(no subject)

* "GOP bets on abortion issue despite gender gap:"

( Embed: )

* "Shaken town eyes fracking for spate of quakes:"

( Embed: )

* ALEC and the GOP War on Voting:

( Embed: )

* Sexism and Politics:

( Embed: )

* "A new ad from the Kentucky senator is worlds away from Tea Party-style rhetoric, but leaves out a lot of details."

( Embed: )

* Best of luck to Mr. Muñoz in his case against the hospital keeping his dead wife on a ventilator against her and his wishes and at his expense, since women in Texas are mere incubators under the law, rather than people with rights. I hope he wins the case to have the machines turned off. I hope he then sues the shit out of them both for the expenses he has incurred and for the suffering they have inflicted on him and his family.

* "Ellis Act Evictions:" http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis.html

* "Surveillance and Scandal: Time-Tested Weapons for US Global Power:" http://www.thenation.com/article/178000/surveillance-and-scandal-time-tested-weapons-us-global-power#

* "King Tut's Mummified Erect Penis May Point to Ancient Religious Struggle:" http://www.livescience.com/42290-king-tut-mummified-penis-explained.html

* Unpacking the use of the word "thug."

( Embed: )

* "Fraternity throws racist MLK day party:" http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/01/23/ac-ridiculist-fraternity-suspended-for-mlk-party.cnn-ap.html

* Remember how I was gender policed at the Neptune in Seattle? This is the account of my friend who was also harassed. "There Is No Bathroom: The Night Vale Edition:" http://greenwick.livejournal.com/267010.html

* So I went to the stupid gatekeeper appointment, which turned out not to be covered by Medicare. They assigned me their LGBT Specialist, which is logical, but Medicare is kind of an asshole about what mental health they cover. The result was a waste of my time and theirs, which can be said about the whole gate keeping process. I have to start over with a covered, non-specialist therapist Tuesday. There was a crisis going on back there, so I spent an hour and a quarter reading in the lobby with my war face on. I do not begrudge a person in crisis the extra time. Still, it prolonged the unpleasantness and I suspect it will take me hours to be as close to human as I get again, since I was shut down so long. I had more paperwork to file on the way out in case the other therapist won't take me, plus I had to gimp across the lot to drop off paper at a diferent bureaucratic office for an unrelated matter.

* I'm pretty sure it was as I swept back into the building to use the elevator up to where I parked my car that something dawned on me. I'd been watching the Sherlock season 3 Premiere before I left home for the errand, see. I thought about Mr. Cumberbatch's precision in his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, the stillness that bursts into sudden controlled motion, the mask of his face with it's subtlety of expression, of the emotional distance and subtle alieness he conveys. I thought about how I am in survival mode, in war mode: the not quite military precision of my movements left over from all that dance and martial arts training, blunted slightly by the spinal damage; the stillness punctuated by sudden deliberate motion, the enigmatic mask of my face, the emotional distance, the subtle alieness that has unnerved any number of people starting with my adult interrogators when I was eight. No wonder Mr. Cumberbatch's Sherlock felt so familiar. No wonder his version holds my fascination in a way other versions can't, not even Robert Downey Jr.'s excellent one, that I consider to be the most authentic of them. So few glimpses of even small aspects of myself turn up in books or media, that even a faint glimpse in distorted fragment or a passing shop window grabs my attention even if it' only subliminally. The thing I wondered as I road the elevator up was if Sherlock is not a sociopath, even though he says he is and looks like one. I wonder if he developed his war face under the pressure of living with his horrifying and creepy perceptive brother. I wonder if he built everything in his life including his persona the way he did to keep distance he absolutely required to survive as something separate and reasonably whole. Essentially, it occurred to me that while there were differences in detail, the pressures that led my to evolve as I did could have shaped the Sherlock character in similar ways if he were a real person. Similarly, given Sherlock's canonical back story, he might not have seen a reason to learn how to be human again, as I did at fifteen, but that perhaps the events in the season premiere might have shown him a reason for the first time in his life. What if all anyone has ever seen is his war face? It took me years of hard work and practice to learn how to surface, to turn most of the defenses that kept me alive off. I think about how Mycroft is always THERE in Sherlock, even when he isn't, the way he is always watching, monitoring, manipulating, testing, endlessly testing his little brother. I think about what it was like when I was small and adults were always ambushing me with interrogations so that I had to always be on guard and in character lest I be caught off guard until I became my mask. Any sign of emotion could be used against me, so I learned to shut things down and make what I was feeling invisible and where that wasn't possible, make them look like different emotions. I am not a sociopath, but I sure looked like one back then.

It works for me and I'm considering it my head cannon.

* As to the Premiere itself, I'm not ready to talk about it. I need to do a whole lot more thinking and watch it at least once more if not several times. There is so much to think about, I'm not sure where to start.

* "Behold, The Noodle Copter!:" http://makezine.com/projects/make-37/behold-the-noodle-copter/