Jambao24 - Jameses Boa

Listen up Jay-Z, this Muslim woman’s got something to say to you.

It's ironic how feminist pop icons sometimes have to objectify themselves to spread their message. Then again, I don't suppose there's a more effective way to spread the Gospel of Gender Equality to as many people as possible... 

Naveed Chowdhury

Notes Toward a Dreampolitik

Right now I am in Los Angeles. I spent the holiday in the Dutch Caribbean, and my long trip back to California turned out to be several hund

This was a really good blog post. Places are so much more than how they voted in the last election.

Here it is!  My 1000th post: The Alignment Chart of Tumblr Users.

They are:

Lawful Good: The Harry Potter Fandom Neutral Good: cute animal gif posters Chaotic Good: The Doctor Who Fandom Lawful Neutral: Social Justice Bloggers True Neutral: Homestuck Fandom Chaotic Neutral: Sherlock Fandom Lawful Evil: Anti-social justice bloggers Neutral Evil: Hipster blogs Chaotic Evil:  People that don’t rebog This started as an attempt to do an alignment chart for the various fandoms, but it sort of took on a life of it’s own.  I may go back to the fandom chart idea at some point, and there are some other tumblr blogs  that need assignments (porn blogs, food porn blogs, suicide help & support, religions blogs, fitness blogs, etc).  But this will do for now.

I’ll eventually add them each individually, so you don’t have to reblog the whole thing if you just like one particular image.

….I wonder how much anon hate I’m gonna get for this…   >.>

#vocalmedia #shortstory #submission #feast #food #baklava #baking #nostalgia

The Baklava Dude

There is the joy of eating food, and there is the joy of gifting food.

Wrote this piece in a hurry for Vocal Media’s The Perfect Pair challenge. It got removed from the challenge a couple hours after being accepted as a story, but oh well. I wanted to write about one of my quirks that I picked up in college. 

The Baklava Dude

There is the joy of eating food, and there is the joy of gifting food.

Wrote this piece in a hurry for Vocal Media’s The Perfect Pair challenge. It got removed from the challenge a couple hours after being accepted as a story, but oh well. I wanted to write about one of my quirks that I picked up in college. 

Feast

Being That Baklava Guy

On making phyllo pastry confections during college

My submission to the Vocal Media Create Your Happiness challenge! This is a revisit of my previous baklava piece

For those who can't get this article:

Dominic McKenzie

BEIJING — In the early 1980s, China’s top leader, Deng Xiaoping, is said to have issued his now-famous rallying cry in defense of a market economy. “Let some people get rich first,” he reportedly said, making the case that the Communist Party’s embrace of a freer market would generate new wealth that would eventually spread to all strata of society.

Indeed, Deng’s so-called reform-and-opening-up policy, first launched in 1978, spurred incredible economic growth. China has seen the emergence of private businesses and a vastly expanded middle class. In the early days of the reform period, social mobility increased notably, producing many rags-to-riches stories.

But after decades of breakneck economic growth, the country’s wealth has ceased trickling down, bringing social mobility to a standstill. Chinese people have fewer opportunities to move up the socioeconomic ladder. State-controlled capitalism and corruption have led to the demise of the Communist ideal of a classless society...

A 2014 nationwide survey by a market-research company suggested that intergeneration mobility in China among the low- and lower-middle class has stagnated, and people from those groups had little confidence that they could improve their fate. Among those who self-identified as lower-middle class, 68 percent said their parents also belonged to the lower-middle class, and 87 percent of people in the lower class said their parents were in the same class. In short, the majority of lower class people in China are staying near the bottom of the class pyramid.

A Stanford report from earlier this year echoes what Chinese social scientists have found: China ranks high among countries in which citizens earn close to what their parents had earned. It is a country with low “intergenerational earnings mobility,” meaning China’s younger people are likely to be in the same socioeconomic class as their parents.

Research shows the bigger the income gap, the lower the social mobility. And the income gap has been widening steadily. A report from Peking University in January found China to be one of the most unequal societies in the world with the richest 1 percent holding a third of the country’s wealth.

When the rungs of the income ladder grow farther apart, it’s more difficult for people to climb upward.

While some 800 million people in China have been lifted out of poverty in the last few decades, the economic reforms have produced a new underclass of low-paid urban workers, including migrants from the country’s rural areas. The new lower class is stuck at the bottom.

The hukou, a household registration system that ties social benefits, including children’s schooling, to a person’s birthplace, has been a main factor behind the class entrenchment. The system, which is slowly being reformed, has meant most rural migrants living in cities get minimal access to social benefits and their children often go to substandard schools.

Meanwhile, the wages of low-income laborers have not kept up with increases in the cost of living. And as economic growth continues to slow, low-income workers are unlikely to see significant gains in wages anytime soon.

Many of those people who heeded Deng Xiaoping’s call to get rich were small-business owners — and entrepreneurship remains a route to enrich oneself. But, as Wang Jianlin, one of Asia’s richest men, said in a speech at Harvard in 2012, it’s difficult for a private company to have success in China. State-owned enterprises still enjoy favorable treatment from the government, giving them a competitive edge over private businesses. The successful entrepreneurs are often those, such as Mr. Wang, who have easy access to top officials.

Access matters in such a corrupt society. Ever since the introduction of the market economy, corruption has been expanding. It is repeatedly cited in surveys as a top concern of the public.

At the core of the corrupt culture are wealthy businessmen, state monopolies, private-property developers and government officials. In China, the government controls not only a large portion of the wealth but the market itself. Those who are close to powerful officials have access to financial resources. This system feeds on itself, making the rich richer and the powerful more powerful. “A waterfront pavilion gets the moonlight first,” as the Chinese would say.

Education used to serve as one of the few class equalizers. “In books, one can find beauty and golden mansions,” as the traditional saying goes. Throughout imperial China, young men from humble backgrounds often became wealthy officials after passing through the civil-service examination system.

But today, education is failing to help people move up the social ladder. Like everything else in the market economy, education has become a commodity. The better a university, the more expensive it is. Children from impoverished families struggle to afford college, even if they succeed in passing the strict entrance examination. Children from the countryside face more hurdles: Many of the spots in the better urban universities are reserved for local students, putting rural residents at a disadvantage. One report from last year said the percentage of university students from a rural background is half of what it was 30 years ago.

For the vast majority of children of migrants living in cities, the race is lost before they reach college age. Because of the many barriers for migrants to enroll their children in legitimate city schools, parents often send them to hometown schools or substandard city schools for migrants run by staff who lack proper qualifications. Struggling in a legal gray area, many migrant schools are frequently shut down by authorities.

Even if some migrant children manage to complete a university education, they face an increasingly competitive job market in which “a good dad works better than a good grade.”

We Chinese have seen vast wealth transform our country in a generation. Those who have yet to benefit from the nation’s success need some hope that, with hard work, they too can move up the social ladder. Underprivileged people who feel trapped in their class may eventually take to the streets to protest how the system is rigged against them.

If the Chinese government is serious about wanting to foster a stable and harmonious society, it should address the limits on social mobility before it’s too late.

tl;dr- this is 2 hours late

I don't know why I decided to wake up at 8 am yesterday morning, on a solid 4.5 hours of sleep, to help a bunch of tree huggers dig out blackberry plants and pass heavy buckets of mulch down a hillside park no one gives a rat's tail about anyway, only to find myself still up at 1:30am, frantically scribbling away at my homework that I had the entire weekend to do.

But there is one thing I do know. I know that yesterday was the day where we commemorate a man who changed the lives of millions as he fought tooth and nail to bring justice to an oppressed people, a man who accomplished more with peace and love than most could dream to do with guns, germs and steel, a man whose humility and altruism inspires nobodies like me to run out of my cozy dorm on a chilly Monday morning and help restore an urban forest park. Sure, it's not like uprooting a few invasive species or passing a few buckets of dirt is going to save the planet or anything. But if there's one thing the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior has shown, it's that giving back is giving back, period, whether it's to your family or friends, community or country. Everything counts, no matter how insignificant, and even though I might never change the world like MLK did, that doesn't stop my from feeling an obligation to honor his memory by giving back, just as he did, with UW Earth Club, volunteering for Earth Core, on this sunny day in Seattle. For lack of something better to say, Happy MLK day everyone.

10 min loop of Mateus Asato cover of “You’re Still the One”

Made with Discord’s/Meta’s media embeds feature, iPhone’s record feature, and iMovie. Enjoy! #mateusasato #guitarcover #instramentalcover #yourestilltheone #shaniatwaincover