I am getting real tired of clickbait headlines

Ever see those 'sponsored'  articles which purport to show some intriguing  fact or picture (which rarely actually shows up in the 'article') with the headline saying something like 'Number 3 shocked us' or 'Number 5 is outrageous'.

It seems like many news organizations are now using the same, stupid, and annoying methods to try and get people to read what is supposed to be a news article. Mostly it is focused on some political situation or person such as:

The internet burns Trump...
Trump is furious over this...
West wing drama...
The internet is celebrating....
so and so does (whatever) and the reason is disgusting...
Twitter explodes as trump...
why (insert country here) thinks that trump is (insert insult here)
so and so 'shreds' Trump (foreign or domestic) policy
so and so 'torches' (GOP/Trump/Democrats/Clinton) for...
is so and so the 'real' president
Trump 'feud' with (insert everyone here) intensifies...
(insert situation) puts (insert party) on the spot
'bombshell' report just published showing (insert politician) has (insert unethical behavior)
so and so just burned trump over (tweet or action of the day)
so and so just did (whatever) and trump is furious.
so and so just did (insert action) and Twitter is ripping them a new one...


You get the idea. These 'article headings' are just designed to get you to click on the article and for the most part are either opinion pieces or speculation, NOT NEWS.

I am tired of this. I go to news sites to read fact, not be manipulated by web pages that mislead people into thinking they will get some new, rather than unsubstantiated speculation.

That is the real 'fake news'.

Sometimes you just have to call a pile of crap Bullshit!

I read this attached article Conservatives explain why they lost on marriage the other day, and one particular statement made by a man named Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission made me so angry, that I found myself waking up in the middle of the night to pen the following:

Dear Dr. Moore,

"There were some people speaking to this issue from my side who were angry and presented a public face of outrage in a way that I don't think was helpful," Moore said. "Evangelicals don't dislike our gay and lesbian neighbors, and we don't mean them harm."

Don't mean gays any harm?

What a load of Bullshit!

For generations you and your ilk have meant them harm in the worst way. You have:

• Castigated them
• Reviled them
• Fired them from their jobs
• Kicked them out of their homes
• Driven them from there families
• Criminalized them,
• Accused them of pedophilia
• Stood by in indifferent silence as they were bullied, beaten, tortured and sometimes killed.
• Instilled in them  as children that they were sick, perverted and evil
• Driven them  to homelessness and even suicide.
• forced them into horrendous 'therapies' that damaged them for life, including chemical castration and aversion therapy.

Now, in this last generation,when they have had enough, and fought for dignity and the right to have equality under the law, you and your kind have fought them tooth and nail, passed laws to limit their citizenship, deny them family; threatening civil war, civil disobedience and the wrath of God if they were allowed to be anything but pariahs, and finally when they have won at least a part of the battle for equality, you have the unmitigated gall to call them your neighbors and assure them you mean  no harm.

You sir, are either a bald faced liar or a hypocrite of the first order.

Of course you mean them harm. You and yours epitomize true evil in the world, not the horns and pitchfork kind you use to keep your followers in line, but true, human evil, the type born of callousness and fanaticism; the type that fosters hopelessness and despair in  children and fear and self loathing in adults.

So don't think that anyone will be taken in by bland assertions that you 'mean no harm', Your intentions have been clear for generations an no one believes it has suddenly gone through a sea change. Gay folks have experienced your 'love and compassion' for all of their lives and know you for who and what you really are.

Ther Republican strategy on ACA

This horrible thought occurred to me last night.

Once the supreme court rules against Obamacare, the entire health care industry will be in total disarray. There will be an outcry for something to be done. The republicans will then propose some plan that does away with the individual mandate, the pre-existing clause, and any other piece that riles their guts.

Then, of course, they will pass it in the house. It may or may not get passed in the senate, but even if it does, Obama will, of course, not sign it, thereby allowing them to claim that it is the democrats and the president that is trying to keep hard working Americans from having healthcare.

Problem solved. Either we go back to the old system, or the democrats get the blame for the fiasco; a win/win for the tea party and the Koch Brothers and a great political stone to throw at the democrats in 2016.

GOD! I hope I am wrong!

In support of the American Muslim community

Sometimes with all that is happening in the world, and with all the racial and religious strife that appears to be happening in the US, we forget who we are and what our core principles are suppose to be.

I just read an article about a group of so called 'Christians', wearing 'F&* Islam' T-shirts and open carrying weapons, marching in front of a Mosque in Phoenix Arizona.  The purpose was obviously to both intimidate the worshipers with the weapons, and denigrate their beliefs.

Seriously? In 21st Century America, we have people using the same tactics against other Americans that our parents and grandparents fought a war to stop. This is the same kind of obscene action taken against Jews before Kristallnacht in pre WW2 Germany. Have we learned nothing from the holocaust?Did we not learn from our own internment camps during that same period?

Just as importantly, have we forgotten who we are and what our country is supposed to stand for?
For all of our internal strife, our struggle against racism, our questioning the meaning civil equality, we have always considered ourselves to be the beacon of freedom, the light of acceptance and religious freedom to the rest of the world.

American Muslims are exactly that: AMERICAN as well as Muslim. It is both disrespectful to that community and to all other religious communities to allow the actions of radicals in other parts of the world to determine how we treat our own people.

To the American Muslim community: You are our brothers and sisters. You are our co workers, fellow taxpayers, our doctors, lawyers, builders, teachers, and students. You are welcome and your beliefs are as American as Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and all the other wonderful variations of spirituality in our country.

There are many of us out there who will NOT allow the Nazis to rise again and make any group a scapegoat for their own failures.

Never Again

Gays vs the Religious Right

My first gut feeling was to say that I really didn't understand why religion has such enmity towards gay people. So I took a look at what I knew about the history of 'Gay Liberation' and came to the following conclusions:

After the event known as the 'Stonewall Riot' in 1969, Gay people, sick of marginalized based on what they considered to be a neutral, if not benevolent difference from the rest of society, attempted to put themselves more into the public eye.

From the start, the Gay liberation movement appeared to be confrontational. While most minority communities had family, church, and schools to give them emotional support, the Gay community had none of these, and soon appeared to develop a bitter, 'in your face' attitude towards towards those parts of society that just wanted them to go away and return to the 'closet'.

As the political marches commemorating Stonewall evolved into Gay Pride marches, the gay community embraced the sub communities that made up its constituency, and the visible attributes such as leather and drag that made up part of the gay subculture, became more and more visible in the Pride marches.

This rankled the Evangelical and Conservative Christian communities, who considered people to be essentially evil, needing redemption by accepting Christianity. Sex itself was considered evil, tempered only by the 'sacrament' of marriage which made it tolerable in that it procreated the race  and was controlled by religious leaders. Seeing the defiant lack of guilt displayed by people in the Pride parades about their sexuality, the religious people started to see this 'perversion' as an affront to their beliefs and as a threat to their authority.

In October of 1979,  10 years after the Stonewall, upward of 75,000 Gay and Lesbian people marched on Washington to demand equality before the law.

A second march in 1987, done in part to protest the Reagan Administration refusing to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic, and the Supreme Court's Bowers vs Hardwick decision which effectively said that gay sex could be made illegal by the states, brought 200,000 gay people to Washington.

The country at this point had become more conservative, and religious conservatives had a much stronger voice in government.  As gay people became more and more visible, public figures started to 'come out of the closet', and the media presentation of gays became more positive, the religious right realized that they needed to take some kind of action to stem the 'perverts' from  achieving social parity with the rest of society.

So came the religiously influenced national anti gay legislation of the 1990s, such as DADT(1993) ,State bans on SSM, and DOMA (1996). In order to combat these legal restrictions on their lives, Gay organizations opted to try and increase their presence in the media, showing the American public that they were not too different than anyone else, and the laws were discriminatory.

This started the cycle which is apparently still escalating. The more visible and accepted Gays have become, the more strident and vitriolic the religious right has become in trying to suppress the trend. This has caused the the Gay community to try and further increase their visibility and integration into American Culture. Over time DADT and DOM have both been rescinded, a move that was felt as a serious blow by the religious conservatives.

The final straw was Same Sex Marriage. As I mentioned earlier, Christians appear to believe that Sex in general is evil, unless strictly controlled by the churches. As the discord between the two communities has grown, modern religious conservatives see national SSM as the final nail in the coffin of what has been termed the 'culture' war. They will have lost control over the sexual mores of American society.

The hysteria felt by these conservative religious movements has reached unprecedented heights, everything from

• states vowing to put state constitutions above the federal constitution:
• a flurry of 'religious freedom' laws whose sole purpose is to legitimize discrimination against the Gay community
• forecasts of armed rebellion
• forecasts of divine retribution in the form of fireballs from space, floods and natural disasters if the supreme court rules in favor of the Gay community in the marriage issue.

I realize there is some bias in the presentation above. I am on the side of the Gay community since as an American Jew, I believe that every American is entitled to the same civil rights as every other, and that religious freedom needs to stop at my front door.

I think perhaps, the American Evangelical community are  spiritual heirs of the Puritans; folks who came to this country when English law prevented them from discriminating against people outside their sect. They need to get used to the idea that they are no longer the arbiters of American culture. We have become more of a diverse society, and as long as there is no practical harm or violence resulting from somebody's lifestyle, religious folk need to tend their own garden, practice their beliefs as applied to themselves and their families, and leave non believers in peace.

I found an article that articulates this much better than I do :confusing loss of power with loss of religious freedom

I can't stand it anymore!!!

The other day I was looking some stuff up on the web. I visited a bow tie site, a geek gadget site, a shoe store site, and a Halloween site.

Now EVERY internet page I go to has ads for (wait for it...) Shoes, Halloween stuff, gadgets, and bow ties.

HEY ADVERTISERS  and web site owners.... STOP F* tracking me. I do NOT want to see your G*D* advertisements everywhere I go. Unlike random ads that I can ignore, these are annoying and I will not click on the ads no matter what.

Did I mention that I had turned on the 'do not track' option in my browser?

ARGH!!!!!!!!

Let em die

Since the 'let em die' response to Ron Paul's suggestion that we should let people sink or swim when it comes to health care, there has been a lot of talk about charities taking the place of our Medicare safety net under a republican administration.

This leads me to ask several more questions ( not that anyone answers any of the ones I ask, lol):

Who are we talking about?

• the unemployed (employment based insurance is great until you get laid off and and can't find new employment or get sick in the interim)
• The elderly - hmmm no employment, living on fixed income, usually ss (unless that is also canned and the elderly are forced to rely on 'charities' for food and clothing)
• The disabled - see elderly above
• The working poor - How many corporations and small business either can't or won't provide health insurance for these 'part time' employees who make just over minimum wage)?
• Poor children - if Abortion and Contraception are made illegal, we are quite likely to see a lot more of these little guys

I would imagine this population would add up to a rather high number.

Who would finance the charities?

Without Medicare and Medicaid, wouldn't all these charities be overwhelmed with people needing medical care? Where would the money come from? There are just so many folks willing and able to support these organizations? It seems to me that they would have to turn people away despite any good intentions on their part.

Speaking about turning people away, what Charities are we talking about:

• Catholic Charities - Great unless you are Gay or Lesbian in which case they don't care if you live or die. Didn't they stop covering all employee spouse's health insurance so that they would not have to provide that service to GLBT employees in states where it was mandated? How charitable!
• Protestant Churches - Will it become standard to have to accept evangelical preaching just to get life saving medications? What if you don't convert? Would there be just so many allowances for medical needs before you are kicked out as a lost cause?  What if you are Jewish? Gay? (See Catholic Charities above)
• Salvation Army - OH you mean the ones who fired a Jewish worker for not signing a statement that she accepted Jesus?
• Community based Charities - Tax increases? If not, I ask again, where is the money supposed to come from?
•  Political Organizations - can you say vote buying? I knew you could!
• AH! I know! THE PRIVATE SECTOR! - we all know how charitable these folks are! All you have to do is look around at bank foreclosures, energy speculation and a host of other charitable work done by these philanthropists.

It seems to me that until and unless these issues are resolved, doing away with Medicare and Medicaid is just another way to say 'let em die!'

- addendum - I just found this article and enclose the link. It pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject but with a bit more solid information...daily kos - let them die