Author Archive | Martha Shelley

A short follow-up to my recent posts. I’m quoting from yesterday’s article in the Guardian: “The FBI has declassified its file on Aretha Franklin…which shows the bureau extensively tracked the singer’s civil rights activism and her friendships with Martin Luther King Jr and Angela Davis.” The file was 270 pages long and “includes close documentation […]

My last two blog posts documented that despite calls from the left to defund the police and from the right to defund the FBI, money for both of those organizations has increased steadily over the years. I then promised to let the reader know about an important government service that actually has been starved of […]

Equal Opportunity Entrapment? In my previous post I documented that neither the police nor the FBI have been defunded, and promised to tell you which government service has really been cut severely. Meanwhile I received more information about the FBI’s tactics. I’d written about the agency entrapping a young Muslim in a bomb plot. In […]

Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the news, or maybe do both simultaneously. This week it’s been the weird and wonderful spectacle of GOP politicians, the self-appointed champions of law and order, clamoring to defund the FBI. The Call to Defund the Police In May 2020, shortly after George Floyd was […]

The world of my childhood is long gone, though the building we lived in still stands. The first home I remember was a small apartment—one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen—on the ground floor of 1563 Sterling Place. My parents moved there in 1943, shortly after I was born. Our windows didn’t get direct […]

I’ve been thinking about end of Roe v. Wade, and in particular about the scientific illiteracy and twisted theology that shape our laws. Ignorance I’m sure anyone who reads the news is familiar with statements coming from Republicans that display a profound ignorance of science, an unlimited capacity for venality, or a combination of the […]

Hordes of Cassandras warned us about global warming, we’ve been ignoring them taking no heed of the storms on the horizon. The disasters descend along with new omens: poison hemlock here in Portland and swarms of mosquitoes. While half the nation is aflame after a decade of drought, our town half drowns. Drenching rains fill […]

The first part of this post discusses how the Democrats fail to defend women’s reproductive rights, and it’s kind of grim. The second part is more cheerful and also about reproduction, specifically how hot, prolonged sex might go on in your kitchen, or dining room, or… Throwing the Fight My maternal grandmother, who used a […]

The Arrogance of Empire All empires commit the same crimes. These include torturing and murdering groups or individuals that resist domination, and theft of other people’s resources to enrich the emperor and upper classes. They also have in common overweening arrogance. In this post I’ll consider the empire of which I am a disaffected citizen […]

In a patriarchal society, how far will women go to get men’s attention and approval? How much of their own flesh will they sacrifice, how much of their daughters’ flesh? In some countries and at various times, these sacrifices have included the crippling procedure known as foot binding; female genital mutilation: surgically removing lower ribs […]