Your great-uncle was Jomo Kenyatta, 1st president of Kenya, right? Did you ever look into the 3-way Cold War struggle over Kenya, with Kenyatta as the Brits' Our Man in Nairobi, Tom Mboya as the Yanks', and Oginga Odinga as Moscow's?
Your Kenyan family has lots of overlaps with Obama family history: Barack Sr. was the anchor witness in the trial of Tom Mboya's assassin, although Barack Sr. was closer ideologically to Mboya's pro-Soviet Luo rival Oginga Odinga.
The families and upbringings of you (half-Kenyan grand-nephew of Jomo Kenyatta and half white American) and Zack de la Rocha (mother is an anthropologist) combined are remarkably similar to Barack Obama Jr.'s:
Did you and Zack ever discuss your respective family histories with Obama? I suspect he would be a little jealous of you: Your Kenyan great-uncle Jomo Kenyatta was a world figure, while his Kenyan dad was only a once-promising drunk.
My guess would be, however, that the Morellos and de la Rochas were always anti-US deep state, while the Obamas, Dunhams, and Soetoros had lots of links to the US deep state's efforts in the Cold War to win over the global left.
Kenyan pro-American labor leader Tom Mboya was Barack Obama Sr.'s mentor who got him to the U. of Hawaii as part of a Cold War program to make young African elites pro-USA. Here is deep state-connected Time Magazine promoting Mboya in 1960:
During Kenya's independence drive, Mboya, a dynamic young Luo, did the statesman-like thing and endorsed Kenyatta, a venerable Kikuyu, to be first president, thus helping unify Kenya.
But how long was that arrangement to last?
Kenyan politician Tom Mboya was gunned down on the street in Nairobi on July 5, 1969, minutes after chatting with his protege Barack Obama Sr.
Obama Sr. was the final witness called in the trial of the gunman, who was hanged.
The 1969 assassination of Luo politician Tom Mboya, Barack Obama Sr. mentor, remains to Kenyan politics a contentious event, rather like the JFK murder is to the U.S. Obama Jr. avoided it in "Dreams From My Father," but there are subtle clues that the Obamas did not like Kenyatta
Something that has been overlooked about President Obama is how dark are some of the 3rd World political events he had family ties to: the murder of Tom Mboya in Kenya and the great anti-Communist slaughter in Indonesia just before his mom arrived to work in the US Embassy.
For example, Obama's stepfather Lolo Soetoro was from an affluent right wing Indonesian family, his father the top native geologist in the Indonesian oil industry.
Lolo attended U. of Hawaii's East-West Center, which competed for hearts & minds of young 3rd World elites.
Life was good for Lolo Soetoro and his girlfriend Stanley Ann Obama when the military back home in Indonesia started slaughtering hundreds of thousands of suspected communists. Lolo wanted to stay, but the Army made clear it would be keeping a list of who served and who didn't.
So, Lolo Soetoro eventually went home to Indonesia and served as an Army officer in the vast slaughter of 1965-1966. He brought his bride Stanley Ann Obama (and her son Barry) to Jakarta in 1967, where she worked in the CIA-heavy US embassy.
In "Dreams From My Father," little Barry Soetoro asks Lolo if he ever saw a man die.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"He was weak."
From the dramatic emphasis Obama gives the scene, I suspect he actually asked his stepdad if ever killed a man.
Obama in "Dreams From My Father" leaves his family connections to the anti-Communist/anti-Chinese genocide in Indonesia vague, but my speculation is he believes his stepdad, a decent guy, drank himself to death as self-medication for his PTSD from participating in the slaughter.
These two almost always overlooked Obama Family background events--the 1969 assassination of his father's mentor in Kenya and the 1965-66 genocide in his stepfather's Indonesia--suggest to me that Obama's worldview is darker than is usually assumed.
These might be the closest I've come to updating my perspectives on Obama using what I've learned about his family members' various Cold War backgrounds. Obama's deep state ties are less scandalous than illuminating:
Here's my new column on the origins of the two opposing ways of thinking about the facts of human biodiversity: race as continuous or discontinuous variation.
South of Greece, the Sahara Desert was less of a barrier due to the Nile, green Ethiopia, and the much-traversed Indian Ocean. In contrast, south of Portugal, the Sahara cut off Europeans from sub-Saharan trade until the Portuguese made the great leap around the Muslim blockade.
Hence, the ancient Greeks tended to see race as more a matter of degree, while the worldview that grew out of Portuguese and Spanish explorations saw it more as a matter of kind.
@ent3c Consider your Dominican example. The DR produces more great baseball players than anywhere else per capita. Why?
One reason is cultural: in Jamaica they play cricket instead of basketball.
But Mexico was baseball-crazed, and sent many utility players to the big leagues.
@ent3c Why didn't Mexico produce superstar baseball players the way the DR does? LA Dodger scout Mike Brito, who discovered Fernando Valenzuela and recently Julio Urias in Mexico, concluded after decades of searching that Mexicans' legs are seldom long enough.
@ent3c Now, leg length is influenced by both nature and nurture: better diets and other factors can drive up average height, and much of the increased height comes from longer legs.
But Mexico is not starving--it rivals the US for obesity--and life expectancies have almost caught US.
Both the Dominican Republic and South Korea are enthusiastic about baseball, with citizens of both countries playing in the US major leagues. But there have been vastly more great Dominican ballplayers. Do genes have something to with that?
The average Dominican looks about half black and half white, but on this list of 25 best DR ballplayers, only Bartolo Colon (the least athletic) looks more white than black, and only a few (e.g., Pujols and Bautista) look pretty evenly mixed.
Watching bodycam in regular speed: I thought it was a bad shoot.
Watching it once in slo-mo: it was a good shoot.
Watching it twice in slo-mo: it was a GREAT shoot.
I was completely baffled when watching the bodycam video in real time.
Somebody should calculate how many tenths of a second margin the policeman had to spare to make his choice before the attacker's big knife impaled the girl in pink: well under 1.0 seconds, I'm guessing.
Personally, if I were the Columbus cop in the patrol car, I would have backed up down the street, then called for a helicopter to drop a giant net over all the disputants so we could sort out the bad guys from the good guys at our leisure.
The Twitter corporation has apologized to me for suspending my account for tweeting about how the co-founder of BLM has bought a $1.4 million house in 1.4% black Topanga Canyon, home tom 1970s mellow singer-songwriters:
Here's a screenshot my offending post. (I wonder if Twitter has apologized to suspended sportswriter Jason Whitlock as well?)
Twitter has a Kafkaesque policy of not explaining which rules of theirs your offending tweet has violated. You are just supposed to guess.
As the cover image of Edward Said's "Orientalism" suggests, Said was particularly outraged by European intellectual sex tourists visiting the Middle East to sexually exploit Arab boys and girls.
Anybody ever notice that Michel Foucault was exactly whom Edward Said despised?
Just as I guessed, Palestinian critic Edward "Orientalism" Said didn't much like Michel "Discipline and Punish" Foucault for his sex tourism in the Arab world. In 2000, Said gossiped about possible reasons why Foucault left a job teaching in Tunisia: