Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is popularly known, could fundamentally change the relationship between working Americans and their government. This could pose an existential threat to the small-government credo that has defined the G.O.P. for four decades.
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"Things in nature often move in complicated ways."
Rather than think of ourselves as isolated islands of microbes, the Hadza teach us that we are better thought of as an archipelago of islands, once seamlessly connected to one another and to a larger metacommunity of microbes via a microbial super highway that runs through the gut and skin/feathers of every animal and water source on the landscape (for those of you keeping up with your homework, this is Macroecology 101). The same can be said for plants and their extraordinary diversity of microbes above (phyllosphere) and below ground (rhizosphere) that the Hadza, and once all humans, interact with on a nearly continues basis.
The boys played endlessly at tracking and hunting, and both boys and girls played at finding and digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building huts, and building other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking their elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and played musical instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even little children played with dangerous things, such as knives and fire, and the adults let them do it, because âHow else will they learn to use these things?â They did all this, and more, not because any adult required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They did it because it was fun and because something deep inside them, the result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally appropriate activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable adults.
Libraries arenât free. And the work that goes into keeping them running (which is a lot more than keeping a bookshelf stocked) is complicated, sometimes thankless and under attack from people who think somehow that libraries are not fashionable enough, not hip or current enough, that our day has passed.
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Designed Conflict Territories- Tobias Revell
The thing we have to consider is who and what we are protesting against. I wonât regurgitate the stacktivism or infrastructure fictions ideas. Chances are, that if youâre here, you know them already but thereâs a general idea that the very shape of global geopolitics has changed in the last 20 years or so and the people in charge are not who we thought they were. To re-word a great Dylan Moran gag: While we were talking, Google very, very gradually built a future around us. (Please replace Google with whatever or whoever you like to satisfy your own biases.) The point stands that the entities constructing and steering our futures, or what they often like to call the future - with all the baggage of powerlessness and inevitability that that wording brings - arenât states, and they work on a completely different geopolitical strata: There is no town square for Google.
When Edward Snowden leaked the details of the PRISM program to the world press, he wasnât revealing anything. We already knew, at some very fundamental level that a vast apparatus existed to observe and harvest us and our âdataâ. Whether through decades of dystopic training or the simple maths of adding ruthless western capitalism and itâs history of paranoia to enabling technology we knew that these things were happening. I wrote some time ago about the fact that the rebalance of power enacted by the PRISM revelations is different to what is easily read - they forced us to react. Snowden issued a call for action, and the world failed to respond. I now have a term for this retreating reaction - shocked acquiescence. When faced with something so large and unfathomable as PRISM or climate change, the most common reaction is to accept or pretend itâs not happening and move on.
So why this response? âThereâs no town square for Googleâ wasnât just a tweetable bite. We have no space in which we can protest, in which we can occupy and configure a conflict besides or in front of the thing we wish to protest and air our grievances against. For both the new geopolitics and the threat of climate change, there is no common language, no common space, no commons.
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Siri can flip coins, roll dice
So far, I canât figure out how to make Siri roll a d20. However, Siriâs coin might occasionally fall into a crack.
Iâm not sure how far back Siriâs been able to do this, but itâs not an iOS 7 addition. Siri can do it on my iOS 6 test device, too.
[via Jerrod H]
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âI always get asked, âWhere do you get your confidence?â I think people are well meaning, but itâs pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, âYou, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. Youâre not skinny, youâre not white, youâre a woman. Why on earth would you feel like youâre worth anything?â There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them. But while Iâm talking about why Iâm so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art.â
âMindy Kaling for the win, ladies and gentlemen.
There is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored.
Larry Page is not going to go to jail. Marissa Mayer is not going to jail - she’s already said she thinks it’s tantamount to treason! The large corporations - whose own business model, after all, is surveillance - have folded their hands and said “we’ve done everything we can within the law to fight this”.
Smashing our smartphones is not a solution. If only it were that simple. That promise of simplicity, in fact, might be why it is so tempting to causally link personal and social problems to certain technologies. It offers a certain comfort to us because we donât have to look to our own crooked hearts for the source of our problems, and it holds out the promise of a relatively painless and straightforward solution.
The assumption the media makes is that something is not important unless a familiar, male white face does it. So, when Dave Eggers decided to rewrite my book as his own novel about a young woman working her way up through Facebook, the Wall Street Journal called it a treatment of âthe essential issues of the day.â
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Rick Owens S/S 2014
Paris, 26th September 2013. Rick Owens has raised the bar.
White chicks? Skinny models? Walk-pose-exit-straightface runway show? Forget those. We got something better for you: Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2014 show.
The show was a step dance performance. As if the show wasnât unusual enough, the cast is truly something different from hundreds of shows weâve been seeing from New York, London, Milan and Paris in this fashion month. It was performed by step dancer girls, and what makes it different is, the majority of them are black, and all of them are plus sizes.
Of course, thereâs definitely debates about the presentation. Some love it. Some hate it. Some confused. Of course, when you see the runway pictures in Style.com you wonât see the usual thing. Youâll be confused, especially if you donât watch the video of the show. But surely, you can tell something is going on.
I think the message is crystal clear. Fashion is an interpretation of visual beauty. And most of the time, fashion didnât represent universal beauty. Fashion often represent only one form of beauty: White and skinny. Which is a shame, because fashion should be representing universal beauty. And when youâre not in on of the âwhiteâ or âskinnyâ category, people valued your self less. You, valued your self less.
Even if itâs not the best collection, this is the best show, best casting of Spring/Summer 2014 for me.
Rick Owens is breaking all rules, murdering all stereotypes of fashion with this show. The message is crystal clear here: DIVERSITY
This is a âFUCK YOUâ in the face for all stereotyping in fashion industry.
My most positive association with Whole Foods is that it was the place I used to steal tea-tree oil toothpicks from when I was quitting smoking. It worked! So thank you, Whole Foods, for having lousy security guards! What goes on in there otherwise has always been pretty offensive to me. A kind of lifestyle-porn orgy, carefully calibrated to make the affluent feel better about themselves and their place in the world.
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blah blah blah, garbage.
Whether our teens will eventually regret the things they post online is the wrong debate to haveâor at least, itâs a debate we should have later on. Instead, we should be asking ourselves why we, as a society, discourage the real teachers, counselors, and principals from seeing a full picture of what their students are up to and what can be done to help.
While gentrification is inevitable, its character is not. Small, personal decisions, like buying your coffee at the local place instead of at Starbucks, can give gentrification in your neighborhood a more organic, human character. So will voting for liberal candidates, who support subsidies for the poor and the elderly, and also donating to and volunteering with charities that support these groups. Don’t be a destructive transient: the future of your neighborhood, and your city, is in your hands.
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Itâs gotten so that when I ride a Citi Bike I invariably end up thinking of all the buildings with their windows shattered, gray snow falling on people trudging in rags on their way to the rat market to buy a nice rat for Thanksgiving.
I did not observe you, but my daughter was with me packing the groceries and saw it all: âEBT: Yeah, right,â you muttered, with that look of disgust that would have shattered someone feeling just a little bit of shame over needing food stamps. As we walked to the car, my daughter told me what had happened, and I sensed her resolve about having made the right decision to work for social justice as she starts her senior year in a social-work program.
Hey, guys. ESPECIALLY âguysâ⌠Watch this. It is very, VERY important that you watch this entire video. THIS is how a Man can be a Feminist. This is how WE, as Men, support the Women and Children in our society.
About halfway through, it starts talking about our obligations to not be âsilent bystandersâ to violence - and it starts with identifying and calling out emotional violence.
When I talk about embracing new Perspectives, pointing out that we are in a battle for the collective soul of our culture, and that every small gesture and change can make a tremendous, unanticipated difference⌠THIS video demonstrates Perfectly what is possible. So please take up the fight against Indifference.
Am I still going to get bookings? Is the promoter still going to book me if I say, âYeah, occasionally I have fellatio with a transsexual?â
There is no way that I could have experienced what Trayvon Martin did (and other black people do) because Iâm white and through white privilege I am immune to systemic racial profiling.