May 2013
this ain't livin': Stop Telling Minorities Not to... →
When minority groups express offense about something that’s happening, and when they join forces in large enough numbers to make their voices heard over the din of the majority, that takes courage, and it takes organising, and it takes anger, and it takes solidarity. And that means that members of the majority should probably be listening to what is going on, rather than attempting to crush the...
A new GOP bill would prevent the government from... →
In what’s becoming a biennial tradition, another House Republican wants to cut the Census down to size. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) is rolling out the Census Reform Act this week, having formally introduced it April 18. The bill, as Michael McAuliff of the Huffington Post notes, would abolish the Current Population Survey, which is used to compute the unemployment rate and labor force...
this ain't livin': My Real Concern About the Great... →
What the horsemeat controversy showed was that our meat is routinely contaminated, and that the inspection process for identifying contamination is not working. If horse can end up in processed meat products, that means that other harmful components can too. For example, tissue from the nervous system like brains and spinal cords, which is banned from meat due to concerns about spongiform...
Global Comment: If I could trust TV... →
Every now and then, I like to indulge myself with fantasies of storylines that could be, if only I could trust television to do them right. Those dreams loom especially large in the wake of finale season, when I think ahead to what we’ll be seeing on network television in the fall, and wonder if this is perhaps the year when television breaks out of itself to do something amazing. Which shows...
Mark Mardell at BBC News: America's Latino future →
The young girls slip long dresses of fuchsia and aquamarine over T-shirts and shorts, swishing and swirling them in time to the beat. The teenage boys, solemn in concentration, join in, stepping and stamping, hands clasped behind their backs. They are clearly having fun, but they and their parents are clear this is not just about keeping them amused. It is about nourishing their Mexican roots,...
Carolyn Jones at Texas Observer: State Left... →
The Observer has learned that the state health department left unspent approximately $2.3 million in family-planning funds in the past year while scores of clinics closed due to lack of money and tens of thousands of women lost access to reproductive care. The Texas Department of State Health Services has about $2.3 million left unspent from a federal family planning grant that totals $14.5...
Der Spiegel: Jobless Youth: Europe's Hollow... →
Four years ago — that was before the euro crisis began. Since then, the Greek government has approved a series of austerity programs, which have been especially hard on young people. The unemployment rate among Greeks under 25 has been above 50 percent for months. The situation is similarly dramatic in Spain, Portugal and Italy. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics...
Amanda Lee Myers at AP: Women sad, angry over sale... →
Under the deal with Western & Southern, the women living at the Anna Louise will stay there until a new building for them is finished, in about two years. It will be located in a shabby neighborhood on a busy street 2 miles north of where they are now. The nearest park is a 1.5-mile walk away, over a freeway. “Western & Southern had the money to fight and the Anna Louise Inn...
9 hilariously bizarre items for “stylish” pets |... →
Watch your “meow mixer” scratch along with Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories with this delightful scratch pad!
I can’t. I am failing to can.
Indian Country Today Media Network: Mohawk... →
From beginning to end, from rise to fall to rise again, the noble Mohawk ironworkers have shepherded the sky-scraping towers of the World Trade Center in New York City into existence. “I worked on the building for four years,” third-generation ironworker John McGowan, Kahnawà:ke, told Kahnawake411, the newspaper for the reserve just outside Montreal. He was recalling his role in building the new...
this ain't livin': Laying Some History On You: The... →
Across the US as a whole, the Asian-American community was already organising, fighting civil rights battles, getting involved, uniting across racial lines to address common issues. The Vincent Chin case became a crystallising moment for the movement, uniting people from a variety of backgrounds in the fight for justice for both Chin and his family. Furious at the fact that his murderers...
Jamilah King at Colorlines: Ryan Coogler’s... →
The film captured the hearts of viewers earlier this year at Sundance, where it won the coveted Grand Jury Prize. For Coogler, who’s an Oakland native, that was an incredible turning point. “To speak on the national stage, which is Sundance, was really something,” he told USA Today. “And to (now) be on the international stage, that means everything to me.”
Rowan Moore Gerety at Guernica: Mozambique’s... →
Isabel Pedro, a farmer from the village of Malabo, remembers being skeptical about resettlement from the start. Now in her late forties, Pedro has cracked feet and strong, lined hands. She has grown food her whole life—corn, bananas, pigeon peas, cassava—using little more than a machete and a broad hoe to work her machamba, or garden, on the banks of the Revuboe river. In Tete province, arid and...
Danny Katch at Socialist Worker: They do protect... →
The mayor likes to imply that stop-and-frisk is a heroic anti-racist cause and that its critics, many of whom are longtime civil rights activists, just don’t care about the safety of people of color. Last month, Bloomberg called out the New York Times, which has belatedly begun pointing out that a policy of mass interrogation of youth of color without probable cause just might be...
Tumblr...
Are we going to have to have another talk about how it’s important to credit and attribute work, and how you shouldn’t engage in copyright infringement (reposting material from other sites in full, for those of you who are vague on the topic)? Because I would like to NOT have to have that talk with you again, since it feels like we just had it.
Oh, we are? Okay.
So here’s the...
Misquotation: “Beam me up, Scotty”
oupacademic:
‘Beam me up, Scotty’, now used to indicate a desire to be removed from a dangerous or difficult situation, is supposedly the form in which Captain Kirk of the television series Star Trek (1966 onwards) habitually requested to be returned from a planet to the Starship Enterprise. In fact, the nearest equivalent found is, ‘Beam us up, Mr Scott’, which occurs in the episode ‘Gamesters...
Southern Poverty Law Center: Groundbreaking SPLC... →
When M.C. was just 16 months old and in the care of the South Carolina Department of Social Services, doctors and department officials decided the child should undergo sex assignment surgery to make M.C. a girl. There was no medical reason to perform this surgery, which robbed M.C. not only of his healthy genital tissue but also of the opportunity to decide what should happen to his own body....
this ain't livin': WisCon Preparations: A Brave... →
This, too, speaks to the idea that disabled bodies are public property. These notions about disabled people and their bodies, and the tools they need to live, are widespread and have serious implications when it comes to making policy, making medical decisions, and just plain etiquette. This is a brave new world of bioethics we live in, and it’s one in which we need to be prepared to face some...
xoJane: Don't Gender Me, Bro: Writing Under a... →
Writing under a name that can be interpreted in any number of ways has provided a fascinating education in how people construct gender on the basis of very few social cues, and how they’re willing to overlook cues in order to maintain their idea of a writer’s gender. It’s also illustrated how important it seems to be to many people to know what someone’s gender is, to force someone into a tight...
Ian Millhiser at Think Progress: Two GOP Judges... →
Two events this morning strike at the heart of whether workers have the right to organize. The first is a brand new decision by two Republican judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit striking down President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The second is a confirmation hearing, coincidentally being held this morning, on five...
xoJane: H&M's NBD Approach to Plus-Size Models... →
And as with the reception to Justine LeGault’s “Elle Quebec” cover, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People are really excited to see Runk appearing as the face of H&M and she’s been deluged in new Facebook fans, letters of praise, and more. Are we seriously starting to see a revolt, a sea change, when it comes to the perception of larger women in popular culture? Because this...
Peter Dreier at Truthout: If Frances Kelsey Could... →
In recent weeks, Congress has been looking into last year’s outbreak of meningitis, which killed 53 people and injured more than 700 Americans in 20 states. The cause was a tainted steroid distributed by the New England Compounding Center (NECC), which is part of an obscure $2 billion-a-year niche of the pharmaceutical industry called “compounding pharmacies. Recent reports document...
US Air Force Measures Potato Cannon Muzzle... →
A question that will have passed through the minds of many hobbyists is: what is the best fuel for a potato cannon? Today, they get their answer thanks to the work of Michael Courtney at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado and another Courtney at BTG Research in Colorado Springs. These guys have measured the speed at which an accelerated potato leaves the muzzle of a cannon powered...
this ain't livin': Locked Out of the Academy: When... →
This becomes especially charged when we’re talking about marginalised groups like women of colour organising and working online, or members of the trans community, many of whom have expressed feelings of violation and dismay at the discovery of studies about their online communities. And even more dismay at the fact that these studies are often inaccessible to them; they’re individual theses...
Richard A. Lovett at Scientific American: Climate... →
Global warming is changing the location of Earth’s geographic poles, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, report that increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet — and to a lesser degree, ice loss in other parts of the globe — helped to shift the North Pole several centimeters east each year since 2005. “There was a big...
Martin Hesse, Jörg Schmitt and Wieland Wagner at... →
“They came onto my property three years ago without warning,” the farmer says. Since he was a child, his family had lived on the patch of land, extracting oil from palm fruits. “We were able to make a living from it,” he says. But then HAGL sent in its clearing squad. “They felled the trees and burnt the rest down, including our house.” More than 8,000...
Socialist Worker: Targeting Portland teachers →
With language that could have been written in the 19th century, the district’s proposal increases the official teacher workday from 7.5 hours to “generally” 8 hours. At the same time, its offer cuts high school teacher planning and preparation time from 90 minutes to 60 minutes per day, a reduction of 2.5 hours per week. Does the district really believe that “the...
Michelle Diament at Disability Scoop: For Kids... →
Children with autism see simple movements twice as fast as their typically developing peers, new research suggests, a finding that could help explain why many with the developmental disorder are sensitive to noise, light and other stimuli.
this ain't livin': 'Guest' Worker Visas are a... →
The Southern Poverty Law Center has looked closely at the problems with existing ‘guest’ worker programmes in the US and has identified a number of key issues that need to be addressed. The organisation identifies conditions ‘close to slavery,’ documenting workers held in debt servitude, forced to live in squalid conditions, deprived of contact with the outside world, denied benefits, refused...
xoJane: I Have the BRCA Mutation, But Unlike... →
Your followup appointment, where you discuss that results, is the one where your life can change dramatically. Maybe you didn’t inherit that family gene. Maybe you did, but your risks are comparatively low; maybe you should consider getting mammograms a bit earlier, although there’s some debate over whether early mammograms are as helpful as we think they are. Maybe you should take tamoxifen as...
Annalisa Quinn at NPR: Book News: Amazon Debuts... →
Amazon debuted a virtual currency called “Amazon Coins” on Monday. The coins can be used to buy apps in Amazon’s Appstore and on Kindle Fire. A dollar will get you 100 of the new coins, though the Internet retailer will discount coins bought in bulk. Although you can’t yet buy books with Amazon Coins, the move has raised eyebrows in the publishing industry. Amazon did not...
Lynn Stuart Parramore at AlterNet: The Vicious New... →
Gangsta-style big banks have taken up where this character left off. They may not send a guy to break your kneecaps, but they are working in the shadows, chasing down debts from credit cards using methods that are both fraudulent and unlawful. They do this whether you actually owe the money or not. Here’s the skinny: After widespread outrage over the big banks’ last crime wave against the...
