The love of my life if you don’t already know is black.

He forwarded me this from Flickr:

The text is very interesting since this dates to the 1920’s:

The Story of Paul Phillips

Paul Phillips was a young black gay man growing up in the Midwest during the early 20Th century. He was the son of a fairly prosperous middle class lawyer within a family exemplifying the aspirations of the talented tenth. Somehow, rumors of Paul’s extracurricular activities revolving around his “sexual behavior and preference” reached his father. Quite calmly and plainly, his father explained to Paul that he was living his life within an “unnatural” condition since he did not evince a desire for the opposite sex within their small segregated community. To help his son overcome this “condition,” a trip was planned to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

For a total of seven day, Paul was interviewed and examined. At the end, the doctors reported to Mr. Phillips and his wife that nothing could be done to change Paul; he would be a “homosexual” to the end of his days. And, that under Minnesota law at the time, they were required to report suspected gay men to the Rochester police, gay being a criminal offense. For whatever reason, the doctors, to the great relief of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, declined to report Paul to the law enforcement authorities.

After returning home from an exacerbating trip that required them to camp out because they were not allowed to stay in white only hotels, Mr. Phillips came to a rather judicious conclusion about the sexual nature of his son. If his son suffered from an “illness” for which there was no cure, he would allow his son to lead his life as before, but lead it with DIGNITY and caution. Mr. Phillips said to Paul:

Find yourself a friend you can trust and bring him …What you do in your own room is your own business.

Mr. Phillips feared for Paul’s welfare. He understood the dangers of clandestine meeting spots where those like his son found one another and sometimes the law waiting for them.

It took Paul sometime to find a congenial lover, but at college in Topeka, Kansas after becoming a lawyer in the mid 1920s, he met another black man, a musician who played the organ for churches near school and together they began a relationship of mutual affection providing a respite against an often hostile and prejudiced world.

Info From: The Other Side of Silence: Men’s Lives & Gay Identities-A Twentieth-Century History by John Loughery

I’m going to have to get the book. But what interests me more is how Paul’s father accepted his sons homosexuality as just a normal part of life.

Yet on the other hand we have NOM glorifying the black churches for helping their cause.

They can be reached at 609-688-0450. They have an auto-attendant so you can press 2 for CA, 3 for RI, etc. If your state is on there, call and give them hell for opposing marriage equality.

In fact this evening I did a first. I called using my cell phone and gave my name and number and dared them to call me back.

I said, in Twiki from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century voice “bigot bigot bigot, no, sorry I said I wasn’t going to call you that anymore and instead call you what you are, Nazis. ”

I urge everyone to do the same.

So I have a Netgear WGR614v7 that I use as a rudimentary firewall. The WiFi performance on it was never any good so I had a clients Linksys WRT54G that was given to me. I set that up as the WAP and all was good.

Then I noticed some network performance degradation. Like dropped packets

So I managed to get online long enough to download the 2.0.30 version of the firmware and lo and behold that did it.

I had to laugh when George Stephanopolous on GMA said that politicians are scrambling to do something. Politicians are impotent because they’ve been thoroughly corrupted. Or have you not noticed all the natural gas and oil ads on television lately?

Ive proposed solutions here before. They wouldn’t be immediate but would require say five years on the first pass.

I’m not going into it here except to briefly summarize:

Research and Development funds for advance battery concepts.

Tax breaks and/or rebates for electric and hybrid electric vehicles.

Local tax breaks on excise taxes with revenue displacement funded by the federal government.

Just those three thing are enough to start the ball rolling. So why aren’t we doing it? See the introductory paragraph, it’s because the oil and gas industry has bribed politicians to NOT act on this. We need to take the power back.

First you have to watch this crap. The ‘right to privacy’ is pretty much central in the right to seek an abortion. And it’s a right that Republicans and Democrats have been abusing for the better part of four decades nw.

Here’s the video:

Trump’s response shows his ignorance of the U.S. Constitution. We have this pesky little thing called the 4th Amendment, you know, you may have learned it in school as the right to be secure in your persons, papers and things.

That Trump is ignorant of this little fact tells me that he has no prayer at being President. I expect a President to have a modicum of understanding of the Law of the Land, e.g. the Constitution.

And I’m heartened that people don’t seem to be buying it. I’ve seen that his potential pool of voters is now down to 7%. The only thing I can see him being a benefit for is to make sure no other Republican has enough of a mandate to even mount an effective challenge to President Obama.

Trump may have great business acumen, perhaps not that great as he’s been bankrupted more times than I can count, but he has no idea on how to be the leader of the United States.

So I noticed performance on youtube was stuttering at best and even Pandora seemed to be having issues. I thought it might be Firefox 3.6.16 but I run the same at work with no issues on an machine that is approximately the same software load, etc. And if you’re wondering why I haven’t upgraded to Firefox 4 yet, it’s because it breaks a ton of Java apps.

So I did some digging, brought up the task manager and sorted by CPU time. I noticed a process, MsMpEng.exe kept sucking 80% to 95% of CPU time. That would definitely cause stuttering video and audio.

So I killed the task and lo and behold YouTube and Pandora played nicely. Downloaded a fresh copy of Windows Defender (Last time I did that was 2007!). Installed it and now all is well. If you’re curious they really haven’t updated Defender app itself in a long time. But removing and re-installing it did the trick.

In other words, the hiring of former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, of the King & Spaulding law firm.

More news is coming out on how King & Spaulding as a firm is fairly LGBT friendly, getting a 95 on HRC’s survey of U.S. businesses.

So I wonder how this squares with the firm having been hired to attempt to defend a clearly unconstitutional law. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that the firm is going to double cross Speaker John Boehner (Boner) and throw the case.

I think they may unintentionally do so. After all, we’ve seen the star legal power brought by the bigots in other cases, and when the strict scrutiny rule is in play, they have a propensity for amplifying our own arguments on why certain laws or policies are seriously unconstitutional and should be scrapped.

The example I’d like to use is the Prop 8 case in the Federal District court in San Francisco. I think Judge Vaughn Walker wrote a fairly excellent debunking of the arguments of NOM, AFA, FRC and all the other bigoted groups out there.

And I have a feeling that Boehners hiring of Clement is typical of anything embraced by the current congress. If you hadn’t noticed, everything they do is purely symbolic because they don’t have a Senate majority to rubber stamp things. And do recall, the Republican were swept into office on the mandate of jobs and the economy, yet here Boehner goes spending tax dollars to try and ‘defend’ an clearly unconstitutional law.

Reading about all of this helps cement one thing in my mind. The average U.S. voter has the memory span of a goldfish. That’s how the Republicans got back in this time around. Of course the Democrats could have used their majority to their advantage but even the thoroughly corrupted Democrats find it hard to be so craven as the Republicans.

And based on what I said above, I also believe that the average voter in the U.S. is woefully unprepared to cast a vote in a national election, let alone their voting for congressmen and senators.

It isn’t that I want to re-implement poll taxes or tests. But I do expect a modicum of engagement on the issue of politics. I know how difficult that is, what with all the distractions like sports, the net, etc. But believe me, you can take an hour a week, or every few days.

Reach out! Talk to the candidates via a letter. They do love their letters by the way, especially when they say they get all sorts of letters AGAINST a certain position that you hold dear. I’ve detected that bovine effluent when talking to Representatives and Senators here in RI.

But like I said, write, call, email, and meet the candidates and the politicians. I cannot stress that enough.

At the very least, learn who your senators, representatives and councilmen are. I recently had a MERI volunteer (Go MERI!) knock on my door and she was astounded that I knew who both my state Representative and Senators were.

Well, that’s the other part, those Reps and Senators know me too. They know me as one who doesn’t buy the political bovine effluent they’re spouting and who will call them on it.

So do rattle the cages of your elected representatives from time to time. It’s how a Representative Republic is supposed to work. And make no mistake, the U.S. was NEVER a democracy, we are a Representative Republic. But it does our souls good to call out politicians on their cowardice and bullshit.

Her testimony before the Congressional committee this past Friday wasn’t all that interesting and you could tell she irritated a number of the members of the committee, including Rep. Nadler. He wasn’t having any of her shit.

But one thing about all her bleating is still present, she links everything to the children and how awful it would be for those children to have two gay parents who love and want the child. Or how awful that a 2nd or 3rd grader would have to find out that there are people out there that do fall in love with others of the same sex, oh the horror!

But other than that she has no new, credible evidence to support her claims. The anecdotes they use are from YEARS ago and there haven’t been any NEW cases since.

Beating a dead horse is one thing Maggie, but beating it until it’s a bloody pulp isn’t cute. And it’s about to get a whole lot less cute.

Apparently Ms. Gallagher was presented with the Anita Bryant Unparalleled Bigotry Award by Michael Dixon of GetEgual. And now Robin McGehee, Director of GetEqual has promised Ms. Gallagher a pie. I’ve suggested a Boston Creme pie. And I hope someone throws it in Gallagher’s face.

Of course there are those who say doing such a thing would be detrimental to our cause. But I can tell you a couple of things that might make you change your mind on that.

1) The only way to effectively deal with bigots like Gallagher is to ridicule them. The presentation of the Anita Bryant Unparalleled Bigotry award is an example of such. It’s the only watching Maggie try to duck away from the questions Dixon was asking was priceless. Of course Gallagher is doing it because she CAN’T answer.

2) The episode here in Providence where activists got up in Brian Browns face could only be milked so much.

So please, I urge you, throw the pie in Gallagher’s face.

Now this one is scary. The X-47B. X is always military signification of experimental, the B tells me this is the SECOND revision of this tech.

The aircraft is completely autonomous. No human involvement other than a likely command channel for permission to fire, etc.

In other news I hear the U.S. is going to permit drone flights in the United States. So do look up, smile, mouth the word “FUCK YOU” and make an appropriate rude gesture when one flies overhead. Paint anti-corporate messages on your roofs. Do your part to oppose the expansion of Skynet.

I can too. I heard that they registered riformarriage.com

So I did a little registering on my own.

rhodeislandformarriage.com
rhodeislandformarriage.org
rhodeislandformarriage.info

And they all now point to:

marriageequalityri.org

I even called NOM’s national office, left my real name and phone number and told them what I did.

Next I have to have MERI include the site names in their meta’s so that Google picks it up.