Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 37

If Ngugi Doesn't Win the Nobel, Screw Them.

That's it. The Nobel Committee, or someone in it had once said that the US lit landscape was too insular (at the turn of the century that was certainly true, maybe still is, or that literary landscape at least) but the Nobel itself is wholly too insular and might as well rename itself the Euro-prize if they don't get it right. Achebe never won and now Ngugi looks to be passed over for more obscure Euros (oh and as many from Sweden have won it as from Asia). Needs to change, and quickly. Let's see. 
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This Neo Feudalism Era Is Getting Me Down.

Mussolini's spawn winning elections in Italy right now and she's just as fascist as her old man. And the Romanovs are trying to make a comeback as well. This in your face Neo feudalism is only going to get ramped up as the other darker side of climate change squeezes us from the other side, all while surrounded by poor peasants like me, but who love to take the side of the new feudal powers. Fuck me. 
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On the NYPD vs a Black Mayor

Well, it shouldn't be surprising, should it? A piece of history, NYC style. Here off duty cops start chanting:

Steisel, then first deputy mayor of operations, heard officers chanting, “Dinkins gotta go!” and “The mayor’s on crack.” They carried signs bearing racist cartoon images of Mayor David Dinkins with humongous lips and nose and an Afro, including several calling the city’s first Black mayor a “washroom attendant.” 

Sound familiar at all? And why were they angry?

They were mad that Dinkins was pushing a bill that would change the composition of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), the oversight body that examined complaints of police misconduct, from half-cop–half-civilian to all civilian and make it independent of the New York Police Department.

Makes sense, if you want complete power. And the threat?
“‘You don’t treat these guys with respect,’” Steisel recalled Caruso telling him. “‘When you create a Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is going to challenge everything they do, it’s just going to respond to “Black whining.”’”
Steisel remembered Caruso telling him, “‘If you don’t respect them, you’ll never have a safe city again.’”

Ah, I'm starting to see a pattern here, especially with the idea that there is an iota of gangsterism and "Nice city you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it." And of course, you know who was there:

"The day of the protest, Rudy Giuliani was also outside the building with a microphone. Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney and failed mayoral candidate in 1989, declared, “The reason the morale of the police department of the City of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins!” The crowd roared.

“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the police department is so low,” Giuliani said. “He blames it on me. He blames it on you. Bullshit!” Giuliani then attacked an anti-corruption commission impaneled by Dinkins, which he said was created “to protect David Dinkins’s political ass.” More cheers rose from the crowd."

And of course, the past is never past:

At the time of the riot, Bill de Blasio was a 31-year-old junior aide in the Dinkins administration. Thirty years later, current and former aides say, the mayor still tells staff that the riot made a huge impression on him as a young person working in politics — a factor that no doubt shaped de Blasio’s early pledges to reform the police and showed him what can happen when the police turn on the mayor.

Una Clarke, then a member of City Council, tried to enter the building, but an off-duty officer blocked her from crossing the street. She later said the white officer turned to another officer next to him and said, “There’s a n - - - - - who says she’s a councilmember.”

The ensuing riot was not impeded by on-duty cops.

City Councilmember Mary Pinkett, in a car on the Brooklyn Bridge, got caught in the traffic. She later recalled off-duty officers shook and rocked her car in order to frighten her and the elderly Black passengers inside. About a dozen mounted officers sat on their horses and didn’t act to quell the riot, one contemporaneous Newsday report said.

When Eric Adams arrived downtown, there was a full-blown riot going on. “When people are riled up to that level, you leave the state of being rational to the irrational behavior of a moblike atmosphere,” he told me.

Some of the city’s newspaper columnists, including Jimmy Breslin, the poet laureate of the city’s blue-collar working class, were repulsed. According to a column he wrote the next day, Breslin saw an officer in a PBA shirt saying to a female television reporter, “Here, let me grab your ass.” He saw one officer yelling “across the beer can held to his mouth, ‘How did you like the n - - - - -s beating you up in Crown Heights?’” Another said, “Now you got a n - - - - - right inside City Hall. How do you like that? A n - - - - - mayor.”

If all of this sounds familiar, it is. From the white mob gong up against a black elected official, to the cops resisting reform in any manner possible. Especially on the heels of unjustified killings of a minority. And of course, the excuses were as plentiful as they are today:

Caruso even blamed City Councilman Guillermo Linares, a Dominican American who represented the Washington Heights neighborhood and was sharply critical of the police in the wake of the Garcia killing. “You are responsible for what happened yesterday and so is the mayor,” Caruso told Linares during a council hearing a day after the riot.

Not a shock, this. And despite all the evidence, soon the narrative went against the mayor:

Some media assigned blame for the riot, the police reaction, the era of bad feelings not just to police but in the weeks after the riot, increasingly, also to Dinkins. By calling out racist behavior, Dinkins was “playing the race card.”

This includes the Times. And indeed, any conciliatory actions towards the cops only serve to embolden them and weaken Dinkins. Giuliani would go on to win the election with many tactics that have happened in our more recent elections. And given the George Floyd protests, one can still see the issues are still in play today. 

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Crimes.

BBC with a doc on Ukrainian era massacres of Jews. Crazy stuff in general, but even today you can see similar attitudes towards the other. Bad things, of course, are happening in Ethiopia and South Sudan (is that genocide even over), not to mention elsewhere. And with Climate Change, it's only going to get worse, especially as people try to escape the horrors of drought and famine. 


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NASA ftw

A reminder that, given how space is now being privatized, NASA (aka a public good) was there first. To that end, I always have to remind my self about all the great things they do. One is looking into space for the beauty that one cannot even start to fathom. Again, the sizes are just ridiculous. I mean the size of the solar system is something I can't quite wrap my head around, but when it gets to galaxies, it gets even crazier. 

Here we have multiple galaxies:

Galaxy cluster Abell 370 contains several hundred galaxies tied together by the mutual pull of gravity. Photographed in a combination of visible and near-infrared light, the brightest and largest galaxies are the yellow-white, massive, elliptical galaxies containing many hundreds of billions of stars each. Spiral galaxies have younger populations of stars and are bluish. Mysterious-looking arcs of blue light are distorted images of remote galaxies behind the cluster. The cluster acts as a huge lens in space that magnifies and stretches images of background galaxies like a funhouse mirror.

Yeah, some real beauty here. and the size of it, is still something one, or I can't comprehend. 
There's more, and more just beautiful scenes on this site, so I recommend you go and just search through this amazing set of galleries. 

and more:


And just wow:
Each of Hubble’s images of the Antennae Galaxies has been better than the last, due to upgrades made during the famous servicing missions, the last of which took place in 2009. The galaxies — also known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 — are locked in a deadly embrace. Once normal, sedate spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, the pair have spent the past few hundred million years sparring with one another. This clash is so violent that stars have been ripped from their host galaxies to form a streaming arc between the two. In wide-field images of the pair the reason for their name becomes clear — far-flung stars and streamers of gas stretch out into space, creating long tidal tails reminiscent of antennae. This new image of the Antennae Galaxies shows obvious signs of chaos. Clouds of gas are seen in bright pink and red, surrounding the bright flashes of blue star-forming regions — some of which are partially obscured by dark patches of dust. The rate of star formation is so high that the Antennae Galaxies are said to be in a state of starburst, a period in which all of the gas within the galaxies is being used to form stars. This cannot last forever and neither can the separate galaxies; eventually the nuclei will coalesce, and the galaxies will begin their retirement together as one large elliptical galaxy. 
One can only be impressed. So go see what your tax dollars have been up to. 

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Offshore Companies Inflating Property Prices.

First, this is some coincidence, though I don't know if it has anything to do with the pandora papers. 

Let your imagination go whichever way you want it to on that one. Maybe you can be the new Q. 
But I do think the Pandora Papers (like the Times expose on Iraqi corruption, most of it going into townhomes in London and such) show that the offshore stash money, that then goes back into property markets is something to behold and may be a large reason behind the ever increasing prices of properties in all major cities. This shit affects all of us. 
Oh and if that's not enough for you, all the question posts on social media look like people slowly trying to build a profile on you. 
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ISIS in Mozambique

Decent doc on the issue there. Some interesting aspects of how it grew. I would like to know if any other factors are at play, but for the most part it does seem to have been started by foreign fighters. There was news about ISIS in the Congo a while back and I could only wonder if that place will get worse in that respect. I imagine there are enough reasons and variables pointing to that possibility. 

Apparently the man in the picture used to sell fish, as fine by all accounts, then just became aggressive because jihad and that was all. So it goes, I suppose, but crazy to think on . I do want to point out that in that screenshot, we have what appears to be a kind of universal stance. The people with their phones out videotaping what's before them (the townspeople, apparently).
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A Million Damoclean Swords.

Hanging over our heads. First, covid is not yet done with humanity, and I've already heard stories from Africa about how'd things are getting. Sweeping through. In Latin America (Venezuela for example, and that's mainly because sanctions... thanks Biden), here's a story from Brazil where the poor are scavenging food from the trash bins of meat factories. 


Yeah, remember this is a pandemic where the supreme rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  To that end, the Pandora papers seem to indicate how corrupt our masters of the universe just are. And like I mentioned before, all the ideological rifts we see don't seem to hinder the methods of covering up their crimes. Corruption most definitely entrenched in our upper echelons.
Here in the states we kinda dodged the bullet, able to pay off some people's pain... but right now we're looking to head face first into dangerous territory. And like I said, we can print our money and not worry about debt (but it's politics, note how no one screamed with a trillion was dropped to save the stock market and yet when it comes to helping poors, a trillion over a decade has the superrich paying us to fight each other so we don't stop them). Meanwhile the developing world has much bigger problems. 
Back here, we still deal with corruption and racism, as the protests of 2020 showed. And just like the rest of the world had its moments of anti-corruption protests, we did too. But ain't shit changed. Take, for example, this NYPD blocking bike lanes (I've seen this many times). IOW, law for thee not for me. That caste system I talked about. 



Note the defender is a NYFD man. Calling those he is there to ostensibly save "savages and animals". Yeah, and that, apparently, allows all kinds of law breaking by him and his ilk. Interesting to hear as this article shows that the NYFD is indeed as racist as the NYPD. 

White firefighters shared racist messages and memes on their phones mocking Mr. Floyd’s dying moments. They gloated about how police could “legally shoot Black children.” And lieutenants discussed turning fire hoses on protesters, prompting debates about whether the tactic would work, because “wild animals like water.”

Again, it's racism, but also corruption, as that racism always leads to more $ being had by said racists. And don't worry, our elites are trying to get you to hate China. So when an article like this states something like a truth, that China says a confrontation benefits neither, well you can bet the comments are Sinophobic to the Max. No one talking nukes (in fact someone on the internet assured me that no confrontation between nuclear armed states will ever lead to such a war... people are too sensible, jfc, we're doomed) or how we here in the US have no place talking shit about China's actions anywhere. Oh, and the "they're like Nazis" bit is also all over that thread. 
I swear it's like the same song every damn time. 
Oh, and here's an example of non-profits being useless:
Age of grift indeed. 
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On China vs USSR

Here's what I would consider the definitive article on the subject. It's well done and looks at the steps that took each of the powers in those nations as they went from one crisis to the next. One thing is that China had fewer entrenched powers (partly because they were poorer, but also, as the LRB points out, the cultural revolution actually weakened many of the institutions that would have impeded change) that made the sudden shock necessary while China did something a little more gradual. Anyhow, it's a great look at each of the steps taken and the power brokers within those nations and how it all played out without ideology (China, apparently, made sure they were well-versed with what happened in the west, learning from Germany and the US, from Depression era to then). 
Damn good magazine to check out, I suppose. I also have a quibble with the "anti-west" journey of Putin. Some make it seem like it was destined. But in the 90s he wanted to join NATO, was rebuffed. Then after Bush's odd statement after the school massacre, he was further pushed away. And finally, Gaddafi's death was what pushed him into opposition (and it's not ideological or very set in stone either). Any mention of Snowden etc, misses the point (note that I put the chances of Snowden as Russian agent, and it would be a new type for a new era, at very low. Probably below 1%. Only a few things bothered me about his leaks, and mainly he was trying to poke the eyes of our elites who were violating all the laws they themselves had made). 
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I was Right. Now Give me a Times Column...

Remember how I mentioned that a lot of the violence over the summer was right wing? Well more proof that it was in fact just that. Now, from all I heard from friends etc, I think it was more complex than that. There were definitely more white supremacists in MN than other cites. There were some doing false flag attacks like this, and others just stoking reactions. In some cities (NYC, possibly LA) organized looting happened. Police made sure to allow those to continue untouched, as it played into their narrative (hard to know how much was just letting them be, or cops probably telling their informants to go out and loot, or even cops themselves doing it through undercover—still more likely than a Soros lead rebellion that the right tried to peddle). There were probably instances of people fighting back, after all, cops were shooting medics and everyone they could see, so some reaction is natural, but that's my breakdown. Now percentages is where people would make their bread, but as you can see from the rest of the internet, it's all about screaming that "there were no outsiders" (something I heard form the left, thinking this was a critique much like the one against the civil rights movement in the 60s (it wasn't, it was specifically against some of the violence, not the movement itself) or that the entire thing was a Soros led movement (I mean I only mention the right's fevered dreams because they have power). So it goes, my friends. 
And I know what you're saying: since when does being right have anything to do with being. Times columnist? You're right. It's almost all a fucking troll and playing up to the powers that be. 

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