Glenn Beck a pedophile?

Why is Glenn Beck taking to the air to deny an interest in child pornography? To my knowledge, no accusations have been made.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201011120014

National Coming Out Day

My father's gay. That gene skipped me, for which I am selfishly grateful; hard enough being a pervert in America without being homosexual, as well.

He never had a chance. Adopted by half-insane Catholics*, raised in an atmosphere of constant head-fucking and crushing guilt, he lacked even the words to conceptualize himself as anything other than diseased and damned. This was before queers had TV shows and media stars, before Stonewall... When his family and society told him what it meant to be gay, theirs was the only answer he had. He was a fag. A fairy. A half-man who could be beaten, tormented, and even raped without consequence.

It broke him. Internalized hatred twisted everything he touched, including our own relationship.

I wonder: had he another answer, would both of our lives be different? Even were it a matter of changing one stereotype for another, something so trivial as thinking, 'I'm gay, I guess I'm stuck in the cultural industry' instead of, 'I'm a faggot, I'm damned and worthless', who would we be today?

I'll never know.

Today is National Coming Out Day. Today is the day we flood our media channels and public squares with a new answer: being queer, trans, bi, or just plain kinked means that straight sex doesn't do it for you. And that's all it means.

Really. It doesn't mean you're better or worse than anyone else, it's not a pathology, it's not a sin. What two (or more) consenting adults want in bed should have nothing to do with which rights they are afforded under the law, their treatment in the community, or their status as human beings.

That's just true. That's my answer.











*Not an indictment of Catholics, but an indictment of -these specific people- whose madness happened to grow on a Catholic trellis.

Fake? Yes.

Nonetheless:




Beats the hell out of a test pattern. Back soon, me lovelies.

Ah, memories.

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate his responsibility."

- Edward R. Murrow

Below this quote, I wanted to share a few words about fear, civics, and beating a dog with a stick. Instead, I found myself writing an essay about the transition of my nation's government from a Republic to a Something Quite Else... Text clipped from this post pending further development; it's a bit of a monster.

Hearing this, he became Enlightened

I found my daughter stretched out on the floor of her room, still, limbs splayed. She breathed and her eyes flicked to me as I entered.

Suppressing a blip of atavistic panic, I sipped my coffee and waited.

"I'm playing dead," she said.

I nodded. "Why?"

"I was wondering what it felt like."

"Most people are at least a little curious about being dead," I said. "What brought it to mind?"

"Nothing, really," she said. "But once I'm dead, I won't be able to think about it. So, I've gotta do that now, while I'm alive."

"Makes sense," I said. I put my coffee down on her bookshelf and arranged myself next to her.

We rotted, awhile.

"Boring," she said. I grunted.

She sat up and scratched her back. "I don't want to die, then," she said.

Memory's a funny thing

I thought I wrote a song in a dream. Not so much.

When something pops out of my head, Athena-style, I usually Google a few key phrases to deflect accidental plagiarism. I appears that, in my sleep, I spontaneously remembered... this?

Well there was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Weile weile waile
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods
Down by the river Saile

She had a baby 3 months old weile weile waile
She had a baby 3 months old,down by the river Saile

She had a penknife long and sharp,weile weile waile
She had a penknife long and sharp,down by the river Saile

She stuck the penknife in the baby's heart weile weile waile
She stuck the penknife in the baby's heart,down by the river Saile

Three hard knock came knocking on the door,weile weile waile
Three hard knocks came knocking on the door,down by the river Saile

Are you the woman that killed the child weile weile waile
Are you the woman that killed the child,down by the river Saile.

The rope was pulled and she got hung weile weile waile
The rope was pulled and she got hung,down by the river Saile

And that was the end of the woman in the woods weile weile waile
And that was the end of the woman in the woods down by the river Saile

(Source: http://martindardis.com/id172.html )

In Monday night's version, it was a penny she stuck in the baby's heart. I dreamed a rapid battery of child's questions to the woman who sang it to me... Yes, the child died, no, she wasn't sure what the woman gained by doing so, yes, a guard (?) took the old woman and made sure she couldn't do it again, no, she wasn't the old woman in question...

(Ah. A guard = Gardaí. See? Writing things down, it helps.)

What was my childhood like, exactly? I'm intensely curious...

Too easy

"Two scientific studies have suggested a field of Vatican Radio broadcasting antennas north of Rome may have caused high rates of cancer in the area."

Raffaele Capone, who heads a residents association in the Cesano area, said: "We hope that it will be removed from our territory so that we can finally live in peace."

Some residents complained the transmissions were so strong they could hear radio broadcasts through their domestic lamps.

Link to BBC story

Well-scried, Mr. Gibson

The news is already ancient, in Internet Years, but it regards something dear to my heart. Take it away, WSJ:

In the latest development, U.S. government scientists say they have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91% of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered.

[...]

The HIV antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man, known in the scientific literature as Donor 45, whose body made the antibodies naturally.

Two dear things, actually. One is biomimicry, the other something for which I'm sure there's a perfect word in German. A ResonantFictionalDetailThatBecomesTrueAndSavesTheDayButWasn'tQuiteAPrediction.

My weather report

Concrete TV and cheap beer, with the possibility of classier forms of dissipation as the evening progresses.

New record for Shortest Traffic Stop

"Do you know why I pulled you over?"

"It's 3am and half the country's drunk. The odds were pretty good."

"All right, drive safe."

First and last word on Twilight:

Team Sarasti. Meat is for eating.

New NOAA Oilpocalypse Impact Study

released, with summary available here. Highlights:

* The coastlines with the highest probability for impact (81 to 100 percent) extend from the Mississippi River Delta to the western panhandle of Florida where there has been and will likely continue to be oil impacts.

* Along U.S. Gulf of Mexico shorelines, the oil is more likely to move east than west, with much of the coast of Texas showing a relatively low probability of oiling (ranging from less than one percent in southern Texas to up to 40 percent near the Louisiana border).

* Much of the west coast of Florida has a low probability (20 percent down to less than one percent) of oiling, but the Florida Keys, Miami and Fort Lauderdale areas have a greater probability (61 to 80 percent) due to the potential influence of the Loop Current. Any oil reaching this area would have spent considerable time degrading and dispersing and would be in the form of scattered tar balls and not a large surface slick of oil.

* There is a low probability of shoreline impacts from eastern central Florida up the Eastern Seaboard (20 percent diminishing to less than one percent). Potential impacts become increasingly unlikely north of North Carolina as the Gulf Stream moves away from the continental U.S. at Cape Hatteras. If oil does reach these areas, it will be in the form of tar balls or highly weathered oil.

The vector sum whistles a happy tune

A conversation held in kisses, a new source of work, cancelling an anticipated trip, enacting vengeance, needing to enact vengeance, draft progress on a stubborn tale, the smell of fresh coffee, good beer with a better friend, a series of banal nightmares, mysterious hardware problems, watching a stranger decompensate, looking for rent money, gorgeous weather...

Mood is a flock of tethered birds.

Another image post

via grinding.be


Pardon my fixation on collapse imagery, of late. It's been that kind of week.

Losing Arizona

It's official:

Demonstrates care for self and others

Some nights, I want whiskey and cruel laughter. I stay home and write, cause alturism is how bread's buttered.

The Hills have an Eye

blinkblink

Oh, the Internet. I remember this...

today's challenge

is to end the day debt-free and with 4k words in the Vats.

has a Droid

Where's the betting pool stand for Time to Gratuitous Rooting? (Hint for ya'll playing the Home Game: I don't crack my toys open until thwarted. If it ain't broke, etc.)

"It's BP's rules, not ours"

Coast Guard 'Under BP's Rules'- CBS News Video

Kelly Cobiella reports that a CBS News team was threatened with arrest by Coast Guard officials in the Gulf of Mexico who said they were acting under the authority of British Petroleum.

I've no time for further comment or research on the subject this morning. I'll look into it when I get back to the grid and post what I find.

Morning thoughts of an ape in its underwear

I've been a human for almost thirty years and raising a child of my own for five; one thing I know for certain is that toys and gadgets don't make the child. They're at best entertaining or convenient, at worst a distraction from meaningful contact and play.

Quoth the Great Grand Grifter: "As above, so below".

We're children, yet. Of our 250,000 years of history, only 10,000 are even somewhat remembered and perhaps 500 years understood and contextualized.

We don't need flying cars, or their motorcycle-analog jetpacks. Cortical computing, ubiquitous digital awareness, these are interesting and dangerous toys. Nanobot colonies in our blood, eating viruses and tumors and shitting rainbows... Useful stuff, in an age of cheap travel and industrial contaminants, but no substitute for meaningful contact and play.

Our development requires two things: a more humane, sustainable socioeconomic system and a thriving biosphere. In children's terms, we must learn to share, play nice, and not shit on the kitchen floor. That's where we are and what we need; without learning these lessons to our bones, we've not a chance in hell of making it off this rock.

I love humans. I do. I dream, fitfully, of my descendants singing and making babies under alien suns, in habitats spanning entire systems. Of knowing and seeing and loving entire universes beyond my dim, ancient comprehension. But I also see us falling in with a bad crowd, so to speak. Dying in a soulless, decaying suburb in a world of 'em, whatever potential we possessed in our youth sacrificed for drugs and shiny, shiny toys.

Just can't write nice things

I just don't know how, it seems. Reading back over my logs (what our ancestors referred to as 'journals' or 'diaries') of the last several weeks, I'm struck by how brainlessly cheerful I sound.

What I know is, I've been a miserable bastard for years. It's only now, finding contentment and joy, that I see the difference.

By the way

Peter Watts is Free

David Nickel posts:

I type this from the basement of the Quay Street Brewing Company, where manager Mike Ziegler has kindly let me post this.

Sentencing is finished. Judge Adair dismissed any thoughts of jail time, made Peter pay a fine, and shared wisdom about the respect we must afford police.

But never mind that. No jail time. We are celebrating for a bit at Quay Street, then heading home.

Watts's sentencing today

Cross your manipulators and watch this space.