Category: Other People

From the NYT on a new show about death-match style craft competition: Ms. Honig added: “That poison and babies idea we had really hasn’t gone anywhere yet.” I’m waiting for the one on people struggling with the newly oppressive bankruptcy law. Or do they already have that one?. Apparently the whole money makover concept is quite a hit. Financial stability sounds boring, but on the other hand, you can really pitch it as “escape from financial doom” and it sounds so much better. At least it beats begging.

Start reading here, where our hero, a femme mostly-lesbian named Heathen, finds a “wayward” does of testosterone. Continue upwards toward the conclusion of the experiment. Caution: contains dirty words.

See also the Slate review of Jose Canseco’s latest book which describes it as less an expose and more a discussion of how cool steroids are. (The press surrounding the book has treated his tales of racism in the press and in the game as an aside, at best– not surprising, I suppose, since we already knew about the racism and nobody ever admitted to the drugs before).

Anyway, it all makes me think steroids are cool. No wonder gynecomastia is in the news so much these days!

Item One: Restrict decongestant purchases? As someone who depends on Sudafed for severe sinus headaches, I am angered.

Item Two: Nine couples claim the same orphaned baby in Sri Lanka.

Which is more crazy and stupid? I’m not sure.

So, some people went down to a gay rights march in Philly to insult the marchers. Some of them were disorderly, loud, or whatever, and they got arrested. What does the AFA do? Blame it on the gay.

According to WorldNetDaily, “Homosexual attorneys from the U.S. Justice Department Civil Rights Division not only attended (the) large homosexual event…but they advised police on the scene who arrested 11 Christian protesters, says a source in the agency.” (Charges against some of the Christians have been dropped.)

The WorldNetDaily article went on to say the U.S. Justice Department is “not likely to take up the cause of the five criminally charged Christians who believe Philadelphia officials violated their civil rights.”

Did you catch that? The Justice Department will refuse to investigate the treatment of the arrested Christians because some homosexual attorneys from the Justice Department were advising the Philadelphia police on how to arrest the Christians!!!!

Now, the Philadelphia police don’t exactly have a good track record in protest-arresting: they pre-emptively jailed a bunch of RNC protestors back in ’00, delayed their processing until the convention was over, and then let them go (lawsuits still pending). But this message still conveys a total disconnect from reality.

These people are totally shocked that the force of law is not on their side, that others have rights, that their behavior is not acceptable. They’re shocked that there are, dear lord, homosexuals in the Justice Department! What has it come to? The next thing you know, they’ll be letting in atheists and socialists!

Also, if you want a look at what passes for news on the right, check out the spin on WorldNet: the UN is always bad, the ACLU is stealing your money, illegal immigration is destroying our hospitals and our culture. And they always put the word gay in scare-quotes, because they want you to know they don’t accept or believe gay people exist. Or something. Their shopping site promotes books on investing in gold, biblical child-discipline, Clintons-caused-9/11 conspiracies, and a bunch of things on the End Times.

For extra credit, compare and contrast WorldNetDaily’s coverage of The End Times with the Economist’s year-end study of end-of-the-world beliefs among religious and non-religious groups.

One NY city is reversing its decision to offer health-care benefits to domestic partners of new city employees. Now, this doesn’t touch either of the two people currently insured under this policy, who are currently insured as partners of current city employees. The city just says that domestic partners of new employees, or new domestic partners of current employees, won’t get health care.

So, you had a system which was discriminatory. You replaced it with one that was fair, but which religious groups disliked as cooties-ridden. And so now you’ve further revised it to be something everyone can hate.

You know, this wouldn’t be a problem if we had a decent health care system to begin with.

My grandfather was persuasive and confident man, as southern leftists had to be, even more so in 1935 than now. In those days he was a student at the University of Virginia, making money tutoring gentlemen who slacked off all year and studied only under duress, usually in last-minute cram sessions that he would prepare for all semester.

I don’t know whose car it was, but he and a friend were driving in a thunderstorm in the evening. Yes, a dark and stormy night. They were moving slowly, so they had plenty of time to see the woman walking down the middle of the road in a thin cotton shift. They helped her into the car: she was apparently fleeing a drunk and violent husband.

I don’t know if they gave her a ride to the bus station, or bought her some coffee, or perhaps a meal. I do know that her story was one that everyone has heard before: husband out drinking late, a violent attack, passing out by the woodshed, he’d likely kill her if this kept up. At some point my grandfather said, “I’m surprised you don’t just wait for him to pass out, then chop his head off with an axe. That’s what I’d do.”

Several hours or weeks later, that’s what she did. In her defense, she said a man from the University had told her it was a good idea. She didn’t recall his name, and he didn’t come forward to announce himself as an advisor or accessory to the crime. The result of her trial isn’t part of the story either.

I’m not sure what I would do in her situation, but it’s quite likely that in his, I’d have made the same off-hand remark. And if I said it, and she then killed her tormentor, I would have to wonder whether I was indirectly responsible for his death. And if I didn’t, and she died at his hands, would I be indirectly responsible for hers?

Dilbert mocks the sales force.

For some reason it never occurred to me until recently to look for my boss’s blog.

One obvious, one actually … well, not newsworthy, but nonobvious: teenagers don’t think ahead, and medicine is finally catching up with the claims of spam-merchants with advances in, er, “enhancement” surgery.

A documentary about gay people in the south is being used as an excuse to kill public television.

All research into human sexual behavior is described as deviant and horrible and evil and bad. So we’re never going to get any good science on the subject. Instead, we get people like Judith Reisman:

She claims that Kinsey actively solicited pedophiles to molest children and report back to him. In fact, she said, “there is absolutely no reason to believe that Kinsey himself was not involved in the sexual abuse of these children.” (None of Kinsey’s four biographers have turned up any evidence that he was.) Reisman also believes that Kinsey died not from heart failure but from what she calls “brutal, repetitive self-abuse.”

That’s right– we have no evidence one way or the other, so let’s call him a pedophile, and claim he died from masturbating. Also, she believes in gay Nazis and homosexual “recruitment.” In other words, science and learning have been replaced with dogma and conspiracy theories in the halls of legislature.

So, bring on the lies which we will tell to our children in classrooms and textbooks– after those books which feature or describe or mention homosexuality are burned.. Also, we’ll promote our lies with a “fun” and “hip” approach in tacky, overpriced, poorly-designed websites. Sites as Cool 2b Real and Zip4Tweens. Sometimes I think my job (marketing) consists of aiming low, advocating for mediocrity, and basically describing ugly realities in pleasant terms– and then I think of the people who build those sites, and wonder how hard it was to make the choice between moral and financial bankruptcy? Why can’t you do something decent, like the folks at Scarleteen, huh?

Yep, we love our childrens (this is has been going on for some time now). We love them so much that if we disapprove of their parents we’ll pull their health insurance. We love them so much we won’t announce that we welcome them at church, because it’s kind of controversial, and might be against national policy.

So, that’s why I’m angry today.