The Smithian

“We have always been able to depend upon a constant shoreline. It’s going to be a hard lesson to learn. This is a new planet we are living on.”

more.

[look of the hour]

…storefront payday lenders tend to concentrate locations in low-income and communities of color…Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina had the highest number of payday stores per 10,000 residents. Outside of the Deep South, Missouri and Nevada were the only states with comparable density of payday storefronts…[the] five states [that]  charged the greatest amount of payday loan interest were California, Texas, Florida, Mississippi and Illinois…“Payday lending is…financial assault on communities of color. By preying on consumers with few resources, this predatory product takes what little they have and winds up leaving borrowers worse off than before..Far from creating opportunity, payday lending creates impoverished households and endangers local economies.”

more.

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art: photo of Charles Bradley by Jacob Blickenstaff in Austin, Texas, 2013

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art: from ‘Contectado’ by Federico Uribe

Offshore oil drilling will soon be allowed in…the Bahamas, which is made up of thousands of islands and cays off the Floridian coast. Initially, the drilling will be exploratory only…The Bahamas environment minister said the option of allowing large-scale commercial oil drilling would be put to the nation’s voters after results of the exploratory drills are known, perhaps in 2015.

more.

tragic.

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art: photo by Bruce Weber at Notre Dame D’Haiti Catholic Church, Little Haiti, Miami, Florida

Rubio is…a politician of unusual gifts. But the spotlight that has fallen on this relatively new arrival to the national scene says as much about the state of the Republican Party as it does about the 41-year-old senator. And it remains to be seen whether he represents the solution to the GOP’s problems, or whether the party’s sky-high hopes in an untested newcomer are just another measure of its drift. His appeal starts with the fact that Rubio embodies two demographic groups with which the GOP needs to connect: young people and Hispanics.

more.

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art: drawing by Carlos Pijeira

Eighteen years ago today, Trayvon Benjamin Martin was born to Sabrina Fulton and Tracy Martin. Nearly a year ago, their son was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., who viewed Trayvon as “a real suspicious guy.”  Instead, the unarmed teenager was found with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea from 7-Eleven and a bullet hole in his chest from Zimmerman’s Kel-Tec 9 mm PF-9.

more.

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art: by Shepard Fairey

…the real deal: heritage sugar cane.

…various cities across the globe will continue to face actual existential threats to their survival. Perhaps sooner than we’d like to think.

more on Mexico City, Gaza City, Miami, New Orleans, etc.

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art: photo, just outside New Delhi, May 2012