Because monkeys remind them of Black people

See racism, speak racism hear racism, everywhere

Out: 2012 UK employment tribunal: “no reasonable person would interpret” the three wise monkeys image as “racist.”

In:

University axes ‘three wise monkeys’ from conference promotion due to ‘racial stereotypes’

According to the Daily Mail, the “three wise monkeys” — which represent “see no evil, hear no evil [and] speak no evil” — had been used to advertise a university art history conference, specifically a “call for submissions” for the online event “Sensorial Fixations: Orality, Aurality , Opticality and Hapticity.”

But conference organizers have since apologized for the “oppressive racial stereotype.”

“Upon reflection, we strongly believe that our first poster is not appropriate as its iconology promulgates a long-standing legacy of oppression and exploits racist stereotypes,” the organizers said in a statement. “We bring this to your attention so that we may be held accountable for our actions and in our privileges do and be better.” [emphasis added]

A university spokesperson added

The Japanese symbol of the three wise monkeys was used to represent a postgraduate conference about the sensory experiences of the body, and it also appeared on a document that asked for submission of research papers to the conference on a range of areas, one of which included papers that represented black, indigenous and people of colour.

It was considered . . . that a monkey, which has been used in a derogatory way in the past, could cause offence in this context, despite this not being the intention of the organisers, so the image was removed.

Daily Mail;

But the monkeys have their origin in the Tendai school of Buddhism where they’re considered “helpers for divine figures.” Those familiar with Japanese culture say the university is overreacting.

“The monkey is a sacred being. They are vehicles of delight,” said Lucia Dolce who’s studied Japanese Buddhism at the University of London for two decades.

(UPDATE) I don’t want to be niggardly with the information supplied here, so here’s what the Oxford Reference site has to say on the subject:

Small statuettes of three monkeys, one covering his eyes, another his ears, and another his mouth, have been popular in Britain since (probably) the 1900s; they are known to have been carried as lucky charms by soldiers in the First World War. They are identified with a proverbial saying, ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’, first recorded in 1926 and now generally used sarcastically against those who, through selfishness or cowardice, choose to ignore some wrongdoing. A few figurines show the first two monkeys peeping and listening, while the third has a finger on his lips; these may reflect the proverb ‘Hear all, see all, say nowt’, known since the late Middle Ages.

The Wise Monkeys originated in Japan, where they have been known since the 16th century; statues of them are set at crossroads in honour of Koshin, the God of Roads, whose attendants they are. There, their slogan is Mi-zaru, kika-zaru, iwa-zaru, ‘No seeing, no hearing, no speaking’, with a pun on saru, Japanese for ‘Monkey’, and it is used seriously to teach prudence and purity.

COVID Contract

751 Lake Avenue, currently asking $7.495 million, reports a contract. A Kaali-Nagy project completed in 2013, it sold for $7.850 in 2014, and after adding a pool and some minor improvements was listed this time in March 2018 for $8.195.

It bears noting, as I have here before, that, while the COVID panic is seeing a huge increase in the number of houses sold, there’s been no similar upsurge in actual selling prices. This is a great time to list and sell your house, if that’s your inclination, but don’t indulge in wild dreams about how much you can charge.

Well this sucks: 'Walt" has died.

A Young Walt, a/k/a Bob Lynch

I kept his identity secret, at his request, all these years, but FWIW’s long term commenter, Bob Lynch, died last Monday, and anonymity is no longer necessary.

Bob first appeared on these pages in 2008, during the Madoff scandal, adopting as his pseudonym “Walter Noel”, Madoff’s unindicted co-conspirator then living on Round Hill Road. Walt’s comments were scathing, verging on obscene, and (almost) always very, very funny. Back then I was interviewed by two separate major publications, the New Yorker and the New York Times, and both reporters were desperate to meet him, but he declined. Too bad, because he would have given a hysterical, colorful interview.

The only clue to his identity I ever gave was when I’d write up the amazing swimming career of one “Meghan Lynch” without revealing that she was his daughter, who he deeply loved, and of whom he was extraordinarily proud. Meghan was just a tiny kid (8?) when she began beating up other swimmers years older than her, and she’s continued since then, setting all-time records in local, state, and national meets. She’s a senior at GHS now and headed for Stanford; I’m hoping to read of her competing, and succeeding in this year’s Olympics. I’m so sorry that Bob won’t be there to cheer her on, but I’ll do that for him from this side of the Pacific.

Sad news for me, and I’ll miss him, just as many readers have missed his absence from the comments page. Damn.

UPDATE: At EOS’s suggestion, I’m linking to the charity Bob’s survivors suggest contributing to in his memory:

Adopt a Boxer Rescue. I met two of his dogs some years ago when I visited Walt at his home. Growing up, our family’s dog, Argus, was half-boxer, so I’m fond of the breed, and got along with Walt’s swimmingly, so to speak.

I'm going with stewed prunes and applesauce, but who knows?

What’s next?

Biden removes the red call button that used to sit on Trump’s desk and the world wonders; what will he replace it with?

Trump’s button summoned a butler with a diet-coke on a silver tray, but only Hunter likes coke in the Biden family (we think), and he’s being kept out of sight in the White House, so what will the doddering octogenarian do with the newly-freed space?

One tweeter speculates that “He replaced it with two new buttons....one for creamed prunes and another for applesauce”, though I’d think a single button could accomplish that.

Others have suggested equally plausible answers, such as a “Help, I’ve fallen and can’t get up” button, or one that will call his and Hunter’s business partners in China. And I suppose the single red button might be replaced with a three-button panel that includes all three options, but could Joe handle such a baffling assemblage of choice? Probably not.

Our house on Gilliam Lane used to have a similar butler-summons button in the dining room floor, beneath the hostess’s place at the table, installed for a previous owner. My mother, parent of five and the child of a Hollywood star who did employ servants, complained that she could pound it all night, without effect; no one was going to respond. Her plight reminded me of this dialogue, from Henry IV:

GLENDOWER

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR

Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Biden won’t have that problem, but he might be well served by remembering the rest of the passage:

GLENDOWER

Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil.
HOTSPUR

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I'll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!

Biden’s no more likely to tell the truth than he is of remembering his Shakespeare, but it’s still a wise bit of advice.

To ask the question is to answer it

What if the Capital rioters had been Democrats and Ashli Babbitt had been a black woman?

PJMedia columnist Jack Dunphy offers a thought experiment. First, he lists his principles:

I believe: 

• People should obey the law.

• Those who don’t should be justly punished as the law prescribes.

• Both of the above should be applied equally regardless of one’s ethnicity or where one falls on the political spectrum.

Simple, right? It wasn’t so long ago that nearly everyone could agree on these rules, but recent events and the demands of electoral politics have inspired a previously unimaginable elasticity of principle in some quarters, most conspicuously among those same sophisticated betters in government, the media, and academia, who were aghast at the sight of federal officers defending against the nightly siege of the federal courthouse in Portland but who welcomed, temporarily, 25,000 troops brought in to protect Biden’s inauguration.

…

[D]ouble standards have been on vivid display since Jan. 6. As further proof of this, consider a counterfactual: Donald Trump has won the election by a slim margin, and some of Joe Biden’s supporters have raised questions about the legitimacy of the vote-counting in certain states. Their objections are rebuffed in the courts, and when Congress meets to certify the electoral votes, a crowd of protesters gathers outside the Capitol, encouraged by Democratic politicians and talking heads on cable news. Some smaller number of those protesters breach the security perimeter and force their way into the Capitol, sending the occupants scurrying for safety. In the chaos that follows, a black woman protester is shot and killed by a police officer as she climbs through an interior window near the House chamber.

Can there be any doubt that such an event would have triggered the destruction of the Capitol and much of Washington, D.C., and that the rioting would have spread to every major American city and lasted for days? Can there be any doubt that the dead woman’s name would be continuously on the lips of every talking head on every news program, and that her face would adorn murals from coast to coast? Can there be any doubt that the video of the fatal encounter would be broadcast endlessly, that the involved officer would be made infamous across all media, and that and there would be calls for him and even Trump himself to be prosecuted for murder?

As it happened, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer without any apparent legal justification, has been largely forgotten in the wake of this so-called insurrection. Her death is a mere parenthetical to the story. Why?

Also largely forgotten is Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who died after leaving the melee at the Capitol and returning to his office. The cause of Sicknick’s death and the circumstances of any altercation he may have been involved in have not been made public, though the FBI is reported to be investigating his death as a homicide.

We are told, again by these same sophisticated betters, that the insurrection was incited by Donald Trump, who propagated the “lie” that the election had been stolen from him and who encouraged his supporters to continue to protest on his behalf. But was Trump really “lying,” or was he merely espousing an honestly held belief, albeit one unsupported by available evidence? 

One need not be a conspiracy theorist to find certain anomalies of the recent election curious. But even if one accepts the notion that questioning the vote tallies makes one a “liar,” where was the similar opprobrium for the rioters who took to the streets in Michael Brown’s name in 2014? Remember “Hands up, don’t shoot”? That was a lie, but it was nonetheless peddled relentlessly in the media until a Saint Louis County grand jury and the Obama Justice Department conclusively refuted it. 

We will of course continue to see violent encounters between police and lawbreakers, some of which will turn deadly and inspire the next round of rioting in American cities. Or rioting may result when, as I expect, Derek Chauvin is acquitted in the death of George Floyd. His trial is set to begin March 8, and I anticipate a six- to seven-week trial, including jury selection, so mark your calendars and make your plans accordingly. You may want to avoid Minneapolis and certain parts of other cities around the end of April.

We are warned of the lurking menace of right-wing political violence, but the reality is that the sunshine and lollipops now showering down around President Biden will far more likely give way to the sort of lawlessness to which we have become wearily accustomed. When this happens, whether in Minneapolis or elsewhere, our sophisticated betters won’t have Trump to blame for it. How maddening they will find this, and how quickly they will revert to excusing, ignoring, and euphemizing all of it.

Biden and his Greens have a plan for the newly unemployed pipe fitters: they can go to law school

Off to Harvard

The shutdown of Keystone XL will immediately throw thousands of “burly men” out of work, our new masters admit, but promise that they’ll easily find “good-paying, green, union jobs” in the new AOC economy.

Uh huh. And what about their soon-to-be-unemployed peers?

The Keystone project is just a sliver of the total number of oil industry workers slated for unemployment: the industry itself counts 1,235,000 jobs, the virulent anti-fracking group Food and Water Watch says it’s “only” 685,534. Use either number; it’s still a lot of people to place in $100,000 “green” jobs.

WThose jobs don’t exist, and won’t appear, if at all, for years.

This flawed assumption [that there are great jobs waiting] emerges when you put people who know nothing about the trades and have never had a job that didn’t require sitting at a desk in charge. Learning a new skilled trade is not the same as learning a new version of Excel …….

This is an unworkable answer for an additional reason. As President Biden should have learned during the “shovel-ready jobs” phase of the Obama administration, infrastructure projects can take years from the time the funds are allocated:

William Ibbs, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkley, was quoted in a September 26, 2011, Politico article saying, “As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at three years for a project, really going from the time the federal government says we have the money and want to spend it…The politicians really don’t understand how cumbersome the process is these days. Environmental permitting, especially on road projects can take years. You’re hiring attorneys, not really shoveling a lot of dirt.”

If environmental permitting on roads can take years, wait until you see what it takes to do wind or solar farms …..

In Maine, a proposed transmission line to carry “green” hydro-electric power from Canada to Massachusetts has been stalled for 10 years by law suits and regulatory delays. Last week, after every possible environmental agency permit, state and federal, had finally been granted, been agency, state and federal, a federal judge granted still another injunction. Because construction can only be conducted during winter, when the ground is frozen, the work that had just become is now shut down, and probably can’t be restarted until next January at the soonest. This for a corridor 75-yards wide through uninhabited, second-growth timber land owned by the power company itself. This will be repeated for every solar farm, every windmill collection, across the country.

And wait for the uproar over lithium mines, necessary to power all those new electric cars.

But that’s okay, Biden is extending food stamps and unemployment benefits to everyone. '“We’ll turn them all into beggars ‘cause they’re easier to please.”

Biden finally admits it: “C’mon, man, all this mask stuff, social distancing and stay-at-home diktats is pure bullshit”.

“There’s Nothing We Can Do to Change the Trajectory of the Pandemic, and anyone who says different is a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.”

Which is why the Biden family doesn’t wear masks on federal property?

Because being paid for doing nothing is what teachers' unions are all about

All tatted up and ready for an extended vacation

Well, that and indoctrinating students.

Va teachers union insists that all students be inoculated before schools reopen.

Children are not passing along the COVID bug, either to themselves or others. And, because they aren’t getting sick, they will absolutely be the last group to receive the WuHu shots — September? December?

That’s a long time to wait for them to rejoin their peers and for their caregivers to be freed to return to work. But for those on the dole, like teachers, that’s a feature, not a bug.

This seems fair

In the spirit of our new national unity, who among us could Bee disappointed by this news?

It’s a miracle! CNN COVID death counter starts running backward

U.S.—In what can only be described as a huge win for the Biden Administration's COVID plan, CNN revealed this week that the total number of COVID deaths is actually going down.

"This is really, uh, quite something," said CNN anchor John King as the infamous COVID death counter rapidly ticked downward behind him. "Only a few days into the Biden presidency, and total deaths are already decreasing! We're not sure if it's Biden's brilliant mask mandate or his flawless vaccine delivery execution, but people across the country seem to be rising from their graves at a rapid pace-- over 200,000 just yesterday."

CNN executives are currently considering announcing the end of the COVID crisis in America. "At this point, I think we have better things to talk about," said CNN President Jeff Zucker. "Now that empathy and competence have returned to the White House, there's nothing really to report here anymore."

CNN has announced they will be pulling their COVID field reporters to cover the Biden family dogs and Jill Biden's exquisite wardrobe.