So today people in my city (Nashville, TN) gathered to protest the Darren Wilson decision & started at the police headquarters. The police then not only protected them (stopping traffic in the highways the protestors closed etc), but also set out table with hot chocolate and other things for them. This is how the police should be reacting across our country when injustices like this happen. They should be fighting with the people, not against them.
Tag: good things
Eli Erlick was just featured in The Advocate for winning a $25,000 grant for TSER (link)! This being super awesome, we also need to give a huge thanks to TSER members Landyn Pan, Alex Sennello, and Danie Diamond for making all this possible!
Okay so there’s this arsehole called Julien Blanc who makes his living by giving expensive seminars on how to pick up women by sexually assaulting them, insulting them, threatening them, degrading them and fetishising them. He was scheduled to give a seminar in Melbourne Australia when activists hit back.
The protests against him were so great that he was kicked out of his hotel, booted from his proposed venue and then literally deported from the country.
Karma is awesome sometimes.
I didn’t see this on my dash at all yesterday or the day before, which made me sad, so I’m posting about it now.
That handsome young man right there? That’s Kwasi Enin, a high school student who was accepted to all eight Ivy League schools. Not one or two, but ALL OF THEM.
The 17-year-old violist and aspiring physician applied to all eight [Ivy League schools], from Brown to Yale.
The responses began rolling in over the past few months, and by late last week when he opened an e-mail from Harvard, he found he’d been accepted to every one. School district officials provided scanned copies of acceptance letters from all eight Monday. Yale confirmed that it was holding a spot for Enin. (x)
Kwasi is 11th in a class of 647 at William Floyd in New York, meaning he’s in the top 2% of his class. He scored 2,250 out of 2,400 points on the SAT. And by the time this kid graduates, he’ll have taken 11 AP courses. He’s also a musician who sings in his school’s a capella group and volunteers in his local hospital’s radiation department.
I just wanted to highlight this kid and his amazing achievements. He’s the kind of future our world needs.
Dudes gonna discover the cure for cancer holy shit he’s amazing o.o
YAS ALL OF THIS
Finally, Nigeria’s Kidnapped Schoolgirls Are Coming Home
Photo: Some of the schoolgirls Boko Haram kidnapped in mid-April.
“On Friday, Nigeria’s government announced it had reached a deal with Boko Haram to release the approximately 200 schoolgirls held captive by the Islamist terror group since April.
The agreement, announced by the country’s defense minister, also involves a cease fire between Boko Haram and Nigeria’s military. The government expects the terror group will not back out on the deal. “Commitment among parts of Boko Haram and the military does appear to be genuine,” an official with Nigeria’s security forces told Reuters Friday. “It is worth taking seriously.”
Boko Haram militants abducted more than 300 schoolgirls from Chibok boarding school in northern Nigeria in mid-April, sparking a worldwide outcry and propelling the group onto to the international stage for the first time. Over fifty of the girls escaped early on. The rest have remained in captivity ever since.”
As reported by Mother Jones
AWESOME NEWS – this has been such a nightmare to follow, it is so great to hear the girls are being released!
Finally.
This photo always cheers me up a bit. It’s a front-page article from 1955 about Christine Jorgensen, one of the first women to have sex-reassignment surgery.
Since the text is a bit small and I couldn’t find a larger copy, here’s what the small blurb says:
A World of a Difference
George W. Jorgensen, Jr., son of a Bronx carpenter, served in the Army for two years and was given honorable discharge in 1946. Now George is no more. After six operations, Jorgensen’s sex has been changed and today she is a striking woman, working as a photographer in Denmark. Parents were informed of the big change in a letter Christine (that’s her new name) sent to them recently.
This article is 58 years old, and it’s more respectful of Christine’s pronoun choices and name than some publications are today. It makes me happy to see a newspaper be respectful of a trans person’s choice of name and pronouns like that :3
If someone from literally one of the most intolerant decades in recent history can respectfully write about trans women current journalists have no excuse.
Seattle joins a growing number of cities officially recognizing Native American history
Columbus Day will now be known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Seattle.
The Seattle City Council on Monday unanimously approved the re-designation, which acknowledges that Native Americans were living in North America well before Christopher Columbus “discovered America” in the 15th century, Reuters reports.
The change, which will go into effect before the Oct. 13 holiday this year, marks the second major city in the U.S. to officially re-designate the day, after Minneapolis’ vote in April. (Though the city of Berkeley, Calif., ceased observation of Columbus Day in 1992.)
The change faced some opposition from some members of Seattle’s Italian-American community, who view the day as a celebration of their cultural heritage (Columbus hailed from Genoa, Italy).
The Seattle School Board voted last week to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Columbus Day on the same day in public schools.
“If you wore a name tag with your pronouns on it you’ll be made fun of so hard” lol OK so why have I gotten nothing but compliments and appreciation for my pronouns button at work, almost all from middle aged women, and have had people ask where it was when they came in again and I wasn’t wearing it?
I got another compliment on it yesterday and the woman said it was really progressive that my store let me wear it!
ok, so today at the daycare that i volunteer at it was ‘princess and superhero’ day and this little boy walked in in this sparkling blue dress and my favorite thing is that none of the kids reacted at all, they just told him he looked pretty and went on with they’re day and that is why children are better than adults
this made my day
Success! India’s First Mars Probe Is In Orbit And Working
“India has managed to do what few other nations have accomplished: putting a satellite into orbit around another planet — and it did so a lot cheaper than the competition.
The $70 million Mangalyaan, or “Mars craft” in Hindi, began circling Mars after a 24-minute engine burn to slow it down enough to be captured by the Red Planet’s gravity.”
Read more from NPR.
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES SPACE
It’s not just that the satellite is cheaper, but that they focused on finding answers to questions that hadn’t been answered AND which could be answered cheaply AND which compliments other nations’ scientific research into Mars.
This was, in short, a very well-realized space expedition. India deserves all the attention.
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