There is APPARENTLY a Large Group of People Who Don't Realize That 'THE ONION' is SATIRE!

sat·ire 

[sat-ahy^uhr]  

–noun

A work of literature that mocks social conventions, another work of art, or anything its author thinks ridiculous. Gulliver's Travels , by Jonathan Swift, is a satire of eighteenth-century British society.

 

- Dictionary.com.

from:

"Literally Unbelievable"

HAPPY 45th BIRTHDAY to Legal Birth Control. Enjoy it While You Can.

comment by: crowepps This is just so discouraging  

June 7, 2011 - 3:25pm

Birth control enabled us to raise our children in middle-class homes instead of poverty.  Birth control enabled women to become far more healthy.  Birth control enabled women to share a close relationship with their husbands instead of cold shouldering them out of fear of another pregnancy.

I understand that some people believe God wants us all to be poor, sick and miserable, but I just cannot understand why the great majority who don't agree with them is tolerating their stupidity.

from: Almost Fifty Years After Griswold, We're Still Fighting for Access to Contraception,

- by Jodi Jacobson.

Family planning--the means through which people exercise their right to decide whether and when to have children, how many children to have and at what intervals--has been cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century because of the huge gains it yields in maternal and infant survival and in the health and survival of children ages 0 to 5 years.

Family planning also has vast economic and social benefits. In the United States, analyses conducted by the Guttmacher Institute show that family planning services are vital to the health and well-being of poor and low-income women in general, and marginalized populations in particular. [...]

Nonetheless, ideologues have hijacked the U.S. House of Representatives, state legislatures, the media and the public discourse around reproductive and sexual health, and there has been a barrage of legislation and other efforts to reduce access to birth control.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

      by Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.


by Robert Duncan, from The Opening of the Field. Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

AWWWWWWWWWW!

Disapeared in Damascus

The Young Syrian Blogger Who Wrote the Poem Below has been Kidnapped, grabbed off the street in Syria. 

This is from a post placed on her blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, today by her cousin:  

Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. [...]

Amina was seized by three men in their early 20’s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. [...]

One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad.

 Update:

I have been on the telephone with both her parents and all that we can say right now is that she is missing. Her father is desperately trying to find out where she is and who has taken her.

Please keep her and her family in your thoughts and prayers, as well as the rest of her people and their struggle to take flight. 

*     *     *

Bird Songs

- by Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari

The bird flies free
Knowing no boundaries
Borders mean nothing
When you have wings

My heart and my soul
Long to follow and soar
Out over mountains
And deserts and seas

I have no wings
And earth presses in
Wrapped in a sheet
Forever to lie

Weighed down by dirtclods
Never to feel
Wind on my wings
Sun on my back

Soaring and flying
Freedom is coming
Here am I wanting
To know it one day 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM

Things Shouldn't Be So hard
by Kay Ryan

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn out place;
beneath her hand,
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space
—however small—
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.

The Changing Light

     by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The changing light
                 at San Francisco
       is none of your East Coast light
                none of your
                            pearly light of Paris
The light of San Francisco
                        is a sea light
                                       an island light
And the light of fog
                   blanketing the hills
          drifting in at night
                      through the Golden Gate
                                       to lie on the city at dawn
And then the halcyon late mornings
       after the fog burns off
            and the sun paints white houses
                                    with the sea light of Greece
                 with sharp clean shadows   
                       making the town look like
                                it had just been painted

But the wind comes up at four o'clock
                                     sweeping the hills

And then the veil of light of early evening

And then another scrim
                  when the new night fog
                                        floats in
And in that vale of light
                      the city drifts
                                    anchorless upon the ocean


from: How to Paint Sunlight. Copyright 2000.

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