In 1894 – (124 years ago) – more than four hundred people were killed in a firestorm that resulted when two separate forest fires merged in the lumber country around Hinckley, Minnesota, at the end of an unusually hot and dry summer. In those days it was common for loggers to strip trees of their branches before cutting them down. That practice covered the forest floor with chunks of dead wood and flammable tinder in areas where steam locomotives regularly passed through, spewing red-hot coal cinders from their smokestacks. In the Hinckley firestorm, powerful convection currents sucked up so much oxygen that many victims died by suffocation. In just four hours, some 300,000 acres of pine forest were destroyed. A few hundred people managed to survive the blaze by taking shelter in a gravel pit and a muddy lake. But their livelihood, the local lumber industry, was completely wiped out. And though an effort was made to rebuild the town of Hinckley, it would never regain its former economic importance.
In 1914 – (104 years ago) — the world’s last known passenger pigeon was found dead on the floor of her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. Known by the name “Martha,” she was about twenty-nine years old, the last survivor of years of failed breeding attempts by ornithologists in Cincinnati and at the University of Chicago. She had never in her life laid a fertile egg, and the last male passenger pigeon had died four years earlier. For thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers, passenger pigeons had been the most abundant bird species in North America and perhaps the world, numbering some three to five billion at their peak. In 1813 the naturalist John James Audubon described seeing migrating flocks that numbered in the millions, so vast that they blackened the sky and took hours or even days to pass overhead. Frontier settlers found they could easily bring the pigeons down by shooting into the sky without bothering to aim, or by using torches to smoke them out of the trees where they nested. Some used the birds as a source of cheap food, while others killed them for fun, leaving them on the ground to rot. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, passenger pigeons were the target of uncontrolled commercial hunting that drastically reduced their numbers. Meanwhile, the timber industry decimated the forests of the eastern United States, depriving the pigeons of their... read more
Chris Hedges discusses his new book, A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine.
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Listen live from 9AM - 1:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
9:20 - Live from São Paulo, Brian Mier reports on the judicial chaos of Brazil's first post-coup election.
Brian recently interviewed UN Human Rights Committee Vice President Sarah Cleveland about Lula and Brazil's election for the news channel Brasil 247.
10:05 - Writer Max Haiven explores the deep connections between art and money under capitalism.
Max is author of Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization from Pluto Press.
11:05 - Matt Christman and Brendan James rebel against the very normal politics of today's hellworld.
Matt and Brendan are co-authors of The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts and Reason from Touchstone.
12:05 - Sociologist Kehinde Andrews charts a new course for radical Black politics in the 21st century.
Kehinde is author of Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century from Zed Books.
12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen does some racial thinking.
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
The late champion of liberal democratic rationalism, Karl Popper, said, "[I]f we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them... we should claim the right to suppress [the intolerant] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument[.]"
Two groups are at odds these days: the MAGAts, and everyone else. MAGAts can often be identified by their red baseball caps with the words "Make America Great Again" in white letters above the bill. The caps are worn to protest the loss of US manufacturing jobs to China, and are manufactured in China. Not true, according to Snopes. But believable. Truthy!
MAGAts don't always wear hats. They can also be identified by their ideological and aspirational fealty to a sleazy real estate developer, who was born with a fake Rolex on his wrist and mentored by Senator Joe McCarthy's scummy lawyer, Roy Cohn – himself such a caricature of a slimy shyster that even the swarthiest Jews in the arms-for-blood-diamonds business are offended by having to share a cultural identity with him. This sleazy real estate developer, who goes by the name Donald Dump, sports a comb-over of bottle-blond fibers that renders his appearance a perfect metaphor for his moral character as well as his aesthetic taste. Donald Dump found Liberace's domestic decor understated.
MAGAts believe that immigrants and other foreigners, rather than the finance industry, overweening corporations, and self-aggrandizing mega-robber-barons, are to blame for workers' depressed wages, buying power, and standard of living in the United States, and they've finally elected someone as their Leader who will not only feed them this line of monkey gland sauce they find so delicious, but even take bold steps to put on scattered Lysenko-esque showcase versions of remedying what is actually not the problem.
In a global civilization slowly killing itself with fossil fuel emissions, industrial fertilizer and cattle farts, MAGAts believe the answer to all their problems is a bloated John Jacob Astor/Benito Mussolini hybrid reviving the coal industry, so that we may return the once great American sky to its once great condition as a gray- black death shroud over... read more
Listen live from 9AM - 1:00PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM / stream at www.thisishell.com / subscribe to the podcast
9:20 - Economist Mark Weisbrot examines the US hand in Latin American politics across the 21st century.
Mark wrote the essay A Note about “Our Backyard”: Advice that Thomas Shannon Might Give to Mike Pompeo for CEPR.
10:05 - Attorney Flint Taylor follows the long, living legacy of police torture in Chicago.
Flint's book The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago is out later this year via Haymarket Books.
10:35 - Journalist Drew Philp talks about building a house and rebuilding a community in Detroit.
Drew is author of A $500 House in Detroit: Rebuilding an Abandoned Home and an American City from Scribner.
11:05 - Historian Lilian Calles Barger explores the past (and future) of the liberation theology movement.
Lilian is author of The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology from Oxford University Press.
12:05 - The Hopleaf's Michael Roper discusses sell-outs and shut-downs in the late stage craft beer market.
Michael is the proprietor of The Hopleaf Bar in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood. Try the Bitterballen.
12:45 - In a Moment of Truth, Jeff Dorchen puts a Great Thinker's words into worst practices.
Jeff said I wasn't gonna like this one, really looking forward to it!
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Talking with some of the regulars at Lily's Coffee at the Laurel Canyon Country Store Monday morning, I was led to an epiphany of sorts. You know how I love my epiphanies. We were talking about how pet philosophies seem to wear out their usefulness after a while. Obviously this isn't something that troubles philosophers who spend their lives developing their thought shenanigans, but for those of us groping through the fever of our lives, merely splashing our faces with philosophies here and there, who don't have the time or desire to dive deep into the currents of thought, for us a thought-pool like Existentialism or Stoicism, used as a handy refresher of perspective skimmed off the surface of better thinkers' deeper explorations – well, we go through these like Wet Wipes. Because we're not plumbing the depths of ideas, we're busy working and sweating and eating spare ribs or barely eating anything and getting all sloppy, and we just want something to wipe off the day's accretion of schmutz.
Whenever I think I've got the tiger by the tail, and keep swinging that tiger around, knocking obstacles out of my way, day after day, I eventually find the tiger doesn't swing the way it used to. My grip on the tail loosens out of habit, or maybe lack of mindfulness, and the tiger itself becomes emaciated and moth-eaten. Eventually I'm holding nothing by the tail. The tail itself has dissolved. The obstacles don't comply, and they're different somehow. The landscape has changed. Finding a new tiger doesn't help, can't get the same grip, it's just no good swinging tigers anymore.
As with mental constructs, so with systems and objects in the material world. After many a strike, the subtle rotation of the wrist no longer gets the bowling ball into the pocket. Musical styles begin to wear on the nerves. The car wears out and croaks a dusty death. To a hammer everything looks like nail, but everything isn't a nail. It never was. That way of seeing only stood the hammer in good stead temporarily. Approaches and equipment need to be refreshed and renewed.
Amish Tripathi is an Indian author of adventure fiction, known best for his first series of books, the Shiva Trilogy. He asserts that the initial novel, The Immortals of Meluha, began as a treatise on the nature of evil. How did the immortals of Meluha become immortal? Easy! They drank the somras, the elixir of... read more