“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
🤷🏾♂️🤷🏾♂️ pic.twitter.com/ehubBOuqha
— Kiyong Tai (@Kiyongtai) January 16, 2024
I produced a song by David Bowie called “Heroes.” They use it for every heroic event, although it’s a song about alcoholics. We did it on 24 tracks in Hansa Studios in Berlin. With all of the backing vocals and instruments on it, we only had one track left for the vocal.
...Hansa was a studio where you could record symphony orchestras; you can have about 150 pieces in this room, and here was David Bowie standing in this enormous auditorium. Every time he sang – he could sing very loud – his voice was echoing off the walls and the ceiling and everything. I said, “Could you give me half an hour? I want to set up two microphones.” So I set up a Neumann U-47 in front of him and then about 15 or 20 feet away I set up something like a 67, then way down the hall I set up another condenser microphone.
I only had the one track left, so I couldn’t record these microphones on separate tracks. What I did is put a gate on microphone two and another gate on microphone three, so when he sang like this [deep voice] those microphones wouldn’t open up, you wouldn’t hear the ambience in the room. When he sang like this [loud voice], the middle microphone would open up and when he went [screams] – that’s called Bowie histrionics – all three microphones would open up...
US elections: Why has Obama stalled? No one mentions race...There is little doubt that race is going to play a starring role in this election after the convention season. 'It has not been too much of an issue so far. Or, at least not talked about. But that is not going to last,' said Bowler. It is already getting a lot of play on conservative talk shows and in books. Rush Limbaugh, the 'shock jock' who is hugely popular with white conservatives, has stepped up race-baiting on his broadcasts. He recently claimed Democrats chose Obama as a sort of 'affirmative action' programme. 'I think it really goes back to the fact that nobody had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy,' he told his millions of listeners. Warming to his theme a few days later, he said: 'You can't criticise the little black man-child.'
Slightly more subtly has come a series of anti-Obama books. The most strident, and most popular, has been The Obama Nation, by Jerome Corsi, who helped mastermind the Swift Boat campaign that derailed Kerry in 2004. Corsi described Obama as having Islamic links and a Muslim past. He wants him to be seen as a scary 'Other', just like some black leaders have always been portrayed. Even the title of the book has that effect: said quickly 'Obama Nation' rapidly becomes 'abomination'. That is not likely to be an accident. ...
Michele Norris appearing on the Charlie Rose Show over the past two nights:"One thing we've only touched on lightly here is the issue of race, and the polling has shown that many of these voters when they say "he's not patriotic enough", "we just don’t know who he is", "we don’t know what he really stands for", if you dig down a little deeper there are suggestions that some of these issues are proxies for this issue of race."Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also appearing on the Charlie Rose Show over the past two nights:“It hurts me to say, as the child of working class people, what these people were saying. When I get email from these people, there ain't a lot of nuance.”AndConnie Schultz: I think Michele makes a very important point about race ... I've been writing about this because I come from the working class, and I am very troubled by some of the things I'm hearing from the working class. About race. And I said, you gotta go home and have the tough conversations with family members.Rose: What do they say?Schultz: (They say) "I will not vote for..."Rose (because he is congenitally unable to stop interrupting people trying to finish their sentences): "...an African American?!?"Schultz: Right. If they say it well. If they say it kindly. I think it's code when they say "Well we really don't know if he's a Muslim" and "we don't know if he's patriotic". That’s all code for race. And for us to pretend that isn't happening is irresponsible for us in the media.
Because 100 years from now, the Tale of Election 2008 will be the story of several million ignorant, white, working-class voters – both Democrats and Independents (the Republicans are a lost cause who will remain an unashamedly morally bankrupt open-sewer for at least another 30 years) and which way they turned.Period.Right now there is so much pressure on these voters -- so much torque to their sense of identity being wrenched onto by them by the economic and cultural disasters wrought by the liars and sociopaths they keep electing -- that they are almost in tears, moaning and clawing at their skulls, trying to figure out how to simultaneously:A) Keep from drowning in a rising tide of ruin and failure of their own making, andB) Stay faithful to the deep, ugly foundation stones of bigotry they dutifully learned at their father’s and grandfather’s knees and which, up until now, they have been spared the pain of facing by the use of pretty, perfumed code.They are becoming unhinged trying to reconcile this massive, existential dissonance at the core of their lives, except this time applying the Negrological Constant to magically explain away their fundamentally defective model of the Universe will not work.This time there they cannot escape the choice they have to make. And this time we on the Left will remind them -- loudly, rudely, and from every street corner, blog, and microphone -- exactly what those choices are: to adapt and change and live in a Progressive and tolerant nation, or stay just as they are and die in a Conservative and bigoted one.And right now it is 6-to-5 and pick ‘em which is stronger: the people, or the American Racism Virus that hag-rides them.
Trump Was Bold Enough to Be a Public Racist. It Worked.
And today he stepped into the Oval Office to meet the outgoing president....The quick retort to people (like me) who argue that nativist racism played a decisive role in the election generally point to counties that voted for Obama in 2008 (and, occasionally, in 2012, too) but flipped to Trump in 2016. This, they say, is proof that the vague sense of having been "written off" in those places was a more powerful motivator there than race. But I tend to agree with Jamelle Bouie, who wrote that a big part of the reason these places went for Obama was that neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney were racially inflammatory enough. That, in this painful area, they didn't "tell it like it is." Trump did. Via Slate:There's an easy rejoinder here: How can this be about race when Trump won some Obama voters? There's an equally easy answer: John McCain indulged racial fears, and Mitt Romney played on racial resentment, but they refused to go further. To borrow from George Wallace, they refused to cry "nigger." This is important. By rejecting the politics of explicit racism and white backlash, they moved the political battleground to nominally colorblind concerns. Race was still a part of these clashes—it's unavoidable—but neither liberals nor conservatives would litigate the idea of a pluralistic, multiracial democracy. Looking back, I thought this meant we had a consensus. It appears, instead, that we had a detente. And Trump shattered it.Those people who felt "forgotten" and "left behind"? Where do they stand on right-to-work laws? Where do they stand on voter suppression laws, which go out of their way to prevent a solid voting bloc of white and black working-class voters? Where do they really stand on trade, with Bernie Sanders or with the Wal-Mart to which they go every weekend?...
Young Black People See the News Media’s Double Standard...This generation grew up seeing double standards. They saw a young black boy's photo captioned with "looting" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when a white couple photographed in a similar circumstance wading in the water with bags of supplies described as searching for food. They see Amber Alerts go national with pictures and narratives about white children in peril, but rarely the same attention to deaths of black and Latina/o children. They see journalists asking, with a straight face, if #BlackLivesMatter is a hate group.
Given these patterns and incidents, why would young black people want to trust the mainstream news media with stories about their lives?
‘Trust’ in the News Media Has Come to Mean Affirmation
...But more important, the Internet has changed society's relationship with the news. For one thing, it’s enabled us to construct digital silos, battlements from which, like the French in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, we fire invective on the people below....But there is ample proof that the Internet has also really “leveled the playing field” between the most powerful and the least. Now the marginalized can speedily gather, demand recognition and challenge the prevailing narratives. This happens every day and it’s far better than the alternative....
Liberal News Media Bias Has a Serious EffectTimothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at The Washington Examiner, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.News media bias is real. It reduces the quality of journalism, and it fosters distrust among readers and viewers. This is bad for democracy.Many prevailing biases exist in the U.S. news media. All news outlets are biased toward an eye-catching narrative. The Washington news media is biased toward Washington-based solutions. And the political press in the U.S. has an overwhelming leftward tilt, mostly on social issues, but also on economic matters.Conservatives aren’t imagining this bias...
HEMMER: Touchy, touchy, touchy deal here. Was it necessary?BORELLI: We're talking about the president of the United States using the "n-word," Bill. He has really dragged in the gutter speak of rap music. So now he is the first president of rap, of street? Come on, he has lowered the stature of the high office of the president of the United States and the question is why did he do this? ...You see all of the people coming together in the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, black, white and otherwise, coming together, praying, supporting each other. And here you have the president make this insane, crazy comment of using the "n-word" to really distract. This is all a distraction, grand distraction to take away from the people uniting and then the president in chief, the rapper in chief, now further dividing our country. I find it outrageous.
A GOP Embarrassment: Racist Nominee in Mich....That anyone could knowingly vote for Carson is beyond their comprehension, and with good reason, for Carlson's campaign in this blue-collar suburb, where unemployment just hit 18 percent, has been unusually virulent and bold.For nine months, he operated a "White Power Hotline," a series of phone messages in which he told whites to drive blacks from their neighborhoods and said that blacks -- being lazy -- were responsible for the lowered automobile production and widespread recession here. For weeks before this month's campaign he operated a shadow campaign -- no headquarters, an unlisted phone; just leaflets and fliers handed out in the street.He copied publicity shots of the local police that appeared in newspapers for National Auto Theft Week and ran them in his own newsletter, distorting the facts: "Crack Troops Ready To Defend Dearborn's Border Against All Outsiders." He said, in his campaign leaflet, that "the biggest problem our country has is the exploitation and oppression of the white majority."Nevertheless, when the primary results were in -- Caygill, the offical Republican, won 3,037 votes to Carson's 3,715 -- people perhaps were showing privately what they might deny publicly: that Carlson was their man.Think Nazi, or Ku Klux Klansman, or John Bircher, all of which Carlson has one time been, and chances are the image you'll come up with will not be Carlson. He's too smooth to fit the stereotype.His debating style, while wary, is aloof and amused -- a sort of J. C. Penney version of William F. Buckley. He lunches on cottage cheese and a glass of milk. In conversation, he refers to Arnold Toynbee and William Shockley. There is even though rare, the occasional touch of wit. Could that have been a jar of hair cream one saw him disappear with before the photographer arrived? Aah, yes, the candidate concedes; "I have such fine Aryan hair."He says this in a borrowed house in Dearborn Heights, the home of friends. His own home -- even the address of his home -- is off limits, he says. He is an evasive man: sometime electricain, sometime student, one-time Air Force linguist. He claims now to make a living as a private detective. For whom? He will not say. Neither does he care to be precise about his politics.Ask him what he means when he says vaguely that he was "associated" with the Nazis (he was, though he doesn't like to admit it, an active member for several months), and he'll attack, wondering why the media always pursue "the sensational." Ask him what he means when he says blacks "just are not schooled to keep up a type of lifestyle in the same level of white people" and he'll try intellectual intimidation."I would just have to heighten my diction level or terminology," he says grandly then: "They just don't keep their places up or they let them run down."This is the basis of Carlson philosophy, which he attempts to bolster with quotations from scientists and historians: that blacks -- supported by "liberal radical communists" -- are the cause of the economic and social breakdown of the country."...
"You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman."
-- Eldridge Cleaver
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
The American Swastika
This is not the Confederate Flag.
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This is the Confederate Flag.
Grand Moff Texan came up with this and I do love it so.
If you google "Confederate Flag," you will not find a single, real Confederate Flag on the first page, and few examples after that.
Not only has"Confederate Flag" changed to mean something it should not, the phony "Confederate Flag" has changed in significance over time, too. It began as a battle flag, a way to tell Confederate from Union forces on the field, since their two flags weren't that different, and units' uniforms and individual banners were anything but standardized. The phonyConfederate Flag seems to have borrowed the Cross of St. Andrew, seen on the Scottish flag, or maybe St.Patrick's cross, incorporated into the Union Jack, but that's just me guessing.
For longer than the Confederacy lasted, and for more than a century after the American Civil War, the phony Confederate Flag has stood for the defiance of the South, for America's own, premodern apartheid. It has become, simply, The American Swastika.
The comparison isn't inflammatory, it's deliberate and appropriate. This wouldn't be the first time an old symbol changed meaning due to its abuse by the sick and twisted.
One Bad Apple From Germany Killed Millions. Hitler didn't just leave behind a mnemonic for all students of astronomy in the English language. He took an ancient good luck symbol, a nearly universal one, and turned it into a universally recognized symbol of evil.
It can happen. And it did happen here. Don't give me that bullshit about slavery not being relevant to most of Southern society, or not being a factor in the Civil War, or not being the monopoly of the South. This is a Southerner you're talking to, and I've heard it all before and I know better. I know my region's history, and it is unique within my country. Something different happened here. The South cannibalized their entire culture, even their supposed religion, to justify the racism that justified first slavery and later (and for much longer) the political subjection of African Americans. The truly sad thing is that even those who never owned slaves (and ante-bellum middle class Southerners were more likely to buy a slave and rent him out than they were to buy their own land) were part of this conspiracy of justification. After the American Civil War an even wider portion of Southern society was directly involved in the subjection of African Americans. The Civil War didn't sweep away a civilization based on slavery, it merely displaced its ruling class and began the South's long, slow march away from its top-heavy, agrarian, aristocratic society. American apartheid had been democratized, and with it, the Confederate Flag became its egalitarian symbol against the Civil Rights movement and all other aspects of integration for generations.
The Confederate Flag resonates, as a symbol, throughout Southern culture.
People all over the world know what they're looking at when they see the Confederate Flag. Regardless of what those who display the Confederate Flag may say it means, the Confederate Flag is never far from the Klan and like groups, and the Confederate Flag is never displayed by their historical victims. Showing the Confederate Flag doesn't just leave the displayer with a burden of proof, to show that for them it's something other than what the Confederate Flag has stood for, now, for generations. Rather, the Confederate Flag's history, both long and recent in this country, are such that theConfederate Flag cannot be displayed in good faith. The meaning of the Confederate Flag is utterly unambiguous. At best, venerators of the Confederate Flag can plead ignorance, not innocence.
I grew up with the Confederate Flagand there was never any question what it meant. The South would rise again, that's what the Confederate Flag meant. We flew the Confederate Flag at my high school. the Confederate Flag appeared on bumpers, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia. "Dixie gonna do it again!" and similar slogans accompanied Confederate Flag.
There was simply no question. The Confederate Flag is not a symbol of heritage. That should have been obvious enough in Mississippi, where more people fought for the Union than the Confederacy, and yet the Confederate Flag's defenders insist it is part of that state's "heritage." No. It's part of the "heritage" of that minority of Mississippians whose "heritage" involved the subjection of the rest. That's their "heritage." Hey, if the pointy hat fits, wear it.
So, if you're going to attack a people, demonize and destroy their language and religion, hold them up as a threat to civilization and "your" womanhood, destroy their families, rape, murder, mutilate, crush them in labor camps and then, when someone justifiably smacks your racists ass, take the whole murderous shame underground, don't be surprised when your precious symbol, the sign of all you hold holy and all the world recognizes as the sigil of your sickness, becomes, quite simply, your Swastika. That's all the Confederate Flag which is not the real Confederate Flag will ever be, now.
It's The American Swastika
Obama’s Twitter Debut, @POTUS, Attracts Hate-Filled PostsWhen President Obama sent his inaugural Twitter post from the Oval Office on Monday, the White House heralded the event with fanfare, posting a photograph of him perched on his desk tapping out his message on an iPhone.The @POTUS account — named for the in-house acronym derived from “President of the United States” — would “serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him,” a White House aide wrote that day.But it took only a few minutes for Mr. Obama’s account to attract racist, hate-filled posts and replies. They addressed him with racial slurs and called him a monkey. One had an image of the president with his neck in a noose.The posts reflected the racial hostility toward the nation’s first black president that has long been expressed in stark terms on the Internet, where conspiracy theories thrive and prejudices find ready outlets. But the racist Twitter posts are different because now that Mr. Obama has his own account, the slurs are addressed directly to him, for all to see.Within minutes of Mr. Obama’s first, cheerful post — “Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really!” it began — Twitter users lashed out in sometimes profanity-laced replies that included exhortations for the president to kill himself and worse.One person posted a doctored image of Mr. Obama’s famous campaign poster, instead showing the president with his head in a noose, his eyes closed and his neck appearing broken as if he had been lynched. Instead of the word “HOPE” in capital letters as it appeared on the campaign poster, the doctored image had the words “ROPE.”The accompanying message said “#arrestobama #treason we need ‘ROPE FOR CHANGE.’ ” It was addressed to @POTUS by a user calling himself @jeffgully49, who has posted other images of Mr. Obama in a noose, and whose Twitter profile picture shows Mr. Obama behind bars. “We still hang for treason, don’t we?” his post said.The writer, Jeff Gullickson of Minneapolis, subsequently posted on Thursday that his reply to Mr. Obama had earned him a visit from the Secret Service at home. Reached for comment, Mr. Gullickson responded by asking in an email how much The New York Times would pay him for an interview....
Mckinney's Consolidated Laws of New York Annotated. Agriculture and Markets Law....
§ 365. Clipping or cutting the ears of dogs1. Whoever clips or cuts off or causes or procures another to clip or cut off the whole or any part of an ear of any dog unless an anesthetic shall have been given to the dog and the operation performed by a licensed veterinarian, is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment for not more than one year, or a fine of not more than one thousand dollars, or by both.
But the legacy of the all these landmarks is much more complicated and tinged with—make that drenched in—irony than the conventional story of courage and triumph lets on. It is time to state the obvious. Forget about weak explanations for today’s deep political divisions like “the culture of Washington,” gerrymandering or the rise of cable TV: The civil rights movement, while a victory on many levels, was also the origin of our present morass. It spawned a powerful national “white resistance” countermovement that decisively altered the racial geography of American politics, pushing the national Democratic and Republican parties off center and toward their ideological margins, undermining the centrist policy convergence of the postwar period and setting the parties on the divisive course they remain on today. Many will blame today’s unprecedented political polarization on recent events, such as the rise of the Tea Party or Obama’s election in 2008, but they will be wrong. The seeds of America’s dysfunction were planted 50 years ago. And the ugly politics of race had everything to do with it....Though Johnson’s nomination was never in danger, the fact that at the height of LBJ’s popularity, an unrepentant segregationist could attract the support of between thirty 30 and 50 percent of registered Democratic voters in three Northern states was nothing short of a revelation to political strategists in both parties. Seeing an opportunity, an increasing number of Republicans began to embrace more conservative racial politics designed to appeal to Wallace supporters throughout the country. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so,” said Ronald Reagan during his 1966 campaign for California governor, in which he also decried welfare and opposed government efforts to encourage neighborhood integration....In the popular vote, Nixon edged Humphrey by the narrowest of margins, 43.4 to 42.7 percent. As Republican leaders looked to the future, however, they weren’t focused on that slim gap, but rather the whopping 57 percent majority represented by the combined votes cast for Nixon and Wallace. Republican strategists believed this figure represented a dominant conservative majority that could ensure GOP control of the White House for years to come. Nixon and the Republicans had claimed the lion’s share of the South’s electoral votes for the first time in history. In a scant eight years, the Party of Lincoln had gone from being the more racially liberal of the two major parties to something more closely resembling a coalition of white racial conservatives, with the South as its natural geographic home, at least when it came to presidential politics.... These politics were on full display in the 2012 Republican primaries, a half a century later, with the candidates seemingly trying to outdo one another in impugning the poor and African-Americans in particular. Newt Gingrich accused Obama of being a “food-stamp president” and opined that, “poor people should want paychecks, not handouts.” Rick Santorum was even more explicit when he offered up the following quote: “I don’t want to make black peoples’ lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”Even Mitt Romney played the race card, blaming his defeat on the policy “gifts” that Obama had bestowed on the very “dependent” segments of the population he had alluded to in his notorious “47 percent” video...
… What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct. …“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”
Eric Holder is confident in his corrupting of the Justice Department, because of his relationship with Barack Obama, who is corrupting the country. I understand perfectly well the motives of these two leftist operatives. What I do not comprehend and refuse to accept is the failure of America's elected politicians to deal effectively with these men. Congress has been given the power to address lawless behavior in government, and that power includes impeachment and removal....
In addition, everyday American whites – people who have not been prone to hatred of blacks – are becoming increasingly fed-up with the violent, destructive, and lawless behavior of many blacks, such as those currently running amok in Ferguson, Missouri. These Americans also resent, and justly so, the usual support that such mobs receive from Holder and Obama, no matter how racist and criminal the mob behavior may be...
I think we can infer that Eric Holder, using his corrupt Justice Department, is laying the groundwork for race war. He is, after all, no different from any other race-hater out there. He just happens to be black with an incredible amount of power to bring suffering to anyone whom he deems worthy of suffering (recall George Zimmerman and the white voters in Philadelphia, among a host of other citizens). This reality is what concerns me as a conservative black who despises everything about Eric Holder.When the intended race war begins, there will be no way for blacks who oppose Holder's behavior to distinguish themselves from him and his leftist ilk...
Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal spin on issues pertaining to race and culture.Ms. Thompson is a copy editor by trade currently residing in Tennessee. She formerly wrote for the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley California Newsletter and the online conservative blog ChronWatch, also out of California.
Crazy Uncle Liberty: Here! Read this! She makes some good points.You: She's fucking nut job. She's just making shit up, You can't really believe this?Crazy Uncle Liberty: Well, she's no worse than Rachael Maddow...
I strongly urge the Ferguson PD to keep the plight of Ferguson's oppressed citizens in the nation's headlines by continuing to ignore the advice of the most famous Missourian in American history:Police fire tear gas into crowd, detain reporters during protests in Ferguson, Mo.Police in Ferguson, Missouri, fired tear gas, stun grenades and smoke bombs to disperse some 350 protesters late Wednesday, the fourth night of racially charged demonstrations after police shot to death an unarmed black teen.Some demonstrators hurled rocks at police as others scattered, while smoke engulfed the area. A Reuters reporter saw two young men preparing what looked like petrol bombs in a bus-stop shelter, their faces covered by bandannas. Police said protesters had thrown petrol bombs at officers.Protesters have gathered every night since Saturday when 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death in the mostly black suburb of St. Louis, during what authorities said was a struggle over a gun in a police car. Some witnesses say he was outside the car with his hands up.Police have deployed camouflage-clad officers in body armor, including one manning a rifle on a tripod atop an armored car, to Ferguson."I've had enough of being pushed around because of the color of my skin. I'm sick of this police brutality," said one protester, who gave only his first name, Terrell, 18. "I'm going to keep coming back here night after night until we get justice."Alderman, reporters detainedA St. Louis alderman, Antonio French, was among some 10 people arrested on Wednesday evening, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper reported. French was released Thursday morning without having to post bail, telling the Post-Dispatch he had received no paperwork from police, nor explanation for his detention...
"Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel." -- Mark Twain
The mainstream media, with the exception of MSNBC, maintains an abysmal record when it comes to diversity, while conservative media don’t even pretend to care. The American Prospect‘s Gabriel Arana took a look at diversity among liberal publications like The Nation,Slate, and Mother Jones, and came away with a raft of excuses from their editors, all of which are pure horseshit. Arana’s own over-complicated analysis eventually gets around to some productive points, but what’s truly revealing are the excuses he elicits from the editors of liberal outlets:1. They don’t know how white they are...