(no subject)

* It turns out Al Queada has been using porn for evil. O.o No really, they were hiding encrypted intelligence in porn files.'

* Congressional Republicans want to remind you that even though Oil Companies are huge Global concerns in the most profitable business in the history of the world, they are really small businesses. I wish someone would ask them if Oil Companies are "small businesses," what constitutes a "big business?"

* Doing the numbers on the gender related pay gap and Republicans ignoring reality yet again: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/

( Embed: )

* RM found, an article on falling in love with a transgender man: http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Falling-in-Love-with-a-Transgender-Man

It's from this excellent answer to someone asking how falling in love ith a tran peron affects orientation: http://lettersfromtitan.tumblr.com/post/21909210784/im-18-a-girl-and-a-virgin-ive-always-identified-as

* The responses in the comments to my thing on homophobes now all being assumed to be gay being problematic are pretty interesting: http://gwyd.livejournal.com/1244532.html

Particularly this link: "Enough – homophobia is not a gay-on-gay problem:" http://www.sparkindarkness.com/2011/03/enough-homophobia-is-not-gay-on-gay.html

* Drift: If you asked me two weeks ago what I thought of Reagan, I would have had a whole list of things I disprove of that he did. Apparently I underestimated just how toxic to our political system he was. Wow. there's a lot of stuff in this book we simply didn't know was happening at the time and we probably should have.

Anyway, a few personal notes. I remember watching the original roll out of "trickle Down theory." I watched a spokesman explain it on the old black and white in the kitchen, Mom cooking with it on in the background. It sounded so plausible and yet it was so wrong and so damaging. It still is, whether you are talking W.'s economic policies or Romney's. They attempted to debunk Keynes and instead pretty much proved him right. There was nothing new to me about the disastrous huge military spending combined with the debt creating unprecedented levels of National Debt compared to GDP. (Way worse than the Great depression and WWII combined). It's long been known that the figures used to "prove" the USSR was massively out spending and out building us were erroneous. I was unaware that it was outright deliberate lie and fantasy specifically concocted to push a far right agenda. I also had no idea what a clusterfuck Grenada was despite my family and I being glued to the set during the invasion. It's got to go back tomorrow and it's a really long wait list, so it'll likely be a while before I get back to it.

* Looking at the way stripping away democracy has failed for Michigan by preventing economic recovery: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/

( Embed: )

* Colbert on Missouri's proposed Don't Say Gay Law: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/413407/april-30-2012/the-word---don-t-ask--don-t-show---tell

( Embed: )

* Rewriting prehistory: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/323827

* Interesting Mummy T scan: http://news.discovery.com/history/mummy-disease-120427.html

* I can't remember if I linked to a previous item on the world's oldest instrument: http://www.classical-music.com/news/world%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98oldest-musical-instrument%E2%80%99-found

* Chinese fort mystery may be solved: http://www.tajikistannews.net/story/205193756

* I want to thank everyone who is doing something to commemorate the May Day. I simply can't, and am grateful to those who do.

* Hector's fine when I'm up and about, but he's still doing everything in his power to prevent me sleeping. It's exhausting. I'm still sick. If I'm not clearly better by tomorrow, I my have to skip the big gay potluck Wednesday. I don't believe in breathing dangerous pathogens on people, particularly the elderly.

* So I'm posting things on tumblr, but it's mostly reblogging interesting stuff I come across with or without comment or selected things from here. Anyway, if folks are interested, it's here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/gwydionmisha

* Breakout Kings: I know it was a good cause and the acrobat was a terrible person. I'm still not okay with what they did to him.

* I just rewatched Lord Jim. It's been something between a decade and a half and two decades since I last saw it. Watching, I remembered the things I took away from it the first time. 1. Never do anything you can't live with later. 2. A whole lot of thinky thoughts about villain design, which my friends and I applied to a bunch of films, most particularly, The Unforgiven. 3. The theory that you should lie early, lie often under physical torture, because eventually everybody breaks, but then they can't tell if you are still lieing so it won't matter as much. I had a whole bunch of rules I derived for resisting interrogation from my childhood, which I later learned matched up with expert opinion. As they were not allowed to leaves marks on me, I didn't have rules for physical torture. Though no one has ever tried physical methods on me, it was and is weirdly comforting to have a rule for what to do. Yes, I grasp how weird it is that a movie like that with all it's torment, guilt, and angst gave me comfort I could carry with me, but that's how my mind works. I like having contingencies to fall back on.

This time, I mostly poked and the racial agenda, but my thoughts are rather tangled.

* Bones was more fun when it was more crime solving and less babies. Just saying I think the shark may have been jumped here.

* Re Kurt Hummel on Glee: I'm voting for SID rather than HFA, as I don't see any signs of things like difficulty reading other people's body language and a bunch of other things you pretty much need for a HFA diagnosis, but I buy the argument that his sensory processing may be different. (With any sort of Autism Spectrum Diagnoses you need a minimum number of things from various categories. For specific diagnosis on the spectrum, you have different criteria. All the evidence I'm seeing so far is sensory (Dislike of touch except for very spefic people/circumstances, visual and physical textures in clothes, etc.. I haven't seen any stimming, but unless you've lived with me in a situation where I can't hide from you, you likely haven't seen me do it either.) which points to SID rather than HFA. I'm saying HFA here, as Asperger's is a specific category within the HFA community and I don't have access to things like IQ scoring for Kurt Hummel. It's possible I'm missing cognitive and affective symptoms that pop up after halfway through second season, but based on what I've seen so far there is no evidence whatsoever for anything non-sensory wiring related being different. Brittany on the other hand reads HFA to me for a whole host of reasons and if she were in my room, I'd be documenting and advocating for her to be assessed if she hadn't been already.

Caveat: To be clear, I was not trained to do assessments. I did work with a lot of kids on the spectrum including low functioning, high functioning, and a bunch of the more complex sub categories, PDD, and SID. I've had adult friends on the spectrum. I'm more a above average educated lay person who's done a lot of research over the years. I'm not trying to be a dick here, I just think people through around the Asperger's label more loosely than makes sense sometimes.

* Two for one Icon sale: http://djinni.livejournal.com/403024.html?view=4997712#t4997712

* This is beautiful: http://safran-safran.tumblr.com/post/20045513256/ta-prohm-angkor-cambodia-1998-by-steve-mccurry

* You should probably see this, unless you are bad with tentacles: http://very-good-things.tumblr.com/post/8812176661/hine-mizushima-the-unnatural-history-museum

* Bwahahahahahaha! https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/534087_439523956077063_205344452828349_1559576_1460609317_n.jpg

* As I suspected: http://cdn.thedevilspanties.com/comics/20120430.gif

* The Clutch:

(no subject)

* It turns out Al Queada has been using porn for evil. O.o No really, they were hiding encrypted intelligence in porn files.'

* Congressional Republicans want to remind you that even though Oil Companies are huge Global concerns in the most profitable business in the history of the world, they are really small businesses. I wish someone would ask them if Oil Companies are "small businesses," what constitutes a "big business?"

* Doing the numbers on the gender related pay gap and Republicans ignoring reality yet again: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/

( Embed: )

* RM found, an article on falling in love with a transgender man: http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Falling-in-Love-with-a-Transgender-Man

It's from this excellent answer to someone asking how falling in love ith a tran peron affects orientation: http://lettersfromtitan.tumblr.com/post/21909210784/im-18-a-girl-and-a-virgin-ive-always-identified-as

* The responses in the comments to my thing on homophobes now all being assumed to be gay being problematic are pretty interesting: http://gwyd.livejournal.com/1244532.html

Particularly this link: "Enough – homophobia is not a gay-on-gay problem:" http://www.sparkindarkness.com/2011/03/enough-homophobia-is-not-gay-on-gay.html

* Drift: If you asked me two weeks ago what I thought of Reagan, I would have had a whole list of things I disprove of that he did. Apparently I underestimated just how toxic to our political system he was. Wow. there's a lot of stuff in this book we simply didn't know was happening at the time and we probably should have.

Anyway, a few personal notes. I remember watching the original roll out of "trickle Down theory." I watched a spokesman explain it on the old black and white in the kitchen, Mom cooking with it on in the background. It sounded so plausible and yet it was so wrong and so damaging. It still is, whether you are talking W.'s economic policies or Romney's. They attempted to debunk Keynes and instead pretty much proved him right. There was nothing new to me about the disastrous huge military spending combined with the debt creating unprecedented levels of National Debt compared to GDP. (Way worse than the Great depression and WWII combined). It's long been known that the figures used to "prove" the USSR was massively out spending and out building us were erroneous. I was unaware that it was outright deliberate lie and fantasy specifically concocted to push a far right agenda. I also had no idea what a clusterfuck Grenada was despite my family and I being glued to the set during the invasion. It's got to go back tomorrow and it's a really long wait list, so it'll likely be a while before I get back to it.

* Looking at the way stripping away democracy has failed for Michigan by preventing economic recovery: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/

( Embed: )

* Colbert on Missouri's proposed Don't Say Gay Law: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/413407/april-30-2012/the-word---don-t-ask--don-t-show---tell

( Embed: )

* Rewriting prehistory: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/323827

* Interesting Mummy T scan: http://news.discovery.com/history/mummy-disease-120427.html

* I can't remember if I linked to a previous item on the world's oldest instrument: http://www.classical-music.com/news/world%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98oldest-musical-instrument%E2%80%99-found

* Chinese fort mystery may be solved: http://www.tajikistannews.net/story/205193756

* I want to thank everyone who is doing something to commemorate the May Day. I simply can't, and am grateful to those who do.

* Hector's fine when I'm up and about, but he's still doing everything in his power to prevent me sleeping. It's exhausting. I'm still sick. If I'm not clearly better by tomorrow, I my have to skip the big gay potluck Wednesday. I don't believe in breathing dangerous pathogens on people, particularly the elderly.

* So I'm posting things on tumblr, but it's mostly reblogging interesting stuff I come across with or without comment or selected things from here. Anyway, if folks are interested, it's here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/gwydionmisha

* Breakout Kings: I know it was a good cause and the acrobat was a terrible person. I'm still not okay with what they did to him.

* I just rewatched Lord Jim. It's been something between a decade and a half and two decades since I last saw it. Watching, I remembered the things I took away from it the first time. 1. Never do anything you can't live with later. 2. A whole lot of thinky thoughts about villain design, which my friends and I applied to a bunch of films, most particularly, The Unforgiven. 3. The theory that you should lie early, lie often under physical torture, because eventually everybody breaks, but then they can't tell if you are still lieing so it won't matter as much. I had a whole bunch of rules I derived for resisting interrogation from my childhood, which I later learned matched up with expert opinion. As they were not allowed to leaves marks on me, I didn't have rules for physical torture. Though no one has ever tried physical methods on me, it was and is weirdly comforting to have a rule for what to do. Yes, I grasp how weird it is that a movie like that with all it's torment, guilt, and angst gave me comfort I could carry with me, but that's how my mind works. I like having contingencies to fall back on.

This time, I mostly poked and the racial agenda, but my thoughts are rather tangled.

* Bones was more fun when it was more crime solving and less babies. Just saying I think the shark may have been jumped here.

* Re Kurt Hummel on Glee: I'm voting for SID rather than HFA, as I don't see any signs of things like difficulty reading other people's body language and a bunch of other things you pretty much need for a HFA diagnosis, but I buy the argument that his sensory processing may be different. (With any sort of Autism Spectrum Diagnoses you need a minimum number of things from various categories. For specific diagnosis on the spectrum, you have different criteria. All the evidence I'm seeing so far is sensory (Dislike of touch except for very spefic people/circumstances, visual and physical textures in clothes, etc.. I haven't seen any stimming, but unless you've lived with me in a situation where I can't hide from you, you likely haven't seen me do it either.) which points to SID rather than HFA. I'm saying HFA here, as Asperger's is a specific category within the HFA community and I don't have access to things like IQ scoring for Kurt Hummel. It's possible I'm missing cognitive and affective symptoms that pop up after halfway through second season, but based on what I've seen so far there is no evidence whatsoever for anything non-sensory wiring related being different. Brittany on the other hand reads HFA to me for a whole host of reasons and if she were in my room, I'd be documenting and advocating for her to be assessed if she hadn't been already.

Caveat: To be clear, I was not trained to do assessments. I did work with a lot of kids on the spectrum including low functioning, high functioning, and a bunch of the more complex sub categories, PDD, and SID. I've had adult friends on the spectrum. I'm more a above average educated lay person who's done a lot of research over the years. I'm not trying to be a dick here, I just think people through around the Asperger's label more loosely than makes sense sometimes.

* Two for one Icon sale: http://djinni.livejournal.com/403024.html?view=4997712#t4997712

* This is beautiful: http://safran-safran.tumblr.com/post/20045513256/ta-prohm-angkor-cambodia-1998-by-steve-mccurry

* You should probably see this, unless you are bad with tentacles: http://very-good-things.tumblr.com/post/8812176661/hine-mizushima-the-unnatural-history-museum

* Bwahahahahahaha! https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/534087_439523956077063_205344452828349_1559576_1460609317_n.jpg

* As I suspected: http://cdn.thedevilspanties.com/comics/20120430.gif

* The Clutch: