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For twelve years starting in 1982, my partner and I in San Francisco joined with two friends in Seattle to produce Lesbian Contradiction: A Journal of Irreverent Feminism, or LesCon for short. We started out typing four-inch columns of text and laying out what was to become a quarterly tabloid on a homemade light table. We used melted paraffin from an electric waxer to affix strips of paper to guide sheets the size of the final pages. Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a... Read more

Source: Stumbling Towards Old Age appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Remember the “red tsunami”? If you’re like me, you don’t answer the phone if you don’t recognize the number or, lately, the spoofed names. Which begs the question: Who does? People willing to speak with pollsters, I’d wager. Pollsters themselves will explain how they control for this bias, to be sure, but polling itself seems more and more a sucker’s game. Remember predictions last fall of a “red tsunami”? Chris Hayes made that point on Wednesday that the only polls that really matter are the ones voters participate in when they vote. Last night, people voted in elections in two different states. “Those results tell us way more about the state of our democracy and the political strength of the pro-democracy forces in this country than all of today’s other political headlines put together,” says @chrislhayes. pic.twitter.com/SVUPFJ3q1L — All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) September 21, 2023 What special elections around the country tell us is that the GOP is in a hole. And they’re still digging.

Gregory M. Mikkelson

The speed of economic growth hinges to a large extent on the supply of fossil fuel, especially of oil and gas, which depends in turn on pipeline capacity. Thus, if we are to turn the tide against economic growth, pipelines are a good strategic place to start. In what follows I focus on the fight against one pipeline in particular.

Spiderwebs of pipelines hold six continents in thrall to climate-wrecking,

The post How to Take out a Pipeline appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

This week, it was revealed that the Labour Party has further weakened its policies to strengthen workers’ rights.  Labour set out its commitment to ‘raise Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) and make it available to all workers, including the self-employed’ in its 2021 employment rights white paper, A New Deal for Working People. But a document […]

Greetings, Earth farmer. We come in peace. Take us to your leader, the one they call Jake from State Farm.

Snake farm? This is not State Farm? Dammit, Todd, I told you to use Google Maps. Where is State Farm? Take us to State Farm.

What do you mean State Farm is not a farm? Then why would they call it State Farm?

What is insurance?

That sounds like a scam.

I’m glad we agree on something, Earth farmer. Now, please, we must speak with the all-powerful Jake from State Farm.

Of course, he is powerful. We see him constantly on your Earth television, laughing and throwing sports balls with Earth celebrities like Aaron from Green Bay, Patrick from Kansas City, and Drake from Toronto.

Wait, Aaron from Green Bay is now Aaron from New York? We love the Giants from New York.

The Jets?!

Sorry to hear that. We are thankful we don’t have Achilles heels. We don’t even have heels.

Anyway, on with the taking us to your leader.

People who complain of abuse and harassment in the often cosy, claustrophobic and interconnected world of British media face an uphill battle

The task of marketing Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East" is no longer an easy sell.  With the 'democracy' pillar crumbling, the 'stability' pillar is falling apart, as well. And without stability, investors simply run away. 

The post Tel Aviv’s Losing Brands: The Israeli ‘Coup’ and the Death of False Democracy appeared first on MintPress News.

David Sirota speaks with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb about the controversial field of extraterrestrial research.

By turning a hose, concrete and jelly into trumpets, this video melds science, history and art to explain the physics of music

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

AIPAC has given at least $3.6 million to the CBC’s old guard since last year, while members of the Squad draw the Israel lobby’s ire.

The post AIPAC Targets Black Democrats — While the Congressional Black Caucus Stays Silent appeared first on The Intercept.

Thousands of pages of newly released documents detail CBP’s involvement in policing the 2020 racial justice protests.

The post Uninvited and Unaccountable: How CBP Policed George Floyd Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

Behind the philosopher’s cryptic phrase is an invocation to sculpt your ideal self out of the hard stone of your psyche

- by Ryan A Bush

Read at Psyche

Long derided as mere coincidences, acrostics in ancient poetry are finally being taken seriously – with astonishing results

- by Julia Hejduk

Read at Aeon

The reaction to the Russell Brand allegations shows why so many women don't feel safe reporting the crimes against them, reports Jamie Klingler

Mathematics is a limited component of solutions to real-world problems, as it expresses only what is expected to be true if all our assumptions are correct, including implicit assumptions that are omnipresent and often incorrect. Statistical methods are rife with implicit assumptions whose violation can be life-threatening when results from them are used to set […]

Opponents of the bill say it is designed to undermine the freedom of speech of those critical of the Israeli Government

The Prime Minister's abandonment of a series of climate pledges hides a much bigger failure, writes Rachel Donald

I am now in a very hot and humid Kyoto having left Australia yesterday in weather that was in some places 20 or more degrees Celsius above the norm for early Spring. The heat here and back home at this time of year is rather scary given what it portends. I also do not have…

Money is something you can (sometimes) exchange for wealth, but it’s not wealth itself.

When I say sometimes I mean that there are things you can’t buy: what those things are change from place to place and time to time. The classic formulation of the preconditions for capitalism includes the ability to buy land, labor and capital. In most places and times you couldn’t actually hire most people to work–they were bound to the land, their clans, or whatever or they could support themselves and sure didn’t want to work for someone else.

Likewise most land was inherited or in the commons and definitely not for sale. You couldn’t buy it.

Wealth is what you control (not own, control) that can be used to make something, grow something or support violent people.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

The Government's commitment to build more homes, while protecting wildlife from deadly pollutants is "failing to deliver for either side"

All is not lost: The Republican Party’s increasing Trump-era tendency toward more extreme nominees and its struggles to account for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade have already cost it plenty. It’s quite possible that these things cost it control of the Senate in both the 2020 and 2022 elections. If unpopular GOP nominees in key states had merely matched the political fundamentals, Republicans might have held the Senate for the duration of Joe Biden’s presidency and had a much more significant House majority with which to work today. Now, these same things may have cost Republicans control of a state. New Hampshire on Tuesday became the latest state in which Democrats over-performed in a special election — a trend that has held very steady ever since Roe was overturned last summer. Democrat Hal Rafter won by 12 points in a state House district that went narrowly for Donald Trump in 2020.