Yesterday, I ran across a story which just tugged at my heartstrings. I expect it will do the same for all who love both animals and justice. I fund it at Democratic Underground,, but the poster provided their original source, and it doesn’t appear to be paywalled, so that’s what I’m linking to.
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The New Yorker – Finally, the Trump Case We’ve Been Waiting For
Quote – And yet Republicans remain in such thrall to their Orange Jesus—the honorific that Party apostate Liz Cheney so memorably quoted one of his acolytes calling him during last summer’s January 6th hearings—that, with each new legal woe, his prospects of winning the 2024 G.O.P. nomination keep going up. Few if any of these cases are likely to be fully resolved before the start of next year’s Republican primaries. Trump’s campaign is now explicitly a race not just to retake the Oval Office but to save himself from criminal conviction. This convergence of campaign and courtroom is, as the former Republican National Committee counsel Benjamin Ginsberg said this week, “a toxic mix unprecedented in the American experiment.” Something’s gotta give. Click through for article. I’m skeptical of the theory that additional crimiality increases his electoral chances, but I can’t dismiss it entirely.
Salon – Expert: Jack Smith can use “surprise” statute cited in Trump target letter for “enhanced penalties”
Quote – “The benefits for using Section 241 are three-fold,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor, told Salon. “First, the statute isn’t novel in terms of applying it to election fraud. Second, is that the DOJ can go after the election fraud scheme and tie it to the insurrection for enhanced penalties. Third, the combination of the first two benefits allows Trump to be tried for January 6th without litigating whether his speech before the riots at the Capitol, which would be the basis of a free-standing incitement charge, is protected by the First Amendment.” Click through for details. Yes, when conspiracy comes in at the door, many of the difficulties of proving direct participation or incitement fly out the window. The Insurrection Act may (may in the sense of “maybe” – IANAL) be able to be used to keephim out of office even if he isn’t directly charged with it, through conspiracy charges.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Ameican History has probably never been taught as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in our K-12 schools – it certainly has not been done in my lifetime, and I was in K-12 in a fairly rational time and in a fairly rational community (as college towns tend to be.) But no one alive today has ever seen such a travesty of American history as is being taught today in Florida. That is ironic, as you will see in this article; it was South Carolina and specifically Charleston which was in the “slaves” corner of the triangle trade. And some of the slaves received in Charleston escaped, or attempted to escape, to Florida, which then belonged to Spain. But now it is in Charleston where the Internatinal African-American Museum has been founded, one of its goals being to set the record straight.
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International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., pays new respect to the enslaved Africans who landed on its docks
Almost half of the estimated 400,000 African people imported into what became the United States were brought to that Southern city, and a substantial number took their first steps on American soil at Gadsden’s Wharf on the Cooper River.
That location of once utter degradation is now the hallowed site of the International African American Museum. Pronounced “I Am” and opened in June 2023, the US$120 million project financed by state and local funds and private donations was 25 years in the making and is a memorial to not only those enslaved but also those whose lives as free Black Americans affected U.S. history and society through their fight for full citizenship rights.
As a historian and founding director of the College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston, I served as the museum’s interim executive director and know firsthand how difficult the road has been to build a museum focused on African American history.
The museum’s mission is to honor the untold stories of the African American journey and, by virtue of its location and landscape design, pay reverence to the ground on which it sits.
America’s widespread historical illiteracy
Many Americans don’t know much about the nation or its history.
And conservative political candidates are working to prevent current students from learning key information about the country’s founding and development by mischaracterizing the teaching of slavery and civil rights as critical race theory.
Though critical race theory is typically taught in graduate and law schools, at least 36 states had banned or tried to ban lessons on Black history from public K-12 classrooms.
In this highly politicized environment, efforts to restrict how race can be discussed in public schools have led to widespread calls from parents and politicians for the censorship of certain books on race.
A 2022 survey of teachers conducted by the Rand Corp. showed the restrictions “influenced their choice of curriculum materials or instructional practices,” as many “chose to or were directed to omit the use of certain materials” deemed “controversial or potentially offensive.”
But the museum is not just a memorial site of enslavement.
Exhibits show how the lives of Black people and their resistance to enslavement helped shape state, national and international affairs.
For example, South Carolina’s 1739 Stono Rebellion, in which fugitive slaves attempted to escape to Spanish Florida, precipitated conflict between Spain and Great Britain.
Many Americans know about white abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 attack against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which led to the Civil War.
But few know that Shields Green, a South Carolina fugitive slave, assisted in the planning and execution of the fateful attack.
Many know the name Rosa Parks, but it was Charleston’s educator and activist Septima Clark who inspired Parks and led the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern educational and voting rights initiatives.
In fact, King once called Clark “the mother of the movement” and considered her to be a “community teacher, an intuitive fighter for human rights and leader of her unlettered and disillusioned people.”
A monument to freedom
The museum’s educational goals are ambitious.
It is an interdisciplinary history museum, where educators plan to work with teachers and administrators around the world to make sure students in American schools – and everyone who lives in the U.S. today and in the future – learns about South Carolina’s significant role in U.S. history.
In my view, that collaboration will likely be challenging, given the efforts to sanitize the nation’s racial history and teachers’ apprehensions about teaching supposedly controversial subjects.
“This is a site of trauma,” Tonya Matthews, CEO and president of the museum, told CBS News. “But look who’s standing here now. That’s what makes it a site of joy, and triumph.”
Indeed, the International African American museum is, by design, a monument to freedom – and an honest engagement with America’s troubled racial past.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, literally the only way we can get even the smallest glimpse of the future is by looking at the (unvarnished) past in order to understand how this happening led to that happening, and so on. Anyone unable to do that will live in delusion. Disney may have built a “Fantasyland,” but DeSantis is the one who is actually living (and forcing Florida’s children to live) in a Fantasyland which is certain to eventually come crashing down around them. Anything you can do to help prevent that happening to the children will be most appreciated. I wouldn’t worry or bother about DeSantis. He’s old enough to know better. He’s welcome to FAFO.
Yesterday, the radio opera was “Wozzeck,” by Alban Berg. Its plot is so bleak that it makes the operas in the verismo school look like RomComs. Wozzeck is in the army, and a Captain and an army doctor are conducting psychological experiments on him without informed consent (for small sums of money), and laughing at him behind his back. He gets no respect from any other men either, and his partner, Marie (with whom he has a son almost old enough to start talking), is flirting (and eventually cheating) with a drum major who offers Marie earrings that Wozzeck could never afford. By the end of the opera the Captain and doctor have him so messed up that he brutally kills Marie, and then himself, and the opera ends with their son rocking back and forth on a rocking horse while the other children taunt him for being an orphan. No, it isn’t pretty – but if art were restricted to pretty, no one would ever learn anything from it. (In fact, it’s quite a stroke of Karma that this is being aired now, at a time when multiple strikes are going on. It definitely calls attention to the strikers’ plights.) The music is also not pretty – Berg, with Schönberg and Webern, comprised the second Viennese school, which developed and worked in the twelve-tone method of composition (in which there’s no such thing as a key – no major, no minor, no nothing – just notes and chords made up artificially. There is a system to it, nd it’s actually not hard to learn how to compose in it,but for the listener, it’s not that easy to make sense of it.). But it certainly makes a statement, and though the Captain and he doctor aren’t entrepreneurs, I’d still say that statement could well be about capitalism as well as the obvious class structure. The performance was recorded live at the Royal Opera House in London by the Royal Opera Company. I didn’t recognize any of the performers’ names, but I’ve gone through periods before when there were a lot of names around I didn’t recognize and few that I did. I think it means there’s a generation of singers heading for retirement and another just coming up and not yet widely known. Between that and the openness to new operas and the Met audience getting younger (average age ten years ago was in the sixties but is now in the fifties), I think the future of opera will turn out to be exciting. Also, today is Virgil’s birthday. He is 80. I’ll celebrate wih him next week which is between his birthday and mine.
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Wonkette – Feds ‘Assess’ Alleged Texas Orders To Push Children, Nursing Babies Back Into Rio Grande. Assess Faster, Guys.
Quote – Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said in a press call with other Texas Democrats that Gov. Greg Abbott “placed death traps in the Rio Grande and has now issued barbaric orders to state troopers that endanger people’s lives.” The Dallas Morning News notes that podcaster and occasional Republican Senator Ted Cruz has not returned calls for comment, while fellow Republican Sen. John Cornyn explained last week, before the allegations surfaced, that Abbott had no choice but to treat the border like a war zone because Joe Biden Open Borders Irresponsible. The story broke after a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) trooper who was working as a medic reported his concerns to supervisors about a number of things he witnessed, including a June 25 incident in which he and other troopers came across a group of 120 migrants, including children and women with nursing babies. Click through for story (and it looks like the popup with “Continue reading” is in place.) Speaking of bleak – I don’t know which scares me most – that a governor would issue these orders, that the state troopers have leadership that would enforce them, or that the state troopers have minions who would follow and obey them. Naziism much?
The 19th – In some states, gender dysphoria is a protected disability — and momentum could be growing
Quote – The Supreme Court’s denial to take up Williams’ case could mean that it agrees with the 4th Circuit, or simply that it is not interested in taking up the issue of whether trans people are covered under disability law right now, according to legal experts. Notably, there has not been a split in opinion on this issue among two or more circuit courts, which is a typical incentive for the Supreme Court to get involved. In the last few years, the high court has declined to take up challenges to several cases that reinforced protections for transgender people facing discrimination. This trend followed the 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the Supreme Court found gender identity to be a protected class of sex. This is possibly because they are abiding by Bostock’s findings that trans people are protected by existing federal laws, said Ezra Ishmael Young, a civil rights lawyer and scholar. Click through for details. There is always a gap between legislated law and case law, though it’s not always this obvious – nor does it always affect people so deeply as it does here. And this is why the Supreme Court’s makeup is so critical to a free society.
Yesterday, I found a video (and partial transcript) of Jamie Raskin explaining exactly how Hunter Biden received no special treatment from the DOJ. I know everyone here knws this, but in case tou ever need to explain it to anyone else, I’m sharing the link. (Besides, Jamie Raskin is easy to listen to.) Speaking of easy listening, I probably don’t even need to say that Tony Bennett died at 96. Virtually no one missed that story. He was much and very widely loved.
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National Public Radio – ‘Active club’ hate groups are growing in the U.S. — and making themselves seen
Quote – These men, dressed in tactical gear and masks, were members of so-called “active clubs” — a term that may be relatively new to American audiences. They are a strand of the white nationalist movement that has grown quickly during the last three years and that has recently taken their message of hate into more public view. These decentralized cells emphasize mixed martial arts training to ready their members for violence against their perceived enemies…. “These clubs are decentralized and they’re forming on their own,” said Morgan Moon, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, which estimates that there are active clubs now in at least 30 states. “We’re starting to see [the active club model] pop up in Europe as well as Canada now.” Click through (and note they have filed this under “national security.”) To everyone who is counting on “the next generation” or “the younger generain” or “future generations” to end bigotry and misogyny, fuggedaboudit. Bigotry – or the lack thereof – can be taught, but it can’t be programmed. We are all born with a tendency toward, or against, bigotry – and that tendency may or may not match outr parents’ tendencies. If it doesn’t, sooner or later, each of us will find either his or her inner bigot or his or her inner lover of diversity.There are plenty of people like Stephen Miller, and Paul Gosar, and RFK Junior. And these renamed hate clubs are finding them young.
Letters from an American – July 19, 2023
Quote – In the 1980s, government officials threw out that understanding and replaced it with a new line of thinking advanced by former solicitor general of the United States Robert Bork. He claimed that the traditional understanding of antitrust legislation was economically inefficient because it restricted the ways businesses could operate. Instead, he said, consolidation of industries was fine so long as it promoted economic efficiencies that, at least in the short term, cut costs for consumers. While antitrust legislation remained on the books, the understanding of what it meant changed dramatically. Click through (as always, click continue on the popup). Look at that Bork quote again. You might as well say thzt legislation against murder, rape, theft, and the like is inefficient because it restricts the way individuals can operate.
Yesterday, it was still cooler, cooler than the day before, and is expected to be even cooler today. But then it goes back up. The highest high predicted in the next nine days, however, is only 94°F. I’m actually good with that. My fans can handle that just fine.
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HuffPost – Why A Victim Of Police Brutality Chose Restorative Justice For The Cop
Quote – Teri Jacobs, a photojournalist, was working at a protest that went awry in Portland on Aug. 18, 2020. When police ordered that the crowd disperse, Jacobs, who identified herself as a member of the press, said she was trying to help a friend when an officer named Corey Budworth began to hit her repeatedly with a baton on the head, neck and back. Jacobs said she went to the hospital the next day with bruises on her face and bumps on her head…. Two years later, Jacobs and Budworth came to a new agreement: They would each participate in a restorative justice program managed by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office. Click through for story. Not only is it about restorative justice, but it’s from Portland, OR. How could I not share it here? TomCat would have been sso proud.
Wonkette – Donald Trump Hoarding Jewish Artifacts At Mar-a-Lago, And We Don’t Mean The Club’s Members
Quote – It’s time for a new episode of our favorite show, “Hoarders: Mar-a-Lago.” What items might our former president Donald “Sticky Fingers” Trump be keeping somewhere deep in the towers of classified documents and old Steak ‘Um packages that line the musty halls in which he will one day die alone, in his bathrobe, muttering “Rosebud” and clenching satellite photos of an Iranian nuclear weapons plant to his chest just before a nurse rushes in for an unenthusiastic round of CPR capped off with a celebratory martini? If you guessed “ancient Israeli antiquities,” well, congrats. According to news reports, Trump has been keeping these antiquities at his home like some sort of 19th Century British lord, and Israel has not been able to get them back. Click through for details. This is the first Wonkette story I have used since they migrated to Substack, so you may need to click something to continue reading – or you may not. Substack allowed Wonkette to keep its domain address so all bets are off. Becca had the same reaction I did – that this is a really Nazi thing for him to do (see FFT).
