April 2011
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What Exactly Does Fair Trade Mean? | Serious Eats →
When perusing the aisles of your supermarket, you’re bombarded by all sorts of claims on packaging. Organic! Natural! Sustainable! Some of these terms are regulated, but many are not. “Fair trade,” however, does actually carry some weight.
There are some basic principles that all fair trade goods must abide by. The production of these foods—the most common being cocoa, coffee, bananas, tea,...
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“Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because...”
– Arundhati Roy (via azspot)
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“Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about:...”
– George Carlin: Once a great comedian, always a speaker of the truth. (via winstonwolfe)
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Why the Facts Don't Matter in Politics →
soupsoup:
by Jonah Lehrer
If a piece of information doesn’t follow Republican talking points - and Clinton’s deficit reduction didn’t fit the “tax and spend liberal” stereotype - then the information is conveniently ignored. “Voters think that they’re thinking,” Bartels says, “but what they’re really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they’ve...
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“Much of the work of government is in private hands, overseen by a corporation’s...”
– One Nation Under Contract (via azspot)
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vruz:
“Religion…cannot be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurance. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one.”
—
God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (via stufflauralikes)
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The Health of Nations →
Medicine may be hard, but health insurance is simple. The rest of the world’s industrialized nations have already figured it out, and done so without leaving 45 million of their countrymen uninsured and 16 million or so underinsured, and without letting costs spiral into the stratosphere and severely threaten their national economies.
Even better, these successes are not secret, and the...
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“A consistent proof that religion is man-made and anthropomorphic can also be...”
– Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (via bonedust)
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“The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to...”
– C.S. Lewis (via azspot)
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sixkindsofbullshit:
“You want 9/11 first responders to know that before they get their chemo money for the cancer they got sifting through World Trade Center rubble in hopes of helping to identify those we lost in the attack, you have one, just last tiny loose end to tie up: we just have to make sure you’re not a terrorist. … You want billions in bank bailout money? You get that without being...
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