I've been to the mountaintop

A day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King gave a speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. The most famous line in that speech is this one:

" Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

I, too, have been to the mountain top - but it's in Atlanta, Georgia.

Stone Mountain near Stone Mountain, Georgia is a quartz monzonite dome monadnock and the site of Stone Mountain Park owned by the state of Georgia. Stone Mountain is the most-visited tourist attraction in the state. At its summit, the elevation is 1,686 feet (514 m) above sea level and 825 feet (251 m) above the surrounding area. Stone Mountain is well known for not only its geology, but also the enormous rock relief on its north face, the largest bas-relief in the world. The carving depicts three Confederate figures, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and is the subject of widespread controversy

Stone Mountain was once owned by the Venable Brothers. It was purchased by the State of Georgia in 1958 "as a memorial to the Confederacy." Stone Mountain Park officially opened on April 14, 1965 – 100 years to the day after Lincoln's assassination

Although a carving on the mountain was proposed as early as 1925, work on the existing carving did not start until 1964, and it was completed in 1972.

In the 1920's, Gutzon Borglum (the guy who carved Mount Rushmore) was hired for the job, but he was fired in 1925 over money disputes. His completed carving of Robert E. Lee was blasted off the mountain.

Both Borglum and the Venable brothers had links to the KKK. After the release of D.W. Griffiths's 1915 film, "The Birth Of a Nation", the KKK started meeting at the foot of mountain on Thanksgiving Day, a tradition that lasted for 50 years.

In response to Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, in 1958, at the urging of segregationist Governor Marvin Griffin, the Georgia legislature approved a measure to purchase Stone Mountain at a price of $1.125 million. In 1963 Walker Hancock was selected to complete the carving, and work began in 1964.

In August 2017, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—a white nationalist protest against the removal of the statues of Robert E. Lee and General Stonewall Jackson—turned violent, many people across the country again demanded the removal of many Confederate monuments and memorials as a part of a national political debate. Georgia State Representative and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called for the removal, by sandblasting, of Stone Mountain's carving. She called it "a blight upon our state".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain

At some time in the 1990's, Coca Cola added a laser light show, which I have actually seen in person - and it is spectacular. At the close of the show, the lighted figures of the three confederate soldiers "rode away from the mountain" accompanied by the music to Dixie. Even if you're a Yankee, it brings tears to your eyes. Before Elvis left the building, he also got some airtime on Stone Mountain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1AmI3W0cshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi1AmI3W0cs

In 2007, Coca Cola added a Christmas snow festival.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20070126005084/en/Stone-Mountain-Park-Announces-Opening-Coca-Cola-Snow

We' re now in a time when Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Land o' Lakes and Eskimo Pies are considered to be racist - so what should we do about Stone Mountain?

Due to the coronavirus, I doubt if the laser lights shows are even being shown this year, but here's my suggestion for the future:

Leave the carvings on the mountain intact, continue the laser light shows, remove ALL the confederate flags, and add informational panels that provide a more balanced look at the conflict that cost over 400,000 American lives.

My merry Oldsmobile

If you spend any time at all on Facebook, you may have noticed that random stories, or ads, pop up all the time.

This morning, my inbox included a link to a trio of 1948 Oldsmobile ads. What I found interesting about these ads are that they showed that an automatic transmission, power windows, power sears, and a power top were available way back in 1948. Although not shown in the ads, the 1948 model also offered power steering and brakes, but the mighty Rocket V-8 was not offered until the 1949 model year. (Like my dad’s 1948 Chevrolet, the cars had a dimmer switch on the floor, and they also probably had a manual choke).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSalRQlAye8

The Oldsmobile brand had a good run, since it lasted from 1897 until it was shut down in 2004. For a couple of years in the mid-1970’s, the Oldsmobile Cutlass was the best-selling car in America, hitting a high of 632,742 units in 1977, and the balance of the Oldsmobile lineup that year pushed the total over 1,000,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsmobile

To my knowledge, Oldsmobile is the first car model to be commemorated in song, since “In My Merry Oldsmobile” was released in 1905:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7QnPtkn8q0

When the ads shown above were produced, not very many people in the country owned televisions. Although television played a part in the 1948 presidential election, there were only 35,000 sets in use in the entire country, and only 37 channels were on the air.

BY 1950, the number of televisions in use had soared to 6,000,000, and a decade later, had jumped up to 52,000 – but most of them were still black and white televisions. By 1997, the total number of televisions was 219,000,000, and by 2005, the number had increased to 285 million, In that year, the population of the United States was 296 million.

https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/TamaraTamazashvili.shtml

In my lifetime, I have owned three Oldsmobiles. The first was a 1960 88 model  that I bought to get me around until my new 1971 Charger came from the factory. Next was a 1974 Cutlass that I bought from my employer for below invoice, hoping to make a quick buck (I ultimately lost $1200). The third (and final) Oldsmobile was a 1979 station wagon that stayed in our family for 15 years, and was eventually sold to a Toastmaster friend, who drove it for at least another 5.

The reasons that guys my age buy cars from the 1950’s and 1960’s are that they remind them of a time when they were much younger. If I wanted to buy a 1948 Chevrolet like the one my dad owned, a nice vehicle can be picked up for around $25,000, roughly what you would pay for a new car today

https://classics.autotrader.com/classic-cars-for-sale/1948-chevrolet-stylemaster-for-sale

I was just a few months old when the 1948 Oldsmobiles hit the showroom, but watching the ads shown above took me back in a time a while, and made me feel like a much younger man.

summer solstice

In 2020, the June solstice is Saturday, June 20, at 5:44 P.M. EDT. This date marks the official beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, occurring when Earth arrives at the point in its orbit where the North Pole is at its maximum tilt (about 23.5 degrees) toward the Sun, resulting in the longest day and shortest night of the calendar year. (By longest “day,” we mean the longest period of sunlight.) At the June solstice, the Northern Hemisphere receives sunlight at the most direct angle of the year.

For most of us, the summer solstice is of little consequence, other than the fact that the hottest day of the summer usually comes about 30 days later. However, six of the 10 hottest days in Tucson have occurred in June, and the record high was 116 on June 20, 2017.

https://www.almanac.com/content/first-day-summer-summer-solstice#

Back about the time of the first established religion (Hinduism) in about 4000 B.C, the ancient people of the world paid a LOT more attention to the summer and winter solstice. Even before 4000 B.C, religion in other forms existed, but they were primarily polytheistic.

Most people are familiar with Stonehenge, built by the ancient Druids in about 3100 B.C., but the Druids also built another structure further north – in present day Ireland. It is called Newgrange, and it was actually built BEFORE Stonehenge, more than 5000 years ago. Like Stonehenge, light from the sun lights up the interior of the structure on both the summer and winter solstice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/science/irish-archaeology-incest-tomb.html?algo=identity&fellback=false&imp_id=567830844&action=click&module=Science%20%20Technology&pgtype=Homepage

Like the pyramids in Egypt that were started about 500 years after construction started at Newgrange, the structure itself was designed as a burial ground for the ruling elite.

Our group did not get to Newgrange when we took our family vacation to Ireland in 1999, but we DID get so some ancient burial sites in country Sligo (the country where my grandparents were born, and some of those graves were 3000 years old.

It’s extremely doubtful that any of us will ever tour Newgrange, but you CAN get a brief look inside by clicking on the link below, which will also enable you to listen to some very nice music by the group Celtic Women:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZzpDgatOa0

Although I’m no longer a regular church goer, I’m fascinated by old religious structures, and have been inside a few that are REALLY old. I’ve been inside my grandfather’s childhood church in Ireland, which dates to around 1850, and I’ve also walked inside Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside, California, which was founded in June of 1798. Like most people, I was also horrified when Notre Dame caught fire in April, 2019. French president Emmanuel Macron said that the cathedral would be restored by 2024,  and launched a fundraising campaign which brought in pledges of over €1 billion as of 22 April 2019. A complete restoration could require twenty years or more.

Worldwide, societies have gotten more secular and less religious (China is the LEAST religious country, but Sweden is high on the list of “not religious counties)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/14/map-these-are-the-worlds-least-religious-countries/

In spite of the fact that society is less religious than it used to be, there’s still a lot to be said for that “old time religion”, and the link below will tell you why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL-4E64tfd8

Wouldn’t you really rather have a Buick?

Due to clever advertising (see below) the sales of Buick automobiles exploded in the 1950’s, and by 1955, sales reached their all-time high of 737,879 units. Two years later, sales had been cut in half, and the brand was well below third-place Plymouth.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-better-cars-are-built.html

Buick Motor Company has a long and proud history, going all the way back to 1903. For many years, the bulk of Buick sales were in the United States, but General Motors has long had a presence in other markets. The first Buick sold in China was to the Emperor of China in the 1920’s

The Chinese market has expanded rapidly in recent years, and it recently became the largest auto market on the face of the planet.

In 2006, Buick sales in China surpassed Buick sales in the United States for the first time, and the gap has widened considerably since then.

For the first nine months of 2009, Buick sold 312,798 cars in China, and only 72,389 in the United States. As a result, when Buick redesigned the Lacrosse for the 2010 model year, the design studio that did the work was in Shanghai, not in America. Sales continued to tumble after 2009, but by 2019, had INCREASED to over 150,000. Roughly 90% of those sales were from its three SUV models, only one of which is made in America. The smallest version, the Encore, is made in Korea, and the mid-sized version, the Envision (see below), is made in China.

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2019/10/united-states-buick-sales-numbers-figures-results-thrid-quarter-q3-2019/

The Envision is not the only Chinese-made car that you can buy in America, since the Cadillac CT-6 plug in hybrid and the Ford Focus are also made there.

Volvo, the venerable Swedish brand owned by the Chinese multinational automotive company Geely, was the first automaker to export from China to the U.S. with the S60 Inscription in 2015. Except for an assembly plate in the doorjam, you never would know. It worked so well Volvo opened an assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina on June 20, 2018. The plant will produce the sleek new S60 sedan initially, and according to Automotive News, the XC90 crossover by 2021. This marks the first time a Chinese-owned automaker assembled cars in the U.S.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/autos/sc-auto-cover-0816-made-in-china-20180810-story.html

Interestingly, Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Saturn were canceled while selling at North American volumes far higher than Buick is now. Olds, in particular, was posting comparatively robust sales near a quarter-million a year when it was handed its surprise death notice in late 2000. Saturn and Pontiac had dipped below 200,000 in yearly sales and did not survive G.M.’s bankruptcy in 2009. If not for the Buick name’s esteem in China — Communist Party leaders once favored lavishly appointed Buick land yachts — it is possible the brand would have been abandoned when Buick City was.

If you bought a new Buick today, you might notice that the name “Buick” is no longer on the car. The only brand identifier is the “tri-shield” logo that was first introduced in 1959.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/business/buick-sales-china.html

In the near future, it’s possible that you will no longer to buy a Buick sedan at all, since production will likely shift to 100% SUV models – and they will no longer by called Buicks, since the “Avenir” name could be the new moniker.

Avenir is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1987 and released in 1988 by Linotype GmbH. The word avenir is French for "future". As the name suggests, the family takes inspiration from the geometric style of sans-serif typeface developed in the 1920s that took the circle as a basis, such as Erbar and Futura. Frutiger intended Avenir to be a more organic interpretation of the geometric style, more even in color and suitable for extended text, with details recalling more traditional typefaces such as the two-story 'a' and 't' with a curl at the bottom, and letters such as the 'o' that are not exact, perfect circles but optically corrected

Somehow, “wouldn’t you really rather have an Avenir” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as the old saying, and people might as well say, “you know, it’s just not my type”.

the way things out to be, part 2

A little more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about Rush Limbaugh. You can read the article at the link below:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2010/01/way-that-things-out-to-be.html

This week, I came across some additional information that provided more background on exactly how Limbaugh got to where he is today. First, here’s the update:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh#1988%E2%80%931990s:_WABC_New_York_City_and_syndication

He is best known as the host of his radio show The Rush Limbaugh Show, which has been in national syndication on AM and FM radio stations since 1988.

Limbaugh hosted a national television show from 1992 to 1996. He has written seven books; his first two, The Way Things Ought to Be (1992) and See, I Told You So (1993), made The New York Times Best Seller list. Limbaugh is among the highest-paid radio figures. In 2018, Forbes listed his earnings at $84.5 million. In December 2019, Talkers Magazine estimated that Limbaugh's show attracted a cumulative weekly audience of 15.5 million listeners to become the most-listened-to radio show in the United States.

Limbaugh has been one of the premiere voices of the conservative movement in the United States since the 1990s. He has been inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame and the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame During the 2020 State of the Union Address, President Donald Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Limbaugh has expressed controversial viewpoints on race LGBT matters, feminism, and sexual consent. Limbaugh rejects climate change and has supported U.S. military interventions in the Middle East. He was also one of the earlier voices pushing the idea that the coronavirus was a hoax.

He’s a “family values” kind of guy, which may help explain why he has been married 4 times. Despite his anti-gay positions, he paid Elton John $1 million to perform at his 4^th wedding in 2010, a sum he could easily afford since he is worth $500 million, a nice chunk of change for a college dropout.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jun/08/elton-john-rush-limbaugh 

Rush owes a lot of his financial success to Ronald Reagan, who repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-fairness-doctrine-in-one-post/2011/08/23/gIQAN8CXZJ_blog.html

 For more than a century, American media has tried to report facts impartially. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Federal Communications Commission enshrined this principle in the Fairness Doctrine, which established that public media must base its news in facts and must present both sides of an argument fairly, honestly, and equitably. Beginning in the 1950s, Republicans who were ideologically opposed to the New Deal state complained that this principle, embraced by the “liberal media,” discriminated against them. In 1987, after President Ronald Reagan had placed new members on the board of the FCC, it abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, and it was formally eliminated in 2011.

With that abandonment, talk radio took off, presenting an ideological narrative that showed white taxpayers under siege by godless women and people of color. The Fox News Channel was not far behind, calling itself “fair and balanced” until 2017, when it dropped the slogan, because it presented the ideological narrative that mainstream media (MSM) rejected. Other media outlets tried to defend themselves against charges that they were biased against that narrative, so they opened up their pages and television shows to that ideological story. Increasingly, the extreme Republican narrative spread into the mainstream on the grounds that the media must show “both sides.”

(Rush Limbaugh is not the only conservative broadcaster to benefit from the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. FOX is the most viewed cable channel, and Sean Hannity’s program was the top-rated show for 3 year in a row. Like Limbaugh, Hannity did not graduate from college.

https://deadline.com/2019/12/cable-ratings-2019-list-fox-news-total-viewers-espn-18-49-demo-1202817561/

Hannity is paid $40 million a year, and has a net worth of $250 million.)

By 2014, though, cell phones and Twitter offered images and reports from the ground in places like Ferguson, Missouri, that showed up the police version of events, echoed by Fox News Channel personalities and talk radio hosts, as dishonest… and dangerous. Young Black journalists called out the reigning narrative that people of color were “thugs” and “criminals,” but their protests did not change the basic media pattern of “both sides-ism – until last week.

(If you want to read why Minneapolis was the breaking point. the Atlantic article below provides lots of answers):

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/wesley-lowery-george-floyd-minneapolis-black-lives/612391/?utm_medium=10today.media.20200610.436.2&utm_source=email&utm_content=article&utm_campaign=10-for-today---4.0-styling

The murder of Gorge Floyd in Minneapolis, quickly followed by the video of two policemen in Buffalo pushing a 75 year-old man to the ground, has changed the narrative overnight. Large crowds of people in the USA and around the world turned out to protest police brutality, and the mayor of Washington D.C. had BLACK LIVES MATTER painted on the streets just north of the White House in bright yellow paint,

Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, recently apologized to Colin Kaepernick (without naming his name), and NASCAR president Steve Phelps issued a statement about inequality before the start of the most recent race in Atlanta.

Employees of respectable news outlets (newspapers, radio, and television) are held to a high standard, and not doing do can result in termination. Even august publications like “the grey lady” (the New York Times) can occasionally make errors, and it happened last week when the Times published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, without doing the appropriate fact checking, which led to the resignation of editorial page editor James Bennett.

Bennet ran an op-ed last Wednesday by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton titled (by the Times, not by Cotton) “Send in the Troops.” The inflammatory piece blamed “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa” for an “orgy of violence” during the recent protests and claimed that “outnumbered police officers… bore the brunt of the violence.” Neither of these statements is true, and they clothe a false Republican narrative in what appears to be fact. Cotton’s solution to the protests was to send in the military to restore “law and order,” and he misquoted the Constitution to defend that conclusion.

Another shift towards sanity occurred on May 29, when Twitter put a warning on a tweet from Trump saying it violates the platform's rules against glorifying violence.

Early Friday morning, Trump tweeted about the protests in Minneapolis over the police killing of George Floyd, saying, “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen” while saying that he could order military action if the protests continue.

The president ended the tweet with, “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/500072-twitter-says-trump-thugs-tweet-violates-standards-glorifies-violence

The move by Twitter to label the tweet comes amid an ongoing feud with Trump after the social media company placed its first fact checks on some of his posts this week regarding mail-in voting. 

The president just hours earlier signed an executive order aimed at increasing the ability of the government to regulate social media platforms, a marked escalation of his lengthy feud with Silicon Valley over allegations of anti-conservative bias.

Although Facebook still has not taken similar action, it likely will be forced to do so in the near future – and that’s the way things out to be.