Category Archives: Current Affairs

Nine Hometown Realities more important to me than trying to ban the Confederate flag

For me, I’d rather focus on realities over symbols. And all the items here are real right where I live; not stuff I see only on TV, a tablet screen, or a license plate. (Oh wait – I do see the flag on license plates. Whatever.)
. . . The reality that at least 40,000 mostly black voters were successfully deterred from voting in the 2014 NC election by racist vote suppression tactics — and that 40,000 was the margin that sent another New Confederate to the U. S. Senate. (And in this case, I actually did get arrested two summers ago, protesting NC’s vote suppression campaign, which is expanding.)

OMG! Sweet Briar College to Stay Open!

OMG! OMG! Sweet Briar College To Stay Open! << WASHINGTON — Sweet Briar College, the women’s liberal arts college in rural Virginia that announced it would close iin August — setting off a storm of protest and lawsuits from students, faculty and alumnae — will remain open for at least another academic year under an agreement … Continue reading OMG! Sweet Briar College to Stay Open! →

After Charleston: Ban the Confederate Flag?? Let’s Do Something REAL.

And let me repeat his main point: the U.S. Civil War had two phases; only the first one ended in 1865, and southern white supremacists won the second phase.

They didn’t form a separate country; but they established a widespread common culture of segregation, maintained by both law and terrorism; and they recreated many slavery cognates.

Let’s call this the New-Confederacy. Not for nothing was the movie that became their epic called “The Birth of a Nation.”

Birth-of-a-nation

New-Confederate rule was somewhat disrupted in the 1960s; there have been some important changes since then. But the New-Confederate forces have come roaring back in the past decade, to regional dominance and national impact, on numerous fronts.

The Photo I Hoped I’d Never See

It remains unclear how over 450 additional troops would overcome the central problem to the training effort in Iraq: a lack of recruits to train. . . . The announcement was greeted with indifference and scepticism in Iraq, where efforts to arm local Sunnis opposed to Isis have foundered and training programmes by the US have made little progress in producing disciplined Sunni fighters capable of challenging the militant group.
“The increase doesn’t have an effect,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar and expert on Isis. “It is a weak step to reduce pressure from the media.”

BIG Almonds, Little Water: The Quickie Guide to California’s Drought

Conclusion: Freaking out about bottled water in California’s drought is like putting a super-mini-nano-sized cart (so small you can’t even see it) before a monstrous sized trojan horse made of almonds and other mass agricultural products that’s bigger than all the mountains in Yosemite.