I would much rather be here today debating this point than trying to explain how we failed to prevent another 9/11.
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander • Discussing, in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the terror plots that the agency’s surveillance programs have stopped, including a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Subway and the offices of a newspaper which drew scrutiny for publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Even if this is the case, do you feel that the programs are worth the added security? (via shortformblog)
America.
“So it’s like Gatsby meets Wall Street.”
“With Leo?”
“Of course with Leo.”
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR
The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.
(via kdhart)
(Source: worstsimpsonspageever)
The SF Health Department is siding with those who want to see San Francisco lose its identity, with the classic, “if you can’t afford to be here, then get the fuck out of the city” attitude. Here’s the Tamale Lady just recently slinging tamales in the TL, where I think I speak for everyone when I say, “keep the hell out, health department!”
Word on the street is Frank Chu is having his signs confiscated by the planning department and buskers around the city are being required to submit a daily tax to the entertainment commission. Unconfirmed reports tell the Tenderlife that city supervisors are also taking a percentage of the money they are entitled to out of the cups of homeless beggars as they walk by them.
This just in: Whistling on your way to work will not require you to get a license from the city so long as you limit your audience to under 20 people who can reasonably hear you. We won, San Francisco! We won!
Perhaps you don’t speak for everyone?
Maybe an emotional attachment to a particular good or service shouldn’t preclude our Department of Public Health from doing its job, like protecting San Franciscans from food-bourne bacteria?
Maybe city supervisors also recognize that no one’s actually getting E. Coli or hepatitis A from that sweet local latina who sells overpriced tamales, and are working to find a solution?
Maybe health experts should prevent health problems. Maybe politicians should fix political problems. Maybe everyone is doing exactly what we pay them to do.
On the other hand, the issue has generated some top-notch local outrage porn, so there’s that.
Reminder: Jony Ive circa 1999. (Via Dana Danger.)
Got my first shot of testosterone today
No joke, it hurt less than the blood they took this morning.
My doctor explained the entire process, let me watch the injection, etc.
Not sure how I feel right now, as a non-binary person taking T. I suppose I’ll let you know when I figure it out.
That said, my father was utterly horrid to me last weekend at my brother’s wedding. Negative to the core, and cornering me in a car (it was pouring rain outside so I couldn’t exactly leave unless I wanted to destroy my dress clothing) before the wedding rehearsal and railing about how terrible and inappropriate I looked in a suit, how I just wanted attention, blah, blah, blah.
I should mention I’m 29, that he lives 3,600 miles away from me and I don’t depend on either parent financially and haven’t for years. So treating me like a 12 year old rebellious child — particularly when my brother and his then-fiance had OKed my choice of attire a month beforehand, and even asked me to do a reading at the church in lieu of being a bridesmaid — was utterly inappropriate and even a tad immature on his part.
By the end of the trip, I was just a mess, self-confidence-wise. I’d even considered canceling the appointment today because I was to the point where I didn’t know if I even wanted to transition if that was the reaction I was going to get.
Then I reminded myself that all my other relatives I’d talked to had been supportive, and my father can be a royal douchecanoe, the end.
And now the first shot is done and I can go back to being my geeky, San Francisco living-and-loving, out-at-work transmasucline odd-ball self.
My only regret is that I have but two thumbs-up to give.
Fareed Zakaria on keeping out of Syria.
Fareed Zakaria is a very smart man.
ht: Ta-Nahesi Coates
It’s not okay that we have secret court that have secret interpretations of secret laws, what kind of democracy is that? I felt like, this is a fight worth having. If there’s fall out, if there’s blowback, I would absolutely do it again, because I think this information should be public.
Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker behind the NSA scoops. (via newsweek)
A Republic. That kind of Democracy.
(via jasencomstock)
Really? All republics do that?
(via copperreddc)
We elected representatives who said it was ok., to have a secret court. We have all kinds of shitty stupid laws. That they make, and like this one, the Supreme court said is constitutional.
“I think this thing shouldn’t be a thing” Well congrats fuckhead, most people disagree with you. Go win an election and stop it.
(via jasencomstock)
The concentration of wealth in this country is astonishing. 400 individuals—you could seat them all on a single airplane—own as much wealth as 60 percent of the rest of the country taken together. I was describing this distribution as “medieval” until a medieval historian set me straight: wealth was far more evenly distributed in the Middle Ages. When you ask where power lies in our system, you are asking who owns the productive assets. And that’s the top 1 percent—in fact, the top 1 percent of the 1 percent. It is a feudalistic structure of extreme power. It is anathema to a democracy to have that kind of concentration of wealth. More and more people are beginning to realize the extent and reach of corporate power and the power of those who own the corporations. The Koch brothers get a lot of publicity, but it’s a much wider phenomenon.
Gar Alperovitz (via azspot)
Life has no purpose now. Bereft of meaning.
i’m so sick of the government reading but never liking my statuses
Oh fuck you.
