GAYS & STRAIGHTS FOREVER

On a positive note, there have always been and always will be gay (bi-, gay, lesbian, transgendered) people. Laws, threats, oppression, torture, and death have not been able to stop them. Just as, on a negative note, there will always be hurtful affairs outside marriage, spousal and child abuse, addictions, hypocrisy, greed, corruption, injustice, and poor people. The flawed wiring of human creatures demands it....Now, is it possible to stop hitting our societal heads against the wall of fact, and start improving the sad, often tragic lives of us all?

RUBBER & REAL DUCKS GO VIRAL IN CHINA

COMMUNISTS AND OLIGARCHS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR.....

ASPIRIN WON'T FIX OUR HEADACHE

Three young women who were kidnapped in their teens, then imprisoned inside a house and raped for 10 years by three brothers (then in their 20's), were freed.

Many people want to castrate them.  But castration might be a big relief. 

Besides understandably reacting Biblically with hatred and vengeance, society must painfully delve into its own deepest twisted secret pits of hell....These 3 men had parents. They went to school. They worked. They had friends. They had neighbors..... 

What failed in our system? Unless we have the courage to confront that, and change, such traumatic events will repeat over and over. As they do now.

MORALITY

ETHICAL QUESTION:  Assad is a killer who gasses his people and bombs villagers....Should America destroy Syria's Assad, who is pro-American (when its suits his purpose) and allows other religious to exist, knowing that an anti-American religious fundamentalist government will take over?  Or should we keep his brutal dictatorship in power?

HATE

Why do fundamentalist clerics, extreme conservatives, ultra-nationalists, and the super-rich almost always look so tormented and ugly?

OBAMA

Although Obama will not / cannot follow the powerful humanistic passion of his own words and beliefs, at least he SAID them...for the first time in American Presidential Inauguration history!  Obama's speech may serve as the final brilliant burst of American ideals, as it grows dimmer and possibly flickers out…..

NEW YORK TIMES - January 21, 2013 - by Peter Baker

OBAMA OFFERS LIBERAL VISION: “WE MUST ACT”
He became the first president ever to mention the word “gay” in an Inaugural Address as he equated the drive for same-sex marriage to the quests for racial and gender equality.

VICTORY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Human beings worldwide desperately want to put a face to the brutalized Indian girl who was raped and killed. That is why the Facebook photo (real or not) went viral....because we all want to mourn a real person we can see and try to know....Any female photo can be the girl, because all women are equally vulnerable, in India and every country. Male lust is not the cause, abhorrent international cultural male barbarism is. It not only brutalizes women, it brutalizes children, the elderly, gays and lesbians, and those of other races, castes, religions, political views, and economic levels. Male barbarism is not animal instinct, it is human insanity.

from NY Times,  1/7/13, by Sohaila Abdulali 

I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t

THIRTY-TWO years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed. Three years later, outraged at the silence and misconceptions around rape, I wrote a fiery essay under my own name describing my experience  for an Indian women’s magazine. It created a stir in the women’s movement — and in my family — and then it quietly disappeared. 

Then, last week, I looked at my e-mail and there it was. As part of the outpouring of public rage after a young woman’s rape and death in Delhi, somebody posted the article online and it went viral. Since then, I have received a deluge of messages from people expressing their support.

It’s not exactly pleasant to be a symbol of rape. I’m not an expert, nor do I represent all victims of rape. All I can offer is that — unlike the young woman who died in December two weeks after being brutally gang raped, and so many others — my story didn’t end, and I can continue to tell it.

PROPERTY RIGHTS

Property rights only exist until someone wants to make money from your property – then it is seized – in the U.S. by law, in China outside the law.