"Piggish Capitalism" from Sirota at In These Times: "If you’re not pummeled by television reports about Wall Street oinkers, you’re bombarded by talk-radio rants about congressional pork and newspaper dispatches about swine flu."

We're really digging Bite Back magazine's News from the Front Lines, especially the notes associated with the white rabbit icon!

Daniel Albert at n+1 comments on GM's latest vehicle: "Their latest death throe is called the "Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility," an incredibly awkward name designed to yield the acronym P.U.M.A. The PUMA is a two-seater city car based on the Segway scooter, a vehicle which has done more to advance situation comedy than personal transportation."

More on disastrous felidae appropriation: a while back, a mention of "reality" show, [...]More

From Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization:
Maybe Logic Can Help
1. "Waterboarding is torture" (President Obama statement a week ago, world opinion)
2. "We waterboarded three prisoners" (statements by CIA, Cheney, Yoo, etc.)
3. "We did not torture prisoners." (statements by Bush, Rice, etc.)

No one contests number 2, so number 1 is wrong or number 3 is wrong. You decide.

Mandy Van Deven writes at Bitch: Mattel is using feminism to sell the Bollywood Barbie® saying: “She allows girls to dream beyond and know that a woman has choices, having herself represented more than 100 careers in her lifetime. ”

At Counterpunch, Doug Peacock explains why global warming and hunting necessitates placing the Yellowstone Grizzly back on the Endangered Species List

Some news is good news: [...]More

Conservation Magazine's article "Not So Silent Spring" details how animals are affected by noise pollution: "A male European blackbird was terrorizing the neighborhood. For several months, he started singing at around 5 a.m. each day, but this was no ordinary song. The bird imitated the sounds of ambulance sirens and car alarms at a jarringly life-like volume. It even produced cell-phone ring tones that went unanswered for hours."

Has Obama fulfilled his campaign promises? In These Times looks to the Obamameter to find out. 

"The artist should be as ruthless in pursuing cultural harmony as the terrorist is bent on destroying it.”  Le Monde Diplomatic reports on a literary festival in Jaipur, India that brings together artists from India, Pakistan, and around the world.

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Gay Culture, for Popular Consumption? New York City markets itself as a "gay tourist destination"

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1950-2009  "It is difficult to calculate the impact of Sedgwick's scholarship, in part because its legacy is still in the making, but also because she worked at a skew to so many fields of inquiry. Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis and literary, legal and disability studies—Sedgwick complicated and upended them all, sometimes in ways that infuriated more anodyne scholars, but always in ways that pushed established parameters." More

'Shoe Thrower' Sentence Reduced "Muntadar al Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist convicted after he threw a shoe at President George Bush, has had his jail sentence reduced from three years to one year."

The Digital Divide and the Color Line  "Across the country, many urban families are struggling to explore job opportunities, communicate with loved ones, and attain an education—because they lack access to a high-speed Internet connection."

Sex, Drugs and ESL: new laws policing foreign teachers in Thailand are mostly ignored "The second most popular justification is that it’s “part of their culture and who are we to interfere?” As though having sex with a prostitute in Thailand is akin to a pig-roast in Hawaii or a thermal pool in Iceland. You simply haven’t experienced Thailand until you’ve tried it!"

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