Worldwide Alliance of Crickets Hops to Pot

WASHINGTON, DC — The Worldwide Alliance of Crickets, kkc (WACK) has released a position paper that advocates for the legalization of cannabis.

The spokescricket for the organization had this to say:

“All over the world and throughout history, crickets have utilized cannabis to treat medical conditions.

From PTSD

to anxiety,

depression and

suicidal ideation.”

The spokescricket continued:  “WACK is only one voice in a cricket-like cacophony that supports legalization, but we felt it was important to publicly join the debate (and the right side of history). And after rigorous study, we easily came to the conclusion that the leaf should be freed — for humans, animals, and insects.”

We can also report that other prestigious groups — like the Conservative Rabbits Alliance, plc (CRAP) and Bunnies United for Democracy (BUD) — are currently working on their own position papers on this issue, many of which will be released in the coming months.

If crickets are for legalization, maybe you can be, too. 🙂

(Interview and photos taken at the Honeysuckle Vine on 8/24/2015.)

The Day Women Went on Strike

http://time.com/4008060/women-strike-equality-1970/

On Aug. 26, 1970, a full 50 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, 50,000 feminists paraded down New York City’s Fifth Avenue with linked arms, blocking the major thoroughfare during rush hour. Now, 45 years later, the legacy of that day continues to evolve…

Friedan’s original idea for Aug. 26 was a national work stoppage, in which women would cease cooking and cleaning in order to draw attention to the unequal distribution of domestic labor, an issue she discussed in her 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique. It isn’t clear how many women truly went on “strike” that day, but the march served as a powerful symbolic gesture. Participants held signs with slogans like “Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot” and “Don’t Cook Dinner – Starve a Rat Today.” …

The day of activism reached beyond New York City, as thousands of feminists across the country coordinated sister demonstrations. A full range of creative, confrontational tactics was on display, as activists infiltrated “all male” bars and restaurants, held teach-ins and sit-ins, picketed and rallied, in Detroit, Indianapolis, Boston, Berkeley and New Orleans. One thousand women marched on the nation’s capital, holding a banner that read “We Demand Equality.” In Los Angeles, feminists wearing Richard Nixon masks enacted guerrilla street theater. “The solidarity was completely exhilarating,” Antler recalls…

Perhaps the least amount of progress has been made in the area of childcare, which remains prohibitively expensive for many American women. In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have set up local day care centers for children on a sliding scale based on family income, but Nixon vetoed the bill. While President Obama has spoken about making affordable childcare a national priority, there are no current plans to offer government-funded, round-the-clock care in the United States as feminists had initially envisioned. As of 2014, the average annual cost of enrolling in a daycare center for an infant is, in most states, higher than the cost of a public college in that state…

So the long-term results of the Strike for Equality March have been mixed. But in the short-term, the event did accomplish one major goal: it helped make the feminist movement visible…

Can chronic pain patients go on strike? What would that look like?

Woman Photographs Homeless Father For Years To Rebuild Their Relationship

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/diana-kim-photographs-homeless-father_55d65746e4b0f593f7f6d59e?kvcommref=mostpopular

She hadn’t spoken to her father in years when her late grandmother reached out to tell her that he struggled with severe mental illness and had become homeless… In 2012, she gathered “tidbits of my father’s health status and living arrangements” and went looking for him on the streets of Honolulu…

In between helping to care for her father, pursuing a law degree at the University of Hawaii, and being a wife and a mother to two young boys, Kim still finds time to reach out to the homeless community and brings books to children in the Kakaako homeless encampment, one of the city’s largest.

She is working on a photo book, which she successfully Kickstarted in January, to chronicle her journey with her father, as well as the lives of other homeless people in Hawaii. She plans to use her Kickstarter funding to distribute USB bracelets to Honolulu’s homeless, so they can have wearable, digital copies of their important documents.

Regarding the big policy issues surrounding homelessness, Kim wrote that, “I oddly accept that the homeless condition will never completely go away. … But no matter what the circumstances are, the most important thing to remember is that they are people. And people deserve to be treated with respect even if they’ve hurt you.” …

Thinking of you, Karyn Washington

http://www.buzzfeed.com/anitabadejo/carefree-black-girl#.yhxGvYGgD

(8/24/2014) Carefree Black Girl: The Life And Death Of Karyn Washington

The 22-year-old old creator of the For Brown Girls blog and the #DarkSkinRedLip project epitomized the Tumblr-popularized image of a Carefree Black Girl. After news of her suicide spread this spring, many were left asking: How could a woman whose mission was to uplift others take her own life?

In the preceding days, a grid of photos of a young black woman rippled across the web. The woman, wearing a black tank top, smiled in various poses on a white background. Her hair was piled high atop her head in a mass of braids and everything about her seemed to glow. Her name was Karyn Washington. She was stunning, she was slim, and, at 22, she had just committed suicide.

I hadn’t heard of Karyn before then, but I quickly wished I had. She was the founder of For Brown Girls and, later, the #DarkSkinRedLip Project, online movements for black women that fought against colorism — discrimination based on how dark the particular shade of one’s skin is…

Karyn was found in her car with a plastic bag over her head — tubing running underneath — and a helium tank, at 5:38 p.m. on a residential road 10 miles north of Baltimore. Five minutes later, she was pronounced dead. The police didn’t find a note…

At the end of the ceremony, Shalea Moser, a childhood friend, steps up to the podium… She begins singing what was No. 1 on a playlist Karyn posted on For Brown Girls: India Arie’s “I Am Light.”

I’m not the mistakes that I have made
Or any of the things that caused me pain
I am not the pieces of the dream I left behind
I am light
I am light

Thinking of you, Capt. Michael Gorhum

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/08/399793-one-man-allegedly-ashley-madison-account-exposed-just-heartbreaking/

What One Man Did After His Ashley Madison Account Was Allegedly Exposed is Just Heartbreaking

According to the San Antonio Current, a city employee believed to have been exposed as part of the Ashley Madison account leak has since committed suicide.

Capt. Michael Gorhum, a 25-year veteran of the San Antonio Police Department, killed himself Thursday with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, KSAT-TV reported. The Current was unable to verify, however, if the hack played any role in Gorhum’s suicide.

The following day, The San Antonio Express-News reported that three city employee email addresses were among those used to create accounts on the extramarital-affair website.

While it did not publish any of the email addresses in its article, it noted that one of them belonged to an SAPD captain. The paper also declined to state whether or not the employees’ email addresses were among those involved in the leak.

In a statement given to the Express-News on Friday, the city said that it was unable to verify if the addresses in question were legitimately used to access the site because the site does not verify user identities. They added that access to Ashley Madison and other similar sites is blocked on city computers through Internet filters.

Earlier this week, the Ashley Madison hackers uploaded the user profiles of the site’s 37 million members online, after the company declined to meet the hacker’s ransom demands.

Nearly 100,000 accounts were established in the San Antonio area before the site was hacked last month, putting it among the top 25 cities worldwide.

Thinking of you, Jamycheal Mitchell

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/28/jamycheal-mitchell-virginia-jail-found-dead

Young black man jailed since April for alleged $5 theft found dead in cell

Mitchell’s family said they believed he starved to death after refusing meals and medication at the jail, where he was being held on misdemeanour charges of petty larceny and trespassing. A clerk at Portsmouth district court said Mitchell was accused of stealing a bottle of Mountain Dew, a Snickers bar and a Zebra Cake worth a total of $5 from a 7-Eleven.

“His body failed,” said Roxanne Adams, Mitchell’s aunt. “It is extraordinary. The person I saw deceased was not even the same person.” Adams, who is a registered nurse, said Mitchell had practically no muscle mass left by the time of his death…

A few hours after Mitchell was arrested on 22 April by Portsmouth police officer L Schaefer for the alleged theft, William Chapman was shot dead by officer Stephen Rankin outside a Walmart superstore about 2.5 miles away in the same city. State prosecutor Stephanie Morales said on Thursday she would pursue criminal charges over Chapman’s death.

Except for a brief item stating that an inmate had been found dead, the story of Mitchell’s death has not been covered by local media in Virginia, and is reported for the first time here.

Adams said in an interview that her nephew had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia for about five years. Nicknamed Weezy, he lived with his mother Sonia and had been unable to hold down work. “He just chain-smoked and made people laugh,” said Adams. “He never did anything serious, never harmed anybody.” …

Adams said prison officials said her nephew had also been declining to eat. She said she saw Mitchell in court in recent weeks and estimated that he had lost 65 pounds since being detained. “He was extremely emaciated,” said Adams…

Does Neuroticism Breed Creativity? Study Says ‘Yes’

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/08/27/does-neuroticism-breed-creativity/

In any case, if you’re neurotic, don’t dismiss it as a failing – on the contrary, it might be intimately linked to your creativity. Pollyanna types may be the ones at a disadvantage. “Cheerful, happy-go-lucky people by definition do not brood about problems and so must be at a disadvantage when problem-solving compared to a more neurotic person,” says Perkins. “We have a useful sanity check for our theory because it is easy to observe that many geniuses seem to have a brooding, unhappy tendency that hints they are fairly high on the neuroticism spectrum. For example, think of the life stories of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, etc. Perhaps the link between creativity and neuroticism was summed up most succinctly of all by John Lennon when he said: ‘Genius is pain.’”