People lie. People have different ideas of what "gay" constitutes, even men who have sex sometimes or always with other men may or may not identify as "gay."

Any stat would be more or less either a guesstimation or an estimation using charts and SSPS or other stastical software.

By the way, there are those who are assuredly "gay" and are celibate and have always been celibate. They are obviously no risk for HIV if they have never been exposed to blood or body fluids in any form, yet they are gay. I am sure that the guidelines are for ensuring the safety of the public in the most general way and not for discrimination per se. The Red Cross does not care from what class of people they get their blood so long as it is within their guidelines.

By the way, people in the US who have spent X amount of time from a time frame of Y-Z months during a certain time period in the UK are not allowed to give blood in the US but can anywhere in the Eurozone. Make sense? No. A holdover from Madcow hysteria in the UK, even though we had our own here in the US.

I had platelets last week, by the way, and all I could think about was the class of people I saw hanging outside the "We buy blood" center the day before. They did not appear to be hard working folks out of work and looking to make a happy holiday for their family by a long shot. It looked like Meth Central. But I took 2 units with no quals, I figure my HIV is under control and cancer trumps HIV for a short life. I wish I could give blood, as I am
B Negative, but I cannot and I accept it. I am willing to face this "discrimination" of being gay and HIV positive and having lived in the UK and avoid internal Red Cross politics in which I have zero voice and rightly so long as they do not discriminate on who gets the blood!

In short, in public health, there is no easy answer: by and large the establishment errs on the side of safety for the public good. Discrimination? Perhaps, but one that is not aimed directly at one single class of people, rather at the likelihood of spreading disease due to people refusing to get tested and also people lying. Sadly, people are apt to do both; lie and refuse to get tested, and that is simply the way of all flesh.

Frankly, when it comes to HIV or gay issues, this one is low on my totem pole by far.

Three guesses on who joined the Republics on that little doozie. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, followed soon after by her holding up Ryan White reauthorization formulae to reflect the epiemic's epicenter moving southward.
If Mrs. Clinton cared so much about people with HIV, why didn't she simply not agree to the bill and then immediately have her staff start working on an equitable formula with input from the southern states? Why did she throw out "Medicare" for everyone as soon as diagnosed HIV+ during that time, yet never had another word touching on that? Did she lose interest? Was she too busy meeting with Penn prior to the official announcement of her candidacy? Does she even know that the new CDC and WHO guidelines call for HAART at a CD4 level of 350, and that under Ryan White, with its waiting lists and freezes in SC and other states, that this is not reflected, as the old cutoff of 200 is still in effect, which, is one of the definitions of AIDS.
Either she doesn't care, she is too busy, or just lost track of people she had on her bandwagon, "defending NYS's rightful chunk of charity medicine" for the People Living with AIDS, the rest of the nation be screwed!
She isn't holy, nor even deserving of any more respect than any other human being, and Senators only get the respect of a plumber or hotel chamber maid in my book.
Her presidency would be a disaster: if we think that the GOP are a bunch of whiny babies holding up everything in the Senate now, just wait until 2009 and she president! The only thing she could do is get some decent federal judicary members in, a viable cabinet (not an AEI/Heritage/AIPAC rubber stamp) and expect to cut a lot of ribbons. I hope she doesn't have to visit Walter Reed too often as her WOT continues.
Hopefully, she won't be president, and Obama will, since given the two corporatists-cum-Democrats, he is the lesser evil, and Franklin Roosevelt was considered a "light weight" but good orator, young and handsome when he became president, and look what turned out for him? Bobby Kennedy was once a big fan and friend of Joe McCarthy: he turned around 180 degrees, now didn't he? FDR and Bobby gave people hope and had a moral compass, two things lacking in the US today.

Lip service to "progress" is precisely that: it is nothing but hot air and a waste of otherwise good oxygen being expended into C02.

One can have a tornado strike, a house fire, and an overflowing creek occur simultaneously, and that is what is happening in working America.

To where can one run? The house is aflame, but going into the basement to save oneself from the wind may kill you from the smoke, if not the rising water in the basement from the flood.

Working America faces three concurrent catastrophes: war, tyranny in the Executive Department and boardrooms, as well as destruction of our manufacturing base. Congress has enabled all of these by their action or lack thereof.

Where do we start? Does one issue trump the others?

I rather fancy them living in a small travel trailer behind Grandpa's barn and ranting about their real estate empire, or having raised a 4-H calf once and thinking they deserve a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade for that endeavor. You know people who stocked up on ammo and beef jerky awaiting Y2K, only to fail to realize that in 1999 the 30 year mortgages issued after 1969 were already into the 2000s for payments due and nothing had crashed yet. You know, people who once played Dungeons and Dragons and had an extensive comic book collection until they read Ayn "Rhymes with Mine and Swine" Rand, then sold their vast libraries on E-Bay and now term themselves "entrepeneurs."

But I do have to say that while his supporters do not always "get" Dr. Paul, he is not an unknown quality: one knows or can at least usually presume reasonably well his position on everything.

I spent last night with Gore Vidal and Manny Kant. Only in print, of course as Vidal is much to frail to travel down a bumpy gravel road into the wilds of North Alabama, and Kant, frankly, who would not stink by now, most probably, however, would be rather difficult to hold together.

One is amazed at the ability of people to actually term themselves Democrats and not see the disconnect between a candidate who has to have every phrase "explained" and every vote discounted as to its appearance vice its effect.

Let us take Feinstein-Leahy, that little now remembered amendment last year, back in Year III of The Tyranny, where Mme. managed to somehow equate (God and/or AIPAC or/or the DLC knows how) a simple control over the use of a noxious weapons system, cluster bombs, with who-knows-what.

Let us not even tax our tired brains on why she voted thus. Good politics in NYC to a small crowd of those who would be vocal and shrill (yes, there is that word again) or otherwise make Mme. be the butt of derision by t.w.m.i.p. or its sisterly clones and cousins, CNN, FOXNews, etc.

One sees a lot of copy by Mme. treating "strength," "skill," and other terms of great import, but little in the way of a true Democratic Warrior.

Mme. Clinton's ability to straddle a fence even when being attacked by those off it is great, she must be given credit for that. Her skills as a mere politician are also fantastic, but those skills are rooted in expediency, rather than a personal motivation for other than power.

Eh, bien. Say what one will, Mme. certainly can draw a crowd and raise money, and in this venal spectator society, that is what counts, evidently.
Kant wrote that we humans were too ready to assume the positions of personal laxness in thought and deed, allowing priests to tell us what to believe and kings to tell us who and what to fight. Alas, this Cult of Clinton takes Kant and inverts him as Marx did Hegel.

To detract is to be called out as a member of the "loonie left," as Mr. Bayh so eloquently termed the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, or even worse: to be termed a sexist for opposing an individual who by chromosomal accident and cultural convention is termed a "woman."

iced tea and coffee throughout the day, and make whiskey which we have been known to consume upon occasion for purely medicinal purposes. We like our Masons in their regular attire and not in green "fig leaf aprons." Furthermore, we consider tobacco to be one of the bases of the Southern Food Pyramid (along with caffeine and alcohol), and were we able to baptize the dead, would most probably choose to allow our deceased hunting dogs to enter the Celestial Kingdom over an ancestor of whom we are sure wasn't raised right. We can't understand why old men in Utah are infallable and Bowden, Bryant and the Mannings not. I will go out on a limb and say that the average Mormon doesn't know the significance of the Racking Horse Show in Shelbyville, Tennessee or know that "The Tennessee Waltz" and not "Rocky Top" is the state song of the state, but were they to ever go on pilgrimage to the Coon Dog Cemetary in the Freedom Hills outside of Tuscumbia, Alabama, or to visit the shrines at Tullahoma, Lychburg and Bardstown (Dickel, Daniels, and Beam) we might give them a sporting chance at giving us a DVD, but we refuse to give up our native peasant costume for black slacks, short-sleeved shirt, and clip-on tie with name tag.

It is not a lack of beds, of specialists or GPs. It is not a dearth of MRI and CT scan machines or Xray and nuclear medicine pharmacists, or even of LPNs. . . it isn't that people can't get emergent care. What could it be? It is obvious that it is access and payment combined and they intersect at one place and that is the BCBS board room.

The Congress clearly has the right to regulate interstate commerce as it sees fit, it is right there in the Constitution. Medical care is most definitely interstate commerce. Insurance is most doubly interstate commerce.

Something is wrong when we pay such a huge percentage of our gross pay for health care when compared to the rest of the Western World. Evidently, only the elderly and the infirm deserve Medicare. And the active duty armed forces and Congress their own systems. . . the rest of us can root hog or die. The unskilled worker cannot afford private insurance and do not pay any taxes after their deductions and EICs. . .therefore unless the "tax credit" is a downright subsidy, it won't be worth a dime for all the former systems engineers who are now working at the stock room at Best Buy!

The Democratic Party needs to get the single message out: we are the party of the people and for the people, their interests are ours and not the corporations, not the HMOs and not the insurance companies. But that would not be prudent -- too polarizing. See, we have to wait and soon the people, after a generation or two, will come our way! Isn't that what triangualtion means?

funding for a candidate, one is forced to get their hands proverbially or perhaps even literally dirty. A subsidized candidate allows one to scream from the mountain tops on the glories of the sudsidizeds' strengths while not having to do more than exercise one's wrists and fingers.

Not fully supporting a candidate in every form is "political masturbation," the same result, but not quite the same intensity of the real deal.

By adopting a candidate hook line and sinker, we are absolved from having to think, to campaign or even do more than post an occasional piece on the invincibility of ________________ (insert name of subsidized candidate here) or perhaps stick a sticker on one's Volvo.

By having one's thinking done for one, and even one's actions done for one, one is assured of nothing of substance happening at the end point. While others play the funding game, others do not play, rather they act.

I, personally, am rather tired of having to have apologetics issued by and for candidates in order to clarify or rectify things they have said or done.

Some play as amateurs and others are dead serious about politics. It is one's choice. I prefer to be very serious, myself, but respect those who wish to be told by the media or a campaign on how they are supposed to think, even though it is skin off my nose in the end.

presidential candidate, but it is apt for many soi disant Democratic Party members throughout the width and breadth of the party:



Gradualism: the Cancer of the Party

Gradualism for the sake of gradualism is a game that allows a player to straddle the fence – to continue the status quo with a few minor corrections and a lot of lip service to radical change, but little resulting. The only person to whom this situation is found unwarranted is the individual who has swallowed the lure offered by the candidate in their candidate persona and those who are willing to allow the status quo to only be slightly altered to no great effect in order to continue to prosper under a static system. The former being in the vernacular, the “sheeple” and the latter the financiers of campaigns.

Gradualism allows one to graze from both sides of the wire. Gradualism allows one to perfect the art of apology and parsing words very carefully, rather than tackling anything. Gradualism is fine for one about to enter a pool of water at the start or end of the swimming season and are unsure as to the warmth of the water, not for the removal of a tumor. To continue with medical analogies, gradualism is fine and actually recommended for exposure of infants to various common pathogens, but not for the excision of a diseased tooth or organ! Would one wish to have a “partial tooth extraction” when the molar is rotting in the gum? Would one wish a “partial removal of the appendix” when it is threatening rupture?

Some will argue that gradualism prepares the people for the end result. With this rationale, there is never a telos: every action might as well be the penultimate or last. Softening up the people is not a strategy for use with adults, for it assumes an infantile mentality and collective inability for the majority to handle change in great doses. Actually, it is like asking someone who is about to move to another city and change jobs to “gradually” stop working at their former place of employment and to “gradually” move from the old place to the new. It is like “gradually ending a war,” with the lessening of offensive movements, followed by the denouement of lessening defensive movements until the cannons are silenced and peace “gradually” ensues.

I, for one, do not argue for armistice and status quo ante bellum when at war, unless so utterly at the point of collapse that the entire belligerence is about to collapse. We are presently at war, a metaphysical war of morality and ethics, of saying one thing and doing another, of claiming that one’s actions are for the greater good, yet in actuality, benefitting only a select few. I write of the war between the people and the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government of the United States of America.

The venal perpetration of sins of both omission and volition in this present administration are too numerous to enumerate. The asinine farce of the present Congress are too painful to witness any longer. The distasteful Diktats upon Diktats of the highest courts of the land are even more troubling, for the administration and legislators are merely politicians, while in theory, our judges and prosecutors are supposed to be justice personified. They charge and rule in the name of the state, not that of the administration or a party. Well, in theory they do.

It is a form of political chicanery of the basest level, ensuring that the alleged "agent of change" remains in power or at least in the news by continually promising that after the nudge in the identified direction, that a hard left or right rudder will ensue.
This ensures their continued funding through their allies and the the simplistic LCD popular media.
Do we want a Democratic Party of Benthams or of Kants? Do we wish our legislators to be Judge Bradshaw or the Vicar of Bray?
Gradualism is fine in small short doses. I prefer, personally, to "gradually" immerse myself into a hot bath or a cool pool, rather than taking the plunge. However, my time spent bathing in such a manner is a mere passtime and of no consequence to the affairs of myself overall or of others. On the other hand, after having my eyes splashed with a strong caustic or acid, I do not wish my eyes to "gradually rinsed." I want full force water, now, and also the temperature is of little concern, unless it be damaging to my tissue.
I do not wish my house aflame to be "gradually extinguished." I do not wish for study groups or the press to goad the fire dept. into action! A person with even low intelligence knows one thing: a fire in one room can and most often spread until the house is consumed and perhaps neighbors' homes as well. I don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and I do not need a "Democratic strategist" to tell me why the status quo is fine for now and that if I only continue to support Candidate X, Y or Z with my donations of time, vote and money that eventually there will be world peace, an end to all that is less than sublime and ponies, pies and Mercedes for us all, and that my house aflame will surely be addressed after the focus group decides the political ramifications of doing an emergency application of water.
Yes, gradualism is how candidates win and stay in office, by promising and throwing just enough bones in random sequence to the dogs beneath the table to keep the dogs under, and that it was the dogs who caught the game in the first place!

homeless, and now I have this little item to add to the catergory of "differentiated others." It is obvious that Bomb Making Using Kitchen Ingredients For Dummies might be rightly avoided by the warden, I find it hard to blacklist religious literature, or most reading material for that matter.
Evidently porn is akin to cigarettes as prison currency, and that is why it is kept out, not as a morality enforcement, per se. But what about the "standard" fare that most people have as popular reading? The Men's Big Four: World War II, the Civil War, Religion, and American Indians. A public librarian cannot go wrong with selecting those.
I have never met anyone who used or worked in a prison library, but I do know that they are out there, and I have seen ads in the trade journals for prison librarians, there was one recently for Guantanamo, but it was basicly to hand out board games and playing cards and innocous Persian and Arabic literature, especially Khalil Ghibran and pulp novels from Arabic language publishing houses in Michigan.
It would be hard to reconcile the professional ethics of most librarians to work under content restrictions or access restrictions of any type save the most basic: the classic "We don't subscribe to Hustler, Playboy, or Penthouse, but is some rather lurid prose in Camille Paglia. . ."
One cannot imagine how enjoyable a serious work is as well as a divesion when one is away from family and friends, and I speak as someone who was under the water on a nuclear submarine for half the year, in three month chunks at a time, making holes in the ocean, where people actually looked forward to drills to break the monotony. I would imagine that it would be even worse behind bars.
I wonder if the Xian and Jewish books were banned as a result of the lurid Old Testament smiting and smoting and the bashing out of infants' brains by Joshua? Add in some Revelations and one could sort of manage a case for "graphic violence" as would be jihadist literature, but it is a case of throwing the baby out with the dishwater.

"Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts."

As meaningful now as it was when Kant wrote it in Konigsburg. . .Kant said it is intellectual laziness. I agree.

Iranian model will be accepted. They have the Lebanese model, rather.

The Sunnis who are religious are drawn towards the big brother of Riyadh, while the religious Shia are drawn towards Teheran. The Christians, Kurds and other religious/ethnic minorities and the secular are drawn towards flight for safety or else entrenching their own autonamous civil society, such as in Kurdistan. However, the fight for control of Mosul and Kirkuk are on the eyes of the Arabs against the government in Arbil.

Lest we forget our own Western Civ II classes, lut us consider the basket case that was Germany at the eve of the Forty Years War. Then after the Peace of Augsburg, the real battle began as various statelets competed for the attention of secular France, Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia.

Even English and Irish history, with its bloody revolutions and religious persecutions as Blighty argued with one another, switching from Catholic to mildest possible Protestant, to moderate Protestant, back to Catholicism, to extreme Protestantism, and then their own upheaval within the Extreme Protestant camp. Finally settling on a prayer book and the Crown appointing the bishops, a partition and its own Catholic Republic. There is no point in going into ethnic division on those two large wet islands off the French coast in detail as one gets the drift. . . .

If a geographic area is hobbled together into the confines of an Empire then loosely governed and largely left to its own devices, save for the law enforcement and the military quota, then "Iraq" is a poster child for how not to "liberate" a nation. First the Ottomans and then the Brits and now us, and nobody ever asked the people of each region what they wanted as a government. Noone at all.

Would anyone care if the provinces of Iraq were independent or a loose federation if their main product were goat skins and figs? Of course not. It is all about other players: namely the US/UK thwarting the Persians, the Persians thwarting the US/UK and the Arab monarchies and the Israelis holding the "prospect of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv" as international sabre rattling. And oil.

Oil and revanche, revanche and oil -- add in hegemony and one has the seeds of chaos as people who lived next door to one another for centuries revert to their basest tribality in the absence of a functioning civil government and an awful lot of guns and explosives lying about.

Does "Iraq" even exist except as a nighmare taking lives daily on every side? Should we care more about the people who are on paper Iraqis or the state that was developed there? I opt for the people.

The main quarrel was on the settlemnt of an Arabic speaking Shia province upon Iran during Ottoman/Persian negotiations long ago. This happens to border the Iraqi border and has the riches oil reserves in Iran as well as a well developed agricultural/industrial infrastructure based on its two very large navigable rivers that provide power and fertile fields, as well as access to the sea.

The Iraqis have been agitating for "return" of "their" province since the Baathists came to power. Finally, with the demise of the US-Shah alliance after the 79 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the time was ripe: they had been hurling verbal barbs and engaging in mini-Tonkin incidents since Ayatollah Khomeini declared Iraq to be the agent of the Great Satan (and we know who that is, the Persian Gulf's then newest BFF, the good ole' U. S. of A.).

Perhaps a million people died in total, Teheran was destroyed by missiles and finally the cease fire went through. Iran has vowed that the state will never be dependent upon fickle allies or outsiders again. Add in the traditional Shia/Sunni cum Arab/Persian emnity and one has the seeds of a deep divide between the two when Arab Sunnis are in control of Iraq.

Prior to Ottoman times, the entire Gulf Region was under the control of the Iranian Shah. All of it, from what is now Pakistan to Baku.

Inferiority complex on behalf of the Sunni Arabs over the glories of Indo-Iranian Classical Culture? Just water and oil? Conflict over who should be Caliph? All of the above? Who knows, pick your poison, nationalism, cultural envy, sheer desire for Lebensraum?

But with Iran surrounded (at least on paper, though how reliable any of these would be in a US led invasion of Iran is questionable, IMHO) Pakistan, Afghghanistan, various post-Soviet Stans and Iraq, then who can sleep well at night in Teheran or Ishafan knowing that the rockets from the subs and B2s might be in flight any moment. . .

That is why Iran is antsy. All 77 million of them.

the Googles.

One wonders if the trauma of witnessing a paradigm shift in one's very midst is so upsetting and unfathomable that a return to what is perceived as absolute is necessary for those not willing to embrace such megachange?

Ergo, the strong daddy of Ronald Reagan and the right wing and their wing men, the fundamentalists, both of the laisser faire capitalist and religious variety here in the US, and only the strong daddy via the return of the Caliphate via jihad and shariah in fundamentalist Islam, and a same sort of disconnection in the contemporary fundamentalist Hindu movement in India?

It seems as if, at least in the West, that once the horrors of the Religious Wars had settled and the Enlightenment begun to blossom, that a lot of toleration and free thought flowed, even though the paradigm was rapidly shifting towards modernism. Perhaps the shift had begun earlier at the outbreak of the Reformation with the discovery of the New World, moveable type, etc. Unleashing a torrent of reaction, the height of which had to have been the 40 Years War. The people turned inward to "protect" the Volk and as a result, Germany was a poverty stricken back water for over 100 years, each little state with its own "truth" and faith. . .

In short, it seems that when a new mode of life is about to be thrust upon everyone that reaction to it by the masses automatically ensues and fighting over the true nature of the "Golden Age" one seeks to regain results in civil war.

We are witnessing the falsehood of Fortress America and Its Place in the Sun Eternal. We don't even make stuff any longer, just consume. The bubble is bound to soon burst, and as a result, people just latch onto whatever they find constant. Although, as a good student of history, I must state that I have never bought into the fact that any thing at all is or can be truly static. All culture is merely an attempt of making sense of the present through corrupted imperfect reflection upon the past and then attempting to either perfect what the viewers see as "desirable" or else to accept it and continue on cultivating their gardens.