This is nifty

Here's a set of pictures of cities in the US, carefully color coded to indicate who lives where by ethnicity.

Naturally, I looked at NYC first. That big gray spot in Manhattan is Central Park, right below it is Midtown - not a lot of people live there, it's mostly where people work. All that stuff on the left of the screen is Jersey.

Of course, down the page a bit is this lovely comment:

Further proof that mixing races only leads to segregation, which leads to voilence. Multiethnic or multicultural societies are doomed to fail.

WTF? Mixing races leads to segregation? And this leads inexorably to violence how, exactly? I'm sure it's because this map proves his point or something, except it doesn't - NYC is actually one of the safest cities in America. (Maybe he's trying to prove a negative and say that NYC isn't actually all that integrated (or maybe that it is...?) and this is non-violent? Who knows?)

So, yeah, that one doesn't even make sense. If you're going to be randomly racist, since you can't have facts on your side, at least try to have logic there!

This is from a year ago, but I just saw it now

(Thanks, Mommy!)

Ginger is my sister, of course - we used to call her that as a kid. Then she stopped and we were the ONLY ones who called her that other than Giann and maybe Gale, friends from way back when. Finally, my mother and I switched over to Jenn... and a few years down the line she started using Ginger again out in the world. D'oh!

Anybody ever read Speak?

It's a YA book about a girl who doesn't, in fact, speak, because (sorry for the spoiling, but it's necessary to understand the post) she was raped over the summer.

One of those books that makes high school reading lists when teachers are bored with reading the classics.

Well, this unmitigated fool has determined that the rape scene in Speak is "softcore pornography". (The link is not to him, but the post where I first read about this.)

Pornography, to my understanding, has to be stimulating, titillating, and fun. The rape in Speak is sickening. And not - let's be absolutely clear here - sickening because I think children are reading softcore porn in school, but sickening because reading it makes me feel nauseous at the very thought of what's going on.

It's well-written, and it's never once been what I've pulled off the shelf because I was bored and thought a little masturbation would help with that.

It's not pornography. Not in any sense of the word. What's very sad is that it seems like for many girls and young women this might be one of the few ways they have of dealing with their own rape. The library book with accounts of rape and assault written on the back pages parallels a scene in the book itself where the protagonist writes her rapists' name on a bathroom stall, and comes back to find whole conversations written about what else he's done.

And it's not that this book is so wonderful in and of itself. Any other well-written book would do. It's that this asshole's attitudes (which he didn't just make up out of the ether) are the same exact ones that keep these people from speaking up! This twit, this misbegotten barely-literate pest, he's part of the problem here! Oh, it makes me so mad. I could absolutely spit.

So, you know, though I don't want to give this person any more attention (let's not encourage him in his ignorance here), I feel I should spread the word so that if somebody tries giving you that line, even if you have no idea what they're talking about, you can smack them hard and tell them why they're wrong.

A few articles

Mixed-use neighborhoods may reduce some crimes

An article ambitiously titled "Evolution in Action" about how some skinks give live birth

What to do if you lose a body part. Not likely to come up, but better to read it now - are you really gonna go google if your fingers get chopped off?

An article on the bedbug conference

Hilariously, it notes that the bedbug control folks all religiously checked their rooms first thing. It'd be the worst kind of irony to come home from this event with a few little hitchhikers!

Interesting quote here: “People still have in their heads that bedbugs means someone’s dirty,” Mr. Linde said, “but I handle multimillion-dollar homes in Westchester and Connecticut, and believe me, no one’s dirty.”

"People" think bedbugs mean you're *dirty*, but *he* doesn't bring up dirt, he brings up wealth. Because people do think the two go together (or don't, rather).

( Read more... )

In Mezuzas, a Custom Inherited by Gentiles

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Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes

This is right on the heels of a huge tree-killing storm only half a year ago. Two years before that we had the storm that took out half the (remaining) trees on our block and a spire off the church up the hill. They call these "freak storms" but how freakish can they be, really?

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A Perk of Our Evolution: Pleasure in Pain of Chilies

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Family Fight, Border Patrol Raid, Baby Deported

What's all this crap I keep hearing about "anchor babies"? For crying out loud, the girl's mother's family has been in the US four generations, but she still got swept away.

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Mormon-Owned Paper Stands With Immigrants

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I found it!

I spent all day trying to find this video!

I would love to tell you what it's about, but you absolutely have to experience it firsthand. It's short!

( Don't read on until you watch the video! )

Of course, you know, the nieces get treated to a lot of impromptu rants

I, um, try to keep it to reasonable levels?

Ana, the other day, was very upset by the litter on the way to the library. (I told her I'd scrounge up a plastic bag for the next time we go so she can gather it up.) "Why do people litter? It's all messy because people are stupid and rude and - "

Me: HOLD ON HERE!

Now, I hated to interrupt her, because if she sticks around with me she'll be pretty darn good at this righteous indignation bit. (Heck, she's pretty good at it now!) But I have a few opinions on the subject myself, and while I do think people shouldn't litter I *also* thought it was time for 5 minutes on the subject of social justice, socioeconomics, and how it relates to the placement and emptying of public garbage cans.

I mean, here we are at the intersection of one, two, three, FOUR major streets (and several other minor ones), at a bus stop where no less than six busses stop (in fact it's two bus stops, five feet away from each other, and the same two across the street going the other way), there's a public school RIGHT THERE, there's a lot of stores, there's the public pool and a park - and until you're actually standing at the bus stop there's no garbage can. In fact, as I showed Ana, the bus stop itself has comparatively little litter, although there's some because although it DOES have garbage cans they're not really sufficient for the amount of people passing through.

When there are garbage cans, people use them. When there aren't, they drop things on the ground. No argument that they shouldn't, but rather than yelling at them to carry their soda bottle an extra 6 blocks or bribing them with a quarter, isn't it easier to just put a garbage can where people are bound to be walking anyway? It certainly seems to work better.

Meanwhile, over in Battery Park City they have a garbage can every few feet, they empty them several times a day, and they even have dispensers for plastic bags specifically so dogwalkers who find themselves at a loss can still pick up the poo! The bags are probably compostable too.

BPC is where the rich people live. They can afford things like that. One of the reasons rich people like to live in areas like that is because it's clean. It's clean because people have a place to put their trash, not because rich people are inherently nicer to the environment!

On a semi-related note, Saturday I went out with Deniz and Su while their mother helped fix up a second room in my grandmother's apartment. Deniz carelessly tossed a straw wrapper on the ground RIGHT as I turned around to make sure she was still behind me. She didn't see me - and believe me, this is the sort of moment you dream of. I quickly turned BACK around and, with my back to her, said in my strictest voice "DENIZ. YOU PICK THAT UP RIGHT NOW."

I'm still giggling over it. Her "Wait, what? OH!" was priceless.