I wrote a thing for Reason a few months back. Now it’s reprinted at C4SS. #ciw #fmac #wildcatunionism http://ift.tt/1eWIaDl

The reason that Cici’s Pizza exists is to prove to the world that there are depths even lower than Little Caesar’s will go to.

“Mexican food [from worker-owned street vendors] was also seen as a threat to white workers, both through unfair competition and labor radicalism. Nativist opponents of immigrant workers claimed that the Mexican diet of tortillas and chili, like the Chinese staple rice, undermined the nation’s standard of living. . . . Mexican food was also associated with anarchism and union organizing. Tamale vendors were blamed for the Christmas Day Riot of 1913, when police raided a labor rally in Los Angeles Plaza. Milam Plaza in San Antonio, where the chili queens worked in the 1920s, was a prominent recruiting ground for migrant workers. Customers could eat their chili while listening to impassioned speeches by anarcho-syndicalists of the [Industrial] Workers of the World and the Partido Liberal Mexicano. [*]” (Jeffrey M. Pilcher, “The Rise and Fall of the Chili Queens,” in _Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food_, p. 113)

Look if you think market competition and different times preferences are all the reasons you need to explain why worker-owned food businesses can’t compete effectively with big corporate chains, then you are wrong, and you need to think harder about this. http://ift.tt/pp4iE4

Let’s make a new national motto for the US: previously “E Pluribus Unum,”* now it’s “Report Suspicious Activity.”

G. E. Moore, especially “Proof of an External World” and “Principia Ethica.”* Then, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Well, I’m sure this will end well. #AgainstAllMilitaryOffensives #AgainstAllOccupations #USOutOfTheUkraine #EUOutOfTheUkraine #RussiaOutOfTheUkraine #UkraineOutOfTheUkraine #EverybodyStandDown

Of course they did. Mass in-security is the damned *point* of the National Security Agency. If communications weren’t massively insecure, they’d have nothing to tap and no reason to exist.

Colloquial language is full of very carefully observed and significant grammaticalization. Also, our curse-word-taboos are getting better: “The increase in public profanity may seem to speak against such a sunny perspective. But what qualifies as profanity? Today, the ‘four letter’ words traditionally termed profanity in American English are more properly just salty. … No anthropologist observing our society would recognize words used so freely in public language as profanity. “At the same time, consider the words we now consider truly taboo, that we enshroud with a near-religious air of sinfulness. They are, overwhelmingly, epithets aimed at groups. Gone are the days when our main lexical taboos concerned religion — with ‘egad’ as a way to evade saying ‘Ye Gods!’ — or sex and the body, as when Americans started saying white and dark meat to avoid mentioning breasts and limbs. “Instead, today the abusive use of the N-word, the word beginning with F that refers to homosexual men and a four-letter word for a body part that can be used to refer to women are considered beyond the pale even in casual discourse, to an extent that would baffle a time traveler from as recently as 50 years ago. . . .”

OK, so, Winter Soldier: have known all the spoilers for years. Still. Damn.