Last Word

Boys (and Girls) Who Cried “HOAX!” Meet the Covid-19 Wolf

September 25th, 2020


“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” - Confucius

“On March 26, 2020, the people of the United States desperately needed a leader (for the Covid-19 Pandemic). Instead they got Donald Trump and Sean Hannity.” – Brian Stelter, HOAX: Donald Trump, FOX News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, 2020

“Too many of us Democrats bought into the right-wing notion that government is synonymous with failure. At a time when Americans are being…

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The Birth(erism) of Trump’s Nation of Cowards

September 15th, 2020

“(Kafka’s) world knows no physical or moral order…We, the readers, are reliving our bad dreams…punishment is over all the characters, but the crime remains mysteriously hidden…” - William Hubben

“The specter of color is apparent even when it goes unmentioned, and it is all too often the unseen force that influences public policy as well as private relationships. There is nothing more remarkable than the ingenuity that the various demarcations of the color line reflect. If only…

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The Milwaukee Bucks and “Big Bucks” Put Racism in the “Penalty Box.”

September 7th, 2020

“The vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.” - Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, 2020

“The NFL is the most conservative, Republican and nationalistic of major sports leagues, despite (a)socialist profit-sharing…

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Endgame for John Wayne/Rambo/Trump, “Reality” TV and “Virtual” History

August 31st, 2020

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” – Ralph Elison, Invisible Man, 1951

“Although the (1965) Voting Rights Act was sponsored by a…pro-civil-rights president who was…a Southern Democrat, most Southern Democrats opposed it. However, (LBJ) could count on strong support from Republicans: In the House, 82% of Republicans voted yes, compared to 78% of Democrats; in the Senate, 94% of Republicans voted yes, compared to 73% of Democrats. But things…

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History vs. Propaganda; Pundits vs. Investigative Journalism

August 24th, 2020

“History, like payback, is a bitch.” - Chicago Dog

“History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda. In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders’ accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions. In our time, as rising inequality elevates political fiction, investigative journalism becomes the more precious.” - Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 2018

“If we…

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A Liberal Cause That Some Conservatives Are Finally Fighting For:  Fairness

August 19th, 2020

“The problem for white, liberal males in positions of responsibility in the 1960s (and later), whether at universities, banks, law offices, small businesses and corporations, or legislatures was that the intellectual arteries of their colleagues were clogged by racism, a racism driven by fears, phobias, and long-standing ignorance and prejudice.” - Charles M. Barber, Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois, Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2016

“…if history is any guide, a change in…

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Dueling Billionaires; And the Rest of Us

August 13th, 2020

“The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia.” - Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia – Europe – America, 2018

“Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair. If so, democracy produces a sense of time, an…

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Celebrating “Good Trouble” Revolution

August 5th, 2020

“Men are born, and always remain, free and equal in their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.”-Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,National Assembly, Paris, 27August 1789

“(James) Baldwin wanted (Attorney General Robert) Kennedy to see (May 24, 1963) what was at the root of all of our troubles; that, for the most part, human beings refused to live honestly with themselves and were all too willing to hide behind the idols of…

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Trump and Barr “Dominate” The Streets of Ignorance

August 2nd, 2020

“…optimism (assumed) we were living in a ‘new world order’ and a ‘new economy’ that would ‘grow’…bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be ‘unprecedented’…The ‘developed nations’ had given to the ‘free market’ the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands and rural communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal…

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Fearing Fear Is Foolish…Fearing Science is Suicide.

July 24th, 2020

“The time will…come when we will not…remember…September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day…The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this…did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percentage of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the U.S.; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its…

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