Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues rock band Pacific Gas & Electric. Enjoy!

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Saturday December 23, 1905
From the Appeal to Reason: A Poem for Mother Jones by Ellis B. Harris

From the Appeal of December 16, 1905:

MOTHER JONES
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Here's to you, Mother, Mother Jones.
Foe of the sabre,
When Justice, reigning, Wrong dethrones,
Helped by Love's labor,
Among the comrades we extol
Thy name shall blazon on the scroll,
In memory of one great soul,
Dear, kindly neighbor.

"I would like to go to the Lion’s Gate," Raziel told him.

The Romanian volubly refused. When Raziel realized that his driver's mind was not about to be changed, he got out of the taxi and set out on foot for the Old City.

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jazz guitarist Charlie Christian. Enjoy!

A group called Privacy for All announced yesterday that it had failed in its attempt to qualify the so-called Personal Privacy Protection Act for the November 2016 ballot.

The PPPA would have forced transgender and gender nonconforming people to use public facilities reserved for our birth sex.

Anti-trans activists needed to get 365800 signatures to place the initiative on the ballot but fell short. They are not saying by how much.

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Wednesday December 22, 1915
From the International Socialist Review: No Budget, No Problem for the Agricultural Workers' Organization

From the Review of December 1915:

A NEW CHAPTER IN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

By J. A. Macdonald

THIS is the story of the success of the Agricultural Workers' organization. This story is not finished, it cannot be till the doomed industrial system of today has also been damned and over thrown. It is the story of the moving of the propaganda of revolutionary industrial unionism from the open forum and the street corner, to the primary theater of the industrial revolution—the job.

The wise men of the labor movement—generally too wise to work—the philosophers of the easy chair and the big salary, said the migratory worker could not be organized. They said the work was too casual. A union for them would have to be too migratory. It would have to have its office in a box car.

Esquire magazine has an article about a time long ago: 5 Transgender Americans on the Hardships of Transitioning, Then and Now.

Transgender men and women have lived openly for decades in America. Most of them transitioned before it was remotely acceptable to the wider culture—and so made possible the social transformation in gender identity that we are seeing today. The three women and two men on these pages lived much of their lives as one sex and then, along with thousands of others, have lived long, accomplished (and dangerous) lives as another. They are a comment on the abiding nature of the human impulse to change sexual identity (at a moment when it's almost regarded as a fad) and also emblematic of those who did so when it was so much harder.

Full disclosure: The author of this diary began transition 23 years ago.