If you spend time with me in real life or follow me on Facebook, you know I’ve been donating to the Center for Nonviolence since the summer of 2020 when it finally became impossible for me to ignore the injustice that surrounds me, yet rarely touches me. I chose them because I wanted to support a local organization focused on building a more just world led by people who could see more clearly than me the ways that violence of all kinds has robbed us, our families, and communities of true freedom to live, love and grow together.

Now, over 2 years later, I’m not only a monthly donor to the Center for Nonviolence, I’m also a volunteer and Coordinating Panel (Board of Directors) member looking for other people who, like me, want to live in a freer, fairer, more loving world. Who are willing to contribute to building…

Sometimes we are just going about our day, minding our own business when out of the blue we are “acted upon by an outside force.” A car cuts in front of us, we get bad news at work (or, more likely, vague news that we don’t know what to do with), Our spouse turns up the TV when we ask for help.

And now we are feeling something.

When emotions wake up, they first try to figure out what woke them and then look for fuel to get bigger. Luckily for them, the brain is there to fill them in. Less luckily for us is brains really like to make stuff up.

So our brain tells a story. When we decide it’s a true story we feed the emotion. The emotion gets bigger and wants a more involved story. The brain is happy to provide. And then we are off…

I read this article sometime last week and my original take away was the intended one: testing is important, we didn’t do it when we needed to, and we aren’t really catching up.

What stuck with me, and prompted me to go back and find the article again was Dr. Helen Y Chu.

The TL;DR is Dr. Chu was all set up to test for seasonal flu and since “a nasal swab is a nasal swab” could fairly easily test for the novel coronavirus as well. In doing so, she’d be able to get a much clearer picture of how much, if any, community spread already existed in Washington state. She asked if she could proceed. The answer was no. She asked again, still no. She decided to do it anyway. When testing uncovered the spread of the virus was already much wider than previously assumed, she was still told…

We’ve said it time and time again: user privacy is important to us. We’re vigilant about protecting it on WordPress.com, and we’re always on the lookout, ready to weigh in on policy proposals that might curtail the privacy that we and our users value so highly.

Today, our focus turns to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for coordinating the internet’s naming system, such as domain names. ICANN is currently considering a proposal that would prohibit many domain owners from using privacy and proxy registration services.

What exactly does this mean? If you’ve ever registered a domain (and millions of you on WordPress.com have), you may have noticed an option to make your personal information, such as your name, address, and phone number, private. This is great for those who want to publish anonymously or those who simply value more privacy. However, ICANN is considering precluding anyone who uses a domain for “commercial” purposes from private…