Onward, upward, thruward

Julia Conley @ Common Dreams News: #NeverAgainIsNow: 36 Arrested As Hundreds of Jewish Protesters Block Road to Migrant Detention Center

"200 Jews are shutting down an ICE detention center because we when we say never again we fucking mean it."

( a roundup of people taking action and resources [USA-centric] )

1.) Pacific Standard: Bonobos Have Lots of Sex, Are Awesome, May Hold Key to Our Past

[...] bonobos—and their sexual appetite—had long been ignored by researchers for all of these reasons. They didn’t fit it with the human-evolution story, while Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees did. And the bisexuality, casual sex, and non-aggro males didn’t fit in with the way society was. Yet, bonobos seem more like humans in almost all of these ways. Pleasure and cooperation may have been more important in human evolution than we’ve ever realized, and as Hitt’s story shows, that’s pretty great.

2.) Dot Earth (NYT): Cell Phone Population Spike Catching up With Humans

That is, the number of cell phones subscriptions world-wide is coming close to equaling the number of human beings living today. In Louann Miller's words (as quoted here via james_davis_nicoll),

So I come to find out that there are about 540 million cell phones in operation in Africa. Almost one per two people. Almost all of that growth since 1994.

All of a sudden, I have no interest in science fiction that /has not even caught up with this present day./ Which is a lot of it.

*cough*Star Trek Into Darkness*cough*

- tammypierce shares ruthlessly honest, raw context for today's breaking news re: Kermit Gosnell, Abortion Doctor, Found Guilty of Murder (post title: "Possible trigger for violence, abortions"; context is personal (Gosnell used to be her gynecologist))

I thought we--the clinic, my feminist friend and I--were all on one side [...] What I read made me sick. It should have made me sick. And now that the verdict is in, I know that it's true.

ETA: followup from tammypierce: Further to Gosnell: why seek unsafe abortion care?

- the Week: 8 brilliant scientific screw-ups

Patience is a virtue, but these eight inventions, including anesthesia, prove that laziness, slovenliness, clumsiness, and pure stupidity can be virtues, too

- ThinkProgress: An Ethical Guide To Consuming Content Created By Awful People Like Orson Scott Card:

Card, to me, is not the only person who matters here [...] But he’s also a particularly noxious illustration of a paradox that plagues politically engaged consumers of culture: a terrible person who has made significant art. [*]

[* J.J.'s note: for more on this subject, see kate_nepveu's panel writeups Arisia: Facing the Prejudice of Giants & How To Be a Fan of Problematic Things]

- via dirtydirtychai: [Quote from] Junot Diaz, Speaking to students at Bergen Community College

"You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.

- ProPublica: Nonprofit Explorer: Research Tax-Exempt Organizations (particularly noteworthy in light of How Nonprofits Spend Millions on Elections and Call it Public Welfare from ProPublica's ongoing investigative series Buying Your Vote: Dark Money and Big Data)

In April 2013, the IRS released structured data culled from the tax returns of almost 616,000 tax-exempt organizations. Use this database to find organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as well as download their tax filings going back as far as 2001.

Captain Awkward continues being exceptionally awesome with this post, which I highly recommend to anyone who finds the holidays and/or the expectations of family & friends re: attendance at events socially stressful: Hiatus, Holiday Open Thread, & #389: Friendly Social Coercion is Still Coercion

(Also, general psa/fyi, there is a Dreamwidth feed for Captain Awkward: captainawkward_feed. In a similar vein, I also highly recommend the Dear Sugar feed as well: dear_sugar_feed)

Two articles that are giving me all kinds of thinky thoughts this morning.

Jodi Kantor, NYT: For President Obama, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics:

As far back as 1995, former colleagues at the University of Chicago remember him talking about moving away from the old politics of grievance and using common economic interests to bind diverse coalitions. “He argued that if political action and political speeches are tailored solely to white audiences, minorities will withdraw, just as whites often recoil when political action and speeches are targeted to racial minority audiences,” recalled William Julius Wilson, now a sociologist at Harvard. [...]

For all of Mr. Obama’s caution, he is on a mission: to change stereotypes of African-Americans, aides and friends say. Six years ago, he told his wife and a roomful of aides that he wanted to run for the White House to change children’s perceptions of what was possible. He had other ambitions for the presidency, of course, but he was also embarking on an experiment in which the Obamas would put themselves and their children on the line to help erase centuries of negative views.

While Mr. Obama resists being the president of black America, he does want to change black America, aides say — to break apart long-held beliefs about what African-Americans can and cannot do. The president, who appointed Lisa P. Jackson and Charles F. Bolden Jr. as the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, wants to encourage black achievement in science and engineering, even urging black ministers to preach about the need to study those subjects. [Emphasis added]

Steven Popkes, Book View Cafe: Consideration of Works Past: Parzifal:

Parzival is an astonishingly modern story. It’s one of the few “coming of age” stories that deserves the term. A modern coming of age story might stop with marrying Condwiramurs. Or make the Grail King some sort of tyrant that is then overthrown by Parzival. I’m going out on a limb and term these “coming of manhood” or perhaps “coming of sexuality” stories. They are stories of people who clearly leave childhood behind but then they embrace a childhood fantasy fulfillment and call it adulthood. They stop short.

That’s when Parzival downshifts and really gets going.

It’s the difference between finding your destiny and finding your place. A person’s destiny is the goal shaped for him by fate, his bloodline, his genetics. A person’s place is where they choose to put themselves. I argue that Parzival’s destiny was to be the finest knight of the round table– which he abandoned. His place, where he decided to put himself with his wife and children, his job, was to be the Grail King. [Emphasis added]

Above and beyond the content of each individually, I think there's something to be said for juxtaposing the meat of those two very different articles, and I'd be interested in hearing what people think in the comments.