Sparta, Michigan is one of those places where if Forrest Gump were visiting for the day, the average IQ in the town would go up.

At least that's the impression I get from the actions of their Village Council, which (with one dissenting vote) is forcing a couple to spray herbicide all over the developing meadow in their back yard, and to replace it with grass. Mowed and watered grass.

Scott and Keri Greenup decided a while back that rather than wasting untold gallons of water and gas trying to keep their back yard looking Astroturf®, they'd develop it into a more natural native meadow with native grasses and wildflowers. (To keep the neighborhood looking suitably uniform, they kept the vegetation in the front yard all dark-green and stubby.) A couple of the retards in their neighborhood complained, apparently believing that Kentucky Blue Grass is what God intended to be grown here in Michigan. And it turns out there's an ordinance on the books in Sparta that aims to enforce that commandment.

The Greenups didn't give in without a fight. They took the matter to the appropriate government panel which actually recommended a change in the orinance, to let these people make that reasonable choice about how to manage their property. The Sparta Village Clavern voted 7-1 against that.

Village Idiot (or "Councilman" or whatever they call them) Bob Whalen said, "If you're going to allow one person to do it, you've got to allow anyone to do it." Duh. That'd be a stroke of brilliance... except that he apparently thinks that's an argument against repealing the brain-dead ordinance.

Fellow Idiot Todd Johnson said of their recovering meadowland, "It's not my idea of a manicured flowerbed." No shit, Sherlock. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be healthy and practical, not an artificial hobby showpiece.

When it comes to the whole "property rights" topic, I tend to be a skeptic. I don't abide by the radical anarcho-libertarian viewpoint that "owning" a piece of land means you can do whatever the hell you want to do with it (e.g. dumping toxic waste). The community ought to have a say as well. But only if they're smart enough, and willing to consider reasonable requests to do something "different".

In the U.S. Southwest, where the general scarcity of water has made the idiocy of golf-course-like yards obvious even to the local Villiage Idiots, natural yards are catching on. But not even the obscene current price of gas is enough to get the retards in Sparta to grasp that landscaping of this sort should be encouraged, not banned. I'm not about to go around demanding that people stop mowing their lawns, cease irrigating their faux fairways, and let their property return to the way God created it. But if someone wants to make that very sane and practical choice, the law shouldn't stand in their way. You don't need to be a genius to grasp that. Normal intelligence would be enough.

If I hear another veteran arguing that we need to protect the American flag from protesters who might burn it, I'm going to punch him in the face. Anyone who says that is a disgrace to the uniform he once wore.

Understand: I have a great deal of respect for veterans. My uncle flew combat missions in Vietnam, and I'd salute him in a heartbeat. Vets deserve appreciation for their service. But when someone says that the physical banner of the United States is more important than the principles embodied in its Constitution, they are demonstrating contempt for their country. And in the case of a veteran, they're violating the very first article of the oath they took, swearing to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States". Whether they like it or not, the Constitution (as upheld by the Supreme Court) says that the right to burn the flag as a form of protest is protected by the First Amendment. I don't agree with everything the Supremes say, but a soldier challenging their authority is flirting with treason.

There's nothing in the military service oath about protecting the flag; that's just a bit of conditioning they use in boot camp to enforce discipline and promote team morale. Honoring the flag and protecting it from physical harm are noble things. But they don't take precedence over the Constitution and their oath to uphold it.

I work at a college, which is at once both entertaining and a little frustrating, because a fairly high percentage of the people around me on a day-to-day basis are about 20 years old, give or take. Naturally they don't pay me much attention, unless they need my help with something. So there's a lot of looking-but-not-touching in my life. Better than not-looking-at-all, though. I don't mind the distraction. I'm certainly not complaining.

It gets a little different in this part of the summer, when the school offers a bunch of not-for-credit classes. This attracts a lot of noisy and annoying little kids, and sometimes-noisy and sometimes-annoying teenagers. Not exactly what I signed up for. I don't complain, but that's just because it'd be pointless.

The thing is, one of those teenagers seems to have taking a liking to me. My office door is usually opened, so he asked me for directions and I helped him find his classroom the first day, and I was my usually-pleasant self* in the process. Nothing special. But since then, he keeps wandering into my office for no apparent reason, during breaks or on his way in/out. He mostly just asks me goofy questions and tells me stories, and I don't think there's anything more to it than being friendly.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't find him cute... and I don't mean in the puppy-dog sense of the word. If only I weren't old enough to be his father... and he weren't young enough that he still needs his father's signature to consent to anything. Not that even his father would be allowed to consent to what I'm thinking.

I know many people would freak out over such feelings, fearing that they've committed some mortal sin or that they have some pathological perversion. I've learned not to fret over what happens to push my buttons. But I'm also sane and ethical enough that I'd never actually do anything immoral or illegal in response to this particular kind of button-pushing, so there's no danger of anything like that. I haven't even flirted with him. He's just less annoying and more distracting than I'm used to. Which really isn't anything to complain about, either.

*Yes, at work I'm usually pleasant. Imagine that. And I'm not even faking it, because I like being able to help people like I do at work. It's dealing with insufferable idiots and malicious ghouls online that makes me unpleasant.

I've been reminded that the so-called "health care" industry in the United States is run by people who really don't care about anyone's health. They're not allowed to. It's a mis-managed bureaucy that's gone so far down the rabbit hole that its rules don't even make sense from a money-focused perspective.

Case in point: I go to my primary care physician (or PCP, coincidentally the abbreviation for a pneumonia responsible for killing countless AIDS patients, and for a lethal recreational drug) and tell him about some knee pain I've been having. So he refers me to the specialist who did surgery on it a couple years ago. Everything's good so far, and my insurance covers everything except some affordable office-visit co-pays. Then the specialist refers me to get physical therapy, and they start helping me get my knee in shape so it won't hurt. Then things go haywire. Two weeks into PT, I get a call from the PCP telling me that the specialists referral to the physical therapist is no good. That means I have to pay for it myself. Instead, the PCP wants me to go to a different physical therapist.

Understand: the issue isn't that my insurance isn't accepted by the PT place; they do billing with (let's call them) Indigo Cross all the time. And it's not that my insurance policy doesn't cover PT; it does, without even a co-pay. It isn't that this is some (in the opinion of the insurance company) quack pseudo-medical facility; like I said, Indigo Cross deals with them routinely. It isn't even about money; if the place I was going charged more than the insurance company was willing to pay, they could demand that I make up the difference, but that's not what happened.

The issue is that my PCP is part of a "network" that serves to channel patients to each other rather than to non-members. And they'll screw over a patient (making me cough up money I can't afford to part with, and then start over with a different therapist) to enforce that.

This is insane. Or at the least, it's unethical. But it's how the American medical-services industry works. I might point out that nothing like this would happen with a single-payer health insurance system. If the physical therapist is certified, and the treatment is properly judged by medical experts to be necessary, it'd be covered.

The people who defend this system (mostly Republicans, but the blame is shared by the other party in power as well) claim it's a free-market system, and that's the only acceptable solution. But it's not... free-market or acceptable. It's more like a RICO ("Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization") case or perhaps less stridently, a good old-fashioned trade-restraining "trust". I admit I'm not the biggest fan of the economic darwinism of the market system. But it's fairly benign as long as it's a true market, in which providers work to supply consumers' demand for something. But this isn't that kind of market. The customers aren't the patients; the customers are the insurance companies. The insurance companies have customers too, of course, but those still aren't the patients... for the most part, they're employers. And it's only in the most reality-distorting sense of the word that employees are "customers" of their employers. (Even when someone - like me - resorts to buying insurance for themselves, they pretty much have to settle for the worst policies the industry knows how to write, which are themselves just cut-back versions of the ones that employer's sign up for, because they can't afford anything better. The notion that I can "shot around" for a better insurance policy is laughable.)

The system might work fine as long as the best interests of the patient and of the customer coincide. But when they disagree, "the customer is always right", so the patient loses.

I'm not a breast man.

OK, I like chicken breasts (preferably boneless), and I have a certain fondness for a muscular male chest (which is technically a "breast"). But I haven't been interested in seeing a plump female mammary in decades. In fact, I'm tired of seeing them paraded about for advertising, and opening a porn-video mailing and unfolding a flyer full of boobies is a huge disappointment. I am not comfortable seeing them in the flesh.

But I was even more disappointed by the anti-breast actions of County Clerk Mary Hollinrake (Kent County, Michigan), as described in The Grand Rapids Press this afternoon. A woman - there at the Clerk's office for official business - was very discreetly feeding her baby, and Hollinrake had the audacity to come out and ask the woman to either stop, or leave!

Hollinrake ducks responsibility for it, of course, claiming she was responding to complaints from other visitors. OK, so she has to respond to them. But the appropriate response would be to tell those visitors to stop whining and... deal with it.

There is nothing more natural, healthy, and for-the-love-of-god wholesome than a mother nursing her child. To say nothing of the fact that it's something a mother's just gotta do when the baby needs it. She shouldn't have to go hide in the bathroom and sit on a toilet, like someone with an intestinal disorder. The fact that some people are uncomfortable seeing it - and I'm one of them, remember - is their problem, not hers.

There seems to be a growing misconception in our society that people have some God-given right not to be offended or upset or uncomfortable. Demonstrators are shoved off the to side where the people they're protesting won't have to see them. Gay and lesbian couples are asked not to kiss or hold hands or hug in front of homophobes. And breastfeeding mothers are asked to please go away.

I'm sorry, but that's not the way a free society is supposed to operate. I'm offended by the very presidency of George W. Bush, but I don't expect to be shielded from its existence. I don't demand that his smug, contemptuous addresses to the nation be put on Pay Per View where I won't stumble across them whilst channel surfing. I don't expect rich SUV owners to keep their conspicuously expensive environmental hazards off the road where I won't have to see them. I don't ask that Christians make their crosses less visible and take any self-righteous and insulting messages off the signs on church lawns. That would be selfish, and most certainly rude. So I don't whine, and I... deal with it.

The right-wingers have been bitching for a while now about "political correctness" and how you can't say anything without offending people, and how horrible that is. But it seems pretty clear to me that the right-wingers are at least as guilty of that as anyone. Hollinrake is no bleeding-heart liberal, after all; she's part of the local Republican Party, and a regarded as a "good conservative". Unfortunately, she's just demontrated again that this makes here a bad public servant, one far too quick to enforce her constituents' Victorian disapproval of breastfeeding (!) against a responsible mother.

What next, a crackdown on "offensive" apple pies?

The Powers That Be on the internet have decided - to my surprise - to approve the creation of a .XXX top-level domain. The arguments for it are so weak, and the arguments against it are - once you think about them - so compelling, that I figured that ICANN (the PTB in question) would continue saying "um no" to the proposals. Instead, they've said "yes", and are currently working out the fine print before it goes live.

There are some arguments for doing it, but they don't hold up to scrutiny. The standard argument for creating new top-level domains is overcrowding of .COM. "All the good names are taken," they say, and they're right. But when they opened .NET and .ORG to let anyone use them for any purpose, .COM didn't get any less crowded. When they created .BIZ and .INFO, .COM was still saturated. Because no one with a .COM domain is going to just give it up for a new one in a less well-known namespace. When .XXX registration opens, you can be sure that every porn purveyor with a .COM domain will rush to register the corresponding .XXX domain. And keep them both. It'll just be a land rush to grab real estate in the New World... with no improvement in the Old World.

Another argument for creating .XXX is that it'd be easy for parents, schools, and businesses to just block the whole domain from the computers used by their children, students, and employees. They certainly have every right to do that. But that won't do a damn thing to block the petabytes of porn already in the .COM domain. So it'll be ineffectual. The horse has fled the barn; there's no point in fixing the door now.

Unless, of course, it were possible to move all that porn from .COM to .XXX. But it's not. ICM Registry - the people who'll be handling registration of this domain - stress the fact that the use of .XXX will be voluntary. And short of the UN imposing legislative authority over its members (as if that could happen without nuclear missles flying), there's no way to require all porn sites to relocate. If someone in Ukraine registers PORNBBQ.COM and puts photos of people fucking on a web server, there's nothing the Attorney General of the U.S. can do about it (short of nukes like those I just mentioned).

I just wish I could be so sure that the A.G. wouldn't try. So far, the U.S. government has been comparatively restrained (mostly by the courts, not self-restraint) in trying to legislate content restrictions on the internet. There's been that whole "free expression" thing getting in the way. But what if there were a segment of the internet specially made for sexually-explicit material? Gee, forcing Americans to "label" that material with a .XXX domain wouldn't deprive them of their free expression rights, would it?

That's the argument they'll make, but it's a bit like those "free speech zones" the government creates to keep protestors out of the way. It takes speech off the corner of Main Street and Common Avenue, and shoves it into an alley in a part of town most people avoid. This web site contains sexually-explicit material, which means it'd probably be carted off to the .XXX ghetto. But it also contains material that has every moral (and Constitutional) right to be heard. Putting it in .XXX would mean it'd be blocked from lots of colleges, libraries, and even ISPs catering to the non-porn-buying market. The bottom line: the ideas of people like me get less distribution. The keepers of the public morals would love that.

I've read the fine print of what's been announced, and find some of the details troubling. For one thing, ICM Registry proudly states that they have no prior connection to the porn industry. So... why are they getting involved in it? One obvious answer is money. They see a lot of people making a lot of money from this internet porn stuff, and they want a piece of the action. And quite a piece it'll be, with $60/year for each domain registered. All for running a web site with a medium-sized database behind it. And of course ICANN itself gets a cut of that, which is no doubt the "argument" that finally swayed them to approve it.

Another bit from the fine print is that the organisation that will be setting policy for .XXX has an agenda. They're honest about it, and it's not as bad as "take over the world", but they're definitely not neutral administrators, like the original domain registrars were. They policy setting agency is called the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, and their agenda includes: setting business-practise standards for anyone who runs a .XXX site, promoting the free-expression parts of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, maintaining the privacy of porn customers, protecting children online, and wiping out child pornography. Like I said: not malevolent. I support a lot of it. But it's an agenda nonetheless, and that's bad for anybody who happens not to share it.

And it means that if you register a .XXX domain, they claim a right to tell you how to run your business. You have to take the steps they deem appropriate for keeping children from accessing your site. And regardless of your views on child pornography (and reasonable people can disagree over whether CGI images or imaginary fiction are "OK"), you have to agree to abide by their standards. For example, you can't have a domain name intended to entice pedophiles into visiting your site. But what if you're trying to wean the kid fanciers from their vice, by offering them barely-legal teenagers? Isn't that a legitimate choice someone ought to be allowed to make? Not under IFFOR's rules. It's not even clear whether someone who wants to run a site that isn't pornographic is allowed to use .XXX.

Their policies might arguably make for a better .XXX domain. But there are the unintended consequences to consider as well: They'll push the most irresponsible site operators and the sites most likely to exploit children out of .XXX and back to... (where else?) .COM. Um, isn't that the place we wanted to remove them from?

I can see this as a kind of circle-the-wagons, Comics-Code-Authority way for the mainstream, business-oriented porn industry to set up a club for those who want to play by their rules, setting everyone else up to be devoured by wolves. Got kicked out of .XXX for using an unapproved method of restricting access to minors? Too bad. Wrote an article calling for the decriminalization of virtual kiddie porn or advocating that the age of consent be lowered? Get out. Someone falsely accused you of doing something IFFOR considers ethical, but convinced them it was true? Tough. There's even the potential for the management of IFFOR to become something of a mafia/cartel, controlling who's allowed to sell porn from the safety of .XXX and who isn't. It's bad enough when the government steps in and regulates an industry that strongly; it'd be even worse for an agency that's accountable to no one but their board of directors.

A few days ago the Center for Public Integrity published a report that said that Dick and Betsy DeVos (the son and daughter-in-law of Amway co-founder Rich DeVos) were (as a couple) the largest individual contributors to political campaigns last year. Turns out the CPI was wrong, and they've now published a correction: nearly a million of that was actually contributed by Rich himself. Rich and Dick have the same legal name except for "Sr." and "Jr." and both CPI and the GOP itself attributed donations without a suffix to Junior, instead of Senior.

But this is really just a technicality, because Dick is little more than a clone of his father. They even use the same return address on their donations, which is part of how their checks got misattributed. And what's interesting is looking at the whole top five. Rich and wife Helen were #3, with over $1.5 million donated. Dick and Betsy actually rank at #5 with just shy of $1 million. And up at #2 is Rich's lifelong buddy and fellow Amway founder Jay VanAndel, who managed to donate $2 million before dying last year. Add up the donations of the Amway klan and you get a cool $4.5 million, doubling the supposed #1 donor (Arizona Democrat Jim Pederson). That's a lot of races - and representatives - paid for by a handful of obscenely rich white fundies.

I just read in the newspaper about a new book by an old acquaintance of mine. David Myers is a Psychology prof at religiously conservative Hope College, and the author of a long-running millions-selling college textbook on the subject, of which the college is very, very proud. They're not as proud of his latest book, however. It's a more mainstream bookstore-friendly - but still academically sound - analysis of gay marriage, from a Christian perspective. The surprise (at least to those who don't know him or his co-author Letha Scanzoni, or their previous scholarly work) is that the book comes down firmly in support of it. The book is entitled What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage.

This is certain to lead to some controversy at Hope College. Especially given the timing. News recently broke about how James Bultman, the president, pounced hard on Miguel De La Torre, a Religion prof who dared to poke fun of fundie demigod James Dobson in an essay published in the local paper. (He ridiculed Dobson's recent rant about Spongebob Square Pants.) Bultman bit into him so hard that he quit. Even with tenure. Read this article in The Muskegon Chronicle for more background. The following quote from a letter Bultman wrote to De La Torre is significant:

"Hope is dependent on enrollment and gifts to drive the college financially," the president wrote. "When people are displeased with what we do, their only recourse is to exercise their options with regard to enrollment and gifting. Several have indicated their intention to do so."

Bultman is talking about people such as Rich DeVos, co-founder of Amway, and a political ally of Dobson. Bultman has since issued a statement that he wasn't talking about DeVos, who hadn't made any such threats (at least not yet), but it's obvious that DeVos was prominently on Bultman's mind when he wrote that. DeVos is, after all, the billionaire who extorted then-President Lubbers of Grand Valley State University - a decent man trying to do the right thing - into backing down from a promise to offer equal benefits to same-sex domestic partners of employees, by threatening to withdraw his millions of dollars in financial support for a major construction project in downtown Grand Rapids. DeVos is now bankrolling Hope's new basketball fieldhouse. Connect the dots.

Fortunately David Myers has something better than tenure to protect him. For one thing, he's famous. He's been on national TV (most recently for his book about... happiness.) People at lots of other colleges know him, and being able to boast about him is a big feather in Hope's cap. Also, he's not latino. The administration see him as "one of us", a longtime member of the family, contrasted with De La Torre, who's fairly new to the college, an "immigrant" if you will. David's also just a very nice person, the kind that's hard to hate. Not that this would protect him from the administration by itself, but it gives him some immunity because stomping on him would produce just the kind of money-threatening controversy that De La Torre's comments did. You see, there are also people in the Hope-funding community who like David personally. So the administration has tolerated Myers' open tolerance of gay students for a very long time already. They'll tolerate this.

But this whole intertwined combination of events is a great example of how - at its core - Hope College is a sham. They go on and on (and on and on) about their commitment to Christian values, but year after year, decade after decade, administration after administration, they betray that. It isn't even about homosexuality. Sure, the administration is packed with hysterical, bed-wetting homophobes. But what really sets their sheets to soaking is their devotion to money. Granted, they have to be concerned about finances. We all get that. But whenever it comes down to a question of money, or the basic Christian priniciple of compassion, money always wins. I've seen them go out of their way to willfully harm people, all in service to their true god, Mammon. Not just by stomping on innocent people who bring "bad publicity" to the college, but also by covering up the misdeeds of the guilty, brushing genuine scandals under the rug. They're amoral. This isn't coming from Myers, or even from De La Torre; I've heard this from a bunch of people I know who've worked there. Mostly past-tense. After some soul-searching, a straight, Dutch friend of mine - also a Hope alumn - declined a job there that he'd be perfect for... but he said he didn't want to work at such a racist institution.

So, anyway... kudos to David Myers, for having the insight and the courage to write this new book. Condolences to Miguel De La Torre for learning the hard way the wages of speaking your mind with only tenure and an expectation of compassion to defend him. And a pox on the administration of Hope College, who deserve every shred of bad publicity that leaks out despite their best efforts, and who deserve precious little of the sweet nectar of money that their god rains down upon them.

There's a bill that's been introduced in the Mighigan legislature to lift the current ban on the sale of alcohol before noon on Sundays. All I can say is that it's about fucking time.

Actually, I can say more than that:

The current law is one without any justification whatsoever. It serves no secular purpose. None. Anyone who tries to argue that there is one, is so full of crap they'd have to flush ten times to send it all down the toilet.

They'll try to argue that it cuts down on alcohol abuse. It doesn't. The 2:00am cut-off probably does, but there's no reason it has to stay in effect until 12:00pm, just on Sundays. People drink just as heavily on Friday nights, but no one seems to mind opening the till of the party store again at 7:00am on Saturday. And it does nothing to actually stop people from drinking on Sunday mornings; they just have to stock up enough to last them those 10 hours. An experienced drunk can handle that.

The only reason for banning the sale of alcohol is religious. It serves to avoid upsetting people of a particular religion, who feel that people should be in church on Sunday mornings, and can't accept the idea of anyone using that time to instead buy liquor. That is the only difference between Saturday morning and Sunday morning: pressure to participate in Christian worship. Anyone with a shred of honesty will admit that.

On the other hand, the people who oppose this change in the law know better than to try to argue that actual reason for it. That's because even they know that "because it makes Baby Jesus cry" is a feeble justification for a law. The best they can come up with it is, "There are plenty of other times during the week to buy alcohol." I have two responses to that:

So what? There are plenty of other times during the week to worship God, but that doesn't mean it'd be harmless to ban that on Sunday mornings. We let people worship whenever they want to, because that's what it means to live in a free society: letting other people live their own lives, rather than having the government tell them what to do. You could make the same "there are other times" argument defending a ban on meat sales on Tuesday afternoons, or tobacco sales on Thursdays. But you'd still lack any actual basis for the ban in the first place. Using this argument is just another way of admitting, "I have no rational argument to make."

Says who? I'm a busy person. Let's look at the past few days: Friday morning and afternoon, I was at work. Friday evening I spent at the movies with a friend. Saturday morning and early afternoon I spent at my college's graduation ceremony. Late afternoon and evening, I spent going to a meeting (no, not AA) out of town. Sunday afternoon I spent with my family for Mother's Day. Sunday evening I did laundry. The only time during those three days when I had time to go grocery shopping (which is otherwise the most convenient opportunity to buy beer) was Sunday morning. Which meant that I had to leave one item on my shopping list unpurchased. I had to make an extra trip to the neighborhood party store Sunday evening to restock my fridge, so I could have a drink while I watched The Simpsons. All to satisfy some puritanical compulsion to keep me from doing my shopping while others worship. (And ending up with Sunday morning as my only convenient time for shopping isn't unusual; the fact that other people tend to schedule group activities to avoid it actually makes that a prime shopping time slot for me.)

The last debating tactic left in the puritans' bag of tricks is to question why anyone (such as I) cares so much about this. Why am I getting so emotional about it? That's easy to answer: Because I'm sick of them shoving their silly religious rules down the throat of people like me who don't share their superstitions. And they use each religion law on the books to justify the others: the "In God We Trust" on our coins is used to justify "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, which is used to justify putting the Ten Commandments on display in government buidings, which is used to justify writing laws about marriage to conform to Christian standards, and so on. I get angry about this because this particular seemingly-trivial imposition of religious rules on non-believers shows just how powerful the Christian theocrats are.

For earlier articles on this topic, see God's ex-Boyfriend, volume one.