February 2012
163 posts
Why does 76 percent of the Ron Paul's Super PAC... →
it should come as a shock and disappointment to his followers that Ron Paul’s single largest donor—his Sheldon Adelson, as it were—founded a controversial defense contractor, Palantir Technologies, that profits from government espionage work for the CIA, FBI and other agencies, and which last year was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting American political opponents of the US Chamber...
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What's Wrong With This Argument?
Another factor I’ve noticed with my bankruptcy clients is that a very rich person whose income takes a sudden precipitous drop to a still-pretty-good income can actually wind up in more financial trouble, faster, than a very poor person whose income drops to zero. If you were making $300k a year and spending $200k of it on fixed expenses, and your household income drops to $125k a year,...
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A. in May
Alfresco on a chairbed the woman confirms the natural. Natural it is to be disgusted and hopeless. Disgusted and hopeless at being related to her, Relating to her is what keeps me alive. Even the unfair trees and the lawn are alive. Alive with beating life she flies in the face of Five w’s: what when where why why? On the chairbed she is breaking out of the sun and the lawn. Really, out of the...
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“The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and...”
– From a report on the Occupy movement by the Department of Homeland Security, released by Wikileaks. For more on this, read Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone.
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“The culture is intense, an Amalgamated higher-up acknowledges at the beginning...”
– From “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave” by Mac McClelland (Mother Jones, March/April 2012)
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Editors' Note (March/April 2012)
The Occupy Wall Street protests are not visible in our cities now, but their remarkable impact is clear for all to see. Large questions about the fairness of our economic system, once excluded from conversations among “serious people,” have been restored to a prominent place in public discussion. But questions do not answer themselves. What can we do to reduce the stark inequalities that...
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Millions Join Strikes Across India Demanding... →
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Myths About the Etymology of "Dude"
“The simple fact is that Mr. Oelrichs, who is distinguished by a deep contempt for effeminacy in either dress or manner, sat one day at a window gazing out on Fifth Avenue. Along came a very much overdressed youth, with so mincing a gait, that involuntarily one of the clubmen with Mr. Oelrichs [the Union Club is meant] began humming an accompaniment to the step, thus: ‘du, da, de, du-du,...
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Storms Without Names
In Central America—where infrastructure is already often subpar or nonexistent, most people don’t have insurance, and the regional poverty rate hovers around 50 percent—small fluctuations in the climate can pose existential threats. Like poverty, climate change is what writer Rob Nixon has coined “slow violence.” Its effects are directly visible only in their most extreme incarnations:...
“We’re living in unequal societies, but what makes the inequality noxious, and...”
– Will Hutton (via azspot)
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Must See TV: Felix Salmon Interviews Occupy the...
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“Five years after the debut of his first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar...”
– Junot Diaz is publishing a new book of short stories. (via libraryjournal)
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Mother Jones obtains Syrian government hit list... →
producermatthew:
From Mother Jones:
A 718-page digital document obtained by Mother Jones contains names, phone numbers, neighborhoods, and alleged activities of thousands of dissidents apparently targeted by the Syrian government. Three experts asked separately by Mother Jones to examine the document—essentially a massive spreadsheet, whose contents are in Arabic—say they believe that it is...
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“Sotheby’s actions are a direct attack on the Museum’s mission to support and...”
– Whitney Biennial Breaks with Corporate Sponsors; Apologizes to Participating Artists (via alternetows)
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Dear Day,
Lately I am more aware of how easily you might lope carelessly off into a fog of never and gray, and so when you come in the morning with your pincers on, when you wake me with your snorts and hacks, when you lie down next to me with your scales poking all my soft places, I hold you to me. The bruises will heal, and it isn’t your fault you’re so spiny. Day, you lower your monstrous head and let...
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MF Global's Jimmy Cayne
Another important figure in the Chicago office is Christine Serwinski, the firm’s chief financial officer for North America. But Ms. Serwinski’s knowledge of the firm’s downfall is limited because she was absent for much of that final week in October. Some people close to the firm have attributed her absence to vacation — specifically a trip to a ballroom dancing competition.
From...
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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?... →