randomWalks

Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore by Gore Vidal.

originally posted by xowie

Ten Do’s and Don’ts to Raising Healthy Multiracial/Multiethnic Children:

Children are concrete learners - they learn about themselves and the world through real experiences, not words and lectures. In a society so polarized by race and ethnicity, our children must have lots of direct contact with both sides of their family. The easiest way for this to occur is through experiences with both parents.

When two adults cross the racial divide to have a child, they can never go back. Your child represents an in-your-face challenge to racism and the belief of every racial, ethnic and national group that ingroup marriage is somehow normal and better. (…)

It’s difficult for a child to develop prejudicial beliefs or inaccurate information about one side of their heritage if they have positive contacts with both sides all the time. Its easy to develop prejudices when the child is around people from only one of his/her backgrounds. (…)

When you hold and talk to your infant, talk about her pretty skin, beautiful eyes, and curly hair. Tell her how much she looks like her father and mother. Sing songs about a beautiful, brown, curly headed baby. Read books about multiracial children, families of the world, and all aspects of her heritage. Give her mirrors to see herself; when you talk to others affirm her positive multiracial identity. (…)

Don’t teach children that color does not matter. It does! - in this country, and most countries in the world. And color matters not only in the greater society, but within every single racial and ethnic group (Blacks, Hispanics, Natives Americans and Asians). People’s initial reactions to other people are based on physical characteristics - what that person looks like (skin color, hair color and texture, facial features).

Children respond to people who care about them - regardless of their background. It certainly helps if these adults know about multiracial children and how to support their healthy identity development.

Do not entrust your child to adults who do not respect their need for a full identity. And, do not assume minority adults support multiracial identity; many do not.

I constantly hear from young biracial and multiracial adults who do not feel good about themselves, because their parents did not support their mixed identity. The rest of the world does not ignore it!

Children need classmates, neighbors, playmates, etc, who represent both racial groups (or more). If this does not occur, children develop an unrealistic - and overly romantic - view of the part of their heritage that is missing, and then want to discover ‘being black’, ‘being Native American’, ‘being Hispanic’, etc. The problem is they truly don’t know what it means to be one of these minorities, so they become attracted to the stereotypes of the group - music, behaviors, clothes, language, etc. Do not raise a child in a single-race environment - especially if its white.

Our children are minorities, have direct personal connections with the dominant group, and are something new - what many are calling third culture children.

Ninety five percent of our children’s experiences - good and bad - have nothing to do with race and ethnicity. Our children progress through the same developmental stages, learn the same school-related tasks, and have all the same challenges as single-race children.

They just have one more experience: being multiracial or multiethnic.

Mr. Kamen plans to demonstrate today a two-wheeled battery-powered device designed for a single standing rider. Its chief novelty lies in the uncanny effect, produced by a finely tuned gyroscopic balancing mechanism, of intuiting where its rider wants to go -- and going there.

“It is Bobby Fischer without a shadow of a doubt.”

originally posted by xowie

CD buyers beware – record companies are distributing discs which are broken in a number of ways: they won’t play on many CD players including most computers and DVD players and they won’t allow songs to be converted to mp3 format. As usual, if you buy one from a store, you’re stuck with it (exchanges only, no returns). So bookmark Fat Chuck’s corrupt CDs list and print it out before you go shopping. Considering that the only music worth listening to since 1991’s Nevermind has come out first on vinyl, this shouldn’t really be a problem.

"In India, there are three to four people sharing beds in hospitals, and two or three more on the floor, waiting for their shift. This is not an old epidemic. It is just starting. In 20 years, we could be talking about a billion cases of AIDS.''

originally posted by xowie

David Furnish, Johnny Bergius and Janet Street-Porter are planning to summit Kilimanjaro today to benefit The Elton John AIDS Foundation.

originally posted by xowie

MetaFilter will be a definitive spot today. If you miss what it was or wonder what it could be, stop by. Which other weblogs are doing a good job with today’s Link and Think observance of World AIDS Day? Yours?

“Almost 10,000 people will die today from AIDS," says Eric Sawyer, founding member of ACT UP NY. (AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power is "a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.")

Five cases of plagiarism involving George Harrison (but not all of them his fault).

originally posted by xowie

The great trouble with the Negro in the South is that all presumptions are against him. A white man has but to blacken his face and commit a crime to have some Negro lynched in his stead.

An abandoned woman has only to start a cry, true or false, that she has been insulted by a black man, to have him arrested and summarily murdered by the mob.

Great song.

originally posted by xowie

Bonghit sanctuary.

originally posted by xowie

CounterPunch: We Are the War Criminals Now by Robt. Fisk, and Suffer Palestine’s Children by Sunil K. Sharma.

originally posted by xowie

Industry 2, Free Speech 0.

originally posted by xowie

Over all, more than 1,200 people have been detained as part of the sweeping investigation, including men traveling the country with large amounts of cash and box cutters, and those who sought information on crop-dusters and flying lessons on large jets. But a senior law enforcement official said for the first time last week that just 10 to 15 of the detainees are suspected as Al Qaeda sympathizers, and that the government has yet to find evidence indicating that any of them had knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks or acted as accomplices.

originally posted by xowie

It has come to be assumed in much of the Muslim world that to be a proponent of women's rights is to be pro-Western. This enmeshing of gender and geopolitics has robbed Muslim women of their ability to develop a discourse on their rights independent of a cultural debate between the Western and Muslim worlds.

The God of Small Things Study Guide

Baptists urged to pray for Muslim conversions during Ramadan.

“It’s a free country,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on Islamic-American Relations. “If he wants to have Christians fast and pray, we’re hardly in a position to tell people not to."

originally posted by xowie

An Alternate Reality (nytimes.com)

Most political reporting about the stimulus debate describes it as a conflict of ideologies. But ideology has nothing to do with it. No economic doctrine I’m aware of, right or left, says that an $800 million lump-sum transfer to General Motors will lead to more investment when the company is already sitting on $8 billion in cash.

Okay, so let's have that national ID card. Or, better, a national ID tattoo. Or, better yet, how about an identifying microchip embedded into every American's ear? I'm sure Oracle's Larry Ellison could devise a tiny chip for that purpose, one that could easily be read by an electronic scanner.

originally posted by xowie

Eliminate terrorism? All you need is love.

originally posted by xowie

Naughty children to be registered as potential criminals (news.telegraph.co.uk) - “[UK] police are to set up a secret database of children as young as three who they fear might grow up to become criminals.”

Remember the little rush of pleasure the first time your brain was forced to question itself by the tessellations, optical deceptions and serene beauty of M.C. Escher? Relive that sense of wonder with a few of his artistic heirs: Kelly Houle and István Orosz specialize in "catoptric anamorphosis" (the art of distorting an image such that you need a mirror to correct it). Their visions include the unexpected, poetic, and flat-out impossible.
to Art by cricket

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