Justice! Justice! Justice! ~ by Hénock Gugsa

Justice!  Justice!  Justice! 

~ by Hénock Gugsa ~

Equivocation and Ambiguity in High Places ~ by TPO

Equivocation and Ambiguity in High Places 

~ by TPO ~

What a con, a slippery person, is good at !  ....🤠

Defending a Child's Mural ~ by Hénock Gugsa

Fleur Jones

Defending a Child's Mural *

~ by Hénock Gugsa ~

First of all, I have read the whole story of this case.  It is a warm and refreshingly decent tale of a community that was in support of the child and her dad.  Their collective action of concern for the child is very instructive and touching.  I am glad things backfired on the "anonymous" letter writer, and again I repeat he was a coward.  He is far from pacifist because like an arsonist he is hiding in the shadows and starting fires (wars).
You know, the person or people who are offended by the "mural" can also just hose down and wash it off easily themselves rather than berating the action of the little child. Now if the proprietors of that wall were to complain, they would be within their right.  But I don't think they would do it anonymously.  Their letter would probably even have a letterhead. 
Personally, I don't think this "mural" is a permanent blight and anything to get worked about. The wind and the elements will blow the chalk away in a short time.
I think the "drama queen" in this case is the person that initiated the whole thing. Why isn't his action even being questioned?  Now, don't get me wrong ... I am only upset that the complaint against the child's action was done incorrectly, and calling it "awful" was not a helpful statement. 
Come out of the shadows ... if you are right, your light will lead us to the truth.  I bet the complainant is a cranky old goat with nothing better to do than rile people.  Case closed as far as I am concerned!
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* https://www.newsbreak.com/news/0OxqjisV/father-is-left-furious-after-receiving-an-anonymous-note-asking-him-to-remove-his-five-year-old-daughters-awful-mural-which-pays-tribute-to-the-nhs?s=oldSite&ss=a1

 

Facebook Ruminations ~ by Hénock Gugsa

Facebook Ruminations 

~ by Hénock Gugsa ~

A Conundrum ! ~ by Hénock Gugsa

A Conundrum ! 

~ by Hénock Gugsa ~

I discussed this topic with a couple of friends on Facebook ...
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T O ===>  His shameful acts are loudly condemned but his behavior continues unchanged. He is shameless.
 
Hénock Gugsa ===> You turn on a switch, you're shameful ... you turn it off, you're shameless. I get it because I'm associating them with binaries. That's what computers do to you ! 😉

T O ===> Feeling "shame" requires acceptance of a moral / ethical standard. There can be disagreement.

F C ===> Exactement [sic], shameless means that the person doesn't care acting wrongly or being judged.
While being shameful refers to a person feeling bad after acting wrongly.
This being said,  ...
1- Feeling shameful brings nothing good to anyone.  It only serves making some immature people feeling better, after another one feels humiliated.
2- Being shameless is not necessarily bad.  As an example, one doesn't have to feel bad just because another person decides to be offended by what the first person said.

Hénock Gugsa ===> So would you say that "Schadenfreude" is both shameful and shameless ... hence cancelling them out and creating a new creature, a new mysterious King Kong ?! 😁

F C ===> Hénock Gugsa, LOL, you're funny, I like that.
This being said, Schadenfreude refers to pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune. Which is not the same thing as not giving a shit about drama queen's bullshit.

Hénock Gugsa ===>  FC ... , Ça ne me dérange pas ! Tout va bien.🙂

F C ===> Hénock Gugsa, exactement, y'a juste nos perceptions qui peuvent nous affecter. Et elles sont fausses pour la plupart.
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A Great Cabaret Song ! ~ by TPO

A great song from the cabaret days of 1930's Paris

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Charlotte Dauvia: " Boulevard des rêves brisés " - 1932

Frances Langford: "The boulevard of broken dreams" - 1939

"Deliberate Homicidal Stupidity" ~ By Fintan O’Toole

"Deliberate Homicidal Stupidity"
By Fintan O’Toole (from The Irish Times)
April 25, 2020
=================================
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the corona-virus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicenter of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – willfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender -
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students traveling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fueled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the corona-virus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the corona-virus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground -
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realization that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behavior has become normalized. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

Arguing with Candace Owens ~ Hénock Gugsa

Arguing with Candace Owens 

~ Hénock Gugsa ~
__________________

Was Ahmaud Arbery “just a jogger”  who was  “murdered for being black”?

I can understand her taking up the role of a devil's advocate on this highly charged and controversial matter.  And she does make very good, solid arguments which she then turns around and contradicts point by point.  For example she says that the victim should not have been there in the first place and that he had a [shady] background.  Then later, she says he had mental issues. 

One crucial and important question she never asks:  Would Arbury have been killed had he been white?!   Instead she dwells on what he was wearing when he was confronted by two armed white men.  She dismisses the whole thing as "obviously something that went wrong."

She denounces Lebron James for being tribal despite his wealth and privilege.  I believe Lebron is aware that were he not wealthy he would and could easily be another "victim" if he were out jogging in a white neighborhood.  She questions Lebron's motivations and actions, but what about her own?

Obviously, she herself is a fortunate, privileged, black person with no doubt more white friends than blacks.  She probably has never undergone a serious personal confrontation with anybody that smacked of racial conflict.

But she is not nearly as neutral and objective as she believes she is.  She does have clear and unmistakable biases  and she is not totally fair and balanced.  If she were, she would try to bring up (at least mention) other cases of outright racism that never got justice !   Yet here she is displaying her youthful folly of challenging three-hundred years of history, and denouncing serious matters with shallow and callous treatment.  What is her background?  Has she read black history?  Has she read black literature?  I wish she had met Malcolm X.  He would have put her in her place!
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© Hénock Gugsa

 

COVID-19 , the Present Reality ~ by TPO

COVID-19 , Hope Persists !

~ by TPO ~

True, we can concede to the American pandemic scenario where the One-Per centers are the final victors in the struggle for survival.

The 1% , i.e. the banker or the house,  always wins in the long run.  Every gambler probably knows that and is just trying to divine the right time to pull out and escape unscathed and maybe even come out a winner.  However, he is on slippery slope because he never admits that the decks are stacked against him.  The gambler never really knows when exactly is the right time to hedge his bets and walk away.

On the other hand (au revanche), we can also go with Edgar Alan Poe and envision where everybody is a loser.  The pandemic is the uninvited guest in the delusional and corrupt world of Prince Prospero who certainly is a member of the 1%.  At the end of Poe's tale everybody, including all of the 1% have been vanquished by the plague! 

However, there is also some real good and refreshing news to get us out of our doldrums! ...

 << Today, there is widespread recognition the novel corona-virus is far more unpredictable than a simple respiratory virus. Often it attacks the lungs, but it can also strike anywhere from the brain to the toes. Many doctors are focused on treating the inflammatory reactions it triggers and its capacity to cause blood clots, even as they struggle to help patients breathe.  ....
It attacks the heart, weakening its muscles and disrupting its critical rhythm. It savages kidneys so badly some hospitals have run short of dialysis equipment. It crawls along the nervous system, destroying taste and smell and occasionally reaching the brain. It creates blood clots that can kill with sudden efficiency and inflames blood vessels throughout the body.  ....
Research and therapies are focused on these phenomena. Blood thinners are being more widely used in some hospitals. A review of records for 2,733 patients, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, indicates they may help the most seriously ill. >> *
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* Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/Health/health-news/doctors-keep-discovering-new-ways-the-coronavirus-attacks-the-body/ar-BB13SoPn?ocid=sf

Beautiful Hymns from the Past ~ by TPO

Beautiful Hymns from the Past 

~ by TPO ~

1 - "In the Sweet By and By" 
- Bird Youmans -

2 - "When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder" 

 - Johnny Cash -

Befuddled ! ~ by Hénock Gugsa

Befuddled ! 

~ by Hénock Gugsa ~