Barack Obama taking on Mitt Romney's abysmal job creation record is a little like critiquing Stalin's abysmal human rights record:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is casting Mitt Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate titan with little concern for the working class in a new, multi-pronged effort that seeks to undermine the central rationale for his Republican rival's candidacy: his business credentials.

At the center of the push — the president's most forceful attempt yet to sully Romney before the November election — is a biting new TV ad airing Monday that recounts through interviews with former workers the restructuring, and ultimate demise, of a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill under the Republican's private equity firm.

Forget Hallmark and Big Flora -- Mother's Day is (and always has been) for radicals:

Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

Howe wrote:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Next weekend, May 12-13, at the Santa Fe Institute, a hand-picked group of physicists, historians, social scientists, systems theorists, and writers will examine the long-term legacies of the Manhattan Project in a timely discussion of an important event in world history that still influences science and society today. Harold Agnew, who was part of the historic effort to develop the first atomic bomb, will participate in the discussion.

SFI is collaborating with Nuclear Diner to bring the discussion to you live on Twitter. You can participate before, during, and after by searching for the hashtag #bomblegacy or following @nucleardiner. Before the event, you can also leave questions at Nuclear Diner and the Facebook event page. If you "like" the Facebook page, you will get updates throughout the week and continuing information after the workshop.

Amina Khan | Boston/Wonderwerk Cave | April 3

LAT - Charred bones in a South African cave suggest that Homo erectus was utilizing fire a million years ago, and may even have been cooking, researchers say.

Flame-bearing Prometheus may have visited humans earlier than we thought. An analysis of charred bones and plant ash in sediment from a South African cave suggests that Homo erectus was wielding fire a million years ago — and perhaps even cooking with it, according to a study released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings present the earliest clear evidence of such use of fire, experts said.

The ability to control fire marks an evolutionary turning point: It would have kept our ancient relatives warm in unforgiving climes and allowed them to cook their food, releasing trapped nutrients and getting more caloric bang per bite.

There's a theme in my thinking with respect to this nation that, eventually, some large-scale changes are going to occur, and that they might occur suddenly and perhaps even violently.

American culture is based on three things: democracy, faith, and capitalism.

There's a basic disconnect in there. Those three things are, jointly and separately, untenably conflicted. Somethings have got to give, because it's within the human nature that one of those things aligns.

A basic drive of humanity is self-protection: food, clothing, shelter are all manifestations of our primal drive to survive. To believe that, somehow, that urge ends just because we satisfy those basic needs flies in the face of modern marketing, Maslow's theory notwithstanding.

Dissent, By Eric Reeves, December 15, 2011

When the history of Sudan’s third civil war is written, most will judge that the precipitating event occurred on May 21, when the Khartoum regime seized the contested border area of Abyei. It is a terminus a quo in some ways similar to the Bor Mutiny of May 1983, which began twenty-two years of unfathomably destructive civil war and came to an end only with the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

Twenty-eight years ago, then-President Jaafer Nimeri sent Colonel John Garang to quell an uprising of 500 soldiers with grievances against the government in Khartoum, in a town in Jonglei State, South Sudan. Garang, however, had prepared the groundwork for the mutiny, which represented above all his broadly supported resistance to Khartoum’s Arabizing and Islamizing of the South’s African and primarily Christian populations. He emerged as the rebellion’s charismatic and visionary leader, and remained so for more than two decades. Eventually his military and diplomatic efforts were crowned with a peace agreement that, if upheld, offered as much as any negotiations could reasonably yield the South.

Indeed, many figures in the Khartoum regime and military establishment felt that too much had been offered. And many observers, including this one, felt that only the most robust efforts to see the agreement—which guaranteed the South a vote on self-determination in January 2011—implemented could avert future war. This included implementation of the CPA’s critical Abyei Protocol, which allowed the Abyei region to determine whether it was part of the South or the North.

Jeremy Warner | Baltimore, MD | February 23

The Telegraph - Students of economic history are in for a treat. An official studying deep in the bowels of the US Treasury library has recently uncovered a prize of truly startling proportions – an 800-plus-page transcript of the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, the meeting of nations which established the foundations of today's international monetary system.

Bizarrely, this extraordinary manuscript has never before come to light. Professor Steve Hanke of John Hopkins University, whose former student it was who discovered the document, is now dashing to publish it in full in conjunction with his friend, Jacque de Larosiere. The first stage of the process, transcribing the type-written document into digital form is now complete, though it is not yet available. It's hoped eventually to produce a hard-copy, book version.

All previous accounts of Bretton Woods have been second hand, with historians apparently completely unaware that a full, and one must presume faithful, transcript of proceedings, had been taken.

Meet Richard Florida (pronounced "Flo-rid-DUH," unlike the hip hop artist).

Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week.

Courtesy of The Brunette comes this very random post. We have an idea of the Victorians, from photos that we've seen of them, as stern, almost wooden people. There was a reason for this:

When Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph in 1828, his photographic plate required an exposure of eight hours. That exposure time was drastically reduced across the course of the nineteenth century, so that by the 1890s the Collodion process had cut exposure times to two or three seconds.

Nevertheless, a three second exposure meant that subjects had to stand very still to avoid being blurred, and holding a smile for that period was tricky.

We forget that they were very, very human. This pool over at Flickr goes a long way to restoring their lost humanity.

I know several of the areas photographed and a lot of people just like those in the photos. Worth running through the gallery.

Photos of a lost America

Happy New Year!

I know that everybody has their Guy Fawkes masks at the ready, just bubbling with revolutionary zeal based on a comic book-style movie. That's cool, i guess, but it might be more instructive to remember a non-fictional event of the 5th that probably has more value for the nascent protest movement in the United States. On November 5, 1916, a boatload of IWW members arrived at the dock in Everett, WA to support a shingle workers' strike. The Wobblies didn't give the sheriff the leader he asked for, they declared themselves all to be leaders. So the mob on the dock opened fire.

Because i am that lazy.

I sort of see Herman Cain "Canegate" going down the twists and turns of legalese in short order.

I mean, really, when FOX's best defenses of the candidate are to point out that two of the accusers work for the government-- like tens of millions Americans nationwide and around the world do-- and also what words were exchanged, things are pained in Cain's campaign.

This, ahead of new allegations, admittedly even more unsubstantiated and hearsay than the original two, that Cain's straining cane plain changed the game for him in this campaign.

I want to talk about expectations. I want to talk about Occupy Wall Street.

Hundreds of attorneys, law students and other legal minds are volunteering their skills to protect the rights of protesters in the Occupy movement, according to the National Lawyers Guild.

In New York alone, dozens of people have stepped forward to act as legal observers at marches in the past month. They don luminous green hats at rallies and document the names of those arrested in confrontations with the NYPD, and they also can be found in court.

(Note to my readers at Agonist: Simply Left Behind is usually a weekly round up of news you might have missed. Sometimes, like today, I have something to address in depth. I felt this needed a wider audience than my crappy little blog's)

1) Break from tradition. I have something to say.

MEMO
TO: Occupy Wall Street

FROM: Actor212

RE: Going Forward

You looked Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Brookfield Properties straight in the eye. They blinked.

I kind of like this latest wrinkle in the Popular People's Liberation Front of Judea:

Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and other issues in New York City are dressing as corporate zombies and greeting Wall Street workers as they head into the office.

Patrick Bruner, a spokesman for the group, says Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are being urged to dress in business wear with white faces and blood, and will march while eating monopoly money. He says financial workers should see them "reflecting the metaphor of their actions."

It is, of course, a most excellent point to make with respect to the people who are responsible for the mess we are in, and have been for thirty-odd years.

This is kind of a random free association comment, but hey, it's a blog so why not?

A couple of months ago, as you know, I read John Graves' book, "Goodbye To A River." One aspect of the book I liked the most were his tales of the Comanches along the upper Brazos River. The tales he tells in an oh-so Texas idiom are well worth reading on for their stylistic value. But more importantly I had not realized until then that many of Texas' modern pathologies can be traced directly back to the brutal warfare between white pioneers and the People, as they called themselves. While the memories of the brutal plains warfare are only in books now, my father has told me tales about his Grandfather who as a child had lived with the very real fear of the Plains Indians, although he never experienced it. The tales were within living memory to my grandfather. But I digress.

Up until reading Graves I had zero interest in reading about the Comanches, but as the intellectual process is a strange, tangential affair I picked up Fehrenbach's history of the Comanches and a history of the Texas Rangers. Finally, I've been reading "Empire of the Summer Moon" about Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief. As a boy growing up in Texas Quanah was often used as the "boogey man" is used in other places to terrify the young. More important: to the Texas settlers the land was theirs, made manifest by destiny. But the Comanches were born unto the land. Thus it was foreordained one group would lose everything. The two could never coexist.

The other day after reading about a particularly brutal episode of Comanche-settler violence I made the connection: the mindless violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Settlers and the tribal vengeance is very, very similar. There is a very real analogue between what the Israelis are doing with the Settlements and what the white settlers in Texas did to the Comanches.

Make of it what you will.

Seen at a local fair.

Yay! This is the best 9/11 since 9/11!

Be sure to light the candle to celebrate!

After we've all had a slice, maybe we can give a bullhorn to a Texas rooster so he can climb all over it and sing cock-a-doodle doo!

Cock-a-doodle doo!

BEST IN CLASS!

a href="http://s575.photobucket.com/albums/ss199/Jonathryn/?action=view&current=DSC03811b.jpg" target="_blank">

One reason to continue to read history after the educational institution has granted you its certificate of completion is because it is an interesting topic to read; but another reason, not to be scorned by any means, is to find analogies, historical analogies, which help the reader to make sense of what is happening at the present time, understood in historical context.

The mental universe becomes richer and more vibrant, not to say, more alive, as a result.

I give you an example and a half.

In 1972 the New York Review of Books published an extraordinarily long article, extending over three separate issues, the burden of which was that the standard explanation for the Third Reich [and let me, perhaps for frivolous reasons, replace that usual term, a German word, with another German word, Hitlerszeit] was no longer a helpful or useful historical study.

The French uberwealthy want more taxes.

See, there's something about a true revolution...not that America's was a slouch, but stick with this for a moment...where a people rise up against (here it comes) its own government to demand change.

The French Revolution was, in essence, the sea-change the American was not. The American Revolution was the landed gentry being tired of their responsibilities to a king 3,500 miles away who really paid them no mind. The French Revolution was the people's revolution, where a nation stood up against its own resident king and said "Enough!"

An article published in the Telegraph yesterday questions whether Marco Polo really went to China. This is one of those questions that can never be definitively answered. I certainly have my opinion on the matter, having read a great deal of the literature, including three versions of Marco Polo's work.

In the past the major crux of the argument falls on Polo's failure to mention the Great Wall, foot-binding, tea drinking and chop-sticks.

Let's take these one by one: More here.

In Europe, the government fears the people:

Britain's biggest police force faced a staffing crisis today after 95 per cent of its 999 call handlers failed to turn up for work because of the national strike. [...]
It comes as hundreds of thousands of public sector workers have begun to strike across the country, closing or disrupting schools, colleges, courts, Government offices and job centres.

Port and airports are being affected, causing travel chaos for holidaymakers trying to head abroad. Anyone arriving in the UK today is likely to be among those facing long queues.

National Geographic, By Charles C. Mann, June 2011

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey.

The reenactors are busloads of tourists—usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses (white, air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement, making a line of perfect cartoon O's.

Tamara Keith | Washington | June 13

NPR - A.J. Daverede wheels a cart loaded with document boxes into his office at the National Archives.

"This is them," he says. "Eleven boxes constitute the entirety of the report of the Vietnam Task Force. You just start here: box one."

Forty years ago, on June 13, 1971, The New York Times published portions of these documents, better known as the Pentagon Papers. On Monday, for the first time, the government released all 7,000 pages of the report with no redactions.

If all goes as planned tomorrow morning I will leave for the border paradise of Laredo. After Laredo I will make several stops along the old Camino Real, or King's Highway, including Pearsall, San Antonio, Gonzales, San Felipe and Nacogdoches. The purpose is to re-create and walk in the footsteps of an early 19th century Mexican officer, draftsman and illustrator named Jose Maria Sanchez y Tapia.

You're probably wondering who the hell Jose Maria Sanchez y Tapia is? Sanchez was attached to the Meir y Teran Border Commission, which ventured from Mexico City to Nacogdoches and then on to swampy river bottoms of East Texas to map out the border between Mexico and the United States. He wrote a very interesting account of his journey, which I learned of and first read about two years ago. I recently acquired Teran's diary of the journey as well. I'm also picking up Berlandier's account of the journey from the library this afternoon. I had hoped to make the entire Mexico City to Nacogdoches journey, but with the Mexican border states as chaotic as they are now is not the time.

Sanchez is one of those rare characters who kept a dairy of his journey that was not only political, geographical and biological observations. He also adds some curious and often times wonderful personal notes. Not sure what I will find along the way but I'm fairly confident there is a story in this, somewhere. I'll be blogging the journey here. Each entry will contain a snippet from Sanchez's diary and then my thoughts on what I've seen from hopefully the exact vantage points he saw in 1828.

Also, there will be lots of photos. Hopefully some good wildlife. The Brush Country of South Texas may look daunting and arid, but it is one of the most fecund places I've ever seen in my life. It's really a shame the white man killed off all the buffaloes, pronghorn antelope, white tailed deer and so much more.