A Sellout's Samizdat
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. (Hold for applause.) Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. (Hold for applause.)
- EXCLUSIVE: First Peek at Donald Trump’s Nomination Acceptance Speech (via flavorwire)
That awkward moment when it’s International Women’s Day and Tumblr is promoting pancakes instead.
“Stunning photo of a 1400-year-old ginkgo tree shedding its leaves at a Buddhist temple near Xi'an, China.” - @nick_kapur
(Source: brooklynmutt)
“Universal Suffrage”
On this day, November 13, 1889, fifteen-year old Lou Henry wrote this essay arguing for Universal Suffrage. It would take 31 more years until women were granted the right to vote in 1920.
Lou Henry Hoover was 46 when Congress passed the 19th Amendment. By then, she had:
- become the first women to graduate with a geology degree from Stanford
- lived in China where she learned to speak and write Chinese fluently
- translated a 1565 manual on mining and metallurgy from Latin into English that is still used today
- worked on WWI food relief programs
Lou spoke at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania a few months after Congress passed the 19th Amendment, before it was ratified and had gone into effect. She told the students at the all-women’s college:
“That we have the vote means nothing. That we use it in the right way means everything. Our political work has only begun when we have the ballot.”
Images from the Hoover Library:
Portrait of Lou Henry in ice skates, 1884.
We gave up many of our freedoms in America to defeat the terrorists. It did not work. We gave the lives of over 4,000 American men and women in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, to defeat the terrorists, and refuse to ask what they died for. We killed tens of thousands or more in those countries. It did not work. We went to war again in Iraq, and now in Syria, before in Libya, and only created more failed states and ungoverned spaces that provide havens for terrorists and spilled terror like dropped paint across borders. We harass and discriminate against our own Muslim populations and then stand slack-jawed as they become radicalized, and all we do then is blame ISIS for Tweeting.
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Paris: You Don’t Want to Read This (via azspot)
More:
If I had exactly the right strategy, I’d tell you what it is, and I’d try and tell the people in Washington and Paris and everywhere else. But I don’t have the exact thing to do, and I doubt they’d listen to me anyway.
But I do have this: stop what we have been doing for the last 14 years. It has not worked. There is nothing at all to suggest it ever will work. Whack-a-mole is a game, not a plan. Leave the Middle East alone. Stop creating more failed states. Stop throwing away our freedoms at home on falsehoods. Stop disenfranchising the Muslims who live with us. Understand the war, such as it is, is against a set of ideas — religious, anti-western, anti-imperialist — and you cannot bomb an idea. Putting western soldiers on the ground in the MidEast and western planes overhead fans the flames. Vengeance does not and cannot extinguish an idea.
Start with those things and see, even if you won’t give it 14 years to succeed, if things improve. Other than the death tolls scaling up further, I can’t imagine we could be doing anything worse.
(via hipsterlibertarian)
(Source: commondreams.org)
life:
65 years ago, LIFE magazine featured an extenstive photo essay in the November 6, 1950 issue about the Connecticut River. Among the many of the photos by the great Margaret Bourke-White was this image of draft horses in Vermont. The article begins: “As gently as sweet Afton, the Connecticut River flows through four states in search of the sea. Almost everywhere it meanders it gives New England a lovely old English look.” (Margaret Bourke-White—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) #thisweekinLIFE
About A Sellout's Samizdat
My journalism career sucked, and that ship's headed for the deep anyway, so I sold out. My corporate job is a joke by comparison, but it's fun in many ways to be a drone to capitalism. Here's my story of what it's like to be a sellout - published in...
Ask me anything How Did You Sell Out With Style?
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