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This. Is why I love America.

I don’t mean like loving that way or anything!

from Zerochan

(Or rather soon-to-be ex-classmates…)

So, why are you excited to spend your vacations on the U.S.?

Classmates: I can’t wait for the theme parks! Oh, and this Water Park, and Walt Disney World, and the rollercoasters and buy this and that clothing and arrgh! It’ll be awesome! 8D

Me: My family there lives conveniently in access to several bookstores, and there are several museums I want to visit or re-visit! History! Also, there’s this book I want to get and this animation film that isn’t being sold ATM in my place, and those videogames at a decent price… I also can’t wait to be able to wear coats and the like on a bit cool weather :’D

…really. I was looking through the list of unvisited museums from last year that I missed and I just got ecstatic. Ffff. I can’t wait to be a Gru in Halloween, either.

…I’m not saying it’s “bad” what my classmates aspire to (I would personally love to go to Walt Disney World someday, I’m just not overexcited yet ^^; ) but oh boy… well, I guess that the clothing factor detracts me a bit, so yay?

If anybody of you lives in Virginia or Columbia or Maryland or the like, please tell me so I can give in an attempt to bug you :3 hah!

/Random

this is insane!

(Or rather soon-to-be ex-classmates…)

So, why are you excited to spend your vacations on the U.S.?

Classmates: I can’t wait for the theme parks! Oh, and this Water Park, and Walt Disney World, and the rollercoasters and buy this and that clothing and arrgh! It’ll be awesome! 8D

Me: My family there lives conveniently in access to several bookstores, and there are several museums I want to visit or re-visit! History! Also, there’s this book I want to get and this animation film that isn’t being sold ATM in my place, and those videogames at a decent price… I also can’t wait to be able to wear coats and the like on a bit cool weather :’D

…really. I was looking through the list of unvisited museums from last year that I missed and I just got ecstatic. Ffff. I can’t wait to be a Gru in Halloween, either.

…I’m not saying it’s “bad” what my classmates aspire to (I would personally love to go to Walt Disney World someday, I’m just not overexcited yet ^^; ) but oh boy… well, I guess that the clothing factor detracts me a bit, so yay?

If anybody of you lives in Virginia or Columbia or Maryland or the like, please tell me so I can give in an attempt to bug you :3 hah!

/Random

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates artificially inseminated an unknowing woman in 2028. With a combination of each other’s sperm. Yes, you read that right. That child eventually became President and the blood line continues to run America in my time. By the way we aren’t the “United States of America” anymore. We are now, “United International 1”. Get used to that.

this is insane!

not a tourist, but i had to :)

not a tourist, but i had to :)

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Viva! by i ea? s?ars on Flickr.

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These are the states I’ve been to. Hell, this is EVERYWHERE I’ve been to.

This is even more accurate regarding my minimal travels.

Note that St. Martin Parish in Louisiana is split up in two because of a surveying error made in the 1860s. I have not been to the isolated southern part of it, just the northern portion that Interstate 10 runs through.

In total, I have been to 183 counties, parishes, independent cities in 13 states, comprising 5.8% of all the counties in the country, and I have been to the District of Columbia.

Overall, it’s proof that I really need to travel more. I still haven’t even been south of St. Petersburg in my home state, but at least I’ve made it to New York City, Washington, D.C., and erm … Houston.

You can make one of these maps here, by the way.

CIA Assassination, Regime Change, Mass Murder and Saddam

Another very good example of a CIA-organized “regime change” was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder.  This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein’s beloved Ba’ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups.  Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director. In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem.  But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington.  He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq’s most popular leader.  He had to go! In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam’s Ba’ath Party came to power for the first time.  Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq’s secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA’s close friends in Iraq. Iraq is once again a target of US “regime change.” Despite that, precious little is being said by the corporate media about how the CIA aided and abetted political assassination, regime change and mass murder, all in the name of putting Saddam’s Ba’ath power into power for the first time in Iraq. One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba’ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963.  If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute “regime change” in Iraq. - Richard Sanders

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“Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty simple. It says, ‘Raise an army.’ It says absolutely nothing about race, colour, creed, sexual orientation. You all joined for a reason: to serve. To protect our nation, right? How dare we, then, exclude a group of people who want to do the same thing you do right now, something that is honourable and noble? Right? Get over it. We’re magnificent, we’re going to continue to be. … Let’s just move on, treat everyone with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines.”

- Sergeant Major Michael Barrett, US Marine, on the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’

30 Day Song Challenge! Day 7: A Song From The First Album You Remember Buying For Yourself

These colors don’t run, they drive.

 (by Jennifer Daniel)

White Sands Sunset Series by mstoy on Flickr.

All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup:

You: doing more with less. Corporate profits: Up 22 percent. The dirty secret of the jobless recovery.

— By Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

Also read harrowing first-person tales of overwork and 12 charts on just how much is being demanded of American workers.

On a bright spring day in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled “on the side.” It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.

“Ah,” he said, “the speedup.”

His old-school phrase gave form to something we’d been noticing with increasing apprehension—and it extended far beyond journalism. We’d hear from creative professionals in what seemed to be dream jobs who were crumbling under ever-expanding to-do lists; from bus drivers, hospital technicians, construction workers, doctors, and lawyers who shame-facedly whispered that no matter how hard they tried to keep up with the extra hours and extra tasks, they just couldn’t hold it together. (And don’t even ask about family time.)

Webster’s defines speedup as “an employer’s demand for accelerated output without increased pay,” and it used to be a household word. Bosses would speed up the line to fill a big order, to goose profits, or to punish a restive workforce. Workers recognized it, unions (remember those?) watched for and negotiated over it—and, if necessary, walked out over it.

But now we no longer even acknowledge it—not in blue-collar work, not in white-collar or pink-collar work, not in economics texts, and certainly not in the media (except when journalists gripe about the staff-compacted-job-expanded newsroom). Now the word we use is “productivity,” a term insidious in both its usage and creep. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don’t you want to be a productive member of society? Pundits across the political spectrum revel in the fact that US productivity (a.k.a. economic output per hour worked) consistently leads the world. Yes, year after year, Americans wring even more value out of each minute on the job than we did the year before. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Except what’s good for American business isn’t necessarily good for Americans. We’re not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory.

Sound familiar: Mind racing at 4 a.m.? Guiltily realizing you’ve been only half-listening to your child for the past hour? Checking work email at a stoplight, at the dinner table, in bed? Dreading once-pleasant diversions, like dinner with friends, as just one more thing on your to-do list?

Guess what: It’s not you. These might seem like personal problems—and certainly, the pharmaceutical industry is happy to perpetuate that notion—but they’re really economic problems. Just counting work that’s on the books (never mind those 11 p.m. emails), Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans. The differential isn’t solely accounted for by longer hours, of course—worldwide, almost everyone except us has, at least on paper, a right to weekends off, paid vacation time (PDF), and paid maternity leave. (The only other countries that don’t mandate paid time off for new moms are Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, and Swaziland. U-S…A?)

To understand how we got here, first let’s consider the Ben Franklin-Horatio Alger-Henry Ford ur-myth: To balk at working hard—really, really hard—brands you as profoundly un-American. Who besides the archetypical Japanese salaryman derives so much of his self-image from self-sacrifice on the job? Slacker is one of the most biting insults available in polite company.

And so we kowtow to—nay, embrace—a cultural maxim that just happens to be enormously convenient to corporate America. “Our culture has encouraged me to only feel valuable if I’m barely hanging on to my sanity,” one friend emailed as we were working on this article. In fact, each time we mentioned this topic to someone—reader, source, friend—they first took pains to say: I’m not lazy. I love my job. I come from a long line of hard workers. But then it would pour out of them—the fatigue, the isolation, the guilt.

“I am exhausted,” said a “part time” college instructor in Illinois. “I can’t help my son with his homework because I am grading papers until late into the night. I get up very early during the week, skip lunch to save not money but time, and the workload never lets up. My employer uses and abuses full-time employees even more so than those of us that are hourly. My supervisor, for example, runs a large department. He was just promoted to a new, even more demanding position, but his position running the department will not be filled. He will now be doing what is a 60-to-70-hour job ‘on the side.’ I can’t complain of overwork, because everyone is competing to get enough classes to pay the bills. If you lose a class, you lose a chunk of your paycheck. If we can’t handle it, the class can always be given to another teacher who will be desperate for the work or money.”

Continued here: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speed-up-american-workers-long-hours

            

Domus magazine has published an article and accompanying set of graphics that display some crucial information released by Wikileaks late last year. According to the article, its purpose is as follows:

Mapping the discontinuous spatiality of the contemporary nation-state through the publication of the secret government memo listing 259 facilities around the world considered crucial to everyday life in the US

Although the graphics couldn’t have been laid in a more confusing way, it’s interesting to see just how far-reaching America’s interests span. From “border crossing” areas in the middle of Mexico (where there’s nary a border in sight), to tightly-spaced “telecommunications hubs” all over Europe and Japan, there are hundreds of sites around the globe that have deemed vital to our national security without being anywhere near the, you know, nation. In the modern globalized world in which we exist, this is anything but surprising, and I hope one day these graphics can be made a bit more interactive (and aesthetically logical), so even more information like this can be released to the public.

Wikileaks FTW. 

We Must Educate All Our Young Men:

One out of every two men that graduate HS between the ages of 15 and 24 will be incarcerated, unemployed, or dead. This makes me seriously fear for my students, all of which are people of color and a little less than half of them being men. It’s crazy that this problem has gotten so bad for men of color that the President of the College Board chose to write about it.

i couldn’t have planned this

photo (c) me

Our “amped intern” over here at MetroLyrics purchased The United States of America’s debut album back in ‘95, where this classic tune is from. Sing along here!

Close up CSX on Flickr.A freight train pulls out of Berea, Ohio...

Carol Morris, Miss Universe 1956

Boston

Photo Courtesy: Werner Kunz

Vineyard, Willamette Valley, Oregon by Robert Crum on Flickr.

New York Taxi by Trash-Photography on Flickr.

When most people think of taxis, they imagine the hustle and bustle going-ons in New York, when busy cityfolk jump into a cab, only to get stuck in two-hour traffic, get out and walk the rest of the way to their destination.

But in Chicago, where traffic tends to be more milder, different types of concerns emerge instead. Which takes us back to sping 2007.

Like any typical third year university student, the looming reality of graduation and a forced simulation into the real world threw me into a flurry as I sought to find some internship from which I coudl determine if my unviersity degree would help me find the perfect marriage, er, career path in which I would find great satisfaction. Incidentally, I had secured myself enough interviews to last me a whole week of interview, at the expense of any needed rest that came with spring break. However, when living out of a suitcase came king sized beds, reimbused meals and a week in the city, what more could a broke university student as for?

Snow at the end of the week, lots of it.

Needless to say, Chicago was hit by a large snowstorm, not as great as the one this year, but still one. As a result, the walk from the hotel to the office for my final interview was not going to work. Thus, I resorted to my last solution, one that someone with a minor fear of wreckless driving would continue to have nightmares over for the next five years.

I hailed a taxi cab with my classmate.

Approximately ten minutes and a whitened knuckle clenching the arm rest later, we finally reach the office. All this while, as we get out of the car, the driver is shatting with their friend/family on the phone. At this point, I realize that my suitcase is in the trunk and that this guy had no intention of getting out of the car to help me with my case. The situation caused me to frown, but I had an interview to get to, so doing it myself would be faster.

Politely knocking on the glass, I signal to the trunk and ask for the guy to open it, which he does. For a moment, I stared into the dark abyss of the trunk in its black lining that threatened to swallow my already dark suitcase. It was deep and my suitcase weighed like a dead body (not that I would know from experience). But being of short stature, I do the only sensible thing to do for someone who is in a rush to an interview. I start dragging the thing out like my life depended on it and manage to get the thing halfway out when the unthinkable happened.

The taxi started.

In Chicago, it is good to keep in mind that drivers will sometimes not close the trunk and resort to starting up their cars quickly and letting the force cause the door to close. But fortunately for me, morning rush hour has the car slowly easing its way into the traffic, as I walk rapidly (hand still on the suitcase) and trying to get this thing out before the door slammed on me or I lose my endurance. But as things went on, the force of the car speeding up caused me to fall in, feel hanging out as the car drove a few feet. At this point, I start screaming obscenities as the person I was with ran after the car, knocking desperately to get the man to stop the car.

Fortunately I managed to pull my suitcase out of the car with only my ego slightly dented and my arsenal of amusing stories increased by one.

Now if only people would stop voting this story as fake when I give two truths and a lie.

Close up CSX on Flickr.

A freight train pulls out of Berea, Ohio close up 2007