Suddenly all the people who cared about human rights when Russia and Qatar hosted the world cup and suddenly quiet. .. No fancy documentary from the BBC on immigrants rights. No expose on Crime in inner cities (as we saw in South Africa)
Just silence.
When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.
He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.
In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.
For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.
He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.
He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.
So let me get this straight:
When immigrants take jobs, it’s a national crisis.
When AI takes jobs, it’s innovation.
Can someone explain why we’re supposed to fear people willing to work, but celebrate technology designed to replace workers?
Property taxes on primary residences are a tax on unrealized gains, and the double standard around it is glaring.
You buy a house for $300k with your after-tax dollars. Years later the market rises and the assessor says it’s now worth $600k. Your tax bill goes up—even though you didn’t sell, didn’t refinance, didn’t pull out a dime of equity. You’re paying higher taxes every single year on “wealth” that exists only on paper. That is the literal definition of taxing unrealized appreciation.
Politicians and pundits scream bloody murder when anyone suggests doing the exact same thing to billionaires’ unrealized stock gains. “It’s unfair! They’ll be forced to sell assets!” Yet the same logic is applied to your family home without a second thought. If the principle is wrong for Elon Musk’s Tesla shares, it’s wrong for grandma’s paid-off house.
The common defense—“It pays for schools and roads”—doesn’t hold up as justification for this specific mechanism. Those services are valuable, but tying their funding to the fluctuating paper value of your home creates a system where success (a nicer neighborhood, inflation, or simple supply and demand) is punished with a higher bill. Once the mortgage is gone, you still don’t truly own it. You’re a tenant with extra paperwork, paying annual rent to the government based on an assessment you don’t control.
This isn’t about hating government services. It’s about honest funding. Tax actual economic activity—consumption via a broad sales tax, realized capital gains, or user fees for specific services. Shift the burden to people who are actively spending or transacting in the economy instead of penalizing ownership itself. Other countries and even some U.S. localities have shown you can fund local government without treating primary homes like perpetual leaseholds from the state.
Ownership should mean ownership. Not “you own it until the county decides your paper equity went up.” Abolish property taxes on primary residences. The current system is a wealth tax dressed up as a service fee, and it’s long past time we called it what it is.
Eighty-one-year-old Oswald Golding, ofMansfield Heights, Ocho Rios, St Ann, has been missing since Saturday, June 06.
He is of dark complexion, slim build, and is approximately 182centimetres (6 feet) tall.
Reports from the Ocho Rios Police are that at about 4:30 p.m., Golding was last seen at home wearing a red cap, blue shirt, andblue sweat pants. All efforts to locate him have proven unsuccessful.
Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Oswald Golding is asked to contact the Ocho Rios Police at 876-974-2533, the policeemergency number 119, or the nearest police station.
An Ananda Alert has been activated for 17-year-old Sushana Sutherland of Fairfield Avenue in St James, who has been missing since Wednesday, June 03.
She is of dark complexion, slim build, and approximately 157 centimetres (5 feet 2 inches) tall.
Reports from the Granville Police are that at about 7:50 p.m., Sushana was last seen at home wearing a floral dress. She has not been heard from since.
Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Sushana Sutherland is asked to contact the Granville Police at 876-925-2039, the police emergency 119 number, or the nearest police station.
Vcs já pararam pra pensar que o atleta negro americano Jesse Owens entrou mais fácil na Alemanha Nazista para disputar as Olimpíadas de 1936 do que o atacante iraquiano Aymen Hussein para disputar a Copa de 2026 nos EUA?
Twenty-nine-year-old Rojay Dennis, of Pink Lane, Kingston 14, has been missing since Monday, May 18.
He is of brown complexion, slim build, and is approximately 170 centimetres (5 feet 7 inches) tall.
Reports from the Denham Town Police are that at about 11:43a.m., Rohjay was last seen using a popular social media platform. His mode of dress at the time he went missing is unknown. All efforts to locate him have proven unsuccessful.
Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Rohjay Dennis is asked to contact the Denham Town Police at 876-922-6441, the police emergency number 119, or the nearest police station.
We were absolutely floored by the millions of you that watched us make silly water sillouettes on our driveway last summer. We are starting out the summer the only way we know how, and this time it’s all about movies! What else do you want to see? We have a whole summer ahead, a driveway and a hose. The possibilities are endless!!!
America lectures the world about human rights.
It sends State Department reports grading other countries on their treatment of citizens.
It imposes sanctions when governments fail to meet its standards.
It funds NGOs and democracy promotion programs and civil society organizations to improve conditions for ordinary people in countries it has decided need improvement.
Meanwhile.
530,000 Americans file for medical bankruptcy every year.
100 million Americans carry medical debt.
28 million Americans have no health insurance at all.
The country writing the human rights report card cannot guarantee its own citizens the right to see a doctor without financial ruin.
This is not hypocrisy in the casual sense.
This is institutional, structural, deliberate hypocrisy, the kind that requires enormous energy to maintain.
The kind that produces entire think tanks and media ecosystems to explain why the richest country on earth simply cannot afford what every other rich country provides as a baseline.
Cannot afford it.
While spending over $1 trillion a year on the military that enforces the lectures.
🇺🇸 Apenas hoje nos EUA:
> Jogador iraquiano preso e interrogado por 7 horas;
> Seleção iraniana sem vistos;
> Tiroteio em Ohio;
> Protestos violentos em San Antonio;
> Protestos anti-ICE em Nova Jersey.
Esse é o país que vai sediar a Copa do Mundo.
Quand on se souvient des appels au boycott de la Coupe du Monde au Qatar, on se demande où sont passés tous les moralistes alors que les Etats-Unis bafouent toutes les règles de la FIFA!
Ils s’en prennent aux joueurs, aux staffs, aux journalistes, aux supporters! Et Infantino qui en avait plein la bouche au moment de remettre un scandaleux prix de la paix à Trump, il est très très silencieux devant de telles exactions ! #CDM2026 #FIFAWORLDCUP
Africa is underdeveloped because:
1) Every nationalistic leader was murdered, and the current leaders are obedient puppets to the Western hegemonies.
2) Western companies continue to steal resources.
3) They continue to fund coups/instabilities, preventing any chance of peace, which would have instigated development.
Rubber stamp Senate! Keith Duncan has no self respect, agreeing with every move this govt makes, no matter how it affects the public! #shameonyou! You're supposed to have principled, objective opinions, not just doing what the circus demands, grow a spine!
🇮🇱🇺🇳 Zionista ataca brutalmente a dos recaudadores de UNICEF en Italia
Mientras recolectaban dinero para ayudar a los niños de Gaza, un sionista los agredió violentamente gritando:
“¡Los voy a matar, hijos de puta! ¡Digan Palestina una vez más!”
Esto es el verdadero rostro del sionismo: no toleran ni la palabra “Palestina”, ni que se ayude a los niños masacrados en Gaza.
Atacan a gente pacífica que solo intenta salvar vidas. En plena Italia, en la calle, con total odio.
El mundo ya ve claramente quiénes son los violentos y quiénes los pacíficos.