"Then I became a sex worker.  A new identity took over the old one.  Another wave of liberation washed over me the first time I danced topless around a pole at the Gold Club in San Francisco in 1999.  Hours before my audition, I plucked out my armpit hair and pulled out the most femme dress I owned, a not so shapely silver rectangle with straps that nevertheless got me my first job in the industry.  Within a week, I had rediscovered all kinds of long repressed gender specific elements that my newly acquired income was now allowing me access to.  [...]  I became a high femme in no time.  I had always had an eye for clothes and fashion, but had been rejecting notions of constructed femininity for the last two years, wearing mostly men’s clothes and nothing on my face but lip liner pencil which I used to both line and shade my lips.  I was a heterosexually identified femme in high school but started to morph into something more androgynous because it seemed to me that femininity did not and could not equal power in a man’s world.  Suddenly, as a new stripper, femininity now equaled power and money.  I became even stronger and more confident.  The color pink represented this new found power to me and it has been my favorite color ever since."

-- Mariko Passion, in Professional Bisexual on marikopassion.wordpress.com

"I am probably blessed with a mild form of bipolarism. I don’t really get clinically depressed.  I don’t stay in bed for weeks, nor do I contemplate suicide.  But I do have my ups and downs and around 2005 this came together with my mid-life crisis and I was mighty grumpy and pissed off.  Sure there were personal factors, but the situation in the Netherlands and the world was part of the problem.  This did get to a point where more and more people were telling me to see a doctor.  They told me: 'There are pills to make you happy again you know…'

Now the role of depression in the individual is understood to be to force change that is painful or expensive in the short term but much needed in the long term.  Reading up on the truly insane numbers of people on anti-depressants and other psychoactive pharmaceuticals in our society, I cannot help but wonder whether this 'unhappiness forces change' principles stops at the individual.  Could it be that we’re prescribing anti-depressants to so many people that we are now below the threshold of relatively smart, relatively resourceful but unhappy people needed to bring change?

My sense is that this is a huge story.  The story of a civilization destroying its capability to fix itself by making everyone artificially happy.  This may not be our field per se, but I feel this is at least as big a story as many of the issues that this community is working on.  I think in future we will see a scientific field called 'pharmacological political science'.  I have a feeling that people of the future cannot really understand our time without it.

One of the positive suggestions we did offer in [my 2005 speech] 'We lost the war' was to focus on battles that could be won.  If I had I listened to all these other people around me, I would have been taking Prozac or Zoloft in 2005.  My life would have been different and possibly much happier, especially in the short term.  But a lot of things that happened to me since then would probably not have happened, because they involve me being angry and attempting to do something about it."

-- Rop Gonggrijp, in his keynote at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.  This written transcript covers his work protecting privacy, exposing voting machine fraud around the world, WikiLeaks, the future, and which way forward for growing the event.

I also loved this bit: "Our leaders are reassuring us that the ship will certainly survive the growing storm. But on closer inspection they are either quietly pocketing the silverware or discreetly making their way to the lifeboats."