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Daily Bread for 3.18.21

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 43.  Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 7:05 PM, for 12h 06m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 22% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1954, Parker Pen Employees Win Wage Increase: “On this date employees of Parker Pen in Janesville won a 5-cent-an-hour wage increase in contract negotiations. After the raise, male employees made a base pay of $1.95 an hour while their female counterparts were paid $1.62 an hour. “

Recommended for reading in full — 

Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Knowles report Sheriff’s official who said spa shooting suspect had ‘bad day’ posted shirts blaming ‘CHY-NA’ for virus:

The backlash began with the sheriff spokesman’s statement to reporters that the mass shooting suspect was having a “bad day.”

“He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” Cherokee County sheriff’s office Capt. Jay Baker said Wednesday. He was describing the 21-year-old man accused of killing eight people, mostly Asian and almost all women, in a rampage across three Atlanta-area spas.

Then — as the violence stirred fears in an Asian-American community that already felt under attack — Internet sleuths and journalists found Baker’s Facebook posts promoting shirts that called the novel coronavirus an “IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.”

….

Baker is not just any employee of the sheriff’s department, some noted, but its spokesman, who shapes public knowledge of the attacks that unfolded Tuesday in his county and then at two businesses in Atlanta.

“All of us have experienced bad days,” tweeted Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). “But we don’t go to three Asian businesses and shoot up Asian employees.”

(Conservatives would have once ridiculed – rightly – the suggestion of bad days as a motive for mass killings. It’s common now to hear them dribble ludicrous excuses like this for those who are visually similar to themselves.)

 Lorraine Ali writes What Woody Allen’s defenders are really upset about:

It didn’t take much to convince Woody Allen defenders that HBO’s four-part docuseries, “Allen v. Farrow,” was a one-sided hatchet job against the revered filmmaker. The four-part investigative series hadn’t yet premiered when they began tearing down its reexamination of the allegation that Allen molested Dylan Farrow, his adoptive daughter with actress Mia Farrow, when she was just 7 years old.

Angry readers wrote to The Times in response to my favorable review of the series, insisting I was part of a lynch mob: “Shame on you!”

….

To these outspoken fans, Allen is a victim of Farrow’s sour grapes, of “cancel culture,” of feminism itself. But the truth underlying their emotional, often highly personal defenses of Allen is that he’s become subject to the forces of change that have finally begun to challenge the old world order, when a girl’s place was tantalizing Allen or other actors on screen, no matter how nerdy or neurotic those men might be, or how young the woman.

No one knows for sure what really happened in the Allen/Farrow household except the people who survived the nightmare. The rest of us base our opinions on the most compelling argument, and up until now, Allen — a beloved filmmaker in a notoriously sexist business in a patriarchal society — has had the megaphone, and the might of the industry, to present his account.

Perhaps these Allen diehards are upset because “Allen v. Farrow” finally explores the other side of the story, and they’re used to a world where women were simply told to shut up.

How Wrigley’s Dominated The World Of Chewing Gum:

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