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If Martin Luther King Jr were alive today, politicians would denounce him
Modern day Republicans and Democrats often speak as if they love King, even as they excoriate the real heirs to his legacy
If Martin Luther King Jr were alive today, politicians would denounce him
Modern day Republicans and Democrats often speak as if they love King, even as they excoriate the real heirs to his legacy
Today is the day American many politicians pretend to care about the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, one of the wisest souls who attempted to save this sorry nation. Don’t fall for their scams.
While King did care about black and/or poor people in the United States and around the world, he was no American exceptionalist. “Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world,” King once said.
He also criticized how Americans “have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice,” when “the fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, here and abroad”.
And yet, modern day Republicans and Democrats often speak as if they love King, even as they excoriate the real heirs to his legacy: the Black Lives Matter activists and other social justice warriors who fight for racial and economic liberation. But the truth is, many of these American politicians would have hated King when he was alive as much as they hypocritically dishonor his radical legacy today. …
‘It was an extraordinary speech’: the day I met Martin Luther King
Nick Nicholson meets the civil rights leader at Newcastle University, November 1967
Fifty years ago, on 13 November 1967, Newcastle University awarded an honorary degree to Martin Luther King. It was the only UK university to do so in his lifetime, and the speech he made that day is the last time he spoke outside the US before he was assassinated five months later.
Newcastle was seen as a modern institution, having broken away from Durham in 1963. I was president of the student council and, along with a dozen other students, met King for coffee an hour before the ceremony. We were wearing our best (and only) suits; we must have seemed very English and conservative. I am from a working-class family and was the first to go to university: it was such an honour to meet him. This photograph appeared widely in Newcastle at the time – the others pictured were presidents of various student associations.
King was quietly spoken and, I think, jet-lagged – he’d flown overnight from the US for a 24-hour visit. We quizzed him about the civil rights movement in America. His assistant, Andrew Young – who would later become the US ambassador to the UN, and the mayor of Atlanta – asked me if we had any radical students. We told him that student protests, which were starting at other universities, had rather passed us by. We were a bit of a backwater, and the student body wasn’t diverse in those days. …
The content of his character
Trump epitomizes the personal failures he tries to pin on black folks
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., August 22, 2017. Exhibit A: Trump’s shithole, rare non-spew mode.
Donald Trump doesn’t know the words to the national anthem. There was some evidence of this as far back as Memorial Day, when during an otherwise solemn Arlington Cemetery ceremony for fallen soldiers, Trump belted out select lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” exactly like someone who oversings the only parts he knows. It happened again at the NCAA title football game Monday night, when Trump mumbled and stumbled his way through the anthem, falling out of step with the words here, keeping conspicuously mum there, and only convincingly singing along after the song’s climax. (In both instances, “rockets’ red glare” seemed to be where Trump’s lyrical knowledge finally kicked in.)
For a president not to know his own nation’s anthem seems both an embarrassment and a shame, emotions that require a kind of self-awareness Trump is incapable of feeling. But this president’s failure at knowing the anthem is especially galling, since he’s made the song such an indispensable weapon in his racist culture war.
It should be obvious by now that everything Trump excels at is also a case-in-point of why he’s so awful. He insults women like a true-blue misogynist and lies like a con-man possessed of a singularly profound dishonest streak. An inveterate racist, his bigotry is so virulent, it makes itself apparent in almost every outburst, both online and off. He deftly invokes tired but politically efficient African-American stereotypes both because he genuinely believes them and to remind his supporters their racism is justified, and reflexively condemns black people, always with an eye toward humiliation. And yet, as we’ve seen time and again, Trump embodies all the worst traits he erroneously faults in “the other.” His attacks on, and proposed correctives for, black folks’ behavior are actual reflections of his own failings. The subtext of every racist Trump utterance inevitably turns out to be a truth about himself.
It is not difficult to find examples. There’s Trump’s more than two-dozen tweeted gripes about how much time President Obama spent golfing and vacationing, which lean hard into the “lazy black people” trope favored by white racists. As of last August, Trump had already chillaxed three times as many days as Obama had the entire first year of his presidency, and a new Axios report finds this shiftless president is too busy watching TV in bed, tweeting and chatting on the phone to get to work before 11am. (Obama worked out in the early mornings and got his first briefing—in actual written words, not pictures—by 8:30am.) …
Recy Taylor’s ‘Baby’ Brother: Decades Before #MeToo, She Was ‘a Fighter’
After she was raped and their house firebombed, her father spent every night for a year perched in a Chinaberry tree overlooking the street, holding a shotgun.
Recy Taylor’s brother recalls that Oprah Winfrey telephoned her around Mother’s Day in 2011.
That was when the state of Alabama finally apologized to Taylor for having failed to prosecute seven armed white men who abducted and gang raped her on Sept. 3, 1944, as she walked from church to home, where she lived with her husband and their 2-year-old daughter. None of the men were ever charged, although one of them confessed.
“She was crying and asking us to let her go home to her husband and baby,” the admitted rapist had told authorities afterward.
Taylor was no doubt glad to get the message of support from Winfrey after the state, along with her native Henry County and hometown of Abbeville acknowledged an abhorrent racial injustice after more than seven decades.
Neither woman could have foreseen that on Jan. 7, 2018—eight days before what would have been Taylor’s 98th birthday—Winfrey would make her the centerpiece of a remarkable speech at the Golden Globe Awards. Winfrey would offer an imagining of true American greatness extending even beyond that of the dream Martin Luther King Jr. so famously proclaimed in 1963 at the civil rights rally in Washington, D.C.
“And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true,” King had said back then of his vision of true racial equality. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: As the Access Hollywood tape reminds us in our present time of Make America Great Again, we are a country not just of Jim Crow but also of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein.
Five Decades of White Backlash
President Trump is the embodiment of over 50 years of resistance to the policies Martin Luther King, Jr. fought to enact.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. In response, a week later President Lyndon B. Johnson scrambled to sign into law the Fair Housing Act, a final major civil-rights bill that had languished for years under the strain of white backlash to the civil-rights movement.
Five years later a New York developer and his son—then only a few years out of college—became two of the first targets of a massive Department of Justice probe for an alleged violations of that landmark act. After a protracted, bitter lawsuit, facing a mountain of allegations that the two had engaged in segregating units and denying applications of black and Puerto Rican applicants, in 1975 Trump Management settled with the federal government and accepted the terms of a consent decree prohibiting discrimination. So entered Donald Trump onto the American stage.
The country has changed since those turbulent days. Many of the major policies created to end the era of de jure white supremacy and address King’s campaigns against segregation and for voting rights have become entrenched in law, the bureaucracy, and courts. Overt racism and bigotry have acquired the stink of faux pas, integrated spaces persist in some places, and there’s even been a black president. But in this Pax Americana, the seed of resistance to those ideas and policies that King championed also germinated across generations. Now that the man who made his name flouting the spirit of King is president, the tree has borne its most ripe fruit.
The term “white backlash” is often used in modern contexts to apply specifically to the racial animus to the presidency of Obama that became a powerful political movement. As outlined by my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, this backlash against “an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption,” can be called to account for the election of Trump to the presidency. And, for the money, that backlash has remarkable explanatory power for the suite of white nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment that has accompanied the chords of Trumpism, and for the power he wields fighting culture wars in any theater. …
Bernie Sanders: Let’s wrench power back from the billionaires
If we stand together against powerful special interests we can eliminate poverty, increase life expectancy and tackle climate change
Here is where we are as a planet in 2018: after all of the wars, revolutions and international summits of the past 100 years, we live in a world where a tiny handful of incredibly wealthy individuals exercise disproportionate levels of control over the economic and political life of the global community.
Difficult as it is to comprehend, the fact is that the six richest people on Earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population – 3.7 billion people. Further, the top 1% now have more money than the bottom 99%. Meanwhile, as the billionaires flaunt their opulence, nearly one in seven people struggle to survive on less than $1.25 (90p) a day and – horrifyingly – some 29,000 children die daily from entirely preventable causes such as diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia.
At the same time, all over the world corrupt elites, oligarchs and anachronistic monarchies spend billions on the most absurd extravagances. The Sultan of Brunei owns some 500 Rolls-Royces and lives in one of the world’s largest palaces, a building with 1,788 rooms once valued at $350m. In the Middle East, which boasts five of the world’s 10 richest monarchs, young royals jet-set around the globe while the region suffers from the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, and at least 29 million children are living in poverty without access to decent housing, safe water or nutritious food. Moreover, while hundreds of millions of people live in abysmal conditions, the arms merchants of the world grow increasingly rich as governments spend trillions of dollars on weapons.
In the United States, Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon, and currently the world’s wealthiest person – has a net worth of more than $100bn. He owns at least four mansions, together worth many tens of millions of dollars. As if that weren’t enough, he is spending $42m on the construction of a clock inside a mountain in Texas that will supposedly run for 10,000 years. But, in Amazon warehouses across the country, his employees often work long, gruelling hours and earn wages so low they rely on Medicaid, food stamps and public housing paid for by US taxpayers. …
‘It’s all explosive’: Michael Wolff on Donald Trump
Speaking to the Guardian, author who shook the White House faces down critical fire and presidential fury and says: ‘I got to a truth no one else has gotten.’
A dinner of clams and Arctic char at Michael Wolff’s Greenwich Village home set the stage for a book that – in the author’s own estimation – has become “an international political event”.
Among the guests were former chairman of Fox News Roger Ailes, expelled from the Murdoch empire over claims of sexual harassment and about to retire to Palm Beach, and Steve Bannon, the would-be inheritor of Ailes’ rightwing political media crown who barely six weeks earlier had orchestrated Donald Trump’s improbable election victory.
“It was six months since Roger had been thrown out of Fox so it wasn’t about having a powerful person here, just the opposite,” Wolff told the Guardian from a low-slung chair by the fireplace in his study. Bannon’s invite came next. “I asked him on the spur of the moment: ‘Roger is coming for dinner. Do you want to come?’”
As the storm generated by Wolff’s Fire and Fury has swept over Trump, Bannon and the White House, Wolff has wondered if Ailes vouched for him that night in January 2017, perhaps over the baba au rhum dessert, even as the torch of populist Republicanism was passed from one man to the other.
“I’ve often thought this is a possible thing that happened,” Wolff said.
Either way, it is the creation story of a book that demolished any illusions about Donald Trump’s improbable White House. …
Requiem for a Dream remix from Paul Oakenfold with the image Night View by Faei.
Ed. I had this track streaming as I pasted the last story up. It sent my head some pretty strange places.
5 Heartbreaking Side Effects Of The Opioid Crisis In America
People have been getting loaded ever since Julius Wine ate all those bad grapes, and we’re mostly OK with it. Sure, we have that War on Drugs business, but as long as dealers aren’t shooting each other within our immediate vicinity, we tend to put our heads in the sand about the whole matter. But prescription opioid painkillers, our latest drug epidemic, are a different beast entirely, affecting everyone from inner-city dwellers to Middle-American grandmas. Ignoring this problem has only allowed it to grow more powerfully weird. For example …
#5. Fentanyl Can Kill You Even If You DON’T Take It
Taking opiates like heroin or morphine has been at best an intensely frowned-upon hobby, and at worst a life-ruining addiction that might lead to membership in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And it’s only getting worse. Overdose has become the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, thanks to a relatively new drug called fentanyl. The potent painkiller didn’t really hit the streets until 2012, but by 2016, it racked up a staggering 20,000 related deaths in that year alone (more than double the year before it). Not that any one person’s life is inherently more valuable than any other’s, but one of those deaths was Prince. If fentanyl were a person, we’d have it drawn and quartered.
The problem with fentanyl is that it’s 50-100 times more powerful than morphine, and up to ten times more powerful than heroin. The difference between fun and fatal doses is damn near microscopic.
You could realistically get a lethal dose stuck under your fingernail.
The thing that really makes fentanyl dangerous is that you don’t even have to take it to overdose on it. It’s so potent that merely touching it or breathing near it can send you to the hospital. A police officer in New Jersey had to be rushed to the emergency room because a little puff of air came out of the bag of fentanyl he was closing. Police have begun stocking protective gear like Tyvek suits and respirators, and crime labs are researching ways to never have to open a bag of the stuff. Hell, even the nurses tending to an overdose patient can become afflicted, as was the case in Ohio in which three nurses came down with symptoms of fentanyl poisoning from secondhand exposure.
It’s like heroin met anthrax in a dark alley, and they found, to everyone’s great dismay, that they actually got along great. …
Hawaiians were falsely warned about an imminent missile attack
FALSE ALARM
The warning was issued in error.
Hawaiians awoke to a startling message on Saturday morning.
A mobile phone alert went out to residents of the US state after 8am local time that falsely warned a missile attack was imminent. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the alert read, based on screenshots posted to social media.
HAWAII – THIS IS A FALSE ALARM. THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE TO HAWAII. I HAVE CONFIRMED WITH OFFICIALS THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE. pic.twitter.com/DxfTXIDOQs
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) January 13, 2018
A voice alert also appeared to go out over local TV stations, interrupting local broadcasts.
TV with the alert pic.twitter.com/VCZAtvyuzQ
— Michelle Broder Van Dyke (@michellebvd) January 13, 2018
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard said shortly afterward that the alert was a false alarm, citing contacts with defense officials. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency also confirmed there was no missile threat to the state. The city and county of Honolulu said in a statement that the warning was issued in error by “the State Warning Point.”
NO missile threat to Hawaii.
— Hawaii EMA (@Hawaii_EMA) January 13, 2018
Governor David Ige, who met with officials at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency after the incident, said the alert was triggered when someone pressed “the wrong button” during a routine shift change, CNN reported. That reportedly sent the alert out over mobile phones and local TV and radio stations. The agency contacted the radio and TV stations to tell them it was a false alarm, but it took time to correct the mobile alert. The correction went out 38 minutes after the false alert on Saturday, the outlet reported. …
Hawaii missile false alarm due to badly designed user interface, reports say
Alert occurred after employer pressed button labelled ‘missile alert’, instead of the one next to it marked ‘test missile alert.’
A false alarm warning Hawaiians of an incoming ballistic missile on Saturday, was reportedly issued because of a “terribly designed” user interface.
The computer system that allows the Hawaiian Emergency Management Agency (HEMA) to send emergency alerts asks employees to select the type of alert that they are sending from a drop-down menu.
Among the options available are two for missile alerts, according to the Washington Post. One is labelled “test missile alert”, which will test the notification system is working without actually sending an alert to the public.
The other is labelled “missile alert”. Selecting that option will send an alert to every mobile phone in Hawaii, warning recipients to “seek immediate shelter” – and specifically noting that “this is not a drill”. That was the option the HEMA employee mistakenly selected.
It was, in fact, a drill. The one-word difference between the two menu options was easily overlooked, and there is only one other difference in the system between the test alert and the real thing: a confirmation prompt, which the employee also clicked through. The employee has been temporarily reassigned, but will keep their job, according to HEMA spokesman Richard Rapoza. …
The Mysterious Twitter User Drawing a Swarm of Japan Traders
• Tweets by the anonymous Okasanman are ‘crucial’ for traders
• Prolific tweeter has more followers than the Bank of Japan
On a day when billions in profits and losses would be determined by split-second trades, the salaried professionals of Japan’s financial markets were glued to their news terminals. Another group was staring at the feed of an anonymous Twitter account.
It was shortly after noon on Jan. 29, 2016, and people with money at stake were waiting for the Bank of Japan to announce its monetary policy. While the decision’s date is set in advance, nobody knows its timing.
“It’s a negative interest rate bazooka!” wrote the Twitter user who goes by the handle Okasanman, attaching a screenshot of an article just published on a local news website, showing the BOJ was discussing introducing minus rates as its latest shock-and-awe stimulus weapon.
As stock futures jumped and the yen tumbled, some traders expressed gratitude for the warning. About 15 minutes later, the bank said it was taking borrowing costs below zero.
“This post saved my life,” one user gushed in reply. “The profits I made are thanks to it.” …
Artists’ impressions: sculptors help to identify victims found on US-Mexico border
The remains of eight dead men have never been formally identified, so a group of New York artists have been called upon for help with facial reconstruction.
The families of eight men found dead on the US border with Mexico do not know what happened to them. The men have not been identified but their skulls sit in the office of the medical examiner of Pima County, Arizona, about 70 miles north of the border.
This week, in a last-ditch effort to provide answers, artists at the New York Academy of Art sculpted facial reconstructions of the men – the first time an art school has done such forensic work on presumed migrants.
The students worked from 3D-printed copies of the skulls and with information available to the medical examiner: usually height, gender, nationality and age range. Each student used clay and other materials to reconstruct the face in front of them. The result was photographed and added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs.
“It’s like a God complex,” said one student, Kathleen Gallo. “This life and the lives of everyone who knew him are at stake.”
The unidentified men were just a small group of the 1,004 people found dead in Pima County since 2000 who have never been formally identified. Another 1,812 have since been given a name. …
The Time the Oxford English Dictionary Forgot a Word
Sir James Murray in his Scriptorium.
When the complete edition of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary debuted in 1928, it was lauded as a comprehensive collection of the English language, a glossary so vast—and so thorough—that no other reference book could ever exceed its detail or depth. In total, the project took seven decades to catalogue everything from A to Z, defining a total of 414,825 words. But in the eyes of its editor James Murray, the very first volume of the dictionary was something of an embarrassment: It was missing a word.
Looking back, it’s impressive that more words were not lost. Assembling the OED was a nightmare. Before the first volume—an installment consisting of words beginning with the letters A and B—was published in 1888, multiple editors had taken (and abandoned) the helm, and each regime change created new opportunities for mayhem. When James Murray took command in 1879, the Oxford English Dictionary could best be defined by the word disarray.
The irony of making this massive reference book was that it required millions upon millions of tiny, tiny pieces of paper. Every day, volunteers mailed in thousands of small strips of paper called “quotation slips.” On these slips, volunteers would copy a single sentence from a book, in hopes that this sentence could help iluminate a particular word’s meaning. (For example, the previous sentence might be a good example of the word illuminate. Volunteers would copy that sentence and mail it to Oxford’s editors, who would review it and compare the slip to others to highlight the word illuminate.)
The process helped Oxford’s editors study all of the shades of meaning expressed by a single word, but it was also tedious and messy. With thousands of slips pouring into the OED’s offices every day, things could often go wrong.
And they did. …
Milkshake duck announced as Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year
Racist milkshake drinking duck has come to define a particular thread of the internet’s collective fickleness.
Finally, justice for milkshake duck.
The racist milkshake drinking duck which has come to define a particular thread of the internet’s collective fickleness was announced as the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2017 on Monday.
Coined on Twitter by @pixelatedboat in June 2016, the term quickly became short-hand for the internet’s habit of rushing to seize on the latest cultural zeitgeist before rejecting it just as enthusiastically when it is revealed to be somehow problematic.
Per Macquarie, it is defined as “a person who is initially viewed positively by the media but is then discovered to have something questionable about them which causes a sharp decline in their popularity”.
“The media” though, might be too broad a prism. Milkshake Ducks by and large are made and unmade on social media.
Think Ken Bone, the mild-mannered guy in the red sweater who briefly became a darling of social media after asking a question during a debate at last year’s US presidential election. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In this parallel cartoon universe, the Commander-in-Chief opens the White House doors for an “all access” look at a typical day in the life of the President of the United States, Donald Trump. Don’t miss the premiere of Our Cartoon President Sunday, February 11th at 8PM ET/PT on SHOWTIME.
“Saturday Night Live” on Jan. 13, criticized President Trump’s reference to Haiti and other African nations as “shithole countries.”
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
An epic battle between a Mantis and a Cat!
Max keeping busy and getting into trouble while I try to do dishes.
FINALLY . . .
Good dog tries to cheer up human in shower, with hilariously adorable results
Imagine stepping into your tub for a nice, hot shower, and then looking down to see this little face staring up at you.
Every time I'm in the shower my dog stares at me, worried, and he must assume I'm upset in here (because he hates baths) so he thinks if he drops his toy in that I'll feel better pic.twitter.com/xfIrRpPdtu
— Rude (@rudeweaver) January 13, 2018
It sounds a little annoying and a lot cute, but once you understand why he’s doing it, it turns out to be the sweetest thing ever: Clark, the mini Goldendoodle, is just trying to help his owners through the harrowing ordeal that is the bath.
And no, this isn’t just Clark trying to play fetch with a captive audience.
@ everyone saying he just wants to play or for us to throw the toy- no, each shower he stays for a good 10 minutes staring and being upset then eventually brings the toy and if you throw it he looks at you like you offended his ancestors and doesn't bring it back
— Rude (@rudeweaver) January 14, 2018
And yes, she does mean every time.
Also if anyone is wondering why I had my phone in the shower it's because he does this every time and I wanted to finally get it on camera haha
— Rude (@rudeweaver) January 13, 2018
It may seem like bizarre behavior to us humans, but by dog logic, this is an incredibly kind and caring gesture. All those cliches about our pets taking care of us as much as we take care of them are true! …
That’s a good boy, Clark.
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?