Jesus Fucking Christ -- 'First Man' Makes a Case for the Lobotomizing of America, since WWII and Iwo Jima

bad is bad, but First Man is lunacy . . . no pun intended . . .

“We are what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote in his third novel, Mother Night (1961), “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Can we just get rid of the Jewish Princess, Katie Halper? Fuck. “What is your overall view of 2024 and what should be done?”

This is the question we asked two Palestinian-Americans: Lexi Alexander, a filmmaker, and Rania Batrice, a political strategist who served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders in 2016. Both guests took the question not to mean who will be better between Trump and Harris, but instead which evil will be worse.

“Number one,” responded Lexi, “is that I don't think anybody in any situation ever should vote for genocide. Not just for Palestinians, but for themselves. And so I find myself constantly shocked to watch Americans eagerly vote for what I consider to be Adolf Hitler in 1942.”

Voting for either candidate, she argues, is a vote for genocide.

“If Trump will be worse, then we'll endure it together. And we'll fight that fucker too. But you still can't reward genocide.”

Vonnegut said, "You dig fifty pounds of moon rock and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt"

Alonso Duralde, the Wrap:

In the grander sense, “First Man” reminds us — in an era of “truth isn’t truth,” “alternative facts,” and established science being treated like an opinion — that there was a time not all that long ago in which we (the taxpaying public, not just some bored billionaire) were capable of sending people into space and to the moon and back again. And we did it, to quote JFK, “not because it was easy, but because it was hard.” In an era of widespread hopelessness, it’s a lesson worth remembering.

Almost everything about this fucking movie is fake, false, foolish, smeared smarmy shit, and it is a testament to the dirty tricks of NASA and the barely back story of Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam.

Whitey on the Moon? Goofy actor plays Gil Scott-Heron:

It was all worth it, millions starved, millions bombed, millions duped, oh, it was worth it, no? White guys in space suits. [Both of his parents are of part French Canadian descent, along with some German, English, Scottish, and Irish. He and his family were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Ryan Gosling has said that the religion influenced every aspect of their lives.]

Faggotry:

“For that kind of money,” Kurt Vonnegut cracked on the CBS Evening News about the Apollo 11 moon landing, “the least NASA can do is discover God.”

At the time of the mission, civil rights activists, anti-Vietnam War protesters and even top scientists were skeptical of its purpose and doubtful of its value. Nostalgia lends itself to glossing over the protest and unrest of the time.

Kurt Vonnegut’s role in televised coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, fifty years ago on July 20, didn’t go down well. Hired by CBS as a commentator on the historic proceedings on July 20, 1969, the American writer best known for his World-War-II-indicting novel, Slaughterhouse Five, was not impressed.

“For that kind of money,” Vonnegut cracked on the CBS Evening News, “the least [NASA] can do is discover God.”

Cronkite would later recall this moment with some chagrin.

“To Vonnegut, the moon landing didn’t mean anything,” said Cronkite, who anchored CBS’s coverage of the moon landing and was a space program enthusiast. “He was real sour . . . he just set the wrong mood, a big downer.”

“For that kind of money, the least [NASA] can do is discover God.”

Vonnegut wasn’t alone in his misgivings: At the time of the moon landing, civil rights activists, anti-Vietnam War protesters and even top scientists were skeptical of its purpose and doubtful of its value. 

But the collective national amazement—and relief—at the accomplishment of the Apollo 11 moon landing, combined with the passage of time, means little trace of such concerns remain as the country prepares for the 50th anniversary of one of America’s most lauded achievements.   

“Nostalgia makes for a foggy lens,” says Tracy Dahlby, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism. “It’s easy to forget that, for most of the 1960s, a majority of Americans didn’t favor Washington spending billions of dollars on the space race. After all, we had plenty of challenges to deal with at home, with issues of economic and social justice, opposition to the Vietnam War, and a tortured political scene that saw a President and other leading figures assassinated in the space of five years.”

1969? Fucking 1-9-6-9!

The revelation in the April 25, 2001 New York Times Magazine that former senator Bob Kerrey murdered innocent women and children in Vietnam has exposed a sharp division in American public opinion over questions of military ethics. Kerrey admitted to having participated, as a young Navy SEALs lieutenant, in a massacre of 13 unarmed Vietnamese women and children in the tiny village of Thanh Phong. Exactly how the incident, which occurred in February of 1969, took place still isn't clear. According to Kerrey, his SEAL commando squad mistakenly believed they were under fire; but one of the members of that squad, Gerhard Klann, disputes this, claiming the killings were deliberate and at point-blank range. (Klann's account is corroborated by one surviving villager, Pham Tri Lanh.)

January 20, 1969: Richard Milhous Nixon succeeds Lyndon Baines Johnson as the 37th President of the United States of America.

February 24, 1969: The official ruling stating students have the right to express opinions at odds with the government is decried by the US Supreme Court in the Tinker vs. Des Moines School District case.

Now — Students have faced accusations of antisemitism and been targeted for speaking out against Israeli occupation since the latest war began

1969 or 2024. Cunts galore:

“If you get me elected, and you should really be doing this … we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” Trump said, according to the report, quoting people at the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The former president also praised the New York police for clearing the campus at Columbia University in late April, and said the other cities needed to follow suit, saying “it has to be stopped now”.

Student protests against the Israeli war on Gaza have rocked the US over the past few weeks, prompting a police crackdown on many campuses and more than 2,000 arrests

Fucking Jews: Wizner, Miller, Rubinstein. The fucking freak Trump has his Roy Cohen/Koch fucking brothers.

Last month, one of the 20 promises in the preamble of the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention was to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again."

But protest organizers contend that Trump and other Republicans are ignoring key facts. The overwhelming majority of demonstrators are U.S. citizens who, under the First Amendment and current U.S. law, have the right to express pro-Hamas, antisemitic or anti-Israel views as long as they don’t break the law.

And Muslim American civil rights organizations say the vast majority of pro-Palestinian protests have been peaceful and showed no public displays of support for Hamas.

The protests, which spread across American college campuses and took over streets in some cities this spring, are expected to flare up again at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week. 

GOP officials and pro-Israel groups told NBC News that they have so far identified only four foreign students on academic visas who were reportedly arrested, barred from graduation or expelled for participating in unauthorized campus protests. 

Former Trump administration officials argue that more foreign students are involved in the campus protests and accuse the Biden administration and universities of withholding such information. 

Biden administration immigration officials told NBC News that, as of July, they had not terminated any student, or F-1, visas based on protest activity related to the Israel-Gaza war.

The four students flagged by Republicans and pro-Israel groups attended Harvard, Columbia and Emory universities and the University of Pennsylvania. The universities declined to comment, citing privacy concerns, or didn’t respond to requests for comment. The four students didn’t respond to requests for interviews.

Civil liberties groups say attempts to deport protesters who are visa holders for speech-related offenses would spark legal battles nationwide. 

Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, argued that foreign nationals who are visa holders are also protected by the First Amendment. He contended that it would be unconstitutional for authorities to try to deport them based solely on their expressing support for Hamas at protests.

“No administration has ever really tried to do this,” Wizner said. “It would be an incredibly novel and extreme policy to remove people from the country simply for their political advocacy in a country that was founded on treasonous political advocacy.”

Reed Rubinstein, a former Trump administration official who is senior vice president at America First Legal, a public policy law firm founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, said foreigners, on visas or seeking them, aren’t allowed to endorse terrorist groups.

“Wearing your little Hamas band, saying, ‘Yea, I support Hamas,’ if you are an alien, that should get you tossed out of the country,” said Rubinstein, who held leading positions at the Justice and Education departments under Trump. “Standing there waving your Hamas flag, saying, ‘I love Hamas,’ if you’re a U.S citizen, it’s fine.”

Fucking Whitey’s on the moon.

“There’s nothing to sustain life” in northern Gaza city; Biden admin ignores illegal use of US weapons in genocide – Day 389

US identified 500 cases where its weapons harmed Gaza civilians – but hasn’t taken action

From the Washington Post: The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging that Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims, according to people familiar with the matter.

At least some of these cases presented to the State Department over the past year probably amount to violations of U.S. and international law, these people said.

[Ken Olende is researching a PhD on race, racism and economic crisis at Brighton University. He has previously worked as a journalist for British Socialist Worker, an editor for Stand Up to Racism and a history tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association.]

Frantz Fanon’s defence of armed resistance against colonialism is timely in the light of the genocidal violence currently being carried out by Israel, armed and supported by the US and Britain.

He reminds us that all colonial settler states were created by massive violence, whether Israel, Australia, Brazil or the USA. And that the violence continues in the demeaning of the oppressed: “The colonized people are presented ideologically as a people arrested in their evolution, impervious to reason, incapable of directing their own affairs, requiring the permanent presence of an external ruling power. The history of the colonized peoples is transformed into meaningless unrest.”

Fanon was a psychologist and a revolutionary who took part in the Algerian revolution. His political ideas developed explosively in his relatively short politically active life from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1961, aged just 36. His philosophical, poetic, political writing is still vital reading, particularly, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, then part of the French empire, and he grew up in a culture that was hypersensitive to nuances of race.

“A revolution is not a tea party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence, by which one class overthrows another.” —Mao Zedong

Although the war was in its final months, Allied victory was still uncertain and Vonnegut and others taken prisoner in this period did not have an easy transition into captivity. According to the principles outlined in the Geneva Convention, POW officers were not required to perform labor for their captors. Kurt Vonnegut later wrote to his father, “I am, as you know, a Private.” Enlisted troops were often transferred to work detachments in small groups instead of being transferred to larger, organized camps. That winter was one of the coldest on record and conditions worsened for the Germans and for their prisoners as shipping was disrupting and the supply chain broke down, making it more difficult for the life-sustaining Red Cross aid to filter through to Allied POWs.

Another significant danger of POW life, especially for those outside of camps, was posed by Allied air raids.  POWs were often transported through German territory via railway car, sometimes marked with red crosses to alert Allied fliers, but railyards and boxcars were often strafed. The train carrying Vonnegut and others to Stalag IV-B was unmarked and was strafed and bombed by the RAF on Christmas Eve. At Stalag IV-B, Vonnegut was one of the unfortunates selected for a 150-man labor detachment destined for Dresden. From January 10th and into February, the American POWs were forced to work extremely long hours in a malt-syrup factory supplied with meager rations and overseen by cruel guards. They were sheltered in a slaughterhouse with the address Schlachthof 5 [Slaughterhouse-Five.] Vonnegut described the seminal event in the history of Dresden in a letter to his family,

“On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”

Vonnegut and the other POWs escaped the firestorm in an underground meat locker. In the aftermath, the POWs were forced to recover bodies and collect corpses for burial or funeral pyres; surviving residents threw rocks and cursed them.