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* Donald Trump continues to insist that the 17 intelligence agencies that say Russia interfered in our elections are all lying, presumably on the advice of his Russian handlers, who were proved to be in con tact with his campaign staff during the run up to the election. After all, who is he going to believe, people with actual facts or the foreign agents who got him elected as to whether foreign agents got him elected. He also insists that the evidence doesn't exist, while refusing to look at intelligence briefings containing the evidence. Since he believes if he does not look at something that doesn't exist, it begs the question: Has the President elect achieved the developmental stage of Object Permanence? Does he understand as most toddlers do that when someone plays peekaboo with him they are still there and not actually disappeared? Because the evidence exists whether he refuses to look at it or not.
* "Obama doles out punishment to Putin's Russia:"
* "The Nixonian ways of Donald Trump:"
* "Trump and the truth:"
* "Trump advisor: The wealthy can't be corrupt because they're wealthy:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-advisor-the-wealthy-cant-be-corrupt-because-theyre-wealthy#break
* "The foolish farce surrounding 'food-stamp fraud':" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-foolish-farce-surrounding-food-stamp-fraud
* "Trump is moving forward with plans to privatize veterans' care:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-moving-forward-plans-privatize-veterans-care#break
* "In New York, Activists Prepare Bystanders To Take Action Against Harassment:" http://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506583208/in-new-york-activists-prepare-bystanders-of-harassment-to-take-action?utm_source=tumblr.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2051
* "Democrats seek to reset Republican gerrymandering:"
* "10 Times Carrie Fisher Helped Those With Mental Illness:" http://www.refinery29.com/2016/12/134173/carrie-fisher-twitter-fans-mental-illness?utm_source=tumblr.com&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=end&utm_campaign=h3
* "Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) Wrote Books and Had a Service Dog:" https://kpagination.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/carrie-fisher-princess-leia-wrote-books-and-had-a-service-dog/
* Today I my body was extra obnoxious. I did about half the paper bureaucracy stack The bits left are things like document hunts. It turns out my Mother's one obituary out of several that actually got uploaded is useless and my Father's never got transferred on line. I wasted more than an hour trying to find a way to get dates anyway not involving a pay wall or a fishing site. I'm pretty sure my Dad's clippings are upstairs in storage. They might as well be on the moon. My Mother's are around here somewhere. They were born in the same month and did a joint birthday so I never learned their birthdates, their birthday being celebrated as a moveable feast within the month of her birth. Apparently knowing mom's date of death and Dad's month and year of death is zero help on getting his exact death date or their birthdays. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I'm about to spend the weekend trying to figure out where her death folder is, aren't I? Which doesn't really help unless one of the documents lists his birth and death date too. Oh, and Pennsylvania's still sitting on my Birth certificate. It's well past a year now, fucking transphobes.
This on top of the usual periodic document hunt.
* I'm not 100% in agreement with all the points in here (Rogue One was less perfect and TFA less terrible than they paint them in my opinion), but I agree with a majority of it and they make some really good points. "Rogue One Succeeds Where The Force Awakens Fell Flat :" https://www.thefandomentals.com/rogue-one-succeeds-where-the-force-awakens-fell-flat/
* I fundamentally prefer characters who chose rather than are chosen. No wonder I took to Rogue One.
* TNG Rewatch, Season 5:
- The Outcast. I've talked and written about this episode a lot over the years, about how intensely it frustrated and infuriated and disappointed me, but this is the first time I've seen it since... I'm guessing in syndication at some point in the '90's so I'm tackling it again. This is the episode where they have an androgynous race, and instead of letting Riker date an Androgyne they have to make the character a woman so it can be safely heterosexual and not flip out the whiny fan boys. They could have had someone who represented people like me on TV and deliberately chickened out. They deliberately decided to make the only non-binary people I'd seen on TV transphobes, and thus oppressors while the cisfolk get to be the open minded good guys. (If you can see the problem here, you really aren't putting any thought into at all).
Fuck that. Fuck that so damned hard. I was sick of always being the villain in 1992. It is the 21st century and I am even more furious.
The thing is, it was so close to being good. There is the little scene where the character calls Riker on his pronoun use and he asks what pronoun to use. Riker mentions that "it" is rude. Unfortunately the character does not give him the gender neutral pronoun because, "it does not translate." So why not use the word from the native language? This is pretty damned good for 1992. I think this is part of why I felt so betrayed by how the episode plays out. There was the nice little scene with Riker and the pea soup and discussion of cultural differences, sex, gender, and social construction of gender roles, with the contrasting one on similar though non-soup related topics with Beverly Crusher. I actually think having the trans person asking the cis person uncomfortable questions about his personal genitals is a good way to make the awkwardness and inappropriateness weird for the cisfolk in the audience who might tend to do this to transfolk RL, again, especially in 1992 where pretty much all the real trans folk one saw on TV were sensationalized and frequently dehumanized on talk shows. I also appreciate Crusher and Troi calling Worf on his sexism and cultural chauvinism, and Worf eventually trying to make good even though Riker never knew what he had said. There was nothing wrong with the trans character coming out to Riker scene or the description of transphobic hate crimes, and Riker's clear condemnation of conversion therapy for trans folk as abusive and a violation of whatever you want to call the galactic equivalent of human rights is excellent. For the record, the person playing the trans woman acted the shit out of this and the plea for her humanity was a thing that needed saying. I just... the ending is so bad on so many levels.
Seriously, this could have been fucking brilliant (so many good things were in there), and they pissed all over it because the network was too timid to do this properly. I would have been happy with one character being trans (preferably a trans man so we still get a bi/pan Riker), but the non-binary characters not being villians, or with a non-binary love interest for an openly pansexual Riker and it being the inter species aspect creeping out the androgynes, but the way they picked to write it was right up there on worst ways to have the second half of the story run. To us back in 1992, it came off as managing to be biphobic (we didn't have the word "pansexual" yet, at least within my group of pre-world wide web friends, though that is the better word here, I think) and transphobic at the same time.
On a personal note, I was fully out androgyne with partners before this point (only sporadically out in other contexts. In 1992, I had never met another out binary person, and there was zero in the media. Trying to explain it could get exhausting at a time where there was nothing much in the way of resources, cultural awareness, and no web to look things up on. I'd heard of other people in other cultural contexts, but I'm about as white as you can get and those weren't my words to use. I'd picked androgyne for myself more than a decade previous because it was and is the best description, but I was doing it in a vacuum that is hard to explain to people born after 1990 or so. As a result, I only got into it with people who either needed to know or were people who had a reasonable chance of getting it. The number of people worth explaining to got significantly larger when I went back to college, and fully out in all contexts made sense later, but that's a whole other story), and my gorgeous cis-male partner was right in there ranting to our friends as loudly and furiously as I was. It's on my top five list of his finest relationship moments. (Right up there with the time he turned down an invitation to a wedding I was specifically disinvited to, telling them he was not going anywhere I was welcome. he didn't tell me for fear my feelings might be hurt, but his mom told me because she was proud of him and thought he ought to get credit. His mom was A+). Anyway, he got it without me having to explain it as was as disappointed and angry as I was.
- Cause and Effect. Another Groundhog Day episode. I do like that they take Crusher seriously. I know I've said this before, but I really appreciate that when female crew notice weird shit happening Picard never poopoos or gaslights them as often happens in reality. I have noticed that just generally they've really improved on the sexism since season one despite the occasional issues. I am also still confused as to why Data is allowed to play poker, given his special skills. (Same for Geordi, who can see the other side of the cards, but isn't doing it in this episode). Do they blow up the enterprise then take it back every season, or does it just feel that way?
- The First Duty. Still a very hard one to watch. Nicholas is very surface polish, the way we all were at my school. That seems appropriate, considering. This was the point the first time through that I really started wishing they'd been giving Wil Wheaton meatier things to do with Wesley, because this is so well acted. Up until this point he'd had a few decent episodes, but most of it was a writing issue, as I've said like a million times over the last two and a half decades. I am pretty sure that it was after this episode my friends and I started brain storming interesting things they could do with Wesley instead of the usual boring things the writers gave him, al of which were better in my opinion that the things they actually gave poor Mr. Wheaton to do before he was written off entirely. Seriously, the waste of it, to hire someone so brilliant in Stand By Me, who demonstrated over and over his skill by doing his level best with the material he was given, and they only gave him a handful of good scenes and a few decent episodes in the course of half a decade. (I know I keep harping on this for Mr. Wheaton and Ms. Sirtis, but at the time people really did act as if it was their fault the scripts for him, particularly in the first season and for her pretty much six out of seven years, were uneven and made really poor use of of their skills).
I still love the grounds keeper in this. I think every school has at least one. At mine we had two, a dish washer and a wood shop teacher.
- Cost of Living. Ugh. Another Lwaxana Troi episode. This holo program is even more annoying than she is. Mrs. Troi's when you get old you compromise speech was well acted and ouch.
*****
* Suicide Crisis numbers: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/153016816845/non-us-crisis-line-list
* Victim of a Hate Crime? Report to the police first, but also report here to help the SPLC track incidents: https://www.splcenter.org/reporthate
* Trans Relief Project: http://transrelief.com/
* "Donate to the SPLC:" https://donate.splcenter.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=463
* "A List of Pro-Women, Pro-Immigrant, Pro-Earth, Anti-Bigotry Organizations That Need Your Support:" http://jezebel.com/a-list-of-pro-women-pro-immigrant-pro-earth-anti-big-1788752078?rev=1478710019591&utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
* General Charities list to help groups being targeted in Trump's America: http://lovingmyselfishard.tumblr.com/post/153111297079/charities-that-may-need-some-love-in-the-upcoming
* Where to donate to help Immigrants: http://colinfirth.tumblr.com/post/152963467726/carecen-la-center-for-community-change
* Ways to protest: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/174f0WBSVNSdcQ5_S6rWPGB3pNCsruyyM_ZRQ6QUhGmo/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true#
* More ways to protest "So here’s the deal:" http://the-cimmerians.tumblr.com/post/153516131819/so-heres-the-deal
* "10 ways we can help Standing Rock Indian Reservation.:" http://browngurlwfro.tumblr.com/post/153755459138/dooder-tooder-this-is-a-photo-my-friend-posted
* "List of Standing Rock Resources:" https://laughingacademy.tumblr.com/post/152671392633/list-of-standing-rock-resources
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
* "Obama doles out punishment to Putin's Russia:"
* "The Nixonian ways of Donald Trump:"
* "Trump and the truth:"
* "Trump advisor: The wealthy can't be corrupt because they're wealthy:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-advisor-the-wealthy-cant-be-corrupt-because-theyre-wealthy#break
* "The foolish farce surrounding 'food-stamp fraud':" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-foolish-farce-surrounding-food-stamp-fraud
* "Trump is moving forward with plans to privatize veterans' care:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-moving-forward-plans-privatize-veterans-care#break
* "In New York, Activists Prepare Bystanders To Take Action Against Harassment:" http://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506583208/in-new-york-activists-prepare-bystanders-of-harassment-to-take-action?utm_source=tumblr.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2051
* "Democrats seek to reset Republican gerrymandering:"
* "10 Times Carrie Fisher Helped Those With Mental Illness:" http://www.refinery29.com/2016/12/134173/carrie-fisher-twitter-fans-mental-illness?utm_source=tumblr.com&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=end&utm_campaign=h3
* "Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) Wrote Books and Had a Service Dog:" https://kpagination.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/carrie-fisher-princess-leia-wrote-books-and-had-a-service-dog/
* Today I my body was extra obnoxious. I did about half the paper bureaucracy stack The bits left are things like document hunts. It turns out my Mother's one obituary out of several that actually got uploaded is useless and my Father's never got transferred on line. I wasted more than an hour trying to find a way to get dates anyway not involving a pay wall or a fishing site. I'm pretty sure my Dad's clippings are upstairs in storage. They might as well be on the moon. My Mother's are around here somewhere. They were born in the same month and did a joint birthday so I never learned their birthdates, their birthday being celebrated as a moveable feast within the month of her birth. Apparently knowing mom's date of death and Dad's month and year of death is zero help on getting his exact death date or their birthdays. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I'm about to spend the weekend trying to figure out where her death folder is, aren't I? Which doesn't really help unless one of the documents lists his birth and death date too. Oh, and Pennsylvania's still sitting on my Birth certificate. It's well past a year now, fucking transphobes.
This on top of the usual periodic document hunt.
* I'm not 100% in agreement with all the points in here (Rogue One was less perfect and TFA less terrible than they paint them in my opinion), but I agree with a majority of it and they make some really good points. "Rogue One Succeeds Where The Force Awakens Fell Flat :" https://www.thefandomentals.com/rogue-one-succeeds-where-the-force-awakens-fell-flat/
* I fundamentally prefer characters who chose rather than are chosen. No wonder I took to Rogue One.
* TNG Rewatch, Season 5:
- The Outcast. I've talked and written about this episode a lot over the years, about how intensely it frustrated and infuriated and disappointed me, but this is the first time I've seen it since... I'm guessing in syndication at some point in the '90's so I'm tackling it again. This is the episode where they have an androgynous race, and instead of letting Riker date an Androgyne they have to make the character a woman so it can be safely heterosexual and not flip out the whiny fan boys. They could have had someone who represented people like me on TV and deliberately chickened out. They deliberately decided to make the only non-binary people I'd seen on TV transphobes, and thus oppressors while the cisfolk get to be the open minded good guys. (If you can see the problem here, you really aren't putting any thought into at all).
Fuck that. Fuck that so damned hard. I was sick of always being the villain in 1992. It is the 21st century and I am even more furious.
The thing is, it was so close to being good. There is the little scene where the character calls Riker on his pronoun use and he asks what pronoun to use. Riker mentions that "it" is rude. Unfortunately the character does not give him the gender neutral pronoun because, "it does not translate." So why not use the word from the native language? This is pretty damned good for 1992. I think this is part of why I felt so betrayed by how the episode plays out. There was the nice little scene with Riker and the pea soup and discussion of cultural differences, sex, gender, and social construction of gender roles, with the contrasting one on similar though non-soup related topics with Beverly Crusher. I actually think having the trans person asking the cis person uncomfortable questions about his personal genitals is a good way to make the awkwardness and inappropriateness weird for the cisfolk in the audience who might tend to do this to transfolk RL, again, especially in 1992 where pretty much all the real trans folk one saw on TV were sensationalized and frequently dehumanized on talk shows. I also appreciate Crusher and Troi calling Worf on his sexism and cultural chauvinism, and Worf eventually trying to make good even though Riker never knew what he had said. There was nothing wrong with the trans character coming out to Riker scene or the description of transphobic hate crimes, and Riker's clear condemnation of conversion therapy for trans folk as abusive and a violation of whatever you want to call the galactic equivalent of human rights is excellent. For the record, the person playing the trans woman acted the shit out of this and the plea for her humanity was a thing that needed saying. I just... the ending is so bad on so many levels.
Seriously, this could have been fucking brilliant (so many good things were in there), and they pissed all over it because the network was too timid to do this properly. I would have been happy with one character being trans (preferably a trans man so we still get a bi/pan Riker), but the non-binary characters not being villians, or with a non-binary love interest for an openly pansexual Riker and it being the inter species aspect creeping out the androgynes, but the way they picked to write it was right up there on worst ways to have the second half of the story run. To us back in 1992, it came off as managing to be biphobic (we didn't have the word "pansexual" yet, at least within my group of pre-world wide web friends, though that is the better word here, I think) and transphobic at the same time.
On a personal note, I was fully out androgyne with partners before this point (only sporadically out in other contexts. In 1992, I had never met another out binary person, and there was zero in the media. Trying to explain it could get exhausting at a time where there was nothing much in the way of resources, cultural awareness, and no web to look things up on. I'd heard of other people in other cultural contexts, but I'm about as white as you can get and those weren't my words to use. I'd picked androgyne for myself more than a decade previous because it was and is the best description, but I was doing it in a vacuum that is hard to explain to people born after 1990 or so. As a result, I only got into it with people who either needed to know or were people who had a reasonable chance of getting it. The number of people worth explaining to got significantly larger when I went back to college, and fully out in all contexts made sense later, but that's a whole other story), and my gorgeous cis-male partner was right in there ranting to our friends as loudly and furiously as I was. It's on my top five list of his finest relationship moments. (Right up there with the time he turned down an invitation to a wedding I was specifically disinvited to, telling them he was not going anywhere I was welcome. he didn't tell me for fear my feelings might be hurt, but his mom told me because she was proud of him and thought he ought to get credit. His mom was A+). Anyway, he got it without me having to explain it as was as disappointed and angry as I was.
- Cause and Effect. Another Groundhog Day episode. I do like that they take Crusher seriously. I know I've said this before, but I really appreciate that when female crew notice weird shit happening Picard never poopoos or gaslights them as often happens in reality. I have noticed that just generally they've really improved on the sexism since season one despite the occasional issues. I am also still confused as to why Data is allowed to play poker, given his special skills. (Same for Geordi, who can see the other side of the cards, but isn't doing it in this episode). Do they blow up the enterprise then take it back every season, or does it just feel that way?
- The First Duty. Still a very hard one to watch. Nicholas is very surface polish, the way we all were at my school. That seems appropriate, considering. This was the point the first time through that I really started wishing they'd been giving Wil Wheaton meatier things to do with Wesley, because this is so well acted. Up until this point he'd had a few decent episodes, but most of it was a writing issue, as I've said like a million times over the last two and a half decades. I am pretty sure that it was after this episode my friends and I started brain storming interesting things they could do with Wesley instead of the usual boring things the writers gave him, al of which were better in my opinion that the things they actually gave poor Mr. Wheaton to do before he was written off entirely. Seriously, the waste of it, to hire someone so brilliant in Stand By Me, who demonstrated over and over his skill by doing his level best with the material he was given, and they only gave him a handful of good scenes and a few decent episodes in the course of half a decade. (I know I keep harping on this for Mr. Wheaton and Ms. Sirtis, but at the time people really did act as if it was their fault the scripts for him, particularly in the first season and for her pretty much six out of seven years, were uneven and made really poor use of of their skills).
I still love the grounds keeper in this. I think every school has at least one. At mine we had two, a dish washer and a wood shop teacher.
- Cost of Living. Ugh. Another Lwaxana Troi episode. This holo program is even more annoying than she is. Mrs. Troi's when you get old you compromise speech was well acted and ouch.
*****
* Suicide Crisis numbers: http://gwydionmisha.tumblr.com/post/153016816845/non-us-crisis-line-list
* Victim of a Hate Crime? Report to the police first, but also report here to help the SPLC track incidents: https://www.splcenter.org/reporthate
* Trans Relief Project: http://transrelief.com/
* "Donate to the SPLC:" https://donate.splcenter.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=463
* "A List of Pro-Women, Pro-Immigrant, Pro-Earth, Anti-Bigotry Organizations That Need Your Support:" http://jezebel.com/a-list-of-pro-women-pro-immigrant-pro-earth-anti-big-1788752078?rev=1478710019591&utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
* General Charities list to help groups being targeted in Trump's America: http://lovingmyselfishard.tumblr.com/post/153111297079/charities-that-may-need-some-love-in-the-upcoming
* Where to donate to help Immigrants: http://colinfirth.tumblr.com/post/152963467726/carecen-la-center-for-community-change
* Ways to protest: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/174f0WBSVNSdcQ5_S6rWPGB3pNCsruyyM_ZRQ6QUhGmo/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true#
* More ways to protest "So here’s the deal:" http://the-cimmerians.tumblr.com/post/153516131819/so-heres-the-deal
* "10 ways we can help Standing Rock Indian Reservation.:" http://browngurlwfro.tumblr.com/post/153755459138/dooder-tooder-this-is-a-photo-my-friend-posted
* "List of Standing Rock Resources:" https://laughingacademy.tumblr.com/post/152671392633/list-of-standing-rock-resources
* "How to help Flint, Michigan:" http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis: http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help
* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com