Lady Mekanika

via Rocketboom (the subtitles seem to suggest an old-style male-focused journalism), this story of female mechanics being trained in Nairobi:

The training captures the need to create a pathway for decent employment for young women. to free young women in Kenya from teenage pregnacies, prostitution, domestic violence and illiteracy.

The Lady Mekanika Project has become a talk in the global arena with several media outlets sharing in the early success of our initiative in promoting gender equality and empowerment of women. Such outlets include http://www.womensenews.org/story/equal-payfair-wage/110530/kenyan-women-chip-away-at-employment-barriers?page=0%2C0

http://www.globalpressinstitute.org/global-news/africa/kenya/women-kenya-challenge-gender-stereotypes-work

This is the beginning of a revolution of femine leadership in Africa. When women dare to dream strive to take on those roles that for along time have been termed masculine. [Source]

40,000 in one blow!

via Mudede / Slog (as usual):

Recall this recent victory:

These are tough times for labor unions. They are under attack in the private sector and at all levels of government. But workers are waking up to the reason for the attacks: unions are essential sources of protection for essential workers.

So it is that the labor movement has now secured one of the most important victories of recent years in a high-profile area of the public sector.

In a run-off election completed this week, the nation’s 40,000 Transportation Security Administration employees voted to become members of the American Federation of Government Employees.

AFGE will provide exclusive representation to the workers at airports across the country, who for many years after the creation of the TSA were denied the right to organize.

Labor has not seen a victory like this in years. 40,000 workers have been unionized. Amazing.

We are still here

It's a shame that this SLOG post kicks off with a reference to the artwork that is pushing the debate, rather than the debate itself - but with statistics like these, not sure it really matters -

Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Reservation fluctuates between 85 and 90%... 39% of homes on Pine Ridge have no electricity. At least 60% of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold. More than 90% of the population lives below the federal poverty line. The tuberculosis rate on Pine Ridge is approximately eight times higher than the US national average. The infant mortality rate is the highest on the continent... cervical cancer is five times higher than the US national average... The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old, roughly the same as Afghanistan and Somalia.

More here, and this is the big, feather-wearing, elephant in the room, in every goddamn room in this goddamn country.

Cloaca

This would have been much needed yesterday.

PS just me, or does this map of ancient Rome have more than a slightly phallic cast to it?

The exigencies of grief

One of the staff tells us a story about a funeral for a young man that had taken place a few days earlier. During some recent funerals people had become so riled in their grief they'd broken several metal folding chairs (at around 500 Haitian gourdes or £7.60 each). The priest, Father Lafontant told everyone during the last eulogy that anyone breaking a chair during the service would have to pay for it, and sure enough he had to point to two people during the service and yell out: "Cinq-cent gourdes!"

Arcade Fire / Cange

Nato will be defeated

With any luck, but with the continuous creation of nonsense like this, we will wait and see.

I love what I do

He positions himself in a chair next to mine but at a 90 degree angle so that instead of looking at me as he talks, he stares intently into a vast mirror that covers one wall of the room.

Snoop Dogg, Guardian

It's not quite a Jaguar

Revisionist futures:

with the issue of women driving, the government seemed to synchronise with the extreme religious scholars, a trend recently becoming more prominent. The deputy minister of the interior released a statement that there was indeed an official law against women driving; it simply had never been announced before. This law was apparently enacted by the ministry of interior in the 1990s in response to a fatwa, or a religious decree, by the late mufti Bin Baz - who judged the women driving as prohibited, haram.

Afganistán es el país más peligroso del mundo para las mujeres

Para la elaboración del estudio se ha consultado a 213 expertos en la materia de los cinco continentes. Estos subrayan como riesgos los problemas de salud, la violencia sexual y no sexual, ciertos factores culturales y religiosos, la falta de acceso a recursos y el tráfico de mujeres.

Afganistán se sitúa en la peor posición en tres de las seis categorías analizadas, concretamente en salud, violencia no sexual y falta de acceso a recursos económicos. Los expertos mencionan la elevada tasa de mortalidad en el parto, el limitado acceso a los médicos y una casi total falta de derechos económicos. UNICEF afirma que una de cada once mujeres afganas mueren en el momento de dar a luz.

Congo, capital de la violación

La República Democrática del Congo se sitúa en segundo lugar, principalmente por la violencia sexual en el este del país. Más de 400.000 congoleñas son violadas al año, de acuerdo con un estudio estadounidense, mientras que la ONU considera que Congo es la capital mundial de la violación. En general, el país africano continúa sufriendo los estragos de la guerra ocurrida entre 1998 y 2003.

Butch

From Popbitch this morning, news of Miss Lincolnshire - made interesting and noteworthy only because -

"The main reason I entered is that I want to be a PE teacher and I want to show young girls that they can be in to sports and still be feminine. I've had it a few times at different schools, where girls have raised concerns about becoming 'butch'."

Source

The Internet

London Slutwalk

This to me is the real meat of the matter:

"If you go to a club you can be grabbed on the behind three times in an evening by a bloke who thinks it's ok because you're wearing a short skirt. There's an assumption it's flattering"

People are still grabbing other people's behinds? Is this a real event that happens? This is appalling in and of itself - the Victorian nature of it, a groper, a flasher, a lurker, a creeper. Arnold, I can understand - he is as much non-real as real. But it happens? For shame.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13739876

UPDATE - this is actually the meat. The above was more like tuna, or TVP - The organiser of the London event was a 17-year-old sixth former, Anastasia Richardson."It's fantastic that this has had such a positive response from people and shows that feminism is cool even if it is not cool."

Among the younger marchers were Ellie Rowe, 12, and Lettie Williams, 11, who persuaded their mums to come along.

V-Girls!

Is it safe, you goon?

Harper's Index June 2011

Percentage change in domestic violence when the local NFL team unexpectedly loses a game : +10
When it loses to a traditional rival : +20

Arundhati Roy

Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? "I don't condemn it any more," she says. "If you're an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."

Her critics label her a Maoist sympathiser. Is she? "I am a Maoist sympathiser," she says. "I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. But right now, when the assault is on, I feel they are very much part of the resistance that I support."

Guardian

A cross between Andy Warhol and Rasputin

The actor Steve Martin has found himself caught up in the biggest art forgery scandal in German history after it emerged he bought a painting "by" German-Dutch modernist Heinrich Campendonk, which turned out to be a fake.

Martin's purchase – he paid $850,000 and sold the painting for a loss at $500,000 to a Swiss businesswoman in 2006 – is just one of many believed to have been faked by a German forgery gang arrested by police last year.

"The gallery that sold me the picture has promised to be responsible to me, if I'm responsible, but it's still unclear," Martin, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, told the New York Times.

Overheard in the office

"Black people all look as though they have perfectly white teeth."

Getting down in the pit and loving somebody

This article by Franzen is getting a good amount of attention - despite its self-serving and perhaps ironically self-aware hyperbole such as 'the telos of techne'. At Slog they suggested it wasn't quotable, but the following for me (sidestepping the point of the article but making it somehow more glorious) works very well:

Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of.

This image of the self as failing the self; this knowledge that one can within an instant change all elements. That movie with Tilda Swinton. The God of Small Things.