It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, January 02, 2022
Have We Really Found Mary Magdalene’s Birthplace?
Candida Moss
THE DAILY BEAST Sun, January 2, 2022 Paris Orlando
It is a rare thing indeed that being mistaken for a sex worker brings someone fame and eternal renown. And yet this is exactly what has happened to Mary Magdalene, the financial backer of Jesus, whose misidentification as a prostitute has followed her for 1,500 years. In a society that is increasingly areligious, Mary has cemented her place as a cultural icon.
Now, she sells digital newspapers: numerousoutletsproclaimed over the Christmas season that archaeologists excavating in “Magdala” may well have identified her birthplace. But have they?
According to initial reports in the Jerusalem Post, a “salvage excavation” (the kind of excavation performed ahead of construction in culturally rich areas) co-organized by the University of Haifa and the Israel Antiquities Association, unearthed the remains of a 2000-year-old synagogue in Migdal, Israel. Migdal is located on the Sea of Galilee and has traditionally been identified as Magdala, the hometown of Mary Magdalene. In a statement, excavation director Dina Avshalom-Gorni said “We can imagine Mary Magdalene and her family coming to the synagogue here, along with other residents of Migdal, to participate in religious and communal events.”
The unearthing of the synagogue is, in fact, the second such discovery in the town. In 2009 a larger, more ornate synagogue was unearthed complete with an elaborately carved stone that featured a seven-branched menorah. Both synagogues date to the Second Temple period, when Jesus lived and preached in the area. The smaller synagogue consisted of a main hall and two other smaller rooms (one of which may well have housed Torah scrolls). The remnants of the accoutrements of ancient ritual life were present at the site. Pottery lamps, molded glass bowls, rings and some stone utensils were all round among the remains. But does any of this get us to Mary Magdalene?
Mere days after the news story broke, biblical scholars and Mary Magdalene experts Professor Joan Taylor, of King’s College London, and Duke University doctoral student Elizabeth Schrader published an important survey of the early evidence for “The Meaning of ‘Magdalene’” in the Journal of Biblical Literature. Three years in the making, this article reviews the literary data for much of what we know about Mary and comes to some persuasive and eye-opening conclusions about the meaning of her name.
When it comes down to it, the association of Mary Magdalene, the apostle of Jesus, with this town on the Sea of Galilee rests on two assumptions. First, that Magdalene is a kind of surname that gestures to her geographical origins as ancient names often did. Second, that this city by the sea was called “Magdala” in the first century CE. Once you drill into the historical foundations of the argument, Schrader and Taylor show, cracks start to emerge.
There was, Schrader told me, considerable disagreement about the meaning of Mary’s name. The fifth-century translator St. Jerome thought that it was a nickname, meaning “tower.” Nicknames like this were common in antiquity, especially among Jesus followers. Just as Peter was the “rock,” and James was the “just” so too Mary was the “tower of faith.” Some ancient authors did think it referred to her birthplace, but no two ancient writers thought the same thing. The prolific third-century theologian Origen did identify Magdala as Mary’s hometown, but never specified where it was located. This is especially strange as Origen spent much of his life in Caesarea and travelled around the Sea of Galilee. How well known could the city have been if Origen didn’t know where it was? In fact, he spends more time emphasizing that her name meant “Magnification” and was a fitting title for a “prominent” witness of the resurrection. Taylor told me that “Since ‘Magdala’ means ‘the tower’ (as well as ‘magnified’) in Aramaic and there were numerous places which were called ‘the tower of something’, Origen… and others could choose different identifications.” Given all these differences of opinion, Schraeder said, we certainly shouldn’t be rushing to geographically based conclusions: “Since there was no consensus in antiquity on the meaning of her name, modern assumptions that she came from a place by the Sea of Galilee are highly suspect.”
Her name aside, ancient opinion about where Mary was from also varied. Several of the earliest commentators on the Gospels—for example, the third-century writer Hippolytus of Rome—assumed that Mary Magdalene was the sister of Martha and Lazarus mentioned in the Gospel of John. If true, this would mean that Mary, like her siblings, was from Bethany and is the woman who anoints Jesus in John 12. (This woman, Schrader and Taylor argue, is distinct from the anonymous sex worker who also anoints Jesus in Luke 7. It’s worth noting that anointing was not a once-in-a-lifetime affair in antiquity). To make things even stranger, the early fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea thought there were two Mary Magdalenes. Eusebius had actually visited a “Magdala” himself but, according to him the town was in Judea, in the south. We are clearly way off course. Schrader and Taylor conclude that “the ancient position that Mary Magdalene hailed from Bethany remains within the realm of sensible exegetical possibility” but her name is more about her religious character than anything else.
Archaeological evidence shows that the town on the Sea of Galilee known today as Magdala was certainly a first-century fishing village. And it was just the sort of place from which Jesus recruited followers. The geography and chronology, however, is a little off. Taylor told The Daily Beast: “In the time of Jesus, there was a village named Migdal Nuniyya (the ‘fish-tower’) located very close by, just one ‘mil’ (about 1 km.) beyond the northern boundary of Tiberias, a city which lay further south than the present town. The Christian pilgrim site of Magdala lies about 6 km from Roman Tiberias on the other side of Mount Arbel, and the archaeology increasingly indicates it was a separate, sizeable town.” There’s no evidence from Christian sources that the pilgrimage site was called “Magdala” until the sixth century, when the site started to become a destination for religious tourists.
That the traditions associated with the archaeological site developed and grew over time parallels the broader phenomenon of the explosion in Mary traditions in general. Several early Christian documents that do not make it into the New Testament—including the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, and the Pistis Sophia—portray Mary as one of Jesus’ closest disciples, whose authority was challenged in orthodox circles. Several generations of important archaeological and historical work by Taylor have pushed back against erroneous yet cherished historical assumptions. While others, like Karen King, have explored the ways in which Mary’s importance was contested in the early church because it served as a cipher for questions of women’s authority in general. The ecclesiastical tug-of-war over her memory and significance meant that even as some traditions and details of her story gained traction and developed, others were contested and erased.
This contestation, Schrader has argued, spilled over into the copying and editing of manuscripts of the New Testament. “There are also some major textual problems around the word ‘Mary’ in crucial manuscripts of the Gospel of John (particularly throughout John 11 and John 20:16). The fact that there were ancient controversies around Mary’s legacy—as well as meaningful inconsistencies in important manuscripts of John’s Gospel—alerts us to the possibility that her story may have been changed along the way.”
The preservation of evidence of textual alterations together with the discovery of new Christian documents, said Schrader, open up new possibilities for how we see the Magdalene’s legacy. It dovetails with the recent work of art historian Ally Kateusz, the author of Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership, who argues that Christian artwork was augmented in order to conceal women’s leadership in the early church.
Beginning with Gregory the Great’s influential misidentification of Mary as a sex worker, Mary Magdalene came to be identified with the anonymous woman from Nain who anointed Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. As nature abhors a vacuum, patriarchal history despises an excess of women. The fact that Mary Magdalene was not from Magdala on the Sea of Galilee—a city that does not seem to have existed by this name in the first century—should not mean that we reflexively collapse into our interpretive bad habits. As Taylor writes in the piece, “the central exegetical mistake of Western Christendom that needs correcting is not the idea that Mary Magdalene might be from Bethany; rather, it is the notion, following Gregory the Great, that all the gospels’ anointing women can be elided into one. As an alternative, we suggest that biblical scholars can celebrate the liberation of Mary Magdalene from inaccurate portrayals while simultaneously acknowledging that Mary’s provenance need not be ‘Magdala’ to maintain this hard-won position.”
This does not mean that the excavations on the Sea of Galilee are somehow meaningless. It’s not always about Christianity, after all. These discoveries give us a richer picture of the varieties of ancient Jewish religious life in the Roman period. More importantly, they displace an assumption that is common to histories of Judaism; namely, that synagogues rose to prominence only in the aftermath of and as compensation for the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70. The existence of not one but two synagogues a mere 650 feet apart, said Avshalom-Gorni, is a testament to the vibrancy of first-century Torah study, social gatherings, and religious life outside of Jerusalem.
UNIVERSITY of FLORIDA
rejects GRU to build power plant; company hoped revenues would stabilize electric bills
John Henderson, The Gainesville Sun Sun, January 2, 2022,
Gainesville Regional Utilities will not get a contract it was seeking to build a plant to supply most of the University of Florida with power.
GRU was hoping the revenue from the project could help stabilize customers’ bills in the coming years.
GRU and Duke Energy, the two local electric companies, did not make the shortlist of companies that submitted proposals to build the Central Utility Plant on Gale Lemerand Drive.
The Gainesville City Commission recently hired consultants to help the city's utility company submit a proposal to UF to build the new plant. They included: a finance partner, law firm and engineering and construction contractor.
“They were retained, but there will be no work to be performed,” said utility spokesperson Dave Warm in a text message on Monday.
The university expects to save more than $16 million a year in energy costs from the new plant, it said in a recent statement.
But the natural gas-fired plant that UF has endorsed would be a step backward for green energy policy, student protesters and environmentalists have complained. Student protesters hold a rally on Sept. 24 at the corner of University Avenue and 13th Street demanding that UF halt plans for a gas-fired energy plant.
City Commissioner David Arreola said Monday that he was not displeased that GRU did not get the contract. He said UF should have, at the very least, first evaluated proposals for renewable energy, such as solar, to provide electricity to UF.
“I’m against any new fossil-fuel infrastructure, period,” he said. “I think that the UF idea in the first place is about 20 to 30 years outdated. We’ve had significant scientific research and studies that has shown for 50 years now we’ve needed to get off off fossil fuels. Here we are, 50 years later, still building fossil-fuel infrastructure.”
In an email dated Dec. 16, city commissioners were informed that GRU is not a finalist for the project.
“Unfortunately, I have received notification that GRU was not shortlisted by UF and will not proceed to the proposal phase of the Central Energy Project,” GRU General Manager Ed Bielarski informed commissioners.
He added that he was "extremely disappointed that the university has not given the utility the opportunity to continue, given our success with the South Energy Center, and the City/University partnership that is often spoken of."
"When I know more, I will communicate it with you all," Bielarski said.
Bielarski, who could not be reached for comment last week, included an attached email from a UF official explaining that GRU did not make the shortlist, but the university official does not divulge details explaining why.
Lisa Deal, chief procurement officer at UF, said in the email that the university's selection committee “took considerable time to read through and evaluate all responses received.”
“However, the response submitted by your group was not selected to move forward in the process,” she said.
Deal could not be reached for comment.
Mayor Lauren Poe said in a text message on Monday that city officials were disappointed to learn the news that GRU is out of the running for the contract.
“While I am disappointed that we will not be able to further our power supply partnership with UF, we knew that this would be a highly competitive process,” Poe said. “We will continue to work with the university on new opportunities to help them achieve their goal of 100 percent renewable energy and a carbon-neutral campus.”
In June, the UF Board of Trustees approved of the Central Energy Plant Project to the dismay of some green-energy advocates who want the university to consider renewable energy instead, particularly solar.
The campus currently receives steam from Duke Energy's cogeneration plant, which is responsible for the distribution network that connects a majority of the buildings on campus for steam use.
UF's current electric plant has been in operation for 25 years and is nearing the end of its service life. It will be decommissioned by the end of 2027.
The university carefully weighed its options before deciding to go with the gas-fired plant, which will be UF's largest source of energy for the coming decades, UF says on a statement on its website.
“Prior to moving forward with a plan, technology options were compared by UF’s team for costs, known energy requirements, local impact, environmental impact and construction and timeline feasibility,” the statement said.
There were 11 companies that responded to UF’s “invitation to negotiate,” with four chosen as finalists.
None of the finalists are registered with the state’s Division of Corporations and it is unclear whether they have ties to other electric companies. The finalists are: Gator Campus Energy, Gator Campus Utility Partners, Gator Energy Services and Swamp Power Partners. Gator Campus Energy is a Delaware limited liability company that was formed on Oct. 18, 2021, records show.
The companies that put in proposals but were not chosen as finalists include: GRU, Duke Energy, Chesapeake Utilities Corp., Gator Energy Partners (Centrio), Gator Energy Partners (Engle), Green Gator Energy and Sustainable Gator Energy Consortium.
Nathan Skop, a local attorney and frequent commission critic who was a state Public Service Commissioner from 2007 until 2011, said Monday that even though GRU had a "fiduciary duty" to submit a proposal to build, operate and finance this plant, the incremental revenue stream generated from it “probably wouldn’t make a noticeable difference in lowering GRU electric rates and may have resulted in GRU issuing additional debt.”
‘We’re here for justice’: Street protest held in Boynton Beach after teen’s death following officer chase 1 / 5
Lisa J. Huriash, South Florida Sun-Sentinel Sat, January 1, 2022,
Scores of protestors crammed Federal Highway in Boynton Beach on Saturday afternoon to demand accountability in the death of a 13-year-old who died after fleeing police on his dirt bike.
Also, Saturday, nationally known civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump confirmed he has taken the case. “We have to say you can’t do this to our children,” he said.
He vowed a “very public demand for transparency.”
Last Sunday, Stanley Davis III had been at a Chevron gas station, filling up the tank of his dirt bike he got for Christmas the day before.
Davis was followed by police, and soon lost control, crashing into the curb in the median. He died at the scene.
“The officer was dead wrong,” said protestor Todd Johnson. “I need him to go to jail.”
Protestors revved up dirt bike and motorcycle engines for 45 minutes at the Chevron and in the parking lot of the neighboring ACE Hardware, many people holding signs along the roadway. There was no police presence on that stretch of highway until after the protest moved to another location.
“People are angry right now,” Johnson said. “It’s what the officer did, he could have gone about it a whole different way.”
Protestors want video. Although the police vehicle involved in this incident is not equipped with a dashcam, a police spokeswoman said bodycam video has been turned over to the Florida Highway Patrol.
“We want transparency,” said protestor Olen Whitely. “We’re here for justice.”
The police agency has refused to identify the officer or how long he has been with the agency, invoking Marsy’s Law, a state law intended to protect the rights of victims. Nor will they give details of how the accident happened other than saying that after the driver was “observed driving recklessly,” the police “attempted a traffic stop, and the dirt bike went down in the 800 block of North Federal Highway.”
Off-road vehicles are prohibited from being used on public roadways according to Florida law.
Family and friends accuse the police department of conducting a PIT maneuver, which is when police can force a fleeing car to lose control and stop by bumping it. But Police Chief Michael Gregory said at a news conference last weekend he has not seen or heard any evidence that the officer struck Stanley or his bike.
Still, police officials won’t say under what circumstances the dirt bike stopped. When asked Saturday whether there was a PIT maneuver, police spokeswoman Stephanie Slater referred questions to the Florida Highway Patrol, which is conducting the investigation. A spokesman for the Florida Highway Patrol could not be immediately reached for comment.
Crump said he’s not yet convinced dashcam video doesn’t exist, and he’ll be taking the police department to court to find out who the officer is so he can comb files to see if there’s a history of problematic chases.
Crump said he wants to make sure the agency doesn’t “sweep it under the rug as if this 13-year-old black child’s life doesn’t matter.”
He said witnesses have reported it was the “police officer driving recklessly in pursuit of this 13-year-old child on this motorbike and the fact they believe this police officer caused this young man to be killed.
“We have to have police officers look to protect and serve our children like they do children in other communities.”
The family of the 13-year-old told the Sun Sentinel at the protest that the child will be buried next Saturday.
The child’s father, Stanley Davis Jr., said the family has questions. “When there’s no more breath left in me, I’ll stop,” he said.
Stanley’s mother, Shannon Thompson, said her heart was ripped. She said he was her only child. She said despite earlier reports identifying her child as Stanley Davis, Jr., he is Stanley Davis III.
“He’s all I have,” she said.
Americans borrowed record $1.61 trillion to buy homes in 2021
Sat, January 1, 2022
Mortgage lenders issued $1.61 trillion in purchase loans in 2021, up from $1.48 trillion in loans issued in 2020 and marking the highest mortgage borrowing numbers ever recorded.
THE BOOM BEFORE THE 2007-2008 BUST The 2021 figures exceeded a previous record set in 2005, when $1.51 trillion in loans were issued, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The record-setting numbers reflect a red-hot housing market. At the beginning of the pandemic, people were drawn to the market with low interest rates and desire to have more space at home - desires that continue to drive up house prices, the Journal noted.
Home prices went up by 18.4 percent in October, marking a slight drop from when home prices were up by 19.1 percent in September.
But with a strong labor market, Americans who have obtained pay raises or saved during the pandemic are potentially prepared to step into the housing market despite the soaring costs.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wages for all private-sector workers increased by 4.6 percent year over year in the third quarter, the Journal noted.
"All of that extra income goes somewhere, and a lot of it went into housing," Taylor Marr, deputy chief economist at Redfin Corp., a real-estate brokerage, told the newspaper.
Can a future ban on gas-powered cars work? An economist explains
Amitrajeet A. Batabyal, Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics, Rochester Institute of Technology Sat, January 1, 2022 A 'green' symbol for electric vehicle charging stations. Photo by Michael Marais for Unsplash, CC BY-ND
But with more than 270 million motor vehicles registered in the U.S. and a long tradition of powering cars and trucks with fossil fuels, how will it be possible to make this switch?
In 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that after 2035, sales of gas-powered vehicles would be banned in California, a state where more than 50% of greenhouse emissions are generated by transportation. This ban includes gas-electric hybrid vehicles and, more generally, any vehicle with tailpipe emissions.
The governor’s executive order leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Will the proposed ban so far into the future have teeth? What will it actually accomplish if it becomes policy? Can it set the tone for the rest of the country and open the floodgates to a green transportation future? Multiple cars traveling on a sunny boulevard.
In 2018, electric vehicles comprised nearly 2% of the U.S. market and nearly 8% in California. A ban on the sale of gas-powered cars in California could pave the way for an expansion of electric vehicle purchases and kick into high gear electric vehicle manufacturing and construction of charging stations. Yet this ban, intended to signal and spark decisive change, entails a certain amount of risk. The implied ‘or else’ of a ban
In the case of climate change, a ban can be useful because, unlike a carbon tax, a ban at a future date doesn’t impose clear costs on consumers today. And, unlike subsidies designed to encourage the use of electric vehicles, bans don’t rely on federal support and, in that way, can be seen as fiscally conservative.
In this case, the circumstances depend on the extent to which electric vehicles can replace and are good substitutes for gas-powered vehicles.
If electric vehicles were perfect substitutes for conventional vehicles – the same price and offering equal or better performance – then the market would drive the creation of a nearly fully electric vehicle fleet. It would not be necessary for governments to put a policy into place to prompt people to buy and drive electric vehicles.
On the other hand, if electric vehicles are not substitutes for gas-powered vehicles, then it would be expensive for a government to push consumers to buy electric vehicles. Illustration of an old Esso gas station.
To a policymaker interested in combating climate change, effective regulatory measures may include putting a price on carbon emissions – rather than enacting a ban – to encourage the market to move toward a future of all-electric vehicles. A carbon tax, which sets a price that emitters must pay for each ton of greenhouse gases they emit, would push the market toward electric vehicles. Currently, 25 countries around the world have a national carbon tax, including Canada, South Africa and Sweden. Emitters want to reduce their emissions to avoid paying the tax. California has a program that caps carbon emissions that similarly raises the cost of emissions.
That said, a carbon tax may be hard to implement in the U.S. because of voter resistance to paying more taxes; voters paying little attention to the benefits of a carbon tax, such as refunds for not emitting a lot; and the existence of a well-organized and -funded opposition. The next best option, then, may be to use a ban rather than a tax. Impediments to an EV future
With improvements in battery technology in the past decade, electric vehicles are becoming better substitutes for conventional vehicles. A symbol of an electric car with plug trailing behind.
With more charging stations in place, auto manufacturers may find that it makes good business sense to shift more of their research and development to electric vehicle production. With less “range anxiety” over the distance between charging stations, consumers may be more likely to make the electric vehicle purchase decisions that policymakers would like them to make.
Moving away from fossil fuels to electricity may require a radical and risky action like a ban. While not ideal or necessarily even the first best policy instrument to achieve this objective, bans can be powerful change agents for consumers and the private sector.
On June 6, 1944, a Miami newspaper reporter took a ride up the south shore of Lake Okeechobee. Overnight, the long-anticipated and historic invasion of Europe had begun. Editors wanted local reaction from Germans. German Germans. Some were not too far away.
In May 1943, Allied forces had begun shipping to the United States Germans captured in combat. More than 9,000 went to 22 Florida camps, many at or near military bases. State headquarters was at North Florida’s Camp Blanding, also an active POW facility. It now is a National Guard training base.
German POWs were confident about war effort in Europe
At Liberty Point, Germans who were put to work performing the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting sugar cane told the reporter that, yes, they had heard of the invasion, on radios. They said it all was propaganda. Germany, they said, surely would prevail.
While the prisoners appeared cocky, their home in the Glades was no winter vacation. If there was a perfect hell for fair-skinned people from chilly northern Europe, this was it. When the American Red Cross inspected Liberty Point in March 1945, it found the temperature at 103 degrees; dust aggravated by six months without rain settled on everything. The Red Cross cited the camp for having only 12 latrines for 293 prisoners; only two had seats. Americans found it hard to feel sympathy. Compared to what was going on in Europe, including to American POWs, German POWs in Florida seemed to have it pretty good.
Prisoners at the various camps worked from before 8 a.m. to about 3 p.m. The military charged farmers the going rate for labor, but they were able to show a profit by paying prisoners 80 cents a day in coupons they traded for items such as cigarettes and beer.
Access to such treats led to a showdown with local distributors in early 1945. They halted supplies to Morrison Field, now Palm Beach International Airport, when they learned it was sharing them with the POWs. A display of what Camp Blanding looked like during World War II at the Camp Blanding Museum during the celebration of the 75th Anniversary of Camp Blanding Joint Training Center near Starke, Florida, on Jan 9, 2015.
Barracks, which held six men each, had mosquito netting but no air conditioning. American camp guards ate the same food as POWs, in keeping with the Geneva Convention. The nearly 300 prisoners fished in nearby canals, saw films twice a week and assembled a concert band using instruments bought with money from their canteen fund. They took classes in bookkeeping, English, geometry and chemistry, and read American magazines and copies of the New York Staatszeitung or “state newspaper.” Coddled in Florida, concentration camps in Germany
Sometimes the POWs pushed their luck. At the Belle Glade camp, when POWs held a two-day strike over a cut in cigarette rations, the American public, press and politicians angrily painted word pictures of coddled Germans whining over cigarettes at a time when GIs were stumbling across Nazi concentration camps.
One escapee got from North Florida all the way to the Everglades south of Lake Okeechobee. He was captured and returned to the camp scratched, bloody and filthy. The head of the POWs complained camp officers had beaten the man. No, the commander said, his scratches and cuts came from the Florida countryside.
Florida Time is a weekly column about Florida history by Eliot Kleinberg, a former staff writer for three decades at The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, and the author of 10 books about Florida (www.ekfla.com).
A California school superintendent said she's been 'subjected to death threats on a daily basis' since launching an investigation into a photo of students posing with swastikas drawn on their bodies
Yelena Dzhanova Sun, January 2, 2022 Godong/Getty Images
A California school superintendent said she's facing death threats after announcing an investigation into students posing with swastikas.
Nicole Newman said she saw a photo of Wheatland Union High School students with thick, black swastikas painted onto their torsos.
"This has been one of the most traumatizing experiences in my life and in the lives of my colleagues," she said.
A school superintendent from California said she's been "subjected to death threats on a daily basis" after launching an investigation into a photo showing a group of students posing with swastikas drawn on their bodies.
"This has been one of the most traumatizing experiences in my life and in the lives of my colleagues," said Wheatland Union High School District Superintendent Nicole Newman on in a video shared to Facebook on Thursday.
She and her colleagues have also received "threats that are aimed against our families," Newman added in the video.
The photo, showing eight white students with thick, black swastikas painted onto their torsos, went viral on social media. The students, some of whom are holding alcoholic beverages, appear to be at a house party. The students attend Wheatland Union High School, Newman confirmed.
"When I first saw them, I was profoundly disturbed and heartbroken. I knew just how much pain these images were going to cause our community," Newman said.
The students have been disciplined, according to the Sacramento Bee. But details of the consequences they are expected to face were not publicly shared for legal reasons.
Newman said the video message posted on Thursday would be the last public update on the case "as we cannot legally go into detail regarding the discipline of these students."
"There is no denying that, the choices made by the students in the picture were hurtful and deeply troubling. Their actions do not represent who we are as a school district and community," Newman said in a separate statement on December 23.
Newman said she'd reach out to elected officials and "key community stakeholders" to "begin the process of having a broader community conversation about how we can work together to prevent this type of issue from ever happening again."
THE PSYCHIC MELTDOWN OF THE USA A Nation On Hold Wants to Speak With a Manager
Sarah Lyall
NEW YORK TIMES Sat, January 1, 2022, A nation on hold wants to speak with a manager. (Shira Inbar/The New York Times)
Nerves at the grocery store were already frayed, in the way of these things as the pandemic slouches toward its third year, when the customer arrived. He wanted Cambozola, a type of blue cheese. He had been cooped up for a long time. He scoured the dairy area; nothing. He flagged down an employee who also did not see the cheese. He demanded that she hunt in the back and look it up on the store computer. No luck.
And then he lost it, just another out-of-control member of the great chorus of American consumer outrage, 2021 style.
“Have you seen a man in his 60s have a full temper tantrum because we don’t have the expensive imported cheese he wants?” said the employee, Anna Luna, who described the mood at the store, in Minnesota, as “angry, confused and fearful.”
“You’re looking at someone and thinking, ‘I don’t think this is about the cheese.’”
It is a strange, uncertain moment, especially with omicron tearing through the country. Things feel broken. The pandemic seems like a Möbius strip of bad news. Companies keep postponing back-to-the-office dates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps changing its rules. Political discord has calcified into political hatred. And when people have to meet each other in transactional settings — in stores, on airplanes, over the phone on customer-service calls — they are, in the words of Luna, “devolving into children.”
Perhaps you have felt it yourself, your emotions at war with your better nature. A surge of anger when you enter your local pharmacy, suffering from COVID-y symptoms, only to find that it is out of thermometers, never mind antigen tests. A burst of annoyance at the elaborate rules around vaccine cards and IDs at restaurants — rules you yourself agree with! — because you have to wait outside, and it is cold, and you left your wallet in the car.
A feeling of nearly homicidal rage at the credit card company representative who has just informed you that, having failed to correctly answer the security questions, you have been locked out of your own account. (Note to self: Adopting a tone of haughty sarcasm is not a good way to solve this problem.)
“People are just — I hate to say it because there are a lot of really nice people — but when they’re mean, they’re a heck of a lot meaner,” said Sue Miller, who works in a nonprofit trade association in Madison, Wisconsin. “It’s like, instead of saying, ‘This really inconvenienced me,’ they say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ It’s a different scale of mean.”
The meanness of the public has forced many public-facing industries to rethink what used to be an article of faith: that the customer is always right. If employees are now having to take on many unexpected roles — therapist, cop, conflict-resolution negotiator — then workplace managers are acting as security guards and bouncers to protect their employees.
At a specialty grocery store in Traverse City, Michigan, a manager named Shea O’Brien was recently accused of being unable to read by a customer enraged that a kind of fish advertised as being discounted had sold out. In another instance, O’Brien said, a man who did not want to wear a mask verbally assailed another employee, interspersing personal insults with an impromptu soliloquy about liberty and tyranny until the employee began to cry.
“He kept shouting, ‘The governor said we no longer have to wear masks,’” O’Brien said. The woman’s response — that they were still required in places with a certain number of workers — only made him angrier.
Finally, the owner arrived and “told the customer never to return,” O’Brien said.
It’s not just your imagination; behavior really is worse. In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48% of adults and 55% of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election.
By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30% overall and 37% among workers. Overall, only 39% of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil. The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.
“There’s a growing delta between office workers and those that are interacting with consumers,” said Micho Spring, chair of the global corporate practice for the strategic communications company Weber Shandwick, which helped conduct the study.
At the same time, many consumers are rightly aggrieved at what they view as poor service at companies that conduct much of their business online — retailers, cable operators, rental car companies and the like — and that seem almost gleefully interested in preventing customers from talking to actual people.
“The pandemic has given many companies license to reduce their focus on the quality of the experience they’re delivering to the customer,” said Jon Picoult, founder of Watermark Consulting, a customer service advisory firm.
In part, the problem is the disconnect between expectation and reality, said Melissa Swift, U.S. transformation leader at the consulting firm Mercer. Before the pandemic, she said, consumers had been seduced into the idea of the “frictionless economy” — the notion that you could get whatever you wanted, the moment you wanted it.
That is not happening.
“There’s a lack of outlets for people’s anger,” Swift said. “That waiter, that flight attendant — they become a stand-in for everything coming between what we experience and what we think we are entitled to.”
How do you measure rage? For many years, Scott M. Broetzmann, now president and CEO of a consulting firm called Customer Care Measurement and Consulting, has been conducting studies of consumer anger. The next iteration is set to come out this spring. He almost can’t believe what he has seen during the pandemic.
“When we founded the study, I never thought that the environment would be like it was today,” he said. “I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that we would be seeing people fighting on planes and beating each other up.” Last spring, he said, his early-morning flight from Washington to Phoenix was delayed for 45 minutes while a drama over a man and a mask played out in the back. The final scene: The man was escorted off in disgrace.
That seems like child’s play, compared to what else is going on in the skies. In the COVID era, airplanes have become fertile landscapes for fights about rules that are really metaphors for other things. This is where mask mandates meet never-maskers and where weary, combative consumers meet exhausted, fed-up (and more and more overworked, because so many people are sick) employees.
In 2021, there were 5,779 reports of unruly passengers on planes, more than 4,000 of them related to mask mandates, the Federal Aviation Administration reported. The stories keep coming: of passengers knocking out flight attendants’ teeth; of flight attendants subduing passengers with duct tape; of people brawling about masks, seat belts, no-alcohol policies, the lack of normal meal service — you name it.
Recently, a woman on a Delta flight from Tampa, Florida, to Atlanta hit and spat at another passenger in an incident that began when she refused to accede to the flight attendant’s request to sit down while the beverage cart was in the aisle. When the woman was invited to find an open seat for a few minutes, she asked, “What am I, Rosa Parks?” according to the ensuing criminal complaint.
Flight attendants say that enforcing rules — not just over masks, but over seat belts and sitting down during takeoff and landing — is perhaps the most wearying part of their job.
“It’s mentally exhausting to have to police adults over this matter,” wrote Adam Mosley, a 51-year-old flight attendant, responding to a request by The New York Times to describe conditions in the service industry at this odd juncture.
“There is definitely a subset of people that don’t seem to think that any of the rules apply to them,” he said. Recently, an angry woman confronted him and another flight attendant in the galley, backing them into a corner while she argued that she had a right to talk to her children without wearing a mask.
It’s not all grim, he said. Some passengers go out of their way to thank him, just as some customers have taken to leaving huge tips in restaurants. Others have been bringing him and his colleagues little gifts, like chocolate.
“I think there was enough media attention over poorly behaved passengers that some people feel bad,” Mosley said.
Airplanes are the scenes of the most obvious instances of consumer rage, along with restaurants, where customers regularly express their annoyance at staffing shortages, higher prices, vaccination mandates and other pandemic-centric problems. But most of the bad consumer behavior is low-grade — a persistent hum of incivility rather than an explosion of violence.
“Customers have been superaggressive and impatient lately,” said Annabelle Cardona, who works in a Lowell, Massachusetts, branch of a national chain of home-improvement stores. Recently, she found herself in a straight-up screaming match with a customer who called her lazy and incompetent after she told him that he needed to measure his windows before she could provide the right size shades.
Such interactions used to make her weep. “But I’ve been calloused by it,” she said. “Now, instead of crying, I’m just really pessimistic and judgmental against the people around me.”
From across the country, workers responded with similar stories: of customers flying off the handle when the products they wanted were unavailable; of customers blaming the store, rather than supply-chain disruptions, for delays; of customers demanding refunds on nonrefundable items; of customers so wound up with worry and anxiety that the smallest thing sends them into a tailspin of hysteria.
In Chicago, a customer service agent for Patagonia described how a young woman became inconsolable when told that her package would be late. Another customer accused him of lying and participating in a scam to defraud customers upon learning that the out-of-stock fleece vest he had back-ordered would be further delayed by supply-chain issues.
In Colorado, Maribeth Ashburn, who works for a jewelry store, said that she was weary of being “the mask police.”
“Customers will scream at you, throw things and walk out of the store,” she said.
The worst, she said, is the political commentary. Once a customer went into a diatribe against Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying she had it on good authority that he was about to be jailed for his “crimes.” Others have called Ashburn a “sheep” and a “fraidy-cat” for wearing a mask.
Her go-to response — looking noncommittal and murmuring “hmm” — seems to make matters worse. “I am very discouraged at the polarization and at the unkind way that people treat each other,” she said.
Miller, from the Wisconsin trade association, said the pressures of the pandemic and the deterioration of elected officials’ behavior — the shouting, the threats, the hatred — had given normal people license to act out, too. With her customers, she tries to remain calm, address their problems and take solace in whatever crumbs of civility they offer.
“I’m not expecting people to be nice,” she said. “They don’t have to wish me a good day. They can say, ‘Hi, I’d like to buy this,’ and then ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye.’ I’d be very happy with that.”
AT&T and Verizon aren't delaying their 5G expansions any further after all. Bloomberg notes the two carriers' CEOs have issued a joint letter rejecting a request from the FAA and Transportation Department to stall their C-band service rollouts beyond January 5th to address concerns of interference with aircraft systems. The companies argued that the government's proposed plan would effectively give oversight of the network expansions to the FAA for an "undetermined number of months or years," and wouldn't cover rivals like T-Mobile.
The move would represent an "irresponsible abdication" of network control, the CEOs said. They also believed honoring the request would be to the "detriment" of customers.
Instead, AT&T and Verizon tried to negotiate a compromise. They vowed not to deploy C-band 5G towers near some airports for six months, but only so long as the aviation industry and regulators didn't do more to halt C-band deployments. American transportation agencies had asked on December 31st for a general delay no longer than two weeks, but called for a gradual deployment of service near "priority" airports through March to safeguard important runways.
It's not clear how the FAA and Transportation Department will respond. The rejection isn't shocking, mind you. C-band service promises to deliver more of the long-touted speed advantages of 5G without the short range and poor indoor service of millimeter wave technology. It could also add capacity to keep 5G networks running smoothly as more users upgrade their devices. However, officials and the aviation industry have a lot to lose as well —they're worried C-band 5G could disrupt flights and put passengers at risk. You might not see either side capitulate quickly.
Kentucky shelter working to locate pet owners post-tornado Alyssa Thorpe, left, and Marlee Burden hold their children while Halyn McKnight, right, searches for possessions with her mother Jennifer Burden in her destroyed home, in the aftermath of tornadoes that tore through the region, in Dawson Springs, Ky., Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2021.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Sat, January 1, 2022,
DAWSON SPRINGS, Ky. (AP) — A Kentucky animal shelter has been doing its part to help with recovery from last month's tornadoes by reuniting pets lost in the storm with their owners.
The Hopkins County Animal shelter has taken in about 90 dogs and about 120 cats from the hard-hit community of Dawson Springs since Dec. 11, The Messenger reported. Shelter Executive Director Dustin Potenzas told the paper on Tuesday there were about 36 dogs left to be claimed and about 50 cats left.
All of the pets found in Dawson Springs will be kept for 35 days before being put up for adoption. If an owner can't house their pet because their home was damaged or lost, the shelter can sign a 15-day contract to board the pets there.
“As long as the owner stays in contact with us and renews that 15-day contract, then we will hold those animals as long as we need to,” Potenza said.
The shelter is still getting animals from Dawson Springs more than two weeks after the tornadoes. Most of those coming in are cats, and Potenza said it can be hard to know if they are strays or pets. Only two of the rescued pets had microchips, which allowed the shelter to reunite them with their owners immediately.
For the other pets rescued, shelter volunteers are showing photos and talking to neighbors in the areas the animals were found to try to locate their owners. To reclaim a pet, the owner must show proof of ownership through veterinary records or photos.
“At a time like this when some have lost all, we still need to make sure we have that proof to make sure we are getting the animals to their rightful owners,” Potenza said. “That is the only fair way for us to do that.”
