WORDS OF WISDOM BY JULIE NEWMAR

WINCE-ably WISE WORDS ON ONE’S 84TH BIRTHDAY

1. Say nothing . . . . . often!
2. Integrity is more important than success.
3. Napping is good . . . please avoid glottal excess.
4. Relax your shoulders, shun political activists.
5. Wearing a crown is good for the posture!
6. Do not undress in public! Acquire pink lights for the bathroom.
7. Monitor . . . your delusions of accuracy.
8. Love nature, in spite of what it did to you.
9. Live above your misery, your pathosis doesn’t need another book.
10. Happiness is your best revenge.
11. Happiness is your verifiable root to good health.
12. Savor all pleasure, magnify satisfaction.
13. Rita Hayworth rules.
14. Borrow a garden, mine if you can.
15. Delegate, delegate . . .
16. Is American history unforgiven? so . . . how would you be here?
17. There is no end . . . it’s always the voyage. Enjoy it.

… and from World War II, my favorite lyrics:
“You’ve got to ac-cen-tuate the po-si-tive, E-li-minate the ne-ga-tive,
and latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mister In-Between…”
(Harold Arlen – Johnny Mercer)

DO YOU HAVE ANY PROOF?

i am blogging this post from my friend- BRANDON ANTHONY this morning to show people how prevelent racial profiling is here- even in california- considered to be so liberal.

imagine what middle america must be like- 

So I'm subbing a class in Tarzana today. 

I got over here super early, so I've been parked in the neighborhood working from my car the past hour. A few minutes ago, as I stepped out of my car, a very friendly older white woman sparked up a conversation with me and asked if I lived in the neighborhood.

 When I told her I taught for YogaWorks, she informed me that for the past hour, 

her and 6 other neighbors had been watching me. 

Some from their lawns and others from their windows. 

They were all calling each other back and forth to discuss me sitting 

in my legally parked car minding my business.

 Apparently they've had some break ins and everyone is very nervous. 

She then asked me if I had some kind of "proof" 

that I worked at YogaWorks that I could show her...

just to put her mind at ease....I didn't scream. I didn't curse. 

I calmly explained that I wasn't required to show her anything. 

I didn't commit a crime and she's not the police. 

I then asked her to take some time and think about the fact that she just asked a young black man to show her proof of employment because she was uncomfortable with him parking on her street and wished her the best. 

This is 2016.

-brandon anthony-

ANGELA DAVIS~ 2014~" THE RACIST STATE OF AMERICA"

 Protesters confront police officers following George Zimmerman's acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Photograph: Zhao Hanrong/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Saturday 1 November 2014 06.00 EDT

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Although racist state violence has been a consistent theme in the history of people of African descent in North America, it has become especially noteworthy during the administration of the first African-American president, whose very election was widely interpreted as heralding the advent of a new, postracial era.

The sheer persistence of police killings of black youth contradicts the assumption that these are isolated aberrations. Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brownin Ferguson, Missouri, are only the most widely known of the countless numbers of black people killed by police or vigilantes during the Obama administration. And they, in turn, represent an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extra-legal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan, to contemporary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes.

More than three decades ago Assata Shakur was granted political asylum by Cuba, where she has since lived, studied and worked as a productive member of society. Assata was falsely charged on numerous occasions in the United States during the early 1970s and vilified by the media. It represented her in sexist terms as “the mother hen” of the Black Liberation Army, which in turn was portrayed as a group with insatiably violent proclivities. Placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, she was charged with armed robbery, bank robbery, kidnap, murder, and attempted murder of a policeman. Although she faced 10 separate legal proceedings, and had already been pronounced guilty by the media, all except one of these trials – the case resulting from her capture – concluded in acquittal, hung jury, or dismissal. Under highly questionable circumstances, she was finally convicted of being an accomplice to the murder of a New Jersey state trooper.

Four decades after the original campaign against her, the FBI decided to demonise her once more. Last year, on the 40th anniversary of the New Jersey turnpike shoot-out during which state trooper Werner Foerster was killed, Assata was ceremoniously added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Terrorist list. To many, this move by the FBI was bizarre and incomprehensible, leading to the obvious question: what interest would the FBI have in designating a 66-year-old black woman, who has lived quietly in Cuba for the last three and a half decades, as one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world – sharing space on the list with individuals whose alleged actions have provoked military assaults on Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? 

A partial – perhaps even determining – answer to this question may be discovered in the broadening of the reach of the definition of “terror”, spatially as well as temporally. Following the apartheid South African government’s designation of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as “terrorists”, the term was abundantly applied to US black liberation activists during the late 1960s and early 70s.

President Nixon’s law and order rhetoric entailed the labelling of groups such as the Black Panther party as terrorist, and I myself was similarly identified. But it was not until George W Bush proclaimed a global war on terror in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 that terrorists came to represent the universal enemy of western “democracy”. To retroactively implicate Assata Shakur in a putative contemporary terrorist conspiracy is also to bring those who have inherited her legacy, and who identify with continued struggles against racism and capitalism, under the canopy of “terrorist violence”. Moreover, the historical anti-communism directed at Cuba, where Assata lives, has been dangerously articulated with anti-terrorism. The case of the Cuban 5 is a prime example of this.

This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of 21st-century western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimised the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarisation of local police departments throughout the country. Police departments – including on college and university campuses – have acquired military surplus from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the Department of Defense Excess Property Program. Thus, in response to the recent police killing of Michael Brown, demonstrators challenging racist police violence were confronted by police officers dressed in camouflage uniforms, armed with military weapons, and driving armoured vehicles.

The global response to the police killing of a black teenager in a small midwestern town suggests a growing consciousness regarding the persistence of US racism at a time when it is supposed to be on the decline. Assata’s legacy represents a mandate to broaden and deepen anti-racist struggles. In her autobiography published this year, evoking the black radical tradition of struggle, she asks us to “Carry it on. / Pass it down to the children. /Pass it down. Carry it on … / To Freedom!”

• Angela Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita, history of consciousness and feminist studies, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wrote the foreword for Assata: An Autobiography

READ MORE~

JOHN LYDON SAYS WHAT WE ALL EVENTUALLY SAY IN OUR LIVES...

MYKKI BLANCO~ AWAKE

It has hit me tonight, it has finally pierced my murky american veil of aloofness that the world right now in many places and in many aspects is very, very, very troubled. Perhaps for the first time in my life at age 28 I am able to consciously be aware of the various plights of other nations, perhaps the severity, the shock and absurdity of the state of the world right now is so extreme that I can no longer accept the bohemian lie , the romantic fiction I create for myself as an artist and creative because the security of that fiction is a falsehood I can no longer bear to uphold for my own existential reasons. 

Though ideologically it has come across my mind I truthfully have never had the urge to pursue humanitarian work. I had always hoped in some skewed petit bourgeoise way to one day have a charity of my own or to be successful enough that the needs of my own family could be met and then eclipsed by a generosity that would flow through me as a manifestation of all the good I had achieved for myself. 

Today I feel vain, I feel vain knowing that those who are seeking to protect the rain forests which will inevitably have a final hand in the longevity of human life are being killed by armed militants hired by local governments or much worse indirectly funded by corporations for logging. My heart ache's for all the children globally who know only a life of war, my mind is still for those who cannot love whom they want within their sex or outside of it, the list is innumerable and you could get into endless debates about which is more important, urgent or severe than the other.

 How do I handle this vanity, my life cannot transform overnight to reflect what I wish I could do to aid to really be of aid in times like this, but I do have my little platform, my little voice in a sea of more intelligible voices, even if it was created at first out of a need to be seen, visible, heard, superficially famous, even if my popularity wains and it recedes with time I will still have this space to write to you and to say to you, now more than ever the world needs our compassion, now more than ever we must not live under veils of western aloofness, now more than ever we must choose to be

AWAKE

repost courtesy~ mykki blanco~ nyc/antebellum correspodent

ELIZABETH WARREN TELLS IT LIKE IT IS....

SOCK MY DICK

SNAP!

highlights from the DNC

OCCUPY BLOOMBERG

KEITH OLBERMANN LET'S IT RIP.....

SGT SHAMAR THOMAS OCCUPIES- BIG TIME!

I took an Oath that I live by. am NOT anti-NYPD. I am anti- Police Brutality. I am no longer under  contract with the USMC.
 I was involved in a RIOT in Rutbah, Iraq 2004 and we did NOT treat the Iraqi citizens like they are treating the unarmed civilians in our OWN Country. No one was brutalized because our mission was to 'WIN the hearts and minds.' why should I expect anything less in my OWN Country.
OCCUPY MILITARY

WORD OF THE DAY

photo courtesy- joey grana