A report by the National Association of Scholars, written by Peter W. Wood and Dion J. Pierre.

This study of racial segregation at Yale University is part of a larger project examining neo-segregation in American higher education in the period 1964-2019. During those fifty-five years, many American colleges and universities that initially sought to achieve racial integration found themselves inadvertently on a path to a new form of racial segregation. In the old form of segregation, colleges excluded black students or severely limited the number who were admitted. Similar policies were applied to other minority groups. By contrast, in the new form of segregation (neo-segregation), colleges eagerly recruit black and other minority students, but actively foster campus arrangements that encourage these students to form separate social groups on campus. Manifestations of this policy include racially separate student orientations, racially-identified student centers, racially-identified student counseling, racially-identified academic programs, racially separate student activities, racially-specific political agendas, racially-exclusive graduation ceremonies, and racially-organized alumni groups. In some cases, colleges also encourage racially exclusive student housing.

Statue of Lee removed from Charlottesville, VA park.

CBS19:

Charlottesville Circuit Judge Richard Moore has ruled that the statues are war monuments, which are protected under state law. That likely means the city doesn’t have the legal right to take them down.

In his nine page ruling, Moore cites the fact that both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are depicted in their military uniforms and on horses associated with their time in the Civil War.

“I believe that defendants have confused or conflated 1) what the statues are with 2) the intentions or motivations of some involved in erecting them, or the impact that they might have on some people and how they might make some people feel,” Moore writes. “But that does not change what they are.”

Moore finds the issue to be so clear-cut that “if the matter went to trial on this issue and a jury were to decide that they are not monuments or memorials to veterans of the civil war, I would have to set such verdict aside as unreasonable…”

The lawsuit was filed after Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statue of Lee in early 2017. City councilors Mike Signer, Kathy Galvin and Wes Bellamy are named individually for their roles in that vote, as are former councilors Bob Fenwick and Kristin Szakos.

While legal analysts have said this ruling could sink the city’s defense, Moore notes that this ruling doesn’t guarantee the plaintiffs will prevail.

He still has several other motions under consideration.

Plaintiffs spokesperson Buddy Weber says plaintiffs are pleased, but also cited the remaining motions as questions that still need to be answered.

In an email, city spokesperson Brian Wheeler says the judge now has to decide whether the city has to pay damages and attorneys fees and whether that question will go to trial in September.

In his ruling, Moore writes that he hopes to rule on remaining motions in the next month.

Why will Yale cost $72,800 next year? Chief Answer: the proliferation of bureaucracy and administrative positions.

University title generator (find your next position here).

Two long years ago
the probe began and many thought
that someday it would make them smile.
And those who said it had no chance
were scowled upon and seen askance
so desperate was the hope to see a trial.

But February made them shiver
as it came clear he’d not deliver.
The news that they desired
was not to be acquired.

I know that many people cried
when they read the news, it hurt their pride,
so deeply in the pipe dream mired
the day collusion died.

So bye, bye to the collusion lie,
Russian Agents, Putin’s Puppet and a plot to deny.
From each new event how the conjecture would fly.
Can they let it go and just let it die?
Let it go and just let it die.

We all know that he’s corrupt
and his list of crimes is building up
so I’ll just list them down below.
While emoluments could’ve kicked the goal
collusion was their chosen roll
investigating all of it real slow.

Well, the Media then lost their mind
as they blundered backward fully blind.
Collusion became news,
evidence not vital for clues.

The other news stories all were then chucked
while collusion filled every news truck
But I knew they ran out of luck
the day collusion died.

But they kept singing
Bye, bye he’s a Russian ally
Putin Puppet, Russian agent and a treasonous spy
and every day, more wacky theories would fly.
Time to let it go and just let it to die.
Let it go and just let it die.

Now when Mueller issued his report
the media could not contort it
to save face though they did try.
They lost all credibility.
Embarrassed is what they should be,
and the damage done they cannot deny.

They gave victory to the president,
validation as if heaven sent.
The courtroom was adjourned,
no verdict was returned.
And now when he screams about fake news
he’ll be correct thanks to their ruse.
The “Witch Hunt” he’ll rightfully accuse
the day collusion died.

‘cause they were singing
Bye, bye he’s a Russian ally
Putin Puppet, Russian agent and a treasonous spy
And every day, more crazy theories would fly
time to let it go and just let it to die.
let it go and just let it die.

I met a girl who sang the blues.
She she asked me for some happy news.
I offered but she just turned away.
Those who followed actual facts
instead of “liberal media” hacks
would know that Mueller knew the only way.

He farmed out criminal indictments
to seven districts, there’s excitement,
all of them pardon-proof,
not like the collusion spoof.
So carefully he did anoint
a prosecution starting point
the outcome couldn’t disappoint
the day collusion died.

Yet they’re still singing
Bye, bye he’s a Russian ally
Putin Puppet, Russian agent and a treasonous spy.
The Russian hysteria was misplaced outcry.
Time to let it go and just let it die.
Let it go and just let it die.

So, bye, bye to the collusion lie,
Collusion obsession-gave the press a black eye.
And if they persist the damage will amplify
Time to let it go and just let it die.

HT: Vanderleun.

Sarah Lewis is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently finishing her current book project on race and photography under contract with Harvard University Press

“We have a problem. Your jacket is lighter than your face,” the technician said from the back of the one-thousand-person amphitheater-style auditorium. “That’s going to be a problem for lighting.” …

It was an odd comment that reverberated through the auditorium, a statement of the obvious that sounded like an accusation of wrongdoing. Another technician standing next to me stopped adjusting my microphone and jolted in place. The phrase hung in the air, and I laughed to resolve the tension in the room then offered back just the facts:

“Well, everything is lighter than my face. I’m black.”

“Touché,” said the technician organizing the event. She walked toward the lighting booth. My smile dropped upon realizing that perhaps the technician was actually serious. I assessed my clothes — a light beige jacket and black pants worn many times before in similar settings.

As I walked to the greenroom, the executive running the event came over and apologized for what had just occurred, but to me, the exchange was a gift.

My work looks at how the right to be recognized justly in a democracy has been tied to the impact of images and representation in the public realm. It examines how the construction of public pictures limits and enlarges our notion of who counts in American society. It is the subject of my core curriculum class at Harvard University. It also happened to be the subject of my presentation that day. …

What had happened in this exchange? It can be hard to technically [capture] light brown skin against light colors. Yet, instead of seeking a solution, the technician had decided that my body was somehow unsuitable for the stage.

Her comment reminded me of the unconscious bias that was built into photography. By categorizing light skin as the norm and other skin tones as needing special corrective care, photography has altered how we interact with each other without us realizing it.

Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good. It has translated into the color-balancing of digital technology. In the mid-1990s, Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three women, one black, one white, and one Asian, and later included a Latina model, in an attempt intended to help camera operators calibrate skin tones. These were not adopted by everyone since they coincided with the rise of digital photography. The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions.

It took complaints from corporate furniture and chocolate manufacturers in the 1960s and 1970s for Kodak to start to fix color photography’s bias. Earl Kage, Kodak’s former manager of research and the head of Color Photo Studios, received complaints during this time from chocolate companies saying that they “weren’t getting the right brown tones on the chocolates” in the photographs. Furniture companies also were not getting enough variation between the different color woods in their advertisements. Concordia University professor Lorna Roth’s research shows that Kage had also received complaints before from parents about the quality of graduation photographs — the color contrast made it nearly impossible to capture a diverse group — but it was the chocolate and furniture companies that forced Kodak’s hand. Kage admitted, “It was never black flesh that was addressed as a serious problem at the time.”

13.4% of Americans are of African American descent. Sarah Lewis acknowledges that the manufacturers’ design choices were dictated by the market, but nonetheless ignores the entire absence of intentional bias to base an entire book of complaint about, boo hoo! the racial injustice of it all.

All this is just another case of a spokesperson for Black America identifying the reality of a majority to which it does not belong as an intrinsic injustice and affront.

The reality is, of course, that almost no one in America belongs to the perfect American majoritarian conceptual ideal. Essentially only a tiny minority of Americans of 17th Century New England descent who are rich and who attended an elite boarding school followed by an Ivy League College followed by an equally prestigious professional school, and who successfully pursued a top tier career and belong to all the right clubs is truly a privileged insider.

All the rest of us are some kind of outsider, looking in. Even if you went to Harvard or Yale, chances are that you were born Catholic or Jewish or a member of some declassé Protestant denomination, not in New England, not to a wealthy or professional family, went to public school, and have never acquired membership in the Links, the Brook, or Bohemian Grove. These days, 1579 freshman enter Yale, and only 15 get tapped for Skull and Bones.

Even Travis McGee, tall, handsome, a hero with a houseboat, complains:

I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each other’s faces, all truth and trust.
And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire.

Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when the most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.

Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. “But we are all like that!” he said. “That’s the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn’t you know?”

—The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald, 1973

We are all like that, but some of us bitch and moan out loud a lot more than the rest of us.

——————

Kate Smith statue outside Xfinity live!.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

–George Orwell, “1984”

Ramon Casas i Carbó, “Interior al aire libre (Outdoor interior), 1892, La Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Peggy Noonan, in the WSJ, blamed Trump for the failed Coup (!).

Don Surber responded:

She wrote, “I’m thinking of the old ambassadors, mostly men in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They’re woven into the town, solid citizens, friends of journalists, occasionally sources, and they know things. They’re mostly retired, and at lunch at clubs in town often begin sentences with ‘And so I told Zbig . . .’ There’s a bit of lost glory with them, but they care about America, are personally invested in it, love it with an old-school love, and respect systems, knowing that creativity — in art, science and diplomacy — can only be born within a certain immediate order.”

Zbig is Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski, who advised LBJ and was Carter’s national security adviser. On his watch, we doubled down on Vietnam (LBJ) and lost Iran and the Panama Canal under Carter.

But he made the cocktail circuit.

President Donald John Trump does not curry DC’s favor. He does not need them. He is a garish playboy billionaire who saved Manhattan only to be resented by Manhattan’s elitists who look down on his Outer Borough ways.

He is saving the country and the people who will in the long term benefit most — the elitists — are spitting angry.

She wrote, “Pretty quickly and to the entire edifice of Washington, it became clear Donald Trump was not a Jacksonian shock to the system, which is what his supporters think he was. He was a daily system overload, a one-man frying of the grid.”

If one man, even a president, can overload a grid, then you need a better grid.

But the fact is, they did this to themselves and refuse to accept responsibility. Anyone can cut you off in traffic; you decide whether to turn that into Road Rage.

We know what she (and they) decided.

Noonan wrote, “Their fears about him weren’t assuaged by trusty old hands inside the White House because those hands weren’t there. They didn’t join the administration, because they didn’t want their résumés tainted or they thought wise counsel would never be heeded. Or because they’d signed a letter opposing him in 2016 and would never be forgiven.

“So a lot of good people didn’t come in or weren’t allowed in. And those who did work for the president came to seem strange — fierce, emotional, half mad themselves. There were good people there — the generals were solid — but one by one they left.”

The message from DC is clear: work for The Donald and you end your career.

So much for her illusion of this crowd being public servants. If you love your country, you serve when called.

Hers is a roundabout way to blame President Trump for the attempted coup by the Deep State and the Fourth Estate, which awarded her a Pulitzer for her contributions to this effort.

She wrote, “It was all this — the president’s disdain, his well-fed resentments — that not only left Washington thinking Mr. Trump was crazy. It made Washington itself a fertile field for crazy. It was in this atmosphere that the Steele dossier, with its whacked out third-rate spy fiction, became believable, that sober-minded officials reportedly wondered if they should wear wires when they met with the president.

“He destabilized the entire town.”

No. The town’s Road Rage against him comes from their refusal to accept the will of the people and the policies that serve America and not Washington.

She is rooting for Democrats to offer a safe choice who will calm the waters, this shaming the legacy of Ronald Reagan for whom she once worked. Oh well, she always said Dan Rather was her favorite boss.

Hers is a cry from Versailles for Sloppy Joe Biden to save them from this Orange Man who wants to Make America Great Again.

Biden’s slogan is “America’s Coming Back Like We Used To Be.”

By America, he means the people who chatted with Zbig at cocktail parties.

But that is not going to happen. It’s over.

RTWT

Peggy, Catholic, Irish, and of working-class origin, is still bedazzled by the charm, prestige, and life-style of the American Elite Establishment. She fails to recognize that they are too commonly just like Scott Fitzgerald’s Buchanans:

““They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

(Via viral email from Hometown Friend):

FINALLY you can retire to Florida where…
1. You eat dinner at 3:15 in the afternoon.
2. All purchases include a coupon of some kind – even houses and cars.
3. Everyone can recommend an excellent cardiologist, dermatologist, proctologist, podiatrist, or orthopedist.
4. Road construction never ends anywhere in the state.
5. Cars in front of you often appear to be driven by headless people.

Why not the Cryptkeeper?

The current democrat frontrunner, Joe Biden was born November 20, 1942. He is currently 76 years old. The month of the next presidential election, he’ll be 78. If he were elected and ran for a second term in 2024, he’d be 82. If he were re-elected and served out two terms he’d be leaving office at 86.

Another prominent contender, Bernie Sanders, was born September 8, 1941. Bernie was born before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor! He’s a year older than Biden. In 2020, Bernie will be 79, in 2024, 83. He’d leave office, after two terms, aged 87(!)

Now, bear in mind, that Donald Trump, born June 14, 1946, set a new record as the oldest man, at age 70, elected president in History.

Ronald Reagan was considered remarkably well-preserved and was constantly mocked for his age by his opponents and accused of being senile and of napping through meetings and so on. Reagan, born February 6, 1911, was 69 when elected in 1980. He left office at age 78, the same age Joe Biden would be when entering. Ronald Reagan was, indubitably, an extraordinarily vigorous and physically gifted man, but he was widely recognized as slowing down and showing his age in the last couple of years of his presidency. Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 83.

Obviously rich men and big cheese public officials live longer, but the average life expectancy of male Americans is only 76.9.

What are the odds that either of these two, if elected, would even live out two terms? Not great, I’d say.

And even assuming President Joe or Bernie lives through nearly an entire decade from now, think about it, what are the odds that he will remain healthy and lucid enough to cope with the stresses, responsibilities, and long hours of the Presidency?

Most people in their 80s, if not already “shaking hands with the groundhog,” as Leo Hobbs used to put it, are nodding away their days, napping in their rocking chairs, not in the White House, but in some assisted living facility.

All this shows, I’d argue, that people younger than 60 have no clear idea what old age is really like, and just how many things can go wrong for you. And, it shows, too, just how feckless and irresponsible democrats really are.

BBC:

Every detail inside the out-of-time barn carried hidden meaning. There were flickering candles elevated on spikes, all thinly spread out to help workers navigate the blackness without fear of treading on the prized crop. There were shadowy hoes propped against the brick walls to help mulch the earth. There was the outline of gas propane heaters, and a sprinkler system to intensify the heat and humidity in the dark. There were around half a million buds – all cultivated in rows and all making groaning sounds as they germinated at an unnatural speed. It was a riveting exhibition of Mother Nature at work, yet a display teetering on the edge of the surreal. And one all-the-more glorious for rarely being seen by outsiders.

Come to West Yorkshire during the rhubarb harvest in mid-winter and you can expect to hear tales of this strange agricultural ritual. Here, land gathers into a swathe of greenbelt that points to the cities of Bradford, Leeds and Wakefield. Some 23 sq km in area, the realm is punctuated by the odd cathedral and castle and framed by plunging dales to the north and the gently sloping foothills of the Pennines to the west. But it is also a pocket of frozen, flinty soil with high rainfall where one of the world’s most complex vegetables grows in abundance. And it would be a peculiar place even without the name ‘the Rhubarb Triangle’. …

“Rhubarb has been called ‘God’s great gift’,” said Oldroyd Hulme, who is also known as the ‘high priestess of rhubarb’ for her knowledge on the subject. “Watch and you can see the plants shooting towards the light – just as we would warm our hands on a fire.”

A notoriously fickle vegetable to harvest, Yorkshire forced rhubarb is anything but easy to grow. It thrives in the county’s cold winters, but if the soil is too wet, it can’t be planted. If the temperature is too hot, it won’t grow; and 10 or more frosts are needed before a farmer can even think about forcing it. Only then can horticulturalists remove the heavy roots from the field, then clean and replant them inside the forcing sheds where photosynthesis is limited, encouraging glucose stored in the roots to stimulate growth. It demands patience, expertise and good fortune, and, ultimately, it is engineered for maximum taste: once deprived of light, the vegetable is forced to use the energy stored in its roots, making it far sweeter than the normal variety.

RTWT