|
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
|
Well Salon says he was!
I have little to add except that I have always despised the sombitch and that rarely (take a look at what is happening in VA) those powerful pols taking bribes or engaging in extortion get their comeupance.
ha
For decades, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been to support “moderates.” The problem is that there are actually very few of them. The Arab world is going through a bitter, sectarian struggle that is “carrying the Islamic world back to the Dark Ages,” said Turkish President Abdullah Gul. In these circumstances, moderates either become extremists or they lose out in the brutal power struggles of the day. Look at Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya and the Palestinian territories.
By Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, August 14, 2014
[....] That’s the dismal judgment of the handful of scholars who study the broad category of online incivility known as trolling, a problem whose scope is not clear, but whose victims keep mounting.
“As long as the Internet keeps operating according to a click-based economy, trolls will maybe not win, but they will always be present,” said Whitney Phillips, a lecturer at Humboldt State University and the author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” a forthcoming book about her years of studying bad behavior online. “The faster that the whole media system goes, the more trolls have a foothold to stand on. They are perfectly calibrated to exploit the way media is disseminated these days.”[....]
A high school teacher of mine told the story of playing a trading game as part of teacher training on race and social issues. The kicker was that the game was rigged. My teacher wound up in the group the game was rigged against. A competitive guy, he grew increasingly frustrated, and eventually stood off to the side and asked others to play his turn for him. Throughout the game, the group the game was rigged for downplayed or outright denied their own advantage and that the game was unfair. They urged him to keep playing (most in a kind manner, some gently upbraiding him for being a sore loser). They insisted that he was just unlucky, and that things could get better.
The lessons he took from this were:
1. People tend to grow discouraged when the game is rigged against them.
2. People benefitting from a rigged game are reluctant to acknowledge that the game is rigged.
The poor Triangles, with less and less power, wealth, or hope, first get angry, then apathetic. They sit around waiting for this dumb game to be over. They come to life only if they think up a way of cheating or of creating a revolution. Only subversion brings out their interest and creativity.
One of my icons is dead!
I am watching a report on MSNBC right now.
The guy had everything, the guy could stand up better than anyone I have ever seen, the guy....
THE GUY IS GONE!
DAMN!
That is all I got right now.
I shall think about this tragedy later.
Enter the Libre Initiative, an organization that has collected millions from the Kochs' political network. Libre, which is pronounced LEE'-bray and means "free," pushes a message of limited government and economic freedom between lessons on how to build family-run businesses and prayer breakfasts with Hispanic pastors.
Its organizers pitch conservative ideals while offering tutorials on U.S. immigration law, support for overhauling the broken immigration system that stops short of campaigning for the Senate's bipartisan bill and collecting donations for the unaccompanied children crossing the United States-Mexico border illegally.
In effect, it is a shadow GOP — one with a gentle emphasis on social services and assimilation over a central party often seen as hostile to immigrants and minorities.
"We've gone to areas that other conservative organizations don't typically go," said Libre's Texas director Rafael Bejar, who helped distribute candy-packed Easter baskets at a San Antonio elementary school. Tucked in with the sweets: a pamphlet in English and Spanish noting that the national debt is approaching $17 trillion.
The "catch" is auto-renewal of your policy.
Liberal critics who point out that a single-payer system would avoid this kind of mess are right. Right-wing critics who are looking to exploit any advantage will trump up stories of auto-renewal sticker shock, which is why it’s so important to get the word out now that everyone need’s to review their plan before the end of the year.
“Auto-renewing is a bad idea regardless of the situation,” Charles told me. “You may end up renewing the existing policy anyway (and I suspect that most people will end up doing so), but everyone should at least log in and check things out.”
By Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, Aug. 10, 2014
The former secretary of state, and probable candidate for president, outlines her foreign-policy doctrine. She says this about President Obama's: "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle."
The Rabbi did not survive. No suspects in custody. Although there is 'no evidence' of a hate crime in this murder, there have been anti-semitic hate crimes in the Miami area in recent weeks.
Via a TPM reader, this description of ISIL's tactics provides the best explanation I've seen for their surprising battlefield successes in Iraq and Syria
(Reuters) - Nigeria's military fought gun battles with Boko Haram Islamists in two key northeastern towns on Friday, after the militants killed dozens of people and drove soldiers out of Gwoza town two days ago, security sources and the military said....
Listen to my interview about Theodore Roosevelt and progressive pioneer, "Fighting Bob" La Follette on Wisconsin Public Radio
President Obama is considering airstrikes or airdrops of food and medicine to address a humanitarian crisis among as many as 40,000 religious minorities in Iraq who have been dying of heat and thirst on a mountaintop after death threats from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, administration officials said on Thursday.
The president, in meetings with his national security team at the White House on Thursday morning, has been weighing a series of options ranging from dropping humanitarian supplies on Mount Sinjar to military strikes on the fighters from ISIS now at the base of the mountain, a senior administration official said.
Heartrending. This raw, beautifully written account by a Palestinian novelist living in a Gaza brings the tragedy to life in a way that raw numbers cannot. Please read.
...While hundreds of thousands are being brutally massacred in Syria, Iraq, Libya, East Africa and elsewhere, there are no serious street demonstrations, few outraged headlines in the international media and barely a whimper from such institutions like the extremely ill-named United Nations Human Rights Council....When Muslims kill hundreds of thousands of other Muslims it does not raise an eyebrow among these keffiyeh-wearing fascists, but when Jews kill Muslims it is “genocide” and a “crime against humanity”...Since....1948, around 12 million Muslims have been killed in violent wars and conflicts. Over ninety per cent have been killed by other Muslims, and less than one tenth of one per cent were killed in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict..
This is exactly the point I have made about the glaring double standards in condemning Israel in it's painful, difficult task of routing out the ruthless Gaza terrorists whose stated mission is the extermination of Israel. Casualties are far, far lower than 'the norm' for wars or violent clashes in the Middle East. Israel could have had far less troops killed if they had used more heavy ordnance, and also if they didn't announce what part of Gaza they were going into next (allowing civilians to leave). The author also points out the 'civilian', 'combatant' casualty figures used by the UN come mostly from Hamas sources in Gaza, and are not at all to be trusted to be accurate.
Take a look at this video by Colbert.
It is indeed heart warming.
I have this granddaughter and Colbert just hit me right in the chest area.
Amazing, really.
He is a father after all and one of many siblings.
Hats off to Stephen Colbert.
I found this by accident at Huffpo.
Mr. Colbert is a very, very nice man and I am sending this link to my son who will soon have two wonderful daughters.
It's extremely unlikely that someone would catch Ebola from simply being on the same plane or in the same public space with someone who was affected. That's because Ebola doesn't tend to travel through the air like the flu and other respiratory illnesses.
In order to catch Ebola, you have to touch the bodily fluids (such as sweat, vomit, diarrhea, blood, urine, or semen) of an Ebola patient After that, you would have to get the virus into your body by, for example, touching food and eating it.
The current outbreak is so bad because it's happening in places with poor health infrastructure
The current war in Gaza was not one Israel or Hamas sought. But both had no doubt that a new confrontation would come. The 21 November 2012 ceasefire that ended an eight-day-long exchange of Gazan rocket fire and Israeli aerial bombardment was never implemented.
....aside from the safety issues, the two predominant obstacles to having a widespread cure revolve around ethical and economical questions.
For the ethical side, it all comes down to human testing. Paul Hunger, professor of Health Protection at the University of East Anglia, broke down both arguments for the Huffington Post:
As a practicing clinician, if I was given the option to help people with a drug that isn't proven, but has been shown to have at least some effect, it's unethical not to give it to them.
[But] in the midst of such a huge epidemic, one could even argue that doing a blind controlled trial would be unethical, because if you give a placebo to some people, who will most likely die, then you are depriving them of a drug that could cure them, something that could save their life.
The economical side is more, well, deplorable, according to Dr. Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "The vaccine companies of course have to be driven by the economic considerations," he told the Huffington Post. "It's a terrible thing to say, but they have to be convinced that it's economically... worthwhile to provide the vaccine."
The U.S. Department of Justice Reports:
* American Indians and Alaska Natives are more than 2.5 times as likely to be victims of violent crimes as other races.
* Depending on which stats one looks at, between 67 percent and 90 percent of rapes against American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIAN) are committed by non-natives. Sixty-three percent of AIAN women victims of assault identify the perpetrators as non-natives.
* One-third of AIAN women report being raped over the course of their lives. Seventy-one percent of AIAN women victims of rape or sexual assault know their rapists; 38 percent are the women's intimate partners.
* Three out of five AIAN women have been assaulted in their lifetimes.
* In some counties, the murder rate for AIAN women is over 10 times the national average. Murder, in fact, is the third cause of death for American Indian women, according to testimony offered by Karen Artichoker, director of the Sacred Circle National Resource Center to End Violence Against Native Women, during the 2007 Senate Committee on Indian Affairs oversight hearing on violence against Native women.
My bold, but it deserves to be emboldened.
It's changing, but until recently, a non-native male could go on to the reservation, rape/molest/abuse/murder a native woman/child/adolescent then run off the reservation like the chicken shit he is and he couldn't be touched for any crime.VAWA is helping, but there sure is a long way to go.
My son's significant other, let's call her Mree, was on a UN panel last year addressing this issue for not only American Indians, but for the Indigenous world wide.
Boehner as the Tea Party star Ted Cruz nixes the parsimonious emergency Border Crisis Bill that the GOP leadership was pushing: "There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action, to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries"..and yes, Cruz is in the Senate, why he is interfering with House legislation is....to promote His Personal Self.
A mild-mannered teen. The violent death of a parent. A mysterious superpower. A plan for revenge. These familiar comic book elements are given a fresh twist in a new graphic novel that ties superheroics to the immigrant experience. The Shadow Hero — written by Gene Luen Yang, author of the National Book Award finalist American Born Chinese, and illustrated by Sonny Liew, creator of Malinky Robot for Image Comics — reintroduces the Green Turtle, a forgotten character from the Golden Age of Comics. Together, Yang and Liew resurrected what many consider to be the first Asian-American superhero from obscurity.
Yang, an Alameda native, UC Berkeley grad and math teacher, and IT specialist at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, grew up in the San Jose area, but maintains deep ties to the East Bay. As the author/illustrator of The New York Times-bestselling graphic novel Boxers & Saints, he has done much to bring Chinese history, mythology, and culture to a wider audience.
On August 2, Flying Colors Comics (2980 Treat Blvd., Concord) will host a launch party for The Shadow Hero, published by First Second just in time for last week's San Diego Comic-Con.
From the birth of the superhero genre in 1938, Asian characters in comic books were usually relegated to roles as Fu Manchu villains or slapstick sidekicks, rendered with yellow/orange skin tones, ridiculous buckteeth, and slanted eyelids. Only with the rise of independent comics publishers and creator-owned titles have Asian-American comics creators, such as Derek Kirk Kim, Adrian Tomine, and Jillian Tamaki, been able to reverse some of these stereotypes by writing about and illustrating realistic aspects of their cultures.
A longtime fan of superhero comics, Yang learned about the original Green Turtle from Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine, an online repository of scanned, mostly public-domain comics stories from the early decades of the medium.
Not much is known about the Green Turtle's character. In 1944, a little-known publisher called Rural House hired Chinese-American cartoonist Chu Hing to create a lead character for its new series, Blazing Comics. Hing devised the Green Turtle, a World War II superhero tasked with defending China, a US ally, against the invading Japanese Army. Wearing a cape over his shoulders and a mask over his face, the Green Turtle didn't really exhibit much in the way of supernatural powers, beyond being unusually good at avoiding bullets at close range. His sidekick was Burma Boy, but not even he knew where the Green Turtle got his talents or what led him to become a superhero.
Yang said that as soon as he read about the character on Pappy's blog, he was fascinated by the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Green Turtle's creation. "When you look at those original Green Turtle comics, the main character almost always has his back turned toward [the reader], so all you see is his big green cape," Yang said. "When he is turned around, something's always blocking his face: another character is standing there, or he's punching and his arm is blocking his face, or a shadow falls right over it. It's very deliberate."
It is here that the history of the Green Turtle moves into the realm of speculation. One popular theory is that Hing wanted his character to be Chinese-American but his publisher wouldn't go along with the idea, afraid an Asian superhero wouldn't find any traction in a comics marketplace dominated by "all-American" Caucasian characters.
"You never see comics, especially superhero comics, drawn like that," Yang said. "The rumor is that Chu Hing did it that is so he could imagine his character as he had originally intended, as Chinese-American."
Whatever Hing's intentions, Blazing Comics lasted only five issues. The Green Turtle was relegated to the scrap heap of comics culture, until Yang, in collaboration with Liew, a Malaysian-born artist currently residing in Singapore, decided to give him a makeover and an origin story.
Set in the late 1930s, The Shadow Hero chronicles the adventures and misadventures of Hank, a teenager who assists his father in the family's Chinatown grocery store, while also putting up with his mother's crazy schemes to turn him into costumed crimefighter. The story includes the tragic death of a beloved parent, a mystical protective animal spirit, martial arts lessons, and encounters with criminal kingpins and a mysterious woman dressed in red.
The tone of the book is lighthearted, the plot alternately slapstick-y and action-packed. Yang's script and Liew's artwork explore and subvert stereotypes about Asian immigrants while also celebrating aspects of Chinese culture. The comic also explicitly plays with the tropes of superhero comics.
"Those pieces of the immigrant experience have always been part of this genre," Yang said. "And with The Shadow Hero, Sonny and I wanted to bring them to the surface. We wanted to deal with them directly."
For all of the character's obscurity, Yang sees the Green Turtle as fitting squarely within the tradition pioneered by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster at DC Comics and Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby at Marvel. "I think the immigrant experience is embedded into the conventions of this particular genre," Yang explained. "All the major superheroes — Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America — were created by the children of immigrants."
"Consciously or not, they put their own lives into these characters," he continued. "This dynamic of having two different names is something a lot of immigrants experience. I grew up with a Chinese name at home and another one at school. This idea that you have to hide pieces of yourself when you're out in public is a daily reality for a lot of children of immigrants."
As Yang wrote in the afterword about his version of the Green Turtle, "Not only is his identity secret, so is his race."
At a time when a female Thor and an African-American Captain America have recently made headlines, Yang is optimistic about comics' progress toward greater diversity in characters and subject matters.
"It better lines up the comic book universes with the real world," he said. "We live in a really diverse world, so it's good that our comic books reflect that. When I was a kid, most of the comics available, in my neighborhood at least, were aimed at pre-adolescent and adolescent boys. As a father with daughters, I'm really excited that there are so many comics now that are for girls or both [genders]."
This fall, Yang will return to teaching computer programming part-time at Bishop O'Dowd. As an educator, he said he sees great educational potential in nonfiction comics and graphic novels. "There are certain types of information that are best conveyed in a sequential, visual fashion," he said.
This past month a large crater was discovered in Yalmal Peninsula in Siberia. Scientist have been there to study it. They didn't come to any conclusions other then it was formed the same way a cork pops from a bottle. This is an area of tundra that is rich in methane gas. It is believed that the thawing of the permafrost cause the gas to escape blowing a hole. They have now found 2 other holes that are smaller. Methane is a more serious threat to global warming then CO2. This gives the scientist more sites to study and may lead to an explanation. The article includes interesting pictures.
They live in luxury villas in the Persian Gulf. They travel in private jets. They skim millions from the oppressed people of Gaza by taxing the tunnel trade with Egypt. They finance development in Qatar and other locations with their millions or billions. On US TV (Charlie Rose) Khaled Meshaal proclaims "I cannot live under this occupation". True. And of course they are not living under occupation. They are profiting like crime kingpins off of it.
(One more time ...)
Okay, I added the last part. But you have to wonder if they've considered the outcome if their wish is granted. I'm quite fond of Joe, just didn't realize so many Republicans are, too.