human_rights (54)

W in the Absolute F...

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Monkeyland: There's a website for everything.

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Dark Humor, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

 

We started with Tuesday’s “debate,” where one candidate came for the debate, while the other as an orange primate slinging shit, trying to get his opponent to stutter and literally, “seeing what sticks.” Every post-debate analysis gave it to his opponent.

 

Now, he’s tested positive for the Coronavirus.

 

The sad part is, we’ve been lied to SO many times, we have a right to doubt the report.

 

It is a bit “convenient” after a disastrous debate, isn’t it? After 20,000+ lies, 200,000+ dead Americans, and counting, he’s caused us to question our reality.

 

He saw his internal polling numbers, and his howling, feces sling fest didn’t move the needle. He is a faux billionaire that played one on The Apprentice reality-TV show. He was so broke, the showrunners rented the furniture seen on the set because his office looked like the remains of "Sanford and Son." Methinks this is the Occam's razor reason why he's desperately terrified for anyone to see his taxes: his net worth is in the crapper.

 

He knew the employment numbers were going to be disappointing. Dow futures went negative at the news of his infection. He knew it as he went to a fundraiser in New Jersey. He knew it as shook hands with supporters. He planned a rally in Wisconsin, despite the protestations from the democratic governor. IF (& that’s a BIG if) he’s got it, he did it, I think, HOPING he contracted the virus from his previous super spreader events, so he could change the subject, and NOT have to debate further. He’s going for a medical resignation, and you can’t get called a quitter if you’re “legitimately” (wink, wink) sick.

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Nuff said.

 

“Stand back and stand by” made the “Proud Boys” little mushrooms poke there rusty, racist zippers. He's disavowed them like he did his father's attendance at a Klan rally in New York City in 1927; as he did ever knowing David Duke, or what the Klan is; as he did after Charlottesville when he called Neo-Nazis "very fine people," making them equivalent to Antifa (which means, say it WITH me now: ANTI-fascist). He's disavowed them because that's just another crime he could be convicted for if he foments violence at what's looking to be a landslide defeat. He knows he’s losing, and losing means prison: the Manhattan DA, SDNY, the NYS DA Letitia James could give a shit about any pardon Mike Pence can worm out of his complicit, faux-Christian ass: no president, no matter how brief the tenure can do anything about state crimes. His best move in 2016 was to lose and inaugurate “Trump TV,” not this American Carnage of apathetic ineptitude he’s unleashed on this nation.

 

Speaking of Christians, what EXACTLY are white evangelicals going to do after this? WHO in their right minds would seek out their example? They couldn't even be street guards at an elementary after this debacle of epic hypocrisy. After decades of facade piety, they voted for the vagina grabber! Their median age is a matched set to Fox viewership: white and getting older. Religious organizations survive from the free-will charitable contributions ("tithes and offerings") from their congregations. Congregations only grow when YOUNG people join them, get married, have babies, and stay awhile. Good luck paying your mortgages. Hit up Franklin Graham or Paula White for a loan to float you.

 

A seventy-four-year-old racist (allegedly) has COVID-19, with associated morbidities: he’s overweight, his diet is disastrous, and yet he’s managed to fire off tweets with supposedly mild symptoms between the land of the living and the hereafter.

 

A malignant narcissist hates the idea of losing, or quitting while he’s clearly behind.

 

This is the equivalent of a more noble and honorable man falling on his sword.

 

I'm voting. I'm voting as SOON as the polls open. He can promise to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. He can promise to give us our "40 acres and a mule" WITH interest. None of these flaccid, half-assed, shoot-from-the-hip promises mean anything to the functioning of this republic, that since I'm LIVING in it, I desperately WANT to function.

 

I need him gone. Quoting his well-worn, rehearsed phrase that made him famous: YOU'RE FIRED. Because in the words of Joy Reid: I "really WOULD like to sleep at night!"

 

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Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc...

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Image from GoComics.com and SpaceAndTime.com

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

 

Public-opinion polling shows that Trump’s low opinion of American elections has practically become Republican Party orthodoxy. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday, Republicans have an “unprecedented” level of “concern and mistrust in the system.” Roughly 70 percent of Republican voters believe that if Hillary Clinton wins the election, it’ll be due to fraud. In both this poll and an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, only half of Republicans say they’d accept a Clinton victory. (In the latter poll, by contrast, 82 percent of Democrats said they would accept a Trump victory.)

 

This suspicious Republican electorate is joined by growing ranks of conservative politicians, pundits, and intellectuals. They’re all increasingly willing to say that the existing American political system is hopelessly flawed and needs to be rolled back to the days before blacks and women could vote. On the most obvious level, this can be seen in moves by Republican governors all over America to make voting more difficult, through stringent voting ID laws, new hurdles to registration, and the curtailment of early-voting options. Equally significant has been the gutting of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act by conservative Supreme Court justices in the 2013 Shelby Country v. Holder ruling.

 

Suspicion of the democratic system is so pervasive on the right because it’s driven by the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom. The evidence is right there in the election results: Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and if current polling trends hold, the GOP will be batting one for seven when the results come in on November 8. Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans may hold on to a U.S. House majority for a while, and they’ll remain competitive in state capitols in the near future. But a whites-only party can’t win national elections. And over time, the GOP’s congressional and state fortresses will crumble if the party doesn’t change dramatically. Or if the democratic system doesn’t change dramatically.

 

The Right Is Giving Up on Democracy, Jeet Heer, The New Republic, October 24, 2016

 

The 2008 electorate was on-record as the youngest and most diverse in Pew Research history. It's why I think the right had a visceral reaction to President Barack Obama. He was the seventh African American to run for president in the modern era, and the first one to actually win. The trial balloon of a "post-racial" society was floated (see? We're not racist, you finally have a negro president). The 2012 re-election sent them over a cliff of brief self-reflection with the post-election GOP Autopsy, officially the Opportunity and Growth Project. That revelation was short-lived, and with past indicative revelations as prologue, quite reasonable and sane. State media/Fox propaganda and other conservative outlets couldn't help themselves. The faux "controversies" from Michelle Obama's bare arms (but not Melania Trump's bare behind), Grey Poupon mustard on hot dogs and tan suits seems delirious, hilarious, and deranged. It was a parade of the insane.

 

There are a pro and con to whether racism qualifies as a mental disorder. To those recipients of its attacks and largesse, it seems to fit the bill. I was the victim of a "Zoom bombing" recently, pornographic materials, and the n-word repeated to an online crowd of African Americans in a Sunday School meeting studying the Book of James: We'd lean "pro."

 

This demographics time bomb was set off by the aftermath of 1865: no longer having free slave labor, many legal machinations were attempted to re-enslave previously free African Americans using vagrancy laws, see "Slavery By Another Name," by Douglas A. Blackmon. The American Prison System exploits a loophole in the 13th Amendment: anyone arrested by the system - state, federal or for-profit - according to The Constitution is technically a slave of the state. We have Asian citizens because Chinese immigrants were imported to replace freed slaves on plantations. ICE likes to raid Hispanics/Latinos at food processing plants, but are missing the bonanza of brown targets at home builders, who probably couldn't offer their great home prices without company owners paying undocumented immigrants cash off-the-books, so as not to incur tax liabilities. Not a single home builder, for example, has done a perp walk.

 

*****

 

Excerpt from "Black Labor, White Wealth: The Search for Power and Economic Justice," (August 1, 1994) Claude Anderson, Ed. D., Chapter 2: Power and Black Progress:

 

Chapter 2, page 33, subsection titled: Numerical Population Power 

 

In a democratic society, the numerical majority wins, rules, and decides. The theoretical rights of a minority, may or may not be respected, especially if they are a planned minority. Numerical population power is the power that comes to those groups that acquire power through their sheer size. The black population peaked in the 1750s when slaves and free blacks accounted for approximately 33 percent of the total population. The high numerical strength of blacks caused fear and concern among whites. They feared the loss of their own numerical power. Word of black Haitians successful slave revolt in the 1790s had spread across America and reportedly ignited several slave revolts in Southern states.

 

The First U.S. Congress enacted the first naturalization law that declared America to be a nation for "whites only." The naturalization act and other income incentives attracted a mass influx of legal and illegal European ethnics, followed by Asian and Hispanic immigrants a century later. The immigration quota for blacks remained zero until their total percentage of the population declined to nine percent. By making blacks a planned numerical minority, white society assured its dominance in a democratic society where the majority always wins.

 

 Source: Sample chapter

 

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc (Latin): after this, therefore because of this. It is an informal fallacy, meaning the fallacy originates in an error of reasoning rather than a flaw in the logical form of the argument. (Wikipedia) So, what WAS the original "argument"?

 

American mythology teaches that the early United States was founded by men of conscience who came to the "new world" in order to practice their religious convictions in peace and freedom. John Winthrop (1588–1649), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in particular, has been quoted as a source of inspiration by U.S. presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.

 

Yet Winthrop did not represent a tradition of either democracy or religious tolerance. He hated democracy with a passion. The state he created did not hesitate to execute people like the Quakers and even brought to the "new" world the very popular tradition of medieval Europe, the trial and execution of witches.

 

"A Shining City on a Hill": Troubling information about a famous quote. The Puritan tradition of intolerance and John Winthrop, World Future Fund

 

We've taken The Constitution, our founding document, through historical apotheosis. Strict constructionists will say it is without flaw, and we should look for "original intent"; "breathing document" aficionados want constant change and continuous improvement, ever-becoming a "more perfect union."

 

The story we tell ourselves becomes muddled over time. This is similar to the game of "telephone," where my teacher whispered instructions to the first student in a line of fifth-graders from a 3 x 5 index card. Twenty-students deep, what we said and the meaning of what they said has irrevocably changed, similarly through essentially a 232-year relay.

 

We are here from Crispus Attucks to George Floyd, from sacrifices in revolts from England to knees-on-necks, no-knock raids, and killing teenagers carrying Arizona Tea and a bag of Skittles. We are here from Manifest Destiny, Trail of Tears, Black Wall Street-like genocides to Coronavirus pandemic. We are here because the original story of this country has become horribly distorted. That's not to say the original picture was perfect. For this republic's continuance, we desperately need to be honest with ourselves.

 

We're here because the country was based on slavery: the wealth of the nation built on the backs of free, uncompensated, kidnapped-from-Africa labor for generations.

 

We're here because those persons were described as a fraction, 3/5th's, and their children sold away like so much cattle.

 

We're here because the same slave owners defining us as inferior beings had unsolicited sex with us, siring Mulatto children in heterosexual rape of African women and "buck breaking" in homosexual encounters meant to emasculate African males in front of their females and families. Sally Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson's "lover": the relationship (or, the rape), started when she was fourteen. That is BY definition, pedophilia, and like all the aforementioned sexual acts above, sadistic.

 

We're here because the slaves, nor their descendants received reparations for years of enslavement, murder, and terrorism by the KKK, "sundown towns" requiring a Green Book to navigate around, and white citizen's councils.

 

We're here because such wealth exchange as reparations would dismantle the current biased system of white supremacy, and the reason it is opposed so strongly.

 

We're here because to justify the system, this nation built-in mythologies of superiority and inferiority, socially-engineered the society to self-fulfill the delusion, and codified it into laws. African Americans can be prejudiced, but they cannot be racist. Racism = prejudice + political power; the ability to codify your hatred with the strength of judiciary. Hitler did not "overthrow" the Weimar Republic: he won the election, seized control, and cloned Jim Crow on steroids in Europe, the only lesson the United States refuses to take ownership of.

 

We are here because unlike the logical fallacy: our current "this" is logically followed by the obvious "that." For us to have a new tomorrow - "[Built] Back Better," we're going to have to admit the sins of the nation's past, and in the vernacular of scripture: repent.

 

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Call It by Its Name...

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Image Source: New York Times, excerpt below

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Fascism, Human Rights

Turning Point: China removes presidential term limits.

First we see the face. The face of America’s Donald Trump, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the face of men who wish to transform democracies into personality cults.

The face is the oldest mark of leadership, the mark that works for clan or tribe. If we see only the face, we are not thinking about policies or politics; instead, we are accepting the new regime and its rules. However, a democracy is about the people, not a single mythicized person.

People need truth, which a cult of personality destroys. Theories of democracy, from the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment to today, take for granted that the world around us yields to understanding. We pursue the facts alongside our fellow citizens. But in a cult of personality, truth is replaced by belief, and we believe what the leader wishes us to believe. The face replaces the mind.

The transition from democracy to personality cult begins with a leader who is willing to lie all the time, in order to discredit the truth as such. The transition is complete when people can no longer distinguish between truth and feeling.

The Cowardly Face of Authoritarianism, Yale Historian Timothy Snyder, New York Times

Yesterday, a demagogue spoke to a former political party that for the first time in its history, doesn’t have a platform.

Remove “R” and “D.” What are national conventions, other than platforms, or means, to lay out the vision of the standard-bearer for the country, and thus the party itself? To give a compelling reason to vote for a party’s vision, or colloquially, “what’s in it for me?” The chaos candidate who became the chaos president foamed at the mouth at a super spreader event breaking the Hatch Act on the White House lawn made no improvement – in FOUR YEARS – on my observations years ago, posted September 1, 2016: Party of Apocalypse.

Excerpt:

The first night of the RNC convention could have been a success with the noted exception of Melania Trump lifting whole cloth parts of now First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech to the DNC convention in 2008. An out-of-work journalist was the first to catch and tweet it (a sad indictment of the employed journalists ACTUALLY at the RNC convention) [1]. The last night of the RNC was like “The Dark Knight Returns”: the world was essentially a shit show like Gotham, and Batman screamed for 75 minutes incoherent, semi-form, hand-tossed Word Salad anointing himself Bruce-Wayne-Almighty-Cheetos-Jesus savior of the planet by the strength of his will alone (no cool gadgets – just a Galaxy Smart Phone and a twitter handle he misspells as he jacks off on almost daily). The Bat’s bravery was previously demonstrated during his selfless sacrificed Vietnam five deferments to let others more worthy die in his place.

My coworkers on the first night’s events had statements like: “that is not plagiarism” (it was); or “what she said (Mrs. Trump) in her speech most people say in one form or another every day!” 38 hours later: a phantom ghostwriter emerged – Meredith Melver, who apparently conveniently works for a man that’s on record imitating his own publicist. [2] The name sounds suspicious enough with the possibility of two plagiarisms vis-à-vis Mrs. Trump and his educational ventures. Trump Institute and University lifted content whole cloth [3]. There are suspicions like his publicist, Ms. Melver may have been a convenient creation, but it seems she’s legit [4]. But more importantly, the Meredith mea culpa was enough for my coworker Trumpism fans. Never mind Mrs. Trump had previously revealed to Matt Lauer of NBC she had “written it all herself.” They pivoted to the next talking point with the ease of any group studied by Leon Festinger.

Don’t know this guy? He studied an apocalyptic UFO cult in the 1950s – a precursor to the Heaven’s Gate Cult of the 1990s. They were ABSOLUTELY sure the world would end and had a date. The faithful sold all their worldly goods and waited for the apocalypse…and waited…and waited… Some of the former faithful felt discouraged and left. Others felt their “vibrations” had saved the Earth from destruction. [5] Simple Psychology defines it thus: “Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance, etc. “For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition). “Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).”</em>

This is a full-blown cult of personality.

cult of personality or cult of the leader,[1] arises when a country’s regime – or, more rarely, an individual – uses the techniques of mass mediapropaganda, the big liespectaclethe artspatriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis, except that it is established by modern social engineering techniques, usually by the state or the party in one-party states and dominant-party states. It is often seen in totalitarian or authoritarian countries.

The term came to prominence in 1956, in Nikita Khrushchev‘s secret speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, Khrushchev, who was the First Secretary of the Communist Party – in effect, the leader of the country – criticized the lionization and idealization of Joseph Stalin, and by implication, his Communist contemporary Mao Zedong, as being contrary to Marxist doctrine. The speech was later made public and was part of the “de-Stalinization” process in the Soviet Union. Wikipedia

Making political speeches from the White House lawn is as illegal as making political speeches as Secretary of State from Jerusalem. They are violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits such actions. If this treatment of The Constitution like toilet paper is going on in plain sight, what happens when American becomes a failed state?

WHICH Amendment will matter, or be reinforced? Forget birthright citizenship: you are citizen if the KING says you’re a citizen. Forget voting rights for African Americans, or women, or their autonomy over their own bodies. Mashing up George Carlin and Margaret Atwood, I can see a dystopian scenario where women become “broodmares of the state” for people screaming about “white genocide,” doing much meth and little coitus. I can think a party, afraid of losing political power to demographics, could easily make the case the 2nd Amendment restricted to citizens with a LACKING preponderance of Melanin. In Putin’s Russia, there is no such thing as a 2nd Amendment, or a preponderance of Melanin, for that matter.

My “Party of Apocalypse” essay has, unfortunately, aged well.

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Entropy and Existence...

Depositphotos_102544000_l-2015.jpg?profile=RESIZE_400x5 Ways To Safeguard Yourself After Divorcing a Narcissist, Weinberger Divorce and Family Law Group

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Entropy as Time's Arrow: "One of the ideas involved in the concept of entropy is that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems." Hyperphysics

The Senate Intelligence Committees' bipartisan report confirming Russian interference in the 2016 election, and that Putin's puppet; his coterie lied in official testimony to Congress and the Mueller Report should be a damning indictment to a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party with a doofus, bizarro mob boss at its helm. You should download both documents and READ them.

Crimes-in-progress is being confessed to on camera and in real-time. You likely think a guilty person wouldn't confess to a crime he's committing, but a brazen criminal unburdened by guilt or a conscious would, and say you shouldn't believe your "lying eyes," or "fake news." Jeb Bush said, "he was a chaos candidate, and he'll be a chaos president." Orange Satan asked African Americans "what the hell do you have to lose?" That hypothesis, as said at the end of a proof, has clearly been shown - healthcare during a pandemic, jobs, the post office: QED.

As a nation and a world, we are all in an abusive relationship with someone that has no real relationship with facts, data, or reality. We're being gaslighted by a narcissist, whose puppeteer is a KGB agent. His ascension was by design. Trigger warning for what follows:

11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting, Stephanie A. Sarkis Ph.D.

1. They tell blatant lies.President Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims
2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.   'Do you regret all your lying?' White House reporter's question startles Trump
3. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.What Makes Some Narcissists Mean, Competitive, and Jealous
4. They wear you down over time.From the Spouse of a Narcissist: Here’s What You Need to Know
5. Their actions do not match their words.A Narcissist’s actions or intent NEVER match up with their words.
6. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.Trump's pardon may be undermining Anthony's wishes, historians say
7. They know confusion weakens people.Dissociation And Confabulation In Narcissistic Disorders
8. They project.The Projector in Chief
9. They try to align people against you.Top Tips for Surviving Your Divorce With a Narcissist
10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.Why Relationships with Gaslighters or Narcissists Can Be So Painful
11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.The Narcissist and His Lies: How They're Different
Your succinct guide to malignant narcissism

 

A lot of the links above are about interpersonal relationships with women and their narcissistic partners. The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements gained significant steam after the "American Carnage" speech at his pitifully-attended inauguration, which turned out to be both projection and promise.

As a country and world, we are all in a wearing, abusive relationship with the current occupant/Russian asset in the Oval Office. It is not hyperbole or hubris to state this election is not just for the "soul of America," but for the very existence of the species.

Whoever is in the next administration in America will have an impact on policies regarding climate change (this is still a thing). Concerning the deregulation of the fossil fuel industry during our current dystopian nightmare, under a second term (or, a lifetime according to Orange Satan), it can only exacerbate a precarious situation, magical thinking may create rainbows, and conspiracy theories make you feel smart, but neither has ever solved a problem relying on a knowledge and appreciation of The Scientific Method. Can you see QAnon in Starfleet? Do you want these people piloting your starship?

The following are excerpts from my previous blog post two years ago this month, The Mendacity of Dopes...:

“Putin’s thesis is that the American constitution is an experiment that will fail if it is challenged in the right way from within,” Mitchell continued. “Putin wants to break apart the American republic not by influencing an election or two, but by systematically inflaming the fault lines within our society. Accepting this fact is absolutely essential for developing a long-term response to the problem.” The problem Mitchell was describing has a kind of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to it as far as Putin is concerned: Not only has the Russian leader tried to exploit political polarization over issues like race and guns, his attempts to do so have themselves become deeply divisive—to the point where even Trump’s advisers frequently find themselves at odds with the man they serve.

Part of Mitchell’s argument—which might be viewed favorably by a president who has taken particular umbrage at the notion that Putin sought to help him defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race—was that the Russian government isn't necessarily interested in supporting a specific politician, party, or ideology. Instead, it simply wants to sow chaos in the United States to advance its own goals, which it sees as threatened by America’s preeminent position in the world. Mitchell cited the revelations on Tuesday that suspected Russian government hackers have been targeting conservative U.S. think tanks and promoting “fringe voices” on both the left and the right on social media sites like Facebook.

Uri Friedman, The Atlantic: Even Trump’s Own Adviser Is Warning About ‘Politicizing’ the Threat From Russia. But the danger he sees is already here.

This is the metastasis of "The Southern Strategy" a rancid, racist tactic that was birthed on the heels of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. It was and is a desperate bid for power. It predates itself as the definition of "white" changed from excluding everyone except "Nordic stock" Europeans (the English, mostly) to eventually including the previously excluded: Italians, Jews [and ironically] Russians all had tiny quotas. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the nascent eugenics movement in the United States fueled and influenced immigration policy in the earlier part of the last century. Admittedly, despite its reprehensible aims, it worked remarkably well for quite a while.

A president with decidedly African features, he and his wife both educated at Ivy League schools and a pitch-perfect family did not personify the fictional "Huxtables" before the fall of Mr. Cosby to their many detractors. The continual reminder that the country is becoming browner only ignited more fear and resolve to fight a demographic shift not in their favor of continual predominance circa 2042 - 2045. Their resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue transmitted a well-worn, white supremacist trope regarding farmland in South Africa (it's returning the farmland to their original, African owners), but he needs a distraction since his former campaign manager and former personal lawyer were both found guilty on a total of 16 felony counts in a matter of minutes. Their visceral reaction to them was an existential crisis, a call to arms; a "white genocide," ironically feared by the descendants of those that caused it well before the "Trail of Tears" for Native Americans. It caused Roger Ailes to see the power of televised propaganda and cater to an audience that was well past facts post the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of listening to Rush Limbaugh on AM Talk Radio and his "ditto head" clones; well past reasoned discourse before Twitter came online. What facts can be revealed are rebuffed by an avalanche of lies, there are no "gotchas" for a party that with the help of Karl Rove started "creating their own realities" a long time ago. A sizable chunk of the electorate has been in this "post-truth" Twilight Zone for decades.

Added: The NY Times reported Aleksei Navalny Hospitalized in Russia in Suspected Poisoning.

This is what the “end of the American experiment” would look like. Foreign nations would pick our leaders. If republicans can visit Moscow July 4, 2018, before the midterm elections, what would prevent democrats from visiting Beijing summer of 2022? Could we protest in the streets, or dissent from the state on systemic racism during a pandemic without getting tear-gassed, flash bombed, rubber bullets shot at our heads, or kidnapped in unmarked cars? Would we see poisonings, or people spontaneously “falling off buildings?” Would AG Bill Barr rescue the rule of law? Would VOTING matter?


That’s the essence of the somber warning President Obama gave Wednesday night, and this is an example of what a sham democracy would be like. Democracies that fail do so slowly – behind the scenes – the rapid fall only seems quick when it’s all over. Russia, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein has “elections,” but they’re fraudulent shows at gunpoint for a despot, thus ensuring high participation numbers in both totalitarian states. NO ONE represents the Russian people. They are ruled by a junta, led by a criminal sociopath. We are barely represented here. We have the nightmare choices of a marginally functional party and a dystopian, dysfunctional one led by a psychopath.


The bedrock of democracy, “an informed citizenry” would cease to exist: we would put in earbuds to jam out, or binge-watch streaming video and “mind our own business.”


Engaged citizens protesting racism during a pandemic looks like anarchy to tyranny.


Fearful, self-centered citizens are what authoritarian regimes crave and need: apathy.

All they needed was a useful idiot avatar, and a master spy to push the republic over the precipice. Ironically, if successful, the 2nd Amendment along with all others in a theoretical fall of our republic would become meaningless as in Russia, there is no right to bear arms that "former Americans" would recognize or appreciate. The imagined confiscation by government "jackbooted thugs" may be under the flag of a foreign power that duped the gullible:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

For the sake of all liberal democracies and humanity on the PLANET, they...MUST...fail.

 
 
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Pig Slop...

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A fan-made cover for George Orwell's novel. "Animal Farm" is one of Orwell's most well-known works and gained unlikely popularity with Ukrainian refugees. (Photo from Flickr user Ben Templesmith.) PRI.org

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

Farmers feed their pigs slop, a messy, wet mix of various leftovers—and when they do, they can say they slop the pigs. A derogatory way to talk about food that doesn't look very tasty is to call it to slop. And you can call sticky, overly sentimental music, writing, or film slop as well. Source: Vocabulary.com

When President Obama used an executive order for deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA), that was considered constitutional overreach and tyranny from the executive branch. That was likely the executive at the time and the children in question are both brown. This was due to the GOP-dominated Congress not passing a DREAMS Act for those same children's path to citizenship. Immigration reform used to be a thing with republicans: Saint Ronald Reagan made a whole bunch of illegal immigrants citizens, and that might have contributed to the high numbers his republican successor, George W. Bush enjoyed for his 2004 reelection. That compassionate conservatism advantage has been dwindling ever since, at least until our current moment of discontent.

Ben Sasse called Orange Satan's executive orders unconstitutional slop, which it is. His clap back to the middle school mean-girl tweetstorm from Mango Mussolini is an admittance: "I don't need you to get reelected, you need me." He like a lot of other Republican senators had their constitutional duty to remove a criminal from office. They are the beneficiaries of Jim Crow, the Southern Strategy, Voter Purging, and Suppression. They shirked it because they are criminals themselves. Conditional integrity is still cowardice.

HuffPost senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte asked the president during Thursday’s coronavirus task force briefing if, after 3½ years, “do you regret at all the lying you’ve done to the American people? All the dishonesties?”

“That who has done?” Trump replied. 

“You have done,” said Dáte, who wrote at length about Trump’s “Ministry of Untruth” earlier this year. 

Trump paused and then moved on to the next question.

In his report, Dáte noted that Trump’s stream of falsehoods across nearly every topic and in any setting is corroding America’s democracy as it normalizes lies coming from the nation’s highest office.

Trump's Response When Asked If He Regrets All The Lies He's Told America: None, Josephine Harvey, HuffPost

We have a view of history that fascism doesn't need competency. Hitler was quite literally a shit show, and the mythology of Nazi efficiency is...just that.

It's poignant that Senator Kamala Harris is African Diaspora through her Jamaican father and Indian Diaspora through her mother - both immigrants who met in Oakland, California where she and her sister were born as American citizens. Both marched and shouted for Civil Rights for all its citizens, especially their daughters, as civil rights have never had a hue, simply for and of humans. America, India, Germany have had and have caste systems that assign portions of humanity to either the apex of the pyramid where all riches are siphoned to or the base where all the weight of society crushes pariahs beneath it. She's a woman that self-identifies with black culture through her HBCU - Howard University and her Sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She married another human that happens to be of European descent. She is above all, an earthling, and Oakland isn't a crater on Mars. Her fraternity brother, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr - found himself in an inflection of revelation.

Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabelle Wilkerson

In 1935, Nazi Germany passed two radically discriminatory pieces of legislation: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Together, these were known as the Nuremberg Laws, and they laid the legal groundwork for the persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust and World War II.

When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren’t just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, that country was the United States.

“America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.”

In particular, Nazis admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany.

Yet they ultimately decided that it wouldn’t go far enough.

How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow, Becky Little, History.com

Fascism, like its cousin racism, doesn't need rationality over "us" and "them." It allows one group to dominate another without guilt, or blame for the consequences. It allows you to long for mythological glory times where Germany and America were "great again."

Fascism in Germany or America just needed enablers, and frankly, intellectuals that underestimate how a cornered animal - hog, rodent or narcissist - is its most dangerous and cunning when it figures it's going to die in prison and has nothing - other than its freedom - to lose.

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Occam's Razor and Scorched Earth...

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

As Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder was a strong advocate of the Nord Stream pipeline project, which aims to supply Russian gas directly to Germany, thereby bypassing transit countries.

At the time of the German parliamentary election, according to Rick Noak of The Washington Post:

In 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s friend Schroeder hastily signed the deal just as he was departing the office from which he had been voted out days earlier. Within weeks, he started to oversee the project implementation himself, leading the Nord Stream AG’s shareholder committee.

Wikipedia: Gerhard_Schröder-Relationship_with_Gazprom_and_Rosneft

Occam’s razor, also spelled Ockham’s razor, also called law of economy or law of parsimony, principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” Source: Britannica online

Occam's razor: Orange Satan spoke two consecutive days to Grand Pooh-Bah Putin; 16 or more private conversations last year (in the current Coronavirus apocalypse, we'll refer to that as the "before times"). He's managed to without fail insult every [former] ally we've had since the end of the Second World War, but not even a nickname for Vlad the Impaler of democracies. What he says in those conversations that like his salary, we're paying is apparently none of our business. We can't see his grades, SAT scores, or his taxes. Al Capone wasn't too keen about the idea of revealing his taxes either, and that ultimately is what landed him in prison. A guy who had "Joey No Socks" at his New Year's bash after Pooh-Bah gifted him the 2016 election and planet is probably a crook. The producers and showrunners of "The Apprentice" was in on the joke, as well as most residents of New York City. He's not a businessman, except of the Keystone Cop variety, every decision is a pratfall and every pronouncement word salad. Case-in-point: you're reading this during a pandemic. His lack of talent in his 74 years of wasting oxygen and producing flatulence at wee tweet hours has been covered by white male privilege, his father, the Mafia, Russian money laundering, and republicans that never once believed their own shtick. Enter Bizarro Capone with a dead Propecia ferret on his head yelling manically "he can fix it."

The "empty vessel" model was introduced by Reagan: as he deteriorated, others like William Barr worked the marionette strings from the shadows as Ronnie "aw shucks" himself into B-movie legend. Mind you, "nature abhors a vacuum," but Donnie just "isn't there." He doesn't say "aw shucks": he might say "oh, fuck," or "oh, I'M fucked."

Nixon - Roger "rat fuck" Stone's back tattoo totem - was unscrupulous, but he was competent: Affirmative Action and the Environmental Protection Agency just two of his accomplishments, other than the whole Watergate Plumber's thing. Simultaneously insulting a landmark and a culture by saying "yo-Semite" ("yo-sim-e-T," idiot!) isn't the "stable genius" his twisted mind and cognitively dissonant followers believes himself to be.

EIGHT republican "patriot" senators were in Moscow on July 4, 2018, months before the midterms. That's strange for patriots (Tom Clancy is confused in the hereafter), especially on the nation's birthday. Probably totally innocent. Good luck with the 2nd Amendment, over there: it doesn't exist.

The Republican Party is shrinking. The Southern Strategy was great for Nixon in 1968, and cool for Reagan in the 80's nostalgic "Back to the Future" decade, when Lee Atwater resurrected the ghoulish grog in "welfare queens", "young bucks", and Willie Horton when Pappy ran in '88, which actually means something to white supremacists. 52 years into the future, any milk left on the shelf that long would be rancid, if not mummified.

So, what do you do when your shtick is shit, your base is melting by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and you just can't win legitimate elections anymore? Domestically, that takes the form of a faux war on faux voter fraud, voter purges and voter suppression of the groups that probably won't vote for endless tax cuts for the 1%, genteel racism and not-so-subtle sexism and homophobia. Internationally, you might "get a little help" from your Russian friends, and make sure they can still help.

Jill Stein, Gary "Aleppo" Johnson, and for God's sake, red hat KANYE are not going to BE president!

And, what if you lose and you don't accept it? A lunatic currently has the nuclear codes and twitchy Twitter fingers.

It's 87 days to the election (yesterday was 88).

It's 165 days to the inauguration of the NEXT president.

Tomorrow is after that.

 
 
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Gaming This Out...

Because of the recent changes in my previous platform, I am discontinuing https://www.physics4thecool.blogspot.com and continuing on WordPress and BSFS. What follows is the post I meant for Blogger. I will miss it.

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

The current first Tuesday of November came into law in the year 1845, when America was an agrarian society, and it took a day’s travel to get to one’s polling place to exercise the franchise. It was also 15 years before the Civil War that ripped the country apart pitting north against south, industrialists against plantation slavery owners. It was a time when my people were considered 3/5th of a person, and the conception of John Robert Lewis and Barack Hussein Obama never would have entered the mostly white male property owner's thinking.

Orange Satan doesn’t have the power to alter the date of the November 3rd election. His tweet came 16 minutes into the speech above. It was also minutes from the GDP dipping 32.9%, lower than it’s ever dipped in history. The Coronavirus has defied all happy talk, magical thinking and vindictive revenge porn, seeing the initial infection hot spots were in blue states. I probably would have wanted to talk about something else as well.

But, what if it’s something far more sinister entirely? He will sincerely try to steal or cast doubt in the election. He will use Russia, China, Iran; the Abominable Snowman, because “playing by the rules” is something his spoiled brat ass never had to do. He will behave like a cornered rat, he’ll do anything to survive, not excluding refusing to leave the Oval Office. We should have contingency plans for a protracted, dramatic, televised brawl: worthy of reality TV. He’s preparing to do what he does best: tie it up in court to wear down his opponents – the American people – to just quit. “Peaceful transition” means prison time for him, and until January 20, 2021, Mango Mussolini has the nuclear codes.

The hallmark of American Democracy was always the “peaceful transition of power.” This assumed everyone played by the same rules, abide by the same reality, and generally of good character, thinking of the country far above anything they could achieve for themselves. We’re obviously not there now. Orange Satan is the personification of fear: fear of the future and the inevitable change in demographics the passage of time brings. It was the core of right wing AM talk radio that evolved to the airwaves and a certain network owned by an Aussie and Saudi prince (so “American”), spewing nightly feces that amounts to mental propaganda and bullshit.

In yesterday’s final lauding of John Robert Lewis by three presidents that didn’t need foreign help and could actually string coherent sentences together, each took their subtle and not-so-subtle swipes at the current Manchurian Puppet. The Civil Rights Movement only looked at the founding documents of this republic, and asked the simple question: are we Americans? After 400 years, and serving this country in every war since Crispus Attucks first died for the American Revolution, the compound interest from “40 acres and a mule” is astronomical, but the wounds of daily racial hatred; the perpetual knee-on-neck of the body politic is exhausting. 400 years to George Floyd is literally, the “patience of Job” on steroids.

The United States is a democracy because of black people.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Now, that’s the “noble” part.

Peruse down a little further in the document: “He (ahem: King George of England) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” That part wasn’t covered in the Broadway Musical, “Hamilton.”

Reference: U.S. History: Declaration of Independence

Frederick Douglass said: “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” As Joy Reid of MSNBC eluded, we read it. We decided we wanted it. People like Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and John Robert Lewis struggled and died for it, and their progeny have decided we WANT it.

The United States is nominally a Christian nation because of black people.

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 19:34

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Matthew 25:35

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Hebrews 13:2

We are the 400-year strangers and angels among you, that you hang, shoot, and strangle all day long.

We are either human or not. We are either fully Americans or not.

This is either a democracy, or it’s a modern American Bund.

Or:

“Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life, I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

“When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.” John Robert Lewis, the Angel that was among us, New York Times

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Good, and Faithful Servant...

John%2BLewis.jpg
Image Credit: New York Times

 

Topics: Civil Rights, Human Rights, John Robert Lewis

"I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." 2 Timothy 4:7

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world, you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.
 

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters, and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up, and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life, I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

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Betwixt Eddie and Mary...

Betwixt%2BEddie%2Band%2BMary.PNG

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Human Rights, LGBT Rights

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon. Franklin D. Roosevelt

At 1 pm eastern, 12 noon in San Antonio, my wife's family laid her favorite uncle to rest, a U.S. veteran. He died due to health complications, non-COVID. Because of the pandemic, we had to say our tearful goodbyes over Facebook live, the participants' voices muffled by masks singing "It is Well." He lived a good life, into his eighties, longer than my own father, but his sons probably don't take solace in his longevity: their hero is gone for now.

Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr's book on James Baldwin downloaded on my Kindle about a week before Dr. Mary Trump's book about her uncle. They are my mental comfort food between writing a research proposal: a book written by an African American heterosexual professor about an LGBT Civil Rights icon, and a book about an unstable, reckless sociopath, written by his niece, a Lesbian, a notion now in a world with Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow is almost cliche. "Jimmy" was out and proud before it was relatively safe, or sane. He literally could have been killed for "the color of his skin, and the content of his character." But that did not stop or stifle his boldness.

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” ― James Baldwin

We are "betwixt and between" the past and the future: one written and one yet-to-be written, first by John Lewis and now, Black Lives Matter et al. We are betwixt and between love and hate, democracy and fascism; working towards a more perfect union, and barreling towards totalitarianism. The philosophies of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler are personified in Bannon, Gorka and Miller, fascist whisperers recycling hate in the 21st century: the ovens now microscopic, efficient, utterly malevolent, and unseen. We are seeing the NRA's "jackbooted thugs" deployed in American cities - Portland, Oregon, soon Chicago, Illinois; our nation's birthplace in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and any other blue-governed city, without a peep from them, as deafening a silence now as for the death-by-police of the licensed gun owner, Philando Castile. The second amendment might be outlawed to Melanin in a dictatorship.

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear. Heinrich Himmler, commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and Gestapo.

*****

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

For Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr., that fierce urgency is he, I and previously "Jimmy" living in these black bodies, witnessing the country careen from "hope and change" to this dark moment of running over civil rights demonstrators in Charlottesville, Nazis in polo shirts carrying tiki torches; or teargassing peaceful George Floyd demonstrators on the Washington Mall. Once we got over the "post-racial America" shtick, it didn't take long to see the new black president hung in effigy, called the n-word almost daily, burned at the stake, bone through the nose as witch doctor for the pejorative: Obamacare. They prayed Psalm 109:8-15, for his death and desolation. They are anti-Christians for an Antichrist. Their hatred of immigrants in chat rooms and over the pit of hell summoned eventually a demon, who recycled for them Hitler, the Klan and Reagan's slogan: make America great again. Exposed in Dr. Glaude's treatise was what Eddie and "Jimmy" referred to as the American lie, broadcast with the hubris of a birther foghorn.

For Dr. Mary Trump, that fierce urgency was living through a slow train wreck: watching her father, Freddy - Fred Trump's namesake - taken apart by her grandfather brick-by-brick until there was nothing left. She could still live in the comfort of privilege, station and American aristocracy: her bloodline leading directly to the seat of power almost infinite. All she had to do was keep her head low and flatter a narcissist. Her clinical training tells her there is no pleasing such a person. His needs are a bottomless pit next to a black hole. His loyalty is demanded of others and expendable to the same. Just as the senior sociopath dismantled her father, her training said a prolific lying, mentally disturbed, gaslighting and violent man could dismantle a nation.

Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

Perhaps she thought of Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It is easy to fill in the blank now: African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, Women, Homosexuals, Lesbians, Transgenders: if we do not speak for our fellow humans, we follow them into the COVID ovens. A pandemic as eugenics is far more efficient, less visible and more excusable than public crematoriums.

I still have hope. I have to. I have a granddaughter barely over a year old, and she DESERVES a future.

Politics in America especially is organized tribalism. The factions George Washington warned about in his farewell address express themselves as republicans and democrats, along with greens and independents.

We are all between yesterday and tomorrow, living out our hyphens. We are ever all in "the fierce urgency of NOW" for tomorrow. We all have children, or know children, and a world that looks like a dystopian novel is only appealing to sociopaths, mass murderers and death cult members. A world like that has few children, and the human species - Coronavirus, climate change, or nuclear exchange - is then in peril.

For this election, for humanity, we have to ALL be Americans, and heroes in the spirit of John Lewis: voting by mail, voting early, getting in "good trouble" for this fleeting, precious thing called democracy: made real by the struggles of the downtrodden and "the least of these." For "the fierce urgency of now," for a "better world beyond the horizon"... for tomorrow.

“never lose sight, as we finger the pain and disillusionment of our after times, of the possibility of a New Jerusalem.” ― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

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This House of Usher...

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Image Source: Freedom Summer link below

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Human Rights, Politics

On June 21, 1964, three young men disappeared near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael (Mickey) Schwerner and James Chaney worked for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in nearby Meridian; Andrew Goodman was one of the hundreds of college students from across the country who volunteered to work on voter registration, education, and Civil Rights as part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. The three men believed their work was necessary, but also dangerous: Ku Klux Klan membership in Mississippi was soaring in 1964 -- with membership reaching more than 10,000. The Klan was prepared to use violence to fight the Civil Rights movement; on April 24 the group offered a demonstration of its power, staging 61 simultaneous cross burnings throughout the state.

The case was drawing national attention, in part because Schwerner and Goodman were both white Northerners. Mickey Schwerner's wife Rita, who was also a CORE worker, tried to convert that attention to the overlooked victims of racial violence. “The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded,” she told reporters during the search.

Throughout July, investigators combed the woods, fields, swamps, and rivers of Mississippi, ultimately finding the remains of eight African American men. Two were identified as Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who had been kidnapped, beaten, and murdered in May 1964. Another corpse was wearing a CORE t-shirt. Even less information was recorded about the five other bodies discovered.

Finally, after six weeks of searching, a tip from an informant -- later identified as Mississippi Highway Patrol officer Maynard King -- sent investigators to an earthen dam on the Old Jolly Farm outside Philadelphia. It was there that the FBI uncovered the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman on August 4.

Excerpt from Freedom Summer: Murder in Mississippi, American Experience, PBS

*****

Russian financial traffic got to the Taliban in Afghanistan: intelligence wouldn't use the word "bounty."  The scandal is there was no reaction or retaliation from the Commander-in-Chief*. In schoolyard parlance, Putin knocked the board off Orange Satan's shoulder, and he slunk away to get into a Twitter spat with a pack of mean middle school students. Twitter saw hacks Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden (hopefully, the successor of Satan), and a lot of other prominent American accounts for a bitcoin scam. I can't imagine this wasn't Putin: he has no push back to any actions in the world he's taking. (Noticeably, Tangerine Nit Twit's account was fine.) Russians are also interested in our vaccine information, because a recovering America during a pandemic to them, is a threat.

Deafening silence (still) from a law-and-order president* and his politically compromised party complicit with a hostile foreign power.

* Putin's puppet, if you didn't already know.

Realize: This republic's unraveling has been an ongoing project. It was held together by spit, glue and duct tape. Every step forward by the marginalized has always experienced backlash. Corey Robin in "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin" states: Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes, i.e. people get pissed off about getting pissed on, and the ones over them calling it rain. This spawns Civil Rights, Women's Rights, LGBT rights movements, because a few of us actually read The Constitution. Jimmy Carter was our first openly evangelical president, and supported by none other than types like Michelle Bachmann. However, he ran afoul when he tried to get Bob Jones University to follow the law, and not be so racist with miscegenation (a fancy word for no interracial dating). Hopping on the abortion bandwagon was an easy dodge that I don't think they ever meant to win, as Corey Robin noted, the war against an enemy was the most important thing. This led them to their first sale of a piece of their souls to a B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan knowingly started his campaign within meters of the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi. This was genteel wink-and-nod politics, giving plausible denial to moderate whites and black republicans that could then both deny the subtle racism directly before them. Since Charlottesville and before it when IT descended that escalator in Trump tower, it's been a foghorn, and only a blind/deaf/dumb man could miss his self-admittance the alt-right, Neo Nazis and KKK can recognize. Every tax cut, then and since Reagan, has been a damned lie of trickle down; pissing on us, and still telling us it's rain. Hell, why change the shtick if it's still working after forty years? It's not a huge stretch from a B-movie actor to a reality show nincompoop.

*****

I purchased Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Dr. Mary L. Trump, feeling better contributing to its rise on the New York Times Bestseller List than John Bolton's (I canceled it when I found out he influenced the disbanding of the pandemic response team). Not that there wasn't a cottage industry that's used their access to this criminal to like Bolton, cash-in. Dr. Trump is a clinical psychiatrist specializing in psychopathy and sociopathy. She is also, by her last name: his niece. She is similar (to me) Marilyn Munster - "plain" by Munster norms - but normal to everyone else viewing the sitcom. In it, the mansion that Fred Trump met out his sociopathic abuse that produced our current president* was simply referred to as "The House."

The "Fall of the House of Usher" is a classic Gothic short story by the master of the macabre, Edgar Allen Poe. In it, the unnamed narrator makes the dysfunction of the Usher family - only one heir per generation - and the house itself one in the same. There is a suggestion this genetic problem might be the result of incest, since they only manage to have one heir per generation.

The narrator's friend Roderick buries his twin sister, Madeline after suffering catalepsy, defined as the loss of control of one’s limbs. Dictionary.com says "a physical condition usually associated with catatonic schizophrenia, characterized by suspension of sensation, muscular rigidity, fixity of posture, and often by loss of contact with environment." Poe sure could pick the sickness!

Madeline "dies" (even before comics, there's a loophole), buried; only to emerge bloodied from the grave she escaped and attacks her brother (who wouldn't, buried alive?). She dies from her wounds, Roderick dies from apparent cardiac arrest and the house poetically collapses with the death of both heirs as the narrator sprints.

Brian Kemp is suing the city of Atlanta, its mayor and other municipalities to stop them from wearing masks, so...he can spread Coronavirus more efficiently? It's about as sensible as hocking Goya beans as refrigerator trucks and bodies are piling up.

I voted for the smart woman last time. I'm voting for the sane candidate this time as well: he models wearing a mask. I will crawl over broken glass, swim molten lava; wrestle man-eating crocodiles to end this dystopian nightmare. It's way past if we "love" Joe Biden: we need to overwhelm the cheating, voter suppression, the Russians hacking/disinformation and affect repairs to the framework of a crumbling republic.

However: If this house disintegrates, this narrator's passport is current.

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Death Cult...

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Image source: NPR

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Human Rights

Barbara Stanwyck: “We're both rotten!”

Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you're a little more rotten.” -“Double Indemnity” (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests – no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachmann (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

Excerpt from "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult," Mike Lofgren, Truthout, September 3, 2011

September 3, 2011 was a year before the re-election campaign of the first African American president, and the quixotic attempt to make him a "one-term president" by now Black Lives Matter Senator Mitt Romney, the goal was clearly stated by Michele Bachmann, Moscow Mitch McConnell and a whole host of characters that might as well have been the compost for the garden variety bullshit metastasized into our current COVID harvest.

Arizona has spiked. Oklahoma has spiked. Orange Satan's resuming in-person campaigning, and bullying schools to put their children through the flaming arms of Moloch this fall, so that the remnant of parents, teachers, principals and janitors that SURVIVE limp the hulking carcass of this economy over the finish line November 3, 2020 towards the re-election of Damien Thorn. Whatever the previous Republican Party's "principles" were, they jettisoned when an improbable black man with a funny name actually won the presidency, making history of course, but he wasn't supposed to. Running's aloud; winning's not.

Frederick Douglass was nominally a presidential candidate at the 1888 Republican convention by one vote. George Edwin Taylor became a candidate of the newly-formed (and brief) National Negro Liberty Party in 1904. Channing E. Phillips received 67.5 votes at the 1968 Democratic convention, the same year Nixon won. Shirley Chisholm was a candidate four years later for the DNC, earning 152 delegates. Jesse Jackson (Aggie Alumnus) garnered 3 million votes in 1984 and 7 million votes in 1988. Reverend Al Sharpton and Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and republican Alan Keyes also ran (2000, 2008). Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was a late entrant into the race for this cycle. Source: Wikipedia

Until President Obama, the "hounds tooth" of white supremacy was remarkably efficient in barring people of any color from the nation's highest office. We also stand firmly as the only nation that has NEVER had a female executive, and until 2008, firmly held the line that whether (D) or (R), the reins of ultimate power would be held by white males 43 times from George Washington to George W. Bush. November 4, 2008 rocked their world.

Barack Obama was to them, a living nightmare: the personification of the demographics bomb they themselves caused with free trade policies that all but eliminated the central class in Central America. It was essentially an extension of slavery and indentured servitude. Builders et al., who payed workers in bags of cash so they didn't have to report them to the IRS, are suddenly freaked out those same people had children, who become citizens and most likely: won't understand their nostalgia for white picket fences and red-lined districts. Superbowl commercials celebrating diversity were denigrated if they didn't remind them of Norman Rockwell paintings, i.e., of themselves as the epitome of humanity. The "evil empire" of their patron, Saint Reagan, didn't look so evil and the PR was changed - common sense ignored - to reflect it. Fascism is nothing if not based on fear.

Death cult: A fringe religious group that glorifies or is obsessed with death. Oxford English dictionary

That Monday night, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick seemed to go full Midsommar—a horror movie about a fictional Swedish death cult that sacrifices their elders—by saying that ”as a senior citizen” he was “all in” on “willing to take a chance on [my] survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves.”

Right-wing internet commentator Jesse Kelly tweeted on Tuesday morning that, “If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.”

Glenn Beck on Wednesday said that he too was ready to risk his life for the stock market, in a stream following a town hall in which Trump floated a return to reopening businesses and public gatherings by April 12, an ambition that Beck conceded could be a death sentence for thousands of Americans—himself included.

If all that sounds to you like the dangerous, macabre ramblings of a movement willing to sacrifice human life for illusory gains, you’re not alone. “I dealt with suicidal cults before. I encountered people who are willing to die for their faith, ideology, race, etc. But, I never encountered anyone who is willing to die for someone else’s 401k,” tweeted Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who now runs an intelligence and security consultancy. “This is a whole new level of craziness.”

Formal experts on destructive cults agreed with Soufan’s diagnosis of Trump and his base’s support for letting some die. When I reached him via a Zoom video call, Steve Hassan, a mental health professional and cult expert, started nodding immediately when I asked if he saw parallels between, say, the Jonestown Massacre and Trump’s willingness to put the elderly on a near literal chopping block. Ben Zeller, a professor at Lake Forest University who focuses on new religions and Daniel Shaw, a New York-based psychoanalyst who has helped counsel people who have left cult religions, agreed with almost no hesitation.

Cult Experts Warn That Trumpism Is Starting to Look Awfully Familiar, Ali Breland, Mother Jones

Mike Logren called it. We are now well past the bug-eyed point with Bachmann.

Fear can motivate irrational behavior. A party with authoritarian tendencies will ignore facts, science and reality, thus, climate change, universal healthcare and COVID mask protocols are immediate non-starters. A party that cannot garner enough votes or convince enough women, LGBT, black or indigenous people of color and youth will simply block, or purge them. A party that fears oblivion might sell our national soul to a Russian devil, cavorting with them openly July 4, 2018. What then, are the "in the event of election landslide, break glass" instructions?

We're beyond the crazy bug-eyed, chrysalis of madness to fully-emerged, political dementia - the kool-aid moment of the republic, and we're a tweet away from Armageddon.

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Xenophobic Idolatry...

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Teen Vogue: Quaranteens Against Xenophobia, Karma Samtani

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Existentialism, Human Rights, Politics

I sent the following article to my advisor and our Dean:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Foreign students in the United States, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, will have to leave the country if their classes are all taught online this fall or if they transfer to another school with in-person instruction, a government agency said.

It was not immediately clear how many student visa holders would be affected by the move, but foreign students are a key source of revenue for many U.S. universities as they often pay full tuition.

China ranked first among countries of origin for international students in the United States with nearly 370,000 during the 2018-2019 academic year, according to data published by the Institute of International Education.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said it would not allow holders of student visas to remain in the country if their school was fully online for the fall. Those students must transfer or leave the country, or they potentially face deportation proceedings, according to the announcement.

U.S. to force out foreign students taking classes fully online, Mimi Dwyer, Reuters

He has lost his goddamn Nazi, rabbit-ass mind!

The only thing "exceptional" about us now is the depths of this nation's racism, stupidity and depravity. We're essentially telling foreign students - many of them my friends and colleagues - they're "canaries in a [COVID] coal mine" before its collapse on the entire enterprise of democratic-republican governance. NO magical thinking is going to get some blond haired, blue-eyed "superior" assholes to design the next innovation, or allow us to compete on a global stage. We're literally NANOMETERS away from the world economy quarantining the (dis) United States as a failed state. I'm sure the NYSE will like Brussels better; "Hamilton" can play Europe and we can go from the dollar as trade currency to the Yuan with the FLIP of a switch!

Short list of things created by immigrants:

1. Blue Jeans (Jacob W. Davis, Latvia; Levi Strauss, Germany); 2. Hamburgers (Louis Lassen, Denmark); 3. Doughnuts, (Adolph Levitt, Russia); 4. Budweiser Beer (Adolphus Busch, Bavaria); 5. Apple Computer (Steve Jobs, father-Syria); 6. Google (Sergey Brin, Soviet Union); 7. Sara Lee (Nathan Cummings, Canada; parents-Lithuania); 8. Hot Dogs (Charles Feltman, Germany); 9. Basketball (James Naismith, Canada); 10. "God Bless America" Song (Irving Berlin, Siberia); 11. YouTube - 2 of the 3 founders (Jawed Karim - Germany, Steve Chen - Taiwan, Chad Hurley - U.S.); 12. KISS, rock band (Chaim Witz - Israel, known by his stage name, Gene Simmons); 13. Kraft Cheese (James L. Kraft, Ontario, Canada); 14. Van Halen, rock band (Eddie Van Halen, Netherlands); 15. Ketchup (Henry John Heinz, Bavaria).

15 Iconic American Things That Wouldn't Exist Without Immigrants, Alison Caporimo, BuzzFeed Staff

Short list of things created by orange dumb ass Satan: _______ (Does chaos count?)

But no worries: some racist assholes deathly afraid of circa 2042, waving the flags of traitors and Nazis will "feel better" about themselves and make it all "great again," while all of the previous "melting pot" collapses to dystopian shit!

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Wrestle Mania...

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Mil Máscaras, 2009. Source: Wikipedia

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Human Rights, Humor, Politics

In the old days, wrestlers would meet, and fans would be interested in knowing who wins and how. There were stories, but there were also plain old matches. Now, there are writers. Every match, every encounter, is designed to advance a character. And all the matches fit in to the general theme of the broadcast, which is given a title. For last week's Raw, the backstage title was "The Evolution of Justice." It's a reference to two sets of wrestlers who are on a collision course.

Your WWE wrestling script begins with background: What happened the last time WWE played to this area. Knowing what the fans remember is very important motivation for the wrestlers.

Then there are the "dark matches." Before WWE Raw goes live on the USA Network, WWE tapes two matches that will air exclusively on the company's own TV network.

Then there's the audience prep. Just like any TV show, the audience has to be conditioned to react to certain things. On April 14, WWE was going to mourn the death of the Ultimate Warrior, felled from a heart attack a few days before. So WWE announcer Jerry Lawler, who gets his own pre-event, full-stage introduction, is instructed to remind fans to put on their masks so that WWE can go live on the air with a tribute.

Then comes the first match. It'll be interrupted by a commercial break, which is something that the wrestlers know — they can't decide to go to "the finish" when the TV audience is watching a Pringles commercial. Match number one is between Rob Van Dam and Alberto Del Rio.

The announcers know who will get "over," i.e. win, but they don't know how. This allows them to actually announce the action in the match legitimately.

Excerpts from: "Here's what a pro-wrestling script looks like," by Mark Ambinder, Newsweek

My last foray with pro wrestling was about 1974 (age 12) with both of my parents at the Winston-Salem Memorial Coliseum.

These were originally father-son outings, but my mother decided she wanted to go, so we let her tag along for more than a few times. Generally, she was quiet during the action as my dad and I shouted either our approval or disdain for the admitted actors in the ring: The "American Dream," Dusty Rhodes, Dick, the Bulldog Brower (I know the definitions of his first two names, I'm clueless as to what a "Brower" is); The Mighty Igor and "the man of a thousand masks," Mil Máscaras. Mil and the Brower were in heated, pitched mock battle in the ring, when mom suddenly yelled out:

Break it off, it don't belong to you!

This was from my mother, mind you. My father and I were speechless. As if reading my embarrassed young mind, Pop said: "I expect we'll go home now." We did, and I never went to a wrestling match again. Mom wasn't exactly fuming: I think SHE was as shocked by what she said as WE were!

Previously, I've speculated this reality show carnival barker is running an episodic tragedy, only because as a terrible B-movie actor with zero empathy and no social graces, this is the only show he knows how to produce. Twitter is just a bullhorn for a snake oil salesman and carnival barker.

I posit here, instead of a reality show, he's running a typical pro-wrestling script. He's fake wrestled before and sent a doctored version of the video out personifying CNN as his adversary. He probably bathed in Ben Gay after the stunt.

My mother when she was alive was five foot, two inches, petite and well, motherly. Yelling like the rest of the crowd was a response of being in the crowd, being influenced by my father's and my actions as well as theirs. Orange Satan's spawn following is in-the-crowd: following every inane tweet, every suggesting this pandemic would be 15 people, then zero, every prediction from a faux "cubic model" this would be over by Memorial Day (it's late June), every suggestion hot weather would diminish the infections (it's not), every suggestion to drink bleach or shine a flashlight up our asses; every stupid example of NOT wearing a mask, until it's become a culture war issue.

"Stable genius" maybe should have asked Mil Máscaras?

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A fan made cover for George Orwell's novel. "Animal Farm" is one of Orwell's most well-known works and gained unlikely popularity with Ukrainian refugees. (Photo from Flickr user Ben Templesmith.) PRI.org
 

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Politics, STEM

 

Columbusing: The art of discovering something that isn't new; "1492, Columbus was Columbusing the 'new world' one journal entry at a time" Source: Urban Dictionary

Black Wall Street:

On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was riding in the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third and Main with a white woman named Sarah Page. The details of what followed vary from person to person. Accounts of an incident circulated among the city’s white community during the day and became more exaggerated with each telling.

Tulsa police arrested Rowland the following day and began an investigation. An inflammatory report in the May 31 edition of the Tulsa Tribune spurred a confrontation between black and white armed mobs around the courthouse where the sheriff and his men had barricaded the top floor to protect Rowland. Shots were fired and the outnumbered African Americans began retreating to the Greenwood District.

In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Greenwood was looted and burned by white rioters. Governor Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa. Guardsmen assisted firemen in putting out fires, took African Americans out of the hands of vigilantes and imprisoned all black Tulsans not already interned. Over 6,000 people were held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.

Twenty-four hours after the violence erupted, it ceased. In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, over 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. Historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died.

1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Tulsa Historical Society and Museum

In popular culture, it was reenacted in the opening scenes of Watchmen on HBO. Today is my sister's, and what would have been my father's 95th birthday. What would have been my mother's 95th is this September 15: on that date in 1963, the Sixteen Street Baptist Church Bombing happened in Birmingham, Alabama. I was one year, one month and one day old. As with my own granddaughter now, I was likely full of happy smiles, and blissfully unaware the world was so complicated.

But today, it is also, Juneteenth.

Juneteenth is a holiday celebrated across the country commemorating the formal emancipation of slaves in the United States. Although the Emancipation Proclamation was scheduled to be effective on January 1, 1863, slavery continued after that date in many states. It was not until two years later, on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas that a Major General from the Union Army informed some of the last remaining slaves of their freedom. This day marked the formal end of slavery in the United States, and Juneteenth was born in celebration of that day. Today the summer holiday is often celebrated by large get-togethers, cookouts, music, and food. But this holiday has evolved significantly over the century. Let's take a look back at some memorable past Juneteenth celebrations and events as reported in many of the popular African-American newspapers of the time, all available through The New York Public Library's electronic resources.

The first Juneteenth celebrations were especially important. Many African-Americans who were enslaved participated in the celebrations and passed on their experiences to the next generation. In Parsons, Kansas in 1895, the Parsons Weekly Blade, told how they celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the emancipation by, "indulging in various pleasures," followed by "sumptuous repasts." Then came a series of speeches about the importance of Juneteenth and the experience of slavery still fresh for many African-Americans. After the speeches the celebrations continued with, "an animated game of baseball."

In 1915, The Chicago Defender wrote, "Texas is a wonderful state in more ways than one. Looking at it from our point of view, they can can deal out some of the most unjust justice and then, as if to relieve their conscience, they can flop over and do the most gracious things." That year, in celebration of Juneteenth, Governor Ferguson pardoned forty prisoners from the state penitentiary.

Researching Juneteenth Celebrations at The New York Public Library, Rhonda Evans, Assistant Chief Librarian, JBH Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, June 19, 2017

The 80s G.A.P. Band derived their name from three corners that intersected Black Wall Street: Greenwood, Archer and Pine. Orange Satan thinks he's "made Juneteenth famous." I tweeted this yesterday to him, with the following: "Juneteenth didn't need you. Did you EVER walk into this building (NYPL), or did I answer my own question?" I think I did.

President Donald Trump planned to hold a rally Friday in Tulsa, Oklahoma – the site of the worst racial attack in U.S. history, by many accounts. After days of controversy over that choice, he changed the date.

The history of the massacre in the area, which was known as "Black Wall Street," spotlights the formation of an affluent Black community and the gruesome events that destroyed it.

In 1921, a white mob attacked a predominantly Black area in Tulsa, killing hundreds of people and destroying the country’s wealthiest African American community. Its abrupt demise and similar incidents around the country during that period played a role in widening the racial wealth divide, experts say.

Part of what enraged critics, Trump had planned to speak to supporters June 19, or Juneteenth, known as Emancipation Day – the date in 1865 when a Union general traveled to Galveston, Texas, to read President Abraham Lincoln’s orders freeing the slaves.

'Black Wall Street': Trump's plan for rally in Tulsa calls attention to 1921 race massacre, Paul Davidson, USA Today

He's planning to accept the nomination of his party on the 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday, August 27, 1960, when peaceful sit-in activists for civil rights were clubbed by whites and local KKK members. Once is an "oops"; twice is trolling.

A simple search of this blog finds entries on the term "war on science," to which this entry is now added. Paraphrasing George Orwell, ignorance has become a sort of strength, or at least a hammer; an ax handle clubbing everyone into submission. Authoritarians have been skittish of science since Galileo. When science confirms their dogma: good. When instrumentation and discoveries go against holy writ from the Bronze Age, literally all HELL breaks loose! Winthrop's Puritanism is pumped up on steroids. Chest are beaten and noses flare, the adrenaline rush falsely empowering the faithful with a sense of mission: a holy grail quest. The most vile heresies can be justified and covered if it's under two words: "God's will," typically interpreted by white, Anglo Saxon Protestant, Cisgender males and their misogynistic, homophobic, racist, xenophobic and patriarchal worldviews.

Masks are now a culture war issue, despite the science that says they help slow the spread of the virus and allow us to SAFELY open. Despite the Coronavirus numbers spiking in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Black Wall Street massacre (not riot), his supporters are signing his waiver, and they are showing up without first notion of protecting others. Though he's dodged a huge bullet up to now, I don't think magical thinking will inhibit an aggressive virus, whose only basic program is to replicate itself, whether in the pews of ardent followers, or on the podium of their reconstructed "Two-Minutes Hate" orange god. We have confused skepticism with contrarianism and intelligence with brute ignorance. There is a pride in exceptionalism Americans have, that has crossed over to haughtiness, and the rest of the planet frankly, could give a shit, which matches the attitude of "dear leader." The faithful may only "get it," when they and their bizarre cult leader are under clinical endotracheal intubation.

The world is studying STEM with vigor, and we are falling behind because of a world changed by anthropomorphic climate disruption, income inequality, employment replaced by - in the words of James Boggs - "automation and cybernation". Backwards time travel only happens on the quantum level and in science fiction stories. We will soon "reap the whirlwind" when instead of blaming China for the pandemic; stealing secrets from us: we may have to eat crow if the plant a communist flag on the moon we, to this DAY, deny we ever visited. Technology will only accomplish one of two things: liberate us superficially, while our minds further atrophy by not exercising it, or efficiently enslave us physically, the strings pulled by an authoritarian puppet master, fearful and manipulative, with enough dexterity and remaining motor skills...to tweet. Both possibilities are "equally terrifying."

"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." Arthur C. Clarke

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#ShutDownSTEM...

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Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Human Rights, LGBT Rights, Women's Rights

I participated in JSNN's version of #ShutDownSTEM yesterday. It was a discussion led by the Dean about the situation we all find ourselves in post the deaths of Ahmaund Aubrey, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, laid to rest next to his mom in Houston, Texas.

It was a tentative meeting, thankfully from the Zoom participants extremely diverse. The Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering is by its construction diverse: Afghanistan, Brazil, Chad, India, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone and the United States represented in its student body and faculty. It's quite easy - at least, before the pandemic - to get lulled by the interactions that are often taken as routine, and that the entire country and world are doing exactly what you're doing.

On June 10, 2020, we will #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives.

In the wake of the most recent murders of Black people in the US, it is clear that white and other non-Black people have to step up and do the work to eradicate anti-Black racism. As members of the global academic and STEM communities, we have an enormous ethical obligation to stop doing “business as usual.” No matter where we physically live, we impact and are impacted by this moment in history.

Our responsibility starts with our role in society. In academia, our thoughts and words turn into new ways of knowing. Our research papers turn into media releases, books and legislation that reinforce anti-Black narratives. In STEM, we create technologies that affect every part of our society and are routinely weaponized against Black people.

Black academic and Black STEM professionals are hurting because they exist in and are attacked by institutional and systemic racism. Black people have been tirelessly working for change, alongside their Indigenous and People of Color allies. For Black academics and STEM professionals, #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM is a time to prioritize their needs— whether that is to rest, reflect, or to act— without incurring additional cumulative disadvantage.

Site: #ShutDownSTEM.com

I recalled my asking Mr. Tedford - my middle school science teacher - a question on the coefficient of linear expansion: I was answered with "no, you big dummy!" Upset, in tears, I relayed the encounter to my parents, who promptly made an appointment with Mr. Tedford and the principal at Mineral Springs Middle School. We got a sweaty apology, and I got all my questions answered the rest of that semester year.

I recalled my own interactions with a store detective at Kings Department Store in Winston-Salem, NC, 1976. I was body slammed and frisked while four white males robbed "Deputy Do Wrong" blind in the tennis shoe section. Despite my trying to bring this to his attention, he was convinced that "nigras steal" despite my objections and his lack of evidence.

I recalled asking a rhetorical question of the Brigade Commander: "what does it take to get to your rank" as a ninth grade, shy and impressed Neo ROTC cadet, answered with: "YOUR KIND will never get to this rank!" I did actually, three years later.The Ku Klux Klan (or, someone pretending to be them) left me a death threat: "don't show up for the Brigade Review (parade), nega, or we'll shoot your azz!" I showed up and commanded 180 cadets in formation in front of onlookers that included my parents and girlfriend at the time: anyone that spells that horribly, can't be serious or aim a gun! I'm sincerely glad I wasn't wrong.

These roadblocks are the moments that either break you, or make you, our Nietzsche ("that which does not kill us makes us stronger") Négritude.

Négritude:

The concept of Négritude emerged as the expression of a revolt against the historical situation of French colonialism and racism. The particular form taken by that revolt was the product of the encounter, in Paris, in the late 1920s, of three black students coming from different French colonies: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) from Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas (1912–1978) from Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal. Being colonial subjects meant that they all belonged to people considered uncivilized, naturally in need of education and guidance from Europe, namely France. In addition, the memory of slavery was very vivid in Guiana and Martinique. Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas were already friends before they came to Paris in 1931.

Beyond the encounter between Africa and the French Caribbean Césaire, Senghor and Damas also discovered together the American movement of Harlem Renaissance. At the “salon”, in Paris, hosted by sisters from Martinique, Jane, Paulette and Andrée Nardal, they met many Black American writers, such as Langston Hughes or Claude McKay. With the writers of the Harlem Renaissance movement they found an expression of black pride, a consciousness of a culture, an affirmation of a distinct identity that was in sharp contrast to French assimilationism. In a word they were ready to proclaim the négritude of the “new Negro” to quote the title of the anthology of Harlem writers by Alain Locke which very much impressed Senghor and his friends (Vaillant 1990, 93–94).

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Négritude

I didn't say any of the above stories, or relate our Zoom meeting to Négritude, but they are not very far behind me.

The deaths of Ahmaund Aubrey, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd sparked a Neo-Négritude, that instead of remaining indigenous has spread throughout the world. Most marches have been peaceful and multicultural, with a few knuckleheads looting. That's important, because to deconstruct white supremacy, we need the creators of it to do it. We also need certain public African American figures to get a little Négritude, get diagnosed for Stockholm Syndrome or enough sense to shut up such that they get out of the way of progress.

This is the minefield/mind-field blacks in STEM have to navigate. Teachers, counselors and what should be "role models" feel an almost instinctive, no: tribal obligation to reinforce the status quo. They will say hateful, hurtful, disappointing things to diminish you; to "keep you in your place." A cursory review of history had only the comfortable roles of the buck boy, mammy, sex slave and step-n-fetch for the African Diaspora. The system reinforces itself by backlash politics, cognitive dissonance and a propagandized, false narrative of history that makes the descendants of the original perpetrators "feel good." Like a membrane disturbed and a nerve throbbed, it responds with cold, robotic efficiency.

This time, it's different. We've taken time out from the orgy of violent shooting incidents our news would report and naval gaze on until the next shiny object; the next shooting. We just couldn't take a break from the 401 year orgy of knees-on-necks, even during a pandemic: it's endemic to the American experiment, that currently, is not giving the results posed by the original hypothesis.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12

No truer words uttered at George Floyd's home going. He is NOT, however, a martyr:

1: a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion 2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle

George Floyd is not a Messianic figure. He never wanted to be. He was a man, like all of us, with his flaws, horrible choices and sins. He was a man that like any man, can learn from his sins and seek redemption, if he so chose. He was a man that had a little brother and children that looked up to him. He was a man that wanted to breathe.

Perhaps, STEM has finally inhaled the stench of racism, and instead of spraying Febreze to mask the odor, found it finally, rancid. Perhaps it will exhale in meetings to come, solutions. This will take time. It will be worth the effort.

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Biff, Galileo and Gaslighting...

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights

On April 12, 1633, chief inquisitor Father Vincenzo Maculani da Firenzuola, appointed by Pope Urban VIII, begins the inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial.

This was the second time that Galileo was in the hot seat for refusing to accept Church orthodoxy that the Earth was the immovable center of the universe: In 1616, he had been forbidden from holding or defending his beliefs. In the 1633 interrogation, Galileo denied that he “held” belief in the Copernican view but continued to write about the issue and evidence as a means of “discussion” rather than belief. The Church had decided the idea that the Sun moved around the Earth was an absolute fact of scripture that could not be disputed, despite the fact that scientists had known for centuries that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Galileo is convicted of heresy, History.com

Authoritarians have a long history of defying science and reality. No one questions now that the Earth isn't the center of the solar system and our understanding of the universe has expanded since Galileo confirmed Copernican Heliocentric Theory. Modern authoritarians resort to pathological lying.

I've discussed Biff's proclivities here and here before. The video above is homage to him without invoking his hideous visage.

You look scared, Donald.

You should be.

A pandemic is problematic for you.

You can’t gaslight a pandemic.

You can’t bully it into compliance.

You can’t lie to it and hope it won’t run a fact check.

You can’t pay for its silence or promise immunity.

You can’t threaten its reelection bid if it breaks ranks.

You can’t fire it when it dissents from your ramblings.

You can’t impugn its character with baseless attacks.

You can’t fool it with talk about God.

You can’t bury it with FoxNews fluff pieces.

You can’t drown it in nationalism.

You can’t dismiss it with cries of fake news.

You can’t pardon it after it completes its assaults.

You can’t give it a demeaning nickname and hope to deflate it.

You can’t rage-Tweet it into exhaustion.

You Can’t Gaslight a Pandemic, Donald, John Pavlovitz, Stuff That Needs To Be Said

By golly, Biff damned sure is trying!

I wrote this on Facebook, May 8th:

He’s wrecked the economy like 1 of his casinos.

He sucks as a moral leader, or comforter-in-chief.

Expect Biff to go full Brown People-Chinese-Mexican-Muslim racist, because, why not?

May 8th was Friday. He managed to fulfill my predictions by Monday.

Like all authoritarians, fascists, Nazis and racists: facts don't matter. What matters is emotion, what a certain thing makes "the base" feel. Most of them, like Biff feel threatened by changing demographics. Fascists take advantage of disasters and chaos, as rampant confusion consolidates their power, and a pandemic is made-to-order. For his bewildered, gun-toting herd, it's like the last gasp of Archie Bunker. They're worried about 2042. I'm worried about Dr. Bright's ominous prediction of this being our "darkest winter." I'm worried about the Forbes article four years ago that capitalism MUST change, or humanity will starve itself to death eight years later in 2050. The so-called white majority becoming numerical minorities will be short-lived, and moot:

Corporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health.

We need to build a new system: one that will balance economic growth with sustainability and human flourishing.

Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity By 2050, Drew Hansen, Forbes, 2016

In one of a number of revolts against colonial rule, in a corner of what is now Tanzania, the Maji Maji Rebellion sought to drive out German colonialists. The rebels were partly incited by a spirit medium who claimed to be possessed by a snake spirit and to have a “war medicine” that would turn German bullets into water. In one of the saddest and most surreal episodes in anti-colonial history, thousands of Africans who put their faith in this magic perished before German machine guns.

It has been axiomatic in anthropology since Bronislaw Malinowski’s seminal work in the early 20th century that people turn to magic when they feel powerless. Soldiers, for example, may repeatedly practice mastery of their weapons, but they know there is still a strong element of chance in whether they live or die in combat, and so they also pray, wear talismans, and develop superstitions about weapons, clothes, or routines that bring luck. In this spirit, the Maji Maji rebels—outgunned but unwilling to tolerate German occupation—put their faith in magic water, as well as their own martial skills, as they rose up.

COVID-19 and the Turn to Magical Thinking, Hugh Gusterson, Sapiens.org

I don't think it will matter what hue of human is in the numerical majority. This pandemic screams at us that capitalism as we practice it is out of balance with the globe we live on. This pandemic roars at us that all the magical-thinking-whistling-past-the-graveyard in the world won't will it away, nor will opening up too soon and assume callously only "brown people" will die. As much as I love Star Trek as nerd mythology, I'm not expecting a leap in physics, discovering warp drive, and leaving the planet for exciting Alpha Centauri tours. In 2050, I pretty much expect to be either 88, or ashes. I just didn't expect the rest of the world to be ashed with me.

It is, in a dark sense, a brute force way to end inequality, forever.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," Matthew 5:5.

I guess that doesn't necessarily have to mean Homo Sapiens.

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Going Forward...

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At the former IBM research facility, Fishkill, NY

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Human Rights, Politics, Women's Rights


Note: Yesterday, eleven years ago, we lost mom before Mother's Day weekend - on a Thursday. Happy Mother's Day - love, "stink."

 

*****


This was my week of finals: Advanced Nano Systems Monday and Solid State Devices on Wednesday. The first was posted on Blackboard and had a set time to answer all questions, open-book and open notes. That took four hours. Wednesday, the exam was proctored on Zoom: 3 hours. I was completely and utterly wiped out. Now, I have to focus on my preliminary research proposal, meaning I'll be doing a lot of reading, summarizing and crafting the proposal in an NSF-style format suitable for publication. My committee will tear it to shreds. I'm expecting it. As such, I will take blogging breaks from time-to-time. Pursuing a Ph.D. in anything isn't trivial, and nanoengineering is by far not trivial, and is mentally and emotionally exhausting. It will be worth it, though.

The above is how I went to work at Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices and IBM in some capacity. Wearing the garments wasn't an "option." We were - as I stated in Protocols - protecting the product from our contact with the outside world.

Our "cleanrooms" are now our living rooms and we're protecting ourselves from the environment outside.

I'm bemused by the now popular label, "essential workers," as if these workers weren't essential before a pandemic showed just how essential they really are. Missing from the list are janitorial services, which is why I've always treated the cleaning person with the same respect I would afford an executive: one makes decisions about the company for typically investors; the other decides daily to clean our messes in the loo.

As of this posting, more than 40 states are starting to relax stay-in-place restrictions, not because of the Russian puppet concerned about re-election and avoiding prosecution from NY Attorney General Letitia James and SDNY, but democratic and republican governors are having a cash flow problem: it cannot flow if we're too concerned with "Life," followed by "Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness" to venture forth.

At best, we're looking at a year and a half to a vaccine. On the website The History of Vaccines: "Vaccine development is a long, complex process, often lasting 10-15 years and involving a combination of public and private involvement." It apparently has an exploratory stage, a pre-clinical stage, IND (investigative new drug) application; phases I - III vaccine trials, post-licensure monitoring of vaccines and VAERS: the vaccine adverse event reporting system, in case, ironically the "cure is worse than the disease."



Testing, shelter-in-place, contact tracing: This is how we can slowly open the economy safely and reduce infections/deaths. Tracing has a noble, brute-force history with smallpox. This is so we don't overwhelm the medical community while research pursues a vaccine or cure. Denmark, Germany, Finland and other European countries are opening, and safely for the most part. Mississippi halted their opening after a spike in infections; Florida and Texas will likely soon follow. Per capita tests per million citizens, we're now second to Italy and slightly ahead of South Korea, that have had 256 deaths ...total. It's both embarrassing and sickening to the soul.


(Suggested) extended protocols:

1. Vote November 3, 2020. Especially millennials. My open letter to millennials (Belief in Oneness) before the 2018 midterms preceded the takeover by the democrats, the prescient predictive power of Dr. Rachel Biticofer's modelling and the impeachment of the Russian ass(et). Democracy means "rule of the people." In short: give a shit.

2. Every building, particularly security guards will have to use body temperature infrared thermometers before allowing access. They're commercially available on Amazon. I posted the most expensive one, but there are other products listed. 99.9 degrees Fahrenheit or greater should be deemed a health hazard, and turned away.

3. Schools and manufacturing particularly are going to have to structure "A-B" days: MWF-A, TTh-B; MWF-B, TTh-A etc., where buildings are filled to 1/2 their capacity, controlling access with BTIR thermometers.

4. Schools especially are going to have to record lectures on YouTube if students are turned away; they're going to have to get a doctor's note to return to class.

5. Telecommuting has to be encouraged if possible at all. Zoom isn't going away.

6. Hotels, restaurants, movie theaters and sporting events are going to have to get used to 25-50% occupancy; financial targets will have to be adjusted.

7. The existence of for-profit prisons will have to be revisited. They are not efficacious. They're structured for high occupancy and recidivism, and hotbed for this or any pandemic's spread; so are meat-packing plants and nursing homes.

8. Get used to leaving home like this (showering when you return):

IML%2BProtocols.jpg

I'm assuming myself asymptomatic: masking protects Y-O-U from M-E. More of us doing this reduces the spread of the virus, while giving a break to emergency services and ventilators. It can be continued for the anti-vaxxer community that won't take a vaccine even if successfully going through trials. I know the history of this country with the Tuskegee experiment. It's lazy scholarship to continually resort to the worst human motivations in the midst of a crisis. Biologists have families, too.

My unfortunate conclusion is, we're going to be at this for a while, post this and any successive administrations' tenures, if we still have a functional republic: the jobs report will be at Depression-era levels; William Barr is pulverizing the rule of law as it's now apparently fine to lie to the F.B.I. after admitting to it twice under oath.

We're in the fight of our lives, and we're literally on our own.
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Ghoulish...

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Image Source: Pinterest

 


Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights, Politics, Women's Rights

Ref: Leadership of Ghouls...October 26, 2018

Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
Th' associates and copartners of our loss
Lye thus astonisht on th' oblivious Pool,
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy Mansion, or once more
With rallied Arms to try what may be yet
Regaind in Heav'n, or what more lost in Hell?


John Milton, "Paradise Lost," Book I, Lines 221-270

Blankets to First Nation peoples.

Colonial weaponizing of smallpox against Native Americans was first reported by 19th-century historian Francis Parkman, who came across correspondence in which Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief of the British forces in North America in the early 1760s, had discussed its use with Col. Henry Bouquet, a subordinate on the western frontier during the French and Indian War.

Early American historian Elizabeth Fenn of the University of Colorado Boulder lays out her theory on what happened in her 2000 article in the Journal of American History. In the late spring of 1763, Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo warriors, inspired by Ottawa war leader Pontiac, laid siege to Fort Pitt, an outpost at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in present-day downtown Pittsburgh.

The fort’s commander, Capt. Simeon Ecuyer, reported in a June 16 message to his superior, Philadelphia-based Col. Henry Bouquet, that the situation was dire, with local traders and colonists taking refuge inside the fort’s walls. Ecuyer wasn’t just afraid of his Native American adversaries. The fort’s hospital had patients with smallpox, and Ecuyer feared the disease might overwhelm the population inside the fort’s cramped confines.

Bouquet, in turn, passed along the news about the smallpox inside Fort Pitt to his own superior, Amherst, in a June 23 letter. In Amherst’s July 7 response, he cold-bloodedly saw an opportunity in the disease outbreak. “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.”

Historian Philip Ranlet of Hunter College and author of a 2000 article on the smallpox blanket incident in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, also casts doubt. “There is no evidence that the scheme worked,” Ranlet says. “The infection on the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox—the smallpox that reached Fort Pitt had come from Indians—and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it.”

The most important indication that the scheme was a bust, Ranlet says, “is that Trent would have bragged in his journal if the scheme had worked. He is silent as to what happened.”

Even if it didn’t work, British officers’ willingness to contemplate using smallpox against the Indians was a sign of their callousness. “Even for that time period, it violated civilized notions of war,” says Kelton, who notes that disease “kills indiscriminately—it would kill women and children, not just warriors.”

 

Did Colonists Give Infected Blankets to Native Americans as Biological Warfare?
History.com


It is ghoulish:

- To attempt infection of peoples whose land you robbed from them.

- To offer blue states accept bankruptcy versus getting a bailout like the "too big to fail businesses and banks."

- To refuse W.H.O testing that would help flatten the curve in an obtuse effort to win re-election.

- For 26 million people to file unemployment in the richest country in the world.

- For the richest country in the world to be so bereft in the face of a pandemic.

- For its executive to be such a braying buffoon at propaganda "press" briefings where nothing is learned or useful.

- To try gaslighting a pandemic and suggest humans essentially ingest Lysol into their systems, guaranteeing this will kill them faster.

More particularly: we barely flinched when we snatched children from their parents; we barely blinked when we put those children in cages. We in Orwellian fashion wouldn't bring ourselves to call them what they really are: concentration camps, now a hot oven for the novel Coronavirus. It's better than Auschwitz or Dachau ovens and kind of "green." That too, is ghoulish.

Cannibalism is the act or practice of species eating the flesh or internal organs of their kind. In the story, scenes of ghouls eating ghouls and humans eating humans pass regularly as the narrative continues.[1][2]

Strictly speaking, one-eyed ghouls always have to cannibalize since they are forced to eat human or ghoul meat. In their case, however, only eating ghoul meat is typically treated as cannibalism.


Ghoul meat tastes disgusting to ghouls, but in contrast to other non-human nutrition, they are able to digest it. Continued cannibalization may trigger a mutation in Rc cells, resulting in turning them into kakujas.

Ultimately, the ghoul is like the pacman emoji in arcade video games: it gobbles until the energy balls are consumed. Ouruboros or cannibalistic ghoul, it consumes its own tail. The fictional monster then resorts to cannibalism - like polar bears impacted by climate change - when all resources and options are exhausted. Pacman and polar bear then wink out of existence.

Conservative columnist Max Boot famously coined the phrase "gang of Putin" in a Washington Post piece last year.

I prefer "ghoulish ossiferous party." You now know ghoul, and ossiferous relates to "sucking the flesh off bones." Both however, are apropos and fitting.
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Protocols...

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Will Smith as U.S. Army virologist Lt. Col. Robert Neville in the movie, "I Am Legend."

 

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Elections, Existentialism, Fascism, Human Rights


Plot: "In 2009, a genetically re-engineered measles virus, originally created as a cure for cancer, turns lethal. The virus kills 90% (5.4 billion out of 6 billion) of the world's population and turns 9.8% (588 million) into vampiric, cannibalistic mutants called Darkseekers, who are extremely vulnerable to sunlight. The remaining 0.2% (12 million) of the population are immune to the virus and are the prey of the mutant Darkseekers.

Three years after the outbreak, U.S. Army virologist Lt. Col. Robert Neville lives an isolated life in the deserted ruins of Manhattan, unsure if any other uninfected humans are left.

Neville's daily routine includes experimenting on infected rats to find a cure for the virus, searching for food and supplies, and waiting each day for any immune humans who might respond to his continuous recorded radio broadcasts, which instruct them to meet him at midday at the South Street Seaport.

Flashbacks reveal that his wife and daughter died in a helicopter accident during the chaotic evacuation of Manhattan, as the military enforced a quarantine of the island in 2009. Neville stayed behind on the island with other military personnel." (Wikipedia)
 
I worked in cleanrooms in the semiconductor industry, the most stringent being Class 1. The old criteria meant 0.5 microns of particles per cubic feet of air. (The newest guidelines were adopted in 2001, metric and still pretty stringent.) Each employee passed through air showers to push off any particulates from their clothing. Smokers are encouraged not to indulge, and cologne is prohibited - smoke and scent are particles. We then put our street garb in a locker, putting on green hosptial gowns and fab shoes that never left the site. Then we donned clean room gowns - "bunny suits" - before going into the alien, hepa-filtered environment, protecting it from any hair, skin, sweat or dirt we could shed that would inhibit the functionality of integrated circuits. I tried to drink as little water as possible before going on the floor. Going to the bathroom, or lunch was a pain.

I have developed a unique protocol for assaulting what used to be trivial things like: getting the mail, mowing the lawn - grass grows as rains falls during pandemics - or, going to the grocers for (what's left of) supplies.

1. I fashion a mask from my father's handkerchiefs and rubber bands per the CDC guidelines.

2. I use cloth/rubber work gloves for mowing as the rubber is tactile enough for me to operate equipment and pay for items at the grocery store.

3. After I enter the house, I immediately put all clothing - including my gloves - in the washer. I proceed to the shower.

It is a ritual of the dish panned and dry skinned. I call it my "I Am Legend" protocols.

I am approximately 45 minutes from the hospital that I was born in. I am in the city I earned an undergraduate in Engineering Physics and a Masters in Nanoengineering. I feel like each day outside my door, I enter an alien landscape. Shopping is now foraging for food at several department stores. The shelves are emptying as the undocumented workers that pick our food are also impacted by this virus. We're going to start seeing shortages. Perhaps I need to look at hunting. Thankfully, there are no Darkseekers.

Now, as many other STEM graduate researchers are doing, I'm continuing Ph.D. studies online. No one knows what this is supposed to look like, since before the entire planet became as hostile as Mars, it was done in-person for the most part.

Wisconsin showed the depth of depravity in the "gang of Putin" from the Supreme Courts at both federal and state levels and its extensively word-salad challenged faux mob head: they'd rather kill us than allow people to vote. It's almost a public admittance that they know they have no ideas to convince a majority of the electorate to vote for. They're reduced to deplorables, fascists, homophobes, racists, rubes, Sambos, sexists, tax cheaters, wife beaters and zombies. NO ONE with a sane grasp of reality - whether voting during a pandemic or by mail - would consciously vote for four more years of this shit. "Planet of the Apes" had intelligent, evolved primates. This is more like "Conquest of the Stupid People." We apparently didn't have to wait 500 years to get to "Idiocracy." Speaking of which, someone wants to open the economy prematurely to save his own ass, since he's supposedly a "stable genius" and wolf-of-Wall-Street business wizard after six bankruptcies. He just didn't tell you, the land he's wizard of is Oz.
 
He hits the nine signs of a sociopath lotto, and the only thing that lowers my systolic and diastolic blood pressure is avoiding those Joseph Goebbels' styled Ministry of Untruth press briefings. They're absolute useless, word-salad garbage.

He won Wisconsin in 2016. Their citizens showed the resolve we've GOT to have to repel Russian meddling and voter suppression: we've literally got to crawl over glass to save this republic, otherwise, I'm pretty sure we'll no longer have one. The inverse of federal republics is fascist dictatorships. That's only fun for fascists and death cult members.

Will Smith is an actor. "I Am Legend" is a movie, for which he likely received a fat 20 million dollar check. Just about that many people filed for unemployment. He's made a lot of movies since then, and barring we burrow underground, he'll probably make a few more before he retires to that big mansion in Calabasas, California.
 

The suddenly unemployed are still waiting for theirs.
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Black Like Me...

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Credit: Getty Images

 

Topics: African Americans, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Human Rights, Medical Science


In recent weeks, my patients in an urgent care in central Brooklyn came in progressively sicker by the day. They were mostly Black and Brown. Many complained of fever, cough and worsening shortness of breath. I even sent a few of the sickest patients to the ER. COVID-19 had arrived in New York City in full-form, hitting its largely Black and Brown areas the hardest.

Only mere weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiologists have not yet had the opportunity to disaggregate nationwide morbidity and mortality data by race, but Black Americans will undoubtedly be one of the most harshly affected demographic groups.

In recent weeks, my patients in an urgent care in central Brooklyn came in progressively sicker by the day. They were mostly Black and Brown. Many complained of fever, cough and worsening shortness of breath. I even sent a few of the sickest patients to the ER. COVID-19 had arrived in New York City in full-form, hitting its largely Black and Brown areas the hardest.

Only mere weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiologists have not yet had the opportunity to disaggregate nationwide morbidity and mortality data by race, but Black Americans will undoubtedly be one of the most harshly affected demographic groups.

This pandemic will likely magnify and further reinforce racialized health inequities, which have been both persistent and profound over the last five decades, and Black Americans have experienced the worst health outcomes of any racial group.

 

What the COVID-19 Pandemic Means for Black Americans
Uché Blackstock, Scientific American

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Dream Variations, Langston Hughes, Poet.org and enotes analysis

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