Out back (Taken with Instagram at US Post Office)
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Remember back in May of last year, when The Lens reported that the same FEMA trailers that once housed victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita were being resold Alabama as cheap housing for people displaced after tornadoes destroyed residential areas in 2011? Our investigation found that the trailers, many of which were proven to be releasing toxic levels of formaldehyde from the particle board walls into the small living space, were being released into the open market with little to no assurance that buyers would be made aware of the possible dangers of long-term exposure to the interior to the trailers — and that the people most likely to buy these units are low-income folks in need of cheap housing in the wake of massive disaster or a housing crisis.
Despite our investigation and frequent indications that people living in the units frequently suffer from respiratory illness and skin problems, we haven’t seen any significant steps toward protecting buyers from potentially harmful housing. In fact, we’ve found that FEMA sold or auctioned these trailers into the open market, and the units are now being used as long-term housing as natural disasters destroy homes and a housing crisis forces some people to downgrade to more affordable lodging.
Most importantly, the tests we’ve run on some of these trailers have shown extremely high levels of formaldehyde, which indicates that dangerous concentrations of the neurotoxin may be present in as many as 50,000 trailers . There has been no effort to track the location of these trailers beyond their initial sale, allowing the potentially toxic units to be easily bought and sold across the country despite the health risks.
For these reasons, The Lens is teaming up with the University of Oxford for Trailertrack, a journalistic and scientific excursion to the southeast United States. Ariella Cohen, an investigative reporter with The Lens, and Nick Shapiro, a medical anthropologist with the University of Oxford, will leave today for Florida to seek out trailers and trailer residents, test the trailers they find for formaldehyde, and learn more about how the units are turning up many miles from New Orleans. The trailertrackers will hit Ocala, Harvey, Tampa and Palm Beach this weekend, and will also visit Texas and Oklahoma in the coming weeks.
” —“
[P]eople close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.
“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.
” — Ron Paul signed off on racist 1990s newsletters, associates say - The Washington Post“
Ellisland, 1791.
Dear Sir:
Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.
R.B.
” — Letters of Note: Robert Burns, Thou eunuch of language[video]
Appealing (Taken with instagram)
[video]
The Kid is reading to me about OpenOffice in Free Software for Dummies. His idea. #geekingout (Taken with instagram)
“The woman born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25, 1938, was far more than just a torch song singer, and was not at all the tragic mulatto with a white daddy complex that “Cadillac Records” constructed. In many ways, James’s personal and artistic journey, as opposed to the film’s caricature, has a lot to teach us about the shifting politics of race, class and feminist politics over the course of the last half century.” — A Political Obituary of Etta James - COLORLINES
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But maybe we should be darkening our sites for deeper, more profound issues. We have the ability to affect marriage equality and reproductive freedom and immigration reform and many other issues where those of us who love technology tend to have similar values regardless of which of the traditional political parties we list on our voter registrations.
This is the power we were promised the web would give us. Let’s use it.
” — The History, and Future, of Web Protest - Anil Dash
Yes, they’ve got the Honey Nut (Taken with Instagram at Trader Joe’s)
[video]
un:
Wow. Matzah walls.
(Source: simplypi, via davidporter)