I will be departing for Australia shortly and my Tumblr activity will be fairly limited for the next couple weeks. But I shall return with a vengeance in June.
America, please try not to start a war or anything while I’m gone. Thx.
“The most significant differences between those who smoked marijuana and those who never or no longer did was that current smokers’ insulin levels were reduced by 16 percent and their insulin resistance (a condition in which the body has trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream) was reduced by 17 percent.” — The Atlantic’s Lindsay Abrams, reporting on the results of a recent study on the health effects of marijuana. In addition, regular pot smokers were skinnier than those who abstained, “even after adjusting for factors like age, sex, tobacco and alcohol use, and physical activity levels,” and had higher levels of HDL (“good cholesterol”). source (via shortformblog)
Why I'm Voting for Her | The Nation -
Next time around…I’m voting for a woman. Not because I believe that the female Democratic candidate (and I think we all have a good idea who that will be) is guaranteed to be the most feminist, but because I’m just too fed up to do anything else. I’ve made a full transition from youthful idealism to jaded orneriness, and my vote will be just as angry as I am.
It would undoubtedly be a cause for celebration to elect the first female President, just as it was thrilling to vote for the first African American President. But if a voter is feeling disenchanted with Obama (and how can they not be?), it’s hard to imagine Clinton improving matters in any significant way. Historically, she’s been more inclined to discard civil liberties and wage unnecessary wars. The likelihood of Clinton implementing sweeping reform, restoring the rule of law, rolling back the war on terror, etc., is virtually nil. By all means, let’s get a woman in the White House, but let’s not do it at the expense of the entire country (or, indeed, at the expense of the inevitable foreign victims of Clinton’s hawkish inclinations).
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When a staffer told Mr. Lopez that she was a victim of a sexual assault in college and that his behavior was particularly upsetting to her, Mr. Lopez brought her head towards him, kissed her forehead and asked if she “felt guilty” about the attack. Lopez then asked her to massage his hand. As she massaged his hand, she began to cry and Mr. Lopez told her, “I like that you’re holding my hand.” She cried harder and Mr. Lopez eventually told her to stop massaging his hand. After the hand massage ended, Mr. Lopez said the staffer would have to “cuddle” with him in his Albany apartment. When the staffer resisted, Mr. Lopez threatened to terminate her, telling her that this would be her last trip to Albany.
At a Long Island restaurant, Mr. Lopez told the same staffer who had massaged his hand to do it again. This time, Mr. Lopez placed his hands on the staffer’s legs which she kept tightly crossed. Mr. Lopez pried her legs open and forced his hand between her legs and high up her inner thigh–in the words of the staffer: “all the way up.”
” — The 10 Worst Allegations Against Vito Lopez in Ethics Report“Whenever someone is accused of racism—even if they are caught saying something patently racist—the response is to deny that they could ever hold any prejudice. We all acknowledge that there is racism in the United States, but we strenuously deny that there are any actual racists.” — Jamelle Bouie
Genius.
The party scenes in Gatsby were exhilarating. I went into the theater anticipating that I’d hate the movie but I found it thoroughly enjoyable.
I also thought the contemporary soundtrack was a good choice as it’s difficult to convey how fun and crazy jazz music was to an audience filled with teenagers who listen to Skrillex.
Very strange to see an Indian actor portraying a Jewish gangster but I suppose they wanted to avoid Fitzgerald’s anti-Semitism.
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4259 days after Sept. 11, One World Trade Center now stands at full height of 1776 feet.
“Every day behind prison walls, inmates—some elderly, some caring for them—wonder…if they, too, are “good” people; if they, too might have contributed something to the world if they had been given the chance to try again. Charles Ramsey did. Can we dare to imagine that there are many others like him?” — Liliana Segura
Sometimes I wonder if our federal officials have ever even heard of the Constitution. According to documents recently obtained by the ACLU, prosecutors at the Justice Department have argued that they do not need a warrant to search through any personal email or social media, public or private.
From CNET:
The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don’t need a search warrant to review Americans’ e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal.
Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they’re not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail. The IRS, on the other hand, publicly said last month that it would abandon a controversial policy that claimed it could get warrantless access to e-mail correspondence.
The U.S. attorney for Manhattan circulated internal instructions, for instance, saying a subpoena — a piece of paper signed by a prosecutor, not a judge — is sufficient to obtain nearly “all records from an ISP.” And the U.S. attorney in Houston recently obtained the “contents of stored communications” from an unnamed Internet service provider without securing a warrant signed by a judge first.
“We really can’t have this patchwork system anymore, where agencies get to decide on an ad hoc basis how privacy-protective they’re going to be,” says Nathan Wessler, an ACLU staff attorney specializing in privacy topics who obtained the documents through open government laws. “Courts and Congress need to step in.”
Like the rest of the bill of rights, the 4th amendment is as clear as a bell. Let’s review it:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In other words, the government cannot simply rummage through or obtain your personal property (digital or tangible) in any way without a warrant. It’s really quite simple. Doesn’t it seem like Eric Holder would know this?
Re: my last post.
The proper function and size of government is a seemingly infinite debate that, at least among politicians who favor rhetoric over reason, has made little headway. But it’s difficult to conceive how basic workplace safety regulations, assuming they are rigorously enforced and substantiated by solid evidence, could be anything but beneficial to the average worker, who is too often a victim of authoritarian employers solely concerned with financial profit. The recent collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh resulted in over 800 deaths that could have been easily prevented. Indeed, we here in the United States and specifically in the great state of New York have a historical model that demonstrates how government regulations can improve working conditions practically overnight.
On March 25, 1911, 146 workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in a building located one block from Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Historian Robert A. Slayton describes the horror of the event in Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith:
James McCadeen, a worker in a nearby building, “saw a girl come to the edge of the roof and stand for a minute. Her hair was in flames. I couldn’t look anymore.” That anonymous victim was joined by many more, who made the impossible choice between being burned alive or jumping to their deaths. Some of them, facing an alleyway, plunged onto a spiked wrought-iron fence and were imapled.
[…]
A New York Times reporter came upon a headless and charred trunk on the sidewalk and inquired of a nearby policeman if it was a man or a woman. The grizzled veteran, who claimed he had worked other New York calamities but they were nothing like this, responded, “It’s human, that’s all you can tell.”
Although it’s true that “accidents happen,” in this instance, the conditions of the factory virtually guaranteed that many workers could not escape in the event of a fire. The back entrance to the building was locked to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks. The door to the staircase opened the wrong way, thus making it difficult for a rushing horde of people to squeeze into the stairwell. The fire escape collapsed as soon as few people tried to step on it. No fire drills had ever been conducted because the factory owners didn’t want to waste time with safety precautions when they could be making money. There was a fire hose, but it barely worked. It took only 30 minutes for 146 workers, most of them women who earned meager pay, to die.
In June of 1911, the Factory Investigation Commission (FIC) was created and Robert Wagner (who would later serve as a U.S. Senator from 1927 to 1949) was named its Chairman and Al Smith (who later ran for President against Herbert Hoover in 1928) its Vice Chairman. The FIC traveled throughout the state, conducted hundreds of interviews, and compiled thousands of pages of testimony. The sweeping investigations discovered, among many other abuses, the horrendous conditions of the canning industry, in which young children, some of them only three years old, worked from 4am to as late as 10pm every day.
In response to their investigations, the FIC created 32 bills, many of which became law. The regulations are now commonplace across the United States. As Slayton explains,
Today doors must egress to the outside, and there is always a panic bar that can be slammed with a foot or shoulder. The commission required that all doors and windows leading to fire escapes be marked with crimson paint, although their original concept called for “a clearly painted sign marked ‘exit’…and in addition, a red light shall be placed over all such exits.” Today’s version is the bright red exit sign we see everywhere…
Fire drills…were also mandated for the first time [and]…sprinklers became mandatory in factories.
All of these new requirements were met with opposition from factory owners who claimed they could not afford the additional costs. Yet somehow, magically, hundreds of thousands of profitable factories still exist in the U.S. today.
Any conversation about individual liberty must acknowledge the tendency, both in the United States and throughout the world, both historically and in the present day, for some business owners to have little regard for their workers, sometimes even to the extent of killing them via negligence. If no powerful entity exists to combat this corporate authoritarianism, then all notions of liberty become mere fantasies totally divorced from everyday reality. The tragedy in Bangladesh is an important reminder of how far we’ve come and of how we went about bettering the lives of millions of workers across the country.
It’s V-E Day.
USA! USA!
(via brooklynmutt)
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