no freedom here

Here's the kind of story you expect to find associated with tyrannical hellholes like Zimbabwe or North Korea, not supposedly benign Thailand:

Writer jailed for Thai 'insult'

Australian writer Harry Nicolaides has been sentenced to three years in a Thai jail for insulting the monarchy.

Nicolaides wrote a novel four years ago, which contained a brief passage referring to an unnamed crown prince. It sold just seven copies.

He admitted the charge of insulting the royal family, but said he was unaware he was committing an offence.

Criticism of those in authority is the lifeblood of democracy; closer to home, we've seen the cost of its lack as loyal Bushies for several years did their best to smother dissent by stigmatizing all critics as traitors, terrorists or worse, thereby stampeding us into two unnecessary and almost certainly unwinnable wars, possibly fatal delays in tackling global warming, vastly increased environmental pollution, a surge in the rates of not just poverty but gross poverty, a slew of war crimes, the abolition of habeas corpus, and the worst global economic crisis in at least generations. Thailand's draconian laws persecuting anyone who offers even the most tangential criticism of the royal family are an obscenity, making a mockery of all other claims -- and there are many -- that the country has to democracy. Shame on them.

heartwarming

This story came to me via the excellent Rock & Rap Confidential e-mailing service (you can sign up for it here) but originated at the website Electronic Urban Report:

MORGAN FREEMAN IN DOC ABOUT SEGREGATED PROMS: Sundance film follows his offer to pay for integrated dance in hometown

For 11 years, an offer has been on the table from Morgan Freeman to finance a prom at his local high school in Charleston, Miss. that would end its long tradition of holding two separate proms – one for black students, the other for whites.

The Oscar-winning actor heard about the segregated proms in 1997 and promptly offered Charleston High School the money to fund a dance for all races to attend. Film cameras were rolling when the school board finally took him up on the offer in 2008.      

Director Paul Saltzman's "Prom Night in Mississippi," which premiered Saturday as part of the world documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the growing pains Charleston went through last year as the community prepared for its first racially integrated senior prom.      

The move came 54 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education case that struck down school segregation and more than 30 years after black students began attending Charleston High School, which previously had been all-white.

So why'm I saying this is a heartwarming story? Sure, while Freeman's generosity and his sterling work to end this sort of crap are admirable (and he's one of my all-time fave actors anyway), it hardly cheers the soul that it's taken a bunch of small-minded bigots something like half a century to see the light, or that the local law enforcement in Charleston, Miss., turned a blind eye to what was surely illegal discrimination -- does it?

No, what brings joy is the next sentence of the report:

Freeman said students were willing to go with an integrated prom when he made the offer 11 years ago, but the school board and parents ignored his offer.

Increasingly, the new generations are rejecting the racist bigotry of the old, and meanwhile the bigots themselves are dying. Now there's a cause for celebration.

 

a must-buy

Drop your Grishams and stow your Rowlings, pop-pickers, it's time for

Transcendental Simulacrum

by Theodore R. Regis

This Amazing Poetry Book was put by the authour's master piece after many years of work. This Book is the solely labor of his. Inside you should find all topics, encompasses all subjects we are facing today in America and as a society as a whole. Many believe Mr.Theodore Regis is a gifted writer,and an extraordinary Poet. They see him as a second Shakespeare who resurrected to breathe poetic words at a greater skills. This book is a work of an artist, it may be bitter, soft, fun, sweet, enjoyable, sad, hopeful, but it is a work of a Poet. Transcendental Simulacrum is written to portray to the world pains,sorrows,and agonies facing all earth's citizens in the early twenty-first century.Its mission is to heal and cure the world malady.

 

 

if you watch only one music video all year . . .

. . . make sure it's this one. At yesterday's inaugural bash in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Pete Seeger (for whom it must feel like he's reaching a destination at the end of a tortuously twisting road it's taken him a lifetime to walk), Bruce Springsteen and Seeger's grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger sing Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" complete with three of Guthrie's verses that're almost always censored out because "too politically controversial".

Hard to watch with a dry eye. We've all got there at last, folks.