AND ONE OF THE BEST EXPLANATIONS OF "RACE RELATIONS" EVER

Here.

BEST EXPLANATION OF GERRYMANDERING YET

Here.

WINTER WONDERLAND REVISTED (A LATE NIGHT PART MINI-RANT PART MINI-RHAPSODY)

People are getting pretty sick of the snow here in my part of Jersey, but I gotta say, I still dig it (in all senses of the word) cause when it comes down like it did today it covers all the slush and mess and dirty snowbanks with a new coating of pure white, it muffles the sounds of the few vehicles on the roads besides plows, and it reminds me of so many Christmas card scenes when I was a kid and winters were storybook winters, with frozen ponds to skate on all season and snow forts and snowmen and snow angels and sleigh riding and all the rest.

People around here got used to those days being something in the past until this winter and the last when climate change brought the arctic air down here and not where it's supposed to be (my nephew in Alaska only got to ski there days this season cause he had more rain and less snow than us as well as higher temperatures most of the time)...

I understand many folks are sick of it, but for me, snow falling and covering everything in one simple shade of white, looking so clean and pure and magical, still makes me smile, as it did today. And fact is, it'll be gone soon enough and by summer some of the same people complaining now will be whining about the heat. That's a whole other story (and just for the climate change deniers out there, January was the hottest January on record, despite the cold weather in Jersey and other parts of the country)...

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LEONARD NIMOY R.I.P.

IF YOU'RE IN OR AROUND MANHATTAN ON MARCH 7TH

[click on it to enlarge and read the small print]

CITIZENFOUR

CITIZENFOUR won the Oscar Sunday night, and filmmaker, Laura Poitras, deserved the win and gave a good acceptance speech though her nervousness and self consciousness made it come out a little stiffly. As others have observed, what makes her film work is her falling into a major story (or actually being chosen by Snowden because of her previous films) by being present for and filming the most dramatic part of the story's timeline, i.e. the exposure by Edward Snowden of the massive spying on U.S. citizens being done by government agencies (here and in the U.K. as well) and then the exposure of Snowden himself as the source of the whistle blowing and the permanent altering of his life and his future as a result.

As we all know, Sowden is stuck in Russia, (ironically, since Putin's government is worse than our government in terms of repressing political activism partly through the collection of personal information on private citizens) because it is one of the only countries that would have him, just to demonstrate their independence from the USA. There's a good chance if Russia hadn't taken him in he'd have been at worst "disappeared" or at best brought back to the USA to face a trial based on a too broad almost century-old law that would have put him behind bars for the rest of his life, a sacrifice he was willing to make if necessary to let the rest of us know we were being spied on and lied to about it.

It's an almost accidentally great documentary, just as Snowden seems to be an almost accidentally heroic figure, in the right place at the right time with the right beliefs about our freedoms supposedly guaranteed by The Constitution and the courage to act on those beliefs. Snowden is a true "American hero." Any politician who doesn't get that is suspicious and should be called out whenever they speechify about the freedom we citizens of the USA supposedly have.