News & commentary on sustainability, activism, urban planning, politics, and our world.
Rhonda Winter was raised by wolves, and subsequently has a difficult time interacting with other humans.
As college costs skyrocket and our nation’s economy continues to flounder, the U.S. Congress has decided to make it more expensive and difficult for poor people to get a college education. Beginning on July 1 tens of thousands of individuals who were previously eligible for Pell Grants for student financial aid will now be denied assistance.
Britain’s excellent Guardian newspaper recently created this clever and poignant advertisement to highlight open journalism by re-imagining the classic tale of the three little pigs and the sinister big bad wolf. The paper illustrates how they might investigate and report about the three little pigs’ drama, while also including an emotional online media discussion; in the commercial the paper is able to uncover some rather timely and unexpected results.
Earlier this month Noam Chomsky published an incisive essay entitled: “Plutonomy & the Precariat: On the History of the U.S. Economy in Decline*, which elucidates how the extreme concentration of wealth with the 1% has transpired because our country no longer manufactures actual things — bankers, stock brokers and financiers simply manipulate the idea of money. The United States has mutated into a vastly economically stratified oligarchy, 99% of whom have almost no political power or influence in our nation’s “democracy”.
An Obama-appointed federal judge, Katherine Forrest, has just ruled that the administration’s indefinite detention provisions are indeed unconstitutional, and violate our Fifth Amendment right to due process. The NDAA statute was found to be so incredibly vague that it is nearly impossible to know what specific behavior could potentially subject one to indefinite secret military detention.
At Amsterdam’s busy Repair Café crowds of different people come to the community center with various items that are not working properly — the broken objects will be repaired for free by volunteers who love to fix things, as well as teach others how to make simple repairs. The social environment the cafe creates not only enables individuals to divert waste, share their knowledge, develop skills and save resources, but also helps to strengthen local communities and foster meaningful connections among neighbors and strangers.
