Month: January 2019

Witness

Updated 24 Jan 2019

A crowd of Covington Catholic (website, Facebook) students harass and mock Nathan Phillips. Known contacts:

  • Browe@covcath.org
  • Sbeiting@covcath.org
  • Rflesch@covcath.org

Nathan Phillips:

Loose timeline of useful information that was released on Twitter:

4:16 AM – 19 Jan 2019 – A video of the event

https://twitter.com/lulu_says2/status/1086552871674368001

3:53 PM – Jan 19, 2019 – Rapist Jake Walter from the school

https://twitter.com/notallbhas/status/1086728345570721795

Boone County deputies say Jake Walter, a one-time Covington Catholic basketball standout, held a woman down this weekend and repeatedly raped her until she bled.

Walter dismissed the victim by laughing at her and telling her that she would be fine.

12:16 AM – Jan 20, 2019 – Statement from one of the students mother

https://twitter.com/AyeLeyan/status/1086854855082135554

Shame on you! Were you there? Did you hear the names the people where calling these boys? It was shameful. Did you witness the black Muslims yelling profanities and video taping trying to get something to futher (sic) your narrative of hatred?? Did you know that this “man” came up to this one boy and drummed in his face? Shame on you. Only reporting what you want. More fake news.

…

Delete my email. I want nothing to do with helping perpetuating (sic) your hate. I do not want to be a part of your story. You are ruining a boys life for fake news. Hate spreads like wildfire. I pray for you.

— Quote captured from WATCH: Covington Catholic Students Wearing MAGA Hats Taunt Native Americans [VIDEO] on Heavy.com.

8:44 AM – 20 Jan 2019 – Each student’s face–45 in all–screengrabbed from the video

Updated 24 Jan 2019

Images of previous incidents where Covington students were being racist

Student wearing blackface at a basketball game, apparently taunting a black player on the other team. Taken from a thread titled Should The Colonel Crazies’ Treatment Of Inbounders Have To Change?

Another image taken from a basketball game with students giving the white supremacy hand sign (the Medium article Does the OK Sign Actually Signify “White Power,” or What? details the symbol’s history and hoaxes). Image originally from this tweet. No source.

6:04 PM – 21 Jan 2019 – Harassing a female before the Nathan Phillips incident

https://twitter.com/roflinds/status/1087486166939680768

Last thing, for people wondering what they yelled, all we specifically heard was “MAGA”, “Build the Wall”, and some people say they hear “slut” at the end of the video ok it’s past my bedtime goodnight twitter

Media presence

Daily Beast posted the article Covington Catholic Teen on ‘Fox & Friends’: Blackface Is ‘School Spirit’ on two students’ interview on Fox the morning of the 23rd. File under “male white privilege makes stupid”. These teens are either unprepared or stupid or both. Cf. the Parkland kids carrying themselves in the public sphere with calm intelligence and moral certitude.

Savannah Guthrie interviewed Nick Sandmann (possibly #1 in the group image above) on NBC Nightly News on the evening of the 23rd. He is as expressive and sympathetic as the two on Fox. This is more of an indictment of thrusting kids into the media. Allegedly, the Bishop at the school has now barred them from speaking to the media.

Predictable, Trump and Fox support them.

I never liked missionaries

I never liked missionaries.

The main thing is that I feel as if they are foreigners coming in to provide food/water/social assistance in trade for a belief system. However, most of them are bound by responsibility by their religious group to give to others. Which is nice. If they are helping without recompense, the system is laudatory. If not, well… who can discern intent? The history of missionaries is not even in the neighborhood of laudatory, so let’s start with that. We’re now in and era wrestling with culture appropriation, but a decade (or so) ago the issue was colonialism. More to it: colonialism rose to the fore of concerns of perennial, justified concerns.

And yet I listened to something today [ed. -ish] that suggested my beliefs re missionaries were hypocritical [ed spoiler I don’t change my beliefs too much]. In a Chris Hayes podcast he interviewed a guy who visits very conservative red districts in order to acknowledge the liberals who are there and, at best, integrate their concerns into the global, liberal concerns. A compassionate visit from the mother ship stinks of paternalist colonialism. And yet.

His story is unbelievable fascinating and unbelievable. Low income upbringing, heavy heavy drug addiction, soup kitchen and avant-garde theatre, a notable arbitrary encounter with a seminal book on community organizing, getting clean, getting active, and now this. He was there and he knows how to get to them who are also there. Get to them via their things of life that are relevant. No one is left or right or conservative or liberal in the absolute. We have nuance in our “hearts” and, at best, our simple desires in life are our immediate and immediately honest desires in life. The small-town and poor-town citizens have a voice and ambition to be kindled. And the undeveloped third-world country citizens have a yearning for kindled development.

That sounds as racist/culturist as it felt to type.

Basically: missionaries visit places that need physical, material assistance and assist, bringing with them, or often times not, a look at the good book. Political missionaries visit and bring ideology and, yet also, pull ideology from their hosts. No answer is wrong when you’re a political missionary, and contra answers change the ask-er as opposed to the ask-er-ee. The missionaries can and should learn.

At best.

Concerts I had been to but have not written about or maybe only in passing

I like to write notes here, for my own reminiscence, about interesting concerts I have been to. However comma some concerts pre-date this web site and I think of them often and so want to let them be counted. Most of the dates I list are from memory and what I can find on the web, so some may be a different venue, and a different year, and wildly inaccurate, but still my experience of the concert is there. Their documentation is only as poor as my memory. [ed. I made a partial reference to some of these in 2009 and 2016].

Elvis Costello at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1989. This was his King of America tour and the first concert I ever went to. I know. KoA was mostly country–his foray into the Nashville song-writing scene–and not my favorite, but a great opportunity to go with my brother and his then-girlfriend who was, unfortunately all I remember, a very likeable goofy blond pot smoker. We were in the upper balcony?

Some punk bands at 688 Club. It closed in 1986, so it must have been my first or second year in college. I remember being freaked out having never been to any place like that. Things have changed. That locale recurs as concert-related because it’s an urgent care location and I had to go for a freaky looking spider bite I got at one of the Piedmont Park Music Midtown festivals.

GWAR at Masquerade in Atlanta. First mosh pit and hanging out with metal heads from college and some weird drugs and yeah. GWAR spit “blood” and threw “maggots” (dye and rice) on the crowd so clothes were trashed by the end of the concert. And the pope raping scene was… something else. This is where I fell in love with the group dynamics and camaraderie of the mosh pit. I miss that and know I cannot again be a part of it at concerts as an older (?) person. Recommended, though.

Music Midtown several years when it started in 1996. It was at where the Federal Reserve building is now (just up the street from where we live now), then where the Georgia Aquarium is now, then off Piedmont and Pine (near Central Park where Shaky Knees is now).

Philip Glass solo piano at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in 2000. This was when I worked at a company in the king (or queen?) building and we went with another couple from work. They sat in the front row of a very intimate setting and left in the middle of the performance. I hate that that’s my prominent memory.

Robert McDuffie performing Philip Glass’s 2nd Violin Concerto at Spivey Hall at Clayton State in Morrow, GA. This I can’t find anything about but I know I was there. Reduction for violin and piano. The joy of the composition was matched by his enthusiasm and passion for the work.

McCoy Tyner at the Variety Playhouse in 2010. I remember his performance being a mix of blocky, forceful and dissonant jazz with the multi-voiced, polyrhythmic complexity of Prokofiev. It was eye-opening.

Terry Riley improvising on the Tennessee Theater’s Wurlitzer organ at the second year of the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, 2010. His performance was hypnotic. Solo on a theater organ performing phased, minimalist feats of brilliance. One of a kind. Lisa’s mom, Mickey, owned that city’s events and so got us free tickets to everything. I was the only one that could go. I missed the first year, with Michael Gira and Philip Glass. It was/is(?) an amazing rock/experimental festival, more so being in Knoxville. Weird, huh?

Home backup

One year ago, I had a major cleanup of my home computers and server. Part of that was to get good off-site backup and so a co-worker recommended IDrive. They worked fine, and for a good price, but for Ubuntu there was only a web-based UI and it didn’t save previous versions of the backed up files. Not horrible, but annoying.

A week or so ago I discovered that I didn’t have a crucial folder in the backup set (!) so I ran their local Python scripts to add it. Script spits out a generic Script error along with a message to upgrade to a new version. New version installed but was even more broken:

Use of uninitialized value in string ne at Helpers.pm line 265.

I contacted them and after a few days (holiday season) they emailed back that I could schedule a time to get with their back end team. Again, not horrible, but it pushed me to look for a more home-grown solution.

Step 1: Copy local files to a network drive

Web server pages and wiki content gets copied daily to a backup folder on a Drobo DAS volume. Four 2 TB drives RAIDed to ~5-1/2 TB. Check their handy capacity calculator. I’ll need to upgrade to an actual NAS someday.

Step 2: Export databases to a network drive

MySQL databases exported with mysqldump every few hours, named with the hour and gzipped (hour_database.db.gz). The hour thing was used because IDrive didn’t give file history, so that can probably be skipped, but it’s nice to have quick access if needed.

Step 3: Generate versioned backups

I use duplicity to take the web server folders, database exports, and various document, photo, development project, and music recording folders and back them up to another location on the Drobo volume. First full backup is slow, subsequent incremental ones are quick.

Step 4: Copy versioned backups offsite

This is the goal. Duplicity can backup direct to an offsite location, but my initial set up uses rclone to do the copying. They support a billion types of storage (Amazon, FTP, Azure, …) but I decided to upgrade my Google Drive to 100 GB for ~$24 a year and use the rclone Google Drive commands.

Each step is a crontab-ed script with taged log output:

2019-01-02 05:00:29 [db_backup] Exporting database-a to 00_database-a.db.gz
2019-01-02 05:00:29 [db_backup] Finished database backup
2019-01-02 05:05:16 [www_backup] Backing up /var/www/site1 to /drobo/site1
2019-01-02 05:10:32 [www_backup] Finished www backup
2019-01-02 06:00:01 [duplicity_backup] Starting duplicity backup from /source to file:///dest

There’s room for improvement, but as a New Year’s upgrade I’m pretty happy.