Friday, August 23, 2024
They Shouldn't Have Been Silenced   SHARE Frederick Joseph, poet and activist from Yonkers, has written cogently today about the shortcomings of the DNC platfom and presences allowed. Joseph noted that Palestinian pain was missing from the speeches, although an Israeli mother was allowed to speak.  He noted the same old same old heavy on the rah-rah rhetoric and light on doing something about substantive issues. Poduct placement pollies squawked: Obama about the dangers of wealth. Mmm-mmm-mmm. For those interested, I reviewed Joseph's excellent book of poetry and ran a short version of my interview with him, here and here. 
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(1 comments)        Saturday, August 3, 2024
Which areas of the world will be most affected by sea-level rise over the next century, and after that?   SHARE Some of the most powerful effects will be seen on flatter coastal land abutting the shallows of large water bodies. If these areas also are prone to landfall by tropical cyclones, the effects will be further intensified. Among the hardest hit will be tropical and sub-tropical river deltas – broad fans of sediment and waterways where rivers meet the sea. Because such deltas often are the sites of port cities, large human populations will be exposed to significantly higher risk. Hot spots include the U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast, Asia, and islands. Like Dylan said all those years ago, If you go down in the flood it's gonna be your fault / oh mama.... This seriously evil map details a reality we cannot in our collective disgrace ignore.  You might as well start packin now.  Time to pack away the road gorp and cds for long travel.  I love you. Be well. I'll be molecules looking down from Heaven, drinking a Harp. oh, mama...
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       Wednesday, June 26, 2024
Julian Assange reunites with family after he arrives in Canberra   SHARE What could be more heart-warming than to see Julian Assange wrap his arms around Stella and his Dad? The tears flow down from mein augen.  Ich bin ein Berliner again. Now it's time to play Beethoven's 9th, the chorale at the end part.  Damn you Yanks. Goddamn you all to hell. You blew it all up.
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       Tuesday, August 1, 2023
NYer Humor: If A.I. Handled Delicate Situations in Your Life   SHARE The New Yorker undoubedly -- despite its too vanilla politics -- has maybe the best writing out there. Except maybe Harper's. Or Lewis Lapham's Quarterly.  Or Ed Snowden's one substack piece in two years. Which was worth the $120 I paid for it. I love playing FDR.  Anyway, here's a fantastic humor piece from NYer that has fun with a future that cozily includes AI as our f*ck-buddy.  Enjoy. Long ride ahead, and you will need to titter to survive. 
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(5 comments)        Wednesday, March 8, 2023
My Fifty Years With Dan Ellsberg   SHARE Here is Sy Hersh describing his lifelong friendship with Daniel Ellsberg, who will be 92 in April, and who is dying of terminal cancer. This is just an anecdotal summation, and it seems like Hersh will be writing more later. Hersh himself is no spring chicken. Blow is audio version of the Substack piece.  It's an AI voice.  But we should listen more. John Hawkins · Sy Hersh Talks Dan Ellsberg (Substack)
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       Thursday, December 8, 2022
Arkansas city elects 18-year-old as youngest Black mayor in US   SHARE A real Feel Good story.  The issues were down-to-earth. The turn-out was impressive.  Let's hope he makes good on his promises now: It is not even a year since Jaylen Smith was learning the power of the youth vote as a student government leader at his high school in Arkansas. Now the pioneering teenager is about to put his knowledge into practice as the youngest elected Black mayor anywhere in the US. Applause. 

       Thursday, December 1, 2022
Black Agenda Report: Club None Long To Belong To"* (Poem)   SHARE If you know your history / then you would know / where you coming from / then you wouldn't have to ask me / who the heck do I think I am... Bob Marley, "Buffalo Soldier" Here is a poem by BAR's resident poet Raymond Nat Turner. Note how the art installment picks up pace and intensity like a Langston Hughes dream too long deferred. In your face, mofo. And the poet's name partly comes to us from the slavery rebeller by any means necessary (before Malcolm), Nat Turner. 
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       Saturday, November 19, 2022
COP27 talks falter over emissions cuts ambitions   SHARE COP-27 and another fuckin failure of  global "leaders" to come to terms on the most basic fact: Fossils must go. This instead: A draft text of the resolution hashed out during the UN climate summit in Egypt has been slammed for not insisting on a fossil fuel phase-out. Talks extended into Saturday as countries struggled to find agreement. WTF? Greta summing up COP-26: "It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure," Greta told the crowd. "It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that." Deja vu all over again, as Yogi would say,  And it was sponsored by Coke:
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       Friday, November 11, 2022
KFC apologises for Kristallnacht chicken and cheese promotion   SHARE Are we mass hallucinating?  Drive-thru Kristallnacht chicken nuggets?  In Berlin?  What's next with KFC or Mickey D's?  Lynch lemonade to go with the freedom fries?  Twin Tower collapsible frappes ice cream blobs falling in freefall competition in clear plastic cups to gleeful young faces in love with the surveillance state and all that the United Stasi represents?
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       Friday, November 11, 2022
Statement from Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona on District Court Ruling on the Biden-Harris Administration Student   SHARE Another promise from Biden bites the dust.  No doubt his administration had already looked into resistance to the Plan and knew this rejection was guaranteed.  But it worked as a feel-good to Blacks for the lead-up to the midterms to save his porky pie. Now the Lesser of Two Evils is pontificating at COP-27. We have to rein in the climate, he goes. Mother fucka. Quick, tell me, what's his Climate Change plan? Huh? Huh? As far as student debt goes, the Biden gov has collected all those details from people looking for relief. Look for the Admin to offer re-financing as a 'concession' to Blacks who don't mind being debt slaves a little longer with Mr. Corn Pop Beater. He's from Delaware, the debt slave state (and they weren't so cool during the Civil neither).  Then that re-financing offer will be rescinded after Avuncular Joe is impeached by Repugnicans.  Mother fucka. They said it was a democracy!
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       Monday, October 24, 2022
America's Open Wound: The CIA is not your friend   SHARE Ed Snowden is back with his first Substack piece since last Christmas, and since becoming a Russian citizen.   Oh, and a father again. Note that the first piece coming back is broadside against the CIA. Check it out: Within a year, the young agency had already slipped the leash of its intended role of intelligence collection and analysis to establish a covert operations division. Within a decade, the CIA was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and—gasp—interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to wiretapping journalists and compiling files on Americans who opposed its wars.
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       Thursday, October 6, 2022
Nord Stream Gas Leaks Could Amount to One Third of Denmark's CO2 Emissions, Official Warns   SHARE This article from Haaretz about the apparent sabotage of the Nord 1 and 2 gas lines from Russia to Europe is a missing piece from the American MSM. Instead of weighing in on whodunnit it talks of the economic damage at a time when Climate Change issues should be front and center. Here, the focus is the leak of methane into the environment. From Haaretz: The Nord Stream pipeline leaks pumping huge volumes of natural gas into the Baltic Sea could discharge the equivalent of one third of Denmark’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions, a Danish official warned Wednesday...Danish emissions in 2020 were approximately 45 million tonnes of CO2. That's 15 million tonnes. It recalls the Brown University study on the Cost of War that estimate that 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases were created by the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

       Monday, October 3, 2022
Inside the 'Chitlin Circuit,' a Jim Crow-Era Safe Space for Black Performers   SHARE Never really knew what chitlins was before. Interesting read from Atlas Obscura. Excerpt: To understand how this network got its nickname, one needs to understand a thing or two about chitterlings. Chitterlings are animal intestines, usually the small intestines, cooked and eaten. African Americans spell this dish in various ways, but “chitlin” and “chitlins” are the most common. As African American newspaper columnist John Robinson once wrote, “Chitlins are as black as the blues, as funky as the bump, as ethnic as Cape Cod turkey and Wonder bread (Yankee), lox and bagels (Jewish), or corned beef and cabbage (Irish). To have chitlins at your family gatherings is to declare yourself so black, culturally speaking, that compared with you, Aretha Franklin seems like Katherine Hepburn.” 

       Sunday, September 25, 2022
The Chris Hedges Report Show with John Shipton, father of Julian Assange, about his son's extradition   SHARE Chris Hedges begins his podcast: The persecution of Julian Assange is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism. Hedges talks with Hedges about the legal entanglements as the extradition od Assange becomes ever more likely. 

       Tuesday, September 20, 2022
The 36 Best Vibrators for Beginners, According to Experts   SHARE One of the greatest things to come out of the 60s is sexuality unleashed. Everybody was getting some.  One tension released regularly. Up next: poverty and equal opportunity. Feminists had a lot to do with and we should be happy that they fucked who they wanted to f*ck. Go Judy Gumbo! The Yippie Girl. Here is an article that came in my Inbox today from the aptly named Self magazine. The article is written by the ultra-free, post-political Kate Sloan, who I will endeavor to Zoom with. It's a marvelous piece of...fun. The world of dildos is refreshingly honest. We read about the "rabbit vibrator" for thrills down the hole with Alice (okay, or Alex). The "bullet vibrator" and its magic. We're told to pay heed to hygiene (thanks!). Watch out for "phthalates" which is pronounced like some one blowing up a condom. Bex Caputo advises on achieving those "little deaths."  Hey, go eff yourself! Laura Dodsworth, TED Talk
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       Saturday, September 17, 2022
In These Time How To Tell Stories To Change The World   SHARE This is an excellent discussion of the state of the world, the US, and what real journalism is doing to promote major public interest stories.  Like Chomsky, ITT believes that we should be focusing on Climate around the clock now, and that the MSM has let us all down by endlessly selling us The Trump Show because he's a cash bull. The discussion here is mainly between Maximilian Alvarez and Adam McKay (director of "Don't Look Up"), who is an activist and Hollywood lefty who supports ITT.  It's a fundraising drive as well, and presents lie a PBS solicitation to viewers. Later they praise the Staten Island group responsible for the unionization at Amazon. Excellent dialogue between Alvarez and McKay. Well worth watching. And DO DONATE to real independent progressive journalism.
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       Monday, September 12, 2022
Mortgage rates just hit a high not seen since the 2008 housing crash   SHARE I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord.... Business Insider is reporting that mortgage rates are heading toward 2008 numbers, due mostly, they report, inflation.  More on the way The recent Inflation Reduction Act (cum climate change fight back - wink) did little to stop this trend.  The Chinese are already in bucky-bucky beaver conversations sizing up our sad dumpling ass. BI goes: It's also the highest mortgage rate since 6.52% in 2008, a time when a combination of cheap debt, predatory lending practices, and complex financial engineering triggered a foreclosure crisis that gave birth to a global recession.  The doom is closing in the middle mighty whitey this time. More buffer erosion. Oh dear. And then Jeffrey over at Counterpunch posted more bad news. The minimum wage requirements to afford a 2BR flat  in the US.  It goes: Sweetest Jesus!
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       Tuesday, September 6, 2022
Harper's Index September 2022   SHARE Harper's Index is an all-time fave from my all time favorite magazine, only slightly less so since Lewis Lapham left.  Here in this September issue the Index starts out by taking stats from the Pew Research Center that polled journalists about their content and discontent regardng the profession.  Here are the indexed stats: Portion of journalists who say that journalism is bad for their emotional well-being : 1/3 Who describe the industry in negative terms : 3/4 Percentage by which journalists are more likely than the general public to think misinformation is a big problem : 21 Percentage of journalists who believe they should not let personal views affect their work : 82 Journalism is a troubled profession. Even the Left will censor and cancel if it has the power to do so.  All of these stats were sourced from the Pew Research Center.  Check out the Pew Research Center while your gadding about today. 
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       Monday, September 5, 2022
My Wild and Winding Path to a College Degree Behind Bars   SHARE It's incredible when you add it all up.  Mose Allison sang, "You don't need to go to off-Broadway / to see something plain absurd."  Here's an example.  Guy can take a loan out for college, fail to pay up on time, lose his credit worthiness and lifestyle, feel ruined.  Or he can commit a petty crime or a major crime (who gives a sh*t for the purposes of the point I'm trying to make), and end up at San Quentin (!) and get a college degree. Come out owing n student loan money.  Hmmmm. What's behind the door or what's behind the curtain.  You choose. The Marshall Project piece explains... 
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       Tuesday, August 23, 2022
What Bob Dylan Wanted at Twenty-three   SHARE The New Yorker reprinted a piece by the late great music writer for the Village Voice and the New Yorker, Nat Hentoff. An early Dylan recording session. Hentoff  on Why Dylan didn't want to be part of a vowel Movement: The conversation turned to civil rights, and the actor used the term “the Movement” to signify the work of the civil-rights activists. Dylan looked at him quizzically. “I agree with everything that’s happening,” he said, “but I’m not part of no Movement. If I was, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else but be in ‘the Movement.’ I just can’t have people sit around and make rules for me. I do a lot of things no Movement would allow.” Hmph. Then there's the explanation for Dylan's disdainful speech at a Civil Rights fundraiser held by hypocritical Lefties: I had the added personal pleasure of knowing that as a teenager I used to correspond with Nat Hentoff myself.  Look at me today. Great read.