Month: June 2010

That's what Michael Schrage is forecasting:

If you are a knowledge worker, cognitive capitalist, or a Reichian symbolic analyst, you will not be retiring at 65. Period. Even if you are in a protected public union with cosseted pension funds, you are at extraordinary risk. Just ask the Greeks, the Californians, or the Japanese. This is a global phenomenon. Demographics and structural deficits don't lie. Unless the global economy comes roaring back in ways that stimulate sustainable growth in OECD countries, even the most talented professionals had better expect to work for at least another five years.

If I live that long, I will be working. I see no reason why not.

Nor Ace of Base:

I was listening to Alejandro with my sister and we both heard the huge similarity to Ace of Base. I was thinking of mixing it with 'The Sign' but the she said it was 'Don't Turn Around'. Obviously she was right.

Compare the originals for yourself here and here.

The little pink pill performed poorly in FDA trials. The New View Campaign has been against the drug because they claim it tends "to pathologize normal sexual diversity and therefore NARROWS the 'cultural ideal' around female sexuality." Miriam at Feministing has a related thought:

Who decides what is hypoactive (aka not active enough or under active) sexual desire anyway?

In my opinion, sexual desire is not something that can be measured independently, most frequently what becomes an issue is how it compares to that of your partner (if there is a partner involved). Women are stereotyped with never wanting sex and men with always wanting it, but we all know it's never that simple.

The ensuing comment thread bats the question around some more. It seems simple enough to me in a free society. If it works, whoever wants to use it should be able to. You want more sex drive? Have at it. Personally, I'm somewhat relieved by the abatement of mine with age. The time I spent!

A reader writes:

Thanks for shining a light on Frank Kameny – a true hero in the LGBT equal rights struggle, who I was fortunate to meet and hear his exploits.  Out here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have our own dazzling pioneer: José Sarria, a.k.a. The Widow Norton, a.k.a. The Nightingale of Montgomery Street!  The kids today can't even begin to imagine what courage it took, back in the 1950s, for these great leaders simply to stand up and assert their humanity and dignity in the face of universal ignorance and hate and derision.  We have come so far so fast and it's wonderful that they are still alive to see it.  They are national treasures.

Another writes:

I love me some Frank Kameny and consider him a great pioneer. But I find it choice that you  go to Kameny for your "Before Stonewall" person and not to Harry Hay, who actually founded the Mattachine Society years before. Kameny helped open a chapter of the Mattachines in Washington, DC, but the group began in California and owe some of its early organizing work to the models Harry learned while organizing shipyard and dock workers into unions during the Depression. Kameny deserves the great props he's receiving but he'd be the first to say that he wouldn't have had a Mattachine model if the generations before him didn't do it first.

Both my readers are correct. Frank was not alone nor the first. I mention him because he is a friend and great man and an inspiration to me personally. I didn't mean to slight any of the other pioneers. My point was to push back against the idiotic – and politically loaded – notion that the gay rights movement began with Stonewall. (It's also worth noting that many of those who fought back that night were not drag queens, but just regular homos who had had enough.)

Former Conservative Party spokesman Kory Teneycke is launching a 24-hour news channel in Canada:

His goal was a punchy, provocative, right-of-centre network to shake up what Teneycke describes as the "lame-stream media."

Pareene posts the trailer, "in case you're curious about what hardcore nationalism looks like in the world's most modest country":

Now that they have their own Fox news, Canadians will soon be demanding that their border be sealed, to protect them from the violent and economically unstable nation to the south.

Martin Krossel sees a bump in the road for Teneycke:

Quebecor needs the approval for the new channel from the Canadian Radio-Television Commission. That’s going to be no easy task. The Canadian Broadcasting Act imposes requirements on all broadcasters that, according to the National Post’s Tasha Kheiriddin, forces Canadian electronic news outlets to “provide ‘balance’” and prevents them from challenging many of the [Pierre] Trudeauvian sacred cows of Canadian identity, as defined by the act.” This, she argued makes it “difficult if not impossible” to create a purely conservative news station.

"I think if two people love each other, then what the hell? I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want," – rapper Eminem.

A reader writes:

I was relaxing in my room on a trip to Mexico, watching an episode of "House" on Mexican cable television, when lo and behold a voiceless advertisement comes on the screen that I found so incredible I immediately thought of your creepy ad watch category. I hopped up to see if I could find it on YouTube and there it was:

Cheezy background porn music and a naked couple sitting in what appears to be a jacuzzi hot tub.  The jacuzzi bubbles are going in full force.  Then the woman slowly gets out of the tub and brings the man an unidentified pill (an upper? ecstasy? some other aphrodisiac?).  As soon as he downs the pill, the bubbles stop, and the box of Luftal medication appears on the screen with the words "Elimina los gases." It was then that I fully realized with some horror that what was being pitched was an advertisement for medicine to control farts. 

Mexico!  Gotta love this country!

Joe Klein is deflated:

There are no indications that the Taliban are willing to make peace. And there are some indications that Karzai's government would collapse, abandoned by its non-Pashtun members, including most of the army, if he pursued this course. But no other course seems plausible. The U.S. military would like to see the Taliban lay down their arms, but that's not likely. A deal in which the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar renounces al-Qaeda, accepts a subsidiary Taliban role in Karzai's government and is allowed to field local militias in some of the Taliban-dominated Pashtun districts of the south seems the least unlikely scenario.

Andrew Exum is also bummed out. I'm not. I expected this. What I suspect is going to happen is that by allowing the counter-insurgency surge to be tried, Obama will prove, rather than merely assert, that bringing a stable democracy to Afghanistan in the tenth year of occupation is a form of insanity.

As Obama basks in his BP deal, the GOP splinters. This means that Boehner has now taken a position that is not that of Rush Limbaugh. So now it gets interesting …