Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  Who is Chris Carroll?   A footnote and victim of the USA’s obsession with conspiracy masturbation. This story isn’t even going to be mostly about him, it’s mostly about another guy, Duane Keith  Davis  AKA “Keefe D.” It’s going to be a long and bloody tale, full of famously unsolved homicides and seemingly well-grounded charges of real conspiracy, before I ever get to how Carroll has been abused.   Davis is a member of the notorious criminal gang the Crips in California and his nephew and fellow gangster was Orlando Anderson. Davis also had famous friends, he’d grown up with rap-band N.W.A. frontman Eric Lynn Wright   AKA “Easy-E” and was close with rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs. Meanwhile his nephew, Anderson, was friends with rapper Christopher George Latore Wallace AKA “Notorious B.I.G.” Also important to this story is another rapper, Tupac Shakur, and his music producer, Marion Hugh  Knight Jr. AKA “Suge Knight,” these last two were involved ...

  “The Black Cat” (1934) Bravo’s “100 Scariest Movie Moments” part II, minute marker 13 minutes Universal Pictures did remarkable things in establishing the horror genre in 1931 with the double release of “Dracula” & “Frankenstein” (both are on this list) and followed these two triumphs with a string of fourteen more releases before the end of that decade, the majority of high quality, several undeniable classics, most starring either Boris Karloff or Béla Lugosi, their horror super-stars. As Universal’s horror films became increasingly childish in the 1940s, RKO stole their thunder. “The Black Cat” is one of the classics of the bunch, and notable for a number of reasons, is best remembered as the first that cast these two men together. That casting was gimicky for sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that a couple of these seven were great films. The two best of the pairings is this film with Universal, which is the first, and “The Body Snatcher” (1945, it should be only li...

  10 years ago Active Robert Emmett Murphy Jr    ·  Shared with Public The book I’ve read recently that I was most impressed with was “The Better Angels of Our Nature”by Pinker. It explored evidence that civilization on a whole, but especially Europe and the North Western Hemisphere, have become less violent, and trying to divine why. Pinker gave a lot of reasons, all of which interacted with each other. One compelling section had to do with our ability to increasingly value the lives of others was recognizing individuals as autonomous. When your autonomy is respected, you are now valued by criterias other than your integration into a norm and utility to the image of that norm. Slavery, the subjugation of women, racism, homophobia, sectarian violence and genocide all require to devaluing of autonomy which makes group judgments easier and frees us to view others only in terms of zero-sum utility. Strangely (and positively) this elevating of the individual has not unle...