Big Fat Hairy Living

Mark had his first cyber sex yesterday. I’ve created a monster!

Mark’s clams finished nibbling on him gently and returned to the sea.

I wish it were possible to avoid buying goods made in China. If I could, I would:

It was one of the most famous symbols of the Tiananmen Square protests: an angry splash of red paint hurled at the massive portrait of Mao Zedong that dominates the entrance to Beijing’s Forbidden City.

It was a defiant gesture that infuriated the Communist rulers. And so, when tanks crushed the pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989, some of the harshest punishments were imposed on the three men who had dared to deface the image of Chairman Mao.

The last of the paint-throwers was finally freed from prison yesterday a shattered and mentally ill 38-year-old man. The prisoner, Yu Dongyue, was driven insane by 16 years of beatings, torture and solitary confinement. He is reported to be incoherent and unable to communicate.

…

Mr. Lu and four other people visited Mr. Yu in prison in 2001. “He had a totally dull look in his eyes, and he kept repeating words over and over again, as if he were chanting a mantra,” Mr. Lu told Radio Free Asia after the visit. “He didn’t recognize anyone.” He said his old friend had been “tortured to the point of psychosis.”

By last year, Mr. Yu was reported to be babbling incoherently and consuming his own feces and urine. “He has become deranged,” Yu Zhijian told the South China Morning Post last year. “He can’t have normal conversations with people. He can’t take care of himself. He talks to himself all day long. . . . His nerve is totally broken and his health is terrible. Few prisoners in China are as bad as he is.”

Remember that when you buy your cheap made-in-China socks at Wal-Mart.

Guess who just made a Bigmusclebears profile?

I picked up a cheap copy of The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins last week and I love it. I was doing some online research on Richard Dawkins himself and ran across a great quote from him that pretty much sums up my attitude towards religion:

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!

The quote was his response to the question “Has the world changed because of 9/11?”

I try hard not to be too judgemental. I probably fail more often than I succeed, but at least I can say that I try.

But fuck, are the guys who post to the “Brotherhood of Bears” Yahoo Group ever numbskulls. Case in point: the response to a picture of a man in leather leading another guy on a leash:

Attempting not to be judgmental . . .

However, I simply cannot fathom what would drive an adult man to allow himself to be drug[sic] through public streets like this . . . The abject humiliation and embarrassment I feel for him is astounding. Unless he was attempting to make some sort of statement about the plight of gay men in general, still under the rule of heterosexuals (although I have no idea if this is what was being portrayed).

I can find no redeeming factor. I feel both pity and horror at this public image of “us”.

Yes, because anti-gay bigots will stop hating us if we just act “normal.”

Update: I replied:

“Attempting not to be judgmental…”

Followed by a whole paragraph of judgement.

A lot of straight people can’t fathom why a man would want to have sex with another man.

and got the following reply:

What a pitiful response . . . Or are you just an excuse of stupidity? Mine was an honest question . . . Your reply was just moronic. And yes, that is my judgment call based upon your silly reply. But, hey . . . If it made you happy . . . Fine . . . Not to bother . . .

Check out the “Fat Boy” patch on his vest.

I despair for the future of the human race. I’m not kidding. Not in the slightest:

Each morning, when Gabriela Ocampo looked up at the chalkboard in her ninth-grade algebra class, her spirits sank. There she saw a mysterious language of polynomials and slope intercepts that looked about as familiar as hieroglyphics. She knew she would face another day of confusion, another day of pretending to follow along. She could hardly do long division, let alone solve for x. “I felt like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I going to do?’ ” she recalled.

Gabriela failed that first semester of freshman algebra. She failed again and again — six times in six semesters. And because students in Los Angeles Unified schools must pass algebra to graduate, her hopes for a diploma grew dimmer with each F.

Midway through 12th grade, Gabriela gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus book room and, without telling a soul, vanished from Birmingham High School.

She’s in high school and she can hardly do long division? Where was she in grade 4? How can someone advance to high school without knowing how to do long division?

It gets worse:

Tina, who says math has mystified her since she first saw fractions in elementary school, spends class time writing in her journal, chatting with friends or snapping pictures of herself with her cellphone. Her teacher wasn’t surprised when Tina bombed a recent test that asked her, among other things, to graph the equations 4x + y = 9 and 2x – 3y = –6. She left most of the answers blank, writing a desperate message at the top of the page: “Still don’t get it, not gonna get it, guess i’m seeing this next year!”

Teachers wage a daily struggle in classes filled with students like Tina. Her teacher, George Seidel, devoted a class this fall to reviewing equations with a single variable, such as x - 1 = 36. It’s the type of lesson students were supposed to have mastered in fourth grade. Only seven of 39 students brought their textbooks. Several had no paper or pencils. One sat for the entire period with his backpack on his shoulders, tapping his desk with a finger. Another doodled an eagle in red ink in his notebook. Others gossiped as Seidel, a second-year teacher, jotted problems on the front board.

If you’re in high school and are mystified by fractions, either you have a learning disability and have slipped through the cracks, or you’re just plain stupid. And Tina is lazy on top of it.

I fear that our civilization is going to turn out like something from a dystopian science fiction novel where the ignorant, uneducated masses are ruled by a few elites who control them using magical technology too difficult for anyone but them to understand.