Category Archives: Viva!

Caught in Your Gaze #memorialday #eagle #haiku – penned in moon dust

 

deep in thought

too many lives to count

wings of gratitude

Source: Caught in Your Gaze #memorialday #eagle #haiku – penned in moon dust

Spend China And Russian Into Submission

Insanity x 100.

In Saner Thought

Since we have bowed out of every nuke deal ever made and China and Russia have stepped up to get in the nuke game….but not to worry the US is willing to spend whatever it takes to crush their rivals in the nuclear arms race….

US arms control negotiator Marshall Billingslea, far from focusing on avoiding an arms race, saying that the US “sure would like to avoid it” but is also willing to spend Russia and China “into oblivion” to win a nuclear arms race.

“The president has made clear that we have a tried and truce practice here. We know how to win these races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion.” This was the go-to US strategy in the Cold War, where the US vastly outpsent the Soviet Union.

With the US scrapping the INF and Open Skies treaties, it seems unlikely to extend…

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White Backlash: A Defining Feature of American History

Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace is shown in this Oct. 19, 1964 photo speaking in Glen Burnie, Md. at a rally supporting Republican presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater. (AP Photo)

The historian Lawrence Glickman has a great essay that very strongly makes the case that white backlash is a defining feature of American history:

There was, then, nothing particularly novel about the constituent elements of white backlash to the civil-rights movement: its smoldering resentment, its belief that the movement was proceeding “too fast,” its demands for emotional and psychological sympathy, and its displacement of African Americans’ struggles with its own claims of grievance.

What is particularly noteworthy is that the white backlash in this case was in place before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. The pattern is this: American reactionary politics is nearly always preemptive, predicting catastrophe and highlighting potential slippery slopes. “White backlash,” after all, got its name in 1963, just months after African Americans in Birmingham risked attacks from police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses in order to demand justice, and immediately after Kennedy mooted the idea of substantive legislation—both events taking place well before the Civil Rights Act became law. What one reporter called “white panic” was driven by fears of “favoritism” and “special privileges” for African Americans—that white “workers would be forced out of their jobs to make way for Negroes,” as one article put it that year, when Jim Crow still prevailed. “Many of my people think the Negroes want to take over the country,” a midwestern Republican politician said in a Wall Street Journal article published on April 10 of the following year, still months before the Act’s passage. “They think there are things in the bill that just aren’t there, like forced sales of housing to Negroes and stuff like that.” White backlashers imagined coercion where it did not exist. They embraced a lexicon and posture of victimization that hearkened back to the era of Reconstruction and anticipated the deceiving, self-pitying MAGA discourse that drives reactionary politics in Donald Trump’s America.

Since reconstruction, many backlash campaigns have imposed a politics of white fragility and frustration onto racial-equality struggles. Reporting on the “hate vote” in The Saturday Evening Post, in October 1964, one month before the presidential election, Ben H. Bagdikian highlighted the “churning, emotional conflict within each voter,” by which he meant white people. He noted that the backlashers “are not against a better life for the Negro, but they are strongly against this being achieved at the cost of white tranquility.” The elevation of “tranquility” over equal justice for all was a hallmark of backlash discourse, which ranked white feelings over black rights.

Backlashers understood civil rights as zero-sum, and therefore treated campaigns for African American equality as an inexcusable undermining of what they saw as deserved white privileges and prerogatives. A New York Times poll revealed, in condensed form, the emotional landscape of the white backlash: “Northern white urbanites have no sympathy for the Negro’s plight, and believe the Civil Rights movement has gone too far, while a considerable percentage believes Negroes ‘don’t appreciate what we’re doing for them.’” The extension of sympathy, such as being in favor of a “better life for the Negro,” was, then, conditional on personal convenience and easily withdrawn. “In general, the persons interviewed were mildly in favor of a better break for Negroes—as long as it wouldn’t affect them personally,” the reporter Dave Allbaugh observed in 1963.

Near the end of the essay, Glickman goes on to show how the backlash narrative spread to other movements, noting that the women’s movement of the 70s faced a backlash before it even really got off the ground. And it seems to me anyway that the resentment at the core of the American right is now manifesting itself in the mask backlash, a particularly stupid and self-immolating form of owning of the libs. But most importantly, these politics are backlash are important because they demonstrate the very real structural limitations to American politics, at least until the distant and quite possibly impossible day when someone figures out how to move white people beyond these politics and into something that looks like class and racial solidarity. The 2016-era myth that the white working class was clearly looking for socialism has been thoroughly debunked by many electoral failures and only true diehards will still espouse it. White supremacy is the single biggest reason why America is such a screwed up country. Not dealing with that head on is a disaster for any attempt to reform or even revolutionize this nation. The more histories of this racism we get, the better.

Lonely But Not Alone #haiku #reflection

penned in moon dust

A Way in the Storm 2012 Moondust Designs


broken by cold
world's storm tears fragile promise
fragrant offering called hope


Are you finding yourself alone in this mixed up world of CoVid 19? Worries swirl about your head for yourself, family, the world.

“This is my comfort in my affliction, For your word has given me life.”

~Psalm 119:50

Hang on to the two words Comfort and Affliction that form a parenthesis around the word and very presence of affliction. Trials and afflictions (doubts and pains) may not be nullified, but they are cushioned by the faithful Word of God.

Please take heart today. He is always there.
Inspired by a fellow blogger’s post: a prayer and a flower.

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Whatever Trump says, Americans are not dying to work – work may cause them to die | Robert Reich | Opinion | The Guardian

the supposed “freedom” to work is a cruel joke when people are forced to choose between putting food on the table or risking their lives. It’s the same perverse ideology that put workers in harm’s way in the dawn of the industrial age, when robber barons demanded workers be “free” to work in dangerous factories 12 hours a day.

In truth, there is no good reason to reopen when the pandemic is still raging: not getting the economy moving again, or workers clamoring to return to work, or the cost of extended income support, or because workers should be “free” to endanger themselves.

Let’s be clear. The pressure to reopen the economy is coming from businesses that want to return to profitability, and from Trump, who wants to run for re-election in an economy that appears to be recovering.

Neither is reason enough.

Source: Whatever Trump says, Americans are not dying to work – work may cause them to die | Robert Reich | Opinion | The Guardian

Wuhan lab had three live bat coronaviruses but none match Covid-19: Chinese state media

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BEIJING (AFP) – The Chinese virology institute in the city where Covid-19 was first detected has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new contagion wreaking chaos across the world, its director has said.

Scientists think Covid-19 – which first emerged in Wuhan and has killed some 340,000 people worldwide – originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.

But the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told state broadcaster CGTN that claims made by US President Donald Trump and others the virus could have leaked from the facility were “pure fabrication”.

In the interview filmed on May 13 but broadcast Saturday night (May 23), Dr Wang Yanyi said the centre has “isolated and obtained some coronaviruses from bats.”

“Now we have three strains of live viruses… But their highest similarity to Sars-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8 per cent,” she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes Covid-19.

One of their research teams, led by Professor Shi Zhengli, has been researching bat coronaviruses since 2004 and focused on the “source tracing of Sars”, the strain behind another virus outbreak nearly two decades ago.

“We know that the whole genome of Sars-CoV-2 is only 80 per cent similar to that of Sars. It’s an obvious difference,” she said.

“So, in Professor Shi’s past research, they didn’t pay attention to such viruses which are less similar to the Sars virus.”

Conspiracy rumours that the biosafety lab was involved in the outbreak swirled online for months before Mr Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the theory into the mainstream by claiming that there is evidence the pathogen came from the institute.

The lab has said it received samples of the then-unknown virus on Dec 30, determined the viral genome sequence on Jan 2 and submitted information on the pathogen to the WHO on Jan 11.

Dr Wang said in the interview that before it received samples in December, their team had never “encountered, researched or kept the virus.”

“In fact, like everyone else, we didn’t even know the virus existed,” she said. “How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?”

The World Health Organisation said Washington had offered no evidence to support the “speculative” claims.

In an interview with Scientific American, Prof Shi said the Sars-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied.

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