California Astronomer to Leap Into 2009 at 3:59:60 p.m. PST

by Sandy Sand

This might be the last time to celebrate the adjustment of atomic clocks if scientists, who think it’s a waste of time get their way.

The quiet high desert town of Valencia in Southern California won’t be so quiet around the home of Skip Newhall this afternoon.

Seventy-year-old retired astronomer Newhall plans to celebrate with a number of friends to equal his age when the clock strikes it’s 60th second at 4 p.m. PST, which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time.

"We are going to have some fun with it," Newhall said while pictured (in the Daily News) sitting next to four digital clocks in his home that will display the “leap second” when it happens, but don’t blink.

The purpose of the leap second is to adjust timekeeping to be in sync with the Earth’s rotation which varies with tidal friction and lunar gravitational pull.

This is the 24th time since atomic clocks have been adjusted since the practice began in December 1972.

A time-tracker since childhood, and fearing that this might be the last time the adjustment takes place, because the scientific community is divided on whether it’s a waste of time or not, Newhall plans to make it the best Leap of Time party ever.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11340442

Bad Economy Trickles Up; Good Economy Does Not Trickle Down

by Sandy Sand

Aaaaaw. Isn’t that just too bad. Even the wealthiest are tightening their belts.
Welcome to the real world.

According to SpendingPulse, luxury sales dropped nearly 35 percent at the beginning of December as compared to the same week last year, and were also down 23 percent for the five previous weeks.

High-end stores and the manufacturers of the brands they carry are feeling the pinch, too. It’s not like no luxury items aren’t being purchased; they are. The wealthy are just buying fewer of them.

Tuff. Things are rough all over.

I lived through Ronald Reagan’s trickle down economics and all I saw was greed, the wealthier getting richer, prices go up, companies swallowed up by mergers and acquisitions then chopped up and sold off and a huge loss of jobs.
All that was really swell for most of us.

That led to global economics, outsourcing of jobs, the death of our manufacturing base, rise in prices and even more loss of jobs.

I never understood why companies like Nike and Mattel outsourced all their manufacturing to cheap labor countries, yet the prices of their good never came down; in many cases they went up.

Global domination is nothing new in the diamond market either.
While diamonds were never a girl’s best friend regardless of what the song said, they were the best little pals of De Beers Group, which is also feeling the pain of the tanking economy.

I can’t begin to say how much my heart goes out to De Beers, which has artificially controlled the price of diamonds worldwide for years. Diamond-rich Russia has vaults filled with billions of the little gems from the precious to the industrial.

If Russia were to released even a small portion of them, a diamond would have less value than a zircon on the open market, which are their real value anyway.
Although the rich haven’t stopped spending altogether, they’re buying fewer pieces of jewelry, yachts, furs, cars or whatever their little hearts desire.

Don’tcha really feel sorry for the Vanderbucks of the world?

They may be making do with fewer diamonds, but they’ll still never have to worry about paying the mortgage; taking their kids to the doctor; choosing between cheap hamburger or a prescription; giving up faithful Fido because they can no longer afford to feed or vet him; choosing between turning on the heat or A/C and freezing or boiling to death; or any of the little financial decisions most of us have dealt with on a daily basis for most of our lives.

No. They’ll never have to make those choices.

Welcome to our world. It’s about time you, too, learned the lessons of frugality and a little less materialism in your lives might make you wake up and smell a little reality.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11292189

One Potato, Two Potato. 100 Potatoes to Cook Up Super-sized Chanukah Latke

by Sandy Sand

Only in Southern California. A beach town Jewish congregation creates a super-sized potato pancake to make McDonald’s proud.

Southern Californians like to pride themselves in being innovators and concocting new ideas that the country soon follows.

Members of Temple Isaiah in Newport Beach combined a green Chanukah with the traditional blue and white celebration making it into a light aqua event, and an attempt to break the world record for the largest potato latke.

Potato pancakes -- latkes -- are traditional fare served at Chanukah parties and are usually about four inches in diameter.

Isaiah congregants shredded enough of the spuds to make a three-foot wide super supper latke, which they cooked up in a solar paneled oven.

Record setting by itself, it must have taken a fantastic amount of sun power to heat up an oven big enough to cook that giant pancake. Not even new kitchen ovens are that big.

Rabbi Marc Rubenstein said in a sermon to the 100-family congregation that focused on the environment, "We are our brother's keeper, and we also have to take care of the Earth."

A neat idea and a fun thing to do, but I’m afraid there will be no prize as far as latke purists are concerned.

Real potato latkes are fried; their’s was baked.

If anything, they should win a prize for baking up the world’s biggest potato kugel.

Cook’s 5,111 Nights Off

by Sandy Sand

Poor baby, Laura forgot how to cook.

No one forgets how to cook, it’s worse than and more engrained than bike riding, which no one forgets how to do either.

If Laura Bush has forgotten how to cook, as she told Fox News in a recent interview, she better reach of the bottle of Arecept.

The plastic-faced wonder with the permanently tattooed smile that never changes, also told Fox that Georgie has only seen pixs of their new multi-million dollar house in a posh section of Dallas.

No matter, except for trying to rewrite the travesty of his eight years in office, George could care less.

He won’t be spending much time there; he’ll be spending most of his time in exile on his 100,000-acre, bovine-less ranchero in Paraguay, and trying to figure out how to hold the world hostage to the largest supply of fresh water in the world that lies under the land when the time comes.

Thirty-one days and counting…

No Double Life For This Young Woman

by Sandy Sand

There’s a fascinating profile in today’s Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-muslimgay17-2008dec17,0,1438523.story about a young woman of Indian descent, who is no longer living the double life of denying her gayness to her devout Muslim family.

Aliyah Bacchus, 22, a transplant from Guyana, is an exotic looking young woman living in New York City who had a big problem -- knowing that while most Americans are generally accepting of gays, her family isn’t.

She was left with two choices: Live a lie or be true to herself and who she is, or leaving her family forever.

She did what we should all do; be true to ourselves and the rest of the world be damned.

The article made it sound like this problem of being true to oneself or living in an intolerable situation is exclusive to homosexuals.

It isn’t.

Many of us have found ourselves trapped in impossible situations.

Bacchus’ story can be inspirational for anyone finding himself in the same situation, and it doesn't matter if it's a miserable marriage, adult children who are leeches, the mother-in-law from hell, a drug addict family member, or having the worst job in the world.

Fed to Lower Interest Rate to Minus 0.50 Percent

by Sandy Sand

It’s a topsy-turvy world.

The Fed began a two-day meeting yesterday to discuss the economic crunch and came up with a solution to stimulate the economy.

“Our economy is like a dying patient,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, “so we’re going to try drastic experimental surgery to see if we can save its life.”

Interest rates dropped to an all-time low of one-percent during the Great Depression, and that coupled with FDR’s jobs programs worked, he noted.

“We’re going to take that idea a step further into the great beyond of an economy on life support,” said Federal Reserve Assistant Money Counter John Cash, III. “We’re going to take the interest rate into uncharted territory and see what happens.

Later today, Bernanke will announce that the Fed will lower the interest rate to minus 0.05 percent.

“I know it’s a whacky idea, but what hasn’t been complete whacked out basackwards during the last eight years?” said a cynical source who demanded to remain anonymous.

“Who knows. It might work. Nothing else seems to, at least not while George Bush is in office,” he added.

It would be ironic if for a change, the rich, who no matter what will be rich, and banks and Wall Street-types who just got themselves a whopping bail out with no strings attached were forced into coughing up a little payback.

By cutting the interest rate to -0.05 percent, at the end of the loan they will owe the borrower money?

You know, just like happened to T-bills last week.

The Day the Music Died

by Sandy Sand

If not died, at least silenced a bit.

Even music has fallen victim to a crumbling economy. Work holiday parties, too, but maybe that's a good thing.

But this is about entertainment, and heaven knows that during tough times we need a little excapism.

= = = = =

Santa Clarita, California -- Due to slow ticket sales and limited fundraising, the Santa Clarita Symphony was forced to cancel its 2009 concert season.

In stead, they will introduce a Café Series, featuring duos, trios and quintets, but large concerts with a full compliment of professional musicians, and the annual family concert will have to wait for some financial recovery to perform again.

Even music lovers have to pay the price for difficult economic times.

Source: http://www.dailynews.com/search/ci_11201264?IADID=Search-www.dailynews.com-www.dailynews.com

In Retrospect, My Job From Hell Was Funny

by Sandy Sand

When I look back on one of my jobs from hell, I can laugh about it.

It’s amazing how time can alter one’s perception of things.

All I could find was an awful boring part time job to take while looking for a real job. I had construction experience and went to work for a general contractor, who was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce from his wife of thirty or more years.

She wasn’t supposed to come anywhere near the office and must have waited in the parking lot for him to leave, because she always walked through the door when he wasn’t there. Like right after he was no longer there.

They were both nice people, and while they both like me, I really liked her better.
Each decided I was to be a best friend, putting me squarely in the middle of their divorce from hell, which made my less than desirable hellish.

It was like being a child of parents who were currying favor, and forcing their daughter to take mom’s or dad’s side.

Two weeks was all I could stand. Not having ever left a job without giving notice, this time I did; I had to for my sanity.

Come to think of it, maybe I should have stuck around and learned how to play the game of pitting mom and dad against each other, and let them bribe me with phenomenal toys to pick a side to play with.

Nah. It was so much easier and less stressful to go back to collecting unemployment and battling the bureaucrats instead of the Bickersons.

I always wondered what happened to them. I had visions of them solving their marital disputes at the point of a sword rather than pointed words.

African-America women and AIDS. We must change this.

by Kathlyn Stone


HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 25 and 44.

Take a moment and let that sink in.

During the ages when the more fortunate among us are starting, then advancing in our careers, and frequently balancing work and families, a generation of American women are getting sick and dying from a preventable disease.

In her article, "This era of black women and AIDS," (See article below) published Dec. 4 on The Black Commentator, feminist scholar and activist Rev. Irene Monroe points out many disturbing facts surrounding black women and HIV/AIDS. She also makes it crystal clear that this is an issue of not only race but gender disparity.

It should get everyone’s hackles up. Why is the prevalence of AIDS among African-American women so well hidden in our society?

Monroe pinpoints the reasons: Failed national leadership, lack of support in the church community, homophobia, and the legacy of slavery.

It's a sobering read that could and should open many eyes.

Suzanne Brooks, co-founder of the Sacramento, Calif.-based group Justice 4 All Includes Women of Colorcalled these times “a holocaust against black women.”

Brooks pointed out that not only is this demographic facing the highest rate of increases in HIV/AIDS, African-American women also have the highest suicide rates; the highest death rates from curable diseases; the greatest likelihood of death from heart disease; and the fastest growing rates of incarceration.

Justice 4 All sponsored a conference in September aimed at establishing a National Women of Color Agenda and reports receiving personal commitments from President-Elect Barack Obama that these pressing issues will be addressed.

Brooks and the group’s co-founder, Akilah Uwimana Hatchett, have also appealed to other organizations, such as the non-profit group WomenCount – now campaigning for a Presidential Commission on Women -- to include the health crisis in their priorities.

“Politicians do respond to the will of the people when that will is expressed in sustained, organized actions,” said Brooks.

Let it be so for the sake of an entire generation of black women.


Kathlyn Stone is an independent journalist and publisher of fleshandstone.net. She can be reached at fleshandstone@gmail.com.

This era of black women and HIV/AIDS - Rev. Irene Monroe

December 1st was World AIDS Day and Black women are dying of AIDS. And is anyone doing anything about it?

Right here in the nation’s capitol, the HIV/AIDS epidemic rivals that of many Third World countries. Washington D.C., affectionately dubbed as “Chocolate City,” is approximately 60 percent people of African descent. And of its residents, one in 20 is thought to have HIV, one in 50, AIDS. Of the 3,269 HIV cases identified (tested positive) between 2001 and 2006, nine of 10 were African American.

Are these statistics overwhelming?

“The Washington data is really a microcosm of what we already know: that AIDS in America today is a black disease,” said Phil Wilson, founder of the Black AIDS Institute, an HIV/AIDS think tank that focuses exclusively on AIDS among black Americans.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-Americans account for half of all new HIV cases despite comprising 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Equally alarming is that HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 25 and 44.

At the “Women and Response to AIDS” panel at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006, Sheila Johnson, founder of the Crump-Johnson Foundation in Washington D.C., pointed out that another at-risk population in the African American community is teenage girls. Seventeen percent of the U.S. teen population is African-American. In 2004, 70 percent of all teens testing HIV-positive were black. One in 10 African-American teenage girls test HIV-positive in the nation’s capital, the highest percentage in the country among this age group. When asked why such a high percentage test positive, Johnson said, “As long as girls see themselves as glorified sex objects in hip-hop videos, HIV/AIDS will increase within this population.”

These statistics are overwhelming?!

But so, too, is the failure of leadership African-Americans have faced since the epidemic began. And no group of women is as affected by the failure of leadership in this country than women of African descent.

African-American women and their struggle against the AIDS epidemic was never so glaringly obvious than in the 2004 vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. And the invisibility of my group’s plight has less to do with African-American women’s agency to combat the epidemic than with how the government, African-American men, the Black Church, and race and gender biases, inherent in the problem, collude with African-American women’s efforts to get help.

Gwen Ifill, an African-American female journalist with PBS’ “Washington Week” and moderator of the vice presidential debate, brought the issue of AIDS in the U.S. front and center when she asked the men to comment on its devastating impact on African-American women. Ifill asked:

“I want to talk to you about AIDS, and not about AIDS in China or Africa, but AIDS right here in this country, where black women between the ages of 25 and 44 are 13 times more likely to die of the disease than their counterparts. What should the government’s role be in helping to end the growth of this epidemic?”

Vice President Cheney responded to Ifill’s question by saying:

“Here in the United States, we’ve made significant progress. I have not heard those numbers with respect to African-American women. I was not aware that it was - that they’re in epidemic there.”

But Edwards’ response wasn’t any better. Edwards deflected the question by first going back to answering the previous question. Then with the remaining seconds left, he flubbed his way through.

However, three years later in the June 2007 Democratic Primary Debate at Howard University, that focused on African-American issues ranging from health care and housing to Katrina relief, the economy and the environment, black women stood on their feet as they applauded Sen. Hillary Clinton’s comment about the impact of HIV/AIDS on African-American women.

“Let me just put this in perspective: If HIV/AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34 there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”

When the color of the epidemic shifted from white to black, the inherent gender bias focused only on the needs of African-American men and rendered women invisible. And when gender became a new lens to track the epidemic, white women were the focus. The invisibility of African-American women in this epidemic has much to do with how the absence of a gendered race analysis makes African-American women invisible to the larger society.

What is also unnerving is that today, African-American women make up 60 percent of all AIDS cases reported among women, 64 percent of new AIDS cases among women, and are three times the number of new cases reported among white women.

Many African-American women with HIV contracted it from heterosexual sex. And two ways the virus is contracted heterosexually is through intravenous drug use and African-American men “on the down low.” But men living on the DL is not a new phenomenon in the African-American community. Naming it, however, is. And it was J.L. King who became the country’s poster boy by exposing the behavior in his best-seller, On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of 'Straight' Black Men Who Sleep with Men.

“There are many women, too many women, in relationships with men who they think they know but really don’t. He knew he had the disease, his mother knew he had the disease, his doctors knew, everyone seemed to know except me. And no one said a word,” LaJoyce Brookshire wrote in the foreword of Browder’s book, herself author of Faith Under Fire: Betrayed by a Thing Called Love .

While homophobic attitudes in the larger African-American community and church contribute to their behavior, African-American men are also not taking responsibility for how their behavior is killing African-American women, and putting the entire community at risk.

But the disparities within the healthcare system also contribute to the disproportionately higher number of HIV cases among African-American women, which directly affects their quality of life and the spread of HIV.

While health disparities in the black community is overwhelming, so too is the failure of leadership African-Americans have faced since the epidemic began.

But Phil Wilson states it plainly:

“I think it’s important for us to take just a moment to realize that we are where we are today because we weren’t concerned when we thought it was somebody else’s disease.”

However, the disease has also taught us about the various people -- across race, class and gender -- who wore and continue to wear the face of this disease.

When The New York Native, a now-defunct gay newspaper, in its May 18, 1981, issue first reported on a virus found in gay men then known as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), an editorial noted that “even if the disease first became apparent in gay men, it is not just ‘a gay disease.’” And HIV/AIDS, having neither an alliance to nor an affinity for queer sexualities, spread.

But where would the leadership on HIV/AIDS come from?

Let’s confront the elephant in the black community, by telling the truth and shaming the devil. The biggest problem black lawmakers have had to confront concerning the HIV/AIDS crisis in their communities is the political gag order imposed on them by their voting constituency’s homophobia and animus toward any discussion of the disease.

Would the leadership on HIV/AIDS come from the Black Church?

When it comes to the Black Church and HIV/AIDS, I am always reminded of what my mayor in Cambridge, Mass., Ken Reeves, who is both African-American and gay, told The Washington Blade in March, 1998, during a two-day Harvard University HIV/AIDS conference: “African American male ministers over 40 are a tough nut to crack. If we wait for the Black Church on this, we’ll all be dead.”

The Black Church continues to play a part in the death of African Americans with AIDS. While its silence on the issue is appalling and unconscionable, so too is its various forms of heterosexualized rituals and pronouncements that denigrate both LGBT people and women. A study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that since 2000, African-American Protestants are less likely than other Protestant groups to believe that LGBT people should have equal rights. And since hot-button issues like gay adoption and marriage equality have become more prominent, support for LGBT rights among African-American Protestants has dipped as low as 40 percent.

Therefore, women with AIDS are as unwelcome in the Black Church as LGBT people. Within Black Nationalist milieus like the Black Church and the Nation of Islam espousing “save the endangered black family,” African-American women with AIDS are also viewed as race traitors. In this patriarchal straightjacket, biological essentialist views are as holy and deified as the Bible itself. And with the belief that women are to multiply and bring forth new life for the perpetuation of the race, women with AIDS lose their status in the community. Often labeled as “loose” for having contracted the virus, she is viewed as not only diseased but also dangerous because her sexual wiles continue to seduce men. A woman with AIDS is a fallen woman, not only for having contracted the disease, but also for having disregarded the policing of sexual behavior by the Black Church.

The feminization of this disease makes many of us AIDS activists and scholars wonder if the same amount of money, concern, communication, and moral outrage that was put into white gay men with the disease will be put into curbing its spread among black women.

The AIDS epidemic among African-American women is also symptomatic of the dialogue we need to have about our bodies and sexuality, which has been choked for centuries by a “politic of silence.”

Working in conjunction with the “Politic of silence” is what African-American women historically created as a “culture of dissemblance” and “the politic of respectability,” the silence African-American women created around their bodies and sexuality that had been exploited during slavery was viewed as a revolutionary act against the white oppressive gaze.

African-American women are no more promiscuous than white women, however, stereotypes about African-American women’s bodies and sexualities prevent the proper prevention and education needed to stem the tide of HIV/AIDS.

The iconography of black women is predicated on four racist cultural images: the Jezebel, the Sapphire, Aunt Jemima, and Mammy. With the image of the strong black women who can endure anything and “make a way out of no way,” her strength is either demonized as being emasculating of black men or impervious to the human condition. The Aunt Jemima and Mammy stereotypes are now conflated into what’s called “Big Mamma” in today’s present iconography of racist and sexist images of African-American women.

While the Aunt Jemima and Mammy stereotypes are prevalent images that derive from slavery, for centuries both of them have not only been threatening, comforting and nurturing to white culture but also to African-American men. The dominant culture doesn’t see and hear African-American voices on this issue because our humanity is distorted and made invisible through a prism of racist and sexist stereotypes. So, too, is our suffering.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. Reverend Monroe is the author of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible Prayers for Not-So-Everyday Moments. As an African American feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Her website is irenemonroe.com.