Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, sets the record state on the question of what the reason was for the United States Civil War. In this interesting short video Col. Seidule makes the case that the single reason was slavery. Does a good job with it, too.
Here are some highlights:
The buzz term “States’ Rights” was coined by Southern state residents and referred to the right they believed they possessed, to continue slavery.
Assemblyman Tim Eustace — the bill’s sponsor and an openly gay man — has called the practice “an insidious form of child abuse.”
Conversion therapy is always forced, psychologically brutal and it is sometimes, physically damaging as well. Furthermore, it is based on the false premise that being gay is wrong.
On 25 June 2015, New Jersey courts acted to establish another legal avenue for protection to victims of conversion therapy by opening an avenue for collecting financial damages:
Bernie Sanders vigorously confronted Alan Greenspan on his flawed economic policies in 2003, 5 years before the Great Recession set in and Greenspan admitted to the Congressional Oversight Committee that he had been wrong for 40 years in his perceptions and the policies he had informed during his tenancy as Federal Reserve Chair.
Sanders told Greenspan that because he spent his social time in country clubs and cocktail parties, Greenspan had become so far removed from the lives of average citizens that he had no idea what their concerns and needs are. Women for Bernie Sanders offers the comment, “Bernie knew all along that it was a flawed ideology.”
No matter what we might be duking out on United States soil in regards to what that means for People of Color, women, transgender folk and whatnot .. what would our lives be like if those rights were permanently taken away from all of us, permanently .. and control over them were given not even to foreign governments, but to major corporations instead of any government at all?
I missed marking the passing of William Safire, who authored my favorite newspaper column On Language until he became late in 2009 at the age of 79. So let me celebrate his work and how it touched me me, a little bit, now.
Safire inspired my love for language to blossom into good and accurate writing and introduced me to etymology – the topic of his twice weekly New York Times Magazine column for over 30 years. Teen me didn’t know that there was such a thing as etymology. It’s the study of words, and it’s fascinating. Safire’s compelling writing style pulled me right in. Google offers this definition:
Speaking via live feed from the White House today, a visionary President Obama announced his administration’s new Clean Power Plan, which has been created to reverse climate change and help heal our world of the effects of global warming. The President joined Pope Francis in calling for global citizens and industry leaders to make immediate and sweeping changes in how we live, work and do business.
“There is such a thing as too late, when it comes to climate change,” the President commented, and pointed out that 14 of the hottest years in over 100 years of recorded history have occurred in the past 15 years.
At the Georgetown University #PovertySummit President Obama made some very real comments, tying his own background to modern society’s challenges in the areas of education and social investment; access to jobs, internet, transportation; mentoring, youth, fatherhood, families and community:
I am a black man who grew up without a father, and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence I think that my daughters are better off … For me to have that conversation does not negate my conversation about the need for early childhood education, or the need for job training, or the need for investment in infrastructure or jobs in low-income communities…
WASHINGTON – African Americans face an unemployment rate double that of white workers and are nearly three times as likely as white Americans to live in poverty, according to a new report by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) released today by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Ranking Democrat on the JEC, and Congressman G. K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).
The report reveals that African Americans continue to confront a range of economic challenges, including disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment and long-term unemployment as well as significantly lower incomes and slower wealth accumulation than white households. When examining various measures to determine economic well-being, the report finds black Americans lag far behind the white population.
Chris Cerf planned to replace Cami Anderson as Newark Public Schools’ state-appointed superintendent, but following his attempted return to New Jersey schools the Feds are scrutinizing his record, and they aren’t pleased with him. Let’s take a look at who this man is:
In many ways, Cerf is the prototypical education “reformer”: he never taught in a public school, never earned a degree in education, and never ran a school building. More accurately, perhaps, Cerf is the prototype of a new sort of reformer, one who leaves a groundswell of resistance in his wake.
Former Newark mayor Cory Booker, a close friend and former employer of Cami Anderson, did not resist the temptation to try to inject positive spin into Cami’s recent removal from Newark Public Schools. Anderson is the New Jersey appointed Newark Public Schools superintendent who just left Newark in the wake of widespread protests for all the damage she’s caused to the students and schools she was hired to serve and protect.
Asked about the politics surrounding Anderson vacating of the position, Booker said “I’m happy with her contributions, things we should all be appreciative of.”
Matt Asay writes a wicked analysis of why Tesla, Amazon and Apple work so dang well and have become such powerful forces in our society. Matt posits that it’s their common commitment to jump into the future whole-hog – no holding back – and he makes a great case for his opinion.
I noted that the automobile industry had been working on electric vehicles for years, but that’s not quite true. What the industry kept foisting on us were half-baked compromises—you know, hybrid cars that looked like hamsters (Toyota Prius) and felt like they were powered by them, too.
Guns actually do kill innocent people. A lot.
Here’s my comment to the USDA about GMOs in less than the 1024 characters allowed. I hope you will add yours!
GMO plants:
1 Kill whole ecosystems.
2 Many GMO crops have pesticides in them. Insects that survive eating them become immune to pesticides and descend on other farmers’ land like locusts, consuming everything.
3 GMO seeds are patented and are bankrupting farmers. Seeds are investments for farmers and many do not understand that GMO seeds must be “re-purchased” every year. In India, every 30 minutes a bankrupted farmer drinks pesticide to commit suicide.
4 In silent GMO forests pesticides built into the trees’ DNA poison everything except the trees. Nothing else lives: no insects, birds, animals big or small. No undergrowth.
5 We do not know the long term effect that GMOs will have on human bodies.
Happy belated Juneteenth! This little known holiday celebrates the announcement in Texas by Major-Gen. Granger’s statement on 19 June 1865 that slavery had come to an end.
On 20 June 2006, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee made a statement to Congress about the importance of recognizing and celebrating this holiday. This is the text of her speech:
JUNETEENTH
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise to acknowledge the World Refugee Day as we keep the flame of hope alive, showing some 20.8 million internally displaced refugees fleeing persecution who are now looking to the world to ask for relief.
Americans for Tax Fairness has published their findings of a Walmart tax evasion investigation. I’m not devious enough to quickly understand how Walmart is doing this, and I sure don’t know if what it’s legal, but I’m glad to know eyebrows are being raised.
Their scheme goes something like this: Walmart has lied in corporate earnings filings about how much money they’ve sent overseas. They have stashed that money in secret accounts, mostly in Luxembourg, to avoid paying United States taxes on it. An interesting sidebar is that they now Walmarts wants to bring a lot of that money back into the US in order to expand their operation – again, without paying taxes on the earnings it represents. This just stinks, don’t you think?
