Wednesday Reads: Anything but real news…
Posted: August 12, 2015 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: Climate change, Egypt, Hillary Clinton, rape, Republicans 37 Comments
Hey, I just can’t bring myself to post anything serious and depressing so here are a few links to other interesting news.
Images in the post are from the Dolce&Gabbana magazine Swide: Saint of the day
Swide’s Saint of the Day Calendar. Swide has commissioned illustrator Lucio Palmieri and Daniel Fields to illustrate and tell the story of each saint of the calendar for 2014.
Alright, big news out of Egypt, as far as archaeology is concerned. Queen Nefertiti: Has the tomb of Tutankhamun’s mother been found hiding in plain sight? via The Independent
Queen Nefertiti has fascinated and perplexed ancient Egyptian scholars in equal measure.
The legendary beauty ruled alongside Pharaoh Akhenaten in 14BC. During her reign she accrued status as an icon of power and elegance.
Despite her prominence in ancient Egyptian history, her resting place has remained a mystery – but now a new theory by a leading historian claims to have finally found the Queen’s burial place.
A diagram of Nefertiti’s possible resting place. Two secret doorways may exist coming from the walls of the main chamber.
Nicholas Reeves, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, has made bold new claims that he believes she has been laid to rest in Tutankhamun’s burial chamber. The pharaoh’s tomb was found fully intact and untouched by explorer Howard Carter in 1922.
More at that link, including an image of a young lady mummy who may be Nefertiti.
And if you take a look here you can read more on the ghost doors: Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb may contain hidden passages leading to Queen Nefertiti’s burial place: Claim
Ghosts in the walls
Dr Reeves has been scouring ultra high-resolution scans of the famous tomb, discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, for clues to its origins and constructions.
In particular, he’s been looking at the overlooked details in the painted walls of Tutankhamun’s inner sanctum, the burial chamber which contains his sarcophagus.
He’s found depressions and edges in the plasterwork which indicates the wall structure behind.
Among this is what he describes as two lintelled, walled-off passages which have long since been painted over with the scenes depicting Tutankhamun’s life and last rites.
“The implications are extraordinary: for, if digital appearance translates into physical reality, it seems we are now faced not merely with the prospect of a new, Tutankhamun-era storeroom to the west; to the north appears to be signalled a continuation of tomb … and within these uncharted depths an earlier royal interment – that of Nefertiti herself, celebrated consort, co-regent, and eventual successor of pharaoh Akhenaten,” Reeves writes.
Go and see the images at that link. It is very cool.
The original paper can be found here: The Burial of Nefertiti?
Hey, what do you know…there’s some tomb/burial news in our own country that is making headlines as well: The Roanoke Island Colony: Lost, and Found? – The New York Times
Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail.
A secluded cove off Salmon Creek near the dig site in North Carolina where archaeologists have discovered several pieces of Border ware and other materials that may suggest an early English settlement in the area. CreditTravis Dove for The New York Times
They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a location that may shed light on an enigma at the heart of America’s founding: the fate of the “lost colonists” who vanished from a sandy outpost on Roanoke Island, about 60 miles east, in the late 16th century.
Next up, a bit of history…yet still dealing with death, well…near death:
The last kamikaze: two Japanese pilots tell how they cheated death | World news | The Guardian
Hisao Horiyama first learned how he was due to die from a simple slip of white paper. On it were written three options: to volunteer willingly, to simply volunteer, or to say no.
With that one act of destruction, he would end his life and the lives of many others, in the name of his emperor as a member of an elite, and supposedly invincible, group of young men whose sacrifice would deliver victory to Japan: the kamikaze.
VE Day: The last British Dambuster – BBC News
…the last British survivor of the famous Dambusters raid explains what it was like to take part.
“I feel privileged and honoured to have taken part,” says George “Johnny” Johnson. “It’s what we were there for. We were determined to do our bit.”
Johnson, now aged 93, is the last British survivor of the original Dambusters, the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron, who conducted a night of raids on German dams in 1943 in an effort to disable Hitler’s industrial heartland.
Their exploits were legendary even before being made into a film, The Dam Busters, released in 1955. A scene showing back-spinning cylindrical bombs, designed by engineer Barnes Wallis, bouncing along the water to avoid protective nets before sinking and breaching the dams with their explosive power, is one of the most famous in British film history. The Dam Busters March is still played at military events.
But Johnson isn’t entirely happy with the film’s depiction of the operation,codenamed “Chastise”, on that night of 16-17 May. “The thing that was disappointing from our point of view was that the raid carried out by my crew, on the Sorpe dam, wasn’t mentioned,” he says.
If you ever get to see Dam Busters on TCM, it is a riot….The Dam Busters (1955) – Overview – TCM.com
Video clips to the film can be seen here: Videos for The Dam Busters
Moving on to movies…women in film: 15 Women of Cinema History You Should Know | Mental Floss
You know Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, and Hitchcock. But did you know that the success of each of these iconic directors depended on a lesser-known woman behind the scenes? Dig into the hidden history of film and discover the women who shaped cinema into what it is today.
1. MARGARET BOOTH // THE FIRST FILM EDITOR
stayforthecredits // TumblrBecause of the hands-on nature of film editing, early Hollywood considered it women’s work, like sewing. “Cutters” were often working-class women willing to take low pay to be a part of filmmaking. But despite the sexism surrounding them, this position allowed these female film lovers a unique place to make critical choices about a film’s final cut. Booth was not only one of the earliest pioneers of the craft, but also the one for whom the term “film editor” was coined.
Right out of high school in 1915, the Los Angeles native got a $10 a week job working underBirth of a Nation director D.W. Griffith as a patcher, eventually making her way up to negative cutter. By the time the controversial filmmaker moved to the East Coast, Booth was in complete charge of print production, managing everything from inspection to cutting to shipping the prints out. Booth would then get a job at the newly formed MGM, where her expertise was quickly recognized by the studio’s head of production, Irving Thalberg. Together the pair would watch and discuss dailies, and Booth’s insightful contributions inspired Thalberg to call her a “film editor,” a move that would forever leave the common term “cutter” behind.
She went on to cut a long list of films, including 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty, which earned her only Oscar nomination. In 1978, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awarded Booth an honorary Oscar for “her exceptional contribution to the art of film editing in the motion picture industry.”
See the other 14 women editors at the link.
Now, following the next connection…comes to our article on young women: Study finds unexpected biases against teen girls’ leadership: Not only many teen boys but many teen girls, some parents appear to have biases against teen girls as leaders, research finds — ScienceDaily
Making Caring Common (MCC), a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, today released new research that suggests that many teen boys and teen girls–and some of their parents–have biases against teen girls as leaders. These biases could be powerful barriers to leadership for a generation of teen girls with historically high levels of education who are key to closing our nation’s gender gap in leadership. The report also suggests that much can be done to prevent and reduce gender biases in children.
Titled “Leaning Out: Teen Girls and Gender Biases,” the research report assesses the explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) biases of teen girls, teen boys, and parents with regard to gender and leadership. Findings suggest that many teen boys and teen girls have biases against female leaders in powerful professions such as politics, that many teen girls have biases against other teen girls as leaders, and that many teens perceive their peers as biased against female leaders. Further, the research suggests that some mothers have implicit biases against teen girls as leaders.
“Our study points to insidious bias against girls as leaders that comes from many sources” said Richard Weissbourd, a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of Making Caring Common. “Bias can be a powerful–and invisible–barrier to teen girls’ leadership. Yet parents and teachers can do a great deal to stem these biases and help children manage them.”
Hilary is in the news, and it seems like bias against teen girls as leaders stay with the girls when they grow up.
Hillary Clinton To Give Justice Department Entire Private Email Server
New poll puts Bernie Sanders ahead of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire | US news | The Guardian
I will go ahead and put some newsy links here:
UN Peacekeepers Accused of Rape, Killing | Al Jazeera America
Texas Cop Fired in Killing of Christian Taylor — NYMag
Woman found dead in jail fears for her life in video – NY Daily News
Let’s update you on the toxic spill: Toxic spill from Colorado mine creeps through US southwest (Update)
Environmental scientists tested a key US river Tuesday for signs of a toxic waste spill from a botched Colorado mine clean-up that prompted a state of emergency in the desert Southwest.
What started as a three-million-gallon (11.4 million liter) orange-hued plume last Wednesday in the swift-moving Animas River dissolved from view as it made its way down the slower San Juan River in New Mexico.
No longer easily visible, it was nevertheless flowing on into Utah and the Lake Powell reservoir in the direction of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon, leaving behind questions as to its long-term impact.
“It’s so diluted, you can’t really see it,” Donna Spangler, a spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, told AFP by telephone.
Intensive water testing is nevertheless underway for signs of such cancer-causing toxins as lead and arsenic, with results expected in a matter of days.
Continue with environmental issues: This video about the aging pipeline below the Great Lakes should be this summer’s top horror flick | Grist
You know that feeling you get when you’re watching a scary movie, and something bad is about to happen? The music gets weird, the action starts to slow down, someone says something meaningful like “I’ll always be there for you.” That’s the feeling you might get watching this video from Motherboardabout an aging oil pipeline lying at the bottom of the Great Lakes.
Here’s the gist: A company called Enbridge (appropriately evil-sounding) owns a 62-year-old pipeline running between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan along the Straits of Mackinac. The pipeline was originally built to last 50 years and is in questionable shape, but don’t worry — Enbridge says they have everything under control. Sure, the company had 800 spills between 1999 and 2010, according to Motherboard, and yes, one of those spills was the worst inland spill in U.S.
history, causing more than 800,000 gallons of oil to spew into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. But no matter — there’s a very nice Enbridge employee in the video who says that the company doesn’t want to have any more spills.
More than 5,000 earthquakes hit northwest Nevada
Seismologists studying a year-long swarm of thousands of mostly minor earthquakes in northwest Nevada say they could be the precursor for a “big one,” although speculation that they’re related to a series of extinct volcanoes can’t be ruled out.
The University of Nevada’s Reno Nevada Seismological Laboratory announced Tuesday that there have been 5,610 earthquakes in a swarm that started in July 2014 in the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge near the Oregon border.
More than 200 have registered at a magnitude of 3 or greater, which is enough to be felt by ranchers and residents nearby. The largest one hit on Nov. 6 with a magnitude of 4.7, although there’s also been a recent flare-up since mid-July.
“It’s kind of unusual that it has lasted so long,” said Ken Smith, a seismologist.
It’s been a topic of discussion whether or not those quakes stem from the extinct volcanos in the Sheldon refuge collectively known as the High Rock Caldera, which is at least 15 million years old.
That hasn’t been conclusively ruled out yet, but Smith said there’s no direct evidence of volcanic activity driving the earthquakes. To rule it out would require more seismic and geodetic measurements.
Such a repetition of small earthquakes is often associated with volcanic activity, but the latest ones point to a fairly typical tectonic sequence that is characteristic of the western Great Basin region.
Extinct volcanoes, 15 million years old, the next couple of links are about history, but not that far back in time.
History News Network | Ancient Vikings Settled Greenland for the Ivory
After Erik the Red killed his enemies in Iceland, he found himself banished and sailing westward. According to a Real Estate Laguna Hills agency, “Around 985 CE, Erik settled his family on an unexplored island, and, in what is widely regarded as the first act of real estate branding, named the place ‘Greenland,’ hoping to attract other Vikings with the implicit promise of rich farmland.” But as archaeologists are now learning, Erik may have been better off naming the place “Walrusland.”
Scholars have long thought that Erik’s branding deception worked, and that Vikings flocked to Greenland to set up farms—even though the growing season is short and raising livestock difficult. Archaeologist Thomas McGovern and colleagues, however, are testing a new idea: that Vikings settled Greenland to provide European markets with luxury trade goods such as furs, eiderdown, hides, and walrus tusk ivory.
The 12th century minstrel Bertran de Born told in a war hymn of what gave him great pleasure: ‘I tell you, that neither eating, drinking, nor sleep has as much savour for me as when I hear the cry “Forwards!” from both sides, and horses without riders shying and whinnying, and the cry “Help! Help!”, and to see the small and the great fall to the grass at the ditches and the dead pierced by the wood of the lances decked with banners.’ To Norbert Elias this was a clear example of the relationship between pleasure and killing in medieval society. Knights often took great pleasure in killing and torturing people, something that according to Elias was a socially permitted pleasure caused by a lack of social control.
It was, however, these warriors that pope Urban II wanted to recruit to his new undertaking; the new kind of armed pilgrimage that was later to be known as the First Crusade.
This paper, however, will not focus on the relationship between the emotion of pleasure and killing on crusade from the perspective of the European knightly class, but rather from the perspective of crusaders from the northernmost periphery of Christendom, the kingdom of Norway. The men of the north are often depicted in the Norse sagas as taking great pleasure in killing, even doing it for no good reason; as famously illustrated in the comment of Þórgeirr Hávarsson, who struck the head of a shepherd for no other reason than that “he was well placed to receive a blow.” How then did these men behave on crusade?
Alright, the last few links have no connections whatsoever to the other links above.
Link between intestinal bacteria, depression found — ScienceDaily
Reverse Graffiti Creates Murals By Cleaning | Mental Floss
This is some cool artwork, check it out:
And your last story of the day: New Study Finds Earth’s Core Will Be Most Habitable Part Of Planet By 2060 – The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
According to a study published Wednesday by geologists at Georgetown University, the earth’s solid inner core will be the most livable part of the planet by the year 2060. “Provided that current trends continue as anticipated, within half a century the most favorable conditions for supporting human life will be located roughly 3,200 miles below the earth’s surface, atop its superheated central
sphere of iron and nickel,” said study co-author Lance Zelowski, who predicted that by mid-century, the inner core’s year-round temperature of 9,700 degrees Fahrenheit and its pressure of 3.5 million atmospheres would make it the most attractive location on the planet in which to live, work, and raise a family. “In order to ensure future generations grow up and reside in the best environment available, people will need to make preparations in the coming years to move their families to this highly compressed metallic ball surrounded by swirling liquid metal.” Zelowski acknowledged that, due to its limited surface area, only the wealthiest would likely be able to purchase property on the inner core, leaving most of the world’s population to make do in magma chambers directly beneath earth’s crust.
This is a long ass post for a Wednesday. Have a good day…share what your thinking and reading about today.
Sunday Reads: Pigs and Ladies
Posted: June 28, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections | Tags: abortion, Barack Obama, Bobby Jindal, Confederate flag, Gay Marriage, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Racism, Republicans, Rick Santorum, SCOTUS 18 Comments
Pictures today by artist illustrator: Mela Koehler (1885–1960)
Good Afternoon
I hope that everyone is enjoying the last couple of days, the decision is not the final say in the matter of GLBT issues, but it is a damn big deal….There are a few states holding out, and refusing to grant licenses and perform marriages to same sex couples.
The hate filled rhetoric is strong in some areas, like here in Banjoville. Add to this tension, the anger over taking away these right-wing christian racist asshole flags of confederate heritage, with a dose of Obamacare is a-go from last week, and you got yourself a power keg waiting to explode. It is frightening, the hate I am seeing. These people mean business.
I think things are going to get worse, did you see this? Who’s burning black churches? Arsonists hit at least 3 Southern congregations in the last 7 days
ur black churches burned overnight this week, and at least three have been attributed to arson.
Last week’s shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel AME was perhaps the deadliest attackon a black church since the 1963 church bombing by the Klan in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four children. Since then, another specter from America’s violent racist history is again rearing its head – setting black churches ablaze.
At least three have been intentionally set on fire in recent days, according to a surveyof news reports compiled by the Daily Kos.
On Tuesday, God’s Power Church of Christ in Georgia was intentionally set on fire, authorities told ABC News. Electronics and other equipment were also stolen in early morning fire. Authorities told reporters there is “no evidence” of a hate crime.
On Wednesday, Briar Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina burned in the middle of the night, causing $250,000 in damage, NBC News reports. Authorities are investigating whether the blaze was a hate crime. It took 75 firefighters to bring it under control.
On Friday, Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in South Carolina, was virtually destroyed in an overnight blaze, the Aiken Standard reports. While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, the FBI has been called in.
Another blaze on Friday morning in Florida at predominantly-black Greater Miracle Apostolic Holiness Church caused $700,000 in damage. The fire is under investigation but fire officials believe it to be accidental, the Tallahassee Democrat reports.
Burning black churches has historical significance that harkens back to the civil rights era, according to the Atlanta Black Star.
“From slavery and the days of Jim Crow through the civil rights movement and beyond, white supremacists have targeted the Black church because of its importance as a pillar of the Black community, the center for leadership and institution building, education, social and political development and organizing to fight oppression,” David Love writes.
The Ku Klux Klan has ramped up recruiting activity in the days since the Charleston shooting. Residents in California, Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia woke last weekend to find bags in their lawns filled with candy and Klan flyers seeking new members.
Oh and they will find plenty of eager members.
White supremacist calls Charleston ‘a preview of coming attractions’ | US news | The Guardian
One of the shadowy figures who appears to have influenced alleged Charleston killer Dylann Roof is Harold Covington, the founder of a white separatist movement and, within supremacist circles, an influential sci-fi author. Covington, the latest in a long line of rightwing sci-fi writers, has been linked to racist crimes in the past and this week called the massacre “a preview of coming attractions”.
The racist manifesto and photos apparently posted by Roof makes mention of the Northwest Front, created by Covington, a former member of the American Nazi party who traveled to South Africa and Rhodesia in order to agitate for white power. In the accompanying photos, Roof wore patches with Rhodesian and apartheid-era South African flags on them.
Covington, if you believe his website, runs a growing enclave of white supremacists near Seattle called the Northwest Front. The non-profit group is reflected in a series of sci-fi novels, authored by Covington, about a dystopian future in which a white nation is the only answer to US economic and racial woes.
Pat Hines: Booth Waited Too Long to Kill Lincoln | Mediaite
Days after appearing on CNN and calling efforts to remove the Confederate battle flag from state grounds an act of “cultural genocide,” League of the South state chairman Pat Hines went on Alan Colmes‘ Fox News radio program and celebrated the 150-year-old assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
Transcript of the exchange below, via:
COLMES: Now the League Of The South in April had an event celebrating the assassination of President Lincoln.
HINES: That’s right.
COLMES: You support that?
HINES: Yes I do.
COLMES: Why?
HINES: He was the most murderous, treasonous President that ever existed.
COLMES: So you honor the actions of John Wilkes Booth?
HINES: John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate agent, who sadly, he didn’t fulfill his mission for almost 2 1/2 years. But he was assigned to kill Lincoln. And it’s too bad that he took as long as he did to do it.
COLMES: You’re upset that it took John Wilkes Booth as long as it did to kill Abraham Lincoln?
HINES: Yes.
COLMES: Why would you favor the assassination of an American President?
HINES: Well he was an United States President. Well, he was Commander-in-Chief, which makes him a legitimate target immediately.
COLMES: Is any Commander-in-Chief a legitimate target?
HINES: Well they are.
Why don’t these people get called out for what they are? At least paypal stopped the donations to Council of Conservative Citizens…
PayPal appears to suspend donations to group in ‘Dylann Roof manifesto’ | US news | The Guardian
But you know that this Council of Conservative Citizens has donated thousands to the campaigns of GOP politicians…‘Supremacist’ Earl Holt III and his donations to Republicans – The Washington Post
News came Monday that Holt had donated about $65,000 over the years to Republican campaign funds. He gave about $25,000 to Republican candidates in 2012 including former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) and Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.).
These people are giving the money away to charity, etc.:
Four presidential hopefuls are among 23 Republicans who have given up more than $36,000 in campaign contributions from the leader of a white nationalist group said to have influenced the Charleston church shooting suspect Dylann Roof.
Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum led a GOP group spanning Congress and statehouses who said they would donate to charity or return money from Earl Holt, following the publication of a Guardian article on Sunday.
Many other Republicans who took money from Holt declined to comment on the contributions. Josh Mandel, Ohio’s state treasurer, said he would not return $1,500 Holt gave to his failed 2012 US Senate campaign, as it had been spent. Mandel’s campaign still has almost $50,000 in the bank.
Holt, the president of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), has contributed more than $74,000 to Republican candidates and committees in recent years, according to public filings, while making dozens of racist statements online.
…the CCC has become the largest white-supremacist group in the nation, according to some observers. Members have donated thousands of dollars to politicians; some national politicians have joined, and dozens have spoken to CCC meetings, often regretting it later. On Monday, Republicans around the country hastened to give back cash they’d received from the CCC’s president, Earl Holt III. Yet despite its size, influence, and unabashed espousal of white separatism, the CCC seems to often go unnoticed, surfacing mostly at times of high racial tension.
[…]
The CCC is now, according to the SPLC, the nation’s largest white nationalist group and at its peak boasted 15,000 members. Though the CCC is sometimes described as “thinly veiled” white supremacists or the like, that’s misleading—it makes little secret of its agenda. (Nonetheless, Ann Coulter has previously stepped forward to defend the group from the white-supremacy attack.) In a statement of principles, the group says: We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people …. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.
New members also receive a pamphlet about Martin Luther King Day co-written by the late racist Senator Jesse Helms. The Anti-Defamation League collects other examples of ties to hate groups and extremists.
The group also maintains ties overseas; in 1998, according to the white supremacist site American Renaissance, a delegation from the group “had the pleasure of presenting Jean-Marie Le Pen with a Confederate flag that had flown over the South Carolina state capitol.” Le Pen founded France’s far-right National Front, but was recently suspended from the party by its current leader—his daughter—for remarks casting doubt on the Holocaust.
The CCC also prominently protested in 2000 when South Carolina lawmakers moved the Confederate battle flag from atop the statehouse—where it had flown since 1961—to a site elsewhere on the capitol grounds in Columbia.
Anyway…Here are some links in dump format.After Confederate flags start coming down, hundreds rally to keep the hate symbol flying
GOP’s gay marriage, Confederate Flag views may hurt party – NY Daily News
Alabama Wal-Mart gets bomb threat over Confederate flag sales | AL.com
Shots Fired at San Francisco Pride Parade [Update]
‘Gone with the Wind’ should go the way of the Confederate flag | New York Post
13 of the South’s Most Racist Monuments | Mother Jones
Confederate battle flag: What it is and what it isn’t – CNN.com
Time to lay these myths about the Deep South to rest – Voices – The Independent
The Power and Sadness of a Black President’s Call for Grace
History News Network | The Shameful History of the Mistreatment of LGBT Teachers
How Is Jim Hoft Making His Readers Stupider And More Hate-Filled Now? | Crooks and Liars
Graham: Keeping Marriage Amendment In Party Platform Will Hurt GOP In 2016 | Crooks and Liars
Clarence Thomas: Cruelty Incarnate? | Lev Raphael
Straddling Old and New, a South Where ‘a Flag Is Not Worth a Job’ – NYTimes.com
Open Thread – Even In Texas. | Crooks and Liars
And more cartoons for you.
Here’s how cartoonists celebrated the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision
Now for some other news links:
This is far disturbing to see:
WATCH: Mob of Philly cops assault man holding crying baby for not paying his $2.25 transit fare
Transit officers working for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority are under investigation after several of them were recorded by a cell phone pushing and shoving an African American man holding onto a baby for reportedly not paying his $2.25 fare.
According to WPVI, SEPTA officials say they are reviewing their policies and procedures after the video — recorded Thursday night — went viral, calling attention to the officer’s actions.
In the video, three transit police can be seen talking to the man as he stays seated in the car holding a very small child. After another officer arrives and handcuffs the man, he is escorted off the rail car and then can be seen being shoved against the wall with the baby still in his arms.
As bystanders attempt to intervene, more than a dozen officers descend upon the platform pushing the crowd back as one man yells , “He still has his daughter in his hands!” as the baby can be heard crying in the background.
More officers arrive forming a cordon around the cops wrestling with the man and forcing bystanders onto the train and away from the struggle.
Addicting Info – Detroit Cops’ Chase Kills Two Children, They Keep Going And Injure Three More
Detroit police chasing a fleeing car decided it would be appropriate to continue the chase into a residential neighborhood. Due to their poor decision-making and inability to let a minor offense go, two small children died and three more were seriously injured.
On June 24, police were chasing what eyewitnesses believed to be a red Charger when they “tapped” the car on the rear bumper. That caused the red car to lose control, hitting and instantly killing Makiah Jackson, 3, and her six-year-old brother, Michaelangelo Jackson. Witness Alisha Jackson told the Voice Of Detroit:
“[The police] were right on their rear, the police car bumped their tail a little bit, and the car flew up in the air. There was no need for the police to be that close. I yelled ‘watch out!’ but it was too late. When the car hit them, both of them just looked at me. They screamed. It just keeps re-playing in my head. I ran down there, I yelled out their names, but they were gone. Makiah’s eyes were wide open, they died on impact.”
Police could have — SHOULD have — stopped right then. But even after this horrific scene, the chase continued onto another residential street. There, the red car crashed into a driveway, hitting three children. Darius Andrews, Jr., 3, Isaiah Williams, 5, and Zyaire Gardner, 7, were critically injured and a 22-year-old woman was also injured.
The car police were chasing was driven by a man who is on parole but neglected to report to his Parole Officer. Now, that’s certainly against the law and Lorenzo Harris should be held accountable. But to chase him into a residential neighborhood, where children are playing and families are out in their yards, is so irresponsible as to beggar belief. What the hell were they thinking? And to then continue to chase the car after two children were run down? Outrageous!
Detroit Police Chief James Craig must know that this is inexcusable because he is scrambling. He’s changed his story several times. First he said that the police in the car had suspended the chase after they “lost sight of the car.” Witnesses blew a hole in that lie. Then he said that a supervisor had ordered the chase to end. There is nothing documented to prove this. Then he said that Harris had a gun. Then he said he didn’t. The cops had “made eye contact” with Harris and a passenger and we all know that if a black man makes eye contact with a cop, that’s all she wrote. That cops will have compliance no matter what. Even if it kills small children.
What the hell….
More news stories:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s glaring double standard – Salon.com
Obama’s new pact provides legal rights to corporations that it does not extend to unions and public interest groups
People thinking that the SCOTUS ruling will change the status of medicaid expansion…think again.
Georgia’s Obamacare stalemate deepens | www.myajc.com
Now that President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law has twice been upheld by the nation’s highest court, Georgia’s state and federal leaders are coming to the begrudging recognition that the legislation won’t be changed any time soon.
But the well-dug trenches remain unmoved: Most Democrats insist on a Medicaid expansion in the state as the only path forward. Most Republicans are determined to repeal the law.
Meanwhile, a small cadre of lawmakers hope that Georgia’s involvement in a controversial waiver program could provide a new, and less contentious, path forward to bring in more federal funding for health care.
In the wake of Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling to maintain health insurance tax credits in states such as Georgia that did not create their own exchanges, the political and policy status quo remained unmoved.
Gov. Nathan Deal and House Speaker David Ralston both signaled they don’t intend to step into what they see as a federal matter, and they called on Congress to give states more flexibility to use federal funding.
On the issue of Reproductive Rights:
What the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling means for reproductive rights – Salon.com
There’s a little Easter egg in Friday’s marriage equality ruling that could have major repercussions for reproductive rights activists — if and when the Supreme Court takes up the issue of abortion again.
In his opinion for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy references the interplay of “personal choice” as it relates to same-sex marriage. But, in doing so, he also acknowledges the way individual autonomy relates to other life decisions, such as the right to use contraception or have a baby:
A first premise of the Court’s relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice regarding
marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy. …Like choices concerning contraception, family relationships, procreation, and childrearing, all of which are protected by the Constitution, decisions concerning marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make.
Let’s string some things together here: “choices concerning contraception…procreation, and childrearing…are protected by the Constitution.” It’s a single line, but it’s no throwaway — especially not in a SCOTUS decision that affirms equal access to happiness and control over one’s own life. It could set a precedent that’s invaluable to the fight to secure reproductive rights once and for all.
Oh if this could only be a good sign!
Gynotician Alert of the Week: June 20-26
Check that link out…
Dutch campaigners fly abortion pills into Poland – BBC News
The group, Women on Waves, flew the aircraft from Germany to highlight Poland’s restrictive laws against terminating pregnancies.
Waiting for the drone on the other side were two Polish women who took the pills, used to induce a miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy.
Abortion was legal in Poland in the Communist era, but outlawed in most cases in 1993.
It is only permitted in cases of rape or incest, in cases of irreversible foetal malformation, or if the mother’s life is at risk.
On the interest of the mob:
The Wheels of Crime Are Greased With Olive Oil – The Atlantic
And on health issues:
New questions about why more women than men have Alzheimer’s | Tampa Bay Times
CDC report: 1 in 8 Americans with HIV don’t know they have the virus
And other newsy stories:
Newly disclosed Hillary Clinton emails may undercut her earlier claims | Reuters
Teenage boy bitten by shark in North Carolina in sixth attack in two weeks | US news | The Guardian
USA can play soccer: five things we learned from the 1-0 win over China | Football | The Guardian
A Catholic Schoolgirl Tells Her Side About An Outdated And Intolerant System | Unwritten
The ballet dancers growing older gracefully | Stage | The Guardian
History News Network | The Countess Who Bested Shakespeare
History News Network | Why I believe Meriwether Lewis Was Assassinated
Defying violence by weaving in the Philippines – Al Jazeera English
Over 150,000 people have been killed and millions more displaced in the region of Mindanao during the armed rebellion that has shaken up southern Philippines for over four decades.
But there is more to Mindanao than war. Weaving, a centuries-old tradition, has become a refuge for some women in the conflict-ridden community. Weaving has helped these women to heal their wounds as they say that the stories of their land are revealed in their patterns.
But challenges are making it more difficult for these women to continue their work. The skills are not being passed on to the younger generation, and women often lack the financial capacity to continue.
A three-metre long mat takes at least two months to make. The patterns are created individually, no pattern is the same. Made from pineapple and abaca fabrics, they are dyed using tree bark and herbal extracts.
Eugene Strong, from the department of Agriculture, told Al Jazeera that “materials are expensive, there are only a few weavers left, and there are only a few buyers as well”.
“For example, here in Basilan, the fabrics are expensive, so not a lot of people buy. We are now looking at where to market it and luckily we have people who help us in the industry.”
Asdinan Baladji is a weaver who, despite the economic challenges, is teaching her daughter Myazare how to weave. “Life is not great but between household chores and a small income I am happy. We do the best we can.”
Video at the link.
The best link for last:
Rats dream about the places they want to go, apparently | Metro News
Considering that they’re known for crawling through the sprawling subterranean networks of the world, it should come as no surprise that rats actually dream about the places they want to go.
That’s according to researchers from University College London – who claimed that when the rodents are shown an inaccessible food treat, they’re likely to dream about how they can get it when they nod off to sleep.
Or as lead researcher Hugo Spiers put it: ‘It’s like looking at a holiday brochure for Greece the day before you go – that night you might dream about the pictures.’
Rats Dream About the Places They Want to Explore – D-brief
Rats, like humans, have dreams about the future.
When they see a treat they can’t reach, rats’ later dreams depict them walking toward it, researchers have found. The discovery may one day provide some insight into what happens in the human mind during sleep.
Maps in the Brain
Scientists already knew that after a rat has explored an area, certain neurons in the hippocampus called “place cells” replay those patterns while the rat sleeps.
“Place cells” in both rats and humans help us store memories about location and form mental maps. When you’re in one spot, a set of place cells fires; when you move to another spot, a different set of place cells fire to mark the new location. If scientists can record the activity of specific brain cells, then, they can spy on how the mind maps new places. So far, that kind of recording requires implanting tiny electrodes on very thin wires into the brain, which can’t be done with human subjects for ethical reasons, but it’s possible with rats.
This is how the scientist found out:
First, researchers let rats explore a T-shaped track. The rats could run along the center of the T, but the arms were blocked by clear barriers. While the rats watched, researchers put food at the end of one arm. The rats could see the food and the route to it, but they couldn’t get there.
Then, when the rats were curled up in their cages afterwards, scientists measured their neuron firing. Their brain activity seemed to show them imagining a route through a place they hadn’t explored before. To confirm this, researchers then put the rats back into the maze, but this time without the barriers. As they explored the arm where they had previously seen the food, the rats’ place cells fired in the same pattern as they had during sleep.
This mental mapping process made up about 8 percent of the rats’ brain activity during sleep. That may not sound like much, but neuroscientist Hugo Spiers, a co-author on the study published in eLife, says it’s a significant amount of activity for the brain to devote to a single task during rest.
That is something to think about.
The rats’ activity may shed some light on what goes on in the human mind during sleep. Sleeping does seem to improve human performance on memory tasks – a finding which has been used to argue against all-night study sessions. And desire is also a crucial part of that process for people. “People are much better at doing the stuff that they’ll make more money on after they’ve slept,” said Spiers. “Something about sleep is using that desire information: that you do want to do better.”
Rats will also become cannibalistic, sort of like humans will…in a figurative sense.
Sorry this is so damn late….think of it as an open thread.
Wednesday Reads: Why?
Posted: February 4, 2015 Filed under: 2016 elections, just because, medicine, morning reads | Tags: abortion, austerity, Hillary Clinton, Republicans, SCOTUS 48 Comments
Good Morning
The latest unbelievable tripe coming from the nuts on both the far right and far left have got me saying only one thing…Why?
Anti-anti-Vaxxers here…anti-vaxxers there, no “Employees must wash shitty hands” signs, and breastfeeding isn’t sexist because men can lactate, too. (Yeah, can you believe this shit?)
That is just a few choice bits.
Is this a joke? Or is this just a way for the gods to torture some of us…who don’t feel obliged to follow “partisan allegiance.” Whatever the fuck that is…seriously this is a term used on a Hot Air site which I cannot link to, you know, for the sake of trolls and suck. (Oops, I mean such.)
If you want to look for the link, it is on Hot Air Quotes of the Day, 2.3.15:
What’s even more dangerous is politicizing the debate over vaccines. Comments by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey calling for “balance” in the vaccine debate after President Obama said Americans should “get your kids vaccinated” could have a similarly perverse effect, turning a public health issue into a matter of partisan allegiance…
WTF is that? Since when does ones party allegiance take precedent over the lives of those kids who are unable to get vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, i.e. they have other illnesses like say…leukemia. This is what I do not understand, and where the question…Why?
Jessica Valenti talks about her daughter in her article, Your feelings about vaccines don’t trump another child’s medical reality | Jessica Valenti | Comment is free | The Guardian
Risking other children’s lives, and other parents’ pain, is exactly what you’re doing when you don’t vaccinate your child: you’re not just making decisions about your children’s health, but the health and safety of the children around them. Children like mine.
Layla was born extremely premature, and because of her low birth weight and underdeveloped lungs, her immune system was not up to par for years. She got sick more easily and more drastically than other children. The first two years of her life were filled with too many emergency room visits, doctors, shots, antibiotics and other medical interventions.
She
was at such risk, in fact, that our pediatrician recommend that we keep her out of daycare and away from groups of children for as long as possible, so we cared for her at home for two years – a luxury we could afford but many other families cannot. But every time she played with a child at the park or a doctor’s waiting room, I was terrified.
So when I read quotes from parents denying any social responsibility to vaccinatesaying things like, “My child is pure … It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child,” it makes me livid. Where once we said “it takes a village”, these days some people don’t care if the village burns to the ground so long as their precious snowflake is left standing.
Emphasis mine, btw.
What kind of mentality must you have to think like this?
It is the same kind of mindset that brings on these gems of wisdom and knowledge from the mouths of idiots:
Beck: Anti-Vaxxers Are Being Persecuted, Just Like Galileo | Right Wing Watch
Rand Paul’s Comment About Parents ‘Owning’ Children Was Not Random – Little Green Footballs
he said the state doesn’t own the children, the parents own the children. Just in case you were wondering, this wasn’t some out-of-the-blue thing. The idea behind Paul’s utterance goes all the way back to the King of Asshole Libertarians himself, Murray Rothbard.
Please go and read LGF for the money quote.
Republican Party Comes Out Against Basic Hygiene, For Freedom | Wonkette
North Carolina’s newbie Sen. Thom Tillis is a damned fine Republican. You can tell because of how much he hates government regulation of any kind, because that is just the government murdering freedom.
Forcing companies to follow Basic Rules of Hygiene, for example, like making employees wash their hands before serving food? He told a delightful story about explaining to some poor constituent who no doubt took a bleach bath after their encounter about how that’s one of those unnecessary regulations that really should be left up to the Great And All-Knowing Free Market:
I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.”
Cool story, bro. But it really helps to illustrate where today’s Republican Party is, which is in the toilet, not washing its hands because freedom.
Israel’s ambassador jokes on Twitter about undermining Obama – Vox
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer are currently embroiled in a controversy that has them under such intense fire in both countries that even Fox News is siding with Obama against them.
Dermer had arranged, with House Speaker John Boehner, for Netanyahu to visit the US in March, without the knowledge or approval of the White House, and give a speech to Congress that is widely expected to bash President Obama’s Iran talks and to endorse negotiations-killing sanctions. It is a major break with diplomatic protocol, and gives the strong impression that Netanyahu is picking sides in domestic American politics — against Obama.
So Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, having damaged the US-Israel alliance that is his job to safeguard and that is crucial to his nation’s security, and drawn heavy criticism in both the US and Israel, decided that Super Bowl Sunday would be a great opportunity to make a joke about it:
Hilarious!
Just to be clear about this, Dermer is jokingly calling attention to the fact that he appears to be working to undermine the sitting president of Israel’s most important ally. He’s making a funny about how his plot to gin up a little short-term political support for Netanyahu has blown up in his face, harming not just his boss’s political chances but the very alliance that is his primary responsibility. It’s funny stuff.
Hey, it is about to get better…
Texas Bill Will Allow Teachers to Kill Students to Protect School ‘Property’ | Alternet
Students better think twice before drawing mustaches in history books.
Supreme Court lets stand ruling that firing woman for breastfeeding not sexist since men can lactate
The Supreme Court has declined to overturn a lower court’s ruling that an insurance company was within bounds when it fired a breastfeeding mother. The woman’s suit was dismissed by the Eighth Circuit Court on the grounds that firing a woman for breastfeeding isn’t sexist because men can lactate, too.
The ACLU’s Galen Sherwin wrote Monday that former Nationwide Insurance Company employee Angela Ames sued her employer when she returned from maternity leave to find that no allowances had been made to enable her to pump breast milk for her baby during the day.
When Ames asked her supervisor for accommodations that would enable her to express milk and store it for her child, the supervisor reportedly responded that Ames should “go home and be with your babies” instead. That supervisor went on to dictate a letter of resignation to Ames that day, effectively forcing her to resign.
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Nationwide and the Eighth Circuit Court, denying Ames’ petition for a review of her case’s dismissal. The trial court’s decision — which the Circuit Court upheld — said that for Nationwide’s firing of Ames for taking time to express milk at work could not have been sexist because under certain circumstances, some men can lactate, too.
Say what???????????
“
The court’s reasoning in this case echoes old Supreme Court pronouncements that discriminating against pregnant women at work isn’t sex discrimination because both men and women can be non-pregnant,” Sherwin wrote. “Congress long ago rejected this ridiculous reasoning when it passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. It’s disheartening to see it resurface again.”
Again I ask, Why?
Now, as I write this post, my brother is being taken away in an ambulance to the Emergency Room. Damn. I feel like we need to set up camp in the ER lately. The rest of the post will be in dump format. (Key word being dump…ha.) (Sorry, I can’t help it…)
Hillary eyes Brooklyn for campaign HQ | TheHill
Pilot’s selfies “likely” caused fatal crash, flight investigators say | Ars Technica
Study: Insurers may be using drug costs to discriminate | AccessNorthGa
These never-before-seen portraits of former enslaved blacks will move you | theGrio
January 31st marked the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.
To commemorate the occasion, new photos have been released showing some of the men and women who lived through that era — and were finally granted their freedom.
The portraits focused on a group of 500 people and were taken in the late 1930s, as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), 70 years after abolition.
Harper Lee’s lawsuit against literary agent Samuel Pinkus – Business Insider
Fifty-five years after its publication, the world is finally getting a sequel to the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
While its author, Harper Lee, is notoriously reclusive, the 88-year-old waged a public court battle in recent years claiming her agent essentially stole the copyright for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about racial injustice in the South.
Her 2013 lawsuit against her former agent, Samuel Pinkus, has since been settled, but the complaint seems relevant today. If the allegations are true, it’s a cautionary tale for aging artists whose agents might take advantage of them even though they’re supposed to be acting on their behalf.
Draft of Arrest Request for Argentine President Found at Dead Prosecutor’s Home – NYTimes.com
Budgeting Away Women’s Reproductive Rights | American Civil Liberties Union
We Must Not Keep Telling the Same Stories About Why Young People Deserve Reproductive Agency
Jet Clips Bridge, Crashes into River in Taiwan — NYMag
Austerity to blame for 35% suicide surge in Greece – research — RT News
Shit this is a depressing post.
The pictures are from the photographer: John Hopkins: Charismatic photographer, activist and leading figure in London’s counterculture of the Sixties – News – People – The Independent
He helped establish the International Times, or IT, which became the voice of the hippie movement. He set up the London Free School, established the UFO psychedelic club and promoted the legendary 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a climactic event of the 1967 Summer of Love. But his clashes with the Establishment made him a target for the authorities. Although he espoused the drug culture, he recognised its dangers and was more interested in encouraging others to “turn on” by fulfilling their artistic potential. It was in the latter role that he would be described as “inspirational”.
Friday Reads: Bigots on the Right
Posted: January 30, 2015 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bobby Jindal, homophobia, Islamaphobia, Radical Christianists, Republicans 31 Comments
Good Morning!
I absolutely cannot believe the hatred coming out of the Republican Party and its christianist grass roots these days. It’s downright embarrassing that my Governor is leading the charge. There are so many of these stories at the moment that they certainly need the light of day given that we’ve just recognized the 70th anniversary of NAZI concentration camps designed for the Jewish, the homosexual, the intellectual, and others considered outcasts of their society.
This first disturbing piece comes from Texas where Texas Muslims gathered peacefully to recognize democracy and to teach their children about how we do things in this country. Unfortunately, many haters gave them the wrong lesson.
They came out by the hundreds from Dallas, San Antonio and Houston, mostly women and children, girls with silver-bowed shoes and pink owl backpacks. They sang the national anthem and prayed.
But less than 20 feet from where the group of Texas Muslims gathered on the steps of the state Capitol in Austin, a small handful of protesters told them exactly how they felt about their visit.
“We don’t want you here!” shouted one. Others yelled, “Go home,” “ISIS will gladly take you” and “remember 9/11.”
“You don’t have to dress that way! Take it off!” came from a woman holding an Israeli flag. “Islam is the war on women!”
Earlier in the morning, Rep. Molly White, R-Belton, commented on the gathering.
“I did leave an Israeli flag on the reception desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representatives from the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws. We will see how long they stay in my office,” she wrote on Facebook.
Thursday marked the seventh annual Texas Muslim Capitol Day in Austin, when hundreds of adherents of Islam visit the Capitol to meet with lawmakers and learn about the democratic process. This year, however, is the first that’s been marked by virulent anti-Islam protests, said Ruth Nasrullah, a prominent Muslim blogger from Houston who also hosted the event.
Christine Weick, who said she was originally from Michigan but now is “on the road,” at one point stormed the succession of speakers, grabbing the microphone and yelling, “Islam will not dominate the United States, and by the grace of God, it will not dominate Texas.”
She was carted back to her spot with the other 12 to 15 protesters holding vigil behind a wall of law enforcement officers. “Muhammad is dead!” she and other chanted, referring to the Muslim prophet.
The Belton Republican was by far the most egregious bigot of the Texas legislature yesterday.
As the group of Muslims continued the event by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the interruptions persisted, with the protesters yelling, “Islam is a lie!” and “No Sharia here!”
Mustafaa Carroll, the executive director of the Houston chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, called the behavior “very frustrating.” Carroll said this was the first year protesters showed up since Muslim Capitol Day began.
“I’m more concerned with state leaders and what they say than I am about anybody else because they are the lawmakers,” he said.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has sent a letter to House Speaker Joe Straus asking whether White had violated ethics rules by instructing her staff to ask Muslim visitors to her office to declare their allegiance to the United States.
“Our ethics question is: Has Rep. White violated any House rules in creating such an internal office policy that is selectively being enforced to discriminate against certain religious minorities trying to meet with her or her staff?” the letter asks. “Are House members prohibited from making constituents take oaths before meeting with their elected representatives or House staff?”
In a statement, Straus said: “Legislators have a responsibility to treat all visitors just as we expect to be treated — with dignity and respect. Anything else reflects poorly on the entire body and distracts from the very important work in front of us.” His statement did not address the ethics complaint.
Neither Gov. Greg Abbott nor Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has weighed in on the matter.
As of mid-morning, the Israeli flag was still on the desk in White’s office. By noon, she had released a follow-up Facebook post that added: “I do not apologize for my comments. … If you love America, obey our laws and condemn Islamic terrorism, then I embrace you as a fellow American. If not, then I do not.”
But at 3 p.m., White released a new statement saying she welcomed “all of my constituents who would like to come and visit our office in the Texas State Capitol.”
“As law-abiding American citizens, we all have the privilege and the right to freedom of speech granted to us by the First Amendment,” she wrote. “… As a proud Texan and American I fully denounce all terrorist groups or organizations who’s [sic] intent is to hurt and destroy the great state of Texas and our nation.”
This was not the first time White has aired her concerns about Muslims on Facebook.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s bigotry has been over the top recently. He called for “cultural assimilation” suggesting that if every one acted white, everything would be just fine. However, he fails to look 
around the country to find there are many examples of non-Muslim people of faith who are not assimilated to the culturally white WASP majority. Peter Weber-writing for the Week–suggested Jindal take a look at Brooklyn where there are ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews that live and dress as their European ancestors have for many years.
“There is a way of thinking by many on the Left in America, which disturbs me greatly,” Jindal says: “The notion that assimilation is not necessary or even preferable.” Liberals, he adds, “think it is unenlightened, discriminatory, and even racist to expect immigrants to endorse and assimilate into the culture in their new country. This is complete rubbish.”
Jindal says he believes that religious and ethnic groups make America stronger when they come to embrace America’s culture and values. But not every group qualifies:
Are they coming to be set apart, are they unwilling to assimilate, do they have their own laws they want to establish, do they fundamentally disagree with your political culture? Therein lies the difference between immigration and invasion….
To be clear — I am not suggesting for one second that people should be shy or embarrassed about their ethnic heritage. But I am explicitly saying that it is completely reasonable for nations to discriminate between allowing people into their country who want to embrace their culture, or allowing people into their country who want to destroy their culture, or establish a separate culture within. [Jindal]
Well, off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of groups in the United States that have established “a separate culture within” America, probably “fundamentally disagree” with America’s “political culture,” and are still an integral part of America’s rich cultural and religious tapestry.
The Amish communities in Pennsylvania and Ohio, for example, don’t drive cars, use smartphones, or allow their members to wear synthetic fabrics. Jehovah’s Witnesses consider themselves a global movement and don’t serve in the U.S. armed forces or salute or pledge allegiance to the American flag; they also don’t accept blood transfusions, or celebrate Christmas or birthdays. And is Jindal really going to tell the Cajun and Creole communities in his home state to stop speaking Louisiana French?
If Jindal is serious about his idea, though, I have a challenge for him: Go to Brooklyn.
In Williamsburg, in Crown Heights, in Borough Park, there are sizable and growing insular communities, or “courts,” of ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews. They have their own customs, language (Yiddish), 19th-century style of dress, political and religious leaders, and, in some instances, laws. Women typically don’t have the same rights as men. The Hasidic communities of Brooklyn and elsewhere in New York and New Jersey have not assimilated to American culture.
Peter Beinart writes that Jindal “wants Christians to stand apart from secular society, but condemns Muslims who do the same.”
In London, Jindal said “non-assimilationist Muslims” threaten the West not merely because they support acts of violence, and not merely because they adhere to Islamic rather than national law. Most fundamentally, they pose a threat because they refuse to embrace the cultures of the countries to which they immigrate. Denouncing the left’s claim that “it is unenlightened, discriminatory, and even racist to expect immigrants to endorse and assimilate into the culture in their new country,” Jindal insisted that “it is completely reasonable for nations to discriminate between allowing people into their country who want to embrace their culture, or allowing people into their country who want to destroy their culture, or establish a separate culture within.”
In his London speech, Jindal made little effort to define American or European culture except to associate it with “freedom.” So it’s hard to know exactly which aspects of it he believes Muslims refuse to embrace. But in his speeches last year on religion, Jindal discussed American culture at greater length. And his verdict was surprisingly harsh. “American culture,” he told students at Liberty University, “has in many ways become a secular culture.” Many churches, he declared, now espouse “views on sin [that] are in direct conflict with the culture.” In case students hadn’t gotten the message, Jindal repeated himself: “our culture has taken a secular turn.”
Then he asked a rhetorical question: “What do we do about it?” His answer: resist. People of faith, he argued, must recognize that they are fighting a “silent war” against the secular, liberal elite. And they must keep waging that war no matter how much of a cultural minority they become. “Our religious liberty,” he insisted, “must in no way ever be linked to the ever-changing opinions of the public.
So let’s imagine a scenario. A devout Christian emigrates from Nigeria to a progressive American college town, where she takes up work as a pharmacist. She quickly finds herself at odds with the dominant culture around her. Co-workers mock her modest dress and her insistence on interrupting work to pray. When she calls homosexuality a sin, they denounce her as a bigot. Ultimately, her employer fires her for refusing to dispense contraception.
Based on his speeches at Liberty University and the Reagan Library, Jindal’s advice to this woman would be clear: Wage “silent war” against the culture that oppresses you, even if you’re a minority of one. If necessary, “establish a separate culture within” the dominant one so you can raise children who fear and obey God.
Now imagine that our devout Nigerian is a Muslim. Suddenly her resistance to the dominant culture makes her not a hero but a menace. Jindal supporters might resist the analogy. Christians, they might argue, don’t kill cartoonists or establish their own separate legal systems. But Jindal’s point in London was that the problems with Muslim immigrants go beyond issues of violence and law. The core danger, he insisted, is their refusal to assimilate into the culture of the countries to which they immigrate. And since Jindal has already declared that American (let alone European) culture is secular, any immigrant who refuses to assimilate into it is, by his definition, a threat. Our Nigerian pharmacist should never been given a visa.
Why point out the contradiction between Jindal’s heroic portrayal of Christian non-assimilators and his demonization of Muslim ones? Because it exposes his lofty talk about culture and identity to be an elaborate ruse. The only principle he’s really defending is anti-Muslim bigotry.
It’s amazing to me that 70 years after the scapegoating of European Jews led to the “ultimate solution” we could still be living with this kind of hatred propagated by elected officials. It is odd that the same people waving flags of Israel understand so little about the history that led to the demand for a Jewish state. Of course, they are only thinking that the fruition of their end times dreams comes only with building of a temple on what is now a holy Islamic site.
I only hope that people of good will speak out against this bigotry.
What is on your reading and blogging list today?
Sunday Reads: One Sad Goat Makes A Happy Ass
Posted: June 1, 2014 Filed under: A My Pet Goat Moment, Afghanistan, American Gun Fetish, Cats, Congress, corporate greed, Diplomacy Nightmares, Discrimination against women, Feminists, Foreign Affairs, Gun Control, Happiness, History, Journalism, Mental Health, misogyny, morning reads, psychology, Rape Culture, Russia, science, sports, Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: Bowe Bergdahl, GOP Assholes, Republicans 31 Comments
We sailed with the reading by the sea of literature Navegamos con la lectura por el mar de la literatura (ilustración de Deena Pagliarello)
Good Morning
Summer is here for my kiddies…at least it is the second week of vacation for them. One thing though, change is coming. Today we are switching bedrooms, moving my brother up to the main floor and bringing my son down to the basement bedroom. Ya, the transformation to adult son living in basement just got all that much closer to reality.
My son will have his own entrance, his own fridge and his own little game room. He will even have a little intercom for those times when he needs a little nourishment.
Longer clip here.
Anyway, to make this switcheroo happen we have to take my brother out for the entire day, and let all hell brake loose when he comes home to find his desk, complete with all Dukes of Hazard paraphernalia has been moved upstairs.
So if you are near the vicinity of Banjoville, and hear the wrath of Uncle Gordy (my kids nickname for my brother) as he cusses us out but good….you will know that we have gotten back from our long drive to Atlanta, and that Denny has realized there was more to that fancy lunch at The Cheesecake Factory than just a huge hunk of cheesecake.
Alright.
Now for the links. Which are all over the place today.
I guess the shit is meeting the fan? At least it looks like it from this headline at the New York Times After Deadly Rampage, Sheriff’s Office Faces Concerns About Conduct
A week after Elliot O. Rodger’s violent rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that left six college students dead and 13 other people wounded, state lawmakers are now calling for an investigation of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office’s previous contact with Mr. Rodger. Some are calling for wholesale changes to how law enforcement officers respond to calls that someone could be a threat to himself or to others.
Sheriff’s deputies visited Mr. Rodger on April 30, just three weeks before his rampage, after receiving a call from his mother, who had been concerned by videos he posted online.
At the time, Mr. Rodger had already bought at least two firearms, which were both registered in his name. But sheriff’s deputies were unaware of that when they visited Mr. Rodger, because they had not checked the statewide gun ownership database. They also had not watched the videos Mr. Rodger had posted.
You go check out some dude who is a “threat” and you don’t even watch the damn video? They did not even do a quick check to see if he had any guns. That is some shitty police work if you ask me. But, I will let you read more about this here:
Kelly Hoover, a spokeswoman for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, would not elaborate on why no weapons check was done, and declined to confirm whether there would be an internal investigation of the visit.
But Hannah-Beth Jackson, the state senator who represents Santa Barbara, said a comprehensive investigation of the deputies’ visit to Mr. Rodger’s apartment was needed to give the public a full accounting of the events leading up to the massacre. “The community will not tolerate any half-baked approach to dealing with this,” Ms. Jackson said.
Law enforcement agencies across California have said that it is not necessarily standard practice to check the state gun registry before any check by officers on someone’s well-being. And the sheriff’s office has defended the six deputies who visited Mr. Rodger in April.
“Based on the information reviewed thus far, the sheriff’s office has determined that the deputies who responded handled the call in a professional manner consistent with state law and department policy,” Ms. Hoover said in an email on Saturday.
After Mr. Rodger’s rampage in Isla Vista, Ms. Jackson co-wrote legislation that would create a “gun-violence restraining order.” If family members or friends alert law enforcement that someone poses a threat to themselves or to others, law enforcement would then be able to petition a judge to prohibit the person from purchasing firearms.
But if you really want a freak out, read this: Lessons From a Day Spent With the UCSB Shooter’s Awful Friends
Tuesday morning, I logged into a chat room full of refugees of the since shuttered PUAHate forum once frequented by University of California-Santa Barbara shooter Elliott Rodger. And I stayed there, silently watching them, for 8 hours. Here’s what I learned.
PUAHate, as other outlets have discussed, is an offshoot of the Pick Up Artist community populated by men (and, allegedly, women) who believe Pick Up Artistry to be a sham waste of money not because women are more than “targets” and “prey,” but because women are fucking hopeless cunts who can’t be convinced to give nice guys a chance. Women, argue PUAHaters, will only go out with good looking alpha males and would never look twice at anyone who isn’t a musclebound dreamboat with a six-figure income, and most men will never be those things, and so the world is against them and life is unfair. From an observer’s perspective, PUAHate is a group of self-pitying babies who believe they’re entitled to women who are much more attractive than they are.
Big news this day however:
Bowe Bergdahl, American Soldier, Freed by Taliban in Prisoner Trade – NYTimes.com
Hagel: U.S. acted fast to save Bowe Bergdahl’s life – CNN.com
Official: Freed US soldier on Way to Military Hospital in Germany
Republicans attack Obama over soldier swap – The Times of India
There is video of Bergdahl eating in freedom at the CNN link. Of course the GOP would be pissed…can you imagine the shit storm if they had known?
Hagel: Congress Kept in Dark on Swap Because Bergdahl’s Life in Danger – NBC News.com
Here is an interesting bit of Snowden news, Russian Web Journalism Award to be named after Snowden – Little Green Footballs
This takes the cake. From the country at the forefront of institutionalized oppression of journalists, featuring a massive surveillance apparatus, comes the Snowden Award for Journalistic Excellence. Not a peep from Snowden about his new host country’s behavior. And no word on when this Russian media outlet plans on an expose on Putin’s marginalization and oppression of his countryman’s journalists and media owners.
Moving on, I told you this post was all over the place…Canadian Bar Sells Cups with Lids to Curb Roofied Drinks
A bar in Saskatchewan right across the border from North Dakota has taken it upon itself to keep an eye out for it’s female patrons by offering drinking cups with screw-on lids. The hard plastic cup is selling for five dollars, and is being sold as a way to prevent spiked drinks. CBC reports that the bar’s management simply wants so keep things safe for their women customers:
“I want girls to be able to come into our bar in groups of two or three, or if they don’t have dates, they can still come in here and have fun and dance and not have to worry about somebody drugging them,” Regina Rooks, manager of the Derrick Motor Hotel bar, told CBC News. “There has been a couple incidents.”
…
“We are now a boomtown and undesirables do come to town,” she said
Rooks very clearly means well. She obviously wants to protect her customers, and she’s showing a resourcefulness and inclination to try and solve a serious problem.
At the same time, it’s still just a bandaid solution to a much bigger issue. It reinforces the idea that potential victims are responsible for their own sexual safety. And charging for the cup adds a whole other layer to that idea. Putting a lid on a beverage isn’t telling rapists they shouldn’t rape, which is, you know, the main problem. It’s not really deterring rape.
Hey, at least it is something. I mean…it tells the rapist who plan to drug women that they should move on to the bar next door, which is not a solution I know. But I will take what ever extra protection is offered, wouldn’t you?
On Wednesday, I brought up the subject of women who are pulling the victim blaming bullshit on the Calhoun rape victim here in North Georgia. I even went so far as to put a label on them…the C-word…you know that one which rhymes with bunt.
Check this out: Men Aren’t the Only Ones Slut Shaming Women | Care2 Causes
Thousands of women have rallied around the hashtag #YesAllWomen on Twitter sharing personal stories of the everyday harassment they face. The response has been overwhelming and put a spotlight on the sexist culture we live in where a young man resorted to murder for being rejected by women.
Sure, not all men are like Elliot Rodger (there’s even a hashtag to prove it: #NotAllMen), but there is no denying that we live in a society where women are targets of violence and shamed for their sexuality. Women are called sluts for having sex and, like Rodger angrily proclaimed, sluts for not having sex, at least with him. Either way we’re sluts. But as the two studies below prove, men aren’t the only ones responsible for slut-shaming women. Sometimes we women are just as guilty.
The first study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly tracked the lives of 53 women attending college at a Midwestern university and found that women often participated in slut shaming one another as a means of maintaining their social status. The findings suggest that high-status women, those women who participated in Greek life on campus and often came from upper-middle class backgrounds, used slut shaming as a means of bullying lower-status girls and keeping them from climbing the social ladder.
On the flip side, high-status women were also far less likely to be slut shamed by their lower-status peers despite engaging in more sexual relationships. It stands to reason then that lower status girls were targets of slut shaming regardless of whether or not they had sexual experience. Lastly, while high-status women with more sexual experience defined their lifestyle as “classy,” their low-status peers who tried to mimic this behavior to fit it were immediately called “trashy.”
This study illustrates that the ladies are also guilty of creating a culture where women are stigmatized and defined by their sexuality. If women are calling each other sluts as a means of pulling social rank, what are their sexual partners saying about them behind closed doors? Does the fact that women are calling each other sluts make it OK for the men (or women) they are sleeping with to do so? If the Mean Girls assembly taught us anything, then yes.
“You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores,” says Tina Fey’s character. “It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.”
It may not make it OK, but it does create a culture where slut shaming women is acceptable.
Another study from a think tank in the UK has found that women are also guilty of slut shaming one another online. The study tracked the use of the words “rape,” “whore” and “slut” on Twitter for about a year and found that 12 percent of the tweets containing these words were intended as a direct threat or insult. What was more alarming, however, was the finding that women were almost as likely as men to send tweets with these words both casually or offensively.
For some sense to all this,
Time magazine looks to Kate Farrar, the vice president of campus leadership programs at AAUW, a non-profit focusing on women’s empowerment, who argues gender based insults have become s0 ingrained in our culture that it’s the norm:
Words like “slut” and “whore” are thrown around so frequently they “become a part of our cultural conversation [about women] from the time we’re very young…there often aren’t instances that we’re told that it’s not okay or that there’s accountability for that.”
And thanks to our culture’s paradoxical attitudes towards female sexuality, where women are expected to be sexy, but not overtly sexual, one of the most effective ways for men and women to bully, judge and degrade a woman is to brand her a “slut” or “whore.”
…that while women are often victims of a sexist culture, we are sometimes part of the problem. I for one will admit that as a college, and even high school, student I used the word “slut” very casually and as a means to put down other women, even if they weren’t actually promiscuous. I wish I could say I hadn’t, but like Farrar points out it was so ingrained in how we spoke that I didn’t think twice, and I was never told it was wrong. Well, here I am now, saying that it is wrong. Defining a woman by her sexuality, or worse demeaning her for it, is wrong whether you are a woman or a man. It’s high time we speak up when someone calls a woman a slut and analyze our own reasons for using this language.
I have done that as well…and perhaps the c-word was also along that line…but I still have to defend my use of that word. It is true, in my opinion, these women who blame rape victims are the most vulgar of women and deserve the most vulgar of titles.
The rest of this post in dump fashion…
Look who graduated: Rachel Jeantel, the close friend who was on the phone with Travon Martin moments before he was shot and killed by George Zimmerman has graduated from high school.
A football player who was taking clomid for low sperm count has been suspended: Robert Mathis of Indianapolis Colts suspended four games for PEDs – ESPN
I looked it up, they do use clomid for this condition on men…go figure.
Did y’all see this?
Ledge cracks at the Willis Tower, closed for inspection – chicagotribune.com
And it is scary considering less than a month ago my daughter was just doing this in that exact Ledge:
Yeah, they are jumping up and down in there.
This Graph From The CDC On Measles Infections Should Scare You – Forbes
Also from Addicting Info, btw Dan says this store is full of bullshit, something is not right at that store: – Walmart Employee Picks Up Stray Coins On The Floor Of Her Store And Gets Fired For Theft
You’re fired! The bad news came to Ashley Johnson, former Walmart employee, as a surprise. She had been working in Store #5440 in Oregon in security for more than a year and a half when the Asset Protection Manager requested an interview with her. Another man attended. The man asked her if she had ever retrieved change from the store floor when she was working.
The question stunned Ashley, but she decided honesty was her best answer. “Yes,” she admitted. The man demanded how much, and Ashley said to him, “Maybe a quarter”.
No. It was much more than that. We’ve been watching you for a long time. I estimate that you’ve stolen about 45 dollars from us.
The company fired her on the spot and given one month to repay the coins or face a lawsuit. This was rather extreme to say the least. Before the incident Ashley had asked the store’s manager, Ben Carlson, for financial aid from Walmart’s controversial Critical Need Fund. Ashley wonders if this the real reason they fired her?
The Walton’s 4759 stores earn a revenue of $469 billion, which is more money than that of nearly 50% of all Americans combined. As America’s richest family, they exploit a variety of legal loopholes in order to make certain they perpetuate the dynasty’s wealth rather than contribute their government share, according public-records requests for court documents and the Internal Revenue Service filings. Yet the company still feels the need to pocket even the loose change on their store floors.
Joan Lorring, Oscar-Nominated Supporting Actress, Dead at 88
Joan Lorring, who was Oscar nominated for best supporting actress in the 1945 film The Corn Is Green, died Friday in the New York City suburb of Sleepy Hollow. She was 88. Born Mary Magdalene Ellis in Hong Kong on April 17, 1926, Lorring fled with her mother from the Japanese invasion in 1939 to San Francisco. Her showbiz career began in radio, and her first American film at 18 was the 1944 MGM romantic war drama Song of Russia. She signed with Warner Bros. for the role of the scheming, trampish Bessie Watty, playing opposite Bette Davis, in The Corn Is Green.
Because this next link is a picture of my idol Jonathan Frid:
Miss American Vampire, 1970 – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
A blog post about film: moviemorlocks.com – Cassavetes vs. Ottinger – Arthouse Grudge Match
A few articles on The Rose Tattoo…the play. Left overs from Wednesday’s post:
“The Rose Tattoo as Comedy of the Grotesque”–Brian Parker
Where I Live: Selected Essays – Tennessee Williams – Google Books
A Life in the Wings: THE LADY AND TENNESSEE : The New Yorker
A LIFE IN THE WINGS about Lady Maria St. Just, the playwright Tennessee Williams’ long-time friend, who after his death became executor of his estate and exercised tyrannical control over his literary legacy. She died in England on February 15, 1994; and was said to be the model for Maggie in Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Lady Maria was born Maria Britneva on July 6, 1921 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her mother, Mary, and brother left their father Dr. Alexander Britnev and went to England in 1922. Maria’s biography “Five O’Clock Angel” tells about her life and is quoted throughout article.
Tom and Lorezo’s review of Maleficent | Tom & Lorenzo Fabulous & Opinionated
“Let us tell an old tale anew,” the ever-present and somewhat talkative narrator intones at the start of Disney’s Maleficent. But by the time we got to the story’s end, we wondered if it was really worth the bother. Like 2012′s Snow White and The Huntsman, Maleficent attempts to take a more nuanced look at an old and (by design,) simplistic tale, in that “everything you know is wrong”manner. Like Broadway’s “Wicked,” it attempts to turn a classic villain into a hero – or at least, a villain that cries and has motivations beyond the acquisition of power or the destroying of annoyingly perfect little girls.
It’s an apparently irresistible thing to modern audiences; this retelling of fairy tales and childhood stories by layering them with darkness and angst; meaning and themes. The Tolkienization of Disney. And we’re not sure it’s to the story’s benefit. Fairy tales are supposed to be relatively simple stories populated by characters with the kind of motivations that children can understand. They evolved over time, but they always served the same purpose (outside of entertainment): to teach the very young about difficult concepts like evil and anger and jealousy and to reinforce a basic moral code about goodness and love and family – and also to not trust strangers or go wandering through the woods. Purely universal childhood themes that still resonate centuries after the original stories were devised. Classic old fairy tales were shockingly dark, so the basic idea behind the darkening and deepening concept of this film might’ve worked – except we’re talking specifically about Disney characters. And we’re not sure adding paper-thin rape metaphors is something that needed to be done to the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty.
Read the rest of that at the link…love TLo!
Can you believe it is 70 years? Operation Mincemeat: One of the biggest hoaxes in history | Stephen Liddell
With the 70th Anniversary of D-Day around the corner I thought that I might write a short series of posts about this historic event. The first of which might be one which you’re unfamiliar with but in its own way was one of the key points of WW2.
After a long series of battles in North Africa had seen the Italians defeated and Monty’s Desert Rats routed Rommel’s dreaded Afrika Corps at El Alamein which set the scene for the Axis retreat from North Africa all together.
More history:
‘Sadly and with a Bitter Heart’: What the Caesarean Section Meant in the Middle Ages
One sunny spring day, a Resurrectionist priest sips tea and speaks of his time as a Bolivian missionary in the 1960s and ’70s. His recollection of the local ‘Indians’ is obscured by more than three decades’ distance. China cup in hand, he recalls vaguely their mud huts, flocks of sheep, herds of llamas, and the beautiful, rugged terrain of the altiplano. With greater precision, he speaks about the local belief system, especially attitudes towards stillbirths. This left a strong impression upon him. The priest emphasizes how deeply fearful the locals were of stillborn babies, and he flavours his recollections with two sad anecdotes. One day, he says, some villagers brought him a small blue corpse. The baby’s father insisted that the missionary baptize it. Since this was canonically impossible, the priest performed an impromptu blessing. It effectively banished the evil spirit conjured by the unfortunate birth. Satisfied with the blessing, the villagers relaxed and returned to their normal lives. On another occasion, one of the priest’s confrères was less delicate. A mother presented him with her dead baby, pleading for a postmortem baptism. At last the cleric told her, “The Church will only permit me to baptize your child if it draws milk from your breast.” Since this was impossible, the mother went away frustrated and ill at ease, having been unsuccessful in her bid to exorcise the unlucky spirit.
Also from Medieval.net: Richard III had severe scoliosis but was not a hunchback, researchers find
Scientists and researchers have completed their study on the spinal column of Richard III, revealing that his scoliosis caused these bones to curve to the right, a well as a degree of twisting, resulting in a “spiral” shape. However, he would not have been hunchbacked as he was depicted by later writers.
This research has been published this week in the journal The Lancet. It was carried out by experts from the University of Leicester, University of Cambridge, Loughborough University and University Hospitals of Leicester
The kind of scoliosis Richard suffered from a form of adolescent onset idiopathic scoliosis, which would have not started until he had almost finished growing. By the time he was an adult, Richard’s right shoulder would have been higher than his left, and his torso would have been relatively short compared to his arms and legs. The scoliosis also caused him to be several inches shorter than his normal height, which would have been about 5 feet 8 inches tall otherwise. This matches a contemporary description of Richard, by the chronicler John Rous who described the king as “small of stature, with a short face and unequal shoulders, the right higher and the left lower.”
Science up: This New “Super-Hydrophobic” Material Is So Waterproof That Water Bounces Off It Like A Ball | Geekosystem
Foodie stuff: Yogurts With More Sugar Than A Twinkie
Since I am dealing with my kids a lot in this post, and since they are named after Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: 10 Incredible Facts About Ernest Hemingway – Listverse
And since Hemingway was a “cat person” we have this next link: Study Shows the Personality Differences Between Cat and Dog Lovers | Geekosystem
New research presented this month at the annual Association for Psychological Science shows the contrasting personality traits associated with cat and dog owners–or in other words, people who would rather scoop a creature’s poop up from the street vs. those who prefer it buried under litter.
Denise Guastello of Carroll University conducted the study using a group of 600 college students. Participants were asked whether they were cat or dog lovers, what attribute they most admired in their pets, and then given a series of questions as part of a personality assessment. 60% of those polled claimed to be dog lovers, 11% copped to a cat fancy, and 29% said they had no preference, i.e., they were scared their cat would find out if they answered truthfully.
Based off trends found in the personality assessments, “dog people” were shown to typically be outgoing and rule-abiding, whereas cat fans appeared introverted, open minded, sensitive , innovative, and more intelligent than dog devotees. But pet owners shouldn’t take the study’s findings too seriously–the research was obviously conducted on a specific segment of the population, so it’s impossible to say how allegiance to one kind of animal over another might manifest in the personality traits of different age groups or demographics.
Guastello suggests the trends in personality associated with cat or dog owners might be related to the kind of care the animal requires:
It makes sense that a dog person is going to be more lively, because they’re going to want to be out there, outside, talking to people, bringing their dog […] Whereas, if you’re more introverted, and sensitive, maybe you’re more at home reading a book, and your cat doesn’t need to go outside for a walk.
Maybe… or maybe cat owners are just too weakened by allergies to do anything but lie on the couch and hope the neighbor’s dog won’t smell their fear.
And one last fun link, the source for this morning’s title: Depressed Goat Is Reunited With His Burro Best Friend
Mr. G, a goat, and Jellybean, a burro, were both rescued from the squalor of a hoarder’s home earlier this year and were, for the first time in their lives, separated to live in different animal sanctuaries. The separation left Mr. G depressed and he didn’t move or eat for six days. Until he was reunited with his best friend.
After Mr. G and Jellybean were rescued, each was taken in by different animal sanctuaries 14 hours apart. Mr G. became depressed in his new home without his lifelong friend, refusing to leave his stall or eat.
That’s when the staff of Animal Place in Grass Valley, Ca. decided that the two needed to be together again. They arranged to have Jellybean transported and from the moment Mr. G heard his burro buddy being unloaded, he immediately perked up.
Watch that video and have a wonderful lovely day!
Friday Reads
Posted: September 20, 2013 Filed under: just because | Tags: chemical weapons, hunger in the US, Neanderthal diets, Pope Francis, Republicans, SNAP, Syria 13 Comments
Good Morning!
Well, House Republicans did in fact vote to cut SNAP by $40 Billion. They seem to think that it’s easy to find a job in country with a persistent unemployment rate about 7.5%.
Right now, there are roughly 47.7 million Americans on food stamps — a number that swelled during the recession and has only recently started to decline.
The House GOP bill would kick about 3.8 million people off the food-stamp rolls over the course of the upcoming fiscal year that begins in October. That includes 1.7 million unemployed, childless adults aged 18-50. It also includes another 2.1 million families and seniors who have incomes just slightly above the federal food-stamp limits. (In recent years, states have been able to extend food-stamp aid to these households.)
Thereafter, the House GOP bill would reduce the rolls by about 2.8 million people each year compared with current law.
Check the graphic at Wonk Blog for the details on how they intend to get folks out of SNAP eligibility keeping in mind that about 1/2 of the folks on SNAP are children and an additional good portion are elderly on limited incomes that were already impacted by cuts in meals on wheels.
I’m not Catholic so the actual things that Popes say has no impact on my personal faith. I also wasn’t raised Catholic so I have no nostalgia or lingering scars or good memories from the growing up Catholic experience that I hear about from so many friends. I really don’t have many kind things to say about Popes in general since most of them recently have made life very difficult for women and gays and have been shown to enable some pretty bad stuff in their priesthood. Will this new Pope usher in a new opinion from me and others? Will he be able to reach out to folks that feel an attachment to the church but a searing disappointment in some of its recent actions and policies?
Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic church on Thursday with the publication of his remarks that the church had grown “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he had chosen not to talk about those issues despite recriminations from critics.
His surprising comments came in a lengthy interview in which he criticized the church for putting dogma before love, and for prioritizing moral doctrines over serving the poor and marginalized. He articulated his vision of an inclusive church, a “home for all” — which is a striking contrast with his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, the doctrinal defender who envisioned a smaller, purer church.
Francis told the interviewer, a fellow Jesuit: “It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”
The pope’s interview did not change church doctrine or policies, but it instantly changed its tone. His words evoked gratitude and hope from many liberal Catholics who had felt left out in the cold during the papacies of Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II, which together lasted 35 years. Some lapsed Catholics suggested on social media a return to the church, and leaders of gay rights and gay Catholic groups called on bishops to abandon their fight against gay marriage.
But it left conservative and traditionalist Catholics, and those who have devoted themselves to the struggles against abortion, gay marriage and artificial contraception, on the defensive, though some cast it as nothing new.
That part of the Pope’s interview was the most newsworthy. However, the part about the Pope’s personal faith was perhaps the most interesting to me. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve heard a church leader actually sound like he’s gotten in touch with the Jesus I remember reading about in the Bible as a kid. This Pope appears to actually like women for a change. The analysis is by Andrew Sullivan of The Dish.
This is the core message of the Second Vatican Council that John Paul II and Benedict XVI did their utmost to turn back in favor of papal authority. The hierarchy is not the whole church, just a part of it, in community with all the faithful. And he uses the example of the Blessed Virgin to buttress his point:
This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, you ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people. In turn, Mary loved Jesus with the heart of the people, as we read in the Magnificat. We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.
And how we live is the only true expression of what we believe. Here is the rebuke to the theocons and their project:
If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.
And where is real faith?
I see the holiness in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but have a smile on their faces because they served the Lord, the sisters who work hard and live a hidden sanctity. This is for me the common sanctity. I often associate sanctity with patience: not only patience as hypomoné [the New Testament Greek word], taking charge of the events and circumstances of life, but also as a constancy in going forward, day by day. This is the sanctity of the militant church also mentioned by St. Ignatius. This was the sanctity of my parents: my dad, my mom, my grandmother Rosa who loved me so much. In my breviary I have the last will of my grandmother Rosa, and I read it often. For me it is like a prayer. She is a saint who has suffered so much, also spiritually, and yet always went forward with courage.
While many journalists appear to be disappointed by the lack of yet another US intervention in the Middle East, most Americans are relieved. What does this new diplomatic effort between the US and Russia on Syrian Chemical Weapons mean for similar efforts in the future?
It is important not so much for what it could mean on the ground – which remains to be seen as inspectors begin to flow into Syria and, we hope, chemical-weapons stockpiles begin to be destroyed. Rather, the agreement’s main significance consists in the fact that it was struck at all: US Secretary of State John Kerry met with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva, that most traditional of diplomatic venues, and cut a deal on an issue of intense mutual interest.
In the days, weeks, and months ahead, the arrangements to remove chemical weapons from Syria will, one hopes, begin a new era in which the US and Russia work together on other pressing global issues as well. A cooperative US-Russia relationship is essential if the international system, now almost dysfunctional, is to work properly in the future.
The agreement on Syria could accomplish something else: Americans might recognize that, lo and behold, there are other ways to solve problems than by dropping bombs. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s clumsy foray into the American debate infuriated many Americans (including me), but it was certainly a teachable moment. Many outside the US thought it was high time that someone offered America a taste of its own paternalism – and even better that that someone was Putin, a politician who has, to put it gently, his own set of foibles.
So Americans might want to tone down their anti-Putin rhetoric. As a practical matter, Putin certainly does not seem to be suffering any adverse domestic political consequences from his bashing in the US. More broadly, America’s supply of moralistic – and even churlish – advice to the rest of the world has greatly exceeded international demand for it. And its willingness to engage militarily as an early step, rather than as a last resort, has alienated many around the world. No amount of “Muslim outreach” and other public diplomacy alone will change that.
Support for insurgencies is a case in point. Many countries – Syria qualifies as a poster child in this regard – suffer under miserable, brutal governments. But backing an armed rebellion is a major step, especially when the rebels whom one is backing have, as in Syria, started something that they may not be able to finish.
This is not to say that the US should never support insurgencies against established governments; but doing so is almost always a lonely affair, without any realistic expectation of enlisting many partners in the process. Such policy choices should be made rarely, and with a clear understanding that support for the violent overthrow of a government is not very popular around the world.
We are learning more and more about Neanderthals and how they may have been a lot more sophisticated than previously thought. It was thought they may not have been smart enough to figure out how to fish. However, recent research shows they had fish in their diets.
It has been thought that the varied diet of modern humans may have contributed to an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals, who were thought to have survived on eating large, herbivorous mammals. But an international team of scientists has been working together at a cave in the Caucasus Mountains, where they have foundevidence that suggests Neanderthals ate fish. To rule out the possibility that the large salmon in the cave had been eaten by the cave bears and cave lions that were also found there, the bones of the large predators were analyzed. The results show that the cave bears were vegetarian, and that the cave lions ate land-dwelling herbivores. “This study provides indirect support to the idea that Middle Palaeolithic Hominins, probably Neanderthals, were able to consume fish when it was available, and that therefore, the prey choice of Neanderthals and modern humans was not fundamentally different,” explained Hervé Bocherens of the University of Tübingen.
It seems that the more that Homo Sapiens try to make themselves exceptional, the more we find out that we are not.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads
Posted: January 25, 2013 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | Tags: abortion rights, Bobby "Crazy" Jindal, dung balls, dung beetles, Filibuster Reform, Mary Jo White, rape, Reid, Republicans, SEC, wimp 46 Comments
Good
Morning!
I really don’t intend this to be a post about Republican crazy but we’re going to start out with that subject. Let’s hope this post morphs into something else by the time I’m done.
Apparently it took a female Republican to come up with the most vicious way to punish women who had the audacity to get themselves raped.
Wednesday, state representative Cathrynn Brown of New Mexico introduced a bill whose sheer audacity makes Todd Akins look as harmless as an ill-informed teenager groping his way through puberty.
The proposed legislation, House Bill 206, would make it illegal for a woman to have an abortion after being raped because the fetus is evidence of the crime. A women who does choose to have an abortion would be charged with the third-degree felony of “tampering with evidence,” which carries up to a three year prison sentence in New Mexico.
As the bill states:
“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.
In other words, Brown just said to rape victims: give birth to this baby or you’ll go to jail.
Crazy Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal says the “GOP is a populist party’ and is the party of the middle class. Whoa, something in that exorcism must be causing him to have some kind of flash back. Here’s Tiger Beat on the Potomac:
“We must quit ‘big,’” he said. “We are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes or big anything. We must not be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys … We are the party whose ideas will help the middle class, and help more folks join the middle class.”
He called repeatedly for a reorienting of the party’s focus from the Beltway to state capitols.
“We believe in planting the seeds of growth in the fertile soil of your economy, where you live, where you work, invest, and dream, not in the barren concrete of Washington,” he said. “If it’s worth doing, block grant it to the states. If it’s something you don’t trust the states to do, then maybe Washington shouldn’t do it at all. We believe solving problems closer to home should always be our first, not last, option.”
Well, he did explain one of the ways he’s made everything worse down here along with that call out to states being able to do what ever they want which sounds remarkably like returning reinstating Jim Crow and expanding Jane Crow.
The Louisiana governor suggested “re-thinking nearly every social program in Washington” in a speech to members of the Republican National Committee gathered here.
“If any rational human being were to create our government anew, today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government workers,” he said, according to a copy of the speech obtained in advance by POLITICO. “We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.”
I’ve been caught in one of his website hells as well as the result of his passion for getting rid of every service that a government more efficiently provides. Things have been replaced by endless phone trees and decidedly unhelpful websites. It ain’t pretty or compassionate. It’s more like being thrown into Somalia.
So, here’s a good time to talk about some interesting facts about Dung Beetles. This is from the National Geographic which should send out a crew to figure out if there’s any sign of intelligent life in Republican held state houses through out the country. Dung Beetles evidently have a keener sense of the right way to go than Republicans as they navigate via the Milky Way.
Talk about star power—a new study shows that dung beetles navigate via the Milky Way, the first known species to do so in the animal kingdom.
The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa.
“This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” said
study co-author Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.
Speaking of moving balls of dung around, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has wimped out on Filibuster reform.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have come to a deal on filibuster reform. The deal is this: The filibuster will not be reformed. But the way the Senate moves to consider new legislation and most nominees will be. Here’s an explanation from Beltway Bob errrr Ezra Klein.
What will be reform
ed is how the Senate moves to consider new legislation, the process by which all nominees — except Cabinet-level appointments and Supreme Court nominations — are considered, and the number of times the filibuster can be used against a conference report. You can read the full text of the compromise, which was sent out to Senate offices this morning, here (pdf).
But even those reforms don’t go as far as they might. Take the changes to the motion to proceed, by which the Senate moves to consider a new bill. Reid seemed genuinely outraged over the way the process has bogged down in recent years.
“What the Republicans have done is turn the motion to proceed on its head,” he argued. “It was originally set up to allow somebody to take a look at a piece of legislation. What the Republicans have done is they simply don’t allow me to get on the bill. I want to go to it on a Monday, they make me file cloture, that takes till Tuesday. Then it takes two days for the cloture vote to ‘ripen,’ so now it’s Thursday, and even if I get 60 votes, they still have 30 hours to twiddle their thumbs, pick their nose, do whatever they want. So, I’m not on the bill by the weekend, and in reality, that means next Monday or Tuesday.”
But the deal Reid struck with McConnell doesn’t end the filibuster against the motion to proceed. Rather, it creates two new pathways for moving to a new bill. In one, the majority leader can, with the agreement of the minority leader and seven senators from each party, sidestep the filibuster when moving to a new bill. In the other, the majority leader can short-circuit the filibuster against moving to a new bill so long as he allows the minority party to offer two germane amendments. Note that in all cases, the minority can still filibuster the bill itself.
Mary Jo White has been appointed to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by President Barack Obama.
Currently the head of litigation at Debevoise & Plimpton, a private law firm, Ms White will add a female voice to Mr Obama’s second-term team, which is so far dominated by men. More importantly, the former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York has experience policing Wall Street, which fell under her jurisdiction. Mr Obama has slammed bankers for their role in the financial crisis and ensuing recession. The choice of Ms White seems to signal his resolve in getting tough with the banks.The appointment is not without controversy. Ms White has benefited from the revolving door between public service and private practice. In the aftermath of the crisis, financial firms sought the assistance of former regulators with strong ties to the government. In a scathing article on Bloomberg‘s website, Jonathan Weil notes that Ms White participated in the defence of many people and institutions at the heart of the financial collapse. In October 2008 she was cited in a critical report by the SEC’s inspector general for receiving “relevant information” that was not publicly available. Some will ask whether she is truly a poacher turned gamekeeper or simply setting herself up for another lucrative turn through the revolving door.Mr Obama, for one, is convinced he is getting the “tough-as-nails prosecutor”. By putting Ms White at the SEC, he has suggested that the agency’s priority is enforcement. But a bigger challenge may come from the sprawling Dodd-Frank legislation, and its many gaps and contradictions. Much of the next chairman’s time should be devoted to rethinking how America’s capital markets are structured, and deciding how that vision will be translated into the numerous rules the SEC is required to write under Dodd-Frank’s sloppy mandates. Ms White, in other words, has a big job ahead of her.
Well, today’s post sorta took an interesting turn didn’t it? It went from crazy Republicans to wimpy Democrats with one little mention of the only smart and honest shit pusher in between. Well, at least the pictures are fun to look at.
What’s on your blogging and reading list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
grayslady
Minkoff Minx
mablue2
NW Luna
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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