ancianita
ancianita's JournalMidday Music for Millennials
Kamasi Washington "Final Thought"More on the artist(s):
Trump ain't got NOTHIN' for black people just cuz he opens 15 new offices in black communities.
In Mar. 2 New Yorker issue, Jelani Cobb raises the most likely reason that Trump has used in the past ("what have you got to lose?).
It's this reason: what Trump is seeking in these black communities is to SUPPRESS the black vote by pushing the "no difference" argument. Which will show up in Russian social media disinformation, too.
Paraphrasing:
The "no difference" argument is false for ANY nominee on EVERY issue that disproportionately affects people of color:
-- criminal justice ... GOP invented the 3 strikes, hard penalty legislation
-- health care
-- education
-- gun control
-- immigration
-- climate change
Trump touts an unemployment rate among black people but declines to point that it is 67% HIGHER THAN THE NATIONAL AVERAGE.
"...less recognized is his clear hope to induce despair in those who do not. The imperative for Democrats is to defeat not only Trump but also the cynicism that abides him. One calculation for his reëlection isn’t how many African-Americans will vote for him. It’s how many will be dissuaded from voting at all. "
//// This article is originally titled "The Cynicism Vote." /// It's online title is typical hype.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/how-did-the-democrats-end-up-here
If I were in those communities, I'd burn them the f**k down.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/poll-black-latino-americans-think-donald-trump-s-actions-have-n1062821
For America
Cuba Has Not Been A Bad Neighbor Or a Threat To the US -- Ever. There Is No Cuban Taint.
Reposted from another thread because I'm sick of the Bernie-Cuba "taint" claims going on around here.
I AM a Cuba apologist. The terrorist has been the USA, trying to kill Castro several hundred times.
I hate when I read this stuff in America, but I won't back down from addressing it. It's been WE, the USA, that have been the terrorists. This is our proven, unclassified history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro
I lived just north of Miami for fifteen years, from age 3 to age 18, and made friends with at least three Cuban refugees who worked in the area. From 8th grade on I acquired conversational level Spanish in and out of school, and learned a lot about the Cubans who left and the Cubans who stayed, all during the many waves of Cuban "refugees" arriving in Florida.
Every American needs to read more Cuban history of its constant conquering and enslavements, about Jose Marti, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and others who fought for Cuban independence from colonial enslavement and exploitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#Independence_movements
Batista was a popular Cuban military veteran figure turned mafia capitalist. Hell, even I knew that because my parents told me so. Everybody in South Florida knew that Batista was tied up with Mayer Lansky's gambling mafia and who-knows-what-else. Castro and Guevara drove him out because Cubans suffered poverty and starvation under Batista. We, the ever bad neighbor of El Norte, helped Batista become dictator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
Cubans who left were Batista loyalists. Right wing. Pro-fascist. Pro-capitalists. They did well in Miami because the gaming capitalists of South Florida welcomed them.
Batista's Cuban supporters are still in Florida! They love Trump for the same reasons they loved Batista!
But not all of them. Some of them are working class Cubans. They know the old Cubans up in Ybor City, in Tampa, the first city founded by Cubans in Florida.
Cuba’s reputation for educational prowess is well earned.
I've talked to Cubans during two two-week visits in the last three years, and I can attest that they are well educated, whether they push a cart, farm, drive taxis or work in restaurants and hotels. Being a teacher, I made it a point to ask them how education in Cuba was for them. The literacy HAS been a miracle, and is the highest in the Caribbean if not the Americas. We can thank the lawyer, Fidel Castro, for setting up free education from 1st grade through college, whether you want to or not.
There's a reason their medical school has turned out thousands upon thousands of doctors who have aided Cuba's African allies struggling to throw European asset strippers off their lands. We can thank the doctor, Che Guevara, for setting up Cuba's medical school in Havana, and Cuba's hospital system.
I visited, with a group of six other Spanish speakers -- a local Cuban university professor explaining everything on our tour with us, and thoroughly answering all our questions -- the northern farmlands and villages of Pinar del Río, Artemisa, La Habana, Mayabeque, Matanzas and Cienfuegos provinces. Many visits, talks with Cubans, photos of farmlands and people, and great learning about their so-called "poverty." In the south, on my second trip, a full week in Santiago de Cuba, formerly Oriente province, my guide for two days was a native Santiago resident, a lovely, proud young woman who rode me around by taxis and pedicabs, taught me so much history from Fidel's grave and the world class cemetery of the greats of Cuba in Santiago, through the city, all the way to the castle/forts on the coastline. (El Morro is a similar one in Puerto Rico)
Oh, I do know American propaganda a lot better now. I know that every single thing I've learned from Cubans and Cuba shows that what this government has said is the real propaganda, the same I've read since I was a kid learning about Cuba from Cuban refugees.
No country who struggles for sovereignty or freedom is clean. Not a single one. Our revolution didn't look clean to proxy supporters on both sides, and it will always appear that way to those who are told to see freedom fighters as terrorists.
MY Bottom Line: I challenge anyone in DU to travel to Cuba and not come back changed toward a positive view of Cuba. If they don't come back with an entirely changed view of Cuba, I will pay their air fare AND buy them a cerveza. Hold me to it.
The only "parrots who don't know better" about Cuba are those who haven't, don't, or won't go to Cuba to see for themselves, and prefer to parrot this mal vecino's propaganda dished out for the last 60 years.
We should be ashamed of what bad neighbors we have been to all of the Americas, especially Cuba, which we've coveted like an empire vulture since the last century. Oh, and Alice Walker, a great American writer, was among the first to challenge the travel sanctions imposed on US by our own government; you know, a wall.
Let's not drag Cuba through the mudslinging of our primaries. Cuba is no pernicious, horrible neighbor to be used as a club to beat any of our candidates over the head with. Cuba is NOT Russia. In any way. Do not fall for this false equivalency of bullshit. Cuba is in TOTAL solidarity with Africa, by its own proud claims.
Cuba and its people, for all they've suffered at our hands, do not in any way deserve this unconscious, ignorant treatment. Nor do our candidates.
MMM
Grimes." Symphonia IX”(love song to Earth)
I try and try to make you cry
And make you love me
Oh I would say yes
Oh I would say yes
The need to be the best before the need to rest
Oh I would say yes
Oh I would say yes
See, my wait is you
My wait is you
My wait is you
My wait is you
My wait
(To be in a dark side, be in a deep mind)
See, my wait is you
My wait is you
My wait is you
My wait is you
My wait
(To be in a dark side, be in a deep mind)
To make the pain defuse the flame can be trying
But I would say yes, oh I would say yes
So as you fade away alive, I lay dying
Oh I would say yes
Oh I would say!
See, my wait is you
Midday Music Twofer For Millennials
The Beatles. "It's All Too Much"Paul McCartney. "Singalong Junk"
Kurt Vonnegut. Palm Sunday, “Thought of a Free Thinker,” 1976.
Trump Demands Sotomayor, Ginsburg Recuse Themselves from Matters of Personal Interest to Him
Shit dicktaters do -- attack high courts.
Today's game move comes in the dictator context reported by CousinIT: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213015214
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/02/trump-ruth-bader-ginsburg-sonia-sotomayor/?fbclid=IwAR1UTbE1LAh4PZjY4mGvkErGDvsvcjI1thhPzjemURRxIBMo7s3ZZ7vKAvM
President Donald Trump railed against Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Twitter late on Monday, demanding that the two liberal justices recuse themselves from cases involving the president and “Trump-related matters.” The move come shortly after Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion effectively accusing her conservative colleagues of granting favors to the president.
“This is a terrible thing to say,” Trump wrote in a pair of tweets that misspelled Ginsburg’s name. “Trying to ‘shame’ some into voting her way? She never criticized Justice Ginsberg [sic] when she called me a ‘faker.’ Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump-related, matters!”
“It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it,” Sotomayor wrote, one of several lines widely interpreted as a criticism of the conservative wing of the high bench.
“Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each. And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow,” she continued.
Trump’s demand on Monday, which follows his ongoing attacks and attempts to influence the Justice Department and intelligence agencies after the Senate’s impeachment acquittal, came hours after Axios reported that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is involved in efforts by right-wing activists to purge individuals deemed as a part of a “Deep State hit-list.”
Non-linear Mind Warfare Enables Mass Control, and Why the Magnitsky Act Helps Stop It
Our "oh dear" defeatist response to "events" has become the central part of a new system of political control -- nonlinear warfare and the sowing of confusion.
In an editorial for the London Review of Books quoted by Curtis, Peter Pomerantsev describes Putin's Russia thus:
In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away.
Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.
—?Peter Pomerantsev, in "Putin's Rasputin", London Review of Books issue of 20 October 2011[8]
Curtis claims that Trump used a similar strategy to become president of the United States, and hints that Trump's Surkovian origins caused Putin to express his admiration for Trump in Russian media.[97][98]
Vladislove Surkov has boasted that "Russia is playing with the West’s minds", "They don't know how to deal with their own changed consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov
Note that this nonlinear warfare is at work as clearly in the U.S. as in Britain.
Bill Browder presents an important voice of Russians, not Russian oligarchs -- Vladimir Kara-Murza-- who explains what the Magnitsky Act means to Russians: why the Act is as obvious and relevant today as it was revolutionary back then -- which is its principle of personal, individual accountability for corruption (hello, Elizabeth Warren) and human rights abuses.
Vladimir Kara-Murza clarifies for US, here, that the brilliance of the Magnitsky Act is that it only punishes the oligarchs, not the Russian people, as old state-sanctioning used to do.
So when 45 says he wants to end sanctions against Russia, what he really means is that he wants to rescind the Magnitsky Act. And we know he'll never name that act.
More Magnitsky Act brilliance: people who, from credible evidence, corruptly acquire their wealth may no longer get visas, own assets, or use the banking services of the countries that pass this legislation (any many have passed versions of the Magnitsky Act). The best way to judge its effectiveness is in the ... absolutely hysterical reaction ... Putin's regime has to this whole ... international justice campaign.
We see through the hypocrisy and double standard built into the very heart of the Putin system of power: the very same oligarchs and senior officials of the Kremlin who abuse, attack, undermine and violate most basic norms of democracy and rule of law in Russia, very much like to enjoy the benefit, the opportunities and the freedoms afforded by the very same principles of democracy and rule of law in the West.
Because it's in the West where Russia's oligarchs
--keep their money,
-- buy their villas in New York,
--keep their wives and their mistresses and
-- educate their children.
It is this feckless, fatass fuck in the WH who has personally enabled Russian crooks to bypass the Magnitsky Act through him personally.
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,030