A Website of the Radical Imagination
What follow is the conclusion of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision rejecting affirmative action in higher education…
With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
Your editor forwarded on the following passages from an informative piece by Michael Tomasky to First‘s…labor caucus:
Nobody seems to have noticed this, but over the course of the spring, the country’s four leading freight rail carriers agreed to grant the vast majority of their workers paid sick days.
Everybody remembers what happened last December. The workers threatened to strike over such days, among other issues. President Biden, generally very friendly toward labor, made it illegal for the workers to strike. He was criticized by unions and workers and fellow Democrats and liberal media outlets, this one included.
None of that criticism was wrong at the time. But it wasn’t the end of the story.
Superintendent Delta Barometre deliberately chose the cheapest and cruelest way to resolve a phone usage issue at New York’s Otisville Correctional Facility. On May 11, 2023, she issued a memo with the header, “SUBJECT: Incarcerated Individual Phone Policy.” In this memo she rescinded a phone policy that permitted each prisoner two thirty-minute phone calls per day (at the officer’s discretion). This was during the suspension of in-person visits due to the pandemic.
San Francisco is made for walking and walkers, though surely not for all times of the day and especially at night when it can be dangerous to walk on a dark and unfamiliar street. I know. I walk two or three miles a day for exercise and to reach a corner store to shop for groceries or a local restaurant like Mixto which serves Peruvian food where I devour the seafood stew.
Walking is probably the most democratic form of travel. It doesn’t cost anything to walk, stroll, or saunter and it doesn’t lift you off the ground and make you higher than anyone else.
This clip from Trump’s Fox interview with Brett Baier is making the rounds…
Trump is boasting about how he used his pardon powers to free low-level criminals. He brings up a woman, jailed on a drug dealing charge, that he pardoned. Baier reminds him that under the policy Trump is touting, wherein he would execute drug dealers, this woman would have been killed.
It is a remarkable moment. For a split second the Fool is caught in his folly, and the gears freeze. Even Brett Baier has to laugh.
But what I see in this clip, more than Trump’s childish policy prescriptions, is one of the keys to the man’s success. How quickly the master Bullshitter comes up with, not one, not two, but three half-coherent responses. Responses graded on a bullshit scale of course. The bar is low.
But Trump is not wooing the genius vote. All he needs is to keep his base bamboozled. And I’m struck, watching this clip, at how quickly the stunned hamsters on the wheels in his brain recover and start spinning even faster than before. How manically the gibbons hurl bananas at the wall to see what might stick. And before you can say, Look out for the bull, you’re covered in fresh bullshit.
Would depend on the degree. Not retroactive. My policy would have scared her off. And his base goes, yeah. Makes sense to me. And he lives to play another day.
You almost have to admire it. It gets him from point A to point B. He never gets bogged down in the details or logic of point A. There’s always a point B and then a point C. And if you get to those points quickly enough, no one remembers point A.
Trump lives his life in five- to ten-minute increments. Whatever bullshit gets him through the next ten minutes. Hell, the next ten seconds. He’ll have new bullshit to spew if/when he makes it through the next ten. Trump family motto. “Trust the Bullshit.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville: “The Covid really brought it out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are — in the inner city. Most of them in the inner city, I don’t know how they got degrees, to be honest with you. I don’t know whether they can read and write. … They want a raise, they want less time to work, less time in school. We ruined work ethic in this country.”
Tommy would have been right at home on a southern plantation.
Forget Succession. If you want drama (and spicy talk), listen in to the latest Class Matters podcast. Episode 12 (link below) features Jane McAlevey who is prompted by Katherine Isaac, Gordon Lafer, and Adolph Reed Jr. to explain (1) how the work of organizing jumps off in earnest AFTER a union wins a certification election. (Getting to a first union contract is hard.) (2) how the health of any union depends on constant engagement with workers as a collective body, not as atomized figures in one-on-one grievance proceedings (3) how real democracy in a union or anywhere rests on “structuring participation.”
Truscott wrote this column at the beginning of May, but his piece remains on time. “Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it.” [1]
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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has, with the recent exposure of an unredacted text message to one of his producers, done the American people a grand favor. He has unleashed for all to see the truth behind his, and racists’ like him, devotion to white supremacy.
This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”
“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.
Originally published here in 2011.
Originally published here in 2020.
Most Army Soldiers came to and from Viet Nam aboard a 707 commercial airliner. Two years ago, I was seated next to a retired flight attendant. Somehow we started a conversation about Viet Nam. She told me she was a stewardess who flew the flights bringing soldiers to and from Viet Nam. I told her how, as we flew to and from the war, the stewardesses looked like angels, especially on the way home after my tour. She told me about the heartbreak she felt flying, “….so many boys to Viet Nam… how young they were… how depressing the flights to Viet Nam were. It was a different experience flying them home.”
Since I last wrote about comedian/videomaker Conner O’Malley in 2020, he’s been posting much less frequently to YouTube, as his work has become more ambitious and elaborate. His latest, “Rebranded Mickey Mouse”, went online in March – and it may be his best to date. O’Malley compresses so much gobsmacking bizarreness – scary-funny-weird narrative surprises, uncanny use of deepfakes and grandiose world-building – into its ten-minute running time that he seems to have assembled all the elements of a totally fresh, satirical aesthetic. It both begs for and beggars analysis.
I won’t ruin it for you by attempting to summarize the story. [Editor’s Note: Watch it below!] But for starters, know that “Rebranded Mickey Mouse” refers to the video’s protagonist (O’Malley) – a young man who has given up his original human identity to embody a Jokerfied reboot of the Disney character.
O’Malley’s expertly tweaking the empty-headed Hollywood trend of gritty, “adult” adaptations of kiddie IP – like the just-announced TV series depicting Winnie the Pooh’s old pal Christopher Robin as “a disillusioned New Yorker navigating his quarter-life crisis with the help of the weird talking animals who live beyond a drug-induced portal outside his derelict apartment complex.”
Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.
This is the news photo used to illustrate the mass killing of five in Texas. AP photo.
Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.
“What do you do?” asks the Russell Brandish/hipster-adman at a deadly L.A. party (full of workmates from a non-union shop). It’s this twit with a top hat’s follow-up question to the antihero of Emily the Criminal—played hard by Aubrey Plaza—who’d deflected his first prompt about her art-life. Emily/Aubrey gives it to him straight: “Credit-card fraud.” No doubt she’d’ve been better off quoting Jesus (the basis for my own once-and-future response to what-do-you-doers?): “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin…” But Aubrey/Emily is no Lilly. (She’s no shrinking Violet either.)
Someone told me you were seen
running behind that beast you’d bred,
Its hide bristling in flashes ahead,
and you, in the wake of stench,
didn’t mind the slaps of slaver.
Then you saw steps, the police.
