My $120,000 Vacation



Thanks to the Four Seasons’ new 24-day, round-the-world fantasy trip, you get all the indulgences of travel without any of its hassles. But like all fantasies, is this too much of a good thing?

I tried but failed to ward off the second bottle of champagne. I was sitting in my room at the Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at Sultanahmet, on the phone with a friend. The hotel staff had already brought me chocolates and Turkish delight to welcome me. They’d put bookmarks in the books I’d left on the desk. They’d replaced my bathmat midday because I’d gotten the first one wet. They’d arranged my notes for this article in clean little stacks. There was already one ice-bucketed bottle of champagne on the dining room table when the door chime rang.

I ignored it, continuing my conversation. It rang a few more times. Then there were knocks. I eventually opened the door. A kind, young, liveried man stood there, beaming, with a second bottle. I tried to protest that this one was superfluous, but in a whisper he was past me. Left in the vapor trail of his hospitality, I watched him glide into the room and busy himself on the other side of the floral display, placing two fresh flutes between a second ice bucket and a tray of figs.

I went back to my long-distance conversation and heard him busying himself in the other room, perhaps having discovered that one of the nuts in the nut bowl was misaligned. Sometimes it is the structure of things that you shall be pampered and you have no choice but to sit back and accept that fact.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top U.S. arms makers are straining to meet surging demand for precision missiles and other weapons being used in the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State and other conflicts in the Middle East, according to senior U.S. officials and industry executives.

Global demand for U.S.-made missiles and so-called smart bombs has grown steadily since their use in the first Gulf War. But the United States and a host of allies are now rushing to ensure a stable supply of such weapons for what is expected to be a long fight against Islamic State, whose rise has fueled conflict in Syria and across a swathe of the Middle East.

U.S. officials say arms makers have added shifts and hired workers, but they are bumping up against capacity constraints and may need to expand plants or even open new ones to keep weapons flowing. That could create further log-jams at a time when U.S. allies are voicing growing concern that Washington's processing of arms sales orders is too slow.

Islamic State's deadly attacks in Paris last month have added urgency to the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the group in Iraq and Syria. The campaign had resulted in 8,605 strikes at an estimated cost of around $5.2 billion as of Dec. 2.
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On this anniversary of the slaying of the Black Panther leader in Chicago — when black people face the fight of their lives — it is important for us to understand why his life and death mean so much to us now.

The charismatic chair of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party accomplished a great deal before he was cut down at the age of 21. Hampton headed the Chicago chapter of the Panthers, where he formed a multiracial “rainbow coalition” of organizations, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Blackstone Rangers street gang, and a Puerto Rican organization known as the National Young Lords. He also started a community service program that included a free breakfast program for children and a free medical clinic, and held political education classes.

And under his leadership, the Chicago Black Panthers monitored the police and looked out for instances of police brutality. Most of all, Fred Hampton brokered a truce among Chicago’s major street gangs.

The Black Panthers, and Hampton, caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. Through his Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, Hoover sought to “prevent the rise of a black messiah” and “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.” Hoover targeted black figures such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and organizations such the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Christian Leadership Conference, and the Panthers.

And Hoover viewed the Black Panthers breakfast program for schoolkids as the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States of America — grits, not guns.

In the hallowed American tradition of going after youthful black power and excellence, and stopping them in their tracks, the FBI took out the Black Panthers. And they took out Fred Hampton.
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Guyanese born Dr. Ivan Van Sertima (January 26, 1935 to May 25, 2009) is a literary critic, linguist, anthropologist, and writer. In 1977 he wrote They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, now in its sixteenth printing, for which he won the Clarence L. Holte Prize for excellence in literature and the humanities relating to the cultural heritage of Africa. He is the editor of the Journal of African Civilizations, and has edited numerous recent books including African Presence in Early America, Great African Thinkers, and Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern.

David Chalian @DavidChalian
Clinton: "We do have the best law enforcement in the world, the best military, the best intelligence services."

After Republican Paul Ryan dog whistled to the racist wing of the Republican Party by calling into question the willingness of inner city blacks to work, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Black community as a whole, rightfully piled on Rep. Ryan. But many forget that Bill Clinton was guilty of similar behavior where Blacks were concerned. And that’s not all that the Black center-left forgets when it remembers the first symbolically Black president.

1.) At the end of Bill Clinton’s term as Arkansas governor, his state did not have a civil rights statute on the books.

2.) Orval Faubus, an avowed racist segregationist and former Arkansas governor, was front and center, invited by Clinton himself, to the new governor’s inauguration.

3.) In his bid for the 1992 nomination, Bill Clinton brought George Wallace to Washington D.C., using pictures of himself in dark sunglasses, appearing as an overseer, while black prisoners worked on a chain gang nearby. That’s a dog whistle if ever I heard one.

4.) Bill Clinton went to Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-Push Coalition not to meet with Blacks in any serious fashion, but to wag his finger at Sister Souljah. Rev. Jesse Jackson later said that “Sister Souljah represents the feelings and hopes of a whole generation of people,” and that Clinton misquoted her.
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