May 26, 2017

DU ads offering me a free duffle bag if I join the NRA

and apparently they sell insurance for guns too

May 25, 2017

Black Farmer Calls Out Liberal Racism In Powerful Facebook Message

A black farmer has the internet talking after posting a powerful message on social media about race relations in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Chris Newman, owner of the Sylvanaqua Farms in Albemarle County, shared his thoughts on a recent “Love Trumps Hate” counter-protest on Saturday. The rally was held in response to white supremacist Richard Spencer leading a protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

“I’d like to appreciate [the Love Trumps Hate rally],” Newman wrote in a Facebook post published on May 17. “But frankly I just don’t.”

Newman went on to call out the subtle racism of his neighbors, who purport to be progressive and inclusive but have yet to acknowledge the fact that Charlottesville is, by his estimation, “the most aggressively segregated place” he’s ever lived in.

The farmer recounted that he’s been racially profiled and questioned by police several times after receiving “strange looks from a passerby.”

“It isn’t Richard Spencer calling the cops on me for farming while Black,” Newman wrote. “It’s nervous White women in yoga pants with ‘I’m with her’ and ‘Coexist’ stickers on their German SUVs.”

The farmer went on to suggest that residents of the town who are interested in racial progress should consider how to effect change in their own everyday lives.

“People are so busy going after that easy fix, going after that Confederate flag, that they’re not doing the hard thing, which is thinking, how did we get here, and how the hell do we dig out of institutional racism,” Newman wrote.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-farmer-calls-out-liberal-racism-in-powerful-facebook-message_us_5925a027e4b0650cc020eb4d

The racism on our side is more subtle. It rears it's racist head in sneaky ways. Often by people who mean well and don't know or don't want to know they're doing it.
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Full Text of Chris Newman's Facebook Post:
A message to Charlottesville about Lee Park from your local Black farmer:

I know some folks are really feeling themselves about this whole Love Trumps Hate counter-rally to Richard Spencer's punch-worthy shenanigans in Lee Park. I'd like to appreciate it, but frankly I just don't.

I've lived in several cities and visited many more before Charlottesville. I like this town for its natural beauty, it's small size, the friendliness of its people, and its food. But folks, here's something else: Charlottesville is by far the most aggressively segregated place I've ever lived in or visited. And that seems a strange thing to have to say about a town that hosts a public university.

I say "aggressively" for two reasons. One, because of how assertive police (and the citizens who summon them) are here with racial profiling. It got so bad in 2014 - 2015 that I stopped renting farmland on estates where I could be easily seen from the road, and I stopped making food deliveries into wealthier neighborhoods because of how often police would "happen by" and sometimes even question me five or ten minutes after I got a strange look from a passerby (usually someone jogging, but occasionally someone in a car). I'm not a paranoid kinda guy, but this happened way too often to be a coincidence.

It isn't Richard Spencer calling the cops on me for farming while Black. It's nervous White women in yoga pants with "I'm with Her" and "Coexist" stickers on their German SUVs.

Second is the sheer degree of cultural appropriation going on with businesses in the city proper. It's little things - e.g. shops and other businesses incorporating wide swaths of hiphop culture into their branding while having not a single Black owner, partner, employee, or vendor. And those businesses are KILLING IT here. This is a town where Blackness advances White-owned brands and subjects Black-owned businesses to inspection by law enforcement.

Do you really think that problem comes from people like Richard Spencer?

Check out C'Ville Weekly's Instagram feed when you get a moment, and try not to notice that the few depictions of Black people are limited to sports, singing, criminal justice, or single parenthood. White people, meanwhile, are represented as political activists, chefs, cogs in the gig economy, musicians, dancers, people who get married, visual artists, songwriters, architects, landscapers, thespians, artistic directors, wedge-heel-wearing rugby players, dog lovers, farmers, firefighters, and people who play with their kids in cul de sacs.

Richard Spencer is not the editor of C'Ville Weekly.

Truth is, as a Black dude, I'm far less bothered by the flag wavers in this picture than this town's progressives assuming its race problem has nothing to do with them. The former is a visual inconvenience. The latter could leave my daughters without a father.

So please, put down the candles and instead ask yourself: why is my city like this? Why is life like this for Black people in my wonderful city? The answer is a lot closer to home than Richard Spencer or Lee Park.

May 24, 2017

The Emancipation of the MILF

Does sexual freedom belong only to the young? Claire Dederer doesn’t think so. By KIM BROOKS

About six years ago, Claire Dederer realized she had a problem. The problem had to do with sex. It had to do with desire. It had to do with being a middle-aged wife and mother and needing and wanting to be seen and known by new people in a new way, maybe even by people she didn’t particularly like or love or respect all that much. Her problem had something to do with sex but didn’t stop there. It assaulted her notions of what it meant to be a grown-up woman in the world and wanting to have romantic encounters with men who were not her husband. She loved her husband. Obviously, she loved her children, her family, the life they had built together. And at the same time, a part of her wanted to step outside the boundary of the polite, middle-class domestic life they’d drawn around themselves. Or, to put it more crudely, she wanted to fuck around.

At the time of her realization, Dederer had worked for many years as a critic, first in film and then in books. She never planned to be a memoirist, but found herself splicing more and more personal history into whatever review she happened to be working on. After getting married, having kids, and moving to an island in Puget Sound off the coast of Seattle, she became fascinated by the obsessive parenting culture rampant in parts of the Pacific Northwest, and began writing a memoir that would merge the cultural history of the place with her personal history as a child of a complicated separation.

The culmination of these ruminations, Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning, is out this week. In it, Dederer tells the story of what happens when a devoted wife and mother in her 40s, a woman in a basically loving and healthy marriage, stops taking care of everyone, stops subsuming her own needs to those of her children and husband, stops repressing her unruly sexual desires, and starts acting like, well … a man. By modern standards, the author’s misbehavior is mild — there is no marriage-destroying, Eat, Pray, Love–style romance or affair. Instead, she yearns and flirts; she stays out late and takes vacations with her best friend instead of her husband; she has a slew of inappropriate email friendships with various suitors, and at her most reckless, allows an unnamed, famous short story writer from California to stick his tongue in her mouth. And yet, as limited as her indiscretions may be, Dederer struggles to find a name for her new desires. If she were a man, she’d be having a typical midlife crisis. In writing about it, she’d be working in the tradition of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, James Salter, Junot Díaz, and dozens of other 20th-century male authors. She’d be behaving like Bill Clinton, Tony Soprano, Don Draper — and countless other touchstones of middle-aged male sexual freedom. But as a woman, she is setting out into the uncharted territory, suggesting, as a few brave souls have now begun to do, that the MILF might not just be a male fetish and a focus of male desire, but a person in her own right, not just an object, but a subject with things she herself would like to do.

The exploration of a mother’s midlife sexuality might not seem groundbreaking, until you think about how few people are doing it, particularly when compared to the destigmatization and taboo-smashing tell-alls younger women have been enacting in recent years. “It’s funny,” she said, the first time we spoke, “how we’ve finally begun to accept that young women might want to have sex, and that this desire doesn’t make them sluts or whores. But this new acceptance goes out the window when a woman gets married and has a baby, the point after which all her sexual desire should be laser-beam focused at her husband, contained to odious date nights and nap-time masturbation.” Is it possible, she asks throughout her book, that middle-aged wives and mothers might want to have sex, too?

http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/05/female-sexuality-desire-what-happens-as-women-age.html?mid=facebook_nymag

I'm posting here instead of GD because this is where the moms are.

May 24, 2017

Manchester attack: Three more arrests in bomber investigation

Source: BBC

Three more men have been arrested as police continue to investigate whether Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi acted alone.
Police arrested the three in the city on Wednesday. Abedi's 23-year-old brother was arrested on Tuesday.
Abedi killed 22 and injured 64 when he blew himself up outside an Ariana Grande concert on Monday night.
The UK terror threat level is now up to its highest level of "critical", meaning more attacks may be imminent.
It means military personnel are being deployed to protect key sites.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40023488

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Pics of victims also at link

May 23, 2017

I'm seeing DU ads to join the Secret Service

https://www.secretservice.gov/join/careers/

Agent Mike must know we are good people to recruit from. Maybe a lot of their staff has been quitting lately?

May 22, 2017

The ugly truth behind Saudi Arabia's love for Melania Trump

(CNN) — Donald Trump's first major trip overseas may be fraught with diplomatic land mines for the President, but the Trump administration can at least comfort itself with the clear hit that Melania Trump has been with the Saudi press.

The fact that Melania is communicating with the media and the public in Saudi Arabia -- mainly through what Saudi news reports have deemed her "classy and conservative" fashion choices -- works well in the notoriously anti-woman kingdom. Her intense appeal makes sense, considering the first lady represents so much that Saudi citizens find familiar and can relate to, especially visually. Melania walks behind her husband, is quiet and reserved, does not make obvious demands (at least not ones we can hear), and most importantly, she looks beautiful and polished.

All of that should come as no surprise, given whom Melania is married to. After all, how the Saudi government likes women to behave is similar to how Donald Trump has said he likes women to behave. And they both prefer women to look pretty in pictures, rather than hold actual positions of power.

Melania's husband and the Saudi government also both know and understand the power and value of a good photo opportunity. In fact, fantastic photo opportunities are something the kingdom values and is hypersensitive about, especially ones that are going to be seen around the world.

For them, Melania Trump was perfectly poised in her black Stella McCartney jumpsuit and gilded gold belt. Melania projected a glamorous image for a country where women live under male guardianship, cannot drive, still do not have the full vote, and cannot travel or seek medical attention without male permission.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/22/opinions/melania-popularity-saudi-arabia-hossain-opinion/index.html

Conservatives love Saudi Arabia. The cartoon American Dad even had an episode on how it was so appealing that they moved there.

Make Misogyny Great Again

May 22, 2017

A Sinkhole Just Opened in Front of President Trumps Mar-a-Lago Estate

A sinkhole opened in front of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's private estate and golf club, on Monday causing minor traffic delays.

The sinkhole is 4-by-4 feet and is believed to be near a newly installed water main, according to a Palm Beach travel alert. Sinkholes are a common occurrence in Florida, according to the Weather Channel, which has called them "as much a part of the Florida landscape as palm trees and alligators."


The town of Palm Beach issued a travel alert on Monday as a result of the sinkhole, saying crews from West Palm Beach Utilities will be examining the sinkhole throughout the day. According to CBS12 in Florida, one lane of traffic has been closed.

The Mar-a-Lago estate is referred to as the "Winter White House" by President Trump who visited the club frequently in the first few months of his time in office. The President has hosted foreign leaders at the club, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Some took to Twitter to crack jokes about the sinkhole opening near Trump's lavish estate.

http://time.com/4788455/trump-mar-a-lago-sinkhole/

His demons are being summoned from hell. The end is near.

May 22, 2017

Defense stocks rally premarket after Trump signs $350 billion of arms deals

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/defense-stocks-rise-across-the-board-premarket-after-trump-signs-350-billion-of-arms-deals-2017-05-22



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I remember Reagan selling weapons to the middle east. How did that work out? I'm sure none of these weapons will accidentally get lost and fall into the lap of ISIS.

May 20, 2017

KKK rally to be held in Lancaster County

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/real-time/KKK-rally-to-be-held-in-Lancaster-County.html



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The National Socialist party of America is also holding rally and Stormfront is holding voter registration drives.

Sick of winning yet? These assholes make America less great

May 19, 2017

We Could Have Been Canada

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canada

Was the American Revolution such a good idea?

And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America—what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior—less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.

The thought is taboo, the Revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda. One can grasp the scale and strangeness of this sanctity only by leaving America for a country with a different attitude toward its past and its founding. As it happened, my own childhood was neatly divided between what I learned to call “the States” and Canada. In my Philadelphia grade school, we paraded with flags, singing “The Marines’ Hymn” and “Here Comes the Flag!” (“Fathers shall bless it / Children caress it / All shall maintain it / No one shall stain it.”) We were taught that the brave Americans hid behind trees to fight the redcoats—though why this made them brave was left unexplained. In Canada, ninth grade disclosed a history of uneasy compromise duality, and the constant search for temporary nonviolent solutions to intractable divides. The world wars, in which Canadians had played a large part, passed by mostly in solemn sadness. (That the Canadians had marched beyond their beach on D Day with aplomb while the Americans struggled on Omaha was never boasted about.) Patriotic pageantry arose only from actual accomplishments: when Team Canada won its eight-game series against the Russians, in 1972, the entire nation sang “O Canada”—but they sang it as a hockey anthem as much as a nationalist hymn.

Over the years, we have seen how hard it is to detach Americans from even the obviously fallacious parts of that elementary-school saga—the absurd rendering of Reconstruction, with its Northern carpetbaggers and local scalawags descending on a defenseless South, was still taught in the sixties. It was only in recent decades that schools cautiously began to relay the truth of the eighteen-seventies—of gradual and shameful Northern acquiescence in the terrorist imposition of apartheid on a post-slavery population.

The Revolution remains the last bulwark of national myth. Academics write on the growth of the Founding Father biographical genre in our time; the rule for any new writer should be that if you want a Pulitzer and a best-seller you must find a Founding Father and fetishize him. While no longer reverential, these accounts are always heroic in the core sense of showing us men, and now, occasionally, women, who transcend their flaws with spirit (though these flaws may include little things like holding other human beings as property, dividing their families, and selling off their children). The phenomenon of “Hamilton,” the hip-hop musical that is, contrary to one’s expectations, wholly faithful to a heroic view of American independence, reinforces the sanctity of the American Revolution in American life.

Academic histories of the Revolution, though, have been peeping over the parapets, joining scholarly scruples to contemporary polemic. One new take insists that we misunderstand the Revolution if we make what was an intramural and fratricidal battle of ideas in the English-speaking Empire look like a modern colonial rebellion. Another insists that the Revolution was a piece of great-power politics, fought in unimaginably brutal terms, and no more connected to ideas or principles than any other piece of great-power politics: America was essentially a Third World country that became the battlefield for two First World powers. Stirred into the larger pot of recent revisionism, these arguments leave us with a big question: was it really worth it, and are we better off for its having happened? In plain American, is Donald Trump a bug or a feature of the American heritage?

What if?

An American response could be would Canada and Australia and others be the way they are if America hadn't done the original Brexit? Or we could have turned out more like Zimbabwe, Pakistan, or Jamaica.