May 20, 2024

Madvillain - Madvillainy (MF DOOM & Madlib) 2004 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

Label: [PIAS] Recordings – PIASX040DLP, [PIAS] Recordings – 940.0040.012, Stones Throw Records – 940 0040 012
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: UK
Released: 26 Mar 2004
Genre: Hip Hop
Style: Alt Hip Hop

May 20, 2024

The Misfits - Hybrid Moments (Extended version of the original Static Age C.I. Studios recording from 1978)

May 20, 2024

U.K. Subs - Police State (Shake Up The City EP version) 1982

Label: Abstract Records – ABS 012
Format: Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM
Country: UK
Released: Oct 1982
Genre: Rock
Style: Punk

May 20, 2024

Iggy And The Stooges - Gimme Danger (Josh Mobley Remix)

Label: Legacy – 19075803531, Columbia – 19075803531
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Record Store Day
Country: Europe
Released: 23 Nov 2018
Genre: Rock
Style: Garage Rock, Hard Rock, Punk

May 20, 2024

Sad to see Fetterman 'bothsides-ing' MTG attacking House Reps Crockett and AOC. Glad to see one of Biden's National

Campaign Co-Chairs, Veronica Escobar (TX-16) pushing back on him.


https://twitter.com/vgescobar/status/1791514939259011107

May 20, 2024

Who Would Benefit From Ebrahim Raisi's Death?

If the Iranian president turns out to have lost his life in a helicopter crash, it will set off a fierce scramble for power.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/05/who-would-benefit-from-ebrahim-raisis-death/678428/

https://archive.ph/uefye



Accidents happen everywhere, but not all accidents are equal. Many hours after initial news broke about an “incident” involving a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s state media has still not confirmed whether he is dead or alive. Various state outlets have published contradictory news—Was Raisi seen on video link after the accident? Was he not? Was the National Security Council meeting? Was it not?—signaling chaos and panic. A source in Tehran close to the presidency told me that Raisi has been confirmed dead, and that the authorities are looking for a way to report the news without causing mayhem. I have not been able to independently confirm this.

Iran doesn’t sound like a country in which presidents die by accident. But it also is a country in which aircraft crash, due to the sorry state of infrastructure in the internationally isolated Islamic Republic. In previous years, at least two cabinet ministers and two leading military commanders have died in similar crashes. Raisi’s chopper, which also carried Iran’s foreign minister and two top regional officials, was passing through an infamously foggy and mountainous area in northwestern Iran. The “incident” might very well have been an accident. Yet suspicions will inevitably surround the crash. After all, air incidents that killed high political officials in Northern Rhodesia (1961), China (1971), Pakistan (1988), and Poland (2010) are still often subject to speculation. In this case, much as in the others, one question will likely drive the speculation: Who stands to benefit politically from Raisi’s death? Even if the answer to this question does not ultimately tell us why the helicopter crashed, it could shed some light on what will come next in the Islamic Republic.

Raisi ascended to the presidency in 2021, in what appeared to be the least competitive election Iran had held since 1997. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had made sure that all other serious candidates were barred from running. Among those disqualified were not only reformists but also centrist conservatives and even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former hard-line president whom Khamenei came to see as a rival. Raisi appeared to have been picked precisely because he could never be a serious rival to Khamenei. In 2017, he revealed himself to be utterly uncharismatic in electoral debates against then-President Hassan Rouhani. His time in office since 2021 also speaks not only to his sheer incompetence but to his political irrelevance. Some call him the Invisible President. During the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which rocked Iran in 2022-23, few protesters bothered to shout slogans against Raisi, because they knew that real power rested elsewhere.

For Khamenei, what mattered was that Raisi could be counted upon to toe the regime’s line. Although competition is tight, Raisi may have more blood on his hands than any other living official of the Islamic Republic. Starting in the 1980s, the Islamic Republic has executed thousands of Iranian dissidents. The judiciary is the arm of the government that carries out this murderous function, and Raisi has held leading positions within it from the very start; he rose to become the head of the judiciary in 2019. The same qualities that likely made Raisi seem like a safe regime choice for the presidency also made him a primary contender for succeeding Khamenei as the Supreme Leader. According to the Iranian constitution, only a cleric with serious political experience can become head of state. By now many clerics who fit that description have died or been politically marginalized (many of them did not share Khamenei’s hardline politics), leaving the field open to Raisi. In turn, many political observers expected that Raisi would be a weak supreme leader, allowing real power to flow elsewhere—to the IRGC, for example, or to other power centers around or ancillary to the regime. Who better for such a position than an unimpressive yes-man?

snip

May 19, 2024

Wounded women dance with the news of Islamic Republic president's helicopter crash. Sima and Mercedeh, were blinded in

one eye and lost use of an arm during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, are now celebrating the possible death of Raisi, the Butcher of Iran.

https://twitter.com/mersedeh_eye/status/1792274450722791904

May 19, 2024

President Biden Morehouse commencement speech

May 19, 2024

Second Russian invasion of Kharkiv caught Ukraine unprepared

Despite months of complaints from troops over shortages and fatigue, Kyiv has been slow to ramp up mobilization, leaving some areas of the front critically understaffed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/17/kharkive-defenses-ukraine-russia-reinvasion/

https://archive.ph/C5A5T


KHARKIV, Ukraine — Russia’s new offensive across Ukraine’s northeastern border had been expected for months — yet it still surprised the Ukrainian soldiers stationed there to defend against it. Ukraine’s 125th Territorial Defense Brigade — stretched thin along a roughly 27-mile stretch of the Kharkiv region’s border with Russia — used reconnaissance drones to monitor, daily, how Moscow was steadily building up forces for a possible attack. But the morning it happened, May 10, the brigade lost all its video feeds due to Russian electronic jamming. Its Starlink devices — satellite internet the Ukrainian military relies on for basic communication — failed, the first time it was knocked out completely for them since Russia’s invasion in February 2022. “We were left at a certain point completely blind,” said a drone unit commander in the brigade. The Post agreed to identify him by his call sign, Artist, in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol.


“This was the biggest problem, we didn’t see how they were moving, we only worked through radio or through phones where they still worked,” Artist, a 53-year-old sergeant, said. The drone feeds, he said, “simply disappeared.” Within days, the Russians had captured — for the second time — some 50 square miles of territory along the border, capitalizing on a moment of particular vulnerability for Ukraine’s military. A U.S. aid package, including funding for precious ammunition for artillery and air defense, stalled in Congress for more than six months before it was approved last month, leaving forces on the front line often unable to fire back as their positions were pummeled. Meanwhile, despite military personnel complaining for months of personnel shortages and extreme fatigue among troops who have been fighting for more than two years, the government in Kyiv has been slow to ramp up mobilization, leaving some areas of the front critically understaffed.



But Russia’s battlefield gains in recent days were not only a result of Ukrainian shortfalls. Begrudgingly, Ukrainian troops admit that their enemy has gotten smarter and adapted, especially with technological advancements such as electronic warfare — a sharp contrast with the first year of the invasion, when Russia’s own blunders and overconfidence allowed the Ukrainians to hold key cities and later liberate large swaths of territory in successful counteroffensives. The new Russian advances, in Kharkiv and in the neighboring Donetsk region, have prompted questions about the viability of Ukraine’s defense — not only if Kyiv can fulfill its promise of expelling all invaders, but also if Russia will soon overpower Ukraine’s forces and seize more territory. The latest assault on the Kharkiv border has forced Ukraine to redirect some reserves north, potentially imperiling other positions.


Even as they watched the Russians building up forces, Artist, the drone commander in the 125th Brigade, said the Ukrainians were largely unable to construct the kind of fortified defense lines now being emphasized by the government and by military commanders. The Russians’ own layered web of “dragon’s teeth” antitank pyramid blocks, mines and concrete-reinforced trenches proved effective against Ukraine’s disappointing southeastern counteroffensive last summer. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky even visited the Kharkiv border in April to inspect the newly reinforced defenses. But Artist and other soldiers said that every time the units stationed here tried to build fortified lines, the Russians — using their own reconnaissance drones — would monitor their activity and fire on them.


snip

May 18, 2024

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

https://aeon.co/essays/what-role-for-revenge-in-jewish-life-literature-and-culture





Is there a distinctive Jewish perspective on revenge? The question obviously bears on the contemporary world in pressing ways. Revenge is a complex concept about which psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law and other fields offer important perspectives. But one way to answer it is to turn to the history of Jewish life, literature and culture. Here we can find a distinctive feeling and action on a matter that is as old as humanity, a human feeling in response to an injury or harm, and one closely bound to ideals of justice. The mid-20th century in particular, a formative period of Jewish and Israeli existence, has much to tell us about the relationship between violence, revenge, justice, memory and trauma in Jewish and Israeli life.

Since 7 October 2023, nekama (‘vengeance’ or ‘revenge’ in Hebrew) has emerged as one of the key words in Israeli public life. We’ve heard discussion of nekama from the government, the Knesset, the media, the army, social networks, synagogue bulletins, and in popular culture. Perhaps the most immediate and relevant invocation came on the same day of Hamas’s attack, from the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared: ‘The IDF will immediately employ all its power to destroy Hamas’s capabilities. We will strike them until they are crippled, and we will avenge with full force this black day they inflicted upon the State of Israel and its citizens.’ In the past few months, there were many poems on revenge written by Israelis, some of them IDF soldiers.

Like many basic concepts, there is really no consensual definition for revenge, or for its relation to near-synonyms such as ‘vengeance’ or even ‘retaliation’ and ‘retribution’. It seems certain, though, that revenge is connected to the realm of emotions and affect, for there can be a desire or a fantasy of vengeance without actualisation. But, of course, it also describes actions. The thirst for revenge animates much of the world of tragic literature, and it is a common element in art, theatre and cinema. Revenge begins within the family or tribe but it expands beyond, to town or sect or king or nation.



Revenge has a distinctive and dynamic relationship to time: it is caused by an act of wrong that happened in the past as an explanation for the present moment, but it is also directed towards the future. Austin Sarat, a scholar of law and politics, explains that vengeance attempts, consciously or not, to reenact the past, as it is ‘one means by which the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration’. The fact that vengeance looks backwards and seeks to cancel out past actions is one reason why the relationship between revenge and justice is complex. Revenge can indeed be the opposite of justice, a product of utter despair, a kind of empty and final gesture toward restoring one’s shattered self-respect. The scholars Susan Jacoby, Martha Minow and Sarat have all written important work trying to better understand and clarify the connection between revenge and justice. They all would concede that there is an understanding that ‘revenge is a kind of wild justice,’ as Francis Bacon wrote in his essay ‘Of Revenge’ (1625). Most modern systems of law claim authority by distinguishing themselves from revenge, though conceding that feelings for revenge cannot be eradicated. Scholars of politics and law seem to agree that there is no place for revenge in modern international relations. Here too, however, as the scholar Jon Elster has shown, revenge persists, often concealed under more technical and dispassionate terminology about state or national interests.

snip