Saturday Reads: a little readin’ and writin’ and rhythmetric

Posted: August 20, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because, morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

So, I’m still fascinated about how much history, science, and just plain reason seems to have gone out the window this political season.  It undoubtedly has something to do with the caliber of candidates that are out stumping about right now. So bad are they that John Huntsmen felt the need to tweet out to people that he wasn’t crazy!!! So, I’m gonna have a little salute today to knowledge, literacy, history, economics, science, and just  plain ol’ rationale thought.

First, some history.  On August 22, 1950, Althea Gibson became the first African American on the US Tennis Tour. Gibson paved the way for today’s Williams sisters who are tennis super stars.

Growing up in Harlem, the young Gibson was a natural athlete. She started playing tennis at the age of 14 and the very next year won her first tournament, the New York State girls’ championship, sponsored by the American Tennis Association (ATA), which was organized in 1916 by black players as an alternative to the exclusively white USLTA. After prominent doctors and tennis enthusiasts Hubert Eaton and R. Walter Johnson took Gibson under their wing, she won her first of what would be 10 straight ATA championships in 1947.

In 1949, Gibson attempted to gain entry into the USLTA’s National Grass Court Championships at Forest Hills, the precursor of the U.S. Open. When the USLTA failed to invite her to any qualifying tournaments, Alice Marble–a four-time winner at Forest Hills–wrote a letter on Gibson’s behalf to the editor of American Lawn Tennis magazine. Marble criticized the “bigotry” of her fellow USLTA members, suggesting that if Gibson posed a challenge to current tour players, “it’s only fair that they meet this challenge on the courts.” Gibson was subsequently invited to participate in a New Jersey qualifying event, where she earned a berth at Forest Hills.

On August 28, 1950, Gibson beat Barbara Knapp 6-2, 6-2 in her first USLTA tournament match. She lost a tight match in the second round to Louise Brough, three-time defending Wimbledon champion. Gibson struggled over her first several years on tour but finally won her first major victory in 1956, at the French Open in Paris. She came into her own the following year, winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Open at the relatively advanced age of 30.

Gibson repeated at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open the next year but soon decided to retire from the amateur ranks and go pro. At the time, the pro tennis league was poorly developed, and Gibson at one point went on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, playing tennis during halftime of their basketball games.

Next up, a little anthropology and biology!  The National Geographic reports on how an ancient dog skull shows how early  humans paired up with some of their first pets.

It took 33,000 years, but one Russian dog is finally having its day.

The fossilized remains of a canine found in the 1970s in southern Siberia’s Altay Mountains (see map) is the earliest well-preserved pet dog, new research shows.

Dogs—the oldest domesticated animals—are common in the fossil record up to 14,000 years ago. But specimens from before about 26,500 years ago are very rare. This is likely due to the onset of the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets are at their farthest extent during an ice age.

With such a sparse historical record, scientists have been mostly in the dark as to how and when wolves evolved into dogs, a process that could have happened in about 50 to a hundred years.

“That’s why our find is very important—we have a very lucky case,” said study co-author Yaroslav Kuzmin, a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.

In the case of the Russian specimen, the animal was just on the cusp of becoming a fully domesticated dog when its breed died out.

So, it wouldn’t be me without some economics.  Economist Greg Ip has a great post up at the WP on how Republicans’ new voodoo economics is worse than the old brand because the new brand isn’t based in economics at all. It’s a nice common sense essay on how fiscal and monetary policy work and how today’s crop of Republicans ignore about 90 years of economic theory and empirical studies

The new GOP views actually have a much longer pedigree: They are rooted in an intellectual contest that raged during the 1930s and 1940s, and had long been settled by the opposing side.

Before then, orthodox economics held that the economy was self-correcting. Just as the price of wheat or the wages of carpenters would always adjust to eliminate surpluses or shortages of either, so would wages throughout the economy adjust to eliminate temporary bouts of high unemployment.

The Great Depression shattered that orthodoxy, as high unemployment became entrenched in the United States and around the world. British economist John Maynard Keynes convincingly argued that when interest rates were zero — a condition he termed a “liquidity trap” — the economy’s self-correcting properties did not operate. The best solution, he argued, was a burst of public spending to restore demand and employment.

Ip goes on to explain how the competing view–Hayek’s Austrian school–was long discredited but has now made some kind of zombie comeback.  This is especially true with Tea Party zealots and Ron Paul fans.  What these folks talk about is not even taken seriously among any of the world’s economists.  The Hayek-style alternatives were tried in South America and led to disaster. No main stream university teaches anything remotely resembling Austrian school “economics” and no serious peer-reviewed journals accept their work because it’s empirical evidence-free.

So, I couldn’t be remiss and leave out some climate science!  Climate change has animals heading for the hills! That goes for plants too!

Regardless of what Rick Perry and the rest of Republican presidential candidate field believe (except for you, Jon Huntsman), climate change is real and it’s happening. The questions for the 98% of climate researchers who accept the consensus on man-made global warming is how fast the climate is changing, and what impact it will have on humanity and the planet.

Here’s one effect of warming scientists are already seeing: plants and animals migrating to cooler climates to escape hotter temperatures. In a study published in the August 18 Science, researchers in Britain and Taiwan found that species are moving in response to global warming up to three times faster than previously believed. Analyzing studies covering over 2,000 responses from plants and animals, the scientists found that on average, species have moved to higher elevations to escape warmer temperatures at 40 ft per decade, and moved to higher latitudes (ie, further away from the equator) at 11 miles per decade.

So, here’s a real shocker and it’s from a DKos diary.   Today’s lesson in journalism shows us that we have a very uniformed commenteriat.  Evidently Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty had never heard of dominionisim until just recently.  That’s the extreme christian belief that’s overtaking a lot of republican circles these days.  Michelle Bachmann oozes it out of every pore.  We’ve discussed it here considerably and Bostonboomer and I have written several posts on it.

You could probably hear my dropping jaw hitting the floor when I heard Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer say they had never heard of dominionism until they read Michelle Goldberg’s article on The Daily Beast.  They apparently had never heard of Christian Reconstructionism or the New Apostolic Reformation either.  Goldberg’s article on Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann’s relationship to all of this was certainly well done. But it is amazing that no other journalist of any prominence had looked into it before Goldberg’s revelations.  There are many, and ever-more prominent pols with similar ties.  And the failure of our national media and political culture to come to grips with this has been astounding.  At least to me.  As someone who has written about the Religious Right in its various dimensions for about 30 years, I’ve watched with horror as too many (but not all) mainstream media missed or misreported the stories of one of the most significant political movements of our time.

Blitzer and Cafferty et al have had plenty of opportunities to learn about dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism.  They could have read Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times best-selling book Kingdom Coming:  The Rise of Christian Nationalism, in 2006.  They could have read my 1997 book, Eternal Hostility:  The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, or Sara Diamond’s 1989 classic, Spiritual Warfare:  The Politics of the Christian Right. — to name but a few that deal specifically with dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism. We were all widely in the media, including national broadcasts talking about this stuff.  They could also read material from such well established and well known organizations that study and counter the American right, as Americans United for Separation of Church & State and People for the American Way, and Political Research Associates. (PRA published my studyof Christian Reconstructionism in 1994.)  Religion Dispatches reports on these things all the time as well.  They have been discussed in wider context in books by such scholarly best selling authors as Gary Wills, Harvey Cox, Jeff Sharlet and Kevin Phillips, to also name but a few, and in major articles in magazines as diverse as Reason and Mother Jones.  (I even discuss Christian Reconstructionism on camera in the 2007 Hollywood film documentary on the politics of abortion, Lake of Fire. Watch it for free, here.)

You really cannot have been awake in American public life for the past few decades and not have encountered dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism.  Blitzer and Cafferty are far from alone in snoozing comfortably through this part of our national life. They are just more startlingly honest that this is no dream.

Now for a little SciFi lit.  What if E.T. thinks we’re evil?

A study that reviews a host of sci-fi scenarios for contact with extraterrestrials stirred up such a ruckus today that NASA had to step in and distance itself from the research. The controversy focuses on the idea that E.T. could well decide that we’re a threat to interstellar order, and therefore we have to be stopped before we spread.

The report itself, published in the journal Acta Astronautica, covers ground that’s familiar to dedicated fans of E.T. lore. For example, the premise of the 1951 sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is that universalist-minded aliens see our civilization as so rooted in violence that it’s better to snuff us out than let us ruin the neighborhood. (The 2008 remake, starring Keanu Reeves, recycled that idea with an environmental theme.)

Then there’s the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” scenario, in which Earth is destroyed merely to make way for a new stretch of intergalactic infrastructure.

“At the heart of these scenarios is the possibility that intrinsic value may be more efficiently produced in our absence,” the researchers write.

The most familiar sci-fi scenario is the one in which the aliens are as selfish and territorial as we are, and want to wipe us out or enslave us and take our stuff. Think “War of the Worlds” or “Independence Day.” In such cases, the researchers note that there’s the potential for big payoffs … if we prevail.

Last up is our music lesson and ABCs rolled into one with this great song from kidhood by the Jackson five!  Have a great Saturday and be sure to share what’s on your blogging and reading list today!!!

Some times what looks like a Conspiracy is a Conspiracy …

Posted: April 23, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, John Birch Society in Charge, religion, religious extremists | Tags: , , | 11 Comments

A lot of discussions here over the last three months–as well as blog posts–have been centered around what seems to be a concerted effort in Congress and Statehouses around the country to restrict women’s right to abortion, attack collective bargaining rights, and disable environmental protection laws and agencies.  This has come behind a similar set of laws aimed at restricting the rights of the GLBT community, immigrants,  and religious minorities.  A flurry of laws supposedly demonstrating state and federal interest in restricting constitutional rights all look and sound mighty familiar.

Bostonboomer and I have been trying to figure out which set of right wing “institutes” have been manufacturing these attacks, laws, and lies. We figured it was an unholy reliance of christian religious extremists and corporate interests like the Koch Brothers.  Neither of us had really dug into it yet, however.    Thankfully, People for the American Way has saved us some research in one of these areas. There’s an excellent internet monograph up called ‘The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection. You can read it online or as a down-loadable and printable pdf .

 One of the things that I find most confusing is why the religious right would want to harm “god’s creation”?  I’d understood that some fundamental christians had actually taken up the call to protect the earth.  However, that old testament verse that gets interpreted as “you’re on top of the world, it’s a gift to you, now go use it like you see fit” still seems to get the shaking and the rolling going among those whose erections depend on feeling godlike and wealthy.  PFAW says it’s basically “dominion theology”.  So, what is this toxic brand of superstition?

In the last decade, as evangelical Christian leaders increasingly became involved in conservation, “creation care” and taking action against global climate change, the alarms went up in corporate America  that many traditional members of the conservative coalition were becoming advocates  for environmental protection. To counter the rise of the faith-based environmentalist Evangelical Climate Initiative, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance emerged. The ISA, propped up by business interests including  Exxon Mobil, has peddled misleading and false claims to make the case that climate change is a myth. In 2007, the ISA was renamed the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and became more belligerent and zealous in its anti-environmental activities.

The Cornwall Alliance is led by E. Calvin Beisner, who believes that since God granted humans “dominion” over the earth, humans have a right to exploit all natural resources. As Randall Balmer writes in Thy Kingdom Come, Beisner “asserts that God has placed all of nature at the disposal of humanity.” Balmer quotes Beisner’s own summary of his dominion theology: “All of our acquisitive activities should be undertaken with the purpose of extending godly rule, or dominion.” As Balmer notes, “the combination of dominion theology from the Religious Right and the wise use ideology of corporate and business interests has created a powerful coalition to oppose environmental protection.”

According to a report by Think Progress, the Cornwall Alliance is a front group for the shadowy James Partnership. Both the James Partnership and the Cornwall Alliance are closely linked to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), an anti-environmental group that is “funded by at least $542,000 from ExxonMobil, $60,500 from Chevron, and $1,280,000 from Scaife family foundations, which are rooted in wealth from Gulf Oil and steel interests.” CFACT is also part of a climate change denialist network funded by the ExxonMobil-financed Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Beisner is a CFACT board member and an “adjunct fellow” of the Acton Institute, which is primarily funded by groups like ExxonMobil, the Scaife foundations and the Koch brothers. Beisner is also an adviser to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which is financed by the oil-backed Earthart Foundation, the Koch brothers, and ExxonMobil.

In fact, Beisner is not a scientist and has no scientific credentials. Despite claiming to be an authority on energy and environmental issues, he received his Ph.D. in Scottish History.

In 2009, Beisner’s Cornwall Alliance cosponsored a climate change denial conference led by the Heartland Institute, a pro-corporate group funded by Exxon Mobil, the Koch Family Foundations, and the Scaife foundations. Other organizations funded by energy corporations that cosponsored the conference include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, and Americans for Prosperity.

The Cornwall Alliance has been enormously successful in recruiting Religious Right leaders to promote its anti-environmental cause. In 1999, the group started recruiting prominent Religious Right figures to sign the “Cornwall Declaration,” a document that attacks environmentalists, saying they “deify nature or oppose human dominion over creation” and promote “erroneous theological and anthropological positions.” Among its signatories were Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Chuck Colson of the Colson Center, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America, Daniel Lapin of Towards Tradition, and Frank Pavone of Priests for Life. The president of CFACT called himself “a driving force” behind the declaration.

You can see it’s the same old interlocking directorates of hate and intolerance.  They even have drafted a new “evangelical declaration of global warming that says “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming” and maintains that “reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures.”   Yes, they believe in religous hokum pokum above the overwhelming evidence for evolution and climate change.  Science holds no sway compared to something contrived by the Nicene Council to Romanize the known world in the 3rd century which was basically a conglomerate of all the superstitions of the day.  Yes, Constantine locked the priests up of every local cult and told them they could not come out until they had invented a “Roman” religion and that’s exactly what they did.  We’re still suffering from that grand kidnapping to this day.  They’re working hard on painting conservation and environmental protection as “anti-Christian” too.

In 2007, Jerry Falwell warned that environmental action was “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” away from evangelism and religious faith, and a year later James Dobson and Gary Bauer slammed Rev. Richard Cizik, a principal evangelical supporter of environmental protection, and his allies for “using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time.”

The Cornwall Alliance has coordinated with Religious Right leaders to accuse Christians who believe in environmental protection not only of attempting to divide the faith community, but of promoting a dangerous anti-religious and anti-Christian agenda. The group calls the environmentalist movement “The Green Dragon” and earlier this year produced a star-studded documentary to help slay it.

The Cornwall Alliance’s documentary, “Resisting the Green Dragon,”  includes appearances by a who’s who of Religious Right leaders: Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association; Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America; David Barton of WallBuilders; Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association and Patrick Henry College; radio show host Janet Parshall; and anti-gay activist Bishop Harry Jackson.

In heartfelt interviews for the documentary, these activists claim that the environmental movement (The Green Dragon) is promoting an anti-religious agenda:  Parshall derides the Green Dragon’s “lust for political power” and “spiritual deception,” and calls the environmental movement “deadly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ”; Fischer labels it a “threat to the Christian faith”; Perkins claims that environmentalists are “pointing people away from God and into humanism” and support “an unbiblical view”;  Beisner says “the green movement threatens liberty”; and Farris warns that environmentalists are “scaring little children to achieve [their] political ends.” Barton adds a summary of the dominion theology: “Mankind is the apex of creation; He placed it over the planet, over the environment.”

Anyway, I’m not going to print out the entire 8 pages of the pdf here although I will beg you to to read it.  Like I said, it’s the cast of usual cretins who’ve found a new cause célèbre and source of the kind of green they worship.  Why can’t we just declare all these folks public enemies or terrorists or something worse and stuff them altogether with bibles in orange jumpsuits at Guantanamo?  Oh, and just think, all those oil and gas companies get to deduct all those contributions to these nutty groups from their revenues.  It’s one of the reasons that they don’t pay much in taxes.  Think about that next time you fill up at anything affiliated with Exxon Mobil or better  yet, go fill up some place else.

So many of them, so few lions …