My Arts Editor adores a good sunflower, and while this season is not as successful as last season, she has a couple of specimens to work with. However, these are nothing like her very first batch from 9 years ago. They lined her secondary parking space at her old house as impossibly attentuated guards, warding against everything but the squirrels that ate them.
Anyway, here they are!
The Huffington Post reports the Green Restaurant Association has found tremendous food waste in the United States – enough to drop my jaw:
A single restaurant in the U.S. wastes about 100,000 pounds of food a year, according to the Green Restaurant Association, making them auspicious donors for hunger relief groups. But many restaurants are reluctant to give away their edible leftovers, citing fears of getting sued.
But they shouldn’t be so worried about backlash, experts say.
Because no such lawsuit has ever been waged.
Just a bit more of numbers…
Bon Appetit has 650 cafes nationwide and donated more than 286,000 pounds of food last year. Cummings said that’s a “low-ball” estimate though.
Restaurants are uniquely positioned to simultaneously tackle the country’s food waste and hunger issues.
In the U.S., up to 40 percent of food goes uneaten. Last year, one in six households didn’t have enough money for food.
Yet, even with the protections in place and the vast number of groups that pick up and deliver excess food, many restaurants will still rifle off a host of reasons that keep them from participating in the rescue effort.
The article goes on to explore the legalities of and obstacles to more efficient food use in the USA. I wonder if I should wander over to the fast food joint a block and a half away and ask if they know how much food they discard in a day …
Last time we discussed country actions in terms of climate change, it was the positive move of the Australians of electing Malcolm Turnbull. Now we may have what is being widely viewed as a setback, as new British PM Theresa May closes the Department for Energy and Climate Change. From CommonDreams:
May shuttered the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) on Thursday and moved responsibility for the environment to a new Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. The decision comes the same week as the U.K. government’s own advisers warned in a report that the nation was not ready for the inevitable consequences of climate change, including deadly heat waves and food and water shortages.
“This is shocking news. Less than a day into the job and it appears that the new prime minister has already downgraded action to tackle climate change, one of the biggest threats we face,” said Craig Bennett, CEO of the environmental group Friends of the Earth. “This week the government’s own advisors warned of ever growing risks to our businesses, homes and food if we don’t do more to cut fossil fuel pollution.”
CommonDreams may be dedicated to the Progressive movement, but actions such as this affect everyone, conservative and liberal, communist and anarchist, from London to Shanghai to San Francisco. The question is the direction of the affect, as it’s not clear to me the purpose of this new Department within the British government – the Climate Change section may be entirely subsumed by the Energy and Business sections and become ineffective, or (on the positive end) it may influence future regulations of companies doing business in the UK. I poked around but did not find an explanation of the change.
May’s views on climate change are not entirely clear.
…. can, unsurprisingly, really hurt those who happen to be neither God nor in Power. AL Monitor‘s Mohannad Sabry reports in September of 2013 on the plight of St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai region of Egypt, which was ordered, with little reason and no compensation, to shut down by security officials:
“Despite having more time to pray and practice, our priests live without crowds of visitors, we are suffering a major financial crisis, and we cannot cover the monastery’s expenses and dozens of families that we constantly support,” said Paolos, who wore his farming clothes covered in mud.
St. Catherine’s Monastery employs 400 workers from the surrounding community at its olive groves, grape farms, honey bee farms and several processing facilities including an olive oil press. As of the beginning of September, the monastery reserves decreased to a level that is barely enough to cover two months of expenditure.
“We respect the Egyptian government, and we will continue to close if they require the closure,” said Paolos, “But we will have to drastically cut down salaries and other expenditures. We are saddened to lose the income we shared with the Bedouin community.”
Meanwhile, the state authorities haven’t moved to help rescue the ailing community despite generating millions of dollars in revenues from hundreds of thousands of tourists who have visited St. Catherine’s over the past two decades.
One example of the income generated by the state is the entrance tickets imposed by the Ministry of Environment in 2004. Since then, every single tourist is required to pay $5 to enter the town of St. Catherine’s.
The monastery’s administration told Al-Monitor that it operated at full capacity between 2004 and 2011, receiving 4,000 visitors — mostly foreign tourists — five days a week. And even on the monastery’s days off, the town received hundreds of tourists climbing Mount Sinai and venturing around the mountains on Bedouin safari trips.
The local Bedouins offered camel rides and other camel based services, and were selling their camels to feed their camels – which they acknowledge was a disaster and, when the closedown would be lifted, would leave them without the ability to generate their former incomes.
Credit: Wikipedia
I wonder who benefited from it – at the ruinous expense of the occupants of St. Catherine’s. I have not tried to discover if the security-ordered shutdown was ever lifted, because I find this oddly to be an object lesson of what happens when man, rather than law, is in charge. With strength can easily come corruption, and Trump’s history with “justice” is such that I don’t doubt he’d immediately be manipulating the system for his betterment.
Oh, hurry up, election. I want to stop thinking about this bad joke of a nominee. “Presumptive nominee.”
I’ll confess I couldn’t stomach watching this first night in any detail (and I wonder just how many engineers could), but Andrew Sullivan, among many others, live-blogged it here if you like your convention coverage with an informed side helping of incredulity and even mourning, and a sprinkling of snark. Here’s his summary:
11:09 p.m [EDT]. Just mulling over the events tonight, there’s one obvious stand-out. I didn’t hear any specific policy proposals to tackle clearly stated public problems. It is almost as if governing, for the Republican right, is fundamentally about an attitude, rather than about experience or practicality or reasoning. The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation.
Which strikes me, honestly, as the results of third- and fourth-raters at work. While Colbert ridicules them on the television, I think this is just a continuation in theme of the entire primary season, because hardly anyone in the Republican race really came off as a competent politician. Maybe Kasich. Trump simply beat everyone by claiming he’d do this and do that, louder and more effectively than the rest – without saying how. By avoiding the “how” question, he lets the primary voters avoid doing anything hard, such as analysis and discussion.
And this is how much of the convention proceeded this evening – I did see parts of speeches by several mourning mothers, who blamed either Obama or Hillary for the deaths of their loved ones, and parts of other speeches proclaiming how Trump give America backbone once again, unlike Obama, who only killed Osama bin Laden, who took the nation into the overthrow of Libya, and thus gains some of the credit for the killing of the man responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, etc. It’s thought-free, emotion-laden, and often devoid of facts.
The nation should really go into mourning for the loss of the party of Lincoln. A man of careful thought, it’s impossible to connect the two without incoherent laughter.
A bit of lawn watering yields this:
The following is not as aesthetic but does show what we believe to be the spider’s tunnel.
This is the off-year for the apple tree – last year it fruited to the amount of maybe 150 lbs. These shots courtesy of my Arts Editor …
Shows off the hostas….
The Quatermass Experiment (1953, aka The Creeping Unknown) is a surprisingly effective taut drama concerning the first flight into space. Three astronauts go up, but when the spacecraft comes back down, there’s only one left – and two empty suits. We follow along as the man in charge, Quatermass, bulldozes his way through British politeness towards finding out what happened to the missing astronauts – and what’s happening to the survivor.
This is a quality production. The acting is at a professional level; the characters are written with some lovely quirkiness, the pretty lady is not preserved, but bullheadedly takes her own initiative and pays the price; the extended search for the monster is well-written, full of twists, turns, horror, and suspense. That poor little girl. But the details were often handled with great respect, such as the live-TV crew that finds the monster in the midst of its documentary and desperately tries different cameras and finally switches to another host, all the while dealing with the police. Most shows would have just had them support the police, but in reality they would have had multiple responsibilities – and the movie shows that.
The special effects range the gamut from mundane to, for the era, quite spectacular. Not in a flashy way, but simply “I believe this” – I refer to the sequence in which the film from the spacecraft is under review. My Arts Editor and I were spellbound seeing this sequence, not only as it was a good reveal that something had happened during the flight, but it was also really very much within the realm of what you’d expect to see. A quiet professional take on the matter.
And yet, for all that the above may sound like a rave, it was, in some undefined way, a trifle flat. Perhaps it’s dated, since we know enough about space to know what is depicted is unlikely, although I suppose not impossible. Perhaps the British sensibilities of the era don’t quite work for an American such as myself. In the event, I wouldn’t mind hearing other opinions of this well-regarded film, which actually initially aired as a serial on the BBC, and, according to Wikipedia, cleared the British streets as everyone had to catch it each episode.
Lloyd Alter @ TreeHugger reports on the unpaving of America:
[John Laumer, author of Trend Watch: Unpaving Rural America “Back To The Stone Age“] noted that there were some environmental benefits and concerns that should be considered:
- Asphalt is a refining byproduct. Less will be needed (either way).
- Vehicle speed is slowed as a practical matter, which means higher mileage.
- Rolling friction is increased, which means more fuel consumed
- More car washing is required, absolutely.
- More erosive sediment movement from the cartway and into streams and lakes.
- More cracked windows and chipped paint and broken headlights, which mean more materials consumed.
…
So in the end everyone pays anyway; much higher gas consumption, and probably more car maintenance, more SUVs and fewer Prii or other smaller, lighter, energy efficient cars. Wouldn’t it make more sense just to have a road tax that covered the cost of actually maintaining the roads?
I’d rather pay a higher tax than replace my vehicles at shorter intervals. I should imagine there’s more safety issues involved as well.
For those who read The [Daily] Dish but didn’t receive Andrew’s notice about upcoming activities, I’ll reproduce his mail here.
Dear Dishheads,
It’s been a while but I’m excited/psyched/terrified to be live-blogging the two party conventions for the next fortnight. From 8 pm till closing each night, I’ll be glued to the TV and channeling my thoughts instantly – as in the olden times – except this time for New York Magazine at nymag.com. Chas Danner, an old Dish colleague who now works at New York, will be helping me filter the various Internet responses to the proceedings, and I truly hope you’ll come along for the ride.
We will, of course, be open to reader emails during the night – and the email address will be posted at the top of the live-blog. Think of it as a pop-up Dish for two weeks, a chance to gather round together again as the end of the republic nears.
Hope to see you next Monday night as the events unfold!
In Dishness,
andrew
I doubt I have the stomach for watching that much convention, but his live-blogging may be interesting.
Climate change – its impact, complexity and persistence – is hard for human brains to parse. In his 2013 book Hyperobjects, the philosopher Timothy Morton described how “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” defy our intuition. Global warming is one such hyperobject: a panel about the ocean hinted at others.
It stretches my brain. A little. A river would be another hyperobject.
[edited – added link and the following.] Thanks to “Face to face in the Arctic with a terrifying new sublime”, NewScientist, 2 July 2016, amended online later.
For those of you, like me, who don’t really understand the Israeli situation, here’s what appears to be admirable historical and current summary from Professor Asher Susser on Lawfare:
In the new regional reality, as some Arab states sink ever-deeper into crisis and disarray, and as the Sunni Arabs struggle with Shi’ite Iran’s hegemonic design, Israel has acquired genuine Arab allies who make common cause to contain Iranian influence. The days when Israel was alone against all the rest in the Arab world, as it had been in its early years, are over. Israel has lasting and stable peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and a fledgling informal relationship with countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It is also building up relationships with the non-Arab states of the region. It has just signed a new agreement for reconciliation with Turkey and earlier in the year, Israel came to agreements for strategic cooperation with Greece and Cyprus.
Readers continue to remark on this thread:
Exactly. 42%? That’s fracking insane.
Yes, and (in chorus with many others) doesn’t bode well for the future of this country. On the other hand, I do not think they can be conceived of as a homogenuous bloc, but rather a fractured mess. Another:
I don’t think it is so much a pro-trump thing as it is anti-hillary.
Which is something I don’t really get. I was around 30 when President Clinton took office, and I’ve never really understood the profound enmity the Clintons seem to have acquired amongst the right wing. It’s certainly true she’s made mistakes – but then who doesn’t make mistakes when trying to run the government of the largest democracy in the world? To some extent, Bill’s high intelligence, along with his ability to take the issues of the opposition and make them his, makes their hatred of him more understandable; perhaps it just washes off on her.
First, the candy corn vine, which we had last year and is just starting to bloom this year.
And then for our move to yellow out in the garden…
I should imagine these are lilies, with a cleome in the background.
Last growing season Deb found picking the tomatoes – in particular the black cherry variety – back behind the garage (we have a detached alley garage) a frustrating experience. This season she’s experimenting with forcing the tomato plants to display their wares with more … enthusiasm! Her approach? Twine is affixed to the ground (via spike) and the garage’s soffit. Here, have a picture:
And then she’s encouraging the tomato plants to use the twine as support. Of course, it doesn’t do this naturally, so she has to put each vine on the string manually – but so long as they stay on the twine, it should simplify picking.
Finally, a side view just for giggles.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, some of the pictures may not show up. If this happens to you, click on the broken picture icon and they should – slowly – show up.
What does not have a subsurface ocean these days? Even Pluto is a candidate, as NewScientist (2 July 2016) suggests from an article in Geophysical Research Letters by Noah Hammond, Amy Bar, and Edgar Parmentier:
If Pluto still has an ocean, then global volume expansion would still be occurring, suggesting extensional tectonic activity could be ongoing. This is consistent with the observations of Moore et al. [2016] who suggest that the relative youth of tectonic features could be consistent with the partial freezing of an ocean. Additionally, tensional stresses at the surface and ocean pressurization, due to the ice shell thickening, could make cryovolcanic resurfacing more likely [Robuchon and Nimmo, 2011].
Or, as NewScientist puts it:
If it had frozen solid, the pressure from the outer ice would have squished the ocean into a denser form called ice-II, reducing its volume. Pluto would have contracted, covering it in wrinkles.
But New Horizons saw deep cracks instead, suggesting Pluto is slowly growing through the formation of normal ice, which has a larger volume than liquid water.
NASA suggests Pluto’s moon Charon may have had an ocean in the past.
If anything swims in that ocean, it’ll need anti-freeze for blood – like certain fish. Wondering about ice-II?
Ice II is a rhombohedral crystalline form of ice with a highly ordered structure. It is formed from ice Ih by compressing it at temperature of 198 K at 300 MPa or by decompressing ice V. When heated it undergoes transformation to ice III.[1] Ordinary water ice is known as ice Ih, (in the Bridgman nomenclature). Different types of ice, from ice II to ice XVI, have been created in the laboratory at different temperatures and pressures. It is thought that the cores of icy moons like Jupiter’s Ganymede may be made of ice II.
Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI via slate.com.
David Hambling reports in NewScientist (2 July 2016, paywall) how “hot ice” or crystsal icing may have taken Air France 447 down – and how it ties into climate change:
… one apparently minor detail is beginning to take on new significance: ice blockage in a sensor called a pitot tube, which measures air speed.
That shouldn’t have happened at 35,000 feet. According to our understanding of weather, it is not possible for ice to form at this altitude. …
Unlike normal icing, crystal icing happens at altitudes where water should not be liquid. The culprits are plumes of crystals around 40 micrometres across, no bigger than grains of flour, which are invisible to weather radar that pick up normal precipitation.
Because they’re solid, these crystals bounce off the wings and other areas equipped with sensors and defences. But when they land on the warmest parts of the plane – such as the engine or pitot tube – they melt. This also happens in contact with the heated windscreen, where they can cause the weird “rain” sometimes reported.
Once a layer has partially melted, it accretes more crystals. When these layers accumulate in the engine, they can stall it, or break off in solid chunks that damage the engine (see diagram).
Ice build-up in the sensors leads to more insidious damage. On flight 447, the ice crystals blocked the pitot tube, which started giving false readings, showing the plane flying too slowly.
[Edit] Here’s that diagram:
[End edit] And the connection to climate change?
There’s even a chance the problem could get worse. “The warmer, moister world predicted by climate change will have more convective instability, ” says Sue Gray, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, UK. “These systems will be more vigorous and more frequent.”
And according to a recent analysis by Rolls Royce engine labs, these increases in extreme weather could make the conditions in which crystal icing flourishes more frequent. In a presentation, Rory Clarkson, an engine specialist with the company, offered an inconvenient but undeniably safe answer: “Restrict operation during severe weather.”
What will this bring? Nothing but evil.
Where is the Martin Luther King, Jr. of today, one who realizes & communicates that violence begets violence, that we must come together in our shared needs, not our trivial differences? Neither side can win this fight, not in the long term – not the white supremacists, not those driven to terrible acts of revenge. They, both, are covered in blood and dishonor; their relatives & friends in disbelief and profound horror.
Adding to our string of old science fiction films, we recently viewed The Man from Planet X (1951), which tells the story of the approach of another planet, somewhat in the vein of When Worlds Collide (also 1951, reviewed here), but in this case the population of the approaching planet has plans to come to Earth, rather than we fleeing Earth. To this eventuality they have sent a scout …
… and to the credit of the movie makers, they keep the story strictly to the human viewpoint, as two astrophysicists, the beautiful and intelligent, even proactive daughter of one of them, and the war-time friend of one of the astrophysicists, now a journalist, find themselves deep in the marshes of a Scottish island, the part of Earth which will be facing the new planet on closest approach, located in a convenient stone building. During a bit of gallumphing about by the daughter and the journalist, an alien probe, made of an incredible metal, is found, thus awakening the avarice of one of the astrophysicists, an unfortunate story-telling device which telegraphs substantial portions of the plot.
The the scout is found, and, in an interesting twist, the poor fellow’s spacesuit is not functioning properly; the journalist fixes it, and while the fix is a little silly, it advances the plot in an engaging manner. The scout is brought back to the castle, where the astrophysicists try to communicate with them, and come up with the approach of using geometry – a sort of visual logic, if you will. I was surprised at the logic displayed by the movie makers.
And at what is a promising juncture, the movie falls apart.
The greedy scientist betrays the conveniently ill senior astrophysicist by concealing the success of the communication while physically controlling the scout, yet in some never revealed manner, the scout breaks free and takes the daughter captive. The astrophysicists disappear, and a desperate signal for help is sent from the Scottish island to a passing freighter (in itself a lovely bit of overcoming an obstacle), and the local Scottish village begins to depopulate as the scout takes more captives. Help arrives from the mainland in the form of Scotland Yard, and eventually a rescue and destroy mission is formulated and carried out (during which the scout is disabled, and yet mysteriously recovers, a serious lapse of story-telling logic). The captives, who somehow learned (telepathy?) the plans of the alien, reveal that the scout must setup a homing beacon for the invading forces, and so the spaceship must be destroyed (and, to much hilarity, suffers total annihilation). All is wrapped up, with nothing more than potential losses. We watch as the alien planet goes flying by, raising questions about just how that entire population was going to transfer to Earth in the blink of an eye…
There was a lot of good going on in this movie. The actors are professionals and not even the Scottish villagers chewed the scenery. The scout plays his role effectively, displaying good will and vulnerability, as well as the necessary aggressiveness, despite being stuck behind a space helmet and a huge mask. The makeup is particularly good for the 1950s – not quite convincing, but then again, if Doctor Who didn’t have to be convincing to be effective, why should this? The special effects are, however, mediocre at best, laughable at worst.
The characters are believable and empathetic. Even the scout, our invader, is at least an ambiguous antagonist, believable in the actions and reactions in which the plot takes him. Collectively, they were a good population for the story.
But the problem is the last half of the plot. The avarice of one of the scientists has been mentioned, and it doesn’t really fit into the general popular temperament of a scientist; the early reveal means we are unsurprised by many elements of the plot. The promising start of the daughter character is wasted as she disappears into the clutches of the scout. And, finally, there’s no real element of insight gained – they ran the characters through the plot, things happened, the good guys win at virtually no cost – maybe a touch of PTSD, we might speculate. No real change happens. And perhaps that’s the worst of it – a good story shows how human – or intelligent entities – actions and emotions cause change to themselves and those around them. In this movie, there’s a little bit. But not enough.
Postscript: I do have to say good things for a movie that has provided my Arts Editor with inspiration. The result?
In case you were wondering, yes, that’s myself and my Arts Editor. The original may be found here.
Tesla’s new AutoPilot feature for their car offerings has been involved in its first fatality. First, what is AutoPilot? From the Tesla blog:
It is important to note that Tesla disables Autopilot by default and requires explicit acknowledgement that the system is new technology and still in a public beta phase before it can be enabled. When drivers activate Autopilot, the acknowledgment box explains, among other things, that Autopilot “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times,” and that “you need to maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while using it. Additionally, every time that Autopilot is engaged, the car reminds the driver to “Always keep your hands on the wheel. Be prepared to take over at any time.” The system also makes frequent checks to ensure that the driver’s hands remain on the wheel and provides visual and audible alerts if hands-on is not detected. It then gradually slows down the car until hands-on is detected again.
Which is to say it’s not yet foolproof; it may never be. But then, neither are human drivers. Given the supervisory requirement on the human occupant, I wonder if they would have been better advised to name this CoPilot.
So on to their reaction to the incident:
We learned yesterday evening that NHTSA is opening a preliminary evaluation into the performance of Autopilot during a recent fatal crash that occurred in a Model S. This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. Worldwide, there is a fatality approximately every 60 million miles. It is important to emphasize that the NHTSA action is simply a preliminary evaluation to determine whether the system worked according to expectations.
Following our standard practice, Tesla informed NHTSA about the incident immediately after it occurred. What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S. Had the Model S impacted the front or rear of the trailer, even at high speed, its advanced crash safety system would likely have prevented serious injury as it has in numerous other similar incidents.
There’s a couple of takeaways here: Tesla’s claim of a first fatality at 130 million miles, which is significantly better than American and world wide averages. Of course, these are small numbers (i.e., 1 fatality) and hardly constitutes an average. But let’s make an unwarranted assumption and assume these numbers will hold up, even if I do feel it’s a little irresponsible to be quoting such numbers so early in the game.
Secondly, the claim that neither AutoPilot nor the driver could see the truck.
Here’s what engineers & scientists are going to see and hear: aggregate accident and fatality numbers and how they compare to traditionally piloted cars. As Tesla points out, the raw data is processed to measure accidents and fatalities, and for engineers who want a clear view of how it performs, this will be the important part, along with questions concerning efficiency (fuel) and throughput (i.e., easing of traffic jams) through coordination of driving.
But how about the rest of the population? In fact, it may be unfair to exclude the engineers and scientists. I’m talking about emotions here. Let’s frame the question right here: your best friend is in a fatal car accident, and you’re sitting at their wake, thinking about their last moments and trying to understand how you’ll feel about it. If they died behind the wheel, perhaps killed through the carelessness of some other driver, it’s going to be a terrible feeling.
But what if they were using AutoPilot, a fully implemented AutoPilot that allowed them to take their attention elsewhere? I don’t know about you, but to me the idea that some automatic driving system may have been responsible for my death puts a chill in my spine. This is because I’m no longer the one in control of the car, nor is it an entity in which I can feel some link, some feeling that I understand how their mind works well enough to trust that they’re well-trained and are doing their best to drive well.
This is an entity built on silicon and Big Data algorithms and who knows how it works? Often even the designers don’t understand the details of particular decisions; how about that mother with her infant?
This is the concern that makes me wonder if we’ll ever really use self-driving cars. Science geeks will look at the numbers and realize that accidents and fatalities have gone down, various efficiencies are up, and this is all working out. But the fight will be with the problem of control and trust of the entity in control. If it’s not understandable, will the average driver be willing to entrust their life to it?
I’m not sure.
With regard to the second point, I wonder if we’re going to expect technology to be better than us. I think the potential is there, but is it right for Tesla to stress that neither AutoPilot nor the driver could see the truck? Are they certain the driver was paying attention at the critical moment? If we do expect technology to outclass us as drivers, will this lead to risky, unjustified behavior?
With regard to the selection of Pence by Trump for the VP slot, a reader remarks:
Calculated move by Trump to pull in the far right ultra conservative wing who despise him.
Another replies:
I always thought the Klan was the far right, and they endorsed him. Who are these people on the far right who hate him, and what do they believe in?
Well, not all on the far Right are KKK – much of the fundamentalist movement is also far Right as a best characterization. And that group seems to be convulsed by Trump. Here’s an article from The Atlantic’s Jonathan Merritt back in September, 2015:
Donald Trump is immodest, arrogant, foul-mouthed, money-obsessed, thrice-married, and until recently, pro-choice. By conventional standards, evangelical Christians should despise him. Yet somehow, the Manhattan billionaire has attracted their support.
According to the most recent polls, Trump is one of the top picks for president among evangelical Christians. One Washington Post poll even had him as the group’s favorite by a margin of six points. His first major rally in the Bible-Belt fortress town of Mobile, Alabama, drew an estimated 18,000 attendees. And on September 28, prominent televangelist Paula White will reportedly lead a delegation of evangelical leaders to meet with the mogul in Trump Tower.
“Why do they love me?” Trump replied when asked about the trend. “You’ll have to ask them. But they do. They do love me.”
Back in May Mugambi Jouet suggested in The New Republic a reason why evangelicals love Trump:
But Trump and his evangelical supporters think alike in more ways than people realize. Fundamentalist approaches to evangelicalism have long fostered anti-intellectual, anti-rational, black-and-white, and authoritarian mindsets—the very traits that define Trump.
The historian Richard Hofstadter explored the roots of the issue in his 1966 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which described how the spread of evangelicalism since the eighteenth century fostered the notion that education is an obstacle to faith. Not all evangelicals thought alike, although many were convinced that people need not read any book except the Bible. As the influential preacher Dwight L. Moody (1837-99) proclaimed, “I do not read any book, unless it will help me to understand the book.” Hofstadter concluded that this anti-intellectual conception of religion extended to life outside the church. Hardline evangelicals became particularly disdainful of reflection and refined ideas, leading some to be drawn to “men of emotional power or manipulative skill.”
I’ve never read Hofstadter, which I now regret a little, as that last phrase, ‘leading some to be drawn to “men of emotional power or manipulative skill“,’ precisely echoes some recent conclusions of my own. Without trying to be offensive (but no doubt achieving it anyways), it had recently occurred to me that if you’re willing to strongly believe in a specific deity to the extent that the deity’s book is the center of your life, you fail to develop the instincts, as it were, to detect the fallacies & frauds employing charismatics, who proclaim falsehoods so loudly, because those same tactics are employed by those who are part of your faith community. There is an important distinction between message and methods of communications, and to my mind an alarming number of people, not constrained to the evangelical fundamentalists, do not understand this. I recall sitting in two medical conferences about a relative of mine. Virtually the same information was presented, but one MD was very upbeat, while the other (the first one’s partner) was a much more sober person. My Dad and I walked out of the second conference saying nothing new had been learned, but other attendees were deeply swayed by the presentation style. Similar remarks may be made of the evangelical support for Bush & Cheney, and the poor decision making that befell the nation afterwards.
I have to wonder if it’s accurate to say that a true debate between a rationalist of any stripe and a fundamentalist is itself a fraud and a circus, because there is no single metric by which to measure the contestants. The rationalist audience will analyze the facts presented, the arguments built on those facts, and tote up the points for each debater. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, will employ a scale in which defense of the faith is the most important facet. This will consist of appeals to popular parts of the Bible, thus demonstrating some familiarity with the theology. If this reminds you of the debates in the wonderful movie Inherit the Wind, be not surprised, as that’s in the back of my mind as I write this. In particular, remember the fury and discouragement of the rationalist lawyer, played by Spencer Tracy, at the obstinacy of the judge. In more modern times, while I did not watch it, the 2014 debate between Ken Ham, a creationist, and Bill Nye “The Science Guy” and of The Planetary Society played out in the same way, as I understand it. On a far more speculative note, the Turkish upper-classes may have stumbled into this quagmire, and even triggered the attempted coup. Why say “triggered”? Because downgrading reason below faith in a deity and the arbitrary book representing the deity can often lead to poor decisions – and if the populace has been taken in by the methods of those now in power, some military personnel may have felt it necessary to remove those in power and let the citizenry detox, as it were, while those who had been in power are shown to be frauds, charges which have already been flying in regards to Turkey’s President Erdogan.
And then there’s those who’d make democracy a shrine unto itself…. but I shan’t walk down the path today.
There are those evangelicals who don’t care for Trump. In March of this year, the Christian Post covered one such megachurch pastor’s experience – Max Lucado:
Lucado mentioned that his recent blog about Trump got 15 million reads, and said while many agreed with him, others wanted him to “shut up.”
Lucado, who ministers at the Oak Hills Church, said while Trump claims to be a Christian, he is using “a language that is so incompatible.”
Referring to Matthew 12: 34, Lucado said, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. He pointed out that Trump has called 64 people “losers” in a short period of time.
But Trump loves the Bible, as he said a few months ago, “Nothing beats the Bible,” the host said.
Lucado laughed, and then said, the core of the Christian faith is that we are sinners who need forgiveness, but Trump said he didn’t need to ask for forgiveness.
“For a person to say that they are Christians but never need forgiveness is like a swimmer saying I’m a swimmer but I never get wet, and I’m a musician and I never pick up a musical instrument… Grace is the oxygen of Christian faith,” Lucado said.
Lucado continued that he doesn’t have an answer to why evangelicals are rallying behind Trump.
“I do not have an answer. I apologize. I have had my own church members come up and criticize me for that blog and I’ll ask them, do you not see a disconnect here? And it’s almost like the ends justify the means in their mind,” he said.
Ed Stetzer on The Exchange blog (hosted by Christianity Today) addresses this issue:
Many evangelical leaders are embarrassed by the evangelical support of Trump. That’s reality. Yet, some of those leaders are responding poorly. Our gut reaction is to dismiss his supporters as not being “real” evangelicals, and to question their faith.
I’d like to suggest a different approach.
Rather than looking down with scorn on evangelical Trump supporters, perhaps we should sit down with them, listen to them, and hear their concerns.
He discusses some of the reasons given by the rank and file evangelicals.
So ….. circling back to the original point: why Pence? Back to The New Republic article by Jouet, and we find the answer:
Leaving aside other factors behind the evolution of evangelicalism, this history helps explain one of the most intriguing dimensions of contemporary America, where approximately a quarter of the population belongs to white evangelical churches. Around 42 percent Americans are creationists who deem that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago, and the same proportion expects the prophesied Second Coming of Christ to occur by 2050. No other modern Western democracy has such a huge share of Biblical literalists. Although Americans of diverse denominations hold these beliefs, evangelicals are disproportionatelyrepresented among them.
Basically, they’re a big voting bloc and if they rally behind Trump, it’ll give him a fighting chance.
The Minnesota State Fair is hosting some sort of hot rod weekend, and I happened to snap these pictures while out for a walk. Just a couple; I didn’t get one of the rusty old convertible on a trailer with a price tag of $6000 – gotta wonder just what it was. Anyways, enjoy this spotless Bel Air!
Gotta love those torpedoes!
With a background of an attempted coup (NYTimes) in Turkey today, the issue of national secularity – or lack thereof – is surely part of the struggle. President Erdogan, characterized as an Islamist, appealed for his supporters to take to the streets, according to the New York Times:
After Mr. Erdogan spoke, many of his followers obeyed his orders to go into the streets, and mosque loudspeakers exhorted his supporters to go out and protest against the coup attempt. [My bold – HW]
So just how secular has Turkey been? AL Monitor’s Mustafa Akyol reports on what he sees as the delusional empty shell of religion within society in the wake of the deadly Islamic State attack on Ataturk Airport:
In other words, as belated as it is, Turkey has begun taking a bolder stance against the terror organization that now threatens the world.
However, Turkey also needs a war of ideas against IS [the Islamic State]. Sadly, Turkey’s ruling religious-minded class seems to have little willingness and potential to do that. The reason is not any love affair with IS or any sympathy with its carnage. The reason is that most of Turkey’s Islamic opinion leaders who have the means to counter IS ideology instead choose to blind themselves to the nature of the problem and explain it as a Western conspiracy against Islam.
This tirade is most visible in the pro-government media sector, which reflects a large part of the Islamic camp. As explained in a recent Al-Monitor piece, several articles appeared in this sector after the attack on the Istanbul airport, putting the blame on “the CIA.” Moreover, there is a whole narrative explaining the very rise of IS as nothing but a Western plot to create a Trojan horse within Islam in order to stain the religion and advance Western imperialism in the Middle East. …
The big problem now with this entire obsession with Western conspiracies is not that it looks ridiculous to anyone who has a better sense of the world. The big problem is that it keeps Turkey’s new ruling class in a bubble of self-delusion, blinding them to the bitter and complex realities that Turkey faces. They seem to have almost no idea about the religious ideology of IS and its brand of Salafi-takfiri-jihadism, or of the social and political dynamics that drive thousands of young Muslims to this zealotry.
The human urge to see ourselves on the side of right will happily engage in all sorts of fancy & fantasy in order to avoid blemishing that which they hold most dear, and I do not hold anyone blameless in this arena, as we’ve seen this from the most conservative of theocrats (who conveniently designate that since God endorses them, they can do no wrong) to the most left-wing of the Marxists and Communists (“We torture you for the good of the State!”). I fear that humankind never evolved to have a disinterested viewpoint, so the alternative of a tremendous blow to the ego implies that we’ll never see these falsehoods stop. Or if we do, it’ll be time to stop calling ourselves humankind.
The motivations of the military involved in the coup remain murky at this time, as do their prospects.
As Donald Trump announces his running mate, former Representative Mike Pence, Steve Benen @ Maddowblog points out a salient feature of now Indiana Governor Pence:
In the 107th Congress (Pence’s first, covering 2001 and 2002), for example, out of 435 members of the U.S. House, Pence ranked #428 – meaning that 427 members were to his left, putting the Hoosier on the far-right-wing fringe. The results were roughly the same in the 108th Congress and the 109th.
By the 110th Congress, Pence was at #432, putting him to the right of nearly everyone in the chamber. The results were roughly the same in the 111th Congress and the 112th. …
Indeed, the Indiana Republican developed a reputation on Capitol Hill as an ineffective extremist who, despite 12 years in Congress, was literally never the chief sponsor of a bill that passed into law.
You have to wonder how well an extremist such as Pence will work with Donald, who though difficult to classify, occasionally appears to hold liberal viewpoints.
Pence was also deeply involved in this mess, including one of my favorite newspaper headlines of all time:
