University of California Workers Strike Against Harassment

Samantha Winslow Labor Notes
The university campus workers joining the medical center workers in the ULP strike have also had similar concessions forced on them. Campus workers struck in 2005 and sympathy-struck in May, but this is the first time both groups have struck together. Unionized graduate students, members of UAW 2865, are sympathy-striking this time.

Green Groups/Unions Walk Out of UN Climate Talks

John Vidal and Fiona Harvey The Guardian and ITUC
The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) joins major environmental and development groups in protest action at COP 19 in Warsaw where Governments are not acting responsibly to tackle the threat to lives, jobs and livelihoods that climate change represents.

The Walmartization of Aerospace

Carl Bloice blackcommentator.com
The conflict in Washington State involves far more than a local dispute over wages and benefits. Boeing appears determined to set the bar higher in its labor relations. As is the trend in much of labor negotiations these days, the bosses have simply decided that moving forward, workers are going to have to forfeit the medical and retirement benefits their unions have previously secured.

A Progressive Victory on the Filibuster

George Zornick The Nation
Progressive organizing was indeed crucial to changing the filibuster, with Senators like Merkley and Udall working the inside game while the outside groups got the public riled up. Many Democratic senators—including Reid—didn’t want to do rules reform back in 2009 when the GOP began its unprecedented obstruction, and it took a lot of convincing.

Tea Party Roots in the Dallas of 1963

Bill Minutaglio Washington Post
If today’s extremist rhetoric sounds familiar, that’s because it is eerily, poignantly similar to the vitriol aimed squarely at John F. Kennedy during his presidency. And just like today, Texans were leading what some of them saw as a moral crusade. To find the very roots of the tea party of 2013, just go back to downtown Dallas in 1963, back to the months and weeks leading to the Kennedy assassination.

Music Love Army: We Are Not for Sale

NC MUSIC LOVE ARMY releases We Are Not For Sale: Songs of Protest on November 26, 2013, on vinyl, CD and for download with worldwide distribution through Redeye Distribution. NC Music Love Army are a united force composed of your favorite musicians set to battle against the regressive legislation of the current North Carolina administration. We are outraged. We fight with songs. We win with your ears and with your help. More information and donations toward this crowdfunded record can be made at: http://ncmusiclovearmy.org. Proceeds from album sales and live performances benefit Progress NC and Planned Parenthood of Central NC, two groups on the front lines of our fight to return sane governance to our beloved state.

Every Nuclear Test

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

Siats - A New Mega Dinosaur

Move over, T. rex. Sian meekorum is a new, 100 million year old carnivorous dinosaur, rivaling T. rex is size and predating it by some 40 million years. Sian, whose fossils were discovered in Utah, is one of the two or three largest North American dinosaurs.
 

All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose

Woody Guthrie's guitar famously bore the legend, This Machine Kills Fascists. Here are the Woody lyrics (probably dating to the 1940s) that most directly spell out this message, with appropriate pictures of contemporary bad guys. Woody's confidence in the victory over fascism was the flip side of his confidence in the victory of the common people who, he sang, were Bound for Glory.