Thursday, June 25, 2020

THE DASH CAM TAPES GREAT MOMENTS IN RACISM Ann Coulter June 24, 2020






Ann Coulter 
June 24, 2020 





If you were watching MSNBC last Sunday, you may have seen Imani Perry, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, and wondered, as I did, Why do I know that name?

Professor Perry’s delightfully original point was that we need to “think in serious contemplative ways about the depth of American inequality.”

So perhaps we know her from her incisive commentary! I certainly haven’t heard anyone talk about American inequality. It really made me think.

But then I suddenly realized it’s that Imani Perry! The one who nearly destroyed a policeman’s life by falsely accusing him of racism!

Back in February 2016, Perry launched a series of tweets, alleging the following:

— She was “arrested in Princeton Township for a single parking ticket three years ago.”

— She was cuffed — FOR A PARKING TICKET — and not allowed to make a phone call “so that someone would know where I was.”

— “I was afraid,” she wrote. “Many women who look like me have a much more frightening end to such arrests.”

Oh my gosh, she could have been killed!

— She was “working to move from being shaken to renewing my commitment to the struggle against racism & carcerality.”

Naturally, her story became instant international news. The president of Princeton leapt to her defense, firing off a letter to the chief of police, demanding an investigation. (I know Perry is a professor, but you’d think that, by now, more people would say, Let’s wait for the facts.)

Perry attributed the universal acceptance of her story to her “small build” and her association with “elite universities” such as Princeton.

Just a thought, but it might also be because she’s black.

The Princeton police spent several days investigating before finally releasing the dashcam footage. I’m hoping they dragged it out to allow public outrage to reach maximum velocity.

Perry wasn’t arrested “for a single parking ticket three years ago.” After being stopped for going 67 mph in a 45 mph speed zone, officers ran her name and discovered her license had been suspended. She was arrested for driving with a suspended license.

The officer was almost comically polite to the professor. He gently explained to Perry that because of her suspended license, “What you’re going to have to do is come with us, it’s $130, so if you have that money we’ll be able to post and we’ll be able to get you right back out.” He offered to drop her at the university, saying, “You really shouldn’t be driving because of your suspended license.”

He informed her that police are required to cuff anyone being transported to the station and assured her that no one would have to know. As for not being allowed to make a phone call, he clearly told her that once they got to the station, “You can make as many phone calls and texts as you want.”

A policeman was kind to her, so Perry turned around and accused him of racism, secure in the knowledge that no one would dare challenge whatever she said.

It would have been firing offense for him, but not for her. She is still gainfully employed as a Princeton professor — and a sought-after guest on MSNBC and NPR! (It must be because of her “small build.”)

There are dozens of these cases. Tweet me your favorites!

Here’s another, from one of our blessed immigrants, Minati Roychoudhuri, professor at Capital Community College in Connecticut. (Really! That’s not one of my proposed new names for Yale, currently named for a slave trader.)

In 2015, Roychoudhuri (B.A., M.A., Utkal University, India) wrote a letter to the commissioner of public safety, as well as “the Senator and Legislator of my constituency” (she teaches English), claiming a policeman had racially profiled her.

Her letter said: “The officer did not give me any reason as to why had stopped me. His asking if I could speak English shows that he had racially profiled me and was not able to give me a concrete reason for stopping me. Further, the officer had checked ‘Hispanic’ in the race category in the infraction ticket.”

The professor also noted that, “I teach about diversity and the negative impact of racial profiling, I have now become a target of the same insidious behavior! It is easy to connect the dots with the nationwide racial profiling which has led to serious consequences.”


(It’s such a boon to have immigrants teaching about the horrors of “racial profiling” in America because we can’t get anyone to do that!)

Then police released  
the dashcam footage.

Below are relevant portions from the transcript. I didn’t include the part where the officer asked Roychoudhuri if she spoke English because he never did that. It was a bald-faced lie.

Officer: Hi ma’am, do you know why I’m stopping you today?

Roychoudhuri: No.

Officer: OK. There’s that big gore area with white lines painted across it and you cut in front of it, in front of me, thinking it’s a lane or something. You have to wait until it’s a dotted white line. License and registration.



Officer: Ma’am. So I wrote you the infraction for that improper lane change that you did.

Roychoudhuri: Please, you know, I probably crossed over there, and that’s why I did it. … Obviously I did that. … My (record) is absolutely clean.

Officer: OK. So I wrote you an infraction for that improper lane change that you did.

Roychoudhuri: OK.

Officer: The answer date is on the front of it and the instructions are on the back of it.

Roychoudhuri: Wait, what?

Officer: It’s a mail-in infraction. All you have to do is mail in, either a check or money order, and mail it in.

Roychoudhuri: OK.

Officer: All right.

Roychoudhuri: Thank you.

Guess who’s still teaching at Capital Community College and paid by Connecticut taxpayers? Our sacramental immigrant!

(NOTE TO MSNBC: Roychoudhuri would make another excellent guest to discuss racism in America.)

After the 2014 killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — a justified killing according to everyone, including Obama’s Department of Justice — the big demand was that police be required to wear bodycams.


OOPS!
(GRIN)

That was a miscalculation. Turns out body cameras are the best thing that ever happened to cops. Which reminds me: The public has still not seen the bodycam footage from the officers arresting George Floyd, explaining how he ended up on the ground. 


(GRIN) 
 
Maybe we should wait for the facts.

COPYRIGHT 2020 ANN COULTER

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

America’s Oldest Radio School: RCA Institutes


RCA Institute
The Marconi
Institute

In order to become an RCA technician, people needed to learn the fundamentals of electronics. For this, students studied at the RCA Institute.

RCA Institutes:

In 1909, the United Wireless Telegraph Company founded the first radio training school in the United States. This institute, later renamed the Marconi Institute, was originally only one small 15 x 30-foot classroom on the top floor of a building on 42 Broadway in New York City. After the passage of the Wireless Ship Act of 1910, which mandated that all US ships traveling over 200 miles off the coast and carrying more than 60 passengers carry wireless radio equipment, there was an influx of students, but they were still easily accommodated by the existing space.

This changed in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic, and the passage of the Radio Act of 1912. That act required that all seagoing vessels continuously monitor distress frequencies, and that radio operators be licensed, and it enacted penalties for non-compliance. Even experienced radio operators had to get certified. To accommodate the greater number of students who were now required to have formal instruction in wireless technology, Marconi Institute moved to a larger building on 24 Cliff Street, and appointed several new instructors.

When RCA was formed in 1919 from a reorganization of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, it also acquired the Marconi Institute. In 1929, they renamed it the RCA Institute and restructured the curriculum. In 1936, they created more specialized courses for radio work, and by 1938, they added television technology to their classes. At the Institute, students take courses to become a television and radio repair technician, a wireless operator, or a television camera operator. They even offered laboratory courses that would prepare them for careers in electronics research. In 1938, they opened another RCA Institute in Chicago, and later opened other vocational colleges in Philadelphia and Boston.

Ms. Fix-It

In the 1940s, RCA began to publish a pamphlet called "RCA: What it is" that gave information about the company's various operations in a question-and-answer format. One of the questions posed in the section about RCA Institutes was whether or not women were allowed to take courses. The answer was a resounding yes. While enrollment records do not exist for the early years of the Institutes, there were no institutional blocks against it, so it's likely that at least a few women were educated in radio repair in the 1930s and early 40s.

The United States’ entry into World War II brought about a shortage of trained personnel as former technicians went abroad to fight, and it also led to an increased demand for repair technicians for the electronic devices crucial to the war effort. The RCA Service company sent hundreds of service technicians to the war front, leaving a shortage back at home. To combat the loss, RCA established a program at Purdue University called the RCA Cadettes, an accelerated 44-week program that qualified women to work as engineering technicians. However, after the war and the return of men from the front , most of these women moved back into less prestigious production roles, or left the workforce completely.

Also, graduates from the RCA Cadette program worked inside of RCA plants, not in the service company. RCA Service Company did not hire its first female repair teachnicans until 1930's, when they began to work for the company.

After the war, many men took advantage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (more commonly known as the G.I. Bill) to take courses at the RCA Institutes. In the 1945 academic year, of the 1,000 new students who entered the New York school, more than 600 of them were returning veterans with their tuition covered by the G.I. Bill. By 1948, the student body grew so large that the New York RCA Institute moved into a newly built 400,000 square foot teaching center to accommodate the more than 1,500 students (most of them returning veterans) that applied each year.

That was not enough to meet the huge demand for both training and for trained repair technicians. In 1951, RCA Institutes, in collaboration with the RCA Service Company, developed a specialized home study course to train television servicing technicians. Over the next few years, RCA Institutes transitioned more and more to correspondence courses, and began to offer a greater range of courses. Eventually, the whole two-year general course for a television and radio technician could be done entirely through correspondence courses. By 1973, when the New York location stopped accepting new applicants, more than 30,000 people had graduated from the original New York City Institute, and thousands more took the correspondence courses. Through both its physical locations and its correspondence courses, RCA Institutes graduated hundreds of technicians a year, many of whom went on to repair the consumer electronics that helped make RCA a household name.

.

RCA Institutes, an electronics school with 12,500 students that opened 64 years ago as the Marconi Institute, is scheduled to close

“Like other non subsidized organizations,” said a spokesman, “the institute has been faced with the increasingly serious problem of rising costs. In addition, student enrollment has been dwindling. As a result, the institute has been losing money for some time.”

News of the school's impending closing came from a suit filed yesterday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan by Odell Butler of Hempstead, L. 1.

Acting as his own counsel and process server, Mr. Booth asked the court to compel the school to live up to “an implied contract that guarantees every student that he will complete his selected course of study within the institution.”

RCA Institutes is a subsidiary of the RCA Corporation. Its principal facility is at 320 West 31st Street. Currently, about 2,500 students are enrolled there in day and night sessions.

30,000 Graduates

About 10,000 more are in home‐study programs. And 500 are enrolled in the RCA Technical Institute — a computer science program in Cherry Hill, N.J., and Upper Darby, Pa.

About 30,000 men and women have been graduated from the institution — 20,000 of them since the nineteen‐fifties, because of the increased interest in electronics.

No date has been set for an actual closing. RCA Institutes officials have been attempting to interest other corporations in buying the school and operating it. But to date, no buyer has been found.

Jack Schnepp, a spokesman for the parent corporation, said yesterday that RCA was in “the process of formulating a phaseout plan based on separate studies and reviews of each of the schools’ operations.”

“The school will be phased out in a gradual manner,” Mr. Schnepp said, “consistent with RCA's student obligations, which the corporation will endeavor to fulfill to the greatest extent possible.”

“This would include the possibility of assisting in the transfer of students to other schools with similar career programs,” he added.

The statement also said that discussions were being held with “a number of firms that have expressed an interest in purchasing all or part of the institute's operations.”

Mr. Butler, the student, said the school's impending closing “came as quite a shock” to students.

“We fervently believe,” he said, “that a contractual obligation owed to the student body is being violated by RCA by not continuing all of the courses of study projected in its catalogue until completion.”

He said RCA's “phasing out of this institution within three to six months prevents some students from graduating who have attended this institution for more than a year's duration.”

Students From Abroad

No new enrollments in either the home‐study programs or the New York City facility on West 31st Street, called the Resident School, will be permitted, school official said.

Students have come to RCA Institutes from at least 75 foreign countries. Some of them have been Arab students who came here when the United Arab Republic was boycotting the RCA Corporation because of its trade with Israel,

Courses of study run from nine months to two and a half years, according to Mr. Butler.

The school specializes in basic electronics and electronics technology, computer technology, courses for radio, television and air‐conditioning servicing, as well as its traditional courses in amateur radio‐operator skills.

The parent company announced that it would continue to run certain educational programs—principally, those it operates for Federal or state governments.

These government‐supported programs include a Job Corps center at Hazleton, Pa., and manpower‐training program at Fort Totten,

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

PICTURE AT A RAILROAD STATION Jack Blanchard's Column June 21, 2020







Thousands of intelligent good-looking readers


For My Dad on Fathers Day

PICTURE AT A RAILROAD STATION

The cavernous old railroad station was dimly lit,
or seems that way in my memory.
My parents, my sisters, and I headed toward the big doors
that led to the platform where the trains chugged and waited.
It was the end of an era. One of us wasn't coming back... ever.

We had never been your average family.
My mother had been an artist and a model.
My father was a flamboyant jack-of-all-trades:
A stock broker at times, head of an oil company,
owner of a gambling ship that never sailed, a mortgage broker,
an aviator, and author of a course on aeronautics.

He was a party thrower and the life of every one,
and made every holiday a festival.
He was rich one year and broke the next.
As a young man he was a boxer and a daredevil.

During World War Two he was drafted
to be General Manager of the Bell Aircraft plant,
at the same time there were rumors
of his involvement with the black market.

I came home from school one afternoon
and couldn't get the front door open.
It was stuck against silver fox furs.
The whole house was knee deep in them.
I don't know where he got them, but I wasn't too surprised.
We all knew him and were ready for anything.
There was a distinguished couple in the living room,
browsing through the pelts,
a New York State Supreme Court justice and his wife.

He was brilliant in an off-beat way, and an adventure as a father.
Then he got sick.
His disease had symptoms similar to Alzheimer's,
and the smart, witty man of the world became like a child.
He couldn't work. He tried.

My mother submitted a resume for him,
and got him a job on his track record as a mechanical engineer.
She dressed him in a suit and tie and took him to the job.
He called a few hours later to be picked up.
He had ordered his crew to put way too much pressure
on a ship's drive shaft they were working on,
and blew it through the factory roof.

The family was broke and had to split up.
My father was to live with his sister in Ohio, "just until things get better".
The rest of us were to sell all the furniture and belongings,
and move in with my mother's parents in Florida.

Certain memories stick in my mind like clear snapshots
and never go away.
One of those is the night at the railroad station
when we kissed my father goodbye,
and lied to each other that it was just temporary.

I remember pushing through giant swinging doors
that led to the train platform.
The steam from the idling engine puffed out across my knees.
The ceiling was dark and high with sooty light bulbs in it.
And that's all I remember! The rest is gone.

I do recall seeing him one more time several years later.
I was hitchhiking from Florida or somewhere
and I stopped in Miamisburg to see how he was.
He opened the door, and after a minute he recognized me.
I didn't think he would.
He grabbed me in his strong arms and hugged tight.
One moment in time again... like a photo... and everything after is blank.

I don't have any memory of hearing of his death or a funeral.
I have a thing about funerals:
People tell me I was there, but I have no memories of them.

All in all, he was the tailor made father for me.
We had so many good times,
it's funny that this railroad station picture surfaces so often.

After he died, I kept seeing men who looked like him for several years.
A car would be ahead of me in traffic
and I'd see the back of the driver's head. It was him!
I'd hurry to catch up and it was just a stranger. Or was it, I wondered?
Maybe it was my dad for the minute before I caught up.

Jack Blanchard