They issued a year-end statement yesterday condemning bigotry in the United States against Jews, gays, blacks, and I think there were more groups on the list, but any mention of the now socially-acceptable Islamophobia was conspicuously absent.
Not surprising, really, given the ADL’s opposition to the (not at) Ground Zero (not a) Mosque.
I’ll repeat what I said this past summer: “As a Jew, the fact that so many Jewish groups are joining the hysteria troubles me. And it’s stupid as well, because traditionally, when a government looks for excuses to single out and discriminate against a religious group, it tends to be the Jews. Letting hysteria decide where Muslims can’t build… is that a precedent we really want to support? Hatred of Muslims is just the flavor of the week: anti-Semitism endures.”
If you live pretty much anywhere in the United States, there might have been a day this month when you came in from the cold and the first thing you did was put on a pair of warm, dry socks.
Now imagine you’re a Marine in Afghanistan, where winters can be bitterly cold, and you don’t have socks that can stand up to the weather.
Rob Verbeck, a long-time visitor to the CIDU site, is an elementary school teacher in New York, and his class is organizing a drive to send “40 below” socks to these Marines. He set up a link on his class page explaining how you can order socks from Extreme Outfitters, and the company will send them to Rob’s school and waive the shipping charges. He’ll take care of sending them all overseas.
Please remember how your feet felt when you came in from shoveling snow or just walking through the slush this month, and help out: if even 1% of everybody who visits CIDU this week buys just one pair of socks each, that’s going to add up to a whole lot of socks — and hopefully we can do better than that.
Now that they’ve struck down Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (and I really wanted the actual law repealing it to be called the Fred Phelps Bill, just because it would drive him crazy), the government insists the changeover will still take several months to implement.
I need somebody to explain this to me: I understand there are some side issues to work out (such as the logistics of returning outed and ousted servicepeople back into the military) — but for now, “implementation” seems fairly straightforward (no pun intended): “You know that whole ‘discharge them if you find out they’re gay’ thing? Stop doing it.”
An NPR panel discussion from 1993: generally interesting and, at least at one point, laugh-out-loud funny (with the benefit of almost two decades of hindsight)
Timothy Carignan sent me this one as an Arlo candidate. I can see where it could be interpreted that way. I can also see an interpretation that isn’t even remotely Arloworthy, but doesn’t really work as a gag.
Actually, even what I think is the Arlo explanation doesn’ really work for me.
Oh hell, let’s just cut to the chase and say I don’t understand this one. Probably. Continue Reading »
