Members of the Class of 2012,
As a former secretary of labor and current professor, I feel I owe it to you to tell you the truth about the pieces of parchment you’re picking up today.
You’re f*cked.
Well, not exactly. But you won’t have it easy.
First, you’re going to have a hell of a hard…
(Source: excellove)
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Photos :
1. A White Rhino mother and calf in the landscape of iMfolozi Game Reserve in Natal, South Africa. It is the world’s largest repository of Rhino, home to an estimated 2,300. Rhino horn is now worth more than gold on the international market. South Africa alone has lost more than 400 rhino to illegal poaching incidents in 2011. The demand for Rhino horn is fueled by a wealthy Asian middle and upper class and used overwhelmingly as medication. (01 May 2011)
2. A female rhino in Natal, South Africa, that four months earlier survived a brutal dehorning by poachers who used a chainsaw to remove her horns and a large section of bone in this area of her skull. She survived the dehorning and has joined up with a male bull who now accompanies her. (09 November 2010)
3. A White Rhino cow is dehorned as a precautionary anti-poaching measure on a game farm outside of Klerksdorp, South Africa. A vet’s assistant holds the horns for an identity picture while the vet does a final check on the animal. (25 March 2011)
4. A Black Rhino in transit after being captured for security translocation at Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, South Africa. The park is famous for its translocation programs that saved the Southern White Rhino from extinction. The Black Rhino remains critically endangered in Africa today, with less than 3,500 surviving. (07 November 2010)
5. A wealthy Vietnamese woman sits and grinds Rhino horn for her personal consumption in a roadside cafe in Baoloc, Vietnam. The dealer who sold her the horn sits next to her. Rhino Horn is an illegal substance in Vietnam yet both the woman and her dealer have no fear of the police, grinding the horn in a cafe in full view of the street. The woman says that ground Rhino horn has cured her kidney stones and she now takes it daily for her general health. Rhino horn is now worth more than gold on the international market. South Africa alone has lost more than 400 rhino to illegal poaching incidents in 2011. The demand for Rhino horn is fueled by a wealthy Asian middle and upper class and used overwhelmingly as medication. (06 October 2011)
[Credit : Brent Stirton/Reportage by Getty Images for National Geographic Magazine]
The pictures make the problem very real.
ZA :(
jyi:
This article sums up in much more eloquent words how I feel about Chris Brown. It’s a good, important read.
Chris Brown beat up his girlfriend so badly that she was hospitalized, and our response to this has basically been, “What a story, Mark”. As in, we don’t give a shit, let’s heap tons of praise and success and money down on him because really, it isn’t a big deal.
I just can’t wrap my mind around it. During his VMA performance last year, I was shocked to see him. I checked twitter to see how other people were responding to this, and the the few angry tweets amongst the many adoring ones were about the fact that he had the gall to use a Nirvana song.
Am I missing something?
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Why you should be in passionate horny love with Elizabeth ‘Nellie Bly’ Cochrane
- Born in 1864/65, Elizabeth, one of 15 children, was always ‘the rebellious one’. Fierce as fuck from an early age, she testified against her abusive stepfather in her mother’s divorce trial.
- In 1880 she enrolled in a teacher-training college but had to leave after her first semester due to lack of funding - then moved to Pittsburgh to help run a goddamn boarding school.
- This is where we get to the good shit. Age 18, she wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch bitchslapping the everloving fuck out of a sexist ballsack of an article entitled ‘What Girls Are Good For’.
- The editor was so goddamn wooed by her razor-sharp tongue that he RAN AN AD asking her to identify herself. Elizabeth owned up, and was hired instantaneously, her badassery radiating from her pores and intoxicating all within a twenty mile radius.
- Working under the pen-name Nellie Bly, Elizabeth kicked the butts of morons everywhere, writing articles aimed at social justice, particularly labour laws to protect working ‘girls’ and reform of Pennsylvania’s divorce law, which greatly favoured men.
- Not content with changing the world from behind her desk, Elizabeth became a founding mother of investigative journalism. She was expelled from Mexico for exposing political corruption, and henceforth wrapped in cotton wool by her editors. Infuriated by their mollycoddling, Lizzie left them a note essentially telling them to fuck themselves and hot footed it to NYC. She was still only 23.
- Within six months she was hired by Joseph fucking Pulitzer himself, and continued her batshit crazy investigations uninhibited. Her very first assingment had her feigning mental illness to expose repulsive conditions in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. Her cutting report was so fucking horrifying, compelling and persuasive that it triggered public and political action, leading to reform of the institution.
- In the next couple of years she had herself thrown in jail and hired by a sweatshop, all for shits and giggles. Oh, and to uncover incomprehensible injustice, cruelty, poverty, and the concealed, heinous treatment of the vulnerable and voiceless.
- But was pioneering journalism, social revolution and batshit badassery enough for our Liz? Like fuck it was. On a whim Nellie did what any self-respecting 25 year old woman in the 1800s would do - she emulated Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and did it in 72.
- Millions followed her journey, and its appeal to a semi-literate populace resulted in greatly increased newspaper readership. So while travelling the entire globe (IN THE 1800s, AS A WOMAN) by ship, train, burro and balloon, she helped the world to read.
- Having essentially conquered the entire goddamn universe before hitting 30, Nellie retired, and wed 72 year old industrialist Robert Seaman. Their marriage was a happy one, and after his death she took over Iron Clad Manufacturing Co.
- But Lizzie was a writer, what would she know about the metal industry? Well, she INVENTED the steel barrel that became the model for the widely used 55-gallon drum and turned her inherited businesses into multimillion-dollar companies, so apparently a fuck ton.
- Furthermore, she set a precedent for working conditions, ensuring her workers had good pay, gymnasiums, staffed libraries, and health care, all completely unheard of at the time, while still writing to further the plight of the Suffragette movement.
- Nellie may have died age 58 of pneumonia, but HBICs live on forever.
When I worked for the Girl Scouts, one of my favorite things was teaching them about Nellie.
AMAZING.
I AM INCREDIBLY UPSET I have NEVER heard of this woman before now. Apparently she’s mentioned in a west wing episode? I need to find this.
how the fuck have i gone this long without knowing of this glorious lady? this is the standard to which all HBICs ought to be judged.
dis bitch
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Do-Ho Suh, Paratrooper
(The threads are attached to a cloth of embroidered signatures of soldiers who died in war)
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