April 13, 2011 archive

from firefly-dreaming 13.4.11

This is an Open Thread

Essays Featured Wednesday the 13th of April:

Highway Song begins the day in Late Night Karaoke, mishima DJs

TheMomCat most kindly gives us a repeat performance of her Health & Fitness News.

Todays recipes focus on Desert!

originally posted on Saturdays at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Wednesday Open Thoughts from Youffraita are some great LoL’s

Today Gabriel D‘s Perfect Conversation discussion is centered on & around:

the idea of The Lottery Exemption

Gha!

Pine Cones on the Stoop from Wendys Wink, republished by RiaD

from Timbuk3: The 100 Greatest Rock Songs of All Time!

Tonight #83

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

Wednesday is mishima‘s well deserved day of rest.

and these featured articles-

The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is an Open Thread

I Put A Spell On You

‘Brave New World’ the third most censored book in America, librarians say

Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World placed third in the American Library Association’s (ALA) Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010.

The most common reason the futuristic novel, written by the British author in 1931 and published in 1932, was requested to be restricted or removed from libraries was because of its alleged insensitivity, offensive language, racism, and sexually explicit content.

Brave New World is set in the London of 2540 AD, where mass production has inundated nearly every aspect of society, free-love is mandatory and residents keep themselves in a happy stupor by self-medicating with an antidepressant-like drug called soma.

Unlike George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel 1984, Huxley’s novel envisioned a totalitarian government than used distractions and pleasures to suppress the population rather than brute force and propaganda.

The novel ranks fifth on a Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Equal Pay Requires Specific Strategies

An occasion marked perfunctorily, but rarely beyond it by much of the media, yesterday was Equal Pay Day.  The day was so named to underscore how far into the calendar year it takes women to equal their male colleagues regarding income, which is well over four months.  Even when mentioned at all, few networks felt it necessary to spell out precisely how this inequality manifests itself, nor wished to show the persistent adversity faced by women who challenge established ways.  That would have required in-depth analysis and a panel of talking heads, which may have shed some light on the topic, though not necessarily.  Accordingly, it is a bit of an understatement to reduce the challenges that face women by referring to one, singular glass ceiling.  In reality, there are many glass ceilings.  Some of them are higher than others, and each of them has to be shattered in different ways.  Every industry has its own standards and historical gender makeup, and so strategies to equalize income between men and women will need to reflect this.

Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Health and Fitness weekly diary which is cross-posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette. It is open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Desserts for the Conscientious

Photobucket

Apple Clafoutis

Winter Strawberry Gelato

Honey-Baked Pears

Grapefruit Ice

Pear and Red Wine Sorbet

Never Forget

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Truth About the Confederacy

Tony Wikrent, Corrente

Mon, 04/11/2011 – 10:03pm

The 150th anniversary of the Fort Sumter bombardment that formally began the Civil War is tomorrow, and wrong-wingers throughout the South and the rest of America are fixing a big celebration. There’s going to be a seemingly infinite issuance of blogs, articles, radio interviews, and television appearances that will proffer a prettified picture of a brave and stolid South, courageously defending the “true conservative Constitutional” principles of states rights, individual responsibility, and limited government. If you’re one of the many Americans who don’t really know that much about the Civil War, you have probably been perplexed by the number of wrong-wing Republican politicians who have made open statements of admiration the past year or two for the Confederate ideas of states rights and secession. This very lengthy diary is designed to fully inform you what the Confederacy was really like – a society suffering acutely from class differences; a society ruled by a slave holding oligarchy that was sickeningly arrogant and grasping, as well as racist. A number of myths about have been developed about the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy for over a century, and those myths and lies are probably going to be repeated so often the coming days and weeks that you’re going to want to puke. My intent for this diary is to help shatter those myths and lies.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

If you’re extraordinary, you don’t have to be ordinary. But it isn’t easy. You have to work, learn, learn some more, and be the best at what you do-whatever it happens to be. And you have to keep that thick skin, because all the people who sold out and played the game are going to resent you for succeeding on your own terms.

–anonymous



Pinks

“Pretty Please, Can We Regulate You”

Cenk Uygur and Dylan Ratigan discuss what it is to regulate banks

“Pretty please, can we regulate you with someone you like?”

The fight for Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a “fight worth waging”. Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan

Late Night Karaoke

The inexplicable explained.

IOZ sweeps away the cobwebs of counter-intuitive nonsense to explain that “that is the way that it is because those wielding the levers of power want it that way:”

If you look at “high unemployment” as a desirable state in which the bargaining power of both the employed and the job-seeking is reduced to essentially zero, a state in which individuals and labor unions accept ever-more-disadvantageous wages and working conditions just in order to have a job; in which, in particular, workers desperate not to be fired increase hours worked and output even though their compensation is shrinking; in which profitability increases in part on the backs of those “productivity” gains . . . well, shit, it all makes a lot of sense.  When nice liberals wonder why Barack Obama and the Democrats and the Republicans and Everybody are enacting policies to “harm the labor market,” I would answer that they are enacting policies to harm the labor market. (bold mine)

That wasn’t so hard, wuzzit?  They want to crush labor.  They want slaves.

Gha!



Giants’ Generosity a Godsend

A Photo from Kabul

Farzana Wahidy - Kabul
Photocredit: Farzana Wahidy

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