Remember the guys who beat up the gay couple in Santa Fe? (Referenced here and here) Just got a comment from someone who claims to know two of the guys who did it.

Sorry Phillip but I’m not buying it. I’ve hung around plenty of nineteen year olds from all kinds of different backgrounds and can’t think of one time when I heard “let’s go beat up those faggots.” If I had I would’ve taken a serious look at who my friends were.

Assaulting a person (or animal in most states) is illegal. Beating up someone because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation just makes you look like an even bigger asshole. And even if the “gay hate” wasn’t intentional their use of the word “faggot” as an insult sure made it look that way.

Maybe because of hate crime laws like this people will re-think using words like gay and faggot as insults (not to mention beating people up for any reason). Because personally I think that use of the words encourages a subconscious feeling of antagonism and in a way encourages hate crimes.

Either way, they put a guy in the fucking hospital. Just because they’re rowdy young men doesn’t mean they can get away with hurting another person like that. And just because they’re (stupid irresponsible) “kids” doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions. I’ll be the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes when I was nineteen but not one fucking time did my actions put someone in the hospital and I can tell you right now that I’ve never used the word “faggot” in a context that could be misconstrued so badly, even when referencing firewood.

Nur Jahan was born Mihrunnisa in 1577 to an aristocratic Persian family, married a soldier and was widowed at an early age. She and her little girl, Ladli, were brought in 1607 to the court of Jahangir, a powerful Mughal emperor.

Around 1611 Jahangir met and fell in love with her and they were married within two months. He gave her the name Nur Jahan, meaning Light of the World.

At the time of her marriage Nur Jahan was considered middle aged. She was a widow of a man who had lost favor with the emperor, and was only one of many other wives and concubines of the emperor, with whom he had children.Yet within nine years Nur Jahan acquired all the rights of sovereignty and government normally due the emperor, becoming virtually in charge of the whole empire until the emperor died in 1627. The key to her success was Jahangir’s addiction to both drugs and alcohol and his adoration of Nur Jahan above everyone else in his vast zanana (women’s quarters within the court). Jahangir needed Nur to help maintain his health and help him rule.

Since women were not supposed to appear face to face with men in court, Nur Jahan ruled through trusted males. But it was she who approved all orders and grants of appointment in Jahangir’s name, and controlled all promotions and demotions within the royal government. She took special interest in the affairs of women, giving them land and dowries for orphan girls. She had coins struck in her name, collected duties on goods from merchants who passed though the empire’s lands, and traded with Europeans who brought luxury goods from the continent. Given her ability to obstruct or facilitate the opening up of both foreign and domestic trade, her patronage was eagerly sought, and paid for. She herself owned ships which took pilgrims as well as cargo to Mecca. Her business connections and wealth grew. Her officers were everywhere. The cosmopolitan city of Agra, the Mughal capital, grew as a crossroad of commerce.

Nur Jahan also ruled the emperor’s vast zanana which housed hundreds of people including Jahangir’s wives, ladies -in-waiting, concubines, servants, slaves, female guards, spies, entertainers, crafts people, visiting relatives. eunuchs, and all the children belonging to the women. Nur greatly influenced the zanana’s tastes in cosmetics, fashions, food, and artistic expression. She spent money lavishly, experimenting with new perfumes, hair ointments, jewelry, silks, brocades, porcelain, and cuisine from other lands.

Fashions at court, highly influenced by Persian culture, began to blend into local styles. Women’s clothing was modified to take account of the hot weather. Since Nur came from a line of poets, she naturally wrote too and encouraged this among the court women. Poetry contests were held, and favorite female poets from beyond the court were sometimes sponsored by the queen, such as the Persian poet Mehri. She also wrote her own poetry.

Both Jahangir and Nur Jahan were devotees of the elegant and sophisticated Mughal artistic style. The emperor owned an admirable collection of exquisite miniature paintings, and together with Nur constructed beautiful gardens, notably in the court’s summer retreat in Kashmir. Nur used some gardens for official functions; others were opened up for the populous in general to use. Architecture, too, was an important imperial activity; some of the mosques, caravasaries and tombs Nur Jahan had built are visible today.

Nur Jahal enjoyed the height of her power when she was surrounded by loyal men which included members of her own family. Struggles between Jahangir’s sons for power, however, slowly chipped away at her reign.

The ultimate winner was Jahangir’s third son, Shah Jahan, who later built the beautiful Taj Mahal for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. By this time Nur Jahan’s influence was weak. Shah Jahan had been allied with Nur Jahan through most of his father’s reign, but when she swung her support to others he rebelled. An old and trusted general, Mahabat Khan, disgusted with the direction of court politics, and particularly the role of a Nur Jahan, joined the rebellion. “Never,” he said,” has there been a king so subject to the will of his wife.”

Upon Shah Jahan’s succession to the crown, he had her confined. Her imprisonment ended her influence at court, and she spent the last years of her life in exile in Lahore. Here she spent a quiet time living with her daughter until her own death in 1645.

Her tomb lies in Lahore next to Jahangir’s. Both she had erected along with the gardens that surround them.

Yet another woman in history.

Rosa Luxemburg was born Rosalia Luxemburg on March 5, 1870 or 1871. She was the fifth child of the Jewish wood trader/timber trader Eliasz Luxemburg III and his wife Line (maiden name: Löwenstein). Rosa had a growth defect and was physically handicapped all her life.

After her family moved to Warsaw, Rosa attended a girl’s school there from 1880. Even in those early days she was a member of the Proletariat, a left-wing Polish party, from 1886. The Proletariat had been founded in 1882, twenty years before the Russian workers’ parties, and started off by organizing a general strike. As a result, four of its leaders were put to death and the party was broken up. Some of its members managed to meet in secret; Rosa joined one of these groups.

In 1887 Rosa passed her Abitur with flying colors then fled to Switzerland in 1889 after threats of imprisonment for her political associations. There she attended Zurich University, along with other socialist figures such as Anatoli Lunacharsky and Leo Jogiches. She studied philosophy, history, politics, economics and mathematics simultaneously. Her specialized subjects were Staatswissenschaft (the science of forms of state), the Middle Ages and economic and stock exchange crises. In 1898 she completed her doctorate with a dissertation entitled The Industrial Development of Poland. Between the years 1892 and 1919 Luxemburg produced almost 700 articles, pamphlets, speeches, and books.

While in Zurich, she met many exiled revolutionaries from Russia including Gregory Plekhanov. Luxemburg and the exiles from Russia fell out over what they believed should happen to Poland – should Poland receive self-determination or not? Luxemburg was against self-determination as she believed that a newly created state was weak and at a disadvantage to the people there as the bourgeoisie would use this national weakness to their advantage to strengthen their hold over the workers. Her view was opposed by many and as a result Luxemburg formed the Polish Social Democratic Party.

In 1898, Luxemburg left Zurich for Berlin where she joined the German Social Democratic Labour Party. Luxemburg was very keen on supporting the idea of debate and in 1900 she produced Reform or Revolution. She supported reform as a way of improving life but she did not want to stop at reforms that came from the government as she believed that governments frequently gave only what they wanted to. Luxemburg wanted a complete revolution of governmental systems.

She saw the revolution in Russia in 1905 as a very good sign of hope. She moved to Warsaw where she hoped to make more of a mark in Russia. However, she was caught by the authorities and put in prison.

When the war broke out in 1914, she was very much against it. Luxemburg was very angered by the Social Democratic Party that had fully supported Germany’s entry into the war. Luxemburg left the SDP. It was at this time that she allied with Karl Liebknecht who shared the same views and had also left the SDP. They formed the Internationale Group that was to become the Spartacists. Their main party platform during the war was for German soldiers to turn their weapons against their officers and then against the government thus overthrowing it.

Both Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested for their political activities. While in prison, Luxemburg wrote the Junius Pamphlet which was to become the foundation of the Spartacists beliefs.

In November 1918, Luxemburg was released from prison. Prince Max von Baden had introduced a general amnesty for all political prisoners though there was reluctance to let Luxemburg have her freedom. On her release, she immediately started her revolutionary activities again. In December she co-founded the German Communist Party which was essentially made up of Spartacists. At this time the so-called German Revolution was taking place and Berlin was a very dangerous place to be. The head of the government, Friedrich Ebert, had moved the government to the safety of Weimar and the right-wing Freikorps was left to deal with the communists.

On January 15th, 1919, Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck, another Spartacist leader, were arrested. What happened next is unclear but Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Pieck were taken from the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, where they were being held, to be local prison. Pieck managed to escape. After hours of torture Luxemburg was battered to death with rifle butts and thrown into a nearby river. Liebknecht was shot in the back of the head then deposited as an unknown body in a nearby mortuary.

An intriguing film was made about her life in 1986 by German feminist filmmaker, Margarethe von Trotta.

Also known as Jinga, Singa, and Zhinga, Nzinga was born around 1583 to the ruling family of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms of the Mbundu people in southwestern Africa in what is now called Angola.

This was the height of the Atlantic slave trade and the consolidation of power by the Portuguese in the region was growing rapidly. After several years of power struggles with Portugal, her brother asked Nzinga to be the envoy for Ngola in the peace negotiations. They would eventually reach an agreement, which the Portuguese proceeded to break

In retaliation she formed an abortive revolt against the Portuguese colonial government and created an alliance with the Jaga people by marrying their chief. The Jaga would eventually betray here but she would go on to form a confederacy of other tribes, allying herself with the Dutch for a while in her continuing feud with the Portuguese, a fight that would span over thirty years.

She gained notoriety during the war for personally leading her troops into battle - even into her sixties. Two of her war leaders were reputedly her sisters. Her council of advisers contained many women, and women were called to serve in her army. She forbade her subjects to call her Queen, preferring to be addressed as King.

An outstanding aspect of her political engagement was the establishment of alliances with Mbundu groups, namely the Imbangala, and even the formation of a coalition in 1635 with neighboring peoples including the Congo, Kassanje, Dembos and Kissama. A coalition that would later be used against the Dutch as well.

In 1659, weary from the long struggle, Nzinga signed a peace treaty with Portugal. She attempted to reconstruct her nation, devoting her efforts to resettling former slaves and developing an economy that did not depend upon the slave trade.

Despite numerous efforts to dethrone her, Nzinga would die a peaceful death at age eighty on December 17, 1663 in Matamba. After her death her alliances disintegrated and the Portuguese overran the area by 1671 although it would not have total control of the interior until the 20th century. Today she is remembered in Angola for her political and diplomatic acumen, great wit and intelligence, as well as her brilliant military tactics.

On June 25, 1678 at thirty-two years old, Elena Lucretia Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman in the world to earn a doctorate in any field from any university. Her doctorate was in Philosophy since the Officials in the Roman Catholic Church did not feel that the University of Padua could grant a doctorate of theology to a woman, even though she was eminently well qualified for the title.

She had not been seeking a degree, had just been enjoying school and learning, but her father insisted that she apply for a degree and her answers at the public examination surpassed anything the panel had been expecting.

In addition to speaking both Latin and Greek fluently, Elena mastered Hebrew, Spanish, French, and Arabic. A student of the sciences as well as of languages, she studied mathematics and astronomy in addition to philosophy and theology. A musician, Elena mastered the harpsichord, the clavichord, the harp, and the violin. She also composed for these instruments and lectured at her alma mater in musical composition, theology, and mathematics.

Elena withdrew from the Venetian noble society she had been born into, instead devoting her life to the Benedictine order and charitable acts. She died at age thirty-eight most likely from tuberculosis.

Continuing with my women’s history month project. I still haven’t installed and played Pirates so I was thinking about doing that tonight. Then I thought maybe I should profile a pirate! Talk about mystique! Women who would dress as men and grab power where they could get it - even in piracy.

Mary Read was born in London, England in the late seventeenth century to the wife of a sea captain. Some historical documents claim that Mary Read was disguised as a boy so that her father would believe that she was his son, whom had died while Mary’s father was at sea, asserting that Mary Read was supposedly the by-product of an illicit affair that her mother had engaged in with an unknown man. Other documents state that Mary’s mother was a widow, and simply wished for her daughter to have all of the advantages offered to a man. Either way, history agrees that Mary Read lived her entire childhood as a boy.

Her mothers’ deception apparently paid off, for after the death of her husband she was able to secure his company and holdings as an inheritance for his “son”, Mary. The little family was able to survive nicely for some time, until Mary’s early teen years, when the money ran out. At this time Mary was forced to procure employment in order to support herself and her mother. Still disguised as a boy, Mary found a job as a footboy to a wealthy French woman living in London. Mary was not happy in her position, and soon managed to run away. Being a girl who longed for excitement, Mary found new employment aboard a Man-o-War, but life on such a ship was not what she had expected.

After a few years of grueling hardship and abuse, Mary managed to jump ship and joined the British military. At first a lowly foot soldier, Mary showed true bravery at the battle of Flanders and was soon promoted to the Horse Regiment. While in the Horse Regiment Mary became friends with another soldier, who believed her to be a man, and soon she found herself in love. Mary confessed her true gender to the man and he accepted her gladly. The two were wed, bought out their commission in the military and together opened an inn by the name of The Three Horseshoes.

Mary’s husband died a few years later, and once more she donned men’s clothing, and attempted a life in the Army again. She failed at this, so she shipped off to the West Indies. On her way, her ship was taken by Captain Calico Jack Rackham.

As fate would have it, another woman pirate, named Anne Bonny, was part of Calico’s crew. Anne saw a young strapping sailor among the captured and decided that she would “have her way” with him. She was not a subtle woman. To Anne’s surprise, when she got the man alone, he opened his blouse and he exposed to Anne that he too was a woman. Calico, knowing a good thing when he saw it, hired the two talented women to be a permanent part of his crew aboard the Curlew.

Calico was a fairly successful pirate and his crew managed to capture many different ships. Mary fell in love with a young sailor they captured. He got into a quarrel with an older pirate with more experience while at anchor one night, and as the laws decreed, a duel was to be set the following day. Mary realized that her lover wouldn’t stand any chance againt the other pirate, so she started a fight with him and demanded an immediate duel.

The quartermaster rowed the two ashore, with pistols and cutlass, and the duel started. They both fired their pistols but missed, then continued the duel with the cutlasses. He had strength but Mary was more agile and cunning. The duel went on for quite a while. At one point the larger pirate slipped and stumbled when making a thrust. He would probably have managed to recover but Mary ripped her blouse open , flashing her the unsuspecting pirate. Naturally he was completely surprised and stood there in shock. Mary grabbed her cutlass and with just one swing of her blade, nearly cut the man’s head off. He lay on the ground gasphing for breath, still astonished that he had been duelling with a woman. Mary’s lover showed up to fight the duel but Mary had already taken care of him. They were married and continued to sail on the Curlew.

In October of 1720, their ship was attacked by an armed British sloop on orders from the Governor of Jamaica. While the rest of the pirate crew hid below deck, Read and her friend, Anne Bonny, and one other pirate took up the fight. Read shouted for the others to join them, but they refused. To scare them into action, Read fired her pistols down the hatch, killing one man and wounding others. But the pirates, including their husbands, still wouldn’t fight. Finally, the whole crew was captured and taken prisoner.

They were tried at St. Lago de la Vega in Jamaica on November 28. During the trials, Mary told the court, “As to hanging, it is no great hardship. For were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so unfit the sea, that men of courage must starve.” Read and the crew of the Curlew were found guilty of piracy and sentenced to hang. As Calico Jack Rackham went to the gallows, Bonnie told him, “Had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog!”

Both Read and Bonny were pregnant, so they were given a delay in execution until their babies were born. Bonny was executed shortly after the birth of her child but Read and her baby died from a high fever soon after the trial.

This is a part of my Women’s History Month project where I post about one woman in history every day for the rest of March. Feel free to request a specific woman to profile!

Lozen was born into the Chihenne, Warm Springs Apache band, during the late 1840’s in a section of New Mexico/Arizona/Northern Mexico known at that time as Apacheria. She was the sister of Warm Springs Chief Victorio, and the most famous of the Apache War Women.

She learned to ride a horse at age seven and soon became one of the best riders in the band. She loved the rough games of the boys and more times than not beat them at their own games.

At her puberty ceremony, Lozen was given the power to find the enemy which she did by going alone to a deserted spot. She would stand with her arms outstretched and her open palms heavenward, chanting a prayer [to Ussen], and slowly turning around:

Upon this earth
On which we live
Ussen has Power
This Power is mine
For locating the enemy
I search for that Enemy
Which only Ussen the Great
Can show to me.

As she prayed, she turned until she felt a tingling in her palms and knew that she had found the direction of the enemy. She could tell the distance of the enemy by the intensity of the tingling.

Lozen fought beside Victorio when he and his followers rampaged against US Federal troops, who had appropriated their homeland in west central New Mexico’s Black Mountains and had tried to confine her people, first, to Arizona’s San Carlos Reservation then to New Mexico’s Mescalero Apache Reservation.

As the band fled U S forces, Lozen inspired women and children, frozen in fear, to cross a surging Rio Grande. “I saw a magnificent woman on a beautiful horse—Lozen, sister of Victorio. Lozen the woman warrior!” said James Kaywaykla, a child at the time, riding behind his grandmother. “High above her head she held her rifle. There was a glitter as her right foot lifted and struck the shoulder of her horse. He reared, then plunged into the torrent. She turned his head upstream, and he began swimming.” Immediately, the other women and the children followed her into the torrent. When they reached the far bank of the river, cold and wet, but alive, Lozen came to Kaywaykla’s grandmother. “You take charge, now,” she said. “I must return to the warriors,” who stood between their women and children and the onrushing cavalry. Lozen drove her horse back across the wild river and returned to her comrades.

One of the most important objectives of the Apache raids was to steal the horses of the enemy, and Lozen was a master at stampeding and capturing the panicked animals during the heat of battle. In addition to her considerable skill as a warrior, Lozen was also a skilled reconnaissance scout and clever battle strategist. She took part in warrior’s ceremonies, sang war songs, and directed the dances of the war parties before going into battle

According to accounts, she fell in love with a Confederate deserter who had been sheltered by the Apaches. When a wagon train came along headed for California’s gold fields, he left, breaking Lozen’s heart. She never married, devoting herself instead to using her unusual powers to sense danger and heal her people. She never married, and devoted her life to the service of her people. She was the only Apcahe woman allowed to ride in a war as a warrior without a husband at her side.

Victorio is quoted as saying, “Lozen is my right hand . . . strong as a man , braver than most, and cunning in strategy, Lozen is a shield to her people.”

Legend has it that Lozen powers helped each Band that she accompanied to successfully avoid capture. No Band was ever caught unguarded when Lozen was riding with them. Lozen was not with Victorio’s band when Mexican army trapped them in the Tres Castillos Mountains, she had left to escort a mother and her newborn infant across the Chihuahuan Desert from Mexico to the Mescalero Apache Reservation and many believed the band would not have been ambushed if Lozen had been with them.

After Victorio’s death, Lozen continued to ride with Chief Nana, and eventually joined forces with Geronimo’s band, eluding capture until she finally surrendered with this last group of free Apaches in 1886. The group was taken to Florida then transported to Mount Vernon Barracks outside Mobile, Alabama, where she died of tuberculosis at the approximate age of 50.

Since the hieroglyphs thing wasn’t really a quiz or a meme.

Which internet subculture do I belong to? [CLICK] You are a FURRY! You are a sick, sick, individual. Stop lusting over animals! Take off that fursuit and quit yiffing. No-one likes furry art! STOP NOW! More Quizzes at Go-Quiz.com

Get your name in hieroglyphs

Born into wealth and nobility (daughter of the 1st Duke of Kingston), Lady Mary (1689-1762) was given a minimal education by her parents. Whatever learning she eventually posessed, she acquired by her own efforts. She read many of the works in her parents’ libraries and she learned Latin by secretly studying a Latin dictionary. In her day, the parents of the bride and groom chose their children’s spouses based on social position and wealth (his inheritance for the groom, her dowry for the bride). As was typical, her parents chose the man she was to marry, made the financial arrangements for the new couple, and drew up a marriage contract for her. Dissatisfied with this arrangement, in 1712, Lady Mary eloped to become the wife of the extremely wealthy politician, Edward Wortley Montagu. Despite the romantic beginning, their marriage was not a happy one, even the birth of their son in May 1713 could not resolve their differences.

In 1714, Queen Anne died, bringing the Elector of Hanover to the throne. Her husband was rewarded by being appointed Ambassador to Turkey and the young couple set off for Constantinople. A perceptive spectator, an adventurous tourist, and a fascinated amateur ethnographer, Lady Mary immersed herself in all things Turkish, even learning the language. She visited the zenanas, meeting the upper class women secluded there, in order to learn more about Turkish customs. Her record of her travels, Turkish Embassy Letters, are still considered among the finest specimens of the epistolary genre.

Upon returning home to England, Lady Mary introduced into England the Turkish practice of inoculating healthy children with a weakened strain of smallpox to confer immunity from the more virulent strains of the disease. The dreaded smallpox, which left Lady Mary herself scarred from her 1715 bout with the disease and which killed her brother, often killed its victims or left them scarred or deformed for life.

It was well known that one only got smallpox once. In the Islamic world in Turkey it became the habit to “engraft” people with the dried pustule from smallpox and that this provided protection. Upon learning of the Turkish practice, Lady Mary immediately had her son inoculated. After returning home to England, she introduced the custom to the nobility by having her daughter inoculated, too.

It was safe- but was it effective? One of the women was made to share a bed with a ten-year-old boy with smallpox and she survived with no ill effects thus confirming protection. Queen Caroline then had it tested on orphans and again it was safe. At last the Royal children were inoculated. However inoculation never became common for too often a full-blown case of smallpox was produced.

Edward Jenner (1749-1823) would eventually be given credit for the smallpox vaccine, but it was really Lady Mary who pioneered the approach in western Europe and made it acceptable to the influential, the rich and the powerful. Eventually, the practice of inoculation would filter down to the middle and working classes and would be extended to inoculation against a variety of infectious diseases..

As time passed, more and more people were vaccinated against smallpox, until in 1979, the UN World Health Organization declared that smallpox, that perennial killer, had been eradicated throughout the world. Following in the footsteps pioneered by the health professionals fighting smallpox, vaccines for a host of deadly and deforming diseases including mumps, measles, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio were developed and distributed making so many of the infectious diseases which were early childhood killers a thing of the past, at least in the developed and developing world. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of people owe their lives or their health or the lifes or health of someone close to them to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

She was also a prolific writer of diaries, essays and poems and translated plays from French and Latin. She had a variety of lovers and boyfriends during her travels. But when famed poet and essayist, Alexander Pope, professed his love in a flowery series of letters, Lady Mary did not conceal her derision. Thus was born a public feud that eventually led to financial scandal and Mary leaving England to live in Italy and France until 1761 when her daughter (now wife to the Prime Minister) finally persuaded her to return to London where she died August 21, 1762.