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vanilla-voyeur · 9 months

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Kinda annoyed with the assumption that all socialists are just economically illiterate dumdums who would realize the error of their ways if they'd just take an Econ 101 class. Well I have taken introductory econ classes. I've taken multiple econ classes. The university I went to has one of the top 10 economics programs in the US. I originally went into college wanting to be an econ major before I switched to CS. I got to the point of taking one upper division class right before we started getting into the calculus.

The problem with how economics is taught in school is that it takes an approach of capitalist realism that taints their interpretation of everything. Everything that supports the ends of capitalism is assumed to be good. Everything that doesn't maximize efficiency is assumed to be bad. Anyone who advocates for something that has been shown not to maximize efficiency is a big dumdum who doesn't understand economics. There is no question or discussion about whether maximizing efficiency is something we always want in every case.

We got taught that price floors and price ceilings and taxes and regulations cause deadweight loss. Deadweight loss is bad for maximizing efficiency. All those politicians who want rent control and minimum wage and increasing taxes on the 1% are big dumdums who don't understand basic economics. Are there any trade-offs where it's worth it to increase deadweight loss for some other benefit? Not considered.

I do remember getting taught that monopolies are bad. Monopolies also cause deadweight loss. Notably, it is incredibly hard to be a billionaire without being the CEO of a monopoly. Billionaires are causing deadweight loss. Any politician who's against trust busting is an economically illiterate dumdum. If you don't have a problem with billionaires then you hate the basic principles of capitalist competition. (Or alternatively you're an economically illiterate dumdum.)

There are many forms of economic efficiency, but the only one I was taught in school was Pareto efficiency. None of my professors mentioned any other variant. Pareto efficiency was treated as a law of the universe. It's just a theory by some guy. He made some pretty math equations that work under idealized conditions. What if he's wrong? What about all the other models that think he's wrong? What if he's right but he didn't consider things like institutions of oppression? (19th century white Parisian nobility are well known for taking into account how racism, sexism, classism, etc affect society.)

I think the order of classes is suspicious too. First you get simplified microeconomics then simplified macroeconomics then increase the math of each while still being simplified, all before talking about where real life capitalist countries are failing at approaching the idealized model. By that time, the capitalist realism has already set in. We should get to the differences between the graphs and the reality by the third class bare minimum. Perfect competition isn't possible. It's a utopia. Does that actually mean that we should be trying to get closer to it? What sort of trade-offs should we consider when we're departing from perfect competition? We never discussed it.

To the extent of my knowledge, my university never had a class on idealized socialism or communism or any other economic model but focuses entirely on idealized capitalism until upper division classes. The only classes that acknowledge socialism exists compares existing capitalist countries to existing socialist countries. By then, you've already drank the Kool aid of how capitalism could be at its best and it turns out theoretical capitalism is more attractive than existing totalitarian dictatorships. What would a socialist democracy look like? They never bother to ask.

You can't compare and contrast something you don't know anything about. It's all capitalist realism. Anyone who hasn't taken a Socialist Economics 101 class where they draw the simplified graphs and they explain the concepts is an economically illiterate dumdum too.

#Capitalist economics #Socialism #Communism #Capitalist realism #Anti capitalism #That said. many US American “socialists” are economically illiterate dumdums #Yall are swimming so deep in capitalist realism soup you dont realize that your “anti-capitalism” is just capitalist reform #If you think Norway is a socialist country then you know nothing about socialism and nothing about Norway #“They have universal healthcare” Bruh everyone has universal healthcare

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years

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I think one of the major problems with the modern left is a focus on cultural analysis instead of economics. When I say culture I EXPLICITLY DON'T MEAN racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and Indigenous rights/decolonization.

Stupidpol and their ilk are reactionaries and should be treated as such. What I'm talking about is the focus on things like analyzing TV shows or picking over the latest issues of the NYT op-ed column, the sort a caricatures you see on Chapo.

Zizek is emblematic of this syndrome. He's a theorist of ideology, a film critic, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and complete reactionary on gender and immigration issues, and he's widely considered to be one of preeminent Marxist scholars alive. And, and this is important, Zizek does fuck all actual economic material analysis. Mark Fisher, who was an excellent Marxist theorist, covers almost exactly the same ground from a different perspective, and you can repeat this across academia.

Inside academia the problem has gotten so bad that the best economic analysis is being carried out by the fucking post-humanists. Take, for example, Anna Tsing's excellent Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Tsing is a brilliant theorist but she spends most of her time writing about multi-species interactions between humans and mushrooms. Carbon Democracy, one of the best theories of the carbon economy ever written, is by a left-Foucaldian.

There are some exceptions to this, Andreas Malm's Carbon Capital is wonderful, Riot Strike Riot is great and I have to mention the group I call The Other Chicago School, Endnotes, whose infrequent analysis is a breath of fresh air. But Endnotes isn't particularly well read even inside the academy, which takes back outside the ivory tower in the dismal mess that is what passes for popular left "economics."

I want to go back to Occupy for a second because what happened there is indicative of the problem. Occupy, at least technically, actually had a theory of economics that went beyond "neoliberalism bad, welfare state good." And it's really not as bad as its critics have since accused it of being. Graeber's "the 1% meme" was supposed to be part of an MMT analysis of the ability of banks to create money out of nothing, see Richard A. Werner. The theory then goes with the ability to create money out of nothing the question becomes who should actually have that power. The 1% are the people who control that power and use that it to gain wealth and their wealth to gain power.

This is essentially what happened after 2008 and it relates to an entire analysis of the politics of debt and war that's captured really well in the last chapter of Debt, The First 5000 Years, drawing from Hudson's excellent Super Imperialism. Again, not bad, and not the disaster it became in Liberal hands. But note two things:

1, His work is intentionally detached from the production process- Graeber uses a value theory of labor about the social reproduction of human beings. That theory is really interesting and I'll leave a link to his It is Value that Brings Universes into Being here. But Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and his recent work is mostly composed of a set of theories of bureaucracy.

And, don't get me wrong, I really like Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, and it's possible to build an economic theory out of them, but almost no one actually does. And this gets us back to my second point about Occupy and economics.

2, Not a single other person I have ever met, including people who were in Occupy, have ever actually heard the theory behind the 1%. Part of this has to do with Graeber’s rather admirable desire to not become an intellectual vanguardist. But, I cannot overemphasize how much of this is a result of the left's retreat into an analysis of consumerism instead of capitalism and its further insistence that the entire fucking global economy can be explained by chapters 1-3 of Capital and this just isn't a "read more theory" rant, it's not like reading the rest of Capital is going to help you here. But even that's better than what's actually happened, which is people reading Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the Communist Manifesto and trying to derive economic theory from that, or getting lost in a Gramscian or psychoanalytic miasma trying to explain why revolution didn't happen. But we can't keep fucking doing this.

If we do we're just going to keep getting stuck in endless fucking inane arguments, one of which is about which countries are Imperialist or not based on trying to read the minds of world leaders, and the other of which is a bunch of racists trying to argue that they're actually "class-first" Marxists and that if we don't say slurs and be mean to disabled people we're going to lose the "real working class," which is somehow composed only of construction workers banging steel bars.

So let's stop letting them do that. One of the reasons Supply Chains and the Human Condition is so great is that it describes how the performance of gender and racial roles creates the self super-exploitation at the heart of global capitalism. Race and gender cannot be ignored in favor of some kind of "class-first" faux-leftist bullshit. THEY ARE LITERALLY THE DRIVER OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.

Most of the global supply chain has been transformed into entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs (see the countless accounts of Chinese garment factory workers who dream of getting into the fashion industry and who attempt to supplement their meager income by setting up stalls in local marketplaces to sell watches and clothes).

The fact that global supply chains have reverted to the kind of small family firms that Marx and Engels thought would disappear is a MASSIVE problem for any kind of global workers movement, because it means that the normal wage relation that is supposed to form the basis of the proletariat isn't actually the governing social experience of a large swath of what should be the proletariat, either because they're the owners of small firms contracted by larger firms like Nike who would, in an older period of capitalism, have just been workers or because the people who work for those firms are incapable of actually demanding wage increases from the capitalists because they're separated by a layer from the firms who control real capital, and thus are essentially unable to make the kind of wage demands that would normally constitute class consciousness because the contractors they work for really don't have any money. These contractors are in no way independent.

Multinational corporations set everything from their buying prices to their labor conditions to what their workers say to lie to labor inspectors. The effect of replacing much of the proletariat with micro-entrepreneurs is devastating.

The class-for-itself that's supposed to serve as the basis of social revolution has decomposed entirely. Endnotes has a great analysis of how this happened covering more time, but the unified working class is dead. In its place have come a series of incoherent struggles: The Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares, the current wave of revolutions and riots stretching from Sudan to Peru to Puerto Rico- all of them share an economic basis translated into demands on the state. We see housing struggles, anti-police riots, occupations, climate strikes, and a thousand other forms of struggle that don't seem to cohere into a traditional social revolution and WE HAVE NO ANSWER.

I don't have one either, but we're not going to get out of this mess by trying to read the tea leaves of the CCP or analyzing how Endgame is the ruling class inculcating us into accepting Malthusian Ecofascism.

I want to emphasize YOU DON'T NEED TO SHARE MY ECONOMIC ANALYSIS to develop one, I'm obviously wrong on a lot of things and so is everyone else. The point is that we need to start somewhere.

There are other benefits to reading economics stuff even if it can be boring sometimes, like being able to dunk on nerd shitlibs and reactionaries who do the "take Econ-101" meme by being able to prove that their entire discipline is bunk. Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is absolutely hilarious for this, he literally proves that perfect competition relies on the same math that you use to "prove" that the earth is flat.

Or learning that the notion that markets distribute goods optimally is based on the assumption that what is basically a form of fucking state socialism exists, and that the supply demand curve is fucking bullshit. Here's a page from Debunking Economics looking at the socialism claim, it fucking rules, and it's the result of the fact that neo-classical economics and central planning were developed together. Kantorovich and Koopmans shared a Nobel Prize.

But wait, there's more! We can PROVE that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST. Do you have any idea how hard you can own libs with facts and logic if you can demonstrate that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST?

But seriously, if you go outside of the Marxist tradition there are all sorts of fun and useful things you can find in post-Keyensian circles and so on and so forth. I'm a huge fan of Karen Ho's Liquidated, an Ethnography of Wall Street/Liquidated_%20An%20Ethnography%20of%20Wall%20Street%20-%20Karen%20Ho.pdf) which looks at how the people at banks and investment firms actually behave and, oh boy, is it bad news (they're literally incapable of making long-term decisions which is wonderful in the face of climate change).

Oh, and also, all of the bankers are essentially indoctrinated into thinking they're the smartest people in the world, so that's fun.

This may sound like I'm shitting on Marxism, and I sort of am, but there's Marxist stuff coming out that I absolutely love! @chuangcn is a good example of what I think the benchmark for leftist economics and historical analysis should be.

Chuang responded to the call put out by Endnotes to cut "The Red Thread of History," or essentially to stop fucking arguing about 1917, 1936, 1968 and so forth and look at material conditions instead of trying to find our favorite faction and accuse literally everyone else of betraying the revolution, and then imagining what we would have done in their shoes. The present is different from the past and we need to organize for this economic and social reality, not 1917's.

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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBM3CXoAA7Qmx.jpg

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Chuang produced an incredibly statically and sociologically detailed account of the Chinese socialist period in issue 1 and the transition to capitalism in the soon to be put online issue 2 that focuses on shifts in production and investment and shifts in China's class-structure and how urban workers, peasants, factory mangers, technicians, and cadre members reacted to those movements and shaped each others decisions and mobilizations. They largely avoid discussions of factional battles of the upper level of the CCP, which dominate liberal and communist accounts of the period and produce, in supposed communists from David Harvey to Ajit Singh, a Great Man theory of history.

Instead, they trace how strikes and peasant protests shaped the CCP's decision making and how the choices of people like Mao and Deng Xiaoping were limited by material conditions, in this case by their production bottleneck.

What's great about Chuang is that their work is so rich in sociological detail that you don't need to agree with them at all about what communism is and so on for their account to be useful, and they force us to think about the world from the perspective of competing classes bound by economic reality, instead of the black-and-white "good state/bad state," "good ruler/bad ruler," discourse that dominates our understanding of both imperialism and the global economy.

I'm just going to end this with a TL;DR: Cut the read thread of history and stop fucking arguing about 1917, use economic theory to dunk on Stupidpol and shitlibs. When you talk about "material conditions" talk about the production process, supply chains, capital movements and so on, not which states are good and bad (the bourgeoisie is a global class friends), recognize that strategies need to be built around current economic and social conditions, WHICH ARE INSEPARABLE FROM RACE AND GENDER, climate change is more complicated than the 100 companies meme (I only touched on this but please read Fossil Capital and Carbon Democracy), and in general try to learn more about different schools of economics and social theory, I swear reading something that wasn't written in 1848 isn't going to kill you.

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bywandandsword · 4 years

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Forcing myself to finish my homework is almost physically painful at this point. It’s not hard, just not mentally stimulating. It’s the chapter on gender (read: women) and delinquency. And it’s like blah blah, Freud being an idiot, blah blah socialization and sexuality, blah blah, liberal vs. critical feminism, blah blah patriarchy. Riveting. Totally not stuff I studied in a 101 class to the point where having an entire chapter devoted to the patriarchy without mention of any other factors seems almost...idk, trite? Not that it isn’t important and I get why the chapter is here, every aspect of society is as effected by it as it is by racism or capitalism, but it relies so much on binary thinking (ugh) and is so obvious and I was taught this stuff so long ago that refocusing on it exclusively seems like Baby’s First Societal Analysis. It’s not, there’s researchers,like Joanne Belknap (who is fantastic for feminist analysis of globalization, btw) who’ve spent their entire careers focusing exclusively on this topic. But it feels that way because of the trajectory of my own study

#Sword speaks

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thehelpfulrev · 4 years

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Healing 101: The New Normal

I want to talk about the idea of ‘getting back to normal.’ We’ve talked a lot about ‘getting back to normal’ these past months and there are people far more eloquent than I who have talked about why we need to not return to what we had considered normal, and how capitalism, racism, white supremacy and a lack of respect for anyone but ourselves has brought us to this breaking point. If that’s what you’d like to learn more about this is not the post for you.

What I want to talk about is what happens after trauma. We have all suffered a trauma these months, in many deep and varying ways. We have all suffered trauma and grief throughout out lives. We are told that ‘you’ll be okay’, ‘it just takes time’, ‘we all heal eventually.’

Which are lies.

See, whenever we go through trauma or grief, whenever we suffer, our ‘normal’ becomes elevated. We have a ‘baseline’ at which we live our daily lives. We all know it, when know when it’s off, we know when we’re better than normal, when we’re worse than ‘normal.’ But, when we suffer and grieve that foundation gets rattled and for a long time we are unable to imagine, never mind return, to what we once thought of as ‘normal’.

The difficult truth is- we never will.

Once we have grieved or suffered in ways that challenge us in ourselves, or touch us deeply, we will never be the people we were before. We can’t be. And, ya know what?

THAT’S OKAY.

Because what will happen is healing. We will work and heal and work and heal and work and heal in a sometimes endless cycle and one day we may realize we have settled into a ‘new normal’. It doesn’t feel the same as the old, maybe there’s a level of just passive grief that we don’t even notice, but is there, maybe there’s pain, maybe there’s a lingering sorrow, maybe there’s any number of things, but what it comes down to is that our life has changed. It will not be the same. And this is our new plateau of neutrality we have reached.

I have a beloved family member who has MS, we’ve had this diagnosis for probably about five years. Just the other month she was talking with a few people about what her plans were in terms of picking up a career, picking up hobbies, what she wants to do now that her children are out of the house and living successfully on their own.

That was the first time in five years we had ever heard her talk like that without a single mention of the MS. She had reached her new normal. Her journey with and through MS, the grief and struggle she faced, does face and will continue to face is not over, but she had settled into her new normal, the new process of life where she now saw the way forward, beyond and past. Her life is no longer consumed by her diagnosis, her diagnosis is now a part of her life that she carries with her, but is not all of her anymore.

We have all found dozens, hundreds of New Normals. We all know this process of grief. For those of you that don’t? Blessings to you. I uplift and cherish you and hope that if and when it comes you find life and love and support whenever and however you need it.

The purpose of this post is two fold- one to give you the language about this idea, because sometimes putting a name to it makes it easier to understand and confront. So here it is. The New Normal. The life you live that considers and accommodates your grief, but no longer revolves around it.

And second to tell you, in no uncertain terms- this is normal. And this can be the process. And it is okay if you are never really okay again. It is okay if your life never feels like it did before. You are not broken. You are not lost. You are not wrong. You are no more wounded than you want or need to be in any moment. Sometimes, most times, there is no ‘being okay’ like you were before.

The process of healing is long and complicated and hard. Tomorrow’s post will be about the journey of healing. I hope you come back to see it.

Go in Peace, Go in Love

Blessed be.

#healing #normal #grief #trauma #illness #mental health #loss

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paulbenedictblog · 4 years

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%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

News Katherine Johnson, ‘hidden figure’ at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101 - The Washington Post

News

Her title, poached by the expertise that would possibly well per chance soon manufacture the providers of a great deal of her colleagues former, became once “computer.”

Mrs. Johnson, who died Feb. 24 at 101, went on to assemble equations that helped the NACA and its successor, NASA, send astronauts into orbit and, later, to the moon. In 26 signed reports for the effect company, and in many extra papers that bore others’ signatures on her work, she codified mathematical suggestions that dwell on the core of human effect jog.

She became once now not the first unlit woman to work as a NASA mathematician, nor the first to write down a analysis myth for the company, however Mrs. Johnson became once within the end acknowledged as a pathbreaker for ladies and African People within the newly created field of spaceflight.

Treasure most on the help of the scenes participants of the effect program, Mrs. Johnson became once overshadowed within the celebrated imagination by the lifestyles-risking astronauts whose flights she calculated, and to a lesser extent by the division heads beneath whom she served.

She failed to allege mainstream attention until President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the country’s most sensible probably civilian honor — in 2015. The next year, her analysis became once notorious in doubtlessly one of the most sensible-promoting e book “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly and the Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

Mrs. Johnson became once “vital to the success of the early U.S. effect functions,” Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian, mentioned in a 2017 interview for this obituary. “She had a unique mind, curiosity and skill position in mathematics that allowed her to fabricate many contributions, every of that would possibly well per chance very neatly be thought to be well-known of a single lifetime.”

A math prodigy from West Virginia who mentioned she “counted every thing” as a child — “the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the will of dishes and silverware I washed” — Mrs. Johnson worked as a schoolteacher sooner than being employed as a computer on the NACA’s flight analysis division, essentially based at Langley Study Middle in Hampton, Va.

The company became once established in 1915 and started enlisting white ladies to work as computers 20 years later. Sunless computers, assigned mainly to segregated providers, like been first employed all over the labor scarcity of World Battle II. Mrs. Johnson became once one of about 100 computers, roughly one-third of whom like been unlit, when she joined the NACA.

The movie “Hidden Figures” took occasional liberties with truth to stress the indignities of segregation. Mrs. Johnson, performed by Henson, is forced to bustle half of a mile to attain the “colored” lavatory. Essentially, Mrs. Johnson mentioned, she used the loo closest to her desk.

“I failed to essentially feel worthy discrimination, however then that’s me,” she recalled in a 1992 NASA oral ancient past. When she detected hints of racism, equivalent to when a white colleague stood up to leave as soon as she sat down, she mentioned, she tried to now not answer. “I don’t keep on my emotions on my shoulder. So I bought along magnificent.”

Mrs. Johnson had a bachelor’s level in mathematics and spent her early occupation studying knowledge from plane crashes, serving to devise air security standards at a time when the company’s central tell became once aviation. Then, in October 1957, the launch of the Soviet satellite tv for computer Sputnik thrust the effect bustle into corpulent tilt.

Mrs. Johnson and dozens of work-mates wrote a 600-page technical myth titled “Notes on Condo Expertise” outlining the mathematical underpinnings of spaceflight, from rocket propulsion to orbital mechanics and warmth security.

Regarded as one of rocket science’s most vexing challenges, they soon realized, became once calculating flight trajectories to make certain that astronauts returned safely to Earth, splashing down within the ocean reasonably stop to a Navy vessel waiting to pluck them from the water.

For astronauts equivalent to Alan B. Shepard Jr., who grew to turn into the first American in effect when Freedom 7 launched on Would possibly per chance well furthermore 5, 1961, the math became once moderately straight forward. Shepard’s craft rose and fell, love a champagne cork, without entering orbit.

Calculating the trajectory for an orbital flight, equivalent to the one to be undertaken by Marine pilot John Glenn in 1962, became once “orders of magnitude extra complex,” mentioned Shetterly, the “Hidden Figures” author.

“I mentioned, ‘Let me assemble it,’ ” Mrs. Johnson recalled in a 2008 NASA interview. “You expose me whenever you happen to want it and where you would like it to land, and I’ll assemble it backwards and expose you when to use off.”

Mrs. Johnson’s findings, outlined in a 1960 paper she wrote with engineer Ted Skopinski, enabled engineers to resolve exactly when to launch a spacecraft and when to originate its reentry. The paper, “Option of Azimuth Perspective at Burnout for Inserting a Satellite tv for computer Over a Selected Earth Set,” marked the first time a lady wrote a technical myth in NASA’s elite flight analysis division.

“That it's probably you'll work your teeth out, however you didn’t gather your name on the parable,” she mentioned within the 1992 oral ancient past, crediting her step forward to what she described as an assertive personality. When a superior mentioned that she would possibly well per chance now not accompany male colleagues to a briefing related to her work, Mrs. Johnson requested, “Is there a regulations that says I'm able to’t wander?” Her boss relented.

Mrs. Johnson’s handwritten calculations like been mentioned to love been extra depended on than these performed by mainframe computers. A short time sooner than Glenn launched into effect, he requested engineers to “gather the girl to test the numbers.”

“Your whole ladies like been called ‘the ladies,’ ” mentioned Barry, “and everyone knew exactly which woman he became once talking about.” Mrs. Johnson, who became once then 43, spent a day and a half of checking the trajectory calculations made by the IBM computer sooner than giving the wander-forward to Glenn, who grew to turn into the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.

In a subsequent myth, Mrs. Johnson took her calculations one step extra, working with a whole lot of colleagues to resolve how a spacecraft would possibly well per chance circulation inner and out of a planetary body’s orbit. Her formulas like been well-known to the success of the Apollo lunar program and are silent in expend on the brand new time, Barry mentioned. “If we return to the moon, or to Mars, we’ll be the expend of her math.”

Modest beginnings

Katherine Coleman became once born in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., then a town of about 800, on Aug. 26, 1918. Her mother became once a aged instructor. She credited her proclivity for mathematics to her father, a farmer who had worked within the fade enterprise and would possibly well per chance like a flash calculate the will of boards a tree would possibly well per chance gather.

By 10, Katherine had executed your whole coursework supplied at her town’s two-room schoolhouse. Joined by her mother and her three older siblings, she moved to Institute, a suburb of the instruct capital, to help the laboratory college of West Virginia Inform School whereas her father remained at home to make stronger the household.

Mrs. Johnson went on to search at West Virginia Inform, a historically unlit college, with plans to valuable in French and English and turn into a instructor. A mathematics professor — W.W. Schiefflin Claytor, broadly reported to be the third African American to receive a doctorate in math — persuaded her to interchange fields.

Mrs. Johnson later recalled his announcing: “You’d manufacture a merely analysis mathematician, and I’m going to stare that you just’re ready.” She had never heard of the win 22 situation sooner than. “I mentioned, ‘The effect will I gather a job?’ And he mentioned, ‘That will probably be your tell.’ ”

After graduating in 1937, at 18, she taught at a segregated main college in Marion, Va., a town come the North Carolina border.

Three years later, she became once one of three unlit college students selected to integrate West Virginia University’s graduate functions. She dropped out of her master’s in mathematics program after one semester to originate a household along with her husband, James Goble, a chemistry instructor. She later returned to instructing, in West Virginia, sooner than a brother-in-regulations instructed she observe for a computer win 22 situation at Langley.

Goble died of cancer in 1956, and three years later Mrs. Johnson married James Johnson, an Navy artillery officer. He died in 2019.

Mrs. Johnson’s demise became once confirmed by lawyer and household handbook Donyale Y.H. Reavis, who mentioned she died at home in Newport News, Va., however failed to quote a particular reason.

Survivors include two daughters from her first marriage, Joylette Hylick of Mount Laurel, N.J., and Katherine Moore of Greensboro, N.C.; six grandchildren; and 11 sizable-grandchildren. Her daughter Constance Garcia died in 2010.

Mrs. Johnson became once invited to circulation to Houston within the mid-1960s to wait on set what's now the Lyndon B. Johnson Condo Middle, however she declined the supply to help her household’s ties to the Hampton neighborhood, Shetterly mentioned.

At Langley, where she retired in 1986, she performed calculations that sure the enlighten 2nd at which the Apollo lunar lander would possibly well per chance leave the moon’s ground to attain to the allege module, which remained in orbit high above. She also contributed to NASA’s effect shuttle and Earth satellite tv for computer functions.

After the launch of “Hidden Figures,” Mrs. Johnson performed down the significance of her impartial within the early years of the effect program. “There’s nothing to it — I became once merely doing my job,” she instructed The Washington Post in 2017.

“They wished knowledge, and I had it, and it didn’t topic that I came across it,” she added. “At the time, it became once merely a inquire of and an answer.”

Read extra:

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fughtopia · 7 years

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Paul Street

February 3, 2017

American “mainstream” journalists who want to keep their paychecks flowing and their status afloat know they must report current events in a way that respects the taboo status of the nation’s underlying inequality and oppression structures and its savage and relentless imperial criminality. Those topics are understood as off limits, as beyond the narrow parameters of acceptable and polite discussion. They are subjects that serious reporters and commentators have the deeply indoctrinated common sense to avoid.

“We’ve Done Enough as a Country”

An excellent example is a recent CNN report on how U.S. President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban is playing out in the small Vermont city of Rutland. A CNN reporter spoke to two local players on different sides of the question of whether Syrian refugees should be settled in Rutland. The first source was the town’s mayor, Chris Louras, who has been leading an effort to make Rutland a refugee resettlement hub that would welcome 25 Syrian families in 2017. When asked about why he’s been pushing for this, the mayor cited humanitarian concerns (“it’s the right thing to do”) but also (and above all) mentioned economic considerations. Rutland’s unemployment rate of 3 percent is “dangerously low,” making it hard for companies to find workers and thereby inhibiting investment and “growth,” the mayor told CNN.

CNN also featured an interview with Rutland doctor Timothy Cook, a Trump fan and an opponent of the mayor’s refugee resettlement plan. “I think we’ve done enough as a country,” Cook told CNN. “I’m tapped out and this nation is tapped out. We need to fix our own problems first and then we can reconfigure and see if we can rescue the rest of the world.” Cook naturally supports Trump’s travel ban.

Capitalism 101

It was fine reporting as far as it went but notice what was, to use the title of Chris Hedges’ latest book, Unspeakable. One unmentionable topic was capitalism’s reliance on what Karl Marx called “the reserve army of labor” – a mass of job-seeking unemployed people sufficiently large to keep the price of labor power to guarantee profitable exploitation of the working class.

Is it unthinkable that Rutland might consider turning their town into a labor magnet that might attract workers by, say, raising the local minimum wage to $15 an hour?

Sadly, it probably is because local employers – including the global megacorporation and leading corporate welfare recipient and “defense” contractor General Electric (GE), which employs more than a thousand workers across two Rutland plants – want to keep wages as low as possible in the interest of sustaining an “acceptable” rate of profit. Grow the “reserve army” and grow the local tax base.

We can be sure Louras doesn’t want to give GE reason to shift its Rutland operations elsewhere in pursuit of cheaper labor. That’s Capitalist Labor Market economics 101 and Corporate Power 102.

Guns v. Butter: Spiritual Death

A second forbidden topic is the role of U.S. militarism in, to use Dr. Cook’s term, “tapping out” America. It is beyond the parameters of acceptable debate and commentary to note that the nation is impoverished thanks in no small part to the massive Pentagon budget (54% of federal discretionary spending), which pays for the global empire that has wreaked havoc, fueled jihadism, and generated massive refugee streams in places like Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Iran (more on this below), all on Trump’s travel ban. It’s a taboo topic in dominant media: the role of the military budget in hollowing out American society from the inside.

Hedges gets this right in the following exchange in Unspeakable, a compilation of interviews with left journalist David Talbot:

Talbot: “[Bernie Sanders] promised to impose much higher taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street speculators.”

Hedges: “Yes, but if we don’t get control of our military spending we are finished…Our infrastructure, our public educational system, our social services – everything is crumbling for a reason, we don’t have money for it. It is being consumed by the war machine. And Sanders didn’t touch the military-industrial complex. That would have been political suicide…There will be no socialism until we dismantle imperialism and dramatically sash military spending power. Martin Luther King understood that.”

And look what happened to Dr. King, who was assassinated (or perhaps executed) exactly one year to the day after giving a celebrated speech in which he made a deep connection between his opposition to poverty and racism at home and his opposition to the U.S. war on Southeast Asia.

In explaining his decision to follow his conscience and speak out against U.S. militarism, King said, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such… A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” King warned, “is approaching spiritual death” (emphasis added changed by Fughtopia).

Don’t take it just from left radicals past (King) and present (Hedges). In his recent magisterial study of the overlapping “deep state” concentrations of corporate, financial, and governmental power that control American society beneath and beyond the nation’s quadrennial electoral carnivals, the former longtime Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren notes that the U.S. struggles with widespread poverty, rotting infrastructure, inadequate health care, and deficient pubic services (schools, transportation, and more) not because the government lacks money but because too much of its money goes to serve entrenched interests. Top among those interests is the nation’s enormous military-industrial complex, funded by a Pentagon budget that accounts for more than half of U.S. federal discretionary spending and nearly half the world’s military outlay. As Lofgren notes in his indispensable book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (2016):

“Even as commentators decry a broken government that cannot marshal the money, the will, or the competence to repair our roads and bridges, heal our war veterans, or even roll out a health care website, there is always enough money and will, and maybe just a bare minimum of competence to overthrow foreign governments, fight the longest war in U.S. history, and conduct dragnet surveillance over the entire surface of the planet (p.4)…It is as if Hadrian’s Wall was still fully manned and the fortifications along the border with Germania were never stronger, even as the city of Rome disintegrated from within and the life-sustaining aqueducts leading down from the hills began to crumble.” (p.216)

A Proven History of Terrorism

Also unspeakable is the criminality of what the America Empire – accurately described by Dr. King in 1967 as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” – does abroad. It is unthinkable that CNN might challenge Dr. Cook’s notion of the U.S. as a nation that tries to “rescue the rest of the world.”

The correction would include confronting Washington’s role in criminally devastating some of the very nations from which Trump has tried to ban travelers and refugees. Iraq, for one leading example, has been subject to two mass-murderous U.S. invasions along with an intervening decade plus of deadly economic sanctions that have combined to kill millions, maim millions, and displace millions more.

Yemen has been ravaged by joint U.S, and Saudi Arabian air assaults, U.S. Special Forces, and U.S. drone attacks.

Sudan has long been tortured by the U.S., which has played a central in political dissolution and civil war there.

Libya was collapsed with U.S. and NATO bombs, miring that country in civil war and jihad.

Syria has been torn apart by an epically murderous Civil War that Washington has fueled along with the jihadism that the U.S. and its oil-rich Arab state allies and Pakistan have spread there and across the Muslim world.

“During his campaign,” CNN reported when the president announced his travel ban, “Trump vowed to ban Muslim immigrants from countries with a ‘proven history’ of terrorism against the United States or its allies.”

Orwell might have enjoyed that statement in light of the United States’ proven history of mass-murderous Superpower terrorism against the countries Trump has imposed his travel ban against.

Meritorious Service

Journalists and others looking for such a history might want to go back and review the July 3, 1988 incident in which U.S. Navy warship Vincennes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner (Iranian Air Fight 655) with a guided cruise missile, killing all 300 people on board, 71 of whom were children.

This monstrous assault was perpetrated in Iranian airspace, over Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. Six years later, the Navy awarded special commendation medals for “meritorious service” to the Vincennes’ commander, Capt. Will Rogers III and to his weapons systems officer. Lt. Cmdr. Scott E. Lustig.

Iranians are likely recalling that horrendous crime now that Trump is saber-rattling against Teheran. The new fascist president’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has put Iran “officially on notice” that Washington is considering action against it. He says that “we are considering a whole range of options.” Meanwhile, U.S., British, French, and Australian warships are engaged in provocative “naval exercises” off Iran’s shores.

Highway of Death

Journalists and others looking for proven histories of terrorism might also want to reflect on the hideous carnage wreaked by the U.S. military on Iraq’s notorious “Highway of Death,” where U.S. forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on February 26 and 27, 1991. The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

“U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours.‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On …miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun…U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions…. The victims were not offering resistance…it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.”

According to Wikipedia’s richly sourced account:

“The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing’s A-6 Intruder aircraft blocked Highway 80, bombarding a massive vehicle column of mostly Iraqi Regular Army forces with Mk-20 Rockeye II cluster bombs, effectively boxing in the Iraqi forces in an enormous traffic jam of sitting targets for subsequent airstrikes…journalist Robert Fisk …‘lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smoldering wreckage or slumped face down in the sand’ at the main site and [saw] hundreds of corpses strewn up the road all the way to the Iraqi border….Some independent estimates go as high as 10,000 or more casualties (even ‘tens of thousands’).”

“Tempering Qualities of Humility and Restraint”

Truth be told, Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building its Iraqi and Muslim Body Counts in early 1991. Washington had yet to enforce the economic sanctions that killed at least a million Iraqis or to undertake the 2003 invasion that killed more than a million more and devastated Iraq beyond repair. It had yet to ravage the Iraqi city of Fallujah (more on that below), as it did in 2004, using (among other things) radioactive ordnance that produced an epidemic of child leukemia there. It had yet to launch Barack Obama’s massive drone war across the Muslim world, recently described by Noam Chomsky as “the most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen.” It had yet to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent villagers and farmers in Afghanistan. It had not yet targeted a Doctors Without Borders hospital for repeated lethal bombing or undertaken the systematic torture and rape of Iraqi and other Muslims, including children, in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram Air Force base.

“Our security,” Barack Obama said during his first Inaugural Address, “emanates from the…tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” No responsible “mainstream” U.S. commentators dared to question the Orwellian language of the new president’s speech. Uncle Sam can do no evil in the eyes of properly indoctrinated and/or fearful U.S. media and educational “elites” (coordinators and operatives).

The same deafening media silence was heard when George H.W. Bush said the following less than a year after his airborne armed forces turned vast stretches of a purposely blocked Middle Eastern highway into an epic monument of one-sided imperial criminality: “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency.”

“The Streets of Fallujah”

As a soon-to-be fully declared presidential candidate, then-U.S. Senator Obama had this to say to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved [in support of the occupation of Iraq, P.S]…They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah” (emphasis added).

It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for colossal U.S. war atrocity by the U.S. military in April and November of 2004. The crimes included the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city. The town was designated for destruction as an example of the awesome state terror promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power. Not surprisingly, Fallujah became a powerful and instant symbol of American imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It was a deeply provocative and insulting place for Obama to have chosen to highlight American sacrifice and “resolve” in the imperialist occupation of Iraq.

A Shocking Scene

Obama would write his own name in the black book of U.S. imperial terrorism, later telling White House aides that “it turns out I’m pretty good at killing people” while commanding a drone program that became “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” (Noam Chomsky). Among the many grisly scenes Obama will carry to his well-heated grave, one occurred early in his presidency in the first week of May 2009, a U.S. air-strike killed more than ten dozen civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As the New York Times reported:

“In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to…the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi…. The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred…. Everyone was crying…watching that shocking scene.’ Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including…many women and children” (NYT, May 6, 2009).

The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific incident—one among many mass U.S. aerial civilian killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning in the fall of 2001—was to blame the deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about the loss of innocent life, but the Administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge U.S. responsibility. By contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official for scaring New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people there of 9/11.

“Peace prize? He’s a killer.” So said a young Pashtun man to an Al Jazeera English reporter on December 10, 2009—the day Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. “The man,” the reporter wrote, “spoke from the village of Armal, where a large crowd gathered around the bodies of twelve people, one family from a single home, all killed by U.S. Special Forces during a late-night raid.”

Murdering a Family One at a Time

Five months later, Obama would order the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, the charismatic Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The cleric was killed in a September 2011 drone strike “despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime” (Glenn Greenwald), but Obama’s lust for killing al–Awlakis still burned. Two weeks later, a shiny new CIA drone killed the cleric’s 16-year-old and American-born son, Abdulrahman, “along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis.”

It’s nice to hear that Obama has voiced support for the mass protests of Trump’s Muslim travel ban but it’s a hard to believe that he could care less about Muslim lives in light of his bloody foreign policy in the Middle East, northern Africa, and Southwest Asia.

Herr Trump ordered a drone assault and commando raid in Yemen last Sunday. The operation was set up and handed to him by the Obama administration. It killed 30 people. Among the murdered: Anwar’s 8-year old daughter, Abdulrahman’s little sister. She bled to death two hours after a U.S. Special Forces warrior shot her in the neck. Call it the orange-haired beast’s first imperial blood, scored with a big assist from the previous Child Killer-in-Chief, Barack Obama.

“What the Hell is Going On–

Candidate Trump said that he wanted a Muslim ban “until we can figure out what the Hell is going on” to cause fear and hatred of the United States in the Muslim world. As if there is some mystery about that.

Selective Revulsion

In its breathless coverage of mass protests of a leading American “alt-right” fascist scheduled to speak on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley last Wednesday night, CNN anchors and commentators were horrified to see windows broken and a bonfire started by Black Bloc anarchists.

CNN and the rest of the corporate media have yet to convey the slightest hint of revulsion over the Obama-Trump murder of 30 people in Yemen, including many women and children and an 8-year-old girl. Also evading media disgust is the recent escalation of police state violence against the heroic water- and climate-protectors in Standing Rock.

“We’ve Done Enough”

So, yes, Dr. Timothy Cook and CNN, “we’ve done enough as a country” – well, as a murderous empire – not “for” but rather to the Muslim world. With “rescuers” like Uncle Sam, who needed the Third Reich?

“Fix our own problems first”? It might surprise many mass-mediated-mind-marinated Americans to know that transferring taxpayer dollars from the U.S. War Machine (the world’s greatest single institutional planet warmer and carbon-burner, by the way) to the meeting of basic social and civic needs in “the homeland” (lovely imperial term, that) would simultaneously help U.S. and global citizens fix a great problem they share: American militarism and imperialism.

Empire, it is worth recalling, is a great upward distributer of wealth and power, something to keep in mind in a nation (the U.S., that is) where the top thousandth (the 0.1 percent) has as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. As Noam Chomsky noted in 1969, “There are, to be sure, costs of empire that benefit no one: 50,000 American corpses or the deterioration in the strength of the United States economy relative to its industrial rivals. The costs of empire to the imperial society as a whole may be considerable. These costs, however, are social costs, whereas, say, the profits from overseas investment guaranteed by military success are again highly concentrated in certain special segments of the society. The costs of empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within.”

In the meantime, here’s something CNN will never tell Donald Trump, his fan Dr. Cook, and the many Democrats and Republicans who’ve been trained to stick their heads in Orwellian sand on Superpower’s crimes: the simplest and most reliable way to stem the Muslim refugee flow is to stop waging criminal wars against Muslim countries. The vast taxpayer largesse squandered on these unwarranted and racist wars should instead be given to the nations the U.S. and NATO have destroyed – and to addressing social, civic, and environmental needs at home.

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

#amerikkka #war #crimes against humanity #crimes of aggression #george bush #george dubya bush #barack obama #donald trump #middle east #military industrial complex #poverty #inequality

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