Came across this beau­tiful, artic­u­late and tal­ented Iranian-Canadian singer and activist, Nazanin Afshin-Jan:

and a *MUST WATCH* inter­view with her from AlJazeera English:

In the interest of embracing opti­mism, I decided to look up some quotes by famous and not-so-famous people that inspire me to approach life in a pos­i­tive, light-hearted manner. Yes, I know, quotes are some­times looked down upon, and quotes are not the only way to learn any­thing, the con­text mat­ters more in most cases. But a good quote is like a good song, a small morsel of wisdom or wit that can inspire great things in the observer’s mind. Here are some juicy ones from my ever-growing collection:

“Snatching the eternal out of the des­per­ately fleeting is the great mag­ical trick of human exis­tence.” ~Tennessee Williams

“When you per­ceive that an act done to another is done to your­self, you have under­stood the great truth.” ~Taoist saying

“Thousands of can­dles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be short­ened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ~Buddha

“The most beau­tiful thing we can expe­ri­ence is the mys­te­rious. It is the source of all true art and sci­ence.” ~Albert Einstein

“To the out­side world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sis­ters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other’s hearts. We share pri­vate family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live out­side the touch of time.” ~Clara Ortega

“Nothing is so strong as gen­tle­ness, and nothing is so gentle as real strength.” ~Ralph Stockman

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” ~T. Roosevelt

“Great spirits have always encoun­tered vio­lent oppo­si­tion from mediocre minds.” ~Albert Einstein

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.” ~Voltaire

“True love sto­ries never have end­ings.” ~Richard Bach

“Anyone can be pas­sionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.” ~Rose Franken

“What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.” ~Pearl Bailey

“To all of us the thought of heaven is dear–
Why not be sure of it and make it here?
No doubt there is a heaven yonder too,
But ’tis so far away–and you are near.”
~Omar Khayyam

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” ~Lily Tomlin

I’ve decided I’m going to par­tic­i­pate in the National Blog Posting Month exer­cise. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on my blog, and I have missed it. I’ve been dealing with a very hectic schedule in my real life, between taking a full load of courses at the uni­ver­sity, and working, and home life, social life etc., I’ve ignored my blog for too long. I get these email alerts for NaBloPoMo, an off­shot of NaNoWriMo, and I always look at the monthly theme and think to myself, “oh that sounds inter­esting, I should write some­thing about that.” Then I forget all about it till the next email alert. But this time, I’ll make it a point to stick to it.

“Look up” invokes three basic con­cepts in my mind:

1: Optimism.

As in, looking up at the bright side of life… trying to find ways to look at things from a pos­i­tive per­spec­tive as much as pos­sible. This is hard for those of us who pay atten­tion to the news, to pol­i­tics, and the state of affairs in many, I’d say most, parts of the world. But as a won­derful vis­iting Professor told our Equity Studies class recently, “the greatest chal­lenge for those of us aware of the prob­lems of the world, is to learn how to love the world.” This really is the greatest chal­lenge and one I’m learning slowly how to handle. I will blog about some of the people and orga­ni­za­tions that have inspired me and are moti­vating me in the world today. I’m not sure if opti­mism is some­thing I really under­stand, on a bigger scale, but I will make a honest effort at it. More on this as the month pro­gresses, I’m sure.

2: Searching.

As in, searching for/looking up infor­ma­tion, or a person, or a resource, group, or any­thing else that isn’t readily or easily avail­able. It could also mean searching for answers, or at least, better ways of artic­u­lating the ques­tions. This month, I’ll blog about some uncanny, off-the-wall, and inter­esting bits of infor­ma­tion that I find, and also about how to search for things on the internet.

3: The Sky.

Halley’s Comet 1986

One of my ear­liest mem­o­ries is of my dad taking us out near the air­port to watch for Halley’s Comet as it came within viewing range from Earth in early 1986. He explained to me what a comet was, and that the next time this ancient one came around I’d be in my 80′s. It was a mind-blowing thing for a 7 year old to dis­cover. It made me appre­ciate from a very early age, the expanse of space and time, and how insignif­i­cant we really are in this grand, beau­tiful uni­verse. Since then, my love for astronomy and cos­mology has only increased. Some of my blog posts this month will revolve around this enduring pas­sion of mine.

So, if you’re reading this and you’d like to com­ment, please do so, and let me know what “Look up” means to you.

I’ve loved this song for a long time, just saw the video for the first time today. Amazing…

If you haven’t seen this yet, here’s your chance It’s a well researched crit­ical analysis of this cur­rent hot-button issue.

Aafia Siddiqui VS (Jews, Zarina Mari, Shazia Khalid and others) by Anas Abbas

Thanks to a Facebook friend, I came across this article in the Times Online which reports on zoo­log­ical find­ings that dol­phins’ brains, cul­tural and emo­tional com­plex­i­ties, and behav­iours are close to those of humans. I think this is sig­nif­i­cant because there are more and more people waking up to the real­i­ties of how we treat non-human ani­mals, and what that implies for us and our humanity, as well as the cor­re­la­tions between cru­elty towards other ani­mals and cru­elty towards humans. If you know me at all, you know this is one of the most impor­tant fields of study, reflec­tion and activism to me. Some excerpts from the Times Online article:

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unac­cept­able to keep such intel­li­gent ani­mals in amuse­ment parks or to kill them for food or by acci­dent when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dol­phins and por­poises die in this way each year.

“Many dol­phin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when cor­rected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zool­o­gist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used mag­netic res­o­nance imaging scans to map the brains of dol­phin species and com­pare them with those of primates.

<snip>

In one study, Diana Reiss, pro­fessor of psy­chology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bot­tlenose dol­phins could recog­nise them­selves in a mirror and use it to inspect var­ious parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought lim­ited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that cap­tive ani­mals also had the ability to learn a rudi­men­tary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dol­phins can solve dif­fi­cult prob­lems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply com­plex social struc­tures and a high level of emo­tional sophistication.

<snip>

Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dol­phin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by con­trast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.When it comes to intel­li­gence, how­ever, brain size is less impor­tant than its size rel­a­tive to the body.

What Marino and her col­leagues found was that the cere­bral cortex and neo­cortex of bot­tlenose dol­phins were so large that “the anatom­ical ratios that assess cog­ni­tive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dol­phins such as the bot­tlenose had the same con­vo­luted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to inter­con­nect with each other. “Despite evolving along a dif­ferent neu­roanatom­ical tra­jec­tory to humans, cetacean brains have sev­eral fea­tures that are cor­re­lated with com­plex intel­li­gence,” Marino said.

There was a time when women, black people, men­tally ill people, chil­dren, were all in var­ious ways regarded as “sub human”, as inan­i­mate objects, to be used, abused, and dis­carded. Today, we still have some seg­ments of pop­u­la­tions arguing for the lack of any rights of non-human ani­mals. This will change, in time, and our cur­rent prac­tices of cruel fac­tory farming, animal testing, breeding for enter­tain­ment, etc., will, I can say with a some con­fi­dence and a lot of hope for the sake of humanity, become more obso­lete, and become as illegal and socially unac­cept­able as slavery, child labour, ped­erasty, misogyny and eugenics are now.

A British MP has caused some con­tro­versy by pub­licly stating that pro­filing of Muslims is to be expected in the light of recent events:

He said: “I think most people would rather be pro­filed than blown up. It wouldn’t be vic­tim­i­sa­tion of an entire community.

What I like is that Muslim orga­ni­za­tions and Muslims with influ­ence are starting to finally speak up in main­stream society, bringing up impor­tant issues like the fact that many of the ter­rorist attacks hap­pening in the world today are being com­mitted by Muslims, and in the name of Islam.

What I don’t like is firstly that things have actu­ally come to this, and sec­ondly that pro­filing based on race or reli­gion could really back­fire. First of all, this opens a whole can of worms in terms of who is Muslim and who isn’t. Is it based on name? On one’s par­ents’ reli­gion? What’s next? Requiring people to put their reli­gion or reli­gious back­ground on their pass­ports? Like what was done to Jews in Soviet Russia? And how hard would it be for someone to bypass such a super­fi­cial system of checks: a change of name, a change of outfit?

I do think that people of cer­tain names, back­grounds, looks and ages will, and it could be easily argued, should, be scru­ti­nized more than the mostly super­fi­cial checks that air­line pas­sen­gers are sub­ject to. However, I think the issue needs to be approached intel­li­gently, to find effi­cient solu­tions (and there have to be many com­ple­men­tary solu­tions, there really is no one simple magic answer), that pre­cisely and suc­cess­fully help iden­tify and quar­an­tine those who intend to use public spaces as per­sonal, fatal soap boxes. We could start by hiring people of higher and more sophis­ti­cated edu­ca­tional back­grounds to screen pas­sen­gers, and we could invest in pro­viding training to air­port per­sonnel to better under­stand things like body sig­nals, psy­chology, etc.

All of which leads me to wonder if per­haps we’re headed for this.

Your thoughts?

Have you ever said, “I’m not gay, but…” or “I’m not bisexual, but…” as a dis­claimer before expressing how much you are attracted to someone of the same gender as you?

If you are pro­gres­sive, lib­eral, and you stand for LGBT rights, have you ever won­dered why you need to give a dis­claimer like that before expressing feel­ings that might qualify you as being bisexual?

I have.

First of all, as a bisexual woman (I prefer the term queer) who has been in rela­tion­ships with both men and women, and who is in a happy, long-term rela­tion­ship with a woman, I find it hurtful when some of my friends still qualify their own sexual desires for people of the same gender by first sep­a­rating them­selves from people like me. There’s nothing wrong with being het­ero­sexual, but there is some­thing very wrong with being het­ero­sexist, which is the idea that het­ero­sex­u­ality is the default, nat­ural, normal thing to be, and that it’s a black or white area with no variations.

If you are telling someone how you sup­port gay rights, you don’t need to keep qual­i­fying that with “I’m not gay or nothing, but…”. Similarly, if you are telling people that you are bi-curious, or attracted to someone of the same gender, then those of us who have put our lives on the line to be honest about sex­u­ality, would appre­ciate it if you could stop talking about this matter like it’s a hot potato that you are willing to sup­port in passing, but not willing to own, even when you your­self have feel­ings that would qualify you as bisexual.

Continue reading ‘(I’m not a queer or nothing, but…)’»

to con­vert man­nequins and bring those dirty little kaf­firs into Dar-ul-Islam.

“Using unusual man­nequins exposing body curves and with heads without hijabs [Muslim veils] are pro­hib­ited to be used in the shops,” police said in a state­ment car­ried by Irna.

Correspondents say that in the past such cam­paigns usu­ally only lasted throughout the summer, but last year’s crack­down, including on tight trousers for women, was still con­tin­uing in the winter.

Oh woman, how many more reli­gions have to be made up before you will realize your place: a degree below men?

From Funny Or Die!

Gus Porter gets mauled by a bear, but he won’t let the socialist Canadian health care fix him up, so he’ll hike back to America.