text:
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. ~ KURT VONNEGUT
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Friday, March 27, 2015
Cartoon du Jour
Hat tip to Frank at From Pine View Farm
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Danny Schecter (1942-2015)
At the end of each broadcast, Schechter exhorted his listeners:
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." More here.
"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." More here.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
As Frank Zappa Famously Remarked, You Can't Be A Real Country . . .
. . . unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team,
or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. More here.
or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. More here.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Sunday, March 15, 2015
The Mysterious Life Magazine Photographer Who Loved Animals
Nina Leen, © Time Inc, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York
Friday, March 13, 2015
Sir Terry Pratchett (1948-2015)
Photograph from The Guardian
Thursday, March 12, 2015
The Dalai Lama And A Gaggle Of Chinese Officials Walk Into A Bar . . .
Do you remember that uproarious Monty Python sketch where the Dalai Lama, played by John Cleese, sits cross-legged in saffron robes in a mountaintop cave and declares that he won't have an afterlife, throwing into an uproar the exhausted Chinese Communist Party functionaries who have hiked to the cave? The officials, played by the other Pythons dressed identically in Mao jackets and clutching little red books, demand that the Dalai Lama reincarnate, dammit, after he dies, but only on their terms.
"You have no say over whether you will be reincarnated!" splutters the official played by Michael Palin. "That is for our government to decide."
Don't remember the sketch? That's because there never was one.
But in an astonishing example of Life Imitating Python, or something, Chinese party leaders meeting this week in Beijing are in high dudgeon over the 14th Dalai Lama's recent speculation -- think of it as a cosmic cream pie aimed at the party's collective face -- that he might end his spiritual lineage as the most prominent leader of Tibetan Buddhism and not reincarnate. The party has repeatedly warned the 79-year-old holy man that he must play by its rules-- or else.
The Dalai Lama's obdurance would confound the Communist government's plans to rig a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China's deeply unpopular presence in Tibet, which it invaded without provocation in 1950. The Dalai Lama fled into exile nine years later and remains deeply revered in his restive homeland, which has never accepted -- and never will accept -- the communist yolk.
Beijing already has rigged a succession following the 1989 death of the 10th Panchen Lama, another senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama confirmed a Tibetan boy as the next reincarnation in 1995, but the Chinese government hid away the boy and his parents and installed its own choice as the Panchen Lama, a fate that the Dalai Lama has indicated he does not want.
The idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of reincarnation and calling the Dalai Lama a heretic, to boot, is deeply comedic because the party is atheistic to its red core, but beyond the Python riffs and inevitable late night TV show witticisms, the standoff is deadly serious. Waves of protests and self-immolations in Tibet and abroad have repeatedly brought to the surface deep discontent with the Chinese gulagization, including its attempts to micro-manage Tibet's culture and control the Buddhist tradition. And Tibetans are sure to reject any future putative Dalai Lama picked by the Chinese government.
If Americans were asked what foreign country they most admired but never visited, doubtless many would answer Shangri La. But since it was foreclosed in the subprime mortgage meltdown, the second choice probably would be Tibet. Indeed, the mountainous nation nicknamed "The Roof of the World" holds a special place in the popular imagination because of multiple gauzy Hollywood treatments and, of course, the Dalai Lama.
If you don't want to disturb your Richard Gere version of Tibet, move along please. But with Tibet back in the news because of the reincarnation brouhaha, it is worth remembering that Tibet's own history is riven with wars between competing Buddhist sects, sexual exploitation, usurious taxation, serfdom and other forms of economic enslavement that extended well into the last half of the 20th century; in other words, on the current Dalai Lama's watch.
This does not forgive the Chinese occupation, which has cost well over a million Tibetan lives, the jailing of millions more and destruction of most of the country's 3,000 monasteries, but does provide some perspective.
And let's face it, the Dalai Lama is who we want him to be: Head of state. Leader of the best known exile movement on earth. Prolific author. Metaphysician. Cross-cultural icon. Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Oh, and caricature, as well.
Veteran journalist-novelist Pico Iyer offers perspective aplenty in The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, a book that I would highly recommend.
The apothegems of the Dalai Lama that appear on buttons, bumper stickers and t-shirts make no more sense "than a single thread taken out of a Persian carpet, an intricate web, and pronounced to be beautiful," writes Iyer, and one of the Dalai Lama's longtime translators shouts to him that "It's nonsense! All these things you see ascribed to him, others are just making up!"
Indeed, one of the conundrums that the Dalai Lama faces on his world travels (he's in Australia at the moment) is that it is the magically esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism that is the primary source of fascination for non-Tibetans who want to turn away from their own religions.
I've always been a worship at home guy, so the contradictions don't bother me, while I'm deeply admiring of the Dalai Lama for his stubborn pacifism. And Tibet has produced some ass-kicking incense as well as a commonsensical pharmacopeia, including a kidney-cleansing compound that may well have saved if not prolonged the life of one of our beloved dogs.
I do have to note that while the 14th Dalai Lama has been moving the world by example for almost half a century, he has not moved China and now Tibet is almost gone.
But as he has said, "Until the last moment, anything is possible."
Monday, March 09, 2015
For Robert Hunter, 'Song Is A Naked, Living And Amorphous Creature'
Think Burt Bachrach and Hal David. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.
Robert who?
While even the most casual listener knows Garcia's name if nothing else beyond him being the face of the Grateful Dead, that love 'em or hate 'em psychedelic-tinged juggernaut, Hunter remains a virtual unknown. Despite his prodigious songwriting skills and vast catalog of lyrics, including some 75 songs written to be sung over Garcia's powerful melodies, his name is not likely to come up even among people familiar with the Great American Songbook, the canon of the most influential and important popular songs of the 20th century.
The Great American Songbook is, for my money, the paragon of American musical culture, but how Garcia and Hunter fit into it is not immediately apparent even if they are being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame later this year. (Other new inductees include Toby Keith, Cyndi Lauper, Linda Perry, Bobby Braddock and Willie Dixon.)
Garcia and Hunter are naturals for the Songwriters Hall of Fame not because they collaborated on a lot of stuff, but because that stuff is uniformly good and some of it is undeniably great. Their songs mine rich veins of Americana -- Appalachian folklore, New Orleans mythos, Memphis blues and Wild West balladry, as well as some biblical narrative, dollops of generational angst and celebrations of the Sixties counterculture from which the Dead evolved, but only very rarely anything overtly political.
Their songs have been covered by artists ranging from Suzanne Vega to Los Lobos to Burning Spear to Jesse McReynolds to Bob Dylan, in whose hands they sometimes shine even brighter and seem even more appropriate to the times years after they were written.
Although Hunter occasionally drops clues, he avoids labeling his lyrics and never -- as in never -- explains in any depth what a song is about because, don't you know, he believes that the lyrics themselves say all that needs saying.
"I also believe, through experience, that beneath the window dressing of metaphor and rhyme, song is a naked, living and amorphous creature" he has said. "Where some assume that song is the transcription of self, my more intimate belief is that one goes out in the woods and ketches one, dresses it up and trains it to talk.
"How the brute is trained is a matter of personal style, but beneath the window dressing the song remains elusively itself, prevented from full expression by the limits of its intended use. The writer's prejudices, blindsides, and occasional strengths are all utilized in the disguising of the primordial beast into form adequate to its specific purpose."
There also is the small matter of some Garcia-Hunter songs never being played the same way twice, "Dark Star" being a prime example.
"Dark Star" is a psychedelic infused modal vamp that could run 20 minutes or longer, always toward the end of the second set and usually woven into extended jams. It includes some of the first lyrics Hunter wrote for the Dead.
Garcia and Hunter met in the early Sixties.
"We both came from the same place musically," he once told an interviewer. "We started out as a folk duet and went on to become a bluegrass trio and all kinds of different bands, and I know what songs Jerry liked the best, and I know why he liked them the best. Lines like, I forget the name of the song, but it's got this line, 'Ten thousand were drowned that never were born.' Wow. It's got the mystery and a rhythm and a beautiful image. Jerry was a sucker for that sort of thing, not that there was much of that sort of thing around.
"I knew what he liked, and it was the same thing I liked, and I think a lot of our songs had that quality in it, like almost an ancient folk touch of some sort. It's hard to put it into words, but it's what makes most of our songs unique."
Hugh Cutler, a journalist who first heard the Dead in their infancy, found them too rough around the edges and anything but professional.
But the more Hunter wrote, Cutler explains in a Kiko's House guest post, "the subtler and more intertwined his images and narratives became, until soon he'd created a unique hybrid of poetic borrowings. And Garcia provided the sweetest sonic envelopes in which to seal them."
Hunter's lyrics seldom referenced current events. "New Speedway Boogie" is a notable and haunting exception, penned after a star-crossed December 1969 rock concert arranged, in part, by the Dead and headlined by the Rolling Stones during which four people died, one at the hands of a Hell's Angel, a grim event immortalized in the documentary film Gimme Shelter.
Garcia left this mortal coil in 1995, some eight days after his 53rd birthday.
"Unlike many stars, Garcia did not seek out fame," is how I once summed up his life. "At heart an unassuming man who just wanted to play music, fame found him. And despite a long career as an extraordinary composer and guitarist that brought him adulation, gold records and eventually wealth, happiness remained elusive. He was never able to get the addictive drug monkey off his back for very long once it climbed on. Technically, heroin finally killed him, or rather his heart, but I believe that fame was the real culprit."
Hunter, 73, has worked with Jim Lauderdale, Warren Haynes, Little Feat, Los Lobos and Bob Dylan, and on rare occasions done solo concert dates, since Garcia's death.
"Hunter is an old buddy," Dylan has said. "We could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there. He's got a way with words and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting."
Which brings us to "Box of Rain," which along with "Eyes of the World" is one of my two favorite songs with lyrics by Hunter. And words to live by.
Musing On Hunter's Hybrid Poetic Borrowings & Garcia's Sonic Envelopes
By HUGH CUTLER
When I first saw the Grateful Dead at the Avalon Ballroom in the early summer of 1966, it was because a housemate in the Haight-Ashbury who helped with the Avalon's light show had proselytized for them – raved, in fact. I was already a Jefferson Airplane fan, having seen them at the Fillmore Auditorium and found them melodic, dynamic and, crucially for me, professional.
The Dead at the Avalon were anything but. They were largely fronted then by vocalist-harmonica man Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, an occasional organist who would not have looked out of place on a Harley hog amidst the Oakland Hell's Angels, and had, in fact, already befriended them. Pigpen, I thought, growled in a fashion that sought to imitate both South-of-the-Border deejay Wolfman Jack and Chicago bluesman Howlin' Wolf, with a bit of gruff boogie guitarist John Lee Hooker.
The acne-riddled lead guitar man, Jerry Garcia, stood back a bit, grinning Cheshire-like, and played rather pedestrian rhythm and blues licks, while the pretty-boy rhythm guitarist Bob Weir and foppish bassist Phil Lesh seemed more like extras for a high school production of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Only drummer Bill Kreutzmann seemed competent.
At the end of each Stax or Motown cover tune – and I say that advisedly because they bore slight lyric resemblance and the tunes meandered via extended noodling until the band members' limited improvisational skills seemed to exhausted – the band would halt and then retune their instruments for nearly as long as the song itself had lasted. Dancers sought either to recoup their breath or recapture lost momentum in the wait between songs.
To say I was unimpressed would be kind. I found the Grateful Dead largely repugnant to my eye and dissonant and amateurish to my ear. Still, I saw the Dead several more times during that period, usually as they joined neighborhood bands in free outdoor concerts in the Haight's Panhandle, and grew to appreciate the leaps forward they seemed to be making both in their musicianship and in reducing their retuning time.
Within the year, though, I had left San Francisco, returned home to the East Coast and enlisted in the Air Force, which sent me to San Antonio, Texas; Indianapolis; and eventually to Tokyo, Japan. When I stopped in San Francisco again while homebound two years later, I learned that virtually all the bands had moved out of the city, usually to bucolic Marin County across the Golden Gate, and the scene in the Haight had been collapsed by hard narcotics and an overwhelming influx of young homeless.
Yet the Airplane and the Dead, along with a few other bands, soldiered on, landing recording contracts and starting to tour nationally.
The Dead's self-titled debut album had come from Warner Brothers in March 1967, and I defy any fan to say it faithfully reflected what their shows were like. The vocal sound was muddy and instruments sonically constrained. Still, I bought it as a faint replica of my time in the Haight.
I encountered Live Dead, their first live album and fourth overall, almost immediately upon my October 1969 Stateside return. By this time, Robert Hunter had signed on full-time as the Dead's chief lyricist, and the band's original songs were growing shapely because of his collaborations with Garcia, whose melodies were increasingly masterful and his improvisations on guitar and pedal steel more focused. "China Cat Sunflower" and "Dark Star" became permanent parts of the repertoire, and elevated everything else, as well. Even Weir, the rhythm guitarist who fancied himself a rock-star singer by imitation long before he became one, was learning to pen original tunes and to actually provide compelling counterpoint guitar backup.
Hunter's verses cross-referenced an array of source material, from Western cowboy lore to Eastern mysticism, astrology to mythology, the I Ching to voodoo magic, Elizabethan balladry to Mississippi blues legends, T.S. Eliot to Jack Kerouac. And then he'd mix and match. The more he wrote, the subtler and more intertwined his images and narratives became, until soon he'd created a unique hybrid of poetic borrowings. And Garcia provided the sweetest sonic envelopes in which to seal them.
Once David Crosby taught the band how to blend their voices for Workingman's Dead and then American Beauty, both released in 1970, the Grateful Dead gained a whole new level of vocal and musical acumen. And those two albums' songs, largely Hunter lyrics that traded in deep pioneering grit, framed its live shows for the rest of the band's days.
The next two years saw more live recordings, especially the epic Europe '72 three-disc set, which showcased the enhanced harmonic possibilities once they'd added the majestic keyboard stylings of Keith Godcheaux and the mellifluous backup vocals of his wife, Donna.
But by 1973, it was time for a new studio recording, on their own label, after they'd been performing most of the songs for several months. Five of the seven tracks on Wake of the Flood are by Hunter-Garcia, and a sixth is by Hunter with Keith Godcheaux. Six of the seven album tracks became career mainstays — the whirlwinds that carried Deadheads onto their psychic waves.
Wake has many worthy and beautiful tunes, but one shone above the rest.
Hunter has said he wrote "Stella Blue" in 1970, in New York's Chelsea Hotel, where Bob Dylan wrote "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and Arthur Miller penned "After the Fall," two other masterpieces that have had potent impact on many and me over the years.
UC Santa Cruz archivist David Dodd, in his online version of Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, has much to say in musings and references related to the song's verses. The first is to note that "stella" is Latin for star, hence "blue star," harking back to "dark star." But then, more plausibly to me from the first, Dodd notes that Stella guitars were popular among blues players such as Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell.
When I first dropped the needle on "Stella Blue," I conjured a poignant image of a woeful and weary tunesmith, beaten but once proud -- his battered, chipped and rustic ax stuck off in a corner of a dusty downtown lodging as its owner mulls better days and imagines one last chance to relive them. I only read of the Chelsea link later, and didn't meet Hunter until much later, but the picture fits, though he was then a much younger man (28 or 29).
I like that Dodd also quotes a Wallace Stevens poem:
Hunter has had a special way of putting us (me) into his scenes, be it holding a pat hand at a poker game, riding the range with desperadoes or, in this saga, smacked with the realization you can't win for trying, once more sunk with smashed hopes in a fleabag with an eerie blue cast to your even bluer surroundings. The song somehow reminded me, too, of a Wyeth painting I wrote about in my high school days, when a print of it hung on a school wall: "The Blue Dump," a gravel cart Andy saw at his Maine getaway; its peeling veneer is sort of how I imagined that guitar might look.They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
When Garcia first sang "Stella Blue," the renderings were delicate and yearning on the early verses, frustrated and then stoically determined on the bridge, then wistful as he closes it out. That seemed to change, though, as he tackled the lyric again and again, finding fresh nooks to explore.
I read one online reviewer underscoring its "gentle melody and dreamy environment," even as he suggested it could put some listeners to sleep like a "boring, sappy lullaby." Yet he saluted it as "absolutely the most downright gorgeous song the Dead ever wrote."
After mainlining the vinyl version, I'm glad that my first "Stella Blue" concert experience was at the Philadelphia Civic Center show that Kiko's House blogger Shaun Mullen and I shared on August 5, 1974. It was certainly no lullaby, but more pained and compelling. It drained me.
I discovered in auditing various versions chronologically from my home collection that "Stella Blue" churned anthem-like as years passed, perhaps as its title chorus in concert more constantly elicited a rousing cheer – at every chorus. By the 1990s, Garcia sang and played the song emphatically, even stridently, and the once-shimmering guitar-solo coda eventually morphed to bombastic. My sense was that the later stylings no longer fit Hunter's initial atmospherics, though Garcia may have decided he was indeed "dust[ing] off those rusty strings just one more time [to] make them shine." Or perhaps he was just seeking to avoid presenting a "boring, sappy lullaby."
For me, delicacy and wistfulness, dreaminess and "downright gorgeousness" better suit the tale. How better to come "crying like the night" or "crying like the wind," as Hunter envisions twice?
That final verse smacks of every Zen Buddhist koan I've ever read:
It all rolls into one, and nothing comes for free;
There's nothing you can hold for very long. …
It seems like all this life was just a dream.
I can almost hear the Master then intoning: "Go wash your bowl."
And if I were to be fully transparent, "Stella Blue" rests today all the more emotionally, almost clairvoyantly on Hunter's part, on that opening figure, that Cheshire China cat at the mike through all the vanished years: "A broken angel sings from a guitar. . . . "
Saturday, March 07, 2015
Plain Talk On The Criminal Justice System, Obamacare & That Bad Old CIA
On March 3, 2015, there was brutal cold and the hangover from several major snow storms to contend with in the Northeast and Midwest, unseasonably chilly weather in Florida that had natives and tourists alike bundling up, and intermittent rain and fog in the Pacific Northwest, but none of this kept the American criminal justice system from grinding along -- from sea to shining sea -- as it does no matter the weather.
In Spokane, Washington, a white family of three medical marijuana patients -- father, mother and daughter -- faced several years in prison after being convicted of growing more pot plants than the law allowed. In Panama City, Florida, a 21-year-old black man was expected to be sentenced to prison after being found guilty of selling a small quantity of marijuana to an undercover agent, while in Washington, D.C., the Justice Department announced that an investigation had concluded that the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, where an unarmed black teenager was shot dead last summer by a white officer, regularly uses force almost exclusively on blacks and stops them without probable cause. In fact, although blacks make up 67 percent of Ferguson's population, blacks account for 95 percent of all arrests. The city's court system, the report found, routinely jails blacks for even the most minor infractions.
But the big criminal justice news on March 3 was that David H. Petraeus had reached a plea deal after admitting that he had provided his highly classified personal journals to a mistress when he was CIA director, a crime that in another day and age would have been considered treasonous and in this day and age would have resulted in a court martial and hard time in a brig -- if not an appointment with a firing squad -- for a lesser ranking soldier.
The family in Spokane and the young man in Panama City, neither affluent or socially connected, are facing prison time, their lives effectively put on hold if not destroyed, while Petraeus, the ultimate insider with many politician friends, including the man in the White House, coped a misdemeanor plea and will pay a $40,000 fine and serve two years of prison-free probation while keeping his job as a lavishly compensated financial industry mover and shaker.
The contrast between the fates of these marijuana malefactors and a highly decorated four-star general who is the best-known military commander of his generation, speaks volumes about how deeply dysfunctional American society is in a most fundamental respect -- that courts and juries, aided and abetted by their police and prosecutorial helpmates, as well as attorneys who get filthy rich off of this cancer, dispense "justice" according to social rank, influence and affluence, outdated mores and, of course, race.
Any clear-eyed student of American jurisprudence knows that the way the law is applied in these United States has always been skewed, but that view is profoundly short-sighted in a contemporary context. Of course it always has been skewed, yet despite laws and policies of recent vintage prohibiting favoritism toward certain defendants because of their standing and wealth, your chances of being treated fairly is more of an abstraction than ever.
The conservative wing of the Roberts Supreme Court, too often joined by Justice Kennedy, has jumped the shark as throwing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush and the Citizens United decision have shown. So when the high court agreed against good sense to hear King vs. Burwell, in which the right-wing litigants argue that four errant words in the Affordable Care Act demand that this highly successful program be gutted, those of us of the left-of-center persuasion started casing out windows to jump from.
But oral arguments last week -- despite some of the silliest legal posturing in modern court history and nary a mention of the more the 8 million people who would lose access to health insurance because of the "death spiral" that would result if the absurdist architects of the King case get their way -- provided a glimmer of hope.
So here's my prediction: King will be thrown out in a 6-3 ruling with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy joining the four justices who believe that access to affordable health care trumps reverse-engineered legal flapdoodle.
While Roberts and Kennedy are not cut from the altruistic cloth that Justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Kagan and Sotomayor might be, perhaps they don't want those 8 million-plus people, a goodly number with life-threatening conditions, on their consciences. That Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas have no such scruples -- and perhaps have no scruples whatsoever -- is what the King litigants counted on. They're just going to fall a couple of rifles short of a full firing squad.
CIA Director John O. Brennan's bold plan to reassign thousands of spies and intelligence analysts into new departments to make it more successful against modern threats and crises (the Cold War really is over, lads) is brilliant because it is so bloody logical. Getting spooks and analysts on the same page, instead of being in their own compartmentalized worlds as they long have in the agency's troubled 67-year-old history, is bound to get results.
But won't.
That is because the CIA, like Britain's MI5, is first and foremost an old boy's club where the independence of the individual is more important than fealty to president and country, or queen and country. And that law of nature is not about to be revoked.
Had the CIA been organized along the lines that Brennan envisions, the 9/11 attacks probably would have never happened. But CIA operatives were hunkered down in their various compartments, vital information was not shared within the agency, let alone with the FBI, and despite myriad warnings of an impending attack using commercial airliners as weapons, Osama bin Laden's henchmen pretty much had clear sailing.
As will the next bunch of terrorists who still will have little to fear from the CIA.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Memo To GOP Wingers: Keep Your Goddamned Religion Out Of My Life
A new study puts a face -- and a particularly ugly one at that -- on what was been increasingly obvious for many years: Christian conservatives, the folks who use their God like a cudgel to bludgeon we heathens with their neanderthal social agenda, exert an inordinate influence on the Republican Party even if their numbers are relatively small and their agenda is outside the electoral mainstream.
This perversity is on display in that quadrennial scrum known as the Republican presidential primary as otherwise mostly sane presidential wannabes suck up to Christian conservatives to win their favor in primaries in states with outsized blocs of holier-than-thou voters because they can be easily motivated to turn out to vote, especially in the Deep South where they predominate, only to inch away from them and back toward the political center as the nominating convention rolls around. (Exhibit A in this regard is the shameless Paul Ryan, who has done a 180-degree turn on abortion to appeal to Christianist primary voters.)
And then, with the fall campaign underway, these wannabes abandon Christianists altogether. George W. Bush did it in 2000 and 2004, John McCain in 2008 , and Mitt Romney took his turn in 2012, while the hapless eventual 2016 nominee will do it again on the way to likely slaughter under Hillary Clinton's sword.
The outsized influence that censorious Christian conservatives have on the GOP -- and by extension the national debate -- is starkly obvious in data compiled for the new American Values Atlas from 50,000 interviews conducted last year by the Public Religion Research Institute.
The institute quizzed people on the issues of same-sex marriage, abortion and immigration, among others, and analyzed the responses based on their religious faiths.
Not surprisingly, white evangelical Protestants, who make up 18 percent of all Americans but an outsized 36 percent of Republicans, were the most conservative. But if you striped away this group, the results were starkly different.
Among all Republicans, 35 percent favored the legalization of gay marriage, while 58 percent opposed it. But without white evangelicals the spread is 45 percent to 47 percent, a heck of a lot closer to Americans in general, although you wouldn't know that given the way GOP congressional leaders suck up to white evangelicals.
On abortion, only 39 percent of all Republicans said that it should be legal, while 58 percent said that it should not be. Subtract those white evangelicals and the spread is 48 percent to 49 percent, again closer to Americans in general.
On immigration, the religious group in which the fewest people (36 percent) said that immigrants "strengthen" the country were . . . you, guessed it, white evangelicals. Among all Americans, the spread was 55 percent "strengthen" and 36 percent "burden."
We live in a golden age of cowardice. People of all political stripes cower behind the flag in the name of an ersatz patriotism rather than defend true American values, and Democratic congressfolk cower when they should be defending their president and his signal accomplishments. But they pale in comparison to Republicans who cower in the presence of intolerant Christianist nut jobs whose intolerance would be right at home with radical Islam.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
The True Story Of The Most Powerful Men In America & A Gang Rape
(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY 2012)This is the story of how the three most powerful men in America were responsible for the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl, who was burned to a blackened char, and the murder of her parents and sister.
The enablers of these heinous crimes were President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who conspired to invade Iraq for bogus reasons, then starved the Army of the men and materiel to get the job done, which led to a lengthy occupation that triggered an Al Qaeda insurgency and a protracted civil war.
Journalist Jim Frederick describes the scene that Abu Muhammad came upon when he was summoned to his cousin's house on March 12, 2006:
"Abu Muhammad had seen what the insurgent death squads could do, but he had never witnessed anything like this. Each body was a different sort of travesty. Qassim, the father, was facedown in the far corner of the bedroom, in a lake of his own burgundy blood. His shirt was brightly patterned, striped with white, orange and brown. The front of his skull had been blasted off. Gore and large chunks of gray matter stippled the walls in a wide, V-shaped pattern. A large amount of Qassim's brain, about the size of a fist, lay nearby on an intricately woven rug.
"Not far from Hassim was Hadeel, just six years old. Wearing a bright pink dress, she was beautiful, her face almost pristine like a death mask, except that she was covered with blood, liters of it. It was everywhere, matting her hair, soaking her dress, covering her face in a thin dried sheen. A bullet fired from behind -- perhaps she had been running away from her assailant -- had blown the back right quadrant of her skull apart, A piece of it was lying several feet away, covered in skin and hair. Her hair band had been thrown across the room by the whiplash of the impact. In her right hand she was still clutching some plants she had just picked, a kind of wild sweet grass that Iraqi children frequently gather and eat for fun.
"Closest to the door was Fakhirah, the mother, wearing a black abaya and an emerald velveteen housedress embroidered with white flowers. She was lying on her back with her eyes wide open. Abu Muhammad thought his cousin might still be alive. He reached down to feel her pulse. Nothing. She was dead. He turned her over, and then he saw the hole. She had been shot in the back, but the rich, dark hues of her clothing obscured the full extent of her wound.
"Shaken, Abu Muhammad moved into the living room. There was Abeer, only fourteen years old. What they had done to her, it was unspeakable. Her body was still smoking; her entire upper torso had been scorched, much of it burnt down to ash. Her chest and face were gone with only the tips of her fingers sticking out from the purple scraps of her dress sleeves, recognizably human. The lower half of her body, however, was mostly intact. Her thin, spindly legs were spread and, rigid in death, still bent at the knees. She was naked from the waist down, her tights and underwear nearby."
NEVER CALLED TO ACCOUNTWhy dredge up a nearly nine-year-old incident in a war that effectively ended in December?
The answer is that today would have been Abeer Qassim Hamza's 23rd birthday. And that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have never been called to account for masterminding the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. And never will be. Absent a deathbed confession, we cannot expect any member of this troika to acknowledge that the deaths of nearly 4,000 Americans, Abeer and her family and perhaps 100,000 Iraqis in all was because of their politically-driven neocon blood lust.
There was only one other known atrocity of this magnitude in Iraq -- the Hadifa Massacre, and rapes and murders were extremely rare in Iraq despite the fact that they happen in every war and by one estimate U.S. troops raped 18,000 women in the European theater between 1942 and 1945.
First Battalion was assigned to the Triangle of Death, an area south of Baghdad that only weeks after the March 2003 invasion already was becoming the most restive hotbed of the insurgency. There were far too few boots on the ground to effectively deal with the task at hand, pleas for more troops went unheeded, and when commanders complained to the Pentagon about troop levels they effectively short-circuited their careers.
The travails of Bravo Company, home to the men who went on the rape and murder spree, were especially severe. They were physically isolated and had no knowledge of how their efforts were fitting into the war's broader strategy, let alone what that strategy might be.
The rape and murders were singularly heinous because they were so calculated. But to lay the entire responsibility for them on Private First Class Steven Green, who was the ringleader, and Sergeant Paul Cortez and Privates First Class James Barker, Brian Howard and Jesse Spielman is wrong because others up the chain of command all the way to the Pentagon and White House also were culpable.
ONE BIG KILLING FIELDBy the time 1st Battalion deployed to the Triangle of Death in November 2005, the people whom Cheney had declared would welcome Americans with open arms were longing for Saddam Hussein. Iraq had become one big killing field with armed militias roaming the cities and countryside, and Shiites and Sunnis killing whomever they pleased at will.
The Georgia National Guard unit that the 1st Battalion replaced had become so cowed that it had stopped patrolling roads where IEDs (improvised explosive devices) had detonated, meaning that pretty much the entire area went uncovered as the guardsmen cowered in their barracks.
Despite boasts by Rumsfeld, that the troops in Iraq were the best equipped in the history of warfare, the conditions that 1st Battalion had to endure were deplorable.
As Frederick writes in Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death, there was no chow hall or even a kitchen to cook meals except at Camp Striker, the battalion headquarters. At bases "away from the flagpole," in military parlance, all food was either MRE combat rations or hamburger patties and steaks that had to be grilled on storm drains. There were no dishes or cutlery so the men had to eat MREs and grilled meat with their hands.
There was no electricity and no lighting that wasn't battery operated, no air conditioning during the day and no heat at night. There were no showers and no toilets, and troopers defecated into so-called WAG Bags, garbage bags with solvents inside that were tied off, thrown in a pit and burned. First Platoon's first major casualty was to be a soldier who suffered bad burns when he threw a match into a diesel fuel-soaked pit filled with the bags.
Humvees were inadequately armored and there wasn't enough body armor to go around, a situation that was not corrected until later in the war and only then because of an expose in a stateside newspaper. And there were no coordinated night recognition signals, resulting in troopers firing on the trucks of other troopers, sometimes with fatal results.
Then there was battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk.
"His reaction to everything was the same," a company first sergeant told Frederick. "If you lost a soldier, or if you had cigarette butts on the FOB [forward operating base], it was the same reaction. He would explode on you. He would just lose his mind, which made his whole leadership style just totally ineffective."
Said one captain: "If you continually crush their spirit, they are going to be timid, wondering if everything they do will earn them another ass chewing. It had an impact on the way those guys operated."
Kunk also whitewashed the reports he sent up to brigade headquarters."They would call three guys a squad," a first sergeant said. "But you can't turn three guys into nine unless you're lying."
"It's not like one little piece of information is going to lose the war," a company executive office said, "but when you see the cumulative effect of information becoming whitewashed in order to tell a story that a battalion or brigade commander wants to tell to their highers, then you got real problems. That's the more sinister side of it."
Meanwhile, the Iraq Army was useless and 1st Platoon troopers quickly came to loath the civilian population. The one member of the platoon who took a liking to Iraqis, becoming nearly fluent in Arabic as he got to know the locals, was called "an Iraqi cock sucker."
And the enemy was everywhere.
HE WAS CRAZY"What that company is going through would turn your hair white," an officer at Camp Victory in Baghdad told Frederick. "I'm only twenty miles away, and most of the people on Victory have no idea how bloody the fight is down there."
IEDs were cleared with the help of Iron Claw bomb-sniffing teams riding in massive armored vehicles, but as soon as a road was cleared it was reseeded by insurgents. The battalion resorted to parking Humvees at one- or two-mile intervals along a key road that was a resupply route, but the ideal relief in the form of Iraqi soldiers manning these checkpoints never came. They simply refused to operate in so dangerous an area.
The parked vehicles evolved into poorly defended Tactical Check Points surrounded by concertina wire where soldiers would be assigned for six-day intervals, further depleting the platoon's patrol and combat power, and most troopers felt like they were school crossing guards when manning them. When six-foot cubed mesh baskets that when filled made excellent defensive barriers finally arrived, there were no backhoes to fill them.
It was at one such checkpoint at the edge of Mahmudiya that Steven Green helped hatch the plan to rape Abeer and kill she and her family.
He was not a bad soldier, but he was crazy. He was a racist and white supremacist who was unable to control his impulses and railed about "niggers," Jews, northerners, foreigners and Iraqis. And he occasionally drooled, a childhood habit that he had not completely broken.Green, who became the first former U.S. soldier to face the death penalty for war crimes in a civilian court because he had been discharged before he was arrested, had matter of factly explained to a journalist three weeks before the rape-murders that "I came over here to kill people."
By December, 1st Platoon was losing men at the rate of about one a week and an already fraying platoon that lived "outside the wire" -- a term for the outposts -- was unraveling quickly, while Bravo Company's 2nd and 3rd Platoons seemed to be humming right along with few problems. Frederick attributes this to those platoons outstanding sergeants and active efforts to combat the hate that 1st Platoon had succumbed to.
Iraqi civilians were now being beaten routinely by 1st Platoon troopers, drinking increased and became more open, and men would burst into tears while eating their lunches. And after being continuously told that they were screwups, Frederick said the platoon subconsciously decided to live up to its outcast status.
Meanwhile, none of the basics essential to maintaining morale and welfare of combat soldiers had been provided and officers and NCOs who complained about this state of affairs were considered whiners.
Two platoon mates who had disobeyed one of Keck's orders and had taken off their helmets at one of the checkpoints were fatally shot in the head by an Iraqi civilian. This was followed by the deaths of two men in an IED blast and then two more in another blast. Later a forward operating base widely considered to be a firetrap burned to the ground because there were too few fire extinguishers.
The carnage prompted Green to tell Keck that "I just want to get out there and get some revenge on those motherfuckers. They all deserve to die."
"Calling them that is like calling me a nigger," interjected Command Sergeant Major Anthony Edwards, Keck's senior NCO. "This sounds like you hate a whole race of people."
"That's about it right there," said Green. "You just about summed it up."
Green had finally snapped.
"Most of the men by this point hated Iraqis and many would offhandedly opine that the whole country needed to be leveled, or the only good Iraqi was a dead Iraq," writes Frederick. "But only Green talked about killing Iraqis all the time. . . . Only he talked about burning them alive so they had to smell their own flesh cooking. Everybody was frustrated that the enemy was cowardly, but Green had a harder time accepting that this was simply the nature of this war: U.S. soldiers had to behave more honorably than the enemy. Why, he sincerely wanted to know, did Americans have to restrain themselves when the insurgents did not?"
Bravo's company commander sent Green to see a combat stress nurse who diagnosed him with Combat and Operational Stress Reaction, an Army term to describe the typically and usually transient stresses of warfare. The nurse noted Green's obsession with killing Iraqis and then sent him back to Bravo.
His next appointment with the nurse would be on March 20, eight days after the rape-murders.
"When I'm on guard next time," Green told Cortez and James Barker, "I'm going to waste a bunch of dudes in a car. And we'll just say they were running the TCP."
"Don't do that!" Cortez exclaimed. "Don't do it while I'm here. I'm supposed to be running this shit."
Barker agreed and said he had a better idea.
"We've all killed Hadjis [Iraqis], but I've been here twice and I still never fucked one of these bitches."
Cortez's interest was piqued, and so was Green's. They talked more about it as the morning wore on and Barker said that he had already picked the target -- a house not far from the checkpoint where a man and three women lived, one a teenager or in her twenties whom he thought was pretty hot. The family had an AK-47 assault rifle, which was allowable under Iraqi law, and he said he knew where it was hidden.
Witnesses were a problem, however, but Green said he would take care of that.
"You'll kill them, right?" Barker asked.
"Absolutely," Green replied. "It don't make any difference to me. A Hadji is a Hadji."
At around noon, the three men and Jesse Spielman sat down outside the TCP with a cardboard box as a table to play Uno. They drank Iraqi whiskey mixed with Rip It, a carbonated energy drink, and soon became very drunk.
Cortez finally said, "If we are going to do this, let's go before I change my mind." Cortez and Barker would take the girl, Green would kill the rest of the family, Spielman would pull guard and Bryan Howard, who was newly arrived in the platoon, would stay behind and man the radio.
Some of the men changed into clothing that made them look like insurgents. Green grabbed a shotgun, Barker took Howard's M4 carbine and Spielman picked up an M14 rifle.
The targeted house was the home of Qassim and Fakriah Hamza al-Janabi. They were poor but dreamed of building a big family and sending their children -- daughters Abeer, 14, and Hadeel, 6, and son Muhammad,12, who happened to be at school that afternoon -- to university.
With the arrival of the Americans in Mahmudiyah and the quick deterioration of relations between the occupiers and locals, Wassim and Fakriah had become concerned about their daughters, whom they took out of school.
Abeer was of special concern. She had big doe eyes, a small mouth and gentle features. On the verge of womanhood, she was tall for her age and her fragile beauty was attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Soldiers would give her the thumbs-up and say, "Very good, very nice," and Muhammad had once watched a soldier run a finger down terrified sister's cheek.
By early March, the harassment of Abeer had become so bad that cousin Abu Muhammad told the family that he would take her to live with him at his secluded house. Abeer stayed there only one night, March 9 or 10, and Qassim came the next day to bring her back home.
Frederick describes what transpired in a few short minutes:
"Sneaking up to the dingy home, Cortez and Barker broke to the right around a small shack in the front. Spielman and Green broke left. Spielman and Green found little Hadeel and father Qassim in the driveway. Green grabbed the man and Spielman grabbed the girl and they marched them inside. Barker and Cortez cleared the house, checking the foyer, the hallway, and moving plast the kitchen, where Cortez stopped to grab the woman, Fakhriah, and Abeer. Green and Spielman entered the house while Barker continued with the sweep, checking the bathroom and the toilet room, the bedroom and the living room. Then he headed up the stairs to the roof, checked the roof, and went back down the stairs.
"The others had corralled the whole family into the bedroom. After they had recovered the family's AK-47 and Green confirmed that it was locked and loaded, Barker and Cortez left, yanking Abeer behind them. Spielman pulled the bedroom door shut and then set up guard in the doorway between the foyer and the living room while Cortez shoved Abeer into the living room. Cortez pushed Abeer down on the ground and Barker walked over to her and pinned her outstretched arms down with his knees.
"In the bedroom, Green was trying to get the man, woman and child to lie down on the floor. They were scared, screaming in Arabic. Green was shouting back, 'Get down, get down now!'
"Back at the TCP, Howard was trying to get Cortez on the radio, each time saying there was a convoy coming and they needed to come back. They never responded. No Humvees actually came during the ten to 15 minutes that they were gone, but Howard was panicked. [Private Seth] Scheller and he were out there all alone.
"In the living room, Cortez pulled Abeer's tights off. She was crying, screaming in Arabic, trying to struggle free as Barker continued to hold her in place. Cortez was masturbating, trying to get an erection. He started to make thrusting motions. 'What the fuck am I doing?' he later recalled thinking at the time. 'At the same time, I didn't care, either. I wanted her to feel the pain of the dead soldiers.'
"In the bedroom, Green was losing control of his prisoners. They weren't getting down on the ground. Terrified, they were yelling, and they weren't responding to Green's orders. The woman made a run for the bedroom door. Green shot her once in the back and she fell to the floor. The man, agitated before, now became unhinged. Green turned the AK on him and pulled the trigger. It jammed. He tried to clear it several more times, but it kept sticking. Panicking, as the man started advancing on him, Green switched to his shotgun.
"Green couldn't remember if there was anything in the chamber, so he pumped once and a full shell ejected. Then, Green said, 'I shot him the way I had been taught: one in the head and two in the chest.' The first shot blasted the top of the man's head off. He dropped backward to the floor as buckshot from the following shots continued to riddle his body.
"Then Green turned toward the little girl, who was spinning away from him, running for a corner. Green returned to the AK and tried to clear it again, and this time it worked. He raised the rifle and shot Hadeel in the back of the head. She fell to the ground. . . .
"As Green was executing the family, Cortez finished raping Abeer and switched positions with Barker. Barker's penis was only half hard. Despite all her squirming and kicking, Barker forced himself on Abeer and raped her.
"Green came out of the bedroom and announced to Barker and Cortez, 'They're all dead. I killed them all.' Barker got up and headed toward the kitchen. He wanted to look outside the window, see if anything was happening outside. As he did that, Green propped the AK-47 he was carrying against the wall, got down between Abeer's legs, and as Cortez held her down, Green raped her. . . .
"The men were becoming extremely frenzied and agitated now. Spielman lifted Abeer's dress up around her neck and touched her exposed right breast. Barker brought a kerosene lamp he had found in the kitchen and dumped the contents on Abeer's splayed legs and torso. Spielman handed a lighter to either Barker or Cortez, who lit the flame. Spielman went to the bedroom and found some blankets to throw on the body to stoke the fire. As the flames engulfing Abeer's body grew, Green, hoping to blow up the house, opened the valve on the propane tank in the kitchen and told everybody to get out of there."
The Iraqi Army began interviewing neighbors and family members the morning after the rape-murders. Some said that it was the Iraqi Army, others said it was the Americans and still others said that it was a family feud gone bad, while 1st Platoon said it was Sunni insurgents. The Hamza Al-Janabi family was buried in a nearby cemetery and there was little or no physical evidence beyond a few AK-47 shell casings.COVERUP, RETALIATION, AFTERMATH
On March 20, 2006, Green kept his appointment at the Combat Stress office in Mahmudiyah. He confessed to having recently thrown a puppy off of the roof of a house that was being searched and said that was no big deal. In subsequent meetings over the next few days, a combat stress nurse concluded that he wasn't registering the moral implications of what he had done.
She concluded that Green had a preexisting antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by indifference to the suffering of others and recommended to Kunk the he be discharged. Even though Green had committed rape and quadruple homicide just 11 days earlier, the nurse's mental-health-status evaluation sheet that initiated the personality order discharge stated that his current potential for harm to others was "low."
Green remained at Mahmudiyah for a few more weeks for observation and processing. By April 14, he was headed back to the U.S. and was honorably discharged at Fort Campbell, Kentucky on May 16.
The cover-up of the rape-murders began to unravel in mid-June.
On June 16, the checkpoint where Green and the others had hatched the plot was attacked and overrun. Specialist David Babineau was killed and Privates First Class Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca were captured.
The bodies of the two troopers were found on June 19, and judging from a video shot by the insurgent abductors, both were eviscerated and half naked, dirty with caked blood and mud, just as one would appear after being dragged behind a truck. Tucker was decapitated and a man, after holding his severed head aloft like a trophy, placed it on Tucker's body. Al Qaeda in Iraq later said the attack was in retaliation for the rape of Abeer and murder of her family and the leader of AQI had slaughtered the two men himself.
While the search for Tucker and Menchaca was on, Sergeant Tony Yribe remarked to Private First Class Justin Watt that "It just drives me crazy that all the good men die and the shitbag murderers like Green are home eating hamburgers."
"Murderers?" Watt asked.
Yribe told Watt about the rape-murders and that Green had confessed to him that he had acted alone. The less you know about it -- the better, Yribe had said.
Watt was horrified. He began obsessing on Abeer's father for reasons he didn't understand and couldn't sleep. When he ran into Howard he insinuated that something really messed up had happened in March. Convinced that Watt knew the whole story, Howard filled in many of the missing pieces and implicated Barker, Cortez and Spielman.
Watt called his father, who had been an airborne combat engineer in the 1970s, and asked him what he would do if his brothers in arms had done something really bad.
"You should let your conscience be your guide," his father had replied. "If it is as heinous as you say, you can't let your loyalty to your men get in the way of doing what is right."
Wanting to bypass what he believed would be a skeptical command structure, Watt revealed the crimes during a psychological health counseling session on June 22. Meanwhile, rumors about the rape-murder began to percolate through 1st Platoon and eventually reached Kunk after two troopers went to their superiors.
While skeptical of the allegations, Kunk ordered an investigation. Then, a few days after the memorial service for Babineau, Tucker and Menchaca, the commanding officer called a kind of town hall meeting.
Frederick writes that Kunk began by telling them, with complete unconcern for the men who were brave enough to speak up, "You are right to think that there is a lot of suspicion and finger-pointing going on because [two men] came forward to tell the chain of command that five of your shitbag friends probably raped a girl and killed her whole family. And these guys are cracking, it looks like they are guilty."
"We thought we were going to get the 'Keep your heads up' speech," said one soldier. " . . . He just crushed us."
The four active-duty soldiers involved were arrested and were court martialed.
Barker pleaded guilty to rape and murder as part of a plea agreement requiring him to testify against the other soldiers to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison and must serve 20 years before being considered for parole.
Cortez pleaded guilty to rape and murder as part of a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison and must serve 10 years before being considered for parole.
Spielman was convicted of rape and murder. He was sentenced to 110 years in prison with the possibility of parole after 10 years.
All three men are being held at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Howard was sentenced under a plea agreement to a dishonorable discharge. He served 27 months in prison for obstruction of justice and being an accessory after the fact.
Green was arrested as a civilian and was convicted in the U.S.District court in Paducah, Kentucky. In September 2009, he was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences in prison with no possibility of parole and was being held in the U.S. Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona when he died in February 2014 from complications from hanging himself.
Kunk, who was investigated because of reports of numerous acts of complacency and a lack of standards at the platoon level, received a letter of concern, the least serious form of admonishment and one that carries no real punitive weight or negative long-term implications for an officer's career. Two of his NCOs received letters of reprimand.
Justin Watt, the whistleblower, received a medical discharge. He said that he has received death threats.
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are retired and except for Cheney, are little in the news. All three have published memoirs that whitewash their roles in starting and utterly screwing up America's longest war.
Abeer's next-of-kind received a $30,000 check from the U.S. government in compensation for the rape-murders.
PHOTOGRAPHS (From top): Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld; Abeer; Blood-splattered wall of the Al Janabi home; Map of the Triangle of Death; Tactical checkpoint where rape-murder plot was hatched; 1st Platoon trooper on patrol; Green, possibly with the shotgun he used in the murders; Barker; Cortez; Spielman; Watt; Babineau; Menchaca; Tucker; Green at sentencing.
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When a child actress is called a vile name by an long-running satire site, a beautiful young singer is labeled a stoner for wearing dreadlocks and a phenomenal 13-year old-female athlete is called a slut, they deserve more than a canned, robotic mea culpa.
Unfortunately, the damage resulting from the nearly decade long apex of black female confinement is substantial.
It feels like Hollywood is finally starting to get what so many of us knew all along; audiences want to see diversity. Yet somehow, at this exciting moment of progress for the industry, Deadline Hollywood found it appropriate to publish what can only be described as a call for regression.
John's life has a lesson for us today. His struggle -- our struggle -- for a just society, for true equality and respect -- is not over. Far from it. All we have to look at is the widespread assault on the Voting Rights Act today. But like him, we cannot walk away; we cannot give up.
Stephen A. Smith is just the latest in a long line to peddle the delusion that the GOP can change its ways and become an open-arms party for blacks.
There's nothing to be happy about -- no feel-good takeaways -- when a middle school girl gets insulted by a man and has to speak up for him so he can continue a baseball career no one gives a fuck about. She is not supposed to be anyone's savior or protector. We need to be saving and protecting her.
Channeling the revolutionary essence of the Harlem Renaisance, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is a gripping, soul-driven melodrama that masterfully depicts the story of a courageous young man fighting through the painful process of liberating himself.
In our everyday fights to silence the racist chants of misguided college students and stifle overaggressive police who racially profile black children, we must reach the finish line. The next generation should never have to question whether their lives matter.
Despite past voting obstacles, there are compelling reasons for blacks in Ferguson to rush to barricades this time to vote. One is the prospect of a regime change. Another is they could move to dump the racket that city officials have run for years that criminalizes virtually the city entire black population. Another is there's no excuse.
The n-word has the blood of thousands of lynchings, beatings, and other horrific crimes melded between its letters, meshed in its very fibers. So, why do some white people want the right to use this abhorrent word again?
The tragic discovery of a missing African-American man's body hanging from a tree in rural Claiborne County, Mississippi is now being investigated by both state and federal authorities.
I was running errands with my youngest two children in tow when an acquaintance of ours spotted us and came over to say hello. She looked at my son, marveling over how much he had grown.
"Yes," I smiled, "He's a big boy!" She replied, "Such a cute little thug." My son is 2 years old.
While we applaud Starbucks for their effort to engage a topic that many seek to avoid, and while their efforts seem well-intentioned, we, as a national racial justice organization, with a name similar to the hashtag used in the campaign feel compelled to say: as a nation, we need more.
Funding for school policing programs has expanded and more school-based police are being armed with the same weapons cops carry on the streets. This expansion has not come with significant strings attached or proper guidelines.
With all due respect to Pastors Creflo and Taffi, instead of wasting community funds on frivolous expenses like a Gulfstream G650, maybe you should spend more time reaching out to the community in order to understand what they need, and how you can use your ministry to support them!
The Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed by Governor Mike Pence last week, is one of the most biased pieces of state legislation we've seen in our modern era. The fact that it is cloaked in the name of religious freedom is particularly offensive to me as a member of the clergy who has been engaged in ministry and social justice work my entire life.
The fact that you have one student offender who did not play to that gate, and claim victimization, and instead accepted, fully, responsibility for his racist, offensive action, is cause for much hope.
As a young boy, I remember when my Grandma Dorothy gave me the book Rosa by Nikki Giovanni, but it was not until more recently that I learned that Rosa Parks was not the first to woman to deny her bus seat to a white person.
This is not a human rights issue. To lower the unemployment rate, we as African Americans have to emphasize to our young people to graduate high school, marry before having children, quit wasting time with trying to be rap artists or athletes, get useful majors that are employable like nursing, engineering, plumbing, electrician, etc.
So that would explain high unemployment of black people in the UK, AU, and the rest of the planet? Whether they are carribean, African, dark indian, etc. - the pattern is still there, and it's a large gap.
Can we finally just admit what is really going on all over the word?
I agree with you.... and would like to add that Black joblessness and hopelessnes is far deeper than many black people want to believe or have any serious dialog about.
Booker T.Washinton had the best solutions with the most progressive advances for the BM ... more than any other organization that "supposedly" represents him today.
Mr. Wasington saw black joblessnes like this:
"Ingnorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state Legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention of stump speaking had more attractions than starting a farm or truck garden."
Black people put far too much attention on the political rather than the rehabiltion of the black man.
The BM has been taught to depend on the Government and the Peninal System to keep him and feed him.
The BM has been taught that hard work and general labor is for others(Mexicans)and not him.
The Democratic Party needs for black people to stay dependent and poor and relying on them. Even the Civil Rights leaders who feeds off black ingornance cannot survive if the BM suddenly got some fortitude..... Cast DOWN Your Bucket, BM
Religion and Faith in the BM's life needs to be examined and explained. The Curses of Deuteronomy 28:16-68 and Genesis 9:24-27 are his to bear too. Whether the BM accepts or believes it... this is his heritage.
Wake is dude! your asleep. Its been a continued human rights violation since they gave our ancestors 40 acres and a mule then turned around and took it back because they could not pay taxes on it
It is definitely more often than we realize, a human rights issue,...I hold an Associate degree and on my last job orientation the new hires were talking and we asked each other where each were from and nobody was from the nearby all black city which has been projected by the media to be a lost cause. I said I was from a nearby suburb and used my sister's address and "ta, da", I finally got hired someplace. Why were are the other blacks (4 out of 9) from only the suburbs? These days if you put your address on your envelope or resume they can SEE your HOUSE on Google Earth or Windows Virtual Earth-Live Streets with a close-up Birdseye and panoramic view of your neighborhood, our nearby suburbs are clean, patterned, brick ranch-style neighborhoods with newly planted trees in a neat row, meticulous lawns, and no one walks since everyone drives and etc. So YES it's definitely a race, human rights, and geographic discrimination issue going on. I was well-qualified while before I used my sister's address, but nobody interviewed me. Then I had to have a special calendar to keep up with all the responses for interviews. What's up with that?
I agree with your statement ! With the advent of technology, potential employers can now do background checks, credit checks, and criminal checks as well as red flag certain streets, addresses and zip codes to weed out Blacks and others and we haven't a clue this kind of crap is going on !
It's more prevalent than one may think !
If it's not a human rights issue, why is it that everyone hired with me who was Afr-American (4 out of 9 people) were all from nearby small suburbs and none from the nextdoor all black large urban city? Why did I have to use my sister's suburban address to finally get numerous calls for an interview? THey can see your house if you print your address on your resume or envelope on your application through Google Earth or Virtual Earth's birdseye view and see a close-up of the neighborhood. There's still alot of qualified blacks here in the inner-predominantly black city that gets alot of bad-publicity and the good and good citizens here get absolutely zero publicity.
You are correct Cookie. And it happens because we live in a system of racism , and a lot of people are in heavy heavy heavy denial about it. It is what leads to high unemployment rates among non white groups. We have to look at the people who are doing the hiring, because that's where the problem lies.
Lets be real honest here, racism plays as much a part in Blacks not being employed as anything else and now that background, credit and criminal checks are the norm of the 21st century in the hiring process, many Blacks, especially Black males, are now being discriminated against in a whole new way that no one seen coming a few years ago.
Where I live, unemployment rate for Black males is 4 times that of their White counterparts so something is terribly wrong with that picture !
How the heck can we only make up 14% of the American population yet we probably make up 80% plus of the prison population for Black males and we have the highest unemployment rate as well !
This is no accident ! It's systematic and it needs to be addressed !
Education is the key but there's Blacks who have education who still can't crack the "good ol boy" network !

subset: commoncrawl


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P-Mation #41: A-Door-Able
Blue boy meets his lovely neighbor!4.46 / 5.00 9,115 Views
Otherworld - Quiet Luke
in da othawurld4.41 / 5.00 5,482 Views
Joe vs the Environment
In collaboration with Earth Hour 2015 and Pocoyo4.08 / 5.00 2,418 Views
I laughed, I chuckled, I raised an eye-brow. Not bad for an older flash. The use of low-res still picture backgrounds gave it a bit of a boost visually, and the movements were good. What set it off though was the humor and choice of tunes.
Not a bad thing to waste a minute watching.


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Hint: Working On Excellence
You Should Be Here lands next month.
Chance the Rapper and Dej Loaf sit down for an adorable joint interview at FADER FORT 2015.
But there's a catch if you want to hear it.
Bam Bam chucks a fan into the crowd.
Read the statement detailing the sexual assault charges alleged against Yung Gleesh.
Photographer Alex Welsh's time capsule of a monumental event, and everyone who made it happen.
"Everybody's got a hustle out here, it's unreal."
Rihanna's BFF steps into the spotlight with the M$$ x WRKNG Title capsule collection
Featuring the xx's Romy Madley Croft on vocals.
Get to know 2 Chainz's label, The Real University.
He got what you need.
TRU Jack City drops January 27.
Memphis rapper Young Dolph enlists 2 Chainz, Gucci Mane, Trinidad James and more on his latest mixtape.
Gucci Mane and Young Thug join Memphis' Young Dolph for "Put Your Hands Up," which isn't as celebratory as it sounds on paper.


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Hi: 12° Lo:4°
By Tristan Harris Friday 23 May 2014 Updated: 23/05 11:07
YOUNG people can take part in Bromsgrove's first ever silent disco at the town's Ryland Centre on Wednesday (May 28).
The silent disco is the same as a regular one, apart from the fact there is no loud music - all party-goers listen to tunes through headphones.
Each person who goes has the option of listening to one of three channels and can choose their preferred DJ or genre of music.
The effect is mind-blowing with the young people sharing the same dance-floor, but listening to different beats.
Those who want a break from the music can simply put their headphones down and talk to others, not having to speak over loud music. It is billed as a truly unique experience and fascinating visually.
There will be two sessions on Wednesday - one for under 13s and families from 6pm to 7.30pm and the other - for 13 to 17-year-olds - between 8pm and 9.30pm.
Those wanting to go can just turn up and tickets are available on the door at £5 per session.
For more information, call the Ryland Centre on 01527 575387.
1 Councillor claims Rubery CCTV is not being maintained
2 Two arrested after dramatic chainsaw raid in Bromsgrove
3 Tribute to former 'witty and wise' Bromsgrove and Redditch MP
4 Line-up decided for Austin Search for a Star final
5 You could not have asked for any more from Jigsaw's Oliver
A NUMBER of Bromsgrove art students have been
A FORMER teacher has been jailed for 13
A DERELICT former pub and restaurant could be
PROLIFIC burglars have been jailed for a series
A MASS rally and march to save services at the ...
MORE homes than originally planned will need to be built ...
Visit the Worcester Observer website for the latest.
DRINKING alcohol in a popular Evesham park could be banned ...


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High Availability Linux with Software RAID
Using a combination of software RAID and a recovery CD, a high availability Linux server can be set up and configured easily. It is conceivable that a drive could fail, putting the RAID into degraded mode, without the system administrator knowing immediately. A cron job could be created to periodically examine the /proc/mdstat file and send an e-mail or page if the RAID volumes were found to be in degraded mode.
After testing with VMware, I used the same technique outlined above to install Red Hat 8.0 on my physical machine. I also went through the same testing procedure on the physical machine, including failing a pure RAID drive, failing the first mixed RAID and native drive, restoring RAID volumes in degraded mode, booting of the recovery CD, rebuilding the native partition and installing the boot loader on the MBR. It worked flawlessly, and my system has been reborn as an HA server.
Micah Silverman has been working in software development and computer security since the 1980s. He's been working with Linux since 1991. Micah is a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) and a Certified Java Programmer.
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backup of /boot partition and MBR on second disk rather than CD?
Is there any reason that the following wouldn't work as ab
alternative to using a boot CD to back up the
/boot partition and master boot record in case of a failure on the first disk:
- Maintain a copy of the boot partition on the second disk and a copy of the boot manager MBR in the MBR area of the second disk (presumably configured to use the boot partition on the second disk).
- In case of a failure of the first disk, use the BIOS to switch to booting from the second disk by toggling "bootable" bits on the partitions?
(Can BIOSes typically boot from a second disk?)
edit which /etc/fstab?
In your second test and its recovery steps, you say to edit
/etc/fstab to comment out the
/boot entry.
Does the boot fail after the RAID drivers/modules are
loaded, so that the volume containing
/etc/fstab is available?
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
using soft raid for swap is waist of CPU,
linux can do the same without soft raid:
just append to all swap partitions "priority=1"
and linux will use them as they were a part of striped soft raid.
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
In case of _real_ drive fail, Linux can (and, imho, will in 99.99%) panic.
In our case drive didn't responded, stupid scsi driver tried to reset scsi adapter, then kernel died...
Certanly, this is far better that lost of _full_ filesystem, but..
Hardware raid is _only_ choise for servers ...
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
I've used RAID and forced failures in dozens of ways and NEVER had a kernel panic. This is with adaptec and Sumbios controllers, and with basically unplugging the drive from a hot shoe while the server was running and serving requests (test environment, as well as actual failures in the real environment)
I did however, know a coworker using a HW RAID controller who had it mark two disks bad because the cable to them had slipped off while the server was being moved. Guess who had to rebuild and restore his whole RAID array because his $1000 RAID card wouldn't let him restart the RAID5 in place due to two bad drives.
P.s. the CPU load on my dual PIII 750 running flat out accessing it's raid arrays is about 1% of a CPU. If you have to worry about 1% of your CPU you have a lot of things on your plate ahead of that.
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
I don't think thats what the author was intending to achieve max performance. But more guarenteed availablity.
If you use the partitions directly in the fstab with priority=1 and a drive fails then the mache will probally go down since a portion of the swap space is now corrupt. However if they are on a RAID 5 setup the machine will just keep on humming. Assuming you don't have a 2nd drive failure.
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
Yes, You could do that, but then You loose HA, because swap will fail,
as soon a disk with a swap partition fails.
Performance wise it would be better to use raid 1 than raid 5 for swap.
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
Anybody has info of how to do this using User Mode Linux?
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
UML is part of the kernel, so is not affected by the RAID subsystem underneath of it. You just need to set up the RAID Disk system as explained, and then install a UML kernel, and way you go.
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
thats not totally true ...
a bug in the ubd driver in uml prevents raidhotadd from working correctly. the bug is known, and a patch is available to fix it (it will be in the next uml release)
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
If one is looking to truely run a HA server, would it not be better to make /boot a RAID-1 array, and use a Ramdisk to boot the machine and allow access to the Software RAID. Also, for better performance of the swap partition, rather than creating a software RAID disk for swap, set all the relevant partitions to swap space and set them to equal priority in /etc/fstab so that they are used as a RAID-0 array, without the overhead of the Software RAID system running.
Re: High Availability Linux with Software RAID
Having swap on RAID is a good idea, otherwise a single disk error
can make your machine crash.
I would tend to disagree with
I would tend to disagree with the whole concept of placing your swap on a raid partition.
See line #18 in the link below for more information:
We're not talking about strip
We're not talking about striping though, but mirroring, so if one drive dies, all the data written to swap doesn't go down with it, as that would be double plus ungood.
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What just took place between hockey and me has probably happened to every one of us at one time or another. I saw hockey at the Olympics, we started having a good time, kind of got swept up in the moment, things got crazy, and let's just say hockey and I went a little further than we should have.
Because the next thing you know, the Olympics were over. A couple of days had passed. The NHL was back. I was taking another look at hockey by the light of Tuesday and she wasn't looking the same as she had back in Vancouver. She was looking like the same tired, ugly, unsightly hag I'd broken up with years ago.
That's right — this isn't my first rodeo with hockey. It was a reunion for us. I used to love her. She and I have had a couple of flings and tried to make things work. She was my first boyhood crush back in the days of Bobby Orr, Gerry Cheevers and Phil Esposito. But then the WHA came along and broke us up. The Don Cherry era was a whirlwind romance, but Harry Sinden got jealous and split us apart. The Miracle on Ice was the greatest romance of my sports fan's life. And while I'll always cherish the memories, it was just a one-time thing. And there were other moments along the way, but none of them lasted very long either.
Because every time hockey and I started getting serious, something always came along and ruined it. And I've finally figured out what that thing is: The National Hockey League. The only thing that's really wrong with hockey is the NHL itself.
As that great philosopher Chris Rock once said, hockey is like heroin. Nobody just dabbles in hockey. You either never touch the stuff or it's your whole lifestyle. And I know a lot of guys who are hooked. True addicts. So for most of my adult life I've made it my life's mission to drive my diehard puckhead buddies insane by relentlessly tooling on their sport. It was I who proposed they switch from three 20-minute periods to 20 three-minute periods, with a Zamboni and end-change after every one. I said hockey would be better if they left a stationary puck in the middle of the ice and slid the nets around. And I suggested they scrap the goals altogether and just let guys skate, check and fight for 60 minutes. I said these things because I believed that the problem with hockey was the game itself. But I admit now that I was wrong.
Hockey is great. Truly one of the best sports ever devised by Man. I can see that now. The problem for me all these years is that just when things were really starting to get going between us, the NHL would come along like a vindictive mother-in-law and poison the relationship.
That's never been so apparent as it was watching the tournament in Vancouver. The difference between the hockey we saw at the Olympics and that dog's breakfast we're subjected to every night on Versus is startling. The action was nonstop. The play was frenetic. But it was also physical; this wasn't some mamby-pamby, no-stakes, gentlemen's-agreement-not-to-hit-each-other-then-grab-a-Molson-afterward exhibition like the NHL All-Star Game. The hitting was relentless. The checking was vicious. And more than anything, the stakes were high and it was reflected in the caliber of play.
So, like a lot of Americans who were caught up in the excitement of Vancouver, I tried to carry it over once regular hockey started back up. And when I opened my eyes, what I saw staring back at me across the pillow was the same Medusa face that caused me to grab my clothes and sneak out the back door without waking her so many times before.
Because let's be honest. Even the most hardcore puckhead — one of those humorless, uber-sensitive, Hockey News-subscribing diehards who defends their sport like Opus Dei guarded the Da Vinci Code — have to admit that 99 percent of all NHL hockey is pure dreck. Meaningless games no one cares about between teams no one pays attention to. Seriously, didn't Reg Dunlop and his boys take a nine-hour bus ride to face the Columbus Blue Jackets?
Gary Bettman and the rest of the bungling idiots who run the NHL have done the impossible. They've taken a sport in which you hand sharp sticks to a bunch of Canadian goons and Eastern Bloc thugs and send them out on an ice rink together, and made it boring. Just on pure bloodlust alone, pro hockey should have the entertainment value of an old Roman bull and bear fight. But what we usually get instead has all the excitement of passive-aggressive dinner night at my in-laws' house.
What the Lords of the Boards have done over the years is nothing less than take something I should care deeply about and ruin it through their own incompetence and mismanagement. And for that I can never forgive them. It's akin to what Hollywood has done with Seth Rogen movies; taking the humor of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the hilarity of "Superbad" and squeezing all the fun out until we're left with the joyless, annoying jackassery of "Pineapple Express" and "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" and they're not to be forgiven for it.
I should love hockey. I should be following the league like I do all the others. I should be able to name all the guys on the Bruins' fourth line or more than six NHL goalies. But the powers that be wrecked it for me and millions more like me.
They've run the league like a Ponzi scheme. Deriving their revenue not from putting a product on the ice anyone wants to see, but by finding some idle rich sucker willing to blow a piece of his inheritance on an expansion team. So, at least one-third of the teams in the league have no reason to exist other than to satisfy the midlife crisis of some douchebag who never saw ice before that wasn't in his martini shaker. Which would be no business of mine were it not for the fact that watering down the league this way has cut into my fun. And I take that personally.
What more proof do we need that the NHL powers that be have FUBAR'ed things than this business of putting games on Versus? I consider myself more of a sports fan than your average schmoe. But I kid you not, if you came over my house right now and asked me to turn on Versus so you could watch the hockey, I wouldn't be able to find it without the channel guide. Meanwhile, on pure muscle memory alone I can find you six channels that show nothing but World War II documentaries. The major difference is that while WWII had a lot more teams in it, it wasn't watered down and everyone was at least competitive. Except for the French.
But if you need more proof of their stupidity, short-sightedness and general asshattery, how about the fact that Bettman right now is trying to decide whether to allow his players to play in the next Olympics? He can talk up the threat of injuries all he wants. But this isn't the Sox losing Dice-K to Bud Selig's stupid company softball tournament in order to promote baseball in Chinese Taipei. This is the flipping Olympics. And all Bettman is really worried about are the crowds at the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, screaming their vodka-filled lungs out being contrasted with a Bruins-Coyotes game in which the TV mics can pick up the sound of people yawning and blowing their noses from the balcony seats.
Look, I understand that in a long season the league can't make every game as competitive as the Olympic tourney. I get that. But there's no excuse for taking one of the greatest sports in the world and turning it into something millions of hard-core sports fans have a hard time caring about. This might sound like one of those stupid ideas I like to come up with just to drive the puckheads insane, but maybe we ought to consider running Olympic hockey eight months out of the year and play the NHL every four years. It would work for me.
But until that day comes, what about us, hockey? We'll always have Lake Placid.
Greg and Chris talk with Mike Reiss from ESPN Boston in hour 2 of NFL Sunday to discuss a variety of offseason happenings with the Pats and throughout the league. Greg and Chris also get into the NFL Draft and where Mariota and Winston will go.
Mike Reiss calls the guys to talk about the offseason news for the Pats. He talks about the Pats/Jets tampoering fiasco, free agency, where he sees Ridley and Connolly ending up, if the Patriots would be interested in Reggie Wayne and more.
In the first hour of the show, Greg and Chris discuss the news coming out of the owners' meetings this week and rule changes. Belichick's blow-up over the league not wanting to spend on endzone cameras was well documented and the guys react. They also talk about the Jets ridiculous tampering charges, free agents still lingering out there, where Stevan Ridley will land and the RB position in New England. Dickerson and Price briefly discuss the adventures of Tom Brady before being joined by WEEI.com's Mike Petraglia to talk all things Pats in the offseason.
Brow Buff's Sam Packard and Ben Kichen break down Marcus Smart's unfortunate ball tap, debate leadership in the Celtics locker room, and rehash the great Kevin Love to Boston rumors.
Flannery joins Mut to break down the Isaiah Thomas trade to Boston and what it means for the Celtics this season and in the future. Paul also chats with Mut about the other deals that happened at the NBA's trading deadline
We talk to Chris Mannix from SI to break down the C's acquisition of Isaiah Thomas and the crazy trade deadline in the rest of the NBA.
Mut, Tomase, and Bradford kick things off talking about Shane Victorino taking offense to people reading into some comments he made about trading for Cole Hamels. They also discuss Blake Swihart and how soon he could be up if Christian Vazquez starts the season on the DL.
Joe Kelly joined the Hot Stove show where he talked about being ready for his next spring training start after a biceps ailment forced him out of his last outing, he talks about his NCAA brackets and how teammate Wade Miley has a perfect bracket still.
Mut, Bradford, and Tomase kick off this weeks show by talking to Red Sox pitcher Joe Kelly about his biceps recovery, getting ready for the season and his NCAA brackets. They then talk about the Red Sox depth at closer with Koji Uehara questionable for the start of the season.
Peter Chiarelli joined the Sunday Skate crew to talk about the Bruins playoff push heading into the final handful of games of the regular season. Chiarelli talked about avoiding some of the overly negative feedback he gets while realizing that the team does have real issues. He discusses what went down at the trade deadline and if he was happy with the outcome, Lucic having a down year and underperforming, the salary cap and if he considers it as big of an issue as it's been made out to be and what the future holds for the team.
It's a big hour #2 for the Sunday Skate dudes - they talk about the B's defenseman and what the future looks like at that position, with both moves the team can make and younger guys in the AHL. They also get into the Bruins philosophy on bringing guys up and sending them back down and how players deal with that. Finally, the boys are joined by Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli to discuss EVERYTHING.
The Sunday Skate crew gets the show going discussing the Bruins big, impressive victory over the NY Rangers yesterday. What can you take from that game? According to LB - Lyndon Byers - who called the guys from the road, not a lot. LB drops a dime on what was going on with the Rangers yesterday. DJ and Joe discuss Claude's lines and groupings and the importance of Ryan Spooner. They also get into Lucic, his contributions this year and if he can turn things around.
The latest edition of the highly rated segment.
The great Lisa Scherber joined us to discuss today's trip to Fort Myers with 46 Jimmy Fund patients.
D&C's favorite author joined the show to discuss his new book.
We hear more audio from Christian's day between the pipes. He did his best to try and intimidate the small children shooting on him.
After Christian gave away his children's dog, we find out that Lola eventually found a better home.
During the recess of the Aaron Hernandez murder trial, Ted Daniel describes the first half of Shayana Jenkins testimony.
Dale, Michael and Jerry Thornton discuss David Ortiz's self-penned piece which took on such topics as steroids, the media, his contract and more. And we get into a back and forth about the fan perception of him in Boston, and why he can be so polarizing at times, even with the on-field track record he has.
Dale, Michael and Jerry Thornton discuss some of the testimony from Aaron Hernandez' fiancee, and try and judge how her words might change the outcome of this case.
Dale and Michael talk Bruins after they managed to snatch defeat from the claws of victory and blow a late game lead to the Anaheim Ducks. With the playoffs still in question, the Bruins need more efforts like that, and more luck.
Chris Price joins Mut to talk about how Revis will heat up the Jets-Pats rivalry next season
Mut opens his show talking about the New York Jets filing tampering charges on the Patriots
Mikey, Mut, and Lucy are talking about all things New England sports, the Red Sox spring training, more Darrelle Revis and Jets talk, and some Bruins mixed in.
Ben and Adam finish the odyssey that is the history of Wrestlemania. Wrestlemanias 21-30 are discussed and analyzed.
Mike Mulloy joins Chris in the studio to talk Raw and Wrestlemania.
Brow Buff's Sam Packard and Ben Kichen break down Marcus Smart's unfortunate ball tap, debate leadership in the Celtics locker room, and rehash the great Kevin Love to Boston rumors.
The latest edition of the highly rated segment.More from this show
D&C's producers took over for the lazy hosts who declined to do this weeks podcast. Sausage needs to join a dating site.More from this show
The top stories of the day as recounted by Kirk Minihane.More from this show
Ortiz writes a column defending his career.More from this show
Christian does not impress the high school girls hockey team.More from this show


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The Blue Jays will also be taking part in the Celebration Station Fall Festival. The festival will be held on Saturday, October 27 from 10am to 12pm. This is a perfect chance to bring the kids out for some Halloween fun. Come join our mascot D-Jay as we celebrate Halloween with a pancake breakfast, pumpkin decorating, free video games, candy, and mini-golf. This wonderful event is made possible by the great people of Celebration Station.
For more information on this and other holiday tips and tricks, contact Kathi Beckman
Stay informed with all things related to the Dunedin Blue Jays via our social media sites (Facebook and Twitter).
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