Dr. Cornel West Interview on the Late Show with David Letterman
Part one…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyn-W4W6bHQ
Part two…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz6MtrfKvRw
Dr. Cornel West Interview on the Late Show with David Letterman
Part one…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyn-W4W6bHQ
Part two…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz6MtrfKvRw
Tom Engelhardt writes:
I’ve often said that Edward Snowden’s revelations gave us the impression that we now more or less know what the American secret world of intelligence, surveillance, and spying is doing. We don’t. Snowden illuminated the workings of one of 17 intelligence outfits in the U.S. Intelligence Community. To have a real sense of what’s been going on, we would need Edward Snowdens to walk out of the CIA, the DIA, and a whole series of other agencies and outfits. Until then, we don’t even know what we don’t know.
via TomDispatch – I've often said that Edward Snowden's revelations….
Tom Engelhardt: TomDispatch.com
Strange Arithmetic (lyrics) by The Coup
History has taught me some strange arithmetic
Using swords, prison bars, and pistol grips
English is the art of bombing towns
While assuring that you really only blessed the ground
Science is that honorable, useful study
Where you contort the molecules and then you make that money
In mathematics, dead children don’t get added
But they count the cost of bullets comin out the automatic
Teacher
My hands up
Please, don’t make me a victim
Teachers
Stand up
You need to tell us how to flip this system
Economics is the symphony of hunger and theft
Mortar shells often echo out the cashing of checks
In Geography class, it’s borders, mountains and rivers
But they will never show the line between the takers and givers
Algebra is that unique occasion
In which a school can say that there should be a balanced equation
And then Statistics is the tool of the complicit
To say everybody’s with it and that you’re the only critic
Social Studies, the goliath to tackle
Which turns into a sermon on simplicity of shackles
Physics is to school you on the science of force
‘Cept for how to break the hell out the ghetto, of course
Home Ec can teach you how to make a few sauces
And accept low pay from your Walmart bosses
If your school won’t show you how to fight for what’s needed
Then they’re training you to go through life and get cheated
https://vimeo.com/103299654
Roy Edroso writes:
As you may have noticed by following their writings, conservatives are not sticklers for historical accuracy, especially when they have a point to defend and not a lot of evidence to support it [….] There are plenty of others. I’ve picked out 10 such ideas
via 10 historical “facts” only a wingnut could believe – Salon.com.
• 10. The Robber Barons weren’t robbers — they were capitalist heroes.
• 9. Sputnik bankrupted the Soviet Union.
• 8. Galileo was a conservative.
• 7. The Founding Fathers really tried to end slavery.
• 6. Teddy Roosevelt was a socialist.
• 5. Conservatives swept MLK and the Civil Rights movement to victory.
• 4. Margaret Sanger was all about the eugenics.
• 3. Women were better off before they got the vote.
• 2. Darwin is a menace to Western Civilization.
• 1. FDR: History’s greatest monster.
‘…Some of the stories in [the book] “One Nation, Under Gods” [by Peter Manseau] are more surprising. “It is perhaps the greatest of forgotten influences on American life and culture,” Manseau writes, that some 20 percent or more of Africans living in America around the time of the Revolutionary War were Muslims, a quantity that “dwarfed the number of Roman Catholics or Jews.” The majority of enslaved Africans did practice such Western African religions as Yoruba and Obeah, all of which contributed to the distinctive customs of African-American Christianity. But we also have a handful of stories of African Muslims abducted to the U.S., where, as in the case of one Omar ibn Said, they astonished the natives by writing fluently in a strange alphabet (Arabic) and impressed, if also bewildered, everyone with their abstemious piety….’
via The stubborn myth of the Christian country: Why the U.S. has always been “one nation, under gods” – Salon.com.
‘An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill….’
via Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government | US news | The Guardian.
‘…In 1528, a Moroccan slave called Estevanico was shipwrecked along with a band of Spanish explorers near the future city of Galveston, Tex. The city of Azemmour, in which he was raised, had been a Muslim stronghold against European invasion until it fell during his youth. While given a Christian name after his enslavement, he eventually escaped his Christian captors and set off on his own through much of the Southwest.
Two hundred years later, plantation owners in Louisiana made it a point to add enslaved Muslims to their labor force, relying on their experience with the cultivation of indigo and rice. Scholars have noted Muslim names and Islamic religious titles in the colony’s slave inventories and death records.
The best known Muslim to pass through the port at New Orleans was Abdul-Rahman Ibrahim ibn Sori, a prince in his homeland whose plight drew wide attention. As one newspaper account noted, he had read the Bible and admired its precepts, but added, “His principal objections are that Christians do not follow them.”
via The Muslims of Early America – NYTimes.com.
Rahm Emanuel was Obama’s right-hand man for years in the White House, today domestic ‘black sites’ exist in his city. Who will be held responsible?
In a letter to Rahm Emanuel, Amnesty USA’s executive director Steven Hawkins wrote: “As the mayor of Chicago, you have a responsibility under US and international law to ensure that human rights violations are not committed within the city.”
via ‘Gestapo’ tactics at US police ‘black site’ ring alarm from Chicago to Washington — The Guardian
‘…Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, who lived in the same condominium complex as the victims, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder. He is being held at Central Prison in Raleigh.
Police searched Hicks’ home the night of the shootings and found two fully loaded handguns, a fully loaded AR-15 Bushmaster rifle, two shotguns, five other rifles, two other handguns and two pellet guns, according to one search warrant. They also found numerous magazines with varying amounts of ammunition, boxes of ammunition, shotgun shells, BBs, gun scopes and other gun-related items, the warrant states…’
via 14 firearms seized from Chapel Hill shootings suspect’s home :: WRAL.com.
Surprise! Surprise! the state doesn’t want to fund Anarchism.
As Infoshop.org says, time to step up and support.
‘…“I’m afraid Dr. Falk has made this a bit adversarial,” [Berkeley Associate Chancellor Nils Gilman says], “and we need to put things into some historical perspective. Since the project began, state support for the university has been slashed. So now, all research projects must find their own basis of support. Our current approach is to provide seed funding, but we make it clear that it comes with a time delimitation—typically three to five years. By contrast, the university provided financial support for the Goldman project for 25 years….’
via One Fewer Radical at Berkeley: Emma Goldman Papers Forced to Go Elsewhere | California Magazine.
‘…What’s hard to get one’s mind around is that everyone who’s singing this tune—the police, the wife, the prosecutor—seems to think that it’s reassuring. Getting blown away by a neighbor just because he’s pissed off at you for some ridiculous reason has become the equivalent of a natural disaster in our country, with our gun culture. It’s got nothing to do with the killer’s ideology, or with the victim’s identity. That’s the thinking. And, with this “parking” alibi, we’re being asked to imagine that these killings are a private tragedy, not some big public deal—not terrorism, not even like terrorism. We’re being told to believe that the vigilante killing of three young Americans is socially and politically meaningless.
It seems we are also supposed to be relieved by the fact that Hicks, who carried a gun to earlier confrontations with his neighbors, was not a religious fanatic. Are we then supposed to ignore the fact that he was an anti-religious fanatic, who was said to have taunted the women he later killed for dressing according to their traditions and beliefs? We are told that he was in favor of gay marriage, as if that negated his militant intolerance of others. He spent most of his time on Facebook heaping contempt on Christians, who are more numerous by far in Hicks’s neck of the woods than Muslims. And yet with law-enforcement sounding like Hicks-family spin doctors, we are being urged to consider this murderer as a figure of all-embracing American assimilation—a man who did not care who they were but hated them as he would hate anyone and everyone, equally and without fear or favor, for the way they parked…’
via The Chapel Hill Massacre Blues – The New Yorker.
RIP Bob Simon.
‘Veteran CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon, for more than four decades one of America’s most respected journalists, was killed in a crash Wednesday night after his limo driver lost control of the vehicle on the West Side Highway….’
via 60 Minutes’ Bob Simon killed in car crash | New York Post.
Donovan X. Ramsey writes:
‘…America is safer than it was 20 years ago. Really. Still, white Americans (and many black Americans, for that matter) believe there’s more violent crime than there actually is, and that blacks are largely responsible for it.
In fact, nearly half of white Americans polled believe that violent crime has increased in the last 20 years. Another 13 percent believe that it’s stayed the same. Less than a quarter of whites realize there are less violent crimes today than there were in the 90s when the crack epidemic and gang violence were at their height. Even more, whites overestimate just how much blacks are involved in “serious street crime” and, on average, believe that black people commit a larger proportion of crime than whites do. According to a 2012 study by researchers at the University at Albany, whites significantly overestimate the share of armed robberies, break-ins and drug crimes committed by black people.
via Police Reform Is Impossible in America.
I am not a friend of Hillary Clinton, but apparently she is the only pro-science. pro-reason candidate for the US of A in 2016. #wtf
The former secretary of state said Tuesday on Twitter that she supported vaccinating children:
The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let’s protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 3, 2015
via The Definitive Guide To Potential 2016 Contenders And Vaccines.