Last week, over brunch, two friends and I were discussing journalism and politics and we swung around to the subject of Robert Mueller, James Comey and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At one point I remarked how uncomfortable I was cheering on the FBI. My friends agreed. Despite the image portrayed in television shows (including a 2018 reboot) and movies—all of which I classify as MAGA Porn*—the FBI, from its inception during the Red Scare of the ’20s, extending through the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s to today has always been the tool of the 1 percent.

Alleen Brown and John Knefel, writing in The FBI Tried to Use the #MeToo Moment to Pressure an Environmental Activist Into Becoming an Informant for The Intercept, detail one such example:

Julie Henry was jogging when she got the call from the FBI. She didn’t recognize the number, which had a Washington state area code, but she answered anyway. The FBI agent identified herself as Kera O’Reilly, and said that Henry wasn’t in any trouble. O’Reilly was there to help.

The phone call, which Henry received on February 22, 2018, brought her back to an internal conflict that she thought she’d finished wrestling with two years earlier. O’Reilly wanted to talk to Henry about her online account of sexual assault, which was strange if you consider that the offense is a crime over which federal agents rarely have jurisdiction. But it made perfect sense considering the person she wanted to discuss: Rod Coronado.

Agent Kera O’Reilly couldn’t care less about Henry. She had a more important agenda and Henry was the wedge. Brown and Knefel explain:

“We’re in the throes of the #MeToo moment,” O’Reilly told Henry, and that had inspired her to reach out. Henry hung up as quickly as possible, sharing nothing. But O’Reilly promised she’d call back.

“My loyalty always has to be with the movement, because the FBI could do so much damage,” Henry told The Intercept. She had no interest in assisting the agency in investigating activists, but she worried that ignoring O’Reilly’s questions about sexual assault could risk endangering other women. “Something was going to happen either way, and I felt, and still feel, completely responsible,” she said. “Whether it’s nothing that happens and he continues to hurt people, I feel responsible for that.”

After O’Reilly left a voice message a few days later, Henry called her back, despite the risks. “I know this is dangerous without having a lawyer. But I have to do this for me,” Henry recalls thinking. “I wanted to ask her why.”

O’Reilly repeated many of the same things she had said before, but one thing stuck in Henry’s head. “‘I understand, it may be hard to talk about the details; we can talk about other things,’” Henry recalls the FBI agent telling her. “And every time she said that I was like, that’s what she really wants.”

After she hung up, Henry Googled O’Reilly. She found a Seattle Times story describing O’Reilly’s years at the bureau, and her previous job as a counselor for sex offenders. But what really caught Henry’s eye was a report in The Stranger, a Seattle newspaper, that described how O’Reilly and two other FBI agents had visited six climate activists in July 2013 and asked “about opposition to tar sands development and brought photographs, hoping the activists would identify the people in them.”

“This has nothing to do with me,” Henry realized. “She wants to get to everyone.”

Not everyone, just the people who threaten the billionaire class. The entirety of Brown’s and Knefel’s piece is instructive.

*24, Blue Bloods and Hawaii Five-0 are a few recent examples that I point to for their gratuitous display of unconstitutional extrajudicial abuses, including torture, that make a mockery of our legal system.

The ultimate bulwark against corruption—both private and political—and finally fascism is an informed and outraged citizenry. Despots of all kinds know this and have always made, and continue to make destruction of that bulwark a top priority in their quest for power.

Here in the United States of America, more so than any other nation, we have enshrined that protection in the first amendment to our constitution where the founders declared that: Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….

While Congress shall not, market forces, if allowed free rein, can and do. They have, in fact, done so in Orwellian ways that have, in the words of former Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger, broken the news. In an excerpt from his book, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, Rusbridger lays out how we got here.

While I find the piece compelling as a journalist, the real case that he makes compels me as a citizen. I provide his final paragraphs below, but everyone should make the vital investment of reading the piece in its entirety.

Rusbridger, writing in Who broke the news? for The Guardian, concludes:

The ultimate defence of journalism is that it remains a public good. But how do we measure, or value, such a public good at a time when, in the words of the political philosopher Michael Sandel, “markets – and market values – have come to govern our lives as never before … Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out non-market values worth caring about.”

A decade ago, talking this way about news would have been dismissed as the bleating of liberals–the despised “subsidariat” who weren’t commercial enough to produce decent journalism that the public wanted to read. (As James Murdoch infamously claimed in 2009, “The only reliable durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.”) But now, faced with the overwhelming scale, popularity and sheer turbo-charged commercial power of the Silicon Valley titans, there is now an outcry across the media against the havoc that free markets have inflicted on the traditional press.

After two decades of disruption, it may be possible that none of the old conventional business models can still support serious news in the public interest. But the challenge has never been so urgent: we need the essential work of journalism–the calling that should, at its highest, separate lies from the truth.

When an attorney for the President of The United States of America can declare, with a straight face, that Truth isn’t truth, we have moved well past the hypothetical.

My list of stories focused on the Colin Kaepernick’s fight for his right to protest police brutality and murder is long. While an ever-growing number of supporters have joined his protest, there has been little good, personal, news for the sidelined quarterback. That has changed.

Monique Judge, reporting in Colin Kaepernick—1, NFL—0 for The Root, ledes:

Colin Kaepernick won the first of many fights in his legal battle against the NFL on Thursday when the arbitrator in the case denied the NFL’s request to dismiss the grievance entirely.

Despite opponents attempts to paint Kaepernick’s protest as anti-American, anti-military, anti-American flag or even anti-Star Spangled Banner, the obfuscation and attempts at distraction aren’t working. This is a peaceful protest, protected by the first amendment, in every sense. Judge continues:

Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem in August 2016—while he was still quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers—as a means of protesting police brutality, the extrajudicial killing of black people by police and racial inequality.

His silent, respectful protest gained momentum as other players across the league and across American sports joined him by kneeling or speaking out against inequality. By the time the 2017 football season started, more players had begun kneeling during the anthem, creating a huge controversy in the NFL as some fans, team owners, politicians and even the president of the United States called the protests “disrespectful” and misrepresented them by saying the players were protesting the anthem itself.

When Kaepernick became a free agent in March 2017, he was not picked up by any other teams. In October 2017, he filed a grievance against the NFL for collusion.

Now all that remains to be seen is the outcome of the case.

So far, Kaepernick is winning.

And our constitution is winning.

So, the governor’s race in Florida went full-on ignorant bigot faster than my dog can snatch up a fallen burger. Stephen A. Crockett, reporting in Well That Didn’t Take Long: GOP Opponent Warns Florida Not to ‘Monkey This Up’ by Voting for Andrew Gillum in Governor’s Race for The Root, explains:

Less than 24 hours after Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum’s historic win in becoming the Democratic nominee for Florida governor, his opponent and Trump favorite, Ron DeSantis, is already pulling out the racist bullhorn to rile up deplorable Floridians.

During a segment on Trump’s personal YouTube station, Fox News, DeSantis, the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 6th Congressional District, called his opponent “articulate” and warned voters not to “monkey this up” when going to polls in November.

Crockett labels, I think correctly, the comfort that citizens and politicians feel in expressing their fears of loosing their white privilege: The Trump Effect. He writes:

Because Trump has burned a cross in America’s lawn, racists, or those with racist leanings, are now emboldened by the highest office in the land. And this isn’t a bad thing. Remember in the past when we had to sort through coded language to find where a politician’s heart truly lay? Now, because of Trump, racists feel free to spout racist rhetoric ad nauseam. We no longer have to guess.

Floridians who go into the voting booth and pull the lever for DeSantis know exactly who they are getting and so do the rest of us. And the world will be better because of it. Expect more of this kind of talk as the race heats up because, first off it’s Florida (which, I’m totally fine with sawing off the map, Bugs Bunny style, and allowing the entire state to float into the Atlantic). And, because this is who DeSantis is and he doesn’t have to hide it. And that’s a good thing for the rest of us because now we know exactly where he stands.

While I’m sure that DeSantis is dancing back his comment, pretending that his dog-whistle was not a bigoted slur but rather a call for voters to not play around with the important race for governor, that is, of course, bullshit. America’s long history of associating people of color with monkeys and apes, to steal a phrase from William Faulkner, isn’t dead. It’s not even past.

The picture above is of the White House interns for this summer. Mouse over the photo to see the summer interns for President Barack Hussein Obama’s final summer in the White House. The enlarged photos may help you to see just how President Donald John Trump has made our White House—where he is not a resident, but our guest—white again.

Part of me wonders if Ralph Nader was being a bit ironic with his list of the ways the Democratic National Commttee can completely cock-up the November elections. I don’t have any problem with any of the items on Nader’s list; they’re all valid, even vital, but give Democrats too long of a list and they’re sure to drop the balls because they can’t focus.

Personally I would restrict the list to three: No. 3, No. 5 and No. 8. Yes, the rest are good, but we have to stay on a tight message, full stop.

Nader, in Fifteen Ways the Democrats Can Lose the November Elections, writes:

1. Focus on Donald Trump’s personal scandals, the Russian interference, and Trump’s outrageous and hugely distracting daily tweets.

2. Overlook what Trump’s henchmen are specifically doing to cause more deaths, injuries, and disease. Ignore this administration’s efforts to scuttle health and safety standards; stop law enforcement against corporate outlaws who pollute the environment, marketplace, and workplace; take federal cops off the Wall Street crime beat that is eating into your savings, while speculating with your pensions and mutual funds. Avoid all the above, while you’re dialing for dollars for your campaign coffers.

3. Give lip service to raising the federal minimum wage. Do not mount a tough, authentic campaign with details and timetables to help the 30 million Americans still making less than workers made in 1968, adjusted for inflation.

4. Avoid talking about the need to crack down on corporate crooks who are bleeding Americans dry—to the tune of one trillion dollars a year.

5. Refuse to put forward a Canadian style healthcare for all system, with free choices of doctors and hospitals. Single payer would result in life-saving outcomes and come in at half the per capita cost of the current price gouging, wasteful, claim-denying monstrosity ruled by big insurance companies, big drug companies and big Continue Reading »

While no one should be breathing a sigh of relief, David French, writing in The Department of Education Wildly Overestimates the Number of School Shootings for National Review, makes a valid point:

But this mistake highlights two things, one related to the challenge of school security, the other to the perception of public risk.

First, there is the needle-in-a-haystack challenge of law enforcement and school administrators, the burden of hardening every target and following every lead on the tiny, remote chance that one of the leads is real and one of the schools is actually a target. It’s the old adage applied to terrorism: School security has to be perfect every time, while the school shooter only has to get lucky once.

Second, our children are, thankfully, safer than we thought — safer, even, than the government told us. That is not a reason to ignore red flags or to blithely blow through warning signs in the assumption that everything will be alright. It is good reason for parents to send their kids to school without fear.

In other words, we should live our lives recognizing the proportionate risks. We can take precautions and live with confidence. So the next time you hear an alarming statistic, take it with a grain of salt. The government, it turns out, is not always right.

We simply can’t trust that there are no errors in the numbers.

This, of course, takes nothing away from the protests calling for sensible gun-control laws.

In a separate, but related, post French concludes:

The media can accurately report the threat, but math and statistics are meaningless compared to the perceptions created by your own child. Only when school shootings recede into a distant (and terrible) American memory will that psychological dynamic materially change.

The first premise of French’s conclusion—that at some time in the future school shootings will recede from memory—is problematic. Prior to Columbine, school shootings had been in decline for a decade. I haven’t checked the numbers, but I suspect that they are still less than they were in those halcyon days when white kids weren’t dying.

The problem then, as now, is access to firearms. Until we actually enforce the second amendment and allow only members of a well-regulated militia to have access to semi-automatic weapons, nothing is going to fade except, perhaps, our optimistic views of the future.

*Yes, the Russians said it first…

This is my favorite line from Stephen Crockett’s Auntie Maxine’s GOP Opponent to Speak With FBI After Tweeting Most Racist Fake Letter Ever: If there was a Pulitzer awarded for scaring the shit out of white people, Omar Navarro would win the 2018 award hands down.

The progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party has received yet another boost. This time the win came in the Democratic Party primary in Florida where candidate Andrew Gillum defeated a field that was rich on cash but poor on ideas.

Maryam Saleh, reporting in Andrew Gillum Brings it Home: Tallahassee Mayor’s Upset Is Latest Insurgent Victory for The Intercept, writes:

Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum pulled off a shocking upset in Florida’s Democratic primary for governor Tuesday night, defeating the establishment favorite, Gwen Graham, by a narrow margin of about 40,000 votes.

With nearly all ballots counted, Gillum held a 2.8 percentage point lead over Graham, with 507,000 votes to her 466,000.

Throughout the campaign season, Gillum trailed in the polls behind Graham, a former congressional representative, and Philip Levine, the former mayor of Miami Beach. The Tallahassee mayor saw a surge after a late-stage endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who traveled to Florida to stump for Gillum earlier this month. As of Monday, Gillum was polling in the No. 2 spot.

His platform includes support for “Medicare for All” and criminal justice reform proposals like the legalization of marijuana; bail reform; and a repeal of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which gained national infamy after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. He’s also called for injecting $1 billion into public education and hiking the corporate tax rate.

Gillum frequently reminded voters that he was the only non-millionaire running for governor. He was successful in part because of the financial backing of liberal billionaires George Soros and Tom Steyer, who poured more than a million dollars into the race through their organizations, the Open Society Foundation and NextGen America, respectively.

Despite that largesse, he was thoroughly outspent in what was an incredibly expensive election. He closed out the campaign with a $4.1 million war chest, compared to Graham’s $7.8 million and Levine’s $31.7 million, according to campaign finance reports.

If you’re not registered to vote in November, get off your butt and file your papers. If you are registered, make sure that everyone you know are; and then make sure they vote.

Back at the end of the July, writing in WHEN YOU’RE DEEP IN A HOLE, STOP DIGGING…!, I praised Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for taking a principled stance and calling out those who wanted football players to shut and pick the cotton play the game.

Now, less than a month later, Abdul-Jabbar is back with What sports have taught me about race in America. He begins:

As the Guardian’s series on race and sports starts today–and we mark two years since Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the national anthem–I am reminded that whenever an NBA player comes close to shattering one of my dusty old records, eager journalists contact me to ask how I feel. Here’s how I feel: At the time I set those records–most points scored, most blocked shots, most MVP awards, blah, blah, blah–I celebrated them because they confirmed that all my hard work and discipline since childhood was effective in me achieving my goal of becoming the best possible athlete.

But that wasn’t my only goal. The even greater significance those records had to me then, and has to me even more now, is in providing a platform to keep the discussion of social inequalities–whether racial, gender-related, or economic – alive and vibrant so that we may come together as a nation and fix them. Historically, that has been the greatness of the American spirit: we don’t flinch at identifying our own faults and using our moral fortitude and ingenuity to become a better nation. In honoring that spirit, I pay tribute to two of my most important mentors, UCLA coach John Wooden and Muhammad Ali. It is Ali’s voice I often hear in my head: “When you saw me in the boxing ring fighting, it wasn’t just so I could beat my opponent. My fighting had a purpose. I had to be successful in order to get people to listen to the things I had to say.” All sports records will inevitably be broken, but the day after they are, the world won’t have changed. But every day you speak up about injustice, the next day the world may be just a little better for someone.

If you go, read the rest, before you doing anything else today, then the world will be just a little better. Abdul-Jabbar quickly gets to the nut of his message when he writes:

Right now, sports may be the best hope for change regarding racial disparity because it has the best chance of informing white Americans of that disparity and motivating them to act.

The problem is that this is not the message that those who profit from disparity want the public to hear.

The message is, has always been, do what I say and you’ll earn a slice of the pie. Get uppity and you’ll be out on your butt. The problem, of course, is that the slice, when all is said and done, is almost always damn thin. Abdul-Jabbar continues:

[Those who are so incensed at players’ protests] want black athletes to be grateful that they’ve been given a seat at the table and to therefore ignore their brothers and sisters who have little hope of achieving that kind of success.

That success of some black athletes has a dark side for African Americans. Some see sports as a path for their children to escape the endless cycle of poverty. Parents pour all their energy into training and grooming their child to become a professional athlete, sometimes at the expense of their academic education. Yet, the odds of success are so slim that they are doing more damage to their child’s future. Even those who make it to the pros usually have a short career: the average in the NFL is 3.3 years, and in the NBA 4.8 years – and most don’t earn enough from those short careers to retire on. We can’t promote professional sports as a real hope any more than we can endorse the lottery as a career strategy. That’s why athletes are so motivated to speak out about the unequal opportunities that leave people desperate to cling to the hope of even a distant longshot.

I love sports. I love to see an athlete perform a physical feat so amazing that I marvel at what we are capable of. I love to see teams work together, to act selflessly in pursuit of a greater goal than individual glory. Sports energizes me and makes me hopeful about humanity.

But I am even more energized and hopeful when I see those same athletes speak out against injustices because I know that in doing so, they are risking the careers that they spent their whole lives working towards. Their willingness to risk everything in order to give voice to the powerless – despite all efforts to silence them – makes me proud as an athlete and as an American.

Abdul-Jabbar concludes with a 1905 quote from our greatest American writer who wrote in The Czar’s Soliloquy (page 324):

Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

While Abdul-Jabbar uses only the bit I’ve placed in bold, I think the whole quote—indeed, Twain’s entire essay—is significant because in many ways we are still tied to the medieval patriotism decried by that representational Russian mother.

In my educational tool box I carry a number of articles or book excerpts—my personal favorite is Chapter 11 of The Autobiography of Malcolm X—that I think may help my students to re-evaluate their present and help to shape their future. Abdul Jabbar’s piece certainly deserves to be in the file.

So, I thought I could be clever and modify the headlines on these compilations, but after only 10 modifications, I’m running out of ideas, hence, the use of roman numerals. That I needed less than 20 days to reach this point is a telling reality in of itself. I realize that there is no uptick in these bigoted and xenophobic acts (there may actually be fewer today than 10 years ago) but I just wasn’t aware of how bad the situation was because they were not part of the daily narrative of news organizations. You can’t fix a problem that you’re not aware (or choose to be willfully ignorant) of.

The murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, like the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, has galvanized a generation to action, yet the list continues to grow.

Black Patients on Pain Medication Are More Likely to Be Tested for Illicit Drugs, New Study Finds

Video: Police Arrest Black Man for Loitering at His Own Apartment Complex

Fatayi Jomoh Was Handcuffed for Bouncing a Basketball, Now His Mother Is Speaking Out

White Woman Who Falsely Accused 2 Black Football Players of Rape Rolls Her Eyes Throughout Sentencing Hearing

Is Racism the Reason Why HBCUs Have to Pay More for Loans Than Other Schools?

1-800-WYPIPO: Breaking Down Trump’s Tweets About Black Folks

2 Men Who Attacked DeAndre Harris in a Charlottsville Parking Garage Last Year Have Been Sentenced to Prison

Audio Recording Catches Georgia School Superintendent Using N-Word Like It’s 1799

White Man Accused of Urinating on 5-Year-Old Black Girl, Calling Her N-Word

Previously…

Although my friend and sometime political angel talks glowingly about him, I’ve not been a fan of Joe Biden. I couldn’t point to any specific reason; he just didn’t seem to connect to me.

After watching Stephen Colbert’s Times Talk, in which he speaks at some length about his relationship with Biden and watching the above inteview, I’ve moderated my view and am thinking much more about Citizen Biden.

The interview led me to the opinion piece that Biden published in The Atlantic one year ago tomorrow. In ‘We Are Living Through a Battle for the Soul of This Nation’ Biden wrote:

If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation.

The giant forward steps we have taken in recent years on civil liberties and civil rights and human rights are being met by a ferocious pushback from the oldest and darkest forces in America. Are we really surprised they rose up? Are we really surprised they lashed back? Did we really think they would be extinguished with a whimper rather than a fight?

Did we think the charlatans and the con-men and the false prophets who have long dotted our history wouldn’t revisit us, once again prop up the immigrant as the source of all our troubles, and look to prey on the hopelessness and despair that has grown up in the hollowed-out cities and towns of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and the long-forgotten rural stretches of West Virginia and Kentucky?

We have fought this battle before—but today we have a special challenge.

Today we have an American president who has publicly proclaimed a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and Klansmen and those who would oppose their venom and hate.

We have an American president who has emboldened white supremacists with messages of comfort and support.

This is a moment for this nation to declare what the president can’t with any clarity, consistency, or conviction: There is no place for these hate groups in America. Hatred of blacks, Jews, immigrants—all who are seen as “the other”—won’t be accepted or tolerated or given safe harbor anywhere in this nation.

That’s the America I know. That’s who I believe we are. And in the hours and days after Charlottesville, America’s moral conscience began to stir. The nation’s military leadership immediately took a firm stand. Some of America’s most prominent CEOs spoke out. Political, community, and faith leaders raised their voices. Charitable organizations have begun to take a stand. And we should never forget the courage of that small group of University of Virginia students who stared down the mob and its torches on that Friday night.

The greatness of America is that—not always at first, and sometimes at enormous pain and cost—we have always met Lincoln’s challenge to embrace the “better angels of our nature.” Our history is proof of what King said—the long arc of history does “bend towards justice.”

A week after Charlottesville, in Boston, we saw the truth of America: Those with the courage to oppose hate far outnumber those who promote it.

Then a week after Boston, we saw the truth of this president: He won’t stop. His contempt for the U.S. Constitution and willingness to divide this nation knows no bounds. Now he’s pardoned a law-enforcement official who terrorized the Latino community, violated its constitutional rights, defied a federal court order to stop, and ran a prison system so rife with torture and abuse he himself called it a “concentration camp.”

Twelve months later, are we better?

I’ve been a strong advocate of the Take A Knee movement from the very beginning and as both a Navy and Army veteran who was proud to repay this great nation for all that I’ve greatly benefited from, I’ve never been in any way offended or felt disrespected because I swore and oath, twice, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. There’s a reason that our right to free speech and to peaceably assemble are enshrined in the first of our constitutional amendments.

From where I stand, those who would penalize anyone for peacefully exercising their constitutional rights are the enemies I swore to protect our constitution against.

They are the true threat to our great nation.

We need real patriots like Beto O’Rourke willing to stand against the forces that would shred our constitution.

This week past I invested three days in tearing down my floor-to-ceiling bookcase—so as to be able to paint the wall behind—reassembling the the same once the paint was cured and then engaged in a well-needed reorganization of my books. In the course of that project I spent some time reading (at Oliver Burkeman’s suggestion) Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free by Damon Young.

There was much I enjoyed and learned from the book, but on page 107 Young spoke directly to my project at hand when he wrote of the Roman philosopher Seneca:

He read good books, careful not to become distracted by too many (restlessness… is symptomatic of a sick mind)—he noted reminders, warnings, suggestions and other helpful passages, using the insights of distant comrades to perfect himself.

I went in search of Seneca’s full statement and found the passage in the second of his moral letters to Lucilius—On Discursiveness in Reading. There he wrote:

Judging by what you write me, and by what I hear, I am forming a good opinion regarding your future. You do not run hither and thither and distract yourself by changing your abode; for such restlessness is the sign of a disordered spirit. The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.

Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.

Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction. Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read.

“But,” you reply, “I wish to dip first into one book and then into another.” I tell you that it is the sign of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied, they cloy but do not nourish. So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before. Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.

This is my own custom; from the many things which I have read, I claim some one part for myself. The thought for today is one which I discovered in Epicurus; for I am wont to cross over even into the enemy’s camp, – not as a deserter, but as a scout. 6. He says: “Contented poverty is an honourable estate.” Indeed, if it be contented, it is not poverty at all. It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. What does it matter how much a man has laid up in his safe, or in his warehouse, how large are his flocks and how fat his dividends, if he covets his neighbour’s property, and reckons, not his past gains, but his hopes of gains to come? Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough.

Farewell.

Farewell indeed. All my life I have wrestled with too many books. Stacks and stacks of books. Last summer I gave away a full half of my books and I still have more than I really be able to read before I become fish food. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have returned library books in mass, swearing to have no more than two, OK, three, books on my reading pile at any one time, only to see that stack grow and grow and grow. (I’m at least in good company, President Thomas Jefferson suffered from the same malady.)

Seneca’s lesson gives me—I know not for how long—a different focus. In that spirit I’m returning to the library: Ballots and Bullets by James Robenalt, Reporter by Seymour Hersh, Nothing Special by Charlotte Joko Beck (I read only 52 pages); South Carolina: A History, by Walter Edgar and The New Rules Of Lifting For Life by Lou Schuler. That leaves me with Young’s book, Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson and A Charlestonian’s Recollections by D.E. Huger Smith.

That list does not, of course, include the books I own which I won’t bother to list.

Oh to live until I’ve read all the books I desire!

When the news broke that federal prosecutors granted David Pecker, the chairman and CEO of American Media (publisher of National Enquirer) immunity I thought, OK, what’s the other shoe? While I do not think that the news today that Dino Sajudin is now free to tell his story is of any political interest—and may not even be news to First Lady Melania Trump—I do have to just shake my head at the sheer volume of rats abandoning the S.S. Trump.

Angela Helm, writing in Ex-Trump Doorman Who Claims Trump Has Love Child Is Now Free to Tell His Story for The Root, explains:

It looks as if the jaws of justice are slowly, but steadily squeezing the breath out of Donald “Can’t Keep It in His Pants” Trump as an ex- Trump World Tower doorman has been released from a “catch and kill”-contract, and can now come forward and speak about an alleged affair Trump had with an ex-housekeeper which supposedly resulted in a child.

Dino Sajudin, the former doorman, is reportedly now able to talk about a contract he entered into after negotiations with American Media Inc., publishers of the National Enquirer, on Nov. 15, 2015.

CNN has exclusively obtained a copy of the “source agreement” between Sajudin and AMI, which is owned by David Pecker, and reports that the contract states that AMI has exclusive rights to Sajudin’s story but does not mention the details of the story beyond saying, “Source shall provide AMI with information regarding Donald Trump’s illegitimate child…”

The contract also states that Sajudin received $30,000 for the story about a month after the contract was signed, through an amendment. The agreement notes that Sajudin’s silence should last “in perpetuity” and that if he breached that provision, he would be responsible for making a $1 million payment to AMI.

“Mr. Sajudin has been unable to discuss the circumstances regarding his deal with American Media Inc. and the story that he sold to them, due to a significant financial penalty,” his lawyer, Marc Held told CNN.

“Just recently, AMI released Mr. Sajudin from the terms of his agreement and he is now able to speak about his personal experience with them, as well as his story, which is now known to be one of the ‘catch and kill’ pieces. Mr. Sajudin hopes the truth will come out in the very near future.”

I suspect that what the Feds really want are all the other catch-and-kill stories. I do not think that the Trump family will be too disturbed. Trump will have locked the mother, and her child, into non-disclosure agreements just as, I’m sure, he has done with his first two wives. I don’t think there are any family secrets here, but I’m equally certain that Trump will rue the day that he decided, as a lark, to run for president because the tarnish on the Trump brand is turning to serious corrosion.

I love the first words out of Colbert’s mouth because I wanted to ask the same question. :)

I’m dyslexic. I didn’t discover this until I was in my 20’s and by that time I had, thankfully, developed skills that allowed me to work around that disability. One of those skills was skimming while I read.

Generally skimming is not good, but I could read 600 words a minute without effort and was able, for other reasons, to maintain acceptable grades in school. This did not become a problem until I was in college the second time—1980-’84—when I was much more invested in my education that I had been for my two quarters in 1974. I compensated, again, by putting a ruler on the page that forced me to read one line at a time. This drastically reduced my reading speed to about 20 pages an hour (about half my normal speed) but my comprehension shot up. My grade point average—3.79—showed, at least to me, that the technique worked.

All of that was more than 30 years ago and my students face another problem: reading on electronic screens and the news is not good.

Maryanne Wolf, exploring in Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound for The Guardian, writes:

Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be causing a variety of troubling downstream effects on reading comprehension in older high school and college students. In Stavanger, Norway, psychologist Anne Mangen and her colleagues studied how high school students comprehend the same material in different mediums. Mangen’s group asked subjects questions about a short story whose plot had universal student appeal (a lust-filled, love story); half of the students read Jenny, Mon Amour on a Kindle, the other half in paperback. Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.

Educated by multiple-choice worksheets and tests, my students rarely actually read anything. They skim, looking for key words to answer particular questions, and then move on. They understand texts as if they were viewing the information through a pinhole. The goal is not to learn, the goal is to pass the quiz or test and move on to the next assignment.

They reduce the text to the simplest level; they, as Wolf writes:

…use an F or Z pattern when reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot through the rest of the text. When the reading brain skims like this, it reduces time allocated to deep reading processes. In other words, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of the reader’s own.

When complexity is lost, the world becomes black and white, right and wrong, and there is no room for nuance because the reader has no idea what nuance even is.

The problem is not their fault. The problem is educational malpractice driven by myriad forces; none of which have any interest in actual education.

There is no one solution and, given the ubiquity of electronics, there may not even be possible on a universal scale.

We may simply be fucked.

By all accounts, this has not been a happy week in our White House, but we have turned so many corners in the past two years that no one can feel complacent that our political nightmare will turn out well for the nation, or, indeed, the planet. I never thought that I would find myself rooting for traditional conservative values, but that is the place I find myself. Taverner was right.

David French, musing in Stop Blaming Investigators More Than Criminals for Trump’s Woes for National Review, writes:

At the end of a yet another tawdry, scandalous week, I’m seeing the same thing I see at the end of every other tawdry, scandalous week. Lots of folks on the right continue to believe that the true scandal is not that the president may be a felon or that he surrounded himself with actual felons, but rather that their conduct has been investigated at all.

While every investigation should be bounded by the law and Constitution, it’s past time to get over the obsession with the very existence of the Mueller investigation (or with the spinoff Cohen investigation in the Southern District of New York.) No one forced Donald Trump to hire the collection of crooks and grifters who orbited his campaign. As Trey Gowdy has pointed out, there would be a Mueller investigation without the Steele Dossier. And as I’ve written before, we cannot forget that at the very time when Russia was interfering with our election to help Trump, the candidate surrounded himself with advisers who possessed problematic Russian ties.

If this doesn’t get French on President Donald John Trump’s enemies list—or maybe he’s already there—I don’t know what could.

The Trump administration’s continued efforts to distract the nation (mostly his base really) from the investigations aren’t working and regardless of the chants from his fanfests.

I found this comment from jgrig563 telling:

I wonder what voters think when they read French and Goldberg constantly scold them like little children. I wonder how nice it must feel to be so morally and intellectually superior like Goldberg and French. It must be nice to feel so much more enlightened than the average gop voter. On the other hand it must be frustrating to know that all your debating, articles, books, interviews will be a dot in the ocean compared to some of the good things trump has done.

Cognitive dissonance will be the end of the GOP.

Here are a few more of the 50 items on McIntosh’s list:

I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.

I can chose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.

I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.

I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.

My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.

I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social

I’ve carried a copy of McIntosh’s article in my educator tool box for years and regularly hand out copies to my students.

Knowing that there is difference between hitting a triple and being born on third base is important.

The most fervent booster of all things Cleveland that I ever knew personally was George Nemeth. George was a high energy thinker and disciple of Ed Morrison (brother of Hunter Morrison).

During those heady Brewed Fresh Daily (the initials were not a coincidence) day George held us all together and generally he and I agreed on most topics. Cleveland’s future, however, was not one of them. That changed sometime in 2011.

George Nemeth, booster turned basher.

Now that multimedia maestro George Nemeth, who for years has been part of the conversation about how to improve Cleveland, has moved at least part-time to California, he’s hurling bombs toward the North Coast.

His new blog : CLE+ SUCKS.

“I’ve had it,” reads the initial post. “With all the lame, indefensible cliches of why all of you LOVE CLE+. Let me tell you brothers and sisters — this city is the pits.”

He says he plans to post videos and links about why Cleveland is no plum.

“Maybe then you’ll understand that it’s time to change. Or get outta dodge.”

Tipoff asked Nemeth, proprietor of the web page “Brewed Fresh Daily,” if he hadn’t gotten his coffee yet.

He said he’s serious about slamming Cleveland and hopes it shatters some rose-colored glasses.

“The real goal is to get the Cleveland cheerleaders to pay attention to people like Tyler (a line cook at Parallax who moved here from CA) who can’t get out of here fast enough,” he said.

He also said “cupcakes” in Cleveland, the pollyannaish civic cheerleaders, float high-minded ideas that “don’t amount to a hill of beans in a town where inept leaders have presided for decades over a bankrupt, demoralized, de-motivated (and shrinking I might add) populace that care more about sports than their neighbors.”

Yeah, George would be all over Blockchain. If it were not for the Bitcoin bubble—and yes, Bitcoin is a bubble that will, in the way of all bubbles, burst—we would not be talking about Blockchain as the next big thing public-money grab. Thankfully, Sam Allard is still here and writing.

Sam, reporting in What the Hell is Blockchain, Anyway? Notes from #Blockland for Scene, lays out the story, but six paragraphs in the middle of Sam’s piece grabbed my attention:

Take a look at this conversation in Crain’s from March, before the first local Blockland meeting and before Jon Pinney’s June City Club speech that kicked a lot of these conversations into a sustained high gear. It’s a sponsored article—that is, a paid advertisement—from Benesch, the region’s third-largest law firm, which incidentally employs only five minority partners of its total 82.

Benesch attorneys Sean T. Peppard and Michael D. Stovsky were speaking about blockchain to promote their firm’s engagement with related issues.

Their take was that blockchain’s applications in the business world had a lot to do with contracts.

“Imagine a manufacturing company that wants to use 3D printing vendors all over the world to manufacture thousands of highly engineered parts for it,” said Stovsky. “Rather than the inefficiency of having face-to-face negotiations with hundreds or thousands of vendors, the parties can agree in an electronic environment on the specific contract terms.”

That electronic environment sounds a lot like a much more efficient, and more popular, existing technological application, namely email, but anyway. Here’s Peppard, elaborating on what he sees as the impacts on Northeast Ohio:

“Imagine a situation in which a large manufacturer can reduce its own capital expenditures by farming out manufacturing to 3D and 4D [Do 4D printers—as a commenter to Sam’s story observed—print time? JH] printers all over the world,” he said. “These are companies that can manufacture precision parts to spec better, faster and cheaper—all while maintaining the integrity of the contracting process and the intellectual property rights of the company in the specifications and other materials provided to the vendors.”

This is a hypothetical paragraph, but it sounds like some Cleveland employees may be out of work in the scenario it envisions. And if one of blockchain’s applications will be to make outsourcing local labor even easier and cheaper than it already is, that’s a step in the wrong direction for the region’s economy. (This is only one case, of course, but it’s the one that leading local lawyers saw fit to mention in an advertisement on the topic.)

Roldo Bartimole, still very much the cogent observer of all-things-Cleveland, left this comment on Sam’s piece:

Thanks for all the words Sam to flesh out the new corporate grab bag.

They call it Blockchain but it’s surely Bullshit. Another hand in the pockets of ordinary people who should just shut up because they can’t possibly understand the beauty of their betters newest gimmick.

Read every word but don’t understand the part that doesn’t go with SUBSIDIES from the taxpayers.

Please keep up the questioning because we don’t have another news outlet.

I attempted to call bullshit on Blockchain myself during a Sound of Ideas broadcast back in July, but there’s only so much you can do when you call into a radio program.

There is nothing innovative about yet another Innovation Center in Cleveland.

This is just yet another example of the cupcakes—the men behind the curtain—grabbing all the public money they can.