Jon Stewart Urges Dems to Fight Like Republicans and Exploit Loopholes | The Daily Show

Jon Stewart covers the latest post-election news from Trump and Biden world, then unpacks Republicans’ strategy of aggressively exploiting loopholes, in contrast to the Democrats’ style of following rules and norms

Peace & Justice History for 11/19:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november19

Letters From An American for 11/17:

This is pretty cool to read!

November 17, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson Read on Substack

Tonight is a break from the craziness of the news.

I often say that 1883 is my favorite year in history because of all that happened in that pivotal year, and one of those things is the way modernity swept across the United States of America in a way that was shocking at the time but that is now so much a part of our world we rarely even think of it….

Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones.

Fifteen minutes before the time of the shift, the telegraph company Western Union shut down all telegraph lines for anything but the declaration of the new time. It identified the moment the new time went into effect in telegraph messages to local railroad offices and to the jewelers known in cities for keeping time. In offices that got the message, men had their timepieces in their hands and ready to reset when the chief operator shouted “twelve o’clock!”

In Boston the change meant that the clocks would move forward about 16 minutes; in New York City, clocks were set back about four minutes. For Baltimore the time would move forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds; in Atlanta it went back 22 minutes.

The system was a dramatic wrench for the rural United States, bringing it into the modern world. Uniform time zones had been proposed by pioneering meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, who developed the U.S. system of weather forecasting. Having joined the United States Weather Bureau as chief meteorologist in 1871, he recognized that predicting the weather required a nationally coordinated team and worked with Western Union to collect information about temperature, wind direction, precipitation, and sunset times from across the country.

Coordinating that information required keeping time across all the stations he had set up. To do so, Abbe divided the United States into four time zones, each one hour apart, and in 1879 he suggested those zones might smooth out the chaos of the railroad systems, each trying to coordinate schedules across a patchwork of local times. Railroad executives, who were concerned that if they didn’t do something, the government would, listened to Abbe, and by 1883 they had concluded to put his new system in place.

Members of the new professional class who traveled by train from city to city were on board because they thought the need to regularize train schedules was imperative. But standard time was controversial. In the United States, people had operated entirely by the rhythms of the sun until the establishment of factories in New England in the 1830s, and most people still lived by those rhythms, their local time adjusting to solar time according to their geographical location.

Telling the time by sundial and history not only was custom, but also was understood as following God’s time. The idea of overriding traditional timekeeping because of the needs of the modern world seemed positively sacrilegious. “People…must eat, sleep and work…by railroad time,” wrote a contributor to the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel. “People will have to marry by railroad time…. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time…. Banks will open and close by railroad time; notes will be paid or protested by railroad time.”

The mayor of Bangor, Maine, vetoed an ordinance in favor of standard time, saying it was unconstitutional, that it changed the immutable law of God, that the people didn’t want it, and that it was hard on the working men because it changed day into night. Those planning for a switch to standard time tried to ease fears by providing that Americans would operate on both local time and standard time, with both times represented on clocks.

On November 18, no one quite knew what the dramatic wrench into the future might mean.

What did it mean to gain or lose time? Many people expected “a sensation, a stoppage of business, and some sort of a disaster, the nature of which could not be exactly ascertained,” a New York Times reporter recorded. As the great moment approached, people crowded the streets in front of jewelers to see the “great transformation.”

They were disappointed when, after all the buildup, the future arrived quietly.

The New York Times explained: “When the reader of THE TIMES consults his paper at 8 o’clock this morning at his breakfast table it will be 9 o’clock in St. John, New Brunswick, 7 o’clock in Chicago, or rather in St. Louis—for Chicago authorities have refused to adopt the standard time, perhaps because the Chicago meridian was not selected as the one on which all time must be based—6 o’clock in Denver, Col. and 5 o’clock in San Francisco. That is the whole story in a nut-shell.”

—

Notes:

Chicago Daily Tribune, “At Noon today Most of the Railroads Will Discard the Old and Adopt the New,” November 18, 1883, p. 12.

Boston Daily Globe, “Modern Joshuas: They Make Clocks, If Not the Sun, Stand Still,” November 19, 1883, p. 5.

Boston Daily Globe, “At the Railroad Stations, At the Churches,” November 19, 1883, p. 5.

Washington Post, “New Time in Other Cities,” November 18, 1883, p. 1.

Chicago Daily Tribune, “Standard Time,” November 19, 1883, p. 1.

Indianapolis Daily Sentinel, November 21, 1883, p. 4, Quoted in Ian R. Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 144.

New York Times, “Time’s Backward Flight,” November 18, 1883, p. 3. https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5748

Robert E. Riegel, “Standard Time in the United States,” American Historical Review 33 (October 1927): 84–89.

CBPP Statement: November 14, 2024 – For Immediate Release

Republican Economic Proposals Would Harm the People Trump Promised to Help

Statement of Sharon Parrott, CBPP President, on key priorities for the 2025 policy agenda

While the new President and new Congress will not take office until early next year, they have already put forward an agenda — through Project 2025, Republican budget plans, and campaign proposals — that would increase poverty and diminish opportunity. Their proposals would raise costs for basics like housing, food, and health care and take health coverage away from people; slash funding for schools where our children learn, roads and bridges we use to get to work, and scientific and medical research that improve our health and strengthen our economy; double down on tax giveaways for wealthy households and corporations while imposing tariffs that fuel inflation; and further widen already glaring differences in people’s well-being and opportunity across income, race, and ethnicity.

These policymakers campaigned on promises to make the economy work better for people without big bank accounts who are trying to get ahead. But their proposals to date seldom match those promises.

Instead, a policy agenda designed to advance economic opportunity and racial justice and help families make ends meet would:

Make it easier for people to afford housing, food, health care, and prescription drugs.
Support children and families with an expanded Child Tax Credit, especially for children who don’t get the full credit today because their families’ incomes are too low; more affordable child care; and investment in our schools so that all of our nation’s children get what they need to thrive.
Invest in the things that will keep the economy strong and growing, including basic building blocks like roads, bridges, and research, as well as protections that keep our communities’ food, air, water, and workplaces safe.
Support these investments with a fairer federal tax system that requires wealthy households and corporations to pay their fair share and strengthens our fiscal outlook.
Create an immigration system that recognizes the critical role that immigrants and their families play in our communities and the economy, eschewing harsh deportation regimes that separate families and embracing reforms that provide people with a workable opportunity to gain legal status and a pathway to citizenship.

This kind of policy agenda would build toward a nation where everyone — regardless of their income or their background — can get the health care they need, afford to put groceries on the table, live in safe homes and strong communities, and have the income, education, and child and home care they need throughout their lives. And it would reflect the truth that our nation succeeds only when all of us succeed.

We are eager to work with policymakers who put forward policies that advance this agenda and we — together with our partners — will work hard against policies that make people less economically secure, less healthy, and have less access to opportunity.

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

By: H.M.A. Leow

Amid the social upheaval of World War II, women entered the American workforce on an unprecedented level. And, for younger Chinese American women in the San Francisco Bay Area, the war made it possible to smash not just entrenched gender barriers, but racial ones as well.

“To a large extent, the war provided an entry for Chinese American women into the larger American society, something for which their ancestors had struggled a hundred years,” writes historian Zhao Xiaojian, who argues that second-generation Chinese American women “grasped the wartime opportunity to enter the larger American society” by joining the Bay Area’s defense industry.

“Partly because of a scarcity of English-language sources on this topic, some scholars simply have assumed that Chinese American women did not share the experience of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’” she reports. But she uses newspapers, company records, and oral histories to push back on this view.

Many Chinese American women already worked out of economic necessity. Yet racial discrimination and social isolation typically restricted them to jobs in Chinatown enclaves.

“It was difficult for many Chinese American women to go outside their communities to work, even when they wanted to,” Zhao explains. “The decades-long isolation had also limited the ability of immigrant Chinese working women to communicate with the outside world.”

During the war, women were also encouraged to adopt domestic roles—preparing “nutritional food” for their families and “show[ing] our fighting men that we are… absolutely behind them.”

But World War II still marked a major turning point—especially for younger, unmarried daughters of Chinese immigrants. Many of these women had either a high school or college-level education.

“With relatively few household responsibilities, in contrast to their mothers, they had the freedom and independence to work outside the home,” Zhao writes. “Since most of them were already living in the Bay Area before the war, these younger Chinese American women were among the first American women to join the Bay Area’s defense labor force.”

In fact, Zhao’s research turned up only four women who were older than forty during their wartime jobs. Still, those wives and mothers capably juggled their duties at home and on the home front. (snip-More; it’s a worthy click!)

Portico’s Part in Telling the Story of Emmett Till

The Emmett Till Memory Project teaches new generations about the tragedy that kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement. Preserving its digital assets is vital.

Emmett Till Headstone

Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP

Portico’s Part in Telling the Story of Emmett Till

By: Sara Ivry

On a late August day in 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, Till stopped with his cousins at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to buy chewing gum. There, Till whistled at the clerk, a brazen act that violated the norms of the Jim Crow South and so angered the clerk’s husband and brother-in-law that they killed the boy.

The events and locations that tell the story of Till’s life and death have been memorialized in different ways and forms over the ensuing decades. The Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), an app, is one of them. It uses digitized archival documents, photos of those involved and of sites central to that fateful August day, and more so that users may educate themselves about who Emmett Till was and why his death still resonates. The ETMP’s digital assets are vital to ensuring the ongoing preservation of Till’s memory as well as his legacy.

That’s where Portico comes in. Dedicated to digital preservation, Portico has partnered with the ETMP to ensure the safekeeping in perpetuity of these digital artifacts.

Historian Dave Tell, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, as well as the co-founder and director of the Emmett Till Memory Project, spoke with JSTOR Daily’s Sara Ivry about the Project and why its partnership with Portico is so critical.

Sara Ivry: How did you first learn of Portico?

Dave Tell: Kate Wittenberg reached out to me as part of the DEI efforts of her organization, specifically, a pilot project to support the preservation of archival content about under-represented topics that might be at risk. Kate contacted me about the time that we were massively reorganizing the Emmett Till Memory Project. She asked if she could just come along and preserve the site as it existed. I said, “Well, yes, you can, but we’re also trying to make it way better.” She sat in on development meetings over the last few years with us and has been an integral partner, not only in helping us think about preserving the site but helping us make design decisions that would render the site preservable.

Can you describe a little what the site was before you revamped it and what you were trying to do in the renovation?

The short story is we went live in October of 2019, and then in the pandemic, we used our last $10,000 of grant money to pay a DEI consultancy to tell us what we did well and what we did poorly. They did this entire audit, focus groups, they talked to the family, they talked to scholars. They looked at analytics, and they came back to us. Essentially, they told us great content, very bad design, which in retrospect is not surprising. Everyone on the project had been a content expert; we had never had design people on board. We had never had UX people.

The design only works for people who already know the story, they told us, which of course was a devastating blow to us. They also said this reads as if it was written by a middle-aged white guy and I’m like, “Well, I wrote it and I’m a middle-aged white guy—so fair enough.”

So, we hired a woman named Renee Payne out of the Rhode Island School of Design who runs a graphic design firm called included. She specializes in computer design for veterans of the Civil Rights movement; her clients include the families of Andy Young, Harry Belafonte, and family of Malcolm X. She assembled a team of young designers of color, and I said to them, “Nothing is sacred here. Let’s make this as good of a project as it can be,” and they reimagined it from the ground up.

When exactly then did Portico come on board?

Kate came in in the middle of this revamped process, and one of the specific things she encouraged us to do was to avoid third-party dependencies. The example that I understood was if you embed a YouTube video, your content is only as secure as YouTube, which you have no control over.

We really thought long and hard about what technologies we could preserve, and Kate and her colleague Karen Hanson pushed us to think about what exactly we’re preserving. The technologies we are currently depending on do not last forever, right? We changed our mindset. We don’t want to preserve this project so that like it will look the same for everyone into the future, but we want to preserve the assets.

Make images preservable, the text—the component parts.

Eventually we’re going to have a lot of immersive stuff on there. It’s only halfway there now. Portico helped us understand better to preserve the components that make up immersive pieces. In the future, people can use whatever technology is then current, use our same data, and create their own project.

I hadn’t thought about the built-in obsolescence of technology, and that we have to account and plan for that in the design of an app or site as well as in the design of an archive. Had you considered that before Portico got involved?

No, I’m a humanist by training, so when I first started thinking about digital preservation, probably a decade ago now, my gut instinct was we make the website just like a book. It’ll sit there unchanged forever. And Portico has been instrumental in changing the way I think about preservation—that first of all, forever might not be the goal.

Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley on the exterior of the house they lived in from 1950–1955. Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP

Second, what gets preserved is not necessarily the sort of same experience that our users have today. What really matters and what needs to be preserved is what we have. The Emmett Till Memory Project has amazing artifacts. We have hours of audio with the family that they’ve given us permission to use that no one else has. We can tell the story in incredibly intimate ways and that’s super important. When you open this app, you’ll hear the voice of Reverend Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin, narrating the story as all this stuff flashes on the screen behind you—I don’t care if the flashy, immersive technologies are preserved forever. But I care deeply that the audio files—and the voice of Rev. Parker—gets preserved. Someone else can build their own tools with that stuff. My ability to make that distinction is a testament to Kate and Portico.

Why is digital preservation of these assets critical in any case?

It’s almost hard to answer this question without going into cliche other than to say: Ignoring the past is a critical component of white supremacy. Full stop. What we want to do and what the family wants to do is tell the story—not that telling the story is sufficient for the change that they and I want to see, but it’s a critical part of the change that they and I want to see.

The Interpretive Center—what’s the first line of their mission statement, “We believe that racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth,” right?—that’s a sentence that accurately describes the vision of the Till family and it certainly describes my vision.

What was the origin of this app?

If you start from the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 you have to count 49 years and 11 months before the state of Mississippi dropped a single dollar on the Till story. Eighteen citizens of Tallahatchie County thought that was ridiculous; they put up a commemorative sign that got shot, defaced with acid, spray painted.

Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour sign, ca. 2015. Photo by Pablo Correa via ETMP

In 2014, I got invited to go down, I’d been writing about Till for a decade and a half by then, and the question was: How do we tell Till’s story in the context of vandalism?

It’s easy to shoot a sign in the middle of the country. It’s harder to shoot an app.

What are some of the assets on the app that stand out to you?

My favorite by far are the hours of audio, oral history we have of Reverend Parker that was taken in his church in Chicago. We also drove him from site to site; we put a microphone on his lapel and on the sun visor of the car. And we just asked him what these sites meant to him as we went from place to place. All that audio’s not up yet, but we have it. (snip-a bit More)

Peace & Justice History 11/16, 17:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november16

Jon Stewart On What Went Wrong For Democrats | The Daily Show

The Harris/Walz Autopsy | Mehdi Hasan | TMR

Mehdi Hasan then joins, first touching on the already-advancing relationship between the Trump and Netanyahu administrations as Israel prepares an annexation of Northern Gaza, before shifting back to the still-developing numbers from Tuesday’s blowout win by Trump and the GOP, looking at Trump’s wins among minority voters (particularly Latin men), and unpacking why his vision was able to appeal to groups he actively seeks to discriminate against. After expanding on the major role misogyny and racism played in grounding Trump’s campaign against Harris, Hasan and Emma parse through the divide between blaming the campaign and blaming the voters, discussing the complete gap in perception and reality around border crossings, crime, and inflation and the failure of messaging behind, before wrapping up the interview with what Democrats have to change about the way they do politics. Emma also touches on a note on fighting fascism from a French Leftist.

Poem-a-Day on Saturday

Joan of England in Bordeaux, 1348

Paisley Rekdal

^{Daughter of Edward III, Joan of England, traveled during the Black Death to meet her fiancée, Peter of Castille.}

What name will he call her when they meet
in her embroidered skirts of silk and velvet?
It’s all that she can bear to wonder,
trapped on board this docked ship

in her embroidered skirts of silk and velvet,
fingering her betrothed’s enamel face.
Trapped on board this docked ship,
sea light ripples through the window,

fingering her betrothed’s enamel face.
No one’s come to greet her.
Sea light ripples through the window
and she is alone. She is never alone.

No one’s come to greet her,
neither courtier, supplicant, nor priest.
She is alone. She is never alone.
The sky outside is thick with smoke.

Where is the courtier, supplicant, or priest
to lead her to the prince her father promised?
The sky is thick with smoke
swirling in knots: a labyrinth of black roses

leading to the prince her father promised.
Her father, who laughed at her love of beauty—
her knotted silks, labyrinth of roses—
In his world, love means power;

he laughed at her love of beauty.
But now, outside, masked figures scurry
and she sees the only power left to her is beauty.
A hard knot rises at her throat.

Outside, masked figures scurry
as a scythe of birds swings over the road.
A hard knot rises at her throat.
This isn’t the kingdom she was promised,

its scythe of birds swinging over the road,
where the sea air smells of rotting roses,
ash from a kingdom she wasn’t promised.
Cold light tongues her betrothed’s face.

The sea air smells of ash and roses.
She’ll ride out soon to meet her husband,
cold light tonguing her face—
No world lasts forever. And she won’t live

without riding out to meet her husband,
smiling as his pale hands reach for her.
No world lasts forever. And she won’t live
a moment longer upon this cold, unmoving sea.

She smiles as pale hands reach for her.
What name will he call her when they meet
far from this cold, unmoving sea?
What dark road will they ride together?
It’s all that she can bear to wonder.

Copyright © 2024 by Paisley Rekdal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 15, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. More about this poem and this poet here.