this is quite moving
A white union man takes on racism in the Presidential campaign.
(via andrew sullivan)
Poll: McCain Old and White, Obama Young and Black
“We accumulate plenty of raw data,” said thirty-year veteran statistician Nelson Temple of Scranton, PA, “even when we don’t embroider reality with made up bullshit. The tough part is making sense of it.”
“This week,” he continued, “49% of those surveyed indicate Governor Sarah Palin is not as hot as they first thought, yet 47% are convinced she is hotter than ever. With a 3% margin of error, what am I supposed to do with that?”
in other Alabama news
Up to $50,000 is being offered to attract Jewish families to an Alabama town.
Launched in June, the Blumberg program has put advertisements in Jewish newspapers in Boston, Miami, Providence, R.I., and Washington, and it plans to expand the campaign.
“I think it’s important that we try to find young people that we could use in our religious school, our Sunday school and help in the way of trying to create more of a family-type atmosphere in our temple,” Blumberg said.
Groups offered financial aid for Jews to return to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Jewish organizations around the country offer moving assistance for relocating families. A congregation has loans and other benefits for Jewish families moving into an area near Boston.
“Our program is distinctive because it’s Dothan, but it’s also distinctive because of the type of financial assistance,” said Rob Goldsmith, executive director of Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services, which will screen applicants and administer the grant program.
Trying to lure Jewish families to a quiet Southern town in a state with a reputation for hard-right politics and racial intolerance might be difficult. About 20 Jewish families have sought information about Dothan, though none has made the move.
First we had some goiter to deal with…
But now we are one step closer to our goat.
The Anglo Files
I have known more than a few Brits in my day but I wish could tell you whether this was substantively true. It is, however, damn funny:
“We look to the future; they look to the past,” she writes. “We run for election; they stand for it. We noisily and proudly proclaim our Americanness; they shuffle their feet and apologize for their Britishness.”
and later:
“Britons trying to boast,” she tells us, “are typically like acrophobes walking along a cliff: It frightens them and makes them feel sick.”
Lower Stories: Mr. Starks and Mr. Green in Dayton
Starks and Green were nightshift high school custodians. They feared the terrible power of the daytime maintenance men. Sherman Starks looked like an earlier version of B.B. King and drove an immaculate blue 1970 Buick Electra 225. Jim Green was an older, more grizzled man with a steel wool mustache and a twinkle in his eye.
Starks wouldn’t say anything without taking a quick look to see if the maintenance men or some white people were listening. He’d laugh without showing his teeth so he wouldn’t get caught.
Jim Green didn’t care who heard him. He talked about prison and how he got there. “Yeah, I killed that sombitch. Then I dug him up and stuck a knife in his heart.”
The difference between white people and black people.
It’s sort of like a train wreck, I can’t help but keep looking. (via)
By Indians
I Told You So What
There I was last weekend, trying on my fancy clothes for the upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions, when the news crackled in over the shortwave: Russia had invaded Georgia. My first thought was, “Clever bastards; I always thought they would come in through Florida.” My second thought was, “What took them so long?”
I suppose the defenders’ resistance has been fierce — everyone in that part of the U.S. is heavily armed — but those folks are going to need some help. Maybe we should airlift a couple million pounds of ground beef into the combat zone. That will stop those Bolsheviks in their tracks. E. coli O157:H7 or litigation, whatever it takes. There are almost 1.4 million lawyers in metropolitan Atlanta. Bloody stools and compensatory damages.
Mr. Pride
It really makes a whole lot more sense now.
Treat them like they took your wallet
How to Tell People They Sound Racist:
Just so. It’s hard to remember, though, when you just want to lay somebody out.
From Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine via Laughing Squid, via our own Elizabeth Perry.
Too Weird for The Wire
In Baltimore, inner city drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories in an attempt to undermine cases against them.
“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. “I object,” Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris’s lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.
The precedents the West Baltimore drug dealers were invoking were based in the laws southern Democrats after the Civil War used to limit the protection of black southerners from violence and discrimination and that marked the beginning of Jim Crow.
Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The flesh-and-blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protesters, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.
The evolution of this defense culminated in a series of self-help seminars for white farmers in the 1980s.
Hucksters and charlatans prowled the Midwest as the farm crisis deepened, selling desperate farmers expensive seminars and prepackaged legal defenses “guaranteed” to cancel debts and forestall foreclosure. Since the gold standard had been abandoned in 1933, they argued, money had no inherent value, and so neither did their debts. All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security number. That number was allegedly tied to a secret government account held in a secure subterranean facility in lower Manhattan, where citizens are used as collateral against international debts issued by the Fed and everyone’s name is on a master list, spelled in capital letters—the very same capital letters used in the official court documents detailing foreclosure and other actions against them. The capital letter name was nothing but an artificial construct, they were told, a legal “straw man.” It wasn’t them—natural, live, flesh and blood men.
A PCP dealer locked up for twenty seven years brought these arguments to inner city drug defendants.
In Baltimore, Burpee found a group of inmates at the margins of society, people like Willie Mitchell and company who were staring at the full force of the federal government. As one defense attorney representing a flesh-and-blood defendant put it, they “saw a freight train coming and felt three feet tall.” Soon the unorthodox legal filings and courtroom outbursts began to multiply. It was, one public defender later explained, “like an infection that was invading our client population of pre-trial detainees.” Burpee appears to have been patient zero in the epidemic. For over a year, he harangued his lawyers and judge about the conspiracy and spread the word in the Baltimore lockup. Then, in a stroke of bad luck for the public defender’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s office decided to drop the charges against Burpee—perhaps reasoning that he wasn’t worth the hassle considering that he had already been sentenced to twenty-seven years. For Burpee’s peers, the decision imbued the flesh-and-blood defense with legitimacy and the hope of freedom.
So, the use of the defense ended 180 degrees from where it began.
Like the Midwestern farmers before them, the Baltimore inmates were susceptible to the notion that the federal government was engaged in a massive, historic plot to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. Such suspicions are prevalent in certain pockets of the black community—that year, a study from the Rand Corporation found that over 25 percent of African Americans surveyed believed the AIDS virus was developed by the government, and 12 percent thought it was released into the population by the CIA. And black separatist groups like the Nation of Islam—also fond of conspiracy theories—have long cultivated members through the prison system; some of these groups have explicitly adopted the language of constitutional fundamentalists. Given these developments, Levitas told me, “I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.”
The Black Hole That is Dallas, Texas
Sometimes I think living in Dallas is just too much of an embarrassment. But then a story like this comes along and I think, wow, where else could I hope to find this kind of entertainment?
That’s right–two Dallas County officials consider the term black hole to be racist.
The Fall of Detroit
Detroit is in the worst state it’s seen in years, and the bureaucracy that runs it is essentially a horde of criminals. I live 20 miles outside of the city border and used to work in the city itself. I’ve been watching this my entire life. The citizen migration rate out of the city is staggering, and the population has dropped below the 1M mark; it is the first American city in history to drop below a million citizens. By way of contrast, in 1950 it boasted 1.8M residents.
Half the housing stock is needed. Many parts of the city are literally a wasteland.
The powers-that-be have a track record of turning down large, entrepreneur-originating initiatives of $200M for new, progressive charter schools. Invariably, the Detroit Board of Education sees the gesture as a white man’s attempt to infiltrate and overthrow the black power structure, not as one to provide a viable option to an otherwise horrible and floundering educational system.
People are starting to talk about Detroit in an urgent fashion, and not just because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ridiculous troubles. Here’s a spot-on video of Newt Gingrich saying what nobody in Detroit wants to hear — and what I bet nobody will listen to in my lifetime.
Why so pessimistic? Because I’m an analytical person, and I see no data whatsoever that suggests this trend is anywhere near being reversed.
Clint Eastwood: Spike Lee Should "Shut His Face"
Eastwood still isn’t into pulling punches:
Clint Eastwood has advised rival film director Spike Lee to “shut his face” after the African-American complained about the racial make-up of Eastwood’s films.
In an interview with the Guardian published today, Eastwood rejected Lee’s complaint that he had failed to include a single African-American soldier in his films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both about the 1945 battle for the Japanese island.
In typically outspoken language, Eastwood justified his choice of actors, saying that those black troops who did take part in the battle as part of a munitions company didn’t raise the flag. The battle is known by the image of US marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
“The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go: ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.” Referring to Lee, he added: “A guy like him should shut his face.”
Amazing that revisionist history would actually be considered a virtue by some over factual historical representation. Just staggering.
(thx Mike)
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick Booed at Stanley Cup Parade
If you’ve been following the travails of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for any length of time, you know by now he’s a giant asshole and absolute embarrassment to the city of Detroit — which is an accomplishment in and of itself given the fact Detroit hasn’t ranked in anyone’s top cities list in, like, forever. So it’s anybody’s guess as to (a) why he accepted an invitation to speak at last Friday’s Stanley Cup parade in Detroit, and (b) why he actually showed up. The thug should have sent one of his many bodyguards or stripper-murderers.
Let’s keep in mind that the demographic for the Stanley Cup parade is essentially white suburbanites who like violent contact sports played with swords on players’ feet and that allow players to brandish a composite weapon with which they are encouraged to accost other players. Not exactly Kwame’s hometome posse.
“Love story stuffed in suitcase opens window”
Inman and Olivia (Merriwether) Perkins. Circa 1942-1944.
“Love story stuffed in suitcase opens window.” Blech. But if you can stomach the arch journalistic language and read through it, this story from Sunday’s St. Louis Post Dispatch offers an instance of what we archivists encounter in the course of what we do (which is to say, read other people’s mail and all).
“I was taught by both (parents) that, generally, we were more alike than different,” Inman wrote in one letter. “And this, according to my parents, was especially true in the area of race. I was also taught that both beauty and deed were not just skin-deep; rather, both had roots that ran all the way to the core of our souls. Differences, my parents said, were created by men, not inherently in men.”
Dear America
You’re breaking my heart again.
Obama’s Speech on Race
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1qbAxqGdIU[/youtube]
Read more
bugatti veyron vs. eurofighter typhoon
Cross-posting this from my blog just because it’s outstanding car porn:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljyEyq5Aw4[/youtube]
Epigenetics, the tricky study of genes and race
People are more than 99.9 percent identical at the level of their DNA, the Human Genome Project has found. But which genes you have isn’t the whole story. What also matters is how strongly those genes are expressed, or turned on. To use an analogy I’ve tried before, DNA is like your iPod downloads: what counts isn’t only what you’ve stored, but whether you play it. So what matters about DNA is not only which genes you have, but which ones are expressed and at what levels.