I have a plan. I’m going to buy a box. Whenever I see something I want to give you, instead of sending it to you I’ll put it in the box. Inside the box will be an envelope with instructions for my brother to send it to you when I die. That way you can have all the things I wanted to give to you and you won’t have to worry that I’ll send you anything more.
LG
-Bruce
PS: It was great seeing you and chatting for a while this week! If there are do-overs like you said, then maybe we can have more time together then.
…it’s almost exclusively to prevent spam in the comments. Those of you who don’t run your own blog would not believe how much spam tries to invade blog comments these days. It’s amazing. I suspect most of it is simply to jack up Google rankings. Anyway, that’s why you have to wait for me to approve comments. It isn’t about controlling what opinions get expressed here, though if I see post or thread highjacking taking place I’ll put a stop to that too. The moderation is about blocking spam. Sorry. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Maggie Gallagher claims that it is rare for same-sex relationships to last. Her proof is the Regnerus study, which did not examine same sex relationships. If I cover my eyes so I can’t see you, then you aren’t there.
So There Was A Reason Why That Story Had A Dark Undertone…
One afternoon a few years ago, while I was strolling around Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World, I wandered by this at one of the gift shops…
…and I had to have it. Sometimes these little random items of consumer art manage to tweak something deep down inside of you, despite themselves.
So romantic isn’t it? And I am very much the romantic. But look at it. What do you see? A beautiful young girl in love with her handsome prince charming, all dashing and heroic. But all art, even pop culture commercial art, involves two creative acts. There is the artist’s turn, wherein the piece is made. The artist brings to it whatever is within themselves. Then there is the viewer’s turn. And the viewer brings to the piece whatever is within themselves. And I am a gay man just one step away from 60, within arm’s reach of social security retirement age, whose love life has been pretty much one failed attempt after another. Here’s what I see: she’s in love with a statue and she thinks the person she sees in it is real and it isn’t.
No, I haven’t actually watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid yet. So if that’s all part of the Disney happy ending then okay…fine. But I am a fan of Walt Disney all the same if not so much of one that I’ve had to watch everything that ever came out of his studios. I like his happily ever after mindset, that There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Shining At The End Of Every Day way of looking at life. That is how I want life to Be. That is why I keep going back to Disney World these days…for that happy sense of life’s wonderful possibilities. So never having watched it I can almost picture the story Disney made of that Hans Christian Andersen tale. And they all lived happily ever after. In one form or another that was the story Walt Disney always told and I am convinced he honestly believed it and that was why that song always came out of him. But for the rest of us it isn’t so easy.
So when just the other day I ran across the story behind the story of The Little Mermaid, I saw why there was something about it I could see, even in that Disney figurine, that tweaked a very dark and lonely place inside of me…
The Little Mermaid was written as a love letter by Hans Christian Andersen to Edvard Collin. Andersen, upon hearing of Collin’s engagement to a young woman, proclaimed his love to him. He told him “I long for you as though you were a beautiful Calabrian girl.” Edvard Collin turned Andersen down, disgusted.
Andersen then wrote The Little Mermaid to symbolize his inability to have Collin just as a mermaid cannot be with a human. He sent it to Collin in 1836 and it goes down in history as one of the most profound love letters ever written.
The story originally ended thusly…
The prince and princess marry, and the Little Mermaid’s heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has given up and of all the pain she has suffered. She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her, but before dawn, her sisters bring her a knife that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their long hair. If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the knife and lets his blood drip on her feet, she will become a mermaid again, all her suffering will end and she will live out her full life.
However the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his bride and as dawn breaks she throws herself into the sea. Her body dissolves into foam…
Later, Andersen gave it a happier ending. The little mermaid is turned into an air spirit and told she will gain an eternal soul after doing good deeds for 300 years. But it seems tacked on and contrived. You need a Walt Disney to turn that story around and Walt found his other half early enough on that he could believe in it. Andersen it seems, never did. A lot of us don’t.
Just Because I Talk Like A Bigot And Think Like A Bigot That Does Not Make Me A Bigot
Here in Maryland this election year, my heterosexual neighbors will be deciding whether or not their gay neighbors can get married. Oh, gay Marylanders can vote on it too…all possibly two to ten percent of us depending on who you ask are the percentage of homosexuals in a given human population. On the one hand homosexuals are a small minority whose needs can be easily and casually erased by the heterosexual majority with a simple flick of a voting booth button. On the other hand we are a terrifying threat to civilization itself.
One of our local numbskulls…no not Don Dwyer…state delegate Emmitt Burns (note: a Democrat), threatened Baltimore Ravens players for speaking out in favor of same-sex marriage. This prompted another NFL player, Chris Kluwe, to pen a scorching hot missive back at Burns, wondering in part…
Why do you hate the fact that other people want a chance to live their lives and be happy, even though they may believe in something different from what you believe, or act differently from you? How does gay marriage affect your life in any way, shape, or form? Are you worried that if gay marriage became legal, all of a sudden you’d start thinking about penis? (“Oh shit. Gay marriage just passed. Gotta get me some of that hot dong action!”) Will all your friends suddenly turn gay and refuse to come to your Sunday Ticket grill-outs? (Unlikely. Gay people enjoy watching football, too.)
All in good fun…right? Burns backed off a tad, allowing that even football players can speak their mind from time to time. But of course the kook pews couldn’t let the matter rest there. It was starting to look like the most manly of sports was open to the idea of gay people being something other then human garbage. So out comes another Ravens player, Matt Birk just to prove that football hasn’t entirely succumbed…
I think it is important to set the record straight about what the marriage debate is and is not about, and to clarify that not all NFL players think redefining marriage is a good thing.
The union of a man and a woman is privileged and recognized by society as “marriage” for a reason, and it’s not because the government has a vested interest in celebrating the love between two people. With good reason, government recognizes marriages and gives them certain legal benefits so they can provide a stable, nurturing environment for the next generation of citizens: our kids.
Children have a right to a mom and a dad, and I realize that this doesn’t always happen. Through the work my wife and I do at pregnancy resource centers and underprivileged schools, we have witnessed firsthand the many heroic efforts of single mothers and fathers — many of whom work very hard to provide what’s best for their kids.
But recognizing the efforts of these parents and the resiliency of some (not all, unfortunately) of these kids, does not then give society the right to dismiss the potential long-term effects on a child of not knowing or being loved by his or her mother or father. Each plays a vital role in the raising of a child.
Marriage is in trouble right now — admittedly, for many reasons that have little to do with same-sex unions. In the last few years, political forces and a culture of relativism have replaced “I am my brother’s keeper” and “love your neighbor as yourself” with “live and let live” and “if it feels good, go ahead and do it.”
The effects of no-fault divorce, adultery, and the nonchalant attitude toward marriage by some have done great harm to this sacred institution. How much longer do we put the desires of adults before the needs of kids? Why are we not doing more to lift up and strengthen the institution of marriage?
Same-sex unions may not affect my marriage specifically, but it will affect my children — the next generation. Ideas have consequences, and laws shape culture. Marriage redefinition will affect the broader well-being of children and the welfare of society. As a Christian and a citizen, I am compelled to care about both.
I am speaking out on this issue because it is far too important to remain silent. People who are simply acknowledging the basic reality of marriage between one man and one woman are being labeled as “bigots” and “homophobic.” Aren’t we past that as a society?
Don’t we all have family members and friends whom we love who have same-sex attraction? Attempting to silence those who may disagree with you is always un-American, but especially when it is through name-calling, it has no place in respectful conversation.
A defense of marriage is not meant as an offense to any person or group. All people should be afforded their inalienable American freedoms. There is no opposition between providing basic human rights to everyone and preserving marriage as the sacred union of one man and one woman.
I hope that in voicing my beliefs I encourage people on both sides to use reason and charity as they enter this debate.
You can almost hear him pleading with his readers to pay attention to all that I Am Not A Bigot hand waving at the end and not the fact that an editorial against same-sex marriage ending with a call for reason and charity had absolutely none of either of those things to offer.
How much longer do we put the desires of adults before the needs of kids?
Chris Kluwe shot a response back that pretty well sums it up:
The only impact same-sex marriage will have on your children is if one of them turns out to be gay and cannot get married. What will you do (and I ask this honestly) if one or more of your kids ends up being gay? Will you love them any less? What will your actions speak to them, 15 years from now, when they ask you why they can’t enjoy the same relationship that you and your wife have now? And if your response is “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”, well, for a lot of people that bridge is here right now. They’re trying to cross it, but the way is barred…
But pay attention to how reliably that Save Our Children rhetoric pops out of their mouths. When you see this, it’s a red flag, because as Kluwe says, some kids are gay. What you’re seeing there isn’t about kids at all, it’s about the old slander that homosexuals are child molesters. Birk isn’t thinking about the welfare of gay kids when he argues that same-sex marriage is a threat to children because there aren’t any gay kids. Nobody is born gay, they’re recruited into it. It’s knowledge so deeply ingrained within him it colors everything he says throughout the editorial. There are no gay kids so I don’t have to worry about my kids being gay. I worry that they’ll be recruited into the lifestyle. I worry that homosexuality will be normalized.
That’s the problem he has with same-sex marriage. But don’t call him a bigot because…you know…he has Reasons. Just don’t ask him for any.
Marriage is in trouble right now — admittedly, for many reasons that have little to do with same-sex unions.
Er…Matt… In this entire editorial you don’t give Any reasons that have to do with same-sex unions. It’s marriages is about the welfare of children and if we let same-sex couples marry that will destroy marriage which would be a very bad thing for children. But don’t ask me why letting homosexuals get married will destroy marriage when we let heterosexual couples incapable of having children get married all the time because then I’ll have to say something like because….homosexuals! And then you’d call me a bigot and I’m not so stop trying to silence me!
I am not a bigot. I respect everyone. Even the folks whose ring fingers I want to cut off and whose lives I don’t have clue one about…
Children have a right to a mom and a dad, and I realize that this doesn’t always happen. Through the work my wife and I do at pregnancy resource centers and underprivileged schools, we have witnessed firsthand the many heroic efforts of single mothers and fathers — many of whom work very hard to provide what’s best for their kids.
Seems you never worked with any same-sex parents Matt. But you have an opinion about the fitness of their families. Why is that Matt? Where did that opinion come from if it wasn’t first hand experience knowing and being a part of the lives of gay couples and their families.
In a video for the Minnesota Catholic Conference, Baltimore Raven center Matt Birk doubles down on the anti-gay sentiment he expressed in an op-ed for the Star Tribune this week in support of Minnesota’s upcoming ballot measure that would constitutionally ban same-sex marriage.
First comes the editorial, then the video, and this was a spontaneous display of support for the heterosexual prerogative like all those Mormons coming together spontaneously to work for Proposition 8 was.
This is the Catholic church talking through a willing football player. But again…take notice of all that I Am Not A Bigot And Calling Me One Amounts To Censorship hand waving at the end. His critics aren’t trying to silence him, he’s trying to silence his critics. This is How Dare You Take Issue With My Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs You Bigot! It’s the only song they have left now apparently. The only reason people support the right of gay couples to marry is because they hate Jesus.
I encourage all Americans to stand up to preserve and promote a healthy, authentic promarriage culture in this upcoming election.
Same-sex marriage is not healthy. Same-sex marriages are not authentic. And charity is you treat me better then I am willing to treat my homosexual neighbor. And don’t be calling me a bigot simply because the only reasons I have for denying gay couples the right to marry are my religious beliefs and a knee jerk reflex that homosexuals somehow threaten my children.
The thing to remember here is this only applies to licensed therapists, not pulpit thumping hate mongers who are still as free as ever to stick a knife in a kid’s heart and twist it in the name of Christ, and then twist it again in the name of love. But already the usual suspects are screaming bloody murder…
In a statement on NARTH’s website, the group says the law will seriously jeopardize the livelihoods of “licensed therapists in California who would otherwise be willing to assist minor clients in modifying their unwanted same-sex attractions and behaviors.” It also will “supplant the rights of parents,” the group says.
Note the reliable appeal to the rights of parents. But no parent has the right to subject their child to sexual abuse and ex-gay therapy is just that. If you think that’s hyperbole I strongly recommend you listen to the stories of the survivors of ex-gay therapy and compare them to the survivors of other forms of sexual abuse.
Kendall said the therapy he underwent “led me to periods of homelessness, to drug abuse, to spending a decade of my life wanting to kill myself. It led to so much pain and struggle. And I want them to know that what they do hurts people. It hurts children. It has no basis in fact. And they need to stop.
The self loathing. The shame. The despair. Blaming yourself for what happened. People need to look at what this practice does to children. And not just ex-gay therapy but the general cultural shaming and bullying of gay kids. Really look at it. This is sexual abuse.
But the abusers won’t stop of their own accord. Oh no…the kids really wanted it you see…
…the law will seriously jeopardize the livelihoods of “licensed therapists in California who would otherwise be willing to assist minor clients in modifying their unwanted same-sex attractions and behaviors…
What those kids want is to be loved. They don’t want to be abominations in the eyes of God. They don’t want their parents breaking down in tears, screaming at them that they’re ashamed to be their parents. They don’t want to be monsters. But who told them they were? No Mr. Nicolosi, those kids didn’t want you feeling up their souls, poking around in the most secret private places of their hearts, you just told yourself they did. That’s how it usually is with the seducers of the too young to understand.
The only purpose this practice ever had is to make gay people hate themselves, and incidentally to excuse the righteous for hating them. You don’t have to be gay, so it isn’t our fault for making your lives miserable, it’s yours for being gay. You choose to be gay, so you choose to be persecuted. There’s a political side to ex-gay therapy, as justification and cover for anti-gay politicians, but beneith the surface there’s the core value: homosexuals must hate themselves, must accept they are society’s outcasts.
The pulpit thumping homophobe who gets caught preying on minors. The bar stool moralizer with a gambling habit. The family values politician who goes for a hike on the Appalachian trail. It’s the homosexuals who are destroying the moral fiber of society, surely not any of these. Our enemies say they are fighting against the normalization of homosexuality. But it isn’t what society and culture think of us, it’s that we might stop hating ourselves they won’t endure. If open homosexuality stops being the touchstone of moral decay, then where will the fingers point when another righteous culture warrior gets caught with their pants down? It’s having to look in a mirror and admit the crying wreckage they’ve made of their own lives was their own doing they’re fighting tooth and nail to prevent.
So the scapegoat must never think themselves worthy of being loved, must never know what it is to love, and be loved. Because love is patient, love is enduring, love can nourish and sustain through the worst of times. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to be able to do is move mountains.
To make a scapegoat, you have to cut the heart out when they’re young.
Tucked in a corner of the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender closet is a little-known group: straight women and men in heterosexual marriages whose husbands or wives come out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender after marrying them as “the right thing to do.” Finding the marriages too difficult to maintain due to their hidden sexual orientation or gender identity, they eventually say, “Honey, I’m gay,” or, “I need to become the woman or man I am,” or their mates discover signs of a same-sex lover or an opposite-gender wardrobe. Though some couples work out ways to stay together, most divorce, their children now in a broken family. As divorced LGBT partners begin to live their lives with integrity, their straight ex-partners are left in shock, their own identity, integrity, and belief system shattered. The spotlight on the disclosing partners, few outsiders think about their wives or husbands. “They’re straight! They’re normal. No problem.”
No problem… For the culture warriors anyway. Years ago, when I became involved in the struggle of a gay teen who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will, I had my eyes opened to a bitter little corner of the culture war that was mostly under the radar of mainstream notice. The many good and decent people scarred horribly from the experience of putting themselves, or having been put through, a relentless gauntlet of shame, allegedly for the sake of saving their souls. But as is usually the case, the saviors were less interested in the people they were theoretically saving then in building their own stepping stones to heaven. They didn’t follow up, they didn’t give a shit whatsoever about the fate of the saved. It was all just theater. Grist for their bar stool conceits about their status as God’s own right hand. And you never saw it more clearly then in the human suffering of straight spouses, mostly heterosexual women, who were nothing more then useful tools for the haters of homosexual people.
Straight spouses are injured by the very anti-gay or anti-trans/pro-straight factors in our society that caused their mates to marry them — “collateral damage,” some say. Those in mixed-orientation marriages, like their partners, feel unfulfilled by the sexual mismatch, often blaming themselves and accommodating their partners’ wishes at the expense of their own.
There were the gay folk themselves, but also parents shamed into believing that their son’s homosexuality was their fault. And there were the spouses of homosexual men. One thing you notice right away listening to the stories of the survivors of ex-gay therapy is how little attention is paid to women. In the manner of righteous misogynistic patriarchal thugs, those women never mattered. Lesbians were seldom a target of the ex-gay outfits. They were focused almost exclusively on male homosexuality. And so of course, heterosexual women lured into marriages with gay men didn’t matter, except as tools to cure men of their homosexuality.
Once they know the truth, the vast majority divorce and must pick up the pieces of their fractured families to create a semblance of normalcy for their children. In addition, a number keep their ex-partners’ “secret,” wanting to avoid the latter’s rejection by community, workplace, or place of worship, and to protect their children from taunts. If their partners disclose publicly, they are rightfully praised for their courage, while their straight ex-spouses are forgotten. Keeping the secret or feeling discounted, straight spouses retreat into their own kind of closet, invisible. Some find peer support through the Straight Spouse Network. Few find the knowledgeable professional help they need.
There is another victim of this human tragedy as well, unseen, unacknowledged, possibly even unaware themselves: other gay men, who might have loved, and been loved by those gay men, had they grown up in a world where their sexual nature was not used against them, for the sake of the righteous.
So much love lost to the world, to so many hearts left to wander the world alone. So the righteous could make their stepping stones to heaven out of other people’s hopes and dreams of love.
I am not an atheist because I have a grudge against religion. I stopped believing simply because I had to finally admit to myself that belief had stopped making sense to me. But I will acknowledge that it was helped along by that relentless torrent of hate flung at me and at so many other good hearts simply for what we were. It forced me to question the biblical truths I was raised to believe. I think eventually the questions would have come anyway. Having had the father I did, the whole concept of original sin, and being held guilty for acts not of my own doing, struck me as monstrously grotesque the moment I began to fully understand it. But there is no doubt the questioning came sooner, and more forcefully, because I had to think about why such a wonderful, beautiful, life affirming thing as falling in love was, for me, proof that I was an abomination.
I’ve had it good, golden even, compared to what other gay people have had to endure. I was never thrown out of my house, never had to hear my own parents tell me they hated me for what I was. But I am alone. I have been alone my entire life. And I have seen the faces of others, so terribly alone as am I. We homosexuals are a minority. In the best of all possible worlds it would still have been a harder road to that place of peace and joy for us. It didn’t have to be made worse. Yes mother, yes father, I will take my heart, and all its hopes and dreams of love and devotion, and put them in this little coffin and bury it. Because I am your good son…
I am an atheist. I love life, and this good earth, and I try to love the people who come my way in it. I try to be a good neighbor. I want love to succeed, if not for me then for others. There is no despair in me in knowing that the end is the end. It means that this life I have now is what I have to make right, make good. To leave this world in some better way because I have walked in it is enough. There is nobility there for me. And hope. But if there is a judgment day coming, I would rather answer for the life I’ve lived then have to answer for the life of someone who told a gay man to get himself married so God would not abandon him, and then be shown all the broken and destitute hearts that he thought on that day would be the proof of his love of God.
…of course it was to teach her self sufficiency, not because he wanted a free lunch. I saw this graphic go flying by on the net yesterday…
And a lot of the time they’re drowning in it because of the greed and avarice of people who like to yap about how there aren’t any free lunches. Cheap labor, sure. The cheaper the better.
I know a little about how it is to be working poor. Not as much as many. Somehow I never went to bed hungry or without a roof over my head. And I didn’t have children to support. But there was a time back when I was in my late thirties that I lived in a friend’s basement and mowed lawns and did Manpower jobs to make ends meet. This was after the Savings and Loan crisis had cost me the small but steady income I’d had as an architectural model maker. Time was I couldn’t afford a car and sometimes not the bus either.
I had this geeky little mindset for fiddling around with electronic gismos. Mom always said I got it from her dad, a man who opened one of the first businesses in his area building and servicing radios back before World War II. But there was never enough money to send me to a nice college and I had to go to work right out of high school. I had one low wage job after another, mostly stock clerk and warehouse work, and no idea what to do with my life. I liked to paint and draw, and I had done some photography for a couple local newspapers. But you need time to pursue a career in either of those and I had to bring money into the household. Eventually I got a job working for a man who went to the same church mom did, and who ran his own business making architectural models. It was work that tweaked my artistic side and I loved it, but my new boss was a fundamentalist nutcase who wouldn’t leave his employees alone about religion and he had an explosive temper. One day right before Christmas I and most of his other employees bolted after one of his outbursts and I was on my own again.
But I liked doing that work and eventually established myself as a freelance model maker with several big customers and one former co-worker who brought me into the shop he’d established. During that time I bought a Commodore C64. I had little use for computers before then, not even as video game playing devices, but the price of the Commodore had come drastically down and when I discovered I could write pretty decent job proposals on a word processor and figure out my costs with a spreadsheet I snapped one up. That little computer turned into a sort of hobby with me as I taught myself how to write programs in its BASIC interpreter and began to tentatively explore the emerging online world of Computer Bulletin Boards, in hopes of finding a gay community I could socialize with there instead of in seedy pickup bars.
Eventually and I was able to build an IBM PC clone from parts I got at a HAM Fest and with its for-its-day vastly greater horsepower and tons of software tools available for it I really started getting pulled into that world. While my customers for my freelance architectural model making business were going belly up all around me I kept dinking around with my PC clone because computers interested me, and because they had become my social outlet. But I had no college degree and no money to go get one so I never seriously considered trying to earn a living with it. Eventually I found a community of fellow gay geeks online and began doing support work on a local gay community BBS system, using what I’d learned dinking around with my own computer. That eventually led to my getting a few one-off jobs writing software. One job was for a local gay community organization that wanted a membership database and form letter generator. I did it in dBase IV, a little Word Perfect macro programming and a little Microsoft Quick Basic. Then, through that same gay BBS, I got another one-off job. And another. And another. Just at a moment in time when having even any sort of IT experience you could put on a resume meant you could get a job at decent pay and you didn’t need to have the college degree that I didn’t.
The dot com boom lifted me out of poverty almost overnight and I managed to hang onto this new career path after it faded. Otherwise I have no idea what would have become of me. I was 38 years old the day I could finally afford to rent my own place, a little one bedroom apartment in a Baltimore suburb. And it was all because of some really lucky breaks. Yes, yes…clearly I have the aptitude for the work I do and a good work ethic or otherwise I wouldn’t now be making a six figure salary and working on the James Webb Space Telescope project. But don’t even start telling me that my income level today is because I am a highly motivated and intelligent person who worked hard to get ahead. I was all of that when I was living in a friend’s basement and mowing lawns to make ends meet. I was all of that when I was standing in an unemployment line because I needed that government handout to put food in my mouth. I had some damn lucky breaks. And…support…when I needed it badly…from my friends, and from my fellow citizens. That is why I’m making the living I am now.
So I get a little ticked off whenever I hear some winger yap, yap, yapping that the unemployed are just lazy and unemployment checks amount to freeloading. There were times in my life I took unemployment and gladly. And I needed that money not because I was lazy and didn’t want to work, but because my jobs had been yanked out from under me. Because Wall Street bet on red 25 when they should have bet on black 17. With other people’s money. Then they wag their fingers at the unemployed and tell them they’re lazy.
Not everyone gets the break I got. Poverty does not equal stupidity or laziness. People who work two grueling minimum wage jobs to make ends meet are not lazy, and particularly if they have children to support. There is a serious lack of opportunity out there and some of that is deliberately crafted to keep wages low and Wall Street profits high and it is obscene for those financiers and their sock puppets to be wagging their fingers at people they’ve basically trapped in low wage lives and the unemployment line and calling them irresponsible.
You want responsibility Mr. Romney? How about taking responsibility for costing people their jobs? How about taking responsibility for trashing the hopes and dreams of all the workers and their families after you Bain raided their companies, and/or shipped their jobs overseas? How about taking responsibility for the fact that the American Dream is smaller and further out of reach of so many hard working Americans because you needed a car elevator? All the luxury that surrounds you every day…it could have been a reflection of the wealth you brought into this world, not the wealth you took from it.
Am I better off now then I was four years ago? No doubt your kind thinks it’s the most important question of all but it’s the wrong question. It isn’t all about Me, it’s about US. As in U.S.. We’re electing a president of the United States. That calls for a different question. You had wealth, which means you already had power. Now you want more. Well of course, lots of people want more power. And…wealth. There’s just never enough is there? The question is, is your country is better off for your having used the power you already had.
I bought the ‘E’ class diesel, Traveler II, last December. It wasn’t exactly the kind of money I had in mind to spend…I would have been thrilled to own a ‘C’ class diesel…the smaller car seemed more reasonable for a single guy…but Daimler still won’t import those for some reason. As it turns out, I really Really like the ‘E’ class after all. It is a solid, beautiful car, very nice on my occasional passengers, has lots of extra trunk space (which is nice for people who take road trips with lots of camera equipment), and yet gets absolutely great fuel economy. It has been an absolutely solid and reliable ride all the way.
It’s already time for Traveler IIs 20,000 mile ‘B’ service. Since the plan is to eventually become one of those wirey old codgers with a Mercedes diesel that has half a million miles on it I feel off to a reasonably good start.
Republicans have enjoyed a state-level resurgence even as they have lost — and lost big — their once commanding national majority. The GOP was once the landslide party, the party of Eisenhower ’52 and ’56, Nixon ’72, and Reagan ’84. Even Bush I’s 53.4 percent in 1988 was very respectable. Reagan’s 50.7 percent in 1980 wasn’t a landslide but still demonstrated that an outright popular majority supported the Republican. In the five elections before ’92, the GOP won popular majorities in four.
You should go read this article in full. It’s a take down on today’s republican party, not bitter, but clearly ticked off. He comes close to saying it outright: the republican party is now the party of southern christianists and wall street financial barons, locked in a deadly embrace of money and highly motivated southern tribalists each demanding fealty from republican politicians…one for their money, the other for their votes.
Because the world view of each is so self-centered, insular and disconnected they have made the nation nearly ungovernable. They have their own facts, their own news channel, their own pundits all telling them their deranged conceits are the highest wisdom. There was a time when I could hope the money guys would eventually come to their senses: economic disaster has a way of making you pay attention to reality. But as their world has become more and more infected with Ayn Rand’s poison that seems a lost hope too.
They’ll let it all burn down: the christianists because Armageddon means Jesus is coming…the financiers because they won’t stop believing in their own Atlas-like infallibility until they’re jumping out their wall street windows because they’ve lost everything and this time there isn’t any money left in anyone’s pockets to bail them out.
I really wish I knew what the answer was. But it seems all there is left to do now is ride it out to wherever it’s going, and maybe grab whatever small piece of America you can as the pieces all float past and hang on to it.
Hoisted From The Archives: You Were Played. You Were Conned. You Were Used. Some Of You Anyway. You Dopes.
Because Eugene Volokh enjoys watching laws meant to protect hated minorities being used against them, and to restate a point I made back in 2007, when Shrub the Junior was still our president…
…I would have been unable to resist saying that Republicans have shown no sign of believing in “the right to keep your own money” or in limited government or in a “strong defense”. Allowing rich people and corporations to make use of (and often ruin) public services without paying for them is not giving you “the right to keep your own money”; in fact, it’s making you pay for the things they get more use from. Limiting the power of government to protect your Constitutional rights is not “limited government”; neither is allowing a president the power to summarily deprive individuals of those rights “limited government”. Bankrupting the Treasury in order to give the DoD money it doesn’t need (and doesn’t spend wisely) while you go blow up other countries that posed no threat to the US is not “a strong defense”.
Conservatives have always supported intrusive government, they have always endangered Americans by aggravating other countries, and they have always been very happy to collect taxes from ordinary working people and use that tax money to fatten the Malefactors of Great Wealth while depriving the rest of us of our freedoms. Those same people conned a number of libertarian-minded young people in the ’70s and ’80s into believing that conservatism was liberalism and vice-versa because a few intolerant lefties went overboard in their objections to morally reprehensible expressions of racism and sexism. I would have thought these kids would have grown up by now and realized that they’re still paying taxes but under the Republicans they’re getting less for them – and that’s before the bill for all that “strong defense” comes due. How dumb they have to be to think it makes sense to be both Republican and gay after all this just doesn’t bear thinking about.
I was one of those who were conned…right up until Reagan gave me a clear understanding of what kind of government we were likely to end up with when market forces become the moral standard and the rule of law bows to the rule of money. But I think the final nail in my libertarian phase’s coffin was the reaction of many of my ersatz fellow libertarians to the supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers, that upheld the sodomy laws. I heard a lot of applause for the court standing up for state’s rights, while at the same time paying lip service to the proposition that individuals should be free to have whatever sex they wanted to, as long as it was mutually consensual. How, I asked them, don’t sodomy laws violate the fundamental libertarian principles of individual freedom and freedom of association? To which I got the standard “state’s rights” reply.
Me: But…sodomy laws are wrong…they’re evil…
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
Me: But…you Do agree that state don’t have the right to trample on the individual’s liberty…?
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
Me: But…states don’t have any more right to abridge the freedoms of the people then the federal government does…
They: The federal government has no business telling the states what laws they can pass.
…and so on. That was when I realized that a lot of libertarians were merely right wing conservatives cloaking themselves in libertarian rhetoric about individual freedom when it suited them. I’ve watched them play that game ever since. And amazingly, as President Nice Job Brownie has proven, they can rip the rights guarantees right out of our constitution, eliminate the right to a trial by a jury of our peers, eliminate access even to the courts, spy on Americans and laugh at the need to get a warrant, lie the country into war, assert that the government has the right to determine what is, and what is not a family, declare same sex couples to be legally strangers before the law with no recourse to marriage or even civil unions, and wave our tax dollars in our faces before stuffing them into their cronies pockets…and those gen-X knuckleheads who bought into it during the Reagan years will still insist that republicans and conservatives are for individual rights and democrats and liberals hate freedom and are for big government.
Rubes…
Seriously…Plaintiff should have joined the International Association For Heterosexuals Who Can’t Stop Whining About Teh Gay Flaunting IT IN OUR FACES. I’ll bet Avis would have given Plaintiff a discount off any car in the lot. Double discount for the jacked up pickup truck model with the confederate flag bumper sticker that says Heritage Not Hate.
The Libertarian Facade: What John Birchers Wear When They Want To Look Cool
Winger Eugene Volokh of the ersatz libertarian leaning Volokh Conspiracy gleefully passes on notice this morning that a lawsuit against Avis for discriminating against a straight customer can proceed. The gist of it is that because Avis gave a discount to the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce they were discriminating against heterosexuals by charging them more in violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act. If you thought that libertarians were opposed to such laws to begin with you’d be right. If you thought that most people who oppose such laws are libertarians you would be sadly mistaken. And especially when they claim to be libertarians.
Pay attention:
Another thread of argument runs through AVIS’s briefs: … since Plaintiff could have become a member of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association or the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and thus qualified for its favored discounts …, there was no pricing discrimination…. [But this] assumes an evidentiary showing which has yet to be made…. [A]lthough AVIS repeats it often as fact, there is no evidence that membership in either International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association or the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce was open to Plaintiff when she rented her car….
Okay…but where was the evidence that membership in either organization was not open to this Plaintiff? There isn’t any. And even if it was, that still doesn’t make a case that Avis itself is discriminating against heterosexuals. Perhaps they give a membership discounts to the International Heterosexuals Butthurt Because Gay Bars Can’t Be Raided And Their Customers Thrown In Jail Anymore Association as well. Surely Plaintiff could have found solidarity there.
But never mind that. Didn’t I hear somewhere that libertarians don’t like anti-discrimination laws to begin with? Hahahahahaha….
Volokh commenter 1: “Is it me, or is this a case where the discrimination laws are shown to be working across the board, that is against gay discrimination against straights as well, and yet the two most ‘voted up’ posts here are of the ‘gays get special rights under this law’ variety. What in the world?”
Volokh commenter 2: “It’s not you. It’s principled libertarians exercising outrage and protesting about a private company’s business decisions, as they always tell us disadvantaged minorities (like straight white people) should do.”
Except of course, this is not a case about discrimination and that first commenter needs to look, really look, at why it’s getting applause from the gays get special rights pew. Special rights are when that smaller kid you enjoyed beating up gets a protector and now you’re having to answer for your abusive behavior and being a bully isn’t fun anymore.
A libertarian would tell the person filing this lawsuit to go to hell, Avis can do as it damn well pleases. Eugene Volokh and his peanut gallery enjoy the spectacle of laws intended to protect a despised minority being used against them. How dare they think they were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Thank You For Choosing A Mercedes-Benz…NOW TAKE CARE OF IT!
Just received in the mail today a nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA, all done up on Very Nice stationary, thanking me for “choosing one of the most advanced diesel automobiles in the world…” and then just about screaming at me to stick to the factory maintenance schedule.
It is critical that you follow the service interval requirements of not more then 10,000 miles or one (1) year, whichever comes first. Permanent engine damage can occur if the interval is not closely followed.
(Emphasis theirs!) Followed by two more pages of Very Nice stationary detailing the maintenance schedule. As if I’d buy a car this expensive and not read the service book. You best believe I read the service book. Like a seminarian studying the holy writ I read the service book.
But I get their concern. I don’t think American drivers understand diesels. I wonder sometimes if one reason the Germans don’t import many of their diesel models into this country is because most American drivers just don’t know how to take care of one. The reputation of diesels, particularly Mercedes diesels, for über longevity probably doesn’t help any. People think hey…it’s a diesel…they’re tough. Well…yes. They’ll outlast a gasoline burner every time. But you have to do the maintenance. Oh…and don’t stomp on the accelerator in a futile attempt to get gasoline engine acceleration out of one because it isn’t in there.
The simplest routine thing you do for a car’s engine, the oil change, is absolutely vital for a diesel engine. That’s because the compression ratios on a diesel are greatly higher then even a high performance sports car’s is. Compression is how a diesel ignites its fuel. They work on the principle that compressing air heats it up. So at operating temperature a diesel gulps down a bunch of air, compresses it to temperature, and then at the right moment injectors squirt in the fuel and it ignites and you get your power stroke. For that to work compression has to be high enough to heat the air enough. (when starting cold, diesels use either glow plugs or pre-heat the fuel before it is injected.)
Compare: The Corvette LS9 6.2 liter V-8 with an Eaton four-lobe Roots type supercharger has a power output of 638 bhp at 6500 rpm and 604 lb ·ft at 3800 rpm and a compression ratio of 9.1:1. My 3 liter V-6 twin turbocharged Mercedes diesel on the other hand has a compression ratio of 17:1. In diesel fashion it only generates 240 bhp at a red line of 4500 rpm…about a third the Vette’s. However it generates 400 lb ·ft at 1800 rpm. So the Vette engine has it on torque and horsepower, but the diesel is less then half its displacement, still has 2/3rds its torque and look at where the torque Is.
These engines are not racehorses, they’re draft horses and they will go any distance and bear loads that would give a gasoline burner of equal size a heart attack. But you absolutely have to do the maintenance. You can slack on the oil changes in a gasoline burner or cheap out on the grade of oil used and still get good service out of one for quite a while before it catches up with you and gets expensive. A diesel can be completely destroyed in a very, Very short time if you do that. Like in under 30k. Try this wee experiment: look at the dipstick right after you’ve given a diesel engine an oil change. See how nice and golden the oil is? Look at it again at 100 miles. Looks dirty as hell doesn’t it? 17:1 and running on diesel oil not lightweight gasoline will do that.
This is the big reason why I never bought one second hand though I’ve wanted one since I was a teenager. By the time I was old enough and making enough to afford a second hand Mercedes diesel I’d seen tragically what your typical American driver does to a diesel engine. Yes, they’ll last practically forever. You can’t build 17:1 ignition-by-compression on the cheap and expect it to outlast the warranty. And the routine maintenance isn’t expensive. But you have to do it.
And I would recommend changing the oil twice as often as the factory recommends on any car. I’ve done that on every car I’ve ever owned and never had any engine problems. But it’s especially critical for a diesel. Daimler gives its engines very large oil reservoirs…something around nine quarts in the V-6s (compared to around 6 in an American V-8) and they say change every 10k. I change at five. The other service gets done on schedule.
So anyway…I’m looking at this very nice letter from Mercedes-Benz USA printed on Very Nice stationary and what I’m seeing is evidence that Americans just don’t know how to take care of a diesel. And these aren’t just any diesels. These are Mercedes-Benz. These are magnificent automobiles, they are expensive, they are exceptionally well made, and it is so embarrassing to see how MBUSA needs to gently remind its customers…it’s presumably well to do customers…on Very Nice stationary, to take fucking care of their cars.
“I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.
“She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.
“And she’s watching this whole election and thinking. You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom…”
Right there’s your problem Peggy. Your party has been faking that fairness and wisdom thing for decades now…ever since Reagan showed them how to do the fakery right. He was an actor after all. But it was never sincere and back in those days the party did its fakery with its eyes wide open. So Reagan could assume that wise and kindly American dad persona at the same time he began his campaign where three civil rights workers were murdered with a speech about states rights. He knew what he was doing. He knew you can’t win by telling Americans you want to dick them over. It seems you’ve forgotten that.
But somewhere between then and now you folks started eating your own dogfood and now it’s Romney who carries the flag. Face it Peggy, he didn’t steal it, your party gave it to him. Romney Is The Modern Republican Party. Its sickeningly plastic smile plastered over its transparent plutocratic callousness toward everyone who isn’t wealthy, sprinkled with the usual bigotry toward darkies, women, faggots and patronizing contempt for all the rest that grow their food, serve their meals, build their homes, mow their lawns, nanny their children and die on foreign battlefields.
For decades you’ve reached that elderly woman on the porch and her husband by way of their fears and prejudices. But their lives have been growing more and more pinched as the plutocrats have been sucking up more and more of the nation’s wealth. And now your party is up against a democrat who talks about citizenship and community, the old American values your kind regards as a dirty joke. He speaks to our hopes and dreams and aspirations as a Nation, not as a collection of gated communities. And that elderly woman is old enough to remember a time when that America was peaceful and prosperous.
It gets harder and harder to wrap policies that are dicking her and her husband over in that fake folksy Reagan fairness and wisdom, but it’s either that or resign yourself to living in a country where even the commoner’s children can grow up healthy, go to school, get a decent education and make a good life for themselves. You needed an ever better Reagan this year and you don’t have one, and that’s because you forgot the only way you win with that woman is to tell her the darkies are coming for their daughters, the homos are coming for their sons, and bullshit her about kinder gentler conservatism and that shining city on the hill they can behold as their standard of living sinks slowly into the sunset. You really needed to groom another good actor for the role. But you ate your own dogfood, you bought into your own spiel about rising tides lifting all boats and Romney, corporate raiding tax evading, everpandering, plastic smiling Mitt Romney is what you got.
Now give him a big hug and a kiss because he’s everything you ever believed in made real. Sickeningly, appallingly, unavoidably real.
Adventures In Medium Format Photography…(continued)
I took a day trip to York, Pennsylvania yesterday to do a little test of the Hasselblad with the metering prism, diopter and focusing screen I bought for it, and two new black & white roll films I’d never worked with before; Fuji Neopan 100 and Agfa Retro 80. The Agfa is advertised has having almost H&W Control like qualities of grain and red spectrum response, but it develops so they say in HC-110. Since Kodak is not at all well these days, and they’ve stopped making Pan-X altogether, which is what I like using in my medium format cameras, I need another source of film. So I am experimenting.
I haven’t developed the Agfa yet, but the Fuji is already stunning me. It’s emulsion backing is more transparent then the Kodak…to an H&W Control degree practically…so there will be more bandwidth in the resulting images. Plus it lays absolutely flat on the scanner tray. I don’t need to fuss with it to get it to lay flat, it just does. My shots with it in York are running though the scanner now. I’ll see what kind of images I get later today.
But I am already delighted with what I see the metering prism doing for me. All exposures are exactly on target with the new prism. Much, Much better then I was able to get reliably get with the Gossen hand held. My thing is I like shooting into the sun and that can be tricky. I’ve developed the Fuji and the two additional rolls of Kodak Pan-X I took with me and glancing at the negatives as they came out of the wash everything was spot on.
And it’s faster to work with then I expected. Since there is no direct coupling between the meter and the lens, you have to transfer the reading you see in the meter to the lens manually. But the reading you get is in EVs (Exposure Values) and the Hasselblad lenses have EV settings on them that are a snap to use. Once you set the EV on the lens, the shutter speed and f-stop settings are latched together and you just rotate both depending on whether you want the highest speed or the greatest depth of field.
I am having zero problems now with focus. The new focusing screen is both brighter and because it has that split-image focusing aid in the center, quicker to focus with. Plus the diopter is a big, big help. I can see everything snapping into focus now, whereas before I had to search it out and sometimes I was just guessing at it. I got it wrong a bunch of times I later found out.
I should have done this Much earlier, but it was a pricy accessory. The only problem I was having as I wandered around York was the Distagon wide angle lens is flarey. I had to pass by a bunch of interesting shots simply because there was obvious lens flare where I was shooting from and I could not find a way out of it. The Distagon is an old design. It also has noticeable vignetting at the extreme corners. But it’s amazingly sharp. There is a newer 50mm lens for my Hasselblad I’ve seen on the used market, which they claim has improvements over the Distagon in terms of vignetting and flare. But that’s another big wad of money. There’s a 40mm that’s an even bigger wad of money and I really like shooting at the wide angle perspective. It suits the kind of work I do. But I can only spend so much on photography equipment in a year. Film itself is getting a tad pricey…for some reason.
The Hasselblad is a tad heavy to start with, and the metering prism adds to that. But it’s a compact weight and I don’t mind carrying it around if it’s because the camera is built to last. I like solid things in my life and especially my tools.
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