by Paul Krugman
Saturday, February 28, 2015
No Dress Rehearsal
This is not a dress rehearsal for your life. I repeat: this is NOT a
dress rehearsal. As they say in the movie business, this is a hot set.
This life is a live take. Whatever you do from here on out do not
assume there will be any do-overs. Try & get it right the first
time.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Hooray for Print!
Sorry, Ebooks. These 9 Studies Show Why Print Is Better
Posted:
Updated:
Younger people are more likely to believe that there's useful information that's only available offline.
While 62 percent of citizens under 30 subscribe to this belief, only 53 percent of those 30 and older agree. These findings are from a promising study released last year by Pew Research, which also found that millennials are more likely to visit their local library.
Students are more likely to buy physical textbooks.
A study conducted by Student Monitor and featured in The Washington Post shows that 87 percent of textbook spending for the fall 2014 semester was on print books. Of course, this could be due to professors assigning less ebooks. Which is why it's fascinating that...
Students opt for physical copies of humanities books, even when digital versions are available for free.
While students prefer reading digital texts for science and math classes, they like to study the humanities in print. A study conducted by the University of Washington in 2013, and quoted in The Washington Post, shows that 25 percent of humanities students bought physical versions of free ebooks.
This isn't just true of textbooks. Teens prefer print books for personal use, too.
Nielson BookScan numbers from 2014 revealed the main reasons why teens buy books: "I've enjoyed author's previous books" ranked No. 1, followed by "browsing in libraries" and "browsing in bookstores," which both ranked above "online bookseller websites." "In-store displays" also ranked above hearing about a book through a social network.
Students don't connect emotionally with on-screen texts.
A 2012 study featured in the Guardian gave half its participants a story on paper, and the other half the same story on screen. The result? iPad readers didn't feel that the story was as immersive, and therefore weren't able to connect with it on an emotional level. Further, those who read on paper were much more capable of placing the story's events in chronological order.
... And they comprehend less of the information presented in digital books.
USA Today shared a 2013 study showing that students retain less when reading on a screen. The study's creator blamed this on the "flash gimmicks" embedded in many ebooks. She also suspects being able to collectively turn to the same page enhances group discussion.
It's not just students opting for print. Parents and kids prefer to read physical books together, too.
According to Digital Book World and literacy nonprofit Sesame Workshop, less than ten percent of kids and parents alike choose ebooks over print books. Parents say fancy features such as videos and interactive games are more of a distraction than a valued tool.
Which makes sense, because ebooks can negatively impact your sleep.
A few months ago, the Guardian reported on a Harvard study linking e-reading and sleep deprivation. If the ebook was "light emitting" it took participants an average of ten minutes longer to fall asleep than those who read physical books instead.
... And it's hard to avoid multitasking while reading digital books.
In a blog for The Huffington Post, Naomi S. Baron wrote about the findings published in her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. "Studies I have done with university students in several countries confirm what I bet you'll find yourself observing," she writes. "When reading either for (school) work or pleasure, the preponderance of students found it easiest to concentrate when reading in print. They also reported multitasking almost three times as much when reading onscreen as when reading in hard copy."
Do you prefer print books to ebooks? Tweet @HuffPo
No Fooling
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some
of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all
of the time, even if your name is Bill O'Reilly.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
In Like Flint
I am in like Flint, home bound due to inclement weather, the hacienda
locked down tight. I'm afraid to go out today. My luck is that I would
end up stranded in Tim-Buck-Too with no way to get back home. I got
lunch meat in the ice box and canned tuna in the pantry. I got Drew
Carey and The Price is Right on the TV. I ain't complaining.
Monday, February 23, 2015
The Fiduciary Rule
Mon Feb 23, 2015 at 07:58 AM PST
White House, Elizabeth Warren team up to protect retirement savings from Wall Street
What will that mean in practice? When workers or retirees rollover their savings accounts, typically 401(k)s, into IRAs, brokers will generally not be able to recommend products that give them a kickback but diminish the clients long-term yield. The new fiduciary standard should block what honest brokers call "over-managing:" unnecessary rollovers, churning (over-active buying and selling that generates brokers' fees at the expense of returns), and the pushing of expensive and risky products like variable annuities.Not surprisingly, Wall Street, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and lawmakers from both parties are gearing up to fight the rule. David Dayen points to a a letter the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a large trade group, got 183 members of Congress to sign, "including 118 Democrats, attacking the Labor Department rule." You can expect a Republican Congress, with the help of some Democrats, to act swiftly to try to find a way to block or blunt these rules. The Department of Labor has created a website where you can read more background about the proposed rule and how to protect retirement savings.
Originally posted to Joan McCarter on Mon Feb 23, 2015 at 07:58 AM PST.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
The Loft
It's an okay movie, certainly not great, but worth it at the discount house on Lorna Road. The plot is too complicated. There is a twist at the end though not so great a twist. On my new scale of 1 to 6 I give it a #3.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Emerson
In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson from "Quotation and Originality"
-Ralph Waldo Emerson from "Quotation and Originality"
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Word of the Week
CONVIVIAL
Meaning: Friendly, enjoyable, lively.
(Of a person) Cheerful. Friendly, Jovial.
Meaning: Friendly, enjoyable, lively.
(Of a person) Cheerful. Friendly, Jovial.
Richard Wightman Fox - Lincoln's Body
Abraham Lincoln is a man about whom it can truly be said that the last word will never be written. Here is a proof: a book that uses Lincoln's body, called ugly and hideous in his lifetime, as a metaphor to present a cultural history of the man. And doubt it not. This is a portrait of the good Lincoln.
"Richard Wightman Fox has ingeniously portrayed the physical body of Abraham Lincoln, living and dead, in his own time and in memory, as a vehicle for evaluating Lincoln's continuing impact on American culture." James M. McPherson (inside cover)
The book borders on hagiography. Lincoln the Renaissance Man. Lincoln the President who could have led the country thru Reconstruction and the industrial age that followed the war. Lincoln the man who could do no wrong.
Lincoln died from the bullet of John Wilkes Booth after speaking of granting limited suffrage to "qualified" blacks in Louisiana. Therefore, the "open-minded" A. Lincoln was moving in a liberal direction toward Reconstruction at the time of he death. Had he lived, he and the Radical Republicans would have done great things to push political freedom forward in the country. Well, maybe. P. 23
The author seems to say that the Radical Republicans were glad that Lincoln had died. This is surprising to me.
The author describes the chaos that followed the assassination. Did Bates really say "now he belongs to the ages?"
The Lincoln Cult from the 1860's to the 1960's. P. 97
Holland's biography published in 1866 fueled the Lincoln cult. P. 98
The story of the funeral train with its 1,700 trek from DC to Springfield is a full story in itself.
Stanton micromanaged events after the assassination. P. 103
Whitman's two poems about Lincoln were popular from the beginning. P. 127
George Bancroft was a states rights Democrat. P. 130
"Richard Wightman Fox has ingeniously portrayed the physical body of Abraham Lincoln, living and dead, in his own time and in memory, as a vehicle for evaluating Lincoln's continuing impact on American culture." James M. McPherson (inside cover)
The book borders on hagiography. Lincoln the Renaissance Man. Lincoln the President who could have led the country thru Reconstruction and the industrial age that followed the war. Lincoln the man who could do no wrong.
Lincoln died from the bullet of John Wilkes Booth after speaking of granting limited suffrage to "qualified" blacks in Louisiana. Therefore, the "open-minded" A. Lincoln was moving in a liberal direction toward Reconstruction at the time of he death. Had he lived, he and the Radical Republicans would have done great things to push political freedom forward in the country. Well, maybe. P. 23
The author seems to say that the Radical Republicans were glad that Lincoln had died. This is surprising to me.
The author describes the chaos that followed the assassination. Did Bates really say "now he belongs to the ages?"
The Lincoln Cult from the 1860's to the 1960's. P. 97
Holland's biography published in 1866 fueled the Lincoln cult. P. 98
The story of the funeral train with its 1,700 trek from DC to Springfield is a full story in itself.
Stanton micromanaged events after the assassination. P. 103
Whitman's two poems about Lincoln were popular from the beginning. P. 127
George Bancroft was a states rights Democrat. P. 130
The Paul Ryan Delusion
Jonathan Chait notes that people are still trying to cast Paul Ryan as reasonable and moderate — hey, he visits bookstores favored by liberals. As Chait says, this sort of political evaluation by personal style is unreliable at best; and Ryan quite clearly deliberately exploits it, too, making moderate noises without ever giving an inch on his hard-line right-wing policies. Remember, this is the guy who pretended to offer a budget based on fiscal responsibility, but when you took out the magic asterisks it was really tax cuts for the rich, severe benefit cuts for the poor, and overall would actually increase the deficit.
I would add that Ryan isn’t just exploiting the press corp’s preference for up-close-and-personal over policy analysis; he’s also exploiting the eternal search for a Serious, Honest, Conservative, a creature centrists know must be out there somewhere (because otherwise their centrism is a colossal error of judgment).
But let’s not make this just about Ryan, or even about conservatism (although conservatives have been the main beneficiaries of the up-close-and-personal syndrome.) The fact is that attempts to judge politicians by how they come across have been almost universally disastrous during my whole tenure at the Times. Younger readers may not remember the days when George W. Bush was universally portrayed in the press as a bluff, honest, guy; those of us who pointed to his lies about taxes and Social Security and suggested that these were a better guide to his character than how he came across got nowhere until years later. John McCain rode for many years on a reputation as a principled maverick, because that’s the way he talked; I think his shameless embrace of every right-wing twist and turn has dented that reputation, but he’s still the darling of Sunday morning talk.
And then, of course, there was the irrefutable case for invading Iraq, irrefutable because Colin Powell made it, and only a fool or a Frenchman could fail to be persuaded. Or, maybe, someone who asked what actual evidence Powell had presented and noticed that there wasn’t any.
Meanwhile, some public figures face the reverse treatment, portrayed as evil and devious because reporters have decided that this is how they come across. E.g., Hillary Clinton, whose harsh treatment by the press has nothing to do with her gender, no way, no how. Or Mitt Romney, portrayed as smarmy and unlikable because — well, actually, he really is smarmy and unlikable, but you should reach that judgment based on his policies, not his persona.
Back to Ryan: the really amazing thing about the persistence of his personality cult is that economic and budget policy is his chosen area, where he has left a broad paper trail. So there is plenty of evidence about what he really believes and stands for, every bit of which says that his overriding goal is to redistribute income from the poor to the one percent. If you want to claim otherwise, show me anything — anything at all — in his policy proposals that doesn’t go in that direction.
On Slavery
Sunday, Feb 15, 2015 07:00 AM CST
(Credit: Stocksnapper via Shutterstock)
Should a person be able to own another person? Today Christians
uniformly say no, and many would like to believe that has always been
the case. But history tells a different story, one in which Christians
have struggled to give a clear answer when confronted with questions
about human trafficking and human rights. Had the Bible been edited
differently, Christendom might have achieved moral clarity on this issue
sooner. As is, the Bible contains very mixed messages, which means that
biblical authority could be invoked on either side of the question,
leaving Christian beliefs about slavery vulnerable for centuries to
prevailing cultural, political, and economic currents.
Old Testament Endorses, Describes, and Regulates Slavery
The Bible first endorses slavery in the book of Genesis, in the story of Noah the ark builder. After the flood, Noah’s son Ham sees his father drunk and naked, and for reasons that have long been debated, is cursed. One recurring theme in Genesis is that guilt can be transferred from a guilty person to an innocent person (think of Adam and Eve’s fruit consumption, which taints us all), and in this case the curse is put on Ham’s son, Canaan.
When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.” Genesis 9:24-27 NRSV
Most likely, this story was intended originally to justify the Israelite subjugation of Canaanite peoples, who, in other stories about the conquest of the Promised Land are slaughtered or enslaved. Later though, Christians and Muslims would use the story to explain why some people have dark skin, and “Ham’s curse” became a justification for enslaving Native Americans and Africans.
Throughout the Hebrew Old Testament, slavery is endorsed in a variety of ways. Patriarchs Abraham and Jacob both have sex with female slaves, and the unions are blessed with male offspring. Captives are counted among the booties of war, with explicit instructions given for purifying virgin war captives before “knowing them.” The wisest man of all time, Solomon, keeps hundreds of concubines, meaning sexual slaves, along with his many wives.
Where the Bible really stands on slavery
(Credit: Stocksnapper via Shutterstock)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
Should a person be able to own another person? Today Christians
uniformly say no, and many would like to believe that has always been
the case. But history tells a different story, one in which Christians
have struggled to give a clear answer when confronted with questions
about human trafficking and human rights. Had the Bible been edited
differently, Christendom might have achieved moral clarity on this issue
sooner. As is, the Bible contains very mixed messages, which means that
biblical authority could be invoked on either side of the question,
leaving Christian beliefs about slavery vulnerable for centuries to
prevailing cultural, political, and economic currents.Old Testament Endorses, Describes, and Regulates Slavery
The Bible first endorses slavery in the book of Genesis, in the story of Noah the ark builder. After the flood, Noah’s son Ham sees his father drunk and naked, and for reasons that have long been debated, is cursed. One recurring theme in Genesis is that guilt can be transferred from a guilty person to an innocent person (think of Adam and Eve’s fruit consumption, which taints us all), and in this case the curse is put on Ham’s son, Canaan.
When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.” Genesis 9:24-27 NRSV
Most likely, this story was intended originally to justify the Israelite subjugation of Canaanite peoples, who, in other stories about the conquest of the Promised Land are slaughtered or enslaved. Later though, Christians and Muslims would use the story to explain why some people have dark skin, and “Ham’s curse” became a justification for enslaving Native Americans and Africans.
Throughout the Hebrew Old Testament, slavery is endorsed in a variety of ways. Patriarchs Abraham and Jacob both have sex with female slaves, and the unions are blessed with male offspring. Captives are counted among the booties of war, with explicit instructions given for purifying virgin war captives before “knowing them.” The wisest man of all time, Solomon, keeps hundreds of concubines, meaning sexual slaves, along with his many wives.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Magic and Science
This Is Your Brain on Magic
Psychologists and neuroscientists have an unlikely ally in
their quest to understand human nature: professional magicians.
She okays. He flips; she glances.
Olson, a graduate student in psychiatry at McGill University, puts the cards back in their box and hands it to her. “So which one did you choose?” The 10 of hearts, she tells him. “The 10 of hearts,” he repeats. “Great. So now if you could just examine the outside of the box to make sure it’s normal”—she does—“and then take that box and just close it right inside your hands.”
He snaps his fingers over hers. “Now I want you to slowly open your hand and read the bar code”—and sure enough, there are the words, printed right on the box: the 10 of hearts. The volunteer hands the box back to Olson, giggling at the seeming impossibility of what just transpired, unaware that she didn’t really choose the 10 of hearts at all. Olson chose it for her, in a piece of trickery so quick and so subtle as to seem almost like magic.
The scene is part of a video released in tandem with Olson’s latest study, published earlier this week in the journal Cognition and Consciousness. Together with a team of researchers from McGill and the University of British Columbia, he demonstrated the effectiveness of a technique that magicians call forcing, or manipulating a person’s decisions without her knowledge.
In the first part of the study, Olson, a practicing magician, approached 118 people and asked them to randomly pick a card as he flipped through the deck, an act that took about a half-second in total. Each time, though, Olson already had a specific card in mind. As he flipped, he’d let his target card show just slightly longer than the rest. Ninety-eight percent of the time, the participants picked the one he had in mind, even as 91 percent said the choice had been entirely theirs—illustrating, the study authors wrote, that magic “can provide new methods to study the feeling of free will.”
But when I asked Olson about the method in question—how, exactly, did he maneuver the flip so that his card showed for just a fraction of a second longer?—he deflected. “I can’t share that,” he said. “It’s part of the secret.”
* * *
Olson and his colleagues are part of a small but growing group of
researchers investigating how tricks like this one can offer insight
into how people think, perceive, and remember. In some ways, the pairing
of science and magic doesn’t seem like much of a pairing at all: One
field dedicated to uncovering the rules of the world, and another
predicated on the (seeming) ability to break them; a discipline that
tries to further understanding, and a performance art whose continued
existence depends on secrecy.In other ways, though, it makes a strange kind of sense. Magicians build their craft on the knowledge of how people act, psychologists dig into the why, and this new area of study that some have dubbed “neuromagic” tries to fill in the space in between. A recent special issue of the journal Frontiers in Psychology titled “The Psychology of Magic, the Magic of Psychology” (Olson was a co-editor) included a study on insight and problem-solving that had subjects watch the same trick over and over until they cracked it, one that used data from eye-tracking movements of audience members to examine attention, and one that used fMRI scans to see what happens in the brain when people witness a seemingly supernatural event.
“The actual link between science and magic is quite intuitive, but it’s actually difficult to draw direct links between the two fields, and one reason is that magicians and scientists generally use quite different language to describe the same principles,” said Gustav Kuhn, a professor of psychology at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, a practicing magician, and another co-author of the Frontiers magic issue.
For example, forcing, the technique examined in Olson’s card study, can take two very different paths towards a similar end. Physical forcing, which Olson used, is when one object is made to somehow stand out over the others that surround it. Psychological forcing, by contrast, is “when you try to make an option more salient in somebody’s mind,” Olson explained. “Say that I ask you to think of a card. Based on the wording of that, I can influence you to choose particular cards.” (In a previous study, he and he colleagues examined the factors that made certain cards more memorable or more visible than others. When the researchers asked subjects to name a card, for example, 40 percent of people would choose either the ace of spades or the queen of hearts, information the team later publicized in the magicians’ magazine Genii.) Both types serve the same purpose—the subject makes what they think is a choice—but one is a matter of perception, the other a more complicated mix of memory, association, and social interaction.
Two other major tenets of magic tricks, illusion and misdirection, present the same sort of challenge. “When [magicians] use misdirection to prevent you from being aware of something, the mechanism by which this happens is sort of irrelevant, really—they just need to have a mechanism that works really well,” Kuhn told me. “But you can fail to notice something because, for example, you fail to encode the information, or because you encode the information and afterwards you forget about it. These are two very different processes in perception and memory, and as scientists, for us, it’s very important to distinguish between the two.”
But if some elements of magic can be translated into patterns and then into science, others are less easily measured, though still easily observed. A trick is not a lab experiment; it’s an inherently social act, one that gets its life from the dynamic between magician and audience. In the second part of Olson’s Cognition and Consciousness study, the researchers tried the same type of physical forcing on a computer, asking volunteers to name a card after seeing several flash by, one staying on the screen imperceptibly longer than the others. The subjects picked the target card 30 percent of the time—still a significant number, but one dramatically smaller than when Olson had been flipping the deck.
“When you give them a choice of card, you want them to make a quick choice and not linger or say, ‘Oh, can I change my card?’ So if a participant is uncomfortable, it’s more likely that they’re going to comply,” Olson explained. But in front of a computer, that discomfort disappears, and with it the tendency to unwittingly succumb to the influence of forcing.
The study of magic, then, is the study of people and groups as much as it is of the senses and the firings of the brain; a magician looks at the whole as much as its parts. “A lot of the demonstrations that I do, when I get inside people’s minds, is understanding human behavior and understanding how people think and getting their patterns down,” famed illusionist Criss Angel told Parade magazine in 2007. “Many people say I’m really a student of humanity.”
* * *
In 1900, Norman Triplett, a professor at Indiana University, published an article in the American Journal of Social Psychology titled “The Psychology of Conjuring Deceptions.”“In the large body of existing conjuring tricks is found much material of value to the psychologist,” he wrote, offering a list that, if not completely comprehensive, must have come close. Over the dozens of pages that followed, he proceeded to group every single act of magic that he knew into categories like “tricks involving scientific principles,” “tricks involving unusual ability, superior information, etc.,” and “tricks depending on a large use of fixed mental habits in the audience.”
Over the next few decades, though, psychologists’ interest in magic petered out, said Ronald Rensink, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia whose research on vision has included studies on the illusions used in magic tricks. No one really knows why, he told me, but some argue that it has to do with the rise of behaviorism in the early 20th century. “They were trying to break everything down into simple bits and pieces.” he said. “There’s a bell and you expect meat. Simple associations, simple stimuli, and magic did not fit in to that.”
Another reason, he offered, is that much of magic’s usefulness to science comes from its status as a setup for measurements like eye tracking and fMRI scanning, things that weren’t possible in Triplett’s day. “Keep in mind, they didn’t have the technologies they do today, so they could only go so far.”
Regardless of the cause, magic stayed largely out of the scientific spotlight until 2007, when it became a temporary star. Neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde, whose work focused on visual illusions in art, had been appointed a co-chair of the annual meeting for the American Society for the Study of Consciousness, to be held in Las Vegas. She and her co-chair, neuroscientist Steve Macknik, wanted to build the conference around a theme that would pique the interest of those outside the field, she told me. “We were thinking maybe something to do with art.” But on a trip out to Las Vegas to plan the logistics of the weekend, she said, “we’re driving up and down the Strip and we see all of these signs, massive signs of magicians—Penn and Teller, David Copperfield, you name it—and then we realized, just as painters and visual artists have developed all these perceptual illusions, magicians are the cognitive artists.”
The pair asked a group of Las Vegas magicians to come speak at the conference, she said, about “why a specific magic trick of their choice works in the mind of the spectator.” Five of them, including the famously silent Teller of Penn and Teller, accepted the invitation, later collaborating with Martinez-Conde and Macknik on a paper in the journal Nature outlining the scientific lessons to be drawn from various tricks. In a rare moment of transparency, the magicians explained their secrets to the audience at the meeting (the videos are available online)—though after describing Teller’s feat of making coins seemingly materialize in the air, Martinez-Conde, like Olson, declined to explain the mechanics behind the trick. “We’ve gotten in trouble before,” she told me; after the ASSC meeting, she and Macknik joined a handful of magicians’ societies, which require members not to divulge the secrets of the trade.
But those who study magic as a science rather than an art maintain that a knowledge of the nitty-gritty isn’t necessary—magic, though an exclusive circle in some ways, also feeds on the most universal of inclinations.
“We want to explain at a fundamental level why you are so thoroughly vulnerable to sleights of mind,” Martinez-Conde and Macknik wrote in their book Sleights of Mind. “We want you to see how deception is part and parcel of being human. That we deceive each other all the time.”
Friday, February 13, 2015
Elvin T. Lim - The Lovers' Quarrel
The contention is that this country had two foundings. There was 1776 and 1787. The real founding was the adoption of the Constitution, written in 1787. The back and forth between the federalists and the anti-federalists is the background of today's politics according to this author.
The author is a political scientist, which give his narrative a different context than that of the historian.
The author is a political scientist, which give his narrative a different context than that of the historian.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Gary May - Bending Toward Justice
This book is an account of the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was fun to read as the movie came to town.
No doubt this law transformed American democracy. It completely changed Southern politics for good. Selma's Sheriff Clark was voted out of office in the next election in Selma, and he would never again plague the city with his virulent racism. Voting rights are threatened again today as Republicans do everything they can with ID laws and restrictive hours and limiting absentee voting to reduce access to the ballot.
The Voting Rights Act was signed on August 6, 1965.
The drama of Selma began with a 21 year old man named Bernard Lafayette all of age 21. He deserves as much credit as anyone.
Leadership of the voting rights effort in Selma passed from Lafayette to MLK.
As late as January of 1965 a voting rights bill was not at the top of LBJ's priority list. Events in Selma and the urging of MLK forced his hand, but the President came thru when it counted and when he had the chance to do something. The activist and the politician eventually came together.
There was first talk of a constitutional amendment. Good thing the voting rights bill eventually won out because it would have taken too long for an amendment to go thru the process.
This book puts the times and the enactment of the Voting Rights bill in historical perspective.
No doubt this law transformed American democracy. It completely changed Southern politics for good. Selma's Sheriff Clark was voted out of office in the next election in Selma, and he would never again plague the city with his virulent racism. Voting rights are threatened again today as Republicans do everything they can with ID laws and restrictive hours and limiting absentee voting to reduce access to the ballot.
The Voting Rights Act was signed on August 6, 1965.
The drama of Selma began with a 21 year old man named Bernard Lafayette all of age 21. He deserves as much credit as anyone.
Leadership of the voting rights effort in Selma passed from Lafayette to MLK.
As late as January of 1965 a voting rights bill was not at the top of LBJ's priority list. Events in Selma and the urging of MLK forced his hand, but the President came thru when it counted and when he had the chance to do something. The activist and the politician eventually came together.
There was first talk of a constitutional amendment. Good thing the voting rights bill eventually won out because it would have taken too long for an amendment to go thru the process.
This book puts the times and the enactment of the Voting Rights bill in historical perspective.
Take it Easy on Brian Williams
Let's cut Brian Williams some slack. I told people for years that I was
on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday until some smart aleck
pointed out that I was only 15 at the time and where was my Momma?
Somehow I had convinced myself. . . . oh, nevermind.
Extremism in All Religions
Was Obama right about the Crusades and Islamic extremism? (ANALYSIS)
President
Obama spoke about how religion can be abused and the common theme of
loving thy neighbor during his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast
on Feb. 5, 2015, in Washington, D.C. Here are highlights from that
event.
“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
This would seem to be Religious History 101, but it was nonetheless met with shock and awe.
“Hey, American Christians_Obama just threw you under the bus in order to defend Islam,” wrote shock jock Michael Graham. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., called the comments “dangerously irresponsible.” The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue said: “Obama’s ignorance is astounding and his comparison is pernicious. The Crusades were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen of the Middle Ages.”
More thoughtfully, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama’s comments about Christianity “an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison. ... The evil actions that he mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians.”
Really?
1. The Crusades
The Crusades lasted almost 200 years, from 1095 to 1291. The initial spark came from Pope Urban II, who urged Christians to recapture the Holy Land (and especially the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem) from Muslim rule. Like the promise of eternal life given to Muslim martyrs, Crusaders were promised absolution from sin and eternal glory.
Militarily, the Crusades were at first successful, capturing Jerusalem in 1099, but eventually a disaster; Jersualem fell in 1187. Successive Crusades set far more modest goals, but eventually failed to achieve even them. The last Crusader-ruled city in the Holy Land, Acre, fell in 1291.
Along the way, the Crusaders massacred. To take but one example, the Rhineland Massacres of 1096 are remembered to this day as some of the most horrific examples of anti-Semitic violence prior to the Holocaust. (Why go to the Holy Land to fight nonbelievers, many wondered, when they live right among us?) The Jewish communities of Cologne, Speyer, Worms, and Mainz were decimated. There were more than 5,000 victims.
And that was only one example. Tens of thousands of people (both soldiers and civilians) were killed in the conquest of Jerusalem. The Crusaders themselves suffered; historians estimate that only one in 20 survived to even reach the Holy Land. It is estimated that 1.7 million people died in total.
And this is all at a time in which the world population was approximately 300 million — less than 5 percent its current total. Muslim extremists would have to kill 34 million people (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) to equal that death toll today. As horrific as the Islamic State’s brutal reign of terror has been, its death toll is estimated at around 20,000.
2. The Inquisition
While most of us regard “The Inquisition” as a particular event, it actually refers to a set of institutions within the Roman Catholic Church that operated from the mid-13th century until the 19th century. One actually still survives, now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was directed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before his 2005 election as Pope Benedict XVI.
These institutions were charged with prosecuting heresy — and prosecute they did, executing and torturing thousands of suspected witches, converts from Judaism (many of whom had been forced to convert), Protestants, and all manner of suspected heretics, particularly in the 15th and 16th centuries. Historians estimate that 150,000 people were put on trial by the Inquisition, with 3,000 executed.
Arguably, the Islamic State’s methods of execution — including crucifixion, beheading, and, most recently, burning a prisoner alive — are as gruesome as the Inquistion’s, with its infamous hangings and burnings at the stake. ISIS is also committing systematic rape, which the Inquisition did not, and enslaving children.
As for torture, however, it’s hard to do worse than the Inquisition, which used torture as a method of extracting confessions. Methods included starvation, burning victims’ bodies with hot coals, forced overconsumption of water, hanging by straps, thumbscrews, metal pincers, and of course, the rack. Believe it or not, all of this was meant to be for the victim’s own good: better to confess heresy in this life, even under duress, than to be punished for it in the next.
Contrary to Moore’s statement, the Inquisition was not “outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and ... met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians.” Though Moore may distinguish between ‘Christianity’ and the Roman Catholic Church, for all intents and purposes the Roman Catholic Church WAS Christianity at the time, or at least claimed to be.
3. Slavery and Jim Crow
“Slaves, obey your masters,” the New Testament says — three times. And indeed, Christian teaching was cited on both sides of the slavery debate, with both slaveholders and abolitionists using it to justify their actions. Segregationists also looked to the “Curse of Ham,” from the story of Noah, and the notion that God had separated the races on different continents. The effects were world-historic in scope: Nearly 12 million people were forced on the “Middle Passage” from Africa to the Americas.
More recently, though the vast majority of Christians abhor it, the Ku Klux Klan, to the present day, still insists that it is a “Christian organization.” There’s a reason the Klan burned crosses alongside its lynchings and acts of arson, after all.
Of course, there was also organized Christian opposition to slavery and to Jim Crow, and Christianity is at least as much the property of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as of the segregationists and slaveholders of the Old South. But this was precisely Obama’s point: All religions have their hateful extremists, and their prophets of justice.
What about popularity? Do more Muslims support the Islamic State today than Christians supported Jim Crow in the past? No. At the height of the KKK’s popularity in the 1920s, approximately 15 percent of white male Americans were members. That number is eerily similar to the 12 percent of Muslims worldwide who support terrorism today.
In other words, not only is Obama factually correct that Christian extremism across history has been at least as bloody as Muslim extremism today, it is also factually true that such extremisms have been equally popular. True, as Rush Limbaugh points out, the Crusades were “a thousand years ago,” the Inquisition ended 200 years ago, and Jim Crow legally ended in the 1960s. But the president specifically noted that “humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.”
Which is the real point. There are two narratives about radical Islamists, and indeed about enemies of any sort, that coexist in American culture. According to one, they are different from us — Muslims, Palestinians, Israelis, Communists, you name it. Thus, in the battle against Islamic extremism, Islam is, in part at least, the enemy.
The other narrative is that all peoples, all creeds, all nations contain elements of moderation and extremism. Thankfully, racist Christian extremists are today a tiny minority within American Christianity. But only 100 years ago, they were as popular among American Christians as the Islamic State is among Muslims today. Thus, in the battle against Islamic extremism, it is extremism that is the enemy.
Hysterical commentary notwithstanding, no one is suggesting that Christians are just like the Islamic State. But Obama did suggest that Christianity is like Islam; both faiths have the capacity to be exploited by extremists.
Christians should not be insulted by the facts of history. Rather, all of us should be inspired by them to recognize the dangers of extremism — wherever they lie.
Copyright: For copyright information, please check with the distributor of this item, Religion News Service LLC.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Friday, February 6, 2015
The Talk
About the new Harper Lee novel is fascinating. It will be interesting to watch it all unfold.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Amazing
Second Harper Lee Novel to Be Published in July
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"To Kill a Mockingbird" will not be Harper Lee's only published book after all.
Publisher Harper announced Tuesday that "Go Set a Watchman," a novel the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the 1950s and put aside,
will be released July 14. Rediscovered last fall, "Go Set a Watchman" is
essentially a sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird," although it was
finished earlier. The 304-page book will be Lee's second, and the first
new work in more than 50 years.
The publisher plans a first printing of 2 million copies.
"In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called 'Go Set a Watchman,'" the
88-year-old Lee said in a statement issued by Harper. "It features the
character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty
decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's
childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became 'To Kill a
Mockingbird') from the point of view of the young Scout.
"I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it
(the original book) had survived, so was surprised and delighted when
my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought
and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was
pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am
humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these
years."
Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal was negotiated between
Carter and the head of Harper's parent company, Michael Morrison of
HarperCollins Publishers. "Watchman" will be published in the United Kingdom by William Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
According to publisher Harper, Carter came upon the manuscript at a
"secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of
'To Kill a Mockingbird.'" The new book is set in Lee's famed Maycomb,
Alabama, during the mid-1950s, 20 years after "To Kill a Mockingbird"
and roughly contemporaneous with the time that Lee was writing the
story. The civil rights movement was taking hold by the time she was
working on "Watchman." The Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in 1953
that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and the arrest of Rosa
Parks in 1955 led to the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott.
"Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to
visit her father, Atticus," the publisher's announcement reads. "She is
forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries
to understand her father's attitude toward society, and her own feelings
about the place where she was born and spent her childhood."
Lee herself is a Monroeville, Alabama native who lived in New York in
the 1950s. She now lives in her hometown. According to the publisher,
the book will be released as she first wrote it, with no revisions.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" is among the most beloved novels in history,
with worldwide sales topping 40 million copies. It was released on July
11, 1960, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a 1962 movie of the same name, starring Gregory Peck
in an Oscar-winning performance as the courageous attorney Atticus
Finch. Although occasionally banned over the years because of its
language and racial themes, the novel has become a standard for reading
clubs and middle schools and high schools. The absence of a second book
from Lee only seemed to enhance the appeal of "Mockingbird."
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Thomas C. Foster - Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America
You can argue with the 25 books that this critic chose, but you can't argue with his wit and presentation. This is fun reading!
The sun never sets on Hemingway. The author makes the most out of his simple words in The Sun Also Rises just as Hemingway makes the most out of a sparse story. At the same time, the author perhaps stretches things when he says there would have been no Raymond Carver with his famous minimalist prose. How do we know there would have been no Carver without Hemingway?
I have read so many things about the symbols in The Great Gatsby I don't know what to say. My hunch is that your guess is as good as mine on the green light and the ashes.
The author makes some sense of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, but I doubt I will ever attempt it.
I'm glad I read Moby Dick in college. I could never go thru it again. Let the whiteness of the whale and what the whale symbolizes rest.
I'm glad this Yankee included To Kill a Mockingbird. Perhaps there's hope for some Yankees.
This is a fun book.
The sun never sets on Hemingway. The author makes the most out of his simple words in The Sun Also Rises just as Hemingway makes the most out of a sparse story. At the same time, the author perhaps stretches things when he says there would have been no Raymond Carver with his famous minimalist prose. How do we know there would have been no Carver without Hemingway?
I have read so many things about the symbols in The Great Gatsby I don't know what to say. My hunch is that your guess is as good as mine on the green light and the ashes.
The author makes some sense of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, but I doubt I will ever attempt it.
I'm glad I read Moby Dick in college. I could never go thru it again. Let the whiteness of the whale and what the whale symbolizes rest.
I'm glad this Yankee included To Kill a Mockingbird. Perhaps there's hope for some Yankees.
This is a fun book.
Super Bowl
It's
a good thing I don't care about the Super Bowl. Who cares who wins?
Who's playing anyway? The outcome will not improve my digestion or make
my dreams any sweeter. Not caring about this game is one less stress
point in my life. I don't like chicken wings. I don't like guacamole.
I don't like watching football in groups. Guess I'm out of luck today.
P.S. Go Seattle. Beat New England!
P.S. Go Seattle. Beat New England!
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