Imamu Baraka was leaving work in Baltimore when he was stunned to see security personnel from the University of Maryland Medical Center take a woman and leave her out in the cold at a bus shelter and dump her things next to her on the ground. Despite the weather being near the freezing point, she was wearing just a flimsy hospital gown with no shoes or underwear. You can see the video he took here.
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In a recent episode of Joepardy a contestant got dinged because he mispronounced the word ‘gangsta’. Fortunately Coolio is on hand to help those of us who are not versed in hip-hop slang.
It is well known that rock and roll originated in the black community but was coopted by white musicians like Elvis Presley and British groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Stereo Williams writes about the history of racism in rock and roll and says that there are many myths about it. In particular, he starts by closely examining the charges of racism against Presley supposedly based on something that he said.
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Given that Donald Trump has deep authoritarian tendencies and sees the government as existing to serve his personal needs and attack his opponents, you would think that Democrats would seize every opportunity to limit his powers. But although they have been deeply critical of him, when it comes to the national security state, the Democratic leadership seems willing to extend to him the sweeping domestic spying powers that Congress gave president Obama.
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… so that you don’t have to spend your time wading through it.
Before he delves into the details, he gives us the gist:
1) Trump has almost no ideological convictions and is motivated almost entirely by the classic narcissistic value equation, i.e. how much praise or scorn he gets on a second-to-second basis, from whom, and why. Had he not run as a Republican – and in particular won on a platform scripted by ap nationalist true believer like Bannon – he might very well by now have been pushed into a completely different kind of presidency. Trump wants so badly to be liked that, especially with the influence of Kushner and Ivanka, he might easily have allowed his White House to drift back toward his original politics, which (as New Yorkers and furious conservatives alike will clearly remember) was once squarely in the Bob Rubin rich-guy sort-of Democrat mold.
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Donald Trump’s racist comments has had swift blowback around the world.
Remarks by Donald Trump describing immigrants from Africa and Haiti as coming from “shithole countries” were racist, the United Nations human rights office has said, as it led global condemnation of the US president.
…The UN human rights spokesman, Rupert Colville, told a Geneva news briefing: “There is no other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘shitholes’, whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome.”
(We are bracing ourselves for a severe ice storm today in this region so I am reproducing a blog post from back in 2006, before I moved to this site, because I thought that readers might find it interesting. I have edited it slightly, because tinkering with my writing is something I cannot help. This question formed the basis of an article by Robert Rosenberg in the December 2005 issue of Physics Today, p. 50-55.)
As you can see from this video, this man was reminded that ice is really slippery.
But why is ice so slippery?
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Donald Trump at a meeting referred to El Salvador, Haiti, and African nations as ‘shithole countries” and wondered why we couldn’t have more immigrants from Norway instead of them. This has made even mainstream media commentators, who usually try to use euphemisms to soft-pedal what presidents say, outright call him a racist. Here’s Anderson Cooper reacting.
I wrote recently about how I had abandoned watching the Star Wars series after being disappointed with Start Wars I: The Phantom Menace but a review of the latest entry Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi suggested that it had somewhat progressive politics that might make it worth watching. But my son-in-law, who is an aficionado of the series, suggested that before watching it, I should see Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens because otherwise the plot of the latest film would be hard to follow.
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There has been a growing movement to make $15 the minimum wage for all employees in any job. Currently the wait staff in restaurants can be paid much less than the federally mandated minimum wage because they supposedly make it up in tips. That is in addition to working conditions that are far worse than in many other professions and lacking many benefits that other people take for granted.
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