Thursday, September 18, 2003

Hurricane Sky

It's seven in the morning here in Baltimore as I write this. I got up and dressed a little while ago, and went outside to size up the weather so far. The sky is completely grey and overcast, with a low deck of clouds rapidly, and I mean rapidly, moving from east to west. Here on the ground, there is a light, but steady, breeze. It is cool and deathly quiet on my street. There are no birds calling to one another, as they usually do in the morning.

Before bed last night I took a walk, and saw huge streamers of high altitude cirrus streaking across the sky from horizon to horizon. A glance at the current satellite images from NOAA confirmed that it was from Isabel. Probably the high altitude outflow.

My web host, who is located in Arlington VA., informs me that power may go out at his site from time to time during the hurricane, just as it may all over the region. He has a backup power source, but it is not an indefinite thing. And for that matter the entire net around the mid-Atlantic states may go a tad screwy here and there throughout the event. And of course, I could loose power at any time myself, and not be able to update the site. Just hang tight. If you try to get through to my web site during the hurricane and find you can't, or if you send me e-mail and find I am not answering, don't worry. Try again later.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Waiting For Isabel

I've been watching Isabel, and remembering Agnes. In 1972 Agnes came right up the Chesapeake and then up the Potomac. Like an idiot, I'd gone out when the eye passed over, thinking the storm over, and took a friend whose pants I'd been dying to get into for months to see The Other. The movie stank, and when the show was over and we went back outside, the rain was going horizontally down Wisconsin Avenue. I had to drive him and me home in it, and there were times when I could not see past the hood of the car. We were both teenagers then, and too excited at experiencing our first hurricane to be afraid of it.

I worked as a freelance photographer for a couple local county papers in those days, and after Agnes passed I took some shots of the damage along the C&O canal. It wasn't until I saw the holes ripped out of the C&O canal by the flood waters that I realized how dangerous that hurricane was.

Along the C&O Canal After Agnes
Copyright 1972 by Bruce Garrett

So far, the path of Isabel seems to take it further west then Agnes went. But to be grateful seems somehow to be wishing trouble on somebody else. And besides, all that rain coming into the western mountains is for sure going to come back to the eastern part of the state. The Potomac will likely go past flood stage and people living alongside of it will be in trouble. Where I live, the Jones Falls river (more like a big creek here in the city) will bear watching. The old timers around here say that after Agnes, they watched cars floating down it.

I've covered over my outdoor basement stairwell with plywood and a tarp, to keep the rain out. The drain down at the bottom of it goes into my sump pump, and I don't want all that water going down there, especially if the electricity goes out. My sump pump is on a battery backup, but best to avoid the problem altogether. I'm laying in stocks of fresh drinking water, in case flooding makes the tap water problematic. I have a water distiller, but that only works if there is electricity. A neighbor who works for Baltimore Gas and Electric says the worry is that since the ground is already a bit soggy from recent rains, it might not take much wind and rain to knock over trees, and hence power lines. He reckons he'll be busy once the storm hits.

There is construction going on at Johns Hopkins where I work. All afternoon they were running some kind of concrete grinder over a new parking deck they're building, and the thing was making a noise as it went back and forth that was uncomfortably similar to the sound the emergency alert sirens make. I try to keep a rational mindset, but sometimes it's a struggle: I'm half techno geek and software engineer, and half moody and temperamental artist, and the left side of my brain knows an omen when it sees one. But the dice are thrown and whatever is going to happen is going to happen. I think I'm ready. I don't think we're going to get a bad hit here; mostly just a big mess we'll have to clean up after Isabel goes on her way. It'll be manageable. I'll keep my eye on my little brick rowhouse, and keep an eye on my neighbors, a few of which are elderly. I know from the big snowstorm we had last winter, that this neighborhood comes together and takes care of itself pretty well. Tonight the weather is cool and the night is quiet, and I'm going to take a short walk now, and enjoy the calm before the storm.

Monday, September 15, 2003

Can we run their photo next to livestock for sale? No? Okay... how about Farm Implements.

Martin Luthor King Jr. once said that shallow understanding from people of good will, is more frustrating than absolute from people of ill will. But there is shallow understanding, and then there is a kind of cowardly, passive-aggressive hate that only looks like shallow understanding. This is the mode of the bigot who knows that others in their community regard their prejudices with disdain, but can't resist twisting the knife in the objects of their hate anyway. Oh...did that hurt? We're terribly sorry...we were only trying to be helpful... Nobody is fooled. Well...except for our national Gay Rights organizations anyway.

In January of this year, then governor Parris Glendening wrote to the Baltimore Sun, and other major Maryland newspapers, asking them to join other national newspapers like The New York Times in publishing same sex commitment ceremonies. The paper said only that it would look into the matter when they got a request from a same sex couple. Nevertheless, GLADD apparently took that as a yes, and included the Sun in its list of newspapers that publish such announcements.

In April, a lesbian couple, Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar, celbrated their six years together with a commitment ceremony. When they learned that the Sun would publish their announcements they sent in a request. On May 9, the Sun responded with the usual "we only publish announcements for legally recognized unions" claptrap, by which many passive-aggressive bigots attempt to cloak their motivations. We're not bigots. Honest. We're just abiding by the law. 'What first amendment' in other words. Sodomy laws were useful for a lot of this sort of passive-aggressive gay bashing before the Supreme court overturned the sodomy laws. We're sorry we can't employ you here, or rent you a place to live, or approve your gay-straight alliance, but after all, we can't condone criminal activity now can we?

For several months the couple continued to nag the Sun to do the right thing, and finally the Sun announced in August, to some great local fanfare, that it was creating a separate but equal section in the paper for same sex commitment announcements. "To me it's a matter of principal," said Sun vice editor and senior vice president William Marimow. "We want a society in which all people are treated equally and treated well." Oh really?

Separate but equal doesn't produce such a society. It cannot by its very premise that a majority can fence off a minority, simply because they are the majority and they can. What finally destroyed separate but equal racial apartheid in the South, was the stench of hypocrisy and brutality that came in wave after stinking stomach churning wave. The pretense that racial apartheid was a moral and honorable way to build a multi-racial society was unsustainable in the face of the practice, which could not have been other then contemptuous and brutal. They say that good fences make good neighbors, but you can't build a nation out of fences. Separate but equal does not cultivate mutual respect, but its exact opposite. It promotes mutual fear and loathing. It allows dehumanizing stereotypes to thrive. It can only be sustained by systematically brutalizing the segregated minority. That is why it is a tool of bigots, and not of honorable people.

Once upon a time, the Sun could be counted in on the good fight. But not now. Not here. Where would Mencken stand now? Where would Duffy? We'll never know. But what we do know, is what the Baltimore Sun is pleased to call separate but equal treatment of same sex couples:

Well there it is. Tucked under lost pets and beside farm implements. How thoughtful. If you're wondering how any heterosexual in the Sun's upper management would feel if their commitment announcement was treated like this, you're missing the point. Of course they know how seeing this must have felt to Ankerson and Sapnar. That was why they did it. That is always why they do it. To spit in their faces. To remind them on the occasion of their joy, that they are hated. Never doubt it.

According to the Baltimore City Paper, GLADD is considering removing the Sun from their list of newspapers that publish same sex commitment announcements. I hope the terrible strain of considering that decision doesn't give any of them heart attacks.

Sunday, September 7, 2003

Further Evidence Of The Decline Of American Higher Education

This crossed my screen today and awakened me slightly from my about to turn fifty and still single funk. The university of Indiana has restored to its public glory, the website of one of its professors of business, Mr. Eric Rasmusen. His website had its plug pulled just a day ago when gay students and their friends and supporters took objection to the professor using the university's computer resources to conduct a campaign of anti-gay hatemongering.

Rasmusen who teaches business uses the postings to condemn gays and calls for gays and lesbians to be removed from jobs as teachers, elected officials and doctors.

Among the postings is one equating gays to child molesters.

"Male homosexuals, at least, like boys and are generally promiscuous. They should not be given the opportunity to satisfy their desires," the posting says.

365Gay.Com, Prof's Anti-Gay Blog Returns To University Website

I'm back in school myself actually. Space Telescope, like a lot of good employers these days, pays tuition for work related courses, and I have set out to finally finish my degree in computer science. While signing up for my first computer science course at UMUC, I had to wade through many pages of text informing me that I could loose the right to use UMUC's computer systems if I misused them. Now...I would have to count an adult professor inciting hatred of minority students on his campus as a misuse of university computer resources. But maybe I'm just missing the overall picture here. This is a university mind you, where diversity of belief and opinion should be engaged, not suppressed...right? I mean, if a professor just happened to think that those Christ killing jews faked the holocaust, I'm sure the university would be only too happy to let him use their computers and their network to promote the view that the holocaust never happened. Right? Just because something is patently untrue, that doesn't mean it can't be taught by an American institute of higher education. Conservatives have been saying that very thing for decades now, haven't they?

Unsurprisingly, Rasmusen's home page contains links to prior fights against affirmative action, and to Charles Murray's Bell Curve Page. There is also a link to a page where he bellyaches that if the story that Jefferson had fathered a child by a black slave was newsworthy, then so was the accusation that Bill Clinton had fathered a child by a black prostitute. Got the picture yet?

And mind you, this man is a professor. Credentialed, I have to assume, and everything. Diploma, along with all the other framed I Love Me Wall accouterments of your usual academic sort. But if you really want to talk credentials, here's what I'd frame and hang on his wall:

I would like to comment on one distortion I heard on talk radio yesterday from the various people condemning me: that there is no evidence of the ill effects of homosexuality. What I said in my web-log was that I did not have such evidence at hand, and rather than hurry out and research it, I'd wait till I happened to see it float by. Thus, I said, "I have no evidence that homosexuals are child molesters more often than normal people" in the same way as I would also say, "I have no evidence that men are child molesters more often than women" (as I did say in the web-log) or "I have no evidence that smoking causes cancer" or "I have no evidence that the earth is more than 5000 years old." Just because I don't have it at hand doesn't mean the evidence isn't there. And even if exhaustive search doesn't find any evidence that claim X is true, it might at the same time be true that the exhaustive search did not find any evidence that claim X was *not* true.

Right. Homosexuals should not be allowed to teach because they would molest children, but I have no evidence that they're more likely then anyone else to molest children, and even if there was no such evidence that wouldn't mean that it wasn't true. Now pass your tests to the front of the room so I can start grading them.

Rasmusen also seems to think that Little Rock Mayor Sandy Keith telling a pathetic joke about rape "may be relevant to the story of Clinton raping [Juanita] Broaddrick in 1978". Huh? The IU web page on Rasmusen says he was educated at Yale and MIT. Personally, I'd like to look the dumbass who actually placed this crackpot's diploma in his hand and ask them what the hell they were thinking.

Thought it was liberals who were responsible for the falling standards in American education did you? Heh.

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

It's Official: Journalism No Longer Cares What Is And Is Not True

I watched a report on ABC News tonight, about the protests surrounding the granite ten commandments monument a renegade judge in Alabama plopped in the lobby of the state supreme court. It was the usual kid gloves treatment of the American Taliban; a reporter standing in front of a camera, and belaboring the obvious: that every time the courts rule for separation of church and state, they howl they're being discriminated against. What was missing, as always, is any objective examination of that claim.

There are people wasting away in the prison camps of tyrants all over this earth, who would regard what the Religious Right is calling religious persecution as freedom beyond their wildest dreams, and the Religious Right knows it. Nobody is being thrown in jail for being Christian. The very same civil rights laws, from whose protections the Religious Right fights tooth and nail to exclude Gay people, keep their impacted asses safe from discrimination on the job, or in housing. But when your goal is to replace American democracy with a right wing theocracy, then obviously your concern isn't that you have the same rights everyone else does to practice your faith. Much the opposite, actually, as we see over and over again, the case in Alabama being just the latest flashpoint, in the religious right's long and bitter war against liberty and justice for all.

Ironic, isn't it, that what the religious right wants isn't equal rights, but special rights. They want the right to force your children to pray to a god you may not even believe in. They want the right to force feed your kids their theology in place of history and science, and never mind what faith you're raising them in. They want the right to coerce your obedience to their religious dogmas, in everything from your choices in commerce and entertainment, to the most intimate moments in your bedroom. The sweep of their desire to control the lives of every ordinary American citizen is astonishing in both its arrogance, and its audacity. Yet always, when they raise the chant that they are being persecuted by secularists, their bellyaching is treated as though it were, in itself, a kind of theological belief, something pluralistic society ought not regard as polite to criticize.

For the sake of preserving that pluralistic society, where a person's status as a full and equal citizen is not dependant upon their religion, the pussyfooting around the religious right needs to stop, and quickly. John Ashcroft, in between travelling the nation to rally support for his evisceration of the constitution, the "Patriot Act", took time out the other day to announce a new campaign against pornography. What you have to understand about these people, is that they regard everything that doesn't glorify their religious dogmas, as pornography. They are the book burners. They are the witch burners. They are the heretic burners. And they regard democracy, as the most evil heresy of all.

Yeah...I've been neglecting this spot again. Jim Capozzola, who has more guts then I do, had a post up that I can't seem to find now, about how exasperating it is when people tell you all you need is to just get out more. To those of you missing Monday's cartoon: hopefully I'll have it up sometime tonight.

Separating The Kids From The Pit Bulls Is Not The Answer. Throwing Them To The Pit Bulls Is.

Read a couple of news articles today; one good about why the Harvey Milk school is necessary, surprisingly in the New York Times, which seems to want to put a knife into it. The other about the closing of a gay youth center in Troy, New York, also illuminating how much hostility they have to face in their daily lives. The center is closing its doors soon due to budget cuts, and just this week, someone threw bricks through its plate glass windows. If the perps get caught, they can always claim they were protesting against the segregation of gay people.

I keep hearing people, transparent homophobes and their useful idiots both, comparing the creation of the Harvey Milk school, with the struggle to desegregate the schools in the 50s and 60s. Segregation was wrong then, they say, and it's wrong now. It's rhetoric you could only get away with, in a nation with the notoriously short memory this one has. Back in the 50s and 60s, though the racists were determined to keep their all white schools all white, the government was willing to obey court orders to integrate them, even if it meant calling in federal troops. Contrast that with the situation gay kids face today, where local governments and school boards can't fall over themselves fast enough to appease gay haters, while the federal government watches on in complete indifference.

There is no political will to protect gay, lesbian and transgendered youth, no stomach for the inevitable bare knuckle fighting needed to protect them, to keep them in school, and let them have the education that is their birthright as Americans. The useful idiots on the Times editorial board say that segregation is not the answer. But they can't handle the answer.

Friday, August 22, 2003

Protecting The Sacred Institution Of Marriage From Homosexuals...(continued)

The Dayton Daily News reports that a Beverly Hillbillies casino is in the works. Attractions to include, among other things, a 200-foot-tall, flame-belching oil derrick, and "Granny's Shotgun Wedding Chapel". In addition to a 30,000-square-foot gambling area with 16 table games and 800 slot machines.

Reading Cato's Making Sense of Electricity Deregulation With A Flashlight

We don't yet know the precise cause of the blackout, and perhaps we never will. But we now can say with certainty what we may only have suspected before: The people running our government and our energy industry believe that Americans are fools, because otherwise they wouldn't dare to conduct politics and business as they do.

Joe Conason, The New York Observer

Good column from Joe Conason. You should read the whole thing. I particularly liked it when he remarked that a thoughtful citizen "of a certian age" might dimly remember how the nation's economy grew for decades with regulated utilities. Yeah. New York city had blackouts at least twice as I can recall, in a regulated power grid. In a free market power grid, everyone from Akron to New York can get in on the fun. It was eye opening.

I have a quirky kinda attitude about electricity, which I probably inherited from mom, who grew up in the Pennsylvania mountains in the 1930s. I grew up in the Washington D.C. area, which always had a reasonibly reliable power grid, yet lived in a household that took for granted that the power would go out from time to time. It's an attitude that's just stayed with me into adulthood. I always keep a stock of fresh batteries. I have flashlights scattered around the house, a small battery operated TV and kerosine lamps. My freezer is about a quarter full of ice and those blue ice pack thingies. My basement sump pump is connected to a battery backup, as are (of course) my computers. A few years ago I spotted one of those wind-up am radios for sale at a Montgomery Wards and bought two of them on the spot. One for me, and one for mom, who was living in retirement then, in the hills of southern Virginia. Mothers and sons have these little ways of reenforcing the bond.

I'm not preparing for Armageddon or anything, I just grew up with this knowledge that the power goes away sometimes, coupled perhaps with a Baptist reluctance to depend too much on worldly things for comfort. I wonder sometimes how much the latter has kept me from really enjoying this life, and I suspect the former is an anachronism from mom's rural childhood, passed down to an urban son who has very little need of it. Compared to the rural branches of my family, I only rarely experience life without power. Certainly not days and days without it, although that has happened to me once, after an ice storm some years back brought down oodles of power lines in the region. But even then, even in the worst power outages I've ever lived through, there were pockets where the power was still on, somewhere nearby. Maybe not in my immediate neighborhood, but in the next, or down the highway a few miles. I hadn't reckoned on how much I was still counting on those, until the Big Dark last week.

Where do you go for gas for your generator, or kerosine for your lamps, when all the gas stations are closed all over your state, and all the neighboring states too, because their pumps are all electric? Where do you go for food, when the grocery stores in all directions have had to throw anything that spoils away, and everything else has been picked clean by people who typically only keep a couple days or so of food at home? How do those grocery stores get new supplies of food, when trucks can't fill their tanks with enough fuel to get to them, from the nearest place where the pumps are still working? Good thing it only took a day to get the power back on in most places in the northeast. If that outage had gone on for several days, the Washington Post would have had thousands of dead here in America to laugh at, instead of the thousands of french dead due to the heat wave over there.

So I'm walking home yesterday and I see a Baltimore City crew digging up the road near my house. What's up, asks I. Water main break says one of the workers at about the same time I notice a small steady stream of water running down the street. Water still on, I ask. For now, says the worker. So I go home and do the no water drill that I was taught in during my cold war duck and cover childhood, dutifully filling the tub and every bucket in the house, so I'll at least have something to flush the toilets with. And while I'm busy with this, I'm thinking about how much fun the republicans can have with water and sewage deregulation. I was looking at several on line catalogues of power generators. The Honda's look pretty nice, and a decent one for Casa del Garrett will only cost about the price of a new laptop. Need to get an electrician to wire me up a power bridge between the generator and the house though. And there is a problem: a gasoline fueled generator will work just fine, so long as I can keep buying gasoline from somewhere. But I suspect we've just seen the first of what energy deregulation is about to bring to us, and of course president smirking fratboy jackass isn't about to let the government spend any money that might otherwise go into his rich cronies' pockets to fix the problem, let alone rethink the process that allows same rich cronies to buy public utilities and exploit them. They make generators that run on natural gas, which my little Baltimore rowhouse has laid in, but they're very expensive...

Welcome to the twenty-first century. Bet you didn't know the twenty-first century would be in the hands of people yearning for the nineteenth century.

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Let Daddy Say Grace So The Slaves Can Start Bringing Dinner In

Excerpt from a letter to the editor in today's Baltimore Sun, from charm city's own Mr. Kenneth E. Iman. I'd post a link to the rest but it was unaccountably absent from the web edition:

You can reject the Bible, but you must reject it all. God did not allow us to cut and paste. And, yes, that means no shellfish or pork and that slavery is not a sin - at least not one specifically condemned in the Bible.

The sound you're hearing is justice Taney applauding his fellow Marylander from the grave. Well you just knew it would come to this, didn't you? If the spiritual cost to yourself of anti-gay prejudice is to wake up one day to find yourself blessing slavery well, (shrug), it's not as though you had all that much conscience left inside to throttle anyway is it?

Who was that you gave your soul to there fella, because it wasn't Christ.

Monday, August 18, 2003

Our David Is Available In Three Versions: Au Natural; Fig Leaf, For More Conservative Locals; And Burqua, For Taliban Governed Areas.

EVANSVILLE, Ind. -- A man who put a replica of Michelangelo's nude "David" sculpture in his yard responded to neighbors' objections by engaging in a cover-up. Christopher Schapker last week used a strategically placed sheet to counteract concerns about the male nude in the side yard of his home. Parents of students who attend a neighboring center that provides services for disabled people had expressed concern over the statue's nudity.

The Associated Press

The county prosecutor, Stan Levco, is quoted in the article, as saying "My preliminary thought is that it does not violate any statute. But I haven't made a final determination." Well that's nice to know.

Schapker and his housemate, Kerry Niehaus, spent $2,000 for the sculpture to enhance the early 20th century style of their home.

Schapker says nobody's complained about the statue of a topless mermaid that's been in his pond for two years. Does anyone really need to tell him why?

Or, Alternatively, You Could Make Better Movies

If it seems like Hollywood's bombs have been hitting the ground at a higher rate of speed then before, there may be a reason (apart from that they're actually getting better at making bad films). The Independent reports that word of mouth that a film is a stinker is spreading faster, thanks to Instant Messaging.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

But those days are over...

I can just picture the brainstorming going on. Maybe we could make ticket holders sign non-disclosure forms. Maybe we can get a court to agree that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids disclosing that a film stinks. Maybe we can outlaw Instant Messaging within a hundred yards of a cinema. Maybe we can get congress to require cell phone makers to put circuitry in the phones, that turns off Instant Messaging for 48 hours after the phone's owner enters a cinema. Aw hell...Fritz is retiring, isn't he...

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Pissing On The Legacy Of Paul Conrad

Just in case anyone was still wondering what part of the republican sewer Michael Ramirez is from:

August 8, 2003: I Loath Homosexuals...

August 11, 2003: Have I Mentioned That I Loath Homosexuals...

One right after the other. Guess the election of an openly Gay Episcopal Bishop made some of the hairs on his butt ingrown. But...hey...check out the deft skill of the professional Pulitzer Prize winning draftsman. Any more pantone covering up those staggering drunk lines and he'll be a regular Leonardo. And you have to admit, spitting in the faces of gay and lesbian Americans is one surefire way to shore up his right wing thug street creds, and make sure that nobody mistakes him for a Bush hater again, so the secret police don't come knocking on his door again.

I know...I know... Ramirez provides Balance. Without opposing points of view there can't be a political dialogue in this country...right? I mean...the L.A. Times runs racist and anti Semitic political cartoons for the sake of balance all the time...

Never Mind What I'm Saying, Just Listen To Me

For those of you who haven't had an irony buffer overflow so far today...

In a society that purports to value freedom as an end in itself, the simple argument from morality to law can be a dangerous non sequitur... The principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn about adopting my view of the situation, I am justified in having the state coerce you into more righteous paths. That is itself a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.

-Robert Bork, Civil Rights - A Challenge, The New Republic, Aug. 31, 1963

Mind you, he was talking about anti segregation laws, not sodomy laws, or anti same sex marriage laws.

Same-sex Marriage Does Violence To Children. Not That We Want Any Children Living In Our Neighborhoods Anyway...

Vaara posts a good one on a much neglected topic: Zoning regulation that discriminate against young families. As Vaara points out, quoting a New York Times article, this is largely to keep the number of children down so a community won't have to spend much on their education, the cost of which keeps going up...

Some communities that may not want to increase their school-age population can embrace the elderly. That is socially acceptable, and because the federal Fair Housing Act allows senior-citizen developments to prohibit younger residents, it is legally acceptable. The fast-growing western suburbs of Boston, for example, are scrambling for developments with age restrictions and otherwise engaging in what one legislator calls "vasectomy zoning." Naperville, Ill., outside Chicago, is imposing restrictive covenants on some new developments to prohibit sales to people under 55.

And of course the elderly, living on fixed incomes which seem to support them a little less every year, will vote against raising taxes for anything because increased taxes accelerate the lowering of their standard of living. So the net effect is to decrease the political will to spend on education. And anything else that might benefit the welfare of kids.

Yet these are the republican family values suburbs we're talking about here. Don't they care about the welfare of kids? Well...yeah. Their own. Anyone remember "white flight"? It's what happened when the supreme court decided that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. The "separate but equal" mantra kept failing miserably, whenever anyone actually compared the schools of black kids to those of white kids. In the grinning facades of all those decrepit black only schools, it was impossible to not to see that the logic of separate-but-equal wasn't about the races living amicably apart, but about one race dominating another. So segregation was outlawed, much to the relief of everyone except the ones who always suspected that E Pluribus Unum was some sort of communist slogan. The suburbs were supposed to restore the natural order of things: white kids get a decent education, and colored kids get an education designed to keep them in their place. And all is right with the world again. But now even the tax base of the affluent suburbs isn't enough to finance their own kid's education.

But the cost of educating children, not a huge concern even in the postwar Levittown decade, now exceeds what their parents' houses yield in taxes. As school costs rise, "people get more desperate about it," said Myron Orfield, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of "American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality" (Brookings Institution, 2002).

It wasn't supposed to be like that. The suburbs were supposed to be a paradise for decent, all American families, where they could live their decent all American lives apart from the noisy vulgar impertinent rest of America. But a diversity of people makes it possible for everyone's needs to be met. A place where rich and poor can live and work together, makes it possible for all those low paying service jobs to be filled, and for the children of those workers to get a decent education, that might improve their own lives. A place where families, childless singles and gays can live together, brings more money to the schools then one of only families with children needing an education and other services. A mix of old and young makes it easier to meet the needs of the old, and for the young to hear their lessons. That is what the profile of American cities and towns used to be, before the right decided to make the nu-cu-lar family the apotheosis of western civilization, and remove it to the safety of the suburbs, and when that wasn't isolation enough, behind the gates of private single family enclaves. The decline of the standard of living in the suburbs is just what you get, when you remove the nu-cu-lar family from the rest of the human family that always had a role in nurturing it. It takes a village, not a monoculture. But that concept is anathema to the family values republicans who led the flight to suburbia in the first place, who have always suspected that E Pluribus Unum was some sort of communist slogan.

Friday, August 15, 2003

Destroying Marriage In Order To Save It...(continued)

Letter To The Editor, The Sun Chronicle (Attleboro, MA)

Stephen Iacobbo in his recent letter, claims the marriage laws do not discriminate against homosexuals, because the requirement that you marry an opposite sex partner applies to everyone, gay or straight. At one time people argued that the anti miscegenation laws did not discriminate, because they too applied to everyone, regardless of race. Some folks had to drink from one fountain because of their race, and some from another, but you cannot claim this is not racism, by saying that everyone, regardless of their race, had to obey those laws. That argument is sophistry. If two people of different races cannot marry, then both are discriminated against; each one standing in front of a door with a sign that reads, "whites only", or "colored only", depending on their race, behind which is their heart's desire. It is the same for gay and lesbian couples, standing in front of doors that keep them out on the basis of their sex.

Iacobbo dismisses the pain caused by such discrimination as merely, "emotional", and says that love is not a requirement for marriage. If this is what the so-called defenders of marriage believe, then I really cannot imagine how gay and lesbian Americans can destroy the meaning of marriage more then its defenders apparently intend to. I'll allow that it probably explains why so many bible belt marriages end in divorce.

Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.

Watching The MSBlast Worm Trying To Get Into My Computer...

GEEK ALERT...

I saw the first hints of trouble a few weeks ago, on The Register, and made sure my XP workstation was patched. But, as I've mentioned before, I really sweat these things, and can't fault others for being a little slow on the uptake. Here's Why. If you were still running NT 4, and applied the patch, you were hosed. Now you need to get the patch, to fix the patch. This, and not user laziness, is why malicious code like MSBlast can find so many unpatched computers to play with. Microsoft has always been a "good enough to ship" kinda operation. The rule of thumb among my friends and co-workers is that you never use version X.0 of any Microsoft product. Use X.1 or better, and you're less likely to find yourself screaming at your computer. Unfortunately, that seems to be true with their patches too. People will listen for the sound of PC administrators screaming, before they apply the patches themselves. It's reflex. There's a saying about how you know who the pioneers are, because they're the ones with the arrows sticking out of them. That's really true in Microsoftland. You just don't jump on everything that Redmond throws out the door. The consequence is that systems don't get patched right away. Some organizations won't roll out a patch until they've tested it thoroughly, which can take weeks. This situation is entirely Microsoft's doing, and they don't really care because they don't really have to. With ninety percent of the desktop market, Microsoft has a lot of inertia in its favor.

I've been running SuSE Linux to connect to the Internet all week now, except just this morning. My firewall software, ZoneAlarm, had problems peacefully co-existing with Windows XP when it first came out, which I'm sure...cough...cough...had nothing to do with the fact that Microsoft decided to bundle its own firewall software with XP. So I gave in a little and tried the Microsoft firewall and of course, since it's their first cut at the firewall thing, it eats toxic waste. Zone Alarm's customer service never really got back to me about fixing the problem with XP so, a little ticked off at them, I never bothered updating the software, figuring I'd try something else. But I didn't like the way other firewall products worked. Zone Alarm is actually a pretty simple, yet powerful piece of software to use. I like software that does just one thing, and does it well. For the past year or so I've been relying on my virus scanning software to protect my XP box, which always made me feel a little uneasy. When I heard about how furiously MSBlast was propagating, I stopped connecting to the Internet with XP altogether.

Hoping the latest version of ZoneAlarm Pro (4) had fixed the XP problem, I bought a copy and installed it just a while ago. So far everything seems running smoothly. Except for the barrage of intrusion alerts I'm getting on the ports that MSBlast and its demon spawn are known to try. It's a little creepy watching that thing trying the locks on my computer.

I'm guessing the patch prevented MSBlast from getting in previously. But I'm hearing now that variants are appearing and more destructive ones are likely. I strongly recommend people use a firewall, as well as a virus scanning program. Or alternatively, you can just run something other then Microsoft software. I know...I know...other platforms have their own vulnerabilities. But Microsoft has always been a fix it after it's out the door kinda company and that, combined with their 90 percent plus share of the desktop, just gives little hacker dweebs days and days of fun at everyone else's expense.

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Not sure why Tuesday's posts suddenly disappeared this morning. But they're back now.

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Yeah...Yeah...And Jerry Falwell Has Trademarked The Slogan, "Baptist Church"...

Fox News is suing Al "Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot" Franken over the words, Fair And Balanced, on the cover of his new book. No...I'm serious. Franken's new book is titled, Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair And Balanced Look At The Right. Fox News is claiming that the words "Fair And Balanced" are a trademark they own. They have filed for an injunction to keep the book from being published next month, claiming that Franken's use of the slogan "Fair and Balanced" is intended to confuse readers and boost book sales.

As if their own imbecilic lawsuit wouldn't boost sales of the book. Is there anybody in the kook pews who can think with any part of the body besides their jerking knees? Franken's book is, as I am writing this, ranked number 3 on Amazon.Com. And of course, since word spread of the lawsuit, the left of William Pierce blog world has mounted a wee protest. Something like a zillion blogs out there are now using "Fair And Balanced" as part of their banner. Not that I would ever engage in that kind of adolescent flip the establishment jerk in the suit the bird behavior myself...

I hear burquas for men are all the rage at the seashore this year...

Okay...I'm a gay man. I like looking at beautiful guys. I'll apologize for it the day straight guys start apologizing for their own girl watching habits. Life is good, and if you don't find the attractive sex proof positive of that, well I pity you, that's all. Beautiful guys are my proof that there is a God, and that God is good. So there. That said, I found this article by a University of Tennessee student, in defense of the speedo, more then a little sad...

Wearing a Speedo around the pool of a university 26,000 students strong might make some people uncomfortable; just reading about a guy wearing a Speedo might make some uncomfortable. Writing a column which will be read by dozens of my classmates about me in a Speedo does not make me uncomfortable, but perhaps it should.

Now...let me see if I understand all this correctly. Sports Illustrated can do a yearly swimsuit issue, featuring women in bikinis you couldn't make a handkerchief out of, and nobody gets uncomfortable. Victoria's Secret, Haynes, and Jockey can run television ads featuring women wearing underwear that could have been made from the cotton in a bottle of aspirin and nobody gets uncomfortable. Up and down the beaches of America all summer long you can gaze at women wearing very little at all, and the only cringe worthy thing about it is the thought that melanoma might be having a field day out there. But when a guy shows a little thigh, suddenly everyone gets all squicky.

I think not. Don't tell me that heterosexual women don't like looking at a little male skin from time to time. I imagine they'd like it very much thank you if guys would do as much for them at the seashore, as they do for guys. But the guys are afraid to.

There is some very wierd, unspoken above the waist/below the waist danger zone that straight guys rigidly obey. Above the waist is the heterosexual male zone. Abs. Pecks. Below the waist is no-straight-man's-land. Gluts. Thighs. And that certain something I keep getting spam about enlarging. An American male can draw attention to anything he has above the waste and his masculinity is secure. They'll bare their pecks, whether or not they've actually got any, and then hide everything below the waist as if they're scared to death you might notice they've got an ass, and maybe even a nice set of family jewels. While watching some news stories about the heat wave in Europe, I was struck by the difference between their beaches and ours. Over there, you still see guys wearing actual swimsuits; not the near thongs they wear in Rio, but sill lightweight and easy. Here, the guys are wearing swim trunks that almost look like jams made from the pants Fred Mertz wore in I Love Lucy, except they're more colorful.

Somehow, being sexy below the waist has become off limits for straight guys. Why is a mystery. There are two pat answers. One is that straight guys are just so terrified of being labelled gay they don't even want to casually call attention to those parts of their bodies gay men brazenly advertise. The other is that straight American males are becoming more angry and agressive, in reaction to the gains made by women and gays. Emphasizing the upper body while de-emphasizing the lower sends signals of power and aggressiveness. But I don't really buy into either explanation. So I really don't know what the motivation here is. My shot in the dark hunch is that the culture doesn't place any value on a man's body, except for its strength. At one time for women only their beauty was valued, and at times it seems as if that's still all this culture sees in women. But women have fought hard in the past few decades to be seen as whole people, beautiful, and strong, and able. I think perhaps American guys are holding on fiercely to their roll as strong in an uncertian world, when what they need is to fight, in their own way, that same fight women fought; to be seen as whole people, strong, and able, and beautiful.

You see them getting all uncomfortable about wearing sexy swimwear for god's sake, and you feel sorry for them. Okay..okay...I have a bit of self interest here. In a culture where the sight of women wearing next to nothing is only slightly more commonplace then the sound of somebody complaining that we homosexuals are imposing our sexual proclivities on the rest of society, I wouldn't mind a little more eye candy. But it's still sad. I don't have the physique for it anymore, I've got a middle aged male body now, but once upon a time I made a boyfriend of mine all hot and bothered on a summer seashore, and it was one of this life's pure joys. It is good to feel oneself desirable, to know that your body has a magic it can awaken in someone else. Everyone should have that feeling a time or two in their lives. Why can't a straight guy revel in his sexiness every now and then, why can't he enjoy making his girlfriend all hot and bothered too? This culture does men no damn good, when it suffocates their ability to be brazenly sexy.

Monday, August 11, 2003

Gene Robinson, And The Unforgivable Sin

One particularly snide and pathetic complaint I'm hearing from the 'phobes about Rev. Gene Robinson, is about his divorce. Never mind that it was by all accounts an amicable separation. Never mind that he is still loved by his wife and daughters. Never mind that he stayed an active presence in his daughter's lives after the divorce. The word in the kook pews is that Robinson is a selfish narcissist whose election to Bishop only furthers the decline of the liberal Episcopalians. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn writes that Robinson is "...a man who broke up his family because he put his sexual appetites before his daughters. I doff my hat to the bishop. This week he got the church to endorse not just his gayness but his narcissism." Well, that's one way of putting it when a man decides to start being honest to himself, and to others, including his wife. But of course, honest to a right winger, is just another word for wimp.

This is the payoff for the right wing in their argument, that homosexuality is a choice, that society must stack the deck against homosexuality, in law, custom and taboo, in order to prevent more people from becoming homosexual. The hard right argues for vigorous enforcement of the sodomy laws, even, especially, to the point of actively pursuing and uncovering closeted homosexuals in the general population. But even in the compassionate conservative choir, the argument goes that it is better to push "waverers" to the heterosexual side of the fence, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, "without disrespect but without apology." But disrespect, not only for homosexuals, but for the human identity, and more to the point, for the institution of marriage, is the bedrock of this notion. In a culture that demeans and degrades homosexual people, the waverer is highly likely to be wavering not because they are unsure of themselves, but because they are certain, and desperately wishing it were otherwise. What the right offers these is a kind of ideological crack cocaine: the idea that acting out a heterosexual life is the best way to cure homosexual feelings, and if it isn't working that's because you aren't acting heterosexual enough. The result is an eminently predictable wreckage of broken marriages and shattered lives, which, naturally, the paragons of responsibility refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for. Oh, you actually took our advice did you? Caveat Emptor...

Some homosexuals trapped in sham marriages take to crusing the pick up spots for sex, and maintaining the marriage solely for appearances sake, something which you feel the right would have preferred Robinson had done. But he did the unforgivable; he decided that marriage was a sacred thing that could not be built on a foundation of lies and deception, and took responsibility for putting things right. James I Will Defeat You Lileks bleats for the kook pews thusly: "This story has irritated me from the start, and it has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson's sexual orientation." Oh really?

Marriages flounder for a variety of reasons, and ofttimes they're valid reasons, sad and inescapable. But "I want to have sex with other people" is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they're sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake. There's a word for people who leave their children because they don't want to have sex with Mommy anymore: selfish.

Except...well...he didn't leave them. His youngest daughter, who says she does not remember much from the time of the divorce, says her father has always been attentive, in the audience at every horse show and school play, according to one news article. This Lileks characterizes as leaving the cell phone on.

You can assume that Lileks,and his fellow right wing smear artists, are writing for an audience that couldn't care less what Robinson's relationship to his wife and daughters actually is. But what's telling is that for Lileks, and Steyn, it is all about sex. "I want to have sex with other people" is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy..." "There's a word for people who leave their children because they don't want to have sex with Mommy anymore..." "...Gene Robinson, a man who broke up his family because he put his sexual appetites before his daughters." Here is the song of bigots: homosexuals don't love, they just have sex. Homosexuality isn't about love. Heterosexuals love. Homosexuals just have sex. Lileks and Steyn accuse Robinson of abandoning his children, just to have sex with another man, of abandoning his wife because he doesn't want to have sex with her, of putting his sexual appetites before his daughter's needs. They know that for homosexuals, it's all about sex. Nothing else. They cannot grasp any other possible motivation for a homosexual male to have. That maybe Robinson divorced his wife, because he loves her very much. The concept is beyond them, because they cannot ascribe any motivation to a homosexual other then sexual self gratification. "This story has irritated me from the start, and it has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson's sexual orientation." Oh yes it does. It has everything to do with it.

By all accounts Robinson has been a better father to his daughters and shown more love to his ex-wife, then some conservatives moralizers (the image of Newt Gingrich pressuring one of his wives to sign divorce papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery comes to mind...). But that's par for the course. Anyone who isn't well aware that it's standard operating procedure for the homophobic right to make stuff up, when the reality of the lives of homosexual people isn't sufficiently sordid, is a green newcomer to this fight. The more the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights heats up, the louder the homophobes demonize homosexuals, so to mask the stench of the open sewer that is their own inner selves, as illustrated perfectly by Lileks, who can sanctimoniously yap out of one side of his mouth that Robinson doesn't care enough about his daughters, and in the same breath out of the other, compare Robinson's daughters to Hitler's dog for still loving him. Nice guy. Do you spit in the faces of other children too, or only the ones whose parents are homosexual?

Backlash?

The possibility of a backlash building now against gay rights seems to be the new thought of the day for the short attention span news droids. It puts me in mind of the days when I was a kid in grade school, and the talk was of a backlash against black equality. If only the coloreds wouldn't push things so hard. They're only hurting their own cause. I kept hearing this and wondering why anyone thought it surprising that bigots would be angry over loosing ground. That isn't a backlash, that's raging at the enemy.

I used to spend a lot of my online time in a Usenet newsgroup, alt.politics.homosexuality. There I argued with gay hating bigots of all stripes, but mostly the self-styled rational opposition. Those were the guys who would always come into the newsgroup announcing that they had nothing against homosexuals personally, why they even had a close friend or two who were homosexual, they just opposed the militant gay agenda. Not because they had anything against gays mind you...they just...well...didn't want children to be recruited into the gay lifestyle...and hey, don't you people know homosexuality causes AIDS? But APH is an unmoderated newsgroup, which meant that everyone, gay, supportive straight and gay hater alike, could freely speak their minds without some moderator somewhere deciding that while saying homosexuals were more likely to molest children and spread disease was just an opinion, calling someone's study that claimed homosexuals were more likely to molest children and spread disease a a pack of hate mongering lies was an impermissible personal attack. In short, you could have all the double standard you wanted, you just couldn't enforce it on anyone else. The result was that the phobes always found themselves on the defensive, particularly when a gang of us got together and started fact checking their asses.

And so gradually, the "rational opposition" either dropped all pretense and began babbling like Fred Phelps at a funeral, or left the field entirely. Drop into APH now, and you find hate without any pretense at all. It was always there, but now it seems more emphatic then it was before. But is that real, or is that just a perception made possible by the fact that the hard core is all that is left of the opposition? The bogus arguments are repeated by rote, like war songs sung mostly for the mindless battle euporia they bring on and nothing more. Little attempt is made to make them sound even remotely plausible. They are flags waving in the wind over the battlements. The lies about homosexuals and homosexuality are thrown openly for their value as verbal spit, not to gain any persuasive advantage. They have lost their power over all but the ones who never cared if they were true in the first place. Now they serve only one purpose: to remind us that we are hated. It is hate's final victory of sorts. Hate, reduced to its bare essence, needs only that you know it still hates, and will always hate. Yes...we know.

This is what I think is happening in the culture at large, though more slowly, because the "rational opposition" can still dictate the terms of the debate in so many public forums. Even so, as homosexual people become more and more visible to our neighbors, the lies about us, about our lives, become more untenable all the same. The rational opposition may be as motivated by the same hate as any raving Fred Phelps yahoo, but they want respect, they want to be taken seriously as honorable respectable citizens, concerned only with the good of the community. As the pretense becomes harder to maintain, even privately to themselves, these begin to drop out of the fight, or give themselves over completely to the hate within. We are left with the purified dregs. The irony here is that in fighting the hate that has cost the homosexual part of the human family so dreadfully, we inevitably refine it.

Each step forward we take causes a few more defenders of the status-quo drop out of the fight, convinced at long last that it was the wrong fight, or that the cost in personal regard is too great to bear it any further. And with that, a little more of the protective facade is removed from the hard burning core of hate, leaving a little less of it restrained by the love the sinner, hate the sin hypocrisies they have always loathed uttering. Eventually, the self styled compassionate and reasoned opposition distills down to Fred Phelps waving signs at funerals and courthouses in the face of the wounded and sick with grief. It is not a backlash. It is the voice of the gutter, clear, unambiguous, loosed finally from the last vestiges of rationalization and evasion that overlayed it, free, free at last.

Devaluing Christianity

Charlotte Allen, waving the bloody flag of the fundamentalists in the Los Angles Times, makes the usual point that more liberal denominations are suffering in raw membership numbers, when compared to the bible thumpers. Like her kook pew brethren, she seems to think this is some sort of proof that the message of the fundamentalists is the stronger one. I have another take. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself Christianity is a damn hard thing to practice, particularly in this age of celebrity hate mongers. You see some laughing right wing thug who made his fortune inciting hatred toward innocent people, like they were put on this earth to give his boots something to walk on, and your gut level instinct is to punch him one in the face, not forgive him. Yet this is precisely what Christ said we have to do.

Love your neighbor. Help the poor. Live modestly, turn away from worldly pursuits of money and power, blind ambition and lust. Love your neighbor. Help the poor. That's a damn hard way for a bleeding heart liberal to live in this day and age, let alone a Rush Limbaugh dittobot. Its been well said that if Jesus Christ appeared on earth today he'd be locked up as a subversive faster then you could say Patriot Act II. Is it any wonder that the churches that are sticking faithful to the teachings of Christ, are loosing members to the ones that give blessings to the pursuit of power, and rage against the Other? I'm surprised fundamentalist churches aren't growing at twenty times the rate they are.

Devaluing Marriage

Quiddity Quack posts a Congratulations On Your Marriage card that's just the thing for all those Young Americans For Freedom in your life who have just tied the knot. Expect to see it in your local Hallmark store Real Soon Now.

One good thing about having same sex marriage as the current talking head topic de jour, is that nothing reveals the barren toxic wasteland that is the soul of your average homophobe better then watching them dump on the idea that marriage has anything to do with mutual love and devotion. Five minutes of listening to them elaborate that the essential meaning of holy matrimony isn't about love should be enough to convince anyone that hell is indeed a real place, and being married to one of these barren toxic soulless wonders is it.

The purpose of marriage is not and never has been to reaffirm the love of two people for one another. This country and healthy societies around the world and throughout history have given marriage special legal protection because of the recognition that it is the one institution that ensures the society's future through the orderly upbringing of children.

Daniel John Sobieski, Letter To The Editor, The Chicago Tribune, August 10, 2003

Mr. Sobieski, and Rick Man-On-Dog Santorum aren't the first jackasses I've seen to explicitly state that marriage isn't about love. I once argued for months with one of his soul mates on a Usenet news group, who declared flatly that he had not married his wife because he loved her. There was a time when I thought that these people were just digging in their heels, rather then admit that their positions were nothing more then animus toward homosexuals, wrapped in layers of sanctimonious claptrap. But when you keep encountering that preternatural void where you would normally expect to find human emotions such as sympathy, let alone love, you come to realize that, yes, the only way the homophobic right can justify their own marriages, is to take a position that marriage is decidedly not about the one fundamental thing they are incapable of bringing to it. Or to any human relationship. The threat they see to marriage isn't that same sex marriage will devalue it, but that it will affirm the sanctity and righteousness of love. The complementary nature of marriage that homophobes insist comes from genitals, comes only from the beating of two hearts as one, and a willingness to give yourself to the one you take into your arms, and bear their trust as a sacrament. But that is precisely where the homophobe cannot go. It is not the love of homosexual lovers that is incomplete. Rick Santorum isn't just dispensing cheap political rhetoric, he's flashing his ugly soul at the world, as a way of shaking his fist at God.

Sunday, August 10, 2003

A Government Drowning In Lies...

Via Atrios, CBS News is reporting that the White House Told EPA to lie about air quality after 9/11, ostensibly so as not to alarm or disturb the public:

An investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general has found that White House officials instructed the agency to be less alarming and more reassuring to the public in the first few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, The New York Times reports in its Saturday editions.

The investigation specifically cites official statements about air quality after the collapse of the World Trade Center.

The agency "did not have sufficient data and analyses" to make a "blanket statement" when it announced seven days after the attack that the air around ground zero was safe to breathe, the Times quotes the report as saying.

"Competing considerations, such as national security concerns and the desire to reopen Wall Street, also played a role in E.P.A.'s air quality statements," the report, which has not yet been made public, said.

I'm going to write a companion book to Joe Conason's Big Lies. It'll be a collection of things Bush has said to the American public that later turned out to be true. I reckon it will run a half dozen pages or thereabouts. If I use a big enough font.

We're Christians...We Just Happen To Disagree With Christ

A remarkably clear headed commentary by Don Hudson in today's Charlotte Observer concerning recent events in the Episcopal Church and the backlash by religious homophobes. The last two paragraphs make a great point:

What's interesting is why so many Christians are so hung up on the topic, when Jesus speaks clearly on divorce and greed and helping the poor.

My guess is most of us use someone else's homosexuality as a convenient way not to look at what Jesus describes as our own real sins.

Just so. Take a another look at the usual suspects. The religious right. The American right wing. Now take a look at what concerned Jesus the most. Divorce. Greed. Helping the poor. Loving your neighbor. Notice a disconnect there, did you? I have a question. How did this particular group of self-identified Christians, come to be the public embodiment of Christianity in America? Are we calling ourselves hypocrites here, or just admitting that when it comes to history and culture, we're mostly dense as a pile of cinder blocks.

Well...This Sure Is A Surprise...

A friend of mine (who really needs to start his own blog, but he'd rather argue with cranks on the Usenet free-for-all (which, yeah, I used to do a lot of too)) sent me this link to the following CNN story:

Responding to findings that some school leaders manipulated data in order to improve their statistical profiles, Texas Education Agency Chief Deputy Commissioner Robert Scott told the district Thursday that the education agency will dispatch a monitor to review dropout data.

The district -- whose former chief is federal Education Secretary Rod Paige -- must also hire an external consultant to look at problems with data collection.

Under Paige, the district's sharply lower dropout rates had contributed to Houston's reputation as a showcase for the "Texas miracle" in education that then-Gov. George Bush cited in his presidential campaign. Paige, tabbed by Bush for his Cabinet shortly after the 2000 election, has acknowledged "there probably was" a dropout problem in Houston while he was there.

In giving the district six months to improve its record-keeping, the state agency opted not to immediately lower the district's state rating to "academically unacceptable."

Just a little something I reckon, for after we're all through wondering whether or not President Smirking Fratboy Jackass lied to the nation in order to invade Iraq. When did the president lie, and when did he know it?

Saturday, August 9, 2003

Tips For Talking About President Bush With Your Children

Daddy...What Was It Like When Everyone Could Vote?

Those who think that Bush v. Gore is a regrettable stain on American Democracy, not part of a relentless pattern of republican hostility toward democracy itself, should take note of this.

Because of a combination of tight budgets and partisan political maneuvering, at least three states, and probably more, will not hold presidential primaries next year. Legislators in recent months have canceled their states' primaries in Colorado, Kansas and Utah. Budget crunches were a big factor in all three states.

Colorado started the trend. On March 5, Republican Gov. Bill Owens signed a bill eliminating the 2004 primary, for a one-time savings of $2.2 million. The move was part of a major budget-cutting package that slashed $800 million from Colorado's 2002-2003 budget.

But in Colorado and elsewhere, there's also a partisan side to the drop-the-primary movement.

That's because President Bush is a shoo-in for renomination, while the Democrats have a vigorous contest with many viable candidates - nine, at the latest count. So Republican strategists figure that holding a 2004 primary will give lots of free publicity to the Democrats while their own nominating process generates close to zero excitement. Canceling the primary, especially in a year of budget austerity, begins to look like a fine idea.

Hey...I have a swell idea guys...why not cancel the primaries. If that flies, we can cancel the general election later... The article goes on to say that even some democratic states are going along with this because of budget concerns. But the democratic governor of Arizona seems to understand the stakes here:

In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano vetoed Republican-backed legislation to cancel the state's primary, which would have saved the state an estimated $3 million. "Arizona can well afford the price of democracy," Ms. Napolitano wrote in her veto message.

So now it seems that part of the price we're paying for the Bush gang's looting of the treasury, is that we go back to the old smoke filled room method of deciding who runs for office in America. Bankrupting the country is just a big win-win thing for the republicans, isn't it?

Clawing My Way To Linuxville

GEEK ALERT...

The single biggest problem for Linux on the desktop is its device support. Servers, where Linux is currently making big inroads on the Beast From Redmond, don't need a lot of support for peripheral devices, but workstations need oodles of it. The good news about Linux is that it is possible to make a decent workstation with it. The bad news is that you absolutely can't assume that your favorite hardware is supported on it, even if it is made by one of the big guys. You really have to pay attention to the supported hardware lists out there when assembling a Linux desktop, in a way you never did with Microsoft, and unfortunately, sometimes you have to dig around for those.

Linux has one of the best graphics manipulation programs around, GIMP. But my scanner, a little Plustek I bought several years ago, just never showed up on any of the supported hardware lists for any of the Linux distributions I run. Downloading the latest versions of the SANE scanner subsystem (yes...no kidding, that's its name. It stands for Scanner Access Now Easy) and getting them to install was a pain because of dependency issues (the Linux equivalent of DLL hell), and never resulted in a working scanner. Whenever a new version of some Linux distro I was using would be announced, I would check the hardware support for my scanner, but it never showed up.

Linux is a cooperative software effort, embracing programmers from all over the world, nearly all of whom donate their own time out of pocket to work on their little piece of it. The amazing thing is how reliable and powerful the thing is, considering it is a noncommerical labor of love for most of the people who actually do the coding on it. But if Windows (in theory) gains from a dictatorial top-down do it my way or else conformity of process, Linux definitely struggles with its more democratic, let everyone have their say approach.

It's tempting to think that living with Microsoft is the easier choice, since you never have to worry about whether or not your favorite piece of software or hardware will work on Windows. Easier...until you've lived in Microsoftland for a while, and watched them screw with Windows to put a company whose product you just happened to like using out of business. (There's a story about how Bill Gates was confronted by a reporter for a tech journal at one of the trade shows, back when they had just entered the browser market. At the time Netscape had ninety percent of that market and the reporter was nagging Bill about how could he expect beat Netscape and so on, and Bill had one of his temper tantrums and turned on the reporter saying, "What part of the fact that we own Windows don't you understand?")

Windows is the kingdom of Bill. Linux is a lot of different people with different takes on how to make things work. You really have to adjust to that fact to live in the Linux world. The other day I had an, in retrospect obvious, insight to go look on the SANE homepage for information about support for my scanner, rather then wait for the distros I use to come up with that support. See, its hard to stop thinking of Linux as shrinkwrap, which it isn't, particularly since that's how you can buy the distros. There, on the SANE homepage, I found out that my scanner was not, and likely never would be, supported.

So I printed out a list of the SANE supported scanners from two different manufacturers: HP and Epson. I ended up buying a little Epson Perfection 2400 Photo, that had racks for scanning slides and negatives like my old scanner did. When I got it home the first thing I did was install it on my Windows workstation, where I figured I'd have the fewest problems. As I unpacked the new scanner, I noticed in the documentation that Windows XP users needed to get a special patch from Microsoft in order for the scanner to work, and I began to worry that I'd bought a quirky piece of hardware that I'd have trouble getting to run. The docs also said the scanner might not work if you plugged it into a USB hub. Swell. I decided to chance it.

First I uninstalled the old scanner's drivers and support software. Most hardware manufacturers want you to install their software first, before installing the hardware, I guess to make sure Windows doesn't jump to its own conclusions about what to do when it sees new hardware appear. But before I started on that I had to go online for the XP patch, which mysteriously was about fixing a DVD player problem. After installing the patch I installed the scanner software, but not the version of Photoshop Elements that came with it, because I had my own copy of that already installed. Then I plugged in the scanner, which made a few noises and then flashed a panel light at me to tell me it was ready. I plugged it into the hub, and Windows immediately recognized it. I did a test scan to verify that it was working, and then shut down Windows.

Now came the point of the entire exercise. I booted up SUSE Linux and logged in. Then I started the SUSE YaST configuration program, and asked it to find my scanner. Lo and behold, it appeared in the list, and YaST asked me if that was what I wanted. I selected it, and a dialogue came up asking me to pick a specific driver from a list. My scanner wasn't on the list, but I was able to select a generic Epson driver and continue. I was given the option of doing a test scan, and after nearly a year of fussing with this, it was enormously gratifying to hear the scanner go into gear when I hit the TEST SCAN button. I accepted the settings for the new device, and got a message saying YaST was updating my configuration files.

Next I fired up GIMP. GIMP still didn't see my scanner. So I decided to manually start the XSANE x-windows front end that GIMP uses, to see if it saw my scanner. That was when I discovered that XSANE wasn't installed. So I started YaST back up again and looked for XSANE, but it wasn't in the graphics packages list, which seemed ridiculous since it was such an important part of GIMP. I had to open a search dialogue to find it, which wasn't the first time I'd had to do that to find a package in YaST. After installing XSANE, YaST again updated my configuration files. I started up GIMP again, and now my scanner was there.

I went downstairs to my drafting table and got one of my cartoons and re-scanned it using the new scanner and GIMP. Then I played with GIMP for a while until bedtime. That's one more Linux roadblock out of the way. Now I can do my cartoons entirely on Linux, although I still have to figure out a way to transfer the fonts I normally use on them over to Linux. That's a project for another day. Now all I need is to get something resembling Palm Desktop working with my Kyocera Smartphone and I'm set to make the switch from Windows to Linux.

Thursday, August 7, 2003

Conservative Family Values

Via TBogg, who saw FOX News slimemeister Britt Hume commiserating with Rick Man-On-Dog Santorum over the grave threat to America posed by al Qaida...er...Same Sex Marriage. Next time you watch Britt jerking off some gutter crawling homophobic runt for the pleasure of Rupert Murdoch, think of this:

WASHINGTON -- The Washington Post over the weekend ran an extensive account of the gay rumors surrounding the decision made by Rep. Bill Paxon (R-N.Y.) not to return to Congress when his term expired...

...Paxon's chief of staff, David Marventano, along with his press secretary John Czwartacki and longtime aide Maria Cino told the Congressman rumors were tearing their way through Washington and New York. They told Paxon that "word on the street" was he was leaving after being threatened with exposure over a gay affair with a young journalist, Sandy Hume, who had committed suicide days before.

-The Datalounge, Monday, 13 April 1998

TBogg reports himself pissed off whenever he sees Hume following his RNC/Fox marching orders regarding gays. Yeah...well expect to see more of that as the splendid little war in Iraq and president smirking liar's poll numbers both go into the toilet. Homosexuals are the one sure fire way for the republicans to fire up their base and demonize democrats as evil pimps who want to let the sodomites rape everyone's kids. Sure it tears the country apart. Sure it gets people killed. At best, they don't care (The dead probably wouldn't have voted republican anyway). At worst the republican Mighty Wurlitzer smears the victims with stories about how they were really sexual predators who had it coming, like the way it started smearing Matthew Shepard as an HIV infected sexual predator as soon as it looked like the venomous anti-gay hate of their religious right allies was going to be called to account for the violence it spawns. A divide and conquer election strategy sure isn't going to cry over the fact that Americans will hate Americans a little more after the next election. And dead homosexuals sure don't bother them. Not even if the dead are their own children. The day you're not pissed off at what the republicans are doing to this country, and to its future, let alone to its gay and lesbian citizens, is a day you're not paying attention.

Wednesday, August 6, 2003

How Can We Have A Discussion About You When You Keep Interrupting...?

I'm couch loafing at home, watching the network news talking droids and their guest experts yap, yap, yapping about the election of the Rev. Gene Robinson to bishop of the Episcopal church. After about nearly an hour of it I'm just dogged out. I wrote a short story a long time ago, posted elsewhere on this site, about a young gay couple watching TV, and getting unnerved while they watch, by the sensation that their TV was talking past them, to an invisible audience of heterosexuals watching silently, invisibly, there in the room with them. I felt like that again today, watching the yapping mouths discuss the election of Rev. Gene Robinson It seemed important for them to figure out what it meant. So important you'd think they could have invited some of us into that conversation to help out. Except we still don't really exist for them yet. We're fashion advisors that can make the dullest of straight men glamorous. No...wait...actually, we're walking signals of impending armageddon. Any day now for sure. The election of a gay bishop proves it. Or perhaps we're tragic figures who bear the burden of American society's failure to live up to its promise, dying for the sins of America. On the other hand we might be the disease spreading cultural decaying family destroying natural result of the supreme court decision to take god out of the classroom in 1963. And then again, we make excellent comic relief. When we're not plotting with satan and his hellish minions to destroy christianity. Well...anyway...we're sure something all right. If you want proof, just listen to heterosexuals on TV talk about us. Maybe some day they'll figure out what that something is.

In the meantime, I have a question. Ever watch a football game? Ever wonder what it feels like to be the football?

Remind Me Again...Which Candidate In 2000 Said He Was Going To Restore Integrity To The White House...?

Good article from Molly Ivins in Working For Change titled, The excavation of deception. A few excerpts:

• Administration announces with great fanfare new regs to control listeria, a deadly bacteria that can contaminate certain foods. Great, they put in new regs, but first they eviscerated them so they have no real impact.
• President nominates Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace. This is one of a series of cruel-joke appointments: Pipes is a Middle East expert whose vision of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no negotiation, no hope for compromise and no use for diplomacy. He wants the Palestinians defeated, period. Just the man for the Institute of Peace.
• The White House today defended the decision of congressional negotiators to deny millions of minimum-wage families the increased child tax credit, saying the new tax law was intended to help people who pay taxes, not those who are too poor to pay.
• Cost of photo-op with the president at a June fund-raiser: $20,000. Cost of a "leadership luncheon" with Karl Rove: must raise $50,000 for re-election.

To that we could add dozens of other examples of president smirking liar's mendacity, like his pledge to spend 15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa, which turned out to be a hoax, which in fact took money out of vaccine programs to fight TB and malaria. And then there is yellowcake. Oh...and the reason we went to war was because Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors back in. Somebody let me know when a pattern is detected here.

Familiar Fingerprints, Aren't They?

An editorial in The Minneapolis Star Tribune raises a point that needs raising, about the smear campaign against the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal church:

The question of whether Robinson should be a bishop is -- and probably will remain for some time -- an issue for the Episcopal Church. But the smear is an issue for the larger community as well, for it demonstrates just how low some people will stoop when honest, reasonable debate is going against them. In fact, it links to the same sort of behavior in the American body politic.

Which seems to keep coming from...where?

The Weekly Standard is important in this. Executive Editor Fred Barnes gave the Robinson story a major boost -- after it was shopped to other news outlets that refused to bite -- when he posted information about the controversy on the magazine's Web site Monday. Barnes asserted that, "Episcopalian bishop-elect Gene Robinson has some curious affiliations," meaning the porn Web site.

No he doesn't, but Barnes does. He's not simply a journalist in this; he's a conservative Episcopalian of outspoken views who sits on the board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. It's a conservative group which believes that mainline Protestant churches "have thrown themselves into multiple, often leftist crusades -- radical forms of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, multi-culturalism, revolutionary socialism, sexual liberation and so forth." The group vigorously opposes gay rights within the church.

Also fascinating is who funds the institute. The most prominent names on the list of contributors are Olin, Scaife and Bradley, the same folks who bankrolled the Clinton wars.

So we come full circle. Gene Robinson, meet Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky...

How often do we have to smell the stench before we notice the cesspool? I've said this before: the entire Scaife, Olin, Bradley right wing machine needs a thorough and ongoing documentation, because people don't appreciate how far its tentacles reach in the American political dialogue these days. The right wing billionaire money that bankrolled the Clinton wars is ubiquitous and often hidden within a matryoshki of various front organizations. It amounts to a handful of very rich right wing degenerates, whose hatred for American values, and the rich diversity and exuberance of American life, is bottomless. If you were watching the attack on Rev. Gene Robinson this week, and it occurred to you that the other side plays by a completely different set of rules, you're almost right. They live in a different world: where the measure of right and wrong is themselves and none other. They are gods, and gods do not feel shame.

Sunday, August 3, 2003

In Other News, The Sky Is Blue

The National Review is spitting nails about a taxpayer funded study, apparently showing that conservatives are sociopathic morons...

The authors describe their work as an examination of "the hypotheses that political conservatism is significantly associated with (1) mental rigidity and closed-mindedness, including (a) increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, (b) decreased cognitive complexity, (c) decreased openness to experience, (d) uncertainty avoidance, (e) personal needs for order and structure, and (f) need for cognitive closure; (2) lowered self-esteem; (3) fear, anger, and aggression; (4) pessimism, disgust, and contempt....

I'm with Byron What's 'is Face. They spent taxpayer dollars to prove this??? Hey...I'm all for government funding of the arts and sciences, but this is like spending money to find out that when a cat has to choose between that nice big cat friendly scratching post you just spent fifty bucks on, or your furniture, the cat will display a marked preference for the furniture. Oh. No kidding.

I'm reading The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker, a book I'm having to take with an unfortunately big grain of salt, because he keeps citing right wing nutcases as if they're actually deep thinkers. Case in point, he cites Thomas Homosexuals Are Deliberately Spreading AIDS Sowell's A Conflict Of Visions, for his hypothesis that humans divide broadly into two visions of human nature: The Utopian Vision, wherein humanity is seen as possessing limitless possibilities, and the Tragic Vision, wherein humanity is seen as being inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom and virtue. Of course, according to Sowell, and more...ah...tragically, Pinker, liberals are people who think in the Utopian sense, and conservatives in the Tragic sense. But this is nothing more then right wing excuse making, dressing itself up as intellectual deep thinking.

To say that the human potential is compassed by the human identity is not to automatically buy into the notion that human beings are somehow tragically flawed, or that our existence is limited. Furthermore, the idea that liberalism believes every limitation on human existence is purely social is your usual right wing strawman argument. There are lots of limitations on human behavior that everyone knows have nothing to do with society. Gravity for one. And as Pinker himself acknowledges, many conservatives, and certainly the social conservatives, strongly reject the notion of an essential human nature. They are as stubborn in their belief in the human identity as a blank slate, and that society is the ultimate author of our inner selves, as any leftist utopian. Just ask all the gay and lesbian children of the religious right, who've had the notion that homosexuality is a choice banged into their heads all their lives. There is no liberal-conservative divide here.

What there is, is the usual right wing excuse making, for what amounts to policies of social perdition. The author Mary Renault once said that politics, like sex, is an expression of the inner person within: If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your politics, and in your sex life, when what really matters is that you're not the sort of person who will behave like that. Just so. The Tragic Vision, is merely the final defense of the moral runt, the last stand of the thug caught with his hands around someone's throat. Oh yes...I'm a bastard all right...but aren't we all...? You hear this from the various right wing pundits all the time. The authoritarian society is a necessity, they insist, because only there will the natural human tendency to brutality, and cruelty be restrained. But they're not so much passing a judgement on humanity, as on themselves.

Can people be said to have a predisposition toward perceiving the world in that way? (shrug) Perhaps. But it's a reach to say that from there it's a straight line to the Pact for a New American Century. To be homosexual is not to be a sexual predator, and to have a "decreased openness to experience, uncertainty avoidance, personal needs for order and structure"...and so on, isn't necessarily to be a right wing thug. Goodness knows there are people all over the spectrum who fit that description. I don't think anyone standing before a war crime tribunal is going to get off my saying "I was only following the orders of my genes." Not that it wouldn't be a kick to be able to lecture conservatives that just because they have these tendencies, they don't have to act on them...

Rand once said, and I'm paraphrasing it here, that there are artists who see the monsters but view the heros of the world as representing the essential human identity, and artists who see the heros, but view the monsters as representing the essential human identity. Both these views, in my opinion, are self deceiving. We are civilization builders, and we are civilization destroyers. We are capable of great brutality and great sacrifice and heroism. It is the way time, and millions of long ago life and death instants of natural selection made us. We are the living embodiment of one long and ancient thread in the story of life on earth. Its antique ways make their claim on us, and where that tide pulls, we will go. But that does not make us in any sense of the word, tragic. We have come a long way, and the more we know ourselves, the further will be our reach into that better tomorrow.

Saturday, August 2, 2003

What's That You're Reading Comrade...?

Via Tom Tomorrow, this article, and this one from The Independent Weekly. A guy sits down in a coffee shop and reads an article his father printed out for him off the web. A "scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country's media", as he later describes it. Someone sees him reading it. A few days later his mother calls him at the bookstore where he works to say the FBI is looking for him. When they arrive, they start grilling him about his choice of reading material in the coffee shop.

[FBI Agent] Trippi's partner speaks up: "Any reading material? Papers?" I don't think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: "I'll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that's why we're here, just checking it out. Like I said, there's no problem. We'd just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can't, then you may have a problem. And you don't want that."

I suppose since librarians around the country are destroying their records, rather then let the government pry into the reading habits of their users, the FBI has decided more intensive measures are required. Just read your bible every day citizen, and whatever Fox News tells you to read. Ok? You don't want any problems.

Friday, August 1, 2003

Lie...Repeat...(continued)

Atrios says that some right wing homophobe was on CNN a little while ago babbling about how the average lifespan of homosexuals is 25 years shorter. That's, as Atrios notes, the bogus Paul Cameron statistic rearing its head again, and if you're amazed that after all the debunking that one's been through that they're still trotting it out, you're not paying attention. Yes, even William Bennett eventually folded on that one. But it doesn't matter. If one-hundred percent of everyone who heard them repeat the lie, knew it was a lie, they'd still repeat it, for the sheer satisfaction of spitting on everyone who knows its a lie.

Department Of Dammed If You Do, Dammed If You Don't

The Register posts an article today on the Department of Fatherland...uhm...Homeland security taking the someone unusual step of issuing a second warning about a Windows secuity flaw. The problem, as The Register reports, is that admins aren't rushing in a Windows Update frenzy to patch their systems when the fixes come out. That is leaving oodles of Internet connected computers vulnerable to attack and mischief, long after the problem and the fix have been made availible.

The move from Homeland Security simply highlights the lackadaisical attitude many network administrators have toward updating their systems -- a bad habit that e-security experts regularly rail against. Indeed, new research released this week from US e-security firm Qualys at the most recent Black Hat briefing in Las Vegas indicates that dangerous flaws often go un-patched for weeks, months or even indefinitely.

Hey...it's not laziness guys...it's fear. Anyone who has never seen a Windows system go belly up or all sullen and cranky after a software update has either never used a Windows system, or never updated one. I'm running an XP Professional system at home on one of my machines, and I get these Windows Update notifications all the time and I sweat every one of them, holding my breath and gritting my teeth while the machine reboots and comes back to life. If I had hundreds of Windows machines to administer these frequent patches to, over and over, year after year, I'd be addicted to tranquilizers by now. If !@$#%@& Microsoft would just ship high quality, reliable software in the first place...

Ah...hell. What am I saying...

Overkill

In case any of my heterosexual readers are still amazed by how potent the rage of homophobes is...

In early 2001, library staff in the main and Chinatown branches began to discover books that had been slashed beyond repair. The common thread of the vandalized books was that most dealt mainly with gay and lesbian topics, as well as women's health and AIDS.

The assault on the books left disturbing images: faces with the eyes and mouth cut out in repetitive almond-shaped gaps, multiple copies of the same book slashed in almost exactly the same manner.

By the time 46-year-old security guard John Perkyns was stopped by a librarian-turned-investigator in September 2002, he had irreversibly damaged 607 books.

-The San Francisco Examiner

I'm hearing talk in the media about an anti-gay backlash to the Lawrence decision. Well...of course. And who expected otherwise? A misinformed prejudice can be taught to see beyond itself. Knowledge can wash away the reflexive disdain. Contempt can be shamed awake