Wednesday, January 31

Goodbye, Molly

Molly Ivins, dead at 62:
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell.
You were loud, brilliant and inspiring. The world's just a little quieter and a little more empty without you.

Tuesday, January 30

Woman Arrested After Reporting Rape Is Denied Emergency Contraception

Welcome to the Republic of Gilead:
TAMPA - A 21-year-old woman told police Saturday that a man grabbed her off Howard Avenue and raped her behind a building during the Gasparilla festivities.

But officers investigating the case arrested her after learning she had an outstanding warrant from her teenage years for failure to pay restitution.

She spent the next two nights in jail.
[snip]
Adding to the mother's ire is her claim that a jail nurse prevented her daughter from taking a second dose of emergency contraception prescribed by a nurse at a clinic as part of a rape examination. The jail nurse, said the mother and the victim's attorney, denied the medication for religious reasons.
http://www.tbo.com/news/nationworld/MGB8IXMVJXE.html

Gee, I wonder why so many women don't report rape?

I also question the implication that money this woman owes from her teen years is more important than a crime committed against her.

Friday, January 26

Friday Bird Blogging: Dark-Eyed Junco

The dark-eyed junco is a northern bird which is much more common in Vermont once winter settles in. I may see them here and there throughout the Summer, but once we're into full on winter, their numbers increase dramatically.

This picture was taken right near our feeders this morning, shortly after I'd restocked them. I've been trying to get good junco pictures for quite some time now, and it's a sign of just how badly they need food on a day this bitterly cold that they were letting me get close enough to get this kind of shot.

Friday, January 19

Friday Bird Blogging: Ruby-Throated Hummingbird

From time to time, I like to take pictures of birds in sequence and arrange them into an animated sequence. This picture of a ruby-throated hummingbird is one of my favorite such projects.

Monday, January 15

How We Fail

I wrote this three years ago, when Barney Frank spoke out against the flood of protest marriages in San Francisco. I still think Barney's awesome, but he was wrong at the time about this, and here's why:
How We Fail

February 18th, 2004-- I like Barney Frank. I really do. He's funny, he's articulate, and he was out long before most of the rest of us were. However, that doesn't mean he's not going to piss me off from time to time. Here's a brief passage from the San Francisco Gate, regarding recent events in San Francisco:

Instead, Frank said, San Francisco's move promotes the notion that unpopular laws can be broken or ignored.

"When you're in a real struggle, San Francisco making a symbolic point becomes a diversion," he said.


The above is why Democrats repeatedly fail and sometimes fail spectacularly. It's not that people don't believe in the ideals of the Demcratic party. It's that we don't believe in the will of Democratic politicians to actually adhere to those ideals. As soon as I heard that statement, I thought "gee, would he be opposed to the wrong people eating at a 'whites only' lunch counter, too?'"

I'm not interested in discussing this any further. I'm not interested in being told how I have to be patient and take my 2nd class citizenship for just a little while longer. I could say more, but I think others have said it better. So instead, I'm going to finish this by posting the words of someone who knows what it means to sacrifice one's self to a cause far better than I do:

Letter From Birmingham City Jail

Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 16, 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen,

While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas...But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every Southern state with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some 85 affiliate organizations all across the South...Several months ago our local affiliate here in Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham...Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of the country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal, and unbelievable facts. On the basis of these conditions Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then came the opportunity last September to talk with some of the leaders of the economic community. In these negotiating sessions certain promises were made by the merchants ˜ such as the promise to remove the humiliating racial signs from the stores. On the basis of these promises Reverend Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to call a moratorium on any type of demonstrations. As the weeks and months unfolded we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. The signs remained. As in so many experiences in the past, we were confronted with blasted hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community. We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through the process of self-purification. We started having workshops on nonviolence and repeatedly asked ourselves the questions, "are you able to accept the blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?"

You may well ask, "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn‚t negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can‚t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?" when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored" when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title of "Mrs." when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"˜then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro‚s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens‚ "Councilor" or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can‚t agree with your methods of direst action" who paternistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man‚s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security, and at points they profit from segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad‚s Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man in an incurable "devil."

The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, "Get rid of your discontent." But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.

In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership in the community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed. I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother. In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues with which the Gospel has no real concern," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely other-worldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader, but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all of their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

M. L. King, Jr.

Friday, January 12

Friday Bird Blogging: Turkey Vulture

The turkey vulture can easily be mistaken for a juvenile eagle in flight-- the bright pink head is not nearly as visible, and the wings are broad and black, but if you are in Vermont or New Hampshire and see a group of very large black birds in flight that's larger than a pair, you've likely seen a group of turkey vultures (I've seen people mistake these for a variety of raptors).

Even though these birds are scavengers, I find them fascinating to watch. They'll fly in circles, hunting for long periods, before descending on an area to feed. I rarely see them as solitary birds.

Friday, January 5

Friday Bird Blogging: Great Blue Heron

I've been taking pictures of Great Blue Herons for some time now, and have over sixty posted on my web site.

There's something beautiful about these birds, despite their odd-looking exterior and awkward shape. Seeing them in flight can be breathtaking and watching them hunt for food is like an exercise in Zen meditation-- long periods of wait followed by moments of inspiration and activity.

My experience with herons has changed over time-- before I became familiar with them, I thought of them as something extraordinary and magnificent. Today, I think of them as commonplace, but still magnificent. There's a lot more variation between them than you might think of at first. This particular picture is one of my favorites-- just incredibly rich and vibrant colors in it, and the light capturing the scene of it just perfectly.

Thursday, January 4

Absolutely Disgusted

Doesn't this seem like a tremendous waste of resources?

There were a lot of actual people who needed help at this point. I get why people would be concerned about their embroyos, but this is ridiculous. From CNN:
Baby from embryo rescued after Katrina due this month
POSTED: 4:39 p.m. EST, January 3, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- The baby album for Rebekah Markham's soon-to-be-born child could include something extra special: photos of officers using flat-bottomed boats to rescue her frozen embryo from a sweltering hospital in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
When this happened, there were some major problems still going on in New Orleans involving human being. But wealthy white people get special resources allocated for them to get a second child.