Category: 2016

  • MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • protest politics

    protest politics

    Any one who knows me knows I’m rather persistent when it comes to physicał protests.

    Anyone who really knows me knows if and why i ‘show’-up, for a protest or stage one with my Fred or follow my fearless sons, can figure out these photos.The where and when.

    Too decide is an ordeal.

    It’s always an ordeal, or better yet a calculation to determine if my physical body can “take it.”

    When I arrived at CUNY I had a workplace injury as University of Denver (DU) –Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), I taught and published only that. I was the “negative” example, if you will.

    No doubt about it!

    How (not why because too obvious) is the question.

    HOW is so much harder, though potentially counter-intuitive then way more interesting. Like ” “disinterest” not rational self-interest.

    Indeed, I get tired hearing either the why — the justification disguised or ʼframedʼ as I write in at least one book racialized – en-cultured or -en-appropriated (Penelope). And if you wanna play the game, select 2 ids please. It is only fair Rudi.

    What is my MO? Mother Courage or Reckless Ruthje? I love to name and to have acronyms like TAP (new-ish) and PRISM. I asked for over 23 years how a Germanic language like Dutch did not soften my name nor Ruudʼs. Happy to catch up with Gradi during the holidays. It is her cennential all year, after all.RPM taught me a lot about what radically changes meaning in transliteration. Being “lost in translation – is too obvious. Cultures are akin to climate(s). Get it?

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • Weasel Zippers Snip the Menu and if it says “oops” this means

    Take it from the Weasel-Zippers, as a woman “writing politics” I’m effective enough to try to silence. They want to silence me. I may seek shelter in scholarship sometimes, but I will not be silenced.

    I appreciate the mirroring with CUNY Academic Commons that stems from my private site to my professional site. CUNY practices freedom of speech protection. No research and travel budget does not help. (Double negative intended.) Images are all mine.

    The National Review trained me (via Frederic D. O’Brien, formerly Frederic. D. Schwarz — his mug name.).

    Even more importantly, University of Chicago. Senior-sage-wise or the legendary academic editor John Tryneski helped me immensely. I forgot Out of Many, One: The Third American Political Tradition was almost pulped give the racket the late Rush Limbaugh made. This is an academic book with lots of footnotes, documenting former President Barack Obama’s first term

    Being a Congressional Page and an American presidency scholar means one tends to get the panic of having two years (or 100 days) to pass a law. Executive orders have always existed but . . .

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • CUNY Graduate Center Historian (Recently Retired) Distinguished Professor David Nasaw  wrote

    CUNY Graduate Center Historian (Recently Retired) Distinguished Professor David Nasaw wrote

    Kudos, David Nasaw! What a wonderful and insightful analysis, albeit a scary one.

    Living on the late-nineteenth-century female muckraker journalist Ida Tarbell’s island– Roosevelt Island — which is under the 59th Street Bridge (as those in Manhattan call it, as opposed to the Queensboro Bridge, as those from Queens call it, though it was relatively recently renamed the Ed Koch Bridge after the late former New York City Mayor), gives one a lot of APP (American Political Perspectives).

    The wet, dirty muck that Ida raked occurred after she checked herself into what was known as “Damnation Island” due to its appalling conditions and the way inmates from the all-male prison on the island took “care” of some of the women along with white male priests.

    While now it remains Roosevelt Island, Cornell Tech dominates it. Former Mayor Mike (or Michael) Bloomberg awarded approximately 37 acres to Cornell, the only private-public Ivy League institution of higher learning.

    So, I think I can speculate that Elon has been here at least once, if not more, and who knows? I might bump into him on the street.

    I can envision Elon rallying or the bolstering the idea of creating Cornell Tech given its unique location, being controlled by New York State though operated by New York City and technically part of Manhattan. Perhaps he supported getting all tech, especially “tech” education, off the “left” coast and in the financial capital of the world — New York City in New York State, rather than any land mass “down under.”

    As Cornell Tech changes Roosevelt Island, I’m glad to know I can count on insightful analysis by a CUNY Graduate Center historian, now retired, since I know his work on Hearst as well as Mellon and can rest assured that his historical analysis will include astute comments or make culturally appropriate comparisons to Robber Barons from one and two centuries ago, and how they dominated the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • In a word, Gail, it’s Gramsci

    In a word, Gail, it’s Gramsci

    One of my cousins asked me a fun question. We were talking about Frick and Stout family artifacts from Iowa, Jacksonville Illinois, Des Moines, Grundy, and Polk Counties, all in Iowa, as well as Hopewell and Amwell, New Jersey, where Colonel Thomas Johnson Stout’s son left to head West.

    See David Forgacs, "Gramsci Undisabled" Modern Italy, 2016 doing:101017/mit.2016.33
    See Critical Studies of Education, Vol. 5 “Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World” Nicola Pizzolato and John D. Holst, Editors (Cham, Switzerland, 2017)

    My baby sister Kathleen even has the china washbowl this single man brought with him all the way to Morgan County, IL The pitcher had long broken, our grandmother Ruth Finlayson Frick explained, along with the Dutch family tradition of giving the most prized artifacts to the last daughter married. On the back of that bowl in very discolored paper is an explanation of who Col. Stout was.

    Not only was he George’s (Washington) aide de camp, but he was a professor of religion and helped start Brown University too. But most of all, reading different newspaper accounts, the Colonel wanted nothing to do with receiving any Revolutionary War pension. Sure, he qualified, but he took it as an affront that anyone would think he would take money reserved for the poor.

    Antonio Gramsci didn’t think like Thomas Stout. And I am not even sure I would label his left-right politics partisan, yet. That said, he may have been honoring Revolutionary War widows and orphans. To me this means, like Gramsci 250 years later, Thomas Stout recognized the family and the hegemonic power within the family like Gramsci, who not only supported women’s rights but also those of children, unlike his Marxist and Communist and Anarchist or Syndicated Anarchist did with his particular preoccupation with culture and all the jarring juxtapositions that exist and do lead to change, like the changes we are seeing in the United States of America today.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • Heretic . . .

    Heretic . . .

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_O%27Brien

    Just in. And I am trying to have a news-less day. But my mini(computer) that is is too observant. “Grr”

    Death of Democracy

    The title is”How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable” in the New York Times the website webpage version of course.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • /Control?/Resist?!?/Bodies_in_Revolt*

    /Control?/Resist?!?/Bodies_in_Revolt*

    This was written before the ADAAA was passed in 2008 as President George W. Bush (43, not 41) with Routledge, 2005 and sold as chapters or I can send PDFs per requests (robrien@gc.cuny.edu within each semester (approximately September to December and February to May) each year. I only have select chapters.

    Finally, Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (USA: Oxford University Press, 2004)

    Crippled Justice: The History of Disability in the Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, October 2001).

    https://www.hulu.com/watch/88ceaa35-dea2-49de-9985-8993d49574a0

    https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-public-square

    Writing Politics inspired both Voices from the Edge and the Public Square (PS) by PUP in Princeton, New Jersey)

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • Twists, Turns, and then Twists again: The Annals of the Proxies between Two State (read nation-states) Agencies — the American Presidency vs. the British monarchy

    Oh please?!*&^ Meghan of Montecito. Or is it Megan of Montecito? You tell me? Having grown up and come of age in the county that houses this supposed woman of Montecito, I think it is no less than outrageous.  Why?  Because of all the work that all the proxies must do.  Full disclosure: I have relatives in Montecito, my first sleep-over restaurant gala was in Santa Barbara (SB), I grew up on the beaches of SB, and decades later I was there for part of my COVID-isolation travels and adventures, when I got to renew my friendship with a Hope Ranch High School sister (we’d gone to Claremont Men’s College together before they shoved the M of McKenna in there).  Phew.  This friend told me that the best thing about Montecito is not the fully-in-view polo park, nor even the real SB ranch that was ranched by the fake-ranch movie-star president (yes, RR, not TR nor FDR).  Phew again.  Please.  I have no problem about reporting on the British monarchy versus Meghan and Megan, the proxy (singular) for all of the colonial and United States of America since Pocahontas.  Yep, I mean Meghan and Megan of Montecito and/or Hillary of FOB and BOB, or really FOB.

    Let me use this to get more twists and turns in, something akin to the “Ana-baptists,” and by Ana I don’t meant those Santa Anna winds but rather the reference here to John Winthrop of, yes, you called it (if you remember it from your civics class), City on a Hill or my American Political Thought and/or American Political Development seminars and what I today refer to as APP, not APT + APD -AS = APP.^

    I’m waiting for Michelle (Obama) to work with or support Meghan or Megan of Montecito, really, though it is actually Ronald Reagan’s stage screen in the SB county-side as well as being backed up to Kevin’s Kern, and yes, that’s potential Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s Kern of Kern County.

    Now, where did I go next with FHO? Well that was Tejon Ranch, where Fred remarked: Did we really have to go back to that county where everyone “hated” (okay, banished) me? We did 🙂 And we enjoyed it, though not for all the reasons one, and that’s the Queen English’s “one” would understand.

    Viewing and Reading Recommendations — check out Princess’ Di’s “authenticity”

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • “Private is Professional, not “Personal”

    Doing research in remote European country on anarchy, state(s), & political violence against “All others-and/or all Others.”

    RuthOBrien.org temporarily dark or minimal content available. No access to plug ins by mirrored professional site. Professional IT retraining scheduled.

    Relieved not professional political hackers, nor personal interference by Dutch Fulbright UCLA trained Islamic Center Ph.D.

    Grants pending on above. IdeaImpact.org (non-partisan, non-profit est. 2914) grants available soon.

    Writing Politics Specialization Founded
    MuckrakerIdaTarbell