Fortunate Son

I'm not going to comment about this, not really. I'm just going to point you towards this post at Stonekettle Station. Read it. Read it!

Note that the post isn't necessarily going where you might think it's going. I'd like to quote the last two lines, because I feel exactly the same way. But read the whole thing. You won't get the ending without that.

Also, note that much of Jim Wright's background is similar to my own - up until he joined the military, at least (at which point our stories definitely diverge). I'm a little older than him. I'm also a straight white man, but I grew up watching those old TV shows myself.

And I lived in a small town that was 100% white and 100% Christian (as far as I knew, at least). Even when we went to a larger town for high school, all of my classmates were 100% white all through high school. I'd never even met a black person until college.

I've got a good life. I retired at 55, and I do whatever I want. Do you think I don't know how privileged my life has been? I've seen it all my life. Even as a child, I saw how differently I was treated because I was a boy. Later, I realized how privileged I'd been in other ways, too.

We weren't rich, but I'd always assumed that I'd go to college. I worked my way through college, but there was never any doubt in my mind that I would go there.

There was never any doubt in my mind that I could be whatever I wanted to be. (I didn't know what I wanted to be. That was the problem.)

OK, I am commenting, aren't I? Heh, heh. I don't mean to, but this just really struck home with me. Read the post. Jim Wright says it far better than I could. Optimism shouldn't be just the privilege of some of us!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone (anyone left reading this, at least). Sorry I don't blog anymore.

The Confederacy

This is great, isn't it? I'm glad they ended on a high note. Only 38% of Americans realize that the Civil War was fought over slavery? Just 38%? Really?

Damn it, I'm depressed again. I should have quit while I was ahead.

The case against the resurrection

I meant to post this on Sunday - Easter- but I never got around to it. Oh, well. It's still worth your time, but I'll make this post especially short.

This is a playlist of video arguments against the resurrection of Jesus Christ - ten video clips from nine different people. They're all interesting, though I'd especially recommend the video with Bart Ehrman and the two from Richard Carrier.

Again, here is the link at YouTube. Enjoy!

Normalizing fascism

(Raw Story)

Here's a fascinating article in Raw Story:

How to report on a fascist?

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

The article begins by talking about how Benito Mussolini was a "darling" of the American press. Later, they called Adolph Hitler "the German Mussolini," which wasn't meant to be a negative term.

Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid ‘20’s to early ‘30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed the Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

Remind you of anyone?

21st Century America is not 1930's Germany. But if we won't learn from history, we won't learn. Did we fight the Nazis only to become them?

The most un-American thing a candidate has ever done

Keith Olbermann is a bit too mild-mannered for me - not enough passion in his commentary. :)

But when he's right, he's right.

Hillary Clinton's election requiring bloodshed?

This isn't just some random lunatic, this is the Republican governor of Kentucky, Matt Blevin. Yes, he's the current governor of the state, threatening America with terrorism if we elect Hillary Clinton as president.

"If Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it's possible that we'll be able to survive? Would we ever be able to recover, as a nation? And while there are people who've stood on this stage [at the so-called Values Voter Summit of the Family Research Council, where Donald Trump also spoke] and said we would not, I'd beg to differ. ... I do think it would be possible. But at what price?

"At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots."

So, in order to "recover as a nation" from a lost election, we need blood - the blood of "the tyrants" (which is clearly a call for assassinating Hillary Clinton, but is convenient for shooting policemen, government officials, or anyone else you find easier to target, don't you think?), but also the blood of whatever terrorists attempt to carry out that murder.

Have Republicans completely forgotten that this is a democracy, that we vote to settle our differences because bloody violence is the alternative to accepting majority vote? And have they somehow missed the fact that there's going to be another election four years from now - and then four years after that and four years after that (not to mention mid-term elections)?

Of course, remember how Barack Obama was never going to allow another election? Yeah, hysterics is nothing new in the GOP.

One of the strengths of America is that losing an election doesn't mean losing your life. If you lose one election, you just work harder to win the next one. You don't start killing people. You don't even start killing people whom you think are "tyrants." (And note that we have laws which even the President of the United States must obey.)

Matt Blevin is ISIS. Oh, he's probably not going to start killing people himself. I'm sure he's too much of a coward for that. But he has no problem encouraging other people to engage in terrorism. (The leaders of ISIS don't blow themselves up in suicide attacks. They use dumb people for that.)

Indeed, when some of their least stable supporters decide to start killing people (and why wait until after the election?), Matt Blevin - like every other Republican leader - will wash his hands of it. You know that. I know that. Matt Blevin knows that. Oh, he didn't mean like... blood blood, right?

This speech is incredible, isn't it? But not unbelievable, not these days. The Republican Party has gone completely off the rails. Still, I never expected a current Republican governor to so blatantly incite violence like this. Is there no limit to how low the Republican Party can go?

We had a Civil War once, which killed more American soldiers than World Wars I and II combined (620,000 to 750,000 dead, with countless more maimed). Who knows how many civilians died? That Civil War took place because slave-owning Southerners would not accept the results of a presidential election. Does Blevin really want us to go down that road again?

Or does he just want right-wing Christians to engage in ISIS-style terrorism as a more-or-less permanent part of American life, just random killings by disgruntled Republicans?

___
PS. Here's more about Blevin's speech from Right-Wing Watch, a project of the People for the American Way (an organization I highly recommend).

And FYI, here's the complete text of Thomas Jefferson's letter (written in France in 1987, before we even had a U.S. Constitution) about watering the 'tree of liberty' with blood. (Right-wing loons are very fond of a single sentence there. Note that Jefferson is talking about Shays' Rebellion, and given the current hysterics of the right-wing in America, I find it interesting that he also says, "The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.")

The dark history behind Donald Trump's nativist speech

Here's an experiment: Take Donald Trump's speech and everywhere he says "illegal immigrant," replace that with "Jew." How does it sound to you then?

It's the same thing, after all. Jews do commit crimes, sometimes - just like every other group of people. If he wanted, Trump could pick out and highlight horrific crimes from any group, including native-born white men like himself.

What Trump is saying is basically the same thing the Nazis said about the Jews in the 1930s. It's the same thing American bigots said about my Irish ancestors in the 1800's, not to mention about the Chinese, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans and, yes, the Jews. It's the same thing lynch mobs said about black people in the South.

As usual, Rachel Maddow does a great job here. We Americans are notoriously ignorant of history. In fact, all the right-wing cares about history is how they can distort it. But World War II wasn't that long ago, was it? Yes, it's history, but relatively recent history.

This isn't the first time we've seen such bigotry. We are a nation of immigrants, full of people who hate immigrants. Hell, Donald Trump's mother was an immigrant. It's almost funny.

Republican leaders brought Donald Trump on themselves with their notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists. For decades, they've been using bigotry for political advantage. And this has brought slime crawling out from under various dark, smelly rocks.

But I never thought I'd see one of our two main political parties nominate that slime as our next President of the United States.

When was Jesus born?

Merry Christmas, everyone.

America and Islam

(Nick Anderson)

Even if Americans don't give a crap about freedom of religion or the Statue of Liberty, perhaps they should remember their history classes:

In the final years of the 18th century and throughout the first two decades of the 19th century, the United States was drawn into multiple, semi-undeclared military conflicts with these Barbary Pirates. The first such Barbary War was conducted by the Jefferson administration against Karamanli’s Tripoli between 1801 and 1805, supported by congressional acts that stopped short of declaring war but authorized activities such as seizing ships and supplies. The Second Barbary War (1815) was fought by the Madison administration (with more overt congressional sanction) a decade later against Algiers, which had sided with England during the recently concluded War of 1812 and was continuing to harass American shipping.

The specific causes and histories of each Barbary War, and of the conflicts that led up to and followed them, were various and complex. Yet from the earliest such conflicts the U.S. government had made one thing very explicit and clear: the battles were not in any way between religions or civilizations. In 1796, the Washington administration sent his old Army colleague David Humphreys and other ambassadors to North Africa to negotiate a treaty with the Barbary States; the resulting document came to be known as the Treaty of Tripoli, and was sent to the Senate by new President John Adams and unanimously ratified in the summer of 1797.

That treaty opened with a clear statement of the goal, “a firm and perpetual Peace and friendship” between the nations. And in Article 11, it addressed directly the issue of religion:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Those interruptions, when they arose a few years later, had no more to do with religion or a clash of civilizations than did these late 18th century issues.

The evolving U.S. relationship with the Barbary States didn’t just affect our foreign policy. During the Revolution, the North African nation of Morocco was the first in the world to recognize the new United States (in 1777); the two nations would subsequently sign a Treaty of Friendship in 1786, with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson signing for the United States. Thanks to this enduring relationship, when a number of Moroccan Muslims—“Moors,” as they were known in the language of era—sought to flee the rising power and brutality of the Barbary States, they chose America as their destination. Many of these refugees settled in Charleston, South Carolina, helping comprise the state’s burgeoning Moorish community that would become the subject of one of South Carolina’s first post-Constitution laws, the Moors Sundry Act of 1790.

There are no easy answers to the international issues and conflicts facing the United States and our allies in 2015, nor simple solutions for the communities of refugees fleeing those conflicts. Yet as our histories illustrate, any answers that include either a “war with Islam” or a refusal to accept such refugees in the United States will represent a significant and troubling break from some of our foundational moments and ideals.

Incidentally, can you imagine getting any bill through Congress today acknowledging that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion"? And that was ratified unanimously.

(David Horsey)

Ben Carson was right

OK, I poked fun at Ben Carson yesterday, and certainly liberals are having a lot of fun with his pyramids-were-grain-silos idea (here, here, and here, for example).

But this guy points out that Carson might actually be right, in a way:

Remember when Cain was peddling the 9/9/9 tax plan that turned out to come from Sim City?

Well Carson's statement about the pyramids being used to store grain is actually true in Civilization II where building the Pyramids wonder gives you a granary in every city.

Obviously, Ben Carson was just talking about my all-time favorite computer game, Civilization II. Hey, maybe he's not so crazy after all, huh?

Of course, do we really want a president who confuses a computer game with reality? How about one who confuses fantasy with reality?

The GOP frontrunner's theory that archaeologists are wrong and that the Egyptian pyramids were really built by the biblical figure Joseph to store grain wasn't created in a vacuum. In the fringier corners of the Internet, variations of the pyramids-as-grain-storage argument has spawned entire blogs and a 30-minute documentary.

Carson -- who is continuing to defend beliefs that were surfaced this week in video of a 1998 commencement address by the acclaimed neurosurgeon -- joins the ranks of pyramids truthers who believe that, warned by God of an oncoming famine, Joseph built grain storage units that exist today in the form of the ancient pyramids. ...

According to [Richard] Flower, the theory gained traction in Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, written in the 6th century, where the bishop wrote about a “city in which Joseph built granaries from squared stones and rubble with marvellous workmanship."

“He made them larger at the base and very much smaller at the top so that wheat could be thrown in there through a tiny hole. These granaries are still visible even today,” Gregory wrote at the time,...

Clearly, this is why Ben Carson is leading in the polls. While the rest of the Republican Party wants to return us to the 12th Century, Carson wants to return to the 6th Century. Now that's conservative!

Also batshit crazy, of course. But that seems to be an advantage in today's GOP.

Ben Carson has the answers

(image via Democratic Underground)

From TPM:

GOP frontrunner Ben Carson, in a 1998 commencement address, floated his own personal theory that the pyramids in Egypt were built by Joseph -- the biblical patriarch known for his coat of many colors -- to store grain, Buzzfeed reported.

In the speech -- given at Andrews University, a school with ties to Carson's Seventh-day Adventist faith -- the neurosurgeon shot down claim that aliens had built the pyramids. But he also disagreed with the archaeological consensus that the pyramids were constructed as tombs for the pharaohs.

“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain,” Carson said. “Now all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain.”

In the video surfaced by Buzzfeed Wednesday, Carson goes on to lay out his argument that the pyramids were constructed for grain storage.

“And when you look at the way that the pyramids are made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, they’d have to be that way for various reasons," Carson said. "And various of scientists have said, ‘well, you know there were alien beings that came down and they have special knowledge and that’s how-’ you know, it doesn’t require an alien being when God is with you.”

This guy is running for President of the United States. Maybe he's an alien himself? After all, how can he be a brain surgeon when he's clearly too dumb to pour water out of a boot?

"Various of scientists" have said that aliens built the pyramids? Really? How crazy do you have to be before you're disqualified from running the most powerful nation on Earth?

Seriously, the problem here isn't intelligence, I suspect. The problem is that Ben Carson is entirely faith-based. Therefore, he just believes whatever the hell he wants to believe. Reality doesn't enter into his thinking at all.

This is today's Republican Party. Do you think it's coincidence that complete lunatics like Donald Trump and Ben Carson are leading in the GOP polls? Not at all. This is the Republican Party, today.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower must be rolling in their graves.

___
Edit: Also from TPM, Josh Marshall wonders if Carson's whole campaign is just a direct-mail scam:

If you remember the plot of Mel Brooks' classic movie, The Producers, the idea was that the scammers set out to produce the worst possible play imaginable to be certain it would close after one night. Yet, they made it so bad it broke through the membrane of awful into the sublime. And they were screwed. Which brings us to the Ben Carson campaign. There is a lot of evidence, coming from a variety of angles, that Carson for President is actually a direct mail scam. Or at least that it started that way. ...

Hucksters and cheats can be found everywhere. But particularly on the right there is a significant layer of people in the business of fleecing outraged and/or low-information conservatives of their money. Some of it you see with those advertisements for buying gold on Fox News. Another is supplements! Supplements, supplements, supplements - a topic we'll get back to, given Carson's controversial relationship with supplement maker Mannatech. But the big thing on the right are various fundraising groups that exist largely to fundraise. So for instance, you'll have Americans Against RINOs which sends out a ton of direct mail, raises lots of money from conservatives who've just had it up to here with RINOs like Boehner and McCain and McConnell selling the country out to Obama. But instead of that money going to fight the RINOs, most of the money goes back into raising more money.

So where's the money going? Well, the direct mail business is very lucrative. And usually you'll find that Americans Against RINOs has a tight relationship with AAR Direct Mail Inc which is making a pretty penny servicing Americans Against RINOs. You get the idea. Obviously there are crooked charities that run this way. But it's a prevalent model on the right.

And Ben Carson's campaign look a bit similar. Ed Kilgore looked at some of the details here. David Graham has more here at The Altantic. ...

There are other versions of this story. Like why is Mike Huckabee running for President? Because he thinks he's going to be president? Or because of the next Fox News gig or to draw a check or just to keep the name out there for the next promotion deal for Golds R' Us or your home bunker and survival kit? There was some hint of this with the Gingrich campaign in 2012 before he improbably took off for his run as the anti-Romney.

In any case, as I said, whatever role Carson did or didn't have with Mannatech, that's a bit of a tell for me since, as I said, 'supplements' are an endemic part of the wingnut fleecing industry.

Mystery Faith

Interesting stuff, isn't it? I'd always just assumed there was a historical Jesus, but the more I hear of these arguments, the more I have to wonder.

Of course, it doesn't matter much to me. One human being, more or less, wouldn't be too remarkable, one way or the other. Certainly, there's no reason to believe the magic stuff, either way.

Incidentally, Richard Carrier mentioned his examples of evil done by the god of the Old Testament. If you're interested, here's the link.

Frankly, as bad as that is, it's not everything. If anything, it minimizes the evil (nothing, for example, about burning priest's daughters alive for having sex outside of marriage). I do not see how anyone can read the Old Testament and remain convinced of a loving god.

It's the slavery, stupid!

I'm old enough that this wasn't even in doubt when I went to school. No, I didn't experience the Civil War firsthand - I'm not quite that old - but I went to school before the right-wing really got busy rewriting history.

Of course, that was in Nebraska. Maybe the South had it's own version of history even then, I don't know. But I've been shocked to find that a majority of Americans today don't know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War - as proclaimed by the Confederate states, themselves.

It wasn't any of these bullshit claims about "states' rights," and certainly not about "small government." It was about slavery. Period.

Slavery isn't accepted these days, so right-wingers are trying to rewrite history, that's all. But what's shocking is how successful they've been. Apparently, young people are the least likely to understand the central role of slavery in the rebellion. And that's an embarrassment to our whole country.

The Tulsa race riot

Incredible, isn't it? And no, I didn't learn about this in history class. How about you?

TPM has more about these incidents here:

In November 1898, white supremacist forces in Wilmington, North Carolina planned and executed the only coup d’etat in American history, overthrowing the city’s democratically elected Fusion Party officials and installing their own officials in their stead. Over the subsequent days, in a similarly and concurrently orchestrated series of events, rampaging mobs, featuring both white Wilmingtonians and members of militias from around the state, attacked and brutalized the city’s African American community, murdering many residents, forcing most of the others to abandon their homes and community, and burning much of it to the ground.

Members of that African American community tried to tell the rest of the nation what was happening, as exemplified by an anonymous woman who wrote a desperate plea to President McKinley requesting federal protection (her letter went unanswered). But it was instead the white supremacists whose version of the story became the nationally accepted one, a process that began immediately and culminated a few weeks later when Alfred Waddell, a former Confederate officer and one of the supremacist leaders, wrote “The Story of the Wilmington, N.C., Race Riots” for the popular publication Collier’s. Waddell’s story, accompanied by H. Ditzler’s cover illustration of marauding armed African Americans, led to the designation of the coup and massacre as a “race riot,” a description that has continued to this day.

The decades after Wilmington saw many more such massacres: Atlanta in 1906, Springfield (Illinois) in 1908, East St. Louis (also Illinois) in 1917, Chicago in 1919, Tulsa in 1921, and Detroit in 1943, among others. While there were certainly unique details in each case, the fundamental story remained the same: rampaging white mobs destroying business and homes and brutalizing citizens of the cities’ African American communities. In Tulsa, as in Wilmington, the mob mounted a machine gun on a vehicle and rolled it through the streets, firing at will. And in each case, in both the contemporary national media coverage and the subsequent historical accounts of the massacres, they were consistently (if not indeed solely) described as “race riots.”

I never heard a word about any of that when I went to school. Indeed, when it came to the Civil War, the Confederacy was romanticized.

They say the victors write the history books. Going by that, who really won the Civil War?

Sioux City, IA, packing plant explosion, 1949

(Sioux City Journal)

On December 14, 1949, the Swift & Company packing plant in Sioux City, Iowa, exploded, killing 21 people and injuring more than 90, many of them seriously. It was a natural gas leak, apparently, though no one ever determined why.

My mother worked in the office there. She'd just returned from her honeymoon and gone back to work two days previously.

I know I'm a little late for an anniversary retrospective, but I was just talking to her about it. Her cousin had told her she'd been mentioned in their small hometown newspaper - which surprised her, since she'd left town 72 years before. Yup, it was their retrospective. 65 years previously, Mom had been listed as seriously injured in the explosion.

I've known about this for years, though she didn't talk about it much. (I think I found some old newspaper clippings, one time.) Until today, I hadn't even realized it happened in 1949, less than three weeks after my parents married. They'd taken a honeymoon to the Grand Canyon (and Bryce Canyon, which especially impressed them). Mom returned to work on Monday, and on Wednesday, the office blew up.

(Sioux City Journal)

Mom was struck by flying glass and was cut from head to toe. She tells me that one of the women she worked with turned to her afterwards and started screaming uncontrollably, over and over again, since Mom was such a bloody mess. Luckily, all of the glass missed her eyes, though just barely.

One thing she used to say to us kids - and she repeated today - is that you never know how people will behave in an emergency until it happens. Of course, they were all in shock, but some people completely fell apart. Some, though injured themselves, immediately began to help others. One man just walked back and forth, praying continuously. Others tried to stem the blood loss and carried her outside.

She knew many of those killed or crippled by the explosion, and she knew she'd been very lucky, herself. My dad was out of town, driving a truck for a grocery wholesaler. Someone got in contact with him and told him to get back to Sioux City fast, because his wife might not survive long. As I say, they'd only returned from their honeymoon a few days previously.

At the hospital, they painstakingly picked glass out of her skin. Shaved bald, she must have been quite a sight. She says she was dizzy for a long time afterwards. But she recovered completely, unlike some of her co-workers.

(Sioux City History)

Here's an excerpt from a city history:

The blast blew out parts of the west wall of the building and shattered all the windows. Floors and walls collapsed. The account in the Sioux City Journal declared, "Heavy steel doors and equipment throughout the structure were blown about like matchwood." The blast left a nightmare of twisted steel and tangled debris. Twenty-one people died and more than 90 people were injured. ...

The six-story building housed the main offices of Swift and Company along with other operations. Offices in the building received the full force of the blast. The room from which meat shipments were made was on the first floor. The third, fourth and fifth floors housed the sausage plant and smoke house. Offices, including those of the superintendent, were demolished. Hardest hit was the main floor and basement. The floor over the basement collapsed. Slaughtering houses located in the north end of the plant were not damaged as much.

Witnesses said that employees in the main office ran from the building with their clothes in tatters. Many of them were bleeding from wounds. Others suffered from ammonia burns. ...

The Fire Department was first to arrive. Fortunately, there was little fire, and fireman quickly joined the volunteers in the search for survivors. Nearly all of the available firemen and policemen were called to the scene. All ambulances were called to duty, but there were not enough of them. Many of the injured were brought to hospitals in private vehicles. Governor Beardsley authorized the mobilization of the National Guard to help in the disaster. The Salvation Army and the Red Cross set up canteen stations to serve coffee and sandwiches to the victims and rescuers.

Ammonia and gas fumes spread through the area, creating fear of another explosion. The police used loudspeakers to warn rescuers and bystanders not to smoke. Some rescuers wore gas masks to prevent being overcome by the fumes. Swift and Company mechanics attacked the wreckage with hacksaws in the effort to clear the way for rescuers. They were afraid that the use of torches could spark another blast. Automobile wreckers and a huge airplane wrecker from the Air National Guard were brought in to help clear the heavy steel girders.

Say what you will about Sioux City, IA - and growing up across the river from the city, I was never a fan - Sioux City tends to perform well in emergencies. Remember the crash of the United Airlines flight 232? Sioux City was rightly praised for its response to that, too.

(Sioux City Journal)

The company, the packing plant, and my mom all survived the explosion. Swift & Company was bought out by a Brazilian corporation, JBS S.A., in 2007. The building was finally torn down in 2010. Mom is still going strong. :)

Fighting Islamaphobia in the 1780s

I thought this was interesting:

By the time of the American Revolution, a sizeable Moroccan Muslim community—known as “Moors” in the language of the era—had developed in and around Charleston, South Carolina. Some of the community’s members were likely former slaves, but many others had chosen to immigrate from Morocco, with which the U.S. had a so-called “Treaty of Friendship.” Morocco, indeed, was the first African nation to recognize the new United States during the Revolution. Worried about being denied rights due to South Carolina’s system of slavery, a group of Muslim Americans petitioned the state’s courts requesting that they be recognized as white. A tribunal of judges led by prominent South Carolinian Charles Pinckney agreed with their petition, and the state legislature passed the Moors Sundry Act (1790), designating this Moroccan Muslim American community white for purposes of the law.

That law was as complicated as race in American history has always been. It allowed members of this community to be counted more fully for state population and federal representation purposes. It also gave these Muslim Americans the opportunity to vote, to serve on juries and to gain and enjoy the benefits of citizenship, even as Black Americans were largely denied those same rights.

The Revolutionary history gets broader and deeper still. The only passage in the body of the Constitution as drafted in 1787 that references religion at all is the paragraph in Article VI that makes clear that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office.” This profoundly progressive phrase, written in an era when every other constitutional government around the world featured an official state religion, was drafted by none other than Charles Pinckney.

After the Constitution was drafted, Pinckney was tasked with taking it before the South Carolina legislature for that state’s ratification debate. During the debate, he was asked by one of the legislators about that exact Article VI paragraph, and more exactly about whether it would mean that “a Muslim could run for office in these United States?” Pinckney’s answer? “Yes, it does, and I hope to live to see it happen.” His words are inspiring, and a challenge to those who say they believe in inclusion today. How many white, Christian elected officials today would say “I hope to see more Muslim Americans in elected office” the way Charles Pinckney did?

Frankly, I wonder if they could even pass that law in South Carolina today. And, of course, it's depressing how important it was to be considered officially "white" in the South back then.

But that's our history, and it shouldn't be forgotten - neither the good nor the bad.

David Christian: The history of the world in 18 minutes

Actually, this is more like the history of our universe in 18 minutes. Fascinating, isn't it?

David Christian is the creator of the "Big History" project, currently being adapted for use in American high schools. (My thanks to Jim Harris for the link.)

I haven't watched the Big History videos - just not enough time for everything - but this video is thought-provoking, isn't it? With a vast universe and an inconceivable length of time, rare events can happen. To us, they might seem magical, but that's because our own experience is very limited in time and space.

If an omniscient, omnipotent god created everything, that amount of time and space would be completely unnecessary (not to mention that, if a universe requires a creator, so does the creator - but that's a different issue).

All of life on Earth is equivalent to the scum on one grain of sand in the largest desert you can imagine. That desert wasn't created for the microbes living in the scum. That would be ridiculous. Those microbes might think so, if they could think at all, but there's no way in hell that would be "intelligent design."

No, the vast size of the universe - in both space and time - explains how exceedingly rare events can happen naturally - occasionally, somewhere. That length of time and that amount of space is hard for human beings to grasp, since it's so outside the reality of our ordinary lives. But it's still true.

When primitive human beings were imagining explanations for the questions they had about the universe, this wasn't the explanation they came up with. No, that has taken science. Sadly, plenty of people still prefer the myths they were taught from infancy.

The history of poop

OK, my title might not be entirely accurate, but it's a fascinating video, isn't it?

Happy Thanksgiving

(via Pharyngula)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

In many ways, Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday. (Shopping is even a part of it these days, as Christmas sales have already started.)

Even in grade school, the myths of Thanksgiving - much more than the history of it - get pounded into everyone. (Part of that is because there's no separation of church and state issues when it comes to this holiday.)

But I was an adult before I heard this, and I can't tell you how profoundly I was affected by it:

From 1616 to 1619, a series of virgin-soil epidemics spread by European trading vessels ravaged the New England seaboard, wiping out up to 95 percent of the Algonkian-speaking native population from Maine to Narragansett Bay. The coast was a vast killing zone of abandoned agricultural fields and decimated villages littered with piles of bones and skulls. This is what the Pilgrims encountered when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Not a pristine wilderness, but the devastated ruins of a once-thriving culture, a haunting boneyard which English libertine Thomas Morton later described as a “newfound Golgotha.”

My ancestors were among those Europeans who settled in what is now Massachusetts and Connecticut in the early 1600s. In school, I'd always heard that they'd found what they considered to be nearly-empty wilderness, but the implication was always that the natives had a hunting and gathering lifestyle which necessitated a very low population level (in other words, that Europeans simply misunderstood when they thought the land empty).

In fact, the native tribes had already been devastated - nearly wiped out - by European diseases before most of them had ever even seen a European. The land was empty - relatively speaking - because so many of the previous inhabitants had already died in horrendous epidemics.

No one is to blame for that. The Europeans had no more idea of what caused disease than the Native Americans did. There is plenty of blame which can be assigned to other historical events, but not to this. It was a tragedy, made even worse because the natives - at the end of a long line of immigration, themselves - were less diverse genetically than other populations of human beings.

Eventually, they would have recovered from that, and from subsequent epidemics, too. But 'empty' land is a powerful attraction to... well, human beings in general. And the surviving tribes weren't given the time they needed.

As that column continues:

The collision of worldviews [*] is almost impossible to imagine. On the one hand, a European society full of religious fervor and colonizing energy; on the other, a native society shattered and reeling from the greatest catastrophe it had ever known. The Puritans were forever examining their own spiritual state. Having come to America with the goal of separating themselves from polluted forms of worship, a great deal of their energy was focused on battling demons, both within themselves and at large in the world. Puritan clerics confused the Indian deity Kiehtan with God, and they conflated Hobbamock, a fearsome nocturnal spirit associated with Indian shamans, or powwows, with Satan. Because of this special connection many Puritans believed that the powwows, and by extension all the New England Indians, were bound by a covenant with the devil. Indians thus became symbolic adversaries, their very existence a threat to the Englishmen’s prized religious identities.

Meanwhile, the Great Migration of the 1630s was bringing in thousands of new colonists, many of them younger siblings shut out of an inheritance back in England, who were hungry for the opportunity to become property owners in their own right. There was a great need for more land. And so, tragically – and not for the last time in American history – self-interest, fear, and deep-seated ideology coincided. Indian-hating became the fashion. Religious piety provided a motive for armed violence.

In May of 1637, colonists from Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay, with a group of their Indian allies, set fire to a fortified Pequot stronghold on the Mystic River. An estimated 700 Pequots perished, mostly women and children, and the few survivors were shipped to Bermuda and sold into slavery. On the heels of the virgin-soil epidemics that had decimated the native population, the ghastly specter of genocide had reached the shores of America. In 1675, bloody King Phillip’s War put the finishing touches on what was more or less the total extermination of the eastern woodland Indians.

"Self-interest, fear, and deep-seated ideology." Yup. It's always easy to believe what you want to believe. And we see how well fear works to cause disaster, even today.

I don't dwell on the past. We can't change the past, and it's important to look forward. Of course, I'm a white descendent of those first 'illegal immigrants,' so that's easy for me to say, isn't it? But look at Islamic countries which are still bitter about the Crusades, for chrissake, blaming their lack of progress since then on everyone else but themselves. Dwelling on the past does no one any good.

Nevertheless, we certainly shouldn't forget the past, and we shouldn't disguise reality with happy myths - even on Thanksgiving. We can't be blamed for our ancestors, and our ancestors can't be blamed for those disease epidemics. But there is plenty they can and should be blamed for, and we European-Americans have benefited from some truly horrific acts (including slavery, of course).

We are not to blame for those acts, but we still benefit from them, even today. Even if your ancestors didn't arrive in this land until centuries later, you still benefit from them. I'm not a Christian. I don't believe we inherit the sins of our forefathers. But we do have obligations. It's just that those obligations are to everyone, and that we need to focus on the path ahead, not back.

Use the lessons of the past to avoid making similar mistakes now and in the future. Recognize the horrors which self-interest, fear, and deep-seated ideology can cause. Determine to do right to everyone going forward (recognizing that mistakes will still be made, since we're never going to be perfect).

Above all, we need to reject the approach of right-wing apologists like David Barton and the Texas State Board of Education to just rewrite history so that it agrees with what you want to believe, rather than accepting reality.

However, in America, Thanksgiving is more about myths than about history. And we Americans are very resistant to giving up our myths.


*PS. Given the situation, I don't see how that "collision of worldviews" would ever have turned out well. That's not to excuse anything, but just to recognize that people are people. Self-interest, fear, and deep-seated ideology are powerful motivators. We struggle with them even today.

But that's not to say that a collision of worldviews will always end badly, certainly not. Back then, the native tribes had been - and continued to be - decimated by disease epidemics. That left them too weak to offer much resistance. Plus, we do learn. We aren't the same people as our ancestors. None of us are.

Today's right-wing fanatics look at history - their distorted view of history, at least - and proclaim that Hispanic immigration is going to end with all white Americans - and all black Americans, too, apparently - ethnically cleansed (among other hysterically crazy claims). Yeah, talk about self-interest, fear, and deep-seated ideology, huh?

But how crazy is that? Historically, America has not just survived, but prospered, from wave after wave of immigration. All of our ancestors were immigrants (even the Native Americans, I'd argue). We became Americans. That's one of the great things America has shown the world.

It hasn't always been easy. There were riots in some American cities when my Irish ancestors started arriving here in large numbers. Now, their descendents protest against other immigrants. (It's the American way, huh? LOL)

The fact is, a collision of worldviews is a good thing, if violence isn't involved. We benefit from competing ideas. Of course, new ideas bring change, and conservatives in general fear change. But that's what brings progress. Stagnation is never good.