And not to piss on the Occupy Seattle folks, okay maybe a little, but they are mostly newly poor while long term poor folks have it much worse.

Housing is a human right. Full stop. When we leave it to charity to fix the sucking black hole that is our lack of a safety net, then we end up with people camping in front of the Gates Foundation and being ignored.

The Gates Foundation has done good work, there are 100,000 fewer AIDS cases in Africa because of that work, and according to the Gates Foundation there are 1400 affordable homes for local families because of their donations. But it ain’t enough and it can never be enough. The only reason the Gates Foundation has all that money to give is because of fucked up tax policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

Oh holy shit how did I not know this story before now! Damn I love Kathleen Hanna!

Video is prolly NSFW

ETA I just realized that she uses a soooooooo not cool word (lame) for things that are so not cool. Apologies.

Bitchery helps release my tension as I read yet another call for cash from the Major Political Party and it’s henchmen. Instead of balling my fists and threatening damage to electronic device (DON’T Kill The Messenger!!!!!!)I sharpen my wit and and send a pithy reply email. For example,

Dear Move On:

Kindly FUCK OFF you asstastic shitstains!

Bitchery is best practiced when faced with a white hot rage, though cold calculated rage is good too. Try it and you’ll see, bitchery makes the everyday abomination that is the current state of affairs, well let’s be honest. It doesn’t make it tolerable, but it does make it, for one tiny second, seem like hitting the sweet spot.

You’ll all have to forgive the evening blthering. It’s when I take the pills that make me functional during the day. But at night I am dizzy and blurry eyed and thoughts don’t turn words don’t turn into posts as easily as they used to.

The kid hands me some frozen pizza that he has cooked for dinner.

Me “Thanks pumpkin pie!”

Me “Oh this is disgusting. The mushrooms are slimy. Have I been making you eat this shit?”

Kid “Yes”

Me “Oh you can totally fire me as your mother for that”.

the We Are the 99 Percent tumblr. It’s making me cry. It is breaking my heart.

And while my eyes are all misty, I also notice how often people with miserable circumstances declare how lucky they are that it’s not worse. I know I’ve done that. And I do feel lucky. I have a job, with benefits. Sure, it’s going to cost almost half my income to use those benefits, but I have them. I have a home. I haven’t had a home for a long time, so this feels pretty damn lucky to me.

But I’ve noticed that you never ever hear the 1% talk about luck, though lucky they most certainly are. Lucky they got pushed out of the right woman, married to the right man, who was pushed out of the right woman, ad nauseum. Lucky they had family money or family connections. Lucky lucky lucky. But that word will never cross their lips. Their tongues are incapable of acknowledging what is so blatant to the rest of us. The didn’t get where they are alone, they got their luck from our backs, from our labor, from our pockets. Lucky lucky lucky.

I should end this before I go off on a violent tear about eating the rich. But they should be devoured by the ravenous masses. We are the ravenous masses. Get a fork.

(Note to self- pick one image per post and roll with it. But since I missed out on that this time, Get a Lucky Fork. )

Black kids more likely to be suspended than white kids. And black kids with disabilities more likely to be suspended than white kids with disabilities.

When the Kid was still in public middle school, the administration was falling over themselves apologizing because they didn’t have a special study skills class for the AP (advanced placement) kids and Kid had to be put in a study kills (i/e special ed) class with the other kids. The black and brown neighborhood kids. I didn’t give a flying fuck what color the kids in his class were. I cared that none of them, Kid included, were actually getting help with study skills. They were warehoused and ignored. Kid, at the tender age of 12, could see the shittiness of the whole setup. He got that when he went to math or science or English (his AP classes) all the kids were white or Asian. But when he went to study skills, he was the only white kid in the bunch.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that when you have an educational system that sets black and brown kids up to fail, that punishes them more harshly for the same infractions committed by white kids, and that gives them less of an education, then of course education is going to be seen as less valuable to those communities. Why would you torture a kid by pushing for success in a system that is programed to fail them, to harm them? No responsible parent would do that.

They call the high school that Kid was supposed to attend “The Slave Ship”, white kids in AP classes on top, brown kids in regular classes on bottom. I couldn’t subject the kid to that shit. And Kid is white but poor. How much worse would it be for him if he was black and poor?

At least today I am, after looking at these lovely protest pics from around the country.

And way to go all the little cities. Fuck Yeah Boise! I thought the only thing people in Idaho got together for was white supremacist meetings.

And way to go Witchita. The only thing I know about you is that the forced pregnancy shitheads are the worst there, but you got yourself together a twee little protest.That ain’t mockery. I’m pleased as punch.

And to Mayor McGinn- fucking issue permits so people can pitch tents at Westlake. Seattle is the old pro at modern protest (cough*WTO*cough) and if people can’t pitch a tent, then they will pitch a fit. Mr. I’m-Progressive-Bicycle-Mayor-Dude, you do not want to be compared to assy Bloomberg. But you will be. Give up. Let the protestors have their way. They’re gonna have it anyways and the pictures of SPD cops hauling off passively resiting middle-aged black men are not doing you any favors.

The weather in Seattle is beautiful, btw, and I plan on being down at the protest with the Kid tomorrow. If you’re local and want to meet up, drop me an email.

Am I the only person on Facebook who finds this appallingly sexist?

Why doesn’t it say “Or ask your mother how it’s done, you ignorant lazy-ass slacker”? Would the ‘likes’ dry up if it did?

What’s so damned funny about treating anyone (least of all your own mother) like a servant, anyhow?

New office supplies at Elizabitch Worldwide Industries global headquarters and European bureaux:

My ex, whose intellect impresses me less all the time, posted today, “All I can say is thank you Steve. You made the world a better place and will be missed.”

Better? Really?

Well, he gave boys great toys and what’s not better about that?

Glad you asked. Where do I start?

Let’s go back to 1976. I grew up surrounded by electronics. My father had an electronic music recording studio in the house. I was fascinated by it.

I entered high school at 13 and signed up for an electronics class at high school. Big mistake.

Whenever I entered the room, jumping, grabbing boys yelled ‘HEY GIRL HEY GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL WITH THE PINK COMB GIRL GIRL GIRL.’ The teacher did nothing. I got no help from anyone. After six weeks, I dropped the class.

And that is the point where my life story and that of every male geek I have ever met, loved or worked with irrevocably part ways.

I took programming and math classes at a university when I was 15 and 16. But I never quite believed in myself and no one around me ever did either. No one saw the potential. I was a girl, at the age where the pressures to develop into a suitably fuckable cunt become crushing. I did not escape its effects. I abandoned tech.

I did come back to geekery after ten years of typing letters for a living, at the behest of my mother, amazingly enough, who had put together a satisfying consultancy writing database applications. I often assisted her performing surgery on computers, fixing up corrupted datafiles in the hex editor, and writing DOS batch file programs. It was her who urged me into IT and I am glad she did.

But over the years since I, as an adult returning student, graduated in the mid-90s, the tech world has remained a white-boys-only club. In every shop I’ve ever worked in there was a core clique of white males who ran everything. They got the good jobs, the promotions, the good work and everyone else in the IT department, the Chick, the Black Guy, that Guy Whose Name We Can’t Pronounce, The Lower Status Non-Warcraft Playing Males, got the crumbs. People with no more intelligence or talent than I rise in IT through the compelling power of the trouser snake.

So back to Steve Jobs. Jobs built a technological and business empire on the firmest of foundations, the narratives that structure our world. He was able to harness the archetypes of white-boys-with-toys, the male wizard bending the physical and social world to his will, the lone visionary. None of Job’s unique catalyzing talents would have made the least difference if he hadn’t had a dick and were he not, to white peoples’ way of seeing, drained of ethnicity. (I saw a friend today who knew him personally. She told me, “Did you know he was Syrian? He was adopted.” No, I did not. Jobs, like Ralph Nader, was socially bleached.)

They say Steve Jobs had a ‘reality distortion field.’ But he did not distort mine. There is a glass ceiling in my field, one that all of my male friends and colleagues floated through, supported by The Narrative and their lower-earning, non-techie, totally unthreatening wives. On the job I was the Perl ‘queen,’ the PHP ‘queen,’ the regular-expression ‘queen,’ the go-to person to solve thorny problems, but I was marginalized and made 10% to 20% less than the men (and those are just the cases I know about.) The past 25 years have been presided over by the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and Mark Zuckerberg, men who are held up as the geniuses and the leaders. I feel the effect of that every single day.

Jobs, by all accounts, was an amazing human being and definitely will be missed by friends, family and colleagues. But let’s not exaggerate. He did not make the world better or even much different. He (however inadvertently) reinforced the narratives and the archetypes that hold me and millions of others back. It’s still a sexist, racist, homophobic, imperialist oppressive shithole of a world…and all we got was this lousy iPhone.