The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Patriotic Purge: The Real Cost of War Fighting for corruption and profits   Donald Jeffries The great Gen. Smedley Butler wrote his classic  War is a Racket  in response to the pointless carnage of WWI. Some 15-22 million largely adolescent boys died for absolutely nothing. That fact that they can’t provide a more accurate estimate than that tells you clearly about the incomprehensible numbers involved. In 1846, President Polk decided to wage war on Mexico. Was the land grab that followed, including what became California, worth the lives of the nearly 14,000 Americans who were killed? Or the 25,000 Mexicans, including an unknown number of civilians? Mexico in fact lost 55% of its territory to the U.S. from 1836-1848. No wonder the La Raza folks hate gringos. In April 1847, the Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution denouncing the war as “a gigantic crime” waged against a “weak neighbor” for the purposes of conquest, territorial aggrandizement, and the ...

  Florida Gothic Zora Neale Hurston and the Sunshine State's Crime of the Century Librarian of Celaeno On August 3, 1952, Ruby McCollum, a black woman living in Live Oak, Florida, drove with her two youngest children to the office of Leroy Adams, a beloved local white doctor and newly elected state senator, and shot him to death in his waiting room. She was arrested shortly after and put on trial in a case that attracted national news. It was a real life story that resembled nothing less than the plot of a Southern Gothic novel, and it is thus fitting that the most notable reporter that showed up to cover the proceedings was one of the greatest Southern writers, Zora Neale Hurston. It was her story, a crime story, a black story, a Southern story, and a Florida story, particular in all those ways, and yet something Aeschylus would have recognized as the tragic course of human nature. I’ve  written about Florida before - my native state, my favorite state. Its past is as fascina...