Bombastic 'Mo

Just kick me while I’m down

I came back from Olympia early because I have a “mandatory” WorkSource training opportunity tomorrow.  If I don’t attend, I would not be eligible for benefits.

Which rings of a little irony since I came home today, checked the mail, and found I was denied for benefits anyway.  Fuck me.

I then went ahead and checked my Bank of America bank account to see how close I was to selling my blood on the street (I don’t know how… maybe in popsicle form or something) and saw that Bank of America has started charging me a $6 a month service fee because I no longer have direct deposit.  Since you know, I no longer have a job.

Ironically, I think had the unemployment come through, they offer direct deposit….

If anything could be called class warfare, this has to be it.  Seriously, I’m being charged a fee because they see I no longer have an income?  What a bunch of fucking assholes.  I’m going out tomorrow and closing down my account.

Plus you know, they are a horrible bank.

Alarmist!

First watch the video and freak yourself out:

Pop Corn téléphone portable micro-ondes
Uploaded by sassiere

Before you flush your iPhone down the toilet, here’s the truth:

“In a microwave oven, energy excites the water inside popcorn kernels until it turns into highly pressurized gas, causing the kernels to pop. If mobile phones emitted that much energy, the water in the fingers of people holding them would heat up.”

My best guess is the video is part of some new viral marketing campaign.  Maybe Orville Redenbacher is developing mobile-pop?

Perhaps the Sequel to 300?

But without all the abs.

The Seattle Times picked up a story from the Associated Press today about one job opening in Tacoma.

807 people showed up.

Let’s Vilify Some More People

Representative Mark Miloscia just introduced a bill that would add an 18.5% sales tax to all adult entertainment items.  The Digest of the Bill reads:

“Dedicates revenue from a tax on the sale and use of adult entertainment materials and services to crime victims’ compensation, with an emphasis towards providing services, support, or therapy to those children who are victims of sexual abuse.

Imposes an additional tax on each retail sale of adult entertainment materials and services equal to eighteen and one-half percent of the selling price.  Requires all revenue collected on sales and use of adult entertainment materials and services to be deposited in the general fund to be used solely for the general assistance unemployable program.”

I’m pro-tax in almost any regard, and I really appreciate that we’re in dire need of new streams of revenue.  But this bill is completely wrong.

I believe in the “sin tax”.  I think raising the taxes on cigarettes makes sense, as they do have a tangible cost to society.   (Full disclosure: I’ve never smoked in my life.)

I can also get behind taxes on alcohol.  Like cigarettes, they have an associated cost to society (DUI’s, disintegrating livers, urine in alleyways) that’s not bundled into the cost of production.  (Full disclosure:  I got so drunk in Portland last weekend I vomited in my pants.)

But this doesn’t pass those same standards.  First off, it’d be very difficult to associate any real, tangible, negative affects of pornography or sex toys on society.  If anything, I think it’d be easier to prove their positive effect.  (One example would be this study that links an increase in access to Internet pornography to a decrease in rape.)

Second, this tax is simply meant to impose a tax on people who generally would be unwilling to speak up for themselves.  Unfortunately we’re still living in the remnants of a very Puritanical society, and many people are rather closeted about their adult entertainment expenditures.  It’s a very dangerous precedent to set to tax people who are either afraid or unable to defend themselves.

And third, the adult entertainment industry isn’t a good revenue source.  With the rise of YouTube-style porn sites, the vast majority of porn is now available for free.  In addition, unless the state gets a LOT better at policing our Internet use, it’s going to be a hard item to itemize.  Especially since the providers (who are mostly out of state already) will simply move further away from Washington.

Seriously folks.  It’s time for a fucking income tax.

That’s not a fucking Privilege

I’m still editing the earlier story, and listening to the Senate hearing.

I just had to spit out.

No one has the privilege to make sure that no one else has privileges.  You do not have the right to know that people you don’t like don’t have rights.

Crazy old lady just gave us a Sex Ed talk about Adam and Eve and men and women coming together physically.

Ah!

Live from Oly: Domestic Partnership Hearings

The atmosphere was tense, the temperature hot, and the crowd an uneven mix of vitriol and hope at today’s House Bill 1727 public hearing.  Openly gay Representative Jamie Pedersen introduced the bill, which will provide all of the benefits of marriage to Washington State’s domestic partners.“[I know] there are strong feelings on this bill,” Pedersen said to the crowd in a plea for civility.  “But we are not going to tolerate disrespect.  I understand that there has been some name-calling and pushing out in the halls.  We are not going to tolerate that in here and neither will security.”

Constituents against the bill outnumbered those for the bill nearly 3 to 1.  Wearing white “Vote No! on 1727 and 5688” stickers and matching pins featuring the silhouette of a man and a woman, the members of the crowd cheered, applauded, and yelled amen while their side spoke, despite repeated requests from legislators to be silent.

“We can’t have outbreaks like that if we are to have people coming up to testify,” Pedersen told the crowd.  “It’s against the rules.”

The crowd booed.  Many of the people against the bill were children who looked to have been pulled out of middle school to attend the hearing.  Pubescent youth leaned against walls, their “Vote No” stickers oversized on their small, acne-riddled forms.  Many seemed disinterested and bored.  A mother sitting next to me scolded her son for putting his “Marriage is between a Man and a Woman” pin in his mouth.

Those for the bill sat in front of the angry crowd and told personal stories about their families.  Pairs of mothers introduced their children, and a gay firefighter spoke of his fear of dying on the job and being unable to leave anything to his partner of 13 years.

The opposition to the bill spoke just as passionately, although their arguments seldom were about the bill itself.  Pastors, church groups, and concerned citizens from Eastern Washington threatened the collapse of the public school system, the dissolution of the economy due to rising gay health care costs, and burning in Hell.

Pedersen sat quietly during much of the testimony; his hands clasped across his mouth as he listened to women talk of their experience “working with the ex-gay” community.  Repeatedly, he and other Representatives would interrupt to remind those against the bill that this was not a Gay Marriage bill, nor a chance to preach about the Bible.

“I’m sorry,” Pedersen would repeat.  “I really wish that you could speak to the bill.”

I actually couldn’t finish

And I consider myself pretty callous.

But The Stranger’s feature on the Pedophiles of Alaska actually outlasted me.  I couldn’t get to the end of it.

Read on if you dare.  It’s heavy.

Emergency: Domestic Partnerships a danger to “Public Peace, Health or Safety”

The gays have had their fun, and after two years of state-sponsored domestic partnership, it’s time to preserve “public peace, health, or safety, or support of the state government and its existing public institutions”.

So says house bill 1980, the brainchild of Representative Jim McCune R-2,  whose district I couldn’t find on a map.

Co-sponsored by like-minded Republicans Shea, Crouse, Schmick, Cox, and Roach, the bill is “AN ACT Relating to reaffirming and protecting the institution and benefits of marriage as a union between a man and a woman”.  In doing so, the legislation would revoke all domestic partnership benefits to already registered same-sex couples in Washington, as well as denying any future benefits that could be granted to the gays of the future.

Citing “serious concern” over the recent California Supreme Court “imposition” that ruled domestic partnerships were unequal to marriage and violated the state’s constitution, the representatives have decided they should nip all problems in the bud by declaring domestic partnerships illegal.

The good news, there is only six Republicans signed on to the bill.  In contrast, house bill 1727 (which expands all rights of marriage to domestic partners) has support from Representatives Pedersen, Walsh, Moeller, Johnson, Carlyle, Quall, Sullivan, Maxwell, Roberts, Chase, Upthegrove, White, Conway, Nelson, Cody, Hudgins, Morris, Eddy, Liias, Kagi, Ormsby, Rolfes, Clibborn, Dunshee, Pettigrew, Springer, Hunter, Williams, Blake, Darneille, Goodman, Dickerson, Hasegawa, Linville, Kenney, Appleton, Van De Wege, Kessler, Santos, Sells, O’Brien, Ericks, Wallace, McCoy, Kirby, Haigh, Takko, Hurst, Seaquist, Wood, Flannigan, Orwall, Jacks, Finn, Hunt, Simpson, and Driscol.

Lesbians Arrested after Kissing in Mall

Maybe this is why they grow up to be separatists in the woods.

Two girls were arrested after an altercation that stemmed from a security guard catching them kissing in a San Antonio mall.  After the guard told the girls their kissing was innapropriate for the mall setting, they were evicted from the mall and subsequently arrested for re-entering to fast track it to their car.

A spokesman for the mall holds that the mall has an anti-kissing policy on the books that they apply to all couples, regardless of their orientation.

One girl was charged with trespassing, and the other was charged with trespassing, resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer.

Full story care of Texas based chron.com.

America’s Amazons: Lesbian Separatist Communities Dying of Attrition

The New York Times has a great article on one of the remaining Lesbian Separatist communities still in existence, although their ranks are dwindling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01womyn.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1

As a child raised by lesbians, I was aware of the contentious debate between lesbians of the time as to what place men could have in their lives.  Although I had my supportive pack of lesbians dubbed “the Moms group”, there were definitely times when I felt estranged due to my genitals.

But I had no idea that there were actually communities of lesbians living together, man-free, in the woods.

“THEY called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate.”

“BEHIND the gate at Alapine, about five miles from the nearest town in the southern Appalachian mountains near Georgia, the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and ‘community full moon circles’ during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like ‘Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?’”

“There is strident debate within and across the womyn’s lands about who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.”

The article also has a great audio slide containing interviews with the womyn, and describes the difficulties they are going through attempting to recruit younger women into their ranks.

Domestic Partnerships >= Marriage?

Well, just equal.  But you get rid of all that crazy religious guilt and saving yourself for marriage.  And you still get to have the party!

Right now the Domestic Partnerships we have in Washington are a start, but they provide a small fraction of the benefits that true marriage provides.

HB 1727 intends to change that.  The 110 page bill will provide all rights that marriage provides to state-sponsored Domestic Partnerships.  The bill is accompanied by Senate Bill 5688, which would do the same thing.

The bill digest reads:

“Declares that for all purposes under state law, state registered domestic partners shall be treated the same as married spouses. Any privilege, immunity, right, benefit, or responsibility granted or imposed by statute, administrative or court rule, policy, common law or any other law to an individual because the individual is or was a spouse, or because the individual is or was an in-law in a specified way to another individual, is granted on equivalent terms, substantive and procedural, to an individual because the individual is or was in a state registered domestic partnership or because the individual is or was, based on a state registered domestic partnership, related in a specified way to another individual.  Provides that the act shall be liberally construed to achieve equal treatment, to the extent not in conflict with federal law, of state registered domestic partners and married spouses.”

Anyone wishing to either listen in on the hearing, or give testimony should attend the public hearing Thursday, February 5th at 10 AM (the house bill) or 3:30 PM (senate version) in Olympia, Washington.

Does Watching TV increase depression? Reading blogs?

The Seattle’s PI has an interesting article up regarding the correlation between watching TV and playing too many video games and a potential link to increased risks of depression later in life.

Which is interesting, but if anything was depressing me this morning, it was the PI’s 911 Blog.

 Man Shot, Dies in West Seattle Shooting Last Night.

Three-Year-Old Child Dies in Car Accident & Other Fatalities.

Three teens assault Lake City Man for his iPod.

Police still trying to find suspect of Greenwood Armed Robbery.

Shit, I’m afraid to leave my house.  Guess I’ll just sit at home in the dark playing Fallout 3 and listening to musicals.

Maybe I’ll start watching football afterall

I skipped this year’s Superbowl, as I’ve never been one to take an interest in watching sports. Or eating nacho dip and drinking Bud Light.

But apparently this year I missed out.  Viewers in Tucson, Arizona were given a brief intermission from the normal ball-play shortly after “Larry Fitzgerald’s heroic comeback(ish) touchdown for the Cardinals” (reports i.gizmodo… I’m not even going to try to report on the actual football).

The video feed cut directly to the Club Jenna channel, and showed porn star Evan Stone bouncing his junk back and forth across his thighs like a game of pong.

Comcast has yet to give a concrete reason for the err, although their poor Call Center employees are likely never going to hear the end of it.

Anyone wishing to experience the blooper themselves can catch a video on http://i.gizmodo.com/5144199/comcast-tucson-airs-graphic-porn-during-super-bowl-nsfw

At least I still have my health

“Dear MR. GLASER:

Basic Health (BH) has reached it’s enrollment limit and cannot offer you coverage.  When space is available, you will be offered enrollment; you will receive instructions at that time.  If we know we will not be able to offer you coverage within 60 days, we will return any money you have sent.

If you applied for coverage through a sponsoring organization, we will notify your sponsor when space is available.  Contact your sponsoring organization if you have questions.

We expect to offer you enrollment soon; however, we cannot guarantee enrollment by a specific date.  Once you are scheduled for enrollment, you will receive a confirmation letter indicating when coverage will begin.

…

Sincerly, 

Basic Health”

Powerful

This video, in response to the some of the religious right’s recent claims of Christian-Bashing, or Christ-a-phobia is really good. It also kind of hurts.

Fair warning, there is some graphic stuff.