Tag Archives: holmes

Colorado River Drought Forces a Painful Reckoning for States

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A Small Furry Prayer – Steven Kotler

Steven Kotler was forty years old, single, and facing an existential crisis when he met Lila, a woman devoted to animal rescue. “Love me, love my dogs” was her rule, and Steven took it to heart. Spurred to move by a housing crisis in Los Angeles, Steven, Lila, and their eight dogs-then ten, then twenty, and then they lost count-bought a postage-sta […]

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Penny Saving Household Helper – Rebecca DiLiberto

This handy guide resurrects the fine art of frugal housekeeping with over 500 tips on saving money throughout the home and garden. Learn creative ways to cut back, pinch pennies, reduce, recycle, and re-use. Want to save on the grocery bill? Buy the whole chicken rather than individual cuts. Get more wear out of your wardrobe? Add a dash of salt to the washe […]

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Decoding Your Dog – American College of Veterinary Behaviorists

More than ninety percent of dog owners consider their pets to be members of their family. But often, despite our best intentions, we are letting our dogs down by not giving them the guidance and direction they need. Unwanted behavior is the number-one reason dogs are relinquished to shelters and rescue groups. The key to training dog […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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What the Dog Did – Emily Yoffe

Dave Barry meets The Secret Lives of Dogs in Emily Yoffe’s funny and insightful look at all things canine. Filled with adventures of heroic dogs, lovable and lazy dogs, malodorous dogs, phlegmatic and incontinent dogs, What the Dog Did delivers some of the most outlandish and certainly the funniest dog stories on record.

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Codex: Tyranids (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

From the cold darkness of the intergalactic void comes a race of ravenous aliens known as the Tyranids, a numberless horde of super-predators governed only by the instincts to hunt, kill and feed. Each Tyranid is a living weapon, perfectly adapted to its designated function, but each creature is no more than a single cell in a vast gestalt entity controlled […]

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Warhammer 40,000 Altar of War: Tyranids – Games Workshop

The Tyranids are a deadly race of intergalactic monstrosities, bent upon devouring the galaxy’s many worlds and leaving nothing but airless wastelands in their wake. To fight the Tyranid swarm is an experience utterly unlike any other battle a general may face, for these terrifying aliens seek not to conquer or to raid, but to consume all life in their path. […]

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Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

Not all battles in the 41st Millennium are massed engagements between lumbering armies and towering war machines. In the shadows of these epic conflicts, squads of elite soldiers clash – their missions no less vital, their foes no less deadly. Designated as Kill Teams by the Imperium, or by a myriad of different names for their alien and daemonic counterpart […]

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Codex: Tyranids (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop

From the cold darkness of the intergalactic void comes a race of ravenous aliens known as the Tyranids, a numberless horde of super-predators governed only by the instincts to hunt, kill and feed. Each Tyranid is a living weapon, perfectly adapted to its designated function, but each creature is no more than a single cell in a vast gestalt entity controlled […]

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Colorado River Drought Forces a Painful Reckoning for States

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What It’s Like To Sneak Across the Border To Harvest Food

Mother Jones

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For most anthropologists, “field work” means talking to and observing a particular group. But for Seth Holmes, a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, it also literally means working in a field: toiling alongside farm workers from the Triqui indigenous group of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a vast Washington State berry patch. It also means visiting them in their tiny home village—and making the harrowing trek back to US farm fields through a militarized and increasingly perilous border.

Holmes recounts his year and a half among the people who harvest our food in his new book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. It’s a work of academic anthropology, but written vividly and without jargon. In its unvarnished view into what our easy culinary bounty means for the people burdened with generating it, Fresh Fruit/Broken Bodies has earned its place on a short shelf alongside works like Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating, Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, and Frank Bardacke‘s Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers.

I recently caught up with Holmes via phone about the view from the depths of our food system.

Mother Jones: What sparked your interest in farm workers—and how did you gain access to the workers you cover in the book?

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What It’s Like To Sneak Across the Border To Harvest Food

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How "Jezebel" Smashes the Patriarchy, Click by Click

Mother Jones

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Anna Holmes, unlike some of her contemporaries, never considered “feminist” a bad word. As a mixed-race girl growing up in a liberal California college town, she was obsessed with Sassy and Glamour—”back when it was still feminist.” She pursued writing gigs at glossy women’s magazines after college, but quickly tired of their formulas: “Their point,” she says, “is to create insecurities and then solve them.”

In 2006, she was tapped by Gawker Media to create Jezebel, a site for women interested in both fashion and how the models were treated. She built it into a traffic behemoth, with 32 million monthly pageviews and beloved features like Photoshop of Horrors and Crap Email From a Dude. Since leaving Gawker in 2010, Holmes, who recently landed a column in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, has kept busy compiling The Book of Jezebel, an encyclopedia of lady things with more than 1,000 entries, from bell hooks and Bella Abzug to Xena and zits. The book goes on sale October 22.

Mother Jones: When I first opened the book and landed on “Patriarchy,” I laughed, because the full entry read: “Smash it.”

Anna Holmes: Some things you don’t need to spell out.

MJ: How did you pick the entries?

AH: The first step was free-associating words and concepts. I don’t want the book to feel academic, so there’s not gonna be a whole page on “cisgender”—but it is an entry. I sat down with a big dictionary at one point, but a dictionary will have Plato, and not Althea Gibson—someone I forgot to put in the book. I would not call the book comprehensive, but that’s because I’m a perfectionist.

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How "Jezebel" Smashes the Patriarchy, Click by Click

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The 5:2 Fast Diet for Beginners: The Complete Book for Intermittent Fasting with Easy Recipes and Weight Loss Plans – Rockridge Press

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The 5:2 Fast Diet for Beginners: The Complete Book for Intermittent Fasting with Easy Recipes and Weight Loss Plans

Rockridge Press

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $6.99

Publish Date: May 8, 2013

Publisher: Callisto Media Inc

Seller: Callisto Media, Inc.


Intermittent fasting is a safe and sensible way not only to lose weight but also to transition to a healthier way of eating. Unlike the deprivation associated with full fasting, the 5:2 diet allows for reduced-calorie meals two days a week. On the other five days, you meet your recommended caloric intake with the help of a variety of healthful recipes. The 5:2 Fast Diet for Beginners is a complete guide to intermittent fasting. Included are: 16 reduced-calorie fasting-day recipes to make your dieting days both easy and flavorful. 35 non-fasting-day recipes that offer you healthful choices for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as low-cal dessert and treat options. Use these recipes—along with your own favorites—to round out your month’s meal plan. 4 weeks of fasting-day meal plans geared to the 500-calorie goal for women and 600-calorie goal for men recommended by the 5:2 diet. 10 tips for motivation and success to get you started toward your weight-loss goals and to keep you on track. References to scientific studies pointing to intermittent fasting’s positive effects on heart health, brain function, and blood-sugar regulation. The 5:2 Fast Diet for Beginners: The Complete Book for Intermittent Fasting with Easy Recipes and Weight Loss Plans is all you need to begin experiencing the weight loss and health benefits associated with intermittent fasting.

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The 5:2 Fast Diet for Beginners: The Complete Book for Intermittent Fasting with Easy Recipes and Weight Loss Plans – Rockridge Press

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SEC Asked to Require Companies to Disclose Political Donations

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports today on a petition asking the SEC to require public companies to disclose their political donations. Needless to day, business lobbying groups are unamused:

Earlier this month, the leaders of three of Washington’s most powerful trade associations — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable — issued a rare joint letter to the chief executives of Fortune 200 companies, encouraging them to stand against proxy resolutions and other proposals from shareholder activists demanding more disclosure of political spending.

….“The Chamber believes that the funds expended by publicly traded companies for political and trade association engagement are immaterial to the company’s bottom line,” said Blair Holmes, a spokeswoman for the business group, who added that the advocates’ “apparent goal is to silence the business community by creating an atmosphere of intimidation under the cover of investor protection.”

You have to admire the chutzpah, don’t you? Who else but the Chamber of Commerce would have the balls to claim that corporations don’t believe that political donations have any effect on their earnings? I mean, that’s pretty much the whole point of political donations, no?

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SEC Asked to Require Companies to Disclose Political Donations

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While West, Texas, Burned, Its Famous Czech Bakery Kept the Kolaches Coming

Mother Jones

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There’s a Czech bakery, deli, and gas station combo in tiny West, Texas that’s world-famous for serving up fruit kolaches and hot chubbies to locals and tourists driving on I-35 between Dallas and Austin, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the last 29 years. Last night was no exception. In the wake of the massive explosion and fire that rocked a fertilizer plant just three miles down the road, Czech Stop kept its doors open—and the kolaches coming—almost without interruption.

“I rushed up there after it happened because one of my employees said the ceiling was falling in,” says Barbara Schissler, president of the Czech Stop empire, who’s worked there since it opened in 1983. “One of our freelance carpenters recommended that we close the doors, but when I showed up, I saw only the ceiling tiles were buckling, so I reopened. The only thing we did was cut the gas pumps, because we were expecting another blast.”

When the plant exploded at 8 p.m., there were about seven employees on shift. Fifteen minutes later, fire trucks and police cars started rushing down the street to the site of the accident. Not long after, injured victims started walked in.

“Two women in a truck stopped by. One’s leg was bandaged and bulging, and she had a few cuts on her arms and legs,” says Schissler. “I don’t know why they decided to stop here first. When you’re in shock, you’re not always thinking. We did whatever we could to make them feel comfortable, gave them ice water.” Several more people with cuts and bruises stopped by through the night, but Schissler said her usual customers were missing. “All the bakery regulars were out there on the scene, helping out.”

In the morning, Czech Stop was ready to help first responders who stopped by, donating cases of water and handing out free food and drink. The store is also planning on donating baked goods to the Red Cross.

Like many local bars, diners, and coffee shops in many other towns rocked by calamity, Czech Stop has transformed virtually overnight into a hub of refuge. After December’s school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the owners of Blue Colony Diner fed hundreds of volunteers, policemen, firefighters, and first responders, earning the nickname “The Food Angels.” The morning after Hurricane Sandy struck, David T. Holmes III turned It’s a Wrap, his lunch cafe in Plainfield, New Jersey into a relief station for 10 days, offering victims free coffee, soup, power, and a place to sleep. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Joann Guidos kept Kajun’s Pub open so that “the lonely and broke would not endure the ordeal alone.” Homeowners fleeing the deadly June 2012 wildfires in Colorado congregated at Bob’s Coffee Shop in Laporte, to figure out, over danishes, where the megafire was headed next.

A Jalopnik writer from Texas says when he first heard about the West Fertilizer explosion, his first thought was whether anyone was hurt. His second thought was whether the Czech Stop was ok. “It’s no surprise that, when I turned on the local news last night, the news producers had thought to call the Czech Stop and put an employee on the air,” he wrote. “It’s what everyone knows.”

This tiny community of around 3,000 boasts a remarkably vibrant and long-standing Czech heritage. In 1859, a popular Czech reverend immigrated to Galveston to minister to German protestants, and many of his compatriots followed. By 1990, almost 300,000 Texans claimed some Czech ancestry according to the Texas State Historical Association, seeding this part of Texas with Eastern European languages, cultures, and cuisines. “Most notably, the Czech pastry ‘kolache’ (pronounced koh-law-chee) is still served today in restaurants and rest stops from Columbus near Houston all the way up to West,” says Jalopnik’s Hardigree. “It’s a soft, sweet dough filled with some fruit, cheese, chocolate or some mixture of all of those. It’s fantastic.”

A box of kolaches. Kent Wang/Flickr

Czech Stop has been a fixture in town since it was opened in 1983 by Bill Polk, a former marine who bought the shop from a national chain and took it over with one employee, a small menu of sausage kolache, and a handful of fruit and poppy seed pastries. Its got lots of Czech neighbors in town. There’s Picha’s Czech-American Restaurant, known for its sausages and kraut. You can pick up a kroje at Maggie’s Fabric Patch, a dress traditionally worn by Czechs and Slovaks at communions, weddings, and funerals. A Czech-language radio station broadcast from here until just a few years ago. West is also home to a branch of Sokol, a Czech organization that started in Ennis, Texas with a mission to help young community members become leaders through the practice of gymnastics.

Today some 75 percent of the town can claim some Czech origin according to Radio Praha, the Czech Republic’s state radio station. Today, the Czech Ambassador to the US is scheduled to visit West in a show of support and solidarity. “The Czech authorities and the media are closely watching the latest news from this little outpost of Czech life in Texas,” writes Radio Praha reporter Rob Cameron. West’s mayor Tommy Muska agrees. “It’s a lovely little town. Everybody’s got a Czech last name it seems,” he said. (Muska’s Czech, too.) Author and journalist Brendan McNally, who grew up in Dallas but now lives in PelhÅ&#153;imov with his family, tells Radio Praha that Czech Stop’s kolaches put West on the map.

Last night’s tragedy has hit close to home in more ways than one: The bakery’s office manager lived three blocks away from the fertilizer plant, and lost her house to the explosion. But Schissler and her crew plan to keep serving up kolaches and coffee 24 hours a day, business as usual. “We’ve never seen anything like this, but we’ve never closed a single day in 29 years,” Schissler says. “You bet we’re staying open.”

Kent Wang/Flickr

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While West, Texas, Burned, Its Famous Czech Bakery Kept the Kolaches Coming

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Michigan Tea Partier: Charter Schools Are for Kids From "Ethnically Challenged Families"

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A few weeks ago, the Michigan chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed conservative advocacy group, held a “citizen watchdog training” in a suburb of Detroit. The training was billed as a workshop for regular folks to learn “the best tools and techniques in investigative journalism, social media, and opposition research.” Featured speakersâ&#128;&#148;including local activists, conservative state legislators, and Scott Hagerstrom, AFP-Michigan’s directorâ&#128;&#148;would also speak about efforts to “reform” Michigan’s schools.

Among the AFP set, reforming public schools usually means converting them into non-union, privately-run charter schools. Nationally, AFP is a vocal proponent of charters and “school choice.” And at the Michigan citizens training, one of the featured speakers, Norm Hughes, a member of the North Oakland Tea Party Patriots, offered this take on charters:

Kids aren’t going to charter schools if they’re “A” students. They go to charter schools because they’re failing students and, by and large, the charter schools have a higher percentage of poor families, ethnically challenged familiesâ&#128;¦

Ethnically challenged? Hughes did not explain what he meant, but you won’t find that take on charters anywhere in the AFP literature. (Listen here to the audio of Hughes’ comment, grabbed by Progress Michigan, a liberal advocacy group.)

Whatever Holmes’ view of charters, AFP’s agenda in Michigan is cause for concern for Michigan’s public schools and teachers unions. AFP played a central role in ramming through so-called right-to-work legislation for public- and private-sector workers in Michigan in December. Right-to-work legislation is central to AFP’s agenda, and its passage in Michigan, a cradle of organized labor, was a major victory for movement conservatives.

If the January 19 event is any indication, a big push for charters is next up for AFP and its allies in the Michigan legislature. But before they go whole-hog on charters, AFP conservatives might want to give their conservative bedfellows, like Norm Hughes, a few tips about messaging.

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Michigan Tea Partier: Charter Schools Are for Kids From "Ethnically Challenged Families"

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"A Killing Machine": Half of All Mass Shooters Used High-Capacity Magazines

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As lawmakers across the country and in the nation’s capital debate possible restrictions on high-capacity magazines, one question emerges: Are these ammunition feeding devices, which allow a shooter to fire many times without reloading, in fact commonly used by mass killers? We examined the data from Mother Jonescontinuing investigation into mass shootings and found that high-capacity magazines have been used in at least 31 of the 62 cases we analyzed. A half-dozen of these crimes occurred in the last two years alone. (With some of the cases we studied, it remains unclear whether high capacity magazines were used; for more details, jump to our data set below.)

Tragedy in Newtown


The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys


MAP: A Guide to Mass Shootings in America


Read our in-depth investigation: More Guns, More Mass Shootingsâ&#128;&#148;Coincidence?


151 Victims of Mass Shootings in 2012: Here Are Their Stories


Do Armed Civilians Stop Mass Shooters? Actually, No.


Mass Shootings: Maybe We Need a Better Mental-Health Policy


DATA: Explore our mass shootings research

In the shooting that injured Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Jared Loughner emptied a 33-round magazine in 30 seconds, killing 6 and injuring 13. Inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes used 40- and 100-round magazines to injure and kill an unprecedented 70 victims. At Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Adam Lanza used high-capacity magazines to fire upwards of 150 bullets as he slaughtered 20 kids and 6 adults.

“It turns a killer into a killing machine,” says David Chipman, who served for 25 years as a special agent in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Outlawing high capacity magazines won’t prevent gun crimes from happening, Chipman notes, but might well reduce the carnage: “Maybe three kids get killed instead of 20.”

With Congress undertaking a highly charged debate over firearms restrictions, many observers are skeptical that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to ban assault weapons will garner enough votes on Capitol Hill. But there may be momentum for mandating universal background checks on gun purchasers, and for outlawing the sale of magazines containing more than 10 rounds. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Americans support stricter regulation of firearms sales, and 59 percent believe that high-capacity magazines were significantly to blame in the recent spate of mass shootings.

The problem dates back to long before Newtown. In 1984, the assailant who massacred 21 at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, unleashed more than two hundred rounds. School and workplace shootings in Stockton and San Francisco in the late ’80s and early ’90s also involved large magazines, with an estimated 100 shots fired in each case. In 1997, a gunman in Orange, California, fired nearly 150 shots, wielding an AK-47 with a 30-round magazine three years after a federal law banned such assault weapons.

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"A Killing Machine": Half of All Mass Shooters Used High-Capacity Magazines

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The Media’s Post-Newtown Autism Fail

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The Media’s Post-Newtown Autism Fail

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