The U.S. should drop its' commemoration of Dr. King's birthday because there is no relationship between Dr. King that the Black freedom movement created & violent, warmongering U.S. settler-colonial state. The King birthday is a colonialist expropriation that should be rejected.
— Ajamu Baraka (@ajamubaraka) January 16, 2023
2) Diana Ross' THANK YOU.
3) Robbie Williams' XXV.
4) Diana Ross' THE BOSS.
5) The 1975's BEING FUNNY IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.
6) Chase Rice's THE ALBUM.
7) Diana Ross & The Supremes' REFLECTIONS.
8) George Ezra's GOLD RUSH KID.
9) Diana Ross' FORCE BEHIND THE POWER.
A recent series of stories in New York Magazine headlined “The Year of the Nepo Baby” has struck a chord among those who are being outed for having benefited from insider status. Nepo babies are the children of the rich and famous, the ones who are borne of naked nepotism and whose ubiquity exposes the myth of American meritocracy. Nepo babies can be found everywhere there is power.
The New York Magazine stories have predictably generated defensive responses from nepo babies. Jamie Lee Curtis, actor and daughter of famed Hollywood stars Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, wrote a lengthy post on Instagram defending her status. Although she admitted that she benefitted from her parents’ fame—“I have navigated 44 years with the advantages my associated and reflected fame brought me, I don’t pretend there aren’t any”—she also clapped back at critics, saying she was tired of assumptions that a nepo baby like her “would somehow have no talent whatsoever.” Curtis went further in claiming that the current focus on people like her was “designed to try to diminish and denigrate and hurt.”
Curtis is clearly a talented actor, of that there is no doubt. But, in defending her privilege from critique, she reveals just how deserving she considers herself. It is the converse of imposter syndrome—the insider syndrome.
The act of calling out nepotism doesn’t necessarily imply that nepo babies are not talented. (Nepo babies are sometimes talented—and sometimes not.) It means pointing out that some talented people are able to benefit from family connections and fame that other equally talented people are not able to.
The critique is intended to call out elitism, not “diminish,” “denigrate” or “hurt,” as Curtis accuses journalists of doing. Journalism that exposes power and its corruptive influence among elites punches up, not down. Curtis is hardly a disadvantaged person whose well-being will suffer from such coverage.
-- Sonali Kolhatkar, "Nepo Babies and the Myth of the Meritocracy" (COUNTERPUNCH).
A video showing New York City (NYPD) policemen holding the metro transit fare gates open for several members of the Proud Boys has surfaced on social media, garnering millions of views in the 48-hour period since its posting.
The individual filming the video can be heard questioning the officers’ actions in disbelief, demanding to know if the militia members were being allowed to evade the subway fare by the police.
The video was posted on TikTok on Sunday, and by Tuesday evening it had upwards of a third of a million individual user “likes,” 18,000 comments and 13,000 “shares.” A reposting of the video on Twitter showed 3.4 million more views, along with 13.9 million views of the thread to which it had been attached.
In an example of popular disgust with the collaboration between the police and the political far-right, one commenter wrote, “I’ve literally seen the NYPD chase people [for] fair evasion, this is insane.” Another user added, “cops let their own in.”
The video was filmed after the Proud Boys, along with the ultra-religious, anti-vaccine, anti-LGBTQ Guardians of Divinity, threatened a Drag Queen Story Hour (DSH) event at the Queens Public Library in Jackson Heights on December 29.
Between the two extreme-right organizations, over two dozen members were present at the event, while about 150 counter-demonstrators showed up in protest against the far-right provocateurs. Guardians of Divinity members and Proud Boys hurled slanderous epithets and attempted to intimidate supporters of the event.
-- Jesse Thomas, "Proud Boys, far-right groups terrorize New York City drag event" (WSWS).
Hey --
Monday night.
Let's thank all who participated this edition which includes Dallas and the following:
And what did we come up with?
Mike and the gang did this and we thank them for it.
Peace.
-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.
Last week, John Lee (OZ ARAB MEDIA) noted:
The Iraqi Minister of Oil, Hayan Abdul-Ghani, has announced revenues of more than $115 billion from exporting crude oil for the year 2022.
More than 1,209 billion barrels of crude oil were exported, giving a daily export rate is approximately 3.320 million barrels per day (bpd).
ARABIAN BUSINESS noted, "This is a four-year high following a collapse in prices during the Covid-19 pandemic." But it means nothing for the Iraqi people because the US-installed government in Iraq has never attempted to better the lives of the Iraqi people. Nouri al-Maliki and his family got rich after the 2003 invasion, it was the Iraqi people who struggled. Jobs are nowhere to be found and politicians and officials steal the public monies. There's no investment in infrastructure. There's no investment in the people. That's what The October Revolution was protesting against: corruption that destroyed not just the chances of the young people but the entire country. Iraq is one of the most corrupt countries in the world as ranked by Transparency International. Today, RUDAW reports:
Over a thousand people held a demonstration before the Iraqi finance
ministry on Sunday demanding permanent employment at the Shiite
Endowment Office and their inclusion in the 2023 Iraqi national fiscal
budget.
The protesters, some of whom have been working with the Shiite endowment
by contract for the past 15 years, called on the government to make
their employment permanent.
“We ask for permanent employment. Three generations of the rest of the
directorates have been granted permanent employment, but we have not
been until now,” Ahmad Abdulrahman, who has been working with the office
for the past 13 years, told Rudaw’s Mustafa Goran, calling on Prime
Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani to address their concerns, saying “we
are tired, and we have had enough.”
The total number of those who are contract-based with the Shiite
Endowment Office is around 7,000, working a variety of jobs including
guarding holy shrines, doing media work, cooking, and running
administrative affairs.
This is the third protest of its kind that they have held in the course
of the past two months, but they have not yet received any answer from
the government.
At least three. Last week, RUDAW noted:
At least five people were wounded in Kirkuk on Monday as police applied
force to disperse hundreds of angry demonstrators who protested the lack
of employment by the North Oil Company (NOC) and tried to storm its
headquarters.
A total of 1350 college graduates received a six-month-long training
course by the state-run NOC four years ago, but have not yet been
employed. Of this number, Over 450 of them staged an angry protest on
Monday.
A protester told Rudaw that Baghdad already consented to employ 458 of
the trained graduates, but they were not true to their words and that
they employed other people instead of them.
And Chenar Chalak (RUDAW) reported:
Hundreds of recently graduated teachers who have been working without receiving payments for years gathered in Kirkuk on Wednesday to protest their lack of contractual employment, calling on the Iraqi government to address their concerns.
Iraq’s Education Minister Ibrahim Namis al-Jubouri announced on
Tuesday that the council of ministers has agreed to include teachers of
the graduating class of 2020 in the 2023 budget, granting them
employment by contract. The decision does not include graduates from any
other year, many of whom have been teaching free of charge and without
contracts for years.
“We teach at schools without any privileges… Yesterday evening, a
decision was issued to employ graduates of 2020, we are graduates of
2019, 2021, 2022 and we are still waiting… We have been teaching for
free for two years,” one of the protesters told Rudaw’s Hiwa Hussamadin.
Most graduates resort to teaching for free hoping it would lead to full-time employment.
The protests come as IANS notes, "The Iraqi Ministry of Planning has said that the poverty rate in the country was 25 per cent in 2022, the Iraqi official news agency reported." So oil income is at a four year high for Iraq, the highest since the pandemic started, in fact. More money than in the last four years has come into Iraq from oil revenues. And at the same time poverty has increased -- and they're blaming COVID for the poverty increase?
None of the links about want to talk about it but those living in poverty were estimated, two years ago, to be at 20%. There's been a five-percent increase in the number living in poverty and this has taken place at the same time that oil revenues have hit record highs.
This isn't about COVID, this is about corruption within the government.
[Excerpted from today's Iraq snapshot.]
Christian Toto is a hate merchant who fancies himself a latter day Rona Barrett. If you've never heard of him, we're sorry to drag him into your world. From time to time, NEWSBUSTERS (a right-wing outlet that monitors the media) features his demented scribbles because they love how he hates and who he hates. But even they tend to shy away from some of his most ridiculous opinions (AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER is "anti-human," according to Toto).
Brains were apparently sold separately when Christian Dodo was being put together. That would explain how, when he yet again wrote about Joe Rogan and SPOTIFY two weeks ago and brought up Neil Young (who infamously pulled or 'pulled' his music from SPOTIFY in protest of Joe), he couldn't even mention (because he's so stupid) that Neil's can once again be heard on SPOTIFY.
Topics he chooses to write about are topics he can't even handle.
In Christian Dodo's latest garbage that NEWSBUSTERS chose to highlight (here), he's whining about the news media which, for the record, is not Hollywood.
He's upset that the media is ignoring two huge stories. His idea of 'huge'? Makes us wonder how small he is because the two stories are beyond minor -- if they were male genitalia, they'd be micro penes and they'd be something, at last, that Dodo could write about from an informed perspective.
Actor James Woods (THE WAY WE WERE, AGAINST ALL ODDS, WHITE HOUSE DOWN, VIDEODROME, etc) was censored on Twitter. And Dodo is upset that the whole world has not dropped everything to discuss this. Now if James brings forward the lawsuit he's threatening, it might be news. But right now, James Woods is not the story. The Twitter dumps have been handled poorly by most working them and they're poorly covered by the larger media. So it's not just James being banned in the past that's being ignored. But censorship would be the story when it's covered. Christian Dodo is pouting in his SALVADOR footie-pajamas over nothing.
His other big concern? The news media has ignored Kirk Cameron!!!
Really? Well that would make them like 97% of the country then.
The 52-year-old Kirk Cameron is butt ugly. Not a crime unless your claim to almost-fame is having been a minor teen idol. We've warned since our first year doing these pieces that time was not kind to male teen idols and they were idiots for thinking they could skate forever on their looks.
That's especially true if you were gopher-like teen idol in your day. Yes, even in his hey day, Kirk was gruesome. It's why he never had a career.
He was third-billed on the sitcom GROWING PAINS -- a FAMILY TIES rip-off that ran for seven seasons. Fans discovered it in season two and made season two and season three top ten hits. Like Kirk's looks, it quickly faded. He became an extremist as season three progressed and that led to the show's falling out of the top ten and sinking each season until season seven found GROWING PAINS ranked 75th out of all the broadcast networks' prime time offerings.
He wouldn't do this, he wouldn't do that. He didn't want to speak to this cast member or that (and would invite none to his wedding), he didn't like this actress because she posed in PLAYBOY (God may forgive, but Kirk never does), etc, etc.
He was a joke and deserved to be. GROWING PAINS never became a syndicated hit because he was so off putting he ran off fans of the show.
Michael J. Fox was a star. Kirk is merely the answer to an obscure trivia question.
His Hollywood career ended long ago. No one wants him and it's not because he's a Christian. Being a Christian never hurt Della Reese's career. But Della wasn't a rude asshole screaming and yelling at the grips or taking over the catering table and telling guest actors that the food set out wasn't for them. Kirk was the definition of "little bitch" when working for ABC and his earned reputation ensured that no one would ever say, "Hey, what about Kirk?" in a casting session again -- a real casting session for a real project -- not the vanity crap he does now.
Christian Dodo is upset because Kirk wrote a book -- or, more likely, put his name to it -- and when he went around calling libraries to make appearances, he found they didn't take him or his 'book' seriously.
Nor should they. He's not an author. He has no following. He is a divisive person who hates gay people, who screams "Communism!" when people start discussing how to slow the spread of COVID, etc, etc. Despite all but spitting on a GROWING PAINS co-star because she posed in PLAYBOY, he thought Donald Trump was the epitome of Christianity -- yes, Kirk is that insane. Cheating on his marriage vows, divorcing twice, etc, etc fits Kirk's idea of Christianity which just goes to how insane Kirk Cameron is.
Add to that, libraries are places for readers and Kirk himself has been described as a book burner.
So Kirk had a children's book to sale and he couldn't understand, since he was a minor TV star as late as 1987, libraries wouldn't be thrilled to pimp his latest hateful offering.
And let's be clear what he's marketing: Hate. It's not Christianity. Christianity does not believe the "swamp still needs to be drained" or any of the nutjob beliefs of BRAVE BOOKS and its publisher Trent Talbot. In fact, the news media would be doing a wonderful job if they exposed to the public exactly who Kirk Cameron has hooked up with.
He was a hateful little bitch when he was a teenager. Though the looks have faded, Kirk's managed to hold on to hateful bitch status and he's found others who he can share the hate with.
Building his writing career around the likes of non-entities like Kirk Cameron goes a long way towards explaining why Toto has a niche following at best. And from this tiny corner, he rails against the world. DISNEY's LIGHTYEAR? It was a movie trying to 'groom' kids, according to Christian Toto. That is an insane take and brought to you by a demented mind. Two same-sex characters have a kiss and that has blown whatever was left of Toto's mind.
He doesn't want the world reflected. He wants to shut out what he doesn't believe in and what he refuses to acknowledge. That's why he lives in his crazy world of hate and wastes his time trying to resurrect the career of Kirk Cameron. It's funny how these hate merchants so often claim to be Christians when the teachings of Jesus Christ are never their focus.
The article likens progressive values to being in a cult and details the mothers’ desire to find a “deprogrammer” to jolt their children back to reality.
The mothers were inspired by another story from the New York Post, that of Annabella Rockwell, a pharmaceutical fortune heiress, a rightwing activist, and a Mount Holyoke alumna who claimed that her mother hired a $300/day “deprogrammer” to turn her conservative after college.
“I saw Annabella’s story and my life turned upside down,” said 54-year-old Beth Pensky, whose son and daughter don’t speak to her.
