But I must admit having some Rand-hole hurl egalitarian at me is a new experience.

I guess the elitist scum who picture themselves as being among the John Galts of the world have a hard time imagining someone taking a founding father like Tom Paine seriously.

But yes I must admit I believe in all those values the neo-Nazis of the right think are bad.

I think values like fairness and compassion are good things.

I think that equality is a good thing not only for people just like me but for people different from me.  I think it is only right and just to help and care for those knocked down by circumstances.  Worst of all I don’t need some magic invisible sky being who lives in a huge church to tell me to remember that there but for fortune.

I also remember that the people the right wing called communists stood up against Jim Crow long before it was fashionable.  They organized the farm workers.

All I had to do was look at the people who were called communists, Americans like Pete Seeger, institutions like the Highlander Folk Institute.

I’d reather be known as an egalitarian than as a bigot.

I sort of think there is more of a queer minority class and the individual branches of the queer alphabet soup are somewhat intertwined, but it is sort of academic whether TS/TG people are a collective of sub-cultures or a minority culture.

This person also whipped out the “cultural imperialism” argument regarding Thailand “Transgender Beauty Pageants”.  Which is kind of bullshit in the era of globalized electronic communications.

What I find sort of amazing is how once you get past the  imposed majority social  cultures of many societies  is how many things the TS/TG people universally have in common.

But let’s leave international culture aside and look for a moment at a more limited field: Rock and Roll.  there have been a lot of TS/TG musicians and a whole lot more who have in engaged in messing with drag and gender fucking.

Now I get to post links to several articles I’ve had sitting around while I tried to figure out a cohesive way to put them together.  Most of these are centered on the singer in “Against Me”, Laura Jane Grace’s recent coming out.

Against Me!’s Tom Gabel Makes Live Debut as Laura Jane Grace in San Diego

Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace: How “Rolling Stone” Got Her Story (Almost) Right

And for a little history with an invocation of Jayne county’s punk song “Man enough to be a Woman”

Man enough to be a woman and still rock’n'rolling

Bear in mind other sisters have had a less public transition than Laura Grace and have been in area of music with less of an association with a macho ethic.

Some like Namoli Brennet and Veronica Klaus are closer to my present musical likes and have been featured on my Friday Night Fun and Culture.

We tend to make our cultural contributions in a manner in which the TS/TG element is a subtext rather than the  main focus of the work, how can it be otherwise as being part of a sub-culture or minority culture means you still live within the context of a dominant culture.

By Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan
17 May 2012

Nothing like deprivation to muddy up your understanding of “want” vs. “need.”

For instance, here’s a sampling of items I’ve considered “needs” over the past two weeks: new sports bras, shower curtain, new couch pillows, lime-squeezer kitchen gadget, iPad case, duchess satin bridesmaid dress, cat scratching post, and a handmade silver ring shaped like a poppy. This is doubly remarkable, as I’m not really the shopping type. But I’m also in the middle of a self-imposed No New Stuff May, and we all know what happens when you start branding the fruit forbidden.

My No New Stuff month is a challenge not to buy anything brand-new for the 31 days of May (food and certain toiletries obviously excepted, you sickos). Why? I already have everything I need to stay hale and hearty, and my small apartment wouldn’t fit much more stuff, anyway. But really, it’s a small stand against a “Bigger, Better, More!” culture that tosses perfectly good items into landfills and gobbles up new resources to build still more stuff — much of which we don’t even need.

That’s not to say I’m going native, eschewing capitalism, and weaving a new wardrobe out of grass clippings. Under my challenge, buying used stuff from resale shops or Craigslist is street legal, as is repairing broken items and just plain doing without. I began without any pressing needs on the shopping front, curious to discover what desires might pop up as the month went on and how well I’d be able to satisfy them. And just as I used to hide forbidden copies of Sweet Valley High books under my bed as a kid, now that new purchases are taboo I’ve been deluged with strange wants masquerading as needs.

Continue reading at:  http://grist.org/living/stuff-it-test-your-mettle-by-giving-up-shopping/

World Health Organisation estimates 10,000 black market operations involving human organs take place each year

Denis Campbell and Nicola Davison in Shanghai
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 May 2012

The illegal trade in kidneys has risen to such a level that an estimated 10,000 black market operations involving purchased human organs now take place annually, or more than one an hour, World Health Organisation experts have revealed.

Evidence collected by a worldwide network of doctors shows that traffickers are defying laws intended to curtail their activities and are cashing in on rising international demand for replacement kidneys driven by the increase in diabetes and other diseases.

Patients, many of whom will go to China, India or Pakistan for surgery, can pay up to $200,000 (nearly £128,000) for a kidney to gangs who harvest organs from vulnerable, desperate people, sometimes for as little as $5,000.

The vast sums to be made by both traffickers and surgeons have been underlined by the arrest by Israeli police last week of 10 people, including a doctor, suspected of belonging to an international organ trafficking ring and of committing extortion, tax fraud and grievous bodily harm. Other illicit organ trafficking rings have been uncovered in India and Pakistan.

The Guardian contacted an organ broker in China who advertised his services under the slogan, “Donate a kidney, buy the new iPad!” He offered £2,500 for a kidney and said the operation could be performed within 10 days.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/27/kidney-trade-illegal-operations-who

Robert Reich
Saturday, May 26, 2012

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.

The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.

With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the “base” defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.

One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program.

So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat.

For example, the Pentagon says it wants to buy fewer F-35 joint strike fighter planes than had been planned – the single-engine fighter has been plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches – but the contractors and their friends on Capitol Hill promise a fight.

Continue reading at:  http://robertreich.org/post/23815137151

By EDWARD TENNER
Published: May 26, 2012

Plainsboro, N.J.

EDITORS and pundits seem to agree that the 2012 presidential election will be one of the hardest fought in memory. Even the international press has jumped in; an Economist cover predicts “Hardball,” and in April The Guardian called the campaign “ruthless in its backstabbing,” warning, “you have seen nothing yet.”

What should be explained instead is how civil our recent contests have been, for as a society America has always been attracted to ruthlessness. It might be defined not just as hard competition but as the deployment of unfair, unethical and distasteful (if often technically legal) methods. American culture blended a Protestant sense of mission and virtue with a pragmatism that could countenance slavery and Indian removal.

America hardly invented ruthlessness — think of that all-American hero, Napoleon Bonaparte — but it extended it to the common people. Moralists from Benjamin Franklin to Horatio Alger and beyond might celebrate character as the path to success, but the man in the street knew differently. Adventurers like the notorious filibusterer William Walker became folk heroes. After a New Orleans jury acquitted Walker of violating the Neutrality Act of 1818, he began a fund-raising tour for a new adventure. The early 20th century rags-to-riches baseball star Ty Cobb “came in hard and with spikes high,” as his biographer Charles C. Alexander put it, and kept alive the false rumor that he sharpened them.

Secession sought to protect not just the plantation owners’ way of life but also the aspirations of Southern yeomen to slaveowning wealth, following the career of the populist military hero and president Andrew Jackson. And after the war, the robber barons were as much admired as condemned for their tactics. As the muckraking historian Matthew Josephson wrote during the Depression in his book “The Robber Barons,” objections to the ethics of post-Civil War entrepreneurs like Jim Fisk and Jay Gould were countered by the observation that they were “smart men.”

Americans had mixed feelings about their 20th-century technological and financial heroes, too. Thomas A. Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company hired thugs to enforce his patent claims; independent filmmakers moved to Hollywood partly to avoid them. Steve Jobs paid little attention to conditions in his Chinese contractors’ factories. After his death protests grew too large for Apple to ignore; but even then, not only was “bad Steve” praised, but many of the demonstrators in the early Occupy Wall Street movement still revered him.

Attacks on the ruthless may actually increase their allure. In the 1930s, The New Yorker reported that a young man applying for a brokerage job declared that he had read “The Robber Barons” and wanted to become one of them. Fifty years later, the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street,” intended as an exposé of greed, inspired a generation of fans of the fictional Gordon Gekko, as portrayed by Michael Douglas. Perhaps it was this dark glamour that helped persuade President Bill Clinton, supported by his deputy attorney general (and current attorney general), Eric H. Holder Jr., to pardon a refugee from justice, Marc Rich.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/nasty-like-us.html

How the gay movement’s successes surpassed feminism and civil rights — and became a model for a new era

By Linda Hirshman
Sunday, May 27, 2012

At the height of the real estate boom in the 2000s, Robert M. “Robby” Browne, 2007 Corcoran Real Estate National Sales Person of the Year, put on his woman’s bathing suit and silver heels and walked out onto the Club Exit stage. A thousand screaming, cheering, photo-snapping real estate brokers roared their approval. The openly gay Browne, six feet tall and nearly two hundred pounds, danced a sweetly amateurish version of the Village People’s gay anthem, “YMCA,” as ten half naked male Broadway dancers backed him up.

“Is there any question of who the star is?” Browne asks proudly, watching the video today. For most real estate brokers, a third year as Corcoran’s top producer would have been stardom enough, but when Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman began planning the 2007 event, Browne thought he wouldn’t bother to attend. He’d had enough top-earner, $100-million-club years. He was turning sixty, and he was thinking about his life as a whole. Finally he said he would show up, but only if he could accept the award in drag. Browne’s beloved gay older brother, Roscoe Willett Browne, died of AIDS in 1985. He’d never forget the day when President George H. W. Bush said that dying of AIDS wasn’t as important as losing your job. “George H. W. Bush did not acknowledge the sacrifice of my brother and our love. My brother. He’s in his eighties and he still has his brothers and I don’t have any brothers,” says Browne. “And my brother was a Yalie and he was in Vietnam; Bush, how could he be more your person?” We exist, says Browne, looking at the video of his awards ceremony. “This show says we exist.”

Exist? You can’t pick up a paper without seeing evidence that gay people exist and are compelling American society to acknowledge them. The federal government protects them from homophobic violence and twenty-one states have laws against discrimination; 141 cities across the country constitute enclaves of equal treatment. A federal nondiscrimination bill gains more support in Congress with each passing year. Poll numbers show Americans overwhelmingly support protection for gays and lesbians against hate crimes and equality in health benefits, housing, and jobs. In July 2010, a federal judge struck down the federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, that excluded gays from the federal benefits for which married people were eligible and that allowed the states to refuse to recognize the marriages if they pleased. In August, another federal judge invalidated the amendment to the California constitution, added by Proposition 8, that limited marriage to a man and a woman. September had hardly dawned when a third federal judge found the policy requiring gay soldiers to hide their sexual orientation, don’t ask/don’t tell, unconstitutional as well. The United States Congress repealed the law prohibiting out gays and lesbians from serving in the armed forces. Right after the Fourth of July in 2011, the federal courts in California ordered the United States military to stop screwing around getting ready and just cease enforcing it at once.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/victory_unprecedented/