If I'm Awesome and You Know It

Okay — this is surreal.

After coming home this morning from another graveyard shift at the hospital, I plopped onto the couch with my laptop to surf the Interwebs. This is what I saw on Saveur’s website:

We’re still waiting on the new Kony 2012 video, supposedly slated to go live later today, that will answer all of our concerns about Invisible Children’s finances and goals, but we have some idea of what we can expect: earnest proclamations about how “uncomplicated” it is to bring Joseph Kony down and reassurances that Invisible Children does spend some of their money (37%) on-the-ground in Africa. Here’s what we’re nearly 100% sure we won’t see: answers regarding the nonprofit’s antigay, creationist donors.

Alternet’s B. E. Wilson researched 990 IRS tax forms and yearly reports from Invisible Children and 990s from its major donors and found deep financial ties to evangelicals and major funders of antigay organizations. Wilson thinks that the hundreds of thousands of dollars given by infamous gay bashers proves that, that from the first year it launched, “Invisible Children had appeared on the radar screen of some of the world’s largest Christian fundamentalist grant-making organizations.”

Invisible Children’s first yearly report in 2006 gives “special thanks” to the “Caster Family Foundation” and their 2007 report straight-up thanks Terry and Barbara Caster. The Caster family is one of the biggest financial backers of California’s anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8. And Philip Anschutz, who helped fund the Discovery Institute and supported Colorado’s 1992 anti-gay marriage Amendment 2, gave $5,218 that year as well.

But one wonders what kind of “special thanks” Invisible Children has given to the National Christian Foundation, which has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the nonprofit over the past few years. The National Christian Foundation is the largest, most active funder of the Far Christian Right, and states on its website that they “make certain every dollar that comes to us is ultimately distributed according to our Christian mission” and that they only fund nonprofits “enable followers of Christ to give wisely to advance His Kingdom.” They decided that Invisible Children deserved $350,000 in 2007 and $414,000 in 2008. Other groups that received donations include Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, The Fellowship Foundation, The Call, and Ed Silvoso’s Harvest Evangelism — all extremely active antigay fundamentalist organizations.

Some of these groups have ties to Uganda, too, like Ed Silvoso, who works with Julius Oyet, the Ugandan author who claims that “even animals are wiser than homosexuals” and has been working to promote the Anti Homosexuality bill (also called the “kill the gays bill”) in his country.

I should have seen this one coming guys. I even side-eyed Inhofe’s presence in the video, but I didn’t make the connection.

“Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday night in Washington, D.C., at the Occupy AIPAC protest, organized by CODEPINK Women for Peace and other peace, faith and solidarity groups.”

The battle for justice in the Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is about living rather than dying. It is about communicating rather than killing. It is about love rather than hate. It is part of the great battle against the corporate forces of death that reign over us—the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the speculators on Wall Street, the oligarchic elites who assault our poor, our working men and women, our children, one in four of whom depend on food stamps to eat, the elites who are destroying our ecosystem with its trees, its air and its water and throwing into doubt our survival as a species.

What is being done in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is a pale reflection of what is slowly happening to the rest of us. It is a window into the rise of the global security state, our new governing system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is a reflection of a world where the powerful are not bound by law, either on Wall Street or in the shattered remains of the countries we invade and occupy, including Iraq with its hundreds of thousands of dead. And one of the greatest purveyors of this demented ideology of violence for the sake of violence, this flagrant disregard for the rule of domestic and international law, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Sarah Palin, reminding us Wednesday that she doesn’t know shit about history.

Love the insinuation that the big problem with slavery was income inequality based on color of your skin — not the whole SLAVERY thing, amirite you guys?!

I swear… this woman has got to be doing some kind of avant garde performance art. Right?

RIGHT?!

What is her “thought” process? I imagine it’s something like, “You know what? I betcha the first black president misses when people like him were enslaved. They had it so good, with their free room and board… Wait… THAT’S SOCIALISM!”

And then she starts talking.

(via cognitivedissonance)

I just… wait, WHAT?

It’s like American History According to Sarah Palin.

(via notsodarling-)

Priceless.

COME, WEARY TRAVELER. WE ARE NEARLY TO THE MAGICAL KINGDOM. YOU ARE QUITE LUCKY TO BE GRANTED ACCESS. FEW HAVE THE TRUE SIGHT, AND SO THE KINGDOM REMAINS INVISIBLE TO THEM. YOU, HOWEVER, HAVE MIXED THE NECESSARY ELIXIRS: ROBITUSSIN AND JÄGERMEISTER. 

Much to Savor, and Worry About, Amid Mild Winter’s Early Blooms

At the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, an experimental plot was in full flower on a recent February afternoon, as the thermometer edged toward 60.

The Japanese camellias, which typically bloom in early spring, have displayed their rose-hued flowers continuously since December. Honeybees, a rarity before late March, were nursing the tiny pink clusters on a Dawn viburnum, while the Adonis amurensis, a ground-hugging spring ephemeral, was a profusion of yellow.

“This is the earliest I’ve seen all of these things in flower,” said Todd Forrest, the garden’s vice president for horticulture and living collections. “The ground isn’t even frozen. That’s shocking.”

The horticulturalists in the Bronx call it the global-warming garden, and in a winter notable for its consistent mildness, it is hardly unusual. From the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park to the Chicago Botanic Garden, flowering bulbs and other plants are bursting out two to four weeks ahead of schedule. Snowdrops are up; daffodils, crocuses and hellebores are already in flower; trailing phlox has opened; and, farther afield, even magnolia trees are starting to bloom on the National Mall in Washington.

Complaining about balmy winter days and an early display of color might seem churlish, but the early run of warm weather is not without its downside.

For one thing, if there is a cold snap, plants and trees are vulnerable to damaged blossoms and, potentially, a falloff in seed production. With the ground still soft in many places and no snow cover, squirrels — already suffering from the acorn shortage last fall — have been digging up bulbs. Populations of insect pests, normally kept in check by freezing temperatures, are expected to grow this year.

Then there is the unavoidable question of climate change.

It is hard to draw conclusions about the pace of warming from a single winter, and indeed, the last decade in New York City has been one of the snowiest on record. Still, Fred Gadomski, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University, said that temperatures were above normal in 80 percent of the days in the past three months in the city. Strong winds from the Pacific Ocean have blanketed most of the country with unusually mild air.

“That’s the distinguishing item this winter — the consistency of the mildness,” Mr. Gadomski said. “If you took away that week in mid-January where it really was sort of cold, it would be the year without a winter.”

So alarming, and people just don’t want to see it. The effects and changes the environment will see are limitless. People also think it’s isolated, that oh sure, the ice caps might melt, but we’ll figure that out and we’ll be ok in the end. No, it’s far-reaching affects will touch everything.

The signs are here. Warming is here. Warming is Now.