Ugly as Sin

News Feed posts Daily magyar 2h · Csúnya, mint a bűn. [ˈtʃuːɲɑ mint ɑ byːn] or Csúnya, akar a bűn. [ˈtʃuːɲɑ ɑkɑr ɑ byːn] (gipsy slang) Translation: He/she/it is ugly as sin. Meaning: He/she/it is ugly as fuck.; He/she/it is really ugly. csúnya [ˈtʃuːɲɑ] – ugly; nasty mint [ˈmint] – than; as…as; like akár [ˈɑkaːr] – just like; as; like akar [ˈɑkɑr] 1) just like; as; like (dialectical word or gipsy slang) 2) he/she wants akarni [ˈɑkɑrni] – to want bűn [ˈbyːn] – sin; vice; guilt

Black Like Me, or You, or Us. Whatever (Draft)

Jessica A. Krug, then an associate professor at George Washington University, posted a confession on the publishing platform Medium, last Thursday, explaining that she is not who she’d been claiming to be. “To an escalating degree over my adult life,” she wrote, “I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.” Her life and, by extension, her scholarly career—or is it the other way around?—had been based on a lie, she admitted, or rather a glut of them, feeding on good faith like, as Krug put it, “not a culture vulture” but “a culture leech.”The blog post is light on details—the where, when, and how of Krug’s masquerade. She speculates that “mental health issues” were an impetus for her behavior; professionals have assured her that altered identity is a “common response” to “the severe trauma” that she incurred during childhood. But she does not name a diagnosis or elaborate upon the instigating traumatic events, resorting instead to the generic jargon of self-help, blended with the D.I.Y. verbiage endemic to the self-care branch of social justice: “redress,” “harm,” “gaslit,” “belonging,” “accountability.” (Absent are the words “sorry” and “apologize.”) The post is not well written, but it wants to be—its self-flagellations taking on the repetitious rhythms of slam poetry. (“I am a coward…. I am a coward”; “Intention never matters more than impact.”) The performance is, above all, profoundly awkward. For all her apparent study of the ways in which certain oppressed groups address wrongs that are done, Krug proves incapable of writing her way to recompense. “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself,” she writes, borrowing, with all sincerity, a term of cultural panic that lost its candor eons ago. “What does that mean?” she asks. “I don’t know.” Within twenty-four hours, a group of Krug’s colleagues at G.W. released a statement calling on her to resign or, if not, to be stripped of her tenure and fired. “With her conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching,” the G.W. Department of History said in a written statement posted to its Web site. On Wednesday, it was announced that Krug had resigned. (She did not respond to my requests to speak with her.)
It seems that Krug exposed herself to avoid being exposed. “I had been following her transformation for a while,” a scholar in Krug’s field told me. The scholar, a junior professor who wished to remain anonymous, met Krug more than a decade ago. “The first time I encountered her, she would talk about ‘us’ and ‘we,’ ” the junior professor said over the phone. “And I was scratching my head, like, ‘us’ and ‘we’? And then I realized she meant Black.” Specifically, “part Algerian”—Krug said that she was the daughter of Algerian immigrants on her mother’s side, and that her father was a white man of German origin. “I took her at her word,” the professor said, “But I always had certain misgivings.” Krug spoke back then of trauma as part of her heritage, describing herself as the product of rape between her mother and father, and the junior professor said that she didn’t want to impinge on Krug by bringing it up, even as she and other friends, all Latinx, harbored doubts about Krug’s claims. The way Krug spoke about the junior professor’s own identity was part of what aroused her suspicion. “I’m middle class. I’ve never tried to be anything else,” she said. “I think she was pushing me or encouraging me to adopt a more radical political position.” These sorts of challenges ate away at the remaining amiability between
Krug and her Afro-Latinx peers. “There came a point when we were just, like, ‘This is bullshit.’ ” Still, they were operating on a feeling. Without proof or a violation of academic protocol or issues with Krug’s scholarship—“I always respected her intellectually,” the junior professor said—there was nothing to be done but add distance. “There wasn’t any big dramatic moment. I just quietly severed the relationship on all fronts.”
Years later, Krug came back on the scholar’s radar when mutual friends on Facebook shared articles Krug had written for RaceBaitr, a platform for race-forward news and criticism, and later for Essence. Those articles, now deleted (though Krug’s work appears in the September/October print issue of Essence), made it apparent that a change had occurred. Krug had left her Algerian roots and been remade, chameleon-like, by Spanish Harlem. “I am boricua, just so you know,” she wrote for Essence last year. Still, the junior scholar told me, “I just sat quietly with it, because who is going to believe me?”
(Krug’s reckoning was finally set in motion after another G.W. professor, H. G. Carrillo, died, in April, at the age of fifty-nine, due to complications of the novel  )Krug’s reckoning was finally set in motion after another G.W. professor, H. G. Carrillo, died, in April, at the age of fifty-nine, due to complications of the novel coronavirus. Carrillo, who went by the nickname Hache (“H” in Spanish, spelled out), was known as a queer Cuban-American author who captured the estranged experience of the Latin American diaspora, notably in his novel “Loosing My Espanish,” from 2004. Upon reading a tribute to the author in the Washington Post, however, Carrillo’s sister and niece contacted the paper with some critical updated information: Carrillo was not born in Cuba but in the United States, Detroit to be exact. His parents were also born in Michigan, and they, like Carrillo (born Herman Glenn Carroll), were Black Americans with no Latino heritage. This was a shock to Carrillo’s husband and to the literary community, prompting conversations among Afro-Latinx writers who had counted him as one of their own.

Jessica Anne Krug grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Her parents, Stuart and Sherry Krug, worked as a grocer and a teacher, respectively, according to obituaries in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. Krug attended the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, a Jewish day school located in the suburb of Overland Park, followed by the Barstow School, a prep school in the city proper. In 1996, when she was in the eighth grade, Krug wrote an op-ed in the Kansas City Star against “white-male bashing,” despite her experiences with harassment from people in that demographic. “A few years ago, while taking a shortcut through a local country club, I was confronted by people who uttered slurs about the Jewish star hanging around my neck,” she wrote. She attended Portland State University and later received her doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 2012. She was “passionate about African and African Diaspora history,” Francisco Scarano, a member of her dissertation committee, told me via e-mail, describing her as a “voracious reader.” After travels to Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, he said, “she always seem to come back

energized by experiences she had and by the people she had met here.” They never had conversations about her race and ethnicity, though, and Scarano said that he was shocked by the news of her forged identities.
“North African Blackness,” “US rooted Blackness,” “Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness”—even the coming clean reverts to a sweeping shorthand. In the course of her academic career, Krug has identified as Algerian, African-American, Black Boricua, vaguely Afro-Latinx, vaguely Caribbean; she’s been from Kansas City, from the Bronx, and “of the hood.” Krug’s students, interviewed by The Cut, recalled a “very heavy accent” and an affected brown-girl cool. The trail of locales and labels explicates little besides their author’s own ethnographic tastes. What unites them, though, is Krug’s affinity for Blackness as an instrument of authenticity as she made her way through academia.
Much of the coverage of Krug has reduced her story to this point: the want of Blackness. The comparisons to Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane woman, now known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, who went viral, in 2015, for her own living minstrel act, write themselves. But while Dolezal’s fabrication relied upon a flat sense of Black American identity (the Howard University degree, the leadership position at the N.A.A.C.P.), Krug’s transformation from white to Black was knottier. The places Krug chose to identify with—North Africa, the West Indies, East Harlem, the Bronx—cannily preyed upon a certain American laziness when it comes to parsing race beyond Jim Crow. It is germane that Krug hid among the bona fides of the American humanities, which, still, as a whole, like the nation as a whole, tend toward incuriosity about the difference between race and ethnicity, let alone how one cuts across the other. (Hence the tendency of so many outlets to account for Adele’s showing only in Black and white terms.)
Consider, for instance, the footage that has been circulating from a New York City Council hearing, held over Zoom in June, which shows Krug in her Afro-Latinx pose. She introduces herself as Jess La Bombalera, a nickname apparently of her own making, adapted from Bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican genre of music and dance. Broadcasting live from “El Barrio,” and wearing purple-tinted shades and a hoop in her nose, she lambasts gentrifiers, shouts out her “black and brown siblings,” and twice calls out “white New Yorkers” for not yielding their speaking time. What stands out, though, is the way Krug speaks, in a patchy accent that begins with thickly rolled “R”s and transitions into what can best be described as B-movie gangster. This is where desire outruns expertise. The Times, in a piece on Krug’s exposure, last week, nonetheless called this a “Latina accent,” lending credence to Krug’s performance. (The phrase was later deleted.) The offhand notation is a tiny example of the buy-in Krug has been afforded her entire scholastic career, by advisers and committee members and editors and colleagues. They failed to recognize the gap not between real and faux, so much, as between something thrown-on and something lived-in. That inattentiveness was Krug’s escape hatch.
A symptomatic reading of the situation is almost too easy. Krug’s academic research is focussed on unhomed peoples whose identities are not reducible to state or tribal filiation—indigenous peoples turned Africans turned slaves turned fugitives who forged a new sense of themselves out of thin air. Her book, “Fugitive Modernities,” from 2018, centers on Kisama, a region within present-day Angola whose people resisted Portuguese enslavement and colonialism in the seventeenth century. It was published by Duke University Press, which is known for its cutting-edge monographs in the area of Black studies. The editorial director, Gisela Fosado, explained in a post on the press’s blog that she, too, had been lied to—in their initial contact, Fosado wrote, Krug claimed that her surname was actually Cruz. Fosado added that she is not sure what’s to be done now with Krug’s scholarship, which “has been widely praised and recognized as important.” I, working far afield from Krug’s work in period, region, and methods, am not equipped to evaluate the fitness of her research. I can only say that her writing is heavy on the kind of equivocation (“and” ... “but” ... “furthermore”) that, in academic texts, can reflect broad-mindedness—or insecurity. After the Medium post was published, excerpts from “Fugitive Modernities” circulated on Twitter. Seasoned authors like to joke about the length of the acknowledgements section in books by début authors, who tend to thank everyone they’ve ever encountered, down to their kindergarten teachers. But Krug is light on thanks, and takes a combative tone. The only person acknowledged by name is the late rapper Biggie Smalls; Krug is tempted, she writes, to just “crib” her comments from him, “to stunt on every institution and person who has ever stood in my way.”

Black studies, a collaborative and multidisciplinary field, is whiter than anyone who hasn’t been in a room with us might assume. Here I’m referring not to the white scholars, though they are plentiful, but to the rest of us: gather us in a group and you’ll be hard pressed to find a tenure-track scholar darker than the proverbial paper bag. There’s a familiar story that accounts for the prevalence of lighter-complected folk in America, the post-bellum legacy of rape—the same narrative that Krug latched onto in making the myth of her “lightskin” presentation, wielding it as a cudgel to protect her against those who might try to pry into the finer points of her background. (According to the junior scholar, during grad school Krug called herself “high yella,” a playfully derogatory term for the fairer African-American set.) But then there is another story that helps account for how someone who looks like Krug can blend in, so to speak: the story of how the lightest among us have a way of perpetuating their lightness over generations, prizing it as it is prized by the institutions they move within. This presents an odd paradox among the scholars presumably best poised to confront white supremacy from inside the university: all of this light skin is not incidental to how Black studies sees itself—to who is promoted, professionally and ideologically, within the field, and to who is extended, as Krug was extended, so much benefit of the doubt.
These things are known but rarely acknowledged in such mixed company. There may be a shift in the air, though. The unravelling of Krug’s charade began with a whisper network of sorts, as so many of these things do. The whispering continues. I am aware of at least one scholar, known for playing with the color line, who quietly modified her institutional bio recently. The self-description now specifies “white.”
(

The Layered Deceptions of Jessica Krug, the Black-Studies Professor Who Hid That She Is White

By Lauren Michele Jackson

September 12, 2020)

Concerning The China Virus From Wuhan, I Have An Opinion

Bill O’Reilly didn’t go home to pout after his ejection from Fox News. He’s still one of the best commentators on current news topics. This is an interesting piece.  

Please keep an open mind… I know, it’s not that easy when someone like O’Reilly is throwing butcher knives.  

This is one of the most concise narratives of what this Covid-19 pandemic is all about. It is written by Bill O’Reilly. Don’t refuse to read just because you may not like him. He is a true student of history and a rabid researcher. He gets the facts before he speaks. He is not a big fan of President Trump, so this is not written in support of him, but an attempt to get the truth out to all of us. 

Please read it with an open mind, absorb it,  do your own research if you don’t trust his. But do not just accept what the media is spitting at you endlessly from behind their partisan platforms - Democratic or Republican, Libertarian, or Socialist. READ IT, PLEASE! It is eye-opening.

An amazing story that explains everything and China’s role in it.

Written by Bill O'Reilly

China’s Bioweapon, and Pelosi...

My wife Angie will tell you that I study history and world events fluently every day. I have studied China for many years. To get answers I need to questions, I call many I know in Washington on Capitol Hill (from my tenure on two Presidential campaigns and Presidential talks) and I ask them for straight-up answers to better understand what affects us as a nation.

Well, in 2016 America elected a new Sheriff:  Donald J Trump. 

For decades the Chinese walked all over America but the new President said “not anymore”. Trump literally strangled China’s economy to the point their economy was in its worst free fall ever. Trump negotiated a new 50 billion trade agreement. He had Xi by the proverbial balls. America’s economy was on fire and unstoppable. President Xi Jinping knew he could not beat the USA militarily and he knew any domesticated economic attack would fail as our economy was too strong. He had to act. But how?

Enter the USA democrats led by Pelosi and Schiff. Impeachment. A hoax. A distraction for our people and President. Xi Jinping and his thugs see this. They aren’t stupid. They have very intelligent intellectual thinkers in their government. Now you must understand, the Chinese regime is truly Barbarians. Notice I did not say ALL CHINESE. Chinese people are good people. I enjoy my interactions with them.

The communist regime has millions of its own citizens slaving in gulags simply for speaking against the government or openly practicing Christianity. Knowing they could not attack us openly they needed to be coy, like a deceptive fox. In my opinion, I believe the regime released a biological weapon upon the world that doesn’t kill everyone but kills “enough,” especially the elderly and in-firmed. Back in WW 2, Hitler thought the same way. He got rid of what he considered the useless and rejects of society.

Trump's task force uses models to figure out things. Xi used and uses “models” too. China's president figured that if he killed a few of his own (a few hundred thousand to them would be a few out of 1.4 billion people) and spread the virus to other nations (especially to the USA) they would “level the economic playing field” and not have fired a shot.

Losses of his own people were acceptable costs of a new war. When China’s own doctors attempted to sound the warning, they were immediately silenced. In fact one died and another has simply disappeared. Trump and the other allied leaders indeed KNOW this is what happened. They have under-reported their own deaths. Trump knows he cannot outrightly seek retribution. His news conference today showed me this when he balked publicly about no outright retribution over Xi’s handling of this and he immediately brought up the “trade deal”.

 However, Trump wasn’t being weak, he too was now being coy. We know this was a biological weapon. The food market story is bullshit.

Xi knows we know it. Trump also today announced he sent two battle groups of destroyers and other ships to sea several days ago to fight drugs and rogue actors like Iran should they try anything.

I say he did this to show Xi he knows what has transpired (we have the greatest intelligence assets) and that they (the Chinese) should rethink further action. Politics is premier. We cannot overtly attack China for what they have done as we would also suffer greatly We all know this.

But China has temporarily achieved its goal. America was literally consumed by Trump's phony impeachment brought by the ultra-left democrats (supported by democrat rank and file and one Republican Mitt Romney) and Xi Jinping saw an opening. 

He took it. Xi did what Trump usually does...he walked onto the world stage and threw a grenade into the “room” and left. It exploded in the form of this worldwide pandemic. It brought the USA and the rest of the world to its knees and leveled the economic playing field.

Our economy is now near depression Xi didn’t fire one bullet. Trump needed to up his game of chess and putting our Naval ships to sea was his next move. He said he is a “war” President. He is.

But now on not one but two fronts. One front is the virus and the other front is the Chinese. While the Saudi’s and Russians are screwing with oil prices they aren’t overtly doing what this pandemic is doing. The drug smuggling story for dispatching the Naval Force is bullshit and the world knows it. I am of the opinion Trump can indeed bring us back from this catastrophe albeit with a changed playing field.

But Trump is a genius in chess and financial matters. He’s become a champ at international politics too. I am sure Trump can once again lead the economy to even stronger strength and greatness than it was. He can do it quickly I’m sure of it. He has proved it. Xi Jinping needs to be sent a message loud and clear. NEVER AGAIN. We need to bring all of our critical manufacturing back from China beginning with our medicines they were recently threatening to withhold. We can do it immediately. Again, another reason for Trump putting to sea such a sizable Naval Force. Sending a clear message.

We all must ride out the next few weeks. Then we and the world pick up the pieces and move on. The democrats who have given Xi this opening wrapped in a bow must pay a heavy price in November as they (the democrats) truly have cost and continue to cost America precious lives by the phony scandals. Nancy Pelosi continues to help the Chinese by her daily shameless attacks upon the President and meddling in stimulus packages as she did this last weekend. Yesterday’s statements she made were truly appalling and the lowest of low. I didn’t think she could go any lower. What a disgrace she is to our nation.

But, Pelosi aside, make no mistake, China must and will be taught a lesson the likes they have never seen before and Trump is the man to pull the trigger.

We the people must teach the democrats the same lesson at the polls.  They (the radical wing of the party) are the enemy of a free America. I am certain of it. The entire democrat party of our forefathers is dead. Remember people, Trump indeed tried to warn us all of the Coronavirus in his State of the Union Speech. He spoke of it. He said he was on top of it. After he spoke, Nancy Pelosi ripped up the speech calling Trump's words “a manifesto of lies”. She disgraced the country and all of our fellow honored citizens present in the House Chamber. Well, she now has American blood on her hands. She is very majorly responsible for these needless deaths as well as the Chinese. She and Adam Schiff.

The left and democrats laughed as she tore up his speech. Well, as they laughed the disease he just spoke of in that speech came to our shores. Republicans and Democrats alike are now dying. Your family members and mine. Our grandparents and middle-aged citizens alike. Our liberty is for the most part suspended. As we bury our dead (without proper funerals) from this calamity let’s drive the nails into the coffin of the Democrat party as well in November.

It’s time people. Stand up for your rights and your country! Our Liberty and survival are at stake!

I am praying for God’s blessing on our nation. But, God also gave us the ability to think for ourselves and it’s time we placed blame for all this death where it belongs: on the doorsteps of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Xi Jinping directly. Wake Up America WAKE UP!

Professional Athletes And Social Protesting, Biting The Hands That Feed Them

Open Letter To The NFL PLAYERS. The Boycott is coming.
You graduated high school in 2011. Your teenage years were a struggle. You grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Your mother was the leader of the family and worked tirelessly to keep a roof over your head and food on your plate.

Academics were a struggle for you and your grades were mediocre at best. The only thing that made you stand out is you weighed 225 lbs and could run 40 yards in 4.2 seconds while carrying a football. Your best friend was just like you, except he didn’t play football. Instead of going to football practice after school, he went to work at McDonald’s for minimum wage.
                                    You were recruited by all the big colleges and spent every weekend of your senior year making visits to universities where coaches and boosters tried to convince you their school was best. They laid out the red carpet for you. Your best friend worked double shifts at Mickey D’s. College was not an option for him. On the day you signed with Big State University, your best friend signed paperwork with his Army recruiter. You went to summer workouts. He went to basic training.

You spent the next four years living in the athletic dorm, eating at the training table. You spent your Saturdays on the football field, cheered on by adoring fans.

Tutors attended to your every academic need. You attended class when you felt like it. Sure, you worked hard. You lifted weights, ran sprints, studied plays, and soon became one of the top football players in the country. Your best friend was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. While you were in college, he deployed to Iraq once and Afghanistan twice. He became a Sergeant and led a squad of 19-year-old soldiers who grew up just like he did. He shed his blood in Afghanistan and watched young American's give their lives, limbs, and innocence for the US.

You went to the NFL combine and scored off the charts. You hired an agent and waited for draft day. You were drafted in the first round and your agent immediately went to work, ensuring that you received the most money possible. You signed for $16 million although you had never played a single down of professional football. Your best friend re-enlisted in the Army for four more years. As a combat tested sergeant, he will be paid $32,000 per year.

You will drive a Ferrari on the streets of South Beach. He will ride in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter with 10 other combat loaded soldiers. You will sleep at the Ritz. He will dig a hole in the ground and try to sleep. You will “make it rain” in the club. He will pray for rain as the temperature reaches 120 degrees.

On Sunday, you will run into a stadium as tens of thousands of fans cheer and yell your name. For your best friend, there is little difference between Sunday or any other day of the week. There are no adoring fans. There are only people trying to kill him and his soldiers. Every now and then, he and his soldiers leave the front lines and “go to the rear” to rest.

When the National Anthem plays and you take a knee, he will jump to his feet and salute the television. While you protest the unfairness of life in the United States, he will give thanks to God that he has the honor of defending his great country.

To the players of the NFL: We are the people who buy your tickets, watch you on TV, and wear your jerseys. We anxiously wait for Sundays so we can cheer for you and marvel at your athleticism. Although we love to watch you play, we care little about your opinions until you offend us. You have the absolute right to express yourselves, but we have the absolute right to boycott you. We have tolerated your drug use and DUIs, your domestic violence, and your vulgar displays of wealth. We should be ashamed for putting our admiration of your physical skills before what is morally right. But now you have gone too far. You have insulted our flag, our country, our soldiers, our police officers, and our veterans. You are living the American dream, yet you disparage our great country. I encourage all like-minded Americans to boycott the NFL.
 National boycott of the NFL is November 8th & 15th in honor of Veteran’s Day, November 11. Boycott all football telecast, all fans, all ticket holders, stay away from attending any games, let them play to empty stadiums. Pass this post along to all your friends and family. Honor our military - some of whom come home with the American flag draped over their coffin.
Add MLB, NBA, and any other sport that kneels to this

#BoycottNFL #BoycottTheNFL #NFLBoycott
#BoycottNBA #BoycottTheNBA #NBABoycott
#BoycottMLB #MLBBoycott
#USA #Veterans #backtheblue #StandForTheFlag