Jones And Yarhouse: We Will Report The Outcome No Matter How Embarrassing Our Badly Skewed Data Is To The Folks Who Are Paying Us For It
Last week the APA released its report on ex-gay therapy, to a somewhat muted response from the charlatans of the ex-gay political machine. Oh yes…we’re so very happy that the APA acknowledges that a patient’s religious needs must be taken into account, they said, politely skimming over the overwhelming evidence that trying to force gay people into straight jackets harms them deeply. You had to expect they wouldn’t leave it at that.
Now comes the "final" release of the Jones and Yarhouse "study" of ex-gay "therapy"…touted in that well known scientific peer reviewed publication, the Baptist Press…
Sure it does. You read through the brief article for a while and, of course, you see little nuggets like this one pop out at you:
Jones expressed frustration that the APA task force didn’t take their 2007 study seriously.
"They selectively apply rigorous scientific standards," he said…
Yes. Of course. It’s all a consperacy of the scientists to further the militant homosexual agenda. Oh…have I meantioned that Exodus paid Jones and Yarhouse for their labors? Naturally that didn’t affect their scientific rigorousity I’m sure.
Or…not…
While Jones and Yarhouse’s study appears to be very well designed, it quickly falls apart on execution. The sample size was disappointingly small, too small for an effective retrospective study. They told a reporter from Christianity Today that they had hoped to recruit some three hundred participants, but they found “many Exodus ministries mysteriously uncooperative.” They only wound up with 98 at the beginning of the study (72 men and 26 women), a population they describe as “respectably large.” Yet it is half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study.
Jones and Yarhouse wanted to limit their study’s participants to those who were in their first year of ex-gay ministry. But when they found that they were having trouble getting enough people to participate (they only found 57 subject who met this criteria), they expanded their study to include 41 subjects who had been involved in ex-gay ministries for between one to three years. The participants who had been in ex-gay ministries for less than a year are referred to as “Phase 1″ subpopulation, and the 41 who were added to increase the sample size were labeled the “Phase 2″ subpopulation.
This poses two critically important problems. First, we just saw Jones and Yarhouse explain that the whole reason they did a prospective study was to reduce the faulty memories of “change experiences that happened in their pasts” — errors which can occur when asking people to go back as far as three years to assess their beginning points on the Kinsey and Shively-DeCecco scales. This was the very problem that Jones and Yarhouse hoped to avoid in designing a prospective longitudinal study, but in the end nearly half of their results ended up being based on retrospective responses.
[Emphasis mine] So basically their data was corrupted by the same half-assed sloppiness of the Spitzer study. Oh but wait…it gets better. Again from Burroway…
Whenever a longitudinal study is being conducted over a period of several years, there are always dropouts along the way. This is common and to be expected. That makes it all the more important to begin the study with a large population. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t terribly large to begin with; it started out at less than half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study. Jones and Yarhouse report that:
Over time, our sample eroded from 98 subjects at our initial Time 1 assessment to 85 at Time 2 and 73 at Time 3, which is a Time 1 to Time 3 retention rate of 74.5%. This retention rate compares favorable to that of the best “gold standard” longitudinal studies. For example, the widely respected and amply funded National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (or Add Health study reported a retention rate from Time 1 to Time 3 of 73% for their enormous sample.
The Add Health Study Jones and Yarhouse cite began with 20,745 in 1996, ending with 15,170 during Wave 3 in 2001-2002. But this retention rate of 73% was spread over some 5-6 years, not the three to four years of Jones and Yarhouse’s study.
What’s more, the Add Health study undertook a rigorous investigation of their dropouts (PDF: 228KB/17 pages) and concluded that the dropouts affected their results by less than 1 percent. Jones and Yarhouse didn’t assess the impact of their dropouts, but they did say this:
We know from direct conversation that a few subjects decided to accept gay identity and did not believe that we would honestly report data on their experience. On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals. Generally speaking, as is typical, we lost subjects for unknown reasons.
Remember, Jones and Yarhouse described those “experiencing difficulty with change would be likely to get frustrated or discouraged early on and drop out of the change process.” And so assessing the dropouts becomes critically important, because unlike the Add Health study, the very reason for dropping out of this study may have direct bearing on both questions the study was designed to address: Do people change, and are they harmed by the process? With as much as a quarter of the initial population dropping out potentially for reasons directly related to the study’s questions, this missing analysis represents a likely critical failure, one which could potentially invalidate the study’s conclusions.
[Emphasis mine] Harm…what harm? We didn’t speak to anyone who was harmed…
But look a tad more closely at what Jones and Yarhouse "know"…
On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals.
Healed. Healed. They believed themselves healed. Not cured. Not changed. But…healed. This is the language of religion, not science. And now you know where Jones and Yarhouse were coming from, and why they were good with allowing data into their study that could only weaken it from a scientific point of view.
It didn’t matter. They needed bodies to get a big enough sample size that they could plausibly go on with it and give the kook pews something they could wave around and claim that scientists were conspiring against them on behalf of the godless homosexual menace. They would have known going into it, that the APA would regard their study as flawed because they engineered the flaws into it themselves. Anyone who was serious about it would have gone back to their funding and told them they couldn’t do it without more first year subjects (a lot more), and more participation from the drop-outs. But they kept on with it anyway. Because knowing whether or not ex-gay therapy works wasn’t the point. Knowing whether or not it harms the very people it purports to help wasn’t the point. Having something to wave back at the APA was the point. That promise that they would report the results whether or not they embarrassed Exodus was as empty as the promise that "change is possible". Neither one had a money back guarantee.
[Update…] Yarhouse is identified Here, as an evangelical psychologist and graduate of Regent University. Regent is Pat Robertson’s baby. This man is as likely to be objective about ex-gay therapy as he is to be a flying pig. Jones is of Wheaton College, which is described by The Princeton Review’s Best 351 Colleges thusly: "If the integration of faith and learning is what you want out of a college, Wheaton is arguably the best school in the nation with a Christ-based worldview." Well this team really looks like a couple of objective researchers to me…
[Update again…] Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin goes another round with this "study"…finds it not too much different from the previous round…
In short, the Jones and Yarhouse study was funded and fully supported by Exodus and conducted by two researchers who were avid supporters of ex-gay ministries. They wanted to study 300 participants, but after more than a year, they could only find 57 willing to participate. They then changed the rules for acceptance in order to increase the total to 98. After following this sample for 4 years, 25 dropped out. Of the remainder, only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Another 17 decided that a lifetime of celibacy was good enough.
Gay Americans…Republican’s Cynical Weapon Against Democrats Since Truman
You hear some folks bellyache about those "Gay Studies" curriculums in various colleges and universities. If they’re not complaining that they’re utterly worthless exercises in pointless "diversity", they’re insinuating that the courses couldn’t be about anything but how to have gay sex.
I’ve never gone through one of these curriculums myself, but if the vast treasure trove of gay history that’s out there is any measure, a Gay Studies course isn’t just a nice idea for promoting diversity, it’s an important part of the human story. Particularly here in America, where gay citizens have been a punching bag, a handy scarecrow, for every hysteria that’s ever swept through the country. Case in point, the red scare of the 1950s.
I’m only part way into David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, and already its challenging some of my bedrock views of what happened to my country during the so-called McCarthy era. Far from being merely a sideshow to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the purges of gay Americans were central to it. And…surprise, surprise, the engine for it all was republican hunger for political power.
Right at the beginning of the book, Johnson describes, using newspaper accounts of the time, interviews, and newly declassified documents, how the republicans in the late 1940s, out of power since Hoover brought on the great depression, saw the issue of homosexuals in government as a useful weapon against the party in power.
They orchestrated a hearing in which they pressed the secretary of state for information about communists in the state department. But it was a game of tag. In the process of defending themselves against the republican charge that they had allowed communists to get and hold jobs in the state department, the democrats described how they were diligently ferreting out "security risks". Far from being lax said the democrats, they’d uncovered and removed 91 "security risks" from the state department.
Which gave the republicans an opening to press them for details. How many of those were communists? It was a question the republicans already knew the answer to, because they’d had all the details in a closed door hearing previously. What they wanted was to get it out in the open. And the democrats, backed into a corner and not wanting to leave it hanging out there that they’d let so many communists into the state department when they hadn’t actually, said, that in fact none of them were communists, nobody had been let go from the state department for disloyalty. The 91 people fired were not accused of being traitors. Just…you know…security risks. Pressed further they admitted that these people had all been fired because they were homosexuals.
That was what the republicans wanted to hear, and get into the papers. Not a communist threat, but a lavender one. Why? Because it was felt that the moral issue played even better against the democrat’s base…working class and poor Americans, then the communist threat did. In other words, it made a great wedge issue against the democrats. And right from the beginning, when Joe McCarthy began waving around his baseless claims of a vast communist conspiracy lurking in the federal government, some republicans…even in his own state…were counseling him to downplay the communist thing and play up the morals charges more, because for one thing they actually were finding homosexuals working in government agencies, but mostly because it made the voters in the democrat’s base even angrier.
McCarthy of course, didn’t take that advise. He pressed on with his communist bogyman and the question echoed in the committee chambers of capital hill, are you now, or have you ever been a communist? But while McCarthy was busy stirring up the Communist Menace and getting headlines, the republican party was busy stirring up the Homosexual Menace and a great purge began which…ironically…led to the formation of the first gay rights groups as gay people began to get tired of being kicked around and started pushing back.
Later, during the black civil rights movement, the republicans would go on to exploit white working class racial fears against the democrats in exactly the same way. But here, even as far back as the late 1940s, you can see them using the Homosexual Menace as a tool to divide and weaken the democrats. Because accusing the democrats of tolerating homosexuality worked even better then nearly anything else the republicans could throw at them…even communism. And it wouldn’t stop working, until we gay Americans, having had enough of it, took to the streets in defense of our lives.
You want to know why it’s so damn important that we make a big deal out of our sexual orientation? Why we don’t just quietly "leave it in the bedroom where it belongs"…? This is why. Because our lives were turned into cannon fodder for the power dreams of politicians and that needs to stop. This country needs to look…really look…at the character of those loud voices bearing moral crusades, waving around scarecrows that have their neighbor’s faces on them.
The moral rot that is on plain view every night on Fox News and in the many health care "town halls" going on all across the country…in the "birthers" and the "deathers"…it isn’t new. Not at all. What’s different now is the gutter that all those country club republicans began playing to back in the Truman years has taken over, and they have their own voice now in the national news media. And you need to understand this: those country club republicans would be fine, even with that, if it could keep them in power.
Perhaps you could see this just as clearly from looking at the history of race relations in America, and republican party race baiting. But the history of the struggle of gay Americans for equality and justice is American history too, and you really see what the republican crusade for "morality" and "family values" is made of when you study it.
Via Sullivan…a handy little snapshot of the state of the Union…
As the GOP declines in popularity, Fox News gains audience. Or in other words, as reality presses closer in, that subset of the American population who never saw a fact they couldn’t look right in the face and deny, is cocooning. Surprise, surprise.
What was once a cultural divide has become a chasm, bigger, and vastly more dangerous then anything the "generation gap" of the 1960s could have produced. Again, from Sullivan…
A reader writes:
I just want to share a sad story with you. Tonight I was at my regular Friday night AA meeting in LA that I have been attending for 18 years – I am a 48 year old woman. One of my oldest friends, a male with 30 years sobriety, is a Republican. I am a Democrat. Every week he talks politics with another like-minded friend. Tonight he arrived a bit later than usual, so as I gave him a hug, I said, "Thank goodness you arrived because I am sure Betty* (name changed) did not want to discuss politics with me!"
He then turned around and started screaming at me. I was so taken aback, I didn’t even know what he was screaming about at first. When I finally tuned in, he was yelling that Obama "sent the SEIU thugs to beat up the senior citizens" protesting at the health-care town hall meetings and that Obama had instructed the SEIU "if they come at you, you go at them twice as hard."
When I tried to reasonably protest this statement, he just spewed forth a tirade of vile invectives.
We were outside and there were about 30 people milling about. I was shocked, embarrassed and literally frozen in place. I managed to turn and walk away. This is a man I have known and respected for the entire length of my sobriety. I am fairly certain this friendship is over. Reasonable discourse is over. The lies and hate spread by the right-wing have won. As a side note, his wife, who is one of my best friends would not talk to me for over a month after the election in November. I am just heartbroken. Sorry, I know this is not the most well-written account, but I am so shaken, I can barely wrap my head around it.
I have an acquaintance…someone I used to call "friend" but simply cannot anymore…who nonetheless calls periodically. I wrote of my frustrations about that Here. Last time he called I ended the conversation when he started going on about how the new supreme court justice Sotomayor was a racist. Next time he calls I’ll have a simple question ready for him…
Do you think President Obama was born here in the United States?
End of story. Life is short. The American Dream is still beautiful and I believe in it and you don’t anymore. There is are lot of things Americans need to discuss with one another and hash out together and the politics of life in a democracy is you have to have those discussions and maybe even a few major arguments and in the end you compromise and you hold a vote and you get on with it. But you’re not there anymore. You’re somewhere on the dark side of the moon where not even light can penetrate. We can’t talk anymore, and to have an America Americans need to be able to talk with each other and you want to shut down the talking so everyone can listen to you scream about nothing for as long as you have the breath to scream about it. Fine. The conversation is shut down…with you. I’ll talk it out with anyone who has a gripe about what I think or what I believe, no matter how angry they are…but not with a Fox News crack addict. You drag yourself out of that gutter and maybe I will. But not before.
Via Sullivan…this little nugget from the front lines from Daily KOS…
It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.
This could be a description of the anti-gay movement in America ever since Anita Bryant. Enfranchised and enabled? Check. They have every right that their gay neighbors are fighting for. Every. Right. Feeling in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones? Check. It’s a constant refrain. Militant homosexuals are oppressing them. Somehow. But don’t ask how exactly because all you’ll get are either vague claims that their "deeply held religious beliefs" are being trampled on every time they’re told to leave gay people alone, or if not that, then outright lies. Remember this?
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
We’re being oppressed…by having to live by the same rules everyone else does…
Not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs? Check. Not only are they not willing to listen to the facts, they’ve built a multi-million dollar industry with dozens of front groups whose only job is to churn out one lie after another about gay people which they insist everyone else accept as holy writ, whereas any actual science is regarded as pro-homo propaganda. Publicly proclaimed their mission to block any actual facts from coming to light? Check. From keeping honest, factual information about sexual orientation out of schools, to keeping it out of public libraries, to keeping it off of television, there is no public space that the facts about homosexuality and sexual orientation can appear that they have not vigorously…and I mean vigorously…worked to shut it down.
This Daily KOS post could have been written years ago, decades even, about about the anti-gay culture warriors. But it isn’t about the fight over gay rights. It’s about the struggle for America…
There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies — things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam’s Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.
Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely — not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry — but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings — that part is new. That part is not normal.
It’s been normal in the battle for gay rights for decades now…you’re only just now noticing it, because they’ve moved beyond us. But you have to understand this: you’ve always been the target too. A free, just, and proud America has always been their target. The America of liberty and justice for all has always been their target. Because in that America, they’re then just a bunch of ignorant runts, resentful that the universe doesn’t revolve around them, resentful of everything fine and noble human beings can be, they they never will because it’s too much work.
You haven’t seen the hate like your gay neighbors have seen it. Now you are. Surprised? Shocked? Just wait until you realize, really realize, that there is no bottom there.
One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply "I hate niggers" — it never is. It was "I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy." Or some such.
Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism — it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.
…
We’ve got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don’t need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.
It wasn’t about desegregation. It wasn’t about feminism. It wasn’t about gay rights. Those were just the flashpoints…the excuses. It wasn’t about any of those things. Not ever. Think about the other major event of the last half of the 20th century…the cold war. Think about the Iron Curtain. Think about the Berlin Wall. Think about all those people who were shot, trying to get over it to freedom. Think about what was going through the minds of the people who gave the order to shoot and kill those wall climbers. What this has always been about: The Gutter…resentful, hating everyone who ever managed to rise above them, fearful of being left alone in the gutter, afraid of the day when the walls all fall down and everyone who can leaves them behind and all they’ll have is each other to look at, and to blame.
Nothing more appropriate for our blog than sexy things you can eat. Japanese brand Niigata makes a pudding packaged inside a pair of tits with some caramel dipping sauce. YUHMM
I’m guessing the pudding tastes like spackling compound so they packaged it in a cup that looks like a female’s breast on the theory that sex can sell anything, even pudding that tastes like spackling compound. But who knows…maybe it’s perfectly decent pudding and some guys just like having it served to them in little tit shaped cups. I’m still trying to figure out that inflatable tits in a box for boys thing…
You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time, And All Of The People Some Of The Time, But You Can Fool Yourself All Of The Time
If the anti-gay petition drive in Washington State fails due to too many invalid signatures, the sweet justice of it might be that their own anti-gay base believed the same signature gathering lies they were telling everyone else. This from The Seattle PI blog:
The numbers for Thursday’s count showed 6,483 checked and 935 rejected, for a cumulative daily error rate of 14.42 percent, said secretary of state spokesman Dave Ammons.
…and this from the comments:
I think the lying on the part of supporters may have hurt them with the error rate.
Imagine someone in Kent waddling up to the Walmart and encountering someone with a petition to "repeal domestic partnerships for gays." They sign it and go in for a triple pounder with cheese before buying lead-filled Chinese crap for their kids.
Then 5 weeks later, they role out of their SUV at the Olive Garden and see someone with a petition to "ban same sex marriage." They go ahead and sign it, not realizing that it’s the same one they signed 5 weeks ago because the paid petition gatherer lied to them.
Gay-marriage supporters and foes on Thursday exchanged vows to take the high road in their campaigns in an anticipated referendum.
The lead organization fighting to keep the state’s gay-marriage law on the books made its request of Frank Schubert of Schubert Flint Public Affairs. Schubert Flint led the successful Proposition 8 proposal to overturn same-sex marriage in California, and it has been hired to do the same in Maine.
"Maine voters expect us to take the high road, avoid poisonous attacks, and make our case based on fact and principle. Today, NO on 1 pledged to abide by that high standard," said Jesse Connolly, campaign manager for NO on 1/Protect Maine Equality.
Reached in Washington, D.C., Frank Schubert said his firm’s campaign to toss out Maine’s gay-marriage law will be conducted in an ethical manner.
"I’m not sure what point they’re attempting to make, but every campaign we’ve run has been an ethical campaign based on factual information. We plan to run exactly that type of campaign in Maine," Schubert said Thursday.
Do I really need to explain the hopelessness of agreeing to a civil debate with the architects of the Proposition 8 campaign? Particularly when these thugs still think that campaign of smears, lies and hatemongering hysteria Was eithical? And…Factual?
Let’s Review some of the ethics and factuality on display in California shall we…?
The campaign promoting Proposition 8, which proposes to amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriages, has masterfully misdirected its audience, California voters. Look at the first-graders in San Francisco, attending their lesbian teacher’s wedding! Look at Catholic Charities, halting its adoption services in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal! Look at the church that lost its tax exemption over gay marriage! Look at anything except what Proposition 8 is actually about: a group of people who are trying to impose on the state their belief that homosexuality is immoral and that gays and lesbians are not entitled to be treated equally under the law.
That truth would never sell in tolerant, live-and-let-live California, and so it has been hidden behind a series of misleading half-truths. Once the sleight of hand is revealed, though, the campaign’s illusions fall away.
Take the story of Catholic Charities. The service arm of the Roman Catholic Church closed its adoption program in Massachusetts not because of the state’s gay marriage law but because of a gay anti-discrimination law passed many years earlier. In fact, the charity had voluntarily placed older foster children in gay and lesbian households — among those most willing to take hard-to-place children — until the church hierarchy was alerted and demanded that adoptions conform to the church’s religious teaching, which was in conflict with state law. The Proposition 8 campaign, funded in large part by Mormons who were urged to do so by their church, does not mention that the Mormon church’s adoption arm in Massachusetts is still operating, even though it does not place children in gay and lesbian households.
How can this be? It’s a matter of public accountability, not infringement on religion. Catholic Charities acted as a state contractor, receiving state and federal money to find homes for special-needs children who were wards of the state, and it faced the loss of public funding if it did not comply with the anti-discrimination law. In contrast, LDS (for Latter-day Saints) Family Services runs a private adoption service without public funding. Its work, and its ability to follow its religious teachings, have not been altered.
That San Francisco field trip? The children who attended the wedding had their parents’ signed permission, as law requires. A year ago, with the same permission, they could have traveled to their teacher’s domestic-partnership ceremony. Proposition 8 does not change the rules about what children are exposed to in school. The state Education Code does not allow schools to teach comprehensive sex education — which includes instruction about marriage — to children whose parents object.
Another "Yes on 8" canard is that the continuation of same-sex marriage will force churches and other religious groups to perform such marriages or face losing their tax-exempt status. Proponents point to a case in New Jersey, where a Methodist-based nonprofit owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings — of any religion — could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs.
The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it’s not public. The ruling does not affect churches’ religious tax exemptions or their freedom to marry whom they please on their private property, just as Catholic priests do not have to perform marriages for divorced people and Orthodox synagogues can refuse to provide space for the weddings of interfaith couples. And Proposition 8 has no bearing on the issue; note that the New Jersey case wasn’t about a wedding ceremony.
Emphasis mine. Go read the rest of it.
But then, asking how you can possibly have a civil debate with an opponent who lies through their teeth every chance they get is begging the larger question. Tell me please, what exactly is civil about wanting to cut your neighbor’s ring finger off? The very premise of the debate is about as uncivil as they come. There is nothing else this can be, but a knife fight. That’s exactly what our enemies not only need it to be, but want it to be. They hate us. They want everyone else to hate us as much as they do. Or at least be afraid of us. Very, very afraid. There is no such thing as a civil debate about whether or not gay people are a danger to families and children. There is no such thing as a civil debate about whether gay people are seeking to bring about the fall of western civilization. There is no such thing as a civil debate about whether same-sex couples defile the very meaning of marriage. There is nothing civil about prejudice. There is nothing civil about hate. There is nothing civil about mob rule.
I could change the caption on this guy representing the Massachusetts Family Institute to one of any of the dozens and dozens of anti gay crusaders out there who insist when the cameras are turned on them that they want to keep the debate civil while spreading every filthy lie about gay people they can think of to their base and just keep reusing this cartoon over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…
It Would Have Worked Too, If It Wasn’t For You Meddling Kids…
Captain Obvious has a message for all you ATM thieves out there. If you’re planning on planting one of your fake ATM bank card skimming machines inside a hotel lobby, don’t do it at one that’s hosting a hacker’s conference…
As the conference was kicking off a few days ago, attendees noticed that at ATM placed in the Riviera Hotel, which plays host to the annual event, didn’t quite look right, according to a senior conference organizer who identified himself only as Priest. "They looked at the screen where there would normally be a camera," he said. "It was a little bit too dark, so someone shined a flashlight in there and there was a PC."
Those Lovely Little Songs That Cut You To Ribbons Inside
I was flipping channels before bedtime the other day and came across one of those Time/Life CD collection ads. This one was for classic love songs from the 60s and 70s. I saw a few titles and heard a few tunes that struck my interest and so I jotted them down and began looking for them on iTunes and Amazon. Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful… I Just Fall In Love Again by The Carpenters… That kind of thing. What the Germans would call schlager if it was played over there. Schmaltzy, sentimental, florid, some would say maudlin tunes. Perhaps it’s a sign of aging that I get into that more. On the other hand, I got into it a lot actually when I was a kid, though I wasn’t really big on the romance thing at the time. But sentimental, evocative melodies always got to me and I had to buy them, even if I wasn’t really paying attention to the lyrics…
…which was probably because none of that spoke to gay kids back then. Gay was a horrible, dirty, vile perversion and gay men were dangerous sexual psychopaths and I knew I wasn’t any of that. Just that this whole dating thing was nothing I wanted to have anything to do with. Except…except…there was this beautiful guy in my high school I just couldn’t take my eyes off…
The joke is that even in a more accepting time, I would have probably had the same empty love life I had then. And…now. It wasn’t all just that I was gay. I was…well…one of those ugly duckling types. And from the other side of the tracks at that. Low income kid…living with his divorced mom… Clothes don’t quite fit right…and the styles are ten years old. Awkward. Shy. Thin and geeky. Book-wormish. That was me. Some small creative talent you could tell was just waiting to blossom…if only someone would pay attention to him. But that never happened.
One of the songs I caught a hint of on that Time/Life ad was a song I’d heard fragments of all though my adolescence but somehow never bothered with…probably because the singer was a woman singing about her girlhood and I was decidedly not interested in girls back then. But on a lark I went and downloaded it along with the others I’d noted from the ad. It was sung by a lady named Janis Ian, who has a beautiful voice. The song was At 17…
To those of us who know the pain
Of Valentines that never came,
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball.
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me.
We all play the game and when we dare
To cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
That call and say, come dance with me
And murmur vague obscenities
At ugly girls like me
At seventeen.
I’m sitting here typing this…and I can’t stop crying…
TRANSCRIPT: Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything. For the past couple of weeks we’ve been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers", the far-right goofballs who claim Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii and therefore the job goes to the runner-up, Miss California Carrie Prejean.
And you know there is nothing you can do to convince these people, you can hand them in person the original birth certificate with the placenta, and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background, and they still would not believe it.
"Hey birthers, wanna hear my theory? My theory was that Obama was born in America and you were born with the umbilical cord around your neck. I don’t know what his mother was doing when she was pregnant, but I’m pretty sure your mom was drinking."
Oh, I kid the birthers, there’s one thing that makes me think they could be right. We’re Americans, of course we’re gonna hire an illegal alien to clean-up.
I’m joking, of course. And laughing it off has also been the reaction from Democratic leaders so far. Proving that Democrats never learn. But if you don’t immediately kill errant bulls**t, no matter how ridiculous it can’t grow and thrive like crabgrass or Cirque du Soleil. This birther stuff might be a deluded right-wing obsession, but so was Whitewater and look where that ended up: "What are they gonna do, keep expanding the case until they impeach the President over a blowjob?"
Yes.
I’m telling you that in America there is no idea so patently absurd that it can’t catch on. Have you ever met a Mormon?
Or, more recently, we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, making him, a genuine war hero, a coward in a race against the guy who never left Texas. It was so stupid Kerry refused to even discuss it and we all know how well that worked out.
Well, you may ask, how something as inane as Whitewater or Swift Boats or the birther-thing gains traction? Well I’ll tell you how, the same way that the story of Elton John almost dying from ingesting too much of Rod Stewart’s sperm gained traction in my high school, dummies talking to other dummies.
It’s just easier now because of the internet. And because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid.
Lou Dobbs said recently, "People are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate." Yes, the same people who want to know where the Sun goes at night and where to put the stamp on their e-mail. And Lou, you’re their new king.
Which is why it is so important that we, the few, the proud, the reality based, attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This is not a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It’s sentient beings versus the lizard people.
And it is to the lizard people that I offer this deal, I will show you President Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.
…because our mainstream media does such a lousy job of talking truth to stupid. Yes. Because they’re not allowed to by their corporate masters. See what happened to Keith Olbermann.
The Music Industrial Complex…Still Digging Its Way To The Bottom…
Two headlines crossed my screen the other day…one concerning yet another grotesque MAFRIAA file sharing judgment. The other, this little tidbit from SlashDot…
The NY Times has an opinion piece that makes starkly clear the financial decline of the music industry. It’s accompanied by an infographic that cleverly renders the drop-off. The latest culprit accelerating the undoing of the music business is free, legal online music streaming.
"Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half. At that rate, the industry could be decimated before Madonna’s 60th birthday. … 13- to 17-year-olds acquired 19 percent less music in 2008 than they did in 2007. CD sales among these teenagers were down 26 percent and digital purchases were down 13 percent. … [T]he percentage of 14- to 18-year-olds who regularly share files dropped by nearly a third from December 2007 to January 2009. On the other hand, two-thirds of those teens now listen to streaming music ‘regularly’ and nearly a third listen to it every day."
The moron who wrote that Time’s piece, seems to agree with the Music Industrial Complex that the internet is killing the business. Starting off with how the speed at which the industry is falling apart is "utterly breathtaking", he proceeds, as in the quote above, to blame this new fangled thing called streaming music.
First, piracy punched a big hole in it. Now music streaming — music available on demand over the Internet, free and legal — is poised to seal the deal.
Okay…when I was a kid, streaming music was called RADIO. And we listened to it constantly. For…free. Yes it had advertising…but back then it wasn’t the constant barrage of screaming in your face ads that broadcast radio is now. And then, as now, RADIO doesn’t pay per song royalties (at least not here in the U.S.). They pay a flat licensing fee to the big music royalty groups, that’s based on a sampling survey of their programming. Internet streaming radio on the other hand, has to pay Per Song Served. So…yes Mr. New York Times…kids are listening to steaming music for free. That doesn’t mean the Music Industrial Complex isn’t getting any money from it. In fact, they’re getting more Per Song then then get from broadcast radio.
When I was a kid back in the late 60s and early 70s, we listened to tons of music for free…on the RADIO. And what was more, if you had a good tape recorder and a good radio, you could tape the music you were listening to and play it back later, as often as you liked. But back then there was an incentive not to. You could actually buy the songs you really liked for a price most of us kids could afford. This New York Times jackass seems to want everyone to forget that…
This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.
Even if they choose to buy the music, the industry has handicapped its ability to capitalize on that purchase by allowing all songs to be bought individually, apart from their albums. This once seemed like a blessing. Now it looks more like a curse.
In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good. You may have only wanted two or three songs, but you had to buy the whole 8-track, cassette or CD to get them. So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones. The resulting revenue provided a cushion for the artists and record companies to take chances and make mistakes. Single song downloads helped to kill that.
Previous Forms. Previous Forms. Previous Forms.
Ahem…
This is a shot I took of myself (before the haircut…) with my 45rpm collection for a post last year. These are Singles. Well…doubles if you counted the B side that nobody ever listened to. That was what you bought back then when you were a kid in the 1960s into the early 70s. Yes…even during the days of the 8 track tapes. Music stores back then usually had a whole wall devoted to the 45 rpm singles, and they were all the top forty tunes, plus a lot of also-rans that sold enough to keep them on the shelves. Singles didn’t kill the music business back then. They brought tons of money into it. That was how teenagers bought music back then. Because that was what we could afford. Teenagers you see, have no money.
Those 8 track tape machines, an early attempt at letting car owners play their own tunes while they drove, were for…car owners. And they were an expensive add-on. And so were the tapes, which often jammed after getting warped while baking inside a car. Kids…that same age group that Mr. New York Times is bellyaching aren’t buying enough albums anymore…didn’t buy 8 track tapes, and only bought an album if it was a particularly favorite group and you had the money. So the Beatles for example, sold tons of albums. But super star bands like the Beatles were the exception. Until the mid 70s, most top-40 hits were singles and they were all available as 45rpm singles.
But the Music Industrial Complex wanted more. So they decided kill the single, to force listeners to buy albums. And in the late 70s it worked pretty much. We boomer children were getting older, had jobs, had money, and albums then weren’t extravagantly expensive compared to singles. You could buy a Led Zepplin album for about 5 to 8 bucks depending on where you shopped. Singles by then were selling for around a buck twenty-five, so if an album was mostly good to listen to, it made more sense to buy the album instead. But soon, many of the top-forty hits couldn’t be found on singles. That was a decision the music companies made, and…surprise, surprise…kids started taping songs and passing them around instead of buying. Music sharing didn’t start with the Internet and this generation of teenagers didn’t invent it.
You really began to see that the greed of the music companies would eventually kill them with the advent of the Compact Disk. Initially their expense was related to the newness of the technology, and its superiority over the vinyl record. But the price never came down and it’s still outrageously high. I remember one day shopping at Tower Records, and seeing a set of new releases of James Bond movie scores (I am a film music buff…). I picked up a few, thinking that my old vinyl LPs were getting a little worn and it would be nice to have fresh, all digital copies. I picked up a copy of Dr. No….From Russia With Love…GoldFinger…Thunderball…Live And Let Die… I had five CDs in hand and was about to walk to the cashier when I realized I was holding, and $22 a pop which was the price then, over one-hundred dollars of CDs in my hands…and there were only five of them. So I put them back.
Eventually I bought them second-hand for a lot less. I was a grown adult then, with a job that let me afford to buy CDs at the grossly inflated price the Music Industrial Complex was charging for them, and I still balked. $110…plus tax…for just five albums? I just couldn’t justify it. What the hell did the music companies think teenagers were going to do when faced with that decision? Let me see… Er…make copies?
The Music Industrial Complex profits from album sales in the 70s, and CD sales in the 90s were driven by the shear size of the baby boomer population. We liked our rock bands. We had jobs in the late 70s, and vinyl LPs were affordable, so the disappearance of the 45rpm single didn’t bother us too much. In the 90s we were buying our old favorite albums all over again in CDs and we had careers by then and we could afford it. But teenagers have no money.
If your business model is based on the impulse buying habits of teenagers, you need to make your product affordable to them. And convenient enough that the impulse to buy won’t flip over to the impulse to…well…borrow a friend’s copy and copy it. You can lecture them all you want about stealing, but when you can’t afford to buy music you copy it and that’s what a teenager is going to do. Ask me how I know. I still have those hours of music tapes I made off the radio. The nice thing about taping music off the radio I discovered back in the early 70s, was you could skip over the commercials.
So I got Traveler back from the shop today, and I’m all entranced with my car all over again. I’m probably one of those highly annoying people who fall in love for the first time, Every Frickin Time He Falls In Love. So if you’d rather watch pill commercials then listen to me going on about my car, you should probably skip this post.
While my car was in the shop, and I was moping about the tire pressure monitoring system failure…Because Electrical System Problems Were Among The Most Complained About Issues With Mercedes Automobiles During Its Let’s Forget That Decade Ever Happened Decade…I wandered over to the web sites of some of those Other luxury car web sites. I wanted to look at pictures of the competition.
My motives were not honorable. No, I wasn’t thinking of dumping my car just because the tire pressure monitoring system went belly up and it took three days to fix it. My Mercedes dealer did what the factory told them to do: replace the broken parts with new factory parts that were better designed then the ones that failed. That required a modification to the wiring harness. I discussed it with the parts department guys after I got my car back, and was told that the new design was already in all new C class Mercedes. This is the Mercedes Way of incrementally improving a model all during its production run. When you buy parts for a Mercedes-Benz, you can’t just order them based on the model year, you have to order parts using the car’s VIN number.
No…I wasn’t shopping around while my eyes roved over those photos of the newest Lexus, Acuras, Lincolns and Cadillacs. What I was doing: Gloating. Okay…maybe not Gloating…but something akin. My car was in the shop for almost ten days. I wanted reminding of why I took a chance on a Mercedes, when I could have easily bought a Lexus, which constantly gets top marks in the Consumer Reports surveys, or the Acura, which is a very close second, and several thousand dollars less costly. Just for kicks I browsed in the Lincoln and the Cadillac web sites too. I wasn’t in the mood to play fair.
You will notice I left BMW and Audi out of it. Porche doesn’t make an "entry level luxury car", and neither do Rolls and Bentley and not in this lifetime will I ever own one of those. I wanted to compare like for like in price, specs and styling: Four door sedans in the 30 to 45k price range, styled as nicely appointed "entry level" luxury models, not those so-called sport/luxury models. I’ve never understood the appeal of those.
An "entry level" luxury car will have more plastic in the interior and fewer über luxury items; like the adaptive seat cushions of the Mercedes S class, which adjust to keep you firmly in your seat during emergency maneuvers. The dash will be mostly plastic of some sort, with maybe a little wood inlay…none of this all hand sewn leather stuff. But if it’s done right, the entry level luxury car can put within the reach of your average middle-class wage earner, something a little better, a little nicer, a tad more thrilling, then the bland, mass produced, lowest common denominator average. If your car is merely a means to get from point A to point B, then a Camry will do. If it is your wings, your magic carpet to explore the world with, then a Lexus doesn’t really seem like an extravagance. More like the just right companion for your journey down life’s many highways. If you can swing it.
But Mercedes doesn’t make anything equivalent to the Camry, and where it shows isn’t in the rarefied heights of the S class, but the car they call the Baby Benz…the C class. The C is as economy model as Mercedes is willing to go. But if the Lexus ES benefits from all the work Toyota puts into the Camry, in terms of being able to mass produce an affordable car that is absolutely reliable, the Mercedes C class benefits from having all that expensive engineering above it. A Lexus ES is a Camry at heart, made to a higher standard. A C class is a smaller and more modest E class, itself a smaller more modest S class. But they are all made to the same Mercedes standard of engineering.
So the C gets a plastic dash instead of a leather wrapped one, but it’s still made to the same engineering standard as the S class dash. You slide your hand across its surface and your fingers don’t tell you it’s a toy. Vinyl upholstery is standard instead of leather, no fancy trim or optional massaging function. But the seats though basic, are still made to the same engineering standard as the seats in the S class. I drove from one side of the country to the other sitting in them and I’m here to tell you I never had it so comfortable. You still get the front seat warmers and the power adjust. You get a lot of nice extras. But it is a plain car compared to the E, let alone the S, with a much smaller body, frame and drive train. It is less expensive, not because it is more cheaply made, but because there simply isn’t as much of it as its bigger siblings. It is smaller, has way fewer high tech gizmos in it, and way, way less sumptuousness. The C is the little brother that gets all the hand me downs. The Lexus by comparison, is a (very) high end Camry.
I don’t even like calling the C class a "luxury" car. And…really…none of them are when you get right down to it. At the price point we’re talking about, compromises have to be made, and a true luxury car isn’t about compromise. And it’s here that you really see the difference: in the Mercedes, when it comes down to it, engineering wins over appearance. The other makes really want you to think of them as luxury cars, so they go for that luxury car appearance and in the process cut corners everywhere. The wood trim isn’t really wood, or a very low grade wood. Likewise the aluminum trim is really just silvered plastic. The leather in the upholstery is second or even third grade at best. The dashes are so elegantly sculpted, but so very very cheesy to the touch. The other makes want to be viewed as luxury cars. The Mercedes C class wants you to think of it as a Mercedes and Mercedes has always been about engineering first. Well…except for that Let’s Forget That Decade Ever Happened Decade…
To my mind the C is a very nice compact four door sedan, but made as well as you can make one. The few luxury touches it has could as easily be options you’d find on any other mass produced automobile. It is hardly the most sumptuous thing you’ve ever seen. It’s actually quite plain looking by comparison to the other "entry level" luxury cars. There is nothing about the C that necessarily says Luxury Car at all. Except…except…that uncanny feeling you get when you look at it, and especially when you sit down inside of one, that this thing is built like a damn vault…
Here’s how that all plays out in the cockpit…
The Lexus ES 350…
The Acura TL…
The Lincoln MKZ…
The Cadillac CTS…
The Mercedes-Benz C Class…
Do you see the difference? Never mind for a moment how each of these cockpits looks. Ask yourself how they would feel to the touch. Which one of these interiors says to your eye that when your hands touch its surfaces it will feel something solid, or something brittle and plastic? All that nice curvy plastic in the Lexus and Acura interiors feels about as cheap as it looks. The Lexus in particular, looks very nice, very sumptuous. No vinyl upholstery there. The carpet on the floor is thick and luxurious. But look at that dash, and the one on the Acura. They both feel to the touch as plastic as they look. The Cadillac is just an unmitigatedly ugly mess, in addition to feeling to the touch like it was made in a toy factory. Only the Lincoln, surprisingly, looks anything like a solid, substantial piece of work. But even there the eye catches little details that seem…well…cheap. And alas, under the hood, it’s a Ford.
By comparison, the C class cockpit is almost Spartan. Just a few nice touches of burled walnut here and there, and a little video display that hides inside the dash as if embarrassed to admit its even there in such a sparse setting. But you sit down in one of these and you know right away how solidly built the damn thing is.
And then you start it up, and you hear a mill that sounds like you could drive it around the world several times and it would only just be broken in. It doesn’t growl, and it doesn’t whine. The sound of it is smooth and deep and precise and lovely. You can tell it isn’t a sports car. It’s a finely machined piece of 330 pound 220 horsepower steel and aluminum clockwork, as solid as everything else about the car. I have driven big block American made V-8s that accelerated more raggedly and with less umpf then this V-6.
Well…I got mine back this afternoon. And I’m going to take it for a ride…somewhere…anywhere…this weekend. We’ve been apart for too damn long…
Is this how lovers feel when one goes away on a business trip? It’s like my entire life is on hold until I get my friggin’ car back. I’m actually getting depressed about this.
I took Traveler in to the shop a week ago Monday to finally have the damage from my neighbor’s sideswipe repaired. It was minor damage, thankfully. Just around the front of the driver’s side front wheel well, and the side indicator light cover. But I didn’t want anyone but my Mercedes dealer touching that car, and especially doing the body work. The instant you lay your hands on that car you notice how nice and smooth and substantial the paint job on it is. I wanted it fixed, not covered over. I had to make an appointment for the work, and the best date they could give me was three weeks away. So I waited three weeks to have the work done, fuming quietly to myself every time I saw the neighbor who I am certain did the damage.
But the weekend before I was to take the car in, I got a sudden message from the speedometer display…
The Tire Pressure Monitoring System Is Inoperative.
HuH? Well, I thought, maybe it’s the battery inside one of the tire pressure sensors that’s gone bad. The cars Mercedes sells everywhere else in the world but here use a system that monitors the wheel spin as the car drives down the road, through the Electronic Stability Control system. A tire that’s getting low will drag more then the others and the stability control system will detect that. But when I bought Traveler, that method of monitoring the tire pressure hadn’t yet been approved by whatever U.S. regulatory department it is that approves these things. I have the Electronic Stability Control system in my car, but it doesn’t also monitor the tire pressure. In 2007-08 Mercedes sold its cars in the U.S. with a tire pressure monitoring system that has pressure monitors inside each wheel. They communicate with the tire pressure monitoring system via an RFID chip inside each pressure monitor.
It’s a more complex system and it gives Mercedes owners headaches whenever a new set of tires or wheels needs to be "registered" with the monitoring system. You can’t just swap on the snow tires every winter. You have to reset the tire pressure monitor and register the pressure monitors inside the snows with the system. That’s to prevent someone else’s car from driving up alongside yours and the pressure monitors in its wheels confusing your car’s monitoring system. Then in the spring you have to do the process all over again when you take off your snows and put back on the regular tires. It’s something an owner can do themselves, but it’s a pain. And the monitors in the wheels sometimes fail and then you have to pull a tire apart to get a new one in.
So I was expecting it to be something like that. But my dealer is having problems figuring out what’s wrong with the tire pressure monitoring system apparently. I brought Traveler into the shop a week ago Monday. It was supposed to be a three day body shop repair and then maybe an afternoon with the mechanic fixing the tire pressure monitor. But the body shop didn’t get done until Friday afternoon, and the machanic said they needed to order a part because they thought there was a grounding problem in the cabling. Swell.
I had a rental Volkswagon Jetta, but it was on the insurance for the body work, so I couldn’t keep it for the machanical work too. So I brought the Jetta back in and the dealer gave me a Subaru Forester to take home for the weekend. It’s nice for an SUV; small, easy to handle and park, yet very spacious inside. It was so new it still had that new car smell to it. I took another load of…stuff…to the city recycling drop-off with it and having that extra cargo capacity was very nice. But it has that odd Subaru opposing piston four banger and seems to get good gas milage. Driving it I could almost see owning an SUV. Well…a mini SUV. Almost.
Yesterday I called the dealer hoping to get Traveler back. No luck. They’re still waiting on a part. And I’m depressed. I don’t have my car. And now I can’t give it a clean bill of health when the next Consumer Reports survey comes along. I’m going to have to report that my Mercedes had an electrical system failure, and even though it wasn’t anything that would have left me stranded and waiting for a tow truck, it will get tallied up and Mercedes cars are going to keep getting a black eye in the Consumer Reports annual report compaired to the Japanese makes. But I’ve looked at the new Lexus and Acuras and I would still not buy one. I might go find another dealer though.
My Windows/Linux workstation, Mowgli, died some weeks ago. It’s had a recurring problem having to do with somehow loosing the keyboard state when it was turned off and refusing to turn back on again until I’d gone through this ritual of unplugging the keyboard and switching off the power supply at the back end and then plugging the keyboard back in and switching back on the power supply. It was a frustrating exercise in appeasing recalcitrant hardware and I was getting tired of it. But simply replacing Mowgli’s motherboard wasn’t a simple option. Ever since Microsoft went to its software branding anti-pirating technology what had been the painfully slow, gruesomely ugly chore of reinstalling Windows took on an added test of wills between Redmond and its customers.
Please activate my license again.
You’re stealing our product!
No…I’m just reinstalling it. Please activate my license again.
This is not the same computer you licensed this software for.
I had to replace the motherboard. Theses things fail you know. Please activate my license again.
Ah-Ha! The hard drive is different too! And the video card!
Duh. I figured as long as I was buying a new motherboard I’d upgrade a few other parts to. Why is it every time Windows Upgrade runs my computer gets a little slower?
This is a different computer. You are not licensed for more then one computer.
No…seriously…you think I’d go to all the time wasting nail biting hair pulling cursing profanely pain of installing Windows just for kicks and grins?? Hey, I know, I think I’ll reinstall Windows today. No idiot, my fucking hardware failed and I had to buy new parts! Activate my license again.
You’re a software thief! You must buy a license for this software!
I ALREADY HAVE A LICENSE!!!
Please wait while you are transferred to our sales department…
&#*@%#$!!!…
I’d planned on just giving up on Windows and running Linux on Mowgli long ago. But Linux has posed its own problems lately, the killer one for me being that for some reason "the community" decided to break Samba somehow. Samba is the open source networking layer that lets you connect to Windows computers and share resources such as files and printers. Previous versions let me network just fine with Bagheera, my art room PowerMac G5, and Akela, my Powerbook G4, just fine. More recent versions can’t seem to talk with them at all. Windows XP never had any problems talking to the Macs, so if there was a problem it was either something introduced in Vista or something introduced in MacOSX Leopard that only affected Samba, but not Windows XP. Since I started networking Casa del Garrett, I’ve taken advantage of being able to balance my storage needs between the art room and the front office. Networking here has to work, or I’m running up and down the stairs with a flash drive in my hand. And while the exercise is probably good for me, the frustration isn’t.
I’m at a stage in my life now where I just need my computers to work. I don’t have time anymore to keep on fiddling with them just for kicks and grins. I have work to do, both at home and for my employer when I’m working from home. I need things to be reliable here. And the only absolutely reliable computers in the house for the past half decade have been the Macs. I have never had any problems with either Bagheera or Akela. Never. I’ve had Mowgli apart dozens of times. And when it hasn’t been apart, I’ve been struggling for hours to resolve either some Windows issue or some Linux issue, usually right in the middle of some other important project. I need computers I can mostly just setup and use and they keep working. That’s the Macs.
And the Macs had the added benefit of Much nicer software licensing terms. There is no branding…at least none that’s visible to the end user. You just install OSX and it runs. I assume Apple already knows its own computers are supposed to be running its OS. And I’ve upgraded both Bagheera and Akela twice now with no fuss at all. What is more, I’ve actually replaced the system drive in Bagheera with a bigger one and simply file-copied over the old to the new drive and the new drive booted OSX without complaint. You just can’t do that with Windows. You need to use drive imaging software for that, and pray the anti-piracy code in Windows doesn’t decide you’re running an unauthorized copy. Hell…I can file-copy the system drives of either of my Macs to an external drive and boot from it if I need to. Try that on a Windows box, go ahead.
And the five license "family" OSX packs cost less then two single licenses. That’s also true for the "productivity" software Apple sells too, such as iLife. Ever since they came into the house, the Macs have just been all-around easier machines to live with.
I’d been considering becoming an all Mac household for some time now. My plain was to replace Bagheera, which is a PowerMac G5, with one of the newer Intel multi-core Mac Pros next year, and then move the PowerPC box up to the front office where Mowgli was. But Mowgli died before I could put that plan into action, and my budget this summer just didn’t have room for a Mac Pro. I considered a Mac Mini, but even one of those ended up being over a thousand bucks when I’d added the extra memory and disk space I figured I’d need. And you’d better buy one of those with everything you want already in it because you are not opening it up yourself to add anything later.
I really wanted something more like what I had in Bagheera. The tower case Macs are so cleanly, so damn elegantly laid out inside that getting into one to add memory, or a new hard drive, is a pure pleasure. I wanted to keep the option of working on my own hardware open. I remember my jaw dropping when I opened Bagheera that first time to add memory to it and saw how beautiful it was in there. Then later, when I opened it again to add a second hard drive, I was floored to see not only how easy it was, but how Apple had even put the extra screws I’d need for the job in a series of screw holes right next to the empty drive bay.
So I looked around at the second hand market, and found a company that deals in used Macs. They had another PowerMac similar to Bagheera for about $450. With added memory the total cost came to $550. It’s sitting beside me now, and I’ve named it Baloo.
Baloo came vi FedEx in a huge box swaddled in what looked like spray insulation foam. The first thing I did after unpacking it was take it up to the office and plug it into everything and boot it up, to make sure it arrived in working order. It was running Tiger (OSX 10.4) and seemed to be in fine shape. It was only later that I discovered it was not the machine I ordered. I had ordered a machine similar to Bagheera, a 1.8g G5 with 1g of system ram. What I got was a 1.6g G5 with 512meg of ram. But I’d also ordered an additional 2g of ram to put into it, so I still had enough to run a decently fast machine. Instead of it being topped up to 3g though, it would be 2.5g.
I spoke with the company I ordered it from and said I’d be willing to live with what they sent if I got a refund for the difference. It was annoying, but not fatal because I had the extra memory and the difference in processors wasn’t that great. And I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of sending it back and waiting for another one. The company agreed to send me a refund after apologizing for the mix-up, so I’m satisfied.
I got out my Leopard install disk and did a clean reformat and install on Baloo’s system drive. I’d saved money by buying the family license pack for two household Macs…I was saving more now by adding a third. Problem is none of the household Macs, which are all PowerPCs, will run the upcoming "Snow Leopard" version of OSX, so the next OS upgrade, when it happens, will be a lot most costly. But I’m not going to be in any big hurry for it.
When Mowgli died I pulled its data drive and put it in a IDE to USB converter box. Then I hooked it up to Akela, then copied its contents over to an external Firewire drive I’d partitioned and formatted in the MacOS file system. While I was running Akela as my front office computer, I kept the firewire drive attached to it and used that as my data drive. With Leopard installed on Baloo, I simply unplugged the firewire drive I had connected to Akela and put it on Baloo and now I had all my data on Baloo now. At some point, I’m going to add a second data drive to Baloo and copy the firewire drive to that, and then use the firewire drive as my backup drive. I’m going to keep the external backup drives I used with Mowgli archived in case I find I need something off of them later. The backup drives have data backups for both the Linux and Windows systems I ran on Mowgli and not all of that was copied over to the firewire drive I have on Baloo now. I’m also archiving the original data drive that was in Mowgli. Baloo starts with a fresh set. Hard drive space is cheap.
I’ve been adding the software I normally use in the front office to Baloo as I go along. Firefox… Thunderbird… Neo Office on the Mac rather then Open Office… the NetBeans IDE for Java development… Oh…and MoneyDance, the checkbook software I’m using lately. MoneyDance is a Java application, so it runs on Windows, Macs and Linux, and the user license attaches to the user, not the computer. So if I want to run it on any of the computers here at Casa del Garrett I can, provided that it’s me that’s using it, and only one instance of it is running at any given time. Nice.
So Baloo 2 and I are getting acquainted and the process is happening just the way I expected it to…smoothly and without fuss. Baloo was the name of my old IBM PS2 Model 80, which is headed for the recycling center soon now. So I’ve passed the name along. In Kipling’s Jungle Books, Baloo was the wise old teacher. In its first incarnation, Baloo was the IBM PC I used for maintenance work on the old DOS programs I’d developed back in my early contractor years. I had an Ethernet card in it, and actually had it networked to the other household Windows computers with a copy of Windows For Workgroups For MS-DOS. I haven’t fired up Baloo 1 in years though. In its second incarnation here, Baloo is the old PowerPC mac that’s taking care of my front office chores while I figure out what to do with Mowgli.
I still need a machine I can run Windows and Linux on occasionally for work related tasks, so that’s what Mowgli may become eventually. Or not. I have a whole new test center facility that I’m working on at the Institute and I can use that if I need to for any Institute work. I really don’t feel like bothering with either Windows or Linux at home anymore.
I Don’t Understand Why They’re Calling Us Bigots Simply For Opposing The Gay Agenda
From our Department of Clueless Nitwits…
Via SLOG, The Seattle Times ran an article yesterday about how fragmented the Religious Right has become lately, and in particular over the fight against gay equality. The general complaint among the local culture warriors, if not the big generals, is that the fight has become too negative. Oh really?
Fuiten, senior pastor at Cedar Park Assembly of God Church in Bothell, long has been a staunch, articulate voice for conservative Christian values.
But his position on what role the church should play on gay rights is shifting, and he’s struggling to understand what God wants him to do next.
He remains against gay marriage, still sees same-sex relations as sinful, and also was against a measure passed by the Legislature this spring that expanded domestic-partnership benefits for same-sex couples.
But he has publicly opposed — and won’t sign — Referendum 71, the effort to repeal that measure, saying people are preoccupied with the economy and there’s not enough support.
More important, he said, Ref. 71 "drags us backward into a negative fight we’re not going to win."
"I don’t want the church to be viewed as oppressive, [and] as opposed to people living their lives and eking out whatever happiness they can."
Well if he’s willing to concede that gay folk are "people" now, instead of a cancer on society, God cursed abominations that want to destroy marriage and families and the very moral fabric of western civilization, I guess that’s progress. But when you’re more concerned about how you are viewed, then the person you really are, you are going to keep missing the point of their anger.
Senior Pastor Emeritus Jan Hettinga, 64, of Northshore Baptist Church, and an organizer of 2004’s Mayday for Marriage rally, said many at his church feel they’ve "been there and done that" on political issues, and "all we got was really, really bad press and a bad image."
The problem isn’t that you have a bad image. Here’s the problem:
Branding the disagreement over same-sex marriage as hatred and bigotry was a smart strategy by gay-rights supporters, Hettinga said. "No Christians I know want to be considered haters.
And here’s where I just want to scream in his face. Strategy. Strategy. Strategy. You stick a knife into people’s hearts, tell them, no, scream in their faces day in and day out that they are condemned by god, call them abominations, threats to families, menaces to children, cancers on society, defilers of the sanctity of marriage, you barge into the gardens of their hopes and dreams and trash everything you can lay your hands on and when they call you haters and bigots you think that’s a fucking strategy??? No asshole, it’s called getting angry with morons who are laying waste to your inner life as if they don’t think you have one. Still can’t see the people for the homosexuals can you? Well…that’s how bigots are.
You don’t see people. You see bogeymen. You see scarecrows. They don’t have human hearts, they have an agenda. They don’t feel pain, they plot strategies. They don’t love, they just have sex. And you are not a bigot, just someone who can’t see the people for the homosexuals. An image makeover isn’t going to solve your problem Jan.
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