A handful of people on a leaky boat are going to save the world.
>DOUGH
https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-milwaukee-bc1a8c1291ef9e7bcef168da0ec3abb0
Suspect in Waukesha parade carnage says he feels ‘demonized’
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-andrew-cuomo-chris-cuomo-75ead598311cbb60f188ffa46d09b7ce
CNN fires Chris Cuomo for helping brother deal with scandal
CNN fired anchor Chris Cuomo on Saturday after details emerged about how he assisted his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as the politician faced sexual harassment allegations earlier this year.
The network suspended Chris Cuomo earlier in the week to investigate his conduct, after New York’s attorney general released details showing he was more involved than previously known in helping to strategize and reach out to other journalists as his brother fought to keep his job.
CNN hired a law firm for the review. The firm recommended Chris Cuomo’s termination and CNN chief Jeff Zucker informed the anchor of the decision on Saturday.
The network said that “while in the process of that review, additional information has come to light.” CNN would not discuss that information, or characterize whether it had anything to do with his brother.
“It goes without saying that these decisions are not easy, and there are a lot of complex factors involved,” Zucker said in an email to CNN staff on Saturday.
Cuomo issued a statement on Twitter calling the decision disappointing.
“This is not how I want my time at CNN to end but I have already told you why and how I helped my brother. So let me now say as disappointing as this is, I could not be more proud of the team at Cuomo Prime Time and the work we did as CNN’s #1 show in the most competitive time slot,” he said.
https://apnews.com/article/business-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-army-only-on-ap-2975ab7e8d4fde2f275179e088878fb0
‘We just feel it’: Racism plagues US military academies
By AARON MORRISON, HELEN WIEFFERING and NOREEN NASIR
Eight years after he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Geoffrey Easterling remains astonished by the Confederate history still memorialized on the storied academy’s campus – the six-foot-tall painting of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the library, the barracks dormitory named for Lee and the Lee Gate on Lee Road.
As a Black student at the Army academy, he remembers feeling “devastated” when a classmate pointed out the slave also depicted in the life-size Lee painting. “How did the only Black person who got on a wall in this entire humongous school — how is it a slave?” he recalls thinking.
As a diversity admissions officer, he later traveled the country recruiting students to West Point from underrepresented communities. “It was so hard to tell people like, ‘Yeah, you can trust the military,’ and then their kids Google and go ‘Why is there a barracks named after Lee?’” he said.
Retired Army Capt. Geoffrey Easterling is photographed at his home in Atlanta, on Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021. Eight years after he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Easterling remains astonished by the Confederate history still memorialized on the storied academy’s campus. (AP Photo/Ben Gray)
The nation’s military academies provide a key pipeline into the leadership of the armed services and, for the better part of the last decade, they have welcomed more racially diverse students each year. But beyond blanket anti-discrimination policies, these federally funded institutions volunteer little about how they screen for extremist or hateful behavior, or address the racial slights that some graduates of color say they faced daily.
In an Associated Press story earlier this year, current and former enlistees and officers in nearly every branch of the armed services described a deep-rooted culture of racism and discrimination that stubbornly festers, despite repeated efforts to eradicate it.
Less attention has been paid to the premiere institutions that produce a significant portion of the services’ officer corps – the academies of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Merchant Marine.
Some graduates of color from the nation’s top military schools who endured what they described as a hostile environment are left questioning the military maxim that all service members wearing the same uniform are equal.
That includes Carlton Shelley II, who was recruited to play football for West Point from his Sarasota, Florida, high school and entered the academy in 2009. On the field, he described the team as “a brotherhood,” where his skin color never impacted how he was treated. But off the field, he said, he and other Black classmates too often were treated like the stereotype of the angry Black man – an experience that brought him to tears at the time.
“I was repeatedly in trouble or being corrected for infractions that were not actually infractions,” he said. “It was a very deliberate choice to dig and to push on certain individuals compared with other cadets – white cadets.”
Xavier Bruce, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1999 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel during his 24 years of duty, said that for him, it was the ongoing slights directed at him as a Black man, rather than openly racist behavior, that cut deep.
“We just feel it, we feel the energy behind it, and it just eats us away,” he said.
Some students of color have spotlighted what they see as systemic racism and discrimination at the academies by creating Instagram accounts — “ Black at West Point,” “ Black at USAFA ” and “ Black at USNA ” — to relate their personal experiences.
“I was walking with a classmate and we were both speaking Spanish when a white, male upperclassman turned around and said ‘Speak English, this is America,’” a 2020 Air Force Academy graduate wrote in one post.
In response to the AP’s findings, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, Maj. Charlie Dietz, said the service academies make it a policy to offer equal opportunities regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. He said the DOD formed a special team in April to advance progress on diversity, equity and inclusion across the entire department, including the academies.
West Point did not respond to repeated requests for comment, beyond reiterating the importance of diversity to its admissions process and to preparing cadets for leadership.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which sparked protests around the globe, a group of prominent West Point alums had released a 40-page letter urging the academy to address “major failures” in combatting intolerance and racism. “Though we are deeply disturbed, we hold fast to the hope that our Alma Mater will take the necessary steps to champion the values it espouses,” the letter said.
An appendix offered anonymous testimonials gathered last year from West Point cadets about incidents they said went unaddressed by school officials. “I had a racist roommate that would call me the n-word and spit on me,” one cadet wrote. “I told the 4th Regimental Tactical Officer about it, and they did nothing.”
Shelley acknowledges West Point has become more racially diverse, but said the academy has significant work to do to retain and support students of color. In his class, he estimated about 35 Black students graduated — “some crazy low number,” he said. “And we started with a lot more.”
In a sense, the tributes to Lee that still dot the West Point campus illustrate the academy’s dichotomy: Cadets studying military history are taught that Confederate soldiers were no heroes, yet the references to Lee — a West Point graduate who later became the academy’s superintendent — remain.
The latest annual defense spending bill mandated that the Defense Department survey all its military properties for references or symbols that potentially commemorate the Confederacy, including at West Point, which the commission overseeing the work picked as its first site to visit earlier this year. But the deadline to act on any recommendations is still more than two years away.
The U.S. armed forces were segregated until the mid-1950s, when an influx of fighters were needed for the Korean War. Now, the collected services applaud themselves for 200 years as “the greatest military force in history,” attracting men and women who represent all creeds, religions, races, ethnicities and sexual orientations.
At the academies, integration happened much earlier, following the abolition of slavery. During Black History Month at West Point, honor is paid to Henry O. Flipper, a formerly enslaved man who became the academy’s first Black graduate in 1877. But the West Point that Flipper attended was rife with prejudice: His white classmates and professors refused to acknowledge his presence.
Today, the academies are a growing pathway to officer status for Black cadets, 2019 data from the Under Secretary of Defense shows, with about 13% of Black active-duty officers commissioned through the five institutions, compared to 19% of white active-duty officers.
Most students who enroll — about 60-70% — are nominated by U.S. senators or representatives from their home states as part of a system created in the 1840s to build a politically and geographically diverse officer corps. But today, the changed demographics of the U.S. mean the system gives disproportionate influence to rural congressional districts that tend to be whiter, the AP found.
Only 6% of nominations to the Army, Air Force and Naval academies made by the current members of Congress went to Black candidates, even though 15% of the population aged 18 to 24 is Black, according to a report on the service academies released in March by the Connecticut Veterans’ Legal Center. Eight percent of congressional nominations went to Hispanic students, though they make up 22% of young adults, the report said.
The diversity of nominations has improved slightly in the past 25 years, but the report noted that 49 Congress members did not nominate a single Black student during their time in office and 31 nominated no Hispanic candidates.
https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1467245114338811905
Michelle and I wanted to give Santa a hand passing out gifts for the holidays, so we made a stop at the @ComerChildrens Hospital.
We hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday season.
https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1467186496964804617
For millions of Americans, riding the bus is part of their everyday routine—our Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will make the investments needed to upgrade our public transit systems.
>adorable!
https://www.wmagazine.com/watch/fashion-films-kendall-jenner-performance-artist-channels-icons-like-marina-abramovic-and-yoko-ono
Kendall Jenner, Performance Artist, Channels Icons Like Marina Abramovic and Yoko Ono
Kendall Jenner has never participated in an art project until she was invited to participate in W’s 10th anniversary Art Issue. Jenner dove into the dazzling history of performance art, studying up on favorite works by Yoko Ono, Ulay and Marina Abramovic, and Yves Klein. Then she was ready to pay homage: Her clothes were cut. She became a human paintbrush. Even BFF Gigi Hadid got involved. Not all went as planned.
>Kendall Jenner, Performance Artist, Channels Icons Like Marina Abramovic and Yoko Ono
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2221922/Jimmy-Savile-necrophiliac-says-colleague-Paul-Gambaccini.html
'Jimmy Savile was a necrophiliac', says former colleague
Former BBC DJ said he was aware of claims in the eighties
'The expression I came to associate with Savile's sexual partners was "under-age subnormals", says colleague of the Jim'll Fix It presenter
In 1990 interview Savile dismissed claims he was a necrophiliac after saying he took pleasure in taking dead people to a hospital mortuary
He said: 'The expression I came to associate with Savile's sexual partners was either one used by production assistants or one I made up to summarise their reports … "under-age subnormals". 'He targeted the institutionalised, the hospitalised - and this was known. Why did Jimmy go to hospitals? That's where the patients were.'
In the 1990 interview with Q magazine, The Sun reported Savile was given the job of taking the dead to the mortuary.
Savile, who died last year at 84, said: 'One of my jobs is to take away the deceased. You can look after somebody, be alone with somebody, who has lived a whole lifetime, and I’m just saying goodbye and looking after him.
>With a name like "Patriot Front" you gotta be clowns.
just a bump in the road