Friday, June 12, 2020


Oxford-educated American museum curator tweets how to destroy statues with household chemicals

Another example of how the elite feel contempt for the society they live in



An Oxford-educated museum curator is being investigated by police after she tweeted expert advice on how to dissolve bronze statues using corrosive chemicals in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. 

Privately schooled Madeline Odent, curator of Royston Museum in Hertfordshire, sent a series of tweets last night to her 5,164 followers, which were then shared thousands of times.

The American-born banker's wife wrote that the damage would be 'irreversible' and 'practically impossible to stop' before saying her next target was 'marble memorials of racists' with a picture of Winston Churchill's plinth.

There are growing demands from protesters for statues all over the country to be torn down due to their links to the slave trade and Britain's colonial past. 

Mrs Odent's remarks on her private account prompted fury online, with one follower threatening to report her to the police, who have promised to investigate.

But the moneyed curator dismissed her critics, taunting them by saying 'my boss has my back' and that she intends to use her 'safe platform' to 'p*** off some racists'.

Glamorous curator Madeline Odent, whose maiden name was Madeline Briggs, comes from a wealthy family of American academics and is married to a banker.

Born in the United States, Madeline – known to her family as ‘Maddy’ – has two sisters, Morgan and Meredith. Her father, Dr Stephen Briggs, a personality psychologist, is the president of Berry College, a private liberal arts college in Georgia. He and her mother, Brenda Morgan Briggs, are old university friends.

Mrs Ordent went to Darlington High School, a private, co-educational boarding school in Georgia. Set in 500 acres of land, the school is based on the English public school system.

In 2017 she married prominent banker Pascal Odent. The couple staged two lavish ceremonies, one in an English country house and the other in the opulent surroundings of her father’s college in Georgia, which sits in 26,400 acres of magnificent landscaped gardens.

In the tweets, which MailOnline is not showing in full, the conservation expert used her knowledge of preserving ancient artefacts to suggest that people use substances found in household products to dissolve public statues.

It is 'extremely difficult' to remove the chemicals once they have been applied, she said, adding that 'it can be done, but the chemical needed is super carcinogenic, so it rarely is'.

And a spokesman for Hertfordshire Constabulary told MailOnline: 'We are aware of a series of tweets on a private twitter account, which we believe may relate to damaging statues, and we are currently looking into this matter along with our partner agencies.'

SOURCE 






Black Lives, Businesses, Neighborhoods, and Monuments Matter

Apparently, for some “protesters,” the irony of their unmitigated ignorance knows no limits. As Peter Heck notes at Discrn, “Exactly 123 years to the day that it was dedicated, the Shaw Memorial, a monument honoring the first all-volunteer black regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War, was defaced by rioters demanding justice for African-Americans.” Heck recounts, “One of the soldiers, Sgt. William Harvey Carney, carried the American flag throughout the battle, never dropping it despite being shot 7 times. Carney was the first black American to [receive] the Congressional Medal of Honor for action.”

The 54th Massachusetts Regiment of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was memorialized in the 1989 movie “Glory.” According to Derrick Wilburn, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives, “They’re out there defacing the memory of the original Black Lives Matter crusaders. They gave their life’s blood for black lives.” Perhaps these “peaceful” protesters should learn some history.

Vandals in Washington, DC, weren’t any better. The U.S. ambassador to India issued an apology after “protesters” defaced the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi. Clearly, they don’t believe, as Gandhi did, in peaceful protesting.

Historical ignorance and criminal vandalism is certainly bad, but it only scratches the surface of how riots over black lives have mostly devastated — and taken — black lives. Black-owned businesses have been burned to the ground, costing the life’s work of those entrepreneurs. Black neighborhoods were torched, destroying the homes of poor blacks. At least 17 people have been killed during rioting, and the vast majority were black.

In Chicago, the weekend after George Floyd’s death was the deadliest in the city since at least 1961 (murder data doesn’t go further back than that), as there were 18 murders in 24 hours and 24 dead throughout the weekend. The victims (and perpetrators) were predominantly black. Ironically, the race-baiting and gun-grabbing Reverend Michael Pfleger, one of Barack Obama’s Chicago cronies, said it was “open season” because, as people told him, “There’s no police anywhere.” Remember that Democrats want to defund police in Democrat-run cities that will become even more dangerous killing fields without any presence of law and order.

Robert Woodson, a conservative civil-rights leader and founder of the Woodson Center, says, “The contradictions and the hypocrisy of these so-called social justice warriors — they are more concerned about their own virtue-signaling, even if it means the continued destruction of black Americans.”

Black lives DO matter. So do black businesses, neighborhoods, and monuments to past achievements and sacrificial service. Someone should clue in the rioters, vandals, arsonists, and murderers.

SOURCE 





Leftist ideology has left young men searching for meaning in destruction

A week into the peaceful protests that have after hours turned into looting and violent riots, it’s obvious this is the result of a toxic combination of issues. People have become entitled after living in cities run by liberals for decades and receiving state handouts. Young people are ignorant of any historical context. And a lack of purpose eventually erodes work ethic, personal responsibility, and morphs into lawlessness.

At first, when residents in Minneapolis—my home town—began to riot and loot the communities, it seemed like a knee-jerk reaction to the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. This was not an entirely productive or logical protest, but it was understandable given the fact that the police officer is white and Floyd was black and racism was presumed therefore to be the root cause.

However, as the destruction continued and worsened, then spread to Philadelphia, LA, Washington, DC, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Houston, Louisville, Memphis, and Dallas it began to look like the murder of George Floyd was just lighter fluid, fanning a flame that had been smoldering for awhile.

To add to it, it looks like antifa, a left-wing, so-called “anti-fascist” group consisting of predominantly young, white males, has joined in the protests and exacerbated the violence and property destruction.

For all intents and purposes, there are two groups fanning the flames of discord in some of our country’s finest cities. While I suspect their origins and reasons for protesting—including violent looting and rioting—are different, they share some similarities: A progressive ideology and a lack of purpose. When combined with the pent-up frustration due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the idleness has given way to pure lawlessness.

Ryan Griffith: "My neighborhood, burning. Median income $33k. Many have no transit. Our pharmacies, banks, gas stations, restaurants are destroyed. The six closest grocery stores are looted. Our post office is on fire. The nearest gas station is on fire. No response from our city or state."

From the dozens of videos I’ve seen on social media, the majority of Antifa and violent protesters destroying property look young and over half are male. This is not the first time we’ve seen this nor am I the first person to point out that this generation has a particular problem with authority and with how to handle anger, frustration, and loss.

Claire Lehmann: "Maybe saddling an entire generation of kids with debt & no hope of joining the property class while sending them to institutions that marinate them in neo-Marxist ideology wasn't such a good idea."

Christina Sommers: "The violence tonight is not about George Floyd.Growing numbers of young Americans have been taught to think of US as an evil empire—a white-supremacist, patriarchal hellscape.The part about the US being the best hope for humankind—a deeply flawed but noble democracy—not taught."

Indeed, this generation of twentysomethings has grown up in fractured homes, are numbed by video games and smartphones, without an immediate threat of war to toughen them mentally and physically as it has previous generations, but still just enough poverty, debt, and job loss to cause anxiety and fear.

What these young men and women have lacked in a strong parental figure they have made up in flawed, selfish peer groups. What they failed to find in terms of moral ethics, vocational purpose, or family, they made up for when they found each other and stoked one another a sense of anger toward a government that couldn’t make their lives better.

For those who have grown up in predominantly Democratic-run areas of the country, this has compounded things for this generation. Liberal ideology hasn’t just seeped into the fabric of many cities, like Minneapolis and Washington, DC, but it has shaped entire areas now for decades.

Where these ideas have taken root, they have caused serious, dire consequences. State programs offer handouts and yet little sense of personal responsibility. Both create a false supposition that property is in fact destructible and replaceable and people don’t have to step up to provide for their own, so they lack purpose.

In Democraticic-run cities, crime is rampant, abortions are common, disregard for life, property, and basic ethics runs high. While high taxes pour money into public schools, basic civics lessons fail to be taught, history is cherry-picked, and teachers care more about a student’s self-esteem than sweat equity in math, reading, history, and government classes.

This lack of education, and an effort to pour into a student’s feelings has backfired, creating a generation of me-centric toddlers who are so entitled yet so full of their own virtue, when they see injustice they can’t fathom squaring their shoulders and making real change: Instead they loot, raid, and dub it righteous indignation. And leaders prop up this view.

If the way to overcome trauma is to find purpose then surely the way to overcome decades of liberal ideas, a fractured family, and a coddled lifestyle that has never seen a threat of real war on our own soil, is for young people to establish their bona fides in a much healthier way.

To find a sense of purpose, work, family, education, meaning, they can pour this pent-up angst into and produce real change, not broken windows. Until they do and until we teach them how, cities soaked in liberal ideology combined with a swath of young people lacking any real meaning and purpose in life will bend towards lawlessness when given the opportunity.

SOURCE  




Australia: Aboriginal Today host Brooke Boney says comedies showing blackface SHOULDN'T be banned



Like most Aborigines who make it into the media, she is effectively white, with only a little Aboriginal ancestry.  Unlike most such, however, she is not a whiner

Brooke Boney has slammed streaming services for removing controversial shows featuring blackface and offensive racial stereotypes, claiming the move will not create real change.

The Indigenous Today show host spoke out after it was revealed Chris Lilley's controversial comedies were being pulled from Netflix in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.

'If these companies truly want to make lasting change and not just virtue signal in a moment of turmoil, then they need to support new talent,' Boney said on the show on Thursday.

'They need to open doors that have been closed to people of talent before.

'So if they truly want to make a difference in the way that we tell stories about who we are in society, then we don't do that by deleting things we've done in the past we do it by making sure we don't do it again in the future.'

Boney explained it was important not to remove the shows as they served as important reminders of how people of colour were viewed in the past.

'If I have children, I don't want them to see and to think that that is how they fit into the world. But I'd also like to show them how poorly our people were thought of and treated in the past,' Boney said.

'These things hurt because it feels lie these people are punching down. It's easy for people who are on the bottom rung of the ladder.'

On Wednesday, Deadline revealed four of Chris Lilley's shows - Jonah From Tonga, Angry Boys, Summer Heights High and We Can Be Heroes - had been removed from the service in Australia and New Zealand.

In the past, those shows raised questions about racial discrimination as several of the characters were portrayed in blackface and brownface.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here
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