2 Cellos with Cobain

Couldn't get this tune out of my mind today, so what the hell.


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Documenting a History of Terror

“Many of these lynchings were not executing people for crimes but executing people for violating the racial hierarchy,” he said, meaning offenses such as bumping up against a white woman or wearing an Army uniform.

But, he continued, even when a major crime was alleged, the refusal to grant a black man a trial — despite the justice system’s near certain outcome — and the public extravagance of a lynching were clearly intended as a message to other African-Americans.

The bloody history of Paris, Tex., about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, is well known if rarely brought up, said Thelma Dangerfield, the treasurer of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. Thousands of people came in 1893 to see Henry Smith, a black teenager accused of murder, carried around town on a float, then tortured and burned to death on a scaffold.

Until recently, some longtime residents still remembered when the two Arthur brothers were tied to a flagpole and set on fire at the city fairgrounds in 1920.

Read more about this history project here.


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Stormy Monday

Hella storm out there at the moment.

The wind came up as I walked to the store. It blew my stocking cap off my head and over the fence at the high-rise construction site on the corner. A worker attempting to fortify a section of the fence that was about to topple over retrieved the cap for me from the edge of the fifty-foot subbasement hole that is being surfaced for parking. Had my cap fallen in I wouldn't even have tried to recover it.

That's my excitement for the day.  I'm just fortunate I still own a stocking cap on this stormy Monday.


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Published

The go-to site for info about my new book.

Or click here or on the sidebar image to see it at Amazon.









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Sigh

On March 4, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, a lawsuit designed by conservative advocates to destroy Obamacare. If the plaintiffs prevail, about 8 million people could lose their health insurance. Premiums are likely to skyrocket by 35 percent or more, threatening coverage for millions of others. Health policy experts have estimated that nearly 10,000 people a year could die prematurely if they lose their coverage. Obamacare itself could collapse.

The King case started out as a legal theory hatched by a group of conservative lawyers in 2010 at a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the right-leaning think tank. Attendees were urged to devise a litigation strategy to bring down the Affordable Care Act, which months earlier had been signed into law. The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank funded by big pharmaceutical firms, oil and gas outfits, the Koch brothers, Google, tobacco companies, and conservative foundations, answered the call. ("This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene," Michael Greve, then CEI chairman, said at the conference.) But CEI had to recruit plaintiffs—actual people who could claim they had been harmed by the Affordable Care Act in a particular way—to launch its lawsuit.

Gory inside pictures of  the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell fiasco. They may not be so "unusual" at all, however.


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Spoiled

Another penis enhancement regimen spoiled.  Listen, it only worked for Hemingway because he was a real writer.

But the real question is where else can a man earn 10 million a year reading Pentagon and CIA news releases over the airwaves?

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Fed Alert/Update

UPDATE: I've discovered, belatedly as usual, that even though the First Row URL I always used to find sports streams has been shut down, ifeed2all.eu is now the magic address.  This is where First Row took you before it was ceremoniously shut down by ICE earlier this month, so a previous post here has been deleted.

I hadn't made the connection until doing a little research this morning.  However else you cut it this is good news for sports watchers, so let's hope it survives the next round of ICE legal wrangling.

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To the Red Planet

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Theme

There is so much damn good stuff in this aggregate website that you would be negligent not to read it.

And this one, which has links to everything a man or woman needs to survive.


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Signing Day

So you want to know all about the Oregon recruits who signed letters of intent today to play ball with the Mighty Ducks next season?  You really do, right?

Okay, here's the lineup with a neato package of highlights and bios, and an interactive map that tells you where the players are from. It's interesting (not really) that not one of this year's signees is from the state of Oregon.

Oregon has a scarcity of top talent because it has a scarcity of human beings, go figure.

Oregon's class is rated number 16 in the country and third in the PAC behind USC 1-1 and UCLA 7-2.

CD, a UCLA honk, is likely happy, but USC signed most of the big stars out of the LA region, just as it does every year.

In reality the whole class-rating and star system in recruiting circles is pretty much overrated. Oregon has never had a top-ten class but does fine year in and year out because the coaches there are first-rate.

You wouldn't know that listening to many spoiled Duck fans who complain otherwise, but it's true.


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CounterPunch Failure

Liberal writers have been lining up for the last month to decry American Sniper along predictable, ideologically comfortable lines. “Macho Sludge” was the title of an Alternet piece by David Masciotra. Chris Hedges called it “a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity.” These reviewers, driven perhaps by their own political distaste of American Sniper miss much – or most of what is at work politically in the film. Straight propaganda rarely makes for compelling entertainment, so the enormous popularity of American Sniper (hauling in $30.6 million in its fourth weekend to total to nearly $250 million in 17 days of broad release) suggests that it has reached far beyond the hard core of ultraconservatives one would expect to embrace the film these reviewers describe.--J.E. Lowndes

Don't let anyone tell you that CounterPunch is simply a leftist rag with a slanted view, for it actually published this piece by a University of Oregon professor.

I can't imagine CP co-founder Alexander Cockburn ever accepting for publication such tripe were he alive.

The Ivory Tower in Eugene just took an RPG round right between its cornices with this piece.

I'll be as succinct as I can. There is no excuse under the sun for this kind of pseudo objectivity about American Sniper. First, not one of the writers the author mentions was placing the sole blame--or credit--for the film's popularity on "ultraconservatives."

Second, ultraconservatives are not exclusively under the spell of propaganda these days, nor have they ever been.  Propaganda's effect, like the measles, can touch all of us who are unvaccinated, and regarding its preemptive wars the U.S. is profoundly ill.

Liberals in the 2003 Congress supported the Iraq invasion for God's sake, and their constituents are pouring into the theaters to absorb this film's muddled message.

And that message is that Americans can get it wrong and wrong and wrong again, and it still won't rectify matters or negate the allure of hegemony on naive minds--liberal or ultraconservative or anywhere in-between.

In other words it's an American film, and that presents a whole lot of political problems that we're unable to solve with the supposedly wise help of Rowdy Yates, Dirty Harry, and Josey Wales.

This is not an us or them matter. This is a significant problem with the terms of the debate.


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Telling It

The integration of elites of color, including Barack Obama, into the upper echelons of institutional and political structures has done nothing to blunt the predatory nature of empire. Identity and gender politics—we are about to be sold a woman president in the form of Hillary Clinton—have fostered, as Malcolm understood, fraud and theft by Wall Street, the evisceration of our civil liberties, the misery of an underclass in which half of all public school children live in poverty, the expansion of our imperial wars and the deep and perhaps fatal exploitation of the ecosystem. And until we heed Malcolm X, until we grapple with the truth about the self-destruction that lies at the heart of empire, the victims, at home and abroad, will mount. Malcolm, like James Baldwin, understood that only by facing the truth about who we are as members of an imperial power can people of color, along with whites, be liberated. This truth is bitter and painful. It requires an acknowledgment of our capacity for evil, injustice and exploitation, and it demands repentance. But we cling like giddy children to the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. We refuse to grow up. And because of these lies, perpetrated across the cultural and political spectrum, liberation has not taken place. Empire devours us all.

Chris Hedges on Malcolm X.  A must read.


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Good Game/Doing it Right

I'm all for social intercourse whenever it happens, but I'm chuckling right now as I think about something a friend said the other day over coffee.  He commented that the Super Bowl is like St. Patrick's Day, a U.S sanctified amateur hour.

The reference is of course to how people who don't have the slightest interest in either the Irish or football pour out of the woodwork on the appointed day and take over out of sheer numbers--bold in their ineptitude and suddenly inspired interest in the proceedings at hand.

Confronted with the mass mind you're overwhelmed and you lose your sense of pleasure and control of whatever space you're in at the time.

I'm glad I'm home alone watching the Stupor Bowl with Chris Collinsworth and the dependable Al Michaels broadcasting the game.

Next up, my dinner of Chicken Alfredo, followed by a little more work on my next book.  I'll skip the halftime show, thanks.


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Good Radio

The This American Life podcast on William S. Burroughs will be available here tonight at 7 CT.  I heard it yesterday.

Recommended for fans and haters alike.


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SB

Not into the Stupor Bowl this year for some reason, and I've never been a big "fan" of watching the glitzy new commercials that occupy many viewers.

Don't feel like joining the crowd.  So I'll sit home and stream it if I can.

Definitely not into the hype.  It's not Oregon football so I'm kind of like, what's the big deal?

Ho hum...


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