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So, today I'm looking around the internet at things, and it's surprisingly difficult. Because, to take two random examples, the Cherokee Nation and Kedila Family Learning Center websites keep returning me only 403 errors, telling me I don't have permission to access their sites.
I feel this is a particular flaw on behalf of Kedila, since they're an organisation who want to recruit volunteers.
(It looks like I might be going to the USA later this year, and while most of the time I'll be with a friend, I'll have a few days on my own. It occurred to me that one of the places in America I have, in fact, always wanted to visit is New Orleans, and I've been looking at options within my capabilities for mixing in some so-called "voluntourism". I think I'd find that rewarding in and of itself, and it would give me an excuse to interact with some locals, which I otherwise wouldn't really have since I don't think I know anyone in New Orleans, and I don't think you really get a feel for a place unless you talk to people.)
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Malaysia has detained an Australian Senator under armed guard.
My best guess is that this is perhaps aimed at intimidating Anwar Ibrahim, a sort of "oh you have foreign friends, well we won't let them in" thing, but it's a pretty bushleague way to go about it, because it's an unprecedented act of international aggression.
Because, seriously. Detaining a Senator under armed guard.
This is not something that we should let happen.
Things I want to happen now:
- Since the reason Xenophon has been deemed a "security risk" can only be that he's critical of the anti-democratic everything the Malaysian government does, and the reason for the now-cancelled visit was a low-profile mission to talk to a few people about how the forthcoming Malaysian elections were likely to be run, I want Australia - and our allies, including you, USA - agitating for United Nations intervention in the election.
- And by agitating I mean insisting. I mean that Australia should demand an apology from the Malaysian government, and demand the Malaysian government accept international administration of their elections. I think we should insist on an electoral police action, like we did in East Timor, sending in the army to ensure that Malaysia gets free and fair elections, if UN observers that we demand Malaysia accept see *anything* suspect at all.
Seriously. Wars have happened over less than this. And while I don't normally advocate getting all pushy and aggressive in international relations, the scale of oh no you better didn't involved in the detention by armed guards of a serving Senator is beyond the expression by mere words. This is a mobilise your active military and start positioning them in "training exercises" scale of national offence.
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It's taken me a little extra time to get started on writing this part out. I think this is because I honestly, still, can't decide whether I think the American system is a net positive or a net negative.
Allow me to explain.
Another one of the historical prerequisites for a fascist takeover of government is an unstable democratic government preceding it. When democracy falls apart and clearly isn't working, people start wanting an authoritarian system that can actually get something done.
The German Weimar Republic already had the odds stacked against it. It was a democratic republic in a country where most people hadn't been particularly unhappy about the authoritarian monarchy, and hardly anyone had wanted a republic or a democracy before suddenly they had one. It came into being when the nation was in a state of shock and trauma, having just fought a gruelling, painful war - one most people had thought they would win, until suddenly they had already lost.
And it was hobbled at the outset by the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Small wonder, then, that the average lifespan of a government in the Weimar Republic was a matter of months.
In Italy - and in France's Third Republic - the reasons were different, but the problem was the same. Governments formed and fell apart within months, over and over. Political chaos means nothing is ever really achieved; it's rare that government policy lasts long enough to have an effect on anything. The country runs on bureaucratic inertia.
In some cases, this doesn't actually require fresh elections to be held. It can result from shifting political alliances, if the parliamentary body is filled with minority parties who form government in coalition. In other cases, it will require new general elections, because in most parliamentary-type systems, if the government becomes deadlocked, then it is dissolved.
This isn't always a result of a total and irreversible breakdown, mind you. Famously (at least in this country), it happened in Australia in 1975. (Controversially, but constitutionally.) The Government became deadlocked; the Labor Party held the Lower House, but the Opposition controlled the Senate, and refused to pass any of the appropriations (generally referred to as supply) bills that fund the operation of government.
This resulted in a Double Dismissal election, where every seat, in both Houses, was up for re-election at once.
How This Applies To America
America's House of Representatives is not functioning very well, but it's functioning. The American Senate, however, is a trainwreck that would be comical if it didn't have such comprehensive ramifications for the country and the entire freakin' world.
The Senate can't pass a budget, nor can it get through a number of truly vital confirmation hearings for presidential appointments. The Senate can't get through just about anything, because the Senate allows for so-called filibustering that doesn't require actual effort. Essentially, any single Senator can block pretty much anything until further notice.
In most systems, this would result in new elections being called, on the grounds that the knuckleheads currently there are clearly incompetent.
However, it's debatable how much this would actually bring about change. Especially when the House is falling apart, too; so many of the worst offenders would probably be re-elected, because most seats in Congress are terrifyingly safe.
So on the one hand, America's system of scheduled-for-always elections means that government is stable, even when it's broken. On the other hand, it means that, well, government is stable, even when it's broken.
I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing overall, but at least in the context of the last decade, it's one of the reasons why America couldn't be given over to fascist dictatorship; democracy maintains the appearance of functionality, even if the democratic government doesn't.
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So, antihistamines. Generally perceived as pretty harmless, used to treat allergies, right?
My dad gets terrible hayfever. He hasn't found an antihistamine that works. Except one, which helped his allergies, I think, but he doesn't take it, even though Dad's hayfever is the "it doesn't kill you, you just wish it would" kind.
Because this antihistamine is my dad's very own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde serum, somehow.
When he took it, Dad became a hateful, horrible, nasty jerk. Horrible! And he has no memory of this. I don't think he even remembers taking the pill, but he definitely doesn't remember being mean to his family afterwards.
Fortunately, he takes my mother's word for it that no, he shouldn't ever take that tablet again. My mother is not a controlling person, or a shrewish wife, or anything like that. Dad is his own person, a grown man who is allowed to make his own choices.
It's just that she has, quite mildly, even cheerfully, observed that while he totally gets to make his own choices, the choice, in this case, is between taking that antihistamine and remaining married.
It is, for the record, the only situation regarding which my mother has ever even hinted at that kind of ultimatum. It makes sense, though. She married Jekyll; if he were to choose to live a life of Hyde, it's a fair call for him to ditch the bastard.
It's just so odd. An over-the-counter anti-histamine, one I *take*. (I think. I'm not naming the brand in part because I'm not 100% confident in my recall of precisely which one he was taking.) And it turns my dad, a loving husband and father who would, I swear, quite literally die before deliberately hurting his wife or children, into a spiteful jerk.
Drugs are weird.
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Sooooo earlier I was in the shower, and I had an idea ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya totally came upstairs entirely uncalled by me because this is all her fault I swear and in no way did I initiate the conversation.
(Under no circumstances should anyone believe her if she claims that I called her name, she thought I might have fallen and hurt myself, and I didn't hear her asking if I was okay, so she came upstairs to check on me, after which I insisted she hear my crazy idea and help me cast the roles.)
My idea: Teen Wolf ~fusion~ with: RuPaul's Drag Race!
Lydia Martin is a guest judge. The contestants (I haven't really worked out all the drag names or anything yet):
Jackson Whittemore
Stiles Stilinski
Danny Mahealani
Greenberg (who was eliminated early but recalled because Santino and Michelle thought he might have had more potential)
The episode:
W.I.L.F. - Wolf I'd Like to Frock
The wolves:
Derek Hale
Vernon Boyd
Isaac Lahey
Scott McCall
Jackson wins the mini-challenge, and gets to assign the werewolves to the other queens. The assignments go as follows:
Derek Hale, being big, super-masculine-seeming and hairy, is assigned to Stiles, because Jackson hate Stiles, obvs.
Scott, who has reasonable potential for pretty, gets assigned to Danny, because Jackson and Danny are BFFs.
Boyd goes to Greenberg, who will fail hilariously, while Boyd will be stoic in the face of terribleness, and will ~turn it out~ during the musical number. (velithya has suggested "She Wolf" by Shakira David Getta feat. Sia. I haven't heard it, but I assume she knows what she's talking about... *pulls it up*)
She *had* said Shakira, but discovered it was the wrong song when she checked lyrics. Shakira can be the lip synch for your liiiife.
Jackson keeps Isaac for himself, because he's all babyfaced twink and he will think Isaac will be easiest to make pretty. (I was briefly wondering if he'd go for Scott, but that cannot happen, because Scott has to flirt with Danny, LIKE HE ALWAYS DOES.)
Anyway. Mad crack ensues. I just can't decide whether the other guest judge will be Deaton or Ms. Morrell.
(Although Ms. Morrell *is*, imo, canonically the Grownup Who Looks Best In Leather.)
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So, velithya and I watched the first two episodes of Person of Interest. I'm kind of undecided on it, still - my summary would be "a bit pretentious, but it has potential" - but I did randomly look at a fic a friend had bookmarked, because it was by a reliably good writer from other fandoms.
... and I could not, could not get into it, because it featured Reese throwing Harold down onto a couch, quite carelessly and mildly roughly, and seriously? Unless events happen in subsequent episodes that seriously alter Harold's "visibly injured" status, hell no.
Harold limps. That was noted in the fic, so that's something. But Harold *also* can't turn his head. When he looks around, he twists his shoulders awkwardly, holding his neck stiff. I don't know what the injuries were that he received between flashbacks and now, but the way he moves suggests fused vertebra(e)/past broken neck and no, I don't think getting thrown around, even onto a couch, is going to be something that a person who cares at all about him, or isn't actively trying to cause him pain, should do.
So, bah.
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It irks me to the point of spluttering fury, occasionally, when people called out for hypocrisy take the line, "Nobody's perfect." Or, in the case of Matt Moore, an ex-gay activist caught on Grindr: "First, everyone is a hypocrite, regardless of belief system... With that said, you can either be a hypocrite under the grace of God or a hypocrite outside of the grace of God."
No. First, the grace of God's forgiveness comes after you repent of your sins, and if you're making excuses for them? You're not repenting. You're not sorry you sinned, you're sorry you got caught.
And secondly, no, not everyone is a hypocrite. That full quote goes like this:
First, everyone is a hypocrite, regardless of belief system. People such as Zinnia preach a message of tolerance and kindness to all, yet they are not tolerant of my beliefs and show me no kindness. That’s hypocritical, is it not? With that said, you can either be a hypocrite under the grace of God or a hypocrite outside of the grace of God.
Zinnia is the person who outed him for his Grindr profile.
Preaching tolerance is not incompatible with disapproving of your belief system, if your belief system hurts people, and frankly, hypocrisy removes any protection you get for your "belief system" anyway. Because you're not even adhering to it.
Even Jesus condemned the Pharisees. Just because I believe in Christian love and forgiveness doesn't mean I can't think you're a dick, and calling people out for their hypocrisy was one of the recurring themes of the Gospels, so don't get pious in defence of yours. Because on this particular topic, the record shows that Christ would not be on your side.
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Despite the histrionic claims in right-wing tantrums, now, or left-wing tantrums, circa the Bush era, the United States of America is not now, and has not yet ever been, a fascist state, and it's not becoming one.
But, in the last few years, it's come amazingly close to following the historical precedents for one. Actual fascist states have only happened a few times, and while no two fascisms are identical (being that fascism is characterised by ultra-nationalism, and no two nations are identical), there are general categories of circumstances that make them a possibility.
In no particular order (seriously, this is not in order of importance at all, because I'm basically thinking into a DW update window), I shall endeavour to go through them, starting with:
The Alien Within (Usually Jews)
( In which I explain anti-Jewish sentiment as part of fascism. )
In summary: a people who are not like us, but are among us, and they are harmful to society, zomg!
[1] Fascism, as a term, was coined by Mussolini. However, the Alliance Francaise, despite predating Mussolini's rise by decades, qualifies as a fascist movement if anything does, not least because a lot of Mussolini's philosophy was inspired or taken directly from the writings of the idealogue behind the AF.
Why This Didn't Happen In America
Well, the Jews wouldn't work, because for a bunch of reasons, some of them sensible, some of them kind of insane (e.g. "Israel is a prerequisite for the Rapture"), the American far-right is hard-line Zionist. And you can't really make a coherent anti-Semitic narrative without also going anti-Zionist, so even the most ardent anti-Semites on the American right have to be kind of covert about it.
Communists lost their power as a serious threat with the collapse of the USSR. Some American right-wingers have picked up a narrative that places "the gays" in that category, but the problem with gay people as an ideological hate fixture is that people will, inevitably, have gay family members, or meet people who are "one of us" and then find out that they're also gay, and basically, gay isn't an ethnic group.
A number of right-wing groups and politicians have made something of an attempt with Latinos, and, in localised areas, have succeeded to a terrifying degree. (See: Sheriff Arpaio, who I had a piece about posted on Shakesville before I broke up with Shakesville hard enough that it just took me ten minutes of going through my tags for old posts to remember what the site was even called.)
However, while localised fascism has absolutely taken hold in parts of America, this hasn't worked on a widespread basis. I think the reason is basically geography. America is huge, and immigration is a progression. You can't make the anti-immigrant fervour take hold in the same way in Ohio or Wyoming, because the immigrants aren't a presence there, certainly not sufficient to make people flip out. At the same time, in states like Texas, there are too many *legal* Mexican and Central American immigrants for an overwhelming consensus of hate. There are too many people for whom they *aren't* Other.
Mostly. You still have, you know, Arizona.
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Feb. 3rd, 2013 @ 04:25 am
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It is 4:25am, and I am literally waiting for paint to dry.
However, I refuse, on principle, to watch it do so.
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velithya has a cold and wanted comfort food for dinner. Specifically, macaroni and cheese. (In actual case, pasta spirals and cheese sauce, but the concept is there.) I made the cheese sauce, and am now going to post the recipe, because she liked it and YOU CAN'T STOP ME.
Sami's Cheese Sauce
Ingredients:
- a bit of butter
- a bit of flour
- a pinch of salt
- a lot of milk
- a bunch of grated cheese
(Approximate quantities used tonight: about 1 tbsp of butter, 2 tbsp of gluten-free plain flour, 1 litre of milk, 2-3 cups of grated low-fat cheddar. Australian cheddar, the yellow kind. Not weird orange American cheddar. Like, Coon, or Bega, or whatever, I can't even remember, but standard cheese.)
Cook in either a saucepan or a jug/bowl, depending on whether you're doing it stovetop or microwave. Either works.
You will also need either a spoon or a whisk. I prefer using a French whisk because it's trivial that way to keep the sauce from having any lumps in it, but a spoon works too. (If your saucepan has a non-stick coating, then you'll have to use a wooden spoon and like it, or else destroy your saucepan.)
Method:
Put butter in cooking container, and heat it up until it's melted. Add flour, stir together thoroughly. Heat some more, until the flour/butter mixture looks sort of like a honeycomb.
Add some milk. About a cup's worth, NOT all the milk. Add a pinch of salt. Not a big pinch. Stir it all together *thoroughly*, then return to heat. On the stove, stir gently every minute or so until it starts to thicken. In the microwave, put it on for two minutes at a time until it starts to thicken up.
This can take several minutes at this point because the milk was cold, but it *will* start to thicken. If I'm doing it in the microwave, I generally miss the "starts to thicken" window and take it out at "oh, wow, it's all thick now", but that's fine, because I use a French whisk, so it doesn't end up lumpy. If you're using a spoon, you want to avoid it thickening too much at once, because lumps.
Add a bit more milk, stir it in thoroughly, then heat it some more. (Microwave: about 90 seconds at a time, generally.) Gradually add milk until you have about as much sauce as you want. If you want *moar sauce* you more-or-less just need to add more milk. If it's not getting thick enough, add a little bit more flour.
When you're happy with your quantity of sauce, add in the cheese, a handful at a time, and stir it in so it melts/dissolves into the sauce.
You have achieved sauce!
You can add stuff into it, and it will be delicious: chopped up ham, eggs, chicken for protein, and it works nicely with just about every kind of vegetable.
Serve over the pasta of your choice.
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I just received an e-mail telling me not to miss the fall discounts.
While it's true that the end of summer is merely about two months away... fall is not a season in my country.
What I'm trying to think of, though, is: is "fall" a season in ANY country in the southern hemisphere? I can't think of a single one offhand. I know it isn't in Australia, I presume it isn't in New Zealand, it isn't in South Africa so I am roughly presuming that to extend generally around the English-speaking countries in Africa, and I can't think of any English-speaking countries at all in South America.
Isn't fall pretty much US/Canada only? (And suddenly I'm not sure about Canada, because of that Barenaked Ladies lyric that goes as we walk together through the autumn, nearing winter, through the dying leaves and trees we call our home and native land.)
So, yeah. Regionalisation fail.
(And this is one of the areas where I think our word is just better, because "fall" has other, relatively unpleasant, meanings, and "autumn" is a pretty word and thoroughly unambiguous.)
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So, yesterday afternoon, I went and babysat my friend's two young boys. They were asleep for the first couple of hours after I arrived, so I chilled out reading a book.
I had a moment to freak out very slightly when I went to collect the younger one from his cot. See, the boys have these special clocks in their rooms, to tell them whether, if they wake up, it's time to get up, or they should go back to sleep. The faces light up softly with a picture of a sun if it's time to get up.
The one in the fifteen-month-old's room was in his cot, with the cord going around his neck.
This didn't panic me outright only because the baby was awake and greeting me. However, naturally, I made a firm mental note to tell his mother because seriously.
And yet, by the time she came home, an hour or so later, I had completely forgotten. Until this morning, when a line I read on the internet made me go: oh hmm that reminds me of something what was it OH YEAH [baby] nearly strangled himself how did I not tell his mother.
So I immediately phoned his mother, so I would definitely have told her before I forgot again.
She mentioned where she puts the clock, which, coincidentally, was pretty much where I put it when I took him out of the cot, so she wouldn't have picked up on things being wildly amiss. She was surprised he could reach it from his cot, at all. So am I, actually, but apparently he can, so she really needed to know that.
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So, the New York Times reports that the FBI was monitoring the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I happen to think, based on the article, that getting outraged about this is kind of a reach.
It's worth noting that they did not infiltrate the movement, or wiretap people, or anything like that; they did discuss information on Occupy movement web discussions and the like, but you know, they're allowed to do that. If it's on the internet, publically viewable, there is no special restriction that says it counts as illegal or invasive surveillance if law enforcement read it too.
The article mentions that the FBI documents record that an internet thread discussed when it's okay to shoot a police officer. This, too, is something that I really don't have a problem with law enforcement taking special note of, because a) seriously, your viewable-by-anyone web forum is not a private conversation b) your not-private conversation is about shooting law enforcement officers, which means you are thinking about shooting law enforcement officers, which is something law enforcement officers both want and need to know about.
But the thing is?
This:
The F.B.I. was concerned that the movement would provide “an outlet for a lone offender exploiting the movement for reasons associated with general government dissatisfaction.”
That is, seriously, exactly what the FBI should be doing when a mass protest movement is under way. Not stopping it or interfering with it at all, not infiltrating it, not anything that jeopardises the rights of the protesters, but monitoring it because if some psycho brings one of the millions of guns knocking around America and starts setting up a body count, it would be kind of a plus if the FBI were ready for that, instead of just looking pointedly the other way.
Sometimes it's not oppression for law enforcement to monitor activist groups. Sometimes, it's just law enforcement.
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Jan. 1st, 2013 @ 12:00 am
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</2012>
GOOD RIDDANCE
<2013>
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I was just reading a discussion of the issue of declawing cats.
This is a topic I always find rather disconcerting, because I don't really understand how that even becomes or became a thing. They're cats. As a species, they are clawed. I always, when I was younger, assumed that declawing was the word for when you trim a cat's claws so they're not so pointy, because the idea of using boltcutter-like devices to sever bone, crippling a pet for one's own convenience, would never have occurred to me.
When I was a kid, we acquired a cat, called Mouse, who was crazy. Super crazy. Before we adopted her she'd been rather nastily abused for a very long time, and she had severe kitty PTSD. You could pet her, and she'd purr, and then, out of nowhere, she would suddenly snap around and scratch you, hard enough to draw blood.
I don't recall the topic of declawing coming up even once. It wasn't something I can imagine my parents even considering.
What we *did* do was gradually train her out of it. It was a process with two primary elements.
The first doesn't apply to all cats, just emotionally scarred ones: we were gently loving towards her, tried to avoid doing the things we knew were specific triggers for her (like picking up a broom in her vicinity, for example; if he's even still alive, the man who abused her is very old by now, and I *still* want to beat him with household implements until he begs for mercy and then keep going), and essentially tried to help her understand that she was safe, now.
(In time, she did, and became the most wonderful cat I've ever known. It's been more than a decade since she died, and I still miss her.)
The second pretty much does apply to all cats, and the correction of unwanted behaviours (with a side-note for emotionally damaged cats that's important to pay attention to).
Simply, discipline, but in the correct fashion, which is to hit them - in a very specific way. With one or two fingers, not hard, across the nose.
The reason is simple enough: Substitute a paw for the fingers, and that's how mother cats discipline their kittens, and is therefore the way that you can communicate No! Naughty! to a cat that will clearly mean just that. A whap across the nose, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to be undeniably a disciplinary action, is something that a cat will understand as a scolding.
A similar understanding is part of the reason why, if you need to restrain a naughty cat, you should catch them by the scruff of the neck to hold them. (Don't lift an adult cat by the scruff alone, it hurts them. If you're lifting them up because they've been naughty, hold the scruff, but lift their weight with your other hand, under the chest.) Adult cats move kittens by the scruff.
The major reason to hold a naughty cat by the scruff, though, is that it's your best bet for preventing them from biting or scratching you. For a really enraged cat, like if you're breaking up a fight, put your palm at the back of their neck, three fingers gathering as much ruff as you can, press them gently down so their chests more-or-less touch the ground to limit their squirm/evasion abilities, and have your thumb and forefinger extended on either sides of their jaw, so they can't turn their head to bite you. Hold them like that until they're calmer, *then* pick them up or let them go. Remember: You are bigger and stronger than they are, but they are *faster* and *sharper* than you are.
It can take a little bit of practice, which may result in minor injury to the human involved, to perfect the technique of grabbing a cat this way so as to gain immediate control of it without it scoring a retaliatory hit first. This practice is readily acquired if, for example, you get a second cat, and your first cat unexpectedly turns out to want her dead.
I digress from getting to the important sidenote about disciplining an emotionally-damaged cat, which is: remember that they can't necessarily help it, and that your objective is NOT to punish, but to teach them that that behaviour is wrong.
Mouse would turn, out of nowhere, and scratch, or occasionally bite, because she was traumatised, and sometimes something would trigger her into a state of reflex aggression. She wasn't trying to hurt us, not really, she was trying to protect herself.
She very, very quickly got the message that this was behaviour we didn't want. Immediately after she'd scratched me, my hand would always be raised above her, because I have reflexes too, and if the thing I'm touching has suddenly turned very pointy, I reflexively pull my hand away from it. Of course, this also left my hand in position to smack her on the nose.
However, I stopped actually hitting her, we all did, because the way she reacted changed quickly. At first she'd switch into aggression mode, and that would be that. But after a remarkably short time, what would happen is that she would snap, and scratch - and then immediately flinch back, cringing miserably and apologetically at us, and halt aggression.
Obviously, at that point, we stopped actually whapping her on the nose because at that point, it's not that she doesn't know it's wrong, it's that she can't help it, and that's not a reflex we were going to beat out of her. At that point, the interaction went like this:
Me: *strokes Mouse*
Mouse: *purrs*
Me: *continues*
Mouse: *suddenly snaps head around and bites my hand*
Me: *yanks hand away*
Mouse: *cringes*
Me (soothingly): It's okay. *gingerly resumes petting*
And in time, it stopped happening at all. Gradually she got used to the feeling of safety, so that it went from it being okay to stroke her head and scritch her ears, to okay to stroke all along her back, and eventually, it got to be okay even to touch her legs or belly.
More and more, I think, I'm developing a view that I'm generally opposed to the concept of punishment. Punishment isn't the point, discipline is. Correction of harmful behaviours is not achieved by retribution.
At least on real living beings. In video games, I have to say, doing something that offends me tends to make me vengeful. In Civ5, if you drop a nuke inside my borders, I will obliterate your civilisation from the face of the earth; in Skyrim, if you murder my chickens, I will kill you and every other member of your species I can find, giants.
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You know, even if I don't catch the name or where they said they're calling from, I can determine that a phone call is from a telemarketer, and one who can rack off at that, if what I do catch is this:
"Hello, this is [something] from [somewhere], how are things there, my love?"
Because, you see, while in some situations I might check who's calling me if I didn't catch the name, I am absolutely certain that I do not know anyone with a strong Indian accent well enough that they can address me with how are things there my love when all I've said is Hello, and also that any business or other organisation which might have legitimate reason to call me is likely to have trained their staff to be more professional than that.
I'm not as much of a stickler for professional niceties as some. I am, in fact, generally okay with it if a stranger addresses me by my first name, even in a professional context. (Caveat: If they're expecting me to address them by honorific/surname, in most contexts, they will call me Miss or else, because one-way formality is a means of trying to establish a power/control dynamic.)
But "my love" is going a little far.
Also, I just growled at the THIRD INDIAN-ACCENTED TELEMARKETER IN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES a bit. (Seriously, you all have the same accent, and very slight variations in the name of the company you're calling from, I know you're calling from the same centre and I'm now PRETTY SURE IT'S A SCAM.)
Growled politely, but still growled.
"Hello, my name is Nancy, I'm calling from Blah Blah Blah, how are you today?"
"This is the third call we've had from you people in the last hour, and we're on the Do Not Call register."
"... I'm sorry, we won't bother you again."
"Thank you." *click*
Because yes, telemarketing at us is ILLEGAL SO GO AWAY.
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"I was really good at drawing orcas, but only if they were facing to the left." *draws orca shape in the air with finger*
"Why did they have to be facing left?"
"Because it makes sense that way."
"Why don't orcas make sense if they're facing right?"
"Because they're backwards!"
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1) I see it noted in some reports that the White House isn't giving details on President Obama's plan for new gun control legislation.
Why should they? Why should he even have one? That's not his job, and it's not even within his remit. Writing legislation is Congress's job. President Obama's job is to lead, sure, but he's done that by saying that something needs to be done. After that it's pretty much his job to sign or not sign, because he's a president, not an absolute monarch.
2) I have also noted gun advocates pointing out that it was apparently the killer's mother, not the killer, who bought the assault rifle in question.
Setting aside the issue of you're still making assault rifles readily available to the public, weapons that have no legitimate actual use, that's still a failure in your gun legislation.
Obviously America isn't going to get anywhere near Australia's wonderfully, eminently sane gun laws, but here's one they could and should pick up: If you have a gun, that thing should be secured, where no-one who isn't the registered, licensed owner is going to be able to grab it for a murder spree.
Legal ownership of assault rifles in Australia is more-or-less restricted to "the Army", but if you have any gun at all, you're required to keep that locked up in an approved gun safe.
Because it's true, background checks and mental health provisions won't help if the crazy person can just pick up someone else's gun. That's why they shouldn't be able to do that.
It's much easier to keep guns out of murderous psychos' hands if the guns are a) much, much rarer anyway and b) all kept locked up.
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When Hillary Clinton, a 60+ woman, is ill with what Americans call "stomach flu" (e.g. gastroenteritis, I believe - in Australia we call it 'gastro'), has to cancel a couple of trips, and is reported to have fainted due to dehydration and suffered a concussion...
... and you declaim that this is totally so that she can avoid testifying before a Congressional committee, when it has already been stated that she'll have to testify anyway at a later date.
Possibly, just possibly, the woman is ill, with an unpleasant illness that's really, really likely to lead to dehydration and the consequences thereof.
"If she was really that sick, why hasn't she been to hospital?"
Because she has gastro, not pneumonia, and she's been seen by doctors, who probably checked the concussion wasn't too severe, and then sent her to bed with a dozen bottles of Gatorade and told her to stay there until she was better. It's not a deadly illness. Fainting doesn't automatically mean you have to be on IV fluids - not if the cause of your dehydration and illness are clear, because you HAVE GASTRO. The poor woman has no doubt been having a miserable few days, and I suspect may have tried to work too long and definitely did not switch to chugging Gatorade soon enough, but... it's just gastro.
It's unpleasant. But unless you were already very unhealthy, people living in a first world country other than America, or who live in America but nonetheless have access to decent health care, it doesn't kill you... but it does excuse you from work.
Let the poor woman throw up in peace.
(Also, if you query whether she might be pregnant and then act all grossed out, you're a hideous misogynist and also incredibly immature. Because apparently you can't see women as anything other than baby factories.)
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Kamahl reads Bad Romance. Yes, the Lady Gaga song Bad Romance.
Kamahl.
Reads Lady Gaga lyrics.
If you are not suddenly realising that you not only want, but need this in your life, you probably have an inadequate knowledge of at least one of these people.
Because it is Kamahl reading lines like want you in my rear window baby you're sick and it is more beautiful than words could ever say.
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