Why cutting public pensions will not lower your property taxes.
It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion
Maria Muldaur:
Love me like a man
Bonnie:
http://youtu.be/SXVoOgwiYc8
I drove all night
Cyndi:
Genocide in the mainstream
Israeli academic brainstorm over how to solve the Palestinian “problems.” Proposed solutions include the rape of female family members!
Happy Hour: Miles Davis Generique
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Yes
This trend toward punitive attacks on mothering styles has a lot to do with lost ground in women’s rights, to the point where a female parent’s decisions are open to criticism and criminal charges from everyone else:
I grew up in the ’70s, when we kids were expected to entertain ourselves, which meant, largely, that we were left on our own. I sometimes walked home from elementary school by myself; when my mother was pursuing her undergraduate degree at the same time, we were often left for long periods under the supervision of my teenaged brother. Being home alone after school was routine for my latchkey friends. The tiny county jail would not have been able to fit all the moms who left kids napping in the car while they ran into the grocery store.
A beloved professor told me that in order to get her PhD while being the mother of five, she had to take her youngest to school with her — and she let him play in the halloutside the lecture room while she attended class. “What else was I supposed to do?” she said. She laughed, also, surveying the no-trimester-is-too-early-to-start-the-Baby-Einstein-tapes of women of my generation. “We didn’t even talk to babies back then — we thought they wouldn’t understand!” Her children survived and even went to Harvard. Her parenting strategy 20 years ago showed pluck, can-do-ness, and other admirable traits, not unlike my mother’s letting my brother cook us no-bake cheesecake for all our meals for weeks at a time.
Poor doors!
Because God forbid the worthies might brush shoulders with the poors!
The push to ban “poor doors”—entrances that spare market-rate tenants from being forced to share an entrance with their less fortunate neighbors—wasn’t quick enough to stop the glass-bound luxury condo at 40 Riverside Boulevard. The Post reports that developer Extell has the green light from the HPD to construct a separate door for the building’s 55 affordable units.
Those 55 apartments, which are located in a separate “building segment” that faces the street, will rent for 60% of the area median income ($51K for a family of four), while 219 nicer, river-facing condos will likely be obscenely expensive.
Extell’s largesse is being rewarded with a “floor area bonus” under the Bloomberg-era voluntary inclusionary zoning program, and they plan to sell that land to other developers at a profit [PDF].
Sodastream fires Palestinian workers
I argue with people about boycotting this company all this time. They do love their Sodastreams, but the company is in an illegal settlement that was stolen from the Palestinians. They employed Palestinians, true — but not anymore:
Sodastream, which makes soda machines for home use, fired 60 Palestinian workers this month from its plant in the West Bank settlement of Mishor Adumim over a dispute about the food they received during their shifts to break the day-long fast during the month of Ramadan.
WAC-MAAN, the trade union representing the plant’s Palestinian workers, said that in early July workers on the evening shift complained that the food they received was insufficient.
“Sixty workers, who are prohibited from bringing food from home because of Jewish dietary laws, found themselves without enough food after the 16-hour fast,” Maan’s Jerusalem coordinator, Erez Wagner, said.
Wagner said the workers approached management and explained that it would be difficult for them to work through the night without sufficient food, noting that it was dangerous for them to work the big machines when they were both hungry and tired.
According to Wagner, one executive accused the workers of deliberately provoking confrontation, an accusation the workers denied.