Lily Salter's Blog, page 1030
August 5, 2015
The indefensible Hiroshima revisionism that haunts America to this day
Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I'm wondering if we've come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world's only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people -- slowly and painfully -- leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000?
Desperate times, desperate measures: California experiments with leasing water rights
This analysis was co-published with the Los Angeles Times.
Last fall, farmers working the flat land along the Colorado River outside Blythe, California, harvested a lucrative crop of oranges, lettuce and alfalfa from fields irrigated with river water. But that wasn’t their only source of income. They made almost as much per acre from the seemingly dead squares of dry earth abutting those orchards and row crops, fields left barren for the season.
The money crop that the fallowed land produced was one of the West’s most precious commodities: water. Under an experimental trading scheme set up by the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe and the Metropolitan Water District — which supplies municipal water to the Los Angeles area, Orange and San Diego counties, and much of the Inland Empire — the farmers essentially leased millions of gallons of their Colorado River water to California’s coastal cities.
America’s inequality crisis is about so much more than money: The ugly realities that elude our politicians
Inequality is about much more than the growing chasm of income and wealth between those at the very top and everyone else in America. It's also about education, environmental hazards, health and health care, incarceration, law enforcement, wage theft and policies that interfere with family life over multiple generations.
In its full dimensions, inequality shapes, distorts and destroys lives in ways that get little attention from politicians and major news organizations. How many of us know that every day 47 American babies die, who would live if only our nation had the much better infant mortality rates of Sweden?
"Poverty is not natural," Nelson Mandela once said. "It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."
The man-made disparities between the rich and the poor are a threat to the liberties of the people. Plutarch, the Greco-Roman historian, observed more than 2000 years ago that, "an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
5 despicable ways the right is trying to undermine the way we teach U.S. history
High school history and civics courses are the first line of defense for preparing children to be engaged and active citizens in the political process. As many have noted, American education is often lackluster, glossing over inequities and injustices in American history and society. But America's conservatives only want to make our educational system even more right-wing and parochial. Here are five ways they're trying to make sure kids get only the most conservative worldviews in the classroom:
August 4, 2015
“It’s OK to always be a loser”: Patrick Stickles reveals the secrets of Titus Andronicus
Patrick Stickles just turned 30. The frontman of Titus Andronicus celebrated by singing Billy Joel and Replacements songs at the end of his fifth concert in a row in Brooklyn, New York. When he and I talk, he's cleaning up the band's practice space in preparation for a tour in support of his band's new rock opera, "The Most Lamentable Tragedy." Lately, he's been watching an Eagles documentary on Netflix to deal with his worsening tinnitus.
"It's leading to some pretty interesting auditory hallucinations," says the songwriter. "So that's fun to be lying in the darkness late at night and hear something. The other night, at about 5 in the morning, it was 'Take It to the Limit.' I never liked the band but I'm obsessed with this movie now."
It's a shame sleep is starting to get harder for Stickles, considering the first track on his new album finds him screaming the refrain, "I hate to be awake," over and over. It seems the thing keeping him content to move through his waking hours is his endless capacity for analysis and deep thought about, well, everything — his interests run from Shakespeare to Springsteen spaces, from Nietzsche to Naked Raygun.
“You tell me that the riots are a good thing? F*ck you. Come to Baltimore and say that”: David Simon on police brutality, the legacy of “The Wire” and the future of American cities
The legendary showrunner David Simon isn’t so sure about his “legendary” status—as wide-ranging and influential as his masterwork “The Wire” has been, to his mind, it’s never quite enough. To wit: This month, HBO is debuting a six-part miniseries from Simon called “Show Me a Hero,” based on Lisa Belkin’s 1993 book of the same name, about real-life Yonkers Mayor Nick Wasickso (played by Oscar Isaac in the miniseries). Wasickso was an opportunist politician who ended up caught in the rancorous politicking around public housing that reveals an uncomfortable sticking point for communities the world over: Where do we house our poorest?
It’s a topic that reveals Simon’s passion for politics at the city level—zoning ordinances, federal funds, section 8 housing, property tax codes. Topics with a reputation for being boring—but Simon’s life work has been bringing the drama of civic politics to life. “Show Me a Hero,” like “The Wire,” is gutting: The title comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line, “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.” It’s poised to be the next game-changing drama in the televisual canon—another show that transforms political consciousness for millions. I’ll be writing more about the miniseries as we approach the premiere; in the meantime, I sat down with Simon to talk about how he makes the mundane into the sublime, how “The Wire” has aged, and the rising profile of police brutality in America.
South Africa’s growing pains: The “Born Free” generation inherits a country awash in contradictions
State of Mind
The state of the mind gets oppressed.
The longer it takes, the quicker you
Break. Choose to let the wind blow.
The foretelling of time spelled unknown.
I still don’t know why continuously I
Feel alone. The bare feet have nowhere
To go. And I’ve lost my way home.
Count from one to ten to please my
Soul yet inside remains a big hole.
When I’m in the most or the warmest
I still feel the brush of the cold, the
Urge to have someone to call,
For I’m the one who didn’t have it all. —Annasuena
Some days, Annasuena simply longed to be a girl. She couldn’t say what her ideal girlhood looked like, and she did not need ideal anyway. If she could re-create her past, she would locate herself in a time before she knew the troubles that now consumed her.
She would reconstruct her family life. Her mother would be alive and Annasuena would grow up living with her, and with her brothers and sister. They would all stay together in the same home. She didn’t have to live with her father, but she would know who he was. She would have the chance to meet him, to know what he looked like, to see whether she inherited her deeper complexion from him.
Digital Orwellian nightmare: Are our smart devices really smart enough to spy on us?
Smart devices have become the latest target in an anti-electronic backlash that has swept the nation in recent years. Spurred by conspiracy theorists, dubious YouTube videos and social media, the public is being led to think smart devices are akin to artificial intelligence spying on our personal lives. While there may be some concerns about electronics that capture or share consumer data, we are far from a digital Orwellian nightmare. Let’s look at the facts behind three maligned “smart” devices.
1. Smart televisions. Earlier this year, the Internet was buzzing with headlines declaring that smart televisions, particularly Samsung’s Smart TV, were designed to spy on everything people say while at home.
“Your Samsung TV is eavesdropping on your private conversations” declared CNN Money in February. In fact, Samsung Smart TV comes equipped with a speech recognition technology, which is not so different from similar technologies used by Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana) or Google, and sometimes your requests are captured and sent over the Internet, which might make you a bit nervous.
This will haunt Jeb Bush: GOP candidate says we spend too much on “women’s health issues”
Jeb Bush asserted Tuesday that the U.S. government spends too much on "women's health issues," quickly backtracking following a political firestorm and claiming he "misspoke."
Speaking before the Southern Baptist Convention today in Nashville, Tennessee, the Republican presidential candidate boasted that as governor of Florida, he defunded Planned Parenthood. Bush vowed to defund the women's health organization federally as president.
When asked about the Republicans' most recent efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, Bush dismissed the notion of a "war on women," to argue, "I'm not sure we need half a billion dollars for women's health issues":
The comment came as part of a larger attack on Planned Parenthood, who according to the organization's own records, received a combination of federal and state funding, totaling around $528.4 million in 2014. Senate Republicans' effort to defund Planned Parenthood failed to garner the veto-proof 60 vote majority in a vote last night but some Republicans have already vowed to keep up the fight, even threatening another government shutdown this fall.
Kelly Osbourne’s Donald Trump fail: Fighting his racism with her own harmful stereotypes
Well, the Donald Trump Award for insensitive statements about race just went to … someone assailing Donald Trump. Or specifically, to Kelly Osbourne, the daughter of Ozzy and reality TV mainstay, who was referring to Trump’s nasty comments about Latinos coming to America to rape and pillage.
Osbourne was on “The View,” where Whoopi Goldberg mentioned Trump’s steadiness in the polls; Rosie Perez, Michelle Collins, and Raven-Symone batted the idea around a little bit. Osbourne made a good point with, "In what way does he think that people are going to vote for him after he's just called them rapists and murderers?"
But then, she tossed out these two cents: "If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?" Osbourne asked. "In the sense that...you know what I mean? But I'm saying that in L.A., they always..."
Perez seemed a bit thrown and fired back, "Latinos are not only the only people doing that." Osbourne appeared to be attempting to describe how rich people (and in California, most people) depend on the labor of Latino immigrants. Collins articulated this a bit more clearly, helping her out with, "I think what you're saying is that Trump himself probably relies on a lot of these people he's insulting,"
