A Delusion

Pumzi - dir. Wanuri Kahiu // Kenya

In a dystopian future 35 years after an ecological WWIII  has torn the world apart, East African survivors of the devastation remain locked away in contained communities, but a young woman in possession of a germinating seed struggles against the governing council to bring the plant to Earth’s ruined surface.

The main character is a museum curator in the future and also yes I would like see this now please

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT THIS I DON’T LIKE

The complete short film is on youtube and it’s really good and the end kind of took my breath away. 

I must see this

Sci fi from Kenya…this looks great.

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I grew up believing that women had contributed nothing to the world until the 1960′s. So once I became a feminist I started collecting information on women in history, and here’s my collection so far, in no particular order. 

Lepa Svetozara Radić (1925–1943) was a partisan executed at the age of 17 for shooting at German soldiers during WW2. As her captors tied the noose around her neck, they offered her a way out of the gallows by revealing her comrades and leaders identities. She responded that she was not a traitor to her people and they would reveal themselves when they avenged her death. She was the youngest winner of the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia, awarded in 1951

23 year old Phyllis Latour Doyle was British spy who parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for D-day. She relayed 135 secret messages before France was finally liberated. 

Catherine Leroy, War Photographer starting with the Vietnam war. She was taken a prisoner of war. When released she continued to be a war photographer until her death in 2006.

Lieutenant Pavlichenko was a Russian sniper in WWII, with a total of 309 kills, including 36 enemy snipers. After being wounded, she toured the US to promote friendship between the two countries, and was called ‘fat’ by one of her interviewers, which she found rather amusing. 

Johanna Hannie “Jannetje” Schaft was born in Haarlem. She studied in Amsterdam had many Jewish friends. During WWII she aided many people who were hiding from the Germans and began working in resistance movements. She helped to assassinate two nazis. She was later captured and executed. Her last words were “I shoot better than you.”. 

Nancy wake was a resistance spy in WWII, and was so hated by the Germans that at one point she was their most wanted person with a price of 5 million francs on her head. During one of her missions, while parachuting into occupied France, her parachute became tangled in a tree. A french agent commented that he wished that all trees would bear such beautiful fruit, to which she replied “Don’t give me any of that French shit!”, and later that evening she killed a German sentry with her bare hands. 

After her husband was killed in WWII, Violette Szabo began working for the resistance. In her work, she helped to sabotage a railroad and passed along secret information. She was captured and executed at a concentration camp at age 23. 

Grace Hopper was a computer scientist who invented the first ever compiler. Her invention makes every single computer program you use possible. 

Mona Louise Parsons was a member of an informal resistance group in the Netherlands during WWII. After her resistance network was infiltrated, she was captured and was the first Canadian woman to be imprisoned by the Nazis. She was originally sentenced to death by firing squad, but the sentence was lowered to hard lard labor in a prison camp. She escaped. 

Simone Segouin was a Parisian rebel who killed an unknown number of Germans and captured 25 with the aid of her submachine gun. She was present at the liberation of Paris and was later awarded the ‘croix de guerre’. 

Mary Edwards Walker is the only woman to have ever won an American Medal of Honor. She earned it for her work as a surgeon during the Civil War. It was revoked in 1917, but she wore it until hear death two years later. It was restored posthumously. 

Rita Levi-Montalcini - Italian neuroscientist who won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor. She died aged 103. 

A snapshot of the women of color in the woman’s army corps on Staten Island

This is an ongoing project of mine, and I’ll update this as much as I can (It’s not all WWII stuff, I’ve got separate folders for separate achievements). 

Annie Jump Cannon was an american astronomer and, in addition to possibly having one of the best names in history, was co-creator of one of the first scientific classification systems of stars, based on temperature. 

Melba Roy Moutan was a Harvard educated mathematician who led a team of mathematicians at NASA, nicknamed ‘Computers’ for their number processing prowess. 

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman was a chemist who developed the concept of conformational topology, and studied at Johns Hopkins University before it officially allowed women entry in 1970. 

Vera Rubin is an astronomer and has co-authored 114 peer reviewed papers. She specializes in the study of dark matter and galaxy rotation rates. 

Mary Sherman Morgan was a rocket scientist who invented hydyne, a liquid fuel that powered the USA’s Jupiter C-rocket. 

Chien-Siung Wu was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, as well as experimental radioactive studies. She was the first woman to become president of the American Physical Society. 

Mildred Catherine Rebstock was the first person to synthesize the antibiotic chloromycetin.

Ruby Hirose was a chemist who conducted vital research about an infant paralysis vaccine. 

Hattie Elizabeth Alexander was a pediatrician and microbiologist who developed a remedy for Haemophilus influenzae, and conducted vital research on antibiotic resistance. 

Marie Tharp was a scientist who mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and provided proof of continental drift. 

Mae Jamison is an astronaut who holds a degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University and was the first black woman in space.

Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and considered to be the world’s first computer programmer. 

Patricia E Bath is ophthalmologist and the inventor of the Laserphaco Probe, which is used to treat cataracts. 

Barbara McClintock won a Nobel prize for her discovery that genes could move in and between chromosomes.

Of course, what allows them to be not offended at rape jokes and racial slurs is that they are not targeted at them. For white guys, these are fun toys to play with; while for much of the rest of the world, they are tools of violence and oppression. Not just relics of the past, but very much alive and well today. So, then, the magical quality that allows these guys to remain so aloof and above-it-all is, quite simply, privilege.

And if you want to watch hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance in action, simply bring up privilege to these not offended white guys and see how fast and hard they become offended. Privilege is a concept so simple and obvious that most social scientists take it as axiomatic, but the mere mention of it gets these guys worked up into a rage. They’re so proud of their ability to be not offended by oppressive language and stereotypes, but they’ll be damned if you point out why. Funny. It’s almost as if they are the beneficiaries of systems of oppression and want to subtly encourage those systems so as to continue benefiting, while simultaneously stifling all mention of those systems, so as to mollify their fragile egos and underused consciences. 

Our attractiveness and/or availability to men should not determine the validity of our movement.

Stop fighting the “Feminists are ugly lesbians” stereotype by shouting, “No, we’re not!” Fight it by acknowledging that that’s a shitty critique of a movement for people who want our human rights. The fact that this is even a problem - that our cause is so often critiqued not by discussions about our ideas but about whether or not we are sexually attractive/available to men - is proof that we’re being viewed not as human beings who deserve rights but as sexual objects.

hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!

what are you going to do if he loses?

because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:

bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton

the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed

while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)

the republican party wins the presidential election.

(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)

so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?

i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.

you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game? 

they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.

i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.

my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:

the republican party wins the presidential election.

that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:

the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.

the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.

those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.

even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:

turn those ideas into policies

get those policies signed into law

get those laws implemented

they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.

can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.

FUCKING THIS.

FUCKING EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.

And this has an embarrassingly low number of notes.

I know how a lot of people here feel about Hilary. If I had my druthers, I would MUCH rather have Bernie Sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. Like, stunningly close. A-breath-of-fresh-air close.

But consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000…

NONE OF US agreed with Gore. I mean, not really, at least. He was Republican-lite. First off, his wife Tipper was a friggin’ censorship Nazi, Gore was a Southern Baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that An Inconvenient Truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the Kyoto protocols in his platform. He supported the limited military action in Iraq, supported NAFTA, and supported driving our production overseas. There wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to Bush”. In other words, he was problematic as hell.

Then there was Ralph Nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against NAFTA, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.

And I voted for him. Proudly. In the general election. My reasoning was that nearly everyone I knew was voting for him (and everyone I knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?

“Well, we’re talking about the primaries,” I can already hear you say. And yes, we are. But consider this: if Bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for Hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes Green or some other third Party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.

Here’s what happened on election night, November 7, 2000:

We waited.  We watched Gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to Ralph fucking Nader. Bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. And then Florida and the recount and the Republican Party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the Supreme Court ruling and handed George W. Bush control of the country.

The first thing Bush did was reverse each and every executive order Clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby Republican Congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate America and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. Then Bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.

Then 9/11 happened.

If you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. In 2001, I was 20. I watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by IUDs. There are people I knew, people I ate lunch with every day, who are FUCKING DEAD right now.

This country was an unchecked fascist dictatorship for six years. Don’t believe me? Here’s the dictionary definition of fascism. And here’s what happened during the Bush regime.

Torture. Suppression of the press. Siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. Investments made by principle members of the Bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Sunsetting the assault weapons ban. The Defense of Marriage Act. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in New Orleans. No Child Left UnTested Behind. A color coded number system on every day of the news telling Americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far Bush dipped in the polls that week. He dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. His poll numbers went back up. Like clockwork.

Between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left Democrats and right wing Republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking Republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. No, the centrists are not the same. THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THE SAME. One faction sort of listens to us. The other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.

…

So for all the “problematic” that you imagine a Hilary Clinton presidency could be, I want you to imagine a Republican presidency (pick one) in which they want people like us fucking dead as pawns in their war games or fucking dying because they’ve stripped away the Affordable Healthcare Act.

So please Support Bernie Sanders. Support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then NO MATTER WHAT it will influence the DNC platform next summer. Support him because we’re all passionate about returning America to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.

But if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support Hilary Clinton. And I’m not kidding, I’m not being hyperbolic.  If the Republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.

Hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist Christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender. 

Three Supreme Court Justices are very old and may die in the next Presidential term.

And the bit about ending up with a 3rd Bush is about right - Jeb Bush is probably the “best” of the Republican candidates right now. It’s a TERRIFYING thought.

It’s like imagine everything in your house is on fire, and you’re standing there and the fire department come in like, describe the fire to me and maybe we can find what caused it and put it out. 

and you can’t just say everything so you’re like… well the fire in the curtain is the biggest but the fire in the photo albums might be doing the most damage also the fire in the couch is really inconvenient 

occasionally the fire guy is like, well your tv is on fire so it might be electronic-fireitus but that would cause other things like fire in the dvd player 

and you’re like, oh yes. that’s been on fire for years. I forgot to mention it because it’s always been a relatively small fire. It’s right next to the bookshelf which has much more fire. 

We’ve walked with Harry, Ron and Hermione, through a world that we thought was great but slowly revealed itself to be the opposite. We unpeeled the layers of corruption within the government, we saw cruelty against minorities grow in the past decades, and had media attack us and had teachers tell us that we ‘must not tell lies’. We got angry and frustrated and, like Harry, Ron and Hermione, had to think of a way to fight back. And them winning? That would have been enough to give us hope and leave us satisfied.

But instead. There was skip scene. And suddenly they were all over 30 and happy with their 2.5 children.

And the Millennials were left flailing in the dust.

Because while we recognised and empathised with everything up to that point. But seeing the Golden Trio financially stable and content and married? That was not something our generation could recognise. Because we have no idea if we’re ever going to be able to reach that stage. Not with the world we’re living in right now.

Having Harry, Ron and Hermione stare off into the distance after the battle and wonder about what the future might be would have stuck with us. Hell, have them move into a shitty flat together and try and sort out their lives would have. Have them with screaming nightmares and failed relationships and trying to get jobs in a society that’s falling apart would have. Have them still trying to fix things in that society would have. Because we known Voldemort was just a symptom of the disease of prejudice the Wizarding World.

But don’t push us off with an ‘all was well’. In a world about magic, JK Rowling finally broke our suspension of disbelief by having them all hit middle-class and middle-age contentment and expecting a fanbase of teenagers to accept it.