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Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns to GLBT teens:
“It gets better.”
“It gets better.”
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Sunday, October 17, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
March of the Penguins, uh, Emperors
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A French TV ad for “March of the Penguins”. In France, the movie is called “March of the Emperors” and it goes from there.
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Thursday, October 7, 2010
Gay Bullying, Gay Marriage & Dan Savage
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[Dan Savage’s Column Reprinted from The Slog]
SL Letter of the Day: Almost Sorry
Posted by Dan Savage on Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 6:42 PM
Letter from L.R.
I was listening to the radio yesterday morning and I heard your interview with Beth McDonald. I have been thinking about it a lot since then and I feel compelled to share my thoughts with you. I was saddened and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bulling. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man that took his own life after being humiliated by people who should have known better. I think you need to be aware of your own prejuduces [sic] and how they might play into your thinking. At best I think your comments were hypocritical.
If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preferance [sic], how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)? There is no part of me that took any pleasure in what happened to that young man and I know for a fact that is true of many other people who disagree with your viewpoint. Please be aware that your words are powerful and people are listening to you.
To that end, to imply that I would somehow encourage my children to mock, hurt, or intimidate another person for any reason is completely unfounded and offensive. Being a follower of Christ is, above all things, a recognition that we are imperfect, fallible and in desperate need of a savior. We cannot believe that we are better or more worthy than other people. I have never in my life know someone who loved the Lord who wished ill will on other people and certainly not death "so that [we] can perpetuate [our own] agenda."
Please consider your viewpoint and please be more careful with your words in the future.
L. R.
Dan Savage’s Reply
I'm sorry your feelings were hurt by my comments.
No, wait. I'm not. Gay kids are dying. So let's try to keep things in perspective: fuck your feelings.
A question: do you support atheist marriage? Interfaith marriage? Divorce and remarriage? All legal, of course, and there's no Christian movement to deny marriage rights to atheists or people marrying outside their respective faiths or to people divorcing and remarrying. Why the hell not?
Being told that they're sinful and that their love offends God, and being told that their relationships are unworthy of the civil right that is marriage (not the religious rite that some people use to solemnize their civil marriages), can eat away at the souls of gay kids. It makes them feel like they're not valued, that their lives are not worth living. And if one of your children is unlucky enough to be gay, the anti-gay bigotry you espouse makes them doubt that their parents truly love them—to say nothing of the gentle "savior" they've heard so much about, a gentle and loving father who will condemn them to hell for the sin of falling in love with the wrong person.
The children of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or at your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. You may only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, but your children have the option of attacking actual real gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.
Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not "sinners." Real gay and lesbian children.
The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from lips of "faithful Christians," and the lies that spew forth from the pulpit of the churches "faithful Christians" drag their kids to on Sundays, give your straight children a license to verbally abuse, humiliate and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your straight children—having listened to mom and dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to the family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry himself to sleep—feel justified in physically attacking the gay and lesbian children they encounter in their schools. You don't have to explicitly "encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate" gay kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It's here, it's clear, and we can see the fruits of it.
Oh, and those same dehumanizing bigotries that fill your straight children with hate? They fill your gay children with suicidal despair. And you have the nerve to ask me to be more careful with my words.
Did that hurt to hear? Good. But hearing it couldn't have hurt nearly as much as what the boys in the photo above had to listen to—day-in, day-out, for years—at schools filled with bigoted little monsters created not in the image of a loving God, but in the images of the hateful and false "followers of Christ" they call "mom and dad."
P.S.: The religious right points to the suicide rate among gay teenagers—which the religious right works so hard to drive up (see above)—as evidence that the gay lifestyle is destructive. It's like intentionally running someone down with your car and then claiming that it isn't safe to walk the streets.
Which is why I argued that every gay teen suicide is a victory for the religious right. Because, you see, your side does use those suicides to "perpetuate [your] agenda." Tony Perkins and all those other oddly effete defenders of "Chrisitian values" and "traditional marriage" will point to this recent spate of gay teen suicides to argue against gay marriage, anti-bullying programs, against allowing gay people to serve in the military—basically, they'll gleefully use these tragedies to justify what they like to call the "Christian, pro-family agenda."
But right now Tony Perkins is being strangely silent. Why is that? Could it be that even Tony Perkins has a conscience? Nah, couldn't be that. He must be away on vacation.
I wonder who's lifting his luggage. [Ed. Note: click on hyperlink for the current usage of that term]
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Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Avoid These Office Buzzwords – Please!
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In Transition
A change from one state of being to another; recession variation: collecting unemployment compensation. Example: "Since the downsizing, I've been in transition." Synonym: doing some consulting.
Brand
Put a good face on. Example: "Okay, so we polluted the groundwater by failing to follow those finicky safety regulations. How should we brand it?"
Space
Industry or field. Example: "I'm in the manufacturing space," "I'm in the waste disposal space," "She's in the adult film space," or "He's in the space exploration space."
Go Offline
Pester me about this after the meeting — or preferably never. "Jones, could we go offline to discuss the $10 underpayment of your expense account reimbursement?"
End of the Day
Formerly 5 to 5:30 p.m., now defined as an uncertain point in the future when everything magically turns out okay. Example. "At the end of the day, the pollution in the groundwater may just drain into the earth's core and become unnoticeable."
Transparent
Open about the facts, but not to be confused with honest. Example: "We've been totally transparent about the 15% fee; we disclosed it on page 37."
Can't Wrap One's Head Around
Unwilling to get into the details or deal with the facts; intellectually lazy. Example: "I can't wrap my head around all this recycling business; Let's throw everything in the dumpster behind Home Depot and let them deal with it."
Bandwidth
Money, staff, computing capacity or other resources. Example: "She lacks the bandwidth to compute compound interest."
KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
Important measurements, usually of the immeasurable. Example: "The American Psychological Association recently established KPIs for marriage: the weekly incidence of sexual intercourse plus the number of hours spent watching the same TV shows, minus total minutes bickering over the proper loading of the dishwasher."
Low-Hanging Fruit
Easy to get, though in the end, often not worth the effort. Example: The Taliban might be low-hanging fruit for our production overrun of beard combs."
Human Capital
Human Resources, previously Personnel. Example: "Human Capital is on the fifth floor."
Skill Set or Fit
Qualifications, generally modified by the words "wrong" or "bad," and most often used by Human Capital staffers as an excuse for not hiring somebody. Example: "His inability to speak in tongues obviously makes his skill set wrong for the litigator position."
Knowledge Economy
An environment in which a person has run up $150,000 in student loans to pay for a law degree only to see jobs exported to India whose citizens are apparently very knowledgeable about the U.S. legal system. Example: "The best job in the knowledge economy is plumbing because nobody with an advanced degree knows how to use Drano."
Throughput
Not your conclusions, but the mind-numbing numbers and facts you chewed over to get there; information generally demanded by a micro-manager who won't believe that you did the work. Example: "Don't tell me what you've decided about the Taliban beard-comb project; I just want your throughput."
Footprint
Impact, formerly ecological, but now applicable to anything. Example: "Auntie Meg's rear end had a significant footprint on our sofa."
Impactful
Having a large footprint. Example: "Auntie Meg's rear end had a very impactful effect on our sofa."
Two of my favorite bits of jargon come from a reader in the U.K. who says he made them up. The first: is "failure cascade", which he defines as a "sequence of bad stuff happening." An example might be: "The knowledge economy seems to be in a failure cascade." "Bus factor," he says, is a measure of how much the company would suffer if person X got hit by a bus. Example: "Billy has a really high bus factor." He reports that both phrases seem to be catching on.
Such inventiveness should be an inspiration to us all. If you don't love the gobbledygook you're with, then create some gobbledygook you'd like.
***
Sunday, September 12, 2010
What America Stands For – 2 Muslims Travel Across America
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[Reprinted from CNN Living – “In America”]
2 Muslims travel 13,000 miles across America, find an embracing nation
By Wayne Drash, CNN
September 10, 2010 3:21 p.m. EDT
(CNN) -- The blue Chevy Cobalt broke down amid the mountains of Montana in an area where there was no cell phone reception. The Muslims in the car, on a cross-country journey for the holy month of Ramadan, approached a bushy-bearded fisherman.
It would be another test of a question they wondered when they first set off from New York three weeks earlier: Is America still the accepting nation that embraced our forebears or has it reached a new level of intolerance?
Far from the media frenzy dominating headlines, from the so-called "ground zero mosque" to a pastor's planned Quran burning, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq traveled more than 13,000 miles into the heart of America over the last month, visiting 30 mosques in 30 days for Ramadan.
They began in New York, headed south and then cut across the country to California before making their way back, ending today in Michigan in the nation's largest Muslim community.
The fisherman in Montana became the embodiment of their trip -- Ali and Tariq were embraced nearly everywhere they went, from a Confederate souvenir shop in Georgia to the streets of Las Vegas, Nevada, to the hills of North Dakota where the nation's first mosque was built in 1929.
Like any road trip, there were strange moments along the way: A Mississippi police officer quizzed them about their beliefs on the ground zero mosque and they were asked to leave a mosque in Mobile, Alabama.
They chuckle about those experiences now and emphasize it shouldn't overshadow the whole trip because, ultimately, they discovered that America still embraces immigrants and the nation is filled with welcoming and loving people.
"After 13,000 miles, I think that America still exists, and I'm happy to know that it does," said Tariq, a 23-year-old American of Pakistani descent. "It's really made America feel like home to me in a way that I've never felt before. The America that we think about [as immigrants] is still actually there. I've seen it! And I'm seeing it still."
When he approached the fisherman after their car broke down, Tariq says, he didn't know how he'd be received. He asked if he could hitch a ride to town and the fisherman "happily does it." When the man asked Tariq what he was doing in Montana, he told him about their 30 mosques journey.
"And he doesn't flinch and doesn't get worried," Tariq said. "For me, it was like, 'Wow! That America still exists.' "
He had a similar experience among Bosnian Muslims in Boise, Idaho, where it took 12 years for the community to build a mosque there "with their bare hands." He saw one man cry on entering the mosque. An elderly couple hugged each other when they walked inside.
"It means so much to these people who've been displaced from their own country, and they come here to this place of worship," he said. "That, to me, is really what this country is about."
For Ali, his favorite moment was Ross, North Dakota, a blip of a town with a population of 48 people. He knew little of the town's rich Muslim history, and it was difficult to try to find someone in the town who did.
A pastor directed them to a woman, who kindly pointed them down a dirt road to where the nation's first mosque once stood. It's no longer there. It's been replaced by a tiny cement block mosque, complete with a gold dome. Nearby, there's a cemetery marking the pioneering Muslims of America, with birth dates of 1882, 1904, 1931.
Ali stood in awe. As he approached the mosque, his heart pounded. "I knew our roots went deep in this country, but it was great to truly experience it. Praying in there was like hopping in a time machine," said Ali, a 25-year-old Muslim who was born in Columbus, Ohio. "I literally felt like I was plummeting and falling."
His takeaway from the trip, he says, was seeing how Muslims in America have assimilated in their communities, from Jacksonville, Florida, to Wichita, Kansas, to Oklahoma City.
"It was really cool and refreshing to see people who genuinely love the communities they're in and they're there to stay," Ali said. "They're involved in the community, not just the mosque."
It was also remarkable to have people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, "just bend over backwards and be friendly to us," he said.
Tariq said their blog also helps the rest of America realize "you have to accept Muslims are here in America to stay, and we've been here for awhile. Even the most bigoted person has to accept that."
As for what's next for the young men, they plan to celebrate Eid with their Muslim brethren in Dearborn, Michigan -- happy to have discovered an America that still embraces them, even if that's not always portrayed in the news media.
"It's a small but vocal group of Americans in this country pushing this anti-Muslim rhetoric," Ali said. "And unfortunately in our society, whomever shouts the loudest is going to get the most air time."
Excerpted from 2 Muslims travel 13,000 miles across America, find an embracing nation - CNN.com
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Monday, September 6, 2010
Labor Day – 1882-2010
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The first celebration of Labor Day was observed in 1882 in New York City
“Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936
"The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.
Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live."
Excerpted from FDR’s 1936 Democratic convention speech.
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Off the Cuff – 9/6/10
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The Thumb & Pinky Phone
Turn your hand sideways folding your index, middle & ring fingers, leaving your thumb and pinky up. Voila! You have a prop to illustrate your tale of a phone call. You see – those of us listening to your tale have no idea what it means to call someone on the phone, needing that prop to understand.
OK really – do we not know what you mean when you say you called someone? Do we really need that hand prop? I don’t think so. Stop doing that!
Paying for Fire & Police Services
A growing trend among municipalities trying to close budget gaps is to double charge citizens for police & fire services. Not only do you pay taxes to fund emergency services, but you may well receive a bill from the town for the cost of responding to your emergency. No citizen can customize the size of the emergency response so no matter the resources sent to your aid you’re stuck with the bill. Some fire and auto insurance policies will cover those bills, but if they don’t it comes out of your pocket. Hard to believe? Check out this article from the NY Times:
More Tired, Trendy Clichés
Let’s drill down on that as, at the end of the day, we have to take it one game at a time. Enough drilling down and we’ll be in China
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