[Marxism] The Radical Lives of Abolitionists | Boston Review
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[Marxism] Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (My review of "Hidden Figures", the film about Katherine Johnson and her African-American female colleagues at NASA: https://louisproyect.org/2016/12/10/hidden-figures-the-man-who-knew-infinity/; Rent "Hidden Figures" on YouTube for $3.99: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U386EMeWo3I) NY Times, Feb. 24, 2020 Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA By Margalit Fox They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them. Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth. A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961. The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred rigorously educated, supremely capable yet largely unheralded women who, well before the modern feminist movement, worked as NASA mathematicians. But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American. In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women — perhaps three dozen — who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film “Hidden Figures,” based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film’s central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture. The film was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. Though it won none, the 98½-year-old Mrs. Johnson received a sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage with the cast at the Academy Awards ceremony that February. Of the black women at the center of the film, Mrs. Johnson was the only one still living at the time of its release. By then, she had become the best-known member of her formerly unknown cohort. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proclaiming, “Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.” In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most high-profile of the computers” — “computers” being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists. She “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space,” NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said in a statement on Monday, “even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space.” As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley — from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 — was “a time when computers wore skirts.” For some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers. “As Good as Anybody” But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues — myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering
[Marxism] After Nevada: Perspectives for the Sanders campaign
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * 'The Wall St. Journal editors are worried. Following the Nevada caucus vote they wrote Republicans shouldn’t be too sanguine… A majority of Americans aren’t socialist, at least not yet... That’s an election Bernie Sanders could win…" 'Here is Terry Sullivan, former campaign manager for Marco Rubio: "If I had a dollar for every voter I’ve heard say, ‘I don’t agree with everything Donald Trump says, but I like that he has the guts to say it,’ I could buy Trump Tower. Mr. Sanders is benefiting from that same sentiment.”' Serious questions remain, including regarding Sanders' claims and the counterclaims. Here are some of the considerations. A Sanders victory, both at the Democratic convention and in November, is very far from guaranteed, but no longer can either be all but ruled out. What can be even further ruled out is a "return to normalcy". https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/02/24/after-nevada-perspectives-for-the-sanders-campaign/ John Reimann -- *“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black Jacobins" by C. L. R. James Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] How should Marxists react to Bernie Sanders becoming the front-runner? | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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[Marxism] The Twittering Machine. Richard Seymour. From Internet Addiction to “post-Truth” politics.
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * "This month Benjamin Griveaux, candidate for Paris Mayor from President Macron’s party, La République en Marche, stood down. Peter Pavlinski had posted on the Internet a video of the Macronist stalwart having ‘virtual sex’. Images of the candidate tossing himself off in a previous online exchange with the Russian exile’s girlfriend, Alexandra de Taddeo, had been taken, without, he claims, her knowledge, from her computer. Published on Paveninski’s site, Pornopolitique, it looked like a victory on the Web for those challenging what Richard Seymour in the Foreword to his new book calls the monopoly “formerly enjoyed by media and entertainment companies”. Pavlinski called it a blow against the “hypocrisy” of politicians." Richard Seymour offers a way of looking at how figures like Branco and Pavlinski have become political players. Seymour has also written a thoroughly readable thoughtful book. https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2020/02/24/the-twittering-machine-richard-seymour-from-internet-addiction-to-post-truth-politics/ Andrew Coates _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] NYT says Maduro and Mendoza made a deal in 2018
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * *Venezuela’s Socialists Embrace Business, Making Partner of a ‘Parasite’* The New York Times By Anatoly Kurmanaev Feb. 23, 2020 CARACAS, Venezuela — As Venezuela tumbled deeper into economic crisis in 2017 and its people searched for a way out, one name kept coming up: Lorenzo Mendoza. The family name is universally known in Venezuela. Empresas Polar, the food conglomerate started by Mr. Mendoza’s grandfather, had grown into the country’s largest private company. Its corn meal, used to make the national dish, was in every pantry, and its beer a welcome part of social gatherings. As President Nicolás Maduro’s disastrous economic policies set off food shortages and a refugee crisis, Mr. Mendoza emerged as an outspoken critic of his administration and its persecution of the private sector. Polished and eloquent, Mr. Mendoza also offered a stark contrast to the gruff president. His popularity was such that pollsters measured him against Mr. Maduro in mock presidential matchups. Then, suddenly, Mr. Mendoza disappeared from public view, and Mr. Maduro stopped calling him a “thief,” a “parasite” and a “traitor.” The government quit harassing Polar with disruptive raids and began, in time, to adopt the economic changes Mr. Mendoza had proposed, like ending crippling price controls. The story behind Mr. Mendoza and Mr. Maduro’s truce, sealed in a previously unreported meeting in mid-2018, describes the rapprochement between Venezuela’s self-styled revolutionary government and the business class it waged war against for nearly two decades. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/world/americas/venezuela-economy-polar.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The First Mean Streets
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Review of Books, MARCH 12, 2020 ISSUE The First Mean Streets by Tim Flannery Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith Viking, 293 pp., $30.00 Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott Yale University Press, 312 pp., $18.00 (paper) A panel from the Sumerian Standard of Ur depicting fish, animals, and goods being brought in procession to a banquet, circa 2600 BC The rise of the city is looked upon as the dawn of civilization, but a deep mystery surrounds the first city-dwellers. All we are left with as we strive to understand their lives are fragments unearthed by the archaeologist’s trowel, and that is a slender basis on which to reconstruct entire lives. In two recent books, Monica Smith and James Scott offer highly contrasting interpretations of these enigmatic, long-vanished people. Smith’s Cities: The First 6,000 Years imagines the world’s first citizens as happy folk, dedicated to festival-going, shopping, and displaying their social status. In contrast, Scott’s Against the Grain, published in 2017, depicts them as disease-ridden, subjugated, and desperate to escape the city’s bounds. Smith is a professional archaeologist who has excavated many ancient ruins around the world. As she conjures the lives lived among those now tumbled stones, she depicts people who bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary, urban Californians. If she has conjured aright, the nature of the urbanite has been more or less set from the start. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist, has never wielded a trowel, but his research is extraordinarily meticulous and detailed, and the lives of his imagined first citizens are unlike anything existing today. His analysis implies that the history of the metropolis has been marked by one long struggle by ordinary citizens to free themselves from oppression. Perhaps not unexpectedly, Smith and Scott disagree on the starting point of cities. Smith posits that the first urbanites lived six thousand years ago, in a now-abandoned settlement called Tell Brak, in what is today northern Syria. Scott traces their advent to a few hundred years later, in a constellation of cities that sprang up on the Mesopotamian alluvium around what was then the northern end of the Persian Gulf. Before the shallow sea was filled with sediment, its shore lay just two hundred miles south of Baghdad, half the current distance. What makes a city different from a large village? In the 1930s the Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe laid out ten criteria for identifying cities that are still used by researchers, though some in modified form. Childe noted that cities are larger and more complex than the settlements that preceded them and possess monumental architecture and specialized workers. They conduct trade over long distances, and their citizens pay taxes to a central authority. A fundamental question, addressed most fully by Scott, concerns why cities only emerged some five millennia after the first crops and herds were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. According to Scott, one of the most convincing explanations has been put forward by Melinda Zeder, a theorist of early domestication at the Smithsonian Institution. She thinks that a village-based lifestyle, which mixed agriculture with hunting and gathering, provided a more sustainable and stable resource base than the less diverse sources of sustenance available to the inhabitants of cities. Shifting to a city meant reliance on a few species of grains and domesticated animals, and giving up hunting and gathering, because wild resources within reach of a city are quickly exhausted by the large, sedentary population. If Zeder is correct, then some strong force must have acted upon the first citizens to cause them to give up the benefits of a hunting-gathering-farming life. What that force may have been is hinted at by the existence of central taxing authorities. The issue of taxation looms large in the arguments put forward by Scott. It is a remarkable fact, he says, that many crops—such as grains, potatoes, taro, and breadfruit—can support high human population densities. But it was only in the grain-based societies that the world’s first cities arose. This is because, Scott claims, grain is the perfect crop for taxation. It is storable, allowing for the accumulation of wealth; it matures simultaneously and predictably and is impossible to hide before harvest, making the tax collector’s job easy; and because grain is divisible, rulers can maximize their take, leaving the grower with only enough for bare
Re: [Marxism] Bernie Sanders denounces AIPAC ‘bigotry’ as campaign surges - The Washington Post
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 2/24/20 8:45 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/24/sanders-aipac-jewish/ Washington Post, Feb. 24, 2020 Amid Sanders’s rise, candidate battles AIPAC and a pundit comparing campaign’s momentum to Nazi invasion By Katie Shepherd Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has never attended an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, according to the lobbying group. In fact, his public refusal to attend last year’s conference early in his bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination spurred a petition that urged other presidential candidates to steer clear of the pro-Israel lobbying group’s event. Things have changed since last year, but the senator from Vermont on Sunday again denounced the conference, which he called a platform for “leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.” In doing so, Sanders has reignited the debate over the lobby’s influence in U.S. politics, at a time when the Jewish candidate’s campaign has been repeatedly compared to the rise of the Nazis. In response, AIPAC, which calls itself a “pro-Israel lobby” and holds substantial sway in foreign policy debates involving Israel and the Palestinian territories, described Sanders’s position on Sunday as “truly shameful.” “Sen. Sanders has never attended our conference and that is evident from his outrageous comment,” AIPAC said in a tweet Sunday. “By engaging in such an odious attack on this mainstream, bipartisan American political event, Sen. Sanders is insulting his very own colleagues and the millions of Americans who stand with Israel.” Bernie Sanders ✔ @BernieSanders The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security. So do the Palestinian people. I remain concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights. For that reason I will not attend their conference. 1/2 86.3K 5:34 PM - Feb 23, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy 16.8K people are talking about this Sanders’s vow to skip the AIPAC conference, which he made on Twitter on Sunday evening, came the day after he secured a landslide victory in the Nevada caucuses, clarifying a possible path to the Democratic nomination. Sanders dominated headlines over the weekend, and a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday night in which he defended past statements made about aspects of Fidel Castro’s rule over Cuba trended into early Monday. 60 Minutes ✔ @60Minutes Bernie Sanders defends his 1980s comments about Fidel Castro in an interview on 60 Minutes. https://cbsn.ws/2Pis7uC Embedded video 3,344 7:09 PM - Feb 23, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy 3,119 people are talking about this Sunday’s Sanders-heavy news cycle offered a window into how the senator will navigate the next stretch of his campaign, after seizing a commanding position in the primary race. The dark roots of AIPAC, ‘America’s Pro-Israel Lobby’ The fact that arguably the most left-leaning candidate in a crowded field of Democratic challengers secured an early lead has shocked many observers. Among those is MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, who was so struck by the candidate’s success Saturday that he compared Sanders's victory in Nevada to Nazi Germany’s invasion of France in 1940. “It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat right now,” Matthews said. He continued discussing Saturday’s Nevada caucus results, emphasizing how difficult it may be for another candidate to surpass Sanders, even though he is a party outsider and has been the target of attacks from the Democratic establishment. “I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940, and the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says ‘It’s over,’" Matthews said, comparing the senator’s win to that moment. “And Churchill says: ‘How can it be? You’ve got the largest Army in Europe, how can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’” Matthews’s comment drew harsh criticism from Sanders supporters who viewed it as unfair and insensitive because Sanders is Jewish. Progressive Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow slammed Matthews and MSNBC on Twitter for using “Nazi comparisons when talking about @BernieSanders, a Jewish candidate with family that was murdered in the Holocaust.” Bernie Sanders, powered by diverse liberal coalition, forces a reckoning for Democrats An MSNBC contributor raised the issue on “AM Joy” Sunday morning. “Why is Chris Matthews on this air talking about the victory of Bernie Sanders, who had kin murdered in the Holocaust, analogizing it to the Nazi conquest of France?” said Anand Giridharadas, an editor-at-large for
[Marxism] MR Online | Notes on a novel coronavirus
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[Marxism] Bernie Sanders denounces AIPAC ‘bigotry’ as campaign surges - The Washington Post
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[Marxism] (30) How Bellingcat tracked a Russian missile system in Ukraine - YouTube
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[Marxism] Syria: How Much Does the Pentagon Pay for the YPG?
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * *Syria: How Much Does the Pentagon Pay for the YPG?* */On the regular subsidies of U.S. imperialism for its mercenaries in Syria/* /By Michael Pröbsting, //24 February 2020/ https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/syria-how-much-does-the-pentagon-pay-for-the-ypg/ -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net ak...@rkob.net Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
