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  • These aren't those women. They're how dudes want to imagine those women would be — what Wire creator David Simon called writing "men with t*ts." They read like men's voices coming out of women's faces. Or worse, they read like the straight girls who make out with each other clubs, not because they enjoy making out with women but because they desperately want guys to pay attention to them. This is not about these women wanting things; it's about men wanting to see them do things, and that takes something that really should be empowering — the idea that women can own their sexuality — and transforms it into yet another male fantasy. It takes away the actual power of the women and turns their "sexual liberation" into just another way for dudes to get off. And that is at least ten times as gross as regular cheesecake, minimum.
  • The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has done a 20 year study and put together some surprising stats about how women are portrayed in entertainment and the media. For example, in G-rated movies, 81 percent of the adults who hold jobs are male, and none of the women who do have jobs hold positions in science, medicine, law, business, politics, or the like. F.or every female character, there are three more male characters. We know that the more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life,” she said. “So there’s clearly a very, very strong message coming through — that boys are picking up too, by the way — that girls can’t do as many things as boys can.” She's provided the statistics to studio heads, who are committing to changing the way women are portrayed on TV.
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  • Equipped with a pocket watch that was certified by the Greenwich Observatory every week, Ruth Belville sold the time to the clockmakers of London. She performed this duty between the years 1836 and 1840, helping these clockmakers set their products according to the watch, which was set to within a tenth of a second of Greenwich Mean Time. Belville is the subject of a new book.
    (tags: time history cool)
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Robert Reich Debunks 6 Big GOP Lies About The Economy

Worth watching. The lies are these – (watch the video to see how he debunks them):

  1. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will trickle down to benefit the middle class and the poor. Corporations are having higher profits now than we have seen in 35 years. Ratio of profits to wages is higher now than it ever has been since before the Great Depression of the 1930s.
  2. If you shrink government you create jobs. (No, you get rid of jobs that way.)
  3. High taxes on the rich hurts the economy. (No, the economy grew when the US did this under Eisenhower.)
  4. Debt is to be avoided and it is mostly caused by Medicare. (No, if debt is properly used to grow the economy, it becomes a smaller part of the budget because of increased revenue and Medicare has the lowest overhead of any health insurance plan out there.)
  5. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (No, its solid for 26 years. Social Security is solid beyond that if the rich pay the same percentage in social security taxes as the rest of us do.)
  6. We need to tax the poor. (This is what Republicans have been proposing when they say any “tax reform” needs to involve all Americans because poor people pay no income tax. The poor have no money and taxing them will not solve our budget problems.)
Continue ReadingRobert Reich Debunks 6 Big GOP Lies About The Economy

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