Wandering... And Probably Lost

And remember, this is 2016. The government itself starves Native Americans who just protect their own land. 

The media is silent, as usual.

God bless these warriors. 

I feel that this is an especially hard concept for Americans as in the modern US, as Jewish people are generally thought of as flavor of white, particularly Jewish people of European descent who “blend” into the white crowd. This is true in more “urban”, and progressive areas of the US (yet there are still pockets of antisemitism). But we need to be able to separate the current American view from the historical European view.  

If someone claims to be providing an account of oppressed and othered people in Medieval to Modern Europe, leaving out Jewish Europeans is disingenuous, dishonest, and just plain amateur.  

This racialized otherness of historical Jewish Europeans is why when you go to some old European cites you can still see the “Jewish ghettos” where Jewish residents were legally required to live. In many places these were located outside the main city wall, leaving residents unprotected in case of an attack. There were also walls around these Jewish enclaves, that were used to block Jews from entering the main city during Christian holidays. The walls were also used by the Jewish communities to protect themselves against organized pogroms and other antisemitic attacks. These ghettos weren’t abolished in most cities until the the later 19th century.

In addition to the ghettos, Jewish people were subject to specific Sumptuary Laws. Sumptuary Laws were laws made to make social distinctions between the different classes of society visible in their dress. Jews were made indicate their “Jewishness” by wearing certain clothing, usually black, including the yellow “Jew badge” and a pointed “Jew hat”. Jewish people were also required to only practice certain profession and with some professions, such as doctors, they were only allowed to practice on Jewish patients.

Even Jewish people who converted to Christianity (whether because of pressure by Christians, in attempt to raise their own social status, marriage to a non-Jew or perhaps a genuine religious sentiment) were looked on with suspicion by Christian neighbors. In many parts of Europe, there were “blood laws” that  prevented people from participating in civic life if they even had a great grandparent who was not a Christian. These “blood purity” ideas were first used in Europe to penalize people of Jewish descent, and then were expanded to the colonial “one drop” laws that penalized people with Native American or African ancestries.

Links

Medieval Jewish ghettos

Sumptuary Laws for Jews

A man who has traveled to 217 countries in the world on visiting Iran 

Lauer’s Pathetic Interview Made Me Think Trump Can Win

“I was totally against the war in Iraq. You can look at Esquire magazine from 2004. You can look at before that.” This is a lie. Trump has been quoted supporting the invasion beforehand and even afterward. Nobody has produced any evidence of Trump contradicting his support for the war before it started. His line to Lauer was transparently ridiculous – how could a 2004 interview supply evidence of having opposed a war that began in 2003? But Lauer did not try even a single follow-up.

[…]

The average undecided voter is getting snippets of news from television personalities like Lauer, who are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian.

Emphasis mine. Matt Lauer failed the profession of journalism, and he failed America tonight. This is not a fucking game, this is not a fucking horserace. This is an election between, as Chait writes, a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian. 

Chris Matthews was quick to defend Lauer after this pathetic display, saying that if Matt Lauer “calls Trump a liar”, then Lauer will be accused of expressing an opinion and not being impartial. That’s a fucking disgrace, and laughable coming from Matthews, who frequently spends most of his show demanding that his guests buy into whatever frame Matthews has constructed that day.

Anyone who is afraid of calling out lies when they are interviewing someone who wants to be president is not qualified to conduct that interview. Anyone who isn’t prepared to challenge the assertions of someone who wants to be president, because they’re afraid of what the big mean old political parties will say about them has no business calling themselves a journalist.

Matt Lauer should stick to empty celebrity interviews and cooking with celebrity chefs, because he clearly isn’t ready for the responsibility NBC gave him tonight.

My amazing wife @stuffinfluffcooking (& of @askrubynsapphire) and her tweets are both succinct and right.

Image courtesy of the University of New Hampshire

The University of New Hampshire has announced that librarian Robert Morin, a longtime employee who died in March of 2015, left his entire estate to the school – a cool $4 million dollars.

As the Boston Globe reports, Morin wasn’t your ordinary frugal librarian:

“He would have some Fritos and a Coke for breakfast, a quick cheese sandwich at the library, and at home would have a frozen dinner because the only thing he had to work with was a microwave,” [longtime financial adviser Edward] Mullen said. “He was a very unusual gentleman.”

But wait, there’s more … according to a UNH news release, 

Morin also had a passion for watching movies, and from 1979 to 1997 he watched more than 22,000 videos. Following this feat, he switched his attention to books. He read, in chronological order, every book published in the U.S. from 1930 to 1940 — excluding children’s books, textbooks and books about cooking and technology. At the time of his death he had reached 1,938, the year of his birth.

LIFE GOALS, people. LIFE GOALS.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

I was doing my Master’s thesis on bullying until the topic triggered me back to my own childhood so badly I dropped out of that degree program.  Let me share something I know.

We haven’t quite found anti-bullying programs that stop bullying once it’s started, but we canreduce the harm bullying does.  Just a few small changes to classroom culture, like limiting children’s opportunities to exclude each other, or spending time talking about respectful communication, has visible changes.  Yeah, there’s still a hierarchy of popularity, but kids at the bottom of the ladder go from having no friends on average to having one or two.  And that’s enough to make or break a childhood.  (Sources: one two three four five)

But here’s the other thing.

There is one major factor that mediates the link between childhood bullying and adult mental illnesses (predominantly depression, anxiety, and eating disorders).  It’s self-blame.

What really damages children isn’t precisely being bullied; it’s believing that they deserve to be bullied. If children don’t blame themselves for being victims, they are much more resilient and experience fewer long-term negative consequences. (Sources: one two three four five)

Society blames children for their victimization by bullies all the time.  It says, “There is something about you that causes people to bully you.“  Common responses to bullied kids are things like: “Don’t give them a reaction.” (They’re bullying you because you get upset.)  “They’re just jealous.” (They’re bullying you because you do well.)  “Let’s teach you some social skills.”  (They’re bullying you because you act weird.)

There is nothing that can ever make you deserve emotional abuse. 

“Stop bullying” programs don’t work because they treat “bullying” like its a unique, child-specific thing you grow out of once you reach the magic age of 18 and It Gets Better ™.

It’s not. It’s just a fancy word for abuse that people coined because they didn’t want to believe their precious little baby could abuse another child and everyone went along with it because NOBODY wants to believe a six year old can intentionally traumatize another six year old to the point where they want to take their own life. Its “just bullying.” It’s not abuse. Only adults can be abusers. Kids are bullies. And if a child DOES do something evil, they’re either mentally ill or an adult drove them to it. Children can’t be bad!

Except here in the land of reality, it doesn’t work that way. Being abused causes the same amount of trauma whether your abuser is 9 or 90. I don’t care if a child has the biggest, saddest sob story in the world, they don’t get to use that as an excuse to abuse other children. Adults don’t (or shouldn’t) get away with that, so neither should children.

The disruption I was causing was being bullied. Me being targeted by bullies was somehow my fault, my problem.They had me removed from classes rather than dealing with the bullies.

“but sex is what makes us human!”

  in 1916 a French officer in his twenties writes his

doctoral dissertation under

heavy mortar fire.

he sends it by mail, a page

at a time, to his wife.

a week before he’s to step up to the podium and

defend his work rather than hiscountry

he is killed in action.

even as the bullets rip

through him he still wishes he could have become a professor

in French literature and

the university awards him a posthumous Ph.D.

sex is

  a woman breaks down in tears on the phone because

a week is not enough time to

get over a breakup.

her sister drives an hour across town,

comes up the front steps with

a gallon of ice cream and somebeer

and together they eat moose tracks and marathon

every

single

Godzilla movie

ever made.

  sex is

she’s late for work but her car isn’t

starting and even through her coat and hat she’s cold.

she knows she can’t be late again because she’s missed

one time too many already because her

father’s nurse was sick with the flu and someone

needed to help him bathe.

the clock ticks past fifteen after and she hits

the wheel like it’s a heavy bag as though that will help

steps on the gas like the car will go

and wonders how she will pay rent

and how she will feed her father.

sex is

  it takes three people to hold the predator down because

even with the cover over his head

a bleeding eye and shattered wing

he is trying to hurt them.

none of them have seen this bird before in their lives but

they bandage his wing and head and give him a painkiller and

put him in a warm place to sleep and heal because

it is right.

at first he is paralyzed and cannot

fly but soon he is taking steps

and then fluttering, and then soaring, and

six months later he is whole and healed and hunting.

once he is gone they never see him again

which means they’ve done their jobs right.

sex is

  in 1969 a girl watches grey-and-white footage on her parents’ tiny television and

can’t quite believe that what she is seeing is not a movie set but

another planet.

the men on the screen look a little like

aliens with bulbous heads and no faces and fat

marshmallow arms

but they are still men.

her mother puffs on a cigarette behind her and declares that

this is progress

even if it was just a small step.

the girl grows up to be not an astronaut but a secretary

and her boss calls her ‘sweetheart’.

but sex is

  a boy is taught that real men don’t cry so

he doesn’t.

when his best friend dies from a self-inflicted

gunshot wound, he locks himself

in the shower every day and sobs under scalding

water until it runs cold

so nobody will see him grieving

so nobody will see that tears are just love that

has no place left to go.

he learns to dull love rather than suppress its expression and

soon the owner of the liquor store knows him by name.

three DUIs, two evictions, and twelve steps later,

he is feeding people at a homeless shelter,

and telling them it’s all right to cry.

Sex is

  the broken man tells the comedian

that he didn’t mean to step in front of the car but the rain

made it hard to see.

he seems okay but his leg

does not.

the comedian clutches a grubby receipt with the driver’s

plate number scrawled on the back

in pink pen, stands out in the rain so the broken man

can have his umbrella,

and gives him the comedy routine that ruined his career

so the man doesn’t think about the pain in his leg.

once he’s out of the hospital, the fixed man sends him a thank-you card

with kittens on it.

what makes us human

  yawning is contagious,

and there is a species of bird whose young we call “pufflings”.

melodic collections of sound, spaced by silence,

can move us to tears.

the tallest building in the world is

two-thousand seven-hundred and seventeen feet tall.

in less than eighty years we went from our first powered flight

to touching the moon,

and in one-hundred from the first phone call

to instantaneous connection between thinking machines of our own creation.

we make pies out of tree organs

and let cow’s milk ferment until it hardens and then

we put them together, because apple pie with cheddar cheese is delicious.

what makes us human is

the earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are

two-hundred thousand years old .

we have had pet dogs

for sixteen-thousand of those years, longer

than corn

or the wheel.

the steps we take are part of

one of the most energy-efficient gaits the

animal kingdom has ever seen.

we invented the concepts of love

and hate

and justice, and mercy

and we invented the language to convey them.

we sharpened rocks, then metal, to convince other people

who don’t hold the same idea of those things as we do

because we think

it’s right.

we are two hundred millennia of love and disappointment and

sorrow and innovation and

mercy and kindness and dreams

and failure

and recovery.

EDIT: ALL INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO DONATE/LINKS WAS COPY/PASTED DIRECTLY FROM OLD FRIENDS SENIOR DOG SANCTUARY’S VERIFIED FACEBOOK PAGE AND LINKS THEY PROVIDED FOR THEIR WEBSITE/EMAIL ADDRESS THEY GAVE OUT FOR PAYPAL DONATIONS. 

Just about the one good, pure thing going right now is the Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary, but some of its neighbors have taken offense and now it is being forced out— in only 60 days. I wish I were a lawyer so I could offer my services to fight this and at least buy them ample time to find and build a sanctuary equivalent to what they have now or better. Since I’m not, it’s time to dig deep and give, and not let 2016 get even worse. These dogs were promised a comfortable home for the rest of their lives. Their people need some help to keep that promise.

Please donate if you can at all, even a few dollars, and signal boost this until every set of dog-loving eyes on this site knows about what’s going down here. There’s a lot of cruel and scary things happening in the world that we can’t do a lot to fix or prevent, but we can stop the worst from happening here, and give these dogs who have finally found much-needed stability and peace a smooth transition to what will be an even better, more stable place to call home.

Donate through PayPal:  [email protected]

Link provided by OFSDS on their site to donate:  http://oldfriendsseniordogs.com/donate.html

Another link to donate can be found on their .org site:

: http://www.ofsds.org/index.html

Their FB

If the signal is boosted enough, maybe we can get some media attention brought to bear.

From OFSDS: