This came out in 1972. Though little known in Anglo America, it sold over a million copies in Latin America. The band toured Latin America with an interpreter, but then shocked Brazil when the lead singer, Brian Anderson, answered an interviewer in perfect Portuguese! He was a falso gringo – someone pretending to be a gringo! His real name was André Barbosa Filho. He was just a plain old Brazilian. The band worked with the biggest fake gringo of them all, Maurício Alberto Kaisermann. His gringo name was Morris Albert, famous among real gringos for the song “Feelings” (1974).
Give me your smile again
I’d like to be with you
With the things I would like to know
Darling, be happy with me
And tell me once again
That you know that i’d die
For your love tell me why
Back to dream
Be careful with the words you say
My heart is open
But believe in the ways of sorrow
And try to find somebody like me
And tell me once again
That you know that i’d die
For your love tell me why
Back to dream
Sit on a chair near me
Or in a place you’ll like to be
I will tell you something new
About life and the things that we’ll do
And tell me once again
That you know that i’d die
For your love tell me why
Back to dream
US President Trump posted a racist video of the Obamas, the former Black president and first lady. It was put on the Internet just before midnight (05:00 GMT) on Thursday February 5th 2026. For hours even fellow Republicans begged Trump to take it down and apologize! He took it down, after 12 hours, but did not apologize. He said that he had not seen the whole 62-second video.
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate:
“it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
The video was mostly about the still-yet-to-be-proved voter fraud in the 2020 election. Near the very end for about a second it shows two apes in the jungle laughing. They have the faces of Michelle and Barack Obama (see above). The song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background.
Trump being racist is not new – in fact, it is on-brand (see links at the bottom for various examples). Nor is Black-people-as-monkeys new – that goes back hundreds of years and is deep-seated among Whites. But even for Trump it seems to be a new low. Even some Republicans can see how racist it is. Or, rather, have the courage to call it racist or offensive.
Black History Month has just begun in the US. But probably way less coincidentally, Trump is in the middle of his worst scandal yet:
The Jeffrey Epstein Files names names and shows pictures of people who seem to take part in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation of underage girls. Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump appear. Trump is losing support within his own Republican Party. It is just the sort of thing that can bring down a strongman leader like Trump. Underage girls are a red line for many people. Just ask Berlusconi. If Trump can make the issue his racism he is on much safer ground. Most White people seem to be perfectly fine with it.
Reactions to the racist video among fellow Republicans:
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC): “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME): “Tim is right. This was appalling.”
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY): “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive — whether intentional or a mistake — and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”
Rep Mike Tuner (R-OH): “I do not feel the need to respond to every inflammatory statement made by the White House. However, the release of racist images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama is offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable. President Trump should apologize.”
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE): “Even if this was a Lion King meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this. The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize.”
The White House called criticism “fake outrage”. Most Republicans remained silent or made excuses, like this:
Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY): “President Trump has made tremendous inroads in the black community and I can’t imagine that sharing a one-minute video the last second of which was pretty racist wasn’t a sloppy oversight by staff.”
February is Black History Month in the US and on this blog. Below are some posts I am thinking of doing (or did) this month on the history of Africa and the Diaspora. Since I am on a Portuguese media diet till Easter, the posts will probably centre on Lusophonia, the Portuguese-speaking world, particularly Black Brazil and Angola.
Estadunidense, also spelled estado-unidense, is a Portuguese word meaning someone or something from the Estados Unidos da América (EUA) – the United States of America (USA). Spanish has a similar word, usually spelled estadounidense.
United Statesian: When I was eight I was greatly disappointed to find out that “United Statesian” was not a real word. In English it is instantly understandable, but no serious person uses it. No grown-up, certainly. But in most Romance languages it is a real word! At least in:
Portuguese: estadunidense, estado-unidense
Spanish: estadounidense, estadunidense
Catalan: estatunidenc
French: états-unien
Italian: statunitense
But it is mainly seen as pedantic or picky.
Only in Spanish has it taken off. Since 2006 it has become more common in print in Spanish than americano or even norteamericano (the most popular term in the 1980s). Even the Royal Spanish Academy, the top authority on the Spanish language, recommends it!
Eduardo Galeano of Uruguay in 2009:
“the grandchildren of the Pilgrims seized the name and everything else. Now they are the Americans. And those of us who live in the other Americas, who are we?”
In Brazil there are several terms applied to things US:
americano – by far the most common, even among those who would never dream of calling the country América (considered one of the six continents in Latin America). It still has a pan-American meaning, so professors, journalists, Wikipedians and other sticklers prefer estadunidense or norte-americano:
estadunidense – sometimes seen as lefty.
norte-americano – does not include Canada, much less Mexico. Just the US. How disappointing. More common than estadunidense.
ianque – from “Yankee”. Not a neutral term!
gringo – means any foreigner, not just those from the US. Not always meant in a nice way. More spoken than written.
The Portuguese model of the world.
The pedantic argument: The whole trouble starts with the official name of the country:
The United States of America
The US does not take up all of North America, much less America as a whole. The “America” it is talking about, what the word meant in 1776, is not a country but a huge part of the world. “The United States of America” is at best (worst) aspirational, a mission statement, not a description of reality, not now in 2026, certainly not in 1776 (when the US was just part of the east coast of North America).
Spanish and Portuguese preserve the original meaning of “America”. So do terms like “Latin America” and “North America” in English. But the power of the US has so distorted English, at least outside of Canada, that “America” (since at least 1938) now just means the US!
But calling it just the “United States” runs into trouble too, because you also have:
The United States of Mexico
The United States of Colombia
The United States of Brazil (from 1891 to 1967)
So even estadunidense, my beloved “United Statesian”, is a logic fail!
The pragmatic argument: “American” as meaning people from the US has become so common, not just in English but in many other languages, that almost no one is confused or misled by the term. They know exactly who you mean.
– Abagond, 2026.
Update (February 10th 2026): Just three days after I wrote this post, Bad Bunny at his halftime show at the Super Bowl, said “God bless America” and then listed all the countries from Chile to Canada. The US was not “America” but the “Estados Unidos” (United States). So beautiful.
Alex Pretti (1988-2026) was a White American shot dead on January 24th 2026 by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US immigration police. Pretti was a native-born US citizen. He did have a gun, but he did not draw it – instead ICE took his gun and then shot him dead. It has all been caught on video. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.
This comes just weeks after Renee Good was shot dead by ICE in the same city, Minneapolis. Trump has sent thousands of ICE agents there, supposedly to crack down on fraud by Somali immigrants. Pretti, like Good, was filming their activities – completely legal. Like Good, the government is calling him a domestic terrorist.
Anti-ICE protests have only grown.
Citizen video: As singer Bruce Springsteen tells it in song:
Trump’s federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead
Their claim was self-defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
Pretti was filming their activities with his mobile phone, shouting at them, trying to protect women that ICE shoved around. ICE pepper sprayed him, and, after they surrounded him and got him on the ground, took his gun and then shot him dead. Some ten shots were fired.
Eleven days before (January 13th) Pretti was caught on film being shoved to the ground by ICE after kicking out a tail light on one of their vehicles and shouting at them, calling them “trash”.
He had a gun in both cases, but he is never shown drawing it. Instead in his hand is a mobile phone, which in no way looks like a drawn gun.
His family says the gun was legal, that he had a gun-carry permit for the past three years. He has no police record. He took part in the George Floyd protests. He was anti-Trump.
Congresswoman AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez):
“Donald Trump [is] accusing a Veteran Affairs ICU nurse (Alex Pretti) as being a terrorist against the United States. A man who was treating services members to our country, who was dedicating his life to serving Americans. Who in his final act on this earth was helping a woman pushed to the ground. And they are calling him a Domestic Terrorist, in order to defend their gross abuse of power, their absolute breaching of the law and in order to precipitate greater conflict.”
President Trump, who likes to talk about the Insurrection Act, also called Pretti an “insurrectionist”.
Pretti’s masked killers have been unmasked: Jesús Ochoa and Raymundo Gutiérrez, both Border Patrol agents from the south of Texas. They have been suspended.
In the wake of huge protests, Trump has backed off somewhat. He demoted Gregory Bovino, the Nazi cosplayer (pictured above) who was in charge of the ICE surge in Minneapolis. Trump also told ICE not to go after protesters. But the surge of ICE agents in Minneapolis, the largest ever in the nation, remains in place despite requests by the governor for them to leave.
A protest song against the ongoing ICE occupation of Minneapolis in the winter of ’26, where Renee Good and now Alex Pretti have been shot dead. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is supposed to just round up and deport immigrants, but now they have taken it upon themselves to shoot dead US citizens who legally film their activities. Law enforcement as an instrument of terror: it isn’t just for Black and Brown people anymore!
[Verse 1]
Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
‘Neath an occupier’s boots
King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
[Verse 2]
Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringin’ through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renée Good
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Verse 3]
Trump’s federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead
Their claim was self-defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
It’s our blood and bones
And these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Harmonica Solo]
[Verse 4]
Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight
In our chants of “ICE out now”
Our city’s heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Outro]
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out
This is by far my favourite Tom Lehrer song. It came out in 1959 but never seemed to have charted. Gilbert and Sullivan fans will know the tune – it comes from the “Major-General’s Song” (1879) from their musical “The Pirates of Penzance”. Lehrer lists all the chemical elements known at the time, all the way up to nobelium (#102). Since then 16 additional elements have been discovered, up to oganesson (#118). Lehrer does not list the elements in order but arranges them to fit the meter of the song.
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium
There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
There’s strontium and silicon and silver and samarium
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium
There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium
There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered
From now till Easter (January 20th to April 5th 2026) I will be on a Portuguese media diet. It will include all of Lent (February 18th to April 2nd) but start almost a month early.
The diet: All private media consumption outside of this blog – books, news, music, Internet, etc – will be in Portuguese or one of its forms, including creoles, dialects (like Galician), and ancient forms (Latin). Unlike in the past, even research for posts will be limited to Portuguese. If that makes my blog less US-centric or Anglocentric, all the better.
The masthead: The picture above of Lusophonia (Portuguese-speaking countries) will be the masthead while the diet lasts.
“The Trumpet of Conscience” (1968) by Martin Luther King, Jr came out soon after his death. It contains a foreword by his widow, Coretta Scott King, four talks he gave on Canadian radio (and thus to the world), and his last Christmas sermon at his church:
Impasse in Race Relations
Conscience and the Vietnam War
Youth and Social Action
Nonviolence and Social Change
A Christmas Sermon on Peace
All of these are from 1967. It is a quick read, only 80 pages.
In brief: He says that the Civil Rights Movement had moved from non-violence to riot and repression, and thus a dead end! On the Vietnam War he covers much of the same ground as his Riverside Speech of April 1967, which I have already done a post on. Excellent! He also talks about the youth, both Black and White, which gave him hope for the future since many of them were trying to change society for the better – not just their protests against racial injustice, poverty and war, but even the counterculture of the hippies. There is also a wonderful defence of non-violence – that violence can only bring further violence, that the ends do not justify the means. In fact, the means mould the end. To create a just society you must begin to live it. Cutting corners undermines the very thing you are trying to do.
It may sound kind of pie-in-the-sky, but it was not like the worldly, materialistic, might-makes-right values were working out so well.
Some of my favourite quotes (with keywordsbolded):
“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”
“The hippies are not only colorful, but complex; and in many respects their extreme conduct illuminates the negative effect of society’s evils on sensitive young people.”
“It is ironic that today so many educators and sociologists are seeking methods to instill middle-class values in Negro youth as the ideal in social development. It was precisely when young Negroes threw off their middle-class values that they made an historic social contribution. They abandoned those values when they put careers and wealth in a secondary role. … they challenged and inspired white youth to emulate them.”
“If just two countries, Britain and the United States, could be persuaded to end all economic interaction with the South African regime, they could bring that government to its knees in a relatively short time.”
“… to planetize our movement for social justice.”
“But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.”
“I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens’ councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear.”
In honour of Sade’s 67th birthday on January 16th! I have posted ten Sade songs before and naturally assumed this was one of them. Not so!
The song came out in October 1985, reaching #3 on the US R&B chart. The video shows her singing in New York and riding a horse in the south of Spain. The story continues in “Is it a Crime?” that came out a few months later.
The term “quiet storm” as a kind of music does not come from this song but from Smokey Robinson ten years before.
[Verse 1]
If I tell you
If I tell you now
Will you keep on
Will you keep on loving me?
If I tell you
If I tell you how I feel
Will you keep bringing out the best in me?
[Chorus]
You give me, you give me the sweetest taboo
You give me, you’re giving me the sweetest taboo
Too good for me
[Verse 2]
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt like this before
There’s a quiet storm that is you
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt this hot before
Giving me somеthing that’s taboo
(Sometimes I think you’re just too good for mе)
[Chorus]
You give me the sweetest taboo
That’s why I’m in love with you (With you)
You give me the sweetest taboo
Too good for me
(Sometimes I think you’re just too good for me)
[Bridge]
I’d do anything for you
I’d stand out in the rain
Anything you want me to do
Don’t let it slip away
[Verse 3]
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt like this before
There’s a quiet storm
I think it’s you
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt this hot before
You’re giving me something that’s taboo
[Chorus]
You give me the sweetest taboo
That’s why I’m in love with you (With you)
You give me, keep giving me the sweetest taboo
Too good for me
[Outro]
You’ve got the biggest heart
Sometimes I think you’re just too good for me
Every day is Christmas, and every night is New Year’s Eve
Will you keep on loving me, huh, huh?
Will you keep on
Will you keep on bringing out the best in me?
Erich von Däniken (1935-2026) was a shady Swiss German hotel manager who is best known for writing “Chariots of the Gods?” (1968). In the book he tried to prove archaeologically that the Earth was visited by beings from another planet in ancient times – the ancient astronauts. He was popular in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. His books sold 63 million copies in 32 languages. That puts him on a level with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House on the Prairie books (60 million).
Carl Sagan, an astronomer and trained scientist who was an expert on extraterrestrial life, said in 1976:
That writing as careless as Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods? in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of Däniken.
Sloppy: Däniken could not even get his facts right! For example the Piri Reis map of 1513 that he says shows Antarctica only goes to 5 degrees south of the equator! It does not even show all of Brazil!
Pseudoscience: His books show all the signs of pseudoscience. For example:
Makes sensationalist claims – most science is dry as dust.
Disagrees with nearly all the experts in the field.
Not trained in the relevant fields – astronomy and archaeology in this case, not hotel management.
Proceeds from conclusions to facts, not the other way round.
Makes no predictions that can be proved wrong.
Does not look for the simplest explanations (Occam’s Razor).
Egypt, circa -1345. Probably Akhenaton as a boy. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Ancient astronauts explain nothing because they can explain anything!
The Alien Fallacy: Just because we cannot explain something does not mean we have to jump straight to “Aliens did it!” You see the same style of thinking about UFOs. Däniken loved UFOs. He simply applied the same fallacy to ancient mysteries. Like the iron Pillar of Delhi, which has not rusted for 1500 years – but which turned out to have a very human explanation after all. No aliens need apply.
Or take the Great Pyramid of Giza. We might not know how it was built, but it did not spring out of nowhere like an alien technology would. Instead it was preceded by older, simpler, smaller, even failed pyramids, like the Bent Pyramid (pictured below).
The Bent Pyramid, built c. -2600.
Racist: Däniken, as far as I know, never broke down into a racist rant to remove all doubt, like Scott Adams did. But his theory is in fact built on a profoundly racist assumption:
Ancient dark-skinned people were incapable of anything that exceeds present-day Western technology. Therefore beings from another planet must have helped them.
Only White people are capable of technological wonders. He never says this straight out, but it is assumed.
Notice that all the ancient mysteries always seem to be in non-Western countries: India, Peru, Mexico, Egypt, etc. Why is it never Greece or Rome? It always seems to be non-White people whose abilities are doubted. It is dehumanizing.
Scott Adams (1957-2026) was a White American cartoonist, famous for the “Dilbert” comic strip, which appeared in newspapers across the US from 1989 to 2023. It made fun of office life – pointy-haired bosses and such. By 2013 it was in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries in 25 languages!
“Dilbert” was funny if you ever worked in an office, especially of a big company, as Adams himself did in California in the 1980s at a bank and a telephone company (Pacific Bell). He makes fun of the brainless bosses and the mindless meetings. He escaped that world by working on his comic strip early every morning till it was a success.
Racist rant: It all ended in 2023 in an unfunny way in a racist rant, saying Black people were a hate group, advising racial segregation for Whites:
“So if you know, nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll. That’s a hate group. That’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them.
“And I would say, you know, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away.
“So that’s what I did. I went to a neighbourhood where, you know, I have a very low Black population ’cause unfortunately there, you know, there’s high correlation between the density – and this is according to Don Lemon, by the way. So here I’m just quoting Don Lemon, when he notes that when he lived in a mostly Black neighbourhood, there were a bunch of problems that he didn’t see in White neighbourhoods.
“So, I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a White citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. It’s no longer a rational impulse.
“And so, I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off, like I’ve been doing it all my life. The only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re White. It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying. Totally not trying.”
Newspapers dropped him. “Dilbert” soldiered on on the Web.
“Dilbert” had no Black characters till 2022! And then only to make fun of wokeness, in particular the hiring of Black people. Some 76 newspapers did not find that funny and dropped him even before he reached the racist ranting stage a year later.
Very fine people: Adams is also infamous, at least on this blog, for defending Donald Trump when he called neo-Nazis “very fine people”.
Adams is still beloved by the right-wing, by people like Megyn Kelly and Jordan Peterson.
The afterlife: Despite the best efforts of his Christian friends, Adams did not believe Jesus was God till the very end, but only in a Pascal Wager sort of way: dying of prostate cancer, he had little to lose.
An artist paints a picture of Renee Nicole Good at the site of the shooting, now an ad-hoc memorial. (Via FOX 9 KMSP)
Renée Nicole Macklin Good (1988-2026) was an unarmed White American woman killed on January 7th 2026, shot in the head at point-blank range by a masked agent of the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). She was a US citizen, a 37-year-old mother of three children, and a poetess no less. She had just dropped off her six-year-old at school.
Location: This was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just 1.3 km (less than a mile) from where George Floyd was killed in 2020! And 4.2 km south of where Mary Moore Moore threw up her hat at the Nicollet Mall (pictured). Or, less coincidentally, in the state governed by Tim Walz and in the district represented in Congress by Ilhan Omar – both unrepentant critics of President Trump. Trump had just sent 2,000 ICE agents to the state, the largest deployment to date, cracking down in particular on Somalis, whom he calls “garbage” (Ilhan Omar herself is Somali American).
Huge protests and headlines coast to coast have followed. She is hardly the first person killed by President Trump’s off-the-chain, Gestapo-like ICE, but she is a White woman. The last person they shot dead before her was Keith Porter on December 31st, also a US citizen, but a Black man. He was shooting his gun in the air to celebrate the New Year – right before being shot dead by an off-duty ICE agent. We did not hear about him till after Renee Good made the news.
Spot the difference!
The usual script: To anyone who has followed the police killing of unarmed Black people in the US, the script is sickeningly familiar: The officer feared for his life! The officer followed his training. She weaponized her car! We will conduct a thorough investigation (into the victim and her family). Authorities “dispute” (straight-up lie about) what everyone saw with their own eyes on citizen video. And so on.
The difference this time, though, is that:
The victim was a White woman.
It was done by federal officers, who are hard to hold to account even in the best of times.
Trump is in charge of said federal government.
President Trump likes to send armed forces to Democratic cities. And he likes to talk about the Insurrection Act. It is like he is looking for an excuse for a military crackdown or something.
Citizen video shows ICE agents surrounding her car. When they try to open her door, she pulls away and shots are fired. Her car speeds away and crashes down the street into a parked car. A doctor offers help. ICE refuses.
She did not get medical attention for 15 minutes. ICE even blocked the ambulance from coming to the scene. Instead they carried her body to the ambulance. She was reportedly still alive.
ICE agents arresting an observer in Minnesota, the day before killing Renee Good. (REUTERS/Tim Evans via PBS)
ICE loves shooting at moving cars. Like they are gangsters or something. They like to stand near your car and then argue self-defence, just as in this case. They wear masks and do not always show their badges. They are more poorly trained than even the police. They are becoming Trump’s secret police right before our eyes.
This is a repost. The song that was #1 on the US R&B chart 20 years ago this week was Mary J. Blige’s “Be Without You”. They did play that to death then, too much, but since I am a bigger fan of Keyshia Cole, this song more reminds me of the time when I started this blog, which just turned 20. Also, the video was filmed in Times Square in New York, which I see as a measure of time.
I used to think that I wasn’t fine enough
And I used to think that I wasn’t wild enough
But I won’t waste my time tryin’ to figure out why you playin’ games
What’s this all about
And I can’t believe
You’re hurting me
I met your girl, what a difference
What you see in her
You ain’t see in me
But I guess it was all just make believe
Oh, love
Never knew what I was missing
But I knew once we start kissin’
I found, love
Never knew what I was missing
But I knew once we start kissin’
I found you
Now you’re gone, what am I gonna do
So empty
My heart, my soul can’t go on
Go on, baby, without you
My rainy days fade away when you come around please tell me baby
Why you go so far away
Why you go
Oh, love
Never knew what I was missing
But I knew once we start kissin’
I found, love
Never knew what I was missing
But I knew once we start kissin’
I found you
I found you
Now go on, what am I gonna do
So empty
My heart, my soul can’t go on
Go on baby without you
Rainy days fade away
When you come around
Say you’re here to stay
With me, boy
I don’t want you to leave me
I need you
Oh
Never knew what I was missing
But I knew once we start kissin’
I found, love
Never knew what I was missing
But I knew once we start kissin’
I found you
Oh, never knew what I was missing
But I knew once we start kissin’
I found
This blog is now 20 years old! I thought this blog would only last a few months. When it lasted a year, I was amazed. When it lasted two years, again I was amazed. But not until today, the 20th blogiversary, am I amazed again. I know I have not been writing much in the past few years, but I am not giving up yet! Even if I am just a voice crying in the wilderness.
Timeline: a brief history of this blog:
2006: (126.9K words posted) my first post. Start out on Blogspot, decide on a 500-word format, as many days a week as I can manage.
2007: (158.0K) move to WordPress, which meant statistics and comments. (Blogspot allowed comments but did not have good spam control); most beautiful women, etc.
I started to write about racism because it required so little research – because there was so little on the Internet that was any good!
2009: (183.9K) first guest post; Comment Policy – trolls are becoming a huge headache. Hard to distinguish between trolls and wilfully obtuse White people.
I stop writing about my private life because of trolls.
The pandemic, when most people were stuck at home, should have been a kind of golden age, but in practice it worked out in the opposite way! Life took over and I fell out of the habit, it seems.
My Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) turns into Trump Fatigue Syndrome (TFS). I retreat into nostalgia!
2026: now.
On my 20th blogiversary, my candle is flickering, but it is not out yet! I do want to get back to my pre-pandemic levels of over 100K words a year. That may sound like a lot, but I have done it before. It comes to 3.8 posts a week on average. Since Programming Note #47 on December 12th, I have averaged 3.9 a week despite the holidays.
Abagond 
