River of Song.

“The Music Timeline shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates). Each stripe on the graph represents a genre; the thickness of the stripe tells you roughly the popularity of music released in a given year in that genre.” Some click-bait fun for a slow day: Google Research’s Music Timeline.

Dirty Henry.

“Kissinger asked how long will it take you (the Argentines) to clean up the problem. Guzzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved. In other words, Ambassador Hill explained, Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light.”

Another file for the war crimes prosecution: New evidence comes to light that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, among his many other misdeeds, egged on Argentina’s Dirty War. “Kissinger watchers have known for years that he at least implicitly (though privately) endorsed the Argentine dirty war, but this new memo makes clear he was an enabler for an endeavor that entailed the torture, disappearance, and murder of tens of thousands of people.”

Cthulhu Fhtagn!

“The National Reconnaissance Office, tasked with watching the earth through largely classified satellite programs, recently launched a new rocket into space. That rocket’s classified contents were marked with an incredibly subtle image: an octopus spreading its tentacles across the globe, over the words “nothing is beyond our reach.” Charming!”

Er, yeah, not sure what they were thinking there. In any event, in honor of this dubious messaging, Popular Science offers eight historical examples of octopi taking over the world. Above is Standard Oil, smothering both ends of Congress with its undulating, oleaginous reach.

Walks like a Progressive…

In case you enjoyed the last go-round in August with Jay Ackroyd, I recorded another stint on Virtually Speaking this past week about Uphill All the Way, who the progressives were, and the shift from progressivism to liberalism — this time with Stuart Zechman. And since I invariably feel like I’m not being altogether lucid when speaking in public, consider this also another plug for the written word and Uphill, still online in full.

The Song of Solomon.

“12 Years a Slave is an easy landmark. It’s a rare sugarless movie about racial inequality…[A]t several points an audience is free to remember that most movies about the Civil War and slavery have been appeals to our higher, nobler selves. They’ve been appeals to white audiences by white characters talking to other white characters about the inherent injustice of oppressing black people at any moment in this planet’s history…McQueen and Ridley turn that dynamic inside out.”

In Grantland, Wesley Morris ably discourses on Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, thus far the movie of the year (and I say that as someone who didn’t think much of Hunger or Shame.) As I said on Twitter, this film should come as a free digital download with any Lee Greenwood CD (or, for that matter, any Gods and Generals DVD.) “A different movie might have taken this story and turned it into a battle between Epps and the white men who feel a duty to free Northrup…The power of McQueen’s movie is in its declaratory style: This happened. That is all, and that is everything.”

The Guerrilla.

“I knew he was proud of his reputation as the ‘Red Napoleon,’ and I presumed he would welcome an opportunity to indulge my curiosity about his triumphs…But he answered most of my questions briefly, adding little to what I already knew, and then waved his hand to indicate disinterest. That is all in the past now, he said. You and I should discuss a future where our countries are not enemies but friends. And so we did.”

The man in the black pajamas, Dude: Upon the latter’s death at the age of 102, Senator John McCain remembers General Vo Nguyen Giap, architect of Dien Bien Phu and Tet. “Countries, not just their armies, win wars. Giap understood that. We didn’t. Americans tired of the dying and the killing before the Vietnamese did. It’s hard to defend the morality of the strategy. But you can’t deny its success.”

All We Have is Now.

“Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them…If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second. And if human history itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since Christ.”

Time? What time do you think we have? As has been going around the Interweb, a series of intriguing timelines ranging from last year to the age of the universe. Among the interesting facts pointed out: “The T-Rex is closer in time to seeing a Justin Bieber concert than seeing a live stegosaurus.” Also: “When we refer to the most ancient of ancient history, we are still just talking about…less than 3% of the time that humans who look like us have existed.”

Chasing Darkness.

“How dark it would have been—imagine leaning out your door and, on the darkest nights, not being able to see more than a few feet in any direction. Historian Peter Baldwin describes as ‘downright perilous’ the streets in early American cities, with few paved and then those only with cobblestones…What lights did exist were intended only as beacons or guides rather than to illuminate the night. The New York street lanterns burning whale oil were, in 1761, merely ‘yellow specks engulfed by darkness,’ and, even more than 100 years later, its gas lamps were still ‘faint as a row of invalid glow-worms.'”

In Slate, Paul Bogart describes (and laments) the end of night all across the world. “With at least 30 percent of all vertebrates and more than 60 percent of all invertebrates worldwide nocturnal, and with many of the rest crepuscular, [the] implications are enormous.”

The Dream Persists.

“We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, August 28th, 1963.

“It is implausible to imagine that, were King to be raised from the dead, he would look at America’s jails, unemployment lines, soup kitchens or inner-city schools and think his life’s work had been accomplished. Whether one believes that these inequalities are caused by individuals making bad choices or by institutional discrimination, it would be absurd to claim that such a world bears any resemblance to the one King set out to create.” As The Nation‘s Gary Younge reminds us, today should not be about resting on laurels by any means: There is work to do.

Virtual All the Way.

Hello all: Back on the mainland as of 48 hours ago. In case the Election of 1924 talk of a few months past whetted your appetite for more radio ramblings about the dissertation, I discussed Uphill All the Way and 1920’s politics last night with Jay Ackyroyd of Virtually Speaking. Embed above — enjoy.