The city with the highest concentration of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is no surprise: San Francisco at 6.2%. Next is my new hometown Portland, Oregon, at 5.4%. Austin, Texas is third at 5.3%. The surprise was fourth place. Salt Lake City came in at 4%. I must say, I have known more than a few lesbians who were closeted within their LDS communities. Here in Portland I keep meeting jack-Mormons.

SOURCE
The Week, 4/3/15 issue, factoids taken from The New York Times
page 14 in the "Noted" section

I was a Campfire Girl, not a Girlscout or Brownie. So I don't know from the inside. But from the outside, having been a river guide and taking many screaming groups of Brownies rafting on whitewater rivers, the organization appears squeaky clean and rather conservative. I never would have guessed that the organization would teach girls about abortion. But who knows? Maybe they are. That's what the teenaged girls from Texas are saying, and they're making news on The Daily Beast. It occurs to me though that the organization will probably have its name cleared. The organization officially does not endorse any political party or birth control method. Meanwhile, the offended girls have started a blog to get their story out. The case they are making is that the official girl scout materials mention websites and people who are "pro-abortion" and so if you follow the links you will discover that these perspectives are ubiquitous. Big surprise. I wonder what fraction of the links in the girl scout material go to sites that hold the opposite viewpoints. It seems to me that the org would serve the girls best by exposing them to many opposing viewpoints so that they could learn to think and decide for themselves. Girls who want to be cloistered would be better served in a nunnery.

Texas and the Republicans are dead set against requiring utilities to generate x power per y emissions, but it sounds like a good idea to me. I'd like to breathe good air, please. I don't want anyone else in my family to become asthmatic because of coal burning in their region. And as for global warming, well, it's not easy to pin down and it's hard for me to get as excited about it as some people do. I do think our climate is changing and that we have increased the rate of change by our burning of fossil fuels. I am not sure that we can change that rate of change now that it has been initiated. But I'm diverging from the subject, which is that the Obama administration, specifically the EPA, is moving forward to enforce the Clean Air Act after Congress has failed to take any action on the issue. They've begun to take on specific state officials in the state of Texas who refuse to enforce federal laws.

I am going to begin to make posts in defense of Obama. Somebody needs to.
( Notes from a 12/23/10 Wall St Journal articleCollapse )

Texas GOP Official Platform Calls for Imprisonment of Homosexuals and Supportive Heterosexuals
http://jaysays.com/2010/06/texas-gop-official-platform-calls-for-imprisonment-of-homosexuals-and-supportive-heterosexuals/
( reactionCollapse )

As of this week, you cannot cross the Mexico-US or Canada-US border without a passport. There are many people who routinely cross the border who do not have passports. As of this week, those people have to choose a country, and stay there. Too bad if their family is on the other side from their job.
( moreCollapse )

--H1N1, type A
--California, Texas, Kansas, New York, Ohio
--http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/investigation.htm

They're doing it because they think that she'll lose to McCain, so "a vote for Hillary is a vote for McCain". One more reason to support the brown upstart Obama.
( a report from an election volunteer in rural TexasCollapse )