Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2010-12-14 07:46 am
silveradept) wrote2010-12-14 07:46 am
That other amount of data - 11-13 December 2010
Good evening, everyone. Let's being by asking whether you have the peices to some very common baord games in the United States and Europe in your house? Yes? Then pick up the Board Game Remix kit, which will turn scrabble into Fighting Words, Cluedo into a zombie survival horror game, and let you play Monopoly Solitaire. Among other things.
Newly declassified documents indicate that the United States recruited or looked the other way on many more of the officers and members of the Nazi Party after World War II than previously thought, mostly to sic them on the expanding Soviet Union.
The Wikileaks rage continues. The United States is considering episonage charges, despite the lack of evidence proving that the releases have actually harmed people or endangered lives. Predictably, the United States military and other government organizations are threatening consequences to any person who reads Wikileaks information, under the ruling that it is illegal to access secret information on unsecured networks, even if that information is being published in the newspapers, and furthermore looking into prospective employees to see whether they are talking about that information.
So, put your Bender helmet on and start singing when you find out The United States is hosting "World Press Freedom Day" in 2011, even as they lay charges against him, only him, and not the other institutions of the press that are freely reprinting his information. I think it's safe to say the U.S. has lost any sort of high ground it might have had on censorship. "The use of words expressing something other than their literal in-ten-tion."
And the useful material continues from Wikileaks: Pope Benedict refused to let Vatican officials testify during an Irish inquiry into child abuse by Catholic priests.
Looking in on romance novels - some of the ones out there disguise abuse as love and then sell lots of copies, which makes for some very poor ideas about what love actually is if someone takes them seriously. Truthfully, though, if you want to see what will develop into bad ideas about love and a lot of other things? Listen/read to this TED Talk about The Man Box, the collective socialization and stereotype of what Being A Man is, and what sort of constrictions it puts on men. A Call To Men is the organization that the speaker works for to help bring about a definition of masculinity that doesn't consider the feminine weak and un-manly, doesn't think of women and girls as less or as objects, and allows for men to inhabit a greater and more diverse personal space and call themselves men. There has been progress - note the changes between the 1963 and 1991 versions of the Richard Scarry Best Word Book Ever, for example, but there's a long way to go.
Out in the world today, Richard Cheney may avoid trial for a Nigerian bribery charge...by paying a $500 million USD settlement on the matter. Getting out of the bribery charge through legal bribery? Priceless.
The city of Tokyo passed an ordinance that will likely curtail the production of anime and manga in the country, by fining companies that produce material they consider unhealthy for children. To defend their "THINK OF THE CHILDRENS!" argument, the government takes to the papers.
The government of Sweden is officially calling two explosions occurring on 12 December an act of terrorism, but have not yet ruled whether the attack would be called suicide bombing.
Ukraine is opening the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site to tourists, hoping to provide education on how to avoid similar disasters...and possibly make a little on the side?
And finally, in advance of the United States review of the First Land War in Asia, the violence in Afghanistan intensifies, as if someone were trying to send a message to the United States and NATO about what they think of having troops in the country. (There were also arrests made in a recent deadly attack.)
Domestically, a reminder of just what is blasting holes in the deficit that everyone claims to be for reducing, and the way that the opposition wants to reduce that deficit - by extending the big tax cuts and cutting programs so as to starve children.
One of the robo-signing companies doing their best to save banks and screw homeowners has gone on the offensive against the people they're trying to help others foreclose on.
BP is still fighting to have as little liability as possible in their oil spill, by arguing the total amount spilled was much less. Since the fines are tied to the volume, this is their way of attempting to preserve some of their profits. In addition, the Navy secretary is trying to get people to see the Gulf's seafood as clean by getting the soldiers to eat mroe of it.
The Department of Homeland (in)Security is bringing UK-style "spy on your neighbors and report them" video messages to Wal-Mart and other public places where they can get the most paranoia for their marketing dollar. And probably the most tips as citizens with grudges, suspicions, or other problems with their neighbors begin calling them terrorists.
Take a peek inside Times Square and the regulations that require it to stay as brightly-lit and colorful as it is historically known.
The campaign for 2012 begins in earnest, and if you are running somewhere with a high immigrant populace, I sincerely hope you voted for the DREAM Act, because they're coming for your political head if you didn't.
A federal judge in Virginia ruled the individual mandate to carry health insurance as part of the health care law is not constitutional, starting the chain of events that will likely have the Supremes decide on the matter. Ah, it could have been avoided, had there been, say, a public option.
Last out, the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics department offers the following - a majority of people believe they are not worse off economically under the current administration than they were the last one, which shows the brilliance of the last administration in delaying the effects of their work until someone else was in charge. The people oppose things like extensions of tax cuts for the wealthy, knowing or sensing that such bills are loaded down with goodies for the richest people and often get torqued from their original purpose through more sweeteners to try and gather enough votes to pass, and just want to get back to work. If they would only realize that fixing in two what took decades to do is very difficult. And seeing stories about how firms with Chinese backing that would do the bulk of their manufacture in China are eligible for United States economic stimulus dollars won't help that perception any.
In sciences and technologies, a suggestion that many anti-depressant techniques don't have effect above placebo, but that one should not conclude that no technique works at all - in some ways, placebo effect might be exactly the thing needed to cure the depression, and in other cases, the medicine or thearpy might be spot on. More research, in other words, less swallowing of pharmaceutical PR.
Also, using open source software, solar power, and an Internet connection, remote areas could achieve worldwide cell phone service at an approximate cost of $2 USD/month to the end user. The startup investment would be about $4,500 USD for the parts and pieces, plus whatever else needs to be done to get the spectrum either licensed or to pay off the officials to look the other way.
Hey, look! Saturn has another ring...a freakin' massive one.
Last out, have a look at how bees see the world - in the UV spectrum.
In opinions, the War on Christmas Department has new fodder: the outrage and indignation of a persecuted majority, his hegemony and privilege threatened by the fact that not everyone believes as he does. In response, the Slacktivist wonders how someone can feel sieged at the well-wishes of others, unless he deliberately chooses to see it as a siege. Not quite as cranked to anger is Mr. Pendry, who feigns dumb and wonders why anyone would be offended at the wish of Merry Christmas or the gift of Jesus, because it's such a nice thing and everyone likes gifts, right?
Staying on the theme, a piece indicating that Christmas is a myth, and should stay so for the greatest effectiveness, instead of being pulled into the literalist or the useless categories. I like it. I like it a lot.
And the "Disabled people don't pay taxes, the nuisances" department sees the request for a city to not pave their crosswalks with bricks, because of the unevenness it provides and the way that hurts wheelchair users and other people who need mobility assistance, for which the only comment is a person claiming the disabled are just leeches on society and that they should not be accommodated, since they're not a majority. It's rather harmful. When queried, the city in question shrugged and said "Not our problem".
Sticking to the economics department, Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota, who might be eyeing a Presidential run in 2012, opines that public sector workers do not deserve unions, because there's no danger to them of being exploited by their employers, nor their current level of compensation, because it is higher than the private sector and such inflated salaries drain money from taxpayers, nor as many jobs as they have, for the same "drain the taxpayer" argument. His suggested reforms are to get rid of government jobs, cut the pay of those that remain to keep them about the same as the private sector, and then destroy their retirement plans by changing them from promising a benefit at the end to forcing them to contribute significant amounts if they want to be able to retire on time. And likely to strip any union that represents a public sector employee of their ability to bargain for them. For Mr. Pawlenty, the government is a business and must be run as such, including the relentless focus on paying the workers as little as possible, offering them no benefits, and trying to make as much "profit" as possible in the form of being able to lower the tax rates and still survive.
The Editors of the WSJ accuse the Democrats of being hostage-takers, more than willing to stick the American populace with higher taxes so they can stick to their guns, and urge the Republicans not to give the Dems any more concessions, because the Democrats are weak and the President will naturally gravitate to the strong pimp-hand of the Republican Party if he wants to get re-elected.
Ms. Malkin rages against the American people who don't display the proper outrage when a potential terrorist plot is defused or goes off, because The Bloodthirsty Religion is still trying to kill us. Some of that cynicism stems from the fact that informants have now conclusively driven otherwise impotent people into acting by giving them the tools they need to act, and another is that a lot of people have figured out that the narrative of Islam Is The Bloodthirsty Religion isn't true, so they tend to dismiss people who keep spouting off about it. But because it's still useful against the people who feel threatened by terrorism and believe that if we just found the right security blanket, the dog would stop grabbing it and running off, we continue in this football-pulling exercise of faux outrage.
Mr. Mead suggests that the oncoming storm requires new thinkers, but the thinkers that could guide us are all still hopelessly stuck in 20th century models of thinking and guild atmospheres in the professional classes. The new technology should be put to use to allow people to cheaply educate themselves and become polymaths of complex tasks and ideas, allowing them to do themselves what would be expensive for others to do for them, be it law, accounting, or even some forms of medicine, and it will drive the discourse to more practical, lay terms than the ever-increasingly self-referential academic ones. Combined with the Inevitable Failure of State Socialism currently in vogue, that leaves entrepreneurs as the powerful people who will use The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) and its inherent chaos, paired with the cheaply-available knowledge wrested from the Knowledge Guilds to drive us forward into the new realm.
Gary Andres sees a good thing in the new Republican congress - more collaboration between the states that have Republican governors and the Republican Congressmen. This is supposed to be a "new federalism" as opposed to Nancy Pelosi's Command And Control of the government legislating and the states falling in line. If those Republican Congresscritters were also trying to work with Democratic governors, I might give them the benefit of the doubt. However, this looks more like a party gathering - "Okay, I'll put in the legislation to repeal it, you guys challenge it in the courts. One of us will succeed, I'm sure." - than any sort of federalism. Real federalism would be red and blue states telling the feds to take a hike and give them some of their power back. Or so I think. We Are Not Unbiased, after all.
And now, because when you run across them, it's hard not to do it, another competition for the Worst People in the World. The bronze to Mr. Hoven, claiming that the Great Recession is exactly what Class Warriors wanted, and the predictable result of the government getting less in revenues was to be expected, so aren't all those Class Warriors stupid? Yes, the rich got less rich in the recession. They're still rich, don't worry, because we tax investments at lower rates than income, and the billionaire who lost tens of millions still has hundreds of millions to hide in tax shelters and loopholes, so as to give the government less revenue by looking like they're poorer than they really are. So we have not gotten either of his first two planks - the super-rich do not pay the most taxes as a percentage of their wealth, nor have all the super-rich vanished. Most of them got bonuses, actually. This still starves the third plank, the supposed flush of excess wealth to the government so they can redistribute to their heart's content. Furthermore, the big glaring omission from that nice package? Corporations. Corporations, especially the richest of corporations, are doing very well indeed, thank you. And they employ all the same tax-avoidance tricks that the rich do and more, so they can pay bonuses and dividends while claiming to the government that they lost money in any given year. Mr. Hoven's situation hasn't come to pass, and probably won't while corporations buy politicians who in turn give them breaks and benefits. It's a very neat system.
The silver effort to Torture apologists John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, claiming that the previous administrator has been vindicated because Congress refuses to fund the closure of Guantanamo Bay and barred persons residing there from ever coming to the United States. They furthermore argue that Guantanamo Bay should continue as a place because many of the people released from there end up being spotted fighting against the United States in other countries. To start with, Congress is composed of various percentages of war porn enthusiasts, torture apologists, and spineless wimps, all of whom will vote to keep that place running because they're all invested in looking "tough" on the matter of security and terrorists. There are also several factions of people who want to suspend the Constitution against anyone they consider an enemy, and to continue acting outside the law, so they'll be more than happy to forbid someone from receiving a fair trial in a civilian court. Furthermore, releasing people who you have given very good reasons to be entirely pissed off at you and then feigning surprise that 25 per cent of them show back up to fight you? You should be dancing in the streets that it's that small of a percentage!
Our winner, however, for the great dishonor of being called the Worst Person In The World, is Mr. Bryan Fischer, homophobe, president of the American Family Association, comparing gay sex to cigarette smoking in terms of having the same public health risks associated with participation. Just one act of gay sex, he says, and you could get HIV, so best that you don't do gay sex. The discarding of all the women who get HIV through straight sex, the men who get HIV through straight sex, and the children who get HIV through no fault of their own should be enough to make the blood boil, but his equivalences are wrong in their technical rightness, to boot. Unlike smoking, sex can have its risks reduced through the proper use of tools and through education and honesty between partners. There is no "safe" smoking - no matter what you smoke, the damage is the same and the risks are the same.
The first act of sex you have could get you HIV, regardless of whom you have it with, even if you use all the precautions, that's true. So if Mr. Fischer wanted to be accurate, he should be calling for nobody to have sex with anyone, because of the risks of HIV. He clearly still thinks of it as Gay-Related Immune Disorder, though, and so he only wants gay people to stop having sex. Thus, Bryan Fischer proves himself a bigot, homophobe, and the Worst Person in the World.
Last for tonight, meet Captain Awesome. One wonders when Doctor Horrible and Captain Hammer will show up. Perhaps they will both appear in the town that sprouted 750 new stops signs that the municipal authorities didn't know about?
Newly declassified documents indicate that the United States recruited or looked the other way on many more of the officers and members of the Nazi Party after World War II than previously thought, mostly to sic them on the expanding Soviet Union.
The Wikileaks rage continues. The United States is considering episonage charges, despite the lack of evidence proving that the releases have actually harmed people or endangered lives. Predictably, the United States military and other government organizations are threatening consequences to any person who reads Wikileaks information, under the ruling that it is illegal to access secret information on unsecured networks, even if that information is being published in the newspapers, and furthermore looking into prospective employees to see whether they are talking about that information.
So, put your Bender helmet on and start singing when you find out The United States is hosting "World Press Freedom Day" in 2011, even as they lay charges against him, only him, and not the other institutions of the press that are freely reprinting his information. I think it's safe to say the U.S. has lost any sort of high ground it might have had on censorship. "The use of words expressing something other than their literal in-ten-tion."
And the useful material continues from Wikileaks: Pope Benedict refused to let Vatican officials testify during an Irish inquiry into child abuse by Catholic priests.
Looking in on romance novels - some of the ones out there disguise abuse as love and then sell lots of copies, which makes for some very poor ideas about what love actually is if someone takes them seriously. Truthfully, though, if you want to see what will develop into bad ideas about love and a lot of other things? Listen/read to this TED Talk about The Man Box, the collective socialization and stereotype of what Being A Man is, and what sort of constrictions it puts on men. A Call To Men is the organization that the speaker works for to help bring about a definition of masculinity that doesn't consider the feminine weak and un-manly, doesn't think of women and girls as less or as objects, and allows for men to inhabit a greater and more diverse personal space and call themselves men. There has been progress - note the changes between the 1963 and 1991 versions of the Richard Scarry Best Word Book Ever, for example, but there's a long way to go.
Out in the world today, Richard Cheney may avoid trial for a Nigerian bribery charge...by paying a $500 million USD settlement on the matter. Getting out of the bribery charge through legal bribery? Priceless.
The city of Tokyo passed an ordinance that will likely curtail the production of anime and manga in the country, by fining companies that produce material they consider unhealthy for children. To defend their "THINK OF THE CHILDRENS!" argument, the government takes to the papers.
The government of Sweden is officially calling two explosions occurring on 12 December an act of terrorism, but have not yet ruled whether the attack would be called suicide bombing.
Ukraine is opening the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site to tourists, hoping to provide education on how to avoid similar disasters...and possibly make a little on the side?
And finally, in advance of the United States review of the First Land War in Asia, the violence in Afghanistan intensifies, as if someone were trying to send a message to the United States and NATO about what they think of having troops in the country. (There were also arrests made in a recent deadly attack.)
Domestically, a reminder of just what is blasting holes in the deficit that everyone claims to be for reducing, and the way that the opposition wants to reduce that deficit - by extending the big tax cuts and cutting programs so as to starve children.
One of the robo-signing companies doing their best to save banks and screw homeowners has gone on the offensive against the people they're trying to help others foreclose on.
BP is still fighting to have as little liability as possible in their oil spill, by arguing the total amount spilled was much less. Since the fines are tied to the volume, this is their way of attempting to preserve some of their profits. In addition, the Navy secretary is trying to get people to see the Gulf's seafood as clean by getting the soldiers to eat mroe of it.
The Department of Homeland (in)Security is bringing UK-style "spy on your neighbors and report them" video messages to Wal-Mart and other public places where they can get the most paranoia for their marketing dollar. And probably the most tips as citizens with grudges, suspicions, or other problems with their neighbors begin calling them terrorists.
Take a peek inside Times Square and the regulations that require it to stay as brightly-lit and colorful as it is historically known.
The campaign for 2012 begins in earnest, and if you are running somewhere with a high immigrant populace, I sincerely hope you voted for the DREAM Act, because they're coming for your political head if you didn't.
A federal judge in Virginia ruled the individual mandate to carry health insurance as part of the health care law is not constitutional, starting the chain of events that will likely have the Supremes decide on the matter. Ah, it could have been avoided, had there been, say, a public option.
Last out, the Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics department offers the following - a majority of people believe they are not worse off economically under the current administration than they were the last one, which shows the brilliance of the last administration in delaying the effects of their work until someone else was in charge. The people oppose things like extensions of tax cuts for the wealthy, knowing or sensing that such bills are loaded down with goodies for the richest people and often get torqued from their original purpose through more sweeteners to try and gather enough votes to pass, and just want to get back to work. If they would only realize that fixing in two what took decades to do is very difficult. And seeing stories about how firms with Chinese backing that would do the bulk of their manufacture in China are eligible for United States economic stimulus dollars won't help that perception any.
In sciences and technologies, a suggestion that many anti-depressant techniques don't have effect above placebo, but that one should not conclude that no technique works at all - in some ways, placebo effect might be exactly the thing needed to cure the depression, and in other cases, the medicine or thearpy might be spot on. More research, in other words, less swallowing of pharmaceutical PR.
Also, using open source software, solar power, and an Internet connection, remote areas could achieve worldwide cell phone service at an approximate cost of $2 USD/month to the end user. The startup investment would be about $4,500 USD for the parts and pieces, plus whatever else needs to be done to get the spectrum either licensed or to pay off the officials to look the other way.
Hey, look! Saturn has another ring...a freakin' massive one.
Last out, have a look at how bees see the world - in the UV spectrum.
In opinions, the War on Christmas Department has new fodder: the outrage and indignation of a persecuted majority, his hegemony and privilege threatened by the fact that not everyone believes as he does. In response, the Slacktivist wonders how someone can feel sieged at the well-wishes of others, unless he deliberately chooses to see it as a siege. Not quite as cranked to anger is Mr. Pendry, who feigns dumb and wonders why anyone would be offended at the wish of Merry Christmas or the gift of Jesus, because it's such a nice thing and everyone likes gifts, right?
Staying on the theme, a piece indicating that Christmas is a myth, and should stay so for the greatest effectiveness, instead of being pulled into the literalist or the useless categories. I like it. I like it a lot.
And the "Disabled people don't pay taxes, the nuisances" department sees the request for a city to not pave their crosswalks with bricks, because of the unevenness it provides and the way that hurts wheelchair users and other people who need mobility assistance, for which the only comment is a person claiming the disabled are just leeches on society and that they should not be accommodated, since they're not a majority. It's rather harmful. When queried, the city in question shrugged and said "Not our problem".
Sticking to the economics department, Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota, who might be eyeing a Presidential run in 2012, opines that public sector workers do not deserve unions, because there's no danger to them of being exploited by their employers, nor their current level of compensation, because it is higher than the private sector and such inflated salaries drain money from taxpayers, nor as many jobs as they have, for the same "drain the taxpayer" argument. His suggested reforms are to get rid of government jobs, cut the pay of those that remain to keep them about the same as the private sector, and then destroy their retirement plans by changing them from promising a benefit at the end to forcing them to contribute significant amounts if they want to be able to retire on time. And likely to strip any union that represents a public sector employee of their ability to bargain for them. For Mr. Pawlenty, the government is a business and must be run as such, including the relentless focus on paying the workers as little as possible, offering them no benefits, and trying to make as much "profit" as possible in the form of being able to lower the tax rates and still survive.
The Editors of the WSJ accuse the Democrats of being hostage-takers, more than willing to stick the American populace with higher taxes so they can stick to their guns, and urge the Republicans not to give the Dems any more concessions, because the Democrats are weak and the President will naturally gravitate to the strong pimp-hand of the Republican Party if he wants to get re-elected.
Ms. Malkin rages against the American people who don't display the proper outrage when a potential terrorist plot is defused or goes off, because The Bloodthirsty Religion is still trying to kill us. Some of that cynicism stems from the fact that informants have now conclusively driven otherwise impotent people into acting by giving them the tools they need to act, and another is that a lot of people have figured out that the narrative of Islam Is The Bloodthirsty Religion isn't true, so they tend to dismiss people who keep spouting off about it. But because it's still useful against the people who feel threatened by terrorism and believe that if we just found the right security blanket, the dog would stop grabbing it and running off, we continue in this football-pulling exercise of faux outrage.
Mr. Mead suggests that the oncoming storm requires new thinkers, but the thinkers that could guide us are all still hopelessly stuck in 20th century models of thinking and guild atmospheres in the professional classes. The new technology should be put to use to allow people to cheaply educate themselves and become polymaths of complex tasks and ideas, allowing them to do themselves what would be expensive for others to do for them, be it law, accounting, or even some forms of medicine, and it will drive the discourse to more practical, lay terms than the ever-increasingly self-referential academic ones. Combined with the Inevitable Failure of State Socialism currently in vogue, that leaves entrepreneurs as the powerful people who will use The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) and its inherent chaos, paired with the cheaply-available knowledge wrested from the Knowledge Guilds to drive us forward into the new realm.
Gary Andres sees a good thing in the new Republican congress - more collaboration between the states that have Republican governors and the Republican Congressmen. This is supposed to be a "new federalism" as opposed to Nancy Pelosi's Command And Control of the government legislating and the states falling in line. If those Republican Congresscritters were also trying to work with Democratic governors, I might give them the benefit of the doubt. However, this looks more like a party gathering - "Okay, I'll put in the legislation to repeal it, you guys challenge it in the courts. One of us will succeed, I'm sure." - than any sort of federalism. Real federalism would be red and blue states telling the feds to take a hike and give them some of their power back. Or so I think. We Are Not Unbiased, after all.
And now, because when you run across them, it's hard not to do it, another competition for the Worst People in the World. The bronze to Mr. Hoven, claiming that the Great Recession is exactly what Class Warriors wanted, and the predictable result of the government getting less in revenues was to be expected, so aren't all those Class Warriors stupid? Yes, the rich got less rich in the recession. They're still rich, don't worry, because we tax investments at lower rates than income, and the billionaire who lost tens of millions still has hundreds of millions to hide in tax shelters and loopholes, so as to give the government less revenue by looking like they're poorer than they really are. So we have not gotten either of his first two planks - the super-rich do not pay the most taxes as a percentage of their wealth, nor have all the super-rich vanished. Most of them got bonuses, actually. This still starves the third plank, the supposed flush of excess wealth to the government so they can redistribute to their heart's content. Furthermore, the big glaring omission from that nice package? Corporations. Corporations, especially the richest of corporations, are doing very well indeed, thank you. And they employ all the same tax-avoidance tricks that the rich do and more, so they can pay bonuses and dividends while claiming to the government that they lost money in any given year. Mr. Hoven's situation hasn't come to pass, and probably won't while corporations buy politicians who in turn give them breaks and benefits. It's a very neat system.
The silver effort to Torture apologists John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, claiming that the previous administrator has been vindicated because Congress refuses to fund the closure of Guantanamo Bay and barred persons residing there from ever coming to the United States. They furthermore argue that Guantanamo Bay should continue as a place because many of the people released from there end up being spotted fighting against the United States in other countries. To start with, Congress is composed of various percentages of war porn enthusiasts, torture apologists, and spineless wimps, all of whom will vote to keep that place running because they're all invested in looking "tough" on the matter of security and terrorists. There are also several factions of people who want to suspend the Constitution against anyone they consider an enemy, and to continue acting outside the law, so they'll be more than happy to forbid someone from receiving a fair trial in a civilian court. Furthermore, releasing people who you have given very good reasons to be entirely pissed off at you and then feigning surprise that 25 per cent of them show back up to fight you? You should be dancing in the streets that it's that small of a percentage!
Our winner, however, for the great dishonor of being called the Worst Person In The World, is Mr. Bryan Fischer, homophobe, president of the American Family Association, comparing gay sex to cigarette smoking in terms of having the same public health risks associated with participation. Just one act of gay sex, he says, and you could get HIV, so best that you don't do gay sex. The discarding of all the women who get HIV through straight sex, the men who get HIV through straight sex, and the children who get HIV through no fault of their own should be enough to make the blood boil, but his equivalences are wrong in their technical rightness, to boot. Unlike smoking, sex can have its risks reduced through the proper use of tools and through education and honesty between partners. There is no "safe" smoking - no matter what you smoke, the damage is the same and the risks are the same.
The first act of sex you have could get you HIV, regardless of whom you have it with, even if you use all the precautions, that's true. So if Mr. Fischer wanted to be accurate, he should be calling for nobody to have sex with anyone, because of the risks of HIV. He clearly still thinks of it as Gay-Related Immune Disorder, though, and so he only wants gay people to stop having sex. Thus, Bryan Fischer proves himself a bigot, homophobe, and the Worst Person in the World.
Last for tonight, meet Captain Awesome. One wonders when Doctor Horrible and Captain Hammer will show up. Perhaps they will both appear in the town that sprouted 750 new stops signs that the municipal authorities didn't know about?