Cameron has now documented Early Gay Death Syndrome (EGDS). According to this new research, which Cameron claims is the largest random sex survey ever conducted, the oldest male that could be found who engaged in homosexuality was 54 years old and the oldest female was 49. According to Dr. Cameron the reason for this is because the average life span of a homosexual is 20 plus years shorter than for a heterosexual.
According to Richard Rothstein at QueerSighted, this new Paul Cameron propaganda offensive is bases on his sex survey of a single Canadian community of just over 120, 000 adults. And you just know you can take Cameron’s word for it, that his methods and his data on this were all top notch…
The best part of this story is that Cameron put out a press release that suggests that he presented his latest research during yesterday’s sessions of the annual Eastern Psychological Association Convention in Philadelphia. According to his press release, "Drs. Paul and Kirk Cameron told attendees of the Eastern Psychological Association Convention…" In fact, he did not present and was not on the agenda at this meeting. The fact is that he roamed the public corridors of the convention venue and "told" doctors about his research. Cameron was neither a registered speaker nor a member of the convention faculty.
Yeah…and he once cited a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine, in one of his publications, as if it were an actual peer reviewed article. Trustworthy guy, eh? The Morals and Values crowd just loves him.
Nonetheless he will present this research to lawmakers and judges as data that was "presented" at this legitimate convention and it will be published (@ $27.50 per page) in a so-called scientific journal, a publication that will be slapped down on desks in court houses and legislatures and successfully used against us.
Yes. That’s how the game is played by the Morals and Values crowd. Rothstein gives us an insight into how junk like this effectively poisons the political process…
As an aside, I rarely reference my professional life, but for the purpose of this posting I will tell you that I have engaged in professional lobbying on behalf of private industry both in Albany and in Washington. And this kind of crap really resonates. If it’s easy to read, can be summarized on one official and slick looking sheet of paper, lists titles like PhD, MSS and ARNP and was published in a journal with an impressive name, congressional and legislative staffers and their bosses will not look beneath the surface. Only two things really matter: how will it play with voters and will you be supporting my campaign efforts.
(Emphasis mine…) So the Morals and Values crowd has understood for a long time now, not only that lies are effective, but Why they are effective and How to make them even more effective. And you thought it was us godless heathens who made the best liars.
…from the daily grind, and just sit back and enjoy life. Life is good. And never more so then when we’re watching our old friend Reddy Kilowatt getting a little playful…
Why crane operators need to be careful around high voltage lines…
…is that you risk running across ones of an old crush wearing really, really sexy cut-offs like guys used to back in the 70s before American males became paranoid about being sexy below the waist.
I always had a pretty well organized filing system for my black and white negatives. My slides were another story. Since I wasn’t in a position to be able to afford a color darkroom back when I was a teenager, I just made do with keeping them in the boxes they came back from Kodak in. Occasionally I would develop my own color slide film, which you could theoretically do without a major darkroom setup. But the old Kodak E-4 processing kit was expensive and at the end of it was the tedious task of mounting all those slides yourself. So I didn’t do that too often. But I did it enough that I can at least say that, yes, I did some of my own color work back then. Just not prints.
So the slides had their own very haphazard filing system which was basically just numbers on the boxes, and a little info about what they were. Now that I’m well into the Big Scan project, I needed to get them a tad more organized then they are. See…the boxes of slides never had contact sheets associated with them like the negatives did. If I needed to find a particular black and white photo I would look through the contact sheets for it, and when I found it that contact sheet would have a number on it that corresponded to a glassine envelope with the negatives for that sheet in it. But to find a particular color slide I had to rummage through the boxes until I found the one I thought it was in, open it, and sort through the slides, eyeballing each one until I found what I was looking for. So searching for a slide always meant handling and shuffling through a lot of them, in a way that searching for a negative never did.
The end result over time was a mess. Over the years far, far too many slides ended back up in the wrong boxes. At one point there was a group of them I just gave up on, and tossed them all together into one big box. I tried buying projector trays and storing a few boxes of slides in those, so I could search using a projector or slide viewer, instead of handling them all individually. By the time I got around to getting all my old slides organized for the Big Scan, I had about three concurrent filing systems for them, and none of them were up to date.
So this weekend I’ve been sorting them all back together, into their original roll film groups. The problem was worst in the slides from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. That bunch needed a lot of work getting them all back together in the right order, and it didn’t surprise me. That period of time in my life was right before the decade when I just put my cameras (and all my other art tools) away, because I just couldn’t cope with my feelings. As badly alone as I’m feeling now, I was really crushed emotionally back then. Life was just complete bleakness and I felt I had no future to look forward to at all. I just couldn’t bear to look at anything I did creatively because that inner desolation kept staring back at me from all of it…
…and ironically enough, that’s when I turned to computer programming as a creative outlet. So in a very strange way I’m earning a damn good living now, because of this horrible personal life crisis I had back then.
Anyway…It was like an intensely condensed review of that part of my life before a lot of darkness fell. And one-by-one all my old boyfriends and all the old crushes, all the guys who made my heart beat, and who one-by one broke it a little more, came popping out of the stacks of slides back at me. Including one I saw just a while ago, that I really, really wish I hadn’t, of one guy in particular who I became way, way too strung out over once upon a time, and who told me a year ago that I needed to stay in the closet if I wanted to make more friends.
I was sorting through some slides I took on a visit to see him when he lived down in Florida back in the early 1980s. We were strolling along the beach and I snapped a few shots of him. He’s just wearing a light short sleeved shirt and these really nice cut-offs. Sometimes he’s smiling back at the camera. Sometimes he’s looking handsomely off into the distance.
Funny how beautiful a tornado can be to behold. I guess that’s why there are storm chasers. But they know to keep their distance. I didn’t.
Stephanie Conntz’ Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage just came in the mail today, and already it looks like a completely absorbing read. I suppose when I get done with it I’ll be even more disgusted whenever some yahoo starts babbling about how same-sex marriage completely outrages the Long Held Traditional Understanding Across All Societies And Cultures Of The Meaning Of Marriage Being Between A Man And A Woman.
The problem with knowing chapter and verse how and why that those jackasses are completely wrong is that you still have to listen to them, and they don’t really give a flying fuck whether they know what the hell they’re talking about or not.
And I mean, completely different. Leper colonies for Sodomites anyone…?
You get the distinct impression he is only marginally less offended by Catholics then by sodomites. I think he’d probably fill in the chunnel too if he could. And it sounds like there was at least one other person in there, possibly more, while he was venting for the camera. I wonder if they’d all just been drinking or something.
Oh…and he used to be a policeman. Good thing for British gays that’s in his past isn’t it?
The upgrade to Bagheera’s secondary hard disk went…okay Mostly. I mean…I got everything working and I’ve gone through worse. Much worse actually. All in all I have to say that upgrading the hardware on a Mac is not a bad experience at all. But it threw me for a couple pretty big loops nonetheless.
I needed to increase the capacity on Bagheera’s secondary hard drive. Bagheera is my art room G5 tower (PowerPC), and I use it for both my cartoons and my photography. I have both the good scanners attached to it, including the new Nikon Coolscan 9000 that I’m using for the Big Scan project (basically, I’m scanning in every negative and slide I ever took since I was a teenage camera bug)
I did one last backup of the old drive and then turned off Bagheera and let its innards cool down for a bit. Then I opened it up. I swear every time I open Bagheera I just have to marvel at how cleanly and…stylishly…its innards are laid out. I often think of Apple as the Bang and Olufsen of the personal computer world. The old drive came out and the new on went right in and I had it all connected in a snap. Then I gave the insides a good dusting with some canned air and the big Kirby vacuum (with the hose attachment of course!). There wasn’t much dust. I’d had it apart just a couple months ago for the memory upgrade. Then I put it all back together.
OSX booted right up and instantly saw that there was a disk inside that hadn’t been formatted, and offered to start up the disk utility. I formatted the new drive with the same file system as the old (Mac OS Extended), and gave it the same volume name. Then I started up Retrospect, which is my backup software, and let it do a restore overnight.
The following morning everything was done, and I rebooted…twice. For some odd reason Retrospect doesn’t properly reset some file permissions it mucks with during the backups when its done, and OSX always asks if I want to fix them during boot up, which requires a restart. So… reboot… reboot… Once that was out of the way I tried starting up iTunes, to see if it could read from my music library. I had a concern that the change out of the hard disk its library was on would cause the iTunes DRM crap to balk. But…not. It seemed to be playing things just fine. But it was not what it seemed. (sigh) More on that later…
Then I started up Aperture, and here’s where it first started getting weird. Aperture found its special library folder on the new drive just fine, but it insisted that the drive where it thought all my master image files were on was now "offline". Crap. Somehow it knew the old drive wasn’t there anymore, and it wasn’t buying the same volume name on the new one.
Here’s why that mattered: Aperture is among a new category of image editing and management software aimed specifically at photographers. Another one is Adobe’s Lightroom. I happen to like Aperture much better, but your mileage may vary. The difference between it and, say, Photoshop, is that it begins with the photographer’s understanding of the negative (or slide) as the master, the source, from which all begins, and from which everything flows. The negative contains everything there is to know about that particular image. You cannot add information to it. It is your source. To alter it in any way removes information from it. That’s damage. Every print you made from then on, would be limited in scope by that damage to that negative.
So unlike Photoshop, or most other image editing software, these programs for photographers perform non-destructive editing on the original image file. Basically, changes are stored in separate files almost, but not exactly, like deltas. More like recipes for making a final image off the master. This leaves the original master files untouched, and allows infinite versions of it to be created and saved in the deltas. When you create a new version of the image, the software reads the master image file, applies the changes it finds in the deltas, and writes out an entirely new file, leaving the master untouched.
In a way this is similar to how it works in an actual darkroom, where you load your negatives into an enlarger (or if they’re big enough, a contact printer) and you make prints. Perhaps you choose a particular paper contrast grade, or use a certain kind of filter on the enlarger. Perhaps you expose the paper a certain way or develop a certain way, for a certain desired result. Perhaps you crop the image just so, or burn and dodge certain areas of the print while you’re exposing the paper. The important thing is that the print is a version and the negative is the master.
For this non-destructive form image editing to work in software, the program needs to always have the master image files where it can get to them. Otherwise the delta files won’t be of any use, since all they contain are the edits. So I needed somehow to convince Aperture that all those files on my new hard disk were really the masters it was looking for. Otherwise I’d have to rebuild its library from scratch, loosing all my previous edits (Like the ones I made for the Rehoboth Beach photo gallery I currently have up).
So I asked a few questions on Apple’s Aperture support board, and came to find that Aperture doesn’t go by the volume name, but by the "hidden" volume ID, which is a kind of unique serial number. This, I was told, is in case the user decides to change the volume name. Swell. Another case of the software protecting you by making simple chores a lot more difficult.
I was pointed to a "manage referenced files" function inside Aperture, which I’d actually used before but on a much more limited scope. For an Apple dialogue it is very, very counter intuitive, especially for ‘reconnecting’ an entire library tree. First you point to the top level of the Aperture Library in the Projects panel, and then File -> Manage Referenced Files. The Manage Referenced Files dialogue comes up and at the top are the available drives and a list of all the managed files. I note that now have two drives in the list of available drives with the same name…one I guess, that will forever read ‘Offline’. So you need to select the first file in the list of referenced files. In the bottom panels in the Manage Referenced Files dialogue, is something like a column file system listing like you might see in Finder. You need to drill down to the location of the file you’ve just selected in the list above and select that. Basically you’re now telling Aperture where to find the file. After a few moments the ‘Reconnect All’ button activates. But it looks from there like you’re telling it to look for files from the point in the directory structure you’ve just drilled down to…not the entire tree.
I…guess…what’s going on is there is some code in Aperture that compares the difference between where it thought the file was, and where you’re telling it that it is now, and it goes like…ohmygod…only the Volume ID changed…maybe I can find all the other files I’ve lost by Just Changing The Volume ID too…!!!! Which is fine because it really saved me a lot of work, but I’ve never, never in my life seen a dialogue this confusing from Apple. It’s very weird considering how lovely the rest of Aperture is. I am absolutely in love with Aperture. I guess there is a period of adjustment in every relationship.
It took Aperture about a half hour to reconnect everything (I have a lot of master images already in there from the Big Scan), but when it was done I had my library back and everything was working.
So I figured I was done. I had some changes I wanted to make in the Dreams of Baía cartoon I posted the other day (mostly just to make the text in my thought balloons clearer…and also to reformat the song text a tad more nicely), so I started up Photoshop and started working on that. All my cartoon scans for the past five years were still there and readable on the new drive as far as I could tell. Photoshop came up and loaded my cartoon panels without complaint. While I was working I decided to bring up iTunes so I could listen to some music. That’s when I got my other unpleasant surprise.
iTunes began complaining that it couldn’t find about four-fifths of the music I had in my iTunes library. WTF!!!
Computers. They’re like children. They don’t break things because they hate us, they just do it to make our hair go gray. It’s part of their job description.
It seems that on the initial reboot after I’d just installed the new drive, and before I even had a chance to do the restore, some part of iTunes was running and when it couldn’t find its library, it reverted to the one it installs by default on the main drive, which I’d left there when I moved the music library to the secondary drive some time ago, because I was afraid there was some DRM crap in there that I didn’t dare delete. It apparently still had copies of all the music I’d put into it before I moved it, and that was what I’d been testing on, unbeknownst to me, the first time I brought iTunes up after the drive restore. So I only thought it was all working.
I opened the iTunes preferences dialogue and in ‘Advanced’ there is a field where you can tell iTunes where its library is. I pointed it back to the one on the secondary drive and a little button labeled ‘Reset’ activated. I gritted my teeth and clicked on it, and iTunes did a scan of the Library on the new drive and one by one all the little I Can’t Find This icons disappeared from my music list. Then iTunes offered to consolidate my library folders and I let it do that too and then iTunes was happy again and I could stop sweating.
So for the moment I think I have it all working now and I have an additional 300 gigabytes of storage that I can fill up with the Big Scan project. But in the meantime I’ve taken the old hard drive and put it carefully in the box the new one came in and stored it safely away. Just…in case…
On the March 20 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage discussed a San Francisco Chroniclereport detailing the murder of a transgender woman whose body was found naked near a freeway outside San Francisco. Savage read a sentence from the article stating that "it appeared the victim had been in the process of becoming a woman," to which Savage replied: "Yeah, process of becoming a woman — psychopath. [She] should have been in a back ward in a straitjacket for years, howling on major medication." He went on to say, "And what’s this sympathy, constant sympathy for sexually confused people? Why should we have constant sympathy for people who are freaks in every society?" adding, "But you know what? You’re never gonna make me respect the freak. I don’t want to respect the freak." Savage concluded: "The freak ought to be glad that they’re allowed to walk around without begging for something. You know, I’m sick and tired of the whole country begging, bending over backwards for the junkie, the freak, the pervert, the illegal immigrant. All of them are better than everybody else. Sick. Everything is upside down."
There’s a link to the audio on the Media Matters page there, and to other gems of wit and wisdom from Michael Savage. And he is far from the only one out there inciting pure, unadulterated hate on the radio. Take a nice long cross country drive someday, through the heart of red state territory and listen. It’s why I got the satellite radio installed in my car; so I would have something to listen to besides hate, hate, and more hate. But you need to listen. This is the republican base. These are the people the republican party knows it cannot win elections without.
I’m On The Lord’s Side…And That Must Mean You’re Not.
So after a couple weeks of dodging questions about why he’s busy helping a bunch of gutter crawling bigots pass an anti same-sex marriage amendment in his state, Colts Coach Dungy has finally decided to make it clear just exactly where he stands. Fine.
CARMEL, Ind. — Colts coach Tony Dungy said he knows some people would prefer him to steer clear of the gay marriage debate, but he used a speech Tuesday night to clearly stake out his position.
Dungy told more than 700 people at the Indiana Family Institute’s banquet that he agrees with that organization’s position supporting a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.
"I appreciate the stance they’re taking, and I embrace that stance," Dungy said.
…
"IFI (The Indiana Family Institute) is saying what the Lord says," Dungy said. "You can take that and make your decision on which way you want to be. I’m on the Lord’s side."
Pisst…Hey…Tony… The Ku Klux Klan thinks they’re on the Lord’s side too. You think you’re not like them because you aren’t burning any crosses Tony? Think again…
The coach said his comments shouldn’t be taken as gay bashing, but rather his views on the matter as he sees them from a perspective of faith.
"We’re not anti- anything else. We’re not trying to downgrade anyone else. But we’re trying to promote the family — family values the Lord’s way," Dungy said.
Like hell you’re not trying to downgrade anyone. You just said there that anyone who supports equal marriage rights for same sex couples is a tool of Satan. Here’s what comes of that Mr. Righteous Man-o-god…
(New York City) Four men charged in the brutal homophobic assault on gay entertainer Kevin Aviance last summer pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court Wednesday.
Avaince was attacked as he left the Phoenix bar last June. The four beat him unmercifully, breaking his jaw, doing serious damage to one leg and leaving him with cuts and bruises over most of his body.
As they attacked him the four young men yelled homophobic slurs.
(Bartow, Florida) Two men charged with the brutal murder of a gay Winter Haven man have been ordered held without bail following a brief court appearance.
William David Brown Jr., 20, and Joseph Bearden, 21, are charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery in the killing of Ryan Keith Skipper, 25.
The prosecutor said he expects to argue for the maximum sentence on the grounds the killing was a hate crime.
Police had originally begun investigating the murder as a robbery gone wrong until associates of the accused said that Skipper had been killed after coming on to the men.
Skipper’s body was found last week on the side of a road. He had been stabbed more than 20 times.
…
Skipper is described by friends as outgoing and gentle. He was studying computer sciences.
On the Lord’s side. On the Lord’s side. Right. You and every segregationist who ever lived and claimed that mixed race marriages were against the Lord’s will.
I would really, really like it if someday some reporter got in this jackass’s face and asked him straight-up if he thinks that since he’s on the Lord’s side, are people who support same sex marriage on Satan’s side. And if they are, would his sport be better off if Satan’s followers stopped attending games. You want it to be a wholesome family experience, don’t you Tony?
…and discover that most of my adult life was all a dream and it’s still 1974…
Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18 day gap?
I think a commenter in our document dump research thread may have been the first to notice that the emails released by the Justice Department seem to have a gap between November 15th and December 4th of last year.
(Our commenter saw it late on the evening of the dump itself — see the comment date-stamped March 20, 2007 02:19 AM in the research thread)
The firing calls went out on December 7th. But the original plan was to start placing the calls on November 15th. So those eighteen days are pretty key ones.
The most commonly approved form of marriage in the past (and the one mentioned most often in the first five books of the Old Testament) was polygamy – one man, many women. Some societies also countenanced polyandry – one woman married to several men. In China and parts of the Sudan, when two families wished to make an alliance but didn’t have an eligible daughter or son still alive, marriages were often arranged between one child and the ghost of another. And at least one society, the Na of China, existed for thousands of years without marriage…
Oh…did you mean the Judeo-Christian tradition…?
The Judeo-Christian tradition does not speak with one voice on marriage. Polygamy, divorce and concubines are all part of the Old Testament tradition. Jesus broke with older religious traditions in prohibiting divorce for men as well as for women. But in doing so, he also challenged the traditional right of a man to take a second wife if the first wife was sterile. Ever since, the validity of a marriage in the Western tradition has not been dependent on ability to procreate.
And despite Jesus’ rejection of divorce, Christianity did not sanctify marriage. (It wasn’t made a sacrament until 1215). In fact, he urged his followers to remain unmarried or leave their families to go off and spread the Christian word.
His definition of family was based not on biological or legal ties but on the community of believers. When he was dying on the cross, he did not ask a disciple to help his mother. Instead, he called a disciple forward and said to his mother, "Dear woman, here is your son." And to the disciple, he said, "Here is your mother."
Perhaps you meant the Western tradition…
The claim that marriage existed unchanged for thousands of years is also false. Two hundred years ago, the generation that produced the Enlightenment and the American Revolution overturned thousands of years of tradition by insisting that the older generation must allow young people to choose their own mates on the basis of love rather than to further their parents’ economic and political ambitions.
Even more radical and recent has been the innovation of giving wives and husbands equal rights in marriage. Until the late 19th century, a husband legally owned all his wife’s property and earnings and could do with them what he pleased. He had the right to physically "correct" his wife and even imprison her in the home for disobedience.
When courts began to treat wives as separate legal entities with their own individual rights, defenders of "traditional" marriage predicted that such a radical social change would "destroy domestic tranquility" and subvert the "order of society."
Actually, making women the literal property of their husbands is probably Exactly what the religious right wants. Tradition.
Go read the whole thing. I haven’t read her book, but I suspect the subtitle, How Love Conquered Marriage, is one to strike absolute terror in the hearts of the kook pews.
Rumsfeld: No. There comes a mike! Just take a second.
Maybe if people who have questions stick their hand up now, someone will get a mike to you and then the mike will be right there with you. There’s one in the back, good.
Go ahead.
Q: Thank you, sir. First, it’s a pleasure to hear you and to be this close to you and see you in person. We’ve seen you on TV a lot, and it’s a neat experience for us.
I’m part of an AEF rotation here, a part of a group that is deployed for AEF 7 and 8, and this is a great place to be deployed, no doubt. But many of us are asking, how long will we be frozen? But my question is, on the behalf of some of our Guard and Reserve men who are here, we know that some units have been mobilized, partially mobilized. Their question is, do you — are we going to go to a full mobilization of Guard and Reserve? And if we are, when will that decision be made?
Rumsfeld: Well — (laughter) — let me say this about that. (Laughter.) It is highly unlikely that we would go to a full mobilization. We — I have been signing a great many deployment orders and mobilization orders and alerting orders. The forces have been flowing now for a good number of weeks, and that has had its intended effect. There is no question but that the world’s focus is on the fact that the Iraqi regime, now for some 12 years, continues to ignore and disagree with the now 17 resolutions of the United Nations. The world understands that; they are looking for cooperation and hoping that the force flow will bring about cooperation, but thus far, it has not.
We don’t talk about deployments in the specific, but we have brought a good many Guard and Reserve on active duty. Fortunately, a great many of them were volunteers. We have been able to have relatively few stop losses. There are some currently, particularly in the Army, but relatively few in the Navy and the Air Force. And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.
Like…you know…six days…six weeks…you know… Whatever. You know.
If you click on the link I’ve provided, to this U.S. Department Of Defense DefenseLink News Transcript, you might notice that it’s a page from the Google cache. Click on the link at the top of the cache page. You know. Where it says, Click here for the current page without highlighting. Go ahead. The original page is gone. We have always been at war with Eastasia…
LA PAZ, Bolivia – Always Coca-Cola? Not if Bolivia’s coca growers have their way. The farmers want the word "Coca" dropped by the U.S. soft drink company, arguing that the potent shrub belongs to the cultural heritage of this Andean nation, where the coca leaf infuses everyday life and is sacred to many.
A commission of coca industry representatives advising an assembly rewriting Bolivia’s constitution passed a resolution Wednesday calling on the Atlanta, Ga.-based company to take "Coca" out of its name and asking the United Nations to decriminalize the leaf.
The resolution demands that "international companies that include in their commercial name the name of coca (example: Coca Cola) refrain from using the name of the sacred leaf in their products."
The commission, which met for three days in Sucre, 255 miles southeast of La Paz, is part of an effort led by President Evo Morales to rehabilitate the image of plant, used in the Andes for millennia but better known internationally as the base ingredient of cocaine.
Oh they’ll get right on it I’m sure…
Coca-Cola released a statement Thursday saying their trademark is "the most valuable and recognized brand in the world" and was protected under Bolivian law.
I can appreciate the sentiment. I’d like it just fine thank you, if words on a product label actually meant things the way real words do. But you have to realize that a product label isn’t there to tell you what the product actually Is. Think of them as little mini advertisements that get put on cans and bottles and boxes of stuff. They’re there to make you buy whatever they’ve been pasted onto, not to tell you what it is you’re buying.
But let me put it this way: if an American food and beverage corporation can feel perfectly fine putting the words ‘Country’ and ‘Time’ and ‘Lemonade’ in the name of an instant drink mix product that is mass produced in factories and in no way shape or form has, or ever did have, any actual lemonade in it, then let’s face it, we’re doing pretty darn good that we can say Coca-Cola has any Cola in it at all, let alone any Coca.
Er…it does still have Cola in it…doesn’t it? Some? I don’t drink the stuff anymore myself…
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