Fragmentation of News and Causes � CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Fragmentation of News and Causes � CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names: In the shadow of neocolonialism, criminal elements within NGOs, religious and otherwise, converge like so many hyenas on the unfortunate victims of the typhoon, for purposes of human trafficking. As in Haiti, soon the women and baby snatchers will be replaced by the likes of Bill Clinton, who will promise investments and reconstruction so long as the country’s assets are liquidated in a fire sale to corporations. More than three and a half years after its earthquake, Haiti is not reconstructed, but rather more demolished than ever before, and it is firmly under the boots of disaster capitalists.

The end of the hipster: how flat caps and beards stopped being so cool

The end of the hipster: how flat caps and beards stopped being so cool | Fashion | The Observer: At some point in the last few years, the hipster changed. Or at least its definition did. What was once an umbrella term for a counter-culture tribe of young creative types in (mostly) New York's Williamsburg and London's Hackney morphed into a pejorative term for people who looked, lived and acted a certain way. The Urban Dictionary defines hipsters as "a subculture of men and women, typically in their 20s and 30s, that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics". In reality, the word is now tantamount to an insult.

Genea-Musings: FindMyPast Acquires Mocavo, Mocavo Provides Free U.S./ Census Indexes

Genea-Musings: FindMyPast Acquires Mocavo, Mocavo Provides Free U.S./ Census Indexes: The Mocavo Genealogy blog post by Mocavo founder Cliff Shaw is at http://blog.mocavo.com/2014/06/new-chapter. The post highlights the announcement, plus provides a link to the U.S. census record indexes that are FREE (and Cliff says they always will be).

The link to search all of the census records is http://www.mocavo.com/1790-1940-United-States-Census/126199, and you can select a specific census from that page.

Genea-Musings: FindMyPast Acquires Mocavo, Mocavo Provides Free U.S./ Census Indexes

Genea-Musings: FindMyPast Acquires Mocavo, Mocavo Provides Free U.S./ Census Indexes: The link to search all of the census records is http://www.mocavo.com/1790-1940-United-States-Census/126199, and you can select a specific census from that page.

Zambia & Rhodesia Genealogy help: Christians of the Copperbelt

Zambia & Rhodesia Genealogy help: Christians of the Copperbelt: Here is a surprising find -- a recent book on the internet archive, in full: Christians of the Copperbelt. For the purposes of this blog, the bonus is that the book has an index including a list of names of people who were influential in the early church on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia.

This account by John V. Taylor and Dorothea A. Lehmann was published in 1961 as part of the World Mission Study series. The book is based on an eight and a half month study undertaken in 1958 and particularly at Nchanga Mine in Chingola and in the township of Kansuswa near Mufulira. Although mainly about the Copperbelt, the authors also worked in rural areas elsewhere in the country, including Northern and Luapula Provinces. The authors say that the time they allowed for their work was too little and that suspicion of political motive hampered their success in interviewing local people. Nevertheless, there will be much of interest here to anyone with missionary roots, to help understand the story of the growth of the Christian church in Zambia, particularly at the time of the transition to independence, and to help understand the impacts of urbanisation. Also of interest is the study of Alice Lenshina's Lumpa Church before its bloody clash with UNIP just before independence in 1964.

Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire - Salon.com

Ayn Rand-loving CEO destroys his empire - Salon.com: The invisible hand waves bye-bye to Eddie Lampert, whose business plan has run Sears into the ground

Flannery O'Connor: Friends Don't Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960) - | Open Culture

Flannery O'Connor: Friends Don't Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960) - | Open Culture: I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Cherie's Place -- Avebury

Cherie's Place -- Avebury: Avebury is a fascinating site that connects to other prominent features in the ancient landscape. What remains of the Avebury Circles is largely reconstructed. In the 1930s Alexander Keiller having purchased the site of Avebury and part of West Kennet Avenue started to excavate the site and in time restore the site to some of its former glory. Where stones had been removed he placed concrete plinths to mark their former position. The outbreak of WWII put a stop to the excavations and restoration. Sadly the excavations have never been resumed.

Facebook email switch continues causing problems - latimes.com

Facebook email switch continues causing problems - latimes.com: After causing a raucous week by changing users' listed email addresses to ones ending in @facebook.com, Facebook's switch is causing yet another embarrassment for the company and problem for many users.

The email switch has gone beyond the walls of Facebook, according to various users, who are saying that the change is affecting the emails listed in their contact books.

Across the Web, people are saying the emails listed for many of their contacts in their address books have been replaced by @facebook.com emails.

Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds - Telegraph

Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds - Telegraph: The researchers say fasting "flips a regenerative switch" which prompts stem cells to create brand new white blood cells, essentially regenerating the entire immune system.

SS songs and antisemitism: the week Golden Dawn turned openly Nazi | World news | The Observer

SS songs and antisemitism: the week Golden Dawn turned openly Nazi | World news | The Observer: Supporters of the far-right party gave Hitler salutes and sang the Horst Wessel song outside parliament last week. Helena Smith reports from Athens on how Golden Dawn has taken on a sinister new tone

14 Google Search Tricks That Make Life A Whole Lot Easier

14 Google Search Tricks That Make Life A Whole Lot Easier

Zuma going full circle – from apartheid telecoms and back

Zuma going full circle – from apartheid telecoms and back: Unbeknownst to many people, Zuma returned to the structure used under the apartheid government, which had a Department of Communications and a Department of Post and Telecommunications.

The cabinet of FW de Klerk, which ran South Africa from 16 August 1989 to 11 May 1994, had Roelf Meyer as minister of communications and Piet Welgemoed as minister of post and telecommunication.

Zuma’s decision to go back to the pre-1994 structure is seen as a mistake by many commentators – and they have a point.

In South Africa, telecommunications services were operated by the South African Post Office until 1991. It therefore made sense to combine telecommunications and postal services into one ministry.

However, Telkom became a public company in 1991, which meant that it started to operate independently from the SA Post Office.

Ten Reasons to Love Uruguayan President Jose Mujica

What did we do to deserve Jacob Zuma?

Isn't this more in line with tbhe spirit of the old ANC? The ANC of Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu?

Ten Reasons to Love Uruguayan President Jose Mujica - FPIF:

President Jose Mujica of Uruguay, a 78-year-old former Marxist guerrilla who spent 14 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, recently visited the United States to meet with President Obama and speak at a variety of venues. He told Obama that Americans should smoke less and learn more languages. He lectured a roomful of businessmen at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about the benefits of redistributing wealth and raising workers’ salaries. He told students at American University that there are no “just wars.”

Whatever the audience, he spoke extemporaneously and with such brutal honesty that it was hard not to love the guy. Here are 10 reasons you, too, should love President Mujica.

What is a Christmas beetle?

How your etymology and entomology can be confused, depending on where you live.

Confusion in South African English: A Christmas beetle in Gauteng is seen but not heard. A Christmas beetle in KZN is heard but not seen.

Flying peanuts, Christmas beetles, leaf chafers, May beetles / Melolonthinae (Invertebrates) by tony rebelo on 13th January 2012 | iSpot:

which Xmas Beetle? The Cicada, this chappie or something else (the Red Driver Ant, for instance) - Just google "Christmas Beetle South Africa" to get a taste of the discussion and see answerit.news24.com/Question/Are there still Christmas Beetles in South Africa? for an overview of how people dont even talk about the same thing.

My wife insists that what I call a Christmas beetle is a "hardie", but we both agree on the singing of Christmas beetles at Christmas time. We were both born in Durban, but I moved to the Transvaal at the age of seven, and so learnt some Valie ways. I know that the Christmas beetles you hear are really cicadas, but are rarely seen, and when seen they're green. But the Christmas beetles that you see are brown...

Analysis: An Arab spring for South African Jews | Daily Maverick

Analysis: An Arab spring for South African Jews | Daily Maverick: South Africa’s Jewish community is regarded as one of the most conservative in the diaspora, its blinkered support for the Jewish state characterised as an approach of ‘Israel – right or wrong’. But recent developments are recalibrating local Jewish opinion on Israel-Palestine, and posing challenging questions regarding the politics of sovereignty, security and democracy. By REBECCA HODES.

Impact of Social Sciences – How to manage a research library with Zotero

Impact of Social Sciences – How to manage a research library with Zotero: Keeping up to date with research and managing an ever-increasing number of journal articles is skill that must be well-honed by academics. Here, Alex Hope sets out how his workflow has developed using Zotero, Dropbox, Goodreader and his iPad.

Skitt's Skittering Grounds

Skitt's Skittering Grounds: Do YOU realize that the overwhelming majority of people have more than the average number of legs? A staggering fact, isn't it!

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor: Can you explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words? It's not very easy. Type in the box to try it out.

Why a South African Braai beats a US bbq | Peace, Love & Giraffes

Why a South African Braai beats a US bbq | Peace, Love & Giraffes: Trust me. I was skeptical too. When my then boyfriend, now husband tried to explain the beauty of a South African Braai, I’ll be honest, I didn’t really get it. It sounded like a basic barbecue. A gathering of friends and family eating food from the grill. “Our barbecues are great,” I argued. “My dad makes a mean burger.” But whenever we cooked out on the grill, my husband’s face said it all – he longed for his beloved braai.