Category: Rants (Page 1 of 2)

Is the AP World History Book Racist?

January 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments


My daughter is taking AP World History and tonight she came to us simply appalled by the context of her textbook.

“The textbook just can’t say anything bad about white people,” she explained. Then she read me the offending sentence

From the time of Columbus, indigenous populations had been compelled to provide labor for European settlers in the Americas .

“They just can’t say what really happened, that they were enslaved by European settlers in the Americas,” she says angrily.

“Not once did they say they were slaves, “forced labor, Encomienda, terrible working conditions, forced to provide them with labor, textiles, food or other goods – so they basically stole their shit -, but not once did they use the word slavery.”  (Later she finds the textbook does use the word, but only when speaking about Brazil).

She went on. The textbook had one paragraph explaining how the Catholic Church oppressed the native population, including using torture and executions. But right after that brief paragraph, they spend three paragraphs exonerating the Catholic Church from the evils they caused:

Despite its failures, the Catholic clergy did provide native peoples with some protections against the abuse and exploitation of Spaniard settlers.

“Failures?” asks my daughter. “They call torture, slavery and executions “failures”?

“It’s not like the book was written in 1980, it was published in 2008,” she says frustrated. (The book is the 4th edition, there is a 6th edition now, but her School District decided to spend money building fences that make the schools look like jails, and huge TV screens teachers use rather than buying books.

She goes on reading, and gets to the part about Brazil.  She grows more appalled:

“It’s so sickening, they actually talk about them like they are animals.”

Although African slaves at first cost much more than Amerindian slaves, planters found them to be more productive and more resistant to disease.

“It sounds like a commercial: ‘Get rid of your Native American slaves, get some African ones – they will be more productive and resistant to disease, buy them now.’  It’s literally what it sounds like.”

 

 

Open Letter to Judge Marco Roldan

October 20, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Missouri Court Cites Woman for Bringing Breastfeeding Baby to Jury Duty

A Missouri judge has actually cited a breastfeeding mother for bringing her baby with her to jury duty!  This is the letter I sent him about it.

Judge Marco Roldan

Judge Marco Roldan 

Dear Judge Roldan,

 Like many other women across the nation I’ve learned about your mistreatment of a breastfeeding mother that was called for jury duty under you.  The woman, like any other breastfeeding mother in her situation, brought the baby with her.  Your response was to criminally cite her.
I don’t know you, so I don’t know if your actions are based in a complete disregard for mothers, for breastfeeding, for babies or for women.  It’s difficult to believe that you did not realize that the options that you offered the juror were not realistic and that they would put the baby in danger.
You suggested that the mother leave her baby at home or bring someone with her to take the baby and feed it during breaks.  Leaving aside the question of where the mother could find a babysitter to do this job and how she could pay her, which is not a trivial matter for a stay at home mom, these suggestions show a complete lack of understanding and concerns for the needs of breastfeeding babies.
First of all, breastfed babies are often fed on demand.  The baby cries or behaves in a distinctive way letting the mom know she’s hungry, and then mom picks her up and feeds her.  How often this happens depends on the baby, some do it every half an hour, some every 2 or 3, but the idea of letting a baby cry itself out and be hungry until the mom is ready to feed him has been proven to be cruel and traumatic for babies.
Your suggestion that the mother “pump” is equally ignorant.  Pumping is not something that breastfeeding women, in particular first-time mothers, can casually do. Pumping is an extremely inefficient way of getting milk out.  I was fairly good at it and it would take me 20 minutes hooked to a hospital-grade pump to get 4 oz of milk. If I used an electric one-breast pump, I’d be lucky to get 1 oz in 20 minutes.  That is definitely not enough for a baby.  And it takes time to learn how to pump efficiently.  A mom who has never done it, is unlikely to take on to it immediately.  I did not read that you offered her the services of a lactation consultant or to buy her a state of the art pump so she could serve.
Even if she could pump (and assuming that she would have stayed up the night before to pump so she could leave the milk for the baby), how do you know that the baby in question would take a bottle? Many breastfed babies don’t. It’s either breastfeeding or going hungry.  Do you actually believe it’s OK to let a baby go hungry?
Frankly, your lack of concern for this mother is deeply troubling.  If you treat a woman who is trying to fulfill her civic duty – she actually showed up to jury duty! — with so much contempt, how do you treat criminal defendants? How do you treat any other woman that comes before you?
As an outsider, I cannot believe that you can possibly be a fair judge.  Your lack of concern and humanity prevents that.
Honestly, I think you should resign and find a career where you cannot so easily harm others.
Sincerely,
Margarita Lacabe
a mom

Media Blunder of the Day: Spanish building with no elevator, actually has 10

August 13, 2013 / / 1 Comment
The Intempo building

The Intempo building

The headlines were somewhere between hilarious and unbelievable.  “Builders forgot elevator shafts on finished Skyscraper,” read the NY Daily News. ”  UPI reported “Spain skyscraper with no elevators nearly complete”, and the Daily Beast echoed “Near-Complete Spanish Skyscraper Forgets Elevators.”

The claims came from a July 20th story in Spain’s El País newspaper about the financial troubles of the Intempo building.  The article discusses the series of problems the builders have encountered during construction and towards the end reads (my free translation): “In January 2012 there was a new surprise: they had not taken into account the shaft for the elevator, as can be seen in the promotional designs which do not not show the spaces typically dedicated on the roofs to the elevator engines. ‘The space had been calculated for a block of 20 stories,’ according to the same sources”.

I will admit that I have no idea what the El País article is referring to, but clearly journalists in both Spanish and English-speaking media interpreted these sentences to mean that the builders had forgotten to build elevators into the buildings.

If they did, however, they had fixed this problem by April 2013, when a blogger visited the building, rode in one of the elevators and wrote about it.  She describes the trip as being incredibly fast, less than one minute to go up 45 stories.  According to the blogger, that’s in “slow mode”.  In fast mode, it can make the ~600 feet climb in about 30 seconds.  The blogger mentions that each of the two towers has 3 elevators.  Four elevators make the trip to the penthouses in the middle.  So in all, it has 10 elevators.  You can see one of the elevators and the space for another one in her blog posting.

She does say, however, that they had to take the stairs to make it to the roof.

Whatever El País meant in its story, it’s certain that the rest of the media that ran with the “no elevators” story did not do the most basic fact-checking of either visiting the building, looking at the blue-prints, calling the construction company, or even googling.  I found the blog posting I referred to above by searching for “ascensores intempo“.  “Ascensor” is the Spanish word for “elevator”.

The real question here is how much can we trust the media, when journalists seem to rush to write stories, repeating what they think they read somewhere, without doing the most minimum fact checking?  To be fair, so far it does not appear that the major English language media has ran with the story, but I wonder if it’s only a matter of time.  It’s troublesome enough that any journalist can be so careless to not even try to check their facts, even when we are dealing with what sounds like a very improbable mistake.

This typical floor plan for one of the towers, shows 3 elevators, in addition to stairs.

This typical floor plan for one of the towers, shows 3 elevators, in addition to stairs.

Some Patchy Catholic Censorship

December 2, 2011 / / 0 Comments

As my local friends from San Leandro (the town I live in) well know, I participate a lot in local politics and write and comment on my San Leandro blog and Facebook page about anything going on in this town.  I’m also a very active participant in the San Leandro Patch, an online hyper-local news portal owned by AOL (which wants to become a media company).   Here again, I comment about anything and everything.

One thing I commented about last night was a short frilly article on what some moms tell their kids about religion.  My comment(s) were left alone, but when a gay atheist man commented about his own experience raising a son and how he feels about the Church’s stands on gay marriage, his post was quickly deleted because the editor considered it an attack (won’t say how or on whom, however).  In any case, I am posting his comment here so that everyone can read it.

I am an atheist and I raised my son to find his own way with religion, he went to quite a number of local church youth-oriented faith events in his teens and I did not pressure him to believe or doub. He has become a wonderfully warm and caring kid, and we both have found our moral compass without any connection to the Judeo-Christian belief system. We are good people because that is the right thing to do, not because a book tells us to do it, or because we live in constant fear of an eternity in hellfire. As a gay man I find the ongoing religious demonization and intolerance toward LGBT families simply outrageous and so NOT what Jesus would do. The Catholic church leads the pack in this regard, Archbishop Dolan makes weekly statements about the horrors of allowing gay couples to get married, while at the same time his church seems to be maintaining the largest group of pedophiles the world has ever known. The hypocrisy that exists in the Catholic church is appalling, an organization that prides itself on ‘justice’ clearly does not mean if it you are a child or gay, and heaven help you if you are both. In closing I will paraphrase Caria: “At the end of the day what is most important to me is that my little boy grows up to be a man who is secure in his heart, his mind and his faith that we as humans should love one another.

Billy Bradford

And I’m posting this cartoon because it’s funny and oh so true 🙂

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