Cool! Real-Time Tracking of Intl Space Station
Real-time satellite and space station tracking. You can watch the International Space Station move. Cool.

---

 WTF?
what?:

"CAL THOMAS, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: In this campaign, we are being asked to accept three things simultaneously, the first woman with a credible chance of being president, the first African-American with the chance to being president and, whoever Michelle Obama is going to be styled, the angry black woman, first lady? This is an awful lot."

I'm sorry, what?

What was that? What was that? What was that?

This isn't an awful lot to be asked to accept. You idiots just need to stop pining for your rose-tinted-glasses version of the 1950s. Michelle Obama is a modern black woman, thank god.

(HT to angry black woman.)

---

 Latest Story Rejection
Weird Tales rejected The Red Sea, which definitely qualifies as a weird tale, and the thought has cross my mind that it's really an excerpt, or spinoff, of something quite a bit longer in a universe that's been evolving in some dank corner of my brain.

In other news, my apartment is hot and that does not make me happy. Fortunately, in New England, summer is one of MANY seasons. Unlike Southern California.

---

 Prison Ships
US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

You know what's so shameful? The title of the article may say "US accused," but there's no question in my mind.

How can we recover from this?

---

 Pro Bono Advocate Award
I received a pro bono advocate award last night at Alternatives for Community & Environment's annual fundraiser and award ceremony. More info: here.

---

 Personal Excitement!
Hm. That sounded like the title of a message from an email spammer, didn't it? Well, of course it's not. No, friends, yours truly interrogated people today. By which, I mean, cross-examined expert witnesses in an administrative proceeding. But "interrogated" just sounds so much more Guantanamo Bay, don't you think?

So, my maiden voyage as an attorney, cross-examining on some dry technical stuff. Well, it was fun/educational for me...

---

 Time to Weigh on the current White Feminist Debate
I'm conflict-avoidant, and really busy, and, let's face it, a beneficiary of white privilege so I am "free" to ignore it, otherwise I would have said something sooner. I should have anyway.

First, to nutshell if I can: white feminist Amanda Marcotte didn't give proper intellectual props to Brownfemipower, a big cheese in the feminist blogosphere, when she should have. You can get plugged in here, here and here. To make matters worse, at about the same time, Amanda's publisher, Seal Press, said some privileged shit about how she "wants" to publish women of color but just can't seem to find them. That sounds just like the "where are the women bloggers" meme that goes around constantly, doesn't it? And then Seal Press put into Amanda's feminist "survival" book a bunch of imagery of, shall we say, questionable merit from a race-conscious perspective. (h/t to Angry Black Woman for most of this.)

So, here's the thing, and I want to give proper thanks to Twisty Faster at I Blame the Patriarchy for schooling white feminists, including me: my benefiting from white privilege makes it easy for me to wave off or ignore as "ironic" or "ignorant" or "but that's not the message they were trying to send!" instead of recognizing that if a member of a minority group calls something out, you should listen to their assessment, since they're the ones who can't wave this shit off or ignore it. To quote Twisty: "That this was unintentional is of no consequence; it was perceived by many, and rightly so." This is exactly what feminists get stuck saying to men all the time: what you thought you were saying, buster, ain't what I heard, and you need to care about my point of view. The fact that someone is having a different experience does not mean they are shrill harpies, or otherwise invalidated. It means they are having a different experience. If you have an expert in the house, listen to what they have to say.

Just so. And white feminists need to listen, and care about the point of view of women of color, and minority voices. This does not, I believe, dilute the feminist movement or its goal of equality for women - and I don't think it requires that women put our advancement as women on the backburner while we "fix" some "other problem" - but rather that understanding the complex experience of different women can help all of us learn new tools and strategies for the advancement of all women. Because different areas of the fight may need different tools. And because one size, does not, as they say, fit all.

---

 Executive Branch Cranks PR Machine For War, Torture, Etc.
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the [military] analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

---

 Yes, They Condoned Torture
What is the delay, here? Impeach!

---

 Shakes Sis Kinda Nailing it on My Dem Candidates
really pretty much how I feel.

(Oh, and Clinton wants to treat gay people like people. Ooo, radical!)

---

 I'm a White Chick Who Cares About Racism - Ask Me How!
If you stop and think about it, racism doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Of course, a lot of “isms” are that way, particularly those that let you say you are somehow magically “better” than that person over there. I mean really, if you’re going to be better than someone, why not have a good reason?

Why should white people be “better” than black people? Or men better than women? Or rich better than poor, straight better than gay, etc. We’re all just people, together, you know. None of us asked to be born different colors.

Today, many people, especially if you’re American, reading this post will find it merely of passing interest that left-handers like myself have historically been discriminated against. Because left-handedness is a sign of the devil. Catholic schools a short generation ago, and other cultures (and here I’m thinking of a specific former colleague, a second generation Japanese-American) forced their children to write right-handed. Some still may today. Physical force. And people used to discriminate against the Irish, here, in America. Wacky, huh?

Now, for everyone who just chuckled at the insanity of such notions, I want to ask you a question. What if you brought for just a moment that same laughter, that same skepticism and sense of amusement to some of your own beliefs? That same “wow, that’s pretty wacky, huh?” to your own table.

Consider the idea that the guy on the corner is a gangbanger who’s gonna put a cap in your ass just because he’s a guy standing on the corner who happens to be black. Or that that black woman over there with the stroller, the one getting on the bus, is on welfare and happy to be so. ‘Cuz welfare’s so much fun. Do the vast majority of poor people, white and black, choose to be poor? Of course not. That’s just silly. Like a lot of things, it doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, once you stop and think about it.

So, what I’d like to do today is encourage you to stop and think, instead of just assuming. What’s that thing you might’ve learned as a kid? When you assume you make an ass out of ‘u’ and me?

Yeah, well. So, how about a few less assumptions?

No one chooses to be discriminated against. That would be silly.

Now, black people in this country have been climbing out of a hole that the slave trade dug, and they’ve been climbing for years and not out yet. It’s a big goddamn hole. The fact that white people dug this hole doesn’t mean that you (if you’re reading this and are a white American) are a bad person. But what is bad, and what all of us, especially white Americans, help perpetuate when we make assumptions based on color, is the idea that black people belonged in that hole, or that there’s something wrong with them today because they’re not all the way out, or that the hole doesn't even exist because, slavery's, like, over, right? It’s a BIG goddamn hole that got dug partly thanks to the idea that whites were doing Africans a favor by bringing them to the Americas and converting them to Christianity. Well, if you put it that way, that’s a bit much, don’t you think? That’s pretty disrespectful of someone else’s culture and beliefs. That’s assuming that they’re “less” because they’re not like you. And on top of that, there was the idea that because they were “heathen” “savages”, they weren’t real people anyway.

Because you could never treat real people like that, turn them into *slaves*, whip them like animals, and live with yourself, could you?

And you know what? In all the ways that count, “they” ARE “like you”.

We all are born, play as children, love our moms, want to marry Mr./Ms. Right, read comic books, call the plumber, save loose change in a jar, ride the bus to school, get a “C”, are tongue-tied by that Perfect Boy/Girl in school and later, alas, at work, eat things that are bad for us, say stupid stuff and regret it later, want things we can’t afford, and want to give our children better lives than our own.

None of that changes because of color. Look back at that guy on the corner, giving in and having a cigarette even though he knows he shouldn’t. Look at that woman on the bus, the one with the folded up stroller and the baby in her lap. She’s just like you, just schlepping along, raising her kid, thinking about tonight’s dinner.

Skin color’s got nothing to do with it.

So, if black people are still in that hole, how are they climbing, and how deep is that f****er? I’m not sure I know the whole answer. Racism, like other isms, is pervasive. It’s not just about the act of enslaving someone physically. It’s everything else, it’s all the ideas that led to slavery in the first place and still operate to keep black people from climbing. It’s *hard* to identify ALL the ways racism has affected our lives, from loans under the federal housing act denied to blacks but granted to whites and black people not being served in restaurants and excluded from unions to boot, to sentencing guidelines that punish users of crack (more likely to be black) more harshly than users of cocaine (more likely to be white), to advertisements that say white features are the most attractive. I mean, shit, man. WTF?

And if it’s so pervasive, how do we fight it?

We fight it day by day, event by event, bit by bit. We fight it by saying to someone making a stupid assumption, or a dumb joke, “hey, that’s not cool.” We fight it whether or not we’re being discriminated against ourselves. We fight it because you could just as easily have been born black instead of white, and would you want someone to discriminate against you? Hell, no.

No one chooses to be discriminated against. That would be silly. But you and I, regardless of our skin color, can choose to fight against assumptions that hold people down rather than lifting all of us up.

---

 Puncturing Buchanan's "Blacks Should be Grateful" Screed
Where's The Gratitude?

I can't imagine anyone being grateful to be subject to institutionalized slavery, and Jim Crow laws. Reading through the list of things in the above article that were done as federal policy to consciously exclude blacks makes my blood boil.

---

 OK, if the Smallest Nation in the World Can Do It
Why can't we?

Wind Turbines Replace Diesel on Sealand.

---

 It's Because They Stop Sweating the Small Shit
People Turn More Liberal With Age

Good sign for us, eh? With the Baby Boomer population aging, right?

---

 There's a Conversation on Race
In the comments of Angry Black Woman's "Thank You, White People", over Pat Buchanan's racism (among others).

If you're not reading ABW, now is a great time to start. I'd specifically like to refer readers to Angry Black Woman's Required Reading.

---

<< # WomenBloggers ? >>