"Letter of Resignation from the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission"

"It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits. We already see openings at our police department that we can’t fill and numerous teacher contracts that we can’t renew because the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction...

Time and again, I’ve seen dozens of people come to both Commission meetings and Council meetings asking Council to make housing its top priority. The City Council received over 1000 signatures from Palo Alto residents asking for the same. In the annual Our Palo Alto survey, it is the top issue cited by residents. This Council has ignored the majority of residents and has chartered a course for the next 15 years of this city’s development which substantially continues the same job-housing imbalance this community has been suffering from for some time now"

https://medium.com/@katevershovdowning/letter-of-resignation-from-the-palo-alto-planning-and-transportation-commission-f7b6facd94f5#.8nqqhtodz

"Colin Kaepernick and the Question of Who Gets to Be Called a ‘Patriot’"

"When a black American protests the demoralizing practices of American government, there is always a white person eager to unfurl the welcome mat to Africa. This is where racism and patriotism tend to point: toward the exits. For some, we learn, being American is conditional on behaving like a grateful guest: You belong here because we tolerate your presence. We don’t yet appear to have settled the matter of citizenship — not even for our president, another black man backhandedly accused of harboring terrorist sympathies. We operate on the old logic that only members of the family are allowed to tell hard truths about the family’s flaws. And when black people speak about America, they’re informed that they do not actually have a seat at the grown-ups’ table and that they should be grateful to be around at all...

“Patriot” has a niftily concise definition: “one who loves and loyally or zealously supports one’s own country.” Support can take the form of dissent just as readily as cheerleading — each is a way of suggesting what kind of nation America is to become, and patriots have lived and died on all sides of the argument. But during the 20th century, patriotism began to treat the question as one we’ve settled. The marketable, propagandistic imagery of World War II gave way to the paranoid suspicion of the Cold War era, and patriotism, more and more, morphed into a matter of optics — of theater. Love of country turned performative. We can know patriotism only when we see it — and so you’ve really got to show it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/magazine/who-gets-to-be-called-a-patriot.html?_r=0

Related: Whiteness define American?

FB: "New expressions of patriotism always make certain white people fear that a wedge is being driven between them and their America — whether by Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the Army, or by Black Lives Matter, or by a backup quarterback for the 49ers."

"The Pro-Trump Intellectuals Who Want to Overthrow America"

"Kesler and Codevilla are West Coast Straussians, one of two rival factions of intellectuals who revere Leo Strauss, the German-born political philosopher who died in 1973. Whereas East Coast Straussians have been heavily oriented towards establishment Republicans like George W. Bush, and thus tend to be #NeverTrump—Kristol’s Weekly Standard has been sharply anti-Trump and Paul Wolfowitz has said he might vote for Hillary Clinton—there’s considerable support for Trump among West Coast Straussians. They justify their support of Trump by saying that America is in such deep trouble it needs regime change. To borrow a Trumpian phrase: “What do you have to lose?”

In these West Coast Straussians we see the emergence, for the first time since the Southern secessionists of the 1850s, of a group of conservative American intellectuals who advocate overthrowing the existing political order. Under Bush, Americans saw what Straussian ideas of regime change could do abroad. Under Trump, we might see the same urge for regime change applied to America itself... 

The disputes between Jaffa’s West Coast Straussianism and Bloom’s East Coast Straussianism can be discussed along philosophic lines: Is America, as Jaffa believes, grounded in ancient philosophy or was the American founding, as Bloom would have it, built on the low but solid ground of early modern philosophers like Hobbes and Locke? Does the survival of America depend on the virtue of the people, as West Coast Straussians believe, or in the maintenance of constitutional norms, as East Coast Straussians believe? But the dispute can also more easily be understood in terms of the familiar social divide in the Republican Party. West Coast Straussians are the grassroots activists, grounded in social conservatism and ultra-nationalist in foreign policy. Sociologically, East Coast Straussians are more aligned with the party elite, and tend to be found in Washington think tanks and serving as career bureaucrats."

https://newrepublic.com/article/137410/pro-trump-intellectuals-want-overthrow-america

"You Don’t Have to Like Kim Kardashian, But At Least Respect Her Humanity"

"One of the saddest things about these heartless reactions is that none of it is exceptional or surprising. Online rhetoric has become so bombastic that we are becoming immune to hate speech and threats. Someone declaring that the robbers would have done the world a favor by harming Kim is met with a simple “LOL.”...

People loathe Kim, as if she isn’t an actual person, but merely a symbolic larger-than-life stand-in for the deterioration of American society. What these people don’t realize is that their readiness to hate and rejoice in the misfortunes experienced by a woman — famous or otherwise — is a far more precise indication of the deterioration of American society than a single Kardashian could ever be."

https://ww2.kqed.org/pop/2016/10/03/you-dont-have-to-like-kim-kardashian-but-at-least-respect-her-humanity/

Related: Other 2 on the Kardashians

“How to Discuss Race With Black People: FAQ Part 1 — Beginner”

"There are some things you just can’t Google, because it’s not so much a matter of mere facts or language as it is of context. So here’s some context...

Q: DON’T I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE MAD WHEN SOMEONE ACCUSES ME OF RACISM?

A: Sure. You have the right, but that doesn’t mean it’s productive. More often than not, when a person points out something racist you did, it is in an attempt to help you identify and reject it. Taking it as a condemnation of you as a person is counterproductive. See it instead as a learning opportunity.

TL:DR — Yes. But you could just listen instead."

https://medium.com/@absurdistwords/how-to-discuss-race-with-black-people-faq-pt-1-2534db9e3409

I'm really into this. 

"No One Understands Donald Trump Like the Horny Narcissist Who Created Dilbert"

"He has not (until just this past week, anyway) been carrying on like this out of any desire to see Trump win. Far from it. He merely sees in Trump a Master Persuader of world-historical significance, and what with Adams being a Master Persuader himself, well, greatness can’t help but recognize greatness. On Sunday, driven largely by concerns about estate taxes and about Hillary Clinton’s health, Adams did finally endorse Trump, but again, this was a matter not of partisanship but of helplessly superior perception. As a hypnotist, Adams has been taught to read “subtle bodily changes,” and he could no longer ignore what Clinton’s eyes and complexion were telling him.

To read his blog—and I recently spent a week mainlining the 1,000-plus pages that he’s published in the 15 months since Trump declared his candidacy—is to overdose on a custom blend of testosterone, paranoia, and self-celebration. Here he is explaining that in the event of a Trump victory, he, Adams, “would be a top-ten assassination target.” Here he is lamenting the “humiliation of the American male,” as evidenced by a dishwasher detergent ad. Here he is unforgettably (I’ve tried) attempting to hypnotize his readers into having the best orgasms of their lives (“I want you wet, or hard, and especially obedient …”).. . 

And lest we should mistake Adams for a titan of a lesser order than Trump, he addresses the question on everyone’s mind: “You might be wondering if I could use my wizard powers to become president someday myself. The quick answer is yes …”"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/09/dilbert_creator_scott_adams_gets_trump_like_no_one_else.html

This is obviously from a little while ago , before the Trump Candidacy finally fell over the cliff. 

And now I am haunted by the thought of it her random narcissists trying to run for President , convinced that know where Trump went wrong. 

And ugh, Trump is going to be endorsing people. 

FB: in a weird way, this totally didn't surprise me "That the creator of an anodyne and highly successful comic strip about office culture should have a minor role in this election is not quite as surprising as it seems. Dilbert seems to function largely as a business endeavor for Adams. His true calling is advocating on behalf of his own colossal brilliance. Trump vs. Clinton is merely the latest and largest forum in which Adams has sought to prove his case."

"How Hostile Poll-Watchers Could Hand Pennsylvania to Trump"

"The GOP attorneys were acting as poll watchers. A common practice in many states, partisan poll watching helps parties get out the vote and keep an eye out for irregularities. But in Pennsylvania, laws governing how observers can challenge voters are unusually broad, and that makes them susceptible to abuse.

On that day in 2004, students who were challenged by the GOP lawyers were told they needed to find a friend who could sign an affidavit proving their identity and residence. Other battleground states, concerned that their voter-challenge laws could be misused, have limited or even abolished them in the past decade. But Pennsylvania hasn’t modified its rules. That worries election experts, who fear Donald Trump’s persistent calls for supporters to monitor the polls to prevent cheating could create conflicts and chaos inside and outside of precincts across the state...

Though such challenges are rare, say election officials in several Pennsylvania counties, it is nevertheless much easier to issue a challenge than it is to answer one. The burden of proof is on the voter, who then has to either vote on a provisional ballot or find a witness who lives in the same precinct (say, a friend, spouse or neighbor) to sign an affidavit vouching for the voter’s identity and residence.

That’s alarming to the Brennan Center for Justice, which has recommended that states abolish Election Day voter challenges. “I think there are much more effective, less confrontational, and less risky ways to ensure the integrity of our elections,” says Weiser. The Brennan Center has urged Pennsylvania’s secretary of state to guard against abuse of its challenge rules, which date from 1937. “Unfortunately, Pennsylvania’s challenger law doesn’t have a lot of specificity about what proof you need to have and how you do it.”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/2016-election-pennsylvania-polls-voters-trump-clinton-214297

"We need to reject the false narratives around anorexia"

"Even now I worry I’m telling the story wrong. Is E unhappy? Did my parents enable us in our sickness, or were they just powerless to reverse the tide? I can hardly conjure those years of my life in memory without thinking I’ve committed some grave narrative sin.

I’m not the most reliable narrator. (To be fair, you probably aren’t, either.) I spin stories about people in order to understand them better, or to soothe or entertain myself. I sometimes balance my sanity on unstable materials—love objects that don’t stay put where I’ve left them. It can be hard to accept that your “characters”—Mom, Dad, sister—don’t belong to you, the tale-teller...

We need to tackle the false narratives clustered around eating disorders in our culture—clichés that vex and complicate treatment, contributing to low recovery rates and a frightening death toll. By looking harder at both the literature and the science of anorexia, we can expose where the plotlines conflict, where the self-deception and self-sabotage sneak in.

The most specific thing I can contribute is my story. I want to tell it as honestly and accurately as I can...

Anorexia is the mental health equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until you die. It is a performance—of femininity, of damage, of power—that turns into a prison. The choreography becomes so absorbing that you can no longer access your own will or desires. You may require an external party to confirm for you that you exist.'"

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/cover_story/2015/12/we_need_to_reject_the_false_narratives_around_anorexia.html

This was a beautiful reflection. I was trying to figure out why the feeling she describes resonate with me, given that I've never had an eating disorder, and I think they are common to situations where people are performing a certain idea of themselves and embracing the unhealthiness and deprivation of that work. For me, and for a lot of the people I grew up with or have gone to school with, that projection was the perfect student/academic, this person with a purity of focus and work ethic who abandoned and was ashamed by their need to spend time and effort on mental health needs. Instead of refusing food, it was refusing free time or sleep or activities that couldn't be rationalized as productive.

"WHY DID IT TAKE 9 HOURS AND 3 EMERGENCY ROOMS FOR THIS WOMAN TO GET A RAPE KIT?"

""I think she's been sexually assaulted," Daniel said, gesturing to Dinisha and holding their son on his hip, when they walked up to the counter of St. Michael's Emergency Room-Westheimer, the emergency room closest to Loraine's hotel, about 20 minutes away. Still in shock and fuzzy from the drugs she'd been given, Dinisha hadn't been able to tell Daniel exactly what happened, but Daniel knew that if she'd been raped, she'd need a rape kit — a forensic evidence-collecting exam that can lead to identifying an assailant through their DNA.

The receptionist hesitated. "Do you have any insurance?" she asked. Dinisha and Daniel looked at each other in disbelief. That was it? Dinisha's new job did offer health insurance, but she had to wait 90 days before it kicked in, and she'd only started a few days prior.

"That shouldn't be the first question that you ask me when we ask for a rape kit," Daniel said, his voice rising in anger. "We can pay."

"We need insurance to perform anything," the receptionist explained. "If she doesn't have any insurance, we can't see her."

This would be the first time that an emergency room turned Dinisha away on that day. It wouldn't be the last."

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a58941/dinisha-ball-rape-kit-texas-emergency-room/

FB: ugh our systems don't work. If it makes people uncomfortable, it doesn't exist "Daniel gazed down at the paper the doctor had given him. In Houston, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, with 2.3 million people, the paper listed only two hospitals where Dinisha could get a rape kit. The first option was in Galveston, Texas — 68 miles away. The second option, Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center, was 14 miles away. While it didn't sound far, Dinisha and Daniel knew that Houston's weekend traffic might make it an hourlong — or more — drive."

"I don’t trust white people, even the liberals, and science backs me up."

"Aversive racism is the conflict that Whites experience between their denial of personal prejudice and their underlying unconscious negative feelings towards and about Blacks. What that means is that even the most liberal and progressive Whites, who explicitly denounce racism, still hold and act upon negative stereotypes and biases against Blacks.

Dovidio and Gaertner argue that it is the existence of both almost unavoidable racial biases and conscious adherence to nondiscriminatory principles that forms the basis of the ambivalence that aversive racists experience...

These unconscious biases not only explain the inconsistency between how Whites perceive themselves and how they actually behave, but also how Blacks perceive their interactions with Whites. One study’s findings showed that when Whites explicitly stated they were non-prejudice, if they held high anti-Black unconscious biases (as measured by the Harvard’s Implicit Association Task), the Blacks who interacted with them found the interaction to be unfriendly and unsatisfying, even if Whites felt it was a friendly interaction."

https://thsppl.com/i-don-t-trust-white-people-even-the-liberal-ones-and-science-backs-me-up-18dc718bcc4b

Related: Ironic effects of anti-prejudice messages; other studies about ambiguous racism vs. not ambiguous having different impacts

"In Praise Of Women Who Give All The F**ks"

"But it also can be deeply exhausting pretending not to give a fuck about everything -- and at times, it may prevent us from fully embracing the fucks we do need to give. The simple fact remains: to affect real change, and feel anything deeply, you probably need to give quite a few fucks.

Police gun down an unarmed black man? Give more fucks.

Your right to reproductive health care is still being questioned? Give more fucks.

You got passed over for a promotion you deserved? Give more fucks.

You feel hurt or insulted or overjoyed or loved by another human being? Feel free to Give. A. Fuck...

We might be closer to embracing "strong women," but we also want those “strong women” to have an uncanny ability to "let it go." Express messy emotion? Probably don’t. Show just how hard you try? Ditto...

So I choose to bow down to the women who give all the fucks. Shonda Rhimes. Cheryl Strayed. Janet Mock. Oprah. Lena Dunham. Laverne Cox. Mindy Kaling. Hillary Clinton gives a ton of fucks -- she wants to be president. I salute these women and all the others like them who have an unabashed willingness to care -- and show it."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/07/in-praise-of-women-who-give-all-the-f--ks_n_7234890.html

me too :) Ladies who openly care.

Related: Cool Girls

"Groupthink: The brainstorming myth.

"Your Creative Power” was published in 1948. An amalgam of pop science and business anecdote, it became a surprise best-seller. Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output. Such a mental boost would spur career success—“To get your foot in the door, your imagination can be an open-sesame”—and also make the reader a much happier person. “The more you rub your creative lamp, the more alive you feel,” he wrote. 

“Your Creative Power” was filled with tricks and strategies, such as always carrying a notebook, to be ready when inspiration struck. But Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm,” which means “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.” ...

The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work...

Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”...

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”... In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” Nemeth says. “It wakes us right up.”...

The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. "

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/groupthink

I think that this really comes down to the way that humans in a group create social interactions that can be overwhelming - if the setting is one in which there is a very particular culture, that culture needs to be present in the nature and presentation of the ideas (and people who are outside of the culture have to do a lot of translating before they act); if there are hierarchies or rocky relationships or one person is really hungry and just wants to get the meeting over with, those are all introduced as complications. However, sometimes we get to be part of magical groups where we form a supportive community that is more than the sum of its parts and where the culture isn't limiting or asking anyone to code-switch, and then I would suspect that brainstorming is super effective. It's probably also something that just naturally occurs, instead of having to be artificially announced and structured.

"Why I vote “no” on (almost) all California ballot propositions, even if I agree with them"

"Ballot measures are not normal laws — they are essentially permanent, changeable only by subsequent ballot prop. This means that agreeing with a ballot prop is not a good enough reason to vote for it. Think of a political opinion you currently hold — how confident are you that you’ll still feel that way in 38 years?... 

To identity a ballot prop worthy of consideration, ask the following three questions:

1. The compelling interest test — is this of such dire importance that the nuclear option is called for?

2. The 38-year test — is it well drafted, clear and concise, not overly specific, and reasonably future-proof?

3. The last resort test — is there a really good reason why it can’t become law the normal way?... 

most ballot measures are abhorrently written. Many propose overly specific solutions or are overloaded with unrelated or unnecessary provisions. For instance, Prop 65 this year not only bans plastic bags, but specifies that plastic bag revenue be directed to a particular agency for distribution to environmental causes. Prop 67 also bans plastic bags — but without the environmental fund — as well as granting $2 million to plastic bag manufacturers(!) and offering a narrow exemption for people on food stamps. These overly specific measures clearly fail the 38-year test... 

Just because “bad guys” oppose it doesn’t mean it’s a good law. A good example is Prop 37 in 2012, which required very specific food labeling for GMO. It was opposed by Monsanto, which made California liberals viscerally like the law. But if you actually read the text, it was horribly written, completely unclear, and reliant on unsettled science"

https://medium.com/@michaellevinson_64108/why-i-vote-no-on-almost-all-california-ballot-propositions-even-if-i-agree-with-them-e672cbe64fcf#.v6cxaaoq8

I found this so, so useful and wise. The California proposition system is so interesting, sort of high-democracy - growing up it felt like this incredible tool of the everyday person and like these biannual referenda on important issues. These campaigns can be so fraught and aggressive and speak so much about culture and get so caught up in morality. Somehow it always comes down to either "the children" or "our environment", stock footage of some racially diverse kindergarten or Yosemite. 

So when one wins or loses, it really really feels like we have won or lost our values. 

And I rarely feel like I have a solid reason for voting 'yes', because we DO know that there are always these unintended consequences and secret sketchy things hidden in these propositions 

FB: THIS IS SO USEFUL AND WISE. Read it, Californians (or voters in other states that have a proposition mechanism). Appreciating lawyers a lot rn

"Incurable American Excess"

"Americans, who dwell in a vast country, sparsely populated by European standards, are hardwired to the notion of individual self-reliance. Europeans, with two 20th-century experiences of cataclysmic societal fracture, are bound to the idea of social solidarity as prudent safeguard and guarantor of human decency. The French see the state as a noble idea and embodiment of citizens’ rights. Americans tend to see the state as a predator on those rights. The French ennoble the dutiful public servant. Americans ennoble the disruptive entrepreneur...

In his intriguing new book, “The United States of Excess,” Robert Paarlberg, a political scientist, cites the 2011 Pew survey as he grapples with these divergent cultures. His focus is on American overconsumption of fuel and food. Why, he asks, is the United States an “outlier” in greenhouse gas emissions and obesity, and what, if anything, will it do about it?...

A resource-rich, spacious nation, mistrustful of government authority, persuaded that responsibility is individual rather than collective, optimistic about the capacity of science and technology to resolve any problem, and living in a polarized political system paralyzed by its “multiple veto points,” tends toward “a scrambling form of adaptation” rather than “effective mitigation...

Individualism trumps all — and innovation, it is somehow believed, will save the country from individualism’s ravages. Paarlberg notes that: “Americans eat alone while at work, alone while commuting to work in the car, alone at the food court while shopping, alone at home while watching TV, and alone in front of the refrigerator both before and after normal mealtime.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/opinion/roger-cohen-incurable-american-excess.html?_r=0


oooh, where are all my socialists, I want to read this and develop a set of slightly unrealistic ideals for a more collectively responsible American society.

For a while now, I've been thinking about what might happen if we were to shift the political rhetoric from the central/precious/sacred unit being the family, to that unit being the community. What if we protected an American's right to provide safety to their communities and assumed that Americans were looking to enter stable and secure communities? What if we weren't concerned so much about how nice our family-homes were, but how nice our neighborhoods were? What if we recognized as our property not just the borders of the land we own (in the sort of American Dream white-picket-fence image) but the sidewalks we walk on and the roads we drive on and the 

I just find the focus on the family kind of reductive, and enabling of a lot of selfishness, almost encouraging tragedies of the commons.

"H&M: Where Pseudo-Sustainability Meets Diversity Porn "

"the ad includes a sort of festival of other “others,” resulting in an awkward spectacle of diversity porn that begs to be shared and tweeted by all those progressive and free-thinking folks who have no problem letting multinational companies into their hearts, minds and closets...

Yes, it’s absurd. Yes, it’s random. And yes, it’scalculated. Like any shrewd retailer, H&M wants you to buy their products, no matter your race, religion, size, age or gender identity. While I strongly support more and better media representations of Muslims, Sikhs, members of the LGBT community, older women and people of color, I’m not about to commend H&M here. For one, their most prominent ads still tend to feature unnaturally thin white women.

More importantly though, squeezing as many minorities as possible into a single one-and-a-half-minute clip full of badly executed stereotypes is not an ideal way to go about promoting genuine diversity or acceptance. If anything, such tactics tend to further otherize and exoticize members of the different minority groups represented by lumping them all together and limiting their inclusion elsewhere amid the majority...

Feminist hijabi women like Hanna are not just opting out of rigid Western standards of beauty by choosing to cover, many are also opting out of the consumerist culture that perpetuates such standards. This powerful act of resistance threatens advertisers and corporations that rely on their constructed notions of beauty"

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/09/30/hm-where-pseudo-sustainability-meets-diversity-porn/

The festival of others. 

"Rethinking Work"

"Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be...

About 15 years ago, the Yale organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied custodians in a major academic hospital. Though the custodians’ official job duties never even mentioned other human beings, many of them viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would joke with patients, calm them down so that nurses could insert IVs, even dance for them. They would help family members of patients find their way around the hospital.

The custodians received no financial compensation for this “extra” work. But this aspect of the job, they said, was what got them out of bed every morning...

there is still little evidence of this satisfaction-efficiency trade-off. In fact, most evidence points in the opposite direction. In his 1998 book, “The Human Equation,” which reviewed numerous studies across dozens of different industries, the Stanford organizational behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeffer found that workplaces that offered employees work that was challenging, engaging and meaningful, and over which they had some discretion, were more profitable than workplaces that treated employees as cogs in a production machine...

In the face of longstanding evidence that routinization and an overemphasis on pay lead to worse performance in the workplace, why have we continued to tolerate and even embrace that approach to work?...Money does not tap into the essence of human motivation so much as transform it. When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/opinion/sunday/rethinking-work.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

ugh capitalism. We are not purely economic animals.


I think that the thesis in this piece can be very true. People can re-orient their dreams and aspirations to the reality that they live in - changing themselves instead of asking their situation to change.

"The Bail Trap"

"On average, a couple of hundred cases pass through Brooklyn’s arraignment courtrooms every day, and the public defenders who handle the overwhelming majority of those cases rarely get to spend more than 10 minutes with each client before the defendant is called into court for arraignment. Before leaving, Stocking relayed what the assistant district attorney told her a few minutes earlier: The prosecution was prepared to offer Tomlin a deal. Plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance, serve 30 days on Rikers and be done with it. Tomlin said he wasn’t interested. A guilty plea would only add to his record and compound the penalties if he were arrested again. ‘‘They’re mistaken,’’ he told Stocking. ‘‘It’s a regular straw!’’ When the straw was tested by the police evidence lab, he assured her, it would show that he was telling the truth. In the meantime, there was no way he was pleading guilty to anything...

In New York City, where courts use bail far less than in many jurisdictions, roughly 45,000 people are jailed each year simply because they can’t pay their court-assigned bail. And while the city’s courts set bail much lower than the national average, only one in 10 defendants is able to pay it at arraignment...

With national attention suddenly focused on the criminal-justice system, bail has been cited as an easy target for reformers. But ensuring that no one is held in jail based on poverty would, in many respects, necessitate a complete reordering of criminal justice. The open secret is that in most jurisdictions, bail is the grease that keeps the gears of the overburdened system turning. Faced with the prospect of going to jail for want of bail, many defendants accept plea deals instead, sometimes at their arraignments...

After less than half an hour, Hechinger was back in the courtroom. The defendants he interviewed were marched out onto a bench against the left wall. First was the turnstile jumper. The prosecutor laid out the charges and the offer. The defendant took the deal and would have to complete community service. Next was the homeless teenager. The prosecutor asked for bail of $5,000. Hechinger argued that bail was unnecessary. The judge set it at $250. The teenager didn’t have it. He would be sleeping at Rikers. The guy with the suspended license was released on his own recognizance — without any bail — and would be due back in court in a couple of months. Next appeared the man who broke his girlfriend’s bowls. The prosecutor wanted bail set at $2,500. Hechinger argued that there was no reason to believe his client wouldn’t return to court on his own. The judge set it at $1,000. ‘‘Your honor, I called the mother, she said she could afford $250,’’ Hechinger said. ‘‘I’m sorry, counselor, that’s my bail decision,’’ the judge responded...

The long-term damage that bail inflicts on vulnerable defendants extends well beyond incarceration. Disappearing into the machinery of the justice system separates family members, interrupts work and jeopardizes housing. ‘‘Most of our clients are people who have crawled their way up from poverty or are in the throes of poverty,’’ Hechinger says. ‘‘Our clients work in service-level positions where if you’re gone for a day, you lose your job. People in need of caretaking — the elderly, the young — are left without caretakers. People who live in shelters, where if they miss their curfews, they lose their housing. Folks with immigration concerns are quicker to be put on the immigration radar. So when our clients have bail set, they suffer on the inside, they worry about what’s happening on the outside, and when they get out, they come back to a world that’s more difficult than the already difficult situation that they were in before.'...

This summer, the New York City Council took a tentative step toward reform by earmarking $1.4 million for a citywide fund to bail out low-level offenders. The fund, proposed with much fanfare by Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito in her State of the City address in February, is modeled on a number of smaller bail funds around the city. The oldest of these, the Bronx Freedom Fund, was established in 2007 in association with the Bronx Defenders, a public-defender organization. The founders shut down the fund after only a year and a half, after a judge argued that it was effectively operating as an unlicensed bail-bond business. But before they did, the fund bailed out nearly 200 defendants and generated some illuminating statistics. Ninety-six percent of the fund’s clients made it to every one of their court appearances, a return rate higher even than that of people who posted their own bail. More than half of the Freedom Fund’s clients, now able to fight their cases outside jail, saw their charges completely dismissed. Not a single client went to jail on the charges for which bail had been posted."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/the-bail-trap.html?_r=1&refe

"How Chance the Rapper’s Life Became Perfect"

"

"When Chance walks in, the room doesn't so much perk up as get more tranquil. He's got a kind of calming force to him, like he's got fewer moving parts than most people. Slender, hat pulled low, quizzical eyebrows, mustache—he looks, from across the room, like what would happen if someone challenged you to draw a man in five lines or less...

I sat in the room and listened to his voice. There's nothing like it in music right now. It's its own jazz instrument, bright and unpredictable as a trumpet, primary colored, a cheerful roar soaked in a meditative sadness. He's an uncommonly dexterous rapper, but it's the voice—the physical quality of it, the way it feels textured by experience and elation—that's truly remarkable...

The majority of Coloring Book ended up getting made in about two months: March and April. Chance slept in the studio for most of it, with his girlfriend and his new daughter. Studio One. “No smoke, no foolishness.” Chance's mother and his father—a lifelong community organizer in Chicago who used to work for then state senator Barack Obama—coming by regularly to check on him and visit their granddaughter.

One of the last things he did was this: “I had the first verse for the intro song, which is called ‘All We Got.’ ” As in: Music is all we've got. Hook by Kanye West. The song has one of the all-time rap boasts, too: I was baptized like real early / I might give Satan a swirlie. Anyway, there was a part of the song that was troubling Chance. First verse. “There was a lyric where I say: Life was never perfect / I could merch it. And for the first, like, the last two months before the project came out, that was the line. It was: Life was never perfect. And I remember, the last week I was like, ‘Let me go in there and do a dub’ ”—an overdub—“and say, Man, I swear my life is perfect. Because I don't know if I really want people repeating that and thinking that and shouting that to me from the crowd on a stage. ‘Life was never perfect.’ Life is perfect! You know?”"

http://www.gq.com/story/how-chance-the-rappers-life-became-perfect

He's great. It's true, too, I have a clear memory of the first time I heard one of his songs because of how much he communicated in the inflection of his voice, it just grabs you.

"Google’s Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring ISIS Recruits"

"Jigsaw, the Google-owned tech incubator and think tank—until recently known as Google Ideas—has been working over the past year to develop a new program it hopes can use a combination of Google’s search advertising algorithms and YouTube’s video platform to target aspiring ISIS recruits and ultimately dissuade them from joining the group’s cult of apocalyptic violence. The program, which Jigsaw calls the Redirect Method and plans to launch in a new phase this month, places advertising alongside results for any keywords and phrases that Jigsaw has determined people attracted to ISIS commonly search for. Those ads link to Arabic- and English-language YouTube channels that pull together preexisting videos Jigsaw believes can effectively undo ISIS’s brainwashing—clips like testimonials from former extremists, imams denouncing ISIS’s corruption of Islam, and surreptitiously filmed clips inside the group’s dysfunctional caliphate in Northern Syria and Iraq... 

Jigsaw’s program is far from a comprehensive solution to ISIS’s online recruitment, says Humera Khan, the executive director of the Islamic deradicalization group Muflehun. She points out that both Google and Facebook have trained anti-extremism non-profits in the past on how to use their keyword advertising, though perhaps without the deep involvement in targeting, curating and promoting video Jigsaw is trying. More importantly, she argues, attracting ISIS sympathizers to a video playlist is only the first step. “If they can hook people in, can they keep them coming back with new and relevant content? That’ll be important,” says Khan. Eventually, any successful deradicalization effort also needs human interaction, too, and a supportive community backing up the person’s decision to turn away from extremism. “This sounds like a good piece of the solution. But it’s not all of it.”

http://buff.ly/2c8DTYc

"The Etymology of 'Woman' "

"Although the majority of English words are loaned, borrowed, or stolen from other languages, woman has no cognates in contemporary or historic foreign languages, making it one of few exclusively English words. The word is derived from wyfman, the combination of wyf [wife] and man. Following is an examination of the word’s history, and a brief glance at its possible future...

In the Early Old English (eOE), wyf was used to describe a member of the female gender, unlike our contemporary use of the word, meaning ‘a married woman’...
there was a need in [middle English] for a word meaning ‘adult human male’. The words were and wapman, meaning ‘male’ and ‘males’ respectively, had become entirely obsolete by the 13th century. The only word left to mean ‘adult human male’ was the word man, which had until then been used irrespective of sex to mean simply, ‘human’...

We may yet see a prefix added to man to indicate maleness, or we may see something entirely new arise to fit the meaning we need... 100 years from now may be a foundation for menmyn, replacing the etymological  wyf with the current man to mean ‘adult male human’, while man reverts back to its original genderless state."

http://thiswretchedhive.blogspot.de/2011/05/etymology-of-woman.html?m=1

Oh wow that was interesting. Seriously, read the whole thing.

Imma start calling dudes "wapmen" and "menmyn".

Also, was anyone else under the impression that woman meant "sheath for a sword"? Where is that from?

Related: revolution of the use of They

"AND DO YOU BELONG? I DO"

"It’s the same tone that the officer has when she tells you your neighborhood is blocked for residents only as you and your friends drive home from a Mardi Gras parade, when you have a residents tag on your car. You’ve been in the car line for 10 minutes and watched them let every one else pass without stopping them at all.

It usually does not include “please.” It does not include “will you.” It does not include “would you mind,” for you must not even be worth wasting their mouths forming these respectable words. Although, you usually see them used seconds before or after you.

You don’t feel that most of the people in these incidents do not like black people, but simply are a product of their white supremacy and are exercising it on you without caution, care, or thought.

Many times the tone just simply says, “I do not feel you belong here... 

You’re full of passion and shock, so you share this story on Twitter, hands shaking, because you actually want these women to face accountability in some kind of way. You know that you cannot speak to them with out it escalating because they have no respect for you or your son, and this will only end badly for you and feel it’s not worth getting the police involved. So, you are hoping they will hear you this way...

You realize that you never called these women racists, but people will continuously put those words in your mouth.

What you did indeed say is, “This is why many black people are uncomfortable being in predominately white spaces,”and you still stand true to that."

http://saintheron.com/featured/and-do-you-belong-i-do/

There is also a Look. I spend a lot of my days with the perpetual feeling that there is something gross stuck to me or a giant revealing hole in my clothes because of that Look. 

Most people don't seem to realize when they are giving the Look. 

FB: "Solange Knowles' important essay on being a black person in spaces that white people implicitly think of as their own, and the exhaustion of having to constantly reaffirm that you belong (a safe space is a space where you have no fear that people would throw limes at you)" 

"Bros Funding Bros: What’s Wrong with Venture Capital "

"The venture capital industry is stuck in yesteryear—the same people, living the same lives and having the same experiences making largely the same decisions. This sameness may have been a strength, but now it is creating blindspots. For every idea we fund, how many great ideas don’t even get a sounding board because we can’t relate to the problem or the entrepreneur? How much better off would we be if we had a larger lens from which to examine a broader class of entrepreneurs and ideas? My suspicion is greatly...

From the foundations and NGOs that are eradicating poverty and taking care of the world’s worst off, to companies like Facebook, Google and Apple that are inventing the future while looking after our best off, they have all explicitly decided to become less consensus driven and less homogeneous. They have found this increases creativity and drives business results. In turn, they are doing the ambitious, groundbreaking work that we used to do. And even though they have more work to do, when you compare the complexion of these leaders to the leaders within our industry, we look like total laggards...

We need a wake up call on Sand Hill Road. We need to recapture our potential and open the doors. Invite more people into the decision making: young people, Blacks, Latinos, females, LGBT and others who aren’t necessarily part of the obvious majority.  Surround ourselves with a more diverse set of experiences and maybe we will prioritize a more diverse set of things. Maybe we will find more courage to do the hard things.

https://www.theinformation.com/bros-funding-bros-whats-wrong-with-venture-capital#comments

Related to: Problem with Silicon Valley; Spoke up at Google nothing happened

(credit to AM) 

"The Abuse of Leslie Jones Shows Us How Tokenism Sets the Stage for Hate"

"We’ve seen incidents like this before—Gamergate and the spate of hacked nude photos of celebrities that made the rounds a few years ago come immediately to mind—but something about the attack on Jones seems to be both reaching new levels of online aggression and echoing deep-seated, centuries-old criticisms against black women. It’s an example of the worst kind of backlash, as it represents how people respond when their supremacy is supposedly under threat, writes Mark Shrayber: “Make no mistake: What happened to Jones wasn’t ‘trolling.’ It was a hate crime.”... 

Jones is also alone—or at least that’s the perception—which makes her especially vulnerable to attack. While there are myriad talented, smart, funny black women in Hollywood, how many of them do we see on a daily basis? Whatever the number, it’s not nearly enough to counter the image of Leslie Jones as an exception rather than a rule. Uniqueness is not a fault; however, it is a slippery slope on the road to tokenism...

Until there’s more than one black character thrown in “for good measure,” we’re not going to see contempt of the likes Jones is experience go away anytime soon."

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2016/08/30/the-abuse-of-leslie-jones-shows-us-how-tokenism-sets-the-stage-for-hate/