quite possibly the scummiest — Planet Money/This American Life propaganda piece for the financial industry, disguised as highbrow progressive journalism.
Utne Magazine - 0 views
metaphor-and-war-the-metaphor-system-used-to-justify-war-in-the-gulf-lakoff-1991.pdf (a... - 0 views
4 Ways the Poor Get Screwed That Everyone Takes for Granted | Alternet - 0 views
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"I'm not in the 1%. At the lower end of what I think of as the upper middle class, I nevertheless take daily advantage of a raft of systems intended to ensure that people who have less money than I do pay more than I do. Since my economic advantages result from public policy, it's fair to call them taxes, levied on people least able to afford them and applied upward for the benefit of people like me. Since the glory days of feudalism are long over, and we don't like to revel in high position, matters are arranged to keep me and people like me from noticing the systemic nature of our economic advantage."
Unfit To Report - 0 views
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The piece was called "Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America" and it essentially argued — using wildly flawed research and straight-up lies — that our Social Security program is burdened by a glut of freeloader disability queens, faking their disabilities in order to live high on the Social Security disability insurance hog. Why would NPR run such a flawed, biased story? The answer takes us right to the heart of Wall Street’s plans to privatize government benefits, which Wall Street bond holders want to slash for their own profits. This battle pits powerful Wall Street interests and their media and political lackeys on the one side, versus an overwhelming majority of Americans — Republicans and Democrats both — on the other. In the middle stands a radio piece from a trusted source, NPR/This American Life/Planet Money, telling its progressive, educated audience that there is in fact a problem with Social Security, and that problem is a bunch of human parasites faking disability to suckle from the Social Security teat. It’s the sort of rancid old 1930s anti-New Deal propaganda that the American Liberty League or NAM or the Chamber of Commerce used to puke out on a regular basis. But this is 2013, meaning this time around, the battleground is on the putative left, pitting the Democratic Party leaders including Obama against the people who voted for him, and who have nowhere else to turn. On the Democratic Party’s side: their funders on Wall Street, and their neoliberal propagandists in pundit-land and in universities. The key isn’t winning over right-wing conservatives, but rather affluent progressives — i.e., Planet Money's and NPR’s audience. If they can flip that demographic, Social Security is privatized toast.
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The good thing is that the piece was such obvious crap, so intellectually flawed and propaganda-soaked, that Ira Glass and the This American Life/Planet Money/NPR people were forced to respond to their critics. The downside is that the critics were far too respectful, basing their criticism on factual flaws rather than on the corruption that made the flawed reporting not just possible, but inevitable.
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Chris Hedges: The Treason of the Intellectuals - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig - 0 views
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"These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands. The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told-the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren't safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again. "
The politics of pubic hair: why is a generation choosing to go bare down there? - Featu... - 1 views
Resilience in mental health: linking psychological and neurobiological perspectives - R... - 0 views
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"Secure attachment,"
Lost Sleep Can Lead to Weight Gain - NYTimes.com - 0 views
The Hazards of Manhood by Michael Schwalbe - YES! Magazine - 0 views
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"Teaching males to seek feelings of worth through displays of power, toughness, and competitiveness turns male bodies into readily exploitable generators of profit. The costs to all but the tiny few who appropriate these profits are enormous: ruined bodies and minds, premature death, perpetual war, depression and drug use, interpersonal violence, and the abuse of women and others who are not men in good standing."
Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Only Fox News, There Are Some Understandable ... - 0 views
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" In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble."
Melancholy and The Infinite Sadness - The New Inquiry - 0 views
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In Ann Cvetkovich’s new “critical memoir,” Depression: A Public Feeling, the University of Texas professor seeks to “defamiliarize” depression within a genealogy of spiritual despair, while attending to the relationship of the psyche to the soma as illustrated by how different cultures or the working class are more likely to somatize their depression. Can we, Cvetkovich asks at the book’s beginning, engage with depression as the “product of a sick culture”?
Why Are We All Ignoring Our Loneliness? | Alternet - 0 views
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"Perhaps when we're able to realize that as a human race and society we have become estranged from one another, when we're able to see this fragmented world for what it is, when we accept the pain of the world as our own pain and see our hearts in the hearts of others, when we're able to recognize that every one of us is essentially floating in the same boat, when we're able to walk down the street and feel our own footsteps resounding from other peoples feet, then, perhaps, we will begin to learn the value, the reality, and the necessity of compassion as the essential human capacity that will heal us from the temporary state of fragmentation into which we have fallen."
How People and Animals in Isolation Die Sooner - Lindsay Abrams - The Atlantic - 0 views
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"ingle, widowed, and divorced people have as high as twice the mortality rate of married people, which is a trend that's held true in studies across countries and time periods. Unmarried peoples' tendencies to die seems to tell us about the relative strength of social bonds, which is supported by similar trends seen among ants, bees, and even cells, described in a fascinating paper in Cornell's quantitative biology archive. "
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, 2013 as Year Zero for Us -- and Our Planet | TomDispatch - 0 views
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"This is, among other things, a war of the imagination: the carbon profiteers and their politicians are hoping you don't connect the dots, or imagine the various futures we could make or they could destroy, or grasp the remarkably beautiful and complex ways the natural world has worked to our benefit and is now being sabotaged, or discover your conscience and voice, or ever picture how different it could all be, how different it will need to be. They are already at war against the wellbeing of our Earth. Their greed has no limits, their imagination nothing but limits. Fight back. You have the power. It's one of your gifts. "
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