Well a Hush Fell Over the Pool Room

 

It’s time to return to Jim Crow laws.

Settle down, Trumpanzees. Not the Jim Crow literacy tests for which you yearn to return. Go retrieve the MAGA ball caps you surely tossed in the air at the prospect (when, exactly, was America great; can you give me a year or even era?).

No, we at the HB call for Jim Crow laws for you. But to make it equal between all parties, let’s make it applicable to every American.

Make no mistake: The Jim Crow laws of the 60’s were an abomination. I unearthed a Jim Crow literacy test from  a half century ago, administered to black voters to keep them out of the polls. I challenge any voter, black or white, to ace just the first five questions:

Muvattupuzha 1965 Alabama Literacy Test
1. Which of the following is a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights?
_____Public Education
_____Employment
_____Trial by Jury
_____Voting
2. The federal census of population is taken every five years.
_____True _____False
3. If a person is indicted for a crime, name two rights which he has.
______________________ ________________________
4. A U.S. senator elected at the general election in November takes office the following year on what date?
_________________________________________________
5. A President elected at the general election in November takes office the following year on what date?
_______________________________________________________

The test went on like that for six pages and 68 questions. I’m not sure your president can even count that high.

No, this test — let’s rename them Jim Croce laws, since the sublime singer appealed to all races and creeds, and loved to skewer dumbasses — would be far fairer.

The Jim Croce test would require to correctly answer just three true-false questions:

  1. Is the Earth round?
  2. Is the Earth getting warmer?
  3. Did dinosaurs live millions of years ago?

I was considering including evolution in there, but realized a Trump base may not know how to pronounce the word, let alone understand it. So we’ll stick to dinosaurs. If you can’t answer those questions, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Consider the questions to get a driver’s license; if that requires a provable level of intelligence, shouldn’t voting?

This, of course, would be assailed by the GOP and Mitch “chicken scrotum” McConnell, who somehow seriously claimed last week that proposing making Election Day a holiday was an attempted power grab by those crafty liberals. He similarly would intuit those three questions alone would spell doom for his party.Image result for mitch mcconnell wrinkly neck

So let’s just stick with something simpler: Slapfacts. And don’t worry; none will be on the test.

  • Chuck Berry had a degree in hairdressing.Image result for Chuck Berry had a degree in hairdressing.
  • Humans share the planet with as many as 8.7 million different forms of life, scientists estimate.
  • John Williams has never seen any of the Star Wars movies he composed the music for.Image result for star wars
  • More people in America own more than 10 guns than there are people in the whole of Denmark.Image result for southerner with many guns
  • Serbia is home to the World Testicle Cooking Championships.Image result for Serbia is home to the World Testicle Cooking Championships.
  • California was named after a fictional island in a 16th-century romance novel, Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián).Image result for Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián).
  • Actress Carrie Fisher once delivered a cow tongue inside a Tiffany box to a predatory Hollywood producer who assaulted her friend.Image result for carrie fisher cow tongue buzzfeed
  • Before he became an actor, Clint Eastwood survived a plane crash, avoided jellyfish, and swam to shore.

 

How to Save Journalism

Amid the layoffs, the dire world and domestic developments, the exclamations of fake news, journalism appears doomed.

Here’s how you fix it. Run just one story, like this out of Chicago, on your front page everyday. Show that real journalism doesn’t need to lead with what bleeds. Counter punch the villains of this world.

Starting now.

Your turn.

Chicago Woman Got 30 Hotel Rooms for Homeless People During Severe Cold Snap

As temperatures plunged to life-threatening lows this week, more than 100 homeless people in Chicago unexpectedly found themselves with food, fresh clothes and a place to stay after a local real estate broker intervened.

The broker, Candice Payne, 34, said it was a “spur-of-the-moment” decision to help. “It was 50 below, and I knew they were going to be sleeping on ice and I had to do something,” she said on Saturday.

Ms. Payne contacted hotels and found 30 rooms available at the Amber Inn for Wednesday night at $70 per room. Temperatures in Chicago reached lows of minus 25 and minus 26 on Wednesday and Thursday, according to the National Weather Service.

After Ms. Payne paid for the rooms on a credit card, she asked on her Instagram account for anyone who could help transport the homeless people. Soon she had a caravan of cars, S.U.V.s and vans with volunteer drivers.

“We met at tent city, where all the homeless people set up tents and live on the side of the expressway,” Ms. Payne said. “It is not a secret. The homeless have been living there for years.”

She asked as many people as she could to go with her to the Amber Inn as donations were pouring in to her Cash App account.

Ms. Payne met two pregnant women and a family of five in the first group of homeless people who went to the inn.

“We had to accommodate everyone. It was really overwhelming,” Ms. Payne said. “They were so appreciative. They couldn’t wait to get in a bath and lay in a bed.”

Ms. Payne bought toiletries, food, prenatal vitamins, lotions, deodorants and snacks and made care packages to help make the people feel comfortable. Restaurants donated trays of food, and many people called the inn.

She said she has spent about $4,700 so far on the rooms and other materials.

“People from the community, they all piggyback off Candice,” said Robyn Smith, the manager of the Amber Inn. “Other people started calling and anonymously paying for rooms,” she added, and Ms. Smith lowered the price to accommodate more people.

What started out as 30 rooms doubled to 60, Ms. Smith said. The rooms were only supposed to be occupied until Thursday, when temperatures in Chicago were expected to moderate. But with the donations Ms. Payne has received — more than $10,000 so far — she has been able to house the people in the hotel and feed them until Sunday.

“I am a regular person,” Ms. Payne said. “It all sounded like a rich person did this, but I’m just a little black girl from the South Side. I thought it was unattainable, but after seeing this and seeing people from all around the world, that just tells me that it’s not that unattainable. We can all do this together.”

Ms. Payne wants to organize other ways to help homeless people in Chicago.

“This was a temporary fix, and it has inspired me to come up with more of a permanent solution,” Ms. Payne said before she received a call on her other line — from J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois.

“He thanked me,” Ms. Payne said. “He said it was one of the biggest acts of kindness we have seen in a long time.”

NYT, 2/2/19

Holy Shit

 

I don’t have a social media account, which not only makes me a dinosaur, but something of a hypocrite. Because I can no more stay away from Trump’s tweets than I can half-off candy.

And this was his latest gumdrop:

Donald J. Trump

The tweet came from, where else, Fox & Friends, the television’s version of Pravda.
The Trumptards had North Dakota Republican Rep. Aaron McWilliams on the program, touting his sponsorship of a bill to support Bible literacy in the classrooms of his state.

In addition, they brayed, five other states are considering similar measures: Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia and Florida.That was enough to get Trump’s sausage fingers a flyin.’ Which will, very likely, get his base in other states to demand similar proposals.

Let’s set aside any legal questions, which interest our president as much reading. Let’s also ignore the fact that the U.S. Constitution, in calling for a separation of church and state, does not use the word “God” once in its text.

Instead, let’s frame this proposition from a religious standpoint. Let’s go further: we’ll tackle the issue as believers, giving as much benefit of the doubt as academically feasible. We’ll even accept the good book is not only accurate, but an acceptable role model for our children, just to appease Bible thumpers.

The question, then, is this: which of its literary passages should the kiddos learn? We’ll tackle only the biggest, as the Bible is rife with innumerable inconsistencies, contractions, and historical and scientific inaccuracies within its covers. I guess that’s to be expected, perhaps even accepted, considering it was written by first century illiterate goat shepherds.

First, the ten commandments, namely the one purists love to point to as the moral compass for humanity. Here’s number six:Image result for the ten commandments

Thou shalt not kill.

Seems reasonable enough. But will we redact the chapter where the priestly tribe of the Levites was instructed to punish anyone who insisted on sticking to their pagan idolatry? Image result for tribe of the Levites draw swords

Thus sayeth the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side. and slay ever man, his brother, companion, neighbor.  — Exodus 32:27

Now onto a common theme of the Bible: rape. The Bible’s rules on rape are laid out clearly in Deuteronomy: pay the father of the violated woman, who must marry her rapist — and who will not be free of him until he croaks:Image result for Deuteronomy rape

The third instruction of that list of golden rules says:

If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives. — Deuteronomy chapter 22.

A shekel of silver is worth $320 in today’s U.S. currency. That’s $16,000 per rape.

It gets better. Old Deuter (sorry, Lebowski) later tosses out the recompense entirely if the rapist is arrested and victim identified:

If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death— the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you. — Deuteronomy verse 29

And I’ll guess we’ll have to omit the 13th Amendment of the Constitution altogether during civics class, because the Bible has a lot to say about slavery, and none of it holy. The Bible describes Timothy as a righteous missionary and good friend friend of the Apostle Paul who warranted his own byline and quote in the good book: 

All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered. — Timothy 6:1

To make the sure point was not lost on the heathens, Paul and Timmy co-wrote this gem: Image result for apostle paul and timothy

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. — Colossians 3:22

One of these days I’m going to quit reading Trump’s twit tweets. I swear to god.