Today’s Wake Up is for a few people and their terrible ideas. Sadly, they reflect the current state of our nation. The Selma march to Montgomery was about voting rights, voting rights that became codified into law in The Voting Rights Act of 1965. This photo taken during the march to Montgomery on March 25, 1965 shows a young black man in white face making the point about what it took to be a voter in Alabama in the 1960’s:
Charles Fentress Jr., The Louisville Courier-Journal
But, despite all of our progress, open (and covert) hostility to civil rights and minorities are still with us, even at the Selma commemoration. You have to look no further than South Carolina’s black GOP Sen. Tim Scott for proof. Sen. Scott (R-SC), was an honorary co-chairman of the Selma trip. He is the only African-American Republican in the Senate. He said voting rights and the commemoration of Selma should be “de-coupled”:
The issue of voting rights legislation and the issue of Selma, we ought to have an experience that brings people together and not make it into a political conversation…
We should “de-couple” civil rights from the struggle that necessitated it? He wants warm and fuzzy, because that’s the only way some lawmakers can stay busy disenfranchising whole groups of Americans, and still smile when they attend the commemoration of the Selma march.
Taken to its limit, what Sen. Scott wants us to do is to now pretend Selma isn’t about voting, because that means the Voting Rights Act was unnecessary. And that makes the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Shelby County (Alabama) vs. Holder, which effectively gutted the main provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the right way to look at the state of voting rights in America today. Sadly, that’s all wrong.
An example of overt hostility was shown by a billboard, within sight of Mr. Obama and the Edmund Pettus Bridge where he spoke on Saturday. The billboard depicts KKK founder and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest with the Confederate Flag in its background:
It is hard to see, but under the image of Forrest is his motto: “Keep the Skeer on ‘Em.”
Indeed. This brings home to us again the William Faulkner quote, “The past is not dead; it is not even past”. In fact, it is all too present. Time to wake up, America!
Here is Barenaked Ladies doing “Brian Wilson”. Many know that Wilson, the key singer-songwriter of the Beach Boys, had a nervous breakdown in the mid-1960’s at the height of the group’s fame. He later took to his bed for 3 years. Wilson had a psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy, who took advantage of him and his money, and is mentioned in the Ladies’ song.
America, you are now “lying’ in bed just like Brian Wilson did”. Republicans are your Dr. Landy. Wilson said that he cured himself by trucking in sand to his house for inspiration. America, get your sand! Here is “Brian Wilson”:
Interestingly, Wilson later covered the song in 2000, on his album, “Live at Roxy Theater”.
Your Monday Hot Links:
Lockheed Martin claims it now has the ability to generate cheap energy from nuclear fusion with little waste or global warming. Lockheed calls this “Compact Fusion” and says it can build a reactor small enough to fit on a truck that could provide enough power for a city of up to 100,000 people. Invest at your own risk.
A Google research team is developing a model to measure the trustworthiness of a web page, rather than how many hits it gets. The system, not yet live, would count the number of incorrect facts within a page. The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the Internet. Facts that the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings. Searching for web sites based on their truthiness? We’ll see.
A cyber-attack in late December involved a smart refrigerator. C/NET reported that 100,000 devices sent upwards of 750,000 spam emails. Consumers have virtually no way to detect or fix infections when they do occur. So, your fridge could have spam two ways…
Like humans, apes make irrational economic decisions. New research suggests that choice biases, such as loss aversion, might be evolutionarily ancient. Oh, and they found that male apes were much more susceptible to bad decisions than were female apes. It’s not your fault, its evolution that’s to blame when you buy an RV without telling your wife.
New York’s Lincoln Center paid the heirs of Avery Fisher $15 million so they could name Avery Fisher Hall after David Geffen. Fisher’s family had threatened to sue if his name was removed, so Lincoln Center, looking to raise $500 million, really wanted to take Geffen up on a $100 million donation in return for naming rights. So, they paid up, and now there’s going to be a David Geffen Hall in New York.
The issue of voting rights is just one example of how a craven Supreme Court has taken an activist role to remove as much of progressive legislation as they can. The billboard is but one example, others are posters of Obama as a nazi and in any of a number of terrible poses. The 50-60s represent a high point in civil society in the US and the period from 1981 (when Reagan took office) represents a regression.