
We have lots of these. But I think we'll have chicken for dinner instead.
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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Bertrand_Russell http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30150.html "It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Soren_Kierkegaard http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27704.html "Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Franklin_P._Adams http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/646.html "There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/David_Smith http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/610.html "In this business you either sink or swim or you don't."


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| User: | valerie_z |
| Date: | 2009-07-12 00:42 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
Meme stolen from girlneedsagun:
• Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive. • NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words. • They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason. • You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.
( the pics )
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oh what a beautiful day
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| User: | valerie_z |
| Date: | 2009-07-11 21:53 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
If anyone has an opinion about who in Rancid is most likely to spontaneously grow tentacles, please vote here. Thank you.
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This really is a follow-up to the discussions here yesterday about the relative merits of compacts vs DSLR's, and their respective abilities to produce decent images with ease.
So I experimented. The subject in each case is a clivia that sits in our basement two-thirds of the year, but flourishes on our porch, right by the front door, during the simmer months. We've had it for over twenty year and it flowers every June. Anyway, both images were taken within seconds of each other, so the lighting conditioins were the same
This first one was taken on my little Lumix LX-2. Frankly I don't mess much with this camera. It's usually on one of the automatic setting, in this case close-up. I chose to exploit its ability to capture a no-nonsense image, whose merit I suppsoe is that it plays on the symmetry of the subject. It's the kind of shot that's easy to pull off on a compact. The EXIF data shows it was shot at ISO 22, f4.9 at 1/8.
The second shot is from the Nikon D90; I went fully manual on this one, deliberately under-expsoing it. I don't think I could have done this easily on the LX2 (at least without heavy post-editing); although the compact has full manual settings, the issue here is that the poor viewfinder makes it hard to see what you've just shot, so it prevents you from thinkering with the exposure after each shot, which is generally the way folks do manual. Because the ISO was pushed to 3200, you'll note that grain has set in, but I'm OK with that here. Other settings: f10 at 1/80. The next logical step would have been to convert this image to b/w perhaps, but I didn' go there, as it would have made comparisons all that more difficult.

I guess this exercise just reinforces the fact that interesting images can be taken on all kinds of cameras. You may in fact prefer the one taken here on the much cheaper camera of the two. It doesn't really matter. The point, I think, is that whatever camera you're using, there are ways to exploit its strengths and cover off its weaknesses.
What do you think?
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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/John_Alejandro_King http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/39698.html "If you're not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Leo_Tolstoy http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27719.html "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Gore_Vidal http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26867.html "I'm a born-again atheist."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Nick_Diamos http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/1075.html "Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens."


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| User: | ginmar |
| Date: | 2009-07-10 18:25 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
Well, the VA says they were adjusting my rating. It should have started on the first. It didn't. I hate having to bitch and bitch about this, and whine and complain and crap. How do you fight these bureaucrats? I think the goal here is to strip you of your feeling of dignity so they can get away with more.
If they had fixed me back when I initially started showing symptoms, I'd be well by now, contributing toward society, working again---ah, I'd kill the ride the bus again and wear any polyester uniform at all, thank you-----but now I'm a wreck who hears things that aren't there, sees things that don't exist, and avoids people, even the phone. After years of this, you feel like you've been drained of personality and worth. There's such a knife's edge there, because you're dealing with this surreal situation and you think you are in fact going crazy. How else do you explain hallucinations? That's pretty much the definition of crazy.
I don't know who I am any longer. It's really easy to write, but it's just about impossible to function. It's easy, when you're smart, to put on a good face of it. It's habit; who wants to admit that you feel embarrassed and humbled? I know why soldiers don't want to come forward and admit that this is what they're experiencing. Helping seems less of a priority than balancing the budget. Soldiers are an abstraction, not real people.
You can't really inflict this on civlians, however far you are from active duty. If you can't unsee it, why would you want to put it on someone else's shoulders?
It's a pain in the ass to experience. Frankly, you're no fun to live around during this. I mean, people have been brought up on movie mental illness, where you turn into a sweet, soulful, funny, insightful, tragic, tormented character who Teaches Important Lessons, before dying in a beautiful way that gives the hero or heroine a chance to win an Oscar.
It's especially bad if you're a woman, because you're supposed to live for others, do for others, and do this al behind the scenes. The fact is that women who transgress in some way---bad mothers, not mothers, convicts, the sick, the non-sexually rebellious----are often abandoned. Women are supposed to stand by their man. What goes unsaid, what's kept secret is that ill women are resented, dumped, and have to face a dual burden of illness and ill-treatment. There are approximately 6,500 homeless female veterans of this war. Homelessness is often the worst and final stop on the mental illness ladder. It's bottom. Then, too, homeless women in general are ignored. When the truth is overwhelmingly awful and about women, people just shrug their shoulders and put it down to life. When women get angry about this treatment, they often find the mentally ill label used to stigmatize them.
Miss Havisham. Ophelia. The madwoman in the attic. Mrs. Rochester. The portraits of mentally ill women in literature tend to confirm female roles, and the punishment that comes if you step out of those roles. Female soldiers make us distinctly nervous. While there's lip service to the idea of female strength, the real, unabashed article leaves people nervous. Women do an incredible amount of the world's labor, yet no one praises them for that strength. The undisguised strength of female soldiers is uncomfortably visible and unambiguous. It makes people question roles and notions of courage, honor, selflessness. MOthers are denied the accolade of selflessness and nobility, by the way, as are other women; it's supposed to be biological, which both denies women credit and imprisons them with impossible standards. If you don't meet the standard, you're an unnatural freak; if you do, you're just doing what comes naturally.
Standards for women are high because standards for men are so comfortably---for them---low. There is give and take. The burden falls on women because men do not do their share, and society does not demand it. When women need help, they are whiners, shirkers, malingerers. The resentment against welfare mothers is a perfect example. Mothers are supposed to do all and everyting for their kids, including sacrificing their lives if need be. This is the standard that pre-lifers yearn for. If only those inconvenient women would do their duty and die! This is very much the attitude toward male and female soldiers, especially the wounded who do not express optimism, perkiness, and can-do spirit.
In the last few centuries, for example, there was the myth of the 'fallen' women, a woman who was seduced and abandoned. Despite the injustice of the situation---these seductions were often blatant rapes----society still demanded, if subtly, suicide as the only method of making up for this spoilage. Women who dared survive were reviled, scorned and abandoned, with breathtaking abruptness and thoroughness. I often cite the case of Edith Wilson (or Thompson, sorry; I don't have the book Women Who Kill in front of me. Her case appears in the footnotes.) A lifelong invalid, she was 'seduced' by a friend of her father, who discovered the matter when she became pregnant and turned her out of the house. She was eleven. There was much hand-wringing and colorful ideas for taking care of the offender, but in reality nothing happened to him or them, as there were many of these cases. Sometimes---both then and now---there were colorful and fantastic threats of revenge; burning in hell for centuries, being attacked by wild animals, etc, etc., Of course none of this did any good, nor indeed existed in reality. Men continued to prey on girls and women who were often entirely ignorant of the details of sex, a state that left them completely vulnerable to unscrupulous men. One German-or Austrian, I can't remember---princess was kept so ignorant of sex that she was impregnated by a footman, and subsequently turned out of the house. Friends took her in, but the lesson was clear; no station in life could protect a woman.
The suicide of the seduction victim was self-suttee, an honor killing forced upon the victim by a society that kept her helpless and then turned its back on her when men took advantage of their power. Suicide tidied things up neatly. By killing herself, the victim had provided her family with a tragedy over which they could weep, instead of an inconvenient complication who aroused questions that were literally unthinkable for the thinkers of the day. With her gone, so was any reminder.
The idea that women are a complication and a drain lingers to this day, when a genuinely sick woman like Andrea Yates is villified as the devil, yet men whose only illness is selfishness hurt others and are routinely called 'ill'. The psychiatrist who hinted that Yates was faking by emulating a Law and Order episode--no such episode existed----also professed great sympathy for Jeffrey Dahmer, who did not suffer from post partum psychosis or schizophrenia.
What's interesting is that both male and female soldiers are often regarded in this way: better a flag-draped coffin than a living, complex, and often angry veteran. What a drag. Better a tragedy than a complication, and it's all compounded when the veteran is a woman, who is probably not doing her husband's laundry while she mopes and snivels. Men are tragic; women are prone to hysteria. Both do suffer from that curious dismissal, though, as if they were servants or wives or other people who are supposed to make someone else's life easier. I once read an article about how men resented hearing about the sheer effort women put into meeting the appearance standards that the very same men demanded of them. Not only did they want her to be gorgeous, they didn't want the guilt of inspiring all that work, either. So it appears to be the case today, where the American public wants soldiers to do their bidding, yet doesn't want to hear about the cost in any great detail. That's the work of a certain class. The resentment is very much the attitude of the person who discovers that those who serve are also those who know their worth. That wasn't supposed to be part of the deal. You're supposed to work round the clock, then disappear when not needed, grateful and humble for scraps from the table.
Which is why maybe soldiers like me, especially women, are often greeted with sadistic gloating when we crumble. At last that self worth and confidence built up by the years of service and work and adventure has been broken! Mission accomplished, indeed. Aren't you supposed to kill yourself? What a shame Al Qaeda didn't succeed. Now why don't you go away, find a bridge to disappear under, and leave us all to our yellow ribbons and our Memorial Day barbecues?
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| User: | valerie_z |
| Date: | 2009-07-10 17:19 |
| Subject: | |
| Security: | Public |
I created a community called rancid_fanfic. Join or I will kill you.
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( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )
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I linked to an alternet story a few days ago about a woman who had to abort her twins late in pregnancy due to pre-eclampsia. Well, the forced-birthers, the pre-lifers, the vagina monitors, are at it on Digg. Here we go! This is Lalabelle, or LuluBelle, or whoever gives a fuck, because GODDAMN I hate these lying fuckers so much I wish it were Tuesday, nausea or no. Who's with me for a little expedition on Tuesday? Ahem.
1) The condition to which you are referring is Anencephaly, not spina bifida.
This was in reference to a woman talking about a pregnancy her grandmother witnessed.
Many, many women now find out that there child has Anencephaly, and they choose to continue with the pregnancy, knowing that they may or may not get to hold their child for very long after the birth.
Er, actually, no, you little murdering assholes did away with that option when you pushed to outlaw something you insisted on calling 'the partial birth abortion', which represented the safest, least damaging way of delivering a relatively intact fetus for the mother and father to hold. It's actually called dilation and extraction, you ignorant cow. Or---- bull? Boar seems more appropriate in this case, because one can just picture a groteque, snuffling woman-hating anti-choicer squealing about those evil women while he types this.
They choose to give their baby a chance to be born, and they choose to give themselves the chance of knowing their child outside the womb, even for a short period of time.
Whatever they choose to do, it's their choice, you arrogant, God-usurping heretic. Does this include cases of sepsis? Fetal death? Pre-eclampsia? Also, HOW MUCH do I love it when somebody pulls the word 'many' out of their ass, which in this case wasn't enough, so she had to add another one and then..some platitudes. Nothing. Nothing referencing a cite, a statistic, peer-review, just the anti-choice version of, "And then she heard this scraping noise on the car door....." Notice, too, that there's no illness, no danger to the mother, nothing. Lots of these scumbags deny entirely and completely the notion that there's any danger to pregnancy at all.
A woman I met through the internet chose to keep her Anencephalic child alive.
Was this Hope Faith, the headless wonder child, whose mother was something of a scary crusader for teh baybeez? I mean, the mother had to keep taping the kid's eyes in because otherwise they'd fall out. And she had to pull the little knit hats down to the kid's eyebrows because....because there was no skull above her eyebrows, if that! I'd be a bit more sympathetic if the woman hadn't so aggressively pimped the kid out as the poster child for making other women feel guilty. Also, wasn't there some kind of scandal with the babydaddy? Like, he was married? Anyhoo, she met this lady on the Internet, which is trufax! I just hope it wasn't that woman who used a doll as the stand in for her non-existant pregnancy.
Doctors, family members and strangers attacked her time and again, telling her she was stupid to keep her child alive in her womb. (So much for choice, eh?)
OMG, those evil pro-choicers! Hahaha! It sounds just like anti-choice propaganda. The only thing that's missing is the evil doctor making piles of money off the abortion. IN fact, the anti-choice movement has a thirty-year history of stalking, threats, murder, terrorist attacks, numerous terrorist acts, and harassment. Somebody's doing some serious projection. They told her that her daughter would die an agonizing death minutes after she was born.
That's because that's what usually happens. Frankly, I wouldn't trust a pre-lifer if they said water was---Well, actually, these people would probably call the ocean 'dry.'
Instead, the baby lived and grew for three months before peacefully passing away.
OMG, REALLY? NO WAI! That's funny. When you read actual non-propaganda accounts of the lives of these unfortunate children, the lives are described as agonizing. It's not like the kid can articulate what they're experiencing, but one woman whose story I read talked about how her daughter would scream when she was touched.
This baby's mother will never, ever regret the time she had with her baby. She was never traumatized by changing the bandages on her daughter's head, much less seeing her baby emerge from the womb.
How do you know, anyway? Frankly, I've read that woman's blog and she sounds a little off to me.
Instead, she enjoyed three months (not three minutes) of watching her daughter grow, hearing her coo, seeing her smile, and rocking her to sleep.
Yeah, an unbiased source, I'm sure. I bet you thought Terri Schiavo was alive, too. After all, you had an affair with a scumbag street preacher who was married, you got pregnant, and the kid was horribly deformed and died. Denial is often a mechanism to spare people pain. However, given the smugness of this woman's propaganda, I'm reserving the right to be skeptical
Choosing to end the life of a "deformed" newborn is not a matter of "saving" mothers from being traumatized. It gives them the opportunity to do something selfish and traumatizing to the CHILD to save themselves the hardships that life presents to people every single day.
AND here we go! Those whores! It's only missing half its skull and all of its brain and it's in agonizing pain or it already died in utero! Tough it out so some busybody online will think slightly more of you! And going through nine months of pregnancy only to face tragedy at the end is just the breaks. Besides, you probably asked for it, you slut. It's no big deal. It's not like you matter, anyway.
2) I personally know someone who battled aggressive cancer during her pregnancy. Both she and her child are doing exceptionally well. No killing of a viable human being necessary. Amazing, huh? It'd be amazing if there were any proof at all, but...no. But how convenient that this anonymous imaginary woman just happened to neatly contradict medical facts! And how fucking annoying are these chirpy little questions she asks, too? Sounds like she doubts her own lies.
3) A late term abortion is procedure that some do when they decide it's medically necessary to end a human life. However, the abuse of the procedure is seen time and again by people like that douche bag Tiller.
Oh, it's ON NOW, MOTHERFUCKER! God, WHAT do you call that? You stalked the guy for decades, wounded him, slandered him, harassed him, murdered him, and now when he can't defend himself, you attack him with more lies? GREAT WAY to promote your cause, scumbags. The compassion----it just shines right through the claws and the fangs.
It is unbelievably ignorant to assume that late term abortions are done only when the mother is at risk or the baby is severely handicapped.
It's not an assumption, it's medical fact. It is impossible to get a late-term abortion in this country for anything but medical necessity. Late term abortions make up less than 1% of all abortions performed in this country. Dr. Tiller always consulted with at least one other doctor.
In addition, it is also COMMON for tests and ultrasounds to provide incorrect results.
Spoken like somebody who knows whereof they speak, because they've been feeding women lies for years. Somebody's been working at a crisis pregnancy center, I think.
There are countless women who have come forward saying that their doctors urged them to abort their "imperfect" child, only to have their baby born without any problems at all, or problems that are exceptionally less severe than the doctor announced.
Oh, yeah, really? Where? And how about those doctors! They just love the abortions! I bet this moron has some really disgusting sexual fantasies about abortion, frankly.
Dear Pre-lifers:
Lying makes you look like the murdering, woman-hating assholes you are. And you're not even trying to hide it.
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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/A._J._Liebling http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27716.html "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Sir_William_Bragg http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26212.html "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday."


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http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/H._E._Martz http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23585.html "He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages, patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount discrimination--and taxes.""


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