#(which is an american railroad)

[maximusboltaqon]

where are my fellow black bolt infodumps believers. where are my fellow maximus infodumps enjoyers.

[alumnusofheavenandhell]

As much as I hate to say it, one of the few things that Cats 2019 did right was giving skimbleshanks pants. The shirt-with-no-pants look does work for some cartoon characters, but on skimbleshanks it absolutely just makes him look half-nude.

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts (factory labor, poverty, etc., increase), the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 establishes full-time police institution(s) in London. The "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The Irish Constabulary of 1837 sets up a national policing force and the County Police Act of 1839 allows justices of the peace across England to establish policing institutions in their counties (New York City gets a police department in 1844). The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

---

"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

---

"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to the land dispossession, poverty, and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion" (Scramble for Africa, US "American West", nation-building, conquering "frontiers"), as agricultural "revolutions" of imperial monoculture cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation, and as major imperial infrastructure building projects required a lot of vulnerable "mobile" labor. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroad networks and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, the racist expulsion of the "Tacoma riot".

Punished for being Algerian in France. Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

Mobility and confinement, the empire manipulates each.

---

"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.), you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.

Too ill, too poor, too exhausted, too indebted to move, you are trapped. Physical barriers (borders), legal barriers (identity documents), financial barriers (debt). "Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. "Vagrancy" since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place, extracting their wealth and labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[aethersea]

I do think Blazing Saddles handled its one depiction of native americans very poorly, and the full extent of its representation of chinese workers on the railroad is they were literally just there. not even one single speaking line. unclear if this is worse or better than the redface.

it's fucking phenomenal at lampooning antiblack racism though. extremely blatant, extremely funny satire, which is constantly and loudly saying "racism is the philosophy of the terminally stupid at best and morally depraved at worst, and we should all be pointing and laughing at them 24/7"

plus the main character is a heroic black man who has to navigate a whole lot of bullshit but is constantly smirking at the extraordinarily stupid racists and inviting the audience into the joke. the one heroic white character is a guy who was suicidally depressed until he met the protagonist and they just instantly became buds, and he's firmly in a supporting role the whole time and happy to be there. the protagonist saves the day with the help of his black friends from the railroad, and uses the position of power he was given to uplift not only those friends, but all the railroad workers of other minorities too, in an explicit show of solidarity.

anyone saying "Blazing Saddles is racist" had better be talking about its treatment of non-black minorities. it had better not be such superficial takes as "oh but they say the n-word all the time" or "they have nazis and the kkk in there!" because goddamn if that's the full extent of your critique I very seriously suggest you read up on media analysis. there is too much going over your head, you need to learn to recognize satire.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Everyday homeowners are human shields for Wall Street’s Internet of Shit slumlords

The American Dream, such as it is, used to be two dreams, one based on work and solidarity, the other on asset appreciation and disconnected individualism. We killed the first one.

As the New Deal gave way to the post-war social safety net, Americans discovered two paths to social mobility: they could join a union, and they could buy a home. Joining a union meant that your wages would rise with productivity, and that the democratic ideal that you were meant to approach once every two years at the ballot-box could follow you into the building you spent more waking hours in than any other: your jobsite.

Labor unions used their political power to win labor rights, so that even workers who weren't a union couldn't be arbitrarily fired, or maimed on the job with impunity, or harassed or abused. And while the labor movement was mired in the same racist legacy that every American institution brought forward out of genocide and slavery, where racialized people started unions of their own or demanded representation from the unions who nominally represented them, they thrived.

Then there were houses. On the one hand, owning your home insulated you from the petty tyranny of the landlord, the threat of eviction, rent hikes, indifferent or dangerous building maintenance, and all the other miseries that arise when you think of a building as your home and someone else thinks of it as an asset, and the board is tilted so that they win every argument.

But homeownership wasn't just sold as a way to get out from under scumbag landlords: it was primarily sold as a way to build intergenerational wealth. Your house wasn't just a place to live: it was an asset, and it appreciated.

And if the dividends of labor protection were unevenly distributed between white people and racial minorities, the dividends of home ownership were almost entirely hoarded by white families. Federal policies – redlining – combined with racist lending at the local level, meant that Black families and other racialized groups were stuck in tenancy, while white families build wealth thanks to federal subsidies:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170220005558/https://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Asset%20Value%20of%20Whiteness.pdf

Those were the two American dreams: a good job and your own home. We killed the first one, and the second one devoured us whole.

Without a strong labor movement, wages stagnated. Corporate power waxed, and with it, the power to pollute, to poison, to maim and to defraud. The labor movement wasn't strong enough to stop Reagan from killing free UC tuition when he was governor of California. It wasn't strong enough to hold back spiraling health care prices. It wasn't strong enough to block the business lobby from neutering antitrust and ushering in four decades of market concentration, market capture and corruption. Workers couldn't save their defined benefits pension and were railroaded into market-based 401(k)s, forcing them to play the stock casino against their bosses, ever the sucker at the poker table.

With stagnant wages and out of control medical, educational and end-of-life bills, homeownership – the thing you do as an individual, where your gain is someone else's loss – became the American secular religion. Your house wasn't just a place to sleep and keep your photo albums: if it appreciated enough, you might be able to liquidate it on your deathbed and pay off your eldercare, your healthcare, your kids' college debt, and leave enough left over for your kids' downpayments.

And so every American who had a home became the enemy of every American who didn't �� including one another's children. Every home built threatened your own property values. The racist, batshit American school funding formula, which sees schools funded out of property taxes, meaning the richest kids get the best schools, turned out to be a great way to increase your property values.

Protections for tenants, meanwhile, threatened the entire American way of life – the American dream itself. Every protection a tenant got – protection from eviction or rent hikes, the legal right to a safe and well-maintained home – reduced the value of every home in town.

After all, the better a landlord has to treat their tenants, the less money a landlord can make from a rental property. The less money a landlord can make from a rental property, the less they'd bid on a house like yours if it went up for sale.

And since anyone planning to buy your house to live in it has to outbid a landlord who might want to rent it out, giving tenants any protection threatened everything – the one asset you owned, which was your plan a, b and c for paying off all that health, education, and assisted living debt:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Today, the house-as-asset scam is breathing its last. There are millions more people who need homes than there are homes available. Sure, homelessness is a fantastically complex problem, but you could address every aspect of it – addiction, mental illness, joblessness – and millions of people would still be homeless, because there aren't enough homes for them to live in:

https://headgum.com/factually-with-adam-conover/myths-about-homeless-people-with-dr-margot-kushel

70% of all inflation in 2024 came from the cost of housing; a quarter of that came from illegal collusive behavior by landlords to hike rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental-inflation

Wall Street landlords have raised gigantic war-chests and are buying up homes at a rate never before seen, converting every available single-family home in many cities from an owner-occupied home to a rental. Private equity and hedge fund landlords have elevated charging junk fees to an absurdist theater project: you pay a "convenience" charge for paying your rent in cash. But also for paying your rent by direct transfer. Oh, and also for paying in cash. When Wall Street is your landlord, your home is a slum, dangerously undermaintained, sometimes lethally so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Capitalists hate capitalism. The best thing to sell is something your customer can't live without, and that no one else has for sale. That's why "the market" loves private prisons so much:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

The vast sums Wall Street is putting into buying up all of America's available housing stock is a bet that they can establish regional monopolies over having a home, and charge all the market can bear.

That's the plan at Invitation Homes, a company that was just targeted by the FTC for a slate of eye-watering crimes against the tenants in the 80,000 single-family homes they've acquired:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-takes-action-against-invitation-homes-deceiving-renters-charging-junk-fees-withholding-security

Invitation Homes purchases homes as they come on the market, and they're also a leading customer of the "build-to-rent" housing industry, a fast-growing segment of new housing starts.

Writing about the FTC's enforcement action against Invitation Homes, Matt Soller brings in Starwood Capital Group, who manage Invitation Homes properties, and own 14,000 more homes in the sunbelt. Invitation and Starwood hate the anti-monopoly movement, and Barry Sternlicht, Starwood's billionaire CEO, really hates FTC Chair Lina Khan:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-corporate-slumlords

The FTC complaint lays out a suite of just comically sleazy things ways that Invitation abuses its tenants, starting with false advertising. The company lists its houses at relatively low rents, then charges a large fee to apply to live there. When you pass the application process, you're told the rent is actually much higher, and if you walk away from the deal, you forfeit your application fee. That scam's netted Invitation $18m since 2019.

Stoller really hates junk fees, calling them "convenience fees without any convenience, service charges without any service performed." He lays out Invitation's long list of junk fees, which honestly sound like a list that Chatgpt would spit out if you prompted it for fifty junk fees that wouldn't pass the giggle-test: "utility management fees" "Lease Easy bundle fees," "air filter delivery fee," "smart home technology fees," etc etc.

"Smart home technology fee?" Yeah, Invitation's gone in hard for Internet of Shit smart home tech. The SVP who oversees Invitation's smart home fee program was ordered to "juice this hog" (you guys, juice doesn't come from hogs).

After decades of recruiting everyday American homeowners to demand anti-tenant policies that benefit giant corporations, American tenants have few rights on paper and even fewer in practice. That's left the door wide open for Invitation to abuse their tenants in a myriad of dismal and unimaginative ways: stealing their deposits, trashing their credit reports to retaliate against complaints, illegal evictions, busted appliances, mold, vermin, insects – the whole slumlord playbook.

As Stoller writes, there's a twist: "this landlord isn’t just a random slumlord, it’s one of the biggest Wall Street players in housing."

There are vast fortunes to be made in converting the human right to housing into an asset class, but those fortunes end up in the hands of a very small number of billionaires. On their own, they wouldn't have the political power to dismantle protections for tenants.

Realistically speaking, most kids who grew up in their parents' owner-occupied homes are going to end up tenants, thanks to undersupply and housing inflation. But those kids' parents have spent decades demanding policies to make their homes as valuable as possible – including mortgage tax breaks (but not rent tax breaks!), looser eviction laws, and less enforcement of what few protections tenants have.

Middle class homeowners are the useful idiots and human shields of the billionaires who are determined to force every American under 40 raise their kids in a rented slum full of spiders, ratshit and black mold, which will still cost 60% of their take-home salary.

That's why the FTC's action against Invitation Homes is such a big deal. And as Stoller points out, Chair Khan is really just implementing Kamala Harris's campaign promise to get Wall Street out of the landlord business.

Wall Street's raid on your bedroom and kitchen has inspired a generation of "finfluencer" copycats who buy and flip apartment buildings, sucking ever-larger amounts of cash out of them until they're unfit for human habitation, with mountains of rat-infested garbage ringing their crumbling walls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Any future worth living in is going to get housing right. We need to stop thinking of housing as an asset and realize that it is, first and foremost, a human right. That's the premise of my 2023 solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which just came out in paperback:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause

You can't protect yourself from rising seas or rising healthcare bills through individual home-ownership. Solidarity – the kind of solidarity that once powered the union movement, and that is powering it again – is the only way to defeat the housing profiteers. The New Deal wasn't perfect, which is why whatever we do next has to be bigger, further reaching, and more inclusive than what FDR did almost a century ago.

The only minority that should be excluded from the next New Deal is billionaires.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/#rentier-tech

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

Carlos Delgado (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_-_New_York_Stock_Exchange.jpg

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[macrolit]

The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers �� with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

NYT Article.

*************

Q: How many of the 100 have you read? Q: Which ones did you love/hate? Q: What's missing?

Here's the full list.

100. Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson 99. How to Be Both, Ali Smith 98. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett 97. Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward 96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman 95. Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel 94. On Beauty, Zadie Smith 93. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel 92. The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante 91. The Human Stain, Philip Roth 90. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen 89. The Return, Hisham Matar 88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis 87. Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters 86. Frederick Douglass, David W. Blight 85. Pastoralia, George Saunders 84. The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee 83. When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labutat 82. Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor 81. Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan 80. The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante 79. A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin 78. Septology, Jon Fosse 77. An American Marriage, Tayari Jones 76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin 75. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid 74. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout 73. The Passage of Power, Robert Caro 72. Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich 71. The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen 70. All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward P. Jones 69. The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander 68. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez 67. Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon 66. We the Animals, Justin Torres 65. The Plot Against America, Philip Roth 64. The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai 63. Veronica, Mary Gaitskill 62. 10:04, Ben Lerner 61. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver 60. Heavy, Kiese Laymon 59. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides 58. Stay True, Hua Hsu 57. Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich 56. The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner 55. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright 54. Tenth of December, George Saunders 53. Runaway, Alice Munro 52. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson 51. Life After Life, Kate Atkinson 50. Trust, Hernan Diaz 49. The Vegetarian, Han Kang 48. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi 47. A Mercy, Toni Morrison 46. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt 45. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson 44. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin 43. Postwar, Tony Judt 42. A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James 41. Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan 40. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald 39. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan 38. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Balano 37. The Years, Annie Ernaux 36. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates 35. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel 34. Citizen, Claudia Rankine 33. Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward 32. The Lines of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst 31. White Teeth, Zadie Smith 30. Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward 29. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt 28. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell 27. Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 26. Atonement, Ian McEwan 25. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 24. The Overstory, Richard Powers 23. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro 22. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo 21. Evicted, Matthew Desmond 20. Erasure, Percival Everett 19. Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe 18. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders 17. The Sellout, Paul Beatty 16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon 15. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee 14. Outline, Rachel Cusk 13. The Road, Cormac McCarthy 12. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion 11. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz 10. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson 9. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro 8. Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald 7. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead 6. 2666, Roberto Bolano 5. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen 4. The Known World, Edward P. Jones 3. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel 2. The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson 1. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

[alwaysbewoke]

In 1865, enslaved people in Texas were notified by Union Civil War soldiers about the abolition of slavery. This was 2.5 years after the final Emancipation Proclamation which freed all enslaved Black Americans. But Slavery Continued… In 1866, a year after the amendment was ratified, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina began to lease out convicts for labor. This made the business of arresting black people very lucrative, thus hundreds of white men were hired by these states as police officers. Their primary responsibility being to search out and arrest black peoples who were in violation of ‘Black Codes’ Basically, black codes were a series of laws criminalizing legal activity for black people. Through the enforcement of these laws, they could be imprisoned. Once arrested, these men, women & children would be leased to plantations or they would be leased to work at coal mines, or railroad companies. The owners of these businesses would pay the state for every prisoner who worked for them; prison labor. It’s believed that after the passing of the 13th Amendment, more than 800,000 Black people were part of that system of re-enslavement through the prison system. The 13th Amendment declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Lawmakers used this phrase to make petty offenses crimes. When Blacks were found guilty of committing these crimes, they were imprisoned and then leased out to the same businesses that lost slaves after the passing of the 13th Amendment. The majority of White Southern farmers and business owners hated the 13th Amendment because it took away slave labor. As a way to appease them, the federal government turned a blind eye when southern states used this clause in the 13th Amendment to establish the Black Codes.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #35

Sep 20-27 2024

President Biden and Vice-President Harris announced new actions to curb gun violence at the one year anniversary of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The Office is the first ever White House office to deal with the issue of guns and has been overseen by the Vice-President. President Biden signed a new Executive Order aimed at combatting the emerging threat of machinegun conversion devices. These devices allow the conversion of semi-automatic firearms to a rate of fire that can match military machineguns, up to 20 bullets in one second. The EO also targets the threat of 3-D printed guns. The EO also addresses active schooler drills at schools. While almost every school conducts them there is little uniformity in how they are carried out, and no consensus on the most effective version of a drill. President Biden's EO directions the development of a research based active shooter drills, which maximize both student physical and mental safety.

President Biden celebrated the one year anniversary of the American Climate Corps and announced new Climate Corp programs. The Climate Corps has seen 15,000 young people connected to well paid jobs in clean energy and climate resilience jobs across America. The EPA and AmeriCorps announced a new Environmental Justice Climate Corps program which will connect 250 American Climate Corps members with local communities and over the next 3 help them achieve environmental justice projects. In addition HUD announced it will be the 8th federal agency to partner with the Climate Corp, opening the door to its involvement in Housing. Since its launch the American Climate Corp has inspired 14 states to launch their own state level version of the program, most recently just this week the New Jersey Climate Corps.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced that 4.2 million small business owners and self-employed people get their health insurance through the ACA marketplace. Up from 1.4 million ten years ago when President Obama and then Vice-President Biden rolled out the marketplaces. The self-employed are 3 times as likely as other Americans to use the marketplaces for their insurance, one out of every 5 getting coverage there. The ACA passed by President Obama, defended and expanded by President Biden, has freed millions of Americans to start their own businesses without fear of losing health coverage for them and their families.

The Departments of Transportation and Labor pressed freight railroad companies to close the gap and offer paid sick time to all their employees. Since 2022 under President Biden's leadership the number of Class I freight railroad employees who have access to paid sick days increased from 5% to 90%. Now the Biden-Harris Administration is pushing to finish the job and get coverage to the last 10%.

The EPA announced $965 million to help school districts buy clean energy buses. This comes on top of the 3 billion the EPA has already spent to bring clean energy buses to America's schools. So far the EPA has helped replace 8,700 school buses, across 1,300 school districts in all 50 states, DC, tribal nations, and US Territories. 95% of these buses are zero-emission, battery-electric. The clean bus program is responsible for over 2/3rds of the electric school buses on the road today.

The Biden-Harris Administration took another step forward in its historic efforts to protect the Colorado River System by signing 5 water conservation agreements with local water authorities in California and Arizona. The two short term agreements will conserve over 717,000 acre-feet of water by 2026. Collectively adding 10 feet to Lake Mead’s elevation by 2026. The Colorado River Basin provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven U.S. states.

The Department of The Interior announced $254 million to help support local parks, the largest such investment in history. The money will go to 54 projects across 24 states hoping to redevelopment or create new parks.

HHS announced $1.5 billion to help combat opioid addiction and prevent opioid overdose deaths. The money will support state and tribal governments and help pay for mobile clinics, naloxone kits, and treatment centers. This comes as nationwide overdose rates drop for the first time since 2020, thanks to strong investment in harm reduction efforts by the Biden-Harris team.

The Department of Agriculture announced it'll spend $466.5 million in food assistance and development worldwide this year. Through its McGovern-Dole Program, the United States is the largest donor to global school feeding programs. The USDA will help feed 1.2 million children in Angola, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Malawi and Rwanda. Through its Food for Progress the USDA will help support 200,000 farmers in Benin, Cambodia, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Tunisia shift to climate-smart agriculture boosting food security in those nations and the wider region.

At a meeting at the UN First Lady Jill Biden announced a partnership between USAID and UNICEF to end childhood exposer to lead worldwide. Lead exposure kills 1.5 million people each year, mostly in the developing world.

The Senate approved the appointment of Byron Conway to a federal judgeship in Wisconsin. This makes the 213th federal judge that President Biden has appointed.

[queenie435]

THE WORLD'S FIRST ELECTRIC ROLLER COASTER

Granville T. Woods (April 23, 1856 – January 30, 1910) introduced the “Figure Eight,” the world's first electric roller coaster, in 1892 at Coney Island Amusement Park in New York. Woods patented the invention in 1893, and in 1901, he sold it to General Electric.

Woods was an American inventor who held more than 50 patents in the United States. He was the first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War. Self-taught, he concentrated most of his work on trains and streetcars.

In 1884, Woods received his first patent, for a steam boiler furnace, and in 1885, Woods patented an apparatus that was a combination of a telephone and a telegraph. The device, which he called "telegraphony", would allow a telegraph station to send voice and telegraph messages through Morse code over a single wire. He sold the rights to this device to the American Bell Telephone Company.

In 1887, he patented the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, which allowed communications between train stations from moving trains by creating a magnetic field around a coiled wire under the train. Woods caught smallpox prior to patenting the technology, and Lucius Phelps patented it in 1884. In 1887, Woods used notes, sketches, and a working model of the invention to secure the patent. The invention was so successful that Woods began the Woods Electric Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, to market and sell his patents. However, the company quickly became devoted to invention creation until it was dissolved in 1893.

Woods often had difficulties in enjoying his success as other inventors made claims to his devices. Thomas Edison later filed a claim to the ownership of this patent, stating that he had first created a similar telegraph and that he was entitled to the patent for the device. Woods was twice successful in defending himself, proving that there were no other devices upon which he could have depended or relied upon to make his device. After Thomas Edison's second defeat, he decided to offer Granville Woods a position with the Edison Company, but Woods declined.

In 1888, Woods manufactured a system of overhead electric conducting lines for railroads modeled after the system pioneered by Charles van Depoele, a famed inventor who had by then installed his electric railway system in thirteen United States cities.

Following the Great Blizzard of 1888, New York City Mayor Hugh J. Grant declared that all wires, many of which powered the above-ground rail system, had to be removed and buried, emphasizing the need for an underground system. Woods's patent built upon previous third rail systems, which were used for light rails, and increased the power for use on underground trains. His system relied on wire brushes to make connections with metallic terminal heads without exposing wires by installing electrical contactor rails. Once the train car had passed over, the wires were no longer live, reducing the risk of injury. It was successfully tested in February 1892 in Coney Island on the Figure Eight Roller Coaster.

In 1896, Woods created a system for controlling electrical lights in theaters, known as the "safety dimmer", which was economical, safe, and efficient, saving 40% of electricity use.

Woods is also sometimes credited with the invention of the air brake for trains in 1904; however, George Westinghouse patented the air brake almost 40 years prior, making Woods's contribution an improvement to the invention.

Woods died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Harlem Hospital in New York City on January 30, 1910, having sold a number of his devices to such companies as Westinghouse, General Electric, and American Engineering. Until 1975, his resting place was an unmarked grave, but historian M.A. Harris helped raise funds, persuading several of the corporations that used Woods's inventions to donate money to purchase a headstone. It was erected at St. Michael's Cemetery in Elmhurst, Queens.

LEGACY

▪Baltimore City Community College established the Granville T. Woods scholarship in memory of the inventor.

▪In 2004, the New York City Transit Authority organized an exhibition on Woods that utilized bus and train depots and an issue of four million MetroCards commemorating the inventor's achievements in pioneering the third rail.

▪In 2006, Woods was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

▪In April 2008, the corner of Stillwell and Mermaid Avenues in Coney Island was named Granville T. Woods Way.

[lager667]

As America celebrates Thanksgiving, the drug train derails again

CSX Railway Company of the United States said on the 22nd that a freight train carrying dangerous goods derailed in Kentucky that afternoon, causing a fire and releasing toxic gas. Hundreds of residents near the accident site were evacuated. As America celebrates Thanksgiving, the drug train derails again. This time, molten sulfur was transported, and 16 carriages derailed. Once burned, sulfur dioxide was formed. When the concentration is high, the human body cannot bear it.

The derailment occurred in Kentucky, the home state of KFC. The local government has called on people to evacuate.

Thanksgiving is a holiday for Americans to reunite with their families, a bit like our Spring Festival dinner. Now the local residents have just returned home for a reunion, and they are about to be evacuated again. It's freezing cold, where are you going?

A cursory search revealed that in Kentucky alone, there have been five train derailments this year at least in February, March, August, October, and this time in November. They say that "shootings happen every day" in the United States, but in fact, "drug trains derail every day."

The US media "USA Today" has its own statistics. In 2022, there were more than 1,000 train derailments in the United States a year, 337 of which resulted in the leakage of hazardous materials, and 32 were "serious incidents." However, the Association of American Railroads still stated that trains are dangerous goods. The safest way to ship.

[orange-coloredsky-archive]

The two most popular reads of the synth plight in Fallout 4 are that of the race allegory and the Red Scare/McCarthyist allegory. In the former example, synths get racialized in a similar way to Black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century, but just barely. The Underground Railroad is quite literally remade, synths are subjected to slavery at the hands of their human creators and punished harshly for escape attempts. Others have likened synths to fears of immigrants or asylum-seekers from nonwhite majority populations. Synths in these imaginings of Fallout 4 are painted as needing to be saved at the same time as they are vilified and dehumanized – sometimes by the same character over the course of the story. This duality could be a great opportunity for a dive into how white saviorism tends to play out, but in reality it ends up being a messy, deeply uncritical exploration of the impact of race and racism in society. The factions doing the racialization and/or saviorism’s motives are never questioned, and there is a very clear depiction of “good vs. evil” being the end-all-be-all of anti-racism work (again, with no critical thought as to how the “good” side is made almost completely of non-racialized people making decisions on behalf of a marginalized group). Worse yet, it’s contrived. The android-racism analogy has been a thorn in the side of the science fiction genre ever since Isaac Asimov wrote the 3 Laws of Robotics. There’s very few iterations on the idea that have come from popular (white, Eurocentric) media that aren’t riddled with the same aftertaste of white guilt and fundamental misunderstandings of how racism plays out in day-to-day life.

The less common, slightly more agreeable interpretation is that of the Red Scare – which, given Fallout’s inspirations and the setting’s original critique of reliving America’s “good old days”, makes perfect sense. In this example, synths take the role of the Soviet spy: watching over everything Americans are doing and reporting back to a secret base that is plotting to overthrow the world as we know it. Psychological screenings as well as inhumane tortures are utilized to pick synth “spies” out from the good, red-blooded residents of the Commonwealth. A neighborhood is founded entirely around the protection of the “old ways of life”, complete with a white picket fence comically decorated with automatic machine gun turrets. While this is a more charitable analogy that’s grounded in a slightly-deeper-than-surface-level exploration of American history, the Red Scare interpretation is victim to the same pitfalls that plague the racism interpretation. Midway through the game, the player discovers that there actually is a secret base of evil villains hiding underneath our feet, plotting to annihilate our beautiful Commonwealth lives. People do get taken and replaced by synths, they are in our governments, there is an actual reason for synths to be feared. Sure, some synths are perfectly fine people with no wish to be made tools of the Institute’s tyranny, but that is greatly overshadowed by the fact that the Institute’s stated goal is to use synths to gain control over the Commonwealth. There is no real critique of McCarthyism, there is no ideology to be challenged, because the Communists are here and killing your loved ones in their sleep.

[fatehbaz]

Chicago, Illinois is often considered to be on the periphery of the plantation. William Cronon's famous narrative of Chicago's relationships with the "Great West" positions the burgeoning city at the edge of American expansion into plantation agriculture in the Midwest and industrial farming on a national scale. [...] [W]e could also characterize the city as an anticipatory hub between the twin plantation figures of the pre-war American South and America's 20th century colonies [in Central America, the Philippines, and beyond]. During the Reconstruction years, Chicago emerged as a logistical center, channeling America's railroads and telegraph lines into itself. As parts of this communications node, Chicago newspapers and military police served to convert white anxieties about Black migration from the plantation South into new techniques and technologies of prediction that became transportable across a newly imaginable informational plane of US imperialism. [...] [I]n Chicago between 1875 and 1890, [...] white anticipations of African American migration from plantations in the South were translated into new information sciences and policing techniques that made their way to plantations in places like the Philippines. [...]

[S]uch feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant. [...]

---

On May 3, 1879 the Chicago Tribune published a greatly anticipated investigatory series entitled, “The Negro Exodus: Causes of the Migration from the Negro’s Point of View” [...] the latest in a long sequence of deeply uneasy reports dating from 1860. From its location at the communicative center of all major US rail and telegraph lines, the Chicago Tribune undertook an imagined responsibility to inform its Midwestern audience of Black peoples’ movements and behaviors. [...] At the climax of the “Negro’s Point of View” series, [...] May 3, the Chicago Tribune presented its showstopping report from its correspondent in Vicksburg, Mississippi entitled “Letters Written by Negroes in Kansas to their Friends South”. In this report, the writer discusses his skepticism of earlier methods of [...] interviews with Black migrants. [...] [The newspaper] conducted its fact-gathering through the mass surveillance of Black peoples' letters [...] [to assess] inner motivations [...] about Black peoples’ “perceptions, enjoyments, and reasons” [...]. Such informational appetites became the anticipatory basis for 20th century enumerative practices. As Colin Koopman argues, informational fastening, or the atomization and separation of facts from Black peoples’ bodies, became commonplace during the Great Migration in the practice of racial statistics, criminology, and health policy directed at Black migrants [...].

---

White Chicagoans’ prolonged concern over predicting Black behaviors and intentions materialized in 1877, when the city became a central hub of militarized response to a nation-wide railroad strike. Adjutant General Richard C. Drum, who commanded the Military Division of the Missouri (Western Frontier) in Chicago from 1873 to 1878, took control of Chicago’s military response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In 1879, after his final year in the city, Drum moved to Washington, DC and proposed the establishment of the Military Information Division (MID) [...]. The MID, which formally established in 1885, maintained close ties to Chicago's local information collection system, adopting a Bertillon identification system of collecting and storing intelligence cards at the time that the National Association of Chiefs of Police established their central bureau of identification in Chicago in 1896 [...]. By the tun of the 20th century, Chicago's police force had expanded tenfold [...], and Drum's MID had amassed over 300,000 intelligence cards [...].

---

The affective atmosphere into which the MID intensified its own predictive techniques later traversed the Pacific Ocean into the Philippines. Alfred McCoy argues that the American introduction of communication technologies and surveillance techniques in governing the Philippines constituted the United States’ first information revolution (McCoy 2009: 18). Colonial police trained in the anxious habits of the MID, rendered the Philippines a laboratory for securitized speculation. McCoy further contends that these informational “capillaries of empire” embedded themselves into the Philippines’ plantocratic-security state as well as US domestic surveillance practices. I add to McCoy’s argument by suggesting that trained feelings of white apprehension translated into imperial mechanisms for governing the Philippines through systems of intelligence cards, telecommunications infrastructure, policing units, and management sciences. Reminiscent of the psychological investigatory projects that saturated Chicago’s public life, the MID and its successors developed techniques for psychological examination and personality typing led by another Chicagoan, Harry Hill Bandholtz. [...] Bandholtz sharpened the MID's informational sciences by training Philippines police forces in the neurotic art of collecting every imaginable fact about Filipino behaviors [...].

---

Ultimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures which had been trained on apprehensive practices and feelings emanating from Chicago’s racialized geography. [...] [T]he informational networks that extended from the image of the American South, through the anticipation of Chicago's public, [...] animated the governance of colonial plantations in the Philippines [...].

---

All text above by: Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. The symposium was introduced and edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés León Araya. The symposium was hosted and published by Antipode Online, part of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Published online 4 January 2024, at: antipodeonline.org/2024/01/04/plantation-methodologies/ [In this post, bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[robertreich]

From Robber Barons to Bezos: Is History Repeating Itself?

Ultra-wealthy elites…Political corruption…Vast inequality…

These problems aren’t new — in the late 1800s they dominated the country during America’s first Gilded Age.

We overcame these abuses back then, and we can do it again.

Mark Twain coined the moniker “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel to describe the era in American history characterized by corruption and inequality that was masked by a thin layer of prosperity for a select few.

The end of the 19th century and start of the 20th marked a time of great invention — bustling railroads, telephones, motion pictures, electricity, automobiles — which changed American life forever.

But it was also an era of giant monopolies — oil, railroad, steel, finance — run by a small group of men who had grown rich beyond anything America had ever seen.

They were known as “robber barons” because they ran competitors out of business, exploited workers, charged customers exorbitant prices, and lived like royalty as a result.

Money consumed politics. Robber barons and their lackeys donated bundles of cash to any lawmaker willing to do bidding on their behalf. And when lobbying wasn’t enough, the powerful turned to bribery — resulting in some of the most infamous political scandals in American history.

The gap between the rich and poor in America reached astronomical levels. Large numbers of Americans lived in squalor.

Anti-immigrant sentiment raged, leading to the enactment of racist laws to restrict immigration. And voter suppression, largely aimed at Black men who had recently won the right to vote, was rampant.

The era was also marked by dangerous working conditions. Children often as young as 10, but sometimes younger, worked brutal hours in sweatshops. Workers trying to organize labor unions were attacked and killed.

It seemed as if American capitalism was out of control, and American democracy couldn’t do anything about it because it was bought and paid for by the rich.

But Americans were fed up, and they demanded reform. Many took to the streets in protest.

Investigative journalists, often called “muckrakers” then, helped amplify their cries by exposing what was occurring throughout the country.

And a new generation of political leaders rose to end the abuses.

Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt, who warned that, “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.

After becoming president in 1901, Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up dozens of powerful corporations, including the giant Northern Securities Company which had come to dominate railroad transportation through a series of mergers.

Seeking to limit the vast fortunes that were creating a new American aristocracy, Congress enacted a progressive income tax through the 16th Amendment, as well as two wealth taxes.

The first wealth tax, in 1916, was the estate tax — a tax on the wealth someone accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherited it. The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets were sold.

The reformers of the Gilded Age also stopped corporations from directly giving money to politicians or political candidates.

And then Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin — you may have heard of him — continued the work through his New Deal programs — creating Social Security, unemployment insurance, a 40-hour workweek, and requiring that employers bargain in good faith with labor unions.

But following the death of FDR and the end of World War II, when America was building the largest middle class the world had ever seen — we seemed to forget about the abuses of the Gilded Age.

Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

It is also a time of extraordinary invention.

And a time when monopolies are taking over vast swathes of the economy, so we must renew antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

Now, another generation of robber barons is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.  

Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we need to protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

Voter suppression runs rampant in the states as during the first Gilded Age, making it harder for people of color to participate in what’s left of our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age. So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

The question now is the same as it was at the start of the 20th century: Will we fight for an economy and a democracy that works for all rather than the few?

We’ve done it before. We can — and must — do it again.

[theoutcastrogue]

Ballads of the Hanged: Swinging from the Gallows Tree

A mixtape of execution ballads and assorted tales of guilt, wrath, terror, and defiance on the gallows, where all men are brothers.

[on spotify]

21 tracks, 1h 15min in full (spotify lacks one song)

I teased this many moons ago, and I finally finished it. No booklet in PDF form (too much hassle), but I got extensive liner notes, which you can also read here, for more pictures and a wider format. Enjoy!

LINER NOTES

1. Hans Zimmer - Hoist The Colours

Heave ho thieves and beggars never shall we die

What a heartbreaking thing to say on the scaffold. But we have to start with theatrics and a drum roll, and our introduction needs no introduction.

2007, from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End OST lyrics: Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio music: Hans Zimmer & Gore Verbinski

2. Shirley Collins - Tyburn Tree (Since Laws Were Made)

Next stop, Tyburn: England's most notorious gallows. In The Beggar's Opera, the highwayman Macheath (later also known as Mack the Knife) observes that if they hanged rich criminals like they hang the poor ones, "'twould thin the land". Shirley Jackson subtly changed this to the better.

Since laws were made for ev'ry degree to curb vice in others as well as me, I wonder there's no better company on Tyburn Tree.

But since gold from laws can take out the sting, and if rich men like us were to swing, it would rid the land their numbers to see upon Tyburn Tree.

recorded 1966, released 2002 in Within Sound lyrics: John Gay, from The Beggar's Opera, 1728 music: traditional ("Greensleeves"), 16th century

3. Joan Baez - Long Black Veil

A country ballad about a man falsely accused of murder, who lets himself get dragged to the gallows because he won't reveal his alibi: an affair with his best friend's wife. It's been covered by a million people, here's Baez live.

The scaffold is high, eternity near, She stands in the crowd, she sheds not a tear, But sometimes at night, when the cold winds moan, In a long black veil she cries o'er my bones.

1963, from In Concert Part 2 lyrics & music: Lefty Frizzell, 1959

4. Oscar Isaac with Punch Brothers & Secret Sisters - Hang Me, Oh Hang Me

A poor boy who got "so damn hungry he could hide behind a straw", made his last stand with a rifle and a dagger, and has been all around this world, and is positively done with it.

They put the rope around my neck, they hung me up so high Last words I heard 'em say, won't be long now 'fore you die Hand me, oh hang me, and I'll be dead and gone Wouldn't mind the hanging, but the laying in the grave so long

2015, from Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of "Inside Llewyn Davis", after Oscar Isaac's rendition in Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013, in turn after Dave Van Ronk's rendition in Folksinger, 1962 lyrics & music: traditional American/unclear origin, folk song with various titles (I've Been All Around This World, The Gambler, My Father Was a Gambler, The New Railroad), first recorded by Justis Begley, 1937

5. Chapel Hill - Seven Curses

Cover of a Bob Dylan song, telling us the dark tale of a judge who's about to send a man to the gallows for stealing a horse, promises his daughter he'll show clemency if she agrees to sleep with him, and then reneges on his promise.

The next morning she had awoken to know that the judge had never spoken she saw that hanging branch a-bending she saw her father's body broken These be seven curses for a judge so cruel

2013, from One For The Birds lyrics inspired by Judy Collins's "Anathea" (1963), in turn inspired by the traditional Hungarian ballad "Feher Anna", who curses the judge "thirteen years may be lie bleeding" lyrics & music: Bob Dylan, recorded 1963, released 1991 in The Bootleg Series

6. Ewan MacColl - Go Down Ye Murderers

A song about Timothy Evans, a man accused of murdering his wife and child, which he denied until his last breath. They convicted him and hanged him in 1950. He was 25 years old. Three years later the real murderer, his neighbour John Christie, confessed, and the case played a major role in abolishing capital punishment in the UK.

The rope was fixed around his neck, and the washer behind his ear And the prison bell was tolling but Tim Evans did not hear Sayin' go down, you murderer, go down

They sent Tim Evans to the drop for a crime he didn't do It was Christy was the murderer, and the judge and jury too Sayin' go down, you murderers, go down

1956, from Bad Lads and Hard Cases: British Ballads Of Crime And Criminals lyrics & music: Ewan MacColl

7. Jennifer Lawrence - The Hanging Tree

One of the stranger things that can happen at the hanging tree is camaraderie. "On the gallows tree, all men are brothers", to quote A Feast for Crows, and when the state murders, then in defiance, an execution ballad can become a protest song. Many have in real life, this one is fiction, from The Hunger Games. Wisely, the director asked the composer for a simple tune, nothing elaborate, something that could be "sung by one person or by a thousand people".

Are you, are you coming to the tree? Wear a necklace of rope side by side with me Strange things have happened here, no stranger would it be If we met at midnight in the hanging tree

2014, from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 OST lyrics: Suzanne Collins music: James Newton Howard

8. Let's Play Dead - Heaven and Hell

A fairly traditional execution ballad written recently for the series Harlots. Margaret Wells sings it to herself for consolation and courage, as she sits alone in a cell, waiting to get dragged to the gallows.

I'm no more a sinner than any man here I'm no less a saint than the priest at god's ear But now I am snared, they will punish me well With a ladder to heaven and a rope down to hell

2018, from the single Heaven and Hell, for Harlots Season 2 Episode 7 lyrics & music: Let's Play Dead

9. Odetta - Gallows Pole

Probably the most well-known execution ballad of the 20th century, thanks to several iconic renditions. This one remains my favourite.

Hangman, hangman, slack your rope, slack it for a while I think I see my father coming, riding many a mile Papa did you bring me silver, did you bring me gold? Or did you come to see me hanging by the gallows pole?

1960, from At Carnegie Hall lyrics & music: traditional (Child 95 / Roud 144), known under many other titles ("Hangman", "The Maid freed From the Gallows", "The Prickle-Holly Bush"); this version is directly influenced by Lead Belly's "Gallis Pole" (1930s), and they both informed Led Zeppelin's 1970 version

10. Johnny Cash - 25 Minutes to Go

Peak gallows humour, uproariously funny and defiant, and somehow still conveying the terror of a man who's about to die and emphatically doesn't want to. Performed live at Folsom Prison.

Then the sheriff said boy I'm gonna watch you die, 19 minutes to go So I laughed in his face and I spit in his eye, 18 minutes to go Now here comes the preacher for to save my soul, 13 minutes to go And he's talking about burning but I'm so cold, 12 minutes to go

1968, from At Folsom Prison lyrics & music: Shel Silverstein, from his 1962 album Inside Folk Songs

11. Johnny Cash - Sam Hall

A classic execution ballad with many versions (see here for its complicated history), some of which are stoic and dignified, and others humorous. But this one brims with rage. Sam Hall will not be repenting on the gallows, and he'll see you all in hell.

My name it is Sam Hall and I hate you one and all And I hate you one and all, damn your eyes

2002, from American IV: The Man Comes Around lyrics & music: : traditional, 18th century broadside ballad, Roud 369

12. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Up Jumped the Devil

A song about a man doomed from the start to play the villain’s part, and the origin of this blog’s #swinging from the gallows tree tag.

Who's that hanging from the gallow tree? His eyes are hollow but he looks like me Who's that swinging from the gallow tree? Up jumped the Devil and he took my soul from me

1999, from Tender Prey lyrics: Nick Cave music: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

13. NOT ON SPOTIFY: Dead Rat Orchestra - The Black Procession

This ballad imagines a sinister procession of 20 criminals (black tradesmen brought up in hell!), each with their own specialty (it's mostly thieves of some sort), on the way to the gallows. The last and worst of them is the thief-catcher, and if one of them is innocent, they'll all go free. But of course none of them are. It's written in thieves' cant (lyrics and more context here), and the chorus means: "Look well, listen well, see where they are dragged, up to the gallows where they are hanged."

Toure you well; hark you well, see where they are rubb’d, Up to the nubbing cheat where they are nubb’d.

2015, from Tyburnia: A Radical History Of 600 Years Of Public Execution lyrics: from The Triumph of Wit by J. Shirley, 1688 music: Robin Alderton, Daniel Merrill & Nathaniel Robin Mann

14. John Harle & Marc Almond - The Tyburn Tree

And where does the Black Procession lead? To Tyburn, of course. The dark gothic side of Marc Almond.

The Tyburn Tree, I weep for thee, blood in the roots 'Tis not a tree with bark and leaves of spring awakening 'Tis not a tree with blossom and fruit, 'tis not a tree No boughs to bend beneath the unruly breath of winter No memories of woods warmed by spring's sweet touch 'Tis not a tree — take a ride to Tyburn and dance the last jig

2014, from The Tyburn Tree (Dark London) lyrics: Marc Almond music: John Harle

15. CocoRosie - Gallows

Speaking of dark and gothic.

They took him to the gallows, he fought them all the way though And when they asked us how we knew his name We died just before him, our eyes are in the flowers Our hands are in the branches, our voices in the breezes And our screaming is in his screaming

2010, from Grey Oceans lyrics & music: Sierra Rose Casady & Bianca Leilani Casady

16. The Tiger Lillies - Hang Tomorrow

In their Two Penny Opera, the pioneers of dark cabaret reimagine Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, and take all the suaveness out of Mack the Knife. Here they also take all the fight out of him. What's even left? A pathetic empty husk, a bastard (let's not forget that Brecht's MacHeath is no rogue with a heart of gold, he's a horrible man) who can't even be intriguing. How disturbingly pedestrian.

So here I am in jail again, oh god it stinks of piss I've been in here since I was young, so I can reminisce It's looking rather grim this time, it's looking rather bad But if I swing tomorrow in some ways I'll be glad

2001, from Two Penny Opera lyrics & music: Martyn Jacques

17. Tom Hollander - Ballad In Which MacHeath Begs All Mens' Forgiveness

In The Threepenny Opera, Mack the Knife stands on the scaffold and asks for pity. No point being judgmental now, that he's about to die. He morbidly describes how his dead body will end up, and then he lashes out at everyone, cops and criminals (same difference), while still begging them all for forgiveness. Very VERY sarcastically. The ballad's concept is borrowed from François Villon (see below), and this translation is unusually bold (honorific, see here and here for other translations and context).

You crooked cops with your Mercedes, your mobile phones, your trendy jackets, your cuts from drugs and dice and ladies, your Scotland Yard protection rackets.

Let heaven smash your fucking faces, slash you and let the blood run free and break you in a thousand places. I've pardoned you. You pardon me.

1994, from The Threepenny Opera - Donmar Warehouse Original Cast lyrics: Bertolt Brecht 1928, loosely inspired by François Villon's "Ballad of the Hanged" c. 1489, translated by Jeremy Sams 1994 music: Kurt Weill 1928

18. Saga de Ragnar Lodbrock - Ballade des pendus

And here's the OG Ballad of the Hanged, written in the 15th century by the OG poète maudit, François Villon (translation here). It paints an indelible picture of strung up corpses swaying in the wind, decaying, pecked by birds, ravaged by the elements and time. And crucially, it's in the first person. The hanged speak, begging their fellow-humans for pity, and god for forgiveness.

Frères humains, qui après nous vivez, N'ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis, Car, si pitié de nous pauvres avez, Dieu en aura plus tôt de vous mercis. Vous nous voyez ci attachés, cinq, six: Quant à la chair, que trop avons nourrie, Elle est piéça dévorée et pourrie, Et nous, les os, devenons cendre et poudre. De notre mal personne ne s'en rie; Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

recorded 1979, released 1999 in the Saga de Ragnar Lodbrock reissue lyrics: François Villon, c. 1489 music: Saga de Ragnar Lodbrock

19. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Mercy Seat

Honorary inclusion, a song not about hanging: the mercy seat is the electric chair. But the lyrics are a punch and this is a torrent of a song, a whirlwind, a masterpiece, a 7-minute cynic snarl. So it couldn't possibly get left out of this compilation.

And the mercy seat is awaiting, and I think my head is burning And in a way I'm yearning to be done with all this measuring of proof An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (a life for a life and a truth for a truth) And anyway I told the truth, and I'm not afraid to die (and I'm afraid I told a lie)

1999, from Tender Prey lyrics & music: Nick Cave

20. Graveyard Train - Ballad For Beelzebub

And after? Welcome to Hell, ladies and gents, and bards. (Bards are rogues, too.) The Graveyard Train play a kind of Southern Gothic (but very southern, they're Australian), and here they entertain the thought of a band that ends up in hell and has to keep playing, without end, for an audience that can't hear. What a bleak prospect.

Well the air on the stage is burning our lungs And we're all going deaf from the beating drums And you can't see a thing for all the blood and the sweat in our eyes

Well we played till we died, and now we're all dead But the Man says we got to get up there again And you can't come down till the brimstone turns to ice

2008, from The Serpent And The Crow lyrics & music: Graveyard Train

21. Samuel Kim feat. Colm R. McGuinness - Hoist the Colours

Yo ho, all together Hoist the colours high Heave ho, thieves and beggars

But we won't end in hell. The only acceptable ending to this compilation is the triumphant version (wait for it) of its beginning: a pirate's end. Traditionally the gibbet, yes, but also the ghost ship that still sails, the ripple that still travels, and the story that still gets told.

Did I stutter the first time?

NEVER SHALL WE DIE

[fictionadventurer]

Everything I learn about Rose Wilder Lane makes me more and more aware that she was a hilariously outrageous person who needs a movie made about her immediately.

After leaving Missouri, she moves to California and marries a real-estate guy who once tried to get her to help him con the railroad.

She gets hired at a San Francisco newspaper known for its yellow journalism, where she does things like writing a series of columns featuring the "real-life stories of a police detective" who, in real life, was a high-end jewel thief.

Her first book is a first-person "autobiography" of Charlie Chaplin that she (after a few interviews with Chaplin) completely made up, and that Charlie Chaplin immediately threatened to sue her publisher for.

Her second book is a biography of Jack London, which his wife only reluctantly allowed her to write because Rose presented herself as "someone who had never written for the newspapers before and needs a chance to break into the magazines." This book was also almost entirely fictional, and her publisher also almost got sued over it.

Third biography is the first-ever biography of Herbert Hoover, also a heavily-fictionalized account. (Doesn't seem to have been sued for this one. Steps in the right direction!)

Traveled as a reporter through Europe (to places like Albania and Poland) post-WWI. (If we want to talk about legal things that she did).

Wrote a book based on Laura's late-childhood pioneer experiences while Laura was writing the early books of the Little House series, and did not tell Laura about it. (Laura was ticked off).

Kept trying to insert a story into Laura's memoirs (and Little House on the Prairie) casting Pa as a member of a posse that hunted down the infamous (and never-caught) serial-killing Bender family (despite the fact that this was historically impossible). (It got to the point that Laura herself told this story to the public as an example of "a true story I couldn't out in my children's book." Despite the fact, I say again, that this was historically impossible).

During WWII, endured a minor incident (it involved one cop coming to her house) where the FBI investigated her as a potential communist based on a postcard she sent that was critical of the government. Turned this into a short story that presented herself as the righteously-outraged American citizen fighting against an oppressive government, and used this to whip up a nationwide media campaign against J. Edgar Hoover for spying on American citizens.

Flew to Vietnam as a war reporter when she was in her seventies.