The phrase “Burn, baby! Burn!” has been associated with the 1965 Watts Riots. As a result, I’ve always found it fascinating that it would find its way into The Trammps’ mega-hit “Disco Inferno.” It is, I suppose, what Thomas Frank wrote about in his first book, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. It isn’t that those ad men were just trying to co-opt what was cool. It was what they thought was cool and they were simply using it.
It’s certainly the case that the songwriters, Leroy Green and Ron Kersey, were not making a political statement. The song came from a scene in The Towering Inferno, where a disco is burned down. “Disco Inferno” is pure fun, the way that the very best Disco music was. But it must certainly be that the writers had the phrase in their mind because they had heard it associated with the Watts Riots. And there is something kind of sad that just one decade after a riot that took the lives of 34 people should be so vague that the phrase could be co-opted to mean nothing more than burning up the dance floor.
But that’s the nature of our modern society. The Watts Riots started over the police stopping an African American man. The reasonableness of the whole thing is not the question, however. The issue is that we had then, as we have today, a racist system. People denied justice will hold in their resentment and anger for only so long. And to nitpick over the exact timing or cause of their anger is to miss the whole point.
Disco Inferno: Burn That Mother Down
When I see white people like those who took over the Malheur wildlife sanctuary, it makes me think of all the people who have real grievances. Throughout its brief history, the Black Lives Matter movement has been nitpicked to death. A twelve year old African American boy with a toy gun is driven up on and murdered by police within seconds. But when armed white men take over a public building because some rich people are being held accountable for their acts of arson, we get a month-long negotiation to see that no one is harmed. Yet it is the Black Lives Matter protesters who are condemned because they aren’t doing it right. They aren’t courteous enough. They don’t wait their turn. They somehow never know the exact right words that would make their problems all just go away.
African Americans, like all minority groups, are just supposed to shut up — unless they are providing us with entertainment as delightful as “Disco Inferno.”
On this day in 1956, Soviet leader 
As you have no doubt noticed, the publishing schedule around here has gotten a bit less dependable. Thus far, all that has been affected has been the afternoon article. But this may just be the beginning. I’m trying to be solid with the anniversary and music posts. I’ve managed to get the last couple of 11:05 publications up just because I happened to be able to. They weren’t done the day before as used to be the case. Now everything just gets jammed into the little bit of time that I manage between other things I’m working on.
Trump won the 
And I think I’m being way too generous to Rubio. I doubt there is much of an appetite on the part of Cruz voters for Rubio. If Hillary Clinton has a problem in terms of seeming authentic, Rubio has the problem in spades. But he’s coming at it from a position of weakness. That’s why I think it is much more likely that the Republican establishment would say that they can better live with a Cruz candidacy than a Trump one, and force Rubio out of the race. That, at least, seems like a plausible way to defeat Trump. Because we all know that Rubio will do whatever the establishment tells him to.
Jonathan Chait wrote what is probably the best discussion of what the death of Antonin Scalia really means, 
As you all know, I’ve gotten serious about image copyright around here over the last nine months or so. The truth is that I always thought that I could use any image on Wikipedia because they were free and that was that. Well, that was not that. Most of the images on Wikipedia at least require attribution. And a large number of them are Fair Use, which is a whole legal can of worms.
On this day in 1836, the 
At my day job, they love me. After five years of writing Frankly Curious at a very intense level, I did learn a lot about professional writing. That’s something that people don’t usually understand: being a professional writer doesn’t mean you are necessarily all that good in what people think of as writing. But it does mean you have expertise in certain aspects of content creation. For example, you could tell me to write a thousand words about any subject at all, and I would have a publishable article for you within about four hours. I’m kind of like a robot. They can plug me into any assignment and it will get done.
Marco Rubio defied expectations by ending strong and beating out Ted Cruz for second place in South Carolina — just ten percentage points behind Donald Trump. This is a big deal, because if Rubio had come in third place, he would have received no delegates. Instead, because he finished in second place, he received no delegates. You see, South Carolina is a winner-take-all state. So Donald Trump, who got 32.5% of the vote, ended up with all 50 delegates. But Rubio’s strong second place finish (beating Cruz by 0.2 percentage points) will doubtless make many Republican establishment types thrilled that their boy still has a shot at the big kahuna.
