wandering stars

Advertisers are more cautious about what they associate with because they do not want to alienate their base, a base which has become a lot more vocal and powerful. They are extremely careful when it comes to the kind of material presented on television shows alongside their ads, and because networks need their support, they have more vetting power over what does and does not appear. Producers warn creative teams away from storylines that are likely to upset advertisers, run potentially sensitive subjects past sponsors, and effectively live in fear of advertisers. Agencies get to dictate the nature and presentation of content on television, and this means that what consumers see is really shaped by advertisers, from beginning to end.

Yay science!

At a memorial service this week for the 32-year-old wife and mother of five, Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said it would be irresponsible to jump to conclusions cautioning, “We don’t know if it was a hate crime. We don’t know if it wasn’t a hate crime.” What we do know is that Alawadi 17-year-old daughter Fatima, found a note next to her slain mother’s body that read, “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” 

Those words and the animosity and bigotry experienced by Muslim communities of diverse racial backgrounds is rooted in years of ignorant stereotypes. According to the FBI’s latest report released last November, hate crimes in the United States against Muslim people increased nearly 50 percent in 2010. And while hate crimes have risen, Muslim communities have been shamelessly spied on by NYPD as Seth Wessler has written about. 

Unfortunately for Mr. Cook, 15 years after his release, the State of Texas still does not share Ms. Johnston’s view. Though he is widely recognized as one of the country’s most famous exonerated prisoners, Mr. Cook is not legally exonerated. In fact, in the eyes of the state, he is still a killer — convicted of the 1977 rape and murder of Linda Jo Edwards.

Mr. Cook’s situation is complex. His death sentence was twice overturned by higher courts, and DNA taken from the victim’s underwear did not match his own, and the evidence used to convict him has been shown to be entirely fallacious — but because Mr. Cook pleaded no-contest to the murder on the eve of what would have been his fourth trial, he cannot be declared actually not guilty.

Maple syrup farmers have “never seen a season like this,” and as a result, maple syrup production has cratered. If you like the stuff, it’stime to start stockpiling it.

Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s urban coastline, according to a new scientific study.

Scientists from California State University, Long Beach tested giant kelp collected in the ocean off Orange County and other locations after the March, 2011 accident, and detected radioactive iodine, which was released from the damaged nuclear reactor.

In 1862, anti-contract labourer activists accomplished two rather significant legislative victories in California and Congress, respectively, both of which are sometimes known as ‘anti-Coolie laws.’ The first was a law in California that specifically targeted Chinese workers. In ‘An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition With Chinese Coolie Labor, and To Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese Into the State of California,’ legislators required Chinese workers to pay a $2.50 monthly tax to remain in California. Many made less than a dollar a day. The legislature’s move was designed to make it difficult for Chinese labourers to survive, and to send a clear message to people in China considering immigration; come to California, and you’ll have to pay for the privilege of living there.

As they rush to complete the legislative session and get back out on the campaign trail, state lawmakers are advancing a variety of bills designed to advance a conservative agenda while Republicans still hold a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature.

The Arizona Senate was on the verge of passing a bill to further restrict abortion rights, which have been so curtailed in recent years that abortions—even via medication rather than surgery—are no longer available in Arizona outside of Maricopa and Pima counties.

“Our views aren’t very popular,” says a woman who’d come all the way from Manhattan for the conference. “You don’t get invited to all the fancy dinner parties on the Upper East Side.” She explains it’s not often you find people — particularly upper-middle-class liberals — who are willing to break bread with those who look down on your value system.

But here, she’s among friends who’ve paid $150 for a weekend of lectures, book signings and above all, networking. For $35 more, she gets a banquet of wilted asparagus and dry pork tenderloin, plus the dinner entertainment of an address by Faye, the French New Right author renowned in these circles for his anti-Muslim writings.

Faye is but one of many speakers who regale the audiences with a collective warning that decades of multiculturalism and racial mixing have eroded the vitality of white, European-derived culture, which can only be reaffirmed by a return to aristocratic rule. Others, such as Cambridge-educated “racial scientist” Richard Lynn, speculate that the torch of Western civilization will be passed to the Chinese.

I just finished reading “Strange Flesh,” which was billed as “hacker noir,” an evolution of the cyberpunk genre that started developing in the 1980s as writers began pushing at the possibilities of a heavily technological world. The book got me thinking about the twists and turns of the genre and how it’s arrived at its present point, which seems to be heavily saturated with torture porn and salacity; readers and writers are both shifting, and consequently the genre is changing along with them.

There is a very common belief that rural accents are markers of poor education and limited intelligence, as well as poor manners. If you ‘sound country,’ you are clearly not worthy of interacting with educated people from urban areas. This has been a continual joke in pop culture for literally centuries; rural accents have been targets of fun in plays, songs, stories, film, and television for a very long time. All you need to do is insert a character with key markers of rural origins, and whether the drama is set for a Chinese audience or a US one, people will instantly get the reference. They understand what is being said through that character and with that character’s voice.

The Southern Poverty Law Center accuses New Orleans jail officials of failing to protect a transsexual prisoner from being repeatedly raped.

In a letter Tuesday to Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, SPLC attorney Katie Schwartzmann alleges the prisoner was gang-raped at knifepoint in February and tested positive for the HIV virus after another alleged rape.

More on this case from the SPLC.

Talackova will not be permitted to enter the pageant’s final round, which will be held in May. Miss Universe Canada’s national director Denis Davila says that all competitors must be a “naturally born female.” But LGBT rights activist and Talackova have criticized the officials’ decision to disqualify her from the competition as the rules do not specifically mention sex changes or plastic surgery.

Initially, the mother of Alexis Kaminsky (above) had sought to get her daughter therapy to cope with the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and the stress of her gender-identity disorder. (Alexis’ father does not support her desire to live as a female.) But after only an hour-long interview, a nurse with the Youth Welfare Office decided that the best course of action was for Alexis to be remanded to an institution and eventually entered into the foster care system.

When it comes to luxury districts, Rodeo Drive is world-famous, and there’s a good reason for it. It’s an unrelenting parade of stores with designer names and multi-thousand dollar outfits hanging in the windows, displays of jewelry worth more than the GDP of some nations. It’s people wearing more than I make in a year walking carelessly along the sidewalk, not even blinking an eye at cars worth millions of dollars. It’s a parade of excess that really kind of beggars the imagination, unless you’re part of that culture, in which case it’s apparently totally normal.

Despite the economy, Rodeo Drive seems to be doing quite well for itself. My hostess pointed out that the Ferrari dealership has been forced to downsize, but that’s about it. Unlike the shopping district in my hometown, there are no empty storefronts, faded and peeling “for rent” signs, or promises of “recession discounts!” inside, let alone going out of business sales or windows covered in dust with an optimistic “be right back” sign that was obviously put up weeks or months ago.

Conversations about forced sterilisation of people with disabilities often focus on discussions of ‘what happened in the past,’ and how this sort of thing does not happen any more. Thus, it is not an issue that people need to be concerned with now, and shouldn’t be considered a pressing reproductive rights topic.

This is not true. Forced sterilisation continues to happen to people with disabilities, as well as other marginalised groups; several nations, for example, have policies that effectively force binary trans people to get sterilised if they want their genders to be legally recognised. In order to change their names on their identifications, they have to provide proof of reconstructive surgery, which involves eliminating reproductive capacity.

Margaret Butler, the executive director of Portland Jobs with Justice, and other supporters came to the rally in solidarity with the three unions. As Butler explained, “Teachers all over our state have been taking it for years in terms of cuts, in terms of higher class sizes, in terms of not getting the support to do their job, and it’s just great that these three groups of teachers, who are facing another set of contract cutbacks, have decided to stand up.”

The three school districts are claiming that the budget crisis is forcing them to extract massive concessions from the unions. All three school boards are demanding a freeze in teacher pay and benefits. In addition, the Parkrose school board is asking for a retroactive pay cut, taking away pay increases teachers previously bargained for. In Gresham, the school board is asking for teachers to take five unpaid furlough days, while in Parkrose, the board is asking for 10.

Internet, may I tell you about these cookies? I really like these cookies. I have basically been making them nonstop since I found the recipe last November, to the point that friends are actually surprised and worried when they check my cookie jar and there are no Cookies of Gingery Goodness in there. I alleviate their concerns by pointing at the dough chilling in the fridge, getting ready for the next batch.

rhymeswithnothing:

I’m disappointed that Claudette Colvin still doesn’t get the recognition she deserves. I didn’t learn about her until a little blurb late in high school and then finally a lesson in freshman year of university. I get sooo uncomfortable and angry when people STILL strip down the Civil Rights movement to Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks (and that evil Malcolm X & those Black Panthers of course)

eta: I was going to post this for the afternoon crowd but, well.

For example, the banks can wipe out more than $2 billion of their obligation by donating or demolishing abandoned houses. Almost $1 billion can be used to help families that have already defaulted move out.

“The $17 billion is supposed to be the teeth of this settlement,” said Neil M. Barofsky, the former inspector general for the Treasury’s bank bailout fund known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “And yet they are getting all this credit for practices that they do every day.”

Only 60 percent of the $17 billion designated for borrowers, or $10.2 billion, must be used to reduce principal for borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth — though banks can do more if they choose.

These are just two examples of her active labor organizing and advocacy. Hernandez has continued working at the Andaz while also trying to improve conditions for herself and other workers. Like the vast majority of housekeeping staff, she’s a woman of color. She’s one of the silent figures who flits through the halls of hotels with a housekeeping cart to make rooms clean and beautiful, cleaning up everything from vomit-splashed bathrooms to rooms mounded high in garbage and filth.

CAMPUS SPIES. Pepper spray. SWAT teams. Twitter trackers. Biometrics. Student security consultants. Professors of homeland security studies. Welcome to Repress U, class of 2012.

Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its places of work and its houses of worship, its public space and its cyberspace. But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival on campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere — until, that is, the less lethal weapons were unleashed in the fall of 2011.

Political advertising is a scourge I dread every year, most particularly the invasive calls to my home, particularly when they happen after hours. Once you let a genie out of the lamp, you can’t exactly stuff it back in, so it appears we are stuck with this, the ads that increase in frequency and intensity every year, the endless campaign promotions filled with lies and half-truths deliberately constructed to deceive, the phone calls that come while you are eating dinner or trying to care for family members or perform any number of tasks in the comfort of your own home, a place where people should not be allowed to call to harangue you about politics.

The methodology of suppressing dissent is multifaceted but transparent: converting public space to private property (for example, Zuccotti Park in New York, the controversial site ofOWS, was created in the 1960s as the result of an agreement by the developer of that lot and the one across the street, now One Liberty Plaza, to allocate park space in return for permission to exceed the zoning limitations on the height of the building); by requiring permission (through onerous and arbitrary permit requirements) to engage in constitutionally protected protest; and, through legislation like ’1752, to declare constitutionally protected speech “illegal” by declaring certain locations off limits.

Consequently, by rendering inaccessible those places in which politicians congregate, and broadly circumscribing where and when dissent may be expressed, the legal system has been utilized to curtail speech in order to spare the powerful the reality and consequences of their actions (and inaction). After all, how can they concentrate on meeting the increasingly exorbitant and extreme demands of their deep-pocket financial contributors with all that racket going on outside?

A hundred thousand people in Haiti are ready and waiting to get vaccinated against cholera.

The vaccine is sitting in coolers. Vaccination teams are all trained. Willing recipients are registered and entered into databases.

The impending mass vaccination project aims to show that vaccinating against cholera is feasible in Haiti. It has never been done in the midst of an ongoing cholera epidemic. So far, more than 530,000 Haitians have fallen ill with cholera, and more than 7,000 have died.

The security services in Germany are scrambling to track down and arrest far-right fugitives and Germany’s federal and state interior ministers have announced they are taking concrete steps towards banning the country’s far right National Democratic Party, the NPD.

This comes after a public outcry following revelations in November that a neo-Nazi cell had apparently been able to go on a nationwide spree of racially motivated murders over several years, under the noses of the German intelligence services.

The group of three are being held responsible for the deaths of eight Turkish and one Greek immigrant between 2000 and 2006, as well as a German policewoman in 2007.

Fort Bragg is not exactly an urban community, but Noyo Food Forest is run like a lot of urban farms, and it provides a real-world example of urban farming in action. The organization provides food to the local schools as well as some regional restaurants, and feeds volunteers as well. Although they also rely on outside suppliers, the schools take advantage of the favourably priced organic fruits and vegetables from the Food Forest; 2/3 of students are on the free and reduced lunch programme, and some eat only at school, making the provision of fresh fruits and vegetables particularly critical in that environment.

The pressure to grieve publicly and to do so in a certain way is yet another thing for people to navigate in the wake of a loss. They must do it just right or be branded as cold, or too emotional, or any number of other unpleasant things people can come up with to describe people who do not stick within the confines of the rubric. It is not enough to admit that yes, you have experienced a loss and you want to process it in your own way, not when you are living in a world where everyone thinks that everything is their business, right down to how you deal, or do not deal, with the death of someone in your life.

Spoilers for the film! And uh the books!