My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass at the Gutenberg Library

The reader will pardon so much about the place of my birth, on the score that it is always a fact of some importance to know where a man is born, if, indeed, it be important to know anything about him. In regard to the time of my birth, I cannot be as definite as I have been respecting the place. Nor, indeed, can I impart much knowledge concerning my parents. Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. A person of some consequence here in the north, sometimes designated father, is literally abolished in slave law and slave practice. It is only once in a while that an exception is found to this statement. I never met with a slave who could tell me how old he was. Few slave-mothers know anything of the months of the year, nor of the days of the month. They keep no family records, with marriages, births, and deaths. They measure the ages of their children by spring time, winter time, harvest time, planting time, and the like; but these soon become undistinguishable and forgotten. Like other slaves, I cannot tell how old I am. This destitution was among my earliest troubles. I learned when I grew up, that my master—and this is the case with masters generally—allowed no questions to be put to him, by which a slave might learn his age. Such questions deemed evidence of impatience, and even of impudent curiosity. From certain events, however, the dates of which I have since learned, I suppose myself to have been born about the year 1817.

Human Embryonic Stem Cells Grown from Skin Tissue

Go OHSU— I love this hospital:

The research team, from the Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, used a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), otherwise known as therapeutic cloning.

This involves transplanting the nucleus of one cell, containing an individual’s DNA, into an egg cell that has had its genetic material removed.

The unfertilised egg cell then develops and eventually produces stem cells, which could one day be used to replace cells damaged by injury or illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and heart disease.

We Need to get over our fear of dying

Many of us have a superficial familiarity with death. We’re used to seeing it in faraway pictures and footage in the news and on the internet or as fiction in films. But the reality for many of us who know someone who’s dying or care for them, it can be incredibly challenging and emotionally labour intensive.

For the dying, though, there is often a lot to say. This might be about putting things to put to rest, making plans about end of life care or how much therapy to have or making funeral arrangements. Most importantly, they might want to be reassured that life will continue for their loved ones when they have died.

This disease’s deadliest weapon is the fact that you’ve never heard of it

A deadly fungal infection has been spreading across western North America. The number of human and animal cases has grown rapidly in recent years, to the extent that government agencies in US and Canada have labelled the infection an outbreak.

The infection, cryptococcosis, affects the lungs first, because it is acquired by inhaling fungal spores. In the absence of therapy and sometimes despite it, the infection quickly spreads to the brain and other organs, with often fatal consequences. During this outbreak in the US, about a third of those who catch the disease succumb to it. Those infected with the disease have to undergo antifungal drug therapy that can last months. But those drugs often fail to curtail the disease, forcing many to opt for surgery.

The fact that it is more deadly in the U.S., though the species is the same is probably due to the fact that Canada has universal health coverage and the U.S. doesn’t. The fact that this is a tropical fungus moving into the Western Pacific region from California to Vancouver Island is probably due to Global Warming.

This past Wednesday morning, I dreamed that I could hop like a kangaroo. The environment I was in reminded me of the University of Texas campus, with tall stone buildings and wide walkways. The walkway in my dream looked like this lovely limestone with a nice, not too smooth, not too rough texture on top.

I have MS. The morning after waking up from this dream, I tried and made four pitiful kangaroo hops that were not fluid and bouncy-lovely like the ones in my dream. In the dream, a young kangaroo hopped up next to me while I was hopping along. We looked at each other for a few seconds while we both hopped. Then the kangaroo turned around and hopped in the other direction, only to hop up again later. We met three times like this. It was faster than I was, but I was moving along at a nice clip. As I was encountering a step that was about two inches high, I got a little nervous that I might not be able to make it, but to my surprise and joy, I did. The dream was very physical, and I can still remember the feeling of my stomach rising as I jumped onto the step. It was as if I really did hop like a kangaroo for about four city blocks. There was no one else in this landscape. It occurred to me while I was hopping that other people might find it very strange and be bothered by it, but I thought, ‘So what. This is a wonderful way to get around.’

The night before, I had seen this article. Also, my sidekick and I have been looking at three-wheeled electric scooters that I’m saving to buy (on top of my regular savings) in September. So, mentally, I’ve been getting around town in my scooter for a couple of weeks, considering mileage, where I could go, what I might do, etc. It was nice of my brain to put those things together for me and give me a chance not only to hop like a kangaroo, but to meet one in my dream.

I’ve had a dream since I got MS, in which I ran. It felt like not having MS, but I didn’t enjoy running in the dream any more than I enjoyed running when I could walk all day. Hopping I like.

Rape and Suicide by Kevin Caruso at suicide.org

Call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1–800-656-HOPE

If you ever are suicidal call 1–800-SUICIDE or your local emergency number.

The Trevor Project: Suicide Intervention

The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

1–866-488‑7386

Online Suicide Prevention at Laura’s Playground a Transsexual, Transgendered and Crossdressing Support and News site

a Live Support Moderated Chat Room for Transsexuals both FTM and MTF, Transgendered, Intersex, Androgynes, Crossdressers and their Friends, famiies and Significant Others only.

Bullying and Suicides ~ the Relationship
by Carl ToersBijns

The number of kids committing suicides keeps rising and there appears to be no end to this epidemic until the dynamics of bullying and its impacts are accepted as abnormal characteristics of our society and dealt with in an effective prevention methods and efforts.

It is the responsibility of our generation and those following us to keep working on this most important condition that is destroying our youth today without remorseful feelings.

National Runaway Safeline We are here to listen and here to help.

Call 1–800-RUNAWAY to talk with someone now. Not ready to call? You can also post on our bulletin board, send us an email, or start a live chat…

NEW MAP SHOWS BUILDING MOMENTUM FOR ENDING PRISON-BASED GERRYMANDERING at Prisoners of the Census

ESO/T. Preibisch
Carina Nebula at Wikimediacommons

1x beautiful photos

photography by Marsha Sadaari at 121 Clicks

photography by Anka Zhuravleva at 121 Clicks

How Women Legislators Help States Become More Supportive Of Older Citizens by Joanne Connor Green and Charles Lockhart at The Society Pages

A stronger presence of women in state legislatures turns out to be good for older men and women. Just as female legislators weigh in on behalf of meeting the needs of families with children, they also appear more likely than male legislators to further policies that make a real difference in medical care and community support for senior residents. As the United States moves deeper into an era where support and care for older people will be an ever more central concern in society and public policy, the growing presence of elected female legislators will almost certainly help the United States face these issues and find family-friendly solutions. Toward the end of life as well as at its beginning and during the middle, women in office seem sensitive to the practical concerns of families and individuals in need of support. Across America, the states whose voters more often send women to serve in their legislatures are therefore likely to be the states best prepared to meet the growing challenges of an aging population.

We Need More Women in Legislatures Worldwide, Period by Rosemarie Clouston at the Georgetown Public Policy Review

… Ester Duflo and her colleagues have shown that in a randomized situation in India where women were put in charge of local governing councils, these bodies invested more in public services prioritized by women (e.g., drinking water) than when men were in charge. They also found that in areas with female council heads, teenage girls had greater career aspirations for themselves than girls living in areas with councils headed by men. Not only does it appear that women deliver policies for women but they may also politically empower their gender, particularly in future generations, so the impact may not be immediately evident in many studies. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have studied this relationship between female legislators and political activity across developed democracies and found that women and girls are “more likely to discuss politics, and younger women [anticipate becoming] more politically active [in adulthood] when there are more women in parliament.”

Facts about women legislators in the U.S. at The National Foundation for Women Legislators

Meet Bubba. He’s a tubal pregnancy (the most common kind of ectopic pregnancy). As persons go, its’s lacking that je ne sais quoi— or, I don’t know— that quality for which you would run into a burning building to save it. If this thing dropped from a tree onto your shoulder at a picnic, the chance that you would want to preserve it in anything but formaldehyde is remote.

Now meet the personhood initiative on ectopic pregnancy

Any wish to risk or trade your own life for the life of this larval flesh could not qualify as “reasonable”. The only things that can be “known” about it are strictly biological, and the chances that it will ever be a viable fetus are so much more remote than the likelihood that it would kill its host without medical intervention that would kill it first, that giving it the rights of “personhood” demands that a women take “heroic” risks to save Bubba, here, because PERSON.

Being killed by a partner is the third leading cause of death for pregnant women. That usually kills the unborn too. They want to charge that man with two murders, but protecting the woman doesn’t seem to interest them that much, because GUNS! And it doesn’t matter how poor you are, no matter that you don’t have health insurance, no matter that you already have children that you are having a hard time providing for, no matter if you aren’t employed and have no source of income, no matter if you have health problems that make pregnancy dangerous for you,it doesn’t even matter if there is no chance that the fetus will ever be viable, because PERSON.

Of course, no man is going to take all the above “you“s personally, because that’s HER problem.

Can you think of other instances written into law in which a person can be charged with murder for not risking their life to save someone else? Can you think of such a case, in which a rescue attempt would have most likely left both dead?

The belief that a zygote/embryo/fetus has a “soul” is a religious belief, and one that Personhood U.S.A. and the Personhood Initiative are lobbying to have have enshrined into law, so that every zygote/ embryo/fetus has the rights of any other person; but the woman who carries it. Her rights as a person would be subordinate to that thing that can’t live without her, even when it can’t live within her, because it’s a PERSON. (And she’s something else.)

The thought that this little mass of cells, chewing through it’s mother’s fallopian tube could have a social value equal to or greater than that of an adult woman denies the “personhood” of women to a degree that is pathological. It makes the fetus a fetish denuded of it’s biological reality and it’s dependency. Of course, the assumption that the woman’s role— her purpose in life— is to produce and care for the wee ones, no matter its toll on her, no matter the cost to her is taken so much for granted that she’s expected to do it and do it well with no resources, no support, no respite.

I made several attempts to refute their repulsive logic that women with ectopic pregnancies should be forced to stay in a hospital bed, then undergo autotransfusion (be given transfusions of her own blood) after a rupture until the fetus is viable no matter how unlikely that would be. But there’s no reason to argue with their bogus interpretations of a bunch of numbers they pulled from hospital records in Israel. They used a jumble of numbers and suppositions about those numbers to make mud pies; while not acknowledging that Israel has universal health insurance, no compunction about ending a pregnancy to protect the mother, and one third the maternal death rate of the U.S. Epidemiological information about ectopic pregnancies in Israel has absolutely nothing to do with women in the U.S.— especially women who are uninsured or who are black women who are much more likely to die of ectopic pregnancies than white women.

We women are PERSONS. ALL OF US ARE PERSONS. No one should be able to tell us that we have to risk our lives, or even fundamentally change our lives because some people believe that God gives people “souls” at conception and wants to use that “argument” to take control over women’s bodies and lives.

A woman wants to die for her fetus that’s her business and her problem and her ideological madness. If no one close to her tries to talk her out of it then you know how little she is cherished.

PERSON and MIRACLE BABIES! is proper legal justification for NOTHING. These people are religious extremists and dedicated misogynists worthy of the name AMERICAN TALIBAN. It’s about time that these people stopped imposing their church on our state and took their interfering filching hands off of our bodies.

In this post, I’d like to tell you some things I learned about the early history of prisons in the U.S., from Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete, which she published in 2003. This books covers prisons in the U.S. from their inception through the beginning of the 21st century. The racist and sexist constructions of what is “criminal” and what is “punishment” has changed throughout the centuries, yet racism still dominates the American view of what a “criminal” looks like and what a “convict” looks like. She traces the evolution of prison in the U.S. from it’s origins to the big business it is today— especially private prisons, which are huge corporate businesses that require a growing number of prisoners in order to keep making profit.

First, though, I’d like to start with this early history— what we think of “prison” writ large as “justice” began in the eighteenth century in Europe, in the 19th century in the U.S., and was spread throughout the world via colonialism.

Incarceration, prior to the nineteenth century in the U.S., was not used as punishment, but only to detain a person until their punishment was carried out. Drawing and quartering, burying people alive, burning alive, etc. were acts of revenge and spectacles for public consumption. The movement to make incarceration the punishment itself, was inspired by the Enlightenment and Protestant Reform, and was shaped in part by a budding capitalist ideology.

Accepting the ideal of Enlightenment that the individual has inalienable rights and liberties (“individual” meaning white men), allowed reformers to frame illegal acts as a break in the social contract. Taking away those rights and liberties could be seen as punishment enough and putting the criminals behind walls, removed from society seemed to reformers at the time to not be revenge, but a chance for the criminals to achieve personal reformation. It certainly eliminated the spectacle of bizarre punishments, tortures, deaths, and desecration of corpses. By comparison, it looked humane and sensible.

The first penitentiary in the U.S., was in a converted area of the Pennsylvania’s Walnut Street Jail that was converted to a prison in 1790. In this prison, criminals were being given an opportunity for penitence and reform through “total isolation, silence, and solitude.” It was believed that prisoners could make “progress.”

This Pennsylvania system was one of two models of imprisonment, the other was the Auburn model. The difference between the two models was that in the Pennsylvania system, the prisoners worked in solitude; and in the Auburn system, the prisoners worked in groups. Auburn became the model because the labor provided by the prisoners was more efficient. “Efficiency” is a particularly capitalist value that was just taking hold at the time. Prisoners were given sentences in units of time, which reflected the growing capitalist ideology and the new practices of paying laborers for time worked.

John Howard— an English prison reformer— was very influential on American reformers. The monastic style of life the reformers imposed reflected their religious beliefs. The condition in which reflection and labor would allow the “souls” of prisoners to “flourish” was considered to be charitable by the reformers and assumed to be effective toward changing the character of the prisoners. There were people at the time who recognized isolation as torture. After visiting the Eastern Penitentiary in 1842, Charles Dickens had this to say about it

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and whose benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers… I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body… because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it exhorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more renounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering is not roused up to stay.

The first panopticon prison in the U.S.— English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s prison model— was The Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh that was opened in 1826. Bentham believed that if prisoners felt and behaved at all times as if they were being watched that they would internalize the Puritan work ethic, in order to develop an independent work ethic that was becoming the model for workers in factories.

The early prisons were for white men. Slaves, Native Americans, and women were ruled by a different system of law. Quoting from her chapter two of her book

Thomas Jefferson, who supported the sentencing of con­victed people to hard labor on road and water projects, also pointed out that he would exclude slaves from this sort of punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sen­tencing them to penal labor would not mark a difference in their condition. Jefferson suggested banishment to other countries instead.

What actually happened was that whites could punish their slaves and Native Americans however they saw fit. Though husbands were limited in the form of punishments they were allowed, married women had no rights. Early prisons reformers who were concerned about how white men were being treated in prison, did not generally concern themselves with the treatment of others. Some women were put in men’s prisons, but were considered, even by the reformers, not to have violated the social contract, but to be “irredeemably fallen women.”

By the nineteenth century, a new prison reform movement wanted to build separate (white) women’s prisons. Reformers Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Shaw were opposed to the idea that women could not be reformed. These reformers had the prison architecture remodeled to reflect domesticity with kitchens and nurseries, and all women prison staff to create an atmosphere in which the women could be “reformed. To these activists, being “reformed” meant being able to serve as well trained domestic servants and embracing that role and identity. The first all women’s prison in the U.S. was established in 1874 in Indiana.

Black and Native women were either segregated from the white women in women’s prisons, or put into men’s prisons. By the end of the Civil War, imprisoned black women in Southern states were given the same hard labor men were in the convict lease system, which was finally completely outlawed in 1928.

Before the slaves in Alabama were freed, ninety-nine percent of prisoners in Alabama prisons were white. A short time after the Black Codes were established blacks became the majority in those prisons. Throughout the South, punishments for prisoners began to resemble the treatment of slaves— the use of whips and chains— and the convict lease system expanded rapidly, employing mostly black labor being constantly supervised and punished for the slightest transgression or whim of the master. Chain gangs of black convicts could be worked to death, such that the prison system became an extension of slavery.