July 2012
26 posts
5 tags
A look at today's headlines....
via Democracy Now!
1.) U.N. Arms Treaty Talks Fail Before Deadline
2.) U.S. Foreign Weapons Sales at Record in 2012
1.) U.S. Drone Attack Kills 7 in Pakistan
2.) 240,000 Pakistani Children at Risk After Taliban Bans Vaccinations in Protest of U.S.
1.) Romney Falls Short of Backing Pre-Emptive Israeli Strike
2.) Obama Unveils New Military Aid to Israel
Can you draw the connections?
5 tags
"Memo to Mitt: The Palestinians’ Problems Aren’t... →
Good narrative Mitt, Palestinians just haven’t advanced enough culturally.
1 tag
“I’m not going to censor myself to protect your ignorance.”
– Jon Stewart
8 tags
“Freedom”
Rick Perry is the latest in a string of governors to reject the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. The reasons range from such falsehoods as, “Medicaid is a broken system” to “we can’t afford it”. The former is a vapid Republican cliché with no basis in fact and the latter is an even more acute lie. The Affordable Care Act states that the federal government will provide for, “the...
4 tags
"Barack, Mitt, and Adam Smith" →
“Everything we mean by a free market depends on a functioning, sympathetic state—a state rooted not in selfish individualism but in a social sympathy so broadly articulated and institutionalized that every man is confident that he can make an honest deal with his fellow man.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/07/barack-mitt-and-adam-smith.html#ixzz21JcecmdG
“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord...”
– “The Value of Nothing” by Raj Pate
(via politicalprof)
3 tags
Texas Conducts 1st Single-Drug Execution →
Why is it that those who oppose the power of the state to provide health care, clean air, and unemployment benefits support the state’s right to murder its own citizens?
Among Western democracies, the U.S. stands alone on the death penalty. After the departure of Nazism and fascism, post-war Europe decided that it maybe wasn’t the best decision to give the state the right to kill its...
“Between 2001 and 2007, some 40,000 U.S. factories closed, eliminating millions...”
– Walmart: 50 Years of Gutting America’s Middle Class (via apsies)
Walmart: Your loss is their shareholder dividend.
(via motherjones)
3 tags
"This Land Is Your Land" →
“THIS JULY 4, the “doodle” for the day on the Google home page was a graphic with the words “This land was made for you and me”—a reference to “This Land Is Your Land,” the famous song by folksinger Woody Guthrie. Conservatives went—to put it mildly—nuts.”
Great little bio piece on Woody Guthrie and the roots of his music.
4 tags
“People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A...”
– George Orwell, Raffles and Miss Blandish
“Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer...”
– Michel Foucault (via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
1 tag
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an...”
– John Steinbeck
3 tags
U.S. Accounts for Bulk of Gov’t Requests on... →
“Twitter has revealed U.S. law enforcement agencies account for the vast majority of requests for its users’ private information. Of around 850 government requests for user information worldwide, 80 percent came from the United States.”
This is what a police state looks like.
PeterWK's Periodical: An abandoned Walmart becomes... →
univisionnews:
Libraries aren’t dead, no matter what you’ve heard.
By LARA FERNANDEZ
Many times abandoned places are left behind, but not in this case. What once was a Walmart is now the largest single-story public library in the United States, reports the design trade site …
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that...”
– Fredrick Douglass. July 5th, 1852 Rochester, NY (via humanformat)
(via shiracoffee)
4th of July →
thepeoplesrecord:
ghosthustler:
The myth of American Independence is exactly that — a myth.
I advise anybody who feels otherwise to read this chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
It lays out far more concisely than I ever could the racist, classist motivations of the founding fathers, and the complete ineffectuality of the revolution in bringing about “liberty”,...
11 tags
Plans
Plans are nothing.
We think they’re something, or rather, like to think they’re something. They give us comfort. The notion that we can control and shape all these things. We can to a degree. Certainly we all have responsibility over our own actions and we can certainly act together to meet common goals. But the idea that we can count on the weather, the actions of others, or the direction of the...
