CYPRESS – A young man from Cypress is set to be charged Friday with 13 felonies for what authorities say was an elaborate scheme in which he would obtain the personal information of unsuspecting young women through Facebook, then send them packages using assumed identities.
The women would receive an e-mail with a tracking number for a package from an "Art Shaw" of Aramark Corp. When they opened the package, they would find blank notepaper and envelopes, and sometimes, markers. Sharpie markers, according to police.
Police allege Arpan Harshad Shah, 26, used aliases, false e-mail addresses, drop locations and stolen corporate FedEx account numbers to hide the fact that he was the one sending the women packages.
I’m guessing that in Cypress you signal your romantic interest in someone by giving them office supplies…
This post was written by CBS News chief political consultant Marc Ambinder:
One reason the Rick Warren thing is a big deal is because, after Bill Clinton, the gay community is unusually sensitive to getting the shorter angle of presidential triangulation. It is hard to overstate the optimism and excitement that gays and lesbians felt in 1992. But the optimism deflated spectacularly after "Don’t Ask, Don’t tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act, not to mention President Clinton’s sneaky 1996 ad boasting about DOMA, which aired only on Christian radio.
Clinton was willing to say the word "gay" in public and appear in black tie at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, but, in the eyes of the gay political community, his commitment to gay rights vanished both times it counted most.
Relative to other minority groups, the LGBT community is disproportionately dependent on the goodwill of the president, because almost all of their big-ticket agenda items are federal laws (the military, DOMA repeal, hate crimes, ENDA, the Permanent Partners Immigration Act, etc.). And relative to other minorities, gays still want and need basic reassurance that they are an ordinary part of American life and politics. So everyone is peering anxiously at Obama wondering if he is going to let them down like Clinton did.
Emphasis mine. That is all we want to be. An ordinary part of American life. And yet…we can’t. Our lives have to be other people’s stepping stones to heaven. That’s what we were put on this earth for, apparently. To be other people’s stepping stones to heaven. Or in the case of Mormons, godhood…
Fine. When we’re all equals in the eyes of the law.
Proposition 8 was not about agreeing to disagree. If the law treated gay people equally with heterosexuals, I doubt any of us would give a rat’s ass what Rick Warren thinks. First we should be a nation of equals. Then we can all agree to disagree. Not before.
While it’s obvious that an invocation is just a prayer and that Warren is not part of the Obama administration, Warren taking the pulpit as some sort of olive branch to evangelicals and a show of unity and diversity is absurd and insulting symbolism. The fact that the Obama camp’s talking points mention a LGBT marching band’s presence during the official parade shows you how clueless (or calculating, you decide) these folks are.
A marching band is entertainment…
Gay people have always provided the entertainment for heterosexuals. And…we do their hair. And decorate their homes. And arrange the floral bouquets on their wedding day. It’s our function in life…
I think it’s more likely that he’s marginalizing Warren’s rivals among the Evangelical leadership. Warren is not actually any less conservative than Dobson or Robertson or anyone else. He is less partisan. His views on abortion and violence are similarly inconsistent, with one being abhorrent and the other acceptable. (The power and legitimacy of the American state, it seems, turns the conservative faithful into moral relativists.) But Warren has shown a tendency not to attack individual political figures the way his peers have, and so Obama has made the decision to elevate Warren at his rivals’ expense. I had an argument with my colleague Brentin Mock yesterday about Obama’s decision, where he pointed out that someone else would be occupying Warren’s leadership role if it wasn’t Warren, and given the alternatives he’s the best choice.
None of this really changes the fact that mainstreaming homophobia is inexcusable, and that Warren does not deserve to share a stage with the Rev. Joseph Lowery. The contrast between Warren’s celebrity and Lowery’s life fighting for civil rights is absolutely staggering. It’s possible to interpret the decision to include Warren and Lowery as another Lincoln "we are not enemies but friends" moment, an attempt to bring the religious right and religious left together. The only problem is the most offended parties, the LGBTQ community and the women Warren equates with Nazis, are not in any symbolic sense present to make the choice to be friends or enemies. Had Obama, say, chosen a gay pastor and forced Warren to make the difficult decision of whether or not to appear, the situation might be a bit different. At the same time, Lowery’s presence as a symbol of his generation’s sacrifice is absolutely necessary. Obama simply wouldn’t be able to run for president without men like Joseph Lowery.
Even if one reads Warren’s presence as a cold political calculation, it’s hard to see why the LGBTQ community wouldn’t be outraged at being exploited for the purpose of cultural triangulation. Obama isn’t a homophobe, but you gotta wonder how long the LGBTQ community has to wait before they get a president who thinks homophobia is unacceptable…
Someone else…I forget who…remarked that it was as if it was 1993 all over again…an unpopular Bush leaves office and a bright and shining new hope for everyone who believes in liberty and justice for all takes office, only to sell out gay Americans and begin a strategy of triangulation…
How long? Yes. That is The Question. How long do we have to wait for our heterosexual neighbors to finally, at long last, become appalled at what has been done all these years to their gay and lesbian neighbors…to their friends…to their own children…? How long before they finally, Finally see the magnitude of what has been taken from? How long before the sight of hate toward loving couples disgusts them more, then the sight of someone making excuses for hate? How long before shaking hands with gutter crawling bigots like Rick Warren disgusts them enough that even a politician can feel it?
ike everyone else who cares about LGBT equality, election night brought a mix of joy as it became apparent Obama would win, and pain as we realized Prop. 8 would pass. My wife and I spent the evening in Union Square trying to enjoy a birthday dinner with friends before heading to the official No on 8 party. When word came at around 8:15 that Obama had been elected, cable cars rang their bells and whoops of job sprang up all around the Square. I joined a dozen folks clustering around a local TV station’s van watching a teeny tiny TV broadcasting CNN. I tried to join in the revelry, but all I could access was alienation. At no other time in my life had I felt so discriminated against . I spend my days working on a variety of progressive issues, but in that moment — and for the next week — all that mattered was Prop. 8. My vision narrowed and intensified. They say this happens when you feel under attack. "What about us?" I kept wanting to say. "What about our rights?"
Our dinner ran late, so we missed Obama’s speech and we even missed the official No on 8 party. Upon leaving the restaurant all we saw was members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and other assorted folks out on the street, stunned and wondering what to do next. I spent the next few days fearing conversation with anyone who might not be thinking about Prop. 8 — anyone who would want to talk about Obama, or the weather, or our kids’ school, or anything not related to my pain. It was as though I was grieving and I didn’t want to be with anyone who wasn’t grieving too.
This is exactly why I haven’t posted much here about Obama’s victory. Yes, I’m grateful. Especially so since a certain someone told me recently, that he’d have moved, possibly back to Germany, if McCain had won. As he’s lived here in America most of his life, its not exactly like the old country is home now. But for him, like for a lot of people, America had started to become a strange foreign land…a place where the American dream of liberty and justice for all had become a dirty joke. A McCain victory would have been the final straw. I’d have wanted to leave too then. I wanted to leave after the 2004 election. But I’m too old to immigrate anywhere unless I bring sacks of money along with me. It’s good Obama won. But how good…really?
So it breaks my heart — in fact, it’s pretty much inconceivable — to learn that Obama has asked anti-gay California pastor Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.
I could forgive Obama his tepid support for the No on 8 campaign. It was election time — he had to win. There are so many critical issues in front of him. He had to win.
But he could have chosen any clergy member in the nation to deliver his invocation. So why one from the state where religion has so recently been a painful dividing line? One who spoke out so publicly in support of Prop 8, stating that "there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about"? One who continues to argue that marriage equality silences his religious views?
Why re-open painful wounds?
As unlikely as it seems, here’s hoping Obama will listen to reason and rescind his invitation. Here’s hoping I will finally, finally, be able to have my Obama moment.
He won’t. He’s smarter then that. Rescinding the invitation now would just make more headlines and keep the thing in the news that much longer. But it’s a disaster. Lee Stranahan, also over at the Huffington Post , assures us that he understands our anger, but that the reality is most Americans agree with Warren on same sex marriage.
Like my comrades, I think Warren is dead wrong on same sex marriage. But the reality is that at the end of 2008, a majority of voters in California agreed with him. A majority of Americans agree with Warren about same sex marriage and many more states have made marriage equality unconstitutional than have ratified it.
Fine. But Warren’s dagger at same-sex marriage was dipped in hate monger’s poison. Here’s some reality for you: Warren said that same sex love was akin to incest. He said that same sex couples were akin to pedophiles. Stranahan urges us to embrace what we have in common with Warren…but what could any decent person have in common with that gutter crawling bigot, other then that we’re all breathing the same oxygen?
This is being portrayed as an olive branch to the social conservatives, by a heterosexual news media that thinks the cheapshit hatreds of bar stool preachers like Warren are more legitimate, more real, more essentially American, then the love and devotion of same-sex couples. But the betrayal here is larger then the gay community. Obama’s election give the entire world hope. That hope, for peace, for justice, for a re-awakening of the better part of human nature, is what was betrayed here.
Rick Warren is on record as saying America should feel free to assassinate foreign leaders if that is in its interests. But when is political assassination ever in the interest of democracy, let alone the rule of law? Reality. Obama is about to sit down in the Oval Office in a world that has become so violent with hate, sectarian and nationalistic, that the possibility of world war III has practically become moot. Hundreds of innocent people died in a series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks in India just a few weeks ago. Reality. And Obama choses a minister of hate to speak the words that begin his presidency. There’s your reality Stranahan. Look at it. No…really look at it.
You don’t heal the wounds in a people by spitting more poison on them. You don’t bind a nation back together by giving the knife that cut it apart a place at the table. You don’t offer an olive branch to your enemy while he’s still busy burning down the forest.
You Have To Figure That Democrats Just Want Gay Americans To Stop Voting Altogether
Rick Warren. Rick Warren. Rick Warren. The man who said that the love of same-sex couples for one another was akin to incest. The man who said that the love of same-sex couples for one another was akin to pedophilia. Rick Warren. Gay Americans were brutalized last November, and now we’re being spit on by what we thought was a ray of hope.
Of course, trying to avoid the hate when you’re a gay man is a little like trying to avoid the rain during monsoon season in India. I ran across this thread on Fark.Com…
I haven’t posted here lately because I’m busy with work and stuff. And I’m getting my Christmas cards ready to send. Every year since I started working at the Space Telescope I’ve made up my own custom Christmas cards with images from the Hubble Space Telescope on them. It’s been one of the joys of working on Hubble that I can do this and send them out to family and friends.
More later. In the meantime I need a break from the fight. Really. It is just such a major stress in my life to have to deal with all the hate out there toward gay people. It never ends. It never ends. And it’s draining all the joy and wonder from my life. I hate it. I never really realized how much it stresses me out until I spent that time in Disney World. When I came back home, several friends and co-workers remarked on how relaxed I looked. One even asserted that I must have gotten laid while I was down in Orlando. No…that didn’t happen. What happened was I managed to recapture some of the joy of life I’ve been missing ever since I took a walk through adolescence, and learned that I would always be hated for what I am, and that finding love was going to be a struggle that I’d probably loose.
I want that joy back. I need that joy back. So I’m going to do something I’ve always disdained: I’m going to drop out of the news loop for a while. Or at least try to. If I can. I’m such a news addict. Especially when it comes to news concerning the gay community. I need to back off for a while. So you won’t see me posting much here about gay issues for a while. Hopefully. Maybe.
I have a lot of vacation time accrued, so I’m taking another two weeks off this Christmas-New Years holiday period. I don’t think I’ll be going anyway…at least not far from home. I might take a few drives here and there…maybe to see an old friend in PA…if he’s free…maybe to Ocean City New Jersey for a while. I dunno. But I need the break. The relentless hate is just wearing me down. I need to ignore it for a while. I need to remember why life is good. Laugh at me, but I really enjoyed my stay in Disney World. When I get last Thanksgiving’s trip paid off, I am going back. No question about it.
I’ve been coding more this last few days, a thing I enjoy immensely. And working on the new virtual test center at work. And I’m feeling the pressure to assume more management kinds of roles. I’ve always resisted that because I like coding and working down in the guts of systems. But there comes a point where you have to just accept the path life is placing before you. I had it explained to me today in terms I was finally able to accept, that my value to the organization is tilting more now towards project management. I’m 55 years old…I’ve been doing this work since the first PCs came to market, and I have so much experience that it makes more sense for me to step up the chain and give the Institute the benefit of that, then keep myself down in the nuts and bolts of things.
There’s an irony here. Parents are always telling their children You just wait…when you have kids of your own you’ll see…! And, being a gay man and not wanting to raise kids of my own I would just shrug all that off with a laugh. But you can’t escape the responsibilities of age, like it or not. I can just hear every boss I’ve ever had now, wagging their fingers at me from the past and saying You just wait…when you have staff of your own you’ll see…!
Well…maybe. All that’s in the future and nothing is certain. But apparently I am being positioned for it on at least one project and I reckon it’s an inescapable part of having a career in a trade you love. And the work we do at Space Telescope is for the ages. You can’t beat that. At some point I realized that my work life and my personal life had become one and it was here, really, that it happened. I don’t do nine to five anymore. I haven’t for years. It’s a joy few people manage to find and I am so blessed that I did. I live and breath this stuff. Single and lonely though I am, I have that at least.
But I guess I can’t be a simple coder forever. At some point, you have to move on. But if it keeps me valuable to the Institute, then I reckon I’ll do it. There is no growing up…there is only growing. And I promised myself when I was a kid that I would never stop growing.
If you made yourself that same promise then I salute you, we are kindred spirits, and I wish you and yours all the best this holiday season.
Germans seem to just love to cobble German words together to make bigger German words. In German, there is no such thing as the word is too big. Sometimes a word isn’t big enough so another word gets added to it. Thus, gammeliges, which means rotten meat, gets combined with fleisch, which means ‘flesh’ to become gammelfleisch, which is German for, uh, "rotten meat". Somehow this new bigger word for rotten meat got coined during a recent food scandal, when it was discovered that some meat packers were shipping food that was past it’s use-by date to restaruants. I’m sure a certain someone could tell me why the one word just wasn’t good enough.
Germans also tend to be brutally direct in their opinions. And thus gammelfleisch, becomes gammelfleischparty…
Gammelfleischparty is German youth word of year
German is famous for its long words — and today’s youth are just as adept at creating new ones as their predecessors, to judge by a poll released Wednesday by the publishers of Langenscheidt dictionaries.
Judges chose "gammelfleischparty", or "spoiled meat party," — an unflattering term for a gathering of people over 30 — as the "youth word of the year 2008." The word "gammelfleisch" was in the news frequently during the year when it was discovered that meat packers had been regularly supplying some kebab restaurants with past-due products.
"Bildschirmbraeune" or "screen tan" — referring to the complexion of someone who spends too much time at a computer — came second, while "unterhopft," meaning "underhopped," or in need of a beer, took third.
How To Wrest News From The TV In 21st Century America
Yes, yes…network news is to news, like processed cheese food product is to cheese. But as it turns out, there Is a way to find out from your TV what’s going on in Washington. You just have to adjust your perspective a tad.
For example…have you noticed all those "clean coal" ads on TV lately?
The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday abandoned its push to revise two air-pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.
One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park. The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would result in fewer such cleanups.
EPA officials had been trying to finalize both proposals before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But yesterday, an agency spokesman said they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters of the measures.
Rule of thumb: When you suddenly start seeing a lot of feel good advertising from some big corporate interest groups, it’s a safe bet they’re trying to push something through congress.
What the coal and energy corporations want you to know, is that coal is clean. Swell. That’s really swell. Glad to hear it. But if coal is clean then why do they need congress to change the clean air act?
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