February 2010
“One 8-year-old girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still...”
– Baptists say they were trying to do good in Haiti - Yahoo! News (h/t @ilauredhel)
January 2010
Anna Quindlen Has Met the Enemy, and it is Us
newsweek:
Photo: Khue Bui for Newsweek
AQ writes on how the biggest task in politics is just getting everyone to pay attention:
At the moment the problem in Washington is us, not them, or at least how they try to figure us out. Good luck with that. One poll of former Obama supporters who abandoned the Democrats in Massachusetts showed that 41 percent of those who opposed the health-care plan...
African summit hears world ignoring Somalia crisis... →
The worsening crisis in Somalia is as big a threat to global security as Afghanistan but is being ignored by the world, delegates told an African Union summit on Sunday. Somalia’s U.N.-backed transitional government is fighting an Islamist insurgency and has been hemmed into a few streets of the capital Mogadishu.
An African Union (AU) peacekeeping force of 5,000, provided by Burundi and...
is the homeless crisis really a health care...
Public costs for homeless individuals in Los Angeles County average about $1,446 per month. However, roughly 80% of homeless individuals have costs below that average, and 40% of homeless individuals have public costs of less than $500. It is the extremely high public costs of the most expensive 10%, $8,083 per month, which raises the overall average. For that most expensive decile, 45% of costs...
“For years, every morning, the sight has been the same at Marcy and Division...”
– Where the Women Wait, an Unwritten Code Is Revised - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com (via kameelahwrites) (via bonesarecoralmade)
“However, I strongly believe people cannot receive messages until they are ready...”
– Latoya (via amandaw)
Haiti, the earthquake, and my family : The New... →
My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.
“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”
“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it should not be.”
“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while.
Americans arrested taking children out of Haiti |... →
Haitian police have arrested 10 U.S. citizens caught trying to take 33 children out of the earthquake-stricken country in a suspected illicit adoption scheme, authorities said on Saturday. The five men and five women were in custody in the capital, Port-au-Prince after their arrests on Friday night.
Authorities said the Americans had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33...
Trade School
so … somewhere along my internet browsing last night, i came across a link to an organization that would let you take classes by bartering skills of your own. i love that kind of idea - i would totally do someone’s turbotax or make them a huge batch of stew or casserole to freeze or drive them somewhere or do some errands for them if they would help me deal with removing the hanging...
Law Requiring Parity of Mental Health Insurance... →
amandaw:
So, if you have health insurance already, and if you have health insurance that offers mental health benefits, then there’s “parity” between mental health and general health benefits.
But given that many people don’t have insurance at all, and most insurance plans do not offer mental health coverage, I don’t see how the word “parity” can be used here with a straight face.
U.S. suspends medical evacuations from Haiti |... →
The U.S. military said on Friday it has stopped flying Haitian earthquake victims to the United States for medical attention following concerns by some state governments about who will pay for the treatment.
“At this moment in time, yes, the flights have stopped,” said Navy Captain Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman for the U.S. Transportation Command, which manages the military’s...
“The first time I bought food on MasterCard, that’s when I knew…You’re in debt....”
– from the Frontline documentary, “Close To Home” (via unburyingthelead)
1 tag
Iran, IAEA say nuclear proposal still on table
that headline is way more bewildering if you read it as IKEA rather than IAEA. self-assembled nukes for all iranians? changeable slipcovers in a variety of pleasing patterns? or is it a metaphor for how everything at IKEA looks wonderous in the store but then you get it home and it’s a bit rickety and perhaps an ill-advised purchase, like how the actuality of nuclear weapons isn’t as...
amandaw:
Today, I looked up two people’s state congresspeople because they wanted to call them to complain about the shitty status of benefits this year. “You know, the legislators are the ones who set the rules. All I can do is follow them. You have the same amount of power to change them as I do: talk to your state senator and state representative, tell them you think this is unacceptable, and...
“As the dark slowly deepens
figures take shape and harden:
great bodies form...”
– poet Dennis Brutus (AFRICA IS A COUNTRY)
Commonwealth to monitor Rwanda's presidential poll... →
The Commonwealth will send a monitoring team to Rwanda’s August presidential election in which incumbent Paul Kagame is likely to seek a second seven-year term, authorities said. On his first visit to Kigali since Rwanda joined the 54-member organization last year, Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma said the Commonwealth would assist in strengthening the central African country’s...
1 tag
J-Logic does NOT like the El Cid management
an excerpt from the most amazing screed ever written by a club promoter:
“we pulled him aside and asked him why he hadn’t returned our calls and where are our bar numbers & he stuttered and stammered and couldn’t really put a sentence together and spewed out something about us not doing a date at el cid in early dec. and we were like huh??? are you high bro because we did dec. 26th with...
se-smith asked: I am wondering if you have ever eaten a peach and encountered sudden startling bitterness in the middle of the sweet, and wondered why that is, and also, how did you feel about it?
bonesarecoralmade-deactivated20 asked: quick word association game:
chanel
cats
obama
defenestrate
mural
riot
clavicle
boulevard
murderous
jubilee
chanel
cats
obama
defenestrate
mural
riot
clavicle
boulevard
murderous
jubilee
open for questions
so i am bored bored bored today and would love to be asked some questions, silly or non. please to assist!
(confidential to previous question asker: yes i’m still sitting on the question about the persuasiveness of all lowercase text because it at root asks me what the hell this blog is for or what its purpose is and i honestly just don’t know and am trying to work it out.)
2 tags
Scott Roeder Found Guilty of First Degree Murder -... →
chuckmore:
Amen.
Walmart Lowers Standards Yet Again with Mass... →
[This week,] some 11,000 Sam’s Club associates were called into meetings and laid off without warning. Most of those workers handed out samples at Sam’s Club stores. But that work will now be taken over by Shopper Events, a company based in Arkansas just a stone’s throw away from Walmart’s corporate headquarters. Shopper Events is described as “the only authorized...
leadership in nigeria
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua of Nigeria has been in Saudi Arabia receiving medical treatment for the past 8 weeks or so. During this entire time, he has not transferred power to a VP or any other official in the Nigerian government, so there has essentially been nobody in power. This is kind of like if Obama took off to Antarctica or something and wasn’t communicating with the U.S. at all...
1 tag
New York Makes First Award: A BIG LASER!
awesomefoundation:
Awesome NY have made their first selection! It was tough NY - you completely blew us away with amazing incredibly brilliant ideas. But - this month, for our inaugural grant, we’ve picked a LASER TWEEZER that makes amoebas eat bacteria. We’ll let Ben do the talking, here’s his original proposal: “How many projects are part lightsaber and part Magic School Bus combined...
“This comment takes umbrage at the use of a word that was in fact “ist” more than...”
– so this comment (yep, still reading) actually kind of raised my eyebrows, all “huh, sounds like someone was called on using some word, my money’s on an ableist word since those words seem to have been the most absorbed into the language, and refused to admit ze could be in the wrong.” and then i...
Food Hardship Report Details Widespread U.S.... →
During 2009, one in five Americans said they lacked the financial resources to provide an adequate amount of food for their families. Furthermore, families with children are disproportionately affected by hunger. The report found that households with children face food hardship at a rate of 1.62 times that of households without young mouths to feed.
Lawyers, Guns and Money: SOTU Rapid Reaction →
He did, though, end on the right tone:
“Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated… the only reason we are here is because generations of Americans weren’t afraid to do what was hard.”
Well said, Mr. President.
i am going to have to go ahead and disagree with that quote. we are not a nation of generations of united americans unafraid to take on thorny...
I Just Remembered Chris Matthews Was White →
I’m put back in the mind of the The Wire, when Slim Charles tells Avon that it really doesn’t matter that our wars are based on a lie. Once we’re fighting, we fight on that lie until the end. I would submit that a significant number of white people in this country, can not stop fighting on the lie. They can’t cop to the fact that they really have no standing to speak on...