If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem

Your results:
You are Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)

Malcolm Reynolds (Captain) 85% Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command) 70% Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic) 60% Derrial Book (Shepherd) 50% Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic) 50% Alliance 45% Inara Serra (Companion) 30% River (Stowaway) 30% Jayne Cobb (Mercenary) 25% A Reaver (Cannibal) 25% Wash (Ship Pilot) 15%

Honest and a defender of the innocent. You sometimes make mistakes in judgment but you are generally good and would protect your crew from harm.

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test

This is from "The Guardian", a British newspaper: Anybody heard of this in the American media yet???



US teacher is suspended for letting pupils read bestseller


Blog: A vocal minority speaks up once more

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Thursday July 3, 2008
The Guardian

An Indiana teacher who used a much lauded bestseller, The Freedom Writers Diary, to try to inspire under-performing high-school students has been suspended from her job without pay for 18 months.

The effective book ban by the school authorities in Perry Township has outraged teachers and education reformers.

The Writers Diary, a series of true stories written by inner-city teenagers, was put together by a teacher, Erin Gruwell, and has been celebrated as a model for transforming young lives. It was made into a film with Hilary Swank last year.


Connie Heermann, a teacher for 27 years, sought permission to introduce the book to her students last autumn after attending a training workshop held by the Freedom Writers Foundation. "If you read the whole book you will see how these inner-city students grow and change and become articulate, compassionate, educated young people who want to do something good in their lives despite the environment in which they were raised," she told the Guardian. "I thought my students would very much relate to those kids."

Her head agreed and Heermann got written permission from nearly 150 parents, but the Perry Meridian high school board urged her to wait for its decision.

Teachers' union officials say that a single board member objected to swearing in the book. The school board member allegedly persuaded the other six officials to ban Heermann from teaching the book. It remains available in school libraries.

Heermann and the union say there was no explicit ban on the book when she handed it out to pupils on November 15. But later that day she received an email from the board advising her not to teach the book. "That was the pivotal moment of my life, when I saw how my students were taken with the book, how they loved it, and then I am told not to let them read it? I said no," she said.

After being threatened with dismissal, Heermann was eventually suspended. The union is deciding whether to take the case to court.

The school board denies book banning and accuses Heermann of insubordination. Barbara Thompson, the school board president, wrote in an email yesterday: "She knew she had defied her supervisors' direction in her work and that her defiance was 'insubordination' and 'neglect of duty'."

I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)

You are Strength

Courage, strength, fortitude. Power not arrested in the act of judgement, but passing on to further action, sometimes obstinacy.

This is a card of courage and energy. It represents both the Lion's hot, roaring energy, and the Maiden's steadfast will. The innocent Maiden is unafraid, undaunted, and indomitable. In some cards she opens the lion's mouth, in others she shuts it. Either way, she proves that inner strength is more powerful than raw physical strength. That forces can be controlled and used to score a victory is very close to the message of the Chariot, which might be why, in some decks, it is Justice that is card 8 instead of Strength. With strength you can control not only the situation, but yourself. It is a card about anger and impulse management, about creative answers, leadership and maintaining one's personal honor. It can also stand for a steadfast friend.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I've been reading a lot lately, and especially over the weekend in the New York Times, that book sales are down. Really down. Pittiful and pathetically down. "Harry Potter" last summer generated a lot of sales (which is an understatement when you stop and think about it) but it was not enough to "save" publishing from a bad year.

Hmmm. Why is that, I wonder? Why are book sales down?

It goes beyond our society's "MTV mind-set" that wants everything in 30 second sound bites; it goes beyond the excuse that there's "too many things to do". It goes beyond the argument that with iPods, cell phones, Facebook, MySpace and the myriad blogs out there that people just don't want to take the time to read.

Maybe they don't want to take the time to read.

Or maybe there isn't enough GOOD out there to read.

The problem, simplified of course, is two fold (from my limited, non-publishing-world point of view, which means I'm not seeing this through capitalistic-colored lenses where the bottom line is make more money no matter what it is you're trying to foist off on the general public):

1. Because it's all "how much money can I make today" publishers (not the indies, but they have their own set of problems) jump on whatever latest bandwagon seems to make the biggest splash--according to the media. According to the handful of prestigious critics who can make or break people. Right now, the focus is on memoir. We've become a people who can't get enough of "reality television", of delving into the innermost psyche of people other than ourselves, to make us feel better about our own pathetic lives. After all, it's quite refreshing to be able to sit back and say, "I don't have it so bad. These other people are really fucked up."

So "reality television" drifts over into the written word and we have everyone and his/her brother baring their souls for a buck and to offer a quick thrill to the outside world. And they're such sad, pathetic stories.

Fiction is definitely taking a backseat, at least according to publishers and the media. There happens to be a good deal of good fiction out there, but one of the cut-backs publishers have taken into serious consideration is marketing. Writers are free to go around and do readings on their own dime; take out advertising on their own dime, but if they aren't a big brand name (i.e. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Grisham for instance) there won't be much, if anything, put aside for marketing fiction.

Instead of relying on trendy analysts, why not actually ask THE READERS. Statistics can be skewed any way at all to justify any decision, good or bad. Instead of down-sizing book reviews in newspapers and magazines, open it up to op-ed people. It's not enough to read the comments on "Amazon.com" because people always have a bitch or an axe to grind so even things there have to be taken with a grain of salt. And one shouldn't have to wade through the loftiness that is known as John Updike to try to figure out what a book is about and whether or not they should read it.

(In an aside, please stop putting blurbs on the back of books, people. Obviously no one is going to say "This was a real shitty book, but they paid me to say something nice about it." WHO CARES? Tell me about the author, tell me about the book. I don't care what fancy-ass author recommends it. As a matter of fact, I might decide NOT to read a book that Updike said was good (ok, I'm down on John Updike, but the point is made here. Knock off the pretentiously wonderful blurbs. It's a marketing technique and really is stupid.)

2. If books aren't selling maybe it's because books have become overly expensive. Way too expensive. When paperbacks are now as costly as hardbacks used to be, with the recession clearly out there and not moving any time soon, wouldn't it make sense to lower prices? Hey, if I could buy a book for $8 bucks, I might actually be tempted to buy four (which comes to $32, if my math is right). More people would buy the lower-priced books, so publishers might sell more; granted at a lower price, but they'd sell the books and might end up making more money to begin with.

Stop with the $24, $25, $28 hardcovered books! Lower the price and sell more.

We need to have faith in the publishing industry again. We need to see more publishers (and more agents) at least try to work with new voices, new talent. We're tired of seeing the same old names being touted with the same old basic kinds of books. Stop paying the "big guns" so much freaking money that other, excellent writers who can't get published because they're not "known" stand at least a fighting chance.

It can be done. Who is willing to step up and do it?

The emperor has no clothes, people. Let's get some on and get back to bringing good reading to the public. If it's there, we'll buy it, we'll read it.

THIS JUST IN: The Tokyo cat café


Once AGAIN the Japanese hand our asses to us.

This time, in the form of "Cat Café", a place on Tokyo where fourteen resident cats make customers "purrrrr with delight." "The clean, odorless cafe -- Calico has six air fresheners and the litter trays are out of sight -- gets about 70 visitors a day during the week and 150 a day at weekends."

You heard me. People can mingle with kittehs and have a cup of tea.

Big props to Kari M., Calico-kitteh photo taker and Gina W., Japanese ass-kicker-pointer-outer

This is from www.cuteoverload.com (something a son showed me!)

What do you think, Caitlin? Can/should we do this here? God, I'd go!!!

Ha Jin's new book has been released today. (For those of you who are keeping track of "new books").

I read Russo's "Bridge of Sighs" but am waiting for Jeff to finish it before saying anything about it.

Meanwhile, I'm rereading Wharton's "House of Mirth" for AmLit and Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale" for Honors Comp.

Just in case you were wondering...

I am SO sick and absolutely beyond tired of people/students/alleged adults who CANNOT FOLLOW DIRECTIONS!!!

Is it so much to ask?????

Thirty years ago, Steven Biko died.

Who remembers Steven Biko?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We really ARE doomed to repeat the history we choose to forget~

I realize I haven't posted to this journal in almost 2 months--not that anyone is shouting for me to say something new--but reading this article today just pushed me over the edge.


US Deports Parents of Dead Soldiers
By Domenico Maceri
New America Media

Tuesday 04 September 2007

Three years after U.S. Army Private Armando Soriano, 20, died fighting in Haditha, Iraq, his father is facing deportation. Soriano is now buried in Houston, Tex., his hometown, where his parents, undocumented workers from Mexico, are currently living.

Before his death Soriano had promised his parents he'd help them get green cards. He only succeeded partially before losing his life. Although his mother was able to obtain a green card, his father did not qualify and is on the verge of being deported.

Enrique Soriano, Armando's father, is not the only person to have lost a son or daughter in the Iraq war and face deportation. There are more than three million people born in the U.S. with parents who came into the country illegally. Those born in the U.S. are automatically citizens and have all the rights and duties enjoyed by Americans. That includes military service with the possibility of losing one's life.

Losing a son or a daughter is always tragic. To try to compensate the families the U.S. government makes efforts to help. In the case of individuals with family members needing immigration help, officials assist them to obtain green cards. That's what happened with Soriano's mother. But in spite of governmental flexibility, certain rules prevent some people from qualifying.

Enrique Soriano had been formally deported in 1999 when he returned to Mexico for a brief visit. That makes him ineligible for any immigration benefits. Enrique Soriano is not alone.

Although exact figures are difficult to come by, many parents with sons and daughters who died in Iraq have been deported.

Official statistics show that more than 68,000 foreign-born military individuals are serving the U.S. How many of these individuals have relatives who do not have a legal right to be in the United States is not known. Figures from the National Center for Immigration Law show that one in 10 U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq have been immigrants.

One estimate claims that five percent of those serving in the American military are illegal immigrants who joined with false papers. The military does not recruit illegal immigrants. Yet, given the shortages of volunteers, meeting quotas may put pressure to close some eyes. Illegal immigrants may feel that joining the military will help them and their families obtain legal papers in addition to other benefits.

Inevitably, some die in the process. The first soldier to die for the United States in the Iraq war was in fact Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala.

Enrique Soriano's case is also complicated by the fact that the rest of his family has a legal right to be in the U.S. His wife has a green card, three of their four kids are U.S. citizens, and another born in Mexico has applied for a green card. If Enrique is deported, the family will have to make the hard choice of going back or separating.

"I think it would be a travesty for these parents to be deported after their son died in Iraq fighting for his country," stated Congressman Gene Green, D-Houston. The congressman introduced a bill in the House, which would help Enrique Soriano obtain a green card. Nothing has happened yet.

Earlier this year President George Bush commuted the sentence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff. In so doing, the President spared Libby two and a half years in prison for his conviction for lying to federal investigators. The President cited Libby's "exceptional public service" and prior lack of a criminal record as explanation for his action. He concluded that Libby's sentence was "excessive" and the punishment "harsh."

In light of the sacrifice made by Armando Soriano, one wonders whether deporting his father is a far more "excessive" and "harsh" punishment?

---------

Reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

I can't help it.

And no, I won't put out any spoilers. After 160 pages, though, I'm not impressed.

Six hundred more to go~

When Is Enough Enough?
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Saturday 30 June 2007

Chances are you didn't hear it, but on Thursday night Senator Hillary Clinton said, "If H.I.V./AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country."

Her comment came on the same day that a malevolent majority on the U.S. Supreme Court threw a brick through the window of voluntary school integration efforts.

There comes a time when people are supposed to get angry. The rights and interests of black people in the U.S. have been under assault for the longest time, and in the absence of an effective counterforce, that assault has only grown more brutal.

Have you looked at the public schools lately? Have you looked at the prisons? Have you looked at the legions of unemployed blacks roaming the neighborhoods of big cities across the country? These jobless African-Americans, so many of them men, are so marginal in the view of the wider society, so insignificant, so invisible, they aren't even counted in the government's official jobless statistics.

And now this new majority on the Supreme Court seems committed to a legal trajectory that would hurl blacks back to the bad old days of the Jim Crow era.

Where's the outcry? Where's the line in the sand that the prejudiced portion of the population is not allowed to cross?

Mrs. Clinton's comment was made at a forum of Democratic presidential candidates at Howard University that was put together by Tavis Smiley, the radio and television personality, and broadcast nationally by PBS. The idea was to focus on issues of particular concern to African-Americans.

It's discouraging that some of the biggest issues confronting blacks - the spread of AIDS, chronic joblessness and racial discrimination, for example - are not considered mainstream issues.

Senator John Edwards offered a disturbingly bleak but accurate picture of the lives of many young blacks: "When you have young African-American men who are completely convinced that they're either going to die or go to prison and see absolutely no hope in their lives; when they live in an environment where the people around them don't earn a decent wage; when they go to schools that are second-class schools compared to the wealthy suburban areas - they don't see anything getting better."

The difficult lives and often tragic fates of such young men are not much on the minds of so-called mainstream Americans, or the political and corporate elites who run the country. More noise needs to be made. There's something very wrong with a passive acceptance of the degraded state in which so many African-Americans continue to live.

Mr. Smiley is also organizing a forum of Republican candidates to be held in September. I wholeheartedly applaud his efforts. But if black people were more angry, and if they could channel that anger into political activism - first and foremost by voting as though their lives and the lives of their children depended on it - there would not be a need to have separate political forums to address their concerns.

If black people could find a way to come together in sky-high turnouts on Election Day, if they showed up at polling booths in numbers close to the maximum possible turnout, if they could set the example for all other Americans about the importance of exercising the franchise, the politicians would not dare to ignore their concerns.

For black people, especially, the current composition of the Supreme Court should be the ultimate lesson in the importance of voting in a presidential election. No branch of the government has been more crucial than the judiciary in securing the rights and improving the lives of blacks over the past five or six decades.

George W. Bush, in a little more than six years, has tilted the court so radically that it is now, like the administration itself, relentlessly hostile to the interests of black people. That never would have happened if blacks had managed significantly more muscular turnouts in the 2000 and 2004 elections. (The war in Iraq would not have happened, either.)

There are, of course, many people, black and white, who are working on a vast array of important issues. But much, much more needs to be done. And blacks, in particular, need to intervene more directly in the public policy matters that concern them.

In the 1960s, there were radicals running around screaming about black power. But the real power in this country has always been the power of the vote. Black Americans have not come close to maximizing that power.

It's not too late.

"It was on this day in 1936 that the novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was first published. When she handed the manuscript over to editors, it was in terrible shape, with more than 1,000 pages of faded and dog-eared paper, poorly typed and with penciled changes. But they loved the story. They asked Mitchell to change the original title "Tomorrow Is Another Day" because at the time there were already thirteen books in print with the word "Tomorrow" in the title. They also asked her to change the main character's name from Pansy to Scarlett.

"Gone with the Wind sold 50,000 copies sold in one day, a million copies six months, and two million by the end of the year. The sales of the book were even more impressive because it was in the middle of the Great Depression. The year it came out, employees at the Macmillan publishing company received Christmas bonuses for the first time in nearly a decade."

It may not be politically correct (or whatever) but it's still going strong.

Just a little bit of trivia for you on this Saturday morning~

So, LadySankofa, your LiveJournal reveals...



You are... 10% unique (blame, for example, your interest in writers colonies) and 50% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy writing). When it comes to friends you are lonely. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are wary of trusting strangers. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is conventional.

Your overall weirdness is: 30

(The average level of weirdness is: 27.
You are weirder than 67% of other LJers.)

Find out what your weirdness level is!

On this, the "longest day of the year," I wish you all peace and comfort and joy.

Your Power Element is Metal

Your power colors: white, gold, and silver Your energy: contracting Your season: fall You are persistent (and maybe even a little bit stubborn). If you see something you want, you go for it. You have a lot of strength, and it's difficult to get you down. Very logical, you tend to analyze everything going on in your life.

So it goes...

He will be missed

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributors

Wednesday 04 April 2007

It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years - his last years - are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling segregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or [the right] to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" - including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall US foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 - a year to the day before he was murdered - King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." (Full text/audio here.)

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the US was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the US was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 - and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington - engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be - until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" - appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with "alacrity and generosity," while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and health care and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

IDF soldier's dream to come true, after death
Posted: Thursday, January 18, 2007 10:15 AM
Categories: Tel Aviv, Israel
By Paul Goldman, NBC News Producer

In August 2002, 19-year-old Sergeant Kevin Cohen was guarding an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip. At 7 a.m. he was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper. It was that bullet that killed Kevin and his dream, which he had related to his mother, Rachel Cohen, of one day fathering a child.

But this week, four years after his death, a dramatic ruling by an Israeli court means Kevin Cohen’s dream may very well come true.

A ‘biological will’
After her son’s death, Cohen approached a non-profit organization called "New Family" which is dedicated to advancing family rights.

The organization is trying to convince people to write a "biological will," which in case of death would allow doctors to extract sperm from their bodies," explained Irit Rosenblum, the founder of "New Family" and Cohen’s lawyer.

It was a mother's instinct that led Cohen to request doctors to freeze her dead son’s sperm. Cohen said she had a dream one year after her son died.

"He appeared in my dream and asked me, mom what’s with my child? Please hurry," said Cohen. "I woke up with a big sweat and decided to go ahead, all the way."

Then came the legal battle, which was fought around the ruling permitting only the wife of a deceased man to extract his sperm and to become impregnated by it. The new ruling now recognizes the parent’s right over their dead child’s sperm.

Battle won
Cohen’s cell phone rang with the good news just as she was laying flowers on her son's grave. "I was too nervous and frustrated with the court battle, I decided the best place to be was near Kevin’s grave," said Cohen.

Rosenblum called with the news that her dream of becoming a grandmother was going to come true. "The decision gave me great happiness but still the pain is so huge, I turned to the grave and told the good news to Kevin," said Cohen.

"The ruling represents a light at the end of the tunnel both for a family mourning the loss of a child, and also for a single woman wanting to bring a new life into this world," said Rosenblum

An unusual appeal
During the course of the legal battle Cohen sent out an emotional appeal to the Israeli public for help. It was a strange request: would a woman come forward and give birth to Cohen’s dead son's child.

The process of finding a mother for Kevin Cohen’s child took more then two years. Two hundred women were interviewed, medical tests were conducted, meetings with psychologists took place and finally one was chosen. "She won my heart right away," said Cohen.

The 35-year-old woman preferred not to be identified, but Cohen said, "There are a lot of women out there that really want to know the father’s identity, his background, to be able to tell the child who was his father."

Now Cohen is waiting for another phone call, for more good news, that maybe nine months from now she will become a grandmother. At last she will be able to look at her son’s picture and tell him he has a child.