Reader Leslie Fain sent this Washington Post piece in. It came out last fall, but I missed it. It’s a haunting portrait of the race and class divide in America, which is, at its heart, a cultural chasm that seems irresolvable.
It tells the story of a poor black family from New Orleans, displaced by Katrina and settled in a small Nebraska town that welcomed them with open arms. But things went badly wrong for the family there. Excerpts:
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Once the Oligarchy is above the law, the Republic is already dead.
To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway: How did you lose your Republic? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly. The Romans experienced this when their Republic was extinguished by Empire.
The most fervent and polarized sides in the renewed debate on gun control share one piece of solid common ground: they both invest rather magical qualities in the cold, lifeless hardware of guns themselves.
Last Thurssday, the Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Joseph Dunford testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). The topic? The President’s defense budget request for next year.
The nearly three-hour hearing covered everything from the fight against ISIS in Syria to NASA’s research and development projects. But what was remarkable, other than senators using valuable time with Secretary Carter to broker pet projects, was the evident reevaluation of threats to the U.S.