Banning The Past - Odyssey -

 

Even Homer Gets Mobbed

A Massachusetts school has banned ‘The Odyssey.’

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles. Thus Seattle English teacher Evin Shinn tweeted in 2018 that he’d “rather die” than teach “The Scarlet Letter,” unless Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is used to “fight against misogyny and slut-shaming.”

Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society and the changes that have occurred." 

NYC: Todd Lyons 33yo Black Man Arrested For Multiple 'Anti-White' Attacks On The Streets - Targeted Elderly People and Women (ABC7) Aug 2019

 

By Eyewitness News

Saturday, August 24, 2019

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Police said a man was arrested in connection with a string of hate crime attacks in New York City, one in which a woman was hit in the head with a brick.

Police said 33-year-old Todd Lyons, of Manhattan, was arrested Friday and charged with hate crime assault and assault.

All four attacks happened on the streets of Manhattan, three in a three-hour span on the same day. In at least one attack, the man allegedly made anti-white statements.

Police believe the man has attacked at least four people since August 9. The first reported victim was a 56-year-old man who was pushed from behind while walking along Fifth Avenue near 14th Street. The victim fell, and the attacker fled.

Five days later, a 64-year-old woman walking on Greenwich Avenue near 8th Avenue when she was struck in her neck and shoulder with a wooden stick.

About an hour later in front of 2 Wooster Street, police say a 20-year-old woman was walking when the suspect threw a brick and struck her in the back of the head before fleeing.

Roughly 90 minutes later, in front of 181 8th Avenue, a 58-year-old man was walking at the location when the suspect struck him in the face and made anti-white statements.

In all the incidents, there was no previous exchange or interaction between the victim and the suspect.

https://abc7ny.com/man-arrested-in-string-of-hate-crime-attacks-in-nyc/5487686/

Vermont: Sculpture honors 1st Black president of an American college (AP)

 

A sculpture of Henry Martin Freeman, the first Black American College president, is on display in his home city of Rutland, Vt., on Monday, Nov. 23, 2020. Freeman graduated from Middlebury College in 1849, and became president of Allegheny Institute in 1856, which later became Avery College, in Pittsburgh, Pa. (AP Photo/Lisa Rathke)

RUTLAND, Vt. (AP) — The first Black president of an American college is being honored with a sculpture installed in the Vermont city where he was born in 1826.

The larger-than-life marble bust of Martin Henry Freeman, a scholar, sits on a stack of books in a downtown square as part of the Rutland Sculpture Trail.

“It’s a very soft, gentle portrayal of Martin Freeman,” said Al Wakefield, one of the sponsors of the piece that was installed in November. “I don’t know how many people remember either through historical writings what kind of person he was, but he’s depicted as a very gentle, kind, literary, artsy kind of a guy.”

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It’s the eighth sculpture to be added to the city’s sculpture trail aimed at celebrating local history and drawing more people to visit the working-class community. Among the pieces is a marble relief honoring the Vermont volunteers who served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, made up of African Americans soldiers, during the Civil War.

In 1856, Freeman became president of the all-Black Allegheny Institute and Mission Church in the Pittsburgh area, later named Avery College. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating at the top of his class in 1849. Freeman’s father fought in the American Revolution, one way for enslaved men to win their freedom.

The sculptures of Freeman and the Black Civil War soldiers were recently added to the Vermont African American Heritage Trail, a guide to various spots around the state that highlights the lives of African Americans in Vermont.

From the start, organizers of the sculpture trail wanted to be inclusive of all kinds of history, events and people, said Steve Costello, who came up with the idea for the trail.

“The country is full of sculptures planned without much consideration of the contributions of women or minorities, so we developed a broad list of ideas, which included Freeman from the get-go,” he said by email.

The very white and liberal state of Vermont has struggled with issues of race. Two years ago, the state’s only Black female lawmaker at the time resigned from the Legislature after receiving racists threats. At the end of this year, the head of the Rutland chapter of the NAACP is stepping down after she said she and her family had been targeted by racially motivated harassment. This fall, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the wounding of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, protesters camped out for more than a month in a park across the street from the Burlington Police Department and held marches calling for the firing of three police officers. The officers are accused in lawsuits of using excessive force against two Black men in separate incidents in 2018.

The Freeman sculpture, designed by Mark Burnett, who is Black, and carved by Don Ramey, was installed at a time when some cities are reconsidering and even removing sculptures or monuments related to the Confederacy or to other historical figures, such as Columbus.

Just this week, Virginia removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that has represented the state in the U.S. Capitol for 111 years. A state commission has recommended replacing it with a statue of Barbara Johns, who protested conditions at her all-Black high school in 1951. Her court case became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down racial segregation in public schools.

Wakefield, a Black man who moved to Vermont from New York City 30 years ago and whose family helped sponsor the sculpture of Freeman, said it was “really, really relevant,” in the context of the nationwide protests for racial justice and the reassessment of public statues.

Freeman’s academic success took hold at Middlebury College, where he was the only Black student in a state that was the first to abolish adult slavery in 1777. Abolitionists in town had urged Middlebury to enroll Black students as a demonstration that the school really stood against slavery, said William Hart, an emeritus professor of history of Black studies at Middlebury College.

Freeman went on to teach mathematics and natural philosophy at Allegheny Institute and Mission Church in the Pittsburgh area, where be became president in 1856. He supported the colonization of Liberia for Black Americans and abruptly resigned in 1863 with a plan to teach at Liberia College.

He went to Liberia, as he often said, to be a man, which he felt he could not be in the United States, Hart said. It was an act of self-determination, he said. But unlike Freeman, many of the Black Americans who went to Liberia were biracial, the sons and daughters of former enslavers, Hart said. Being dark-skinned, Freeman felt discrimination there, too.

He taught at Liberia College and subsequently also became its president. He died in Monrovia in 1889.

“I think that what is important for Vermonters to know is that there has always been a place for persons of African descent in the state of Vermont,” said Curtiss Reed, executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness & Diversity. He would like to see more public works of art like the sculpture of Freeman.

“There are those who would say that we can deny the existence of folks of color as well as their contributions, whether as pastors, or as legislators, or as business people, as abolitionists, as veterans,” he said. “There’s a lot of education to be done.”

 https://apnews.com/article/us-news-race-and-ethnicity-rutland-vermont-dc40895a0d696adf64ba6f35ac90425b

 

Capitalism Doesn't Work - The DC Political Monopoly Just Doesn’t Get It - by Richard D. Wolff - 25 Dec 2020

 

The spectacle of political “leaders” disconnected from basic social realities survived Trump’s defeat. He and his GOP had shown little grasp of the two great crises of 2020: the crash of capitalism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s resulting political defeat did not reconnect them. The Biden Democrats already show they learned little from Trump’s loss; disconnection governs them too.

A basic social reality of the United States is its capitalist economic system that organizes enterprises internally into a small minority (employers) dominating the majority (employees), with markets to distribute resources and products. Like capitalisms everywhere, the U.S. version crashes recurringly. Variously called crises, recessions, or depressions, they have happened, on average, every four to seven years throughout capitalism’s history. With three in this century’s first 20 years (“dot-com” in 2000, “subprime mortgage” in 2008, and “COVID-19” in 2020), the United States illustrates that four-to-seven-year schedule. 

The 2020 crash is second only to the Great Depression of the 1930s in its social impact. That fact alone demands major policy interventions on the scale, at least, of what was done then (including the creation of Social Security, federal unemployment insurance, the first minimum wage, and the creation of millions of federal jobs). Moreover, the 1930s were not simultaneously a time of deadly viral pandemic. Given the uniquely immense challenge of 2020’s two crises, no remotely adequate policies were undertaken nor even contemplated by Trump, Biden, Republican or Democratic establishments. They just don’t get it.

The COVID-19 pandemic replicates past viral outbreaks: from the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic to recent SARS, MERS, and Ebola outbreaks. Coping with them requires having ready (or quickly acquiring) adequate supplies of tests, masks, ventilators, hospital facilities, and trained personnel. Where supplies of these essential resources were left mostly to the private capitalist sector, fatal failure resulted. It was not privately profitable (and far too risky) to produce, stockpile, and maintain these supplies for years until a pandemic enabled them to be sold. Private capitalists chose other more profitable and/or less risky investments. Private capitalism, as many had forewarned, was unreliable for protecting public health.

Of course, the government could have intervened to offset private capitalism’s failure to safeguard public health. It could have purchased tests, masks, and ventilators as fast as private capitalists produced them at prices profitable for those capitalists. The government could then have stockpiled them at taxpayers’ expense for use when the next dangerous virus threatened. In fact, the U.S. government already does that, but not for public health. It buys and stockpiles missiles, warships, and tanks from private capitalists because profit-driven capitalists would not stockpile them. In the United States, Republican and Democratic establishments promote the government’s full socialization of military costs as patriotism while they demonize and block an equivalent socialization of public health costs as “socialism.”

Inadequate preparation for COVID-19 was followed by failure to contain it. Trump and the GOP never considered, let alone implemented, massive government intervention. Many other countries did, mobilizing private and public resources effectively against COVID-19. Crude laissez-faire ideology plus corrupt political calculation drove Trump and the GOP. As to the pandemic’s effects, they just did not get it.

Either a capitalist crash or the COVID-19 pandemic alone would have been a critical challenge for the United States. Having both occur together, a staggering combination, requires just what Trump did not and Biden is not doing: a similarly unprecedented government response. Thus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are not even trying for an adequately large stimulus. Their joint product promises to be a prime example of too little, too late. Neither party leadership advanced policies enlarging upon what worked well in the 1930s: a massive federal jobs program to end unemployment, a Green New Deal, and a national system of COVID-19 testing, tracking, and treatment in additionally constructed hospitals and clinics. Nothing suggests Biden’s centrist Cabinet sees the magnitude of the need. They just don’t get it.

For both Republican and Democratic establishments, political strategies are similar. Each endorses, privileges, and supports private capitalism. Each blames the other party for negative results that flow from the social dominance of private capitalism. Neither dares blame private capitalism for social problems like unemployment and pandemic casualties. Instead, each has its preferred set of scapegoats to blame. Republicans blame immigrants, foreign trading partners (especially China), non-whites, pro-abortion rights activists, mainstream media, liberals, and socialists. Democrats blame Russia and Russians, China, gun enthusiasts, white supremacists and racists, Fox News, and Trump and his supporters.

A solution would be a genuinely level political playing field. It would include a new political party that criticizes and opposes the capitalist system because of its responsibility for critical social problems. It would break the political monopoly run by Republicans and Democrats just as many economic monopolies have ended in the nation’s past. Today’s crises, inequalities, divisions, and the sufferings of so many deserve no less. Yet the political monopolists want to keep their control.

They just don’t get it.

************

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

‘The Grass is Always Greener In the Other Fellow’s Yard’ – A Milk Toast to Eisenhower – Everyday at Noon

Posted on May 22, 2019 by xenagoguevicene

I was looking out the back door at the waving little green plants in my backyard. I looked to the neighbor’s yard to the right, and to the yard to the left of my thirty-three feet wide yard. The grass in both yards had recently been cut. My plants are a variety of weeds and vines my daughter planted. I began to sing the song “The grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard…”

The grass is always greener
In the other fellow’s yard.
The little row
We have to hoe,
Oh boy that’s hard.
But if we all could wear
Green glasses now,
It wouldn’t be so hard
To see how green the grass is
In our own back yard.

I turned from the door and went to the computer to look up the song. I found an entry on Wikipedia about the children’s television program host “Big Brother Bob Emery” who used to sing the song each day on the program I watched in the 1950’s.

I went to my bedroon to look up the song on Youtube. But then I recalled the story I had seen this morning about a musician who had three hundred songs on Youtube that he had composed and played himself. All of his work was challenged by someone who claimed to own the copyright to the music the man had composed and performed himself. So…I had a negaitve feeling about Youtube. I reached under a dresser where my iPad was charging and went to Spotify to see if I could find the song. There it was in various versions.
The song had come from some Broadway musical in the 1920’s when Big Brother Bob Emery was on radio in Massachusetts. He adopted the song as his theme.

Emory had grown up on a Massachusetts farm in the early 1900’s. He went to a farm school on Thompson’s Island in Boston Harbor. The man was on some of the earliest radio stations in Massachusetts. He had a children’s program on the radio at a time when most of the broadcasters had a children’s story program. A club was set up and many kids sent in membership applications during the 1920’s. Emory transitioned to television in the 1940’s.

 

 

I watched his program in the 1950’s. I remember drinking a glass of milk with Emory as he saluted a picture of the US President Eisenhower.

 

I felt like I was a part of something. I had something to do with the US president.  I can still taste the milk.  I remember my father saying that Eisenhower proved that the country could run without a president.  I didn’t understand at the time that my father was saying that Eisenhower was a ‘do nothing’ nonentity president.  I guess sometimes that’s what you need. 

 

 

 

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Boeing Creates 'Safe Spaces' - Wrong Think From the Past Gets 'Communications' Boss Fired -

 

Perhaps attempting to distract from the revelation that management knew about the shortcomings in the 737 MAX’s onboard computer that killed hundreds of passengers in two crashes within six months, Boeing was quick to embark on an internal witch hunt this summer, wielding the big stick of cancel culture against its own employees. 

Communications chief Niel Golightly resigned after just six months with the company over a 33-year-old article he’d written arguing against women serving in the military. While he claimed the piece no longer reflected his views, it was nevertheless “embarrassingly wrong and offensive,” Golightly said - to applause from the CEO, who boasted about the company’s “unrelenting commitment to diversity and inclusion in all its dimensions.” 

Boeing’s planes may still be horrifically unsafe, but at least doomed passengers can die content that the airplane manufacturer has “zero tolerance for bigotry of any kind.”

Boeing 737 MAX: Internal documents reveal staff mocking regulators, management (DW)

The disclosed emails and messages are yet another embarrassment for the US aircraft manufacturer after two deadly crashes. Employees said they could mislead regulators to get the now-grounded 737 MAX certified.

 10 January 2020

Boeing internal documents released Thursday by US lawmakers have revealed employees knew about problems with pilot training for the 737 MAX and tried to conceal them from federal aviation regulators.

The communications also show that Boeing employees bragged that they could get the now-grounded aircraft certified with minimal training for pilots by misleading US regulators about problems with the simulators.

"This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys," said an employee in 2017, apparently in reference to senior management and/or regulators.

The documents include exchanges among Boeing test pilots that highlight problems with the simulators reproducing actual flight conditions, Boeing said.

Now open to the public, the once-secret documents could further derail the company's reputation and deteriorate relations with regulators as the former bestselling grounded jetliner waits to restart operations.

Read more: Airbus topples Boeing as biggest plane maker

Deadly crashes

Boeing, one of the world's largest plane makers, has had its entire 737 Max fleet grounded since March 13 last year.

The 737 MAX was involved in two deadly crashes that killed a total of 346 people in late 2018 and early 2019. Hundreds of MAX aircraft were grounded after the fatal accidents of Ethiopian Airlines and Indonesia's Lion Air as a result of a series of failures.

Investigations of the two crashes have focused primarily on the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, an automated flight control system.

Insider information

The latest set of internal Boeing communications were given to the FAA and Congress in December but were only released Thursday.

"Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," another Boeing employee wrote to a colleague in another exchange. "No," the colleague answered.

"I still haven't been forgiven by God for the covering-up I did last year," one employee wrote in a message from 2018, in reference to dealing with the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA).

"I know but this is what these regulators get when they try and get in the way. They impede progress," another wrote in August 2015.

Read more: Boeing's woes unlikely to open gap in market for rivals

Boeing response

In response to the released documents, Boeing said in a statement, "Some of these communications relate to the development and qualification of Boeing's MAX simulators in 2017 and 2018." The company said it sent the internal documents to lawmakers for the purpose of transparency.

Boeing is now working to make changes to its automated control system at the request of the FAA.

On December 23, the company replaced chief executive Dennis Muilenburg with its chairman, David Calhoun, after the board decided a change in leadership was necessary to "repair relationships with regulators, customers and all other stakeholders" amid the protracted 737 MAX crisis.

FAA response

FAA spokesperson Lynn Lunsford said the regulator found no new safety risks that have not already been uncovered as part of the FAA's demands for changes.

''Any potential safety deficiencies identified in the documents have been addressed,'' said Lunsford, adding that the simulator mentioned in the communications has already been checked three times in the last six months.

Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, accused Boeing of putting profit over safety.

"They paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally,'' said DeFazio, adding that the documents detail "some of the earliest and most fundamental errors in the decisions that went into the fatally flawed aircraft.''

The grounding of the MAX will cost Boeing billions in compensation to families of passengers killed in the crashes and airlines that canceled thousands of flights.

mvb/ng (AP, AFP)

https://www.dw.com/en/boeing-737-max-internal-documents-reveal-staff-mocking-regulators-management/a-51950981

Ann Coulter: Is There A Vaccine Against Pandering To Black Anti-Vaxxers? 23 Dec 2020

It now appears that the greatest threat to black Americans isn’t COVID, it’s being pandered to death.

As the distribution of vaccines got underway last week, the Centers for Disease Control was trying to ensure that black people would get the vaccine before the elderly (too white!), while the media were focused on rationalizing black people’s opposition to taking the vaccine at all.

• NPR Weekend Edition:
  Scott Simon: “Help us understand why many black Americans may be skeptical of a vaccine.”
  
  Liz Walker: [Pictured right] “Well, Scott, you know, black people have been traumatized by a betrayal of the system forever for generations. … We have all now talked about the experiment that used people with syphilis in Tuskegee. We all know about Henrietta Lacks.”
• ABC’s Good Morning America:
  Zachary Kiesch (voiceover): “From the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, where scientists deliberately infected men and withheld treatments, to Henrietta Lacks, a young black mother of five who, in 1951, unknowingly had cells taken from her that biomedical research led to breakthrough cancer treatment.”
• MSNBC The Reidout:
  Joy Reid: “And then the other piece is, when it comes, particularly in our community, black people, they might be like, I don’t trust science, the science. We—Tuskegee experiments, etc. There’s just not a lot of trust. And it was developed during the Trump era.”

Yes, because black people have a long track record of trusting the government …

A New York Times/WCBS-TV poll found that 70% of African Americans believed that “the government deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods to harm black people.”

A CNN/Essence poll found that 88% of African Americans think the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was part of a “larger plot.”

A survey of more than 1,000 black church members by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference showed that 35% believed that AIDS was a form of genocide, and another 30% were unsure.

Although vaccines are one of Western medicine’s greatest inventions, I think people should be free to refuse to take the COVID vaccine for any reason, such as, off the top of my head, they’re young and healthy.

But liberals don’t! Anti-vaxxers are one of the media’s most despised groups—provided they’re affluent white women.

When people like Jessica Biel and Jenny McCarthy opposed mandatory vaccinations, they were universally reviled for hawking scientific nonsense. Los Angeles Times: “Jenny McCarthy: anti-vaxxer, public menace.” The New York Times headline: “When Did We Start Taking Famous People Seriously?” Even Saturday Night Live ridiculed McCarthy for her anti-vaccine stance.

But now that it’s African Americans who are reluctant to take the COVID vaccine, they’re treated like children. Who can blame them? It’s because of Tuskegee and Henrietta Lacks!

I know about Tuskegee, but what did the bad white doctors do to Henrietta Lacks? Answer: Johns Hopkins Medical School provided this poor black woman with the most advanced treatment available for her aggressive cervical cancer—gratis.

Her rapidly reproducing tumor cells were then studied around the globe, advancing cancer research by leaps and bounds. But apparently, it was a violation of Mrs. Lacks’ “black body” for her cancer cells to be used to benefit mankind. Maybe she wanted to display them on her mantle!

But the runaway winner for patronizing black people is … director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci! This media darling recently announced: “So, the first thing you might want to say to my African American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman. And that is just a fact.”

Wha …? So far, we’ve got vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and soon may have one from AstraZeneca.

Pfizer’s CEO is a Greek businessman. The company has no black women in its executive leadership.

Moderna’s chief executive is Frenchman Stephane Bancel. The president of the company is the translucently white Dr. Stephen Hoge.

AstraZeneca hasn’t had its vaccine approved yet, but it’s a British-Swedish company, and the chief executive is Frenchman Pascal Soriot.

Each one of these companies had hundreds of people working on a vaccine, so who’s the “African American woman” who single-handedly “developed” it?

She’s a government bureaucrat with the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett. The NIH, you see, “worked with” Moderna during the vaccine approval process. Corbett made the invaluable contribution of accusing doctors of allowing black people to die of COVID, calling the pandemic a black “genocide” and condemning “systematic oppression” of black people. Among the oppressors was one … Anthony Fauci, whom she directed to “check” his “privilege.”

How could we ever have come up with a vaccine without her?

First, it was racist not to put black Americans at the head of the line for the vaccine. Once again, black people have to go to the back of the bus!

Then the CDC decided minorities would get it first, before the elderly. True, those over 70 make up the lion’s share of COVID deaths, but they’re mostly white, so screw them. Oh wait—black people are getting the vaccine first? You see! They’re using us as guinea pigs!

Just tell me when black people get the vaccine, so I’ll know what the explanation is.