Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
News
25 days until your taxes are due, folks: just a reminder from your friendly neighborhood bookkeeper.
& BTW, your taxes need to be postmarked the 16th this year, since the 15th falls on a Sunday, which will give some of you the extra 24 hours you need to finish them, no doubt.
There’s been a huge recall of cat & dog food, so please check the list & make sure it’s none that you own, as consumption of the recalled products can be fatal.
Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle told the Feds to keep their money if the only education it can fund is abstinence-only.
Wisconsin has received the federal funding since 1997, but new guidelines tying the money to abstinence-only education programs were implemented this year. These guidelines include that students be taught that sexual activity outside of marriage could have harmful physical and psychological effects and that students receive no information about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases and infections.
How much does he rock?!
Four other states have already rejected this strings-attached financing: California, Maine, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The Office of Women’s Health – which researches funding on women’s medical issues such as menopause, birth control, pregnancy & the like – was allocated $4 million. $2.8 million of that is already spent or appropriated, and the final $1.2 million won’t be coming at all.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to withhold 30 percent of the funding allocated for the Office of Women’s Health in 2007, an unnamed, high level official told the Washington Post.
The source isn’t allowed to speak publicly about it and remained unnamed.
Um, isn’t that our money?! As taxpayers? Shouldn’t we at least know who made this decision and why? This type of mumblefuck is exactly why we need more women in government. Sure we’re 51%, but with nothing close to that in terms of representation. I guess this is the way the Feds decided to celebrate Women’s History Month: thanks, guys.
Or you’ll be an hour late for your life for the next six months.
Frances Allen is the first woman to win the Turing Award, often called “The Nobel Prize of Computing.”
She recalled being one of four women in a room of 100 when she was a manager at IBM.
Even cooler? “Allen plans to create a scholarship fund for working class computer science students with the award money.”
From the Feminist Daily News:
Adding to the chorus of women leaders demanding that President Bush retreat from the possibility of war against Iran, retired Army Reserves Colonel and former high-ranking diplomat Mary Ann Wright asked military personnel to refuse potentially imminent orders to attack Iran.
More after the break. Continue reading “Cool Women: Mary Ann Wright”
This, in a report about a 72 year old man who was beaten for being a homosexual:
Anthos, who was helping a wheel-chair-bound friend who was stuck in the snow, was struck with a metal pipe by a man he had been riding the bus with that evening.
Okay, now read that sentence again.
Isn’t it hard to believe those two men are the same species, sometimes? It reminds me of those lyrics from Family Affair by Sly & the Family Stone:
One child grows up to be
Somebody that just loves to learn
And another child grows up to be
Somebody you’d just love to burn
At the very least, they are going to prosecute the murderer for a hate crime, but you know, what about the friend in the wheelchair? Shouldn’t the murderer have to pay for the person to hire an attendant now that he’s taken his friend’s help from him? I think so.
Legislators in Nigeria are trying to make homosexuality illegal:
This bill, titled the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill, includes penalties of five years imprisonment for any individual possessing or purchasing gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (GLBT) literature or film, subscribing or donating to a GLBT organization, attending GLBT events, or expressing any form of same-sex desire.
I expect that if AIDS is still stigmatized as a “homosexual disease” – as it still is here in the US, depending on who you talk to – this will make treating the disease that much harder, too. & That’s of course in addition to the arrests & harassment LGBT people would expect under a prohibitive ban like that. Imagine, owning my books would be grounds for five years in jail.
top row, left to right: Brigitte, Jenny Boylan, Andy Marra, Eden “Bianca” Riegel, & Betty.
Bottom row, left to right: Tommy, Jeffrey “Zarf/Zoe” Carlson, June, & David Harrison.
& Here’s the GLAAD newsclip about it.