Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- The New Jim Crow
- Will you pay us to lie to you?
- It’s time for action: 10 things you can do to stop the filter
- It’s just a game
- Despair
- Attacks on Detainee Lawyers Split Conservatives – NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Contributor – P.S.A. prostate screening is inaccurate and a waste of money. – NYTimes.com
- Book review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
– “The mass incarceration of African Americans over the past 30 years is primarily related to the War on Drugs — a convenient cover for a program essentially targeted at the black community. The talking points all came back to the supposed rates of drug-related violence, but that doesn’t exactly compute with historical fact:”
– “Take the new US plan to encourage tourists wary of the country’s Bush-era hostility towards visitors (you know, where they fingerprint incoming foreigners like criminals) to come and visit again:”
– “There has been a lot of talk in the media and on Twitter over the past week about protests, rallies and other events to stop the Government’s mandatory Internet filter from ever becoming law. Electronic Frontiers Australia remains sceptical of the value and impact of those sorts of events. Rather, the most effective strategy is to apply pressure on our elected representatives, so that they know Australians are opposed to the filter and this issue will cost them votes, as well as the media, so that they give this issue the mainstream media coverage it deserves.”
– “That’s not all… Roebuck witters on to say that all the great sportsmen have wonderful, supportive wives at home. That may well be the case. But given his thundering misogyny, I’m willing to bet that if one of these great sportsmen and his wife had decided to bring that marriage to an end, then suddenly, the man’s “special contribution” would be all that mattered, and the wife’s on-going support that enabled the career would count for nothing.”
– “There are moments/days where I read something so horrifying that I just utterly despair of society, of who we are, what we do, the people we produce, of the possibility of change and equality, of ‘humanity’.
Today’s story about a man in a wheelchair who was beaten (beaten doesn’t quite get at the brutality of the attack) with metal bars, punched, kiched, ’stomped on’ by two teenage boys.”
– “Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.”
– “I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven public health disaster. The medical community must confront reality and stop the inappropriate use of P.S.A. screening. Doing so would save billions of dollars and rescue millions of men from unnecessary, debilitating treatments.”
– “Are you a scientist? If you’re not, I recommend that you read Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks because it’s a jolly decent popular science book.
But if you are, I urge you to read it, because it is not really a popular science book at all. “
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
The ASU and a number of other unions have just lodged an application before Fair Work Australia for pay equity in the social and community services sector arguing that work covered by their awards has been undervalued as women’s work, and that rates should reflect other equivalent work.
Readers of Australian IR will recall that there was a successful equal pay case in Queensland which won workers in the sector an 18%-37% pay rise; this is the national version.
And there’s a blog.
Liam, thanks for the link. I’ll be veeerrrrry interested to see how this goes at the Federal level.
Absolutely true about the incarceration of African-Americans, primarily men, but also some women and others of color. I have a pen-pal in a New York State prison, called Correction Facility (interestingly, nursing homes are called Long Term Care Facilities,too and are like prisons…see http://www.adapt.org on nursing homes, which are 2 to 4 times more expensive than someone disabled living at home with carers). There are also some good articles on this topic on http://www.blackagendareport.com.