Obama’s killing it today
My fucking president. Ahaha
God I can’t get enough of him. I just loves him.
(Source: samljackson, via stfuhypocrisy)
—President Obama in North Carolina today on why Congress has to act to prevent interest rates on student loans from doubling (via barackobama)
When Obama was nominated, he got a lot of criticism for not having military experience. I think it’s more pertinent that he had the experience of not growing up wealthy and privileged in America. How can someone who’s never had to worry about money or loans create a fair policy about them? -Jess
(via stfuconservatives)
This is why he’s the people’s president. God love him.(via historicalslut)
Researchers develop stem cells that attack and destroy HIV | The Raw Story (via pieceinthepuzzlehumanity)
This is great news, only in small part because it plays directly to the pro-life anti-gay crowd who have always assumed that lesbians get abortions to cure AIDS with stem cells. (Seriously, some of them believe that.) It’s true! We’re conspiring against traditional marriage AND babies! Next stop: indoctrinating the post-born fetuses who squeaked by our 24/7 abortion mills into the homosexual agenda.
-Jess
(via stfuconservatives)(via stfuconservatives)
The new Swiffer commercials make me giggle a bit - I have a relatively small amount of tile in my apartment (probably less than 200 square feet) but I can mop all of it in less than 10 minutes and it honestly is so low hassle as compared to using a mop and bucket.
That’s the premise of the commercials - this (relatively cheap) addition to your cleaning repertoire can save you a ton of time. This is how advertising sold washers and driers, dishwashers, vacuums … So many household tools were created to make money and were sold to us by telling us it would save us time. And that is actually very true.
In these new Swiffer commercials, a woman (usually a mother) completes a chore with a Swiffer product, and having saved a huge amount of time does something she loves but never has time for, like reading a book or relaxing. The commercials make it seem like it has been so long since the woman has had the opportunity to do such a thing that she can hardly remember it - the one woman picks up a book and says “I’m going to read one of these” but doesn’t seem to know what “these” are called.
Part of me feels like this is social commentary on the amount of chores women tend to do in families (it is demonstrated that women who are married actually do more chores than single women, parents or not though I do not have a link handy).
The other part of me doesn’t trust the advertising industry one bit and believes that they are continually co-opting the struggles of women to sell their products.
Does anyone have an opinion? I’m still fleshing out how I feel about this.
These awful things break my heart.Unlike the beautiful 6-year old Jonbenett Ramsey who received coverage all over the media - every tabloid, newspaper, news channel, talk show, 7-year old Aiyana Stanley was killed by a police officer during a raid while she was sleep and her murder received very little coverage.
Police, searching for a murder suspect, threw a flash grenade through the window of her family’s apartment around midnight. According to Aiyana’s father, it landed on the couch, setting Aiyana on fire. A police officer’s gun then went off, and shot Aiyana in the neck.
Aiyana was asleep on the living room sofa in her family’s apartment when Detroit police, searching for a homicide suspect, burst in and an officer’s gun went off, fatally striking the girl in the neck, family members said.
Her father, 25-year-old Charles Jones, told The Detroit News he had just gone to bed early Sunday after covering his daughter with her favorite blanket when he heard a flash grenade followed by a gunshot. When he rushed into the living room, he said, police forced him to lie on the ground, with his face in his daughter’s blood.
“I’ll never be the same. That’s my only daughter,” Jones told.
We haven’t forgotten about you baby. R.I.P.
WHAT THE FUCK.
FUCK EVERYTHING.
As I said in a previous post: it doesn’t take a study to show that racism and violence towards people of color is prevalent in our society. It’s time to stop studying the problem and start doing something about it.
(via silverlilacs)
BEST EVER!Jon: “I’m just saying to the people who are upset about their hard earned tax money going to things they don’t like: Welcome to the fucking club.”
(via stfuconservatives)
So, I need to update my About Me Blurb because I am no longer pursuing a master’s degree in economic analysis; I’m going to go to law school.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the greatest is this: It is neither circumstance nor by individual design that there are so many people in the world who cannot meet their daily needs - it is a direct result of hundreds of years of colonialism followed by neoliberalism, structural readjustment and public policies that exist not to better the lives of the impoverished but rather to make them feel guilty for being in their miserable socioeconomic situation.
I want that to change.
I originally thought Econ would put me on a road to doing this but at Northwestern I realized how many of my fellow economists were competing against each other for this consulting internship or that summer program at Goldman Sachs. And for oh, roughly, 5 minutes I wanted exactly that and began playing the game.
Then I read Freedom Summer by Doug McAdam. Quick synopsis: It’s about the rich white kids who went to fight in the Civil Rights Movement in 1964. Those kids were either BRAVE or STUPID - I haven’t figured out which. The fact of the matter is that they went. Because of this, I was inspired to apply for a summer program at Northwestern which will send me to intern with an NGO in either Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia or India for 8 weeks this summer. That to me is really participating in sustainable change.
The shift didn’t stop there; I realized that I could be most effective to organizations working for social justice if I could help them change the existing social policy and infrastructure that make it so hard for a person to change their economic status.
So law school here I come.
But the gendered implications of this are interesting to me. Sure, there are thousands of women who go to law school with the intention of pursuing a typical, high-powered career with a firm or a bank, etc. However, I think there is a much greater concentration of women than men who enter law to go into public service - exactly my plan.
Sure, for about 5 years after law school I’ll be financially bound to working with a firm so that I can pay off my loans and buy a house, etc. But after that I know what I want to do - I want to work for change.
Furthermore, I am being ever more conscious of how difficult it will be to time my children. I want to have two kids during law school so that way I don’t have to take time out of my career to raise them; this makes me simultaneously guilty and satisfied because I am walking my feminist walk, ya know? but I still feel like I should WANT to stay home with my kids - I can’t figure out a way to hire someone else to raise them without feeling exploitative. This is a post for an entirely different day.
Anywho, if I don’t get to some good posting between now and then, look forward to my stories from Nicaragua :-)
