@earthling1

thanks, i hope that you had a great holiday weekend.

Perfect for day.
Thanks.

@Azazello

heh, if you can tell me if joe had tools in his hands and was doing projects outside the house or if he was sitting at his computer searching youtube for tunes, i can tell you roughly what time you saw him last night.

alive as you and me.
But joe, says I, you're ten years dead.
I never died, says he.

@Meteor Man

i suppose that if jim is now working at the car wash, he was ironically probably hoping for better.

Is Working At The Car Wash

@karl pearson

heh, here's pete with a word or two about that song...

@MrWebster

yep, the loss of all of that slave labor (not to mention the economic value tied up in the ownership of a slave) left the south in a bad way economically. all sorts of means to press blacks into unpaid prisoner labor (which is allowed by the 13th amendment) was resorted to.

hambone willie newbern is reputed to have been beaten to death in jail because, when captured and imprisoned for vagrancy he refused to work. he was an excellent musician that gave the world one of the standards of the blues:

A buddy was telling me about the chain gang songs. Basically they came out of the South jailing large numbers of African Americas to build up alot of the infrastructure. It wasn't a matter of giving criminals what they deserve, but pure out economic exploitation. In many ways, neo-slavery.

I realized the same happened to a aunt in the Soviet Union. She was given seven years in basically a slave labor camp for being caught with moonshine. My aunt was sent to work on building canals off the Volga from what I can tell. And yes, Stalin was very socially progressive. The camps had both genders. It did have a section for political prisoners though--my aunt was considered a common petty criminal. She got off early when Stalin died.

The slave model of work seems to coming back.

@gjohnsit

it will be interesting to see what happens when isis is defeated in syria and the various contestants have to decide whether to fight it out amongst themselves or cede the country back to bashar al-assad.

steffan mistura from the un, last week said that he expected isis to be defeated in october. that will leave the us and its allies (chief among them the kurds) in possession of a great deal of syria and israel still holds a piece of the golan heights.

it looks like the wild card might be israel. netanyahu is in deep trouble, with corruption investigations looking like they might lead to serious legal actions. netanyahu might very much like to wag the dog about this time and he has been making noises like this is in the works.

big victory

With a sudden lunge through jihadist lines, the Syrian army and its allies on Monday came to within 3 km of relieving the Euphrates city of Deir al-Zor, where Islamic State has besieged 93,000 civilians and an army garrison for years.

and in Raqqa

U.S.-backed forces in Syria have captured the Old City of Raqqa, the latest milestone in their ongoing assault against the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State’s rapidly shrinking territories, according to a U.S. military statement on Monday.

Kurdish and Arab fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces secured the neighborhood over the weekend after vanquishing a last pocket of resistance in the city’s historic Great Mosque, the statement said.

The capture followed a grinding two-month battle for the neighborhood that has proved the toughest challenge yet of a three-month-old offensive for Raqqa, launched in June and still far from over.

Unlike in Mosul, the Old City does not lie at the heart of Raqqa and its seizure does not signify an imminent end to the fighting, said a U.S. military spokesman, Col. Ryan Dillon.

The SDF now controls about 60 percent of Raqqa, said Dillon, who would not put a timeline on how long it would take to claim the rest but predicted that weeks of fighting lie ahead.