Month: November 2018

 

By KYLE EUSTICE

 

Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died over 24 years ago from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Seattle. But as one of the forefathers of grunge, the legacy he left behind is still being dissected.

Prior to the release of Nirvana’s iconic 1991 album, Nevermind, Cobain was asked about rap and white people engaging in the culture in a recently unearthed interview with Robert Lorusso. When Lorusso pointed out that Cobain had once said,  “The white man has ripped off the black man for long enough,” Cobain replied, “Oh I don’t know. Was I drunk at that time?”

He went on to say, “I’m a fan of rap music, but most of it is so misogynist that I can’t even deal with it. I’m really not that much of a fan.

“I totally respect and love it because it’s one of the only original forms of music that’s been introduced, but the white man doing rap is just like watching a white man dance. We can’t dance, we can’t rap.”

The interview was conducted on September 20, 1991 at the Opera House in Toronto, Canada, right before Nirvana was catapulted into mainstream success. Lorusso details the circumstances of the conversation on the Dead City Beat Bandcamp page.

“This is a terrible interview,” he begins. “I am not feigning self-deprecating modesty when I say this, this is objectively terrible by all journalistic standards. It is so for the following reasons: 1) my questions were poorly crafted because 2) my research was incomplete and inaccurate. I decided to release this now for the following reasons: 1) it’s still history, despite how poorly done the interview was, and 2) my friends keep bugging me to post this trash fire.

“So here you go, jerks. This is the entire unedited recording of the interview, in articulate musings and all. For context, the recording starts while Kurt Cobain and I were having a casual conversation about censorship. Specifically, he was asking if we had something similar to the PMRC that was attempting to censor artists. This is where the recording starts. It ends with him patiently recording a ‘Station ID’ promo for my university radio station, CHRW in London, Ontario, Canada. In between is well… yeah…not great.”

Lorusso ends his description with an interesting observation.

“Final take-away from that interview,” he concludes. “As we spoke I got a vague sense that he wasn’t really enjoying their success. I couldn’t understand it. I was so enamored with and envious of his talent and success I just couldn’t understand how he could have been so indifferent to it.

“A few years later it became very clear why. When I reflected on this experience, I realized that success doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if your world is falling apart. Depression is a cruel thief that bankrupts your life with one fleeting moment of joy at a time. It still bums me out.”

Listen to the full interview above.

 

By RILEY WALLACE

 

 

By KYLE EUSTICE

 

DAYTON, OH – Chuck D and Flavor Flav showed up at DJ Terminator X’s wedding in Ohio over the weekend, which in itself isn’t surprising.

What is surprising is the legendary duo performed a set as Public Enemy, marking the first time the unlikely pair performed together since 2017. (Remember, Flav filed a lawsuit against his longtime partner-in-rhyme last year.)

According to Dayton.com, Robin Dugger and the Public Enemy vet were married November 17 at Residence Park Church of Christ in Dayton.

With the exception of two SW1s and Professor Griff, who also got married this year, Chuck, Flav, DJ Lord, Khari Wynn, Sammy Sam and all other members of the band attended the wedding and reception at Country Club of the North in Beavercreek.

Chuck told HipHopDX he performed several classic joints — including “Rebel Without a Pause,” “911 Is a Joke,” “Don’t Believe the Hype” and “Fight the Power” — with Flav and X.

 

 

By BELEN FERNANDEZ

 

Americans continue celebrating a holiday that whitewashes the mass killing of millions of Native Americans.

When I was a schoolchild in the US a couple of short decades ago, I spent my time acquiring important life skills, ranging from how to fake a wrist fracture in order to obtain a purple cast, to how to craft a teepee replica out of a paper bag.

The latter art was perfected in accordance with the holiday of Thanksgiving, which arrived each November to great fanfare, and which, in addition to teepee replication, required my classmates and I to mass-produce turkey drawings, paper Pilgrim hats, and modified, feathered headdresses.

These materials were then incorporated into our reenactments of the “original” Thanksgiving feast: that mythologised, gastronomic encounter of 1621 between Pilgrims and Native Americans that now serves as a cornerstone of the fairytale version of US history.

On the surface, it may seem that there’s not much to criticise about a holiday based on gratitude and eating – especially when it’s accompanied by absurd spectacles like the presidential turkey pardon.

But a glance at the historical context of Thanksgiving reveals a thoroughly nauseating affair.

Land grabs and massacres

For starters, as University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen reminds us in a dispatch on the AlterNet website, the very term “thanksgiving” is saturated with disgrace.

By 1637, Jensen writes, Massachusetts Bay Colony (A Trust)  governor John Winthrop “was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children” – a bloody pattern that would “repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated”.

The work of historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, serves up plenty of additional food for thought, on why Thanksgiving perhaps shouldn’t inspire too many warm-and-fuzzy feelings.

In a 2015 paper on the indisputable genocide of Native Americans, Dunbar-Ortiz explained point blank that settler colonialism in general “requires a genocidal policy” and that “Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.”

Among the many, obvious financial perks of land theft, Dunbar-Ortiz noted that the seizure of Native American trade routes also prompted acute shortages of food and other necessities, thereby “weaken[ing] populations and forc[ing] them into dependency on the colonisers, with European manufactured goods replacing indigenous ones.”

So much for bountiful harvests.

In his book, A People’s History of the United States, late historian Howard Zinn outlined other mechanisms of capitalist dispossession. An 1814 “treaty” with the Creek nation, for example, functioned by “splitting Indian from Indian, breaking up communal landholding, bribing some with land, leaving others out – introducing the competition and conniving that marked the spirit of Western capitalism.”

Furthermore, US “land grabs” of Native American territory “laid the basis for the cotton kingdom, the slave plantations.”

In short, with such a sinister past on their plate, it’s no wonder US myth makers prefer to focus on pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce.

Predatory capitalism

In recent remarks headlined “I am tired of being invisible to you all,” rural development economist and indigenous rights activist Winona LaDuke summed up the logic underpinning the United States’ vigorous campaign to whitewash its criminal history vis-a-vis the Native Americans: “If you make the victim disappear, there is no crime.”

But how, exactly, to go about making victims disappear when US crimes are far from said and done with, and the ramifications of genocidal policy are ongoing?

There are, it seems, several possible approaches. Consider the fact that, as late as the 1970s, the forced Sterilisation of Native American women in the US was not uncommon.

In other, even more literal instances of physical elimination, as CNN reported earlier this month, data from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention shows that “Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group.”

Case in point: just a few days prior to the CNN report, a 14-year-old Native American boy was gunned down by a US law enforcement official on a reservation in the state of Wisconsin.

In 2016, the Independent observed that, of 29 Native Americans killed by US police between 1 May 2014 and 31 October 2015, “27 of those deaths received no coverage” in the media.

Talk about disappearing acts.

As it turns out, many of those killed suffered from mental illness. And indeed, one can easily argue that the prevalence of mental health conditions among Native American groups isn’t enormously surprising in light of continuous antagonism by US authorities and society, often in the form of socioeconomic ostracisation and environmental destruction – not to mention food insecurity.

It’s pretty clear, then, that a lot of people in the United States won’t have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. But at least there’s Black Friday to look forward to: the ode to gross over consumption that directly follows the supposed day of gratitude (and that has been known to result in news headlines like “Wal-Mart worker killed in Black Friday shopping stampede”).

To be sure, the Black Friday phenomenon only befits a nation built on predatory capitalism – where material excess is rendered sacred, obscene inequality is the name of the game, and communal bonds are systematically obliterated along with any remaining potential for human symbiosis with the physical environment.

In the end, you don’t need to gorge yourself on turkey and stuffing to see that the United States itself is positively sick.

 

By  EVAN BURGOS

 

Attorney General Robert Kennedy was not a believer in the lone gunman theory.

Like many Americans, he could not accept that a man as ordinary as Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone in assassinating the president of the United States, his brother John F. Kennedy.

Who did he suspect was part of the plot?

“Apparently Bobby Kennedy’s first suspicion was that it was some rogue element in the CIA,” said Philip Shenon, author of a new book on the JFK assassination.

But, after an intimate meeting with CIA Director John McCone, the president’s brother was convinced the agency was not involved. He lived the rest of his life suspecting the Mafia or the Cubans were behind his brother’s death, according to Shenon’s book, “A Cruel and Shocking Act.”

But 50 years on, the Central Intelligence Agency remains a prime suspect for a portion of the American public. Polls show that about six in 10 Americans believe JFK was killed in a conspiracy, and a November Gallup poll found that 7 percent of respondents believe the CIA is the most likely culprit.

Why the spooks?

President Kennedy — killed in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 — was thought to have had a prickly relationship with CIA brass, mostly appointed under his White House predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Heading the agency at the time was Allen Dulles. Below him were Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, and James Angleton, chief of counterintelligence.

Where the CIA under Dulles had spent years working to topple foreign heads of state — in Guatemala and Iran, for example — Kennedy preferred a more diplomatic approach, though he was not entirely opposed to covert operations. Before Kennedy, the CIA acted largely without restriction; under him that changed.

CIA officials were reportedly deeply angered by Kennedy’s lack of support in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Cuba’s Fidel Castro, a debacle that cost Dulles his job in 1961. Conspiracy buffs argue that Dulles’s firing incited plans for an assassination.

Kennedy was even once quoted in a New York Times report, by an anonymous source said to be a trusted aide, as saying he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” following the Bay of Pigs.

“It would be odd in a way if [the CIA] didn’t go after Kennedy,” said Lisa Pease, a Los Angeles-based author and researcher who recently spoke at a JFK conspiracy symposium in Pittsburgh, Pa. “He was one of the few leftist leaders still standing.”

But was Kennedy’s relationship with CIA leadership so strained that an assassination became the only resort? Here, perspectives diverge.

“Apparently the Kennedy family had no particular hostility toward Dulles,” Shenon said, citing remarks made privately by Robert Kennedy.

Moreover, according to Shenon and Dr. John McAdams, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University who self-identifies as a debunker of conspiracy theories, there is substantial evidence to suggest that Robert Kennedy recommended Dulles’ appointment to the Warren Commission, whose 1964 report on the assassination is the official account of Kennedy’s murder. Lyndon B. Johnson, who formulated the commission, writes in his memoir that Robert Kennedy recommended Dulles, too.

It is not universally believed that Dulles took his firing poorly, let alone as cause for retaliation.

“Dulles has to be a scapegoat (for the Bay of Pigs) and Dulles probably understood that,” McAdams said.

Oswald and the CIA

McAdams is among those who accept that Oswald was a lone gunman, given the absence of hard evidence to the contrary. But even among pragmatists, some can’t ignore the notion of CIA involvement.

“I think it’s premature to rule out a conspiracy involving CIA people,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and the moderator of jfkfacts.com. “It’s obviously very difficult to detect and it may not be there.”

For the past decade, Morley has been in a court battle with the CIA, using the Freedom of Information Act to try to gain access to classified documents he believes are crucial to the public record and will provide important insights into Kennedy’s death.

The records are the work of deceased CIA agent George Joannides, who monitored anti-Castro Cubans in the South, a group that had brushes with Oswald. Because of those brushes, Morley believes the CIA was watching Oswald much closer than it has let on — and that the agency is concealing potential revelations vital to history.

The CIA would not comment on the lawsuit, but the agency dismisses all accusations that it was involved in a conspiracy to kill the president.

“While the CIA conspiracy theories make good fodder for movies, they are pure fiction,” spokesman Edward Price said.

Morley does not subscribe to the idea that the CIA hatched an elaborate plan to kill Kennedy — only that it knew more about Oswald than it has ever acknowledged.

“Here’s the important thing, and I think it’s something that really gets lost in the relentless focus on ‘was there a conspiracy,’” Morley said. “CIA officers were paying much closer attention to Lee Harvey Oswald than the CIA ever admitted.”

He added: “The question of whether that’s (Proof of A Conspiracy) or not, I think is a distraction from the simple fact that it’s true.”

 

By THE GUARDIAN

 

The ‘tireless’ artificial news readers simulate the voice, facial movements, and gestures of real-life broadcasters

 

By The Associated Press

 

Holistic doctors who found that vaccines had cancer enzymes in them have all be found dead, and the cause was said to be suicide. The deaths of the doctors did leave the medical community speechless because they had been researchers who had been working on a new breakthrough cure for cancer.

Doctor Was Found Dead in River with Gunshot Wound to Chest

Dr. James Bradstreet is a renowned specialist in autism, and he had been looking into the enzyme before his premature death in July 2015. The body of Bradstreet had been found floating in a river in North Carolina, and a post-mortem revealed he had died from a gunshot wound to his chest. It was said that the doctor might have been murdered due to the controversial research he was conducting. Bradstreet along with his colleagues found out that nagalase was compromising the immune system and it was thought that it was being introduced into the body by way of vaccines.

Dr. Bradstreet worked with a compound that was naturally occurring, and which might be the most effective thing in the body’s immune system for killing cancer cells in the body. Nagalase is said to interfere with one of the most important proteins in the human body that kill cancer cells according to Dr. Ted Broer.

GcMAF Is the Breakthrough Cancer Cure

The breakthrough cancer cure has a globulin component macrophage-activating factor, also known as GcMAF. This activates the macrophages existent in the body and helps the body to destroy any cancer cells. The body produces the substance on its own, but most patients suffering cancer are not able to produce enough to kill off the disease. When given GcMAF the immune system of the sufferer becomes stronger and helps the body to fight cancer without the person having to undergo treatments such as radiation or chemotherapy, which are considered evasive.

 

By KYLE EUSTICE

 

 

By KYLE EUSTICE

 

TOLUCA LAKE, CA – Model/actress Kim Porter — Diddy’s ex-girlfriend and mother of his children — has reportedly passed away. According to TMZ, Porter was found dead at her Los Angeles area home on Thursday (November 15).

Audio reveals a patient was in cardiac arrest when first responders were dispatched to the scene.

Sources close to Porter said she’d been sick with pneumonia for “several weeks,” but the cause of death hasn’t been determined.

Porter has three children with Diddy —12-year-old  twin girls Jessie James and D’Lila and 20-year-old son Christian Combs (also known as rapper King Combs). She also has a son from her previous relationship with Al B. Sure named Quincy Brown (or simply Quincy) who is an actor on Star.  

The couple dated off and on for 13 years and broke up for the last time in 2007. Diddy had been romantically linked to Cassie but they recently broke up.

Diddy’s rep Cindy Berger confirmed the news to TMZ.

“Sadly, I can confirm the passing of Kim Porter,” she said. “I ask that you give the families privacy at this time.”

Porter was 47.

 

By CHERISE JOHNSON

 

Sean “Diddy” Combs has delivered a message forewarning the loss of Hip Hop culture if more ownership by the ones who built it aren’t put in place.

He used a clip of a bunch of white kids sitting atop a parked car, emulating a rap music video with wads of cash and parroting dance moves often seen in those same visuals to St. Louis rapper AMR Dee Huncho’s 2017 cut “Body Bags & Bricks.”

“Our culture is a global resource,” Diddy” captions under the clip on Instagram. “Let’s not play ourselves and wake up one day and not own our own culture. Tighten up on your contracts, tighten up on your deals. Demand ownership. Demand equity. Protect your culture. IT’S FOR EVERYONE TO ENJOY BUT FOR US TO OWN!”

As history has shown, music genres such as rock and jazz were co-opted by white Americans in the past and Diddy is encouraging for black Americans to not let that happen with Hip Hop by demanding ownership and equity.

Hip Hop is currently the #1 listened to genre in the world and its impact on cultures across the globe cannot be denied. However, it’s the creators of the music, style of dress, slang and dance that get the short stick when it comes to receiving the proper credit and compensation deserved. Historically, it’s been older, White male executives who profit off the culture and who then resell it back to the culture’s creators at a premium price.

Though some feel as though this is a memorandum to exclude non-Black people from Hip Hop, Diddy, who champions the thought of Black Excellence, just wants his people to get their fair share of the pie through ownership.

The Hip Hop pioneer and mogul isn’t one to just talk, he’s shown through action that he means what he says. He’s the founder of minority-owned REVOLT TV, founded Harlem’s Capital Preparatory School and recently pledged $1 million for Capital Prep’s Bronx site.