Mind the gap!

"Mr. President, we may have a problem..."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Benny Johnson and Turning Point USA at UNL: stealing people's stuff to own the libs

Image
The newly 'recognized' Turning Point USA UNL chapter have immediately put paid to speculation they might be any different than the other chapters of the alt-right campus freak show, by recruiting the unsavory Benny Johnson as their first speaker. Benjamin Arthur Johnson graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009. Although it's been variously reported he also has a degree in Organic Chemistry, U. Iowa seems to think he only graduated in Psychology . Since he was an honors student, I hoped to find the thesis he is supposed to have written; running that through a plagiarism checker might be a laugh riot. Unfortunately, it seems not to be in their digital repository. Johnson commenced his career with a listicle-laced gala performance of promiscuous plagiarism at Buzzfeed, which led to his firing. He stole from no fewer than 41 articles. Then, after a brief break to let the scandal die down, he got a job at IJR Review . The man has no shame; a hate click, he claims,...
Read more

Dan Whitney, aka Larry the Cable Guy, a short biography

Image
I have known of Dan Whitney, Larry the Cable Guy , longer than most people have. In the car on the way into work at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, we used to listen to one of the usual mostly-talk rock radio shows. Larry would quite regularly call in. His accent fascinated me. Probably because I’ve lived in so many places, I like to try to place accents. Larry the Cable Git's accent was vaguely southern, or was meant to be southern, but I couldn’t place it anywhere in particular in the South. In any case, he’d distorted it so much you could make out only half of what he was saying.  What he was saying was mumbled, consciously transgressive hate.  Later on, I discovered he was was born and grew up in Pawnee City Nebraska, until his preacher daddy hauled him down to Florida. It’s a long story… (1) Daddy issues Daniel Lawrence Whitney, better known by his stage name and character Larry the Cable Guy, was born on February 17, 1963 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, to the Reverend ...
Read more

The Fortenberry slaves: a prelude

Image
Toiling in the mid-morning sun, in a hot, muddy cotton field in Copiah County, in the south of Mississippi, three young African American men, brothers, aged 18, 20 and 22, hoed the rows. It was late June, 1860, and so the men were slaves. The ground was wet from yesterday’s rain, the air heavy, and the men were anxious to finish their work before the clouds gathering on the western horizon flooded the fields with another summer cloudburst. Inside the plantation house, unbeknownst to them, they were being enumerated . James R Fortenberry, the slave-holder, a man of about 35, was listing their important personal details to Elijah Peyton, Assistant Marshall. These details were three; age, gender, and race. The race was officially ‘mulatto’; at that time, and in that place, mulattos were usually the sons or daughters of a black woman raped by a white slave-holder. They had no names, as far as the United States Government was concerned. Instead they would be listed, in Peyton’s elegant,...
Read more