By ann summers
“Christ reigns in such a way that the Emperor who persecutes Luther for the Pope is forced to destroy the Pope for Luther”
— Luther on the Sack of Rome in 1527
Authors
Recent Comments
Plunder the Lox: Trump would let Daesh sack Rome
Posted in Capitalism, Celebrity, Christianity, Conservatives, Democracy
Tagged 2016 Presidential Candidates, Catholic Church
1 Comment
Word Cloud: PASSAGE
by Nona Blyth Cloud
There are 93 days this year between Summer Solstice on June 21, and Autumnal Equinox on September 23. Today is day 53 of that in-between time. Even as temperatures scorch us, we are closer to summer’s end than its beginning.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), our most famous American woman poet, is much loved and often quoted, yet she remains out-of-focus. We have the poems – glimpses of her extraordinary inner life – and facts about her outer life, but she remains elusive, a figure of myth and legend.
Her poems are inconsistently reproduced – punctuation and paragraph breaks added, even word order changed. It’s a struggle when most of the poems were hand-written in journals. You think you know a poem, but you may find a slightly different poem in one source from the poem you’ll find in another. She often didn’t give titles to poems. Editors numbered them, usually with Roman numerals, which don’t always match either.
Rachel Hadas (1948 – ), daughter of renowned Classical scholar Moses Hadas, inherited her father’s gift for languages. She’s translated Tibillus, Baudelaire, and the modern Greek poets C.P. Cavafy and George Seferis, among others. Her busy life as a gifted poet, professor, essayist and translator was turned upside down when her husband was diagnosed with dementia at age 61, and she became his primary care-giver. During the years before her husband was moved into a facility, reading and writing were Hadas’ safe haven. “Poetry has always been a way of coping for me … since my father died when I was 17, I’ve turned to poetry not only to express my feelings … but consistently to figure out what I was feeling at a given time.”
Posted in Poetry, Word Cloud
Tagged Change, Emily Dickinson, Passage, Rachel Hadas, Summer
2 Comments
So, this seven-foot sad clown walks into a bar….
by Chuck Stanley
Puddles the sad clown. Puddles of Pity Party fame. Then he begins to speak….
Bailout deal allows Greek oligarchs to maintain grip – The Guardian
Greek PM resigns – Snap election in September
The Guardian summed up my annotated version of Greece’s Third MoU with this title. Click here for the Guardian’s webpage or read on…
View original post 863 more words
Posted in Countries, European Union
Tagged Alexis Tsipras, Greece, Greek Crisis, Yanis Varoufakis
1 Comment
Losing it at the movies is now so much 19th Century Security Theatre
New literal forms of Security Theater make going to the movies so 19th Century where life is a panopti-diorama, old chum.
By ann summers
From the theatrical large-scale hand-cranked diorama giving urbanized music hall culture new life to the post-WWII sprawl of multiplexed drive-in theaters, we are in a New Age of Mechanical Reproduction for the work of art, namely the mobile device asynchronously delivering on-demand program content given the expansions of bandwidth, wireless network proliferation, all despite net neutrality. Movie theater ushers will be checking your bags and purses, but don’t worry you can still talk back to the characters on the screen.
We are soon to reach the apotheosis of Security Theater no longer content to infest airport terminals in the form of uniformed low-wage petty thieves but now with movie theater bag checks soon to be common. Making them less rigorous than the metal detectors in schools is perhaps a ploy to make sure that you eat overpriced junk food in the name of constraining stochastic(sic) individuals (aka violent non-state actors) from shooting up the place, or at worse making the place smell like unAmerican cuisine.
Posted in Animation, Art, Capitalism, Celebrity, Civil Liberties, Constitutional Law, Democracy
14 Comments
Question of the Week: August 18, 2015
In countries with socialized health care, one price a society has to usually pay for such a valuable social service is accepting some limitations on torts related to medical malpractice. This protection for doctors in all but the most egregious violations ostensibly serves to encourage people to enter the profession and controls costs by limiting liability. Given the inherently litigious bent American society has taken over the last thirty years, this naturally flows into the discussion about universal health care.
Posted in Polls, Question of the Week
24 Comments
Back-Rank Checkmate of Hillary Clinton
by Bob Stone
18 U.S.C. 1924 reads: (a) Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
As Michael B. Mukasey astutely noted in his article in The Wall Street Journal:
Note that it is the information that is protected; the issue doesn’t turn on whether the document or materials bear a classified marking. This is the statute under which David Petraeus—former Army general and Central Intelligence Agency director—was prosecuted for keeping classified information at home. Mrs. Clinton’s holding of classified information on a personal server was a violation of that law. So is transferring that information on a thumb drive to David Kendall, her lawyer. (Clinton Defies the Law and Common Sense, Michael B. Mukasey, 8/14/2015)
Clinton hit the trifecta under this law by having the server maintained by an IT Firm that was not cleared by the DSS.
Posted in 2016 Election
Tagged 2016 Presidential Candidates, Email security, Hillary Clinton
39 Comments
How posse comitatus or Commadus’s posse is already here
by ann summers
Regardless of the degree of derangement, lone gunmen are always the decentralized form of terror, whether domestic manslaughter or random carnage. The problem despite some neologistic tendencies by the MIC to organize fear or procurement of weapons against fear, is that random violence is not necessarily predicated on its instruments and that its real solution is of course the degree of communitarian cohesion or recognition of the social contract or even fear of the rule of law. Posse vigilantism has always been with us, whether it had white sheets or chose less bedroom-based apparel for their lynchings. In some cases we now worry about how we can at least video-document such behavior when it’s operating under color of law especially on people of color.
Word Cloud: CHORTLE
by Nona Blyth Cloud
As an antidote to all the preliminary Primary Screaming dominating the news, I highly recommend Sarah Vowell’s wonderful books, which are a combination of Tours of Historical Sites, Vowell’s Interactions with her Family and Others, and her Musings on History and Historical Figures.
Sarah Vowell photo credit Montana State Univ.
Sarah Vowell is my favorite kind of writer, a Meanderer. She will get you to her point, but the trip there goes through lots of whimsical places. Her Titles and Chapter Headings alone are worth the read – books like The Wordy Shipmates, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, Assassination Vacation, and Unfamiliar Fishes.
In The Partly Cloudy Patriot, the chapter “God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass,” is about, among several Other Things, her trip to Salem, Massachusetts, which turned the Salem Witch Trials into a Tourist Industry:
“On July 19, 1692, a woman named Sarah Good stood on the gallows and answered the minister making a last-ditch effort to get her to confess to witchcraft. She famously proclaimed, to the reverend and, I’m guessing, the town, “You are a liar; I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Could she have any idea then that, three centuries later, bloodthirsty tourists would sip her life story from a souvenir shot glass? What would she think of the local ice cream parlor going by the name Diary Witch? Or that the high school football team is called the Salem Witches? Or that a cartoonish witch logo adorns the town’s police cars and newspaper?”
Instant Poll: Grand Juries
The Sacramento Bee is reporting that California Governor Jerry Brown has signed SB 277 into law. Those of you outside California might not have heard of SB 277 but that is likely to change. SB 277 bans the use of grand juries in cases where police officers use lethal force. This is in response to the rash of police shootings we’ve seen in the media that go unpunished when the oft secretive (and easily manipulated) grand jury process has returned no true bill (a.k.a. opted not to prosecute). This blog has seen a fair amount of the controversy surround Ferguson and other like incidents, much of it around the grand jury process itself.
Posted in Instant Poll
Tagged California Governor Jerry Brown, grand jury process, police shootings
9 Comments
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 