aka Contrarian

@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...

Hey, sweet thing. Why you wanna waste all your credentials and potential and ruin your life by getting mixed up in some Trump shit??

I'm more interested in Mel and Chevdov, hoping their absences are just their usual long breaks. Maybe pioneer is somewhere sulking, lickin his wounds. HeeHaw.

Nobody on social media is taking this assassination threat seriously. Too much about it seems staged, including Trump's news conference. I've never been into conspiracy theories... but I'm very suspicious about this latest occurrence. I don't put anything pass the sinister well organized Project 2025 American Heritage Foundation. This latest gunman is a "brotha" and that's a plus for these right wing Retrumpicans, hoping that will lure more racists into their base.

J.Edgar Hoover genuinely feared the Black Panthers. Really believed they were a serious threat.

My daughters were big Prince fans and that's how I came to be a fan. I attended at least 4 concerts with them including his Purple Rain tour one in Chicagoland where he broke all records selling out 8 nights at a large venue. I remember my youngest daughter camping out all night with hundreds of fans to be first in line to get tickets. I actually liked old vintage Prince better than his later work. Also liked "The Time" who were his opening act when he first started out.

💜😟💜

@umbrarchist My original question in regard to your ongoing crusade was, is it possible that you are out of touch with reality in thinking your concerns will be addressed. Your response was beside the point because it didn't address the "you being out of touch with reality" issue. I think that in a Capitalistic society your particular gripes are a waste of time. Without "planned obsolescence" there would be no industy. Admitting construction and design mistakes is not profitable. It's all about the bottom line. (Life isn't fair.) And, so it goes...

@umbrarchist Is expecting experts in the field of Physics who continue to ignore or expose the twin towers enigma you describe and attach importance to, an example of YOU being out of touch with reality in thinking what you have exposed is important?? Especially since not exposing the discrepancy about what amount of steel was poured where, has not had an impact on the 20+ years since the twin towers collapse. What big difference would knowing what you know make to a population already cynical about its Government. Being deceived is nothing new, something I'm sure others have called to your attention. You are obviously out of touch in attaching great importance to this quirk you are fixated on. The reality is: it is what it is. After all these centuries, engineers are still trying to figure out the meta-physics of HOW the pyramids were built. Who ever has their priorities together enough to figure out the answer to that puzzle, could win a Pulitzer Prize! OTOH, maybe you could share the truth about the construction of the twin towers with the Trump administration. That information is on a par with the Epstein files and could prove to be yet another finger in the dyke. 😜

@Troy lol My opinion about the new format calls for the least concern on your part. As I previously said, I'm the past not the future. My remarks should've been automatically deleted by the omnipotent Chess Master who is playing the game we are pawns in. It's all good. 😬

@Troy I didn't think there was anything wrong with the old format. The new way is very .. "busy". You have to go through a whole process just to discern what's current. Also, I uploaded my picture thinking it would be a tiny little image replacing the initial "A" , it didnt do this. Instead, my profile provided a lot more info about me than I preferred to have known. Sometimes we should all just leave well enough alone. 😜

@Delano Everytime I hear about Australia's criticism of America going to war with Iran, you come to mind. So how ferverant is the anti American sentiment among Australia's general population? Are they indifferent or indignant??

Speaking of conspiracy theories and computer technology and Aliens, the longer I live, the more convinced I am that there's more to "Life" than meets the eye, that what I once thought were delusions or hallucinations or dreams, are different forms of reality, vibrating at a different frequency; I definitely believe in a multi-verse and that I shift between parallel worlds. I also see images out of the corner of my left eye and sense that I have a spirit "guide" who looks out for me. Whether these are extra-terrestial or divine phenomena, they are super-natural and outre. I have also had some weird things happen in regard to computers deleting things on their own; especially when I went on a tirade about something better left unsaid; these rants would suddenly disappear from the screen as if I was being monitored. And then there was the "duplicated phrase" quirk as if, while typing, I shifted from one universe to another in the middle of a sentence causing an overlap which resulted in a phrase appearing twice in a sentence... Like just now, when the words "twice in" for some reason became underlined in yellow??? 🤫 Also, I always thought a lot more attention and investigstion should be given to the possibilities raised about other beings living inside the Earth. There are places in the South Pole that have never been explored by Man, and restricted areas there where pilots are not allowed to fly over... Whatever. Once I decided to just go with the flow when it came to the inexplicable, Time seemed to stop existing; now, - I just am. I might be dead and don't know it.😗 I've never been into conspiracy theories so I never questioned whether we actually went to the moon before, but now when I see the old photos of the astronauts on the moon, they look - phony. 🤫 And speaking of "phony", why aren't we given more specific images and info about the U.S. pilot who was supposedly rescued from the cave he was hiding in after being shot down in Iran? No name no actual picture of him. Nothing. I would think they'd be parading him around to justify the millions of dollars the rescue operation cost to pull off...

When the pendulum swings back and the smoke clears, America will never be the same, no matter which party prevails. Civilization aided and abetted by AI will morph into an entirely different society. If you're an optimist, nothing to worry about.

That being the case,Trump's base could stand pat and re-elect him.

I didn't say Trump wasn't the embodiment of the American spirit. I'm the one who is lukewarm about this country. Y'all the ones declaring your love for America and optmistically thinking this nightmare will soon be over and the good ol USA will make a comeback. 😉

I don't know how I'm able to post here, having not done the required procedure, but I'm not complaining.😛

@ProfD Trump always takes the low ground, never the high ground. He says what a lot of prople really think and appeals to the worst in people, with his lack of propriety. England's royal couple, King Charles and his consort Queen Camilla are coming to America as a good will gesture in connection with America's celebration of its 250th birthday. Wouldn't be surprised if the meglomanical Trump tries to upstage them, and a lot of people will approve of this. Trump is an iconoclast, which wouldn't be such a bad thing if he, himself, wasn’t such a depraved, narcisstic, ignoramus. As POTUS, he's a terrible embodiment of the America spirit on the occasion of its 250th anniversity.