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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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“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
###
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 -
“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 Realityy
###
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 -
“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 Realityy
###
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 -
“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
###
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 -
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
-
#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
-
#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
-
#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
-
#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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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
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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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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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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 -
The simple truth is that Kamala Harris should be promising an arms embargo on Israel because Netanyahu is conducting a nearly year-long genocide in Gaza, he's doing it with U.S. funded and supplied weapons he couldn't accomplish this goal without, and said arms embargo seems like it's the only way to get Israel to stop bombing hospitals and sniping children in broad daylight. There can be no question about these facts, and America's continued material support for Israeli's militarized campaign of extermination makes U.S. leaders culpable for these crimes against humanity. As I've also pointed out repeatedly however, the fact that the Democratic Party probably can't beat Trump without winning my home state of Michigan, and that state has an extremely large population of Muslim Americans who may not just "shut up and vote" for a government actively helping to exterminate Palestinians, is also another pretty good damn reason for an immediate arms embargo by the U.S., on Israel.
Muslims Were Reliably Democratic Voters. With US Gaza Policy, That’s Changed.
"Vice President Kamala Harris and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are virtually tied, with about 29 percent of Muslims planning to vote for each candidate, according to a survey of 1,159 voters conducted shortly after the DNC. Another 4 percent plan to vote for Cornel West, the unaffiliated antiwar candidate who is still fighting to be on the ballot in multiple states.
Just over 11 percent plan to vote for Republican Donald Trump, and 16 percent remain undecided. Only 8 percent said they are not planning to vote in November.
“This is showing that Muslim voters who traditionally in the last election voted over 60 percent for Biden, that 60 percent has evenly split now between two candidates who have two very different messages that are addressing their concerns,” said Robert McCaw, CAIR’s director of government affairs, during a press conference Thursday."
Look, I know some people (including "progressive" political darlings like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) are going to read that quote and reflexive start bitching about what a fraud Jill Stein is, and I'm certainly willing to concede that she's no friend of mine. By that same measure however, if you give people a choice at the ballot box between genocide, and more genocide, you probably shouldn't be at all surprised when folks whose friends and relatives you're helping to exterminate start casting around for another option.
If you read this whole article, it's clear that these folks are not committed Stein voters, so much as outraged at the crimes against humanity Harris is effectively refusing to take action against even if she wins the election. The Democratic Party hasn't lost Michigan yet, and inexplicably there's still time to turn this around; but given the paper-thin margins polling in the state is presenting, Muslim Americans in Michigan probably aren't a constituency Harris can simply ignore. The best time to slap an arms embargo on Israel was over ten months ago; the second best time is right now, and even if Biden refuses, Harris can promise that she'll do so if and when she wins the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. Refusing to do that is not only criminally inhumane, but a staggering example of political malpractice by a campaign that keeps swearing up and down that *the* most important thing to save America is stopping Trump, as well.
Furthermore, with recent polling showing that as many as seventy-five percent of Democrat voters now oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, there would appear to be no political downside at the ballot box for Harris if she promised to end it; if anything she'd likely attract more voters by doing so, particularly young and nonwhite voters who were a vital and likely irreplaceable part of the coalition that stopped Trump and got Biden over in 2020. If Harris is serious about winning this election and stopping Trump from potentially ending what passes for American democracy, the choice here could not be clearer; she needs to side with everyday voters, and against fascist apartheid states, Biden's ongoing support for a genocide, and weapons contractors - not just because it's the right thing to do, but because she's not going to win in 2024 without Michigan and other former "blue wall" states in the Midwest, and they demand action.
If you don't want to see a second Trump presidency that will almost certainly result in a right wing attempt to install a permanent, overtly fascist political order in America, you need to stop yelling at people online to "shut up and vote" and start telling Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party that you demand they do what it takes to actually win this election; and they can start by promising an arms embargo on Israel that will come into effect on day 1 of her presidency at the latest.
#USPol #Harris #Election2024 #Trump #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Biden #ArmsEmbargoNow #MuslimAmericans #Michigan #Imperialism #Colonialism
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The simple truth is that Kamala Harris should be promising an arms embargo on Israel because Netanyahu is conducting a nearly year-long genocide in Gaza, he's doing it with U.S. funded and supplied weapons he couldn't accomplish this goal without, and said arms embargo seems like it's the only way to get Israel to stop bombing hospitals and sniping children in broad daylight. There can be no question about these facts, and America's continued material support for Israeli's militarized campaign of extermination makes U.S. leaders culpable for these crimes against humanity. As I've also pointed out repeatedly however, the fact that the Democratic Party probably can't beat Trump without winning my home state of Michigan, and that state has an extremely large population of Muslim Americans who may not just "shut up and vote" for a government actively helping to exterminate Palestinians, is also another pretty good damn reason for an immediate arms embargo by the U.S., on Israel.
Muslims Were Reliably Democratic Voters. With US Gaza Policy, That’s Changed.
"Vice President Kamala Harris and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are virtually tied, with about 29 percent of Muslims planning to vote for each candidate, according to a survey of 1,159 voters conducted shortly after the DNC. Another 4 percent plan to vote for Cornel West, the unaffiliated antiwar candidate who is still fighting to be on the ballot in multiple states.
Just over 11 percent plan to vote for Republican Donald Trump, and 16 percent remain undecided. Only 8 percent said they are not planning to vote in November.
“This is showing that Muslim voters who traditionally in the last election voted over 60 percent for Biden, that 60 percent has evenly split now between two candidates who have two very different messages that are addressing their concerns,” said Robert McCaw, CAIR’s director of government affairs, during a press conference Thursday."
Look, I know some people (including "progressive" political darlings like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) are going to read that quote and reflexive start bitching about what a fraud Jill Stein is, and I'm certainly willing to concede that she's no friend of mine. By that same measure however, if you give people a choice at the ballot box between genocide, and more genocide, you probably shouldn't be at all surprised when folks whose friends and relatives you're helping to exterminate start casting around for another option.
If you read this whole article, it's clear that these folks are not committed Stein voters, so much as outraged at the crimes against humanity Harris is effectively refusing to take action against even if she wins the election. The Democratic Party hasn't lost Michigan yet, and inexplicably there's still time to turn this around; but given the paper-thin margins polling in the state is presenting, Muslim Americans in Michigan probably aren't a constituency Harris can simply ignore. The best time to slap an arms embargo on Israel was over ten months ago; the second best time is right now, and even if Biden refuses, Harris can promise that she'll do so if and when she wins the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. Refusing to do that is not only criminally inhumane, but a staggering example of political malpractice by a campaign that keeps swearing up and down that *the* most important thing to save America is stopping Trump, as well.
Furthermore, with recent polling showing that as many as seventy-five percent of Democrat voters now oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, there would appear to be no political downside at the ballot box for Harris if she promised to end it; if anything she'd likely attract more voters by doing so, particularly young and nonwhite voters who were a vital and likely irreplaceable part of the coalition that stopped Trump and got Biden over in 2020. If Harris is serious about winning this election and stopping Trump from potentially ending what passes for American democracy, the choice here could not be clearer; she needs to side with everyday voters, and against fascist apartheid states, Biden's ongoing support for a genocide, and weapons contractors - not just because it's the right thing to do, but because she's not going to win in 2024 without Michigan and other former "blue wall" states in the Midwest, and they demand action.
If you don't want to see a second Trump presidency that will almost certainly result in a right wing attempt to install a permanent, overtly fascist political order in America, you need to stop yelling at people online to "shut up and vote" and start telling Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party that you demand they do what it takes to actually win this election; and they can start by promising an arms embargo on Israel that will come into effect on day 1 of her presidency at the latest.
#USPol #Harris #Election2024 #Trump #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Biden #ArmsEmbargoNow #MuslimAmericans #Michigan #Imperialism #Colonialism
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The simple truth is that Kamala Harris should be promising an arms embargo on Israel because Netanyahu is conducting a nearly year-long genocide in Gaza, he's doing it with U.S. funded and supplied weapons he couldn't accomplish this goal without, and said arms embargo seems like it's the only way to get Israel to stop bombing hospitals and sniping children in broad daylight. There can be no question about these facts, and America's continued material support for Israeli's militarized campaign of extermination makes U.S. leaders culpable for these crimes against humanity. As I've also pointed out repeatedly however, the fact that the Democratic Party probably can't beat Trump without winning my home state of Michigan, and that state has an extremely large population of Muslim Americans who may not just "shut up and vote" for a government actively helping to exterminate Palestinians, is also another pretty good damn reason for an immediate arms embargo by the U.S., on Israel.
Muslims Were Reliably Democratic Voters. With US Gaza Policy, That’s Changed.
"Vice President Kamala Harris and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are virtually tied, with about 29 percent of Muslims planning to vote for each candidate, according to a survey of 1,159 voters conducted shortly after the DNC. Another 4 percent plan to vote for Cornel West, the unaffiliated antiwar candidate who is still fighting to be on the ballot in multiple states.
Just over 11 percent plan to vote for Republican Donald Trump, and 16 percent remain undecided. Only 8 percent said they are not planning to vote in November.
“This is showing that Muslim voters who traditionally in the last election voted over 60 percent for Biden, that 60 percent has evenly split now between two candidates who have two very different messages that are addressing their concerns,” said Robert McCaw, CAIR’s director of government affairs, during a press conference Thursday."
Look, I know some people (including "progressive" political darlings like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) are going to read that quote and reflexive start bitching about what a fraud Jill Stein is, and I'm certainly willing to concede that she's no friend of mine. By that same measure however, if you give people a choice at the ballot box between genocide, and more genocide, you probably shouldn't be at all surprised when folks whose friends and relatives you're helping to exterminate start casting around for another option.
If you read this whole article, it's clear that these folks are not committed Stein voters, so much as outraged at the crimes against humanity Harris is effectively refusing to take action against even if she wins the election. The Democratic Party hasn't lost Michigan yet, and inexplicably there's still time to turn this around; but given the paper-thin margins polling in the state is presenting, Muslim Americans in Michigan probably aren't a constituency Harris can simply ignore. The best time to slap an arms embargo on Israel was over ten months ago; the second best time is right now, and even if Biden refuses, Harris can promise that she'll do so if and when she wins the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. Refusing to do that is not only criminally inhumane, but a staggering example of political malpractice by a campaign that keeps swearing up and down that *the* most important thing to save America is stopping Trump, as well.
Furthermore, with recent polling showing that as many as seventy-five percent of Democrat voters now oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, there would appear to be no political downside at the ballot box for Harris if she promised to end it; if anything she'd likely attract more voters by doing so, particularly young and nonwhite voters who were a vital and likely irreplaceable part of the coalition that stopped Trump and got Biden over in 2020. If Harris is serious about winning this election and stopping Trump from potentially ending what passes for American democracy, the choice here could not be clearer; she needs to side with everyday voters, and against fascist apartheid states, Biden's ongoing support for a genocide, and weapons contractors - not just because it's the right thing to do, but because she's not going to win in 2024 without Michigan and other former "blue wall" states in the Midwest, and they demand action.
If you don't want to see a second Trump presidency that will almost certainly result in a right wing attempt to install a permanent, overtly fascist political order in America, you need to stop yelling at people online to "shut up and vote" and start telling Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party that you demand they do what it takes to actually win this election; and they can start by promising an arms embargo on Israel that will come into effect on day 1 of her presidency at the latest.
#USPol #Harris #Election2024 #Trump #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Biden #ArmsEmbargoNow #MuslimAmericans #Michigan #Imperialism #Colonialism
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The simple truth is that Kamala Harris should be promising an arms embargo on Israel because Netanyahu is conducting a nearly year-long genocide in Gaza, he's doing it with U.S. funded and supplied weapons he couldn't accomplish this goal without, and said arms embargo seems like it's the only way to get Israel to stop bombing hospitals and sniping children in broad daylight. There can be no question about these facts, and America's continued material support for Israeli's militarized campaign of extermination makes U.S. leaders culpable for these crimes against humanity. As I've also pointed out repeatedly however, the fact that the Democratic Party probably can't beat Trump without winning my home state of Michigan, and that state has an extremely large population of Muslim Americans who may not just "shut up and vote" for a government actively helping to exterminate Palestinians, is also another pretty good damn reason for an immediate arms embargo by the U.S., on Israel.
Muslims Were Reliably Democratic Voters. With US Gaza Policy, That’s Changed.
"Vice President Kamala Harris and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are virtually tied, with about 29 percent of Muslims planning to vote for each candidate, according to a survey of 1,159 voters conducted shortly after the DNC. Another 4 percent plan to vote for Cornel West, the unaffiliated antiwar candidate who is still fighting to be on the ballot in multiple states.
Just over 11 percent plan to vote for Republican Donald Trump, and 16 percent remain undecided. Only 8 percent said they are not planning to vote in November.
“This is showing that Muslim voters who traditionally in the last election voted over 60 percent for Biden, that 60 percent has evenly split now between two candidates who have two very different messages that are addressing their concerns,” said Robert McCaw, CAIR’s director of government affairs, during a press conference Thursday."
Look, I know some people (including "progressive" political darlings like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) are going to read that quote and reflexive start bitching about what a fraud Jill Stein is, and I'm certainly willing to concede that she's no friend of mine. By that same measure however, if you give people a choice at the ballot box between genocide, and more genocide, you probably shouldn't be at all surprised when folks whose friends and relatives you're helping to exterminate start casting around for another option.
If you read this whole article, it's clear that these folks are not committed Stein voters, so much as outraged at the crimes against humanity Harris is effectively refusing to take action against even if she wins the election. The Democratic Party hasn't lost Michigan yet, and inexplicably there's still time to turn this around; but given the paper-thin margins polling in the state is presenting, Muslim Americans in Michigan probably aren't a constituency Harris can simply ignore. The best time to slap an arms embargo on Israel was over ten months ago; the second best time is right now, and even if Biden refuses, Harris can promise that she'll do so if and when she wins the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. Refusing to do that is not only criminally inhumane, but a staggering example of political malpractice by a campaign that keeps swearing up and down that *the* most important thing to save America is stopping Trump, as well.
Furthermore, with recent polling showing that as many as seventy-five percent of Democrat voters now oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, there would appear to be no political downside at the ballot box for Harris if she promised to end it; if anything she'd likely attract more voters by doing so, particularly young and nonwhite voters who were a vital and likely irreplaceable part of the coalition that stopped Trump and got Biden over in 2020. If Harris is serious about winning this election and stopping Trump from potentially ending what passes for American democracy, the choice here could not be clearer; she needs to side with everyday voters, and against fascist apartheid states, Biden's ongoing support for a genocide, and weapons contractors - not just because it's the right thing to do, but because she's not going to win in 2024 without Michigan and other former "blue wall" states in the Midwest, and they demand action.
If you don't want to see a second Trump presidency that will almost certainly result in a right wing attempt to install a permanent, overtly fascist political order in America, you need to stop yelling at people online to "shut up and vote" and start telling Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party that you demand they do what it takes to actually win this election; and they can start by promising an arms embargo on Israel that will come into effect on day 1 of her presidency at the latest.
#USPol #Harris #Election2024 #Trump #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Biden #ArmsEmbargoNow #MuslimAmericans #Michigan #Imperialism #Colonialism
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From OregonLive:
Unique Portland City Council meetings focus on Zenith, leave company’s future unclearUpdated: Jan. 21, 2025, 6:38 p.m.|Published: Jan. 21, 2025, 6:18 p.m.
The Portland City Council on Tuesday held a first-of-its-kind work and listening session on Zenith Energy, the controversial crude oil storage company that has promised to transition to renewable fuels.
The combined session featured presentations from city staff, Zenith officials and environmentalists who oppose Zenith. It was meant to educate council members about the company’s history and land-use policies but also nodded to heightened public interest in the company.
Yet it left much unclear about whether the council would have any say about Zenith’s future operations in Portland.
The session came a month after the Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality asked Zenith to get a new city approval – known as a land-use compatibility statement – after discovering inconsistencies in the company’s air permit application.
The city has until Feb. 4 to make a decision on the land-use credential.
The Zenith session served as a test of authority for newly elected council members under Portland’s reshaped form of government as they grappled if they could and should intervene in Zenith’s trajectory in Portland.
Given the council’s progressive leanings and the fierce public criticism of Zenith’s violations and lack of transparency, some council members have indicated an interest in taking the reins of the Zenith permission process.
But city staff members have maintained that the decision on the land-use credential should be purely administrative – and told the council that permitting staff would make the call by the deadline, as a delay could open the city up to a lawsuit.
Portland processes about 150 land use compatibility statement applications a year, said David Kuhnhausen, city permitting and development interim director. A number of state agencies require the approvals, including the Oregon DMV for auto dismantling businesses, Oregon Department of Agriculture for hemp handling businesses and the Oregon Department of Education for child care facilities, he said.
Under the old form of government, the vast majority of those land-use approvals were issued as administrative decisions at the bureau level, Kuhnhausen said. In Zenith’s case, its credential was denied in 2021 based on an executive decision by then-Commissioner Dan Ryan who oversaw the former Portland Bureau of Development Services, which issued the documents. (The city reversed course a year later and approved Zenith’s land-use credential.)
Under the new form of government the mayor can allow the decisions to be handled by bureau staff or the council can take legislative action to create a new quasi-judicial process for the council to make land-use credential decisions, City Attorney Robert Taylor said.
Short of action from the mayor or the council, “as things presently stand, this is an administrative decision,” Taylor told council members.
Donnie Oliveira, interim deputy city administrator for community and economic development, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that city staff likely would approve Zenith’s application.
“Given existing policy and procedures and early review of the applicant’s newest request, yes the LUCS would be granted because it is an outright allowed use, assuming staff’s complete analysis confirms that,” he said via email. “And yes, it is council’s prerogative to take up a legislative action for new LUCS decision-making, so if they chose to take that path their conclusion may be different than the bureau subject matter experts.”
The session also underlined a desire by some residents for more participation in the public process for significant land-use decisions like Zenith’s.
“There’s a disconnect between what our city officials perceive as a robust public process and what citizens have been demanding for over six years, legitimate public engagement and legitimate enforcement power for the city to wield in its land-use decisions,” said John Giacoppe, a Mount Tabor neighborhood resident.
“This is not a land-use decision for a daycare,” Giacoppe said. “This is a land-use decision for a giant facility which can explode, and even if it’s a small possibility of an explosion, that is something which should be considered when we’re evaluating how public input is weighed and the opportunities we present to the public to be involved in this process.”
The listening session cemented some residents’ repudiation of Zenith as well as their deep skepticism over the city’s policy to transition to renewable fuels, also known as biofuels, to reach greenhouse gas emission-reduction mandates. Zenith is one of 11 companies operating a fossil and renewable fuel terminal at the Critical Energy Infrastructure hub on the Willamette River.
For two hours, 45 people urged the city to deny Zenith’s land-use compatibility statement, an approval the company needs to apply for a new state air permit.
“The issue before us is not whether there will be an accident or earthquake at the CEI hub, but when. The issue before us is what can we do today to prevent a catastrophe just five miles from where we sit, what we can do is limit the future harm,” Portland resident Peter Kokopeli told the council members. “What we can do is deny the Zenith LUCS and phase out the trans-shipment of dangerous liquid fuels through our beautiful city.”
“A massive transition to biofuels is not a climate solution,” he said.
An analysis of Zenith’s now-on-hold air quality permit application by The Oregonian/OregonLive showed the permit, if approved, could pave the way for Zenith’s expansion in Portland and was not likely to lead to substantial emission reductions.
Zenith’s chief commercial officer, Grady Reamer, reiterated that the company would wean itself off fossil fuels by 2027 and was the only local option to bring a steady supply of renewable fuels to Oregon and to Portland.
“Oregon has limited production of renewable fuels, such as renewable diesel. So renewable fuels must be imported to this market. Zenith is the only major rail facility in the market capable of handling the renewable fuels that meet Oregon’s demand,” Reamer said. “What is driving the demand for renewable fuels? Local and state climate-related programs.”
Several business groups also sent letters in support of Zenith, including Oregon Business & Industry, a statewide association representing businesses from a wide variety of industries.
“The most effective way to reduce carbon emissions in the near term is to expand the availability of low carbon, renewable fuels,” the group wrote. “Zenith’s terminal is crucial to complying with the City’s aggressive carbon reduction targets.”
In November, state regulators put Zenith’s air permit process on hold after an inspection uncovered inconsistencies in its application. In December, Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality asked Zenith to secure a new land-use compatibility statement from the city before the state agency will consider issuing a new air permit.
Environmental activists, who want the city to deny the credential, hailed the session a success, praising the new council members for listening to community concerns about Zenith’s numerous violations and potential to increase the risk of spills in the case of an earthquake.
The violations have ranged from Zenith performing months of construction work without a permit at its terminal to the company failing to conduct a state-required preparedness drill for a crude oil spill to violating city code by lobbying city officials to get approval of the land use document.
“We’ve had more oversight and transparency over this issue in the last two hours than we had in the prior three years,” said Nick Caleb, an attorney with the Breach Collective, a climate-justice advocacy organization that tracks and opposes Zenith’s operations.
— Gosia Wozniacka covers environmental justice, climate change, the clean energy transition and other environmental issues. Reach her at [email protected] or 971-421-3154.
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Happy Caturday!!
By Joan Gillchrest
This week, Trump has truly shown himself to be a fascist. To our everlasting shame as a country, this disgusting man, this convicted criminal–found guilty of rape and 34 counts of business fraud–is still permitted to run for president. If he somehow wins the election in November, he will be able to act with impunity, since the right wing Supreme Court has said that the president cannot be prosecuted for official acts. Thanks to this horrible creature Trump, our democracy hangs in the balance.
Now, as Dakinikat wrote in detail yesterday, Trump has been spreading an insane attack on legal Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city, Springfield, creating a crisis there involving attacks on innocent people and bomb threats that have closed the city hall and two elementary schools on Thursday and Friday.
Trump’s VP candidate J.D. Vance was the first to spread the hateful rumors, and he has continued to do so even after they have been debunked. Vance also called attention to the event that began the anti-Haitian fervor in Springfield–a bus crash that killed a young boy. The bus driver was a Haitian immigrant.
As Daknikat also wrote, Trump has been hanging around with Laura Loomer, a hateful far right activist, and she may also have been a source of the anti-Haitian rumors. (FYI: Here is a very good Guardian article about Loomer) Trump has been taking Loomer with him on his plane to events such as the 9/11 anniversary commemorations in Shanksville, PA, and New York City and the debate with VP Kamala Harris on Tuesday. Loomer reportedly has been staying at Mar-a-Lago for at least the past week.
As you can tell, this is a follow-up to Dakinikat’s excellent Friday post. I want to add a little more background.
An Op-Ed by Lydian Polgreen at The New York Times: Trump Has Crossed a Truly Unacceptable Line.
When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.
But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be nice to be able to have access to so much food, another joked. At the time, this was puzzling and upsetting — I had moved from Kenya, not Ethiopia, to my father’s home state, Minnesota. But the facts didn’t matter. These unkind remarks did the job the bullies hoped they would: They made me feel like an alien, an unwelcome stranger.
We live in even crueler times now, with humanitarian catastrophes unfolding on several continents, but the response of the wealthy world has been to demand tighter borders and higher fences. There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday, a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.
And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the fringe of the MAGA-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by Trump himself.
There is a temptation to treat this as yet another Trump rant, a disgusting lie about immigrants like the ones he uttered as he began his presidential bid in 2015, describing migrants crossing the border with Mexico as rapists and criminals. He’s done it time and again since. He is the master of exaggerated and fabricated claims against the boogeymen, a skill he has used for decades to polarize public opinion and raise his profile and power at the expense of others.
But there is something particularly insidious about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. Food and pets are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined symbols in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about identity and belonging.
What you eat is an instant way to communicate the most basic forms of human connection. There’s a reason American political rituals cluster around cookouts, clambakes and fish fries. The human need for sustenance — food and water to feed the physical body — is universal. But what is also universal is the meaning food carries. Everyone has a personal version of Proust’s madeleines, a food that immediately and ineffably names who you are, where you come from, the culture that made you. Food is a powerful signifier, of both belonging and exclusion.
Below is a gift link, if you want to read the entire article. It’s well worth the time.
At the Atlantic, Isabel Fattal provides a timeline for the spread of the ugly rumors: The Springfield Effect: Trump and Vance spread racist memes that turned into bomb threats and school evacuations.
To say that Donald Trump is reckless with his public comments is about as big an understatement as you could make. But this week, we are watching the real-world effects of that recklessness play out with alarming speed.
Consider the timeline. On Monday, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, mentioned on X the claim—for which there is no verifiable evidence—that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “abducting” and eating pets. Vance was promoting a racist theory that had been circulating in certain corners of the internet in recent days, a manifestation of the anti-Haitian sentiment that has bubbled up in Springfield after roughly 15,000 Haitian migrants arrived in the town over the past few years. MAGA supporters quickly kicked into action, sharingcat memes referencing the pet-eating theory.
By Alice De Miramon
On Tuesday, Vance posted on X that his senatorial office in Ohio had “received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.” Vance acknowledged in his post that these rumors may “turn out to be false” but went on to say: “Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” And he egged on the internet trolls in a subsequent post: “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
Vance was referring to an 11-year-old who was killed when a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus last year. (The driver has since been convicted of involuntary manslaughter.) On Tuesday, the boy’s father spoke out against the politicization of his son’s death. “My son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” Nathan Clark said in remarks before Springfield’s city commission. “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.”
In 2020, the population of Springfield, Ohio, was nearly 60,000. The town had been losing residents because of declining job opportunities, but a recent manufacturing boom has brought in an influx of immigrants, who are mostly Haitian, as Miriam Jordan of The New York Times hasreported. Most of these immigrants are in the U.S. legally; local authorities and employers say that Haitian immigrants have boosted what was once a declining local economy, but such a mass arrival of migrants has also strained government resources.
Trump’s decision to bring up Springfield at the debate—in his now-infamous and bizarre “eating the pets” non sequitur—may have been his attempt to redirect attention to immigration, which he sees as a winning topic for his campaign. But it was also a reminder of his penchant for spreading conspiracy theories and his habit of fueling the fire of racism and hate in America. The days that followed revealed how a rambling Trump comment—with the help of Vance and the pair’s social-media faithful—can generate actual threats of violence.
JD Vance continues to spread disgusting anti-Haitian rumors. Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate: JD Vance now says Haitian immigrants are spreading HIV after bizarre pet-eating claim flops.
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Trump’s running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance, made a series of controversial, bigoted, and inflammatory statements during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Vance doubled down on debunked claims about Haitian immigrants abducting pets to eat them and falsely linked the migrant community to rising rates of HIV and tuberculosis in Springfield, Ohio. His remarks have since drawn widespread condemnation for their harmful, fear-mongering nature.
During the interview, Vance insisted on the veracity of a discredited conspiracy theory circulating in Springfield that claims Haitian immigrants have been abducting pets for food, a laughable claim Trump made during the debate. Local officials have already said that “no credible evidence” supports these allegations, but Vance continued to push the narrative. “We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground… saying this stuff is happening,” Vance said. When Collins pointed out that officials had found no evidence, Vance responded, “They’ve said they don’t have all the evidence.”
By Marek Brozowski
Collins pressed Vance on his responsibility as a public figure to avoid spreading misinformation. “If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot,” Collins asked. Vance, however, stood firm, responding, “Nobody’s calling my office and saying that they saw Bigfoot. What they’re calling and saying is we are seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats.”
In the aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Trump’s running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance, made a series of controversial, bigoted, and inflammatory statements during an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Vance doubled down on debunked claims about Haitian immigrants abducting pets to eat them and falsely linked the migrant community to rising rates of HIV and tuberculosis in Springfield, Ohio. His remarks have since drawn widespread condemnation for their harmful, fear-mongering nature.
During the interview, Vance insisted on the veracity of a discredited conspiracy theory circulating in Springfield that claims Haitian immigrants have been abducting pets for food, a laughable claim Trump made during the debate. Local officials have already said that “no credible evidence” supports these allegations, but Vance continued to push the narrative. “We’ve heard from a number of constituents on the ground… saying this stuff is happening,” Vance said. When Collins pointed out that officials had found no evidence, Vance responded, “They’ve said they don’t have all the evidence.”
Collins pressed Vance on his responsibility as a public figure to avoid spreading misinformation. “If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot,” Collins asked. Vance, however, stood firm, responding, “Nobody’s calling my office and saying that they saw Bigfoot. What they’re calling and saying is we are seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats.”
Wiggins discusses the history of false attacks on Haitian immigrants:
Vance’s comments tap into a broader, troubling pattern of discrimination that Haitian migrants have faced for decades. Historically, U.S. immigration policy has treated Haitians disproportionately, often in ways that are harsher than those directed toward other groups. According to a 2021 U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants report, Haitians have frequently been misclassified as economic immigrants rather than political refugees, even when fleeing violence during authoritarian regimes, stripping them of asylum rights and leading to mass deportations.
One of the most egregious examples of discrimination occurred in the early 1990s, when Haitians attempting to flee their country were subjected to HIV and AIDS screenings by U.S. authorities. Even as the HIV epidemic was waning, Haitians who tested positive for the virus were held to higher standards when seeking asylum. Many were sent to quarantine camps in Guantanamo Bay, where they lived in squalor and were denied proper medical care, the report notes.
This history of associating Haitians with disease resurfaced during the Trump administration, when Title 42—a public health measure aimed at stopping the spread of communicable diseases—was invoked to justify the expulsion of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
This is a very good article by Henry J. Gomez, Brandy Zadrozny, Allan Smith and Julie Tsirkin at NBC News: How a fringe online claim about immigrants eating pets made its way to the debate stage.
“In Springfield they’re eating dogs,” the former president said, referring to an Ohio city dealing with an influx of Haitian immigrants. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating … the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
The extraordinary moment — the airing of a claim worthy of a chain email while participating in a prime-time presidential debate — probably puzzled most of the 67.1 million people tuned in for Trump’s clash with Vice President Kamala Harris. But the rumor, which has been criticized as perpetuating racist tropes, was already thriving in right-wing corners of the internet and being amplified by those close to Trump, including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
No one involved in Trump’s debate preparations or in a position to speak for his campaign agreed to discuss the strategy on the record or answer questions abouthow it mutated from a fringe obsession to a debate stage sound bite….
While the fallout has been a combination of bafflement and outrage, the makings of the moment are rooted in grievances that have long defined and animated Trump and his followers — and on the platforms where those grievances blossom….
By Catriona-Millar
How the rumor developed and made its way out of the right wing fever swamps:
Blood Tribe, a national neo-Nazi group, was among the early purveyors of the rumor in August, posting about it on Gab and Telegram, social networks popular with extremists. While the group’s leader has taken credit for Trump’s indulgence of the claims, Blood Tribe’s reach is unknown; its accounts on those sites have fewer than 1,000 followers.
Some Blood Tribe members also planned a couple of events in the real world, like a small Aug. 10 march in Springfield protesting Haitian immigration and an appearance at a city commission meeting later that month.
The rumor soon crossed over to mainstream social media, like Facebook and X. NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation, traced the origins to an undated post from a private Facebook group that was shared in a screenshot posted to X on Sept. 5.
“Remember when my hometown of Springfield Ohio was all over National news for the Haitians?” the user wrote. “I said all the ducks were disappearing from our parks? Well, now it’s your pets.”
Around that time, other social media posts about the rumor sprouted and went viral, some of them based in part on residents’ comments at public hearings. On Sept. 6, there were 1,100 posts on X mentioning Haitians, migrants or immigrants eating pets, cats, dogs and geese, according to PeakMetrics, a research company. The next day there were 9,100 — a 720% increase.
The article says that many social media participants suspected Laura Loomer of passing the rumor on to Trump. Others blamed Vance. Anonymous Trump sources responded:
Loomer and Trump did not speak on the plane ride, a source familiar with the trip said. And a Trump aide noted that Loomer “is not a member of our staff.”
“The president is the most well-read man in America, and he has a pulse on everything that is going on,” the aide added.
Claire Wang at The Guardian: ‘A very old political trope’: the racist US history behind Trump’s Haitian pet eater claim.
People of Haitian descent say these xenophobic attacks are nothing new for their community, and experts say the “dog eater” trope is a fearmongering tactic white politicians have long deployed against immigrants of color, particularly those of Asian descent.
“The way white Americans have positioned themselves as culturally and morally superior, this is low-hanging fruit to rally xenophobia in a very quick way,” said Anthony Ocampo, a professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
By Joan Gillchrest
Demonizing immigrants through falsehoods about their diet is a political tactic that originated in the late 19th century, during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, said May-lee Chai, author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign published trading cards that featured cartoonish sketches of Chinese men eating rats, and smeared his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as “China’s presidential candidate”, according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History.
“It’s a very old political trope to dehumanize Chinese male immigrants and show them as a threat to white American workers,” Chai said. Chinese workers posed not only a “labor threat” in the restaurant industry but also a “civilization threat”, she added, as one rationale for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would contribute to the “browning of America”.
An urban legend alleging that Chinese restaurants serve dog meat, cat meat or rats dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the US. An editorial from a Mississippi newspaper in 1852, for example, laments that trade with China is “not what it ought to be”, then says, “and besides, the Chinese still eat dog-pie”.
Chinese people may have been the first immigrant group to be widely profiled as “dog eaters”, but the slur was soon directed at other Asian communities, said Robert Ku, author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.
At the 1904 world’s fair in St. Louis, organizers reportedly forced the Indigenous Igorot people from the Philippines to butcher and eat dogs for entertainment – an event that cemented the stereotype against Filipinos.By the late 20th century, Ku said, groups including Koreans, Filipinos and Cambodians became “principally stereotyped as dog eaters”.
More recently, in 2016, the Oregon county commissioner and US Senate hopeful Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting“ dogs and cats for food. And last May, a false claim that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California served dog meat caused months of harassment and eventual closure of the business.
It’s not surprising that these claims have extended to other non-white immigrant groups.
At The Nation, Elie Mystal writes: White People Have Never Forgiven Haitians for Claiming Their Freedom.
I could tell you that the only ”evidence” for the baseless Republican claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, comes from an American-born woman charged with animal cruelty in Canton, Ohio. I could tell you that the Haitian immigrant community living in Ohio is made up largely of people who are in the country legally, under temporary protected status visas. I could tell you that Haitian immigrants, like those in all immigrant communities, are generally hard-working people who pay their taxes and commit fewer crimes, per capita, than native-born citizens.
But I can also tell you that none of these facts matter one jot to vile and racist Republicans like JD Vance and Donald Trump, who spread lies and misinformation about immigrants. The people pushing these falsehoods long ago abandoned any tether to facts or reality. The very online, white-wing MAGA movement has found another group of dark-skinned people to hurt. Today, it’s Haitians; yesterday it was Venezuelans, and tomorrow it will be some other group of Black or brown people.
By Marek Brozowski
The goal—their only goal—is to hurt people. It’s their kink. Hurting people of color titillates and excites them. It makes them feel powerful and important. When these small people see reports that Haitians in Springfield are afraid to send their children to school; when they read about the damage being done to immigrants’ property, it makes them feel strong. Imagine being able to contribute to a lynch mob raised against largely defenseless people from the comfort of your own home, simply by sharing a cat meme. That kind of power is intoxicating to some people, and what you see online is the real, honest thrill a racist experiences whenever they find someone to menace.
I hate to give these people the satisfaction of being hurt by them. I hate to acknowledge their lies and insults, and I’d like to pretend that I can’t even hear them. As a New Yorker of Haitian descent, I’d like to tell these people “Kou langett manman ou!” (which loosely translates to: “Have an inappropriate relationship with yourself, followed by your mother, posthaste”) and go about my day.
But the pain racist Republicans and their cult spokespeople are causing is too real to laugh away. It’s too familiar to ignore. And it’s entirely too consistent with how this country has always treated Haitians to pretend that it isn’t all happening again.
Haitians committed the greatest sin possible in the modern world: We took our freedom back from the white man. Haiti is the birthplace of the only successful slave-led revolt in the “New” or “Western” world. Like everywhere else in this hemisphere, enslaved Haitians asked for their freedom, agitated for it, and were willing to negotiate terms with the enslavers for their emancipation. Unlike everywhere else, when those negotiations and political dealings resulted in nothing more than the continuation of permanent chattel slavery, Haitians stopped talking and started rebelling—and by 1804 had liberated themselves from their suddenly-not-so-superior captors.
White people have never forgiven us for being free. The French demanded “reparations” from the Haitians for taking their property—that property being the formerly enslaved Haitians themselves—as the price for their freedom. And the Americans, under the presidency of inveterate slaver Thomas Jefferson, refused to recognize Haiti or its independence, and imposed a trade embargo on the fledgling nation. Remember that the next time someone calls Jefferson a lover of liberty: That man didn’t just enslave and rape Africans brought here against their will; he tried his best to snuff out the embers of freedom burning on his doorstep.
Please read the rest at The Nation.
One last excerpt from a piece by Eric Levitz at Vox: Republicans know exactly what they’re doing. The twisted political logic behind Trump’s attacks on Haitian immigrants.
Trump’s demonization of entire categories of immigrants is dangerous. But when he advocated for a Muslim ban during his first presidential run, he did not direct his followers’ anxiety and loathing toward worshippers at one particular mosque or community.
With this new smear, Trump and his running mate are fomenting hatred for a discrete group of 15,000 people in one location. This dramatically increases the risk that their campaign of dehumanization will lead to acts of violence. And indeed, on both Thursday and Friday, Springfield was forced to shutter its public schools and municipal buildings in response to bomb threats. Meanwhile, a Haitian community center in the city is getting threatening calls and Haitian families are keeping their kids home out of fear for their safety.
Alice in the Afternoon, by Catriona Millar
The juxtaposition between the victimization of such innocents, and Republicans’ gleeful dissemination of AI-generated cats that are purportedly imperiled by the existence of Springfield’s Haitians, is morally nauseating, at least to any person who believes in the equal dignity of all human life. And the fact that Vance has implored his social media followers to keep spreading such libelous memes, at the expense of his own constituents’ safety, is similarly disgraceful.
Why do Trump and Vance believe it is in their interest to advertise such moral bankruptcy and recklessness?
The Republican ticket’s foray into inciting ethnic hatred in a single municipality cannot be understood as unthinking or impulsive. Sure, Trump routinely makes demagogic statements that are inspired less by political calculation than whatever he happened to just witness on Fox News.
But Vance is nothing if not a ruthless and self-disciplined striver. One does not rise from his humble origins to Yale Law School without some ability to filter one’s thoughts or rationally pursue one’s goals. And a person capable of likening Trump to an opiate in 2016, and then becoming an apologist for his insurrection just a few years later, when that posture became politically useful, is plainly willing to do most anything in a calculated bid for power.
Vance did not smear the Haitian community of Springfield just once. He chose to double and triple down on that smear, reiterating it again in an X post on Friday morning, in which he blamed Haitian immigrants for bringing “communicable diseases” to Ohio (without presenting any evidence to substantiate that timeless nativist trope).
So why would a ticket with strong incentives to project moderation and reassure swing voters choose to direct hatred against a small community, even after their words have already yielded bomb threats?
I suspect the ugliness is the point.
“The ugliness is the point.”
I’ll end there. I plan to learn more about the history of these horrifying attacks on immigrants.
Take care, everyone.
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/09/14/lazy-caturday-reads-178/
#antiImmigrantDiscrimination #foodAndEthnicity #HaitianImmigrants #JDVance #LauraLoomer #slavery #SpringfieldOhio
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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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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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> When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.
— ‘Contradiction’ in *The House at Pooh Corner* by A. A. Milne
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