06. Peach Plum Pear - Owen Pallett
Feedback makes it even better.
June 2013
24 posts
“Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
—John Steinbeck (via 13neighbors)
Alemanno accetta la sconfitta, ma piange →
ilsalvagente.it
Il sindaco uscente dopo la conferenza stampa si lascia andare allo scoramento.
Ma l’anima de li mor…
Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind revelations of NSA surveillance →
guardian.co.uk
The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in US history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows
“this is what happens when a society tacitly agrees that, while (theoretically, at least) its citizens have rights the government may not abridge, the government is free to subcontract that job to every other important institution that affects the lives of its people. Employers, for example, may drug-test employees without cause, and they may monitor the political and social media activities of those employees even when those employees are off the job. Your children lose their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights — and most of their First Amendment rights — as soon as they walk through the schoolhouse doors. There have been, of course, no effective counterweights to any of this. Union protection in the workplace is gone. Schoolchildren have no effective lobby for their rights. Of course, Verizon cooperated with the government. Even if they hadn’t been ordered to do so, do you think there would have been 15 minutes of serious debate in the boardroom over the privacy rights of their millions of customers? How’s that no-call list thing working for you?
This is the surveillance state writ large, with large corporations and the government in close cooperation, and hallowed by a warrant from a secret court that was supposed to be the last line of defense against this sort of thing. (Even though the FISA court has been a rubber stamp for years, which was an argument back during the previous administration for why that administration should have gotten a warrant. Ah, thim was the days.) And because we are supposed to be a self-governing political commonwealth, we are complicit, too. All of the powers under which the NSA operated were approved, over and over again, by the Congress, the members of which we freely elect, and none of whom will ever win an election on issues like this because, all tricornered hats and the outrage of the Paul family aside, there is no electoral constituency for the Bill of Rights any more. All of the powers under which Verizon operated were approved, over and over again, by its customers, who now know what the company was doing, and who, I predict, will keep handing over the data. Given the dark, midnight nature of government secrecy, a lot of the infrastructure behind this current outrage was put in place in the daylight. The fault, dear Brutus…” —
This is the surveillance state writ large, with large corporations and the government in close cooperation, and hallowed by a warrant from a secret court that was supposed to be the last line of defense against this sort of thing. (Even though the FISA court has been a rubber stamp for years, which was an argument back during the previous administration for why that administration should have gotten a warrant. Ah, thim was the days.) And because we are supposed to be a self-governing political commonwealth, we are complicit, too. All of the powers under which the NSA operated were approved, over and over again, by the Congress, the members of which we freely elect, and none of whom will ever win an election on issues like this because, all tricornered hats and the outrage of the Paul family aside, there is no electoral constituency for the Bill of Rights any more. All of the powers under which Verizon operated were approved, over and over again, by its customers, who now know what the company was doing, and who, I predict, will keep handing over the data. Given the dark, midnight nature of government secrecy, a lot of the infrastructure behind this current outrage was put in place in the daylight. The fault, dear Brutus…” —
Charles Pierce, Verizon Phone Record Scandal - Why Verizon’s Phone Record Scandal Is No Real Surprise
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
William Shakespear, Julius Caesar
(via stoweboyd)
“
In 1969 … Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips offered a blueprint for crushing the Democrats’ New Deal coalition by recruiting Southerners and Catholics to the G.O.P. …
Nixon’s advisers urged him to reconsider his position on abortion and family planning. … Observing that abortion was “a rising issue and a gut issue with Catholics,” Buchanan wrote, “If the President should publicly take his stand against abortion, as offensive to his own moral principles … then we can force Muskie [one of Nixon’s potential democratic challengers up for the nomination] to make the choice between his tens of millions of Catholic supporters and his liberal friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
A week later, in a statement to the Department of Defense, Nixon borrowed the language of the Catholic Church to speak of his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”…
Abortion wasn’t a partisan issue until Republicans made it one. In June of 1972, a Gallup poll reported that sixty-eight per cent of Republicans and fifty-nine per cent of Democrats agreed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” Fifty-six per cent of Catholics thought so, too.
” —from:
“The Politics of Planned Parenthood and Women’s Rights;” The New Yorker
November 2011
Literally all of the ~~moral~~ bullshit the GOP puts out about abortion has its origins in a Nixon campaign strategy designed to get him to run against a weak candidate: McGovern. Nixon wanted to run against him, rather than Muskie, so he came up with some moral crap about abortion to destabilize Muskie’s support base, which ensured that McGovern received the nomination and ran against Nixon.
He didn’t even really believe in what he was saying. And he politicized it. And forty years later, look at the mess we have now.
(via collegegrrrl)
O
(via mommapolitico)
