All You Need Is Love

seldo:

I am super bored of hearing this.

Could Yahoo have done a better job of managing Flickr? Absolutely.

In retrospect, if they’d been patient and poured money into it like Facebook did with their own photo-sharing features, Flickr might have been a lot bigger. (Facebook is by far the…

je-mappelle-michelle:

: irresistible-revolution: rillness: Seriously talk all your shit about…

irresistible-revolution:

rillness:

Seriously talk all your shit about “authenticity” and “real talent” but do you honestly think your cloying overdone White Guy music “legends” could…

starllex:

one time i saw a girls bra strap. that was it. i was gone. i just couldnt focus anymore throughout the whole day because i saw it. all i could think about was bra strap. i went to a restauraunt and they asked what i wanted and the only words that came out of my were were “bra…

sinidentidades:

Francisco Zapata keeps a copy of the Constitution on his cellphone. So when the police stopped, frisked and charged him with misdemeanor marijuana possession, he wanted what that cellphone document promised.

“I was under the assumption,” he said, “that if I kept going back to court, eventually I would get my day in court.”

But this was the Bronx.

Court delays of as long as five years in felony cases have pushed the Bronx criminal courts into the bottom ranks of courts nationally, reaching what even the judges call crisis levels.

But that backlog has a less-noted companion. The courts are so dysfunctional that those accused of minor offenses — misdemeanors like trespassing or driving with a suspended license — have all but lost the fundamental guarantee of the American legal system: the right to a trial.

The case of Mr. Zapata would usually be overlooked in the flood of 50,000 Bronx misdemeanor filings a year. But he was part of a special legal-defense effort led by the Bronx Defenders, which provides legal representation to poor Bronx residents charged with crimes. That effort tested the borough’s courts by trying to bring 54 misdemeanor marijuana possession cases to trial for clients who had been arrested as part of New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program and wanted to fight the charges.

Instead, these defendants got a through-the-looking glass criminal justice system where charges that were punishable by a maximum sentence of three months in jail could take many times that just winding toward an always elusive trial. And when the increasingly elastic speedy-trial rules of the Bronx were finally stretched too far by delay after delay, prosecutors would sometimes drop the cases as if they were never quite worth their time anyway.

Eventually, the effort by the Bronx Defenders, done in partnership with the Wall Street law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, was scrapped. The grim conclusion was that the borough’s courts were incapable of giving defendants the hearings that people expect. Of the 54 cases, not one ended in a trial.

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

afrofuturistaffair:

Running a massive deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars, Philadelphia’s school system is planning to eliminate all sports, extracurricular activities, counselors and libraries—beyond which, for schools eviscerated by austerity politics, there’s not much left to lose. At noon today, May 17, thousands of students are expected to walk out of class and flood downtown. [Afrofuturist Affair: The walkout happened, and it was peaceful, well-organized, and productive].

“It’s time that the City Council and Governor Corbett started listening to students,” says Sharron Snyder, a junior at Benjamin Franklin High School and an organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union. “If they spent even one day in my school, they would know that already we don’t have the right resources to succeed.”

Walkout organizers state, “We are willing to break the stereotypes and expectations of urban youth, and are taking this opportunity to tell the world that urban school districts deserve funding, and it is your responsibility under the Commonwealth Charter to provide us with more than a ‘bare bones education.’”

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174401/what-you-should-know-about-philly-student-walkout#ixzz2TZyv1nes

(via girljanitor)