Vesth claims that they, “shot the actors pretending to have sex and then had the body doubles, who really did have sex, and in post we will digital-impose the two…So above the waist it will be the star and the below the waist it will be the doubles.”
Lars von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ Will Digitally Morph Its Stars With Their Porn Body Doubles
| — | Robert Reich (via azspot) |
May 17, 1954: The Supreme Court unanimously rules public school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.
Fifty-nine years ago today, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a landmark case that the segregation of public schools was prohibited under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; newly-appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the opinion:
Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group…. We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
The doctrine of “separate but equal” as justification for racial segregation emerged in the United States in the 1890s and was upheld in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could enact racial segregation laws; in the South, this legitimized the dismantlement of Reconstruction Era reform and the South’s enactment of Jim Crow laws. Many states in the North/members of the Union during the Civil War also maintained racially segregated schools — it was the policy of the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that Oliver L. Brown and twelve other plaintiffs sought to challenge, after all. At the time, the Board’s policy permitted Topeka’s school districts to segregate their elementary and middle schools. Under the direction of the NAACP, each of the plaintiffs enrolled their children in local all-white schools and, when their children were refused enrollment, filed a class action suit in the District Court of Kansas, which subsequently ruled in favor of the Board. This decision took place in 1951.
The case that was heard by the Supreme Court in 1953 was a combination of five similar cases (all backed by the NAACP), including Brown v. Board, which lent the Supreme Court case its name. After much deliberation, including a request to rehear the case after the court failed to reach a decision the first time, the Warren Court banned (in a unanimous decision) the segregation of public schools. The justices were divided on how Brown could be enforced and on the issue of judicial activism versus restraint, though Warren pushed for unanimity to further legitimize the decision and prevent Southern resistance (it did not). Although Brown was a key decision and the first step toward the end of de jure segregation, the path to desegregation was long and rocky; Topeka desegregated its elementary schools within two years, but resistance in the South against the court’s decision and against desegregation was inexorable, resulting in incidents such as the Little Rock Crisis and other manifestations of what Virginian politicians dubbed “massive resistance”.
Brown vs. Board of Education
On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision overturning “separate but equal” as unconstitutional, stating that segregation in public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment.
Four years earlier, members of the Topeka, Kansas, Chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine governing public education through a class action suit when they were denied the opportunity to enroll their children in the white-only schools.
When the Topeka case made its way to the United States Supreme Court it was combined with other NAACP cases from Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina and Washington, D.C. The combined cases became known as Oliver L. Brown et. al. vs. The Board of Education of Topeka (KS).
You can see the original Complaint against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Court Order, and correspondences between President Eisenhower about Brown vs. Board of Education from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Papers as President here.
Pictured: Supreme Court Opinion of Brown vs. Board of Education, pages 1-3. 5/31/55.
-from the Eisenhower Library
Gregory Scarpa, Sr. was an enforcer for the Colombo crime family, specifically for the boss Carmine Persico. He was responsible for at least three murders in 1991. In addition to being a murderer, Scarpa was also racist. He despised African Americans. In fact, in 1986, he underwent emergency ulcer surgery at Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn. He refused blood donations from the local blood bank because he feared that the blood may have been donated by African Americans.Instead, he took blood donations from several family members and associates. One associate was mobster Paul Mele, who was a body builder and steroid user. Mele had contracted HIV from a dirty needle and ended up passing it on to Scarpa. It eventually progressed into AIDS which caused the death of the mobster. So Scarpa died from being a racist.
I know I shouldn’t have laughed at this, but I did. Karma can be cruel.
| — | Farai Chideya, “How to Fix Journalism’s Class and Color Crisis” (via thenationmagazine) |
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the time, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
He wrote those words more than 70 years ago, yet the conditions he describes still ring true for 50 million Americans living in food insecure households today… . Hungry families do not have enough food… [but] not because of scarcity. Every year 40% of food produced goes uneaten. That’s 20 pounds of food per person per day. And that is the twisted irony of hunger in America today. What Steinbeck called that crime that goes beyond denunciation, landfills brimming with rotting food while 15% of households don’t have enough to eat.
Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy, in case you hadn’t heard. How dare she remove those ticking time bombs from her chest, amiright? Like, hasn’t she learned by now that her body is public domain and we all get to vote on what she does with it? Sheesh, how selfish can ya get.
A+ Would recommend
But Sunday’s broad-daylight shooting of a largely-black New Orleans second line parade, which left 19 people injured, including three critically, merited just a six-paragraph AP story tucked into the bottom corner of A11 in The New York Times. The Mother’s Day bloodshed evidences a jarring disjuncture in how violence is treated in the media: Americans killed by Muslims or in white suburbia merit non-stop coverage while the victims of everyday bloodletting on the streets of New Orleans, Philadelphia and Chicago are typically rendered a footnote.
Jim MacMillan of Philadelphia’s Gun Crisis Reporting Project says such disparate treatment is the norm.
“What struck me as unusual after the Mother’s Day incident was that — somewhere between the press conferences and the media narrative — we have been presented with an explicit suggestion that the incident was ‘not terrorism’ and that many victims were ‘only grazed.’”
See the AP’s first-paragraph mention that the shootings “appear to be street violence, and not terrorism-related” and CNN’s assurance that “federal investigators say they have no indication that the shooting was an act of terrorism”
Nothing to see here, folks—at least nothing that you don’t think you already understand all too well and have learned not to care about.


