148 years ago this week, on April 6, 1871, armed participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune seized the guillotine that was stored near the prison in Paris. They brought it to the foot of the statue of Voltaire, where they smashed it into pieces and burned it in a bonfire, to the applause of an […]
Shingles
This morning a continuation of the wonderful weather everyone’s been enjoying the past few weeks; mid-October, early fall, Indian summer. Cool, mid-fifty degree mornings; warm, mid-70s afternoons, balmy breezes (even when it’s windy it feels great), sunny day after idyllic sunny day, the absolute best time of year in this state of extreme weather and […]
The Response of the captain of “Sea-Watch 3” to the Mayor of Paris who wants to give her a medal
A friend of Hard Crackers in Paris has forwarded us the following article. Pia Klemp, who faces twenty years in prison in Italy, has refused the medal that the mayor of Paris wanted to award her. “You want to give me a medal for actions you fight inside your own walls,” she says. The mayor […]
Connections
So, this is an odd piece. On a late summer Saturday in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, my daughter and her husband did a swim-and-run in a state park. My wife and I watched their kids, three of our six grandchildren. Their swim-and-run was part of a larger Swim/Run/Walk/Kayak and I-don’t-remember-what-else event that went on for the […]
This Place is Poisoning Our Loved Ones
Below is a post from the “Look Out For One Another” FB group in Huntsville, Alabama. Most of the responses gave specific information about who to contact, but a few made larger points such as the responses here below JC’s original post. JC: “I just saw a post on here about the Madison County Jail. […]
A Gory Gift to Trump: A Cruel, Militarized, Expensive, and Decades Old, Bipartisan Border Policy
A review of John Carlos Frey, Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border, New York: Bold Type Books, 2019, 243 pages. John Carlos Frey’s Sand and Blood relates the roughly 140-year history of U.S. anti-immigrant racism and policy on the southwest border, and highlights its mostly pre-Trump, bipartisan intensification over the last […]