rebelpleb

Remember that silly game we used to play with fortune cookies from Chinese restaurants? Maybe people still play it. It’s the one where you read your fortune and tack on “… in bed” to the end of the sentence – like, “You will soon meet a mysterious stranger … in bed.” The supplemental phrase usually fits fairly smoothly onto the given fortune, and generates a few chuckles from listeners. Here’s a new game in a similar vein, but this one doesn’t engender much laughter. First, take a look at the statements below. See if you can identify which are true versus which are false. We can’t end poverty… We can’t end homelessness … We can’t feed the hungry … We can’t have livable wages … We can’t have a universal basic income so all people have the basic necessities to live … We can’t end sweatshop labor … We can’t work less … We can’t produce less … We can’t consume less … We can’t have universal, single-payer healthca...

And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names -- The Jam (Also published here: Counterpunch - Superunknown - Kristine Mattis ) You may not recognize names like Amy Cuddy, Kristina Durante, or Brian Wansink but if you listen to NPR, watch TED talks, or read popular online news sites or local and national outlets such as the New York Times, you have probably stumbled across their work. They are among a growing number of academics who have produced one or more exciting, novel, too-amazing-to-be-true research studies that have caught the attention of the media and have been widely disseminated through American culture to the point that we may have internalized their findings as fact. Yet their work has since been debunked, shown to be unscientific and irreproducible. It is all part of what has been dubbed the “replication crisis” in science. Since replication is one of the basic ten...

There is not an industrial company on earth, not an institution of any kind - not mine, not yours, not anyone's - that is sustainable. I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth. But not by our civilization's definition. By our civilization's definition, I'm a captain of industry and in the eyes of many, a kind of modern-day hero.                                                                     -- Ray Anderson, (1934-2011) CEO of Interface, Inc. We are living a collective illusion known as the civilized world. We feign concern for our horrendous conditions of poverty, socioeconomic inequality, deterioratin...

 Years ago my husband and I were traveling out of town when he noticed a very itchy red blotch growing around his elbow. By dinnertime, the redness had migrated throughout his arm. We knew that it could be an infection, so after dinner, we were luckily able to stop at an urgent care clinic where we immediately saw the physician on duty who diagnosed it as a bacterial infection. She prescribed a course of antibiotics and told us to return in 24 hours for follow-up to be sure that the infection had receded. All of this cost between $5-7 - an inexpensive and satisfying medical visit. Several weeks later we had settled into our temporary home and decided we were overdue for physical exams. We called a nearby doctor's office. They scheduled appointments for us in about a week and facilitated the visits so that my husband and I could each see a doctor at the same time. Moreover, the office was within a few miles of our home, so we could easily walk there. When we arrived, the ...