Hey, Anybody Local That I Know!

Anybody got a post-hole digger I can borrow?

also

I have a lot more wood than I did before. No, wait; I have a lot more dead trees than I did before, and they've now been cut down. Anybody (again, who is local and who I know) want to chop them up for their wood stove? [ETA: They're alders, all 10 of them. Also, the three (four?) I brought down on my own - or which came down on their own - are also alder.]

I suppose I could also rent a chipper (why I hardly) and use them as mulch... anybody done that? Is it expensive and/or annoying?

go read this, but not from work

This is the best most horrible thread on LJ so far in 2006. It is not worksafe in any way whatsoever. Recommended!

Today's Cultural Warfare Update

You know how the Boy Scouts were saying that they discriminate against GBLT kids and atheists, but anyone with religious faith is okay? Not so much on the ground. A Louisiana group booted two kids for having Wiccan faith; best yet, according to the Eagle Scout father, they told him that if he'd lied about it, he could have stayed. The national says that the decision is up to the local group; eventually the local governing board relented, but the resulting situation was so hostile the kids left anyway;

WorldNetDaily's "Vox Day," who describes himself as a "Christian libertarian," says hell yes we can expel massive numbers of illegals - hell, it only took the Nazis seven years to kill six million Jews. YES REALLY. He says he was "misinterpreted" (pointer courtesy elfs); [ETA: The original article has been edited to remove all the Nazi imagery. See the comments section below for details];

Salon has an except from the Michelle Goldberg book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism;

I don't have any summary for this, so I'll just paste in the first paragraph and hope desperately that it's just astoundingly tone-deaf but well-intended medical advice: "New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon." The Washington Post titled their article about it, "Forever Pregnant";

One woman's reaction to that (where I got the WaPo URL), talking about how her doctor is already putting any potential foetus's potential health ahead of her health by refusing the anti-seizure medications she would like to try - because said doctor doesn't trust her not to get pregnant, even though she has no interest whatsoever in carrying another child;

Fundamentalists demand more action from President Bush and Republican leaders in their anti-gay, anti-abortion, and "indecency" legislation efforts;

Missouri town bans unmarried parents from living in the same house;

State appeals judge strikes down Georgia's gay-marriage ban on the multiple-subjects rule - like a lot of states, they have a "single-subject" rule for their initiatives; they'll do it again next year, only I imagine it'll be two separate initiatives, one to ban marriage, one to ban civil unions;

Iraqi Ayatollah Ahmad Husseini Al-Baghdadi calls for the murder and burning of all gay men and lesbians;

Focus on the Family ACTION ITEM and news story wanting answers on marriage rights from candidates, and telling people to write in to support the anti-marriage-rights amendment;

California marriage ban fails to make ballot;

Focus on the Family ACTION ITEM to use their "letter-writing wizard" to shuffle their canned letter segments into "original" letters to the editor; this is their way of trying to get around bans on standardised letters; nobody, but nobody, is for it, but their letters still get through on a semi-regular basis in various little papers across the country;

Senator Brownback promises Focus on the Family that the Senate will vote on the Broadcast Indecency Act; includes ACTION ITEM to support either of two versions coming up for consideration;

Focus on the Family pushes proposed state bans on lesbian and gay foster parenting and adoption in 16 states; they have a list of states with bans in progress; the Roberts Supreme Court has already refused to hear an appeal on Florida's blanket ban, so assume any of these that pass will stand, too;

FotF version of the Georgia marriage ban story quotes the governor attacking the judges for their ruling, vowing a new amendment;

FotF attacks polls showing support for embryonic stem-cell research as "biased" for not including bullshit fundamentalist rhetoric as part of the questions;

Family Research Council ACTION ITEM pushes the "Broadcast Indecency Bill";

Family Research Council condemns Georgia judge who rules by the law and overturns the state marriage ban initiative because it included more than one subject in violation of state law; yes, they call him a judicial activist threatening marriage; it's important to note how the whole "judicial activism" thing is only applied when they dislike the ruling;

American Family Association ACTION ITEM calling for letters to Congress to support the anti-marriage-rights "Marriage Protection Amendment;" they're fully engaged in the Republican "assert that Democrats support gay marriage" message for 2006; if only it were true;

AFA/Agape Press attack genetics research in the form of "transhumanism";

LifeNews reports on more fundamentalist calls to pull RU-486 from the market;

Tennessee Baptist Convention threatens lawsuit against university over appointment of non-Baptist trustees;

AFA: Laura Bush is wrong, we must make opposing marriage for lesbian and gay people the primary issue of the campaign;

Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) introduces bill requiring schools and libraries to ban access to social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster; no word on whether Livejournal would be BAHLEETED! but I imagine it would;

New York Posts CWA admitting that their big objection to the morning-after pill is that people might have sex;

AFA/Agape Press condemn California education bill; CWA wonk Robert Knight is quoted extensively;

Alberta bill providing widespread protections to anti-marriage activists in marriage-related state jobs to refuse to do those jobs without punishment of any sort if queers were involved fails; Focus on the Family Canada reacts unhappily to the news.

( Articles and excerpts below )

non-cultural-warfare politics

These are five stories I thought were interesting that are not CWU material, at least, not in the traditional sense.

CATO Institute on the abandonment of liberty and freedom as primary goals of the modern conservative movement; I'd link to Brooks's endorsement of authoritarian conservatism, but it's behind the TimesSelect wall and you can't get to it without paying;

An older Fox News piece on the same shift - this one from 2004 - talks authoritatively on the "No Guardrails" question, and really exposes in great detail the classism of the entire set of assumptions behind it - how people of money can afford their vices, but the lower classes can't be trusted with them;

Joe Galloway "goes for the throat" in an email exchange with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's press secretary Larry Dirita;

Blog entry about Joe Galloway and Larry Dirita;

Bill O'Reilly gets very racist.

( Articles and excerpts below )