Marriage

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.

The judges of New Jersey's Supreme Court should have a ticker-tape parade:

TRENTON, New Jersey (Reuters) - Saying that times have changed, New Jersey's highest court on Wednesday guaranteed gay couples the same rights as married heterosexual couples but left it to state lawmakers to define how the state wants to define marriage.

"Times and attitudes have changed," the New Jersey State Supreme Court said in a nuanced 90-page ruling that was neither a clear victory nor a defeat for gay marriage, which is currently legal in the United States only in Massachusetts.

"Despite the rich diversity of this State, the tolerance and goodness of its people, and the many recent advances made by gays and lesbians toward achieving social acceptance and equality under the law, the Court cannot find that the right to same-sex marriage is a fundamental right under our constitution," the ruling continued.

But saying that gay couples must have the same rights as other couples, the court said gay advocates must now "appeal to their fellow citizens whose voices are heard through their popularly elected representatives."

I love, Love, LOVE the wording of this decision.

Let me go on the record as saying that I don't believe marriage is all that. I don't understand why the fuck gay people want to call themselves married. Seriously: why! Why! WHY!

The only way I can understand this craziness is that they're fighting for the right to get a divorce.

If the new fascism has a pretty face, it may very well be the face of Zach Braff. That, perhaps, is one of the more painful lines I've ever written. I'm an admirer of Mr. Braff--Garden State was well-crafted, and Mr. Braff's ability as creator of mix tapes was sealed with the soundtrack. It was the soundtrack to The Last Kiss that drew me in the door: the music is a heady collection of mellow reflections on love and betrayal and all that affairs of the heart encompass (and I'm listening to it as I write this). So, why, 15 minutes into The Last Kiss was I ready to start chucking my shoes at the screen? And why, at the end of the movie, was I so infuriated that I wanted to walk up to Mr. Braff and cold cock him?

I'm not the kind of person who is unable to differentiate betweeen an actor and a role. I have singled out Zach Braff because chances are, most of the audience for this movie is going expecting some further installation of Garden State. There are some parallel themes—men in their 20's who haven't quite found their way being the most obvious. In The Last Kiss, however, there's a new element: the women all have vagina dentata Every single one of the women has only one object in mind: to castrate the man she's with so he will never, ever stray.

[via Is baby Suri Cruise living the Scientology life? - Gossip: The Scoop - MSNBC.com]:

"While on his worldwide promotion of Mission Impossible III, I am told, his behavior was, in a word, paranoid," says Ross. "He was obsessed about the purity of the air and at one point, he was convinced he was being followed and insisted on taking longer routes to places. He was also quite concerned about whether locks worked and had them checked. Scientologists are not only afraid of creating engrams, they're also afraid of the effects of those around them who they call Suppressive Persons or SPs. It's possible that Tom Cruise is being overcome by his Scientology training and that's leading to a paranoid world view that is being reflected in his behavior with baby Suri."

I really was not going to write an article about Tom Cruise's bizarro family life but I have to. This privacy and religion thing is cutting too close to the bone for me.

You see, I am living my little invasion of privacy hell because the father of my children has convinced them to try going to school this next September. The privacy that we were afforded with our homeschooling life is gone, dead, kaput and now I have to contend with prying noses of school teachers, principals and administrators in a way that is invasive and crosses the line of being not just rude but anti-constitutional.

This is a total navel-gazing moment but eff it, it's my blog!

I'm in a lot of physical and emotional pain. Forty has hit me like a frying pan on a toon's nogging and it has taken me almost a month to write about my passage into official middleagehood because ... well ... it's painful.

I don't like it.

It sucks.

I hate being old.

Not because I look old but because I feel old. Every bone and muscle in my body has started to sink into decrepitude. I don't feel emotionally older than 30 yet here I am seeing my body crash and burn further and further away from my self.

What is worse than the pain is the horrible, terrible fear that keeps me awake at night : Four years ago I woke in a pool of sweat, smacked with the horrible realization that I would be cursed with ... the gift of longevity.

I've been thinking a lot about Friedrich Nietzsche and two of his books, Beyond Good and Evil and Gay Science.

I've always thought of Beyond Good and Evil as the best critique of the hypocrisy involved in the concept of sin and righteousness.

Aphorism #138: What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so.

Nietzsche has always been critized for being some sort of a brutal philosopher but I've never in all the years I have been reading his books thought about him as being brutal to be cruel. On the contrary, with this particular book I have always thought of it as a book about the power of love and compassion through the understanding of perspective.

Aphorism #153 : What is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.

The Gay Science is a book written way before the word gay became synonymous with homosexuality; yet I've always found it interesting that Nietzsche used the term as synonymous to queer. And queerness in this books is what's he describes as being at the heart of all creative people.

#116 : Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

# 275 : What is the seal of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

# 283 : For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously.

# 299 : We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.

# 381 : I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.

To which I must add, it is the book where he first wrote about the Madman who screamed to the crowds in Aphorism #125, God is dead and you killed him.

Why all of this?

When I read the following article about how Muslim gay men are seeking to marry Muslim lesbian women --and are using the internet to find their partners-- I couldn't help but wonder.

On the one hand, it's a testament of how the internet is not just a technology but a means for communication and community. On the other hand, since these gay men are using the net to stay in the closet and protect themselves while remaining within the strictures of theocratic cultures that would rather have them dead than gay, I could not but shake my head and say, But god is dead, now it's time to dance as philosophers.

World Cup 10 Best Goals, 2002

Are you struggling with the urge to stay glued to the TV watching the World Cup?

I live with a philistine who does not appreciate my being excited about the real world series that involves actual countries other than the United States --not like that fake thing that involves gringos with a bat and a ball.

This after years of making me believe he liked soccer. Last night he said, gasp, that he just did not like it because he finds it frustrating to watch and too hard to play.

HOW DARE HE!

A man that fakes liking soccer is as bad as a woman that fakes her orgasms.

FIFA FOR LIFE!