Lotripper

This is the "Fall back" switch from Daylight Savings Time, so set your clocks to 11 pm at midnight or whenever: you can always check timeanddate.com, just to be sure. I'm going to try and think of it as an extra hour to sleep in or get things done.

ETA to add Our Neighbors To The North

The fail was back in November when a small majority of voters went against equal marriage rights. The state supreme court just upheld the proposition, because they are bound to decide on the law rather than principle. At least they also confirmed the legal marriages during the interim. But it's not the court's fault, it's the voters' fault, so that's where we have to fight it next.

MarriageEquality.org has a list of protests and actions (mostly in California).

DayOfDecision.com has another list

There are twitter reports from the Sacramento protest at twitter.com/stop8dotorg and from San Francisco at twitter.com/geminiwench with lots of pictures. More coming at twitter #rejectprop8

Couragecampaign.org is proposing a Meet in the Middle demonstration reaching out from the coastal liberal cities to the more conservative inland California.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win -- Ghandi

I've been quiet about Mammothgate (Racefail 09 part deux), partly because it's so easy for me to understand the blindness going on there. I doubt I would have even noticed the assumptions, much less thought of speaking out against them. I just didn't see it either, completely missed the wrongness of handwavingly undoing the existence of all Native Americans for the sake of an interesting story.

Though I have learned that listening is a whole lot better than trying to justify oneself about things that matter like this. The author and defenders didn't think: would they have argued so much if it was a huge anachronism they missed, or a quote from someone 100 years later? Why not shut up and learn, and maybe say Oh shit, I screwed up.

Following a bunch of links I found a fabulous essay by a woman of color writing Science Fiction/Fantasy, Nalo Hopkinson: Looking for clues It's all good, articulate, emotional and inspiring. My favorite bit is this:




I hope, very much, we can go on from there.

a) "pandemic" just means it's everywhere, not that it's killing everyone. don't panic

b) there have been no deaths outside of Mexico, at this point

c) my tame scientist says that there are probably a lot of infected people in Mexico who have not reported symptoms, so even if there is a death rate of 0.01%, that's enough to explain the numbers

d) wash your hands, a lot. If you work with kids, make them wash their hands

e) some good sources of real information (inspired by linaelyn )

• World Health Organization
• US Government Pandemic site
• Nature.com
• New York Times
• BBC
• Wired flu update
• USA Today map
• arstechnica

panic is silly

1. First day in office, President Obama (oh how I love typing that) put limits on lobbyists, and froze the salaries of staff making more than $100k a year (New York Times).


2. They have good taste in computers: The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos. (Washington Post)


3. I'm not much of a gamer, but the US Democracy Server : Patch Day post cracked me up! (gacked from kntb )


4. A commitment to closing Guantanamo. What a pathetic legal fiction, where only the honor of military lawyers and judges kept us from running Stalinist show trials. What a horror that was. POW status would have been much more appropriate.

in foot news: ow ow ow ow ow.

I honestly could not have hoped for this a year ago. I did not have confidence that a small majority of our voters could possibly vote for a black man. It really was a choice between the paranoid dangerous past and a rational moderate future.

Obama's not a socialist-leftie, he's a moderate; the Rick Warren thing stinks, wtf about not broadcasting gay bishop Gene Robinson's speech but considering what we've lived with, we have pulled something good from the jaws of disaster.

And I got to watch in a public-school auditorium with kids and parents from all over the world, a wonderful mix of cultures. It made me cry.

UNITED STATES PRESIDENT BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA!

• We go off Daylight Savings Time tonight, so turn (or digitally reset) your clocks back one hour, so that 2 am is 1 am. timeanddate.com has more if you're curious.


• The best ever kitty in a box video (link from cesare)


• Don't Speak For Me, Sarah Palin done by a Hockey Mama for Obama who can really sing


• And in conclusion: a bigger photo of Dom with eyeliner and a really dorky smile (from yesterday, a Cirque de Soleil opening in Las Vegas)

I'm not sure where this meme came from, but it's been all over my flist and I love it. The best kind of protest, what we would have called, in my childhood, a Teach-In. I'm not going to repeat the rules, but here I go.

I give you one of the worst rulings ever: Dred Scott (1857), which held that:

Africans residing in America, whether free or slave, could not become United States citizens.

That means that not just those born in Africa, but also their descendants who were born in the United States, were denied the same human rights as all other "races".

It also held that the United States Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories, or free states to grant freedom to slaves who entered the states. So, state's rights were great, but not for Free States.

Why? In an appeal to the strict constructionism much like that beloved of our right-wing-looney Supreme Court Justices (Scalia and his shadow, Thomas), the majority decided the drafters of the Constitution had viewed all African-Americans as:

...beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

That's disgusting.

The ruling, IMNSHO, made the Civil War inevitable. The Slave States were were willing to revolt for the right of states to choose slavery over humanity. Dred Scott encouraged this, going so far pro-slavery as to make compromise impossible.

That was back when the Republican Party had the moral high ground, they were the party of enfranchisement and liberty. Now, not so much. They want to dismantle the public school system so we can give vouchers for suburban private schools, they prosecute mostly African Americans for civil rights violations, they refused to raise the minimum wage for years... I can give details, if anyone is undecided, and is willing to listen to my version of the issues. But I have no interest in debating Republican True Believers, or libertarians, for that matter. Obama's a little conservative for me, but his take on ISSUES is pretty good. And that's honestly the only thing I care about.

Collective intelligence: people filled in a form to say how much is shook near them, and out comes a map. USGS was doing mashups before there WAS a google maps.



I'm not hot-linking to the dynamic updating one. You can go see the updated map or .report your own experiences. I always check there first, I think it's amazing.

For some reason, this is my earthquake icon.

The wedding was preceded by a > 100 F / 37 C heat wave, a wild fire about five miles from the house, a thunderstorm, and hail (well, really a small bout of frozen rain). The ceremony itself was graced by sun and light breezes, and was lovely.

Both women were radiant: they said they were married four years ago in SF, which was voided, and again now. And they're "going to keep getting married until it sticks, everywhere!" It made me cry a little: I'm all for love, in all its possibilities.

...in that "it's a selfish grasping onanistic power play disguised as utopian openness and universal freedom." (by cesare, used with permission)

( Anyone who thinks that male assumptions of privilege and sexual objectification don't exist any more, and female safe spaces are not necessary... )

(cut because I got all ranty and used italics and bold)

And HAH: apparently he is a Heinlein fan.

ETA: when I told my husband about this, he was literally speechless for a while. He's one of the aware & respectful guys, and has helped socialize some of the geeks in his gaming circles, giving them Stern Talks about bad behavior and disrespectful comments and worse. It was kind of fun to watch him open his mouth, shake his head and look pained, as I talked. Because really, what is there to say besides WTF?

I just got an AIM message with a scary content from flakz18:

your private friends-only posts have been stolen: http:// msilvrstar.on.nimp.org/?u=r4l

But a quick web search shows clearly it's a malware site that hijacks JavaScript to do bad things to your browser. If you get something like this, block the sender and close the window!