Quote of the Week

Bishop Desmond Tutu:
Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity — or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country [...]

Roots on a whole new level

This is absolutely horrifying. The United Kingdom is rolling out Human Provenance, a program to collect tissue samples from potential immigrants in a plan which the Border Service says will allow them to accurately assess an applicant’s country of origin.  In effect, a mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA) would be used to decide whether someone [...]

They The People

The Iraqi Constitution (pdf), pushed by the Bush II administration and passed by the Bush-endorsed government:
Article 31:
First:  Every citizen has the right to health care. The state shall maintain public health and provide the means of prevention and treatment by building different types of hospitals and health institutions.
Second:   Individuals and entities have the right to [...]

There is no happy ending

I spent a decade unsuccessfully attempting to write salable historical romance.  After 4 completed novels, I gave up.  My problem?  I couldn’t do interpersonal conflict.  Characters tormented by internal conflicts?  No problem.  Conflict between the protags and the bad guy?  No problem.  But between hero and heroine, who were supposed to love each other?  It [...]

The revolution will be tweeted

After my last post expressing my disenchantment with Twitter and Facebook, I should note the incredible use Twitter has been to Irani protestors in getting their message out.   This has been their media of last resort because the govenment has strangled available bandwidth down to 12 K to make it impossible to upload video.  Compare [...]

Why not just blind them?

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. Matthew 5:29
From BBC News:
A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear [...]

Cruising

It’s tough being young and repressed. A NYT article talks about the lengths young men in sex-segragated Saudi Arabia will go to meet young women. One of the most popular ways is “numbering,” trying to exchange phone numbers with women they pass in cars.
A phone number written out on a piece of cardboard [...]

The Greeks called and they want their name back

Since the 7th century BCE, the Greek isle of Lesbos has been famed as the birthplace of Sappho, perhaps the greatest poet of antiquity, who is noted for her poetry celebrating love between women. In her honor, gay women adopted the label lesbians for their self-identification. I think most of us know [...]

Imagine a place this safe ….

When Meredith first started talking about going to Denmark for a semester, her primary goal was to convince me of how safe it is there. I didn’t believe her, knowing the crime statistics of any US city of comparable size. But from the archives of her memory she pulled out the story of [...]

“The fire down below”*

In the US we’re shamefully uncomfortable discussing the sexual needs of the physically and mentally handicapped, as well as the elderly. Because we’d rather not think about it, their needs are often left unfulfilled. That doesn’t appear to be the case in Europe.
From the Copenhagen Post:
Carers help nursing home residents buy sex [...]

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