A welcome note this morning from poet Sherry Chandler. She writes:

Dear Friends,

As many of you already know, Main Street Rag will be publishing my third book, Talking Burley, to be released in February

The book retails for $14.00 but, for a limited time, you can purchase it for $8.50 by placing an advance discount order through the MSR Online Bookstore.

My author’s page contains all the information necessary to place your order along with some sample poems and advance praise.

This price is only available for orders placed online before the book goes to press. Books purchased early will not be shipped early.

If you don’t like buying online, Main Street Rag will take checks. Because processing has to be done by hand, check sales are offered for a flat rate of $12.50 per book, including shipping (and sales tax in North Carolina). No further discount is offered for quantity.

Those of you who asked me to save you copies, I can’t make sales until I’ve got copies in hand in February, so I suggest you take advantage of this discount, especially if you want more than one.

Thank you,

Sherry

I’ve ordered mine.

Good attorney always caution their witnesses to answer only the specific question asked and then shut up. Never, never offer more information than is asked for in the question. Politicians are masters at this. They will, if they have half a brain and have not been ambushed, listen carefully to the question asked and then offer a minimal response before proceeding to the talking points that support their agenda.

This is one of the reasons that Republicans assiduously avoid town hall meetings. They don’t want to appear as evasive as they are when speaking to people who actually can chose to vote, or not vote for them in the next election.

Ralph Nader has some ideas about the tough question we should be demanding answers to. Nader, in Questions, Questions Where are the Answers? writes:

In an oft-reported exchange between Gertrude Stein, an American widely known for her wisdom and glittering 1920s Parisian literary salon, and one of her earnest admirers, the admirer asked her–“What are the answers, Madame Stein?” She replied “What are the questions?”

Within our media/political/corporate culture of self-censorship and taboo topics, we should restate Ms. Stein’s rejoinder—what are the questions of gravity and relevance that are chronically unasked?

Here are some questions that should be asked, until answered!

1. Why are Supreme Court nominees, including Judge Brett Kavanaugh, not asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee about corporate crime, tyrannical, one-sided fine print contracts, weakened tort law and U.S. violations of constitutional and international law affecting all Americans?

2. Why do reporters and elected and regulatory officials decline to ask questions about peer-reviewed studies concluding a minimum of 250,000 Americans are losing their lives every year due to preventable problems in hospitals? (see Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s May 2016 report). Five thousand fatalities a week on the average plus many more preventable injuries and illnesses should be an ongoing subject Continue Reading »

On 8 December 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) slipped Section 111 of Title I, Division J, of the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 108-447) and a new national holiday into our collective consciousness: Constitution Day. Our Constitution is the single most important document in Human History; read it all.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Please keep reading…

The U.S. Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution Day.
Celebrate Constitution And Citizenship Day.
A Day Set Aside for the Constitution.

I never leave home without my pocket-sized copy of our Constitution.

The school system I attended—Warren Local—had an had a common high school for grades 9-12 and several satellite schools for grades K-12. The system had a pseudo junior high program that moved us from having one teacher for the year to rotating among specialists in Math, Science, English, &c. Seventh grade was a huge transition period, but by the 8th grade we thought we had the system worked out. Then the hormones hit.

I don’t remember anything quite so dramatic as Gordon’s meltdown, but we probably came close.

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing…

Employee’s Racial Slurs, Videos of White Student Declaring Her Love For N-Word Causes Uproar at Alabama High School

‘Safe Space for White Students’ Backfires at University of Maryland

#StephonClark: Brace Yourselves, Sacramento’s Mayor Says Shooting Investigation Is Nearing Conclusion

Sounds About White: Admitted Sexual Offender Avoids Jail and Keeps Teaching Certificate

2 Different Versions of Amber Guyger’s Story Appear on 2 Different Warrants Related to the Shooting of Botham Jean

South Carolina Refuses to Evacuate Prisons in Hurricane Florence’s Path

Everything You’ve Been Told About Botham Jean is Wrong

As Ugly As President Trump Is, He’s Just A Mirror For White America

Previously…

ENT: Insomnia – Dr Hugh Selsick from Camden CCG on Vimeo.

Generally speaking, I have not slept well for 30 years or more. I have no problem falling asleep—I’m out in less than five minutes of my head hitting the pillow, but I’m back up on a good night after six hours and after four hours on a bad night. By mid-afternoon my butt is dragging and my ability to focus is shit after noon. I nap when I can but that has never been a good solution. I’ve tried all the usual sleep hygiene recommendations and even a CPAP machine at one point (the mask drove me nuts) but the problem has persisted.

This morning Simon Parkin’s long-read on The Guardian—(caution, always beware of headlines ending in question marks): Finally, a cure for insomnia?—grabbed my attention. While Parkin’s piece offers a good introduction, the nut is his examination of Dr. Hugh Selsick’s Insomnia Clinic. Parkin writes:

“We have very little at our disposal,” Clare Aitchison, a GP with a practice in Norwich, told me. “In a 10-minute consultation it’s impossible to teach people to break bad habits.” With so few options, doctors resort to advisory cliches. Take a hot shower before bed. Eat a banana. Switch off your phone. Read a book. Masturbate. These titbits often have some basis in science or logic. But when the insomniac has tried them all (sometimes simultaneously) where do they turn?

There is, it turns out, a London clinic that has achieved remarkable results. Founded in 2009 by Hugh Selsick, a South African psychiatrist, the Insomnia Clinic in Bloomsbury has revolutionised treatment for sleeplessness in the UK. As Britain’s only dedicated insomnia facility, more than 1,000 patients have passed through the clinic at a rate that has quickened to, in 2018, 120 new casesa month. According to the clinic’s figures, 80% of patients report major improvements, while almost half claim to have been fully cured. This success has earned the clinic an enviable reputation and a waiting list to match; patients can wait two years for a consultation.

At the root of Selsick’s approach is a revolutionary assertion that has led to a new approach to treatment, quite unlike the old wives’ tales with which, in the absence of a coherent medical solution, every insomniac will be familiar. Where, for decades, insomnia has been treated as a symptom of another issue (if indeed it has been treated at all) Selsick contends that insomnia is not merely a symptom, but a disorder in its own right. This remains an unorthodox view. Yet, for Selsick’s patients, the approach does more than fix a category error: it provides a life-changing validation, a route out of helplessness, a way of getting to sleep. [Emphasis mine, JH]

I have to think that the vast majority of my current health problems—fighting weight gain, dealing with memory lapses, irritability—are all related to my sleep problems. My doctor’s at the Veteran’s Administratin have been working with me, but now I have something new to bring to my primary-care physician next week when I have a regular appointment.

In my junkmail box this afternoon.

Good day My Dear Friend

I am Mr. VINCENT GUENNOU a Bank Staff of Ora bank of Togo. We have a business tycoon customer who invests immensely in oil and gas business in Togo some years back. He deposited a huge amount of dollar with our bank last twenty years ago and till now nobody has come to claim the money.

I want us to make a deal to the favor of both of us to become millionaires;

I will send the money to your bank account through ATM CARD and any money deposited to your account should be shared 20/80%. You will take 20% of any money deposited to your account and send back the 80% to me and my colleagues. I will continue to send it until these billion of dollars finished; I hope with that you will be richer than you can imagine.
.
If you agreed to make these deal with us, kindly forward this information to us so that we will start sending the money immediately Contact me with my private email (vincentguennou1@gmail.com)

1* Front and back picture of your ATM CARD

2* SSN (social security number)

3* Date of birth, phone number

4* Card address

5* Maximum deposit limit allowed, maximum withdrawal limit allowed

In other not to be afraid or think that I may have other things in mind to do with your ATM Card bank account, you can empty all your money in bank account; and transfer all your money to another account or you withdraw all your money before sending the information above.

All needed from you is to have deal which will favor both of us. And trust

Regards

Mr. Vincent GUENNOU

As a nice touch Vincent [Le] Guennou is a real person.

Of course, these emails cost nothing to send and that scammers are still sending these out decades after the first emails appeared is testament that they work. Even if only 0.000001 percent of the targets respond, the reward is well worth the cost.

Did you know, however, that the Nigerian Prince grift has been around for more than a century and that it began with 14-year-old American Bill Morrison?

I had the occasion last week to revisit Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract With America for an Op-Ed I’m writing on implementing real term limits. So, when Ralph Nader’s question regarding a contract with America for 2018, my ears went up. With only a little more than 50 days to the mid-term elections, Democrats need to read what Nader has to say very, very carefully lest they go down in flames for what Nader, an I, see as more of the same chronic washed-out drivel. Nader, rightly, asks:

What does the Democratic Party stand for? The big question persists! Typical of the Democrats, they delegated this question to political consultants who came up with the vapid slogan, “A Better Deal.” The specifics under that moniker are too general and, as a result, too easily dismissed by the public.

The Democratic operatives need to take a page out of Newt Gingrich’s playbook when he toppled an anemic Democratic House of Representatives in the stunning 1994 elections and became Speaker of the House.

During the 1994 Congressional campaign, Gingrich’s party released a “Contract with America.” It was so anti-American that comedians called it a “Contract on America.” For example, the “Contract with America” attacked the fundamental right of having your full day in court, based on falsely asserting there was an “endless tide of litigation.” That was only one of the ways Gingrich pleased the big corporations.

House Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and her deputy, Steny Hoyer, just can’t put forward a compelling agenda. They seem unable to speak assuredly and Continue Reading »

Act 2, Gamify the Midterms: Can We Reward You For Voting? and
Act 3, Gamify the Midterms: Can We Make A Good App?

Download This Is Not A Game, The Game now…

I’m on page 327—only 50 pages from the end—of what may be Walter Mosley’s magnum opus: John Woman. (I say may be only because I have no idea what Mosley will write next.) I’ve paused there because on that page he wrote:

…John’s mind opened wide. Abruptly a world he couldn’t imagine came fully into being, like Athena emerging from Zeus’s brow or the atomic bomb exploding over Nagasaki.

“Is this a trick?” Cornelius Jones asked.

What caused we to pause? What made me muse is this a trick, a mistake or literary jujutsu?

Nagasaki.

The atomic bomb dropped by Bockscar’s bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, on 9 August 1945 was the world’s third nuclear explosion and the last such detonation to be used in war. The first such explosion—code named Trinity—less than a month earlier, on 16 July, had prompted Julius Robert Oppenheimer to recall the line from the Bhagavad Gita: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. The second bomb—and the first used in war—was dropped on 6 August by Enola Gay bombardier Thomas Wilson Ferebee.

Why did Mosley choose the third bomb and not the first or second?

My immediate inclination as a writer would have been to pick Trinity because that was the bomb that brought thermonuclear war fully into being, like Athena emerging from Zeus’s brow. Barring that, Little Boy, the bomb drop on Hiroshima would be the next likely candidate because that decision resulted in the deaths of tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of civilians and innocents. That could have been our Athena moment.

So, why did Mosley pick Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb?

In this moment I think he chose the final bomb because it was the first atomic bomb, knowingly used in the annihilation of humans. Trinity was a test. Oppenheimer and his team knew, theoretically, what would happen in the desert, but at 0529, the theory became reality. Likewise, what would happen with the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was unknown for two reasons: first, the bomb’s design was different from Trinity and second, Trinity had been a static test. Hiroshima would be the first dynamic test.

On 9 August we both knew the bomb (because it was the same design as Trinity) would work and what the result would be. At Nagasaki all innocence was lost and we truly became Shiva, destroyer of the World.

Or maybe Mosley just fucked up.

I make no mystery of my admiration of Walter Mosley as a writer, I have said and written much less about Mosley the thinker. His brilliance there is amazingly apparent in his latest work: John Woman.

From the beginning I knew that this work was different—Mosley chose Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVII as his epigraph—but I stopped on page 117 when I read:

For the next few hours John read Colonel Chabert by Balzac, on an electronic tablet. There wasn’t enough light for a real book and John liked e-readers; they seemed somehow secretive to him. He’d read the novel years before but adhered to his father’s edict—real reading is rereading.

Herman usually added that there is more history, more truth in fiction than in most so-called history books. Our dreams and fantasies get it right even when they don’t know it.

I’m only on Chapter 18, page 254, but I’ve already realized that when I hit the final page that I will immediately go back to the first page—where Mosley writes: Luci Napoli’s family name had been Tartarelli before her great-grandfather migrated from Naples to the Lower East Side.—and begin again.

Reading is, indeed, rereading.

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing…

Why the Serena Williams Cartoon is Racist, Sexist Trash, Explained

Has Valerie Scogin, the Teacher Who Said Black People Should Go Back to Africa, Ever Taken a DNA Test? Because, Well…

The NRA is So Mad About Thomas the Tank Engine’s Black Friends, They Put a KKK Hood on Him

Dallas Cop Who Killed Botham Shem Jean After Intruding into His Home Identified [Updated]

Barry Jenkins on Racism: ‘If It Can Happen to Me, It Can Happen to Anyone’

When You Hate a Black Man’s Silent Protest So Much, You Ban Nike In Your City

Walking Pile of Fecal Matter George Zimmerman Allegedly Threatened Beyoncé over Trayvon Documentary

Family, Mourners Remember the Life of Botham Shem Jean, Killed in His Own Home by a Dallas Cop

#StephonClark: Family Files $35 Million Wrongful Death Claim With City of Sacramento

Ex-Cop Convicted in Murder of 15-Year-Old Jordan Edwards Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison

Police To Seek Manslaughter Charge Against Dallas Cop Who Shot and Killed Man After Mistaking Victim’s Apartment for Her Own [Update]

Chicago Police Will Have to Notify Dispatchers Whenever They Point a Gun at Someone: Report

Sacramento Police Shoot and Kill Teen They Say Pointed a Pellet Gun at Them [Updated]

Previously…

From Cleveland State University:

Plain Dealing is a book of essays by 25 accomplished Cleveland-area journalists. It’s a book of stories, many never told before. It’s a first-person account of journalism in Cleveland, life in the newsroom, the issues and events these journalists covered, and the characters they worked with and met. The stories begin in the 1950s and go up to 2013, covering the post-World War II era through the days when Cleveland was a three daily newspaper city, then two, then one. The book ends with the mass layoffs and resulting decline that ushered in “digital-first” age.

Previously: A MUCKRAKER COMES TO CLEVELAND…

Over my lifetime several of my friends have taken their own lives long before they might have been expected to die from natural causes. They all had many years, many decades of life before them. In every case they did so believing that the pain of continuing was too great and in every case they had previously been diagnosed with a brain disorder that hindered their thought processes.

This is the challenge society faces when considering physician-assisted suicide: how do we determine any criteria for a doctor and their patient to use when making an irrevocable decision? Can the decision be as mundane as Camus suggests?

[Suicide] is merely confessing that [living] “is not worth the trouble.” Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering. p. 5-6.

From The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

There can be usefulness in suffering. Where do we draw the line?

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

So, despite all the presidential bluster, disregarding all the owner posteruring, there will be no ban or policy (or, I expect, further official mention of) the exercise by football players of their First Amendment right to speech and protest.

Lauren Theisen, reporting in NFL Will Not Have National Anthem Policy This Season for The Root, writes:

Back in May, NFL owners terrified of Donald Trump approved a new jingoistic national anthem policy decreeing that “all league and team personnel shall stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem,” before games. The new rule essentially banned any kind of visible protest—such as Colin Kaepernick and many other players’ kneeling to protest racial injustice—short of staying in the locker room while the song played.

Thanks to pressure from the NFLPA—which was not consulted about the policy—and complaints from players, the NFL stood down and suspended the anthem rule before any games were actually played, as the two sides talked it out. Now, according to Adam Schefter, those talks aren’t going to lead to any anthem policy for the 2018 season. Via ESPN:

The NFL is not expected to implement a new policy on the national anthem this season, league sources told ESPN, no matter how many meetings and conversations occur regarding the topic.

The new policy is going to be no policy—at least for this season, according to sources.

“Too many people have stances too strong to figure out a compromise,” Schefter writes, but the result of this standstill between owners who want a policy and players who don’t is obviously not a compromise. As it stands, the outcome is a rare but clear win for the NFLPA. And the NFL continues to be so bad at this.

Gee, you suppose they didn’t want to give up all those free uniforms and advertising dollars?

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.

That was, and continues to be, the real way We The People made, and make, America great.

I caught the tail end of Eric Garcetti’s talk at Cleveland’s City Club on Friday as I was driving home. I don’t listen to many City Club talks, but I heard enough to convince me that investing 60 minutes in listening to the entire presentation made sense.

Sam Allard, reporting in Eric Garcetti, Mayor of Los Angeles, Comes One Step Shy of Announcing 2020 Presidential Candidacy at City Club of Cleveland for Scene, ledes:

In a speech that seemed like it might easily culminate in the announcement of his presidential candidacy, Eric Garcetti, the Mayor of Los Angeles, diagnosed American political ills and celebrated the resolve of American cities at the City Club of Cleveland Friday afternoon.

Garcetti, who in Los Angeles has enacted legislation to raise the minimum wage, created a $120 billion infrastructure spending plan, kick-started the largest homelessness and affordable housing initiatives in the country and created a coalition of American Mayors to battle climate change, reminded the City Club audience what a driven and energetic city administrator looks like.

When the audience rose in a standing ovation at the conclusion of Garcetti’s remarks, the applause seemed to gasp: We want one of those! [Sam’s emphasis, JH]

I was equally impressed. Clearly there’s blood in the water and Democrats—like Garcetti and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and, and (yes the list is long—are hitting the ground to build momentum when the election is still 26 months away.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. If Usain Bolt could run a marathon at his 100-meter pace—9.58 seconds—the world record for a marathon–42,195 meters—would be 1:07:22 instead of the current record of 2:02:57. That is, of course an insane comparison. Yet, we act as if we can maintain the pace we set for ourselves ruing the 480 minutes we supposedly spend at work for the full 960 minutes we supposedly spend not sleeping each day.

We need to pace ourselves, not only during the day, but during the week and the year. We need constructive, intentional downtime, not feverish hurry for diversion.

Because it’s opposed to professional life, which is serious and important, free time becomes a kind of pointless play or desperate refueling; what Dewey described in Human Nature And Conduct as a feverish hurry for diversion, excitement, display, otherwise there is no leisure except a sudden torpor. pp. 50-1

From Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide To Being Free by Damon Young

Enjoy your 40-hour work week, paid holidays and vacation time? Thank a union member.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.