Saw this and thought of @shadesofmauve :)
Blog
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So that chicken counting
The car cost about £6k more than it was meant to.
The house is selling for £10k less than we originally agreed.
I’ve earned around £8k less than I was hoping/expecting to.
…oh, and the pound’s dropped against the dollar by quite a bit.This is going less well than we might hope.
I tried not to engage in too much counting of eggs before they hatched, but seriously, this is quite painful at the moment. Despite being available pretty much every day where I can be, I’ve *just about* equalled my pay when I was working for the NHS, working privately. Normally I could earn about 3x as much… but our ‘illustrious’ Health Secretary has made it very difficult for the NHS to use agency nurses. Now, if the NHS suddenly had enough nurses that’d make more sense, but actually, hospitals (ime) are just running short staffed. I’d actually suck up lower pay, but it’s too late for me to join another agency.
So it’s just painful at the moment.
And that’s today’s financial news.
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This is a map of Asia. North Americans, you may notice this map is not solely comprised of Japan, Korea, China and Thailand. People in the UK, you may notice India is not a continent. That is, if those of you who generalize entire continents can even pinpoint India on a map. Indians are Asian, gasp! And not all brown skinned people are Indian, also, gasp! There are an alarming amount of people, of all ages, from all backgrounds, who seem to be unable to process this.
I’m ethnically Asian. Since Asia is an extremely large continent, I could be from any number of countries. I am neither from India, China, Korea, Japan or Pakistan, yet not so surprisingly, I am still Asian.
Yes, there are commonalities across regions, through the conflation of cultures, colonialism, globalization, transnationalism and movement of diasporas. Sometimes these are all the same thing. Rickshaws, rice and curry can be found across the continent. But let’s not overgeneralize. You can also find Buddhists, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus across Asia. Cantonese Speaking Chinese Muslims! English Speaking Indian Jews!
No, we are not all the same. Orientalism? (Please look up Edward Said for basic concepts) No thank you.
Geography, people. It’s important.
This pops up on my dash every so often. I reblog it again, not just because I wrote it, but because nothing has changed since I first posted this.
What’s cool about Iran is that it falls in 3 different regions of Asia so depending on what part of Iran you’re in, you can kind of get culture shocked a bit. The central and western part of the country is West Asia, the north east is Central Asia, and the southeast is in South Asia.
To the folks wondering about Russia being included, I want to mention that the cultural debates and angst about that has been going on for CENTURIES. While France has been pretty fetishized all the way back from Peter the Great, there is no question that we are not Europe, even with that influence showing really obviously in historical seats of power like St. Petersburg. Nonetheless, the whole country was under control of the Mongols (The Golden Horde) from roughly 1242 to 1480, and that left an enormous Mongolian and Tatar heritage that remains to this day. The ancient Scythians are huge in the cultural imagination as well. And besides… look at the Russians who are outside the standard “Kievan Rus” phenotype (which most folks assume is how all Russians look.)
Here are three of the 30 distinct ethnic groups in Siberia alone:
Buryat grandfather, photo by Alexander Newby
Evenk children, photo by Evgenia Arbugaeva
Young Yakut couple, photographer unknown
boom
AS SOMEONE WITH NORTHERN IRANIAN (AZERBAIJANI)/RUSSIAN/ HAZARA-PERSIAN/ UYGHUR-CHINESE ANCESTRY THIS IS SUCH A BEAUTIFUL POST
And that’s why sometimes you’ll see a person with curly black hair, pale skin, and hazel-green eyes (my grand-father’s sister) who turn out to be Chinese. Mad recessive genes game at play, I swear. Mongols, they really got around.
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It doesn’t take much for us, the English, to ignore the atrocities of a fellow Englishman. The arrogant and vicious racism at the heart of traditional Englishness would have you believe that we left the people we colonised better off than we found them.
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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.
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Hey CT Dems, seriously?!
Apparently (CTMirror, Washington Times, Hartford Courant) the Democratic leadership in the Connecticut Senate is about to kill the public funding of elections in Connecticut for the 2016 cycle.
Connecticut is one of three states with serious public funding for state officials (CT, AZ, and ME). In the first year after its enactment, 78% of elected representatives opted into the system. But now, the Dems are talking about killing the program — which of course would be wonderful for the lobbyists in Connecticut, and further strengthen the power of SuperPACs in that state.
This is officially #REALLYbadNEWS. A week after Maine voted to strengthened its own public funding system, and Seattle voted to establish an innovative voucher program to fund city elections (here’s Paul Blumenthal’s piece about both), Connecticut should be talking about how to make their program better, not dead.
If you’ve got friends in the state, please ask them to ask the Democratic leadership what’s going on? You can reach the President of the Senate, Martin Looney (D-New Haven), here.
We Democrats tell ourselves that we’re leaders on this issue — everywhere, including Connecticut. Let’s make that true.
(More from CommonCause and EveryVoice).
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Watch: Obama points out the hypocrisy in the U.S. governors and politicians refusing Syrian refugees.
Makes me glad once again I live in Washington:
Governor Jay Inslee ?@GovInslee Nov 16
WA continues to welcome those seeking refuge from persecution, no matter where they come from or their religion http://1.usa.gov/1WWnbLq 3/3
Yay to our soon to be home for doing the decent, human thing.
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…and down
So today is one of those sucky days where I feel much less good than normal. I’m feeling frustrated by the lack of progress on the house, I’m frustrated by feeling like we’re not moving forward and I’m feeling down about leaving our beautiful home that we’ve made for ourselves for a disturbingly unknown future.
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“The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor.” .. (Thomas Donahue)
