Miss Cellaneous

Taken from aurora - mostly because my work days go from 9am to 11pm, but admittedly I am not only a bleeding-heart liberal but also lazy:

</a></a>one_hoopy_frood has a follow-up to the post I linked to last night: Why I will not let it go (and neither should you)</b>

- </a></b></a>kuwdora has been providing background info, context and updates of the current situation:
1) Iran Basics, History, Video and linkspam
2) Iran: Wednesday June 17th, 2009

- </a></b></a>ontd_political has an ongoing ~IRAN ELECTION FALLOUT DISCUSSION/LIVE POST~, with more links and the latest updates from several news sources. I heart them for braving the mess that is Twitter right now and filtering out the relevant information. (This post started out yesterday, or maybe even earlier, so page 30+ has today's intel.)

Came home early-ish in order to roll up my blouse-sleeves and bring order into this my somewhat messy apartment before even reading the flist.

If only all real life messes were as easily fixed:

• I tried not being The White Woman Who Knows Better, but it's hard to find Afghan women's voices on the new Afghan law further restricting the rights of the Shiite women, so I'll link to the New York Times article this time. Here is a petition to President Obama, and then there's always RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, where you can help in many ways, and also donate.

• First one, then a second 11-year-old (!) committed suicide after middle & elementary (!!) school bullying that involved homosexual taunts. This latest one does hit a bit closer to what was once home; DeKalb is the neighbouring Georgia, USA county of my own exchange student school days. There are a few factors that I think play in there: their race, the school system, and in the latter case, the Bible Belt world that surrounds them (and that doesn't suffer deviations from the norm gladly).

• Another wretched excuse for an attorney is trying to use the so-called "trans-panic defence" and lay the blame for one Allen Ray Andrade brutally murdering Angie Zapatera, a transwoman, on her shoulders. Here is the original post; for what it's worth, I did join the Facebook group to light a virtual candle for Angie, as the Zapatera family asked for just that: a sign, a message against hate crimes, a call for solidarity with transpeople.

I had some pleasant chit-chat post planned yesterday--grundbuch's & my trip to the movies, a review of No Country for Old Men, a praise of the mean Cosmo he mixes--but the news about the Chinese military killing eighty protesters in Tibet, the news about a 'people's war' declared against separatism, made me too sad and angry at once. And I thought about about these developments and my reaction.

Because we see citizens' uprisings and dictatorial governments brutally squashing them all the time on the news; what's different about Tibet? ( ... )

"She risked everything in her attempt to win democracy in Pakistan and she has been assassinated by cowards afraid of democracy."

Rest in peace, Benazir Bhutto. The country you fought for won't, not now.

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Sad but unsurprised about the violent oppression of the Burmese protests but not giving up all hope: UN envoy to Burma Ibrahim Gambari has met detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in the main city of Rangoon.

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I generally and somewhat casually boycott yellow press like Bild or Express because of ever-present populism and all-too-frequent libel, but today, I considered buying one because the news on the front page interested me. The Advocate has an abbreviated account here: Twelve-year-old Kim is believed to be the youngest person to begin gender reassignment. (There are other, more current reports, but they don't get the pronouns right. If you are intrigued or have doubts, feel free to take a look at my earlier post.)

People who rock my political socks:

- Buddhist monks in Burma. Hundreds of prominent members of the religious caste standing up -- peacefully -- against a dictatorship -- wow. I'm awed and not a little bit humbled.

- Angela Merkel, our chancellor, for inviting the Dalai Lama into the Federal Chancellery to further human rights against the prior warnings and current outrage from the Chinese government. (Pravda being the most prominent English-language on-line newspaper reporting this? Interesting.)

In other news, I watched the Munich Tatort. Aw, Batic & Leitmayr: fifteen minutes in, there were yet again bickering like an old married couple.

Waitasec....

Tatort icons featuring favourites of mine -- the teams in ( Muenster, Munich, Hannover, Hamburg, Cologne, & Ludwigshafen )