February 2012
137 posts
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Revolutionary Reads
If you live in the SF Bay Area, you may want to join this reading group being started by Web Editor David Johnson. Be sure to RSVP!
The revolutionary reading group is meeting for the first time, ever, on Wednesday, February 29 at 7:00pm in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s conference room:
Electronic Frontier Foundation 454 Shotwell Street San Francisco, CA 94110
EFF is within walking...
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Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The... →
susie-c:
A preview of my new and rather long...
Massachusetts town vows to defy indefinite... →
glitchthemachine:
A small town in Massachusetts says it is “opting out” of a federal law that allows the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial.
The city of Northampton on Thursday passed a strongly worded resolution (PDF) to protest provisions of the federal government’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which even President Barack Obama said he had “serious...
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It disappeared! Vaporized!
The obscene euphemisms the media has been using to describe MF Global’s theft of customer funds remind me of a routine by comedian Paul Mooney …
White broker, what happened to your customers’ money?
It disappeared.
Really? That’s fascinating. We’ll have to study it and perhaps implement further regulations.
Black broker, what happened to your customers’...
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Perhaps David Graeber Has a Point ...
Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.
Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population, according to a report published...
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WatchOccuprint’s Kickstarter campaign to spread Occupy’s visual culture far and sundry. Consider throwing in a couple of shekels.
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NY TIMES: "Clearly, and without hype, (reporter... →
Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace... →
“[The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and...”
– In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. (via nprfreshair)
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The Book of Jobs
In the end, of course, Jobs would bow to shareholder demands and export the robots’ jobs to cheaper human laborers in China. But that is not part of Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, which makes zero mentions of Foxconn, the million-employee contract manufacturer that ultimately enabled the great iResurrection of America’s favorite iBrand.
Foxconn is a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision, a Taiwanese...
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Summer of '76
When I pulled into the driveway of Harper’s, I parked right by the service bays. Lola’s aging black Ford sedan was parked in front of the gas pumps, untended. I saw Lola standing inside the doorway of the station, the rattling fan whirring away above her head, not moving much air from what I could see. She appeared, to me, to be as untended as her car.
Bob and Billy Harper were sitting on an...
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Cheating Death
What if someone were truly good, a follower of, per Johnston, “the command of agape or radical altruism,” and cared about everyone as if they were herself? That pattern of self-concern would make her a higher-order individual; not quite Humanity, but something like it. If someone conforms to the demands of agape and regards the interests of others as she regards the interests of herself, then...
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“The police couldn’t do nothing. The police was there in my face just...”
– “Hail to the Thief,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2012)— From interviews with participants in riots that took place in England last August, conducted for Reading the Riots, a study by the London School of Economics and the Guardian.
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“He could easily not have known, because as you can imagine, at these kinds of...”
– “French Police Detain Strauss-Kahn for Questioning,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 2012.
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Santorum Good for Chastity-Belt Sales?... →
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“Nobody in the Beltway dinner-party circuit has ever been ostracized for...”
– Paul Krugman, “Hoover/Brüning 2012”
Interview: Anthony Shadid (1968 - 2012)
granta:
On Thursday, Anthony Shadid died in Syria whilst covering an armed insurrection against the government. The following interview was published on August 23, alongside the publication of Shadid’s essay in Ten Years Later,‘The American Age, Iraq’. It is respectfully dedicated to his memory.
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Happy Presidents' Day
We used to celebrate the birthdays of Presidents Washington and Lincoln because of the excellent qualities they had as leaders.
Then we decided to junk that practice in favor of a single day celebrating all presidents. Today we celebrate George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson … all of them, good and bad. In fact, that we set aside a holiday for presidents...
“Occupy the SEC insists there’s no contradiction between its in-the-weeds policy...”
– Occupy the Volcker Rule!, Washington Post. (via susie-c)
“Explanations for why so many Ivy League graduates rush into finance — along with...”
– Ezra Klein, “Harvard’s Liberal-Arts Failure Is Wall Street’s Gain” (via ryking)
Occupy Wall Street Objects to the Occupy Wall... →
anticapitalist:
The formation of an Occupy Wall Street super PAC by an activist in Decatur, Alabama is sparking a backlash from the movement’s organizers in Washington, D.C. and New York City.
This week activist John Paul Thornton opted to fight fire with fire, filing paperwork with the FEC to establish The Occupy Wall Street Political Action Committee, allowing it to raise unlimited...
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Visiting Sunny Chernobyl
Q: What was the biggest learning experience you got from your travels and writing this book?
A: If visiting polluted places taught me one thing, it’s that you can get used to anything. First of all, there’s a huge disconnect between what you expect a devastated environment to look like and how it really seems when you’re inside it. Even though the destinations lived up—or...
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US taxpayers to subsidize $40 billion housing... →
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Anthony Shadid: In Remembrance by Angry Arab →
thenoobyorker:
I was quite sad about the passing of Anthony Shadid. I never met Shadid although we have been in contact first via phone and then on email since his days in the Boston Globe. He was a nice, modest, open-minded, persistent, courageous, and thoughtful reporter. Comrade Talal after reading one of his long pieces on the Arab uprisings wrote to me that he was pleased that there is...
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“We didn’t really know who was going to show up for the occupation. It was all a...”
– David Graeber, “What We Owe to Each Other”
The New Inquiry: Precarity and “affective... →
thenewinquiry:
The word precarity is becoming increasingly fashionable as a way of describing the effects of neoliberal policy. The concept expresses the sense that the state has broken its ideological promise (what Polanyi posited in The Great Transformation) to ameliorate the misery capitalism…
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A Poem for the 99%
If it’s true that a person has to become more than half-
dead to this world to live in it happily, then I’ll be happy
never to live in it happily again. Let the phenomena
alternately capsize and crank me up into the Atlantic
air—I will hang there jangling till the point of view
turns out to be borne on the concave back of some far
too faulty conception of happiness,...
“Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation...”
– Jill Abramson, New York Times executive editor, in her memo to the New York Times newsroom announcing the death of their colleague, Anthony Shadid (via soupsoup)
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Circling the Roundabout: Robert Scheer: Apple’s... →
circlingtheroundabout:
Robert Scheer: Apple’s China Comes Home to Haunt Us | Truthdig
Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only…
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A business idea for JPMorgan Chase
(1) Buy the claims of MF Global customers at a substantial haircut, say 50% of the value.
(2) Lobby the government to bailout the poor customers.
(3) Profit!
— DVJ
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“During the first big demonstrations against the tuition raise, students actually...”
– David Graeber, “What We Owe to Each Other (Part 2 of interview with Boston Review)”
