Blood types

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I have a moderately uncommon blood type: B-positive. Only about 8% of the American population shares it with me. Apollonia has O-positive, which is horribly common; Partner thinks he’s A-positive, which is also moderately frequent.

So I am more special than they are.

There are even rarer types. AB-positive is pretty rare, and as for AB-negative, only one-half of one percent of the American population has that one.

Back in the 1970s, I used to give blood on a regular basis. Why not? I’m a good citizen, and very altruistic.

But then, with the onset of HIV/AIDS, the government changed the rules. Gay men are no longer welcome to give blood in the United States, if we have ever been sexually active.

At all.

O my!

Many countries have changed this rule. In some countries, they ask about how sexually active you’ve been. In the United States, it doesn’t matter. If you’re a man who’s ever had sex with a man, they don’t want you to give blood.

This is a shame, because my B-positive blood is desirable.

It’s also ridiculous, because they test blood now to see if there’s anything dangerous in it, like HIV.

But still they won’t take my blood.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has recently reopened this issue. I applaud her for it.

I want to give blood again.

I’m a B-positive who wants to help. And I’m pretty sure my blood is okay for public consumption.

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Lessons from the 2012 Presidential campaign

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It has taken me a little while to compose myself after Election Night 2012.  Now that I’ve stopped screaming with joy, however, I’ve jotted down a few things I’ve learned over the past few weeks and months.

 

 

As follows:

 

 

Probably you shouldn’t try to redefine the word “rape.” It doesn’t make you many friends. (Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock: hear me?)

 

 

Money doesn’t necessarily win elections.  When it’s quite evident that you’re trying to buy a House/Senate seat (McMahon in Connecticut, Hinckley in Rhode Island), you will probably lose. And Donald Trump publicly mocked Karl Rove for wasting millions of dollars of PAC money on candidates who lost. (As a Tumblr commentator said: Who knows more than Donald Trump about wasting money?)

 

 

Lying is very traditional in American presidential elections, but it’s getting easier and easier to disprove a lie. Probably people should try to lie less (or at least more cleverly). And they should not openly flout the fact-checkers.

 

 

In a state where people traditionally hate and fear state troopers (like Rhode Island, for example), the opposition party shouldn’t nominate a state trooper as their candidate. (Bye-bye, Brendan Doherty.)

 

 

Don’t make fun of your opponent. It makes you look small. (This one goes out to former Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who insisted on belittling his opponent Elizabeth Warren as a liar, as ugly, as untrustworthy, as a “college professor.” It didn’t work, did it, Scotty?)

 

 

Do not, in your concession speech, imply that God made your opponent win in order to make the Apocalypse happen sooner. (Okay, Mr. God-be-the-glory Todd Akin?)

 

 

Don’t assume that gay marriage is a passing fad. Before Tuesday, every popular referendum on gay marriage had failed, and the Republicans / social conservatives were convinced they had a failsafe way to defeat gay marriage: bring it to a popular vote. Well, on Tuesday, four states voted, and three (Washington, Maine, and Maryland) upheld gay marriage. You can be sure the GOP will be less confident in future about this particular strategy. (So Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee can take their Chick-fil-A sandwiches and jam them up one another’s asses. And they can make sure those sandwiches are up there real tight, too.)

 

 

And finally:

 

 

The country is changing. We are more diverse, and more tolerant, as a whole. (A commentator in 2008, shortly after Obama’s first election, said that bigotry and intolerance in the USA would decrease over time, but (like seawater evaporating) they would become more concentrated and intense. I remember thinking this was a very wise thing to say. Now, after four years of concentrated intense vicious hatred of Obama and the liberal agenda, I see how prescient he was.) But we are not Sarah Palin’s America, and we are not Mitt Romney’s America (whatever the hell that was supposed to be about). We are a multicolored America. We do not care to be ruled by Christian law, or Sharia law, or any kind of religious law for that matter. We like our marijuana. We like being married to our common-law partners. We like Planned Parenthood. We like knowing that, if we become ill, we will not go into bankruptcy if we go to the doctor. We have no problem with electing women, and gays, and differently-abled people; in fact, we’re proud to be represented by them.

 

 

Let the right-wing nuts shriek about socialism and the Death of America, kids. They’ll tucker themselves out in a while, and we can have some peace, maybe even through Inauguration Day.

 

 

And I’m sure the 2016 campaign won’t begin before June or July of 2013.

 

 

(I plan to vote for Hillary. How about you?)

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Elizabeth Warren, Scott Brown, and the Sacred Cod of Massachusetts

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Scott Brown, the loathsome incumbent junior Senator from Massachusetts, is now running for reelection. He (horribly enough) won Ted Kennedy’s seat two years ago, when the Democratic Party in Massachusetts was too lazy to run a campaign, figuring that they’d win in any case.

 

 

The Massachusetts Democratic party was wrong.

 

 

Scott Brown won by being cute (he was a Playgirl model) and riding around in a pickup truck (which he’s doing again currently) and being ingenuous, and pretending to be very much a man of the people.

 

 

Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate in 2010, did absolutely nothing to campaign for herself. She was smug enough to believe that the legacy of Ted Kennedy was enough to win the seat for her, even if she did diddlysquat to earn it.

 

 

The Democratic Senatorial candidate this time, Elizabeth Warren, is not making that mistake.  She is strong and smart and capable. She’s made a few missteps, but she’s a good person.

 

 

(I’m a Rhode Islander, so I’m not voting in that election. Our two Senators are firm and fervent Democrats.  But we Rhode Islanders are deluged with Massachusetts political advertisements, so I speak from knowledge.)

 

 

In his adverts, Scott’s usually driving around (yet again!) in his pickup truck, talking to “regular folks.” He even shows images of himself with President Obama, portraying himself as a Republican who can compromise with the Democrats.

 

 

(Don’t you believe it. He voted with his party most of the time over the last two years.)

 

 

But here’s the thing that irritates me the most: he’s been running ads about the local fisheries industry, about how “government regulation” has been destroying the Massachusetts fishing industry, and that he’s been fighting to protect the fishermen.

 

 

Fact: the fisheries outlook in the North Atlantic is bleak at the moment, because the North Atlantic has been entirely overfished. The trademark fish of Massachusetts – including the sacred cod – are now endangered. There is now officially a fisheries “disaster” in the North Atlantic.

 

 

If you like cod and haddock and suchlike, prepare to pay a lot more for them, or switch to salmon and tilapia.

 

 

And if you’re a Scott Brown admirer, remember that things are never as simple as they seem in a political advertisement.

 

 

And for you Massachusetts readers: vote for Elizabeth Warren, kids. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

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