Women Born Transsexual

From Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/kucinich-wikileaks-american-people/

By Muriel Kane
Friday, October 22nd, 2010 — 7:57 pm

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) responded to the WikiLeaks release on Friday with a statement saying, “We need a true accounting of the war in Iraq. The American people have a right to know how many innocent civilians were killed in a war based on lies.”

“We must remember that the Iraqi people are still grieving over the loss of husbands, wives, sons and daughters who were innocent noncombatants,” Kucinich stated. “We have a moral responsibility to acknowledge the massive loss to the people of Iraq and the world. … The suffering of the Iraqi people is unfathomable.”

Kucinich has been a consistent voice speaking out against the war in Iraq and the loss of civilian lives in that nation under both Republican and Democratic administrations. According to his own website, “On October 14, 2005, Rep. Kucinich wrote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to request a copy of all Pentagon records pertaining to Iraqi civilian casualties. While the Pentagon maintained that it does not keep a list of civilian casualties, there has been abundant evidence to indicate the contrary. Rep. Kucinich still has not received such records.”

Last August, Rep. Kucinich challenged the notion that the Obama administration’s withdrawal of 50,000 troops constituted an actual end to combat operations.

“Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq now?” he asked. “George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. … This is not the end of the war; this is simply a new stage in the campaign to lull the American people into accepting an open-ended presence in Iraq.”

Continue reading:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/kucinich-wikileaks-american-people/

In these troubled financial times the best thing one can do is turn off advertisers.

I won’t buy any sports shoes with some zillionaire jock’s name on them.  Fuck-em they make way too much money as it is although I am well aware that they too are workers on the same plantation I am working on, not the owners of the shoe companies.

The same goes for not buying products because someone pushing them promises to donate a few pennies from the sale to some charity I might well support.

Living well does not mean owning every single freaking expensive toy under the sun while  paying usurious interest rates on credit card bills one will still be paying when the toy has lost its shine.

Living consciously means weighing the cost in time and money versus the amount of benefit, pleasure and satisfaction one gains from the object purchased.

I didn’t used to have the problem with making those choices back when I was closer to my hippie roots.  Some where along the line the combination of making purchases with plastic instead of cash coupled with the constant back ground drone of sales pitches dulled my ability to make conscious decisions regarding purchases.

Thanks to the economic and ecological crises  the skill is coming coming back.  Going home to my left wing radical hippie/crunchy dyke roots is helping me rediscover my values.

Getting back to DIY is another thing.  Looking at what I want and perhaps doing it myself.

Last year I built a banjo.  Building several musical instruments has been on my personal “Bucket List” since I was a hippie kid who had just started living as a woman for my RLE (as prescribed by Dr. B.).  In reality  I could have bought a banjo on e-bay for what I paid for the parts to build it.  But then I wouldn’t have had the experience of building it.

I’ve had built 3 of my last 5 desktops.  Even though I’ve listened to whole bunches of folks who have told me I would be happier with Apple the reality is you can’t build one yourself.

I’m on guitar lists and camera lists.

It seems that most people spend more time talking about the ultra expensive guitars or cameras and lenses they must have.  When I was young I owned two different Martin guitars (not at the same time) much nicer than the one I own at present.  Yet the one I own today cost about a quarter of what I would cost me to own a Martin like the ones I had when I was young.  Yet the value to me is there.

The same goes for cameras.  What I own today are not the most expensive yet they do what I need them to do.

Today in the New York times Financial section there is an article about running shoes.  The gist of which is that expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better.

I’m going to write more about cost vs values and social impact, I’ve gotten back to an ecology of economy and how we are being turned into wage slaves in a way that is destroying both our lives and the life of the planet in order to enrich the wealthy elite oligarchs.

In the mean time I suggest reading article in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/health/23patient.html?_r=1&ref=business

10/23/2010

For Running Shoes, It’s Fit First and Price Last

By LESLEY ALDERMAN
SHARON TANENBAUM has been a serious runner for six years. The Brooklyn resident, 30, has completed three marathons and several shorter races. Each week she logs about 20 miles.

Her favorite trainers? A $25 pair of Champion shoes she bought at Target.

“I like running in simple shoes,” she said. “The more you pay, the more unnecessary stuff you get.”

She is right. Money often buys higher-quality goods, but not when it comes to running shoes.

Over the last three decades, running has exploded as a leisure sport. In 2009, 476,000 runners completed a marathon. In 1976, the number was just 25,000. Sales of running shoes reached a record $2.36 billion in 2009, 60 percent more than a decade earlier.

But some of those dollars may not have been well spent. In 2007, Scottish researchers tested running shoes at three price levels, ranging from $80 to $150, and found that low- and midcost shoes within the same brand cushioned runners’ feet just as well as high-cost ones — sometimes even better.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/health/23patient.html?_r=1&ref=business

Queen Emily, Lisa, Sarah Jaffe… have a new Blog Socialism and…

Now I could write a whole bunch of stuff saying how wonderful the people at QT all are and how great an idea I think their new Blog is…  But I’d only be repeating myself.

What I am going to say is that I have seen this one coming.  It has to.  When this blog started out it pretty much focused on just transsexual issues.  But transsexual and transgender folks live in a larger world, one where wars, fascism, climate change and economic issues all play a role in our oppression.  Therefore this blog changed.  I’m seeing this happening in a lot of places.  I am very happy to see the women of Questioning Transphobia are also making the connections to the issues that unite TS/TG folks with other people who will benefit from a left wing analysis of the social issues of oppression.

So instead of me writing a great long introduction I’ll just say,”Welcome To The Left” and quote the posting from Questioning Transphobia in entirety.

Socialism and…

So Lisa and I have been talking about economics a lot lately, for obvious reasons.  In the light of this, we’ve started a new blog addressing economic inequality from an intersectional social justice perspective called Socialism And…. There’s a bunch of other folks you might familiar with, including Sarah Jaffe (currently blogging up a storm about music at Bitch) and s.e. smith from FWD/Feminists With Disabilities For a Way Forward, as well as more exciting stuff hopefully coming up soon.

Here’s my welcome spiel from the first post:

The idea of this blog is simple: as an accumulator of the work of those people interested in social justice in its many forms (feminism, womanism, GLBTQIA, disability, anti-war, anti-racist, indigenous rights, immigrant rights, Muslim rights, Judaism, and so on) and a broader focus on the ways in which capitalism creates the conditions for those oppressions.  The so-called Leftist turn of “identity politics” has often put the economy off the table in all but the most aspirational, liberal ways, but we will foreground it while remembering that some of us suffer much more than others because of capitalism.   We’re interested in how gender, race, disability, sexuality etc interact with capitalism, how our oppression occurs through the economic and the political, and how we change this.

We propose that there are juster, fairer better ways to organize human society than the one we have, and it is high time we started building broad coalitions to do so.“Socialism and…” is about building community, sharing our experiences and theories about the present day and strategies to make a better world.  What are the socio-politico-economic causes of oppression, and what are its consequences?

Liberation for all, oppression for none.

We hope you’ll join us.