#like did they HAVE to make ilhan so hot in this??

[turkishdreams]

what if safir reeled me back into my dizi era 👀

[xenophanatic]

In Depth Quasi-Analysis of Ramo: 'If the show was called Neco.’

Okay, so after seeing so many posts about this show, I thought “yeah, need a new addiction... and the guy looks hot.’ 

Sadly, I came to the realisation that the guy I found attractive wasn’t the main lead ‘Ramo’, but a side character name Neco. When I found the plot dull, I decided to skip the ‘main’ plotline and instead skip to Neco scenes - which all the posts were about anyway. So be aware that when I’m criticising the show, I haven’t watched the whole thing to deeply analyse every aspect. It’s like what The Witcher’s critics did. Also, I’m reading subtitles so things may get lost in translation.

Saying that... Ramo isn’t a good show. By the end of every episode I was fuming with distaste for the show. Ramo, as a character, is glorified to the point of irritation. As GRR Martin has stated, 

“It irritates me when I'm watching a movie and/or reading a book and the hero is going through incredible dangers, him and his six buddies, and none of them die.”

What I get from this quote, and other interviews from Martin, is that - as an audience - it gets annoying when each week Ramo is in danger, but we know he will get out of it - because he’s the main guy. He revokes on deals made with bad guys, sets up traps, shoots men down, and dodges all the consequences. Then the audience is forced to listen to others making speeches about the greatness of Ramo. “Ramo will die to save us!” - But don’t worry cos that won’t happen and Ramo will get everything he wants and win by the end of the episode. There may be a little setback here and there - which makes the episodes drag - but Ramo will win. Ramo is a cliche character that you have seen multiple times and therefore, isn’t engaging to watch. 

A moment to reflect on the comment made above about all characters praising the awesomeness of Ramo. The issue with the series, I found, is that everything is said. The exposition is down poorly and makes me cringe when characters just describe how they feel or their opinions about the situation. 

My brief summary of the show: Mob/Revenge Story - Ramo and his family/neighbour hood are members of the Pumper Gang, stealing and selling diesel illegally. Ramo also works for a richer gangster, Cengiz, who had killed Ramo’s dad. Cengiz and his father-in-law killed Ramo’s dad and Ramo wants revenge. Episode one pretty much ends with Ramo killing Cengiz. 

At first, I thought this was a good premise. Most revenge dramas begin with the act that thrusts the character on the path of revenge and ends with them achieving their goal; however, by ending the episode with the revenge coming to an end - the show has a chance to explore the implications and consequences of revenge. The tales similar to Monte Cristo, end with the character achieving their revenge - but what happens after. Do they feel content? Are they able to have a ‘normal’ life? What about the victims of their revenge? 

Going off track.... 

In the Indian verision of Hamlet, Haider (2014), Ghazala (Gertrude) tells Haider (Hamlet) that ‘revenge does not set us free’, ‘revenge begets revenge’, ‘violence only results in violence’, and that there is no end to this cycle, but Haider, who is bent on revenge, ignores these warnings. 

During the shootout of Ramo and Cengiz - Cengiz’s son, Neco, runs away and survives. Neco is then motivated to kill Ramo. This beautiful depicts the above statements. Ramo getting revenge for his father’s death, has now put Neco on a journey to avenge his father’s death. Will this cycle ever end?

However, sadly, this is not the story and the focus is on more on Ramo and Sibel’s (Cengiz’s daughter and Neco’s sister) love story. I’m sorry - I don’t care what excuse your lover gives you for killing your father - but it ain’t okay. The mafia plots are repetitive and the love story is cliche at its worse. 

So... let’s talk about the Lament of Neco

Neco is introduced, from the start, as spoilt rich boy player - who is only handsome, and doesn’t have the intelligence nor the cunningness to lead his mafia family. This is nicely shown through Ilhan Sen’s (Neco) acting and the dialogue that others have around him. 

We can see, in scenes, that Neco not only looks but feels out of place in mafia meetings. The way his father, mother, and sister talk and move is different from his. He is out of place and shocked when others (Ramo) include him in the conversation as the future heir of the empire. You can see his eagerness to prove himself, as it comes off sincere, optimistic and naive. The meeting scene is a great demonstration of Neco’s character and relationship with his family.

His father is in the middle. Neco’s sister is on the right side of her father - depicting how Cengiz sees his dauther as his right hand. The left said is Neco’s mother. The three are close and are able to have an intimate conversation. Neco is further away from them. Ramo is standing and his body is facing forward - talking to the three family members. He needs to turn to address Neco and include him in. No one else looks towards Neco. When Ramo mentions Neco being the head of the family, Boz (another goon) holds in a laughter. Neco is visible upset and gets up. 

One could see this as a childish gesture on Neco’s part, however, I saw it as a sign of Neco’s insecurities. Neco has been seen as inferior by his father, mother, and sister - all his family, who should be supporting and helping him, and whom he cannot fight against. But a servant is looking down at him.. Neco can’t stand that. This is not explained in words, I inferred all this from the scene and was happy that it was proven in later episodes - even if it was in direct exposition dialogue by Neco.

As revenge for laughing at him, Neco disrespects Boz in front of others - not only putting him in his place, but making Boz feel what Neco feels all the time. Boz then beats Neco up and runs. Neco was defeated by a servant. Neco’s dad wants Boz dead, and Ramo decides to save Boz and kill Cengiz. Neco, before so smug seeing Boz so close to death, runs away when he sees/hears gunshots - It’s almost comedic. They catch him, but Neco pleads and begs for his life. He tells Boz and Ramo that they can use him. This presents Neco as a coward juxtaposing him against the ‘awesome’ Ramo. 

Long story short, to end the warring families, Ramo has to marry Neco’s sister and Neco has to marry Ramo’s sister Fatos - who is in love with Boz. 

This is where I put my critical, feminist, and logical hat off and start dancing to the hymns of fangirling. I love this romantic trope in all it’s glory. You have:

enemies into lovers

constant bickering

forced marriage

co-habitation

badboy/plaer is in love and shows softer side/changes

love triangle

girl realising that difference between first love and true love.

I love it!

But they did my Neco dirty. And therefore my hat is back on.

Ramo, through it’s writing, has also ruined this for me. Remember, Neco is a minor character - so his and Fatos’s scenes are very minimal and not enough to exploit these tropes. 

Fatos and Neco, in my opinion, never bond. They never have moments were it allows them to fall for one another. There was one scene, which I believe is where Neco falls for Fatos, but Fatos’s character is so cold that I don’t understand how he fell in love. 

Before I discuss that underwhelming scene, let’s talk about the great scene that came before it. Neco’s grandfather takes him to an abandon place and makes him shoot a random guy - execution style. Granddad yells at Neco - pretty much saying ‘be a man’, ‘your sister has more balls than you’, ‘You will never kill Ramo and avenge your father’, ‘you’re worthless’. Again, the acting is better than the script. Neco’s face shows that these words are not  the first time he has heard them, but these words have also been constantly going through his head. Neco is also distressed at the act of killing a random guy - Neco isn’t a killer and, because of the family he’s in, that is connected to whether or not he is a strong man. 

I wish, I WISH this was explored more. Neco representing this idea/notion of masculinity and toxic attitudes of societal expectations. We see this earlier on, when Sibel is grieving over her dead father and Neco says that it’s worse for him because he saw it happen. She bitterly mentioned that he ran away like a coward and begged Ramo for his life. Neco, angrily, asks her what she would have done. She replies she would rather die than be a coward like him. This angers Neco. Again, moments like these allow us to sympathise with Neco and I wished we could explore not only that event from Neco’s point of view but also the relationship he had with his father..

Anyway, Neco - after killing the man (it seems) - comes home destroyed. He is physically shocked from the events. He goes to his room to find his ‘wife’ - both have been fighting up to this moment - and lies in her lap. She is shocked by his behaviour and actions. He begs her not leave. I have no major issues with this but one. Fatos needed to show a little more compassion or gesture for it to make sense that Neco is now in love with her. She doesn’t move as he lies in her lap. If she simply put her hand on his head or through his hair, and Neco took the simple platonic gesture as love - I would be here for it. But no.

And then this moment is ruined by other scenes. This will show my bias, because when a Neco scene is good - I give credit to the actor. And when a Neco scene is the worst - the writers are the victims of my anger. 

So, you know this character you’re going to fall in love with - against all attempts by other characters and writers to make you hate him - well... he is a rapist?

OMG! These sequence of events. So, Neco has killed a guy. He is upset and finds solace in Fatos. FLASHBACK! Remember the time that Neco was held at gunpoint because he was forcing himself on a girl who has said no? Sibel and Ramo come and Sibel slaps Neco - disgusted by her brother’s action. BTW Neco doesn’t feel guilty about his actions. Back to the present, he is now flirting with Fatos and pretty much telling her he wants to sleep with her. 

She is scared (remember she was forced into this marriage and loves another). He makes a move to kiss her and she slaps him. She is so scared she gets a gun and points it at him.

This is would have been amazing if done right!

Why it is bad? The audience was just shown a scene were an unremorseful Neco was held at gunpoint for trying to rape another girl. Therefore, this makes the audience, through the codes and convention of storytelling, think Neco is capable of doing the same thing to Fatos and makes Fatos decision and actions justified. This makes Neco, a character I enjoy and want to keeping enjoying, a ‘problematic’ character. This scene is an affirmation of Neco’s despicable acts. The flashback isn’t shown as a misreading of the events, it is shown as fact and this scene is shown as a confirmation. 

Could this be good? YES! Neco just had a traumatic experience. He had to shoot and kill someone. He struggled to do so and hasn’t gotten over it. Then he sees Fatos holding a gun at him. He, knowing how he felt, thinks she wouldn’t shoot because how could someone do that. But she does. This scene should be an exploration about human nature to shoot and kill someone. What goes through our head and how do we deal with it after. But atlas, she shoots him, he survives and this is barely talked about again because the main plot comes and rears its ugly head. 

What this scene could of been? When I saw this I thought about a similar scene from Siyah Beyaz Ask. Asli is forced to marry assassin Ferhat. Fearful, she keeps a knife under her pillow. When Ferhat, in anger, pushes her to the bed, she stabs him. Ferhat then challenges her to finish him off, Asli cries that she can’t and Ferhat has a lovely speech on what makes a murderer and how she is no different than him. These sequences is what, I believe, should have been produced between Neco and Fatos, minus the crying. 

So, elements that needed to go: rapey Neco. No one wants it nor needs it. The scene should have explored the characters. Neco inability to hurt others, and Fatos courage to protect herself against Neco. Like she is ‘powerless’ in front of other, or she can’t hurt any one else, except Neco. And I don’t know about you, but after trying to kill someone, there could be moments between the two characters to talk and heal one another. Maybe Fatos freaking out that she could pull the trigger. Neco being envy of her. So much CONFLICT!

Now let’s talk about NecFat. The ship that made me want to watch this series. I don’t know whether it is the subtitles or writing but... eh. Like the gifs, fanvids, and acting makes this look amazing and everything I need right now. But it is so poorly done. 

So, Fatos and Neco meet when Ramo, Fatos’s brother, keeps Neco as a hostage. She’s there to give him food and water. The two bicker and Neco asks her to do him a favour and at least call his mother who must be worried about him. We see Neco caring for his mother and Fatos feeling sympathy for him. This is their only scene as Boz doesn’t like the two meeting. In a funny scene, Fatos sarcastically tells Boz how handsome Neco is and what girl wouldn’t want to keep seeing him. She laughs and says she was joking, but - I think the lady protest too much. Off topic, I love how every character agrees that Neco is super good looking. Even when Neco is kidnap and looking in the mirror, the kidnapper is like ‘Hey Handsome, stop looking in the mirror’. Kidnapper has taste. 

Anyway, they needed more scenes with Neco as a prisoner and Fatos as the one who brings him food, maybe even bandage some wounds. As mentioned earlier, this show should have been about the never ending circle of revenge. Neco, while hostage, promises to kill Ramo. 

The show goes with the mafia/gangs saying the only way this feud will end is if  Ramo marries Sibel and Neco has to marries Fatos . Okay, so love the plot, not the execution. In the series, the two barely have any scenes until Fatos shoots him and then the families decide... ‘hey there this thing called... a divorce?’ And now the couple are separated. So, the show failed to take full advantages of the marriage plot. At the moment, up to Episode 11, Neco is in love with Fatos , she is pregnant with Boz’s child and has no feelings for Neco. Neco is obsessed with Fatos and his love comes off as childish and selfish. 

And that’s the thing, the actors and their chemistry is what is making NecFat, because the script and series give them nothing. I mean, Neco gets kidnapped and you think this would be a good moment for Fatos to be worried about Neco, but nope - nothing. She is in love with Boz and currently has no feelings for her husband. 

The last time we see them is when Neco, after putting doubts in Boz’s head about the father of Fatos’s unborn child, tells Fatos that Boz shouldn’t have asked the question about the paternity.  He says he would never had asked such a question. He tell her that he accepts her and is willing to do anything for her. His love is so big that he will look after both her and her unborn child. Neco states ‘you and the baby could be my family”.

Awww... I love this. This is an awesome moment - when isolated. Neco is in this 110%, while Fatos is not even on the same wavelength. So his declaration isn’t shown as earth shuttering to Fatos . That’s where we end with them. She isn’t seen reflecting on it and it doesn’t seem she will be Team Neco any time soon. Also, the episode/season ends with Neco setting a trap for Ramo so don’t think Fatos is jumping into Neco’s arm anytime soon.

If the series was called Neco.

This show would have been my jam if the whole Ramo/Sibel story was cut. Have Ramo already married - I don’t care. The first episodes ends with Ramo killing Neco’s father. Wow, a revenge story where the revenge has been accomplished. What’s next? 

NECO!

Now Neco - the coward, womanising, good-for-nothing, son must take his father’s place. Same as the original where he tries to run and gets caught. He gets bargained back by, now, the granddad. There is a scene, in the original, where Neco is at his father’s funeral and has his head down low. His grand-daddy reprimands him - saying he is now the head of the family and his head should be held high. Boy can’t even grieve at his own father’s funeral. Explore that!

Have the plot about ending the feud with marriage. Have Neco and Fatos against it. How can they marry into the family that killed their fathers? Also, have it that when Ramo finds out that Boz and Fatos are in love, Ramo makes Boz promise to let Fatos go. Pretty much a ‘you owe me for all the things I’ve done for you over the years.’ Fatos begs Boz to runaway with her, but he can’t go against Ramo. Boz chooses Ramo over Fatos . Fatos is heartbroken. This will also show Ramo as a complex character and allow Fatos to see the cracks in her relationship with Boz (which I will mention later). 

Also, Neco needs a sidepiece. Again, they say he is a player but we never see it. Have a sidepiece which he promises that won’t end because he is married. It will also give jealousy moments for Fatos. We see both characters coming into this marriage with no intention to fulfil it. Fatos is there to find out/spy if Neco’s family plans to attack, and Neco uses Fatos as a bullet proof vest, so Ramo won’t kill him.

So, like I mentioned about his conversation with Sibel about how he ran away -have the conversation with grand-daddy or mum, but then have Neco have nightmares about that day his dad died. In his dreams his father says Neco is the reason he died. If he was a better son, Boz wouldn’t have laughed, Neco wouldn’t have insulted Boz, Boz wouldn’t have beaten him up, and Ramo wouldn’t have killed Cengiz. He calls Neco a coward for running that day.

Pretty much, Neco subconsciously blames himself and believes by killing Ramo he will be the son his father needed. You could also have Ramo have similar dreams in the first episode with his father about getting revenge. This would show that the characters are haunted by their fathers and revenge.

When Neco and Fatos share a bedroom - obviously after bickering who has the bed. Fatos wakens up from the floor by Neco night terrors. He keeps saying ‘baba’ and ‘sorry’. Fatos , insensitive to Neco, wakes him up. Neco, trying to hide his insecurities leaves the room - instead sleeping on the couch in the living room or something. Fatos therefore gets to see a broken Neco and sees the consequences of revenge.

What I love about how Neco’s character is protrayed in the show is how awful he is as a gangster, but wants to prove he is capable. This needs to be explored more and should the basis of NecFat. 

Neco’s family, and society, expect him to be this masculine macho man, but the series presents him as this broken child, just wanting his family to say ‘I’m proud of you’. Neco has a desire to succeed where others say he would fail. And in the show he fails a lot. 

What I would love to see is him succeeding in something that is more ‘feminine’, in something that his family doesn’t recognise. I’m not trying to stereotype gender when I say feminine. In contrast, I want to see them challenge gender roles. So what do I mean by this? 

Like, have Neco have a hobbie that is incredible ‘unmasculine’ or just simply cute and adorable. A contrast to the ‘masculine macho man’ image he so wants to project. These could be writing poetry, painting, playing a classical instrument; but my personal favourite (I’ll explain why later) - baking. 

(Author’s Note: I’m ashamed/proud of the time I spent making the above image)

Maybe it is the fangirl in me, but I would love to see ‘badass’ Neco stress baking. But why do I think a hobbie is needed for Neco? It shows softer side to him, and that he is good at something. But his family had never supported him and instead puts a gun in his hand and forced him to kill someone. 

Also, this would allow an opportunity for a scene where Fatos smells something delicious and gets out of her room. She goes downstairs to see Neco stress baking - maybe he has gotten up from a nightmare or something. Fatos, realising it’s Neco goes back, but Neco tells her to eat something, because he’s going to throw it away anyway. While eating Neco’s baked goods (hehe...), Fatos and Neco converse - obviously ending in a fight. Fatos leaves. Neco leaves some baked goods at Fatos’s door and throws the rest away. 

Why is this important? Well, when Fatos goes back home, whenever she eats she thinks about Neco’s food. She misses it and you can have cute moments when Neco gifts her his baked goods. Also, there could be a moment where Fatos compliments him and either says “you’ve done good’ or ‘I’m proud of you’. Awwww... 

But the main reason is this...

Back to what actually is happening on the show. So, as mentioned earlier, the cracks in Fatos’s relationship with Boz. When the aunt finds about Boz and Fatos, Fatos says that, after Boz almost getting killed, she wants to marry him and have a safe life. The aunt says that can never happen. When you marry someone from this lifestyle, death is always lurking around. 

We see this come up later on when Fatos says to Boz that when they get married they can be a normal married couple. Boz says that this is normal for them. He will continue to risk his life but that they will continue to love each other until death does them part. Through these scenes we see that Fatos doesn’t want to marry into the life of crime. She wants a ‘cookie cutter’ marriage.

Therefore, Neco by not fulfilling his families wishes will actually be accepted by Fatos. While Neco doesn’t belong in the life of crime, Fatos doesn’t want to live in one. In short - they will leave the crime world and Neco can open a bakery in the country side, or something, with his wife. 

Pretty much, ‘Neco’ (if the show was called Neco) would go on a journey of Neco -  the coward, womanising, good-for-nothing gangster - trying to get revenge but realising that this revenge won’t end. His dad killed Ramo’s father, Ramo killed his dad, Neco killing Ramo would lead to someone killing him. Fatos, and their love, will show him he can be something else and that he chooses his destiny. 

Overall, Ramo isn’t a good show and I am way too obsessed of what this show could of been than what it is. Though I love the actors and NecFat, the chemistry is good and it is using one of my favourite tropes, the relationship is losing potential through bad writing and plotting. 

Don’t know when we will see this show back on air, but when we do, I hope NecFat becomes less ‘forced’ and more mutual.  

Thanks for reading another one of my rants! What did you think about Ramo and everything I have written. Let’s dicuss!

[deonsdomain]

Trump Card Review

I can clearly recall the day I came across Dinesh D’Souza on YouTube in late 2016. This was during my phase in life where I thought I was smarter than other people because I watched popular conservative personalities on the internet. This was during a time where I was trying to find my identity in politics, where did I truly stand on topics. This was during the election of 2016, where it felt like a shift in the politics I knew as a kid. Something seemed different, more divided if you will, maybe they were always like this and as I got older, I finally realized the situation. I would watch these videos that had millions of views of talking heads going to colleges and trying to impose their point of view. The appeal at the time was that they were confronting ideas that seemed to attack a viewpoint I didn’t understand because I was close-minded. It wasn’t until I went to college and started talking to people that come from my background that I could see other’s perspectives.

So how does this tie into D’Souza, well next to Ben Shapiro this was a guy I saw in the recommended section on YouTube all the time, I never clicked on the videos but I was aware of him being someone doing the same thing. I wasn’t aware that he pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation donating around $30,000 when the limit is $5,000. His lawyer was claiming that it was a misguided act of friendship. This is important because since then he has had this chip on his shoulder about it claiming that Obama was going out of his way to suppress conservative voices. Instead of accepting that he got a light sentence and a cushy place to call jail he instead tried to make it a point of contention in his other films. While I have only seen Death of a Nation I probably will get around to his other films because from Trump Card and Death of a Nation I believe that D’Souza is a fraud. He is a liar who will say anything to provoke people and try to “own the libs” which gets clicks and mouthpieces to discuss what he’s doing. It comes off as pathetic when looking at his personality he’s built up.

Eventually I met new people with ideas that challenge mine. It was easier to see their perspective since I was able to associate with them, know who they were, and acknowledge where they were coming from. I got curious and began to wonder what D’Souza was up to these days and that’s how I came across his film Death of a Nation which I dragged my brother and a friend to. We were the only people in the theater who were under the age of forty. Watching that movie was akin to having my brain become smoothed over and then shaken about like how a baby would shake their rattler. It was easy to laugh at the movie because it was pure nonsense. Much of nothing about that movie really amounts or added to anything other than echo beliefs you already had. It was a film that was never going to expose anyone to anything new.

So what is Trump Card all about then? Well as the title implies it suggests that Trump is someone who is created by the system democrats put into place when having Obama in office. D’Souza then starts to interview people on the fringes of politics asking them questions about Obama being a part of the deep state, or how Ilhan Omar is somehow going to cause the fall of America since radical Muslims love her, but doesn’t do anything to help back up his points other than the trustworthy words of someone who claims that he gave Obama oral while he was doing crack in a limo. D’Souza also then looks to tackle school shootings saying that democrats and liberals have helped create an environment that allows for these crimes to happen since they are doing everything in their power to remove guns. It is really disgusting to watch D’Souza exploit the pain of a family for his talking point to “own the libs” as you see that the parents are still suffering from the loss of their child in a school shooting. D’Souza has a technique of asking leading questions to get the answer he wants for the skewed perspective of how republicans are the only people who are here to protect the country.

It wouldn’t be a D’Souza documentary without the horrible recreations. This time it’s 1984 and Lincoln narrating a speech as he rides a train into modern day whilst also having the communist flag across recognizable landmarks and having figures like Stalin and Lenin on Mount Rushmore. At least this time he has learned how to use green screen effects and using better rendering methods for this 3D effects since in Death of a Nation it looked like it came from the PS2 era of visual effects. The purpose of having 1984 is to have it alliterate how liberals want to control your mind ala 4 is actual 5. In his Lincoln monologue it is just Lincoln speaking about America at the time while having him looking concerned out the window of a train as we cut to B-roll footage of America’s landscapes with an anthem playing proudly.

Trump Card is a movie that is only out right now since it’s an election year released in October. If you were to ask me I don’t think that this is meant to convert people, but to help reaffirm those who already believe this. This is not anything more than a propaganda piece for Trump since Trump was the one who pardoned him from his light sentence. This is also the same movie that is takes a section dedicating it to Trump’s apartment ventures in New York ignoring all the racial issues that occurred during the time or fails to acknowledge how Trump wanted the death penalty for The Central Park Five and still believes that they are guilty of their crimes they have since been proven innocent of. This is nothing more than a fluff piece that serves to give an ego boost to Trump’s followers as they are some of the most vindicated people in the country right now, but aims to give them more ammo to fire out when people want to criticize the President. For me, this is simply a poorly made film that aims to do nothing more than leave me disinterested and disgusted with the attempts to make something to cover the truth or disfigure the reality of these hot button issues so much that it is hard to believe that this is even real. It is mental gymnastics put together in one convenient film for people to observe for years to come.

[ruminativerabbi]

Omar and Tlaib: A Way Forward

Sometimes I have to search around to find the topic I wish to write about in my weekly letter to you all, but other times the universe simply presents me with an issue that it feels almost impossible not to write about. This is one of those weeks. And that was before President Trump called the loyalty of Jewish Americans who vote Democratic into question.

I am thinking, of course, of the huge brouhaha surrounding the proposed, then banned, then half-unbanned, then cancelled trip of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) to Israel.

The single point of near-universal consensus is that the whole incident was handled maladroitly by all concerned—and that really is saying the very least.

The congresswomen, by declining to go on the actual trip of members of the House to Israel that took place just a few weeks ago, were making it clear that they had no interest in actually visiting Israel or hearing what representatives of our staunchest ally in the Middle East might or might have had to say to them…and then feigned shock when they were called out for insulting the leadership and citizenry of Israel by planning a propaganda tour featuring meetings solely with Palestinian bigwigs and Arab members of the Knesset. (The itinerary for the trip they then proposed to make on their own confirmed their intentions clearly, although Rep. Omar now says—contrary to the itinerary she herself released—that she would have met with at least some Israeli officials.)

President Trump, by putting his oar in where it wasn’t even remotely needed, seems to have made Prime Minister Netanyahu feel obliged to ban the Omar and Tlaib from entering Israel lest he appear weak or—and, yes, I know how weird this sounds to say out loud—unmanly. (The ensuing firestorm on this side of the world would have been considerably less hot had it not seemed that the Prime Minister’s decision reflected more than anything his desire not to provoke President Trump or to irritate him—which paradoxically actually did make him look and sound weak. And unmanly weakness was indeed the specific issue in play: the President’s tweet confirmed as much: “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit.” He didn’t have to say who specifically was going to be labelled weak for not banning the two!)

For his part, the P.M. himself, more than aware of the importance of playing ball with his nation’s biggest supplier of foreign aid and himself an extremely savvy politician, seemed somehow not to understand what a huge error of judgment it was going to be to appear to disrespect members of Congress…and, at that, the specific members of the House that the world was just waiting to see if he would dare to insult.

The whole incident played out in Israel entirely differently than it did here. For your person-in-the-shuk Israeli, the whole rumpus was basically uninteresting. I saw very little coverage in the Israeli press—not none, but nothing like what I saw on every American website I visited while we were in Israel. When it did come up, most regular Israelis I talked to seemed confused why this was even an issue. Although I think most Americans surely do not, everybody in Israel remembers when, in 2012, the United States barred a Knesset member, Michael Ben Ari, from entering the United States because the party he represented, the Kahanist Kach party, was formally labelled as a terrorist group. (Nor, for the record, is it unheard of for the United States to bar entry to people deemed undesirable for one reason or another, a list that over the years has included such dangerous criminals as Amy Winehouse, Diego Maradona, and Boy George. For a full list of people now or once barred from entering the United States, click here.) So the notion that Israel would bar entry to two individuals who have been outspoken in their animosity towards the Jewish state and who openly and shamelessly support the BDS movement, and neither of whom is above lacing her rhetoric with openly anti-Semitic language, merely because they were also elected to Congress—that didn’t seem that big a stretch to most Israelis that I heard giving forth on the topic. Indeed, when I did hear Israelis talking about the issue, the question was more why Israel shouldn’t decline to offer unambiguously hostile people a public platform on which to promote invidious policies than it was why they should let them in without any assurance that they would be at least minimally respectful of their hosts’ sensitivities.

Still, Israel could have turned this whole affair to its own advantage by inviting Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Omar to come to visit, but by making the invitation conditional upon their agreement to meet with Israeli officials and learn about the Israeli take on the Middle East conflict. It would have been a good thing if that happened too, because, as their comments about Israel over the last few days prove, both Omar and Tlaib are as naïve as they are hostile towards the Jewish state. Omar wants Israel to grant Palestinians “full rights,” but without saying what she means exactly. Does she want Israel to annex the West Bank and make its Palestinian population into Israelis with the full rights of citizens? It seems hard to believe that that’s what she means. But then what does she mean? Is she in favor of a two-state solution featuring a State of Palestine in which the Palestinian citizens would have “full rights?” But then why is she not addressing the Palestinian leadership and telling them to declare independence and get down to the work of nation building? When she denounces the Israeli decision to bar her entry as “unprecedented,” does she not know that our own country also bars entry to people deemed hostile or dangerous, or likely to promote views considered inimical with the nation’s best interests? When she speaks about “the occupation,” does she not realize how bizarre it is to blame Israel for “occupying” the Palestinians’ land when Israel has repeatedly offered the Palestinians an almost complete withdrawal in exchange for their willingness to live in peace? And, of course, also without showing the slightest interest—at least as far as I can see—in the places in the world that actually are occupied by foreign powers—Tibet, for example, which has been occupied by China since 1951 or the part of the Western Sahara that Morocco has illegally occupied since 1976.

For her part, Rashida Tlaib sounds more calculating then naïve. When she denounces Israel for setting up roadblocks that inhibit free travel from the West Bank into Israel, she conveniently forgets to mention the reason those roadblocks were set up in the first place: to prevent terrorist attacks on innocents of the kind that were part and parcel of daily life in Israel during the first and second Intifadas. To suggest that those roadblocks were set up to harass innocents like her elderly grandmother instead of owning up to the fact that they have worked so well, as has the security fence, that terror attacks inside Israel have plummeted to almost zero—that crosses the line, at least in my estimation, from finessing the details to make a point and approaches something more reasonably called manipulating the facts to create a wholly false impression. (I think we can all be confident that, if violent terrorists were blowing up children in discotheques and pizzerias in her own home district, she would support any plausible effort to end the carnage even if it caused her grandma some inconvenience.)

It would, therefore, be a good thing for both Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to come for a visit to Israel. Nor is it too late. In my opinion, Israel can and should offer to invite them to Israel if they are willing to listen, to learn, and to refrain from promoting anti-Israeli views while they are in Israel as guests of the State. Contrary to the President’s tweet, principled reaching-out towards people who have in the past been hostile but who could conceivably change their minds would be seen by all—or certainly by most—as an act of strength, not weakness. There is, after all, a lot to learn. Understanding Israel today requires knowing a lot about Jewish history and its impact on Jewish reality today. It requires understanding the relationship between Israel and both Judaism and Jewishness, a relationship that is obscure in many ways even to relatively savvy observers of the Middle Eastern scene. And it requires understanding the specific way that Israeli identity has been forged over the decades against a background of unremitting hostility on the part of most of its neighbors and, even more perfidiously, on the part of the United Nations—and how decades of exposure to that kind of stark enmity so often tinged with not-so-subtle anti-Semitism has made Israelis, to say the very least, wary and mistrustful of the world.

It would surely have been better if we hadn’t come to this impasse in quite the way we have. But having come to this crossroads, we must now traverse it and I believe we can. If they are truly sincere in their interest in learning about Israel, Representatives Tlaib and Omar should indicate their willingness to come and to listen. Israel, for all it is barred by its own laws from admitting to the country people who advocate policies inimical to the nation’s survival (and specifically the BDS movement), should find a way around that restriction to welcome them both and to help them understand where Israel is coming from and why it acts as it feels it must. If everybody involved is willing to take a step back and to calm down a bit, what at the moment is an impasse can become a crossroads that all concerned can grow mightily by traversing.

[dee6000]

Ilhan Omar Illegally Married Her Gay Brother to Help Him Commit Immigration Fraud

The family of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu on the Mississippi) plays a big part of her brand. Her grandfather was in charge of the light houses of Somalia and her father was a teacher. Then, suddenly, all sorts of people in Somalia wanted to kill them so they had to become refugees to save themselves from their neighbors’ wrath, which gives her moral dominion to lecture Americans on how to order our affairs.

And to be fair, her family dramas are pretty interesting. For example, her father the “trainer of teachers” turns out to be a colonel in the genocidal army of dictator Siad Barre, which might help explain why other Somalis tried to kill them as soon as Siad Barre fell at the end of the Cold War.

Siad Barre, who had started out as a policeman under the Fascist Italian colonial regime, saw the truth of Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s when Moscow started sending aid to Third World dictatorships. But then in the late 1970s Somalia took its Soviet-supplied tanks and invaded its fellow leftist neighbor Ethiopia with Rep. Omar’s dad playing a role. But Brezhnev said, what do we need this hothead troublemaker for? and sided with much bigger Ethiopia, which duly defeated Somalia’s invasion. In one of the more depressing low points of the Cold War for the U.S., Siad Barre suddenly discovered the glories of capitalism and became an American client, and after that mostly tended to wage genocideagainst internal rebels like the Isaaq clan.

Rep. Omar, another hot-blooded Somali, has gotten married four times: first to the Somali father of her children, then she got divorced and had a small town minister in rural Minnesota, far from the Somali community, marry her in a Christian ceremony to an extremely effeminate Somali man who is widely rumored to be some sort of brother of Omar. She soon divorced the gay guy and remarried the father of her kids. Then she divorced him and married the white campaign consultant whose marriage she’d broken up.

And then they all lived happily ever after.

Or perhaps not, we’ll see.

The Daily Mail has a good rundown on the background:

Claims that Omar and Elmi, 36, are siblings have been rampant for years. The allegation is that they married so Elmi, a British citizen could go to school in the United States. He followed Omar to North Dakota State University.

Lazzaros’ website says: ‘Rep. Omar was a U.S. Citizen for a decade and her brother/ex-husband Mr. Elmi was a UK Citizen.

‘This is purely a crime of convenience, by an individual with extremely poor ethics now representing hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans in Congress. There was absolutely no threat to these individuals causing them to commit multiple felonies while living in the two wealthiest countries in the world seeking reduced tuition at a public University.

Omar, who was first elected to Congress in 2018, has never fully addressed the question of whether she is related to Elmi. While serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives she did issue a press release in which she called the allegations ‘absurd and offensive.’

In her memoir, This Is What America Looks Like, published last year, she claims she hardly knew him when they married, saying: ‘I had a Britney Spears-style meltdown, I not only eloped with a man — whom I spent so little time with that I wouldn’t even make him a footnote in my story if it weren’t for the fact that this event turned into the main headline later on — but I shaved my head.

‘Yes, like the beleaguered pop star, who shaved her head in 2007, I took clippers to my own head. Too many headaches, too little sleep — I had to flee myself, my relationships, my hair.

‘The difference between Britney and me is that I wore a hijab, so nobody knew what I had done — except my children who were very surprised. ”Mommy looks like me,” Adnan (her young son) declared. And he was right, I did look like a little boy.’

She didn’t even name Elmi in her memoir.

But others have long claimed that she married him so he could go to school in the United States. She had come to America as a refugee fleeing war in her native Somalia, but he had taken up British nationality.

He followed her to North Dakota State University, after their marriage in 2009. A Christian minister performed the ceremony despite the fact that both are Muslim.

Somali blogger Abdihakim Osman Nur told DailyMail.com in February last year that he had known Omar growing up and suddenly her brother arrived in Minneapolis.

At the time Omar was married to Ahmed Hirsi — who she later remarried. They have since divorced and in March 2020 she married Mynett, her chief fundraiser.

‘No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,’ Nur said, about the Elmi-Omar marriage.

‘People began noticing that Ilhan and Southside were often with a very effeminate young guy,’ Osman said, referring to Hirsi by his nickname.

‘He was very feminine in the way he dressed — he would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very, short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him, added Nur, who spoke in Somali through an interpreter.

‘Southside and Ilhan both told me it was Ilhan’s brother and he had been living in London but he was mixing with what were seen as bad influences that the family did not like,’ added Nur.

‘So they sent him to Minneapolis as ”rehab”.’

Nur said that Omar kept her marriage to Elmi quiet, with no one from the Somali community invited to the wedding that was held at a county office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

He explained: ‘When Southside and Ilhan got married, a lot of people were invited. It was a big Islamic wedding uniting two large clans in the Minneapolis community.

‘I would say there were 100-150 people there.’

But he said: ‘When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it.’

Nur said he believed Elmi and Omar sought out someone outside the Somali community to conduct the ceremony because an imam would have known they were related and would have refused to marry them.

The marriage was conducted by Christian minister Wilecia Harris. When DailyMail.com approached her in 2019 she would not discuss the ceremony or why a Muslim couple would have asked her to marry them.

In a Facebook message, Harris’s husband Marcus told DailyMail.com: ‘My wife doesn’t want to be involved or interviewed about Congresswoman Omar.’

‘It’s not going to happen, not now and not never.’

So now some organization is claiming to have obtained DNA off a cigarette and a straw from the two ex-spouses that proves they are siblings. (How you would prove chain of custody sounds daunting.) A conservative operative who posted the DNA results was then immediately arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors.

So, lots more entertainment is likely in store, although it will no doubt mostly be covered by British tabloids rather than by the US prestige press.

And with the Taliban running amok in Afghanistan at the moment, we no doubt can look forward to a future of being lectured to by future hijab-wearing Afghan Congresswomen whose wealthy clan got ran out of Afghanistan in 2021. To paraphrase Che Guevara, American can look forward to two, three, many Rep. Omars.

[sgreffenius]

We have a well-known story from Texas politics, that politicians forget at their peril. It recalls Lyndon Johnson’s early career, when he ran for Congress in the 1930s. He came up with a plan to charge his opponent with bestiality - I believe a sheep was LBJ’s favored animal. An advisor told him that was a stupid idea: no one would believe it; the lie just makes Johnson look bad. Johnson replies in his Texas drawl, “Don’t matter if it’s true or not - matters that the other guy has to defend himself.”

Of course Johnson’s strategy doesn’t work without assistance from the press, and what we now call the chattering classes. They all flock to the poor guy with their latest news: “Your opponent says you sleep with sheep. What do you say to that?” A week or two down the line, don’t matter who told the lie, who believes it, how long the poor guy had to squirm, what news people do with such scurrility when the story fades, or even which candidate’s reputation holds up best over the long term. It just matters who has the most votes on election day, and for several glorious days your opponent has nothing to talk about but sex, with sheep.

With his Twitter finger active every morning, ready to dominate every news cycle, Donald Trump was a veritable Roman candle of accusations, insults, outlandish statements, lies, distortions, and every kind of misstatement he or you could imagine. He was Lyndon Johnson on hyper-drive, in the age of the Internet. The press could not keep up with him. He kept his base humming, and his victims knew what that meant: challenge Trump, and you will pay. You will be primaried. You will constantly have to defend yourself.

Thus you have one answer to Holman Jenkins’ question about how bad money came to drive out the good in our marketplace of political rhetoric. The prevalence of lying in the public sphere depends on unholy synergy among media, government officials, and activists, where all three comprise what we might call the hive. Each group seems all-in to amplify falsehoods that appear useful, no matter where they may first appear.

Trump started many of his tweets with a phrase like, “They say that...” He didn’t care where the story came from. His filter for what his followers would appreciate signaled which rumors would be most useful, which less. As president, he amplified useful ones to keep his base riled up, as critics put it, to keep the hive humming, and to force his opponents to defend themselves.

We used to expect mainstream, national media to tone down rumors, exaggerations, distortions, unfounded accusations, and otherwise false statements. What was natural for a Texas reporter from a local newspaper was not standard procedure for the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Walter Cronkite at CBS News. If a story deserved to be buried, they would bury it. Not any more. With social media, the more outlandish or suspect the story might be, the more it rises to the top of your news feed. As Ilhan Omar might say, “It’s all about the clicks, baby.”

Now throw in partisanship as an aggravating factor. That gives you government officials, activists, and media on the left versus government officials, activists, and media on the right. Few in each group hold honesty dear. The plugged-in soldiers on the front lines merely want to win the current battle, or put enough points in their political accounts to win the next one. The calculation generally reduces to, what can I do or say now, to win later? If not win, where does my advantage lie? Especially, how can I remain in good standing with my group?

As Jenkins points out, lies have been around for a long time. Donald Trump did not invent them, nor was he a particularly good liar. He was a relentless and in some ways skilled verbal pugilist who would say anything that came into his head. Calculated lying is not something he even thought about. He sought out ways to use words to get what he wanted, and to intimidate others.

Before Trump came along, though, people began to realize that in many situations, benefits of lying exceed the costs of getting caught. Weighing costs and benefits, however, requires a little calculation. You could say Trump’s inability to calculate defeated him in the end, first at the polls, then at the Capitol on January 6. He could not break his Twitter habit, or the rush that comes from getting a crowd excited. He did in fact want to stay in office, and he knew the crowd in front of him presented his last chance. In that kind of situation, the difference between an excited crowd and a mob narrows.

You do not need to defend Trump to observe similar political strategies among the president’s opponents. Both sides can deploy dishonest accusations to stir the hive with unpredictable results. Just as Trump probably did not envision a destructive mob that would make his presidency crash and burn, his enemies did not envision one futile effort after another to force him from office.

The major effort, of course, was what we might call the breathless, rumor-laden Mueller investigation: breathless because Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, and countless copycat outlets lent credibility to charges that retrospectively turned into gaseous emissions after Mueller issued his report. A lot went wrong during that investigation, but its key weakness lay at its core, not the periphery. That is, a lot that was wrong about the 2016 campaign led back to the FBI, the same agency tasked to find out what went wrong in the 2016 campaign. The Department of Justice could not investigate the campaign without revealing its own corruption.

Did Democrats pay a price for the Russia collusion hoax, as it’s now called? Apparently not. When Robert Mueller published his report, the whole business sank pretty fast. The Ukrainian impeachment campaign looked like a better bet. In the end, people do not like to dwell on false accusations, even if they did serve a purpose at the time. You are happy if someone else makes them for you. Mueller filled that role well, until he didn’t with his report. Sympathy started to shift toward Trump, ever ready to play victim, a maligned man who counter-punches only to save himself. When you bring charges against your enemies, you are happy to have them disappear when they prove false. They are only useful if you get a conviction, or until battle tides shift.

Brazen or reckless statements, versus calculated arguments help you assess social or political advantages of lying. Another way to assess these advantages returns us to our original point about amplification, in what we now call partisan echo chambers. An echo chamber is not exactly a hive, but in the context of social media, they are fairly similar. These chambers develop for a number of reasons, obvious among them the need many have to belong to a larger group. The group affirms your beliefs. You will do a lot, and refrain from a lot, in order to remain a member. Membership makes you feel connected to a larger whole.

These group-minded affirmation chambers operate in diverse settings. When students agitate to force a professor out of the classroom on a respected campus, when employees petition to have an editor fired from an established newsroom, when government officials claim that a crime is not actually a crime, it seems these actors do not care how their actions appear outside of their bubbles. They want to deposit points in the bank: call them intimidation points. The more scalps you tie to your battle standards, the greater your chances of victory the next time you meet your enemies.

Often, when I hear sound bites of people in other countries talk about political matters, I think, “Man, these people are over-the-top full of hot anger and passion. If they spend that much energy on their speech, how do they get anything done?” Now we observe the same qualities in our own political rhetoric. It threatens to boil over at every second. Given that level of activity, you start to understand how angry people get things done. If you use passion as your driver, turn up the heat another couple of notches.

Thus we can assess lying in social and political contexts based on the mix of emotion and reason in participants’ arguments. Jenkins lines up with common language about cool analysis versus angry passion. We expect jurists who evaluate evidence, rules, and precedents in a court case to bring a certain cool headedness to that activity. No one faults an attorney who brings emotion into a closing statement, but the case overall ought to be grounded in evidence and analysis.

Not so in the political realm, where ruthless aggression and brute strength rule. The kinds of arguments about political ethics and ideal republics you might read among political philosophers do not count for a lot in the public arena, where blood in the sand matters a lot more. Participants have recognized for a long time that politics is a blood sport. Most participants who emerge from the arena would question whether it is actually a sport. Warriors play for keeps, where defeat means destruction.

By that standard, if you do not draw blood, then what the hell are you doing out there? How will you cut your opponents, how will you weaken them with fear, while you evaluate evidence, or pray, or seek wisdom? The last four and a half years present a master example in a key phenomenon related to truth during political conflict: when swords and knives come out, brains shut down. They must. You just want to survive. To do that, you destroy your opponents, without thought.

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: Donald Trump Jr. Claims Today’s Democrats Would Reject John F. Kennedy as a ‘Neo-Nazi Terrorist’

(WASHINGTON) — Donald Trump Jr. claimed Tuesday that the modern-day Democratic Party has moved so far left it would have rejected President John F. Kennedy as an “alt-right, neo-Nazi terrorist.”

The president’s son launched the broadside against Democrats during an interview on Fox News to promote his newly published book, “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.”

“The reality is this isn’t your grandfather’s Democrat Party,” Trump Jr. said in the interview. “If you look at their party platform, it’s not for working-class Americans. You know, JFK would be an alt-right neo-Nazi terrorist, according to them today.”

President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that the Democratic Party is too liberal for the average American, deriding self-professed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and liberal freshmen Democrats in the House, like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar.

Trump Jr. did a round of television interviews to promote his new book a day after his father took to Twitter to urge his 66.5 million followers to “Go order it today!” Trump has accused former Vice President Joe Biden’s son of profiting off his father’s office.

Trump Jr. also revealed that his father, who frequently posts controversial comments on Twitter, has suggested at moments that he tone down what he’s posting on social media.

“Every once while, I’ll get that call like, ‘Hey, you’re getting a little hot on social,'” Trump Jr. said, recalling conversations with his father. “I go, ‘Wait a minute.’ I will take your advice. I will take your advice on anything. … But I was like this may be the one place where I’m just going to say I’m on my own and maybe, you know, you don’t have the authority to start talking about this.”

Some ethics watchdogs say the president’s promotion of his son’s book raises red flags.

Trump’s promotional tweet would be a violation of ethics rules if it had come from any federal employee other than the president, said Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.

“Frankly he’s using his Twitter account to try to financially benefit his son,” she said Monday. “That’s not only distasteful, but it’s a misuse of public office and it would be an official misuse of public office if it was anyone other than the president.”

The tweet also highlights a well-practiced tactic of Trump trying to turn a weakness into an attack on his opponents.

In this case, Trump has zeroed in on Biden’s son Hunter, going as far as to ask foreign governments, including Ukraine and China, to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings. Those efforts helped spark the impeachment inquiry into his conduct.

Biden is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination and could face Trump in the general election next year.

“The Biden family was PAID OFF, pure and simple!” Trump insisted in a tweet last month, despite no evidence suggesting that the former vice president received any payments or that Hunter Biden did anything illegal. The younger Biden has acknowledged he displayed poor judgment when he took a post on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, after his father became the Obama administration’s point person on U.S.-Ukraine relations.

Hunter Biden also recently said that he would step down from the board of directors of a Chinese-backed private equity firm because his service had become a “distraction.”

Trump is repeating the playbook he used during his 2016 campaign, when he tried to paint his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as corrupt and untrustworthy, mixing legitimate criticism of her past with unfounded conspiracy theories.

Trump is the first president in modern history who has failed to divest from his business holdings. He makes frequent trips to his for-profit golf clubs, continues to collect dues at his members-only properties, and hosts fundraisers and foreign delegations at hotels that bear his family’s name.

And his sons continue to operate his company, at one point trying to launch a lower-budget hotel chain they hoped would appeal to Trump voters.

The White House did not respond to questions Monday. But a spokesman for Trump Jr. defended the tweet, insisting that there is little in common between a father promoting his son’s book and a son being paid large sums of money by foreign companies because of his last name.

By JILL COLVIN and AAMER MADHANI / AP on November 05, 2019 at 01:07PM

[chkinpotpie]

Us and Them

A couple of days ago I posted an article about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the US representative for Minnesota’s 5th district, and stated my support for her willingness to question policies and ask difficult questions.  I had read a few articles about Congresswoman Omar before making this statement.  Due to the discussion that ensued, I realized I needed to read more.  I spent several hours reading about Congresswoman Omar and this issue over the weekend.  I feel comfortable saying that I stand behind my original statement.  Here’s why, and please understand I recognize what a hot button topic this is.  I respect everyone’s views on this topic, and welcome hearing them in a respectful, mature manner.  This is my opinion based on my life experiences.

Wow.  This is a tough issue that deals with emotion, politics, and deeply rooted beliefs about religion, race and anti-Semitism.  It is not a black and white issue at all. Wading through it is difficult, but I honestly feel it is necessary to have these tough discussions if we are to do the single most important thing we need to be doing as Americans right now – bridge the divide that occurs between us and come to a place where we can connect in some way. 

Is it possible that Congresswoman Omar is anti-Semitic?  Absolutely. I acknowledge that several of her statements hint at such.  If that is the case, I do not support her and would never support any behavior that is hateful or discriminatory.  The desire in me to reach across the table and connect with people to bridge the divide has motivated me to dig deeper, however, and try to understand people’s motivations and intentions.  In that space, I find myself wondering the following, also possibilities.

Is Congresswoman Omar trying to make a name for herself in her new position of power?  

Is Congresswoman Omar out of touch with the power that her words now hold?

Is Congresswoman Omar extremely intelligent, and knows how to walk the line between anti-Semitism and anti-bigotry perfectly and manipulate her words as such?

Is Congresswoman Omar an antagonist, as she states in this article

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/08/ilhan-omar-dean-phillips-minnesota-democratic-party-225696

“As much as other people are uncomfortable, I’m excited about the change in tone that has taken place that is extremely positive. The insightful conversations that we’re having about money and its influence in Washington. And my ability, I think, to agitate our foreign policy discussions in a way that many of my colleagues who have been anti-intervention, anti-war have been unable to do in the past,” she says. “So, I’m OK with taking the blows if it means it will ignite conversations that no one was willing to have before.” – Ilhan Omar

All of these scenarios are possibilities.  It is also possible and very likely that we will never know the absolute truth, and possible that Congresswoman Omar does not even understand her own truth.  She is a 37 year old Muslim woman born in Mogadishu on the Somali coast.  Her mother died when she was 2 years old and she was raised by her father and grandfather. She spent 4 years in a refugee camp in Kenya after war broke out in Somali in 1991.  She moved to the US in 1995.  Her father worked as a taxi driver and post office worker.  She became a US citizen at age 17.  She went to school in Virginia and was bullied for wearing a hijab. Ilhan graduated from North Dakota State University with a degree in political science and international studies in 2011.  She is married with 3 children and lives in Minneapolis.   She is a person, with thousands of life experiences that have shaped her thought process and beliefs.  

Reading about this issue has made my head spin.  I cannot imagine being Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and being in the center of it.  It must be extremely stressful, and test her values, faith, career objectives, family life, and strength on a daily basis. Yes, she chose this path.  Yes, we all have problems and tragedy in our lives. Yes, adversity and stress do not give us a free pass to say things that offend people based on their religion and race. But maybe, just maybe, her intentions are good.  Maybe she does not hold any negative beliefs against Jews, and did not realize what she was saying had anti-Semitic tones.  Maybe she is so fed up with the ways of this horrific world we live in, that she is willing to ask questions that need to be answered in order to incite change.  Whatever her motivation, we need to build a bridge between “us” and “them”.  Only then can we remember that we are really the same.  We are all “us”.     

[ssdpuhouston]

It’s official -- yesterday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an official impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump. Below, we’ll give you a rundown on what the next steps are, but first we want to take a moment to recap what led up to this point. (Feel free to skip this first section if you’ve been checking Twitter as obsessively as we have!) How We Got Here It’s been all over the news: A whistleblower complaint alleges that Trump asked Ukrainian leaders to interfere in our elections and provide intelligence on his political opponents. Trump himself -- along with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani -- admitted it. On camera. So that brazenly illegal act was what led to additional Democrats coming out in support of impeachment and Pelosi finally backing the effort, right? Well, sort of, but it wasn’t entirely as fast and easy as the headlines make it sound. This happened because members of Congress -- mostly members of color -- came out early for impeachment and never gave in to whether the winds of public opinion had swayed Pelosi. People like Maxine Waters, Al Green, Pramila Jayapal, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ayanna Pressley (and so many others) who have been outspoken about Congress needing to have the moral clarity to do what's right and take one small step to protect our damned democracy. It happened because of our partner organizations, Indivisible groups and so many individuals who made calls, sent emails, held meetings, and visited district offices for TWO YEARS, demanding to be heard and for their members to do the right thing. In short: thousands of people have been greasing the wheels on impeachment for months. And that’s created a steady buildup of pressure on members of Congress to back the process. The Mueller report, the events and rallies during Impeachment August, the town hall questions and social media posts, the Letters to the Editor -- all these things were kindling just waiting for a spark. And then there were the calls. Yesterday, when it became clear that Speaker Pelosi and other Democratic leadership were planning to meet about impeachment in the wake of revelations about Trump’s call with Ukraine, Indivisibles did what we do best: we sprung into action. Together, in just 4 hours, we generated more than 11,000 phone calls into congressional offices pressuring Members to support impeachment in advance of the House Democratic Caucus meeting. That’s the kind of effort that makes a difference. It’s the kind of effort that brings Nancy Pelosi onto national television to say, “No one is above the law.” And it’s the kind of effort we’re going to need to replicate to keep this inquiry moving forward. What’s Next Now that the official inquiry has been announced, you may be wondering what the next steps are. In simple terms -- we need to keep up the pressure. Yesterday we had three simple asks, but we already won one (yay!) so now it’s two: Keep the investigation in the Judiciary Committee, which has the authority and is already moving forward. ← Big win! At 5 pm yesterday, Speaker Pelosi announced she will not be establishing a special select committee on impeachment. Instead, the existing committees will continue their ongoing investigations in service of a formal impeachment inquiry. That’s what we wanted! Cancel next week’s recess. Rather than going home and letting the news cycle move on without any action (we’ve seen that before), Congress should cancel their scheduled recess, stay in Washington, and do their jobs to hold Trump accountable. Hold a vote on impeachment as soon as possible. Every day Trump sits in office without any consequences for his behavior is a threat to the country and our most fundamental principles. The time to act is now. We’ve gotten some questions about that last ask, so we want to give our two cents. Trump's actions are not just corrupt -- they are a matter of national security, election security, and the integrity of our democracy. And several committees have been investigating Trump’s conduct for months. That means that a lot of the up-front work that would form the basis of articles of impeachment has already been conducted by committees in the House and is ready to be forwarded to Judiciary. We’re not at all saying we shouldn’t have any more hearings, but there’s no reason this process should take months to move forward -- as long as Democratic leadership treats it with the urgency it requires. Here is a call script for you to call your members of Congress. And if you’d like to take it a step further, after you make your calls, click here to write a letter to the editor supporting impeachment. What if they stay on recess? We know very well that asking Congress to give back their vacation time to go back to still-hot-and-muggy DC could be a losing battle. So if they don’t do the right thing, we’re ready to get loud. Yesterday afternoon, we worked with some of our sister organizations to form IMPEACH-NOW, a coalition of progressive organizations dedicated to pressuring members of Congress to Impeach Trump. We’ve launched a shared website, impeachnow.org. Until Speaker Pelosi does the right thing and brings Congress back from recess, use the resources there to find town halls and organize office visits while your member of Congress is home. Truthfully, even though we put a lot of work into it today, we hope that impeachnow.org won’t be live very long -- because if it’s not, that means we’ve succeeded! What else can I do? The amount of movement we’ve seen on impeachment just in the last week is evidence that chance really does favor the prepared -- Indivisibles helped create an environment that’s ripe for action, and you were ready to take up the call when opportunity struck. But even when you’re prepared, it takes an unbelievable amount of work to pull off something like what we did yesterday, and the tools we use to make it happen aren’t cheap. Over 30 Indivisible staff members spent the majority of yesterday developing and promoting rapid response resources. Here’s a look at what that took: We built a brand-new call in page, and we wrote, developed, and recorded a phone dial-in so you could text IMPEACH to 97779 and get a recording of messages. Our policy experts researched and wrote new content to match the fast-changing news -- and then worked with our video team to script and film a video explaining what was happening. We sent an email to nearly a million Indivisibles, and a text message to over 150,000 more, outlining the state of play and asking you to take action. We coordinated with partner organizations and progressive members of Congress to ensure our asks were aligned across the movement and that we weren’t duplicating each other’s work, but amplifying instead. We answered dozens of emails offering support to Indivisibles who were having trouble contacting their members of Congress. (Yes, we do read replies to these messages!) The fact is that marshalling those resources of both tools and time costs money. And while we will never, ever, EVER ask you to prioritize donating over giving time (if you haven’t done the ask above, stop reading and go do it!), we do truly count on Indivisibles’ financial support to keep all of this work moving forward. So please: Chip in even just $10 today to support Indivisible Project and help us respond with all our might in big moments like this.

http://www.indivisiblehouston.org/

[epistolizer]

Hit & Run Commentary #124

Joe Biden insists that the only thing making his history of tactile constituent interactions wrong now yet appropriate at the time are changing social norms.  So what he is saying is that such behavior and even much worse will be perfectly acceptable when America falls to Islamist radicals because of the failure to crack down at the border because of similar multiculturalist drivel.  If one wants to hold that Biden’s actions are always wrong, one can only appeal to an absolute and transcendent morality, the only legitimate of which is found in traditional Christianity.  

Pundit Matt Bai warns in a column titled “Stephen Miller Stokes Trump’s Nationalist Vision”. So would he prefer an internationalist alternative? That would mean America’s future would not necessarily be determined by those holding to traditionalist conceptions of human freedom and constitutional liberty.  Rather, just as much say would be granted to those that value perpetuation of the regulatory bureaucracy at the expense of the individual and even to some thinking that those not holding to particular conceptions of God or even notions of dress deemed acceptable by anyone with a lick of common sense should be eliminated in the most brutal ways imaginable.  

Did those now tossing a fit that Turning Point USA  functionary Candace Owens allegedly glossed over Hitler’s atrocities get similarly jacked out of shape over a Chairman Mao ornament adorning a White House Christmas tree during the Obama regime?  Unlike anyone connected with the decoration of that particular sprig of Yuletide foliage, Candace Owens is a private citizen. Mao killed more than Hitler. Or are Chinese lives not as valuable as Jewish ones? Do those outraged at Candace Owens get as worked up when they see youth inspired to advance the cause of world Bolshevism often at the behest of their tenured pedagogues wear Che Guevara shirts?  For that particular figure was quite explicit in regards to his disgust for Black people.  

If migrants from beyond America’s borders only enhance the nation and, contrary to what President Trump insists, are not criminals but only truly remarkable people of robust health, why are the advocates of open borders and sanctuary cities less than enthusiastic about the opportunity the President is allowing these jurisdictions to add this diversity to their own regional distinctiveness? Interesting how when it is the backyards of radical multiculturalists on the line that they become as territorial as any member of the Tea Party or Minuteman movements. 

If the undocumenteds are not wanted in sanctuary cities, isn't that proof these jurisdictions are not in a warped fashion about the well being of the migrants but rather about the virtue signalling of the subversives undermining border security in this fashion?  

Did any of those now bellyaching how criticism of Lady Mao  (aka Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) leads to an uptick in death threats ever come out with as much righteous indignation in opposition to the Antifia insurgents that insinuated bodily harm to the wife of Tucker Carlson while pounding on the family’s door?  

President Trump is reportedly not too pleased that Fox News held a town hall with Bernie Sanders.  Though the President is allied with a number of pundits on the network, he does not deserve so much influence over that particular media outlet so as to determine programming content.  If anything, Fox News and Senator Sanders are to be commended for sharing a willingness to appear in the same venue despite profound ideological differences.  

In detailing the origins of the Islamist front group CAIR, Representative Ilhan Omar said the organization “was founded after 9/11 because they recognized some people did something, and that all us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” To remind people exactly what that something was, the New York Post graciously published an edition with a cover photo of the jetliner flying into one of the World Trade Center towers. For this act of responsible and accurate journalism, the newspaper has been accused of “dangerous incitement”. So if it is now unacceptable to reference documented events for fear that such might instigate hatred against Muslims, does that mean Black History Month should be similarly downplayed since a significant reason for that commemoration is to agitate animosity against Whites?  

If a medication for excessive underarm perspiration is advertised as also causing urinary retention, inability to regulate body temperature, and blurred vision, I think I’ll just settle for the sweaty armpits.  

If Donald Trump legitimately wrote off nearly a billion dollars in losses, isn’t this an instance of “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”? Shouldn’t even greater ire be directed towards the legislators and regulators that set up such system in the first place?  

Too bad PETA is not as concerned about lowering the euthanasia rates in their shelters as they are about expunging the English language of phrases such as “opening a can of worms” or “letting the cat out of the bag”.  

One can understand conservatives standing against transgenders infiltrating women’s sports. But how are these Fox News pundits jacked out of shape over these types getting business set asides intended for women much different than Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson begging for Affirmative Action and assorted handouts for minorities? If true to their convictions, shouldn’t they oppose someone being granted a beneficence for an occupation where it does not matter whether you’re   reproductive orifice is an outie or an innie? By insisting that women should be the beneficiaries of these sorts of programs, isn’t that an admission that women are not as good at business as men? If the response is that private corporations should be allowed to lavish benefits upon whomever they please, do these voices then intend to advocate similar set asides be lavished solely upon men or at that point do they intend to rampage in the street?  

Nancy Pelosi is outraged that President Trump believes merit should play a key role in immigration decisions. The Speaker countered that, throughout American history, most immigrants did not arrive with merit. But neither were they lavished with extravagant government handouts and benefits for simply arriving here. Many were even denied entrance for failing to comply with explicit health guidelines.  

Lady Mao, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, laments that the Alabama abortion law forces a woman to be pregnant against her consent. How is that different than child support laws which make men pay against their consent?  

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pitched a fit that Game Of Thrones was obviously written by men because the ultimate victor apparently wasn’t a women. Interesting you heard no complaints from her about the gratuitous unnecessary sex scenes for which the drama is infamous that do not likely comply with MeToo rigors regarding consent and disparities of gender power or assorted related drivel.  

Regarding those that do not want the women that get abortions punished. Do they intend to similarly coddle fathers delinquent in meeting their child support obligations?  At least those neglected kids are still alive.  

Given that the debt is on the verge of surpassing the entire worth of the U.S. economy, irrespective of party, where exactly are the funds for infrastructure investment supposed to come from?

Migrant hordes are being released by literal busloads into American cities. That’s certainly a much more effective policy upholding national security than a wall built around the border.  

It was said in a sermon that perhaps an individual does not have wealth because God cannot trust you with it.  This means wealth might cause an individual to fall into sin. Relatedly, could it also be said that God does not want certain churches to increase in terms of attendance numbers because such could similarly go to the head of a particular pastor or congregation?

In manipulative propaganda disguised as a razor blade commercial, a transgendered is admonished that shaving is about confidence.  Actually, shaving is nothing more than the removal of facial hair to comply with grooming standards imposed as social norms either by employers and members of the opposite sex or preferences of individual appearance and comfort.  

Regarding steak and cheese Hot Pockets advertised as "high protein" as if the customer is being done a favor. Aren't steak and cheese high protein to begin with?  

If humor is to be devoid of racial reference as epitomized by the tolerancemonger outrage now directed towards the cinematic classic “Blazing Saddles”, where is the sustained ongoing protest against the Comedy Central series “The New Negroes”?  

Regarding the presidential contenders jacked out of shape about Biden working with segregationists in the past.  Are they as outraged over their supporters that wear Che apparel or Representative Omar’s links to radical jihadists?  

In Taylor Swift’s propaganda video in favor of the Equality Act, those opposing her endorsement of wanton licentiousness are depicted as unenlightened hayseeds and trailer park trash.  Islamists take an even harderline stance against the acts of carnality depicted in the video. An activist number go far beyond touting protest signs to commit what Westerns would consider unconventional forms of capital punishment such as the tossing of the accused off multistory buildings .  As such, does this naive minstrel intend to produce a video ridiculing those of this additional religious persuasion that wear distinctive apparel such as burkas, hijabs or keffiyehs?  

By Frederick Meekins

[cksmart-world]

The Completely Unnecessary News Analysis

by Christopher Smart

July 16, 2019

Inland Port: You Call That A Riot?

That was no riot. Please. Melee, maybe. Two dozen protesters and four dozen cops. Huh. It was more like Romper Room. But the way the news media was carrying on you'd think it was Chicago in 1968 — now that was a riot. And poor Gov. Gary Herbert — “tantamount to terrorism,” he bellowed. Was he hallucinating? Nonetheless, you have to hand it to the protesters — they did get a lot of attention. Now, everyone is wondering, what the heck is an inland port? Generally speaking, it's a sea of warehouses and manufacturing plants along with non-stop train and truck traffic. If state planners have their way, it will be immense. But the truth is that Salt Lake City zoned the area west of Redwood Road and south of I-80 for light industrial decades ago. More recently Mayor Jackie Biskupski signed an agreement for the north side of the freeway west of the airport to be developed in a similar manner. It looked like such a gold mine that former House Speaker Greg Hughes and his band of pirates seized it for themselves, er uh, the state of Utah. Somebody's gonna make bank — but it's not the taxpayers. All they get is traffic jams and air pollution. It's enough to make you want to protest. But maybe next time, kids, you could practice up a bit.

Alien Confab Is A Go!

If aliens like crowds, they'll really love this. An estimated 200,000 people say they will meet at Area 51 in Nevada on Sept. 20 at 3 a.m. to search for evidence of extraterrestrials. And you thought Burning Man was weird. Imagine the entire population of Salt Lake City scouring the desert for aliens at the same time. Talk about close encounters. And just think of the logistics — who'll bring the Porta Potties? But don't bother true believers with details. For decades folks have said that galactic visitors frequented the place. The 1947 crash of a spaceship near Roswell, New Mexico is evidence that aliens are among us. The Pentagon insists that UFO was nothing more than a weather balloon. But what about the little, green men? Obviously it was another Defense Department coverup. Since then, at least four spacecraft landings have been witnessed by citizen UFO-ologists. Finally in 2017, the DOD had to confirm that there was, in fact, a $22 million government program to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats.” Ahah! We do have visitors from outer space. Maybe they could do something about Sean Hannity.

Go Back Where You Came From

Donald Trump had one thing right when he told congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts to back to their troubled and broken countries — the U.S. is troubled and broken. Thank you Mr. Trump. But the staff here at Smart Bomb decided to see if we could actually go back to where we came from. So we spit into a cup and sent it off to Ancestry.com But when the results came back it became complicated. No one on the staff had forebears that came from just one place. There was Ireland and Wales, Scotland and Germany, Sweden and Italy and on and on. We know, we know, it's quite WASPy and white. And that's why Donald Trump doesn't want us to go back there — not that we could. For one thing, they don't have baseball. But Ayanna Pressely's people came over here many centuries ago in chains. That was long before Donald Trump's grandfather, Frederick immigrated in 1885. Trump actually could go back, but you're right, Wilson, they probably wouldn't take him in Germany. They think he's something of dangerous nut case. Imagine that.

Paul “Come-Lately” Ryan: Trump's A Dipshit

Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is no scaredy-cat boot-licker. No siree, Bob. President Donald Trump is a horrid person who doesn't know dung from shoe polish, he says in a new book, "American Carnage," by Tim Alberta. Unlike his former colleagues who remain in Congress, Ryan is standing up to the insulter-in-chief. "I'm telling you, Trump didn't know anything about government. I wanted to scold him all the time." Sure, he's saying these things now from the safety of his Michigan sofa, far from the gory gridiron of Washington, but Ryan insists he's always felt that way and people just don't understand how courageous he really is. Ryan sucked up to Trump like a lilting violet, he explained, only so he could steer the president away from making “bad decisions.” He is, in reality, an unheralded hero. Some critics say he's too late taking a stand against insidious buffoonery, but they don't understand how mean the president can be. Ryan just could not take two more years with Trump, so he hit the "escape hatch.” There's an old saying about people remaining silent in the face of evil, but don't ask Republicans what it is, they're busy sucking up to Trump so he doesn't make bad decisions.

Well, that's it for another sizzling week here at Smart Bomb, where the staff has taken to bathing in ice tea (no sweetener, thank you), while reading the very last issue of Mad Magazine. But if you think it's hot now, just give it 30 years — climate change models indicate that Salt Lake City will resemble Phoenix, Arizona. Too bad Global Warming isn't a hoax. Maybe the aliens could help us out with their greenhouse gas vacuums. That would be cool (no pun intended, hah). OK Wilson, tell the band to put down their beers and take us out with something for our friends on their way to Area 51:

Woke up this morning with light in my eyes / And then realized it was still dark outside / It was a light comin' down from the sky / I don't know who or why / Hey Mr.Spaceman, won't you please take me along / I won't do anything wrong / Hey Mr.Spaceman, won't you please take me along for a ride...

[fadingfartconnoisseur]

AK Monthly Recap: February 2017

After a quiet January, I got back to the road in February with two trips that were out of the norm for me. A trip to Florida and a cruise — two very typical American vacations, but not the usual kind of trip I take. Even so, I had a blast on both trips!

Best of all, these were trips with friends — a road trip through Florida with Cailin and a cruise through the Caribbean with Jeremy.

Punctuated with some fun times at home in New York, it made for a very satisfying month. Here’s everything I got up to in February!

Destinations Visited

New York, New York

Orlando, Islamorada, Key Largo, Tavernier, Marathon, Key West, and Miami, Florida

Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Favorite Destinations

Key West is one of my new favorite places in the United States!

San Juan is a fabulous city and I was happy to return.

And I’m just discovering how awesome Miami Beach can be.

Highlights

Having fun at Universal Orlando. Universal Studios was the main reason for our Florida trip. Cailin is an ambassador for the park, and part of her partnership is that she gets to bring friends with her to experience the park for themselves. She kindly invited me and I was happy to join her. We had a great time!

Some of the highlights: throwing out beads on a Mardi Gras float, going to the actual Moe’s Tavern from The Simpsons, wearing our hot pink BEST FRIENDS shirts, experiencing The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (and doing a hilarious Bertie Botts Roulette video on Facebook live!), having breakfast with the Minions, riding The Mummy over and over (flying around in the dark, fiery explosions, Brendan Fraser demanding a cup of coffee — what’s not to love?), and THE FOOD. Seriously. I did not have high expectations for the food at Universal but the restaurants at CityWalk were excellent, especially Antojitos. They made the best salmon over sweet potatoes…

Road tripping down the Keys. The Florida Keys were amazing and both fulfilled and defied my expectations. They were absolutely beautiful, gritty in all the right ways, and surprisingly a lot like New Hampshire…

Having a little too much fun in Key West. Let’s just say that at age 32, Key West is for me what San Juan del Sur was at 30, Vang Vieng was at 26, Las Vegas was at 23…it’s a fun place. And wild. And incredibly beautiful and historical as well, but still — this is a place where you come for fun. The highlight was our sunset cruise with a bunch of rowdy Boston sports fans and unlimited rosé…

Trying all the key lime pie. This was my major diet fail this month — but I did eat clean otherwise. Cailin and I decided to go on a quest to find the best key lime pie in the Florida Keys and we sampled eight different top recommended pies across the archipelago. Stay tuned for a post on the best slices!

Kicking back in South Beach. We had two nights in Miami at the end of our trip and decided to just chill out — we ate ceviche, relaxed on the beach, and vegged out at the W’s pool.

Enjoying my first cruise ever. Jeremy kindly invited me to join him on a weeklong cruise on the Carnival Vista. The cruise was split between February and March, so it seems a bit weird only writing about the first half of it here. I’m still on it as I write this, and I’m having a blast. It did take some getting used to (it was SO OVERWHELMING at first!) but once I found my zone (balcony, adults-only deck, fitness center, spa, and sushi bar), I was happy as a clam. And my favorite part was getting to know the staff. I’ll be writing more about my introduction to cruising in the future, so stay tuned.

An awesome catamaran ride in Grand Turk. We booked only one official shore excursion and it was a good one — a catamaran ride with snorkeling and a visit to a private beach. The water in Grand Turk is an UNREAL shade of blue and the beaches are fine white sand — Jeremy and I definitely chose the perfect excursion.

Revisiting Old San Juan. Jeremy and I had both been to San Juan previously, so this day was about wandering the town, revisiting some of our favorite places, and taking photos. Puerto Rico is a fantastic place and I’d love to return for a third time and see new spots (Culebrita, yo vengo!).

Meeting up with blogger buds for the first time. This month I met Hannah and Adam from Getting Stamped at Universal Orlando and Gloria from The Blog Abroad came to visit me in Harlem! It’s so nice to meet blogger friends in real life.

I also got some nice plane views over New York en route to Orlando. So pretty!

Challenges

As far as months go, there were no major personal challenges, and for that I am grateful.

From the “learn from my mistakes” files — Cailin and I decided to save money and have me be the sole driver on our Florida road trip, but we really should have paid more and shared the driving. Orlando to Islamorada took six hours and was a slog, especially through traffic around Miami!

Post of the Month

You may have noticed publishing was much lighter than usual this month. I only have one non-recap post, but it’s a good one: Where to Stay in Barcelona: Best Neighborhoods and Accommodation

Most Popular Instagram Photo

This is a bit of a misnomer — my actual most popular Instagram photo was the recipient of roughly 2,000 fake likes from a spammer that has started targeting me and a host of other travel bloggers. (Their method: give 2k bogus likes “as a gift” and then ask us to sign up for their paid service. No thanks. Plenty of travel bloggers use bots to artificially inflate their Instagram numbers, but I refuse to play that game.)

But this is the most popular photo minus the spamming — one of Key West’s legendary sunsets.

For real-time updates from my travels, follow me on Instagram and Snapchat at adventurouskate!

What I Read This Month

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins (2016). Kathleen Collins was one of the first prominent black female filmmakers, and she died in her 40s in the 1980s. This collection of short stories she wrote was only recently found among her belongings and published last year. Some stories read like poetry, some like prose, some like plays.

More than anything, this book is about how black women love and the sacrifices they make as a result. I loved these stories of women who fell in love, women who stayed by their cheating men, women who attempted to carve out a life of their own. You could call it a companion piece to Beyonce’s Lemonade. It’s a relatively quick read and one that I highly recommend. Category: A book by a person of color.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016). I was afraid to read this book for a long time, despite its stellar reviews. I tend to avoid books about confronting death and grief (the same reason why I haven’t read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking), and I didn’t know how I would handle reading about a brilliant young neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer. This book is about how he evaluates his life prior to diagnosis and his outlook afterward. I shouldn’t have avoided it.

This book is written so beautifully. The best memoirs are fascinating stories that are told well, and this absolutely fits the bill. Dr. Kalanithi wrestled with whether to become a doctor or a writer, and tentatively planned on leaving medicine to focus on writing later in life. But what a way to leave the world — this book is a treasure. I read it in one sitting. I’m grateful that I got to know Dr. Kalanithi, if only posthumously. Category: A book about a difficult topic.

What We Do Now: Standing Your Ground in Trump’s America by various authors (2017). This book, obviously published quickly following the 2016 election, is a collection of essays by liberal leaders talking about what needs to be done in the resistance against Donald Trump. Some of the authors include Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and the first Somali-American legislator, Ilhan Omar.

I had read a handful of the essays before, including Warren’s and Krugman’s. Everything was organized by topic, from LGBT rights to the environment. And honestly, this is a very preaching-to-the-choir book, especially if you’re a liberal who follows the news, but I enjoyed reading it nonetheless and got some new insights. Category: A book with multiple authors.

Wendy Darling, Volume II: Seas by Colleen Oakes (2016). My cousin Colleen is an incredibly prolific author and the mind behind two young adult series of retold fairy tales. My favorite books of hers so far are the Wendy Darling books — a dark retelling of Peter Pan from Wendy’s point of view. These books are visually lush and much more mature.

In the first book, Wendy realizes that both Neverland and Peter Pan are far more sinister than they appear, and she escapes with her brother Michael. In the second, she joins Captain Hook and his crew as they sail Neverland, trying to stop Peter Pan with the help of bloodthirsty mermaids and deranged fairies. And if Peter Pan was sexy in the first book, CAPTAIN HOOK was sexy in the second! I love Colleen’s view of Neverland! Category: A book involving a mythical creature.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (1934). I’ve actually never read a book by Agatha Christie in my life (!) but I needed a book that’s becoming a movie this year, and I got excited when I saw that not only is Murder on the Orient Express going to be a movie in December, but Leslie Odom Jr. (a.k.a. Aaron Burr from Hamilton) will be in it! It has an awesome cast: directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh with Odom, Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley, Michelle Pfeiffer, Josh Gad, Willem Dafoe, and DAME JUDI MOTHERFUCKING DENCH.

This iconic mystery takes place on the Orient Express from Istanbul to Calais in the 1930s. A passenger is murdered and the train gets stuck in a snowstorm, which means the murderer is one of the passengers in the car. Good thing detective Hercule Poirot is on board and is able to deduce who the killer is.

One thing I didn’t expect…the surprising amount of casual racism about Italians and Italian-Americans. According to one character, the Italian must be the murderer because Italians love to stab people…That said, it’s a reminder that Italians and Irish were once treated with the prejudice and scorn that Muslims, Latinos, and Africans receive in America today. I’m eager to see how they modernize the film. Category: A book that’s becoming a movie in 2017.

What I Listened To This Month

“Etunnel” by Primary feat. Gaeko. Another one of Spotify’s picks for me (seriously, Spotify knows my tastes inside and out), this is a lovely Korean electronic/hip-hop song with a touch of Burt Bacharach. Give it a listen; I bet you’ll love it!

Fun fact: I didn’t even know it was Korean until I looked it up just now…

What I Watched This Month

I’ve started watching Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix. This comedy stars Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant as boring-yet-happy realtor couple living in the suburbs with a teenage daughter — until one day Barrymore’s character suddenly turns into a zombie and starts eating people.

It’s not the sharpest or most cutting-edge comedy of all time, but it’s wacky and I love it! The cast is great, and it has a very sweet message of doing everything you can to protect your family, even if that means killing people you can’t stand in order to eat them.

What I Cooked This Month

No pics, but I am cooking these turkey spinach burgers all the time. They’re super healthy and a good source of protein, and I love making four at once so I have a few ready to go in the fridge! Plus, they look like Oscar the Grouch.

Four pieces of advice: 1) This recipe calls for a truly insane amount of spinach — just go with it. 2) Be very gentle when mixing the turkey; if you mash it too hard it will be too dense. 3) They will fall apart if you grill them, so bake them in a glass dish. 4) Top them with avocado or guacamole — it’s the best! Avocado is my main substitute for cheese these days, and I find it just as satisfying.

Fitness Update

I’m still working hard on my fitness and I think I’ve been making progress at a much faster rate lately. Something has shifted — I work harder and better and am feeling great!

That said, this was also my first month traveling since starting my fitness regimen, and it was challenging to keep up workouts and eat well on the road. I could have done better with both, but I’m glad neither trip turned into a gluttonous free-for-all, as it would have in the past.

I tried two new classes this month — Pon de Flo with Oneika, and IMAXShift with Beth. Pon de Flo is a Caribbean dance class in SoHo that includes HIIT segments — think Zumba but with more push-ups. IMAXShift is a spin class in front of an IMAX screen located in DUMBO — you ride through space and lasers and the sky.

I only lost a few pounds in February, but I don’t mind — according to my body analysis I’m gaining a ton of muscle, which is heavier and cancels out a lot of fat loss. Weight isn’t as important as you think. More important is that I look and feel different — especially in my face, my upper arms and my thighs. And I’ve lost three inches off my waist since December.

Also a bonus: I went bathing suit shopping and found three suits that I loved and felt great in!

Coming Up in March 2017

I have a few more days on the cruise at the beginning of March, and beyond that, I have no travel plans scheduled in March. Which, once again, is great. I feel like I’m actually starting to live my goal of traveling 25% of the time or less.

I do have a lot I want to do in New York this month, including visiting the new Golden Girls cafe in Washington Heights, so stay tuned for more local coverage!

Plus, Cailin is coming to stay for a few days (amusingly, she’ll already be at my place when I get back from the cruise). I’m also looking forward to hosting my book group at my apartment, which is shockingly the first time I’ve invited more than two people into my apartment simultaneously!

What’s coming up for you in March? Share away!

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