Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We chat about our lives, our health, our families, our social circles, our pets, etc. We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
This diary series is produced by the Team DFH group but anyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome.
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Good Morning!
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Drop in any time of day or night to say hello. |
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A Few Quotes for This Morning
There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled. ~Edward Lucas
A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book. ~Irish Proverb
Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up. ~Ellen Goodman
Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year-olds. ~JoJo Jensen, Dirt Farmer Wisdom, 2002
I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps. ~Tom Hodgkinson
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News
The barrage continues in Syria...
Assad forces renew barrage on Syria's Homs
AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces rained rockets and bombs down on opposition-held neighborhoods of the city of Homs, reducing buildings to rubble and killing more than 80 people, including two Western journalists.
The barrages marked an intensification of a nearly three-week offensive to crush resistance in Homs, one of the focal points of a nationwide uprising against Assad's 11-year rule, and prompted further international condemnation.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy described the deaths of the two journalists, French photographer Remi Ochlik and American Marie Colvin of Britain's Sunday Times, as an assassination and said the Assad era had to end.
Some good news regarding DOMA...
Judge’s Ruling Adds to String in Favor of Same-Sex Couples
A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday threw out a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, becoming the latest court to rule that the law passed by Congress to prohibit federal recognition of same-sex marriage violated the constitutional rights of same-sex couples.
Jeffrey S. White, a United States District Court judge appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002, ruled that the act violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution by denying Blue Cross health benefits to the spouse of Karen Golinski, who works as a staff lawyer in the United States Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit. She married her partner of 20 years, Amy Cunninghis, in August 2008 during the brief period when same-sex marriages were permitted in California.
Debunking the idiocy...
Debunking the right’s contraception myths
Unable, apparently, to convince the public that women having sex without “consequences” is inherently bad for society, conservatives have taken to claiming that increasing access to contraception won’t actually prevent abortions. They’re wrong.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat argues that even though conservatives have failed in selling chastity to the public (even in solidly red states), a remedy he seemingly wants to offer for married couples too, ”the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well.” What, exactly?
An interesting article about the mental health of our nation in general...
Reality Wars: Measuring the Collective Mental Health of a Nation
As a nation, we are fighting several "reality wars" at once. These wars are not only political, but deeply psychological. As a result, our collective mental health as a nation is being severely challenged and tested.
Like that of individuals, the mental health of a nation is measured primarily by how well it is in touch with reality. (Social scientists have long recognized that everything that applies to individuals has a direct analogue with larger social entities. Thus, the "mental health of a nation" is not an absurdity or a contradiction in terms.) Even more basic, mental health is measured in part by what an individual or nation calls reality in the first place, and how it treats it subsequently. Since language is the primary means we use to describe and invent reality, the language a nation uses to frame and treat important issues is a measure, however imperfect, of its mental health.
For example, consider what Republicans call "class warfare." To call legitimate demands that the richest pay their fair share in taxes "class warfare" is not only a gross insult towards the downtrodden and poor, but it obfuscates the basic fact that the gap in wealth between the rich and the poor/middle-class is as large as it has ever been in our history. It tries to dismiss this painful fact through the use of a clever phrase.
If you're of age, think about getting one...
Report Affirms Lifesaving Role of Colonoscopy
A new study provides what independent researchers call the best evidence yet that colonoscopy — perhaps the most unloved cancer screening test — prevents deaths. Although many people have assumed that colonoscopy must save lives because it is so often recommended, strong evidence has been lacking until now.
In patients tracked for as long as 20 years, the death rate from colorectal cancer was cut by 53 percent in those who had the test and whose doctors removed precancerous growths, known as adenomatous polyps, researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The test examines the inside of the intestine with a camera-tipped tube.
“For any cancer screening test, reduction of cancer-related mortality is the holy grail,” said Dr. Gina Vaccaro, a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University who was not involved in the research. “This study does show that mortality is reduced if polyps are removed, and 53 percent is a very robust reduction.”
An interesting look at the Oscars...
The Oscars’ old, white, male problem
On one hand, the evidence dredged up by an extensive Los Angeles Times investigation into the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is damning: The Oscars are being decided by 5,765 voting members (itself a smaller number than usually reported) who are 94 percent white. The membership is also 77 percent male and 86 percent over the age of 50. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is drastically unrepresentative of the United States population as a whole, which is about 36 percent non-white and 51 percent female. The median age of all Americans is 36.8 years, meaning half the population is younger than that and half older.
Now, it’s also true that my reaction to all this diligent legwork by a team of at least seven Times reporters can be summarized with a colloquial phrase that begins with “No” and ends with “Sherlock.” No one who has paid attention to the Oscars or the Academy — or the American film industry at large — harbors any illusions about who’s running the show, or believes that Oscar voters have much in common with Americans or moviegoers at large. Indeed, the borderline-cruel caricature of a typical Oscar voter, often bandied about in private by journalists and publicists, is of a 70-something retired actor, certainly white and probably Jewish, who wears sky-blue slacks and white patent leather shoes and lives in Brentwood or Beverly Hills. That seems to be almost exactly what the Times investigation has revealed. If anything, I found the median age of Academy members to be surprisingly young, at 62, and the male membership surprisingly low, even at 77 percent. It’s only half facetious to say that those numbers reflect years of outreach and affirmative action.
I just wanted to type the words "monster lobster"...
Monster lobster caught off Maine coast
BOOTHBAY HARBOR, Maine (AP) — A giant 27-pound lobster has been caught off the Maine coast, but it won't be going into a pot of boiling water.