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The Census Won’t Collect L.G.B.T. Data. That’s a Problem.

By Praveen Fernandes The New York Times
Given the discrimination, social isolation, health disparities and economic fragility that L.G.B.T. populations as a whole face, this need is especially urgent. The data collection rollbacks don’t just prophesy bad policy. They recall a time of deep discrimination and pain that we have spent decades trying to reverse.

What Risk Says About Julian Assange

David Sims The Atlantic
Risk is an incredibly gripping work, one made with an unprecedented level of access to Assange, but for all its intimacy, it still struggles to nail down its target. Instead, it’s more a story of Poitras herself, and the evolution of the movie she set out to make about Assange, who founded Wikileaks in 2006.

Media Bits and Bytes – Doity Woids Edition

Portside
Sinclair eats Tribune Media; Obscene but not absurd; NYT does it again; Women still down in the Valley; Beware the botnets; Canadian breakthrough; California takes on cop tech

Atlanta as a Sanctuary City: Holding Leaders Accountable for Violence Against Marginalized People

Azadeh Shahshahani, Adelina Nicholls and Mary Hooks Truthout
On January 20, our organizations -- Project South, GLAHR and SONG -- joined more than 25 other Georgia-based groups for an action we called the People's Inauguration. Together, we demanded that the City of Atlanta declare itself a sanctuary city by addressing a list of demands to protect the human rights of our communities.

Basic Income in a Just Society

Brishen Rogers Boston Review
A decent future of work and welfare requires a basic income—and much more. We need a revamped public sector and a new and different collective bargaining system

Locked Up for Being Poor

N.Y. Times Editorial Board The New York Times
The county’s lawyer defended this policy by arguing that poor defendants — who are disproportionately black and Latino — stay in jail not because they can’t buy their way out but because they “want” to be there, especially “if it’s a cold week.” Judge Rosenthal called this despicable claim “uncomfortably reminiscent of the historical argument that used to be made that people enjoyed slavery.”

Hacked Records Show Bradley Foundation Taking its Conservative Wisconsin Model National

Daniel Bice Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Records make clear the Bradley Foundation no longer simply favors groups promoting its signature issues: taxpayer-funded school choice and increased work requirements for welfare recipients. It now regularly funds nonprofits that are, among other things, hostile to labor unions, skeptical of climate change or critical of the loosening of sexual mores in American culture.

Why It's So Hard to Understand That the Violence Your Country Exports Is Terrorism

Vijay Prashad Jadaliyya/AlterNet
Rather than evaluate one’s own behavior in a bad situation, one tends to blame others and to disregard the constraints that others operate under. This is typically considered to be a “self-serving bias”. The character of the man of the West always surmounts the character of the man of the East. The violence of the West is prophylactic, while the violence of the East is destructive.

Review: Black Subjugation in America

Kim Scipes Logos
On a recent visit to Ho Chi Minh City’s (Vietnam) War Remnants Museum I was reminded Americans have never come to grips with our invasion and war on Vietnam. Yet, while we haven’t come to grips with our war on Vietnam, Americans have never come to grips with our own history, specifically how Europeans stole this land from Native Peoples and then built this country on the backs of of African slaves, while institutionalizing white supremacy.