Posts Tagged ‘class action’
Friday Night Links!
* New Study Predicts Year Your City’s Climate Will Change.
* Hacking, War and the University. Hackers, War and Venture Capital.
* The sequester is a government shutdown which never ends.
* An accidentally published, unredacted document from a lawsuit against the TSA reveals that the Taking Shoes Away people believe that “terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports.” Of course that’s not to say they’re not doing very important work.
* New Jersey to allow gay marriage.
* The state-local-federal divide means even when progressive laws get passed they don’t count.
* What your country is best at.
* Six Decades of the Most Popular Names for Girls, State-by-State.
* High-speed trading algorithms poised to eat the bond market.
* Elliott Sailors was a blond bombshell with the prestigious Ford modeling agency and had curves that graced Bacardi billboards around the world. But when jobs dried up in an industry that considers 25 middle-aged, Sailors, 31, chopped off her blond locks and reinvented herself — as a male model.
* One Tea Party leader has the plan to finally fix everything: just file a class-action lawsuit against homosexuality.
Saturday Night
* On Thursday, 80 lawsuits against the NFL related to brain injuries and concussions were combined into one complaint and filed in Philadelphia. The suit also names helmet maker Ridell, and if I’m reading the article correctly, 2100 former players are involved in the case.
* This pamphlet, written in four hours, Xeroxed, and distributed on the coach up to the 1972 Women’s Liberation conference, contains six demands, beginning with “We demand the right to work less,” and including, for the first time, “We demand wages for housework.” The Guardian profiles Selma James.
* How hard is it to dismantle 150 nuclear reactors? Europe’s about to find out.
* This Detroit News Archivist Tumblr is really something.
* And this summer, LARoB will #OccupyGaddis.
Friday!
* Euro 2012 starts today! Here’s your calendar and your tournament map.
* Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types. So now I have to spend the whole afternoon trying to figure out if I’m a Bert or an Ernie.
* Damon Lindelof is being brought in to rewrite World War Z after it’s already been shot. I’ll be brutally honest: That’s not a great sign…
* A brief history of the university.
* Lauren Berlant explains her new book, Cruel Optimism.
I’ll focus here on three matters. The first is the concept of cruel optimism (what’s optimism, what’s cruel about it). The second is on a particular scene—the end of the postwar good life fantasy and the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S. and Europe—in which the consequences of cruel optimism are lived collectively. The third is about the need for a realism that embeds trauma and suffering in the ordinary rather than in a space of exception, given that the crises of exhaustion and knowing how to live are problems saturating ordinary life.
* So what does American politics cost, anyway?
* Pixar’s rules on how to write a story.
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
* The crooks are ruining my lake! Power Plant Mercury Emissions Poisoning the Great Lakes.
* Federal data released Thursday show the United States has had its warmest spring, its warmest year to date, and warmest 12-month stretch on record.
* Salon covers the class action lawsuit against student loan agency Sallie Mae.
* Expressing both public and private frustration with Pakistan, the Obama administration has unleashed the CIA to resume an aggressive campaign of drone strikes in Pakistani territory over the last few weeks, approving strikes that might have been vetoed in the past for fear of angering Islamabad.
Now, said a senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity in discussing sensitive issues, the administration’s attitude is, “What do we have to lose?” What indeed! See also: Media, drones and rank propaganda. And also: International law and drone strikes. And also.
* Conservatives never liked left-wing, government-run solutions to problems like unaffordable health care and climate change. These days they don’t seem to like right-wing, market solutions, either.
* And Mr. Rogers Remixed. Because there’s still a good and decent kid inside you somewhere, dammit.
Corporations Are Different from You and Me
Businesses may use standard-form contracts to forbid consumers claiming fraud from banding together in a single arbitration, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in a 5-to-4 decision that split along ideological lines.
Though the decision concerned arbitrations, it appeared to provide businesses with a way to avoid class-action lawsuits in court.All they need do, the decision suggested, is use standard-form contracts that require two things: that disputes be raised only through the informal mechanism of arbitration and that claims be brought one by one.
Gerry Canavan 