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The plot of “The Manchurian Candidate” relied on a convoluted brainwashing technique to get an American to attack his own country. Who knew that a simple venal carnival barker from Queens and a lunatic South African fan of Apartheid and Nazism could achieve a much more impressive result?

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Black and white photo: Looking up at circular fire escapes around bay windows, and bas-reliefs under windows on hotel, Chrysler Building just visible at right.

“Murray Hill Hotel, Manhattan” by Berenice Abbott on November 19, 1935, for her “Changing New York” Federal Art Project.

Via The New York Public Library, image id 458449867.

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Despite Russia’s unrelenting propaganda, Ukraine is not a U.S. client state, and NATO is not a U.S. client organization, not even when the current U.S. administration talks as if they were.

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Let the great eugenicist experiment begin! RFK Jr.’s terrifying Senate confirmation puts the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO in a foul new light. Ditto Felonious Husk’s freezing of USAID funds.

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  • If Gulf of Mexico = Gulf of America
  • If America = Great Again
  • Then Gulf of Mexico = Gulf of Great Again
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📽️ Watched “The Deadly Affair,” dir. Sidney Lumet (UK, 1967), a spy thriller based on John le Carré’s 1961 debut novel, Call for the Dead. Quincy Jones did the musical soundtrack. Good stuff.

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It must be rough to have many billions but to not know love, friendship, or respect.

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“Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?” by Samantha Hancox-Li, Contingent Magazine, October 1, 2019, contingentmagazine.org… 🏳️‍⚧️

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Diplomacy 101: Orange Oaf’s threats are going to lose their value as fast as Putin’s nuclear saber rattling has. It sure would be nice if Orangina deigned to surround himself with people in possession of expertise and experience.

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Sounds like artillery fire. Guess I’m close to Aberdeen Proving Ground. That, or things in DC are escalating.

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Black and white photo of a dumpster in a DC alley. The message in block letters painted with stencils reads, 'WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER'.

“When this is all over, Adams Morgan, Washington, DC” by Tracy Meehleib, April 8, 2020. Via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2020632316/. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

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Orange Oaf is setting up a mediocre cadre of leaders who will only tell him YES. And why not? This approach has been working out real well for the bare-chested judoist of the Kremlin, who’s losing hundreds of thousands in Ukraine.

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Translations from MAGA to English:

  • merit – good-for-nothing
  • meritocracy – mediocracy
  • patriot – sucker
  • taxpayer – sucker
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📽️ Watched an antifascist drama set in the time before the United States was at war with Germany, “Watch on the Rhine,” dir. Herman Shumlin (USA, 1943). Despite the title, it takes place around the U.S. capitol, except for an initial border crossing from Mexico and a train to Washington.

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It’s hard to look at the coming constitutional crisis and not think of Prussia’s constitutional crisis of 1858–64. But instead of Bismarck, we’ve got Boris and Natasha role-playing leaders.

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I don’t understand how tariffs are supposed to foster American industry. How is investing in a country led by a criminal lunatic a sound plan?

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I don’t know how the Republican party comes back from their fascism, however long the affair lasts, without some thorough housecleaning and a major rebrand.

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Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944

Black and white photo of a convivial scene. More details in caption.

Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.

Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/

  1. For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎

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The one who deals the blow forgets.
The one who carries the scar remembers.
– Haitian proverb*

* Quoted in Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism (St: Martin’s, 2022), front matter.

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What’s the U.S. version of “banana republic”? “Orange republic”?

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World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front

Poster. The women described in the detailed caption below are separated into different quadrants with the help of a big 'V', which itself is underlined by the text 'for victory'.

The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.

Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.

Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.

  1. See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎

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Yellow poster with brown and a bit of blue. The heads of three Black men are sketched. One is wearing a World War One helmet, one is wearing pilots headgear, and the other appears to be civilian.

Books Are Weapons – World War Two poster by NYC WPA War Services promoting knowledge about Black history and culture, the war's colonial entanglements in Africa, and the role of Black Americans in national defense. The books referenced were housed in the New York Public Library's renowned Schomburg Collection.

Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id 5211531.