Post Christmas 2014

After being rebuffed by Ruth Chris we procure dinner from Kobe, a Japanese steakhouse on 280 which opens at 4:30.  The place is packed and I have to wait over an hour for our food although we all agree the food was good.  I supposed it turned out okay. At the restaurant a lady fell to the floor and the paramedics had to be called.  Another man was waiting a long time for his order and told me congratulations as I left.   Freddy has to return to Little Rock today.  I look forward to the day when we are all living in the same town.

Christmas Eve

There will be no chestnuts roasting on an open fire, no Jack Frost nipping at our noses, but the Hudsons are all home for Christmas. We'll sing our own yuletide carols and dress up like Eskimos if need be. Santa is on his way. We'll sing our own Oh, Holy Night and Away in a Manger. We are blessed and thankful. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all from Alabama.

When Humans Quit Hunting And Gathering, Their Bones Got Wimpy

BY Nell Greenfieldboyce
NPR
22 December 2014

Compared with other primates and our early human ancestors, we modern humans have skeletons that are relatively lightweight — and scientists say that basically may be because we got lazy.

Biological anthropologist Habiba Chirchir and her colleagues at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History were studying the bones of different primates including humans. When they looked at the ends of bones near the joints, where the inside of the bone looks almost like a sponge, they were struck by how much less dense this spongy bone was in humans compared with chimpanzees or orangutans.

"So the next step was, what about the fossil record? When did this feature evolve?" Chirchir wondered.

Their guess was that the less dense bones showed up a couple of million years ago, about when Homo erectus, a kind of proto-human, left Africa. Having lighter bones would have made it a lot easier to travel long distances, Chirchir speculated.

But after examining a bunch of early human fossils, she realized their guess was wrong. "This was absolutely surprising to us," she says. "The change is occurring much later in our history."

The lightweight bones don't appear until about 12,000 years ago. That's right when humans were becoming less physically active because they were leaving their nomadic hunter-gatherer life behind and settling down to pursue agriculture.

A report on the work appeared Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, along with a study from a different research group that came to much the same conclusion.

Those researchers looked at the bones of people in more recent history who lived in farming villages nearly 1,000 years ago and compared them with the bones of people who had lived nearby, earlier, as foragers.

The bones of people from the farming communities were less strong and less dense than those of the foragers, whose measured bone strength was comparable to similar-size nonhuman primates.

"We see a similar shift, and we attribute it to lack of mobility and more sedentary populations," says Timothy Ryan, an associate professor of anthropology at Penn State University. "Definitely physical activity and mobility is a critical component in building strong bones."

Study: White Men Most Influential on Capital juries - and That's Bad News for Black Defendants

BY Brendan Kirby
23 December 2014

Two white women on a jury deciding the fate of convicted murderer Mitchell Hall were expressing doubts about whether he should get the death penalty when an older white man on the panel took control of deliberations.

Before the forewoman had finished her explanation of why she hoped the defendant might one day positively influence his children, the death penalty advocate cut her off.

"I would refute that completely," he said, before launching into a long argument in favor of execution.

By the time he had finished, the holdouts for life-without-parole prison sentences had flipped, and the jury rendered a unanimous verdict in favor of death.

The case was not real, and the jurors were residents of a central California county paid $40 to participate in a study by University of California-Irvine criminology professor Mona Lynch and University of California-Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney. The study, published this month in the Journal of the American Bar Foundation, indicates that emotion plays a central role in death penalty deliberations. It also draws three main conclusions:

White men on juries are most likely to argue forcefully for their position - whether it is life in prison or the death penalty, and are more likely to be elected jury foremen.

When jurors change their minds during deliberations, it usually is to switch from life to death.

Race plays an important, if subtle role. White male jurors were more likely to empathize with white defendants and more likely to discount mitigating factors in cases involving black defendants.

"In the case of capital jury decision making, our findings suggest that emotions significantly shaped outcomes and the very processes by which they were reached," the study states. "Indeed, they appeared to be inseparable from the critically important judgments that capital jurors were called on to make."

Devising the study

The study reaches similar conclusions to previous research, based on interviews with people who had served on capital juries, that demonstrated the influence of race on deliberations.</

Lynch and Haney constructed their study by dividing participants into 100 juries of four to seven members. They told jurors that the defendant in the case they would review already had been convicted of capital murder and that they were to consider one of two options - the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole.

They then watched a videotape of the penalty phase of a trial based on a real California case. In each case, the victim's name was Mitchell Hall and the victim was named John Emerson. The races of the defendant and victim varied from panel to panel, but the facts were the same otherwise.

The study found that overall, deliberations produced an 11 percent increase in jurors opting for death compared with pre-deliberation preferences that jurors marked after watching the penalty phase. Among the 134 participants who changed their minds during deliberations, about three quarters moved from life to death. According to the study, several jurors did not even admit their original positions in favor of life in prison that they marked on their questionnaires.

White men were most successful at swaying other jurors to their point of view, according to the study. Also, juries with higher proportions of white men had a greater tendency toward racial disparities in sentencing.

"In the present analysis, we found that white male jurors often asserted emotional authority in the deliberations in two distinct ways: first in terms of asserting their own emotional responses and, second, by policing the emotional expressions of others," the authors wrote. "Moreover, this authority appeared to be deployed differentially as a function of the defendant's race."

White men most forceful

White male jurors were more likely to be forceful advocates for life when the defendant was white - especially when the victim was black. In one case, a white man on a jury distinguished the defendant from other murder defendants.

"So Mitchell, as compared to your generic gangster, he's a guy that is really going to suffer in prison, this is going to be a tremendous pain to him and it's going to be with him for his whole life," he said.

On the other hand, white men on the mock juries were more likely to shut down fellow jurors who expressed empathy for black defendants. In some cases, white male jurors viewed a white defendant's children as a mitigating factor in his favor while other when men viewed the black defendant's children as a sign of irresponsibility.

In one case, a white male juror used a racist slur during deliberations. While that was unusual, the study's authors wrote, "race remained a subtext" that helped shape the discussions in most of the other cases.

"Finally, our analysis of these deliberations underscores the apparent intractability of racism in capital decision making," Lynch and Haney wrote. "It suggests that racial bias can operate emotionally as well as cognitively."

Slow Coming

It seems like Christmas has been slow coming, but come it will.  It rained today and is supposed to rain much more tomorrow.  Rain, rain, go away.  Come again some other day.

Holiday Suggestions

Suggestions for a happy holiday season: Tylenol. Avoid political talk with family and friends. Tylenol. No regifting to avoid guilt feelings. Tylenol. That Salvation Army bell tolls for thee. Tylenol. Forget about being politically correct (oh so 90's). Tylenol. It won't hurt you to act happy with that ugly tie gift or something else you will have forgotten by the 26th. Tylenol. Don't blow your cool. Tylenol.

Why No Resistance?

Why Have Americans Stopped Resisting Economic Privilege?

December 19, 2014

by Steve FraserThe following excerpt is from the introduction to Steve Fraser’s new book, The Age of Acquiesence

Marx once described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. Several decades have come and gone during which we’ve learned not to mention Marx in polite company. Our vocabulary went through a kind of linguistic cleansing, exiling suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor” or even something as apparently innocuous as “working class.”
In times past, however, such language and the ideas they conjured up struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as accurate depictions of reality. They used them regularly along with words and phrases like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced. Never before, however, has the Vatican of capitalism captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that recently ran the country for a long generation and ended up running it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville (no Marxist he), confessed as much during the Clinton years, when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”

Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University

Occupy Wall Street, even bereft of strategy, program, and specific demands as many lamented when it was a newborn, nonetheless opened up space again for our political imagination by confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament. It rediscovered something that, beneath thickets of political verbiage about tax this and cut that, about end‑of‑the ­world deficits and ­missionary-​minded “job creators,” had been hiding in plain sight: namely, what our ancestors once called “the street of torments.” It achieved a giant leap backward, so to speak, summoning up a history of opposition that had mysteriously withered away.
True turning points in American political history are rare. This might seem counterintuitive once we recognize that for so long society was in a constant uproar. Arguably the country was formed and re‑formed in serial acts of violent expropriation. Like the market it has been (and remains) infinitely fungible, living in the perpetually changing present, panting after the future, the next big thing. The demographics of American society are and have always been in permanent upheaval, its racial and ethnic complexion mutating from one generation to the next. Its economic hierarchies exist in a fluid state of dissolution and recrystallization. Social classes go in and out of existence.
Nonetheless, in the face of this all­sided​ liquefaction, American politics have tended to flow within very narrow banks from one generation to the next. The capacious, sometimes stultifying embrace of the two­-party­ system has absorbed most of the heat generated by this or that hot­-​button­ issue, leaving the fundamentals intact. Only under the most trying circumstances has the political system ruptured or come close. Then the prevailing balance of power and wealth between classes and regions has been called into question; then the political geography and demography of the nation have been reconfigured, sometimes for decades to come; only then have axiomatic beliefs about wealth and work, democracy and elitism, equality and individualism, government and the free market been reformulated or at least opened to serious debate, however briefly.

Why, until the sudden eruption of ­OWS — a​ flare‑up that died down rather quickly­ — was​ the second Gilded Age one of acquiescence rather than resistance?

A double mystery then is the subject of this book. Speaking generally, one might ask why people submit for so long to various forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination. And then, equally mysterious, why they ever stop giving in. Why acquiesce? Why resist? Looking backward, the indignities and injustices, the hypocrisies and lies, the corruption and cruelty may seem insupportable. Yet they are tolerated. Looking backward, the dangers to life, limb, and livelihood entailed in rebelling may seem too dire to contemplate. Yet in the teeth of all that, rebellion happens. The world is full of recent and long-ago examples of both.
America’s history is mysterious in just this way. This book is an attempt to explore the enigma of resistance and acquiescence as those experiences unfolded in the late nineteenth and again in the late twentieth century. We have grown accustomed for some years now to referring to America’s two gilded ages. The first one was baptized by Mark Twain in his novel of that same name and has forever after been used to capture the era’s exhibitionist material excess and political corruption. The second, our own, which began sometime during the Reagan era and lasted though the financial meltdown of 2008, like the original, earned a reputation for extravagant self-​indulgence by the rich and famous and for a similar political system of, by, and for the moneyed. So it has been natural to assume that these two gilded ages, however much they have differed in their particulars, were essentially the same. Clearly there is truth in that claim. However, they were fundamentally dissimilar.
We have grown accustomed for some years now to referring to America’s two gilded ages. The first one was baptized by Mark Twain in his novel of that same name and has forever after been used to capture the era’s exhibitionist material excess and political corruption. The second, our own, which began sometime during the Reagan era and lasted though the financial meltdown of 2008, like the original, earned a reputation for extravagant self-​indulgence by the rich and famous and for a similar political system of, by, and for the moneyed. So it has been natural to assume that these two gilded ages, however much they have differed in their particulars, were essentially the same. Clearly there is truth in that claim. However, they were fundamentally dissimilar.

Penthouse helipads, McMansions roomy enough to house a regiment, and private island getaways… Substitute those Fifth Avenue castles, Newport beachfront behemoths, and Boss Tweed’s infamous courthouse of a century before and nothing much had changed.

Mark Twain’s Gilded Age has always fascinated and continues to fascinate. The American vernacular is full of references to that era: the “Gay Nineties,” “robber barons,” “how the other half lives,” “cross of gold,” “acres of diamonds,” “conspicuous consumption,” “the leisure class,” “the sweatshop,” “other people’s money,” “social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest,” “the nouveau riche,” “the trust.” What a remarkable cluster of metaphors, so redolent with the era’s social tensions they have become permanent deposits in the national memory bank.We think of the last third of the nineteenth century as a time of great accomplishment, especially of stunning economic growth and technological transformation and the amassing of stupendous wealth. This is the age of the steam engine and transcontinental railroads, of the mechanical reaper and the telephone, of cities of more than a million and steel mills larger than any on earth, of America’s full immersion in the Industrial Revolution. A once underdeveloped, infant nation became a power to be reckoned with.
For people living back then, however much they were aware of and took pride in these marvels, the Gilded Age was also a time of profound social unease and chronic confrontations. Citizens were worried about how the nation seemed to be verging on cataclysmic divisions of wealth and power. The trauma of the Civil War, so recently concluded, was fresh in everyone’s mind. The abiding fear, spoken aloud again and again, was that a second civil war loomed. Bloody encounters on railroads, in coal mines and steel mills, in city streets and out on the Great Plains made this premonition palpable. This time the war to the death would be between the haves and ­have-​nots, a war of class against class. American society was becoming dangerously, ominously unequal, fracturing into what many at the time called “two nations.”
Until OWS [Occupy Wall Street] came along, all of this would have seemed utterly strange to those living through America’s second Gilded Age. But why? After all, years before the financial meltdown plenty of observers had noted how unequal American society had become. They compared the skewed distribution of income and wealth at the turn of the twenty-first​ century with the original Gilded Age and found it as stark or even starker than at any time in American history. Stories about penthouse helipads, McMansions roomy enough to house a regiment, and private island getaways kept whole magazines and TV shows buzzing. “Crony capitalism,” which Twain had great fun skewering in his novel, was very much still alive and well in the age of Jack Abramoff. Substitute those Fifth Avenue castles, Newport beachfront behemoths, and Boss Tweed’s infamous courthouse of a century before and nothing much had changed.

New York Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez marches with Occupy Wall Street protestors before an attempted re-occupation of a vacant lot beside Duarte Park in New York. December 2011. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Or so it might seem. But in fact times had changed profoundly. Gone missing were the insurrections and all those utopian longings for a world put together differently so as to escape the ravages of industrial capitalism. It was this social chemistry of apocalyptic doom mixed with visionary expectation that had lent the first Gilded Age its distinctive frisson. The absence of all that during the second Gilded Age, despite the obvious similarities it shares with the original, is a reminder that the past is indeed, at least in some respects, a foreign country. Why, until the sudden eruption of ­OWS — a​ flare‑up that died down rather quickly­ — was​ the second Gilded Age one of acquiescence rather than resistance?
If the first Gilded Age was full of sound and fury, the second seemed to take place in a padded cell. Might that striking contrast originate in the fact that the capitalist society of the Gay Nineties was nothing like the capitalism of our own time? Or to put it another way: Did the utter strangeness of capitalism when it was first taking shape in ­America —​  ­beginning decades before the Gay ­Nineties — so​ deeply disturb traditional ways of life that for several generations it seemed intolerable to many of those violently uprooted by its onrush? Did that shattering experience elicit responses, radical yet proportionate to the life‑or‑death threat to earlier, cherished ways of life and customary beliefs?
And on the contrary, did a society like our own long ago grow accustomed to all the fundamentals of capitalism, not merely as a way of con-ducting economic affairs, but as a way of being in the world? Did we come to treat those fundamentals as part of the natural order of things, beyond real challenge, like the weather? What were the mechanisms at work in our own distinctive political economy, in the quotidian experiences of work and family life, in the interior of our imaginations, that produced a sensibility of irony and even cynical disengagement rather than a morally charged universe of utopian yearnings and dystopian forebodings?
Gilded ages are, by definition, hiding something; what sparkles like gold is not. But what they’re hiding may differ, fundamentally. Industrial capitalism constituted the understructure of the first Gilded Age. The second rested on finance capitalism. Late-​nineteenth-​century American capitalism gave birth to the “trust” and other forms of corporate consolidation at the expense of smaller businesses. ­Late-twentieth​-​ century­ capitalism, notwithstanding its mania for mergers and acquisitions, is known for its “flexibility,” meaning its penchant for off­-loading​ corporate functions to a world of freelancers, contractors, subcontractors, and numberless petty enterprises. The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion.
Excerpted from The Age of Acquiescence by Steve Fraser. Copyright (c) 2015 by Steve Fraser. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company.