kpete
kpete's Journal
Finally......
enough is enough
"When I approached him, he kind of leaned toward me, put his head toward me,
and asked me to touch his hair."
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/27/politics/donald-trump-hair-toupee/
Million Dollar Blocks
This is fascinating and important.
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The Museum of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition which displayed the maps created by the Justice Mapping Center. The name of the exhibition was “Architecture and Justice, from the Million Dollar Blocks project. 2006”
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The description of the exhibition reads as follows:
Of the more than two million people incarcerated in jails and prisons in the United States, a disproportionate number came from very few neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of sing city blocks. Using rarely accessible date from the criminal justice system, the Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center have created maps of these “million dollar blocks” and of the city-prison-city-prison migration flow of five of the nation’s cities. “The maps pose difficult ethical and political question for policy makers and designers,” explains Kurgan. “When they are linked to other urban, social, and economic indicators of incarceration, they also suggest new strategies for approaching urban design and criminal justice reform together.”
The graphics are staggering.
Much more:
http://milliondollarblocks.tumblr.com/
The Case for Bernie from an Expat
The Case for Bernie from an Expat
by beachten
..................
By now most of us are familiar with what Sanders means when he calls himself a 'democratic socialist'. He insists that the US, one of the wealthiest nations in the world, can afford to provide its workers with paid vacation time, with universal health care, with a free college education (again, something Hillary does not support). He knows that we have the wealth to improve our nation's infrastructure--every time I return to the US, I'm horrified by how dilapidated this country has become. The position of many Hillary supporters is that (some of) these things are pie-in-the sky dreaming, unrealistic, and unattainable in the US. There is indeed some truth to this--Republicans are committed to obstructing social progress.
But this attitude reflects just how far we have fallen, how far right our discourse has gone, how deeply disconnected we are from the rest of the world, particularly northern Europeans, who view the US with a combination of horror, disgust (at our foreign policy), and at times, sympathy. They fundamentally do not understand how we still do not have single-payer health care, strong public education that is state subsidized from preschool through specialty training or university education and beyond, unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, generous pensions, and more (much more!).
...........
My point here is that we will never get there if we don't plan it, and if we don't demand it. And we will certainly NEVER get there by supporting a candidate that is silent on what should be viewed as basic workers and human rights. I'm not even getting into foreign policy or Wall Street--again, no need to get into Hillary's relationship with Wall Street--we know what it is. But it should be obvious to all that without a fundamental change of the role of Wall Street and corporate power in our nation, none of the social values our party should support will be realized.
So when you tell me that these "socialist" values are not realistic, and that most Americans won't vote for them, I'll tell you that the only way to bring this country back from the abyss the right has taken us is to fight for these values and support the candidates that best represent them. The choice is obvious.
More:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/30/1416741/-The-Case-for-Bernie-from-an-Expat
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