Humanize the Earth!

Africa’s first female elected leader

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf appears to have won the Liberian elections.Her opponant is claiming fraud. If his claims are rejected, Johnson-Sirleaf will become Africa’s first female elected head of state.

Congratulations!

Of course, I have no idea if her victory is good for the country or not. I would’ve said the same if George Weah had won. She’ll certainly be a role model for girls from now on. Excellent

The clitoris needs more respect

There are just so many reasons to criticize mainstream western medicine. Here’s another one (luckily, one being addressed inside the system, at least by one doctor) (via Brutal Women): “There was no description of the clitoris in the main textbook that was being used to prepare surgeons in training. There was no diagram, and in the diagram of the pelvis no clitoris was evident.”

You Throw Like A Girl

via Brutal Women: 15-year-old girl throws three touchdowns

When the Bishop Montgomery High School quarterback went down with a fractured leg, his replacement stepped in and completed four of five passes for three touchdowns.

There’s nothing too unusual about that, except that the replacement quarterback was a girl.

Miranda McOsker, 15, is one of 253 girls out of 100,000 high school students in California who are playing football this year, according to the California Interscholastic Foundation. She joined the private Catholic school’s football program last spring.

I love when our expectations are challenged. Stereotypes might feel true in aggregate yet they don’t tell the whole story. Ever.

my tendencies

I tend to get caught up in whatever I’m involved in at the moment. I find balance quite difficult.

I had some web stuff open in tabs of my browser ready for blogging, when I got the chance. And then firefox came out with a new version and I upgraded and lost those tabs in the process. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.

My current endeavor is learning the Ruby programming language. Before August, I hadn’t written a computer program in over 12 years. Yet here I am, learning a language. And I’m having a good time with it.

I’m planning to get myself a timer of some kind, to remind me to look up at least, and preferably walk around for 5 minutes every half hour. I think a kitchen timer is too loud. Any suggestions?

In case anyone’s interested, the Ruby project I’m working on at the moment is to convert restructured text marked up word to html. And back. Restructured text is used as a way to allow people editing text to “mark up” their words with bold and italics and whatever else, without having to learn html. That’s great until you try to port that text to another system that uses a different method to mark up it’s text. The larger project my programs will fit into will use html inbetween any two markups so we can copy and move text back and forth.

I’m learning a lot! About Ruby and about myself. Good stuff.

the crash

More and more people seem to be predicting the end of civiliation as we know it. From GlobalResearch.ca via mousemusings

what happens when trucking companies go belly up from gas prices, when truckers can no longer afford fuel, and when their axles break because interstates are in dis-repair as a result of the prices or shortages of the petroleum needed to build roads? What happens when the housing bubble bursts, when massive unemployment engulfs the nation, and when hundreds of thousands or millions of people must walk away from their mortgaged homes? Add to this, the likely crashing of the U.S. dollar and the certainty of more natural disasters. Anarchy may not even approach the description of such a scenario.

I tend to agree. My view is that the next 5-15 years are critical for the future of humanity. In my mind, we either die out as a species or we make some pretty big changes which result from us moving from pre-human to human (that process will likely take much longer, but this decision-time will be a quantum leap.

failure - Google Search

I find it quite funny that when you do a Google Search on the word “failure,” Google feels the need to explain in an ad on the side that the result is not politically motivated on their part. If you search for “miserable failure,” however, the other side has managed to answer the prank (Google still explains their lack of bias.).

upcoming west coast trip

I’m leaving Chicago on the 13th of Oct for Portland, OR. Early the next morning we’re WikiVanning towards Santa Barbara, expecting to arrive there on the 15th. We’re attending WikiSym the 16, 17 & 18th and then returning to Portland around the 20th. I fly out on the 23rd to return to Chicago. Not sure if I’m going to make it up to Seattle to see folks or if people can come see me in Portland. In any event, let me know if you’d like to see what fits.

Department of Peace And Nonviolence

I’m not big on political solutions or spending vast amounts of time lobbying. That said, this news, via Mousemusings and Common Dreams, that Congressman Dennis Kucinich today reintroduced legislation to create a cabinet level Department of Peace and Nonviolence is good news.

The legislation, first introduced in the 107th Congress, embodies a broad-based approach to peaceful and nonviolent conflict resolution at both domestic and international levels. The Department of Peace and Nonviolence would serve to promote nonviolence as an organizing principle in our society, and help to create the conditions for a more peaceful world.

This American Life: After the Flood

Last week’s This American Life radio program is amazing. Take an hour or whatever time you have and go listen. Skip the first couple of minutes if you don’t want Ira Glass’s editorial about federal responsibility. The rest is stories directly from people involved:

Surprising stories from survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. A woman who was at the convention center talks about some things she says were widely misreported and misunderstood. Two people explain how armed police from Gretna actually prevented them from leaving New Orleans at the height of the crisis. A teenager talks about what it actually feels like to go without water for two days. And more.

One of the teenagers interviewed in “After the Flood,” Ashley Nelson, is the author of an amazing book called The Combination, about her neighborhood in New Orleans. All the copies that were available are now underwater. But The Neighborhood Stories Project, which collaborated with Ashley and several other New Orleans teenagers on books about their neighborhoods, plans to print another run as soon as possible.

Episode 296 from 9 Sept 05

Hurricane Katrina hits home

Two links to share. The first from Sister Helen Prejean’s Blog: Hurricane Katrina hits home

The second is from my friend Rose Vines. She’s been writing emails to family and friends about her experiences and also posting them at omidyar.net and has not put them into a new blog: My Katrina She works with Sister Helen (so there’s the connection) and evacuated before the storm hit to Baton Rouge and is getting ready to move to Houston in the next few days. She is going to continue writing long after this “story” falls out of media favor.