A friend of mine has five sons and two daughters. One of the daughters returned from Iraq in October; she still won't talk about what went on there. Now one of the sons, a real "Joe Soldier" boy, "Soldier of the Month" and runner-up for "Soldier of the Course" at basic training at Fort Benning, who is an E-6 I think, something like the position of Staff Sergeant that my father held in the newly created Air Force in Korea, has a brutal, frightening, bizarre, and hilarious story to tell, of o...

Jane is one of the friends who finds tales for me. She is a ‘Plain-Jane’, wholesome hyper-fox who lets my hungry eyes linger, flirts with me occasionally, and generally plays along as a foil to my foolishness, in exchange for my willingness to ‘interview’ friends of hers who have sagas to relate that no other journalist is willing to countenance as a story. What she gets from this deal, at her end, is some weird “spectacular-theory” sort of boost, a combination of vicarious mediation and wh...

LEGAL LYNCHING IS BACK IN STYLE The Marcus Dixon Case HERE IS AN INTERESTING QUESTION. DO WE WANT TO SENTENCE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN TO PRISON FOR HAVING SEX WITH EACH OTHER? A SUBSTANTIAL MAJORITY OF CITIZENS HAVE ANSWERED THAT QUERY WITH A BIG, “I DON’T THINK SO!” IN THE NEXT PERIOD OF TIME, WE WILL FIND OUT IF THE SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA AGREES, WHEN IT ISSUES ITS DECISION IN THE MARCUS DIXON CASE FROM FLOYD COUNTY GEORGIA. AN UPDATE ON THE CASE WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT WEEK OR SO H...

Thursday’s Earth Day: What are the Other 364? WHEN PSYCHOLOGY SEES ECOLOGY AS JUST MYTHOLOGY, PREPARE THE EULOGY FOR HUMANKIND The origins of the celebration of Earth Day are fantastic to remember---the culture and thought and ethos of oneness and abundance and impact, the idea that a single person might join with others to reform or otherwise improve the collective. The 1960’s were ending and the sobering and debilitating recognition of oil as a non-renewable resource had not yet b...

Here's the rest for any who are interested to continue.... King, apparently, couldn’t find the time or inclination to look into these matters and so manages to see them as establishing a basis for the jury’s conviction and, apparently, for condemning or at least strongly cautioning all teen sexual energy. Marcus’ proclivity for necking and fondling and his spreading his legs had NOTHING to do with the Jury’s decision in May, 2003. To take Marcus’ case as exemplary of the benefits of cha...

Pretense and the Suspense of Nonsense Debates MARCUS DIXON’S SITUATION AND THE FALLACIES OF ‘RACE’ AS AN IDEA I have yet to get really ‘barnyard’ or ‘ghetto’ in the essays and accounts I’ve been posting for the last six weeks. This note serves notice that the “JIM GOES GHETTO!” series has begun, reserved for instances such as this, where the sanctimony and the horseshit are so deep and profuse that the State of Georgia could supply its energy needs on the basis of the manure and hot...

Distractions, Infractions, and Subtle Retractions A FEW CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS ABOUT JOYCE GRIGGS Joyce called me last night, and asked,, “Why’d you put that in there about steamy affairs,” she paused for emphasis, “with White Officers and Black businessmen?” She was referring to the article I posted April 17. I thought she would like the piece, and she did, for the most part. But she corrected my mis-statement about her love life, for which I want to apologize. My respon...

Dedications, and Indications of Eradicating the Addiction to Bigotry LITTLE KEYSVILLE, GEORGIA GETS A CITY HALL AND GIVES TO US ALL A CHANCE TO HOPE FOR SIMILAR THRALL Sometimes the smallest development can portend the marvel or the terror that is coming. These days, when a focus on the insanity and brutality is as easy to envision as remote access to CNN or Fox, optimism is hard to find anywhere near the center of things---where, even if it exists, the dogfights around ownership and...

“RACISMUS RIDICULOSITY”: Putrid Paradigms and Random Murder THE STUPIDITY OF RACISM, AS AN IDEA, AND THE RESULTS TO EXPECT FROM ITS CONTINUATION AS THE STANDARD OF THOUGHT The ruination we bring on ourselves, by our current unwillingness to be honest and responsible, grows daily more abominable. And, God knows, we all contribute to this tendency. I know I do. None of us is capable of even recognizing perfection, let alone acting perfectly or being perfect. The abomination that r...

Pickle Payments: Dried-Up Trickle-Down Economics That Leave Wage-Earners with Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones MOUNTING MOUNT OLIVE BOYCOTTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD Saturday marked another instance, among hundreds of thousands of such cases that take place daily in different corners of the human condition, of unheralded social foment that portends irreversible changes in how we live and what is cooperatively possible for us to do. The situation...

This Woman Gets Naked in Public to Save Us HOW A FRAUDULENT MEDIA, FOR AN ASLEEP-AT-THE-SWITCH PUBLIC, FOLLOWS THE SCRIPT AND DOESN’T PAY ATTENTION Helen Caldicott is an extremely attractive woman, a driven genius of Seventy Winters whose voice and humor are as piercing and haunting as her logic. She shares a Nobel Prize for her role in creating Physicians for Social Responsibility, and has garnered praise and awards otherwise essentially innumerable, in addition to writing copious ...

The excellent entry a few days ago, about Adult ADD, has taken hold in my mind. My children are of an age that results in significant numbers of their peers being on powerful prescription drugs that are essentially addictive amphetamines and tranquilizers. This addictive epidemic occurs simultaneously as our taxes pay for a futile and brutal and stupid “War on Drugs” that more and more nations, where rational discourse has more cachet than here, are rejecting as policy or practice. Cana...

“Human Sacrifice Zones” and the Moans of Pain Inaudible from the Thrones of the Mighty HISTORY, LAW, AND THE LAYERING OF HUMAN MEANING The “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge”, by Ambrose Bierce---the best writer in American history, perhpas, and the “Old Gringo” of Carlos Fuentes’s book---should annually be a required text for all U.S. citizens. It tells of a wealthy Southern romantic, cut off from the human costs of his choices, whom a treacherous Yankee scout---dressed in Confederate g...

Running & Stunning & Gunning & Shunning Without Cunning Any Sense of Responsibility for the Carnage Wreaked in Our Names CRIMINAL INJUSTIC IS A SYSTEM---EITHER WE CHANGE IT, OR IT WILL CONTINUE TO EXPLODE IN OUR CHILDREN’S FACES Working as a prison guard has to be some of the most grueling and gruesome work imagineable. This would prove especially true---at least I want desperately to think so---when the normal course of a shift involves killing someone with a stun gun. This has oc...