MetaFilter posts tagged with US

Former United States Senator Jesse Helms, 1921 - 2008.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:22:18 -0800

Fmr. US Senator Jesse Helms, 1921 - 2008. Wikipedia | Wikiquote | Collection of attributed quotes (unsourced)

Taking Affirmative Action Against Crime and For Economic Reconstruction

orthogonality — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:12:57 -0800

The black backs by and on which the fortunes of the New South were built:

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”... Cottenham’s offense was blackness.... [After a brief trial] Cottenham... was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North — U.S. Steel Corporation — the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence.... he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners.... Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.

— from the Introduction to Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The book's website includes reviews of the book, an excerpt of the Introduction, and an extensive photo gallery that includes disturbing images of enslaved and tortured prisoners. For those unable to read the entire introductory excerpt, I've copied a few paragraphs, but you're better served reading the whole thing:

The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3 Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion. Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations.... By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina — where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.... That the arc of Green Cottenham’s life led from a birth in the heady afterglow of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

copyrite more like copyrong

dersins — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:54:38 -0800

"Happy Birthday to You" is the best-known and most frequently sung song in the world. Many - including Justice Breyer in his dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft - have portrayed it as an unoriginal work that is hardly worthy of copyright protection, but nonetheless remains under copyright. Yet close historical scrutiny reveals both of those assumptions to be false. [Full pdf here.] [via] Over two hundred unpublished documents found in six archives across the United States have been made available on a website that will serve as an online appendix to this article.

Under His Robes

rzklkng — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:48:24 -0800

U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals Chief Justice Alex Kozinski [wiki] is currently adjudicating a remarkably hardcore obscenity case. He is currently facing his own obscenity case as well, having allowed public access to NSFW or illegal-for-minor-viewing material posted on his own vanity website, as reported in the LA Times. Although he maintains that the material's posting was just innocent fun, he clearly knows his way around the internets. Kozinski is a prolific and well-regarded essayist, and is occasionally mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee.

Are Americans leaving the US?

yoyo_nyc — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:09:05 -0800

While Gerorge Soros and Jim Rodgers predict one of the worst recessions for the US, Americans seem to look for exit options in form of a second citizenship. Some people seem to see it as treason if Americans accept a second non-US citizenship, but it must not necessary be a bad thing if Americans (and other folks) start leveraging with a second citizenship. After all they might not have much of a chance when corporations manufacture in China, administrate in India, sell in the US and pay their taxes on the Cayman Islands. The world has been flat for quite some time and if borders are open for capital and goods, why shouldn't they be open for people? Maybe you want to check out if you are eligible for a European citizenship? But be aware of the disadvantages.

HeroWorship Filter

l33tpolicywonk — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:50:44 -0800

Is Barack Obama the Messiah? After all, it may explain the logo. Maybe he's just a light-worker, "who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet." This could just be all hootenany from the press, like Chris Matthews, who called BO the "New Testament." But, as always, there are unbelievers.

Another Report Which The President Won't Read

chuckdarwin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:45:05 -0800

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program has just released "Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.3: The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States." It makes for pretty interesting reading. * Grain and oilseed crops will mature more rapidly, but increasing temperatures will increase the risk of crop failures, particularly if precipitation decreases or becomes more variable. * Higher temperatures will negatively affect livestock. Warmer winters will reduce mortality but this will be more than offset by greater mortality in hotter summers. Hotter temperatures will also result in reduced productivity of livestock and dairy animals. * Forests in the interior West, the Southwest, and Alaska are already being affected by climate change with increases in the size and frequency of forest fires, insect outbreaks and tree mortality. These changes are expected to continue. * Much of the United States has experienced higher precipitation and streamflow, with decreased drought severity and duration, over the 20th century. The West and Southwest, however, are notable exceptions, and increased drought conditions have occurred in these regions. * Weeds grow more rapidly under elevated atmospheric CO2. Under projections reported in the assessment, weeds migrate northward and are less sensitive to herbicide applications. * There is a trend toward reduced mountain snowpack and earlier spring snowmelt runoff in the Western United States. * Horticultural crops (such as tomato, onion, and fruit) are more sensitive to climate change than grains and oilseed crops. * Young forests on fertile soils will achieve higher productivity from elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Nitrogen deposition and warmer temperatures will increase productivity in other types of forests where water is available. * Invasion by exotic grass species into arid lands will result from climate change, causing an increased fire frequency. Rivers and riparian systems in arid lands will be negatively impacted. * A continuation of the trend toward increased water use efficiency could help mitigate the impacts of climate change on water resources. * The growing season has increased by 10 to 14 days over the last 19 years across the temperate latitudes. Species' distributions have also shifted. * The rapid rates of warming in the Arctic observed in recent decades, and projected for at least the next century, are dramatically reducing the snow and ice covers that provide denning and foraging habitat for polar bears.

"NIXON-AGNEW", in red and in blue.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:49:33 -0800

United States election logos, 2008-1960.

Robert Rauschenberg, dead at 82.

krautland — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:08:19 -0800

Robert Rauschenberg (previously), painter, sculptor, perfomance artist, printmaker, photographer, theater designer, technologist, dead at 82. Here's the American Masters profile of Rauschenberg, an old interview about his erasing of a De Kooning, the Man At Work piece and a long Charlie Rose interview with him (starts at around 30 minutes in, after Chuck Close).

The story of the Democratic primaries so far, boiled down to seven minutes.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:10:22 -0800

The Democratic Primary Season in 7 Minutes.