February 2012
Ideas and Opinions.: Why can't education be free?... →
anticapitalist:
When people talk about “higher education”, they are not talking about intense learning in a field of your desire. They’re not talking about developing yourself into an intellectual. They are talking about preparing yourself for corporate slavery.
The various Bachelors, PhD, Masters, and MD programs we refer to as “higher education” are not higher education as much as they...
“If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shabby furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shabby philosophies. It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the wrapped meat inside it.”
—Albert Einstein
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
—Dr. Seuss
Portishead - Roads
From theory, action.: Being called "unable" to say... →
neurodivergentsexuality:
by Devyn
An autistic woman and sexual abuse survivor was just declared to be “incapable of consent” in the UK. Let me repeat that: someone who has experienced and survived genuine sexual assault was just banned, against her wishes, from having consensual sex.
And I feel like, this duality—forced “sexlessness” paired with forced sex—is so fundamental to the ways that...
Monsanto's Roundup Found in People's Urine →
A recent study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of Glyphosate, a carcinogenic chemical found in herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup, in all urine samples tested. The amount of glyphosate found in the urine was staggering, with each sample containing concentrations at 5 to 20-fold the limit established for drinking water. This is just one more piece of evidence that...
Etta James-Trust In Me
Chicago Communities Occupy School In Protest of... →
The Brian Piccolo Specialty School in Humboldt Park, Chicago is currently Occupied by parents and students. Occupy Chicago and other allies are outside the building in solidarity and have set up an encampment. Around one hundred people are present and are taking shifts to ensure the safety of the occupation. The Chicago Teachers Union has expressed support for the action. Piccolo, an elementary...
Stephen Colbert: What is the most beautiful thing that you know of in science?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: E = mc2.
Stephen Colbert: Really?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh, it's awesome. It is.
Stephen Colbert: So that equation doesn't just have a great publicist? It's actually...? Because everybody knows it, but also everybody knows Coke. It's like the Coca-Cola of science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, you learn [it] before you even know what any of those symbols mean. You hear it in elementary school. It's a gorgeous thing.
Stephen Colbert: What is beautiful about [it]? First of all, tell everybody what all the pieces mean.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: E stands for energy. M is mass. C2 is just the speed of light squared. Ignore that for the moment. The thrust of that equation is that energy and mass are equivalent to each other. Which means you can transmute one into the other and back. What makes that extraordinary is that [that] hardly ever happens in our everyday lives, yet it's going on all the time in the rest of the universe.
Stephen Colbert: So we're in this little pocket where e = mc2 is not visible?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Never happens. It's not visible. It's not happening in our lives, no. But if it did, the world would be really different.
Stephen Colbert: What is beautiful about it to you?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: It's simple. It's simple yet it accounts for hugely complex things. And for me that is where the beauty lies in the truth.
News media distributes propaganda to prepare for... →
desukapital:
jonathan-cunningham:
Diane Sawyer of ABC News created and aired a ‘report’ filled with fabrications, uncritically repeated government accusations, and outright lies.
Sawyer begins by warning of “a kind of shadow war being waged by Iran around the world” — based on her blind acceptance of totally unproven Israeli accusations that Iran was behind three bombings yesterday in India,...
“I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know.”
—Albert Camus, A Happy Death
