RP RIP

Richard Pryor (1940-2005) has passed away. He was America's funniest comedian, political or otherwise, and will be missed. Any obituary can ill do the man justice. Pryor didn't simply cross America's racial boundaries, he exposed them, ridiculed them, and refused to perform according to their dictates. He wasn't the good black comedian that made whites feel comfortable. "Richard was always upset with Bill Cosby," comedian and friend Paul Mooney told The Times in a 1995 interview. "I think he wanted to be Bill . . . But I always like Richard's stuff better. Bill didn't wow me. He wowed white people . . . Black people sank into Pryor's material like an easy chair . . . That's what his talent was—talking about black people to black people."
"Richard basically blazed a trail for black comedy. He defined what it is. As a young black man he was saying what he felt—and was shocking," comedian Damon Wayans once said. "You were supposed to be smiling and laughing and shucking and jiving and he said, 'F--- that and f--- you for thinking that.' " But no one else's words can do the man justice, we'd suggest you go and rent some of his landmark standup to get an idea of what he was doing.
Here's an MP3 of Pryor talking about the police.

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Added Angelina Grimké Weld's speech at Pennsylvania Hall and John Brown's Last Speech.
Also. I read an interesting essay by Monbiot on biofuel:

Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic.

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter “containing 44×10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet’s current biota.”(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries’ worth of plants and animals.

The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy – and the extraordinary power densities it gives us – with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states – such as ours – which seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one of them is worse than the fossil fuel burning it replaces.

(via Monbiot)