October rambling #2: Threat of Tribalism

UncleSamLadyLiberty.PinterestClimate change: The Media is Failing Us and Billionaires Are the Leading Cause

Triumph of the strongman has worrying echoes of the Thirties

Why America Didn’t See Fascism Coming

More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think

John Oliver Takes Down Saudi Dictatorship, In Detail

The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Tyranny or Revolution

This Is What Living on Minimum Wage Looks Like

This is why the Founders banned emoluments

Here’s why he threatened to pull out of a 144-year-old postal treaty

‘It Doesn’t Matter What He Says We’ll Support It’: His Fans Profess Cult-Like Love

Vlogbrothers: The Rigged Election

Republican Voter Suppression Efforts Are Targeting Minorities, Journalist Says (nothing new)

Weekly Sift: 12 Things to Remember Before You Vote and Souls in Darkness

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: State Attorneys General (at 10:00)

Kavanaugh proves one of the nine justices is not like the others

Pregnancy discrimination’s toll: Women in strenuous jobs miscarried after employers denied requests for light duty

The Threat of Tribalism – The Constitution once united a diverse country under a banner of ideas, but partisanship has turned Americans against one another—and against the principles enshrined in our founding document

Melania, we have a Be Best emergency

Guy’s $650 World Series Ticket Stolen by Scammer Through Instagram Photo

How a Ragtag Group of Oregon Locals Took on the Biggest Chemical Companies in the World — and Won

The Most Googled Medical Symptoms by State

James Karen, R.I.P.

Eugene Peterson, author of ‘The Message’ and pastor to other pastors, dies at age 85

A nice remembrance of Neil Simon that was assembled upon his recent passing

Robert S Hoffman The big chill has broken our circle

The heart-busting story of Igor Vovkovinskiy, one of the tallest men in the world

Spectrum customer service

Julia Louis-Dreyfus receives Mark Twain Prize

Speeding up sitcoms

Jimmie Walker on the “Good Times” cast – TelevisionAcademy.com/Interviews

Back Machine stops in 1969

intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

Nik Durga’s new blog, My Impression Now. “I’m coming back to blogging because it trains me to write more than a few pithy sentences”

A sin, Arthur! Blogging about blogging

More meta: Internet Wading: A bit of it

PostSecret Ted Talk

SEEN: Albany Public Library Foundation’s Literary Legends Gala 2018

Now I Know: The “Faithful Employee” Award Which Had the Opposite Effect and Until Death Does the Hangman Part and The Battle over The Collect Call and Why We Park on Driveways and Drive on Parkways and The Cell Phone Contract Killer

Dancing robot dog is too creepy

MUSIC

A Scary Time

‘Swamp Rock’ Master Tony Joe White Has Died At 75; Polk Salad Annie

Can’t Run But – Paul Simon, Saturday Night Live, 13 Oct 2018

Steel Here- Tisha Campbell-Martin (powerful backstory)

While My Guitar Gently Weeps – the Beatles (Acoustic Version, Take 2)

English singer Kathy Kirby (1938-2011)

Hard Times Come Again No More – Mavis Staples

I Need To Be Loved – Keiko Togi, Carpenters

POP Chamber String Orchestra

Poke at The Pope – Donovan

I’ll Follow the Sun – The MonaLisa Twins

Coverville 1237: The Radiohead Cover Story IV and Coverville 1238: The Duran Duran Cover Story IV

The Wheels on the Bus – Mad Donna, and Leo Moracchiol

The oddly controversial cover: T Ko Ko Korina -Ahad Raza Mir & Momina Mustehsan

K-Chuck Radio: Seamless segues

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys – Sabrina Lentini

WatchMojo.com’s 10 Worst #1 Songs on the Billboard Hot 100; I own four of them

Music as Medicine

The Copyright of Spring

“Immigrants helped this country become what it is”

“At every point in our history, the idea of American has stretched far enough to include past waves of immigrants, while still balking at the more recent ones.”

Occasionally, reading conservative websites is a fruitful endeavor. For instance, Sarah Quinlan wrote in Red State, “Laura Ingraham’s Comments Were Wrong In Every Way.” Fox News host Ingraham “lamented ‘massive demographic changes’ that have caused the end of the “America we know and love.”

While Quinlan loves the United States, she is not blind to the “shameful events — from the savagery of our early history, to slavery, to extrajudicial lynchings and implementing legal discrimination, to women being treated as second-class citizens.” She goes on at length about this.

“During Ingraham’s lifetime” – Laura was born in 1963 – “Americans of color have been repeatedly denied justice and forced to fight to receive the rights they were due. During Ingraham’s lifetime, women have had to demand to be treated as human beings in their own right…

“Is that the America that Ingraham wishes still existed? I find it utterly baffling that people express nostalgia for a pleasant, untroubled past in American history, because that has never truly existed…

“Ronald Reagan once promoted the belief that anyone can come to this country and become an American — which is possible here because America is an idea, not an ethnicity, and no American is more American than another based on birth, wealth, religion, political party, or race.”

It’s noteworthy that Ingraham criticizes “legal immigration and disparagingly refers to it as something that ‘of course progressives love.’ Since when did Republicans turn against legal immigration? Since when are Republicans against the idea of people legally coming to America in pursuit of a better life and the American Dream?

“Immigrants helped this country become what it is. And America endures because of the core American values that guide us, not because of what her people look like.”

“According to Pew [Research], 58% of Americans consistently say increasing diversity makes America a better place to live…Alex Nowrasteh, Senior Immigration Policy Analyst at Cato Institute says that “recent immigrants’ assimilation to American culture and values is doing ‘as well as or [on] a better pace of assimilation than previous immigrant waves….’

“Laura Ingraham’s comments…were despicable, and it is not virtue-signaling for me to point that out but rather simply standing up for what I believe is right; such comments should not be treated as normal or acceptable. When former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke is cheering on Ingraham’s comments, that’s a side that I do not want to be on.”

Unsurprisingly, other Red State contributors supported Ingraham. But as the Weekly Sift noted: Anti-immigrant rhetoric is an insult to your ancestors.

The timelessness of xenophobia. But there’s a strange thing about that rhetoric: It’s been part of American discourse forever. And most of us here today — including most of the white supremacists — are descended from those darker immigrants who supposedly would never assimilate…

The elasticity of Americanism. At every point in our history, the idea of American has stretched far enough to include past waves of immigrants, while still balking at the more recent ones. At every point, there has been a clear line between Them and Us, and every time the issues seemed totally different than what we had seen before.

Of course, it is White House adviser Stephen Miller who is the hand behind the regime’s current offensive policy “to make it impossible for many legal immigrants to become citizens or lawful permanent residents (green-card holders).”

Their offenses? Using public benefits to which they are entitled: Enrolling in Obamacare or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or using food stamps or other social welfare programs.

David S. Glosser wrote Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”

Ironically, The regime has denounced what he calls “chain migration.” His in-laws just became U.S. citizens by taking advantage of that program.

Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave.

May rambling: Red-Eyed Tree Frogs

The gayageum is a Korean Instrument Dating Back to the 6th Century


Change Can Happen Faster Than You Think

Sierra Club secures 24,000 pages of EPA emails, calls logs, and documents which expose the culture of corruption in and around Scott Pruitt

NYSUT congratulates Albany Med nurses on the decision to unionize

Waging Peace: Two Billboards Outside Albany, New York

Speaking in Code: Two phrases that no longer mean what they used to

Roy Cohn, the Original Donald Trump

America’s Word is Worthless

‘Project Trumpmore’ to Carve President’s Face into Melting Iceberg

Federal Employees Face Cuts To Retirement Benefits And Pay Freezes

Cartoon: Circular Sarah

What ‘Daily Show’ host Trevor Noah means by ‘the 5:30 curse’

The point at which the US politics firmly pivoted toward the Right

It’s A Toxic Myth That Celibacy Makes Men Violent

Monica Lewinsky: What We All Can Learn from My Disinvitation Debacle

Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice May Be World’s Largest

New Yorker cartoon: Late at night is my sacred time to catalog every single instance of when and how I am a terrible person

Is this the loneliest generation?

She was the first woman senator. Her term lasted exactly a day

Culture Cruise: ‘Homer’s Phobia’

Did Little Syria in Lower Manhattan Consist of Asian-Americans?

Their Ancestors Were on Opposite Sides of a Lynching. Now, They’re Friends

Free press: the future of Boulder, CO’s Daily Camera

The architecture of First Presbyterian Church in Albany, an article by Warren Roberts, who died this week, struck by two cars in Florida.

Science Marches On

Wait But Why: A thing happened while I was at the coffee shop

This Video is about Red-Eyed Tree Frogs? and How to Win

Ken Levine on the state of network TV

Internet Wading: The return

“Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”

Why Whales Got So Big

Gone to the dogs

Names list offers origins, statistics and popularity rankings for people names

Now I Know: The Color Changing Building (and Democracy Experiment) and The Accident and the Musical Savant and Why Dippin’ Dots Never Became the Ice Cream of the Future and When the NBA Doubled Its Money and I Can’t Believe It’s All Butter

Magnolias In The Park

Credit and Debt Management

The Best Coffee in Every State

MUSIC

Confounds the Science – parody of Sound of Silence

My Last Day Without You – Nicole Behari

Dire Straits’ “Sultans Of Swing” Played on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument Dating Back to the 6th Century

Birdsong – Kina Grannis

I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You – Louis Armstrong

I’m Not in Love – Don’s Mobile Barbers (UK surf act)

Slow Turning – John Hiatt

Coverville: 1215: Cover Stories for Adele and Captain & Tennille and 1216: The Irving Berlin Cover Story

Uptown Funk- Big Daddy

When I’m Sixty-Four -MonaLisa Twins

The Hamilton Polka – The Casts of Hamilton

Black Water – some Doobie Brothers and the Playing for Change Band

Riley B King – Keb’ Mo’

In The Mood – Henhouse Five Plus Two

Beatle For 13 Days

Hit Parade: The B-Sides Edition

N is for nativism versus immigration

“Illegal” immigration has always been a red herring.

There have have always been nativism movements in the United States. Seldom has been as blatant as it’s been the past year and a quarter. In February 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director L. Francis Cissna announced that the agency changed its mission statement from:

“USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.”

To now:

“U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”

The aspirational angle has been lost.

By contrast, “During the 1940s, America basically underwent a nationwide sensitivity training program. Zoe Burkholder, a historian of education, writes… that a ‘forced tolerance’ movement had begun frothing a decade earlier as educators feared that scientific racism—the pseudoscientific ‘Master Race’ theories brewing in Germany—could waft overseas.” A reasonable worry, evidently.

Thus the story about the Superman pic shown. (Hey, wasn’t he an illegal alien?) What I do know is that the current regime’s attitude is troublesome.

Fran Rossi Szpylczyn notes: “The part where Jesus says to welcome the stranger is not a suggestion, it is a directive.”

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes that Ronald Reagan “not only celebrating the concept of welcoming people from all sorts of places during his kickoff of the fall campaign, but arguing that it was immigrants who helped build the country and it was the dream that they embodied that was what made America great.” The GOP icon didn’t believe in nativism.

In other words, the US Needs ‘sh*thole’ countries, not the other way around. “America’s prosperity and security are greatly dependent on the goodwill and cooperation of other nations, developed and emerging markets alike.”

That would include chain migration, or family reunification.

Read former President Obama on immigration from September 2017

A pastor friend of mine noted recently, “I am thinking this morning of good people, great Americans I know, who have come here from Haiti, [various African countries], Pakistan, Philippines. These Americans contribute to the greater good of the US… [they] have worked hard, learned to live in an often-less-than-friendly new place, raised strong families, and sent their kids to college so they can also contribute to society… You ARE the American People.”

As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting.

The Weekly Sift guy nailed it when he wrote about The Real Immigration Issue: “‘Illegal’ immigration has always been a red herring. The more fundamental question is whether the United States will continue to be a country dominated by English-speaking white Christians.” Will nativism continue to push back?

For a brief historic perspective, read Becoming a Citizen: Naturalization Records, 1850 – 1930

For ABC Wednesday

November rambling #1: until we get power again

Controversial Newsweek cover
Amy Biancolli: Slave castles, and the weight of history

The lost children of Tuam: Ireland wanted to forget

After I Adopted Two Black Babies, I Realized My Church Was Full Of Racists

Chaz Ebert: My daughter loves country music

I Want ‘Allahu Akbar’ Back

The Billie Jean Republicans

Every scandal plaguing him

A LOT of smoke

‘I want the government…to bring kindness back’ – Alas, not here. Jacinda Ardern sworn in as Prime Minister of New Zealand

When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’

Floods: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Saudi Arabia issues first non-human citizenship to humanoid AI robot Sophia and Are We Ready for Intimacy With Androids?

Why This Cardiologist Is Betting That His Lab-Grown Meat Startup Can Solve the Global Food Crisis

The ‘good guy with a gun’ theory didn’t work out well in Colorado

Philip Schuyler’s Last Project: Before the Erie Canal

Effective November 30, 2017, AOL will no longer offer the ability to add new usernames or restore deleted usernames to an account

How Betsy DeVos Became The Most Hated Cabinet Secretary

Why you hate contemporary architecture

The Hotel at the Center of the World – I’ve been there

Judi England: Life is change (redux)

Born this month (1954)
Goodbye Katie Lee

Robert Guillaume RIP; Benson theme; SOAP- Stop in the Name of Love

Farewell, 747

David Letterman reflects on Harvey Pekar

Creating Saturday Night Live

Back To The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling’s Binghamton

Frank Oz news

Woody Woodpecker cartoon called The Bird Who Came to Dinner redux

Now I Know: How a Minnesota Town Body Slammed Its Neighbor and Stolen Smile and The Problem with Seven Eights and When Ice Was a Hot Gift

How Pringles Potato Crisps are made and how do they make crayons?

MUSIC

(Earth is) Not OK – Ingrid Michaelson -October 25, 2017 Full Frontal on TBS (language)

The Story Behind Devo’s Iconic Cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”

Good For Me – Aimee Mann from season 3 of Supergirl

K-Chuck Radio: Edison Diamond Discs and Until we get power again…

Coverville 1192: The Cover Me Interview

Lorena -John Hartford, written in 1856

It’s Not Your Nationality (It’s Simply You) -Billy Murray (1916)

The Oz medley

All Through The Night – the Mystics, with Jerry Landis aka Paul Simon

Rumble – Link Wray

Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin

Neuroscientists Discover A Song That Reduces Anxiety By 65 Percent (Listen)

NOLA The Cat Performs John Cage’s 4’33”

Ringo Starr Talks New Album, Reuniting With Paul McCartney

The Unlikely Return of Cat Stevens

Sex, spies, and classical music: The BSO scandal

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