It’s almost 3 PM and I haven’t heard from the oncologist’s office. It’s starting to look like they aren’t going to call today. If I don’t hear from them today, tomorrow I will start calling them until I get results.
I don’t have too much to blog about today. The key stuck in our new back door yesterday. The workers came by today and looked at. They decided they will have to replace the entire lock.
My daughter-in-law, Cynthia, called from California to check in with me.
I have spent the day goofing off, reading and doing some playing.
The second chapter of LikeWar by Singer and Brooking is the best history of the Internet I have ever read. It’s very helpful to review this history since I lived through it. I’m not sure when I began making my own daily website but I’m pretty sure it was very early in the history. The WaybackMachine Internet Archives shows activity in 2002. But I’m pretty sure I was doing my website before then.
I probably have this info on old hard drives, but I’m too lazy to go looking for it today.
When I moved here in 1987 there was no World Wide Web only the internet. I remember accessing it with a phone modem via a local General Electric hub that had been left over from their company here. Very soon after arriving I remember accessing the university library catalog of Notre Dame using this connection.
Anyway, the history in this book lays it all out in readable prose. I recommend it if you want some easy clear background on the rise of the Internet.
I keep slogging away at Stamped from the Beginning as well. It’s a history of racism and I’m now up to the 60s.
Some interesting ideas from it:
The attempt at integration following the Civil Rights act was itself an act of racism. Instead of working to even out the education for all kids, it acted on the implicit racist premise that if only black students were purchase of diazepam online exposed to white students they would end up the better for it. This is the aspect of racisim that Kendi defines as “assimilation” which simply means the more black people can be like white people the better off they are.
An anti-racist approach would have been to bus kids both ways (something that was rarely done) and sharing of resources and tax revenues. The premise of anti-racism is that black people and white people are not different in any way.
Also IQ tests and SAT type tests originated in racist ideas that one could measure intelligence. If one could do this, reasoned the creator of these tests (Stanford eugenicist Lewis Terman) they would become the “newest ‘ojective’ method of proving Black intellectual inferiority and justifying discrimination.”
Another fun fact is how racist Tarzan movies and the King Kong movie were. If you think about it, both of these movies were codes about African American inferiority. The white guy civilizes Africa. King Kong is forcibly brought to America (like the enslaved) and falls in love with a white woman.
Kendri puts it this way: “Actually, King Kong was nothing but a remake of The Birth of a Nation, set in the island scenery of Tarzan, and then New York. But King Kong did not invite the controversy of The Birth of a Nation. The filmmakers had veiled the physically powerful Black man by casting him as the physically powerful ape. In both films, the Negro-Ape terrorizes White people, tries to destroy White civilization, and pursues a White woman before a dramatic climax—the lynching of the Negro-Ape. King Kong was stunningly original for showing images of racist ideas—without ever saying a word about Black people.”
Finally my last share from Kendri: “Malcolm [X] condemned the half truth of racial progress bellowing that you don’t stick a knife in a person’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and say you’re making progress. ‘The black man’s supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it’s still going to live a scar!”