Marriage

Back in July I wrote a post titled Pain that went under the radar for a lot of people but for my hardcore readers. It's interesting looking back at it that it's a post almost at the year's mid-point and that it was the first time I was openly acknowledging in more than a year that offline Liza was living a very different life than Liza online.

And yet I really didn't own up to everything that was and has been ailing me : 2008 goes down as the year I had to contend with the fact that the life I've lived for the last 10 years is over and that the physical pain that has been bashing me for the past year and a half has been amplified by the emotional anguish of knowing that my marriage is over.

I love this bitch!

Brad Pitt is putting US$100,000 of his money to fight for the right of gays and lesbians to marry.

"Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn't harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8," the actor said in a statement.

Courage! And let it be known that I am in an infinitesimal minority who doesn't find Brad Pitt that attractive.

Now, before the Brangelina-bots go crazy : I recognize that Brad Pitt is a good looking man. He just doesn't do it for me. I don't get the bit, you know, moist just by looking at him.

Now, I loooooove his comedic acting. I loooooove his dadditude. I honestly love Brad Pitt for his philanthropy and his politics. He seems like a genuine decent guy.

Yup. Love the Man for his character not his face.

The Public Service Administration strikes again with a positively not safe for work (NSFW) video about McCain and his most egregious quote about his wife.

You can find the uncensored video here. The SFW version is here.

Am so ambivalent about the reporting of this incident that, honestly, I won't publish about it here on my blog out of respect for Cindy McCain. I don't see the need to repeat or even make public this incident unless you want to play dirty politics.

I don't care either if you are a so-called progressive like Clift Schechter bringing up the dirt. It's still dirty and still further debases the political process into who gets to digg up and sling more dirt at their contender.

What do you all think?

The traditional marriage ceremony in Western Culture ends with the bride carried over the threshold by the husband. How many modern couples realize that this ancient custom symbolizes rape and the unwilling capture of women for breeding purposes.

The myth of the founding of ancient Rome included the so-called "Rape of the Sabine Women" where women from a neighboring community were forcibly captured and forced to join the nascent Roman polity. These women were not, according to tradition, given any choice in the matter, but were the founding women of Rome's aristocricy.

The custom of carrying the bride over the threshold dates back to this ancient Roman myth. It is meant to symbolize the UNWILLINGNESS of the woman in the marriage. To quote from the Chronicle of the Roman Republic by Philip Matyszak:

To symbolize the fact that their first brides did not come willingly, later Roman men carried their brides into their new homes--a tradition continued in Western countries today.

I bet few couples today who participate in this ancient custom realize that the symbolism is the unwillingness and rape of the women forced (according to legend) to participate in the founding of ancient Rome.

2008 started "off" to say the least, for The New York Times. First it was the hiring of Bill Krystol as an Op/Ed columnist. Then it was their craptacular endorsement of both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Yet, if we're going to cast aspersions, let's not forget the embarrassment and disgrace Judith Miller's aiding and abetting of the Bush Administration brought to the paper's credibility not so long ago.

So it's just amazing that they'll come out with a hit job against John McCain. In an allegedly "investigative" report of John McCain's ethics, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk is a thinly vield gossip piece about whether he was lobbied hard, really really hard, by a woman called Vicki Iseman.

I am of two minds about this. Let me start with the deep and ponderous one first :

Look, anybody who has been married ought to never take anybody else's private life as a barometer of their professional shortcomings. Especially when you have someone like Hillary Clinton in the running.

Hi Ms. Clinton,

This is an awkward note to write to you. Although I voted for you twice to represent me as Senator of New York, from the first rumors I heard in political circles here in New York City, I was vehemently opposed to your running for president.

As I said to many party insiders in New York, this had nothing to do with your abilities and all to do with where the country stands now.

We are at a point in which our democracy is in shreds. Nothing has been so damaging to our democracy than the attitude that has fueled Washington all these years : That "The People" are just an inconvenient obstacle to the Washington elite's road to power.

This country needs a movement willing to tearing down the walls of dynastic entitlement that George Bush has built around the White House during his eight years of quasi-imperialistic rule. This country needs a leader and a party and the people to bring it back from the place where Iraq, FISA, New Orleans, Read ID, racist immigration laws, the sub-prime lending fiasco are all seen as just the consequences of doing business in Washington DC.

This country needs a healing period and a new start.

A Hillary Clinton candidacy would have made sense in 2012. 'Hillary 2012' would have given us 8 years of healing the country, of bringing it back to its democratic roots and it would given you enough time to distance yourself from the Washington corruption that made eight terrible years of Bush possible in the first place.

But no.

It's all about Billary.

Not Hillary and Bill, but Bill and Hillary.

Billary is the reason why it will never be enough for your husband to modulate his tone throughout the campaign. Your candidacy is looked on by many as the loophole that'll bring your husband not just back to the White House but also to the Oval Office.

I have been meaning to write this one for a while now, but it's not just my blogADD that has kept me away from this discussion. I just so get emotionally pissed off about this subject that it becomes unbearable to try to write everything that comes shooting by my brain. Yet Nance here point to a post by Amanda Marcotte that has pissed me off so royally that I have to respond to it.

In the comments Amanda insists that she allegedly has no problems with either stay at home mothers or homeschoolers; yet in her writing she betrays herself. When she opens up her post with and I quote, "This interview in Newsweek with Laura Derrick, the president of the National Home Educator’s Network, was even fluffier than I expected it would be when I opened the link", you know that her expectation was to see a piece excoriating the "different path" of homeschooling.

It goes downhill from there because she conflates her contempt for xian fundamentalists with homeschooling:

I didn’t expect the interviewer to hammer at Derrick about the issue of whether or not it’s wise for people to homeschool their kids if they are doing so with the intention of teaching them that Noah had a pet dinosaur or that Jesus founded America (and therefore feed them into upper echelon jobs in the Justice Department), but I figured it would at least come up. No luck, though.

In the next paragraph her cluelessness about homeschooling shows with flying color when she claims to know that homeschooling is gaining steam in the left. Ahh ... hmmm ... see ... no!

Homeschooling has never been an either/or proposition for people in the left or right. It has been always a proposition for radicals; especially radicals who have a strong libertarian political background. There's conservative libertarians, Christian libertarians and then people like me, who Chris Nolan has most famously described as Social/Progressive Libertarians.

The problem is that christian fundamentalist homeschoolers in this country have had a well funded public relations machine. That's it. That's all.

The HSDLA was the pet project of Michael Farris, one of the signers of the Manifesto for a Christian Church; which really should be read as a manifesto for a extremist American theocracy.

But you already suspected as much.

I was doing some voogling and I stumbled upon one of the funniest "educational" videos I have seen in a long time.

“The TRUTH About Marriage” is an over-the-top satirical look at the current gay marriage debate. Presented in the style of 1950’s ... all » educational films, “The TRUTH About Marriage” asks the question: How far HAVE we come in the last forty years?

This is definitely not for the politically faint of heart. If you are missing the IHG (irreverent humor gene), you should steer clear of this video.

Enjoy.