Katherine Hamnett's Licence to Kill

"Getting old is a licence to kill. You become more sure of yourself, more confident in your views. There are some dodgy bits: you still feel 25 inside as you get older, and sometimes I look at myself and think: “What the f**** happened?” I loathe exercise – but now it’s do it or die."
Katherine Hamnett



photograph taken by Chris Floyd (2015) via

(Un-)Quoting Jair Bolsonaro

"I've got five kids but on the fifth I had a moment of weakness and it came out a woman."
Congresswoman Rosario is "not worth raping; she is very ugly."
"I wouldn't rape you because you don't deserve it." (watch from minute 1.05 how he continues insulting her)
Jair Bolsonaro



"Because women get more labor rights than men, meaning they get maternity leave, the employer prefers to hire men. I would not employ (a woman) with the same salary (of a man). But there are many women who are competent."
Jair Bolsonaro

"I visited a quilombo and the least heavy afro-descendant weighed seven arrobas. They don't do anything! They are not even good for procreation."
Jair Bolsonaro

Interviewer: "If your son was in love with a black woman, what would you do?"
"I will not discuss promiscuity with anyone. There's no risk of that because my sons are well raised."
Jair Bolsonaro

"The scum of the earth is showing up in Brazil, as if we didn't have enough problems of our own to sort out."
Jair Bolsonaro

"I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son."
I'd rather my son "died in an accident than showed up with some bloke with a moustache."
Jair Bolsonaro

"We, the Brazilian people, don't like the homosexuals. Your culture is different from ours. In Brazil, we are not ready yet because no father is proud of having a gay son. Pride? Organising a party because there's a gay son in the family?"
"When your son starts getting a bit gay you slap him, and he changes his behaviour, OK?"
Jair Bolsonaro

"I am in favour of torture, you know that. And the people are in favour as well."
"Elections won't change anything in this country. It will only change on the day that we break out in civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn't do: killing 30,000. If some innocent people die, that's fine. In every war, innocent people die."
Jair Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro won Brazil's presidency. Trump, Salvini, and Le Pen congratulated him (via) while human rights groups put out statements and chief justice of the Supreme Court read out the part of the constitution reminding Brazil that the "future president must respect institutions, must respect democracy, the rule of law, the judiciary branch, the national Congress and the legislative branch" (via).

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- photograph via
Interesting:
- Remembering Brazil's decades of military repression, BBC
- In Brazil, nostalgia grows for the dictatorship - not the brutality, Washington Post
- Brazil president weeps as he unveils report on military dictatorship's abuse, The Guardian
- The Brazilian Military Regime, 1964-1985, Oxford Research Encyclopedias

Female Fashion Photographers - Where are They?

"If you look at the most successful photographers in the world, the top ten are all male, except for maybe [husband-wife team] Inez and Vinoodh. Photography has been a male-dominated business since it began."
Amanda de Cadenet



In 2017, 153 magazine covers from ten of the leading US-American fashion magazines were mainly shot by men, with only 13.7% being shot by women. Some magazines, like e.g. Marie Claire, did not hire a female photographer for the cover shot the whole year. The advertising industry is even more extreme. According to data from major photography publications and awards organisations, male photographers made up between 89 and 96% of those in the advertising categories between 2013 and 2017 (via).

"Over 50 percent of grads coming out of photo school are female, and yet when you look around at the assistants out there, the vast majority are male. Assisting is a physically demanding job, where strength and height are very helpful. I've spoken to countless women who tried to enter the field, but could not get assisting work. Two told me that some agencies outright stated they don't use female assistants. As assisting is the most common path to becoming a photographer, if you shut this door, that can be the end for some."
Cybele Malinowski

"We need to have a say in how we're represented. What I see with women photographing other women is that we find the nuance. We often find different things interesting and beautiful and sexy and charismatic than when men photograph women. I think a lot of it, unfortunately, comes down to sexualizing."
Amanda de Cadenet




photographs of Marilyn Monroe with Milton Hawthorne Greene's (1922-1985) son Joshua via and via and via and via, (c) Joshua Greene, Archive Images

Black Man (1976)

"Black Man" was written by Stevie Wonder and Gary Byrd and published in 1976. The song is about ethnic harmony and criticises racism using colour-based terminology (via).

::: LISTEN



First man to die
For the flag we now hold high [Crispus Attucks]
Was a black man
The ground were we stand
With the flag held in our hand
Was first the red man's
Guide of a ship
On the first Columbus trip [Pedro Alonzo Nino]
Was a brown man
The railroads for trains
Came on tracking that was laid
By the yellow man

We pledge allegiance
All our lives
To the magic colors
Red, blue and white
But we all must be given
The liberty that we defend
For with justice not for all men
History will repeat again
It's time we learned
This World Was Made For All Men

(...)

This world was made for all men
God saved His world for all men
All people
All babies
All children
All colors
All races
This world's for you
And me
This world
My world
Your world
Everybody's world
This world
Their world
Our world
This world was made for all men
Hear me out...

Who was the first man to set foot on the North Pole?
Matthew Henson - a black man
Who was the first american to show the Pilgrims at Plymouth the secrets of survival in the new world?
Squanto - a red man
Who was the soldier of Company G who won high honors for his courage and heroism in World War 1?
Sing Kee - a yellow man
Who was the leader of united farm workers and helped farm workers maintain dignity and respect?
Caesar Chavez - a brown man
Who was the founder of blood plasma and the director of the Red Cross blood bank?
Dr. Charles Drew - a black man
Who was the first American heroine who aided the Lewis and Clark expedition?
Sacajewa - a red woman
Who was the famous educator and semanticist who made outstanding contributions to education in America?
Hayakawa - a yellow man
Who invented the world's first stop light and the gas mask?
Garrett Morgan - a black man
Who was the American surgeon who was one of the founders of neurosurgery?
Harvey Williams Cushing - a white man
Who was the man who helped design the nation's capitol, made the first clock to give time in America and wrote the first almanac?
Benjamin Banneker - a black man
Who was the legendary hero who helped establish the League of Iroquois?
Hiawatha - a red man
Who was the leader of the first microbiotic center in America?
Micho Kushi - a yellow man
Who was the founder of the city of Chicago in 1772?
Jean Baptiste - a black man
Who was one of the organizers of the American Indian Movement?
Denis Banks - a red man
Who was the Jewish financier who raised founds to sponsor Cristopher Columbus' voyage to America?
Lewis D. Santangel - a white man
Who was the woman who led countless slaves to freedom on the underground rairoad?
Harriet Tubman - a black woman

lyrics via



photographs of Stevie Wonder rehearsing on his piano in Los Angeles for an upcoming concert, taken by Al Satterwhite in 1974 via and via

Heart Attack, the Patient's and the Doctor's Gender

"We find that gender concordance increases a patient’s probability of surviving a [heart attack] and that the effect is driven by increased mortality when male physicians treat female patients."
Brad Greenwood



Greenwood et al. looked at records from emergency admissions for heart attacks in Florida from 1991 to 2010, at patients' age, gender, and the emergency room doctors' gender. Results from more than 580.000 patients reveal that "when patients shared the same gender as their doctor, they were more likely to survive". Survival chances also increased when the emergency department had a higher proportion of female doctors and when the male doctor had treated many female patients for heart attacks before (via).

Further analysis showed that men and women had similar chances of survival when they saw female doctors. But male doctors were linked to worse outcomes, particularly for women.
Female patients treated by male doctors were about 1.5 percentage points less likely to survive a heart attack than male patients in the care of female doctors. (...)
These results suggest a reason why gender inequality in heart attack mortality persists: most physicians are male, and male physicians appear to have trouble treating female patients. (via)

images of Star Trek's Dr McCoy via and via

Father's Daughter, Husband's Wife, Son's Mother. Women in India and their Suicide Rate

"Our social norms are very regressive. In the village, a girl is called her father’s daughter, then she is her husband’s wife, and when she has a son, she is her son’s mother."



From 1990 to 2016, India's share of global suicide deaths among women increased from 25.3% to 36.6%. About two in five women who commit suicide worldwide are Indian turning suicide into the leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 39 years. The suicide rate is three times higher than a country with the given socio-economic indicators would have. The main reasons are believed to be early marriage, youth motherhood, low status in society, lack of (financial) independence, and male violence (via and via)

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- Gender differentials and state variations in suicide deaths in India: the Global Burden of Disease Study 1990-2016, download
- photograph of a contortionist with her puppy Sweety at the Great Raj Kamal Circus in Upleta, India, 1989, taken by Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015), via

Quoting Rita Moreno

"All my life, I faced sexism and racism and then, when I hit 40, ageism."
Rita Moreno



photograph ("Rita Moreno During a Rehearsal for West Side Story, 1961. © Phil Stern/Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles") via

The Things of Life. Grieving Patterns, Gender and Bias.

The ways people cope with grief are sometimes labelled as "feminine" - when the grieving pattern is intuitive, expressed in an affective way -  or "masculine" - when it is instrumental, i.e., experienced physically and expressed in a cognitive way. And then there are blended patterns.



The reason why men tend to grieve in a "masculine" way is socialisation; the patterns are "influenced by gender but not determined by it". This grieving style is usually seen as negative within counselling and grieving literature which could reflect "a general Western bias in counseling that tends to value affective expressiveness as inherently more therapeutic than cognitive or behavioral responses", sometimes stating that grief work can only be accomplished when one starts expressing one's feelings. This is a potential barrier when counselling with other cultural groups (via).

This affective bias finds its boldest expression in literature about men and grief. It is unsurprising, given the bias toward affective expressiveness that many clinicians have seen aspects of the male role placing men at a disadvantage in grieving when compared to women. Women are seen as more ready to accept help; and express emotion, both of which are viewed as essential to the process of grieving. Since men are perceived as less likely to show emotion or accept help, they are seen as having more difficulty in responding to loss. Recently at a lecture, one counselor suggested that when grieving men use the word “fine” in answer to how they are doing, it should be viewed as an acronym for “feelings inside, never expressed
Kenneth Doka

The following excerpts are taken from a paper written by Versalle and McDowall.

Studies of gender and grief have looked at differences in grief reactions between widows and widowers, or differences between fathers and mothers of deceased children. In studies of elderly bereaved spouses, some researchers found that bereavement was harder on women than on men (Carey, 1979; Lopata, 1973; Parkes, 1970). Widows complained of greater negative health symptoms than widowers and were more prone to psychological illness (Gilbar & Dagan, 1995; Parkes & Brown, 1972). Other researchers, however, found that widowers fared worse than widows in risk of mortality (Bowling & Windsor, 1995; Stroebe, 1994) and other measures (Cummings & Henry, 1961; Sanders, 1989; Stillion, 1985).

In research involving bereaved parents, one study showed that women scored higher than men on all but one of the bereavement scales of the Grief Experience Inventory (Sidmore, 2000). Another study found that mothers cried much more than fathers, were more likely to cope by writing and reading about loss and grief, reached out to help others more frequently, and overall used a wider variety of coping mechanisms than fathers (Schwab, 1990). Yet another study showed that mothers scored higher on measures of coping difficulty, active grief, depression, preoccupation, sadness, difficulty in functioning, and finding resolution than fathers, whereas fathers scored higher on measures of specific anger. This study also found that fathers received higher scores than mothers on a measure of most severe grief two years post loss, indicating that mothers’ grief over the death of a child decreases over time while fathers’ increases. The authors concluded that men may deny grief over the death of a child, in part because of gender stereotypes calling for men to be strong and unemotional, and thus are prevented from adaptively coping with their loss (Stinson & Lasker, 1992).

Researchers have labeled these gender differences in grief “masculine” and “feminine” (Corr, Nabe, & Corr, 2000; Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999; Stinson & Lasker, 1992). The consensus of most research has been that so-called feminine grief, characterized by open displays of intense affect, support seeking, and sharing of emotions with others, is necessary for any griever regardless of sex (Staudacher, 1991). According to this point of view, people, usually men, who fail to express their grief in this affective manner are considered to be responding in an inappropriate, unhealthy way (Corr et al., 2000; Martin & Doka, 1996).

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- image (Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider), "The Things of Life", directed by Claude Sautet, via
- Versalle, A. & McDowall, E. E. (2004-2005). OMEGA, 50(1), 53-67.

Slipping Away. Grief: Universal + Culturally Defined

"It seems reasonable to expect that the cross-cultural study of grief would have been a good subject for the emerging field of cross-cultural psychology because it is a shared experience among peoples. It also seems reasonable to expect that it would be a subject in the very old field of psychology of religion, because a part of the rituals and beliefs of the major religious traditions concern transcending death (see Chidester, 1990). Neither expectation turns out to be realized."



"Grief is understood to be universal, but grief has “variations” in different cultures just as, it seems, in a musical score there can be variations on a melody. “Death and grief, though they are universal, . . . occur within a social milieu, and deeply embedded within each person’s reality” (Irish, Lundquist, & Nelsen, p. 187), that is, the universal is only experienced within culturally defined reality."

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Klass, D. (1999). Developing a Cross-Cultural Model of Grief: The State of the Field. OMEGA, 39(3), 153-178.

Nichelle Nichols. Her Legacy Project.

Nichelle Nichols plans her final on-screen performance (as the matriarch of the family) for a film she is executive producing and calling her so-called legacy project: Noah's Room. The film is inspired by true events and is about "bringing diverse people together with love, faith, and forgiveness" and a "contemporary look at what it's like to be black in today's America". It tells the story of a black US-American family taking in an abused white youth (via) and saving his life. The young man "goes on to be an astronaut" (via).



"Noah’s Room is currently in a bidding war with a number of companies interested in green-lighting Nichols bold hour-long tv series. The series will focus on an African American family who takes in a white youth that has been abused by the Foster Care system, changes his life through love, redemption and forgiveness, a second chance on life." (via)

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image via

Celeste Yarnall (1944-2018)

"The number boggles my mind, because my 69th birthday will be July 26. But I don’t refer to them as years. I refer to them as trips around the sun on a big, blue ball. So when you look at life as a trip around the sun, rather than getting locked into the fear paradigm of age or how many years you might have left, my philosophy is that 60 is the new 30. My work is all about anti-aging."
Celeste Yarnall



Celeste Yarnall played Corporal Martha Landon in the Star Trek Original Series episode "The Apple", played with Elvis, Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Christopher Lee, and had roles in Bonanza and Men from UNCLE. In 1998, she received her Ph.D in nutrition and worked as adjunct professor at the Pacific Western University (via and via). In 2014, she was diagnosed with cancer. Celeste Yarnall passed away Monday night.

On age:
"Isn’t that just amazing? My daughter just celebrated her 20th wedding anniversary. For me, it just feels like time has been standing still. Time, fortunately, has been kind to me. It’s just been fantastic. I met the love of my life in 2009 and we were married in 2010, and we’re coming up on our third wedding anniversary. So, life is just a blessing and a gift. I’ve been on what I call a celestial Trek, and it’s wonderful that fans of the show keep us (people who were involved in Star Trek) alive in their memories and with their good wishes."
Celeste Yarnall

On NBC Broadcast Standards and Star Trek:
"They were very concerned. They didn’t want it thought that I was spending too much time in this hut with these four or five men. It was explained to them by the producers that this is the 23rd Century; that men and women are equal; there’s no reason for concern. But it didn’t matter. This isn’t the 23rd Century. This is 1967. And this is American TV. So they had some changes made, and some good moments were left on the cutting room floor."
Celeste Yarnall

On the fight scene in "The Apple":
"None of us were singled out as not being capable. I participated in a fight scene. It was very good for the liberated spirit of today’s woman because, I think, we were treated as equals. The show was progressive that way."
Celeste Yarnall



images via and via

Quoting Sir Karl Popper

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.



Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
Karl Popper

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photograph of Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) taken by Steve Pyke (1990) via

One Scotland

Dear haters,
you're going to hate this, but we've had enough.
Yours, Scotland

"Scotland believes in equality for all. No one should be denied opportunities because of age, disability, gender, gender identity, race, religion or belief, or sexual orientation." One Scotland

One Scotland is a Scottish Government campaign celebrating the progress made on equality "whilst recognising the work still to be done to achieve a truly inclusive society" (via). Part of this campaign is fighting hate crime - addressing bigots, disablists, homophobes, racists, and transphobes - and encouraging people to report hate crime whenever it happens:

::: Your hate is not welcome here, Yours Scotland: WATCH
::: Aneel's Story: WATCH



"Yes, we. Because no matter what your race, creed, colour or culture, you’re welcome here. After all, it’s the contribution of the many, that makes Scotland what it is: one great country. 
The truth is, all of us – living, working, laughing, sharing and loving life in Scotland – have more in common than that which divides us. 
This is Scotland standing up for what matters at a time when it couldn’t matter more. Because the reality is – and the evidence shows – a more equal, more diverse society makes for a more productive, happier society. So it’s with pride we say that in Scotland there’s no V, there’s just you, me and we. 
And we are Scotland."
We Are Scotland

More "We Are Scotland" videos:

::: Geoff Palmer: WATCH
::: Claire Simonetta: WATCH
::: Yuting Ling: WATCH

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photograph taken in Edinburgh (David & Alison Lambie) via

World Teacher's Day

World Teachers’ Day 2018 will mark the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that recognizes education as a key fundamental right and establishes an entitlement to free compulsory education, ensuring inclusive and equitable access for all children.



This year’s theme, “The right to education means the right to a qualified teacher,” has been chosen to remind the global community that the right to education cannot be achieved without the right to trained and qualified teachers. Even today, a continuing challenge worldwide is the shortage of teachers. There are an estimated 264 million children and youth still out of school globally. To reach the 2030 Education Goals of universal primary and secondary education, the world needs to recruit almost 69 million new teachers. This ‘teacher gap’ is more pronounced among vulnerable populations, such as girls, children with disabilities, refugee and migrant children, or poor children living in rural or remote areas.

Held annually on 5 October since 1994, World Teachers’ Day commemorates the anniversary of the signing of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers. It is co-convened in partnership with UNICEF, UNDP, the International Labour Organization, and Education International. (literally via)

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photograph via