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silveradeptGreetings! There is good news in the fight against coronavirus, and that is that vaccine doses are happening right now. How the vaccinations roll out and the underlying infrastructure that will be needed to support them might be much less organized, but that's a thing to be patient with in the States. Other places with a more unified set of logistics may have an easier time getting vaccine to the places they want them to go.
(The Algorithm believes that what you really want to see after many of the images and videos of people receiving the vaccination are people who believe conspiracy theories about the vaccinations being either untested, cover for some other nefarious program, or otherwise not actually what it says it is. Most of those comments, of course, offer no evidence, because social media is about who shouts loudest, not who's actually right. So ware the comments, as usual.)
Native nations are getting priority in vaccine distribution, as they have been hit hard by the virus, and since most Native nations have been held in poverty, it became even more difficult for them to do anything than suffer.
SELF Magazine looked at most of the stock images of immunications and recognized most of them were meant to inspire fear or pain at the thought of immunizations, so they created some stock images of their own to counteract those ideas. Those images can be freely used, with appropriate credit given, and if you want to see them yourself, The American Academy of Pediatrics has an image gallery of the new pictures.
(Regrettably, there might be a new strain and now we'll have to figure out whether the current vaccines will also work on the new variation. So we might still need some pattern idea of making a mask meant to be work for long period of time without becoming too constricting as well as exoskeletons for common mask types.)
And, who knows, it's possible that we're finally going to get that "rush to make everything work better and vaccinate" thing happening, because there's the possibility that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 could cause erectile dysfunctions, even after the infection has cleared or been successfully fought off.
The original Boba Fett, Jeremy Bulloch, passed on to becoming a Force Ghost after 75 years of age on Earth.
Pride flag iterations of the Dreamsheep! So if you wanted the dreaming sheep in the colors and designs of many pride flags, they are available for the adoption.
Additionally, I've been alerted to the existence ofstarterpack, goodbyebird's attempt to help people overcome the learning curve of joining and using a site like Dreamwidth.
It has been twenty-five years after the conflict that engulfed the former Yugoslavia, and there are still scars and reminders everywhere. All the same, the people are very glad there is not still conflict going on.
Impending Brexit is causing panic for the UK, including airlifts of food supplies amidst worries of shortages Which is itself causing some other infrastructure problems, as queued-up drivers have to deal with inadequate facilities for relieving themselves.
TIME Magazine selects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as their Persons of the Year. The reasons they give for this, however, are a harbinger and a warning of what the narrative is going to be for the year to come.
Making this decision even more of a problem is who Joe Biden and Kamala Harris beat out for this designation. The criteria is "a person, a group, an idea or an object that 'for better or for worse' has had the most impact on the events over the [last] 12 months," according to the BBC article. The other candidates were apparently Dr. Anthony Fauci and front-line care workers (who received a Guardian of the Year), Porche Bennett-Bey, Assa Traoré, and racial-justice organizers (who also received a Guardian of the Year), and the Current Administrator, all three of whom I would say have had much more impact on events this year than the election of Biden and Harris. It seems that the Presidential people elected are the default for Person of the Year in the year they are elected and something truly astounding would have had to have happened to dislodge that. Although, if we had gotten four more years, I suspect TIME would have given a lot of thought to snubbing the Administrator for the designation.
But, here we have the election of a moderate Democrat being sold to us as the most important thing, when the election of that moderate Democrat owes itself far more to the dogged efforts of doctors trying to keep as many voters alive as possible and even more so to the Movement for Black Lives and all of the people who protested and demanded and shoved hard to get the needle moved in their locality and buckled down and tried to get as many voters turned out, voter fraud fought and dispelled, and to power through all the roadblocks and deliberate sabotage done to the electoral process by this administration so as to make it impossible for a close election that could be stolen away. (Not that they still aren't trying.) The two Guardians of the Year award really feel like the consolation prizes to people who were never really in the running at all as soon as Biden and Harris were elected. I thoroughly expect a wave of messaging coming that says "You got a woman of South Asian descent as Vice President, you got some good representation in the Cabinet, so be grateful and shut up about systemic racism and all those ills that are still present and didn't magically disappear when the Democrats took office."
Researcher danah boyd has advice for the incoming administration on how to avoid being distracted by the shiny by installing people into government who can listen and understand how things have gone so terribly wrong with government trying to imitate capitalism and can work on generational timelines for getting government to work, to recruit, and effectively communicate.
There's still a little joy that could be taken in the fact that the neighbors of Mar-a-Lago are insisting that a person who notoriously tries to weasel out of any agreement he signed in the past when he took over the place actually stick to the terms of his agreement. But the joy there is sometimes wiped out by his complete willingness to use and abuse the powers he has in the time he has left, including the pardon power so that he can theoretically save his loyalists from being charged and prosecuted for crimes at the federal level for all of the things they did to help him do corrupt things or the corrupt things they did themselves. (Someone else will have to help him if he gets thwacked with a voter fraud charge for changing his permanent address to a place that he said he can't use as a permanent address.)
A person who is doing necessary work that's not in their job description needs to have that work become recognized and used for promotion, whether by becoming part of their job description and therefore usable for promotion, by having that work spread out to other people so that someone can do work that will be promoted, or even just stopping doing the glue work and focusing solely on what their job description is. Because sometimes people don't know what they've got until it's gone. The slide and talk is in a tech and coding kind of environment, but it's applicable to all spaces and places, especially with the acknowledgment that diversity work is absolutely glue work and should be rewarded appropriately for all the people who do it. Especially in libraries, where the people who are doing most of the diversity work are not usually the managers or even the librarians. And, of course, there's always a high probability that everything that an organization says about how they care and want to be anti-racist is posturing and words with no intention of real action behind them. (I note that effective worker-focused socialism/communism would, in the Platonic form, also be really good for dismantling a lot of systemic discrimination. The actual application would probably be less so, because there's a lot of people who still want benefits for themselves and not for the people who they've been taught are inferior to them.)
The poor have always had to fight to receive proper assistance from society, because society continues to make it as difficult as possible for them to get help, new papers from paupers reveal.
The Anpetu Wi Wind Farm Project, to provide clean wind energy and revenue to Standing Rock. They are looking for donations so as to be able to keep more significant control and to avoid having to give away assets or other things to a developer in the process of raising the capital to do the studies and build the wind farm itself.
The art of Lenore Tawney, a Bauhaus waever and artist, the struggles of small K-pop groups to stay afloat, now supremely magnified because of the pandemic, your regular reminder that women have always been there, wherever there is, but especially in writing, and might have even had opinions about the suffering inflicted upon them by placing little to no restrictions on how husbands could treat their wives and the property of their wives, as well as being very involved in politics long before they were formally given the right to vote. Which means good things about the Smithsonian Museums for Latino History and Women's History getting properly funded, despite the occasional Senator that believes anything celebrating the fact that not-white people have done stuff is "weaponizing diversity". Which goes along well, I'm sure, with the executive order that insists that beautiful buildings are in styles that are derived from Greece and Rome or use the same forms and language of Greece and Roman. Which, as someone who has studied the period right after the destruction of Rome to the rediscovery of all the culture that Latin Christendom had lost when Rome was destroyed, I have to laugh, ever so slightly, because everyone in Latin Christendom and their derived cultures wants to position themselves as the true successor to the golden ages of Greece and Rome, the enlightened few compared to the ignorant masses, who are, of course, completely wrong and leading people astray from the reconstruction that would
The Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art is exhibiting quilts and the way that quilting is a way of expressing subversive attitudes and ideas by creating images out of discards and scraps.
Being trans is not a binary option, and there really isn't an unmodified body that exists, whether trans or cis, so there's no singular meaning about any particular body modification that happens. If we think, instead, about gender as a process of reification, of bringing the abstract into reality, then the point for which someone aims is their correct point, which makes it much easier to include the entire spectrum of nonbinary folx in the idea of trans, since there's no underlying assumption that someone has to be going from one part of the binary to the other. (And, in fact, there's no need for the binary at all, just "I started here, I'm heading here.") I think these kinds of ideas might make some useful questions about gender either easier or more complex to answer.
Stories of conservation, reintroduction, and discovery, sea slugs that can utilize photosynthesis because they've swiped cells and genes from the algae they eat, octopuses punching fish, and wildlife photography winners for 2020.
In technology, a major provider of IT monitoring infrastructure reported their software product had been compromised, with malicious code being inserted into updates pushed out to their customers, customers including several corporations and government agencies. The black-hats thought to be responsible are associated with the Russian Federation or are working for them, which certainly makes people start wondering even more about the outgoing administrator's continual buddying-up and effusive praise of the Russian Federation president, Vladimir Putin.
Roger Young, the first Black woman to obtain a Ph.D. in zoology, could have done so much more if she wasn't having to fight racial segregation and academics who didn't like her as an organizer and advocate for full equality.
An interesting paper about how qualitative methods used to be used fairly significantly in propaganda research and public opinion gathering, and then was shoved out in favor of quantitative methods, even though those methods were not able to capture the interesting twists and spirals in the opinion that would give them useful information. I feel like there's useful commentary here about both of the last two US election cycles, where "the polls" (quantitative) said that things would be quite easy for the Democratic candidate, when actually talking to people (qualitative) revealed that there were more than a few people who were proud to say they were voting for destruction and many, many more people who were ashamed or trying to hide they were going to vote for destruction, or who were going to vote for destruction but deny it to anyone who asked, because it might make them lose social status to do so.
A project highlighting the still regular lack of private and sanitary toilets in many parts of the world.
Data from the UK indicates that the temporary measures put in place to prevent virus spread allowing telemedicine visits and receiving medical abortion pills through the post should be continued, as complications and other negative outcomes dropped with the increased access.
Public transit in the United States needs to survive, especially in places where the transit network is the only way that enough people get to where they're supposed to go, but the pandemic has made things much worse for them, and the people who should be stepping in to keep them funded are the kinds of people who believe that government should be small enough to focus on making sure what the wealthy get everything and everyone else gets nothing.
Last for tonight, The Staunch Book Prize, offering prizes to the best pieces that don't beat, stalk, murder, rape, or sexually exploit the women in their stories. Along with global good news stories for the year 2020, on the assumption that you welcome news of carbon emissions falling, countries becoming less autocratic, more women and girls being educated, diseases being shown the door, and infrastructure changing so that it will be less terrible to both people and planet in the future.
And a meditation on the idea of not even being in competition with yourself, much less anybody else, for anything you do, and how so much of what we do that we might be good (or terrible) at, we disclaim, because there's always some asshole out there who's going to sniff and declare that it's not objectively good. (And that sometimes that asshole is our past self.) Since we all spent this year learning How To Be At Home (a video poem), that we managed it as well as we did says enough about us.
All the same, if there are things you would like to do and challenge for the new year, there is a![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cookbook_challenge with the idea of actually making the recipes that have been in your cookbooks or bookmarks and having a community to help and cheer you on, and there is both a journal to look back upon the year that was and the idea of setting a word for the year, rather than a resolution (or many resolutions) that may help you orient to something you would like. Or, perhaps, you could engage in trying to read at least one book by a BIPOC writer each month, with each month being on a different theme.
(The Algorithm believes that what you really want to see after many of the images and videos of people receiving the vaccination are people who believe conspiracy theories about the vaccinations being either untested, cover for some other nefarious program, or otherwise not actually what it says it is. Most of those comments, of course, offer no evidence, because social media is about who shouts loudest, not who's actually right. So ware the comments, as usual.)
Native nations are getting priority in vaccine distribution, as they have been hit hard by the virus, and since most Native nations have been held in poverty, it became even more difficult for them to do anything than suffer.
SELF Magazine looked at most of the stock images of immunications and recognized most of them were meant to inspire fear or pain at the thought of immunizations, so they created some stock images of their own to counteract those ideas. Those images can be freely used, with appropriate credit given, and if you want to see them yourself, The American Academy of Pediatrics has an image gallery of the new pictures.
(Regrettably, there might be a new strain and now we'll have to figure out whether the current vaccines will also work on the new variation. So we might still need some pattern idea of making a mask meant to be work for long period of time without becoming too constricting as well as exoskeletons for common mask types.)
And, who knows, it's possible that we're finally going to get that "rush to make everything work better and vaccinate" thing happening, because there's the possibility that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 could cause erectile dysfunctions, even after the infection has cleared or been successfully fought off.
The original Boba Fett, Jeremy Bulloch, passed on to becoming a Force Ghost after 75 years of age on Earth.
Pride flag iterations of the Dreamsheep! So if you wanted the dreaming sheep in the colors and designs of many pride flags, they are available for the adoption.
Additionally, I've been alerted to the existence of
starterpack, goodbyebird's attempt to help people overcome the learning curve of joining and using a site like Dreamwidth.It has been twenty-five years after the conflict that engulfed the former Yugoslavia, and there are still scars and reminders everywhere. All the same, the people are very glad there is not still conflict going on.
Impending Brexit is causing panic for the UK, including airlifts of food supplies amidst worries of shortages Which is itself causing some other infrastructure problems, as queued-up drivers have to deal with inadequate facilities for relieving themselves.
TIME Magazine selects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as their Persons of the Year. The reasons they give for this, however, are a harbinger and a warning of what the narrative is going to be for the year to come.
"For changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are TIME's 2020 Person of the Year."That's a statement that very strongly hints that they believe the correct path forward is going to be one of forgetting all of the damage, corruption, grift, separation, and death that can be laid at the feet of the current administration as making gestures toward "unity" with a party that has, for decades, openly allied themselves with fascists, attempted to create theocracy, denied the basic humanity of anyone who isn't white, het, cis, evangelical, men, and repeatedly insisted that lives are acceptable costs so that the already wealthy can become even more wealthy, without having to contribute anything back to the society that made their wealth possible.
Making this decision even more of a problem is who Joe Biden and Kamala Harris beat out for this designation. The criteria is "a person, a group, an idea or an object that 'for better or for worse' has had the most impact on the events over the [last] 12 months," according to the BBC article. The other candidates were apparently Dr. Anthony Fauci and front-line care workers (who received a Guardian of the Year), Porche Bennett-Bey, Assa Traoré, and racial-justice organizers (who also received a Guardian of the Year), and the Current Administrator, all three of whom I would say have had much more impact on events this year than the election of Biden and Harris. It seems that the Presidential people elected are the default for Person of the Year in the year they are elected and something truly astounding would have had to have happened to dislodge that. Although, if we had gotten four more years, I suspect TIME would have given a lot of thought to snubbing the Administrator for the designation.
But, here we have the election of a moderate Democrat being sold to us as the most important thing, when the election of that moderate Democrat owes itself far more to the dogged efforts of doctors trying to keep as many voters alive as possible and even more so to the Movement for Black Lives and all of the people who protested and demanded and shoved hard to get the needle moved in their locality and buckled down and tried to get as many voters turned out, voter fraud fought and dispelled, and to power through all the roadblocks and deliberate sabotage done to the electoral process by this administration so as to make it impossible for a close election that could be stolen away. (Not that they still aren't trying.) The two Guardians of the Year award really feel like the consolation prizes to people who were never really in the running at all as soon as Biden and Harris were elected. I thoroughly expect a wave of messaging coming that says "You got a woman of South Asian descent as Vice President, you got some good representation in the Cabinet, so be grateful and shut up about systemic racism and all those ills that are still present and didn't magically disappear when the Democrats took office."
Researcher danah boyd has advice for the incoming administration on how to avoid being distracted by the shiny by installing people into government who can listen and understand how things have gone so terribly wrong with government trying to imitate capitalism and can work on generational timelines for getting government to work, to recruit, and effectively communicate.
There's still a little joy that could be taken in the fact that the neighbors of Mar-a-Lago are insisting that a person who notoriously tries to weasel out of any agreement he signed in the past when he took over the place actually stick to the terms of his agreement. But the joy there is sometimes wiped out by his complete willingness to use and abuse the powers he has in the time he has left, including the pardon power so that he can theoretically save his loyalists from being charged and prosecuted for crimes at the federal level for all of the things they did to help him do corrupt things or the corrupt things they did themselves. (Someone else will have to help him if he gets thwacked with a voter fraud charge for changing his permanent address to a place that he said he can't use as a permanent address.)
A person who is doing necessary work that's not in their job description needs to have that work become recognized and used for promotion, whether by becoming part of their job description and therefore usable for promotion, by having that work spread out to other people so that someone can do work that will be promoted, or even just stopping doing the glue work and focusing solely on what their job description is. Because sometimes people don't know what they've got until it's gone. The slide and talk is in a tech and coding kind of environment, but it's applicable to all spaces and places, especially with the acknowledgment that diversity work is absolutely glue work and should be rewarded appropriately for all the people who do it. Especially in libraries, where the people who are doing most of the diversity work are not usually the managers or even the librarians. And, of course, there's always a high probability that everything that an organization says about how they care and want to be anti-racist is posturing and words with no intention of real action behind them. (I note that effective worker-focused socialism/communism would, in the Platonic form, also be really good for dismantling a lot of systemic discrimination. The actual application would probably be less so, because there's a lot of people who still want benefits for themselves and not for the people who they've been taught are inferior to them.)
The poor have always had to fight to receive proper assistance from society, because society continues to make it as difficult as possible for them to get help, new papers from paupers reveal.
The Anpetu Wi Wind Farm Project, to provide clean wind energy and revenue to Standing Rock. They are looking for donations so as to be able to keep more significant control and to avoid having to give away assets or other things to a developer in the process of raising the capital to do the studies and build the wind farm itself.
The art of Lenore Tawney, a Bauhaus waever and artist, the struggles of small K-pop groups to stay afloat, now supremely magnified because of the pandemic, your regular reminder that women have always been there, wherever there is, but especially in writing, and might have even had opinions about the suffering inflicted upon them by placing little to no restrictions on how husbands could treat their wives and the property of their wives, as well as being very involved in politics long before they were formally given the right to vote. Which means good things about the Smithsonian Museums for Latino History and Women's History getting properly funded, despite the occasional Senator that believes anything celebrating the fact that not-white people have done stuff is "weaponizing diversity". Which goes along well, I'm sure, with the executive order that insists that beautiful buildings are in styles that are derived from Greece and Rome or use the same forms and language of Greece and Roman. Which, as someone who has studied the period right after the destruction of Rome to the rediscovery of all the culture that Latin Christendom had lost when Rome was destroyed, I have to laugh, ever so slightly, because everyone in Latin Christendom and their derived cultures wants to position themselves as the true successor to the golden ages of Greece and Rome, the enlightened few compared to the ignorant masses, who are, of course, completely wrong and leading people astray from the reconstruction that would
The Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art is exhibiting quilts and the way that quilting is a way of expressing subversive attitudes and ideas by creating images out of discards and scraps.
Being trans is not a binary option, and there really isn't an unmodified body that exists, whether trans or cis, so there's no singular meaning about any particular body modification that happens. If we think, instead, about gender as a process of reification, of bringing the abstract into reality, then the point for which someone aims is their correct point, which makes it much easier to include the entire spectrum of nonbinary folx in the idea of trans, since there's no underlying assumption that someone has to be going from one part of the binary to the other. (And, in fact, there's no need for the binary at all, just "I started here, I'm heading here.") I think these kinds of ideas might make some useful questions about gender either easier or more complex to answer.
Stories of conservation, reintroduction, and discovery, sea slugs that can utilize photosynthesis because they've swiped cells and genes from the algae they eat, octopuses punching fish, and wildlife photography winners for 2020.
In technology, a major provider of IT monitoring infrastructure reported their software product had been compromised, with malicious code being inserted into updates pushed out to their customers, customers including several corporations and government agencies. The black-hats thought to be responsible are associated with the Russian Federation or are working for them, which certainly makes people start wondering even more about the outgoing administrator's continual buddying-up and effusive praise of the Russian Federation president, Vladimir Putin.
Roger Young, the first Black woman to obtain a Ph.D. in zoology, could have done so much more if she wasn't having to fight racial segregation and academics who didn't like her as an organizer and advocate for full equality.
An interesting paper about how qualitative methods used to be used fairly significantly in propaganda research and public opinion gathering, and then was shoved out in favor of quantitative methods, even though those methods were not able to capture the interesting twists and spirals in the opinion that would give them useful information. I feel like there's useful commentary here about both of the last two US election cycles, where "the polls" (quantitative) said that things would be quite easy for the Democratic candidate, when actually talking to people (qualitative) revealed that there were more than a few people who were proud to say they were voting for destruction and many, many more people who were ashamed or trying to hide they were going to vote for destruction, or who were going to vote for destruction but deny it to anyone who asked, because it might make them lose social status to do so.
A project highlighting the still regular lack of private and sanitary toilets in many parts of the world.
Data from the UK indicates that the temporary measures put in place to prevent virus spread allowing telemedicine visits and receiving medical abortion pills through the post should be continued, as complications and other negative outcomes dropped with the increased access.
Public transit in the United States needs to survive, especially in places where the transit network is the only way that enough people get to where they're supposed to go, but the pandemic has made things much worse for them, and the people who should be stepping in to keep them funded are the kinds of people who believe that government should be small enough to focus on making sure what the wealthy get everything and everyone else gets nothing.
Last for tonight, The Staunch Book Prize, offering prizes to the best pieces that don't beat, stalk, murder, rape, or sexually exploit the women in their stories. Along with global good news stories for the year 2020, on the assumption that you welcome news of carbon emissions falling, countries becoming less autocratic, more women and girls being educated, diseases being shown the door, and infrastructure changing so that it will be less terrible to both people and planet in the future.
And a meditation on the idea of not even being in competition with yourself, much less anybody else, for anything you do, and how so much of what we do that we might be good (or terrible) at, we disclaim, because there's always some asshole out there who's going to sniff and declare that it's not objectively good. (And that sometimes that asshole is our past self.) Since we all spent this year learning How To Be At Home (a video poem), that we managed it as well as we did says enough about us.
All the same, if there are things you would like to do and challenge for the new year, there is a
cookbook_challenge with the idea of actually making the recipes that have been in your cookbooks or bookmarks and having a community to help and cheer you on, and there is both a journal to look back upon the year that was and the idea of setting a word for the year, rather than a resolution (or many resolutions) that may help you orient to something you would like. Or, perhaps, you could engage in trying to read at least one book by a BIPOC writer each month, with each month being on a different theme.
