祝日 / Permanent Vacation
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
almost home
Product Placement
Xuebing Du
JVL
Kiana Khansmith
dirt enthusiast
NASA
Cosimo Galluzzi
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
#extradirty
One Nice Bug Per Day
Cosmic Funnies
Discoholic 🪩
Game of Thrones Daily
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Andulka
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Love Begins
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Venezuela
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Türkiye
seen from Pakistan
@queerlynotcomplacent-blog
This blog is going quiet
I haven't had the time or energy to contribte to it as I should. I'm sorry if its a dissapointment, but unless someone wants to help out, I don't have the juice to keep blogging on mulitple bolgs right now.
-Harry
Here’s a hilarious Helen Keller joke! Do you know what no one saw or heard coming? Helen Keller’s radical socialist activism for the rights of the poor, women, the disabled. And so people ignored and belittled her politics. They argued a deaf, blind person could not know what she was talking about. And so they reduced her to the safe story of a young girl who overcame disability, and nothing else. Wait I mean haha she was blind! How funny.
The head of the Iron County Forestry Department says the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Ojibwe isn’t doing enough to remove its harvest village project in the Penokee Hills, and says the sheriff should evict them.
Breaking News: White People Still Don’t Understand Treaty Rights
If you blame Native American communities for their poverty, remember that the entire continent was stolen from them. If you blame Black American communities for their relative poverty, remember that Black Americans were stolen from a continent, trafficked, and enslaved for nearly 300 years. Tell me again about how your family ‘started from nothing’ when they immigrated. Didn’t they start from whiteness? Seems like a pretty good start. The American Dream required dual genocides, but tell me again about fairness and equal opportunity. Tell me about democracy, modeled after the Iroquois Confederacy. Tell me your proud heritage, and I will show you the violence that made it so.
Kim Katrin Crosby, Keynote Speaker for LGBTQ History Month at Dartmouth, September 30, 2013 (via thenegrotude)
Forget Google Glass, Android Wear, Smartwatches or contact lenses that give you night vision. Instead let’s talk about the awesomeness that is this 17th century Chinese abacus ring. It’s wearable tech from the Qing Dynasty, perhaps the world’s oldest smart ring.
Measuring a mere 1.2 centimeter-long by 0.7 centimeter-wide, the miniature abacus is a fully functional counting tool, but it’s so tiny that using it requires an equally dainty tool, such as a pin, to manipulate the beads, which are each less than one millimeter long.
"However, this is no problem for this abacus’s primary user—the ancient Chinese lady, for she only needs to pick one from her many hairpins."
[via Fashionably Geek and Gizmodo]
oh my god ancient chinese ladies knew where it was at
I’m talking with a boy. He’s at that age when the edges of the man he will become are just starting to press against his baby-round face. He’s got his first opinions and ideas and jokes, which are horrible, because there is nothing that boys his age love more than corny jokes. There is a whole industry of knock-knock-joke books for boys this age. Everything about him is gangly; his voice and his limbs fit awkwardly, like hand-me-downs. He’s young enough that his smile is easy, and he is the kind of boy who finds reasons to smile in everything: the cracking of his voice, a fire-engine siren, the fact that a grown-up is talking to him and listening to what he says. When I talk with kids like this, our conversations always seem to go the same way: “So you’re telling me these are all the books published last year for kids?” they ask me. “That’s a lot of books. That’s more books than I could read in a year.” There was something missing. I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. “Yep, it’s a few thousand.” “And in all of those thousands of books, I’m just not in them?” “Well…um…yes.” “Are there books about talking animals?” “Oh, sure.” “And crazy magical futures?” “Absolutely.” “And superpowers? And the olden days when people dressed funny? And all the combinations of those things? Like talking animals with superpowers in magical futures … but no me?” “No you.” “Why?” “Because you’re brown.”
"The Apartheid of Children’s Literature" (via cauda-pavonis)
So I might be beating a dead horse at this point, but, for all of y’all who were throwing your support to Rooney Mara/Warner Brothers for her casting as Tiger Lily in Pan citing “she was probably the best actress for the part!” or some other bull, here’s more proof that Hollywood is racist and you need to not blindly defend things you have no knowledge on…
This is something to think about, because it debunks another version of the “well we just couldn’t get a/an *insert group name here* to audition, we chose the best person for the job” excuse.
A message for the brown kids
By Q Wideman
This is for the brown kids.
This is for the free and reduced breakfast club.
This is for my loudmouth fistfighters.
My under-the-covers-reading all-nighters.
My late-shift-working in-class nappers.
My back-of-the-classroom rappers.
My mother-tongue-speaking back-talkers.
My always-finding-death-threats in their lockers.
My always-late-to-class little sibling caretakers.
My smartass saggy-pants troublemakers.
My brown genderqueer hip-switchers.
My test-anxiety-prone class-skippers.
My outside-agitator walkout organizers.
This is for my never-meant-to survivors.
In kindergarten, I already knew not to go anywhere unless I was sure there wouldn’t be a check-in.
I was always too chicken to speak to the men with guns on their hips.
And slurs in their snarling lips and I didn’t even go
to a school where they met me at the door.
So I’m gonna try to compute just how much more afraid I’d be today if the first school club I was introduced to was a billy club.
I’ll try to raise the number of panic attacks I’ve had this year to the power of pepper spray, taser, glocks, handcuffs and a badge.
I’ll try to multiply my fear by the number of kids who look like me who had their faces slammed into pavement last semester.
And I know I haven’t been good at math since I was told I was a poor tester.
But something about the trauma of going to school under occupation seems to add up to walking out with less capacity to trust than we walked in with.
To fear and resistance to authority.
To hyperactivity and needing to get free.
Critical Thinking Question: Why were the millions of dollars Wake County [N.C.] spent on police station contracts and security guards somehow easier to budget than even half the recommended number of counselors?
Answer: Because our minds are worth more to them terrified than understood.
See, our schools might look like prisons, but the bars aren’t for keeping us in; they’re for pushing us out.
Our schools are factories producing marketable products, not making good citizens, but punishing manufactured misconduct.
There are more of my people incarcerated today than there were slaves in 1850 and black students in Wake County account for 60% of suspensions because their definition of defiance is “looking kinda shifty.”
Schools claim to be invested in teaching critical thinking but from us brown kids, asking questions equals dissension which leads to detention, suspension, and apprehension by state henchmen with the intention to arrest.
So ask us again why we don’t feel like participating in class discussion.
We dare you.
Ask us why we’d rather spend 90 minutes in a bathroom stall or wandering empty halls than in your classrooms.
We know that when we ask questions we scare you.
You thought you were ready for us.
You’d already bought us jumpsuits instead of graduation gowns.
You’d even opened up a whole new prison by shutting some arts programs down.
You thought you were ready for us.
Us brown kids?
We’re ready for you, too
We are: Healing our black eyes in peer mediation sessions
Channeling Laila Ali in Second Round Boxing lessons
We are: Staying up all night reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, comprehending all kinds of things we were never supposed to know.
We are: Working the late shift paying bills to stay alive, even though we know we were never meant to survive.
We are: Rapping about restorative justice and letting our spirits soar, spittin’ about the day when Central Prison is no more.
We are: standing together, from AP English to ISS to alternative schools to Central Prison.
We are: teaching you a lesson, and this time you’re gonna have to listen to us, the brown kids, the kids from the back of the bus.
Know your rights.
Michelle Alexander: White men get rich from legal pot, black men stay in prison March 14, 2014
Ever since Colorado and Washington made the unprecedented move to legalize recreational pot last year, excitement and stories of unfettered success have billowed into the air. Colorado’s marijuana tax revenue far exceeded expectations, bringing a whopping $185 million to the state and tourists are lining up to taste the budding culture (pun intended). Several other states are now looking to follow suit and legalize.
But the ramifications of this momentous shift are left unaddressed. When you flick on the TV to a segment about the flowering pot market in Colorado, you’ll find that the faces of the movement are primarily white and male. Meanwhile, many of the more than 210,000 people who were arrested for marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010 according to a report from the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, remain behind bars. Thousands of black men and boys still sit in prisons for possession of the very plant that’s making those white guys on TV rich.
“In many ways the imagery doesn’t sit right,” said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in a public conversation on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”
Alexander said she is “thrilled” that Colorado and Washington have legalized pot and that Washington D.C. decriminalized possession of small amounts earlier this month. But she said she’s noticed “warning signs” of a troubling trend emerging in the pot legalization movement: Whites—men in particular—are the face of the movement, and the emerging pot industry. (A recent In These Times article titled “ The Unbearable Whiteness of Marijuana Legalization,” summarize this trend.)
Alexander said for 40 years poor communities of color have experienced the wrath of the war on drugs.
“Black men and boys” have been the target of the war on drugs’ racist policies—stopped, frisked and disturbed—“often before they’re old enough to vote,” she said. Those youths are arrested most often for nonviolent first offenses that would go ignored in middle-class white neighborhoods.
“We arrest these kids at young ages, saddle them with criminal records, throw them in cages, and then release them into a parallel social universe in which the very civil and human rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement no longer apply to them for the rest of their lives,” she said. “They can be discriminated against [when it comes to] employment, housing, access to education, public benefits. They’re locked into a permanent second-class status for life. And we’ve done this in precisely the communities that were most in need of our support.”
As Asha Bandele of DPA pointed out during the conversation, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Today, 2.2 million people are in prison or jail and 7.7 million are under the control of the criminal justice system, with African American boys and men—and now women—making up a disproportionate number of those imprisoned.
Alexander’s book was published four years ago and spent 75 weeks on the New York Timesbestseller list, helping to bring mass incarceration to the forefront of the national discussion.
Alexander said over the last four years, as she’s been traveling from state to state speaking to audiences from prisons to universities about her book, she’s witnessed an “awakening.” More and more people are talking about mass incarceration, racism and the war on drugs.
Full article
A federal judge has ruled that Tennessee must recognize the marriages of three same-sex couples as their marriage equality lawsuit works its way through the courts.
The three couples were married in other states and filed a federal suit against Tennessee for failing to recognize their marriages. Today, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger issued a preliminary injunction saying that Tennessee must recognize their marriages in the meantime — but only the marriages of these couples, NOT all same-sex couples in the state.
In Tennessee, marriage between partners of the same gender is prohibited by state law and by a constitutional amendment approved in 2006.
"We only have one Constitution in this country. It applies to us in Tennessee, as well as New Jersey, New York, anywhere else," said attorney Abby Rubenfeld in October 2013. "These married couples are entitled to receive the same treatment as any other couples in Tennessee, and that’s what’s going to happen in this lawsuit."
Well, this is exciting! Here’s hoping it’s a good sign!
Recently the following quote by bell hooks was shared and reblogged on tumblr over 350+ times:
“White supremacist power is always weakened when people of color bond across differences of culture, ethnicity, and race. It is always strengthened when we act as though...
[image description: 2 tweets from Chuks @Black_in_Asia
1: “My 12yo cousin today told me that she was sad because she isn’t beautiful because she isn’t light skinned.”
2: “I asked her if she had seen Lupita and how gorgeous she was, and it immediately changed her frown to a big smile. :) #ThePowerofRepresentation”]
"Twenty-one million people with disabilities did not vote,” said [Christopher] Dodd. “That made the disabled communities the single largest demographic group of nonvoters in the United States of America. At that time, only 16 percent of polling places were physically accessible. And not one, not one of the nearly 500 polling locations which the General Accounting Office (GAO) visited on Election Day in 2000, had special ballots adapted for blind voters.”
Improving the Voting Experience in America
My polling place is not accessible (the line to vote goes up an enormous staircase), so I have to use the “special” accommodations instead of voting like everyone else.
But if I didn’t know about that option, I would’ve just turned away. And what about all the people that don’t consider themselves disabled and wouldn’t ask for accommodations but also can’t stand in line for HOURS at a time, either because of their knees or their hearts or their kids or their jobs?
Not to mention these absurd “voter ID” laws that require people of color, poor people, old people, students, and disabled people - disproportionately - to stand in line at the DMV for hours on end just for the “privilege” <ahem shouldn’t it be a right> to vote.
(via disabilityhistory)
BREAKING: Two buildings collapse after gas explosion in Harlem
'We saw people flying out the window,' one witness said. The buildings were left in rubble on Park Ave. at East 116th St. At least 11 people were injured, according to the Fire Department. Witnesses said the blaze began Wednesday morning in the Absolute Piano store. Metro-North service was suspended in both directions as Mayor de Blasio went to the scene.
Updates: At least one person killed.
One more confirmed death.
More than 12 people still missing.
breaking news
building just exploded in harlem, 116th & park
11 injured, so far.
Be safe, New Yorkers. all my love.
We have ‘free’ education through grade 12 as a basic human right in the U.S. And what is it? A system set up for processing, grading and sorting human raw material into an input for corporate HR departments. The first statewide public school systems were set up in New England because mill owners needed hands who’d been taught to be punctual, line up on command, eat and pee at the sound of a bell, and cheerfully obey instructions from an authority figure behind a desk. As a majority of people moved into white collar jobs, this basic function persisted — with the additional task of schooling students to prioritize tasks set for them by an authority figure over their own self-directed interests, and to regard as a trivial ‘hobby’ anything not assigned by a boss.
Kevin Carson ("When Basic Services Are Guaranteed As a ‘Right’")
