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Duplicity and Immorality: Women and Gays in the Military

On Monday, four star Marine General Peter Pace — speaking in his current role as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the United States military — said, like adultery, being Gay is immoral and that Gays should not be allowed to “openly” serve their country in the armed forces.
Over 65,000 gay and lesbian soldiers currently serve in the military under the current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” fallacy of a policy that General Pace, pictured below, must enforce.

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Incarceration Nation and the Carceral Citizen

According to the annual report from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in every 32 American adults were doing hard time, were on probation or on parole last year.  2.2 million were incarcerated; 4.1 million were on probation; nearly 800,000 were on parole.

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The Myth of Racial Harmony: Dumb and Dangerous

I recently heard on the radio 45% of American Black males do not graduate from high school. Why does their education end before their 18th birthday? Is there something culturally askew where education has no value? Are they born not to succeed in life? Is there a genetic code that denies them fruitful opportunity for living? The answer to those questions is a resounding: No!

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Violence as Commerce in the Urban Core

Based Violence for Profiton our conversation yesterday in the comments thread for my Red in Tooth and Claw: The Language of Killing article, I am curious to know your thoughts on the following matter.

Do you believe violence — as framed in the context of yesterday’s article — creates or serves as commerce in the urban core?

Is the infliction of physical suffering a necessary city commodity from which secular humanism rises?

Or does violence only eat itself by gnawing and clawing away at its inborn behavior until red is all that’s left?

Violence for Profit

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Judging a Book by its Cover: Dress White and Play Nice

A friend of mine is a criminal defense attorney. His job is tough and dirty. He deals with Racism on both sides of the justice scales. Lives hang in the balance on his shoulders. Some of his clients are guilty. His job is to defend them anyway. Some of his clients are set up by police, or enemies, or mistaken identity. His job is to defend them anyway.

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The Food Police Live Inside of Your Mouth

Do you believe your local government exists to protect you? Does your local government have the right to decide what you eat and how you eat it?
On Tuesday, New York City announced plans to require all trans fats gets cut out of your diet when you eat out whether you want it that way or not:

The New York City Board of Health voted unanimously yesterday to move forward with plans to prohibit the city’s 20,000 restaurants from serving food that contains more than a minute amount of artificial trans fats, the chemically modified ingredients considered by doctors and nutritionists to increase the risk of heart disease. …

If approved, the proposal voted on yesterday by the Board of Health would make New York the first large city in the country to strictly limit such fats in restaurants. Chicago is considering a similar prohibition affecting restaurants with less than $20 million in annual sales.
The New York prohibition would affect the city’s entire restaurant industry, by far the nation’s largest, from McDonald’s to fashionable bistros to street corner takeouts across the five boroughs. …
Officials said that the typical American diet now contains 5.8 grams of trans fats per day, and that a single five-ounce serving of French fries at many restaurants contained 8 grams of trans fats.

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To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS

HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.

Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.

People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.

To live is to remember.

I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.

There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.

Continue reading → To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS