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Illinois
Mother to 1
Lover of all
Friend to Mother Nature
Child of the Universe
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Dissolve the Ego. Transcend. Escape
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
Desmond Tutu. (via theashkaari)
“When Kepler found that his long-cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions. That is the heart of science.”
Harper bans pre-op and non-op trans* people from flying under new law
Sec 5.2(1)(c) of the ID screening regs of Aeronautics Act: “An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents.”
OH FUCK NO.
That shit won’t fly.
(Source: believeinthegrey)
Chilean students 'occupy' school and run it by themselves
Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.
“If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school,” says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.
“Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,” Cristóbal says. “It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.”
After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. “When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education,” says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.
Holy shit. This is fucking awesome.
That is actually the coolest thing I have read all day.
I am actually crying. This is beautiful.
I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human race.
Rosika Schiwner (via thirdw0rld)
(Source: aliyahloves)
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.
Mahatma Gandhi (October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948)
(Source: jar-of-elixir)
Time for women to rise up, urges Desmond Tutu
DAVOS, Switzerland — After the uprisings in the Arab world, South Africa’s veteran Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu said Wednesday it was now time for women to have their revolution and banish men to the margins.
Speaking at a gathering of the world’s political and financial elite in Davos, the vast majority of them men, Tutu said women had long been locked out of policy-making — and the world had paid the price.
“Let us realign forces, let us ensure that women have a significant part in the decision-making process… we have been excluding women,” said the former archbishop of Cape Town.
Telling the event’s compere Klaus Schwab that he might need a security escort from the podium, Tutu said he was about to upset much of his audience.
“What we need is a revolution led by women. I think women ought to be saying to us men: ‘You have made a mess, just get out and let us in’,” he added.
Sanctions take their toll on ordinary Iranians
A raft of Western economic sanctions on Iran over its controversial nuclear programme are increasingly stifling the lives of ordinary Iranians, hit by rising inflation and growing isolation.
EU and US banking sanctions put in place 18 months ago, and reinforced on Monday, have fuelled Iran’s runaway inflation and triggered a collapse in the value of the rial, with implications for the country’s residents and diaspora.
Millions of struggling Iranians have supportive relatives living abroad, especially in the United States, Canada and Europe.
“The cost of foreign products, whose value is linked to the dollar, has risen by 20 and 50 percent in recent months,” says Ali, who runs a grocery in north Tehran.
“On the other hand, the government closely controls the price of products made in Iran,” which represent 90 percent of consumed products. “Dairy products for example have not risen by more than five to 10 percent.”
But with inflation officially now pegged at around 21 percent, the real cost of numerous consumer goods is significantly higher, aggravated by the weaker rial.
Iran’s long overvalued currency, which the central bank allowed to weaken in recent months to shore up its foreign currency reserves, has almost halved in value over the past year.
The rial tumbled in black market trading to a new record low against the dollar, news agencies said earlier this week, with the unofficial rate in central Tehran at around 20,500 for one greenback.
All imports, notably electronic equipment such as computers, mobile phones, televisions and fridges, have shot up in price by more than 50 percent.
“Luckily I bought my laptop two weeks ago. Its price has since gone from 15 million rials to 24 million rials,” said Ahmad, a retiree. The minimum monthly wage in Iran is around seven million rials.
The price of certain types of imported medicine has risen by around 30 percent, and foreign books have become unaffordable for most Iranians.
“Before, books costing 20 euros would sell for 300,000 rials. People would buy them rather reluctantly. But now they would go for 500,000 to 600,000 rials, and no one will pay that,” said one vendor, who just cancelled his latest order of English and French books.
For all these products, importers had to buy their currency on the parallel market, now a black market where prices have soared as the government limited the official sale of foreign currency to importers of essential goods, particularly industrial ones.
Sanctions have also choked most of the banking channels for trade in dollars or euros, making it difficult for the many Iranians who have family abroad to send or receive money.
The Iranian diaspora is estimated at nearly five million people, with the majority based in the United States, Canada and Europe.
(Source: favoritelittlelyrics)
Nonviolence promoted at rally on eve of anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s death.
Underprivileged Indian children dressed to look like the late Mahatma Gandhi arrive on a bus in Kolkata, India, before attempting a world record for being the largest gathering of people dressed as Gandhi, Jan. 29. Local non-government organizations put on the event and a total of 485 children from the Training Resource and Care for Kids (T.R.A.C.K.S), a charity for single mothers and children living without support at railway stations took part in the rally promoting the Gandhian ideology of nonviolence ahead of the anniversary of Gandhi’s death which falls on January 30th.
