When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.
I’m only (yes…Only!) 54 years old and I’ve been struggling with the sensation for years now that my world is getting too full of information. But I’ve always reckoned that to be a consequence of the information age.
Maybe not so much…
Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review…
You know…I remember that. In school, whenever I stumbled over something that didn’t seem to make any sense, I’d just roll on by and hope that I got something later on that made the awkward piece fit in. I try to do that now, and my mind just won’t seem to let the awkward piece go and move on. It gets frustrating. I feel as though I’m learning more slowly.
And I’ve always…Always…been easily distracted. Unless I’m totally focused on something, in which case I’m more like an obsessive then an absent minded little geek. But that total mental focus comes in spurts. Like when I’m drawing something, or photographing something, or deep into code at work. Then it’s almost as if I’m in a trance. I just can’t keep that up for long though. And the totally focused moments are always in familiar mental territory. When I’m working with the camera, or at my drafting table, I Know what I’m doing. Beyond those moments, I seem to be more and more adrift in a restless sea of information, where my attention is constantly being grabbed by this and that.
And I get pissed and start tuning things out. Much of my day is a struggle to filter. In my adolescence I used to dislike most advertising. Now I loath it. Never mind spam…mainstream corporate commercial advertising just seems to get more and more Insistent every year that you Have to pay attention to it, and always right at some moment my mind is busy with something else. The reason I stopped listening to broadcast radio long ago was that I didn’t like being busy with something around the house with music playing in the background, and suddenly my attention is yanked away from whatever I’m working on by a commercial. They work Hard to grab your attention. It isn’t just they compress the audio so the commercials seem louder, they use a host of sound gimmicks besides that to draw your attention to the ad. Ever notice how a lot of ads are conversations now between two people talking in an urgent, or excited tone of voice? Or maybe it’s someone who sounds vaguely like a friendly authority figure from your past…someone you used to respect and listen to a lot. You can’t help but listen. Lets hear it for the off switch.
I actually spend a lot of my day at home now in complete silence and I don’t even notice it. When I do listen to music, it’s usually via the iPod while I’m fussing around the house doing chores. There was a time I liked to have the radio or TV going in the background for company. Now I very seldom do that, because it’s just too distracting. For quite some time now I’ve been wondering, and worrying, if this is because my mind is getting older and slower, or because my world is just getting too crammed with information demanding my attention. It might be neither. My 54 year old brain may just be getting better at sucking it all in.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.
Creativity has always been my trump card in life. Pulling rabbits out of the hat as I like to think of it. It gets me by when my plain looks, horrible fashion sense, and general social geekiness seem like a ball and chain. I can figure things out, usually before any of the cool kids do, and that keeps me in the game. I can think outside the box. I can create. And this is why, ultimately, I didn’t end up in a dead end job. Yes, there was a lot of luck involved too, but some brains just can’t recognize a dead end when they encounter one. There are no dead ends, only difficulties that you can’t let go of until you understand them.
But every Yin has its Yang and severe social geekery may not be so much a curse as the price you pay for having that creative mind. That, and a feeling of being overwhelmed more and more as you get older. I’m not getting stupider after all. My bandwidth isn’t narrowing, it’s still slowly getting wider and wider as I walk through life learning more and more and that has consequences I wouldn’t have expected. And unexpected consequences means that life is still interesting and I’m still in the game. So I reckon I need to adjust my coping mechanisms somewhat.
Relax and enjoy the inevitable as Heinlein would say. I’m beginning to see now why older people seem to always look so bewildered. It’s not that life is passing them by. Some of them anyway. It’s that it’s all rushing in on them more then when they were young. I probably need to just get comfortable with constantly feeling like I’m swimming in a torrent of data. That feeling of being overwhelmed means that my brain is still working the way its supposed to, not that it’s getting tired and loosing its edge. So just get on with it.
Now Tell Me Why I Bothered Exchanging Dollars For Pesos
On the one hand, ten dollars gets you about one-hundred pesos. On the other, an item selling for ten dollars here in the United States costs about one-hundred pesos in Mexico, apparently…
Gambian President Yahya Jammeh says he will “cut off the head” of any homosexual caught in his country.
Addressing supporters at the end of his meet the farmers tour here Sunday, Jammeh also ordered any hotel or motel housing homosexuals to close down, adding that owners of such facilities would also be in trouble.
He said the Gambia was a country of believers, indicating that no sinful and immoral act as homosexual would be tolerated in the country.
He warned all homosexuals in the country to leave, noting that a legislation “stricter than those in Iran ” concerning the vice would be introduced soon.
I have a question: Where are all the love the sinner, hate the sin faithful here? Last week the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of giving same-sex couples access to marriage and Pope Ratzinger was Instantly out of the gate with a statement condemining same-sex marriage. So were the usual suspects in the protestant religious right. All the while piously declaring that they were not acting out of any sort of hatred towards homosexuals. Yet here’s a head of state declaring that he will cut off the head of any homosexual caught in his country and the silence from the erstaz followers of Christ is deafening.
Let me hazard a guess as to why: the thought of loving same-sex couples being allowed to marry disturbs them more then the thought of thousands of homosexuals being butchered by a madman. They don’t hate us, they just want us gone. It isn’t hate to believe that everything would be fine if there just weren’t any homosexuals. It’s…love…
And you thought today’s kids were unruly. Some early school rules of etiquette from around 1900, from Horton Cooper’s North Carolina Mountain Folklore (1972):
Neither boys nor girls must wink at one another.
Boys shall not carry any girls in their arms or on their backs unless heavy rains or much ice have made the creeks and branches impossible to cross. No hugging, squeezing, or kissing shall take place while the girl is being transported across the water.
Don’t pretend to see ghosts in an effort to frighten younger pupils.
You shall not go swimming naked within 200 yards of the schoolhouse.
You shall not bring to school any hawks claw for use in pinching the ears and noses of others.
Do not put any dead pigs, polecats, or other dead animals in the schoolhouse loft to create a stink.
You shall not argue hotly as to whether the earth is round or flat.
In some schools around this country they’re probably still arguing about that.
It is astonishing, though, how quickly gay marriage went from being something as unthinkable by most people as legalized polygamy is today, to being considered a constitutional right by high courts, and accepted by roughly half the populace. I was thinking today that there’s a parallel between what happened to the Catholic Church, especially in Europe, in the 20th century — how it went from being apparently strong and vital to facing all kinds of crises in the blink of an eye. As those familiar with the arguments know, there is a tendency among the right to blame the Second Vatican Council, but the truth is if the Church were as strong as she seemed, things wouldn’t have fallen apart so rapidly.
So it is with the institution of marriage. Gay marriage is and is not a sudden shift in the meaning of marriage. It started with the Reformation. The reason I think gay marriage cannot be stopped, only delayed, is because it is only the latest manifestation of deep social trends in the West going back centuries. These currents run so deep in our civilization they carry us all along without many of us being aware of how far from shore we’re receding.
Ah…for the good old days, when heretics, witches and homosexuals were burned at the stake. Dreher has tried, oh so hard in recent months, to seem like a decent man. A love the sinner, hate the sin kind of man. Not a bigot…just someone who has very strong moral values. And then California goes and does this to him. One good thing to come from the California Supreme Court ruling the other day is that reflexive release of stench from that open sewer Dreher’s kind like to call a conscience. We don’t hate homosexuals…honest…really…we just don’t want THEIR PRESENCE DEFILING OUR SACRED INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE!!! We need to get these from time to time, so we don’t start believing all that crap about them kind actually being anything other then somewhat more publishable in family newspapers then the Westboro Baptist Church.
And Much more verbose. Fred could distill Dreher’s entire column of crap down to a single poster sign that reads: GOD HATES FAG AMERICA. No kidding…go read the damn thing. Dreher is literally calling same-sex marriage a symptom of the inevitable destruction of the west that began with the Protestant Reformation. Take that all you Christian fundamentalists who oppose gay rights. You’re just as much a threat to western civilization as homosexuality as far as Dreher is concerned.
This is why I don’t see any hope of stopping gay marriage. It did not come out of nowhere, but emerged as the working-out of the logic of our civilization and its exaltation of individualism.
You know…all that American stuff about freedom and liberty and justice for all. Why Dreher doesn’t come right out and say that the very existence of United States Of America is a symptom of the inevitable decline of the west too I’ve no idea, other then he likes having that stars and stripes thing on his passport. Oh…and the standard of living in a free country is kinda swell too.
I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, "How does Jill and Jane’s marriage hurt Jack and Diane’s?" The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.
But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don’t believe in slavery? Don’t buy one.
Look at that carefully. Dreher may seem to be throwing moral relativism back in the face of liberals, but what he’s actually doing is employing it as a weapon. What mattered about slavery was the wrong done to slaves, regardless of who did or did not choose to own any. The question remains, what is the wrong done to Jack and Diane if Jill and Jane are free to marry. But Dreher has an answer for that too…
Redefining marriage to include same-sex partners within its definition radically changes the institution, reinforcing the idea that it has no transcendental meaning, but can be changed at will.
Transcendental meaning. Same sex marriage destroys marriage, by depriving it of its Transcendental meaning. And whatever that Transcendental meaning is, it’s something that only heterosexuals can bring to it. By virtue of their being…well…heterosexual. Whatever it is that same sex couples bring to a marriage, it cannot be marriage because it cannot have that Transcendental meaning. Only heterosexual coupling can possess that Transcendental meaning. Which means that only heterosexual families possess that Transcendental meaning. Because only heterosexual love possesses that Transcendental meaning.
Here…let me decode that: Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Only now the thinking is we don’t even have that. We only have make-believe sex. Mere genital stimulation. Nothing more then that. Certainly nothing Transcendental. We are shallow, empty beings. Creatures who only resemble true humans. Our hearts can hold none of that Transcendental Meaning that heterosexuals wake up to and regard favorably in the bathroom mirror every morning. Our brief barren assignations are just pitiful imitations of true heterosexual love. And by demanding that our pseudo unions be regarded in marriage as being on the same Transcendental plane as the rich and noble and truly human heterosexual unions are, we do more then mock their genuine human capacity to love…we destroy the institute that enriches and sustains it. And take down western civilization with it. And thus, the Protestant Reformation finally achieves its goal. Praise Satan.
That pretty much sum it up Rod?
Over at Box Turtle Bulletin and Ex-Gay Watch the discussion is about how to reach out to the other side. But you can’t. Not to the other side. To your neighbor…yes. Even if they oppose gay rights bitterly. Neighbors must always be reached out to. But you need to understand this…the other side isn’t the anti-same sex marriage side. Listen to Dreher again. Here is the other side:
This is why I don’t see any hope of stopping gay marriage. It did not come out of nowhere, but emerged as the working-out of the logic of our civilization and its exaltation of individualism.
This is the side that has been bitterly opposed to everything fine and noble a human being could ever become since the caveman days. This is the side that would rather make you bow down to the gods and beg forgiveness for being born with a heart and a brain, then live in a world where the human spirit can soar. Because the sight of everything a human can be, that they cannot, is more offensive to them, more frightening, then a landscape of beaten bent and broken humans in chains. When Rod Dreher accuses liberals of using the rhetoric of slave masters, he’s laughing in your face, and then spitting in it.
It is one thing to reach out to a neighbor, and another to reach out to the one who presumes to be your master. They get only the finger, and that so long as they keep their hands to themselves. So…in the spirit of dialogue…Go Fuck yourself Rod…
You and all the other haters of humanity, and everything fine and noble human beings are capable of, and all the beauty they are capable of making, and giving to one another. I’ve got your decline and fall of western civilization right here you gutter crawling bigot…
And if this image frightens you less then the sight of a devoted loving same-sex couple being joined in marriage in the eyes of the law, never mind your Nazi Pope’s, then you can just go fuck yourself because it isn’t the death of western civilization you are worried about because western civilization isn’t anything to you but a perch to shit and squawk on. You never had to go through anything like this to marry the one love of your life…
…so save your pusillanimous rhetoric about the Transcendental Meaning of marriage for someone who thinks you really give a flying fuck about it more then pissing on the courage of lovers who would walk through fire for the sake of their love. Would you go through the gauntlet gay couples have to go through for the woman you married? Would you hold her hand in public if it meant the two of you might get your skulls bashed in? Would you take her hand in marriage if it meant that someday some fanatic might decide to kill both of you to avenge the institution of marriage and prevent the fall of western civilization? Would you have the nerve to love, if you had to have the nerve gay couples do? I doubt it. Because only cowards try to incite passions toward minorities.
And that’s what bothers you isn’t in Dreher. Not that in our struggle for equality people come to see our humanity after all, but that they’ll finally see what a bunch of runts your kind are. It isn’t the end of western civilization that keeps you awake nights. It’s the end of pretense.
If It Was That Long Ago, How Come It Seems Like Only Yesterday?
Whilst browsing Fark.Com I came across this site, and this photo…
This is from a G. C. Murphy’s store, circa 1968. I was 14 back then. Note the ad above one of the portable sets on the second shelf above the boy RCA – First In Color TV… Color sets were just starting to become affordable to the average person back then. Still hugely expensive, and most TV shows throughout the day were still broadcast in black and white. But all the prime time stuff by then was in color, and they all advertised that fact proudly…
And so did the networks…
I still vividly remember the impact of watching the premier of the second season of Star Trek in color the previous fall of 1967, when our downstairs neighbor bought a color TV. I’d grown up watching TV in a black and white world and my little teenybopper jaw just dropped watching those scenes of the planet Vulcan in color. The next summer mom bought a color TV, pretty similar to the one you see above. Within a year TV seemed like it had always been in color. I had a little GE black and white portable in my bedroom by then, and the only thing I bothered watching on it were the old reruns of TV shows that had been filmed in black and white.
Never mind the clothes and hair styles in the photo above, the first thing I noticed in it were the legs on the TV set. They mark it as being of its period. It seemed back then that nearly every piece of furniture you laid eyes on had legs like that…dark wood pegs turned down to a shiny metal cap at the bottom. In my household we had a TV, a record cabinet and a beautiful Eumig mahogany Hi-Fi console with legs like that. Teens reading this now note the…Dials…on the set. That was how you changed the channel back then. And there were only 12 of them, starting at channel two and going up to channel 13 (whatever Did become of channel one???). Now you know why all the local TV stations everywhere are somewhere in that range. The other two large dials were probably a UHF tuner and the volume control. In theory the UHF channels gave you channels 14 to 69. In practice there were very few UHF channels. The Washington D.C. area where I grew up, had 14, 20, 22, 26, 45, and 53, and half of those were PBS stations. The row of small knobs were probably the brightness, color intensity and tint controls.
The set almost certainly was powered by a bunch of vacuum tubes and if you looked behind it you would see a Masonite servicing panel with a bunch of holes drilled in it for ventilation.
So…anyway…having found the Pleasant Family Shopping Blog…I decided to do a little shopping. He links to other sites that have images from the period I grew up in, and I think I spent about half the night browsing, and occasionally shouting with delight like the little teenybopper I once was…
Oh!!…Fizzies!!!!
You can’t see it…but the back of the pack is a sheet of eight little square aluminum foil packets, each with a tablet in them about the size of an Alka-Seltzer. And they did pretty much the same thing as Alka-Seltzer did…they fizzed…only these tablets turned the water in the glass into a bubbly soft drink. Between the ages of 7 and 10 I was addicted to those things. I pretty much stopped drinking that stuff when I was old enough to have an allowance that let me buy real soda.
Oh! Crazy Foam…!
I think the most delightful part of last night was finding something I’d played with as a kid and completely forgotten about. This stuff was a thick foam soap for a kid’s bath. It was so thick it stood up on it’s own when you squirted it out of the can…practically like some kind of caulking compound. It was almost as much fun as silly putty…
And as much fun as finding things I’d played with, was finding photos of the architectural environment I grew up in. They made buildings different back then. The style was…well…very sixties. Here’s a shot of a Sears store that really brought it back for me…
Note the palm trees poking up one side of the store. We didn’t have palm trees where I grew up, but that building just shouts its period.
Here’s what you probably would have found had you walked over to the snack bar…
According to the photo, that’s circa 1962. Note the signage, the hanging lamps and the chairs. Oh…and the color scheme. Here’s what a grocery store might look like…
Back then they actually gave you double lines separating the car spaces. Here’s what you might see inside at the frozen foods area…
Freezers with no doors. A couple rows of them usually. Those things worked because cold air sinks and the electricity to run them was cheap. These days they mostly use standup freezers with glass doors to keep the cold air in. I used to hang my head over the edge of these things and look sideways down an entire row for the thin layer of fog that formed in the zone between the warm store air and the cold freezer air. Note the analog butcher’s scale over in the meat department.
That’s enough nostalgia for now. I had an absolute blast going through Pleasant Family Shopping. And some of the sites he links to. And it really startles me how immediate some of the memories were that those images brought back. It just doesn’t seem like it’s that long ago. And while I would not want to go back to those days (not back to a time before the Internet, not back to a time before cell phones and home video and safer cars, and absolutely not back to a time before the APA took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses!) I can appreciate a little better now why the times I live in irritate me so often. One thing I think is so appealing about the iPhone is it’s display is made of real glass and the chrome trim around the edge is really metal. I like solid things in my life. The Mercedes for example. Things used to be made like that.
Now that I have a passport (yes…more on that later), the need to learn other languages besides English, if only to be polite and not the Ugly American when I travel to other countries, has become more pressing. The logical choice for a first other language for me here in the U.S. is Spanish, and as my first trip out of the country will be to Mexico, I’ve been trying to pick up a little basic tourist Spanish, although they say in most resort areas by the beach English is spoken enough that you can get by. But I want to be polite.
For various personal reasons I am also trying to pick up some German (read that however you want). So I was attracted to this headline on Fark.Com…
Never mind the gratuitous Nazi joke there…the comment thread on that article became really absorbing…
Ugliest language on earth.
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A long time ago, I was playing a recording of the Vienna Boys Choir. My aunt stopped, listened, and said, "That’s beautiful! They must be singing in French!" And I said, "No, it’s German."
A friend of my mother’s wanted me to say something in French, so I did. She made me repeat it, I did. She said it put shivers up and down her spine, it was so beautiful. She asked me for a translation. I said, "Take out the garbage."
If you say a language is beautiful or ugly, you reveal more about yourself than the language.
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To us southern California folk, people in Spain sound remarkably like gay Mexicans.
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No, actually, I think Moroccan Arabic (if not Arabic in general) holds that honor. Never have I heard an angrier sounding language. Even spoken in normal tones, it sounds like people are arguing with each other.
German *can* sound quite sexy. Arabic, not so much.
Arabic can sound pretty damn sexy too. My husband sounds almost like he’s purring when he rolls his r’s and I just adore it. Maybe I’m a little biased because I love him so much. :)
But you’re right, the Moroccan dialect does come across a little harsh. Palestinians and Egyptians are a little more lyrical and pleasing to the ear. And the Algerian dialect is beautifully intertwined with French.
Anyone here know what language the Vikings spoke and whether it’s still around? I wonder if THEY sounded angry.
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It´s quite easy for Germans to learn English, because most English terms evolved out of the German language and therefore have many similarities.
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The vikings spoke norrønt mål (aka Old Norse). The closest living equalents today are Icelandic and Faroese – allthought as a Norwegian I have little trouble understanding written norrønt given a bit of time. And personaly, i don’t find any of the North Germanic languages to sound particulary angry…
German is the perfect language for giving commands in though; even to tell someone you love them (Ich liebe dich!) sounds like a direct order.
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German is an brilliant language. I dare someone to find me a another language that has more words for "the".
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It has one word for the, its just inflected.
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Oh fine, if you wanna get all nit picky…
"I dare someone to find another language that has more variations for "the"". Is that alright? Does my point make sense now? I hope the German’s aren’t going to be that pedantic when I go to Wacken.
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You’re a brave man, doing that in front of the Germans.
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On a related note, whoever invented different genders for words should be drawn and quartered.
THIS
I live in Switzerland and not only do I have to learn Hoch Deutsch in school but I have to try to understand Berndeutsch, which is a dialect that is totally different from German. I love hearing Germans speaking in the streets because I actually understand what they say. It’s damn frustrating to leave German class and stand open-mouthed at some store clerk who has mumbled some simple question to you in Swiss that you, of course, don’t understand.
Btw, I read somewhere that the different gendered articles for nouns probably originated from assigning articles to animate objects versus inanimate ones and that eventually evolved into a gender-based system.
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And we don’t sound angry all the time. But a swearing german is scary.
Am arsch! I find German is missing a good substitute for the word fark though.
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I’ll have to agree on that. "Ficken" doesn’t sound quite right for swearing.
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Also, I never realized how much Spanish I knew until I tried to survive in Germany and learn German. Spanish comes to mind easily. German is like getting blood from a stone.
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I live in a town of about 13,000 people about 1.5 hours north of Hamburg by train. I have found a local primary doctor who speaks English (trained in Boston), a pediatrician who speaks English (fluent enough, but sometimes we miscommunicate), and there is a teacher at my child’s school who speaks English well enough. I travel 15 minutes to a nearby town for banking because there is someone there who speaks English well. I can order in a store in German well enough and I traveled to Kiel for purchasing appliances etc. The salespeople there were fine. There are fluent people around, but most people studied it in school (decades ago) and then never used it or just know enough phrases to minimally interact with tourists. The good part is that it forces me to work on learning.
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That must be nice, when I use german here they just respond in English, which is why I have been here a year and my skills are mediocre at best.
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English and Mandarin are the languages of business. I would add Spanish. If a person knows these three language, they can travel anywhere in the world and communicate with most people.
A person who speaks 3 languages is trilingual. A person who speaks 2 languages is bilingual. What do you call a person who only speaks one langauge?…an American.
Good day!
Heh. Of course that’s not fair, we’re not all like that. But I can see how we might seem that way to the rest of the world. Hopefully when I go traveling abroad I won’t be doing my part to reinforce any negative stereotypes. One of the things I wish now that I could do over again, is have traveled abroad more. But there was never a whole lot of money for travel in my household…we pretty much stuck to the beaches a few hours drive away…and I never had enough nerve to try wandering all over Europe with only spare change like some kids did back in the 70s. I’m starting to appreciate in my middle age now, how that lack of nerve I always had stifled my life in so many ways besides romance.
A mural meant to bring people together is causing a rift in the Bastrop community.
The painting in question, a student project completed in 2003, adorns a wall in the corridor leading to the Bastrop High School gym. It depicts the sometimes unpleasant history of the town, showing scenes of a Mexican and Comanche raid and slaves working in a cotton field, as well as unifying visions of children of different ethnicities reaching out to one another.
Bastrop school board members were surprised when almost a dozen district residents who signed up to speak at a community forum Tuesday evening wanted to talk about the mural, some calling for its removal on religious grounds and others with arguments for keeping it up.
…
Bastrop resident Lauren Hansell, who made the original complaint, homeschools her children but visits the school on Fridays to pray with students at the flagpole.
A Christian, Hansell said she wants the mural removed because of the war and slavery scenes and depictions of Buddha and ancient gods. Hansell said girl’s basketball coach Dee Deshay pointed out the mural as a potential problem.
"When she showed it to me, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ " said Hansell, who added that the mural presents a new age idea of peace and unity that could be confusing to Christian students.
Emphasis mine. Hansell waves her finger at the depiction of many faiths in the mural…
Among the images on the mural are an Aztec sun, ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamen, Buddha and Shiva, a Hindu deity, dancing on a demon of ignorance.
Hansell, who at first interpreted Shiva’s dance as a message in favor of abortion, said laws that bar Christian symbols from public schools should apply to the mural.
Here is the tack being played now by the KulturKrieger: If one religion is kept out of the schools they should all be kept out. But fundamentalist hysterics notwithstanding, Christianity isn’t being kept out of the schools and never has been. Here, the Austin-American Statesman actually does some journalism …
The First Amendment, which bans government-sponsored religious activities even as it protects religious expression from government interference, allows students to pray during school in informal settings, according to U.S. Department of Education guidelines. The guidelines say students have the right to "express their beliefs about religion in the form of homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free of discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions."
Valdez, the muralist, said the purpose of the project was to represent the history and cultural unity in Bastrop. Although no one symbol can represent a culture, he said the students chose the mural’s imagery to represent unity.
That’s the problem. That was always the problem. Not that Christianity is being kept out, but that kids of other faiths are allowed to feel welcome…to believe that they are a part of the American fabric too. That was why the fight was waged back in the 50s and 60s to stop public schools from forcing prayer on students. That is why people work hard to this day to keep the fundamentalists from co-opting the American public school system. The public schools are for all children, not some. And that’s because America is for people of all faiths, not the people of one faith.
That idea is anathema to the fundamentalists, who think Jesus smiles every time they spit in a Samaritan’s face. If they can’t beat the heathen children down one way, they’ll try to beat them down another. One way or another, the heathens must be forced to give up their faith. If they can’t be forced into school prayers. Maybe they can be forced into silence.
The point was always to coerce everyone into Christianity. Their brand of Christianity. This is why the depictions of unity on the mural might be confusing to their children. It includes everybody.
Via numerous sources… When the homophobes say gays are obsessed with sex, count on them to describe the sex we are obsessed with in more detail then most gay pornography. So naturally, in the wake of the California decision, we see Peter LaBarbra framing the issues involved in his own demure way…
How Will California Homosexual Couples Consummate their Counterfeit ‘Marriages’?
Oh I suppose they’ll…Go To Disneyland!
Whatever. Here’s how my gay couple consummated the Lawrence v. Texas decision that finally overtuned the sodomy laws…
For someone who thinks same-sex sex is so ugly Peter, you sure do think about it a lot…
The hated Earl Warren was appointed by Eisenhower, arguably a republican although in this day and age I doubt he could even get his party’s nomination. And as it turns out, the majority on the California Supreme Court that decided equal rights under law means equal, not separate but equal, were all appointed by republicans too. The Chief Justice Ronald M. George, who wrote the opinion, was appointed by Pete Wilson no less. But even Pete Wilson is old school, compared to the Bush republicans. Think, Samuel Alito. When you can put a man on the court who thinks the warrantless strip searching of 10 year old girls isn’t any big deal, let alone poses a constitutional issue, you can safely know the gutter Eisenhower would have recognized, though not as American, has ascended to power.
I am elated on the one hand, and terrified on the other. There is a referendum coming. Californians have not won this yet. Millions will be spent to put the knife back in the hearts of same sex couples in the Golden State. Only two things give me slender hope. The right wing there has become more insane since Wilson. And Schwarzenegger says he will oppose it. If he lives up to his word, we could yet win this now. If not, there may well be more bitter years of fighting to come. I am not dancing yet.
This, as Annie Wagner over at SLOG points out, is the nugget of gold in this decision…
Furthermore, the circumstance that the current California statutes assign a different name for the official family relationship of same-sex couples as contrasted with the name for the official family relationship of opposite-sex couples raises constitutional concerns not only under the state constitutional right to marry, but also under the state constitutional equal protection clause. In analyzing the validity of this differential treatment under the latter clause, we first must determine which standard of review should be applied to the statutory classification here at issue. Although in most instances the deferential “rational basis” standard of review is applicable in determining whether different treatment accorded by a statutory provision violates the state equal protection clause, a more exacting and rigorous standard of review — “strict scrutiny” — is applied when the distinction drawn by a statute rests upon a so-called “suspect classification” or impinges upon a fundamental right. As we shall explain, although we do not agree with the claim advanced by the parties challenging the validity of the current statutory scheme that the applicable statutes properly should be viewed as an instance of discrimination on the basis of the suspect characteristic of sex or gender and should be subjected to strict scrutiny on that ground, we conclude that strict scrutiny nonetheless is applicable here because (1) the statutes in question properly must be understood as classifying or discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, a characteristic that we conclude represents — like gender, race, and religion —a constitutionally suspect basis upon which to impose differential treatment, and (2) the differential treatment at issue impinges upon a same-sex couple’s fundamental interest in having their family relationship accorded the same respect and dignity enjoyed by an opposite-sex couple.
Suspect class…Strict Scrutiny… This is what we, gay Americans, have needed for so very long. Without this, the statehouses and congress will continue to stack the deck against us, whenever the hate vote demands it.
This is a work in progress. I’m trying desperately to get my drawing groove back. I took a sick day off today because my insomnia came roaring back last night for some reason and I felt utterly miserable this morning. I stumbled down to the basement to do a laundry and laid eyes on the little pirate statuette I’d bought in Catalina a couple of summer’s ago. My brother probably remembers it. The subject is female but I took one look at it and knew I could draw a really sexy male pirate from it. So I bought it and took it home and it’s been sitting on one of my art room shelves ever since. This morning I picked it up and plopped it on my drafting table, taped some Strathmore to one of my drawing boards and somehow, even though I could barely think straight, managed to wrest out a pretty good pencil sketch of what I had in mind when I first set eyes on it.
A few slight adjustments to the body here and there…somewhat broader shoulders, a slightly different curve on the backside, a somewhat sharper jawline…and there was my beautiful and dangerous young pirate. I think I’ll leave him blond.
I’ve some more work to do on this, mostly background stuff now. I need to work on the monkey a bit too. Then I’ll ink it up. Stay tuned.
So far away; Doesn’t anybody stay in one place any more?
It would be so fine to see your face at my door;
Doesn’t help to know you’re just time away…
Long ago I reached for you and there you stood;
Holding you again could only do me good;
How I wish I could, but you’re so far away
One more song about movin’ along the highway;
Can’t say much of anything that’s new;
If I could only work this life out my way;
I’d rather spend it bein’ close to you;
… I sure hope the road don’t come to own me;
Yet so many dreams I’ve yet to find…
SecurityBob writes "Debian package maintainers tend to very often modify the source code of the package they are maintaining so that it better fits into the distribution itself. However, most of the time, their changes are not sent back to upstream for validation, which might cause some tension between upstream developers and Debian packagers. Today, a critical security advisory has been released: a Debian packager modified the source code of OpenSSL back in 2006 so as to remove the seeding of OpenSSL random number generator, which in turns makes cryptographic key material generated on a Debian system guessable. The solution? Upgrade OpenSSL and re-generate all your SSH and SSL keys. This problem not only affects Debian, but also all its derivatives, such as Ubuntu."
At last year’s Open Source Conference in Portland (OSCON), I was made aware of a wee dust-up between the Apache project and "some" Linux distros. Specifically, the Apache folks were complaining that certain Linux Distributions routinely modified their product, sticking libraries and configuration files wherever they damn well pleased because that was how, in their opinion, things should work.
Now…the beauty of Linux and open source in general is that it is open and community driven and anyone can do whatever they damn well please with it. I hope it always stays that way, Microsoft’s backdoor attempts to stifle it notwithstanding. But the other side of that coin is that if you modify someone else’s software to work with yours now it’s your responsibility. The Apache folks were complaining that they could not help end users configure their servers when they themselves didn’t know how the software worked anymore, particularly when it came to configuring it. That’s not a trivial complaint coming from a project that powers the majority of web servers. Most of what you see on the World Wide Web was fed to you by an Apache server, running on either Linux or Unix.
Well, the Debian folks pretty well knew who the Apache folks were talking about and sure as the sun rises they started pointing their fingers back at Apache’s big monolithic configuration file, and other in-their-righteous-opinion Apache shortcomings. Begun, the clone wars have…
My feeling is, if you change it you own it. At least in the sense of now you have to support it. At minimum you ought to run your "fixes’ by the people who are maintaining the software you are "correcting". They might actually appreciate what you’ve done and incorporate the changes into their build. Or they might tell you why you shouldn’t do that. Sometimes you should listen to that. But from what I hear, listening isn’t one of the Debian project’s best points.
I keep hearing about how wonderful Ubuntu is, and knowing that it’s a Debian family distro I’ve been highly reluctant to bother with it. I get along fine in the Red Hat family. For the past couple years I’ve been happily running CentOS here at Casa del Garrett and I admit I would like it a lot better if it came bundled with better multi-media support, but on the other hand adding packages to it isn’t hard because everything is pretty much where everyone expects it to be. Yes, I have to configure a lot of it in its own specific way, as opposed to having a nice common configuration system to do it for me. If you want consistency, open source isn’t going to work for you. Try Apple. Seriously. I run Macs here at Casa del Garrett too and damned if I haven’t been impressed by how well integrated everything is on a Mac. I do all my artwork on Bagheera, my art room G5 tower, because it just gets out of my way when I’m in a creative mood and lets me create. I love that. On the other hand, it’s like that because Steve won’t let software developers color outside the lines. Just ask anyone who ever unlocked an iPhone. That’s why I’m still running Linux here too.
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