rochester friends, this will be a final screening of my film ‘a thin wall’ before i move away. what better venue than 540WMain, Inc. a wonderful collab with Calvin Eaton and a way to raise some funds for community work. if u haven’t seen the film, pls join us. i will be there for a discussion afterwards 🙂
the difference between sanders and warren. she can’t even manage to say the word ‘muslim.’ #bernie2020
George Monbiot: Every night, millions of children and adults sleep on mattresses treated with a class of chemicals that was long ago banned from sheepdips and pesticides. Every day, we sit on furniture containing the same toxic compounds, absorbing them through our lungs and skin. According to parliament’s environmental audit committee (EAC), mothers in the UK and the US have the world’s highest recorded concentrations of a toxic class of flame retardants in their breastmilk. Banned fire retardants have recently been discovered in umbilical cord blood. We have no clear idea of how they might affect the development and future health of foetuses. But we know that they are persistent, accumulative and associated with cancer and disruption of the hormonal and reproductive systems. More here.
in india: mobs attacking muslims, looting their businesses and desecrating their houses of worship.
“Stop what you’re doing, watch this video & read about what’s happening in India. As Trump and Modi parade across the country, mobs are openly attacking Muslims, looting their businesses & desecrating houses of worship just like you see in this video.
Aaron Mate: For more than three years, US audiences have been flooded with fearmongering about a supposed “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign, and even more intense speculation—since shown by Robert Mueller to be baseless—that the Trump camp conspired with it. A core goal has been to help US elites, particularly in the Democratic Party, avoid challenging the corrupt system that gave rise to Trump’s presidency. Such a challenge would threaten their own status and power inside that system. For national security state officials, it doubled as a means to undermine Trump’s calls for better cooperation with Russia and stigmatize the appeal of his campaign-trail promises, however insincere they were, of ending regime change wars abroad.
The Russiagate playbook has been a mirror image of what its adherents ascribe to Russia: to “sow chaos” and “undermine confidence in American election systems” by spreading disinformation and hyberbolic warnings. The Russians, via their “dark arts,” are all-powerful, able not to just install a president in the White House, but to hack into voting systems, cut off heat during frigid temperatures, and help “convince blacks not to vote in Michigan.”
Embedded in this playbook is an elitist condescension toward the public targeted by it. Critical issues that affect regular people’s lives are relegated to the margins, replaced by breathless panic that presupposes them to be malleable enough to be duped by Russian memes and bots. It also has no relationship to the reality of what this supposed Russian operation actually amounted to: juvenile posts on social media that few people actually saw and that seldom mentioned the 2016 election. Contrary to claims that the campaign was “Russian intelligence-backed,” the Russian social media ads were the product of a private firm with no established ties to the Russian government, as Mueller’s prosecutors have conceded in court. If Russian intelligence indeed stole Democratic Party e-mails (and I do not think that has been proven to date), then that would mean it is guilty of a cyber-crime that exposed accurate information about Democratic National Committee corruption—not fabricated propaganda.
The fact that this cynical playbook is now being used against Sanders and his presidential campaign should be no surprise. Sanders’s policy agenda is a threat to the same forces behind Russiagate. In fact, he is a far more dangerous threat than Trump ever was.
A politics rooted in real issues and real people is far more powerful than the cynical methods that brought us Russiagate. More here.
jokes aside, this is what’s going on in delhi. it’s terrifying. how indian msm are twisting the narrative is also deeply unsettling/orwellian. feels like the violence of the partition all over again. more here.
yesterday was such an emotional/powerful day. some lovely pakistani american friends threw a lavish tea party and i got to say goodbye to so many astonishing women i love. i am so lucky. thank u shahida, anjum, ayesha, darakhshan, farah a, farah m, and najia! and thank u to all the ladies who took the time to visit. love u all. (more pictures soon)
said it before, here it is again. it’s not just the ‘bros’. once i’m settled in long island, and before i dive into editing my film, i look forward to volunteering for bernie’s campaign.
read article here.
at the greenhouse cafe with some seriously powerful women – Cat Ashworth, Nancy G. Ghertner and Loret Steinberg. thank u for empowering other women, creating brilliant art and working hard to change the world. love u all!
the problem with all this talk about ‘bernie bros’ is that we, women of color, muslim women, black and brown women, immigrant women, get erased so easily. some of the most prominent (and viciously attacked) woc in leadership positions, people like ilhan omar, rashida tlaib, AOC, and linda sarsour, who exist at the intersection of countless marginalized identities (black, refugee, african, arab, latina, palestinian, muslim, working class, woman) are supporting bernie sanders very publicly, yet it’s the ‘bernie bros’ who persistently define the narrative about his support. i understand that it’s deliberate, that the media are crafting a story, but it’s interesting how familiar the MO is – delete these inconvenient people who never mattered anyway. it’s infuriating. and yes, i know politicians are not a panacea and that the struggle will continue. just sick of this normalized form of erasure.
read article here.
‘it goes, it goes.’
with the wonderfully vibrant and brilliant Andi Ongoiba and her beautiful daughter – thank u for the incredible work u do for Refugees Helping Refugees <3
with the brilliant Calvin Eaton at starry nites cafe today where we talked about a new collab – will be coming up at 540WMain, Inc. in march inshallah.
Mark Provost: Just learned something worth sharing. A new study has been published by a team of Yale epidemiologists in The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal in the world, which they found Medicare for All would save 68,000 lives and $450 billion in cost per year. The study was posted to The Lancet’s website literally an hour ago and so far not a single news outlet has covered it, which I expect to change soon.
Feminists, POCs, activists, pls watch.
BARBARA SMITH: The reason I support Bernie Sanders is because of the fact that he has a theory of change. You know, that’s a popular phrase now. He has an understanding of like why things are not working in our U.S. society, and he has ideas like Medicare and healthcare for all, like changing the criminal justice system, like having access to college for all young people and not just for those who are privileged. He has good ideas about how we can actually fulfill that promise that the Founders supposedly put out, in their very flawed way, since they didn’t really include people like me. They didn’t include women. They didn’t include black people. But they had some great ideas about freedom and justice for all. He has the plans. He has the passion and the compassion. He has the base of support, which is much more diverse than, I think, any of the other candidate at this point.
He just — you know, we’re just in sync. He and I are near the same age, and we were both involved in movements in our younger days, as students. And we just — as I said, I don’t — I’ve only met him once, so I don’t know him. It’s not like we’re like buddies or anything like that. It doesn’t come from that kind of contact. It comes from looking at what he is standing for, what he proposes to do and what he has done, actually. I’ve been aware of him. Someone asked me, “When did you first know about Bernie Sanders?” I said, “I feel like I’ve known about him all of — at least all of his life, and — his political life, because I knew about him when he was a mayor in Burlington.” So, I have definitely followed him through the years. Watch here.
