The costs of the dirty deal (done dirt cheap) must be patiently explained by the people whom it affects. These are our children.

thenationmagazine:

Losers from the Debt Deal: Students

Graduate students would be the hardest hit, as the bill proposes an elimination of the interest subsidy on federal student loans for “almost all” of them. This means that beginning July 1, 2012, grad students will be responsible for the interest on their loans while in school and during any subsequent deferment period.

Credit: AP Images

utnereader:

laughingsquid:

Please Turn Off Your Books

(via kwayb)

Sign o’ the times.

utnereader:

Now that Washington has at least six wars cooking (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and more generally, the global war on terror), Americans find themselves in a new world of war.  If, however, you haven’t joined the all-volunteer military, any of our 17 intelligence outfits, the Pentagon, the weapons companies and hire-a-gun corporations associated with it, or some other part of the National Security Complex, America’s distant wars go on largely without you (at least until the bills come due).

War has a way of turning almost anything upside down, including language.  But with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, crumbling infrastructure, and weird weather, who even notices?  This undoubtedly means that you’re using a set of antediluvian war words or definitions from your father’s day.  It’s time to catch up. Read more …

Oh, Brooklyn…

utnereader:

Guerilla gardeners and chairbombers around the world are taking to the street under the banner of “tactical urbanism” (here’s a round-up on the trend). Would you go rogue for urbanism?

minnpost:

Search prompts tell an interesting story about Libya (and how much we don’t know).

theforestofthings:

Wonderings…

While my apprehension and appreciation of Hui Neng’s poem makes me a little uncomfortable with notions of “cleaning,” “polishing,” or “scrubbing,” I do find in my own practice of yoga that repetition is the mother of learning, and that habits leave depart from us with when we make small shifts. This is a further meaning of observances and ritual, to which I rarely refer as “hollow.”

utnereader:

“Spiritual training involves scrubbing out deeply ingrained habits, which takes time and reiter­ation. It is like trying to flatten a scroll that has been coiled for thousands of years. One pass of our hands across the surface won’t do it. We have to press it out again and again.”

utnereader:

In the immediate  aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, media outlets too often portrayed survivors as helpless victims or barbaric looters, not only propagating public fear and panic but also painting a distorted portrait of disaster-stricken areas. When an earthquake devastated Haiti five years later, reporters followed the same narrative thread. In her steely-eyed critique of the coverage, Rebecca Solnit likens the hyperbole to a “second wave of disaster.” Solnit is telling a different story, a story of strength and resilience.

What is this interpretation and gatekeeping of which you speak? You sound like a social scientist or something. Seriously, though, here’s today’s ray of sunshine.

utnereader:

Here’s a snippet of why we think Assange is a visionary of our times:

“WikiLeaks represents a ray of sunshine. By placing raw documents in the public domain, the organization not only leaps past the interpretive and gatekeeping roles of investigative reporting but also subverts the power of governments and businesses to censor the paper trail of their actions. (Reuters filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the video that captured the shootings of its newsmen. The request was denied. WikiLeaks never asked for permission in the first place.)”

Read the rest at Utne.com.