Posted by Alexander Jerri
This day in rancid, ugly, horrible, putrid, rotten history . . .
On this day in 1386 – (629 years ago) – the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur of Samarkand, known to Europeans as Tamerlane, captured and sacked the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, took King Bagrat V of Georgia captive, and—according to the ancient chronicles—forced the Christian monarch to convert to Islam. Tbilisi was just one of Timur’s many conquests. His domain stretched from the western edge of China into what is now Turkey, but it was short-lived. On his deathbed, Timur designated a favorite grandson as his successor—but his other descendants ignored his wishes and went to war with each other, and the empire disintegrated in a few years.
On this day in 1918 – (97 years ago) – amid the armed conflict that persisted between Poland and Ukraine after the end of World War I, Polish soldiers and lawless civilians in the eastern European city of Lviv subjected its Jewish population to a pogrom that would last three days. Between 50 and 150 Jewish people were massacred, while about two thousand lost their homes, and some five hundred businesses were destroyed.
On this day in 1920 – (95 years ago) – in Dublin, Ireland, thirty-one people were killed in a day of deadly violence during the Irish War of Independence. It was the second and bloodiest of four different historical incidents in Ireland that have since become known as “Bloody Sunday.” It started in the morning with a series of carefully planned killings of British spies at various locations around the city by members of an assassination unit operating under the Irish military leader Michael Collins. Late that afternoon, a unit of militarized British police responded to the assassinations by showing up at a well-attended football match and firing upon the crowd of Irish spectators. By day’s end, the death toll on both sides included fourteen Irish civilians, fourteen British spies, and three IRA prisoners.
On this day in 1927 – (88 years ago) –about five hundred striking miners and I.W.W. activists outside the Columbine Coal Mine near Boulder, Colorado, were attacked by a detachment of state police armed with tear gas and machine guns. The month-old strike, prompted by wage theft and dangerous work conditions, had been uneventful for more than a month until the arrival of cold weather... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 1PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com
9:10 - Writer Curtis White sees new (and old) problems when he looks ahead to our futuristic robot economy.
Curtis is author of We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data from Melville House.
10:05 - Anuradha Mittal profiles the dangerous lives of land rights activists in Ethiopia and Cameroon.
The Oakland Institute just posted the release International Civil Society Alarmed by Conviction of Cameroonian Environmental Human Rights Defender.
10:35 - Laura Carlsen explains how marijuana legalization trends are shifting US-Mexico drug war policies.
Laura was just on CCTV talking about legalization trends in Mexico and the United States..
11:05 - Sociologist Brooke Harrington opens the door to the hidden world of elite wealth management.
Brooke is author of the Atlantic article Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts.
11:35 - Kyle Lydell Canty talks about why racism and police violence have him seeking political asylum in Canada.
Kyle wrote the Guardian opinion piece It's so dangerous to be a black American, I've sought asylum in Canada. To help with Kyle's legal fees, contribute to his GoFundMe here.
12:05 - Live from Beirut, Rania Masri calls out Western complicity, and silence, in the wake of Middle East violence.
Rania was quoted in the Intitute for Public Accuracy's news release From Beirut After Bombing: 'We are Not Numbers'.
12:45 - Jeff Dorchen apologizes to fiscal conservatives for not telling them what he thinks of them sooner.
Not sure if this program is the most effective forum for that, but we're with you Jeffy.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 10AM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com
9:05 - Author Roslyn Fuller explains why democracy lost its way, and how to restore its promise.
Roslyn is author of Beasts and Gods: How democracy changed its meaning and lost its purpose from Zed Books.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
'The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.'
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in 1936. I won't deal here with the context in which he wrote it. I'd rather take it on its merits as a thing unto itself. Fitzgerald meant contradictory ideas such as "doom" and "hope." Let's be a bit less grandiose in choosing our ideas. Let's choose, for now, bigotry against black people, and the idea that bigoted notions about black people, or any people for that matter, are wrong because they are not informed by the deep and wide fullness of reality.
Clearly, a person can hold these two opposed ideas in the mind simultaneously. We white citizens of the USA are famous for doing so, and very few us can be accused of being plagued with first rate intelligence. How can we be intellectually both racist and anti-racist? This is because the mind is not a flat surface on which ideas are inscribed and from which they are read. The mind is a layered, weird thing, puzzling the creature attempting to use it to define its identity. It's not even clear how to define the mind within boundaries. The mind is so complex and elusive that even now it's telling me all kinds of lies about itself.
Fitzgerald was evidentally after something else in his statement than we've come to imagine when we consider it. As such, it's irrelevant to our topic, which today is "distraction." Well, then, why begin an essay on distraction with an entirely irrelevant bromide?
How better to demonstrate distraction? Right? I mean, that's pretty clever, actually.
Instead of testing for first rate minds, which are irrelevant in almost every circumstance involving anything of any importance, we should be trying to weed out the last rate minds. And to me, a last rate mind is one that divides the world into opposing ideas.
Here's an example: a friend of mine posted an article from Mother Jones about law enforcement attempts to identify individuals who might be planning to commit the kind of mass shooting we've been seeing more frequently over the last few years, and to connect with that (typically) young white man's family, friends and community contacts at school and elsewhere to get (typically) him to seek help in sorting out and dealing with his anti-social feelings in a non-destructive way. This strategy was... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 10AM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com
9:05 - Law professor Erin Murphy examines the blind spots in DNA forensic evidence.
Erin is the author of the Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA from Nation Books.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
This day in rancid, ugly, horrible, putrid, rotten history...
On this day in 1903 – [112 years ago] – a specially chartered passenger train was carrying the Purdue University Boilermakers, along with hundreds of fans, to a football game against their rivals at Indiana University. Just as the fast-moving train rounded a curve near Indianapolis, a coal train engineer, who was unaware of the Purdue train’s approach due to a railroad signaling error, backed his own train onto the main line. By the time the engineers of the two trains saw each other, it was too late. The railroad collision killed eighteen people -- including fourteen Purdue football players riding in their train’s lead car, which was smashed to pieces.
On this day in 1984 – [31 years ago today] – Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was shot and killed by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in the garden area of her official residence. The killing was widely viewed as an act of revenge, since four months earlier she had ordered Indian troops to enter the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, to remove armed separatist rebels who had taken refuge there. Indira Gandhi had been heavily criticized for that military operation, which cost hundreds of lives, and had been accused of pursuing it for political reasons. But her assassination sparked a backlash among her supporters which led to even more violence, as riots broke out in the streets of New Delhi and other Indian cities, ultimately resulting in the massacre of an estimated three thousand Sikhs.
