iO Tillett Wright thanks her parents for not asking her to define herself as a child. Her experience of growing up without having check boxes like “female,” “male,” “gay” or straight” thoroughly infuses her art.

iO’s photography can be seen regularly in two features in The New York Times: Notes from the Underground and The Lowdown. She is also the creator of Self Evident Truths—an ongoing project to document the wide variety of experiences in LGBTQ America. So far, she has photographed about 2,000 people for the project. Her goal: 10,000 portraits and a nationwide rethinking of discriminatory laws.

iO had her first solo show at Fuse gallery in New York City in 2010, and exhibited her latest work at The Hole Gallery in early summer of 2012. She has published three books of photographs; Lose My Number, KISSER, and Look Ma’, No Hands. She has directed several music videos, and spent nineteen years acting in films.

Mano Singham writes: But really, should we be surprised? When Bush was president and waging wars and torturing with abandon, at least some Democrats were up in arms, warning of the grave violations to the constitution and human rights that those actions represented. As soon as Barack Obama took office, he halted torture practices such [...]

1745: Thomas Jefferson and slavery Update — 19 October at 1128: And then there’s the takedown: Henry Wiencek is not at all conflicted. He loathes Thomas Jefferson. In Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, his attempted takedown of the man, the third president appears as a demonic figure warped one summer day [...]

Via What’s Up: WHAT: How To Start A Revolution WHERE: Northwest Akron Branch Library,1720 Shatto Ave., Akron WHEN: Monday, 1 October, 6:30 p.m. WHO: Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee How To Start A Revolution is predominately concerned with Gene Sharp’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, the 198 non-violent “weapons” [...]

0451: Pussy Riot’s jailing: the full story

Thank you Susan Miller. Yesterday morning I wrote about TrapWire, a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology installed it across the U.S. under the radar of most Americans. Trapwire collects video data from thousands of surveillance cameras, according to emails made public by WikiLeaks. When the news broke hacktivists discovered that [...]

[Upate @ 0829 -- From Cleveland Heights City Council Member Bonnie Kaplan: Hi, The cameras in Cleveland Heights are monitored by the Cleveland Hts police dept. There is no secondary monitoring, or data collection system involved. Have a good day. Bonnie Caplan] Glenn Greenwald alerted me to this trending story this morning on Twitter. David [...]

Glenn Greenwald writes: In response to these events, a teenaged member of that mosque, Joplin high school student Laela Zaidi, began using social media such as Reddit to talk about what happened and to discuss the importance of the mosque to her community (it’s not only the town’s only mosque, but the only one within [...]

Juan Cole give us his Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others: 1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” 2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” 3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. 4. The family of a white [...]

Venkatesh Rao writes: The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures — historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion — increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I [...]

There is quite a gulf between: I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married. and: …all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then [...]

Helpful tips from Ruben Bolling for American citizens under: President Barack Hussein Obama’s brave new regime…

Glenn Greenwald writes: The ACLU said last night that the bill contains “harmful provisions that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world” and added: “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage his legacy.” Human [...]

Celebrating recovery…

Over the past couple of weeks Cleveland’s most intelligent blogger Mano Singham posted a 16-part examination of Free Will, or more properly the myth of Free Will. I wrote in several comments that I agreed with his premise — we are biological Skinnerian machines that, if fully understood, would be perfectly predictable — and that [...]

The threats to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as George Orwell so well illustrates in The Road To Wigan Pier, haven’t changed. Even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But [...]

I have long argued that people who think that the Internet is somehow inherently free are delusional. The Internet exists on a mish mosh of government/corporate-owned hardware and the switch can be thrown in an instant. Yes, the consequences of such an act would be catastrophic, and up until now the alternative has been many [...]