Portside

In the gun lobby’s America, you’ll have to kill if you don’t want to be killed. The delusional project of outsourcing public safety to private vigilantes.

Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republican won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true. We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants.

“Our research showed that Facebook users still had a few hours a day when they were leading somewhat healthy and productive lives. Our new software will change all of that.”

In death Margaret Thatcher has caused further division. The left has failed to convince enough people of the alternatives

Arguments against Michigan's 5-day-old right-to-work law are prompting conservative activists and Republican authors of the historic legislation to consider other ways to reduce the power of public-sector unions.

First, a terrible jobs report, then a Democratic President offers a budget that proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare. What they actually heard was Austerity 2013 - U.S. style. President Obama's offering up a cut in Social Security (make no mistake, that's what it is) contravenes promises he has previously made about not undermining the program and a recent flat out pledge by Vice-President Joe Biden that it would not happen.

The use of threats and isolation against Iran and North Korea is a bizarre, perilous way to conduct foreign relations

More Sandys are surely headed our way, more climate-driven disasters of all sorts...They will be no more "natural" than the Chicago fire, the Johnstown flood or the San Francisco earthquake. We need to deal with now is the power of the finance, insurance and real estate sector whose leading corporations now effectively run our economy. Without doing that, the "nature" these interests have helped create will punish us all while providing a ghoulish boondoggle for a few.

Readers comments: CPI, Grand Bargain, Social Security Cuts; Labor Party Time?; Whither the Socialist Left; Plan B; Thatcher - Reality & Myth; Incredibly Angry Songs About Iron Lady; Forgotten Radical History of March on Washington; Medi-Cal interpreters; How Maggots Heal; Announcements - Two events with Angela Davis - Berkeley - Apr 17; Los Angeles - Apr 19; May Day 2013 - New York; The Labor Film Database In Memoriam: Harry Kelber; Philip Bonosky (memorial Apr 21)