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Mark Zuckerberg is now working overtime to convince the American people to trust him with their personal data. Facebook knew tens of millions of Americans had their personal information stolen by Cambridge Analytica for the purposes of helping Steve Bannon and billionaire Robert Mercer elect Donald Trump, but only took responsibility for the breach after it became international news — two years after the fact.

Facebook’s lack of transparency is part of a broader pattern by its leadership. Mark Zuckerberg is an unelected, unregulated oligarch who controls industries and shapes the fate of our democracy without our consent. Congress must stop relying on his empty promise to self-regulate his monopoly, and take action to protect the American people.

Politicians shouldn’t be afraid to take on Zuckerberg — I’ve done it myself, and won. In 2014, he bought 700 acres of beachfront land in my home state of Hawaii. He built a wall around the property and then tried to force hundreds of Native Hawaiians to forfeit their gathering rights to the land by suing them. This same tactic was used by sugar barons in the Gilded Age to displace thousands of Native Hawaiian families from their ancestral lands.

Instead of letting a billionaire buy another vacation home and displace local families, I introduced a bill that would keep Hawaiian lands in Hawaiian hands. We organized thousands of Native Hawaiians and residents to fight back, and we won; Zuckerberg dropped the lawsuits.

Washington needs to learn from the people of Hawaii. We need bipartisan congressional investigations into unregulated monopolies like Facebook, and once Democrats retake the House in 2018, we need to push for bold new antitrust policies that challenge corporate power.

Hawaii has a long history of dealing with oligarchs like Zuckerberg. After it was annexed by the United States in 1898, five families quickly consolidated control of the sugar industry and rigged the political system to their favor. The attorney general of Hawaii, Edward Dole, said that the government of Hawaii was “probably almost as much centralized as it was in France under Louis XIV.“ At the height of the Gilded Age, these ultra-wealthy monopolists had an iron grip on our island, much like the railroad tycoons and robber barons on the mainland.

Today, we’re seeing a new generation of billionaires take control of our democracy. The growth of unregulated giants like Facebook has given rise to a digital oligarchy and a new Gilded Age. Our democracy is on the brink of collapse because our economy is owned by a handful of enormous corporations and our elections are being manipulated by a small group of billionaire donors.

Facebook has grown into a monopoly the size and scope of which the world has never seen, and the lack of oversight and competition encourages reckless behavior, stifles innovation, and leaves the rest of us bearing the personal and financial risks. Facebook strives to be a public utility that informs and connects the public, but unbeknownst to many of its users, it acts like a surveillance machine that sells our data to enrich billionaires.

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Kaniela Ing just keeps getting better and better! Remember his name.

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girls don’t like boys, girls like the pastoral escapist fantasy of living in a large house with many friends and several pets on a beautiful chunk of land with no financial, political, or medical anxieties. also, bread. 

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Lucy Liu photographed by Markus & Koala

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Macarons by Ayseyamanbutikpasta on Instagram

Follow So Super Awesome on Instagram

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Big math news! It’s been thirty years since mathematicians last found a convex pentagon that could “tile the plane.” The latest discovery (by Jennifer McLoud-Mann, Casey Mann, and David Von Derau) was published earlier this month. Full story.

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some of my favorite skies I’ve drawn

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Fence and Naya Details

The carpenter really takes pride in the quality of his work. The fit of wood components is excellent. The cut and finish on the fence’s roof bearer is amazing too, including the grain exposing chamfer and little notch on it’s end.

Even the fixings impress; stainless nails for exposed, and brass for under cover.

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Honestly, in the absence of autoimmune conditions that impose dietary restrictions, ANY diet that says that Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a species that is wildly successful in large part because we have spent the last six million or so years evolving to be opportunistic omnivores (and yes, that’s going back before any human species, to our common ancestor with chimpanzees, because chimps are also opportunistic omnivores and we both got that from our common ancestor) is not designed to eat __________, immediately trips my ‘bullshit’ alarms. 

We can eat just about any damn thing we can shove in our faces and chew. If it’s toxic, we may be able to cook it so it isn’t and still shove it in our faces and extract nutrition from it. We’ll sure as hell try. 

You are absolutely designed by millions of years of evolution to eat plants, animals, grains, fungi, whatever. ‘Original human diet’ my left asscheek. Show a Cro Magnon hunter a burger and fries and he’d be all over that shit.  

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The only way we’re going to get through this new administration is by leaning on each other.

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I think we need to talk about the under appreciated Window Seat fandom

I mean really? With the book shelves?

It’s like an alcove of happiness.

You want a whole row of individual seats? Fine, here you go. 

Or how about a whole window bed for those snugglers out there.

Curtains.. Guys this one has curtains.

Seriously? This is basically a glass cube of bliss.

 You can even get them with corners! Not enough corners? Okay.

Ba-BAM!! Corners for cocooning. 

There’s also the Roman-esque themed seat for the historians out there. 

 If you don’t want to snuggle up in blankets with hot cocoa in this then I don’t even know why you’re on this planet. I mean dat stonework. 

This one’s an entire rectangle. Just imagine all the cuddling that could happen in there. It’s practically a fortress.

This one’s fucking curved okay? it’s just chillin, up of the ground, and curved for your lounging convenience. 

don’t like rectangles or square? Okay. Have a fucking trapezoid seat.

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He is coming….

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Ghost Pokemon Evolution by WednesdayWolf

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Library Extension is a Google Chrome add-on that makes it easier to borrow the books you see online. When you browse Amazon, Goodreads, and other various sites, it automatically searches your local libraries for the book you’re viewing, displays the availability of that item, and adds a ‘borrow’ button that takes you right to the library’s online catalog so you can instantly reserve the book instead of buying it. Source Source 2

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Mystic American West Moodboard

Driving through forgotten highways, the old magic of the land starts to creep down your spine…

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The ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Theme Song on Marimba by percussionist Aaron DeWayne.

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the moon and the prince katamari damacy ost