Tag Archives: OddBox

Trump Administration Says Huawei, Hikvision Backed By Chinese Military

Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Booz Allen Hamilton all controlled by US military via billions of dollars of contracts. Should other nations refuse to do business with them based on similar rationale?

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Trump administration has determined that top Chinese firms, including telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies and video surveillance company Hikvision, are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, laying the groundwork for new U.S. financial sanctions, according to a document seen by Reuters on Wednesday. The list of 20 companies that Washington alleges are backed by the People’s Liberation Army also includes China Mobile Communications Group and China Telecommunications Corp as well as aircraft manufacturer Aviation Industry Corp of China.

The designations were drawn up by the Defense Department, which was mandated by a 1999 law to compile a list of firms “owned or controlled” by the People’s Liberation Army that provide commercial services, manufacture, produce or export. The Pentagon’s designations do not trigger sanctions, but the law says the president may declare a national emergency which would allow him to penalize any companies on the list that operate in the United States.

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Facebook Creates Fact-Checking Exemption for Climate Deniers

Profits from advertising before people, facts, science, survival.

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Facebook is “aiding and abetting the spread of climate misinformation,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University. “They have become the vehicle for climate misinformation, and thus should be held partially responsible for a lack of action on climate change.” From a report: Brulle was reacting to Facebook’s recent decision, made at the request of climate science deniers, to create a giant loophole in its fact-checking program. Last year, Facebook partnered with an organization, Science Feedback, that would bring in teams of Ph.D. climate scientists to evaluate the accuracy of viral content. It was an important expansion of the company’s third-party fact-checking program. But now Facebook has reportedly decided to allow its staffers to overrule the climate scientists and make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it “opinion.”

The organization that requested the change, the CO2 Coalition, is celebrating, E&E news reported on Monday. The group, which has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, says its views on climate change are increasingly ignored by the mainstream media. Now it plans to use Facebook to aggressively push climate misinformation on the public — without having to worry about fact checks from climate scientists. A column published in the Washington Examiner in August 2019 claimed that “climate models” were a “failure” that predicted exponentially more warming of the earth than has occurred. The piece, co-authored by notorious climate science denier Pat Michaels, was quickly shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook. There was just one issue: It wasn’t true. This is exactly the kind of mess that Facebook’s network of independent fact-checkers is supposed to solve.

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Trump Says He Was Dead Serious About Slowing Down ‘Overrated’ Coronavirus Testing

If you don’t weigh yourself, you can’t get fat – F#cking dumb and reckless enabling of thousands of more needless deaths. ksdaa3wt9tbwqtfmstvi.jpg

President Trump told reporters Tuesday that he was absolutely sincere about his intent to reduce covid-19 testing, an incoherent move given the sharp increase in covid-19 cases in several states. Trump first shared his plan during his recent flop of a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, leaving the White House…

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President Creates Law Protecting Racist Hunks of Concrete From Human Constituents

OK that thousands die from ineffective anti-Covid-19 programs but 10 years in prison if you tear down a racist statue? tegwhsmbggjzuhmvedx4.jpg

When I was a child and thought childish thoughts, I believed that the main priority of the President of the United States of America was the welfare of the American people. Now that I am an adult with a fully formed prefrontal cortex, I understand that the POTUS’s main interests are: protecting rich people’s money,…

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Why Are NYPD Cruisers Playing the Ice Cream Truck Jingle?

Editor’s note: This article describes racist imagery and slurs.

In early June, an ice cream truck jingle rang out in Brooklyn, yet it drew no children, produced no soft serve, and evoked no nostalgia. It was midnight, and it came from an unmarked NYPD cruiser.

It was the third night of an 8 p.m. citywide curfew, issued by Mayor Bill de Blasio, ostensibly to curb looting and violence. Despite the order, peaceful protests continued well past 8 p.m. It was around 11 p.m. in the historically Black neighborhood of Crown Heights that police officers descended upon a group of protesters headed home. Sounds from the street brought Taylor, who wished to have his last name redacted, and many of his neighbors to their porches and windows.

“At least six cop cars showed up, and a few dozen cops in full riot gear popped out with their batons and started tackling and aggressively detaining the protesters,” says Taylor. “It was just sheer violence.” He says neighbors broke out in Black Lives Matter chants while the arrests took place, such as the call-and-response “No justice! No peace!” In response, says Taylor, the police taunted the neighbors. “They were yelling back, like, ‘Is that all you got?’”

The cruisers dispersed around midnight, though one unmarked car remained in front of Peter Chinman’s apartment. “They couldn’t start their car, and all the people in the surrounding buildings started really jeering at them,” he says. When they finally got the engine running, however, they made a curious exit. “They drove off giving everyone the middle finger, while playing the ice cream truck song.” A video of their departure taken by a separate witness and posted on social media immediately garnered thousands of likes and comments.

The next night, I heard the jingle as well. At 2 a.m., the unmistakable melody emanated from an N.Y.P.D. cruiser rolling slowly down a Bedford-Stuyvesant thoroughfare framed by housing projects. I returned to the Instagram post to find an outpouring of similar testimony. “They’re playing this in Harlem every night,” read one comment. “This is not an isolated incident,” read another.

So, why are police officers blasting this jingle from their cruisers in predominantly Black neighborhoods? As of the time of publication, the NYPD has refused multiple requests to comment. But with the nation in the midst of a racial reckoning, it may be illuminating to look at the melody’s place at the intersection of ice cream and Black history.

The tune many recognize as “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” first reached American shores with an influx of Scots-Irish immigrants in the 1700s; it was originally a fiddle song called “The Rose Tree.” Early Americans took kindly to the meandering melody, and by the early 1800s it became “Turkey in the Straw,” a playful exploration of rural Appalachian life. The jingle was borrowed again later in the century for an altogether new, and uniquely American form of entertainment: traveling blackface minstrel shows.

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As Theodore R. Johnson writes for NPR, the earworm lost its innocence in the 1820s when it became “Zip Coon.” The song introduced a blackface character of the same name who, after finding freedom and moving into a metropolitan setting, clumsily attempted to fit into white society with fancy clothing and big words. By the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, “Zip Coon” was the most popular song in the United States.

The success of the melody as a vessel for white supremacy hit a fever pitch in 1916 with Harry C. Browne’s “Nigger Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!,” released by Columbia Records. Oddly enough, music of this ilk found a happy home in American ice-cream parlors.

To keep American families entertained while they enjoyed their soft serve with sprinkles, many parlors housed music boxes that played popular songs of the day. Unfortunately, well into the 20th century, that meant minstrel show tunes like “Camptown Races,” “Dixie,” “Jimmy Crack Corn,” and, of course, “Zip Coon.” When ice cream went mobile in the 1920s, newfangled ice cream trucks kept the parlor soundtrack, blaring instrumental versions of the aforementioned hit songs into newly constructed suburban neighborhoods. Thus, the catchiest tune of them all, “Zip Coon,” became simply known as “the ice cream truck jingle.”

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When Johnson’s article went viral in 2014, detractors argued that ice cream trucks were, surely, only playing the innocuous “Turkey in the Straw.” Yet as Johnson points out in a follow-up article, early-20th century sheet music for “Turkey in the Straw” featuring racist imagery proves that “Zip Coon” had made such a splash that even the once-innocent song leaned into its more problematic connotations. As Johnson wrote, “There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people.”

So is the NYPD playing this storied jingle as a joke, by coincidence, or as an obscure dog whistle? A quick survey of officers’ sense of humor suggests it could be the latter.

The NYPD’s challenge coins—small, members-only medallions bearing departmental insignias and slogans—offer a look at both a rich trove of departmental inside jokes and how they view the civilians in their jurisdiction. East Harlem’s 25th Precinct covers several drug-treatment clinics, an area they call “Zombieland.” Queens’ 42nd Precinct depict themselves (“Warriors of the Wasteland”) as muscle-laden vikings beating criminals with spiked bats. A “Justified 4X” coin pays homage to “supercop” Ralph Friedman, who killed four people on duty between 1970 and 1984, one of whom was a burglary victim who called the police for help.

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The department’s impressive grasp on even antiquated racist tropes is public record as well. From displays as conspicuous as wearing blackface while tossing fried chicken and watermelon into a crowd from a Labor Day Parade float in 1998, to more subtle ones like flashing white-supremacy symbols at recent George Floyd protests, many NYPD officers have used an array of blatantly racist imagery. In 2015, a federal monitor tasked with overseeing police reform within the NYPD recommended new training that included “Do not tell or tolerate ethnic, racial, or sexist jokes.”

The ice cream truck jingle’s history is as complicated as it is obscure. And while a look at the NYPD’s historic sense of humor is telling, the officers’ exact motives for playing the song in today’s climate remain uncertain. For the time being, however, we can surely all agree that the jingle is best left to those who actually sell ice cream.

A diary on Occupation : Forbidden Reflection

The ignorance of the Israelis in trying to make a myth about their history and forcing it into a new reality that denies our existence is a mere act of ignorance and panic. And the fact that we Muslims deny the existence of a two or three thousand years of history where Jewish people lived, and that life was under the earth of the modern Jerusalem is also ignorance.

I was listening to some news about the Israelis renewed the attempt to demolish the Mughrabi Gate and the installation of the new bridge, in preparation to create a museum or whatever…under the tunnels… and somehow behind all the political games of occupation and attempts of seizing more control over Jerusalem and AL-Aqsa and everything else. And somehow behind the reality that Israel wants to shake the grounds under the Aqsa. And somehow also that Israel works within a matrix of control as well in the surrounding of the old city, and this attempt would increase the possibilities of seizing the area at any needed time. There lies a good thing behind the current excavations and tunnels that are unveiling what the Israeli calls as the Torah city. And that what disturbs me when I hear our closed circle defense and shallow calls for defending the Place. The fact that there is a Torah city that existed thousands of years ago is only a complement to the greatness and authenticity of this town. The ignorance of the Israelis in trying to make a myth about their history and forcing it into a new reality that denies our existence is a mere act of ignorance and panic. And the fact that we Muslims deny the existence of a two or three thousand years of history where Jewish people lived, and that life was under the earth of the modern Jerusalem is also ignorance.

I really cannot understand that we have to fight against the findings of the city under the current city. It is part of our history as people of this land. It is part of our history of monotheists. It is part of our history as human civilization as well.

And admitting, recognizing, acknowledging, whatever term we might use, the presence of these people (the Israelis) in this land, doesn’t take our rights in it. The Islamic Jerusalem (Christian as well) cannot be denied. It is all there standing up high and proud, and deeply rooted and evolved despite three thousand years of history of various people who lived , resided or existed and continued to live on this land.

Paulo Freire says in the pedagogy of the oppressed: “It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves. It is, therefore, essential that the oppressed wage the struggle to resolve the contradiction in which they are caught; and the opposition will he determined by the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but the man in the process of liberation. If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their aim by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by just changing poles.”

When would it be time, when we rise for who we truly are, and just acknowledge our existence without denial of the others? When we get there, we can end our vicious occupation, or at least can manage it as human beings, not as dehumanized people.

18-4-2012

A diary on Occupation : Feeling Nakba

A day, a month, a year, six decades… of crying over a loss of a land, of a diaspora of a nation, of imprisonment of a population, of occupation…. And yet… we fail to have a single voice for reconciliation … we carry on to a black fog of authority that exists on personal interests and draining every single vein of its people … a mist that certifies.. each single moment the death of Palestine.

Yes… this is Nakba.

I look around and wonder if it is just a foggy day or month or year or decades of my life as a Palestinian … holding up tight within myself waiting desperately for a clear day … just an average day when I will wake up and look at the sky and see it bright. Look at the sun and see it shine…look at the trees, the flowers and watch them moving in their destinies lively dance. Waking up one day to the Palestine I grew up thriving to have… to the Palestinian cause that was injected into our veins. To join the rally of humanity .. to feel normal.. to feel human .. to feel belonging to the human race…

But instead. I wake up not knowing if it is another dusty day .. if the sun that shines in the morning will keep its warmth to the night…

An ugly reality of our lives.. a nation that has been so fragmented when each one of us became a nation of his own. Palestine became a single unit for each. Each one of us has his own Palestine, with its people, its government, its ministers. It is not the Palestine we were raised to have.. it is not the Palestine we thrived to liberate…

It is a Palestine that is injected with egocentric needs and personal interests, and anything else is the enemy…

A day, a month, a year, six decades… of crying over a loss of a land, of a diaspora of a nation, of imprisonment of a population, of occupation…. And yet… we fail to have a single voice for reconciliation … we carry on to a black fog of authority that exists on personal interests and draining every single vein of its people … a mist that certifies.. each single moment the death of Palestine.

Yes… this is Nakba.

17-5-2012

Maybe Journalism Needs a Coup

Would they accept an editorial by head of KKK or American Nazi Party? mafrkqmvzamkmttlzaqu.jpg

On Wednesday, the New York Times Opinion section made the choice to publish an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton that can only be described as a fascist call for the military to crack down on people protesting against police violence and brutality, under the incendiary headline “Send in the Troops.” Earlier that…

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Out of the Darkness

WE get enough negative images around these protests…the violence, brutality and destruction and thanx to a loyal reader Kim we now have some positive images of Americans showing their compassion….thanx Kim. chuq

By Hook Or By Book

Genesee County, Michigan Sheriff Chris Swanson joining protesters.

I know so many of us have been transfixed by the horrifying images over the last few days of violence and destruction, as some peaceful protests have turned into rioting. And then of course there were the lovely images from last night of military police and soldiers firing rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protesters in front of the White House so the “Law and Order President“ and “ally of peaceful protesters” could have a photo-op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. But I’d like to call your attention to some images from around the country that aren’t getting as much attention.

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Camden New Jersey

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Houston, Texas

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Santa Cruz, California

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Coral Gables, Florida

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Ferguson, Missouri

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Fargo, North Dakota

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Kansas City, Missouri

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Black protesters protecting a white police officer who got separated from his unit in Louisville, Kentucky

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Protesters forming a…

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