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Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts

Monday, June 30, 2014

Communal Living 2014

What with recent graduates and young families in need of financial help moving back in with parents, and many sharing apartments to help with expenses, the concept of communal is becoming attractive again.  In the U.S. communes were big in the '60s and '70s, but fell out of favor.  The article on communes at Wikipedia notes:
Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times wrote that, contrary to popular misconceptions, "most communes of the '90s are not free-love refuges for flower children, but well-ordered, financially solvent cooperatives where pragmatics, not psychedelics, rule the day." There are many contemporary intentional communities all over the world, a list of which can be found at the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC).

Huffington Post has a section on Communal Living.  The video below was found there.
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BBC's article, "Living the communal life," gives some interesting insights into why people decide to share their living space.
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Living the communal life, BBC (Julius Schrank/www.juliusschrank.de)
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This Washington Post article also has some good insights:  A new generation of 'Golden Girls'. And this thread at Reddit caught my attention: Want to live in eco-village/hippie commune.. help!

Lisa Law's history the '60s counterculture and  of communal living at Smithsonian's site gives a detailed account of how and why they lived on that frontier.

-- Marge


Friday, June 13, 2014

Cartoons: the genie out of the bottle

image: cartoon by Gary Varvel
Gary Varvel, The Week
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The news this week may appear to be about Eric CantorHouse Majority Leader, losing the Virginia primary to a Tea Party candidate, but it's really about what voters will tolerate.  In the Washington Post's Opinion Section E.J. Dionne says:
We’ll never know whether Cantor would have done better if he had held steady on the subject [of immigration reform]. What we do know is that sending out campaign literature bragging about a news story that declared him “the No. 1 guy standing between the American people and immigration reform” did nothing to placate or persuade those who were out to defeat him.
Dionne's article is an excellent look at Republicans, the Tea Party, and the effectiveness of Republican attack ads, presumably backed by Big Money Republicans.

I don't know about you, but to me the Tea Party has become scary. They seemed innocent enough when they started out and their goals looked good, then they shut down the U.S. government and gloated about it.

At least the cartoonists can still evoke a laugh.
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image: cartoon by Adam Zyglis
Adam Zyglis, The Week
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image: cartoon by Steve Sack
Steve Sack, The Week
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image: cartoon by Michael Ramirez
Michael Ramirez, US News
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image: cartoon by R J Matson
R J Matson, The Week
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Interesting that in this last cartoon Google takes on the role of Supreme Manipulator.

-- Marge

Friday, April 04, 2014

Cartoons: American democracy for sale

We're back to writing about the Koch Brothers and Republicans yet again.  

Picture U.S. and state governments with only Republicans writing and enforcing legislation.

It's possible, because the big political spenders--the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson--spend Republican.  And the U.S. Supreme Court supports their spending, as shown in this article "Winners and losers from the McCutcheon v. FEC ruling."  If you're tired of seeing the Supreme Court replace democracy with rule by dollar (a plutocracy), you can show your resistance by signing Credo Action's petition to Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy.  Or you can join MoveToAmend and get into the action.
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image: photo from Credo Action
Supreme corporate justice Scalia, Credo Action
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Here are some editorial cartoons that give more information.
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image: cartoon by David Horsey
David Horsey, US News
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image: cartoon by Marshall Ramsey
Marshall Ramsey, US News
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image: cartoon Pat Bagley
Pat Bagley, The Week
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--Marge