Hmm. So over 90% of charges laid against Black Lives Matter protestors were dropped b/c the kkkops failed to produce any evidence to back up the charges.
Do the math here & you’ll see that maybe half of those arrests happened at #BLM protests with no property damage or injuries reported. So why were protestors arrested?
Turns out for no reason that kkkops could produce any evidence to back up. More than 90% of the time.
On this day, 20 April 1914, the Ludlow massacre took place when US troops opened fire with machine guns on a camp of striking miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado.
12,000 miners had gone out on strike the previous September against the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation (CF&I) following the killing of an activist of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
They then demanded better safety at work, and to be paid in money, instead of company scrip (tokens which could only be redeemed in the company store).
The Rockefellers evicted the striking miners and their families from their homes, and so they set up “tent cities” to live in collectively, which miners’ wives helped run. Company thugs harassed strikers, and occasionally drove by camps riddling them with machine-gun fire, killing and injuring workers and their children.
Eventually the national guard was ordered to evict all the strike encampments, and the morning of April 20 they attacked the largest camp in Ludlow. They opened fire with machine guns on the tents of the workers and their families, who then returned fire.
The main organiser of the camp, Louis Tikas, went to visit the officer in charge of the national guard to arrange a truce. But he was beaten to the ground then shot repeatedly in the back, killing him. That night, troops entered the camp and set fire to it, killing 11 children and two women, in addition to 13 other people who were killed in the fighting. The youngest victim was Elvira Valdez, aged just 3 months.
Protests against the massacre broke out across the country, but the workers at CF&I were defeated, and many of them were subsequently sacked and replaced with non-union miners. Over the course of the strike 66 people were killed, but no guardsmen or company thugs were prosecuted.
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Learn about miners’ struggles at this time in West Virginia in our podcast episode 7, available wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1698660560319087/?type=3
There are many known Ancient Egyptian jokes and puns, just the reason you don’t hear of them is that they require a lot of background cultural and linguistic knowledge for someone in the present day to a) get the joke and b) understand why it’s funny. Their jokes are very involved sometimes, often making words that sound the same as a pun in a sentence, but if you don’t know that those two words have the same consonantal value (i.e. two words both sound like ankh) then it doesn’t make any sense.
So let’s start with an easy one. This one is from the Instruction of Ankhsheshonq, and is a Ptolemaic text (c.100-30BC) that sets out maxims/proverbs for the way one should live their life through a fictional narrative, as do many older Sebayat texts, but largely strikes a far more humorous tone:
“If a crocodile loves a donkey it puts on a wig.“ (page 24, line 7)
An instruction about how someone dangerous will disguise themselves in order to get close to someone, but gives the humorous image of a crocodile in a wig.
“Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey; his purse is what restrains him.” (page 24, line 10)
The ancient Egyptian version of ‘dating is expensive’, but also refers to men being hornier than donkeys and unable to do much about it.
You can have this one from Late Ramesside Letter no.46 (c.1095 BC) between a unknown family members:
“I say every single day to Amun Re Harakhty when he rises and sets, ‘Give you life, prosperity and health, long life and great and good old age, and very many favours in the presence of Amun, your lord" As follows: I heard that you are angry. You have cause me to swell up with insults, on account of this joke which I told the chief taxing-master in this letter, when it was Henuttawy who suggested to me, “Tell some jokes to the chief taxing-master in your letter.” You are like the story about the woman blind in one eye who was in a man’s house for 20 years and he found another one, and he said to her, I will divorce you, for you are blind in one eye,” so the story goes, and she said to him, “Is this the discovery you’ve made during the 20 years I’ve spent in your house?” Such am I; such is the joke I have played on you”
The joke here is two fold; one in the original joke for the man pretending to only notice his wife was blind in one eye when it was convenient for him, and two the second implied joke that the recipient is as foolish as the man in the story for conveniently ruining his relative’s time with the chief taxing master.
Then you have the much more involved jokes, which often occur in ‘magical’ or religious texts, that require more explanation than I’ve just given for the ones above. Take some examples from the Chester Beatty Dream Book, which is a document that was supposed to help the Egyptians interpret their dreams:
If a man is eating the flesh of a donkey (aA.t): Good. (It means) he will become great (aA.t)“ (recto 2, line 21)
If white bread (HD) is given to him: Good. (It means) something at which his face will light up (HD) (recto 3, line 4)
If a man is seeing his penis stiffen (nxt): Bad. (It means) the stiffening of his enemy (nxt) (recto 8, line 2)
All three of these are linguistic puns, which, without the use of the transliteration in brackets, most people wouldn’t know were even puns. Here you can see Donkey (aA.t) and Great (aA.t) (pronounced ah-aht) being juxtaposed as a aural/visual pun because both words sound the same and are spelt the same (donkey has the added ‘donkey’ determinative, but essentially they are the same word). Same goes for HD (hedj), because it’s a pun on HD meaning silver/white/light, so the white (HD) of the bread will light (HD) up his face, and nxt (nekhet - stiffen) can also mean strength, which means as your virility increases so does the strength of the enemy. Basically, don’t fuck too much or your enemy gets stronger.
The problem with interpreting puns such as this, is that there’s a massive cultural gap between us and the Ancient Egyptians. This means that some of what the Egyptians intended with these puns is now largely lost to us and forcing our own understanding onto the texts distorts it from the original intent, thus we can only really give surface interpretations. This is why, although there are more puns, I’m not going to show them here, as they’d require more knowledge about Ancient Egyptian culture and linguistics than is feasibly possible to write about in a blog post. But I hope I’ve at least enabled you to see how the Egyptians went about jokes and puns.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It’s better
not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it’s a
very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the
meaning for somebody else.
The Philadelphia Police Department enlisted federal drug agents to infiltrate crowds of protesters during racial justice demonstrations in the city last spring, a move that critics say may have circumvented a decades-old ban aimed at deterring police from spying on activists.
The undercover operation was made public last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a D.C.-based think tank that obtained emails between police and federal officials through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
The emails show Philadelphia police requested the DEA support on June 2 and the operation lasted at least through June 6.
In one message, a ranking agent with the drug agency emailed colleagues and told them they’d be placed on teams to assist Philadelphia police and should “dress in a fashion that will allow you to bend [sic] in with the crowds. Masks and bag packs are a good idea.” Another from a DEA official said, “the purpose of the request is to identify protest leaders, agitators, and individuals who are inciting violence or destruction of property.”
The Philadelphia Police Department is restricted from using its own officers to infiltrate protest groups. A 1987 mayoral directive written as part of a settlement to a lawsuit requires that to conduct covert surveillance of activists, Philadelphia police must detail a threat of criminal activity in writing and obtain approval from the police commissioner and the city managing director.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
