Thursday Reads
Posted: March 10, 2022 Filed under: just because 27 Comments
Mara, Slavic goddess of winter’s end, by Margo Kai
Good Afternoon!!
Putin’s war on Ukraine continues unabated. Each day he commits more atrocities. It’s getting very difficult for me to understand the U.S. and NATO’s refusal to get more involved in the conflict. Obviously I’m no expert and I do think President Biden has handled this unmanageable situation very well. Every day I’m thankful that Trump is no longer in charge. But surely we can find a way to do more? After Russia’s deliberate bombing of a children’s and maternity hospital, don’t we have to consider further actions? As I said, I’m no expert, but today I’m going to post some articles that present some alternative views of the events in Ukraine.
I’ll begin with the most radical critique, offered by Sean O’Grady at The Independent: Russia bombed a maternity hospital – and the west let them do it.
Bombing a maternity hospital is an atrocity, by definition. The only possible reason for it happening might be that it was collateral damage, or accidentally perpetrated. But the Russians have another story.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told a press conference that the Russians deliberately targeted it – because it was not being used as a maternity unit at all, whatever the western journalists claim. Lavrov explained to a disbelieving world that, contrary to the pictures carried by responsible media outlets, this wasn’t a hospital but was in fact a military installation, taken over by the Ukrainian Azov Battalion and “other ultra-right”, “radical” groups.
Lavrov explained that the mothers had already been “driven out” by these extremists. Hence what Lavrov called the “pathetic outcries concerning so-called atrocities” and the biased media coverage. You may think that what you saw was a heavily pregnant woman being carried away on a stretcher, but the foreign minister of the Russian Federation is telling you that she’s a neo-Nazi renegade, or possibly an actor, or else a human shield (which is no justification for the attack anyway). Lavrov invites the world to draw its own conclusions.
That’s Russia’s side of the story, an atrocity against the truth itself, the ultimate in gaslighting. If you’re going to lie, I suppose you might as well go big. But the world has already drawn its conclusions about what it can see, not just in Mariupol but in many other places across Ukraine – just like the previous atrocities and war crimes committed by Russians and Russian stooges in Syria, Georgia and Chechnya.
Still Life with Cups, by Lena Vylusk, 2018
O’Grady argues that the U.S. has appeased Putin going back to Obama’s failure to defend his “red line” in Syria and Trump’s disgraceful defense of Putin in Helsinki.
Biden and every western European power gave Putin due notice that they would not fight for Ukraine, and wouldn’t do much more than slap the usual token sanctions on him. They let him have Crimea with not much more than some modest barriers to trade with Russia and some eloquent indignation from Obama.
What was Putin supposed to think about the west after a decade and a half of empty threats? He prodded his bayonet at us and never found the hard steel of a credible military response. What would the west really do if he invaded Ukraine?
What indeed. Not even the atrocity in Mariupol will provoke western intervention. Not even a single rattly old MiG jet will be lent to the Ukrainians so they can defend their citizens against the next atrocity.
So, because of that, there will certainly be more atrocities. There is disturbing talk about the use of chemical weapons – the red line that Obama laid down in Syria and then forgot about. Maybe they’ll go for battlefield nuclear weapons next, or organise a surrogate Russian militia to plant a dirty bomb in Maidan Square. Whatever happens, Putin may be sure that he will face no retaliation and no direct military action.
O’Grady makes some good points.
This is a long read from David Cay Johnston at Raw Story: The dangerous Ukraine invasion issue no one is talking about.
Let’s step back for a moment from the awful human tragedy in Ukraine as the Russian army targets civilians. There is an even bigger issue here. And until we come up with an answer it’s going to continue to plague the world.
It’s an issue that Americans, more than anyone else, should understand. Yet based on all the news and commentary I’ve been reading since the Russian buildup began almost a year ago, this overarching issue is not even on the table.
The bigger issue is that there is no way to stop a nuclear power from invading a non-nuclear power, as America did 18 years ago this month when it took down the dictatorship in Iraq.
And make no mistake, Vladimir Putin himself has long made clear that Ukraine is not the only country he intends to take over.
Three years ago I spent a week in Ukraine. Every person to whom I spoke, whether in a formal interview or casual conversation, said that Putin was going to invade their country.
Portrait of Alice, by Marina Kim
Many of them expected an invasion while Donald Trump was in office. That made sense because Trump repeatedly declared his trust in and fealty to Putin, denounced American intelligence agencies saying he did not trust them and lambasted our NATO allies. Destabilizing and, if possible, shuttering NATO is a long-term stated goal of the modern Russian tsar, as foreign affairs columnist Trudy Rubin explained recently.
Putin, whose words I have carefully read for two decades, doesn’t plan to stop with Ukraine. He has called the collapse of the old Soviet Union the worst geopolitical disaster of the 20th century and has said he is determined to put it back together. His words:
“Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory.
“Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.”
As I said, this is a long read, and I can’t give you the full flavor with brief excerpts. I’ll just add that Johnston writes that the same fear of invasion by Russia is common in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well. If you’re interested in what’s happening in Ukraine, I recommend reading the whole thing.
Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal: Memo to NATO: Secure Lviv From Russian Aggression. The Allies saved West Berlin from the Soviets in 1948. They should save the Ukrainian city from Putin 2022.
The clear issue at the center of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s unprovoked invasion and intended occupation of a sovereign nation. This crude reality explains the world’s united opposition to Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
Citizens in free countries everywhere recognize that if Russia wins, a principle of invasion and occupation that World War II was fought to reverse will be re-established. Plausibly, a strategy of unprovoked invasion and occupation will be repeated by China against Taiwan, North Korea against South Korea and Iran against Israel or its neighbors in the Middle East.
It is conventional wisdom that if Mr. Putin takes Ukraine, eventually he will similarly pressure the Baltic states or Poland. Sweden and Finland already operate civilian-based defense plans on this assumption.
Forest Fairy, by Ivan Marchuk
But while the world’s people recognize this invasion can’t stand, they don’t know how to stop it.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has rejected the no-fly zone requested by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as likely to start a war between nuclear-armed Russia and the West. The effectiveness of sanctions on Russian oil is uncertain.
The West’s policy of mounting a stand-off defense of Ukraine likely means we are rolling toward a world in which invasion and occupation become normalized, bringing a succession of trips to the nuclear brink with China, North Korea and surely Iran.
Henninger’s recommendation:
At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into zones of occupation by the victorious armies. Though the capital of Berlin was in the Soviet-occupied east, the Western allies refused to let Berlin be absorbed into Stalin’s communist bloc. Berlin was divided into sectors, with West Berlin protected by the U.S., Britain and France, and East Berlin by the Russians….
Just as the three major Allied powers occupied the western sector of Berlin then, NATO—which was created during the Berlin blockade—should assert and establish control in western Ukraine of Lviv, its airport, the perimeter, and transport connections to nearby NATO members Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.
As long as Lviv remains free, Mr. Putin will never “occupy” Ukraine. A free Lviv would stand as a counter-symbol to Russian invasion and occupation.
Read the rest at the link. The WSJ has opened it’s Ukraine coverage to everyone.
Some Ukraine news: You may have heard that the woman and children who were murdered while trying to escape from the Ukrainian town of Irpin while trying to get to Kyiv, have been identified. A shocking photo of their bodies has been widely circulated. The San Francisco Chronicle: Silicon Valley tech worker was the Ukrainian mom lying dead on street in brutal photo that sparked outrage.
A Silicon Valley employee and her children are the subjects of photos so devastating that they shocked the world: a Ukrainian family lying dead on the pavement, killed by Russian mortar fire while trying to flee the conflict.
Oleksandr Balbyshev, Flower Face
The images of Ukrainian soldiers tending to the bloodied bodies of a woman, her teenage son and young daughter, and their friend ran on the front page of the New York Times this week, along with online videos of the unprovoked attack on civilians. They stirred international outrage and a pledge from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to punish the perpetrators. “There will be no quiet place on Earth for you,” Zelenskyy said. “Except for the grave.”
Palo Alto startup SE Ranking confirmed Wednesday that the photo depicts its chief accountant, Tatiana Perebeinis, 43, along with her daughter, Alise, 9, and son, Nikita, 18, who were killed by Russian forces as they tried to flee the town of Irpin, a suburb about 15 minutes from Kyiv. They had just dashed across a partially destroyed bridge over the Irpin River into Kyiv when a mortar hit.
“For me as her colleague it’s a tragedy to see those pictures,” Ksenia Khirvonina, the company’s spokeswoman, told The Chronicle. “They show that it’s real. On the other hand, they prove that (the) Russian army and Putin himself are monsters who deserve no mercy for their doings.”
There’s more about Perebeinis at the link above. See also this piece in The New York Times: They Died by a Bridge in Ukraine. This Is Their Story.
I’ll end with some January 6 news:
NPR reports that Merrick Garland is not shying away from prosecuting Trump: Garland says the Jan. 6 investigation won’t end until everyone is held to account.
On his first anniversary as attorney general, Merrick Garland said he’s committed to unraveling the conspiracy behind the storming of the U.S. Capitol, in what he calls “the most urgent investigation in the history of the Justice Department.”
Members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asserted former President Trump could be charged with conspiracy and obstruction for his actions. But Democrats in Congress and even some of Garland’s friends have worried he’ll shy away from the political firestorm that would result from charging a former commander-in-chief with a crime.
“We are not avoiding cases that are political or cases that are controversial or sensitive,” the attorney general said in an exclusive interview with NPR. “What we are avoiding is making decisions on a political basis, on a partisan basis.”
Victor Onyshchenko, Autumn in Synevar Glade
This week, prosecutors won their first convictions in federal court in a Jan. 6 case against former Texas oil worker Guy Reffitt. That followed a guilty plea to seditious conspiracy by an Alabama man affiliated with the far-right Oath Keepers militia.
“We begin with the cases that are right in front of us with the overt actions and then we build from there,” Garland said. “And that is a process that we will continue to build until we hold everyone accountable who committed criminal acts with respect to January 6.”
Garland discussed his wide remit, where the priorities range from price-fixing in the chicken industry to Russian oligarchs financing the war in Ukraine with ill-gotten gains.
Listen to the interview or read highlights at the NPR link.
More January 6 reads:
NBC News: D.C. police officer’s suicide after Jan. 6 riot declared line-of-duty death.
The Guardian on John Eastman: Trump lawyer knew plan to delay Biden certification was unlawful, emails show.
CBS News: Guy Reffitt, first January 6 defendant to stand trial, found guilty on all charges.
The Washington Post: A Capitol rioter pushed an officer over a ledge, FBI says. A photo from a sea turtle fundraiser led to his arrest.
That’s it for me today. What else is happening? What stories are you following?
Lena Vylusk, “Sweet”
Monday Reads: To War or Not to War, That is the Question
Posted: February 21, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: President's Day, Russia attacks on Ukraine 26 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Today is President’s Day which is basically the day we celebrate the myths of the men holding the position. While I intend to focus on the Ukraine situation, I did trip across this article in Politico that made me wonder if we should just call the entire holiday off. It’s like Colombus day which basically celebrates the invasion of a mass murderer, enslaver, and rapist so evil that his royal funders refused to pay him on his return. I shudder at the thought of celebrating a holiday that includes that orange monster that we can’t seem to get rid of and then the other racists and mass murderers that need a good bit of daylight to show who they were and what they did. Andrew Jackson–the mass murderer and originator of the Trail of Tears–comes to mind. Then, there the huge number of slave owners we have white washed and basically say it was okay for them to own people including their own children.
“It’s Time To Cancel Presidents Day. By elevating myth over reality, the holiday does a disservice to history.” The article is printed in Politico and penned by John F Harris.
Long-forgotten lives, like the dozens of people killed in the Tulsa race massacre, are being vaulted into public consciousness. More controversially, people who long enjoyed revered status in the national story are being dethroned as national heroes.
Historical reappraisal has been especially vigorous in a particular arena: the U.S. presidency. Woodrow Wilson, a president whose reputation among many historians placed him in the ranks of “near-great” leaders, has in recent years become toxic because of new attention to his deeply prejudiced racial views.
On the other hand, it is still treacherous to take on presidents of Rushmore-sized stature. Liberal San Francisco voters recently evicted school board members whom they judged too preoccupied with left-wing advocacy, including efforts to rename public schools honoring George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
The presidency itself, like so many aspects of American culture, is now in the middle of ideological crossfire between left and right. Is there a way that the center can find its voice in arguments about the presidency?
Yes, there is. A good way to start would be to cancel the day we mark today: “Presidents Day.”
One hastens to add: The aim is not to “cancel,” in the contemporary sense of the word, any particular president. Lincoln and Washington — the two presidents most closely linked with Presidents Day — face stiff challenges when judged by contemporary standards, but they aren’t the targets here. Instead, it is the notion of Presidents Day — an inane name for a dubious concept that is less a show of genuine respect for American history than an insult to it.
The problems with Presidents Day are intertwined with a basic challenge of how Americans think about their history — or, really, how the people of any country think about their national story. There are two conceptions of what it means to learn history — always in tension with each other, and sometimes in flat contradiction.
The other conception of history is something quite different — a disciplined effort to reconstruct the past as it actually happened. This enterprise relies on evidence that is always fragmentary and on interpretive arguments that are never settled with finality. This brand of history aims to liberate its audience from national mythologies, and its characters are not marble heroes. They can suffer from bad tempers, diarrhea, self-doubt — the last entirely justified, given that, unlike people who will later study their histories, they have no idea what’s about to happen next, or how their decisions will look in hindsight.
So while one style of history studies the past in search of moral clarity, the other is attuned to moral ambiguity. One kind of history aims to create national heroes. The other kind — even when it is not expressly aimed at demolishing heroes — can’t help but dismantle the reputations of presidents and other outsize figures, revealing all manner of unheroic traits.
A brand of history that embraces reality over myth, and ambiguity over sharp moral judgments over heroes and villains, ultimately offers far more useful lessons for a democracy.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
By Emma, Age 12, She choose to draw him because he was a president and helped abolish slavery.
The author goes on to deconstruct the relevancy of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches in the modern world. It seems that a large number of people prefer propaganda and myth to history. The current kerfuffle over Critical Race theory is just one of the attempts by people that lack critical thinking skills to cover up the sins of their fathers. Here’s a brief introduction to the topic from last May’s EducationWeek. Laws banning this in Louisiana are currently being hyped in our Lege.
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
I have no idea what’s threatening about this. I have said this many times, that I am really fortunate to have a mother who was a history buff and put us in the station wagon to discover the reality of American History. This included the Trail of Tears and where I was born in Oklahoma on the Cherokee strip and the mass murder and theft of Native lands that all ensued. When she was doing our family genealogy in the 1970s she made it clear that there were slave owners in the family and would bring the copies of the original documents to show me. She was always clear that our family’s Civil war Soldiers stood firmly with the Union but one after another shocking relative was not whitewashed including the one that signed the Constitution and wrote the Fugitive slave act. My Harvard-educated uncle helped write and defend the policy of Japanese-American internment and as a kid, I witnessed my Public school-educated father ask him how on earth he could do that. My dinner table and vacations were always deep dives into American history and I never suffered any complex at all from knowing the truths even at a very tender age. It just made me aware of the reality to choose good actions over evil. Then–if you can–work to unroot all the evil from the system.
I chose him because he was brave and didn’t care about what people said about him. I hope to be like him one day.” -Glory Gezaei, fifth grade, Blessed Sacrament School, Washington, D.C. 2022
So, now the choice is yet another war in Europe and the role NATO will play in restraining or punishing Putin of Russia. BBC News newly reports that “Ukraine-Russia: Putin mulls recognising independence of breakaway regions.”
Russia will decide today whether to recognise the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has said.The Donetsk and Luhansk regions have been contested by Ukraine and Russia-backed rebels for years, with regular violence despite a ceasefire agreement.
Leaders of both regions asked Russia to recognise their independence on Monday.
But Western powers fear such a move could be used as a pretext for Russia to invade its neighbour
Since 2019, Russia has issued large numbers of passports to people living in the two regions.
Analysts say that if the two regions were recognised as independent, Russia might send troops into Ukraine’s east under the guise of protecting its citizens.
Russia has built up more than 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, a move which has widely been seen by Western nations as preparation for an imminent invasion. Russia denies any such plans.
“The objective of our meeting today is to listen to colleagues and decide on our next steps in this area,” Mr Putin said.
“I mean both the appeal to Russia made by the heads of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic for the recognition of their sovereignty,” he added.Several officials at the council meeting spoke up in favour of the move, and the Russian parliament has already asked Mr Putin to recognise their independence.
But the Russian President did not indicate his final decision, saying it would be made later Monday.
This quote is from the Harwood tweet above from CNN.
“Ultimately Putin wants some kind of deal,” Hill said. “They think Biden is the kind of president who could actually make a deal. Trump never could.”
So far, Biden has held NATO allies together in rejecting Russia’s core demands, bolstering their forces in Europe and threatening punishing sanctions even though they guarantee domestic economic blowback. Steeped in decades of bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the Democratic President has also drawn support from top Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who have shunned Trump’s embrace of Putin.
That demonstration of resolve has at minimum made Putin stop and think. Biden has warned for weeks that Russia could launch a new invasion of Ukraine at any time. It hasn’t yet.
“They might have thought we were going to crumble, and we didn’t,” said Hill, who became an American citizen twenty years ago. “It might have deterred a full-scale invasion. Now (Putin) is basically recalibrating, recalculating.”
But durable success for Biden and European allies will depend on staying power. Even if Russian tanks don’t roll across the border, Hill envisions an extended “boa constrictor” siege in which Putin applies escalating pressure in hopes of bending Ukraine to Russia’s will.
“The real challenge is keeping everyone together for a considerable period,” Hill concluded. “It’s going to go on a long time.”
The Guardian reports a different view from the Defense Secretary of the UK.
The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has warned of continued provocation operations orchestrated by the Kremlin, describing them as a ‘strong cause for concern that President Putin is still committed to an invasion’. Speaking to MPs in the House of Commons, Wallace said Russia continues to be ready to attack Ukraine and has increased troop numbers in the region
The next few days of news on the subject should further clarify our risk for a ground war in Europe.
Hope your week goes well!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: Once again, I manage to avoid the Stupor Bowl
Posted: February 14, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: Black Lives Matter, Half Time, Puppy Bowl, Stupor Bowl 29 Comments
The Kingfisher, Vincent van Gogh. 1886
Good Day Sky Dancers!
We’re beginning to see signs of spring around here so that’s a good thing!! There are patches of green grass and bird arrivals. I also like spring so we get beyond the national Panem et circenses frenzy. It drags on longer than National Crass Consumerism Season. We’re deep into Carnival here and the parades are back on the streets of New Orleans. I always wonder why the greedy and rich always co-opt perfectly wonderful festivals celebrating the passage of the season and turn them into ordeals requiring mass credit card spending, ads, and tourists.
However, I did miss this sight which reminds me of me when I had to go to football games with my father and occasionally my mother. I loved the time with my Dad but it took me about two seconds to drag a book out to read through the rest of the game. The best part was the Cheese Frenchie, Onion Rings, and chocolate malted at King’s in downtown Lincoln prior to the the parking spot at the stadium and mass crowd chaos.
The only other thing I used to do at the University of Nebraska games was to stand up and cheer when the opposing team scored. We sat on the fifty-yard line in the 20th row right behind the marching band and close enough to throw stuff at the cheerleaders. I never indulged in any of that but I especially enjoyed singing Boomer Sooner. I knew all the words because that’s where I was born and my Dad went to Law School there. It was enough to irritate people but back then you just got dirty looks. Nebraska ruled college football at the time and their rival was always Oklahoma.
I also had the pleasure of reading through a Stupor Bowl in LA back in the day although my dad was a Ford Dealer and not part of the NFL players like Andrew Whitworth. Good for whoever Whitworth is because he’s got himself a nerdy, book-reading daughter!
Little Owl – Albrecht Dürer (1506)
The other parts of the Stupor Bowl–and I name this for the fans and not for the poor players who wind up severely brain damaged with CTE–are the ads, the halftime, and the Puppy Bowl. So, let’s just say that paying all that money to hype a product seems crazy but it must work. Hence, the costs of living in an oligopolistic monopoly-based failed market. The Puppy Bowl is damned cute. I missed it since I worked through the entire shindig but the country’s First Puppy stole that show! The best thing about this huge ad campaign was the game was dedicated to animal rights activist Betty White. Team Fluff won the game! (via Daily Beast)
In what may prove to be the most important sports-related story this Sunday, Team Fluff snatched victory out of the tiny jaws of defeat in Puppy Bowl XVIII. Following a fur-ocious three-hour battle, Fluff edged out Team Ruff with a final score of 73-69. The eighteenth iteration of the Puppy Bowl saw 118 adoptable puppies competing for the “Lombarky” Trophy by dragging chew toys around the miniature field. Representing more than 60 shelters and rescues in 33 states, this year’s lineup also featured a record number of puppies with special needs, including Benny, a goldendoodle with partial paralysis who used a set of rear support wheels to race around the field. Benny was also crowned the 2022 Puppy Bowl’s “Most Pupular” player. And, most importantly, “every Puppy Bowl ends with every single dog being adopted,” longtime referee Dan Schachner told the New York Post.
The Threatened Swan – Jan Asselijn (1650)
So, there are a few noteworthy things about the half-time show. And no, it’s not Snoop Dog’s toke prior to his appearance. That’s par for the course and perfectly legal in California.
Eminem–bless his bad 49-year-old ass–took the knee to remind everyone that black lives matter.
My youngest daughter–then a middle schooler–came with me to spend the holidays in NYC. The first thing she wanted to do was go see 8 Mile and so I splurged for the tremendously expensive tix and we headed to the movie theatre in the East Village. She had been playing the heck out of the CD on my laptop and was indulged by my then-boyfriend when we spent time with him in Harlem. He had very large speakers. This was 2002 so back in the good old days. I am familiar with him and rap in general. I was substitute teaching in a music class and let the kids play vinyl back in 1979. I got my first introduction to rap at Omaha Tech High School!
Well, good for Eminem! He may be middle aged, white, and rich but at least he still knows where he came from. Dr Dre set the whole thing up and was Eminem’s mentor. The genre has grown a lot since then.
On Sunday, Eminem knelt and held his head in his hand after performing “Lose Yourself,” his anthem about self-determination from the movie “8 Mile.”
Air – Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1566)
I haven’t seen it but I plan to because the royalty of early 21st-century rap performed and some bonus artists showed up. Plus, Mary Ann Blige …
Blige, whose 14th studio LP, “Good Morning Gorgeous,” arrived on Friday, sang two of her most beloved older anthems, “Family Affair” and “No More Drama,” reaching deep for some powerful high notes and ending the set flat on her back.
However, I agree with this headline in MSNBC: “NFL Super Bowl halftime show was a master class in gaslighting. The Dr. Dre-led performance was awesome — but it played into the NFL’s plan to distract from the league’s race and gender issues.” It’s written by Ja’han Jones. It seemed like awfully convenient timing to present black artists. There were also some “gender issues” present in the performances.
The mini-concert was an undeniable smash hit, featuring Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg performing their classics together, 50 Cent rapping upside-down like it was 2003, along with Mary J. Blige, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and even Anderson .Paak on the drums.
Theirs was one in a number of acts that constituted what was arguably the Blackest night in NFL history, withgospel duo Mary Mary, country music star Mickey Guyton and R&B singer Jhené Aiko performing ahead of the kickoff.
And, most importantly to the NFL, there were virtually no references to the league’s sordid racial politics, exposed in recent years by its treatment of former San Francisco49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and allegations of systemic racism from former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores. (The league denies such allegations.)
The only thing even approaching a critique was Eminem taking a knee in a purported act of solidarity with racial justice activists.
Watching it in real time, I wasn’t sure whether that was a form of protest or a performance miscue, and if you have to question whether a protest is a protest … it probably isn’t.
The league did seem to convey its racial ideology in another way some may not have realized, though. During Lamar’s performance of the protest song “Alright,” a lyric was conspicuously censored to remove a line critical of police who kill.
The line — “and we hate po-po, when they kill us dead in the street, fo’ sho’” — was scrubbed of any reference to the police at all.It seems the NFL won’t even tolerate criticism of police in an imagined-yet-realistic scenario of anti-Black violence.
So, about those gender issues which were mostly hidden by a stupid tweet by some right-wing troll, I had never heard about. Well, he’s all over Twitter so he got his share of 3 minutes of fame. So wtf is Sexual Anarchy? It sounds like a 70s metal band name. I’ve got dibs on it for my next band’s name!!!
Kirk’s tweet, which he did not care to explain any further, drew all kinds of responses from critics on the left, many of whom derided Kirk over his prudish tendencies.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what Charlie Kirk means by ‘sexual anarchy,'” tweeted attorney Ron Filipkowski. “I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s probably better than whatever the opposite is.”
Peacock and Peacock Butterfly – Archibald Thorburn (1917)
Still, there was a lot of that Rapper vibe in the show which means a lot of women dancing provocatively with scant clothing. Dance has mostly always been that way but anyway, I’m not a dance critic but I do have issues with hyper-sexualizing black women for the pleasure of men. Historically, that never ends well.
So, I have to make a disclosure here. I worked the Gentilly Stage for Jazz Fest for many years as part of the front-of-the-house sound team. I have seen a lot of performers in my day on that stage and set up their kits, microphones, and instruments. My thrill was to mic Etta James. That’s closely followed by setting up the piano mics for Randy Newman then watching over his two small children side stage. I don’t want to turn this into a name game but let’s say I’ve happily helped a lot of talent of all flavors. The guy I really didn’t like was Elvis Costello but, oh well. However, I boycotted and refused to deal with 50 Cent and I was not the only one back in the day. I did not make a scene but I clearly let it be known I thought his treatment of women was appalling and I would not enable it. He showed up in “Da Club” last night with that same schtick.
After Snoop and Dre combined for “The Next Episode” and “California Love” to kick off the halftime show, the camera panned down to 50, upside down and flexing, just as he did to kick off the “In Da Club” music video 19 years ago. 50 Cent was soon joined by a slew of dancers to bounce to the rap classic, and he then threw the performance to Mary J. Blige, who sank into “Family Affair.”
Maybe, that’s where the sexual anarchy term came from, I don’t know. Like I said, I was working and not watching. I think displays of sexuality are fine. I’m cool with exuberant dancing. New Orleans represents all of that and more! All people are sexual beings. But,I still object to the objectification of women for the benefit of men. So, if I missed the cues on this I’ll go look but I’m not sure. I’m open to input.
So, of all the people to do a Super Bowl wrap-up, it shouldn’t be me but there it is. BTW, who won the game?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: Depths of Depravity
Posted: February 11, 2022 Filed under: just because | Tags: Trump's Shredder is a golden Shitter 13 Comments
Otto Dix, The Seven Deadly Sins, 1933
Good Day Sky Dancers!
I can only wonder what the January 6 Committee is unearthing. Today, I saw this in The New Republic. Just when I think I can’t learn anything more appalling about the Trump Family Crime Syndicate and its enablers something else unearthly floats to the top of the golden septic tank. This is a follow-up to BB’s excellent post yesterday. “January 6 Committee Recap: Concerns About Trump’s Records Can’t Be Flushed Away. Trump could be in legal trouble for potentially violating federal laws related to the handling of government records.” This analysis is written by
It was another big week in developments related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump’s lawyer and a frequent main character of these updates, reportedly asked a Republican prosecutor in northern Michigan to turn over his county’s voting machines to the Trump team. According to The Washington Post, Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team asked Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter for the machines after the county initially misreported its election results in favor of Joe Biden. Rossiter told Giuliani that voting machines could not simply be seized and delivered without probable cause, a term that Giuliani, himself a former prosecutor, should have been familiar with. (Giuliani failed to appear before the House select committee on January 6 in a required deposition this week.)
Meanwhile, the National Archives asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s handling of presidential records, the Post reported, amid revelations that some records had to be recovered from the former president’s residence in Mar-a-Lago and that Trump had torn up other records. Adding to the pile-on of news related to the former president’s records, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported in her upcoming book that White House residence staff occasionally found toilets clogged with wads of paper—and that they believed Trump had flushed pieces of paper. (This may add some context to Trump’s claims during campaign rallies that toilets were no longer working properly.) These reports raise questions about whether Trump violated federal laws dictating how government records should be handled.
As to the substance of the records: CNN reported on Monday that records obtained by the select committee provide new details about a call between Trump and Representative Jim Jordan on the morning of the attack. The Times also reported on Thursday that the committee had discovered gaps in the official White House telephone logs from January 6 during the critical hours when Trump was making calls.
The committee on Wednesday subpoenaed yet another person in Trump’s orbit, former White House official Peter Navarro. In his memoir, Navarro claimed to have concocted a plan with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to delay certification of the Electoral College results.
Wave (1916)
Maurice Denis
You may continue reading at the link. This is not the end of the piece even though I shared a lot with you. If you want proof that records were altered and destroyed look no further than this CNN headline: “White House records obtained so far by January 6 committee show no record of calls to and from Trump during riot.” And CNN please, it was a violent insurrection. It was not just a riot damn it!
The records the House select committee has obtained do not contain entries of phone calls between the President and lawmakers that have been widely reported in the press. Trump was known to make calls using personal cell phones, which could account for those.
Two of the sources, who have also reviewed the presidential diary from that day, say it contains scant information and no record of phone calls for several hours after Trump returned to the Oval Office after giving a speech to his supporters at the Ellipse until he emerged to address the nation in a video from the Rose Garden
The House select committee has received hundreds of White House records since Trump lost a legal fight at the Supreme Court to keep them secret. The committee had asked the National Archives for all call logs and telephone records for Trump and top aides as well as daily presidential diaries.
Empty Wheel reminds us that altering and deleting documents was par for the course in Trump’s White House and Justice Department.
And, Eric Boehler reminds us:
The media continue to normalize his criminality, in this case absconding from the White House with classified documents as he readies another presidential run. (And shredding other docs.) It’s the same D.C. press corps that crucified Hillary Clinton for years simply because journalists thought her email story might have a hint of criminality to it. It never did.
What Trump has done since he first arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 2017 was shred longstanding Beltway protocols; traditions that for decades and sometimes centuries were based on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on the proper way to behave and the ethical course that should be followed while running the government. The consummate bully and liar, Trump didn’t care about any of those rules and began obliterating them immediately. He flooded the zone with crass, outlandish and destructive behavior, which the press tried to keep pace with at first. Shattering Beltway protocols used to carry a penalty, which was handed out by the press.
Eventually, as the years passed, news outlets mostly gave up, especially with the day-to-day transgressions, adopting a Trump-being-Trump view of his chronic rule breaking. Beltway institutions, particularly within the federal government, embraced the same mealy-mouthed approach, which gave Trump the okay to trample norms. “He didn’t think the rules applied to him,” a former White House aide told CNN this week. And he was right.
Mikhail Vrubel, Flying Demon, 1899
He and his followers are the consummate bullies. Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney continues to refuse to be bullied. She wrote an OpEd in the notoriously right-wing WSJ Opinion section today.
Republicans used to advocate fidelity to the rule of law and the plain text of the Constitution. In 2020, Mr. Trump convinced many to abandon those principles. He falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him because of widespread fraud. While some degree of fraud occurs in every election, there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have changed this one. As the Select Committee will demonstrate in hearings later this year, no foreign power corrupted America’s voting machines, and no massive secret fraud changed the election outcome.
Almost all members of Congress know this—although many lack the courage to say it out loud. Mr. Trump knew it too, from his own campaign officials, from his own appointees at the Justice Department, and from the dozens of lawsuits he lost. Yet, Mr. Trump ignored the rulings of the courts and launched a massive campaign to mislead the public. Our hearings will show that these falsehoods provoked the violence on Jan. 6. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have begun to pay the price for spreading these lies. For example, Rudy Giuliani’s license to practice law has been suspended because he “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump, ” in the words of a New York appellate court.
The Jan. 6 investigation isn’t only about the inexcusable violence of that day: It is also about fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law, and whether elected representatives believe in those things or not. One member of the House Freedom Caucus warned the White House in the days before Jan. 6 that the president’s plans would drive “a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” That was exactly right.
Those who do not wish the truth of Jan. 6 to come out have predictably resorted to attacking the process—claiming it is tainted and political. Our hearings will show this charge to be wrong. We are focused on facts, not rhetoric, and we will present those facts without exaggeration, no matter what criticism we face
There are so many things out there to arrest Trump for that it is amazing to me we see little movement towards the target by the DOJ. Every one is still turning their lonely eyes to Merrick Garland. Surely the request from the National Archives must be answered timely!
Normal public servants get sent to jail for this! Watch Glenn Kirschner’s #Justice Matters for more coverage including what he said on Joy Reid’s show last night.
I’ve just about had it with this! Now we have a group of right-wing truckers funded by the usual tea party billionaires out to wreck our recovering economy! This is not a form of public discourse! It’s insurrection and domestic terrorism. The DOJ/FBI needs to get more aggressive with these nutters too. I feel like we’re in some kind of Cold Civil War and not many of us are paying attention.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Tuesday Reads: Odds and Ends
Posted: February 8, 2022 Filed under: just because 18 Comments
Laurette With a Cup of Coffee, Henri Matisse
Good Morning!!
Over the weekend, Todd Gitlin, one of the most well-known leaders of the 1960s New Left died, possibly from Covid-19. The Washington Post: Todd Gitlin, activist and scholar who shaped and chronicled the New Left, dies at 79.
From The Boston Globe, Canadian and U.S. anti-vax truck drivers have taken over the city of Ottowa and created a nightmare for residents and law enforcement: Ottawa declares emergency after protests spin ‘out of control.’
Canada’s capital city declared a state of emergency Sunday as police struggled to rein in protests against vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, who declared the emergency, said that increasingly rowdy demonstrations posed a “serious danger and threat to the safety and security of residents.” Hundreds of trucks continue to occupy the downtown area near Canada’s parliament with no sign that the protesters plan to leave.
Truckers and their supporters have been stockpiling jerry cans of diesel and other necessities. They built a wood shed as a kitchen and set up logistics centers in a downtown park and the parking lot of a baseball stadium.
But on Sunday, police fenced off the park and showed up at the stadium location to seize fuel cans, propane cannisters and vehicles. A total of seven people were arrested as part of investigations related to the protests, according to a statement from the Ottawa Police Service. It said there are more the 60 active criminal investigations, primarily for mischief, thefts, hate crimes and property damage.
Protesters gathered near Parliament Hill during the Freedom Convoy demonstration in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022. David Kawai, Bloomberg
The protests started in reaction to Canadian and Us laws that went into effect in January, requiring truckers crossing the border to be fully vaccinated. They’ve since morphed into a rally against COVID restrictions more broadly. Demonstrators have been camped out in the capital since Jan. 28.
The Canadian protest, which expanded to cities across the country this weekend, was championed by the likes of Fox News and by podcaster Joe Rogan, Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump.
In Ottawa, the truckers’ blockade of streets and use of air horns for days — sometimes deep into the night — has angered residents. The city’s police force warned people that they could be arrested for bringing “material supports,” including fuel, to the protest zone.
So far, the Canadian federal government has refused to get involved. I think they may have to do that. This story is behind a paywall, but I’ve given you the gist.
Will Saletan has moved from Slate Magazine to The Bulwark, and yesterday he published an outstanding article on Trump’s anti-democracy movment: Lies Are the Building Blocks of Trumpian Authoritarianism.
Americans like to think our country is immune to authoritarianism. We have a culture of freedom, a tradition of elected government, and a Bill of Rights. We’re not like those European countries that fell into fascism. We’d never willingly abandon democracy, liberty, or the rule of law.
But that’s not how authoritarianism would come to America. In fact, it’s not how authoritarianism has come to America. The movement to dismantle our democracy is thriving and growing, even after the failure of the Jan. 6th coup attempt, because it isn’t spreading through overt rejection of our system of government. It’s spreading through lies.
It turns out that you don’t have to renounce any of our nation’s founding principles to betray them. All you have to do is believe lies: that real ballots are fake, that prosecutors are criminals, and that insurrectionists are political prisoners. Once you believe these things, you’re ready to disenfranchise your fellow citizens in the name of democracy. You’re ready to cover up crimes in the name of fighting corruption. You’re ready to liberate coup plotters in the name of justice.
And that’s where we are. Donald Trump and his party have sold these lies to more than 100 million Americans. He has built an army of authoritarian followers who think they’re saving the republic….
At a rally in Arizona this past Jan. 15, Trump repeated his standard lie that “the real insurrection took place on Election Day,” through voter fraud. From that standpoint, he noted, the Jan. 6th uprising was an attempt to restore democracy, and the people arrested in the uprising were “political prisoners.” The House Jan. 6th Committee is, in Trump’s words, a partisan cabal that trampled innocent people “like this is . . . a communist country.” So are the federal and state prosecutors looking into Trump’s possible financial and political crimes. In the name of law and order, he urged his supporters to rise up against these agents of the state: “We must protect our nation from these monsters that are using law enforcement for political retribution.”
Trump continued his Orwellian themes at a Jan. 29 rally in Texas. He argued that President Joe Biden had been installed by fake ballots, not real voters, and that legislation to make voting easier would just lead to more fake ballots. Democrats “don’t have a voting rights bill,” Trump scoffed. “They have a voting fraud bill.”
This strategy—inserting lies into conventional moral appeals, so that his listeners think they’re doing the right thing when they’re actually doing the opposite—is central to Trump’s propaganda. Without the lies, the evil would That’s what happened a week ago, when Trump forgot to lie. In a statement, he complained that when Congress counted electoral votes on Jan. 6th, Vice President Mike Pence could have, and should have, “change[d] the results” and “overturned the Election.” The words “change” and “overturn” revealed Trump’s despotic intent. So, in a follow-up statement two days later, he replaced them. His true purpose, he insisted, was to “ensure the true outcome” and “ensure the honest results.”
I hope you can find the time to read the whole thing.
More stories to check out today
Politico: Senate GOP backlash smacks RNC after Cheney-Kinzinger censure.
CNN: Republicans are frustrated by RNC move reopening party’s January 6 divide ahead of midterms.
The Daily Beast: ‘Stop the Steal’ Organizer Scored Big Payout at Curious Time. Ali Alexander received a major payout to his old consulting firm right when he was subpoenaed.
The New York Times: Supreme Court Restores Alabama Voting Map That a Court Said Hurt Black Voters.
Gawker: We Have Kyrsten Sinema’s Social Security Number.
Politico: Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander, resigns amid reports of bullying.
The New York Times: Putin Warns the West and Ukraine, but Keeps His Intentions a Mystery.
Financial Times: France says Vladimir Putin is moving towards de-escalating Ukraine crisis.
The Washington Post: Documents reveal U.S. military’s frustration with White House, diplomats over Afghanistan evacuation.
Have a nice Tuesday, Sky Dancers!!
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