#what the GA thinks? like what would they even do? boycott the show? it's the last season anyway 😂

[miharuhebinata]

i genuinely think when if mike/will become canon, yes it'll be a whole big thing, yes there's sure to be homophobic outrage, accusing the show of pandering, bad writing, etc. obviously. there's just simply no way of avoiding that. but in general i think once the idea is planted into the general audience's heads that this is what they were building toward all along (which so far we know is actually 100% true, at least in will's case, like.....lol), once people actually rewatch the whole show with this knowledge, it won't be that big a deal. because once you watch the show through that lense, a lot of things (particularly mike's character, especially throughout seasons 3-4) start to make a lot more sense.

#idk i just feel like people worry too much about the GA's reaction. like if by some miracle it DOES become canon why would the d*ffers care #what the GA thinks? like what would they even do? boycott the show? it's the last season anyway 😂 #........i mean i SAY that. but then i remember spn & i. 😐 you know what let's not talk about that right now. #my point is in the event that they do get together i think more of the GA will come around than most people on here would expect #& if you need proof? literally just look at this whole hsm2 parallel nonsense 😭 #byler #p: the best thing i've ever done #stranger things #st5 #📺 tag #send tweet

[apatheticlexicographer]

psychoanalyzing the stranger things marketing team for fun and profit: “the heart”

(brainrot set in thanks to this post go read it it’s straight facts)

i think i know the strat the marketing team are using here.

in all the merch related to will’s painting and his corresponding speech they’re trying to frame it in a seemingly very platonic way. by having erica there in the new postcard design they’re basically just making it an “oh look these are the characters who play D&D, how fun” type thing. that holds up okay unless you actually watch the goddamn show, even as a GA member, because will’s painting is undeniably romance coded for TWO canon pairings (an “unrequited” pairing is still canon). with that in mind, the forcefully platonic approach in the marketing is so blatantly full of shit it’s kind of funny.

that being said, the people in charge of marketing have a pretty good reason for it, or at least a logical one. they can’t market the painting as a m’leven thing, even if that might be more profitable in the short term (i don’t even know if that’s true these days tbh), because anybody who’s seen the show knows that the entire m’leven approach to it is a straight up lie on will’s part. not even a lie to the audience, either, because we’re fully in the loop with it. it’s only mike and, by extension through his answering monologue, el who believe it. they can’t sell m’leven merchandise that centers around an unresolved lie, that just... doesn’t work. they also doubly can’t market it as a m’leven thing because after s5 people are gonna be pissed if they discover they were being conned into spending their money on merchandise for the opposite ship in the love triangle.

on the other hand, they cant market it as (romantically) byler-centric yet, because that blows the lid way too soon. considering how conservative of an approach (conservative as in moderation not as in boomer politicians) they took to directly indicating byler canon, they don’t want it being confirmed til s5. they dedicated a lot in s4 to m’leven being bones and obscuring mike’s true feelings about either of his love interests, but very little to explicit byler canon indicators (i’m not talking about deep subtext, i’m talking about the implications a GA member can pick up on after one viewing). since it’s clearly a close kept secret that they want to build up to revealing, they aren’t about to show their hand over merch of all things. this is probably both for the shock impact of the reveal and how “groundbreaking” it would be or whatever (which it would) and also to retain the maximum viewer base in the build up to the finale. regardless of how GA opinions are shifting away from m’leven, disliking mike and el doesn’t equate to liking mike and will, and though the show isn’t made for conservatives at allll (now i do mean it in the boomer politician sense lol) there are inevitably a lot of people in the audience who would throw a major tantrum and boycott s5. the duffers’ statement that they’re not going to let what the audience wants influence where they take the story is a major green flag for byler in this respect, but netflix can’t have viewer counts dipping for the finale of their flagship show.

by marketing the painting ambiguously platonically they get to keep the m’levens and homophobes placated because it doesn’t pose any direct threat to them, and keep the bylers and LGBTQ audience engaged because we see through their shit and take it as the byler dub it is.

#byler #byler proof #the gays stay winning #returning to my delulu arc actually it's fun to be insane #byler meta #byler canon #byler analysis #??? #not textual or subtextual analysis but uh. metatextual??? #you're the heart #stranger things

[opedguy]

Orban Tells Truth About Sanctions

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), July 16, 2022.--Hungarian President Viktor Orban, 59, is the first European Union [EU] leader to tell the truth about the U.S. and EU’s sanctions against 69-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin:  They have failed.  Putin worked successfully with the BRICS economic bloc, including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to continue Russian oil sales to everywhere but the U.S. and EU. Putin would like for everyone to buy Russian oil but if he has to, he can certainly limit sales to China and India, the world’s largest oil consumers.  Orban was the first EU leader to confront economic plans that hurt the EU more than it hurt the Kremlin.  Most U.S. and EU elected officials think that the Russian economy suffers more than the U.S. and EU.  Bit with gas prices and inflation soaring, the sanctions backfired.  Biden was so convinced that crippling economic sanctions would Keep Putin from invading Ukraine.

Orban wants the sanctions and Russian oil boycott to end because it fuels the worst inflation in the EU in 20 years.  Orban now thinks that if the economic sanctions are not rolled back, the EU’s economy will crash.  Leave to the U.S. and EU press to know so little about the economy that only punishing Putin made any sense.  “Initially I thought we had only shot ourselves in the foot, but now its is clear that our European economy has shot itself in the lungs, and its is gasping for air,” Orban told the Budapest radio show.  Orban acknowledges that Ukraine needs help but the EU can’t sustain the crippling sanctions applied to Moscow.  Orban says all the U.S. and EU sanctions has done nothing to bring the war to an end, instead has protracted the war in one of battlefield attrition.  Orban is the first EU leader to tell Brussels that something must be done to save the EU economy.

EU officials refused to think for themselves, instead followed the White House like sheep, even when it was clear it was harming the economy.  “The sanctions do not help Ukraine, however, they are bad for the European economy and if it goes on like this, they will kill off the European economy,” Orban said.  “What we see right now is unbearable” asking Brussels for a change.  Five months into the war, it’s clear that in the U.S. and EU economies and on the battlefield, the West has lost the war.  Biden didn’t consider the effects on the world economy from boycotting Russian oil.  Accounting for 10% of the global oil supply, Biden should have known before imposing his boycott the effect on the U.S. and EU.  Mideast oil simply cannot compensate for the lost of Russian oil in the U.S. and EU.  Unlike other elected officials, Orban’s the first high-profile leader to tell the truth.

U.S. and EU officials dismiss Orban as a Moscow apologist.  But the fact  remains that Biden’s reckless sanctions hurt the economies on both sides of the Atlantic.  “The moment of truth must come in Brussels, when leaders admit they have made a miscalculation, that the sanctions policy was based on t wrong assumptions and it must be changed. All Biden has to show for his sanctions is dragging down the U.S. and EU economies, not pushing Russia close to his plans.  When you remove 10% of the world’s oil market to the West, you’re creating shortages and skyrocketing prices, fueling the worst inflation in over 40 years in the U.S.  U.S. press and Democrats all want to blame the inflation on extraneous factors like the pandemic but clearly it’s based on Biden’s Russia oil boycott.  Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia showed he has regrets, especially in approval ratings, for what he’s done.

Both U.S. and EU countries now deal with budget deficits directly related to the Russian oil embargo.  But Biden’s done something far worse to the U.S. and EU than simply applying crippling economic sanctions.  Biden changes the war to a U.S. proxy war against the Russian Federation, telling a horrified world March 26 in Warsaw Poland the Putin should not longer remain as president.  Biden denied completely to his EU colleagues the role he played provoking Putin to invade Ukraine.  Had Biden not armed Ukraine to the teeth to the point that it looked like a puppet U.S. state, Putin wouldn’t of invaded.  Biden rejected all of Putin’s requests for months before the Feb. 24 war to rewrite Ukraine and Eastern Europe security arrangements.  Biden ignored Putin’s requests for months, continuing to arm Kiev.  No one in the EU asked Biden to consider the consequences.

Orban knows that other EU countries like Germany, who bought some 25% of its oil and natural gas from Russia, has been scrambling to figure out what to do.  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, while trying to play good ally to Washington, knows that Biden has overstepped his bounds, expecting the EU to go down with the U.S., creating an economic mess not seen in post-WW II Europe.  Apart from the economic consequences, no one in Brussels has loudly asked Biden to stop his proxy war to topple the Russian government.  Whatever happened in Ukraine, Ukraine’s 45-year-old President Volodymyr Zelensky is all about PR, not about the consequences of the war in Europe and around the globe.  Zelensky asked for a no-fly-zone and troops which would have started WW III on the European Continent.  Zelensky, like Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) says, is all about himself.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[hussyknee]

The latest evidence is a study published last week that finds that 97 percent of fossil data in a major, global database comes from authors based in North America and Western Europe— indicating that scientists from western nations hold a global “monopoly over palaeontological knowledge production.” The authors say it’s a symptom of researchers from those nations “parachuting” into other countries and taking what they find away with them. Once researchers return to their home institutions, their findings are often inaccessible to people from the places where the research was conducted — often the same places where colonizers previously planted their flags without regard for the people who already lived there. Today, that creates barriers for local experts, whose contributions would be huge assets to our understanding of the world. ... Biases in the data Raja-Schoob works with are concerning because that data forms the foundation of scientific predictions about what might happen to corals in the future as the climate changes. The outlook for coral reefs is of particular importance because scientists are racing to save them from being wiped off the planet. Ninety-nine percent of coral reefs around the world are expected to die off in the future if greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels continue unabated. The western bias in the earth sciences does more than skew our knowledge toward certain corners of the planet. According to Aline Ghilardi, one of Raja-Schoob’s co-authors and a paleontologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, it could lead to “the delay or even the impediment of great innovations and discoveries in a scientific field due to the lack of geographically comprehensive data, the plurality of ideas and good local knowledge.” “This power imbalance can also turn many brilliant minds away from science, simply because they were not born in a ‘scientific power center’ or speaking English as their native language,” Ghilardi wrote in an email to The Verge. The abundance of western researchers doing fieldwork in foreign countries can fuel other problems as well. Raja-Schoob points to amber — fossilized tree resin that might encase an insect, lizard, or even a dinosaur tail — as a particularly egregious example. No local Burmese researcher has ever been named in a paper on fossils found in Myanmar amber, Raja-Schoob and colleagues have found in their research. Meanwhile, the purchase of Myanmar amber for paleontological research concentrated overseas is tied to human rights abuses to the extent that some paleontologists have pushed for a boycott ... Katti co-authored a paper in May about decolonizing ecology. It included a map showing that countries in Africa and South America that were formerly colonized by European powers have the most bird species named after European surnames. Today, there’s a whole movement to scrap racist bird names. If successful, up to 150 birds named after people who benefited from slavery might get new monikers. There are also activists pushing for museums to give back the fossils, antiquities, and specimens they’ve collected from the Global South over generations without locals’ consent.

National parks and other “protected areas” are another prevalent example of how the colonial mentality seeps into modern-day conservation efforts, Katti says. These landscapes are typically legally protected from urban development, but usually only after their original inhabitants, who lived there for generations without destroying the landscape, were pushed out.

“We’ve constrained our thinking about ecosystems by thinking of people and nature as separate categories. And I think that’s an exclusive result of the European colonial outlook,” Katti says. To heal old wounds and keep history from repeating itself, Katti’s paper emphasizes honoring local knowledge and expertise. There’s growing research, for instance, on ecosystems that flourish under Indigenous guardianship. .... Improved access might involve repatriating items in museums back to the communities

they were taken from, a movement that’s been picking up steam in places like New York City. Activists have targeted the American Museum of Natural History, for instance, demanding that “human remains, sacred things, and objects of power stolen from Indigenous peoples should be returned.” It’s also important to decolonize the mainstream definition of who is considered an “expert” to make it more inclusive of Indigenous peoples or other local knowledge-keepers, Katti says. They have intimate knowledge of their homelands, even if that isn’t acknowledged with a Phd attached to their names. Scientists like Raja-Schoob also want to see more pathways into academia for people from underrepresented communities. That can happen through more dedicated funding for collaboration between foreign and local researchers, she and Ghilardi write in their paper. “Our current practice is not sustainable and could also be biasing our science,” she says. “We have to learn how to develop ethical collaborations.”

#natural history #ecology #conservation #science #earth science #paleontology #zoology #ocean science #colonialism #racism #indigenous rights #decolonization #global North #global south #knee of huss

[twdmusicboxmystery]

Do you think the GA will accept Beth's return as plausible? I have a feeling a certain dark ship will collectively A) Lose their damn minds and B) Boycott the show. Because we all know, and dark ship included, if she does return Bethyl is going canon! I feel like it already is (Amc episode bios for Still and Alone basically confirmed it) but this would be the real deal. Are you worried that if the dark ship viewers stop watching, the numbers will tank and they'll cancel the spinoff?

The GA and the dark ship are two completely different things. So, will the GA accept it? I think 99% will. Sure, there will be a few who don’t, and there’s always a handful that complain about the death fake out angle. But remember that MOST people were on board with the Bethyl ship. They simply don’t think she survived. Once they realize she’s back, I think they’ll be right back on the wagon. 

The dark ship? Yeah, you’re right. They’re going to throw the biggest online temper tantrums we’ve ever seen. So, we’ll just have to make sure the writers know we’re glad she’s back, and ignore the rest. Remember that, even though they tend to be the loudest, which makes people think they’re a majority, they’re really not. They’re simply the loudest. They’re still a minority, same as TD is right now. 

And no, I’m not at all worried that they’ll change anything. Nicotero famously said they wouldn’t. That they would tell the story they’d set up to tell, no matter what the audience thought. And I think that was aimed chiefly at the dark ship. Perhaps also to those who got really mad over Carl’s death or any other character they loved, but most the dark ship.

And think of it this way. That ship has been railing about their ship for years, now. And the writers have gone out of their way to tell them it’s not happening. If they WERE going to change course based on the dark ship, it would have happened a long time ago. 

So, there’s really nothing to worry about. Xoxo!  ❣️

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusional #team defiance #beth is almost here #bethyl

[tom-hanks-is-bae]

I need some help. Please.

Okay, so this is my baby, Alex

On the morning of August 25, I lost him. This is a hard post to write.

I drove home late Saturday august 24th because he wasn’t doing well (my mom took care of him while I’m at school but I FaceTimed him every single day)

Alex wasn’t eating or pooping, this has happened before but we can usually get him out of it by using pear juice, baby gas drops, tummy massages, critical care and other things. I knew this time was different. We got him to the emergency vet (over an hour away) at around 8:30 PM. He was different this time.

They took an x-Ray and did some bloodwork and found he had a big gas bubble in his tummy. And the bloodwork showed his potassium and proteins were off. His temperature was Also a little low, running 99ish and rabbits should run over 100

They wanted to hospitalize him for 24 hours but I didn’t want to leave my baby. We stayed for a while and they gave him pain meds, he became very sleepy after this, this is the last picture I have of him alive, he was sleeping in my arms

They started an IV drip to hydrate him and hopefully get things moving, there was also pain medication in the drip.

We left him there but got a hotel 5 minutes away. ($120) I slept absolutely none, and called to check on him ever 1-2 hours.

I called at 4am and they tell me his temperature had dropped (96ish) and were planning on starting syringe feeding at 6am if there were no improvements

He didn’t make it to 6

I woke my mother and we went there straight away. We get there about 4:10 and he was in a small room they have for rabbits and it was really warm trying to raise his temp. At this point we’re doing almost everything, there’s one other thing they can do.

A procedure where they sedate him and go in his stomach with a tube and release the gas (which he still had not passed)

I agree to this because it was a last resort, my baby wasn’t eating or using the bathroom. I sat on the floor and held him for a couple minutes before they took him to do the procedure. I remember holding him and putting my head on his and thinking “I hope this isn’t the last time I get to hold him, I have to remember this moment.” And it was the last time I held him alive.

They did the procedure and the vet comes out and says they got a good amount of gas out and he pooped one pellet, I was hopeful. I went back to see him and he was laying on the table, groggy from the sedation. I rubbed him and told him I loved him. I told them about how sweet of a bun he was, how he loved to get under the recliner and thought it was a game, how he just got a scooby doo chair that made him feel like a king.

They took him back to let him rest and I thought he could use it so I went to the waiting room. I’ve questioned and went over 1000 times or more in my head if I did the right thing. Because about 10-20 minutes later the vet comes and tells me Alex has arrested.

My baby. Writing this is beyond hard. I scream, I cry, she leaves and said something about CPR. I run to the back and open a door, I see him on the table and her trying to revive him. The vet tech comes out and tells me she’s doing what she can, I scream, I beg them to save him. He wanted to come home. I screamed I didn’t care about the money, just to help him.

They brought me my limp baby boy in a blanket, brown stuff all over his mouth and I cried and begged him to wake up. He didn’t. My baby was gone and gone too soon.

To you he may be just a rabbit but he was my baby, he helped me through things in ways I never thought he could. I found a love for rabbits, much more then them just being cute, they have personality and he was the best boy, he just wanted to be loved and he was, but I wanted to love him more and more and more and more.

Early in the night we realized the bill was going to be much more than the money we had in our pocket or our bank accounts. So we applied for care credit and were allowed $1,500. The total ended up being a little over 1,600 and we used $200 something from my grandmas credit card that we will have to pay back to her. The whole time I said “it’s okay, Alex has insurance, they’ll cover most of it right?”

WRONG. I got NATIONWIDE exotic pet insurance for emergencies like this and I submitted a claim. They are willing to give us a whopping $279??? So we called to find out the reason, and here’s the gag. They’ll only cover up to a certain amount of $ for a certain issue, so for GI Stasis (which is in simple terms what Alex had but there was other stuff going on) they only cover $140. They have a limit they will pay for each health issue so essentially Alex would have to have been even worse for them to cover more (I don’t remember what the other $139 went to) the exam itself cost $130. So honestly boycott nationwide because not only did they do this but we called the day it happened and told them to cancel the policy because he was deceased and when we called to question the amount, the policy was STILL ACTIVE!

So I’ve got this thing to pay off and if it’s not paid off in 6 months it gains 14% interest, not on what you have left to pay, but on the entire loan amount. Which is almost $200 more. I’m a student and will be doing work study but I can only work 80 hours per semester and will make less than $700 if I did all that. My dad doesn’t work because he has multiple sclerosis (and so do I, yippi! 😕) my mom is picking up every shift she can but we have extra medical bills because I just started a new medication after having a relapse on my old one.

I’ve been in a super depressed state since losing him, not being able to eat, drink, shower, or just generally take care of myself. This bill is a big stressor because I know it’s stressful to my mother as well and I worry about losing her too. I hope this post gets seen by people that would be willing to help me or at least pass this post on so that others could. I would never ask for this if I wasn’t desperate.

I’d do anything to hold my baby again, to tell him how much I love him, get nose kisses and give him treats, I’d pay even more. I’m going to post a couple more pictures of him and then my links to PayPal/cash app/ and Venmo at the bottom if anyone wants to donate to help me. If this gets a lot of attention somehow and I get enough to pay the bill off I will not let people continue to give me money, I will post updates of the care credit balance once i make payments. Here’s my baby:

My paypal: https://www.paypal.me/mikalaalex

Cashapp: $mikalaalex

Venmo: mikalaalex

#bunny #booplesnoot #help #help me pay a bill #paypal #cashapp #venmo #donate #rainbow bridge #please help me #please reblog #if you can donate at least spread this post #my baby #dutch rabbit #emergency #emergency vet #i really need help #im not kidding #depressed #ive been in such a bad state and this bill is just one big reminder

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

I need to vent a minute...

FFS, why the hell can’t people understand why the protests are happening???

This has been building forever! This particular incident is only the trigger, but the  explosives have been added to longer than any of us can remember. Longer than any of us have been alive. And so little has ever been done to try to defuse things. It keeps fucking happening!!!

How long are people supposed to protest politely and accept no one is listening to you? Don’t these people asking “Why?” not understand frustration and rage??? Haven’t they ever wanted to lash out at the world that keeps hurting you and ignoring your pain??**

Police violence and monsterous brutality against people of color, the general abusiveness of power many cops always show, seeing the public as the enemy.... All this has been at best dismissed as a fluke of individuals, at worst ignored entirely. The simple fact is that the basic structures and attitudes wired into law enforcement permits all sorts of horrors.

Alright, I will admit I hate cops. I’m a white, blonde, woman and yet I’ve been on the recieving end of bullying and aggressive behavior. Stupid ones too, but that’s whole other issue. In my experience they seem constantly keyed  up to find some way to get you, seeing everyone as a threat or target, with the ones most vulnerable most likely to see the ugly version of their sense of power.

Cops as bullies isn’t new. Hell, my parents had a black friend in the 1960s that gotten beaten up for walking on the wrong side of the road. (Are you supposed to walk with or against traffic? Was it even a real law? And obviously none of that mattered.)

When my father was tiny in the 1940s his father was in charge of maintenance and security at buildings owner by Boston Edison. When Frank Sinatra performed grandaddy decided to bring Pop along. I dunno why, since Pop was too young to know who the clammy handed shifty eyed skinny guy was, but what happened outside the concert made a much bigger impression. 

Outside the building hordes of bobby sockers swarmed to see their crooner hero. These were teenage girls, many of them young teenagers, and probably mostly if not entirely white...and the cops were abusing them. Decades later, telling me about it, my father would get emotional voice shaking in rage and almost in tears. The girls were being beaten and groped. Girls were knocked to the ground. Billy clubs were being shoved up their skirts by laughing cops. Bleeding and sobbing girls everywhere.

My grandfather was outraged and confonted the cops. These were little girls, he shouted at them. They got aggressive with him, pointing out his authority was only as far as the building but that the sidewalk was theirs.  If he took so much as one step out the door they would treat him the same and arrest him right in front of his little boy....

There is a reason my father and grandfather didn’t like cops, even before the 1960s when the local ones here told them they were on their own to deal with death threats and being shot at. That incident when Pop was four or five traumatized him. He knew the darkness of police.

Now imagine if those hadn’t been white girls and my grandfather had been black. I expected it would have been so much worse. 

But you don’t need personal experience of witnessing brutal cops. You don’t need to have been pushed around by an aggressive cop. You don’t have to encounter a cop that almost openly is trying to find an excuse to nail you for something. You don’t even have to think about the bullies and racists you knew as a kid that became cops. Just watch the damn news! 

 I am constantly suspended between fear and anger about cops.

But all this isn’t just law enforcement. It’s the racism you can find in all the structural systems in society in general.

  “Little” things like a doctor dismissing a patient’s symptoms or my 8th grade science teacher telling some black kids they might as well put their heads down on the desks because they weren’t going to learn anything anyway. Or heck, take something seemingly unimportant, like  entertainment of my childhood where adventure stories would have a token black person and a token woman, but the white dude was ALWAYS the main hero. But the child notices who gets to be the leader.

Imagine a lifetime of that!

You protest. You write letters. You take part in a march and wave signs. You do boycotts. You shout louder and louder.... And it all just keeps happening! You feel like nothing changes!

 Or maybe you end up with a fucker like Trump as president and you can’t help but feel like it is getting worse. A dude that actually endorses armed take over of goverment buildings because folks don’t want to take precautions in an epidemic, but wants to call in the military on largely unarmed black folks protesting getting killed by cops!

All of us were under stress because of Covid-19, but remember people of color are suffering more. They are more likely to die from it and be working jobs that endanger them. And it seems like this has been shrugged off as something inherent in their race, rather than the result of the way racism  has impacted their lives. It has to have added to the emotions. I know it made me angrier!

Will the current unrest inspire postive change? Will it just be a temporary venting with nothing really changing? I dunno. I try to hope.

I won’t be doing a lot of posts on this subject or reblogging things. It isn’t that I don’t care. For me, things I do on Tumblr feel like hollow gestures, If I changed my icon to support Black Lives Matter would it just seem performative, someone trying to get cred for thinking right while doing nothing? I’m holding on my fingernails in my life, and feel guilty for not having the resources and energy to do anything tangible. I will be blogging like usual (when I can keep my internet going!) but raging in the real world.***

**Another admission: I planned how to blow up my high school as a teen. Obviously I never actually did it, and my intent was to blow it up when it was unoccupied on a Sunday, but just the intent held satifaction. I hated that place, what it did to people I knew, and the pain it caused me. The school system as destroyer of souls.  I knew the building wasn’t the cause, but it was the symbol of it. Blowing it up would have felt sooooo GOOD and meant people had to notice the rage no one seemed to see. So believe me, I do get some of the destruction in these protests. Burn a police station or police cars? Yeah, don’t get caught, but fuck yeah!

***I live 50miles from the nearest place with protests and my town doesn’t even have one cop. I’m struggling to make sure I have the cash to get gas, so a road trip is out of the question. My anger is kinda worthless. The animals will get to hear a lot of profanity! LOL

#police #police brutality #race #protests #racism

[deniscollins]

How Companies Learned to Stop Fearing Trump’s Twitter Wrath

What would you do if you were a General Motors executive and President Trump publicly requested that rather than close a plant in Lordstown, Ohio due to business economic reasons the company should reopen the plant or sell it “fast” to someone who would: (1) continue with plans to close the plant, (2) reopen the plant and sell a plant in China or Mexico instead, or (3) sell the plant fast to someone who would reopen it? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Two years ago, some of America’s largest corporations were tearing up their business plans to accommodate President Trump, fearful that he could send their shareholders and customers fleeing with a tweet. Now they have a new strategy: Ignore him.

This week, General Motors became the latest recipient of a barrage of tweets from Mr. Trump, who is angry about the company’s closing of a plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The president told the company to reopen the plant or sell it “fast” to someone who would. He suggested that G.M. shutter a factory in China or Mexico instead.

“What’s going on with General Motors?” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday during a speech at a tank factory in Lima, Ohio. “Get that plant opened or sell it to somebody and they’ll open it.”

G.M. has not budged. After Mr. Trump’s tweets over the weekend, the company issued a terse statement noting that it was relocating workers and that it would be discussing plant closings with the United Auto Workers union. It made no mention of the demands of Mr. Trump. In the past, G.M. has blamed the president’s trade war, including tariffs on steel and aluminum, for raising the company’s costs.

“Companies are balancing political pressure against their own return requirements,” said Philippe Houchois, an automobile sector analyst at Jefferies. “I don’t think they are being swayed.”

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

Early on, Mr. Trump’s ability to direct outrage at companies appeared to work. Before Mr. Trump even took office, Carrier agreed to keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana that it had been planning to move to Mexico. In 2017, Ford canceled plans to build a new factory in Mexico and increased its investment in a self-driving car plant in Michigan. Last year, Pfizer delayed drug price increases at Mr. Trump’s request after he threatened, vaguely, to take action against the industry’s pricing policies.

Mr. Trump’s power over companies started to show signs of slipping last year. After Harley-Davidson announced plans to move some of its production overseas in response to Mr. Trump’s trade war, the president repeatedly blasted the company as disloyal and urged his supporters — many of whom ride motorcycles — to consider a boycott. Harley-Davidson executives acknowledged the president’s disappointment, but pressed ahead with their plans.

Another frequent target, Amazon and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has largely met his criticism with silence. In 2018, the president accused Amazon of pulling a “scam” on the United States Postal Service and convened a task force to come up with ways to overhaul the Postal Service business model that would allow it to charge higher rates.

For some companies, living up to the promises made to Mr. Trump has gotten complicated. Foxconn, the Taiwanese consumer electronics giant, won praise from the president when it announced that it would build a $10 billion television screen production plant in Wisconsin.

In January, Foxconn appeared to hedge on that commitment, suggesting that it was too expensive to build the screens in the United States and that the plant would be less focused on manufacturing than it had initially suggested. After Mr. Trump had a conversation with the chairman of Foxconn last month, the company said that it was moving forward with its plans for the factory, but that only a quarter of the 13,000 people it planned to staff it would be focused on manufacturing.

Despite Mr. Trump’s vast media presence and his popularity among Republicans, he has not demonstrated the ability to do lasting damage to a corporate brand that crosses him.

Mr. Houchois, the Jefferies analyst, said he was not surprised that G.M. was sticking to its plan despite Mr. Trump’s displeasure. Broader economic forces, such as lower gas prices and falling demand for small cars, compelled the company to abandon the Lordstown plant. And Mr. Trump’s metals tariffs, combined with the possibility of more levies on automobiles, have been a drag on the industry and made car companies less inclined to do the president any favors.

“The administration, to some extent, has made their life more difficult,” Mr. Houchois said. “They felt wronged by some decisions, on tariffs for example, so they are less likely to bow to pressure if they don’t think there is a business case.”

#General Motors

[superleeleehipster]

Caryl Speculation S8-9

After the episode last night, and after reading the few interviews Melissa had done for the episode this morning, I kind of felt prompted to speculate about what this season and next season entails for our favorite couple.

This is simply pure speculation under the cut with some SPOILERS from last night and possible spoilers for the future. It’s a bit long (nothing new there XD). I’m sure ppl will agree as well as disagree. Feel free to comment your opinion.

Okay, first of all, I am a die hard Caryl shipper. Just like the lyrics to that 90′s song (can’t remember the name), ‘I will go down with this ship’ b/c it gives me joy and it is something I love being a part of. Now unfortunately we haven’t had many filming spoilers this year b/c much of the filming has happened at the studio, so no one has any clue as to how much Daryl and Carol have filmed together this season. Keeping a few things in mind, I’ve decided there are two outcomes that could happen for our Caryl ship in season 8 and 9. I’ll tell you what the variables are that we have to keep in mind before I say my theories:

A) First thing to think about is what the actors have said about the ship itself. I know quite a few caryl fans were disheartened by Melissa’s comments on one of the interviews last night. Personally, I wasn’t necessarily surprised by what she said, nor does it bother me. You can tell her patience for these kinds of questions are sort of running thin. In fact, you can tell by both actors that these questions are starting to become annoying to answer b/c they really have no answer that would give us 100% satisfaction and stability. Now granted Melissa shows her annoyance more flawlessly than Norman (foot in mouth disease), but you can tell that both are starting to struggle with this question. Keep in mind that both actors have been asked this question arguably since season 2, so 6 years. The first couple of years they were fine with answering, and in fact I’d say those first few years were the years that Norman had the best answers about the Caryl ship. Then the shipping wars happened and they both seemed to become more reserved about answering... then 4 more years of answering the same question over and over again and you’re left with two actors who both seem to be at their wits end about it.

There is only so much you can say after all these years. They have literally said anything and everything you can about the ship without actually flirting that they will go canon, or, “oh hell yeah they’re romantic, and I guarantee they’re gonna fuck in the next episode.” Both actors have said that they’re each other’s person, they do love each other and care deeply for one another. Daryl is the most important person to Carol and vice versa. Both actors have also said that there’s always a possibility of a romance between them. In fact one of my favorite answers that both actors have said before is that it goes beyond romance. The bond is beyond a friendship, a familial relationship, a romantic relationship, which is how I feel about them. They’re the epitome of soulmates in my opinion.

Melissa’s answers last night, I feel, is exactly how both of them feel about these questions. “I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s basically whatever ppl want to see”. In other words, Mel has said practically everything she’s allowed to, but she herself doesn’t know. So what else can she say after all this time? I don’t necessarily think she said Caryl won’t happen, I just got the impression that she just kind of threw her hands up and said, “Look, I’ve said all I can say. I understand ppl ship them and I wish I had a better answer, but I don’t. I’m sorry.”

B) Second thing to keep in mind is AMC and their promoting shenanigans. Now part of me feels like there’s no way Caryl won’t happen this season simply b/c of all the promoting they have done during the pre-season and even the low key promoting during the season so far. I mean, let’s be honest, they have never promoted Caryl this hard before. But another part of me is side eyeing it b/c it coincides with the HUGE rating drop from the season before. So I’m not sure if they’re promoting it simply to get ppl excited and watching TWD again and that’s it, or will they give us more.

We also have to keep in mind that no matter what, there will always be a fraction of the GA that won’t like Caryl going canon. It’s unfortunate to admit, but they know that part of the appeal with Daryl is that he’s the “hot bachelor” of the show. Every show has them, and every network knows that once you pair the hot dude with someone, there’s a good chance not as many ppl will tune in. Same thing with simply shipping a couple. Once they’re together, the show becomes less appealing. It sucks, I don’t like that they’re possibly thinking this way, but it happens all the time. AMC will lose fans no matter what, no matter how small, and right now, they don’t want to lose any more than they got. HOWEVER, it would be a very dumb move on AMC’s part to flirt and promote Caryl and not give us anything. They can’t afford to lose the die hard Carylers, so they HAVE to give us something. 

Now that I’ve bored you all with a bunch of hoopla, I’ll tell you the two scenarios that I’ve been speculating for our Caryl ship:

1) First theory is the less likely of the two. I call this theory my “compromise” theory b/c I feel that its a “meet me halfway” between AMC, Caryl shippers, and the GA who don’t necessarily ship them (Not including the haters/ageists or ABC/D’ers). Whether you ship these two characters or not, you cannot deny the fact that they have an incredible bond with amazing chemistry. Even though we’ve never seen them become romantic, and even though their dialogue has been shit sometimes, Melissa and Norman steal the screen with their natural chemistry. AMC knows that, hence all the promos and the 8x01 hug and the ‘Carol hear’s Daryl’s bike and smirks knowingly’ (I’ll admit, I squealed out loud when I saw that). So what AMC might do is meet us halfway. As in, at the end of the war, Daryl and Carol do live together/near each other, and are always together, but the possible romantic/intimate side of their relationship is never disclosed.

In other words, give what the vast majority of the entire audience wants, which is Caryl scenes, and Caryl hanging out together and just being near each other and happy together. But all the while still keeping Daryl as a lone wolf so that they wouldn’t lose part of the DD fanbase that is all about the “hot bachelor”. In fact, I could see them creating both Daryl and Carol as the lone wolves of their group, and they naturally just stick together after the war but don’t take that final intimate step. B/c, honestly, I do believe that in regards to both Carol and Daryl, it’s either them together, or no one. That’s not a biased Caryl shipper opinion on my part, that’s from a writer’s/character’s perspective. There is no one else Daryl would be able to have a romantic relationship with other than Carol, and vice versa. It just wouldn’t work with anyone else, especially after their similar, harsh backstories.

Now, personally, I think it would be a horrible idea for AMC to dangle Caryl as much as they have without giving us something. And I also think it would be bad taste for them to have them ‘together’ but not intimately together, so my second theory is still not only the better option, but also the more likely option. Season 8 is the perfect time for them to go canon, even if it is by the end of the season. I want more than anything in the world for Daryl and Carol to be a couple, and I think it could be an incredible new character arc for both of them. AND US CARYLERS DESERVE NICE THINGS!!!... ehm... But unfortunately, I have to take into account the ppl who actually write, produce, and run the show... b/c we’re stuck with them and not these beautiful writers I see on tumblr.

2) This is a no brainer, Caryl goes canon by the end of the season. I say “by” b/c I really am not sure how they would go about it. Would they mirror the canon moment like Richonne, where they would have them kiss during 8x10 (like 6x10)? Would they have something happen during the mid season finale to keep people tuned in? Would they have it at the end of the season after the war’s over? I’m just not sure yet b/c the filming spoilers have been sub par at best.

But there are two ideas that I’ve fiddled around with that I like (although to be honest, I like any kind of Caryl canon ideas. I’m not picky AMC!!). The first one is the idea that we see the first steps in Daryl and Carol’s relationship after the war in the season finale (intimate hand holding, a shy first kiss, etc). At the same time, we’ll get flash forwards again, except Rick will see how Daryl and Carol’s relationship has blossomed after all the years that have passed by. Maybe we could see Daryl kissing Carol passionately in front of everyone like it’s no big business, or maybe even a sex scene in the future and showing how confident they both are b/c they’ve made love before (sigh).

Now fair warning on this second idea. I won’t say the spoiler, but I will be hinting at a MAJOR UNCONFIRMED SPOILER in this theory. Again, I won’t blab, but I will refer to it, so skip this paragraph if you don’t even want to hear references to it. Another theory of mine is that Caryl will go canon during the mid season finale b/c there’s a very big event that happens in the mid season finale/premiere. This event (if true) will shock TWD fandom to it’s core, and it’s something that AMC I’m sure knows would cause an uproar (again, if true). It’s so big that I seriously doubt Daryl or Carol will die this season b/c AMC wouldn’t be able to afford it. So for AMC to save face, they might have to give the fans something to cheer for the second half of the season b/c there might possibly be a boycott for TWD after mid season finale... yeah, it’s that bad.

Now like I said above, no matter what, I do believe that Daryl and Carol are soulmates and that they will stick together after the war no matter what. Everyone can agree that they should be together (whether in a platonic way or romantic). To me, just like with what both Mel and Norman have said before, Caryl is beyond a romantic or friendly relationship. You can’t label what they have b/c it’s one of the purest relationships I’ve ever seen on television. It has every type of relationship in one. The only label I would put on them is soulmates, b/c they really are each other’s half. They don’t feel complete without the other, and they feel at ease when they know the other is safe. Both of the actors agree that they’re the most important persons in their character’s lives, as well as the closest.

I know many ppl have gone over this but both Daryl and Carol have shown that they are each other’s exception. Daryl had the same fierce revenge during the 2nd half of season 7 as he does now in season 8. But the only time he was not willing to take an opportunity to kill the saviors was when it put Carol’s life in danger. Vice versa, Carol shooed everyone away from her creeptastic house... everyone except Daryl. He was the only one she invited in, the only one she hugged without hesitation, the only one that was able to make her laugh and smile for the first time in god knows how long. I know we’ve said this before, but 7x10 happened for a reason. It didn’t progress the main story line whatsofuckingever, yet TWD was willing to spend money to give the audience Caryl for basically half of an episode. Gee I wonder why.

I can go on about 7x10 and the significance of it but I’m pretty sure we’ve beaten that dead horse enough.

Does my first theory mean that I’ve lost hope in the Caryl ship? Of course not, it’s just speculation. I know others have said this before me, and I agree, I will not stop the hope for Caryl to go canon until one or both is dead. There is always a chance, and honestly, I think season 8 has the most potential for something to happen between them by the end of it. If one thing gives me comfort, it’s that Gimple does like Caryl. He knows it’s a big ship, and he plants easter eggs for it all the time. So if anything, he may even want Carol and Daryl to go canon too.

Also, after watching last night’s episode, it’s pretty much confirmed to me that Carzekiel isn’t going to happen. The sound of Daryl’s motorcycle gave Carol more joy than any time she was around Zeke. The mere rumbling of the motorcycle caused her to smile like she just got her favorite toy at christmas, despite just being shot at ruthlessly, and the threat of being eaten alive still looming over her. I’m sure Carol and Ezekiel will develop a good, close friendship, but in regards to romantic? I don’t think so.

Anyways, these are my thoughts. I still very much believe that Caryl is endgame, and that season 8 still looks promising to me. I think my first theory is still more likely to happen. Either way, I believe Caryl will wind up living together after the war, and I cannot wait for them to have nothing to stand in their way between them. No matter how intimate they become, they deserve to grieve, to heal, and to finally be happy again. And the happiest I have ever seen these two is when they are together.

Caryl on guys!

#caryl #caryl positivity #twd spoilers #carol peletier #daryl dixon

[southeastasianists]

In the last few weeks, over 400,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled a bloody pogrom in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, crossing into Bangladesh. Among the horrified and largely moralistic reactions in the West, some have pointed to economic factors supposedly behind these events. They are right to highlight the importance of political economy drivers of conflict, but their analysis is disappointingly superficial and crude. This post critiques their approaches and briefly outlines a better one.

Vulgar Marxism 101: land grabs and the Rohingya crisis

The most prominent commentator suggesting economic drivers behind the Rohingya crisis is the renowned geographer Saskia Sassen—whose published work I generally admire greatly. Sassen penned an extremely speculative piecefor The Guardian in January 2017, and another for the Huffington Post in September 2017, linking the conflict to land grabs. In her lengthy January essay, Sassen suggests that the conflict is “generated by military-economic interests, rather than by mostly religious/ethnic issues”. However, she offered no evidence for this proposition except that the government had designated 1.27m hectares of land in Rakhine for agricultural development. “Expelling them from their land is a way of freeing up land and water”, she asserted. Many Myanmar scholars reacted with some scorn on social media.

Undeterred, she rehearses these claims in her latest article, again with precious little evidence supplied—though now she also cites the Chinese port and special economic zone (SEZ) being constructed at Kyaukphyu. She speculates: “the land freed by the radical expulsion of the Rohingya might have become of interest to the military… Religion may be functioning as a veil that military leaders can use to minimize attention on the land-grabbing aspect of this economic development part of their agenda.” Some other scholars penned a similar piece for The Conversation, again offering little concrete evidence but pointing to the oil and gas pipeline connecting Kyaukphyu (though they mistakenly suggest it runs from Sittwe) to western China, and an Indian port development in Sittwe. They conclude: “The government of Myanmar therefore has vested interests in clearing land to prepare for further development”.

One does not need to be a particularly brilliant political economist to recognise that these claims are extraordinarily sloppy. One can simply look at a few maps. Firstly, note the map of Rakhine below, showing the Rohingya population concentrated heavily in a few townships bordering Bangladesh. Then note the second map, showing the latest forced displacement and burning of Rohingya villages, which have been concentrated entirely in these townships. Almost all of the far north of Rakhine has been depopulated of Rohingya, but the centre and south have been relatively unaffected this time around.

Now consider the location of the developments that are supposedly driving this forced displacement. Kyaukphyu is in central Rakhine state, about 120km south of the present crisis. How can a desire to clear land in Kyaukphyu possibly explain the ethnic cleansing of townships located so far away? Sittwe is also about 40km from the nearest violence.

It would be far more plausible to link the present crisis to the shocking announcement, just days into the pogrom, of the state’s intention to establish an SEZ in Maungdaw, at the centre of the recent violence. This certainly deserves investigation, though it is missed entirely in these recent commentaries.

However, this is not just a question of shifting the explanatory weight from one land grab to another. Ultimately, the vulgar Marxism of these accounts does a disservice to political economy analysis more broadly. Attributing complex events like this to “business interests” is crude and reductionist, and can actually explain relatively little. Yes, land grabs have happened across Myanmar to facilitate megaprojects like mines, dams, SEZs, ports and agribusiness plantations, and this has certainly fuelled ethnic conflict. This is well documented by the indefatigable Kevin Woods, whose years of painstaking fieldwork and brilliant scholarship nonetheless goes unacknowledged by these authors. And land grabs, including for the projects cited in these articles, have undoubtedly produced forced displacement in Rakhine state, causing resentment among both Rohingyas and the Buddhist Rakhine, the state’s dominant ethnic group.

But development-induced land grabs simply do not require vast ethnic cleansing displacing 40% of a given population. Nor, crucially, can “business interests” explain why this ethnic cleansing is greeted with indifference or even enthusiasm by the vast majority of Myanmar’s population—even by groups, like the Rakhine, that have themselves been victims of previous land grabs. Nor, crucially, can it explain very similar pogroms in 1977 and 1992, both of which occurred decades before any megaprojects and their associated land grabs.

Towards a better political economy analysis

The only benefit of such crude accounts is that they do prompt us to think about the relationship of sociopolitical conflict to economic factors. This is better than simplistically attributing conflict to “communalism” or “religious intolerance”, as if the problem were solely ideological, lacking any material underpinning—which is never true in reality. But rather than suggesting that the “real” cause is land-grabbing and religion is only a “veil”, it is important to situate sociopolitical conflict within a historically evolving political economy context, in a way that takes social and ideological formations seriously. I can only gesture here at the main lines of analysis one might undertake, but this is still an improvement over the commentary just described.

Buddhist–Muslim conflict over land and resources in what is now Rakhine state is not new. From the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries there were struggles between Muslim empires expanding from the west and the Buddhist Arakan kingdom of Mrauk U, ending only when the area was conquered by the kingdom of Burma in 1785. However, it was British colonialism (1824–1948) that arguably sowed the most important seeds for the contemporary crisis.

Burma was ruled as part of the British Raj, enabling vast inward migration from the Indian subcontinent. The British particularly encouraged Bengalis to migrate to address labour shortages on agricultural plantations. In Akyab district, for instance (present-day Sittwe), from 1871–1911, the Muslim population more than tripled, while the Rakhine population grew by barely a fifth. Understandably, then, the Rakhine have long cultural memories of being “swamped” by “Muslim immigrants”. More broadly, immigration to Burma peaked at 480,000 in 1927, out of a total population of 13 million. By then, ethnic Indians had acquired prominent positions across the Burmese economy, not just as agrarian coolies but also as skilled professionals, merchants and financiers. In the 1930s economic crisis, many farmers indebted to Indian moneylenders defaulted, leading Indians also to become major landlords.

The reaction to this rapid influx was a racially inflected form of economic nationalism which still persists today. This is not entirely dissimilar to the xenophobic nationalism that has sometimes accompanied mass immigration in straitened economic circumstances in many Western countries. There wereanti-Indian riots in 1930–31 and specifically anti-Muslim riots in 1926 and 1938. These were led by the majority ethnic Bamar and did not spread into Rakhine itself. It was not until Britain’s defeat by invading Japanese forces in 1942 that communal violence erupted there, with Rakhine militias exploiting the war to wreak bloody vengeance on their Muslim rivals, prompting tens of thousands to flee into India.

To make matters worse, the British then armed Rohingya volunteer forces, ostensibly to attack the occupying Japanese, but instead these groups often raided Rakhine settlements and Buddhist monasteries and pagodas. These forces also accompanied Britain’s reconquest of Rakhine, after which armed Rakhine groups were forcibly suppressed. Understandably, some of the returning Muslims feared being incorporated into the postcolonial Burmese state, launching a “Mujahit” rebellion to press for the incorporation of northern Rakhine into East Pakistan, prompting counterinsurgency operations by the Burmese army through the 1950s.

An important legacy of this WWII-induced displacement, and the subsequent unrest, is that Muslims gradually returning to Rakhine were thereafter often depicted as “illegal Bengali immigrants”. This complex, unhappy history is what lies behind the subsequent rejection of the Rohingyas—a term used commonly only after Burma’s independence—as one of Myanmar’s 135 official “national races”, and their designation instead as “Bengalis”.

Given the experiences under British colonialism, it is not surprising that, from the outset, popular Burmese nationalism has had a strongly racist flavour, directed in part against those branded kalar—dark-skinned “interlopers” from the Indian subcontinent. The central objective of Burma’s post-independence government was the Burmanisation of the foreign-dominated economy. Recalling the trauma of the 1930s, land was nationalised in 1953, and private lending to farmers banned (a situation that largely persists today), eviscerating the remaining Indian landlord class. Burmanisation culminated in the nationalisation of 15,000 businesses after the 1962 military coup, prompting 125,000 to 300,000 ethnic Indians to flee the country. They followed the more than 400,000 Indians, British and Anglo-Burmese who had already left following decolonization. The post-2011 “969” movement, which encouraged Buddhists to boycott Muslim businesses, is arguably just the latest instantiation of this form of xenophobic economic nationalism.

Colonisation also left a legacy of deep religious trauma. On top of the loss of indigenous sovereignty and the influx of Muslims, the British refused to perform the usual duties of Buddhist kingship, such as appointing abbots, and permitted growing Christian missionary activity, provoking a deep sense of cultural crisis among Buddhists. The restoration of Buddhism became central to Bamar nationalism, and steadily this religion, and Bamar culture, became hegemonic elements of postcolonial nation building efforts, with ethnic and religious minorities being increasingly “othered”.

Today, many ordinary Myanmar Buddhists genuinely believe that—like in colonial times—their religion and culture is under threat from a Muslim demographic “tidal wave”. They often point to countries like Indonesia, formerly home to Buddhist and Hindu empires, as examples of what Myanmar will become without vigorous countermeasures. This has virtually no objective basis: only about 3% of Myanmar’s population is Muslim, while around 89% are Buddhist.

But this fact is irrelevant, since most people nevertheless believe it, following decades of government propaganda, atrocious educational provision, and widespread deference to Buddhist monks, some—though far from all—of whom have promoted virulent Islamophobia. Nor is this fear of being culturally overwhelmed new, or somehow a product of the post-2010 “democratic” transition. Anti-Muslim riots occurred under the previous military regime, in 1997 and 2001, and the notorious Buddhist nationalist monk, Ashin Wirathu, the figurehead of MaBaTha, the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, was jailed for incitement in 2003.

This history explains why there is widespread support today for MaBaTha, for the Protection of Race and Religion Laws (which discriminate against Muslims) and for the ethnic cleansing currently being perpetrated by the Myanmar military. It also explains why, politically, Aung San Suu Kyi has such limited room for manoeuvre—though it must be stressed that she has done virtually nothing to challenge these dangerous myths or to foster intercommunal harmony. Indeed, her own office’s use of the term “Bengali”, her past remarks about “global Muslim power”, and her purging of Muslims from the ranks of NLD parliamentary candidates in 2015, all suggest that she may even personally share anti-Muslim prejudices.

It is the intersection of these material and ideological dynamics that explain the recurrent persecution of the Rohingya and anti-Muslim attacks more generally, rather than a simplistic, short term land-grabbing agenda. Many Muslims were viewed with inherent suspicion due to their association with colonialism and the Mujahit rebellion. After decolonisation, although the term “Rohingya” was used in official circles, they were never formally accepted as one of Burma’s official ethnic groups. Initially, they were allowed to vote, and several were elected to parliament, with one even serving as a junior minister. However, as Bamar Buddhist nationalism intensified, and struggles by ethnic minorities resisting forced homogenisation mounted—prompting the onset of the world’s longest running civil wars—the state became increasingly hostile towards its Muslim population.

In 1962, the army expelled Muslims from its ranks. In 1977, the belief that many “Bengalis” had exploited the state’s weak border controls to cross from East Pakistan/ Bangladesh into Rakhine led the military-backed regime to launch clearance operations ahead of a national census, displacing 200,000 Muslims into Bangladesh. Thereafter, under the new 1982 Citizenship Act, the Rohingyas were gradually stripped of their rights, often finding themselves unable to prove their families’ long-term residency in Burma—thanks in part to the destruction of records in previous rounds of conflict and forced displacement. When, after 1988, the Rohingyas participated prominently in the pro-democracy movement, hoping to recover their rights, they again faced violent suppression, prompting another exodus in 1992, with 250,000 fleeing to Bangladesh.

The position of the Buddhist Rakhine needs special mention here. From their perspective, they have been doubly “victimised”, by a growing “illegal Bengali immigrant” population (even if the Rakhine still outnumber them two to one), and by the Bamar-dominated central government. Rakhine state is Myanmar’s second poorest, and what little development has occurred there has involved either a tiny handful of megaprojects—which create virtually no local employment and whose benefits are monopolised by the regime and foreign investors—or the development of a highly exploitative fisheries industry, with Thai trawlers using quasi-slave labour.

Conditions in Rakhine villages are sometimes scarcely better than those in Rohingya internally-displaced person camps. In conditions of extreme scarcity and economic competition, they profoundly resent the Western focus on the Rohingya, seeing donors as deeply “biased”, which explains violent attacks on aid convoys and protests against donor offices perceived to have slighted Buddhism. The Rakhines have seized the opportunity offered by the post-2010 transition to organise politically, dominating the state assembly. Many have also supported heavy handed military and police action as a long awaited form of redress against their local rivals, and have exploited periods of unrest to seize land used by Rohingyas. However, some have even joined the Rohingyas in exile, reflecting a shared sense of desperation and impoverishment.

It is hardly surprising that these extraordinarily grim conditions have spawned violence among both communities. Rakhine militias organised to attack Muslims during the 1940s, and today three are active, all of which promote “self-determination” in Rakhine but reject the Rohingyas as “Bengalis”. The Rohingyas have also taken up arms periodically, and the only mystery is why the latest armed group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), has taken quite so long to form in the face of such harsh persecution and misery. ARSA’s attacks on police and army outposts—the most recent of which, in late August, triggered the army offensive behind the present refugee crisis—smack heavily of desperation, as men often armed only with catapults and wooden “guns” launch themselves at the security forces.

In short, while simple pecuniary motives can never be entirely discounted, particularly in Myanmar’s borderlands, the political economy underpinning the current Rohingya crisis is far more complicated than is suggested in articles making a few sloppy references to megaprojects and land grabs. Ultimately, like Myanmar’s other ethnic conflicts, it reflects the crisis-ridden nature of the Burmese state since its inception.

Burma was founded with no real meaningful consensus among its population groups over the nature of the state or nation, or the extent of power and resource sharing. Bamar-Buddhist chauvinists, unprepared to make the concessions needed to secure others’ consensual participation in nation-building, have instead sought to impose their vision by force, leading to brutality across the borderlands. However, the Rohingya have suffered particularly harshly because their claim to ethnic-minority status is not even recognised. While the Bamar state seeks to coercively incorporate recognised ethnic minority groups into the Union, it seeks to coercively exclude the unrecognised Rohingya. That is, ultimately, traceable to British colonialism and its legacy.

…………………………

Lee Jones is Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Politics and International Relations. He has written extensively on Myanmar’s political economy, regime transition, experience under sanctions, and relations with China. You can follow him on Twitter at @DrLeeJones.

#Southeast Asia #Burma #Myanmar #Rohingya People #Resources

[brishu]

Everybody’s Heart’s in the Same Fucking Place

My shift at the Park Slope Food Coop is usually the first Saturday of the month (A Week). I am the squad leader for the 8:30 PM Food Processing shift and, for the past 9 years, I have amassed a spotless record of showing up drunk. Sometimes I wonder if a non-shift encounter with any of my squadmates would make them think, “There’s something different about you right now.” Under my drunken helm, nobody’s cut themselves on a cheese slicer or box cutter or tape roll blade. And for the most part nobody’s emerged from the coop’s basement after two and a half hours getting bossed around by a booze-soaked contrarian nursing any grievous emotional injuries. Actually, more often than not, somebody doing a make-up or holding up their end of a shift swap enjoys their time so much that they try to join our squad. 

But this is the Park Slope Food Coop and the self-righteousness is as abundant as the kale. I am not the first grump to notice that some people base their most cherished beliefs on whose approval they gain. Why would you want to brutalize the planet to access natural gas when you can oppose it and feel like you’re marching right alongside Mark Ruffalo? Would you rather your foreign policy views align with the sneering, bomb-happy conservatism of Norman Podhoretz or the serene brilliance of Noam Chomsky? These are obtuse dichotomies, to be sure. So here’s a specific one: I am skeptical of the gun control movement. Less than 10 minutes of research can tell anybody who wants to know that more than 1 million AR-15s get sold each year. For those who might stagger in horror at a number that high, I’d ask you to take a moment and consider some other information that sales figure connotes. Personally, I’m extremely reluctant to demonize that many people I don’t know. Setting aside the implicit interpersonal dynamics lecture and moving from cursory research to wonkier statistics, we can learn that mass shootings account for less than 1% of gun deaths in a given year. In 2017, 39,773 people were killed by guns in America. 23,854 or 60% were suicides, and of the 14,542 or 37% that were homicides, 117 fatalities fit the legal definition of “mass shooting.” If this sounds like I’m trying to minimize the horror inspired by mass shootings in America, it’s because I am. Does this mean I side with gun owners over victims of these atrocities? No, it does not. It means I reject the notion that those are the two sides pitted against each other. And I will assert that fear of losing a loved one in a mass shooting is about as mathematically sound as treating a lottery ticket like a reliable path to wealth. But there’s actual likelihood, and then there’s media-spurred terror. So I’m not exactly raring to see a penstroke turn several million law-abiding citizens into criminals just because an incident I heard about in the news upset me.

Anyway, I only mention this because one time a young guy doing a make-up on my Food Processing shift started lecturing me about the correlation between Scandinavian rights to bear arms (according to him, they have none) and the number of gun-related deaths they suffer there. And yes alcohol was a factor but I got really pissed off at this guy. In retrospect, I should have been patient and respectful as he regurgitated his boilerplate arguments. But I guess I was too busy getting rankled by his presumption that only cretins unworthy of respect could harbor views as indifferent to human suffering as mine, instead of thinking, “Hmm, this guy seems pretty smart and he’s rocking a terrific playlist and everyone on his squad seems to like him a lot so maybe there’s more to his viewpoint than my kneejerk assumptions have led me to believe.” So I unleashed a bunch of other data and upbraided him for being so obtuse that he presumed my suspicions about anti-gun rhetoric amounted to my being a MAGA-head. The basement got tense and I apologized for making things awkward for everyone and changed subjects to talk about movies (whereupon our anti-gun crusading dried mango bagger announced that he was boycotting Miramax’s ouevre. Good for him.). 

For years, our shift occurred the night before the Superbowl and the night before the Oscars and we worked hard to stock the shelves upstairs with enough cheeses, olives, nuts, dried fruits, teas and spices to sate the frenzied consumption that is de rigueur on these particular Sundays. Eventually, A-Week Saturday rotated away and it was up to some other squad to work like Santa’s unpaid elves to meet the demands on Pepper Jack and Brie. But somehow our shift remains on the one Saturday night when I refuse to exert myself (or get shitfaced): Marathon Eve. 

So last year I swapped shifts with someone who liked our squad so much that she joined. My policy is that as long as you show up with some regularity, you’re welcomed warmly on our shift. We care about each other’s families and careers, opinions on matters political and artistic, and general well-being. This is less some sort of management strategy enacted to optimize productivity than a simple extension of the good will I feel toward nearly all people and certainly all Food Processors (even the Pulp Fiction boycotter who pronounces Weinstein incorrectly). Now. At our shift in August, the subject of the coop’s long, tortured debate on carrying Israeli products came up. I love this subject, even though I disagree with almost every other view anybody has on it. I don’t agree with ardent supporters of Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions, and I certainly don’t agree with the ultra-orthodox Jews who consider all criticism of Israel tantamount to Naziism.

My first exposure to this debate was at a General Meeting in the summer of 2012. The meeting was held in the ballroom of Congregation Beth Elohim, of which we are members. People I expected to shoot down anything anti-Israel (because they looked like elderly Jews) stood up passionately decrying coop complicity in Israeli policies they already unwillingly supported by paying taxes. And then some younger people with tattoos and gender fluidity vibes stood up in defense of selling Israeli products. The debate was passionate but civil. I found all arguments convincing and simply loved being in a room among people who cared so deeply about doing the right thing. Ultimately the boycotters advanced their initiative one more rung along the coop’s bureaucracy, and the next General Meeting would include a vote on whether to have a coop-wide referendum to BDS or not to BDS. 

This meeting got so much publicity that the coop needed to rent a larger space, so 1,600 or 10% of all Park Slope Food Coop members filed into the auditorium at Brooklyn Tech. BDS advocates who were not coop members stood outside leafleting attendees, while school buses ferried several minyanim of ultra-orthodox Jews. Unlike this meeting’s predecessor, the tone was not civil and the arguments were not convincing. They were hystrionic pleas that transparently appealed to each speaker’s own moral vanity. Lost in the debate was any consideration for practical details like how much it would cost to stage a coop-wide referendum, or have the BDSers found alternative, morally acceptable sources for vegan marshmallows? And meanwhile, it became very clear, very quickly that the measure to hold a referendum was going to get voted down. So the series of speakers dabbling in petty-demagoguery was a depressing waste of time. 

Two months later, at a meeting I did not attend, the issue came up again, and aroused such anger that a physical altercation occurred. After that, the subject was banned from future General Meetings. While appreciating the moral passion on all sides, my personal view was that people who wanted to boycott should, but they had to acknowledge that other coop members wanted to buy these supposedly blood-soaked products and depriving them of that right felt like some kind of tyranny too. 

Anyway, the tortured history of the debate comes up every now and then and I always love hearing what other people think, and also amplifying my own view that the passions that made the debate inflammatory are part of what makes the coop so special to me. So during our August shift, the woman who had swapped with me on the first Saturday of November, 2018, said with no compunction whatsoever that Israel was guilty of genocide. And despite my inebriation (that night I had done most of my drinking at a dear friend’s surprise 60th birthday party), I was able to express disagreement with this term, and assurance that, whereas many people would hear that and go through a series of internal reactions that would result in antipathy toward the issuer of such a serious charge, I understood that her beliefs were motivated by a desire to do the right thing, whatever that may be. Now she may have thought that I was just another Jew defending the indefensible. And I may have thought she was just another self-righteous ignoramus who prizes wokeness over common sense. But speaking for myself, nobody’s just another anything. In my consumption of online commentary, I see a lot of “[that] tells you all you need to know about her.” And it amazes me that this is an acceptable way to rest your personal case against a person who is always more complex, and usually well-meaning, than you presume when you decide that one view, or one errant phrase is a full representation of another person’s soul. That the practice of basing a holistic view of another person on one political position is so blithely unexamined suggests to me that anxieties underlying our need to close our minds are the real problem. 

I got annoyed with my fellow squad member. In truth I’m still kind of annoyed, both with her, and with the consortium of opinion that sent her forth believing that accusing Israel of genocide is the right thing to do. And it would be more comfortable for me to let my annoyance snowball into full-blown contempt (spurred at some level by the same anxieties which lead to over-eager mind-closing), to tie her incorrect view of my people’s national homeland to the neuroses her parenting has visited on her daughter, even to her insufficient appreciation of my marathon running, all of which are trumped up charges to be sure. Plenty of people would do exactly this, with no real consequence. They’d condemn this person because her version of doing the right thing is in opposition to theirs. Where is the conscience that holds condemnation at bay? 

Either way, while I feel alright about being able to see the light in this person despite my ethyl-clouded mindframe augmenting the shadows cast by her risible political views, I still struggle to find the balance between advancing views I know to be correct with being more of a conduit than a catalyst. And it also feels unfair that I agonize over this stuff only to see significantly less introspective people exert greater influence. But none of that will stop me from getting rip-roaring drunk before my next coop shift.

#Park Slope #Park Slope Food Coop #Coop #Woke #Cancel Culture #Israel #Palestine #Cheese #Food Processing #Alcohol

[putris-et-mulier]

so do you appporve the new arc of captain america, or you find it 'offensive"?

I agree with it, it makes perfect sense and I’m kind of disappointed in how so few people understand what they are trying to do

I’m not defending Marvel, I’m defending Nick Spencer. I believe wholeheartedly in his premise and I want him to get a chance to finish the story, whether he will do a good job or not remains to be seen.

It’s really convenient that everyone remembers when Captain America punched Nazis but not the multiple times he was a Nazi. Which even occurred when the creators were writing his book.

Captain America is not Jewish, he’s America. What he really represents is America as a nation and at his best has been used as a personification of America. He was punching Nazis before real American soldiers ever did and when we look back his creation, along with many others, encouraged Americans to actively take a place in World War II. He was a propaganda tool of social dissent. Sometimes the best way to tell his stories, to put them in perspective to its readers (which were not children, comic books are something everyone read regardless of age and gender and they were up until the Comics Code Authority) is to make him sympathize and work with Nazis. If your protagonist can’t understand something then neither will you and avoiding issues isn’t going to help anyone. If your protagonist doesn’t work things out to the core of the issue it’s a book in an ongoing series and I don’t want this world to get a sequel, I want to just wrap this one up with the best ending possible.

America just elected Trump as president. I could list a bunch of other things but that should sum everything up. In the last few years it’s become clear how infested our nation and government is with white supremacist eugenics and to all of us it seems like everyone who has any humanity left lost and a lot of us, a lot of marginalized groups, can see more clearly how close we are to becoming victims of World War III.

I get it, that’s why you don’t want Captain America to be a Nazi. He’s your unproblematic fave, if you ignore 90% of his cannon, and if he’s going to represent America then he damn sure represent what America was meant to be, what those white able-bodied racist social elites meant for it to be. 

I would be so disappointed if Marvel didn’t allow this pitch to go through. Captain America being a nice guy and punching out people you demonize is not going to teach you anything. And Americans have things to learn. As a nation we need to be taken to school.

It feels like everyone complaining about this has never read anything or has ever seen a movie or TV show or have any grasp on critical thinking… This is art. This is what art is meant to do. If art doesn’t make you mad or sad or furious it’s pointless and un-motivational, especially when it’s sociopolitical. If you aren’t mad enough about the way the world is enough to do something, you need something to put a fire under your ass. Nick Spencer might not be a good enough writer to take this on but we won’t know until he tries and people definitely need to tell this story in as many ways as possible.

Captain America is becoming a Nazi because America is a fascist country and the personification of American propaganda being a Nazi only makes sense. No one actually believes this is permanent, do they? Captain America is going to fix everything in the end and that’s the point. To show him not just grandstanding, as America is want to do, but to show Nazis as actual people with love and fears, they aren’t monsters.

It would be easier if they were monsters because we could eradicate them with no lingering guilt about mass murder. It would be easier if they were monsters because that would mean none of us can turn into one. That’s the lesson that needs to be learned.

Trump didn’t win the popular vote but he got a lot of votes and demonizing the people who voted for him isn’t going to solve anything. We are in this together, they are our neighbors and a part of our American family, even if we fucking hate them. Until everyone stops treating bigotry as a foreign object that can be taken on and off at will nothing is going to improve.

As a disabled person I’m relieved a story like this is being told and that they are pressing forward despite the backlash because a lot of the people complaining have time, but we don’t.

The Nazi party didn’t just spring out of nowhere with the power of political and social support to just get to work on concentration camps. It takes time.

Let’s ask the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum what the initial steps to the Holocaust were:

1. Nazi Germany sterilized 300,000 to 400,000 people under their Sterilization Law (1934) who targeted the “abnormal” (a.k.a., disabled people) as apposed to the “asocials” (non-aryan races) citizens2. The Marriage Law (1935) required all people to provide proof that they could not produce children with disabling heredity diseases3. 1939 Hitler made it legal to give disabled people “mercy deaths” by their physicians as the government saw fit4. Systematic killings of disabled people in government, church, and nursing homes were done under the secret operation called “Operation T4” in reference to Tiergartenstrasse 4.  Patients targeted were identified by a red cross on their papers (hilarious irony)5. In 1940 the preferred method of killing these patients became gas chambers. 70,273 victims were recorded between 1940 and 1941, 5,000 of these disabled people were also Jewish6. In 1941 Operation T-4 ended the killings went public with the slogan “useless eaters” to justify the murders7. It is estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 people were murdered under Operation T-4

8. Many of the gas chambers used in the infamous Nazi camps were originally built for the T-4 victims and physicians trained through this operation went on to work at the camps and run the chambers.

These were social acceptable things that gained the Nazi party popularity and directly, and literally, created concentration camps. If you compare that time to what’s going on now it should be obvious why people like me have no patience for babying anyone.

Right now in North America more and more states/provinces are making assisted medical suicide legal and although it is still the disabled person’s choice whether or not to go through with it insurance companies are beginning to only cover the assisted suicide because it’s cheaper than covering all the costs it takes to be a disabled person. So disabled people are given the choice of slowly dying or just letting someone killed them now. To put it in perspective, it’s a very simple process that you do yourself at home by taking 9g of secobarbital or 10g of pentobarbital. Pentobarbital is disgusting so I doubt that will be the preferred poison but it would’ve been fun to be referred to as a P–10 patient, it’s more fun to say then S–9 patient.

So, given all that and the fact that there was a massive genocide of disabled people last year, a manifesto calling for our eradication and everything, in a first world country and no one talked about it, just like no one talked about any of these things, makes me pro Nazi Captain America. Fuck, it wasn’t even just a genocide, it was very efficiently done because of segregation, the names of the victims weren’t released because outing people as having disabled relatives, even freshly dead ones, would have been embarrassing to the families,  and tokens like flowers/candles/gifts from citizens weren’t allowed to even be put outside the facility on city property.

Give me Nazi Captain America.

I didn’t mention where the genocide happened or what it was named for a reason. If you guys reading this can  tell me off the top of your head at least what country it took place in I don’t give a shit what you think about Captain America being a Nazi. If America isn’t a place where people at least knew when one of our major allies had and honest to God genocide then that’s the Captain America they deserve.

If you’ve heard about Chechnya’s gay concentration camps but haven’t heard about this try thinking about why that is.

No one is learning from history so I hope to God at least a few people can learn through literature and art.

Boycott the company if you like, I’m actually glad people are because I believe boycotts are one of the most effective protests in a capitalist country so the more common the better, but don’t tell me Captain America isn’t a fucking Nazi.

#crowley-crow #abelism #actually disabled #disability #spoonie #Signal Boost™ disability #nazi #captain america #Nazi Captain America #racism #eugenics #world war ii #Genocide #Info

[the-record-columns]

Oct. 2, 2019: Columns

More interesting Kiwanis history...

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

More than a few columns in this space have been prompted by a visit from one person or another to the offices of The Record and Thursday Printing.  Admittedly, the front of our building surely will attract most any person looking for an antique store, and, after a brief apology for nothing being for sale, many a great visit has ensured. 

Some time ago, one of our customers, Terry Nichols with Wilkes Fire Systems, dropped by.  Terry very much enjoys local history and, in the course of our conversation, he asked about any pictures I may have of the Town of North Wilkesboro from earlier times.  Actually, I have a small notebook full of those pictures, thanks to two wonderful ladies, my sister-in-law Pug Welborn, who, in her own way, helped raise me; and Mrs. Elizabeth “Lib” Forester, a truly kind soul who was the go-to person for local history for many, many years.  These two ladies were always willing to dig through their things and find some photo or artifact that would help in any project.

I miss them both a great deal.

I found my notebook of pictures and showed it to Terry, but, while looking, I also uncovered my Kiwanis newsletter notebook which I compiled from the papers of local educator, attorney, and legislator Mr. T.E. Story.  Most of these newsletters are from the 1920’s and early 1930’s, and each one is printed on stationery donated by one of the members to save the club money. So, in addition to the well-written and often humorous newsletters themselves, they also provide a lot of business history for the area. 

In no time, I was flipping through the Kiwanis book, sharing with Terry some of the fascinating things I ran across in putting them together.  The club secretary for many of those years was a man called Bid Williams who was I the insurance business.  In his “thank you” note to the donor of the letterhead and the envelopes, he often injected a gentle dig or a bit of levity; and often added a quote or thought for the day.  “Usefulness is the rent we pay for the space we occupy in this world.  Some of us are way behind on the rent.”  Another favorite is “The poorest man I the world is the man who has a lot to live on and nothing to live for.”

Often in the thank you’s are short plugs for the donor's business.  When it was Marvin Brame's week, the secretary noted that one of Brame Drug Store's famous patent medicines was the “Pain Knocker” which Marvin called, The Great Eliptical Asiatical Panticurial Nervous Cordial that cures all diseases known to humanity and other beasts.” Or from 1924, when J. C. Reins, owner of Reins Brothers Monuments, donated the paper, envelopes and stamps. Bid Williams, the secretary, referred to him as “Tombstone Jim” and noted that he would take your measure, either day or night, living or dead, and promise satisfaction.  A thanks to Ed Turner of J. L. Turner and Son funeral home noted that he “...was a fine and on time undertaker.” adding, “Give him a trial and see where you'll go.  And, while we are I this vein, there is a note on the newsletter of April 10, 1931 thanking Mr. Jr. R. His, President of Turner-White Casket Company for the stationery.  It goes on to say that Jim says his WOODEN OVERCOATS are selling right along in spite of the...“REPRESSION.”

Think about that line a minute.

And I know I have mentioned this one before, but no column that includes any of Kenny's Kiwanis History would be complete without noting that some of the letterheads are as entertaining as the newsletters themselves.  There are several, including Henry Reynolds letterhead which mentions “Kitchen Sinks, Auto Parts, Plumbing Outfits, Steam Rollers, Hot Air Appliances, and, of course, Rat Traps. But the best of all is William Fletcher Absher's clothing store, Absher and Blackburn, noted on a 1828 newsletter as Western North Carolina's Leading Clothier and Haberdasher, followed by the classic line “Anything for sale that can't be found at Nike Smithey's” 

Thanks for stopping by Terry, you're welcome anytime.

Next year in Jerusalem

By AMBASSADOR EARL COX and KATHLEEN COX

Those who are proponents of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel do it under the banner of helping promote social justice for those Arabs who have decided to call themselves Palestinians.  Truth be told, ALL, Jew and Arab alike, who are native to the land of Israel are actually “Palestinians” as this term was coined to describe a region and not a nation or a particular people group. There are no Palestinians in the sense of describing a specific nation just as there is no nation made up of “Western North Carolinians.”  But the world has accepted this lie because It’s been told so many times and everyone knows that what appears in print or is reported on the television must be true!  Let’s pray the reverse is also truth – that truth told often enough becomes recognized and embraced as fact.  That’s the primary goal of the articles appearing in this column.

 BDS campaigns first appeared on the scene following Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.  On the very day Israel was reborn as a nation, this tiny, fledgling country, with no organized military and very few weapons and munitions, was attacked from every side by her Arab neighbors.  Viewed through the lens of human reasoning, an Arab victory was certain.  Before even taking its first breath, the plan was for baby Israel to die.  To everyone’s surprise, Israel crushed the invasion.  Israel proved such a formidable force of resistance that the Arab ran to the U.N. begging them to stop Israel. 

Since war did not destroy the Jews, the Arabs devised a plan to starve them out.  It started as a boycott and, while loosely organized at first, the BDS campaign took shape over the years and spread beyond the Middle East.  The Arab League, a group of Arab countries formed to promote economic health and political unity in the region, is credited with giving traction to the boycott movement.

The modern BDS movement is fueled by those Arabs calling themselves Palestinians and is supported by the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups and, through a very effective propaganda machine, has spread around the world and even infiltrated certain denominations within the Christian community. It’s grown from a boycott of Israeli goods to now include a shunning of Israel’s culture, sports, academic institutions, as well as any services provided by Israel.  As excellent as the Palestinians are at forming and promoting their anti-Israel campaigns, Israel is extremely poor at handling their own public relations.  “Tooting your own horn” is viewed by Israelis as culturally shameful.  This must change.  If the world only knew of the many Israeli products and technological advances used in our cars, homes, hospitals, and businesses, all who engage in BDS would have to return to living cave-man style or admit that they are hypocrite.  

BDS is not a peaceful campaign.  Its leadership legitimizes terrorism and the murder of Jews as ‘legitimate resistance’ claiming Israel is illegally occupying land that belongs to the Palestinians – even though there is not, and has never been, a Palestinian nation. History reveals that the entire land of Israel rightfully belongs to the Jewish people. The Holy Scriptures and modern archeology support this fact.  

Nevertheless, Israel has always had enemies wanting to destroy and wipe the nation from off the face of the earth. BDS is just one of the newer foes that have risen for that purpose, but it will not succeed.  When Jews the world over gather together outside of Israel for weddings or other celebrations, upon departure they always declare to one another, “Next year in Jerusalem!”  

Did you say Bacon?

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

I have come to understand that bacon is more than food. It seems to have the power to drive people to all sorts of levels of human experience.

Did you know that the first meal eaten on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin contained bacon? After landing at the Sea of Tranquility, the two astronauts dined on a meal that consisted of bacon squares, peaches, sugar cookie cubes, a pineapple grapefruit drink and coffee; a tasty meal suited for any hero.  

On any day in the Carolinas, the smell of bacon cooking is enough to bring everyone in the house together, if only for a moment, to secure their portions of the alluring food.

Why do we like the smell and taste so much? From generation to generation, the love of bacon seems to be part of our cultural makeup and we are not alone.  Many parts of the world enjoy their version of a pork cured delight as well.

Some years ago, there was a survey taken in Canada that suggested that more than 40 percent of those surveyed would choose bacon over an intimate moment with a companion. That’s big bacon love if you ask me. Or maybe it’s just one of those surveys that makes you laugh and think at the same time.

I recently attended the N.C. Bacon Festival in Rocky Point. The first year of the festival was delayed due to Hurricane Florence. It was a wet time for everyone in the eastern part of North Carolina. A lot of damage was seen by many; however, when things dried out enough, the festival did take place for one day and attracted around 6,000 people.

In late September 2019, the N.C. Bacon Festival at Old Homestead Farm enjoyed excellent weather, 15,000 attendees, thousands of pounds of bacon and food vendors who added bacon to almost everything they offered.

For those of us who just love the smell of bacon, the bacon scented candles were a big hit.

I asked Festival Director David Crookes why this event was important to Rocky Point. He shared with me some of the challenges of our coastal communities and especially those who have experienced the damage caused from storms in recent years.

A great family-focused festival will attract people and those people will fill up at gas stations, eat at local venues, stay in nearby hotels and in general be beneficial for the local economy.

A unique festival such as this brings people together for a good time and that is what I witnessed. Sure, traffic was a challenge, some of the lines were long, but that’s all part of a successful festival and there were a lot of things for people to do.

It is for the love of bacon and a good time that these 15,000 people came together. If you wanted it, you certainly had the opportunity to indulge in a somewhat salty, smoky flavorful delight, sometimes even covered in chocolate. I talked with people who thought the chocolate covered bacon was the best thing they had ever eaten. Others were purest and did not care for it at all.

That’s the way it goes in the world of bacon. If you don’t like it one way, you will likely enjoy it in another.

Here’s to the N.C. Bacon Festival and all the bacon lovers. May the next year be even better.

To my sweet vegan and vegetarian friends, please go to the watermelon festival. I’m serious. There is a lot of bacon at this festival.

Carl White is the Executive Producer and Host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its 10th year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at noon and My 12. The show also streams on Amazon Prime. For more information visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com. You can email Carl at [email protected]