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 Russ wrote:
Really? I thought it was pretty much legal everywhere already?
 
 Not in Iran, oops, I forgot, they don' have homosexuals in Iran. They do however have laws against anti-gravity

 

This is prety tame, compared with FOX news pundits who were discussing Al Qaeda involvement in the fires in California, evidently they want to drum up more reasons for us to invade Iran (I know Iran an Al Qaeda as not on the same team, but FOX viewers evidently don't know this).  

All of us, in this post-modern world have so many people who are members of our lives. Some are people we know, others are people we grew up with, and others are people we "know" from movies and TV. In addition, we have two other categories we lump people into who have touched our lives: those who are alive and those who are dead. When any of these people dies, it affects us.

 Just last weekend, I learned to my great sorrow that one of my favorite young actresses, Adrienne Shelley, had died. She was one of the people I occasionally scanned for in the Internet Movie Database, to see if she'd done anything new that sounded interesting. She also wrote, produced, did stage productions, and devoted part of her time to helping aspiring actors.

 It didn't help that she was murdered. If she'd died, like Jim Hansen, of some disease, I'd still be sad, but sometimes people do get sick and die of their illnesses. Likewise, if she'd died in a car wreck, I'd hope she'd died quickly and suffered little. But this was not a death like those. She'd been working in the apartment she used as an office. There was some construction going on in the apartment immediately below hers and she went down to complain about the noise. She had an altercation with a young man who was doing the work. He has said that there were angry words spoken, she slapped his face and he "punched her out." Then, fearing that he'd killed her, he took her body upstairs to her apartment and hung her from her shower curtain rod around the neck with a bed sheet to simulate a suicide. That is where her husband found her, several hours later.

 There is nothing but tragedy in this story. Why did she confront him? She was a native New Yorker - perhaps she thought he was, too - many Latinos are. New Yorkers argue all the time. It's not like Minneapolis or Seattle, where people would put "Please" prominently on the card they slipped under the door. In New York, you get in their face amd make it known what you want. He didn't understand and he was scared of being deported, since he was in the country illegally. He worked long, hard hours to send money back to his family in Ecuador. He was not a man without compassion or remorse. And now he's going to write his own tragedy as he lives out the rest of his life in jail - all for one stupid, senseless act.

 Ms. Shelly was one of the people I'd put on my fictional dinner party list. She's someone you'd assume would have something interesting to say, about just about any topic that happened into the conversation. I met her once, complimented her on her work, she said "thanks." It was a very busy place and nothing would surprise me more than if she had the slightest recollection of having met me. Guess that makes me a fan. So be it. She's joined the ranks of Kathryn Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Harrison, Sandy Dennis, James Herriot, and a host of others whom I missed getting to know.

 They say that when the death of a person matters to you, you ought to do something about something that mattered to them. If I were a person of wealth and consequence, I might have some hope of doing something like that, but I'm just an ordinary person. It makes me sad that some other ordinary person wasn't there to say "Hey, what're you doing?" when their altercation started to become physical. It wouldn't have been me. I haven't been in New York in thirty years and have no reason to go there. I am reminded of the time, more than twenty years ago now, when my wife and I were in San Francisco and happened to see some young men beating up another young man. My English wife ran down the street toward the affray, yelling at them to stop beating him up. I ran behind her, with my American don't-get-involved reluctance tugging at me. They all ran away and nothing happened. What would have happened if we'd just turned away? Could the boy on the ground getting kicked have pulled a knife and killed one of those other boys? I'll never know, but I was proud of my wife and ashamed at my own reluctance to intervene in something that was so obviously wrong.

 I suppose that's the only way I can do something to honor Ms. Shelley's memory - to keep my eyes and ears open and to fail to turn away. It may never happen that I'll have an occasion to make a difference such as would have saved her life and returned her to her husband and three year old daughter, but in her memory I'll not turn away if it does.

 

[font style="font-style: italic;" size="2"] Sportsdude wrote:
[/font][font style="font-style: italic;" size="2"]Believe it or not all the girls around here want it to be the 50's. They have openly stated that they never want to work and want to have kids by 25.  I think they've been brain washed by the republican party and the catholic church.[/font]

I take it that "all the girls around here" are not themselves in their 70's, which is the requirement for having any real memory or actual knowledge of what being in the 1950's was all about. They may be punch drunk on a fantasy of some other time... kind of like wanting to be alive back in the days of chivalry, but only as a lord or lady, not as a surf.

Being in the 1950's was rather too much like today - vacillating between being bored or scared.  Talk about a cult of mediocrity, but that's too simplistic because a lot of good social legislation and peple's politics got its start in the 1950's.  It wasn't all St Joe McCarthy and Happy Daze.

And as for the Catholic church, they're on record as being in favor of women pursuing occupations of service helping other people - dimetrically opposed to the selfish hedonism of the Republican Party (which, when you're referring to George W's party ought to be capitalized as a proper noun, so as to not be confused with anything as egalitarian as a republic). It's Geogre W's [font size="-1"]Western Hemisphere Institute for Security that is applauding the demise of liberation theology, not the Catholic church, whose preists and bishops were murdered by CIA backed thugs. [/font]  

This is what happens in war, which is why anyone with a shred of common decency or intelligence is against any war and resists it at every opportunity.  

And to the "boys will be boys" guy:  will it be okay with you when it happens to your daughter, your sister, your mother?
 

When I was 14, I did a foreign exchange to East Africa. When I arrived in Nairobi, there were these two blokes arguing over a bottle of Johnny Walker - then they both left and I took it. A couple of days later, my room-mate Alex and I stayed up late and "matched drinks."

We were staying in a older hotel, that had prententions of grandeur. There was a buzzer in every room that allowed you to buzz for room-service at any time. Outside our room's door was a device hung on the wall which displayed the room number that had buzzed for service (on our floor). The attendant would come padding down the hall, read the room number and push it back up and then go to that room number and ask them what they wanted.

About 2 am, we came up with a brilliant plan - we would buzz, go to the box on the wall, push our number up and pull some other room number down.  We thought this was hillarious. Unfortunately, one of the things being drunk does is make you incapable of quitting while you're ahead.

I don't know if it was on our third or fourth turn in the game that the attendant caught us at it and chased us around the floor with a big stick.  They had a big grand staircase - I do not recommend running down one of these when you're drunk.

We did get to the bottom, and we must've been ambulatory because I remember that we went out for steak and eggs.  My last memory from that evening is watching my fork falling in slow motion from the table...

To support the Bush regime, you have to have a sincere belief in Weldpolitik or a significant capacity for suspension of disbelief. People who have conned themselves into believing in Weldpolitik generally deny that they believe in anything - they think they're the supreme realists and consider other folk who believe in ethics to be deluded. Cheny, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc are self-interested, amoral, elistists and are very pragmatic about pursuing expediency over ethics every time. They believe in nothing moral unles you define your morality in terms of personal profit and loss.

  It is interesting that much of their base of support likes to fancy themselves monocular moralists. These are the people in denial. Most have so handicapped themselves intellectually that they are incapable of perceiving the world or responding to it with anything but fear.Carl Rove, the master drover, directs the herd from imaginary fear to imaginary fear, giving them what they expect in doses they can tollerate. They keep to their faith by denying every ideal their Savior believed in. They do what is right by committing sin.

  You can say a lot of things for or against the Christian God, but the Christian Devil is beyond argument a damned clever bastard.

[!-- Begin Summary --]Among the most discreditable practices is "Astroturfing" - a process where a group pays people to create a fake grass-roots movement for or against something. The good folk at Wal-Mart are currently trying to reinvent blogging, transforming it from a free method of information exchange into more advertising. [/p][!-- End Summary --][!-- Begin Body --]What ever happened to honesty? Wasn't it the case, not very long ago, that most people were pretty honest? Of course the meaning of being honest has changed subtly in the past few decades, too, so it's pretty hard to tell. It use to be that if an ordinary person went into a store and was lied to (and found out about it), they'd avoid that store and tell all their friends to avoid that store. Honest people didn't tell lies and didn't put up with people who did. They certainly did not favor them with their custom.[/p]You tell some friend these days that XYZ store lied to you and they're apt to say, "so what?" or "yea, everybody does that" or "but they've got the lowest prices." People have gotten conditioned to being treated like criminals - being scanned at every exit and watched by a thousand cameras. If all the customers are crooks, why should you be surprised when all the store employees are dishonest, too?[/p]The most recent example of systematic dishonesty I've come across is the brainchild of the people who do PR for Wal-Mart. They've discovered the Internet and they've figured out that many people go online and look up other people's opinions about products, stores, and social issues. Some of these opinions are available on consumer assistance sites, while most of the rest appear on an ever increasing landscape of blogs. Most blogs are web sites that contain some person or some group's views, together with public responses to those views. Some are very specifically directed toward something specific, while others pride themselves in ranging all over the cosmos. The PR folks at Wal-Mart are paying people, lots of people, to voice opinions on these blog sites - not their own opinions, naturally, but the corporate opinions of the Wal-Mart leadership.[/p]Go out to any public blog and post something bad about Wal-Mart. True or not, in a few hours or days, you'll find that this opinion has been found and that many people, apparently, disagree. Some people might honestly disagree, but it is impossible to distinguish these actual people from the fakes from Wal-Mart. There is a term for this: astroturfing, which is the attempt to make a fake grass-roots movement for or against something.[/p]Paying people to pretend to support an idea or cause and to argue on its behalf is dishonest. Paying them to also keep the fact that they were paid advocates a secret is also dishonest and ought to be illegal.[/p]Previous to this, there have been other PR shell games, where people were paid to engage other shoppers (or other PR shills) in apparently spontaneous and genuine conversations about products or politics in an effort to influence everyone who heard the conversation. This was proven to be an effective selling technique, when done properly, but it was expensive and tended to read only very small groups. It was also dangerous for the PR folk, who would be attacked by their intended victims whenever they were unmasked.[/p]But through blogspace on the Internet, one clever liar can reach millions of potential shoppers. We've gotten so used to being lied to in advertising. Now companies like Wal-Mart are threatening to pollute a global resource that is of tremendous value to billions of people all over the earth and turn it into another liars carnival.[/p]I don't shop at Wal-Mart for many reasons. This is just one more in a long line of dishonest, depraved, and indecent things Wal-Mart is doing in my world. I wouldn't go in a Wal-Mart for free beer. No honest person should confer their blessings on Wal-Mart's atrocious behavior by spending their money there.[/p][!-- End Body --]

[!-- Begin Summary --]The Patriot Act is an insult and an affront to every American who believes in America as the cradle of freedom, liberty, and equal rights to all under law. This becomes more and more clear every week as the Department of Homeland Security takes more and more to wage war on the rights and human dignity of the American citizen.[/p][!-- End Summary --][!-- Begin Body --]In our consumer-driven materialistic society, what is the best way to guarantee control over people? You control people through their money. The example of a Texas school teacher, as reported in Capital Hill Blue, who attempted to pay down his credit card debt and had his family's assets frozen by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) because their conduct was "questionable." Anyone who sends in a larger than "normal" payment to their creditors is reported to DHS by law and may look forward to the same consequences.[/p]Do you have hay fever? Do you take anything for it? If so, very soon you will need to produce identification at your pharmacy to buy your medicine. Why? Because the DHS is using provisions in the Patriot Act to require your local druggist[/p][ol][li]to demand proof of identity [/li][li]to record your identity and keep it on file [/li][li]to provide those records whenever the government asks for them [/li][/ol]The reason why Homeland Security is requiring druggists to be their unpaid informants? Because drugs are a threat to the nation. I'm no fan of drugs, but I didn't know that the DHS was supposed to be keeping me "safe" from everything. What about the next time I want to go to Canada. If somebody gets sick in Canada, I might be bringing that disease with me. Sounds like a good reason to keep citizens from going abroad. And if I decide to keep some money stuffed in a ma tress, so that in the event that DHS freezes my assets for six months for no reason, my children can eat regularly - that's very suspicious behavior.[/p]This is just exactly how the Nazis worked. They had a small elite force of counter-insurgency specialists, the Gestapo, but they relied on ordinary people to do most of their spying and leg work for them. Did I take a subversive book out of the library? The librarian doesn't want to get into trouble and the law says she must report these things. Does my neighbor do something unusual, something I don't know what he's doing? He might be doing something illegal and if I fail to inform on him I'll be in trouble, too.[/p]If Heinrich Himler could have, he would have has a TV program like "Germany's Most Wanted" on in a heartbeat. As it was, they had patriotic posters on every street corner, reminding people to be good citizens. Complaining about the government interfering in private areas of ordinary peoples' lives made you an enemy of the state because it questioned the right of the state to maintain security. The only thing missing from DHS PR hand outs are art decco eagles flanking idealized portraits of George W Bush.[/p]Apart from all the presumptions that if we didn't have the Patriot Act many more terrorists acts would have been committed, I have yet to see any credible, tangible evidence that the things DHS does have any real effect on a determined terrorist adversary. They've made it horrible to fly anywhere, but they haven't implemented a single restriction on corporate jets. Any self-respecting, moderately well-funded terrorist could fly a plane load of who knows what into any out of hundreds of US airports from abroad and face about the same scrutiny and security as the average foreign tourist could expect in 1955.[/p]Why is this? Because wealth, powerful and influential people take corporate jets and they will get you fired from your cushy job with DHS if you piss them off.[/p]By the time DHS has everybody carrying a federal electronic identity card, which must match your RFID identity chip and match the RFID chips in your clothes and personal effects (matching the list of your kown purchases), it will probably be too late. By that time, we will have given away the structure of our nation to despots, thieves, and liars of every sort. We will then have no alternative than to burn that building down and start afresh from a solid foundation that begins with citizens who not only expect liberty and freedom, but demand it.[/p][!-- End Body --]