I'm furious, and disgusted with behavior that seems to be coming mostly from my generation and people up to a decade or two older. Town halls are supposed to be for discussion, not booing a woman in a wheelchair as she describes her financial distress.

Political rallies are supposed to be opportunities to present your opinions, not to bite off people's fingers. Mike Tyson is not a role model, folks! The pro-health care biter was described as swaggering off after maiming someone and is apparently hiding from the police. The anti-health care bitee not admits to throwing the first punch in the fight, it turns out this guy who opposes socialism in all forms is being treated thanks to Medicare.

Baby boomers, grow up.

Some E-Books are More Equal than Others

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Scary.

Okay, I've had a few drinks, but seriously, what the FUCK? Who are the men who think this way in the US in the freaking 21st century and how did they ever gain entry into the same sex that produced my feminist husband?

[M]arriage is concerned above all with female sexuality...The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage...This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood–and sexual accessibility–is defined...This most profound aspect of marriage–protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex–is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage...

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.

Not to mention this blatant envy of teh Ghey:

Can gay men and women be as generous as we straight men are? Will you consider us as men who love, just as you do, and not merely as homophobes or Baptists? Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared.

Please, spare me your generosity. Please.

ETA: I just saw this gem at the original source. "[T]he illicit or licit nature of heterosexual copulation is transmitted to the child, who is deemed legitimate or illegitimate based on the metaphysical category of its parents' coition." He must be joking. Please tell me he's joking. It is 2009.