Politics

Drinking Liberally: Indianapolis

Great idea — Drinking Liberally: “An informal, inclusive progressive drinking club. Raise your spirits while you raise your glass, and share ideas while you share a pitcher. Drinking Liberally gives like-minded, left-leaning individuals a place to talk politics. You don’t need to be a policy expert and this isn’t a book club – just come and learn from peers, trade jokes, vent frustration and hang out in an environment where it’s not taboo to talk politics.”
Indianapolis has a chapter, with an email mailing list and forums. I signed up, and I’ll be going once we get the house squared away.

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Video Game encouraging killing gay people

A description of the new “Left Behind” video game, based on the series of books, the game will be release in October 0f 2006, just in time for Christmas. The synopsis is from the “Talk to Action” website. The game has been previewed at video game exhibitions.

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.

If the purpose of your life is to kill or convert me, you’re in for a very short and unhappy existence, people.

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What the NSA Data Mining really means

Graphpaper.com has an interesting series of articles on what the real implications of the NSA datamining program really are for average Americans and their privacy and freedom from government abuse. The polls are showing that people seem unconcerned about data mining — until they actually have data mining explained to them, and they start to realize exactly how vulnerable to abuse they are as a result.

NSA Data Mining 1: If you aren’t against it, then you don’t really understand it.

NSA Data Mining 2: So you think you have nothing to hide?
NSA Data Mining 3: Wiretaps? Maybe not. Stakeouts? Definitely.

NSA Data Mining 4: Total Information Awareness, Resurrected
One of the major points he illustrates is that even if you’re innocent, you can get caught up in a government investigation if anyone arround you is suspicious — and he’s got some social networking charts to show you exactly what that could mean.

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Gay People in Iraq sentenced to Death

From the Times Online UK:

THE death threat was delivered to Karazan’s father early in the morning by a masked man wearing a police uniform.
The scribbled note was brief. Karazan had to die because he was gay. In the new Baghdad, his sexuality warranted execution by the religious militias.
The father was told that if he did not hand his son over, other family members would be killed.
What scares the city’s residents is how the fanatics’ list of enemies is growing. It includes girls who refuse to cover their hair, boys who wear theirs too long, booksellers, liberal professors and prostitutes. Three shops known to sell alcohol were bombed yesterday in the Karrada shopping district.
In this atmosphere of intolerance and intimidation, the militias have made no secret of their hatred of homosexuals.

This is what we started a war to promote? This is our vision of a free Iraq?

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The Handmaid’s Tale springs to life?

According to the Washington Post:

Forever Pregnant
Guidelines: Treat Nearly All Women as Pre-Pregnant
New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves — and to be treated by the health care system — as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.
Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

Combine that with this information from the New York Times:

Wider Use of DNA Lists Is Urged in Fighting Crime
The F.B.I.’s DNA database can now be searched only for exact matches to DNA found at crime scenes. But with slight modifications, it could be searched for close relatives of whoever left the DNA.
“Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual to the family,” the scientists, Frederick R. Bieber and David Lazer, say in an article in today’s issue of Science.

And then there’s this interesting information about the company providing data-mining to the Federal Goverment:

The leader in the field of what is called “data mining,” is a company, formed in 1997, called, “ChoicePoint, Inc,” which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans — and I know they’ve expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
…
The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds — but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was “the number one” provider of DNA info to the FBI.

All I can say is, you’re on some dangerous ground, Federal Government.

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Adoption

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Salon has an interesting article on a new book about women who gave up their children for adoption prior to Roe V. Wade: Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

Spirited away under the pretense of an illness or a family vacation, the women — many of them teenagers — spent their pregnancies away from home and gave birth among strangers. While the maternity homes were billed as a quiet place for women to reflect on their futures, when it came time to sign adoption papers, most of the women Fessler interviewed said they felt intense pressure to relinquish their children. Persuaded by social workers who said they would never be able to provide as well for their babies as a stable couple would, ostracized by families who were shocked by their behavior, and insecure about their own strength and intelligence, most women did as they were told and tried to forget.
Decades later, though, the mothers say the repercussions of those decisions are still being felt, as they struggle with depression, fight to find their lost children, and make peace with their past.

Fascinating. I know I have a cousin out somewhere in the world that I don’t know.
This is the part I think is really interesting, and particularly relevant, given that the religious right is trying to force us back into the dark ages by stamping out birth control, limiting sex education and eliminating abortions:

The second myth was that during the time period the book covers, anyone who got pregnant and sent away was considered a slut. It was an extremely hypocritical time sexually, because by the end of the 1960s something like 68 percent of women were having sex before age 20, but everybody lied about it. So all the girls who were having sex but didn’t get caught could claim they were virgins, but the ones who got pregnant couldn’t deny what they had done. So it was assumed they were either promiscuous or more sexually advanced than their peers, when most weren’t. It turns out, actually, that among the women I interviewed, most became pregnant with their first sexual partner, some with their very first sexual experience, and many within only five sexual experiences. So most likely they got pregnant not because they were promiscuous, but because they were naive. They didn’t know anything about sex; some didn’t even know how babies were born. People just didn’t talk about sex during the era; there was no sexual education, and in some families it simply never came up.

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The NSA has your phone records

I’m sure you’ve heard the news, but in case you haven’t — as USA Today and hundreds of other media outlets are reporting, several major phone companies, including AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, turned over all of their customer phone records to the NSA — affecting tens of millions of Americans.
They turned over ALL their records — not just records of people who had contact with terrorists. They turned over your records. They turned over mine. The government has a massive database of all of your phone calls.
And the bullshit response they’re coming out with about why this is all okay is that they’re not actually tapping anyone’s phones (that we know of) but just looking at who you made calls to and who you received calls from. So, yeah, that’s supposed to be alright.
Um, no. Who I call and who calls me is NONE OF THE GOVERMENT’S F$%#ING BUSINESS.
If this is not a clear message to you that our government is out of control, and we need to clean house in both congress and the White House, then you’re either not paying attention, or you just to sad for words.

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Alabama needs better sex ed classes. Seriously.

The website goodasyou.com pointed out an anti-gay “sex-ed” (no actual education included) pamphlet distributed by an Alabama Middle School that has a quote that literally made me snort soda out of my nose a few minutes ago.

These same sex “unions” cannot provide an adequate means of achieving a genuine physical relationship with another human being because this type of “union” is contrary to the laws of nature. There can be no real union because same sex bodies do not even fit together.

Somebody seems to have a lack of imagination, there. Apparently, they’ve never read my post on intelligent design, or they’d know better than that.

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Julia Carson and Fall Creek Place

I can’t believe that I forgot, in my endorsement of Julia Carson, to mention her involvement with developing Fall Creek Place neighborhood — the now thriving neighborhood just north of mine, that is the threshold of an urban renaissance for downtown Indianapolis. Julia was instrumental not only in getting the federal funding to revitalized the neighborhood of Fall Creek Place, but in ensuring that the subsidies went to people of a variety of incomes — that the neighborhood would be affordable to the people who already lived there, and not just to the wealthy people who wanted to move into historic neighborhoods downtown.

Drive down Pennsylvania Street today, and you’ll see row after row of beautifully designed houses in keeping with the character of the original neighborhood. And you see the people living in those houses and walking their dogs and children on the streets, are from a diverse set of cultures and backgrounds. For those of us who live in nearby neighborhoods downtown, the change to our own areas as a result has been breathtaking as well.

You have both Julia Carson and Bart Peterson to thank for that.

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