Suddenly San Franciscan

The great state of Oklahoma (where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain) has somewhat unfortunately elected a raving bigot called Sally Kern as a Congressperson more than once.  She’s well known notorious for describing homosexuality as a greater threat to America than terrorism or Islam (which by the way she does nevertheless think are great threats) and suggesting that “it[homosexuality]’s deadly and it’s spreading”.  Check out the recording of her comments here.

Sadly, SSF now has to report the loss of the Congresswoman through an interdimensional portal to The Twilight Zone.  Given the Obama administration’s inertia and indeed outright aggression towards equality for LGBT Americans (oh come on, I’ve banged on about it enough recently), that’s the only explanation I can think of for her apparently sincere (well, okay, as sincere as Republicans can get - how’s that extra-marital affair been for you, Governor Sanford?) avowal that President Obama, the man who is willfully refusing to stop military discharges under DADT, whose DoJ is filing aggressive defences of DOMA, is, in fact, pursuing a radical homosexualist agenda.

Americans for Truth, a scary and really quite evil organisation, carry the whole mad diatribe.

June 24th, 2009 | Tags: just plain weird, LGBT rights | Leave a comment

Had a couple of days much-needed break at the weekend, driving with The Mrs and a friend of his who’s visiting down the coast to Big Sur. We took Highway One south from the city via Half Moon Bay, round Monterey and stopping for lunch in Carmel before heading on to our stopping place for the night at Big Sur Lodge.  Then over the following 24 hours we hiked and hiked, ate, walked, sat on a beach, walked some more, took some photos, and then came back to the city last night.

The whole thing, in a word:  Stunning.  Dining on a terrace overlooking the ocean was great enough, but climbing the hills above and seeing the whole swathe of the valley from Point Sur southwards was breathtaking.

Recommendations, which mostly came from people at work and which I happily pass on:  The Pfeiffer Falls and then Valley View trails in Pfeiffer State Park, Pfeiffer Beach, dinner at Nepenthe and brunch as Cafe Kevah just downstairs (both with sea view terraces), the beach at Andrew Molera State Park.

It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, and I think everyone should put it on a ‘places to see before I die’ list.

June 23rd, 2009 | Tags: real life | Comments (2)

I love my bank in the UK.  I love that they’re an online bank, but part of The Co-Operative Bank, and so governed by the Co-Op’s Ethical Policy.  I love that I can be happy that my money’s not being used to support industries or regimes engaged in practices I don’t approve of.  I love that they provide interest on their current accounts, and it’s better than most other banks’.  I love that they keep customers informed about changes to the way their account works, or the charges on it, and do so in nice, simple terms, not the grim jargon that most banks indulge in.  But also, they make it clear that they need to act like a bank that needs to charge for some things in order to keep themselves viable.  I don’t mind paying when necessary in these circumstances.

And I love that they act like human beings dealing with human beings.  Like this morning I had a mail from them saying that they want to be fairer about dealing with charges on informal overdrafts (ie those odd occasions when you might go overdrawn for random reasons without planning for it ahead of time).  Basically, if you usually operate your account in credit or within the bounds of an agreed overdraft, and you get it back to that state within 6 days, they’ll waive the charge that should strictly speaking apply.

What’s not to love?

June 19th, 2009 | Tags: real life | Leave a comment

It’s odd how one person’s eye and mind can pick up on particular things which pass another’s by.

It was The Mrs who drew my attention to the current craze for labelling novels as novels.  You know the kind of thing; The Nervousness of Clarissa Poole - A Novel (I just made that up, but now I want someone to write it).  I hadn’t registered it as quite the epidemic it’s become.

The Mrs’ view is that no book of his is ever going to be so announced.

I’m aware that novels have always occasionally used this kind of labelling, but honestly, now I’m looking out for it, it really is a craze.  I just spent a few minutes in Borders at lunchtime, and in their ‘New Fiction’ display, viewing from the top shelf down, of twenty books on five shelves, sixteen employ either ‘A Novel’ or ‘A Novel of…’  (A Novel of Pretentious Wank, one suspects.) And one of the other four is a collection of John Updike short stories.

It’s weirdly nannyish.  As if people either don’t have the intelligence, wit or ability to work out what kind of book they’re looking at.  OR it’s sheer pretension on the part of authors and publishers.

Is it just US editions, or has the craze got other countries in its grip?

June 18th, 2009 | Tags: just plain weird | Leave a comment

I do quite a lot of travelling, much (pretty well all of it really) by air.  In recent years a couple of things have struck me.

One is that the standards of security applied to passengers varies wildly from airport to airport, country to county.  Shoes on/shoes off.  Laptops out of bags/laptops left in bags.  Belts that set off some airport metal detectors and not others.  It’s quite a long list.  This isn’t really anything new.  I used to work for an airline at a major international airport in the UK.  Whenever I went airside I had my photo ID checked and went through a detector.  On a visit to colleagues at a major international airport in the US, one of them drove me and my fellow visitor airside through a security check point where the sticker on the van was checked, but none of our individual IDs were, and the interior of the van itself wasn’t checked.

The second thing is that quite a lot of the stuff that’s been put in place since late 2001, and since the introduction of liquid restriction in particular, is, broadly, nonsensical.  Or perhaps it’s better to say ‘only makes sense when viewed as a sop to passenger sensibilities, not as an actual security measure’.

The phrase that’s been coined to describe this is ’security theatre’, and The Atlantic carries as good an overview of it as any here.

Via Lyle.

June 18th, 2009 | Tags: news | Leave a comment

In around 15 minutes President Obama will be announcing a new extension to employment benefits for domestic partners of Federal employees.  Woo.  And indeed, Hoo.

Given that the extent of the change has already been announced, a great many commentators are already noting that this is pretty much the scraps from the table.  In brief:

1. It’s a ‘memorandum’, not an Executive Order, meaning it ceases to have any effect when he leaves office.
2. The single biggest benefit that could ideally be provided, medical cover, can’t be provided because of (all together now) DOMA, which expressly prohibits recognising gay partnerships, and which, let’s not forget, the President’s administration aggressively defended just five days ago.
3. The single largest group of Federal employees is the Armed Forces.  The armed forces will be barred from applying for such scraps of benefit as this memorandum will offer because, hmmm, how does this go again?  Oh yes, they’d have to say they were lesbian or gay, and then they’d be fired under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

The New York Times covered this story today, noting that, contrary to the assertions of those advocacy groups in bed with Obama that he has a grand plan for LGBT rights, the details of even this sop were hurridly being worked out last night.  They also quote a White House source as explicitly linking this action with the need to try and rescue the fundraiser I mentioned yesterday.

The whole thing reeks of panic and ill-considered policy from the self-proclaimed ‘fierce advocate’ for LGBT rights, and I’m glad to note that it doesn’t feel like anyone except those already on the inside is buying it.

EDIT:  It gets better.  Turns out that every benefit the President is going to talk about is already available for every Federal agency to provide to its employees and many, if not all, already do.  The only effect of this memorandum is going to be to tell them to do it.

June 17th, 2009 | Tags: LGBT rights, news | Leave a comment

Next week, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is holding a fundraising dinner ($1000+ a head) for LGBT ‘Leaders’ in a swanky hotel in Washington DC.  The Vice-President will be in attendance, and the event is being hosted by former DNC Chair Howard Dean and three openly lesbian or gay representatives.

Obviously the event has been planned for months, but it’s rather bad timing considering that growing backlash against the administration over recent events I’ve mentioned.  Various of the high profile movers and shakers whose attendance the DNC has been touting as a draw have started to pull out of the event as a direct consequence of the DOMA brief, including, as reported on Americablog, the Human Rights Campaign’s National Field Director.

And now, one of those three hosting representatives, Jared Polis of Colorado, has issued a statement (arguably five days late, but it’s a start) calling the language of the brief ‘unconscionable’, and saying

Since this filing, I have called on the President to issue a statement or give any sign that would clarify his position and am disappointed in his lack of reply.

He doesn’t make any comment about his participation in the fundraiser, but even without that, it feels like this statement took balls.  Good on you Congressman.

June 16th, 2009 | Tags: LGBT rights, marriage equality, news | Leave a comment

The New York Times has joined what’s feeling like a steadily growing groundswell of opposition to the DoJ’s defence of DOMA with an Editorial today.

Arguing, as others have, that even if the DoJ felt compelled to fight the case it could have done so without also putting the boot in to gay rights generally, The Times concludes:

… busy calendars and political expediency are no excuse for making one group of Americans wait any longer for equal rights.

Well said.

June 16th, 2009 | Tags: LGBT rights, marriage equality, news | Leave a comment

The significant global event of the last few days is of course the Iranian election, and specifically its fallout.

The reports coming out of the country trigger a combination of stunned amazement at the apparent transparency of the fraud (have you seen that graph which shows the growth of Ahmadinejad’s lead being almost entirely consistent across every region and at every point in the count?) and admiration for the people who, in the face of violence and in some cases the death of their friends, are on the streets protesting the theft of their votes and the coup that appears to have been perpetrated in their country.

And in the midst of it, I have to stand up and say “I was wrong” in my somewhat cynical view that much social media, and Twitter in particular, is just a shallow fad.  While obviously anything may turn out to be faddish over time, the Twitter feeds of many of those participating in the events have been by turns compelling, shocking, heartwarming, depressing and inspirational.  The channel that Twitter has provided for people to tell the world what’s happening, while many mainstream media outlets have either been silenced or failed to provide full coverage (I’m looking at you in particular CNN), is remarkable in its immediacy and effectiveness.

@persiankiwi and @change_for_iran, plus many others, I salute you.

EDIT:  And as I just spotted, I salute Twitter itself and its hosting partner NTT for recognising the role they’re currently playing in supporting this communication and postponing critical maintenance http://tinyurl.com/ktwde6

June 15th, 2009 | Tags: news | Leave a comment