17 Apr 2014
Chained American Dream - Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert with Alasdair Macleod
The Men’s Human Rights Movement Needs You
Victor Zen: "The issues that effect men and boys, effect you, whether you are a man or a woman and by leaving problems unchecked they can only get worse, they grow in magnitude and they can effect more and more people to the point where it can effect your families, it can effect your loved one's your friends and at that point when there's no system, when there's no support for the suffering whatsoever particularly the suffering of men and boys, you are left only with the entire burden of the suffering with no community support and no emotional support from a culture that is not sympathetic or even epithetic to the issues effecting men and boys. Thankfully this is changing."
Love’s Bitter Rebuke - Over Generations
By PART 1
I will always remember my mother’s words.“You’ll never forget your first love,” she said as I cried into her arms.
For some months, I had been keeping a terrible secret. My girlfriend, my first girlfriend, had been raped. They didn’t just rape her; they broke her nose. A knife was used. She was cut. There were two of them.
Picture Alley Sheedy in The Breakfast Club — well, that was Louise. Her soft Irish accent, long black hair and scruffy oversized jumpers made me love her with all my heart.
We were both seventeen years old and still at school.
Louise had met my mother just once, but things hadn’t gone well at all. My mother had ignored her and when she had left, she pronounced caustically that Louise looked like she had “come off a council estate*,” and that I was never to bring her to the house again.
I never understood my mother’s snobbery. So much of my mother’s behaviour left me terribly confused. In any case, her prejudice was unfounded — Louise was actually from a wealthy Irish family who lived in the expensive part of town. They were also puritanically Catholic. If anything, I had assumed that my mother would approve.
Michael Howard to Andy Coulson, inept spin has always raised a laugh
By John Ward: Although many threaders here obviously think I’m a miserable bugger, the truth is that during any given day I laugh on average about 20 times more than most people. This has probably got something to do with reading 20 times more news: but whether the equality-forcers like it or not, it’s also because older, more intelligent and worldly folks know it’s laughable, and the overwhelmingly majority don’t even know (or care about) what the issues are. Why should they? They pay their taxes to have soi-disant ‘professionals’ sort this stuff out for them. They think those people know better. And anyway, the semi-final of The Voice is on tomorrow. Between 65 and 80% of the population in the West consume media on most of the issues of the day, and only rarely spot when they’re being manipulated. I was talking to a friend yesterday whose theory is that advertising (or perhaps more accurately, ‘publicity’) has simply invaded the editorial completely, so the thing that drives hacks these days is “Will it get the sales/hits/thread numbers up?” She’s right, of course.
George Orwell famously said that journalism is the craft of printing stuff nasty people don’t want printed, and the rest is just pr. Today, it’s all pr and spin in one form or another.
Who Goes To Jail? Matt Taibbi On American Injustice Gap From Wall Street To Main Street
Our Consent: You Don’t Have It ...Feminists
By I hope nobody minds too much if I spend the entirety of this article talking about my penis.It might seem self-indulgent of me, of course. I do have my reasons. For example, I have been listening and reading for a number of years, as just about every single other voice within our shared (and fabricated) cultural narrative that tells me, and tells you, and tells anyone within hearing, in the most authoritative and condemning terms, all about my personal, private sexual parts. Yours too, if outboard plumbing is what chance favoured you with.
For some, all P.I.V. – “Penis in Vagina” – is rape. But, of course, never mind the rape; aren’t we all inured to that chorus of hatred by now? Nobody seems to remark at the reduction of the most intimate act of physical affection to mere mechanics.
The U.S. Is An Oligarchy - New Report From P&N Proves It
"..the 0.01% have stolen everything."
By Michael Krieger: Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in
previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses
suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little
influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy
many features central to democratic governance, such as regular
elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still
contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is
dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of
affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society
are seriously threatened.- From a recent study titled Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University
In response to the publication of an academic study that essentially proves the United States is nothing more than an oligarchy, many commentators have quipped sentiments that go something like “so tell me something I don’t know.” While I agree that the conclusion is far from surprising to anyone paying attention, the study is significant for two main reasons.