Culture Wars – Page 31 – The Wrongologist

Let’s Talk About Baltimore

Regarding Baltimore, the NYT says:

Hundreds of rifle-toting National Guard members began deploying here on Tuesday morning, lining one of the city’s main thoroughfares and taking up posts around a police station in western Baltimore that had been the scene of earlier protests.

From the start of the demonstration through Tuesday morning, 15 police officers were injured, 2 people were shot, both in the leg. And approximately 200 people were arrested. There is a night curfew. There are the predictable images of large groups of young black males, buildings on fire, up-armored cops and National Guard, and the shaking of jowls by media and politicians.

These stories are always depressingly similar: Police shoot a black guy. They obfuscate for several days. A protest turns violent, and some of those professing to be “victims” create victims of their own, mostly in their own neighborhoods. The police are happy to give them room to destroy property in black neighborhoods, but then draw the line when the crowd moves out of that prescribed area.

Something was bound to give in Baltimore. Check out this report from the Baltimore Sun, called “Undue Force“:

Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations [by the Baltimore police department].

According to state law, Baltimore cops cannot be sued for more than $200,000 for each “offense”. That statutory cap can be exceeded when there are multiple claims in a lawsuit, and if there is malice the cap may not apply. The largest settlement has been $500k. In total, the city has paid $5.7 million since January 2011, and that doesn’t count the $5.8 million spent by the city on legal fees to defend these claims against their police. Just a cost of doing business in Baltimore.

So, once the riot started the mayor and the governor called for calm. “Why can’t these people react non-violently?” Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic provides an answer:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con.

Here is a series of tweets by Billmon: (edited by the Wrongologist)

…but the cops did not destroy the black industrial working class, or finance the slumlords, or redline poor neighborhoods. Police brutality isn’t the only reason that #BlackLivesMatter.
… And not being unlawfully killed is a pretty minimal standard for “mattering.”
…And so the policy “debate” becomes limited to: “Black men: Should we let the cops kill them or not?” Which is fucking sick. Or: “Should America have an incarceration rate that’s 10 times higher than the rest of developed world? Or just 5 times higher.”

We are witnessing a continuing trend in US policing: Violence against inanimate property equals violence against “the people”. It brings a disproportionate response, whether it is the Occupy movement, Ferguson, or Baltimore.

“Urban riots” always conjure up bad images and bad responses, like the riots in 1964 in Harlem and Philadelphia, and in Newark in 1967, all of which were ignited by allegations of police brutality. In Newark, Governor Richard J. Hughes (R) called up the National Guard. When they arrived, reports were coming in of black snipers roaming the city, and terrorists with dynamite and arms heading towards Newark. The result was 26 deaths and 725 wounded in Newark, but no snipers or terrorists were found.

Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R), channeling his inner Spiro Agnew, vowed to quell rioting by sending in 1,000 National Guard troops. From the Baltimore Sun:

Hogan said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a political ally of the new Republican governor, would sent 150 troopers plus additional resources to Baltimore.

Christie will never let a good crisis go to waste.

The ultimate outcome of Baltimore will predictably be calls for more law and ordering by the right, and more calls for inconsequential band aids by the left. Perhaps the policy debate ought to be broader than: “what will it take for police to stop killing black guys?”, although that would be a good start.

Police need to remember that since they have the authority and the power, they also have the responsibility to use both properly. It’s not the responsibility of the person they pull over, the person they want to question, or the person who is standing nearby, it’s THEIR responsibility.

Let’s face it, Americans live in a soft police state. Whites may not sense its severity or doom like urban black males, since their threat is to privacy. But the freedoms of most Americans have never been more threatened and violated by governments at the federal, state and local levels.

Here is Randy Newman singing his composition, “Baltimore“:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 26, 2015

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether same-sex marriage bans are constitutional. Gay marriage is currently legal in 36 states. And, by the end of this Supreme Court term in June, same-sex couples will either be able to wed in all 50 states, or gay marriage bans may be restored in many states where they’ve been struck down.

Opponents of same-sex marriage shouldn’t worry, because Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the Pride of Iowa, has their backs. He proposed legislation to strip federal courts of the ability to make any ruling on marriage. His “Restrain the Judges on Marriage Act of 2015” would, if enacted, strip federal courts of jurisdiction in all cases related to marriage. The bill would leave the issue solely to State courts. Mr. King released this statement along with his bill:

For too long, federal courts have overstepped their constitutionally limited duty to interpret the Constitution. Rather, federal courts have perverted the Constitution to make law and create constitutional rights to things such as privacy, birth control, and abortion. These un-enumerated, so-called constitutionally-protected rights were not envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

He isn’t alone with the “my religion is supreme” arguments:

Mike Huckabee warns gay rights will outlaw Christianity: Because God-fearing Americans know that the gayz will destroy traditional marriage and Christianity. Is THAT what you want, America?

Anti-Gay Activists: We Are Prepared to Die to Fight Gay Marriage ‘Slavery: E.W. Jackson, the 2013 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia said this at the National Press Club. Maybe dead anti-gay activists is not such a bad idea.

Iowa GOP official says Christians should enjoy special rights: No, Steve King didn’t say this, it was Tamara Scott, a Republican National Committeewoman. She conceded that Muslims had First Amendment rights, but she said Christianity should be favored under US law.

Look, these charlatans have to whip up their base, those Gulfstreams aren’t going to buy themselves.

So in honor of their ideas, the anti-gay right gets a free McDonald’s next time in NYC:

GOP jerks twerk for Koch dough. Very hard to un-see this:

Loretta Lynch finally gets ticket punched to DC:

Europe still thinking about an acceptable migrant solution:

Earth Day comes and goes with speech-making and little change:

Is a Mob at The Gates?

There is an idea deep in the American psyche that there always is “a mob at the gates”. The mob wants in so that they can take advantage of the good things we have, or they want to lay waste to our culture and way of life. Therefore, we must be vigilant, because our innocence and openness makes us vulnerable to exploitation or infection from outside. This is well-documented in Robert Reich’s 1986 book, Tales of a New America.

We have a history of fearing and demonizing the “others”. It has been a strong weapon in hands of America’s conservatives. In the 1950’s we were visited by McCarthyism. In the early 1950s, conservatives were deeply frightened by Communism’s advances overseas (communists were ruthless and Godless!). By hunting alleged communists in the State Department, suggesting that the real threat lay not overseas but at home, Joseph McCarthy played brilliantly to those fears.

Sadly, the McCarthy period wasn’t the first time in American history that we demonized outsiders who we thought were trying to climb inside the gates. When they tried to get in, we attacked people from their homeland who were already here. We had slavery, followed by Jim Crow. Hyper-nationalists went after German-Americans during World War I, and we rounded up Japanese-Americans during World War II. After McCarthy was discredited, cultural conservatives moved on to “protect” America against supposed internal threats from black militancy, feminism, and the gay-rights movement.

After 9/11, President Bush defended Islam. He called Islam “a faith based upon love, not hate,” and even visited a mosque. In a Presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush condemned the fact that “Arab-Americans are racially profiled.”

But today, would-be Republican presidential candidates are turning on Muslim-Americans. From Peter Bienart in the Atlantic:

In January, the Republican presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal argued that “it is completely reasonable for [Western] nations to discriminate” against Muslims in their immigration policies, on the grounds that radical Islamists “want to destroy their culture.”

In February…Mike Huckabee, declared, “Everything [President Obama] does is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel. The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community.”

In March, after New York City announced that public schools would close for two Muslim holidays, Todd Starnes, a Fox News contributor, lamented, “The Islamic faith is being given accommodation and the Christian faith and other religious faiths are being marginalized.”

In fact, Bienart thinks that if George W. Bush were seeking the Republican presidential nomination today, he’d be excoriated for his view of Islam. Why are Republicans more hostile to Muslims and Islam today than they were after 9/11? And why are American Muslims, who in 2000 mostly voted Republican, replacing gays and feminists as the right’s chief culture-war foe?

Could there be a new McCarthyism emerging in the Republican Party?

A 2014 poll by the Pew Research Center found that Republicans were 31 percentage points more likely than Democrats to be “very concerned” about the threat of “Islamic extremism” around the world, and were 25 percentage points more likely to be concerned about Islamic terrorism in the US.

Most conservatives are happy to bomb ISIS or drone the Taliban, but many have lost the appetite for American boots on the ground against Islamic terrorists. And by reconceiving the Islamist danger as a domestic problem, (exactly as McCarthy did with Communism in the 1950’s), conservatives can now appear to fight it ferociously, without having to invade yet another Arab country.

Republicans all across the US have warned that Sharia might be adopted in parts of the US, and that American Christians might thus be subjected to Muslim law. Bobby Jindal said (falsely) that Muslims have established “no-go” zones for non-Muslims in some neighborhoods in Europe, with the implication that they might do the same in the US.

Muslims make up only 1% of the US population. They are not marching in the streets. For the most part, they constitute a small, culturally conservative minority that wants little more than to be left alone. They don’t have the numbers to punish Republicans at the ballot box for demonizing them.

For the rest of us, that makes the immorality of the Republican’s position clear.

Promoting Islamophobia is unlikely to hurt the GOP politically, and it will help them with their base. The February and March 2016 primaries are predominantly in southern states, where Islam is more reviled than elsewhere in the country.

So, look for the rhetoric on culture war issues, including the threat allegedly posed by Muslim-Americans to become even more outrageous in 2016, as Republicans launch their new McCarthyism against the mob both inside, and outside our gates.

Friday Music Break – April 17, 2015

A new Bloomberg poll indicates that Republicans think that “patriotism” doesn’t mean we should support America’s interests first when it comes to Israel. From Bloomberg:

Republicans by a ratio of more than 2-to-1 say the US should support Israel even when its stances diverge with American interests…Democrats, by roughly the same ratio, say the opposite is true and that the US must pursue its own interests over Israel’s.

Let’s focus on that again. The poll asks: Given the choice of agreeing with the view that “Israel is an ally, but we should pursue America’s interests when we disagree with them [Israel]” or, alternatively, “Israel is an important ally, the only democracy in the region, and we should support it even if our interests diverge”, Republicans said that Israel comes first by a 67/30 margin.

OK, this shows that we now have evidence that “patriotism” now means something different to Republicans. As Ed Kilgore says:

You can have all sorts of disagreements over what constitutes your country’s interests, of course. But flatly asserting they should be subordinated to another country’s interests is hard to accept from people who have a bad habit of thinking of themselves as the only real Americans.

Maybe Bloomberg’s use of the word “support” in the question created some ambiguity, but that can’t account for the result that 2/3 of Repubs think we should support Israel’s interests over our own.

So if Republicans say we should put the interests of a democratic state located 10,000 miles away, one that is edging up to apartheid as national policy, ahead of the interests of our country, well, that’s that. It’s the new patriotism.

For Republicans, our interests simply can’t diverge from Israel’s. To them, that’s an ontological impossibility, like God making a rock he can’t lift, or Jesus helping the poor.

Aren’t Republicans our flag-waving hyper-patriots? Those who say “love it or leave it”?

Israel is a major ally. One that most Americans support, but since when do patriotic Americans believe that our government should put the interests of a foreign country above the interests of our own?

That used to be called treason.

Unless there is something wrong with the Bloomberg poll, what Republicans believe means we are facing huge trouble domestically. We may be seeing a three thousand mile wide Yugoslavia in the making.

On to music. In recognition of the Israel First Republicans, here is a plea for them to come back, and believe in America again. Let’s watch Journey’s, “Don’t Stop Believing”, from a 2006 live concert in Houston:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video on YouTube here.

Hard to believe that The Sopranos ended 8 years ago.

See you on Sunday.

Monday Wake Up Call – April 13, 2015

Today’s Wake Up is for the House Judiciary Committee, who last month cleared a bill to the House floor that if passed, would grant asylum to families who want to home school their children, while it would restrict current levels of asylum-granting to children fleeing violence in Central America. The committee vote was 21-12.

Think Progress reports that this provision of the bill grants asylum for up to 500 individuals fleeing home school persecution in countries where home schooling is illegal (Germany is one). The bill refers to people who home school as a “particular social group” and indicates that a person is eligible for asylum if he/she is:

Deemed to have been persecuted for failure or refusal to comply with any law or regulation that prevents the exercise of the individual right of that person to direct the upbringing and education of a child of that person.

This provision seems to put homeschoolers ahead of others seeking asylum who experience much more dire circumstances. The bill also includes provisions to limit asylum claims generally, prohibiting:

• Unaccompanied alien children, like the ones who crossed the southern US border last year, from applying for asylum if “such child may be removed to a safe third country”
• Increasing the number of full-time immigration judges and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers

In addition it raises the information standard for those children who try to prove that they would be threatened if they were deported back to their home country.

So, the Republican Party is saying that home-schooling is a priority for asylum, ahead of murder, rape, or child abuse. They say that the denial of the right to home-school is persecution, while most lawyers would say it is religious discrimination, a bad thing, but not a reason to let homeschoolers into the US.

Today, applicants must prove that they would face persecution, torture, or even death if they were returned to their native countries. Out of 3,996 asylum requests from Mexico, only 38 were granted.

So sure, homeschoolers, just cut to the head of the line.

This is the state of the Republican Party: Escaping from drug cartels makes you a moocher. Escaping from the tyranny of public education makes you noble.

Or, as Thoroughly Republican Jesus might say: “That which you did for the Home Schooled, you did for me.” Forced to learn about evolution? You’ve got asylum. Forced into prostitution or drug-muling? You better be able to prove it, kiddo.

So, wake up Republicans! To help with that, and in honor of yesterday’s Masters golf tournament, listen to The Texas Tornados doing “A Little Bit is Better Than Nada” from the movie, “Tin Cup“:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p8H_ESwrWg

For those of you who read the Wrongologist in email, the song is here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

The avocado is ‘transgender’ and has overnight sex changes, a botanist has discovered. Soon, the “avocado-phobic” brigade will be all over this! Apparently, eating avocados does not make you bi-sexual.

The Onion has a list of The Pros and Cons of body-cams for police. The #1 pro? Provides accurate record of where the cop was when he turned off the body-cam.

Muck Rock reports that Homeland Security can download your PC’s hard drive when you enter the US. Based upon the opinion of any US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer, your device can be searched and its contents read. With approval of a supervisor, the device can be seized, its contents copied in full, or both. This is despite the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Because, terrorism.

Huge oil find near London’s Gatwick airport hypes stock of tiny company. The BBC says it could be as much as 100 billion barrels. The North Sea field has produced 40+ billion barrels over the past 40 years.

Friday Music Break – April 10, 2015

Friday’s Music break is late, but worth your time. When Walter Scott was first pulled over in North Charleston SC, much of the initial traffic stop was caught on the dash-cam of Police Officer Michael T. Slager. These dash-cams capture video and audio from inside the police car in addition to what transpires in the traffic stop.

The dash-cam video was released by the South Carolina authorities on Thursday, showing Walter Scott getting out of his car and running away after a traffic stop moments before he was killed by Officer Slager. As Slager drives up behind the green Mercedes-Benz driven by Scott, there’s a song playing in the background inside the police car. That song is “What It’s Like,” by Everlast:

Sample Lyrics:
We’ve all seen a man at the liquor store beggin’ for your change
The hair on his face is dirty, dread-locked, and full of mange
He asks a man for what he could spare, with shame in his eyes
“Get a job, you f*** slob, ” is all he replies
God forbid, you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes
‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to sing the blues

It is the last song Walter Scott heard before being gunned down by a killer cop. For those of you who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see song on YouTube here.

Does this song playing in the background of the cop car tell us anything about patrolman Slager? Probably not. It was a #1 song in 1998 from an album that went double-platinum.

But the song’s message, of “Don’t Prejudge” means that it should be the anthem of an America that wants an end to police violence. We are a country where you are 55 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist.

One reason is that many law enforcement officers consider failure to comply with the officers’ demands as an excuse for using lethal force. Police have become so militarized in modern America that we are gradually losing the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

Cops need to make quick judgements. Everyone accepts that.

But, “What it’s Like” should become a part of their training.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 5, 2015

What a week! An Iran deal that may lead nowhere, or that may be a reset on our Middle East adventure, and continued blowback on the anti-gay, pro-religious bigotry legislation in Indiana and Arkansas. Couple these things with Easter and Passover, and you have a jam-packed weekend in America.

Easter is a good time to talk about “Homeless Jesus”. It is a sculpture by Timothy P. Schmalz that depicts a homeless person sleeping on a park bench, with holes in his feet. Schmaltz, a Catholic, says that Homeless Jesus is intended as a visual reminder of the passage in the Book of Matthew, in which Jesus tells his disciples,

As you did to one of the least of my brothers, you did unto me.

Here is the statue:

Several casts of the original are installed in the US, Europe and Canada. In Davidson, NC where the photo above was taken in 2014, a woman actually called police the first time she drove by; she thought it was an actual homeless person. Obviously, the irony was lost on her, or maybe she was just more comfortable with a Jesus-as-crucified statue.

Politics deals with power in society, and in the last 50 years, we have made economic class a sub-category of our politics. America’s rampant homelessness goes straight to the heart of the Christian message. Some Republicans should reflect on why they insist on objectifying people (think Mitt’s 47% comment), when we should be helping them as humans in need. Now, it is possible to materially help someone while still objectifying them. From a Christian viewpoint, this is morally wrong.

Link that thought to the current Republican budget. Their planned social safety net cuts are ruinous. Those in need include people with disabilities, under-fed children, abused women, the mentally ill, veterans, and oh yes, the working poor.

When you hear politicians who would deny these funds because “My taxes might go up”, we should ask, what part of Christian teachings, and where on the moral spectrum, do these ideas come from?

So, on to the cartoons of the week.

Jesus takes the fall for Republicans in Indy:

Republicans retreat to revise legislation after hearing from the Big Guy:

Iran deal is framed in eye of the beholder:

Johnny Volcano doesn’t like Iran announcement:

Easter eggs may contain better message this year:

Friday Music Break – April 3, 2015

A final thought about Indiana. The Financial Times has an article about corporate backlash to the RFRA laws in Arkansas:

The Arkansas u-turn followed a rare intervention by Walmart in a sensitive social policy debate. Doug McMillon, the retailer’s chief executive, said on Twitter the bill ‘threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present through the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold.’

Who is the moral arbiter for 21st century America? Wal-Mart. Big business has become MORE of a moral arbiter for equality in our society than religious right legislators.

We also are seeing a love-fest between Progressives and Big Business over the Arkansas/Indiana fracas. This isn’t the first time Progressives and Big Business have seen eye-to-eye, but the spectacle of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, taking his brave position on Indiana’s lack of discrimination protection for the LGBT community begs the question about whether he would ever take the same position about China’s discrimination of LGBT individuals. Would he reward states in the US that had already protected LGBT rights even before big business made it trendy, maybe by pulling a factory or two out of China and relocating them to those states?

You already know the answer.

On to music, well, to a story about music. The Smithsonian has an exhibition of the art and music of Mingering Mike. Mingering Mike is a fictitious funk and soul recording artist created in the late 1960s. Mike’s work might never have been seen if Dori Hadar hadn’t visited a flea market in Washington, DC in 2003. Digging through a crate of used LPs, he found 40 album covers that Mingering Mike had created for his non-existent music career:

I came upon this one crate that contained albums like I had never seen before…There were approximately 40 LPs that had hand-painted covers and handwritten liner notes and lyrics. And they were all made by someone named Mingering Mike.

Hadar later met Mike, and learned that starting in the late 1960s, Mike recorded hundreds of songs on a reel-to-reel recorder with his cousin. Today his music is only available on the subscription service eMusic.

To Mike, the album covers seemed like a natural way to archive his music in case a record label ever came calling. That never happened. In 1970, he was drafted into the military. He made it through basic training, but when it was time to fly to Vietnam, Mike just went home. In 1977, after President Carter pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers, Mike got a job and put his hand-painted albums in a storage unit. After 20 years in storage, when he fell behind on the payments, his albums eventually ended up at the flea market.

NPR reported that Leslie Umberger, who curated the exhibition, Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits at the Smithsonian, was drawn to one cover, made just after Mike went AWOL, because it shows his feelings at the time:

It kind of shows him as the civilian on one side, back to back with himself as a soldier…On the back side it shows the singer and the artist making people happy, and the other Mike, the soldier, going to war and standing in formation.

Here is a clip of Mingering Mike at his art show at Duke University in 2010:

Here are two images of his album art:

See you on Sunday.

Indiana’s Bridge Too Far

We all have heard about Indiana’s “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA). Republicans are arguing that Indiana’s law is no different from the federal law passed in 1993 that Democrats voted for and Mr. Clinton signed. That is untrue. As Think Progress points out, Indiana’s bill goes much further than the 1993 federal law or any other state law:

There are several important differences in the Indiana bill but the most striking is Section 9. Under that section, a “person” (which under the law includes not only an individual but also any organization, partnership, LLC, corporation, company, firm, church, religious society, or other entity) whose “exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened” can use the law as “a claim or defense…regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.”

So here is the difference: Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state RFRA statutes says anything like that, only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, and the new Arkansas RFRA law contain similar language.

Garrett Epps in The Atlantic points out that the federal RFRA and the other 18 state RFRAs protect private citizens’ religious beliefs from their government. Indiana’s is the only law that explicitly applies to disputes between private citizens. This means it could be used by individuals to justify discrimination against individuals that might otherwise be protected under law.

That’s the difference. The Indiana law is a blanket permission to discriminate, plain and simple. It’s effectively a “Stand Your Ground” law for bigots. If you choose to discriminate against someone, you can claim the law as a defense if you feel your “exercise of religion is substantially burdened.”

Back to Section 9, which also defines a person in this case as any organization, partnership, LLC, corporation, company, firm, church, religious society, or other entity. So, if an Indiana business wanted to refuse to serve LGBT customers on religious grounds, they could theoretically claim this law as a defense, and say that allowing them to shop there would “substantially burden” the business’s “exercise of religion”.

If you doubt the original intent of the Indiana RFRA, check out the photo of Gov. Pence’s signing ceremony. You will see nuns in full regalia, along with 2 anti-gay lobbyists as well. If you missed it, you can see it here. Maybe its not surprising that the Governor’s people won’t reveal the names of all who are in the picture. Indiana had the lowest voter turnout percentage in the Nation in 2014 at 27.8%. Maybe Indiana voters need to take charge of their own situation.

Those on the religious right who hold political office continually promote a social agenda as an act of political resistance to our secular world. This problem has been with us since before we became a country. It was part of most of the original 13 state constitutions. Except for Pennsylvania, every other state’s constitution required you to be a Christian believer to hold office, or in some cases, only Protestants could hold office, since being a Christian seemed too broad a definition.

William Penn only required an acknowledgement in some sort of creator, leaving only atheists outside of the political arena.

Those that want the laws of god in heaven to become the laws of the USA here on earth see Indiana’s RFRA as a political victory. Conservative Christians vote for politicians who will prosecute various forms of “sinful” behavior, especially if sexually defined, like abortion, online pornography websites like hdpornvideo.xxx, pornography magazines, and homosexuality. Some want to outlaw certain books, or music. Some go further, and bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors, while some will beat a gay person to death every now and then.

Now they are back to passing laws against “sin” while pretending they are upholding religious liberty. This is a country where Christianity is overwhelmingly the majority religion. To carry on as if its followers are a persecuted minority is abjectly false. Many of them carry little copies of the Constitution. Too bad they don’t understand what it says.

The Wrongologist is sick of eating their shit, and so are the majority of Americans.

Monday Wake Up Call – March 30, 2015

Today’s wake up is for the science deniers. Gallup conducted a poll that correlates political ideology, education level and acceptance of the consensus of scientists about climate change. 74% of Republicans with a college degree say the risk of climate change is exaggerated, while the opposite is true among well-educated Democrats, only 15% of whom think the risks of climate change is exaggerated. More education apparently will not mitigate the partisan divide on global warming.

The same seems true with evolution. Here is a snippet of an article by James Krupa, Professor of Evolution at the University of Kentucky:

…one of the most misused words today is…theory. Many incorrectly see theory as the opposite of fact. The National Academy of Sciences provides concise definitions of these critical words: A fact is a scientific explanation that has been tested and confirmed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing it; a theory is a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence generating testable and falsifiable predictions.

So “theories” and “facts” co-exist by definition. Krupa quotes the late Stephen Jay Gould:

Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts.

The public acceptance of evolution in the US is the 2nd lowest of 34 developed countries, just ahead of Turkey. Half of Americans reject some aspect of evolution, so it must be a steep uphill climb in states like Kentucky to fight against the power of fundamentalism.

Why does this have to be a battle of faith(s)? Among the religious groups that support the teaching of evolution are the Episcopal Church, Lutheran World Federation, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church, United Unitarian Universalists, Roman Catholic Church, and the American Jewish Congress.

In fact, 77% of all American Christians belong to a denomination that supports the teaching of evolution. The question that should be asked is: “Why can’t evolution and faith in God co-exist”? Why can’t the physical body spring from one source of life, and the soul from another?

So, wake up deniers! Today is Eric Clapton’s 70th birthday. This wake up is from the movie, “The Last Waltz”, celebrating the career of The Band, directed by Martin Scorsese. You must see this movie. Here is “Further On Up The Road“, first recorded by Bobby “Blue” Bland. That’s Levon Helm on drums and Robbie Robertson on guitar along with EC:

Your Monday Hot Links:

Willie Nelson will be offering his own brand of weed. The legendary pot smoker is trying to get out ahead of big business in those states where pot is legal with “Willie’s Reserve”.

Prospect Magazine is out with its annual list of the top 50 world thinkers. Any list like this is always good for a laugh, and this year, Prospect doesn’t disappoint: They have Russell Brand at #4 on their list.

Amazon is now requiring warehouse employees to sign a non-compete agreement. The requirement extends even to seasonal workers. The agreements can last for up to 18 months. But, seasonal workers can be employed by Amazon for as few as three months. That’s a hell of a trade-off.

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the UK, which publishes 277 peer-reviewed journals. In a sad commentary on scientific scholarship, there is a blog that tracks scholarly paper retractions called Retraction Watch.

A scientific team in Myanmar rediscovered a bird previously thought to be extinct. The bird is Jerdon’s babbler, and had not been seen in Myanmar since July 1941. The team found the bird on 30 May 2014. Jerdon’s babbler is not to be confused with Boehner’s babbler, which is immortal.

5 years after its launch, there are 5 things that Americans still don’t understand about Obamacare.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Culture Wars