longreads:
U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them:
The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from the night of Pearl Harbor, when Eleanor Roosevelt told a radio audience, “I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific.”
Instead, America now has its first generation of political and business leaders who have not served in the military, and it shows. With the Pentagon ordered to slash spending as part of wider government budget cutting, military benefits, such as pensions, and college education funding for veterans are on the chopping block.
“Veterans’ Struggle.” — Anna Fifield, Financial Times
See also: “The Last Two Veterans of WWI.” — Evan Fleischer, The Awl, May 3, 2011
I missed this. Thanks for the link-love, guys.
(via theatlantic)
2:23 pm |
January 23 2012
| 163 notes
“Obama promised to transcend forty years of demographic and ideological trends and reshape Washington politics. In the past three years, though, he has learned that the Presidency is an office uniquely ill-suited for enacting sweeping change. Presidents are buffeted and constrained by the currents of political change. They don’t control them.”
— Barack Obama, Post-Partisan, Meets Washington Gridlock : The New Yorker (via rubenfeld)
(via rubenfeld)
12:32 am |
January 23 2012
| 102 notes
24vultures:
Outside my host family’s house, in the middle of the village in Twifu Mampong, Ghana. The children used their own initiative and created a drum kit, keyboard and microphones from tins, cans, bamboo sticks and oranges.
7:25 pm |
January 22 2012
| 14 notes
obliquecity:
Iranians celebrating Nowruz, the Iranian New Year
7:24 pm |
January 22 2012
| 15 notes
medicalschool:
X-ray of a retained surgical instrument (Weitlaner retractor)
6:24 pm |
January 22 2012
| 155 notes
“JAIPUR: Salman Rushdie’s shadow over the Jaipur literature festival grew longer on Sunday with four participating authors who had read out excerpts from Rushdie’s banned novel, The Satanic Verses, being “advised” by the organizers to leave the city.”
— Absurd. (Previously.)
4:35 pm |
January 22 2012
Newt/Netenyahu have Sheldon Anderson. Romney has John Paulson. Santorum now has Foster Friess: story/wikipedia.
12:05 am |
January 22 2012
“Just how powerful is ARGUS? You know, just a 1.8 gigapixel camera package, consisting of 92 five-megapixel imagers. One blink of ARGUS’ eye covers up to 36 square miles, depending on the quality of the resolution; it will give its remote pilots at least 65 independent, scaleable video windows within that blink. It was initially developed for Army Special Forces by the mad scientists at Darpa. In a single day, ARGUS collects six petabytes of video — the equivalent of 79.8 years‘ worth of HD video.”
— via.
4:10 pm |
January 21 2012
| 2 notes
