Current Events

Juliet and Juliet

Apparently, Boston’s famous swan couple are a same-sex couple. Testing recently revealed that the swans who have been promoted by the city as a Shakespearean romantic dream are actually both female. How very appropriate. This, however, is not:

”Each year when the swans go in, the kids immediately come to us and say, ‘Which one’s Romeo, and which one’s Juliet?’ ” parks spokeswoman Mary Hines said yesterday in response to a Globe inquiry. ”It’s just like one of those fairy tales; why spoil it?”

How offensive that the idea that a romantic pair of female swans would be considered “spoiled.” Nice.

Continue ReadingJuliet and Juliet

Gender Roles

There are lots of things that I like that are traditionally considered feminine. For example: big poofy white wedding dresses. There are lots of things of things that I like that are traditionally considered masculine. Like pipe tobacco smoke (which is because I have memories of my dad smoking a pipe when I was a really little kid and he played with us a lot).

I don’t reject wearing things, or decorating my house with them, because they fit one gender role or another. I simply don’t care about gender roles; if I like something, I wear it, regardless of whether it fits with society’s conventions or not. I intend to get married in a big poofy wedding dress, and if that doesn’t fit with your image of me, then you don’t know me very well.

So when it comes to the subject of purses: I just don’t like the way they look. I don’t carry one because it’s a visual that I don’t like, regardless of what the gender role of it is. If I carry a purse, I look like an old lady, or a soccer mom, which has a lot to do with the purse in conjunction with the size of my butt. It just doesn’t look right on me.

Continue ReadingGender Roles

21 Bush Admin Officials who should see criminal charges

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Politics

An excellent article on the 21 white house officials who were involved in the illegal leaking of a CIA agent’s identity to the public, and the details of how they were involved. If you want to sort out the details and see who this generations version of “The Watergate 5” are, here’s your article.

Continue Reading21 Bush Admin Officials who should see criminal charges

“Outing” Revisited

Way back in March of 1998, I wrote a long article/essay/diatribe on the subject of “outing” people. Reading it today, I realize it wasn’t as much about “outing” people as it was about complaining about prevalence of opportunistic gay people who stay in the closet to prey on people who are out while avoiding the stigma of being gay, rather than about the action of “outing” itself.

The subject of “outing” has come up recently in the local gay community, surrounding the issue of Prop 68, the city’s human rights ordinance. It seems that there is some evidence that one of the city-county councilors who voted against the measure is gay or has a history of gay behavior, and none-other than State Rep. Julia Carson herself threatened publicly to “out” him as a hypocrite because he didn’t support it.

The suggestion has caused huge debate within the gay community; see bilerico.com for some of the discussion on the issue. It even has the religious right’s panties in a bunch; Micah Clark from the AFA sent out an email to his kool-aid drinkers where he was all in a tizzy about it.

Here’s my take: If you truly believe there’s nothing wrong with being gay, then revealing someone as gay shouldn’t be wrong, should it? If there’s nothing wrong with me having blue eyes, then why would you be hesitant/bothered/ashamed to talk about my blue eyes with other people? You don’t see black people running around worried about whether to reveal other black people as black, do you?

I thought not.

Continue Reading“Outing” Revisited

“Fair” Tax is only fair to the Rich

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Politics

Read this great threat at TMPCafe for information about why — including the most enlightening comments. Also, for all Democrats who desperately need to brush up on this issue before the GOP blitz, here’s a great site: TaxWisdom.org

Paper towels: One roll for 99 cents, 3 for $2.50. If you can buy three rolls right now, you get 50% off the third roll. If you only have money for one roll, you don’t get that discount.
Credit: The less you need the credit, the less of a risk you are to the lender. Say you keep a credit card “for emergencies.” Say you’re honest about that, you really don’t buy dinner out on the thing, you really don’t even use it. A poor person can expect, of course, to pay a higher interest rate on carried balances. But, also… they can expect to pay a $6 a month “membership fee” or some such nonsense.
Services you don’t think about: Say you’re well off, you bought a new car recently, and it breaks. It’s got a warranty. You take it the dealer. The apologize profusely. They fix the thing. While they’re fixing it, they get you a rental car. You’re a AAA member and AAA gave you a free tow to the garage. You’re inconvenienced, but not out much but time. Same thing happens to a poorer person: You drive a used car, no warranty. Nobody comps you a rental car. There’s no spare car at home for you to use. You just shelled out for a tow. Maybe, you’ll pay extra for a rush job on your car, you need it to get to work. Oh, did I mention it’s a used car? The mechanic says he hasn’t seen one like this in awhile. And that means he needs to order parts….

and this

A consumption tax creates an incentive to save. This is generally good, but what happens when the wealthy actually start saving more? Tax receipts drop (at least temporarily). So how does the government meet it’s obligations? Either it borrows more (god forbid) or it raises taxes. And who pays the raised taxes under a consumption tax? People who are spending–i.e., the people living paycheck to paycheck. For all the theoretical reasons a consumption tax might be good, I think in practice it will simply result in the tax burden being transfered to the poor.

Continue Reading“Fair” Tax is only fair to the Rich

Money better spent

A great New York Times op/ed piece on how bottled water is not really better for you, and how it’s an enormous waste of money and natural resources. Here’s the real kicker, though:

Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.
More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world’s population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.

Let me point out that not only could the cost of clean water be easily covered by not buying bottled water… but we’ve spent upwards of 300 billion dollars in Iraq. That’s almost 30 times what it would cost to make sure every human on earth had clean water, eliminating 80 of all the illnesses in the world.
That’s what we could have done with the money we’ve spent killing people in an illegal, unethical, pointless war.
What else could we have done with that money? Heck, for $46 billion, we could give every American health care insurance. And technically, it wouldn’t even cost that, because once all Americans were insured, the insurance overhead and medical administrative costs would go down.

Continue ReadingMoney better spent

Secret Societies

I’m in the middle of reading:
Secret Societies Handbook
by Michael Bradley
A History of Secret Societies
by Arkon Daraul
And I’m fascinated, especially by the Handbook, because it lists the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome and the Council on Foreign Relations; all are real groups that seem to have major influence on world events. Which makes me glad that Wikipedia has a whole section for secret societies.

Continue ReadingSecret Societies