Zephyr Dear

1% entering period of crisis as people with too much money prove too stupid to know what to spend it on. Today's edition, Twitter has purchased two 19th century Log Cabins from Montana and plans to install them in its San Francisco headquarters to serve as dining halls. Because, something.

Phil Plait, writing for Slate:

Here’s the thing: If you listen to Fox News, or right-wing radio, or read the denier blogs, you’d have to think climate scientists were complete idiots to miss how fake global warming is. Yet despite this incredibly obvious hoax, no one ever publishes evidence exposing it. Mind you, scientists are a contrary lot. If there were solid evidence that global warming didn’t exist, or that CO2 emissions weren’t the culprit, there would be papers in the journals about it. Lots of them.

I base this on my own experience with contrary data in astronomy. In 1998, two teams of researchers found evidence that the expansion of the Universe was not slowing down, as expected, but actually speeding up. This idea is as crazy as holding a ball in your hand, letting go, and having it fall up, accelerating wildly into the sky. Yet those papers got published. They inspired lively discussion (to say the least) and motivated further observations. Careful, meticulous work was done to eliminate errors and confounding factors, until it became very clear that we were seeing an overturning of the previous paradigm. It took years, but now astronomers accept that the Universal expansion is accelerating and that dark energy is the culprit.

molly-ren:

micahcheek:

therareandferociousswamprabbit:

daveyoufool:

Neither Courage Wolf nor Calming Manatee were doing much to help my anxiety, but I knew they were both on to something.

So, I created Calmage Wolfatee.

I’M SO INSPIRED

Someone needs to make this into a t-shirt

umnachtung:

quillusquillus:

eowyner:

do german snakes go ßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßß

to be honest swiss don’t use ß when writing german so I automatically read that as a raspberry noise

Honor is never enough! This superbly-edited trailer parody of The Wolf of Wall Street by Grant Gourley throws new light upon everyone's favorite Klingon.

Read more...

Prison Architect is forever trapped between two political poles: the side that says that prisoners should be locked up, punished, and left to rot; and the side that thinks they should be reformed, educated, and made better able to return to society and not re-offend. Introversion want both methods to have value within their management game, and alpha 18 takes the first steps towards enabling the liberal half by adding therapists.

Also tazers. New update video below.

… [visit site to read more]

Japan:

It turns out that half of all homes in Japan are demolished within 38 years — compared to 100 years in the U.S.  There is virtually no market for pre-owned homes in Japan, and 60 percent of all homes were built after 1980. In [professor Jiro] Yoshida’s estimation, while land continues to hold value, physical homes become worthless within 30 years. Other studies have shown this to happen in as little as 15 years.

Does this make  sense? Not according to Alastair Townsend, a British-American architect living in Japan, who is perplexed — and awestruck — by the housing scenario there:

TOWNSEND: The houses that are built today exceed the quality of just about any other country in the world, at least for timber buildings. So there’s really no reason that they should drop in value and be demolished.

In a November blog post, Townshend shed light on the cultural logic:

Firstly, Japan fetishizes newness.

The frequent severity of earthquakes has taught its people not to take buildings for granted. And impermanence is an enshrined cultural and religious value (nowhere more so than at Ise’s Grand Shinto Shrine, which is rebuilt every 20 years). These oft-repeated truisms nonetheless fail to offer a sufficient economic rationale for Japan’s ingrained real estate depreciation. Its disposable attitude to housing seems to fly in the face of Western financial sense.

In the country’s rush to industrialize and rebuild cities decimated after WWII, housebuilders rapidly spawned many cheap, low quality wooden frame houses – shoddily built without insulation or proper seismic reinforcement. Older homes from this period are assumed to be substandard, or even toxic, and investing in their maintenance or improvement is considered futile. So, rather than maintain or upgrade them, most are simply torn down.

Listen to a podcast on the topic here.

(Photo of building at the Ise Shrine in Naikū by Flickr user pelican)

Remarks from Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s Shambhala Day Address, March 2, 2014
compiled by President Richard Reoch for The Shambhala Times

“We are entering the Year of the Horse which is very much associated with windhorse and action, a year of doing and accomplishing,” the Sakyong said in his Shambhala Day Address, delivered from Boulder and broadcast worldwide. “It is a hitch up your chuba and roll up your sleeves kind of year!”

Echoing his book, The Shambhala Principle, he told an overflowing gathering in the Boulder shrine room: “We are all deeply concerned intellectually, emotionally and viscerally, about the direction in which society is going.”

“It is important in this constantly shifting world to know how to guide our life and to reflect on the values we share as a community,” he said. “There is so much that can overwhelm us. In the current geopolitical situation we all wonder about the goodness of being human and the goodness of society.”

“Shambhala is about looking up. At an atomic level, we need to understand the purpose of living. We need to re-set our orientation,” he said. “There is a tendency to be depressed, hard and not optimistic. We need to galvanize, not only our own energy, but the energy of community.”

“We are not trying to meditate our way out of the problems,” he said. “The Shambhala teachings talk about the nature and fabric of creating a paradigm shift. We are being asked to become architects of a new civilization, and to ask ourselves, ‘What are the value systems we want to uphold?’”

“One way we do this,” he said,” is by creating a culture of kindness. That would be an intelligent community, being observant of others.” He said that rather than being a culture of separation, fear, mistrust and animosity, it would be what he called a “pro-active culture that manifests our principles.”

~~
The Shambhala Times will be sharing the video of this international broadcast in the coming days, so stay tuned.

All photos of the Sakyong and Sakyong Wangmo and their family are the property of the Sakyong Lhadrang. If you would like to learn more, please visit: www.sakyongladrang.org

Sent to me from Kristycat, because she is awesome: Wendy Darling believed in fairies all her life.

This gave me ALL the blubs, and I think those of you who like post-Narnia Susan fic will like it too. I'm especially impressed at how the author has explored some of the questions we've recently talked about with regards to Lucy Pevensie and the difficulties involved in making friends with "normal" girls after coming back from a fairytale world. (I love-love-love the resolution to this question.)

And my favorite line in this, possibly my favorite line in anything ever, is here:

Wendy wondered what the mermaids would have said, if she had ever learned their tongue. She wondered what stories Tinkerbell could have told her. She wondered if Tiger Lily would have taught her how to dance.

She wondered why none of the women in Neverland had been able to speak to her. She wondered why she hadn’t tried.

A romantic comedy for Lupita Nyong'o! A superhero role for Chiwetel Ejiofor! A new director for Jennifer Lawrence!

The post Five Things That Should Happen After The 2014 Academy Awards appeared first on ThinkProgress.

“Wal-Mart has become a national symbol of the poverty wages paid to millions of ordinary working Americans, who can only survive because of their taxpayer-funded social welfare subsidies. But Wal-Mart is actually a great American success story and those economic problems are merely a consequence of the mistaken government policies of the last forty years, which have allowed a collapse in the real value of the minimum wage despite the simultaneous doubling of American labor productivity. Boosting the minimum wage to $12 would be good for Wal-Mart workers, Wal-Mart customers, and Wal-Mart shareholders. And what’s good for Wal-Mart is good for America.”

- What’s Good for America Is Good for Wal-Mart, and Vice-Versa

girljanitor:

bashi-bazouk:

peppercyanide:

sisterwolf:

via

I never even

c

wow

How did they get away with that

AH

I LOVE THIS

What do you mean how did they get away with it?

History isn’t one straight line progressing towards a liberal society.

Look how much Americans attitudes have changed between 1980 and today. 1980 was the first time most very religious people voted, they abstained before that at the behest of their churches. Now they dictate policy at every election.

In my family photo album there are pictures from the 20s of a woman called ‘uncle bob’. She dressed in men’s clothing, and had a ‘companion’. This was a rough industrial town, they were working class, nobody cared. It was her business.

This is why politics is important - the moment you think everything is better today than it was in the past, you let other people take control of the direction society goes in - with you sitting back presuming we’re going forwards.

reblogging for the commentary

If Churches paid taxes…

defenseoftheancients:

maplehoofs:

aquaticspacepussy:

prettygirlwithahandgrenade:

HETEROSEXUALITY IS NOT A HURDLE

OH YEAH

TRY TO GET A DATE WITH LITERALLY ANYONE NORMAL

TRY GOING TO ANY FAMILY EVENT AND HAVING EVERYONE ASK YOU WHY YOU DONT HAVE A BOYFRIEND YET

AND WHEN YOU DO HAVE A BOYFRIEND WHY YOU HAVEN’T GOTTEN MARRIED YET

AND WHEN YOU ARE MARRIED WHY YOU HAVEN’T HAD KIDS YET

once you come out as gay, and people accept it or don’t, THAT IS THE END.  that is the end of the conversation.  YOU LUCKY FUCKERS

Lol that’s right. They either accept you’re gay or not.
Or kick you out
Or send you to reprogramming camps
Or sterilize you
Or murder you

Boy us queers got it so easy.

Pro tip: if your comment or post ends with telling an oppressed group they are “so fucking lucky”, delete your post and instead occupy yourself with the no doubt arduous task of removing your head from your own ass.

straight people like “i cant get a sweetheart :(” queer people like “please dont murder me on the street”

though both are suffering from heteronormativity, the hetero person can’t see that. they see it only as expectations that are normal, but not as impossible for them to fulfill. they just seem them as things they individually fail at, which perhaps are unfair in a way that is not deeply considered, perhaps not considered at all and only left individual. this is why it is critical that queers speak for themselves: the fact, the fact, that heteronormativity means death for us is something that should make the hetero person take pause.

it is life or death when it is not possible for you to even participate in the paradigm which a straight person can “fail” at. gay people literally can’t even fail at straightness—that is what you cant fucking get here—they cant even fucking fail at it. (same as trans folks cant fail at cis, and black folks cant fail at white, it is not even possible to FAIL at that norm.) and straight people literally can’t produce this insight (i mean, the above is a perfect example of why the fuck not).

this is why “privilege” is useful to me, in that privilege really translates to a lack, “privilege” really just means “beneficial ignorance”. it translates into the lack of ability to produce this insight: you can pass or fail at the norm, or you can be excluded from the norm such that you cant even pass or fail at it! this is why you can spend your whole life scrambling to pass, or even succeeding to pass, or even expanding the limits of what “passes” and never advance justice a single centimeter.

Logan Hill talked to four of the most popular New Yorkers on OKCupid.  Among them is James, “the living embodiment of his OKCupid handle, MyTiesAreSkinny,” who shares his strategy for maximizing dating success:

“You ready for the secret?” James asks me. “Not to blow your mind, but it’s disgusting …” He picks up his phone. “So, every couple days, I will do this,” he says. He opens the Tinder app, but before I can see the first woman’s face, he swipes right: interested. If the woman he likes also swipes right, he has an official match. In short: He never swipes left (not interested).

“I will say yes to every single person,” James says. And he never follows up with someone who hasn’t already confirmed her interest. On ­OKCupid,­ he does the same thing: He gives everyone five stars (and if someone gives him four or fives stars in return, the site will notify him of a match). By doing so, he exposes himself to less risk, an appealing upside to James, who’s had two difficult breakups. He’s since had thousands of matches—so many that he’s had to refine his strategy.

When he messages women on ­OKCupid­, it’s time-consuming:

He reads the profile and tailors each email with personal details. On Tinder, he basically tweaks the same message. “The last person I matched with was Allison,” he says. If he were to send a message to Allison on a Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday, it would read: Hey there Miss Allison. What kind of trouble did you get into this weekend? “That’s exactly what I do, every fucking time,” he says, laughing. For Wednesday: Hey there Miss Allison. What sort of trouble are you getting into this week? Thursday or Friday: What kind of trouble are you getting into this weekend? And if it’s Saturday: What kind of trouble have you been getting into?

Depending on how the Tinder chat evolves, he tries to move the conversation to text and then to a real date. “There’s a tyranny of choice,” he says. “I feel kind of gross saying that out loud, because I don’t want to objectify people. But you just kind of have to.”

Previous Dish on online dating here and here.

a couple of interesting internet conversations happened in short order of each other and made me pause.

one was some fuckin dudebro getting upset at a socialist org making what i thought was a super bland “duh” statement about support for feminist struggles. the dudebro said we were better off trying to ally with fascist elements of the working class than letting the left be divided by “cultural” issues like race or gender. this would be pitiable or hilarious if it were not such a routine response.

the other was a bunch of leftists clambering all over each other to support the coup government in ukraine, as if literally any revolution was better than an incumbent government, as if revolutions could not themselves have a reactionary character. as if the working class could not be hijacked by fascists, thus precluding their own unique revolutionary character and instead channeling themselves into the hands of the capitalist class’ interests.

looking at the two together, i cant help but think to myself yet again “unless you take serious the ‘cultural’ elements of liberatory philosophy, your revolutions will always be endangered by capture by fascists, and by extension, capitalists.” real socialist revolution, imo, will have cultural consequences that are more than mere lip service to class exogenic inequalities.

because the ruling class is slippery: if it can use forces outside its own productive logic in capital to its interest, it will, and unless you consciously choke off those potentialities, you will be vulnerable to defeat.

natgeofound:

A young Kenyan woman holds her pet deer in Mombassa, March 1909. Photograph by Underwood and Underwood.

TINY PET DEER???!?!?!?!????

“It’s not until you watch it happen close up that the way things do not get done in the World’s Legislative Body becomes well and truly nauseating. This afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought forth a carefully crafted bill to provide $21 billion in new veterans benefits over the next decade. These included medical benefits, education benefits, and job-training. It contained 26 provisions that came from the Republican members of the Veterans Affairs Committee, which Sanders chairs. It was so wide-ranging that it contained a provision that would eliminate a rule prohibiting the Veterans Administration from covering in vitro fertilization on behalf of veterans whose wounds prevent them from conceiving a child in the usual manner. There was a time, and not so long ago, when both parties would fall all over themselves to help America’s veterans. How many platitudes are we going to hear on the stump between now and November about America’s Heroes and Our Wounded Warriors? This bill was a put up or shut up moment. It failed. Badly. Only two Republicans were willing to vote with Sanders, and the bill died a procedural death. The final straw was an attempt by Republican legislators to hang an amendment onto the bill calling for increased sanctions on Iran. There was also some cheap bullshit thrown around about the budget, most notably by Senator Jefferson Davis Beauregard Sessions of Alabama. There also was, spectacularly, some debate time taken up by, believe it or not, Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI!”

- Charles P. Pierce

“…what we’ve got is, like, a bipartisan neoliberalism, right, that’s at the center of gravity of the American government. And to be clear, what I mean by neoliberalism is that, it’s two things. It’s a free market, utopian ideology. And it’s a concrete program for intensified upward redistribution. And when the two objectives conflict, I mean, guess which one gets put — on the shelf? But both parties are fundamentally committed to this. And at this point, and I think we’ve seen this much more clearly since the 2008 election, the principal difference between Democrats and Republicans Is the choice between a neoliberal party that is progressive on multicultural and diversity issues, and a neoliberal party that’s reactionary and horrible on those same issues.”

- Adolph Reed

 Same-sex relationships were often really emotionally wrought and even sensual, and the men recognized them as such. But mere romantic feeling wasn’t enough to put same-sex relationships in the same mental category as heterosexual pairings. Not even sex was enough. Heterosexual pairings were distinct because they were about family, marriage, sex, babies, God; same-sex pairings were friendship, even if they were romantic or sexual. 

Part of this is because, even by Lincoln’s time, marriage still wasn’t completely a companionate and romantic endeavor. It was moving in that direction, but for the upper classes it still had a veneer of respectability; it was about arranging the joining of two families, not kowtowing to the starstruck whims of young people. So love didn’t EQUAL dyadic life partnership. Love was evident in all sorts of non-dyadic relationships.

That’s… kind of weirdly sweet.  I mean, obviously there’s a lot of problems I’d have with it in practice, but the basic idea of love and even sex being accepted as part of friendship instead of “these feelings are for your monogamous heterosexual marriage only!”… is sweet, and cool to learn about.  Thanks for sharing.

“…working people in America got more from Richard Nixon than we got from Clinton or Obama. And it’s not because he was our fan, right, it’s because, you know, the labor movement and what has since been called the social movement of the ’60s were dynamic enough forces in the society that even Nixon, who called himself a Keynesian, felt that there was a need to respond to them. So that’s how we got occupational health and safety, affirmative action like other stuff. So it’s not, and, see, this is the key point, I think, right. Because one of the ways that our politics have been hollowed and a source of the collapse of the left is a forgetting, right? A kind of social amnesia about what movement building is and how and what social movements are and how they’re constructed.”

- Adolph Reed

“Drones are proliferating faster than we can make up made up rules for them. I can buy one right now and fly it around my neighborhood filming people. Police departments are starting to use them for surveillance purposes and I’m sure they won’t use them excessively and disproportionately against the poor and minorities, the way they’ve used every tool ever plopped into their palm—batons, mace, guns, and tasers. Other countries are perking their ears to the thought of armed drones. Something tells me Americans would object to Cuba coming after sworn enemies of their regime by firing hellfire missises into a Miami neighborhood. Our robot death planes aren’t ensuring that we only kill the Bad Guys. They allow us to not have as much skin in the fight, so less is revealed to us about the nature of killing. Improved technology does not equal acting more moral. The wheel was pretty great, unless you were being tied to one and tortured to death on orders from men with righteous and good intention.”

- Welcome To The Terror Drone

““Son of God” is guilty of all the sins of the 1950s Bible epics, but without any of the majesty. The supporting characters lack depth, and the actors are blocky and silly, lugging around those half-British accents that supposedly indicate seriousness. The special effects aren’t good enough for the big screen — Jerusalem looks like it was created out of Legos — and the overbearing soundtrack turns what ought to be quietly transcendent moments into corn syrup. The Last Supper? Doesn’t need a lot of embellishment. It’s a profound moment. So why bury it under the rubble left by orchestral bombardment?”

- ‘Son of God’ review

“Criminal cases aren’t usually viewed through a partisan lens. A killer on the loose is generally seen, regardless of political ideology, as a Bad Thing. The apprehension of a suspect, his trial and conviction are generally seen, regardless of political ideology, as Good Things. But this is not always the case. Fox News clearly regards the Florida murder trial of Michael Dunn as a partisan issue. Dunn is their guy — their side. How did that happen? Is there any way, other than the horrible and obvious way, to explain why the conviction of a white man for killing a black teenager should be viewed as some kind of setback for conservatives? Is there any way to view Fox News’ take on this case as anything other than an admission and an embrace of racism as a component of their political ideology? What other explanation can there be for the reflexive insistence that a white man with a gun pointed at black boys must be defended as part of the conservative tribe?”

- Down at the little church they all wear hats

kant is responsible for “reverse racism”. discuss.

“Why should kids be taught to hate the police? Because there are 2.3 million people in jail in the US right now and every single one was put there by a fucking cop. Some people talk about good cops and bad cops, but a good cop, a cop doing their job properly, still puts nonviolent drug users in jail for many years, totally ruining their lives as they lose their jobs, houses, cars, romantic partners, access to college, and become substantially less employable upon release. A cop doing their job properly still gives homeless people tickets for vagrancy which they obviously can’t pay and when a warrant is issued as a result an officer doing their job properly arrests those homeless people. An officer doing their job properly peppersprays and arrests environmental protesters so that logging companies can clear-cut old growth forests. An officer doing their job properly is evicting a family from their home as you read this because the parents’ jobs were shipped overseas so that the bosses could make eight figures a year instead of seven. Those people will become homeless, vagrancy tickets will be written, warrants will be issued… And then there’s the “bad ones”.”

-

Sacking Rome: A Magazine for Vandals, issue one

nicely put.

waroncops.tumblr.com

(via waroncops)

Fucking thank you. There are no good cops, only deadlier ones

(via strugglingtobeheard)

By the way, the cop with the pepper spray at the old growth forest… not a good cop anyways.

(via timekitt)

"Good cop" is like "cold fire." The phrase is only meaningful as a comparative.

#cops #police #police brutality #classism #violence #corporate prisons #prison #looting #homelessness #poverty

(via mylittledraenei)

Not making this up. McCain declares: "We are all Ukrainians."

Marco Arment:

The argument that we don’t want “such a dysfunctional government” regulating broadband is weak: “the government” isn’t one big coordinated bogeyman that can’t be trusted with anything. That’s just rhetoric that politicians use to avoid regulation so corporations can make more money at the expense of the citizens or environment. In practice, governmental regulation works so well in most cases that it’s taken for granted and too boring for most people to even think about.

Consider the FCC’s 2011 decision to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile — T-Mobile is universally hailed today as shaking up the entire U.S. mobile industry to the benefit of consumers.

If you set out deliberately to destroy the church and pervert the gospel, you probably still couldn’t come up with anything as diabolically effective as the teavangelical nonsense of the angry white religious right.

William Lindsey:

It’s not quite accurate to say that the top pastoral leaders of the Catholic church in the U.S. are doing nothing to address the exodus of younger Catholics from the church due to the church’s homophobia. As a collective body, the bishops of the Catholic church in the U.S. are, in fact,actively contributing to this exodus by throwing the institutional weight of the Catholic church behind homophobia.

Instead of addressing the departure of younger Catholics from the church because they can no longer stomach the defense of indefensible discrimination, the church’s top pastoral leaders are  placing the Catholic church in the U.S. squarely on the side of such indefensible discrimination.

E.J. Dionne:

To young adults, Campbell and Putnam wrote in a 2012 article in Foreign Affairs, “ ‘religion’ means ‘Republican,’ ‘intolerant,’ and ‘homophobic.’ Since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves — or wish to be seen by their peers — as religious.”

Congratulations to the Arizona Legislature for doing such an excellent job at de-evangelization.

Rachel Held Evans:

Despite enjoying majority status, significant privilege, and unchallenged religious freedom in this country, we evangelical Christians have become known as a group of people who cry “persecution!” upon being wished “Happy Holidays” by a store clerk.

We have become known as a group of people who sees themselves perpetually under attack, perpetually victimized, and perpetually entitled, a group who, ironically, often responds to these imagined disadvantages by advancing legislation that restricts the civil liberties of other people.

But living in a pluralistic society that also grants freedom and civil rights protection to those with whom one disagrees is not the same as religious persecution.  And crying persecution every time one doesn’t get one’s way is an insult to the very real religious persecution happening in the world today. It’s no way to be a good citizen and certainly no way to advance the gospel in the world.

… I fear that we’ve lost not only the culture wars, but also our Christian identity, when the  ”right to refuse” service has become a more sincerely-held and widely-known Christian belief than the impulse to give it.