Those who try and change racist symbols and names like that of the Washington football team immediately come right up against that brick wall of the ‘It’s our tradition and as long as we think its not racist, it can’t be racist’ argument. I cannot afford to laugh at such ridiculous arguments because the people of Cleveland use that same argument to defend the racist Chief Wahoo baseball logo.
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Kalle Lasn is the editor of the magazine Adbusters that is credited with being one of the brains that inspired the Occupy movement that in 2011 resulted in huge numbers of people occupying public spaces in New York and other cities to protest inequality and financial corruption. While many people have argued that the dispersal of the movement signaled its failure, when Jake Whitney interviewed him for the December 2015/January 2016 issue of The Progressive magazine, Lasn disagreed with that conclusion and said that the spirit of Occupy is very much alive.
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The eastern seaboard of the US has been hit by a major snowstorm starting last night that is shutting down major cities along the coast, like Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. In Cleveland we are used to a couple of such blizzards every winter but the path of this particular storm was such that it completely missed this area and we have not had any snow at all in the last few days. In fact, the entire winter has seen only about 8 inches of snow so far, when the average by now should be close to 30 inches.
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I know nothing about jazz and don’t listen to it but I laughed out loud when I heard this item on NPR’s All Things Considered on January 19, 2016.
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This is the time when organizations and individuals start endorsing candidates for the presidency. It is not clear that endorsements matter these days as much as they were reputed to do in the past. Nowadays people have greater access to information and are less likely to vote the way that some organization tells them to, even if they belong to that organization. What endorsements do is indicate a vague general alignment of views between the candidate and the endorser.
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Have you ever wondered what would happen if you placed a washing machine on a trampoline, put a brick into it, and turned it on? Me neither. But somebody thought it might be a good idea and the video below shows what happens. In general, my distaste of waste and wanton destruction of perfectly good appliances makes me reluctant to endorse this kind of thing. But I have to admit to being fascinated by the video because it made me think about the physics that was driving it.
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Glenn Greenwald writes that when seriously challenged, the political party establishments react in ways that are similar to the stages of grief, with the relevant stage being proportional to the degree of fear about the strength of the challenge. He lists seven such stages and provides links to elaborate on each.
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He is delighted with her re-entrance to the political limelight and points out that like all revival acts, she hauled out her greatest hits in her endorsement of Donald Trump. He then does a dead-on impression of her speaking style.
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The famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow advised lawyers that they should not pick jurors who had strong Calvinist religious beliefs about right and wrong because they have a harsh and unforgiving attitude. It should not come as a real surprise that new research supports his view.
A new study backs up Darrow’s advice, finding that belief in a vengeful God will lead a person to oppose programs that help prisoners re-enter society, while a person who believes in a loving and forgiving God is more likely to support those programs.
“Stronger feelings of religious forgiveness led to greater support for assisting offenders,” says the study of 386 random Missourians. “The people who had the stronger punitive picture of God were less likely to support transitional programs, things like substance abuse programs,” says Brett Garland, a professor at Missouri State University and an author of the study.
Past research echoes the Missouri findings. “Fundamentalists tend to be more punitive. They do believe in ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’” Monica Miller, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, tells Newsweek. Miller’s research found stronger support for the death penalty among those who take the Bible literally and among fundamentalists, who place more weight on the Old Testament than the New.
In Darrow’s time one did not have the option of picking non-religious people since they were unlikely to publicly declare their unbelief so Darrow advised defense lawyers as to which denominations were preferable.
In his 1936 essay for Esquire, Darrow predicted the views toward criminals and defendants that Guyton, the Methodist, and Moore, the Southern Baptist, would hold almost 80 years later. The guidance he gave defense attorneys for picking sympathetic jurors seems to remain solid.
“The Methodists are worth considering; they are nearer the soil. Their religious emotions can be transmuted into love and charity,” Darrow wrote. “If chance sets you down between a Methodist and a Baptist, you will move toward the Methodist to keep warm.”
Given that we now have telescopes that can probe far into the most distant regions of the universe, and are even able to detect the existence of what are known as exoplanets (i.e., planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun), you would think that we would pretty much know everything that exists in our own neighborhood of the solar system.
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