This gets us back into that whole "once you go black" thing again:

"Before Uncle Remus, there weren’t really narrative serials for kids (think: television shows as opposed to movies), nor were there animals that walked, talked, and had sass like humans. Brer Rabbit is an original (Signifyin’) gangsta."

Stop it, or else you'll rile up they menfolk. These are NewAgers - some kinda "Magic In Da Mind" folk - so I been watchin' and speakin' they language:

Take it from me - they's practically drawn to the word "thug"....

Reading/thinking. Thinking/reading - it's nothing but trouble:

"Mr. Jennings, who died in 1874 at age 75, did not discuss his personal difficulties in his memoir, but Ms. Taylor and others say he encountered many hardships. As a slave, he was forced to live apart from his wife and children, who lived on another plantation. And he seems to have chafed under Mrs. Madison’s ownership after her husband died.

Articles in abolitionist newspapers uncovered by researchers at the University of Virginia’s Dolley Madison Digital Edition, an online collection of Mrs. Madison’s correspondence, reported that she treated her slaves poorly. In March 1848, the Liberator newspaper published a letter charging that Mrs. Madison had hired out Mr. Jennings to others and then kept 'the last red cent' of his pay, 'leaving him to get his clothes by presents, night work, or as he might.'

The letter also said Mrs. Madison had refused to free Mr. Jennings, as her husband had wished. Instead, she sold him to an insurance agent, who in turn sold him to Senator Daniel Webster for $120. (He promptly set Mr. Jennings free and let him work off the debt as a servant in his household.)"

My, my - let me tell you what crossed my mind:

Since I know ever more realistic (and, thus, ever more horrifying) images of America are coming - so it's going to get really, really dark out there - can we just cut to the chase and agree that calling history "black," early on, was the right thing to do?

 

The things believers find confusing are, themselves, confusing:

  “Costco has Bibles for sale under the genre of FICTION. Hmmmm." 

 Meanwhile, Whole Foods has homeopathy for sale under the guise of MEDICINE. Hmmmm,...

 

"In the world of dieting, many promises are made and broken. But author Kevin Trudeau's is an extreme case: He had been warned by no less than the Federal Communications Commission not to make false claims about his diet book in advertisements.

Nevertheless, he appeared in a recent set of infomercials for his book "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You To Know About" saying that it revealed a miracle substance that would allow people following his diet plan to eat all they wanted and still lose weight. The infomercials aired 32,000 times.

A federal jury in Chicago found Trudeau guilty of criminal contempt Tuesday and he was taken into custody, Reuters reports. He faces potential federal prison time."

"Now, in his explosive autobiography, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, published today, he has revealed that he spent the weeks leading up to that sentencing, traveling round the country ‘romancing’ his various girlfriends. 

And where legal measures had let him down he had turned to ‘divine intervention,’ to bring him a light sentence. He visited a, ‘hoodoo woman’ who said she would cast a spell to keep him out of jail if he put five hundred dollar bills in a jar, urinated in it and kept it under his bed for three days. 

He sought out a voodoo priest who turned out to be a fraud, ‘I knew that guy had nothing,’ he recalls.

And he followed the instructions of a Santeria priest – going to the courthouse one night with a pigeon and an egg which he dropped on the ground as the bird was release and he yelled. ‘We’re free!’

He almost believed it would work. Because he felt invincible. ‘In my mind,’ he says, ‘I had no peers. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.’

He was sentenced to six years and served three."

He documents this journey in his book “Escape: My Lifelong War Against Cults,” a thrilling read that’s also educational. It links half a century of mental manipulation, violence, and legal warfare waged by controversial totalistic movements.

Chapter after chapter details the similarities of cults and their megalomaniacal leaders. It’s revealing to see the same elements in Charles Manson’s “family,” the Symbionese Liberation Army, Synanon, Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, Werner Erhard’s est, the Unification Church, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s commune and even Scientology.

Many of these cults have their own version of forced abortions, extreme hours with little to no pay, sleep deprivation, and constant ego-smashing abuse combined with praise and reassurance. Also common are disconnection from families, and diabolical legal strategies intended to ruin reputations and cripple outside interference.

But Paul’s heroics have come at a steep price. In 1978, his fiancé left him out of fear for her children. And then 10 years ago, Paul was diagnosed with a serious blood disorder linked to rattlesnake venom. Paul’s forced to live on bi-monthly transfusions. (He jokes, “I’ve developed simpatico with Dracula.”)

In “Escape” Morantz skillfully traces Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung’s theories of brainwashing he used on his own people and also on American POWs during the Korean War. Paul lays the groundwork for showing how many controversial groups here at home, particularly those coming out of the 1960s human potential movement, shared the same ideas, methods and, all too often, the same tragic results.

“Anyone who wants to understand the devious, insane nature of the fraud known as L. Ron Hubbard should read this book cover to cover, and investigate all the footnotes. You will not only want $cientology ended forever, you'll feel the same way about any similar spiritual huckster that comes along in Hubbard's wake.”

"Why Men Don't Read:

 How Publishing is Alienating Half the Population."

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is David Blight and he is the director of Yale's Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He's edited a couple of slave memoirs and he's in the process of writing a biography of Frederick Douglass. And we're talking about some of the things that helped set the context for the memoir "12 Years a Slave," which is the basis of the new film of the same name.

There are a lot of monuments in the South to Civil War generals. Do you ever think that there should be, like, a national holiday to just remember the people who were brought here to be slaves or who were born into slavery or sold into slavery?

BLIGHT: Yes.