Women Born Transsexual

I’m one of those evil free thinking atheists.

No gods, No masters and all that.

I only invoke Gaia as a unified concept of life in our solar system and how all living things on this planet are related.

I grew up with the fresh history of Hitler and the German people’s genocidal ravaging of Europe.

As a lifelong victim of hatred, bullying and prejudice I have struggled for answers as to why I, along with what seems to be the majority of obvious transkids were targeted for prejudice.

I read Gordon Allport and Hannah Arendt.

I follow the postings from Southern Poverty Law Center and from People For the American Way’s “Right Wing Watch.”

In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin delivers a soliloquy where he points out how when dictators arise and manipulate their people in to actions that are clearly not in their best interests, when the leader of the mob delivers speeches to arouse and inflame hatred; they always get around to persecuting the Jews.

Sixty-six years later Sasha Baron Cohen, in Borat gets right wing bigoted morons to join him in singing the supposed Kazakh folksong “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”

Like TS/TG people the Jewish people are scapegoated all over the world and blamed for the majority or the world’s ills by the people of majority religions who are actually responsible.

I was raised in the  Catholic church and one of my earliest questions about religion centered around how the Jews managed to get blamed when Italians (Roman) murdered this Jewish carpenter.

This only make sense if one is trying to conceal the real power behind people’s misery by pointing to a small and relatively powerless group and saying, “It’s their fault, they are the ones to blame.”

Ever since I came out in 1969 I’ve listened to lies from feminists about everyone from drag performers to post-transsexual women mocking and degrading women.

When drag performers camp it up on stage they almost never mock or exaggeratedly perform women from real life. They camp up the performances of already exaggerated roles played by women in the movies. The most common lip syncing acts are virtual hagiographies to the dive singer, who the  performer is lip syncing.

The other attack is that transsexual and transgender  both the create and reinforce of gender stereotypes.

Pretty fucking cool don’tcha think?

That a group of people  that make up about one tenth to one quarter of one percent of the world’s population are responsible for all that.  Not only that, they do this while being seriously persecuted and discriminated against from the time they are tiny little children.

Meantime these huge powerful religious organizations are waging total war on women.

Yet so many women continue to support these organizations.

See Secularist10:  http://secularist10.hubpages.com/hub/Women-and-Atheism

Women, Gender and Atheism

Women, religion and atheism

Women and girls lose the most in religion. Every major religion, and most minor ones, oppress, constrain, disrespect, demean, dehumanize or harm women in a variety of ways. Yet the disproportionate majority of atheists and agnostics are men. Why is this? Why do women dominate religious traditions, why are they more religious than men, and why do they not embrace atheism or agnosticism nearly to the degree that men do?

Perhaps the number of radfems who have been nuns, Catholic theologians or educated in Catholic Schools  offers one explanation for the hesitancy to attack the main source of patriarchal oppression of women.

For me coming out as an atheist in my teens was just one more thing to be picked on for,  after all when you are already getting picked on for being a commie-queer- hippie-transkid adding atheist isn’t all that big a deal.

I mean religion is nothing but a power trip for manipulating the ignorant into obeying the priests and giving them money. The priests use superstition  to play on people’s fear and stupidity.

I was one of those natural atheists.  I saw contradictions really easily.  Science offered better explanations.

For me some of the weirdest aspects of second wave feminism was the whole homeopathy, aroma therapy, crystal therapy, goddess worshiping Wicca stuff.

Sort of went along with it because the partying was fun.

But really…

When you’ve already reached the point of not believing in one god, it’s a real stretch to turn around and believe in a whole bunch of gods and goddesses.

Which brings me back to the present attacks the radfems are making on TS/TG folks.

How come they are attacking this tiny minority group when religious institutions are the main pillars of the patriarchy and misogyny as well as the forces behind the right wing war on women.

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/arts/music/kitty-wells-country-singer-dies-at-92.html

By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
Published: July 16, 2012

NASHVILLE — Kitty Wells, who was on the verge of quitting music to be a homemaker when she recorded a hit in 1952 that struck a chord with women and began opening doors for them in country music, died on Monday at her home in Madison, Tenn. She was 92.

The cause was complications of a stroke, said her grandson John Sturdivant Jr.

Ms. Wells was an unlikely and unassuming pioneer. When she recorded “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” she was a 33-year-old wife and mother intending to retire from the business to devote herself to her family full time. The only reason she made the record, she told the weekly newspaper Nashville Scene in 1999, was to collect the union-scale wage ($125) that the session would bring.

“I wasn’t expecting it to make a hit,” she said. “I just thought it was another song.”

But Ms. Wells’s record proved to be much more than just “another song.” It was a rejoinder to Hank Thompson’s No. 1 hit “Wild Side of Life,” a brooding lament in which the singer blames a woman he picks up in a bar for breaking up his marriage, and it became her signature song.

“Honky Tonk Angels” resonated with women who had been outraged by Mr. Thompson’s record, which called into question their morals and their increasing social and sexual freedom. At a time when divorce rates were rising and sexual mores changing in postwar America, the song, with lyrics by J. D. Miller, resounded like a protofeminist anthem.

“As I sit here tonight, the jukebox playin’/The tune about the wild side of life,” Ms. Wells sings, she reflects on married men pretending to be single and causing “many a good girl to go wrong.” She continues:

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/arts/music/kitty-wells-country-singer-dies-at-92.html

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/17/hsbc-executive-resigns-senate

Executive quits in front of US Senate as bank faces massive fines for ‘horrific’ lapses that resulted in laundering money for drugs cartels and pariah states

Dominic Rushein New York
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 July 2012

Executives with Europe‘s biggest bank, HSBC, were subjected to a humiliating onslaught from US senators on Tuesday over revelations that staff at its global subsidiaries laundered billions of dollars for drug cartels, terrorists and pariah states.

Lawmakers hammered the British-based bank over the scandal, demanding to know how and why its affiliates had exposed it to the proceeds of drug trafficking and terrorist financing in a “pervasively polluted” culture that persisted for years.

A report compiled for the committee detailed how HSBC’s subsidiaries transported billions of dollars of cash in armoured vehicles, cleared suspicious travellers’ cheques worth billions, and allowed Mexican drug lords buy to planes with money laundered through Cayman Islands accounts.

Other subsidiaries moved money from Iran, Syria and other countries on US sanctions lists, and helped a Saudi bank linked to al-Qaida to shift money to the US.

David Bagley, HSBC’s head of compliance since 2002, and who had worked with the bank for more than 20 years, resigned before the committee.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/17/hsbc-executive-resigns-senate

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/barons-in-control-of-britain

The Magna Carta forced King John to give away powers. But big business now exerts a chilling grip on the workforce

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012

Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen’s estates surrounding Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn’t work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born.

At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries) call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old rugby pitch of Brunel University’s Runnymede campus. It’s a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.

The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the hill into the woods behind the campus – pressed, as if by the ineluctable force of history, ever closer to the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they have built and their cluster of tents, you can see across the meadows to where the Magna Carta was sealed almost 800 years ago.

Their aim is simple: to remove themselves from the corporate economy, to house themselves, grow food and build a community on abandoned land. Implementation is less simple. Soon after I arrived, on a sodden day last week, an enforcer working for the company which now owns the land came slithering through the mud in his suit and patent leather shoes with a posse of police, to serve papers.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/barons-in-control-of-britain

From Other Words: http://www.otherwords.org/articles/we_cant_put_a_price_on_nature

The greenwashed economy threatens our ability to pursue sustainable development.

By Wenonah Hauter
July 16, 2012

A group of international scientists says that the earth is dangerously close to its tipping point of irreversible damage. Clearly, we need a way out of the mess we’ve made of the planet.

The so-called “green economy,” which governments, business leaders, and some environmental organizations touted at last month’s United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is actually a greenwashed economy. Its proponents ask questions such as: How can we put a price on nature so as to better manage it? Or, how can we make it financially undesirable to pollute? Those are the wrong questions, and they don’t lead us to real solutions.

Putting a price on nature — as if it were a widget to be bought and sold on the market — devalues its life-giving properties. It partitions the environment off as a commodity, leaving it for sale to the highest bidder. And pollution trading is like paying a robber not to steal from your home. Neither gets to the root causes of our environmental problems: the failure to take meaningful regulatory actions and the undemocratic means by which our natural resources are managed worldwide.

As our access to the planet’s resources that once seemed endless has become limited, corporations, multinational institutions, industry-funded non-profits, and policymakers are eagerly offering market-based solutions. They typically position private interests to profit from our increased need for shared natural resources.

Calling this dangerous trend “the green economy” just isn’t appropriate. It’s more accurate to say that these special interests are promoting the same old dirty economy under a new banner. And this failure to prevent pollution threatens our ability to pursue sustainable development.

Continue reading at:  http://www.otherwords.org/articles/we_cant_put_a_price_on_nature

From Truth Out:   http://truth-out.org/news/item/10358-occupy-national-gathering-electrical-storms-and-insurrectionary-corpses

By Natasha Lennard
Tuesday, 17 July 2012

On a scorching afternoon recently in Philadelphia’s Franklin Square, where Occupy’s National Gathering participants had set up a daytime base, small circles of people – from gray-haired peace activists and Code Pink members clutching candy-colored parasols, to crust punks rolling cigarettes in the shade and many more – relaxed in advance of a final evening march. It would be the end of a weeklong summit of assemblies and discussions (with a march here and there for good measure), which brought over 500 hundred Occupy participants together from around the country, but passed without media fanfare.

It’s a tall order, vying for attention in Philadelphia over the July 4th holiday. Even the impressive Independence Day fireworks show, which drew in around half a million revelers, was outshone that night when an electrical storm lit up the hot sky like a strobe. But the National Gathering (or NatGat, if we’re going by Twitter parlance) was not necessarily aiming for spectacle. The idea, according to organizers, was to bring Occupy participants together from around the country to share and focus visions for the movement. Pundits have noted the relatively small attendance as an index for Occupy’s death. But for many anarchists and radicals heavily involved in Occupy’s first swell, NatGat was a nail in a different coffin altogether: the death of “Occupy” as the banner du jour under which experimental, insurrectionary action could be fostered.

Dustin Slaughter, 30, a Philadelphia-based activist and journalist who helped organize NatGat, told me he thought the week had gone “spectacularly well.” He explained some of the key intentions behind NatGat and its numerous “visioning” sessions:

“‘Visioning’ really means crafting something of a blueprint,” said Slaughter, a longtime Occupy Philly participant. “The idea is to focus the movement a little, to recognize that there are some core issues driving it – like opposition to corporate personhood and money’s influence over politics,” he said, explaining that the idea was to condense thoughts from NatGat into a final document, which Occupy groups around the country could use. The document, released recently, describes itself as a “first step toward the development of a collective vision.” But Slaughter stressed that it “in no way would be a binding thing, or definitive of Occupy,” – in deference to Occupy’s decentralized structure.

Continue reading at:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/10358-occupy-national-gathering-electrical-storms-and-insurrectionary-corpses

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/morality-of-capitalism_b_1679945.html

Jedediah Purdy07/17/2012

Despite what David Brooks thinks, it is not true that Barack Obama has forced Mitt Romney into a debate about the morality of capitalism. Too bad. But with Bain, LIBOR, and offshoring all in the campaign mix, it’s just possible that that the debate might happen. If we manage to have it, a few points should come into focus.

First, there are some good moral defenses of capitalism. They appeal to freedom, dignity, responsibility, and humanitarianism.

Second, these arguments are weakest as defenses of the kind of finance capitalism that Bain Capital and much of Wall Street practice these days. This hyper-capitalism borrows the traditional defenses of the system, but it doesn’t much deserve their support.

Third, all the good defenses of capitalism are equivocal. They don’t say that it produces the best imaginable world, but that, all things considered, it’s the best we can do. This is the basis for a mixed economy of intelligent regulation, a strong public sector, and responsible capitalism. How to create that balance should be the question, not a for-or-against punching contest between blow-up caricatures.

Why a moral conversation? Why not just talk about the economists’ go-to, efficiency? Well, partly because efficiency is itself a value, not a neutral and objective principle, and partly because, as Brooks admits in the New York Times today, it isn’t enough. I will come back to it.

Continue reading at:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/morality-of-capitalism_b_1679945.html

From Rethinking Schools Blog:   http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/hot-enough-for-you-time-to-teach-against-fossil-fuels/

by Bill Bigelow
July 16, 2012

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve been spared most of the brutal weather experienced in the rest of the country. Throughout the United States, in the month of June alone, 3,200 daytime high temperature records were broken or tied. In Washington, D.C., an 11-day stretch of temperatures above 95 degrees is the longest since records have been kept. The weird and deadly mid-Atlantic storm—the “land hurricane”—took the lives of 23 people and left 4 million without electricity. Colorado has suffered through the worst forest fires in the state’s history. And the fire still burning in southeastern Oregon is the biggest one the state has seen in 150 years.

As climate scientists will tell you, there is no way to link any single weather event to global warming. But as Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground website, said recently on Democracy Now!, “What we’re seeing now is the future. We’re going to be seeing a lot more weather like this, a lot more impacts like we’re seeing from this series of heat waves, fires, and storms. . . . This is just the beginning.”

And yet, the fossil fuel industry continues to lead the climate change denial parade. On June 27, a day when almost 200 high temperature records were broken, Rex W. Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, gave a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, pooh-poohing climate change, saying that the problem was activist organizations that “manufacture fear.” Tillerson said that the problem was an “illiterate public,” which needed to be taught that all environmental risks were “entirely manageable.”

And conservative pundits proudly wave the same flat-earth flag. Arguing with E. J. Dionne on ABC’s This Week, George Will said, “You asked us—how do we explain the heat? One word: summer. . . . We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.”

Continue reading at:  http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/hot-enough-for-you-time-to-teach-against-fossil-fuels/