The music scene was always bizarre and on the edge of sucky. But at least it was. Now, there's a vacuum.

Once they complained about Hillary's performance at State, including how some email of hers *might* leak out.

They've been silent since we outsourced our State Department to a guy fully captured by Russian interests, likely with a ton of "back channels" to the Kremlin. Possible accidents are a sin; planned espionage and state vandalism are a feature. God help us.

Kafka? Or not? By Rick Gladstone @ Saturday Profile @ NYTimes.com, March 9

He was walking home from his consulting job at Iran’s United Nations mission in New York, his adopted city of many years, when the F.B.I. agents approached. He was arrested, handcuffed and driven to a hotel.

The life of the consultant, Ahmad Sheikhzadeh, a naturalized American citizen of Iranian descent with a doctorate from Columbia University and a network of prominent Iran contacts including its foreign minister, was altered on that day in March 2016.

In the hotel room where he was kept overnight, Dr. Sheikhzadeh recalled, the agents told him he could be imprisoned for decades on tax and sanctions violations if he did not become an informant. He had worked at the Iranian mission since 1990, preparing analyses of published articles on Iran and discussing them at weekly meetings.

Dr. Sheikhzadeh, a 62-year-old bachelor, migrated to the United States before Iran’s 1979 revolution and became a citizen in 2000 [.....]

E.J. Dionne gets it.

By David McCabe @ Axios.com, March 9

In a brief filed in a federal court, a group of former Justice Department officials say they are worried about the possibility that the DOJ's suit to block the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger is motivated by President Trump's loathing for Time Warner subsidiary, CNN.

Why it matters: This group of former officials includes fired U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and John Dean, who was Richard Nixon's top White House lawyer [....]

Rhetorical tendencies in American politics feed off each other and drag us all into the abyss.

Op-ed by Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of Reason magazine, @ NYTimes.com, for Sunday Review, March 9

[....] The result: an odoriferous stew of political rhetoric that is nearly irresistible to those on the inside and confusingly abhorrent to those on the outside.

The explosion of the smugs-vs.-trolls phase of our political discourse is traceable to a now infamous 2004 confrontation between Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson in the waning days of “Crossfire,” in which Mr. Stewart, a comedian, dropped his jester’s mask and accused Mr. Carlson and his ilk of undermining serious discourse with their partisan feuding and made-for-TV talking points. “Stop hurting America,” was his specific request. Mr. Carlson sputtered and fumed; it was generally agreed that Mr. Stewart won the day.

Around the same time, New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt was formulating a theory about why liberals and conservatives have such a hard time productively conversing. After mucking around in a lot of survey data, he came up with this basic idea: Liberals and people of the left underpin their politics with moral concerns about harm and fairness; they are driven by the imperative to help the vulnerable and see justice done. Conservatives and people of the right value these things as well but have several additional moral touchstones — loyalty, respect and sanctity. They value in-group solidarity, deference to authority, and the protection of purity in mind and body. To liberals, those sincerely held values can look a lot like, in Dr. Haidt’s words, “xenophobia, authoritarianism and Puritanism.” This asymmetry is the fountainhead of mutual incomprehension and disdain [.....]

Facing utter hopelessness, I snapped. I tried to get a gun; I wanted to take out as many people as possible — people who had tortured or ignored me — and then kill myself. It was 1997, and I had two possible locations mapped out: my school and a mall food court. I wanted to be heard. The abuse I’d suffered had closed me off, and I wanted to feel an emotion other than pain. I wanted to feel, for once, like I was in control, even if that meant spreading destruction and death.

In honor of National Women's Day - go big or go home.

"[Wells] pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism. And as a former slave who stood less than five feet tall, she took on structural racism more than half a century before her strategies were repurposed, often without crediting her, during the 1960s civil rights movement."

A few essential or interesting passages from the obituary:

“Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women,” Wells wrote.

Instead, Wells saw lynching as a violent form of subjugation — “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the nigger down,’ ” she wrote in a journal.

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Wells' husband and closest confidante, Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widower ... was a lawyer and civil rights activist in Chicago. After they married in 1895, Barnett’s activism took a back seat to his wife’s career. Theirs was an atypically modern relationship: He cooked dinner for their children most nights, and he cared for them while she traveled to make speeches and organize.

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Later in life, Wells fell from prominence as she was replaced by activists like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, who were more conservative in their tactics, and thus had more support from the white and black establishments. She helped to found prominent civil rights organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of Colored Women, only to be edged out of their leadership.