There has been much speculation about what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin said at their two-hour long private meeting in Helsinki. Trump likes these one-on-one meetings and had one with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un too, prior to the later meeting with aides. But of course, these meetings are not exactly one-on-one and hence not entirely private. Along with them were two translators.
[Read more…]
Jackie Robinson is known mainly for the fact that he was the first black baseball player in the major leagues. He was an anti-Communist and thus he was persuaded to speak against Paul Robeson before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he knew that he was being used as a pawn by the white power structure. While that appearance tarnished his image and resulted in him being called an Uncle Tom and an Oreo, largely forgotten is the fact that the rest of his life was devoted to advancing the cause of black athletes and breaking down color barriers and pushing for integration in every aspect of society. And his actions have reverberated down to this day.
[Read more…]
20-year old Walter Carr was due to start a new job with a moving company near Birmingham, Alabama. But the day before his first day was to start at 8:00am, his car broke down. Since he lived 20 miles away, he decided to walk through the night to get to work on time. When the owner of the moving company heard about the dedication of his new employee from the woman whose stuff Carr was scheduled to move, he drove from Tennessee to give him his own car, a 2014 Ford Escort.
[Read more…]
The put-down of ‘shut up and play’ and ‘stick to sports’ has been used to try and silence athletes, especially black ones, who have taken stands against police brutality and other forms of injustice. In his excellent book The Heritage about black athletes and politics that I reviewed earlier, Howard Bryant writes about how this has always been the case against any black athletes who dared to take a political stand that was not submissive to white power.
[Read more…]
At the joint press conference following their summit meeting, Donald Trump made an unusual statement where he seemed to suggest that he was more inclined to believe Russian president Vladimir Putin rather than his own intelligence agencies about Russia’s role in US elections.
“My people came to me, [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
The issue of Russia and Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin has become the subject of great debate in the US, with much heat but less light. In this discussion on Democracy Now!, Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshare Fund, takes the position that the recent summit was a bad idea and gives his reasons. Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept disagrees. The discussion is much more substantive than what you usually get on commercial talking head TV.
The problem of plastic pollution has come to the fore, thanks to the work of environmental groups who have highlighted the toll it is taking on the oceans and marine life. Much of the damage comes from the sheer volume of plastic items that are used just once and then thrown away. This website by a company called SLOActive that markets sustainable, eco-friendly swimwear has data on the harm that plastics are doing and what we can do to mitigate the damage. The numbers are staggering. About 1.15 to 2.41 million tons of plastic are said to annually enter the world’s oceans via rivers.
[Read more…]
The Kickstarter project for the Pursuance Project met its goal!
Thanks a bunch to all who contributed.
Sacha Baron Cohen has a new TV series premiering on Showtime called Who Is America? in which he does his trademark shtick of pretending to be someone with views similar to the person he is interviewing and getting them to lower their guard and say what they really think. And what he reveals about gun rights advocates in the US in this 10—minute promotional video has to be seen to be believed.
It is always dangerous to take these kinds of videos at face value because by highly selective editing, one can make the target look ridiculous, appear to endorse views they do not hold, or look outright nuts. But I would like to see how the people shown on this video explain away or otherwise walk back the outrageous things they said.