#Country Music #R&B #history "The R&B Singer Who Recorded the Greatest Country Album You’ve Never Heard The First Lady of Black country is from Houston, but her name isn’t Beyoncé. It’s Esther Phillips. Little Esther, who was just over five feet tall, was pretty tough herself, showing up in Nashville to sing country songs in a way that no one who appeared at the Grand Ole Opry would ever have attempted. Black musicians had been singing hillbilly music for decades, and they had even played on some of the first country records, made in the twenties and thirties. But by the early sixties, Music City was lily-white. Things have changed somewhat today; there are a fair number of Black country singers, such as Mickey Guyton and Kane Brown. But progress hasn’t been easy. Just look at the backlash against Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. Phillips entered this fray before any of those modern pioneers was born. And the album that resulted from her Nashville sessions—eventually titled The Country Side of Esther Phillips—is an ignored classic, a collection of country covers that sounds as soulful and sad today as it did six decades ago. Until recently, I’d never heard of it. I’ve listened to Phillips’s music for years—her early blues and R&B, her covers of pop hits, her sophisticated jazz, her mid-seventies disco—and loved her deep, powerful voice. Yet somehow this album, which belongs in the sixties pantheon alongside the likes of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison and Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man, escaped my attention, and that of nearly every other music fan I’ve asked about it. Phillips’s voice had a worn rasp to it, a timbre that made her sound brash and vulnerable at the same time. But I didn’t fully appreciate it until I stumbled onto The Country Side—the first album she ever made. The songs were mostly about broken hearts, a subject Phillips knew plenty about. Though only 26, she was a pro at disappointment and disillusionment. Hearing her sing these songs of pain makes them come alive in ways I’d never sensed before. Phillips, who would have turned ninety this month, went on to be one of the most overlooked singers of all time. Part of that was bad luck—as well as a habit of making her own bad luck. But part of it, I feel sure, was that in 1962, Nashville wasn’t ready—it perhaps still isn’t ready—for a Black woman bringing a Black sensibility to country music." https://archive.ph/mYJWt#selection-1813.87-1813.103

#ClimateCrisis #cannabis "The War On Drugs Makes The Climate Crisis Worse, New Report Shows Drug prohibition is a driver of the climate crisis, outlines a major report by international researchers and policy experts. Both drug policy reform and 'ecological harm reduction,' it argues, are essential to climate justice."

The War On Drugs Makes The Climate Crisis Worse, New Report Shows - Marijuana Moment

#ClimateCrisis #archetecture "How Architects Are Using an Ancient Building Technique to Combat Climate Change Rammed earth buildings have been around for thousands of years. Now, they’re having a modern moment. As a building technique, rammed earth—which combines clay soil with aggregate such as gravel into tightly compressed layers—traces back thousands of years. It was widely used in ancient China, but appears globally throughout history, including in the U.S. After the industrial revolution, and the innovations of steel, concrete, glass, and mass-produced bricks, the traditional method fell out of favor. Now, however, an increasing number of architects are looking to the material as a sustainable, place-rooted way to build amid a climate crisis that calls for dramatically reduced carbon emissions." https://www.inc.com/fast-company-2/how-architects-are-using-an-ancient-building-technique-to-combat-climate-change/91278667

#Nazis #Thiel #ACTS17 "When Peter Thiel recently delivered four private lectures warning that climate activists and tech industry critics are 'legionnaires of the Antichrist,' most coverage ended up focused on the carnival-like spectacle — apocalyptic language, religious fervor, sheer weirdness of a billionaire investor preaching eschatology into San Francisco 'tech elites'. These reporters missed the point entirely, perhaps because historians are so rare these days. The lectures, hosted by ACTS 17 Collective—a religious lobby group pushing church control over state through tech industry elites—are neither eccentric theology nor mysterious. As leaked to the Washington Post, they represent the latest iteration of a multigenerational fascist project: establishing sovereign territorial racist enclaves outside democratic accountability. Understanding this requires historical rigor, not journalistic circumspection or diplomatic euphemism. Let’s be precise then: ACTS 17 Collective functionally is a return to overt promotion of the Nazi Lebensraum doctrines. Lebenswhat? I know, the word sounds like some kind of gross cake the neighbors bring over for the holidays. The Nazis promoted a concept of Lebensraum (living space) to justify territorial expansion. Several interlocking claims were used: • Superior people require separate territory • The 'contaminated' mixed societies are irredeemable • Wacky groundless mystical frameworks, meant to sound philosophical or even moral, provide legitimation • Availability of space, or really existing populations are worthless and to be displaced or subordinated • This expansion is civilizational necessity, not mere conquest or colonization. That’s how 'Mars' references, to the trained historian ear, have the unmistakable ring of 1960s Rhodesian or Namibian white flight. The sophistication of modern tech fascism is that it replaces military conquest with silicon venture capital, and racial pseudo-science with scripture. But the core structure remains identical. The Thiel surname itself appears repeatedly in Nazi records: Walter Thiel, a famous example, managed a Nazi techo-compound in the 1930s where his more than 700 slave laborers died producing weapons systems. When German newspapers today glorify this “Silicon Valley,” they’re explicitly connecting Nazi tech slavery to modern tech culture. '. . . a part of the Nazi war machine, Thiel dreamed of . . . a rocket capable of manned flight to the Moon.' (. . .) The Genealogical Evidence Peter Thiel’s father Klaus Thiel provides the clearest through-line. In 1967, Klaus departed Frankfurt on the eve of denazification intensification, relocating to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1971, he pivoted his United States papers into criminal work in apartheid-era Namibia (illegally occupied by South Africa), where he managed the Rössing uranium mine from a Nazi enclave. His clandestine illegal nuclear weapons supply operation was being reported for Black workers 'dying like flies' from radiation exposure, while white managers like Klaus enjoyed country club privileges. In 1977, Klaus abruptly fled his racist enclave of Namibia when Black majority rule no longer could be blocked, settling into Reagan-era California’s white-flight suburbs. The Klaus Thiel story is NOT a normal economic migration. (. . .) President Trump regularly parrots 1970s racist extremist doctrine when fraudulently attacking cities as unsafe or in 'decline.' This echoes Klaus Thiel’s 1970s Namibia rhetoric about 'failed' multiracial governance—the same lens Peter Thiel applies to San Francisco today, marking its prosecutorial reform, equitable history teaching, and social treatment of homelessness as signs of an 'irredeemable' city. It’s the Nixon 'Urban Renewal' playbook: frame diverse, democratic governance as failure requiring white-flight (abandonment) or destruction and replacement. Thiel told Stanford classmates that apartheid 'works” and is 'economically sound.' His current projects apply the same logic: democratic, diverse society is dysfunctional; superior people require separate sovereign space of exclusivity."

ACTS 17 Collective: Silicon Nazi Lebensraum Project of Peter Thiel | flyingpenguin

#SiliconValley #Nazis #Lebensraum "Silicon Valley Kids Form Giant Human Swastika Silicon Valley is shocked, shocked to see kids on a field laying down to form a giant human swastika, and sharing it online with platforms like… wait for it… swastika (formerly known as Twitter). 'People were just shocked to see that this is happening at their school, in broad daylight, students purposely doing this, there was clear intentionality, the caption under the post itself was horrifying,' Bronicki said. The school responded Friday and said the incident is under investigation and that hate has no place on campus or in the community. The school principal released a statement saying in part, 'Branham stands firmly against all forms of hate, discrimination, and intolerance.'"

ACTS 17 Collective: Silicon Nazi Lebensraum Project of Peter Thiel | flyingpenguin

#ElonMusk #Nazis "Elon Musk Targets His Own Daughter With Nazi 'Womb' Attack Musk’s formulation of 'If you have a womb, you are a woman. Otherwise, you are not', is the biological-determinist reduction that underpinned Nazi ideology about women. The specific reduction of womanhood to a single organ, with rights of citizenship/identity derived only from reproductive capacity, is what Hitler used to do."

Elon Musk Targets His Own Daughter With Nazi “Womb” Attack | flyingpenguin

#Nazis #escape #Pyrenees #history "Most escape lines began spontaneously, acts of defiance by people unable to fight Nazi tyranny through conventional means. There were two strands to underground organisations – first, agents de passage, who helped escapees towards the Pyrenees, feeding them, hiding them in attics and barns. Second, the passeurs (guides), mostly men, who smuggled them over the mountains to Spain. It’s estimated passeurs helped more than 30,000 people escape to Spain. It was a perilous occupation. More than half, approximately 1,000, never made it to the war’s end. Some died in the mountains; others were betrayed and shot or deported to concentration camps in Europe."

The Irish Times

The Freedom Trail: Retracing the steps of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazis in the Pyrenees

History and hazard mingle on a trip that inspires many emotions

#Australia #surveillance "All Australians Should Be Concerned About the US Surveilling Our Migrant Population During a 24 November 2025 US Department of State presser, an official told the foreign press that the Trump administration has ordered its embassies in Australia, Europe, New Zealand and Canada to monitor local migrants in respect of crime. And while the Albanese government has failed to mention this, Greens Senator David Shoebridge warns that the nation should not be complacent about it. On taking power on 20 January, the US Trump administration launched its long-threatened mass deportation of undocumented immigrant program, with the scope of it stunning the planet. US president Donald Trump has deployed bands of ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials to conducts raids in various jurisdictions to detain suspected illegal migrants for potential deportation. The US deportation drive is authoritarian, with thuggish ICE agents disappearing suspected undocumented migrants off the streets. This overtly white supremacist policy has been used to detain citizens advocating for migrants and even people Indigenous to the land. And this process of dehumanisation is beginning to mirror the Nazis treatment of Jewish people during World War II. The recent announcement from the state department official suggests that the US will be monitoring people of a 'migration background' in Australia in terms of criminal offences in order to curb the 'existential threat' they pose to western civilisation, and considering the White House is taking it upon itself to surveil Australians, it’s then really only a step away from conducting local enforcement. (. . .) The White House has now told all of its western allies, including Australia, that it will be surveilling its populations for crime caused by its nonwhite people of a migration background for lawbreaking. And the US is in no way giving its allies any choice in this matter."

Sydney Criminal Lawyers

All Australians Should Be Concerned About the US Surveilling Our Migrant Population

Trump’s order that our government gather and provide data relating to migrant crime is yet another example of our imperialist master’s ...