February 2012
Facebook – The Second Birth of a Mighty Titan or... →
Simply put, with its frontiers all but expanded to their limits, if Facebook wants to keep going it must try to dig deeper into its existing user base in search of profit. To do this it will have to become ever more intrusive in its advertising and marketing methods. Yet this will turn people off the platform and diminish its popularity. So, Facebook finds itself caught between a rock and a hard...
Rep. Bachus faces insider-trading investigation -... →
The Office of Congressional Ethics is investigating the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee over possible violations of insider-trading laws, according to individuals familiar with the case.
Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), who holds one of the most influential positions in the House, has been a frequent trader on Capitol Hill, buying stock options while overseeing the nation’s...
Reuters, NBC, Fox, CBS Renting Tel Aviv Rooftops... →
journalofajournalist:
Interesting link from Globes, Israel’s main business program. News outlets such as Reuters have been renting rooftops in Tel Aviv; television news producers have also been making arrangements for Iran-Israel war coverage. Article’s Hebrew-only, but Google Translate gives the gist.
Really there is no adequate response to this
Students At Catholic Colleges Protest Lack Of...
letterstomycountry:
From HuffPo:
WASHINGTON — Single, 18-year-old female, likes having control over her own body, looking for affordable birth control.
That’s Keely Monroe’s summary of her life at Fordham University, a Jesuit college in New York. “Finding contraception at Fordham was about as easy as finding a good man from a want ad,” Monroe said of her alma mater at a press conference held...
A broken underwater wellhead has been dumping... →
“Although Gingrich attacks Romney for what he’s done to US workers, there’s an...”
– Mitt Romney, ‘welfare queen’ - Opinion - Al Jazeera English (via progressivefriends)
“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract...”
– Alabama State Senator thinks raising teacher pay is against the teachings of the Bible (via desertmar)
So we should pay teachers less to make sure only people who really really really want to be teachers become teachers? WHAT THE FUCK. Teaching is one of the hardest jobs out there. Unlike office...
1 tag
Why?
Why can I not chose which blog I want to post to with the mouse? Why must I scroll down and down and down to get to Other Stuff?
What does Highlight this post mean? (Don’t ignore it like all my other posts? What is the point?)
Survey | Majority of Catholics Think Employers... →
A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad... →
jonathan-cunningham:
mehreenkasana:
“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,” the intelligence officer said. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”
There is no denying that there is a covert, bloody, and ongoing campaign aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear program, though no evidence has emerged...
“Among the most contested provisions of the bill is the section that would exempt...”
– Kansas Abortion Bill Would Impose Sweeping Restrictions
A wrongful death suit could still be filed, however, if the mother died.
So, a man could sue if his wife died, but a woman wouldn’t be able sue on her own behalf if she is damaged. Gosh, Kansas, it’s almost as if you are saying that women...
Privacy Death Stars Approved By Congress →
Today, it is tricky for governments and corporations to constantly spy on people using drones. By 2015, it wil be much much easier, thanks to a Monday Congressional vote authorizing drones above 400 feet, in the same airspace as commercial airliners.
At last, we can be monitored around the clock by high-altitude Privacy Death Stars.
"The GOP wants to save zygotes so they can later...
leftish:
~ Talyn04
Or put them to work as child janitors.
A brief 3-question survey about American foreign... →
kimjonggoon:
kimjonggoon:
PLEASE ANSWER TRUTHFULLY AND ONLY SELECT ONE ANSWER FOR EACH QUESTION TO ENSURE YOUR RESULTS WILL BE COUNTED!
guys, i need about 250 more people to take the survey in order to get the sample size i want. please help me out, i’m almost there!
Renewables Will Bring Golden Age Of Free Energy →
kp777:
by Susan Kraemer Earth Techling February 8th, 2012
From the article: Most people understand that once solar panels are paid off, the energy they provide is free.
But what about on a national level? Many haven’t really internalized the corresponding fact. The same people worry that government investment in solar, or policies that encourage it, is somehow wasting money. But solar works...
I just figured out that
inothernews:
the (run by men) Catholic Church is so against the policy of having to provide contraceptives to their employees under their health plan because some of those employees who are probably Catholic will actually want said contraceptives and then oh my God, the paperwork when the (run by men) Church has to excommunicate someone, OMG OMG! Also, they’d lose another member (from a Church...
Dire Warnings Over Muslim American Terrorists... →
almaswithinalmas:
A new study of homegrown terrorism involving Muslim Americans suggests that the alarm bells set off by Republicans in Congress over sleeper cells of Islamic extremists may be much too loud.
Despite warnings of a potential wave of violent attacks hatched on U.S. soil, research by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security finds that the number of attacks committed...
New Hampshire Republicans Propose Bill To... →
sarahlee310:
New Hampshire’s GOP legislature has come up with all manner of absurd bills recently, including a proposal making public school curriculum optional, another to prevent police from protecting domestic abuse victims, and even a measure mandating that new laws be based on the Magna Carta. Some of the Granite State’s GOP lawmakers have even proposed doing away with the law that...
O'Keefe Releases Another New Video Fraudulently... →
In his latest video, O’Keefe two illustrated claims are:
1) No ID is needed to register to vote in Minnesota and
2) After registering without an ID, one could subsequently vote fraudulently via absentee ballot.
Both of those claims are, by and large, true-ish —- at least in Minnesota, though in many other states as well. But there are two key points, one for each of his claims, that...
Obama's "Controversial" Birth Control Rule On... →
President Barack Obama’s decision to require most employers to cover birth control and insurers to offer it at no cost has created a firestorm of controversy. But the central mandate—that most employers have to cover preventative care for women—has been law for over a decade. This point has been completely lost in the current controversy, as Republican presidential candidates and social...
And It Was Wrong →
sarahlee310:
And it was Wrong is a grassroots compilation of women’s experiences with sexual assault.
It is a project made up of women giving voice to a problem society silences: that of sexual assault as it occurs in our everyday lives. We share our stories because together we can define sexual assault, not as it is convenient for those who perpetrate it but to reflect and validate what...
Scientists image plants warning of danger and... →
geopsych:
“Increasingly they [scientists] believe there’s a chatter in plants all around us.”
One of my early recollections was from an article in the parent magazine of Ranger Rick — I have forgotten the name — but the article was about plants and how they seemed to react more to threats than to actions. They had measurable responses to threats of clipping, but very little...
California Nuclear Plant Suffered Steam Tube... →
miraclesawake:
The San Onofre nuclear power plant leaked radioactive gas last week when steam generating tubes ruptured. Indeed, hundreds of tubes at the San Onofre nuclear plant are experiencing problems.
(To add insult to injury, a worker also fell into a nuclear refueling pool at San Onofre. He may have swallowed fuel particles in radioactive water.)
James Chambers – a licensed nuclear...
Question for liberals
stfuconservatives:
liberalchristian:
stfuconservatives:
thetruthisouttheree:
Okay, so I know that one of the major criticisms Democrats make about Republicans is that we don’t care for the poor.
How do you figure that? You’re right that we don’t want the government to do that through the welfare/ food stamp system. But this is not because we’re greedy and unwilling to help people. It’s...
“Proposition 8 served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the...”
– Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Kick-Ass Mega-Judge (via jessethorn)
Raise the Crime Rate →
Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential...
There is this guy....
sarahlee310:
who lives in a community near me. He has been hauled in by the police a number of times for violence against various partners. Each time, the women - for all the reasons women in such situations do - lots of poverty, too few places to live, fear of recrimination by his relatives, believing the sad requests for forgiveness, needing to be loved by someone… - these women didn’t...
yobaba:
The concept of “personhood” defines human life as beginning at the moment of conception and, in the case of Oklahoma’s pending Senate Bill 1433, says that the resulting fetus “at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.” If Senate Bill 1433 were to become law, all forms of abortion and...
BP is rich as shit →
anticapitalist:
BP returned to profit with a bang last year, posting net earnings of $23.9 billion on Tuesday as the British energy giant prepares for a criminal trial linked to the US Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.
BP announced adjusted profit after tax equivalent to 18.2 billion euros for 2011, as higher oil prices offset a drop in production, according to a group statement.
The company...
The moral of this story is that Mitt Romney is a... →
“There is a country where the leading cause of death of pregnant women is murder...”
– Jessica Valenti, in “Equality begins at home: U.S. lags pathetically behind other nations in some basic rights for women.” (via azelie)
Also: “For all of our rhetoric about respecting mothers and parenthood, the United States is the only industrialized nation without paid maternity leave, putting...
“[The] transfer of any military aid now sends the wrong message, both to the...”
– U.S. must bring pressure to bear on Bahrain | The Washington Post (via theamericanbear)
“The moral failings of advanced liberal societies, not least this one, tend to be...”
– Adam Gopnik (via letterstomycountry)
Bowing to golden calf wasn't always the human way →
The first economic exchanges, in a tribal setting, were based on networks of mutual support and reciprocity. Early tribal societies were more about giving away than hoarding, because the gift economy strengthened the network of mutual obligations. Graeber’s anthropological point of view supports the ideas of University of Bologna professor of economics Stefano Zamagni, who has long argued that...
U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners →
The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.
The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”… .
...
Governor Plays Politics With Cancer Research →
kohenari:
Gov. Dave Heineman compared the University of Nebraska to a wealthy “special interest group” with its hand out for taxpayer dollars while the state’s citizens want tax relief.
Heineman, in an interview Friday, said that his top priority remains passage of his proposed tax-cut package and that the university needs to reprioritize its spending or use private dollars from its...
Do People Become More Conservative as They Age? →
Amidst the bipartisan banter of election season, there persists an enduring belief that people get more conservative as they age — making older people more likely to vote for Republican candidates. Ongoing research, however, fails to back up the stereotype. While there is some evidence that today’s seniors may be more conservative than today’s youth, that’s not because older folks are more...