gay marriage = hitler?

You know it's getting down to the wire on Prop 8 when the super-duper crazies come out. But even I don't quite know where to begin with this one: Brad Dacus of the right-wing Pacific Justice Institute comparing same-sex marriage to the rise of the Nazis.



Um...wow.

WTF????

Wow.

Wait...listen closely...did he just invoke Pastor Martin Niemoller? The "first they came for the..." guy???? Even though, as far as I can tell, the little story he's telling never happened? Even though, um, thousands of gays and lesbians were killed in the Holocaust? Even though...AAAHHH IRONY OVERLOAD GAAAAAAHHHHMRFSOORHBAFJALDBLH--

Well. I guess you can understand why these people might be whipped up into a frothing frenzy of messianic homophobic rage. The end of the world is coming, after all.

Just be careful, Brad Dacus. When you start comparing gays to Nazis, it can only lead to this.

prop 8 parents pissed

The (straight) parents of two children featured in a new ad supporting Prop 8 held a press conference announcing that not only do they not support Prop 8, but they are outraged that footage of their children was used without their permission in a misleading and manipulative ad. They demanded that the ad be taken off the air immediately.

I actually saw this particular ad (which can now only be viewed on the Yes on 8 donation page) during The Daily Show yesterday. It describes how a first-grade class was required to attend a lesbian wedding as a "teachable moment." Right away something sounded fishy about this.

As it turns out, the ad used footage from the San Francisco Chronicle website without requesting permission from either the newspaper or the parents of the children depicted in the video. The children, along with several parent chaperons, were invited to attend the wedding of their teacher to her longtime partner. Take a moment to watch the original video. It is just about the most adorable scene the Internet can provide.

Several parents did choose not to have their children attend, which is permitted under California's "opt-out" law, which allows parents to pull their children from any instruction they feel violates their religious beliefs. In fact, Brad Dacus, one of the leading spokespeople of the Yes on 8 campaign, is a champion of the "opt-out" law and would clearly have known that it would apply here, making this ad an intentional and blatant lie.

this just in: it is raining!

This is notable since it's the first time it's happened since I moved here, over two months ago. And the nice thing is that since my neighborhood is really quiet during the day, you can actually hear the sound of the rain.

Update, 10:40 am: It's over and the sun is out again.

tim gunn says no on 8!

And seriously, why on Earth wouldn't you do what this adorable and wise man says?

cars: not just a heartwarming pixar movie

No doubt, Los Angeles is a car city.  "Traffic in Los Angeles is what weather is to the rest of the country," one of my profs said on the first day of class.  It's a crafty one--they tease you with just enough public transportation to make you think that maybe, just maybe, not having a car is a feasible option--but it's a car city nonetheless.

Several random events lately have made me think about my attitude toward cars.  The first was when I was planning my schedule for next semester and realized that I had automatically ruled out a class that met at night because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of figuring out how to get home after 7 pm.  Why?  Because taking the bus at any time other than rush hour (7:30 to 9 in the morning; 4:30-7 at night) pretty much blows.  At any other time of day, waiting 40 minutes for a bus to mosey on by on my route is not unusual.  In 40 minutes I can walk to campus.  I've done this a few times and it's not a terrible option--except of course if it's the middle of the day and hot, or it's late at night--which are the exact times when bus service sucks the most.

The second was at the first meeting for First Pitch, where a guy told a story that involved agents asking him what kind of car he wanted to drive, which was supposed to be some indication of his career ambitions.  I found myself asking myself the question.  "Um, a hybrid...I guess?"  I couldn't really come up with a good answer, because, frankly, I didn't care.

Then today at work, I was scanning lots and lots of pictures of cars and car racing for someone's Powerpoint presentation on historical somethingorother, and I came to a realization: I would be perfectly happy living the rest of my life never owning a car.

I realize that the possibility of me getting through a minimum of two years in Los Angeles without ever driving is somewhere between "low" and "nil."  I must admit, the idea of re-learning how to drive terrifies me, which is of course why I've worked so hard to avoid it.  I only like learning new things when they only involve the brain.  Motor skills, not so much--as the few witnesses to a disastrous early-semester roller skating event can attest.  This is the same fear that has kept me from learning to ride a bike, which would doubtless solve some of my problems here.

But aside from the actual act of driving (and parking!  don't get me started on parking!) there just seem to be so many arduous and unpleasant things that come along with owning a car.

First is buying a car.  I hate the feeling that someone may be taking advantage of me because of my own ignorance, which seems to be hard to avoid when buying a car--particularly in the world of buying a cheap car, which is certainly the world I would be in.  I've thought of the idea of taking my dad on a car-buying expedition with me, but then I'd be a girl buying a car with her dad.  (Of course, I could just go the route my parents went when the faithful white minivan we called the Millennium Falcon refused to go above 40 miles an hour: a cash-only, no-questions-asked transaction with the dude who runs the body shop that backs up to our house.  We now have a lovely Malibu, thank you.)

Once you purchase the car, there is the matter of insuring the car (expensive), putting gas in the car (even more expensive), parking the car, worrying the car will get stolen or broken into, worrying that something will break on the car and will cost you thousands of dollars, worrying you'll get in an accident, worrying about parking tickets, speeding tickets, drunk driving, and on and on.  All this seems like altogether too much worrying to me.

I realize that I'm probably in the minority here with my opinion on cars.  I know that to many people, cars represent freedom, independence from parents, even fun.  Well, I guess you can find someone who thinks just about anything's fun.

/end rant

P.S. I probably will try to learn to drive again over winter break, if the weather in Baltimore, where cars are available for said practice, isn't too shitty.  My hope is to learn enough to use Zipcar when I absolutely have to drive somewhere.  But I'm not saying I'll be happy about it.

fight over Prop 8 gets dirty

In what is hopefully a sign of growing desperation, supporters of anti-gay Proposition 8 recently sent menacing letters to a number of business owners who had donated large sums to the No on 8 campaign, threatening to "out" them as supporters of gay marriage if they did not give equal amounts to the Yes on 8 folks too.

Do these people not understand how political campaigns work?  I'd like to see one of the presidential candidates try this trick.

Unfortunately for the Yes on 8 folks, their hit list was not very carefully vetted.  Turns out one of the letter recipients was Equality California board member Jim Abbott, who owns a real estate company in San Diego and married his partner in August.  Abbott promptly posted his letter on the No on 8 website, and the story made it to the Associated Press on the same day.

stay of execution for Troy Davis!

More good news from the anti-death penalty front: Troy Davis, who was scheduled to die on Monday, received a last-minute stay of execution after the Georgia state government received over 300,000 letters in his support.

Troy was scheduled to be executed for the 1989 murder of a Georgia police officer, even though no physical evidence linking him to the crime has ever been presented, and 7 of the 9 witnesses who originally placed him at the scene have recanted their testimony.  (One of the witnesses who has not recanted was the other principle suspect in the case.)  Amnesty International and other anti-DP groups have been leading the fight for a stay of execution and a new trial.

Troy could still be executed if the stay is overturned.  Read all about it and learn how you can help here.

gay marriage legal in connecticut!

OK, this one is now old news, but just a quick shout-out to Connecticut, where the state supreme court legalized gay marriage on October 10!

The Connecticut ruling is significant because Connecticut has had same-sex civil unions for several years, but the court still ruled that anything less than full marriage was unequal--even though the Connecticut law supposedly guaranteed equal rights for holders of civil unions. It remains to be seen what impact, if any, this will have on New Jersey, which has a similar law.

With the gays now a-marryin' in Connecticut and Jersey, one has to ask: New York, WTF? Get on with it, already.

In other gay news: in a mere three months' time, California has overtaken Massachusetts as the state with the highest number of married gay couples, with over 11,000 marriages recorded to date. Gee, wouldn't it suck if all those people became unmarried on November 5 because Proposition 8 passed? Vote NO ON PROP 8, peoples!

f*ck yeah! jon burge arrested!

What a lovely surprise I got today to read this headline amidst the New York Times's  chronicling of capitalism's latest crisis:

Former Chicago Police Official Arrested in Torture Scandal

Now, there's only one Chicago police torture scandal I know of.  Could it be?  Yes!  Jon Burge, the cop responsible for the torture of numerous black suspects in police stations on Chicago's south side--and the sentencing of at least 12 innocent people to death--has been arrested for perjury.*

Burge, a Vietnam vet who joined the police force in 1970 and rose rapidly through the ranks, was responsible for the torture of somewhere between 40 and 200 African-American suspects who were unlucky enough to pass through the interrogation rooms at the Area 2 and 3 police stations on Chicago's south side.  Among his victims were members of the Death Row 10, black men sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit, who found each other on Death Row, compared notes and realized that they had remarkably similar stories of police brutality--tales of suffocation, beatings and electric shocks that they discovered had all been perpetrated by the same person.

Burge was finally busted as a result of a civil suit filed by Madison Hobley, one of the Death Row 10.  I remember first hearing Madison's voice over a scratchy prison phone connection at a Campaign to End the Death Penalty event as a freshman at Columbia.  That was in 2000, and Madison had been on death row for 13 years.  

In 2003, in a large part because of the publicity that had built up around the Death Row 10, Governor Ryan emptied Illinois's death row, declared a moratorium on executions, and commuted the sentences of several members of the Death Row 10.  I heard Madison speak in person for the first time some time in 2003.  He seemed like a broken man.  Unused to freedom after so many years in prison, or simply unable to speak about the events that had led him there, I remember him as barely able to finish a sentence.  About a year later, I heard him speak somewhere else and he seemed like a human being again.  The transformation was amazing.  Since his release, Madison has become a tireless organizer against the death penalty and the prison system.

Madison once said that he feels no hatred toward Burge and the people who sent him to prison for 16 years.  I guess after so many years, he decided it just wasn't healthy to hold on to that anger.  I, on the other hand, happen to think that the idea of Burge spending even one night in the prison system into which he sent numerous innocent people (and others who were not innocent but certainly didn't deserve the treatment they got) is pretty friggin' sweet.

*Note: As it turns out, Burge can't actually be tried for any of the cases of torture, which are now quite well-documented, because the statute of limitations has expired.  So he's being tried for lying about torture.  But as a US Attorney involved in the case said, "If Al Capone went down for taxes, it's better than him going down for nothing."

yes! yeeesssss!

This just makes me smile:

Mass Display of Proposition 8 Support Delayed

Okay, so this was probably not the work of some secretly gay Chinese factory worker, but it's still pretty funny.

this is just a test. EARTHQUAAAAAKE!!!

Forget boring old fire drills. In California we have something even better: earthquake drills!

I have to say I was perhaps a little too excited to discover that next month my school will be participating in the Big One of earthquake drills--something called The Great Southern California Shakeout, which will simulate a 7.8 magnitude earthquake on the southern end of the San Andreas fault. For those uninitiated in the Richter (or trendier moment magnitude) scale, that is approximately 5,000 times stronger than the Chino Hills earthquake that rattled California this summer, about a month before I moved there.

A pretty cool video of how the hypothetical earthquake would travel is available here. (White and yellow represent the worst shaking.) Watch for the little pocket of lingering trapped vibrations near the "Los Angeles" dot--East LA, you get fucked pretty hard in this scenario.



Here is a fun earthquake fact I learned while investigating this matter: standing in a doorway is not the safest thing to do in an earthquake! Turns out that piece of popular wisdom started about 100 years ago, when many houses in the area were built from unreinforced adobe bricks, and the doorframe was often the only part of the building that did not collapse in an earthquake. In moden-day buildings, which in this part of the country are built to withstand a hefty seismic shake, the doorway is no safer than any other part of the building. These days, you are far more likely to be injured by falling objects or broken window glass than to be in a building collapse, which is why modern earthquake experts recommend getting under a desk or table instead of heading for the nearest doorway. In a pinch, crouching against an interior wall will also do.

Just exactly how this simulation is going to play out remains somewhat of a mystery to me, but I'm quite intrigued by the official USC email that mentioned "simulated damage to university buildings" and "actors in makeup playing 'victims' who will wait for emergency response." Sweet!

Of course, at 10am on November 13, I will be in Nina Foch's class, and for some reason I doubt she will be participating in said drill. I will, however, try to look for some earthquake victims during the break.