Barack Obama Archives - Page 7 of 16

May rambling #1: The Case Against Reality

I had a terrible blogging April, but because I work ahead, it wasn’t always evident.

1965 edition of “Our New Age”[/caption]

The Case Against Reality. A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

Song Of My Self-Help: Follow Walt Whitman’s ‘Manly Health’ Tips, appearing in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. It was uncovered by a University of Houston student, and includes: “The beard is a great sanitary protection to the throat.”

The Neverending Workday – A pervasive cultural norm of work devotion leaves many employees with little time for family, friends, or sleep.

In rural Maine, a life of solitude and larceny. Police say the hermit stole to survive 27 years in the woods.

What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?

After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight. “Contestants lost hundreds of pounds during Season 8, but gained them back. A study of their struggles helps explain why so many people fail to keep off the weight they lose.”

United Methodist Church Requires Removal of Reference to LGBTQI Christians from Worship Greetings, and, reported the next day, United Methodist clergy come out as church conference begins.

Transcending ignorance. Plus AmeriNZ weighs in, as does Funny or Die.

This isn’t just for me. It’s for everybody who needs a pep talk.

The smug style in American liberalism.

John Oliver: science reporting and Puerto Rico debt and cicadas.

Russian Insider Says State-Run Doping Fueled Olympic Gold.

Someone Put Bartolo Colon’s First Homer In The Natural, Where It Belongs.

Boston Globe: As great as David Ortiz is, Teddy Ballgame is still No. 1.

Free Comic Book Day isn’t free for everybody.

Morley Safer Stepping Down From ’60 Minutes’ After 46 Years.

President Obama delivered a commencement speech at Howard University.

WHCD: Barack Obama and Larry Wilmore. Plus An Obama Blooper Reel, from The White House Correspondents’ Association.

America operates under a crazy quilt of voting requirements, “with each state making its own laws for different populations and with challenges to those laws whipping back and forth through the courts. But if the primaries have frustrated the candidates, try being a voter in November.” Including New York.

Former NY State Assembly Speaker Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison. And former NY State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos sentenced to five years for corruption. Those were two of the three most powerful people in state government, along with Governor Andrew Cuomo.

MUSIC

First Listen: Bob Dylan, ‘Fallen Angels’.

Great audio/visual presentation of Billboard Top 10 songs from 1956 – 2016 (22,000 songs!)

Jaquandor: Music to write swashbucklers by.

Happy birthday to Reverend Gary Davis (April 30, 1896 – May 5, 1972) and James Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006).

K Chuck Radio: Rare tracks.

Return of the Monkees and remembering Harry the Hipster Gibson.

What Have I Done to Deserve This? – Pet Shop Boys, with Dusty Springfield.

What does Becky mean? Here’s the history behind Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ lyric that sparked a firestorm. (And me, nearly oblivious to it all.)

Keef cartoon: Nina Simone.

Local legend Ruth Pelham to close Music Mobile. Lack of funds leads the musician to close her beloved program.

Minnesota’s Broad Publicity Rights Law, The PRINCE Act, Is So Broad That It May Violate Itself.

GOOGLE alerts (me)

TWC Question Time #36: I Love You, But… Moments from your favorite comics characters you consider particularly embarrassing.

Arthur on the blog balance. I too had a terrible blogging April, but because I work ahead, it wasn’t always as evident. So we may be Blogging Twins™.

Dustbury is blogging. Chaz is my blogging hero.

AmeriNZ on Kasich dropping out of the presidential race and the REAL May Day.

Shooting Parrots is a grammar nerd.

Ted Cruz solicits me; no, that doesn’t sound right…

I goose Jaquandor; it was not painful.

Ahead of the curve: Harriet Tubman on the $20

I took some great pleasure from the large number of folks who expressed confusion at the decision to pick the $10 for revision.

As you’ve likely heard, the redesign of the United States currency involves putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. While most people thought it was a swell idea, naturally there have also been all sorts of backlash.

One thread, which I shan’t link to, was an attack on political correctness. “Why can’t we have money the way we’re used to?” Why, she wasn’t even a President! Neither were Alexander Hamilton ($10) or Benjamin Franklin ($100).

But the path to get Tubman on the $20 actually predated any government initiative. A non-profit group called Women On 20s was campaigning in early 2015 to get a woman on that popular denomination. I wrote about it on March 15, 2015, including the organization’s reasons for booting Andrew Jackson, in addition to the Trail of Tears: “He was a fierce opponent of paper money and the central banking system, and would probably be horrified to see his face on our national currency.”

Five weeks later, I explained why Harriet Tubman is my choice for the $20 bill. She won the Women on the 20 online poll, announced around May 10, barely beating out Eleanor Roosevelt, who I also seriously considered.

So I was disappointed to hear Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announce in mid-June 2015 that the US is changing the face of the $10 bill. Because of my close personal relationship with Alexander Hamilton, I opposed that choice.

Moderators finished the Republican debate in mid-September by asking the candidates which woman they would put on the $10 bill.

The Rand Paul: Suffragist Susan B. Anthony

Mike Huckabee: His wife, Janet [living people cannot appear on U.S. currency]

Marco Rubio: Civil rights activist Rosa Parks

Ted Cruz: Put Rosa Parks on the $20 bill and keep Alexander Hamilton on the $10 [props to Cruz for picking the $20!]

Ben Carson: His mother, Sonya [still alive]

Donald Trump: Rosa Parks

Jeb Bush: Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher [God save the PM]

Carly Fiorina: “We shouldn’t change the $10 dollar bill or the $20 dollar bill. I think, honestly, it’s a gesture. I don’t think it helps to change our history. What I would think is that we ought to recognize that women are not a special interest group. Women are the majority of this nation, we are half the potential of this nation and this nation will be better off when every woman has the opportunity to live the life she chooses.” [Sisterhood is powerful.]

Scott Walker: American Red Cross founder Clara Barton

Chris Christie: First Lady Abigail Adams

John Kasich: Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mother Teresa [it needs to be an American]

These were some lame answers.

Oddly, I took some great pleasure from the large number of folks who expressed confusion at the decision to pick the $10 for revision. “I thought they had picked the $20,” I read fairly often. People conflated an online campaign by the nonprofit with government action!

Fortunately, the Hamilton musical, which started previews on July 13, 2015, and opened on August 6, became a phenomenon, eventually winning the Pulitzer Prize. The Treasury Department started looking at the $20 bill and ended up planning to redesign the $5, the $10, AND the $20 bills.

This is what I wrote on December 30, 2015: “This is a prediction, based on nothing but a gut feeling, and the unexplained postponement of the $10 redesign. Obama decides that the $10 won’t be replaced after all, because, in his feisty last year, he wouldn’t do that to old Alex. Instead, he dumps Jackson, an opponent of the banking system. He suggests a woman, a black woman, maybe Rosa Parks, but I’m hoping Harriet Tubman.”

Not sure how much, if anything, the President had anything to do with the process. Still, every once in a while, things work out the way I want them to. Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill! Allow me to enjoy the moment.

Of course, many people think it’s fairly irrelevant. I mean, “Who uses cash, anyway?” (Actually, I did this past weekend, when my chip-technology embedded credit card failed to work at the grocery store. Fortunately, they STILL accept greenbacks.)

Oh, I like this from Samantha Bee: “Andrew Jackson Was ‘Trump With Better Hair'”.

Literally, while I was writing this

[I received an email from Women On 20s:]

Without your help, a woman front and center on the widely circulated $20 bill and female representation on two other bills would not have been possible and we THANK YOU for all your support…

We are pleased to claim VICTORY and so should you. We think of this, not as a day done but rather a day just beginning that has everyone seeing with new eyes and new hope. You proved we can work together to make a difference and shake up the status quo. The new TRIFECTA — the $5, $10, and $20 — will look like more of what has made us a great country and why you stuck with us for the last year.

After more than a year of campaigning to convince the U.S. Treasury to replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with the face of a female American hero, Women On 20s is celebrating your historic game changing influence. Now, the Treasury Department acknowledges the importance of accelerating production on the new $20 bill, and plans to reveal its design in time for the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 2020. Hallelujah! What’s more, we have been assured that Treasury has a commitment from Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellen to fast track the $20’s issuance into circulation. What usually takes 10 years per bill is going to happen so much sooner because Women On 20s will make sure Treasury knows you care.

Whether you voted for Harriet Tubman or not, we hope you’ll agree the freed slave and freedom fighter is an excellent choice to replace the slave trader Andrew Jackson on the $20. She provided critical military intelligence to end a brutal Civil war and later fought for women’s rights alongside the nation’s leading suffragists. Whatever obstacles she faced, she kept going. There was no stopping her. She’s an inspiration and now the whole world will know her story. So, let there be no stopping us from making this and the other currency changes a reality.

[Oh, yeah, and then the pitch for money.]

Once again, thank you and help us keep this dream on track for the celebration of women’s inclusion in our democracy in 2020.

xkcd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Bigotry as pack mentality

The word miscegenation was coined in an anonymous propaganda pamphlet published in New York City in December 1863, during the American Civil War.

When I linked to a couple of articles about obvious signs of bigotry, my friend Chris wrote: “Holy 1952, Batman! What’s up with all the crazy racism stories? Are they more prevalent or are they being reported more?”

Well, yes. Both, I would assert.

At the same time, I’ve come up with a theory. There was a period that bigotry, at least in the public forum, was considered impolite, inappropriate, untoward. What changed is that people have been able to more easily find like-minded folks online. In other words, bigotry as pack mentality.

So, if Malia Obama is going to Harvard — but is taking a year off first, that’s a rather benign story. But the racial vulgarity that appeared in comments in the FOX News, just-as-tame, report, was a torrent that forced FOX to disallow comments altogether.

Old Navy tweeted a picture of an interracial family and Twitter is inflamed in racist blather. It echoes the 2013 Cheerios TV commercial generated Sturm und Drang in numbers so great that the General Mills website likewise had to forego comments.

I contend that a “lone wolf” bigot, being shouted down by other readers, might give up. But when he finds like-minded allies, this emboldens the bigot to spew vile, knowing that at least some others will also take up the cause.

One of the comments in the Old Navy story made reference to the word miscegenation, a rather old-fashioned term:

Miscegenation comes from the Latin miscere, “to mix” and genus, “kind”. The word was coined in the U.S. in 1863, and the etymology of the word is tied up with political conflicts during the American Civil War over the abolition of slavery and over the racial segregation of African-Americans. The reference to genus was made to emphasize the supposedly distinct biological differences between whites and non-whites…

The word was coined in an anonymous propaganda pamphlet published in New York City in December 1863, during the American Civil War. The pamphlet was entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. It purported to advocate the intermarriage of whites and blacks until they were indistinguishably mixed, as a desirable goal, and further asserted that this was the goal of the Republican Party. The pamphlet was a hoax, concocted by Democrats, to discredit the Republicans by imputing to them what were then radical views that offended against the attitudes of the vast majority of whites, including those who opposed slavery…

Only in November 1864 was the pamphlet exposed as a hoax…

By then, the word miscegenation had entered the common language of the day as a popular buzzword in political and social discourse. The issue of miscegenation, raised by the opponents of Abraham Lincoln, featured prominently in the election campaign of 1864.

In the United States, miscegenation has referred primarily to the intermarriage between whites and non-whites, especially blacks.

Before the publication of Miscegenation, the word amalgamation, borrowed from metallurgy, had been in use as a general term for ethnic and racial intermixing.

Of course, President Obama is the child of a white mother and a black father. For a time, I think that partially insulated him from the full brunt of bigotry. “His mom’s white; maybe he’ll be all right.” But once he showed that he actually expressed the feelings many blacks in America experience, he had his “half-white” card revoked.

Not all gatherings are online. Check out White Power Meets Business Casual: Inside the Effort to ‘Make White Nationalism Great Again’. “Trump, the engrossed crowd was told, intends to smash an oligarchic system ‘stacked’ against white America. The only way to break free from the system that blocks ordinary white Americans from fighting against the ‘disease’ of multiculturalism and the unilateral rule of the American elite is to get behind a candidate with tremendous cultural capital who is also capable of funding his own campaign in full.”

September rambling #2, hernia operation edition: Consent 101

SamuraiFrog completes his Weird Al epic.

Am I having fun this morning? Hernia operation. I may be “out of pocket” for a few days.

Why did the Speaker of the House quit? The Plot Against Planned Parenthood and John Boehner.

From the American Conservative, no less: The Quiet Grand Strategy of Barack Obama. “Are the president’s diplomatic initiatives winning a new American Century?”

Study: White people react to evidence of white privilege by claiming greater personal hardships.

There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts.

Re: the Muslim teen who created a clock and got arrested, it’s now clear they didn’t think he had a bomb. And talk about foolishness in school settings: 11-year-old gifted student suspended 1 year for having a pot leaf that wasn’t a pot leaf.

From Wondermark: Fauxtopia.

A TIDE commercial.

And now for the sex portion of our post: Consent 101 and How Often the Average Couple Has Sex.

Too Much in Love to Say Good Night.

End Daylight Saving Time.

Harvard linguist points out the 58 most commonly misused words and phrases.

Now I Know: Switzerland Making Headway Against Rabies and The Mystery of the Appalachian Bend and Everyday Superheroes at the Elder Care Facility and How Smoking Gave PEZ a Boost and How to Pay Yourself $2.1 Million in Taxes.

From Donna: “Thinking of writing a bedtime book for grownups along the lines of GOODNIGHT MOON. It will be titled SHUTUP BRAIN.”

R.I.P., Nancy J. Ellegate, who sat about 40 meters from my desk at work, and who I talked with about myriad topics several times a week.

A bridge comes down in Binghamton, my hometown.

Ron Marz on reviewing comics.

There Will Officially Be NO MORE X-Men in Marvel Comics.

A nice little primer on aspect ratio in movies.

Muppets. As of this writing, I haven’t yet watched the first episode of the new show yet. TV’s Newest Reality Stars (e.g., Kermit Gets Set Up) and has the new show taken an-unfortunately-dark-turn and Joey Mazzarino has left Sesame Street.

I Made Alex Trebek Say ‘Turd Ferguson’.

The longest-running shows on Broadway.

R.I.P., Ben Cauley of the Mar-Keys.

Like what you like, ABBA division.

Joe Jackson’s Ode To Joy.

SamuraiFrog completes his Weird Al epic: 10-6, and 5-1. Could my response to his response to a post of mine be far behind?

Chuck Miller says goodbye to his 78s.

MASHUPS: Blondie Vs. The Doors – Rapture Riders and Stevie Wonder vs The Clash – Uptight/Rock The Casbah.

The history of the memorable and covinous Dick Van Dyke Show comic books published by Gold Key in the sixties.

GOOGLE ALERT:
What was the first comic book you remember reading? and Tips for Surviving and Thriving at The Albany Comic Con and a roundtable discussion on the topic of comics blogging and Do comics matter? (And I don’t mean Chris Rock, I mean Sgt. Rock.)

Re: the second cartoon:
Reza Farazmand says: “Feel free to repost these comics on your blog/website/forehead, as long as it’s for non-commercial purposes. Just attribute the comic to poorlydrawnlines.com and include a link back. Thaaanks.”

Restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965

“It would be transformative if everybody voted. That would counteract money more than anything.”

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson because “Congress [had] determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment,” which had been ratified on February 3, 1870.

“Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans.”

The Act has been chipped away by the Supreme Court, resulting in a recent surge in voter ID laws, cuts to early voting and gerrymandering. One of the heroes of the Selma march of March 1965, John Lewis says voter ID laws are ‘poll taxes by another name’.

The 2014 midterm election turnout was the lowest in 70 years, when World War II was an understandable reason for failure to exercise the franchise. President Obama, who did NOT “suggest requiring everyone to vote”, did recognize that “it would be transformative if everybody voted. That would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country…” As my friend Steve Bissette put it, “It’s discouraging how many folks I know (especially younger voters) rationalize and justify opting out. ‘It’s rigged’ is easy when your refusal to vote cinches the rigging.”

At least, in June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the right of states to set up independent, non-partisan committees to draw the district maps that determine seats in Congress.

The trend for most of this country’s history was to expand the right to cast the ballot, from requiring direct elections of US Senators, to allowing women and 18-year-olds to vote. This retrenchment in recent years is discouraging for my sense of what democracy should look like. See A Dream Undone: Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act from the New York Times magazine.

One last thing: from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, learn about the disenfranchisement of Americans living in U.S. territories.