This evening's music features Chicago blues singer, songwriter, arranger, bandleader and bass player Willie Dixon. Enjoy!
Willie Dixon - Wang Dang Doodle, Mojo Workin'
Good morning 99percenters!
How about a little comic relief this morning?
I love Photoshop, I've made many photo mashups over the years, mostly political. I don't do them much anymore but I used to crank them out regularly. So, excuse me while I indulge myself on this rainy Tuesday morning.
JayRaye, I copy/pasted your last diary from DKos using the Easy Copy extension and this is how it laid out.
How can anybody be sucked in by such shallow and deceptive swill? It's not like it is in any way convincing or genuine – or even rational. It's pure bullshit and obviously so. Someone wrote a diary that 'the democratic insiders' didn't think Bernie did well in the debate. Wait! What? The establishment doesn't like Bernie? The establishment is willing to tell any fucking lie at all on Bernie? No shit, Sherlock.
It's Transgender Awareness Week, which will culminate on Friday with Transgender Day of Remembrance. That's the day we put aside to enumerate or losses through murders over the past year.
The truth, which we sometimes try to avoid, is that we lose just as many to suicide every year. We try to avoid it because, as Bynn Tannehill puts it, "Those who want to drive transgender people into the closet, legislate against us, and stigmatize us, talk about it all the time in order further marginalize us. It is literally a matter of life and death."
People know that transgender people are at a higher risk of suicide, but why this risk is higher is often not understood by the public, or misused by people who wish us further harm. The statistic that 40% of transgender people have attempted suicide is used all the time to justify all sorts of things that have absolutely zero basis in science.
--Tanneyhill
This evening's music features blues singer Big Bill Broonzy. Enjoy!
Big Bill Broonzy - Worried Man Blues/Hey, Hey/How You Want It Done
Woo Hoo, 11/16 aka B/10 in Hex. Let's look at that 16.
First, however, being here on a Monday the 16th always means you survived a Friday the 13th, so congrats on that.
The mother of the trans girl at the center of the controversy in Palatine, IL has posted an essay by the title name at the ACLU-IL website.
The ACLU of Illinois is representing the family in their dealings with the school district. The mother writing the essay says that her daughter's friends call her "the most famous anonymous student." Her daughter is "Student A" in the legal proceedings.
[O]ur daughter is “Student A” at the center of the recent controversy over whether a girl who is transgender should be permitted to use the girls’ locker room. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights says yes. Our school district — Township District 211 — insists that students “of the opposite sex” should not be permitted in the girls’ locker room.
For the record, we agree with District Superintendent Daniel Cates about not permitting students of the opposite sex in the locker room. But the inconvenient fact for Mr. Cates and his supporters is that our daughter is not “of the opposite sex.”
She is a girl.
The district wrongly assumes what many who are not educated about the issue assume: That what makes a girl a girl and a boy a boy is simple anatomy. We believed this, until our daughter came along. Despite early signs — from as young as four, when she declared herself a girl, to the fact that she had mostly girlfriends growing up, played with dolls, begged to wear girls’ clothes, insisted on wearing a Hannah Montana wig while she danced around the living room, and was heavily distraught over the male characteristics of her body — we were still shocked and ill-prepared when, at the end of seventh grade, our daughter again told us that she was a girl and had to live openly as one.
Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Asleep At The Wheel.
Victims mourned as France investigates Paris attacks
Country enters second day of mourning as police make arrests and find weapons in a car abandoned in Paris suburb.People have gathered across France as the country marks its second day of mourning following coordinated attacks claimed by ISIL that killed at least 129 people in Paris.
A nation is in mourning today after a horrific ISIS attack that claimed dozens of innocent victims.
That nation is Lebanon.
