9:09 Jun 26th, 2012 | 0 notes

"Heat waves and freak weather events are almost definitely going to continue happening with greater frequency across the U.S. and the world, regardless of the majority’s opinion of the scope of the Commerce or Supremacy Clauses."

5:06 Jun 21st, 2012 | 0 notes

"Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the “have it all” formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism – as opposed to persistent gender inequity – that’s to blame."

3:00 Mar 13th, 2012 | 0 notes
I like the flavor and flexibility of being a sometime meat-eater, of knowing that boeuf bourguignon is still an option and that I don’t have to sweat the menu when I’m traveling or a guest at someone’s home. I also like supporting the hard-working farmers who make their living from their livestock, who aren’t part of the grotesque industrial-meat complex.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

1:28 Feb 27th, 2012 | 0 notes
Right now, it’s a loser’s game to try to find a more ethical smartphone. Everything and everyone is compromised. But it’s a winner’s game to figure out how to use what we’ve got to bring progressive change. We have computers in our pockets that not only connect us more easily and effortlessly to information about what’s going on in the rest of the world than ever before, but also connect us to each other. We might (and we should) feel guilty and ashamed when we stop to think about the suffering of the workers who built those devices, and it sure seems like there’s a hell of a market opportunity for someone who figures out how to build these devices through a clean and green, worker-friendly supply chain, but in the meantime, our best option is to use our devices to learn more, donate money where it is most effective, and make our voices heard. In this crazy ultra-connected world, we might end up surprised at how fast things can turn around.

Andrew Leonard

2:59 Nov 28th, 2011 | 4 notes

"The first test of the Occupy movement was whether it would sustain itself and grow beyond the excitement of its first few days and first major confrontation with law enforcement and whether it could get people to pay attention to it: it passed. The second test was whether a ragtag bunch of protesters could do what American society couldn’t: live in peace, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless: it failed in that; but there’s maybe an argument to be made that if it failed, it failed nobly, doing no worse than than America, with all its means, has done. This is it’s third test: surviving as a movement without the spectacle that kept the media coming back and the sheer exuberance that turned who knows how many people into activists overnight."

9:23 Nov 20th, 2011 | 4 notes

"Arming domestic police forces with para-military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil; they will simply find other, increasingly permissive uses for those weapons."

3:07 Nov 8th, 2011 | 4 notes

"Jackson, on the other hand, was full of bullets from getting shot all the time, and swore a lot, and had a parrot."

1:49 Nov 1st, 2011 | 8 notes
American anger at greedy banks is not a partisan issue. Most Americans have a visceral understanding that the big banks played a key role in precipitating the financial crisis, but got bailed out and returned to profitability while the rest of the country continued to struggle. The fact that readers of the Wall Street Journal, whom you might reasonably expect to skew conservative, are still clicking on the bank fee story, four days after its original publication, is a clear sign of the broad base of resentment against the financial sector.

Salon

11:37 Oct 26th, 2011 | 7 notes

"Pretty much every adult American pays taxes. Workers who are too poor to pay federal income taxes still pay payroll taxes, and property taxes if they own their home. Even the unemployed pay sales taxes. The poorest Americans — people who make an average of $12,500 a year — pay, on average, 16 percent of their paltry income in taxes. That is less than every other demographic, but the point of a progressive tax system is that 16 percent of a poor person’s income is a hell of a lot more meaningful to that person than 30 percent of a millionaire’s."

8:45 Oct 18th, 2011 | 7 notes

"The thing itself is only part of the end. My personal vision is to see many, many more examples of people in their workplaces, in their schools, and in their neighborhoods creating these participatory spaces. Whether you use a general assembly or another form of direct democracy, it doesn’t really matter. The importance is that everyone is participating actively and can make decisions about things that affect their lives because right now we’re excluded from decisions that affect our lives."

must-read article from @salon’s @elliottjustin on how to understand what is going on down at occupy wall street.