Nobody’s There…

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Make no mistake. I’m a natural Republican. I’m white, wealthy and Radical. I think government should play the smallest possible part in out lives and that when it does it should be effective.

There is now absolutely no possibility of voting for them. There hasn’t been for some time. Last night I asked several registered Republicans how they are voting this year. Three of the five told me they will be voting for Obama. 

Why? Perhaps this explains it.

I have just witnessed the most bizarre convention moment. Fred Thompson speaks. He whips the audience up into a frenzy of coziness. 

Up on the stage hops a young christian singer. She performs like a gifted karaoke singer. On time, in tune and totally unintelligible. The crowd goes weird.

I have never seen so many middle class, middle aged, middle of the road, white people rise out of their seats and shake their shoulders. Thick lips mumble amens. Arms and eyes are raised to the sky. Acres of dewlaps wobble. Double chins bounce like baskets-balls.  It must be jelly ‘cos jam don’t shake like that. Shudders go down my spine in the same way that they did when I was sixteen and my parents tried to be hip. Their eyes slide sideways and they look at the cameras- hoping they’ll be on TV - and sure enough they are. 

I am repulsed by that sea of straight, white christian folk bent on removing the rights and freedoms of the majority of Americans. I’m disgusted by the choice of vice-presidential candidate, horrified by the extremity of their politics.

I’ll apologize for this mess the only way I know how. I just donated to the Democrats.

Apple is amazing.

We bought and used “Blackware” IBM’s in the early 1980’s - in fact we were amongst the first ten people in the Uk to buy and set them up. Even the staff at IBM didn’t know hoe to put in extra memory and a young American university student had to do it for us. We couldn’t print a pound sign but it revolutionized out businesses. Two years ago became frustrated with the operating systems so we changed to Apple. Easy-peasy.

It takes minutes to find and correct problems. We don’t have long periods of “out-time.” I can even run glitch free PC programs on them.

Yesterday my iPhone went out of service. Two minutes on the Apple site and the solution was apparent.

This is how to run a business.

If anyone else has the same problem I’m going to place the solution here so that serch engines can find and report it.  

———————

I updated the software with phone in Airport mode and it went into “Emergency Mode”

Fix?

Hold down the home button and replace in the cradle. Do a reset. Restore form the backup in iTunes.

———————

Mary Beard, who’s blog on the Times Online describes her thus:- 

“…a wickedly subversive commentator on both the modern and the ancient world. She is a professor in classics at Cambridge and classics editor of the TLS.”

points out that Obama spelled backward is the greek word for “I shall love.”

We’ve just had a small tropical storm run through Key West. Most of us ignored it and stayed home watching the rain and rather enjoying the peace and quiet.

During really bad weather, however, we shutter the house and stay home. Our buildings are on high ground, we have our own generator and water supply so we feel relatively safe. Those who are not safe - the homeless, the elderly and the housebound and who cannot evacuate - normally rely on the social services provided by the churches.  But during a hurricane nobody’s there!  They close the meals services, shutter up the churches and nearly every pastor runs out of town. It’s left up to people like my partner and I, the local gay bar staff and the drag queens to go around with a first aid kit and hot soup. So it comes as a surprise to me that Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri wants to organize churches to act as disaster relief centers.

They might have the buildings, they may have the kitchens and they probably want the kudos… … but they run like the chickens!

What puzzles me most though what they pray for. They ask that the hurricane passes over their house/town/area code and that someone else gets it instead of them.

And then? They run.

Year after year I’m sickened by the Christian approach to disaster. When they say they are going to be there for the community - nobody’s there!

Down here in Key West we have  Drag Racing.

But No Olympics yet!

Might It look like this?

Kisik Lee is the coach for the US Olympic archery team. He a proselytizing christian. He says that to be an effective archer athletes must learn to clear their heads and focus. I now quote him!

 “If you are Christian then people can have that kind of empty mind.”

Mens inanis corpora sana?

.  Crackergate is over and dusted. I did my bit by writing to the Dean of The University of Minnesota in support of PX Myers and followed the story avidly. I have to admit to a bit of queasiness simply because it had a faint scent of unpleasantness about it. Not that it was in the same league of a Nazi leaving a pig’s head on the steps of a Synagogue or a Klan member burning a cross - but there was a gentle perfume on the wind that reminded me of them. In the UK many blogs characterized the situation as “The Affair Of The Magic Biscuit” - a rather more literary reflection! So… …There I am seated on the loo with a copy of “Everything You Know About God Is Wrong” and I happen upon the essay by John G. Bourke entitled “Holy Shit - Excrement and Religion” and discover that there is, in the annals of the catholic church, an old argument going on. What happens to the host AFTER you eat it? Stercanorarians thought that “the host was liable to digestion and all its consequences, like other food.” I presume this heresy was defeated but I am not sure what the current belief of Catholics is. I’d like to ask readers for enlightenment. * Googlewhacks are usually 2 word combinations. This word actually appears in the 1841 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and, together with the word biscuit, was a Googlewhack. Now this post is up it no longer is!

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Complete report on Towelroad and the ACLU 

OKEECHOBEE, FL - The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida today welcomed a district court decision ordering Okeechobee High School to officially recognize and allow equal access to the Okeechobee High School Gay Straight Alliance. 

“This decision sends a clear message to other schools that they face a similar fate in federal court if they choose to discriminate by deliberately misrepresenting GSAs as something they’re not,” said lead attorney Rob Rosenwald, Director of the ACLU of Florida’s LGBT Advocacy Project and John C. Graves Fellow. “Violence and harassment against gay students is a rampant problem in Florida.”

Here in Key West we have the greatest students in the whole USA. I’ll fist fight anyone who says different!

Of course there will always be bullying but the young people here stand together and just don’t allow it. It can be difficult even when the population is about 20% GLBT - and you only have a population of about 23,000. How the hell do you go to the Gay Centre for counseling and NOT be noticed?

Go see out kids work it all out at their MySpace pages GSA Key West.

Just wanted to crow!

Judge Orders a Florida School to Allow a Gay Tolerance Club

Federal Judge Rules Okeechobee, FL Students Can Form Gay-Straight Alliance Club

Liberal Christians are, at last, making a  little more noise within their own communities… Yet I’m still dismayed that they continue to go and form their own break away churches rather than remain and tackle the wrongness within their congregations.

Smulospace (I was led there by friendlyatheist.com) is a conversational blog that interests me, and many atheists, because the blog is liberal and christian. Yet still the old prejudices remain.

Commenters state that they are for or against gay marriage and go on to say things like:-

People obviously don’t understand what marriage actually is. It is not a natural state; animals don’t marry, and a lot of humans don’t bother. The only reason humans marry is because we recognize there’s something sacred in the permanent commitment that people make to create families (usually with children). Since this commitment is properly understood as being before God, both instituted and sustained by Him, it makes marriage inherently religious. 

Notice how this redefines marriage as a solely Christian concept. Marriage, I would point out has ALWAYS been a secular institution that was grabbed by the churches in the fourth and fifth centuries. It was so far removed from the churches that, even up to the fifteenth century, most marriages took place in the porches of churches with the couple only entering the nave for blessing.

I’ve made a general comment of the last blog entry Gay Marriage In California

I’ve looked carefully through all the comments on many pages before I wrote this.

I think you should all be ashamed of actually being either Christians or Christ Followers.

Why? Well… I look at what people do rather than what they say. What I see happening is mouths opening and speeches about love but actions that are hateful. In a lifetimes work as a psychotherapist I became convinced of the damage that churches do to young gay men and lesbians, evidenced by self harming and suicide attempts.

The double standards, cherry picking at biblical verses to confirm personal prejudice, sly undermining of individuals’ self worth had led me to condemn, in full and without exception, nearly all religious statements and the individuals tht make them.

Set at the base of Christians’ philosophy lies the concept of sin and it often seems as if this is what leads to the abnegation of life, love and self, the joyless miasma based on fear of punishment that wafts around the churches.

I realize that this is, to an extent, an overgeneralisation and I’m posting this on my own blog http://www.nobodysthere.com/blog if people what to take me to task about this.