I want to talk about what Obama has given us, what we should not take for granted, what we’ll miss when he’s gone. I want to talk about the persistence and work ethic of a former city planner. I want to talk about the nuanced political understanding of a Harvard-educated lawyer. I want to talk about the grassroots funding of a revolutionary political campaign. We can forever cherish the gains our country has made under his Presidency, from wider availability of insurance to the legalization (finally) of gay marriage. But who knows how much we may (depending on the outcome of the next election) come to miss watching a man of sense and compassion clearly delivering a beautifully crafted speech, not folkified or dumbed down, to an audience he respects and cares for?
9.1% of the Miami population is estimated to suffer from a mental illness (the largest percentage in the country). In 2000, facing such numbers, Judge Steven Leifman held a summit with officials and came up with a plan.
Today thousands of Miami-Dade police officers have become skilled tacticians in de-escalating encounters with mentally ill suspects; arrests and incarcerations have plummeted. The program revolutionized the relationship between the county’s criminal justice system and its mental health system. The key to the program’s extraordinary success: It treats mental illness as a disease, not a crime. Police departments everywhere should follow Miami’s lead.
Giant tarantulas keep tiny frogs as pets. Insects will eat the burrowing tarantulas’ eggs - so the spiders protect the frogs from predators, and in return the frogs eat the insects. Source
When you open up the pint, there’s this big disc of chocolate on the top, covering the entire top. And below it is just plain mint ice-cream. The disc of chocolate represents the 90 percent of the wealth that’s gone to the top ten percent over the last ten years.
The way you eat it is that you take your spoon and you whack that big chocolate disc into a bunch of little pieces and you mix it around, and there you have it: “Bernie’s Yearning.”
Rey, the female lead of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, is not among the character tokens one may play in the film’s tie-in version of Monopoly.Featured are only male characters, including one not even present in the new movie.
Why is it that the police officers in Cleveland who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice after an encounter of a few seconds have been deemed participants in a shared tragedy, but not murderers?
Why is it that a Northern Virginia mother, whose baby died after she put him down for a nap on his stomach, is considered a murderer and not part of a tragedy?
Hello there, I am a feminist. This is not meant as a surprise. If you google “Emily Heller f…” it autofills with “feminism,” because apparently I’m the only female comedian in the world whose feet the internet does not want to see. And, though it contradicts our Official Feminist Recruitment Platform, I have to confess something. Me and my friends - we hate men. I admit it! We often sit around talking about how much we hate men, and the society they made, and the shit they put us through on a daily basis. You got me! I confess! ;-P
Sure, there are some good ones in there. My boyfriend, for example. Terry Crews, for another example. AND YET. When my coven and I are sitting around bitching (lol) about men and plotting the downfall of the patriarchy, you know what we never, ever talk about doing? You know what strategy has never once crossed our minds?
Pretending to have been raped.
I know that might come as a shock to you, considering how incredibly certain some folks are that the women making these accusations against Bill Cosby, James Deen, R. Kelly, and many others are lying. You know, just making stuff up to try and destroy an innocent guy’s reputation, because they hate men or something, like I do. And while I’m not surprised people think that way, I feel I have to set things straight. Us man haters, when we want to ruin a man’s life, that’s not how we work.
I’m a little hurt, honestly. You don’t think we’re creative enough, smart enough - hell, evil enough to come up with better revenge plots than that? You know, stuff that would feel more at home in a montage under an angry Beyoncé song?
Here’s just a SHORT list of punishments I’d rather inflict on a guy I hate:
- Hide a hundred alarm clocks in his room set to various ungodly hours
- Put a bunch of wack bumper stickers on his car (I did this one time. It was great. One of them said “The Goddess is dancing and magic is afoot”).
- Stretch cellophane over his toilet bowl (but under the seat).
- Do everything they do in the song “Hit ‘Em Up Style”
- Publish his poetry (no man’s poetry is good)
- Pile a bunch of watermelons at his door and then ring the bell and run
- Release his high school band’s demo (if anyone did this to me I would die)
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are better ideas out there that would be more satisfying. I haven’t seen Waiting to Exhale, but I vaguely remember from the preview that they set someone’s car on fire in it, and while I’d never do that myself, it does seem like a hoot! Accusing someone of rape, on the other hand, isn’t even Plan Z.
You know why? Because making a false rape or abuse accusation is NOT FUN. Making a TRUE rape or abuse accusation is NOT FUN. It is, instead, a reliable way for the accuser to get harassed, doubted, mocked, threatened, sued for defamation, ostracized from her community, scrutinized for her sexual behavior, blamed for her own pain, and generally treated like crap. It’s one of the least effective, riskiest, most terrifying ways to fuck with someone’s life other than your own. And the chances of it bringing consequences for the accused are perilously low! According to RAINN, only two percent of rapists will ever see jail time. Think of all the famous men who have been accused of violence against women. Are any of them bankrupt? How many are in jail? And how many are walking around still adored millionaires?
Before she was the award-winning director / writer behind the brilliant film The Diary of a Teenage Girl, my sister Marielle Heller was making her living as a theater actor in New York. One day she called me to ask for my advice about an audition she was offered, because she knows I’m a genius. The role was a rape victim on Law & Order: SVU. You see, she wasn’t sure she even wanted to audition, because - get this - she didn’t want to pretend to have been raped. If she landed the part, they were going to pay her money! She was going to be on television! She was going to meet Richard Belzer! She would get to eat all kinds of cheeses off the craft services table! Maybe even brie! But she knew that in order to get all those things, she’d have to spend the day thinking about being raped, and talking about being raped, and acting as if she had been raped, and she wasn’t sure she could handle it. If my sister didn’t want to play a rape victim for money, an IMDB credit, and face time with the Belz, what makes you think these women want to do it for free, for fun, for spite?
So, yeah, men. Sometimes we do hate you. What do you expect? You harass us, you cheat on us, you legislate our bodies, you blame us for the Beatles breaking up. And sometimes we even want to ruin your lives. But we’re too clever and wonderful and self interested to lie about being raped to do it.
When someone says they were raped, it’s because they were raped. When they say they were abused, it’s because they were abused. And they need you to believe it.
The panicked flight into rightwing ideologies and crass xenophobia we see everywhere in Europe today might also be a frenzied refusal of the fact that, if human rights can be denied to some people, then nobody is safe. Anxiously glancing at the human misery of others from within the blubber of our own historical amnesia, now more than ever we need to understand why their misfortunes are also our own. This is not impossible. Other parts of the world take in refugees, host the permanently stateless, always at some cost but also with humanity. Today’s politicians might do well to look beyond the myth of Europe’s generously compassionate past and to the example of the Eritrean camps in Sudan, the Somali camps in Kenya, to Baddawi camp in Beirut, Amman in Jordan, and Gaziantep and Hatay in Turkey, for some contemporary lessons in humanitarian solidarity.
In Santa Rosa, Calif., the local BSA chapter told 10-year-old Ella Jacobs and five other prospective female members that their application for membership was “inappropriate.” Calling themselves “the Unicorns,” the girls plan to protest the decision in person Friday with new applications. But why were they blocked? A prejudice women have to face all their lives.
