I don’t know how many times I’ve repeated this to myself, to other writers and here on Have Coffee Will Write, but I believe, in my deepest soul as a writer the Frank Herbert’s Litany Against Fear is the strongest tool any writer must have at their disposal.I

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t quite so effusive, but he didn’t shy from talking, and writing, about fear.

About fear: I heard a Hindu holy man sat at a lecture a couple of years ago that it was crucial to learn how to make decisions without allowing fear to become involved—and that fear liked to hitch rides on all sorts of words and images. When fear intrudes on your thinking, it may be an old fear, hitching a ride still, but which need not really concern you any more.

—to Nanny Vonnegut on 18 May 1978, p. 258

While I am in a distinct, if not minuscule, minority, I still think of David Lynch’s Dune as the greatest Science Fiction movie that I’ve ever watched, and re-watched. (I’m going to pop my Blu-Ray copy in this afternoon.

Found in my electronic chapbook under KURT VONNEGUT: LETTERS…

Act 1: Culture Wars: Episode 69 and Act 3: The No-Wave Wave…

No one can be a reader of the Science Fiction without having, as a minimum, an awareness of The Three Laws of Robotics. Some, perhaps, are not aware that Asimov formally stated a fourth (labeled the Zeroth Law—a law the preceded and precluded the next three.)

Ralph Nader, in Unmasking Phony Values Campaigns by the Corporatists, lists 10 values that he attributes to the people of Kentucky, but he misses the zeroth value: Independence.

Now, I getting this second hand—based on my West Virginian roots—and I would welcome anyone actually living in Kentucky (Sherry?) to say this better, but here goes: Kentuckians don’t need no outsiders telling them what their values are.

With that caveat stated, Nader writes:

Corporatist candidates like to talk up values without getting specific and without drawing attention to how their voting records put the interests of big financial backers against the interest of most voters. This election season is no exception, from Florida to Texas to California to Ohio to Wisconsin. In 2004, I wrote the following article for the Louisville Courier-Journal comparing Kentucky values to the starkly opposing record and behavior of Senator Mitch McConnell.

All current candidates for elective office who stand for “we the people” and believe that big corporations should be our servants, not our masters, may find this list of values applicable in their states. Corporatist opponents’ voting records, positions, and their campaign contributors’ interests can be clearly compared with civic values and Continue Reading »

I generally like Robert Reich. A lot. I’ve had a few minor disagreements with him over the years—the North American Free Trade Agreement has always been one—but generally he has his head screwed on right. That’s why when I was looking for someone to replace Ta-Nehisi Coates on my blog roll (because he just hasn’t been writing much lately, he has other projects) I went back to Reich.

The video above caught my attention because I am in total agreement with him about taking President Donald John Trump out of the equation when discussing politics at the kitchen table level. Here are the ten suggestions Reich offers to cross the divide:

1. Don’t avoid political conversations with people who are likely to disagree with you, even in your own family.

2. Don’t start by talking about Trump.

3. Make it personal.

4. Ask them why they think all this has happened.

5. If they start blaming immigrants or African-Americans, or elites, or Democrats, or even Obama–stay cool.

6. Gradually turn the conversation into one about power–who has it, who doesn’t.

7. Ask them about the roles of big corporations and Wall Street.

8. Get a discussion going about how the system is organized, for whom, and how it’s been changing.

9. Then get to the core issue: Do they think any of this has to do with big money in politics?

10. Oh, and don’t forget to use humor.

All great advice. When we live in our echo chambers, we cease to listen. One mouth, but two ears: we should listen twice as much as we speak.

Conversations are the building blocks of community.

Occupying Arthur Witfield by Charles Johnson, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

On a Sunday night in early October, just moments after I dropped off a fare at the Lucid Jazz lounge in the University District, I got the call from dispatch to pick up my last passenger.

The title reminded me of the movie Waking Ned Devine (you’ll see how if you read the story). I continue to enjoy both how Johnson writes and tells a story. I find myself savoring passages in the way I am told Italian opera goers would savor the songs; demanding encore after encore in the middle of the opera, paying much more attention to the music, the performers, than the story arc. I like to think I’m having the same kind of fun here.

I did not go to Æthelflaed’s funeral.

This is the 11th, and latest installment in Cornwell’s Saxon Tales (renamed The Last Kingdom Series).

The flu brought me to Cornwell. When I was down for three days a friend recommended that I watch the Richard Sharpe videos—then on VHS—and I was hooked. I own a complete set of the Sharpe novels and when I need to just get away for a while I pull a volume off the shelf and just read at random.

Back in college I took a course on historical research writing and chose the role of military technology in the 19th century. I focused on the evolution from muskets to rifle and a memoir of the 95th rifles was the backbone of my paper. My knowledge from that helped me to enjoy Cornwell’s work all the more.

Netfilix will air the third season of The Last Kingdom series sometime later this year.

Wyrd bið ful aræd.

I am, of course, on record as being no fan of the House of Saud. When ever I get in to a conversation about the Middle East I often recommend T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars Of Wisdom to provide a base of understanding and insight.

So, $110 billion? Really? Well, actually, the number is less. A lot less.

Mary Louise Kelly, reporting in Fact Check: How Much Does Saudi Arabia Spend On Arms Deals With The U.S.? for NPR, tries not to snort coffee out her nose:

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: So 110 billion – is that the state of the current arms deals between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia?

GREG MYRE: No, it is not. The president seems to be mixing some old contracts, some current contracts and some hoped-for contracts. We spoke to some people who study this, including Bruce Riedel at the Brookings Institution. He noted that, during the Obama administration, the Saudis bought about $112-billion-worth of U.S. weapons. So they – that was in the – that ballpark. But those contracts are mostly completed by now. And here’s what Riedel said when I asked him about the state of sales with the current administration.

BRUCE RIEDEL: Since Donald Trump has been president, the United States and Saudi Arabia have concluded less than $4-billion-worth of arms agreements.

So, what’s a $106 billion dollar fudge among depots?

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing…

#CornerstoreCaroline Wants to Press Charges Against the Mother of Falsely Accused Child

When Aunties Attack: Video of Cop Manhandling Black Child Goes Viral

Why Do White People Feel Entitled to Police Black People?

Michigan Man Who Shot at Black Teen Asking for Directions Found Guilty of Assault

When White Women Attack: White Woman Calls Cops on Black Boy for Sexual Assault, Clash of the Beckys Ensues

Washington State Abolishes the Death Penalty, Finding the Punishment ‘Racially Biased’

Harvard Honors Colin Kaepernick, Others With W.E.B. Du Bois Medal: ‘Love Is at the Root of Our Resistance’

Education, Not Discrimination: NAACP Legal Defense Fund Asks Florida Schools to End Biased Hair Policies

Is That All You Got? Georgia Organizations Were Ready for Black Voter Purge by the GOP

Previously…

I found this video after reading and listening to discussions about the Joan Jett documentary Bad Reputation. Nearly 40 years after I bought my first Joan Jett album, she still rocks.

Idols Of The Cave by Charles Johnson, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

State my name for the record?

All right. Wahab Khan.

Do I understand why I’m on trial? Do I understand the seriousness of the charges against me?

Yes, sir, I do. But sometimes I wonder if it really happened, or if someone told me a story about it.

This is the sixth story in Johnson’s even-dozen collection of short stories. I pretty much stopped reading short stories during the ’90s because they were just too experimental and lacked the central element that’s right there in the description of the form: story.

Johnson’s works tell great stories first and indulge in creative urges second.

More writers should do the same.

I have a new tool to make the case. Thank you Tom Tomorrow!

You know that no one is buying your bullshit when the National Review compares your story to a Monty Python skit.

Jonah Goldberg, writing in What If I Told You…? explains:

Over the weekend, my wife and I were talking about how the Saudi assassination team must be terrified right now. After all, if the crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, and he feels the need to deny it, the lives of those goons aren’t worth a plug Riyal. And if he didn’t order the murder, and these guys freelanced it, well, ditto.

It looks like that’s the way things are heading. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Saudis are thinking about saying that “rogue killers” took out Jamal Khashoggi in an interrogation gone wrong.

President Trump seems to be working from the same talking points as well.

Some minor strategic-communications advice for the Saudis: Either say that’s what happened or don’t say it. Floating a trial balloon that you might say it telegraphs the impression that you’re just fishing for a cover story. And it’s a pretty crappy cover story. What kind of “interrogation” ends with the subject’s death? Not the kind with very pointed questions and a bit too much shouting. That’s not to say that it can’t be true. But framing it in an almost Monty Python–esque “Would you believe…?” way is almost the perfect way to get people not to believe it.

With billions in arms sales on the line, don’t expect our president to do anything even remotely right.

Follow The Drinking Gourd by Charles Johnson, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

After escaping from slavery in Alabama, he went back willingly into he bleak, macabre world of slaves once again.

I discovered a minor mistake on page 64 where Johnson writes:

Fowler tore away the planks of plywood, pulling so hard the muscles in his neck bulged, and cutting his right hand on a rusty, square nail.

Since the story is set in 1855, 10 years before plywood was introduced plywood was introduced into the United States, the use of the material here is an anachronism.

‘S’all good, man’: How Better Call Saul became superior to Breaking Bad by Stuart Heritage.

Heritage concludes:

Sure, Breaking Bad was good. But the prospect of the next episode never made me feel sick with equal parts excitement and apprehension. Better Call Saul has just done this 10 times in a row. If you ask me, it is the superior series. Fight me.

No fight here. I agree that Better Call Saul is the better show, but neither rises (yet) to the level of my No. 1 Homicide: Life on the Street or my No. 2 The Wire.

Sharon, a 46-year-old single mother of three teenagers, came to see me about her increasing forgetfulness. Working full-time and managing her household was becoming overwhelming for her, and she was misplacing lunchboxes, missing appointments and having trouble focusing her attention. She was worried because her grandmother got Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 79, and Sharon felt she might be getting it too–just a lot younger. I said it was highly unlikely that Sharon was suffering from early-onset dementia, but I agreed to evaluate her.

Whenever I consult with people about their middle-aged pauses, I first check for physical conditions or medication side-effects that might be affecting their brain health. Left untreated, high cholesterol, hypertension and other age-related illnesses can worsen memory, increase the risk of dementia, and shorten life expectancy. I also review their daily lifestyle habits to see if there are any areas they can improve to boost their brain health.

I convinced Sharon to enroll in a two-week research project at the UCLA Longevity Center to determine the brain effects of a healthy lifestyle programme. Before beginning the programme, her baseline memory scores were about average for her age, and MRI scanning during memory tasks showed extensive neural activity–her brain was working hard to remember things.

Sharon then started a programme of daily physical exercise, memory training, healthy diet and relaxation exercises. After two weeks, her memory tests demonstrated significant improvements, and a follow-up MRI showed minimal neural activity during word recall – her brain had become more efficient. Sharon was amazed that in just two weeks she had enhanced her memory and found it easier to learn and retrieve new information. Her healthy diet and exercise routines helped Sharon shed a few unwanted pounds, and she felt more confident – both at home and at work. These striking improvements motivated her to maintain her new healthy brain habits over the years.

I ordered Small’s book from the library.

Mary Jo also sent me Food for thought: the smart way to better brain health by Lisa Mosconi.

The lost art of concentration: being distracted in a digital world by Harriet Griffey.

I don’t know how many times—to little or no avail—I’ve attempted to convince my students that this is true:

We have known for a long time that repeated interruptions affect concentration. In 2005, research carried out by Dr Glenn Wilson at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that persistent interruptions and distractions at work had a profound effect. Those distracted by emails and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ, twice that found in studies on the impact of smoking marijuana. More than half of the 1,100 participants said they always responded to an email immediately or as soon as possible, while 21% admitted they would interrupt a meeting to do so. Constant interruptions can have the same effect as the loss of a night’s sleep.

The impact of interruptions on individual productivity can also be catastrophic. In 2002, it was reported that, on average, we experience an interruption every eight minutes or about seven or eight per hour. In an eight-hour day, that is about 60 interruptions. The average interruption takes about five minutes, so that is about five hours out of eight. And if it takes around 15 minutes to resume the interrupted activity at a good level of concentration, this means that we are never concentrating very well.

Also highly recommend Cal Newport’s Deep Work on this topic.

This conservative supreme court could care less about human rights by Lawrence Douglas.

It was 75 years ago in a slender book called Majority Rule and Minority Rights, that the great American historian Henry Steele Commager delivered a devastating critique of judicial review – the extraordinary power, vested in the supreme court, to declare legislative acts unconstitutional. In theory, judicial review empowers the members of the court, insulated from the political fray by life tenure, to safeguard the rights of vulnerable minorities.

“Rubbish,” said Commager. Canvassing American history, Commager insisted that the only “minority” rights the court had protected were those of the wealthy. The court had consistently “put property rights above human rights”.

This article is a great example of the prejudice many of us have fueled by our mistaken belief that how we see the world is the way everyone else sees the world. That belief handily demonstrates the maxim: It’s not what we don’t know that can hurt us, rather it is what we think we know that just isn’t so that will harm us. Tomova writes:

I was seven when, in hindsight, I first questioned my imagination. I remember watching the first Harry Potter film and my friend, who was a huge fan, was complaining that the characters weren’t how she imagined them to be. I couldn’t understand what she meant because, in my mind, they had never been images at all, just concepts. When I shut my eyes, I see nothing. It is black. I have no visual imagination.

I thought everyone’s minds worked this way until about two years ago, when I stumbled across a blog post about aphantasia; a condition where you lack a functioning mind’s eye. I was 23, and it blew my mind to learn that others could visualise things. I’d never known any different but it was clear I had aphantasia, too, and a lot of things started to make more sense.

So, if Walt Disney had created Afantaisa, would it be just the concert?

Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra by Charles Johnson, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

Not far from Osaka, deep in the forest, there a a fourteen-hundred-year-old Buddhist temple called Anraku-ji, which in Japanese means “peaceful, at ease.”

[Radcliffe] took a breath. “Moving along: you also serve a beef-tartare tostada? (Correct.) “And that has some fried grasshopper on it?” (Actually, the insect is toasted over a wood fire, Bazdarich said. Radcliffe, his pencil trembling, scribbled “toasted.”) “And is that a whole grasshopper you get with each one, or is it sort of segments?” (Whole, but sometimes they break apart.) “Would it be correct to say that meat is a major theme?” Bazdarich seemed skeptical. Radcliffe, panicking, added, “Don’t worry, it is also made mention of that vegetarians or pescatarians can be very, very happy at your restaurants.”

He got to the dreaded “Venice Beach” line. “Would it be correct to say that you’ve got a very light, sort of California feel inside?” he asked. Bazdarich said that he considered it more Mexican than Californian. “Sorry, yes,” Radcliffe said, laughing nervously. “I’m an English person who has not been to Mexico, so that was my first frame of reference.”

Radcliffe hung up and exhaled. “I just fact-checked a fucking article!” he said. “Nothing I do today will be harder than that.” A few days later, a New Yorker fact checker called Radcliffe to verify the above account. “Very meta,” he said. Everything checked out, except that he had been drinking a cappuccino, not a latte, and he has, in point of fact, been to Mexico.

(I seem to recall that Michael J. Fox endured a similar experience in preparation for his role in Bright Lights, Big City but I can’t find a reference online.)

Joan Jett’s Raw, Inclusive Rock and Roll by Sarah Larson.

What happened next begins Bad Reputation: Jett asked for an electric guitar, and her parents gave her one for Christmas. Then she took lessons and told her teacher she wanted to play rock and roll. “Girls don’t play rock and roll,” he said, and taught her “On Top of Old Smokey.” He wasn’t saying that girls can’t master the guitar, Jett told me, but that “girls aren’t allowed to play guitar socially. I can’t be the Rolling Stones. Rock and roll, by its nature, exudes sexuality. A girl playing rock and roll, it’s going to be sexual. Americans are very uncomfortable with that—with women and sexuality in general, but when you get to teen-agers expressing themselves, forget about it.”

Jett’s primal, commanding sound is, in part, a reaction to that attitude. As a teen-ager, she co-founded the all-girl band the Runaways, fronted by Cherie Currie—a group that was adored by many and disparaged, with sexist language, by others. Later, she wrote the song Bad Reputation in response to such reactions

I bought my first Joan Jett album—I Love Rock ‘n Roll—in 1981. I was in love.

What happens in our society that we busy ourselves to such an extreme that we render other persons invisible? How have we reached the point where mayhem and death appear attractive, even reasonable, as tools to register our existence in the reality of some other? Who decided that we should take as common that bad acts were pleas for attention and not to be encouraged? Why did Sally Fields’ 1985 Academy Award acceptance speech not give us all pause?

In that moment, when we are invisible, when we will take any step just to be noticed, when our pleas and not only not heard, but willfully ignored, when did laughter, even nervous laughter, become acceptable to the likes of Sally Fields’ admission and sacrificing our life so that even for second we are seen become reasonable?

Attention will be paid, although we receive no guarantees regarding the quality of that regard.

I have heard of an emulator of Peregrinos, a post-war writer who, after having finished his first book, committed suicide to attract attention to his work. Attention was in fact attracted, but the book was judged no good. Footnote No. 3, p. 7.

From The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

The life of John Kennedy Toole is instructive here.

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.The Myth Of Sisyphus,Albert Camus,suicide

From: Médecins Sans Frontières:

Médecins Sans Frontières strongly condemns the government of Nauru’s sudden decision to cease MSF’s provision of desperately-needed mental health care to asylum seekers, refugees and the local community on Nauru. MSF describes the mental health situation of refugees on the island as “beyond desperate” and calls for the immediate evacuation of all asylum seekers and refugees from the island, and for an end to the Australian offshore detention policy.

“It is absolutely disgraceful to say that MSF’s mental health care is no longer required; the mental health situation of the refugees indefinitely held on Nauru is devastating”, said Dr Beth O’Connor, MSF psychiatrist. “Over the past 11 months on Nauru, I have seen an alarming number of suicide attempts and incidents of self-harm among the refugee and asylum-seeker men, women and children we treat.”

“We were particularly shocked by the many children suffering from traumatic withdrawal syndrome, where their status deteriorated to the extent they were unable to eat, drink, or even walk to the toilet”, Dr O’Connor said.

Also: Dr. Paul McPhun and Psychiatrist Beth O’Connor

All of this, of course, begs the question: Is the Trump administration advising the Australians; are the Australians advising the Trump administration or are we, and they, part of a global plan—hatched at Davos?—to turn rogue nations into massive concentration camps/killing zones?

The Cynic by Charles Johnson, found in Night Hawks: Stories and which begins:

If you listen to those who are wise, the people who defended my my teacher at his trial before he was killed by the state, they will tell you that the golden days of our city were destroyed by the war.

(This story has an uncanny connection to yesterday’s Could populism actually be good for democracy? by James Miller.)

I found the story Abdul Rahmanof particularly riveting, and, given Ohio’s concealed-carry laws, particularly instructive and indicative of a need to demand open-carry only.

Two young Arizona Republicans tried to make a donation to a Democratic congressman as members of the Communist party in an apparent attempt to tie him to the far left.

On Friday afternoon, two men who called themselves Jose Rosales and Ahmahd Sadia walked into the campaign office of first-term Democrat Tom O’Halleran with $39.68 and an urgent desire for the Northern Arizona University Communist party to be given a receipt for the donation.

Since the end of the first century A.D., people have been playing a game with a certain book. In this game, you open the book to a random spot and place your finger on the text; the passage you select will, it is thought, predict your future. If this sounds silly, the results suggest otherwise. The first person known to have played the game was a highborn Roman who was fretting about whether he’d be chosen to follow his cousin, the emperor Trajan, on the throne; after opening the book to this passage—

I recognize that he is that king of Rome,
Gray headed, gray bearded, who will formulate
The laws for the early city…

—he was confident that he’d succeed. His name was Hadrian.

Through the centuries, others sought to discover their fates in this book, from the French novelist Rabelais, in the early sixteenth century (some of whose characters play the game, too), to the British king Charles I, who, during the Civil War—which culminated in the loss of his kingdom and his head—visited an Oxford library and was alarmed to find that he’d placed his finger on a passage that concluded, “But let him die before his time, and lie / Somewhere unburied on a lonely beach.” Two and a half centuries later, as the Germans marched toward Paris at the beginning of the First World War, a classicist named David Ansell Slater, who had once viewed the very volume that Charles had consulted, found himself scouring the same text, hoping for a portent of good news.

What was the book, and why was it taken so seriously? The answer lies in the name of the game: sortes vergilianae. The Latin noun sortes means lots—as in “drawing lots,” a reference to the game’s element of chance. The adjective vergilianae, which means “having to do with Vergilius,” identifies the book: the works of the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, whom we know as Virgil.

And then this near the end of Mendelsohn’s piece:

Latin is a rather chunky language. Unlike Greek, which is far more supple, it has no definite or indefinite articles; a page of Latin can look like a wall of bricks. As such, it’s particularly difficult to adapt to dactylic hexameter, the waltzlike, oom-pah-pah meter of epic poetry, which the Romans inherited from the Greeks. One of Virgil’s achievements was to bring Latin hexameter verse to an unusually high level of flexibility and polish, stretching long thoughts and sentences over several lines, gracefully balancing pairs of nouns and adjectives, and finding ways to temper the natural heaviness of his native tongue. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, called the result “the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.”

David Ferry more than succeeds in capturing the stateliness, as his rendering of the Proem, the epic’s introductory lines, into English blank verse shows:

I sing of arms and the man whom fate had sent
To exile from the shores of Troy to be
The first to come to Lavinium and the coasts
Of Italy, and who, because of Juno’s
Savage implacable rage, was battered by storms
At sea, and from the heavens above, and also
By tempests of war, until at last he might
Bring his household gods to Latium, and build his town,
From which would come the Alban Fathers and
The lofty walls of Rome.

Alone among recent translators, as far as I am aware, Ferry has honored the crucial fact that, in the original, this is all one long flowing sentence and one thought: from Troy to Rome, from past to present, from defeat to victory.

Given the New Yorker piece on Daniel Radcliffe and fact checking above, I was surprised by this discovery in the text.

Today, the themes that made the epic required reading for generations of emperors and generals, and for the clerics and teachers who groomed them—the inevitability of imperial dominance, the responsibilities of authoritarian rule, the importance of duty and self-abnegation in the service of the state—are proving to be an embarrassment.

While technically not incorrect, self-abnegation seems clunky and ill-informed to me in the way people say pizza pie without knowing that pizza is Italian for pie and are thus saying pie pie. Abnegation means self-denial so the use here came across to me as self-self-denial.
So call me a word nazi unworthy of throwing the first stone.

I ordered a copy of the Ferry translation this morning.

Nina Turner, as always, is brilliant and spot on.

President Donald John Trump wants take the free out of free speech and put a price tag on the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Clearly the our sweet-potato saddam doesn’t like that the crowds outside our White House are not like those that show up for his campaign rallies adoration fests.

We the people have until 11:59 on Monday, 15 October to voice a loud and sustained: Oh hell no!

To submit a comment: go to Regulations.gov and file the comment for RIN: 1024-AE45—Special Regulations, Areas of the National Park System, National Capital Region, Special Events and Demonstrations—and click on the Comment Now! button.

Luke O’Neil, writing in Trump administration plans crackdown on protests outside White House for The Guardian, has the details:

Donald Trump has frequently and falsely crowed about the idea of so-called paid protesters, including most recently the sexual assault survivors who confronted senators in the lead-up to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. Now his administration may be trying to turn that concept on its head, by requiring citizens to pay to be able to protest, among other affronts to the first amendment.

Under the proposal introduced by the interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, in August, the administration is looking to close 80% of the sidewalks surrounding the White House, and has suggested that it could charge “event management” costs, for demonstrations.

Currently the National Park Service is able to recoup costs for special events, but not spontaneous protests like the ones that typically take place in Lafayette Park across from the White House. These charges could include the cost of erecting barriers, cleaning fees, repairs to grass, permit fees and the salaries of official personnel on hand to monitor such demonstrations, all tallied at the discretion of the police.

Naturally, civil liberties groups consider the proposals an affront to the rights guaranteed under the first amendment. As the ACLU notes, such fees “could make mass protests like Martin Luther King Jr’s historic 1963 March on Washington and its ‘I have a dream’ speech too expensive to happen”.

I filed my opinion—aka my Oh hell no!—writing:

Please keep the “Free” in Free Speech and protect our the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If we can afford to give the military billions that they haven’t asked for, we can afford manage protests outside our White House.

Please make sure you file yours.

Yes, Breathing While Black is now a thing…

High School Soccer Team Accused of Yelling Racial Slurs at Black Players Travels to Away Games With Armed Guards

ACLU Files Lawsuit Against City of Denver for Outrageous Bail Bond Fees

The Wizard of Voter Suppression: Brian Kemp’s Long History of Making Black Votes Disappear

Sheriff Insults Colin Kaepernick by Having Prisoners Wear Nike Shirts in Mug Shots

Black Man Actually Able to Use Self-Defense Plea After Violent Confrontation Outside Pennsylvania Bar*

Former Students at Pittsburgh-Area High School Settle Lawsuit Alleging Physical Abuse and Tasing by School Resource Officers

Dark Times: Trump and Sessions Seek to Halt Mandated Reform of Chicago Police Department

#BabysittingWhileBlack: White Woman Calls Police on Black Man Riding Around With White Kids

Kansas Man Handcuffed for Attempting to Move Into His Home Late at Night

Cop Who Killed Tamir Rice Working as Part-Time Officer in Another Ohio Town

*See also the case of Abdul Rahman.

Previously…