silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
[personal profile] silveradept
It is an interesting world, one where conservation of land efforts intentionally displace native people from living on their ancestral lands, which seems rather counterintuitive.

But we also have a selection of the beautiful pictures entered in National Geographic's International Phtography Contest for this year, a little MAD-style folding work on New Moon's male stars, a picture of a crescent Terra from a departing spacecraft, One hundred photographs of one hundred apartments that are exactly one hundred square feet in size, and, of course, the circus of disemboweled plush toys.

On the international stage, heterosexual couple denied civil partnership, because the law only lets homosexuals get civil partnerships. Heterosexuals have to get married. The couple said they didn’t want to get married, though, because marriage discriminates against homosexuals. Hopefully, what follows from his point is the sensible position that “all unions will become civil unions, and marriage is just an additional religious component that people can choose to opt into.”

Just because tensions can’t drop because of harvest festivals, a report indicating Iran has begun war games intended at protecting its nuclear facilities against outside attack.

Domestically, Utah Senator Buttars makes a very specific choice of phrasing when talking about his support for some rights for homosexuals - "But I don't want 'em stuffing it down my throat all the time. Certainly not in my kid's face.". The Senator is okay with nondiscrimination from landlords, but is against letting homosexuals adopt, marry, and has previously called homosexuals a threat to the foundation of American society. This is either another example of a Freudian slip or a deliberate choice of wording intended to stoke the fears of the homophobic populace.

There has to be more to the following story than Fox is reporting. According to their headline, Navy SEALs are being prosecuted for assault charges in realtion to the capture of a terror suspect. Fox is spinning it as “the SEALs gave the dirty rotten terrorist maybe one hit in the gut and now they have assault charges, how absurd is that?” I doubt, somehow, that that’s all there is to it.

Four men in Philadelphia were arraigned on charges they were plotting to support Hezbollah, the Lebanese terror group, through the purchase and funneling of weapons.

And last, of course, the approval ratings fall because the President has not made serious progress on any of his key issues, as well as suffering the constant negative rating that an opposition party gives.

Into the opinions, where we start with the Newsweek cover that Sarah Palin thinks is sexist, despite it being her own image provided, and with context of another hyper-gender-role picture of a male politician to show just how similar the two really are. (Scary.) Also, Mr. Taibbi reminds the viewing populace that the media takes a lot of roles upon itself unbidden, and that Sarah Palin is not really different than anyone else the media bosses have decided isn't a serious candidate. It just happens to be that she’s getting it from everywhere.

Returning to matters of The Gay, Star Parker tries to hide it in her critique of Washington D.C., but can't resist claiming that D.C.'s high HIV infection rate is due to homosexual sex, and that the measure to let homosexuals marry would be pouring gasoline on that fire. She also makes false equivalencies that the D.C. people care more about “moral relevance” than in feeding and caring for the children, because D.C. didn’t immediately fall down on their knees and beg for forgiveness when the Catholic diocese threatened to stop supporting social services if D.C. let homosexuals marry. If the city can redistribute the slack left behind to other agencies, then they don’t have to care when someone throws a tantrum about an issue unrelated to the providing for children’s physical welfare. Argue what you like (and Ms. Parker does) abnout the necessity of raising children in your preferred moral environment, but homosexual marriage should have nothing at all to do with either the spread of HIV/AIDS or with social service welfare. Unsafe sex practices are the primary transmitter of HIV/AIDS, regardless of the orientation of the people involved, and the government officially doesn’t give a rat’s ass what religion you are, so long as you adhere to their nondiscrimination guidelines. If you can’t, then you shouldn’t be participating. Start your own social services, if you like, so that you can cater to your preferred clientele and morality, but keep your hands out of the government coffers.

Fruthermore, the Slacktivist on yet another supposed Christian entertaining paranoid fantasies of stormtroopers for The Gay invading churches, despite the clear evil involved in doing so, and how it lets the victimizers beleive they are victims instead.

More on letting batterers feel like they are the battered comes from Ms. Joyce's analysis of how scarily effective "men's rights" groups, those that claim men are as abused as women and that women and feminists have manipulated the system to favor and automatically believe them, have become, mostly because they’ve started dressing in sheep’s clothing. The tactics fo the groups, though, resembles those of the abusers - downplay the numbers, claim the violence is mutual, and leave a threat of more violence hanging if their demands aren’t met.

Polenth, a mushroom, tells us of an experiment in psychology where people fill in gaps in a cultural story with schema from their own culture. Thus, when writing for multicultural audiences, or writing multicultural characters, there should be an editing pass to make sure that your culture hasn’t filled gaps, instead of figuring out how the other culture would actually do something.

Cathy Young looks at the difficulty of making sure warning signs of violence are taken seriously, without descending into a "ban all X" response, the fine line between common sense and overt prejudice, of which Mr. Gerecht thinks we're not even to common sense because we're too afraid of hitting the prejudice line.

Greta Christina expands discussions of religion into a discussion of why all religion is harmful to adherents and to bystanders - no reality check, and in fact, several mechanisms that actively discourage reality checks.

On things requiring different amoutns of belief, The WSJ does not like a bill that would reqrite the authoritiy of the government to let federal agencies provide unlimited amounts of bailout dollars to anyone in an emergency.

Last out, though, Mr. Lomborg suggests a better way to spend money is not on climate change carbon cuts and the like, but in infrastructure that will allow people to withstand the changing climate we have, especially in poor places. He does have a persuasive argument about efficacy. Hopefully, though, that won’t translate into, “Well, we have our domes that can withstand the storm. Why do we need to worry about the carbon amount?”

In technology, science making two good engines out of four bad ones, letting a probe mission continue its journey back to Terra, pictures from a robot exhibition in Japan, the possibility that cigarette smoking near a Mac voids the warranty by creating and exposing it to a biohazard, spherical solar cells, a protoype solar powered device that intends to convert waste carbon dioxide back into fuel hydrocarbons, isolating a mechanism that lets us focus and filter out distractions by tuning our brainwaves to a certain frequency, and a retrospective on hwo science fiction and technology have inspired each other throughout the years.

Last for tonight, unfortunate names, to make you like yours, and a great visual map of the pros and cons of credit versus debit cards, and proof that making vulgar and obscene poetry is not the province of anyone even remotely modern. But any classical cultures student could tell you that just from the graffiti.
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silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
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