Onyx Lynx

•  Colleen McCullough, novelist.  NYTimes obit avoids the pitfalls of the work cited herein.
• Suzette Haden Elgin, author, poet, linguist. (I have The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense somewhere in the apartment.)
• Rod McKuen, poet/songwriter/singer.  Ne me quittez pas.  (And translated Jacques Brel.)

• Bill Monbouquette, pitcher (when I was ten, I thought his name was Mambo Cat)
• Charles H. Townes, developer of lasers

Republic of T compiles statistics on legal and extra-legal murders of African Americans.  And it gets ugly quickly.

(or whatever)  Andrew Sullivan retires from blogging.

Which means that Driftglass will be retiring that lovely Reagan Stomp graphic, at least for now.

Oh well.

Joe Franklin, talk show host for many years; mostly interviews.

Ernie Banks.  Mr. Cub.

Via skippy:  Forward Progressives reports on Politifact's assessment of the truth of statements made on CNN, MSNBC/NBC, and Fox "News."

While the first two networks don't exactly ooze candor, Fox "News" is much more prone likely to go with half-true, mostly false, outright lies.

Just so you know.

Peggy Charren, activist for children's television.

• Item 1:  Fort Lauderdale, FL, which may for all I know still be famous for spring break shenanigans, has criminalized feeding the homeless in public.  (Also has arrested a 90-year-old who has been feeding the poor for 20 years.)

  In less than two years, 21 cities have passed legislation restricting food-sharing, according to a survey published last month by the National Coalition for the Homeless. More than 10 other cities are reported to be doing the same.

• Item 2:  Overview of the plight of the homeless.

  But these regulations aren’t about maintaining “quality of life” for the local community’s residents: the laws are simply about colonising the commons to make it safe for the rich, typically to the exclusion of others. Their proponents are using the allure of social harmony to paper over the shame of massive inequality.

But again, it's not for us to judge. The rough men are doing that violence to protect us. It's not like they invaded a random country that never did us any harm under a ridiculous pretext and then launched a near decade-long nation-building project led by incompetent civilians and generals who sucked up to the administration, along with a shadowy global campaign of permanent war whose nature is almost completely unknown to us, and about which our leaders have a proven track record of deceit. It's not as if we accepted all this, and then supported a feel-good action film about a guy just because he was the best at blowing people's heads off in the middle of this kind of brutal and unnecessary nonsense.

From, of course, Goblinbooks.  And that is why I will not be seeing American Sniper.

Oh, and read the rest.

Editors with relationships to financial powers-that-be might not like to publish information counter to the prevalent mythology.

Just saying.

(Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith reprinting an article by Eric L. Prentis.)

• A high school history club in Alabama prevented from seeing Selma.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid, who is Not Convinced that "profanity" is the reason.)
• Reminder:  Regime change is only permitted when the regime is "leftist."  "Rightist" regimes are our friends.  Sometimes people find this out too late. 
• Final (!) Freedom Train runs San Jose to San Francisco.

Tony Verna, instant replay.

• From AlterNet, an excerpt from Karen Armstrong's book Fields of Blood, about "religion," war, evolution, and reverence toward life.  Many things have changed...
• Louis Gossett, Jr., makes some points.  (CBC Radio transcript.)  (The Oscar nominations have garnered some controversy this year.)

I've added Popehat to the Time Insensitive blogroll; I kept running across references to them and not quite getting around to reading the site (skimming is my friend, says the soupmaker).  I'm sure I'll be offended very soon.

Meanwhile, how lack of fact-and-source-checking impacts The News Media and therefore the news we get.  Particularly note the updates.  The latest one brings in Kirby Delauter.

• Senator Barbara Boxer has announced that she will not run in 2016.  Which means that the primaries are going to be interesting, and the campaigns will be running a full year ahead of schedule.  Which means lots of lying ads on the radio.  Crap.
• Via a comment at Making Light:  The Cemetery Angel.  Have tissues handy.

• Andrae Crouch, gospel singer/songwriter and pastor
• Rod Taylor, actor (The Time Machine, et al.)

Also, yahrzeit.

• A Christian gives another point of view on #BlackLivesMatter.
• A Voltairean Evelyn Beatrice Hallian discussion of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

And yes, I'm crossposting.

1. Politician:  You shall not take my name in vain.  Newspaper:  You're not God, Kirby Delauter.  Oh, yes.  Yanno, Mr. Kirby Delauter, there are easier ways to get your name in the papers.  Additionally, the rules about the appearances in media of ladies (at one's debut in society, one's wedding, and one's funeral) do not apply to politicians public officials [Thanks, Avedon!].  What do they teach in schools these days?  (ETA:  Lance Mannion goes further.)
2. Three terrorists of alleged Islamist stripe attacked the offices of the French satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed l2 people.  (The equivalent crime on this side of the puddle would be three Tea Partyists firing on the offices of The Onion.)  Obviously, cowards; the way one fights satire is with words.  Smarter and better words.  I hope the murderers are caught soon.  On behalf of the 12 victims, Je suis Charlie.  (Also, Islamists, if you're expecting that killing people will make others respect you;  have you looked at your stereotype lately?)

• Edward Brooke, former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.  Mentioned here.  You might notice that the current crop of black Republicans seems to have forgotten about him.  It's that scary tag "liberal."  (He was supposed to be working on a book; I hope it was finished and will be published soon.)
• Stuart Scott, sportscaster.
• Edward Herrmann, actor.  No, I don't know why the headline still says "reportedly."  It's been a few days now.

• Slavery in South Korea:  disabled workers harvesting sea salt.
• The movie version should be interesting:  Chinese double agent and political party fundraiser and donor.  Via Mercury Rising, 
• At Friends of Justice, via The Slacktivist, a Christian's response to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture.

  More troubling is the substitution of a “conservative” position for a Christian position. American evangelicals, by and large, are conservatives first and Christians second. They forget that their Savior was born in a manger who became an illegal alien in Egypt in order to flee the legal violence of Empire. Finally, our Lord was tortured mercilessly by the Imperial guard before being nailed to a Roman cross.
  
  If you don’t see Jesus on the water boarding table; if you don’t get that it’s Jesus standing for hours in a dark room on a broken leg; if you don’t realize that it’s Jesus dying of hypothermia on a cold, urine-soaked floor, and if you don’t understand the ultimate target of the anal probe, you don’t grasp what happened on Good Friday and, just as significantly, you haven’t reckoned with our complicity in the extra judicial crucifixions outlined in the Senate Committee’s report.

  See, I've been muttering for a while now that people who identify as Christian should be identifying with Christ in that narrative; a lot of Americans seem to be identifying with the Roman soldiers.

Now go back to sleep.