The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

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Mad Magazine Is Over

By Orion on Wed, 07/03/2019 - 11:49pm |

Dude, Mad Magazine is over. Maybe Pete Buttigieg made a good move in saying Donald Trump's nickname for him ("Alfred E. Neuman") was outdated.

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TRUMP'S CYNICAL BUILD UP OF TENSION PART 2: MEXICO COOPERATES

By Orion on Wed, 07/03/2019 - 12:21am |

When a leftist president was elected in Mexico, one who had attempted to win office but been passed over in favor of more centrist candidates, one might think that would mean confrontation between Mexico and America's president, who opened his campaign by saying Mexico was sending "drugs," "crime," and rapists." Apparently not: 

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It Is Now Conservative To Be Anti-War

By Orion on Fri, 06/28/2019 - 10:43pm |

Being anti-war is now conservative:

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Trump's Cynical Build Up Of Tension

By Orion on Wed, 06/26/2019 - 7:43am |

There's a whole lot of jubilation out there that Donald Trump cut short a military operation that could have started a catastrophic war with Iran. Iran is a massive country with a population of 81.16 million. It is at the nexus of America's tension in the Middle East, from the implementation of the Shah to the revolution during Carter's administration to the Iran-Iraq war and then the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is no mistake that so much blood and treasure was spent occupying two countries directly bordering Iran. Iran has ties with most of the world, located as it is at the heart of the nexus between Central and South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It's an ancient and impressive civilization. Everyone seems to get this ... now.

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Reparations Should Be Done Right

By Orion on Wed, 06/26/2019 - 12:19am |

We should have slavery reparations, not just as reparations for slavery itself but also for the legacy of lynching, mass incarceration, and housing and workplace discrimination, which at its height, went to a level that crossed in to urban planning and design (Dan Crenshaw's congressional district geographically cuts out the predominantly African American area of Houston, Texas).

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Passing The Torch From WWE To UFC

By Orion on Wed, 06/26/2019 - 12:03am |

I remember when I blogged here before that Michael Maiello was really in to the WWE. WWE was truly a strange creation and while it dominated the market for "sports entertainment," with copycats like TNA or WCW mimicking its image, in retrospect, it seems like the creation of madman Vince McMahon.

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The Death Of Naivety

By Orion on Tue, 06/25/2019 - 11:26pm |

I found this interesting: 

"Ocasio-Cortez’s 'concentration camps' comment questions an old orthodoxy: that only other countries—and not the U.S.—are capable of evil.

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Random Thoughts On The World Part 1

By Orion on Sun, 06/23/2019 - 4:59am |

Taken from Facebook statuses.

1. Miles Davis put more soul and effort in to Sketches of Spain than Kind of Blue. I didn't listen to the former until well after I heard the latter. It's the real deal as far as composition.

2. Western society has progressed from printed information to putting all of our information in a cloud. If that cloud ever shuts down, we might not leave much more behind than ancient civilizations did - and the physical inside of a computer will seem as comprehensible as hieroglyphics.

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Everyone's Podcasting! But Who Is Still Reading?

By Orion on Sat, 06/15/2019 - 10:49pm |

In Berkeley, there are many copies on display of Slavoj Zizek's "In Defense of Lost Causes." After his debate with Jordan Peterson, it was the book put up in Berkeley to promote him. The book is fantastic and Zizek's analysis is incredible - his writing on Mao, on artificial intelligence, even on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novel, is all stellar. All of it was clearly written in the 2000s, however, as there are a bunch of references to George W. Bush or Hugo Chavez.

Since then, he has mostly become known online in videos on YouTube. His persona is being built through various interviews on Russia Today, at college seminars, Vice documentaries, etc. Unlike a lot of people today, he doesn't seem to produce the videos himself, which I guess makes him kind of an outlier.

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How America May Amend Its Gun Culture

By Orion on Tue, 02/20/2018 - 3:44pm |

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam war dragged on for over a decade. Opposition to a military draft that required youth to become involved in it, regardless of what they thought of it, led to the burning of draft cards, marches on Washington D.C., and, eventually, the elimination of the military draft in the country, and the end of the war itself.

That didn't mean America suddenly became pacifist. No, that would be naive to find possible. However, America never again tried drafting anyone. Wars proliferated after the Vietnam war on a smaller but more numerous and clandestine scale, including in neighboring Cambodia, throughout Latin America in the following decade, and in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa after that. War for the U.S. became more and more remote, culminating with Bush's all volunteer occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and Obama's drone wars. Tours of duty were extended again and again and bombing done from thousands of miles away, with a draft being avoided as much as possible.

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