No more for me thanks. I have to denigrate his driving.
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New Yorker Cartoon: Driving Lesson
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New Yorker Cartoon: Creator's Remorse
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It has been said that some planets are the corresponding hells of other planets.
In my personal attempt to merge Catholic Christianity and Buddhism
I believe that when you die and go to purgatory, you go to earth.
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New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, September 28, 2014
Throw him back son. We'll have to eat the rich some day, but not while there's fish in the sea.
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First Woman Nobel Laureate On Curiosity Wonder & The Spirit Of Adventure In Science
Marie Curie on Curiosity, Wonder, and the Spirit of Adventure in Science
by Maria PopovaA short manifesto for the vitalizing power of discovery.
“Few persons contributed more to the general welfare of mankind and to the advancement of science than the modest, self-effacing woman whom the world knew as Mme. Curie.” So read the obituary for Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to date to win a Nobel in two different sciences, published the day after her death in 1934. Three years later, her younger daughter, Eve Curie Labouisse, captured her mother’s spirit and enduring legacy in Madame Curie: A Biography (public library).Among the ample anecdotes of the great scientist’s life and the many direct quotations of her humbly stated yet fiercely upheld convictions is one particularly poignant passage that speaks to the immutable resonance between science and wonder, the inextinguishable causal relationship between childhood’s innate curiosity and humanity’s greatest feats of discovery. Eve Curie quotes her mother, adding to history’s greatest definitions of science:
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty.Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.
Complement with this excellent 1964 meditation on what children can teach us about risk, failure, and discovery, then revisit artist Lauren Redniss’s sublimeillustrated cyanotype biography of Curie, one of the best art books of 2011.
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ: "Research Is Adoration"
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"How We Think" By John Dewey. Assertion, Guess, Opinion And Testing Belief
John Dewey on the True Purpose of Education and How to Harness the Power of Our Natural Curiosity
by Maria Popova“While it is not the business of education … to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions.”
“Do not feel absolutely certain of anything,”philosopher Bertrand Russell instructed in the first of his ten timeless commandments of teaching and learning in 1951. And yet formal education, today as much as then, is for the most part a toxic byproduct of industrialismbased on the blind acquisition of certainty and the demolition of the “thoroughly conscious ignorance” that gives rise to real progress, both personal and cultural. To fuel the internal engine of learning is a lifelong journey we are left to steer on our own as the education system continues to flounder. The quest to repair that broken system has never been addressed with more urgency and passion than it is today, and yet one of the most intelligent and timely takes on it comes from more than a century ago.
In How We Think (free download; public library) — his timelessly stimulating 1910 treatise on the art of reflection and fruitful curiosity — John Dewey, one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century, distills the purpose and ideals of education with remarkable clarity and conviction. The enactment of these ideals today would produce nothing less than a radical, sorely needed transformation of our broken education system.
Dewey champions the role of education in equipping us with the sort of critical thinking necessary for questioning authority, deconditioning our “mental bad habits,” and dispelling false beliefs and illusory ideas bequeathed to us by society:
Causes of bad mental habits are social as well as inborn… Over and above the sources of misbelief that reside in the natural tendencies of the individual (like those toward hasty and too far-reaching conclusions), social conditions tend to instigate and confirm wrong habits of thinking by authority, by conscious instruction, and by the even more insidious half-conscious influences of language, imitation, sympathy, and suggestion. Education has accordingly not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind—its rashness, presumption, and preference of what chimes with self-interest to objective evidence — but also to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages. When social life in general has become more reasonable, more imbued with rational conviction, and less moved by stiff authority and blind passion, educational agencies may be more positive and constructive than at present, for they will work in harmony with the educative influence exercised willy-nilly by other social surroundings upon an individual’s habits of thought and belief.
While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves. No matter how much an individual knows as a matter of hearsay and information, if he has not attitudes and habits of this sort, he is not intellectually educated. He lacks the rudiments of mental discipline. And since these habits are not a gift of nature (no matter how strong the aptitude for acquiring them); since, moreover, the casual circumstances of the natural and social environment are not enough to compel their acquisition, the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. The formation of these habits is the Training of Mind.
And yet this training, Dewey is careful to point out, isn’t a one-size-fits-all operation but, rather, should be tailored to finding each student’s element and harnessing his or her natural ability:
The very importance of thought for life makes necessary its control by education because of its natural tendency to go astray, and because social influences exist that tend to form habits of thought leading to inadequate and erroneous beliefs. Training must, however, be itself based upon the natural tendencies — that is, it must find its point of departure in them. A being who could not think without training could never be trained to think; one may have to learn to thinkwellthink. Training, in short, must fall back upon the prior and independent existence of natural powers; it is concerned with their proper direction, not with creating them.
Alan: Most "educated" people confuse education with instruction. "Education" - deriving from the Latin "ex ducare" - "leads out of" preemptive concern with individual good to re-focus attention on The Common Good. In a word, "education" is social. On the other hand, "instruction" - from the Latin "in struire" -- builds facts and skill-sets"into" atomistic individuals, enabling them to make their own way in private worlds. "Instruction" is essentially monadic and isolating. Without education, instruction (the planet's default learning method) undermines The Common Good, teaching people to treat the world as a money mine to be exploited like 49-ers staking claims to private land tracts used for personal advantage. The goals charted by education and instruction are essentially antipodal although the latter can -- and should -- be used in service to the former.
Dewey makes an enormously important point — one that Adrienne Rich would come to echo decades later in her brilliant commencement address on why an education is something you claim, not something you get — arguing that “the one taught must take the initiative”:
Teaching and learning are correlative or corresponding processes, as much so as selling and buying. One might as well say he has sold when no one has bought, as to say that he has taught when no one has learned. And in the educational transaction, the initiative lies with the learner even more than in commerce it lies with the buyer. If an individual can learn to think only in the sense of learning to employ more economically and effectively powers he already possesses, even more truly one can teach others to think only in the sense of appealing to and fostering powers already active in them. Effective appeal of this kind is impossible unless the teacher has an insight into existing habits and tendencies, the natural resources with which he has to ally himself.
Two of our most important and most universal natural faculties essential for learning are curiosity and a “desire for fullness of experience.” Dewey writes:
The curious mind is constantly alert and exploring, seeking material for thought, as a vigorous and healthy body is on the qui vive for nutriment. Eagerness for experience, for new and varied contacts, is found where wonder is found. Such curiosity is the only sure guarantee of the acquisition of the primary facts upon which inference must base itself.
He later adds:
To the open mind, nature and social experience are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further.
Matthew Chapter 6
Do Not Worry
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
Our ability to cultivate the powers of curiosity and reap its fruits, however, is predicated on our fragile willingness to embrace uncertainty and welcome the unknown. Lamenting “the open-minded and flexible wonder of childhood and of the ease with which this endowment is lost,” Dewey considers the various channels of this loss and how education, at its best, can rekindle curiosity:
If germinating powers are not used and cultivated at the right moment, they tend to be transitory, to die out, or to wane in intensity. This general law is peculiarly true of sensitiveness to what is uncertain and questionable; in a few people, intellectual curiosity is so insatiable that nothing will discourage it, but in most its edge is easily dulled and blunted.[...]Some lose it in indifference or carelessness; others in a frivolous flippancy; many escape these evils only to become incased in a hard dogmatism which is equally fatal to the spirit of wonder. Some are so taken up with routine as to be inaccessible to new facts and problems. Others retain curiosity only with reference to what concerns their personal advantage in their chosen career. With many, curiosity is arrested on the plane of interest in local gossip and in the fortunes of their neighbors; indeed, so usual is this result that very often the first association with the word curiosity is a prying inquisitiveness into other people’s business. With respect then to curiosity, the teacher has usually more to learn than to teach. Rarely can he aspire to the office of kindling or even increasing it. His task is rather to keep alive the sacred spark of wonder and to fan the flame that already glows. His problem is to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming blasé from overexcitement, wooden from routine, fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.
Illustration from 'My Teacher Is a Monster' by Peter Brown. Click image for more.
Pupils who in matters of ordinary practical experience have a ready and acute perception of the difference between the significant and the meaningless, often reach in school subjects a point where all things seem equally important or equally unimportant; where one thing is just as likely to be true as another, and where intellectual effort is expended not in discriminating between things, but in trying to make verbal connections among words.[...]The depth to which a sense of the problem, of the difficulty, sinks, determines the quality of the thinking that follows; and any habit of teaching which encourages the pupil for the sake of a successful recitation or of a display of memorized information to glide over the thin ice of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind training.
In the remainder of How We Think, an immeasurably lucid and necessary read in its entirety, Dewey goes on to explore the most reliable strategies for cultivating the essential “mental discipline” of intellectual development and self-expansion, both in public formal education and in our private journeys of lifelong learning. Download it as a free ebook here, then revisit Kio Stark’s modern manifesto for lifelong learning beyond the classroom.
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How Burmese Elephants Helped Defeat the Japanese in World War II
Taking cues from the mahout on its back, a domesticated elephant uses its trunk to move a heavy teak log.
A British "elephant whisperer" and his best beloved helpers waged guerrilla warfare and carried refugees to safety.
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 28, 2014
James Howard "Billy" Williams, the son of a mining engineer from Cornwall, in England, seems to have stepped straight out of the pages of The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY RANDOM HOUSE
In 1942, when the Japanese invaded Burma, Williams joined a British Special Forces unit that specialized in guerrilla warfare. Deep in the jungle, his elephant company built bridges and ferried weapons and supplies. Cornered by the Japanese, they faced their most daunting test, an epic trek across several mountain ranges to India—and safety.Employed as a forest manager with a British teak company in colonial Burma, he was captivated by the strength, the intelligence, and even the sense of humor of the elephants used to haul timber.
Vicki Constantine Croke, author of Elephant Company, talks about how "Elephant Bill" and his troop of pachyderms scaled a 300-foot cliff, how the logging industry in modern-day Myanmar is helping conserve the Asian elephant, and why she believes that elephants make us better people.
James Howard "Billy" Williams is a fascinating—and largely forgotten—historical figure. What drew you to tell his story?
For me it was the elephants. As a little girl, I loved the Jungle Books—I loved stories about people with a deep and authentic connection to animals, and I haven't changed. I write about animals, and I came across a book about elephants from the University of Chicago Press. In it there was a little black-and-white illustration, showing a man sitting on top of an elephant, high up on a cliff overlooking a valley. The caption said: "J. H. Williams, helping refugees escape Burma in WWII."
I was very intrigued, so I began to do some research. He had written several memoirs, and his wife wrote a memoir. So I could find out a lot about him right away. I immediately liked him, and what I liked about him was his connection to the elephants. He said the relationship between man and elephants is nine-tenths love.
Tell us a little bit about his story.
I'm always interested in what makes someone who they are. From the time he was a child, he said, "My way has always been the way of animals." What is unique is that he just didn't love them. He wanted to see the world through their eyes—that was always his goal. That's true love: When you want to see the perspective of the person or animal you love.
He grew up in Cornwall, in England, and was always curious about wild animals. By observing wrens, for instance, he could tell where they would nest. He understood what they looked for in a nest. He could put his fingers down into the grass and feel a little nest with eggs in it just from intuiting where they would nest.
He was in World War I, serving in the Middle East and Afghanistan. He hardly ever spoke of the war, though clearly he was deeply affected by it. His solution was to go as far away from England and Western civilization as he could. So in 1920 he accepted a job with the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation, as one of the forest assistants.
He would go from elephant camp to elephant camp. He became a really gifted elephant doctor and elephant trainer. Elephants became his life mission. By the time he left Burma, he knew a thousand elephants by name—something I find really enviable.
The hero of this tale is the magnificent Bandoola. Introduce us.
Bandoola is the great hero, and I am in love with him. He was a large Asian elephant who was the same exact age as Billy Williams. I think of them as twins: one elephant, one human. Bandoola was nine feet at the shoulders. His skin wasn't just gray; it was lavender, and he had pink freckling against his ears and trunk and cheeks. His tusks were like the arms of a Burmese dancing girl. So he had a kind of rakish appearance.
Bandoola was also different from all the other elephants. The others had been trained by breaking them. Bandoola had been trained by a master mahout named Po Toke in a very different way. From the time he was just a young elephant, he was gentled rather than broken by Po Toke.
That meant that when Billy Williams met him, Bandoola had no scars. Elephants are hugely intelligent; they have great social sophistication, and Bandoola was a wise elephant. He also had a sense of humor, something that was important to Billy Williams.
At an air base in India in early 1945, an elephant loads a gasoline drum into a military supply plane with the Air Transport Command’s Indo-China Division, bound for China via Burma.
PHOTOGRAPH BY AP
One of the stories that people always told was that he would bring large logs right up to the creek. But as he got to the bank of the creek, instead of just throwing the log in, he would sometimes pretend that he couldn't push it any farther. He would pantomime using all of his strength while not being able to move it another inch.
His "oozie," or rider, would say: Come on, Bandoola! I know you can do it! Stop fooling around; throw the log in!
So when Bandoola was good and ready, he would flick the log in with his trunk, like it was a twig. Those who knew Bandoola swore they could see him laugh after he did that. And having been around elephants, they do have a sense of humor, and you can see in their eye and their facial expression when they think something is funny.
The relationship between mahout and elephant seems much like that between horse and rider, albeit a much longer-lived relationship. Talk about that emotional and spiritual connection between elephants and people like James Howard Williams.
To me, it's magical. When Williams first met Bandoola, he felt his life had changed. He'd already met many elephants, and he was in love with them as a species. But he swore that when he first touched Bandoola, putting his palm against Bandoola's flesh, he felt something pass between them, and that this elephant would know him better than any other human.
He learned largely from the mahouts. Most of his contemporaries used Western texts about elephant behavior and elephant care. It was primitive. They treated them with brandy or allspice or roasted onions. Williams wanted to work with whatever was actually successful. He sensed the mahouts knew what they were talking about. They grew up with the elephants from the time they were boys. It was always kept in the family. They would work with their fathers who were mahouts. So they were incredibly intuitive about these animals. And they always loved their own elephant, no matter if their own particular elephant was the handsomest and largest or the smallest and ugliest. They adored them and knew the habits and the minds and hearts of their own elephants. The mahouts saw these animals as worthy of the kind of understanding you would have with a fellow human being. It was a beautiful thing. And Williams wanted to learn about that kind of understanding.
Williams was a member of a British wartime organization, which Ian Fleming was connected with: Special Operations Executive (SOE).What was it?
When the Second World War started, Billy Williams knew he could be of help. And he knew his elephants could be. The British had been driven out of Burma—they were in India planning a comeback. Williams's intelligence was of huge value. He was like a walking map of the western part of Burma.
But he didn't want to be sitting in India giving information. He wanted to be back over the border, using his elephants to help the war effort. The only way he could go back in was with Force 136, which was a cover name for SOE. These were the guys who used whatever means necessary, who were able to move without a lot of troops, stay under the radar, and be able to infiltrate behind enemy lines. At the peak of the campaign, he had more than 1,600 elephants and their riders and mahouts under his command.
dThe French enlisted these elephants to carry soldiers and supplies into the jungles of Laos and Cambodia in 1950 in their fight against the Red Guerrillas of Ho Chi Minh.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMAN/CORBIS
Williams wrote that his Burmese mahout Po Toke was "my master in the study of elephants and my most trusted assistant in their management." Tell us about Po Toke.
He's a fascinating guy, but we only know him through the eyes of Billy Williams. He didn't leave a record of his own life, which is unfortunate. What's particularly interesting is he's about 15 years older than Billy Williams, and for him to have had this notion of gentling elephants is a fascinating one, and he did it at his own peril. At the time that he was working as a mahout in logging camps, he came up with this idea of being gentle to the young ones and raising them that way.
There was a high mortality rate among the babies. The females, whether they were pregnant or had a baby, were not treated any differently. They had to go to work every day as any elephant did. Po Toke took special care of Ma Shwe, Bandoola's mother, by taking her out of the heaviest work and giving her rest breaks. He was risking his own job. But that's what he did to train Bandoola in a way that had never been done before.
In one of the most moving scenes in the book, Bandoola and the other elephants build an "elephant stairway" to escape the Japanese.
It is remarkable. What happened is that Williams had to take his elephants away from the fighting to keep them safe, because they were so important. His plan was to go over the border into Assam, in India. On top of that, he was asked at the last minute to bring away a group of 64 Ghurka women and children who had been held by the Japanese. Of course he agreed to do that, even though it would probably hamstring his effort.
They had a long way to go over five mountain ranges to reach safety. Battles were breaking out all around. The route they were planning to take was swarming with Japanese, and they couldn't go out that way. Partway into their trip they came to a cliff face. Williams could hear enemy fire. They couldn't go back toward the Japanese. They had to get up and over this cliff. But the cliff face is sheer.
So in this remarkable moment, the whole group decides that, as there are a couple of steps in the cliff and the stone is porous, to cut some other stones, remove vegetation on the ledges, and make an elephant stairway. It was a crazy idea. But they had no other choice. So they spent several days cutting out vegetation to create stairs that would be wide enough for an elephant's foot. They were going to march all 53 elephants up this 270-foot cliff face, led by Bandoola.
For Williams, this put to the test his 25 years of working with elephants. He had always said how miraculous they were, but he wasn't sure whether they'd be able to do something like this. But Bandoola led the whole train of elephants, one by one, up steps that were hardly wider than an elephant's foot. It took three hours for each elephant to climb from base to top. Williams was at the top when Bandoola made it up.
He later said that it was the validation of his life's work. He couldn't believe that they'd been able to do something they'd never been asked to do before in their lives. If one elephant fell, it would wipe out all the other elephants and the people behind them. But every elephant made it up to the top.
Williams helped redesign how elephants are trained for the teak industry, using humane methods. What is the state of the teak industry today? Are elephants still used in the jungles of Myanmar?
Elephants are still being used in logging. I have spoken to several conservationists studying elephants, and it's interesting that there is general disagreement about the status of the elephants and what the future should be.
Everybody agrees that part of the reason Burma has the second largest population of Asian elephants in the world is because they've been so important to the economy through logging. But the concern now is that as the country opens up and large corporations start coming in, the elephants are going to be put out of work.
Many elephants in India are literally begging with their mahouts on the street for money and food. So there's a huge concern how this time of transition will affect Myanmar's elephant population.
This past June National Geographic reported that the giant tuskerSatao, one of Kenya's most adored elephants, had been killed by poachers for his ivory. How did that killing affect you?
Even you just saying it to me now makes my heart drop. It's so sad. Billy Williams thought of these elephants like human beings. And I feel the same way. He said during World War II that when they were wounded by bullets or by leaking battery acid from the radios they carried on their backs, it was the same to him as it would have been with human soldiers. It really broke his heart. Elephants are capable of such intelligence and intense emotion toward one another. They live lives as long as ours. And to see them killed, for what is basically their teeth, is heartbreaking.
What do you think makes elephants so special?
The more we know about them, the more there is to respect and love. This is one of the great things about Billy Williams's story. As long ago as 1920, he saw the things scientists have validated today: their intelligence, their sense of humor. They can recognize themselves in a mirror and use rudimentary tools. They have shown many of the traits we think of as uniquely human, including recognition of death. They are as endlessly intriguing as human beings.
You say, at one point, that elephants change people's lives. How has writing about elephants changed you?
I hope that elephants have made me a better person, as they made Billy Williams a better person. He said that he learned more about courage and trust from elephants than he did from human beings. One of the lessons I took away from this is the concept of trust. You only trust someone who's strong enough to deserve your trust, someone you can rely on. Trust is something you earn from someone by having a backbone-which elephants certainly do!
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Cory Booker On Religion - Theory And Practice
Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/08/yeshua-excoriates-fellow-pharisees-woe.html
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The urge to invoke damnation is an attempt to hurt others more than you hurt yourself
"Fire and brimstone" is hatred's "Final Solution."
Philosophically, it is kin to the last "Final Solution."
Its perpetrators are unwitting bedfellows.
The urge to invoke damnation is an attempt to hurt others more than you hurt yourself
"Fire and brimstone" is hatred's "Final Solution."
Philosophically, it is kin to the last "Final Solution."
Its perpetrators are unwitting bedfellows.
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Women Whistle Blowers And The Great Recession
A fertilized egg attaches to the endometrium.
Dear Ger,
I hope you and Betsy had a great time in Italy!
Any memorable anecdotes?
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I think you'll be fascinated by today's "This American Life."
If the title sounds boring, rest assured it is not.
Federal Reserve Bank Investigator Carmen Segarra Fired For Holding Banks Responsible
Admitting that life is a mixed bag, with pros and cons scattered at snaggle-tooth random, I am increasingly struck by the bleak outcomes that inevitably emerge from "toe-the-line, don't-rock-the-boat, let's-get-along incrementalism."
Most of the time, cautious incrementalism "works" - more or less.
After all, tedium and stability are joined at the hip.
Even so, incrementalism cannot prevent The Big Disasters.
Pressure builds and The System blows.
"Republican Rule And Economic Disaster: A Lockstep Relationship"
My working hypothesis is that cautious incrementalism causes these catastrophes.
Or, perhaps it is more to the point that incrementalism fails to prevent catastrophe.
In any event, it is an indispensable factor. A partner in the dance.
A good companion piece to "Carmen Segarra" is Frontline's "The Warning." It describes another woman, Brooksley Born, who sounded the alarm when The Great Recession was still an embryo.
In a tawdry escapade best described as financial thuggery, "The Big Boys" -- Greenspan, Clinton, Rubin, Geithner, Summers -- jammed Born's tongue down her throat.
Soft core economic porn.
Soft core economic porn.
Here is the link to the Frontline documentary: http://www.pbs.
And here is the Frontline transcript: http://www.pbs.
Recently, I summarized my frustrations in a blog post entitled:
Finally! Wall Street Goes On Trial: Holding The 0.1% Responsible For The Shithole
Love
Alan
PS If it was you who recently subscribed me to St. Anthony's Messenger, thanks! I've enjoyed the Messenger since Dad signed us up in childhood and am happy to be back in the loop.
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Tom Toles Cartoon: Global Warming
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Paul Krugman: "The Invisible Rich" (And The Invisibility Of American Inequality)
Our invisible rich. "I don’t think the poor are invisible today, even though you sometimes hear assertions that they aren’t really living in poverty — hey, some of them have Xboxes! Instead, these days it’s the rich who are invisible. But wait — isn’t half our TV programming devoted to breathless portrayal of the real or imagined lifestyles of the rich and fatuous? Yes, but that’s celebrity culture, and it doesn’t mean that the public has a good sense either of who the rich are or of how much money they make. In fact, most Americans have no idea just how unequal our society has become." Paul Krugman in The New York Times
Benefits of economic expansion are increasingly going to the richest Americans. Neil Irwin in The New York Times.
"Plutocracy Triumphant"Cartoon Compendium
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"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Pie. They're Taking It All"
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"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Pie. They're Taking It All"
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"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
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Ebola: Why Does God Allow A Disease That Denies Dying Children Human Touch?
"Theological Implications Of Ebola: Praying For A Cure? Creating A Scientific Cure?"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/theological-implications-of-ebola.html
Alan: My own practice of Christianity does not require a providential God who always answers our prayers.
St. Teresa of Avila's had this to say on the matter: "There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."
However, as the blackguardly stupidity of so many Christian fundamentalists increasingly tarnishes Christianity's "public face," I find myself troubled by this question: "What omnipotent, loving God would permit a disease whose dying victims -- especially child victims -- cannot be comforted by human touch?"
"The Bible Belt Is Christianity's Worst Enemy"
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"John Ford, John Wayne, Aquinas And Theosis"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/more-on-theosis.html
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"Since God Doesn't Heal Amputees, Humankind Will"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/since-god-cant-heal-amputees-mankind.html
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"Aquinas, St. Symeon The New Theologian And Their Spiritual Kin"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/08/aquinas-stsymeon-new-theologian-and.html
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In fight against Ebola, U.S. troops up against math. "The American military effort against history's deadliest Ebola outbreak is taking shape in West Africa, but concerns are mounting that the pace isn't fast enough to check a virus that is spreading at a terrifying clip....They will level swampy grassland, unload supplies and build tents, then train thousands of nurses from Sierra Leone and Liberia to treat Ebola. The epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone will likely worsen until 70% of Ebola patients can find room in a treatment center or other setting where they can't transmit the disease to others, the CDC said. Currently, just 18% do so, it said." Drew Hinshaw and Betsy McKay in The Wall Street Journal.
Explainer: Fighting Ebola with data, satellites and drones. Patrick Tucker in Defense One.
Interview: Meet Nancy Powell, America's new top Ebola fighter. Abby Haglage in The Daily Beast.
What's behind that magic 70 percent number? "Seventy percent is a number full of hope and dread....Right now, only about 18 percent of Ebola patients in Liberia are being isolated. Each day the epidemic persists makes 70 percent more difficult to reach....For every 30-day delay, the peak number of new daily cases triples, according to a model of the disease created by the CDC....Despite its reputation as a killer, Ebola isn’t very good at reproducing itself. The virus is spread through body fluids, not air, and it often kills patients before they have a chance to spread the disease widely. When 70 percent of patients are isolated, the disease no longer spreads fast enough to replace dying or recovering patients. It burns itself out." Tom Randall in Bloomberg.
Related: Ebola's deadly math. Peter Coy in Bloomberg Businessweek.
Another barrier: Denial. "When stories circulate about a seemingly irrational response to disease, it's easy to dismiss the reaction as a bizarre denial of reality. But is it so hard to understand? In fact, attributing Ebola deaths to a curse is not as unreasonable as it might first seem....And we all are susceptible....Here in the United States, some parents opt against vaccinating their children....Some of the reaction in Ebola-affected areas is immediately understandable when put in context. Avoiding health facilities is reasonable if those facilities are associated with isolation and death, not cures....It's also important to consider the region's political history. In the past decade or so, both Liberia and Sierra Leone have emerged from debilitating civil wars." Hannah Bloch in NPR
WHO sees small-scale use of Ebola vaccine in January. "The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday it expected to begin small-scale use of two experimental Ebola vaccines in West Africa early next year and in the meantime transfusions of survivors' blood may offer the best hope of treatment. WHO is working with pharmaceutical companies and regulators to accelerate the use of a range of potential treatments to fight the disease, a senior WHO official said." Stephanie Nebehay in Reuters.
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What Drives Abortion? Income? Or The Law?
Alan: Optimum protection of unborn babies depends on education, universal healthcare and income equality (shared wealth).
***
Hard Truth
Often, those who clamor most about "protecting the unborn" harbor core political beliefs that actively nourish the practice of abortion.
It is delusional to think that "abortion goes away" just because "laws gets put in place."
Consider...
If The Ninth Commandment were taken seriously, Fox News would not exist.
If The Ninth Commandment were taken seriously, Fox News would not exist.
In the absence of education, universal healthcare and universally shared prosperity, rigidly moralistic lawmaking increases the number of abortions.
Most proife Christians do not believe the contribute to abortion because their simple-minded version of "common sense" -- coupled with their fondness for Pharisaic moralizing -- prevents them from valuing paradox and irony.
Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/08/yeshua-excoriates-fellow-pharisees-woe.html
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In the United States, most anti-abortionists foster the socio-political conditions that promote the popularity of abortion.
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Basil Hume: "Universal Healthcare And Infrequent Abortion Are Obviously Related"
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E.J. Dionne: On Abortion And Conservative Opposition To Universal Healthcare
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"Iowa Abortions Drop 30% Despite Greater Access"
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"Will You Still Be Prolife After She's Born?"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/01/will-you-still-be-pro-life-after-shes.html
***
About 50,000 women worldwide die because of unsafe abortions. Five million more are admitted to hospitals with complications after the procedure.
Activists and researchers on both sides of the abortion debate agree that these "back-alley" operations are dangerous for women. It's figuring out the best way to stop them that has been contentious.
One approach has been to make abortion illegal. But evidence is accumulating that this strategy doesn't work. And it may even backfire, says Ana Langer, who studies reproductive health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
"Many studies have shown that making abortions illegal doesn't decline the number of abortions," Langer tells NPR. "Women just resort to unsafe providers more often."
Poulomi Basu for NPR
To support the claim, Langer cites a large study published in the Lancet a few years ago, which looked at abortions around the world. The conclusion: Prohibiting the procedures is linked with slightly higher rates of abortions. And the majority of these illegal procedures are dangerous for women.
The study estimated abortion rates in the 18 regions around the globe, determined by researchers at the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank in Washington that advocates for abortion rights, who worked with the World Health Organization. The researchers also calculated the fraction of women in each region living what they called "liberal laws" for abortions.
About 1 in 5 pregnancies worldwide were terminated by an abortion in 2008, the team found. That translates to about 44 million abortions. Rates of abortion were about 10 percent higher, on average, in regions with widespread restrictions compared to places where liberal laws dominate.
"Once a procedure becomes illegal, the need is still there," Langer says. "Women will look for services, safe or unsafe, to terminate their pregnancy."
Political scientist Michael New thinks the Lancet study is misleading. He works at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a research organization that is opposed to abortion.
"The study tries to compare apples and oranges," New tells NPR. "Many of the countries where abortion is legally restricted tend to have high poverty rates and a variety of other social pathologies that increase the demand for abortions. This clouds some of the findings and makes them less reliable than one would like."
Allison Shelley for NPR
In 2008, an estimated 86 percent of abortions worldwide occurred in developing countries, WHO estimates, and nearly of half of those were performed by someone lacking the proper training or in an unsafe environment. In Africa, about 97 percent of abortions fell into this unsafe category.
Data for these poor countries are only rough estimates, New points out. Health records are scarce. So researchers had to extrapolate from small surveys or deduce rates from models based on data from other countries.
A better way to see how laws affect abortion rates, New says, is to look at what happens in a particular country when it relaxes or tightens its restrictions.
Consider the U.S. The number of abortions increased by nearly 70 percent in the first six years after Roe v. Wadelegalized the procedure. In 1974, about 750,000 abortions were reported in the U.S. By 1980, the number had shot up to nearly 1.3 million, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionreported. Legal abortions in the U.S. are safe procedures. The mortality rate is about six deaths per 1 million abortions.
Another example is Eastern Europe. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many countries had the freedom to change their abortion policies. Some started limiting the procedure to only those needed for medical reasons. That restriction was linked to about a 25 percent decrease in abortion rate, a study in The Law and Economics Journal reported in 2004.
If you dig deeper into that study, another finding stands out: Rates of maternal deaths declined when countries soften restrictive abortion laws — presumably because of a decline in unsafe abortions.
The change was small in the Eastern European countries. But a similar trend has occurred in other places that relax restrictions on abortion, says Gilda Sedgh of the Guttmacher Institute, who led the Lancet study.
"The clearest evidence that legalizing abortion reduces deaths and complications from unsafe procedures comes from South Africa," Sedgh says. The country legalized abortions in 1997. Within three years, the number of women dying from procedure fell by 90 percent.
Simply changing the law is not enough to reduce dangerous operations, Sedgh says. For instance, abortions have been legal in India for decades. Still, about 60 percent aren't performed by skilled physicians or in medically safe rooms, the Guttmacher Institute estimates.
"After a law changes, women need to know that abortions are legal," Sedgh tells NPR. "Providers need to be trained to do safe abortions, to deal with complications. And supplies need to be in place."
A test case for this idea has been occurring in Mexico City. In 2007, the metropolis became one of the few places in Latin America to allow first-trimester abortions. But the government went one step further. They trained doctors to do the procedures, distributed information about the law and ensured clinics had the supplies they needed.
The result? No studies have looked at how the mortality rate from abortions, both legal and illegal, changed in Mexico City since 2007. After about 170,000 procedures in legal clinics, Anger says, the city has not reported a single death.
But the key to protecting women from abortion injuries may have nothing to with changing the law or offering women safer options, both Langer and Sedgh say. Instead it may boil down to stopping unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
"Ensuring access to contraception for all women definitely decreases abortion rates," Harvard's Langer says.
"Sweden and Norway have the lowest rates of abortion, not because adolescents engage in less in sexual activities," she says. "But rather they know how to protect themselves."
This story is part of a series looking at the health implications of abortion in developing countries. The series will continue over the next week.
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Rochester Focuses On A New Picture Of American Manufacturing
"Rochester, New York And The Fortunes Of Kodak"
"Kodak To Exit Chapter 11"
Rochester Focuses On A New Picture Of American Manufacturing
by David GreenSeptember 29, 2014
Audio File: http://www.npr.org/2014/09/29/351522788/rochester-focuses-on-a-new-picture-of-american-manufacturing
Rochester, N.Y., was once the imaging capital of the world, home to Kodak, Xerox and the eye care company, Bausch + Lomb.
Led by these companies, the manufacturing sector once employed 60 percent of Rochester's workforce. Now, that's less than 10 percent. And so, like many cities in this country, Rochester is trying to build something new from its manufacturing heritage.
If you want to understand the story of Rochester, says historian Carolyn Vacca, you need to come to High Falls, where from a bridge visitors see a waterfall and a panoramic view of downtown.
"We are in the heart of what was the center of Rochester, historically, and is still, somewhat, today," she says.
Part of the appeal to settlers was what she calls the "good dirt" around the Genesee River. "When Revolutionary soldiers came through the area they were coming from New England, where the dirt basically was good for holding rocks together at that point. And here, the soil is so fertile, so they immediately recognized the value of that and went home and told people there's a place we can get land where you can be a successful farmer," she says.
Farmers used the good Rochester dirt to grow grain. They needed somewhere to sell it, and that spawned flour mills — so many, in fact, that Rochester became known as Flour City. That legacy faded, though. The old mills along the river closed down — but the manufacturing seed had been planted. Eastman Kodak grew out of that.
Mike Bradley for NPR
For decades Rochester was Kodak.
At its peak in the 1980s, Kodak employed 60,000 people in the city. Today, it's just 2,300. It's been a painful collapse. And once again, in 2014, Rochester is trying to use its fertile soil to grow something new.
"Nobody ever wants to let go, obviously, not of something like Kodak that not only was so dominant, but had such a quality brand name. But, recognizing that we have to, we've moved on and created new things — new prospects for the future, building on what we had in the past," Vacca says.
'Just Gut Feel'
There are former Kodak employees at work in new places — like Exelis, which makes parts that may be in the Thirty Meter Telescope, one of the largest. When complete, it will peer out beyond the Milky Way, to the edge of the observable universe — 13 billion light-years away.
Mike Ognenovski, who is now with Exelis, worked at Kodak for 27 years, and sees parallels between the two companies. For example, Exelis uses polishers on its glass to make lenses, machines similar to ones used at Kodak on its camera lenses.
"The tradition is there. It just has another name. Now we're called Exelis," Ognenovski says. "The Kodak heritage technology that was there, that is essentially in the bedrock of what Kodak stood for back when George Eastman built it, is still there."
- Mike Bradley for NPR
- Mike Bradley for NPR
- Mike Bradley for NPR
- Mike Bradley for NPR
- Mike Bradley for NPR
That said, this picture is far from perfect. You look at this factory: making incredible things with machines both old and new, but there's almost no one here. The factory has more than 16,000 square feet, but only 80 people work here.
"You look at the folks that are on this floor right now working, they're highly skilled, and what we want to do is make the work more of a science versus an art. Where optics in the past traditionally tends to be more art and that's where the optician came in," Ognenovski says. "So that means a lot of years of experience, a lot of manual labor, touching and feeling and just gut feel."
Gut feel. Touching things. Making things with your hands. That was American manufacturing.
Where Is The Blue Collar?
Now, it's less art, more science. And this is exactly the challenge today. Even when a place like Rochester seems to be figuring it out, this deeper problem remains. There are very few jobs for the blue-collar worker.
It's a conundrum Nabil Nasr thinks about every day. He's the associate provost and director of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Among his many duties, Nasr's work seeks to help manufacturers remain competitive globally, and he thinks a lot about the future of manufacturing.
"Manufacturing today is not what it used to be. In the past, for example, Kodak used to make very sophisticated, high-precision lenses in a very primitive process that was very time-consuming," Nasr says. "Today, we're making very sophisticated computerized equipment that can make some of these lenses in a fraction of the time they used to spend in making those lenses before."
That takes skill. And there are RIT students training for the kinds of jobs they have at Exelis. But that still leaves the question: Where is the blue-collar worker today? What options are there for them?
"This is a serious issue, and I think there are a lot of people left out of the manufacturing sector, and there are a lot of barriers," Nasr says.
Mike Bradley for NPR
There are high-paying openings, he says, but not everyone is qualified for them because they require expertise and education. "They really want to get these jobs but they aren't able to because it would take them a long time to get there, and they're not able or willing to actually spend that time to get there," Nasr says.
The U.S. leads the way in many types of research and technology, but as we've heard about for years now, new technology means fewer jobs. And when workers are needed, companies can find them cheaper abroad. So, what does all this mean for the U.S.? Where does the modern factory fit into American life? Nasr says policymakers, big companies and communities have to come up with a plan.
"Manufacturing is so critical. I serve on an advisory board in Singapore. They want to take the best knowledge they can get to provide them with advice," he says. "Obviously, it's a small country but it's just phenomenal to see the will and the desire to make things happen and the metrics they develop, and the partnership between the government and industry, and of course they have a strong industrial policy."
Singapore is just one country in a global race. We'll be hearing in the coming weeks how the U.S. is cultivating its manufacturing sector to make sure it stays competitive.
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University of Rochester Scientists Create Harry Potter Invisibility Cloak
Harry Potter's 'invisibility cloak' cracked: University of Rochester scientists create masking device
By
on September 28, 2014
Who needs magic when you have science? Noted to match the powers of Harry Potter's "Cloak of Invisibility," a device created by University of Rochester scientists completely hides objects from view.
According to the University of Rochester Newscenter, the device, referred to as the "Rochester Cloak," uses inexpensive, everyday materials in its unique structure.
John Howell, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester, and graduate student Joseph Choi developed the device, which features four standard lenses that allows an object to appear invisible as the viewer moves several degrees away from the "optimal viewing position," Howell and Choi explain. Many scientists have approached the fundamental idea behind "cloaking," but instead use "high-tech or exotic materials," Howell says.
The "Rochester Cloak" is the first of its kind, Choi adds, as it's capable of "three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking." Howell told the Newscenter that he was inspired to make simple cloaking devices with common materials while working on a holiday project with his children.
How the "Rochester Cloak" works
In order to both cloak an object without disturbing the background, University of Rochester researchers determined the lens type, power needed and the precise distance between the lenses. In order to test their device, researchers placed the cloaked object in front of a grid background, the Newscenter explains.
Next, the scientists looked through the lenses, changing their point of view by moving from side to side. The grid would shift as expected, and as if the device wasn't even there.
How to make your own device
The scientists at University of Rochester provided steps on how to make your own cloaking device. Here's how to make your own "Rochester Cloak":
- Purchase 2 sets of 2 lenses with different focal lengths f1 and f2 (4 lenses total, 2 with f1 focal length, and 2 with f2 focal length)
- Separate the first 2 lenses by the sum of their focal lengths (So f1 lens is the first lens, f2 is the 2nd lens, and they are separated by t1= f1+ f2).
- Do the same in Step 2 for the other two lenses.
- Separate the two sets by t2=2 f2 (f1+ f2) / (f1-- f2) apart, so that the two f2 lenses are t2 apart.
Mashable notes efforts have been made for a real-life invisibility cloak over the last several years. However, none have quite been made available to muggles. Science will have to do, for now.
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Spanish Island Nears Goal Of 100% Sustainable Energy
Tiny Spanish Island Nears Its Goal: 100 Percent Renewable Energy
It actually takes quite a lot of fossil fuel power to reach the tiny Spanish island of El Hierro. You have to catch a commercial jet flight, a propeller plane and then a ferry to reach what was once the end of the known world, before Columbus set sail.
But once you're there, there's no need for fossil fuels at all. The ancient island off the west coast of Africa is now a model for the future, within months of running on 100 percent renewable energy, which consists of a mix of wind and hydro-power.
El Hierro, the most remote of Spain's Canary Islands, is now billing itself as the world's first energy self-sufficient island that has never been hooked up to a power grid.
A Danish island, Samso, is also energy-independent, but was previously hooked up to the Danish grid and didn't make the change in isolation, like El Hierro.
Because of the topography of the surrounding seabed, El Hierro, an active volcanic island with a population of about 10,000, could never hook up to Spain's power grid.
Instead, it used big barges to ship in 6,600 tons of diesel fuel — the equivalent of 40,000 barrels of oil — each year, to power electricity generators. It was an expensive, time-consuming and dirty endeavor ... until now.
This past summer, El Hierro inaugurated the Gorona del Viento power plant, a $110 million wind and water turbine farm. By the end of this year, the plant will generate all of the island's energy needs of up to 48 gigawatt hours per year.
Lauren Frayer for NPR
The plant consists of five big industrial windmills and two lakes. On windy days — and there are plenty — the windmills harness the Canary Islands' Atlantic gusts. When production exceeds demand, such as at night, excess energy is used to pump water from a sea-level lake up into a natural volcanic crater half a mile uphill.
When the wind dies down, the water is released down through a pipe connecting the two lakes. On its way, it passes through turbines, which generate hydro-power.
Everything is connected with sensors so that within five seconds of the wind dying down, the hydro portion of the plant kicks in. For island residents, the lights don't even flicker.
The technology used in both the wind and water portions of the plant is simple, but El Hierro is the first to combine the two components, says Juan Manuel Quintero, an engineer who serves on the board of the Gorona del Viento plant.
Lauren Frayer for NPR
"The wind machines, we basically ordered out of catalog; we didn't invent the technology. Same with the water turbines," Quintero says. "The innovation we made is hooking up the two systems together."
The Spanish government, a local university and a Spanish power company all collaborated on the project. Gorona del Viento is one of the last major efforts the Spanish government approved before the financial crisis forced it to cut all subsidies for renewable energy.
"We're lucky the crisis came when the project was almost finished," says Alpidio Armas, president of the El Hierro cabildo, a role roughly equivalent to that of a U.S. governor.
El Hierro has long been known as a place people emigrated from. It's a harsh outpost far from the Spanish mainland, in the middle of the Atlantic. But Armas hopes the Gorona del Viento power station could revitalize the place, and make local residents proud of their island.
"When they turn on the light, they think of the windmills moving and maybe they think, 'We are different than the rest of the world, because we are catching electricity from these windmills and not from conventional engines,'" Armas says.
The Gorona del Viento power station is the talk of the cafes in El Hierro's biggest settlement, Valverde. Many residents hope their island's new 'green' credentials might draw ecologically-minded tourists.
"It seems like a good investment for us, and everyone benefits — economically and environmentally," says local resident Ildefonso Santana.
It won't immediately affect their pocketbooks, though. Electricity prices are set at the national level, so El Hierro's residents won't pay less for wind and water energy than they were paying for diesel-generated power before.
But they will get energy security for the future, says economist Gonzalo Escribano of the Elcano Royal Institute, a think tank in Madrid.
"How much will be the price for oil in 20 years' time? We don't know! But we are sure that we will still have wind in the Canary Islands in 20 years time," Escribano says. "And the price, or the cost to generate an additional gigawatt, will be ... zero."
Meanwhile, El Hierro is already planning its next energy project. It wants all the island's cars to be electric by the year 2020.
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Bush's Calamitous "Appointment" Of Al-Maliki Detailed In Frontline's "Losing Iraq"
We got here because....
"God Told Me To End The Tyranny In Iraq," George W. Bush
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
"God Told Me To End The Tyranny In Iraq," George W. Bush
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
***
Frontline: "Losing Iraq"
***
Alan: Recently, when 3000-5000 ISIS operatives invaded Iraq, 50,000 Iraqi soldiers dropped their arms, shed their uniforms and fled Mosul. President Nouri al Maliki, a ridiculously unprepared Department of Education bureaucrat - elevated to primacy by George W. Bush (who "took a shine" to the man) - was responsible for relentless oppression of Iraq's Sunni minority. In turn, Mosul Sunnis became so alienated by Iraq's dominant (and domineering) Shiite majority that when ISIS fighters suddenly appeared in-and-around Mosul, Iraq's Shiite army had no choice but to flee before Sunnis rose up to slaughter them all.
***
Exceptional America
Infallible Leaders Annointed By God
***
Here's an "infallible" decision:
Nouri al Maliki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouri_al-Maliki↧
Weird Enuf Fer Ya? News From Barbaria #152
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- Video of police murder of John Crawford shows 911 caller lied
- ‘Little Jewish radical’ responds to Pat Robertson: Religious freedom & feigned valor in the military
- Sign this: Rare opportunity to reverse draconian drug laws
- Female fighter pilot? To Fox host, that’s just ‘boobs on the ground’
- Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts signed document declaring Virginia home as his ‘principal residence’
- Quick signature needed: Game-changing regulations to stop coal pollution
- Daily Beast: The $1 billion right-wing conspiracy you haven’t heard of
- Remarkable personal story: Did the Standard Hotel assume this woman was a prostitute because she’s black?
- Virginia Republican wants you to forget that whole forced ultrasound thing
- Report: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to resign
- Missouri police wearing ‘I am Darren Wilson’ bracelets
- Sign the petition: Time to beat the Kochs at their own game. Fight back against Americans for Prosperity funded ads attacking Democrats
- Joni Ernst, cynical tea party conspiracy theorist
- Lesson of Hobby Lobby: No accommodation on birth control is acceptable to religious right
- Voter discontent with Cuomo brews as he abandons his promise to help Democrats win the state Senate
- Barbara Comstock demands we track immigrants like FedEx tracks packages
- Number of Latinos with health insurance surges with Obamacare
- Boehner endorsed debate over air strikes in Iraq and Syria. In 2015. Maybe.
- Awesome! Rolling Stone outs the Kochs!
- Jon Stewart to Eric Bolling: 'F*** you and all your false patriotism'
- Signature needed: Smarter Sentencing Act would go a long way toward real criminal justice reform
- Oops: Ferguson public relations representative is a convicted killer
- AMAZING NASA photos of Iceland volcano eruption
- Women's rights activist tortured and executed by ISIS
- Signature needed: This could be a game-changer in curbing climate change
- South Carolina top prosecutor called SC police shooting a 'clean shot'
- 'The most important chart about the American economy you'll see this year'
- Quick signature needed: Stop Ted Cruz's latest obstructionist attempt
- Fox News mocks female UAE pilot, calls her 'boobs on the ground'
- Cartoon: Win Win!
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg explains why she isn't retiring yet: The filibuster
- 'Unblemished' Trump blames 'someone unknown' for his endorsement of McConnell for speaker
- Cartoon: Unemployment isn't a bug—it's a feature
- What the right doesn't hear about Obamacare
- The Daily Show: The Race to Get Filibustered
- FCC Commissioners hear an earful on net neutrality in California
- War on Women charges make Rich Lowry see starbursts ... of rage
- A look back at the insane GOP fantasy version of Eric Holder's tenure
- Why Hillary Clinton has lost my respect
- Pittsburgh man tasered at hospital bedside while grieving for his stepson
- JeffCo Colorado school board member opens her mouth, shows why students are right to protest
- Sign the petition: by Daily Kos and Everytown for Gun Safety calling on Kroger grocery stores to prohibit open carry guns in their stores.
- Could there be a new America’s dumbest Congressman? Meet Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman
- Three 16-year-old girls win Google’s global science competition with breakthrough project
- Kochs try to register a cat to vote in North Carolina
- If you sign this petition to the EPA right now, you can actually DO something about climate change
- Senate Dems have more money, because Citizens United is killing Republicans
- Kansas teachers roll out welcome mat for Rick Perry in Wichita
- GOP Congressman says he’s urging American generals to resign rather than follow the President’s orders
- Not the Onion: Forced birthers getting the vapors over abortion costing one penny too little
- How to divide by zero
- CHART: Obamacare’s successes hurting Republicans
- Sign this: Rare opportunity to reverse draconian drug laws
- Republicans cry of money disparity that only exists in the future
- Hospitals will save $5.7 billion this year because of Obamacare
- Remember before the Iraq War? Remember that?
- FBI criticizes Apple and Google for giving people what they want: privacy
- Could Republicans lose North Dakota’s only House seat? A new Democratic poll says they can
- The (Al) Gorification of Neil deGrasse Tyson
- The Kochs: The greatest American criminals of the last century
- Exciting criminal justice reform (please read)
- Cotton slammed for 'creating a fantasy version of history' in food stamp attack ad
- Bernie pulls no punches: Longterm Democratic strategy 'pathetic'
- The Civil War never ended. The neo-Confederate tea party fights on
- Signature needed: We can pass the first-ever limits on carbon pollution
- iPhone 6 camera pocket square, creates fusion with the $1.6 trillion fashion industry and civil rights
- Americans need more religion: The pecans, punching and paperwork edition
- Far-right groups to campaign against three impure Republican candidates
- 7 in 10 Americans believe in the principles of Roe v. Wade. Join the the majority of Americans who believe in reproductive freedom.
- Texas is not a Red state. It's a nonvoting state wanting a reason to vote
- 50,000 protesters take over financial capital of Asia (and they aren't going home)
- How to fix our elections (hint, it does not include an ID card)
- Daily Kos Elections forecast update: North Carolina remains a bright spot
- Mama, my hero didn’t grow up to be a cowboy, he grew up to be a farmer
- Defense contractors already are reaping the bounty of the all new unwinnable war
- Where can you stretch your contribution dollars? These races give you bang for the buck
- As usual, Republicans are in corporations' pockets. Dem Senate candidates should hammer them for it.
- A party in disarray: the California GOP can’t find its ass with both hands
- Detroit water shutoffs to continue after judge says poor have no right to water
- Renegade New York Democrats ready to welcome Republican into their junta
- John Cleese on (Fox News) stupidity
- Chelsea Clinton had a baby, Politico consults an astrologer … seriously
- Cartoon: Climate of terror
- HBO’s John Oliver: How is Ayn Rand still a thing?
- Ferguson officials demand exorbitant fees for city files related to Michael Brown killing
- If you thought House Republicans were crazy now, just wait
- North Carolina judge: ‘Why does the state of North Carolina not want people to vote?’
- Dem candidate for Michigan’s 93rd House District sends epic response to anti-gay hate group
- Ferguson police defy Justice Department on name tags
- Legally married Mississippi couple faces AFA backlash
- Democratic candidates: THIS is how you win elections
- New polls show Iowa Senate race moving away from Democrats
- Pesticides: Canadian beekeepers sue Syngenta-Bayer for $400 million
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The Biggest Impediment To Marriage Is Income Inequality
"What Drives Abortion? Income? Or The Law?"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-drives-abortion-income-or-law.htmlFor millennial women, ‘the one’ must have a steady job
A plurality of never-married Americans ages 25 to 34 say the main reason they haven’t gotten married is that they’re not “financially prepared” to do so. Singles want to get their own finances and careers in order before hitching their wagon to another person. More important, they may otherwise have trouble attracting, or keeping, a mate.
Especially if they’re of the heterosexual male persuasion.
When asked what qualities they’re looking for in a potential spouse, never-married men were most likely to say that finding someone who shared “similar ideas about having and raising children” was very important to them. This was a priority for women, too, but not the most commonly cited one.
Women were most likely to say they wanted a spouse with a “steady job.”
You can imagine how this might be a problem, seeing as “steady jobs” are hard to come by these days, especially if you’re young and male. Even more so if you happen to also be low-skilled or black, among the demographics for whom both marriage and employment rates — not coincidentally — have fallen furthest in recent decades.
Wages for young men who are gainfully employed have skidded downward in the past 30 years, by about 20 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. Worse, many don’t find jobs at all. Which means the number of “eligible bachelors” out there — at least as defined by the quality that most women say is important to them in a partner — has fallen.
Consider what’s happened to the gender ratios in the population of never-married Americans, ages 25 to 34: In 1960, there were 139 employed men for every 100 women, primarily because women tend to marry younger than men do. By 2012, the ratio had dropped to 91 employed men for every 100 women.
The ratio is particularly stark for young, never-married blacks, among whom there are just 51 employed men for every 100 women. This seems an especially cruel trend when you consider that, of all races surveyed, blacks were most likely to cite a “steady job” as a top criterion for a potential spouse, the Pew report found. Nine out of 10 black women surveyed said this was “very important” in selecting a spouse. Blacks were also most likely to have traditional views about the social significance of marriage, saying that it is “very important” that a couple legally marry if they plan to spend the rest of their lives together.
The lesson of all this: If family-values types want to promote wedlock among the young and noncommittal, they might start not by lecturing about morality but rather by improving the economic prospects for millennials. Higher incomes and better employment prospects, as it turns out, are also associated with lower rates of divorce.
As an aside, I often hear puzzlement about why the gay and lesbian community is so intent on gaining access to an institution — wedlock — that their straight peers are increasingly forgoing. But, actually, the intensifying fight for legal recognition of same-sex unions seems perfectly consistent with declining marriage rates: If you view marriage as aspirational, as a milestone that Americans are sidestepping because of financial insecurity rather than disinterest, of course it makes sense that access to marriage should become more, not less, desirable over time, especially to historically marginalized groups. Marriage is, increasingly, a status symbol.
For most of Western history, marriage was a political and economic transaction (for both the spouses, and the communities they belonged to). In the late 18th century, it began transforming into an institution based on love and soul-mating. Now, it’s about politics and economics once again.
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Sinclair Lewis' Keen Insight Concerning The Underbelly Of Uncompromising Moralism
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Bill O'Reilly's Latest Foray Into "Ethnic Cleansing"
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"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"
"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"
It’s a fortunate thing that Bill O’Reilly’s latest book, “Killing Patton,” was written by him and not someone else. If not, O’Reilly would have taken the poor person apart, criticizing the book for its chaotic structure, its considerable padding and its repellent admiration of a war-loving martinet who fought the Nazis and really never understood why. George S. Patton stood almost shoulder to shoulder with them in his anti-Semitism — not that O’Reilly seems to have noticed or, for that matter, mentioned it in his book.
Alan: American conservatives are exceptionally skilled at "hearing what they want to hear" while categorically denying the rest.
It is, of course, permissible to admire Patton for his generalship and astonishing bravery. It is even possible to give him a pass for some of the foolish things he said that were repeatedly getting him into trouble and finally caused Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to effectively sack him. Even Patton’s likening some Nazis to Republican or Democratic apparatchiks, while tasteless and heroically impolitic, had an explicable context: Plenty of people became Nazis for career, rather than ideological, reasons.
Alan: Because most of us seek "professional advancement" - typically in service to someone else's "alien" agenda - we overlook "career climbing" as a fundamental propellant of evil.
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Patton’s anti-Semitism is a different matter. As far as I know, he never made his views public, but he was repulsively candid in letters home to his wife, Beatrice, and in diary entries. What’s more, he acted on those views. It was Patton’s job after the defeat of Germany to run the displaced-persons (DP) camps in southern Germany, where he was commanding officer. In the view of some, including an outraged President Harry S. Truman, he treated these Holocaust survivors little better than the Nazis did.
In a letter to Eisenhower, Truman quoted from a report on conditions in the DP camps. “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”
The “military guard” that Truman mentioned was Patton’s idea. He had his reasons, Patton wrote in his diary: “If they [the Jewish DPs] were not kept under guard they would not stay in the camps, would spread over the country like locusts, and would eventually have to be rounded up after quite a few of them had been shot and quite a few Germans murdered and pillaged.” At least twice in his diary, Patton referred to the Jewish DPs as “animals.”
The report to Truman was written by Earl G. Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school who had inspected the camps. Here is what Patton thought about Harrison: “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to Jews who are lower than animals.”
These excerpts from Patton’s letters and diaries can be found in “The Patton Papers,” a collection edited by Martin Blumenson, a military historian. Remarkably, O’Reilly and his co-author, Martin Dugard, cite the Blumenson volume in their bibliography but make no mention of the passages I’ve quoted. It’s not as if they don’t exhibit appropriate horror at Nazi atrocities or, for that matter, cite the two instances where Patton slapped hospitalized GIs claiming shell shock. But they are silent about Patton’s anti-Semitism. As Truman’s letter suggests, this was not a personal and irrelevant belief that had no practical application. It was a bigotry that warped Patton’s judgment and affected his treatment of some of history’s most unfortunate people. Some of his “animals” had just survived Auschwitz.
Patton didn’t care. He had witnessed the liberation of the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, a hideous place of unimaginable cruelty, and while what he saw led him, as O’Reilly writes, “to vomit at the side of the building,” it seemed to make no lasting impression. When he later took command of the DP camps, he not only made the survivors feel they were once again imprisoned but also put one-time Nazi sympathizers in with the Jews, adding an element of sheer terror. Even the effort to try leading Nazis for war crimes offended Patton: “It is not cricket and is Semitic.”
How O’Reilly could have written 335 pages on Patton and not have mentioned his repellent anti-Semitism and its impact on the DPs is beyond me. It suggests — no, not anti-Semitism — a compulsion to make the facts conform to some predetermined conviction. The result is not history but clunky hagiography, a book that tells you more about O’Reilly than it does about Patton.
Hagiography is unusually attractive to conservatives because their hard (and often cold) hearts can only be warmed by unbending moralistic principles.
Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive.
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