An Import of my Tumblr Blog
For forty years, Cuba has been under constant US attack: military attack, economic warfare, efforts at strangulation, trying to induce maximal suffering on the population – straight outright terror, lots of it – so who’s the ‘rogue state’?
In the political domain I would like to see people energized to think for themselves and reject systems of propaganda to overcome illegitimate authority, domination and hierarchy and free themselves. That’s the best legacy I can imagine.
Unpaid Internships: Bad for Students, Bad for Workers, Bad for Society
An Atlantic Monthly article saying what I’ve been saying for a long time: unpaid internships are terrible and should be illegal. There is no reason businesses should expect unpaid labor from anyone.
Full disclosure: I worked an unpaid internship at a major newspaper in college. I was very lucky that I still had time to go to class and work a part-time (paid) job waiting tables at Chili’s. And that my parents paid my rent, bills, tuition and books.
That internship has given me a leg up in my career ever since. And you know what? That’s unfair. It’s not that I didn’t work hard at it or deserve the internship. It’s that I was privileged enough to be able to afford to take it. Only students who could afford to work for free could take an internship like that. It was a gigantic newspaper and could have easily, easily afforded to pay us minimum wage. But they didn’t, because they didn’t have to.
The most galling is when internships are offered in exchange for college credit. At many universities, students pay per unit. So in order to take an unpaid internship, they have to pay more in tuition. Essentially, they’re paying to work. At least my school only charged a flat tuition rate per quarter.
But there is a silver lining to my tale of privilege. At every job I’ve had since then, whenever someone mentions hiring interns, I personally insist we pay them. On three separate occasions I’ve made paid internships available to people when my bosses wanted them to work for free. If you have ANY chance to do the same, please do. Businesses, if you can’t afford to pay your employees, you don’t get to have employees.
I’m not saying interns should get a salary and benefits or anything. But minimum wage and a modicum of decency should be standards for all workers in America, no matter what level they’re at.
-Jess
A shoal of sigils I made the other day. Not sure why I didn’t share it at the time, considering how much I liked this particular set, and how especially “right” the ritual I did felt – I tried a few new techniques (most of which I made up on the spot), and it felt really productive.
I think one of the reasons I don’t often share is because my sigils look so raw, and the perfectionist in me feels the need to recreate them in a vector art format to make them look clean. But that completely goes against every magickal instinct in me, because I feel that (for me, east least), chaos magick is being done “right” when it’s a little dirty and frayed around the edges. Spending too much time fucking around and making it “perfect” feels like a kind of fruitless waste of time – I’d rather be firing that shit off into my inner headspace and then start living the example necessary to transmute it into reality.
Anyway, I am finding that, as with many things in my life, each time I try a new ritual, I get better at it, get better results more quickly, am more comfortable with ditching my conventions and trying a new way of going about it, and most importantly, ENJOYING THE PROCESS rather than LONGING FOR THE RESULT. That last bit is absolutely crucial to success, in pretty much any endeavor, I think.
Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.
The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).
This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.