What I’ve Noticed

Instead of paying for decent healthcare or public transit, our government is paying, quite literally, for more cheese.

Coming out can be really, really hard.  But funny, too: “I think I’m… well, um… a bicycle.”

Overcoming gender essentialism is also really, really hard.  But it’s so worth it.

Cheating is a huge problem in our education system, but the problem isn’t just the cheaters – our society doesn’t give people who don’t want or need higher education other options and the educational system is badly failing them.

Why people come to the US illegally.

The first US water census since the 70s is happening in the Colorado Basin.  It’s not going to be pretty.

What I’m going to do when I grow up. Like freedomgirl says, “i think that those stories are what change people’s minds, so they can begin to collectively sign on to the new rules we try to put in place to reflect the humanity we all share”

I really don’t understand why the US isn’t investing more in renewable energy, though this post points out that we are fighting the wrong battles.

Republicans sure do hate research.

Russia has a real hard time with freedom of the press.

We’re doing biofuels wrong.

What’s more important – copper or some of the rarest, weirdest ecosystems on earth?

Julian Sanchez on patriotism:

You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism—a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don’t have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don’t have to do a damn thing but be born here. Cultural valorization of “American-ness” relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.

Oversimplifying experiences with racial categories and the Tea Party:

Among the many distortions arising from the conceptualization of the human social world in terms of ‘race’ is the false belief this instills among lower status, historically disadvantaged ‘white’ people that they have something innate in common with all other ‘white’ people, and thus that their current disadvantage is the result of some exceptional injustice. This in contrast with the disadvantage of their non-white neighbors, which is, the reasoning goes, just in the nature of things. In the United States, ethnic difference among whites has been bleached out in the name of egalitarianism, and the only differences that are allowed to remain are the ones that are thought to be so pronounced in the phenotypes of ‘non-white’ groups that assimilation is ruled out on supposedly biological grounds. This seems a natural way of doing things for most Americans, while in fact it is anything but.