Mar 7 2023
Many of us don't realize that access to death records is not something protected by our constitution. It depends on what state you live in. If you look across the 50 states of the US, there are states that don't allow people to get access to death records unless you are the next of kin. Even if you get those records, it's not always the case that those records are going to reveal the truth of what happened. I think perhaps more nefarious and difficult is we in this nation hold terrible ideas about people on the wrong side of the law. We often don't want to admit it, but we often believe that when people get arrested or go to jail and they lose their lives or they become sick or ill, we feel they deserved it somehow.
Terence Keel returns to discuss his new book from Beacon Press, The Coroner's Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence. "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview.
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Ben Freeman
Dec 2
A Trillion Dollar War Machine Keeps Americans Poor and at War / William Hartung & Ben Freeman
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Mar 1 2023
Posted by Matthew Boedy
I wept no bitter tears when Scott Adams’s “Dilbert” cartoon was dropped from the Cleveland Plain Dealer after he posted a video wherein he declared:
"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f*ck away… Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”
My non-existent tears remained unembittered when several other papers followed the Plain Dealer’s lead, even though I know we will all miss Scott’s noble contributions to the Black equality discussion and his substantial aid to Black communities. Even though I feel like we’ve lost Paul Robeson, Fred Hampton, and Muhammed Ali all over again.
But then I realized Scott wouldn’t have wanted me to feel any such loss anyway. He isn’t about feelings. He’s about offices and data and demonically elitist dogs in computer chairs.
I come not only to condemn Scott Adams, creator of “Dilbert,” but to bury him.
We are a nation of schadenfreude. That’s the kind of audience we are. When a bigot or bigshot gets taken down, as Andrew Tate was in Rumania, the audience laughs and cheers. Tate’s case is especially funny because the cause of his downfall was his own preening ego which led to his unprovoked reactionary attack on a teenage climate activist. I mean, there’s not much funnier than Tate being grabbed for sex trafficking by Rumanian law enforcement tipped off to his presence in the country by his braggadocious video with a locally branded pizza box in the camera frame, unless it’s Greta Thünberg’s parting words to seal the flame war: “this is what happens when you don't recycle your pizza boxes."
The bully was an obvious bully, the victim refused to be a victim, and in the end the “good guy” won in a way that was highly amusing and poetically just.
However, when good guys and bad guys are not so easily distinguishable, but a clearcut distinction in imposed on... read more
Episode 1561
Clean Up or Cover Up? ChemTrain Capitalists & Lobbied Lawmakers Say 'Trust Our Tests' / Prem Thakker
Feb 21 2023
Feb 20 2023