So today we exchanged contracts! Which is good. Although it feels rather anticlimactic, and because of other scheduling things we’ve gone from having a nice 2 weeks to sort stuff out to utter stress about having only 9 days to pack everything.
Which is kinda stressful.
And since we’ve finally hit the point of doing shipping we’re going to need to pay for things, and because of the car and the lack of agency shifts, this is now juggling lack of money to try and pay for all the things we need.
please do not let ferguson die out like everything else big does. do not let this die out. do not let this continue on for three days and then everyone forget about it. do not let this happen.
queue this post up 3 days from now, a week from now, a month from now, a month from then. make sure even if you forget your blog will remember.
While leaders across the country refuse to accept Syrian refugees, insisting they pose an unacceptable security risk, homegrown domestic extremists have been doing a pretty good job of terrorizing their fellow Americans with guns, explosives and threats of large-scale attacks. In addition to these, we can leave off the shooting in Minneapolis.
I keep on seeing this image being posted and liked on various forms of social media, particularly Facebook. Many are cooing over Hitler’s alleged humanity in this photo, when in reality his supposed affection and “love” for this child is absolutely contrived; this is his love and perverted obsession with the superiority of the Aryan race and its’ continuation and expansion through the Lebensborn program.
According to menzet.org, this image is from Hitler’s Lebensborn program, a program created to mass produce “Aryan” babies (like products) by offering young German girls up and assigning SS men (Hitler’s police and officials) to essentially rape them in order to give birth to many “Hitler babies” in order to further his political ideology of creating German living space and increasing the population of “superior” Aryan beings. This program began in 1935, the same year that the Nuremberg laws outlawed interfaith marriage between Jews and Christians.
While Hitler was mass-producing these lily-white babies, an estimated 1.5-2.5 million Jewish babies and children, in addition to a significant unknown number of Roma and disabled babies and children were mass murdered through human experimentation (twins killed by Josef Mengele), were sent to killing centers (mass shooting and gassing), newborns were shot immediately after birth, toddlers and children were killed by having their heads smashed open on concrete walls often for just crying and many other violent practices were used to exterminate innocent beings. Hitler mercilessly viewed children as useless for they could not perform most heavy labor, thus the children were most often ripped away from their parents and violently killed first before all others.
About 50,000 people on Facebook, including some of my Facebook friends who are biracial are posting this and liking this photo… I don’t know if a lack of education, blatant anti-semitism or desensitization is to blame.
If this child were to have not been 100% Aryan with blonde hair and blue-eyes, or would she have been a Jew, she would have faced death at his hands like the millions who died horrific, violent deaths.
These beautiful lives and legacies lost are still felt in the Jewish community to this day, especially because this all happened not too long ago. So much of our people’s cultural traditions have died with entire families systematically murdered. Yiddish is now a dying language, rarely ever spoken. So many Jews like myself, who’s ancestors had to assimilate in order to survive or flee genocide and persecution, leaving all of their cultural markings and legacy behind them will NEVER KNOW who we really are or have the luxury of “ethnic foods” and “family traditions” that some of you may have. Some Jews may never even learn that they are Jews.
Moral of the story is: You CANNOT humanize Hitler. He was not a genius, he was not loving. He was a disrespectful failed student in High school who became a talent-less failed artist. He was a deluded heartless man filled with unimaginable evil and hatred.
My first time growing Teosinte, which is Corn’s ancestor. Well, I’m not sure which Teosinte species this is as I got it from @dinhteresting and @lorrieclevenger at @ucscfarm, simply labeled “Teosinte”. Corn is one of the most domesticated plants – there are no wild forms that look anything like it. It is estimated that beginning about 9,000 years ago, it took at least several hundred if not a few thousand years for people in what is now southern Mexico to transform Teosinte (which has very few hard-shelled kernels that shatter into individual seeds) into Corn (which has very many juicy kernels neatly and securely arranged along a cob). Many people these days stress the importance of knowing where our food comes from, table to plate, but I think we must go deeper and thank the hundreds of generations of farmers who brought plants from the wild and selectively and naturally bred the amazing foods we eat today. This Teosinte is cool because it helps me be that much more grateful for an abundant and delicious ear of Corn. #teosinte #corn #zea #zeamays @bartramsfarm #seedkeeping #seedsaving #plantbreeding #selectivebreeding
Racists never want to believe that they are racist. They are constantly redefining what racism means so that they can escape meeting the definition while simultaneously engaging in the behavior.
Son of Baldwin (via mukuroikusaba)
by Ursula K. LeGuin
On Tuesday night, the Sci Fi Channel aired its final installment of Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries based—loosely, as it turns out—on my Earthsea books. The books, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which were published more than 30 years ago, are about two young people finding out what their power, their freedom, and their responsibilities are. I don’t know what the film is about. It’s full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense. My protagonist is Ged, a boy with red-brown skin. In the film, he’s a petulant white kid. Readers who’ve been wondering why I “let them change the story” may find some answers here.
When I sold the rights to Earthsea a few years ago, my contract gave me the standard status of “consultant"—which means whatever the producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. My agency could not improve this clause. But the purchasers talked as though they genuinely meant to respect the books and to ask for my input when planning the film. They said they had already secured Philippa Boyens (who co-wrote the scripts for The Lord of the Rings) as principal script writer. The script was, to me, all-important, so Boyens’ presence was the key factor in my decision to sell this group the option to the film rights.
Months went by. By the time the producers got backing from the Sci Fi Channel for a miniseries—and another producer, Robert Halmi Sr., had come aboard—they had lost Boyens. That was a blow. But I had just seen Halmi’s miniseries DreamKeeper, which had a stunning Native American cast, and I hoped that Halmi might include some of those great actors in Earthsea.
At this point, things began to move very fast. Early on, the filmmakers contacted me in a friendly fashion, and I responded in kind; I asked if they’d like to have a list of name pronunciations; and I said that although I knew that a film must differ greatly from a book, I hoped they were making no unnecessary changes in the plot or to the characters—a dangerous thing to do, since the books have been known to millions of people for decades. They replied that the TV audience is much larger, and entirely different, and would be unlikely to care about changes to the books’ story and characters.
They then sent me several versions of the script—and told me that shooting had already begun. I had been cut out of the process. And just as quickly, race, which had been a crucial element, had been cut out of my stories. In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers). A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned. When I looked over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence.
Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future science fiction books are not white. They’re mixed; they’re rainbow. In my first big science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In the two fantasy novels the miniseries is “based on,” everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg, is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend, Vetch, is black. In the miniseries, Tenar is played by Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk, the only person in the miniseries who looks at all Asian. Ged and Vetch are white.
My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one.
I was never questioned about this by any editor. No objection was ever raised. I think this is greatly to the credit of my first editors at Parnassus and Atheneum, who bought the books before they had a reputation to carry them.
But I had endless trouble with cover art. Not on the great cover of the first edition—a strong, red-brown profile of Ged—or with Margaret Chodos Irvine’s four fine paintings on the Atheneum hardcover set, but all too often. The first British Wizard was this pallid, droopy, lily-like guy—I screamed at sight of him…
What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather
Students at Princeton are asking for Wilson’s name to be removed from a building there. Here’s part of why.
