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Google Reader to Get Google+ Integration | Mashable! • Todd Wasserman
The changes, which are “highly requested,” according to Google software engineer Alan Green, include a new design and the retiring of features like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader, which will be supplanted by Google+.
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The history of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow | kottke.org • Jason Kottke
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Patrick Stump Performs Kanye West Medley A Cappella | Idolator.com • Becky Bain
Today in the ever-growing series of Patrick Stump’s own personal version of The Sing Off, the Soul Punk crooner gives his spin on a number of Kanye West classics in an ambitious a cappella medley. Dude has an entire album’s worth of a cappella gold at this point.
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Daily Kos: Herman Cain is pro-choice (he just doesn’t know it)
Whoa. Herman Cain just articulated exactly what the pro-choice position is. Word for word. He might as well be filming an ad for NARAL. Because that is the pro-choice position: it’s a choice the mother has to make. …
Don’t expect this to remain Herman’s position, though. Just as he said earlier this week that he’d release the prisoners at Guantanamo and negotiate with Al Qaeda, only to reverse himself and say he “misspoke,” someone will no doubt sit Herman down and explain things to him, and he’ll be “misspoking” this too.
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Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You’d be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.
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Occupy Wall St. Care Packages (tumblr)
This is a collection of notes, cards, and letters of support enclosed with contributions and care packages sent from across the US–and around the world–to Occupy Wall Street.
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Occupy Wall Street is a healthy and robust occupation right now. It is swarming with media… every day there is some kind of an action that pulls into focus how poor, working class and middle class Americans are being made to shoulder the burdens of society …
Nearly a half million dollars has been raised to support the occupation so far. Occupy Wall Street could eventually purchase storefront property in the Financial District to help keep the action going through the winter.
That cannot be said for the majority of other occupations in the United States. Here are some of the other occupations in the country that are ongoing and deserve much more coverage: …
This is why I will be forming a schedule for a tour of occupations that are ongoing. I will be visiting these occupations over the next couple of weeks. …
What occupations should I stop at as Firedoglake’s tour of the occupations presses on?
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Fact and fiction about student loans | Felix Salmon
This chart shows the total stock of credit-card and student-loan debt, up to the second quarter of 2011. The most recent figures show total credit-card debt at $690 billion, and total student-loan debt at $550 billion. It is not true that Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards, and total student-loan debt isn’t even close to $1 trillion.
Unfortunately, Cauchon’s article is seeping into the blogosphere: Suzy Khimm picked up on it today, and Kevin Drum and Eyder Peralta followed her lead, asking for “more analysis, please”. Which is always a good thing to ask for, when USA Today can’t get its facts straight.
As for what the real facts show, I think it’s pretty clear: the stock of student loans outstanding continues to increase at a pretty much the same pace it’s been rising at for the past six or seven years.
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The Associated Press put out a story this week showing that South Carolina’s voter I.D. law “appears to be hitting black precincts in the state the hardest.”
One person who really loved the story was Wesley Donehue, the CEO of Donehue Direct and a political strategist for the South Carolina Senate Republican Caucus, who took to Twitter to write that the story “proves EXACTLY why we need Voter ID in SC.”
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Statistics Have A Well-Known Keynesian Bias – NYTimes.com
OK, several correspondents have weighed in on the story I’d heard about the economics department that abandoned econometrics because it was rejecting its models. It wasn’t quite as alleged, but close enough.
The department in question was the University of Minnesota. …
So the story as I now have it was that there was harsh conflict between the macroeconomic theorists at UMinn, especially Prescott, and the econometricians who had the nasty habit of showing that those models didn’t work.
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How Occupy Wall Street Is Like the Internet – Conor Friedersdorf – Technology – The Atlantic
Here is the Cliff’s Note version: If you’re raging against the symbol of Wall Street, your message is going to resonate with a lot of people. But it’s so abstract that it’s going to provoke a backlash too — after all, for some people Wall Street remains a symbol of free enterprise and meritocracy. The case against symbolic Wall Street turns out to be weaker than the one against actual Wall Street, I wrote, since actual Wall Street’s firms did specific unethical and illegal things.
To practice the kind of grounded-in-the-real-world critique I was preaching, I even offered a specific criticism of actual Wall Street.
…I now understand a little better what it means for a protest movement to be without “a traditional narrative arc,” to be “the product of the decentralized networked-era culture,” to be about “inclusion and groping toward consensus.”
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[Cain of course is not the first person I know of to be both pro-choice and anti-abortion. Pro-choicers have all along known of and supported those who are against abortion FOR THEMSELVES. What makes my brain hurt is that so many people who do understand the government shouldn't get to make decisions about the contents of your uterus are nevertheless lending support to those who are adamantly in favor of government regulation of uteri. -L]
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The Abacus sign | Felix Salmon
…something true, and accurate, and touching, and grammatical, and far too long to be a slogan, and gloriously bereft of punctuation, and ending even more gloriously in a mildly archaic preposition. …
This picture is a vastly better way of bringing Abacus to the public’s attention. And it’s also a fantastic example of why it’s great that OWS isn’t a carefully-organized movement with an easily-identifiable and discrete set of demands. The fact that OWS is open-ended means that it’s much more open to the kind of creativity which went into this sign, and also means that snapshots like this one are much more likely to go viral.
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You smell like bacon to us.
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Encoded Conversations | Anaea Lay – October 12, 2011
I was listening to this conversation very intently, in part because their understanding of current perceptions don’t match mine. Finding out what great transition had occurred to demote Madison schools, why on earth they seem to think sending your kid to West high is tantamount to child abuse, was really important to me. They talked about their reasons, but even though I hung on every word, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying.
…I’m starting to read the constant questioning in regards to the Occupy Wall Street movement along the lines of, “What are their goals?” and “What do they hope to accomplish,” as a code for, “I feel okay, why don’t they?” and “They can’t accomplish anything.”
…[OWS is] a generation waking up to say “What the fuck?” and trying to solve it with conversation and jazz hands.
I’m in such deep wait-and-see mode over the whole thing I’m not even willing to put my current opinions in writing – they’re changing with each new story from a different city. But I will say this: The Occupy Wall Street people are not afraid to name their enemy. They are not afraid to list his crimes. And they are not afraid to confront him directly.
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Steven Greenstreet proves he’s definitely not a misogynist by making rape jokes. — Feministe
Steven Greenstreet is the dude behind the Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street tumblr and video. That video has gotten a lot of attention — a lot of women and some dudes have been like “well this is fucked up,” and then some other dudes have been like “I don’t see what the big deal is, boys will be boys and what’s wrong with wanting to meet attractive women at a protest?”
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Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke acknowledged yesterday that the central bank may need to do a better job dealing with asset bubbles. I think I just heard Dean Baker’s head explode. Specifically, Bernanke said that he would move to use interest rate policy and not just regulatory tools to head off bubbles. …Bernanke is basically engaging in the polar opposite approach of Alan Greenspan – and himself, at the end – during the housing bubble. Greenspan said that the adjustable rate mortgage was an exciting product for consumers to use. Bernanke is saying that he would consider using interest rates to stop the so-called “irrational exuberance” in a particular market. That’s a sea change.But I doubt it will go beyond the theoretical stage unless you do something about the massive conflict of interest at work in the Federal Reserve.
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Multiple Reports Say Gadhafi Captured in Libya. UPDATE: Death Official. | Firedoglake • David Dayen
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Opposes Keystone XL | Tar Sands Action
Today in the Washington Post it was revealed that Sen. Harry Reid has sent a letter to Secretary of State Clinton with his opposition to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. …
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Reading, Writing, Empathy: The Rise of ‘Social Emotional Learning’ – Education – GOOD
At a time of contentious debate over how to reform schools to make teachers more effective and students more successful, “social emotional learning” may be a key part of the solution. An outgrowth of the emotional intelligence framework, popularized by Daniel Goleman, SEL teaches children how to identify and manage emotions and interactions. One of the central considerations of an evolved EQ—as proponents call an “emotional quotient”—is promoting empathy, a critical and often neglected quality in our increasingly interconnected, multicultural world.
…developing empathy in kids requires working on their teachers first.
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If you would, please do yourself a favor and wait for Smooth’s three-card Monte metaphor. It might just make your ears tingle with joy.
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Daily Kos: Why OWS is more important than ever: Global Network of Capitalism Revealed by New Study
New Scientist has a heads up on a study to be published soon at PloS One. The application of techniques used to model complex systems combined with a large economic database….
The researchers used computing power and systems analysis techniques to map out the interlocking relationships and ownerships of 43,000 transnational corporations to elucidate the underlying structure.
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Daily Kos: Veterans face high unemployment, and tax cuts to businesses don’t look like the answer
For all the recruitment ads the military runs about the skills they teach, it turns out that going on the civilian job market having been a multi-channel radio operator, single-channel radio operator and psychological operations specialist doesn’t make most potential employers go “oh, I know just what you can do for me; you’re hired.” And so far, preference for veterans in government jobs, education and job training funding, and private sector efforts to increase hiring of veterans is not making a dent in their abysmal unemployment rate.
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‘Lolpera’ an opera about more than just cats – Press-Telegram
Warkentine and Pedroza took a funny picture of a cat from the humor website www.icanhascheezburger.com and wrote a song about it.
Then they wrote another song about another picture, and, after two years of effort, they had created an entire opera based, at least on the surface, on comic cats (and a walrus). …“It’s all found art, really,” Pedroza concluded.
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GOP Senator Pushes Radical Bill To Restrict Discussion Of Abortion Over The Internet | ThinkProgress
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Massachusetts School Bans Columbus Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving
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Environmental History, Food Security, and African Methods of Production.
Whilst larger faming concerns can afford fertilizer, many of Africa’s smallholders can not. In the past, soil has been improved by rotating crops with nitrogen fixing plants such as legumes, but this is not always possible …
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Oct. 13, 1943 | Italy Switches Sides in World War II – NYTimes.com
…one month after Italy surrendered to Allied forces, it declared war on Nazi Germany, its onetime Axis powers partner.
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Oct. 18, 1968 | American Olympic Medal Winners Suspended for Black Power Salutes – NYTimes.com
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Remains of the Day: Google+ Will Remove the Real Name Restriction | Lifehacker • John Verive
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In the News: Occupy Protests | Librarians’ Internet Index: New This Week • theipl2blog
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Daily Kos: Occupy Wall Street TV commercial set to hit the airwaves
This may well be the first time a protest movement will air a positive branding ad.
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Daily Kos: Arrests at Occupy Long Beach on Oct 16 and 17
Four people were arrested in a planned and peaceful civil disobedience action on Sunday, our second night occupying Lincoln Park. Two were cited and released, one taken to jail, and one to juvenile hall. We didn’t know Jonah is only 17–he led the action.
Check out Renee’s first-person account of that night, with a memorable photo of Jonah’s arrest. …
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Occupy Design is a grassroots project connecting designers with on-the-ground demonstrators in the Occupy Together movement. The project’s goal is to create freely available visual tools around a common graphic language to unite the 99%. The project places an emphasis on producing infographics and icons to improve the communication of the movement’s messages and the data surrounding them across the world.
The site includes a showcase of existing designs, a how-to guide for demonstrators, a graphic toolkit for designers, and a platform for the community to suggest ideas for designs. -
Hip-Hop Past and Present: What Will Be the Legacy?
…hip-hop accurately diagnosed an era of lopsided leadership and shortsighted public policies. See the Furious Five’s “The Message” in 1982, Tupac Shakur’s “Changes” in 1992 and Nas’ “Black Zombie” in 2002. Similar to the memoirs, each one of these songs schooled its audience on issues of a community paralyzed by joblessness, underfunded public schools, lack of health care, lack of community vision, gang violence and drug infestations. From this perspective, the legacy of hip-hop rests on enlightening listeners and teaching the values of life through complex storytelling.
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Who does God want in the White House? – CNN.com
It is beginning to feel like if we don’t start pushing back soon, in the next election we’re going to see campaign slogans like, “Vote for me or God won’t bless America.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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