I'm really hung up on this song right now. 100% RIAA free. Fuck the RIAA. Video below.
UPDATE: After listening to the whole album, there is this really nice link to Everything but the Girl, and some other very familiar sounds. It is great listening and very good as a soundtrack to work. The remake of Dust in the Wind (original here) is especially nice.
I've recently found another podcast I love, love, love. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is dedicated to refuting the massive amounts of bad science and pseudo-science in the world. The most recent podcast has a great debunking of Sylvia Browne, a psychic who my mother found interest in in the 80s.
I'm right now going back into the archives on iTunes to see what they say about UFOs. I'm sure that somethign is happening, but the proof has never been there. I want to see what they put together as an argument against UFOs and how they might consider proof to be valid. I'll also look into their global warming topics, as I'd like to see how they address some of the data. Listen to them and see what they say.
Some debunkings:
- Enviga doesn't make you lose weight.
- Sylvia Brown is a thief.
- Jesus was not found.
UPDATE: Al Gore's movie pissed me off because of it's over-dramatization and overbearing charts. I've been looking through the podcasts to see what they had to say about his movie to convince me he might have been nearly right. I found it in a great interview with Spencer Weart, author of The Discovery of Global Warming in January (Episode #77). In it, he breaks down the claims of climate change deniers, presents data and discusses "An Inconvenient Truth". The interview starts at about 35:45 and is worth your time. Really.
Also check out the site Real Climate.
J
Enjoy.
I'm having a hard time finding the published source for this. I'll update when I do.
Why do straights hate gays?
An aging 72-year-old gay man isn't hopeful about the future.
By Larry Kramer, LARRY KRAMER is the founder of the protest group ACT UP and the author of "The Tragedy of Today's Gays." March 20, 2007
DEAR STRAIGHT PEOPLE,
Why do you hate gay people so much?
Gays are hated. Prove me wrong. Your top general just called us immoral. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is in charge of an estimated 65,000 gay and lesbian troops, some fighting for our country in Iraq. A right-wing political commentator, Ann Coulter, gets away with calling a straight presidential candidate a faggot. Even Garrison Keillor, of all people, is making really tacky jokes about gay parents in his column This, I guess, does not qualify as hate except that it is so distasteful and dumb, often a first step on the way to hate. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama tried to duck the questions that Pace's bigotry raised, confirming what gay people know: that there is not one candidate running for public office anywhere who dares to come right out, unequivocally, and say decent, supportive things about us.
Gays should not vote for any of them. There is not a candidate or major public figure who would not sell gays down the river. We have seen this time after time, even from supposedly progressive politicians such as President Clinton with his "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military and his support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act. Of course, it's possible that being shunned by gays will make politicians more popular, but at least we will have our self-respect. To vote for them is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us.
Don't any of you wonder why heterosexuals treat gays so brutally year after year after year, as your people take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood? Why, even as we die you don't leave us alone. What we can leave our surviving lovers is taxed far more punitively than what you leave your (legal) surviving spouses. Why do you do this? My lover will be unable to afford to live in the house we have made for each other over our lifetime together. This does not happen to you. Taxation without representation is what led to the Revolutionary War. Gay people have paid all the taxes you have. But you have equality, and we don't.
And there's no sign that this situation will change anytime soon. President Bush will leave a legacy of hate for us that will take many decades to cleanse. He has packed virtually every court and every civil service position in the land with people who don't like us. So, even with the most tolerant of new presidents, gays will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate. Courts rule against gays with hateful regularity. And of course the Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality, and in the end, it is from the Supreme Court that such equality must come. If all of this is not hate, I do not know what hate is.
Our feeble gay movement confines most of its demands to marriage. But political candidates are not talking about ‹ and we are not demanding that they talk about ‹ equality. My lover and I don't want to get married just yet, but we sure want to be equal.
You must know that gays get beaten up all the time, all over the world. If someone beats you up because of who you are ‹ your race or ethnic origin ‹ that is considered a hate crime. But in most states, gays are not included in hate crime measures, and Congress has refused to include us in a federal act.
Homosexuality is a punishable crime in a zillion countries, as is any activism on behalf of it. Punishable means prison. Punishable means death. The U.S. government refused our requests that it protest after gay teenagers were hanged in Iran, but it protests many other foreign cruelties. Who cares if a faggot dies? Parts of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. are joining with the Nigerian archbishop, who believes gays should be put in prison. Episcopalians! Whoever thought we'd have to worry about Episcopalians?
Well, whoever thought we'd have to worry about Florida? A young gay man was just killed in Florida because of his sexual orientation. I get reports of gays slain in our country every week. Few of them make news. Fewer are prosecuted. Do you consider it acceptable that 20,000 Christian youths make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls? This is not free peech. This is another version of hate. It is all one world of gay-hate. It always was.
Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated. Don't those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce the hate? Why is it socially acceptable to joke about "girlie men" or to discriminate against us legally with "constitutional" amendments banning gay marriage? Because we cannot marry, we can pass on only a fraction of our estates, we do not have equal parenting rights and we cannot live with a foreigner we love who does not have government permission to stay in this country. These are the equal protections that the Bill of Rights proclaims for all?
Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love? I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don't see much change
coming.
I think your hate is evil.
What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim.
And even if your objections to gays are religious, why do you have to legislate them so hatefully? Make no mistake: Forbidding gay people to love or marry is based on hate, pure and simple.
You may say you don't hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what's the difference? Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you.
More: Larry Kramer's Cooper Union Speech Nov. 2004
Dan Savage's Response to Garison Keillor's recent statements
Got this in an e-mail today. Yet another moment where it is clear that society hates little girls. Hates them. And their happiness.
Christians crusade against cancer vaccine
Activists don't want girls inoculated against HPV because they want sex to remain as scary as possible.
By Bill Maher
March 2, 2007
New Rule: If you don't think your daughter getting cancer is worse than your daughter having sex, then you're doing it wrong. Last year, science came up with a way to greatly reduce cervical cancer in young women. It's a vaccine that prevents women from getting HPV, which is a sexually transmitted disease that acts as a gateway to the cancer. And the vaccine is so good, it could wipe out HPV. I keep a stockpile near my hot tub, and I can tell you, that tingling sensation means it's really working. And I'd say that even without the endorsement deal.
Now for the bad news: Not everyone is pleased with this vaccine. That prevents cancer. Christian parent groups and churches nationwide are fighting it. Bridget Maher -- no relation, and none planned -- of the Family Research Council says giving girls the vaccine is bad, because the girls "may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."
Which is really a stretch. People don't get the vaccine for typhoid and say, "Great, now I can drink the sewer water in Bombay." It's like saying if you give a kid a tetanus shot she'll want to jab rusty nails in her feet. It's like being against a cure for blindness because it'll encourage masturbation. It's like being for salmonella poisoning in peanut butter because it'll discourage weirdos from spreading it on their ass and calling the dog.
And yet, the anti-vaccine folks seem to think that if a teenage girl feels a little prick, she's gonna want to feel a whole lot more. But HPV shots don't cause promiscuity. Tequila shots do. Everything your kids buy is sold to them with sex. The vaccine doesn't make them want to screw: MTV does. And hormones. And having moron parents they want to escape from. Hey, when you're 15 years old, breathing encourages sexual activity.
But let's be frank: These Christian groups aren't just against the HPV shot; they're against family planning and condoms and morning after pills -- they want to make sure sex is as dangerous as possible, so that kids know, if they sleep around and get an STD, that's God teaching them a lesson. And the lesson is, you should never have tried out for "American Idol" in the first place.
There's only one kind of medical science that excites Christians, and that's anything that proves life begins earlier and earlier in the womb. If you could use stem cells to prove that life begins at foreplay, the pope would turn the Vatican into a lab. These people don't really want to see a cure for anything, except homosexuality.
But as a parent, if you're so obsessed with abstinence you'd risk your kid's health, there's a word for what you are, but it's not "follower of Christ." It's not "moral." It's not "Christian." It's not even "logical." So just admit it. You hate sex. It's OK to say you hate for the sake of hating. It hasn't hurt Dick Cheney.
I hate to tell you this, Mrs. Maher, and anyone else who thinks a vaccine gives your girls a "license to have sex": Your daughter knows she doesn't need a license for sex. She's already on the Internet exchanging bondage fantasies with a German boy she met on MySpace. Forget HPV; she's already on to S/M. We all know, there's only one 100 percent proven method to make a woman abstinent -- marry her.
I've received three e-mails from palm in the last five days (Get off me back, Palm!) telling me I need to update my Treo software because of daylight savings time changing. Fortunately, I pad my weekends with enough fuck-off time that the only thing that I could mess up, is my scheduled game of "Where did that sock come from?" with the cat.
I'm going to be watching this closely tomorrow AM and Monday. There could be some pretty funny screw-ups tomorrow and THEN AGAIN on the traditional DST change day which is...ummm...later.
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