Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights

 

Out on the wily, windy moors
We'd roll and fall in green
You had a temper like my jealousy
Too hot, too greedy

How could you leave me
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you, I loved you, too

Bad dreams in the night
They told me I was going to lose the fight
Leave behind my Wuthering, Wuthering
Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your window

 

Sleaford Mods & Gwendoline Christie

 

Ya got awards for joyless faces 'cause ya fans like joyless shit
You got poses while the tour photographer polishes the turd, ya prick
On ya head like a parrot, you wear crap clothes like Jasper Carrott
Ya not a large, you're a tedium, waist down, waist size feedin' 'em

paquetá....

 

The president’s condition is deeply alarming

 

 

 

 

"And then there was Bondi’s treatment of the survivors, beginning with the brutal fact that many of their identities were fully exposed in the DOJ’s unredacted Epstein files. These women had endured cruelty that many of us could never imagine, and Bondi’s DOJ released their names while protecting the men who were accused of these horrendous crimes. The redactions shielded the powerful and exposed the powerless. That decision was a betrayal.

And Bondi refused to apologize to the victims for what she and her office did. When Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked if she would turn to the survivors in the room and apologize for including many of their names in the unredacted Epstein files, Bondi refused. When Rep. Hank Johnson pressed her again, she deflected and remained hostile, accusing Democrats of theatrics and acting as if congressional oversight was some kind of personal attack. Then came the moment that will forever haunt this country. Lawmakers turned and asked the survivors directly: ‘Has the DOJ reached out to you? Have they asked for your statements?’ And one by one, each survivor shook her head. Every single one of them said they had not been contacted. Then they were asked how many had been completely ignored by the Department of Justice. And with silence so heavy it almost swallowed the room, every survivor raised her hand.

That moment should be burned into our collective memory. These were women who had been trafficked, abused, silenced, and erased, many as children, and when they bravely showed up to be heard, the Attorney General of the United States wouldn’t even look at them. That was a display of cowardice. And it gets worse. Many of these women had never publicly disclosed their identities. They were anonymous survivors for a reason: they didn’t want their trauma to become their entire identity, they feared for their safety, and the weight of being publicly linked to Epstein is not something anyone should carry without consent. And yet Bondi’s DOJ published their names. They redacted the names of wealthy men and powerful officials, accused co-conspirators, financiers, and friends of Epstein, but they left the victims exposed. They protected the powerful and betrayed those already bearing the ultimate cost."

more in the stack by Heather Delaney Reese 

The president’s condition is deeply alarming

NOFX - Minnsota Nazis

 

If those Minnesota Nazis
Are so sure they're part of the master race
Why do they cover their white faces when they're shooting
Friendly white unarmed lesbians in the face
Oh there's Nazis in my neighborhood
Old white bitter people can be so rude
When they deport all of their Mexicans
They'll have to cook their own Mexican food

Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government

 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Last night’s thirteen-minute Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bad Bunny had more watchers than any other halftime show in history: an estimated 135 million watched live, while millions more have streamed it since. Rapper, singer, and record producer Bad Bunny, whose given name is ​​Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is from Puerto Rico, and rocketed to prominence with the release of his first hit single on January 25, 2016. On February 1, 2026, just a week before the halftime show, Bad Bunny made history by being the first artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys for an album recorded in Spanish. 

 

Right-wing critics complained about the NFL’s invitation for Bad Bunny to do the halftime show, saying he was “not an American artist.” 

 

In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism. 

 

In the 1880s, large companies in various industries gobbled up their competitors to create giant “trusts” that monopolized their sector of the economy. The most powerful trust in the United States was the Sugar Trust, officially known as the American Sugar Refining Company, which by 1895 controlled about 95% of the U.S. sugar market. Thanks to pressure from the Sugar Trust, in 1890, Congress passed the McKinley Tariff, which ended sugar tariffs and tried to increase domestic production by offering a bounty on domestic sugar.

 

This privileged domestic producers, and in 1893, sugar growers in Hawaii staged a coup to overthrow the Hawaiian queen and asked Congress to admit the islands as an American state. President Benjamin Harrison, a friend and confidant of tariff namesake William McKinley, cheerfully backed annexation, but before the treaty could be approved, an 1894 law reinstated the duties on sugar and ended the bounties. Voters elected President Grover Cleveland later that year, and with Hawaiians furiously protesting against the machinations of an American business ring, Cleveland insisted on an investigation, and Hawaiian statehood stalled.

 

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, the Senate still did not have enough votes to admit Hawaii, so Congress annexed it by a joint resolution and McKinley, now president, signed the measure. As the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly put it in a cartoon with a little boy dressed in the symbols of the American flag eating candy, America was swallowing “sugar plums.”

 

The acquisition of the territory of Hawaii had begun the question of annexing islands. Then the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war transferred from the control of Spain to the control of the United States the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands including Guam, all of which either were sugar producers or had the potential to become sugar producers. 

 

Since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, adopted under the Articles of Confederation that made up the basis of the nation’s law before the Constitution, the U.S. had rejected colonies and had instead established a system for incorporating new territories into the country on terms of equality to older states. But in the era of Jim Crow, annexing the newly acquired islands under the terms established a century before presented a political problem for lawmakers. Although sugar growers wanted the islands to be domestic land for purposes of tariffs, most Americans did not want to include the Black and Brown inhabitants of those lands in the United States on terms of equality to white people. 

 

Congress’s 1898 resolution of war against Spain in Cuba had contained the Teller Amendment, which required the U.S. government to support Cuban political independence once the war was over and Spanish troops gone, providing a quick answer to American political annexation of Cuba (although it left room for economic domination). But there was no such amendment for the rest of the islands the U.S. acquired in 1899. 

 

A fiercely pro-business Supreme Court provided a solution for Puerto Rico in what became known as the Insular Cases. In May 1901, in Downes v. Bidwell, the court concluded of the newly acquired island that although “in an international sense [Puerto Rico] was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island had not been incorporated into the United States.” This new concept of “unincorporated territories” that were “foreign…in a domestic sense” allowed the U.S. government to legislate over the new lands without having to treat them like other parts of the Union, while also preventing the inclusion of their people in the U.S. body politic.

 

Two months after the court’s decision, on July 25, McKinley issued a proclamation removing tariff duties for products from Puerto Rico, and the sugar industry boomed. 

 

But what did this system mean for the people in Puerto Rico? In 1902, a pregnant twenty- year-old Puerto Rican woman named Isabel González arrived in New York City to join her fiancé, but the immigration commissioner turned her away on the grounds that she was an “alien” who would require public support. González sued. 

 

When her case reached the Supreme Court, it concluded in the 1904 Gonzalez v. Williams case that González was not an alien, and indeed that she should not have been denied entry to the United States. The justices went on to create a new category of personhood for the island’s inhabitants. They were not aliens, but they were not citizens either. Instead, they were “noncitizen nationals.” As such, they had some constitutional protections but not all. They could travel to the American mainland without being considered immigrants, but they had no voting rights in the U.S. 

 

U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans was established in the 1917 Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act, also known as the Jones-Shafroth Act. 

 

Today, Puerto Rico is a self-governing commonwealth of about 3.2 million people. Puerto Ricans do not pay federal taxes or vote in presidential elections, although a resident commissioner serves in Congress and can sit on committees and debate, but not vote on legislation. Puerto Ricans do pay U.S. Social Security taxes and receive certain federal benefits. 

 

Last night, Bad Bunny highlighted Puerto Rican history, beginning with the workers at the heart of colonial sugar production and moving through to those same cane workers hanging from electric poles in an evocation of the recent blackouts in the country’s inadequate electric grid, poorly addressed by the U.S. government after Hurricane Maria wiped out the system in 2017. He carried the flag of the island from before the U.S. takeover—an independence flag banned from 1948 to 1957— its light blue triangle picked up in various fabrics throughout the performance.

 

He ended by shouting “God Bless America” in English, echoing the United States mantra in an answer to right-wing critics. And then he rejected the idea animating the current U.S. administration’s deportation of Black and Brown people with the claim they are not Americans and their culture will undermine American culture. 

 

After saying “God Bless America, Bad Bunny listed in Spanish: “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, Antilles, United States—not Estados Unidos—Canada, and Puerto Rico.” 

 

“Together,” the football he carried said, “we are America.”

 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN  

 

 

 

Hey, think of me as a racist

ZEZ VAZ

 

The Super Bowl Safe Space for Fragile Stupids

 

"Because I do know this… Bad Bunny doesn’t scare you because he’s successful—he scares you because he didn’t crawl, didn’t beg, didn’t audition for your approval, and didn’t flatten himself into something small, obedient, and flavorless enough for your brittle, toothless worldview to gum without choking. He’s out here selling out stadiums so large they look like military installations from space, bending global culture around his voice while you’re still arguing with strangers online about whether deodorant is a government plot.

Every record he breaks, every show he headlines, feels like a breach of contract because you were sold a lie—that your whiteness was a passport, a guarantee, a permanent starring role. He doesn’t look like you. He doesn’t talk like you. And you won’t see “yourself” on that stage, which offends you deeply, because it exposes the bullshit promise you keep being sold every single day.

And oh the goddamn irony of all of this. Oh, the soul-satisfying schadenfreude—of watching you finally choke on the very fragility you spent years mocking in everyone else.

All that time you laughed, sneered, and spat about “safe spaces,” ridiculed anyone who flinched at cruelty, treated empathy like a contagious rash you could shame people out of. And now here you are, whining for emotional daycare because a man singing on television rattled your delicate little sense of entitlement."

read more by JOJOFROM JERZ 

The Super Bowl Safe Space for Fragile Stupids

BAD BUNNY - NUEVAYoL

 

Tú tienes piquete, mami, yo también
Tú estás buena, yo estoy bueno también
Huelo rico y ando con los de cien
Si tú los quieres, lo tienes que mover

paqueta.....

 

Donald Trump is a Racist

 

 

"By now everyone knows that Piggy Trump posted a racist video to his stupid ass Truth Social. I know everyone knows because it punched straight through the background noise and landed in the one place that only ever lights up when something is seriously fucked — my girlfriends’ group chat. The sacred space normally reserved for Instagram reels, town gossip, drink plans, and the ongoing existential crisis of what the fuck am I making for dinner because for the love of all things holy I cannot make pasta again. When that chat suddenly turns political, something has gone so wrong it kicked the door in and made itself everyone’s problem.

Because when a group of women who are trying to decompress, drink wine, and watch people spin across ice in sequins are suddenly rage-typing about racism and Republican creeps instead, it means the bullshit didn’t stay where it was supposed to. It forced itself into the room, wiped barbecue sauce on the do-not-ever-touch decorative bathroom towels, drank the milk straight out of the carton, knocked shit over, sprawled out on the couch, and sat there long enough for the smell to register before your brain caught up."

read more from Are you f'ng kidding me?
 

Donald Trump is a Racist - by JoJoFromJerz

Narrar sem entender

  

(ilustração: Romero Cavalcanti)

"Eneida de Moraes foi uma escritora nascida no Pará e depois radicada no Rio de Janeiro, com longa atuação na imprensa carioca. No seu livro de crônicas Aruanda (1957) ela conta, entre outras histórias saborosas, a história da amizade de seu pai com um vizinho. O pai dela era um ex-comandante de navio, e toda noite, depois do jantar, recebia a visita desse amigo, Seu Lima, que morava ali perto.

O outro velho vinha para conversar, mas na verdade os dois ficavam sentados em duas cadeiras de balanço, no terraço, balançando-se, fumando e olhando a rua. Depois de meia hora de silêncio, o Comandante dava um suspiro fundo e dizia:

-- Pois é isso, Seu Lima.

E o outro respondia:

-- É verdade, Comandante.

Este é provavelmente o mais cinematográfico dos diálogos, e no entanto não aparece em nenhum manual-de-roteiro de Syd Field ou de Robert McKee. Não por culpa deles, é claro. Eu vejo esse diálogo, com sua tonelada de significados implícitos, como algo extraído de um filme de Andrei Tarkovsky ou do recentemente falecido Béla Tarr."

continue lendo no stack de Braulio Tavares 

035) Narrar sem entender - Braulio Tavares