Category Archives: Viva!

What we talk about when we talk about women and aging | Fit and Feminist

We are told we will become invisible. That we will be ugly hags that no one will ever desire sexually again.  That we will be biologically worthless once we can no longer bear children.Lies. It’s all lies. It’s not our aging they fear.  It’s our power.  Confident women still scare the shit out of many people in our society. What better way to undermine that confidence than by making us terrified of the single biological reality we cannot escape no matter what we do?We’re scary because we see through your bullshit. We’re scary because we don’t need your approval.  We’re scary because we don’t need you.

Source: What we talk about when we talk about women and aging | Fit and Feminist

US immigration raids as seen from El Salvador

Central America is at the gates of a wave of deportations of its undocumented citizens in the US which will aggravate the precarious situation of the region and could lead to a “certain death” for thousands who left fleeing the gangs.

This is the opening paragraph from an article in El Salvador’s leading newspaper La Prensa Grafica on Sunday.   This paragraph highlights how Salvadorans are viewing the raids by US immigration authorities starting New Years weekend which rounded up Central Americans who were under orders of deportation.  The news coverage of these immigration raids at migrant’s homes and the subsequent deportations has been constant.

Church leaders in El Salvador denounced the deportations.  The Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar, used the occasion of his Sunday press conference to call on president Obama to stop the deportations.    Escobar labelled the deportations unjust and urged the US to adopt comprehensive immigration reform.  Salvadoran Lutheran bishop Medardo Gomez called for migrants who had fled for their lives to be granted asylum in the US, and warned of what could befall them if they were sent back to El Salvador.

US Ambassador to El Salvador Mari Carmen Aponte was forced to give a press conference to defend her country’s actions.   She stated that families need to understand that there are consequences for failing to comply with US immigration law which had not changed.   Those who failed to comply with the law would be deported, she said, emphasizing that the current round-ups were for those persons who already had an order of deportation after immigration courts had determined they did not qualify for any available status to remain.

The Salvadoran government announced a program for re-integration of Salavadorans deported back to the country.  

What the New York Times calls a shameful roundup of refugees has been a major foreign policy mistake for the US.    The number of Central Americans being deported in these raids is tiny compared to the more than 21,000 Salvadorans deported from the US and Mexico in 2015.  But the result has been news coverage in El Salvador and throughout Central America where  the US is easily portrayed as a heartless country rounding up mothers and children at the beginning of a new year and sending them back to mortal danger.  It might be a policy intended for political benefits in the US, but if the idea was to deter more migrants from coming it won’t work.    The only thing getting more news coverage than the immigration raids is the record wave of violence which forces people to flee..

How I went from a 4:49 marathon to running a BQ

you go

Fit and Feminist

A commenter asked me last week to write up a straight-forward post looking at the path I took to qualifying for the Boston Marathon.  I realized that I’ve dribbled the information all over my blog but I’ve never bothered to do a comprehensive post.  I read a similar post by Teal at Miles to the Trials, where she details her path from a 4:09 marathon to qualifying for the Olympic Trials, and so I’m going to model my post after hers (and by the way, if you haven’t read hers, you should – talk about freaking motivational!)

I ran my first marathon a little over six years ago, at Walt Disney World in Orlando.  My most recent marathon was last March in Albany, Georgia.  I’ve run about one marathon a year since 2010, which is when I decided that it made sense to pay someone a bunch of money to…

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