Op-Ed

McDonald’s Corporation on the hook

Flickr/creative commons

McDonald's NLRB joint employer ruling Yesterday's ruling gives litigants and activists alike a bigger target, and a big boost for fast-food workers' rights everywhere.  We like to catalog progress when we see it. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) finally came to its senses by ruling that McDonald's Corporation could no longer avoid complaints from its workers by asserting that they were not responsible for what goes on in their franchised stores, the vast majority of its 14,000 restaurants. This single ruling gives renewed hope and power to dozens of court cases to end unfair labor practices, and to ...

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in News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Professor Walt Helps Explain America’s Bankrupt Israeli Policy

Palestine vigil and demonstration Effi Fuks Flickr/creative commons

  AIPAC Is the Only Explanation for America's Morally Bankrupt Israeli Policy As we speak, today, Israel is expanding it ground offensive in Palestine. [US] politicians and policymakers continue to back a brutal military campaign whose primary purpose is not to defend Israel but rather to protect its longstanding effort to colonize the West Bank.

-- Stephen M. Walt, International Affairs Professor Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government

  In a two-parter this week, Israel's Messy Package (Part 1 and Part 2) I offered up my youthful experience of my own family of "regular jews" to trace the more than ...

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in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 2)

Yesterday, in Part 1, I told my personal family's jewish history in an attempt to put the existence of Israel into a broader context. Earlier enough, I had dispensed with the myth of my youth, that Israel was simply the world's and Palestine's gift to the jewish culture, a safe harbor for Jews following the atrocities of WWII. In fact, Israel was conceived by a militant zionist movement begun in the late 1800s, so it is motive that has to be understood for anything to change. (We use the word, zionists, as we use the word, christianists, to denote ...

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in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Israel’s Messy Package (Part 1)

Photo by LeftMedia Flickr/creative commons

"Creating land already occupied by Palestinians would 'imperil not just American but all Western interests in the Middle East.'"

--Dean Acheson, 1947, statesman and foreign policy expert for several presidential administrations, including as Harry Truman's Secretary of State

In the early 1900s, both sides of my Jewish family fled the Kiev countryside because of the militant anti-Jewish pogroms, leaving dead my paternal great grandfather and my grandmother's infant sister killed by armed men on horseback who burned their farm to ground. Both my grandfathers were born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They didn't ...

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in Campaigns / Events / Grassroots / Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Counting on what is good

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By everyone's estimation, last week was bad, in fact we are having many bad weeks piling up for sometime now. But, these horrible events distract us from all the good that is emerging at the same time. It's not Pollyanna-like to see that this cauldron of world-wide strife is now bubbling over for all to see and evaluate and soundly reject.  Universal human rights, environmental protection, and self-determination, and all that they convey, will prevail, not just because of their rightness but because they represent survival. Science-denying, theocratic fundamentalists, here and abroad, simply have no future. Previously I have ...

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in Key Issues / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Our Horrible Days

by Alfonso Flickr/creative commons

How Do We Respond to This Really Horrible Day?

"It's too late to reverse the death and destruction, but it's never too early to advocate for peace and life." -- 

Just 3 days ago, believing things are getting worse at a faster pace than ever before, we revisited Where Does of All This F*cking Evil Sh%t Come From? to offer up some explanation of why the world seems to be plummeting downward. Yesterday, everything got much worse. While the media was fixed on the passenger jet that was shot out of the sky by Russian-backed Ukrainian ...

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in Events / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Arrow’s Paradox Dismembers Supreme Court Illogic

Kenneth Arrow

A few years ago around July 4, we wrote about the fallacy of the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in the Citizen's United v Federal Communications Commission case opened the door to giving personal rights to corporations by prohibiting the government from restricting political expenditures. These same fallacies underpin the recent ruling in Burwell v Hobby Lobby  newly bestows on corporations the right to assert religious freedom when considering their employees birth control. Neither were good decisions. They were irrational and false because they are devoid of any valid national vision. As Congress waves its arms trying to rectify ...

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in Key Issues / Op-Ed / Public Information  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Transhumans Transform the World

by Alice Popcorn Flickr/creative commons

Transhumanism has a very simple definition, so you may be a transhuman without realizing it: Transhumans translate their ideal visions of what the world can become into actions they can accomplish in the here and now. For example, transhumans envisioned new technology for driverless cars, decades ago. What was once considered fanciful is now recognized as inevitable as we now see some of these cars on our highways and local streets. It began with an idea a long time ago and then brought into reality. It is the same with social issues such as civil rights, economic justice, and free immigration. ...

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in Op-Ed / Public Information / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Women Like Sex (a lot)

Photo of central panel of Bosch

  "Women like sex. Stop making ‘health’ excuses for why we use birth control” --  Jessica Valenti, author, Guardian columnist, and founder of Feministing.com (@JessicaValenti) Once again, Valenti has focused her laser-sharp analysis to challenge popular arguments on behalf of free access to reproductive health. She urges everyone to stop saying that birth control is necessary for the small percentage of women who use it for medical health reasons, and deal with the reality that 99% of women use birth control, mostly because they like sex, and shouldn't have to make excuses for it. It's amazing that in 2014 ...

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in Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Transhuman Erotic Freedom / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments

Yes, It’s True: Gay is Good

Photo by Beth Lofgren Flickr/creative commons

Study: Children Raised by Same-Sex Couples Healthier and Happier Our children are now 28 and 32 after being raised in what we originally called a post-gender family, in keeping with our world view that post-genderism is part of everyone's future. As their parents, Dan and I may have appeared to them, and most of the world at large, as a "straight" couple, but we both considered ourselves true androgynes, wishing since our youth to encompass everything available to males, females, and everything in between. It's why we fell in love and stayed in love, and eventually founded VenusPlusX to usher in ...

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in Key Issues / News of Note / Op-Ed / Public Information / Uncategorized  by Alison Gardner 0 comments