Netflix is showing “When They See Us,” a film about the five young Harlem boys dubbed the ‘Central Park Five’ who were framed by the NYC police & prosecutor Linda Fairstein for the 1989 brutal rape & assault of 28-year-old Trisha Meili. Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam & Korey Wise were between the ages of 14 & 16 when they were charged. Despite the lack of physical evidence tying them to the crime, they were coerced into false confessions (which were inconsistent with each other) after deprivation of food, drink, & sleep for over 24 hours

Trump entered the case by taking out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York state so it could be imposed on the five boys. He continues to insist on their guilt even after the 2002 confession of serial rapist & murderer Matias Reyes whose DNA matched the attack on Trisha Meili. Linda Fairstein went on to prominence as a television authority on sex crime prosecution & as a successful crime novelist. The Netflix film has ignited a campaign of retribution against her so that her publisher has dropped her & she is being forced to resign from prestigious trustee positions. It’s not clear why she should not be subject to prosecution.

The film series is very powerful, especially in the depiction of the problems faced by Raymond Santana, the only Latino defendant, on returning home after prison. But it is especially wrenching in portraying the experience of Korey Wise who as a teenager was sent to Attica prison, a maximum security prison for adults, where he faced harassment, assault, & rape & chose solitary confinement just to protect himself. Trump, Fairstein, & the police detectives who framed the boys are responsible for the heinous & racist crimes committed against them but as sociopaths are incapable of feeling guilt or remorse. Korey Wise’s experience in prison stands as an indictment of the entire US prison system, the racism of that system, & of the frivolous popular treatment of prison rape. The $41 million they received in litigation from NYC is chump change for the hell the city put them through.

All the boys are in their forties now & have gone on to rebuilding their lives. Four of them live outside NYC but Korey Wise remains there & has used his lawsuit money to create a foundation for those falsely accused.

(Photo is poster of “When They See Us”)

Palestinians dancing at the Great Return March in defiance of Israeli snipers:

https://www.facebook.com/JewishVoiceforPeace/videos/561099777730162/UzpfSTE2MjUyMjkwNjE6MTAyMTY3MjMwNDgyMjE2NTQ/

In my pursuit of cheap, non-toxic cleaning products, I found an effective alternative for bleach which can be also used on colors. I had several white blouses & linen too yellowed to ever wear in public. This formula took minutes to prepare & made my white blouses sparkle like new:
I cup hydrogen peroxide
1-1/4 cup of lemon or grapefruit juice
12 cups of water
Store in a one-gallon jug & add two cups per load of washing.

I also found this effective alternative to extremely toxic starching to iron those blouses: 1 cup of vodka (which is made from potatoes) to two cups of water in a squirt bottle.

That’s as close to “Suzy Homemaker” as I will ever get.

Assange isn’t the only journalist incarcerated & suffering health problems from conditions in the prison. Despite his rotten politics & personal creepiness, his case is politically important as a matter of free press. But it could be said that white supremacy is reflected in the prominence of his case over that of hundreds of other journalists around the world who are jailed, tortured, murdered for committing the same crime of investigating & exposing the crimes of repressive & violent regimes.

This is Kashmiri journalist Aasif Sultan who was arrested last year & is also sustaining health problems in prison. Pardon me for considering his case as important as that of Assange & yet there is no international campaign demanding his release.

Free Aasif Sultan!

This is an interesting article about the resurgence of ‘race science’ in the universities. Race science is a misnomer since there isn’t a blessed thing about racism that is scientific. The ideology of racism was invented in German universities to justify slavery & other forms of social hatred & persecution. Laying its stinking corpse to rest will also have to be fought out ideologically & politically & regrettably that will be a protracted political & theoretical struggle. Though nothing overcomes stupid faster than political power, as the US Civil Rights Movement showed.

‘Race science’ received the contempt it deserved by scholarship coming out of the US Civil Rights Movement & from the anti-colonial struggles after WWII. But sociobiology, which changed its name to evolutionary psychology (evo psycho) as some kind of political dodge, countered anti-racist & Black liberation politics by claiming racism (as well as misogyny, homophobia, et al) was genetic. Evo psycho, which is as banal & lowbrow as scholarship gets, dominates universities & media today as though it were accepted science when it is unscientific rubbish through & through.

Some of the leading voices in the theoretical struggle against racism are the redoubtable Frederick Douglass from the 1870s, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ashley Montagu, Stephen J. Gould, but there are many others. They reject the very notion of distinct human races & they reject it without mercy.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-on-the-rise-angela-saini?

On June 4th, over 180,000 protesters gathered in Victoria Park, Hong Kong, as they gather every year, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 & to recommit to the struggle for Chinese democracy. Tiananmen Square was a watershed moment in the Chinese struggle for democracy against a corrupt bureaucratic elite.

We would like the Maoists, Stalinists, & Assadists posting halfwitted vituperations denying the massacre ever took place (but adding that if it did, those rich kids protesting Chinese socialism deserved it), or posting articles from Unz Review (which collaborates with fascists & denies the Jewish holocaust of WWII) & postings from demented socialist cults like Freedom Road Socialist, to explain to us how these Chinese protesters have got it so wrong on Tiananmen Square but they have got it so right? We really want to hear their explanation so we can make chopped liver out of their contemptible apologetics for a massacre & mockery of Chinese political intelligence. The better to hang themselves with, my dear.

(Photo is June 4th, 2019 vigil in Hong Kong by Lam Yik Fei for the NY Times)

We need to put a face to the refugee kids being arrested, stuffed like sardines into dirty, overcrowded concentration camps, physically, emotionally, & sexually abused by immigration authorities. We need to take the savagery meted out to them by immigration authorities very personally, as though they were all our own children.

This is 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez who his family called Goyito. According to his dad Bartolomé Hernández from Guatemala, Goyito was a smart kid who loved soccer & music & played both the bass & the piano. His family said he took the treacherous nearly 2,000 mile trek to the US to help support eight siblings, especially his brother with special needs.

Unfortunately, Goyito got caught crossing the Rio Grande River by the border patrol & stuffed into an overcrowded detention facility in McAllen, Texas. When he showed signs of illness, a medic diagnosed him with the flu, had border patrol agents give him Tamiflu, & then he was placed back in a dirty cell rather than taken to a hospital. You can’t blame prison guards at the facility for not being medical personnel. That culpability goes all the way to the White House where a halfwit named Trump presides who would shoot the kids sooner than give them medical treatment when they’re sick. But the guards should have known that a stressed out, frightened, sick young boy should be watched like a hawk to make sure he is okay. Instead, it appears from their own accounts, that he was left alone for hours after being dosed with Tamiflu.

May our Goyito Rest In Peace. We need to keep this brave young kid in mind as we organize consistent, public opposition to US immigration policy which criminalizes refugees, including small children, rather than obey international law by giving them asylum.

(Photo of Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez from his family in Guatemala)

The Texas-Mexico border is subtropical with summer temperatures reaching up to a sweltering 110 Fahrenheit. There are repeated warnings in media not to leave children or animals in parked cars for even a few moments because after 6 minutes they become dehydrated & begin to suffer permanent neurological damage. Port Isabel, where this incident took place, is about two hours from McAllen & shares the same climate. Leaving 37 children from 5 to 12-years-old in a parked van for 39 hours was a criminal, even homicidal act toward those children & all the agents involved & their supervisors should be fired & prosecuted.

How does their criminal negligence differ from the trucker who in May 2003 in Victoria, Texas (246 miles north of Port Isabel) abandoned a milk van with Mexican & Central American immigrants, 19 of whom suffocated to death? How does it differ from US special forces who in 2001 transported Afghan prisoners in shipping containers with no air holes, killing all of them gruesomely & then dumping them in a mass grave? This casual indifference even contempt for human life is the character of racist US policy. The fact that it is not being massively & publicly opposed by antiwar, immigration rights, or human rights groups speaks to the crisis of political leadership in US politics. What’s the point of all those socialists if they can’t get off their asses to oppose this?

https://www.gq.com/story/ice-children-van-parking-lot?fbclid=IwAR1BDxqRy6mQo9eN43YQn-

Children of conflict: a Kashmiri kid cries upon seeing the dead body of a militant in south Kashmir’s Pulwama.

(Photo & text by Faisal Khan)

A very cogent article by Maung Zarni on the Islamophobic politics of Aung San Suu Kyi:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/aung-san-suu-kyi-world-buddhist-islamophobia-201311342243286354.html?