This story just blows my mind. And yet at the same time, it doesn’t surprise me that this has happened. A woman in Philadelphia was denied entrance to a club because she appeared intoxicated. So the woman jumped into her car and ran into a group of people outside the club. She then drove around the block and drove into another group of people. At the end, one woman was dead and six others were injured before the woman and her girlfriend were arrested.

While this is a truly heinous act, it’s also reflective of so many attitudes  in this country lately. Too many people think they’re entitled to take what they want regardless of the cost to others. Too many people striving to find fulfillment by being found at the “right” clubs in the company of the “right” people wearing the “right” clothes. Too many people who take revenge for a perceived “insult” and take that revenge to an extreme. Far too much selfishness and “me, Me, ME!” instead of “what can I do to help you?” The words of JFK seem to be lost on the people in today’s America.

“Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

While we’re on JFK quotes, here’s one I really like too.

“If by a ‘Liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a ‘Liberal,’ then I’m proud to say I’m a ‘Liberal.’” (Acceptance of the New York Liberal Party nomination, Sept. 14, 1960)

It’s not a pleasant topic, but survivors of rape and incest around the world are applauding Stieg Larsson’s film “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. The US distributors of the movie have partnered with RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) to give free DVDs to rape crisis centers, college groups that educate women (and men) about the effects of rape and to counseling centers that help victims of sexual assault and incest.

The film comes with a warning that survivors may find it difficult to view the graphic scenes or may be triggered for flashbacks. But for those survivors who have watched the movies, they have applauded the film as being helpful on several fronts. To those who are not survivors, it helps them understand the horror that rape victims undergo, horror that cannot be explained in words. For survivors, it shows them that they’re not alone. That the mental health issues they may develop are not because they are somehow “faulty” but because of what was done to them. It shows them they’re not the only ones suffering from depression, from PTSD, from the desire/need to self-harm, from thoughts of suicide or any of the other myriad problems that arise dealing with relationships and trust and self-esteem.

Maybe if enough people see this film, if they get a glimpse inside the horror experienced by so many women, maybe things will start to change for the better with respect to reporting and prosecution of rape/incest cases, support for survivors, increased mental health resources and a change in attitude among those men who, on some level, view women as mere objects for their sexual pleasure. (And I include in that group any man who goes to a strip club and any man who buys/views porn for solo use.)

I have no fondness for Dr. Laura. I don’t wish her ill, I just wish she’d shut up. Or at least keep her bigoted, outdated, prejudicial viewpoints off the radio. (Of course, I feel the same way about Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and a whole host of others…) What this world does NOT need right now are narrow-minded bigots spreading misinformation and their own biases as if they were God’s word. But I digress…

I was going to post a rant about Dr. Laura shortly after her last diatribe, but I decided this time to give it some time. So that I’d be able to approach it more logically and rationally than in the heat of the moment.

For those who don’t remember, Dr. Laura threw out the n-word several times in a rant during a discussion with a black woman who was married to a white man and was upset about her husband’s friends’ use of the n-word. When word of her diatribe got around, Dr. Laura went off the air and offered an apology but several days later vowed to come back or at least to stay in the spotlight, even if it’s not on radio.

Should she be allowed to come back? Of course. Not because I agree with her in the least, but because this is a free country.

Can she come back? That depends on her sponsors, whatever radio stations she tries to get back on and the people who listen to her. According to her website, her show was listened to weekly by more than 8 million people in 40 different countries. If she is allowed to spew the kind of hate-filled rhetoric she spews on a regular basis, that says something very disturbing about this country (or at least about the corporations and businesses who sponsor her) and it gives a really nasty view of America to those in other countries.

But here’s the problem I have with what Dr. Laura did. She said she did it to make a point. The point she was trying to make appears to be “If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it’s affectionate. It’s very confusing.” (That’s copied from the transcript of the conversation.)

But it’s not  confusing because the lines are very clear! If you are black, you can use the word. If not, don’t use it! That’s not a confusing situation. If you’re black, you know what the word means and you know what it can do and you can try to reclaim that word for use within your community. To change its meaning, to change its intent, to change its effects.

It’s not different than the use of word “fag” or “queer” within the gay community. If someone outside the gay community wants to call a gay man a fag, it’s an insult. If one gay man calls another gay man a fag, it’s okay. Why? For the same reasons as blacks reclaiming the n-word. A similar movement is going on within the community of those who are overweight. Many are now saying “I’m fat!” with pride and not with the shame intended by those who use it as an insult.

Words have been used to hurt certain communities and those communities have every right to attempt to lessen the damage those words can inflict by reclaiming them, giving them different meanings when used within that community (different meanings in the sense that they’re not meant as an insult). In doing so, they’re helping their communities to feel a greater sense of community and to heal from the damage inflicted on them by those who used those words as insults.

That’s not a difficult concept to grasp and, quite frankly, for someone who is supposed to be as intelligent as Dr. Laura appears to be (at least in some/many/most(?) of her viewers’ eyes), it almost seems as if saying “It’s very confusing” is a cop-out. A cover-up. A way to allow her to use the words and spread the real point she was trying to make:  that if it’s wrong for one, it’s wrong for all. Which just isn’t true.

Or maybe the real point was, “If you can do it, so will I, even if I’m not black.”

A new study has determined that the health benefits of drinking 1-2 drinks a day are not as great as was once thought, but that they do in fact exist. While the study seems to suggest that those who do drink 1-2 drinks a day tend to live longer than those who abstain, when researchers took into account factors like pre-existing health conditions that kept people from drinking and absention for alcoholism as well as social factors like income (rich people may drink more often but also have better health care options or drinkers are often social people and having friends around has been shown to lengthen your lifespan), it was found that the benefits of those 1-2 drinks were almost eliminated. But the fact that they weren’t indicates that there is a very real benefit to moderate alcohol consumption.

The two biggest benefits seem to be that alcohol acts as a “blood thinner” (which in reality means that it inhibits the ability of the blood to clot, which is why drinking a lot is not a good idea) and that alcohol increases the presence of “good cholesterol” in the body.

But there are some caveats!

These benefits seem to help those who are middle-aged and older the most.  And drinking anything may not be a good idea if alcoholism or other addictive behaviors run in your family. Additionally, drinking, even in moderation, has been tied to an increased risk of developing certain types of cancer. So if you can get the same results from other methods (like proper diet and exercise), even moderate drinking may not be worth the increasesd risks.

Given the virtually unlimited number of outside factors that could influence a study like this, we’ll probably never know conclusively whether drinking alcohol in moderation is good for us or not. Given my family history, I choose to abstain for the most part, although I will indulge in a social drink once in a while. But that is my truth and my experience and it may not work for you. That’s fine too. However, if you do decide to drink because this study says it’s healthy for you, there may be some issues you need to look into in your own past.

In the past, “advanced” society’s have assumed that the “savages” they encountered would love to become more advanced. So they essentially destroyed the “savages” way of life (either by wiping out most of the “savages” or destroying their villages or hunting grounds or prey) and indoctrinated them into the more “advanced” way of life. As the saying goes, “You can’t fight progress” (although one would not be remiss to question if that is indeed progress) and in most cases, the “savages” (or their descendants) were slowly assimilated into the “more advanced” society.

But that was then and this is now.

In Brazil, there is a man, thought to be in his early 40s, who is thought to be the last remaining member of his tribe. Brazilian authorities first became aware of him in 1996 and in 2007, with most of the land around him being consumed by logging and ranching interests, the Brazilian government declared a 31 sq. mile area around what is thought to be the man’s home to be off-limits to everyone. If there is to be contact between the “advanced” societies and this man, it will be on his terms.

While this may be a new policy for governments to take, Star Trek fans have been aware of this kind of policy for a long time as it is essentially a form of the “Prime Directive”. I have to applaud the government of Brazil for taking this action and for allowing this man to live the remainder of his days in the manner in which he is accustomed and comfortable and, quite frankly, entitled.

The Russians have come up with a great idea and I hope it catches on the world over. What’s the idea? Blow up military equipment. Blow up tanks. Blow up missile launchers. Blow up fighter jets. Blow up bombers. They even have heat elements and metal elements to fool radar and thermal imaging. And instead of costing millions, they cost about $10,000.

But here’s the best part. No one is ever killed! Blow up missile launchers don’t fire missiles that kill people. Blow up tanks don’t knock down homes or destroy forests by running down trees. Blow up bombers don’t drop bombs that kill hundreds and destroy infrastructures and homes and businesses and leave behind pieces of depleted uranium to poison the environment for generations to come. Wouldn’t it be great if all wars were fought with blow up equipment?

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about bullying.  But this shows how really, truly ugly bullying can make us.

This story is about a 7 year old girl who is dying of Huntington’s disease. The same disease that killed her mother just last year. This video shows Jennifer and Scott Petkov, neighbors of the young girl, at their ugliest. (Or at least it’s to be hoped they can’t get much uglier than this.) And I mean “ugly” on all levels. Watch the face of Jennifer Petkov as she speaks and you can see the ugliness coming to the surface of her face. It is distorted by ugliness and heartlessness and cruelty.

Next time you get ready to insult someone, remember Jennifer Petkov’s face in this video and imagine your face looking just as ugly and twisted and distorted….

So it appears from a recent study that found that the longer a couple has been together, the less they’re likely to know about each others’ preferences. The study seems to fly in the face of logic, which would seem to suggest that those who knew each other longest would know each other best.

While the size of the study was limited (38 younger couples and 20 older  couples) and later studies may not validate the conclusions, I was not really surprised by the results of the study.

For one thing, people tend to forget that everyone changes. The older couples may have known all kinds of things about their partners in the early days of their relationship, but once they “knew” them, they didn’t ask anymore. They probably just assumed that their partners had the same preferences years later and never bothered to see if perhaps they had changed.

Additionally, people tend to think they really “know” someone after spending so many years with them. They seem to believe they can “predict” what their partner will say because “no one knows them better than I do”.

And finally, as the high divorce rate seems to support, many couples simply grow apart. They lose interest in each others’ like and dislikes, but many, especially among older couples who grew up in a time when divorce was not so common, may stay together out of convenience, a sense of shame, a sense of duty/obligation or even a sense of comfort. While it may be a rut, it is a comfortable rut and they may not want to leave it and have to start over, particularly in these unsettled economic times.

Personally, while it’s interesting on some level, I don’t think the study is all that earth-shattering. Neither group of couples was able to predict their partner’s response more than half the time and both sets of couples were able to predict their partner’s responses at least 40% of the time.

Perhaps the real lesson here is “Ask, don’t assume or guess.” Maybe if we all did that, the divorce rate would go down as well.

A woman in Indiana locked her five children in a closet that was 18″ deep and about 6′ long. After approximately 10 hours in the closet, the mother returned to the apartment to find two of her children dead. It was another four hours before authorities were called. By the time medics arrived, both children were in full rigor mortis. The mother has been arrested and charged with neglect resulting in death. But in the court of public opinion (if you read the comments posted afterwards), this woman has already been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in jail and, if some had their way, forced sterilization.

This is certainly a tragic story. Two young children lost their lives. But was that the mother’s goal? She had five children, with the oldest being 7. Her husband (the children’s father) was out of the country and had been for a couple weeks according to the story. She was an immigrant from a war-torn and ravaged country: Somalia. This was a woman who was probably used to having to hide from hostile raiders/soldiers in small places to avoid being killed and/or raped. Perhaps she viewed this as a way of keeping her children safe as it probably kept her safe in her homeland, which has been ravaged by civil war since 1991.

Her actions afterwards are probably best explained by fear. She found two of her children dead, for God’s sake! She was probably scared to death not only of the police and the legal system but of what her family and husband would say and/or do. Perhaps she was more scared of that than of the legal system.

We will probably never know this woman’s reasons behind what she did. Whatever we hear now will be what her lawyers want her to say. But unless this woman is a sociopath or psychopath, my guess is that she will be punished far more harshly by herself for the deaths of her two children than anything the state may throw at her.

We’re supposed to be a nation where all people are considered equal. But anyone who really thinks that’s the case in the US has their head in places no one should ever really put their head. Truth of the matter is that non-males, non-white, non-straights and non-Christians face bigotry and discrimination every day. Day in and day out. Day after day. And that’s not to deny that every once in a while some straight white Christian male gets discriminated against, but relatively speaking, it’s a non-issue. After all, straight white Christian males have held the reins of power in this country for time out of mind. Even the election of our first African American president doesn’t negate the fact that Congress has to pass the legislation before he can sign it. And Congress is still mostly straight white Christian males.

Here’s just a small sampling of stories I’ve found over the last month or so.

• In Texas, a firefighter’s widow finds herself being sued by her husband’s parents. Why? Because they say he didn’t know that she was transgendered and started out her life as a male. In Texas, even if you are transgendered, you are always legally considered to be the gender that you were born.
• At a recent high school football game in Ohio, a spectator captured one teams supporters chanting “powder blue faggot” at their opponents, whose uniform shirts were a light blue color. According to one report, the light blue team supporters retorted with “Halloween Homo” due to the black and orange colors of their opponents.
• Muslims can be verbally skewered by pundits and Rush Limbaugh wannabes and there is no negative impact on their career or their income. They can just say an insincere apology and, despite the damage their words have done, they go on as if nothing happened.
• About 100 Wal-Mart’s in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and the “intermountain west” region are going to start selling a book that pushes the Mormon view of homosexuality. The book condones the mentally, emotionally and physically harmful practice of “conversion therapy” and supports the belief in the “ex-gay” movement.
• A candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino, recently said that he doesn’t want kids “brainwashed” into believing that being gay is as normal as being straight. Cause according to Paladino, it isn’t. That’s not the way God intended it, he says. Although he seems to forget that no law in the US is to be based on any one religions interpretation of what God says.
• A California man, a natural born citizen and a Muslim, discovered a tracking device planted by the FBI on his car. Like the only terrorists in the country are Muslims…
• Twelve teens, mostly women, were taken to the hospital in Washington (state) after their drinks were spiked, possibly with a date rape drug. When was the last time you heard of a woman spiking a guys drink to have sex with him while he was unconscious? Why do some guys think this is acceptable?
• A Southern Baptist preacher from Kentucky has suggested that all people who practice yoga, which began in India among Hindus, are violating their Christian faith.

• Seven (at least) teens who were gay or perceived by others to be gay have committed suicide after bullying and taunting by others. Felix Sacco of Saugus, MA apparently jumped to his death from an overpass on October 1, 2010. Raymond Chase, an openly gay student at Johnson and Wales University on September 29, 2010. Asher Brown, 13, of Texas, shot himself to death on September 23, 2010 after years of bullying about his small size, his religion and the fact that he was gay. Seth Walsh, 13, of California, was found hanging from a tree on September 19, 2010 after being bullied for years for being gay. Tyler Clementi, 18, a student at Rutgers University, jumped off the George Washington Bridge on September 22, 2010 after his roommate streamed live video of Mr. Clementi in a sexual encounter with another male. Billy Lucas, 15, of Greensburg, Indiana, hung himself in his family’s barn on September 9, 2010, after being taunted for being gay, although the young man never self-identified as gay. Zach Harrington, 19, of Norman, OK, killed himself on October 5, 2010,  one week after listening to three hours of debate over whether to declare October LGBT History month in Norman. For most of that three hours, the young gay man had to listen to people’s disparaging remarks about the “sinful” lifestyle and the lack of support from the majority of Americans.
• A young boy from Ohio had his arm broken, allegedly by two football players, for joining the cheerleading squad. (While this is a case where a white male is being picked on, the obvious perception is that he’s gay for joining the cheerleading squad.)
• The official platform of the Republican Party in Montana, adopted his past June, seeks to make homosexual acts illegal. While there is no hope of this ever coming to pass, the fact that it remains a part of their party platform and has not been removed is a very telling fact about the attitudes of some Montana Republicans. It also sends a very dangerous message to the GLBT community in Montana: you’re not worthy of protection by the law and we don’t want you in our society.
• People with Tourette’s syndrome are shunned by society, outcast in schools and otherwise made to feel as if they’re not real human beings.
• A man from Concord, NC, was charged with providing information to someone he thought was going to blow up a women’s clinic. The man was allegedly a member of the “Army of God”, a group that violently opposes abortion and hails as martyrs those who have killed abortion doctors or blown up women’s clinics. This attack on women’s rights is also an attack on religious freedom.
• Just prior to 9/11 this year, Muslim groups all over the country were preparing for an onslaught of anti-Muslim rhetoric and even physical attacks due to the mistaken belief still held by so many Americans that Muslims attacked the WTC and the Pentagon. Terrrorists, who just happened to be Muslim, attacked the WTC and the Pentagon, just like a terrorist, who just happened to be Christian, blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
• The site where a mosque will soon stand was damaged by arson in Tennessee days before the anniversary of 9/11.
• In North Carolina, a woman who agrees to have sex cannot then change her mind. If the man ignores her orders to stop after she has already agreed to have sex, the man cannot be charged with rape.
• A young girl in North Carolina belongs to the Church of Body Modification, whose members do not necessarily believe in a deity but do believe in the spiritual connection between mind, body and soul. When this young girl wore a tiny nose stud to school, as many youth wear crosses or Star of David or pentacle necklaces, she was stopped by a school official and told to cover her stud. The school refuses to recognize her church as a valid one despite the fact that a church does not need government recognition to be valid (according to the first amendment.)
• A ninth grader in Arkansas was suspended for “disrupting education” by wearing a T-shirt that said “Proud to be lesbian” on one side and “Support Homosexual Love” on the other. The day before, a teacher had asked the student to remove her rainbow bracelet because the teacher believed it supported an “immoral cause.”
• Anti-choice terrorists are distributing “wanted posters” feature the faces, names, home addresses, telephone numbers and children’s names of those they consider “abortionists”. This is both an attack on women’s rights and religious freedom.

As you can see from this extensive list, this is not just an occasional incident. This is widespread and it has GOT to stop.