Chamblee54

Planting a garden, during the great American lockdown, is different. There is plenty of time to turn up the soil, and walk to Lowe’s. The problem is when you get to the store. The seedling selection is skimpy. What seedlings there are cost more. To get a package of seeds, you have to wait in line to go inside. Lowe’s thinks people will be safer if only a few people are inside the store.
I brought my ear plugs. This way, I can listen to a show while waiting in line. This was the first time, since the gym closed, that I used the wireless plugs. When I rode the stationary bike, listening to shows was essential. Today, it was a nostalgic luxury. I had to struggle a bit with the bluetooth, but it started working soon enough.
The Anthropocene Reviewed is the show for today. “The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale.” TAR is typically about 20 minutes long, which is a good length for indoor biking, and Lowe’s admission. Today’s episode is Staphylococcus Aureus and the Non-Denial Denial.
TAR is usually fun to listen to, with enough intellect to make the listener feel smart. SAATN-DD (is that a bra for the large busted satanist?) goes over the discovery of staph bugs, and the antibiotics we use to kill them. While listening to this, I was standing about twenty feet away from the “killing wall” at Lowe’s. This is where they keep the traps, and poisons, used in mortal combat with varmints. The “killing wall” is adjacent to the garden supplies. There may, or may not, be a reason for this.
How does this rate on a five star scale? It was pleasant enough, if you don’t mind the inconvenience of waiting to buy green bean seeds. Mr. Green sounds as serene as ever, even while talking about Non-Denial Denial. This is the part I heard as I was walking home. There is a gravel road, between the MARTA gold line and the Norfolk Southern tracks. I like walking on this road, and am usually the only person there.
The show started to mention examples of Non-Denial Denial, and Bill Clinton came up. Slick Willie is the master of seeming to say something, while saying nothing at all. I somehow knew what the quote would be, before hearing it. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
I give listening The Anthropocene Reviewed, while waiting to get into Lowe’s, three and a half stars. Tomorrow is the fourth Thursday of April, and there should be another episode of TAR. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.

Becky is a generic insult for *some* white women. If you don’t know what a Becky is, you might not understand the feature below. Chad is the equivalent expression for *some* white men. He is not important enough to be studied critically. This is a repost.
It started out with a tweet, about a symposium, Critical Becky Studies: Critical Explorations of Gender, Race, and the Pedagogies of Whiteness. Soon, PG was googling CBS. The paywall protected Wall Street Journal had an article on CBS. The seminal article was at City Journal, Racial Resentment As Pedagogy. The CBS flap originated at 2019 AERA Annual Meeting, sponsored by American Educational Research Association.
@chamblee54 @CityJournal @maxeden99 There was no link to this event in your article. I suspect this is a hoax. Please provide a link to the location on the event guide, for “critical becky studies.” The AERA conference guide is a confusing academic labyrinth. After a while, PG clicked on the correct link, and found a way to search for whiteness pedagogy.
CBS is real. “In the tradition of speculative fiction, parable, and counterstorytelling within critical race theory, this session aims to problematize the characterization of “Becky,” a term specific to white women who engage whiteness, often in gendered ways. This characterization is relevant to education by critically examining who is Becky and how she is characterized, her positionality in education, and how the hope for diversity, inclusion, equity, and racial justice within the P-20 educational pipeline is impacted by Becky. … tied to the gendered and raced mechanisms of whiteness enacted by Becky. ”
The symposium featured the presentation of several papers. If, after reading this feature, you want to learn more about these papers, you can follow the links.
This Ain’t No “Wizard of Oz,” Becky “The chapter is a parable in the spirit of speculative fiction, about the fictional (mis)adventures of Becky in the land of Ny as she faces obstacles that she can only overcome by grappling with her own whiteness.”
Two Woke Beckys? “Although both Sheila and Erika slip into different whiteness performances during their conversation, including passive aggressiveness and tone policing, white innocence, and white saviority, they check each other and delve into how they each have and are employing whiteness, despite their desires to rid themselves of whiteness, albeit through different means. …”
Love in the Time of Beckyism “… a particular white heterofeminine citizen-subject popularly known as “Becky,” … Despite “progressive” commitments such as equality, and social justice; and sentimental responses to historical atrocities and current social events, these (conditional) protestations made by Becky serve as a hedonistic mechanism for image management that hinges on the exploitation and social death of people of color. …” How can a teacher preparation program work to rethink the episteme and ethos that socializes Beckyism?”
Book Club Becky: White Racial Bonding in the Living Room “Many liberal white women gather monthly for book clubs … This paper reveals the more insidious workings of these spaces, as they are places where white women bond in order to maintain their place in white patriarchy, what Christine Sleeter named white racial bonding. The conversations that take place, the women who are included as “educated,” and the spaces where they meet are laced with white supremacy and surveillance.”
Border Becky “… why white women still invest in whiteness. Using the term “Becky” establishes an academic backing that can be applied and analyzed when researching the pathology of whiteness. … whiteness manifests in classrooms riddled with white women seeking to prove how they are not like other racist white people. Becky in the counterstories demonstrates the character-like roles white women play in a white supremacist folklore.”
It was a busy weekend for whiteness pedagogy. Ekemini Uwan shocked a Christian conference with her remarks about whiteness. “So then when we talk about white identity, then we have to talk about what whiteness is. Well, the reality is that whiteness is rooted in plunder, in theft, in slavery, in enslavement of Africans, genocide of Native Americans, … It’s a power structure, that is what whiteness is, and so that the thing for white women to do is you have to divest from whiteness because what happened was that your ancestors actually made a deliberate choice to rid themselves of their ethnic identity and by doing so they actually stripped Africans in America of their ethnic identity. … Because we have to understand something – whiteness is wicked. It is wicked. It’s rooted in violence, it’s rooted in theft, it’s rooted in plunder, it’s rooted in power, in privilege … ”
“Inter city beauties, Atlantic City Pageant, 1925” illustrate this feature. These images are from The Library of Congress. We do not know if any were named Becky. UPDATE @chamblee54 I found the link. My apologies for doubting you. @maxeden99 No worries. I couldn’t have made it up if I tried :)

There was a much praised video about a Plastic Bag. that winds up in the Pacific Trash Vortex. The bag has a voice (supplied by uberkraut Werner Herzog), and goes looking for it’s “maker” (an unknown actress). Today’s version: Plastic Bag (sottotitoli in italiano – voce di Werner Herzog)
The bag has a remarkable existence. First, it is used to carry tennis balls, then dog food, then to pick up the by product of dog food. This is remarkable in itself… the typical kroger bag, if it doesn’t get thrown away on arrival at home, will not be used for more than one chore. But this is a special bag.
After the secondary canine duty, the bag is thrashed. Somehow, it escapes from the municipal destination, and begins a wind propelled odyssey in search of “my maker”. After a while, it is on the beach, and the wind takes it into the ocean. It floats in the sea, has pieces bitten off my non nutrition conscious fish, and heads off for a legendary garbage nirvana.
Before long, the bag is in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The GPGP is a bit north of Hawaii, and west of California. The bag movie was filmed in Wilmington, N.C. You should not think about this too long. At any rate, the bag is not happy in the GPGP, and moves on to greener pastures.
The next day, PG goes to a site called Listverse. The letterman of the day is “top ten places you don’t want to visit”. Number ten on the list is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. GPGP is either the size of Texas or twice the size of the lower 48. It is a collection of debris, largely plastic, from the world. It is held in place by something called a gyre, which is a place where swirling ocean currents bump up against each other. Greenpeace has a neat little visual that illustrates this.
Plastic is a petroleum by product, and has many benefits to our world. It’s durability is one of them, and also one of it’s negatives. (The fact that plastic is so cheap to make is another.) A plastic bag cast off into the environment simply does not disappear. Fish eat them, thinking it is good food, and die of starvation. (Does this affect the food chain?) While the film about the plastic bag is an exaggeration, the fact is that plastic is forever, and ever.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. The poster is from Treehugger.com. This is a repost.

@JohnFPfaff Holy crap. One person, who refused to be tested and instead went to church and a buffet lunch, is the source of over 1,000 (!!) infections in S Korea. One person, who refused social distancing. No brunch or bar is worth being This Person.
“For the first four weeks of the outbreak, South Korea marshaled high-tech resources to respond aggressively…. The government tracked the movements of travelers arriving from China, for example by tracking the use of credit cards, checking CCTV footage, or mandating they download an app to report their health status every day. For those infected, the government published an extremely detailed list of their whereabouts, down to which seat they sat in at a movie theater.”
“The info was also presented (with names removed) in an interactive website that allows the public to trace the movement of every single individual with coronavirus. To be sure, there were real privacy concerns—as when one unfortunate patient in Daejeon had news of their visit to a risqué lingerie store blasted to every smartphone in their city. Yet on balance, these disclosures did much to calm the nerves and prevent unnecessary panic in the population. By Feb. 17, South Korea’s tally of COVID-19 patients stood at 30, with zero deaths. Ten patients were fully cured and discharged, with some of the discharged patients declaring the disease was “not something as serious as one might think.” The government seemed ready to declare victory.”
“It’s not clear where Patient 31 became infected with the virus, but in the days before her diagnosis, she travelled to crowded spots in Daegu, as well as in the capital Seoul. On February 6 she was in a minor traffic accident in Daegu, and checked herself into an Oriental medicine hospital. While at that hospital, she attended services at the Daegu branch of the Shincheonji (SHIN jun jee) Church of Jesus, on February 9 and again on February 16.”
“In between those visits, on February 15, doctors at the hospital said they first suggested she be tested for the coronavirus, as she had a high fever. Instead, the woman went to a buffet lunch with a friend at a hotel. In an interview with local newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, the woman denied that doctors had advised her to be tested. As her symptoms worsened, however, doctors say they once again advised her to be tested. On February 17, she finally went to another hospital for the test. The next day, health authorities announced she was the country’s 31st confirmed case. … those numbers soared as hundreds of people at the Shincheonji Church and surrounding areas tested positive.”
“The Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (KCDC) said on Saturday they had obtained a list of 9,300 people who had attended those two Shincheonji church services, around 1,200 of whom had complained of flu-like symptoms. Hundreds of cases have now been confirmed there.”
@JohnFPfaff “So, as I’ve leaned from the comments, Patient 31 wasn’t just a random vector (wasn’t clear in the Reuter’s piece). She belonged to a religious group w virus-spreading practices. Barhopping may not yield 1000 cases, but still: this spreads fast.”
“That all came to a crashing halt last week thanks to the 31st case. Patient No. 31, discovered on Feb. 18, was a member of a quasi-Christian cult called Shincheonji, one of the many new religious movements in the country. Founded in 1984, Shincheonji (whose official name is Shincheonji, Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony) means “new heaven and earth,” a reference to the Book of Revelation. Its founder Lee Man-hee claims to be the second coming of Jesus who is to establish the “new spiritual Israel” at the end of days. … “
“Shincheonji’s bad theology makes for worse public health. Shincheonji teaches illness is a sin, encouraging its followers to suffer through diseases to attend services in which they sit closely together, breathing in spittle as they repeatedly amen in unison. If they were off on their own, that might be one thing—but according to Shin Hyeon-uk, a pastor who formerly belonged to the cult, Shincheonji believes in “deceptive proselytizing,” approaching potential converts without disclosing their denomination. Shincheonji convinces its members to cover their tracks, providing a prearranged set of answers to give when anyone asks if they belong to the cult. Often, even family members are in the dark about whether someone is a Shincheonji follower. The net effect is that Shincheonji followers infect each other easily, then go onto infect the community at large. …”
“Since the discovery of Patient No. 31, the number of COVID-19 cases in South Korea jumped from 30 to 977 in eight days. Nearly all of the new cases are Shincheonji followers, or traceable to them. Particularly tragic is the case of Cheongdo Daenam Hospital … This hospital alone saw 114 cases, most of whom were long-term psychiatric patients. Because these patients never left the hospital, much less traveled abroad, they were not tested early for coronavirus, nor were they properly quarantined. This led to an advanced stage of the disease among many of the psychiatric patients, resulting in seven out of the 12 coronavirus deaths thus far.”
The source article about Shincheonji is dated FEBRUARY 27, 2020, 10:45 AM. On March 2, this video appeared: Shincheonji leader apologises over COVID-19 outbreak as South Korea postpones opening of schools. This chamblee54 feature quotes extensively from two articles: Cults and Conservatives Spread Coronavirus in South Korea – How coronavirus cases exploded in South Korean churches and hospitals Both articles have charts, links, and more information. A big thank you goes to @JohnFPfaff for his initial tweet. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.