Obama Starts Off On The Right Path

First, apologies to the two people who sometimes read this blog. I've been traveling and am now preparing to leave Israel to return to the US.

Now, today I read that President Obama has reversed the ban on US support to international family planning organizations that offer abortion or even information about abortion. This ban has been on (Reagan/Bush I), off (Clinton), and on (Bush II) again. Now it's off again, and I can only hope that it is off permanently.

Justifications for the ban are generally that no American tax payer should be forced to pay for what they believe are morally reprehensible programs. This is a silly argument on its face in that we all pay for things we would rather not - with our tax money. I would certainly prefer not paying Blackwater to terrorize various parts of the world on behalf of the US. I would certainly prefer not to have paid a penny towards the war in Iraq, which I was against from the very start. I would prefer not to pay for religious-based rehab programs. There are several morally reprehensible things my tax money supports.

Justifications for lifting the ban include the fact that funded programs offer many, many valuable services to women and families, including HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention programs, birth control provision and counselling, and general health and preventive care programs. It seems unfair that poor women and families cannot have access to these things while wealthy women and families can pay to go to private clinics, even traveling out of the area to do so.

This is one of the many reasons I have a problem with abortion restrictions here in the US as well. The wealthy seventeen-year-old who chooses abortion can afford to go just about anywhere to get one. The poor seventeen-year-old has no choice. She can't afford to travel to another county, state, or even country. Even if she can scrape up enough cash to go to some other county, she has to be "counseled," shown ultrasound pictures of her fetus, and otherwise delayed and delayed and delayed until she risks being fired from her job, missing important classes at school, or otherwise forced to take chances that the wealthy seventeen-year-old is not. This is a class and gender issue, not a moral one. If one set of morals apply to one woman and another set to another woman, that is just the type of moral relativism that the so-called Right to Lifers abhor. It is also annoying that, as the immortal George Carlin pointed out, right-wing fanatics' concern for life stops at birth - after that, they're on their own and social conservatives who made damned sure that they were born, wanted or not, able to be cared for or not, do not want to lift a finger to help them survive and thrive after they're born. Again with the moral relativism!

An interesting video is up on Youtube. A man visited an abortion protest and asked this question: If abortion is made illegal, what legal penalty should be placed on women who get an abortion. Most of the respondents were stumped by this question. One woman had the intestinal fortitude to admit that if abortion is killing a human, than murder laws and penalties should probably apply. She still hemmed and hawed with talk of "looking at the circumstances," but at least she is aware of the problems inherent in making abortion illegal.

Hmph. Rant over. Thanks President Obama. Let's try to work together to provide education and birth control to all the world so that abortion will be minimized.

Christmas Rant

I don’t give a crap about Christmas. There. Call me Scrooge, I don’t care.

I also don’t give a crap about my birthday, my wedding anniversary, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, or, really, any day that has been set aside as something special, but seems to actually be set aside in order to encourage profligate and unnecessary spending.

Every day I am alive is as special as the day on which I was born. Every day I am married to my wonderful Nigel is as special as the day on which we married. Every day on which I have enough to eat is as special as Thanksgiving. Every day on which I act as a good citizen and enjoy the fruits of democracy is as special as Independence Day.

But I digress. Back to Christmas. Both my family and Nigel’s family are populated by several poor planners and spendthrifts. Without going into boring detail and a 40 page rant, let’s just say that my brother and his family, Nigel’s brother and his girlfriend, and Nigel’s mom and her boyfriend have planned their finances very poorly and can’t control their impulses to spend money they do not have to buy luxury items. We have given Nigel’s mom large amounts of money twice within the past year, simply to allow her to eat and pay her bills. My brother and Nigel’s brother generally leech off of my mom and Nigel’s dad respectively.

At any rate, the tale continues as we plan for our trip back to the US for Christmas. Nigel got an e-mail from his brother recently saying that he and his girlfriend have no money but that their mom has helped him get presents for us and for the kids. This pisses me off on several levels:
1) His mom doesn’t have any money. How does Nigel’s brother have the nerve to leech off her? Why give gifts at all?
2) Again, his mom doesn’t have any money. Why give gifts at all?
3) When we give his mom money to allow her to pay bills and eat food, why would she think it is okay to use that money to buy crap for our kids!? We can buy crap for our own kids without her as the middle man. Why would she think it is okay to buy crap for our kids for Nigel’s BROTHER to give them?
4) Why can’t we just have a nice dinner and stay up all night talking and laughing and listening to music? Why do there have to be gifts at all when nobody has the money to pay for them?

We have asked them NOT to give presents they can’t afford. Why do they insist on it? Especially when they can’t even buy themselves the requirements for life without subsidization? I understand the desire to give things to your grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. I do not begrudge them wanting credit for getting things for the kids. They want the kids to love them the most and apparently think that unless they buy crap for them, the kids won’t love them. Whatever – we’re trying to raise the kids not to think that way. We’re trying to raise them to be responsible and productive members of society, neither dependent on others nor with others dependent on them. We’re trying to raise them knowing that PEOPLE are more important than THINGS, and that love is better displayed through everyday kindnesses than through the occasional giving of things.

There is an additional angle here, too, in that MY mom spent her whole life planning for retirement. She invested the maximum allowable into her retirement fund, made sure she did not spend money she didn’t have, and hired a financial planner to help her maximize her money and prepare for the earliest possible retirement date. Because of her good planning, she actually has disposable income, not as much as in the recent past, due to the current economic crisis, but she does well for herself – through her own hard work and thoughtful planning. This is a bone of contention between her and MIL. MIL feels competitive. While she can’t buy the kids one expensive toy or other gift, as my mom has done in the past, she tries to outdo my mom in quantity, with bags and bags of crappy crap from the Dollar Store.
In addition, Nigel’s dad recently remarried a woman with seemingly bottomless reserves of cash. So there’s competition there as well.

Nigel and I have also been actively planning for the time when we either don’t want to work anymore or cannot work anymore. We have invested and planned for ourselves and for our kids’ futures. We have pinched pennies and minimized spending on non-necessities for the past 15 years and have built up a nice nest egg.

Am I wrong to be offended? Am I a bitch for thinking that the $100.00 my MIL spent on bags of Dollar Store crap that will be broken within 24 hours of Christmas would have been better spent on my MIL’s household heating bill, or that Nigel’s brother would be better off using any money MIL gives him to pay off one of his credit card bills instead of buying crap for my kids? Am I stingy for thinking that if she has the nerve to ask for financial help from Nigel and I this Christmas, I will put my foot down and tell her to piss off until she can swear on a stack of WalMart circulars that she will not buy a single thing for us or our kids during the year? I fear that Nigel and I will not benefit from our hard work and penny pinching because of the profligacy of our families. Will we have to continue working until we die so that our families can buy Christmas presents for people? Fuck that.

I need to think of some sort of solution for the dilemma. My first thoughts are that I need to get Nigel’s support and tell everyone, my family AND his, that next year, for the kids’ birthday and for Christmas, if they MUST give presents, they will contribute to a central pool of money and that money will be used by the kids to buy something they want or need. Nobody will know how much any other person put into the pool, thus removing the competition angle. Also, any additional gifts given will be returned and the money will be given back to the giver or applied to the giver’s utility bill or mortgage/rent. This should also apply to any gifts given to me or to Nigel. We do not need socks or sweaters or potpourri, and if we do, we can get it ourselves.

Can’t we make Christmas, which I hate anyway, into a simple day, one to spend with our family eating and talking and laughing and having fun? Now, THAT, I wouldn’t hate.

College Student's Suicide Blamed on Dawkins

A young college student has committed suicide. His father blames Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion for causing the young man to lose faith in God and in a fit of hopelessness, kill himself.

Keith Kilgore told WND he feels, by allowing his son to move into the atmosphere of a secular school, like "I put a toddler in the front of my car."

Exactly so. By teaching his child that there is nothing but but hopelessness and nihilism without a god, and that intelligent design is a viable alternative to the theory of evolution and then sending him out into the real world, to a real college, with a real biology class, he DID put his child in the front of a car. I have found nothing in The God Delusion that says life is meaningless and hopeless without a god; on the contrary, Dawkins is consistent in that he loves to write about how fascinating and beautiful life in the real world is and he encourages readers to seek that fascination in their own lives.

Any good biology class will challenge fundamentalist beliefs. This poor young man was taught from childhood all the terrible arguments anti-science religious people parrot long after they have been refuted. It would have been difficult for any child growing up knowing only the " then why are there still monkeys" and "where are the transitional forms" types of argument to stay faithful in the face of actual scientific knowledge that would contradict what he has been taught all his life. How difficult and depressing it must have been for this obviously intelligent young man to finally understand that his family and friends and community had been lying to him his entire life.

"I'm all for academic freedom," Keith Kilgore said. "What I do have a problem with is if there's going to be academic freedom, there has to be academic balance. They were undermining every moral and spiritual value for my [son]," he said. "They ought to be held accountable."

Because, obviously, and as many others have written, colleges and universities should be teaching future MD's how to balance the four humours through bleeding and purging in addition to actual science-based medicine, such as germ theory. And astronomy students should be learning astrology and geocentrism as well. And chemists should learn alchemy. And geologists should learn flat-earth theory. For academic BALANCE, you know.

Damn those scientists and their big brains! Don't they know it is their job to make sure their students' moral and spiritual needs are being met in their classrooms? If I choose to raise my child to believe things that directly contradict reality, and to take pride in his ability to debate his false beliefs against the blasphemers using stale and long-discredited arguments, they should respect that and cater to his ignorance by teaching the falsehoods WITH the reality! That's what I'm paying them for! They ought to be held accountable!!!

IMO, Mr. Kilgore, his family, his church, and his community should be held accountable for lying to this young man and encouraging his false beliefs and hopes, directly resulting in his loss of faith and suicide. Apparently and very sadly, based on the young Kilgore's lack of communication with his father and other family members in regard to his loss of faith, the poor young man felt unable to even discuss his despair with his family, and instead, only communicated his feelings to a few friends who apparently didn't feel it would be appropriate to inform anyone who might be able to help him. While that is not quite as morally reprehensible as watching a young man commit suicide on the internet and doing nothing other than express shock or laugh and encourage him to do it, I still have to wonder how these "friends" will handle the guilt of knowing how depressed and hopeless Kilgore felt while doing nothing to help.

I say that it was this young man's parents, his friends, and his church that betrayed his trust and set him up for this tragedy. Dawkins's books are chock full of hope. Religion is chock full of false hope.

My Supernatural Pet-Power

I scoff at people who tell me, “It was MEANT to BE!” However, that said, one afternoon, I picked up the kids from school and as we were driving down the not-yet-paved road away from school, a black dog ran right in front of the van. I honestly thought I had hit the poor thing. I screeched to a halt, got out, and ran around the front of the van to look - nothing. I went around the passenger side - nothing. I went to the back - nothing. I could hear the kids shrieking, but thought it was because my fear had rubbed off on them. I finally shook my head and went to get back into the van. Guess who was in the driver’s seat?

There was absolutely no way we could have another pet. We already had four cats, two geckos, an aquarium, and another dog at home, and were preparing to move overseas for two years!

But we all fell in love with Zippy after we had gotten him back up to speed healthwise - he had been living out on the mesa, eating rabbits, and had worms and every other parasitical disgusting disorder possible. He was a loveable dork, with separation anxiety, nervous tail-biting, and a penchant for throwing up in the car.

Soon, though, the day came when I was going to have to find Zippy a new home. We had already prevailed on our families to keep two of the cats for us until we returned home, had found a new home for the geckos and the entire aquarium. One cat had died, and we were taking one cat and our other dog with us. Nobody wanted to keep Zippy. I called a friend who worked for one of those no-kill, all-volunteer, adoptathon places. She said there was little hope, since they had so many dogs who needed good homes, but to bring Zippy to their next adoptathon and fill out paperwork.

The morning of the adoptathon, I had a horrible cold, and almost decided not to go. But I got up and dragged my sorry butt and Zippy’s nervous and excited butt down to the place. I started filling out the paperwork, while Zippy stuck like glue to my leg.

Before I even finished, a man and his two kids came up with their dog and asked about Zippy. He and their dog sniffed each other and began to play. He twisted the kids up in his leash and licked them everywhere he could reach. The man said, “Well, that was easy. We want HIM.” I explained all about his nervousness and barfage, but they insisted Zippy was the one. So, within an hour, we had finished the paperwork, driven one of the volunteers to the family’s house to make sure it was appropriate for Zippy, gotten the volunteer’s approval, and sent Zippy off to his new home. It was so fast I didn’t even have time to get verklempt until I was driving home afterwards.

The family has sent me updates and photos and have reported that Zippy gets along famously with their other dog and cat (cats he did NOT tolerate at our house!), and had stopped biting his tail and never threw up in their car! He is much happier there than he was with us. The three kids fight over who gets to have Zippy sleep with them. The timing was perfect.

So, part of me says it was meant to happen exactly the way it did or it wouldn’t have happened so smoothly. The other part of me says, “Oh, come ON, ya’ freak!”

We also have a ginger cat, Tang, who is with us now, who I had known as a kitten when he was put up for adoption at the vet clinic where I worked. He was the last kitten left and I had almost talked DH into bringing him home, but we had a very old cat and didn’t want to torment her in her old age. After hours, I would let him out and he would follow me around while I cleaned up before leaving, chasing the dust mop, climbing up onto my shoulders, etc.

One day, he was gone. A friend of one of my co-workers had taken him home.

Six months later, this friend came in with him. He was horrible, she was allergic, they couldn’t keep him out in the garage anymore because he was peeing all over everything, etc. They had never vaccinated him, had no litter box (no wonder he was peeing all over the garage!), never neutered him. Basically, the poor guy was alone in a garage 24 hours a day. So I brought him home - after getting his vax done and having him neutered. He’s been perfect and is the best cat I have ever had in my life. When we decided to come overseas, and were looking for babysitters for our other cats, every single family member we asked said, “Oooh! I’ll take Tang!”

Again, it seems like it could have been meant to be! He reappeared just a week after our older cat had died. He seemed to remember me, though I’m sure he really didn’t. Had they just taken him to the pound, he probably wouldn’t have been a good candidate for adoption, since he was no longer a tiny, cute kitten and he had health issues that I was able to have corrected quickly and more affordably, since I worked at the clinic. He fit in immediately with our other cat and our dog. The timing was perfect.

Similar story applies to our other dog, but not as dramatic. A woman came in to the clinic with an adorable black and white dog under her arm. Her first words were, "I want a rabies vaccination and nothing else! How much will it cost?" While she waited for the doctor, the rest of the story came out. She had gotten the dog from AHA for her three(!)-year-old. The three-year-old, of course had no idea what to do with a dog, and was too afraid to go into the backyard anymore. The dog had been alone in the backyard getting haphazardly fed and watered (based on her condition when I first saw her), but never played with or trained in any way for the past six months. She smelled awful.

I suggested an exam and at least one more vaccination, for parvovirus, since I had seen puppies die of parvo and didn't want to see it ever again. She said, "No, just a rabies."

She went into a room to get the vaccine, and soon, the doctor came out from the back room with the dog under her arm. "Does anyone want this dog? The owner is going to take her to the pound as soon as we are done here. She only got the vaccine because she got a ticket for not vaccinating and she needs the vax certificate so she doesn't have to pay the ticket."

I immediately spoke up, "I want her." The doctor put her down and I squatted down and the dog ran over to me right away and tucked her head under my knee, peeing all over the place in excitement and nervousness. I typed up a document for the woman to sign stating that she was giving the dog to me in exchange for my paying for her vaccinations. The woman signed the paper and left with her vaccination certificate.

Before I left work that day, Speck had a complete exam, all the appropriate vaccines, a nice, long bath and grooming, and more love and attention than she'd probably had in her 8 months of life. She has been the best dog in the entire world ever since! The timing was perfect.

So, it appears that I have a supernatural power to arrange the best possible outcome for stray cats and dogs. Or perhaps I exude some ectoplasmic stuff that attracts the needy cases that only I can take care of appropriately. Or some other supernatural power arranged things and they were just meant to be.

Naah, I just got lucky. But it’s fun to play pretend!

When Patriarchy Makes the Rules V

11/11/08 Update: This young woman, the rape and murder victim, is named Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow. I want to always include names when I can find them. These victims should have names so that they are more difficult to forget. Let's not forget Aisha.

Pharyngula has this BBC article today. It is enough to render me speechless, but I'm fighting it.

A 13 year old rape victim was convicted by an Islamic court of adultery in Somalia. Following her family's report of her rape by three men, she was detained. She was placed into a hole up to her neck and stoned by a group of 50 or more men in a football stadium before an audience of at least 1000 people. They dug her up to make sure she was dead. She was not. They returned her to the hole and finished the job.

In further Somalian news, from the same article, two men who helped kill a thief after torturing his mother received 39 lashes, and the man who actually completed the murder paid 100 camels to the dead thief's family and was released.

Penalty for being raped: DEATH BY STONING.
Penalty for torture and aiding murder: 39 LASHES.
Penalty for murder: FINE OF 100 CAMELS.

Among the approximately 1000 fans at the football stadium watching the stoning of the crying, pleading rape victim, exactly NONE stepped forward to try to stop it.

Fucking barbarians.

Skeptic Alert!

While "Stop Sylvia Browne" website author, Robert Lancaster, was recuperating from a stroke, his domain name expired and was snapped up by a believer in/advertiser for psychics. In order to support Mr. Lancaster's herculean efforts to expose and document the activities of the heinous, money-grubbing, immoral, and unethical Sylvia Browne, please link to the new website: http://stopsylvia.com, tagging it ,Sylvia Browne. Hopefully if many bloggers do so, it will prevent potential victims of the wealthy scam artist, Sylvia Browne, from being sucked into allowing her or any other so-called psychic to profit from their grief by pretending to communicate with their dead loved ones.

Vote Early and Often!

Yeah, I'm kidding about that "often" part! But I have been reading things that say that lines are already starting to get long at early polling locations all over the country where early voting is allowed. If the lines are getting long now, imagine what they will be like on Election Day next Tuesday!

Don't miss your opportunity to vote by waiting until the last minute and getting there too late! Four years ago, I stood in line for 2 1/2 hours to vote in a PRIMARY! It took me so long, that by the time I was finished and got back home, Nigel didn't have time to go vote at all! Our candidate lost by ONE VOTE! Well, I kid, but really, folks, don't take the chance that you may lose your opportunity to vote! Go NOW! DO IT!