The Republic of T.

He’s ba-aaaaaaaaaack. And this time he’s actually writing fiction.

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There was a time when I would have at least given it very serious consideration — like around the time his first CD came out — but I’ve know for some time now that I’ll never marry Rufus Wainwright. That’s OK, because I’m happily married, and because he’d never marry me or anyone else.

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I’m not an economist. I’ve never studied economics, beyond reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Economics about a year ago. I’ve read about derivatives, and had my mind blown by the concept of securitization and the idea that people not only sell debt, but chop it up into little pieces, mix those pieces up, and then resell them to other people. (And, wait a minute, debt has value?)

And, all with no regulation or oversight?

Now, after following economic news this past year, it’s like somebody pulled back the curtain and revealed the economy as little more than floating game of craps. And I find myself thinking, “You gotta be kidding me, right? This can’t really be the economy. Can it? We gotta have something else, because you know what this sounds like to me?”

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• The Last of the Zoroastrians – TIME
  (tags: religion)

Source.

Some people might call Margaret Atwood paranoid, but you know — if you’ve been paying attention at all — that there are some people who’d move to the Republic of Gilead tomorrow, andwould drag the rest of us with them if they could.

I read The Handmaid’s Tale either during my senior year of high school or my freshman year of college. By then I’d already heard Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition recommend quarantining people living with AIDS in “cities of refuge.” I remember thinking then that it wouldn’t be a far leap to suggest quarantining gay people altogether, and that Lou would probably think it was a good idea.

Then I read about “gender treachery” and how it was punished in Gilead.

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• Was Jesus' Resurrection a Sequel? – TIME
  (tags: religion history)
• The Man Who Bought a Resurrection – TIME
  (tags: religion history)

• CultCase: Get Your Own Copy: Top 10 Online Video Conversion Services
  (tags: video youtube resources)

The winding down of the dark age of W feels like something like a long night’s journey into day. (Apologies to Eugene O’Neill.) Granted, Republicans are doing everything they can on their way out to make sure the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed a train. (More on that later.) But the world’s response to the incoming Obama administration is a nice reminder of what it’s like to live in a world where people are actually glad to see us when we show up.

As John Kerry put it when he dropped by the United Nations’ climate conference.

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I don’t know if I’ve said it before, but I just love Jon Stewart too. Here’s a man who really gets it. From his recent interview with Mike Huckabee. (Favorite line: “At what age did you choose not to be gay?”)

In particular, he gets something that I’ve written about here before as Steve Benen explains.

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• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
  (tags: research genealogy slavery africa)

I know I’ve said it before, but I just love Keith Olberman. This time, it’s his take on the Bush “legacy.”

Yes. Once upon a time.

I took this survey via Lifehacker.

CNET reports that Wikipedia has received $890,000 in funding specifically aimed at creating an easier to use interface for readers with a low level of tech knowledge. Wikipedia’s goal is “to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and then work to systematically reduce or eliminate them.” It’s an excellent idea, considering the obvious fact that there are presumably countless potential contributors with a lot of knowledge but a low level of tech skill. Still, since most of our readers are a tech-savvy bunch, it got us wondering:

Have you ever edited Wikipedia?

Well yes. But I soon stopped.

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I read about an attack on a lesbian student at Wayland Union High School, near Grand Rapids, MI, via Ed’s blog.

Police in Wayland, Mich., are investigating an attack by two 14-year-old girls on a third girl in Wayland Union High School. The victim was identified as a supporter of gay rights. The June 10 attack was purposely recorded on a cell phone video by another female, police say.

Wayland is located south of Grand Rapids and according to the city’s Web site has a population of 3,939 people.

Police told Grand Rapids-based WOOD-TV 8, the NBC affiliate, the two girls attacked the victim because she was a “gay rights advocate.”

Chief Dan Miller of the Wayland Police told the Kalamazoo Gazette the 14-year-old victim identified herself as a lesbian.

“I guess some say she’s pretty outspoken, and the other two girls didn’t like that,” he said in the Gazette. “We were told by the two suspects it was over the sex-orientation issue that they don’t believe in.

It was around the same time that I was researching the murders of Simmie Williams and Lawrence King, both of whom were harassed in school. I guess it interested me because of that, and because I was harassed in school. But I was fortunate never to experience something like this.

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I started researching the murder of Simmie Williams back in August, around the same time I began researching the murder of Lawrence King. I started researching King’s story because of the Newsweek article about his murder that came out in July, and there was a lot of controversy around it. I starting researching Simmie William’s murder because the similarities with King (gay youth, of color, non-gender conforming, etc.) and the reality that —though his murder happened little more than a week after King’s — William’s murder got far less attention.

Maybe it was because of race, maybe it was because of the difference in age between him and King, whose murder has arguably received the most attention since Matthew Shepard. But, then, that’s no different from any number of anti-LGBT hate crimes that rarely make headlines outside of the communities where they occur. Memorials are held, sometimes vigils on the murder site or where the body was found or outside of hospitals. Local groups organize. Sometimes a suspect is caught, and even tried and convicted.

But most of the rest of the world never hears.

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If nothing else, this election revealed how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.

Yes, there’s the irony of celebrating the historic election of Barak Obama while simultaneously mourning the passage of Proposition 8 and the other anti-gay ballot initiatives in Florida, Oklahoma, and Arizona. But this started way before November 4th. It started, this time, with a decision — conscious or not — by the McCain campaign to play to the basest of its base.

I said to myself at the time that, whether McCain won or lost, there would be a price for that tactic; one that John McCain would be among the last to ever have to pay. As president, there would have been no way he could have united the country. And even in the aftermath of his loss, we will continue to live with the belligerent bigotry and racism he and his running mate stirred up from their bottom-of-the-barrel base.

The evidence? The rise in hate crimes in the wake of the election.

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After the previous post, it seems appropriate to move delusion to delusion. So, let’s look into the case of Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. In what world does Peggy Noonan reside? And what color is the sky there?

I ask because, though capable of surprising moments of clarity (which I hope to get to in a another post), her latest WSJ column sounds like a dispatch from the mental space to which Noonan decamped during the Clinton years, a place I’ve wondered about since her bid to let dolphins determine child custody and immigration policy — somewhere unrelated to the world I’ve been reading about in the headlines lately.

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Probably not going to post much today, but wanted to share this.

It’s been going on more and more often lately. Look like he’s getting the hang of it.