Gaza Genocide!!! Sponsored By The West!!! War on Gaza: With hospitals destroyed, there is little help for Palestinian cancer patients

Cancer patients and others who cannot leave have been left to their fate as Gaza's health facilities shut down.

10,000 Palestinians with cancer are waiting to get out for treatmenthttps://t.co/okYIv7uogz

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) February 25, 2024

100+ "Palestinians perished in a single night of intense strikes that the Israeli military, scrambling to free two hostages, dubbed 'diversionary.' The attacks may be a sign of worse to come" if "Netanyahu proceeds with a promised ground assault on Rafah." https://t.co/PXfHRgCEhl

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) February 25, 2024

 

Keep on licking the racists asses!!!

This was one of the most racist interactions of my career.

I went to HR. Was told by higher ups that this editor “didn’t mean it that way”

What way did she mean it?

There is no way to tie someone’s identity to blatant exclusion and not have it be wildly racist. 2/

— Soraya Shockley (@sorayashock) November 17, 2023

Wow.
Incendiary findings about NYT reporters engaging in knowingly misleading propaganda to bolster support for Israel's atrocities in Gaza-

summarized here by Jeremy Scahill, an award winning investigative journalist who's work has sparked congressional hearings in the past. https://t.co/fRWNKA2gz7

— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) February 25, 2024

 

In Europe, Fascism has won!

It has been reported that this footage shows Italian police beating schoolchildren protesting against Israel's genocide in Gaza.pic.twitter.com/mfw62nz18c

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) February 25, 2024

NYTimes Opinion • How Italians Became ‘White’ By Brent Staples

via Howard French @hofrench

How Italians Became ‘White’ , an American story. @BrentNYT https://t.co/x4QguPGKEQ

— Howard French (@hofrench) October 12, 2019

Congress envisioned a white, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only “free white persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States” were eligible to become naturalized citizens. The calculus of racism underwent swift revision when waves of culturally diverse immigrants from the far corners of Europe changed the face of the country.

As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson shows in his immigrant history “Whiteness of a Different Color,” the surge of newcomers engendered a national panic and led Americans to adopt a more restrictive, politicized view of how whiteness was to be allocated. Journalists, politicians, social scientists and immigration officials embraced the habit, separating ostensibly white Europeans into “races.” Some were designated “whiter” — and more worthy of citizenship — than others, while some were ranked as too close to blackness to be socially redeemable. The story of how Italian immigrants went from racialized pariah status in the 19th century to white Americans in good standing in the 20th offers a window onto the alchemy through which race is constructed in the United States, and how racial hierarchies can sometimes change.
...

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::


If the Italians with their HUGE cultural baggage DID "struggle" to get into the CLUB is not enough for you to stop using that token - WHITE, you are __________ (fill in the blank!)

Titus Kaphar

An Artist Rises, and Brings a Generation With Him

In a struggling neighborhood with a vibrant history, Titus Kaphar found a home for himself. Now he’s creating a center there to nurture emerging artists.

By Patricia Leigh Brown, from April 12, 2019

Once Upon a Time In The Land Of The Brave

When Slaveowners Got Reparations

Lincoln signed a bill in 1862 that paid up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.

By Tera W. Hunter

Dr. Hunter, a professor of American history and African-American studies, specializes in the 19th and 20th centuries.

• April 16, 2019

The Capitol stands in the background of this 1830 engraving.CreditCreditLibrary of Congress/Corbis, via VCG, via Getty Images

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill emancipating enslaved people in Washington, the end of a long struggle. But to ease slaveowners’ pain, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paid those loyal to the Union up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.

That’s right, slaveowners got reparations. Enslaved African-Americans got nothing for their generations of stolen bodies, snatched children and expropriated labor other than their mere release from legal bondage.

The compensation clause is not likely to be celebrated today. But as the debate about reparations for slavery intensifies, it is important to remember that slaveowners, far more than enslaved people, were always the primary beneficiaries of public largess.

...

Machado de Assis

In Brazil, a New Rendering of a Literary Giant Makes Waves https://t.co/Vt1rfYLpUl

— Howard French (@hofrench) June 14, 2019

Socialist! Capitalist! Economic Systems as Weapons in a War of Words (NYtimes)

• Language changes, and as convenient as it can be to use linguistic shorthand, it’s important to remember that beneath the words are ideas — the things we should be talking about.

• Joseph Stiglitz

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• Interview By Andrew Ross Sorkin 
  
  

  …

  “Some people are trying to attach more emotions to the historical legacy of socialism, which was never the same as communism, but in the United States those distinctions have gotten blurred,” Mr. Stiglitz said.

  …

  It all comes back to semantics, Mr. Stiglitz said. And perception was on his mind when titling his new book, “People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent,” which is to be published next week.

  In it, he maps out a plan that he calls a “social contract” to improve jobs, health, education, housing and retirement. …

  …

  Even the word “capitalist” has evolved, Mr. Stiglitz said. It is only since the late 20th century and the rise of the economist Milton Friedman, he contends, that “capitalist” stopped being a dirty word. It was once used in what he called “a pejorative way.”

  …

NO PANICKING! || Revenge of the Bacteria: Why We’re Losing the War

Bacteria are rebelling. They’re turning the tide against antibiotics by outsmarting our wonder drugs. This video explores the surprising reasons.

Book Review || Black Leopard, Red Wolf | Marlon James

Marlon James

By Alex Preston 

Sun 17 Feb 2019 12.00 GMT (The Guardian)

It’s two days before the US release of Marlon James’s much-hyped fourth novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the prizewinning Jamaican author has an air of baffled, exhausted ebullience about him. He’s no stranger to critical success: he won the 2015 Man Booker prize for his violent, multi-voiced epic, A Brief History of Seven Killings. But it feels like this new book will propel James into a new galaxy of literary stardom.

...

By Ron Charles 
January 28 (Washingtonpost)

 ... “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” the first spectacular volume of a planned trilogy, rises up from the mists of time, glistening like viscera. James has spun an African fantasy as vibrant, complex and haunting as any Western mythology, and nobody who survives reading this book will ever forget it. That thunder you hear is the jealous rage of Olympian gods.... 

By Michiko Kakutani  
Jan. 31, 2019 (NYTimes)

...In these pages, James conjures the literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe — filled with dizzying, magpie references to old movies and recent TV, ancient myths and classic comic books, and fused into something new and startling by his gifts for language and sheer inventiveness....

Hirokazu Kore-eda || THE SATURDAY PROFILE | NYTimes

Noriko Hayashi photo for The New York Times

Hirokazu Kore-eda

NYTimes´ THE SATURDAY PROFILE || ‘Shoplifters’ Director Pierces Japan’s Darker Side

By Motoko Rich

…

“I don’t portray people or make movies where viewers can easily find hope,” said Mr. Kore-eda, during an interview in his studio in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo. “Some people want to see characters who grow and become stronger over the course of a film. But I don’t want to make such a movie.”

“It’s such a lie,” he added. “And I don’t want to tell a lie.”

… after he won the Palme d’Or, the country’s education minister invited Mr. Kore-eda for a congratulatory meeting, the director demurred.

“I didn’t get the point of why they were trying to congratulate me,” Mr. Kore-eda said. “I don’t think it’s right for the government and moviemakers to get too close. So I wanted to keep a distance from the government.”

“Shoplifters” was made in part with government funding, and some critics on social media have bashed the director as anti-Japan or hypocritical. “You took the money and then say that you want to keep a distance” from the government, wrote one blogger. “What a convenient excuse you make.” On Twitter, Tsuneyasu Takeda, a conservative commentator, accused Mr. Kore-eda of being a “shoplifting director.”

Mr. Kore-eda told an interviewer from Mainichi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, that he was grateful for the public money but viewed it as a subsidy from taxpayers rather than a grant from any particular administration.

“If you think of culture as something that transcends the state,” he said, “then you understand that cultural grants don’t always coincide with the interests of the state.”

…

In their own way, Mr. Kore-eda’s movies offer slivers of optimism as well as moments of impish humor. But does he still have hope for his country?

He paused for several beats.

“I have not thrown away hope,” he said.

Steve McQueen || ‘Widows’ Review | NYTimes

Steve McQueen narrates a sequence from the film featuring Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki.

By A.O. Scott || Viola Davis Commands the Screen in a Somber Heist Film

“Widows” is a heist movie in a somber mood, a thriller not entirely comfortable with thrills. Though it has plenty of mayhem and a plot that twists, buckles and swerves, this movie, directed by Steve McQueen (“Hunger,” “Shame,” “12 Years a Slave”) from a script he wrote with Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl,” “Sharp Objects”), moves at a slow, contemplative pace, driven by grief, dread and desperation rather than the more familiar motives of greed, ambition and rebellion.
...

The Assassins (of Character) And Their Enablers

C.I.A. Concludes That Saudi Crown Prince Ordered Khashoggi Killed • NYTimes || Julian E. Barnes

The Films of St. Clair Bourne || NYTimes

Documentarian St. Claire Bourne takes a close-up look at author and historian John Henrik Clarke, who, on camera for much of the film, bounces back and forth between a description of his own personal history, and his views on the history of Africa and of Pan-Africanism. His points are backed up by old newsreel footage, and by images of artwork depicting Africans and their civilization over the centuries. Actor Wesley Snipes executive produced the film and serves as a narrator. John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk was made in 1996, with Clarke suffering from glaucoma, barely able to see as he gives his sweeping account. He talks about his own upbringing, and his growing interest in Pan-Africanism, the failures of the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, his close friendship with Malcolm X, and his critical assessment of Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March. He also gives a primer on the history of African civilization, and argues that no conquering or colonizing power ever "brought civilization" to Africa, but rather these nations destroyed what civilization they didn't understand, and brought many of Africa's ideas back to their bases in ancient Greece and Rome.
He also describes how Black Africans were methodically removed from the history of the civilization of the Nile. He details how leaders like Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah spread the ideas of Pan-Africanism throughout the U.S. and the world. John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk was shown at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, and won the Best Documentary award at the 1997 UrbanWorld Film Festival. Clarke died of a heart attack in 1998.

~ Josh Ralske, Rovi

Raye Montague

Raye Montague, the Navy’s ‘Hidden Figure’ Ship Designer, Dies at 83 || NYTimes

By Katharine Q. Seelye

During World War II, when Raye Montague was 7 and growing up in Arkansas, her grandfather took her to see a traveling exhibit of a German submarine that had been captured off the coast of South Carolina. She was enchanted.

“I looked through the periscope and saw all these dials and mechanisms,” she recalled years later. “And I said to the guy, ‘What do you have to know to do this?’ ”

His response: “Oh, you’d have to be an engineer, but you don’t have to worry about that.”

The clear implication was that as a black girl she could never become an engineer, let alone have anything to do with such a vessel.

She would go on to prove him very wrong.

The girl who faced racism and sexism in the segregated South, where she rode in the back of the bus and was denied entry to a college engineering program because she was black, became an internationally registered professional engineer and shattered the glass ceiling at the Navy when she became the first female program manager of ships. She earned the civilian equivalent of the rank of captain.

…

---

Racists (sadly most people do not know what racism is, they pin it with dislike and hate, which it is not necessarily …) and the right-leaned folks ignore racism and the consequences of everything that sprung from it.

Stupid || Teachers Get Baseball Bats to Confront Shooters in Pennsylvania District | NYTimes

NYTimes || Teachers Get Baseball Bats to Confront Shooters in Pennsylvania District

A school district in Erie, Pa., has supplied teachers and other school employees with miniature baseball bats to use as a last resort if confronted with an active shooter.

“We don’t want to be sitting ducks,” William Hall, superintendent of the Millcreek Township School District, said on Wednesday. “We’re not just going to go hide.” […]

The 600 bats each cost $3, Mr. Hall said, and are akin to a ballpark souvenir.

They are no match, of course, for a gunman toting a semiautomatic weapon. Even so, Mr. Hall said, “I think a bat could disarm a pistol with a nice swing.”

…

Does this qualifies as ostrich syndrome?

Racist-In-Chief || STOKING FEARS, TRUMP DEFIED BUREAUCRACY TO ADVANCE IMMIGRATION AGENDA | NYTimes

STOKING FEARS, TRUMP
DEFIED BUREAUCRACY
TO ADVANCE
IMMIGRATION AGENDA


Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, reporting for The New York Times:

…


According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.


More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.


Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.


Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

…

…………………………………………………



And Some people were surprised that this guy won the election.

Jordan Peele’s X-Ray Vision || Wesley Morris | NYTimes

“Get Out,” his docu-horror-thriller-comedy about race in America, was the movie of the year. What will he show us next?

Hints of Trigonometry on a 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Tablet

Hints of Trigonometry on a 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Tablet by Kenneth Chang for the NYTimes (AUG. 29, 2017)

Suppose that a ramp leading to the top of a ziggurat wall is 56 cubits long, and the vertical height of the ziggurat is 45 cubits. What is the distance x from the outside base of the ramp to the point directly below the top? (Ziggurats were terraced pyramids built in the ancient Middle East; a cubit is a length of measure equal to about 18 inches or 44 centimeters.)

Could the Babylonians who lived in what is now Iraq more than 3,700 years ago solve a word problem like this?

Two Australian mathematicians assert that an ancient clay tablet was a tool for working out trigonometry problems, possibly adding to the many techniques that Babylonian mathematicians had mastered.

“It’s a trigonometric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time,” said Daniel F. Mansfield of the University of New South Wales. Dr. Mansfield and his colleague Norman J. Wildberger reported their findings last week in the journal Historia Mathematica.


…

The other three columns are much more intriguing. In the 1940s, Otto E. Neugebauer and Abraham J. Sachs, mathematics historians, pointed out that the other three columns were essentially Pythagorean triples — sets of integers, or whole numbers, that satisfy the equation a2 + b2 = c2.

This equation also represents a fundamental property of right triangles — that the square of the longest side, or hypotenuse, is the sum of the squares of the other two shorter sides.

That by itself was remarkable given that the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, for whom the triples were named, would not be born for another thousand years.

Why the Babylonians compiled the triples and wrote them down has remained a matter of debate. One interpretation was that it helped teachers generate and check problems for students.


…

Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say (NYT)

• Carl Zimmer for NYTimes

For centuries, skin color has held powerful social meaning — a defining characteristic of race, and a starting point for racism.
“If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.
On Thursday, Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues showed this to be a profound error. In the journal Science, the researchers published the first large-scale study of the genetics of skin color in Africans.
…

Hugh Hefner

I called Hugh Hefner a pimp, he threatened to sue. But that’s what he was || Suzanne Moore || TheGuardian

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
NYT : Hugh Hefner, Who Built Playboy Empire and Embodied It, Dies at 91

How Facebook Is Changing Your Internet || NYTimes

How Facebook Is Changing Your Internet from The New York Times - Video on Vimeo.