Alan: American conservatives should learn enough "civics" to understand that adherence to God's Lawover federal, state and local law brings consequences.
If Kim Davis refuses to perform official duties, she should quit her government job.
Or, she can stay in jail -- perhaps paying a daily fine --for as long as she keeps her job but fails to perform its duties.
With striking regularity, "conservative" Americans -- particularly conservative Christians -- think "they can have their cake and eat it too."
When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) condemns President Obama – a frequent occurrence – the far-right national candidate often emphasizes the rule of law. Cruz doesn’t just think the president is wrong; he thinks Obama is a tyrannical dictator who flouts legal norms.
“The pattern we’ve seen under President Obama, disregarding the law, is really one of the most troubling aspects of this presidency,” Cruz said last year. “When he disagrees with the law … he simply refuses to comply with it.” The Republican senator added that the president is “lawless.”
But that was in 2014. In 2015, Cruz sees Kentucky clerk Kim Davis ignoring court orders, ignoring Supreme Court rulings, and ignoring her oath of office – and the GOP presidential candidate sees her as some kind of hero. In a written statement released late yesterday:
“Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny. Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. This is wrong. This is not America.
“I stand with Kim Davis. Unequivocally. I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to choose between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion.”
Cruz’s statement went on to argue, “Those who are persecuting Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office. That is the consequence of their position. Or, if Christians do serve in public office, they must disregard their religious faith–or be sent to jail.”
He added that Davis should face no consequences for brazenly defying federal court orders she doesn’t like.
I’m not sure what’s worse: the possibility that Cruz actually believes this nonsense or the fact that Cruz expects Americans to take his arguments seriously.
Let’s unwrap the senator’s statement a bit, because by Cruz standards, it’s an extraordinary piece of propaganda.
“Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny”? A judge appointed to the bench by George W. Bush issued a court order; a local official brazenly defied that order; and the judge held her in contempt of court. If Cruz genuinely believes this constitutes “tyranny,” Harvard Law School should ask for its degree back.
“Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith”? Actually, that’s ridiculous. Here’s a story of an 84-year-old Catholic nun who was sentenced to nearly three years in federal prison for breaking into a nuclear facility as part of a protest. The sentence was later overturned, but Cruz didn’t raise a fuss when the nun was first taken into custody.
“I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to choose between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion”? Honestly, the Obama administration doesn’t have anything to do with this. Literally, nothing. The judicial branch is an entirely separate branch of government. Senators and presidential candidates should at least try to understand this.
“Those who are persecuting Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office”? Actually, Davis isn’t being persecuted – she chose all on her own to ignore the law and court orders, knowing there would be consequences – and all kinds of Christian clerks throughout the Bible Belt have no problem complying with the law of the land in the United States.
Remember, we’re talking about a high-profile politician who specifically blasted President Obama by saying, “When he disagrees with the law … he simply refuses to comply with it.” There’s no real truth to the allegation, but Cruz nevertheless believes it’s a travesty to see an American refuse to comply with laws he or she doesn’t like – except when he believes the exact opposite.
Ted Cruz should make a choice. He can celebrate the rule of law or he can celebrate those who deliberately ignore court orders they don’t like. If the far-right senator wants to be taken seriously, he should probably avoid doing both at the same time.
MINEOLA, N.Y. — A federal judge has struck down as unconstitutional a suburban New York town’s law banning day laborers from soliciting for work on public sidewalks, declaring its broad application could affect children selling lemonade in their driveway.
U.S. District Court Judge Denis Hurley said in a ruling Thursday that Oyster Bay’s law violates the First Amendment, and he suggested that the town’s concerns about public safety could be addressed by enforcing existing state vehicle and traffic laws. The town is considering whether to appeal.
“The ordinance prohibits speech and conduct of an expressive nature that does not pose a threat to safety on the town’s streets and sidewalks,” Hurley said. “It reaches children selling lemonade at the end of a neighbor’s driveway ... the veteran holding a sign on a sidewalk stating ‘will work for food,’ and students standing on the side of a road advertising a school carwash.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit along with several other groups challenging the law after it was enacted in 2009. Because of the ongoing litigation, the town has never enforced the ordinance, which called for fines of $250 for violators.
“Localities across the country have undertaken unconstitutional measures like this as a way of targeting vulnerable immigrant populations,” said NYCLU senior attorney Corey Stoughton. “This ruling sends a message to local governments that courts will not let them get away with subverting American constitutional values to pursue an anti-immigrant agenda.”
Maryann Slutsky, an advocate for immigrants on Long Island, said: “After five years, justice has been served.” She viewed the law as “a means to force day laborers out of town; it has racist undertones.”
John Venditto, Oyster Bay town supervisor, said in a statement that he was disappointed by the judge’s ruling. He has said the law was intended to address safety concerns because day laborers were congregating in various communities creating traffic hazards.
“We appreciate that the court recognizes the seriousness of the day laborer problem,” Venditto said, adding the town is reviewing the ruling before deciding whether to appeal.
The 165-square-mile town, with a population of nearly 300,000, is actually a confederation of 18 villages and 18 hamlets stretching north from the Atlantic Ocean to the Long Island Sound in the center of Long Island, outside New York City. The hamlet of Oyster Bay is perhaps best known as the home of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Isaac Newton was a classic neurotic. He was a brooder and a worrier, prone to dwelling on the scientific problems before him as well as his childhood sins. But Newton also had creative breakthroughs--thoughts on physics so profound that they are still part of a standard science education.
In a Trends in Cognitive Sciences Opinion paper published August 27, psychologists present a new theory for why neurotic unhappiness and creativity go hand-in-hand. The authors argue that the part of the brain responsible for self-generated thought is highly active in neuroticism, which yields both of the trait's positives (e.g., creativity) and negatives (e.g., misery).
People who score high on neuroticism in personality tests tend to have negative thoughts and feelings of all types, struggle to cope with dangerous jobs, and are more likely to experience psychiatric disorders within their lifetime. The most popular explanation for why people are neurotic comes from British psychologist Jeffrey Gray, who proposed in the 1970s that such individuals have a heightened sensitivity to threat. He reached this conclusion after observing how antianxiety drugs reduced the sensitivity of rodents to cues of punishment and also helped to relax and liven up psychiatric patients.
"Gray had a useful and logical theory, but the problem is that it doesn't account for the full spectrum of neuroticism--it's pretty difficult to explain neuroticism in terms of magnified threat perception because high scorers often feel unhappy in situations where there is no threat at all," says paper lead author Adam Perkins, a personality researcher at King's College London. "The second problem is, there's literature showing neuroticism scores are positively correlated with creativity; and so why should having a magnified view of threat objects make you good at coming up with new ideas?"
Perkins' eureka moment came after attending a lecture by coauthor and University of York psychologist Jonathan Smallwood, a leading expert on the neural basis of daydreaming. Smallwood described his research during the lecture, including a key study which showed that individuals at rest in an MRI scanner who spontaneously have particularly negative thoughts (a key marker of neuroticism) displayed greater activity in the regions of the medial prefrontal cortex that are associated with conscious perception of threat. Perkins realized that individual differences in the activity of these brain circuits that govern self-generated thought could be a causal explanation for neuroticism.
They collaborated with Dean Mobbs of the Columbia University Fear, Anxiety, and Biosocial Lab, who is an expert on the neural basis of defense in humans. Mobbs had previously shown that there is a switch from anxiety-related forebrain activity to panic-related midbrain activity as a threat stimulus moves closer. Mobbs had also showed that this switch from anxiety to panic is controlled by circuits in the basolateral nuclei of the amygdala--the brain's emotional center.
"It occurred to me that if you happen to have a preponderance of negatively hued self-generated thoughts due to high levels of spontaneous activity in the parts of the medial prefrontal cortex that govern conscious perception of threat and you also have a tendency to switch to panic sooner than average people, due to possessing especially high reactivity in the basolateral nuclei of the amygdale, then that means you can experience intense negative emotions even when there's no threat present," Perkins says. "This could mean that for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator."
The psychiatric relevance of this theory was highlighted by psychiatrist and coauthor Danilo Arnone, who argued that this novel cognitive model might help to explain the ruminative thinking pattern seen in depression and is complementary to the already defined role of the subgenual prefrontal cortex in the aetiology of mood dysregulation.
The overthinking hypothesis also explains the positives of neuroticism. The creativity of Isaac Newton and other neurotics may simply be the result of their tendency to dwell on problems far longer than average people. "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light," Newton once said of his problem-solving method.
"We're still a long way off from fully explaining neuroticism, and we're not offering all of the answers, but we hope that our new theory will help people make sense of their own experiences, and show that although being highly neurotic is by definition unpleasant, it also has creative benefits," Perkins says. "Hopefully our theory will also stimulate new research as it provides us with a straightforward unifying framework to tie together the creative aspects of neuroticism with its emotional aspects."
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The authors are funded by the National Institute for Health Research Mental Health Biomedical Research Centre, the NHS Foundation Trust, the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences (TICS), published by Cell Press, is a monthly review journal that brings together research in psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience. It provides a platform for the interaction of these disciplines and the evolution of cognitive science as an independent field of study. For more information, please visit http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences. To receive media alerts for TICS or other Cell Press journals, please contact press@cell.com.
'Exceptional response' as thousands of migrants pour into Austria
Doug Stanglin and Jessica Estepa, USA TODAYSeptember 5, 2015
137COMMENT
Thousands of migrants arrived in Austria and many more were heading there on foot Saturday as European countries broke a stalemate and began finding ways to take in the masses of humanity.
Hungary, which had spent days stopping migrants from leaving by train, provided buses to take them into Austria. The government relented under international pressure and after desperate refugees who had camped out at the Budapest train station simply began walking toward the border.
Austria opened the floodgates by announcing that "every refugee in Austria can apply for asylum." By early afternoon Saturday, about 6,500 migrants had crossed into the country, Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said.
"Given the challenges facing our German friends as well, all of Europe needs to wake up. (The time for) reverie is over," she said, according to Reuters. "Now the continent of Europe is challenged. In this great challenge the entire continent has to give a unified answer. Whoever still thinks that withdrawal from the EU or a barbed wire fence around Austria will solve the problem is wrong."
The migrants are mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and have endured hardships for months, often traveling overland after lengthy stays in Turkish refugee camps or crossing the Balkans after landing in Greece. Hundreds of thousands of them have fled war, persecution and other hardships this year alone.
In jubilant scenes on the border, hundreds of migrants walked off buses and into Austria, where volunteers at a roadside Red Cross shelter offered them hot tea and handshakes of welcome. Many collapsed in exhaustion on the floor, smiles on their faces, the Associated Press reported.
Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, arriving for talks with his EU counterparts in Luxembourg, said the refugee crisis "has to be an eye opener about how messed up the situation in Europe is now."
"I hope that this serves as a wake up call that (the situation) cannot continue," he told reporters, according to The Guardian. "Thank god, the problem could be solved yesterday evening in a humanitarian way. Anyone who believes that you can sit out this problem is wrong."
Migrants had the option of traveling onward to Germany, which also announced that it would take them in. German police said they expect to receive 10,000 migrants from Hungary on Saturday, Reuters reported.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there is no legal limit to the number of migrants her country can receive. "As a strong, economically healthy country we have the strength to do what is necessary" and ensure every asylum seeker gets a fair hearing, she told the Funke consortium of newspapers in an interview published Saturday.
At a meeting of European foreign ministers in Luxembourg, the policy shift was almost palpable as states began bracing for a steady stream of migrants.
"This is not an emergency," said Federica Mogherini, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. "It is an urgency that we are facing. It is not something that starts one day and ends that day."
She said the sooner that Europe accepts this "psychologically," the sooner it will find ways to effectively address the problem.
Mogherini said European countries need to work together in five key areas — protection of asylum seekers, combating human trafficking, control of borders, addressing the root causes of the refugee crisis, mainly the instability in Libya and Syria, and helping those countries outside of the EU deal with the flood of refugees across their territories.
The U.N. refugee agency welcomed the decision by Austria and Germany to receive thousands of migrants, but warned that a longterm solution is needed.
António Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said Friday that the biggest influx of refugees into Europe in decades required a "massive common effort."
"Europe cannot go on responding to this crisis with a piecemeal or incremental approach. No country can do it alone, and no country can refuse to do its part," he said in a statement issued ahead of a key round of EU meetings on the crisis. "Exceptional circumstances require an exceptional response. Business as usual will not solve the problem."
Stamp Honour For Dogs Who Saved Macquarie Island Jane Ryan
Eleven dogs, mostly springer spaniels and Labrador retrievers, worked tirelessly to hunt and eradicate rabbits and rodents from Macquarie Island.
And they have now been recognised with a series of Australia Post stamps.
Dog handler Nancye Williams said the island owed its pest-free status to the dogs.
"Macquarie Island would not have its rabbit and rodent-free status without these dogs," she said.
"To see them on the stamps I think it's a lovely and worthy tribute."
Ms Williams said the dogs worked tirelessly in horrendous conditions hunting feral animals on the island.
"There was rain, driving sleet, strong winds, rough and rugged terrain," she said.
"They had grass seeds embedded into their skin and icicles off their coat and these dogs kept working."
She says seeing their fortitude honoured is very exciting.
"Now others can see what these dogs have been through," she said.
"You can get a bit of that through these stamps.
"You can see Macquarie Island, you can see the conditions that the dogs have worked in.
"And after the project finished there's been a little lapse and now these stamps can stay here and people can look at them for a long time."
Ms Williams worked with a springer spaniel called Katie.
"The dogs were the best part of working over there," she said.
"Katie was a fantastic springer spaniel and helped find a couple of rabbits, the last remaining rabbits, and without her and the other dogs it wouldn't have been successful."
Many ancient peoples recognized a religious right of asylum, protecting criminals (or those accused of crime) from legal action and from exile to some extent. This principle was adopted by the early Christian church, and various rules developed for what the person had to do to qualify for protection and just how much protection it was.
In England, King Æthelberht made the first laws regulating sanctuary in about AD 600, though Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136) says that the legendary pre-Saxon king Dunvallo Molmutius (4th/5th century BC) enacted sanctuary laws in the Molmutine Laws as recorded by Gildas (c. 500–570).[2] By Norman times, there had come to be two kinds of sanctuary: All churches had the lower-level kind, but only the churches the king licensed had the broader version. The medieval system of asylum was finally abolished entirely in England by James I in 1623.[3]
Dear Fred,
Thanks for your email.
Good question about sanctuary cities...
In my view, an intrinsic feature of American governance is that local political bodies "test the waters" to see what "they can get away with" under aegis of "subsidiarity."
Sanctuary cities are a case in point.
If "the Feds" choose NOT to crack down on sanctuary cities, what emerges is a law which multi-jurisdictional executive bodies - in coordination - choose not to execute: in consequence, the law "stays on the books" but "authorities" overlook it.
On the other hand, if the Feds choose to crack down on sanctuary cities -- and the sanctuary cities resist -- then it is up to the Feds to bring in The National Guard to enforce submission.
Or not.
If the Feds succeed (and are not over-ruled by The Supremes), it is appropriate, under Rule of Law, that the Feds work their will. Like Mao said: "Political power comes from the barrel of a gun."
Right now, if all skeletons were out of my closet (and the statute of limitations did not apply) and "the authorities" chose to charge me with every felony infraction of which I am guilty, I suspect I'd be sent down river for dozens of crimes.
At bedrock, it is always a question of which battles we choose.
It is standard operating procedure for governments to create enough laws to ensure that everyone is guilty of something. This enables selective prosecution whenever authorities deem it necessary to punish or incarcerate someone.
Blacks Arrested For Contraband Twice As Often As Whites Though Much Less Likely To Have Contraband
Sanctuary Cities successfully navigate "end-runs" around laws that were passed by small, rural states which are disproportionately represented in Congress and therefore anti-democratic by the "one person, one vote" principle.
The sale of recreational marijuana remains a felony in 11 states.
I do not know if these 11 states still bring felony charges for marijuana crimes but I hope not.
It is not because I undervalue The Rule of Law that I hope such laws are not enforced but because the The Law, with surprising regularity, has its head jammed in The Dark Place.
Of course, my personal preference -- and The Rule of Law -- can be very different things.
Even so, if a state chooses to imposeThe Rule of Law-- even though it contradicts my desires -- I acknowledge its legal right to do so.
As always, definition comes into play.
St. Augustine (354-430), in Book IV of The City of God, relates the story about the pirate who had been seized and brought before Alexander the Great. The cheeky pirate asks Alexander what is the real difference between a pirate and an emperor apart from the scale of action
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”
In the end, I have no objection to Kim Davis taking a stand.
However, I much prefer Christians take stands that don't "wreck the brand."
Although Bertrand Russell pointed out that he found no New Testament verse praising human intellect, the future of Christianity is much too important to be left to dimwits.
Christians Are Their Own Worst Enemy: Wrecking The Brand
It has occurred to me that Laura Wood is probably "wrecking the brand" for her own children. Either they will succumb to "the party line," or, as rebellious teens, they will be flabbergasted that "orthodox Christianity" made Mom "fall" so hard for white supremacy that she ended up a conspiracy theorist who chose David Duke as an ideological bed-mate.
"Jesus In The Talmud" By Peter Schafer... Brought To You By "The Thinking Housewife"
On the other hand, a real moral stand -- a stand that is begging to be taken -- is the conscientious position that Americans should not have to violate their moral integrity by paying that portion of their federal taxes which support The Military-Industrial Complex, an "agency" dedicated -- 23/7 and trans-generationally -- to fucking us in the ass while fostering an international milieu that reduces entire cultures to rubble. (You would think sodomy alone would prompt Christians to protest.)
"Do War's Really Defend America's Freedom?"
(Homage Marine Commandant, Major General Smedley Butler)
The fact that American Christians don't see the denial of marriage licenses to the previously divorced as being an equally strong argument to denying licenses to human beings wanting to get married for the first time is an indicator of why shifting sensibilities guarantee 100% compliance over the short-to-intermediate term.
Theologically -- and scripturally -- it makes more sense to keep marriages together -- and not give people a second chance if they blow the first one -- than to prevent people who love one another from making a ritual life-long commitment in the first place.
I have the feeling I'm leaving something out.
But a prior commitment in Durham prevents me from brooding this email any longer.
Proponents of gay marriage pursue total victory and 100 percent compliance. This is never a good idea, for any movement. Sensible people quit at 98 percent and call the rest a sampling error..
You speak often of the dangers of absolutism -- well, we see it at work here.
Attempts to stamp out the likes of Kim Davis will backfire. I guarantee it
"I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! Don't do it!""Why shouldn't I?" he said. "Well, there's so much to live for!""Like what?""Well... are you religious?" He said yes. I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?""Christian.""Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant ? "Protestant.""Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?""Baptist""Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?""Baptist Church of God!""Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?""Reformed Baptist Church of God!""Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.
Emo Philips
Alan: The spread of secularism has propelled westerners beyond the absurd (and obligatory) prejudices of Christian sectarianism.
Even when I was a teenager, the Catholic church still taught that everyone "outside the fold" was destined to eternal perdition.
To this day, the doctrine of "extra ecclesium nulla salus" remains a core credo of an ultra-conservative group known as Traditionalist Catholicism.
Like many manifestations of ecclesiastical pretzel logic, "extra ecclesium nulla salus" has been recently re-spun to provide a new cloak for "the elephant in the room."
However, the weave of this modern mantle is already threadbare. And in the minds of most people the elephant still sits (and shits) smack dab in the middle of the room.
"Authority has simply been abused too long in the Catholic church, and for many people it just becomes utterly stupid and intolerable to have to put up with the kind of jackassing around that is imposed in God's name. It is an insult to God himself and in the end it canonly discredit all idea of authority and obedience. There comesa point where they simply forfeit the right to be listened to."
Thomas Merton in a letter to W. H. Ferry.Dated January 19, 1967,
Representatives of a well known faith-based charitable organization were refused a New Jersey bank’s notarization service by an atheist employee. After inquiring about the nature of the non-profit organization and the documents requiring notarization, one of the bank’s assistant managers claimed she couldn't witness the signatures or attach the State's official notary seal to the documents because of "personal reasons."
The Christians later related the story in a Facebook post saying, “Even though we had a valid, legal document and valid, legal identification — she was legally able to refuse me service.”
Wait…what? No. It didn't happen that way at all.
American Atheists, Inc. President, Dave Silverman and Managing Director, Amanda Knief were refused service yesterday by an assistant manager at TD Bank in Cranford, New Jersey.
In a statement released on the American Atheists Facebook page, Knief said, “I was just refused service — because I am an atheist. It was embarrassing, humiliating, and pissed me off.”
According to Knief:
A notary at a local bank, where I have gone more than a dozen times to have work documents signed, asked me to explain what we were having notarized. The documents were charitable organizations registrations for American Atheists in several states. So I told her what AA is about.
After learning the nature of the organization and the documents requiring notarization the bank manager refused to witness the signatures on the documents. She interrupted another employee’s lunch to come do the authentications.
Knief says:
I have been called names, threatened, hated on and all manner of ridiculed because of my atheist activism, but I think sitting in a bank and having another professional refuse to do business with me because I am an atheist was the worst slight I have ever received.
In New Jersey, notaries are not required to abide by any code of conduct or ethics that prevents them from refusing service to people based on "personal reasons." Even though we had a valid, legal document and valid, legal identification--she was legally able to refuse me service.
Her description of the incident was confirmed shortly afterwards by David Silverman in a follow-up post.
“Yup. We just got refused notary services because we are atheists from the Assistant Store Manager at TD near our office. No, we are not moving our business there, at least not until this is rectified.”
While I am not an attorney and expect to be promptly and appropriately chastised if I make any incorrect assumptions here, I do not agree with Ms. Kneif’s assessment that the bank manager was within her legal rights to refuse her a public service.
There may be some ongoing legal confusion, controversy and argument over religiou discrimination and/or religious freedom regarding a privately owned business, but this is clearly not the case.
The bank manager’s refusal is a violation of the bank's diversity statement, as a bank employee, let alone a manager, she clearly sucks at her job and has failed to live up to the bank's expectations and should be repremanded.
However, as a notary she does not represent the bank, she represents the state and must be held responsible for civil discrimination.
As in most states, a notary public in New Jersey is deemed to be “a public servant.” Commissioned by the Secretary of State she is required by law to serve as an impartial witness to the signing of documents and to the acknowledgement of signatures on documents with a duty imposed upon her to provide notary services to the public.
A notary public is not responsible for the content of the document. The duties and responsibilities of a notary public are restricted only to the execution of proper notarial procedures.
And the National Notary Association’s handbook, The Notary Public code of Professional responsibility specifically notes in Section I-A-3:
The Notary shall not refuse to perform a lawful and proper notarial act because of the signer’s race, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, politics, lifestyle, age, disability, gender or sexual orientation, or because of disagreement with the statements or purpose of a lawful document.
Her actions were blatantly discriminatory. Her commission should be revoked. Take the word Christian in the title of this diary and replace it with Muslim, Jew, or Hindu. Replace it with Latino, African-American, or French Canadian.
How long before a Pentecostal refuses to provide a service for a Catholic? And the Catholics won't do business with Methodists?
"the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross... In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians." - from Bob Jones University Press American history textbook
How to explain the growing polarization of American, into two different cultural and political camps, each with almost diametrically opposing worldviews and contradictory sets of facts?
One overlooked possible reason - schools.
Consider the following claims, from the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press fundamentalist textbook lines used in Christian schools now subsidized with state tax money in over a dozen states across America:
- Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists. - "the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross... In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians." - "God used the 'Trail of Tears' to bring many Indians to Christ." - It "cannot be shown scientifically that that man-made pollutants will one day drastically reduce the depth of the atmosphere's ozone layer." - "God has provided certain 'checks and balances' in creation to prevent many of the global upsets that have been predicted by environmentalists." - the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda. - "Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free-enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created." - Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media. - "The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns to set up his kingdom on earth."
These claims are from the Accelerated Christian Education textbook line, also used in state-funded Christian schools:
- Science Proves Homosexuality is a Learned Behavior - The Second Law of Thermodynamics Disproves Evolution - No Transitional Fossils Exist - Humans and Dinosaurs Co-Existed - Evolution Has Been Disproved - A Japanese Whaling Boat Found a Dinosaur - Solar Fusion is a Myth
As I detail in my new story Nessie a Plesiosaur? Louisiana To Fund Schools Using Odd, Bigoted Fundamentalist Textbooks, Louisiana is the latest front in the expansion of government funding of religious schools that use fundamentalist textbooks filled with dubious, factually incorrect, politically tendentious, and racially and culturally insensitive material.
Excerpt:
This 2012-2013 school year, thanks to a bill pushed through by governor Bobby Jindal, thousands of students in Louisiana will receive state voucher money, transferred from public school funding, to attend private religious schools, some of which teach from a Christian curriculum that suggests the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution and states that the alleged creature, which has never been demonstrated to even exist, has been tracked by submarine and is probably a plesiosaur. The curriculum also claims that a Japanese fishing boat caught a dinosaur.
On the list of schools approved to receive funding through the new voucher funding, that critics warn could eventually cut public school funding in half, are schools that teach from the Christian fundamentalist A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education curriculum.
What's in that curriculum? Last year, researcher Rachel Tabachnick and I co-produced a 35-minute documentary on the spread of a similar voucher program in Pennsylvania and other US states, titled "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias". Embedded at the end of this post is an eight-minute video segment from that documentary with scans from material in currently used A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press texts (in this May 25, 2011 story Tabachnick provides quotes from those textbooks.)
"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"
As the chart above from Unions Work shows, over the past nearly hundred years of American history, when union density has been low, inequality has been high. Union density isn't theonly factor in that, of course. But it's not a coincidence. Neither is this:
There are lots of complicated economic and political factors. But they tend to boil down to upward shifts in money and power, and workers getting squeezed. Even if you're not in a union, the fate of unions affects us all.
Laura Clawson Here's another example to point to when opponents of a higher minimum wage claim that it would cost jobs. The minimum in San Jose, California, has gone from $8.00 an hour to $10.00 and then $10.15, and University of California-Berkeley economist Michael Reich has been studying the results:
[The minimum wage increase] directly and indirectly affected 70,000 of the city's 370,000 workers, Reich says.
San Jose restaurants, which Reich says were most affected by the pay increase, raised menu prices by an average 1.75%, according to his study. He says there has been no discernible impact on employment.
The unemployment rate in the San Jose metro area, in fact, has fallen to 5.4% from 7.4% in March 2013. The San Jose Downtown Association says the number of restaurants in the district has increased by 20% the past 18 months.
So 70,000 people have gotten a raise, unemployment has fallen, the resulting price increase is 1.75 percent in the industry most affected, and the number of businesses in that most-affected industry is actually growing. Some restaurant owners say they've been hurt by the increase, but others have been surprised by how well it's gone:
Chuck Hammers, who owns five Pizza My Heart outlets in the city with about 115 employees, says he was panicked until he realized the pay hike would also affect his competitors. To offset a 4% increase in costs, he raised the price of pizza slices by 8%, or 25 cents for a $3 slice of pizza. "Ninety-five percent of customers didn't even notice," he says, adding that his sales were unaffected.
As always, there is more going on economically in San Jose than just a minimum wage increase. But this example joins a long list of others—like strong small-business job growth in Washington, the state with the highest minimum wage—showing at least that a higher minimum wage does not, by itself, cost jobs. And of course, for the 70,000 workers who got a raise, it means the ability to get a cracked tooth fixed or find a place to live on their own or eat out occasionally.
Theologically and scripturally it makes more sense to "keep marriages together" -- not giving people a second chance at marriage if they blow the first one -- than to prevent two people who love one another from ritualizing a life-long commitment.
Pax tecum
Alan
Islamic Jihad and Christian Fundamentalism are mirror images
each projecting its own evil on the other.
Best Pax Posts On Psychological Projection And "The Shadow"
Proponents of gay marriage pursue total victory and 100 percent compliance. This is never a good idea, for any movement. Sensible people quit at 98 percent and call the rest a sampling error..
You speak often of the dangers of absolutism -- well, we see it at work here.
Attempts to stamp out the likes of Kim Davis will backfire. I guarantee it
It was rapid, massive loss of life that devastated the population of one of the planet's most endangered species of antelope and has horrified conservationists.
But clues to what wiped out up to 80 percent of Kazakhstan's saiga antelope in just a couple of weeks are now starting to emerge.
Scientists believe the deaths may have been caused by bacteria that normally live harmlessly in the animals' bodies turning into deadly infections.
A mass die off of saiga in May shocked biologists after it wiped out half of the population of the critically endangered animals in Kazakhstan (pictured). Scientists have found clues that suggest the animals suffered massive internal bleeding after Pasteurella bacteria in their bodies went out of control
They have found bacterial toxins in tissue samples taken from the dead antelopes that appear to have caused extensive bleeding in most of the animals' organs.
However, exactly what would have triggered these bacteria to become so deadly almost overnight is still baffling researchers.
Genetic analysis has shown the bacteria – Pasteurella multocida and Clostridia perfringens - were ordinary types commonly found in the bodies of ruminants like saiga.
WHAT IS THE SAIGA ANTELOPE?
Huge herds of saiga once roamed the earth alongside the wooly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger.
The mammoth and tigers died out but the saiga became prized for its delicious meat, which resembles succulent lamb.
There were more than 1 million saiga in the 1990s, but by 2003 poaching and disease slashed their numbers in Kazakhstan to 21,000.
They play a key role in the ecosystem of the steppe grasslands by recycling nutrients back into the soil through their dung.
They are also a vital food source for the predators that prowl the steppes.
They do not normally cause disease in the animals unless they have weakened immune systems and if a disease-causing strain was spreading in the herds, the die-offs should have taken much longer.
Carlyn Samuel, from the Saiga Conservation Alliance, which has been leading the efforts to understand what happened, said: 'The most likely primary disease appears to be haemolytic septicaemia, caused by an opportunistic infection with the bacterium Pasteurella multocida serotype B, which is naturally found as a latent infection in the upper respiratory tract of saigas and other mammals.
'Another opportunistic super-infection with the bacteria Clostridium perfringens was also identified in some cases - perhaps a half - and this infection results in the release of massive amounts of lethal toxins into the intestine, which are absorbed into the bloodstream and contribute to a rapid death.
'However, it is not clear what triggered these bacteria suddenly to become virulent.'
Over just four days, 60,000 of the antelope perished, a rate of spread that defies conventional epidemiology of disease.
The saiga started dying towards the end of May this year with the females and then the calves perishing (pictured). An estimated 134,000 of the creatures died in total from what is suspected to be bacterial poisoning
By June this year the die-off had finished, taking at least 148,000 animals with it, according to government figures, although the real number could be much higher.
The Saiga Conservation Alliance said: 'Our latest expedition to the migration area and die-off sites reported many carcasses remained unburied and so the figure might be closer to 200,000.'
Scientists are now looking at other aspects of the environment that might have triggered a change in the bacteria.
Testing has shown that pollution and contamination of soil, water and air are unlikely causes while radiation levels in the area are also within normal ranges.
Bitter cold over the winter and a damp spring may have weakened the antelopes' immune systems while also giving the bacteria the perfect conditions to multiply.
However toxic algae, plants or otherwise naturally occurring toxins have also not been ruled out.
Official government burial sites recorded 148,000 animals died in the month long die off but experts who have visited the area say there are still many animals lying dead and the final number could be more than 200,000
Steffen Zuther, a geoecologist and coordinator of the Atlyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science: 'The extent of this die-off, and the speed it had, by spreading throughout the whole calving herd and killing all the animals, this has not been observed for any other species.
'It's really unheard of. The question is why it developed so rapidly and spread to all the animals.'
Saiga are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature after their numbers fell to less than 21,000 in the 1990s.
There were an estimated 257,000 of them in Kazkhstan in 2014 together with a herd in Russia and a herd in Mongolia.
They have an unusual, oversized nose, called the proboscis, which is thought to help heat up the freezing air during the winter before it enters the lungs.
They play a key role in the ecosystem of the arid steppes, helping to recycle nutrients into the soil.
Experts first noticed the die offs on 9 May when females started to die and then their calves.
Large die-offs are not unusual in saiga - in previous years as many as 12,000 of the creatures have died.
Saiga die-offs have occurred in previous years like in 2014 when 12,000 of the animals perished (pictured) but the scale of the this years mortality has left conservation groups worried about the creatures' future
However, the scale of this year's deaths has shocked veterinarians and biologists. Two discrete populations some 180 miles (300km) apart suffered the die offs simultaneously.
Professor Richard Kock, a wildlife veterinarian from the Royal Veterinary College in London, was part of the team that went to Kazakhstan to investigate the deaths.
He told Nature: 'I have worked in veterinary diseases all my career and I have never seen 100 per cent mortality.
'We had a herd of 60,000 aggregated and they all died. That is extraordinary.'
'Epidemiologically, you cannot get a directly transmitted disease to kill a whole population in seven days… I'd say it's a polymicrobial disease.'
Saiga, which have an unusual nose for warming cold air as they breath in the winter, play an important role on the grassland ecosystem by helping to put nutrients back into the soil
This is where pathogens present in the body have seized an opportunity to multiply to a point that they kill their host.
The researchers are now searching for what may have given them this opportunity.
E J Milner-Gulland, a conservation biologist at Imperial College London said: 'If we understand the factors that contribute to these events, we may be able to mitigate or prevent them in the future.
'This is important because three of the four remaining populations of saiga are at such low levels that an event like this could wipe them out completely.'
Buying organic veggies at the supermarket is a waste of money
Quartz
It has happened to all of us. You’re standing in the produce aisle, just trying to buy some zucchini, when you face the inevitable choice: Organic or regular?
It’s a loaded question that can mean many different things, sometimes all at once: Healthy or pesticide-drenched? Tasty or bland? Fancy or basic? Clean or dirty? Good or bad?
But here’s the most important question for many customers: Is it worth the extra money?
The answer: Probably not.
Higher price doesn’t really mean higher quality
It’ll come as no surprise to most shoppers that organic produce is typically more expensive than the other options. In March, a Consumer Reports analysis found that, on average, the prices on organic foods were 47% higher than on their conventional counterparts. USDA numbers bear out this difference too. The wholesale price of a 25-pound sack of organic carrots in San Francisco in 2013, for example, was more than three times the price of a conventional bag.
(It’s worth noting that not all items see such drastic markups all the time: Three-pound cartons of mesclun were only 23% more expensive, according to the USDA, and sometimes organic produce is actually the less expensive option—but that’s a rarity.)
But this price difference does not just reflect the added cost of organic agriculture techniques: It’s also because people will pay more for the label—often without knowing what it means. “Organic” has essentially become another way of saying “luxury.”
As a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found, the “premium” markup on organic food is 29-32%, when only a 5-7% markup would be needed to break even—making organic farms more profitable than conventional ones. (Of course, it takes three years of organic practices to get certified, so farmers may still be left covering their additional investment after that period.)
Organic produce is not necessarily better for the environment
There is little doubt that synthetic pesticides and fertilizers substances can have negative impacts on the environment, from potentially endangering pollinators to polluting natural waterways. But many organic farmers, especially the large ones, don’t skip pesticides and fertilizers—they just use natural options, which are hardly risk-free.
In 2010, a study found that some organic pesticides can actually have a worse environmental impacts than conventional ones. Plus, a recent study found that because organic agriculture is now done mostly en masse by big corporations (what’s known dismissively by advocates as “Walmart organic”), the lower yields combined with the use of heavy machinery means it actually releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than conventional farming.
Any health benefits from organic produce are teeny-tiny
The science available thus far says any additional nutritional benefits from organic produce, compared with conventional, are very small.
A 2009 meta-analysis said there was no nutrient difference in organic versus conventional. Since then, two larger meta-analyses have found slight differences, but ones that are probably too small to really matter. The 2012 study found slightly higher phosphorous levels in the organic produce, and a 2014 study found higher antioxidant levels and lower cadmium levels in organic foods.
But as Jeffrey Blumberg, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University told NPR, because there are so many variations within organic and conventional production systems, drawing overarching conclusions about their products isn’t really methodologically sound. And any differences in nutrition are relatively insignificant. Ultimately, if you want more nutrients, eat more vegetables, organic or not.
Even the “Dirty Dozen” vegetables we’re told to avoid aren’t really that dirty
Every year, the Environmental Working Group puts out a highly anticipated list called the “Dirty Dozen“—the fruits and vegetables it says have the highest pesticide residues, and are therefore most worth buying organic.
But in 2011, scientists from the University of California published a report finding that even the fruits and vegetables in the Dirty Dozen had less than 2% of the maximum allowable amount of the measured pesticides established by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The researchers criticized EWG’s methodology and concluded that that there was no “appreciable reduction of consumer risks” in eating these organic foods.
For its part, EWG told Quartz that it disagrees with Winters’ conclusions for several reasons, including that they used the risk for adults, not children, in their calculations, and that they looked at average amounts instead of the highest levels used.
Organic farms don’t treat their workers any better
Farm work is hard and those doing it are often exploited. Unfortunately, this is no less true at organic farms—the USDA certification doesn’t include any labor requirements.
In 2006, the eco-minded news site Grist published a story detailing the many ways organic farmworkers were being mistreated, including violations of minimum wage laws, laborers allegedly being barred from speaking with inspectors, and sexual discrimination.
“The exploitative conditions that farmworkers face in the US are abysmal—it’s a human-rights crisis,” Richard Mandelbaum, a policy analyst at the Farmworker Support Committee, told Grist. “In terms of wages and labor rights, there’s really no difference between organic and conventional.”
And there’s no reason to expect your organic vegetables to taste better, either
Taste depends on so many factors, and organic certainly doesn’t come with any guarantees. “My jet-setting Argentine asparagus tasted like damp cardboard,” the journalist Michael Pollan wrote of the organic asparagus he purchased at Whole Foods in his 2007 manifesto Omnivore’s Dilemma. Seven years later, the chef and food advocate Dan Barber wrote in The Third Plateabout his shock when he tested his Mexican organic carrots for their sugar content—and discovered it was zero (probably making for a rather muddy-tasting bite).
So, what’s the best option?
Bottom line: If you want to know more about your fruits and vegetables, buy them at the local farmers market, organic or not. The prices are often competitive with supermarkets, the in-season goods will be fresher than those shipped long distances, and any questions you have on production practices can be asked and answered on the spot. If you can’t make it to the farmers market, don’t waste your money on that little label.
The Organic Trade Association did not respond to a request for comment.
ABC News published an intriguing poll the other day, one that spelled out a growing racial divide:
"Nonwhites see Trump negatively by a vast 17-79 percent… That said, whites are the majority group – 64 percent of the adult population – and they now divide evenly on Trump, 48-49 percent, favorable-unfavorable. Clinton, by contrast, is far more unpopular than Trump among whites, 34-65 percent. So while racial and ethnic polarization is on the rise in views of Trump, it remains even higher for Clinton."
The Republicans already lost virtually the entire black vote (scoring just4 percentand6 percentof black voters the last two elections). Now, by pushing toward the nomination a candidate whose brilliant plan to "make America great again" is to build a giant wall to keep out Mexican rapists, they're headed the same route with Hispanics. That's a steep fall for a party that won 44 percent of the Hispanic voteas recently as 2004.
Trump's supporters are people who are tired of being told they have to be part of some kind of coalition in order to have a political voice. They particularly hate being lectured about alienating minorities, especially by members of their own party.
Just a few weeks ago, for instance, establishment GOP spokesghoul George Will spent a whole column haranguing readers about how Trump was ruining his party's chances for victory. He noted that Mitt Romney might have won in 2012 if he'd pulled even slightly more than 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Will blasted Trump's giant wall idea and even ridiculed the candidate's deportation plan by comparing Trump to Hitler:
"The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump's project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion."
It's not clear how forcing 11 million people to wear yellow patches saves money, but whatever. However it was supposed to be taken, the shock argument didn't work.
A few days later, in a rare episode of National Review-on-National Review crime, blogger Ramesh Ponnuru blasted Will for his hysterics. He argued Romney wouldn't have won even with a 45 percent bump in the Hispanic vote. "He needed more votes, obviously," Ponnuru wrote, "but he didn't need more Hispanic votes in particular."
Ponnuru was echoing an idea already expressed by the conservative commentariat. Hack-among-hacks Byron York said the same thing in the Washington Examiner back in 2013.
He argued that even 70 percent of the Hispanic vote wouldn't have helped Romney, whose more serious problem "was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off… that they abandoned the GOP."
Rush Limbaugh bought what York was selling, arguing that Romney didn't lose because he failed to convince Hispanic voters that Republicans "like ‘em."
"The difference-maker was, a lot of white voters stayed home," Rush said.
Anyway, the night after Ponnuru ran his brief blog post a week and a half ago, Trump had Univision anchor Jorge Ramos tossed from a press conference in Dubuque, Iowa, sneering at him to "siddown" and "go back to Univision."
Conservative blogs and social media commentatorscheered Trump's decision to have "butthurt" Jorge Ramos "deported" from the press conference, thereby turning the whole thing into another brilliant piece of symbolic political theater for the Donald.
Whether or not it's true that a Republican candidate can win the White House with a minus-51 percent net unfavorable rating among Hispanic voters (Trump's well-earned current number) is sort of beside the point. The point is that Trump clearly feels he can afford to flip off the Hispanic community and win with a whites-only strategy. And his supporters are loving the idea that he's trying.
The decision by huge masses of Republican voters to defy D.C.-thinkfluencer types like George Will and throw in with a carnival act like Trump is no small thing. For the first time in a generation, Republican voters are taking their destiny into their own hands.
In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it.
Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they're about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates' charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs.
They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things.
They mostly don't care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It's about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation.
They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything.
They get everything from the Republicans because you don't have to make a single concession to a Republican voter.
All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who thereal Americans are. Call it the "Rove 1-2."
That's literally all it's taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base.
While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn't get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.
While it's certainly been fun laughing about the lunacies of people like Bachmann and John Ashcroft and Ted Cruz, who see the face of Jesus in every tree stump and believe the globalist left is planning to abolish golf courses and force country-dwellers to live in city apartments lit by energy-efficient light bulbs, the truth is that the voters they represented have been irrelevant for decades.
At least on the Democratic side there was that 5-10 percent of industry policy demands that voters occasionally rejected, putting a tiny dent in what otherwise has been a pretty smoothly running oligarchy.
Now that's over. Trump has pulled all of those previously irrelevant voters completely out of pocket. In a development that has to horrify the donors who run the GOP, the candidate Trump espouses some truly populist policy beliefs, including stern warnings about the dire consequences companies will face under a Trump presidency if they ship American jobs to Mexico and China.
All that energy the party devoted for decades telling middle American voters that protectionism was invented by Satan and Karl Marx during a poker game in Brussels in the mid-1840s, that just disappeared in a puff of smoke.
And all that money the Republican kingmakers funneled into Fox and Clear Channel over the years, making sure that their voters stayed focused on ACORN and immigrant-transmitted measles and the New Black Panthers (has anyone ever actually seen a New Black Panther? Ever?) instead of, say, the complete disappearance of the manufacturing sector or the mass theft of their retirement income, all of that's now backing up on them.
The party worked the cattle in their pen into such a dither that now they won't rest until they get the giant wall that real-life, as-seen-on-TV billionaire Donald Trump promises will save them from all those measles-infected rapists pouring over the border.
Not far under the surface of Trump's candidacy lurks a powerful current of Internet conspiracy theory that's a good two or three degrees loonier than even the most far-out Tea Party paranoia. Gone are the salad days when red-staters merely worried about Barack Obama inviting UN tanks to mass on the borders of Lubbock.
Trump supporters have gone next-level, obsessed with gooney-bird fantasies about "white genocide," a global plan to exterminate white people by sending waves of third-world immigrants across American and European borders to settle and intermarry.
The white-power nerds pushing this stuff don't like the term RINO (Republican In Name Only) and prefer "cuckservative," a term that's a mix of "cuckold" and "conservative." Cuck is also a porn term that refers to a white guy who gets off on watching his wife take it from (usually) a black man. A cuck is therefore a kind of desexualized race traitor.
So you can see why the Internet lights up when Donald Trump tosses Jorge Ramos from a presser and tells him "mine's bigger than yours" (Trump was referring to his heart, but again, whatever). All of Trump's constant bragging about his money and his poll numbers and his virility speak directly to this surprisingly vibrant middle American fantasy about a castrated white America struggling to re-grow its mojo.
Republicans won middle American votes for years by taking advantage of the fact that their voters didn't know the difference between an elitist and the actual elite, between a snob and an oligarch. They made sure their voters' idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.
Trump similarly is scoring points with voters who don't know the difference between feeling sorry for themselves and actually being victims. We live in a society that is changing for a lot of reasons, and some of those changes feel annoying to certain kinds of people, particularly older white folks who don't like language-policing and other aspects of political correctness.
But as basketball star turned pundit Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pointed out earlier this week, PC isn't a new thing, or even a thing at all. It's just an "emotional challenge every generation has had to go through." We get older, our kids correct our bad habits, it happens.
Not to Trump's supporters. They've turned some minor cultural changes into a vast conspiracy of white victimhood. They're eating up Trump's "Make America Great Again" theme (which one supporter hilariously explained must be his true goal, because "it's on his hat"), because it's a fantasy tale of a once-great culture ruined by an invasion of mongrel criminals.
For reasons that are, again, obvious to everyone but Republican voters, this "woe is us" narrative is never to fly with the rest of the country, including especially (one imagines) the nonwhite population. Few sane people are going to waste a vote on a sob story about how rough things have gotten for white people. But Trump supporters are clinging to this fantasy far more fiercely than red-state voters were ever clinging to guns or religion.
That leaves us facing a future in which national elections will no longer be decided by ideas, but by numbers. It will be a turnout battle between people who believe in a multicultural vision for the country, and those who don't.
Every other issue, from taxes to surveillance to war to jobs to education, will take a distant back seat to this ongoing, moronic referendum on white victimhood. And there's nothing any of us can do about it except wait it out, and wonder if our politics only gets dumber from here.
Only a few weeks ago, pundits and political observers roundly proclaimed that Donald Trump, the reality-show tycoon who's mounted a takeover of the GOP, would flame out, fade, implode, or whatever. Jeb Bush's campaign aides were telling journalists that they had no concerns about Trump threatening a third Bush regime. "Trump is, frankly, other people's problem," said Michael Murphy, the chief strategist for Bush's super-PAC. It's becoming clearer, though, that Trump, still dominating the polls and the headlines as the Republican front-runner, could well pose an existential threat to the Grand Old Party (or at least its establishment, including the Bush campaign). But the fundamental problem for the Rs is not Trump; it's Republican voters.
Trump is a brash and arrogant celebrity who is well skilled in pushing buttons, belittling foes, uttering outrageous remarks, causing a ruckus, and drawing attention to one thing: himself. He's a smart marketer and a brilliant self-promoter. His name recognition is over 100 percent. He cooked up a wonderful ready-for-swag tagline: "Make America Great Again." He's incredible. He's yooge. But none of this would matter if there was no demand for his bombastic, anger-fueled, anti-immigrant populism—that is, if Republican voters did not crave a leader who equates undocumented immigrants with rapists and who claims that everyone else in political life is a nincompoop selling out the US of A to the Chinese, the Mexicans, and just about every other government.
The polite way to say this is that Trump's message is resonating with Republicans. And polls show that his support is not ideological. He's winning over GOPers across the spectrum, from conservatives to evangelicals to supposedly moderate Rs. His assault on the GOP powers that be (or powers that were) is not the rebellion of one wing against another. (Political commentators are so programmed to view party conflicts as battles between conflicting factions.) Instead, Trump is tapping into a current that runs throughout the various strains of the GOP. It's a current of frustration, despair, anger, and yearning—a yearning for a time when the United States will not be confronted by difficult economic and national security challenges, and when you will not have to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish.
Republicans are pissed off. (In polls, they express far more dissatisfaction with the nation's present course than Democrats.) And they believe the nation has been hijacked by President Barack Obama, whose legitimacy most Rs still reject. A recent Bloomberg/Des Moines Registerpoll of likely Iowa caucus participants found that 35 percent of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the United States. A quarter said they were not sure. (Nine out of ten Democrats said the president was born in the United States.) So nearly 60 percent of Rs believe there is cause to suspect Obama has hornswoggled the nation. Meanwhile, according to another poll, 54 percent of Republican voters say Obama is a Muslim. A third were not sure. Only 14 percent identified the president as a Christian.
These findings—which echo a long string of surveys conducted during the Obama years—would seem to indicate that at least half of the GOP is unhinged and living in its own fact-free and perhaps Fox-fed reality. To top it off, many Republican voters have expected the GOPers in control of Congress to kill Obamacare, shut down the government and slash the budget, prevent Obama from issuing executive orders, and impeach the pretender who inhabits the White House. Oh, and there's this: Benghazi! So they are mighty ticked off and seriously disappointed. The Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll found that half of GOP caucus-goers said they were unsatisfied with the US government and 38 percent were "mad as hell" at it. Slightly more than half were unsatisfied with Republicans in Congress; a fifth were mad as hell at them.
Given the psychological state of the GOP base, it's not surprising that the fellow expressing the most outrage on the campaign trail—the guy who sounds like he, too, is mad as hell—has taken the express elevator to the penthouse floor of the polls. After all, he's the only one in the pack who has confronted Obama on his birthplace. Trump has not renounced his birther ways. He has already made that point for this audience and can move on. (In the past few days, Trump also came close to endorsing another far-right conspiracy theory. He essentially accused Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's longtime aide, of being a security problem because she is married to disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner and presumably shared classified State Department information with this "perv." For years, conservative conspiracy theorists have claimed Abedin was a Muslim Brotherhood mole within the US government.)
The anti-immigrant, anti-Obama, anti-establishment sentiment that Trump is tapping runs deep within the Republican electorate. Many Republicans clearly see the president as a foreign-born secret Muslim with a clandestine plan to weaken, if not ruin, the United States—remember the death panels—and they have a dark, nearly apocalyptic view of Obama’s America. (My email box of late is full of fundraising notes from right-wing groups claiming Obama is about to confiscate all guns, suspend the Constitution so he can run for a third term, relinquish American sovereignty to the United Nations, and mount a military operation within the United States to subdue any opposition to him.)
If this is your perspective when seeking a presidential candidate who will represent your desires and demands, you are unlikely to be drawn to a politician who wants to gain your vote by presenting a 27-point economic plan or by advocating charter schools. Voters this dissatisfied and this detached from reality will be looking for someone who can vent for them. Trump does that. He also promises quick and simple action to address their concerns: a wall (not a fence), great trade deals at a snap of the finger, the end of ISIS, you name it. And you just won't believe how great this country will be after four years of President Trump. A focus group of Trump backers recently conducted by GOP pollster Frank Luntz found that Trumpites fancied Trump as much for his cut-the-crap manner as for the substance of his remarks.
As a way to counter Obama, the Republicans eagerly courted the tea partiers and other dissatisfied voters. They rode that tiger into the congressional majority in the low-turnout elections of 2010 and 2014. They whipped up the frenzy. (During the Obamacare fight, House Speaker John Boehner hosted a tea party rally on Capitol Hill, during which the crowd shouted, "Nazis, Nazis" when referring to Democrats.) Washington Republicans vowed they would take the country back from Obama for the tea party. They exploited the Obama hatred, but their often effective obstructionism was still not enough to feed the beast that had carried them into power.
Though Trump may beg to differ, Trumpmania is not about Trump. He's merely supplying the rhetoric and emotion craved by a large chunk of the GOP electorate. That yearning won't go away. Ben Carson, who in the latest Iowa poll tied for first place with Trump, is pushing a similar message—America is going to hell and the nation needs an outraged outsider to clean up the mess. His tone is kinder and gentler (and musical!). But like Trump, he is mining profound dissatisfaction and promising a national revival. Combine the Trump and Carson electorates at this point, and it's close to a majority of Republicans.
A Trump-Carson ticket? Maybe not. (But if so, you heard it here first.) The point is, the GOP is overflowing with voters who long for a candidate who echoes their rage and resentment. Whatever happens with Trump in the months ahead, this bloc of voters won't go away. Neither will their fury. This is the true dilemma for the Republican Party and its pooh-bahs. Trump, the deal-making businessman, is merely responding to market forces. He's just the supplier. Trump is the drug, and the voters need to score. The demand is what counts.
I was a relative latecomer to the work of Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), that great enchanter of storytelling who spent his life bridging science and the human spirit — partly because I was not yet born when he first bewitched the reading public with his writing, and partly because those early books never made it past the Iron Curtain and into the Bulgaria of my childhood. It was only in my twenties, having made my way to America, that I fell in love with Dr. Sacks’s writing and the mind from which it sprang — a mind absolutely magnificent, buoyed by a full heart and a radiant spirit.
His intellectual elegance bowled me over, and I felt a strange kinship with many of his peculiarities, from the youthful affair with iron — although the 300-pound squats of my bodybuilding days paled before his 600 pounds, which set a state record and earned him the moniker Dr. Squat — to our shared love of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
Indeed, it was his uncommon insight into the role of music in the human experience that first drew me to Dr. Sacks’s writing. I landed into Musicophiliaand soon devoured his older writings. Both his science and his life were undergirded by a profound reverence for music — music seemed to be this intellectual giant’s greatest form of spirituality. He knew that the life of the mind and the life of the body were one, and understood that music married the two — an understanding he carried in his synapses and his sinews.
Nowhere did this embodied awareness, nor his luminous soul, come more vibrantly alive than in the remarkable story of how he once saved his own life by song and literature while running from a raging bull in a Norwegian fjord, told in his 1974 memoir A Leg to Stand On (public library) — the story by which I shall always remember him.
To commemorate this irreplaceable man, I asked artist Debbie Millman to create a piece of art illustrating the passage that captures not only the heart of that heartening story, but the spirit in which Dr. Sacks inhabited and exited our world.
As the broken instrument of his body is buried motionless and mute into the earth, may the symphony of his spirit live on in his writing with the same eternally resounding vigor as what Dr. Sacks called “one of the world’s great musical treasures” in his final communication with the world:
What a privilege for this world to have been graced with this extraordinary human animal and his fully embodied mind. The only thing left to say is what Dr. Sacks himself wrote to his beloved aunt Lennie, who shaped his life, as she lay dying: “Thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living — for being you.”
