Month: August 2016

Know Your Prophecies

Many of us are baffled by rumors circulating this year about the end of the world. Friends who once seemed stable are now spouting rhetoric of impending doom. Instead of arguing, sometimes it can be more helpful to listen and think about why the person finds the myth appealing. A huge motivator behind the idea of the apocalypse is despair, merged with a bit of laziness. It is far easier to say “the world is ending, so why bother” than to actually get up and confront the huge problems we face. But myths don’t have to de-motivate us. A myth can be a powerful tool, creating an epic backdrop while we build the world we seek. To shed some light on these “dark times,” here’s a guide to this year’s apocalyptic murmuring:

RUMOR: The Mayan calendar ends in 2012.

ACTUALLY: The Mayan calendar is cyclical and will never end. Each cycle is about 395 years and called a b’ak’tun. On Dec 21 of this year, the 13th b’ak’tun will end.

RUMOR: Ancient Mayans predicted a cataclysm at the end of the 13th b’ak’tun.

BUT THE THING IS: Not a single Mayan text or tradition says this. In 1701, a Catholic friar wrote the Popol Wu’uj, a collection of Mayan myths. According to one of these myths, the gods created and destroyed 3 failed worlds before creating the 4th world, in which we live. The 3rd world lasted 13 b’ak’tuns. In the 1960s, Michael D. Coe, a CIA agent turned anthropologist, speculated that contemporary Mayans must believe that the world will be destroyed again after 13 b’ak’tuns. But the Maya do not believe this – it was entirely invented by outsiders.

RUMOR: The Earth will align with the Galactic Center on Dec 21.

SORRY, BUT: The most perfect alignment between the Earth, Sun and the center of the Milky Way occurred on Dec 21, 1998. Sorry, you missed it!

RUMOR: On Dec 21, the magnetic poles will reverse and everyone will die!

CHILL OUT: Geomagnetic pole reversals happen sporadically & cannot be predicted. Also, polar shifts aren’t instant, but occur gradually over thousands of years. The only thing you might notice is your compass pointing a little more south each decade.

CALM DOWN: With stellar spectroscopy (try it at home), we can see that the sun has 5 billion years worth of fuel left. Life on Earth might even last that long, if we don’t fuck it up.

RUMOR: Capitalism is in the process of collapsing.

AND PIGS CAN FLY: Capitalism has more or less collapsed 8 times now. The worst was perhaps the recession of the 1890s, when entire countries went bankrupt and the populace overthrew governments globally. Individual political and economic systems entirely collapsed, but capitalism just started over. Likewise, this recent “economic collapse” has ended nothing. Capitalism is now stronger than ever in its march towards global consumption. The seed of capitalism is capital (money/credit/specie). Capitalism is a social behavior in which people transform every aspect of life into something that can be bought or sold. To kill the beast, we must retool our social relations to not include capital.

HAVE YOU HEARD: According to astrologers, the 2400-year-long Age of Pisces is in the process of ending, to be replaced by the Age of Aquarius. Pisces is represented by two fish with their tails tied together and is often associated with obsessive spirituality, weak will, escapism, and confusion. Aquarius, on the other hand, is represented by a person pouring out a jug of water, dispensing it freely to all. The water represents truth. It is said that the Age of Aquarius will bring a new society ruled by honesty, innovation, humanitarianism, and intellectualism.

MURMURINGS: In the summer of 2010, a rare astrological alignment occurred called a Grand Cross. It began on June 21, 2010, and was active on and off for about two months. It is said this alignment merged revolution with rebirth, forcing everyone to undergo subtle, psychological changes that will begin to consciously surface over the next few years. Some astrologers mark the 2010 Grand Cross as the end of the Age of Pisces.

STRANGE WHISPERS: Within the psychic community, people who call themselves Lightworkers have been transmitting revolutionary energy for the past several years. They have something special planned for Dec 21. …and perhaps for February 29th as well.

AND: Some people believe that everyone born between 1979 and 2000 is part of a generation called the Indigo Children. Named for their brilliant purple auras, Indigos are highly energetic and deeply psychic. Hierarchy makes no sense to them: they believe that everyone is royal should be free to rule ourselves. The guardians of capitalism have attempted to repress the Indigos, labeling them as “unproductive” and “mentally ill,” forcing them to take mind-numbing productivity drugs. But the Indigo Generation will not be held down forever. Some prophets say the Indigos will soon rise up and lead us to a new world.

LEAP OF FAITH: Long ago, a loose collective of people called the Tohsgnils noticed that the yearly movement of the sun did not align with the daily rotation of the planet, causing an extra day to appear every 4 years. The money lenders worked to suppress this magical day, telling people to ignore it, to continue their toil. But the Tohsgnils sensed that untapped energy vibrated within this extra day. They prophesied that on February 29, 2012, the populace would rise up and claim this day for the Leap Day Revolt, igniting the 2012 Uprising.

Many of us are surrounded by conveniences that appear to improve our lives by making them easier. But the system of convenience comes with deep costs.

Some of these costs are obvious. The instant gratification world has given rise to a system of technology and industrialization that centralizes decision-making power into the hands of a few corporate leaders who treat people as objects for marketing, management, and exploitation. The rest of us are reduced to consumers, citizens, and laborers – our daily lives spent servicing a system that is beyond our control or comprehension. Meanwhile, an unsustainable global supply chain of oil, corn, and computer chips feeds the machine, devastating the environment.

A less obvious cost of convenience is the way it isolates us and robs our lives of meaning. For most of the 200,000 years Homo sapiens have walked the Earth, we have spent our lives in small groups, with the people close to us providing our food, music, shelter, warmth, and sex. But now many of us don’t count on the people in our lives to meet our needs. Our food is instantly served to us by smiling strangers. Buttons control the sound that enters our ears. Machines and photographs stand in for sex partners. Fast food. Fast tunes. Fast orgasm. Fast isolation. Depersonalized convenience explains why people in the “wealthiest” nations suffer the most from loneliness and mental illness.

Convenience also robs us of the opportunity to solve problems. Advertisers would like us to believe that human beings dislike problems, that we want things to be as easy as possible. But we are nature’s most tenacious problem-solvers. When we don’t have any challenges — when convenience has robbed us of the opportunity to do things for ourselves — we go crazy with depression and anxiety. People need complexity. We are not computers. Capitalism seeks to conquer nature and solve all problems, but when it does, what is left for human beings?

Each time you choose to “conveniently” alter your state with a corporate-distributed object, you are building up the walls of your own prison and isolating yourself from others by becoming dependent on corporations to fit your needs. “It’s all about you,” the advertisers coo, enticing us to crawl into the corporate womb of instant gratification. As products become more reflexive, responding to our needs instantly, we become trapped in individualized cages of convenience. And the Cage of Convenience is precisely the thing that is killing the Earth and making our rulers more rich and powerful, while robbing our lives of meaning. Addressing the cage means smashing hierarchy and reclaiming our lives as dynamic, meaningful interactions with people we care about.

It won’t be easy. Sometimes when we cook for each other, the food gets burned or there’s a slug in the homegrown salad. And sometimes your housemates really can’t sing that well or the scarf your boyfriend knitted doesn’t quite wrap around all the way. Meeting each other’s needs doesn’t bring instant, easy satisfaction – which is precisely the point. People have their own wants, needs, and feelings that don’t always match ours. Sometimes your partner doesn’t want to have sex with you right now, but she’ll help you repair your bicycle. Maybe your housemate will cook dinner tonight, but not the lasagna you crave. It is in the moment when other people stop being convenient – when they say “no” to our needs – that they are no longer commodities but people, with wills of their own. And it is people (not commodities) that challenge us and create texture in our lives.

And sure, sex toys are nice when you’re in a pinch, but they can’t stand in for the thrill of flirtation, the sublimity of seduction, the taste of another person’s lips, the rippling warmth of erections, ear nibbles, and ankle licks. And no fast food unit can compare to a successful home meal, to a steaming omelet with eggs from your own hens and garlic-buttered chard with a glass of dandelion wine. And yeah, it’s nice to drop the needle on a good Pink Floyd record sometimes, but the sweet sounds of In the Clouds can’t compare to the thrill of rocking out on the accordion amongst electric guitars and theremins in the new freakfolk/punk band you and your neighbors have just invented.

Corporations want us to forget that we have the power to create these deeply meaningful interactions. Our rulers seek to convince us that we aren’t ready for the hard work of building amazing lives with the people around us. But hard work is exactly what we need to make our lives meaningful and save ourselves from the machine that is destroying the Earth’s life support systems. The CEOs and corporate advertisers will scratch their heads when they discover millions of abandoned cages, then they will throw off their suits and join us.

 

Day-to-day reality can be a nightmare — chainstores, alienation, surveillance cameras and McJobs. But we’re never entirely trapped in any particular version of material reality — reality is inherently relative and multi-facetted. Tapping into other realms can inform efforts to transform the world. Our dreams can become our reality.

Lucid dreaming means dreaming while you know you are asleep. A lot of the recent knowledge of lucid dreaming has been heavily co-opted by entertainment media. Nevertheless, lucid dreaming has been part of yogic traditions for thousands of years, as a method for improving mental health and facilitating creativity. With practice, you can learn to shift or change the reality of your dreamscape as you dream it, and to prolong your dreaming so that you can explore it more deeply. If you want to learn how to induce lucid dreaming, be patient with yourself. This process is partly about the goal, and partly about enjoying your innate human faculties, which include dreaming and being asleep. Here are some simple steps that can help improve your ability to lucid dream:

1. Set a journal by the bed. Before you go to sleep, set your intention to remember your dreams. Whenever you wake from a dream, immediately record what you remember, and how it made you feel. Practice this regularly to improve your ability to recall your dreams. Also look for any patterns or repetition. As you get more information about the nature of your dreams, it will become easier to pick out dream signs, things that will indicate to you that you are dreaming.

2. Practice reality testing by writing a phrase or a string of nonsense letters on the inside of your wrist. Look at them several times a day, then look away, then look back again. See if the characters have changed. Try making them change while you look at them. If they don’t change, you may conclude you are still awake….

3. The oldest recorded instructions for lucid dreaming, a thousand year old text on dream yoga from Tibet, advises that you should sleep “on the right side, as the lion doth.” A relatively recent study found that participants who slept on their right sides were several times more likely to have a lucid dream.

4. When you are ready to attempt lucid dreaming, set your alarm clock for 6 ½ hours from when you go to sleep. Use a gentle alarm clock sound if you can, so that you are conscious but not fully alert. Write anything you remember from your dreams in dream journal.

5. Go back to sleep. As you rest, repeat this mantra: “I will wake after every dream and remember my dream….”

6. When you wake up, write down whatever you remember immediately, even if it’s vague.

7. Go right back to sleep. Your goal is to pick up where you left off. Repeat the mantra, while simultaneously visualizing yourself recognizing a dream sign, something you often dream about or the letters moving on your wrist.

8. If you become aware that you are asleep and dreaming, stay calm. If the dream starts to fade, imagine you are spinning in a circle like you did as a kid to make yourself dizzy, as the dream world spins around you, you may be able to re-enter it and begin dreaming again, only this time with full awareness that you are doing so.

9. You can also practice lucid dreaming without an alarm by repeating the mantra as you fall asleep, then waking yourself up to record your dreams throughout the night (however we dream most vividly after seven or more hours of sleep, so this is the most likely time for lucid dreaming to occur).

Lucid dreaming is much easier if you get plenty of sleep and are not busy being an overwrought overachiever type. It may not happen immediately, but with practice, lucid dreaming is something you can learn to do literally overnight. If you want to learn more, the best information I have found about lucid dreaming comes from The Lucidity Institute, based on the work of a researcher named Steven LaBerge. Hit www.lucidity.com.

Fiction

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

The Climate Change Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin

A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Homeland by Sam Lipsyte

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Q by Luther Blissett

Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Ubik by Phillip K. Dick

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

 

Nonfiction

Black Bloc, White Riot by A.K. Thompson

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck

The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott

Endgame I & II by Derrick Jensen

Everyday Pornography ed. by Karen Boyle

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Justice Movement Under Siege by Will Potter

Living in the End Times by Slavoj Žižek

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

Be Here Now by Ram Dass

Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture by Lauraine Leblanc

Steal this Book by Abbie Hoffman

Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence by Christian Perenti

The Voice of Hope: Coversations with Alan Clements by Ang San Suu Kyi

Why I Can’t Read by Wallace Stegner

 

Poetry

Poetry as Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima

The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolano

The Totality for Kids by Joshua Clover

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

 

Theorycore

Principles of the Philosophy of the Future by Ludwig Feuerbach

The German Ideology by Karl Marx

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat by Geörgy Lukács

“Theses on the Philosophy of History” by Walter Benjamin (in Illuminations)

Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno

“Formulary for a New Urbanism” by Ivan Chtcheglov

“On The Poverty of Student Life” by The Situationist International

Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis by Norman O. Brown (esp. “My Georgics: A Palinode in Praise of Work”)

The Care of the Self by Michel Foucault

Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida

The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek (esp. ch. 1, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?”)

The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee

This is Not a Program by Tiqqun

 

Zines to Watch Out For

Absolutely Zippo, Ad Busters, Antipatia, The Anvil, Awesome Future, Brushfire, Chintz, Communicating Vessels, Dreams of Donuts, Dreamwhip, Cometbus, Earth First! Journal, Feral Revolution, Fifth Estate, Fluke, Full Metal Faggot, Graceless, Hack This Zine, Heart Check, Maximum Rock n’ Roll, The Match, Medatrocity, Media Junky, Morgenmuffel, No Gods No Matress, Nuts!, Pipe Bomb, Rad Dad, The Raging Pelican, Rot, The Student Insurgent,Turning the Tide, Zine World

This year’s organizer is like a single mushroom sprouting from a vast, complex, subterranean counter-cultural mycelium. After silently and slowly feeding unnoticed off the decaying log of corporate America, it pushes suddenly and unexpectedly through a thick layer of leaves and debris out into the light. Its flesh is twisted, complex and colorful and it smells moist, funky and delicious. Around this mushroom — this tiny collective project — you can see other mushrooms blooming, too, all throughout the forest — each spreading spores far and wide. Each alternative project, each direct action campaign, each study-group the realization of autonomous social circles acting collectively to express our humanity and struggle for our liberation.

Making a day planner by hand like this is a throwback — a dumb paper book in a smart phone world. Worse than that, the organizer isn’t even all that organized — it’s chaotic, cluttered and messy. A lot of the art is drawn by amateurs, pasted together with wax in an overcrowded loft late into the night — scruffy people spilling coffee on the pages and negotiating for any available flat surface. The printed contents lack the depth, timeliness and clarity easily accessible with a Google search.

Which is perhaps the point. The meaningfulness of our lives is more complex, messy and difficult than straight, computerized lines. The counter-culture we’re a part of is raw, rowdy and on the margins, but it is heading in the right directions: towards a beautiful, pleasurable, sustainable world where people are free. Meanwhile, the mainstream corporate/industrial system is heading over a cliff. In such a contradictory world, it is humbling and an honor to be amongst freaks. We’re glad you’re part us.

This is our 18th Organizer. It raises funds to publish the quarterly, radical, independent Slingshot Newspaper which we try to distribute everywhere in the US. Let us know if you want to become a local distributor of the newspaper. Thanks to the people who created this organizer: Ali, Aminah, Anka, August, Babs, Bird, Crux, Claire, Danny, Dee, Dominique, Eggplant, enola d!, Evan, Fil, Gabriella, GATS, Heather, Hurricane, Jay, Jesse, Joey, Joshua, Julie, Karma, Kathryn, Kermit, Kerry, Kurt, Lew, Liane, Lvci, Melissa, Michele, Miranda, Moxy, Nuclear Winter, Rachel, Ramona, Rubicil, Samara, Sean, Sarahtops, Stephanie, Trouble, Umul, Zoe.

 

Slingshot Collective

Physical officer: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94705

Mail: PO box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

510-540-0751 ex. 3 • http://slingshot.tao.ca • slingshot@tao.ca

 

anti-copyright. Borrow whatever you want.

 

Printed on recycled paper

 

All volunteer collective – no bosses, no workers, no pay.

 

Front Cover People include:

Sylvia Rae Rivera, Transgender activist, present inside the Inn during the Stonewall Riots b. 1952, US

Bell Hooks, Feminist and post-modern theorist on the intricate connections between race, class, and gender b. 1952, US

Angela Davis, prison abolitionist, scholar, political activist, former member of the Black Panther Party b. 1944, United States

Emma Goldman, anarchist, feminist, free love advocate, and founder of the anarchist journal Mother Earth b. 1869, Lithuania

Maria Lacerda de Moura, teacher, journalist, anarcha-feminist, and individualist anarchist b. 1887, Brazil

Graffiti in the Bus: from a tag by Mujeres Creado, a Bolivian anarcha-feminist group.

2012 is Leap Year — could we make someting magical and powerful with this extra day? The corporate/industrial system devours our time, strips life from the earth, centralizes power into a few hands, and extracts the meaning, humanity and pleasure from our lives. How can things keep getting worse and worse year after year, with so little resistance?

While many people are ready to fight back, it isn’t easy to know how to start or what to do that will make a difference. You can’t revolt alone. It’s a lot easier to join a general strike once thousands of people are already marching in the street and occupying the local factory. But to get things moving, someone or a small group of people have to take the first terrifying step off the sidewalk. It’s hard to take risks when you aren’t sure those around you are ready to back you up.

The only way to find out is to try — to take a leap of faith and start something. If you look through the radical dates in this organizer, you can read about revolts around the world and across the ages. Each began with an idea, determination, daring, and of course luck. People who begin revolts are regular people just like you. The day before a revolt, conditions usually look discouraging — the power structure rock solid. Last year’s revolts in North Africa and the Middle East took everyone by surprise. By contrast, it seems like a long time since the last uprising in the US. It’s easy to make excuses.

The right time to begin revolt is now, but the precise day is, in some way, arbitrary — the correct conditions already exist and have been present for some time. Leap day offers an extra day and invites us to shake off our routine, but any other day could work just as well. The global economic/technological system — while vast — is fragile and vulnerable. Alternatives to the system of corporate centralization and economic degredation exist — cooperation, local control, sharing, living in harmony with the earth.

There is nothing quite like the excitement and community with other people that you experience on the streets during revolt. The creativity of an uprising is powerful and can swiftly replace stubborn structures with new values. While many of us have spent years laying the ground work — working in tiny collectives, nurturing gardens and bike coops and art coops — these efforts in the absence of a revolt to challenge and undermine the key structures of the system are not enough.

We need to openly discuss and challenge power. The systems and values of corporations and police concentrate power by reducing individuals to consumers, viewers and objects to be managed. We seek to dismantle power so that each of us can determine what we want to do and figure out what is important. This goes way beyond just the distribution of resources — instead, its time to question whether resources, alone, is what life is really about. We demand a world organized around being awake and engaged — where we pursue intimate knowledge of others, ourselves and the world around us rather than getting distracted by treats distributed by rulers to keep us obedient and on-task.

Shifting the focus from things to experiences is what the world needs now to prevent the technological system from destroying the earth’s life support systems. Life is too short and the world too beautiful to spend more time muddling through accepting the comprimises of the corporate system and waiting for something better — far off in the future.

This year, consider February 29 as an experiment and an invitation. How do you really want to live? What would you do if you were living life like it really mattered? Would you go to work like normal, or can you think of something better? This leap day can be a universal general strike and uprising for a world worth living in, but its up to you, your friends and the whole world to take that first step. Leap for it.

www.leapdayaction.org

 

 

 

This culture is wedded to binaries: good/evil, left/right, with us/against us, pick your favorite. And this society wants things to stay in whatever either/or box they get put into, we don’t like the gray areas. Gender and sex is one place where ambiguity is particularly not tolerated; parents, doctors, the State want to know your sex and gender, preferably at birth. Further, having ambiguous gender, or transitioning from one perceived gender to another, can cause some people to react violently and because gender is such a charged topic, transgendered people often don’t receive the respect they deserve. This is a short, incomplete introduction to transgender topics.

In this society this is the usual scenario: a baby is born and one of the very first things done is sexing the child. Everyone wants to know, boy or girl?

Some folks don’t fit this binary from the start, their genitals don’t seem to match either male or female completely. These folks are called intersexed. Unfortunately, because of the anxiety of doctors, parents or society, around sex/gender, panic ensues and intersexed individuals are more often than not subjected to surgeries they do not need and may not want and that can be damaging to a pleasurable adult sexuality. Adults seem to have a hard time imagining infants ever being adults and having sex or getting pleasure from their genitals; so, it seems genitals are for identifying infant sex only, not for the pleasure of the person who has them. How sad.

More often, we are born with genitals that look like either male or female and so we are assigned a gender at birth to match, either boy or girl. This (seems) to work for most. Males are happy being men in male bodies, females are happy being women in female bodies (excepting the malaise of late capitalism, of course).

But what if this is not the case? For some, the sex they are assigned at birth does not match the gender they feel inside. They are girls in male bodies or boys in female bodies or somewhere in between, because not all trans folks see themselves as one or the other, but rather on a continuum of gender.

Though not all trans folk dismiss the binary sex/gender divide, they just see themselves on the wrong side of it. For the most part, transsexual is a term used by folks who have completed sex reassignment (or who want to). For FTM (female to male) transsexuals this means taking testosterone and having top surgery (double mastectomy) and bottom surgery (hysterectomy, vaginectomy and either metiodioplasty or phalloplasty). For MTF (male to female) transsexuals there are hormones and vaginoplasty and labiaplasty. Not all transgendered folks are transsexuals, and not all want all the surgery, for various reasons. Sometimes they just don’t want surgery, or don’t have health care, or enough income to pay for hormones and/or surgery, because trans folk can suffer from discrimination in employment just for being trans. Some trans guys, for example, just take T (testosterone), or just take T and have top surgery. Also, not all trans folks see themselves as either male or female, but as some combination of both. These folks sometimes use the term genderqueer, which reflects issues with or a rejection of the usual societal gender binary.

The main thing to remember about trans folk is that they are people just like everyone else. Having respect for what pronouns trans folk want used is a good start. For instance, FTMs usually want to be called he or him. MTFs would really like it if you said she or her. And some trans folks use ze or hir, or make up pronouns to fit them. These can be hard to get used to, particularly when someone is first transitioning, but trying to use the preferred pronoun is only respectful. It is true that some trans folk don’t “pass”, but gender is not about what you see from the outside, but about what the person feels inside. Transwomen and transmen struggle enough with their own body dysphoria and internalized transphobia that getting called out on their looks can be devastating. So if you see someone who may be trans, don’t ask them in front of a bunch of people, in fact don’t ask at all. If they want you to know, if it is relevant to your relationship, they will let you know. This can also be an issue of safety for a trans person. Violence against trans folk is frequent and often deadly, so outing a trans person is never a good idea.

Another huge issue is bathrooms, and for trans folks using the “wrong” bathroom can get them beat up or worse. Until gender neutral bathrooms are the norm chances are you will see an ambiguously gendered person use a bathroom now and again. DON’T PANIC! Adults usually know what bathroom to use, being trans does not alter this ability. Not panicking just might keep someone from getting beaten, and since a lot of violence against transfolk is perpetuated by police and other authority figures, alerting them is not wise either. (Not that we anarchists would ever call cops anyway, right?)

Increasingly, trans identity is being seen as an individual matter, who we are is our business not the prerogative of doctors or the larger society. No matter how comfortable we are in our bodies, trans or not, we are all affected by binary gender roles, though this is most blatant, and violent with transgenders. Gay men, no matter how butch; femmy men, no matter how straight; butch women, straight and lesbians; nerdy guys, the list goes on of people oppressed by binary gender norms. Trans folk cross these gendered lines and forge a way beyond just this or that, man or woman, male or female. By listening to and celebrating trans folk we too can unhinge ourselves from the yoke of conforming to roles we may not want.

Intersex Awareness Day October 26th

Transgender Day of Remembrance Day November 20th

 

Pollution, genetics and lifestyle choices are all risk factors for breast cancer. If you smoke cigarettes or use deodorants with aluminum, you are at higher risk. When cancer is detected earlier, treatments are often more successful The best strategy for early detection is to do a monthly self breast exam. Follow up with a doctor if you find a suspicious lump. You cannot tell by yourself whether a lump is benign or cancerous. Men are also at risk for breast cancer and should do exams. To check yourself out:

~With your chest uncovered, sit or stand in a comfortable position. Consider showering beforehand to release muscle tension and make it easier to feel.

~Put one arm over your head with your elbow bent to expose the skin around your armpit. With your middle three fingers of the opposite hand, gently palpate the tissue from the lymph nodes in your armpit to the bottom of your breasts.

~Cover all the breast tissue on that side with an overlapping pattern of palpating.

~If there are any suspicious lumps, most likely they will have the consistency of frozen peas.  Breasts are lumpy by nature, but not hard. Repeat for your other breast.

~If you have a partner whose help you would enjoy, teach them how to do your exam!

Breasts are more tender around ovulation and menstruation, so doing your exam at a similar time each cycle helps reduce false-positives. Knowing your breasts can help you know if something is wrong.

Testicular cancer is the most common cancer for male-bodied people between the ages of 20 and 35. Testicular cancer can spread quickly, but it is an easy cancer to detect with a monthly self-exam and can be treated. So get to know your nuts! Familiarity with them now can make you more sensitive to irregularities later.

~It’s best to do all this after a hot shower, when the scrotum is loose and relaxed. Stand up and elevate one leg for easier access to your scrotum. You can sit or lay down if it’s more comfortable.

~Take one testicle in your hands, with your thumbs on top of it and index and middle fingers on the bottom. (See the diagram below.) Gently roll it between your thumbs and fingers slowly feeling the whole surface area of your testicle. When you’re done with one, move on to the other.

Your balls should fee smooth and slightly spongy. (It’s normal for the tubular epdidymis at the rear to feel less smooth than the testes. ) You should be on the look out for:

~A hard lump—as small as a pea or as large as a golf ball. Don’t completely freak out if you find one. You can’t tell the differennce between a cyst and seminomas yourself. But if you find a lump, get it checked out.

~Hardness in the entire testicle. This is usually the result of hydrocele, a cystic mass in the nut caused by a leaky hernia, prior trauma or infection—easily treatable.

~Changes in size or color. It’s normal for one to be larger or hang lower than the other. If there’s a noticeable change, something may be up.

 

Many people in radical circles spend a bit of their time doing prisoner support activities. This can range from joining a books-to-prisoners project that mails free books to inmates, to individually becoming penpals with a prisoner. Some people focus on political prisoners — prisoners held because of their involvement in radical actions or framed because of their beliefs. Other people see the entire prison-industrial complex as illegitimate, criticize the way that it targets marginalized communities, and/or believe that it is wrong to imprison people at all. Many people are in prison because of the war on drugs, or because economic inequality under capitalism impoverishes entire communities and pushes people to do illegal things to survive.

A key way we can support prisoners is by communicating with them. Prison is a deeply isolating environment. In an email-dominated world, writing an old-fashioned letter on paper can be surprisingly rewarding for you as well as a prisoner. There are many penpal networks that connect prisoners with those on the outside. If you’re in the bay area, Slingshot collective receives hundreds of letters from prisoners each year and is always looking for people to help us write back.

Here are some tips on writing letters to prisoners.

• When writing to prisoners, you have to put their prisoner number on the first line of the mailing address to get it through.

• Make sure to put a return address on your letter. If you are writing to a prisoner you don’t know, it may be best to use a PO box or other address that doesn’t disclose where you live.

• If you’re writing to a prisoner, keep in mind that the prison officials or other authorities may read your letter. Don’t discuss anything sensitive. If the prisoner is waiting for trial or sentencing (or on appeal), it may be better not to discuss the details of their case.

• Prisons prohibit mailing certain items like books, food, money, etc. Ask the prisoner for the rules.

• Don’t make promises you can’t keep like offering to find a lawyer to take their case, sending them money or expensive items, offering them housing on release, organizing a support campaign, etc.— being let down when you’re locked up can be especially devastating. Be clear about your intentions. If you’re not looking for a romantic relationship, it can be helpful to all involved to say so right off.

• While the state locking people up is shitty, it doesn’t follow that all prisoners are angels. They are people just like everyone else, and some of them are flawed or can be manipulative. Use reasonable caution and treat prisoners like you would another penpal.

• Be careful about accepting collect phone calls from jail — prison collect calls are usually absurdly expensive.