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Kind of Blue

Kind of Blue's Journal
Kind of Blue's Journal
May 25, 2019

Wow, as if it's probable that anyone will readily admit,

before or once they're exposed, utterly failing these children. The kids also observed white students touching prohibited displays without reproach. It's disheartening that these academically exceptional kids, let alone any kid is treated this way and disbelieved without even checking for further proof that one's unquestioned belief about lying kids is correct.

As the students progressed through the museum, Lamy claimed the situation worsened. “We were instructed not to touch any of the artifacts in the museum, yet white students there touched the displays several times while security looked on without saying anything,” Lamy wrote on Facebook. “The minute one of our students followed suit, the security guards would yell at them…Throughout our walk through, they followed us.”

Lamy added that she addressed the issue with one of the museum’s security guards, but to no avail. “When I told him I did not appreciate him following our students, he said that he was just doing his job.”
http://time.com/5595544/mfa-schoolchildren-racism/

Prestigious Boston art museum bans 2 of its members for 'racist comments'

The museum said in a May 24 message on its website that it looked into the complaints and found two instances of two of its patrons making "racist comments" to students.

"We have identified the patrons who made the disparaging remarks and revoked their memberships, banning them from the Museum's grounds," the museum stated. "We will serve them with a no-trespass cease-and-desist notification."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/prestigious-boston-art-museum-bans-2-its-members-racist-comments-n1010286

If the museum relied on security cameras to definitively confirm or disprove what the kids say, there's no doubt their statement about the staffer is also true.

May 24, 2019

Video of the officer "scared for his life" thereby putting

himself in more danger by forcing her out of her car.
What a piece of shit.

Her perspective is even more chilling than the police dashcam.

&feature=youtu.be
May 24, 2019

Boston Museum of Fine Arts Apologizes for Racist Remarks, Profiling 7th Grade Students

The field trip was supposed to be a reward for the kids being exceptional students and to provide them with a firsthand look at the cultures they had been studying in school, but instead, it only served as yet another cruel reminder of how pervasive racism is.

“This is really about creating a culture of inclusivity in the museum, and as an institution in the city we want to be a leader in that space,” she said. “If they feel they were treated in a way that was racist or unwelcoming, I don’t need to review video. What I’m interested in is that it doesn’t happen again,” Makeeba McCreary, MFA’s chief of learning and community engagement.

https://www.theroot.com/boston-museum-of-fine-arts-apologizes-for-racist-remark-1834977922





May 24, 2019

God Is So Not Pro-Life

Most of us probably know this but I find the following useful in bolstering my counter-arguments IRL about "what God says."

Scriptural truths

Ten biblical episodes and prophecies provide an unequivocal expression of God's attitude toward human life, especially the ontological status of "unborn children" and their pregnant mothers-to-be. Brief summaries:

• A pregnant woman who is injured and aborts the fetus warrants financial compensation only (to her husband), suggesting that the fetus is property, not a person (Exodus 21:22-25).
• The gruesome priestly purity test to which a wife accused of adultery must submit will cause her to abort the fetus if she is guilty, indicating that the fetus does not possess a right to life (Numbers 5:11-31).
• God enumerated his punishments for disobedience, including "cursed shall be the fruit of your womb" and "you will eat the fruit of your womb," directly contradicting sanctity-of-life claims (Deuteronomy 28:18,53).
• Elisha's prophecy for soon-to-be King Hazael said he would attack the Israelites, burn their cities, crush the heads of their babies and rip open their pregnant women (2 Kings 8:12).
• King Menahem of Israel destroyed Tiphsah (also called Tappuah) and the surrounding towns, killing all residents and ripping open pregnant women with the sword (2 Kings 15:16).
• Isaiah prophesied doom for Babylon, including the murder of unborn children: "They will have no pity on the fruit of the womb" (Isaiah 13:18).
• For worshiping idols, God declared that not one of his people would live, not a man, woman or child (not even babies in arms), again confuting assertions about the sanctity of life (Jeremiah 44: 7-8).
• God will punish the Israelites by destroying their unborn children, who will die at birth, or perish in the womb, or never even be conceived (Hosea 9:10-16).
• For rebelling against God, Samaria's people will be killed, their babies will be dashed to death against the ground, and their pregnant women will be ripped open with a sword (Hosea 13:16).

And good Lord! Jesus on the end times...
"Woe to pregnant women and those who are nursing" (Matthew 24:19). https://ffrf.org/component/k2/item/25602-abortion-rights
That's all he had to say!

Likewise, throughout the history of the early church into the middle-ages, there is little to no mention of abortion as a topic of great alarm – from the days of the Old Testament until modern history. Hence, there is no case to be made for a definitive Christian stance throughout history on the spiritual or moral aspects of abortion. Arguably, three of the most prominent authorities on Christian doctrine and teachings historically would be the Apostle Paul, St. Augustine in the 5th century and St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, and compared to Christian leaders today, these figures are mostly silent on the topic. Traditionally the Church was “tolerant” on abortion before the third trimester, from the time of the early church until the late 19th century.

St. Augustine is considered a Christian doctrinal authority in all respects, helping to shape the Christian religion and finer points of doctrine and practices. His statements and teaching on abortion can be summarized in this quote: “The law does not provide that the act (abortion) pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.” He was simply reiterating the traditional Jewish view…that the destruction of a fetus could be considered homicide only at a relatively late stage of fetal development.

St. Thomas Aquinas held a similar view in not calling abortion homicide until around the third trimester. Aquinas did not believe in life at conception, but rather “ensoulment.” He offered no defense for abortion, but also did not give the matter much importance in comparison to his other writings.

Abortion was very prevalent in many of the places Paul visited – we know this from other historical texts, and as he mentions in his letters, these cities were brimming with prostitution and illicit sexual activity. In fact, Paul never had a problem speaking out on any topic he believed followers of Christ should pay attention to!

There are 3,000 verses in the Bible that are concerned with social justice, taking care of the poor, the stranger, attitudes of kindness and compassion. It is dominant in the Old Testament and the New Testament and there is no ambiguity.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-truth-about-christianity-and-abortion_b_58f52ed7e4b048372700dab5
May 24, 2019

The article mentions the Clotilda as the ship

that brought the last known survivor of enslavement Cudjo Lewis, real name Oluale Kossola, to the U.S. Early last month, survivor Sally Redoshi Smith who lived longer than Cudjo was discovered. Both Redoshi and Cudjo recalled the nightmare of that journey to author/anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.

May 24, 2019

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talot

From the Back Cover
Nearly everyone is familiar with holograms—three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Two of the world's most eminent thinkers believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, an architect of our modern understanding of the brain, have developed a remarkable new way of looking at the universe. Their theory explains not only many of the unsolved puzzles of physics but also such mysterious occurrences as telepathy, out-of-body and near-death experiences, "lucid" dreams, and even religious and mystical experiences such as feelings of cosmic unity and miraculous healings.

May 17, 2019

Lois Lane Attempts Being Black For A Day. LOL...Who wouldn't?

The 70s. Oh, the 70s. That interesting time in U.S. history when white people and black people were legally segregated and everyone hated everyone. But what the 70s did spawn was inspiration for several things aside from just The Civil Rights Movement and the afro. Out of the 70s came this Superman comic, when Lois Lane wanted to see what it would be like to be black for a day. As the story goes, Lois attempts to speak to people on the black side of town, but no one will speak to her because she’s white. She figures, hey, if I was black, I would be able to report on the black community because they would trust me more. So, her lover, Superman, puts her in a machine, and viola, she’s colored for 24 hours. Things are great for Lois until she leaves her house and realizes that people are treating her different because of her skin complexion. This comic is from Lois Lane 109 and was written by, a white guy, Robert Kanigher, who probably fantasized what it would be like to spend a day black himself. Because, I mean, who wouldn’t? You know, go through racism and all.



https://afropunk.com/2011/03/lois-lane-attempts-being-black-for-a-day/
May 7, 2019

The Enslaved Girl Who Became America's First Poster Child

The daguerreotype shows a 7-year old girl. Her face is pale, her expression somber. Her elegant plaid dress, trimmed in lace, and the notebook on the cloth-covered table behind her, suggest that she comes from a prosperous family.



Though modest, the photograph taken in Boston in 1855, is actually historic. It shows not a white child but a black girl — Mary Mildred Williams — who was born into slavery. It was an image so compelling to white Americans at the time that it helped transform the abolition movement. Housed in relative obscurity at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the daguerreotype was recently rediscovered by the photographer and scholar Jessie Morgan-Owens while researching her dissertation.

“Mary’s daguerreotype was one of the first images of photographic propaganda and one of the first portraits made solely to prove a political point,” Ms. Morgan-Owens wrote. “It marks a forgotten moment in media history: when photography, introduced to the United States in 1839, first began to make its tenacious claim on our sympathies and on our political points of view.”

Mary is now the subject of Ms. Morgan-Owens’s groundbreaking book, “Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement” (W.W. Norton & Company). Mary and her family had been enslaved in Virginia. Her father, Henry Williams, escaped to Boston and worked with members of the Vigilance Committee, which provided legal and financial help for fugitive slaves, to free his family in the South. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a prominent ally, saw an opportunity in the family’s story.

After helping to secure her freedom, Mr. Sumner enlisted Mary — whose light skin reflected the legacy of generations of sexual violence against enslaved women — as a poster child for the movement. He saw in her experience a parallel with Mary Hayden Green Pike’s popular abolitionist novel, “Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible,” in which a white girl is kidnapped, her skin dyed brown, and sold into slavery. Ms. Pike’s fictional portrayal presumably motivated white northerners to turn against slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act, which required that runaway slaves be returned to their masters, by stoking the fear that even their children could be vulnerable.

By highlighting the light-skinned Mary, Mr. Sumner appealed to the prejudices of white Americans who were potentially sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. Employing her image to suggest that slavery was not bound by skin color, he transformed it into a benign icon: a symbol of an institution so malevolent that even innocent children who were practically white were swept up in it; a rallying cry against slavery through the lens of white self-interest and an excuse to feel virtuous without committing to absolute racial equality.

Mary Mildred Williams’s fame was fleeting. For many years, she worked as a clerk in the registry of deeds in Boston, and died in New York in 1921.

From Smithsonian.com "Little Ida May” faded from view after the Civil War, but I was able to piece together the basic facts of her life. She never married and did not have children. She resided mostly in Boston, near her family, working as a clerk in the registry of deeds and living as a white woman—a decision criminalized in the Jim Crow era as “passing.” The Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an abolitionist who knew her, said he “willingly lost sight of her” so she could “disappear...in the white ranks.”

“To use a 21st century metaphor, I believe stories like Mary’s offer a patch in the virulent social programming about white girlhood that American society has inherited from that time,” Ms. Morgan-Owens said. “She complicates the visual language of antislavery. Meanwhile, the ignorance and nearsightedness that occasioned this story can still be found in activist communities today, as evidenced in narratives of pity, savior complexes, and colorism, in who gets chosen to be a poster child.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/lens/photo-abolition-movement-girl-in-black-and-white.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/enslaved-girl-americas-first-poster-child-180971444/

http://www.morgan-owens.com/#/giving-circle/
May 4, 2019

Grass Is Greener Official Trailer

Rolling Stone interview Fab Five Freddy's latest project, 'Grass Is Greener,' presents the racist origins of the War on Drugs.

When did you link policies around cannabis use to musical movements?

The narrative formed in my head: From jazz and the beginnings of American music, particularly New Orleans, to when black folks migrated north to cities like New York and Chicago, and use and awareness [of weed] grew. These records spread the word. You can imagine being at some cool party and you put a nickel in the jukebox and you’re playing Cab Calloway’s “The Reefer Man” or “You’re a Viper” by Fats Waller. You were getting the message that this is the cool thing to do. And as blacks and whites came together, particularly whites came up to Harlem to experience this cultural revolution, that started to attract the ire of racists that didn’t want to see what was going on, and then reefer madness nonsense to scare the hell out of people. They were able to convince people of influence to criminalize this plant and disproportionately target people of color, particularly the musicians back then. That’s a big part of the saga of the plant in America.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/marijuana-grass-is-greener-fab-5-freddy-pot-social-justice-racist-history-824290/

Louis Armstrong was among one of the most popular Jazz musicians of the time and was open about his use of marijuana. He was also one of the first celebrities to be arrested for smoking a joint. By the 1920s, some states had begun to outlaw marijuana uses, including California. In 1930, Louis Armstrong was famously arrested outside the Cotton Club, where he was performing, for smoking a joint.

“One of the things Louis never understood was why marijuana was illegal” -Larry “Ratso” Sloman, author of ‘On the Road With Bob Dylan’, and ‘Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America’ reads one of Louis Armstrong's personal letters where he explains his desire to his manager to acquire a permit that allows him to smoke marijuana anywhere in the United States without the fear of being arrested.
https://www.rawmusictv.com/article/amp/2019/Louis-Armstrong-wanted-a-marijuana-permit-to-smoke-weed-anywhere-in-the-United-states-Grass-Is-Greener[div]

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Hometown: California
Member since: Fri Aug 29, 2008, 10:47 AM
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