Posted by Alexander Jerri
On This Day in Rotten History...
On this day in the year 752 – (1,264 years ago) – in Rome, Pope Stephen II died of a stroke just three days after being elected to succeed the former Pope Zacharias. To this day, Stephen II holds the record for the shortest time in office of any Catholic pope.
On this day in 1812 – (204 years ago) – the city of Caracas, Venezuela, was struck by two major seismic tremors within a half hour. The earthquakes leveled the city, along with five nearby towns, and killed some fifteen to twenty thousand people. The tremors were so severe that they created a new lake and permanently changed the courses of several rivers and streams in the area. Since Venezuela was fighting its war of independence at the time, local representatives of the Spanish crown viewed the earthquakes as divine punishment for the colonial rebellion — and the Catholic archbishop of Caracas pronounced the deadly cataclysm “terrifying, but well-deserved.”
On that SAME DAY in 1812 – (again, 204 years ago) – the Boston Gazette published a political cartoon that ridiculed how electoral districts in the state of Massachusetts had been redrawn in such a bizarre and contorted way as to benefit candidates of the state party organization led by Governor Elbridge Gerry. Noting that the long, strange, twisting boundaries on the map of one new district made it resemble the shape of a salamander, the cartoonist labeled it a “Gerry-mander,” after the governor and party boss. The name stuck, and more than two hundred years later, “gerrymandering” remains a favorite practice of party leaders and politcos across America who seek to create inpenetrably “safe” electoral districts for their favored career legislators.
On this day in 1969 – (47 years ago) – having suffered for months from severe depression and paranoia after his novel The Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by two major publishers, the author John Kennedy Toole committed suicide by running a garden hose from his car’s exhaust pipe into the car. It was almost ten years later that his mother finally managed to browbeat the famous novelist Walker Percy into reading her dead son’s unpublished manuscript. Percy was wowed, the book was published in 1980, and Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981, twelve years after his death.
On this day in 1998... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 1PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com
9:10 - Author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explores the revolutionary potential of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Keeanga is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation from Haymarket Books.
10:05 - Writer Sarah Kendzior reports on the tabloid spectacle of Trump's campaign through the Midwest.
Sarah wrote the recent articles Who won the Midwest? Not the people who live in it for the Globe and Mail and Trumpmenbashi: What Central Asia’s spectacular states can tell us about authoritarianism in America for The Diplomat.
10:35 - Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier sees a coup emerging from Brazil's current political crisis.
Brian will be talking about the Brasilwire piece Overthrowing Dilma Rousseff: It’s Class War, and Their Class is Winning and his own most recent writing Rio Olympics: A City within a City.
11:05 - Mark and Paul Engler explain why strategic nonviolence is the future of political protest.
Mark and Paul wrote the new book This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century from Nation Books.
12:05 - Writer Shiyam Galyon highlights the revolutionary work Syrians are doing in between bombs.
Shiyam is author of the article Syrian Protests Bloom During Lull in Bombings posted at Warscapes.
12:45 - Jeff Dorchen laughs in the face of Death, or rather in the faces of other people's Deaths.
This is maybe about Garry Shandling. Or maybe about Rob Ford. Hopefully not about Phife Dawg.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
On This Day in Rotten History...
On this day in 1687 – (329 years ago) – the French explorer Robert de La Salle was murdered by his own men. For more than twenty years, La Salle had led expeditions deep into parts of North America never before seen by Europeans — up the Saint Lawrence, through four of the five Great Lakes, and down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico. After claiming the Mississippi watershed for France, and naming it “Louisiana” after King Louis XIV, La Salle finally led some two hundred colonists in a doomed attempt to establish a settlement on the Gulf of Mexico. The party was plagued by sickness, shipwrecks, pirates, and Indian attacks until only thirty-six men remained. Fed up with La Salle’s arrogance and never-ending demands, a group of the men lured him into an ambush and killed him. The street at the center of Chicago’s downtown financial district is named after him.
On this day in 1866 – (150 years ago) – A British sailing ship named the Monarch of the Seas departed from Liverpool, England, bound for New York with 738 passengers aboard. It was never seen again. Four months later, one of its lifeboats washed up on the west coast of Ireland, containing several decomposed and unidentifiable human bodies. Two weeks after that, a bottle was found on a beach in Cornwall, containing a handwritten message. Dated May 2, the note read in part: “Monarch of the Seas, left Liverpool 19th March . . . no wind, short of provisions and no water.”
On this day in 1958 – (58 years ago) – an oven explosion at a third-floor textile plant in downtown Manhattan caused a massive fire at the Monarch Underwear Company, located on the loft floor just above. Dozens of garment workers, mostly women, jumped from windows into fire rescue nets. In the panic, six of the workers missed the nets, hitting the sidewalk instead. When firefighters managed to get inside the building’s upper floors, they found charred bodies piled near doorways and windows, and under work benches. Twenty-four people were dead and another fifteen were seriously injured. One woman survived the blaze by hiding inside a metal storage cabinet. The building was located just three blocks from the former site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, where another fire had killed 145 people in 1911.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 1PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com
9:10 - Policy researcher Paul Pillar explains why Americans misunderstand the rest of the world.
Paul is author of Why America Misunderstands the World: National Experience and Roots of Misperception from Columbia University Press.
10:05 - EPA whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo exposes regulatory failures in Flint and beyond.
Marsha is an EPA whistleblower, and wrote the recent pieces Water crises like Flint's will continue until the EPA is held accountable for the Guardian and McCarthy and Snyder to Testify before House Oversight Committee on the Poisoning of Flint’s Children for Black Agenda Report.
10:35 - Organizer Beverly Bell profiles the life and legacy of assassinated environmental activist Berta Cáceres.
Beverly wrote Why Was Berta Cáceres Assassinated? for Other Worlds.
11:05 - Writer Thomas Frank explores the continuing failures of liberal politics and the Democratic party.
Thomas is author of the new book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? from Metropolitan Books.
12:05 - Journalist Andrew Cockburn dives into America's profitable/ineffectual election-industrial complex.
Andrew wrote Down the Tube: Television, turnout, and the election-industrial complex for Harper's magazine.
12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen punctures the bubble of middle-class self-satisfaction.
Fleece vest futures are falling fast!
Posted by Alexander Jerri
On this day in Rotten History...
On this day in 1928 – (88 years ago) – near Los Angeles, the two-year-old Saint Francis Dam collapsed, hurling massive chunks of concrete and releasing 12.4 billion gallons of water. A wave more than one hundred feet high rushed down the San Francisquito Canyon, destroying powerhouses, neighborhoods, and farm worker camps, and cutting off electric power to large parts of metropolitan Los Angeles. Within hours, some four to six hundred people were dead. The exact number is unknown, because many bodies were washed into the Pacific Ocean. Remains were still being found as recently as 1994. It was determined that the dam had failed not due to any earthquake, but because it had been built on inadequate bedrock. Chief engineer William Mulholland — who had also designed the far more successful Los Angeles Aqueduct — took full responsibility for the dam’s collapse. A jury found him not guilty of criminal negligence, but he immediately ended his career and lived the rest of his life a broken man. A famous street in Los Angeles is named after him.
On this day in 1938 – (78 years ago) – Austria was invaded by the forces of Nazi Germany. It was one of the Hitler regime’s first moves toward the creation of a greater German Reich. While the Nazis’ annexation of Austria was forbidden by international treaties, it met with relatively little protest from neighboring countries. It would soon lead to the dismantling of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Poland, and the many other horrors of World War II.
On this day in 1955 – (61 years ago) – the saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, one of the greatest figures in the history of jazz, died while watching television at the hotel suite of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who acted as friend and patron to many avant-garde jazz musicians in New York City. Parker, also known to jazz fans as “Bird,” had revolutionized the music with his harmonic innovations, inspiring colleagues like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and many others in the development of bebop — a new musical language that reached only limited commercial success in its original form, but whose echoes spread throughout serious and popular music, and remain potent to this day. When he died, Parker had suffered from heroin addiction, alcohol abuse, cirrhosis, obesity, pneumonia,... read more
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 1PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com
9:10 - Economist Mary Mellor explains how to reclaim power from banks and redemocratize the economy.
Mary is author of the book Debt or Democracy: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice from Pluto Press.
10:05 - Civic educator Tom Tresser shows why the city of Chicago is not broke, just poor in leadership.
Tom is raising funds to publish the book We Are Not Broke: Funding the City We Deserve.
10:35 - Laddie O examines personal cybersecurity in the wake of the Apple / FBI court case.
Laddie will be talking about the RSA Conference covered in this Fortune piece.
11:05 - Activist Ashley Williams talks about a new generation of Black protest and confronting Hillary with her own words.
Ashley recently disrupted a Clinton fundraiser in probably the most inspiring event of this campaign process.
11:35 - Geography scholar Meleiza Figueroa surveys NAFTA's damage to lives and livelihoods across Latin America.
Meleiza wrote the recent article Hillary Clinton Cries Crocodile Tears for Latin American Immigrants for Truthdig.
12:05 - Investigative reporter Greg Palast explores finance vulture Paul Singer's big bet on the Republican party.
Greg wrote about Singer's influence in the piece Who hatched Rubio? at his own site.
12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen produces noises regarding anti-productivity.
Mouth noises are one of the things Jeff Dorchen does best!
