June rambling #1: procrastination, and tessellation

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson: America’s Mozart?

waltz in
When You Kill Ten Million Africans and You Aren’t Called ‘Hitler’ – King Leopold II of Belgium, who “owned” the Congo.

The Dannemora Dilemma. “‘Little Siberia’ turned out to be the prison’s nickname.”

The Weekly Sift addresses the Duggars’ brand of fundamentalist Christianity and other stuff. Plus What’s So Scary About Caitlyn Jenner?

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet and The Crystal Ball‘s 2016 Electoral College ratings. I have NO idea who the Republican candidate for President will be.

If it’s not Jeb Bush, and I have my serious doubts that it will be, then one of those people from the “he/she can’t win” category could possibly emerge.

ADD on blaming the victims of today’s disastrous economy for trying to survive it.

What Poverty Does to the Young Brain.

Disunion, The Final Q&A: The New York Times’s series on the Civil War.

Franklin Graham Calls for Christian Boycott — Here Are Some Ideas for Targets.

Rachel Dolezal and minstrelsy.

David Kalish: The Fine Art of Procrastination.

THE MARVEL-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX and a follow-up.

Drawing the Undrawable: An Explanation from Neil and Amanda Gaiman, re: The New Statesman and Art Spiegelman.

Microsoft’s Windows 10 will be available on July 29. This SHOULD mean you can update from Windows 7, and I can get rid of the dreadful Windows 8.

How to create strong passwords.

Why Pluto Is a Planet, and Eris Is, Too.

Now I Know: The Lights That Almost Led to World War III and America’s Most Wanted Coincidence and Why are there so few $2 bills?

Gouverneur is a small town of about 6,000 located in St. Lawrence County, NY. But how do you PRONOUNCE it? In English and in French.

Berowne: George Gordon. Better known as Lord Byron.

Never-before-seen film of the legendary aviator Amelia Earhart — from her last photo shoot ever, shortly before she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.

The origin of that Orange Church of God sign I see on Facebook all the time. Speaking of which: 6 Facebook Statuses That Need To Stop Right Now.

Mark Evanier’s childhood Christmas chicanery.

The app that identifies plants from a picture. Seriously, I could use this.

What is a tessellation? Math, and design.

A marbles tsunami.

True: Why are the Tony Awards so afraid of the Tony Awards?

Sex Pistols credit card.

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson: America’s Mozart?

James Taylor’s creativity flows anew.

The Mary Lou Williams Suite, the jazz pianist and arranger. Includes the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee.

SamuraiFrog ranks Weird Al: 60-51. He also brought to mind that the birthday of Todd Rundgren is coming up, which reminded me of a 1985 album I own on vinyl that I haven’t heard in a good while. LISTEN to A Cappella, or at least the last song, a cover of the Spinners’ Mighty Love.

Bert Jansch’s Blackwaterside, first recorded in 1966. Which sounds an awful lot like Jimmy Page’s instrumental Black Mountain Side, from Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut.

DJ Otzi – Burger Dance, “based on the premise that the single aspect of American culture most readily recognizable in the rest of the world is fast food.”

This list is rubbish, but hey, it has links to Beatles songs. The most skippable Beatles cuts, from “All You Need Is Love” to “Yellow Submarine”.

Muppets: Puppetman and Kermit the Frog and Grover on The Ed Sullivan Show and Grover is Special and the 1962 pilot Tales of the Tinkerdee and some other stuff.

Legendary Special-Effects Artist Rick Baker on How CGI Killed His Industry.

Actor Christopher Lee, Dracula and Nazi hunter, dies at 93. From The Guardian and BFI and the Hollywood Reporter and Bruce Hallenbeck in Diabolique and Mr. Frog and Gordon at Blog This, Pal.

Ornette Coleman, Jazz Innovator, Dies at 85.

Dustbury notes the passing of Monica Lewis, a voice, at least, you’ve heard, if you are of a certain age.

GOOGLE ALERTS (not me)

Roger and Carmen Green of Baraboo, Wisconsin celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

UK: An illustrated guided walk tracing the route of the Nickey Line is being led by railway enthusiast Roger Green on Saturday, June 27.

Lincoln’s assassination, and the end of the American Civil War

As we mark the sesquicentennial of these important events, notice how many articles one gets when Googling “still fighting the civil war”.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, ending the Civil War.
Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House

Four years ago, I started to dread what I feared would be a media rehash of the American Civil War 150 years ago, battle by bloody battle. It might have happened, for all I know, but I managed to keep myself out of the loop. Surely I mentioned it rarely here.

This week, though, was quite significant. Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia, though fighting continued elsewhere for another couple of months.

President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, shot on April 14, and dead by the next morning; read about the funeral train. Given his prominence in American history, I’m nevertheless still fascinated that there have been at least 15,000 books about the 16th President. His death left that great unanswerable “What if?”

Had Lincoln lived, how would Reconstruction have been handled? Would slaves have received their 40 acres and a mule, and if so, how would that have been reflected in black people’s wealth in the United States today? What would have been the terms of the Southern states re-entering the Union?

Would Lincoln have died early from Marfan syndrome? He was only 56 when he was killed.

And after four years of reminiscing, we’re still at odds about what to call the conflict. The War of Northern Aggression is particularly popular in parts of the South. The Confederate battle flag is a sign of either regional pride or treason, as it appears on several state license plates and flags to this day.

As we mark the sesquicentennial of these important events, notice how many articles one gets when Googling “still fighting the civil war”. While several are from 25 or 50 months ago, for instance, from CNN and The Atlantic and Daily Kos, the latter citing a piece in the Washington Post, it appears that the conditions mentioned then are no more clarified now, and in fact have even hardened.

The New Republic published an article this week, Make the Confederacy’s Defeat a National Holiday, with a controversial recommendation: “The federal government should… commit to disavowing or renaming monuments to the Confederacy, and its leaders, that receive direct federal support.” Brian Beutler also said, “Those who would caution that a more accurate reckoning with the Confederacy would inflame racial tensions are merely restating the implication that the country is too weak to be introspective.” That, I would suggest, is, at best, an open question.
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Could the South Have Won the War?

Ununited States

These first person shooter games might have some effect on the cognitive understanding of life for some people,

purplemapJaquandor asks:

How do we solve the police brutality problem? To what extent is it a part of a larger problem with our society, indicating a deep and abiding devotion to punitive violence? I see police brutality as another facet of the problem that leads to our awful prisons and our enormous prison population.

First, I need to note the killing of two New York City police officers on December 20. It was correctly described as an assassination, and I mourn their deaths.

At the same time, I believe the remarks of Rudy Guiliani, blaming their deaths on President Obama as amazingly irresponsible, as well as untrue. The problem of excessive force by the police exists in a small, but a significant number of cases. And it’s not “anti-police” when New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who is white but married to a black woman, instructs his children, and especially his son with the great ‘fro, in specific ways to cautiously and politely deal with the police.

Others, including former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who had some legal problems of his own a while back, suggested that the shootings were ultimately encouraged by de Blasio and the Rev. Al Sharpton, and that “they have blood on their hands.” He told Newsmax: “The people who encouraged these protests — you had peaceful protesters who were screaming ‘kill the cops’ — the so-called peaceful protesters. Who was encouraging these protesters? De Blasio, Sharpton, and other elected officials and community leaders. They encouraged this mentality. They encouraged this behavior.”

Anyone who has ever been to a protest – I have attended more than a few in my time – knows that there are occasionally outliers at these events, people whose positions don’t jibe with the organizers’ intents. So would it be better that such Constitutionally-protected demonstrations be quashed?

That, BTW, was what the Tea Party folks said when a couple people killed two Las Vegas police officers in June 2014, that those cop killers, who had rallied with Cliven Bundy, along with people who POINTED GUNS at law enforcement officials, did not represent the movement.

Jon Stewart got it right when he said one can grieve the loss AND worry about the police overreach; they are NOT mutually exclusive.

To the question: I should note that not all of the excessive violence is directed toward young black males. For instance, the TX SWAT team beats, deafens nude man in his own home, lies about arrest; judge declines to punish cops or DA. There seems to be a need by some police to quash all possibly illicit behavior. If Eric Garner WERE selling individual cigarettes in Staten Island, it certainly wasn’t a felony.

I’m not sure of the cause of ALL the violence. I once posited on someone’s website the theory that these first-person shooter games might have some effect on the cognitive understanding of life for some people, but was told by gaming experts that there’s “no relationship.” Maybe, maybe not. I’ve wondered about this at least since Vietnam when one could drop the precision bombs without having any discernible understanding. And now war can really tidy, with people in the middle of the US dropping bombs on people half a world away; looks very much like a video game to me.

I AM convinced that the tremendous rise in the prison population, mostly for non-violent drug use, which I wrote about extensively, is a major contributor. Prison is, I’ve been told, a great school for becoming a better criminal.

Surely the militarism of the police, with all that post-9/11 money doled about by the federal government has led to a war zone mentality. But even in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military had a plan of engaging with the communities, whereas in the urban centers of the US, some of the residents feel like the police are an occupying force.

Maybe all the things that keep us disconnected from our surroundings – surburbia, synthetic food, our personal electronic devices, the bile that comes from commenting anonymously on social media – matter. SOMETHING is fueling a general rage – road rage, online rage.

Bottom line, though: the anger in the community is not just that there are excessive uses of force. The problem is that there appears to be lack of accountability for the actions. I’ve heard the body cameras for police will be a solution. But there WAS footage of Eric Garner dying. Police video would have not likely change the “no indictment” outcome. Did you see that the Ferguson prosecutor allowed witnesses that were “clearly not telling the truth” to the grand jury?

It may be that guns make police less safe, their jobs more difficult and communities less trusting. Or maybe it’s just the human condition.

This is a long way of saying, “Makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands.”

Uthaclena wonders:

Okay, here’s one of my ponders: can the United States survive as a united entity? SHOULD it be a united entity, or would it be better off broken up so that the racist, theocratic barbarians can abuse themselves and leave the rest of us alone?

There are lots of precedents in the 20th century suggesting that this is a terrible idea. The creation of the state of Israel did not lead to peace in the Middle East. I learned from watching the Sanjay Gupta episode of the PBS series Finding Your Roots when the subcontinent was divided in 1947, there was massive dislocation, with millions moving to Hindu India or Muslim Pakistan, needing to abandon their historic homelands; moreover over a million people were killed in clashes. The eastward shift of Poland after World War II was also a hardship for about a third of the country.

How would this work anyway? The redneck in rural Pennsylvania or downtown Cincinnati moves to Alabama or Utah? That flaming liberal in Austin, Texas goes to New York City? Where do you put purplish states such as Iowa and Colorado?
How would the infrastructure be organized? Will I need a passport to visit the Grand Canyon? How do you split the federal government and its various jurisdictions?

More basically, the whole bloody Civil War was fought, in part, to keep the Union intact; the splinter would make that sacrifice in vain. Moreover, Lincoln’s rationale for not allowing the breakup of the Union is that there was no mechanism in the Constitution to do so; ipso facto, it ought not to be done.

In any case, I don’t think people are that binary. Sure there are your “racist, theocratic barbarians”, but most of the rest of us are in the spectrum. And subtle racism shows up in the mainstream media, which many people buy into. I noticed this piece on 60 Minutes how Tom Coburn (R-OK) got along with Barack Obama (D-IL) when they were both freshman Senators in 2005, and even enacted legislation together where they could find common ground.

Just not feeling this divided nation thing.

Then Dan Van Riper jumps in:

Well, I’ll ask a more pointed version of Uthaclena’s question. With all this subtle propaganda from above calling for the USA to break up, do you think that the United States will survive intact as a nation by the end of this decade? (I suspect not, and I hope I’m very wrong.)

Let’s look at the people who could actually pull off this coup. I mean other than the 99% if they could get their act together.

1) The armed forces. I suppose they COULD be mobilized if they were conned into thinking that it was for the greater patriotic good. But it’s not like the Egyptian army, an entity unto itself, that could make or break the government.

2) The police. Too decentralized. Not like the corrupt Mexican police. Although it COULD happen in a few places, despite efforts by the brass. And I’m really unsettled by the recent US Supreme Court ruling that police officers are permitted to violate American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights if the violation results from a “reasonable” mistake about the law on the part of the police.

3) Some right-wing coalition. It is true that there are more hate groups under Barack Obama than ever, that there are 41 states that have an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and that there are anti-government types such as alleged cop-killer Eric Frein out there. Can they work some loose affiliation with the Clive Bundy supporters and disrupt things? Maybe.

My feeling, though, is that at least some of these groups will dissipate somewhat when Obama leaves office because the myth of the terrible black Kenyan sticking it to the white man won’t be sustainable anymore.

Y is Year 2015

Likewise, this will be the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1945.

2015.blocksOf course, no one knows what will happen in the year 2015 except that we’ll celebrate anniversaries of past events.

Back in 1965, fifty years ago, the brilliant music satirist Tom Lehrer, in the introduction to So Long Mom, a song of World War III, said this: “This year we’ve been celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Civil War and the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of World War I and the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War II. All in all, it’s been a good year for the war buffs.” (With a different intro, LISTEN to So Long Mom.)

This being a half-century later, we just “celebrated” the beginning of World War I. 2015 will be the sesquicentennial of the end of the American Civil War in 1865, with all that entails:

January: The U.S. Congress approves the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, to abolish slavery.
March: Second inauguration ceremonies for President Lincoln in Washington.
April: Gen. Robert E. Lee surrenders his Confederate Army to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the village of Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary see the play “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater. During the third act of the play, John Wilkes Booth assassinates the President.
June: Juneteeth in Texas.

Likewise, this will be the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1945:

January: The Soviets enacts a massive offensive against German foes along the East Front. Russian troops find fewer than 3,000 survivors when they liberate Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland.
February: U.S. troops invade the Philippines, while British planes bomb the German city of Dresden.
April: US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies. Adolf Hitler, in the face of certain defeat, commits suicide.
May: Germany surrenders unconditionally to General Eisenhower at Rheims, France, and to the Soviets in Berlin
June: The Pacific island of Okinawa is captured by the Allies.
August: The Japanese sue for peace after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
September: General MacArthur accepts the formal, unconditional surrender of Japan in a ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

So what else shall we celebrate this coming year?

April: Josephine Baker’s death (40th anniversary)
May: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s death. (150th anniversary)
June: Signing of the first Magna Carta. (800th anniversary)
June: Battle of Waterloo. (200th anniversary)
June: William Butler Yeats’ 150th birthday.
July: JK Rowling’s 50th birthday
August: Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and surrounding areas (10th anniversary)
December: Rudyard Kipling’s 150th birthday.

What will YOU be celebrating in 2015?

abc15

ABC Wednesday, Round 15

Memorial Day: revisionist history

Jesus taught us to give comfort to people with dying loved ones. He also gave comfort to the Centurion (Matthew 8).

Almost a year ago, Demeur sent me an article about the history of Memorial Day.

[Historian David] Blight’s award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) explained how three “overall visions of Civil War memory collided” in the decades after the war.

The first was the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ remembrances and the politics of Radical Reconstruction, in which the Civil War was understood principally as a war for the destruction of slavery and the liberation of African Americans to achieve full citizenship.

The second was the reconciliationist vision, ostensibly less political, which focused on honoring the dead on both sides, respecting their sacrifice, and the reunion of the country.

The third was the white supremacist vision, which was either openly pro-Confederate or at least despising of Reconstruction as “Black rule” in the South.

Over the late 1800s and the early 1900s, in the context of Jim Crow and the complete subordination of Black political participation, the second and third visions largely combined. The emancipationist version of the Civil War, and the heroic participation of African Americans in their own liberation, was erased from popular culture, the history books and official commemoration.

Interesting. Not surprising, but interesting to read about revisionist history.
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Last year, when I bewailed what I consider the theological justification for war as anti-Christian, anti-Jesus, and utterly false glorification of war, Chris Honeycutt noted:

I’d say that Memorial Day is 100% a holiday in the real Christian spirit, just like Jesus would want.
Other people make it about celebrating the wars. But it’s really about remembering the soldiers who died.
Everyone who served lost people and had no time to stop and grieve. The war kept coming.
Jesus taught us to give comfort to people with dying loved ones. He also gave comfort to the Centurion (Matthew 8).
So… yeah. Jesus was pretty clear about the war issue. Still think he’d think Memorial Day was a great idea.

I think she might very well be right. Jesus cared for those whose hearts were heavy-laden.

So let us remember our lost ones, even as we redouble our efforts for peace.

Do you know who does really nice Memorial Day posts? Jaquandor. Here’s his post from last year. And here’s a post he did during the last Advent which feels applicable today.
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The Gun Jumpers.

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