Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features delta blues musician and pioneer of the slide guitar, Casey Bill Weldon. Enjoy!

The Illinois School District 211 school board in Palatine, Illinois voted in the wee hours of last evening to approve a settlement about a transgender girl's access to girl's locker room facilities, much to the apparent displeasure of many in the community.

With hundreds gathered in the cafeteria at Hoffman Estates Conant High School last evening, the majority speaking against any settlement, but apparently favoring rather punishment of the child who dares to be different.

Signs were carried by opponents to fairness which read:

As always, I would respond to that, using their own vernacular, with, "And God made transgender people, but your God is too limited to have done anything like that."

(cross-posted at Café Babylon.net)

climate refugees

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues and r&b singer, songwriter, saxophonist and bandleader, Louis Jordan. Enjoy!

When Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced yesterday that we were conducting ground operations in Iraq "at the invitation of the Iraqi government", he made it sound like we are cleared this with the government of Baghdad.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has done a new analysis of the current situation with transgender health coverage. As you may know, while the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has started paying for transition-related healthcare for transgender people, many private insurers deny such coverage, judging it to be "experimental," purely cosmetic," "elective," or just plain icky...even though the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological association all consider the treatment to be medically necessary to be available for transgender people.

It's the same as saying if you have cancer, you need chemotherapy if you are going to survive.

--William Padula, Johns Hopkins

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Joe Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden. He immigrated to the United States in 1902 and, at some point, began using the name Joseph Hillstrom. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World, most likely in 1910 in Portland, Oregon, and soon thereafter began writing songs under the name of Joe Hill, eventually becoming the most popular rebel songwriter of his time. His songs were published in the songbook, "I. W. W. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent," famous then and now simply as the "Little Red Songbook."

By the time of his murder at the hands of the Utah (in)Justice System, Joe's songs were being sung on picket lines all across the nation, in Britain, Australia, and many other far and distant lands, where, after his death, his ashes were scattered to the winds. Perhaps, some fading flowers will yet arise to take up the cause of Industrial Freedom for which Fellow Worker Joe Hill so courageously gave his life.

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