Women Born Transsexual

With Photoshop You can turn human beings into plastic android images.  Barbie Doll Sexbots instead of human beings.

From The Guardian UK:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/jan/13/many-americans-2012-worse

The chance of realising the American dream is receding for millions as jobs are lost, savings run out and houses are repossessed

by Joseph Stiglitz
Friday 13 January 2012

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake.

In that brief moment when the tide was indeed rising, millions of people believed that they might have a fair chance of realising the “American Dream”. Now those dreams, too, are receding. By 2011, the savings of those who had lost their jobs in 2008 or 2009 had been spent. Unemployment cheques had run out. Headlines announcing new hiring – still not enough to keep pace with the number of those who would normally have entered the labour force – meant little to the 50-year-olds with little hope of ever holding a job again.

Indeed, middle-aged people who thought that they would be unemployed for a few months have now realised that they were, in fact, forcibly retired. Young people who graduated from college with tens of thousands of dollars of education debt cannot find any jobs at all. People who moved in with friends and relatives have become homeless. Houses bought during the property boom are still on the market or have been sold at a loss. More than seven million American families have lost their homes.

The dark underbelly of the previous decade’s financial boom has been fully exposed in Europe as well. Dithering over Greece and key national governments’ devotion to austerity began to exact a heavy toll last year. Contagion spread to Italy. Spain’s unemployment, which had been near 20% since the beginning of the recession, crept even higher. The unthinkable – the end of the euro – began to seem like a real possibility.

Continue reading at:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/jan/13/many-americans-2012-worse

Why do I feel like I’m being conned into supporting another war based on the lies of the Pentagon and Intelligence Scum?

From The BBC:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16501566

11 January 2012

A university lecturer and nuclear scientist has been killed in a car explosion in north Tehran.

Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, an academic who also worked at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, and the driver of the car were killed in the attack.

The blast happened after a motorcyclist stuck an apparent bomb to the car.

Several Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated in recent years, with Iran blaming Israel and the US. Both countries deny the accusations.

The US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters she did not have “any information to share one way or the other” on the latest attack.

Iran’s Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi told state television that the attack against Mr Ahmadi-Roshan would not stop “progress” in the country’s nuclear programme.

He called the killing “evidence of [foreign] government-sponsored terrorism”.

Continue reading at:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16501566

From Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/12/u-s-has-some-ideas-who-killed-iran-scientist-panetta/

U.S. has ‘some ideas’ who killed Iran scientist: Panetta

By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, January 12, 2012

WASHINGTON — Pentagon chief Leon Panetta said Thursday that US officials had “some ideas” who was behind the assassination of a nuclear scientist in Tehran this week, but insisted the United States was not involved.

During a meeting with soldiers at a Texas military base, Panetta said the United States was “not involved in any way, in any way with regards to the assassination that took place there.”

“I’m not sure who was involved. We have some ideas as to who might be involved. But we don’t know exactly who was involved,” he added.

The United States had denied Iranian claims that it had a role in killing the scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, in a car bomb attack, and on Wednesday condemned it as an act of violence.

US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier spoke by phone, after Iran accused the allies of plotting the killing.

Continue reading at:   http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/12/u-s-has-some-ideas-who-killed-iran-scientist-panetta/

From The Gothamist:    http://gothamist.com/2012/01/12/ny_times_asks_should_we_report_the.php

NY Times Asks: Hey, Should We Report The Truth?

NY Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane posed an interesting question in his column today: should the Gray Lady point out when politicians and other officials are clearly lying to us? To figure out whether the “newspaper of record” should report truth in addition to parroting bullshit, they decided to crowdsource the question: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

After citing several examples—including misunderstandings by Clarence Thomas and outright lies by Mitt Romney—Brisbane says many readers fed up “with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight.” But even so, he worries about reporters remaining objective while becoming “truth vigilantes,” which makes them sound like Robert De Niro’s character in Brazil:

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

It seems the Times is having a hard time understanding that there is a middle ground between manhandling facts and patronizing readers. The column was successful in one regard: sparking a conversation online. It has led to hundreds of angry comments on the Times, as well as all over Twitter and other sites, expressing outrage that such a question was even asked to begin with.

Continue reading at:   http://gothamist.com/2012/01/12/ny_times_asks_should_we_report_the.php

Yesterday morning I was hit with several announcements that rather hysterically claimed Canada had or was about to void some 5000 same sex marriages by non-Canadian Citizens living in locations where same-sex marriage was not legally recognized.

As the day progressed it came to appear as though this hysteria was the result of an Internet “Mike Check” gone awry>

First story:

Pink News UK:

Up to 5,000 Canadian gay marriages ‘may not be valid’

Oh, it is so much fun to watch the Republicans dine on their very own Republican Vulture Capitalist.

From The Guardian UK:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/09/time-cancel-unpayable-old-debts

Economic history is full of examples of successful debt default – so let’s make 2012 a default jubilee for have-nots

Aditya Chakraborttyguardian.co.uk, Monday 9 January 2012

In the week between Christmas and New Year, those bleary few days when the world has better things to do than catch up on news or check its Twitter account, The Guardian carried a story that bears repeating. It was about Dimitris and Christina Gasparinatos and their kids in the Greek port of Patras. For ever hard up, the parents had been pushed by the economic crisis into outright poverty; and just before Christmas Dimitris and Christina put four of their children into care.

Nor is the Gasparinatos’ case an isolated one. Greece must be the most family-centric society in western Europe, yet its media is full of reports of newborns dumped outside clinics, or infants shunted into foster homes.

Such stories almost never come up when politicians and economists debate Europe’s meltdown; implicitly, they are categorised as fall-out, for journalists and campaigners to highlight. Yet the abandoned children of Greece are not merely coincidental to those discussions about how to tackle the debt; they are integral to it.

Strip away the technicalities and you are left with two ways to think about the debt crisis. One is as a battle between the past and the future. The vast majority of Greece’s debts are historic commitments made to creditors by previous governments, sometimes in very dubious circumstances. Yet Athens has been forced to prioritise repaying these old loans over generating economic growth, or future income. One result of that policy has been to snatch away whatever chance the Gasparinatos kids might have had of decent lives.

Something similar is happening in Britain. David Cameron came to office with the primary goal of paying down debt. Less than two years later, his ministers are now obliged to go on the BBC at regular intervals to explain why more than a million young people are out of work. Study after study shows that a young adult unemployed at the outset of his or her career suffers permanent damage to their prospects, yet this government’s economic policy favours the past even though it means ruining the future.

Continue reading at:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/09/time-cancel-unpayable-old-debts

From Huffington Post:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scottie-thomaston/odious-new-antitransgende_b_1201889.html

Scottie Thomaston
Posted: 1/12/12

Note: This piece also appears on DailyKos.com

A new anti-transgender “bathroom bill” was filed in Tennessee’s General Assembly today by a Republican state Senator. The bill “restricts access to public restrooms and public dressing rooms designated by sex to members of that particular sex.” There is a monetary fine for people who violate the law. And since in Tennessee it’s legally impossible to get your sex changed on your birth certificate (and only a little less impossible to get it changed on your drivers’ license), this affects all transgender and gender non-conforming people.

Tennessee has been proposing and passing some of the most homophobic and transphobic bills in the country — it is, after all, the state that passed HB600 stripping local jurisdictions of LGBT antidiscrimination provisions. There are ongoing court challenges to that law I’ll be discussing soon. There’s also the “license to bully” bill. And the “Don’t Say Gay” bill was introduced there as well.

The response to many of those bills came too late — HB600 is now law, and it went almost entirely unremarked upon until its passage. But this one was introduced January 10th in the House and will be introduced today in the Senate, so hopefully we can mobilize to rally against its passage fairly quickly.

The purpose of the bill is entirely unclear unless they are just trying to erase people who are transgender and stigmatize them permanently as sexual predators who want to prey on unsuspecting victims in public accommodations. The bill seems to be trying to criminalize gender variance — not something that’s unheard of. And it’s obvious that there is no way to enforce this if it becomes law. They can’t possibly employ bathroom police all across the state of Tennessee to make sure that someone going into a female bathroom possesses a birth certificate proving they have the requisite body parts for that bathroom and that they have had those same parts since birth.

Continue reading at:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scottie-thomaston/odious-new-antitransgende_b_1201889.html

Anti-trans “Police the Potty” bill withdrawn — Tenn. state rep. calls trans people “perverts” and would ‘stomp them.’

From Lexie Cannes:   http://lexiecannes.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/anti-trans-police-the-potty-bill-withdrawn-tenn-state-rep-calls-trans-people-perverts-and-would-stomp-them/

Lexie Cannes
1/12/12

Creative Commons permission

THE GUERRILLA ANGEL REPORT — “Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk,” said Rep. Richard Floyd, a Tennessee House Republican who sponsored a bill in the state legislature that would force trans people to use public restrooms and dressing rooms of their birth gender. Fortunately a state Senator withdrew his co-sponsorship of the bill placing it in limbo. It is said Floyd drew up the bill after reading about the Macy’s dressing room incident late last year.

More from Rep. Floyd:

“I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there — I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them in there — I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry.

“Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk. We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts.”

Now, this is a man full of vile hate and I’m holding him accountable for his actions.

From The Daily Mail:    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2085163/Children-dumped-streets-Greek-parents-afford-them.html