A wisecrack from Robert Alvarez:

“Describe everything you have ever heard about the anti-Christ and tell me Donald does not fit the profile.”

(Reposted from July 21, 2016)

This article by Baba Umar is from July 21st last year when Facebook began taking down one Kashmiri account after another to censor news of the brutal crackdown. The Dawn had a few articles on this issue which is still relevant today. Almost once a week we hear from another Kashmiri whose account has been shut down.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1272236/silencing-kashmir-the-two-faces-of-facebook

This is a Facebook wall that supporters of Kashmiris, Palestinians, & the Syrian revolution will want to like & share:

https://www.facebook.com/FreePalestine2016/?pnref=story

Free Kashmir. Free Palestine. Free Syria.

Trump is going to find that cell at Attica State Prison very uncomfortable because he’ll be meeting a lot of residents who turned to a life of crime after they lost their NYC apartments because of his predatory landlord practices. He’ll be begging Putin to stick him in a Siberian gulag. The more they circle in on him, the more my heart sings.

My cousin Haley Vail who just graduated from high school. Her grandmother is my first cousin & friend Jane Vail Schroeder; her great-grandmother is my mother’s sister & my favorite aunt Rosemary Vail. I used to babysit Haley & her younger sister Brianna when they were small. They’re from the Vail clan who are more siblings than cousins.

My aunt Rosemary met her husband Wayne in the small village outside St. Paul that my parents moved to after they got married. Wayne’s parents, who both lived to over 100, got the first TV in town in 1948 & everyday at 4:00 would open their house to let the town kids come in & watch Howdy Doody.

Haley is just an awesome kid.

The OJ Simpson phenomenon is so psychologically remarkable. We know he was a wife beater & is probably a murderer but there’s something so endearing, almost mesmerizing, about his personality. Is it his good-looks or the warmth of his smile? Or just that he has the talents of all good con artists? It used to be a literary conceit to describe character by one’s physical description but hopefully writers have evolved beyond that nonsense. You can’t tell much about others based on how they look.

TV news today is all OJ Simpson’s parole hearing all the time. Quite frankly, I think he was sent to prison not for stealing his own property back but because they were trying to get him for murdering Nicole Simpson & Ron Goldman. A jury found him innocent of those 1994 murders. He probably did murder them but if the police hadn’t planted evidence to nail him & the forensics team hadn’t mishandled evidence the overwhelming evidence would have been more persuasive to a jury. If he hadn’t had the resources for a dream team of lawyers & was a Black working class kid, he’d have been sent up the river for life without parole.

What to me is most memorable about the 1995 verdict is that media immediately began beating the drums of polarization about the incompatibility of Blacks & whites. This incited racists to come out from under their rocks which was a very scary phenomenon to witness. Serendipitously, just two weeks after the verdict, Black organizations held the Million Man March in Washington, DC which had conservative politics but was a show of Black power that drew at least a million people. The racist crap in media stopped on a dime & the racists went back under their rocks. That is why I am an advocate for Black power.

Twelve-year-old Aroofa Farooq was struck & killed by an Indian army vehicle today near her home in the Shopian district of south Kashmir. With 700,000 troops deployed to Kashmir, India must have thousands of armored vehicles that endanger especially small children. They are probably as reckless driving the damn things around Kashmir as they are shooting off pellet munitions that blind, disfigure, do serious, permanent physical harm, & kill children, youth, elderly. In such a situation, this cannot be considered an accident but should be condemned as a war crime.

Go back India, go back!

“Al-Qaeda & Assad regime have one goal in common: Elimination of the Syrian Revolution.”

–Mohanad Mezghiche

From Syria: “For Palestine, for Aqsa mosque we stand. Our hearts & prayers have always been with you.”

–tweeted by Lina Shamy