Of all the things I’ve enjoyed at this conference, watching Harry Belafonte transform the world through pop culture in his biopic has been my favorite. Here’s a video of his appearance on the Muppet Show for now - next week we’ll go deep with it.
point of no return
"What if the baby you abort could have cured cancer?"
What if the trans* person beaten to death could have cured cancer?
What if the gay teen who committed suicide from bullying could have cured cancer?
What if that young girl sold into the sex trade and died from untreated STIs could have cured cancer?
What if one of those hundreds of thousands of civilians that have been killed in the war could have cured cancer?
What if that African-Canadian woman who was raped and later died from internal complications could have cured cancer?
What if all the people on the planet how can’t afford to go to post-secondary education, and will live and die in poverty could have cured cancer?
What if the woman who died giving birth to the baby she didn’t want could have cured cancer?
BOOM.
What if, instead of putting all of our resources into worrying about that abortion, we just work on that cancer? Maybe we could fucking cure cancer ourselves if we actually put the resources into it. For that matter, what if instead of blaming gays for the AIDS epidemic, we put some fucking money into HIV and AIDS research and for once in the history of this country actually WORKED ON THE PROBLEM instead of throwing around blame and excuses.
(via feminally)
Feist on Sesame Street
“
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.
Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral”
(source: npr)
(Source: lonelyheartsdeathmetal, via mutations)
“I need more evidence,” and other things that probably make you a mansplainer
The “I need more evidence” and the “devil’s advocate” approach are particularly familiar to me.
“ If you’re gonna have pizza with someone else, what do you have to do? You gotta talk about what you want. Even if you’re going to have the same pizza you always have, you say, ‘We getting the usual?’ Just a check in. And square, round, thick, thin, stuffed crust, pepperoni, stromboli, pineapple — none of those are wrong; variety in the pizza model doesn’t come with judgment. So ideally when the pizza arrives, it smells good, looks good, it’s mouthwatering. Wouldn’t it be great if we had that kind of anticipation before sexual activity, if it stimulated all our senses, not just our genitals but this whole-body experience. And what’s the goal of eating pizza? To be full, to be satisfied. That might be different for different people; it might be different for you on different occasions. Nobody’s like ‘You failed, you didn’t eat the whole pizza.’
NY Times: Teaching Good Sex (via ffolkthepainaway)
A metaphor about pizza and sex? Perfect!
(via dreadhawkedmuckaround)
I fucking love this analogy, and I just read the whole article and loved it too. It’s long but definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already!
(via paper-is-patient)
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.
(via glossylalia)
(via haltman)
(via fuckyeahfeminists)
Miranda Kerr
(Source: butterflydisguise)
