Yeah. I know that the Dems are not perfect, and will not fix our shared problems without us pushing them, but at this point, I feel like we’re staving off an utter disaster by voting from them…
If my previous comment came off a bit snippy, I apologize, but I’m sure you feel it too… just things are… ugh…
No problem. Actually, I had you in mind when doing up the post. I took a risk 
given your never-too-often voiced urge for proactiveness (I’m there with ya) and issues (again, with ya) with those who seem to rationalize giving up… something that is so not me (to a fault, in fact). Just keep that flag waving!
A very interesting story out of Indiana: A case of ‘religious freedom’ effectively pushing against ‘anti-abortion’.
This is absolutely awesome.
More grist for why I always think of “Economics” as a fundamentally conservative field.
Thanks for this. I sent it to my colleagues in Econ with a little 
.
For me, the most satisfying moment, by far, of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — Amazon’s expensive adaptation of Tolkien’s Second Age — involves Númenor and a dramatization of Tolkien’s “terrible dream.” The fourth episode of the blockbuster series, called “The Great Wave,” opens with a vision of huge waves crashing over and drowning the Númenórean city of Armenelos. Yet this dream also clashes, deliciously, with the supposed memory that Tolkien so cherished. Tolkien understood his dream as part of a racial pattern of white “father-son affinity” that began with Elendil and his son and extended up to Tolkien and his own child Michael. In his appendices — for which Amazon gained the rights from the Tolkien estate for a whopping 250 million dollars — Tolkien highlights the racial purity of Elendil’s ancestral line in Middle-earth, writing that “it was the pride and wonder of the Northern Line that, though their power departed and their people dwindled, through all the many generations the succession was unbroken from father to son.” Elendil is one of the white characters in the Amazon series (played ably by Peter McKenzie). In The Rings of Power , though, it isn’t Elendil but rather a woman of color, Queen Regent Míriel (realized beautifully by Cynthia Addai-Robinson) who dreams of the great flood. Moreover, Míriel’s vision of Númenor radically rejects the white patriarchal bonds embraced by Tolkien. The tsunami hits the island while the queen is blessing newborns brought to her by an emphatically multicultural group of mothers.
It’s hard to imagine an adaptation that would have bothered Tolkien’s racist sensibilities further. As I have discussed, Tolkien was both a little Englander who detested globalism and a medievalist who dissuaded his Jamaican advisee at Oxford — none other than the future multiculturalism pioneer, Stuart Hall — from becoming a medievalist. (As medievalists of color such as Mary Rambaran-Olm have made clear, the whiteness of medieval studies remains a vexing problem.) If Tolkien could not tolerate the prospect of a Black scholar analyzing his treasured medieval English literature, how much more would he have rejected the very idea of a Black Númenórean woman, let alone one who shared his Atlantis dream?
Everyone who ever lived is part of an unbroken line of mothers and fathers. You wouldn’t exist otherwise. 
The epitaph of poor whites everywhere, though.
Hmm, not sure what you mean. Could you please elaborate on that?
Sure, but just to be clear, Tolkein’s fetish was for a racially unbroken line.
It’s not uncommon for poor whites around the US to hang onto their racial identity as a point of pride, all the while ignoring the very real economic issues that are keeping them powerless and in poverty.
Ah, got it.
Indeed, they’ve been bamboozled by the divide and conquer strategy that is white supremacy. Wish Du Bois was still here to school us all on that.
Rich whites learned a lot from Bacon’s Rebellion, and never looked back. Not a perfect analysis, but . . .
You’re telling me! (i.e., yup, I’m aware)
