Hey fellas…let’s go make fun of guys who look like girls…

Look at this graphic…is the dancer spinning clockwise, or counter-clockwise…?

Actually…she can be spinning in either direction.  It depends on how your brain initially puts together the visual cues it finds. This from The NeuroLogica Blog, where Steven Novella debunks the notion that this optical illusion reveals left brain/right brain dominance…

Take a look at the spinning girl below. Do you see it spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? I see it spinning counter-clockwise, and I had a hard time getting it to switch direction. Give it a try.

These kinds of optical illusions are always fun. What they reveal is how our brain processes visual information in order to create a visual model of the world. The visual system evolved to make certain assumptions that are almost always right (like, if something is smaller is it likely farther away). But these assumptions can be exploited to created a false visual construction, or an optical illusion.

The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.

By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction. 

The trick, once you’ve settled on a direction for the dancer’s movement, is changing your mind about it at will.  It’s not easy at first…at least it wasn’t for me.  Initially I saw her spinning counter-clockwise.  It took effort, but after a while I found that if I view the image in my peripheral vision, I can train my eye, while not looking directly at the image, to see her spinning in the opposite direction until it "takes".  Then when I look directly at her she’s now spinning in that direction.  At first it took a while and a lot of effort, but after some practice I could make her switch pretty quickly.

But…now I have a headache… 

It used to be when I got real sick I’d experience a bounce effect at the end of it.  One morning after a long bout of sickness I’d wake up and it would be gone, and I’d be all bright-eyed and bushy tailed and it would seem like the whole world was brighter and livelier then ever.  My head would be crystal clear and my body full of energy and I would feel more alive and alert then ever.  As a compensation for days and days of misery it wasn’t bad.  Then as I got older, that bounce seemed to go away.  The past few years it’s been more like I drag myself back to health, then suddenly bounce back into it.

But I’m having myself a really nice bounce this morning, and I’m wondering now if this No-Junk diet of mine I’ve been doing this past year is part, or all of it.  The fever and misery is gone.  I’m a bit drained, but gosh I feel so…alive…right now.  Almost like it always was.  Only I’m still not a twenty-something anymore, so the energy and perkiness I’m feeling isn’t quite the same.  But it’s close.  It’s helping too, that the sky is bright and blue this morning.  The leafs on my Japanese Maple tree have turned bright red, and I can look through them and see the golden leafs of the trees across the street.  The effect is stunning…deep blue sky, vibrant reds and golds…one of the nice spiffs of owning this house is how great the view is out my front windows when the leafs around here change.

That oh-so-clear sky is because we had a cold front pass through Maryland last night and it’s damn cold out there now.  So best to stay indoors today too, as much as possible.  I want to make sure this damn flu is gone, gone, gone because next week is Thanksgiving week and I have friends to visit and a class reunion to go to.

It’s saying something for how deep in new car love I still am, that the thing I’ve been missing most being sick is being able to drive my car.  Traveler has been sitting patiently out front waiting for me to get in and take him somewhere.  At least my gas bill this week won’t be so much. 

Oh Gosh…I haven’t even Seen gas prices for the past week or so.  Something tells me I should be very afraid…

I hate it.  Which is why I get the shot every year.  But it takes up to two weeks to confer immunity and I started coming down with the one I have now about two days later.

Right now I’m pretty miserable.  This was not a good time at work for me to be taking off sick.  And I’m sitting here at Casa del Garrett with an absolutely skull splitting headache due to spending too much time in bed.  So I can’t go lie down like my body wants to right now, and I can’t stay active because I’m too weak and feverish.  

This is the other reason why I stock up on supplies for the winter in November.  Being single means there’s no one else around here to go get things at the store while I stay home sick.  So if I come down with something I’d better have everything I need here at home.  Even so, every time I come down with something like this now, it reminds me how vulnerable I am because I’m single.  I was stepping weakly down the stairs this morning to go to the kitchen and get a glass of OJ, and maybe make myself a quick sandwich, and it felt like my legs were barely able to hold me up.  That’s the first time a flu has ever done that to me.  It put me to wondering what would happen if some illness simply made me too weak to even get out of bed.

Next year, I’m getting the shot earlier.  I waited this year for the usual freebie shot we get at work every year and it came (obviously) a tad too late.

So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement.  Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house.  Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered.  Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…

I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?

Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series.   Wille.  Wille.  You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that.  Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex.  But the worst I ever was, was indifferent.  I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do.  I like guys.  I like being a guy.  I like being around guys.  I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys.  But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy.  I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close.  Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman".  Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.  

I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.

Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female.  Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here.  Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight?  There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex.  It’s not in our willies, but in our heads.  Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way?   And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement.  I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)

I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls.  Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work.  There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood.  That opened my eyes.  As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears. 

Here’s Sullivan trying to make heads or tails of the implications of that after a reader reminds him…

What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles.  You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar.  I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men."  I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.

Surely you know this.

To which Sullivan reliably babbles… 

If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?

Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either.  Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans.   But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves. 

Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways.  Men and women from other men and women.  Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians.  Gays from other gays.  How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual?  Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together.  Since when did prejudice ever make sense?  No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character.  Neither does your sexual orientation.  Neither does your gender.  Neither does your gender expression.  And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:

Now, look at that.  No…Really Look At It.  Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves.  What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities.  Look At That Image.  This is what the bigots see, when they look at us.  They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot.  They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender.  To them, it’s all sex perversion.  You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman.  Never mind you don’t think you are.  It’s not about what you think.  Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman.  They see gender non-conformity.  In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women.  You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan. 

None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority.  That’s why we’re discriminated against.  That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny.  Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world.  Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it.   But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual.  Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman.  That’s the thinking going on here.  They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual.  None.

And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.  Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere.  Civil Unions before marriage.  Okay…I can dig that.  I don’t like it but I can dig it.  At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something.  The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky.  You know…behaving like democrats always do these days.  Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality.  And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory.  Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.

But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me.  I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for.  The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he?   And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it?  Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?

Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it.  That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?

No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here.  Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself.  Just not the big stupid ones. 

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin 

54 doesn’t feel like a whole hell of a long time to have been walking this good earth.  I have to keep reminding myself that to a lot of people whose paths I cross nowadays, 54 years is just a tad short of forever…

This Weekend at the Movies

Posted by Annie Wagner on November 9at 12:33 PM

What is Guillermo del Toro smoking?: Pan’s Labyrinth director will adapt an ancient British TV show about secret agents who acquire psychic powers after crashing in the Communist Himalayas.

Ancient?!  I glanced at that photo and instantly remembered the show without even needing to follow the link.  It was called The Champions.  I would have been 15 when it started airing in the fall of 1968.  I recalled it running for just one season and that the stories were fairly unexciting and unimaginative considering the premise.  It was certainly no Avengers, but then nothing else was either.  I wouldn’t go out of my way to own the DVD set, assuming anyone would make one.

Ancient.  Ancient.  It’s not helping that I can remember when telephones all looked like that too.  And…window blinds.

On the other hand, a remake of Run For Your Life could be cool…

If the day ever comes that I start thinking about checking myself into an ex-gay ministry, it’ll be headlines like this that talk me out of it…

Ex-Wife Accused of Torching Bison Head

A southwest Idaho woman accused of setting fire to a mounted bison head at her ex-husband’s home faces arson charges. Police arrested Ryann Jean Stafford, 26, Thursday on a charge of third-degree arson, a felony.

Investigators said Stafford and her former spouse got into an argument at his home. But after he left the house, police said Stafford began throwing objects and then used a lighter to ignite the mounted head.

I’m sitting here wondering if the Bison head was there when she married him.  Did he put it there to spite her?  To drive her crazy?  Hey honey…you ever notice how the bison’s eyes seem to follow you around the room…?  Did he give it to her as a gift and she filed for divorce immediately thereafter?  Was it a prized memento from their honeymoon?  Were they fighting over who gets it in the settlement?  Did he name it after her?  After her mother? 

Note to self:  Marital bliss is probably not enhanced by tacking large dead animal heads to the wall.  On the other hand, I used to know a gay couple who had a buffalo hide rug and they said it was absolutely their favorite thing to have sex on.

This is very cool…

Nice! Whoever invented that can be proud. They have contributed greatly to the welfare of the species.

I may actually try that someday…

Noticing that glasses feel cold on my face no matter how warm I bundle up…

Damn.  Oh well…

The problem with applying unfettered capitalism to the health system is that it takes the purpose of health care away from curing disease and keeping people healthy and makes it selling them health care products and services.  Suppose a new superbug suddenly appeared in hospitals all over the world.  Suppose it was killing people and there didn’t seem to be any way of stopping it from spreading from the hospitals to the general public.  But suppose that all along there were older, generic drugs that could kill this new superbug and could have prevented the deaths of those who had died, but the drug companies weren’t interested in them there was no profit to be had in selling people the old drugs…

It’s not fiction…it’s happening right now.  You’ve heard about that new super staph bacteria…right…?

Deadly Staph Germs May Be Cured by Old, $1-a-Day Antibiotics

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) — Generic, World War II-era antibiotics may become the newest weapon of choice in the fight against deadly, drug-resistant staph germs.

Physicians funded by the U.S. government are mounting two studies of drugs costing less than $1 a day to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA. The bacteria, once found only in hospitals and nursing homes, are spreading to communal settings such as schools and gyms. Last month, MRSA was linked to the deaths of a student in New York and one in Virginia.

The generic antibiotics are used to treat infections before they require surgery. Drugmakers, meanwhile, are spending hundreds of millions developing medicines that cost more than $100 a day to treat advanced cases. More than 18,000 Americans annually are killed by MRSA, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

…

The grants represent a realization by the NIH that there is a “gap in the current knowledge” about the older drugs and that government needs to step in when market conditions may discourage drug companies from filling it, Moran says.

“We know these drugs work,” he says. “They are already in wide use. But we want to confirm what doctors are doing, and the trials may change behavior somewhat.”

…

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the NIH, says the grants were intended to fill a vacuum left by pharmaceutical companies. Drugmakers, he says, don’t have an economic incentive to study drugs with expired patents or to develop antibiotics that have limited market potential.

(Emphasis mine)  The article goes on to state that the use of the older drugs is only a stopgap measure until newer (hideously expensive) drugs can be developed.  But of course, those newer drugs will also only be stopgap measures too, as the germs evolve and develop resistance.  But look at this confession here, that the profit motive doesn’t work in health care, and so the government has to step in and do these tests.  Drugs may already exist that kill this new superbug, but we don’t know that, because the drug companies aren’t interested in selling them because they can’t make enough profit on them.

And the bottom line there is, people are dying for the sake of drug company profits.  Welcome to the best health care system in the world, according to the republicans.  And obviously what’s so good about our health care system is how much money it makes for the drug companies.  That’s the purpose of health care in George Bush’s America.  Not to cure sick people.  Not to keep healthy people healthy.  The purpose of health care in America is to make drug company executives rich.

I’ve never understood the appeal among the art pundits for architect Frank Gehry’s style. 

I think his buildings are more like fruit wine hallucinations then daring expressions of form.  But I’ve always assumed that part of the appeal at least, was how he managed to do what he did, be so expressive in his way, and still make what must have been many extremely complex engineering problems all work out right. 

Well…as it turns out…maybe not so much…

MIT sues Gehry, citing leaks in $300m complex

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed a negligence suit against world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, charging that flaws in his design of the $300 million Stata Center in Cambridge, one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up.

The suit says that MIT paid Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners $15 million to design the Stata Center, which was hailed by critics as innovative and eye-catching with its unconventional walls and radical angles. But soon after its completion in spring 2004, the center’s outdoor amphitheater began to crack due to drainage problems, the suit says. Snow and ice cascaded dangerously from window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other parts of the building, according to the suit. Mold grew on the center’s brick exterior, the suit says, and there were persistent leaks throughout the building.

The suit says it cost MIT more than $1.5 million to hire another company to rebuild the amphitheater, with new bricks, seats, and a new drainage system.

The institute alleges that both Gehry Partners and the construction company, New Jersey-based Beacon Skanska Construction Company, now known as Skanska USA Building Inc., violated their contracts with MIT and are responsible for construction and design failures on the project. The 400,000-square-foot Ray and Maria Stata Center, on Vassar Street, also houses labs, offices, classrooms, and meeting rooms, and features a "street" that winds through the ground floor.

"Gehry breached its duties by providing deficient design services and drawings," says the suit, which was filed in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston on Oct. 31 and seeks unspecified damages for costs and expenses incurred by MIT.

Gehry Partners did not respond to repeated calls and e-mail yesterday from the Globe. A spokesman for MIT declined to comment because of the pending lawsuit.

An executive at Skanska’s Boston office yesterday blamed Gehry for problems with the project and said Gehry ignored warnings from Skanska and a consulting company prior to construction that there were flaws in his design of the amphitheater.

"This is not a construction issue, never has been," said Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of Skanska USA. He said Gehry rejected Skanska’s formal request to create a design that included soft joints and a drainage system in the amphitheater, and "we were told to proceed with the original design."

After the amphitheater began cracking and flooding, Skanska spent "a few hundred thousand dollars" trying to resolve the problems, but, he said, "it was difficult to make the original design work."

I worked as an architectural modelmaker for much of the 1980s and I know the companies I freelanced during that time all had teams of engineers on staff whose only job was to pay attention to the environment a building exists in as much as the physics of keeping it standing up.  Snow loading, ice, rain, even nooks and crannys where birds might nest were all taken into account.  And I saw designers overruled time and again by the engineers over those issues.

After learning of the lawsuit yesterday, Silber said Gehry "thinks of himself as an artist, as a sculptor. But the trouble is you don’t live in a sculpture and users have to live in this building."

Oh bullshit.  The sculptor who doesn’t understand how marble or bronze behave, or whatever material it is they work in, is no artist.  Art is a step above craft, not below.  You cannot approach the vision in your mind, in your heart, if you are not a master of the materials you work in, or at least aspire to be.  You have to love your tools, and know them as well as you know your own hands.

Bye Ernie.  Don’t let the diversity hit you on the way out.   And…good riddance…

Kentucky Governor Loses to Democrat

Dogged by political scandal in his first term, Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, a Republican, lost his bid for re-election yesterday to Steve Beshear.

Looks like Teh Gay couldn’t drive the rubes to the poles this time.  Things are looking up in Virginia too, of all places.  I was reading an interesting view about how the current sub prime mortgage crisis may be a factor in the elections.  The McMansion suburbs have been a republican stomping ground for the past decade and now a lot of those people are loosing their houses or finding themselves suddenly under debt loads they cannot bear.  The problem for the republicans in all that is that those folks are educated enough to know that the republican greed reflex is largely responsible for the mortgage system collapse and they’re probably closely following its ripples through all their other investments too. It can’t be fun reading the financial news these days knowing that you voted for the idiots who are now running the economy like they’d been given a license to steal. 

And you thought republicans really meant all that stuff about small government and fiscal responsibility.  Never mind the price of oil…gold is now at an absolutely incredible eight-hundred and forty-one dollars an ounce as of last night.  When Bush took office it was selling for around two-hundred sixty.  The Canadian dollar is worth more then the U.S. dollar and the Australian dollar is inching close.  The national debt has skyrocketed.  So have foreclosure rates.  People in upscale neighborhoods in southern California are taking care of the lawns of homes that haven’t sold in months, so the neighborhood won’t look like a slum.  And now they’re finding squatters in some of those homes.  I’ll bet a lot of red neighborhoods in the McMansion suburbs turned blue this election.

"Greed is good", they said.  People should have paid more attention.  No, greed is not good.  Greed eats this year’s seed and doesn’t care if there’s any left to plant next year.  Greed squeezes what the market will bear out of it, and doesn’t care if what the market will bear keeps getting smaller and smaller every year.  Greed doesn’t favor the short term gain over the long run investment because it doesn’t admit there is any such thing as tomorrow.  There is only now.  Right now.  I want it Right Now.  "Greed is good", is the economic theology of seven year olds.

Paul Krugman had a good riff on the excuses we’re hearing now from the party faithful, that Bush and his cronies don’t so much perfectly represent modern movement conservative values in practice, as they are a betrayal of them.  Bullshit…

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

Bush is not incompetent.  He’s been dead-on target every moment, every second he’s been in power, doing Exactly what the right has always promised America it would do once it got its hands on the levers of power.  Of course financial institutions all over the world are trembling now at the scale of the losses in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco.  They don’t matter.  Finance is predicated on a notion that both the secular and religious right categorically reject: that there’s such a thing as tomorrow.  Greed is good.  Or to put it succinctly:

SCHADENFREUDE ALERT….The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror, who apparently got his hands on a royalty statement he wasn’t supposed to see:

"It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"

….The authors, who say in the lawsuit that [Regnery’s parent company] has been "unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars," are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, "We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice."

Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?

You got what you voted for.  The problem wasn’t that you didn’t read the fine print.  You didn’t read the bold print.

During my lunch break at work today I took a quick drive to my local Wild Birds Unlimited shop to buy a case of "Woodpecker’s Delight" suet cakes for my suet feeders for the winter.  I’ve been re-adjusting the layout of the feeders in the front yard here at Casa del Garrett for another try at defeating the local squirrels, and I’m hoping I can attract the variety of woodpeckers again this winter that I did last.  And of course, it was an excuse to drive Traveler, my new Mercedes-Benz C300 somewhere.

I was about halfway up I-83 to to the beltway when I noticed a rattle coming from somewhere in the back of the car.  I waited for a while for it to go away.  I tried ignoring it.  I tried to think if I had anything stored in any of the rear door armrests but I knew I didn’t.  I’ve been keeping that car spotless inside.  I tried cocking my ears this way and that to zero in on where exactly it was coming from and couldn’t tell exactly…just that it was coming from somewhere around the area of the rear window.  I tried raising and lowering the rear window sun screen a few times, but that didn’t solve it, nor change the tone of the rattle one bit.   I tried raising and lowering both the rear windows.  The rattle didn’t go away.

When I got to Wild Birds and parked I opened a back door and got in the rear seat and looked around for something, anything, that I could see might be obviously causing the rattling sound.  But there wasn’t anything.  I checked the seatbelts, poked and pressed at some of the upholstery and door panels, tapped on the rear deck paneling around the speaker moldings.  It all seemed as solid as the day I bought the car.  This had all the makings of one of those perfectly annoying car rattles that just drive you nuts until you find it.  Every car I’ve ever owned has had one of those.  But this wasn’t just any car.  It was my brand new Mercedes-Benz.

The last thing in the world I wanted was to know beyond any doubt that my brand new 45 thousand dollar car had a rattle in it.  Other then an outright mechanical failure, there wouldn’t be much more then that to demolish my sense of pride in owning a work of Mercedes-Benz rock solidness.  One of the delights I’ve had in the past few weeks in just driving that car somewhere, anywhere, is its exceptional feel of solidity as you drive it down the road.  That’s always been one thing in which a Mercedes-Benz is quite unlike any other car, except maybe the rarefied hand built cars of the super rich like the Bentley and Rolls.  A Mercedes sedan is a bit stogy, but solid as a rock, over engineered and high performing in a way its looks don’t advertise…the ultimate techno geek car when you think about it.  No way could it have a rattle. 

But that was what Mercedes-Benz was.  In the 1990s they stopped being that, to the discontent of many.  Then some years ago they owned up to it, and promised to start building them like they used to.  For the last couple of years it seemed like they had finally turned a corner.  They divorced Chrysler, they got rid of the CEO who led them downward in quality for the sake of his grandiose dream of making Mercedes the world’s biggest auto maker.  And I wanted so much to believe.

I bought my case of suet and barely looked at the other merchandise.  I was preoccupied.  Does the warranty cover rattles…?  No way was I going to allow my Mercedes to have a rattle.  Tolerating it was absolutely not an option.  Mercedes-Benz Don’t Rattle Goddammit.  I will Not allow it!  On the way back down I-83 the rattle returned like a chicken coming home to roost.  I was getting depressed.  I’ve owned a junker or two in my time and I know the sound of a rattle that isn’t going away until you track it down and fix it.  And the more I listened to it, the more it sounded like something coming from inside a panel somewhere.

I drove back to work in a funk.  This month I have many other things going on at work to occupy my mind.  Back home again in the evening, I logged into the servers at the Institute and did a little more work.  After rush hour had settled down a tad I walked out to the car, sat down in the driver’s seat, and thought about it.  I sat there in a funk for a few minutes.  Who do I know that I can get to sit in the back seat and isolate a rattle for me while I drive the car…?  All afternoon at work I’d been trying to debug a set of server configuration problems that were keeping me from getting some things done I’d needed to get done.  So my mood wasn’t exactly serene and peaceful.  But now that debugging mind frame I’d been in all afternoon took charge of my little rattle problem…

Let’s step through this…  Where’s the rattle coming from?  The back of the car.  What’s in the back of the car?

Well…the trunk of course.  I got out and opened the trunk.  Inside my trunk I have several items.  One is a big canvas pouch I bought at a truck stop ages ago.  It’s supposed to hang off one of the front seat headrest pillars down the seatback, and it has big pockets to hold a roll of paper towels, bottles of cleaner, a flashlight maps and other miscellaneous items.  I wasn’t about to hang it off the back of one of Traveler’s seats, so I put it in the trunk.  The other item is a small Rubbermaid container that holds my emergency kit…road flares, duct tape, tire sealant, heavy duty jumper cables, a large APC 12 volt DC to 120 volt AC power converter, a bright orange safety poncho and a few miscellaneous tools.  Also in the trunk was my window squeegee, the first aid kit that came with the car, the one I already had, and the spare wiper blades.  The first aid kit that came with the car was stowed in a compartment on the side of the trunk, behind one of the rear wheels, along with the spare wiper blades.  I took all of this out of the trunk, started up Traveler and took it for another drive up I-83. 

The rattle was gone.  Absolutely gone.  Back was the cozy quiet I’d fallen in love with the first time I drove the car from Baltimore to Washington.  I drove a short loop up I-83 and back and the inside of the car was as quiet and serene as before. 

One at a time I reintroduced the items back into the trunk, exactly where they were before, and did the same drive up and back on I-83 again.  Eventually I discovered it was the spare wiper blades.  They’re made of a very flexible rubber/plastic compound and they’d wedged themselves into a position where they were vibrating against the metal walls of the storage compartment they were in.  In Mercedes’ defense, that’s not where they were when I bought the car.  When I bought the car the spare wiper blades had been stowed in the front passenger seat map holder.  I didn’t think that was an appropriate place for them, so I put them in that side compartment in the trunk with the first aid kit.

From now on, the spare wiper blades go in the Rubbermaid container. 

Don’t ask if I’m still pissed off at you…

Kentucky GOP Pushing Anti-Gay Message In Final Days Of Gov Race

Going into the home stretch in in the Kentucky gubernatorial election, the Republicans appear to have brought out one last card: Paranoia against gays.

The state GOP is now sending a robo-call throughout the state featuring none other than Pat Boone, warning that as a Christian he is concerned that Democratic nominee Steve Beshear, who has been way ahead in the polls, will work for "every homosexual cause."

"Now do you want a governor who’d like Kentucky to be another San Francisco?" Boone asks. "Please re-elect Ernie Fletcher."

And at a campaign stop last night, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor made a direct attack upon the Democratic ticket: "Do you want a couple of San Francisco treats or do you want a governor?"

(Emphasis mine) So the republican candidate gets way behind in the polls and he starts waving the Gay Menace.  This is what republicans do to win elections, and never mind how many gay Americans it gets killed.  Talking Points Memo has a recording of Fletcher’s robo call.  You may recall that on April 11 of last year Fletcher, declared Diversity Day in Kentucky, and on the same day eliminated anti-discrimination protections for gay state and local government workers.

I wrote a post a few days back about wanting a door I could walk through from time to time.  Don’t assume that means I’m not just as pissed off at all of you as I was.  In fact, I might even be More pissed off now then I was.  Because it just never stops with the republicans.  It just never stops. 

I don’t expect everyone who knows me to agree with me on every political issue.  But if you can vote republican while they’re doing this to gay people to win elections then you are not my friend.  It really is that simple.  I’ve got a bullseye on my back, along with ever other gay American citizen, and it’s not gutter crawling maggots like Ernie Fletcher who put it there, it’s all of you who told the republicans they can incite passions toward gay people as often and as crudely as they like and you’ll still vote for them.

So don’t ask.  Just…don’t. 

When the roll call of the gay bashed for this election cycle is read and I’m lucky enough not to be on it that’ll be no thanks to the likes of any of you.

Burger King Workers Charged In Gay Couple’s Beating

(Union City, New Jersey) Two workers at a Burger King in Union City have been charged with assault and a hate crime in connection with the beating of a gay couple outside the restaurant.

Christopher Soto and Angel Carbaballo, who have since been fired by the chain, are scheduled to appear in court this week.

The victims, both in their 40s, have not been named.

When the couple asked for a refund for a menu item that the counter person discovered was not available, another counter person then asked who wanted the refund – “The faggots over there?”

The couple left the restaurant, but a group of Burger King employees allegedly followed them to a side street and beat them mercilessly, though not fatally. 

The employees made repeated anti-gay slurs during the beating according to the indictment.

You never know where what you put up on the web will land.  Andrew Sullivan links to this lecture by James Alison titled "Love Your Enemy: Within A Divided Self"…

For people like me, Senator Craig is, in a very obvious sense, an enemy: he has been a solid functionary of the system of hatred which has used people like me as a wedge issue to frighten people into acquiescence with other, and far more serious forms of evildoing. A system of hatred which is, thank heavens, far less strong in this country now than it is in the United States, and far less strong than it was in this country as recently as fifteen years ago. I say this, since there is an obvious sense in which I, as a child of my culture, am tempted to rejoice in the discomfiture of my enemy, to depict Senator Craig as the “not me” which gives me a tidy little identity. It was in this context that I was very moved to read a piece by one of the gay-bloggers in the US, fairly shortly after the Craig story broke, which helped remind me of the truth of the Gospel.

This blogger, whose name I cannot now remember, showed me something which enabled me to see sameness rather than difference.

He pointed out that Senator Craig was born in 1945, in rural Idaho. When he was ten years old, in 1955, there was a scandal in Boise, the Idaho State Capital, not too far from where young Larry lived. It was the big tabloid gay scandal of the 1950’s, coming just as America was in the grip of the McCarthy witch hunts, themselves helped along nicely by at least two self-hating gay men, “killer fruits” as Truman Capote wrily called them: Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover. It was revealed that in Boise, of all unlikely places, there was a network of public officials and influential citizens employing the services of a group of rent boys. Well, you can imagine what sort of impact the news of all this, the sensation of it, the hatred it revealed, might have had on a ten year old boy. It might well have taught him that if he wanted to grow up being good, then the one thing, above all else, that he was not, was gay (or whatever approximation to that word existed in his milieu at that time). A boy like that might well have been taught by his culture, just as he came close to puberty, simultaneously who he was, and who he was not; and faced with any little boy’s desire to grow up to be good, he may have been locked into a form of denial and self-hatred which could then perpetuate itself for many years thereafter.

I can’t be sure, but I think that nameless gay blogger was probably me, Here.  At the time I was seeing some references to the issues Craig’s generation faced, but I’d also previously seen announcements come around one of the gay news lists I’m on about the Fall of ’55 Documentary, which reminded me of the book, Sex Crime Panic, about another one that happened, also in 1955, in Soux City Iowa, and I did a quick mental calculation of how old Craig probably was at the time of the scandal in his home state and sure enough there he was, just at the threshold of puberty when all of this was going down.  That generation had it a lot rougher then mine even, I’m about ten years younger then Craig, but some gay kids growing up in some parts of the country back then had it worse, if that’s possible to imagine.

The web’s a big place and who knows how many other gay bloggers, knowing about that documentary or about that scandal independently figured out its link with Larry Craig’s life and posted their thoughts for Alison to read, but nobody else I’d read up ’til I posted my piece as the story was developing had, or took the time to figure exactly how old he would have been.  I don’t get the kind of hits per day that Sullivan gets, or even the third or forth tier gay bloggers get, but I have have regular and semi-regular readers here, and many others who stop in via Google every day, and I see lots of email links in my server logs, as people find things here on the blog, and on my cartoon pages, that they want to share with others.  The point is, who knows where a thought that you put down in writing will go here on the web?

This is what the Internet has done for us, for the political and cultural dialogue among the everyday folk.  With so many active and curious minds roaming around the web to stumble across and behold the links between people and events that animate our times, we don’t have to wait for some Old Media gasbags to tell us what the connections are.  We find them, and ponder them for ourselves.