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silveradeptGreetings, everyone! Props to the radio show that got the Prime Minister of Australia to record a deadpan ad for them about the end of the world.
Elsewhere, see how far we've come on the matters of race - fathers will disown their daughters for marrying someone black. Still. And highly-educated well-accomplished black men are assumed to be drug dealers simply because they are black.
A shooting in Connecticut has killed several elementary school children, teachers, and support staff. The school may have been targeted because the shooter's mother works there. The shooting of children is an atrocious act. Not tragic, which implies that there's nothing we can do to stop them, but atrocious. We need to be able to change the culture so that there are fewer atrocities, as well as trying to make it more difficult for someone to act in a lethal manner. And while we're at it, why don't we bolster the system we have for dealing with mental issues. And, perhaps, we can make the school system less about cramming students and overworking teachers, so that teachers could be able to interact with students, students would have time to talk about their issues to trustable adults, and perhaps maybe we could have counselors whose job it is to be there for students and teachers so that things like students (who know the school well) don't kill their fellow students.
To help the victims of the shooting, here are several options, courtesy of The Huffington Post.
There's some interesting research possibilities here, too - take a look at how shootings like these could be a form of suicidal action - by mass murder. Which still makes them atrocities with meaningless loss of life, but hopefully, the research will make it so that we can develop ways to find and stop these things before someone else shoots up other people. Also, if the name were more Middle-Eastern sounding, would we be talking about "terrorism" instead of a school shooting?
The Dead Pool Musician's Corps plays the music of Ravi Shankar, at 92 years of age.
Out in the world today, the first of a set of three pages worth of The Year (2012) in Pictures. Lots of very striking images there.
the Austerity Government in the UK announced cuts to social programs after admitting they could not reach target goals for the economy. They also continued to believe that cutting taxes on corporations was a viable strategy.
The United Kingdom has decided it will allow women to be first in succession, as well as allowing for Roman Catholics to marry into the royal family.
Trying to get Israel and Palestine to talk with each other is [INSERT METAPHOR EXPRESSING NEARLY ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY HERE]. And nearly eight years after his death, Yasser Arafat's grave was exhumed and samples taken for analysis to try and determine whether he was poisoned.
Finally, The United States warned the Assad regime in Syria that there would be swift consequences if they planned on using chemical weapons against their own civilians.
Domestically, King County, Washington, held the first ceremonies to legally marry same-sex couple in Washington State on 6 December, the day it became legal to do so in Washington.
The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints no longer believes that being gay is a lifestyle choice. They still do believe that acting on being gay is sinful, but that is a small step.
In honor of World AIDS Day on 1 December, 31 years of AIDS awareness posters.
The Untied States Senate rejected a UN treaty that would have granted the disabled protections against discriminatino - 60+ Senators voted for it, but not 66, so the treaty failed. And that was with Bob Dole there for the intransigent Republican minority to see before they rejected the treaty. One other thing - ratifying the treaty would have required absolutely no changes in United States law.
The Secret Service will likely accompany Presidents for their lives after their time in office, because of the potential for a terror plot or assassination plot to strike a symbolic blow.
Last out of this section, a graphic novel form summarizing the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign.
In the sciences - a large amount of refiguring may need to be done, as a new measurement suggests that Polaris is a lot closer to Terra than originally thought - almost a third closer.
More than forty years ago, the last successful manned mission to Luna left Luna for Terra. It has been far too long since we have been back to the moon. We should have had many more manned missions there in the intervening time.
The Department of Homeland Security wants to record you by using microphones and cameras emplaced on public transit. To do simultaneous recording of audio and video.
The remarkable difficulties of communicating science in ASL, and some proposed new signs (neo-??) to help fix that gap.
Last out of this section, Chicago wanted to go paperless. Which, as an idea, had popularity. But then came the exceptions and all the other things that made going paperless exceedingly difficult.
Welcome to opinions, where you should think about modern shooter games and how they portray minorities and the Middle East. Also, the assumed defaults of straight, white, and male for people who are important to the narrative...are ahistorical and quite politically charged. Which is rather interesting when people choose to deploy this idea in narratives that are explicitly about worlds, times, and places that do not necessarily correspond with the timeline of Earth-616. To see how badly this falls over, an example of criticism involving fantasy settings and characters where the proper response is "piss off">. Or, more academically, the response is "go piss facing north with a north wind blowing". Because history is sexist, but fantasy does not have to be. And can more safely call out all that sexism without knee-jerk defensiveness.
Also, Hard To Get is a pernicious poison that should be excised immediately from the sphere of dating and mating, because it causes Bad Things. Following close behind it should be definitions of "modesty" and "appropriateness" that are heavily steeped in the idea that someone other than the women who owns the body gets to decide what the body should or shouldn't be wearing, the idea that a woman brought on her own assault by being anything other than virginal, and the idea that a guy who is nice in almost all other aspects of their life couldn't possibly commit rape. (It is entirely possible to discuss the complexity of men while still condemning those that choose to commit sexual violence. In their places, we should inculcate the idea that you must like women before you can do much in the way of feminism and the idea that a female-coded author does not mean the work of fiction, science fiction, fantasy, or any other genre (or not) is automatically inferior. (Also, have lots of examples of female-coded authors that have done quite well using their own names.)
This is not limited to adults, either. According to toy companies, boys are allowed to be whatever they want. Girls are supposed to just be in the kitchen, and girl stuff is often worse than boy stuff in what its supposed to do. Well, okay, they assume boys aren't supposed to want to do things like bake and cook.
Else-place, suggestions on what not to say to someone whose neurology is somewhere on the autism spectrum. That is, unless you are callous enough to take joy in saying something offensive.
On a related note - Don't complain about the food choices people make - complain about the arseholes who choose not to locate good food in urban areas, who choose to price fresh food out of the range of the poor, and who create the kinds of situations where someone has to eat sub-par food because it's the only way their paychecks will stretch far enough that they have actual food to eat for the month.
Burning Man chooses a theme for 2013 - Cargo Cult. Which has Unfortunate Implications like whoa.
And then there's the case of the case of contraceptives behind lock and key.
Last out of opinions, advice and asking for suggestions on how to throw a party for introverts.
Finally for tonight, the science of how a good story is really engaging - because it engages the parts of the brain as if we were living the experience instead of hearing about it.
comments on Dreamwidth.
LiveJournal, Wordpress, and other compatible blog service users can comment on DW posts utilizing their accounts through OpenID.
Elsewhere, see how far we've come on the matters of race - fathers will disown their daughters for marrying someone black. Still. And highly-educated well-accomplished black men are assumed to be drug dealers simply because they are black.
A shooting in Connecticut has killed several elementary school children, teachers, and support staff. The school may have been targeted because the shooter's mother works there. The shooting of children is an atrocious act. Not tragic, which implies that there's nothing we can do to stop them, but atrocious. We need to be able to change the culture so that there are fewer atrocities, as well as trying to make it more difficult for someone to act in a lethal manner. And while we're at it, why don't we bolster the system we have for dealing with mental issues. And, perhaps, we can make the school system less about cramming students and overworking teachers, so that teachers could be able to interact with students, students would have time to talk about their issues to trustable adults, and perhaps maybe we could have counselors whose job it is to be there for students and teachers so that things like students (who know the school well) don't kill their fellow students.
To help the victims of the shooting, here are several options, courtesy of The Huffington Post.
There's some interesting research possibilities here, too - take a look at how shootings like these could be a form of suicidal action - by mass murder. Which still makes them atrocities with meaningless loss of life, but hopefully, the research will make it so that we can develop ways to find and stop these things before someone else shoots up other people. Also, if the name were more Middle-Eastern sounding, would we be talking about "terrorism" instead of a school shooting?
The Dead Pool Musician's Corps plays the music of Ravi Shankar, at 92 years of age.
Out in the world today, the first of a set of three pages worth of The Year (2012) in Pictures. Lots of very striking images there.
the Austerity Government in the UK announced cuts to social programs after admitting they could not reach target goals for the economy. They also continued to believe that cutting taxes on corporations was a viable strategy.
The United Kingdom has decided it will allow women to be first in succession, as well as allowing for Roman Catholics to marry into the royal family.
Trying to get Israel and Palestine to talk with each other is [INSERT METAPHOR EXPRESSING NEARLY ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY HERE]. And nearly eight years after his death, Yasser Arafat's grave was exhumed and samples taken for analysis to try and determine whether he was poisoned.
Finally, The United States warned the Assad regime in Syria that there would be swift consequences if they planned on using chemical weapons against their own civilians.
Domestically, King County, Washington, held the first ceremonies to legally marry same-sex couple in Washington State on 6 December, the day it became legal to do so in Washington.
The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints no longer believes that being gay is a lifestyle choice. They still do believe that acting on being gay is sinful, but that is a small step.
In honor of World AIDS Day on 1 December, 31 years of AIDS awareness posters.
The Untied States Senate rejected a UN treaty that would have granted the disabled protections against discriminatino - 60+ Senators voted for it, but not 66, so the treaty failed. And that was with Bob Dole there for the intransigent Republican minority to see before they rejected the treaty. One other thing - ratifying the treaty would have required absolutely no changes in United States law.
The Secret Service will likely accompany Presidents for their lives after their time in office, because of the potential for a terror plot or assassination plot to strike a symbolic blow.
Last out of this section, a graphic novel form summarizing the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign.
In the sciences - a large amount of refiguring may need to be done, as a new measurement suggests that Polaris is a lot closer to Terra than originally thought - almost a third closer.
More than forty years ago, the last successful manned mission to Luna left Luna for Terra. It has been far too long since we have been back to the moon. We should have had many more manned missions there in the intervening time.
The Department of Homeland Security wants to record you by using microphones and cameras emplaced on public transit. To do simultaneous recording of audio and video.
The remarkable difficulties of communicating science in ASL, and some proposed new signs (neo-??) to help fix that gap.
Last out of this section, Chicago wanted to go paperless. Which, as an idea, had popularity. But then came the exceptions and all the other things that made going paperless exceedingly difficult.
Welcome to opinions, where you should think about modern shooter games and how they portray minorities and the Middle East. Also, the assumed defaults of straight, white, and male for people who are important to the narrative...are ahistorical and quite politically charged. Which is rather interesting when people choose to deploy this idea in narratives that are explicitly about worlds, times, and places that do not necessarily correspond with the timeline of Earth-616. To see how badly this falls over, an example of criticism involving fantasy settings and characters where the proper response is "piss off">. Or, more academically, the response is "go piss facing north with a north wind blowing". Because history is sexist, but fantasy does not have to be. And can more safely call out all that sexism without knee-jerk defensiveness.
Also, Hard To Get is a pernicious poison that should be excised immediately from the sphere of dating and mating, because it causes Bad Things. Following close behind it should be definitions of "modesty" and "appropriateness" that are heavily steeped in the idea that someone other than the women who owns the body gets to decide what the body should or shouldn't be wearing, the idea that a woman brought on her own assault by being anything other than virginal, and the idea that a guy who is nice in almost all other aspects of their life couldn't possibly commit rape. (It is entirely possible to discuss the complexity of men while still condemning those that choose to commit sexual violence. In their places, we should inculcate the idea that you must like women before you can do much in the way of feminism and the idea that a female-coded author does not mean the work of fiction, science fiction, fantasy, or any other genre (or not) is automatically inferior. (Also, have lots of examples of female-coded authors that have done quite well using their own names.)
This is not limited to adults, either. According to toy companies, boys are allowed to be whatever they want. Girls are supposed to just be in the kitchen, and girl stuff is often worse than boy stuff in what its supposed to do. Well, okay, they assume boys aren't supposed to want to do things like bake and cook.
Else-place, suggestions on what not to say to someone whose neurology is somewhere on the autism spectrum. That is, unless you are callous enough to take joy in saying something offensive.
On a related note - Don't complain about the food choices people make - complain about the arseholes who choose not to locate good food in urban areas, who choose to price fresh food out of the range of the poor, and who create the kinds of situations where someone has to eat sub-par food because it's the only way their paychecks will stretch far enough that they have actual food to eat for the month.
Burning Man chooses a theme for 2013 - Cargo Cult. Which has Unfortunate Implications like whoa.
And then there's the case of the case of contraceptives behind lock and key.
Last out of opinions, advice and asking for suggestions on how to throw a party for introverts.
Finally for tonight, the science of how a good story is really engaging - because it engages the parts of the brain as if we were living the experience instead of hearing about it.
LiveJournal, Wordpress, and other compatible blog service users can comment on DW posts utilizing their accounts through OpenID.
