May 23, 2015

The Renaissance of Student Activism

“There has been a real powerful sense ... that the future they were promised has been taken away from them.”


by ALIA WONG

Maybe the campus protests seemed rather isolated at first. Dissatisfaction with the administration. Outrage over bad decisions. A student altercation gone bad.

For example: The protest at Florida State University last fall, when students didn’t like the idea of having the Republican state politician John Thrasher as their school’s president and launched a campaign—#SlashThrasher—against his candidacy. Citing the lawmaker’s corporate ties, various groups staged demonstrations, including some who organized a march to the city center.

Or the protest at the University of Michigan in September, when, amid frustrations over their football team’s losses, students rallied at the home of the school’s president to demand that he fire the athletic director. They had more on their minds than lost points: The director had neglected to remove the team’s quarterback from a football game after he suffered a serious head injury that was later diagnosed as a concussion. (The Florida students’ protest failed to change minds at FSU, but Michigan’s athletic director was quickly sent packing.)

There was the confederate-flag fiasco at Bryn Mawr, which resulted in a mass demonstration by hundreds of students who, all dressed in black, called for an end to racism on the Pennsylvania campus. A week later, more than 350 students staged a similar protest further north, at New York’s Colgate University. That one—dubbed #CanYouHearUsNow—likewise aimed to to end bigotry among students and faculty; it was in part prompted by a series of racist Yik Yak posts.

more
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/the-renaissance-of-student-activism/393749/?preview=bsAAn9c5Ovlh5RcfPOWQdcmYu6Y&utm_source=SFTwitter

May 23, 2015

Inside the legal crusade against Colorado’s marijuana laws

ALISON STEWART: Adam Hayward is the sheriff of Deuel County, Nebraska, which is right by the state line with Colorado. Sheriff Hayward says his work hasn’t been the same since Colorado legalized recreational marijuana.

SHERIFF ADAM HAYWARD: Keep it over there. It’s still illegal here. We don’t have a choice. We have to enforce the law.

ALISON STEWART: The sheriff says he’s arrested all sorts of people carrying marijuana back from Colorado along Interstate 76: teenagers making weekend runs to Denver and once a 67 year old grandmother. With each arrest the sheriff collects more and more marijuana. It is cataloged and then stored in the Deuel County jail cell.

SHERIFF ADAM HAYWARD: Now we keep our evidence here.

more

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/inside-crusade-colorados-marijuana-laws/

May 23, 2015

Toon: Sadly, we all expected this...

May 23, 2015

Weekend Toon Roundup 2: The Rest

Ireland Vote




Voters


GOP











Iraq








Duggars






Delegation


Leeches




Oil

May 23, 2015

Weekend Toon Roundup 1:Bankster freedom day

Tuesday May 19th was Bankster Freedom Day, the day after the end of the 90 day period where the AG's office said they would be looking into indicting Banksters. The date passed un-noticed.

May 23, 2015

Astronomers nickname one-of-a-kind Wolf-Rayet star 'Nasty 1'

BERKELEY, Calif., May 22 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope recently spotted a star never-before-seen in the Milky Way, or anywhere else. The massive star, which lies some 3,000 light-years from Earth, has been tentatively labeled a Wolf-Rayet.

But while most Wolf-Rayet stars are marked by their twin polar lobes of burning gas, the newly discovered star is surrounded by a large, flat disk of gas, measuring some 2 trillion miles wide. Scientists believe they're observing a Wolf-Rayet in a never-before-seen (and likely short-lived) transition phase.

The star's catalog name (NaSt1) inspired astronomers to nickname it Nasty 1. But its strange appearance and the source of its unusual nature align with the moniker.

Wolf-Rayet stars are defined by their large size and exposed insides. As these massive stars are stripped of their hydrogen-filled outer layers, they swell in size, and their super-hot helium-burning cores are revealed.

more

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2015/05/22/Astronomers-nickname-one-of-a-kind-Wolf-Rayet-star-Nasty-1/2331432295554/

May 22, 2015

Duggars In The Ditch: Five Offenses And Counting

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

I will grant you that it may be a while before the uncivil schadenfreude of the whole deal recedes enough. I mean, seriously. Is there anything better than the fact that almost every Republican politician of any note has had his picture taken with admitted family-preferential child molester Josh Duggar? Or the fact that serious people within the conservative movement wanted young Josh to run for Congress? Unless, of course, it's the panoply of punchlines regarding the techniques of family research young Josh undertook prior to his job at the Family Research Council. It's time, once again, for Max Von Sydow from Hannah And Her Sisters: "If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

(No, wait. We have another entry. Mama June Shannon, another former star of The "Learning" Channel, who lost her show because one of her boyfriends molested one of her non-Honey Boo Boo daughters, is outraged that she and her infinitely more charming brood -- who never were photographed with Mike Huckabee -- got 86'd while the Duggars for the moment still have their show. There's a fine class-based point to be made here, but it sits at the bottom of a deep lagoon of pure Ick, so to hell with it. Is it too late for someone to turn The "Learning" Channel into another venue for the sale of cubic zirconia?)

Nevertheless, ya haht-less bastids, let's try to stop chuckling for a moment and consider for a moment What It All Means beyond the glorious hypocrisy of it, the tragic-but-hilarious detail of the fact that the original investigating officer is now doing eight-million years for kiddie porn, and the bumbling attempts by Dominion-holding Pa Duggar to bury the whole mess by shipping Josh off as convict labor to one of his pals who needed cheap help...

OK, let's try again. Serious up, people.

I'm sure there's a profound McLuhanesque argument to be found here about how we don't really know the people with whom we identify on our electric teevee sets, and how the very presence of the medium changes the reality of that which is being transmitted, and how because of these factors, the disillusionment resulting from the sad revelations -- And, goddamn, do I feel badly for whichever of the Duggar sisters were the actual victims here. There's no indication from any of the reports that they got any kind of help -- will be sharpened out here in the world.

more
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35184/the-duggar-family-nightmare/

May 22, 2015

The War In The Shadows

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

Do yourself a painful favor and watch the Frontline special currently kicking around on PBS about the CIA's program of systematic torture and the agency's fight to keep its crimes hidden and its criminals beyond the reach of justice. The cold fish of the CIA are truly startling when you realize that these people were formed in what was still a democracy, which has proven to be a marvelous environment in which to create monsters.

After you watch it, and when you're finished being crippled with nausea, you should read the latest from the invaluable Charlie Savage, who asks the only question worth asking.

Secrecy is addictive. It deforms and mutates political institutions the way that alcohol and heroin deforms and mutates individual lives. It forces those institutions to take secrecy itself as their primary constituency. It forces the imperatives of secrets onto institutions designed to be free and open and democratically accountable. This is really what you're being asked to debate when Chris Christie bellows about your not having civil liberties when you're dead, or when Marco Rubio talks tough about what has to be done to maintain our values. The answer to Savage's question is a definitive "no," but that doesn't really mean much any more.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35175/democracy-dies-in-the-dark/?click=welcome-ad

May 22, 2015

Jobs plummet in Kansas at worst possible time for Gov. Sam Brownback amid budget crisis

BY YAEL T. ABOUHALKAH
abouhalkah@kcstar.com

The new jobs report released Friday contained all-around horrible news for Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, the Legislature and Kansans themselves.

▪ Total nonfarm jobs in April fell by 2,300 over March.

▪ Total private sector jobs plummeted by 2,900 for the month.

▪ Kansas actually has now lost 300 total nonfarm jobs in the first four months of the year.

▪ The state’s usually rock-solid unemployment rate went up to 4.3 percent in April.

▪ Finally, over a longer time period, Kansas has gained only 11,300 total nonfarm jobs in the last 12 months. That’s an average of fewer than 1,000 a month — far short of the 2,000-a-month pledge that Brownback is hoping for in private sector employment.

All of this information comes at a time when the Legislature is desperately trying to close a $400 million revenue gap in the proposed budget.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/yael-t-abouhalkah/article21670374.html#storylink=cpy

May 22, 2015

Paul Krugman: Trade and Trust

One of the Obama administration’s underrated virtues is its intellectual honesty. Yes, Republicans see deception and sinister ulterior motives everywhere, but they’re just projecting. The truth is that, in the policy areas I follow, this White House has been remarkably clear and straightforward about what it’s doing and why.

Every area, that is, except one: international trade and investment.

I don’t know why the president has chosen to make the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership such a policy priority. Still, there is an argument to be made for such a deal, and some reasonable, well-intentioned people are supporting the initiative.

But other reasonable, well-intentioned people have serious questions about what’s going on. And I would have expected a good-faith effort to answer those questions. Unfortunately, that’s not at all what has been happening. Instead, the selling of the 12-nation Pacific Rim pact has the feel of a snow job. Officials have evaded the main concerns about the content of a potential deal; they’ve belittled and dismissed the critics; and they’ve made blithe assurances that turn out not to be true.

more

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/opinion/paul-krugman-trade-and-trust.html?ref=opinion&_r=0