You Will Anyway: The Wall

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

The Wall

As Las Vegas prepares for Wednesday's third and final presidential debate, the Culinary Workers Union is protesting GOP nominee Donald Trump on his own turf by forming a "wall" of taco trucks outside his hotel Tuesday.

"We did not come up with the idea for the wall, Donald Trump came up with building the wall," Yvanna Cancela, political director of the Culinary Workers Union 226, told NBC News.

[...]

The protest is a dual reference to Trump's call to build a wall along the border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants and to a statement by Latinos for Trump founder Marco Gutierrez if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins, "you're gonna have taco trucks on every corner."

[...]

The taco trucks are being used to help register potential Latino voters in Nevada. But they also are aimed at drawing attention to an ongoing labor dispute between the union and Trump International Las Vegas hotel. [Trump has allegedly refused to bargain with workers after they unionized].

News Max

Brilliant.

You couldn't pay me enough to be in Las Vegas tonight. Well, you COULD, but you don't have that much money.

There's an interestingly timed documentary currently streaming on Netflix about the 1968 contentious primary debates that included ABC coverage with equally contentious debates between William F. Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal: Best of Enemies.

Catch it if you have Netflix. (h/t She) Here's the trailer if you can't:

And here's the full recording of their most contentious (and debatably - pardon the pun - most interesting) debate on the evening of the police/protest clash in Lincoln Park, which is presented in a short clip in Best of Enemies:

On a related topic, a couple years ago I saw a good documentary on the trial of the Chicago 7, which I thought might have been a Netflix offering. I don't see that now, streaming or otherwise, and I searched YouTube for it to no avail. There are a number of videos about the events of the '68 convention, but I don't see what I'm looking for. If you're young enough to not have been aware of that piece of our history, I recommend you check out some of those videos anyway.

We're still trying to become a democracy. Keep at it, and keep a safe distance from Las Vegas tonight.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.