"The virtue of their victims"

 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (part 3, ch. 1), Dr. Hendricks to Dagny Taggart:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward.

“I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards — never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy.

“I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind — yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it — and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

What the Obama adminstration really thought about the media

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus," he said. "Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing." 

Ben Rhodes, advisor to President Obama. From "The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign-Policy Guru" by David Samuels. New York Times, May 5, 2016.

The gullibility of the intellectual community

Simon Karlinsky wrote in his introduction to Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971:

...the groundswell of enthusiasm for Soviet Russia among America’s intellectuals which came just as Stalin was consolidating his power and plunging the country into the worst nightmare in its history. What amazes a person even minimally acquainted with Soviet realities about the intellectual climate of America in the thirties is the almost inconceivable gullibility of the intellectual community, its lack of any meaningful criteria for comparing the situations in the two countries.

Muggeridge's Law

From Tom Wolfe's "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast:  A literary manifesto for the new social novel," Harpers, November, 1989. 

While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

A full Moon can occur on Easter Sunday.

The rule for finding the date of Easter is usually stated as follows:

1. Determine the date of first full Moon on or after the first day of Spring.
2. Easter is the Sunday after that.

This eliminates the possibility of the Moon being full on Easter Sunday.

Except that it doesn't. A lunar eclipse can occur only when the Moon is full, and there was a nearly total lunar eclipse which was seen in most of Europe on Easter Sunday, April 12, 1903 (pdf).

There are two factors in the rule for Easter that contribute to this situation.

1. The first day of Spring is always assumed to be March 21. This is not exactly true. The vernal equinox (determined astronomically) can occur on March 19, 20 or 21.
2. The full Moon used is not the astronomical full Moon, but an ecclesiastical full Moon, i.e., one that is used for ease of determination.

The second factor is responsible for 1903, because the ecclesiastical full moon was on April 11.

The date of Easter is actually determined by the Roman Catholic Church using tables that were set up by Johannes Kepler when the Gregorian Calendar was established in 1582.

For further information: United States Naval Observatory, The Date of Easter.

"[We academics are] the most useless people in the world" --Germaine Greer, 2014

Germaine Greer, FemiFest radical feminist conference, London, August 31, 2014 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7b59mFyREY
https://vimeo.com/105476725 [timing in brackets]

4:01 [3:34] "So I really think we've gone about as far as we can go with this equality nonsense. It was always a fraud. It always placed women in a position of having to adapt to a pre-existing reality that they didn't approve of anyway."

4:37 [4:10] "[The corporate world] is a completely sclerotic, phalliform organizational system, and everything travels vertically. All orders come down from the top. Everybody's in authority over everybody else. It's not the way we do things. It's not the way we can go on doing things because we know that those systems depend upon oppression and cruelty, downright cruelty, and--'unmanning people', I almost said. Making people feel inferior, making them apologize for their existence, making them strive to be more like whatever the thing is you want them to be, and I think we have to do something."

7:07 [6:40] " ...the abominable Guardian, which is probably the most treacherous newspaper the women's movement has ever had...and their treatment of their female staff, with a few exceptions, is usually a pretty good example of what they're like at base level."

9:26 [8:52] "How do we form ourselves into an activity--a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academic--[we're] the most useless people in the world."

Islam and Nazism

Oriana Fallaci, The New Yorker, June 5, 2006, "The Agitator":

“Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West. […]

“I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its ‘Mein Kampf,’ its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently.”

The rest of this post is from http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2008/08/fundamentalism-and-fascism

Michael Potemra tells us that in Bernard-Henri Levy’s forthcoming book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism , there is an interesting line from the journals of Paul Claudel. On May 21, 1935, Claudel wrote, “Hitler’s speech: a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe . . . ”

The Catholic poet and diplomat Claudel wasn’t alone in linking National Socialism to Islam. Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian who was the principal author (with Bonhoffer) of the Barmen Declaration against the Nazis, had this to say:

Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet. 

(Church and the Political Problem of Our Day , 1939, p. 43)

Cato the Elder on women

Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is useless to let go the reins and then expect her not to kick over the traces. You must keep her on a tight rein [...] Women want total freedom or rather - to call things by their names - total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters ...

I post this quote solely to provide its exact source and the context. It's attributed to Cato the Elder in many places on the Web, and it's composed of excerpts (with some paraphrasing) from a speech of Cato reported in Livy's History of Rome, book 34, sections 2-4:

Give the reins to a headstrong nature, to a creature that has not been tamed, and then hope that they will themselves set bounds to their licence if you do not do it yourselves. This is the smallest of those restrictions which have been imposed upon women by ancestral custom or by laws, and which they submit to with such impatience. What they really want is unrestricted freedom, or to speak the truth, licence, and if they win on this occasion what is there that they will not attempt? 

Call to mind all the regulations respecting women by which our ancestors curbed their licence and made them obedient to their husbands, and yet in spite of all those restrictions you can scarcely hold them in. If you allow them to pull away these restraints and wrench them out one after another, and finally put themselves on an equality with their husbands, do you imagine that you will be able to tolerate them? From the moment that they become your fellows they will become your masters. [...]  

You have often heard me complain of the expensive habits of women and often, too, of those of men, not only private citizens but even magistrates, and I have often said that the community suffers from two opposite vices - avarice and luxury - pestilential diseases which have proved the ruin of all great empires. [...] The very last things to be ashamed of are thriftiness and poverty, but this law relieves you of both since you do not possess what it forbids you to possess. The wealthy woman says, 'This levelling down is just what I do not tolerate. Why am I not to be admired and looked at for my gold and purple? Why is the poverty of others disguised under this appearance of law so that they may be thought to have possessed, had the law allowed it, what it was quite out of their power to possess? 

Do you want, Quirites, to plunge your wives into a rivalry of this nature, where the rich desire to have what no one else can afford, and the poor, that they may not be despised for their poverty, stretch their expenses beyond their means? Depend upon it, as soon as a woman begins to be ashamed of what she ought not to be ashamed of she will cease to feel shame at what she ought to be ashamed of. She who is in a position to do so will get what she wants with her own money, she who cannot do this will ask her husband. The husband is in a pitiable plight whether he yields or refuses; in the latter case he will see another giving what he refused to give. Now they are soliciting other women's husbands, and what is worse they are soliciting votes for the repeal of a law, and are getting them from some, against the interest of you and your property and your children. When once the law has ceased to fix a limit to your wife's expenses, you will never fix one. Do not imagine that things will be the same as they were before the law was made. It is safer for an evil-doer not to be prosecuted than for him to be tried and then acquitted, and luxury and extravagance would have been more tolerable had they never been interfered with than they will be now, just like wild beasts which have been irritated by their chains and then released. 

Edward Gibbon, Charles Martel, and Islam

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter LII.

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

In actual fact, today Arabic studies are taught in Oxford.

From such calamities Christendom was delivered by the genius and fortune of one man. Charles, the illegitimate son of the elder Pepin, was content with the titles of mayor or duke of the Franks, but he deserved to become the father of a line of kings.

In 732, around October 10 (exact dates uncertain), Charles battled the Muslim armies between the cities of Tours and Poitiers and finally defeated them.

...the Arabs never resumed the conquest of Gaul, and they were soon driven beyond the Pyrenees by Charles Martel and his valiant race.

Charles Martel was the grandfather of Charlemagne.

"Answer" by Fredric Brown (1954) (complete short-short story)

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."

"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."

He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

"Yes, now there is a God."

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

Loyalty and lying

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol4-dr-johnsons-hypothesis/

For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. 

Obama and Saruman

The Two Towers, “The Voice of Saruman”:

Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard  [Obama's “racism” speech]; and if they did, they wondered for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell [...] But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.

Return of the King, “Many Partings”: 

[Gandalf said,] “I fancy [Saruman] could do some mischief still in a small mean way.” 

Return of the King, “The Scouring of the Shire”:

[Saruman said,] “ ‘One ill turn deserves another.’ It would have been a sharper lesson, if only you had given me a little more time and more Men. Still I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives. And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries.”...  

But Frodo said, “...He has lost all power, save his voice that can still daunt you and deceive you, if you let it. ...”

Sexual Identity in 1958, from comedian Shelley Berman.

We only hear his side of the call.

He phones his sister, but his very young nephew answers instead. Hilarity ensues.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=300&v=nWwUgjkOHAA 

 

Finally (at 7:52 in the video) his sister comes to the phone.

Do me a favor, tell my nephew he's a boy, will you?

He doesn't know. He doesn't know! I asked him before, he didn't know what the hell I was talking about!

What do you mean, "he's a baby"? Now is when he should know! Now, during his formative years! Don't wait till he grows up and makes an arbitrary decision!

Originally on the LP Inside Shelley Berman.

"Chivalry is the most delicate form of contempt"

Albert Léon Guérard, Bottle in the Sea (1954):

Descartes wrote in heavy but lucid nontechnical French, for the layman if not for the man in the street. He was the first of the great popularizers (vulgarisateurs in the strictly French sense): a distinguished line and particularly Gallic, in which Pascal himself, and Renan, were to be his successors. He went so far as to include among his potential audience "even women": a revolutionary step, for the elaborate gallantry of the time had not yet broken down the prejudice against feminine brains: chivalry is the most delicate form of contempt. It is odd to think of the austere logician, mathematician, and physicist as a professor for society ladies: yet he had among his disciples Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden. We might consider him as a forerunner of Trissotin in Moliere's Learned Ladies; most decidedly of Fontenelle, whose Chats on the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds are masterpieces of drawingroom wit and courtesy; of Voltaire, who wrote his Universal History for Madame du Chatelet; of Bellac in Pailleron's Le Monde ou Von s'ennuie, the professor as society pet, a composite picture of many successful academic lecturers; even of Bergson, whose courses at the College de France were thronged with the aristocracy of birth and wealth.

Cesar Chavez' fundamental problem

Like most ’60s radicals—of whatever stripe—he [Chavez] vastly overestimated the appeal of hard times and simple living; he was not the only Californian of the time to promote the idea of a Poor People’s Union, but as everyone from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the Black Panthers would discover, nobody actually wants to be poor.

The Madness of Cesar Chavez (by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, July/August 2011 Issue)

Phaedrus - "what is good" - Plato/Jowett vs. Pirsig

Phaedrus by Plato (258d) (translated by Benjamin Jowett):

Soc. The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.

Phaedr. Clearly.

Soc. And what is well and what is badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?

As paraphrased in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig:

And what is good, Phaedrus , and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Science and religion

Max Planck, Where Is Science Going?  (1932), page 214

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

1 Thessalonians 5:21 (NKJV)

Test all things; hold fast what is good.

Another Ogden Nash poem

Medusa and the Mot Juste

Once there was a Greek divinity of the sea named Ceto and she married a man named Phorcus,

And the marriage must have been pretty raucous;

Their remarks about which child took after which parent must have been full of asperities,

Because they were the parents of the Gorgons, and the Graeae, and Scylla, and the dragon that guarded the apples of the Hesperides.

Bad blood somewhere.

Today the Gorgons are our topic, and as all schoolboys including you and me know,

They were three horrid sisters named Medusa and Euryale and Stheno.

But what most schoolboys don't know because they never get beyond their Silas Marners and their Hiawathas,

The Gorgons were not only monsters, they were also highly talented authors.

Medusa began it;

She wrote Forever Granite.

But soon Stheno and Euryale were writing too, and they addressed her in daily choruses,

Saying we are three literary sisters just like the Brontës so instead of Gorgons why can't we be brontësauruses?

Well, Medusa may have been mythical but she wasn't mystical,

She was selfish and egotistical.

She saw wider vistas

Than simply being the sister of her sisters.

She replied, tossing away a petrified Argonaut on whom she had chipped a molar,

You two can be what you like, but since I am the big fromage in this family, I prefer to think of myself as the Gorgon Zola.

An Ogden Nash poem

from the collection I'm a Stranger Here Myself  (1938).

How Now, Sirrah? Oh, Anyhow 

Oh, sometimes I sit around and think, what would you do if you were up a dark alley and there was Caesar Borgia,

And he was coming torgia,

And brandished a poisoned poniard,

And looked at you like an angry fox looking at the plumpest rooster in a boniard?

Why that would certainly be an adventure,

It would be much more exciting than writing a poem or selling a debenture,

But would you be fascinated,

Or just afraid of being assassinated?

Or suppose you went out dancing some place where you generally dance a lot,

And you jostled somebody accidentally and it turned out to be Sir Lancelot,

And he drew his sword,

Would you say Have at you! or would you say Oh Lord!?

Or what if you were held up by a bandit,

And he told you to hand over your money, would you try to disarm him and turn him over to the police, or would you over just meekly hand it?

What would you do if you were in a luxurious cosmopolitan hotel surrounded by Europeans and Frenchmen,

And a beautiful woman came up to you and asked you to rescue her from some mysterious master mind and his sinister henchmen?

Would you chivalrously make her rescue your personal objective,

Or would you refer her to the house detective?

Yes, and what if you were on trial for murdering somebody whom for the sake of argument we might call Kelly or O'Connor,

And you were innocent but were bound to be convicted unless you told the truth and the truth would tarnish a lady's honor,

Would you elect to die like a gentleman or live like a poltroon,

Or put the whole thing in the hands of an arbitration committee headed by Heywood Broun?

Yes, often as through life I wander,

This is the kind of question I ponder,

And what puzzles me most is why I even bother to ponder when I already know the answer,

Because anybody who won't cross the street till the lights are green would never get far as a Musketeer or a Bengal Lancer.

Political correctness, white chauvinism

Dorothy Healey, in California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (Google Books) (archive.org), (1990, U. of Illinois Press):

However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign—not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner.

(See the end of this post for a more recent watermelon incident.)

Healey was eventually accused of "white chauvinism" herself. She gave in to the charge because she thought the whole thing was a farce and this would end her involvement. But then she was ordered to sign a written public statement, which was used against her in her later dealings with the Party.

She writes:

Because it was almost impossible to criticize a Black leader, the Party suffered and I think the Black leaders themselves suffered […] When Blacks were spared this [criticism], it wasn't doing them any favor. [sic] […] when you have the notion that only Blacks can lead or that you must uncritically accept Black leadership without any standards, then you get reverse application of what you were fighting for. […] One of the great ironies of the white chauvinism campaign is that we lost a large number of Black members because of it. They were just contemptuous of the whole thing because it had so little to do with fighting racism in the real world outside the Party's ranks.

Joseph R. Starobin was the American foreign editor of The Daily Worker. In his book, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1947 (U. of California Press, 1975), he described the campaign against "white chauvinism" as a "witch hunt" and that it was used to "settle [personal] scores". Words like "whitewash" and "black sheep" were considered racist.

Doris Lessing, Language and the Lunatic Fringe (NY Times, June 26, 1992):

Yes, I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism—as Swift, for one, tells us—but the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had its root in German academia. And now it has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world. […]   

Raising Consciousness, like Commitment, like Political Correctness, is a continuation of that old bully, the Party Line. […] 

The demand that stories must be 'about' something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.  The phrase Political Correctness was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the Political Correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

Ron and Allis Radosh's Red Star Over Hollywood (archive.org, Amazon "search inside", Google Books) recounts how Dalton Trumbo was severely criticized for "white chauvinism". One of his sins was describing a Negro boy in one of his writings as "polished and dressed in his very best" because this implied he was "clean only on special occasions"! (update: more info in this post.)

Here's another excerpt from that book (archive.org). Herbert Biberman was a screenwriter, one of the Hollywood Ten. He had gone to New York to consult leading "Negro cultural workers" there about films the Communists were planning. Biberman wrote about this to Albert Maltz and Dalton Trumbo.

Biberman found, much to his surprise, that they "were too busy and occupied to spend an instant dealing with people who were so misinformed as to still consider that they were being 'broad-minded' in consulting Negro cultural leaders as 'experts' on Negro material" that was developed by "lily-white artists for the good of the Negro people." White artists could join with them, he reported, but they would have to admit that "they needed the Negro People more than the Negro people needed them." 

With each sentence, Biberman sounded more and more agitated. What he had learned from his experience in New York, he wrote, was "soul-shaking, land-shaking, country-shaking." He learned about "the poison of chauvinism" and how it was deeply embedded even in people like themselves. After all, they were only white middle-class artist, separated from the real struggles going on in America. After talking with the New York African-American cultural leaders, Biberman decided that all their films—including those they thought were favorable to the fight for civil rights—were in reality patronizing and racist.

From October 2017, a watermelon incident similar to that reported by Dorothy Healey. Snopes: 

Detroit firefighter Robert Pattinson was fired for behavior deemed offensive and racially insensitive after bringing a watermelon to work on his first day on the job. 

Rating: TRUE.  

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/detroit-firefighter-watermelon-fired/  

https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/detroit-firefighter-fired-for-bringing-watermelon-to-station 

Black Detroit firefighters defend white recruit fired over watermelon:   

https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/black-detroit-firefighters-defend-white-recruit-fired-over-watermelon