I think I've figured out why our political world seems so crazy recently.
It's because people are misusing words and labels.

All identity politics are based upon historical grievances. Well, guess who knows less about history than Americans? No one.

Folks, this is more or less a sequel to my previous diary, The Failure of Political Imagination -- if you haven't read it, you should read it now, and then come back to this diary. As such, this diary will be short and sweet, because what I really want is for more people to read my previous diary.

Mourning America

They call it the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
St. George

America was grown out of genocide and built by slavery...both travesties wound tightly in our national DNA...both still evident today. Genocide continues with global corporate capture, for example, in Brazil where mining on indigenous territories brings ecological devastation, land invasions, and renewed cycles of violence. Slavery continues blatantly in our penal system, and less obviously with college debt enslaving our youth. So the idea the US is "great" is a farce, but wave the flag and celebrate the myth.

“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross”

source?

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”

― Benito Mussolini

Engineering Culture
Pt. 2

‘Rethinking the Fourth of July’, Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Schools curriculum editor, Zinn Education Project co-director, huff-po, July, 2014

“But the yahoo of fireworks also turns an immensely complicated time in U.S. history into a cartoon of miseducation. For example, check out Ray Raphael’s “Re-examining the Revolution“ at the Zinn Education Project, an article that every history teacher should read before wading into the events leading up to 1776. Raphael analyzed 22 elementary-school, middle-school, and high-school texts and found them filled with inaccuracies — some merely silly, but others leaving students with important misunderstandings about U.S. history and how social change does and does not happen.

The white Queen infamously told Alice "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day."
So here's a Jam from yestidday.

“Now something that will interest you – we’ve made some excursions in the brothels, and it’s likely that we’ll eventually go there often to work,” said Van Gogh in the only letter he ever co-wrote with a fellow artist. “At the moment Gauguin has a canvas in progress of the same night cafe that I also painted, but with figures seen in the brothels. It promises to become a beautiful thing.

Hi all,

Since I don't see anything here yet, looks like some of my photog friends are trying to volunteer me, so I'll throw something up quick here... I'll be in and out...

THE SUN INTERVIEW

Not So Different After All
Frans de Waal On Animal Intelligence And Emotions

BY MARK LEVITON
With the coronavirus we have another interesting issue: how we eat wildlife. Ecologists and conservationists have been saying for fifty years that we shouldn’t be eating everything on the planet.

Mama with her daughter Moniek, at the Royal Burgers’ Zoo, Arnhem, the Netherlands.