Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.
Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Breakfast News
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Is there a second NSA leaker after Snowden?
Top experts say there could be a new person leaking details about the National Security Agency, in addition to former contractor Edward Snowden.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist most closely associated to Snowden, said he suspects someone else has been involved in leaking out new documents, and other experts have backed up the claim.
The existence of a second leaker “seems clear at this point,” Greenwald wrote on Twitter over the weekend.
“The lack of sourcing to Snowden on this & that last [Der Spiegel] article seems petty telling,” he added, after German broadcasters reported that the NSA was tracking people searching for details about privacy software.
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Noam Chomsky: America Is the World Leader at Committing ‘Supreme International Crimes’
The front page of The New York Times on June 26 featured a photo of women mourning a murdered Iraqi.
He is one of the innumerable victims of the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) campaign in which the Iraqi army, armed and trained by the U.S. for many years, quickly melted away, abandoning much of Iraq to a few thousand militants, hardly a new experience in imperial history.
Right above the picture is the newspaper’s famous motto: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
There is a crucial omission. The front page should display the words of the Nuremberg judgment of prominent Nazis – words that must be repeated until they penetrate general consciousness: Aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
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Robert Reich: Walgreens shouldn’t have a say about how the U.S. government does anything
Dozens of big U.S. corporations are considering leaving the United States in order to reduce their tax bills.
But they’ll be leaving the country only on paper. They’ll still do as much business in the U.S. as they were doing before.
The only difference is they’ll no longer be “American,” and won’t have to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they make.
Okay. But if they’re no longer American citizens, they should no longer be able to spend a penny influencing American politics.
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World’s largest study on same-sex parents finds kids are healthier and happier than peers
A cross-sectional study of children raised by gay couples, the largest of its kind, found that the kids are all right – and are, by some measures, doing even better than their peers. Conducted by University of Melbourne researchers, the survey followed 315 same-sex couples, mostly lesbians, and their 500 children, using a variety of standardized measures to compare their health and well-being to the general Australian population.
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That Time a Corporation Cited Religious Freedom As a Way to Avoid Desegregation
In her dissent in the Hobby Lobby case today, Justice Ginsburg mentioned a 1968 precedent in which the owner of a chain of barbecue restaurants in South Carolina “refused to serve black patrons based on his religious beliefs opposing racial integration.”
The Hobby Lobby majority emphasized that their ruling applied only to contraceptive coverage but would not undercut laws prohibiting racial discrimination. The conservative Justices said that the latter are “precisely tailored” to meet the government’s compelling interest in eradicating racial discrimination, while the Affordable Care Act provision falls in this case because it is not the least restrictive means to meet the government’s interest in providing women access to contraception.
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Must Read Blog Posts
Let’s nationalize Amazon and Google: Publicly funded technology built Big Tech
by Richard (RJ) Eskow
Hellraisers Journal: The clarion notes of an I.W.W. bugle gave us the RED FLAG, sung to the end.
by JayRaye
One Man’s Quest to Eat Healthy On a Food Stamp Budget
by Johan Moreno
10 Words Every Girl Should Learn
by Soraya Chemaly
Women Like Sex. Stop Making ‘Health’ Excuses for Why We Use Birth Control
by Jessica Valenti
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The Daily Wiki
Cafeteria-style means picking and choosing, as if “sliding our food tray along a cafeteria’s counter”,[3] referring to some Christians’ making a personal selection of Christian teaching, “picking and choosing the stuff you want and discarding the rest”.[4] The term implies that an individual’s professed religious belief is actually a proxy for their personal opinions rather than an acceptance of Christian doctrine. The selectivity implied may relate to the acceptance of Christian doctrines (such as the resurrection or the virgin birth of Jesus), or attitudes to moral and ethical issues (for example abortion, homosexuality, or idolatry) and is sometimes associated with discussions concerning the applicability of Old Testament laws to Christians and interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. “The idea is the moderates pick and choose the parts of the Bible they want to follow.”[5]
Cafeteria Christianity is somewhat related to latitudinarianism, the position that differences of opinion on church organization and doctrine are acceptable within a church.
As the Christian version of “cherry-picking theology”, it is seen as a result of postmodern reading of texts, where the reader goes beyond analysis of what requires interpretation, adopting an approach where “anything goes”.[6]
In The Marketplace of Christianity, economists Robert Ekelund, Robert Hébert and Robert Tollison equate Cafeteria Christianity with self-generated Christianity, i.e. the religion of many Christians which “matches their demand profile” and “may be Christian or based in other areas of thought.” They conclude that “Christian religious individualists have existed in all times.”[7]
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him. ~Mahatma Gandhi
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Breakfast Tunes
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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee
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1 comment
I would have encouraged him to change the ending of that one:
I would have suggested
I get that his point is about the severe damage our meddling and neocolonialism actions have caused. But the broad base of the American people can’t even find these places on a map. The folks who have been driving our policies are the same folks getting the bonuses.