no. 347: Halloween edition

“Dear ignoramuses,

Halloween is not 'a yankee holiday' celebrated only by gigantic toddlers wearing baseball caps back to front and spraying 'automobiles' with eggs. This is ignorance.

Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that.

Pinatas on the other hand are heathen monstrosities and have no place in a civilised society.”

Jenny Colgan, Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams

no. 346

"…there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel sexy. I want your idea of sexiness to be grounded in what makes you feel awesome and comfortable and excited inside of your own awesome and unique body, whatever shape or size that body might be. I don’t want you to feel forced to conform yourself to anyone else’s idea of what sexiness is. But you have nothing—absolutely nothing—to be ashamed of if you want boys or girls to find you attractive. It is normal and natural and OK for you to find other people sexy, too, and to have sexual desire. This does not make you a slut. It makes you a perfectly typical teenager."

A Message To Teen Girls About That Letter From Mrs. Hall


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no. 345

"Opinions are like orgasms, most girls aren’t taught that it is okay to have their own and are only expected to further men’s."

awfulbanter

no. 344

“If you’re gonna bail, bail early. This applies to relationships, college classes, and sledding.”

Advice from my high school science teacher, Mr. Miller (via mumfordslionheart)

no. 343

“They introduce themselves as pro-life. And I say, ‘Oh, I’m so glad. You must be fighting for healthcare for the poor.’ And they look at me like I’m bonkers.”

Sheila Walsh, a Catholic nun

no. 342

“Oh please. Taxes are not *your* money. If people could give up the idea that it’s THEIR money being pried out of their hands, rather than just another bill, there’d be a lot less whining. You want lights, you pay the electric company. You want a place to live, you pay the bank or landlord. You want food, you pay the grocery store. You want to live in a civilized society, you pay taxes. Get. Over. It.”

Comment of the Day: Paying For a More Civilized Society

no. 341

“Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none.”

Herbert Spencer, The Development Hypothesis (1852)

no. 340

"Fuck that. Fuck that right now. I’m going to tell the generation of so called men something right this second. It’s an amazing mystery of the universe. It’s how to never get friendzoned.

This is how you do it.

You come to the terms that the friendzone doesn’t exist and that the most important thing in the universe is not your dick."

Wesley, as reporting how her dad got real defensive when some guy told him that she friendzoned them.

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no. 339

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’”

Carl Sagan

no. 338

“Women’s liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have. For that power denies unity, denies common connection, and is inherently divisive.”

bell hooks; Ain’t I A Woman: black women and feminism

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no. 337

“Society has a problem with female nudity when it is not … ”—Badu pauses to get her words together; she wants this point to be very clear—“… when it is not packaged for the consumption of male entertainment. Then it becomes confusing.”

Erykah Badu: June/July Cover Story [Pg 1] | VIBE

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no. 336

“If sexism is a gun, men hold it. And sometimes it recoils and hits them and that HURTS…but not as much as getting hit with the bullet.”

Laura

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no. 335

"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal."

Statement by Bradley Manning read after his sentencing, by his lawyer David Coombs

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And, that, my friends, is what a soldier does for his country.

no. 334

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

Carl Sagan

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no. 333

"Women are presented too often not as consumers of the product, but part of the product – a sexy body sexily getting ready to surf, or a sexy body sexily wearing American Apparel. We’re used to seeing women look sexy and undressed in ads, while men in ads tend to just wear the clothes properly while also looking handsome in the face area."

Caitlin Welsh, Quoted in "Men Need Clothes; Women Need to Look Sexy" by Dr. Lisa Wade


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no. 332

"It's freeing to fail and realize that you didn't die."

Tina Fey

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no. 331

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no. 328

"Immature is a word that boring people use to describe fun people"

Will Ferrell

no. 327

"Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be."

Clementine Paddleford

no. 326

no. 325

“Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie.”

Russian Proverb

no. 324

"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

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no. 322

"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Neils Bohr

no. 321

"Seven blunders of the world lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character. commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle."

Mahatma Gandhi

no. 320

"A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to 'support our troops' is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation."

Steven Salaita, No, thanks: Stop saying “support the troops”

no. 319

“Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions. Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole, or when is the world’s birthday, or why we have toes. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys many adults. A few more experiences like this, and another child has been lost to science. There are many better responses. If we have an idea of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don’t, we could go to the encyclopedia or the library. Or we might say to the child: 'I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.'”

Carl Sagan

no. 318

“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent’. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”

Stephen Jay Gould

no. 317

"I hated high school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something wrong with you."

Stephen King.

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