After sharing the video on how Fast Food has changed the world, it seems only fitting to share “The Dark Side of the All-American Meal with my readers….. Watch the video, read the book.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001) is a book by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser that examines the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry.
First serialized by Rolling Stone in 1999, the book has drawn comparisons to Upton Sinclair’s classic muckraking novel The Jungle. The book was adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Richard Linklater.
The book is divided into two sections, “The American Way,” which interrogates the beginnings of the Fast Food Nation within the context of post-World War II America; and “Meat and Potatoes,” which examines the specific mechanizations of the fast-food industry, including the chemical flavoring of the food, the production of cattle and chickens, the working conditions of beef industry, the dangers of eating meat, and the global context of fast food as an American cultural export.
Fast Food Nation opens with discussion of Carl N. Karcher and the McDonalds brothers, examining their roles as pioneers of the fast-food industry in southern California. This discussion is followed by an examination of Ray Kroc and Walt Disney’s complicated relationship as well as each man’s rise to fame. This chapter also considers the intricate, profitable methods of advertising to children. Next, Schlosser visits Colorado Springs, CO and investigates the life and working conditions of the typical fast-food industry employee: fast-food restaurants employ the highest rate of low-wage workers, have among the highest turnover rates, and pay minimum wage to a higher proportion of its employees than any other American industry.
The second section of the text begins with a discussion of the chemical components that make the food taste so good. Schlosser follows this with a discussion of the life of a typical rancher, considering the difficulties presented to the agriculture world in a new economy. Schlosser is perhaps most provocative when he critiques the meatpacking industry, which he tags as the most dangerous job in America. Moreover, the meat produced by slaughterhouses has become exponentially more hazardous since the centralization of the industry: the way cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed provides an ideal setting for E coli to spread. Additionally, working conditions continue to grow worse. In the final chapter, Schlosser considers how fast food has matured as an American cultural export following the Cold War: the collapse of Soviet Communism has allowed the mass spread of American goods and services, especially fast food. As a result, the rest of the world is catching up with America’s rising obesity rates.
The book continues with an account of the evolution of fast food and how it has coincided with the advent of the automobile. Schlosser explains the transformation from countless independent restaurants to a few uniform franchises. “The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society… During that period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills. In 1975, about one-third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds of such mothers are employed. As the sociologists Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning, and child care. A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants – mainly at fast food restaurants.”
Regarding the topic of child-targeted marketing, Schlosser explains how the McDonald’s Corporation modeled its marketing tactics on The Walt Disney Company, which inspired the creation of advertising icons such as Ronald McDonald and his sidekicks. Marketing executives intended that this marketing shift would result not only in attracting children, but their parents and grandparents as well. More importantly, the tactic would instill brand loyalty that would persist through adulthood through nostalgic associations to McDonald’s. Schlosser also discusses the tactic’s ills: the exploitation of children’s naïveté and trusting nature.
In marketing to children, Schlosser suggests, corporations have infiltrated schools through sponsorship and quid pro quo. He sees that reductions in corporate taxation have come at the expense of school funding, thereby presenting many corporations with the opportunity for sponsorship with those same schools. According to his sources, 80% of sponsored textbooks contain material that is biased in favor of the sponsors, and 30% of high schools offer fast foods in their cafeterias.
NB COMMENTARY: I really wanted to NOT be in this Beyoncé Madness, but the irony of it all is to see folks being offended by her antics to the point of calling it racist when in fact, if they took the time to read the lyrics, they would see the song is all about Beyoncé getting hers. With a smattering of some retorts against “whatever.” The fact that she even uses this “so-called” Black Panther imagery, which in and of itself is a smack in the face of the movement, a downgrade at best in its presentation and surely not militant at all; is amazing to me. The fact that folks are getting hot under the collar over it is outright laughable. Then, on the other hand, you have these drones who support and even consider this “show” as something meaningful or even intrinsically an acknowledgment of her “Blackness.” Now I am ROFLMAO and sadly, there are many in that camp as well.
In it’s simplicity it barely shows any aggression or hatred or anything against the police. It’s a bunch of scantly clad women, fist balled up, dancing with Beyoncé in formation. The directive?? Work hard, grind hard, own it so you can “have the paper.” Which none of that was what the BPP Movement was about but surely a capitalistic approach to success.
These folks give money to these movements (Black Lives Matter which is suspect on its face), and bail protesters out of jail, but none of them will give up their way of life to join the Movement on the Real, and that’s the point. If twirling her ass, and rocking her crotch gets her money, that is what she will do, she certainly is not on the front lines of the conscious movement or on the front lines of the progressive movement.
Being part of the conscious or progressive movement would be detrimental to her power bank account cause folks would stop spending money on those things that do nothing for their progress and that would mean to stop buying her and her husbands stuff. Her lyrics were more about, “this is what you get for your money, I work hard for it, I slay for it, and see, what your money did for me??? I am at the Super Bowl.”
It’s all about her and will always be about her, and folks need to get real cause she ain’t doing nothing against her handlers who are all “albinos.” LOL Check out the lyrics if you haven’t already. Click Here for the Lyrics
Assata Shakur Speaks
SOURCE: http://blackpantheressproject.tumblr.com/ Although the Black Panther Party (BPP) revolutionized the condition of Black people and communities in the 1960s, sexism in the group silenced the voices of Black women to promote a Black nationalist agenda that became conflated with the idea of preserving Black masculinity. This project aims to examine how and why this brand of racialized sexism in the Black Panther Party operated in the group, and to shed light on some of the silenced and erased the narratives about radical Black womanhood.
Regina Jennings, a Black woman who joined the Black Panther Party as a teenager, reflects about her experience with sexism in the group. She recounts a particularly difficult encounter with a captain who romantically pursued her. When she rejected his advances, she explains, “he made my life miserable. He gave me ridiculous orders. He shunned me. He found fault in my performance” (262). Ultimately, he had her transferred to a different branch of the organization, even though that meant completely disrupting her way of life. Jennings brought the incidences to the Central Committee’s attention, but the all-male panel accused her of white, bourgeois behaviors and values.
In spite of this situation, Jennings takes great pains not to demonize the entire group. While she and other women in the Black Panther Party confronted this form of sexism and misogyny, they also received a lot of support from Black men. Some Black men even defended Jennings when she complained of the sexual harassment, even when that meant that other men would shame them or call them emasculated. Jennings attributes these circumstances with a lack of knowledge or experience with power. “Black men, who had been too long without some form of power, lacked the background to understand and rework their double standard toward the female cadre” (263), she contends, demonstrating that oppression not only works to degrade a group, but also impels that group to internalize a set of power structures and enact oppression upon others. In spite of her claims, she emphasizes that this type of sexism should not be excused but rather understood. Jennings celebrates the love present in the BPP, forgiving the Party for the conditions that made it imperfect while honoring the uplift it achieved.
“I want you to know how much they perfectly loved you,” she clarifies in reference to those who dedicated their energies to Black communities. “I want you to know that they were willing to die for you” (264).
Kathleen Cleaver was the first female member of the Black Panther Party’s decision making body. In this interview, Cleaver challenges Euro-centric standards of beauty while expressing the BPP’s stance on self-love, and Black revival through celebrating different images of Blackness. She really does make a case for “the personal is political”!
What about Feminism?
Although Black women have not always identified with labels such as “feminist,” Black women have advocated for women’s issues as early as the 19th century. Black women have fought for economic justice/equality, against racism, against sexism, and against imperialism throughout U.S. history. In fact, the first wave white feminists learned much of their organizing and political strategies from Black, female abolitionists.
The late 1960s and the 1970s did witness an increasing number of Black women articulating their experience around the words “feminist” or “feminism,” but also a number of Black women challenging the structure of feminist movements. The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) took the nation by storm, voicing many women’s grievances, but it did not appeal to many Black women and women of color who interpreted the movement’s work as an agenda that principally furthered white, upper-class women’s issues. Furthermore, many Black women considered their involvement in mixed gender spaces more pressing because they identified more with their male counterparts’ struggles than with the affluent white women’s problems. Kathleen Cleaver explained this phenomenon:
“The problems of Black women and the problems of White women are so completely diverse they cannot possibly be solved in the same type of organization nor met by the same type of activity… [but] I can understand how a White woman cannot relate to a White man.”
This racial solidarity in some ways led some Black women in mixed gender groups to tolerate oppressive ideologies to avoid division, or to subscribe to certain roles. In the pamphlet, “Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation,” some women insisted that “Black men understand that their manhood is not dependent on keeping Black women subordinate to them,” but also claimed that because “our men have been sort of castrated,” women had to avoid taking up too much space in leadership so that Black men would not have any “fear of women dominating the whole political scene”. That kind of admonition to other Black women invokes ideas about pathologized matriarchy. Other women in the BPP adopted more masculine roles in order to be taken more seriously. Assata Shakur confessed, “You had to develop this whole arrogant kind of macho style in order to be heard… We were just involved in those day to day battles for respect in the Black Panther Party,” revealing the complications in negotiating one’s gender identity and the implications of said gender, even in anti-oppression organizations.
Although the climate of the BPP proved difficult to articulate in terms of gender politics, it was due to Black women’s participation in mixed gender groups and organizations (as opposed to the tendencies of some white, radical feminist groups who championed separatism), that Black women could interrogate the sexist and misogynistic ideologies present in anti-oppression organizations. Various BPP chapters even collaborated with the Women’s Liberation Movement at times, such as in 1969 when WLM members protested the cruel treatment of imprisoned Panther women.
Black women’s presence in the BPP forced men to reconsider their sexist assumptions. Even Party leaders like Eldridge Cleaver shifted positions. In 1968, Cleaver limited Black women’s political potential only to “pussy power,” or, the idea that Black women should withhold sex from Black men until he was ready to “pick up a gun” and embrace his own activism. In contrast, a year later, responding the cruel treatment of Black Panther women in prisons, Cleaver asserted that “if we want to go around and call ourselves a vanguard organization, then we’ve got to be… the vanguard also in the area of women’s liberation, and set an example in that area.” Black women demonstrated that sexist gender norms could not dictate their worth, and that in the grand scheme of things, the police imprisoned them just as they imprisoned Black men, and that white society had stripped them of their femininity just as it had stripped Black men of their masculinity.
Sources:
Anon. “Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation.” In Heath, ed. Off the Pigs! Pg. 339.
Cleaver, Eldridge. “Message to Sister Erica Hugggins of the Black Panther Party.”The Black Panther Party. 5 July 1969. Reprinted in Foner, The Black Panthers Speak. 98-99.
Cleaver, Eldridge. “Speech to the Nebraska Peace and Freedom Party Convention,” 24 August 1968. Pg. 22
Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In: The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998. Pg. 274, 284, 290.
In 1965, then Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, issued a report about the question of poverty and the Black American population. Startled by statistics that showed that the unemployment rate of Black people doubled that of white people, Moynihan set out to expose the conditions that economically limited African Americans.
Given its historical context, the Moynihan Report actually represented a radical conceptualization of the relationship between gender identities, family structure, and socio-economic class; however, Moynihan’s statement falls short of the mark by pointing to Black matriarchy as the damning factor. While recognizing that structural conditions that originate in the enslaving of Black people in America has contributed to and caused many of the social disadvantages that plague African American communities contemporarily, Moynihan implicates Black motherhood thereby suggesting that without a patriarchal structure, the Black family is doomed to fail. “He does… identify the fundamental problem confronting the Black community as the ‘tangle of pathology’ associated with a matriarchal family structure,” contest Juan J. Battle and Michael D. Bennet in “African-American Families and Public Policies.” By legitimizing Western, patriarchal culture over non-white alternatives to the family structure, Moynihan prioritizes the suggestion that the Black family is deviant and therefore pathologically damaged instead of demonstrating how institutions like racism, sexism and classism systematically oppress Black families. In this way, he roots the problem in a presumed cultural deficiency, shifting the onus to Black mothers to stop corrupting the family structure instead of on the government to stop discriminating against people of color.
African Americans had initiated conversations about the Black family long before the Moynihan Report; nevertheless, using anecdotal, historical, sociological, and statistical evidence, the Report validated many Black men’s sentiments of “castration” and their resentments about a lost masculinity. Without a doubt, some Black men within the Black Panther Party endorsed the Moynihan Report to sanction their own desires for male superiority. Even Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton attested to this male inferiority complex:
“[The Black man] feels that he is something less than a man… Often his wife (who is able to secure a job as a man, cleaning for White people) is the breadwinner. He is therefore, viewed as quiet worthless by his wife and children” (Huey Newton, To Die for the People. Pg. 81)”
Interestingly enough, although Newton does not necessarily subscribe to the subordination of Black women to elevate the Black man, he does not attempt here to undermine the assumption that men should be the breadwinner, that womenshould not head the Black family, or that the solution is to esteem the Black man above the Black woman. Women, especially those in the BPP, would have to create most of the awareness about the fallibility of this form of social change.
Sources:
Battle, Juan J. and Bennet, Michael D. “African-American Families and Public Policy: The Legacy of the Moynihan Report.” Sage Publications, London and New Delhi, 1997. Pg. 154
Moynihan, Daniel P. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” 1965
Newton, H. To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton. City Lights Publishers, 2009. Pg. 81
In the 1960s, Maulana Karenga spearheaded Us, a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to raising Black people’s awareness of their cultural heritage. Us propounded the notion that a revival of African traditions would elevate the condition of African Americans. Whether real or contrived, these traditions would ennoble Black people in new ways.
[Malauna Karenga, founder of “Us,” creator of the pan-African/African American Holiday of Kwanzaa, intellectual and writer.]
The Black Panther Party and Us supported each other ideologically, and Maulana Karenga even attended various BPP meetings and rallies. In spite of this initial alliance, the two groups diverged when their ethics no longer aligned. The BPP pushed back against Us’ idea that all Black people were allies in the struggle simply because of the color of their skin. On January 17, 1969, a shootout erupted between BPP and Us members during a Black Student Union meeting at UCLA, which resulted in the death of two BPP members. From that point onward, the relationship between the two organizations never recovered.
Although the Black Panther Party and Us often feuded, the earliest philosophies in the Black Panther Party do reflect many of Karenga’s beliefs. With respect to women, Karenga championed female submission in the name of reinstating Black male authority. He observed:
“What makes a woman appealing is femininity and she can’t be feminine without being submissive. A man has to be a leader and he has to be a man who bases his leadership on knowledge, wisdom, and understanding… The role of the woman is to inspire her man, educate their children and participate in social development. We say male supremacy is based on three things: tradition, acceptance, and reason. Equality is false; it’s the devil’s concept.”
Karenga espoused a complimentary gender theory; this theory depends on the credence that Black women serve to affirm Black men’s superiority. The foundation for this brand of Black racial uplift remains in the notion that empowering Black men necessarily will translate to empower Black communities. Ironically, this philosophy does not interrogate the premise that the restoration of Black male supremacy only occurs insomuch as Black women inspire and educate these Black men. Unfortunately, many of these problematic viewpoints continued to circulate in BPP chapters after Karenga’s departure from the group, necessitating that the Party resolve many of its gendered issues in later years.
Sources:
Halisi, Clyde, ed., The Quotable Karenga. Los Angeles: Us Organization, 1967. Pgs. 27-28
Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In: The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998. Pg. 272
How is it that an organization so committed to righting the wrongs committed against Black people, could often support ideologies that endorsed the subordination of women? It is important to recognize that the Black Panther Party (BPP) did not exist in isolation; competing concepts about gender and sexuality perpetuated and upheld in mainstream society shaped the social frameworks of BPP members. The process of dismantling sexism meant theoretical and practical work on the part of all Party members. One female Black Panther who worked in the Oakland and international chapters, the late Connie Matthews assessed the disparity between the BPP’s philosophies and practices.
“I mean, it’s one thing to get up and talk about ideologically you believe this. But you’re asking people to change attitudes and lifestyles overnight, which is not just possible. So I would say tht there was a lot of struggle and there was a lot of male chauvinism… But I would say all in all, in terms of equality… that women had very, very strong leadership roles and were respected as such. It didn’t mean it came automatically.” (Interview with Tracye Matthews, 26 June 1991; Kingston, Jamaica.)
The men and the women in the Black Panther Party had internalized various views that validated sexism and even a racialized form of sexism. This brand of misogyny that specifically targeted Black women (contemporarily referred to as misogynoir) manifested itself in public discourse in two important ways: throughcultural nationalism, and through the Moynihan Report. True equality in the Black Panther Party meant interrogating these cultural “norms” and exchanging those views for a more egalitarian framework.
Source: Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In:The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998. Pg. 289
1969, the Free Breakfast for School Children Program was initiated at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland by the Black Panther Party. The Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area.
Male figures in the Black Panther Party, such as Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and David Hilliard, were key to the initiation process of this project; however, Black women figured greatly in the execution of the first Breakfast Programs. Neighborhood mothers, who lived close to St. Augustine’s Church and actively participated in local parent-teacher associations, focused their energies on the program, even though they were often unaffiliated with the BPP, and made it a success. Female members of the Black Panther Party also contributed to the Free Breakfast Program by feeding as well as educating the children present. Although tensions often arose between the more conservative community mothers — who preferred that the children quietly and orderly ate — and the Black Panther women — who brought their restless, activist spirits into the spaces — these women cooperated to transform their neighborhoods.
Ms. Ruth Beckford, a parishioner at St. Augustine’s Church who helped to establish the Free Breakfast program with Bobby Seale and head of the Church, Father Earl Neal, spoke of the communal uplift that occurred through nourishing the community’s children. “When we were doing it the school principal came down and told us how different the children were. They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps, how alert they were and it was wonderful” (412), Beckford insists in an interview, demonstrating that by feeding the young children, the predominantly female Black Panther Party and Black community members radicalized their youth’s relation to education systems and thus their youth’s access to societal opportunities. The Free Breakfast Program, a largely woman-run project, asserted Black people’s right to food, to preparations so that they could thrive academically, and to conditions to further their position in society.
Source: Heynen, Nik. “Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival: The Black Panther Party’s Radical Antihunger Politics of Social Reproduction and Scale.” Department of Geography, University of Georgia, published online: May 2009.
“[W]omen ran the BPP pretty much. I don’t now how it got to be a male’s party or thought of as being a male’s party. Because those things, when you really look at it in terms of society, those things are looked on as being woman things, you know, feeding children, taking care of the sick and uh, so. Yeah, we did that. We actually ran the BPP’s programs.” (Frankye Malika Adams in an interview with Tracye Matthews, 29 September 1994; Harlem, New York)
When the media invokes images of the Black Panther Party (BPP), it often displays images of gun-toting Black men in military garb. Historical representations have relegated many women who participated in and devoted their energies to the Black Panther Party to a prop status. Excluding the outliers like Assata Shakur and Kathleen Cleaver, women in the Black Panther Party earn their time in the spotlight insomuch as they endorse the male cause; even some of the more famous images of these Black women feature them holding up signs for the Free Huey Campaign. Despite these depictions, Black women played a fundamental role in the Black Panther Party. Often comprising the majority of local BPP groups, women staffed and coordinated free breakfast programs, liberation schools, and medical clinics. The Party even sought out Black women unaffiliated with the organization, such as women on welfare, grandmothers and community figures, to staff these initiatives. If these women played such a fundamental role in the infrastructure of the BPP, why aren’t Black women as celebrated for their contributions? History has a way of degrading work that mirrors “traditional” female duties to categories like “community service” or “support work”. The term “support work,” especially invokes the connotation of inferior, menial and subordinate labor. Sexism not only impacted what jobs Black women in the BPP received or fulfilled but also how history conveys the value of said efforts.
Source: Matthews, Tracye. “No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is”: Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966-1971.” In:The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered]. Edited by Charles E. Jones. Black Classic Press, Baltimore, 1998.
“Black liberation politics became equated with black men’s attempts to regain their manhood at the expense of black women,” asserts Anita Simmons in the chapter “Black Womanhood, Misogyny and Hip-Hop Culture: A Feminist Intervention”. Simmons continues, “In the Black Panther Party, attainment of black manhood meant the degradation of black women and womanhood.” Sexism in the Black Panther Party (BPP) silenced the voices of Black women to promote a Black nationalist agenda that became conflated with the idea of preserving Black masculinity. This project aims to examine how this brand of racialized sexism in the Black Panther Party silenced and even erased the narratives about radical Black womanhood in the late 1960s from our social history. What are these narratives? How did women in the Black Panther Party radicalize their position? This project will also examine the interaction between Black feminists of the 1970s and their criticism of Black men’s understanding of Black womanhood. What was the stance of women in the Black Panther Party? Were there Black feminists who were also Black Panthers?
ABOUT
Although the Black Panther Party (BPP) revolutionized the condition of Black people and communities in the 1960s, sexism in the group silenced the voices of Black women to promote a Black nationalist agenda that became conflated with the idea of preserving Black masculinity. This project aims to examine how and why this brand of racialized sexism in the Black Panther Party operated in the group, and to shed light on some of the silenced and erased the narratives about radical Black womanhood.
NB Commentary: I enter this discussion kicking and screaming and swearing to myself that I am not, and I mean, am not gonna fall prey to the hype. But today, I had to come forth with another blog post. I was compelled by the comments under many of the pictures posted of her and her girl gang at the Super Bowl and how some folks were actually seeing it as a Powerful Movement, a statement about Black Power, a high five to Malcolm X, and the insane indicators of it being an Illuminati ritual. But what really took me to the top of the clock was the actual lyrics, which in no way seem to reflect any of this, in fact quite the contrary. So here I am again, with something to rant on about That!!!
Let me begin my rant with a shout out to Cookie Couture who posted the lyrics to Beyoncé song.
“Thank you for this. You know how you witness something and something inside you goes off and tells you that there is something wrong with this because inside of you, you can feel it going in all kinds of different directions. Well, thanks again, I really appreciate you posting those lyrics!!”
Nowadays, we cannot take lightly the impact of the media. It’s in your face in an instant and manipulating you and brainwashing you in the millisecond. Nowadays, it’s more dangerous due to the advance technology they can use to grab your brain and do all kinds of trickery with it.
The invention of motion pictures and later television, herald the beginning of an epic age, where the minds of the masses are in the hands of the elite controllers who can massage, manipulate, brainwash and control the narrative to such a degree that people believe that what they see is real and true.
People identify with the character on the screen so much so that they protect them as if they have an intimate relationship with them, all because of what they see on the screen. People project themselves into the personification of a made up image on the screen and it becomes their alters. For that matter, fans are as much MK-Ultra slaves as much as the people they Idolize and Adore. The Cult of Personality has replaced the Gods and Goddesses of ancient times.
The people on the big screen are fallible human beings, but the masses need Gods so they elevate them to the status of “Gods” and defend their “Persona” as if it’s real, or actually means anything. The psychological irony of this is that their “Persona” does mean something for the hungry masses, but 99% of them won’t use this power for anything other than maintaining the status quo of the Elite Moguls who control them from behind the scenes. Their true creativity is eclipsed by the greed, avarice and debauchery that is the world of celebrity. If they step out of the mold that was designed for them, they will fail or meet a worse fate. Thus the hype is just that, hype, form no substance, yet the impact of such superficiality is as deadly has a thousand poison arrows.
And Now to the Lyrics. You decide, how progressive these are.
What happened at the New Wil’ins?
Bitch, I’m back by popular demand
[Refrain: Beyoncé]
Y’all haters corny with that illuminati mess
Paparazzi, catch my fly, and my cocky fresh
I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress (stylin’)
I’m so possessive so I rock his Roc necklaces
My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana
You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama
I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros
I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils
Earned all this money but they never take the country out me
I got a hot sauce in my bag, swag
[Interlude: Messy Mya + Big Freedia]
Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah I, ohhhhh, oh, yes, I like that
I did not come to play with you hoes, haha
I came to slay, bitch
I like cornbreads and collard greens, bitch
Oh, yes, you besta believe it
[Refrain: Beyoncé]
Y’all haters corny with that illuminati mess
Paparazzi, catch my fly, and my cocky fresh
I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress (stylin’)
I’m so possessive so I rock his Roc necklaces
My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana
You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama
I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros
I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils
Earned all this money but they never take the country out me
I got a hot sauce in my bag, swag
[Chorus: Beyoncé]
I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow-bone it
I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it
I twirl on them haters, albino alligators
El Camino with the seat low, sippin’ Cuervo with no chaser
Sometimes I go off (I go off), I go hard (I go hard)
Get what’s mine (take what’s mine), I’m a star (I’m a star)
Cause I slay (slay), I slay (hey), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)
All day (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)
We gon’ slay (slay), gon’ slay (okay), we slay (okay), I slay (okay)
I slay (okay), okay (okay), I slay (okay), okay, okay, okay, okay
Okay, okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay
Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay
Prove to me you got some coordination, cause I slay
Slay trick, or you get eliminated
[Verse: Beyoncé]
When he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster, cause I slay
When he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster, cause I slay
If he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper, cause I slay
Drop him off at the mall, let him buy some J’s, let him shop up, cause I slay
I might get your song played on the radio station, cause I slay
I might get your song played on the radio station, cause I slay
You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making, cause I slay
I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making
[Chorus: Beyoncé]
I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow-bone it
I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it
I twirl on my haters, albino alligators
El Camino with the seat low, sippin’ Cuervo with no chaser
Sometimes I go off (I go off), I go hard (I go hard)
Get what’s mine (take what’s mine), I’m a star (I’m a star)
Cause I slay (slay), I slay (hey), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)
All day (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)
We gon’ slay (slay), gon’ slay (okay), we slay (okay), I slay (okay)
I slay (okay), okay (okay), I slay (okay), okay, okay, okay, okay
Okay, okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay
Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay
Prove to me you got some coordination, cause I slay
Slay trick, or you get eliminated
[Bridge: Beyoncé]
Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, I slay
Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation
You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation
Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper
[Outro]
Girl, I hear some thunder
Golly, look at that water, boy, oh lord
AND NEXT, TRENDING ON THE OTHER END OF THE MASS MIND CONTROL SCALECOMES THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE.BELIEVE IT OR NOT???? FEBRUARY 10, 2016ARE BEYONCE’S ‘FORMATION’ LYRICS ANTI-COP, PRO-BLACK OR JUST PLAIN PERFECT?ZACHARY VOLKERTThe lyrics and video to Beyonce’s new single “Formation” shouldn’t be surprising to any fans who have been closely following the political leanings of the pop artist and her husband Jay-Z. While the power couple have often tried to keep it quiet, they’ve been huge financial supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. Last year, activist Dream Hampton revealed that the couple had poured in tens of thousands of dollars in bail money without a second thought when Baltimore and Ferguson protestors were jailed. After those tweets were deleted, he later suggested that they didn’t really want to largely publicize the fact, reported The Guardian.That attitude seems to be shifting when peering into the video, performance and lyrics behind Beyonce’s “Formation.” Just as she gained accolades for aligning herself with feminism on her 2013 surprise self-titled album, Beyonce has once again recognized the power of pop and the cult of her own artistry to send a message. This time, it’s about the police violence faced by the black community. Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2782102/are-beyonces-formation-lyrics-anti-cop-pro-black-or-just-plain-perfect/#hMszhuT7eD83CMiW.99
Mysterious Islamic Tribe Where Women Have Sex With Different Men, Don’t Wear A Veil And Own Property
Behind the ancient way of life for the Tuareg tribe of the Sahara is a culture so progressive it would even make some in liberal western cultures blush.
Women are allowed to have multiple sexual partners outside of marriage, keep all their property on divorce and are so revered by their sons-in-law that the young men wouldn’t dare eat in the same room.
What is even more surprising is that even though the tribe has embraced Islam they have firmly held onto some of the customs that would not be acceptable to the wider Muslim world.
It is the men, and not the women, who cover their faces, for example.
Photographer Henrietta Butler, who has been fascinated by the Tuareg since she first followed them through the desert in 2001, once asked why this was. The explanation was simple.
‘The women are beautiful. We would like to see their faces.’
But this is certainly not the only place the Tuareg, related to the Berbers of North Africa, differ from the Muslim world of the Middle East, and even other parts of their own continent.
Before a woman marries, she is free to take as many lovers as she wants.
These two children were pictured in December 1967. Tuareg children traditionally stay with their mothers after a divorce
‘They turn a blind eye,’ explained Butler. ‘The young girls have the same great freedoms as the boys.’
For years, the men of the Tuareg have been able to ride to a young woman’s tent, and sneak into the side entrance – while his well-trained camel stands quietly and waits.
There, they will spend the night together – while the family, who all live in the tent, politely pretend not to notice.
Should the woman choose to welcome a different man into her tent the next day, so be it.
However, there is also a code of practice which none would dare break. Privacy is all important for this centuries old tribe of nomads, who once crossed the desert bringing dates, salt and saffron south, and slaves and gold north.
The idea of breaking the rules of courtship would be mortifying; as a result, the man is always gone before sunrise.
‘The Tuareg are utterly discreet. Everything is done with utmost discretion and respect,’ said Butler.
The relaxed customs around sexual partners has resulted in the girls getting married later than they may otherwise do, with the age of 20 not being uncommon.
Although, before then, they will have been wooed with poetry written by the men, who spend hours carefully crafting the words which they hope will win their beloved over.
But it is not a one-way street: the women are just as capable of putting pen to paper, using their own alphabet, taught to them by their mothers.
‘The women also make poetry eulogizing the men,’ says Butler. ‘There is high romance and idolatry.’
Unlike in so many other cultures, women lose none of their power once they marry either. Many marriages end in divorce among the Tuareg. And when it happens, it is the wife who keeps both the animals and the tent. And it is she who normally decides that she’s had enough.
His wife, meanwhile, will keep possession of everything she brought to the marriage and that includes the children.
The mother’s camp, Butler explains, is the root of the community, the home everyone returns to – and this arrangement ensures it stays that way.
And there is no shame in divorce. Families will often throw their daughters a divorce party, to let other men know they are available once more.
But this is not a matriarchal society, where the women are in charge.
Butler explains it is still the men ‘who sit and talk politics’. But even here, the women can be deferred to. They are often consulted for their views by their sons or husbands, and are quietly pulling the strings behind the scenes.
However, Tuareg society is matri-lineal, which means the families trace their lines through the women, rather than the men, right the way back to their first queen.
So, Butler explained: ‘Traditionally, the man would belong to the woman’s group, rather than the other way around.’
The preference for the women’s line goes as far as man leaving his possessions to his sister’s son as it ‘is considered a stronger link to your family than to your own son’.
In other words, it can be guaranteed that your sister’s child belongs to your sister, rather than a man’s son, who cannot be absolutely guaranteed to share his genes.
A nomadic Tuareg woman in front of her tent, with younger children sit inside. The mother’s tent is the heart of the family.
Before young Tuareg women marry, they are allowed to take as many different lovers as they want – as long as they abide by the strict rules of privacy which govern their society.
This means the man must only arrive at her tent after dark, and leave before sunrise. Pictured: A Tuareg woman’s decorated hands.
But there is one tradition which is certainly far more unusual: it is highly rude for a man to eat in front of a woman who he cannot have sexual relations with, or any of his elders.
In front of his mother-in-law it is especially shameful.
‘I didn’t realise this until the I was having dinner with a Tuareg woman, who had brought her son-in-law as her travelling companion,’ Butler recalled.
‘We were all sitting down to dinner, and the man has his back turned. She said the poor man was completely horrified because he has to eat with his mother-in-law.’
But it is unlikely he would have ever complained about it, or felt sorry from himself. The very idea is horrendous to the Tuareg.
‘You would shame yourself. The Tuareg will go to great lengths to maintain personal dignity. They will suffer,’ said Butler.
‘If they are not offered water, they won’t ask for it – even if they are thirsty.’
Perhaps for this reason, the Tuareg welcome is legendary. They never forget to offer water, and travelers who appear on the horizon will always be ‘treated like a king’.
Every night, the families come together at the tents. The men are traditionally part of the women’s group – not the other way round.
It means the mother’s tent is the heart of the community – although they do not eat together, and do much separately.
It is the men who cover up their faces, while the women are happy to show off their faces – although they often cover their hair
The camels are of vital importance in the Sahara, and are often the only thing a man is left with when he gets divorced
A Tuareg man in a traditional indigo veil, which is likely to leave his face with a blue mark across his skin
THE LEGENDARY QUEEN AT THE TOP OF THE TUAREG FAMILY TREE
The Tuareg’s many small groups are joined together by the same family tree – and at the top of that tree is the person who bought them all together.
And it should probably come as no surprise for a tribe which views women in such regard, that person was a queen.
Tin Hinan is said to have traveled south from modern day Morocco to what would one day become Algeria in the fourth century, where she became the first queen of the Tuaregs.It is from Tin Hinan – whose name translates as ‘she of the tents’ – that every noble family is said to descend.
Takamet, her handmaiden who traveled by her side, is believed to be the ancestor of the peasant caste. It is unlikely there will be any quibbling over who gets what. Pre-nuptial agreements are the norm. In practice, this often means a man is forced to return home to his mother, possibly with just his camel and nothing else.
Now the Tuareg living in south-western Libya face a new threat – that of ISIS – while those living in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria now have to contend with the rise of Boko Haram.
The Tuareg women, seen here arriving at the Tuareg Political Party speech in 2006, may not obviously be part of political life, but their opinion is highly valued by the men, who will likely discuss issues with their mother or wife.
NB Commentary: Let me preface my commentary with these words, yes, my commentary is biased, yes, it may have even been a little bit emotional, and yes, I may have been a little curt if not with a tinge of anger, but sometimes when someone gets on YouTube and provides “disinformation” as if they are an expert on a subject they are talking about… well it just rubs me. It is a particular rub for me in this case as this is a subject that I have explored, studied, understood it pros and cons across cultures, etc. So, jump into this opinion piece with that in mind. Nana is on a roll in this one.
To the narrator of this video, first of all, I do not know where you are getting your facts about the so-called down side of polygamy (polygyny = one man, many wives) and I feel that if you have statistics then you should present them.
Secondly, I am offended by your gross generalization of the so-called backwards African societies that practice polygamy. I am also offended that you think that women are so petty that they have no clue of what it means to build a nation, or that building a nation means having many children. These women are not that naive that they don’t realize that nation building will take a long time with just one wife. To these people polygamy is not a matter of how much sex a man can have but how many children a man can help to produce and quite frankly getting pregnant does not require a lot of sex. It is the Western world with its suppression of the naked body that brought down shame on the indigenous people who were quite comfortable with their style of dress. Sexual implications based on what someone had on was not as overt as it has become in western hypocritically puritanical cultures.
If you want to point out backwardness of polygamous societies, then what about Saudi Arabia, The United Arab republic, Qatar, Sudan, Iran, India and others. These are predominately Islamic societies where Polygamy is practiced and they have booming cultures, technology and educational systems. None of which are “backwards” as you would define it.
I find your statement about African societies where polygamy occurs, and defined by you as backwards, to be quite disingenuous and falling way short of any valid study, survey or actual living in these cultures that you call backwards. The fact that you omit the ancient history of African Cultures, the Songhai Empire, the Mali Empire, the Great Kings and Queens who came out of Africa during ancient times and from a culture where polygamy was the norm shows the limit of your knowledge on this topic.
You fail to mention the impact of the European hypocritical influence on indigenous African culture and the imposition of hypocritical Western ideologies upon the African experience. You even fail to mention the irony of these so called Christians whose early prophets were all polygamous.
Your protestations are ill-founded even to this day when you do not understand the mechanism of the customs and culture of the society where polygamy is intrinsic to it. The in-fighting that you speak of hardly had to do with who was married to whom, and particularly, since natural selection had more women than men being in the world, then it is most advantageous for the women to be absorbed into a household or family unit, rather than having them left out.
And what if the wife is barren through no fault of her own, should her husband go with out having a progeny because his only wife cannot bare him children?
In strong societies where polygamy is the norm, many customs support it and encourage the family unit to work as a whole. The women and children are seen as resources and they help to build the community, take care of the children, teach and pass on the customs. The women are as industrious as the men and have markets, stores, farms and trading that increases the wealth of the family unit and community.
When many of the wars and strife were started, believe me, it was not over woman and who had the best looking women or pick of the crop. It was over resources, land, politics and hegemony. It was the male desire to fight and conquer his competition which quite frankly, was not another woman but what her husband had. Wars are socio-economical-political ventures that take place between warring tribes all over the planet. And it is modern society with its monogamy that has had the absolute worse wars of aggression against each other while you, and many others, consider Western society civilized.
I find your entire video disingenuous, insulting, linear in its presentation, and absent of the true facts and/or understanding of indigenous cultures and the how and why they participate in polygamy.
If you believe it is not a viable option for Western men and women, I have to agree because the culture is not designed to support that type of marital relationship. Western cultures are selfish, self-centered, narcissistic and pathological. They have abandoned the extended family for the nuclear one and have isolated themselves through individualism and personal ownership, thus creating a cesspool of fear, insecurity, paranoia, co-dependency and toxic relationships which according to the latest statistics, leads to 50% of marriages end in divorce.
There are a vast array of issues, concepts, nuances of indigenous cultures that you have blatantly ignored, therefore your conclusions, based on YOUR FACTS, can only be skewed and distorted. Western cultures create laws and regulations to manage their societies thus forcing people into unnatural relationship roles that sour, end, and foster mental health issues for all involved.
You do have the right to your opinion, but I think that if you are going to take on a subject such as polygamy, you either need to do better research or refrain from stating that cultures who practice it are backwards because that is patently incorrect, Sir.
ADDENDUM: The most ironic thing of all is that those countries that prohibit multiple spouses will punish the participants with jail time, a fine or both. That is to say, that it is criminal to have more than one spouse in some countries. How is that even a criminal offense? Who are you hurting when all parties agree? Civilization at its finest.
In most of the following examples, polygamy only refers to polygyny. Except when polyandry is explicitly stated, either all kinds of polygamy are forbidden, or the only allowed form of polygamy is polygyny.
Mayotte: Considered to be de facto illegal since a referendum sponsored by France in March 2009, forcing the island to comply with the French laws.[19][20]However, pre-existing Muslim marriages are currently still valid.
Benin: Benin recognized polygamous marriages until 2004 when they were constitutionally outlawed. However, pre-existing marriages are currently still valid in Benin.[21]
Burkina Faso: Both Muslims and non-Muslims can join in polygamous unions under Burkina Faso law.
Côte d’Ivoire: Akin to the situation in Benin, polygamy and such marriages were outlawed, though previous marriages are still recognized.[22]
Gabon: Both men and women can join in polygamous unions with the other gender under Gabonese law, although in practice only men do.
Ghana: Illegal under civil law, but recognized under customary law and Sharia law.
Nigeria: Recognized in all northern sharia states, federal law recognizes polygamous unions under customary law.
First Amendment Lawsuit Against Retaliation For Fighting for Medical Treatment For Mumia Abu-Jamal and All Prisoners
URGENT UPDATE: PA JUDGE IMMEDIATELY DISMISSED MAJOR TILLERY’S LAWSUIT AS “FRIVOLOUS.” MAJOR TILLERY WILL FIGHT THIS IN FEDERAL COURT!
Major Tillery filed a civil rights lawsuit pro se against John Wetzel, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC), SCI Mahanoy Superintendent John Kerestes, SCI Frackville Superintendent Brenda Tritt and 17 other prison officials. The DOC punished and retaliated against Tillery for acts of solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal and other prisoners fighting for the fundamental human right of medical care.
The lawsuit was filed in the Schuylkill County Court of Common Please on January 5, 2015:
This is a civil rights action brought by Major George Tillery, a 65 year-old African-American man to stop and remedy retaliation against him for his exercise of his First Amendment Rights. Tillery was subjected to numerous retaliatory acts by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and its employees, including medical neglect and medical mistreatment, unjustified cell searches, transfer to another cell block, loss of his prison job and precipitous transfer from SCI Mahanoy to SCI Frackville and then being set-up with a false misconduct and given over four months in disciplinary custody (solitary confinement).
This retaliation was intended to punish and stop Tillery from filing grievances challenging medical neglect and mistreatment of him and other prisoners, including the well-known journalist and former death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. This retaliation was punishment for Tillery continuing to publicly advocate for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and to publicly expose the DOC’s neglect and mistreatment of prisoner’s medical problems as well as the DOC’s retaliation against Tillery; and continuing to file grievances objecting to these retaliatory actions by prison officials.
Throughout his over thirty years in prison serving a sentence of life without parole, Tillery has challenged his conviction and sentence, and unconstitutional restrictions on access to courts, prison conditions including security classification and placement procedures, medical treatment, and housing conditions on behalf of himself and other prisoners. He was held in solitary confinement in super-max institutions in the federal and Pennsylvania prison systems for over twenty of those years.
Tillery was the lead plaintiff in Tillery v. Owens, a class action lawsuit filed July 23, 1987, challenging the constitutionality of the conditions of confinement at the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh (“SCIP”) located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It started as a pro se legal action by Tillery. It resulted in an historic legal order requiring remediation of unconstitutional prison conditions including deficient security, fire protection, access to the courts, over-crowded housing, medical care, mental health care and dental services. The DOC was required to make prison renovations costing more than a million dollars. See Tillery v. Owens,719 F.Supp. 1256 (W.D.Pa.1989).
Major Tillery demands that the DOC stop its retaliation, remove the false misconduct from his record, provide medical treatment and transfer him out of SCI Frackville to a different prison in eastern Pennsylvania so he remains near his family.
This lawsuit is just part of Major Tillery’s fight for medical care and to protect himself and other prisoners who are standing up for justice. He has liver disease and chronic Hepatitis C that the DOC has known about for over a decade. Tillery is filing grievances against the prison and its medical staff to get the new antiviral medicine. This is part of the larger struggle to obtain Hep C treatment for the 10,000 prisoners in Pennsylvania and the estimated 700,000 prisoners nationally who have Hepatitis-C and could be cured.
Major Tillery, his daughter, Kamillah and his two granddaughters.
Major Tillery’s daughter, Kamilah Iddeen appeals for our support:
It is so important that my Dad filed this lawsuit– it shows what really goes on inside the prison. Prison officials act as if my father is their property, that his family doesn’t exist, that he isn’t a man with people who love him. They lied to us every time we called and said he needed treatment. They lied and said he hadn’t told them, that he hadn’t filed grievances. The DOC plays mind games and punishes prisoners who stand up for themselves and for others. But my Dad won’t be broken.
The DOC needs to learn they can’t do this to a prisoner and his family. Justice has to be done. Justice has to be served. Please help.
Call prison officials and demand:
Demand decent medical care for Major Tillery!
Stop the Retaliation Against Major Tillery. He should be exonerated for the false charges of drug possession and this misconduct removed from his record.
Transfer Major Tillery from SCI Frackville back to SCI Mahanoy or to another facility in eastern Pennsylvania to remain near his family.
“Should I Stay In An Abusive Marriage With My Children’s Mother”
NB Commentary: Great video and great advice. Kudos to Lenon Honor and his wife, Aida. I can confer as a Mental Health Professional for many years and also from my own experience. One thing that is missing in this presentation is the focus on the female in this relationship. Why is she so angry? Of course he obviously does not know or cannot see what it is that has made her so angry, but it could be a number of things. She may have come from a very angry household and he may have come from an abusive household which we all know, one sickness feeds the other.
But even on a deeper level, how many people take the time to notice what childbirth does to the female, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically? It seems from what has been mentioned here that she has had a succession of childbirths, one after the other. Why? Religion? Family pressures? Economics? What and why did she have 4 children in such a short time span? Could she possibly be overwhelmed with the amount of work that it took and continues to take to care for the everyday needs of her children? How much help does he offer to make this a lighter burden? Are they able to get assistance from family/friends or maybe a nanny from time to time? What I am pointing to is all too often people jump into marriages and have children when they were not prepared for marriage what it means to be a marriage partner and much less prepared for the day to day routine of childrearing and I mean healthy creative childrearing where two partners, family and even friends agree. How often do we find ourselves isolated due to the questions around how we are rearing our children? How often do family, friends, co-workers, and even associates question and judge the way we rear our children? What if there is a chasm in the way these two individuals parent within the household. Women need to take more control over their lives and their bodies. Being a baby machine does not offer the comfort, security, peace and support that is portrayed by the high rollers and celebrities. Without support from a caring and nurturing family, friends etc. a woman can feel so isolated and alone. She may even be angry with and at her situation that she has all these children and little support. Women need to take time to get to know what their strengths and weaknesses are before they even get married, as well as know what a healthy relationship looks like and what healthy creative parenting looks like. There are so many nuances to this story and the man who wrote this letter to you sounds like a classic victim. But victims are often passive aggressive and that is how they fight back when they are feeling victimized and/or dominated by the other person in the relationship. Again, I have to go back to how pregnancy changes a woman in every way, and each pregnancy brings new and sometimes strange changes. She never goes back to being her old self, or the self she knew before she had the children. She may lose weight or even fit back into her clothing, but really and truly, she changes. So the question of “what changed” may be that “she changed” and that she changed more and more after each pregnancy. If she did not have the mental, spiritual, emotional and physical support to help her understand her changes then it is most probably that she wrap that “neglect” into anger and began to do what she knew how and that was lash out. She sounds like she is very, very angry. She is angry with her own life. She may have been living a lie for far too long. She wants out but then what? What man is going to marry her with 4 children? She may feel so lost, isolated, devastated, out of control, out of touch with her reality, deeply saddened and hurt that she is in her predicament, that all she can do is lash out to gain some control over her situation. This sounds like a very convoluted situation with more nuances than I am sure, this young man can address or even fathom. It is a long unaddressed situation that has spiraled to the point where no one is hearing anyone, everyone is desperate, needy, hurt, overwhelmed and out of alignment on so many levels. With that being said, saving the marriage may be the least of their worries, saving their individual beigness may be an even bigger challenge, but one that needs to be addressed so that they can move forward as healthy human beings. Because like second hand smoke can be just as deadly, so can second hand toxicity stemming from past unresolved relationships can lead to a string of hurtful, unhealthy relationships for both in the future. My suggestions…….
WTF? White Man Gets Off Easy After Admitting To Choking His Black Wife To Death
NB Commentary: Hmm, he got 31 years… I guess you could call that easy if you ain’t going to jail. And you definitely don’t know about jail house justice when it comes to killing women, rapists and pedophiles.
He probably plea bargained so he wouldn’t get life, but 31 years may as well be life. It could very well be about race, but for some reason, I don’t get the sense it is. And at risk of sounding like an apologist, some stuff is just what it is. He plea bargained, he got his mom off end of story. Shit happens. I often wonder why folks want to have someone killed because they killed someone, it never made any sense to me, neither does the death penalty. As for Erica’s family, how is killing this dude gonna bring their daughter back? She may have really loved him. Do you think she would want her family to have him killed? He was obviously a drug addict and she was obviously co-dependent. Would it help her spirit to rest if they killed him? To me capital punishment is barbaric. Whatever happened to rehabilitation? So now, the prison industrial complex has another slave laborer. Who really wins in this scenario??
Is It Because He Is White? White Man Gets Off Easy
After Admitting To Choking His Black Wife To Death
A New Jersey man is getting off light after he admitted to prosecutors that he murdered his wife and then tried to dispose her body in the next state over. While everyone was grieving beside Kyle Crosby, he knew that he has chocked her to death during a domestic dispute and then employed his mother to help him dispose of the body. Kyle Crosby recently plead guilty to aggravated manslaughter for the 2014 death of his wife Erica Crippen.
Crosby sold his deceased wife’s clothes for drug money and his mother was involved in covering up the crime after the couple had a simple argument that turned deadly.
Crosby, of Mount Laurel, N.J., man has pleaded guilty to killing his wife last year on New Year’s Eve and later disposing of her body in a rural area in Maryland, the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office announced Tuesday.
Kyle Crosby, 29, entered a guilty plea to aggravated manslaughter and Hindering Apprehension, ABC7 reported.
Crosby will serve a 31-year sentence in state prison.
According officials, Crosby admitted in court that on December 31, 2014, he fatally choked his wife, Erica Crippen, 26, inside their Mount Laurel home and later transported her body to Maryland.
Investigators found Crippen’s body March 17 along a rural road in Sykesville, Maryland. She had been missing since New Year’s Eve, and her body was discovered under some branches and brush. Prosecutors have said the body was wrapped in a blanket; her arms, legs and neck were bound with an electrical cord and duct tape was on her face and nose.
Crosby’s mother, Jo Crosby, 68, of Sicklerville, N.J., was indicted in April on one count of Hindering Apprehension and one count of Tampering With or Fabricating Physical Evidence. But she is getting off clean.
After posting $12,500 bail and as part of the the plea agreement with Kyle Crosby, the charges against his mother will be dismissed at sentencing.
The question remains is: how does the murderous husband get off with manslaughter convictions and his mother, who was a felony accomplice after the fact, get off unscathed?
The Laughable Idea that Cosby would Change the Stereotypes of Blacks if He Had a Network!
by Nana Baakan Jan. 14, 2016
Why do people think that if Bill Cosby had NBC that would make him more powerful. Come on Folks!! NBC????
Irritated Genie on Bill Cosby & NBC
What makes folks think that that is power? And what makes people think that if he got it and did all that stuff that folks think the Powers that Be don’t want him to do, that he would be successful? A take down is a take down and they don’t care what kind of Psuedo power you have. Besides, it’s commerce… people really don’t have a clue how this shithole works when it comes to fame, money, fame, money, politics, fame, money and corruption…
Even Ruppert Murdock has some running competition and he owns a bunch of media. Don’t get it twisted folks. Cosby would have to be in a whole other league to be untouchable. Perhaps create his own TV Network? Perhaps, but buying NBC is so laughable and people keep saying this over and over.
His power days have long since been gone. And when he had it, that was the time to really do something for the Black Community.
If they really wanted to shake him down, they would have “allowed” the buy out and then expose him to the world, what better way to pull the rug out from under him.
Cosby said “No” to somebody, and that did not go over well. So they launched a well hidden campaign to defame him in the eyes of the masses. This campaign has been hidden for some time, and held on to, for just the right moment and then, boom to the moon!
Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say that the conjecture that Cosby was gonna change the stereotypes of blacks in the media and that it was gonna make a big difference int he black community and that this difference was gonna scare white folks so much so they had to take Cosby down. Let’s just say you might have a point.
Now.
Let’s take a look at reality. If all it took was righteous examples of Black Folks in the media to change things around, how come there are hardly any, no where? Is everyone who comes up with the idea being threatened with a take down?
No, in fact Spike Lee did his fair share of changing that image and you see what happened to him right? I ain’t just talking about what the elite did to him. I am talking about what Black Folks did to him.
Black folks support shows that are very stereotypical. They support the rap artists
that talk about bitches and hoes and gangsters and drugs. They watch BET and the TV shows. And the MEDIA knows that!! Black folks participate quite handsomely in their own demise.
Look at the food we eat, the music we listen to, the TV shows we watch. If there was no market for it, then it would not sell and they would have stopped portraying Black folks like that a long time ago.
So the idea that Cosby was gonna do ANYTHING is laughable, because Black folks would soon tire of a zillion Cosby Shows and Fat Alberts. And we have to face that fact. If it were not for Blacks spending their money on the things that destroy them, there would be no market for the stereotypes. Cosby would soon have to fold because nobody would be watching his boring, tired, unexciting network full of do-gooder black folks, going to college and having their own businesses, being respectful to each other and helping the homeless. GIVE ME A BREAK! That network would fold in 6 months for lack of advertisement sales and viewers. Let’s be serious.
People wanna see muck, mire, debauchery, crime, punishment, illicit sex, scandal, corruption, etc. That is why it sells. Do you think Oprah is living high off the hog with her whining and crying Network?? Heck no, she don’t care now cause she don’t need the money!! LOL
Black folks need to stop being apologists for Cosby and open their eyes. It’s a rabbit hole and it’s way deeper than you think.
As far as the Media is concerned, Blacks have got to stop blaming the white man for their depictions of stereotypes! If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, don’t buy their music, don’t buy their fashion and cosmetic lines, don’t support any artists who are not uplifting and liberating the Black community. Don’t support businesses that do not support the Black community. Don’t go to their institutions of learning and stay the hell out of their jails.
Blacks complain and complain about White Supremacy in one breath and support the Machine in the next. That is why the idea is laughable because the Machine knows that the majority of Black folks would not support a Network that wasn’t catering to the lowest most defiled images of Black Folks, they know that and that is why they are rich because of it.
We really gotta wake up to what is happening and take responsibility for our actions and stop blaming the white man!
The Media gave us Bill Cosby, a relatively unknown comedian who reached meteoric stardom. They made Bill Cosby and gave him certain privileges that they would not give to any other Black man during the 60’s & 70’s and like Fred Sanford would tell us, if the white man is doing it than it must be right. Remember how he wouldn’t go to a black dentist? Well, during that time we too were struggling if we could trust a Black professional “anything” over a white one. Once Cosby was sanctioned by “white America” then Black America felt it was safe to throw their support behind him.
What we miss out on is that it is a selection process. They chose Bill Cosby and the Media took it from there. He was allowed to do what no other Black Man in those times and even these to do. They gave him position and status in their circles, rubbing elbows (and whatever else) with “their women” and basically making him part of the in crowd. Couple that with the fact that he was a “clean comic” on stage, which was another part of the selection deal. He was a favorite of not only blacks but he WAS ACCEPTED BY WHITES! So, we cannot compare him to any other Black Man by saying, because he was Black they would not have allowed him to do any of what he is accused of by white women. This little caveat is missed in the debate. It has a lot to do with we as a people and how we, especially during those times, aligned ourselves with those “Black Folks” that white folks approved of.
Now as before, there is a different atmosphere around our feelings about successful Black Folks, we don’t need the sanction of the “White Man” as much as we did in the past, but how trusting are we of a successful Black professional, unless the White man sanctions them? This is just another nuance of this whole situation and its impact on the Black community. When we go to the root, the actual history of this man and how he became a superstar, we can clearly see that it was part of an agenda. Was it a divide and conquer strategy, as we know there were other comedians, more like Black Market comedians who were NOT embraced by white audiences.
The question remains, what price did he have to pay to be
Hollyweird’s Manchurian Candidate?
Cosby took the bait, he agreed and that meant he had to do whatever they said. I am almost certain he was guaranteed millions and a pristine image in the public eye. News outlets and tabloids would not be allowed to defame him in anyway or suffer the consequences. They protected him from the peering eyes of the public and maintained, sustained and protected the illusion they created call Bill Cosby, the clean comic, who appeals to all audiences world wide.
His attempts to cover his tracks through philanthropic donations and support to the Black Colleges etc., was most definitely done by his wife, Camille, his business manager. She was behind every single act of charity. Was that her effort to conceal his back-door deals and prop up his reputation keeping him squeaky clean in the eyes of the masses, but behind closed doors, anyone who knew him personally knew a very different guy? This is true.
Cosby’s head is on the chopping block. He is no longer needed. His chip of protection has been removed. The White Establishment that propped him up have all pulled out their support and turned their backs on him abandoning any and all promises of protection. He has been thrown back into the pool of Black American opinion, that is, much to his dismay, an opinion that is shaped and manipulated by the powers that be. Cosby became a house nigger, to coin a phrase. He was allowed to be the Misses Playmate. But once he completed his chores he was thrown back into the field with the rest of us along with all the shuckin’ and jivin’ he did to keep his house nigger status.
A person who does not learn the lesson from his past history is bound to repeat the mistakes in his future. We must become more discerning as a people. We must support our own whether or not they get the stamp of approval from the “Wizard of OZ”. We must prop up those genuine folks who are in all sincerity attempting to improve our station in life on this planet. We must rally around the sincere folks who are making changes that will benefit our youth and generations to come. We must stop looking at our people through the Willie Lynch lens and work with those who have shown their honest nature and work. We have so many others scientist, inventors, statesmen, philosophers, educators and performing artists who are deeply dedicated to the emancipation of our people and are not simply perpetrating a fraud hand crafted by the Elite Media Moguls.
Once we get there it will be very difficult for anyone to sully the image of these dedicated men and women.
Again, I say, the Media gave us “Cosby” and the “Media” has taken him away. We need to think about how duped we have been and continue to be by Mass Media and develop discernment, particularly when it appears that a White Supremacist culture has seemingly stepped beyond their racist inclinations in support of a person of color. In the final analysis, if we can identify this issue as racially motivated, we cannot in all honesty, see any of his meteoric success that has proceeded this current attack on Bill Cosby as any more than a part of a racially motivated agenda of power and control.
77% of Two-Year-Olds Now Use Mobile Devices on a Daily Basis
NB Commentary: When raising my own family, I realized the danger of television, especially unsupervised. My children were only allowed to watch Channel 12 and during that time, most of the programming was educational. That was over 40 years ago. They grew up wanting to be like other children and have free access to Television. After a while, the battle that ensued required, I completely eliminate the TV from my home. To this day, I do not own one. However, if you were to enter the homes of any of my offspring, you will find their homes filled with televisions, some of them so large, you would think it was a movie screen. And they have more than one! Those who have children not only allow them to watch TV but they all have media devices.
Today, these children not only have TV, media devices, cell phones, Xboxes, WII, they have facebook pages, instagram, twitter and YouTube channels. How do you monitor all these contraptions taking up the attention of our youth? How do you do it when you too are glued to one or all of them?
I don’t have a television, but the amount of time I spend on my computer, internet, YouTube, social media surely does say a little bit about my transfer from TV to Internet where I can watch movies, documentaries, TV shows, etc along with my daily dose of news drama local and from around the world.
Being an independent entrepreneur I use my internet access and social media to promote my business but to be honest, I also spend a bit of time on the social media roller coaster ride.
What I do with my grands is use the internet for research, learning and expanding awareness. I guess we have to use the same tactic of making what appears to be disruptive, destructive and dumbing down to awaken our youth. We must monitor what they connect to while using these devices. We have the option of “child proofing” the devices so that they can only access “kid friendly” stuff. But these young people are so savvy with these gadgets that they can work around it.
All too often I have found my 4 year old granddaughter hiding in a corner and looking at YouTube videos that are not the best thing for her to be watching. She’s had her gadgets since she was under 2years of age and has become quite proficient in using them. She manages to get to sites and games that I have no idea how she did that and so quickly. Her older brother spent hours on Nick Jr. when he was 2 and 3 years old and that was 7 years ago. Technology has leaped so far ahead that now Nick Jr. is on the cell phone!
We are certainly moving like gangbusters into the age of the gadget, and our children are riding side saddle right with us. So many things that were used to educate our youth 30, 40 years ago have become obsolete, and they can even use the Internet to get their homeschool education! Imagine that! It went from being illegal to homeschool to now having cyber charter schools.
I watched my neighbors child from infancy to now about 2.5 years old and sure enough as she was climbing up the stairs to enter her home, she had one hand on the banister and the other was holding a cell phone. I shook my head and said to myself, with a houseful of older siblings it was just a matter of time before she would catch the bug!
I am not too sure if we are creating people who don’t know how to interact in a social medium with physical contact as folks are playing video games, emailing, chatting and text messaging one another all day every day. But I do know there are some wolves out there who are willing and able to use the media to distort, corrupt, and damage innocent minds. And in that vain, we as parents must monitor their use of these gadgets and maybe force them to play outside.
I use the gadget for leverage when my grands are with me. Let’s finish our homework, read, do some research, eat our vegetables, bake cookies, make dinner and then… we can get with the gadget. They balk and squawk and complain but at least they get to do something other than stare into those interactive flashing lights and moving objects that are mesmerizing, hypnotic and addictive.
There is no doubt that the pace of technological development we’ve seen in recent years has been both amazing, and frightening. It’s certainly made our lives easier, but no one can ignore the fact that these developments are happening faster than the human race can adapt to them. Predictably, this has spawned a widespread fear of technology in our culture.
These fears must be prolific. If they weren’t, then Hollywood would have never made a fortune on movie franchises like The Terminator and The Matrix, and TV shows like Battlestar Galactica. Clearly, there are plenty of people in our society who are deeply afraid of the direction that modern technology is lurching towards.
However, for all their bluster about robots and AI taking over the human race, I don’t think these people are seriously prepared to do anything about it. They may say that they’ll never submit to the comfort and convenience of technologies that dehumanize them, but to be perfectly honest, I think that many of them have already acquiesced.
In fact, when it comes to taking care of our children, the majority of the population is already outsourcing their child rearing responsibilities to the machines. We didn’t notice this development, because it didn’t arrive in the way that pop culture prepared us for. Rather than being brutally subjugated by robot overlords, we’ve been conquered by consumer electronics.
Recently, a study was conducted on over 300 kids between the age of 6 months and 4 years, living in a low-income neighborhood in Philadelphia. The study found that most parents now let their kids use mobile devices; often with the intent of keeping them preoccupied. With numbers like these, I’m sure that plenty of the technophobes in our midst are among them.
Overall, 97 per cent of the children, or 338 kids, had used a mobile device. The researchers gave falling costs, marketing strategies and subsidies by cellular service providers as possible contributing factors.
Other findings from the survey included:
About 44 per cent of children under age one used a mobile device on a daily basis to play games, watch videos or use apps. The percentage increased to 77 per cent in two-year-olds and plateaued after that.
One-quarter (28 per cent) of two-year-olds did not need any help navigating a mobile media device, and 61 per cent needed help sometimes.
Of parents surveyed who allowed their child to use a mobile device, 70 percent reported letting their children play with mobile devices to do chores, to keep the child calm in public places (65 per cent) or run errands (58 percent), and 28 per cent used a mobile device to put their children to sleep.
They also found that half of the children in the study had their own TVs, and three-quarters of them had their own personal mobile device. A third of the kids were found to be using more than one media device at the same time. So much for playing outside I guess.
We have to ask ourselves, is this really what we want? Do we want to foster an entire generation of kids who, rather than simply learning how to use technology, are literally raised by it? We all know by now that these devices aren’t very good for our well-being, just as we’ve known for decades that watching TV all day is bad for us. We know these devices are addictive, and we know that they can stunt the emotional and social development of children.
We’ve all seen the smartphone zombies walking around us with their faces buried in their gadgets, oblivious to the world around them. Do we really want to raise our progeny to be like that? Are we really going to plug them into technology before they’re ever aware of the consequences? (There’s a reason why Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids use the devices he pioneered.)
Yes, we are going to do just that, because our society’s obsession with convenience now trumps our fear of technology. We talk a big game, but at the end of the day most of us give up on fighting what we perceive to be inevitable. Most of us are going to let these devices take over our lives, and the lives of our children, because it’s so much easier than giving a damn. Until we see this generation grow up to be devoid of creativity, imagination, social skills, and emotional intelligence, we aren’t going to change our ways.
Joshua Krause is a reporter, writer and researcher at The Daily Sheeple. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personal Twitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger.
NB Commentary: Let’s Talk About the Difference Between Who is Considered a Patriot and Who is Considered a Terrorist.
While the MOVE Organization was not officially declared a Terrorist Organization they were indeed treated like they were Enemies of the State. I am from the area and was there when it happened.
The group was/is called MOVE. they were/are a back to nature group of Africans who leader’s name was John Africa. They felt that the government was vile and used vile language to express their contempt for it.
On the other hand, they were mostly self sufficient, planted their own food and were vegetarians and wore dread locks.
A group of them moved onto Osage Ave., in West Philadelphia and built a fortress within the house because they had been threatened jailed and tortured by the police for their way of life. They claimed freedom of speech and continued to express their discontent with the government, local, national and global.
In 1978 they previously lived in an area of West Philly called Powelton Village
where a blockade was place upon them, no food or water was allowed to get to them and no one could interact with them or be arrested. This stand off ended with them firehousing the house till its collapse and the members were forced to leave. Delbert Africa was brutally beaten.
In 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on the house located on a city block of Osage Ave. There was a bunker on top of the house and the fortress was so well constructed that the police after firing multiple rounds could not penetrate the walls of their home. The next option was to drop a bomb, this bomb ignited a fire that cause the MOVE members to escape while others, women and children, died in the blaze. Because it was allowed to burn, the entire block succumbed to the fire and was destroyed, and the mostly homeowners, displaced and/or homeless.
The city did a make-shift job rebuilding their homes but never could they return to those people the valuables and memories and momentums. Some of these people had lived on this block their whole lives and had grand children who visited them there. It was devastating to the neighborhood, who simply believed that by asking the city government to intervene that they would simply remove the occupants of the MOVE home and all would go back to normal. This blazing inferno could be seen for at least a mile radius. It turn a beautifully sculptured community neighborhood into a war zone.
The war against civilians is not a recent occurrence. However, it is demonstrated in a certain and accurate strategy of terror, control and manipulation and in many cases is racist at best and xenophobic at worse.
One thing that is certain, if they can drop a bomb on a residential area in the middle of a large city, no place is safe from the aggression of the militarized police.
“I took a cab to the 6200 block of Osage Avenue this week, to the block where
the City of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on a rowhouse in 1985. I had been at work that day, in my office which is also in West Philadelphia and I wanted to see for myself what the location looks like now. While the driver waited, I walked up and down the sidewalks with my cellphone camera and my small Cannon PowerShoot A2500. The street was narrower than I had imagined. I was shocked by the townhouses that had been built to replace the homes destroyed in the bombing and fire. At most they were a step off the ground. No stairs to sit on, no porches. Small areas for a chair or two are enclosed with black wrought iron fencing. Many houses are boarded up. Others appear occupied but look unfinished. There are flowers and other signs of life where people are living. I tried to be discrete as I took snapshots. I failed. A man came up from the western end of the block … grumbling. He pointed out 6221, the location of the MOVE house; maybe he assumed that was what I was looking for. I introduced myself to a woman sitting in front of her property. She expressed mild dissatisfaction with visitors/voyeurs like me. She said that all she wants is for the city to fix up the vacant properties and allow the neighbors to live in peace. Thirty years and the MOVE fiasco is not over yet for either of us.” Source: https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/5657-collective-trauma-transitional-justice-and-two
Check out this information: 25 Years Ago: Philadelphia Police Bombs MOVE Headquarters Killing 11, Destroying 65 Homes
In this May 1985 photo, scores of row houses burn in a fire in the west Philadelphia neighborhood. Police dropped a bomb on the militant group MOVE’s home on May 13, 1985 in an attempt to arrest members, leading to the burning of scores of homes in the neighborhood.
On May 13, 1985 at 5:20 p.m., a blue and white Pennsylvania State Police helicopter took off from the command post’s flight pad at 63rd and Walnut, flew a few times over 6221 Osage Avenue, and then hovered 60 feet above the two-story house in the black, middle-class West Philadelphia neighborhood. Lt. Frank Powell, chief of Philadelphia’s bomb disposal unit, was holding a canvas bag containing a bomb consisting of two sticks of Tovex TR2 with C-4. After radioing firefighters on the ground and lighting the bomb’s 45-second fuse — and with the official approval of Mayor W. Wilson Goode and at the insistence of Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor — Powell tossed the bomb, at precisely 5:28 p.m., onto a bunker on the roof.
This was followed shortly thereafter by a loud explosion and then a large, bright orange ball of fire that reached 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit. That day, Powell, the mayor, the police commissioner, Fire Commissioner William Richmond, city Managing Director Leo Brooks, and numerous police officers committed, in the words of Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission (better known as the MOVE Commission) member Charles Bowser, a “criminally evil” act that led to the death of 11 human beings, including five completely innocent and defenseless children, the destruction of 61 homes, and the incineration of thousands of family photos, high school and college sweetheart love letters, heirloom jewelry, inscribed Bibles and Korans, and many other totally irreplaceable mementos.
Mr. Bowser, my mentor and the author of the powerful tell-all expose entitled Let the Bunker Burn, told me that five of the city’s most influential black political leaders met at the mayor’s home before dawn on May 13, 1985, in response to the mayor’s invitation and warning that “I’m going to make a move on the MOVE house … (this) morning.” This was in connection to what Goode described as complaints by Osage Avenue neighbors and outstanding arrest warrants. By the way, it should be noted that those same neighbors attempted to stop the police department’s siege of their community as soon as they realized what was developing. In fact, as the five influential black leaders watched the television broadcast of the military-like assault unfolding with shots and tear gas, two of them repeatedly urged the Mayor to call it off. In particular, City Council President Joseph Coleman, sitting at the Mayor’s kitchen table, told him the 500-strong police action was “excessive” and State Senator Hardy Williams, standing near the kitchen entrance, said “Why don’t they just back up and relax? Nobody’s going anywhere.”
MOVE: An Assault That Never Would Have Happened in the Northeast
More than 500 cops fired more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition in less than 90 minutes — in a middle-class, black neighborhood. WTF? No, let me say it: What the Fuck?! This was blatantly outrageous brutal racism. It never would have happened in the Northeast or in South Philly, even if the Hell’s Angels had kidnapped then-President Ronald Reagan. And everybody knows it.
The cops would have simply sent in a hostage negotiator. And if that didn’t work, they would have cut off access to electricity, water and food, and then waited the criminals out. And if that didn’t work, they would have sent in a professionally trained SWAT unit to storm that specific house with surgical precision. Goddamnit, even Osama’s house and neighborhood in Abbottabad weren’t firebombed. The mayor, police commissioner, fire commissioner, managing Director, and the cops — and especially the public — would not have approved, allowed or tolerated the burning down of a white neighborhood and the destruction of 61 white homes.
And don’t tell me some shit about the incineration of Osage not being racist simply because the mayor and the managing director were black. It’s the victims that make it racist! They were black. And they lived in a black neighborhood. Furthermore, Powell, the bomb-dropping cop, was white. Moreover, William Klein, the cop who made the bomb, was also white. As eloquently stated by Bowser, “Goode and Brooks did not shoot 10,000 bullets into that house. They did not put military explosives into the bomb. They did not decide to let the bunker burn. And they did not shoot at children trying to escape the fire. I know none of that would have happened in a white neighborhood and so do you.” That’s exactly why the MOVE Commission pointed out, in one of its final official comments, that none of this would have ever happened “had the MOVE house and its occupants been situated in a comparable white neighborhood.”
MOVE: The Making of the Bomb
Tovex TR2 was a commercial explosive invented in the 1960s as an option to dynamite, and its purpose was to dig trenches through rock in order to lay pipes. The “TR” is the abbreviation for trench, and the “2” refers to the second DuPont Company item in its trenching products. The company’s explosive products division was located a little more than a half hour from Philadelphia in Delaware. But not one fire or police department official ever cared enough to contact DuPont and ask what could happen if TR2 were used in a residential neighborhood. And that’s because they didn’t give a shit about black people. If they had asked, DuPont would have told them that it had been designed exclusively for, and had been used exclusively for, underground purposes. And the last time I checked, every black man, woman and child in the Osage community lived above-ground.
It gets worse. As horrifically explosive as TR2 was, Klein fired things up even more. Exercising his independent judgment, he decided that TR2 wouldn’t be strong enough to breach the bunker. So what did he do? He unilaterally placed a one-and-one-quarter-pound block of C-4 on top of the two sticks of Tovex — despite the fact that the U.S. Army in 1979 had ended distribution of C-4 to all local police departments throughout the country. But, as documented in an October 22, 1985, letter from a special agent who headed the FBI’s Philadelphia office, approximately 30 blocks of C-4 had been delivered to the city by an FBI agent without the city requesting it and as a proposed solution during discussions regarding an anticipated confrontation with MOVE. Wow! And the rest, as they say, is history — or better said, it’s Philly’s 9/11, but as our own city, state and federal governments’ inside job.
MOVE: The Scene of the Crime
If that’s worse, and it certainly is, here’s worst: The children, and some of the adults, were shot at or shot and killed by police as they were fleeing the flames and surrendering. Wow, again! The police covering the alley leading from the rear of the MOVE house had automatic weapons and shotguns. No one ever claimed that MOVE had automatic weapons or shotguns at the scene, and no automatic weapons or shotguns were found among the ashes. Police officer William Stewart, a 28-year veteran of the department and a firearms instructor at the academy, was asked by investigators, “Did you hear gunfire at this time,” meaning when people were fleeing the MOVE house from the alley in the rear. With his lawyer present, he responded “Oh yes, automatic fire.” And when asked about who was firing the weapons, he replied, “Police officers. All the stakeout officers were running into the alley. They all had Uzi machine guns.” Strangely, though, 16 days later, he told the MOVE Commission that he never heard any police gunfire in the alley.
Fire Department Lt. John Vaccarelli and fireman Joseph Murray, who were veterans of the Vietnam War and who were in the vicinity of that very same alley, said they did, in fact, hear automatic fire when the MOVE members were running away from the flames. In fact, Vaccarelli pointed out that he saw at least three MOVE members in the yard next to the alley. This was corroborated by police officer James D’Ulisse. So since these people were outside the property lines of the interior of the house itself, how is it that their bodies were later found inside those property lines among the charred rubble? Only the police (and no reporters or other civilians) had access to the sealed-off crime scene during and after the inferno. Hmmm …
And why does the official report of the city’s own medical examiner provide proof from the autopsies of six of the 11 dead — namely, 7-year-old Tomasa, 9-year-old Delicia, 10-year-old Phil, 11-year-old Netta, 13-year-old Tree, and 25-year-old Rhonda — that they did not die inside from flame-fire but died outside from gun-fire? If, as the police later testified under oath, these victims died from the flames that exceeded 2,000 hellish degrees inside the house, why were Tomasa’s long locks still long? Why was Phil’s body not burned? Why was Netta still wearing her white blouse with red trim? Why were Tree’s pubic hair and blue jeans still intact? And why did Delicia’s body and Rhonda’s body have in them metal fragments consistent with shotgun pellets as noted by an FBI ballistician? You think maybe they were fatally hit when they all were being shot at while trying to run from the flames and surrender?
Even MOVE Commission Chairman William Brown, stated, “I firmly believe that more people got out than Birdie and Ramona and that’s something that still nags at me. I believe that someone, someday will deliver a deathbed confession …” And the Commission itself noted in Finding Number 28 of its official report that “police gunfire in the rear alley prevented the escape from the fire of some occupants of the MOVE house.”
Also, consider this: Detective William Stevenson, who was assigned to take contemporaneous notes during the entire confrontation, wrote that Sgt. Donald Griffiths, a commander on the scene, “from stake-out is in the rear of Osage Avenue, 6221, and is pointing to an area that he states, ‘I dropped an adult male from the MOVE property who fired at me when the female and child escaped.’” And Battalion Chief John Skarbeck said he had overheard a police sergeant say, “something to the effect that ‘I got one back there’ or ‘I shot one back there.’” But Sgt. Griffiths testified that he had been misquoted, that what he really had said was people had “dropped out of sight” at that particular time and place. Yeah. He actually said that. With a straight face, too.
The overkill police presence, the military-style assault, the malicious bombing, the callous burning, and the evil shooting at fleeing victims were not just “grossly negligent” and “unconscionable” as the MOVE Commission properly and officially noted in Findings Number 15 and 18. They were also murderous. And justice demands the prosecution of each perpetrator because there’s no statute of limitations for murder. If it were your family, your neighborhood, your home, your property, and your memories — even if it weren’t — wouldn’t you agree?
If you do agree, join Dr. Cornel West, Angela Davis, Chuck D of Public Enemy, Fred Hampton Jr., me, and hundreds of others by attending the daylong “Memorial and Empowerment” event beginning at 11 a.m. on May 13th at 62d and Osage — 30 years to the day after the bombing. For more info, call 215-307-3960.
Michael Coard’s radio show, “The Radio Courtroom,” airs at noon on Sundays and Wednesdays. It can be heard locally on WURD 900 AM and on the Internet at 900amwurd.com. Follow @MichaelCoard on Twitter.
“It’s the week of the 29th anniversary of the MOVE bombings, and for those who were in the middle of it and are still with us, the memories of those tragic events still linger all these years later. As the haunting story unfolds in Jason Osder‘s Let the Fire Burn, which premieres tonight on Independent Lens on PBS (check local listings), you may be curious as to what became of some of the people involved.”
Imagine If Armed Black Lives Matter Protesters Occupied a Federal Building
NB Commentary: Yeah, tell me about it. by David A. Love | January 4, 2016 at 7:47 AMHere’s a question worth asking right now: What would happen if 150 armed Black Lives Matter protesters occupied a federal building?This is exactly what an armed white militia did when they took over the headquarters at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Burns, Oregon. Known in some circles as #YallQaeda, who are waging #YeHawd, they reportedly took the action to protest the government control of land in the West, and punishment of two local ranchers who refused to sell their land. Specifically, Dwight and Steven Hammond, father and son, were convicted of arson on federal land. A member of the group, Ammon Bundy, son of Nevada anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy, said the group is “planning on staying here for years” and told the Oregonian they are “willing to kill and be killed if necessary.” Another militia member said, “I didn’t come here to shoot, I came here to die.”Meanwhile, also joining Bundy is Ryan Payne, an Army vet who claimed he organized militia snipers to target federal agents during the Bundy standoff in Nevada last year.Political protest, which is free speech, is one thing, as was the original protest throughout Burns. But when you and your boys get your guns, form a splinter group and take over a federal building, that is terrorism. And yet, law enforcement is taking a low-key approach to the whole thing. No national guard has been called in. Nothing to see here. Is this not the country that seeks to end terrorism?And while the media are all too eager to cover a terrorism story, in this case, not so much. Some media outlets painted the ongoing armed standoff as an innocuous event, more like a campfire gathering of guys roasting marshmallows in the woods: When the Black Panthers walked into a government building armed, the state of California changed the gun laws OVERNIGHT #OregonUnderAttack//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js What is terrorism? The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” J. Edgar Hoover terrorized the black community for years, so the FBI should be a dependable source. And yet, the working definition of terrorism does not apply in actual practice. Remember, in the U.S., whether it actually counts as terrorism depends on the skin tone and religion of those doing the terrorizing. So, black and brown people are painted as thugs, gangbangers and terrorists, in a nation that has empathy even for white mass murderers, who are captured alive. Charleston shooter Dylann Roof—certainly a terrorist yet not called one—was even treated to Burger King on his way to jail, hours after the white supremacist had murdered nine black people at the Emanuel AME Church. This, in a nation that has declared walking while black an offense punishable by death, as unarmed black women, men and children are shot for no good reason, left to die in a pool of their blood.In the case of Oregon, the double standard of color coded terrorism speaks for itself. At least one CNN expert was honest and embraced the double standard. Law enforcement analyst Art Rodericksaid this white militia was not being treated like Black Lives Matter protesters or Muslims because they were not looting. “This is a very rural area,” Roderick argued. “It is out in the middle of nowhere. What are they actually doing? They’re not destroying property, they’re not looting anything.”“The last thing we need is some type of large confrontation because that’s when stuff goes bad,” he added. “And I think in this particular instance, if we just wait them out, see what they’ve got to say, then eventually, they’re all going to go home.” Go home? If Black Lives Matter protesters were to take over a federal building, armed to the teeth with firepower–and they certainly would not do this—they would wind up dead, or in prison for life on terrorism charges.And it is almost fitting that Oregon provides the backdrop for this latest case of white domestic terrorism. Known for its violent history of oppression against Native peoples, Oregon was established as a white racist utopia. It was the only state whose founding constitution forbade black people from living within its boundaries, which was the case until 1926. And today, Oregon is only 2 percent black. Meanwhile, America is no stranger to white domestic terrorists. For African Americans, the Ku Klux Klan was our ISIS. They were praised in the White House, and controlled state governments throughout the country, including Oregon. We faced the lynching and firebombing, and the aerial bombing of Black Wall Street. Even today, black people fear for their lives, as America normalizes the violence against them. This, as angry white men–uneducated, disaffected and wanting to “make America great again”—threaten to use their guns, their only manhood, against their perceived enemies. But white terrorists are not taken seriously, because (white) boys will be boys. Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidaloveSOURCE
NB Commentary: All too often we get things twisted. Actors are just that, actors. Their personal persona is NOT on stage, yet we identify with them as though their character on stage is who they really are rather than the mind control puppets that they truly are.
Hollywierd is just that weird, sick and painful for all. Why are we devastated when our favorite Entertainer dies or disappoints? Because we believe in the illusion they present on stage. We have no clue of who they really are or what their personal struggles.
Humanity engages in the cult of personality, and Hollywierd provides all the God’s. Humanity lives and dies thru the lives of their new found Gods whom they pay to entertain them and never renege on the agreement of keeping the illusion alive.
In ancient times, the enactment of the myths, legends and folklore was done by a select group of “actors” their mission was to inspire the community with the morals of the stories they told. Even Shakespeare had his role in this. In Ancient China this was done for the purpose of community and social cohesion. The Actors were highly revered, almost sacred in that they had the power to effect change in the minds, hearts and spirits of the masses. Same was true in Africa, particularly notable is the Griot, or Jali. Even in the Bible with Joseph being able to tell the King what his dreams meant and with great imagery he was able to avert certain natural calamities.
So, there certainly is a place for those who are enacting or acting out the stories, tales, myths and legends of a society.
Over time however, as with much of human cultural presentments, things became more and more corrupt, The performers began to realize how powerful they were and that they were able to effect those whom they performed in front of. You have to be a special kind of weird anyway to be able to enact various characters and scenarios and make it believable. You have to practically believe in the illusion that you are creating. You actually become a magician in whose hands the audience is swept away. You are able to move people to a gamut of emotions and actually change a person”s world view simply by you being “believable.” Now that’s power. All too often the actor may not be as privy to their power as the one behind the scenes and over time this one became the power behind the mask with the ability to keep or dismiss anyone at any time for any reason. Needless to say, this lead to competition, dishonesty and cruelty among all participants.
Modern performing arts, particularly in Hollyweird is overflowing with all types of debauchery, mind control, sex kittens and handlers. If you want to get anywhere you have to do the ritual and make the sacrifice. These people’s lives are so screwed up they are hardly examples for anyone to follow on the real. And nowadays they put their stuff on blast for the whole world to see.
They rise and fall like shooting “stars” and some are often killed if they don’t do the bidding of their handlers. If one of them falls we need only look at what they said or did or didn’t say or do to become a marked man. They are car crashed, airplane crashed, ruined, suicided or overdosed to death when their time is up. Everyone in Hollyweird knows this, and that is why there is such a silence around this matter.
Cosby is just the fall guy this time around, but the problem of sex abuse, pornography, pedophilia, alcohol and drug addiction is the seedy side of Hollyweird. That is just the way it is and commonly accepted. It is run by a Mob of unscrupulous people who care less about doing what is right and more about the power they can get by doing every immoral thing you can think of, which includes “worshiping Satan” and being part of some secret order or cult.
It is what it is, Cosby just finally had his come-upins. He pissed somebody off, or is a cover for even a much worse and bigger story.
There is always more to these Hollyweird tales. More that goes on behind the scenes. It’s part of the way things are done. People get it twisted thinking the “actor” is the part they play.
I have heard of actors being assaulted publicly because of a role they played on TV or in the movies. Obviously, they are acting and some do a good job of it.
Take Denzel for example. His roles varied, did that mean he was any or all of them in his personal life?
Again, do some research on what goes on after the show, look at what people are asked to participate in, what they are bribed into doing, how they are manipulated and how their families suffer. It’s called the cult of personality.
Humanity has given up its Ancient Gods for modern day celebrities. They keep them alive through offerings, praise and worship, they do not see them as humans but as demigods who give them an outlet for their desire to transfer power to someone outside of themselves. In doing so they can avoid being responsible for their own behavior.
These celebrities rise and fall and are as much a part of mind control as the masses who worship them. As a result the entire society is manipulated.
Celebrity magic where people take on the imaginary lives of people on the big screen and personalize them as if these folks were blood kin.
Hollywierd is a trap for all involved. The game is played, the whole world is literally a stage.
“So do you remember model Beverly Johnson claiming that she is one of Bill Cosby’s rape victims??? Now her talent manager, Don Gibble, is speaking out, and he says he remembers that single meeting Johnson had with Cosby…and she never said she was drugged or raped; instead, she said she had a nice brunch with both Cosby…and his wife. Gibble said, in part “It was odd to me that she changed her story. She said [she was] drugged and raped. I just remember that was not the conversation we had. And we had it repeatedly. It was brunch. It was just one time. It was a typical nice pleasant experience. It can be easily proven that Camille Cosby was at that brunch, so it was kind of dumb for her to lie.” Smh…. Read the rest here: http://newsone.com/3082011/beverly-johnson-bill-cosby-2/“
It’s mind control, people, it’s Hollywierd!
Not fishy at all. If you understand the victim mentality and/or the pathology of the abused. You would see how they replicate their history in subsequent relationships. In fact, I would not be surprised if some of Cosby’s accuser already had a history of some abuse. Mental, emotional or physical. People are missing the point. This is about a pathology and the culture of rape and abuse in our society. Bill is the fall guy but there are deeper issues and bigger fish to fry in the Hollyweird kitchen.
These allegations have been going on for more than 20 years. Everyone in Hollyweird knew it, there was even a story that came out in 2014 in the New York Daily News about how, Frank Scotti, who worked for Cosby was given money to pay these women. He’s an old dude now and he came out. But I keep saying, this is a non-issue, everybody in Hollyweird does this, they fool around even though they are married, they have wild parties and do all kinds of debauchery, But in Bill’s Case he obviously pissed somebody off! Pure and simple, he said no to the wrong dude.
You have to understand the Hollyweird lifestyle to understand how this works. For all we know he could be an example to the others who may even THINK about saying “no”.
Remember this, entertainers are OWNED. They are bought and sold on the stock market, they make money for their handlers, managers or whomever controls the money they get. I big slice of the pie goes to the banksters. We gotta come out of the clouds people. In the real world, Mr. Huxtable does not exist, Bill Cosby does. And if he don’t march on the line like he is told, he will go down, sooner or later.
Whether it was rape or not is a non issue to me. Cosby was/is a married man, so any fooling around on anyone’s part is a breach of contract. All parties need to own up to that. I agree they are giving him hell and there were claims to get money out of him, but in the final analysis is it appropriate for a married man to bring women to his hotel room while scanty clad and is it appropriate for the women to agree?
What’s up with this Hollyweird bullshit? Is any of their lewd behavior acceptable to the average married couple? I’m just saying. As a husband, father and so called role model, where was any of it okay?
It’s mind control, people, it’s Hollywierd!
December 18, 2006Bill Cosby Under Fire By Alex TresniowskiThe Comedian Settles a Case Accusing Him of Sexual Abuse—but Other Women Make Similar Claims. Pasted from <http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20059561,00.html> Cosby Testifies About Secret PaymentsCourt: Comedian says he gave $100,000 to a woman who claims to be his daughter and her mother. July 16, 1997|JOHN J. GOLDMAN | TIMES STAFF WRITERPasted from <http://articles.latimes.com/1997/jul/16/news/mn-13121> Cosby scandal exposes hypocrisy in more than one placeMarch 13, 2005|By Leonard Pitts Jr.WASHINGTON – I like hypocrites. You would, too, if you had this job. A hypocrite is the next best thing to a day off. Some pious moralizer contradicts his words with his deeds and the column all but writes itself. It’s different with Bill Cosby.
The Truth About Black Religion and Spirituality and The Lies of Christianity, Islam Dr. Umar Johnson (video)
NB Commentary:
Dr. Umar ,made some really good points particularly when it relates to spirituality. Having gone thru Christianity to Islam to African traditional spiritual belief systems. Clearly, they do entail a great deal of the culture from which they are derived or shall I say controlled by. I have a few points to add.
1. The yin/yang principle is within every one of us, having been born from both a male and female conjugal relationship. Each person has a male principal and female principle within them. Therefore, we are a manifestation of the “whole” in and of ourselves. Gender is a construct but not applicable in the spirit realm, that is, a person may be born with the physicality of a male, but have a strong principal within of a female and the same can apply to a female. Here is where my departure comes as it relates to his statement about homosexuality. All too often, the spiritual nature of same sex relationships is packaged in disdain, hatred, and much confusion as to its purpose and nature. If he reads, studies or observes Malidoma Some’s work he will find that there is a deeper, often hidden purpose for this than is commonly acknowledge. Dr. Some is from Dagara people of Upper Volta in West Africa. In Dr. Some’s culture the homosexual is held in high esteem and are called Gatekeepers.
2. Expanding on my above comment I would also include that in traditional African spirituality, particularly among those who have not been influenced by Western taboos, you will find the notion of re-incarnation. It is believed that we re-incarnate as male or female. With that being said, we may present more closely to our most previous gender in our present life time as we navigate through the sexes. The idea is to experience “spirit” through the physical. In order to do so, we come as male or female through our lifetimes and that in and of itself may have us gravitate to a person of the same sex whom we knew and loved in a past life. There is no so-called gender construct in the spirit realm only as it manifests in 3rd dimensional reality. African spirituality is keenly aware of this, that is, how, a person who is part of the Yoruba/Ifa spiritual system can have an opposite or same sex Orisha as their patron. The male may find himself very intrigued by the female principal of a particular Female Orisha and appear to be “effeminate” but the reality is that the female energy is very strong within him. The opposite is true with women.
3. One point of departure for the Ancients particularly in reference to the Khemetian Spiritual Science; like many other religions that we are familiar with today, it was kept from the masses and only the “Royals”, the Priests and Priestesses were initiated into it. They were set apart from the masses and often revered as God incarnated and here we see the objectification of the God source to something outside of the individual. The separation between the haves and the have-nots was profound and the magic, spiritual practices, etc. were delegated to the royal blood lines, and priests. This carried over into the more modern religions of our time. But even if you look at Ancient China, Mesopotamia, India, and other ancient cultures the same is true. Some how the idea of controlling and manipulating the masses became prevalent for political, social and economic reasons and this system was primarily responsible for the civilizations to thrive. That is not to say they wouldn’t have done so without this separation, but in doing so, the element of controlling the masses for gains of the few was much more manageable. So, when we speak of Empire we must be fair in our delineation of exactly what that meant then and what it means now.
4. Finally, I would like to mention that modern constructs of traditional African spirituality has become more institutionalized and thus there is a chasm between the Knowledge of “God” and the actual imbibing with the God within. Because it has become another tool of control through rituals and sacrifice, those in these “systems” become imprisoned as do the others in institutionalized religious practices. that is, African traditional spirituality becomes the same bastion of mind control and manipulation as the other more popular “religions”. It has become an institution and like he mentioned, it has become a business. People have their finances scarfed from them under the guise of pleasing the Gods/Ancestors and are seldom lead to believe that they can achieve this without all the trappings, i.e., shrines, altars, sacrifices, etc.
We are all here to learn, evolve and develop and for the most part Dr. Umar is clearly on point, and even with admitting his own evolution and development, it is very refreshing to hear him mention that, if just for the sake of perspective.
Personally, I applaud Dr. Umar and his work. He is very intelligent and creative in his manner of educating us about the issues we face in this world as African descendant peoples. Continue in your work, Dr. Umar, you are a blessing for those who have ears to hear.
Like he mentioned, there is no ONE AND ONLY WAY to connecting with the Divine within. In fact, the path may have many twists and turns, but if we remain vigilant we will succeed and the awakening will be all pervasive. We Are The Change We Are Looking For! Ase’, Namaste
Have You Ever Been Surprise By Garlic Turning Blue-Green?
NB Commentary:
I was about to throw all my blue garlic out. It was such a shock to see my garlic turn blue. I like to buy garlic cloves and blend them up in my blender with a little water. They are so much stronger in scent and flavor rather than buying the already hulled garlic cloves that come stored in a jar. I debated whether or not to purchase them or overcome the dread I feel when having to hull garlic cloves, they come in so many sizes and shapes inside the bulb and like a box of chocolate, you never know what you are gonna get.
Then, knowing that I had no idea how long those cloves had been in that jar I decided to get over my dread and go ahead and hull the garlic while watching a crazy news video on YouTube. I won’t mention my favorites but I will mention that many of the ones that are considered “alternative” media are only a stone’s throw away from the MSM when it comes to all kinds of crazy.
I have done this routine several times in the past. But this time, I decided to add a little vinegar to it to keep it fresher longer. Somewhere in my head I got the idea that vinegar would do the trick, and of course, “Real Apple Cider Vinegar” by Braggs would be the ultimate ingredient for my desired affect. So I drop a little bit in, blended it down into small pieces and put it in a jar in the refrigerator. However the jar I had was a bit too small so I had to leave some out to be cooked with dinner later. To my surprise, when I returned the small portion I had left out had turned the prettiest green ever! My sensibilities took hold and the battle within started. Of course food poisoning was my first thought and I quickly threw it away assuming that the garlic I had stored away in the refrigerator was safe and sound. The next day, I noticed that it too had begun to change. And with each passing day it got greener and greener and bluer and bluer.
I consider myself an alchemist especially when it comes to preparing a meal. So as a scientist I began to think some type of chemical reaction had taken place. However, I was not sure if the reaction was safe or not safe. I went threw the antics of taking it out of the refrigerator and putting it back, taking the lid off and smelling it and putting the lid back on. It did have a slight metallic scent to it, but it smelled more like a really strong dose of garlic. I remained uncertain for several days after, while my freshly chopped in the blender and stored in the refrigerator garlic turned even bluer green.
I began to question everything that I knew. For years I have used garlic and I never, ever saw this happen. How could this not be a ominous sign of potential food poisoning? Ironically, we have come to see green, the most healing color ever, as poison! Especially when it sits on top of meats, breads, yogurt, cheese and now it’s sitting inside and outside of my GARLIC!!!
Thankfully, before I wasted $2.00 and at least an hour of time I decided to check it out on Google. My question started off like this, “Fresh Garlic turns…..” and before I could write the word green Google had already figured me out. That’s Google for you, reading your mind, I say.
I felt that it was completely ludicrous to even ask such a question. Whoever heard of such? GARLIC TURNING GREEN!!! But after years of using garlic, I really began to wonder if I may have come across a bad batch or maybe even a poisonous one. I began to question my home remedy Braggs “Apple Cider Vinegar”. I began to wonder if I had poisoned my food and if I would be too sick to attend my online meetings or live performance. I really began to worry, so my only other option was to look it up and to my surprise this is not an unusual occurrence but it has been done purposefully by the Chinese in some of their recipes. SMDH, who knew?
Well, now I know and now I can put that garlic back in the refrigerator and enjoy its even stronger taste and color.
Perhaps you, as I, have been cooking with garlic for years, expecting garlic to remain a kind of off-white, uninteresting color throughout the cooking process. Then one day, the garlic turns a bright blue-green, even an aquamarine or turquoise color, transforming a familiar dish into an odd concoction of color accents that undermine the familiar tones we expect. The visual impact of this changed dish can be likened to the colors of trees in autumn, with their red, gold, green, and dun colors, suddenly being splashed with fluorescent hues of blue and green reminiscent of the op art of the 60s. Autumn colors aren’t supposed to display this jarring contrast, nor is food. It’s unsettling.
If one day your garlic turns a shocking shade of blue, making your homemade pickles, pork roast, or pot of cabbage and kielbasa look strange and even poisonous, be assured that no matter how strange it looks, it hurts only your eyes, not your body.
My Blue Garlic Experience
This past Thanksgiving I volunteered to bring our family’s traditional Polish kielbasa and cabbage dish to the holiday dinner. Ours is a simple recipe consisting of traditional Eastern European ingredients including onion, garlic, cabbage, sausage, black pepper, and apple. Our version of this dish is mild-tasting and slightly sweet, and we all love the recipe just as it is. But this year I decided to charge up the flavor a bit by adding sauerkraut to the cabbage, something I had never done before.
By early evening on Wednesday, my kitchen smelled heavenly from the onions, cabbage, apple, and kraut slowly simmering on the stovetop, from the freshly pressed whole head of garlic waiting to go into the pot, and from the thinly sliced kielbasa resting on the cutting board. It was a peaceful moment, leaving me with the feeling that all is well with the world.
An hour before the pot was to finish, I added the pressed garlic and sliced kielbasa and folded them in. Immediately, I began to see a few bright blue-green bits of color in the pot. As I stirred the pot, more began to appear. Soon, the pot contents were lavishly sprinkled with shocking, almost neon-like, blue-green, confetti-looking bits. I started picking them out and putting them in a small dish, but soon gave up. It seemed the more I removed, the more appeared.
There are so many variables causing accidental garlic color change that it may be impossible for you to duplicate this surprising event in your home kitchen.
No one as yet has discovered how to turn blue garlic back to white, although continuing to heat the turquoise garlic may dull it down to a pinkish-brown.
When serving your dish that contains aquamarine bits of color, say nothing. Most folks, if they notice this color at all, will never ask, knowing that whatever you bring to the table is good to eat because you brought it. If someone does happen to ask why there are bright blue-green flecks of color in the dish, take them aside and tell them your secret and that you expect them to keep it: “The dish needed some color.”
In reality if there is no serious response from our people after all that marching in the streets and demanding justice, etc. Then we will not be a force to be reckoned with. The police will continue to assassinate our people with impunity and nobody should say nuffin no more.
How can we make any kind of impact or change if we are too weak, brainwashed and conditioned to stop participating in their holidays? I always say that this time of year is the most blatant celebration of white supremacy ever! White Jesus, white Christmas and giving all your money to the white man, going into debt for a capitalistic economy and it’s banksters who could care less about you or anyone in your family who suffered under police brutality.
Marches keep them going. T-shirts give them a spike in sales. Magic markers and poster boards ring their cash registers. George Soros can bank roll it and profit from it, but does it change anything? NO! We have to hit them in their pockets. But if we are too dumbed down to do it, well, ain’t no need to be griping about how racist this country is.
I wrote this rant, last year in December, 2014. To be honest not much has changed since then. In fact, it seems that some of the things mentioned in this post last year have gotten progressively worse!
After reading it again, I could not help but think, “Play it Again, Sam!”
There is an interesting twist to this year’s Christmas rant… Now we have to add “Justice Or Else” and “BlackLivesMatter” and aren’t we supposed to be boycotting? Whatever happened to hope and change? So, I am going to leave this Rant pretty much intact. All you really have to do is change the date from 2014 to 2015 and add, “More Of the Same” after every paragraph.
I would like to add however, that this year has me aching in my heart because not only is this the biggest disinfo campaign of the past 2000 years, modern day man continues to deceive his/her children about some fat white dude coming down some chimney to bring them toys! Let’s just look at that aspect of this bizarre story. How many houses have chimneys anymore? I mean, we got condos and high-rise buildings and apartment complexes, and ain’t no damned chimneys nowhere in their homes! Why don’t these modern day children, with all manner of access to technology and information, tell their parents to stop lying to them? Sigh.
xmas traffic accident
Well, the holiday season is upon us and here we go again. I must admit that 2014 was one hell of a year for everybody on Planet Earth. We got mass extinctions of animals and humans, executions of guilty and innocent, carnage, disease, plummeting gas prices along with Pres. Obama’s approval ratings, terrorists so nondescript that they weren’t sure what to call them, more wars and occupation that you can shake a stick at, scandals of the seedy kind, and various weather anomalies that boggle the mind. It has been a war of truth and lies and truth and more lies and confusion to boot with the common phrase being, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” The so-called alternative media has stuck its fingers into the corporate pie and are now mouthing so much disinfo you have to take out your ouji board to determine who is moving things around. We have had so many false flag announcements about the coming apocalypse it makes your head spin, as the checkerboard trails cross the skies, the denials of Mon”santan”o, the cover-ups on Mars, the loose change falling of Tower 7 and 3d Holograms you can cuddle with. I mean, we have practically seen it all except the missing MH370. We have had a herd of celebs take their last breaths and mourn the lost of a woman who openly proclaim Michelle Obama as a tranny! There is so much more that I could list here but it would detract from my original reason for this post. I guess I have a bone to pick with the so-called NEW AGERS! I don’t understand how they can continue to persist in the most commercialized cycle of insanity that hits this planet every year moving into the so-called New Year. Now, I am not pointing a finger at ALL of them, so let me just say MOST OF THEM! All year round we get the love and light spew. We get the “we are awakening” or the “awakening is upon us” or the “Guardian Forces” and the “Ashtar Command” are helping us, or even we are “moving into the 4-5th dimensions.” How do we do all that and still celebrate Christmas? CHANNELERS ALERT! If you are channeling, and particularly if you are channeling “Jesus” or Sanada as some call him, how in the world do you celebrate Christmas? Do you mean to tell me that he is not telling you the truth about this holiday? Do you mean to tell me that he is encouraging you to go out and purchase a tree and various other odds and ends so that you can celebrate his birth? Did he not tell you the true story, the whole shebang, the real deal about all this? If he did not, then who, pray tell are you channeling? I have subscribed to various “Love and Light” blogs and websites. I have also subscribed to various UFO stuff on the internet. So I thought the above picture was quite apropos for my rant today. Seriously, as Mr. Claus is traversing through the inner and outer planes surely, even he knows the TRUTH ABOUT CHRISTMAS. He has to be multi-dimensional to be in all those places around the world at one time, wouldn’t you think? How come ain’t nobody channeling Santa Claus?? He is real, right? But I digress. My real rant is how unnerving it is to receive “Season’s Greetings”, “Merry Christmas” etc., etc., etc. from these so-called “New Agers”. Don’t they know that it’s all a hoax, at best and quite fabricated? If they are contacting “Ancient Aliens” and/or “Mary” haven’t they been told that this is a bunch of balderdash to just grab people’s money? Well, I am seriously questioning these folks now. It was bad enough that they had folks running helter-skelter over 2012. But here we are 2 years later and they have not deterred in their participation in this horrendous disinformation campaign called Christmas. As spiritual beings, they should know the truth and as beings of integrity, they should live by it. Otherwise, these 50 million channelers are just in it for the money. What other reason could there be? They have to be politically correct and keep in touch with their constituency. That is, if they step too far away from the status quo, they may lose their bread and butter, fine cars and nice houses and expensive seminars that they invite folks to come to to ASCEND. THIS ASCENSION THING MUST BE A CROCK OF BS!If people are truly ascending, channeling and talking to ET’s how can they participate in this massive disinfo campaign and call themselves true leaders of the movement? I am beginning to seriously question the authenticity of the so-called ASCENSION movement when I see ASCENDED MASTERS, not pulling the coat tail of their followers and telling them to stay away from the tripe. Or, do these so-called ASCENDED MASTERS have a hidden agenda? It just makes you wonder. Where are they during the times when we are sold a huge hypnotic bill of goods, that keeps us treading for another year and/or lifetime, trying to keep our heads above water on a Prison Planet such as this one. If these folks are willing to defy all logic and participate in this scheme of disenfranchisement, then it certainly makes anything they say after the said, ‘New Year’ holiday, dubious and base. These people, have played on the heart strings of the masses for decades if not longer than that. I assume the so-called NEW AGE movement has been going on for more than 50 years from checking out the print date on many of these materials. These folks have been giving information about the Sun, the moon, the stars, the galaxies, the other worlds, the other worldlies, the inner earth, magnetosphere, the comets, asteroids and errantly massive dustballs and light/space ships, orbs, etc. and they have not come to the conclusion that Christmas is disinfo. How is that possible? Maybe I will answer my own question…. They are not really channeling anything. They are not channeling beings of high integrity.They are not listening to whomever they are channeling.They are reticent to change things in their personal lives for fear of losses.They don’t want to upset the boat.They are liars.They are all frauds. Believe me, I am inclined to believe all of the above but most inclined to believe the last one. If these folks are truly contacting these entities and they are not adjusting their lifestyles accordingly then something is really and truly wrong with the so-called NEW AGE movement.
How is it that having a European looking man, with blonde hair and blue eyes, from the middle east elevated to the status of God, is NOT promoting white supremacy?
For the next 30 days folks will be peppering their house, lawns, schools and churches and every where else with the image of a “white” child in a manger purported to be GOD incarnate. A so-called Christmas celebration that really is a cloak for white supremacy.
Think about it, from now on it will be quite alright for Jesus to be depicted as White! All over the world from the deepest jungles to the highest skyscraper, Jesus will not represent every racial group or ethnicity, he, his parents and most of everyone around down to the angels will all be white. What a mind f***ck that must be for every body! They get to promote White Supremacy unabashed and take your money in the process. People keep saying folks are waking up, but this time of year makes me wonder on the real.
What do I suggest?
I suggest the truth, the real story…
No trees in houses;
No more tree farms for the purpose of chopping them down for folks to drag into their houses;
No more high electric bills from burning lights all day and night.
No more competitions about who’s house is burning the most Christmas lights in the most beautiful way;
No more suicides because of feeling unloved during these times;
No gifts given to folks when it ain’t their birthday;
No jacking up commercialism and credit card debt;
No more propaganda through movies; TV; radio; advertisements; etc. seducing people into buy, consume, buy, consume;
No false promises;
No so-called “Christmas Parties” where people only go to “see” what someone else is gonna give them;
No more pretending that “Jesus” was born on Dec. 25;
No more trashing the vibration of the Winter Solstice with greed and avarice.
No more soup kitchens once a year to feed the homeless; feed them all year;
No more Santa Claus lies; while chastising our children for lying;
No more thousands upon thousands if Not millions of turkeys; chickens; sheep; pigs and cows being slaughtered;
No more stuffing the gut with GMO laden food dishes; No more lies;
No more betrayals; these are some of the things I suggest.
If you really want to let the banksters know the real deal; don’t buy anything till January 30th that is Not necessary for sustenance.
And finally; what would “Jesus” say if he came back and saw how much BS is going on in his name. Of course I confer that if he really exists than he sees it already. And judging with what they say about him; I am sure he is and would be appalled. And then they took his original image; if there ever really was one; and made him look like a European!! Come on; why did they do that? The original Jews did Not look like that.
But I digress.
Unless this “Jesus” is a megalomaniac; I would suggest; he is shaking his head pretty hard at this foolishness.
Megalomaniac:
“1. A psycho-pathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth; power; or omnipotence.
2. An obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions.
NB Commentary: Sometimes it is hard for me to wrap my head around the dichotomy that the US calls foreign policy. On one hand they support “freedom fighters” who want to dispose of an evil dictator, on the other hand they prop up evil dictators and guarantee them long life and protection.
In the case of immigration they want to take in Syrians, whom they have no idea what type of social ills they may bring to this country or how many of them may be disgruntled refugees ready to be radicalized, and yet, not far away to the south of the US are poor and starving people, not terrorist but folks who are suffering unfathomable obscenity due to their position on top of tremendous, gas, oil and various other mineral reserves. I am so struck by this and often find myself in a quandary to make sense of it.
Then like clockwork, the little voice inside my head reminds me of what the geopolitical priority of the US & NATO are really based on. And while these “facts” may give way to lesser confusion, it still boggles my mind.
Along this arid strip of borderland, the river brings life. Its languid waters are used to cook the food, quench the thirst and bathe the bodies of thousands of Haitian migrants who have poured onto its banks from the Dominican Republic, fleeing threats of violence and deportation. These days, the river also brings death. Horrid sanitation has led to a cholera outbreak in the camps, infecting and killing people who spilled over the border in recent months in hopes of finding refuge here. Nearly 3,000 people have arrived in the makeshift camps since the spring, leaving the Dominican Republic by force or by fear after its government began a crackdown on illegal migrants. Some, born in the Dominican Republic but unable to prove it, cannot even speak French or Creole, Haiti’s main languages, showing how wide a net the Dominican government has cast.
Haitian officials have done almost nothing to support them. The population is scattered across the drought-racked southwest border, mostly barren plains. Families of eight sleep in tents fashioned from sticks and cardboard. They drink river water, struggle to find food, and make do without toilets or medical attention.
Families wash clothes in the river that runs by Tête à l’Eau, Haiti, where many who fled the Dominican Republic have settled. CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
Now stateless, the refugees exist in the literal and figurative space between two nations that, along with their island, share a history steeped in hostility. Some of the camps were created decades ago, during another iteration of their troubled pasts, but had long since been abandoned. Now, in a new cycle of tension between the nations, they are packed to capacity once again.
The plight along the border is reminiscent, on a smaller scale, of the devastating 2010 earthquake, which claimed the lives of 100,000 to 316,000 Haitians and summoned a wave of billions of dollars in aid. Even today, more than 60,000 displaced people still reside in tent cities around the country.
Only this time, the upheaval is man-made, the result of the policies of the Dominican Republic and the seeming indifference of the Haitian government. The authorities in Haiti do not even formally recognize that the camps exist.
“I haven’t felt normal since my son died,” said David Toussaint, 55, whose 9-year-old boy was one of at least 10 people in the camps to die of cholera. Officials say more than 100 people have been infected.
He lifted himself from a bed his family built in their tent, covered with a frayed tarp. He spends his days there, immobilized by grief. An acrid smell filled the hot air as dust swirled into the tent, cloaking everything.
“This is no way to live,” he said.
When the Dominican government announced that all migrants in the country illegally had to register this June, mass deportations were feared. Those later rounded up were taken largely from remote areas, and bused quietly to border crossings. In total, more than 10,000 people were expelled officially, with nearly another 10,000 people claiming to have been kicked out as well, according to the International Organization for Migration.
But in this climate of fear, an even bigger phenomenon emerged: Tens of thousands of people of Haitian descent decided to leave the Dominican Republic on their own, rather than risk deportation, including some who were born on Dominican soil and knew nothing of Haiti.
Hugo Chavez shares thoughts of why Haiti is poor. The following is a transcript of the speech given prior to Hugo Chavez’s death on March 05, 2013. Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías born on July 28, 1954 – passed away on March 5, 2013)
Haiti, the Black Jacobins, that of Toussaint Louverture.
Haiti that of Pétion.
Haiti, from where Miranda arrived with our flag, it, and a dream of several years, and a project: the South American revolution.
Haiti, that of Bolivar.
Haiti, that of the expeditions of Los Cayos, sister Haiti, Haiti, painful reality.
Fidel Castro, as always, continues to launch his thoughts, his ideas, his contributions to the world in which we live. And this afternoon I received – this morning, rather – the reflections of Fidel, his most recent.
Fidel said, permit me to read some of these deep thoughts of our companion, comrade, commander.
I read: “The tragedy excites, in good faith, a lot of people, specially because of its natural character. But very few of them stop and ask the question: why Haiti is a poor country?
Why does the population depend almost 50% on orders sent from the outside by its families.
Why not also analyze the realities that led to the current situation of Haiti and its enormous suffering? “
I would add that this painful moment seems opportune to reflect and get to the bottom of things: why haiti is so poor?
Why is there so much misery in Haiti?
I continue reading Fidel:
“The most curious in this story is that nobody said a word to remember that Haiti was the first country in which enslaved Africans 400,000 of them, trafficked by Europeans, rose against white owners 30,000 plantation sugar cane and coffee, fulfilling the first great social revolution of our hemisphere. Pages of unsurpassable glory could be written around the earth.
The most eminent general was defeated, Napoleon, out there. Haiti is the net product colonialism. Haiti is the net product of colonialism and imperialism, of more than a century of use of its human resources in the hardest work, of military interventions and the extraction of its wealth.
This historical oblivion is not so serious to the reality which is that Haiti is the shame for our time, in a world where those prevail on the exploitation and plundering of the vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet. “
And then continues in Fidel and his reflections by launching rays of light that lives for this moment humanity. But it is by here we start:
“Haiti is a net product of colonialism. Haiti is a product of imperialism. As not only will complete colonialism, as not only will complete imperialism, and I go further: as not only will complete capitalism, we have situations and people living the painful situation facing Haiti.”
I confess my personal experience, when several years, for the first time, we visited Haiti. I confess, I wanted to cry myself. With one of my companions, I went to see these people in the street, with elation, hope, magic and misery, and I remembered a phrase that came out of the soul, I told my companion nearest the descent of a van – we wanted to walk for a while and we ended up running into a street – I told him: look, mate, the gates of hell, inhabited by black angels.
Because it is a people full of it: this is an angelic people.
I ratify what President Sylia has decreed: while our commitment to our people, all the people, the Venezuelan people are with Haiti, the Bolivarian revolution is with the people of Haiti, with its pain, with its tragedy, with its hope.
For some Haitians, the deportation order invoked memories of the notoriousParsley Massacre of 1937, when Dominican President Trujillo ordered troops to kill thousands of Haitian migrants living along the border of the two countries.
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