By Raffique Shah
September o4, 2021
No state of emergency, lift the curfew and let’s get back to normal. We are fed up with Covid-19, 20 or whatever edition or variant is stalking us. No more. Time to show this beast just what Trinis are capable of. We will beat him to death with ‘wining’ and ‘jamming’, drinking puncheon rum. Release the Trini beast, Mr Prime Minister, and we shall show the world how to fight Covid, David, any id.
Continue reading Catapult, club and a bullpistle
Israel was down to a handful of daily COVID cases. Now it’s around 11,000. What happened?
Israel has the highest 7-day rolling average of new daily coronavirus cases per million people
By Mark Gollom
September 01, 2021 – CBC News
“Just months ago, Israel was a world leader in vaccinating its population and appeared to be putting a stranglehold on the virus that causes COVID-19, wrestling down its daily case count to double digits — and at times, near zero.”
“And while Israel went several weeks in May without a death, more than 550 people have died of COVID-19 in August, including over 100 of them in the last five days, the Times reported.”
Continue reading Highly Vaccinated Israel Sees Dramatic Surge
By Dr Kwame Nantambu
September 01, 2021
Within recent times, massive chupidness has overtly erupted in T&T in regard to Trinbagonians taking their jabs. Indeed, the clarion call has been publicly bandied about to the extent that Trinbagonians are “skeptical” and “hesitant” toward agreeing to take their jabs. No problema.
The salient fact of the matter is that it is a well-known and accepted fact that Trinbagonians just have a magnetic love for “foreign.” In other words, this writer is of the totally firm conviction that Trinbagonians are “skeptical” solely because they have noticed albeit totally brainwashed that Americans feel that way also. Totally false and stupid.
Continue reading Real vaccinate chupidness in T&T
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 31, 2021
PART 3
“Pointerman/The crossroad is self…./ seek the source of rivers/ begin here, in your hands, begin/each beginning,/new beginnings/ like vertiginous sacraments of water/ begin at the navel’s resolve, new/ incarnate flower.”
—LeRoy Clarke, Douens: Poems and Drawings
Painting was LeRoy Clarke’s true forte, but he was equally adept at poetry. In Parables of Joyless Days, Clarke described himself as “The Poet Who Paints With Words.” In 1981, he shocked our sensibilities when he cried: “Carpenter, shoemaker, dancer, wirebender,/ let me be the Artist—Poet—Farmer./ I will fork this earth, with my tongue/ let me plunge into your ear/ through syllables of violet, the science of turquoise, / through populous ochres and energetic reds/ through fathomless greens, through supplicant blue, / through the arterial vegetation of the rainbow” (Douens).
Continue reading The Passing of the Pointer Man
By Raffique Shah
August 30, 2021
If I were asked to put a human face to a new portrait of Trinidad and Tobago at age 59, I would sketch a decrepit Jean or Dinah, aged beyond her actual years, scowling and regretting her wasted years, waiting to die at the feet of an ungrateful people.
I am not happy conjuring such a sorry image of my native land at a point in its history when it should be bubbling with life, oozing confidence and full of energy befitting a nation that has had a good run, whatever obstacles it may have encountered after it became an independent nation on August 31, 1962.
Continue reading T&T at 59: Jean or Dinah?
By Stephen Kangal
August 29, 2021
Tobago is a small island of 116 square miles. However, the geographical location of Tobago is very strategic. It helps in configuring and generating significantly the total maritime area that is now attributed to T&T resulting from the conclusion of maritime boundaries in 1990, 2006 and 2010.
Were Tobago to secede from Trinidad the current maritime boundaries concluded with Barbados and Grenada will become those of Tobago alone.
Continue reading The Strategic location of Tobago as a Pivotal Maritime Asset
How about some accountability for Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen?
By Philip Giraldi
August 24, 2021 – unz.com
If you want to know how the United States wound up with “government by stupid” one need only look no farther than some of the recent propaganda put out by members of Congress, senior military officers and a certain former president. President George W. Bush, who started the whole sequence of events that have culminated in the disaster that is Afghanistan, is not yet in prison, but one can always hope.
Continue reading The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 23, 2021
PART 2
EL TUCUCHE can be made the symbol of our greatest achievements—it is graced with the sovereignty that represents our transcendent power over Douendom where we are still held in disarray and ignorance. Above all, is Aripo, symbolically, the Eye am that Eye am, the one God in whose house there are many mansions, and to which many are the paths!
—LeRoy Clarke, Parables of Our Joyless Days
In the 1950s a modern phase of T&T’s artistic development revealed itself in the paintings of M. P. Alladin, Geoffrey and Boscoe Holder, Leo Basso, Alfred Codallo, and Carlisle Chang. In “Painting in Trinidad and Tobago,” Pat Bishop declared: “These painters were not merely taking the brave step of painting in black face but were also prepared to participate in the modification or destruction of traditional image making.”
Continue reading The Passing of the Pointer Man
By Raffique Shah
August 23, 2021
If there was anything shocking about what happened in Afghanistan last weekend, it was the millions of people who were surprised by the speed at which the Afghan regime collapsed, the military imploded and the Taliban swiftly moved in to declare itself the new government.
BBC journalists referencing Saigon way back on May 1, 1975, when the last Americans who were evacuated from a war that never should have been, reversed on board the aircraft, kicking away desperate Vietnamese who had worked for the US, and who wanted to escape before General Giap’s army took control of the country. “Experts” spoke of the colossal waste of US resources in pursuing yet another ‘mission impossible’ in a country and among a people who will never be tamed, not by Western standards anyway.
Continue reading Surprise us, Mullahs