Musings

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Tim Alberta on How Donald Trump Seduced a Very Eager and Willing Republican Party

 

Tim Alberta is Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent. He is also the author of the bestselling new book American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.

 Alberta explains how the American fascist Donald Trump took over a very willing and eager Republican Party, what it was like to interview Donald Trump, and is the president a political genius, an idiot, or something all together different? Alberta also explains how and why the wicked sinner Donald Trump is viewed with such adoration and love by white right-wing Christian evangelicals-Christian Nationalists and the role of Michael Pence in nurturing and cementing that relationship.

Alberta also offers his thoughts on if Donald Trump is a "sincere" racist and white supremacist or if such values and behavior are just a means to an end for him to secure and expand his political power.

Notes on Inauthenticity in a Creeping Fascist Nuthouse by Paul Street

 

“The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” ― Michel Foucault 



  Paul Street: Notes on Inauthenticity in a Creeping Fascist Nuthouse

The Story and Life of David Rodigan

He may look like ‘a bank manager’, but after 40 years immersed in reggae music, this legendary DJ is respected from Jamaican dance halls to London superclubs to Nigeran hot spots. Quite a life!!

Musings

                                      The Last Question to Bawa by Coleman Barks

... The last question I asked **Bawa before his death on December 8, 1986 , was about his eyes.

"Will what I see in your eyes ever come up behind mine and look out through me?"

He used that most profound pun in English to answer, "When I (eye) become a we."

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**Bawa | Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen was a revered Sufi saint from the island of Sri Lanka who shared his knowledge and experience with people of every race and religion and from all parts of the world. He belonged to the Qadri order of sufism. He first came to the United States in 1971 and established The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship of North America in Philadelphia. It was Bawa who as guide gifted vision, inspired and instructed Coleman Barks to bring and revive Rumi for the western audience. And credit to Coleman, Rumi is today's best selling poet in America and perhaps the most read poet in west.

The Amazon Is Burning, and the Entire Planet Is at Risk

Death of a Deceiver & Thief: David Koch (May 3, 1940-August 23, 2019)

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The enormity of the David Koch's (& his brother, Charles') fortune is no mystery.He's worth more than $40 billion &that translated to enormous electoral influence especially Republican politics Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today’s GOP.

David Koch's business is not entirely opaque. The company’s troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions – augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle­-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.

I shed no tears for this man. I see his passing as having one less demon in this world.

White Terror: Toni Morrison on the Construct of Racism by Ipek S. Burnett

“To lose one’s racial-ized rank is to lose one’s own valued and enshrined difference,” writes Toni Morrison in The Origin of Others. In a 2016 post-election essay entitled “Mourning for Whiteness,” this sense of loss and the ensuing disorientation become Morrison’s focus. In today’s America as “people of color” are increasingly occupying everywhere including the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, white people can no longer hold onto the “conviction of their natural superiority,” Morrison argues, and continues:

To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that.

Uncle Sam was Born Lethal by Paul Street

For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
– Frederick Douglass, July 4, 1852

                             
                                              UNCLE SAM WAS BORN LETHAL
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The Wisdom of Black Hawk

The Biotech-Industrial Complex Gets Ready to Define What is Human by Stuart A. Newman

Fabricating part-human-part-nonhuman animals, with features of both, seemed like something out of Greek mythology until the late 20^th century. New research then on “geeps,” fully developed, viable mixtures of goats and sheep, showed that constructing such “chimeras” was a real possibility. Still, the warning by H.G. Wells, a century before, in his novel “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” that scientific experiments like this could go terribly awry, seemed fantastical. But this will soon change. At the end of July, it was reported that the biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, director of a laboratory at the Salk Institute in California, produced fetal human-monkey chimeras. He did this in collaboration with researchers in China. And this month the Japanese government is expected to give the go-ahead to scientist Hiromitsu Nakauchi, leader of teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, to conduct similar experiments with the goal of bringing human-pig chimeras to full term. These novel forms of life will soon be among us.

Facing the Tempest of Global Class War

 

Sociologist William I. Robinson points toward a new understanding of global capitalism in the 21st century - as the transnational capitalist class accumulates wealth and power through chaos and predation of the working class worldwide, only a borderless and democratic socialist movement can win a new world for all people on this planet.

 William wrote the book Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Dr. Justin Frank Pt. 2

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(see Pt. 1 as well) 

Dr. Justin Frank is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center and a physician with more than 40 years of experience in psychoanalysis. He is the author of the bestselling books Bush on the Couch and Obama on the Couch. His newest book is Trump on the Couch. Dr. Frank's work has appeared in Time magazine and the Daily Beast and he has appeared as an expert commentator and guest on MSNBC, CNN, PBS and other outlets.

Dr. Frank explains how Donald Trump's many mental pathologies give permission for the violence, hatred and terrorism of his supporters and why the massacres in El Paso and Dayton -- and his reactions to them -- reveal Trump's lack of empathy for other human beings and how the president is likely a sociopath.

Dr. Frank also warns that Donald Trump hates to see happy families and this is why he does not care about seeing nonwhite children and their families suffering in his concentration camps. Dr. Frank also sounds the alarm about how the right-wing terrorism and other political violence that Trump has encouraged and commanded will spread across the country like an epidemic.

Musings

One must say Yes to life, and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places. For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out

~~James Baldwin

One Man's Simple Song to his God

I'm not religious although I do see beauty in the major religions of today; however, I am deeply spiritual. I've always felt that one should pray with one's thoughts & actions - being good to people, respecting their value - & simply say "Thank you" to our magnificent Creator at the beginning & close of each day. That's all that's needed I believe in this life. Going to church or mosque is also beautiful & can enhance one's faith & devotion, but there are other ways to honor the God within.

This song captures for me the sweet simplicity of knowing that God is real & active within us no matter if we sometimes lose sight of this. The singer's deeply felt words express the joyful truth of a loving Presence:

The only truth I've ever known
Is You, the only Light I see
When all is dark and there's no peace
I know that I have You
I am because of You
When I have tried and failed to understand
All that's in Your plan
When I fall short and lose my way
You never place the blame
You love me just the same



Let love manifest.

The Enduring Brilliance of Edgar Allen Poe

Despite his short and tragic life, Edgar Allan Poe left behind a remarkable literary legacy consisting of poems filled with both mystery and horror.

After enduring a life of sickness, losing his parents and his wife, being caught between the rational and irrational due to his fighting with depression and alcoholism, Poe used writing like a medicine that helped him stay sane. His innovative and dark work still shocks and amazes readers and influences authors to this day.

Here are some of my favorite sayings:

TEXTBOOK RACISM: HOW SCHOLARS SUSTAINED WHITE SUPREMACY BY DONALD YACOVONE

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education


There it sat on a library cart with 50 other elementary, grammar, and high-school history textbooks, its bright red spine reaching out through time and space. As I opened the book’s crisp white pages, it all came back. My loud gasp startled those near me at the special collections department of Harvard University’s Monroe C. Gutman Library. Exploring the New World — published repeatedly between 1953 and 1965 — had been assigned in my fifth-grade social-studies class in Saratoga, Calif.

Is Trump Building a White Ethnostate?

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On August 3rd, a 21-year-old white man entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, with an automatic rifle and opened fire. By the time he was finished, 20 people were killed and dozens of others were gravely wounded. Two more would die as a result of the injuries they suffered during the carnage.
The suspect left behind a manifesto that cited the Christchurch mosque shooter as the inspiration for his massacre. Similarly, the document made repeated reference to the "great replacement," a theory among white nationalists that immigration threatens the demographic future of their race. As "Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate" author Alexandra Minna Stern would likely attest, this sudden eruption of violence is part of a larger trend across the West, facilitated in no small part by the presidency of Donald Trump.

In this episode of "Scheer Intelligence," Stern traces the origins of this poisonous ideology with Robert Scheer. While groups like the Proud Boys are fundamentally racist in nature, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, professor notes, they are fueled by misogyny and a broader anxiety about evolving gender roles. "I would say that the gendered elements of this are, for me, some of the most resounding neofascist elements of what white supremacy is today. Because it's about traditionalism, it's about patriarchy, and it's about anti egalitarianism in its most stark [and] primordial forms."

They're also nothing new. Stern acknowledges that contemporary white nationalists are beholden to the eugenicists of the 20th century, as well as regressive thinkers like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. "What was called race suicide in 1910 would be called white genocide in 2020," she continues. "So there's very similar logic at play, and there's a rehabilitation of these ideas in an attempt to kind of update and repackage them—not always in the most effective way, sometimes quite clumsily—but nonetheless to do that for our current moment."

For Stern, the fascist threat is much larger than any single American organization or movement. "This is part of a transnational phenomenon, and the alt-right is part of a transnational network," she concludes. "And I think it's important to be aware of that, because [it] gives alt-righters energy and gives them points of connection."

Book Review: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

 

Book review by Alan Weisman


Climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios back in 2007, the first year the Northwest Passage became navigable without an icebreaker (today, you can book a cruise through it), have all been overtaken by the unforeseen acceleration of events. No one imagined that twelve years later the United Nations would report that we have just twelve years left to avert global catastrophe, which would involve cutting fossil-fuel use nearly by half. Since 2007, the UN now says, we’ve done everything wrong. New coal plants built since the 2015 Paris climate agreement have already doubled the equivalent coal-energy output of Russia and Japan, and 260 more are underway.

Like a Fox — How a TV Channel Is Tearing America Apart

 

Source: Klaus Marre and DonkeyHotey



A little over 20 years ago, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes concocted a profitable way to tap into the white supremacist ideology still bubbling below America’s surface.

They started a “news” network that, instead of providing actual news, gave white, conservative viewers the news they wanted to hear: that they, their families, and their values were under attack by minorities, gays, women, liberals, socialists, Muslims, atheists, the media, etc. — and therefore their biases were justified.

It’s been a lucrative strategy. However, just making a buck wasn’t enough for them. They also wanted to shape the fortunes of the country they were dividing. Here, too, they had tremendous success.
And that is what is getting lost amid the outcry over Donald Trump’s latest round of racist tweets: The US president is often just parroting what he sees on Fox News.* His racism and distorted view of reality are a direct reflection of what this conservative network decides to put on the air.

Monsters With Human Faces by John Whitehead

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Enough already.

The Science Behind Trump’s Ability to Control the Media Through Twitter by Paul Rosenberg

 

“Bush Lied/People Died.” It was simple and to the point: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no reason to invade. People paid for it with their lives.

Iraq Body Count kept track of how many. Trump lies too (bigly!), but in a fundamentally different way that journalists can’t seem to get a handle on — well into his third year in office — leaving themselves (and too many of us) floating around in an ever-fluctuating state of befuddlement.No one can imagine what Trump’s equivalent of Iraq Body Count might be. As Trump ramps up his racist attacks with the 2020 election cycle starting in earnest — while obfuscating his own far-flung misconduct — it’s long past time for journalists to do something serious to curtail the power of his lies and deceptions. The answers are there, if they’d start asking experts, because there are social scientists who understand a great deal about what’s going on — not just with Trump himself, but with the larger environment in which he thrives. There’s still a great deal more to be learned, but they know enough to provide a vaccine against the needless spread of Trump’s venomous disinformation.

Musings

This quote was taken from a keynote address at Portland State University in 1975 where she speaks on the true purpose of racism. You can skip to the 7:00 mark in the following clip:

Eddie Glaude: "This is Us"

Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude delivered a power punch to the jaw of America's smug face earlier today. He called on the American people to acknowledge that while blaming President Donald Trump might be easy to do—especially given the available evidence—for the racist-inspired massacre at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas over the weekend it cannot be ignored that hatred and violence behind the attack is something deeply woven into the fabric of the country's politics and culture.

"America's not unique in its sins as a country," Glaude said. "We're not unique in our evils, to be honest with you. I think where we may be singular is our refusal to acknowledge them—and the legends and myths we tell about our inherent goodness to hide and cover and conceal so we can maintain a kind of willful ignorance that protects our innocence."

Poet'sNook: "dodging the devil" by Mereba

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Damn

You stuck dodging the Devil the older you get
Youth grants grace, growth grants grit
With that grit comes this known opposition, like addictions, evictions, convictions, lost visions, love riddled with truths hidden, world trippin'

Shit's just glitchin', man."

Here come the Devil, talking to you with a smile and shovel, ready to bury you and your lil' hustle
And give some bills and a brand new muzzle
The piece of peace that your perfect would release into the world would be a poison to the Devil
So every chance is taken to take your light, and sell it back to the sky, and for twice as high

You're wise now, though, know it.

Do not plant a seed in your mind, if you do not wish to grow it
You're fast motion kept in focus
Cash calls some people worthless
But what's chess to Hocus Pocus
Pale folks' papas deemed what work is
The broken people ain't always the brokest

As for the Devil, show it.

No ruler can size you
No ruler should rule you, but the one that never binds you
Realize too, All that will try you is designed to unwind you, define you, but you do get to decide if this tide will capsize you

The Devil's been lied to

The Devil can die, too
                              

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Taken from her outstanding album, "The Jungle Is The Only Way Out".  See also the 5 Pieces of Wisdom Gleaned from The Jungle Is The Only Way Out

A Brilliant Insight On This Moment In History & America's Choice In 2020

As usual, my man Dr Cornel West spits the unvarnished truth in a way that only he can!