[Signal boosts are awesome.
...zomg, Yahoo! is axing, er, selling Delicious.com!
...And over here on the calm planet, I am looking into my options.
--L.]
- Moore and me continues (Pandagon – Amanda Marcotte)
- …Assange is being targeted for something other than the actual rape charges, and…it’s still wrong to engage in standard issue rape apologist crap…
…#mooreandme [is] being flooded… Michael Moore, along with Keith Olbermann, are waiting this out, letting the overt woman-haters …wear down the feminists…
Read [Sady's entire post, which] makes a good case [that] shutting women up about the injustice of rape apologism is paralleled to the shutting of women up about actually being raped. It’s all about using sexist stereotypes and lies against women…
Ironically, this is how the powers that be are trying to shut Wikileaks down—by making people involved choose between self-preservation and justice.
[I didn't link to Sady's post yesterday because I wanted to quote at least a thousand words of it. SERIOUSLY, (if you have the spoons for reading about rape culture today), READ SADY--click through to Marcotte's post for the link. -L]
- John McCain thinks all liberals went to Harvard
- [Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte]
[video]
…he’s trying to create a dichotomy between Real Americans With Patriotic Family Values Who Only Have Missionary Heterosex In The Dark Before Praying and Perverted Liberals Who Eat Bon Bons And Screw Each Other In The Ass For Fun On Big Piles Of Money. And I’m going to say there’s a lot more overlap there than you’d think.
- Talking Dolls of 1890
- Back in 1890, Thomas Edison worked on a miniature phonograph to go inside a "talking" doll. The dolls were expensive and the technology didn't work very well, so the dolls were a commercial failure. This article provides an interesting look at this bit of period technology, including a recording of the doll's voice:…
- Not Just A Contact Form
- [WordPress.com - Joseph Scott]
The short version of this story is that the contact form on WordPress.com has been upgraded. But that leaves out so many of the juicy details :-)
A couple of months ago we took a step back to look at what sort of things the comment form needed and what it could be. While this is still technically a contact form, it is now so much more…
[Custom form builder, and responses stored in database.]
- Would-Be Jurors Stage ‘Mutiny’ in Marijuana Case
- [Law.com]
More than two dozen Montana residents told a judge last week there was no way they would convict anybody of having a couple buds of pot, prompting attorneys to reach a plea agreement.
- Off The Rails: The Year In Fox News Misinformation
- As the year comes to a close, Media Matters offers a month-by-month look back at Fox News' most outrageous and factually challenged moments of 2010.
- White House staff: It gets better
- [The Maddow Blog - Laura Conaway]
We're not where we should be, but I think this means we're getting closer.
- 2010 Census Results (Calitics – Robert Cruickshank)
- This morning the US Census Bureau released its official population count for the nation… For the first time since 1930, California will not gain a seat in the House – our growth rate of 10% wasn't nearly enough to keep up with states like Texas…
…a Congressional district now represents about 708,000 people. By contrast, after the 1790 Census a Congressional district represented about 34,000 people. Since 1913 the size of the House was capped at 435. It's an absurd situation, and the House needs to be expanded so that each district represents around 100,000 people…
[Holy crap. My hometown would be five congressional districts all by itself. -L]
Sound far-fetched? A new lawsuit seeks to force the House to expand, claiming the current cap of 435 is a violation of the "one man, one vote" doctrine:…
…huge Congressional districts distort power and, with the Electoral College capped at 538, it distorts the presidential vote as well.
- Haiti: An Overview of MSF Operations in 2010 | Doctors Without Borders
- [Doctors Without Borders]
none
- The Brooklyn Grange, a commercial rooftop farm in New York City
- One of the biggest farms in New York City, the Brooklyn Grange, sits six stories above the sidewalks of Queens. It has over a million pounds of soil and spans an acre, with a view of the Manhattan skyline in the distance. The rooftop farm is the first of many the founders of Brooklyn Grange plan to build; they have visions of kale and tomatoes spilling over rooftops across the city to the delight of locavores. Now in their second year, they are looking to increase their growing power and encourage others around the world. We recently spoke with Ben Flanner, Brooklyn Grange's head farmer, about how a rooftop farm works and solicited his advice for urban farming hopefuls….
- Minimizing historical injustices
- [Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte]
[On the supporter's of Michael Moore's recent asshattery, the real reason for the Civil War, Falwell's anti-segregationist history, Haley Barbour's probable racism, etc. As provocative as usual, with some actual facts and reasonable arguments mixed in. -L]
…they deny the Holocaust because they don't want to confront what their own anti-Semiticism led to in the past. Or, in the case of the trolls on #mooreandme, they deny that rape is a real problem and always has been, because they don't want to confront their own resentments of women's right to control their own bodies, or really struggle with the fact that most of their people (in this case, men) have, throughout most of history, treated women like they were subhuman…
I understand the urge to minimize. Acknowledging how ugly people can get to places of power in our country is hard to do. But please don’t. [Collective denial] is why someone like Barbour can get as far as he has.
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
The Of interest (Tue, Dec 21st, 12pm) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.