Tamah Jada Clark is really, really upset about something — it’s not clear what. She has filed a legal something or other titled To Fuck This Court and Everything that it Stands For in which she chews out a judge, colorfully, and fails to make much of a case for anything. She apparently thinks she is not obligated to pay federal taxes? She does not recognize the fed because she is a Floridian-American? I don’t know. But she goes on for pages raging about the judge who dismissed her case.
It’s dismaying to see law enforcement in this country exposed as a gang of thugs abusing the rights of citizens — we have a militarized police force that basically executes people they don’t like. Now we learn that even if they survive arrest, suspects will get railroaded straight into a conviction by biased crime labs. The latest culprit: the FBI has been jiggering hair analysis results for decades.
Other than just what she tells you to, that is. Now we have some evidence of the names of the women warriors of the Scythians — Greek pottery illustrating Amazons seems to have had some phonetically translated Scythian words attached to the images.
To do so, they translated the inscriptions into their phonetic sounds, and then submitted the phonetic transcriptions to linguist John Colarusso of Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, who is an expert on rare languages of the Caucasus. Colarusso, who was not provided with any information regarding the source of the transcriptions, matched the phonetics to Scythian words and names, which mean ‘Princess’, ‘Don’t Fail’, and ‘Hot Flanks’. There was also an archer named ‘Battle-Cry’ and a horsewoman named ‘Worthy of Armour’. On one vase, a scene of two Amazons hunting with a dog appears with a Greek transliteration for the Abkhazian word meaning "set the dog loose."
But it seems Putin thinks it is. Read this exceedingly strange story about the recent twists and turns of American/Russian interactions, and how Steven Seagal, the wooden star of bad martial arts movies, became Putin’s darling.
It’s always one step forward, one step back. A town in Missouri voted in their first black woman mayor.
Voters in Parma, Missouri voted in their first African-American female mayor.
Tyrus Byrd will be sworn in as mayor on Tuesday evening, April 14 at the Parma Community Building.
Great! Democracy works at last! Only it turns out that Parma has been a fiefdom of Mayor Quimby for 37 years, and Officer Wiggum just doesn’t like change.
I tend to be suspicious of theories that explain everything all at once, but this discussion of the Civil War really flicked on a light bulb for me. Once this model is in your head, it puts a lot of things into a new configuration that makes sense: modern racial oppression, the Tea Party, the Birther movement, and why I’ve never been able to sit through Gone With The Wind without stomping out in a rage. We lost the Civil War. The Confederacy is still pulling strings.
Amy Goodman hosted a discussion between four progressives on the Hillary Clinton candidacy. It’s interesting reading, and I think is actually somewhat representative of the conversations I hear. Two of the four were lukewarm about Clinton — two detested her. I’d put myself in the cool to lukewarm camp myself, but the the other side rather discredited itself with all the enthusiastically goony praise for Rand Paul, highlighted by Charles Pierce. I’m sorry? Really? You want a more progressive candidate than Hillary Clinton, so you’re raving about a bizarrely theocratic racist Libertarian? That makes no sense.
Greta Christina does a marvelous job of rebuking American Atheists for their presence at CPAC. I agree completely with it. Go read it.
Nick Fish of American Atheists does a very good job of replying. In particular, he tries to put their efforts in a different light.
I want to clarify one thing right out of the gates: American Atheists did not attend CPAC with the purpose of “recruiting” conservatives into the broader atheist community. This is a misconception that I have seen repeated on Twitter, in the blogs, and in person. That this needed be clarified is likely a failure to clearly articulate it on our side. So, we’ll take our licks there.
It is much more accurate to say that we were there to empower atheists who already exist within the conservative community to be more vocal about their opposition to the theocratic elements of Republican Party orthodoxy.
Good try. Falls apart with a moment’s thought.
I figured I might as well comply with Radford’s lawyers’ demands, since there wasn’t much effort required. I throw out a lot of my redundant correspondence, so when I went looking for bits of any conversations with Karen Stollznow, I only have one left, and it’s a doozy. It included several files documenting her claims. Here’s her letter, and you’ll immediately see a major problem.
