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By Neil, February 16, 2012 1:28 am

Well, I made it most of the week without any TV. I was pretty good about not wasting time watching online videos or movies. My only downfall really, was when Kate and I watch the Walking Dead on Sunday night. I figure it was OK since it was a few hours from the end of the week anyway. Now the interesting thing about this experiment is that after about 2 days of not watching TV I started having vivid crazy dreams. One was about being chased around my university campus by giant spiders and then trying to kill them by throwing bricks at them from the top of the Johnson Center (the main student center at GMU).

Bronze Giant Spider by Louis Bourgeois (Photo by Nathan Strange/AP)

Also, I think I slept a little bit better mostly because I would end up going to be earlier instead of staying up to watch an episode of John Stewart or something. All-in-all, I think this was a great experiment and Kate and I are going to try and incorporate less TV watching into our weekly routine. In fact, we are going to try and save all the episodes we would normally watch during the week for the weekend.

One more thing I have discovered through this process. I do not have the willpower to tackle a new lifestyle each week. I need a break between the weeks to rethink what I am doing an prepare. So, I am going to amend my initial plan and give myself a free week between each experiment week.

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By kate, April 15, 2011 7:16 am

So, yeah, not to boast, but the Hip Hop Conference was pretty awesome.

I got to meet Rosa Clemente (a-mazing), Skim (a-mazing).

On the tees & behind the panelists is the amazing Lady Justice that Neil conjured up for the Conference. Can we all just admit that Neil is a genius? She is inspired by my prof Pamela Bridgewater.

This panel, Law(lessness), (In)Justice and Legacy of Hip Hop Music and Culture, was amazing. By far the best law school panel I’ve ever attended. R-L Moderator: Dekeera Greene, WCL grad. Panelists: Rosa Clemente, Hip Hop Activist, Former Candidate for Vice President (Green Party ‘08); Leila Steinberg, activist; artist; organizer; founder Alternative Intervention Models; former manager of Tupac Shakur and founder of The Microphone Series, an artist development workshop; Mora Namdar, 3L WCL, activist and organizer on issues and youth movements related to political and human rights in Iran, founder and Editor- in-Chief of AU National Security Law Brief.

These amazing women hit the issues from police brutality to racism to COINTELPRO. It was amazing to listen to them, and for the panel not to be specifically “women’s issues,” but as experts and intellectuals on a grand scale.

Another highlight for me was this performance by Gabriel Teodros. In a brilliant rhyme he called out “pseudo liberals afraid of the real conversation,” ahem, 1/2 of my school.

I also got to meet Head-Roc a local DC hip hop activist. He is an artists who has been very involved in the D.C. Statehood movement. Go New Columbia!

I really want to recommend the film Beyond Beats and Rhymes to you, internet. We watched it during the lunch break at the Conference. It’s about misogyny and homophobia in Hip Hop music. It is really amazing. I highly recommend it, but it’s not suitable not for little ones… as the music videos they highlight are pretty horrific (hence, the point).

That’s right. We hit ALL the issues.

My vicarious street-cred has increased exponentially by just attending this conference, but if you are interested in knowing how my closing remarks went, you can pretty much just watch this video:

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By kate, December 12, 2010 5:11 pm

Read this In Praise of Wikileaks.

People are saying, the leaked documents are “no big deal,” or talking about how we all already know that the government lies, so what’s the big deal?

Let me tell you what the big deal is.

The big deal to me is that suspicion is different than specifics. You can go around talking about government plots to thwart the judicial systems in other countries, or to back an illegal coup but, you are dismissed as a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.

When these things are no longer theories held by the overly imaginative, but are plain and simple (documented) fact, we have no excuse not to act. If we go on and simply ignore this as “business as usual” when we know the intimate details of the horror and corruption, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

The big deal is: We no longer have the luxury of pretending its a secret.

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By kate, November 30, 2010 10:48 pm

In lieu of writing a 30 pg. legal paper for my Feminist Jurisprudence class, I am making a documentary film.

No, I do not know how to make a documentary film. But, I am learning. And, I now am now amazed and floored by every documentary I have ever seen, because I understand what an extreme amount of work went into the projects.

For my project I am making a mini-documentary where I interview four women I know about reproductive issues and how they have affected their lives. I am interviewing:

• Donna: My mother who gave up a baby for adoption at age 15 in 1972.
• Anne: My sister who was surrendered to another family and later found my mother after receiving her original birth certificate when she turned 18. She is now a single mother.
• Ashley: My best friend who is currently single and pregnant and has decided against abortion. She is torn between keeping the baby and surrendering her baby.
• Briana: Another dear friend who is a direct entry (home birth) midwife by profession and is Ashley’s midwife.

The purpose of the film is to record women’s stories from their own mouths, and to help illustrate themes and to go about “exploring common experiences and patterns that emerge from shared telling of life events,” this way, “[w]hat were experienced as personal hurts individually suffered reveal themselves as a collective experience of oppression.” Leslie Bender, A Lawyer’s Primer on Feminist Theory and Tort. 1988.

I hope I can adequately edit the film to do justice to these amazing narratives.

This clip is a bit of the unedited (unprocessed sound, without music etc.) footage. Even in its unadulterated form, it is beautiful.

If any blogsters out there are interested in helping with the project & have access to an HD capable camera in Utah, we are in desperate need of more b roll footage of Ashley & Briana for the film. So, let me know if you know of anyone who would be up to the challenge! Who wouldn’t want to follow these amazing women around with a camera?!??

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom from Neil Ransom on Vimeo.

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By kate, October 27, 2010 10:19 pm

If you are in law school, have ever attended law school, or know anyone who wants to go to law school: this will be the most hilarious thing you have ever witnessed in your entire life.

Period.

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By kate, October 20, 2010 8:06 am

Christine O’Donnell walked into the legal-world equivalent of a lion’s den and did not come out alive.

You do not have to be a law student or professor (although that was the audience she was addressing at Widener law school) to know that the separation of church and state is addressed in the 1st Amendment.

Apparently, however, this knowledge is not a requisite to run for Senate. O’Donnell repeatedly attacks her opponent, Chris Coons, for “falsely” stating that the idea of “separation of church and state” is in the U.S. Constitution.

Yikes!

The worst part is that O’Donnell kept heckling her opponent as if she had got the best of him.

Ok, there are really two worst parts… the other is that when everyone was laughing out loud AT her she has a smirk on her face like they are laughing at her zinger of a line.

God bless America.

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By kate, September 14, 2010 12:23 pm

This week a friend told me about a gang of women who are gathering together and taking concrete action to avenge the simple and devastating imbalance of power between the sexes they experience. The Gulabi Gang.
The Gulabi [Pink] Gang is a group of Dalit (untouchable) women who live in extreme poverty and an environment of extreme oppression against women. The police and the government will not help them, and so instead of seeking redress of their grievances through the normal bureaucratic channels, they take matters into their own hands.
If a woman comes to their leader seeking refuge from an abusive husband, the gang will go to his house, all dressed in pink saris, and demand that he modify his behavior… or be beaten to a pulp. The group also takes on causes that affect all poor people, men and women. For example, “Last year… the Gang unearthed corruption in the local public food distribution system. A government-run shop was siphoning off tons of grain that was meant to be handed out free to the poor and selling it on the black market—until the night neighboring Gulabi Gang members, … stopped two trucks loaded with grain. … the women managed to deflate the truck’s tires and confiscate their keys. The pink vigilantes then successfully pressured their local government to seize the grain and properly distribute it.”
For my Feminist Jurisprudence class (yes, my school is awesome) I read “Toward a Theory of Law and Patriarchy,” where the author Janet Rifkin discusses the legitimizing of a patriarchal legal system by seeking redress through it. She says, “The reliance on litigation reflects the belief in law as a source of social change, while ignoring the ideological power of law to mask social reality and block social change.” She notes that while some token battles for women are won through the bureaucracy, “the basic sexual hierarchy is not changed.”
The Gulabi Gang does not buy into the ideology of law. They seem to intuitively understand the deep roots of their anger and oppression. The pink vigilantes do not accept that they must go to the police (all male) to have justice. They find power in women, and seek change, not by asking for power from men, but by wrenching it from their tight grasp themselves. They see to it that men suffer public shame, if necessary, so that women are not the only ones to suffer the consequences of abuse and shame.
I wish that we American women could learn a lesson from these courageous Indian sisters. I wish every woman had a group of pink-saried women to knock down the doors of oppressors and avenge the savage inequalities she experiences. I fear we, all too often, buy into what Rifkin calls the “mythological vision” of the world that law presents in relation to women. By buying into the patriarchy as a source of authority, we reinforce its legitimacy and dilute the momentum necessary for a true revolution. We think that a man (or the patriarchy) must give us legitimacy, or acknowledge our concerns out of benevolence. We have got to realize, like the Gulabi Gang, that we do not have to be given legitimacy; we must demand it.

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By kate, September 10, 2010 7:53 am

I know I am prone to hyperbole, but this is the most amazing thing ever accomplished by a canine, and perhaps a human being.

PS in case you didn’t know, I am now a dog lover. Well, really just a Bernese Mountain Dog lover (and an occasional Basset Hound)

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By kate, July 28, 2010 9:52 am

Apparently Elle fashion magazine ran this spread.

Seriously?

Seriously?

Do these people have no shame?

Answer: yes, they do not have any shame.