March 2012
3 posts
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“Admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations.”
– A senior Stratfor executive quoted by a senior figure in the company in one of the exposed e-mails
WikiLeaks Publishes Intelligence Firm Emails
Monday 27 February 2012
by: Somini Sengupta, The New York Times News Service | Report
...
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Nebraska Resurrects "Justifiable Homicide"... →
The legislation, LB 232, was introduced by state Sen. Mark Christensen, a devout Christian and die-hard abortion foe who is opposed to the prodedure even in the case of rape. Unlike its South Dakota counterpart, which would have allowed only a pregnant woman, her husband, her parents, or her children to commit “justifiable homicide” in defense of her fetus, the Nebraska bill would...
February 2012
20 posts
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Mitt Romney’s Abortion Record →
To understand Mitt Romney, you have to understand the most difficult passage of his political life: how he changed his position on abortion. Not the story he tells about it, but the real story. Romney began his political career as a pro-choicer. In the story he tells, he had an epiphany, a flash of insight, and committed himself thereafter to protecting life. But that isn’t what happened. The...
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“A president needs the cunning of a poker player, the preternatural dexterity of...”
– Harry S. Truman
From WHAT IT’S LIKE BEING PRESIDENT, METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING.
BY MARCO KAYE
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-its-like-being-president-metaphorically-speaking
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Queer Sisters Keep Saving Me: The Brilliantly... →
Guest Post by Black Artemis
The Crunk Feminist Collective
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The making of gay marriage’s top foe →
Salon exclusive: How Maggie Gallagher’s college pregnancy made her a single mom, and a traditional marriage zealot
BY MARK OPPENHEIMER
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WatchNEWSROOM (2:54)
In The Know Panel Analyzes Obama’s Furious, Profanity-Filled Rant At Nation
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This Chart Is a Lonely Hunter: The Narrative Eros... →
Essay By REIF LARSEN
We’ve given today’s visual storytellers considerable power: for better or worse, they are the new meaning-makers, the priests of shorthand synthesis. We’re dependent on these priests to scrutinize, bundle, and produce beautiful information for us so that we can have our little infogasm and then retweet the information to our friends.
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“It’s like a doctor going, ‘I’m not concerned about the very healthy, because...”
– Jon Stewart
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On Being Blog: How a Freed Slave's Response to His... →
beingblog:
by David McGuire, guest contributor
As we begin Black History Month, here’s a letter from 1865 making the rounds. In it, Jourdan Anderson, a former slave, responds to his former master Colonel P.H. Anderson, who had written to invite him back to the plantation — this time, with pay.
“Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us...
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“Remember that the word psychiatry means ‘healing the soul’, not ‘medicating the...”
– Elio Frattaroli (via psychotherapy)
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550 seek restitution from Milwaukee Archdiocese →
Associated Press
7:42 a.m. CST, February 2, 2012
About 550 people are asking for restitution for alleged sexual abuse by clergy in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee — more than in any of the other U.S. dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy protection, according to a lawyer involved in the Milwaukee case. …
A victims’ advocacy group called the number of filings “extraordinarily...
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“We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of...”
– Carlos Castaneda
January 2012
66 posts
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Attacks on Social Security, Medicare borrow a... →
For three decades, conservatives’ proposals for dramatic changes to the programs have reflected a divide-and-conquer strategy inspired by the Leninist movement.
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Women in the Battlefield and the Barracks: A... →
by: H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout
The first decade of the 21st century was a record one for women serving in the US military: Women constituted 14 percent of all active duty military (over 200,000), with one in ten serving in the Middle East and 17 percent in the National Guard. Women soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though barred from ground combat, have worked in as dangerous...
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“Our community, much like society-at-large, needs a paradigm shift as it relates...”
– Zerlina Maxwell, Stop Telling Women How to Not Get Raped, Ebony.com, 1/14/12
::wild applause::
(via racialicious)
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Does Wisconsin Still Have a Budget Deficit? →
Governor Walker has been touting the state’s balanced budget. Yet his administration submitted a report to the federal government asking for clearance to cut thousands of people from Medicaid because the state faces a three billion dollar deficit.
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“Sex education should focus not just on the mechanics of heterosexual sex and how...”
– Simone Webb (Underage sex isn’t automatically a problem | Comment is free | The Guardian)
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Your Mind is Your Religion →
DHARMA TALK: Lama Yeshe teaches the importance of regular mental check-ups.
You are intelligent; you know that material objects alone cannot bring you satisfaction, but you don’t have to embark on some emotional, religious trip to examine your own mind. Some people think that they do; that this kind of self-analysis is something spiritual or religious. It’s not necessary to classify...
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Words About Words: 5 Essential Books on Language →
by Maria Popova
We love, love, love words and language. And what better way to celebrate them than through the written word itself? Today, we turn to five of our favorite books on language, spanning the entire spectrum from serious science to serious entertainment value.
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The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious... →
The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
by Clay Johnson
[J]ust like we know we’re products of the food we eat, we must understand just how much we’re products of the information we consume — and consume accordingly.
Linked article by Maria Popova at brainpickings.org
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Pasta by Design - Part II →
“We were interested in, if you like, the amalgamation of mathematics and cooking tips — the profane, the sacred,” Mr. Legendre said. “I was actually speaking to someone in Paris last week who said, ‘This might have been a project by Dali.’ ”
The book classifies 92 types of pasta, organizing them into an evolutionlike family tree. For each, the book provides a mathematical equation, a...
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Pasta by Design - Part I →
Photographs, mathematical equations and descriptions of unusual pasta shapes from the book “Pasta by Design” by George L. Legendre.
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'Don't Make Me Do This!' The Equations Screamed →
You can torture numbers into very unmathematical contortions — contortions that will make you smile.
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Panetta: Could be 19,000 military sex assaults... →
Senior U.S. defense officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, announce new efforts to combat sexual assault in the military.
Panetta spoke two days before the premiere of a new documentary about sexual assault in the U.S. military, titled “The Invisible War.” The film is being shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Saying he wanted to speak directly to...
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Scott Walker Recall Webcam Wisconsin’s Favorite... →
Wisconsin’s latest craze … is a hawt new web show with just a single overhead camera starring the dozen or so people that the Government Accountability Board locks into a secret room at an undisclosed location in Madison each day to verify 1.9 million recall petition signatures one piece of paper, one line at a time. Tens of thousands of viewers have already been sucked in by the phenomenon...
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The Price of Apple →
Best from comments, by hekate_darkness:
None of this is easy to think about, that we may have been complicit in such awfulness. But we owe it to our basic sense of humanity and to future generations to look in the mirror and learn to get the monkey that is corporate (and materialistic) addiction off our backs for good.
The author of the article shows waaay too much of his own privilege, imo,...
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10 Things Customer-Service Reps Won't Tell You →
10. “The machines are winning.”
Call a toll-free customer-service number and a computer often picks up: In fact, 79 of the top 100 online retailers use automated systems …
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Lechery, Immodesty and the Talmud →
From an op-ed in yesterday’s NY Times by Rabbi Dov Linzer, which demonstrates how religions can be/have been/are perverted into a fervor for controlling women’s bodies:
IS it possible for a religious demand for modesty to be about anything other than men controlling women’s bodies? …
This is not a problem unique to Judaism. But the Talmud, the basis for Jewish law, offers a...