niyad
niyad's JournalData centers and water (WHAT WATER??) Two stories from yesterday,
both of them important to me.
The first is from a townhall meeting in my community about a proposed data center to be built near the Garden of the Gods (a beautiful geologic entity). The company that wants to build that damned thing lied last night, saying they were ONLY going to use TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND GALLONS OF WATER to open, and never use again. We live in a desert, we are in severe drought, our reservoirs and snowpack are dangerously low, and we already have watering restrictions (pathetically minimal as they are). The Colorado River is dangerously low. The SCDS . . So, at whose expense will they get their mere one-time-only gallons? From what friends who attended the meeting tell me, the reaction of the citizens was wonderful.
The second story comes from my beloved Lake Tahoe. The 57,000+ residents were told that they have to find a new power source by next May, because the company is going to be giving all the power to a new data center. Isn't that lovely?
Sooo. .fuck the people. fuck the environment. Apparently data centers are the new gods we must all worship without question or cavil, regardless of the cost. Which is going to be higher than most can imagine.
Re: the asshole who attacked the Hawaiian monk seal. Since krasnov's
feds are supposedly investigating this, and the guy brags about being rich, what are the odds on him paying any fine, or serving any time?
My guess is ZERO. The "hands on" lesson he got will be it legally. Of course, the internet may have other ideas!
Is it the "pee tapes", or simply hero worship? While reading the don bacon
thread about him suddenly realizing krasnov is on "team putin", and mention of those tapes, a simple thought occurred. Why assume the tapes are the factor, when it is obvious that krasnov worships putler, just as he worships adolph. No coercion. No blackmail. No threats. Hero worship, and a frantic desire to emulate.
MMIWG DAY. Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls Day.
Calling attention to the horrific number of Indigenous women and girls murdered or missing, and how little attention is paid by law enforcement and other officials. The numbers, the stories, are heartbreaking, as is official indifference.
Also known as REDdress Day, as we are asked to wear red in memory.
Today in history. Just two: 29 April, 1975 Saigon. 29 April 1992. Rodney King riots.
Images that still haunt me.The embassy in Saigon. The streets off the City of Angels. I knnow that many other things have happened on this day, but these two always haunt this day for me. And here we are, again?? Still?? When will we, as a country, ever learn?
For my 76th natal day, Dear Multiverse, I just have one TEEEEEENY little wish.
Just one! It would bring so much joy and happiness, and not just for me. Right now would be good. I have a fresh cup of coffee and cake and everything. PLEASE??? Pretty please??? With sprinkles???
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Bill Penzey does it again. His email this morning was once again about
the 4th anniversary of his "about repubs" piece, and celebration thereof. So if you missed it last week, enjoy now!
Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash
(lengthy, depressing, enraging, informative)
Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash
PUBLISHED 4/13/2026 by Nimisha Barton
As women fought to claim higher education—from the early republic to today—race and gender determined who was allowed in, and each gain sparked a backlash aimed at restoring the status quo.
Four African American women sit together on the steps of Atlanta University in 1900, their poised expressions and fashionable dress reflecting both the dignity and determination of a generation shaping Black intellectual and cultural life at the turn of the 20th century. (Thomas E. Askew, W.E.B. Du Bois collection / Universal History Archive via Getty Images)
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
The war against “radical gender ideology” has been staggering.
The ascent of President Trump brought calls for the elimination of women’s and LGBTQ centers, rollbacks on Title IX protections, the exclusion of trans women from college sports and the purging of gender and sexuality studies from college curricula throughout U.S. institutions and higher education. These actions signal a massive backlash against the decades-long fight for gender equality and are inseparable from the administration’s wider assault on Civil Rights-era protections for people of color. However, this moment is nothing new. It echoes an earlier race- and gender-based backlash in U.S. history over a century ago, when white middle-class American women began to attend colleges in large numbers. Against the backdrop of Black emancipation, the mass migration of racial “undesirables” and the immense success of the feminist movement, white women’s enrollment was seen as a threat, not just to white patriarchy but to the very future of the white race.
Today’s backlash is the most recent attempt to restore the status quo—to distinguish between who is and is not entitled to higher education on the basis of race and gender and to safeguard the future of a white nation. From its earliest days, Americans looked to education to stabilize the fledgling republic. In his 1778 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Thomas Jefferson made this connection explicit, writing, “the most effectual means of preventing [tyranny] would be, to illuminate … the minds of the people at large.”Revolutionary Benjamin Rush took it a step further, arguing in 1786 that women, too, “should be instructed in the principles of liberty and government, and the obligations of patriotism should be inculcated upon them.” In this manner, Rush articulated the 18th-century doctrine of republican motherhood, according to which American women were responsible for inculcating democratic values in their children and thus preparing future generations of citizens.
. . . .
Students gather in the anatomical lecture room at the Medical College for Women in New York City, where women claimed space in professional education despite widespread resistance. (Bettmann Archives / Getty Images)
. . . .
In response, Native groups were less interested in attending predominantly white institutions than beating back federal control over all facets of Native life, including education.
Native American girls from the Omaha tribe at Carlisle School in Pennsylvania. (Corbis via Getty Images)
. . . .
American Indian and African American students at Hampton Institute, in Hampton, Va., circa 1900. They women study the human respiratory system. Artist Frances Benjamin Johnston. (Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
. . . . .
Whereas an educated white woman in the eighteenth century was considered well-suited to raise future citizens, by the late nineteenth century, she was considered a threat to the future of the white race. Fears over the fate of white America pushed educators and other officials to exclude large numbers of women out of higher education and to denounce “co-education.” Then as now, racism and misogyny mutually constituted and reinforced one another in ways that limited educational opportunity for all. Not until the Civil Rights era would women advance forward in the fight for college access, when the Black Campus Movement forced white supremacy, systemic racism and other varieties of oppression onto the institutional agenda.
Group portrait of Radcliffe College Class of 1896, Harvard University. (Geography Photos / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In the post-Civil Rights era, gender-based exclusion in higher education appeared to be a thing of the past. Since the 1980s, more women than men attend college, though women of color attend college at lower rates than white women. They are also less likely to graduate within four years—a stark reminder of how race must be accounted for in these gendered experiences. Nonetheless, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, women now account for over half of the nation’s college-educated labor force, making significant inroads into the highest-paying male-dominated occupations, including medicine and law. Though the gender pay gap remains, it’s narrowing in part thanks to women’s educational attainment and the struggle for gender equality that made college-going possible. In the late 1800s, a resurgence of virulent xenophobia, nativism and anti-Blackness revealed how the educational fates of all women were hopelessly intertwined. As the Trump administration works doggedly to reverse the gains of the past few decades, we would do well to remember that lesson. We must also consider the ways that white patriarchal backlash on college campuses erodes at the very foundations of our democracy, which, as our early founders first argued, requires a liberal education for all.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging in the U.S., Anne Anlin Cheng, Louis W. Fairchild class of ’24 professor of English at Princeton University
Making Disability Visible in History: A Conversation With Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany
Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash, Nimisha Barton, lecturer at Cal State Long Beach and a DEI consultant in higher education
Founding Feminists, original art by Nettrice Gaskins.
https://msmagazine.com/2026/04/13/history-women-college-university-native-black-schools-segregation-civil-rights/
A Public Syllabus on Feminist Resistance Across U.S. History: Books, Films, Archives and Tools to Rethink America's Orig
This is an incredibly detailed, lengthy resource. I hope you all make good use of it in these misogynist, woman-hating times!)
A Public Syllabus on Feminist Resistance Across U.S. History: Books, Films, Archives and Tools to Rethink America’s Origins
PUBLISHED 4/16/2026 by Janell Hobson
A sweeping, multimedia guide to feminist resistance—past and present—grounding the nation’s 250th in the voices, histories and cultural work of those long excluded from its founding story.
View of a demonstrator, with an American flag over her shoulders and carrying a baby, as she smiles during a A rally in support of immigrants’ rights in Union Square Park in New York City on May 1, 2010. The protests were a response to Arizona’s law (Bill SB 1070), allowing law enforcement to check immigration status during stops, which critics feared would lead to racial profiling of Latinos and other communities. (Walter Leporati / Getty Images)
This public syllabus is a resource guide for readers of Ms.’: Founding Feminists project, part of the FEMINIST 250 project that spans from Women’s History Month to the midterm elections this November.
The multimedia syllabus curated below spans the Revolutionary era and the long afterlife of feminist resistance—from the 19th century to the present.
It includes works by series authors, books and articles, podcasts, films and television, primary-source collections, a Google Map of sites across the U.S. relevant to women’s histories, and a Spotify playlist tracing the legacy of protest music.
Many of these works center marginalized communities and are organized under the themes of Revolution, Resistance and Reclamation.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a nation came into being … Will we remember the ‘founding feminists’ who planted these democratic seeds?
. . . . . .
https://msmagazine.com/2026/04/16/feminist-250-founding-feminists-public-syllabus/
Sudan war 'being fought on women's bodies': Survivors detail sexual assault (trigger warning)
(AND THE MISOGYNIST, PATRIARCHAL, THEOCRATIC, WOMAN-HATING, WAR ON WOMEN continues apace)
Sudan war ‘being fought on women’s bodies’: Survivors detail sexual assault (trigger warning)
In a new report, Doctors Without Borders says sexual violence is the ‘defining feature’ of the conflict in Sudan.
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Sudanese refugees are assisted in Oure Cassoni, Chad, after seeking refuge from the fighting between the Sudanese army and the RSF [File: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images]
By Al Jazeera Staff
Published On 31 Mar 202631 Mar 2026
Hanaan was 18 years old when she was raped by members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group accused of committing widespread war crimes during nearly three years of fighting against Sudan’s army. She was walking alongside a female friend to her makeshift home in an encampment for displaced people in South Darfur, when four men on motorbikes stopped them and asked where they were going. “Two took each girl, and they raped us,” she told Doctors Without Borders, an international medical NGO known by its French initials MSF. “I feel uncomfortable in my body, heavy. I don’t feel pain, apart from in my back – because they beat me, they beat me with their guns on my back,” she said. Hanaan – not her real name – shared her testimony as part of a report released by MSF on Tuesday, which details the widespread use of sexual violence as a weapon in Sudan’s ongoing brutal civil war.
The NGO said 3,396 survivors of sexual violence sought treatment in MSF-supported health facilities across North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025. The data, presented in the report titled, There is Something I Want to Tell You…, was drawn from MSF programmes in just two of Sudan’s 18 states and reflects only a fraction of the crisis, while the true scale of the phenomenon remains unknown. Women and girls accounted for 97 percent of survivors treated in MSF programmes. The RSF and allied militias were found to be primarily responsible for the systematic abuse.
Children among the survivors
“Sexual violence is a defining feature of this conflict – not confined to front lines, but pervasive across communities,” Ruth Kauffman, MSF emergency health manager, said in a statement.“This war is being fought on the backs and bodies of women and girls. Displacement, collapsing community support systems, lack of access to healthcare and deep-rooted gender inequalities are allowing these abuses to continue across Sudan.”
Following the RSF’s capture of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, on October 26, 2025, MSF treated more than 140 survivors fleeing to Tawila. Among them, 94 percent were attacked by armed men, with many reporting assaults along escape routes.The assaults “deliberately targeted non-Arab communities as a means of humiliation and terror, echoing previous RSF atrocities such as the dismantling of Zamzam camp”, the report said. The RSF took control of famine-hit Zamzam camp in the western Darfur region after two days of heavy shelling and gunfire in April 2025. Survivors described attacks not only during fighting, but in everyday settings, such as fields, markets and displacement camps. Children were also among the survivors. In South Darfur, one in five survivors was under 18, including 41 children younger than five, the organisation said.
MSF called on the United Nations, donors and humanitarian actors to urgently scale up health and protection services in Darfur and all of Sudan, and on all parties to the conflict to cease and prevent sexual violence and hold perpetrators accountable.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/31/sudan-war-being-fought-on-womens-bodies-survivors-detail-sexual-assault
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