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1000 results for “robert_said_what”
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@cpoliticditto anyone else getting that #GameofThrones #reek vibe off this picture ?
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@[email protected] anyone else getting that #GameofThrones #reek vibe off this picture ?
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Please consider using @resistbot to contact your senators, representatives and the president so they can address #elmo about the suspension of #steveherman and #voa if you live in the #USA he is literally a government employee and a fascist billionaire is attempting to muzzle him.
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#techhubsocial how does one donate to their instance since I keep seeing that donating to mastodon as a whole doesn’t help the individual instance.
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#techhubsocial how does one donate to their instance since I keep seeing that donating to mastodon as a whole doesn’t help the individual instance.
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@robertcasties @lavaeolus @DigitalHistory
Yes, what Robert said, you are always welcome to visit #DHBerlin and @dh_berlin and have some drinks and talks with us. ☀️
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@robertcasties @lavaeolus @DigitalHistory
Yes, what Robert said, you are always welcome to visit #DHBerlin and @dh_berlin and have some drinks and talks with us. ☀️
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Steve Mac releases the second single from his forthcoming album 'Bless This Acid House' this week, which sees the Jack Said What co-label head teaming up with house legend Robert Owens.
https://909originals.com/?p=25765 #newrelease #housemusic #stevemac #robertowens Follow @909originals for more
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Steve Mac releases the second single from his forthcoming album 'Bless This Acid House' this week, which sees the Jack Said What co-label head teaming up with house legend Robert Owens.
https://909originals.com/?p=25765 #newrelease #housemusic #stevemac #robertowens Follow @909originals for more
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GOWER: Penclawdd gelato brand GG’s takes over iconic Caswell Bay kiosk in first step of expansion
A popular Gower gelato brand is expanding beyond its Penclawdd home – taking over an iconic beachside kiosk at Caswell Bay as the first step in a wider growth strategy.
GG’s Gelato, which has operated its ice cream parlour in Penclawdd since 2019 and supplies multiple trade customers across the region, has acquired the food and beverage kiosk at Caswell Bay through chartered surveyors RJ.
The kiosk – known as The Beach Shack – was run for 54 years by Robert, who retired earlier this year having served generations of beachgoers at Caswell Bay. Robert said at the time that he had already offered to help the new owner settle in.
Toby Link-Jones, Operations Manager at GG’s, said Caswell had been on their radar for some time. “When this Caswell property became available it was a no brainer,” he said. “It’s such an iconic spot, and for what we’re building with GG’s, it just felt like the right fit.”
As well as its full gelato range, the kiosk will offer grab-and-go coffee, cold drinks, and a selection of hot food and snacks – including pizza served from a bespoke pizza oven.
Link-Jones said the location held a special significance. He described Caswell as a place with a real sense of nostalgia for many people – somewhere they had grown up visiting. Taking over from another family-owned business that had operated there for many years made it feel, he said, like “a genuine full-circle moment.”
The goal, he added, was to become part of the same memories for the next generation.
The Caswell acquisition marks the first step in what GG’s describes as a planned portfolio of owned sites across South Wales. The brand said it would continue looking at opportunities – but only where the location felt right and could be operated to the standard they want.
Link-Jones was clear that growth would be managed carefully. He said the focus over the next few months was getting Caswell operating to the standard the brand wanted, before looking at further sites.
RJ Chartered Surveyors has been working closely with GG’s to identify suitable premises across South Wales.
James Smale-Davies, Associate Director at RJ Chartered Surveyors, added: “It has been a pleasure working alongside GG’s as they take this exciting first step into expanding their physical presence. Caswell is a prime coastal location, and the kiosk presented a unique opportunity for a high-quality, locally rooted brand to establish itself in a setting that aligns perfectly with its offering.
“We look forward to continuing our relationship with GG’s as they explore further opportunities across South Wales and build on what is already a strong and much-loved brand.”
GG’s was founded in Penclawdd and has built a reputation for high-quality artisan gelato, supplying a growing number of trade customers alongside its original parlour. The Caswell kiosk represents its first permanent second site.
Caswell Bay is one of Gower’s most visited beaches, sitting within the UK’s first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and drawing visitors from across south Wales and beyond throughout the summer season.
Related coverage
Gower beachside cafe owner retires after 54 years
The story of Robert and The Beach Shack – the business GG’s has now taken over at Caswell Bay.Gower: The UK’s first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty turns 70
#CaswellBay #GGSGelato #Gower #iceCream #Penclawdd #RJCharteredSurveyors
Why Caswell Bay and the Gower Peninsula remain among Britain’s most special places. -
Robert Kiyosaki predicts BRICS new currency will destroy the US dollar
Robert #Kiyosaki predicts #BRICS new currency will destroy the #US #dollar - The dollar is dying. And the BRICS group's proposed new currency will be the perpetrator that fires the final and fatal shot. As a result, everyone is better off investing their hard-earned #money in various alternative asset classes to be adequately prepared for the inevitable day the US dollar comes crashing down. These are the chilling words of Rich Dad Poor Dad author, Robert Kiyosaki, one of the world’s most trusted names in personal finance and investing. Kiyosaki’s chilling prophecy has sent shockwaves through the financial world, with many asking the same question: Are we truly on the cusp of a new world order where BRICS's upcoming currency will dethrone the US dollar as the dominant global reserve currency?
Robert Kiyosaki said in a series of tweets made on X on Sunday, May 19th, 2024, that the US dollar is at risk of losing its status as the global reserve currency immediately after the BRICS alliance establishes its proposed new currency. He tweeted: “Currently in South Africa a country I love. Watching and listening to rumours of what will happen when BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa produce BRICS crypto, possibly backed by gold. If BRICS gold crypto happens trillions in fake money, fiat US dollars will come rushing back to home to America causing hyperinflation in America, ultimately destroying the US dollar, he said.” The renowned personal finance author proceeded to recommend his usual blend of investments, advising: “Best Buy real #gold, #silver, and #Bitcoin now, and protect yourself from the crash of the US dollar.”
youtube.com/watch?v=eluEqBgUSf…
#economy #Economy&Policy #Géopolitique #Politique #Politics #Journalism #actu #news #GeoPolitics -
Robert Kiyosaki predicts BRICS new currency will destroy the US dollar
Robert #Kiyosaki predicts #BRICS new currency will destroy the #US #dollar - The dollar is dying. And the BRICS group's proposed new currency will be the perpetrator that fires the final and fatal shot. As a result, everyone is better off investing their hard-earned #money in various alternative asset classes to be adequately prepared for the inevitable day the US dollar comes crashing down. These are the chilling words of Rich Dad Poor Dad author, Robert Kiyosaki, one of the world’s most trusted names in personal finance and investing. Kiyosaki’s chilling prophecy has sent shockwaves through the financial world, with many asking the same question: Are we truly on the cusp of a new world order where BRICS's upcoming currency will dethrone the US dollar as the dominant global reserve currency?
Robert Kiyosaki said in a series of tweets made on X on Sunday, May 19th, 2024, that the US dollar is at risk of losing its status as the global reserve currency immediately after the BRICS alliance establishes its proposed new currency. He tweeted: “Currently in South Africa a country I love. Watching and listening to rumours of what will happen when BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa produce BRICS crypto, possibly backed by gold. If BRICS gold crypto happens trillions in fake money, fiat US dollars will come rushing back to home to America causing hyperinflation in America, ultimately destroying the US dollar, he said.” The renowned personal finance author proceeded to recommend his usual blend of investments, advising: “Best Buy real #gold, #silver, and #Bitcoin now, and protect yourself from the crash of the US dollar.”
youtube.com/watch?v=eluEqBgUSf…
#economy #Economy&Policy #Géopolitique #Politique #Politics #Journalism #actu #news #GeoPolitics -
Global Actions Blast Marcos’ Sham Peace
On August 26, organizations and allies of the Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle (FFPS) staged a Global Day of Action to denounce the Marcos government’s intensifying repression. Coordinated actions in more than 10 countries, participated by over 30 organizations, called out the administration’s sham ‘peace’ agenda and rallied in solidarity with the Filipino people.
“How can Marcos claim to champion ‘peace’ when he is the number one sower of unpeace?” said Robert Reid, chairperson of FFPS. “While the Filipino people endure landlessness, low wages, rising prices and other systemic problems under Marcos’ presidency, the government relentlessly attacks anyone who dares dissent. We should call it for what it is: a war of suppression. Massacres, murders, military control and bombings of rural communities have become the policy of this government.”
As of June 2025, human rights watchdog Karapatan has documented 51,206 victims of bombing; 67,204 victims of indiscriminate firing; and 45,097 victims of forced evacuation, all in the course of the Marcos regime’s counterinsurgency war.
Reid denounced Marcos’ so-called peace programs and also criticized the role of the US and other international support to the Philippine government. “Foreign military aid and political support fuel Marcos’ war crimes. The only ‘peace’ they are buying is a peace of the grave. A just and lasting peace requires addressing the root causes underlying the armed civil conflict.”
Under Marcos, PH-US ties have deepened, with the US heavily embroiled in the counterinsurgency war. Examples include the $5.58 billion US arms sale in 2025 and direct involvement in spy-plane operations and ground patrols during Balikatan exercises.
From the capitals of Europe to cities across North America, and across the world from Hong Kong to New Zealand, activists echoed the call for a just and lasting peace. At mobilizations outside Philippine embassies and consulates solidarity activists voiced out their condemnation against the war of suppression, whilst other groups organized film screenings, teach-ins, postering and wheat-pasting, graffiti, and other creative actions to show their support to the Filipino people’s struggles for national and social liberation.
“The revolutionary movement represented by the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) offers the most genuine path to change,” said Lidia Rodenburg, Coordinator of Maya Solidarity in the Netherlands. “Its program addresses the real problems driving the Filipino people to take up arms. A just and lasting peace can only come when the people’s desire for national liberation and social change is fulfilled.”
Activists also slammed Marcos’ State of the Nation Address claim that no guerrilla forces remain and vowed their continued support to the revolutionary fighters.
“If there were no more guerrillas, why are Marcos’ bombs raining down on communities and his battalions occupying villages?” asked Jonathan Bagot, Chairperson of FFPS-CST in Vancouver. “These claims are part of counterinsurgency tactics, and are directly and daily contradicted by the reality of continuous counter-revolutionary violence on the one hand and expanding revolutionary armed resistance by the Filipino masses on the other.”
Rei X of the Canada-Philippine Solidarity Organization in Toronto added, “We reject US-Marcos’ fake peace and call on people worldwide to support the Philippine revolution until victory. The national democratic revolution is the expression of the Filipino people’s will for genuine change, and the people’s war waged in the countryside is a legitimate means to achieve it.”
Coni Ledesma of the NDFP emphasized the ongoing struggle: “Today we continue to commemorate the Cry of Pugad Lawin, the cry for freedom and liberation, because we are still struggling and fighting for the full liberation of the Philippines. The revolutionaries that are building a new Philippines are building peace.”
“History has proven that no amount of fascist suppression will succeed in extinguishing the revolutionary fire of the Filipino people’s democratic revolution,” Reid concluded. “As internationalists, we have to also be irrepressible and intensify our support to contribute meaningfully to their struggle.”
About Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle (FFPS):
Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle (FFPS) / Friends of the National Democratic Front (FNDF) is a global organization that supports the Filipino people’s struggle for genuine national liberation as outlined in the 12 point program of the NDF. For more information, visit https://ffps.info.Received by email.
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#InwoodPark Ablaze as #BrushFires Reach Historic Levels Across #NYC
Firefighters have responded to more than 200 brush fires in the past two weeks, including nearly two dozen in #VanCortlandtPark in The Bronx, as the city reckons with an historically dry and fiery season.
by Jonathan Custodio and Max Rivera Nov. 13, 2024
‘We Could Smell It From Our Apartment’
"The recent brush fires over a historically dry stretch included two separate ones over four days in wooded parts of the Bronx’s sprawling Van Cortlandt Park that have local residents and officials concerned about what could be coming before significant rain finally arrives.
"'Remarkably dry conditions in October and so far in November have resulted in a historic amount of brush fires over the last two weeks,' FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker said in a statement on Wednesday, hours before another brush fire erupted in Inwood Hill Park. 'Due to a significant lack of rainfall, the threat of fast spreading brush fires fueled by dry vegetation and windy conditions pose a real threat to our members and our city."
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/11/13/brush-fires-nyc-inwood-van-cortlandt-parks/
#NYCBrushFires #NYC #WildfireWx #Drought2024 #FireSeason #NortheastWildfires
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#InwoodPark Ablaze as #BrushFires Reach Historic Levels Across #NYC
Firefighters have responded to more than 200 brush fires in the past two weeks, including nearly two dozen in #VanCortlandtPark in The Bronx, as the city reckons with an historically dry and fiery season.
by Jonathan Custodio and Max Rivera Nov. 13, 2024
‘We Could Smell It From Our Apartment’
"The recent brush fires over a historically dry stretch included two separate ones over four days in wooded parts of the Bronx’s sprawling Van Cortlandt Park that have local residents and officials concerned about what could be coming before significant rain finally arrives.
"'Remarkably dry conditions in October and so far in November have resulted in a historic amount of brush fires over the last two weeks,' FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker said in a statement on Wednesday, hours before another brush fire erupted in Inwood Hill Park. 'Due to a significant lack of rainfall, the threat of fast spreading brush fires fueled by dry vegetation and windy conditions pose a real threat to our members and our city."
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/11/13/brush-fires-nyc-inwood-van-cortlandt-parks/
#NYCBrushFires #NYC #WildfireWx #Drought2024 #FireSeason #NortheastWildfires
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@bodhidave @EgyptianAphorist @mcmullin @clarablackink @histodons
Mathematics and #art are human activities, and in a #mathematics paper
(on #conic sections, the #conics, in particular, and described in the
linked blog post), I was pleased to have reason to quote what
Robert Pirsig said about teaching #writing. I commented,> What #Pirsig wanted, as an English teacher, was for students to learn
> to write what *they* wanted. In the end, this would be what everybody
> else wanted, which was *quality.*But there's a difference:
> In mathematics, an essential part of #quality is *truth,* or
> *correctness* if you prefer. We take this to be universal.Not everybody may agree on what is good art, but I think they should
agree on what is correct mathematics.https://polytropy.com/2020/08/05/an-exercise-in-analytic-geometry/
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Finally Friday Reads: Only the Very Worst People
“I feel safer already,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
While we’re waiting for Putin to take what’s left of Yam Tits’ scalp in Alaska, let’s focus on what he’s trying to pass off as serious hires for all levels of the Federal Government. I’m going to start with the last target of South Park’s wonderful new season, ICE Barbie. This is from the Washington Post. “Kristi Noem is living free of charge in Coast Guard commandant’s home. A DHS spokesman said Noem must live on the military base because she had been “so horribly doxxed and targeted that she is no longer able to safely live in her own apartment.” I find it more than slightly ironic that the head of “Homeland Security” doesn’t feel secure in her own home.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem is living for free in a military home typicallyreserved for the U.S. Coast Guard’s top admiral, officials familiar with the matter said. The highly unusual arrangement has raised concern within the agency andfrom some Democrats, who describe it as a waste of military resources.
Noem recently moved intoQuarters 1, a spacious waterfront residence at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Southeast Washington where the Coast Guard commandant typically resides. She did so because of concerns over her safety after the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, published photographs in April of the area around Noem’s residence in Washington’s Navy Yard neighborhood, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin described Noem’s time at the commandant’s residence as temporary. She did not specify how long thesetup would last or how long Noem has lived there.
Noem pays no rent to live in the commandant’s house, according to an official familiar with the matter granted anonymity to speak candidly. That’s a departure from how other Cabinet secretarieshave handled similar arrangements. Other Cabinet officials, including during both Trump administrations, have paid to use military housing that otherwise would be occupied by top generals and admirals.
Noem’s housing has raised eyebrows from current and retired Coast Guard officials, as well as Democrats, who warn that Noem risks creating the perception that she is exploiting the perks of her position as DHS secretary, in which she supervises the Coast Guard. They say her decision could set off a chain reaction that could displace other senior members of the service in a situation with limited housing.
Current and former Coast Guard members have also cited Noem’s frequent use of a Coast Guard Gulfstream aircraft as a point of tension. Agency guidelines require the DHS secretary to use a plane with secure communications for both personal and professional business, though they are required to reimburse the government for personal travel. McLaughlin said that Noem had reimbursed “tens of thousands of dollars” for the air travel, after publication of the story.
Noem faced scrutiny for her expenses when she served as governor of South Dakota. She spent $68,000 in taxpayer funds to refurbish the governor’s mansion with a sauna, chandelier and other amenities, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported in 2021. And South Dakota picked up the tab for at least $150,000 in campaign and personal travel for Noem related to her security when she was governor, the Associated Press reported this year.
Noem’s housing arrangement could create the impression that she is exploiting her position of authority over the Coast Guard to accrue perks for herself, said Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog nonprofit.
“What are the optics?” Brown said. “And is this taking advantage of your individual position as a government official to benefit unduly?”
So, I wonder if her neighbors hide their dogs? It’s amazing to me that the law and order crowd can’t seem to actually figure out either. Let’s continue with people who don’t know how to do their jobs. “US Attorney Pirro’s office admits grand jury refused ICE interference charges — twice. Federal prosecutors told a judge they had failed twice to secure an indictment against Sydney Lori Reid for allegedly assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE arrest.” I have to confess that I can’t listen to or watch any interviews with her. Her voice is disturbingly grating. She also looks like something out of a horror film. I pity the poor jury that has to deal with this. This much body dysmorphia in one administration is a sign of something. You may discuss that amongst yourselves. The story comes from the local news station at WUSA9.
Federal prosecutors twice sought a grand jury indictment against a D.C. woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE inmate transfer — and were twice rejected, the U.S. Attorney’s Office admitted in court Thursday.
Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey revealed the denials to attorneys for Sydney Lori Reid and later granted their request to remove all bond conditions and release her on her own recognizance over prosecutors’ objections. He will resume a preliminary hearing on Friday afternoon to determine whether to dismiss the case entirely.
“Two presentations to the grand jury returned no bill both times,” Harvey said. “Suggesting the evidence is wanting, given the standard for indictment is probable cause. Suggesting the government may never get an indictment.”
Grand juries are tasked with deciding only whether there is a reasonable basis to support charging someone with a crime – a much lower burden for prosecutors than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of criminal juries – and typically make their decisions after hearing evidence only from the government. At the federal level, grand juries return indictments, or “true bills,” in the vast majority of cases.
Reid, 44, was charged last month with an enhanced felony version of an assault charge that requires inflicting bodily injury on a federal officer and carries a maximum sentence of up to eight years in prison. The charge is the same offense filed this week against a former DOJ employee accused of throwing a sandwich at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent.
In a press release last month, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office accused Reid of trying to impede the transfer of two alleged members of the 18th Street gang who were being arrested by ICE outside the D.C. Jail prior to transfer to the custody of the FBI.
Federal prosecutors declined to call the injured FBI agent or any of the ICE officers involved in the incident during Thursday’s hearing, however. Instead, they had an investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s Office testify about his review of video of the incident and brief conversations with the officers. The investigator, Special Agent Sean Ricardi, said he’d had no involvement in the case until he was asked to prepare for testimony Thursday morning.
Video played by prosecutors shows Reid approaching the ICE officers while holding up her phone, which she says is for her protection. She is then later seen being held by multiple officers against a wall while she asks, “How do you feel about stealing f***ing people?”
Even the first soft porn star is getting into the headlines. You know, I really hate to slut slam or pick on woman for their looks. I love Stormy Daniels. She’s as sweet as pie, and she helped feed the neighborhood animals during our last hurricane. I’m always happy to see her when she visits. But, there’s a crossed Rubicon at some point with some behavior. Melania whiffed with this one. This story is from The Guardian. “Melania Trump demands Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to Jeffrey Epstein. First lady threatens to sue Joe Biden’s son after he said sex offender Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump. I can’t wait to read the testimony on the Trumps explaining their relationships with Epstein, frankly.
Melania Trump has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and has threatened to sue if he does not.
Biden, the son of the former president Joe Biden, alleged in an interview this month that Epstein had introduced the first lady to Donald Trump.
The statements were false, defamatory and “extremely salacious”, Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, said in a letter to Biden. Biden’s remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm”, he added.
Biden made the Epstein comments during a sprawling interview with the US journalist Andrew Callaghan in which he lashed out at “elites” and others in the Democratic party who he said had undermined his father before he dropped out of last year’s presidential campaign.
I’m sorry, but I just keep laughing at the “reputational harm” part. It’s not like you were “modelling” for some wannabe Picasso. We’ve seen the pictures, honey.
“Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep,” Biden said in one of the comments that the first lady disputes. Biden attributed the claim to the author Michael Wolff. Donald Trump has accused Wolff of making up stories to sell books.
Biden responded to the lawsuit on Thursday, speaking again to Callaghan, this time from a holiday location, and in effect doubled down on his unsubstantiated claim.
Asked if he wished to apologize, Biden said: “Uh, fuck that, not going to happen.”
“What I said is what I have heard and seen reported and written primarily from Michael Wolff, but also dating back to 2019.” He cited a number of publications, including the New York Times and Vanity Fair, as sources of his information.
The first lady’s threats echo a favoured strategy of her husband, who has aggressively used litigation to go after critics. Public figures such as the Trumps face a high bar to succeed in a defamation lawsuit.
The president also responded to the issue, accusing Biden of fabricating stories to denigrate the first lady. Trump told Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday morning that he had encouraged her to sue.
“I said go forward. You know, I’ve done pretty well on these lawsuits lately … and Jeffrey Epstein had nothing to do with Melania and introducing,” he told Kilmeade.
“But they do that to demean, they make up stories. I mean I can tell you exactly how it was and it was another person actually … but it wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein. “I told her go ahead and do it.”
Yes, my goodness, Yam Tits! You never tell tall tales or make up stories! I bet it hurts your virgin ears to hear that kind of talk! I mean, it must’ve been so challenging to sneak around with her behind your second wife’s back, even though you had all that practice sneaking around behind your first wife’s bank. Pete Hegseth would be so proud of you! This Guardian article on Trump begging the Norwegian Finance Minister for a Nobel prize just had me spitting out my morning tea with laughter. “Trump reportedly called Norwegian minister ‘out of the blue’ to ask about Nobel prize. The US president told Norway’s finance minister he wants the Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Norwegian press.” He just can’t stand that former President Obama got one! “Trump reportedly called Norwegian minister ‘out of the blue’ to ask about Nobel prize. The US president told Norway’s finance minister he wants the Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Norwegian press.” What? Ruining the Kennedy Center honors and wrecking the U.S. economy wasn’t enough for you?
Donald Trump cold-called Norway’s finance minister last month to ask about a nomination for the Nobel peace prize, Norwegian press reported on Thursday.
The Norwegian outlet Dagens Næringsliv, citing unnamed sources, reported: “Out of the blue, while finance minister Jens Stoltenberg was walking down the street in Oslo, Donald Trump called … He wanted the Nobel prize – and to discuss tariffs.”
The outlet added that it was not the first time that Trump had raised the question of a Nobel peace prize nomination to Stoltenberg.
In a statement to Reuters, Stoltenberg, the former Nato secretary-general, said the call focused on tariffs and economic cooperation ahead of Trump’s call with Jonas Støre, the Norwegian prime minister.
“I will not go into further detail about the content of the conversation,” Stoltenberg said, adding that several White House officials including the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, were on the call.
Each year, the five-member Norwegian Nobel committee reviews hundreds of candidates before choosing laureates. The committee members are appointed by Norway’s parliament according to the will of Alfred Nobel, a 19-century Swedish industrialist. Laureates are announced in October.
Trump has previously complained multiple times about not receiving the Nobel peace prize, an award which four of his predecessors, including Barack Obama, have received.
In his most recent tirade, Trump took to Truth Social in June, saying: “No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!”
How about a little whine with that Skrei Yam Tits? So, I just had to put up this article by Mother Jones. It’s about the deluge of propaganda we get daily and its impact. “The Official Voice of the US Government Is Cruel, Gross, and Weird. What Is That Doing to Us? Joking memes about imprisonment, deportation, and death by alligator are designed to radicalize and desensitize.”
In March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a woman they accused of drug trafficking and entering the country illegally. Standing in a parking lot, they photographed her, weeping, eyes half-closed in anguish, her arms cuffed behind her back. And then—in a cruel innovation specific to the Trump administration—the White House’s official Twitter account used an AI tool to make a cartoon illustration of her crying and handcuffed, in the style of the beloved Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. The tweet got 155,000 likes, a mix of outraged and delighted responses, and, as it was designed to, a lot of attention: it’s so far been viewed 76 million times. On Twitter, many users posted positive responses declaring that the image was exactly what they had voted for.
This is, at the moment, the official voice of the US government: a rancid mixture of trolling, cruelty, propaganda, and crass jokes about the human suffering they’re creating, an effort, as Wired’s Tess Owen recently put it, to turn actions like mass deportation into “one big joke.” On Instagram and Twitter (their largest audience), government entities including the White House, ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security attempt to surf viral trends to expanded public attention: They twist memes and sounds popular on TikTok, repurpose South Park’s parodies for their own self-promotion, and blend it all with images that draw on or directly reproduce classical art and Americana paintings that are designed to stir nostalgia for an imagined past. (The use of some of this art, as the Washington Post has written, has stirred the ire of the artists themselves or their representatives; it’s not easy to extract a stern condemnation from the estate of treacly pastoral painter Thomas Kinkade, but this government managed to do it.)
A lot of the trends are specifically designed to appeal to young white men, like one that repurposes a 1970s-looking ad for a van to ask, “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” Another ICE recruitment effort asks, “Which way, American man?” in front a befuddled-looking Uncle Sam gazing at a crossroads post labeled with signs including “INVASION,” “CULTURAL DECLINE” pointing one way, and, pointing the other, “SERVICE,” “OPPORTUNITY”; in Uncle Sam’s hands lies “LAW AND ORDER.” The phrase “Which way, American man?” is a barely altered reference to the phrase “Which way, Western man?,” the title of a book by white nationalist author William Gayley Simpson that’s been popularized by the far right as a meme. In this case, the white supremacist undertones are more like overtones.
While the government uses social media to bolster its philosophical choices on issues like mass deportations, it also deploys it to prop up support for deeply unpopular aspects of its plans, like “Alligator Alcatraz”—an immigration detention camp, trolling opportunity, marketing bonanza for amoral swag-sellers, including Florida’s attorney general. Before the tent prison was even officially open, Trump administration officials and their proxies in right-wing media bragged about the camp, joked about escapees dying by alligator and python, and made AI-generated images of President Trump standing alongside alligators wearing ICE hats.
Disinformation researchers and experts on propaganda have followed the sludge and bile emanating from these governmental accounts with alarm.
“What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism,” says Jason Stanley; he’s a philosopher, author, and professor at University of Toronto who’s in the process of leaving the United States because of, as he baldly puts it, “concerns over fascism.”
You may read more at the link. So, everyone knows that Pam Bondi is in over her Miss Clairol Fox Blonde dye job head. She’s also doing things not in keeping with the role of the Attorney General. This is from Law Dork‘s Chris Geidner. “NEW: D.C. officials sue Trump admin over Bondi order claiming D.C. police powers. D.C.’s A.G. asserts that Bondi’s order — purporting to make the DEA administrator D.C.’s “Emergency Police Commissioner” — is “unlawful.” A lawsuit followed.”
A Thursday night order from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi caused the Washington, D.C. officials — who have responded cautiously to the Trump administration’s efforts to exert more control over D.C. — to declare that the administration had gone too far.
[Update, 11:00 a.m.: The D.C. government sued the Trump administration on Friday morning, asserting that the administration was violating the Home Rule Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and separation of powers. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is seeking a temporary restraining order to block Bondi from enforcing her order.]
[Update, 11:30 a.m.: The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee, and she has scheduled a hearing for 2 p.m. Friday to address D.C.’s TRO request.]
In the order, Bondi purported to have significant control over the Metropolitan Police Department — D.C.’s police force. Most significantly, she claimed that she had the authority to announce that “Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terrence C. Cole shall serve as MPD’s Emergency Police Commissioner.”
She also purported to rescind a Thursday morning order from MPD’s chief of police, in addition to suspending three other MPD orders, all relating to immigration enforcement.
She also announced that D.C. police are to enforce D.C.’s law against crowding streets or sidewalks “enforce, to the maximum extent permissible by law.“
In a final section, Bondi purported also to rescind “any existing MPD directives” that conflict with her order.
You may read this along with the associated part of Bondi’s order. We’ll see how that jives with the District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act. It is also known as the Home Rule Act. Meanwhile, everyone not associated with Putin is hoping that FARTUS will not give away the farm in Alaska today due to his advanced dementia, his Putin Fan Girl status, and his basic ignorance of history and diplomacy. This is from the New York Times. “Russia and Ukraine Agree: A Trump Summit Is a Big Win for Putin. The talks on Friday in Alaska pull the Russian leader out of diplomatic isolation from the West, and Ukrainian and European leaders fear it gives him an opening to sway the American president.” Andrew Higgins and Nataliya Vasilyeva share the byline.
President Trump has spent the week setting the bar extremely low for his high-stakes U.S.-Russian summit on Friday in Alaska. Hardly anyone expects him to make much progress in halting the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, given how far apart their views of the conflict are.
But those two warring countries do seem to agree on at least one thing. Merely meeting with Mr. Trump is a big win for President Vladimir V. Putin, bringing the Russian leader out of a diplomatic deep freeze and giving him a chance to cajole the American president face to face.
“Putin’s visit to the U.S.A. means the total collapse of the whole concept of isolating Russia. Total collapse,” Kremlin-controlled television crowed after news of the hastily arranged summit broke last weekend.
For Russia, “this is a breakthrough even if they don’t agree on much,” said Sergei Mikheyev, a pro-war Russian political scientist who is a mainstay of state television.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, iced out of the Alaska talks about his own country’s future, has come to the same conclusion, telling reporters on Tuesday: “Putin will win in this. Because he is seeking, excuse me, photos. He needs a photo from the meeting with President Trump.”
But it is more than a photo op. In addition to thawing Russia’s pariah status in the West, the summit has sowed discord within NATO — a perennial Russian goal — and postponed Mr. Trump’s threat of tough new sanctions. Little more than two weeks ago, he vowed that if Mr. Putin did not commit to a cease-fire by last Friday, he would punish Moscow and countries like China and India that help Russia’s war effort by buying its oil and gas.
This editorial cartoon is by Michael de Adder .
This is another fine mess that #FARTUS (Felon Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States) has gotten us into. The world is expecting Putin to eat him for lunch. My favorite magazine, The Economist, has this headline. “The real collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. It may be scarier than their critics long suspected.”
To DEFY Donald Trump is to court punishment. A rival politician can expect an investigation, an aggravating network may face a lawsuit, a left-leaning university can bid farewell to its public grants, a scrupulous civil servant can count on a pink slip and an independent-minded foreign government, however determined an adversary or stalwart an ally, invites tariffs. Perceived antagonists should also brace for a hail of insults, a lesson in public humiliation to potential transgressors.Vladimir Putin has been a mysterious exception. Mr Trump has blamed his travails over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on just about everyone but him. He has blamed the war in Ukraine on former President Joe Biden, for supposedly inviting it through weakness, and on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for somehow starting it. Back when Russia invaded in February 2022, Mr Trump praised Mr Putin’s “savvy”.
For months, as Mr Putin made a mockery of Mr Trump’s promises to end the war in a day and of his calls for a ceasefire, the president who once threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea and tariffs as high as 245% against China indulged in no such bluster. He has sounded less formidable than plaintive. “Vladimir, STOP!” he wrote on social media in April. His use of the given name betrayed a touching faith that their shared intimacy would matter to his reptilian counterpart, too.
When Mr Putin kept killing Ukrainians, Mr Trump took a step that was even less characteristic: he admitted to the world that he had been played for a fool. “Maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” he mused on April 26th. A month later, he ventured that his friend must have changed, gone “absolutely CRAZY!” Then on July 8th he acknowledged what should have been obvious from the start: “He is very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.” Mr Trump threatened secondary sanctions on Russia but then leapt at Mr Putin’s latest mixed messages about peace, rewarding him with a summit in America.
Why, with this man, has Mr Trump been so accommodating? Efforts by journalists, congressional investigators and prosecutors to pinpoint the reason have often proved exercises in self-defeat and sorrow. The pattern seemed sinister: Mr Trump praised Mr Putin on television as far back as 2007; invited him to the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013 and wondered on Twitter if he would be his “new best friend”; sought his help to build a tower in Moscow from 2013 to 2016; and tried unsuccessfully many times in 2015 to secure a meeting with him. Then came Russia’s interference in the election in 2016, including its hack of Democrats’ emails to undermine the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Some journalists fanned suspicions of a conspiracy—“collusion” became the watchword—by spreading claims Mr Putin was blackmailing Mr Trump with an obscene videotape. The source proved to be a rumour compiled in research to help Mrs Clinton.
Nine years later Mr Putin’s low-budget meddling still rewards America’s foes by poisoning its politics and distracting its leaders. Pam Bondi, the attorney-general, has started a grand-jury investigation into what Mr Trump called treason by Barack Obama and others in his administration. The basis is a misrepresentation of an intelligence finding in the waning days of Mr Obama’s presidency. Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, has said that because Mr Putin did not hack voting machines, the finding that he tried to help Mr Trump was a lie. The conclusion under Mr Obama was instead that Mr Putin tried to affect the election by influencing public opinion.
The exhaustive report released in 2019 by an independent counsel, Robert Mueller, affirmed on its first page that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.” Mr Mueller indicted numerous Russians, and he also secured guilty pleas from some Trump aides for violating various laws. But he did not conclude the campaign “conspired or co-ordinated” with the Russians.
To wade through the report’s two volumes is to be reminded how malicious the Russians were and how shambolic Mr Trump’s campaign was. It is also to lament the time and energy spent, given how little proof was found to support the superheated suspicions. And it is to regret how little Mr Trump was accorded a presumption of innocence. In the final words of the report, Mr Mueller noted that while it did not accuse Mr Trump of a crime, it also did “not exonerate him”. One might understand his bitterness.
The puzzle of Mr Trump’s admiration for Mr Putin may have been better addressed by psychologists. Certainly Mr Putin, the seasoned KGB operative, has known how to play to his vulnerabilities, including vanity. Mr Trump was said to be “clearly touched” by a kitschy portrait of himself Mr Putin gave him in March.
Indeed, no one expects Trump to prevail in this discussion. I love to follow these things on the BBC. They’re updating live, as are most media outlets. “Will Trump achieve his aims? It remains to be seen.” This news analysis is provided by Gary O’Donoghue.”
It has proved incredibly hard for US President Donald Trump to make any progress on the Ukraine war whatsoever.
Bearing in mind, he’s sent his envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow five times now.
The only real thing that’s come out of that is a few pretty low level meetings in Istanbul, between Ukrainians and the Russians, some prisoner swaps – but really very little progress.
Typically with these sorts of summits, all of the work has already been done – all the preparation and agreements have been ironed out. Usually this would be a ceremonial moment.
But what is happening in Alaska is that the two countries are starting pretty much from a blank sheet of paper.
We don’t know exactly what either side is really trying to achieve here, other than President Trump saying he wants to stop the killing.
That’s a noble aim. These talks are about life and death, war and peace – these things do matter.
But, we don’t know how Russian President Putin and President Trump will get from their positions now to where Trump wants to be.I
I will try to keep the blog feed updated as we move through the day. As usual, Trump has been met with protestors.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
A massive show of solidarity in Anchorage today as hundreds—some estimates put numbers at around 1,000—gathered in the streets waving Ukrainian flags and chanting “Ukraine and Alaska — Russian never again!” ahead of the Trump–Putin summit. No deal for War Criminals! #SlavaUkraini 💙💛🇺🇦
— MadGreek 🧿 (@madgreek2024.bsky.social) 2025-08-15T17:31:57.797Z
#PresidentPussyAssBitch #AlaskaSummit #FARTUS #JeaninePirro #KristinNoem #PamBondiWeirdo #PutinInternationalManOfCrime #TrumpSWorstHires #Weirdo
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Finally Friday Reads: Only the Very Worst People
“I feel safer already,” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
While we’re waiting for Putin to take what’s left of Yam Tits’ scalp in Alaska, let’s focus on what he’s trying to pass off as serious hires for all levels of the Federal Government. I’m going to start with the last target of South Park’s wonderful new season, ICE Barbie. This is from the Washington Post. “Kristi Noem is living free of charge in Coast Guard commandant’s home. A DHS spokesman said Noem must live on the military base because she had been “so horribly doxxed and targeted that she is no longer able to safely live in her own apartment.” I find it more than slightly ironic that the head of “Homeland Security” doesn’t feel secure in her own home.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem is living for free in a military home typicallyreserved for the U.S. Coast Guard’s top admiral, officials familiar with the matter said. The highly unusual arrangement has raised concern within the agency andfrom some Democrats, who describe it as a waste of military resources.
Noem recently moved intoQuarters 1, a spacious waterfront residence at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Southeast Washington where the Coast Guard commandant typically resides. She did so because of concerns over her safety after the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, published photographs in April of the area around Noem’s residence in Washington’s Navy Yard neighborhood, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin described Noem’s time at the commandant’s residence as temporary. She did not specify how long thesetup would last or how long Noem has lived there.
Noem pays no rent to live in the commandant’s house, according to an official familiar with the matter granted anonymity to speak candidly. That’s a departure from how other Cabinet secretarieshave handled similar arrangements. Other Cabinet officials, including during both Trump administrations, have paid to use military housing that otherwise would be occupied by top generals and admirals.
Noem’s housing has raised eyebrows from current and retired Coast Guard officials, as well as Democrats, who warn that Noem risks creating the perception that she is exploiting the perks of her position as DHS secretary, in which she supervises the Coast Guard. They say her decision could set off a chain reaction that could displace other senior members of the service in a situation with limited housing.
Current and former Coast Guard members have also cited Noem’s frequent use of a Coast Guard Gulfstream aircraft as a point of tension. Agency guidelines require the DHS secretary to use a plane with secure communications for both personal and professional business, though they are required to reimburse the government for personal travel. McLaughlin said that Noem had reimbursed “tens of thousands of dollars” for the air travel, after publication of the story.
Noem faced scrutiny for her expenses when she served as governor of South Dakota. She spent $68,000 in taxpayer funds to refurbish the governor’s mansion with a sauna, chandelier and other amenities, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported in 2021. And South Dakota picked up the tab for at least $150,000 in campaign and personal travel for Noem related to her security when she was governor, the Associated Press reported this year.
Noem’s housing arrangement could create the impression that she is exploiting her position of authority over the Coast Guard to accrue perks for herself, said Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog nonprofit.
“What are the optics?” Brown said. “And is this taking advantage of your individual position as a government official to benefit unduly?”
So, I wonder if her neighbors hide their dogs? It’s amazing to me that the law and order crowd can’t seem to actually figure out either. Let’s continue with people who don’t know how to do their jobs. “US Attorney Pirro’s office admits grand jury refused ICE interference charges — twice. Federal prosecutors told a judge they had failed twice to secure an indictment against Sydney Lori Reid for allegedly assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE arrest.” I have to confess that I can’t listen to or watch any interviews with her. Her voice is disturbingly grating. She also looks like something out of a horror film. I pity the poor jury that has to deal with this. This much body dysmorphia in one administration is a sign of something. You may discuss that amongst yourselves. The story comes from the local news station at WUSA9.
Federal prosecutors twice sought a grand jury indictment against a D.C. woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE inmate transfer — and were twice rejected, the U.S. Attorney’s Office admitted in court Thursday.
Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey revealed the denials to attorneys for Sydney Lori Reid and later granted their request to remove all bond conditions and release her on her own recognizance over prosecutors’ objections. He will resume a preliminary hearing on Friday afternoon to determine whether to dismiss the case entirely.
“Two presentations to the grand jury returned no bill both times,” Harvey said. “Suggesting the evidence is wanting, given the standard for indictment is probable cause. Suggesting the government may never get an indictment.”
Grand juries are tasked with deciding only whether there is a reasonable basis to support charging someone with a crime – a much lower burden for prosecutors than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of criminal juries – and typically make their decisions after hearing evidence only from the government. At the federal level, grand juries return indictments, or “true bills,” in the vast majority of cases.
Reid, 44, was charged last month with an enhanced felony version of an assault charge that requires inflicting bodily injury on a federal officer and carries a maximum sentence of up to eight years in prison. The charge is the same offense filed this week against a former DOJ employee accused of throwing a sandwich at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent.
In a press release last month, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office accused Reid of trying to impede the transfer of two alleged members of the 18th Street gang who were being arrested by ICE outside the D.C. Jail prior to transfer to the custody of the FBI.
Federal prosecutors declined to call the injured FBI agent or any of the ICE officers involved in the incident during Thursday’s hearing, however. Instead, they had an investigator with the U.S. Attorney’s Office testify about his review of video of the incident and brief conversations with the officers. The investigator, Special Agent Sean Ricardi, said he’d had no involvement in the case until he was asked to prepare for testimony Thursday morning.
Video played by prosecutors shows Reid approaching the ICE officers while holding up her phone, which she says is for her protection. She is then later seen being held by multiple officers against a wall while she asks, “How do you feel about stealing f***ing people?”
Even the first soft porn star is getting into the headlines. You know, I really hate to slut slam or pick on woman for their looks. I love Stormy Daniels. She’s as sweet as pie, and she helped feed the neighborhood animals during our last hurricane. I’m always happy to see her when she visits. But, there’s a crossed Rubicon at some point with some behavior. Melania whiffed with this one. This story is from The Guardian. “Melania Trump demands Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to Jeffrey Epstein. First lady threatens to sue Joe Biden’s son after he said sex offender Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump. I can’t wait to read the testimony on the Trumps explaining their relationships with Epstein, frankly.
Melania Trump has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and has threatened to sue if he does not.
Biden, the son of the former president Joe Biden, alleged in an interview this month that Epstein had introduced the first lady to Donald Trump.
The statements were false, defamatory and “extremely salacious”, Melania Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, said in a letter to Biden. Biden’s remarks were widely disseminated on social media and reported by media outlets around the world, causing the first lady “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm”, he added.
Biden made the Epstein comments during a sprawling interview with the US journalist Andrew Callaghan in which he lashed out at “elites” and others in the Democratic party who he said had undermined his father before he dropped out of last year’s presidential campaign.
I’m sorry, but I just keep laughing at the “reputational harm” part. It’s not like you were “modelling” for some wannabe Picasso. We’ve seen the pictures, honey.
“Epstein introduced Melania to Trump. The connections are, like, so wide and deep,” Biden said in one of the comments that the first lady disputes. Biden attributed the claim to the author Michael Wolff. Donald Trump has accused Wolff of making up stories to sell books.
Biden responded to the lawsuit on Thursday, speaking again to Callaghan, this time from a holiday location, and in effect doubled down on his unsubstantiated claim.
Asked if he wished to apologize, Biden said: “Uh, fuck that, not going to happen.”
“What I said is what I have heard and seen reported and written primarily from Michael Wolff, but also dating back to 2019.” He cited a number of publications, including the New York Times and Vanity Fair, as sources of his information.
The first lady’s threats echo a favoured strategy of her husband, who has aggressively used litigation to go after critics. Public figures such as the Trumps face a high bar to succeed in a defamation lawsuit.
The president also responded to the issue, accusing Biden of fabricating stories to denigrate the first lady. Trump told Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday morning that he had encouraged her to sue.
“I said go forward. You know, I’ve done pretty well on these lawsuits lately … and Jeffrey Epstein had nothing to do with Melania and introducing,” he told Kilmeade.
“But they do that to demean, they make up stories. I mean I can tell you exactly how it was and it was another person actually … but it wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein. “I told her go ahead and do it.”
Yes, my goodness, Yam Tits! You never tell tall tales or make up stories! I bet it hurts your virgin ears to hear that kind of talk! I mean, it must’ve been so challenging to sneak around with her behind your second wife’s back, even though you had all that practice sneaking around behind your first wife’s bank. Pete Hegseth would be so proud of you! This Guardian article on Trump begging the Norwegian Finance Minister for a Nobel prize just had me spitting out my morning tea with laughter. “Trump reportedly called Norwegian minister ‘out of the blue’ to ask about Nobel prize. The US president told Norway’s finance minister he wants the Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Norwegian press.” He just can’t stand that former President Obama got one! “Trump reportedly called Norwegian minister ‘out of the blue’ to ask about Nobel prize. The US president told Norway’s finance minister he wants the Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Norwegian press.” What? Ruining the Kennedy Center honors and wrecking the U.S. economy wasn’t enough for you?
Donald Trump cold-called Norway’s finance minister last month to ask about a nomination for the Nobel peace prize, Norwegian press reported on Thursday.
The Norwegian outlet Dagens Næringsliv, citing unnamed sources, reported: “Out of the blue, while finance minister Jens Stoltenberg was walking down the street in Oslo, Donald Trump called … He wanted the Nobel prize – and to discuss tariffs.”
The outlet added that it was not the first time that Trump had raised the question of a Nobel peace prize nomination to Stoltenberg.
In a statement to Reuters, Stoltenberg, the former Nato secretary-general, said the call focused on tariffs and economic cooperation ahead of Trump’s call with Jonas Støre, the Norwegian prime minister.
“I will not go into further detail about the content of the conversation,” Stoltenberg said, adding that several White House officials including the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, were on the call.
Each year, the five-member Norwegian Nobel committee reviews hundreds of candidates before choosing laureates. The committee members are appointed by Norway’s parliament according to the will of Alfred Nobel, a 19-century Swedish industrialist. Laureates are announced in October.
Trump has previously complained multiple times about not receiving the Nobel peace prize, an award which four of his predecessors, including Barack Obama, have received.
In his most recent tirade, Trump took to Truth Social in June, saying: “No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!”
How about a little whine with that Skrei Yam Tits? So, I just had to put up this article by Mother Jones. It’s about the deluge of propaganda we get daily and its impact. “The Official Voice of the US Government Is Cruel, Gross, and Weird. What Is That Doing to Us? Joking memes about imprisonment, deportation, and death by alligator are designed to radicalize and desensitize.”
In March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a woman they accused of drug trafficking and entering the country illegally. Standing in a parking lot, they photographed her, weeping, eyes half-closed in anguish, her arms cuffed behind her back. And then—in a cruel innovation specific to the Trump administration—the White House’s official Twitter account used an AI tool to make a cartoon illustration of her crying and handcuffed, in the style of the beloved Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. The tweet got 155,000 likes, a mix of outraged and delighted responses, and, as it was designed to, a lot of attention: it’s so far been viewed 76 million times. On Twitter, many users posted positive responses declaring that the image was exactly what they had voted for.
This is, at the moment, the official voice of the US government: a rancid mixture of trolling, cruelty, propaganda, and crass jokes about the human suffering they’re creating, an effort, as Wired’s Tess Owen recently put it, to turn actions like mass deportation into “one big joke.” On Instagram and Twitter (their largest audience), government entities including the White House, ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security attempt to surf viral trends to expanded public attention: They twist memes and sounds popular on TikTok, repurpose South Park’s parodies for their own self-promotion, and blend it all with images that draw on or directly reproduce classical art and Americana paintings that are designed to stir nostalgia for an imagined past. (The use of some of this art, as the Washington Post has written, has stirred the ire of the artists themselves or their representatives; it’s not easy to extract a stern condemnation from the estate of treacly pastoral painter Thomas Kinkade, but this government managed to do it.)
A lot of the trends are specifically designed to appeal to young white men, like one that repurposes a 1970s-looking ad for a van to ask, “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” Another ICE recruitment effort asks, “Which way, American man?” in front a befuddled-looking Uncle Sam gazing at a crossroads post labeled with signs including “INVASION,” “CULTURAL DECLINE” pointing one way, and, pointing the other, “SERVICE,” “OPPORTUNITY”; in Uncle Sam’s hands lies “LAW AND ORDER.” The phrase “Which way, American man?” is a barely altered reference to the phrase “Which way, Western man?,” the title of a book by white nationalist author William Gayley Simpson that’s been popularized by the far right as a meme. In this case, the white supremacist undertones are more like overtones.
While the government uses social media to bolster its philosophical choices on issues like mass deportations, it also deploys it to prop up support for deeply unpopular aspects of its plans, like “Alligator Alcatraz”—an immigration detention camp, trolling opportunity, marketing bonanza for amoral swag-sellers, including Florida’s attorney general. Before the tent prison was even officially open, Trump administration officials and their proxies in right-wing media bragged about the camp, joked about escapees dying by alligator and python, and made AI-generated images of President Trump standing alongside alligators wearing ICE hats.
Disinformation researchers and experts on propaganda have followed the sludge and bile emanating from these governmental accounts with alarm.
“What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism,” says Jason Stanley; he’s a philosopher, author, and professor at University of Toronto who’s in the process of leaving the United States because of, as he baldly puts it, “concerns over fascism.”
You may read more at the link. So, everyone knows that Pam Bondi is in over her Miss Clairol Fox Blonde dye job head. She’s also doing things not in keeping with the role of the Attorney General. This is from Law Dork‘s Chris Geidner. “NEW: D.C. officials sue Trump admin over Bondi order claiming D.C. police powers. D.C.’s A.G. asserts that Bondi’s order — purporting to make the DEA administrator D.C.’s “Emergency Police Commissioner” — is “unlawful.” A lawsuit followed.”
A Thursday night order from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi caused the Washington, D.C. officials — who have responded cautiously to the Trump administration’s efforts to exert more control over D.C. — to declare that the administration had gone too far.
[Update, 11:00 a.m.: The D.C. government sued the Trump administration on Friday morning, asserting that the administration was violating the Home Rule Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and separation of powers. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is seeking a temporary restraining order to block Bondi from enforcing her order.]
[Update, 11:30 a.m.: The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee, and she has scheduled a hearing for 2 p.m. Friday to address D.C.’s TRO request.]
In the order, Bondi purported to have significant control over the Metropolitan Police Department — D.C.’s police force. Most significantly, she claimed that she had the authority to announce that “Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terrence C. Cole shall serve as MPD’s Emergency Police Commissioner.”
She also purported to rescind a Thursday morning order from MPD’s chief of police, in addition to suspending three other MPD orders, all relating to immigration enforcement.
She also announced that D.C. police are to enforce D.C.’s law against crowding streets or sidewalks “enforce, to the maximum extent permissible by law.“
In a final section, Bondi purported also to rescind “any existing MPD directives” that conflict with her order.
You may read this along with the associated part of Bondi’s order. We’ll see how that jives with the District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act. It is also known as the Home Rule Act. Meanwhile, everyone not associated with Putin is hoping that FARTUS will not give away the farm in Alaska today due to his advanced dementia, his Putin Fan Girl status, and his basic ignorance of history and diplomacy. This is from the New York Times. “Russia and Ukraine Agree: A Trump Summit Is a Big Win for Putin. The talks on Friday in Alaska pull the Russian leader out of diplomatic isolation from the West, and Ukrainian and European leaders fear it gives him an opening to sway the American president.” Andrew Higgins and Nataliya Vasilyeva share the byline.
President Trump has spent the week setting the bar extremely low for his high-stakes U.S.-Russian summit on Friday in Alaska. Hardly anyone expects him to make much progress in halting the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, given how far apart their views of the conflict are.
But those two warring countries do seem to agree on at least one thing. Merely meeting with Mr. Trump is a big win for President Vladimir V. Putin, bringing the Russian leader out of a diplomatic deep freeze and giving him a chance to cajole the American president face to face.
“Putin’s visit to the U.S.A. means the total collapse of the whole concept of isolating Russia. Total collapse,” Kremlin-controlled television crowed after news of the hastily arranged summit broke last weekend.
For Russia, “this is a breakthrough even if they don’t agree on much,” said Sergei Mikheyev, a pro-war Russian political scientist who is a mainstay of state television.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, iced out of the Alaska talks about his own country’s future, has come to the same conclusion, telling reporters on Tuesday: “Putin will win in this. Because he is seeking, excuse me, photos. He needs a photo from the meeting with President Trump.”
But it is more than a photo op. In addition to thawing Russia’s pariah status in the West, the summit has sowed discord within NATO — a perennial Russian goal — and postponed Mr. Trump’s threat of tough new sanctions. Little more than two weeks ago, he vowed that if Mr. Putin did not commit to a cease-fire by last Friday, he would punish Moscow and countries like China and India that help Russia’s war effort by buying its oil and gas.
This editorial cartoon is by Michael de Adder .
This is another fine mess that #FARTUS (Felon Adjudicated Rapist, and Traitor of the United States) has gotten us into. The world is expecting Putin to eat him for lunch. My favorite magazine, The Economist, has this headline. “The real collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. It may be scarier than their critics long suspected.”
To DEFY Donald Trump is to court punishment. A rival politician can expect an investigation, an aggravating network may face a lawsuit, a left-leaning university can bid farewell to its public grants, a scrupulous civil servant can count on a pink slip and an independent-minded foreign government, however determined an adversary or stalwart an ally, invites tariffs. Perceived antagonists should also brace for a hail of insults, a lesson in public humiliation to potential transgressors.Vladimir Putin has been a mysterious exception. Mr Trump has blamed his travails over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election on just about everyone but him. He has blamed the war in Ukraine on former President Joe Biden, for supposedly inviting it through weakness, and on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for somehow starting it. Back when Russia invaded in February 2022, Mr Trump praised Mr Putin’s “savvy”.
For months, as Mr Putin made a mockery of Mr Trump’s promises to end the war in a day and of his calls for a ceasefire, the president who once threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea and tariffs as high as 245% against China indulged in no such bluster. He has sounded less formidable than plaintive. “Vladimir, STOP!” he wrote on social media in April. His use of the given name betrayed a touching faith that their shared intimacy would matter to his reptilian counterpart, too.
When Mr Putin kept killing Ukrainians, Mr Trump took a step that was even less characteristic: he admitted to the world that he had been played for a fool. “Maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” he mused on April 26th. A month later, he ventured that his friend must have changed, gone “absolutely CRAZY!” Then on July 8th he acknowledged what should have been obvious from the start: “He is very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.” Mr Trump threatened secondary sanctions on Russia but then leapt at Mr Putin’s latest mixed messages about peace, rewarding him with a summit in America.
Why, with this man, has Mr Trump been so accommodating? Efforts by journalists, congressional investigators and prosecutors to pinpoint the reason have often proved exercises in self-defeat and sorrow. The pattern seemed sinister: Mr Trump praised Mr Putin on television as far back as 2007; invited him to the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013 and wondered on Twitter if he would be his “new best friend”; sought his help to build a tower in Moscow from 2013 to 2016; and tried unsuccessfully many times in 2015 to secure a meeting with him. Then came Russia’s interference in the election in 2016, including its hack of Democrats’ emails to undermine the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Some journalists fanned suspicions of a conspiracy—“collusion” became the watchword—by spreading claims Mr Putin was blackmailing Mr Trump with an obscene videotape. The source proved to be a rumour compiled in research to help Mrs Clinton.
Nine years later Mr Putin’s low-budget meddling still rewards America’s foes by poisoning its politics and distracting its leaders. Pam Bondi, the attorney-general, has started a grand-jury investigation into what Mr Trump called treason by Barack Obama and others in his administration. The basis is a misrepresentation of an intelligence finding in the waning days of Mr Obama’s presidency. Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, has said that because Mr Putin did not hack voting machines, the finding that he tried to help Mr Trump was a lie. The conclusion under Mr Obama was instead that Mr Putin tried to affect the election by influencing public opinion.
The exhaustive report released in 2019 by an independent counsel, Robert Mueller, affirmed on its first page that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.” Mr Mueller indicted numerous Russians, and he also secured guilty pleas from some Trump aides for violating various laws. But he did not conclude the campaign “conspired or co-ordinated” with the Russians.
To wade through the report’s two volumes is to be reminded how malicious the Russians were and how shambolic Mr Trump’s campaign was. It is also to lament the time and energy spent, given how little proof was found to support the superheated suspicions. And it is to regret how little Mr Trump was accorded a presumption of innocence. In the final words of the report, Mr Mueller noted that while it did not accuse Mr Trump of a crime, it also did “not exonerate him”. One might understand his bitterness.
The puzzle of Mr Trump’s admiration for Mr Putin may have been better addressed by psychologists. Certainly Mr Putin, the seasoned KGB operative, has known how to play to his vulnerabilities, including vanity. Mr Trump was said to be “clearly touched” by a kitschy portrait of himself Mr Putin gave him in March.
Indeed, no one expects Trump to prevail in this discussion. I love to follow these things on the BBC. They’re updating live, as are most media outlets. “Will Trump achieve his aims? It remains to be seen.” This news analysis is provided by Gary O’Donoghue.”
It has proved incredibly hard for US President Donald Trump to make any progress on the Ukraine war whatsoever.
Bearing in mind, he’s sent his envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow five times now.
The only real thing that’s come out of that is a few pretty low level meetings in Istanbul, between Ukrainians and the Russians, some prisoner swaps – but really very little progress.
Typically with these sorts of summits, all of the work has already been done – all the preparation and agreements have been ironed out. Usually this would be a ceremonial moment.
But what is happening in Alaska is that the two countries are starting pretty much from a blank sheet of paper.
We don’t know exactly what either side is really trying to achieve here, other than President Trump saying he wants to stop the killing.
That’s a noble aim. These talks are about life and death, war and peace – these things do matter.
But, we don’t know how Russian President Putin and President Trump will get from their positions now to where Trump wants to be.I
I will try to keep the blog feed updated as we move through the day. As usual, Trump has been met with protestors.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
A massive show of solidarity in Anchorage today as hundreds—some estimates put numbers at around 1,000—gathered in the streets waving Ukrainian flags and chanting “Ukraine and Alaska — Russian never again!” ahead of the Trump–Putin summit. No deal for War Criminals! #SlavaUkraini 💙💛🇺🇦
— MadGreek 🧿 (@madgreek2024.bsky.social) 2025-08-15T17:31:57.797Z
#PresidentPussyAssBitch #AlaskaSummit #FARTUS #JeaninePirro #KristinNoem #PamBondiWeirdo #PutinInternationalManOfCrime #TrumpSWorstHires #Weirdo
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Can Negroes Afford to be Pacifists? — Robert F. Williams, 1959
“Non-violence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilised, but non-violence is no match or repellent for a sadist.”
Robert F. Williams is rightly remembered for his militant stance on Black armed self-defense — a stance distilled in those iconic photographs, like the one above, where he is poised to fight back, pistol cocked and ready, or through the title of his autobiography, Negroes with Guns (1962). Of course, for Williams , armed self-defense was more than a stance or a pose. His armed confrontations with cops, crackers, and the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina are not only legendary, but they were also strategically effective actions in the battle for African American civil rights.
Importantly, Williams was also a theoretician of armed self-defense. Williams was an intellectual, one whose arguments for violence were as considered and thoughtful as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s arguments for non-violence. Take, for example, Williams’ 1959 essay “Can Negroes Afford to be Pacifists?”, published in the pacifist journal Liberation: An Independent Monthly . (Liberation published a response from King in the next issue, and was the first to publish “Letter from Birmingham Jail ” a few years later). The essay provides a theoretical rationale for self-defense based, not only on Williams’ own experiences, but also on his unsentimental and lucid understanding of the nature of US racism buttressed by state power.
His conclusions are both strategic and moral. “Non-violence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilised,” he says, “but non-violence is no match or repellent for a sadist.” The whites committing savage violence against the African American community, in other words, could not be civilized: “The Southern brute respects only force.”
For Williams, the call by African American leaders for non-violence is not merely contradictory, but corrupted and compromised. He argues that advocates of non-violence take an individualist, almost personal approach to violence while they are largely silent on the organization of violence on an industrial scale through war, mass destruction, and genocide in the name of national interests.
William’s position on violence has resonance today, as does his theoretics of armed self-defense. Below, we reprint the essay “Can Negroes Afford to be Pacifists?”
Can Negroes Afford To Be Pacifists?
Robert F. Williams
In 1954 I was an enlisted man in the United States Marine Corps. As a Negro in an integrated unit that was overwhelmingly white, I shall never forget the evening we were lounging in the recreation room watching television as a news bulletin flashed on the screen. This was the historic Supreme Court decision that segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. Because of the interracial atmosphere, there was no vocal comment. There was for a while complete silence. I never knew how the Southern white boys felt about this bulletin. Perhaps I never will, but as for myself, my inner emotions must have been approximate to the Negro slaves’ when they first heard about the Emancipation Proclamation. Elation took hold of me so strongly that I found it very difficult to refrain from yielding to an urge of jubilation. I learned later that night that other Negroes in my outfit had felt the same surge of elation.
On this momentous night of May 17, 1954, I felt that at last the government was willing to assert itself on behalf of first-class citizenship, even for Negroes. I experienced a sense of loyalty that I had never felt before. I was sure that this was the beginning of a new era of American democracy. At last I felt that I was a part of America and that I belonged. That was what I had always wanted, even as a child.
I returned to civilian life in 1955 and the hope I had for Negro liberation faltered. I had returned to a South that was determined to stay the hand of progress at all cost. Acts of violence and words and deeds of hate and spite rose from every quarter. An attitude prevailed that Negroes had a court decree from the “Communist inspired court”, but the local racist had the means to initiate the old law of the social jungle called Dixie. Since the first Negro slaves arrived in America, the white supremacists have relied upon violence as a potent weapon of intimidation to deprive Negroes of their rights. The Southerner is not prone to easy change; therefore the same tactics that proved so successful against Negroes through the years are still being employed today. There is open defiance to law and order throughout the South today. Governor Faubus and the Little Rock campaign was a shining example of the Southern racists’ respect for the law of the land and constituted authority.
The State of Virginia is in open defiance of federal authority. States like my native state of North Carolina are submitting to token integration and openly boasting that this is the solution to circumvention of the Supreme Court decisions. The officials of this state brazenly slap themselves on the back for being successful in depriving great numbers of their coloured citizens of the rights of first-class citizenship. Yes, after having such great short-lived hope, I have become disillusioned about the prospect of a just, democratic-minded government motivated by politicians with high moral standards en forcing the Fourteenth Amendment without the pressure of expediency.
Since my release from the Marine Corps I could cite many cases of unprovoked violence that have been visited upon my people. Some, like the Emmett Till case, the Asbury Howard case and the Mack Parker incident , have been widely publicized. There are more, many many more, occurring daily in the South that never come to the light of the press because of a news blackout sponsored by local racist officials.
Laws serve to deter crime and to protect the weak from the strong in civilised society. When there is a breakdown of law and the right of equal protection by constituted authority, where is the force of deterrent? It is the nature of people to respect law when it is just and strong. Only highly civilised and moral individuals respect the rights of others. The low-mentality bigots of the South have shown a wanton disregard for the well-being and rights of their fellowmen of colour, but there is one thing that even the most savage beast respects, and that is force. Soft, polished words whispered into the ears of a brute make him all the more confused and rebellious against a society that is more than he can understand or feel secure in. The Southern brute respects only force. Non-violence is a very potent weapon when the opponent is civilised, but non-violence is no match or repellent for a sadist. I have great respect for the pacifist, that is, for the pure pacifist. I think a pure pacifist is one who resents violence against nations as well as individuals and is courageous enough to speak out against jingoistic governments (including his own) without an air of self-righteousness and pious moral individuality. I am not a pacifist and I am sure that I may safely say that most of my people are not. Passive resistance is a powerful weapon in gaining concessions from oppressors, but I venture to say that if Mack Parker had had an automatic shotgun at his disposal, he could have served as a great deterrent against lynching.
Rev. Martin Luther King is a great and successful leader of our race. The Montgomery bus boycott was a great victory for American democracy. However, most people have confused the issues facing the race. In Montgomery the issue was a matter of struggle for human dignity. Non-violence is made to order for that type of conflict. While praising the actions of those courageous Negroes who participated in the Montgomery affair, we must not allow the complete aspects of the Negro struggle throughout the South to be taken out of their proper perspective. In a great many localities in the South Negroes are faced with the necessity of combating savage violence. The struggle is for mere existence. The Negro is in a position of begging for life. There is no lawful deterrent against those who would do him violence. An open declaration of non-violence, or turn-the-other- cheekism is an invitation that the white racist brutes will certainly honour by brutal attack on cringing, submissive Negroes. It is time for the Negro in the South to reappraise his method of dealing with his ruthless oppressor.
In 1957 the Klan moved into Monroe and Union County. In the beginning we did not notice them much. Their numbers steadily increased to the point where in the local press reported as many as seventy-five hundred racists massed at one rally. They became so brazen that mile-long motorcades started invading the Negro community. These hooded thugs fired pistols from car windows, screamed, and incessantly blew their automobile horns. On one occasion they caught a Negro woman on the street and tried to force her to dance for them at gun point. She escaped into the night, screaming and hysterical. They forced a Negro merchant to close down his business on direct orders from the Klan. Drivers of cars tried to run Negroes down when seen walking on the streets at night. Negro women were struck with missiles thrown from passing vehicles. Lawlessness was rampant. A Negro doctor was framed to jail on a charge of performing an abortion on a white woman. This doctor, who was vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, was placed in a lonely cell in the basement of a jail, although men prisoners are usually confined upstairs. A crowd of white men started congregating around the jail. It is common knowledge that a lynching was averted. We have had the usual threats of the Klan here, but instead of cowering, we organised an armed guard and set up a defence force around the doctor’s house. On one occasion, we had to exchange gunfire with the Klan. Each time the Klan came on a raid they were led by police cars. We appealed to the President of the United States to have the Justice Department investigate the police. We appealed to Governor Luther Hodges. All our appeals to constituted law were in vain. Governor Hodges, in an underhanded way, defended the Klan. He publicly made a statement, to the press, that I had exaggerated Klan activity in Union County—despite the fact that they were operating openly and had gone so far as to build a Klan clubhouse and advertise meetings in the local press and on the radio.
A group of non-violent ministers met the city Board of Aldermen and pleaded with them to restrict the Klan from the coloured community. The city fathers advised these cringing, begging Negro ministers that the Klan had constitutional rights to meet and organise in the same way as the N.A.A.C.P. Not having been infected by turn-the-other-cheekism, a group of Negroes who showed a willingness to fight, caused the city officials to deprive the Klan of its constitutional rights after local papers told of dangerous incidents between Klansmen and armed Negroes. Klan motorcades have been legally banned from the City of Monroe.
The possibility of tragedies striking both sides of the tracks has caused a mutual desire to have a peaceful co-existence. The fact that any racial brutality may cause white blood to flow as well as Negro is lessening racial tension. The white bigots are sparing Negroes from brutal attack, not because of a new sense of morality, but because Negroes have adopted a policy of meeting violence with violence.
I think there is enough latitude in the struggle for Negro liberation for the acceptance of diverse tactics and philosophies. There is need for pacifists and non-pacifists. I think each freedom fighter must unselfishly contribute what he has to offer. I have been a soldier and a Marine. I have been trained in the way of violence. I have been trained to defend myself. Self-defence to a Marine is a reflex action. People like Rev. Martin Luther King have been trained for the pulpit. I think they would be as out of place in a conflict that demanded real violent action as I would in a pulpit praying for an indifferent God to come down from Heaven and rescue a screaming Mack Parker or Emmett Till from an ungodly howling mob. I believe if we are going to pray, we ought to pass the ammunition while we pray. If we are too pious to kill in our own self-defence, how can we have the heart to ask a Holy God to come down to this violent fray and smite down our enemies?
Three Centuries of Prayer
As a race, we have been praying for three hundred years. The N.A.A.C.P. boasts that it has fought against lynching for fifty years. A fifty-year fight without victory is not impressive to me. An unwritten anti-lynch law was initiated overnight in Monroe. It is strange that so-called Negro leaders have never stopped to think why a simple thing like an anti-lynch law in a supposedly democratic nation is next to impossible to get passed. Surely every citizen in a republic is entitled not to be lynched. To seek an anti-lynch law in the present situation is to seek charity. Individuals and governments are more inclined to do things that promote the general welfare and well-being of the populace. A prejudiced government and a prejudiced people are not going to throw a shield of protection around the very people in the South on whom they vent pent-up hatreds as scapegoats. When white people in the South start needing such a law, we will not even have to wait fifty days to get it.
On May 5, 1959, while president of the Union County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, I made a statement to the United Press International after a trial wherein a white man was supposed to have been tried for kicking a Negro maid down a flight of stairs in a local white hotel. In spite of the fact that there was an eyewitness, the defendant failed to show up for his trial, and was completely exonerated. Another case in the same court involved a white man who had come to a pregnant Negro mother’s home and attempted to rape her. In recorder’s court the only defence offered for the defendant was that “he’s not guilty. He was just drunk and having a little fun.” Despite the fact that this pregnant Negro mother was brutally beaten and driven from her home because she refused to submit, and a white woman neighbour testified that the woman had come to her house excited, her clothes torn, her feet bare, and begging her for assistance, the court was unmoved. The defendant’s wife was allowed to sit with him throughout the trial, and his attorney asked the jury if they thought this white man would leave “this beautiful white woman, the flower of life for this Negro woman.” Some of the jurymen laughed and the defendant went [sic]. This great miscarriage of justice left me sick inside, and I said then what I say now. I believe that Negroes must be willing to defend themselves, their women, their children and their homes. They must be willing to die and to kill in repelling their assailants. There is no Fourteenth Amendment, no equal protection under the law. Negroes must protect themselves. It is obvious that the federal government will not put an end to lynching; therefore it becomes necessary for us to stop lynching with violence. We must defend ourselves. Even though I made it known that I spoke as an individual American citizen, I was suspended by the N.A.A.C.P. for advocating violence. The N.A.A.C.P. was so fearful of the consequence of this statement that I heard about my suspension over the radio before I got an official notice. The radio announcer tried to give local Negroes the impression that the N.A.A.C.P. advocated tum-the-other-cheek-ism. The thing that struck me most was not the suspension, but the number of letters and telegrams I received from Negroes all over America who showed a readiness to fight. The Negro on the street who suffers most is beginning to break out of the harness of the non-violent race preachers. The fact that the N.A.A.C.P. had to issue a statement saying, “The N.A.A.C.P. has never condoned mob violence but it firmly supports the right of Negroes individually and collectively to defend their person, their homes and their property from attack”, is a strong indication of the sentiment among the masses of Negroes. How can an individual defend his person and property from attack without meeting violence with violence? What the N.A.A.C.P. is advocating now is no more than I had advocated in the first place. I could never advocate that Negroes attack white people indiscriminately. Our branch of the N.A.A.C.P. in Union County is an interracial branch.
It is obvious that the Negro leadership is caught in a terrible dilemma. It is trying to appease both white liberals who want to see Negro liberation given to us in eye-dropper doses; and the Negro masses, who are growing impatient and restive under brutal oppression. There is a new Negro coming into manhood [sic] on the American scene and an indifferent government must take cognizance of this fact. The Negro is becoming more militant, and pacifism will never be accepted wholeheartedly by the masses of Negroes so long as violence is rampant in Dixie. Even Negroes like King who profess to be pacifists are not pure pacifists and at times speak proudly of the Negro’s role of violence in this violent nation’s wars. In a speech at the N.A.A.C.P. convention, he said, “In spite of all of our oppression, we have never turned to a foreign ideology to solve our problems. Communism has never invaded our ranks. And now we are simply saying we want our freedom, we have stood with you in every crisis. For you, America, our sons died in the trenches of France, in the foxholes of Germany, on the beachheads of Italy and on the islands of Japan. And now, America, we are simply asking you to guarantee our freedom.” King may not be willing to partake in expeditions of violence, but he has no compunction about cashing in on the spoils of war. There are too many Negro leaders who are afraid to talk violence against the violent racist, and are too weak-kneed to protest the warmongering of the atom-crazed politicians of Washington.
Some Negro leaders have cautioned me that if Negroes fight back, the racist will have cause to exterminate the race. How asinine can one get? This government is in no position to allow mass violence to erupt, let alone allow twenty million Negroes to be exterminated. I am not half so worried about being exterminated as I am about my children’s growing up under oppression and being mentally twisted out of human proportions.
We live in perilous times in America, and especially in the South. Segregation is an expensive commodity, but liberty and democracy too, have their price. So often the purchase check of democracy must be signed in blood. Someone must be willing to pay the price, despite the scoffs from the Uncle Toms. I am told that patience is commendable and that we must never tire of waiting, yet it is instilled at an early age that men who violently and swiftly rise to oppose tyranny are virtuous examples to emulate. I have been taught by my government to fight, and if I find it necessary I shall do just that. All Negroes must learn to fight back, for nowhere in the annals of history does the record show a people delivered from bondage by patience alone.
Robert F. Williams, “Can Negroes Afford To Be Pacifists?” Liberation: An Independent Monthly 5 no. 6/7, (September 1959) 8.
source: Black Agenda Report
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=12904
#blackLiberation #northAmerica #resistance #robertFWilliams #us
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In Texas and across the country,
far-right candidates have won control of school boards,
swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs.O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government,
offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.Since he was elected county judge
— a position similar to that of mayor in a city
— O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach.
He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.
O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically.
In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time.
Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace #Christian #nationalism.
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like,
and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,”
said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism.
“The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.
With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans.
When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020,
many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades.
After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents.
The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, #Glen #Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022.
Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President #Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin #Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race.
“You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-judge-tim-ohare-far-right
-
In Texas and across the country,
far-right candidates have won control of school boards,
swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs.O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government,
offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.Since he was elected county judge
— a position similar to that of mayor in a city
— O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach.
He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.
O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically.
In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time.
Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace #Christian #nationalism.
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like,
and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,”
said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism.
“The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.
With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans.
When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020,
many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades.
After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents.
The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, #Glen #Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022.
Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President #Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin #Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race.
“You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-judge-tim-ohare-far-right
-
In Texas and across the country,
far-right candidates have won control of school boards,
swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs.O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government,
offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.Since he was elected county judge
— a position similar to that of mayor in a city
— O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach.
He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.
O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically.
In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time.
Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace #Christian #nationalism.
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like,
and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,”
said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism.
“The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.
With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans.
When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020,
many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades.
After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents.
The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, #Glen #Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022.
Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President #Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin #Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race.
“You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-judge-tim-ohare-far-right
-
In Texas and across the country,
far-right candidates have won control of school boards,
swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs.O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government,
offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.Since he was elected county judge
— a position similar to that of mayor in a city
— O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach.
He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.
O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically.
In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time.
Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace #Christian #nationalism.
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like,
and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,”
said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism.
“The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.
With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans.
When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020,
many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades.
After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents.
The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, #Glen #Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022.
Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President #Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin #Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race.
“You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-judge-tim-ohare-far-right
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In Texas and across the country,
far-right candidates have won control of school boards,
swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs.O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government,
offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.Since he was elected county judge
— a position similar to that of mayor in a city
— O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach.
He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.
O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically.
In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time.
Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace #Christian #nationalism.
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like,
and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,”
said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism.
“The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.
With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans.
When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020,
many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades.
After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents.
The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, #Glen #Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022.
Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President #Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin #Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race.
“You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-judge-tim-ohare-far-right
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@screwtape @svetlyak40wt @galdor @ldbeth
I think they are pretty similar actually, with the major differences imo being that #scheme implementations typically reify stack frames as continuations, allowing you to step through program execution live without necessarily needing a macrostepper, while #CommonLisp offers the SLIME/Sly experience on top of countless battle hardened tools & techniques developed over decades, with of course the downsides of a dynamic lexical environments and lack of hygiene that can lead to particularly funky debugging situations.
Most schemes have let-syntax, which I believe is like macrolet but with syntax-objects, which is another distinguishing difference. Syntax-objects are like records with an AST & source location information. It's worth noting that Robert Smith said that Common #Lisp's lack of a means to perform transformations over locations is one of the biggest obstacles to improving #coalton's user experience: https://twitter.com/stylewarning/status/1574868014855380992
But overall, scheme systems are typically very bare bones, you're often expected to roll ad-hoc debugging tools that I believe common lisp ships with. But the attraction of this is that our systems are easy to decompose and mold into whatever you need, and tools you simply can't imagine elsewhere (because of lack of first-class continuations) simply fall out the bottom once you get the hand of it. But I'll admit, moving from #racket to pure scheme was at times daunting and very challenging, whereas I could pretty much pick up racket and roll with it.
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“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
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As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
“Where’s the beef?”*…
There’s been some consternation over the FDA’s new food pyramid, with nutritionists arguing that, while the emphasis on “whole foods” (as opposed to processed) is a plus, the guidance overstresses satured-fat-rich foods and under-recommends gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains (see also here).
There could be material economic costs as well. The Federal goverment already spends over $72 Billion subsidizing livestock— not counting the reduced cost grazing permits offered ranchers on Federal land. And as ranch and farm land ownership has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fwer hands, the benifits are flowing to fewer, wealthier “ranchers” (like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, a clutch of large corporations, and foreign investors).
Then there are the environmental implications. Oliver Milman ponders the potential scale of that impact if the new pyramid is followed…
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
Even a 25% increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100m acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit research body.
“We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that – adding 100m acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI.
“It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.”
While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 144kg (317lb) of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended.
Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed.
Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet – beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution.
“To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University.
Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences”, said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500m tonnes by 2050 –double what it was in 2000.
In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores – just 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating, fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein.
The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind.
“The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004.
However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat.
“The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines.
“Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US.
“We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”…
Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land: “Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines,” from @olliemilman.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
* Wendy’s advertising tagline (from 1984)
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As we deconstruct diet, we might send bibulous birthday greetings to William Claude Dukenfield; he was born on this date in 1880. Better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields, an actor, comedian, juggler, and writer, became a vaudeville headliner, “the world’s greatest juggler” [which he may have been], then transitioned to Broadway (e.g., the Ziegfeld Follies revue and Poppy, wherein he perfected his persona as a colorful small-time con man) and began appearing in silent films. In the 1930s, Fields wrote and starred in a series of successful short films for (his golf buddy) Mack Sennett, then appeared in 13 feature films for Paramount. An illness sidelined him in the late 30s, but he roared back in the early 40s with Universal classics like My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Now widely regarded one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century, the Surrealists loved Fields’ absurdism and anarchistic pranks. Max Ernst painted a Project for a Monument to W. C. Fields (1957), and René Magritte made an Homage to Mack Sennett (1934).
The Firesign Theatre titled the second track of their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him “W. C. Fields Forever,” a riff on the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.”
– W. C. Fields
Source #Health #agribusiness #agriculture #art #climateChange #comedy #culture #economics #environment #Food #foodPyramid #history #humor #land #livestock #nutrition #publicHealth #WCFields -
We need to talk about Dogman
Dogman, a hairy humanoid, bipedal creature with a canid-type head, started its upward climb in cryptid popularity in the early 2000s. It was relatively invisible in cryptid literature prior to the work of one person: Linda Godfrey. Today, the dogman is one of the hottest mysterious animals on social media and podcasting where hundreds of stories have materialized from people who claim to have experienced this creature. Why did the dogman cryptid rise to prominence in the last 20 years? And why is modern cryptid investigation enamored with this highly paranormal creature?
We need to talk about the dogman and what it has done to modern cryptozoology.
Dogman as a para-cryptid
Starting in the 1990s, the cryptid scene was been overrun by the dogman/werewolf/canid-humanoid theme. The stories originated in the American Midwest, first in Wisconsin – thanks to Linda Godfrey’s coverage of the Beast of Bray Road. Then the Michigan Dogman legend rose to prominence across the Great Lakes area. Godfrey’s subsequent books expanded to include stories of “American Werewolves” and “Real Wolfmen”, encompassing the ancient ideas of the Egyptian god Anubis, the Rougarou legend of the southern states, and any mention of an anomalous wolf creature. Now, accounts of the “dogman” or equivalent creatures, can be found nearly nationwide.
Let’s take a step back and look at this big picture. There is nothing about the dogman descriptions or accounts that suggests it is an unknown animal that can be captured and scientifically identified. Nothing about it is biologically plausible. Consider that Bigfoot (if it was discovered to be an actual unclassified hominin) would not break the boundaries of biology as we know it; but the dogman would.
Canids (dogs or wolves, in this context) did not evolve robust bodies, human-like torsos, become bipedal, and change the functionality and morphology of their forelimbs to become arms with elbows, with long fingers and claws. This cannot naturally occur in a few years time, or may never occur if the genetic setup is not there to begin with.
An alternative would be that the animal described is not dog-like, but a baboon or kangaroo. (No one, however, is running with those latter suggestions). Therefore, the only option that one must accept in order to believe in a literal dogman, is that it is a non-natural creature, not a zoological one. Here is where the conversation leaps from the realm of “scientific” cryptozoology (if that ever existed) and lands entirely in the para-cryptid zone.
America’s werewolves
Godfrey’s coverage of the Bray Road Beast and other associated creature sightings and anomalies was commendable and in good faith. She talked to witnesses, taking their details at face value. She believed their accounts and tried very hard to lend a credible framing to the very strange body of dogman anecdotes. Her documentation, however, does not make the creature a reality. It remains unresolved what some people experienced when they described a dogman encounter.
Even with Godfrey’s documentation, we have nothing but stories. We can’t tell how truly reliable any of that information is. Many of the experiences of dogman were recounted from decades ago. Some of the tales are clearly exaggerated, as the level of detail reported was hardly possible in the dark or from far away as described.
Until Godfrey published the accounts, there were no well-documented examples that sounded credible or verifiable. Why would that be unless the animal suddenly appeared in the cultural setting?
As with Bigfoot, misidentification is always a possibility. Mangy bears, in particular, look surprisingly dog-like. Normal canids – large dogs, coyotes, wolves – are also likely to be involved. It is hard to convince people, however, that they may have been mistaken about what they think they saw.
A black bear suffering from mange.Hoaxes
The next necessary consideration is hoaxing. Unfortunately, influential hoaxes have tainted the stories of dogmen throughout their history.
The Defiance werewolf created a local panic in the Ohio town when, in 1972, Ted Davis reported to the police that he had been attacked by a “werewolf” wielding a wooden board. The creature was seen a few times, which, in turn, sparked many other residents to also say they saw it. But then it disappeared without a trace, leading to the most obvious conclusion that it was a person in a mask. When dogman tales ramped up online, this old story was resurrected and attached as further evidence of similar creatures, regardless of how weak it was.
The Gable film was uploaded to YouTube in 2007. It was made by filmmaker Mike Agrusa to look like it was taken in the 1970s. The “found footage” showed the camera person observing and being attacked by a large canid with the backstory that he was killed. For years, people argued about its authenticity as a real depiction of a cryptid, until it was revealed to be a hoax in 2010. Some newer fans of the subject never got the memo, or refused to believe it was faked.
The Michigan Dogman began its life as a song called “The Legend” released in 1987 by disc jockey Steve Cook at WTCM-FM in Traverse City, Michigan. It was intended as an April Fool’s joke, based on some legends in Michigan – an 1887 tale from Wexford County, MI where two lumberjacks claimed to see a man-dog creature, and a 1937 story from Paris, MI, where Robert Fortney said he was was attacked by wild dogs, one of which walked on two legs. A few additional accounts of strange creatures were mentioned from the intervening years but none were authenticated. Cook was astonished at the outpouring of stories that were triggered by his re-invigoration of the legend. Cook eventually collaborated with Agrusa for the Gable film.
The basis of much of the dogman lore is dubious or outright bogus. But the current hot spot for dogman tales comes from a wildlife area that has a dark history of its own.
LBL Beast
The lore of the beast in the Land Between the Lakes National Park (Kentucky-Tennessee) is a metaphorical “dog’s breakfast” – this was a term one of my former bosses used to describe a situation that was a complete mess. The LBL and its “beast” tales have served at the focus of dogman stories since about 2018. The stories now even attribute multiple deaths to the beast. Because park officials deny that these deaths have anything to do with attacks by unknown animals (or that they even happened at all), a stench of conspiracy-mongering permeates the tales.
Only one actual murder is associated with the park: Carla Atkins and Vickie Stout’s bodies were found in LBL in October of 1980. They were killed with a shotgun. Their killer was never found.
There are other famously retold stories: a family massacred in 1982, a hunter pulled from his tent and mauled, a camping family terrorized by huge creatures. The details are unclear or outright manufactured. The locals got annoyed. According to those that have lived there for decades, there is no actual folklore of a beast. It’s been manufactured – more like “fakelore”.
In 2004, a fictional story, written by “Jan Thompson” on a website that collected other stories, called Jan’s Tales, featured the tale of “The Beast of LBL”. This short story manufactured a folkloric history of a wolf-like bipedal beast and the bloody massacre of a family of three at their RV camping site (with the extra detail that the remaining child was missing). Various officers and the coroner were involved in the gruesome scene. Then the twist:
All types of samples were placed in plastic bags, marked as evidence, and carefully stowed away. As they were packaging up what appeared to be one of the fathers [sic] arms, one of the doctors noticed something wrapped between the dead fingers. Some tweezers slowly untangled a clump of long, gray and brown hairs. This too was placed in a bag, marked and put away to be analyzed at a lab later.
This story is fiction, yet it was repeated as fact. Horror filmmakers got wind of the legends and planned a movie called The Beast of LBL. I can’t find that the film was ever released but no one had anything positive to say about the parties involved in it.
[Producer] Vervoort said community reaction to the project has mostly been positive. He said he’s producing the movie because he saw a business opportunity and jumped on it. “I think it’s a case of jealousy because they’re not the ones doing it. And I saw an opportunity to create a story and I’m going with it,” Vervoort said.
Capitalizing on a fictional story promoted as real? Sounds familiar.
Fake images of Dogman are everywhere online. Even if absurdly obviously fraudulent, people click on them to comment that they believe it is real.Dogman expands to be everywhere and everything
Linda Godfrey’s efforts to collect dogman tales, unfortunately, turned her into an advocate for its reality. Her books were overly credulous. For example, she referenced Jan Thompson’s fictional tale as if it was factual. (Others did the same.) Eventually, she entertained supernatural explanations because the stories were so weird and were multiplying that it all was too much to consider dismissing them. The supernatural slide became more appealing as natural explanations didn’t add up. She was convinced that something was going on.
There was something going on: the dogman creature had resonated with popular culture about mysterious creatures and propagated. Even though the infamous TV show Monster Quest ended its run in 2010 with the reveal of the Gable film hoax, people loved the dogman story too much to give it up. The MQ end was just the beginning for the run of the dogman.
Small Town Monsters (the primary, serious producers of cryptid documentary content) jumped on the dogman train, producing multiple media pieces exaggerating and repeating the tales from the Midwest, LBL, Texas, and New Mexico. (Some programming consisted solely of witness reports filmed for the other features, loosely tied together). Unmentioned in their films is an explanation for expansion of accounts of dogman/werewolf creatures throughout the 2000s. It simply didn’t exist before this. In an attempt to account for this sudden appearance, Ron Murphy, a prolific paranormal writer, said that he thinks earlier accounts might previously been categorized as Bigfoot encounters but could have been dogman because we didn’t have a “frame of reference” then. This hypothesis fails because it ignores the facts that dogman descriptions, while often highly varied, usually include mention of a long muzzle and ears, as well as digitigrade legs. Bigfoot has small, usually unmentioned, ears, a distinctly flat face, and a human-like footprint.
That lack of prior dogmen sightings is far more likely cultural – because it was invented and promoted in the late 90s into the 2000s. We see social contagion at play -when people are hearing the associated stories and then interpreting their experiences in that framing. Another interviewee (from STM’s The Dogman Triangle) remarks that he heard of accounts from podcasts, which got him interested in the subject. This reveals how influential cryptid podcasts and social media (particularly YouTube) are in spreading the word and pulling new people into the topic.
America’s new werewolves
The trajectory of the dogman’s popularity exemplifies the move of the field of cryptozoology away from zoological cryptids towards the culturally-derived cryptid. If there are no zoological rules to be applied, then anything goes. The dogman, in its various forms, was open to addition of fun and dramatic embellishments of its story. Much was made of the creatures’ association with burial mounds and cemeteries (like Anubis), its demonic characteristics, association with Satanism and the occult and Christian references. The idea of the shapeshifter was an obvious tie-in considering its extraordinary behaviors (such as running alongside cars) and ability to not be captured. Even the fantastical story of the Hexham heads, so-called magical artifacts from the UK, were tied to the lore. Considering that LBL is a US National park, the dogman existence became a conspiracy where officials must be barred from speaking about the sightings, missing persons, and unexplained deaths.
Eventually, people described the dogman in terms of movie monsters from An American Werewolf in London, Silver Bullet and Dog Soldiers. There is significant crossover with tales of Bigfoot, Goatman, and Rougarou. Even modern chupacabra depictions are converging on the Dogman type.
Social media reveals countless AI renderings of dogman videos. Ambiguous photos are said to be of dogman.
A screengrab from a (manufactured) video of the “Black Walker”, reportedly taken in Vermont in 2009. Many people consider this evidence. In reality, such a creature would be biologically impossible.Dogman now has a reputation as a violent predator. In the LBL area particularly, believers suggest that the Dogman territory is in the North while Bigfoot’s is in the South. Sometimes they fight. Alternatively, some suggest Bigfoot protects the area and people from the dogmen. Or, maybe they work together. Or the dogman manifests via human energy. Or it travels through portals to an alternative dimension. The absurdity knows no bounds.
I find the cultural aspects of dogman, as a contemporary legend, fascinating and deserving of research and discussion. However, whenever I talk of cryptozoology as having almost entirely cultural value, I am told that it aims to be a scientific endeavor to explore possible unknown animals. We have various investigation teams searching for a prowling, predatory, magical, grave-guarding, biological impossibility, with no legitimate scientific evidence for its existence. This is, in no way, scientific.
With the Dogman as one of the most popular cryptids right now, those calling themselves cryptozoologists have some explaining to do. Those attempting to hold the line of cryptozoology as a serious “science-based” effort must address the Dogman problem. The evidence consists of unverified stories based on fictional foundations to describe a biological impossible creature. Yet, they aren’t addressing it. Instead, they continue to commodify it with media and merch, but no rational investigation. I can’t take that seriously.
Suggested reading: The Tale of the Dogman at Tetrapod Zoology
This is post 7 of the 12 Days of Cryptids.
#12DaysOfCryptids #BeastOfBrayRoad #dogman #LandBetweenTheLakesBeast #LindaGodfrey #werewolf
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We need to talk about Dogman
Dogman, a hairy humanoid, bipedal creature with a canid-type head, started its upward climb in cryptid popularity in the early 2000s. It was relatively invisible in cryptid literature prior to the work of one person: Linda Godfrey. Today, the dogman is one of the hottest mysterious animals on social media and podcasting where hundreds of stories have materialized from people who claim to have experienced this creature. Why did the dogman cryptid rise to prominence in the last 20 years? And why is modern cryptid investigation enamored with this highly paranormal creature?
We need to talk about the dogman and what it has done to modern cryptozoology.
Dogman as a para-cryptid
Starting in the 1990s, the cryptid scene was been overrun by the dogman/werewolf/canid-humanoid theme. The stories originated in the American Midwest, first in Wisconsin – thanks to Linda Godfrey’s coverage of the Beast of Bray Road. Then the Michigan Dogman legend rose to prominence across the Great Lakes area. Godfrey’s subsequent books expanded to include stories of “American Werewolves” and “Real Wolfmen”, encompassing the ancient ideas of the Egyptian god Anubis, the Rougarou legend of the southern states, and any mention of an anomalous wolf creature. Now, accounts of the “dogman” or equivalent creatures, can be found nearly nationwide.
Let’s take a step back and look at this big picture. There is nothing about the dogman descriptions or accounts that suggests it is an unknown animal that can be captured and scientifically identified. Nothing about it is biologically plausible. Consider that Bigfoot (if it was discovered to be an actual unclassified hominin) would not break the boundaries of biology as we know it; but the dogman would.
Canids (dogs or wolves, in this context) did not evolve robust bodies, human-like torsos, become bipedal, and change the functionality and morphology of their forelimbs to become arms with elbows, with long fingers and claws. This cannot naturally occur in a few years time, or may never occur if the genetic setup is not there to begin with.
An alternative would be that the animal described is not dog-like, but a baboon or kangaroo. (No one, however, is running with those latter suggestions). Therefore, the only option that one must accept in order to believe in a literal dogman, is that it is a non-natural creature, not a zoological one. Here is where the conversation leaps from the realm of “scientific” cryptozoology (if that ever existed) and lands entirely in the para-cryptid zone.
America’s werewolves
Godfrey’s coverage of the Bray Road Beast and other associated creature sightings and anomalies was commendable and in good faith. She talked to witnesses, taking their details at face value. She believed their accounts and tried very hard to lend a credible framing to the very strange body of dogman anecdotes. Her documentation, however, does not make the creature a reality. It remains unresolved what some people experienced when they described a dogman encounter.
Even with Godfrey’s documentation, we have nothing but stories. We can’t tell how truly reliable any of that information is. Many of the experiences of dogman were recounted from decades ago. Some of the tales are clearly exaggerated, as the level of detail reported was hardly possible in the dark or from far away as described.
Until Godfrey published the accounts, there were no well-documented examples that sounded credible or verifiable. Why would that be unless the animal suddenly appeared in the cultural setting?
As with Bigfoot, misidentification is always a possibility. Mangy bears, in particular, look surprisingly dog-like. Normal canids – large dogs, coyotes, wolves – are also likely to be involved. It is hard to convince people, however, that they may have been mistaken about what they think they saw.
A black bear suffering from mange.Hoaxes
The next necessary consideration is hoaxing. Unfortunately, influential hoaxes have tainted the stories of dogmen throughout their history.
The Defiance werewolf created a local panic in the Ohio town when, in 1972, Ted Davis reported to the police that he had been attacked by a “werewolf” wielding a wooden board. The creature was seen a few times, which, in turn, sparked many other residents to also say they saw it. But then it disappeared without a trace, leading to the most obvious conclusion that it was a person in a mask. When dogman tales ramped up online, this old story was resurrected and attached as further evidence of similar creatures, regardless of how weak it was.
The Gable film was uploaded to YouTube in 2007. It was made by filmmaker Mike Agrusa to look like it was taken in the 1970s. The “found footage” showed the camera person observing and being attacked by a large canid with the backstory that he was killed. For years, people argued about its authenticity as a real depiction of a cryptid, until it was revealed to be a hoax in 2010. Some newer fans of the subject never got the memo, or refused to believe it was faked.
The Michigan Dogman began its life as a song called “The Legend” released in 1987 by disc jockey Steve Cook at WTCM-FM in Traverse City, Michigan. It was intended as an April Fool’s joke, based on some legends in Michigan – an 1887 tale from Wexford County, MI where two lumberjacks claimed to see a man-dog creature, and a 1937 story from Paris, MI, where Robert Fortney said he was was attacked by wild dogs, one of which walked on two legs. A few additional accounts of strange creatures were mentioned from the intervening years but none were authenticated. Cook was astonished at the outpouring of stories that were triggered by his re-invigoration of the legend. Cook eventually collaborated with Agrusa for the Gable film.
The basis of much of the dogman lore is dubious or outright bogus. But the current hot spot for dogman tales comes from a wildlife area that has a dark history of its own.
LBL Beast
The lore of the beast in the Land Between the Lakes National Park (Kentucky-Tennessee) is a metaphorical “dog’s breakfast” – this was a term one of my former bosses used to describe a situation that was a complete mess. The LBL and its “beast” tales have served at the focus of dogman stories since about 2018. The stories now even attribute multiple deaths to the beast. Because park officials deny that these deaths have anything to do with attacks by unknown animals (or that they even happened at all), a stench of conspiracy-mongering permeates the tales.
Only one actual murder is associated with the park: Carla Atkins and Vickie Stout’s bodies were found in LBL in October of 1980. They were killed with a shotgun. Their killer was never found.
There are other famously retold stories: a family massacred in 1982, a hunter pulled from his tent and mauled, a camping family terrorized by huge creatures. The details are unclear or outright manufactured. The locals got annoyed. According to those that have lived there for decades, there is no actual folklore of a beast. It’s been manufactured – more like “fakelore”.
In 2004, a fictional story, written by “Jan Thompson” on a website that collected other stories, called Jan’s Tales, featured the tale of “The Beast of LBL”. This short story manufactured a folkloric history of a wolf-like bipedal beast and the bloody massacre of a family of three at their RV camping site (with the extra detail that the remaining child was missing). Various officers and the coroner were involved in the gruesome scene. Then the twist:
All types of samples were placed in plastic bags, marked as evidence, and carefully stowed away. As they were packaging up what appeared to be one of the fathers [sic] arms, one of the doctors noticed something wrapped between the dead fingers. Some tweezers slowly untangled a clump of long, gray and brown hairs. This too was placed in a bag, marked and put away to be analyzed at a lab later.
This story is fiction, yet it was repeated as fact. Horror filmmakers got wind of the legends and planned a movie called The Beast of LBL. I can’t find that the film was ever released but no one had anything positive to say about the parties involved in it.
[Producer] Vervoort said community reaction to the project has mostly been positive. He said he’s producing the movie because he saw a business opportunity and jumped on it. “I think it’s a case of jealousy because they’re not the ones doing it. And I saw an opportunity to create a story and I’m going with it,” Vervoort said.
Capitalizing on a fictional story promoted as real? Sounds familiar.
Fake images of Dogman are everywhere online. Even if absurdly obviously fraudulent, people click on them to comment that they believe it is real.Dogman expands to be everywhere and everything
Linda Godfrey’s efforts to collect dogman tales, unfortunately, turned her into an advocate for its reality. Her books were overly credulous. For example, she referenced Jan Thompson’s fictional tale as if it was factual. (Others did the same.) Eventually, she entertained supernatural explanations because the stories were so weird and were multiplying that it all was too much to consider dismissing them. The supernatural slide became more appealing as natural explanations didn’t add up. She was convinced that something was going on.
There was something going on: the dogman creature had resonated with popular culture about mysterious creatures and propagated. Even though the infamous TV show Monster Quest ended its run in 2010 with the reveal of the Gable film hoax, people loved the dogman story too much to give it up. The MQ end was just the beginning for the run of the dogman.
Small Town Monsters (the primary, serious producers of cryptid documentary content) jumped on the dogman train, producing multiple media pieces exaggerating and repeating the tales from the Midwest, LBL, Texas, and New Mexico. (Some programming consisted solely of witness reports filmed for the other features, loosely tied together). Unmentioned in their films is an explanation for expansion of accounts of dogman/werewolf creatures throughout the 2000s. It simply didn’t exist before this. In an attempt to account for this sudden appearance, Ron Murphy, a prolific paranormal writer, said that he thinks earlier accounts might previously been categorized as Bigfoot encounters but could have been dogman because we didn’t have a “frame of reference” then. This hypothesis fails because it ignores the facts that dogman descriptions, while often highly varied, usually include mention of a long muzzle and ears, as well as digitigrade legs. Bigfoot has small, usually unmentioned, ears, a distinctly flat face, and a human-like footprint.
That lack of prior dogmen sightings is far more likely cultural – because it was invented and promoted in the late 90s into the 2000s. We see social contagion at play -when people are hearing the associated stories and then interpreting their experiences in that framing. Another interviewee (from STM’s The Dogman Triangle) remarks that he heard of accounts from podcasts, which got him interested in the subject. This reveals how influential cryptid podcasts and social media (particularly YouTube) are in spreading the word and pulling new people into the topic.
America’s new werewolves
The trajectory of the dogman’s popularity exemplifies the move of the field of cryptozoology away from zoological cryptids towards the culturally-derived cryptid. If there are no zoological rules to be applied, then anything goes. The dogman, in its various forms, was open to addition of fun and dramatic embellishments of its story. Much was made of the creatures’ association with burial mounds and cemeteries (like Anubis), its demonic characteristics, association with Satanism and the occult and Christian references. The idea of the shapeshifter was an obvious tie-in considering its extraordinary behaviors (such as running alongside cars) and ability to not be captured. Even the fantastical story of the Hexham heads, so-called magical artifacts from the UK, were tied to the lore. Considering that LBL is a US National park, the dogman existence became a conspiracy where officials must be barred from speaking about the sightings, missing persons, and unexplained deaths.
Eventually, people described the dogman in terms of movie monsters from An American Werewolf in London, Silver Bullet and Dog Soldiers. There is significant crossover with tales of Bigfoot, Goatman, and Rougarou. Even modern chupacabra depictions are converging on the Dogman type.
Social media reveals countless AI renderings of dogman videos. Ambiguous photos are said to be of dogman.
A screengrab from a (manufactured) video of the “Black Walker”, reportedly taken in Vermont in 2009. Many people consider this evidence. In reality, such a creature would be biologically impossible.Dogman now has a reputation as a violent predator. In the LBL area particularly, believers suggest that the Dogman territory is in the North while Bigfoot’s is in the South. Sometimes they fight. Alternatively, some suggest Bigfoot protects the area and people from the dogmen. Or, maybe they work together. Or the dogman manifests via human energy. Or it travels through portals to an alternative dimension. The absurdity knows no bounds.
I find the cultural aspects of dogman, as a contemporary legend, fascinating and deserving of research and discussion. However, whenever I talk of cryptozoology as having almost entirely cultural value, I am told that it aims to be a scientific endeavor to explore possible unknown animals. We have various investigation teams searching for a prowling, predatory, magical, grave-guarding, biological impossibility, with no legitimate scientific evidence for its existence. This is, in no way, scientific.
With the Dogman as one of the most popular cryptids right now, those calling themselves cryptozoologists have some explaining to do. Those attempting to hold the line of cryptozoology as a serious “science-based” effort must address the Dogman problem. The evidence consists of unverified stories based on fictional foundations to describe a biological impossible creature. Yet, they aren’t addressing it. Instead, they continue to commodify it with media and merch, but no rational investigation. I can’t take that seriously.
Suggested reading: The Tale of the Dogman at Tetrapod Zoology
This is post 7 of the 12 Days of Cryptids.
#12DaysOfCryptids #BeastOfBrayRoad #dogman #LandBetweenTheLakesBeast #LindaGodfrey #werewolf
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Wednesday Reads
Good Afternoon!!
Today is the second full day of Trump 2.0, and the whirlwind of activity is already exhausting. Trump is trying to reverse everything Joe Biden accomplished over the past 4 years. He has issued hundreds of pardons to the January 6 rioters and other criminals. He is beginning to enact the policies laid out in “Project 2025.” And he has begun his campaign of revenge and retribution against anyone he perceives as criticizing him or opposing his wishes. I can’t possibly touch on everything that has happened, so I’ll just share commentary on two stories that I think are important: Trump’s pardons of the January 6 criminals and Elon Musk’s public performance of the Nazi salute.
First, in one fell swoop, Trump has destroyed the hard work of hundreds of prosecutors, judges, investigators, and members of the public who worked tirelessly to track down the criminals who attacked and trashed the Capitol and threatened the lives of legislators, law enforcement officers, and Trump’s own Vice President on January 6, 2021. We were assured by VP J.D. Vance, and multiple Republican politicians that Trump would only free non-violent offenders from that day, but it was all a lie. He released them all back into society where they can do whatever they want–no paroles, no supervision of any kind. In my opinion, Trump sees these criminals as his defenders. They can now organize and act as his private army.
Kelly Rissman at The Independent: ‘F*** it, release em all:’: Inside Trump’s decision to issue blanket Jan 6 pardons.
In one of the first acts of his second administration, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly all of the January 6 criminals and new details reveal the spur-of-the-moment decision to release 1,500 people charged.
“Trump just said: ‘F*** it: Release ‘em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told the Axios.
On the campaign trail, Trump flirted with pardoning who he describes as the “J6 hostages,” and on Monday decided to issue pardons to most of the people charged in connection to the riot and effort to overturn the 2020 election. That ended their prison sentence and allowed those convicted to walk out of prison.
In one of the first acts of his second administration, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly all of the January 6 criminals and new details reveal the spur-of-the-moment decision to release 1,500 people charged.
“Trump just said: ‘F*** it: Release ‘em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told the Axios.
On the campaign trail, Trump flirted with pardoning who he describes as the “J6 hostages,” and on Monday decided to issue pardons to most of the people charged in connection to the riot and effort to overturn the 2020 election. That ended their prison sentence and allowed those convicted to walk out of prison.
Trump had fluctuated on whether to grant clemency to either some or all rioters convicted of January 6-related crimes. Ultimately, the decision was made in the spur of the moment, White House advisers told Axios.
Trump’s pardons were made in defiance of JD Vance’s advice that convicts who committed violence during the Capitol attack shouldn’t be granted clemency. He told Fox News last week: “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
The president’s move also came as a surprise to some Republicans, who have said they don’t agree with his move.
“Well, I think I agree with the vice president,” Sen. Mitch McConnell told Semafor. “No one should excuse violence. And particularly violence against police officers.”
But Trump not only excuses violence that he perceives as supportive of him; he also celebrates it. Again and again, he has said that the January 5 attack was a “day of love.”
Rachel Leingang at The Guardian: Trump rewrites the violence of January 6 and ‘legitimates future ones.’
Donald Trump spent the four years after the January 6 insurrection attempting to rewrite the violence and chaos he inspired as his supporters stormed the US Capitol.
On the first day of his second term as president, he took the rewriting to its final step by issuing pardons and reducing sentences for those involved in the insurrection, including the leaders of far-right militias and those who battled with police that day.
If the criminal charges were meant to deter future acts of political violence, the pardons of more than 1,500 people do the opposite, experts said.
“This is going beyond rewriting what January 6 was,” said Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago who has studied January 6 defendants. “This is about legitimating future January 6ths.”
A procession of Proud Boys marched in Washington on Monday, carrying a banner that congratulated Trump on his victory, a visible representation of the welcome the far right is receiving from the new administration, and their former national chairperson, Enrique Tarrio, received a full pardon. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia group, had his sentence commuted.
“This will have powerful future consequences for normalizing political violence, because many of those he has granted clemency to are an ongoing threat for political violence in the future,” Pape said.
Even those who didn’t themselves participate in violence on January 6 may have played a part in violence. Pape’s research shows that nearly 500 people convicted of low-level non-violent misdemeanors were “knowing and willing participants in the violent aspects of the Capitol siege, and that without the participation of this vast group, the siege would likely have never happened or been quickly ended by the police”….
Trump also directed the justice department to drop the charges in ongoing cases, ending the years of work by the department to find and prosecute the Capitol rioters. Trump named Ed Martin, a conservative lawyer who was involved in the Stop the Steal movement and supported January 6 causes the interim US attorney for Washington DC, putting him in charge of the January 6 prosecutions, NBC News reported.
This also undercuts Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, who said she planned to evaluate these releases case by case. A bit more from The Guardian:
Perhaps the most visible face of the rioters, Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon shaman”, wrote on Twitter/X that he had just received the news from his lawyer that he was pardoned. “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!
Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman
Several of those who have publicly discussed their cases have books scheduled to be released about their involvement on January 6 or intend to do speaking engagements about it. Others have started organizations to support those who were involved in the January 6 attack.
Those involved and their supporters were also looking for ways to seek retribution for what they believed was a system rigged against them for their political views.
They could bring civil lawsuits against the government seeking redress or reparations for the charges or time spent in prison, using the language in Trump’s pardon as proof they were overcharged. The pardons call the charges a “grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years”.
Dean Obeidallah writes at The Dean’s Report: Trump’s pardon of the J6 Terrorists is about encouraging future MAGA violence.
I hope your blood is boiling after Donald Trump’s pardon of approximately 1,500 terrorists who attacked our Capitol on Jan. 6. And yes, Trump’s own hand-picked FBI Director testified before Congress that Jan. 6 was an “act of domestic terrorism.” So those people Trump has now pardoned—which includes those in the video below you can see brutally attacking police officers—are terrorists. This is akin to Bin Laden pardoning those involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Overall, the pardons covered more than 600 rioters who had been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers at the Capitol. Approximately, 175 of these Trump allies used deadly or dangerous weapons in the attack–including toxic sprays, baseball bats, two-by-fours, crutches, hockey sticks and broken wooden table legs.
Those Trump pardoned include people like Julian Khater, who pled guilty to “assaulting law enforcement officers with pepper spray,” including Officer Brian Sicknick, who died the following day. And Ronald Colton McAbee, a former sheriff’s deputy who was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for assaulting police officers. As DOJ detailed, McAbee held down a police officer who had been “knocked to the ground, kicked, and stripped of his baton by other rioters” enabling the crowd to viciously beat him. As a result, “the officer sustained physical injuries, including a head laceration, concussion, elbow injury, bruising, and bodily abrasions.”
Daniel Joseph “DJ” Rodriguez who used a stun gun on Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone and was sentenced to 12.5 years for his bevy of crimes. And David Dempsey who prosecutors called “one of the most violent” Jan. 6 attackers—who assaulted and injured numerous police officers by spraying then with pepper spray and hitting them with various items including a metal crutch, chairs and a long wooden pole. He pled guilty and was sentenced to two decades in prison.
Then there are the leaders of the militant groups the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been convicted of “Seditious Conspiracy”—which is almost as serious as Treason. As DOJ noted, the Oath Keepers leaders “plotted to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power” and then came to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 “with paramilitary gear and supplies including firearms, tactical vests with plates, helmets, and radio equipment.” Yet Trump freed them from prison despite their sentences of nearly 20 years.
These are violent and dangerous people—including many with military experience and tactical planning skills–who Trump pardoned and released from jail. Why? Trump—like any other aspiring dictators—wants to make a public showing that if you commit crimes and violence on his behalf, he will have your back.
However, there is also an even more sinister reason for Trump’s pardons of the most violent attackers. Trump wants to incentivize others in MAGA to do the same in the future—with the implicit promise being “I will pardon you like I did the Jan. 6 terrorists.”
That is not just my view. That what authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained to me last year when I interviewed her about Trump’s praise of the Jan. 6 attackers and vow to pardon them. She first shared that Trump—like other fascist leaders—is trying “to change the perception of violence. To get people to see that violence is not negative.” Trump is thereby conditioning his supporters to believe that. “Violence is sometimes morally necessary and even righteous, and even patriotic.”
As to Trump’s promise of pardons, Ben-Ghiat explained, “All authoritarians use pardons because why do you want people sitting in jail–the worst people in the world–who are for you the best people and could serve your goals?”
We’ll find out if it worked for Trump when and if people publicly protest his decisions and actions.
The Washington Post: Clemency for Oath Keepers, Proud Boys fuels extremism threat, experts say.
President Donald Trump defended his decision to free all of roughly 1,600 Jan. 6 riot defendants on Tuesday as the leaders of two extremist groups who played outsize roles in the Capitol attack walked out of federal prisons after serving a fraction of their sentences for seditious conspiracy. Trump called the conspirators’ sentences “ridiculous and excessive,” saying he pardoned “people that were treated unbelievably poorly.”
But counterterrorism experts say the pardons could further embolden fringe groups and hamper the Justice Department’s fight against political violence.
Former Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was headed home to Miami from a Louisiana prison and expected to address the media Tuesday at the airport, his lawyer said, freed from the longest sentence in the riot — 22 years — for mobilizing his right-wing group as an “army” to keep Trump in power as Congress met to confirm the 2020 election.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years, was released shortly after midnight in Cumberland, Maryland, his lawyer said, and emerged later Tuesday outside the D.C. jail to await release of those held on Jan. 6 charges. Rhodes was found guilty of urging Trump to use paramilitary groups to hold the White House and bringing armed followers to Washington ready for “civil war.”
Extremism researchers raised concerns over the message their freedom sends to armed militia-style groups or others with violent anti-government views. If those convicted of plotting such violence against the government walked free with support from the nation’s commander in chief,would others be energized to take up more action?
“Those groups of course are going to see the return of battle-hardened leaders, who in addition to having a kind of real-life legitimacy due to having actually fought the government, will also have a strong sense of victimhood and martyrdom, which will further radicalize and fuel recruitment platforms,” said Jacob Ware, a Council on Foreign Relations research fellow. “This move is going to make combating terrorism far more difficult, not just over the next four years as groups feel like they have an ally in the White House, but beyond that as well.”
Ware called the pardons “a pretty catastrophic moment for domestic counterterrorism.”
The Proud Boys and especially the Oath Keepers “have been relatively dormant for several years now,” hit very hard and deterred by the seditious conspiracy cases, he said.
“In the past when individuals were acquitted of this crime, recognized as among the most serious in a democracy, it incontrovertibly breathed new life into far-right violent extremism in the United States,” said Bruce Hoffman, a veteran counterterrorism and homeland security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1988 a jury in Fort Smith, Arkansas, acquitted 14 white supremacists of seditious conspiracy, revitalizing an anti-government militia movement that spurred the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City five years later, Hoffman said.
I guess we’ll find out soon enough if these predictions are accurate.
I’m sure you’ve seen the Nazi salute that Elon Musk performed during a speech at Trump’s inaugural “parade.” Personally, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the salute was genuine and intended to shock, but some observers are trying to minimize it.
Some commentary:
Martin Pengelly at The Guardian: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally.
Elon Musk waded into controversy on Monday when he gave back-to-back fascist-style salutes during celebrations of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.
“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, the richest person on earth and a major Trump donor and adviser, told Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.
Musk then slapped his right hand into his chest, fingers splayed, before shooting out his right arm on an upwards diagonal, fingers together and palm facing down.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which campaigns against antisemitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down”.
As the crowd roared, Musk turned and saluted again, his arm and hand slightly lower.
“My heart goes out to you,” Musk said, striking himself on the chest again. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured. Thanks to you. We’re gonna have safe cities, finally safe cities. Secure borders, sensible spending. Basic stuff. And we’re gonna take ‘Doge’ to Mars.” [….]
Social media users expressed shock at Musk’s gesture. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, said: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.”
Musk did not immediately comment, though he did repost footage of his remarks that included the second salute and endorsed memes seeking to turn footage of his salutes into jokes.
One X user wrote: “Can we please retire the calling people a Nazi thing?”
Musk wrote: “Yeah exactly” and added a “yawning” emoji.
Nonetheless, Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, described Musk delivering “a Roman salute, a fascist salute most commonly associated with Nazi Germany”.
The ADL, meanwhile, says that in Germany between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi salute “was often accompanied by chanting or shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ or ‘Sieg Heil.’ Since world war two, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have continued to use the salute, making it the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world.”
Kate Connolly at The Guardian: ‘The gesture speaks for itself’: Germans respond to Musk’s apparent Nazi salute.
There were angry reactions across Europe to Elon Musk’s apparent use of a salute banned for its Nazi links in Germany, where some condemned it as malicious provocation or an outreach of solidarity to far-right groups.
Michel Friedman, a prominent German-French publicist and former deputy chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, described Musk’s actions – at an event after Donald Trump’s swearing in as US president – as a disgrace and said Musk had shown that a “dangerous point for the entire free world” had been reached.
Friedman, who descends from a family of Polish Jews, hardly any of whom survived the Holocaust, told the daily Tagesspiegel he had been shocked when watching the inauguration live on television, adding that as far as he was concerned Musk had unambiguously performed the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute, despite attempts to downplay it.
“I thought to myself, the breaking of taboos is reaching a point that is dangerous for the entire free world. The brutalisation, the dehumanisation, Auschwitz, all of that is Hitler. A mass murderer, a warmonger, a person for whom people were nothing more than numbers – fair game, not worth mentioning,” Friedman said.
Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, described the gesture as “highly disconcerting”. But she said it was not as significant as Musk’s recent attempts to meddle in German politics, where he has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland ahead of next month’s federal election.
“Far more worrying are Elon Musk’s political positions, his offensive interference in the German parliamentary election campaign and his support for a party whose anti-democratic aims should be under no illusions,” she said in a statement.
The Washington Post: Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant.
Right-wing extremists are celebrating Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture during a speech Monday, although his intention wasn’t totally clear and some hate watchdogs are saying not to read too much into it….
Many social media users noticed that the gesture looked like a Nazi salute. Musk has only fanned the flames of suspicion by not explicitly denying those claims in a dozen posts since, though he did make light of the criticism and lashed out at people making that interpretation.
“The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X several hours after he left the stage.
Critics and fans alike of the Tesla CEO and world’s richest man were quick to react to the gesture.
“The White Flame will rise again,” a chapter of the white nationalist group White Lives Matter posted on Telegram.
“Maybe woke really is dead,” white nationalist Keith Woods posted on X.
“Did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler …” right-wing commentator Evan Kilgore posted on X. “We are so back.”
Some expert commentary:
Kurt Braddock, a professor of communication at American University who studies extremism, radicalization and terrorism, said the gesture was a fascist salute and “people shouldn’t doubt what they saw.”
“I know what I saw, I know what the response to it was among elements of the extreme right including neo-Nazis, Braddock said. “And none of it is a laughing matter.”
1934: German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) giving the Nazi salute from his car whilst at the Nazi Party Congress. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Efraim Zuroff, the retired head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office and formerly the organization’s top Nazi hunter, said he also saw it as Nazi salute, and that it happened at U.S. presidential inauguration celebration made it especially shocking to see.
“It’s totally improper, and it raises all sorts of questions regarding his motivations, or his ignorance,” he said in a telephone interview from Israel. “This is America, the leader of the free world, the people who sacrificed 200,000 soldiers who died to defend Europe. He has to explain himself.”
In Europe where the fascist salute is associated with the hate, death and destruction of World War II, Musk’s arm gesture elicited outrage.
An Italian communist youth organization on Tuesday hung an effigy of Musk upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini’s body was hung upside down after he was executed during the final days of World War II. The organization, Cambiare Rotta (Change Course), noted in a Facebook post that a photo of the effigy had been removed by the social media company.
“We are correctly a little afraid, because that image is scary,’’ author Filippo Ceccarelli told Italian La7 private television.
Known as the Roman salute in Italy, the straight-arm greeting officially adopted in 1925 by the dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime is banned in Italy though it is rarely prosecuted.
This post is getting too long, but I just want to share one more article by Andrew Perez, Asawin Suebsaeng at Rolling Stone: In Trump’s America, the Oligarchy Is Done Pretending to Care About You.
Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term on Monday before the world’s richest people. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg were among those seated closest to Trump as he demonized the most vulnerable members of our society, rewrote the history of his criminal prosecutions, and pledged to roll back Joe Biden’s efforts to address climate change.
They smiled. They laughed. They thumbs-upped. They loved it.
By the end of Inauguration Day, Trump had signed an executive order attempting to abolish “birthright citizenship,” cut off all asylum claims at the southern border, signed an order prohibiting federal recognition of transgender Americans, once again ended America’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and issued pardons to 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, including the seditionist leader of the Proud Boys.
Not so long ago, some of the ultra-wealthy and big corporations would feign disgust with Trump. They paid lip service to social justice movements and pledged to make paltry efforts to reduce their climate impact. That’s all over now. America’s oligarchs are done pretending — there is too much money to be made and power to be amassed together. They’ll get to keep their Trump tax cuts, and can expect to receive more. The government investigations of their businesses and regulatory scrutiny will end. All they have to do is act like — or freely admit — they support Trump and his policies. Pay up, show respect, get paid, and whatever else you want.
In the days leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, pockets of deep-blue Washington were transformed into a mecca of MAGA glitz and boozy, Trumpified access-peddling. In downtown D.C., Trump’s Sunday and Monday afternoon pageantries were quickly followed with rows of richly dressed MAGA fans and ticket-holders standing out in the cold, waiting to get into the evening’s selections of this exclusive party, sponsored by that corporate colossus, all to toast the dawn of yet another four years of reality-TV-style authoritarian decay.
Just a few short years ago, corporate America was so mad about the Jan. 6 insurrection, when Trump whipped up his supporters and they attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to block Joe Biden from becoming president. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it was “appalled by the violence at the Capitol,” and Zuckerberg, its CEO, declared on Jan. 7, 2021 that the company would block Trump from posting after its platform was used “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”
Zuckerberg’s concerns about the health of our democracy appear to have subsided. On Jan. 7 this year, he announced Facebook would end its fact-checking program. He also went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about how the “corporate world is pretty culturally neutered” and society has become “emasculated.” Meta, like many big corporations, made a large donation ($1 million) to Trump’s inaugural committee….
Due to cold weather, Trump’s coronation was moved inside, into the Capitol building his supporters ransacked four years ago. Holding the ceremony in the small Capitol rotunda gave it an exclusive, cozy feel and kept out the riff-raff: No commoners could watch Trump’s swearing-in live in-person — not even Republican governors, who were relegated to an overflow room. Only the elite of the elite and the best Trump supporters. Musk. Zuckerberg. Bezos. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat with them. Apple CEO Tim Cook was there. Former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush were seated in front of UFC’s Dana White. Rogan, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, and Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk were there, too….
Musk — who leads Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter) — came out as a MAGA fanatic this summer and leaned in, spending $153 million to boost Trump’s presidential campaign via his Super PAC. He amplified Trump’s campaign against migrants and undocumented immigrants, running ads decrying the “HISTORIC BORDER INVASION” and “illegal immigrants getting handouts.” [….]
Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chairman, has his own space business, Blue Origin, and Amazon provides cloud services to the government. The world’s second-richest man started cozying up to Trump not long before the election, when he killed The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Bezos, who’s owned the paper since 2013, wrote in a Post op-ed that “no quid pro quo of any kind” was to blame for his decision. After Trump won, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. The company, which is spending $40 million to license a documentary and a limited series about First Lady Melania Trump, recently deleted its public commitments to protecting the rights of Black and LGBTQ+ people from its website. The Post’s editorial board separately endorsed most of Trump’s Cabinet and Cabinet-level nominees….
Zuckerberg, the third-richest man in the world, was seen as a Trump enemy — specifically because he funded election infrastructure during the 2020 contest, after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump literally threatened to jail him for life. Following Trump’s win, Zuckerberg flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to suck up to the incoming commander in chief. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Meta announced it is ending its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and changed its policies to allow users to attack LGBTQ+ people as “mentally ill,” women as “crazy,” and Mexican immigrants as “trash.”
If corporate America used to toss liberals some cultural wins here and there, instead of improving anyone’s material conditions, the ultra-wealthy are done bothering with that charade now.
There is no reason for America’s oligarchs to hide anymore, no penalty to pay. What matters, financially-speaking, is getting close to Trump.
We are turning into post Soviet Russia. I wonder if it is going to be possible to fight this? We can only hope.
#EnriqueTarrio #JacobChansley #January6Pardons #NaziSalute #OathKeepers #ProudBoys #StewartRhodes