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Roaming Charges: Demon Seed

Posted By Jeffrey St. Clair On In articles 2015,Leading Article,Roaming Charges | Comments Disabled

Portland under federal occupation. Photo: Bette Lee.

Der Spiegel: Professor, two weeks ago the world still seemed in order…

Theodor Adorno: Not to me.

+ They came for Portland and Portland didn’t back down in the face of extreme state-sponsored violence. Instead, the resistance grew every night. The Feds got their asses kicked, here and in Seattle. Let’s hope it provides a model for the people of Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, and ABQ.

+ I got the sense from how the invasion of Portland has played out that Trump’s Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time-Gestapo wasn’t prepared for the kind of resistance they might face in Oakland, so now they’re planning to descend on the well-known ANTIFA strongholds of Kansas City, Milwaukee and the ABQ instead…

+ When Trump’s goon squads are finally run out of Portland by unarmed mothers wearing bicycle helmets, medical masks and Birkenstocks, the city’s streets will still be patrolled by an ultra-violent and unaccountable police force that employs Nazi-sympathizers who have repeatedly used tear gas in defiance of city ordinances.

+ Portland Police Bureau General Funds have increased over time, with a sharp spike after timber trust fund Mayor Ted Wheeler took office. The police budget has increased by more than $37 million since Wheeler was elected and would have increased by $52 million without the 3% cut imposed after the death of George Floyd.

+ Oregon Public Broadcasting interviewed 26 protesters in Portland, ranging in age from 17 to 43, who said they believe regular exposure to tear gas has caused irregularities within their menstrual cycle.

+ The Trump Gestapo’s use of flash-bang explosives and concussion grenades in Portland severely agitated the mentally ill people jailed in Multnomah County’s psych ward.

+ Apparently, Trump DHS has been compiling intelligence dossiers on reporters covering the protests in Portland. They used to call them “enemies lists”. Clinton’s paranoid Secretary of Energy, Hazel O’Leary, compiled one on journalists and environmental and anti-nuke activists. I was disappointed not to make it and kept trying harder to infuriate her in my reporting on radioactive malfeasance at the Hanford, Savanah River and Idaho Nuclear Lab sites….

+ The Portland Police Bureau alone has made at least 455 arrests since the mass demonstrations began…

+ Portland Police Bureau Chuck Lovell told City Commissioner Joann Hardesty that, “He did not believe that media had the right to stand and record and document police activity.” Fortunately, a federal court disagreed.

+ A dozen protesters in Portland facing federal charges have been banned from going to “public gatherings” as a condition of their release from jail, a restriction one legal expert described as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.”

+ Trump on Ghislaine Maxwell: “I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.” Meanwhile, his Goon Squads are shooting concussion grenades at unarmed mothers in Portland.

+ Meanwhile, 90 miles south of Portland, in the mill town of Springfield, Oregon…

 

+ Number of murders in the US linked to ANTIFA in the last 25 years: 0.

Number of murders in the US linked to rightwing domestic terrorism since 1994: 329.

+ Blow(er)back in Portland…

+ Border Patrol has already deployed more than 2,174 personnel, 46 aircraft and 2 drones to assist dozens of police departments across the country since June…

+ Trump is threatening to send 75,000 more federal troops into US cities in August and September. Imagine if they sent 75,000 nurses, doctors, testers, or contract tracers, instead?

+ Trump on sending federal goons into Chicago: “I think in their own way, they want us to go in.”

+ This is the same line Trump uses every time he is accused of molesting or raping a woman…

+ In the USA, you’re much more likely to be killed by the very police you called to protect you from the person you thought might kill you….

+ It’s not even August yet and Trump is threatening to postpone the elections. How weird will it get in October?

+ Note: Trump shot out this tweet 15 minutes after the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported a 33% drop in GDP for the second quarter of 2020, the worst performance by the economy in modern history.

+ If I were Ari Fleischer, I’d have ripped that Mission Accomplished banner off of the USS Abraham Lincoln about three seconds after the newly rehabilitated George W. Bush said, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

+ Here’s Stephen Calabresi, a co-founder of the Federalist Society, which has apparently filled its quota of Federalist Society judges, and is now ready to dump Trump: “This latest tweet [on postponing the election] is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”

+ You can’t make it up, you’ve just got to grin and swallow it.

+ Take a breath. Trump can’t send federal goons into an American city, against the wishes of its mayor and governor, and begin snatching people off the street in unmarked vans….

+ To those who say that the Constitution prohibits Trump from delaying the fall elections, consider the fate of the US Post Office, who existence and operation is also inscribed in the Constitution, Article 1 Sec 8. Yet Trump’s killing it, day by day. The “emergency powers” assigned by a Democratic Congress to the president have given Trump the power to do almost anything he wants. Unless someone stops him. Who will?

+ There are no Constitution Cops. Those who are charged with enforcing the Constitution (Bill Barr) are the same ones most eager to shred it. Only a mass movement–Portland coast-to-coast–can defend democracy as we know it or, even better, democracy as we want & need it to function.

+ US Constitution: “I can’t breathe!”

+ Reopen the schools! Don’t open the mail-in ballots!

+ To update Emma Goldman: “If voting by mail changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

+ Mail-in voter fraud rate over the last 20 years: .00006%.

+ Now the NYPD is disappearing protesters right under Bill DeBlasio’s complicit nose…

+ Pro Publica has published a database listing active-duty officers who’ve had at least one allegation against them substantiated by the CCRB: That’s about 4,000 officers out of the NYPD’s 36,000-member force.

+ Police agencies are refusing to work the Democratic convention if they’re not allowed to tear gas people…

+ The United States now has the highest number of COVID19 deaths per day of any country in the world since the outbreak began: 1054.7, closing in on one death every minute since early May.

+ Coronavirus cases are rising in 48 places across the U.S., according to analysis by NPR analysis. Here’s how much cases are up compared to just 2 weeks ago:

Puerto Rico: +126%
North Dakota: +122%
Montana: +112%
Kentucky: +102%
Missouri: +92%

+ One of those deaths was Herman Cain. Cain’s last public appearance was as one of the unmasked surrogates at Trump’s June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where at least eight Trump advance team staffers tested positive for coronavirus.

+ There are two things that we should always remember about Herman Cain: first, he died of a disease he spent months telling others was harmless; second, his xenophobia was so pathological that he wanted to electrocute immigrants on the southern border.

+ Trump’s Tulsa event was an act of political theatre, designed to promote unsafe behavior. If the USA had a functional contact tracing program, we might be able to track the train of negligent homicides, finding out who gave COVID-19 to Herman Cain and who Cain gave COVID-19 to…

+ We know why Herman Cain, and many others, got sick and died after attending an anti-science rally encouraging people to take lethal risks for the benefit of corporate America. We won’t know the names of the thousands of people who have and will continue to die because of the anti-science policies of both parties that have ignited a lethal climate for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry and the banks and corporations that feed off of it.

+ Then there’s Bill Montgomery, founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative group supporting Trump, who just died from the coronavirus. Montgomery introduced Trump at a crowded and largely unmasked rally in Phoenix in June….

+ Multiple Republican Congressional aids report that they are forced to work without masks….No wonder Congress exempted itself from OSHA.

+ Similarly, no email was sent out informing NSC staff that their boss, Robert O’Brien, had tested positive for coronavirus. He abruptly left the office last Thursday. Several found out from press reports…

+ Speaking of schools reopening, O’Brien reportedly contracted the virus from his daughter.

+ Hermiston is an agricultural town on the Columbia Plateau in eastern Oregon. Random testing of local residents by Oregon State University revealed that as much as 17% of the city may be infected with COVID-19, or about 3,000 active infections in a city of about 18,000 residents.

+ All of Europe, including eastern Europe and Russia, reported about the same name number of Covid-19 deaths on Thursday (347) as the state of Texas (322). Why does the “ChinaVirus” hate us?

+ Someday it will disappear…(the testing, he meant.)

+ Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,  Redux, wherein Peter Hoekstra, the US ambassador to the Netherlands, strolled through a cemetery for Nazi soldiers, while reflecting on the “cost of going to war.”

+ What’s the reading on the Susan Collins “concern-meter” today?

+ How many more changes in presidential tone can the country survive?

+ “We are in a worse place than we were in March,” when the virus coursed through New York, said Dr. Leana S. Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner. “Back then we had one epicenter. Now we have lots.”

+ Here’s a press release from Hidalgo County in Texas reporting that deaths from COVID-19 are more than twice the state’s count, which they imply is because people are dying too fast to record….

+ There have been more than 6,300 cases of the coronavirus linked to college campuses across the US. And fall classes haven’t even started yet at most schools.

+ A new study has linked the spring school closures to a decrease in COVID-19 cases and deaths…

+ The right-to-lifers would never tolerate treating fetuses like this…

+ A 23 percent surge in child cases and hospitalizations in Florida directly contradicts Cruella DeVos’ claims that children are “stoppers of the disease” who “don’t get it and transmit it themselves.”

+ Kimora “Kimmie” Lynum, a 9 year-old girl from Putnam County, Florida, died of COVID-related causes this week. She had not underlying “co-morbidities.”

+ The same people who loathe public schools are also the most insistent upon sending kids, teachers, school bus drivers, cafeteria workers and janitors back into virus-ridden public schools. I wonder why?

+ Meanwhile, St Andrews Academy, the Maryland school attended by  Trump’s son, Barron, will not fully reopen in September out of concern over the coronavirus pandemic…

+ More than 4,000 federal employees have already contracted Covid-19 in the workplace. The total number of claims is expected to increase to 6,000 within weeks…

+ It’s really friggin’ nuts out there: A healthy 45-year-old nurse died of COVID in Idaho. Then social media accounts started circulating that she died of a heart attack, not COVID. Now her doctor is forced to explain exactly how she died…

+ Sarah Palin, it looks like we’ve found your Death Panels, down in south Texas, where a hospital in Starr County is prepared to send Covid-19 patients “home to die“, if they’re deemed “too sick” to waste a bed and ventilator on…

+ The most useful information yet from a Trump doctor: “Sex with demons makes you sick.”

+ Belarus President Alexandr Lukashenko, who just tested positive for COVID-19, should have tried demon seed instead of demon drink…

+ Imagine how berserk Americans would get if stores required people to wear shirts and shoes before entering…

+ Officially, Mexico has reported about 410,000 Covid cases. But Mexico’s actual Covid case count may be closer to 7.1 MILLION people, according to Amesh A. Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

+ Mexico reported excess deaths of over 70,000 from March 15 to June 27. And that’s just in 20 of its 32 states alone…(The Mexican government has attributed on 45,000 deaths to COVID from all regions of the country through July 30.)

+ According to new research from the CDC, COVID-19 symptoms persist for weeks after discharge from the hospital, even for young adults with no co-morbidities…

+ Over half of the coronavirus patients in Spain have developed lingering neurological problems…

+ A modeling study of doctor’s and hospital’s exam rooms finds that simply by breathing an infected person can raise the concentration of coronavirus in a small room to over a thousand viruses per cubic meter. Coughing raises it to seven million…

+ House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer declared this week that the Democrats are willing to agree to a new coronavirus stimulus package that doesn’t include an extension of an extra $600 in weekly unemployment benefits, saying the party’s position is “not $600 or bust.” Clearly Hoyer is just another socialist puppet whose strings are being pulled by Sanders and AOC….

+ Platform fights are the most ludicrous fights of all. For decades, the Democratic platform read like it could have been written by Subcomandante Marcos, while their elected politicians shoved neoliberalism down the country’s throat. Still…

+ The Democratic National Committee’s platform committee voted 106 to 50 to reject an amendment to endorse legalizing marijuana. Biden, of course, is in the drug warrior hall of fame.

+ The DNC Platform Committee has voted down support for Medicare For All: 36 yes,  125 no, and  3 courageously abstaining.

+ The Song Remains the Same: By a vote of 177-34, the DNC platform committee members voted to oppose language that would express the party’s opposition to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and support conditioning aid to Israel in response to annexation.

+ Ralph Nader called Christopher Dodd the “Senator from Aetna.” Dodd was also present with Teddy Kennedy at the infamous “waitress sandwich” incident. So he’s obviously the perfect person to vet Biden’s choice for VP …

+ Here are the House Democrats who voted against Ilhan Omar’s amendment to accelerate the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan…

+ Some Sanders supporters are urging Bernie to take his delegates and walk out of the Democratic Party Convention. Why? Sanders did his job. He’ll probably get a biscuit for his services.

+ Bernie come home!

https://twitter.com/buitengebieden_/status/1286063516999397376?fbclid=IwAR2Q1AAJJ4x5AEO3Yte3OQ-VFkS8jnVGiSEJ_lfZQWmKVGMgkLgPlsrEWCE

+ Forget the Gettysburg Address, every school child should be required to recite WEB DuBois succinct demolition of the myth of Robert E. Lee…

Robert E. Lee

Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: “of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.

No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.

Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white south. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.

It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.

+ No less of a rightwing icon than Ammon Bundy, occupier of federal lands, has come out in favor of BLM and defunding the police…(Bundy previously announced his opposition to Trump’s border wall, which didn’t impede it from going up or being knocked down by Hurricane Hannah.)

 

+ In January, in the first known case of its kind, Robert Williams was arrested for in Detroit, Michigan for a crime he did not commit due to a flawed algorithmic facial recognition match.

+ The banality of evil, redux…ICE agents, complaining about being compared to Nazis, claim they are only following lawful orders.

+ ICE officers threw sick and disabled immigrants to the floor after they asked for care, at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Two were in wheelchairs. Another lost vision from the impact of his head hitting the floor.

+ Tom Cotton, whose family owned generations of slaves, says that enslaving Black people was a “necessary evil.”

+ Here’s Bill Clinton in full-triangulation mode at John Lewis’s funeral, invoking cancel culture and dissing black power movement in one sentence: “When he could have been angry and determined to cancel his adversaries, he tried to get converts instead. He thought the opened hand was better than a clenched fist.” (This is, of course, a largely accurate description of Lewis’ timid and accommodating political career and a major reason for his split from Stokely Carmichael and the other radical leaders of SNCC.)

+ I challenge you to detect the differences between Clinton’s eulogy for John Lewis and the speeches he gave after Nixon and Reagan died. Like Obama, there’s really only one Clinton speech, he repeats endlessly, occasionally re-arranging the order of the platitudes of compromise and capitulation…

+ In one of his last interviews, with CSPAN’s Brian Lamb, Stokely Carmichael joked that at SNCC HQ there were two offices. On Lewis door the sign read,”Student Non Violent.” Carmichael’s door the sign read, “Coordinating Committee.” (h/t Jack McCarthy.)

+ Kathleen Cleaver joked last year that SNCC’s unofficial name was the Non-Student Non-Nonviolent Non-Coordinating Non-Committee.

+ In a funeral service that rambled on for 3.5 hours, the highlight of which was Jennifer Holliday’s shattering performance of “Precious Lord”, the organizers couldn’t find time to invite one of Lewis’ former SNCC colleagues to speak.

+ I’m told that many of the widows, mothers and children of his drone victims share this experience…

+ Biden said this week that Trump was the first racist to be elected president of the United States. Biden’s cognitive challenge should be to name the presidents who weren’t racists…

+ Biden’s hero FDR put American citizens into concentration camps based solely on the color of their skin.

+ “Healer:” a liberal who seeks to bring the nation (and more importantly the banks) together by forgiving the crimes of the fascists they replaced and proving the sincerity of their political absolution by implementing many of their policies.

+ There are fascist goon squads snatching people off the street and shooting concussion grenades at unarmed women in Portland, a deadly virus is raging across the country, millions are unemployed, their pittance of insurance about to run out, millions more are facing eviction, it’s 104 in the Arctic, but for Biden, and most of his Democratic Party colleagues, it’s still RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA…

+ Matt O’Brien: “A question that is rarely asked: did Vichy collaborators have some good ideas about judicial nominees?”

+ Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina officials sterilized an estimated 7,600 people for being sick, disabled or deemed “feebleminded,” many by force or coercion. A recent study out of the University of New Orleans also finds that the state’s eugenics program targeted Black people who were considered economically “unproductive” in society.

+ Under Texas’ restrictive voter ID law, voters can vote with gun permit but not a student ID. More than 80% of Texas handgun licenses went to white people in 2018. By contrast, more than half the students in the University of Texas system are people of color…

+ As it gobbles up more and more Palestinian land, Israel is converting mosques into synagogues and bars.

+ Making America Safe for White Flight Again…

+ The number of inmates in Chicago’s Cook County jail reached a low of about 4,000 in May, after prosecutors and judges took steps to reduce the jail population in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. But since mid-May, the population has been steadily increasing, and last week the number of people incarcerated at the jail topped 4,800, according to data published by the Sheriff’s office.

+ Some of the most sexually insecure and intellectually fragile men in the country are running the government: Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) chased down and verbally scolded AOC in the House office building, calling her “disgusting” and a “fucking bitch.”

+ In the same misogynistic vein, after NSA whistleblower Reality Winner tested positive for COVID-19, one correctional officer approached her in middle of outbreak and said, “I just wanted to congratulate you on your positive results.”

+ Before yesterday, there’d never been an Atlantic hurricane season with more than 7 named storms prior to August 1st. With the advent of Isaias, we’re now at 9.

+ Record high temperatures have been plaguing the Middle East, the mercury soaring to extreme levels during a blistering & unforgiving heat wave. Baghdad surged to 125.2 degrees (51.8 Celsius) on Tuesday, its highest temperature ever recorded.

+ As the US economy ground to a halt this spring, U.S. energy consumption plummeted to its lowest level in more than 30 years.

+ Oil giant Shell reports a net loss of $18.4 billion for the second quarter of 2020. Last year they posted a $3.5 billion profit for the same period. Shell’s profits fell by $22 billion dollars in one year and sank well into the red. BP’s losses may be even larger.

+ The French oil company Total has taken a $7 billion write down on its oilsands assets in Alberta, acknowledges that they’re unlikely to be fully tapped and withdraws from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

+ In more ominous news for the climate, the first sea-bed leak of methane has been detected in Antarctica.

+ From disappearing sea ice to coast erosion to scorching heat and tundra, nearly ever dire forecast for the consequences of climate change is already dramatically playing out in the Arctic.

+ Thawing permafrost may have caused a catastrophic diesel spill in the Russian the Arctic Circle, hopefully throwing an ecological wrench in Putin’s expansive plans for military and industrial development in the region…

+ Washington, DC has shattered the mark for most days hitting at least 90 during July. It’s now done it 28 times out of 30 days. The capital’s weather has best resembled Houston’s this summer.

+ With an average temperature of 99.0 °F, July 2020 now becomes the hottest month on record for Phoenix, crushing the previous mark of 98.3 °F.

+ Nearly one-quarter of the earth’s human population lives in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, a region where the level of air pollution has risen by 44% over the last twenty years. The air is so toxic on the subcontinent that it is expected to cut at least five years off the lifespan of everyone living there.

+ Migratory fish populations have fallen globally by more than 76% since 1970, with the worst declines in Europe (93%), and hitting specific groups of fish, where sturgeon and eel populations are both down by more than 90%…

+ Trump in Texas this week: “Generations of oil workers loved our country so much, they couldn’t breathe.” And neither can the rest of us…

+ The Tesoro High Plains Pipeline, which delivers 74,000 barrels of oil a day to a Mandan, North Dakota refinery, has been shutdown after the Department of Interior determined it was trespassing on Native land for the past seven years. The corp must pay $187 million in damages.

+ Of the 30 operating gold mines in Nevada in 2019, 14 of them declared enough deductions to zero out their state mining tax bill even though the combined value of the gold extracted at those 14 mines was more than $716.5 million dollars.

+ The Trump administration is working to transfer ownership of federal water infrastructure to California’s Westlands Water District, the country’s largest water hog and a former lobbying client of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt.

+ According to a new study reported in Science News, global lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the amount of seismic noise produced by humans by up to 50 percent.

+ Some cheerful news for a change: California’s only wolf pack has 8 new pups.

+ Even Lautréamont, the master of the macabre, couldn’t write something this weird…

+ Peter Green, who founded the best version of Fleetwood Mac, died this week at 73. He was one of the most gifted of the English blues guitar players–the precision of Freddie King with the feeling of Otis Rush.

+ I got some most unwelcome news this week that longtime CounterPunch writer Michael Dickinson died in England earlier this month. Michael was a member of the Stuckist Art Movement & was tried and expelled from Turkey for lampooning Erdogan. He designed the covers for two Cockburn/St. Clair books: Serpents in the Garden & Dime’s Worth of Difference. I hadn’t heard from him in months & my emails had gone unanswered not unusual because since his expulsion from Turkey he’d been living a cardboard box & later a tent in Camden, where he was often seen walking backwards–a case of retropulsion, he called it. This obituary gives a pretty vivid introduction to Michael Dickinson’s wide-ranging and subversive life…

+ Here’s the archive of Michael’s writings for CounterPunch…

+ Here’s Michael’s cover art for our book Serpents in the Garden: Liaisons with Culture and Sex, prominently featuring Angelina Jolie in homage to Alex’s amusing essay on Jolie and the French Revolution…

+ Fans of Roaming Charges might want to checkout the brand new Roaming Charges t-shirts featuring the RC bison on really soft cotton. Type in “workuniform” for a nice discount courtesy of Deva.

Hang in There America…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act
Nicholson Baker
(Penguin Press)

Chasing the Light: Writing Directing and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface,  Salvador and the Movie Game
Oliver Stone
(Houghton Mifflin)

Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left’s Resistance to the Vietnam War
Ted Glick
(PM Press)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Dialectic Soul
Asher Gamedze
(On the Corner)

Love Letter
Jimmy Heath
(Verve)

That’s How Rumors Get Started
Margo Price
(Loma Vista)

Core Beliefs

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.” (Frantz Fanon, Black Masks, White Skin)