Under the law, she would qualify for Medicaid. Her eyebrows shot up as the law was described to her. “If they put that law into effect, a lot of people won’t need disability,” she said. “A lot of people go onto disability because they can’t afford health insurance.”
Tom Boughan, 58, came to the clinic for glasses and dental work, with a sci-fi novel to pass the time. He’s been without coverage since being laid off from his industrial painting job last year, which means he’s paying $400 every few months for blood work for a thyroid problem.
Barbara Hickey, 54, is a diabetic who lost her insurance five years ago when her husband was injured at his job making fiberglass pipes. She gets discounted diabetic medication from a charity, but came to the clinic to ask a doctor about blood in her urine.
Why I hate the corporate news media and can’t wait for it to die a slow and painful death: This story was shopped to The Washington Post which rejected it because it was too “supportive” of the Affordable Care Act. Yes…of course. The reason there is little support in the country for the ACA is people don’t know what it does, and some people don’t even know it exists. They hear republican talking points about the mandate and they think big government is just taking their money. Meanwhile the news media doesn’t tell them they’re getting access to health care because that would be taking sides. We’re newspapers, we can’t report the facts.
.
Lord Carey: opponents of gay marriage treated like bigots“This debate is not about the dignity and rights of gay and lesbian people, who already have the benefits of marriage through civil partnerships, but about a change in the definition of marriage for everyone…” Yes, yes…if we could only leave the dignity and rights of gay and lesbian people out of this we could have a nice friendly discussion about why letting same-sex couples marry would utterly destroy family life and civilization as we know it. Matter of fact, we would very much appreciate it if we could just leave out of this debate entirely why we are in opposition to same-sex marriage. That would spare everyone a lot of hurt feelings. And really…do we need to explain ourselves? We are the church. Just do as we say.
A woman participating in a Hooters Swimsuit Pageant notices a video camera recording her in the dressing room. That was the excuse the owner of the camera gave to the cop who arrested him. I suspect the reason he’s never had a girlfriend is he hasn’t figured out yet how to treat women like people. Hey guy…there’s this perfectly legal thing called Pornography you can buy with lotsa lovely women willing to take their clothes off for your onanistic pleasures…
I read about this on Fark, read the comment hilarity that followed, and cringed inside.
There’s a flashback scene at the end of The Detective, where the William Windom character (Colin MacIver), a closeted self hating homosexual (who turns out (naturally) to be the real killer the Frank Sinatra character was looking for all through the movie), confesses the killing to his shrink in a sickening display of the kind of acid self hatred Hollywood was only too happy to tell everyone was the natural state of homosexuals.
It begins with MacIver walking back to his car with his girlfriend. They’re assaulted by robbers who call MacIver a faggot. Somehow this causes him to go looking for sex with another guy. You have to remember this is 1960s Hollywood being all edgy and gritty now that they can take on taboo subject for mass entertainment and ticket sales. Even though he has a girlfriend, MacIver is really a sick and pathetic queer and the encounter with the thieves triggers his perversion and now he has to go get him some cock even though the very thought disgusts him. MacIver tells his shrink: “The thought of turning…of turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me…and made me sick with anger.” Nonetheless he promptly drives down to the docks for a quickie. Because queers can’t help themselves.
“I went down there. I had heard about the waterfront. People giggle and make jokes about it. I had had only two experiences before…once in college, once in the army. I thought I’d gotten it out of my life…but I hadn’t.”
Experiences. Experiences. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Anyway, it all builds up to MacIver going to the docks, then to a gay bar, walking slowly past every homosexual stereotype in the Twentieth Century Fox prop department, all leering back at him archly. Because homosexuals always look back at you archly.
“I looked at them. Was this what I was like? Oh my god…”
He stares in horror at the “twisted faces”…but he can’t help himself. He’s just gotta have some cock tonight…
“And here I was and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop. I thought if I could have just one night, I could get it out of my system. Just one more time…”
Just one more…experience…
Oh that poor pathetic faggot…pass the popcorn… It’s bullshit…yes, sane people these days understand that. But that was the accepted view of homosexuals back then, back when I was growing up, and what angers me about this film and that sequence in it is thinking about all my generational gay peers who accepted that this was what it was to be a homosexual; that they could either try as desperately hard as they could to overcome their “condition”, become straight or live their lives as pathetic faggots or psychotic killers, either way spending the rest of their lives loathing the person they were. Because a man having sex with another man was the most disgusting thing you could imagine, and to desire such a thing even if you never acted on it meant that you were the most loathsome thing there ever was. This is what Hollywood taught them about themselves, it’s what Hollywood taught their parents, their siblings and all their friends…and mine: to look at us with the same disgust and contempt with which MacIver looked upon himself.
This is what I grew up on. This was pretty much the constant barrage from the culture around me about homosexuality. And it’s a big reason why, when I finally came out to myself, I swore I wasn’t going to live my life in the closet. Never mind the “Twisted faces” MacIver stared at with equal parts horror and desire that sickened him. At least they knew what they were about hanging out there. I’d fallen in love…I knew what I was and what I wasn’t. The ugly stereotypes of homosexuals didn’t frighten me because I knew I wasn’t that and for the honor and dignity of the one I loved I would never become that…nor would I allow myself to become a self hating basket case, horrified by my own sexuality. The twisted face I was afraid of becoming, resolved never to become, was MacIver’s.
So I dug in my heels and lived an honest life. And for that I can take some pride. And yet…and yet… I never found my other half. And in the background of my life was another twisted face, another pathetic stereotype that I am still, deep in my heart, afraid of.
“Man to man, I did it because I’ve never had a girlfriend.”
It’s illogical, it’s irrational, I am simply not the sort of person who would ever do what this guy did. I dallied with gay pornography back when I was younger and found I didn’t even really like that all that much. Yeah, there were lots of very attractive hot bodies in it. But there was no romance. I am just not voyeur material. Sometimes I sit down to my drafting table and I draw myself a fantasy boyfriend and dream on him. That’s about my speed. I could never do what that guy did. Certainly not to someone I thought was beautiful. Desire should awaken something more noble in a person then that or it’s just empty greed.
But I have been single for so very very long and I read these things and get depressed. Is this what the rest of my life is going to look like? Is this how others see people like me? Alone. Single. Old. Creepy. How do you get to be fifty-eight years old and you’ve never had a boyfriend? There must be something wrong with you. Sometimes I wonder now, if maybe there is after all. And I read stories like this about creepy single guys and I cringe inside.
“I looked at them. Was this what I was like? Oh my god…”
Regnerus knows what he did. He set up a study that would make it seem that anyone who ever slept with someone of the same sex hurts their children by doing so. Instability is well known to be harder on children than stability. Decades of research are clear on this: Children do better with parents who stay together and have relatively low-conflict relationships than they do in high-conflict structures. The new parenting studies that are trying to measure whether the gender of your parent’s partner matters are following families where same-sex parents are together from the beginning – and comparing them with families whose different-sex parents are together from the beginning. That’s how you tease out the effect of gender from the effect of instability. Regnerus did the opposite.
Regnerus is smart enough to know this. He did one thing while purporting to do another. He compared fidelity with adultery. He compared stability with instability. Then, in Slate, he said he was comparing different-sex parenting with same-sex parenting—conflating the effect of family explosion with the effect of parental sexual orientation.
Anyone who can write the words, “Liberal War On Science” in anything other then the purest irony is a bigger asshole then even the right wing culture warriors who are have been engaged in just that thing for decades now. But never mind. The reason William Saletan is defending Mark Regnerus’ right to defame loving families is because he’s exactly the same sort of double talking faker Regnerus is.
In the article above E. J. Graff points out in sickening detail how Regnerus talks out of both sides of his mouth; first admitting his data does not say anything about same-sex households, then when in friendly territory (like…oh…Slate…) saying he’s proven the conventional wisdom about same-sex families is terribly wrong and that children of same-sex parents have suffered devastating effects from being raised in such households. Never mind that it’s flatly untrue his data shows any such thing…in the he-said/she-said journalmalist world of William Saletan talking out of both sides of your mouth isn’t a sign of untrustworthiness, but the highest sort of journalmalistic integrity. It’s people who insist that facts matter who are the creepy untrustworthy ones. Saletan comes to Regnerus’ defense because he sees a soul mate…someone who knows that there are no facts just opinions, truth is whatever someone says it is, and people who frown on playing fast and loose with the evidence are dangerous ideologues. Maybe even dirty fucking hippies.
That Mark Regnerus spent nearly a million right wing dollars on an anti-gay hit piece is just a matter of opinion. Like the humanity of gay people is just a matter of opinion. These are controversial matters…no one has a monopoly on the truth…and especially not gay people when it comes to the truth of their own lives. We must respect both sides… Saletan understands him perfectly.
Some random linkage. Most other bloggers I read do this occasional post of links they haven’t and aren’t likely to get around to riffing on, and rather then let them keep nagging me to post about them until they get old and broken and die I reckon I’ll just start doing it too…
Gay rights’ surprise weapon: Morality. I have been on about this for decades, literally. Back in the 1990s, before I started blogging, when USENET was all there was, I kept engaging the bigots on the unmoderated alt.politics.homosexuality on moral issues and it was so unsurprising and disheartening how they’d figure the moral arguments against homosexuality were their trump cards because no one ever bothered engaging them directly on it.
There is nothing innately wrong with homosexual relationships. There is no science that says otherwise, there is no moral argument that makes that case, there are only arguments from supposed religious authority, junk science and outright lying. Mostly, from Paul Cameron to Mark Regnerus the moral case is based on outright lying. Listen…when you have to lie constantly to make your moral case, that should tell you something about your moral case
.
In the battle between morality and faith, morality is winning. “Obviously, as an atheist, I can’t see this as a bad thing. I appreciate that liberal Christians like Rachel and Jamelle find spiritual solace in having faith, but by and large, the historical purpose of religion is not to comfort but to control.” Well…yes and no. I am an atheist myself (coming out to myself as atheist a couple years ago felt a lot like coming out to myself as gay…something I keep wanting to write about but the words just haven’t gelled yet), and it has always looked to me that religion isn’t so much for control as it is all too often used by tyrants to control.
What I see in this is people, mostly but not always young people, leaving a lot of greedy possessive cults and going on their own journeys. That’s a good thing. Hopefully they will find their way to a place that genuinely speaks to their heart. Just as they are. Something that never fails to cheer me whenever I see it is the rainbow Christian fish. It tells me that people are holding on to their inner sense of self, their spirituality, despite the relentless efforts of spiritual dictators to snuff it out within them, so they can fill the void left behind. Regardless of my own path in life, there will probably always be that Baptist part of me in there cheering that private personal journey on. We are all strolling on Newton’s beach, now and then picking up and appreciating that prettier seashell then ordinary.
.
I Don’t Care Who Financed Prof. Regnerus. I think he should. “I see this scenario all too often in our opponents: A scientist makes an objective study of gays and lesbians and announces favorable results. Our opponents seize on that as proof that the scientist is a pro-homosexual activist, and therefore fatally tainted with bias.” But there’s a difference between seeing a conflict of interest in a study’s conclusions and seeing one in who paid for the study. It’s like saying we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about tobacco industry funded studies of lung cancer, or oil industry funded studies on global warming and fracking.
But there’s more to it then even this. It’s about integrity and who is trustworthy and who is not. When you see data and facts that consistently, reliably, inevitably turn out to be laughingly bogus coming consistently from of a particular source, it isn’t anything like an ad hominem attack to point out that these people simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth. It’s just…well…telling the truth.
.
Scandinavia And The World – Metal. Some days the little rocker boy in me comes roaring out, and listening to the radio I feel a bit like Denmark here…a little rocker boy trapped between a world of metal and glitter.
.
Kathryn Schulz thinks Frost is much, much darker than anyone suspects… Well she’s wrong. Or maybe not. Haven’t you ever wandered out into a winter forest, in the snow, in the night, just stood there and breathed in the silence before continuing on your way? That’s not Nietzsche’s abyss. The forest, the earth, is alive, not even really sleeping. Our lives are so short, and time is not what we think it is. In the quiet winter darkness you can almost sense the scale of it. A little bit. This rhythm of growing season and winter hibernation has been going on for ages. The darkness and silence is the beat between one breath and the next in a story that is very very old. It’s not scary, it’s sublime. Better then any man made cathedral. You are not getting out of these woods, but why would you want to? The woods are in you and you are the woods.
I’ve been very graciously linked to recently by a couple folks, including Fred Clark whose readership I must assume is every bit as decent and good hearted as he is. So for the sake of those just tuning in, and especially after that last post, I feel should explain something.
You may have noticed things are a bit odd around here. Hi…my name is Bruce Garrett. This is my place. It’s odd because I am.
I started blogging back before blogging really took off, years ago in the late 1990s when I read about someone who was just basically posting their diaries online as a kind of living art project. I thought that was kinda cool and started doing it myself. I wasn’t about getting attention. If you have the art gene in you too then you understand. Mostly, I do graphic art…imagery. Try the cartoon and photo galleries sometime. But sometimes I try to write.
I started blogging back in 1998, although this blog’s archives only go back to 2002. Before then it was just a random note here and there on what was nominally my cartoon and photography web site, hosted by the company I had my email account on. Then in late 2001 a friend showed me how to get my own domain started up and offered to host me. Once again the site was mostly about my political cartoons and my photography, with the blog being an extra…a place I could write about this and that. The blog, like everything else about the site back then (and mostly still now) was hand rolled. I was earning a good living then as a software developer and I just typed my own HTML into my programmer’s editor and uploaded it. It wasn’t until my original domain host retired and I had to move the site elsewhere that I was talked into switching the blog software over to WordPress. Even so, most of the rest of the site, like my household computers (apart from the Macs), is hand built.
Of course, being the times we live in, the blog started capturing my feelings about political issues and in particular the gay rights struggle. But this is not actually a political blog. It is not a blog about gay rights specifically, or religion or philosophy or economics. It is not about my opinions on anything. I am not doing punditry. I only vent a lot about politics here because it’s more satisfying then yelling at the TV. But that’s not what this blog is. It’s a life blog. Basically just random bits and pieces of one guy’s life as he lives it, like an always changing collage. It’s The Story So Far…
If it seems confusing at times, that’s normal. I’m confusing. Just ask anyone who knows me. Especially the certain someone whose regrettably thin skin I’ve been poking with that Llama. Or maybe you shouldn’t ask him. No…don’t ask him…
Fischer’s political activism, however, began years before the advent of same-sex-marriage laws. In fact, his preoccupation with family dysfunction seems to have started with his own…
Fischer didn’t volunteer anything about his mother, but, when pressed, said, “My parents divorced when I was about twenty. It just rocked my world.” His mother, who worked as an interior decorator at a furniture store, was “chronically late,” and the bus driver on her route to work would always hold the bus for her. Eventually, he said, “my mom fell for the bus driver,” deserting him, his father, and his younger sister. “I don’t want to go into it,” Fischer said…
A former leader of the religious right in Boise who was friends with Fischer for twenty years before Fischer cut him off…a common theme in Fischer’s friendships apparently…said that Fischer, “had a deep-rooted disappointment in his father, for not being strong enough”, which Fischer denies. But over the years Fischer has been relentless in his belief that women should have no power or even a voice in church matters, time and again either leaving a church or being forced out over issues of gender and women’s role in religious life. It may seem too pat to lay all of this on Fischer’s inability to let go of what his mom did, but the obvious connection isn’t always wrong either.
I could sympathize with Fischer…after all I’m also the product of a “broken home”…except that he’s made a career out of punishing other people’s families for the sins of his own. I made peace with dad long ago. He was not the best of examples but mom loved him all the same and she did her level best to raise me as well as any kid ever got raised despite the scorn and contempt self righteous moral scolds like Fischer heaped on her. All in all I am very glad it was mom who raised me and not dad after the split. But for all his faults and crimes I loved him and only wished he would let mom show him a better way to live after all. But mom did her best for me, not just telling me that better way but living it in front of me every day, and everything I am today I owe to that.
Still, let me say absolutely that if I had to choose between being raised by dad or by the likes of Bryan Fischer I would without hesitation choose to be raised by the thief rather then the bully.
Every Time I Try To Get Out, They Pull Me Back In.
I figured I wouldn’t, because I just don’t see myself going back to Disney World as often in the coming year as I have in recent years (Hi Tico!). But then I did the nefarious Disney math.
They say if you do a couple weeks or more you’ve paid for your annual pass. But tickets to the Disney Parks are on a sliding scale and that’s taking into account the longer stay tickets. Base single day single park ticket is $89. Lets say you do a week, seven days, which (as of my writing this) is $41.14 a day or $287.98. Twice in a year that’s $575.96. The annual pass is $611.31, but if you’re renewing it’s only $574.00 so that’s a break even for returning guests. But that’s the standard ticket price and there are options.
The base ticket gets you into one park for one day. But let’s say you want to visit one park in the morning, and a different one in the afternoon. Then you need the Park Hopper option, which for one day is $35.00 or (again the sliding scale) $8.14 a day for seven days. That brings you up to $344.96 for seven days and if you do that twice it’s $689.92 for that year. When I first bought my annual pass I could add the park hopper option for a little more, but it seems now you have to get the Premium Annual Pass to get that (which I upgraded to last year to get the water park option…I’ll go into that in a bit…). The Premium Annual Pass is $744.44 or $649 to renew. That’s still close to break even for new purchasers, better then break even for renewers. But then there is one more option. The water parks and Disney Quest.
Disney Quest is an arcade like thing located in Downtown Disney. I don’t bother with it because it seems more a kid thing. But I like doing the water parks, Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach. Water park tickets are $55.38 a day and there is no sliding scale for those I can find apart from being an option on the park tickets. Let’s say you want to do a water park some afternoons and wander one or more of the parks others. Three days out of seven if you buy the tickets separately and it’s $166.14 you add to the bill. Or you can just add the water park option to a seven day park ticket and it’s $8.14 a day which is only another $56.98…just a tad more then a single day ticket. Of course you want to add the water park option.
Dizzy yet? Oh but there’s more!
Transportation to the Disney Parks is very well organized along bus routes into and out of and within the parks, and there are monorail routes you can use depending on where you stay and where you go. In theory you won’t be needing a car once you enter Disney World. But if you bring a car along like I do, and you’d rather keep to your own schedule then the bus schedule, then you will need to pay for parking. Parking is free for all annual pass holders of all types. Otherwise that’s $14 a day but it gets you parking at all the parks for that one price for that one day. So seven days of parking is another $98. Parking at the water parks is free, so it’s possible to just do one day or more at a water park for $55.38 a day and get fewer days on the park tickets otherwise. But that sliding scale means fewer consecutive days cost more each. And you can’t get by with saving some of the days on your ticket for a later visit. The tickets expire unless you add the “No Expiration Date” option. I am not even here going to go into that one, but it isn’t cheap. In fact it’s the only ticket option that gets more expensive per day the more days you buy. Otherwise the tickets expire 14 days after first use. You buy a seven day ticket, you have two weeks to use it all.
Now…add it all up (not counting the “no expiration” option) and you are looking at something like $499.94 just for one week if you do the park hopper option, the water parks option and the parking fees. Twice in a year and it’s very nearly a thousand bucks you’ve spent and that’s not even getting you the hotel and your food. Now the premium annual pass seems like an outright bargain. Plus, annual pass holders get discounts on in park hotels.
Now let’s cost out one measly three day weekend shall we? The base three day ticket is $80.67 a day or $242.01 total (notice how close that is to the cost of the seven day ticket). Add the park hopper for three days at $19 a day and it’s another $57 which brings us to $299.01. Add the water parks, also at $19 a day for three days and it’s $356.01. Add parking for three days and it’s $398.01. Do that long three day weekend twice in a year and you’ve spent $796.02.
Verses $649 to simply renew my pass for an entire year.
Okay…whatever…I renewed the pass. It’s actually cheaper to get the pass even if you don’t go that often. And of course, having a year of access to the Disney World Parks means I might just go more often then not…and spend more once I’m there. If I didn’t so thoroughly enjoy being in Disney World so much I might get a tad pissed at how expertly they manage to get my wallet to open up. But I do love being there, so…
Bear in mind the ticket price gets you not just into the park but also onto all the park rides and attractions (some special seasonal attractions, like the Halloween party in Magic Kingdom for instance, are extra however). You don’t buy separate tickets per ride like in the old days. Once you’re inside you just go get on all the rides you want, as often as you can, if that’s your thing (I did the new Star Tours ride in Hollywood Studios about a dozen times in a row one night). Should you question the ticket prices in spite of that I strongly recommend taking the backstage tour. Trust me, when you get even a small glimpse of how much goes into the operation and maintenance of Disney World, and it is a massive operation, absolutely massive, you will wonder that the tickets aren’t lots more costly then they are.
[Edited a tad…the renew price on my Premium Annual Pass was $649…the price I originally quoted $691.19 was the price plus Maryland state sales tax. All other prices come directly off the Disney World ticket pages.]
While at the grocery store this morning shopping for office snacks, I pick up what I think is a jar of “low fat” peanut butter. “50 percent less fat then regular peanut butter” says the label cheerfully. Peanut butter being a dietary staple, I give the matter some thought. Then I see a logo on the side of the jar that reads, “dry roasted peanut taste”. That ominous phrase “peanut taste” makes me look closer. I notice that nowhere on the jar does it actually say Peanut Butter. So what is this stuff? Ah…the fine print. Yes, it looks like peanut butter, it’s stacked on the shelves right next to the peanut butter, the label says “50 percent less fat then regular peanut butter”, but it is not peanut butter. It is peanut butter spread.
Sol was right…
Okay…you can turn my cheese into cheese food product, you can turn my lemonade into lemonade flavored drink mix, you can turn my potato chips into potato crisps, but this…This is a snack food abomination. What’ll it be next…chocolate flavored Hershey bars???
In the 1950s Evelyn Hooker realized that all extant studies of homosexuals were conducted on homosexuals who had been imprisoned for sex crimes, in therapy or committed to mental institutions, and so they were concluding homosexuals were sick because they only studied sick homosexuals. Her 1957 study, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual was the first to systematically examine homosexual men who weren’t in prisons or mental institutions or undergoing therapy and, surprise, surprise, discovered that if you study gay men the same way you study straight men they look pretty much alike.
In 2012 Mark Regnerus studied broken families with gay people in them, compared them to intact families headed by heterosexuals, and concluded that gay people make lousy parents, thereby proving that the religious right wants social science and the view of gay people to stay back in the early 1950s.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…
And finally, he grants interviews to conservative outlets, claiming that his study shows the harm of same-sex parenting, even though his own words, in his own study, demonstrate that he knows his sample size is just too damn small to say anything with confidence.
The funding for the study came from the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation. Not only are both of these major hard right money teats, National Organization For Marriage (NOM) co-founder Robert (Super Genius) George is a Senior Fellow at Witherspoon and a Board member of the Bradley Foundation. So the study is also intimately tied to NOM and NOM’s political anti-gay, anti same-sex marriage agenda. And…surprise, surprise, George is also on the editorial board of the Mormon Church owned Deseret News, which ran with Regnerus’ conclusions in both its news and editorial pages. The Mormon church is widely suspected of being the power behind the founding and bankrolling of NOM. If that’s not enough, the study’s author (“of record”, as opposed to “of funding”), Mark Regnerus is a graduate of Trinity Christian College, a former professor at Calvin College, now a sociologist at the University of Texas, with a track record of pushing religious right propaganda posing as research into mainstream news outlets. George knew perfectly well what he was buying with Witherspoon and Bradley money.
What the hell…the motivation here could not be clearer if it was written in neon lights. How does anyone not know why Regnerus is saying his three quarter of a million right wing dollar study proves that gay parents damage children regardless of what the data actually says? It’s Anita Bryant and Save Our Children again for the zillianth time because that’s the song they know works when the polls start tilting in favor of Teh Gay and push comes to shove. Didn’t NOM play that song over and over during the proposition 8 campaign? The homos are coming for our children! We must Save Our Children from the homos!
I recognize, with Paul and Cynthia, that organizations may utilize these findings to press a political program. And I concur with them that that is not what data come prepared to do. Paul offers wise words of caution against it, as did I in the body of the text. Implying causation here—to parental sexual orientation or anything else, for that matter—is a bridge too far.
Well, in the generation that are adults now, kids raised in a same-sex household were more likely to experience instability and shifting household arrangements. For example, 14 percent of kids whose moms had a lesbian relationship reported spending more time in foster care, well above the average of 2 percent among all respondents.
I elected NOT to make this about orientation or self-identity. You suggest more ominous motivation, but I assure you that was not true.
Your accusations are getting more heated, and I’m afraid unless we can correspond civilly, I may have to call a conclusion to this.
Hang tight…we’ll be hearing shortly about all the gay friends Regnerus has.
I have a wee suggestion for mainstream news media journalmalists, bloggers, folks who may just be a tad curious about it all: if you want to know what the motivations are behind this study, don’t bother asking the parties involved directly. Go listen to what they say to each other. In their publications, on their talk radio stations, on their blogs and newspapers and magazines. Go to the hard right, where they talk to each other, and just…listen. It’s all there…everything you need to know about what motivates them and what they hope to achieve. If you ask them straight up they will look you right in the face with a warm and friendly smile and lie through their teeth. If you just sit back and listen to them talk to each other you will get the hard cold brutal truth of it. Animus does not even begin to describe how they feel toward gay people. Or toward you, for that matter.
We went through this yesterday, but it’s a stark reminder of where we are.
The deal, though, fails to address a fundamental issue that has been spooking markets: This is the worst possible time for Spain to borrow 100 billion euros. Under the agreement, any amount used to bail out Spain’s banks will be added to the country’s government debt, potentially pushing it to a net 70 percent of gross domestic product, from about 60 percent today.
According to Our Galtian Overlords, austerity is necessary. Except, of course, when it comes to massive failing companies known as banks. Just keep lighting billions of taxpayer money on fire, paying massive salaries to the people who are destroying the world. And nobody mention moral hazard, because that’s what happens when you give someone an extra $10/week in food stamps.
There are lots of reasons the banks are having problems, but one reason is that people have no jobs and no money. And the Galtian Overlords are determined to keep people broke and unemployed, while extracting everything possible from the economy to give to the banks.
There’s stupid, but also a whole lot of evil. Bad people run the world.
-Atrios
This has been another edition of What Atrios Said…
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” -H. L. Mencken
These are the times that try men’s souls. Also their charity. Granted Walker was swimming in corporate money. Granted he outspent his democratic opponent 30 to 1. But the buck stops with the voters and at some point you just have to accept that more of them would rather cut their own throats then live in a state of peace and prosperity with people they despise.
Fine. I won’t help you cut your own throat but I’ll be happy to stand here and watch. I might even applaud if you’re good. Just don’t call me “neighbor” if I do. Don’t use that word in my presence. Don’t even think of me that way. My neighbor is the guy whose face you’re kicking.
Not Exactly A Wandering Star…More Like A Lost One…
Mud can make you prisoner
And the plains can bake you dry
Snow can burn your eyes
But only people make you cry…
Maybe I will become a misanthrope when I’m old. I’ll bet most misanthropes are people who’ve had their hearts broken a few too many times and now all they can do is stare at the pieces, just slightly amazed that there could be so many from so small a thing as a heart.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
