aka Contrarian

Did either one of them marry her? If not, she didn't "pull" them. She was just a star struck "thot". 🫣

@Troy In its summation, Gemini never said one way or another that the places you mentioned weren't empires. Or that America wasn't a civilization. America not being a specific civilizaton was my opinion reached from the dictionary definition of civilization. Your disputing that empires last longer than 250 years is your opinion. I don't feel that America can be separated from the general term of Western civilization. To me, loosely speaking, civilization is about culture and Anthropology. While Empires are about conquest and control. Dividing an empire into 10 phases is an arbitrary convenience, using certain criteria which can be disagreed with. We might be in a semantical bind.

The terms "civilization" and "empire" are not interchangeable according to Gemini, a distinction I'm very comfortable with although I'm inclined to believe you two will disagree. There's nothing drastically distinctive about American culture and mores when it comes to the ongoing progression of western Civilization. Its location is what distinguishes it. It became an Empire via conquest and political domain.

WOW. That's all I can say. Ancient history I'd forgotten about. I've been outed. 😮

@ProfD I didn't know at first that Rachel Scott was a sista - with impeccable journalistic credentials! Trump has also been accused of referring to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson as having a "low IQ". He seems to really be intimidated by black women who, when it comes to being qualified, put that skank Melania to shame whose only notable accomplishment is being multi-lingual, able to say "unzip" in 7 different tongues. 😛

@ProfD Everything bad we know about Joe Jackson, we learned from his children. Later in life they did give him a few props. He had a love child and he and Kathryn were estranged (divorced?) at the time of his death. She seems to be the glue who consistently held the family together.

@troyg Is a "civilization" the same as an "empire"? I never thought of America as a specific civilization.

I'm rather impressed withTa-Nehisi Coates and Angela Davis.

I've come across several references to this book entitled " America's Expiration Date" by Cal Thomas, published in 2020, and it sounded like something I would be enlightened by, so I turned to my new best friend Gemini and requested a summary of the work which, according to Gemini, draws heavily on a historical thesis proposed by a Sir John Glubb who, back in the 1970s, concluded that the average lifespan of an empire is approximately 250 years (roughly ten generations). Supposedly, such 250-year periods can be broken down into the specific stages that empires historically go through before they collapse, and these phases are as follows:⁰ The Age of Pioneers: Bold, determined individuals explore and settle new lands. The Age of Conquests: The nation expands its borders and establishes military dominance. The Age of Commerce: The focus shifts to wealth creation, trade, and economic prosperity. The Age of Affluence: Success leads to the accumulation of great wealth and the rise of a "ruling class." The Age of Intellect: A shift from action to debate and philosophy; the society becomes increasingly self-analytical and focused on education. The Age of Decadence: The final stage, characterized by moral decay, internal division, excessive luxury, and a loss of the original pioneering spirit. In comparing these eras with America's history, author Cal Thomas believes that the American Empire is on a collision course with extinction because it is currently in alignment with this 250-year pattern. Using the timeline that dates back to this nation's birth in 1776, and adding 250 years to that number, amounts to 2026... Thomas goes on to cite massive, mounting national debt as a primary symptom of the "Age of Decadence," along with the moral and cultural divisions that cause the loss of shared values and the extreme political polarization that causes unity to unravel. He mentions eight major empires (including the Roman, Ottoman, and British ones) noting that they all staggered and eventually lost their superpower status after reaching these similar cultural milestones. Gemini's optimistic takeaway from this data is that while the 250-year pattern is historically consistent, it is not a death sentence and that America could potentially escape this fate through a cultural and spiritual renewal, rather than through political or economic policies or the waging of wars. The book's author notes that in entering the final Age of Decadence, the financial overreach caused by unsustainable national debt and a devalued currency, and the moral and cultural shift causing a weakening of the family structure along with the obsession with entertainment and sports and sexuality are definitely hurdles, but not challenges that are impossible to overcome. Meanwhile Trump and company march on in lockstep, pursuing their version of what will make America great again.

@ProfD If everything you say about the true nature of Black people is right, then they have no reason to complain about being at the bottom of the totem poll. That's where they belong😜

I've always contended that if the situation were reversed, black people would be racist against white people. MLK called this "a dislike of the unlike". In all if my years, I've never met a black person who said they actually like white people. They always roll their eyes and say something to the effect that they can tolerate some of them. Even Uncle Toms have an uneasy smile when discussing their sentiments about them. Me, I can "em take or leave 'em. Whatever. I am, however, starting to develope an affinity for the element among them who genuinely hate Trump.And there are millions of them out there who see him for what he is. He has really polarized this country.

That's why Trump's base is so loyal to him. Because he makes rudeness and crudeness virtues. He never takes the high road or personifies the civility expected of a wise diplomatic leader with integrity. And he is the hero of 50 million mostly white Americans.

@Troy very true. In this dog-eat- dog world, ignorance can be bliss. One person's concern, is another one's indifference. Such is life...

Well, when it comes to the Jackson family, its no secret, their domineering father Joe had a lot to with their being ummm - eccentric. Michael always complained about being robbed of his childhood, attributing his affinity for young boys to that, imagining himself to be a real live Peter Pan. La Toya was /is nutty as fruit cake and always claimed that Joe tried to molest her when she was a teenager. Jermaine was reportedly consumed with jealously of Michael, hence his leaving the group and going solo. He was reportedly furious when he hit on Whitney Houston and she rejected him for Bobby Brown. Mama Kathryn, was a devout Jehovah's Witness and didn't celebrate Christmas but supposedly accepted and encouraged family members to give her large packets of money in plain brown paper bags on December 25th. Prince was a total control freak, the reason for his breakup with Vanity and the failure if his 2 subsequent marriages His older half sister from his father's first marriage supposedly warned his inner circle early in his career, that Prince's weakness for cocaine needed to be reined in... The price of being a superstar took its toll on so many young Blacks who died relatively young. But, - that's show biz...

I appreciate you all's perspective on this subject but why, then, do you give so much weight to YouTube which you regularly post clips from, either because they support your views or contradict them. To me, YouTube, aside from its musical offerings, has always been a haven for crackpots and snake oil salesmen. I'm not defending FB, I'm just holding it up as a mirror that reflects Life's vicissitudes. In a perfect world, it wouldn't exist.

@Troy One of the reasons I posted the article about Thomas Sowell, was that I knew you were familiar with him. I, myself, don't know a lot about him, but do know he's a favorite among black right-wingers who love to cite and reference his ideas. What I find most noteworthy is that he personified the conservative philosophy by being someone with humble beginnings who "pulled himself up by his boot straps" and went on to become a successful, well-respected negro. But, as the article in question illustrates, the "Young Turks" of liberal black sociologists are taking him to task and besmiching his legacy. So be it. When it comes to America's racial dilemma, there are 2 sides to every issue. In response to your complaints, I can only reiterate that Sowell's academic critics are not, themselves, posting their articles on social media. It's ordinary people who find these commentaries thought-provoking who call attention to them, using FB as a source of what turns out to be free publicity for controversial black spokesmen. Yes, Zuckerberg profits from black patronage, but all FB users including Blacks, take advantage of it offering them an outlet for free publicity, always with the possibility of a post going viral. Some folks even get paid by FB if they have a large following and generate a lot of traffic. Finally, FB is literally a free bulletin board available for public access, its notices running the gamut from funeral arrangements to a wide vatiety of upcoming events. I don't say this to heap praise on Zuckerberg, I just mention it to call attention to the fact that FB users are not totally exploited. "Free" exposure is the operative word when it comes to assessing its appeal.

For many people, FB is a sounding board. A chance to get on your soap box and blow off steam to a vast, ready-made audience. It is many-faceted and convenient for millions of people who have nothing better to do when it comes to occupying their free time. It's escapism and is very accessible. It also provides a way to connect with friends and strangers. To me, since I no longer have a lot of mobility, hangin around there is just something to do... I've always been curious why the guys on this site always express so much disdain for FB, but have no problem with YouTube, which to me is not that different from Face Book. They both just need to be taken with "a grain of salt".

@Troy Well, as I previously stated, the articles that I occasionally re-post here are posted on FB not by the people who wrote them, but by others who are quoting them. I share some of the provocative ones here sometimes to just start conversations...

@Troy Well, former AALBC contributer. Linda Chavez, was who posted the article on FB. All these articles I re-post here have been posted there by just regular people who found them interesting, like me. One of the people who "liked" the article was another former regular here, "a woman". And just for the record. that quote that you attributed to "aka contrarian" was not my words. That was still tdka speaking.

@Troy No wonder Del didnt elaborate. Probably was wondering if AI was at work.🤫

Another one of my FB friends who was a member of the old crowd is my boy Shannon King who went under the user name "Yukio" and who also went on to become a college professor and a published author. Below is an article he posted which was written by Peter Birkenhead and which I found very timely. "I was about to write that I don’t think white people understand how much we are about to lose as a consequence of Black people losing electoral power, that we don’t have anywhere near an adequate appreciation of how much everybody in this country has benefited from the Voting Rights Act and the seismic political, legislative and cultural shifts it set in motion (there’s no Obamacare without the VRA — hell, there’s no Obama,) that almost everything we do every day has in some way been affected for the better by the democratization of political power and the corresponding investment in the public good represented by the VRA and its countless direct and indirect ripple effects (wether or not you send your kid to Head Start you have a hundred reasons to be grateful that other people send theirs,) and that I doubt very much that many of us would like to go back to a world lacking, for instance, the countless contributions, innovations and inventions of Black scientists, academics, engineers and artists subsidized by grants and institutions that would not themselves have existed but for the pressure exerted by people who could finally vote and have their votes weighted fairly. But then I remembered who we are, and how not once since the Voting Rights Act passed has a majority of us voted for a presidential candidate who supported the immeasurably better future that it ushered in, or the many better futures it would still no doubt have delivered. I remembered that we are white people, and that there is nothing — absolutely, positively nothing — that we aren’t willing to go without if it means Black people go without more."

As I've previously mentioned, I'm still in touch with several members of the old crowd who used to post here, and who are now my FB friends. One if these is a good ol sista named Linda Chavez and below is an article by someone named Tdka Maat Kilamanjaro which she posted and which I found very compelling because it takes to task a famous black pundit, revered by many. Below is the article. "Thomas Sowell---he is 95+ years old, he'll be dead soon, so I am making sure I analyze the mess he has made for over 65 years of slick ruling class capitalist propaganda...before he passes away. Out of Maatian respect for an elder. He like Clarence Thomas, has done his share of dirt for the White far right wing Heritage Foundation and other far right-wing Nazi organizations that paid him. He was but a bird paid to sing, yet another Black empty wagon rattling down an empty dirt road making noise by say nothing of substance. Once you peel things back, these are elementary school lightweight hired negroes just trying to pay their bills from the very Nazi Whites systematically impoverishing Blacks since slavery. Intellectual arsonists for these parasitic Whites, starting fires and blaming the Black populations they burned up in the the flames. Our problem as a people is our overall low level of capacity to think critically. So lightweight Black stoolpigeons like these two, Sowell and Thomas, can essentially run rings around most of our people by just talking mess with big words amplified with the Whiteman's international mass media. The moment you hear these windbag negroes of the far right wing Heritage Foundation are speaking on something or publishing something, you should automatically know the White Nazi garbage that will come out of their mouths. They are on the payroll. They are ignorant slick-talking mindless tools, effectively bought and paid for. They have zero independence of thought. If they deviate fundamentally from the Whiteman's right-wing script, their jobs and pay ends. But why fault them for being the degenerate enslavers mouth pieces they have been since these enslavers used chattel slavery to build the White capitalist system in the beginning? Even in the progressive community of Blacks the standards are just too damn low because most opposition Blacks are trying to be capitalists to get wealthy just like the Whiteman. So they, in their usual infantile way, just straddle the fence, tap-dancing around thinking they are going unnoticed. Foolishly deluded that they are some how independent. Playing both sides. As a result, these Black miscreants serving the far right Whites should have been intellectually crushed years ago. For decades these Black propagandists for Nazi Whites have had free road to just slander our poorest for their poverty when they were systematically made impoverished by this parasitic capitalist economy these Whites created for their own benefit. We explained this in detail in our newest research Fundamentals of Economics (2027, 900 pages). Below is a summary of the infantile right-wing rhetoric Thomas Sowell has propagated for over a half century. ANALYSIS The central error in the conservative economic interpretation associated with Thomas Sowell is that it treats social outcomes primarily as the cumulative result of culture, incentives, and individual behavioral patterns while systematically underestimating the historical construction of unequal material conditions. This framework often abstracts present-day economic behavior from the long development of murderous White genocidal conquest, 300+ years of enslavement, land theft and dispossession, deliberate labor stratification, imperialist colonial extraction and outright theft, 100 years of direct segregation, deindustrialization, and state-directed capital accumulation that shaped modern racial class structures. As a result, disparities are frequently interpreted as evidence of dysfunctional values or dependency rather than as the predictable outcome of historically produced differences in ownership, infrastructure, political power, education access, labor-market positioning, and wealth transmission. A major weakness in Sowell's approach is its tendency to isolate “free market” outcomes from the state structures that created and maintained them. The modern capitalist economy in the United States was never a neutral competitive field. Northern industrialization, railroad expansion, suburbanization, banking growth, agricultural development, and university formation were all heavily subsidized through state intervention, land grants, military expansion, exclusionary labor laws, racially restrictive housing policy, and infrastructure spending. And before that genocidal chattel slavery of Blacks by these rotten Whites and their predatory economic and land stealing government. Black populations were historically excluded from many of these state-supported wealth accumulation systems---of which Whites overwhelmingly benefited from. Therefore, arguing that contemporary inequality merely reflects differences in "decision-making" ignores the fact that entire racial populations entered the modern economy with radically unequal access to capital, land, credit, and protected labor markets. These rotten Whites monopolized wealth accumulation solely for Whites. They still do, by and large. Sowell's childish and silly interpretation of Black unemployment particularly suffers from this narrow causal lens. The argument that welfare programs or minimum wage laws produced Black unemployment reduces a complex structural process to a simplistic incentive hypothesis. Black unemployment expanded dramatically during periods of automation, deindustrialization, union decline, suburban capital flight, urban disinvestment, discriminatory hiring, and the relocation of manufacturing overseas. Entire Black working-class urban communities had been integrated into industrial labor markets during the mid-20th century, only to be devastated when industrial capital abandoned cities in search of cheaper labor and higher profit margins. The destruction of manufacturing employment removed stable wage structures that had previously absorbed semi-skilled labor. This collapse cannot be adequately explained by welfare incentives alone because the disappearance of jobs preceded or outweighed many behavioral explanations. Furthermore, the conservative claim that government assistance weakened Black work ethic often reverses causality, inverting logic in an essentially infantileattempt to blame the victims. Welfare expansion was itself a response to structural unemployment, low wages, urban poverty, housing segregation, and labor exclusion. Assistance programs did not create mass poverty; rather, mass poverty created pressure for social assistance. Even where dependency effects existed, they operated within an economic environment already characterized by insufficient employment opportunities, weak public investment, unequal schools, and racialized labor segmentation. The deeper issue was not merely whether aid existed, but why 10s of millions of Black and other people required aid in the wealthiest capitalist economy in history. Simply asking Sowell this question would have forced him out of his lazy childish mess. The treatment of food stamps and social programs also tends to ignore how capitalism structurally produces surplus populations during technological change and labor restructuring. Modern economies continuously generate underemployment through mechanization/AI/robotization, productivity increases, and capital concentration---the wealth for a few increase and poverty for many increases. Social welfare systems emerged partly to stabilize consumption, sell goods that could not be sould profitably, prevent resulting unrest, and preserve market order under conditions where the labor market alone could not guarantee survival. To portray welfare recipients as the primary source of economic dysfunction ignores the far larger structural processes of speculative finance, monopolization, wage suppression, tax policy favoring capital, and declining labor bargaining power. Our dumbest negroes calling themselves conservative fall for this elementary school argument all of the time. The critique of civil rights legislation similarly contains serious contradictions. Here the stupid Sowell argument that anti-discrimination laws interfered with voluntary exchange assumes markets naturally punish irrational discrimination. Historically, however, racial exclusion was not merely individual prejudice but an organized White predatory economic system enforced through law, violence, custom, labor unions, banks, real estate markets, insurance systems, and state institutions. Segregation persisted for generations precisely because markets often accommodated profitable discrimination rather than eliminating it. In many regions, employers, landlords, and businesses collectively benefited from maintaining a cheap and politically weak racial labor force. Without state intervention, these systems had little internal incentive to disappear. The criticism of affirmative action also often treats competition as occurring on a historically level playing field. Yet access to wealth, educational quality, inheritance, professional networks, neighborhood safety, and political influence are cumulative and intergenerational. A society cannot legally exclude Black populations from asset accumulation for centuries and then expect “meritocratic” equality immediately after a few formal barriers are removed. Economic inequality reproduces itself materially across generations through property ownership, social capital, school funding, and access to investment. Ignoring these inherited structural inequalities leads to an overly individualistic reading of success and failure. Another major flaw is the tendency to selectively interpret immigrant success stories as proof that systemic barriers are insignificant. These immigrants were purposely/deliberately set up in Black communities---liquor stores, gas stations, hair and weave shops, pawn shops. Tax friendly profit enterprise zones are set up for them throughout the country. Different groups entered the United States under radically different historical conditions. Many immigrant populations arrived voluntarily, often after exclusionary immigration systems filtered for education, skills, or capital. Descendants of enslaved populations emerged from centuries of uncompensated labor, racial terror, political exclusion, educational suppression, land theft, and targeted segregation within the same national economy. These are materially distinct historical trajectories---and as slick as Sowell and others are, they know this. Comparing groups without accounting for these structural differences obscures the specific economic legacy of racial slavery and segregation. The conservative framework also tends to underestimate the role of wealth versus income. Even when Black incomes rose substantially after the civil rights era, wealth inequality remained extreme because wealth accumulates intergenerationally through property, inheritance, business ownership, and investment access. Housing discrimination, redlining, exclusion from New Deal programs, unequal GI Bill implementation, and banking discrimination severely limited Black asset accumulation during the very decades when white middle-class wealth expanded most rapidly. Thus, focusing narrowly on behavior or income statistics without examining wealth structures produces incomplete conclusions. His treatment of Black business development similarly overlooks structural barriers in credit markets, procurement access, insurance, transportation, commercial zoning, and capital formation. Historically, Black businesses often operated within segregated economies lacking access to mainstream banking and investment networks. Integration alone did not automatically create equal market power because large corporations possessed economies of scale, distribution networks, advertising advantages, and access to finance that smaller Black-owned enterprises often lacked. Government assistance programs sometimes failed, but the deeper issue was that Black enterprise existed within an uneven capitalist structure shaped by concentrated capital ownership. Finally, the broader ideological limitation of this conservative analysis is that it often treats capitalism as fundamentally neutral and self-correcting while locating dysfunction primarily in state intervention or culture. Yet modern capitalist development has repeatedly depended on coercion, imperial expansion, racial stratification, cheap labor systems, land seizure, and uneven development. Racial inequality in the United States was not external to capitalism; it was historically integrated into its labor organization, agricultural expansion, industrialization, housing markets, and financial systems. Therefore, many of the social crises affecting Black communities—unemployment, homelessness, underfunded schools, mass incarceration, unstable housing, and concentrated poverty—cannot be fully understood as moral or behavioral failures detached from the material organization of the economy itself. Again. Get up to speed...Sowell is now just another senile has-been tool of the lowest element of White Nazi ideological thought. Soon to be buried literally and figuratively." End of article.

@Troy How do you know that's Delano? What is the back story?

Trump earlier sat down with "60 Minutes" correspondent, Norah O'Donnell, for an interview after the alleged assassination attempt at the annual white house press dinner, and during the course of the conversation, she directly quoted the words of the alleged shooter who said he wanted to rid the country of a "rapist, pedophile, traitor". Trump's immediate response was that he was not a "rapist, pedophile traitor" to which Norah responded, "oh, do you think he was referring to you?" a question that left Trump totally miffed and sputtering as he lapsed into a tirade against Norah, calling her among other things, "a terrible person"! This is where we presently are as a country as we approach the 250th anniversary of America's founding, and we've got a couple more years left of Trump's term in office. How much worse can it get? Or, - can it possibly reach the point where it's so bad it can only get better? 😳 Who knows?

Well, the much anticipated Michael Jackson bio opened in theaters this weekend fulfilling expectations of being a box office smash. Critics pretty much panned it as being all style and no substance but fans are giving it a thumbs up, praising the job his nephew, Jafaar Jackson, for the good job he does, playing Michael. Meanwhile , it's been reported that 6 more alleged victims have all of a sudden come forth, fiing charges against the gloved one's estate, charging him with child molestation...