In Never Never Land

When I heard about the American Baptist missionaries who have been arrested for trying to take allegedly orphaned Haitian children out of Haiti, allegedly to a new institution in the neighboring Dominican Republic, I remembered an incident that occurred here in Bloomington in the 1970s. A local evangelical church sent its Sunday School bus around to some local playgrounds, including one near University married housing, where many foreign students lived. The idea was to invite children to come to its Sunday school, where they would be exposed to the Gospel and find hope of salvation. To the church's great surprise, many parents thought that they should at least be consulted before their children were whisked away by strangers. The church's leaders maintained their good intentions, their purity of motive, and plaintively lamented the outsiders' inability to understand that they only wanted good things for these children. Who, they protested, could object to a child's going to Sunday school?

It was hard for me not to see their defense as disingenuous. At the very least, if the children's parents -- and therefore the children -- already had a non-Christian religion of their own, they might very well object to their children's being taken away for indoctrination by Christians. The parents might just as easily have been Christians, though evangelicals often do not consider non-evangelical Christians (or even evangelicals of different flavors) to be Christians. The most obvious response to the church leaders' arguments, I thought, would be to ask them how they would react if the local synagogue or mosque -- or for that matter, one of the Roman Catholic churches -- had sent a bus to the local Christian schools to round up children for perfectly innocent visits to their institutions of spiritual instruction.

I'd still like to know how they would answer that question. I imagine they simply did not regard parents from competing sects as having any rights at all; as I remember it, they never did acknowledge that parents of other religions might have legitimate objections to what they were doing. Not that I think they were especially malicious -- I just don't think that people outside their church were real to them. (Readers may remember the time a Christian college student asked why heterosexuals shouldn't decide that homosexuals were not fit parents and take their children from them, so I asked her how she would feel if Protestants took Catholics' children from them on the same ground, or if mainline Episcopalians took evangelicals' children from them. Unable or unwilling to see the analogy, she became quite upset at me, accusing me of religious intolerance; so did the graduate student teaching the class in which our panel was speaking.)

Something similar seems to have been going on in the minds of those Idaho Baptists in Haiti. I'm sure their intentions were pure, and that's the problem: they were so pure in heart, mind, and spirit that reality never impinged on their mission plan. It's apparently been established that most of the children had living parents or other adult relatives who had not given up their claims on their children. The Austrian children's aid charity SOS Children's Villages told the Guardian that "According to a 12-year-old girl, she and her family had been told she was going to a boarding school in the Dominican Republic."

The Telegraph's religion writer, the amusingly named Will Heaven, splutters:

So, bearing this in mind, why don’t we listen to the version of events from the Christian group? Laura Sillsby, one of those being held in Port-au-Prince, said: “We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there.” And where did the children come from? “We have a Baptist minister here (in Port-au-Prince) whose orphanage totally collapsed and he asked us to take the children to the orphanage in the Dominican Republic,” she replied. “They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong.”

Of course we should listen to the version of everyone involved. Unfortunately, Mr. Heaven doesn't seem to be interested in listening to the children's version of events. Notice, too, how he refers to the missionaries' side as "the Christian" one. Most Haitians are Roman Catholics. The children and their families are Christians too. So why not listen to the other Christians' version of events?

The Associated Press also tried to divert attention from the real issues, with a story that reports parents in one Haitian "tent camp" saying that they saw nothing wrong with giving their children to foreigners, in hopes they would have a better life in America or Europe. Fair enough, but I don't see why the Baptists preferred to take children with living families who had not chosen to give them up for adoption, when so many other children and parents were (literally) going begging. The AP story admits, though, that "The church group's own mission statement said it planned to spend only hours in the devastated capital, quickly identifying children without immediate families and busing them to a rented hotel in the Dominican Republic without bothering to get permission from the Haitian government." Given the history of US interference in Haiti over the past two centuries, the group's lack of interest in dealing with the Haitian government seems high-handed, to put it gently.

And I'm sure that the good Baptists were not trying to do something wrong; the trouble is that they have a rather distorted version of what is wrong and what is right, as their conduct shows. They're members of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose record on many social issues leaves something to be desired. Back in Idaho, the senior pastor of the missionary's home church told the AP that they acted "because we believe that Christ has asked us to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole world, and that includes children." Again, it seems not to have occurred to them that Haitians, as Catholics, would already have received the gospel of Jesus Christ; Baptists aren't terribly fond of Roman Catholicism anyway. Nor does it occur to them that they could bring the gospel to Haitian children without spiriting them away from their families -- but then, their families were Papists (or worse), and probably would have objected to their children's being saved. The missionaries simply followed the teaching of Christ that a Christian's real family is not flesh and blood, but "whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mark 3:35).

"Abduction" and "stealing" are strong words. These Baptists seem to have thought that Haitian children could be plucked from the trees, that as Christians and as Americans they could do whatever they wanted. To do something wrong implies that they saw other people as, well, people, with interests and wishes of their own; this doesn't seem to have occurred to them at all. Only their motives and wishes mattered. I'd like to think that their experience in Haiti will give them something to think about, but so far they seem to be too busy shutting down their minds as they protest their innocence to do any thinking.

In Never Never Land

When I heard about the American Baptist missionaries who have been arrested for trying to take allegedly orphaned Haitian children out of Haiti, allegedly to a new institution in the neighboring Dominican Republic, I remembered an incident that occurred here in Bloomington in the 1970s. A local evangelical church sent its Sunday School bus around to some local playgrounds, including one near University married housing, where many foreign students lived. The idea was to invite children to come to its Sunday school, where they would be exposed to the Gospel and find hope of salvation. To the church's great surprise, many parents thought that they should at least be consulted before their children were whisked away by strangers. The church's leaders maintained their good intentions, their purity of motive, and plaintively lamented the outsiders' inability to understand that they only wanted good things for these children. Who, they protested, could object to a child's going to Sunday school?

It was hard for me not to see their defense as disingenuous. At the very least, if the children's parents -- and therefore the children -- already had a non-Christian religion of their own, they might very well object to their children's being taken away for indoctrination by Christians. The parents might just as easily have been Christians, though evangelicals often do not consider non-evangelical Christians (or even evangelicals of different flavors) to be Christians. The most obvious response to the church leaders' arguments, I thought, would be to ask them how they would react if the local synagogue or mosque -- or for that matter, one of the Roman Catholic churches -- had sent a bus to the local Christian schools to round up children for perfectly innocent visits to their institutions of spiritual instruction.

I'd still like to know how they would answer that question. I imagine they simply did not regard parents from competing sects as having any rights at all; as I remember it, they never did acknowledge that parents of other religions might have legitimate objections to what they were doing. Not that I think they were especially malicious -- I just don't think that people outside their church were real to them. (Readers may remember the time a Christian college student asked why heterosexuals shouldn't decide that homosexuals were not fit parents and take their children from them, so I asked her how she would feel if Protestants took Catholics' children from them on the same ground, or if mainline Episcopalians took evangelicals' children from them. Unable or unwilling to see the analogy, she became quite upset at me, accusing me of religious intolerance; so did the graduate student teaching the class in which our panel was speaking.)

Something similar seems to have been going on in the minds of those Idaho Baptists in Haiti. I'm sure their intentions were pure, and that's the problem: they were so pure in heart, mind, and spirit that reality never impinged on their mission plan. It's apparently been established that most of the children had living parents or other adult relatives who had not given up their claims on their children. The Austrian children's aid charity SOS Children's Villages told the Guardian that "According to a 12-year-old girl, she and her family had been told she was going to a boarding school in the Dominican Republic."

The Telegraph's religion writer, the amusingly named Will Heaven, splutters:

So, bearing this in mind, why don’t we listen to the version of events from the Christian group? Laura Sillsby, one of those being held in Port-au-Prince, said: “We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there.” And where did the children come from? “We have a Baptist minister here (in Port-au-Prince) whose orphanage totally collapsed and he asked us to take the children to the orphanage in the Dominican Republic,” she replied. “They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong.”

Of course we should listen to the version of everyone involved. Unfortunately, Mr. Heaven doesn't seem to be interested in listening to the children's version of events. Notice, too, how he refers to the missionaries' side as "the Christian" one. Most Haitians are Roman Catholics. The children and their families are Christians too. So why not listen to the other Christians' version of events?

The Associated Press also tried to divert attention from the real issues, with a story that reports parents in one Haitian "tent camp" saying that they saw nothing wrong with giving their children to foreigners, in hopes they would have a better life in America or Europe. Fair enough, but I don't see why the Baptists preferred to take children with living families who had not chosen to give them up for adoption, when so many other children and parents were (literally) going begging. The AP story admits, though, that "The church group's own mission statement said it planned to spend only hours in the devastated capital, quickly identifying children without immediate families and busing them to a rented hotel in the Dominican Republic without bothering to get permission from the Haitian government." Given the history of US interference in Haiti over the past two centuries, the group's lack of interest in dealing with the Haitian government seems high-handed, to put it gently.

And I'm sure that the good Baptists were not trying to do something wrong; the trouble is that they have a rather distorted version of what is wrong and what is right, as their conduct shows. They're members of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose record on many social issues leaves something to be desired. Back in Idaho, the senior pastor of the missionary's home church told the AP that they acted "because we believe that Christ has asked us to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole world, and that includes children." Again, it seems not to have occurred to them that Haitians, as Catholics, would already have received the gospel of Jesus Christ; Baptists aren't terribly fond of Roman Catholicism anyway. Nor does it occur to them that they could bring the gospel to Haitian children without spiriting them away from their families -- but then, their families were Papists (or worse), and probably would have objected to their children's being saved. The missionaries simply followed the teaching of Christ that a Christian's real family is not flesh and blood, but "whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mark 3:35).

"Abduction" and "stealing" are strong words. These Baptists seem to have thought that Haitian children could be plucked from the trees, that as Christians and as Americans they could do whatever they wanted. To do something wrong implies that they saw other people as, well, people, with interests and wishes of their own; this doesn't seem to have occurred to them at all. Only their motives and wishes mattered. I'd like to think that their experience in Haiti will give them something to think about, but so far they seem to be too busy shutting down their minds as they protest their innocence to do any thinking.

Tentacle Fetish Vid!

Well it was only a matter of time before someone finally did something in regards to my anime fetish. A friend of mine, Larry, did a short animation based on me and my little sexual desire to see a male character get violated by a tentacle monster. It's pretty short (less than a minute) and it's not a professional vid that I know he's capable of doing, but still, for a free animation, this was pretty fucking awesome! Maybe he'll do longer vids in the future being that this is probably going to be a future career for this guy. Maybe I'll actually be allowed to voice a character (LOL, can you imagine me moaning and grunting with a tentacle fucking me!?) I can't wait to see his future stuff. If you want more of his stuff, you can see his flickr site at:

Laphiha's Photostream

Or if you want to talk to him directly and request to purchase an animation or sketch you can email him directly at:

laphiha@yahoo.com

Tentacle Fetish Vid!

Well it was only a matter of time before someone finally did something in regards to my anime fetish. A friend of mine, Larry, did a short animation based on me and my little sexual desire to see a male character get violated by a tentacle monster. It's pretty short (less than a minute) and it's not a professional vid that I know he's capable of doing, but still, for a free animation, this was pretty fucking awesome! Maybe he'll do longer vids in the future being that this is probably going to be a future career for this guy. Maybe I'll actually be allowed to voice a character (LOL, can you imagine me moaning and grunting with a tentacle fucking me!?) I can't wait to see his future stuff. If you want more of his stuff, you can see his flickr site at:

Laphiha's Photostream

Or if you want to talk to him directly and request to purchase an animation or sketch you can email him directly at:

laphiha@yahoo.com

They All Look Alike, Don't They?

Jenny Crusie linked to a blog called Failbooking, from which she quoted this bit:

A couple of commenters pointed out that the added lyrics should include "E-I-E-I-O." Another suggested the line "There was a farmer had a god..."

Browsing around Failbooking, I found this more sobering example:

Oh well, countries full of poor black people, how can an American be expected to tell them apart? Even when they're in different hemispheres, or movies. (Notice, though, that "Chris" spotted the mistake right away. Not everyone is ignorant.)

And they need Jesus. I noticed that some of my Facebook friends first reacted to the news of the Haitian earthquake by waving around their Christian piety. Offended by Pat Robertson's remarks, but apparently more for reasons of Christian PR than by their falsity or truthiness. Many calls to prayer. But before long they remembered that Christians think of themselves first, not about foreigners who are already poor anyway. Another viral cut-and-paste job, of course. (Someone else noticed and blogged about it.) Here's the text, posted by one of the former prayer-mongers:

A country with millions of homeless children going to bed without eating, elderly going without needed medications and mentally ill without treatment- yet we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 stations. 99 percent of people wont have the guts to copy & repost this.

Of course I was one of the the few, the proud, the Socialist. I reposted it, and taunted the friend who'd posted it by pointing out that she was calling for universal health care. She indignantly replied that she did not, because she didn't want to help illegal immigrants. We got off into a short debate about whether universal health care would help illegal immigrants, which was fun but beside the point, though it did show how far her Christianity extended.

Still, it's not the Haitians' fault that Americans don't have decent health care or a better general welfare system, nor is it the fault of the bleeding-heart Obama-voting liberals who organized the Haiti earthquake relief-Telethon. It's not even the fault of the mass of Americans, despite Christopher Hitchens (via), who "sometimes think Americans want to live dangerously. They think this wouldn’t be America if you had health coverage." Some of Roy Edroso's liberal commenters agree with Hitchens, bashing Joe Sixpack for opposing health care reform even though it is well established that most Americans favor a government-run health insurance plan, if not a government-run health care system. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. It's hard for me to tell who's nuttier these days, my fellow members of the Hoosier-American Diaspora, or the liberal blogogentsia.

They All Look Alike, Don't They?

Jenny Crusie linked to a blog called Failbooking, from which she quoted this bit:

A couple of commenters pointed out that the added lyrics should include "E-I-E-I-O." Another suggested the line "There was a farmer had a god..."

Browsing around Failbooking, I found this more sobering example:

Oh well, countries full of poor black people, how can an American be expected to tell them apart? Even when they're in different hemispheres, or movies. (Notice, though, that "Chris" spotted the mistake right away. Not everyone is ignorant.)

And they need Jesus. I noticed that some of my Facebook friends first reacted to the news of the Haitian earthquake by waving around their Christian piety. Offended by Pat Robertson's remarks, but apparently more for reasons of Christian PR than by their falsity or truthiness. Many calls to prayer. But before long they remembered that Christians think of themselves first, not about foreigners who are already poor anyway. Another viral cut-and-paste job, of course. (Someone else noticed and blogged about it.) Here's the text, posted by one of the former prayer-mongers:

A country with millions of homeless children going to bed without eating, elderly going without needed medications and mentally ill without treatment- yet we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 stations. 99 percent of people wont have the guts to copy & repost this.

Of course I was one of the the few, the proud, the Socialist. I reposted it, and taunted the friend who'd posted it by pointing out that she was calling for universal health care. She indignantly replied that she did not, because she didn't want to help illegal immigrants. We got off into a short debate about whether universal health care would help illegal immigrants, which was fun but beside the point, though it did show how far her Christianity extended.

Still, it's not the Haitians' fault that Americans don't have decent health care or a better general welfare system, nor is it the fault of the bleeding-heart Obama-voting liberals who organized the Haiti earthquake relief-Telethon. It's not even the fault of the mass of Americans, despite Christopher Hitchens (via), who "sometimes think Americans want to live dangerously. They think this wouldn’t be America if you had health coverage." Some of Roy Edroso's liberal commenters agree with Hitchens, bashing Joe Sixpack for opposing health care reform even though it is well established that most Americans favor a government-run health insurance plan, if not a government-run health care system. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. It's hard for me to tell who's nuttier these days, my fellow members of the Hoosier-American Diaspora, or the liberal blogogentsia.

Gut Check Time

There are no two ways about it: looking at current charts of not only Gold miners but also the general stock markets is downright scary right now. Many stocks in many sectors are deeply oversold and due for a bounce, but stock market crashes happen from oversold conditions. But I use technical analysis as a complement to the fundamentals and am not a "pure" chartist.

Particularly in the Gold market, which is manipulated just as much if not more so than many other markets, technical analysis can fail just when you need it most. In the end, all we retail investors are just guessing what will happen next in any market. The only comfort is that jp whore-gan and goldmun sucks apparently don't know what's going to happen next either, since they are only still in business thanks to American taxpayers. What a joke these guys and gals are! They have all the insider information, see what orders are coming into the market before everyone else, can withhold bids and offers at a whim, and they still get wiped out during a crash. If the "smartest guys in the room" (I use this phrase very tongue-in-cheek) aren't any good at knowing what comes next, what hope do the rest of us have?

Having said this, I have strong opinions on the markets, for better or worse. These opinions are based on a study of not only technical analysis, but also of market history and cycles that seem to recur based on human nature. Unfortunately for the other life on earth, human nature has not evolved much over the past few centuries.

We are in a secular credit contraction, or the prolonged bust that follows a boom like night follows day. The stock bubble burst in 2000 and the real estate bubble burst in 2005-6. Those looking to "buy and hold" in these sectors are making a losing bet when gains are calculated on inflation-adjusted terms. Of that, I am confident (unique individual opportunities aside). As a retail investor, my best chance is to be invested in a secular bull market to make money.

Gold is in a secular bull market that shows NO SIGNS OF ENDING. I don't care what Prechter says, this chart is a bull market with no, AND I MEAN ABSOLUTELY NO, chinks in its armor so far:



The Dow to Gold ratio is in a downward swing and the prior two downward generational swings suggest it won't stop dropping until we get below a ratio of 2. Could this time be different? Yes, but only because the Dow to Gold ratio could go below 1 this cycle given the extent of the excesses of the previous boom and the extent of the misguided central planner attempts to stave off the inevitable bust.

Fundamentals are very strong for Gold stocks as a sector. I am not a fundamental analyst for individual Gold mining companies - I don't have the background to do it. But as a sector, Gold stocks are the stocks you want to be invested in right now. Choosing to stay out of the stock market entirely for the next few years and sticking with the physical metal of the elite is not a bad idea. For those like me who are seeking speculative gains in addition to safety, however, risk is high and the likelihood of losses is much more than negligible over the intermediate term.

I remain bullish on Gold stocks, however, because of both fundamental and technical factors. Where one chartist sees a bearish opportunity, another sees a bullish one. I see a heavily oversold Gold stock sector, both relative to Gold and relative to its own chart internals. I don't think this is 2008 in the Gold patch, I think it is 2007 or perhaps 2001-2. Here's the summer of 2007 in real time as it felt to those in the Gold stock sector (60 minute intraday candlestick chart of the $HUI Gold Bugs' Mining Index):



And, of course, here's what happened next (daily candlestick plot of the $HUI):



So, why am I confident that we are bottoming rather than setting up for a crash? Well, the benefit of the doubt belongs to the bulls first of all. Remember, too, that during secular Gold bull markets, stock bear markets are not an issue in the bigger picture. Fundamentals for Gold stocks are also excellent based on the "real" price of Gold or the price of Gold divided by the price of a basket of commodities (I use the $GOLD:$CCI ratio chart for this), a crude measure of Gold miner profit margins:



We are in a strong bull market for Gold and Gold stocks, fundamentals are supportive, and Gold stocks and Gold are oversold using basic momentum indicators. This is as good as it gets. No one can give you guarantees when investing, not even the inbred clods at goldmun sucks and jp whore-gan, and if they do then you should run the other way.

The other thing I like here is the behavior of platinum, which bucked ol' Uncle Buck on Friday and made a hearty attempt to re-start its powerful uptrend. Here's a 6 month daily candlestick chart of the action thru Friday's close:



I think we're due for a powerful snapback rally that should begin by the middle of this week. Don't get me wrong, I bought into this correction too early and I am down significantly over the past week in my speculative accounts. But I remain bullish here and less concerned than many "pure" chartists. Having said this, I expect Gold stocks to begin performing pronto (before the week ends for sure) and the character of the bounce will determine how long I stick around when it comes to my leveraged shorter-term option trades.

Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

To return to a question I asked a couple of days ago: I'm about a hundred pages into The Old Garden a novel by Hwang Sok-yong about a middle-aged South Korean who's released after eighteen years in prison for political crimes, only to learn that the woman he loved, and who'd sheltered him while he was on the run from the dictatorial government, died of cancer shortly before his release. Finding it difficult to adjust to the relative freedom of life outside, he returns to the village they lived in before his arrest, to the house she had bought and refurbished when she learned she was dying. Reading her notebooks and letters, he remembers his activist past and broods on the changes that took place in South Korea after the success of the democracy movement and the growing consumerism and commercialization of Korean society.

That is as far as I've read, but The Old Garden is fascinating in its detail and sweep, and I'm looking forward to reading the next 400 pages. Originally published in Korean in 2000 by a distinguished author known for taking on difficult episodes of recent Korean history, such as its involvement in the Vietnam War (Shadow of Arms) and inter-Korean atrocities during the the Korean war (The Guest), The Old Garden was made into a film in 2007, and finally was translated into English in 2009. But the question I want to ask is whether a book like The Old Garden is an escape from reality, or a way of coming to grips with reality.

It's a trick question, of course, as I suggested before, and my answer is: Both. First, it's an escape from reality, because the South Korean society is so different from American society. We were not ruled by a brutal military dictatorship for forty years, nor did we suffer a civil war that devastated much of the country and ended in an armed truce that still leaves the nation divided. Even the high-water mark of political activism in the 1960s (in my lifetime, that is -- there were other peaks in the past) didn't exact quite as great a toll from the opposition movements as resistance to the South Korean dictatorships did: widespread torture, execution, and imprisonment of dissidents. (There were notable exceptions, but they remain exceptions; the bulk of US state violence and terror has been directed at foreigners.) Above all, there is no equivalent in recent American history to the Kwangju massacre of 1980, when the South Korean government responded to a local democracy movement and uprising by blockading the city of Kwangju, and sending in shock troops who slaughtered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of citizens. This event haunts not only The Old Garden but much of recent Korean literature and film.

So, reading a book like The Old Garden gives me a glimpse into the lives of people in a different society, facing different problems from any that I have faced. And there is no reason why I shouldn't read about the lives of people who are different from me. Yet it's not fantasy: Hwang, who was an activist himself and spent some years in exile from Korea, writes from experience and the experience of people he knew about a world that is all too real. (I'm reminded of Bruce Cuming's reminiscence, in Korea's Place in the Sun: a Modern History (W. W. Norton), of Korean students who told him that they were willing to die for democracy: sadly, he remarks, many of them did.

But that's the other side of the answer to my question: there are suggestive and disturbing points of contact between Korean and American experience, which I hope emerge in some of my posts on the past few years' mass protests in Korea. (See most of the posts from June 2008 and the beginning of July 2008, and this and this one from the following year.) As the US government cracks down, ever more harshly, on peaceful protests in the US, more and more Americans will face problems that begin to approach what South Korean dissidents faced. There's a lot to be learned from the Korean experience. For one thing, though it might seem now that the sides were more clearly defined in a dictatorship than in a nominal democracy like the US, the Korean dictatorships had not only secret police and censors, they had a collaborationist press that pushed their side of the story. And now that Korea is officially a democracy, the same corporate media mostly jeer at dissidence in terms very similar to those we encounter in the US: hey, the dictatorship is over, you've got your freedom, so why are you complaining? If you don't like the rascals in power, throw them out by the power of the vote! There's no need to clog up the streets with candlelight vigils in a free society. The derogation of the vigils in the Korean press (which still didn't satisfy President Lee -- he sicced his prosecutors on media which had been insufficiently supportive of his policies) is framed in very similar terms to the derogation of the protestors against the World Trade Organization in 1998, complete with lies and distortions of history.

I'd say, then, that The Old Garden contains lessons for Americans no less than Koreans. For me it is partly an escape from the largely apathetic political movements of today's America, and my own personal lack of involvement, to a time and place where many people put their lives and freedom on the line in the cause of freedom, justice, and democracy. But it also gives me a sense of what it could mean to do such things, and makes me ask myself under what circumstances I might choose to do them too.

Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

To return to a question I asked a couple of days ago: I'm about a hundred pages into The Old Garden a novel by Hwang Sok-yong about a middle-aged South Korean who's released after eighteen years in prison for political crimes, only to learn that the woman he loved, and who'd sheltered him while he was on the run from the dictatorial government, died of cancer shortly before his release. Finding it difficult to adjust to the relative freedom of life outside, he returns to the village they lived in before his arrest, to the house she had bought and refurbished when she learned she was dying. Reading her notebooks and letters, he remembers his activist past and broods on the changes that took place in South Korea after the success of the democracy movement and the growing consumerism and commercialization of Korean society.

That is as far as I've read, but The Old Garden is fascinating in its detail and sweep, and I'm looking forward to reading the next 400 pages. Originally published in Korean in 2000 by a distinguished author known for taking on difficult episodes of recent Korean history, such as its involvement in the Vietnam War (Shadow of Arms) and inter-Korean atrocities during the the Korean war (The Guest), The Old Garden was made into a film in 2007, and finally was translated into English in 2009. But the question I want to ask is whether a book like The Old Garden is an escape from reality, or a way of coming to grips with reality.

It's a trick question, of course, as I suggested before, and my answer is: Both. First, it's an escape from reality, because the South Korean society is so different from American society. We were not ruled by a brutal military dictatorship for forty years, nor did we suffer a civil war that devastated much of the country and ended in an armed truce that still leaves the nation divided. Even the high-water mark of political activism in the 1960s (in my lifetime, that is -- there were other peaks in the past) didn't exact quite as great a toll from the opposition movements as resistance to the South Korean dictatorships did: widespread torture, execution, and imprisonment of dissidents. (There were notable exceptions, but they remain exceptions; the bulk of US state violence and terror has been directed at foreigners.) Above all, there is no equivalent in recent American history to the Kwangju massacre of 1980, when the South Korean government responded to a local democracy movement and uprising by blockading the city of Kwangju, and sending in shock troops who slaughtered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of citizens. This event haunts not only The Old Garden but much of recent Korean literature and film.

So, reading a book like The Old Garden gives me a glimpse into the lives of people in a different society, facing different problems from any that I have faced. And there is no reason why I shouldn't read about the lives of people who are different from me. Yet it's not fantasy: Hwang, who was an activist himself and spent some years in exile from Korea, writes from experience and the experience of people he knew about a world that is all too real. (I'm reminded of Bruce Cuming's reminiscence, in Korea's Place in the Sun: a Modern History (W. W. Norton), of Korean students who told him that they were willing to die for democracy: sadly, he remarks, many of them did.

But that's the other side of the answer to my question: there are suggestive and disturbing points of contact between Korean and American experience, which I hope emerge in some of my posts on the past few years' mass protests in Korea. (See most of the posts from June 2008 and the beginning of July 2008, and this and this one from the following year.) As the US government cracks down, ever more harshly, on peaceful protests in the US, more and more Americans will face problems that begin to approach what South Korean dissidents faced. There's a lot to be learned from the Korean experience. For one thing, though it might seem now that the sides were more clearly defined in a dictatorship than in a nominal democracy like the US, the Korean dictatorships had not only secret police and censors, they had a collaborationist press that pushed their side of the story. And now that Korea is officially a democracy, the same corporate media mostly jeer at dissidence in terms very similar to those we encounter in the US: hey, the dictatorship is over, you've got your freedom, so why are you complaining? If you don't like the rascals in power, throw them out by the power of the vote! There's no need to clog up the streets with candlelight vigils in a free society. The derogation of the vigils in the Korean press (which still didn't satisfy President Lee -- he sicced his prosecutors on media which had been insufficiently supportive of his policies) is framed in very similar terms to the derogation of the protestors against the World Trade Organization in 1998, complete with lies and distortions of history.

I'd say, then, that The Old Garden contains lessons for Americans no less than Koreans. For me it is partly an escape from the largely apathetic political movements of today's America, and my own personal lack of involvement, to a time and place where many people put their lives and freedom on the line in the cause of freedom, justice, and democracy. But it also gives me a sense of what it could mean to do such things, and makes me ask myself under what circumstances I might choose to do them too.

Bought Some Kruggies Today

For newbies, that means I bought some 1 oz. Gold coins minted by the South African government aka Krugerrands. When we dipped below $1080 this morning, I couldn't help myself. I dipped into savings held in U.S. Dollars because I sensed value. I came to realize that I cannot go back to the other side of the Matrix.

I did a google search of "Krugerrand" and came up with 107,000 hits. I did a search of "Eurodollar" and came up with 198,000 hits. For those who don't know what Eurodollar means, check here. Our paper debt is more popular worldwide than the first government-sanctioned and minted Gold coin with no face value if Google is a reliable guide. This, of course, is pure paperbug insanity and now that I know what I know, I can't go back with the herd.

It is not anti-American to be pro-Gold. It is basic recognition of unsustainable trends and problems that are not going away. Our evolving fascist government (call it "corporatist" if you can't handle reality) will not stop until they are hung from trees. There is no end game except to screw the public and get as rich as possible. It's like 50 Cent and the G-Unit on heroin and steroids are running the country but with 5000 times the amount of firepower available to quell any dissent. The "average Joe" doesn't stand a chance unless they want to give up their job (if they still have one) and family and risk their life and liberty to rebel against the treason being committed at the highest levels of government.

The "free" markets always find a way to spank the guilty and weak. The unsustainable paper regime that began in 1971 when Nixon defaulted on the promises America made to the world is entering its terminal stages. The current international monetary system collapse will take longer than bears like me anticipate but it is inevitable. This does not mean the U.S. is screwed in the long term and it does not mean the end of the world. This is not doom and gloom for the prepared - it is opportunity.

The ideals of the U.S. have been subverted to a large degree (i.e. a central bank has impoverished the nation as Jefferson predicted, the Constitution is now routinely ignored, corporate lobbyists now write the bills pushed thru Congress, individual rights are no longer respected, etc., etc.). However, much like relative currency values are a reverse beauty contest, the U.S. still has a huge advantage over most of the world. We have one of the most vibrant and entrepreneurial populations on the planet, an abundance of natural resources, and a good heterogeneous mix of cultures. There is still a good chance for a renaissance in the United States.

I am not into the Armageddon scenario. I don't want to buy a log cabin, ammo to protect it and some freeze dried rations to eat in case the system breaks down. I consider myself a realist, not a pessimist. The Dow to Gold ratio is a pendulum, not a machete.

The American system needs to be fixed, but it won't be until things get worse - much worse. Complacency reigns despite the anger bubbling under the surface. I predict things will get worse for America and the rest of the world before good things can happen. America no longer deserves to print the world's currency, so the secular bear market in U.S. financial assets won't stop until the global market corrects this problem.

I realized today when Gold went under $1080 again that I no longer trust America to do the right thing to fix its problems. This is not a democrat or republican issue - a corporate whore is a corporate whore regardless of which corporation(s) he or she supports. Welfare, warfare or both is not a choice I am interested in making (I choose "none of the above" or "Ron Paul," whichever is available). Our government and its federal reserve keiretsu partner are the problem, not the solution.

Government can create jobs just like widdle tax cheat Timmy Geithner can tell the truth. Government can "stimulate" the economy just like a drug dealer can stimulate an addict, but why would we want such an unhealthy situation? Government can regulate the corporations who pay their campaign bills just like CNBC can be bearish on the corporations who pay to advertise on their network.

Gold is money and nothing else. It is a reality check on the insane clown posse that prints our funny green debt tickets. Our society is now literally dependent on further paper debt ticket issuance to prevent an economic collapse. A few people "at the top" can either turn off or on the monopoly money spigots and create "Prechterville" (i.e. hyperdeflation) or "Sinclairville" (i.e. hyperinflation) at their own whim and none of us has a say! Talk about "command and control"...

I choose Gold. I choose to opt out with a large portion of my savings until sanity returns. Now money market fund redemptions can be halted at the whim of any private company. The U.S. government (no, not Venezuela or Argentina) is now considering "helping" U.S. workers by switching their retirement money in 401(k)s and IRAs into government bonds "for their own good."

We are now at war with two Middle East countries that have never harmed us or done anything to provoke a military response against a sovereign nation. Before so called "patriots" get riled up, do they remember that most of the people on the "terrorist" list after 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia? Do they remember that we sponsored Bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviets? Do they really think that Bin Laden is something other than a government-sponsored boogie man feeding the military-industrial complex or do they think that a dialysis patient can survive in caves in the middle of nowhere for years on end?

I am now asked to remove my shoes and turn in my water when I go to a domestic airport, and I am not asked nicely. Do you see where I'm going with this? If you don't, read a few Martin Armstrong article that were written while he was (and still is) in prison for some vague financial crime that hasn't yet been proved (did you know America now has the HIGHEST PER-CAPITA INCARCERATION RATE IN THE WORLD?!).

As Armstrong says, capital goes where it is treated the best. Capital flows are an important part of the argument that make the deflation-inflation debate a little more nuanced than it seems at first glance. Will global capital rush into the U.S. during the next crisis or will it flow East? The answer is probably "yes and yes."

Paper currency volatility is set to increase, just as in the 1930s when the international monetary system last broke down. Last time it was Britain that sent the world into a tail-spin when it suspended its Gold standard. This time, we hold the reserve currency privilege and are doing everything in our power to abuse, exploit and essentially make sure we lose this honor. I think we can succeed.

When the storm is over and the Dow to Gold ratio is back below 2, I will start looking for opportunities to invest outside the Gold patch. I have given up trying to short the market for now, as shorting rules are changed on a whim and the printing press ensures that those with the power to manipulate markets in the short term (i.e. goldmun sucks and jp whore-gan) are given all the freshly printed money to paper over the rot in our system.

Much like the last time Gold dipped below $1080, I remain steadfastly bullish on all things precious and metal. Are you taking advantage of the buying opportunity before us in the Gold patch? If so, how? If not, why not?

Gold Plated Ferrari in The streets of Paris

This is a Saudi owned Gold plated Ferrari , the clip was shot in Paris France , the owner is probably a saudi prince

LEAVE IT AT THAT.

We alluded to the huge remix package that's come together to support the upcoming release of Ellie Goulding's debut single proper "Starry Eyed", and last week we unveiled the jaw-dropping first effort from Russ Chimes. This week we shift our gaze from London to NYC, where the city's best new producer and hottest young rap sensation have teamed up to take the original to new levels of AMAZING. Stripping the original of Starsmith's synth-laden pop production, Penguin Prison transforms the track into an after hours disco burner, complete with a huge feature from Brooklyn hip hop phenom Theophilus London. Penguin, Ellie and Theo are already three of the most hyped new names in music in their own right, so much so that we fear this union of the three in a holy trinity of pop perfection could potentially be enough to throw the earth off its axis, but fuck it, we can't bear to keep this under wraps any longer.

MP3: "Starry Eyed" (Penguin Prison Mix ft. Theophilus London) - Ellie Goulding

Gold Stock Bugs - Need a Boost?

Sentiment is terrible in the Gold patch right now, which is what's usually needed to form a lasting bottom. It's so bad that people are actually concerned about what Prechter is saying is going to happen to the Gold price right now (in case you don't know Prechter's track record on Gold, it's simple: he's been "big picture" bearish on Gold for the past ten years).

Watching each tick lower is frustrating when you pay too much attention to the daily tape (the author is guilty as charged). To give fellow Gold and Gold stock bulls a little taste of what may be coming, let's take a walk down memory lane to an earlier stage in the current secular Gold stock bull market. Here's a current 6 month chart of the $HUI unhedged Gold Bugs Mining Index thru today's close:



Now, here's what I think is a similar point in time from late 2001 (daily candlestick $HUI chart):



And here's what happened next in the $HUI back in late 2001:



And then, here's what happened next in 2002 after this massive spike higher completed:



Now, since I already know the paperbugs are going to counter with "bear market means Gold stocks go lower," here's what the NASDAQ (main candlestick plot) and S&P 500 (black linear plot below) did during the 158% gain in the $HUI:



And, for the curious, here's what the Gold price (main linear plot) and U.S. Dollar Index (lower plot) did during this historic bull run:



I remain bullish on Gold and Gold stocks. I think 2010 is going to be a banner year for Gold stocks based on fundamentals (i.e. "real" price of Gold at multi-decade highs), and I think times like these are when Gold bulls should be buying hand over fist. The secular Gold and Gold stock bull market will not end until the Dow to Gold ratio gets to 2 and we could even go below 1 this cycle.

Scribble Scribble Scribble - Eh, Miss Alcott?

Another bit from Kiddie Lit. Louisa May Alcott wrote much more than the books she's most famous for (Little Women, Little Men, etc.). She also wrote thrillers under various pseudonyms. One of her most serious efforts, though, was A Modern Mephistopheles, published anonymously in 1877. (A later edition, published just after she died, bore her name.) The Atlantic Monthly's reviewer praised it more highly than any of Alcott's acknowledged works. Beverly Lyon Clark points out in Kiddie Lit (113):

Of course this book was not presumably for children, nor was it necessarily drawing on a genre that had made its primary appeal to females. It was also published anonymously. The reviewer thought it could only be by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian. The Atlantic was most enthusiastic, in short, when neither the book’s genre nor its author’s name was identified as feminine and when the book was not specifically addressing children.

Clark has some rather amusing information about Hawthorne fils (50).

“We are told that women – and unmarried women at that – do three-fourths of the novel-reading in the world; and that, consequently, novels must be so fashioned as to please and attract the feminine mind, and especially the junior feminine.” So declaims Julian Hawthorne in 1888, in his essay “Man-Books,” echoing his better-known father, who had famously complained in 1855 that his own novels had had to compete with those by “a d------d mob of scribbling women,” and also echoing the younger Hawthorne’s acerbic contemporary H. H. Boyesen, who indicted the nineteenth-century audience as an “Iron Madonna who strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist.” Julian anticipates “that the great American novelist, when he comes, will give us a man-book”; meanwhile he finds only one or two “man-books” in nineteenth-century American literature – W. S. Mayo’s Kaloolah and perhaps Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

"Man-books"! I wonder if what Hawthorne was looking for was something like John Preston's gay leather S/M classic Mr. Benson, a book that wouldn't be published until the second half of the twentieth century. But "man-books" sounds like porn talk to me. As David Savran wrote in Taking It Like a Man (Princeton, 1998, page 233),

Much of the discourse by leathermen stresses S/M’s remasculinizing force. Yet sometimes this process produces unexpected side effects, connecting S/M to masculinities that have, at best, problematic histories. Thus, for example, two of the contributors to Leatherfolk pointedly invoke Robert Bly’s Iron John. Referring to Bly’s description of various initiation rites, John Preston argues that “[w]hat Bly is talking about, ... the S/M world can deliver.” Mark Thompson, meanwhile, much more indebted to New Age vernacular than Preston, adopts Bly’s nomenclature of the “soft man” and presses into service both the jargon of authenticity and the metaphysics of depth to which Bly continually appeals, noting that what drives leathermen on is “a curiosity to know a deeper part of ourselves, that place where the source of our authentic power resides.” Given the historic positioning of Bly’s work and of the men’s movement, these moves strike me as being inauspicious.

Inauspicious or not, the misogyny and homosexual anxiety that characterizes so much male whining over the past couple of centuries might well be eased by a fatherly spanking from a leather daddy. If the majority of fiction readers are women, Julian, then suck it up and produce what they want; if not, Daddy's always ready to warm your pink behind. But the Atlantic reviewer's assumption that A Modern Mephistopheles must have been written by a man reminded me of something more recent.

In the late 1960s work by an exciting new science fiction writer began to appear, under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. Tiptree corresponded with other writers and fans, but stayed out of sight, which led to much speculation about Tiptree's real identity. It was known that he had worked for the US Army's photointelligence unit in World War II, had later joined the CIA, but returned to school for a doctorate in experimental psychology. Oh, Mary, how butch! It was like James Bond had begun writing science fiction. On the other hand, Tiptree wrote with sensitive attention about women, so some fans speculated that he might be female. Distinguished sf writer Robert Silverberg contributed an introduction to Tiptree's first collection of stories, in which he argued that a woman could not have written such work: "It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male." Elder Bad Boy of sf Harlan Ellison wrote of Tiptree's contribution to his Again, Dangerous Visions anthology, "[Kate] Wilhelm is the woman to beat [for awards] this year, but Tiptree is the man." And of course, it soon emerged that Tiptree was a 61-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon.

You'd think, after all the times writers have successfully passed for the other sex, that people would have learned better than to make such claims as Silverberg made about Tiptree. In fairness, some second-wave feminists have also argued for the existence of female sentences and other specific ways that women can write that men can't. And it seems that most people, whatever they may claim, are still very invested in gender difference. It's always seemed to me that if there are real psychological, emotional, artistic differences between men and women, they'll take care of themselves.

Scribble Scribble Scribble - Eh, Miss Alcott?

Another bit from Kiddie Lit. Louisa May Alcott wrote much more than the books she's most famous for (Little Women, Little Men, etc.). She also wrote thrillers under various pseudonyms. One of her most serious efforts, though, was A Modern Mephistopheles, published anonymously in 1877. (A later edition, published just after she died, bore her name.) The Atlantic Monthly's reviewer praised it more highly than any of Alcott's acknowledged works. Beverly Lyon Clark points out in Kiddie Lit (113):

Of course this book was not presumably for children, nor was it necessarily drawing on a genre that had made its primary appeal to females. It was also published anonymously. The reviewer thought it could only be by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian. The Atlantic was most enthusiastic, in short, when neither the book’s genre nor its author’s name was identified as feminine and when the book was not specifically addressing children.

Clark has some rather amusing information about Hawthorne fils (50).

“We are told that women – and unmarried women at that – do three-fourths of the novel-reading in the world; and that, consequently, novels must be so fashioned as to please and attract the feminine mind, and especially the junior feminine.” So declaims Julian Hawthorne in 1888, in his essay “Man-Books,” echoing his better-known father, who had famously complained in 1855 that his own novels had had to compete with those by “a d------d mob of scribbling women,” and also echoing the younger Hawthorne’s acerbic contemporary H. H. Boyesen, who indicted the nineteenth-century audience as an “Iron Madonna who strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist.” Julian anticipates “that the great American novelist, when he comes, will give us a man-book”; meanwhile he finds only one or two “man-books” in nineteenth-century American literature – W. S. Mayo’s Kaloolah and perhaps Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

"Man-books"! I wonder if what Hawthorne was looking for was something like John Preston's gay leather S/M classic Mr. Benson, a book that wouldn't be published until the second half of the twentieth century. But "man-books" sounds like porn talk to me. As David Savran wrote in Taking It Like a Man (Princeton, 1998, page 233),

Much of the discourse by leathermen stresses S/M’s remasculinizing force. Yet sometimes this process produces unexpected side effects, connecting S/M to masculinities that have, at best, problematic histories. Thus, for example, two of the contributors to Leatherfolk pointedly invoke Robert Bly’s Iron John. Referring to Bly’s description of various initiation rites, John Preston argues that “[w]hat Bly is talking about, ... the S/M world can deliver.” Mark Thompson, meanwhile, much more indebted to New Age vernacular than Preston, adopts Bly’s nomenclature of the “soft man” and presses into service both the jargon of authenticity and the metaphysics of depth to which Bly continually appeals, noting that what drives leathermen on is “a curiosity to know a deeper part of ourselves, that place where the source of our authentic power resides.” Given the historic positioning of Bly’s work and of the men’s movement, these moves strike me as being inauspicious.

Inauspicious or not, the misogyny and homosexual anxiety that characterizes so much male whining over the past couple of centuries might well be eased by a fatherly spanking from a leather daddy. If the majority of fiction readers are women, Julian, then suck it up and produce what they want; if not, Daddy's always ready to warm your pink behind. But the Atlantic reviewer's assumption that A Modern Mephistopheles must have been written by a man reminded me of something more recent.

In the late 1960s work by an exciting new science fiction writer began to appear, under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. Tiptree corresponded with other writers and fans, but stayed out of sight, which led to much speculation about Tiptree's real identity. It was known that he had worked for the US Army's photointelligence unit in World War II, had later joined the CIA, but returned to school for a doctorate in experimental psychology. Oh, Mary, how butch! It was like James Bond had begun writing science fiction. On the other hand, Tiptree wrote with sensitive attention about women, so some fans speculated that he might be female. Distinguished sf writer Robert Silverberg contributed an introduction to Tiptree's first collection of stories, in which he argued that a woman could not have written such work: "It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male." Elder Bad Boy of sf Harlan Ellison wrote of Tiptree's contribution to his Again, Dangerous Visions anthology, "[Kate] Wilhelm is the woman to beat [for awards] this year, but Tiptree is the man." And of course, it soon emerged that Tiptree was a 61-year-old woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon.

You'd think, after all the times writers have successfully passed for the other sex, that people would have learned better than to make such claims as Silverberg made about Tiptree. In fairness, some second-wave feminists have also argued for the existence of female sentences and other specific ways that women can write that men can't. And it seems that most people, whatever they may claim, are still very invested in gender difference. It's always seemed to me that if there are real psychological, emotional, artistic differences between men and women, they'll take care of themselves.

Kentucky Supreme Court recognizes nonbio mom

In one of the best and most straightforward court opinions I have ever read on the subject, the Kentucky Supreme Court last week ruled, in a 4-3 decision, that a nonbiological mom was entitled to joint custody of the son she planned for and raised with her former partner. The opinion, Mullins v. Picklesimer, reads as a beacon of light shining through the obfuscation courts all too often bring to the actual lives of lesbian couples and their children.

Arminta Mullins and Phyllis Picklesimer had a baby. They selected a semen donor who resembled Mullins, and Picklesimer was inseminated and bore the child. Mullins and her mother were present at the child's birth. The child was premature and spent two months in neo-natal intensive care. Both moms attended him. They named him Zachary Alexander Picklesimer-Mullins. Once Zachary came home, both moms took leave to care for him, and when they both returned to work, Mullins' mother cared for him while the moms were at work. Both women provided care and financial support. The child called Mullins "momma." He considered both women his parents, even according to Picklesimer's testimony.

When the child was less than a year old, the couple filed custody papers granting a judgment of custody to Mullins on the basis that she was the child's de facto custodian. The couple split up a few months later, and they continued to co-parent for several more months, until Picklesimer refused to allow Mullins to see the child. Mullins filed a petition for joint custody.

So. It turned out that Mullins did not meet the statutory criteria for a de facto custodian because Kentucky does not recognize that status if the parent and de facto parent are actually parenting together. Therefore, the court order the couple had obtained was invalid. Nonetheless, the Kentucky Supreme Court found that Mullins was entitled to joint custody.

First, she had standing (which means the ability) to file because the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA), adopted in Kentucky and almost all states, allows "a person acting as a parent" to file, and it defines that to mean a person who "has [or within the last six months has had] physical custody of the child and .... claims a right to legal custody under the law of this state." The court interpreted this to permit standing in a shared custody situation; Mullins did not have to have physical custody to the exclusion of Picklesimer. Because so many states have the UCCJEA, this portion of the case has the potential for impact beyond Kentucky. The court was clear that the specific facts in this type of family situation differed from circumstances involving nonparents such as a grandparent, babysitter, or boyfriend or girlfriend of the parent.

Turning to the statutory standard for awarding custody to Mullins, the court said that a parent has a superior right unless the parent is unfit (not relevant here) or "has waived [her] superior right to custody by clear and convincing evidence." And, in the most significant part of the opinion, the court ruled that the law of waiver of superior custody rights includes partial waiver that gives a child "another parent in addition to the natural parent." "In this case," the court wrote, "Picklesimer waived her superior right to sole custody of the child in favor of a joint custody arrangement with Mullins....What Picklesimer waived...was her right to be the sole decision-maker regarding her child and the right to sole physical possession of the child."

The court continued with what might be some of my favorite sentences ever in an opinion on this subject. It said the doctrine of partial waiver was both legally justified and "necessary 'in order to prevent the harm that inevitably results from the destruction of the bond that develops between the child and the nonparent who has raised the child as his or her own. The bond between a child and a co-parenting partner who is looked upon as another parent by the child cannot be said to be any less than the bond that develops between the child and a nonparent to whom the parent has relinquished full custody." The focus, according to the court, should be on "whether the legal parent has voluntarily chosen to create a family unit and to cede to the third party a sufficiently significant amount of parental responsibility and decision-making authority to create a parent-like relationship with his or her child."

The Kentucky trial court had awarded Mullins joint custody. The intermediate appeals court had reversed. The effect of the Kentucky Supreme Court's decision reversing the appeals court is that the trial court order goes into effect. Zachary has his two moms back.

This opinion is stunning. The first obvious reason is that it is from Kentucky, a state not known for being gay-friendly. Beyond that, however, it seems to me that the majority totally understood the family this couple created, and it understood it without the friend-of-the-court briefs customarily filed in such cases by LGBT legal groups and mainstrean mental health organizations like the American Psychological Association. The biological mother created a two-parent family; she did cede part of the right she gets from her biological connection to the child to her partner. She did it every bit as much as a married woman who has a child with her husband using donor sperm. The court specifically said that Mullins cared for Zachary "in the capacity of a parent." The child, although only 18 months old when the trial took place, knew he had two parents. And so did the majority of the Kentucky Supreme Court.

In other cases, even when the non-bio mom has been successful, the courts often hedge. They come up with a list of factors the non-bio mom must meet. They act squeamish, ever guarding against the possibility of opening the door too wide to actual non-parents. Sometimes they qualify the victory by allowing only visitation rights, not custody. This court saw exactly how this family was created and functioned and was not at all concerned about its ruling going beyond a family so obviously created in this fashion. One of the dissenting judges expressed the fear that step-parents, even after short marriages, would be able to contest custody of their step-children. I don't see that at all. The majority describes this family first by the couple's decision to bring a child into the world through donor insemination and to parent that child together. The majority makes its ruling seem like simple common sense. Which it is.

Reality Is For Those Who Can't Face Oz

"Fantasy is not for everybody," [Martin] Gardner contentiously puts it. "I know of no studies by professional psychologists on this matter, but I hazard the guess that an eight-year-old's liking for fantasy reflects the strength of his imagination. ... I suspect that it is from the ranks of such children, when grown, that come our most creative individuals." (Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America [Johns Hopkins, 2003], page135)

Such a tendency [to accomodate the real] was reinforced by John Dewey's turn-of-the-century preference for stories that do not encourage children to escape from reality... (Clark, 136)

When asked whether Oz is especially popular with young girls, Martin Gardner responded, "I'm afraid it is." (Clark, 140)

I think it's quite funny, this notion that "fantasy" fiction encourages children (or adults) to escape from reality while "realistic" fiction encourages children to face it. It's as funny as the Freudian belief that the Pleasure Principle is somehow opposed to the Reality Principle, though I suppose that one makes sense if you believe that Reality is no fun at all, but c'mon -- pleasure is still part of reality. I read all kinds of books as a child, from fairy tales to "realistic" fiction, biographies, popularized science, and so on, and I used all of them to escape "reality," the reality of growing up a book-crazed sissy in the semi-rural Midwest during the 1950s. Alexander the Great, George Washington Carver, Frank Lloyd Wright, Clara Barton, and Madame Curie were as real, and as fantastical, to me as Stuart Little, Jo March and her boys, Horton the elephant, the Boxcar Children, or the Three Billygoats Gruff.

Reality Is For Those Who Can't Face Oz

"Fantasy is not for everybody," [Martin] Gardner contentiously puts it. "I know of no studies by professional psychologists on this matter, but I hazard the guess that an eight-year-old's liking for fantasy reflects the strength of his imagination. ... I suspect that it is from the ranks of such children, when grown, that come our most creative individuals." (Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America [Johns Hopkins, 2003], page135)

Such a tendency [to accomodate the real] was reinforced by John Dewey's turn-of-the-century preference for stories that do not encourage children to escape from reality... (Clark, 136)

When asked whether Oz is especially popular with young girls, Martin Gardner responded, "I'm afraid it is." (Clark, 140)

I think it's quite funny, this notion that "fantasy" fiction encourages children (or adults) to escape from reality while "realistic" fiction encourages children to face it. It's as funny as the Freudian belief that the Pleasure Principle is somehow opposed to the Reality Principle, though I suppose that one makes sense if you believe that Reality is no fun at all, but c'mon -- pleasure is still part of reality. I read all kinds of books as a child, from fairy tales to "realistic" fiction, biographies, popularized science, and so on, and I used all of them to escape "reality," the reality of growing up a book-crazed sissy in the semi-rural Midwest during the 1950s. Alexander the Great, George Washington Carver, Frank Lloyd Wright, Clara Barton, and Madame Curie were as real, and as fantastical, to me as Stuart Little, Jo March and her boys, Horton the elephant, the Boxcar Children, or the Three Billygoats Gruff.