People keep saying Washington DC violence from militias is a new thing to prepare for, yet who remembers 1960s and early 1970s saw repeated attacks on US capitol by violent domestic groups?
The FBI records have details of the groups involved, including one that used bombs on Capitol Hill, and how they were defeated (presumably then fading from memory).
…credit for 25 bombings—including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California Attorney General’s office, and a New York City police station.
Hearings by United States Congress, House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service in 1971 give a pretty succinct description:
On the approach to Mont Blanc, France. Photo by me, 2001.
The esteemed and prolific poet Amanda Gorman has been chosen to read at the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden
She is calling her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” while otherwise declining to preview any lines. Gorman says she was not given specific instructions on what to write, but was encouraged to emphasize unity and hope over “denigrating anyone” or declaring “ding, dong, the witch is dead” over the departure of President Donald Trump.
Sad to hear “ding, dong” has been discouraged, as I kind of like the sound of it.
…”shatter our nation rather than share it” came from reading Tweets by people who don’t want to share the country with the rest of us…
Video of her reading:
When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.
But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain.
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the West.
We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked South.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.
The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
I’ve been asked, perhaps in jest by those reading my SS blog post, whether the Columbia logo is a swastika because it also has four quadrants (it’s not).
…founded in 1938 [a year after largest shirt factory owners Paul and Marie Lamfrom were forced to escape Nazi Germany], used a simple wordmark until the introduction of the geometric emblem in 1978 [by Gertrude Boyle, daughter of Lamfrom and wife of Columbia President who died suddenly]. It was a rhombus, composed of eight equal rectangles, which aimed to represent the woven textile.
It should be noted here that 1978 was a year after a company named Pinwheel was founded to create children’s television. Two years later Pinwheel was renamed Nickelodeon (as you probably would recognize it today), but Columbia kept their pinwheel logo.
I mean what if Gertrude, like a lot of people in the 1970s including a children’s network, thought that pinwheels meant fun and pretty things? And she wanted to convey woven threads so she gave hers a textile look? Here are some other similar examples:
In that case what we see may be little more than accidental framing, which reminds me of the many examples of unfortunate errors like this one by Target.
Arguments against mine go something like this: from certain angles and in exceptional cases the Columbia pinwheel could in fact resemble a swastika, such as when poorly knitted.
Here’s someone clearly shocked to realize just how bad Columbia manufacturing (or doctored images) can get — and hopefully nobody really wants to argue here low quality and sloppy knits are carefully planned by a textile company:
It’s a terrible outcome, yet I maintain this is far too apocryphal for people who fled Nazi Germany to restart their lives and rebuild the same business in America… their daughter to then use the symbol of her parents’ persecutors as their logo, which shows when product quality declines.
She may have been unintentionally influenced by her parents’ pain of survival under swastikas, or intentionally influenced through the pleasure of pinwheels; in either case or even both I see nothing yet to justify the case she wanted to spread Nazism through inexpensive low-quality white socks.
Dare I say… it’s a stretch.
I mean that’s a bit like asking me if every inexpensively made (unpredictable outcome) single pinwheel or rotational quadrant we see (common design in history) is a swastika. For example, here’s the Stanford-born Sun Microsystems logo in 1982. Hard not to assume he designed this while staring at the Columbia logo on his socks.
Sun’s “rotational symmetric ambigram” credited to Stanford professor Vaughan Pratt.
And here’s another Stanford-born technology company logo (Google).
I’ve roundly criticized Stanford, yet I do not see in any way how these pinwheel logos of theirs symbolize that school’s genocidal heritage.
In that context, some symbols are just so obviously obvious (and meant as such) we shouldn’t even have to discuss them.
Clint Watts today tweeted a report to Telegram worth mentioning:
.@telegram – there’s an issue on your platform, a channel posing as the President (presumably a fake or hacked account) is inciting violence and advocating that Biden should be killed. The channel has >350K members. Might want to take a look. (trump_33)
33 means the KKK, as documented in federal trial for 33 year old Alexander DeFelice.
“The eleventh letter of the alphabet is K,” Nill told the jury explaining that “three times 11 is 33.”
It’s not a swastika, it’s as bad or worse because of context.
That 33 alone should have been the red flag loooooong before inciting violence and advocating death started to flow, and even before it had followers.
This isn’t rocket science.
In a similar vein, hate groups in America are waving flags and using symbols that very clearly show intent to do harm.
Armed ‘militias’ are illegal. Will authorities finally crack down…? 29 states have criminal statutes outlawing private militias…. These laws have been tested in the Supreme Court dating back to 1886…
It’s not that hard to see where this line is drawn and when speech is not protected in America. Don’t believe anyone who says speech is unrestricted. That is false and the courts have said so many times in conviction of criminals trying to hide behind speech laws.
We’re way past the time to reject the platitudes of seemingly incompetent big tech security officers who’ve argued that telling them to block imminent harms makes their product Orwellian.
Not having power sure can suck. We should aim to keep power flowing unless we’re talking about being killed by power. Then shut it down BEFORE the killings.
…his company had been able to limit ISIS’ use of their network, technical and legal reasons meant they couldn’t apply the very same measures to far-right extremists. But after several more social media-linked mass killings — Christchurch, El Paso, etc. — what he’d said was “impossible” suddenly became possible.
When you look at all the Doppler radar-filled nose cones that used to be crossing the planet and reporting detailed weather, and then the empty skies today… you might be inclined to think forecasting will suffer.
I laid awake one night thinking about this but I haven’t seen it discussed widely yet.
If weather predictions are less accurate now with flights reduced, I suspect nobody anticipated losing a huge number of live airborne sensors.
Update: I should have waited to post this. A quick bit of searching found at least two studies in mid-to-late 2020 saying forecasts have been seriously affected.
COVID19 pandemic imperils weather forecasting of surface temperature, RH, pressure, and wind speed due to the lack of aircraft observations during the global lockdown.
And here’s another from The International Air Transport Association (IATA) and World Meteorological Organization.
“One of the many unfortunate aspects of the COVID-19 crisis has been the severe loss – of up to 90% – of aircraft-derived meteorological data as a result of the steep decline in airline operations and passenger flights since March 2020,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas. “Meteorological services and other data providers have tried to offset this loss, but there has been a measurable negative impact on the accuracy of weather forecasts as a result of AMDAR data reductions,” said Professor Taalas.
