#Washington State guard and Portland native

[scottbcrowley2]

With chip on his shoulder, Washington State guard and Portland native Isaac Bonton lights up Oregon State on 34-point night - Sat, 18 Jan 2020 PST

Isaac Bonton wasn’t totally shunned by the colleges in his home state. The 6-foot-2, 175-pound point guard and former two-star prospect from Portland’s Parkrose High School did have one offer in the state of the Oregon. It came from the WCC and the University of Portland. With chip on his shoulder, Washington State guard and Portland native Isaac Bonton lights up Oregon State on 34-point night - Sat, 18 Jan 2020 PST

[scifigeneration]

Tomanowos, the meteorite that survived mega-floods and human folly

by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos

Surface detail of the Tomanowos meteorite, showing cavities produced by dissolution of iron. Eden, Janine and Jim/Wikipedia, CC BY

The rock with arguably the most fascinating story on Earth has an ancient name: Tomanowos. It means “the visitor from heaven” in the extinct language of Oregon’s Clackamas Indian tribe.

The Clackamas revered the Tomanowos – also known as the Willamette meteorite – believing it came to unite heaven, earth and water for their people.

Rare extraterrestrial rocks like Tomanowos have a kind of fatal attraction for us humans. When European Americans found the pockmarked, 15-ton rock near the Willamette River more than a century ago, Tomanowos went through a violent uprooting, a series of lawsuits and a period under armed guard. It’s one of the strangest rock stories I’ve come across in my years as a geoscientist. But let me start the tale from its real beginning, billions of years ago.

History of a rock

Tomanowos is a 15-ton meteorite made, as most metal meteorites are, of iron with about 8% nickel mixed in. These iron and nickel atoms were formed at the core of large stars that ended their lives in supernovae explosions.

Those massive explosions spattered outer space with the products of nuclear fusion – raw elements that then ended up in a nebula, or cloud of dust and gas.

Supernovae disperse the iron produced in heavy stars. NASA

Eventually the elements were forced together by gravity, forming the earliest planet-like orbs, or protoplanets of our solar system.

Some 4.5 billion years ago, Tomanowos was part of the core of one of these protoplanets, where heavier metals like iron and nickel accumulate.

Some time after that, this protoplanet must have collided with another planetary body, sending this meteorite and an unknowable number of other chunks back out into space.

Riding the flood

Subsequent impacts over billions of years eventually pushed Tomanowos’ orbit across that of the Earth. As a result of this cosmic billiards game, the Tomanowos meteorite entered Earth’s atmosphere around 17,000 years ago and landed on an ice cap in Canada.

Over the following decades, flowing ice slowly transported Tomanowos southwards, towards a glacier in the Fork River of Montana in what is now the United States. This glacier had created a 2,000-foot-high ice dam across the river, impounding the enormous Lake Missoula upstream.

The ice dam crumbled when Tomanowos was nearing it, releasing one of the largest floods ever documented: the Missoula Floods, which shaped the Scablands of Washington State with the power of several thousand Niagara Falls.

Geological evidence of the Missoula Flood includes prairie ripple marks and layered silt deposits.

Trapped in ice and rafted down river by the flood, Tomanowos crossed modern-day Idaho, Washington and Oregon along the swollen Columbia River at speeds sometimes faster than 40 miles per hour, according to simulations by modern geologists. While floating near what’s now the city of Portland, the meteorite’s ice case broke apart, and Tomanowos sank to the river bottom.

It is one of hundreds of other “erratic” rocks – rocks made of elements that do not match the local geology – that have been found along the Columbia River. All are souvenirs from the cataclysmic Missoula floods, but none is as rare as Tomanowos.

A rock worth suing for

As flood waters ebbed, Tomanowos was exposed to the elements. Over thousands of years, rain mixed with iron sulfide in the meteorite. This produced sulfuric acid that gradually dissolved the exposed side of the rock, creating the cratered surface it bears today.

Several thousand years after the Missoula floods, the Clackamas arrived to Oregon and discovered the meteorite. Did they know it came from the heavens, despite the lack of a crater? The name Tomanowos, or Visitor from the Sky, suggests that they may have suspected the rock’s extraterrestrial origins.

Millennia of peaceful rest in the Willamette valley ended in 1902 when an Oregon man named Ellis Hughes secretly moved the iron rock to his own land and claimed it as his property.

Hauling a 15-ton rock on a wooden cart for nearly a mile without being noticed wasn’t easy, even in the Wild West. Hughes and his son labored for three back-breaking months. Once the meteorite was on his land, he began charging admission to view the “Willamette Meteorite.”

In fact, however, the legitimate owner of the iron rock turned out to be the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, which owned the land where Hughes had found the meteorite and sued for its return. While the suit worked its way through the courts, the company hired a guard who sat atop Tomanowos 24 hours a day with a loaded gun. They won the case in 1905, and sold Tomanowos to the American Museum of Natural History in New York a year later.

Children sitting in pits of the Willamette Meteorite at the American Museum of Natural History, 1939. Bettman Archive/Getty Images

Floods

Today Tomanowos can be seen in the museum’s Hall of the Universe exhibition, which still refers to it as the Willamette Meteorite. In 2000 the museum signed an agreement with descendants of the Clackamas tribe, recognizing the meteorite’s spiritual significance to the Native people of Oregon.

The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde hold an annual ceremonial visit with the ancient rock that, as their ancestors so aptly observed, brought the sky and the water together here on Earth. In 2019 several fragments of the meteorite that had been held separately were returned to the tribe.

But the museum’s written display tells only some of the rock’s long story. It omits the Missoula Floods, despite the significance of this event for modern earth science.

Present display of the Tomanowos meteorite, American Museum of Natural History. Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, CC BY-ND

Decades after geologists J. Harlen Bretz and Joseph T. Pardee separately posited the theory of the Missoula floods in the early 20th century, their research was used to explain how Tomanowos reached Oregon, where it was found. Their work also triggered one of the most significant paradigm shifts in recent geoscience: the recognition that catastrophic flooding events significantly contribute to the erosion and evolution of landscape

Previously, scientists had followed Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism, which held that Earth’s landscape was sculpted by regular, natural processes distributed evenly over long times. Normal floods fit into this theory, but the notion of swift, catastrophic events like the Missoula Floods were somewhat heretic.

The idea of huge Ice Age floods helped geologists a century ago prevail over pre-scientific, religious explanations for unusual finds – such as how marine fossils could be found at high elevation, and how a giant metal rock from outer space came to rest in Oregon.

About The Author:

Daniel Garcia-Castellanos is an Earth scientist at the Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra Jaume Almera (ICTJA - CSIC)

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

[carolxdanvers]

I am native and this is misleading. Obama didn't exactly help matters, but he didn't send federal agents into north dakota. The governor of the state did. It is still fascistic and evil, yes. It is still militarized force against civilians, yes. It is notably NOT an unprecedented invading force of federal secret police into a state against the governor and mayor's will. Please understand that there is a TERRIFYING difference. Yes, Standing Rock was a dry run for Portland.

The secret police invading Portland are not members of the Washington state national guard and they were not brought in by the governor. Trump is essentially invading states to disappear their citizens. Please understand that.

When we say this is unprecedented, we don't mean that nothing this terrible has happened before. We mean that this, the act of invading a state with federal forces over suspected vandalism, is LITERALLY unprecedented.

[adventuresinclientservice]

Where to find your first advertising job, or your next one.

When I gave a speech at New York’s Yale Club called The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing, I made what was, at the time, a bold prediction (at least to me), pointing out the big advertising agencies -- the Ogilvys, JWTSs, and BBDOs of the world --  

“are playing a losing hand.  Caught between the avarice of their holding company parents and the savings-at-all-costs procurement people, they will be forced to cut their staffs, reduce investment in the people they do keep, and watch as more senior clients grow frustrated with their junior agency counterparts, and put their accounts into revolving-door reviews.” 

If the situation sounded dire back then, it was because it was dire.  Things were bad before but even worse now, confirmed by a Media Post story claiming that, according to analysts at the respected research company Forrester, U.S. agencies will shed an estimated 52,000 jobs in just this year alone.  Dire indeed. 

The holding companies will of course point to the pandemic as the root cause, but my view is Covid isn’t the source of job reduction, it simply is an accelerant to it.  Needless to say, a disproportionate share of the pain will be borne by the people who (once) worked for Omnicom, WPP, IPG, and the other holding-company agencies, many of them experienced, expert, knowledgeable, and of course older, more expensive, and discardable. 

As sad, disappointed, and disillusioned as I am about the now-diminished state of these once-storied shops, I bring this up because I realized universities are on the cusp of declaring their Spring semesters concluded, which means some of you either in the midst of or about to begin a quest for that first post-graduation job.  Others, out of necessity or (I hope) opportunity, are looking for that next job in a career possibly cut short too soon.   

When I went looking for my first job in this business, I wasn’t smart enough to look at one of the New York-based, well-recognized agency brands.  Instead, I traveled from Washington DC to a place not New York, to join an anonymous entrepreneurial start-up that, at the time, didn’t even know it was an advertising agency.   

The venture was called Eastern Exclusives. Today you know it as Digitas, which for me was a serendipitous if terrifying accident of good fortune, given I became an integral, early part of an organization that would evolve to a formidable international player.   It was a long way from New York.  It was not like other well-known shops.  And yet, over time it likely will outperform (and possibly outlast) all of them.

If you’re searching for that next job, be it your first or fifteenth, I suspect your inclination is to think of those big agency brands, but I would urge you to think instead of shops that are digitally native rather than analog, specialized rather than generalized, entrepreneurially inclined and independent rather than indentured to a holding company, in a location other than New York, Chicago, or some other advertising mecca.   

It could be an agency like PMG Digital in Ft. Worth, Level in Pittsburgh,  Fingerpaint  in Conshohocken (most people don’t even know how to pronounce or spell “Conshohocken,” let alone know where it is), Rain in Portland, or hundreds of other, similar shops with names you need to look up rather than already know. 

Why do I suggest this?  Forrester analysts see “a minimum of a 5% increase in small and mid-sized boutiques and start-ups that deliver marketing, ad tech and martech solutions.”   What does this mean?  While the big shops are progressively diminished, fighting rear-guard actions to cling to profits at all costs, small- and medium-sized agencies are expanding, pandemic, social distancing, and working remotely be damned.

I predicted as much eight years ago, but then it was one person’s opinion.  Today, if you’re inclined to believe Forrester, it’s a fact.

The future of advertising likely lies with those “small and mid-sized boutiques and start-ups.”  I realize none of us would reject out-of-hand an offer from a big, established, holding company-owned agency, nor would I suggest you do so, but if I were in the market for a job, I would search elsewhere, knowing that the future will follow you.  

[sinrau]

In front of a brick building northwest of downtown, on a day when the nation’s gaze again fixed on this once-strong factory city, Justin Blake declared that President Trump must be defeated as he stood over the spot where a police officer shot his nephew in the back seven times.

“We don’t have any words for the orange man,” Blake said of Trump as he spoke to a crowd of more than 100 people — most of them Black — who had come for a block party complete with barbecue and bounce house. “All I ask is he keep his disrespect, his foul language far away…. Our president hasn’t been a unifier.”

Two and a half miles away, a different scene unfolded in uptown Kenosha, as the president’s supporters lined up behind barricades in anticipation of his arrival, waving American flags and hoping to catch a glimpse of his motorcade.

Sue Wells, a 57-year-old retired cleaner and factory worker, came with her daughter and her 5-year-old grandson. She signed a petition to recall the state’s Democratic governor and disparaged the racial justice movement as she stood by the historic Danish Brotherhood Lodge, which had burned to rubble during recent protests.

“If you’re so for Black Lives Matter, why are you destroying their community?” said Wells, a white Kenosha resident. The protesters, she said, don’t “understand how it is dividing us.”

Trump’s visit to Kenosha on Tuesday, where he toured downtown and met with business owners, law enforcement and elected representatives, lasted all but two hours. Yet it drew out the raw passions and divides of this town — and the nation — where debates over racism, policing and protest are colliding ahead of an election many fear will only bring more rancor.

“Reckless far-left politicians continue to push the destructive message that our nation and law enforcement are oppressive or racist,” Trump said after he landed here. “They’ll throw out any word that comes to them. Actually, we should show far greater support for our law enforcement.”

Conflicting images played out across Kenosha, which like Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., before it, bore the burden of a nation’s multiplying troubles in a narrative that featured a polarizing president, parents fearful of more bloodshed and members of right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys.

Police stand near a burning Department of Corrections building during protests Aug. 24 in Kenosha, Wis.

In Blake’s neighborhood, stereos blasted the “Cupid Shuffle” as groups danced in the street, some wearing shirts that said “BLAK: Black Lives Activists of Kenosha” and others calling for justice for Blake’s nephew, Jacob, who was left paralyzed. Volunteers lined up to register voters and offered free COVID-19 testing.

A few blocks northwest, dozens in red Make America Great Again hats cheered for the president’s motorcade before he spoke with local officials at Mary D. Bradford High School. Trump did not mention the Blake name, and when a reporter asked about protesters’ concerns about racism, the president said that was “the opposite subject” of what he wanted to discuss. He wanted to talk about the violence that has struck cities and left buildings torched.

“I keep hearing about peaceful protests. I hear it about everything, and then I come into an area like this, and I see the town is burned down,” Trump said. He said protests were really “acts of domestic terror” and “anti-American riots.” While much of Kenosha is on alert with boarded-up stores visible well into the suburbs, actual damage is limited to a small stretch of its urban core.

The president said he rejected a chance to speak with Jacob Blake’s mother, Julia Jackson, after learning she wanted lawyers present.

Benjamin Crump, a family lawyer, confirmed the account. “If the call had occurred, Ms. Jackson was prepared to ask President Trump to watch the video of Mr. Blake’s shooting and to do what she has asked all of America to do — examine your heart,” he said.

The police shooting of Jacob Blake and subsequent shootings in which 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse now faces murder charges in the deaths of two protesters have further split this crucial swing state. Trump won by a small margin four years ago in both Kenosha County and Wisconsin. Democrats hope this year that former Vice President Joe Biden will instead make gains.

Trump is pushing a “law and order” theme and is against the Black Lives Matter movement. Biden, who has spoken to the Blake family, has blamed the president for stoking violence among far-right and militia groups that have increasingly clashed with those protesting against police brutality.

Trump said Kenosha “would have been burned to the ground by now” if not for the intervention of the National Guard, which he claimed was his doing. The Wisconsin National Guard, however, has been in the city for more than a week at the request of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, and federal law enforcement and National Guard troops from several other states joined later last week.

In a statement Tuesday, Biden called Trump’s time in Wisconsin “self-centered divisiveness accompanied by zero solutions.”

“Trump failed once again to meet the moment, refusing to utter the words that Wisconsinites and Americans across the country needed to hear today from the president: a condemnation of violence of all kinds, no matter who commits it,” a reference to Trump’s defense earlier this week of Rittenhouse, who he said was defending himself.

If plans went as some locals, including the governor, mayor and county executive had hoped, Trump would not have landed in this city of 100,000, halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago. The Democratic mayor, John Antaramian, said it would “be better had [Trump] waited.” Seven of the county’s 23 supervisors, however, wrote a letter saying they wanted the president’s “leadership in this time of crisis.”

David Swartz, 56, protests President Trump’s visit to Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday.

At the Danish Brotherhood Lodge, several members spent Tuesday combing the ruins for relics, including their 110-year-old registry. They were glad to hear the president was touring damaged areas of their historic neighborhood, which has undergone gentrification over the years and is now dotted with small businesses.

“He’s drawing attention to this area instead of sweeping it under the rug and saying ‘Oh, poor protesters,’” said Joe Vaughn, 58, a retired ironworker who serves as the lodge’s treasurer.

Among those scouring the wreckage were Bryan Bernhardt, 52, and his 27-year-old son. Bernhardt’s grandfather helped found the lodge, where he and Bernhardt’s late father later served as presidents. Bernhardt said he was glad to see Trump and the National Guard in Kenosha, but was worried violence would rise again.

“Minneapolis is still going through it, Seattle, Portland,” he said. “Everyone feels for the family. Does change need to be made? Probably. Let’s get all the facts first.”

A few streets away, David Swartz, 56, said he turned out to protest Trump’s use of his town as a campaign stop. Swartz, a union electrician laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic, attended recent demonstrations in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, “because nobody deserves seven bullets in the back.” But he said he has brothers in the local electricians union who support Trump.

“He’s dividing the country, dividing people, pitting them against each other,” said Swartz, wearing his IBEW Local 127 jacket as he carried his sign on a street corner.

Kenosha has been under curfew since last week because of protests and riots after police shot Blake, 29, on Aug. 23 after officers showed up to a northwestern neighborhood in response to a 911 call about a domestic dispute.

Rittenhouse, the teen from Illinois, is charged with two murders on the night of Aug. 25 near protest sites. Rittenhouse, who carried a semiautomatic rifle and said he was protecting local businesses, fled the scene — in plain sight of police — and was arrested the next day in Lake County, Ill. Like Trump, his lawyers said he acted in self-defense.

For Porche Bennett, a 31-year-old native Kenoshian who attended the block party on the street where police shot Jacob Blake, not enough is being done to bring police to justice.

“We want the officer charged and fired,” said Bennett, who is Black and co-founded the group Black Lives Activists of Kenosha that has helped organize recent protests. “We do not want violence. What we want is justice for Jacob Blake and his family.”

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) joins Justin Blake, uncle of Jacob Blake, during a community gathering at the site of Jacob’s shooting Tuesday.

As the party wound down, a few hundred protesters marched around the Kenosha County Courthouse. National Guard troops stood watch over the fenced-in site. In this open-carry state, a handful of armed protesters, both those in support of and against the president, appeared. Small groups with members of right-wing movements, including the Proud Boys, were also present.

Protest leaders urged crowds to disperse before the 7 p.m. curfew, fearing things could quickly go wrong.

“Jacob Blake’s family really doesn’t want people out,” said KeJuan Goldsmith, 19, a University of Wisconsin-Green Bay sophomore from nearby Racine. “All it takes is one cop triggered.”

Times staff writer Eli Stokols in Washington contributed to this report.

Trump’s Kenosha visit exposes U.S. divides over race and policing ahead of November vote

[xtruss]

The U.S., Like Israel, Is Wielding The Violence of An Occupying Power

The killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests bear striking parallels to similar events in Israel-Palestine. Despite their differences, the mechanisms of repression operate in the same way.

— By Mairav Zonszein | June 1, 2020 | 972Mag.Com

— Dr. Norman Gary Finkelstein

George Floyd protests in Washington DC. Lafayette Square. May 30, 2020. (Rosa Pineda/Wikimedia Commons)

Another white cop murdered a Black man in the United States. After over two months in which public spaces were emptied by the coronavirus pandemic – a disease which itself has been disproportionately killing Black and brown people in the country – the streets are now filled with people risking their lives and safety to demand justice for George Floyd and all Black lives.

Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis one week ago is painfully familiar. It comes just two months after the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Just a few weeks after footage surfaced of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. After Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castille, and Tamir Rice. The list goes on.

And yet, this time, it feels like a moment of reckoning. Mass protests, sirens, fires, fireworks, riot gear, tear gas, and curfews fill the streets of cities like Minneapolis, New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Portland, Louisville, and Washington D.C. Police have arrested at least 1,400 people in 17 cities and authorities have ordered curfews in 39 cities across 21 states. It looks and feels like an American Intifada.

As I watch everything unfold, I cannot help but notice the striking parallels between George Floyd’s murder and the countless Palestinians killed at the hands of Israeli forces. I write this as someone who is neither Palestinian nor Black, but as a journalist and activist in solidarity with both communities, who has witnessed such events both in the United States and Israel-Palestine.

While there are substantial differences between the two countries and their circumstances, the mechanisms of state violence and repression ultimately operate in the same way. There is a clear “us” and “them.” A sense that there is the occupier and the occupied. If you are Palestinian under Israeli control, you are a target. If you are Black in America, you are a target. And when you take a stand, you are beaten or shot down.

Israeli police arrest a Palestinian protester outside the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. May 14, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

In both countries, like many others, the state wields brutal violence to preserve the structural inequalities on which it stands. Those defending the sanctity of Black lives in the United States, like those standing with Palestinians against Israeli authorities, are finding themselves face-to-face with armed forces that are fulfilling the role of a hostile occupying power.

The parallels grew even more resonant last week when, just a few days after Floyd’s murder, a 32-year-old Palestinian with autism, Iyad Hallak, was killed by Israeli Border Police in Jerusalem’s Old City. The officers claimed they believed he was holding a gun, yet there was none. When they ordered him to freeze, Hallak, out of fear, ran and hid behind a dumpster. One of the officers shot him multiple times, reportedly even after his commander told him to stop.

Last week’s killings, along with many others, illustrate how the two countries mirror each other’s experiences of discrimination and brutality. Here are just some of those commonalities.

The Power of Cameras

George Floyd’s murder was caught on video from multiple angles. It is the primary reason why news spread so fast, and why those who tried to explain away the incident failed. Palestinians, too, have been documenting Israeli human rights abuses for years, with footage of violence often being one of the only tools they can use to demand justice and draw attention to their plight.

Floyd’s murder particularly reminded me of when Israeli soldier Elor Azaria murdered Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, a Palestinian resident of occupied Hebron, in March 2016. Although the circumstances were different – Al-Sharif had tried to stab a soldier – like Floyd, Al-Sharif lay incapacitated on the ground, posing no threat, when Azaria fatally shot him in an extrajudicial killing.

IDF Sgt. Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier, who shot dead a disarmed and injured Palestinian attacker in Hebron a few months ago, with family and friends in a courtroom at the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, on January 4, 2017. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

Azaria was deemed a bad apple by some in Israel, but was defended by others on the right. After serving nine months in prison, Azaria was released and welcomed by many Israelis as a hero. Despite the massive uproar, the IDF has not changed anything about their conduct in the West Bank any more than American police have changed theirs.

Nonetheless, if such footage had not been captured, many investigations of police officers and soldiers (no matter how futile) would not have been opened and brought to public scrutiny. It is why Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid bird watcher, instinctively took out his camera in New York’s Central Park last week when Amy Cooper, a white woman, called the police on him after he asked her to put her dog on a leash, claiming he was threatening her life. It is why many Palestinians in the West Bank similarly start filming when they face Israeli officers or Jewish settlers, either through their personal phones or professional cameras distributed by human rights groups.

The Narrative Around Violence

Were it not for the protests that erupted in Minneapolis, which saw the city’s 3rd Precinct police station gutted by flames, David Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd, would likely not be in custody at this moment and charged with third-degree murder.

Still, as places are being looted and vandalized, the mainstream media narrative has been turning against the protesters, claiming that they are “thugs” undermining their own cause. A New York Times op-ed by Ross Douthat, for example, discouraged the riots arguing that “what nonviolent protest gains, violent protest unravels.”

A destroyed car with graffiti in Minneapolis during demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd. May 28, 2020. (Hungryogrephotos/Wikimedia Commons)

Tamika Mallory, a prominent Black activist who has also been deeply engaged in the Black-Palestine solidarity movement, gave a poignant response to these narratives: “Don’t talk to us about looting. Y’all are the looters… America has looted Black people. America looted the Native Americans when they first came here. So looting is what you do, we learned it from you. We learned violence from you… So if you want us to do better, then dammit, you do better.”

This same media dynamic exists in Israel-Palestine. For decades Israel has looted Palestinian lives and properties, depriving them of their rights, incarcerating them, raiding their towns, demolishing their homes – an entire infrastructure of state violence and plunder. But when Palestinians protest and fight back, they are blamed as the violent ones; they are the “terrorists.” Suddenly, state violence becomes invisible.

All the while, the vast majority of Palestinians have continued to demonstrate nonviolently, including through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. The same kinds of demonstrations have been led by groups like Black Lives Matter since Ferguson in 2014, while Black athletes like Colin Kaepernick have knelt during the national anthem against racism and police brutality – a simple gesture which was still met with punishment and backlash. No form of protest is ever good enough.

Double Standard Toward Protests

The double standard in how white and Black protests are treated by U.S. police is striking. When white, far-right, anti-lockdown demonstrations were held this past month – such as when hundreds of armed protesters in Michigan stormed the state house – police did not shoot tear gas or make arrests; they did not even bring out their batons.

Police in St.Paul and Minneapolis during protests following the killing of George Floyd, May 28, 2020. (Hungryogrephotos/Wikimedia)

In contrast, in the wake of last week’s protests, mayors have imposed curfews, and governors in several states have called in the National Guard. While tanks roam neighborhoods, police have been shooting stun grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets in Minneapolis and other cities. Journalists also reported at least 60 incidents since Friday of being targeted by the police, even though they were identifiable by their press helmet, vest, and pass; a female photographer, Linda Tirado, was blinded in her left eye by a rubber bullet in Minneapolis.

All of these practices are a mainstay of Israeli occupation, tactics taken right out of the Israeli playbook. The Los Angeles curfew order reads like an IDF closed military zone order. The arrests and attacks on journalists for doing their job, which rarely happens in the United States, is a frequently occurrence in Palestine.

The state’s contradictory response is also blatant in Israel-Palestine. When Palestinians protest, they are often beaten, arrested, or shot at, and those caught throwing stones can be sent to jail for years. Israeli Jews, meanwhile, can usually protest relatively freely, rarely having to fear arrest or repression – the major exception being Ethiopian Jews, who have been repeatedly brutalized by the police for protesting state discrimination and violence.

The U.S. certainly did not learn all its repressive methods from Israel, but there are many direct connections. In recent years, American law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels have held trainings in Israel on exchange programs sponsored by groups like the Anti-Defamation League, many of them centered around counterterrorism tactics used by the Israeli military. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have campaigned to end these exchange programs precisely because they bolster the methods and mentality of an occupying force.

JVP Philly protesting outside the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference in Philadelphia, calling on the Anti-Defamation League to stop running exchange programs between U.S. police and Israeli military. October 22, 2017. (Joe Piette/Flickr)

The hypocrisy of the groups sponsoring these police exchanges is also startling. The ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, for example, issued a statement of solidarity with the Black community following Floyd’s murder, acknowledging that they are subject to a “racist and unjust system.” Greenblatt, who frequently comments on Israeli affairs, has yet to condemn the killing of Hallak or make a similar remark about Israel’s own “racist and unjust system.”

Police and Military Impunity

The Minneapolis police is notorious for refusing to remove bad officers or to adopt reforms; the officer who killed Floyd, David Chauvin, had 18 previous complaints filed against him. In New York City – where cops have assaulted Black people over social distancing during the pandemic – about 2,500 complaints of bias were lodged over the past four years against NYPD officers; the police deemed every case invalid.

Similarly, Israeli soldiers and police are rarely brought to justice for killing or harming Palestinian protesters. For example, during Gaza’s Great March of Return that began in March 2018, only one Israeli soldier was tried for shooting and killing a plainly unarmed Palestinian child during the mass protests, and was sentenced to only a month in prison.

Other soldiers who have shot tear gas and rubber and live bullets at protests in the West Bank rarely get tried. The soldier who killed Palestinian activist Bassem Abu Rahmeh, by shooting a tear gas canister at his chest during a protest in Bil’in in 2009, was never charged. Over a decade later, no one has been held accountable for his death.

For now, George Floyd seems to have avoided Abu Rahmeh’s fate, as his killer Chauvin appears set to face trial for his crime. But there is still nothing to guarantee that Chauvin will face meaningful justice, nor to ensure that other violent police officers will face the same consequences. Until then, America will continue to see many similar uprisings.

Mairav Zonszein is a journalist and editor who writes about Israel-Palestine and its role in U.S. politics. Her publications include The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Intercept, VICE News, Foreign Policy and many more.

[scottbcrowley2]

It’ll be an all-too-familar matchup for Isaac Bonton when Washington State faces Payton Pritchard, No. 8 Oregon - Wed, 15 Jan 2020 PST

Two weeks ago Isaac Bonton got the best of an old AAU acquaintance, hustling back to stuff UCLA’s Jules Bernard in the second half of Washington State’s game against the Bruins. This week, the WSU guard and Portland native gets to relive another portion of his AAU upbringing – the part that so regularly featured Oregon point guard Payton Pritchard. It’ll be an all-too-familar matchup for Isaac Bonton when Washington State faces Payton Pritchard, No. 8 Oregon - Wed, 15 Jan 2020 PST

[beavertonairporter]

GASTON TO PDX SHUTTLE AIRPORT

GASTON TO PDX SHUTTLE AIRPORT

APRIL 8, 2019

EDIT

Gaston

to PDX shuttle airport

$ 85 00

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History

Prior to the arrival of European immigrants in the 1800s, little is known about Native American settlements in the Gaston area. What is known indicates that Native Americans in the area lived similarly to other Pacific Northwest tribes. In nearby Cherry Grove there are a few petroglyphs usually credited to the Atfalati tribe, which is a division of Kalapuya. Diseases such as smallpox, malaria and influenza which were brought to North America by European Settlers, decimated local native American population. By the time Europeans began to significantly settle the region, as much as 90% of the original native populations had been killed.

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In the 1860s, the census recorded only about 70 people in the Gaston area. Nonetheless, in 1866, the first Gaston School was founded. In 1870, a new school was built near the connecting road between Old Highway 47 and the new Highway 47. Initially students only attended school for three to six months per year, later expanded to nine months. In 1871, as a stage coach line brought more settlers, and in anticipation of a new rail line, railroad developer and town namesake Joseph Gaston set aside 2 acres (0.81 ha) of land on what was then the edge of town for a school.

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Rail services

PDX shuttle airport find in the early 1870s, stagecoach and rail service was expanding rapidly in Washington County. By 1872, a stop on the Portland – St. Joseph line in Patton Valley was officially named Gaston. With a train stop, more people came and by 1873 a post office opened in the new town. The same year, the first church, Gaston Congregational Church, was also built. In the 1880s, Joseph Gaston was responsible for draining Wapato Lake, which lay in the valley around the rail stop, creating the farmland that exists today. “Wapato” is a word from the local Indians that refers to a water-based starchy root vegetable related to arrowroot sometimes called a “water potato” in local English. Rail service ended in 1985 with the removal of rails back to the junction to the Seghers spur.

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1900 to present

PDX shuttle airport know The addition of a spur line to the nearby Cherry Grove area for the construction of a lumber mill in 1911 added significant activity to the local economy, although it had to be shut down in 1913 during a lumber market crash. The crash of 1913 notwithstanding, by 1916 Gaston had added a bank, J.H. Wescott and Sons General Merchandise, Bell & Owens General Mercantile Company, and other businesses.

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In early May 1935 workers at the Stimson Mill went on strike. On May 22, “twenty-five cars loaded with pickets left the Labor Temple in Portland” to support the strikers. The next morning Governor Charles Martin ordered the state police and National Guard to protect the strikebreakers. Armed with gas grenades and machine guns, the military and police forces demanded the strikers leave or be shot. The strikers chose to disperse, averting a potential bloodbath. http://beavertonairporter.com/ +1 (503) 760 6565  PDX shuttle airport

In 1915 a new high school was built on the land Joseph Gaston had previously set aside for a school. That high school was in use through the 1986–87 school year, when it was condemned. The condemning of the building became a crucial local issue for the town, with residents split between merging with a nearby district (both Forest Grove and Yamhill were considered), and building a new high school. In the end, a new high school was built and Gaston retained its independent school system and with it a degree of local pride. Currently the Gaston School District is a full K–12 district, with 525 students total in 2007, and a single high school.

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Modern expansion

The growing popularity of Portland and the Pacific Northwest in general has led to population growth throughout the region. Though too far from Portland to benefit much at first, recently Gaston has started to see new housing and an uptick in school registrations. The late 1980s brought a new fire station and the 1990s baseball/softball-oriented park. Just after 2000, a new post office was built on the edge of town. Thus far, the town has not been able to effectively capitalize on the local wine industry’s growing national and international recognition. In 2006, the mayoral candidate advocated obtaining state or federal funding to revitalize the commercial strip on Main Street which, in theory, could help the city capture some of the wine tourism dollars.

2010 census

As of the census of 2010, there were 637 people, 241 households, and 160 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,275.0 inhabitants per square mile (878.4/km2). There were 251 housing units at an average density of 896.4 per square mile (346.1/km2). The racial makeup of the city was 91.2% White, 0.3% African American, 1.4% Native American, 0.6% Asian, 0.2% Pacific Islander, 3.3% from other races, and 3.0% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 11.0% of the population.

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There were 241 households of which 36.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 49.8% were married couples living together, 10.0% had a female householder with no husband present, 6.6% had a male householder with no wife present, and 33.6% were non-families. 25.3% of all households were made up of individuals and 3.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.64 and the average family size was 3.18. http://beavertonairporter.com/ +1 (503) 760 6565  PDX shuttle airport

The median age in the city was 35.2 years. 26.7% of residents were under the age of 18; 9.5% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 26.7% were from 25 to 44; 31.2% were from 45 to 64; and 6% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 51.2% male and 48.8% female.

2000 census

PDX shuttle airport  base on wiki find as of the census of 2000, there were 600 people, 196 households, and 139 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,691.7 people per square mile (1,053.0/km²). There were 204 housing units at an average density of 915.2 per square mile (358.0/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 88.33% White, 0.83% Native American, 0.17% Asian, 7.00% from other races, and 3.67% from 2 or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 14.50% of the population. http://beavertonairporter.com/ +1 (503) 760 6565  PDX shuttle airport

There were 196 households out of which 44.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 52.0% were married couples living together, 14.8% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28.6% were non-families. 25.0% of all households were made up of individuals and 3.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 3.06 and the average family size was 3.73.

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In the city, the population was spread out with 37.7% under the age of 18, 9.5% from 18 to 24, 30.7% from 25 to 44, 18.2% from 45 to 64, and 4.0% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 28 years. For every 100 females, there were 104.1 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 90.8 males.

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The median income for a household in the city was $36,458, and the median income for a family was $42,031. Males had a median income of $31,641 versus $25,833 for females. The per capita income for the city was $17,758. About 9.8% of families and 11.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 21.3% of those under age 18 and none of those age 65 or over.

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[vampireadamooc]

Long Post is LOOOOOOOOOONG And a racially disparaging version of where the phrase Blue Blood came from.

Also a very humorous account to Mara/Nightmare / Old Hag type vampires hoarding and sitting on piles of gold.

VERBAL FOUNDLINGS.

Boston Daily Globe (1872-1922); Jun 9, 1889;

pg. 21

----------

VERBAL FOUNDLINGS.

Paternity of an Odd Lot of Words and Sayings.

Queer Incidents That Gave Them Tolerance in the English Language.

Facts Regarding Common Phrases That None of the Dictionaries Tell.

(Collected by New York Sun.)

    London Times: The word "teetotal" had its origin through a stuttering temperance orator, who urged on his hearers that nothing less than "te-te-te-total" abstinence would satisfy temperance reformers. Some one at once adopted "teetotal," and it sprang into general use.

    Lincoln County News: the first vessel of schooner-rig said to have been built in Gloucester, about the year 1718. When she went off the stocks into the water a bystander cried out, "Oh, how she scoons!" The builder instantly replied, "A scooner let her be!" and from that time vessels thus rigged have gone by that name. The word scoon is popularly used in some parts of New England to denote the act of making stones skip along the surface of the water. The Scottish scon means the same thing. The word appears to have been originally written scooner.

    Notes and Queries: The term uncle's, as applied to a pawnbroker's shop, is said to be a pun on the Latin uncus a hook.  Pawnbrokers employed a hook to lift articles pawned before spouts were adopted. "Gone to the uncus," therefore, is exactly tantamount to the more modern phrase, "up the spout." In France the concierge of a prison is called uncle because the prisoners are "kept there in pawn" by government. In the seventeenth century a usurer was called "my uncle" in the Walloon provinces because of his near connection with spend-thrifts, called in Latin nepotes, nephews.

    All the Year Round: Among exclamations in common use "Halloo!" and "Hurrah!" have curious origins attributed to them. It is said by the author of the "Queen's English" that the people of Carnwood forest, Leicestershire, when they desire to hail a person at a distance call out not "halloo!" but "halloup!" This he imagines is a survival of the times when one cried to another "A loup! a loup!" or as we would a now say: "Wolf! Wolf!" "Hurrah!" again, according to M. Littre, is derived from the Slavonic huraj, :to Paridise," which signifies that all soldiers who fell fighting valiantly went straight to heaven. "Prithee" is obviously a corruption of "I pray thee;" while "marry" was originally a method of swearing by the Virgin Mary.

    Boston Transcript: After the black Moors were driven out of Spain, or such of them as were too high-spirited to become Christians on compulsion, the aristocracy of Spain was held to consist of those who traced their lineage back to the time before the Moorish conquest. These people were whiter than those who had been mixed with Moorish blood: the veins upon their white hands were blue, while the blood of the masses, contaminated by the Moorish infusion, showed black upon their hands and faces. So the white Spaniards of old race came to declare that their blood was "blue" while that of the common people was black. The phrase passed to France, where it had no such significance, and was in fact, quite an arbitrary term, and so to England and America.

    Detroit Tribune: One night, in the winder of 1855, Artemus Ward lectured in Lincoln Hall, and when the great humorist was about half through his discourse he paralyzed his audience with the announcement that they would have to take a recess of 15 minutes so as to enable to go across the street to "see a man." H.R. Tracey, then editor of the Washington Republican, was in the audience, and seeing an opportunity to improve upon the joke, penciled these lines and sent them to the platform:

"Dear Artemus - If you will place yourself under my guidance I'll take von to 'see a man' without crossing the street."

Artemus accepted the invitation, and while the great audience impatiently, but with much amusement awaited the reappearance of the humorist, the latter was making the acquaintance of a man a luxuriating at a well-laden refreshment board. Of course, everybody "caught to" the phrase, and men became fond of getting up between the acts and "going out to see a man." The restaurateur's business from the time forward boomed. Men who would ordinarily sit quietly through an entertainment and behave themselves allowed themselves to be influenced by the contagion.

    Portland Oregonian: Moses Folsom of Port Townsend sends the following sketch of the use of the letters "O. K.," which he stated was furnished him personally by James Parten:

While at Nashville in search of material for his history, Mr. Parten found among the records of the court of which General Jackson had been judge, a great many legal documents endorsed "O.R.," which meant "order recorded," but often so scrawlingly written that one could easily read it as O.K. If "Major Downing" noticed a bundle of papers thus marked upon President Jackson's table, documents, perhaps, from his former court in which he still had interest it is very easy to see how a punster could imagine it to be "O.K.," or "oll korrect."

No doubt Sela Smith, who wrote under the nom de plume of "Major Jack Downing," had much to do with creating the impressions that President Jackson was unlettered and illiterate, whereas many existing personal letters, military reports, court opinions and State papers show to the contrary. He lived before the the day of stenographers and typewriters, and yet carried on a voluminous correspondence. Hundreds of his personal letters to old soldier friends are still preserved as heirlooms in the South and his handiwork is numerous in Washington. He was evidently a rapid penman and made greater use of capital letters than is the present custom, but misspelled words and stumbling sentences were few and far between.

    Detroit Free Press: There are few people that have looked into the dictionary, especially who know how the term "spinster" originated. We often find it in Shakespeare and other of the English classics, but it is used to define the spinner. This is it's specific meaning. Its general significance is wider. There was an old practice, in the years agone, that a woman should never be married until she had spun herself a set of body, table and bed linen. It is not difficult to see how easily the term became applicable to all unmarried women, and finally became a law term and fixed.

    "Standing Sam" (paying the reckoning),  This arose from the letters U.S. on the knapsacks of the soldiers, The government of Uncle Sam has to pay or "Stand Sam" for all.

    "To find a mare's nest." What we call a nightmare was by our forefather suppose to be the Saxon demon Mara or Mare, a kind of vampire, sitting on the sleeper's chest. These vampires were said to be the guardians of hidden treasures, over which they brooded as hens over their eggs, and the place where they sat was termed their nidus or nest. Hence then anyone supposes he had made a great discovery we ask if he had discovered a mare's nest, or the place where the vampire keeps guard over the hypothetical treasures.

    "Shell out" (out with your shells or money) In southern Asia and many other parts, shells are used instead of coins.

    "To kick the bucket." A bucket is a pulley. When pigs are killed they are hung by their hind legs on a bucket.

    "Little urchin" is a little arc (ore-kin : Dutch - urk, urkjen). The ore is a sea monster that devours men and women ; the ore-kin or little ore is the hedgehog, supposed to be a sprite or mischievous little imp.

    "Eau de vie" (brandy). A French translation of the Latin aqua vite (water of life) This is a curious pervision of the of the Spanish agua di vite (water or juice of the vine) rendered by the monks into a aqua vite instead on aqua vitis.

    "Gone to the dogs." This undoubtedly is a a perversion of the Dutch proverb "Toc goe, tos de dogs" (money gone, credit gone too).

    "Dog weary." This ia also the Dutch saying, "Doege waere hie" (being lond on one's legs tells at last).

    "To write like an angel." This ia French expression. The angel referred to was Andel Vergecios, a Greek of the fifteenth century, noted for his calligraphy.

    "Pig iron." This is a mere play upon the word sow. When iron is melted it sund off into a channel called a a sow, the lateral branches of which are called the pigs. Here the iron cools and is called pig iron. Sow has nothing to do with the swine, but is from the Saxon sawau, to scatter. Having sow for a parent channel, it required no great effort of wit to call the lateral groove little pigs.

    San Diego Sun: Speaking of his recent travels through the State of Sonora, Mexico, a gentleman said:

"While in Guayman I met a sea captain by the name of Bruce, then a commander of the schooner La Umon. He asked me if I would like to take a trip with him to a small seaport village called Ajiavampo, 65 miles down the Gulf of California, near the mouth of both the Mayo and Yaqut rivers. We had been on shore probably half an hour when we heard heard that the natives were celebrating the anniversary of a saint and were having a great time. I invited the captain to accompany me to see it and the host welcomed me cordially and told me to bring {ia?} my companion, "El Gringo".

We were then introduced to the heads of the families and were politely told to make ourselves at home. I drifted away from the captain and sat down by an old lady whose name I learned was Fabiana Murrieta de Farrel. She stated that she was 94 years old and had been married to a 'gringo' 32 years. She then explained why the Americans were called 'gringos' as follows:

'About the year 10 (meaning 1810),' she began 'a great many of us then, of course girls, were surprised to see a great crowd coming ashore in some boats from a buque (meaning a ship) in the port of Guayman and singing a song that my husband afterward taught me how to pronounce. That was "Green Grows the Meadows" of course. All we girls could catch was the first two sentences, 'green grows.' Therefore when we saw them walking in groups we christened them "gringos" and there you have the origin of the word.'"

    Louisville Courier-Journal: During the recent presidential campaign a great deal of talent in the invention of slang phrases was displayed. "Whats the matter with Cleveland?" and it's answer "He's all right," did not have it's origin during the campaign, but owes its birth to Battery A of the Louisville Legion of this city.

In 1881 there was a big military affair held in St. Louis. There were competitive drills for infantry, cavalry and artillery, companies and a large number of each arm entered the lists. The famous Chickasaw Guards of Memphis were there, as well as crack companies and artillery sections from all over the country. A section of the Louisville Battery was there and it may not be amiss to say that it acquitted itself honorably.

The boys composing that particular section -- which afterwards became famous all over the United States -- were a pretty lively set. Among them was George Clark. George is living in this city though he is no longer a member of Battery A. The boys had a great deal of fun among themselves and one of their jokes was to lay everything that occurred on George. One night when they had been accusing him of something, not now remembered, though it is thought it was for capturing a big dog while passing through Indiana, one of the boys yelled out: "What's the matter with George Clark?" and the answer came instanter: "He's all right."

The question and answer were immediately taken up by the Chickasaw Guards and other companies in the immediate vicinity, and the night was not far gone before the cry had spread throughout the entire camp. The thing seemed to strike everybody's fancy. In using the phrases they all stuck to George Clark's name before they began to substitute other names in the meantime the battery boys began to continue as it were. One man would ask the question at the top of his voice and a dozen others would shout the answer in unison.

This idea too caught the soldiers and it could be heard in every company's quarters. When the encampment broke up the troops carried the cry to their homes, but it was suffer to fall somewhat into disuse until the Louisville Legion went to Washington in map 1887. At that encampment there were many who had been at St. Louis six years before, including some of the Louisville boys who lost no time in reviving their old war cry.

The legion marched down Pennsylvania Avenue Sunday afternoon and went into camp at the base of the Washington Monument and by the next afternoon the famous old shout was ringing all over that historic shaft. It spread all over Washington. From the Washington encampment it spread further than ever, until by te time the presidential campaign opened it had become universal.

[goldeagleprice]

Bowers on collecting: Facts, fantasies, and opinions about the Bank of the United States

By Q. David Bowers

I love history, and over a period of time, I have immersed myself in many accounts published in early newspapers, books, and directories. These include Niles’ Weekly Register, launched in Baltimore in 1811, and continued for decades afterward. I skimmed every issue and read anything that had to do with finance or numismatics. The result was an “I was there” experience, such as in late summer 1814 when Hezekiah Niles, editor, was at his desk in Baltimore while British forces were approaching the city. Of course, we all know they didn’t make it, and the rockets fired from Fort McHenry forced the British ships to flee from the Chesapeake, with “The Star Spangled Banner” memorializing this event. I have looked through the Congressional Record, the National Intelligencer, and other early print matter—this in an era when it had to be done by hand. Today, most of these sources are on the Internet and are searchable. Probably, what took me a year to do a decade or two ago could be done in a month now!

1776 Continental Dollar. Newman 1-C. CURRENCY. Pewter. MS-62. Hover to zoom. Image courtesy of Stack’s Bowers.

As it is, there are still things I am seeking that I have not found on the Internet. The subject of the 1776 Continental dollar (most of which are struck in pewter and grade from Very Fine to About Uncirculated, indicating use in commerce) has come to the fore in recent years. Where were they made and by whom? Ever since the mid-1950s, I have studied the 1785–1788 coppers made for the Republic of Vermont (it did not become a state until 1791). Even with Internet searching, I have found very little new information to add to what I gathered earlier. And then there is the little town of Arcadia, New York, where some of my ancestors settled in the late 1850s after emigrating from Germany.

However, I am getting off-topic, so now to the history of the Bank of the United States—an interest of mine for a long time, and the entity, actually two entities, that I read about in the aforementioned Niles’ Weekly Register and other publications, including quite a few books written in the 19th century into the early 20th. Andrew Jackson is one of my favorite 19th-century personalities, and I have read a lot of source material about him. I have delved into Senator Thomas Hart Benton, his daughter and her connection in a way with the San Francisco branch mint, and more. Lots of fun. On the other hand, I haven’t paid much attention to Henry Clay (except for his 1844 presidential campaign) or New Hampshire native Daniel Webster (honored here, but did he have to move to Massachusetts?).

In writing this article I sent a draft to several people, including John Kleeberg and Joel Orosz. Both are rocket scientists, so to speak when it comes to history, and both have written extensively. Their feedback, including corrections, has resulted in a rewrite and expansion of my original narrative.

By any account the two Bank of the United States institutions were controversial: Were they essential to the health of the American economy in their time, or were they partially helpful but also an interference? Today, in my opinion, later accounts of them are often confusing and muddled. Congress chartered the first in 1791 with a 20-year life. This became standard with many state-chartered banks and, beginning in 1863, with federally chartered national banks. The idea was to allow two decades for a bank to go into business and, it was hoped, prosper. Near the end of the term, the officers of the bank could petition to have the charter renewed. The charter of the first Bank of the United States expired in 1811. Its operations were quite controversial, and the charter was not renewed. Fast-forward to 1816, and a new contingent in Congress, plus optimism following the War of 1812, furnished the basis for establishing the Second Bank of the United States, also with a 20-year charter.

Neither bank was a federal bank in the sense of being owned and managed by the government and the Treasury Department. Instead, they were what can be called public-private enterprises. Most of the stock was held by private individuals and interests.

Both were headquartered in Philadelphia, with branches in other cities. The second Bank of the United States, the main subject of this article, was headquartered in Philadelphia in a new grand building in the Greek Revival style. In time 26 branches were opened in various towns and cities, a very short list including Boston, Baltimore, Portsmouth (New Hampshire), Washington, and Charleston. The bank issued paper money in various denominations, printed by private engraving and printing companies, which circulated widely.

The Bank of the United States.

A Bank of the United States note, of, say, $20, could be cashed at face value in Portland, Maine, in Charleston, South Carolina, or in Chillicothe, Ohio. As such, they were a stable unit in commerce, accepted everywhere. In unfortunate contrast, in the same era, this was not true for money of the several thousand state-chartered banks that as a group issued a far greater number of notes. These state banks were owned by stockholders who formed to seek state charters, after which capital was raised by selling shares to the public. However, unlike the bills of the Bank of the United States, which could be cashed almost anywhere for full face value, the notes of state banks were mainly of regional interest. For example, a $20 note issued by a bank in Portland, Maine, could be redeemed at face value at that city or even in Boston, where there was a currency exchange, but someone taking the note to Savannah or Charlotte or Pittsburgh would find it would not be accepted at all, or, if it was, only at a deep discount. State-chartered banks had thousands of stockholders and their officers were often leaders of the various states (including governors and legislators), so the Bank of the United States was viewed as unfair competition. Great resentment developed concerning this. Most of the state-chartered banks were sound financially and well managed. However, as a further complication, there were many exceptions, and some notes of state-chartered banks were basically of questionable value, even in their places of issue. In contrast, there was no question about Bank of the United States notes, except for occasional counterfeits (which merchants and banks either were unaware of or simply passed along to the next customer).

President Andrew Jackson.

In 1824 Andrew Jackson ran for president against John Quincy Adams. Jackson, a rough-cut military hero, contrasted the New England gentility of Adams. Jackson won the popular vote, but Congress decided the outcome and named Adams. A great brouhaha was caused, and Jackson and his followers formed the Democratic Party. In 1828 the same two men faced each other, and Jackson won by a landslide, with the results uncontested. He took office on March 4, 1829. His term, while controversial (mostly arising from the threatened secession of South Carolina from the Union due to a tariff viewed as unfavorable), was quite successful in an era of growing prosperity in America. (Whether he was significant in this expansion is a matter of controversy among historians.) Members of the old-guard, the friends of Adams and others, were distressed. In 1832 Jackson was elected to a second term. This had its own “situations,” including the “Petticoat Affair” with the flirtatious (and more, according to some accounts) Peggy O’Neal causing the resignation of some Cabinet members.

With advice and counsel, Jackson, casting himself as a “common man,” formed a strong dislike of the Bank of the United States, thought to be controlled by the aristocracy, and stated that he was against having its charter renewed (scheduled to happen in 1836). Certain of his followers agreed. In Congress, an alarm was sounded and it was decided to advance the renewal of the charter to 1833, so that the Bank of the United States could operate with confidence after that point, during Jackson’s second term, continuing to the stated charter expiration in 1836, and possibly even have the charter renewed by Congress for another 20 years to 1856.

That did not happen, as after Congress approved in advance the 1836 renewal, Jackson vetoed the legislation. The death knell was sounded for the Bank of the United States. In the mid-1830s it wound down with the various branches being liquidated and buildings sold; by late 1835 there was not much left.

Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

In the meantime, in the 1830s there was great speculation and prosperity in the Prairie lands, these comprising territories west of Pennsylvania, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and other districts. The federal government was selling millions of acres of land, and it could be purchased by giving promissory notes or notes of state-chartered banks, some of which uncertain value. The matter got out of hand, and in the summer of 1836, President Jackson issued the Specie Circular, which mandated that, henceforth, federal lands could only be purchased by paying in gold and silver coins. By that time the Bank of the United States was nearly completely defunct. Not all was well, and on the other side of the story, as John Kleeberg reminded me, there were many problems in the cotton market, the issuance of state bonds that defaulted, and more. Due to various causes, investment and speculation ceased, values fell, and the stage was set for an economic adjustment. Early in 1837, there were economic disturbances in New York and elsewhere and a chill was felt in commerce. In the meantime, Jackson had not run for reelection, and in March 1837 Martin Van Buren, his vice president, was elected to the position. Economic matters went from bad to worse, and beginning on May 10, 1837, nearly all the banks in the East stopped paying out silver and gold coins at face value in exchange for paper money. The Panic of 1837 ensued, an economic depression that lasted until early 1843 (which seems to have been the end of the “Hard Times” era), after which prosperity gradually returned, and continued into the late 1850s, later checked by the Panic of 1857.

That is my well-studied (in my opinion) view, taken from original sources, plus, as noted, some recent adjustments by John Kleeberg.

It is my opinion, not at all widely shared, that the idea that it was President Jackson’s veto of the Bank of the United States charter in 1833 that was the primary cause of the Panic of 1837 is not correct. However, excellent studies have been made on both sides of the question. Perhaps of related complexity: Who was the greatest president of the United States? Washington? Lincoln? FDR? Who was the worst? (I won’t go there!)

Portrait of Nicholas Biddle by William Inman.

Whatever the case, once the bank closed, Nicholas Biddle, who formerly had been a president of the Bank of the United States, formed a new institution, chartered by the Pennsylvania State Legislature, called the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania. Cleverly enough, the words “of Pennsylvania” were not used on the bank’s currency including those of face value of $1,000 or more, which to all appearances seemed to be issued by the earlier Bank of the United States! However, they are nothing more than notes of a state-chartered bank. They are interesting to collect, but few numismatists know of their history. Biddle, a leading member of Philadelphia society, did not do well as his bank was charged with fraud and failed in 1841. He died on February 17, 1844, while still enveloped in civil suits alleging misdemeanors.

Today, original notes of the First Bank of the United States and the Second Bank of the United States are extremely rare. These bear the names of the different bank branches that issued them. Most denominations from various offices are completely unknown. Genuine bills sell for four-figure prices.

Image courtesy of the Eric P. Newman Collection.

In contrast, notes from the Bank of the United States (of Pennsylvania) are rather plentiful, including those in large denominations. In most instances, they are offered by sellers who are not aware that this is a different, unrelated enterprise. Some have even called this the Third Bank of the United States.

A display of the notes of Biddle’s 1836 to 1841 bank is interesting to view, as hardly any notes of denominations of $1000 or more survive from other state-chartered banks. In connection with these their history is interesting to contemplate.

❑

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         Comments

@NCM Collector “..Wonder if the coin medal sets will come ... by Tinto

Engaging story – I often wonder how the financial structures ... by Numismatrix

Wonder if the coin medal sets will come with individual COAs. ... by NCM Collector

Very nice article. I'm really pleased to see the Biddle ... by just another dave in pa

Wow, super interesting! Thanks so much for the information. by ClevelandRocks

[sfcmac57]

Antifa Thug Murders Trump Supporter in Portland

Antifa Thug Murders Trump Supporter in Portland

Michael Reinoehl murdered Jay Bishop on the streets of Portland, Oregon because he was a Trump supporter. Reinoehl, 48, is a native of Portland and self-proclaimed security guard for the rioters.

Fox News

The man killed after Portland protesters clashed with Trump supporters was a backer of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, it was reported Sunday.

Joey Gibson, head of the Washington state…

[asfeedin]

Tomanowos, the meteorite that survived mega-floods and human folly

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, Earth scientist, Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra Jaume Almera (ICTJA – CSIC)

The rock with arguably the most fascinating story on Earth has an ancient name: Tomanowos. It means “the visitor from heaven” in the extinct language of Oregon’s Clackamas Indian tribe.

The Clackamas revered the Tomanowos – also known as the Willamette meteorite – believing it came to unite heaven, earth and water for their people.

Rare extraterrestrial rocks like Tomanowos have a kind of fatal attraction for us humans. When European Americans found the pockmarked, 15-ton rock near the Willamette River more than a century ago, Tomanowos went through a violent uprooting, a series of lawsuits and a period under armed guard. It’s one of the strangest rock stories I’ve come across in my years as a geoscientist. But let me start the tale from its real beginning, billions of years ago.

History of a rock

Tomanowos is a 15-ton meteorite made, as most metal meteorites are, of iron with about 8% nickel mixed in. These iron and nickel atoms were formed at the core of large stars that ended their lives in supernovae explosions.

Those massive explosions spattered outer space with the products of nuclear fusion – raw elements that then ended up in a nebula, or cloud of dust and gas.

Supernovae disperse the iron produced in heavy stars. (Image credit: NASA)

Those massive explosions spattered outer space with the products of nuclear fusion – raw elements that then ended up in a nebula, or cloud of dust and gas.

Eventually the elements were forced together by gravity, forming the earliest planet-like orbs, or protoplanets of our solar system.

Some 4.5 billion years ago, Tomanowos was part of the core of one of these protoplanets, where heavier metals like iron and nickel accumulate.

Some time after that, this protoplanet must have collided with another planetary body, sending this meteorite and an unknowable number of other chunks back out into space.

Riding the flood

Subsequent impacts over billions of years eventually pushed Tomanowos’ orbit across that of the Earth. As a result of this cosmic billiards game, the Tomanowos meteorite entered Earth’s atmosphere around 17,000 years ago and landed on an ice cap in Canada.

Over the following decades, flowing ice slowly transported Tomanowos southwards, towards a glacier in the Fork River of Montana in what is now the United States. This glacier had created a 2,000-foot-high ice dam across the river, impounding the enormous Lake Missoula upstream.

The ice dam crumbled when Tomanowos was nearing it, releasing one of the largest floods ever documented: the Missoula Floods, which shaped the Scablands of Washington State with the power of several thousand Niagara Falls.

Trapped in ice and rafted down river by the flood, Tomanowos crossed modern-day Idaho, Washington and Oregon along the swollen Columbia River at speeds sometimes faster than 40 miles per hour, according to simulations by modern geologists. While floating near what’s now the city of Portland, the meteorite’s ice case broke apart, and Tomanowos sank to the river bottom.

It is one of hundreds of other “erratic” rocks – rocks made of elements that do not match the local geology – that have been found along the Columbia River. All are souvenirs from the cataclysmic Missoula floods, but none is as rare as Tomanowos.

A rock worth suing for

As flood waters ebbed, Tomanowos was exposed to the elements. Over thousands of years, rain mixed with iron sulfide in the meteorite. This produced sulfuric acid that gradually dissolved the exposed side of the rock, creating the cratered surface it bears today.

Several thousand years after the Missoula floods, the Clackamas arrived to Oregon and discovered the meteorite. Did they know it came from the heavens, despite the lack of a crater? The name Tomanowos, or Visitor from the Sky, suggests that they may have suspected the rock’s extraterrestrial origins.

Millennia of peaceful rest in the Willamette valley ended in 1902 when an Oregon man named Ellis Hughes secretly moved the iron rock to his own land and claimed it as his property.

Hauling a 15-ton rock on a wooden cart for nearly a mile without being noticed wasn’t easy, even in the Wild West. Hughes and his son labored for three back-breaking months. Once the meteorite was on his land, he began charging admission to view the “Willamette Meteorite.”

In fact, however, the legitimate owner of the iron rock turned out to be the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, which owned the land where Hughes had found the meteorite and sued for its return. While the suit worked its way through the courts, the company hired a guard who sat atop Tomanowos 24 hours a day with a loaded gun. They won the case in 1905, and sold Tomanowos to the American Museum of Natural History in New York a year later.

Floods

Today Tomanowos can be seen in the museum’s Hall of the Universe exhibition, which still refers to it as the Willamette Meteorite. In 2000 the museum signed an agreement with descendants of the Clackamas tribe, recognizing the meteorite’s spiritual significance to the Native people of Oregon.

The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde hold an annual ceremonial visit with the ancient rock that, as their ancestors so aptly observed, brought the sky and the water together here on Earth. In 2019 several fragments of the meteorite that had been held separately were returned to the tribe.

But the museum’s written display tells only some of the rock’s long story. It omits the Missoula Floods, despite the significance of this event for modern earth science.

Present display of the Tomanowos meteorite, American Museum of Natural History. (Image credit: Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, CC-BY-ND)

Decades after geologists J. Harlen Bretz and Joseph T. Pardee separately posited the theory of the Missoula floods in the early 20th century, their research was used to explain how Tomanowos reached Oregon, where it was found. Their work also triggered one of the most significant paradigm shifts in recent geoscience: the recognition that catastrophic flooding events significantly contribute to the erosion and evolution of landscape

Previously, scientists had followed Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism, which held that Earth’s landscape was sculpted by regular, natural processes distributed evenly over long times. Normal floods fit into this theory, but the notion of swift, catastrophic events like the Missoula Floods were somewhat heretic.

The idea of huge Ice Age floods helped geologists a century ago prevail over pre-scientific, religious explanations for unusual finds – such as how marine fossils could be found at high elevation, and how a giant metal rock from outer space came to rest in Oregon.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.  

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Tags: folly, human, megafloods, meteorite, survived, Tomanowos

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Oregon Ducks Fans are Tailgating In the Parking Lot of a Youth Jail

It was the day before the University of Oregon Ducks were to play Washington State at home and a teenager with a flat top, soft voice, and criminal record stood up in court and started to talk sports with the judge. His mother held a cooing baby. His lawyer looked on and smiled.

"I started boxing," he told the court. "I'm doing good in math, too. That's a new thing for me."

He was one of a dozen or so teenagers who filed into Lane County Juvenile Court on Friday afternoon on a range of charges that included robbery, arson, burglary, reckless endangerment, and sexual abuse in the third degree. As the clusters of teens, family members, and lawyers waited in the lobby to be called before the judge, Autzen Stadium, the 54,000-seat mecca for Ducks football, loomed behind them in a large window across Martin Luther King Boulevard.

While much has changed about Duck athletics, including a new, sprawling complex of Nike-funded buildings nearby, the youth center—which features both a court and a detention facility—was almost exactly as I remembered it 17 years ago when it was the subject of my first-ever published article for the hometown paper, the Register-Guard. I was drawn to the contradiction even then: How was it that some of my classmates were in court, detoxing from drug addictions and dealing with the consequences of violent crime while others were getting recruited to the top-tier football program across the street?

The detention center's parking lot has long been prime real estate for tailgating at Ducks games, especially as the team's success has ballooned in the last decade. The two make strange neighbors, all the more as the nation chooses sides over football players taking a knee during the national anthem, arguing that it's the players' right to act against racism in America or that it muddles sports and politics and has no place on the field.

A beer garden on the lawn of the Lane County Juvenile Justice Center. Photo: Mary Pilon

The #TakeaKnee turmoil over criminal justice, racial history, and sports bubbled up again recently when Vice President Mike Pence left an Indianapolis Colts game after several players knelt during the anthem. Meanwhile, owners and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell continue to spar with players.

On this side of the street, pamphlets titled "Quit Tobacco in Pregnancy" and "Parents' Guide to Gangs" lay about the lobby. Beeps of the metal detector sounded just beyond the courtroom, where a wiry man with concave cheeks paced nervously as two men in camouflage hats talked cars. Later that afternoon, a mother of a sexual assault victim gave a statement to the judge that included details about her daughter being born with a meth addiction. A guardian reported that a teen on probation, another victim of sexual abuse, was "raging at home." The 28-day detention meant he was "clean for the first time of his life," his advocate said, after being admitted to the emergency room for an LSD overdose. "But now we're noting relapses," she said. A young man with slumped shoulders was recommitted after admitting to violating his probation and smoking pot. "He really wanted to do sports," his advocate said. "But his attendance at school is not good."

Like many prisons, Oregon's have a disproportionately high percentage of people of color. Black residents make up 2 percent of the state's population but 9.3 percent of the state's prisoners. Here in Eugene, where pot is legal, tie-die is common, and murals celebrating diversity abound, the population of 150,000 is 90 percent white, making it even less diverse than Portland two hours north, known as the whitest city in America. Perhaps this is not surprising, considering that Oregon was founded as a white utopia and black people were barred from the state altogether until 1926 and other racist language in the state constitution was not removed until 2002.

As a white child in Oregon's public schools (including one named after Thomas Jefferson), I learned about Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery as cradles of the Civil Rights movement, but I didn't learn about racism in my home state. Or, that Autzen Stadium sits in Lane County, named for Joseph Lane, the state's first governor and a slavery advocate whose policies displaced or killed Native Americans.

Oregon may not have as many confederate flags or statues of Civil War generals as some of its Southern football peers, but it does have buildings that are now being renamed because of their connections to KKK members. My alma mater, Thomas Jefferson Middle School, was recently renamed the Arts & Technology Academy and boasts a new track named for Margaret Johnson Bailes, an African-American sprinter who practiced on the gravel behind the school and went on to win a gold medal as a teenager at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Yet other buildings named for outspoken racists, including at least one on the U of O campus, will keep their names as a "wonderful learning experience."

On game day, the parking lot of the youth detention center was packed, a sea of green and yellow tents. Two men in their twenties tossed a yellow football back and forth as friends plunked little balls into red beer pong cups. A local brewery had fenced in a beer garden on the detention center's lawn, and loud jock jams blared in a frenetic symphony. The smell of burgers sizzling on the grill wafted through the air as a light rain came down. High fives and chest bumps abounded.

Oregon fans in front of the justice center. Photo: Mary Pilon.

As I roamed the parking lot before kickoff, it became clear that the vast majority of people there seemed completely befuddled or clueless that they were tailgating in the parking lot of a juvenile detention facility, and in some cases, had been for years. One woman in a bright yellow hoodie brandished a Coors Light can and told me that she knew the detention center was there, but "didn't want to talk about it" as she walked away. A college student who lived in a housing complex nearby told me she thought its existence "was a rumor," even as she stood a few feet away from the sign: LANE COUNTY JUVENILE JUSTICE CENTER.

Views on player activism were mixed, too. "I believe this is our country," Amber Meyer, a native of Eugene and alum tailgating in the parking lot with her husband, said. "Put the hand on the heart."

"That's a prison?" Rick Westby, a fan in a green U of O hat said, looking over his shoulder at the large signage. He perched on a grassy knoll with his cousin, Bill Westby, a Cougars fan, and noted that he had been coming to games at Autzen since the 1980s. "I had no idea!"

Regardless, Westby said that he hoped that President Trump's hostility toward athlete activism didn't hold back college players in Oregon. "It's everybody's right," Westby said. "It's why we live here—the ability to express our views."

Back in the stadium, the Ducks band played the national anthem and unfurled a field-size American flag, putting the fans on their feet, chanting, "USA! USA! USA!" The players, who at Autzen don't come out onto the field during the anthem, then appeared. Washington State won 33-10.

The Oregon Ducks coach, Willie Taggart, isn't known for talking politics publicly but he has won respect among his players for hosting political conversations in the locker room and allowing them to express their views in social media. Last month, Taggart brought players together to talk in small groups about their backgrounds and what led them to Oregon.

"As athletes we should take advantage of our platform and speak on social injustice that's going on," senior cornerback Arrion Springs told the Oregonian. "Instead of us being silent, we should speak out about it."

After the game, slumped-shouldered athlete press conferences were focused on the follies of the game: a young offense, the challenges of a fresh quarterback, giving Washington State too many opportunities to score. Across from the stadium, in the detention center parking lot, the tents were packed up one by one and the cars pulled out into the night.

Oregon Ducks Fans are Tailgating In the Parking Lot of a Youth Jail published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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Oregon Ducks Fans are Tailgating In the Parking Lot of a Youth Jail

It was the day before the University of Oregon Ducks were to play Washington State at home and a teenager with a flat top, soft voice, and criminal record stood up in court and started to talk sports with the judge. His mother held a cooing baby. His lawyer looked on and smiled.

“I started boxing,” he told the court. “I’m doing good in math, too. That’s a new thing for me.”

He was one of a dozen or so teenagers who filed into Lane County Juvenile Court on Friday afternoon on a range of charges that included robbery, arson, burglary, reckless endangerment, and sexual abuse in the third degree. As the clusters of teens, family members, and lawyers waited in the lobby to be called before the judge, Autzen Stadium, the 54,000-seat mecca for Ducks football, loomed behind them in a large window across Martin Luther King Boulevard.

While much has changed about Duck athletics, including a new, sprawling complex of Nike-funded buildings nearby, the youth center—which features both a court and a detention facility—was almost exactly as I remembered it 17 years ago when it was the subject of my first-ever published article for the hometown paper, the Register-Guard. I was drawn to the contradiction even then: How was it that some of my classmates were in court, detoxing from drug addictions and dealing with the consequences of violent crime while others were getting recruited to the top-tier football program across the street?

The detention center’s parking lot has long been prime real estate for tailgating at Ducks games, especially as the team’s success has ballooned in the last decade. The two make strange neighbors, all the more as the nation chooses sides over football players taking a knee during the national anthem, arguing that it’s the players’ right to act against racism in America or that it muddles sports and politics and has no place on the field.

A beer garden on the lawn of the Lane County Juvenile Justice Center. Photo: Mary Pilon

The #TakeaKnee turmoil over criminal justice, racial history, and sports bubbled up again recently when Vice President Mike Pence left an Indianapolis Colts game after several players knelt during the anthem. Meanwhile, owners and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell continue to spar with players.

On this side of the street, pamphlets titled “Quit Tobacco in Pregnancy” and “Parents’ Guide to Gangs” lay about the lobby. Beeps of the metal detector sounded just beyond the courtroom, where a wiry man with concave cheeks paced nervously as two men in camouflage hats talked cars. Later that afternoon, a mother of a sexual assault victim gave a statement to the judge that included details about her daughter being born with a meth addiction. A guardian reported that a teen on probation, another victim of sexual abuse, was “raging at home.” The 28-day detention meant he was “clean for the first time of his life,” his advocate said, after being admitted to the emergency room for an LSD overdose. “But now we’re noting relapses,” she said. A young man with slumped shoulders was recommitted after admitting to violating his probation and smoking pot. “He really wanted to do sports,” his advocate said. “But his attendance at school is not good.”

Like many prisons, Oregon’s have a disproportionately high percentage of people of color. Black residents make up 2 percent of the state’s population but 9.3 percent of the state’s prisoners. Here in Eugene, where pot is legal, tie-die is common, and murals celebrating diversity abound, the population of 150,000 is 90 percent white, making it even less diverse than Portland two hours north, known as the whitest city in America. Perhaps this is not surprising, considering that Oregon was founded as a white utopia and black people were barred from the state altogether until 1926 and other racist language in the state constitution was not removed until 2002.

As a white child in Oregon’s public schools (including one named after Thomas Jefferson), I learned about Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery as cradles of the Civil Rights movement, but I didn’t learn about racism in my home state. Or, that Autzen Stadium sits in Lane County, named for Joseph Lane, the state’s first governor and a slavery advocate whose policies displaced or killed Native Americans.

Oregon may not have as many confederate flags or statues of Civil War generals as some of its Southern football peers, but it does have buildings that are now being renamed because of their connections to KKK members. My alma mater, Thomas Jefferson Middle School, was recently renamed the Arts & Technology Academy and boasts a new track named for Margaret Johnson Bailes, an African-American sprinter who practiced on the gravel behind the school and went on to win a gold medal as a teenager at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Yet other buildings named for outspoken racists, including at least one on the U of O campus, will keep their names as a “wonderful learning experience.”

On game day, the parking lot of the youth detention center was packed, a sea of green and yellow tents. Two men in their twenties tossed a yellow football back and forth as friends plunked little balls into red beer pong cups. A local brewery had fenced in a beer garden on the detention center’s lawn, and loud jock jams blared in a frenetic symphony. The smell of burgers sizzling on the grill wafted through the air as a light rain came down. High fives and chest bumps abounded.

Oregon fans in front of the justice center. Photo: Mary Pilon.

As I roamed the parking lot before kickoff, it became clear that the vast majority of people there seemed completely befuddled or clueless that they were tailgating in the parking lot of a juvenile detention facility, and in some cases, had been for years. One woman in a bright yellow hoodie brandished a Coors Light can and told me that she knew the detention center was there, but “didn’t want to talk about it” as she walked away. A college student who lived in a housing complex nearby told me she thought its existence “was a rumor,” even as she stood a few feet away from the sign: LANE COUNTY JUVENILE JUSTICE CENTER.

Views on player activism were mixed, too. “I believe this is our country,” Amber Meyer, a native of Eugene and alum tailgating in the parking lot with her husband, said. “Put the hand on the heart.”

“That’s a prison?” Rick Westby, a fan in a green U of O hat said, looking over his shoulder at the large signage. He perched on a grassy knoll with his cousin, Bill Westby, a Cougars fan, and noted that he had been coming to games at Autzen since the 1980s. “I had no idea!”

Regardless, Westby said that he hoped that President Trump’s hostility toward athlete activism didn’t hold back college players in Oregon. “It’s everybody’s right,” Westby said. “It’s why we live here—the ability to express our views.”

Back in the stadium, the Ducks band played the national anthem and unfurled a field-size American flag, putting the fans on their feet, chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” The players, who at Autzen don’t come out onto the field during the anthem, then appeared. Washington State won 33-10.

The Oregon Ducks coach, Willie Taggart, isn’t known for talking politics publicly but he has won respect among his players for hosting political conversations in the locker room and allowing them to express their views in social media. Last month, Taggart brought players together to talk in small groups about their backgrounds and what led them to Oregon.

“As athletes we should take advantage of our platform and speak on social injustice that’s going on,” senior cornerback Arrion Springs told the Oregonian. “Instead of us being silent, we should speak out about it.”

After the game, slumped-shouldered athlete press conferences were focused on the follies of the game: a young offense, the challenges of a fresh quarterback, giving Washington State too many opportunities to score. Across from the stadium, in the detention center parking lot, the tents were packed up one by one and the cars pulled out into the night.

Oregon Ducks Fans are Tailgating In the Parking Lot of a Youth Jail syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

[canadianbasketballl]

Knicks sign Jarrett Jack

The Knicks have signed guard Jarrett Jack. Jack, 6-3, 200-pounds, holds career averages of 11.0 points and 4.5 assists over 28.1 minutes in 805 games over 12 seasons with Portland, Indiana, Toronto, New Orleans, Golden State, Cleveland and Brooklyn. The Fort Washington, MD-native appeared in two [...] from InsideHoops http://ift.tt/2xKEvMZ via IFTTT

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New York Knicks sign veteran guard Jarrett Jack - ABS-CBN Sports

ABS-CBN Sports

New York Knicks sign veteran guard Jarrett Jack ABS-CBN Sports Jack, 6'3", 200-pounds, holds career averages of 11.0 points and 4.5 assists over 28.1 minutes in 805 games over 12 seasons with Portland, Indiana, Toronto, New Orleans, Golden State, Cleveland and Brooklyn. The Fort Washington, MD-native appeared in ... Knicks make Jarrett Jack signing officialNew York Daily News all 9 news articles »