The Link

Back in 1968 before I got there in '74, Columbia University was the scene of one of the most famous of the college campus takeovers that went down in the 60s during the Vietnam era.  They made a movie about it called the Strawberry Statement.  The book was much better, but it wasn't too bad.

Fast foward half a century, the Radicals are back on the Quad in front of Butler Hall and Low Library, this time over the Israel-Palestine conflict.   What's old is new again.



In the background on the left is Furnald Hall.  It's a dorm, I lived there Junior/Senior year.
Next to it is Columbia School of Business, which along with Harvard Biz and the Wharton School at U of P are the 3 top biz schools in the country where the Masters of the Universe are groomed.


https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/nypd-disperses-pro-palestinian-protest-columbia-university/index.html

RE

"Columbia University's students have a proud history of protest and raising their voices," Mayor Eric Adams said during a news conference Thursday evening. "Students have a right to free speech, but do not have a right to violate university policies and disrupt learning on campus."

HTF can you have a protest if you can't gather together on a lawn?  The only policy they volated as far as I can tell was setting up the tents.  At least when I went there, you were allowed to go sit on the lawn between classes to study, smoke dope and pick up girls. 

How does holding signs up disrupt learning?  That happens in classrooms inside the buildings, and unless they had a huge amplifier and loudspeaker system you couldn't have heard them even from the closest 2 buildings with classrooms,  Most of the buildings on that side f the campus are dorms.

Far as administration at Columbia capitulating to da Goobermint, that's nothing new.  They did in '68 also, and the cops went in with tear gas.  This was pretty tame by comparison.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook/2024/04/19/columbia-university-in-crisis-00153273

Columbia University in crisis

RE

QuoteColumbia University president Minouche Shafik faced the House committee whose grilling led to the ouster of her Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania counterparts last year.

Panel members of the hearing focused on campus antisemitism and wanted to know how Shafik was protecting Jewish and pro-Israel students on campus with frequent pro-Palestinian protests.

And the pigs zip tying the students support this congressional scam without even getting a cut.

Pro-Israel Lobbying

What would it mean in our world to get $5,736,701

At a paltry 2% above inflation it yields $114,734.02

And that is prime rib every night.    Even the low man on this totem pole could live good.  A nice two bedroom rambler.  Do nothing but scratch balls all day long, and still take the wife out for a good $90 steak dinner for two (including desert and tip) once or twice a week.

Just off the interest.  Add steak dinners and vacations in Vegas two or times a years as appropriate if you can find a higher yield.  Add Hawaii to the mix if you put it in a proper annuity that can't deplete before you die, and take more than the interest.  Donations from Israel is all a guy would need to get by in our world so donations are enough to buy total loyalty if you get them.

Fortunately politicians are a superior life form and are immune from corruption.  A politician would not be influenced by millions of dollars in campaign contributions like common people like you and I would be.  A million dollars means nothing to politicians.  Politicians work for the good of the people.  ChatGPT told me so.


Top 20 Member Recipients of Money from Pro-Israel , 1990-2024

• Member    Amount
• Biden Joe (D)    $5,736,701
• Menendez Robert (D-NJ)    $2,500,005
• Clinton Hillary (D-NY)    $2,361,812
• Kirk Mark (R-IL)    $2,294,469
• Lieberman Joe (D-CT)    $1,999,274
• McConnell Mitch (R-KY)    $1,954,160
• Schumer Charles E (D-NY)    $1,725,324
• Hoyer Steny H (D-MD)    $1,662,194
• Engel Eliot (D-NY)    $1,618,904
• McCain John (R-AZ)    $1,494,066
• Cruz Ted (R-TX)    $1,432,806
• Gottheimer Josh (D-NJ)    $1,425,625
• Berkley Shelley (D-NV)    $1,409,433
• Jeffries Hakeem (D-NY)    $1,298,153
• Wyden Ron (D-OR)    $1,279,376
• Levin Carl (D-MI)    $1,245,913
• Schneider Brad (D-IL)    $1,219,634
• Torres Ritchie (D-NY)    $1,213,154
• Cantor Eric (R-VA)    $1,153,751
• Perdue David (R-GA)    $1,139,708

*  One of these days I will post the pic of me while I was at the Trump Tower in Vegas.  Two months ago.  I was a very nice place and the price was good.  Trump and I both appreciate fine woods and stone.  I am into wood and stone.  Gold looks nice, but so does polished copper.  I don't have a gold fetish, but the gold plating on the aluminum frames around the windows and revolving doors of the entrance looks very nice. 

** The hamburger in the Hotel Restaurant was very good.  I give it four and a half paws.

*** The trip was self-financed.

It appears the Yale university administration did not want the negative publicity of having Yalies arrested for their anti-Israel protest and did not give the go ahead for ther security force and the New Haven Gestapo to go in and clear the occupation with arrests the way Columbia had the NYPD do it.  They let the protesters hang out all night to continue the action.

Now if you remember 1968, the anti-Vietnam War protests spread across college campuses all over the country after Columbia, culminating of course in the massacre of 4 students by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio.  So the question is, will this movement grow outside the elite universities of the Ivy League and spread to the state universities across the midwest and down south in Trumpland, or will it be short lived and squashed out before a simiar result can be achieved?  It was the student protests that eventually forced the withdrawal from Vietnam by Nixon in the 70s.

The big difference of course is that we had the Draft in 68 and Amerikan boys were being shot and killed every night on the news, along with the college protests.  Today, not only do we not have the draft, news coverage of overseas wars is highly controlled by the military and you don't have independent journalists wandering around with cameras and footage being shown on network news shows.

We do of course now have zillions more cameras out there, practically everyone has one on their cell phone.  We also have the internet, s in theory there should be tons of footage coming out from these towns.  But of course, it's all highly censored and controlled as to what can be posted on YT or tiktok etc, plus anything that does go up can be disinformation and fake, so you don't know what's real and what's not.  As a result, people believe what they want to believe, and most people tend to accept Da Goobermint narrative they are sold.

Definitely more pressure is building against Israel though, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.


https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/one_day_after_columbias_arrest_yale_chose_to_let_students_sleep_in_beinecke_plaza_encampment

Unlike At Columbia, Yale Protesters Not Arrested

RE

QuoteThe big difference of course is that we had the Draft in 68 and Amerikan boys were being shot and killed every night on the news, along with the college protests.

Yeah,

Hell No We Won't go.

made things a bit different.  I was in the last group of 18 year olds that were given draft numbers, but nobody was called up in 73.  Now we live in a different times and baby killing is fine.  The reality that you might be the actual one who does the baby killing made for a cultural awareness that first person shooter has totally destroyed.  And holy fuck.  I just realized I am a voice of authority about this.

The Department of Defense funded or collaborated on over 800 films going back to 1911 and 900 TV projects were backed by the DOD between 2005 and 2017.  Criteria is if a production will increase public awareness of the military leading to enlistment retention and a positive attitude to baby killing.. 

Funding and collaboration comes at a price.  The DOD takes creative control.  Movies, TV, and games.  As propaganda delivery tools they are all the same.  An uncritical attitude to the military is successfully cultivated. 

The elevator music I must endure at work has given me a new perspective on musicians, and I regret all the time in my life I have ever spent trying to find deep meanings in lyrics.  That is a different subject, but every time this come on I want to puke.

QuoteThe easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most peoples minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture, where they do not realize that they are being propagandized.

Our entire culture is built on exploitation.  All American institutions and cultural models support violence under the right conditions. 

The pragmatic policy from the point of view of power is to indulge young idealists and let them have their party.  Nothing will come of their actions.  Cultural conditioning to love baby killers is simply too great.  Our doom is baked in the cake.  The reaction at Columbia if accompanied by 100 similar actions would cultivate some outrage.  Perhaps enough to 'move the needle' for a day.  100 Yale situations will mean nothing at all. 100 Yale type protests will essentially get no media coverage and Americans have better things to do.



Fun times to be had, and at the end of the day violence is normalized.  And more white phosphorus will fall from the sky.

Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 21, 2024, 05:11 AMFunding and collaboration comes at a price.  The DOD takes creative control.  Movies, TV, and games.  As propaganda delivery tools they are all the same.  An uncritical attitude to the military is successfully cultivated. 

The most recent completely BLATANT propaganda for the military coming out of Hollywood was the Avengers series of superheroes which was so over the top in terms of how it depicted the arms industry, the CIA and WMDs it boggles the mind.

Tony Stark, aka Iron Man is a Billionaire who inhserited his wealth from his dad, a WWII sientist who built up the fortune making more and better bombs, and Tony picks up and goes dad  a few better, turning himself into a WMD.  Early in the 1st movie he's giving a demonstration of his latest smart bombs and says:

"The best weapon isn't one you never have to use, it's one you use only once and your enemies are so terrified they'll never fuck with you again."  This being an obvious reference and excuse for the nukes we dropped on Japanese civilians living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but since have not (yet) dropped another one.

Then there is Captain America, a comic bok character that actually originated during WWII, another living WMD who is the product of a German scientist who defected from the NAZI side after first creating the Red Skull, his WWII era nemesis.  Then he gets a Cold War era nemesis, the Red Guardian, who steals ecret information for mind control being done by Amerikan scientists to then deliver to the Soviets who use it to create "Black Widoes", child and female Assassins, one of whom defects back to Amerika to become an Avenger.

They all work for SHIELD, a CIA style Black Ops agency that battles HYDRA, a stateless group of shadowy fascist Globalists who overthrow governments and want to rule the world.  The local enemies are Terrorist mostly Muslims but also a significant number of Asians usually depicted as North Koreans since we are sorta friendly with China and they want to sell the movies in China too.

The big enemy though is Thanos, who wants to bring balance back to the universe by killing off half the population of every planet in the universe, which is called genocide but it's not really, since your objective in genocide is to get rid of everyone.  Thanos also wants to do this cmpletely randomly, killing off equal percentages of rich and poor, races etc.  Supposedly after he does this the planets become paradises again because they aren't so overpopulated, but Thanos obviously knows nothing about the exponential function and that even if successful the populations would double up again.

Anyhow, death and destruction are everywhere in these films, and the US military is potrayed heroically throughout, although they always need help from SHIELD  and the Avengers because the rule book gets in their way and the Avengers don't pay attention to any rules.

I loved Superhero comics as a kid, which were slightly more anti-heroic in the 60s & 70s when I read them but not by much.  Superman still fought for Truth, Justice and the Amerikan Way.  Spiderman, while somewhat more conflicted and rebellious and considered a criminal by the NYPD and the newzpapers wasalso basically a hero who fought gangsters and other NYC type criminals like drug dealers.

Somehow however despite my addiction to reading them beginning at age 10 and collecting them right up until college, I never got sold on the violence and the military as being cool.  I just loved the idea of having super powers like being able to walk through wall or read minds etc.  Flying of course, who doesn't wish they could fly?  Comicbooks don't have near the visceral impact of modern movies loaded with CGI explosions and space battles though.

Anyhow, there's no doubt that this stuff along with all the 1st person shooter games makes the recent generations more violence prone and accepting of the demonization of other countries and religions used to justify dropping death from above on towns and villages that have to be destroyed in order to save them.

And the Beat Goes On.


RE

Superhero stories are loved by the military.  The simple binary message of good vs bad is a great place to show off military hardware without any examination of the morality of using it at all.

QuoteSomehow however despite my addiction to reading them beginning at age 10 and collecting them right up until college, I never got sold on the violence and the military as being cool.

Yes, that is great for you.  Personally I was horrified by some bible stories I heard when I was 12 years old.  But most people are woven of different cloth.  The human creature is social and imitating others gives them social approval and many have something built into them which prevents them from being critical.  They accept whatever social program they are given without question.  They have a feature others lack. 

A man can be in his late sixties, he can lose his drivers license, and then be told he can't buy weed or liquor because he can't prove his age.  The clerk says with a straight face. 'I don't make the rules'.  If the rules say shit on someones life for no good reason the clerks of the world are there to do it.  There is a race between most people to do the shitting.

I'm just following orders.

 

He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of 31 and he's only 17
He's been a soldier for a thousand years

.
.
.

He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war

Not to be out-protested by the Yalies, the Columbia contingent of anti-Israel protesters have returned to the campus in force.  Tents are back up, with protester vowing to stay "forever", which is a very long time and highly unlikely. However, according to the article, rumour is the university will tolerate their presence for a week.

This likely because it is Finals Week, and the NYPD dropping in with Tear Gas to disperse the protesters would disrupt the all important test taking.  Once finals are over, many students will leave anyhow, so I suspect they are just waiting to see how many hang out going into the summer session.

One thing I find annoying is that being anti-Israeli is equated with being anti-semitic, though they are not one in the same.  Antisemitism is a hatred of Jewish people and the religion, anti-Israel is a hatred of the Zionist political state.  There are plenty of Jews who can't stand the Israeli goobermint.  Those Jews do tend to stay quiet though, because they get called out as being traitors by those in favor of the Israel goobermint policy of getting ridof the Palestinians by any means necessary.

Still waiting for the Harvard preppies to drop in the competition for most radical Ivy League student body, so far the Cambridge crowd has been pretty quiet.  Also so far nothing from 2nd tier schools like Duke or 3rd tier like Notre Dame to check in, as well as the state schools and CUNY, the City University of NY, which I would think was pretty full of lower class aspirants to become part of the great capitalist game.

It's a good start to what promises to be an entertaining summer of collapse newz. 

https://nypost.com/2024/04/21/us-news/new-anti-israel-tent-city-takes-over-columbia-university-we-are-here-forever/

New anti-Israel tent city takes over Columbia University lawn days after NYPD raid as activists vow to stay 'forever'

RE

This is a week old.

It describes the Iranian attack on Israel and has some info that is good to know.  Background on the current genocide.

This one is new.

A14 billion aid package is passed.  The US responds to the Iranian attack.





There was a movie about this back in the days of the floppy disk.






An even earlier move suggested what ridin Biden would be like. 

Well, so far it's still growing.  Yalies have now been arrested, there's acttion downtown at NYU, Harvard, MIT and Boston University have joinedthe East Coast party and UCLA and Berkely are representing the Left Cost radicals.  Faculty has joined the students at Columbia and the rhetoric is whipping up.

So far, not much heard from Uncle Joe and Da Fed Goobermint yet, they're still leaving it to tthe school adminstratos and local Gestapo to control the protests.  The critical change will be if/when these protests migrate from the "liberal elite" schools on the coasts to the state universities across the country.  That's when the National Guard took over and you got Kent State and 4 dead in Oh-Hi-Oh back in '68.

So far, the threats of expulsion, arrests and some ass kicking by the Gestapo hasn't been enough to put a lid on it, and my sense is that it will grow, sort of like Occupy.  I think there's been enough anger and frustration boiling up from before and after Covid that the Gen Z crowd is ready to take their turn at battling TPTB.  We'll see.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/23/yale-nyu-uni-college-arrests-pro-palestine-protest-israel-gaza-war

Dozens arrested at Yale and NYU as pro-Palestinian student protests spread

RE

Here's the view from the editorial staff of the Columbia Spectator, where I once was the photography editor.

https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024/04/18/is-columbia-in-crisis/

Is Columbia in crisis?

RE

This money buys no love.

Goin' Global now!  This will make Gestapo Crackdown in any individual country more difficult and make the whole movement more difficult to quell.  It's starting to take on the level of the Occupy movement which went International.  Of course, in the end Occupy didn't really accomplish all that much, but it didn't really have easily defineable goals like this.  Divestiture of investment from any arms manufacturers or companies doing business with Israel is a very straightforward goal that would have a huge effect of the Israeli ability to prosecute the war.  Of coursee, I'm sure the Smartest Guys in the Room could find a way to do back door financing, but it would still have an effect.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/26/are-us-campus-protests-against-israels-war-on-gaza-going-global

Are US campus protests against Israel's war on Gaza going global?

RE

Quote from: RE on Apr 26, 2024, 06:03 PMAre US campus protests against Israel's war on Gaza going global?

RE

I mentioned I took perverse pleasure watching the decline :

QuoteI doubt that three-quarters of them actually give a flying fugazy about the Palestinians, and even fewer could find Gaza on a map if you water-boarded them. They affect to be intersectional victims of the universal oppressor, but in so far as many of the rioters are girls of the Ivy League, or comparable redoubts of privilege— little blue-eyed, blonde-haired muffins raised on pony club, Hermes, and artisan granola — there must be something else going on. That something else is probably sex, which is so problematical now in any traditional frame of a man getting it on with a woman that the American birth-rate is going to zero.

This having nothing to do with what could go on in a 'young muffins' brain.  This Zionist mofo's brain is so full of hate he ruins himself.

I can't believe this xenophobic ageist misogynist.  Over the top.  I hope anger against the genocide in Gaza goes global.  Yesterday would not be soon enough.