User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-23 20:40
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	Security:	Public

Just so you all know, Planned Parenthood has a private donor who will match all funds donated between now and midnight on December 31. I know because I was just on their website; when I asked my mom what she was hoping someone would get her for Christmas, she said, "If you want to give me something, donate instead. What I want is health care for all women."

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-23 17:47
	Subject:
	Security:	Public

Although Mr. Liu is charged with writing six articles recently published on overseas Web sites, the main accusation seems to be a role in crafting Charter 08, a political reformer’s wish list that attracted 10,000 signatures this year during its brief life on China’s heavily censored Internet.

The petition called for rule of law, expanded human rights and an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

...

Lei Ji, 48, an unemployed meat plant worker and self-described social critic, made an 18-hour train ride to show his solidarity outside the courthouse. He said that he had never met Mr. Liu but that they had exchanged e-mail messages in years past. And yes, he said proudly, he had signed Charter 08.

Then he reached into his fraying leather satchel to reveal a bundle of photocopied manifestos. “I’m not afraid,” he said after handing one to a court official who had stepped outside to look at the scene. “I love China. I just want my country to have freedom and human rights.”

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-16 20:43
	Subject:
	Security:	Public
	Music:	the clash - the card cheat

Yesterday was Paul Simonon's birthday, and I didn't even headbang to celebrate. :( So here, have some post-birthday celebration. I'm pretty sure I posted this a year or so ago, but it's worth rewatching. Look dudes, he's hot, and more importantly (connectedly?) he wrote "Guns of Brixton." Don't judge.



QUICK LET'S HAVE A CLASH PARTY! EVERYONE NAME A SONG YOU LOVE!

...................it's totally going to be just me playing, isn't it. I hate finals. :( I am so goldfish right now, inarticulate and babbling and out of my mind scared about tomorrow.

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-16 18:16
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	Security:	Public

A very important (and potentially very triggering) essay: "The Not Rape Epidemic," by Latoya Peterson.



Sometimes the only way we can understand our anger is to fuel it at the horror to which we can put a face; the defense attorney here exactly illustrates why we need shield laws. But he is not the point of the essay.

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-16 17:13
	Subject:
	Security:	Public

ericaplease

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-16 14:36
	Subject:	fuck yeah California Penal Code!
	Security:	Public

And how often do you get to say that, eh? But this is an auto-reblog of something that makes me smile, studying for my Domestic Violence final tomorrow morning (oh God oh God oh God) and writing my Feminist Legal Theory final and and and stuff.

Penal Code Section 1473.5

(a) A writ of habeas corpus also may be prosecuted on the basis that expert testimony relating to intimate partner battering and its effects, within the meaning of Section 1107 of the Evidence Code, was not received in evidence at the trial court proceedings relating to the prisoner's incarceration, and is of such substance that, had it been received in evidence, there is a reasonable probability, sufficient to undermine confidence in the judgment of conviction, that the result of the proceedings would have been different. Sections 1260 to 1262, inclusive, apply to the prosecution of a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to this section. As used in this section, "trial court proceedings" means those court proceedings that occur from the time the accusatory pleading is filed until and including judgment and sentence.
(b) This section is limited to violent felonies as specified in subdivision (c) of Section 667.5 that were committed before August 29, 1996, and that resulted in judgments of conviction after a plea or trial as to which expert testimony admissible pursuant to Section 1107 of the Evidence Code may be probative on the issue of culpability.
(c) If a petitioner for habeas corpus under this section has previously filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus, it is grounds for denial of the new petition if a court determined on the merits in the prior petition that the omission of expert testimony relating to battered women's syndrome or intimate partner battering and its effects at trial was not prejudicial and did not entitle the petitioner to the writ of habeas corpus.
(d) For purposes of this section, the changes that become effective on January 1, 2005, are not intended to expand the uses or applicability of expert testimony on battering and its effects that were in effect immediately prior to that date in criminal cases.
(e) This section shall remain in effect only until January 1, 2020, and as of that date is repealed, unless a later enacted statute, that is enacted before January 1, 2020, deletes or extends that date.

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-15 20:15
	Subject:	random thoughts about Lady Gaga; tl,dr?
	Security:	Public

Poking around on tumblr I saw a post wondering at the safety net created for Lady Gaga's "transgressions" by her being slender and white. It got me thinking. I love Lady Gaga. I do. I quite like her music as good pop and I quite like her fashions and I quite like the persona that she has and I quite like that she gets people talking, and that she pushes the envelope in that way. She gets us talking, and she gets us talking on her terms about the issues she wants to raise.

But the tumblr post did get me thinking. I saw her tour last night, or as much as I could see from the back of the crowd and a height of barely 5’2”, and I think perhaps the tumblr post expresses part of my hesitancy at calling her completely transgressive. She’s lovely in her fierceness, but she’s also normatively lovely, where “normative” is (not that it should be, but that it often is with our pop stars) skinny and white (and blonde and red-lipsticked and heeled). I loved her attitude at the show: she wanted to embrace us as her “monsters.” She wanted us to feel sexy. She wanted us pumped and dancing and listening to her politics. But she also seemed to want us to inhabit our sexiness from a place of viewing her as grotesque, and from a place of embracing the grotesque in ourselves, and while I can admire that as a move to make space for those without it, or for those who identify as without it, I’m left wondering whether a) she is truly as other as so much of her hype suggests, and b) whether everyone in that crowd, one of the most diverse I’ve seen at a San Francisco show, wanted only to be allowed to embrace him or herself as a “monster.” The show was fantastic. I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But having seen her, I am left wondering whether her ‘transgressions’ are truly revolutionary, and whether they would be read by popular culture as similar successes for women who are not slender and white and (visibly, at least) able-bodied. Maybe I’m too blase, and thus unappreciative. I do not mean to discount her as a writer or an artist or a woman. But I am hesitant, for myself, to buy into her as transforming the pop world.

One thing I do wonder at, in context of the linked post, is how much of her performance is ‘only’ a shuckable act when it touches on the mental world; I’m not in her head, and I don’t know how much of the nightmare paranoia terror of the tour’s “Paparazzi” set piece is something she lives with every day. I do respect her and like her and part of me just wants the bottom line to be “I had such a great time last night dancing and seeing my sister dancing, oh wow.” But another part of me is glad that because she is so in the public eye (partially due to those reasons linked above), she provokes these conversations. And a third part of me wants to hear other more informed people talk about her in context of those stars whom she most readily brings to mind, from Madonna to Grace Jones, and what her place among them means.

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-15 19:36
	Subject:	this video makes me so happy
	Security:	Public

	User:	emilytheodd
	Date:	2009-12-15 13:02
	Subject:
	Security:	Public