This is one of his essays, reposted in the comments section on Kos. Here he is on what looks like a riff about the meaning of liberalism, but it’s really about swinging back when the gutter takes a swing at you. Steve had no patients for liberals and democrats who wouldn’t stand up proudly for themselves and their political and moral values, and who by default, allowed the right wing smears against their party and its history to go unchallenged in the name of not sinking down to their level. Steve understood that you just can’t allow a single solitary right wing lie to go unchallenged because before you know it, that lie will take on a life of its own. As many have.
This is so typical of him, and why he will be much missed.
You know, I’ve studied history, I’ve read about America and you know something, if it weren’t for liberals, we’d be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren’t fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.
What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn’t given us anything we didn’t have and it wants to take away our freedoms.
The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man’s path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?
Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.
For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn’t. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn’t enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.
Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.
Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.
It’s time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.
It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America’s defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
Why are so many liberal bloggers up in arms about Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine being picked to give the Democrat’s reply to Bush’s State of the Union? There’s been fury in the blogosphere about everything from Kaine’s looks, style, obscurity, his open talk about his faith and his inexperience in national security.
Liberal writer Ezra Klein (no Brad Pitt, last time I checked him out) vented that Kaine is "a squat, squinty, pug-nosed fellow." Even the invariably smart and strategic Arianna (Huffington) weighed in: "What the hell are they thinking?" She accused Democrats of picking "someone whose only claim to fame is that he carried a red state" when they need to make the case that "the GOP is not the party that can best keep us safe."
But, let’s get real here.
1. It doesn’t really matter who gives the reply, since no one listens and it’s an impossible task.
2. This is slightly less important than whether House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi chooses to wear blue or red to listen to the speech.
…………….
4. And, hell, Kaine is pretty liberal for a Virginian. During the campaign, he was derided relentlessly by the GOP, in an expensive and vicious campaign, as "the most liberal candidate who’s ever run for governor in the Commonwealth of Virginia’s history." Kaine is a guy who made a name for himself working with the American Civil Liberties Union, who connected his faith to his politics in authentic ways (he was a thoughtful opponent of the death penalty), who was an honest and forthright advocate of government’s affirmative role–supporting moves to increase taxes to fund education, transportation and environmental programs…………………..
For liberal bloggers who want to get exercised about something really important: Where are the Democrats or liberals talking about Ford laying off some 30,000 workers, the end of middle class benefits for working Americans, IBM’s gutting of pension security, and the collapse of American manufacturing?
…………………….
If you want to know why Dems don’t win elections, it won’t be because Kaine is talking this Tuesday night. It’s because the mainstream leadership of the Democratic party doesn’t think, feel, viscerally respond to the increasing insecurities of working americans.
I guess Katrina doesn’t read any labor blogs, oddly enough she should, but that’s a pig fight for another day.
First, let’s start with her cheap shot at Ezra Klein. He wasn’t talking about the man’s stature for no reason. It’s because it matters. And the point of having Jack Murtha speak was to discuss the war and Bush’s lies with impecable credibility. We don’t need any fucking lectures on Tim Kaine’s strengths and weaknesses. We’re the ones who backed his campaign. And frankly, we were more concerned with ginning up support for a filibuster than who refuted Bush at the SOTU. A couple of opinions is not a controversy. Less people posted on this than a discussion on mac and cheese I had on this site a few weeks ago.
I mean, I wouldn’t call Marc Cooper a fat piece of shit to describe him, beacuse that’s cheap, mean and irrelevant, just like that was a cheap and unfair shot about Klein, who unlike some heiresses with a taste for short skirts and leather jackets, didn’t have his blog handed to him. It’s an unfair use of power and position to smack someone down for no good reason. But he has friends and friends of friends who won’t let that little slam go unremarked.
When Jonah Goldberg attacked her over the hurricane, many in the blogosphere ripped him a new asshole for what he did. It was cheap and unfair and we stuck up for her. This is our repayment.
Ever wonder why liberals get their ass kicked? Because they don’t take things seriously like responding to the State of the Union. It may not matter to her and the cocktail party circuit, but it matters to millions of people on TV to hear they’ve been told bullshit by the President. If she thinks it’s on par with Nancy Pelosi’s clothing choices, well………
"Pretty liberal for a Virginian". Wow, not condescending at all. That’s pretty much like saying "he speaks well for a black man". And she’s giving lectures on what Democrats miss? Well, fuck me, she just sneered at the fairly large number of liberal democrats in Virginia (UVA, what’s that?) like they were trained monkeys or something. Just because he has an accent doesn’t mean he’s a racist or a conservative. There are liberals in every part of the country, but not to the Nation.
She’s has the gall to lecture us on workers rights? I mean, I could swing a dead cat around the Nation’s offices before hitting a black person. Did you ever notice this city was 57 percent minority? What, not enough blacks or hispanics at NYU or City College to offer internships to? Or only when you know the parents do the offers come through. It’s easy to talk about 30,0o0 Ford employees you’ll never meet.
But don’t you think something is just fucked up when you look around your offices and it looks as white as a country club? You want to talk about visceral? Let’s talk about your hiring practices. You want to talk about Democrats and liberals, yet your own publication reflects an increasingly narrow and unrepresentative slice of liberal ideology, one which oddly enough, people are rejecting to read blogs for. Who do you speak for? Not the majority of New Yorkers or urban america, except through a filter of uper middle class entitlement and distant concern.
So I’m in no mood to take lectures from people who have no clue about what Democrats or bloggers even do. And is frankly so spineless as to keep the aformentioned Marc Cooper on the masthead, after he shit on the staff of the Nation to cozy up to his reactionary buddies at Pajamas Media. If the Nation was run by some of the tough minded people who run blogs, his ass would have been bouncing down the street.
We’ve lost a fighter. Steve Gilliard was someone I admired immensely and read daily, and when he fell ill this time, and I read about the difficulty he was having in the hospital, I was afraid it would come to this. I am going to miss his passionate, angry, righteous voice more then I want to think about right now.
He began as a frequent commenter on Daily Kos…
When reporters ask me when I first started thinking Daily Kos would become something more important, I tell them about the Dean campaign, or about the traffic explosion during the run-up and start of the Iraq War.
But that’s pretty much bullshit. Because the reality is much more mundane, much less sexy —
It was the arrival on the site’s comment boards of two people — Meteor Blades and Steve Gilliard.
They were a real revelation to me — I couldn’t believe that people like them, so brilliant, so insightful, so talented, would spend time at my little corner of the world. They inspired me to keep writing, keep building this place. Because if nothing else, I needed to make sure they had a platform upon which to speak.
So they ended up being two of the first contributing editors on Daily Kos. Steve, in fact, was the first person I ever approached with the "guest blogger" offer. And he didn’t waste time getting started, drawing on history of the region and the British occupation of Iraq in the late 1910s to set the stage for what the US would soon face in Iraq. He was frighteningly prescient on Iraq, and it wasn’t the only topic he would consistently nail. He was a credit to the progressive blogosphere.
Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage. And he got it with the News Blog, which he soon built into a full-time gig, still a rarity among bloggers. It was one of three sites I religiously checked more than three times a day.
If you knew Steve only from his blog, you’d think he was a pit bull. He was blunt, loud, aggressive, unafraid, and took no prisoners.
But you’d meet him in life, and he was the exact opposite. He was soft-spoken, shy, modest, calm, friendly, and — this was the most surprising to me — gentle.
I never would’ve gotten that from his writings. But that’s what he was.
I’d known Steve five years — just about my entire blogging existence. I don’t know of a blogging life without him. He has been a friend, a confidant, a sounding board, a reality check, a loyal ally, a mentor. He was family.
And while that all came to an end Saturday morning, I’m still not ready to let it go.
We were blessed to have Steve as long we did. But I’m selfish. I wanted much, much more.
I went a couple of rounds with Steve a few years back, mostly ribbing during one of the earlier rounds of blogger wars (the "pie fight" drama). More often than not though, over the last two years, we agreed on quite a bit, including our disdain for the religious right and the outlandish transparent efforts by the GOP to promote the candidacies of sell-out, fundie kissing house negroes like Ken Blackwell as proof of the party’s "outreach" to the black community.
We corresponded every once in a while, mostly of the "can you believe this sh*t?" nature regarding the above. Steve enthusiastically came to my defense back in February when The Peter and CWA launched their email disinformation campaign to discredit me (and attempt jeopardize my day job) by calling me "anti-Christian." Steve emailed and said:
You need to call these people out as racists and homophobes.
They think you’re going to care what they think. Tell them that you don’t need a bunch of racists lecturing you on the black church or anything else. That their rampant homophobia also disqualifies them. And then add in that they have no respect for lesbians or blacks anyway, besides hiring tokens.
As far as anti-Christian, unless you grew up in a far different family than mine, you know about the church and the one you grew up in was not filled with hateful screeds like this.
Steve was a fighter. He knew that when the gutter takes a swing at you, you have to swing back, and hard and keep on swinging until they crawl back to wherever they came from. None of this, faux civility crap when it came to dealing with the gutter. Steve told it like it was, said it like it needed to be said, and never, Never conceded so much as an inch of the moral high ground to posturing republican thugs. He knew his history…God how he knew his history…and he could relate the past to the present with breathtaking precision and insight. Kos is right about how prescient he was on Iraq. He saw with clarity how the imperialist impulse, and that relentless blindness to the lives and humanity of non-westerners, the arrogance and conceit of white superiority, still lives on and moves the hard right. He understood it. He understood how it informs the history we are living today. And he never shrank from calling it for what it was, just as he never thought twice about calling out democratic party sell-outs, or those black leaders and ministers who think they can make a deal with the right for their own personal glory. He always called it for what it was, no matter how impolitic.
We need more like him nowadays, not less. And now he’s gone. Damn. Damn!
You were an honest, righteous, decent voice. You fought the good fight. You’re going to be missed. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to bear taking your link down.
If you’re feeling brave today, perhaps you’d like to take a walk up to the edge of the Pit and peer in. I promise you’ll see something worth knowing.
Hate. Ever wonder what it’s like, to look it right in the face and behold? Hate. Hate. Not to ask it why, or wherefore, but just to look and observe and then walk back away from it…always, always, walk away from it…and remember. Remember what you saw. Remember. I’m not talking Fred Phelps’ circus o’ hate. Fred’s been in it for the shock value longer then he can remember why he hates. He just wants to be the center of attention now. Same with all those poor weak little white power Nazi wannabes you see, gamely giving the stiff arm salute for the cameras, while surrounded by a ring of police protection. Himmler would have considered them little more then useful idiots. No…I’m talking the good stuff. Pure. Uncut. Hate. Hate. I have a hit of it right here for you.
Just be careful. Remember what Nietzsche said…repeat it like a prayer before you look… If you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you… When you are done looking, you are going to walk away. You must. It will be hard.
Here, via a Latvian group calling itself Defend The Family, is Scott Lively. He’s delivering a lecture to this group on the dangers of the homosexual menace. Lively may already be known to some of you, as the holocaust-revisionist author of The Pink Swastika. As Jim Burroway says…
Lively goes beyond the small cadre of anti-gay extremists who deny that gays were victims of the holocaust. He claims that ‘homosexualism’ itself was responsible for the rise of the Nazi party and led directly to the Holocaust. He writes that “homosexuality is primarily a predatory addiction striving to take the weak and unsuspecting down with it.”
Despite the crackpot theories manufactured largely from rumor, conjecture and the recycling of popular myths, Lively’s book has become something of a best seller. It’s now in its fourth edition. While it has been dismissed by historians, it has gained a significant following among anti-gay activists, particularly among European neo-Nazi groups who have been responsible for several anti-gay assaults in recent years.
Lively has been active in Latvia recently. On March 21st, he was invited to speak at a Kaunas Police Academy about “the effects of sexual ‘freedom’ that is promoted by the homosexual movement.”
Here is a video of Lively giving his talk during a workshop at the New Generations church in Riga, Latvia last March. This isn’t the Fred Phelps family chanting their obscene slogans, waving their signs at hundreds of angry protesters. This isn’t a group of faux Nazi milk babies strutting around in uniforms they think make them somebody. This is an intelligent man calmly, and methodically demonizing one group of people to another group of people who he knows are ready to accept anything he says to them, and have utterly no way of measuring the truth of anything he’s telling them.
They are people who have been taught since childhood to believe whatever the authorities tell them to believe. Once it was their Soviet masters. Now it’s their church leaders. Those leaders have told them that Lively is a great American author who traveled around the world just to speak to them, to warn them of a danger to everything they have ever known. Watch now, as Lively, calmly, deliberately, methodically, teaches them to hate and fear and loath their homosexual neighbors more then they ever, ever hated the Soviets. Watch his face.
As a compromise, Riga Pride organisers held a private indoor rally at the Berg hotel, following an Anglican church service. The church was surrounded by a group of religious extremists, old women and skinheads. "We tried to leave by the back door but they had put guards there. We tried to move through them but groups of people started to run at us shouting, ‘You deserve to die,’ and ‘Leave our land.’ They were carrying bags, which could have had anything in them," remembers Jolanta Chianovica, a half-French, half-Latvian activist.
The bags were full of human excrement, which was hurled at the mostly female congregation. Meanwhile, more counterdemonstrators had swarmed to the Berg hotel, where they were refusing to let Pride supporters in or out. "I saw two girls trying to leave and people spat in their faces directly in front of the police but they did nothing. When they saw the police weren’t interfering to stop the violence, they felt they could do whatever they liked. That was really frightening," says Chianovica.
This is the situation Lively walked into, this is the situation he knew he was walking into, as he told his audience that the gay rights movement has "destroyed the family structure in a large part of the United States", when he said of homosexuals that "they have no place in a society that protects marriage and family."
Now…walk away. Go find a friend and make them smile. Find a small uncared for corner of your world and make it beautiful. Go. Leave this place. Later, you can remember what you saw…
I May Be A Drooling Jackass, But At Least I’m A Brown Haired Drooling Jackass
There are those who say that race is an invented social construct. There is color of skin, among other things, that serve as racial markers. And often, people bearing those markers are persecutied if their particular marker is expressed by a minority of people in their part of the world. But it’s not enough that a person has a certain skin color either. Racist governments throughout history have taken great pains to measure the bloodlines of citizens, to insure racial purity. If an ancestor of yours had black skin, your degree of blackness was carefully measured in your bloodline, not the actual tone of your pelt.
But for some odd reason, not everything works that way. Blond hair for instance, is uncommon and yet it’s almost always well favored in communities of mostly dark haired people. Looked at, as merely one genetic variation out of many, it seems ridiculous that we treat color of skin one way and color of hair another. How is it that human prejudice suddenly fixates on one thing? The poet A. E. Housman mocked it in his poem, The Color of His Hair…
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
The poem is a brilliant, and bitterly angry laugh aimed at prejudice by a gay man who knew the sting of it himself. So rediculous to persecute someone for the color of their hair. Right?
Kevin and Barbara Chapman say they and their four children, aged between 10 and 13, have endured years of taunts, smashed windows and violence.
They said they moved from Walker to Newbiggin Hall to try to escape the bullying, and then again to Kenton Bar.
Son Kevin, 11, said he was recently punched in a street attack. Newcastle Council is "discussing the situation".
Mr Chapman, 49, said his 10-year-old daughter Ryelle and sons Daniel, 10, and Jordan, 13, have also been badly affected.
He said each time the family received abuse they moved home.
They’ve been punched and kicked and thrown over a hedge
The family also say they have endured their homes being daubed in graffiti.
Mr Chapman said: "The abuse we get is unbelievable. It started more than three years ago, when the kids started getting bullied by lads over the colour of their hair.
"They’ve been punched and kicked and thrown over a hedge. Every time they go out these gangs get to them."
He added that the family now wanted to move again.
Community police officer Sergeant Colin Murray, of Northumbria Police, said there had been a number of incidents all of which had been fully investigated.
Commenting on the matter, a Newcastle City Council spokesman said: "We are currently discussing their situation."
The first headlines I saw on this story, read that the family had "Ginger Hair", and I thought the poor family had some sort of unfortunate genetic defect that they were being mocked and tormented over. I’d never heard the term before. So I did what any computer geek will do: I did a Google image search on "ginger hair" and right away I got a page full of various red heads, many of which were actually quite beautiful. I could feel my jaw dropping. Jesus Fucking H. Christ…they’re talking about redheads…
Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,
And the quarry-gang on portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the god that made him for the colour of his hair.
Never underestimate the human capacity to hate people for any stupid shit reason they can dream up…
Via Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin… Dr. Joe Nicolosi of NARTH will be lecturing in London on June 22-23, 2007 on the subject of The Time for Truth – is gay real?
A conference for professional counsellors and therapists, pastoral care givers, church leaders, and those who are dealing with or affected by homosexuality.
Contact: Dr Lisa Nolland
ls.n@hotmail.co.uk
NB. Dr Nicolosi will take a scientific rather than an explicitly Christian approach.
And a good thing that is too, since you folks probably don’t want to hear from any Christians on this matter, do you? Or does this no longer apply…?
Thou shalt bear no false witness against thy neighbor.
The evidence that biology, genetics in part, perhaps development in the womb in part, determines sexual orientation is now so overwhelming even the mainstream news media can see it too. How else to explain the older brother effect, and that it only works for right handed boys? Yet Nicolosi persists in his junk science dogma that male homosexuality is caused by a poor father/son relationship. So why are these ersatz men of god inviting this quack to speak to them about homosexuality, and not a real scientist?
Simple. It comforts them to know that they’re beating on people who in at least some sense, choose to be homosexual. Let us have the pseudo science that tells us homosexuality is caused by a broken family relationship, rather then the honest science that tells us it is simple random biology that is neither chosen nor changeable…because the pseudo science allows us to blame homosexuals for not seeking treatment for their condition, because the pseudo science allows us to keep blaming the homosexuals for every evil thing we do to them, in the name of Christ, in the name of love. Nicolosi helps them shift the blame for all the pain and heartbreak they have ever brought down on the lives of gay men and women, onto their victims. Nicolosi will come to them as a man of science, and they, the men of God, will wash, wash their hands of every wrong they’ve ever done to innocent lovers in his junk science, and lift those hands in praise afterward. Then they’ll take up their holy clubs, and start beating on gay people again in completely clear conscience.
I remember when I worked on a software project for a medical diagnostic instrument company. A lab technician gave us a talk about their working conditions, since we were making a tool for them to use. She told us briefly about dealing with highly contagious agents like TB. TB, she told us, was a mycobacteria. In it’s most contagious form she said, she could put a tiny vial of it in the room we were in, with the cap tightly screwed on, and it could nonetheless infect every one of us just sitting there. The mycobacteria were tiny, she said, got out of confinement easily, became easily airborne, and then you breathed them in.
So I’m thinking about this as I read about the guy who has a extensively drug-resistant form of tuberculosis, and exposed dozens of people by flying to the U.S. instead of turning himself in to doctors in Italy like he was told to. Seems he’s a tad puzzled now that he has an armed guard outside the door to his isolation room. After all, he’s a well educated, successful, intelligent person.
The man told the Journal-Constitution he was in Rome during his honeymoon when the CDC notified him of the new tests and told him to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be isolated and be treated. The CDC told him he couldn’t fly aboard commercial airliners.
"I thought to myself: You’re nuts. I wasn’t going to do that. They told me I had been put on the no-fly list and my passport was flagged," the man said.
He told the newspaper he and his wife decided to sneak back into the U.S. through Canada. He said he voluntarily went to a New York hospital, then was flown by the CDC to Atlanta.
…
"I’m a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told the paper. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I’ve cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing."
Er…that’s why you have an armed guard outside your door buddy. Not merely no remorse for your actions, utterly no clue whatsoever that you did anything wrong by putting your fellow passengers at risk, let alone giving this extremely dangerous new form of TB a chance to spread far and wide beyond you. Fucking airplane cabin. And an international flight. Christ Almighty. And you can’t figure the armed guard. I’d put a dozen of them outside your door. Ones that know how to shoot.
Naive? Clueless? Easily Manipulated? You Could Have A Career In Journalism…
Remember that story about the honeybees dying off? Not so much…
…even the original report describing and naming the phenomenon explicitly says it’s something that has been seen before (repeatedly), named before, and studied before – in all cases without coming to any conclusion about the cause. The researchers didn’t like the older names for the syndrome (which usually included the word "disease," which has connotations about infectiousness that don’t seem applicable here), so they renamed it colony collapse disorder. That point has largely eluded the press, with the result that most people think this is a new phenomenon, when in fact the researchers who described it note reports of similar die-offs dating back to the 1890s.
So…If they call it a surge instead of an escalation, it’s really a different thing…right? But then it’s really hard sometimes to completely grasp what people are telling us, even when they’re telling it to us straight…
At least once in the present case the media got something completely wrong and created a huge mess: The story about cell phones was basically a misrepresentation of what one pair of reporters wrote about a study that they misinterpreted. In a nutshell, the original research didn’t involve cell phones, and the researchers never said their research was related to honey bee colony die-offs.
Can we work in a quote from someone famous? Someone everyone trusts?
Even details like the alleged Einstein quote are dubious. No one has yet found proof that Einstein said anything about bees dying off – the earliest documented appearance of the "quote" is 1994 and, yes, Albert was dead at the time.
Here’s one version of the Einstein quote making the rounds…
"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination …no more men!"
Snopes has more…(Just be sure to turn off Javascript before you visit them). The quote apparently first popped up in news stories about a beekeeper protest in Brussels in 1994, where they were distributing pamphlets with the quote on it. I can’t find anything more on the specific nature of the protest, so I don’t even know if they were protesting to draw attention to bee die-offs or for a pay raise or what. But apparently the quote has just been mindlessly recycled for news stories about colony collapse disorder. Never let a good quote go to waste I guess, even if it’s completely bogus.
I’m starting to wonder now if the news media here in America was always this bad, and we just never noticed it before the Internet allowed the rest of us to compare notes behind their backs.
Well I think I passed one of those life thresholds today. I admitted that I’m getting old. It was in the comments on another guy’s blog. Nice guy. Young, gay man. I visit his blog every now and then and today he made a passing crack about how an older gay guy he knows should have spent more time in a church social group or community group and less time in the gay club party scene and maybe he’d know fewer gay guys who died young. And I had to raise a voice in his defense. Our generation had it rough. There were a lot fewer venues for meeting other gays back in the day then there are now. There’s a reason why my generation grew up in a degrading, demeaning subculture of cheap sex and booze and drugs. And some of us fought like hell to change that I said. Every tiny little shred of dignity and freedom to live our lives openly and proudly we had to claw bitterly to win out of a culture that refused to admit that such as we deserved to exist, let alone have any dignity and pride. And now that it’s here I said, now that we have more opportunities to live our lives outside of the bar scene…we’re getting old.
That would be me I was talking about. Yeah. Getting old. Tired. Going out for my evening walks…cigar adding to the high of my evening cocktail. Alone. Tired. Old. I was afraid of this. I knew when I started going out again, and socializing with my friends in D.C. that it would be like this. I just have to barrel my way though it I guess if I’m ever going to find someone. I would enjoy the company of friends, most of whom are themselves happily coupled, or content to just find a someone to spend a few hours of random intimate companionship with every now and then. Some helpfully suggest I should do the same. Better then being all alone they say. But that isn’t me. I want the soulmate. Nothing else will do. And you aren’t much likely to find that in the bars. But where else is there for the likes of me? I can’t spend my life all alone, and yet going out always leaves me in this state of solitary grief at the end of the day. I can’t just let myself get picked up. I can’t just have a casual fling for the night. It isn’t me. I want the soulmate. Nothing else will do.
So I go back home to my little nest and I get myself wasted to ease the grief a bit, then drift off to bed and maybe if I’m lucky I get to dream about being in love. It’s disgusting but there it is. I’ve been in a holding pattern since I was about 25, waiting for that intimate other that never seems to come into my life, so it could really start. So many near misses. So many chances that just seemed to slip away. So many faces I remember. And one in particular that never drifts far away from my thoughts. I’m not the only lovelorn soul in this poor world. But I’m the only one who has to deal with my own life. I have the best job in the world. A nice little rowhouse. A good life by any measure. But I feel like life has just passed me by. They say you’re as old as you feel. I’m 53 and I feel like I’m still 25 and you would not believe how old that can feel.
There’s one more thing I have to admit. And I’m afraid to. It’s not going to happen.
It would surprise few people, conservative or progressive, to learn that coverage of the intersection of religion and politics tends to oversimplify both. If this oversimplification occurred to the benefit or detriment of neither side of the political divide, then the weaknesses in coverage of religion would be of only academic interest. But as this study documents, coverage of religion not only overrepresents some voices and underrepresents others, it does so in a way that is consistently advantageous to conservatives.
Ya Think?
Among the study’s key findings:
Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.
On television news — the three major television networks, the three major cable new channels, and PBS — conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.
In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.
Despite the fact most religious Americans are moderate or progressive, in the news media it is overwhelmingly conservative leaders who are presented as the voice of religion. This represents a particularly meaningful distortion since progressive religious leaders tend to focus on different issues and offer an entirely different perspective than their conservative counterparts.
I’m shocked…shocked. Well…actually not. When was the last time you saw an actual liberal on any of the Sunday morning talk shows…?
Of all the moral positions the anti abortionists generally take, the easiest one to discern the honesty of is the argument from the sanctity of life. Life, they aver, begins at conception, thereby making abortion murder. Fine. You can always tell the folks who argue this position in good faith, from the ones who don’t, because they’re the ones who also have a passionate concern for the welfare of children After they’re born. When you see someone babbling about the killing of innocent babies on the one hand, while supporting public policies that take food out of the mouths of living children, and which put healthcare beyond the reach of their families, then you know you’re dealing with a fraud. They don’t give a good goddamn about innocent children. Their motives are elsewhere, and the dishonesty of their rhetoric is enough to give you a pretty good clue where that elsewhere probably is.
It’s the same with religious arguments over homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals. Scanning Google News this morning, I came across this news article in The Age (Australia), concerning the current hostilities in the Anglican church over homosexuality. Whenever someone starts pontificating about the tensions in various religious sects over homosexuality, you know they’re not really willing to look the beast in the eye when you see them starting from a premise of good faith on everyone’s part…
Not only is it divisive, it seems almost impossible to resolve because the opposing camps believe so strongly that they are right, that conscience demands they take the stand they do, and that they speak for God.
Er…no. But it’s true that some folks expect you to accept their declarations of their faith and devotion to God at face value. That needs to stop.
Those Christians who say homosexual acts are always wrong – and it is the act, not the orientation, they condemn, though gays don’t think this is a very meaningful distinction – do so because the Bible says so.
Here’s the problem with this: how often do you see these people who are standing pat on the bible’s anti-gay verses, living their own lives by the rest of it as well? Just as you can tell who the frauds are in the abortion arguments by a passionate devotion to the right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth, you can tell who the frauds are in an argument over homosexuality, by an absolute devotion to the word of God that begins with all the biblical proscriptions against homosexuality, and comes to an abrupt halt wherever the bible starts telling heterosexuals what to do with Their genitals.
It isn’t the people of faith who are the problem here. The problem is the people of bad faith. We can’t have honest discussions about homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals in this country, until we start demanding that the people of bad faith either come clean about what they really believe, or step aside and shut the fuck up. Because all they’re doing…deliberately doing…is poisoning the well for the rest of us. Shoving them aside until they’re ready to start speaking their mind instead of trying to incite and manipulate and short circuit the political conversation is the first order of business.
You think the bible is crystal clear about homosexuality do you? Fine. But you think that divorce should be legal? Had a divorce yourself have you? Oh…two? On your third wife now are you? But the bible is clear about homosexuality you say? No compromise with what God has condemned is it? Well…okay…until you’re ready to have an honest discussion about this, just shut the fuck up while the grownups talk among themselves.
I Guess It’s Time To Relax Now That The Holiday Weekend’s Almost Over…
Painting. Painting the iron rails out front. Painting my deck out back. Repairs. Many little things I’d been putting off until I had time. The dripping outdoor faucets. The broken hose quick connectors. Cleaning. Both the deck and the front porch tiles. So many things that still need doing that I just didn’t have time to get to.
Swear to god the quickest way to put an end to the entire concept of holidays is to buy a house…
Mine is in and out of L.A. county jail. Latest go around is identity theft. Think the last little stint was GTA.
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She got pregnant and had an abortion, and then wnt crazy and I think lives on a commune somewhere.
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Mine died young too. Good argument for helmets.
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Mine moved to Atlanta and became a lesbian journalist.
/not my fault
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I married mine, 22 years later. Now he’s dead. There was real comfort in knowing that he looked at me and still saw who I was 30 years ago. Now there’s no one left who does.
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Mine is a pathological liar and has depression issues.
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Just saw mine last night, she said hi, i said hi, then stared like a dumb eye kid. I guess i’m still powerless.
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Mine became a Bible-thumping, street-corner preacher– no thank you!!.
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Mine got married to a BPD insane guy who tried to kill her and her entire family. She’s now with a recovering heroin addict.
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I ran into my first love at a grocery store near my mom’s while I was on a visit. He was working as a bagger. Took me about 3 minutes to recognise him, and about 3 seconds to be grateful that he didn’t recognise me!
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Mine’s a prostitute.
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A mutual friend who’s a cop now said he saw her about 15yrs after we graduated. (She was a freshman when I was a senior) He stopped her for a routine traffic stop and saw it was her, but she didn’t recognize him. She had a different last name, married of course…When he ran her license, he found out she had been married 3 times, had several convictions for shop lifting, forging checks, mail fraud and some minor drug convictions!
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Wow…doubt anyone will read this far down, but here’s my story, FWIW: My first love was a geek in high school, but we went to prom together. Then, we had a long-distance relationship when he went away to college at the Naval Academy. He dumped me. Twenty years later, he tracked me down before our high school reunion. He was living in Japan. I went to the reunion just to see him, sparks were incredible (and he enjoyed the BJ on the pool deck). I thought I was in love again. Apparently, he was not. He just got re-married, and still wanted to have me on the side. No thanks,
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I told mine I hope she dies. Does that make me a bad person?
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I haven’t seen mine since she moved during freshman year of high school. I still carry her school picture in my wallet.
I’ve found her listing on Classmates.com
I’ve found where her parents live.
Now she’s married to someone else, and so am I…
/depressed now
//where’s my hanging rope?
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Mine passed away at 18 from a rejected heart transplant. I think we would have married, though, he was the sweetest thing in the whole world. I still miss that boy.
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I seriously hope there is a hell just so mine can rot in it… not that I’m bitter or anything.
And then there is this practical fellow…
I hook up with random 18-year-olds in the hopes that I’ll be their "childhood sweetheart." Later in life I should have throngs of women ready to get it on with me at any chance encounters.
Consider that you may instead have throngs of women scattered here and there, ready to beat the living crap out of you when they lay eyes on you again. Just a thought.
Ah…love. I have been asked over and over again by heterosexual jackasses if I would take a pill that would cure me of my homosexuality if such a thing existed. My standard retort is to ask them if they’d take a pill that would grow them a brain if such a pill existed. My love life has been an excruciatingly difficult one, but I have never blamed my sexual orientation for that. Note that Fark.Com is a mostly straight hangout and that most, if not all of the comments above came from heterosexuals. Of all the people I knew in high school, only two managed to do the find your soulmate and spend your life together thing. Ironically one of them was My first love. Everyone else I know…Everyone…has had it rough. Some of them very rough. I’m far, far from the only broken heart in this poor world. Which is why it pisses me off no end how fundamentalist and right wing jackasses do their level best to make it hard for people to find, and then keep that love of their lives in this poor lonely world! If there’s a hell after all, then there needs to be a special place in it for people who made it more difficult for people to love. And it needs to be really, really painful, to even come close to atoning for all the pain they left behind in this world.
So I have another retort now to the ones who keep asking me if I would ever take a pill to cure me of homosexuality. If there was a pill You could take that would cure you of the ability to love…that would erase all knowledge of and even the memory of love from your mind…would you take it? It wouldn’t kill your libido…just your romantic need. You could still have all the random, carefree, hot sex you ever wanted, and even more guilt free then before, knowing that there would be no emotional attachment afterward. Love’s a hard thing to deal with sometimes. It can really, really fuck up your life, leave it a tattered mess. Would you take that pill?
I’m sorry to say, I think a lot of people would. And if you would too, then I’m sorry for you. Better an aching heart, then an empty one.
First loves are indelibly etched into our minds, scientists say, but they warn that rekindling that old flame could have lasting, irreversible consequences, tearing apart marriages and leaving a trail of devastation.
"It’s not your average affair," said Nancy Kalish, a California State University-Sacramento psychologist, who has studied such relationships for 14 years. "It goes from the phone to the hotel. It’s that quick."
Not always…
Adolescent hormones carve those first loves into our brains, said Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of the book "Why We Love."
The lost love’s voice or touch triggers wanting, needing, craving in the same spots in the brain as those affected by cocaine.
Sound like addiction?
"It is more powerful than addiction," said Fisher.
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"The lost-love people seem to have a tremendous sense of entitlement to do what they want and screw everyone else."
The poet Richard Lovelace wrote, "…I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not honor more." That’s the hard part of love, but it’s what separates the gold from the fools gold. Lost-lovers aren’t acting from a sense of entitlement. They’re acting on something that was theirs once, and never really went away…a thing as common and obvious as the warm summer sun. But fucking up a marriage isn’t the nicest thing in the world to do to someone you were once madly in love with. And do you really want to die remembering that first love of your life as a cheat?
It’s the holiday weekend, and I don’t feel like posting any heavy stuff here now. I’m busy with a bunch of home repair and improvement chores this weekend, and I just want to take a break from the world for now. I’ve got the deck to reseal, my iron handrails by the front steps and porch to clean and paint, and a bunch of pots to put flowers in. I don’t want to even look at the news for now. So I’m going to share a little family trick with the rest of you kids. How to make a jug of perfectly smooth and tasty sweet ice tea. I’ve no idea why so many people get it wrong, but most of the stuff I taste, particularly around here in Maryland, is too rough on the pallet. They like to make this "sun tea" for some reason, and it never tastes right to me.
Making ice tea right is really very simple. They seem to have the knack for it in the South, but I didn’t know that until I visited down there recently. Apparently sweet ice tea is a southern thing. I’ve no idea how my mom, a Pennsylvania Yankee, got the method figured out. I think it was just trial and error. But by the time I was 12 she had it down pat and when I was a kid I just loved summertime because it was ice tea time. Now I make it all the time. I generally have a tall glass of it somewhere nearby all day long.
I start by boiling a kettle of water. Filtered usually. There are two tricks to it. The first is to figure out how much sweetener you need for a given amount of boiling water beforehand. It isn’t sweetened to taste afterward, but before. I make about a kettle full, which works out to, I reckon, about a quart and a half, or about 48 ounces of water. So I know from experience that it takes about a quarter cup of sweetener. Your mileage may vary. I used to use pure sugar, which I bought by the 25 pound bag at Costco. But since I started watching my weight I’ve been using Splenda. It works just fine for me as a sugar substitute.
I put the sweetener in the empty jug first. When the water comes to a boil I pour it in over the sweetener, and it goes instantly into solution. Then I put in the tea bags. I just use plain old Lipton orange pekoe and pekoe tea bags. Three standard size bags work for me for this amount of water. Again, your mileage may vary. I’ll place the top on the jug loosely and walk away from it.
See, the second trick, and probably the most important, is to let the tea cool down at its own speed. Never, Never put it into the fridge before it’s at room temperature. It’ll go bitter when you do that, even if it’s just a little bit warm to the touch. Just let the jug cool off on its own to room temperature with the bags in it. It may take hours. That’s fine. I usually do a jug before bed and just leave it overnight. Once it’s at room temperature, then take the bags out, put the jug in the fridge and let it cool down.
That’s it. Nothing really special about it. But do it that way and you’ll get a nice, smooth sweet ice tea every time. You can add lemon, and maybe a touch of lime after you pour it into the glass.
Long Island Ice Tea is another story, for another time.
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