Sophianotloren

…and pissed off.  Specially if that “child” is a woman.  Especially a woman-child in Nevada where the oh-so-heroic (NOT!) scuzball Bundy too-cheap-to-pay-grazing-fees on land-that- is-not-fucking-his says he’d put the womenfolk in front as human shields to be killed first if the Feds come for his lying, seditionist ass.

But is should scarcely surprise American women, those who have been paying attention, to find such gallant males advocating using them in ways we loudly decry when it is done by religious fundamental sorts in the Mideast or political tyrants in other nations.  The GOP has been chipping away (with a jack-hammer) at the idea of females being people for quite some time now.  And now that ideation of that sort is out there in the American “aether” so to speak, it is going to be a bitch getting that genie back in the damned bottle.

The weeds have been a-growing for a while.  And yes, to a certain degree, being the old-school bitch I am, I blame some feminists.  I blame certain feminists for playing mind-mouth games arguing about shit like whether or not consensual hetero sex is really rape because it involves penetration instead of consistently attending to life-changing shit that once was primary — like equal pay and maternity leave.  Life changing stuff like fighting the religious bullshitters who think a few cells of life count more than a self-propelled, breathing woman.

But mostly, I blame a bunch of old white guys who have decided that by gawd, with all the darkies coming for them, they at least will keep those women in their damned place.  I blame the military for going backwards in time to my father’s era…or earlier, when women in uniform had TWO jobs: typing and fucking.  When the WACS were called the “whore corps” because it was a given that they were there as secretaries and comforters of the males.  MY generation of women in service generally did NOT deal with that except from the occasional asshole.  And there was always someone willing to listen to reason and make it right; not that it was enough to make me continue in a career when I was already tired of assholes, alas.

The new generation seems to deal with it ALL the time and again, a bunch of old white military guys are defending their little club, and hey, we know those guys all vote GOP, right?  Why, I don’t fucking know because the GOP ALWAYS fucks over the troops of both genders.  But hey, they know who covers their asses and butters their bread (and with the same dirty fingers) don’t they? So, American women?  Please wake the fuck up, ok?  When people can talk about watching their women gunned down by Federal marshals as if it makes them some sort of martyr-hero and get patted on the back by gun nuts for doing it?  Katy?  You better be barring the fucking door!  Because the GOP doesn’t care if you are civilian and a rape victim needing justice, either.  Fuck you, Honey, you slut.

I surely do hope that little purple patch of passion there is the truth, I hope NO American woman is buying the crapbuckets of shit being shoveled by little GOP twatchens (yes, I did just call them little cunts, deal with it); and please DO remember that the males of that species of asshat think throwing acid at women for political purpose is  AOK, USA!

And remember, the GOP is the party that supports the religious nutcakes who think female bodies are merely walking incubators. And yes, some of them HAVE suggested that women should NOT vote.  Obviously, as the chart shows, the GOP does not care what you THINK, nor about your right to be in charge of your own reproductive life.  So, think seriously about it and talk OUT LOUD about it from now clear through the election.  And yes, for pity’s sake VOTE.  I admit, I often am so low with the viral damned stupid I see daily that my own will falters.  But you know what?  Those yahoos are going to go to the polls this November.  If they can’t put the blacks, the Asians, the Mexicans back in the “box” that makes them feel all special and in charge?  They will settle for putting American women back pregnant and barefoot in barely stocked kitchens.  So seriously, vote.  Because if you don’t?  Don’t come crying to me in the years of hell ahead of us. (And thanks to Yellowdog Grannie, from whom I swiped the nifty graphics!)

Filed under: Politics, PTSD Journals, Religious Nuts & Bolts, Snark, War on Women Tagged: abortion, asshattery, contraception, feminism, military rape, rape culture, sedition, voter disenfranchisement, war on women

The most recent salvo in the Right’s [totally imaginary] War on Women is a bill that landed on Gov. Bill Haslam’s (R-TN) desk yesterday for signature.  That would be SB 1391, the Pregnancy Criminalization Law.  Unless the governor vetoes it, Tennessee will become the first state in the nation with a law requiring criminal prosecution of pregnant women if they harm their unborn children by taking illegal drugs.

Miscarriages, stillbirths, and infants born with birth defects would be grounds for police investigation and charges that could put the mother behind bars for up to 15 years.

Critics of the bill, and there are many, argue that this type of law scares at risk mothers away from pre-natal care and drug treatment and ends up costing states more for incarceration and disrupted families than they would spend on effective pre-natal support and access to family health services aimed at keeping families together.

It’s bad medicine and it’s spectacularly sloppy, mean-spirited law as the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in their petition-to-veto sent to Gov. Haslam, yesterday.  The ACLU presents a laundry list of the reasons the law is unconstitutional, strewing case law as they go; cite expert opinion from the American Academy of Pediatrics and wind up labeling SB 1391 “constitutionally unsound” and “threatening to the health and well-being of Tennessee women and their families.”

So who writes laws like this?

Well, in this case, it was a Republican woman, one Terri Lynn Weaver, country singer, songwriter and state representative in the Volunteer State.

Here are some of Ms. Weaver’s thoughts on the matter:

I’ve held and rocked these babies. I just want to bawl, I just want to cry. It’s wrong. “These babies are meant to come into the world addicted to mommy’s milk, not cocaine or heroin.

Some people believe this is a very tender time when the woman’s pregnant ... but there is accountability,” she said. “These are illegal narcotics. This is something that’s criminal anyway. They choose to do this, they choose to ingest it. We’re going to give them a choice to take a misdemeanor or take drug court.

On the other hand, Commissioner Dreyzehner of the Tennessee Department of Health says:

Our data show the majority of these births involved a mother taking medicine prescribed by a health care provider. We need improved conversations between women of childbearing age and their doctors about waiting for a safer time and preventing an unintended pregnancy while the mother is in medically-necessary treatment and referral to treatment that includes addressing this for women using these powerful drugs illicitly.

Undaunted, Rep. Weaver is sticking to her guns. She says the bill isn’t designed to target these women who abuse prescription medications but will, instead, go after “the worst of the worst” or those addicted to cocaine and heroin.

And we all know who the “worst of the worst” are . . .

At any rate, I’m just getting to the really good part.  Whenever I come across stories like this, the biggest question in my mind is “what motivates people like this?”  This is a human being, like me, she has a family, friends, gets up everyday and tries somehow to make her world better.  How can the wheels come off like this?

Here’s my theory . . .

You noticed, up near the top, I mentioned that, if Gov. Haslam signs this thing, it’ll be the first law of its kind to be enacted.  Some other states—Georgia, Virginia and Utah—have taken similar laws out for a fetal-personhood test drive but stopped short of enacting them. 

So, what’s different about Tennessee?  Well, this might seem unrelated but stay with me . . . Tennessee is the home of Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit private prison operator in the country.  CCA was founded in 1983 and, in those 30 years has grown to a $1.7 billion [with-a-B] company trading on the NYSE.

Happily, for CCA the American prison population has grown by leaps and bounds.

The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, according to statistics gathered by the ACLU.

The majority of those we incarcerate in this country—and we incarcerate a quarter of the world’s prison population—have never committed a violent crime.

Business is, as they say, booming and according to a CCA investor prospectus, the future looks rosy because incarceration “creates predictable revenue streams.” The document cites demographic trends that the company says will continue to expand profits. These positive investment trends include “high recidivism”—“about 45 percent of individuals released from prison in 1999 and more than 43 percent released from prison in 2004 were returned to prison within three years.”

The prospectus invites investments by noting that one in every 100 U.S. adults is currently in prison or jail. And because the U.S. population is projected to grow by approximately 18.6 million from 2012 to 2017, “prison populations would grow by about 80,400 between 2012 and 2017, or by more than 13,000 additional per year, on average.

In keeping with their fiduciary duty to shareholders, though, CCA did warn in their 2011 Annual Report that:

The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws.

And that:

. . . any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration” could “potentially [reduce] demand for correctional facilities,” as would “mak[ing] more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior,” the adoption of “sentencing alternatives [that] ... could put some offenders on probation” and “reductions in crime rates.

Free market, gotta love it.

Well, CCA has had its problems keeping things profitable.  LOTS of problems, as documented in an excellent report entitled Banking on Bondage.  I won’t get into all of that here, suffice it to say that many states are currently rethinking their relationship with for-profit prisons.

Nevertheless, $2B companies don’t lay down and die, they expand.  And who’s always there to help corporations realize the American Dream?  Our good friends at ALEC providing legislation to float all boats.

DiversityInc.com has a great study entitled Who Profits From the Prison Boom which contains fun facts like:

One of ALEC’s main task forces is the Public Safety and Elections Task Force (formerly known as Criminal Justice and Homeland Security), which oversees the drafting of model bills that often serve as the basis for criminal-justice legislation. For years, the criminal-justice task force was co-chaired by high-ranking CCA executives.

“The busiest Task Force is Criminal Justice which had 199 bills introduced. The anti-crime legislation with the most enactments was the Truth in Sentencing Act (inmates serve at least 85 percent of their sentence) which became law in 25 states.”

ALEC’s “Habitual Offender/Three Strikes” bills (life imprisonment for a third violent felony) passed in 11 states.

In large part because of these laws, the country’s prison population has ballooned from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million in 2009, greater than that of any other nation in the world. Including the number of people on probation and parole in this country, more than 7 million people—one out of every 31—lives under the control of the U.S. criminal-justice system, and 60 percent of them are from traditionally underrepresented groups, such as Blacks and Latinos.

So, ALEC “models” the laws that keep prisons full for CCA, in turn, CCA lavishly lobbies state representatives to get such laws on the books.

In fact—oh wouldn’t you know it—CCA contributed to Rep. Weaver’s campaign and her Senate counterpart, Sen. Reginald Tate? is an ALEC Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force Member.

CCA must consider that money well -spent.  Here’s Rep. Weaver coming up with a brand new class of prisoners, not only that, everyone knows women and kids make for the most profitable inmates—they don’t eat a lot and they’re less trouble.

Which makes it a lot easier to understand this new, heretofore, mysterious criminal justice development:

The Department of Justice issued new guidance Wednesday aimed at curbing harsh, discriminatory over-punishment of school discipline violations.

Kids are arrested for wearing the wrong color socks and starting food fights.

Schools seeking to discipline students call the police, and police policy was to arrest all children referred to the agency

In Texas, another DOJ lawsuit highlighted one county’s policy of filing automatic criminal charges against students for truancy.

And in Florida, Broward County agreed in November to reform its policy after a spate of arrests for rule violations as minor as starting a food fight.

Research suggests almost half of all black males are arrested by age 23.

More than half of youths are detained for offenses that do not threaten public safety. Data collected this summer by the National Juvenile Justice Network and Texas Public Policy Foundation found that, as of 2010, “almost 60 percent of confined youth in the US (41,877) were still detained and imprisoned for offenses that do not pose substantial threats to public safety.

As the ACLU concluded in their report Banking on Bondage:

In America, our criminal justice system should keep us safe, operate fairly, and be cost-effective. Mass incarceration, however, deprives record numbers of individuals of their liberty, has at best a minimal effect on public safety, and cripples state budgets.

Meanwhile, the private prison industry rakes in profits by obtaining government money in increasing amounts, by depriving Americans of liberty in ever greater numbers, and potentially by cutting corners at the expense of public safety and prison security.

 

The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along.
-  Friedrich Nietzsche

The day has at last arrived!  Tonight at 6:30 I’ll be appearing at the Healthy Rhythm Community Art Gallery in Fairfield, Texas (a bit southeast of Dallas) to read selections from my book, sell copies, sign autographs and answer questions.  I met the gallery’s owner, Ken Vail, at the Southern Harm Reduction Conference in New Orleans last December, and when I told him I would be publishing a book soon the first question out of his mouth was, “Have you chosen a place to do your first book signing?”  When I told him I hadn’t he volunteered his gallery, and here we are!  I hope some of my readers from the Dallas area (and Austin & Houston, if you don’t mind a two-hour drive) can make it out to show your support; if you’ve already got a copy I’ll sign it for you, and if not I’ll have a whole box of ‘em with me.  If you live farther away, check my tour page to see when I’ll be close to you, and if you have any advice or input about events I should attend, places that would like to host a book signing or have me speak, etc, please let me know.  If you own or manage a business or organization and would like to hold an event for me, please contact me ASAP so we can work out the details; if you aren’t the boss but still think you could put in a good word, let me know that too!  And even if you live outside the US, or in a part of the country I won’t be visiting, please take a moment this evening to beam me a few prayers, positive vibes, good thoughts, best wishes or whatever the equivalent in your philosophy; as I embark on this new adventure outside my comfort zone, I’ll take all the help I can get. 

From Reason Magazine today:

David Brooks Vying for Ellsworth Toohey's Column Space in the Banner With a Passover Song of Praise for Compulsion 

Brian Doherty|Apr. 15, 2014 12:02 pm...

From me in a 2010 post about David Brooks:

...
Dear New York Times,

I know a guy, can write you da sweetest little algorithm you ever seen. Twice a week, it'll poop out identical, perfect, steaming, 800-word-long logs guaranteed indistinguishable from the run-down, played out, vanilla-infused-excreta you're slinging now -- forever -- and for about 1/10,000th the cost.

If you order in the next 24 hours and mention offer code "Ellsworth Toohey" --

"Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity, and the shrines are razed."

-- I can get him to throw in a subroutine that will periodically crap out a random, gushy paean to Ronald Reagan, John Thune, Scooter Libby or any of two dozen other bilaterally symmetrical Conservative Authoritarian Daddy figures of your choice, no extra charge.

Again in 2011

...
Tomorrow, next month, next year Ellsworth Monkton Bobo will still be there collecting princely sums for filling the world with his soft, mealy, razor-concealing road-apples of common wisdom.

And just how is that possible?

Because Bobo is a very senior member of a very special, very selective union -- Pundits Local 183.

A union whose chief innovation was boldly and irrevocably severing all "relationship between excellence and reward" years and years ago.

"Peter, you’ve heard all this. You’ve seen me practising it for ten years. You see it being practised all over the world. Why are you disgusted ? You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You’re in on it. You’ve taken your share and you’ve got to go along. You’re afraid to see where it’s leading. I’m not. I’ll tell you.
...

Judgement, Peter ! Not judgement, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeroes – since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand – and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what makes you tick – you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who’ve liked and accepted these names. You’ll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the general.

A union whose members haven't missed a meal since.

And again in 2011

...
Brooks: We're sinful! And ignorant!

Noonan: And not humble enough.

And then, lacking anything else to say or do, they broke into song:

Load up on guns and

Bring your friends

It's fun to lose

And to pretend

She's over bored

And self assured

Oh no, I know
A dirty word
...


With the lights out

it's less dangerous

Here we are now

Entertain us

I feel stupid

and contagious

Here we are now

Entertain us

A mulatto



An albino


A mosquito


My Libido

Yeah!


Brooks: I'm for a quota system. If you talk to a Conservative, talk to a Liberal. If you read a Liberal, you should read a Conservative. If you find yourself feeling good, hit yourself in the wrist with a hammer. If you notice you're getting too smart, huff some paint until Tom Friedman starts to sound like Stephen Hawkings. Are you above average height? How about hacking off a few obtruding inches if leg bone?

And if you've gotten pretty much everything wrong for the past few decades, considered getting a permanent column in the New York Times to balance it out.

David Brooks may not be Peggy Noonan, but he sure as shit is the perfect Centrist-Mediocrity-as-Virtue love child of Diana Moon Glampers.
and Ellsworth Toohey:

Our little group has always been

And always will until the end

Hello, hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, hello, how low?
Hello, hello, hello, hello, how low? 

Yeah!

tsunflowers:

bye they’re so cute. this is so cute

OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

Remember two weeks ago when you were outraged like never before that the rich, pedophilic, no-good trust fund bastard Robert H. Richards IV, aka “the DuPont heir” got away with no jail time because he “wouldn’t fare well in jail” according to some liberal activist judge in Delaware? Remember that you were so angry that he was rich and therefore got special treatment and you wanted to burn him instead of burning down the system that encourages such disparities?

Now, do you also remember that generally speaking the media is god-awful at reporting on criminal justice?

So, when the former meets the latter, who do you think you got fooled into fake outrage? You. That’s right. You got suckered. Again.

A Delaware judge who sentenced a DuPont heir to probation for the rape of his young daughter didn’t say “he will not fare well in prison” during the hearing, though the comment was in the notes section of her sentencing order.

…

Richard Kirk, who chairs the Delaware State Bar Association Committee on Response to Public Comment, has said it is “speculative and misleading” to assume the comment in the notes section about not faring well in prison reflected [Judge] Jurden’s own feelings.

Oops. Here’s the transcript, if you want to search for your shame.

In fact:

[Judge] Jurden expressed some reluctance about the sentence, the transcript indicates. “I have concerns about this,” Jurden told Richards at the hearing, “because arguably you should be at Level Five [prison] for what you did, and I hope you understand the gravity of what you did.”

Richards answered that he does understand.

“But I think that you have significant treatment needs that have to be addressed, and you have very strong family support,” Jurden said. “So, unlike many other unfortunate people who come before me, you are lucky in that regard, and I hope you appreciate that.”

Remember those prosecutors who seemed to be in agreement with the judge? But they were just commentators, right? I mean, the prosecutor who prosecuted this case must’ve been outraged:

Prosecutor Renee Hrivnak said at the hearing that the state would usually seek jail time, but she believed a sex-offender treatment program in Massachusetts was a viable alternative to jail. “The first option that the state would present is that this jail time will be suspended for completion of that program, followed by a lengthy period of probation,” Hrivnak said. “If the court is not inclined to send him to the Massachusetts program, then the state would be asking for some period of jail that the court would feel would be appropriate.”

Oh.

Next time, learn to think for yourself.

Listen, if you’re going to propose a bill that criminalizes a “trend” in assaultive behavior and you want to single out juveniles for especially harsh treatment, you better have a more concrete response than this:

Verrengia said it was difficult to determine how many of the attacks have occurred when he was asked Monday if there was any evidence suggesting that a large number have been committed by 16- or 17-year-old offenders.

“I tried to wrap my arms around it, I tried to get statistics, but it’s very difficult to do so by virtue of the present reporting requirements by various law enforcement agencies,” he said. “. . . I think if you were to ask [victims] how many assaults have there been throughout the state of Connecticut, they would say, ‘One too many.’”

You know why he couldn’t “get statistics”? Why he tried to wrap his arms of justice around this issue and failed? I mean, if the ‘knockout game’ is such a big problem that you need to specifically legislate against it in ass-backwards ways, shouldn’t the statistics be abundant? Shouldn’t there be data flowing out your rear hole?

And yet, here we are. After I warned these folks a few weeks ago about the problems that plague their desire to criminalize the “knockout game”, they have returned, this time with an amended bill that has made it through the judiciary committee and now will head to the full legislature.

Now, to be sure, people assault each other all the time. The fact that assaults occur doesn’t mean that the knockout game is new or real or that it is a trend. It is, of course, none of those things. What it is, however, is code for racially-biased legislation.

In an attempt to shove this bill through the legislature and sate the outraged throngs of citizens who are crying out for justice and relief from this horrific trend of zero, here are the following ways that Lady Logic has been sacrificed at the altar. First, the amendment language:

(a) A person is guilty of assault in the second degree when: (6) with intent to cause serious physical injury to another person by rendering such other person unconscious, and without provocation by such other person, he causes such injury to such other person by striking such other person in the head.

First, pursuant to this amendment to the Assault in the Second Degree statute, you will now be subjected to a harsher penalty for one knockout punch than you would be if you took a baseball bat and beat the crap out of someone. Doesn’t that make a lot of sense?

Next, the proponents of the bill said that this bill should be enacted to send a message to “yewts” that “random” attacks will not be tolerated. Point me to the part of the subsection that requires that the attack be random. I’ll wait. Don’t see it? Oh. That’s because it doesn’t fucking exist.

Finally, do you know how badly they’ve destroyed logic? They’ve ruined their own bill and made it completely useless. How? Re-read the bill. What is the intent requirement in order to convict someone? That’s right. “Intent to cause serious physical injury by rendering such other person unconscious.”

Good luck proving that. Ever. I can almost guarantee that this subsection will never, ever be used because there’s no damn ‘knockout game’ and because no prosecutor can ever prove that intent.

Here it is, your moment of zen:

But Verrengia said he was seeking to make the victims of unprovoked attacks a protected class similar to how the law treats victims who are handicapped, pregnant, or blind.

“Although the victims in this case may not be legally blind, they are certainly blindsided by this sort of attack,” Verrengia said. “. . . I believe it warrants that sort of penalty.”

Okay, Reince, now we’re talking!  Looks like the RNC is getting its ground game going and bringing it to a neighborhood near you.

The Republican National Committee announced its “14 in ‘14” program in Charleston on Monday, calling for GOP female volunteers in the 14 weeks before the November midterm elections. The volunteers will recruit other women who are 21 to 40 years old to vote Republican and become involved in election season.

Republicans are asking the women to spend 30 minutes a week on election season outreach.

RNC Co-Chair, Sharon Day, unveiled the program Monday targetting purple-ish counties in West Virginia, Florida, Montana, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania with large numbers of independent and female swing voters.

According to Ms. Day:

You can see time and time again, it was no surprise that we didn’t win the Hispanic vote, we didn’t win the African American, Asian, women because we didn’t engage.

Bless their hearts . . . if only they had engaged?  Who could have known?

And then what? volunteers are going to describe the GOP’s brand-new totally pro-woman policy platform?  Better let the folks at the American Legislative Executive Council know—their hopper is still full of a list of horribles designed to make women and children’s lives a living hell.

The RNC is just about due for a winner, I guess, seeing as how their other attempts at female voter outreach have been, well, embarrassing flops.  First was the Growth and Opportunity Project which promised to “develop a forward-leaning vision for voting Republican that appeals to women.”  That ain’t happenin’.

Next was a little something they called Project GROW, Growing Republican Opportunities for Women, a post-2012 program to recruit Republican women to run for Congress in 2014 which, despite a lot of fanfare, appears to have somehow effected a record-breaking low - a grand total of 13 - Republican female candidates for 2014.

Programs like GROW are doomed to fail in today’s GOP political climate.  Women are intrinsically moderate and bipartisan and the Republican political machine is iconoclastic and results oriented.  The party might make a big show of encouraging women to participate but, unless they’re well-connected to the prevailing power structure, they shouldn’t count on any financial or moral support.

A hard truth is that President Obama won the female vote decisively in 2012.  Recent polls suggest that nothing much has changed there.  A CNN/ORC survey in February, 2014 confirmed what most of us already know— that 59 percent of women say the GOP does not understand them.

Not to mention the fact that, every day, women are treated to the spectacle of Republican politicians voting unanimously against their interests.  MoveOn.org has published a list of the Top Ten GOP legislative attacks on women.  I dare anyone to read through that list and tell me that the War on Women doesn’t exist.  I’m looking right at you Marsha Wedgeworth Blackburn.

So, no, I don’t expect this latest idea to work, for so many reasons.  First of all, what’s with the 21-40 year-old age cap?  Is that an optics thing?  Do they figure that perky young conservatives will “engage” better?  Or do they know they’ll be deploying an ageist, sexist anti-Hillary campaign in the near future that might cancel out some of this groundwork? 

And, speaking of optics . . . in one article describing the RNC’s new outreach ideas, this was mentioned:

They are encouraging candidates to include their wives and daughters in campaign ads, have women at their events and build a Facebook-like internal database of women willing to campaign on their behalf.

Isn’t this the same GOP that was shrieking, just last week, about Democrats “politicizing” women?”

Another reason this probably won’t work is that conservative women are just so darn BUSY!  remember that?

If you’re a 21-40 year old flower of conservative womanhood are you seriously going to take time out from the full-time job of pleasing your man, homemaking and home-schooling to go door-to-door and try to talk to some Libtard feminista about core conservative values that they’re too brainwashed to get?  I don’t think so.

Maybe Almost-President Romney will be willing to sell Reince his Binders Full Of Women???

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat…but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later.  -  Anita Brookner

“We’re going to have to move soon; I really think Eleanor is beginning to suspect.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Hazel, handing him his drink and then moving behind him to rub his shoulders.

“Nothing I can really explain,” he said, then after a sip: “When you’ve been married to somebody for twenty-seven years, you get to know all her little ways, and you notice when they change.  You were married before, you know what I mean.”

“Yes.  But how do you know she isn’t cheating on you, too?”

Ted laughed.  “You don’t know Eleanor; she’s as cold a fish as there is.  We were both virgins when we got married, and once we were done having kids she just wasn’t interested any more.  I’ve already told you this more than once.”

“There’s no need to get testy,” she said reassuringly.  “I just want you to consider all the possibilities so you don’t start acting nervous and setting off her radar.”

“Like I said, I think I already have.  Oh, I’ve been very careful; before I met you I saw escorts for years, and before that I had cultivated a pattern of not really telling her much about my comings and goings.  And since she leaves the money to me, it’s always been easy to use as much as I want without her being the wiser.  But lately, she’s been requesting a lot more money for all sorts of things, as if she’s trying to probe the state of our finances.”

“Has she been questioning you or anything like that?” 

“No, she wouldn’t.  Eleanor is maddeningly indirect; she never makes a statement when an insinuation will do, and whenever she’s angry at me it always takes me days to figure out why.  I’ll never understand why so many women are like that; is it something on the X chromosome?”

“You have an X chromosome as well, Ted.”

“I know, but maybe something on the Y cancels it out.  Maybe real sneakiness requires a double X.”

“Oh, really!  Now you’re just being ridiculous.  I’m relatively straightforward, and you’re extremely sneaky; if quietly converting most of your investments to negotiable form so you can fly off to Tahiti with your mistress doesn’t qualify, I can’t imagine what would.”

Ted looked as though he had been slapped.  “I’m not leaving her destitute,” he said quietly; “In fact, as per your suggestion I transferred the house and several large investments into her name.  I just want to divide the money fairly rather than leaving it to courts and lawyers who would probably give her everything.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” she said, hugging him closely.  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.  It’s just that I feel nervous, too, and dumb female stereotypes always get me irritated.  Please forgive me.”

“See, Hazel, this is what I’m talking about.  You know how many women would apologize like you just did?  Practically none.  That’s not a stereotype, it’s just the truth; men usually end up having to apologize no matter who was wrong.  I don’t think you really understand how different you are from most women.  I never believed I would fall in love with anyone ever again, much less want to live my life with her.  But you just make me feel so special, so safe.  I know I can trust you, and that we won’t end up being strangers sleeping in the same bed like Eleanor and me.”

“I promise you that will never happen,” she said through glistening eyes.  And then she kissed him, and for a while there was no more conversation.

****************************************************************

A few days later, though, she brought up the subject again on the airplane.  “I just can’t help but feel guilty about what we did.  I know the two of you really shouldn’t have married in the first place, and that you haven’t had a sex life in over 15 years.  I know the kids are grown up, and we really do love each other, and there really wasn’t a home to break up.  But damn, don’t you feel bad about running off with all the negotiables as well as the stuff he put in your name?”

Eleanor shrugged.  “Not really.  I left documents donating the house back to him, and he’s still under fifty; he has twenty more years to build up again, and with no alimony that’ll be easy with his salary.  He’ll be a lot better off in the long run than I would’ve been had he been the one to run off with you as he thought would happen.”

“I suppose you’re right,” sighed Hazel.  “But I still feel bad about playing him like I did.”

“No worse than he thought he was playing me,” Eleanor huffed.  “He got what he deserved.”

“Maybe,” she replied.  “But I guess he was right about women being the sneakier ones, after all.”

Tomorrow, in the wee hours of the morning throughout much of the United States, there will be a total eclipse of the full moon corresponding with Passover.  During a lunar eclipse, the Earth is positioned between the moon and the sun, and the moon is obscured by the shadow (there are two regions of shadow, the penumbral and umbral regions)- during a total eclipse of the moon (as opposed to a total eclipse of the sun or of the heart), sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere colors the moon a shade of red.  This reddish hue has inspired the term “Blood Moon” for eclipses of this sort.

Religious nutbars being what they are, whackaloon John Hagee believes that four coming lunar eclipses signal Earthshaking events, perhaps even the dawn of the “End Times”.  Religious fundies can even spoil the beauty of the celestial dance.

Religious people are often characterized as humble people, but I think that’s total B.S. Every religious fundamentalist sees him-or-herself as the center of momentous events, a witness to the climax of history.  In reality, each and every one of us is a tiny speck of matter on a slightly larger speck of matter, as Douglas Adams put it far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy, and I would add, not even a particularly distinguished galaxy at that.

We are not that important in the grand scheme of things, no matter what interpretation of an ambiguous passage in a book written by Bronze Age goatherders and passed through many translations over the course of the last couple of millennia is favored by a crazy religious fundamentalist in Texastan.  Get over yourselves, fundies.  Enough of this bloody lunacy. 

Cross posted at my eponymous blog.

Wisconsin Republicans will vote at their convention next month on a proposal affirming the state's right to go it alone, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Daniel Bice reported Monday.

The state party's Resolutions Committee has voted in favor of a so-called "state sovereignty" measure stating the party "supports legislation that upholds Wisconsin's right, under extreme circumstances, to secede," according to the Journal-Sentinel. The resolution came out of one of the state party's regional caucuses and was edited and adopted by the committee despite top GOP officials' efforts to quash it.

Why would you vote on this unless you wanted people to think you hated America and no longer wanted to be a part of it?   What "extreme circumstances" constitute the necessity for secession?  Another Democrat in the White House? 

Gov. Scott Walker (R) dismissed the unconventional proposal last week.

"I don't think that one aligns with where most Republican officials are in the state of Wisconsin — certainly not with me," Walker said Friday at a press event, as quoted by the Journal-Sentinel.

Gosh, what a bold statement.  He doesn't think secession "aligns" with GOP officials in the state.

Why do Republicans hate America so much that they want to leave it?  That kind of was the problem 150 years ago, yes?  So do Republicans want a second Civil War?

Why else would you want to affirm the right to secede?

Tomorrow, in the wee hours of the morning throughout much of the United States, there will be a total eclipse of the full moon. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth is positioned between the moon and the sun, and the moon is obscured by the shadow (there are two regions of shadow, the penumbral and umbral regions)- during a total eclipse of the moon (as opposed to a total eclipse of the sun or of the heart), sunlight passing through Earth's atmosphere colors the moon a shade of red. This reddish hue has inspired the term "Blood Moon" for eclipses of this sort.

Religious nutbars being what they are, whackaloon John Hagee believes that four coming lunar eclipses signal Earthshaking events, perhaps even the dawn of the "End Times". Religious fundies can even spoil the beauty of the celestial dance.

Religious people are often characterized as humble people, but I think that's total B.S. Every religious fundamentalist sees him-or-herself as the center of momentous events, a witness to the climax of history. In reality, each and every one of us is a tiny speck of matter on a slightly larger speck of matter, as Douglas Adams put it far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy, and I would add, not even a particularly distinguished galaxy at that.

We are not that important in the grand scheme of things, no matter what interpretation of an ambiguous passage in a book written by Bronze Age goatherders and passed through many translations over the course of the last couple of millennia is favored by a crazy religious fundamentalist in Texastan. Get over yourselves, fundies. Enough of this bloody lunacy.

Cross posted at Rumproast.

The hardest part for me dealing with my anxiety is having to accept that my perceptions of things are wrong, because they seem so absolutely certain.  And regular things I shouldn’t rationally be afraid of, seem like the most terrifying things possible.  And it’s hard to deal with.  It’s hard to believe my friends aren’t out to get me, that silence on their end is not them ignoring me, that they aren’t always prioritizing everybody else over me, and they don’t see me as lesser than them and a bother.  Because it seems so REAL.  It’s like my eating disorder and how that affects my body image.  I feel HUGE, and I’m certain of it.  And I can’t shake it, and telling myself to believe otherwise feels like sticking my hand into a shark’s mouth and trying to convince myself it’s okay.  It’s so hard, and I can only convince myself for so long before I break again, before my mind finds some OTHER reason that everything is going wrong.

And it’s really hard because my instincts and perception is what I rely on to get myself through life.  It’s what’s behind all the analysis I write that people seem to really like.  It got me through my childhood, kept me safe, helped me create shields to function through my dysphoria, helped me defeat my bullies at sports using tactics.  And it’s usually so right, except now it gets to stuff that personally concerns me, then everything goes completely out of whack. :\  It’s in part because some really bad stuff happened to me that I never predicted or saw coming from people I trusted and cared about and loved.  And my brain just kind of ramped everything up because obviously I should have been more careful.  It’s like my security settings are all messed up now because I had a security breach. :(  And I can’t shut it off, it just sees so much stuff as a threat now that I need to panic about.  It’s really hard for me to deal with because I feel like, I can’t shut off my security systems, then I’m totally vulnerable. :(  Not being able to trust what I am certain makes sense to me is terrifying.

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

Now, if this is true the NSA has a lot to answer for, but "two people familiar with the matter"?  No names?  Pretty big bombshell for anonymous sources, yes?  And as far as I can tell, nobody has independently verified this story yet.

Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

Again, this represents a huge ethical problem if true, but that's a huge if right now.  It's not stopping people I read and respect from assuming this is now gospel truth because of course any story these days claiming the NSA has done X has to be true because the NSA is evil and you can'[t trust them.

And once again, if this story is true and if the NSA did know about this (or as some people have also speculated created the bug in the first place in order to open a nearly universal back door to secure websites) then heads need to roll.

Ironically, if this story is true, shouldn't Edward Snowden's vast treasure trove of stolen documents have contained this information?  This is a pretty damning accusation. Something like this would be at the top of the list for his stated goal of exposing unethical, damaging, and illegal practices by the NSA, yes?

This is a bug that affected millions of ordinary people. Right now, there's as much "proof" that Snowden knew about Heartbleed and said nothing as there is that the NSA knew the same and did nothing, i.e. total speculation.

Might want to keep that in mind.

This needs to be preserved for posterity:

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and nobles will look up and shout “Save us!”

And I’ll look down, and whisper…

“Hodor.”

Many conservatives are attacking Brandeis University for denying Ayaan Hirsi Ali her sacred right to an honorary degree from Brandeis University.

What the university is supposed to have done wrong, I can’t tell you. There’s no issue of “silencing”; she has an open invitation to speak at the university. As to whether she should also have a vested right to receive a special honor, let’s consider what she’s actually said:

Reason: In Holland, you wanted to introduce a special permit system for Islamic schools, correct?

Hirsi Ali: I wanted to get rid of them. I wanted to have them all closed, but my party said it wouldn’t fly. Top people in the party privately expressed that they agreed with me, but said, “We won’t get a majority to do that,” so it never went anywhere.

Reason: Well, your proposal went against Article 23 of the Dutch Constitution, which guarantees that religious movements may teach children in religious schools and says the government must pay for this if minimum standards are met. So it couldn’t be done. Would you in fact advocate that again?

Hirsi Ali: Oh, yeah.

Reason: Here in the United States, you’d advocate the abolition of—

Hirsi Ali: All Muslim schools. Close them down. Yeah, that sounds absolutist. I think 10 years ago things were different, but now the jihadi genie is out of the bottle. I’ve been saying this in Australia and in the U.K. and so on, and I get exactly the same arguments: The Constitution doesn’t allow it. But we need to ask where these constitutions came from to start with—what’s the history of Article 23 in the Netherlands, for instance? There were no Muslim schools when the constitution was written. There were no jihadists. They had no idea.

If one were to substitute “Jewish” or “Roman Catholic” for “Muslim,” the question of giving Hirsi Ali an honorary degree would be moot because there’s no chance it would happen in the first place. And rightly so. (And the context doesn’t help; as you’ll note she is very clear that she’s not talking about “radical Islamists” but “Islam”: “So when even a hard-line critic of Islam such as Daniel Pipes says, “Radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution,” he’s wrong?” “He’s wrong. Sorry about that.”) I’m baffled that Brandeis either failed to find or ignored these statements when deciding to give her an honorary degree, but I don’t know why they’re required to go forward with it.

Was the State Department wrong to withdraw the “Women of Courage” award given to Samira Ibrahim after her history of anti-Semitic tweets was uncovered? I certainly don’t think so. And since I think this standard should apply to all religious groups, I don’t understand what Brandeis has done wrong here either.

Companies love the 401(k) System because it amounts to Private Enterprises being able to Tax American Workers.

A Defined Benefit pension plan is superior to 401(k) which is why Corporations don't like them. Corporations don't want workers who have assured retirement benefits, they want workers who are slightly desperate and willing to agree to whatever Ownership wants for fear of losing everything.

But, in keeping with the Neoliberal Economic Assault on 99% of Americans the 401(k) plan was sold to America as a superior way for you to manage your retirement! But, all 401(k) turned out to be was another mechanism for Corporations to steal your money.


But, it's the day-to-day, year after year nickel-and-diming fees which eventually allow Hedge Funds to steal thousands of dollars from your retirement account.

From the Center for American Progress (CAP) comes a study of the impact the often hidden fees which Wealth Mismanagement Firms use to siphon off your retirement funds.

The CAP study showed how raising the annual fee from 0.25% to 1% or 1.25% would take $70,000 to $100,000 from the employees 401(k) account.

Putting aside the current American Job Market where no employee is going to last 30 years at a company offering up to 5% matching funds for your 401(k) account, the bigger picture is the continuing Legerdemain and accounting gimmicks Hedge Funds use.

One of the ways, Vultures like Wealth Mismanagement Pro Bruce Rauner caused the Illinois Pension Crisis was by charging fees. Rauner's firm GTCR and other Hedge Funds gained access to Public Pensions in the 1990's and now we find they are underfunded.

A President from Texas who fumbled one of the bloodiest wars in US history, who got tens of thousands of US troops killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians slaughtered is now being furiously rehabilitated in order to help his party in 2016.

And no, I'm not talking about Dubya.  I'm talking about LBJ.  WaPo's Harold Meyerson:

Come August, we’ll have another semi-centennial moment, but it probably won’t be celebrated. Aug. 7 will mark the 50th anniversary of Congress passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Johnson had requested to give him the authority to respond with military force to North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. ships (some of which, the U.S. government later concluded, hadn’t actually taken place). By 1965, Johnson was interpreting the resolution as carte blanche to send hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to Vietnam, 58,000 of whom died there. 

By Bushian standards, Johnson was pretty awful across the board.  Yes, he signed into law civil rights legislation, but the civil rights movement made him do it, kicking and screaming.  TNR's Michael Kazin has an even lower opinion of LBJ.

In 1965, as Johnson was pushing Congress to enact the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, he was also initiating the bombing of North Vietnam and signing the orders which eventually sent over 500,000 U.S. troops to occupy and fight to “pacify” the Southern half of that country. At the time, liberal Democrats who opposed the war condemned the hypocrisy of a President who could help millions of Americans win their rights and a degree of medical security while he oversaw the destruction of what he called “a raggedy ass little third rate country.” Fifty years later, powerful Democrats in search of a usable past would just prefer to ignore the contradiction.

They would also, it seems, like to forget the profound damage which Johnson’s conduct of the war did to the fortunes of liberalism back home. As every politician and journalist once knew, mass discontent about the debacle in Vietnam split the Democratic Party in two and convinced LBJ not to run for re-election in 1968. The party’s nominee, that flaming liberal Hubert Humphrey, then won less than 43 percent of the popular vote. It would be another 40 years before another unabashed liberal (uh, “progressive”) was elected president.

Johnson's Medicare and civil rights laws were a great contribution to America.  But  the damage he did contributed directly to Nixon and Reagan, and then Bushes Senior and Junior, and he had more blood on his hands than Dubya ever did.

Just a history lesson.  You can't talk about Johnson's accomplishments without mentioning his bloody, awful, immoral failures as both a President and human being.

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The Laborers’ Union continues to burn every bridge with other progressive communities with a napalm air strike:

A letter distributed Friday by the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) to the districts of 27 House Democrats calls for union members to make sure their representative “feels the power and the fury of LIUNA this November.”

Their crime: signing a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry last month urging him to reject Keystone, which would carry oil sands from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.

“Your member of Congress is trying to destroy job opportunities for our LIUNA brothers and sisters,” said the letter signed by Terry O’Sullivan, the general president of LIUNA.

“For every action, there is a reaction, and our reaction to this frontal assault on our way of life needs to be loud and clear. If you do not stand with us, we sure as hell will not stand with you,” O’Sullivan wrote, noting the jobs Keystone would create for union members.

While I’m sure LIUNA does not have the power to make anyone suffer, especially since most of these targeted representatives have the support of far larger unions like SEIU and AFSCME, unions it should be said who see value in not making other Democrats hate them for supporting climate change creating projects, it’s still unfortunate to say the least. As I’ve said before, I completely understand LIUNA supporting the project for their own members. What I don’t get is the aggression that represents something far more than the relatively few jobs it will get from the pipeline. This is the kind of cultural warfare the Carpenters used in the Northwest during the ancient forest campaigns in the Northwest in the 80s and 90s. The hippie enviros are an existential threat far beyond Keystone. This is about what it means to be an American, which for LIUNA is supporting any construction project regardless of social cost.

I have trouble seeing how this works out for the Laborers in the long run.

Remember when we spent a couple of trillion dollars unleashing large amounts of death on Iraq because Saddam was about to work with his imaginary terrorist allies to nuke Omaha with mustard gas he didn’t possess human rights? Well, extremely unfunny thing about that:

Decades ago, in the years after Iraq gained independence, a tradition of child marriage persisted in its hills and plains. Upon their fathers’ orders, Iraqi girls were betrothed to strangers and rivals alike to resolve tribal disputes or incur favor.

But in the mid-1970s, such acts — called “fasliyah” — were prohibited as the nation moved toward secularization and modernity.

“This decree [banning fasliyah] constituted the first step toward a civilized Iraqi community,” reports the Middle East publication Al-Monitor, “which would put an end to the failures of the tribal… society.”

In the years that followed, rates of child marriage plummeted. By 1997, only 15 percent of Iraqi women were married as children, according to the Central Organization for Statistics. This figure was the same in 2004.

But as the country plunged into the darkest days of the Iraq War, traditions emerged anew — including child marriage.

In 2007, Al-Monitor says, 21 percent of young Iraqi women reported they were married as children. Six years later, the Population Reference Bureau determined that “the decline in early marriages has stopped.”

In fact, the rate had risen.

By mid-2013, more than one-fourth of females were married as children, and 5 percent had been wed before age 15. This rate of child marriage placed Iraq ahead of many nations in the region.

Now the Iraqi government is poised to legalize child marriage for the nation’s majority Shiite Muslim population. But the law, which some expect to pass before this month’s parliamentary elections, would do significantly more than that.

Called the Jaafari Personal Status Law, it would prohibit Muslim men from marrying non-Muslims, prevent women from leaving the house without their husband’s consent, automatically grant custody of children older than two to their father in divorce cases and legalize marital rape.

The law, which proponents say will save women’s “rights and dignity,” would also permit boys to marry as young as 15 and girls to marry as young as nine. Girls younger than nine would be permitted to marry with a parent’s approval.

Something to remember the next time a neocon fantasy runs out of other justifications and settles on human rights as a pretext…

More detail will be is up later at the other blog here and here about completion of the last six weeks of kitchen project.  But it is DONE!  The floor is still sawdust covered….but it is done!  We will now be cleaning the entire dusty house for the next 48 hours!  week.

Filed under: Life Tagged: householding

The kitchen is done!  Still a huge clean up of house (dusty all OVER) and garage due to demolition debris and tool clean up.  The porch even needs pressure washed to clear away mess.  But the kitchen is finished after six long weeks.  More detailed pics later….after clean up and rest.

Tagged: householding, kitchen

This one makes me recall TG’s find a while back. Let’s throw a NSFW tag on this, not that it’s obscene, but you probably don’t want it on the screen as the boss walks by. Didn’t go the way I … Continue reading →

Aiming at who-knows-what entertainment value, Fox News, on Friday, launched a “robust discussion” of the current state of racism in America.  Or, at least as robust a discussion as five white conservative pundits, including a B-list comedian, could have on that topic.

The timing of the program probably had to do with Attorney General Eric Holder getting all “uppity,” a few days ago, about being disrespected by Louie Gohmert (R-TX), and follow-up remarks by Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) when he was asked if Holder had played “the race card.”

The discussion meandered along most of the well-trodden paths leading to Post Racism America.

Comments like these abounded:

This race thing is – you know, at this point, I can’t believe they’re still saying it.

I might even agree with you that there may be some racism left in America, but who cares?  Anyone who does or says anything racist is always punished for it immediately. So why do we even talk about it anymore?

Dana Perino even managed a deftly worded boy-who-calls-wolf admonition when she wondered if “playing the race card so promiscuously actually drains the power of calling someone a racist.”

Eric Bolling and Andrea Tantaros seconded the theme that most Americans aren’t even concerned about racism anymore.

Americans don’t want to see themselves, or have the world see them, as racists.  It doesn’t fit the “shining city on a hill” image of supremacy that many Americans treasure.  Unfortunately, we don’t really have a choice.  Throughout our history, America has had a strong tradition of racism and discrimination that we tend to like to forget about. 

Let’s just pause to reflect a moment . . .

Starting with the genocidal rout of Native Americans to free up the land we coveted, then building a booming new economy on the backs of a century of slave labor; when it was no longer fashionable to own black slaves, we built our railways using cheap imported Chinese laborers who might as well have been slaves, who, when their work was done, were ghettoized or deported. 

Then came the waves of socially abused and exploited European immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries, each group taking a turn at being on the bottom rung of the American ladder; and let’s not forget the confiscation of property and shameful internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. 

Which brings us to post-WWII America where racism against blacks was so blatant, oppressive and shameful that the government had to step in to guarantee the civil rights of a whole cross-section of American society.  Bringing us up to date and the post 9/11 burning and defacement of American mosques . . .

Some form of racism has been a constant throughout American History, it’s bred in the bone.  If you think I’m exaggerating check out these guys, from The League of the South, who would most likely proudly proclaim that I’m right on about that.

When a black reporter in Tallahassee asked League of the South President, Michael Hill, if he minded if the league was depicted as a “bunch of racists,” Hill responded: “So what? I’m standing up for my people – white Southern people – no one else.”

Likewise, South Carolina chapter chairman Michael Cushman celebrates the shift toward unapologetic racism saying that the league is “smashing that taboo”:

We’re supposed to be embarrassed to talk about race. We’re supposed to turn red in the face and kind of turn away and whisper if we say anything at all about race. We’re smashing that taboo as well.

Michael Hill is all about ethnic fear-mongering, warning that the white majority population of the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority, which “will mean the end of our civilization.”

He went on:

There comes a time when you got to get just pure mad-dog mean. If your civilization is worth fighting for, that’s what you will – you will let nothing deter you from it.

150,000 white supremacists and 50,000 practitioners of the Christian Identity religion, espousing overt racism, doesn’t sound post-racist to me . . . Christian Identity teaches, among other things, that:

. . . non-Caucasian peoples have no souls, and can therefore never earn God’s favor or be saved.  Believers in the theology affirm that Jesus Christ paid only for the sins of the House of Israel and the House of Judah and that salvation must be received through both redemption and race.

I suspect that The Five’s white panel on racism would put this down to fringe activity and the random list of daily reports of racist behavior listed below, as out-lyers.  They’ve long since determined that there was no racial element to Trayvon Martin’s killing . . .

Here’s a sampling of current events in Post Racist America:

This fellow in Michigan, [above] is an Army veteran, who tried to make three white guys stop harassing a black 7-Eleven clerk at 2 am.  When he left the store, the three men followed him and beat him up for being a n-word-lover.

When a fine, hard-working young black student was recently celebrated in the press for being accepted to all 8 Ivy League schools, the Internet lit up with racist responses to his achievement, chalking it all up to Affirmitive Action.

Then there’s, Steve King, a US House representative sworn to uphold the Constitution from a seat of power, who said this about any DREAMer who might actually want to serve in the US military:

As soon as they raise their hand and say, ‘I’m unlawfully present in the United States,’ we’re not going take your oath into the military, but we’re going to take your deposition and we have a bus for you to Tijuana.

And that wasn’t King’s first rodeo.  In the past:

He has compared immigrants to dogs, the unemployed to kids who want to eat before they’ve done their chores, and offered a bizarre description of DREAMers as generally having calves the size of cantaloupes from hauling marijuana across the border.

And let’s not forget this with all its RTs and Faves:

In a country where things like this happen on a daily basis it is silly, deluded and, ultimately, racist to say that:

This race thing is – you know, at this point, I can’t believe they’re still saying it.

That’s like saying that the number of rapes is down so women should stop pressing charges if they get raped.

Some of these present-day deniers might be surprised to learn that Americans have been denying that racism exists for decades.  For example, in 1963, two thirds of Americans felt that blacks were treated equally in their communities as far as employment, housing and education go.

1963 was a year BEFORE the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Law was enacted so, clearly, someone felt there was a need for it. In 1962, 94% of Americans said black children’s access to education was equal to that of white children.  [As long as the National Guard was on hand to get them safely to school?]

Our history, and those polls, clearly demonstrate that many, many white Americans are either oblivious to the lives of their fellow Americans or willfully colorblind and no one can expect many solutions from people who don’t see a problem. 

It is racist to deny the racism that exists in our country because it robs people of color, among us, of their reality. It cheapens their achievements to pretend that there’s anything like a level playing field.  And it cheapens us for not recognizing, rewarding and utilizing the indomitable spirit of people who have refused, for centuries, to be defeated by systemic discrimination in their pursuit of the American Dream.

Imagine it’s New Year’s Eve, 2000. A bunch of us are sitting around with a good Cabernet, and someone wonders—“what do you suppose would happen if the U.S. were flooded with free, high-quality pornography?”

Opinions, of course, would vary:
“Some people would quit their jobs and watch porn 24 hours a day.”
“People would be horny all the time.”
“Everyone would go on a diet to compete with porn actors and actresses.”
“There would be an epidemic of rape and child molestation.”
“Divorce would skyrocket.”
“Nothing would happen at all.”

Just weeks later, America did the experiment.

That’s when broadband internet started bringing porn into almost every home in America. With mobile devices, porn was soon in everyone’s pocket, too.

Before the internet, pornography had been attacked as immoral. Some Senators even said it was part of a Communist plot to weaken the character of America’s youth and husbands.

But morals change. Drugs and rock music—not to mention Vietnam and Watergate—changed the entire landscape of morality. And the birth control pill changed the definition of what “good” girls did.

What, then, to do with pornography?

Invent a public health menace.

And so the government, churches, and decency groups switched the narrative from porn is immoral (bad for users) to porn is dangerous (bad for everyone). Americans started hearing that viewing pornography caused consumers to rape and molest. This justified the demands (continuing to this day) that porn be restricted or even criminalized.

Porn became a legitimate civic concern, and still is. A good citizen has to be concerned about a product that leads to violence, coercion, and perversion.

The only trouble is, there has NEVER been conclusive evidence of this. There still isn’t.

Lyndon Johnson’s commission couldn’t find this evidence. Richard Nixon’s commission couldn’t find it. And in 1986, the Meese Commission—specifically chartered by President Ronald Reagan to find porn dangerous—couldn’t, either. The report stated the opinion that porn is dangerous, but they admitted there was no evidence to prove it.

Later lab studies—still cited today—gave undergraduates forced choices after showing them porn, and came to narrow conclusions about porn changing attitudes about rape. But no one has been able to replicate these studies, and there’s no proof that supposed rape-supportive attitudes lead to an increase in actual rape.

Today there’s talk of America’s “rape culture,” and how our society has to acknowledge and challenge it, using every tool from eliminating porn to eliminating rape jokes.

But here’s the inconvenient fact: while there’s still too damn much rape, the rate of rape has gone DOWN since internet porn flooded America’s homes. Documented by the government, reported in the Journal of Sex Research, the rate of forcible rape in the U.S. has steadily declined since the explosion of internet porn. (Yes, rape is under-reported—now, as it has been every year.)

So how can people claim that porn viewing leads to rape? Only by ignoring the facts.

And so Morality in Media and other groups point to “violent porn.” They’re right of course—there’s some very disturbing stuff out there. Makes you wonder how someone can maintain an erection while watching it. But how does this affect the viewer when he walks out of his house? Science says “not very.”

And what exactly is “violence” in pornography?

Periodically, American society wants to assess violence on television. Estimates of its occurrence always vary wildly, depending on how violence is defined: news shows? War movies? Westerns? Horror films? Gone With the Wind? It’s a tough call.

And so is identifying “violence in porn” (and porn that’s “demeaning to women”). Consider these activities commonly depicted in porn:

Two women and one man;
Two men and one woman;
A woman being watched masturbating;
Fellatio;
Cunnilingus;
Anal sex;
Spanking.

Which of these should be coded for violence? Some people would say all. Others would say some, while most viewers would say none. Hence the wildly different estimates of how much violent porn there is.

To put it another way, someone’s opinion about what’s violent in porn says as much about their concepts of sex as it does about the porn they’re describing. And since so many women enjoy these activities, it’s reasonable—not damning—that actresses are smiling during these depictions. That’s not abuse they’re smiling through, it’s pleasure.

Finally, let’s remember that adults play sex games. Pretending to force a lover to do what you both enjoy (while he or she pretends to resist) is a common one (it’s called teasing). So is biting or holding someone down.

To know if porn is depicting a sex game or a character coercing another character, you’d have to watch enough of the film to get the context. Researchers don’t. You’d have to ask the director and actors what scene they think they’re playing. Researchers don’t.

Nevertheless, here’s a final inconvenient truth: millions of men and women (gay, straight, and bisexual) like to pretend they’re involved with violence when they make love. Are we not allowed to portray this in porn? In the absence of real scientific evidence that watching “violent porn” makes consumers commit sexual violence more than watching “non-violent porn” or a college football game, how can we justify today’s hysteria about “violent porn”?

To repeat: the rate of rape has gone down as the availability of porn has gone up. That effect has also been documented in Germany, Denmark, Croatia, China, and Japan. Whether or not Americans live in a “rape culture,” whether that culture is being increasingly glorified, there is no epidemic of actual sexual violence.

Instead of blaming porn for a non-existent epidemic, people should be wondering what we can learn from the good news about the decrease in the rate of rape.

Since I posted Fuck Forgiveness and Worth It, I knew I was eventually going to have to tackle the topic of whether there’s any connection between childhood abuse and being kinky. I was planning to dig up the studies referred to in that last link, and present a perfectly researched, air-tight case against the idea that my shitty childhood caused me to be kinky. But then I decided, fuck that shit.

If you want to spout condescending bullshit like this,

I get that most people that are into it [kink], are into it because of things that have happened to them.

then you are the one making the extraordinary claim, and you are the one whose job it is to provide extraordinary evidence to support that claim. By all means, show me a remotely believable study proving that childhood abuse makes people kinky.

I’m not going to hold my breath waiting, though. Why? Because I have a basic grasp of logic. Mr. Condescending, in fact, is an excellent argument against his own idiotic theory. He followed up the part of his comment I quoted above with:

I’m not one of those people. I had a happy childhood

If there are kinky people who had happy childhoods, it’s pretty fucking hard to argue that kinkiness is caused exclusively, or even mostly, by abuse. If it was, then where did all the kinky people with happy childhoods come from? Oh? You don’t have a good answer? What a huge fucking surprise.

People do tend to assume that there is a greater percentage of childhood abuse survivors in the kinky community than in, say, the model train building community because in the kink community we have to talk about it. That’s idiotic, but it sort makes sense in a dumb as a sack of wet mice sort of way. If the kink community is the only place you see people talking about their abuse, you might assume (if you’re an idiot) that the kink community is the only place where people who’ve been abused end up.

Or, you know, you could think about that for five seconds. Maybe, just maybe, abuse survivors in the model train building community don’t talk about it because they don’t fucking have to! Honestly, do you think anyone enjoys talking about how much their childhood sucked? We do it in the kink community because it’s the only place where we have to explain why we’re fine with being spanked with a hand but not with a belt. There are probably just as many abuse survivors building model trains as there are building bondage furniture, but because the model train builders don’t generally have to explain the deep dark trauma behind their dislike of modern train engines, nobody knows that they’re abuse survivors.

I hate to break it to you, but child abuse is not exactly uncommon. According to McCreary Centre Society. Healthy Connections: Listening to BC Youth, 1999, p. 17. (link found on safekidsbc), 35% of girls and 16% of boys between grades 7 – 12 had been sexually and/or physically abused. With statistics like that, what would be strange is if there were no abuse survivors interested in kink.

Finally, it’s stupid as well as hugely insulting to assume that I’m nothing but a puppet whose strings are pulled by terrible memories. Human behavior is complicated, there’s no single simple reason for much of anything we do. Now, there are certainly people who spend more time reacting to their trauma than they do responding to what’s actually happening right now, but if the only evidence you have that I’m doing that is the fact that I’m kinky, well you don’t have much of a case now do you.

If you’ve got anything like evidence that there’s a connection between having a shitty childhood and being kinky, bring it. If you don’t, and we all know you don’t, shut the fuck up.

Law Enforcement: If you're ever being robbed, just do what the attacker says and don't fight back so you can avoid further injury and get to a safe place.
Law Enforcement: You didn't say no or fight back, so it doesn't count as rape.