Doc City

I spent the weekend watching a few old documentaries and a couple of newer ones.  This one doesn't tell you anything that isn't common knowledge at this late date, but it kept my interest.  I'd not seen it before and I offer it here just in case you haven't either and you're interested.



Here's a more recent one by the mystery writer James Patterson as he obsesses about poverty in his home town in New York and the neglected communities near his present home in wealthy Palm Beach, Florida.



And this one about the life and work of Richard Feynman.



Sorry about the ad in front of this one, but if I can take it so can you.

TS

Doc of the Day

FWIW.


TS

Facets of Exceptionalism

The second meaning of “American exceptionalism” holds that the domestic United States “homeland” is a uniquely excellent and unmatched global role model of political and societal democracy, freedom, and opportunity. This is what US politicians mean when they customarily refer to the US as “the envy of the world” (a phrase Obama has used more than once), the “greatest nation on Earth,” the “leader of the free world,” and the like. It’s what Republican US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) meant when she called the US “the beacon to the world of the way life should be” – this during a speech given on the floor of the US Senate in support of Congress authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq if he wanted to.

So what if the current “New Gilded Age” United States is now the most savagely unequal society is the industrialized world, an ever more openly plutocratic nation where the top 1% owns more than 90% of the wealth and a probably comparable share of the nation’s democratically elected” officials? So what if 6 Walmart heirs possess as much wealth between them as the bottom 42% of US citizens (or ex-citizens) while 16 million US children live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level and 1 in 7 US citizens rely on food banks for basic nutrition (half of those people are employed, incidentally). And who cares if these and numerous other terrible facts reflect more than three decades of deliberately engineered upward wealth and income distribution: a ruthless state-capitalist concentration of riches and power that has brought the “homeland” to a New Gilded Age of abject oligarchy and (along the way) to the brink of environmental catastrophe? Or that white median household wealth is 22 times that of Black median household wealth while Blacks make up more than 40 percent of the nation’s 2.4 million prisoners in the US, the world’s leading prison state (a curious achievement for the self-declared Land of Liberty!) and 1 in 3 Black adults males carry the crippling mark of a felony record?

More from Paul Street.

Be sure to read it this weekend because you will be tested come Monday.


TS

Racism Today

Our country’s addiction to arrests and incarceration has created fear in poorer communities of being arrested for minor, nonviolent offenses, prompting interactions with police that we have seen time and again escalate quickly into unnecessary tragedies. A moment of conjecture: If Walter Scott does not fear that a routine traffic stop or owing money is going to lead to his arrest and possible imprisonment, does he flee from the officer? Is he alive today?

Ezekial Edwards of the ACLU says it better than I can.


TS

Who? Never Heard of Him...

The fact is, Iran has not invaded another country since the 1730s, when Nader Shah waged war on both the Ottoman and Mughal empires and established an ephemeral empire stretching from the Caucasus to the Indus Valley. In modern times Iran has been the victim of repeated attacks and encroachments on its sovereignty—by Britain, tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union just after the Second World War, and Iraq (with U.S. blessing and support) from September 1980 to August 1988. But it has not directly attacked any of its neighbors.

In 1953 the U.S. itself engineered a coup in Iran against a democratically elected prime minister (to prevent his plans to nationalize the oil industry). It imposed on the Iranian people the brutal, tyrannical rule of the Shah up to 1979. In the latter year, in the most genuinely mass-based revolution in Islamic history, the Shah was overthrown. Ever since then the U.S. has held Iran in the cross hairs, applying economic sanctions, freezing its U.S. bank-holdings, even providing Iraq in the eighties with military aid and satellite intelligence as Saddam Hussein waged an aggressive war against his neighbor. All to punish the Iranian people for having the audacity to (at least try to) shuffle off the shackles of imperialist hegemony.

The essay of the day by Gary Leupp.

Most Americans don't know or understand this stuff because corporate media don't reveal crucial facts about American imperialism, past or present.

The average Joe does not understand how controlled and guided by coercive power his own life is, never mind the damage such persuasion has on sovereign nations and people around the world.  He has not heard of Mohammad Mosaddegh because he has ignored history, or finds it fallacious.

He has not heard of Abbas Kiarostami because he hasn't the slightest interest in the cultures of other lands.

If his leaders or the propagandists in the media who represent power tell him another nation is evil, he becomes a talking parrot without understanding that those leaders are not vested in him as a citizen, but rather to their corporate handlers.

He will bitch about taxes, but expect the roads to be smoothly paved for him.

He will scorn the poor and people of color, even as they are choked to death and gunned down by those sworn to "protect and serve."

He'll trade the social contract for a new cluster of bombs.

He will decry "liberal" education while ignoring history and science and not understanding the proper uses of "their, there, and they're."

He will look to the exceptional shield God has constructed around his fabled nation and call it good when, in too many ways to name, it is rotten to the core.


TS 

Poor Wisky

Bummer it had to be Duke.

Me no like.






TS

A Uniquely American Story

A telling story forwarded by photographer Lee Santa of Sandpoint, Idaho, the author of "A Journey into Jazz."

Thanks for this, Lee.






TS

Opening Day

Say, did you know
it's Opening Day?
Hoorah, hooray!
But it's not as sweet
as long ago,
when "Say Hey"
Willie Mays roamed
centerfield for the Giants,
and peanuts didn't cost
an arm and leg.
Batter up anyway!


TS

Phssst

Ha, ha, ha.

I finished watching the Wisky/Kentucky game and turned over to Portland soccer.

Providence Park is jammed as usual.  It's a low-scoring affair, surprise!

I still don't get it, what a boring spectacle after watching a truly outstanding college bball game.

Oh well, there is no accounting for taste.  I think part of the problem is even the casual watcher can clearly see how weak US Major League Soccer is compared to premier leagues around the world.

It's just sooooo slow.


TS

Kentucky Falls!!

Yes, yes, yes!

Next year, Duckies.  You're that close.








TS

Trillium/Charles Lucas

Charles Lucas sells his work here.


TS

LOL, Judith

Like many others, she didn't understand the role of journalism back in 2003 when she worked for the NY Times, and she still hasn't learned her lesson.

To question. To seek the truth as an upholder of the Fourth Estate.

This woman is supporting the elite and the lie, a losing proposition.

This is a pathetic Wall Street Journal piece by the maven of germ warfare, Judith Miller.  She demonstrates how an acquiescent, influential writer with too close ties to real power got it wrong--but alas, she is still blaming others for her reportorial incompetence.

She has never met G.W. Bush, but so what?  In 2008 she found a new job after the Times self-corrected.

I cite this because I once wrote to an Oregon congressman and pleaded with him to not vote in favor of the Iraq War because the jury was still out on WMD for all but the hawks in the White House.

"Read Germs," he protested my intransigence.  Never mind that many had already debunked that Judith Miller tome as it related to Iraq. (Arms inspectors knew Hussein had killed innocents with American-purchased gas.  They also figured he had ended the campaign.  But who wanted to listen to that enlightening fact?)

Well, I learned my lesson. There was no logic in attempting to convince a corporate shill that the threat was exaggerated and hysterical.  That congressman had the war fever and was unapproachable. He'd read too much Judith, who was now his ally--the ally of a corrupt administration.

And of course his justification of the invasion/occupation/mayhem adapted along with the others'. The US had invaded for a lot of reasons the partisans initially forgot to mention.

The war was now, you know, about freedom...

His crowd still votes for him every two years, the obviously overwhelmingly stupid farts who live in the hinterlands of my great state.

The case for WMD was indeed manufactured, as many have subsequently noted--with the exception of Judith Miller here, who is lucky enough, I suppose, to push this piece off on a sympathetic rag.

4/9 Update:  About her new book, a "memoir."


TS

Oink, oink...

Karl Rove may be a lot of things, but being sorry for the 2003 invasion of Iraq is not one of them.

A 32-year-old Iraq war veteran confronted Rove at the University of Connecticut this week, calling on the former senior advisor to President George W. Bush to apologize for the horrors of that war and its lingering effects both at home and abroad. 

"I've taken responsibility for my actions and dealt with my demons while advocating for a peaceful resolution for a war that was an act of aggression with no clear goal," said Ryan Hemowitz, who said he served as a medic with the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Infantry Regiment, at an event sponsored by the UConn College Republicans. "Can you take responsibility and apologize for your decision in sending a generation to lose their humanity and deal with the horrors of war, which you have never had the courage to face? Will you apologize to the millions of fathers and mothers who lost their children on both sides of this useless war?"

Rove, who helped lead the disinformation campaign that led to the 2003 Iraq invasion, refused to say he was sorry.

It was a reasonable request, but we all know that truth and reconciliation are not part of the fabric of America.


TS

Ugh...

ESPN has blown it with a new website.

The obtrusiveness of the shimmering ads and constant motion therein is ugly, another instance of a site not leaving well-enough alone.

"New and Improved" has never been so damaging to the cause.

Another site I go to often, CommonDreams, plugged in a similar new design last year, though they made a quick amendment and ditched a ridiculous home page that made the hunt for content too challenging--or as in my case too much like work.

The site works okay for me now, largely because it is donor-driven and not reliant on ads, but the small fix did wonders as well.

If you look at the ESPN site you'll note the larger, flash-driven ads are no longer innocent sidebar attractions, but full-scale assaults on your senses with a column-width nearly the size of the text space.

The site's new, more aggressive ad world accentuation is not my cup of tea.

I'll be going there less often these days.


TS

Yep

The war on terror morphed into a legitimization for state terrorism as was made clear under the willingness of the Obama administration to pardon the CIA torturers, create a “kill list,” expand the surveillance state, punish whistleblowers, and use drones to indiscriminately kill civilians—all in the name of fighting terrorists. Obama expanded the reach of the militarized state and along with Democratic and Republican Party extremists preached a notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than in a notion of social security that rallied against the deprivations and suffering produced by war, poverty, racism, and state terrorism. The war on terrorism extended the discourse, space, location, and time of war in ways that made it unbounded and ubiquitous making everyone a potential terrorists and the battlefield a domestic as well as foreign location, a foreign as well as a domestic policy issue. Obama has become the master of permanent war seeking to increase the bloated military budget—close to a trillion dollars–while “turning to lawless violence….translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq,” including an attempt “to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine.”[6] Fear became total and the imposition of punitive standards included not only the bombing, abduction, and torture of enemy combatants, but also the use of the police and federal troops for drug interdictions, the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools, and the increasing criminalization of a range of social behaviors that extended from homelessness to violating dress codes in school.

Henry A. Giroux gets down with it.


TS