columbiareports | The Medellin
Police Department and Colombia’s 4th Army Brigade played a key role in
the Medellin Cartel and the formation of what is now known as the Oficina de Envigado.
In
the 1960’s and 1970’s, when Colombian marijuana was in fashion in the
United States, the so-called “gentlemen of drugs” as narcos like Pablo Escobar, were considered respectable businessmen who received support from the local police department and the 4th Brigade.
The gentlemen from Medellin provided the Caribbean mafia with pot from the surrounding Antioquia province and even as far south as Cauca.
Medellin’s current crime syndicate, the Oficina de Envigado,
originates from the Security and Control Department (DSC) and the
Civilian Order Department (DOC).
The DSC from Envigado and the DOC
from Medellin were formed in 1968, and gained force under Escobar with
the support of police and mayors in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
The ties between the narcos, the local gangs, the Medellin Police
Department and the 4th Brigade got even stronger in 1981 when they found
a common enemy, the M-19 guerrilla group.
After
these guerrillas kidnapped Martha Ochoa, the sister of two founding
members of the Medellin Cartel and a personal friend of Uribe, Escobar
and his associates founded Death to Kidnappers (MAS), a paramilitary
group that would later become the Medellin Cartel.
The “gentlemen” lost their social status in Bogota
after Escobar got kicked out of Congress in 1983, the cartel
assassinated Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara in 1984, and the US demanded
their extradition.
The terrorism used in opposition to an
extradition pact with the US government was mainly a problem for
innocent civilians, politicians and the National Police in Bogota.
In Medellin, the cartel could still find loyal allies in the local elite, the Medellin Police Department and the 4th Brigade.
The
cartel’s 1989 bombing of Avianca flight 203 that killed 107 people, for
example, would not have been possible without former Army mayor Oscar
Echandía and Medellin Cartel founder Gonzalo Rodriguez, a.k.a. “El
Mexicano,” who in flew in 11 British mercenaries to give explosives
lessons to cartel members and paramilitaries.
brucewilds | Just how unkind the recent Covid-economy has been to the middle-class
has been masked by the helicopter money flowing from Washington. This has skewed income and spending across America but little
attention has been paid to those taking it on the chin. This includes
the owners of small businesses and those making substantially more than
before the pandemic hit. The evidence of the pain
and damage being inflicted on the Main Street economy is going beginning
to become apparent. It can be seen as we drive down the street and see
move empty windows and for lease signs which are sprouting up like weeds.
Even the appearance of a coin shortage due
to our government being inept is causing people to claim this is all an
intentional part of a larger plan. It means businesses are using the
coin shortage to stop taking
cash. This has left some people wondering if those wanting the demise of
paper money are using the virus scam to eliminate cash altogether. The
pandemic and warning germs can be transferred on the surface of money
mean that suddenly "money" has now been deemed "unsafe." The rumor is
out that Nancy Pelosi has already
inserted in one stimulus bill the seeds of "taking our currency
digital."
This would force everyone
into the banking system increasing the government's ability to tax,
track, and control just about everything. The complete transformation to
digital currency would mean if the government
does not like your business or politics they could just lock you out of
the system. They could even charge you to park your money while the bank
would be allowed to lend it out and charge interest on it. Eliminating
cash is the first step they must adopt for this to work. It would lock
money into their system, they would eliminate or control all
alternatives to money so it cannot be
diverted from or moved out of the banking or financial system.
As events unfold I have witnessed a growing opinion being battered
around that something sinister is happening beneath the surface. This
includes the feeling we are no longer in control of our fate. More and
more the idea that form follows function and the winners were picked
before all this started is being injected into the mix. This theory
embraces the proposition the bottom half of society is destitute and
totally dependent on the government which means they have been removed
from the battlefield. Now that these people are no longer a threat,
corporate and government collaborators are consolidating power and
control.
While you sleeping, that other cat was steady creeping. Tried to tell you sum'n was up with those funky multi-state drone swarms - nobody paid any heed - now a minute later - come to find out deeply disturbing incursions were taking place prior to, during, and subsequent to this mysterious and unexplained public interval. If you don't understand exactly how bad this is, then school is officieally adjourned for you. Suffice it to say, there are levers upon levers upon levers available to those intent on implementing the aims of the Great Reset. Bad as it is, the panic-demic is a cake-walk compared with what's provably and trivially feasible to those intent on the aims of the new economic and social order. Think Chernobyl, Fukashima - and like a basic but elite hacker incursion - totally devastating and completely untraceable.
Forbes | Documents gained under the Freedom of Information Act show how a
number of small drones flew around a restricted area at Palo Verde
Nuclear Power Plant on two successive nights last September. Security
forces watched, but were apparently helpless to act as the drones
carried out their incursions before disappearing into the night. Details
of the event gives some clues as to just what they were doing, but who
sent them remains a mystery.
Details of the events were obtained from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Douglas D. Johnson on behalf of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies
(SCU) using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The SCU’s main
interest is in anomalous aerospace phenomena, what other people term
UFOs. In this case though the flying objects were easily identifiable as
drones, although their exact mission and origin are unknown. Johnson
passed the information to The War Zone who give a detailed account.
Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant
is the largest in the U.S., producing over three gigawatts, 35% of
Arizona's total power capacity. It supplies electricity to Phoenix and
Tucson, as well as San Diego and Los Angeles. It is a critical piece of
strategic infrastructure; during the 2003 Iraq War, National Guard
troops were deployed to Palo Verde
to defend against a possible terrorist threat. In normal times, as with
other nuclear installations, it is protected by armed security guards.
The armed guards, gates, fences and barriers were useless on the night of September 29th. According to the official report:
“Officer noticed several drones (5 or 6) flying over the site. The
drones are circling the 3 unit site inside and outside the Protected
Area. The drones have flashing red and white rights [sic] and are
estimated to be 200 to 300 hundred [sic] feet above the site. It was
reported the drones had spotlights on while approaching the site that
they turned off when they entered the Security Owner Controlled Area.
Drones were first noticed at 20:50 MST and are still over the site as of
21:47 MST. Security Posture was normal, which was changed to elevated
when the drones were noticed.”
The drones departed at 22:30, eighty minutes after they were first
spotted. The security officers estimated that they were over two feet in
diameter. This indicates that they were not simply consumer drones like
the popular DJI Phantom, which have a flight endurance of about half an hour and is about a foot across, but something larger and more capable. The Lockheed Martin Indago, a military-grade quadcopter recently sold to the Swiss Army,
has a flight endurance of about seventy minutes and is more than two
feet across. At several thousand dollars apiece minimum, these are far
less expendable than consumer drones costing a few hundred. All of which
suggests this was not just a prank.
mises | The basic idea of the Great Reset is the same principle that guided
the radical transformations from the French to the Russian and Chinese
Revolutions. It is the idea of constructivist rationalism incorporated
in the state. But projects like the Great Reset leave unanswered the
question of who rules the state. The state itself does not rule. It is
an instrument of power. It is not the abstract state that decides, but
the leaders of specific political parties and of certain social groups.
Earlier totalitarian regimes needed mass executions and concentration
camps to maintain their power. Now, with the help of new technologies,
it is believed, dissenters can easily be identified and marginalized.
The nonconformists will be silenced by disqualifying divergent opinions
as morally despicable.
The 2020 lockdowns possibly offer a preview of how this system works.
The lockdown worked as if it had been orchestrated—and perhaps it was.
As if following a single command,
the leaders of big and small nations—and of different stages of
economic development—implemented almost identical measures. Not only did
many governments act in unison, they also applied these measures with
little regard for the horrific consequences of a global lockdown.
Months of economic stillstand have destroyed the economic basis of
millions of families. Together with social distancing, the lockdown has
produced a mass of people unable to care for themselves. First,
governments destroyed the livelihood, then the politicians showed up as
the savior. The demand for social assistance is no longer limited to
specific groups, but has become a need of the masses.
Once, war was the health of the state. Now
it is fear of disease. What lies ahead is not the apparent coziness of a
benevolent comprehensive welfare state with a guaranteed minimum income
and healthcare and education for all. The lockdown and its consequences
have brought a foretaste of what is to come: a permanent state of fear,
strict behavioral control, massive loss of jobs, and growing dependence
on the state.
With the measures taken in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a
big step to reset the global economy has been made. Without popular
resistance, the end of the pandemic will not mean the end of the
lockdown and social distancing. At the moment, however, the opponents of
the new world order of digital tyranny still have access to the media
and platforms to dissent. Yet the time is running out. The perpetrators
of the new world order have smelled blood. Declaring the coronavirus a
pandemic has come in handy to promote the agenda of their Great Reset.
Only massive opposition can slow down and finally stop the extension of
the power grip of the tyrannical technocracy that is on the rise.
theatlantic | Other researchers with whom I spoke echoed many of the same concerns
about people’s possible resistance to taking a vaccine, especially if
its rollout is botched. To avoid such mistakes, Michele Andrasik and
Chris Beyrer, who are among the leaders of the COVID-19 Prevention
Network, an initiative by the National Institutes of Health, have
already started to test different messages for communicating the
benefits of immunization to the public. As Beyrer told me, early results
indicate that an emphasis on the importance of the vaccine for
revitalizing local communities will be crucial. “A lot of people are
feeling very isolated,” he said, “so we are building a lot around
solidarity: ‘We are all in this together!’”
Because of the
influence of the anti-vaxxer movement, the vaccination rate for measles
has dropped so low in certain areas of the country that children from
Brooklyn to Santa Monica have contracted the potentially
life-threatening disease. It is natural to fear that the same could
happen with the coronavirus. But this ignores the fundamental
differences between the two diseases. “You can’t just take the
anti-vaxxer mentality you see with measles,” Flier told me, “and apply
it to the situation we face with COVID.”
But will enough people get it? What happens if, as the CBS poll suggests, one in five Americans refuses to cooperate?
According to the experts I spoke with, the threshold for herd
immunity for COVID-19 is likely to fall somewhere between 50 and 70
percent of the population. Since about one in 20 Americans is likely to
have suffered from COVID-19 by the time a vaccine becomes available,
this means that somewhere between 45 and 65 percent of the American
population will need to be vaccinated.
In the case of measles,
herd immunity requires an almost total social consensus about the
utility of vaccines. As some children have painfully learned, such near
unanimity is difficult to sustain. But in the case of COVID-19,
anti-vaxxers would have to convert a much larger proportion of Americans
in order to have a similarly devastating impact on our collective
health. Unless one in three—or even one in two—Americans refuses a
vaccine that would allow them to go back out into the world without fear
and protect their loved ones from a deadly pandemic, the U.S. is likely
to reach herd immunity.
Again and again,
the coronavirus has defied expectations about how it is likely to
behave. We would therefore be well advised to reckon with the
possibility that things could once again break against us. Perhaps this
virus is not only uniquely suited to disrupting human civilization but
also unexpectedly adept at beating our attempts to immunize people
against it.
Fist tap Dale | This is a condensed version of the three hour phone call between survivor Maria Farmer & investigative journalist Whitney Webb. I’ve included all of their discussion relating to Mossad, Mega Group, Les Wexner, and Israel. These are the key pieces of information that the mainstream media won’t touch and is in fact complicit in keeping this decades long blackmail operation continuing. Jeffery Epstein was not the head of the snake, he was only mid management and was assigned by Israeli Intelligence to work for Ghislaine Maxwell in the 80’s, who reported to billionaire Zionist Les Wexner.
*Alan Dershowitz decided to yet again attack another Epstein victim smearing Virginia wasn't enough, so he wrote a blast piece accusing Maria Farmer of being a bigoted anti-semite because of this phone call. This is inexcusable- Maria Farmer is a victim of racism by these fake Jewish supremacists INCLUDING Alan "I kept my underwear on" Dershowitz.
She is not the racist, her captors were. She clearly says she knows its not all Jews in this call, she accuses the elite & mafia for what happened to her & her sister & the other victims. This particular EDITED video is only focusing on the Zionist/ Israeli connections in the phone call, but please take the time to hear out the full 3 hour unedited call with Whitney Webb. Maria Farmer isn't the anti-Semite, nor is Whitney Webb. Alan Dershowitz and this band of criminals hiding behind a Jewish identity to get away with their wicked crimes are the anti-semites.
https://www.blacklistednews.com/artic...
I hope you guys listen to the full unedited phone call between Farmer & Webb, because there’s a lot I didn’t include in this video.
Whitney Webb is working on writing a book that covers the intelligence aspects of the story. Keep an eye out for her book in late summer! She’s amazing!
Please feel totally free to re-upload or share this video. I provided a download link because I want to encourage people to expose the criminal Zionist network. The more the REAL story gets out there, the more likely we can bring justice to the victims and put these gangsters away! Wexner, Maxwell, Barak, Netanyahu, Rothschild, Lauder, Bronfman, and Dershowitz are all villains who have been complicit in trafficking children around the world in order to blackmail the political elite to control them for Israel’s agenda. They must be exposed!
For 100 minutes, not a single truth was discussed outside the truth that Abraham Cooper is supremely arrogant about being in a position of strength and control, and very explicitly says as much to the slobbering, grinning, and thoroughly chastened and humiliated negroe "celebrity".
Nick
Cannon's jaws and knees must really, really hurt after a hundred
minutes of grinning, bowing and scraping before this nasty little
Brooklyn mensch.
Finally, isn’t it in the nature of contemporary
culture, with its emphasis on entertainment, consumption, and sex, to be
the perfect environment in which to hide many “Invisible Gorillas”?
Isn’t it a whirlwind of fixations and distractions, replete with untold
numbers of “woke” viewers happy to report that they’ve been
enthusiastically counting passes and have the accurate number? Isn’t it
rather the axiom of our time that, from the idiotic Left to the idiotic
Right, Invisible Gorillas stroll freely and unhindered, laughing and
waving as they go, hidden in plain sight?
bloomberg | A major new study of the relationship between carbon dioxide and
global warming lowers the odds on worst-case climate change scenarios
while also ruling out the most optimistic estimates nations have been
counting on as they attempt to implement the Paris Agreement.
A
group of 25 leading scientists now conclude that catastrophic warming
is almost inevitable if emissions continue at their current rate, even
if there’s less reason to anticipate a totally uninhabitable Earth in
coming centuries. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Reviews of Geophysics,
narrows the answer to a question that’s as old as climate science
itself: How much would the planet warm if humanity doubled the amount of
CO₂ in the atmosphere?
That number, known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” is typically
expressed as a range. The scientists behind this new study have narrowed
the climate-sensitivity window to between 2.6° Celsius and 3.9°C.
That’s smaller than the current range accepted by the United
Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has for
almost a decade used a spread between 1.5°C to 4.5°C—a reading of
climate sensitivity that has changed little since the first major U.S.
climate science assessment in 1979. Improving these estimates is “sort
of the holy grail of climate science,” says Zeke Hausfather, director of
climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and one of the study’s
authors.
Climate
sensitivity is one of the most iconic numbers in climate science, but
it’s not necessarily intuitive. The range isn’t a projection; it’s more
like a speed limit that influences projections. “It informs all the
other things—like 2100 warming projections, for example—that depend on
the sensitivity of our models, and our scenarios,” Hausfather says.
What gave the authors confidence is that three independent
lines of evidence—the modern temperature record, geological evidence,
and the latest Earth systems models—all agreed on the same answer. Kate
Marvel, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies and Columbia University’s applied math and physics department,
also contributed to the new paper. She answered questions for Bloomberg
Green about the scope and meaning of the new work.
What is “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” and why is it so important?
It's
basically answering this question: How hot is it going to get? People
are sometimes really surprised. They’re like, “You guys have one job
like, why do you not know this?”
The number one determinant in how
hot it's going to get is what people are going to do. If we gleefully
burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, it's going to get very hot. If
we get extremely serious about mitigating climate change—cutting our
emissions, moving off fossil fuels, changing a lot about our way of
life—that will have a different impact on the climate. As a physical
scientist, “What are we going to do?” is totally above my pay grade.
variety | “ViacomCBS condemns bigotry of any kind and we categorically denounce
all forms of anti-Semitism. We have spoken with Nick Cannon about an
episode of his podcast ‘Cannon’s Class’ on YouTube, which promoted
hateful speech and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. While we
support ongoing education and dialogue in the fight against bigotry, we
are deeply troubled that Nick has failed to acknowledge or apologize for
perpetuating anti-Semitism, and we are terminating our relationship
with him. We are committed to doing better in our response to incidents
of anti-Semitism, racism, and bigotry. ViacomCBS will have further
announcements on our efforts to combat hate of all kinds,” the company
said.
On Monday, Cannon said on Twitter and Facebook
that he has “no hate in my heart nor malice intentions” and doesn’t
condone hate speech. He also said that he holds himself “accountable for
this moment” and takes full responsibility for his actions.
Late on Tuesday and well into the early hours of Wednesday, the host
began retweeting scores of messages of support from fans, some of whom
condemned ViacomCBS for severing ties with Cannon and expressed concern
for the future of long-running MTV sketch comedy series “Wild ‘N Out,”
which Cannon has hosted since its 2005 debut and recent expansion to
sister network VH1. Cannon also retweeted a number of his critics who
called him the N-word.
I want to clarify
my now deleted tweet. I was not supporting or condoning what Nick
Cannon specifically said, but I had expressed my support of him owning
the content and brand he helped create 🙏🏾
The host has had a relationship with Viacom since he was an actor on
Nickelodeon in the ’90s, and into the 2000s with “Wild ‘N Out.” More
recently, he’s been known as the host of “The Masked Singer” on Fox and hosted “America’s Got Talent” on NBC from 2009-2016. He’s also launching a syndicated daytime talk show in September with Debmar-Mercury.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
WaPo | "We always think, well, we’re never going to have integrated schools
as long as we have such highly segregated neighborhoods," she says. "I
want to point out maybe we’ll never have integrated neighborhoods if we
have segregated schools."
If we found ways to integrate schools — as former District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) controversially proposed two years ago —
that might take some of the exclusivity out of certain neighborhoods.
School quality is capitalized into housing prices, making
those neighborhoods unaffordable to many families. Imagine, for
instance, if all the public schools in the District or the Washington
region were integrated and of comparable quality. Families might pay
more to live in Northwest to be near Rock Creek Park. But you'd see
fewer home-bidding wars there just to access scarce school quality. More
to the point, homes families already paid handsomely to buy might lose
some of their value.
Politically, the two topics that most enrage
voters are threats to property values and local schools. So either of
these ideas — wielding housing policy to affect schools, or school
policy to affect housing — would be tough sells. Especially to anyone
who has secured both the desirable address and a seat in the best kindergarten in town. Parents in Upper Northwest, for instance, deeply opposed the idea of ending neighborhood schools in Washington. And Gray's proposal never came to pass.
But,
Owens says, "I feel more hopeful in studying these issues today than I
did five years ago." At least, she says, we are all now talking more
about inequality and segregation.
NYTimes | In many northern cities, the 1974 United States Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley
killed any hopes of integrating the public schools. That ruling,
involving Detroit and its suburbs, said that a mandatory plan to achieve
integration by busing black children from Detroit across district lines
to mainly white suburbs was unconstitutional. The result accelerated
white flight to the suburbs, leaving the schools in urban centers even
more segregated than they had been.
Most famously, this happened in Boston, where court-ordered integration
resulted in a busing plan that wound up mainly moving children of color
around the city.
But busing had greater success in some places, particularly those where
the plans were carried out countywide, reducing the chances of white
flight. They included Louisville-Jefferson County, Raleigh-Wake County
and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County.
This week’s Retro Report video, “The Battle for Busing,” follows the
story of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which became a national
model for racial integration for 30 years only to resegregate about a
decade ago, after a court ruling lifted the mandatory integration plan.
When the Charlotte busing plan began in 1971, there were whites who
threatened to go to jail before they would let their children attend
schools with blacks. The open racism voiced by whites in the Retro
Report’s archival footage is vicious and ugly; students were injured
when fistfights broke out between whites and blacks.
But by 1974, the district was being singled out in the news media as a
national model, particularly West Charlotte High, which had previously
been all black. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately
at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a
former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking
lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were
renovated.
Over the years, researchers like Prof. Roslyn Mickelson at the
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, conducted studies concluding
that children of any race who attended diverse schools were more likely
to succeed, in areas like graduating, avoiding crime and attending
college.
But in the end, the same federal courts that had ushered in integration helped kill it. In the late 1990s, Judge Robert D. Potter of Federal District Court
essentially said that the Charlotte district had met its constitutional
duty by successfully creating a single school system serving all
children regardless of race and that no more need be done.
In a few years’ time, West Charlotte High, which had been roughly 40
percent black and 60 percent white in the 1970s, became 88 percent black
and 1 percent white. And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Today, nearly
two-thirds of the school districts that had been ordered to desegregate
are no longer required to do so, including Seminole County, Fla. (2006);
Little Rock, Ark. (2007); and Galveston County, Tex. (2009).
The New York City system is more segregated than it was in the 1980s:
half the schools are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. For more
about the nation’s “steady and massive resegregation,” see this Reporter’s Notebook from Retro Report.
This week’s Retro Report is the 10th in our documentary project, which was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report
has a staff of 12 journalists and 6 contributors led by Kyra Darnton.
It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a
thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. The videos are
typically 10 to 12 minutes long.
I was fetching around for a way in which to try and integrate today's dismissals of both BLM and the black political mainstream, with tomorrow's refresher course on American racism and living memory history. Tomorrow is REALLY important. That said, I suspect that even here, short attention span theater predominates - such that a simple succinct six minute turn that Irami Osei Frimpong offered - will have been lost even on my audience.
For sure what has been lost is the fundamental, core living memory experience of racism that shaped my life, largely i'm guessing, because it had little to no impact on any of your lives. What I'm referring to is public school desegregation attempted in the 70's and flatly and legally and politically rejected by white Americans of all socioeconomic and political persuasions.
Kunstler entirely misses this in his haste to blame black folks for their exclusion and alienation from the American mainstream. See, I and a number of my peers, my immediate personal cohort, were among the lucky and durable ones who integrated public and private schools during the 70's, survived, got tough, and thrived, all the while learning everything there is to know about white America.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, don't get me wrong. I'm not crying about anything, I'm not playing a victim card, and I sincerely believe and exemplify the ethos "that which does not kill you". But the simple fact of the matter is, that when white Americans refused to accept integration of public schools and shifted themselves in very dramatic macro-scale fashion in response to the prospective horror of little Cindy Lou sitting next to young Tyrone in the 3rd grade, well..., that kind of set the mold for much of what has followed over the next 50 years.
kunstler | That business was the full participation of Black citizens in
American life. The main grievance now is that Black Americans are still
denied full participation due to “systemic racism.” That’s a dodge. What
actually happened is that Black America opted out and lost itself in a
quandary of its own making with the assistance of their white
dis-enablers, the well intentioned “progressives.”
Let me take you back to the mid-20th century. America had just fought and won a war against manifest evil. The nation styled itself as Leader of the Free World.
That role could not be squared with the rules of Jim Crow apartheid, so
something had to change. The civil rights campaign to undo racial
segregation under law naturally began in the courts in cases such as
Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So-called public accommodations —
hotels, theaters, restaurants, buses, bathrooms, water fountains, etc. —
remained segregated. By the early 1960s, the clamor to end all that
took to the streets under the emerging moral leadership of Martin Luther
King and his credo of non-violent civil disobedience.
Many acts of non-violent street protest were met by police using
fire-hoses, vicious dogs, and batons to terrorize the marchers. This
only shamed and horrified the rest of the nation watching on TV and
actually quickened the formation of a political consensus to end
American apartheid. That culminated in the passage of three major
federal laws: the Public Accommodations Act of 1964, the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Meanwhile, something else was going on among Black Americans: not
everybody believed in Dr. King’s non-violence, and not everybody was so
sure about full participation in American life. Altogether, Black
America remained ambivalent and anxious about all that. That full participation implied
a challenge to compete on common ground. What if it didn’t work out? An
alternate view emerged, personified first by Malcolm X, who called MLK
an “Uncle Tom,” and then by the younger generation, Stokely Carmichael,
the Black Panthers and others retailing various brands of Black Power,
Black Nationalism, and Black Separatism. It amounted, for some, in
declining that invitation to participate fully in American life. “No
thanks. We’ll go our own way.” That sentiment has prevailed ever since.
So, the outcome to all that federal legislation of the 1960s
turned out not to be the clear-cut victory (like World War Two) that
liberals and progressives so breathlessly expected. The civil rights
acts had some startling adverse consequences, too. They swept away much
of the parallel service and professional economy that Blacks had
constructed to get around all the old exclusions of everyday life. With
that went a lot of the Black middle-class, the business owners
especially. In its place, the liberal-and-progressive government
provided “public assistance” — a self-reinforcing poverty generator that
got ever worse, especially in big cities where de-industrialization
started destroying the working-class job base beginning in the 1970s. Fist tap Big Don.
theamericanconservative | Lincoln’s legacy as the Great Emancipator has survived the century and a
half since then largely intact. But there have been cracks in this
image, mostly caused by questioning academics who decried him as an
overt white supremacist. This view eventually entered the mainstream
when Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote misleadingly in her lead essay to the “1619 Project” that Lincoln “opposed black equality.”
Today, we find Lincoln statues desecrated. Neither has the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry,
one of the first all-black units in the Civil War, survived the recent
protests unscathed. To many on the left, history seems like the
succession of one cruelty by the next. And so, justice may only be
served if we scrap the past and start from a blank slate. As a result,
Lincoln’s appeal that we stand upright and enjoy our liberty gets lost
to time.
Ironically, this will only help the cause of
Robert E. Lee—and the modern corporations who rely on cheap, inhumane
labor to keep themselves going.
***
The
main idea driving the “1619 Project” and so much of recent scholarship
is that the United States of America originated in slavery and white
supremacy. These were its true founding ideals. Racism, Hannah-Jones
writes, is in our DNA.
Such arguments don’t make any sense, as the historian Barbara Fields clairvoyantly argued in a groundbreaking essay
from 1990. Why would Virginia planters in the 17th century import black
people purely out of hate? No, Fields countered, the planters were
driven by a real need for dependable workers who would toil on their
cotton, rice, and tobacco fields for little to no pay.
Before black
slaves did this work, white indentured servants had. (An indentured
servant is bound for a number of years to his master, i.e. he can’t pack
up and leave to find a new opportunity elsewhere.)
After
1776 everything changed. Suddenly the new republic claimed that “all
men are created equal”—and yet there were millions of slaves who still
couldn’t enjoy this equality. Racism helped to square our founding
ideals with the brute reality of continued chattel slavery: Black people
simply weren’t men.
But
in the eyes of the Southern slavocracy, the white laboring poor of the
North also weren’t truly human. Such unholy antebellum figures as the
social theorist George Fitzhugh or South Carolina Senator James Henry
Hammond urged
that the condition of slavery be expanded to include poor whites, too.
Their hunger for a cheap, subservient labor source did not stop at black
people, after all.
Always remember Barbara Fields’s
formula: The need for cheap labor comes first; ideologies like white
supremacy only give this bleak reality a spiritual gloss.
The true cause of the Civil War—and it bears constant repeating for all the doubters—was whether slavery would expand its reach or whether “free labor”
would reign supreme. The latter was the dominant ideology of the North:
Free laborers are independent, self-reliant, and eventually achieve
economic security and independence by the sweat of their brow. It’s the
American Dream.
But if that is so, then the Civil War ended in a tie—and its underlying conflict was never really settled.
vox | “What was once peaceful and uncontested is now crowded and adversarial,” Vice President Mike Pence said in an August 2018 address
at the Pentagon announcing initial plans for the force. “It’s not
enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have
American dominance in space. And so we will.”
Bringing that vision to pass has not been easy for the Trump administration.
The executive branch does not have the power to
unilaterally create new branches of the military; the Constitution gives
Congress the sole power “to raise and support armies.” And as Ward has reported,
the White House faced a military that was not in favor of a Space Force
— a former Navy secretary said it was “a solution in search of a
problem,” and then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told
reporters last summer: “The Pentagon is complicated enough. This will
make it more complex, add more boxes to the organization chart.”
In a sort of compromise, rather than delivering on the
administration’s initial grandiose vision for space dominance, Congress
attempted to answer both the White House and Pentagon’s concerns.
“Part of the argument for Space Force was that space was
kind of getting lost within the Air Force, with its focus on air
dominance,” Kaitlyn Johnson, an associate fellow and associate director
of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, told The Verge.
The Space Force, then, will focus just on space — and on
countering Russia and China there — as the Trump administration wanted.
But, in response to military concerns, it will not add a completely new
structure to the Pentagon, housed as it is in the Air Force. (Its
leaders will, however, have the authority to make operational and
training decisions without consulting the Air Force.)
Beyond the creation of a chief of space operations, the
Space Force will give the military a few other new top-level officials,
most notably, assistant secretaries dedicated to developing new
technologies and creating strategies for orbital warfare.
redflag |In
the event of disaster, the response of the rich hasn’t been to work with
others to ensure the collective security of all those affected. It has
been to use all resources at their disposal to protect themselves and
their property. And increasingly, as in New Orleans, this protection has
come in the form of armed violence directed at those less well off –
people whose desperation, they fear, could turn them into a threat.
The
most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading
toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to
keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need
to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and
futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his
annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort ... on the
subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of
investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five
super-wealthy guys ... from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”.
Rushkoff wrote:
“After
a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information
I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with
questions of their own ... Which region will be less affected by the
coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? ... Finally, the CEO of a
brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own
underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over
my security force after the Event?’
“The
Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social
unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that
takes everything down ... They knew armed guards would be required to
protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the
guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from
choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special
combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making
guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.”
There’s
a reason these conversations go on only behind closed doors. If your
plan is to allow the world to spiral towards mass death and destruction
while you retreat to a bunker in the south island of New Zealand or some
other isolated area to live out your days in comfort, protected by
armed guards whose loyalty you maintain by threat of death, you’re
unlikely to win much in the way of public support. Better to keep the
militarised bunker thing on the low-down and keep people thinking that
“we’re all in this together” and if we just install solar panels,
recycle more, ride to work and so on we’ll somehow turn it all around
and march arm in arm towards a happy and sustainable future.
The
rich don’t have to depend only on themselves. Their most powerful, and
well-armed, protector is the capitalist state, which they can rely on to
advance their interests even when those may conflict with the
imperative to preserve some semblance of civilisation. This is where
people like Morrison come in. They’re the ones who have been delegated
the task, as Karl Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, of
“managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. In the context
of climate change, this means taking the steps necessary to ensure the
continued ability of the capitalist class to profit even if the world
may be unravelling into ecological breakdown and social chaos.
There
are three main ways in which Australia and other world powers are
working toward this. First, they’re building their military might –
spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of
destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an
increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal
detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those
deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re
enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and
expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to
help crush dissent at home.
Military
strategists have been awake to the implications of climate change for a
long time. As early as 2003, in a report commissioned by the Pentagon,
US researchers Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall argued that “violence and
disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the
climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are
accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a
desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water
rather than conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The
shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are
most vulnerable and the existing warning signs of security threats”.
DenverPost | Myers suspects the drones might be operated by a private company,
although the machines haven’t targeted any obvious landmarks or features
— sometimes they fly over towns, other times over empty fields.
“They do not seem to be malicious,” Elliott said. “They don’t seem to be doing anything that would indicate criminal activity.”
Vic Moss, a Denver-based commercial photographer, drone pilot and
co-owner of an online drone school called Drone U, said Monday he’d bet
either a company or a government agency is flying the aircraft.
“We have a number of drone companies here in Colorado, and they’re
very innovative,” he said. “So maybe they’re testing something of theirs
out in that area because it is very rural. But everyone that I know of,
they coordinate all that stuff with local authorities to prevent this
very situation. They all very much want people to understand drones and
not cause this kind of hysteria.”
The grid pattern suggests the drone operators might be creating a map
or carrying out a search, Moss said, although he added that some drone
operators will fly at night in order to use infrared cameras, which are
sometimes used in agriculture to examine crops.
He urged people not to try to shoot the drones down, both because
their batteries can cause intense fires and also because shooting a
drone is a federal crime.
“It becomes a self-generating fire that burns until it burns itself
out,” he said. “If you shoot a drone down over your house and it lands
on your house, you might not have a house in 45 minutes.”
Even if the sheriff’s office identified the pilot or pilots of the drones, they’re likely not breaking any laws, Myers said.
“The way Colorado law is written, none of the statutes fit for
harassment or trespassing,” Myers said. “Colorado hasn’t gotten on board
with identifying the airspace around your property as the actual
premises, so we don’t have anything we could charge.”
Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story [Media Notes 119]
-
Was it funny? Yes. Worth watching? I suppose. But it wasn’t the
laugh-out-loud hilarity fest I was hoping for. It wasn’t Duck Soup for the
21st century. ...
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
