August 28, 2014 archive

Cartnoon

The Breakfast Club (Beyond the Sea)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

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This Day in History

Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech; Clashes mar the 1968 Democratic National Convention; Emmett Till abducted and killed; Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana granted a divorce.

Breakfast Tunes

On This Day In History August 28

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

August 28 is the 240th day of the year (241st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 125 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King addressed the crowds assembled on the Washington Mall from the steps at the Lincoln Memorial. His speech, “I have a Dream”, is forever embedded in history and our memories as one of the great moments in the fight for civil rights. But there were many other speakers, and in particular one great performance by the “Queen of Gospel”, Mahalia Jackson. Right before Dr. King spoke, Ms. Jackson performed “How I Got Over”.

Indeed, if Martin Luther King, Jr., had a favorite opening act, it was Mahalia Jackson, who performed by his side many times. On August 28, 1963, as she took to the podium before an audience of 250,000 to give the last musical performance before Dr. King’s speech, Dr. King himself requested that she sing the gospel classic “I’ve Been ‘Buked, and I’ve Been Scorned.” Jackson was just as familiar with Dr. King’s repertoire as he was with hers, and just as King felt comfortable telling her what to sing as the lead-in to what would prove to be the most famous speech of his life, Jackson felt comfortable telling him in what direction to take that speech.

The story that has been told since that day has Mahalia Jackson intervening at a critical junction when she decided King’s speech needed a course-correction. Recalling a theme she had heard him use in earlier speeches, Jackson said out loud to Martin Luther King, Jr., from behind the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” And at that moment, as can be seen in films of the speech, Dr. King leaves his prepared notes behind to improvise the entire next section of his speech-the historic section that famously begins “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream….”

There is no embeddable video of Ms Jackson from that day but here is the inspirational song she performed that day.

Late Night Karaoke

Global Warming: Irreversable and Humans Did It

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The leaked draft report on global warming by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a dark picture for Earth’s climate. The runaway increase in greenhouse gases is causing the climate to warm at a rate that is could be irreversible.

U.N. Draft Report Lists Unchecked Emissions’ Risks

by Justin Gillis, The New York Times

Using blunter, more forceful language than the reports that underpin it, the new draft highlights the urgency of the risks that are likely to be intensified by continued emissions of heat-trapping gases, primarily carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.

The report found that companies and governments had identified reserves of these fuels at least four times larger than could safely be burned if global warming is to be kept to a tolerable level.

That means if society wants to limit the risks to future generations, it must find the discipline to leave a vast majority of these valuable fuels in the ground, the report said. [..]

The draft report found that past emissions, and the failure to heed scientific warnings about the risks, have made large-scale climatic shifts inevitable. But lowering emissions would still slow the expected pace of change, the report said, providing critical decades for human society and the natural world to adapt. [..]

Continued warming, the report found, is likely to “slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing poverty traps and create new ones, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger.”

If that isn’t bad enough, the ocean’s are choking on plastics:

Plastic rubbish heaps at sea pose bigger threat to Earth than climate change, claims ocean expert

The world’s leading expert on the poisoning of the oceans said he was “utterly shocked” at the increase in plastic floating on the sea in the past five years and warned that it potentially posed a bigger threat to the planet than climate change.

Charles J Moore, a captain in the US merchant marine and founder of a leading Ocean research group, has just finished his first in-depth survey of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – one of five major expanses of plastic drifting in the world’s oceans – since 2009. [..]

Plastics are now one of the most common pollutants of ocean waters in the world. Pushed by winds, tides and currents, plastic particles form with other debris into large, swirling glue-like accumulation zones, known to oceanographers as “gyres”, which comprise as much as 40 per cent of the planet’s ocean surface, said Captain Moore, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Institute in Long Beach, California.

In a previous study of Southern California’s urban centres, he calculated that they spilled 2.3bn pieces of plastic – from polystyrene foam to tiny fragments and pellets – into the area’s coastal waters in just three days of monitoring.

Just because it’s going to snow in Minnesota, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world isn’t cooking.

TDS/TCR (Human Sexual Response)

TDS TCR

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Is It Live Or Is It Memorex?

Perhaps tonight we shall see how hung over Stephen really was.  The real news, as well as the 2 part web exclusive extended interview with David Rose below.

238 Years of Racism In America (continued)

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

~Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852~

This is the 4th, 5th and 6th part of the conversation with African American historian and author Gerald Horne at Real News Network “Reality Assets Itself.” The  first three parts are here.

White Unity and American Propaganda History



Transcript can be read here

Abolition of Slavery was Not a Fight Against Racism



Transcript can be read here

“I Can’t Breathe”



Transcript can be read here

238 Years of Racism In America

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

~Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852~

Racism and white supremacy in America has existed since this country was founded, even to the extent that it was enshrined in the Constitution itself and declared every 5 slaves be counted as 3 people in terms of apportionment for the House of Representatives. With the  abolition of slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment, new ways of discrimination arose with Jim Crow laws in the Soutn and relining in the North.

In a six part series at Real News Network “Reality Assets Itself“, African American historian and author Gerald Horne discusses the history of racial discrimination and its impact on the national psyche and politics today. This is the first three parts.

The Price of NAACP Compromise Was Too High



Transcript can e read here

The Black Scare and the Democratic Party



Transcript can be read here

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and the Construction of Whiteness



Transcript can be read here