What’s going on here…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

100 and counting*
Ford wins ninth term as Williamstown mayor
Jaclyn Harris and Stephen Hussey
Lights out for Pike Street, beyond
3 members of same family arrested

Top Headlines Poll: Do you think there is a lot of discrimination against those with mental illness?

This is the third day for the same poll question. Has this ever happened before? Has the Marietta Times given up on the polls?

(For comparison’s sake, I’ve added a link to the The Anchor News to these posts.)

*The picture accompanying this story is of my friend Bill Stacy. Bill and I knew each other as members of the First Congregationalist Church on Front Street (where my family were members for several generations) and we were somewhat infamous there for hi-jacking acolyte duties from other young members who were happy to get out of the job. I was sometimes mistaken as Bill’s brother because I often sat in the front, right pew with his family and since both Bill’s mother and I both had red hair, people who didn’t know me made a connection.

Previously…

From Honor Thy Father…

Ann Gibbs: You know what your grandpa used to say? Water never forgets; anyone with a boat named after them, will live forever.

Jackson Gibbs: Don’t let go of it now, son. Don’t let go.

From Chronicle

And there is a rending of entrails, of viscera, over the whole lighted space of the Century: linens laved in primaeval waters and the finger of man probing, in the sky’s deepest violet and green, those bleeding raptures of dream–live wounds!

What, if any, thoughts does this pensée raise in your mind?

Found in my Electronic Chapbook…

Previously…

Only two movies have scared the holy shit out of me and given me nightmares: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Ridley Scott’s Alien. Giger created the most horrible monster that anyone has ever imagined.

When I get home I’ll put on some Brain Salad Surgery…

What’s going on here…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

One hospitalized after car hits semi
Protect the Past: Historic Cabin
Shared duties for athletic directors
Reno man enters race
Belpre needs 10th patrolman

Top Headlines Poll: Do you think there is a lot of discrimination against those with mental illness?

(For comparison’s sake, I’ve added a link to the The Anchor News to these posts.)

Previously…

I expect to sit down to read Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State this weekend, but for now, here’s a few snippets from today’s Guardian:

A prime justification for surveillance – that it’s for the benefit of the population – relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are “doing something wrong”, and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy. This is an old tactic. In a 1969 Time magazine article about Americans’ growing concerns over the US government’s surveillance powers, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, assured readers that “any citizen of the United States who is not involved in some illegal activity has nothing to fear whatsoever”.

The point was made again by a White House spokesman, responding to the 2005 controversy over Bush’s illegal eavesdropping programme: “This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people.” And when Barack Obama appeared on The Tonight Show in August 2013 and was asked by Jay Leno about NSA revelations, he said: “We don’t have a domestic spying programme. What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack.”

For many, the argument works. The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat. [Emphasis mine, JH]

This sentence will ring true for anyone living in, or around, Cleveland, Ohio:

The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.

Greenwald nails the real message of the Bush-Obama Security Scheme:

All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing.

In other words, play nice like the nice little drone we taught you to be and you won’t get hurt.

As Mano Singham noted last week, we don’t want to get hurt.

Rachel Carson wrote:

But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly—for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.

For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end.

That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it—so I hope, may you. Thank you for this morning.

Reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was an important moment in my young life. Like many, her book was what made me an environmentalist and I count it among the books that have shaped my world.

How about from an Old-School Pontiff:

Last year, for instance, Francis laid hands on a man in a wheelchair who claimed to be possessed by demons, in what many saw as an impromptu act of cleansing. A few months later, he praised a group long viewed by some as the crazy uncles of the Roman Catholic Church — the International Association of Exorcists — for “helping people who suffer and are in need of liberation.”

Do you suppose that Bobby and Tommy were rejected by the IAE?

My Google Alerts are still silent on the Trezza story.

There, that–along with the helio-centric solar system, the spherical Earth, evolution, gawd, &c.–is settled.

Move along, we have more important debates to engage in.

Hat tip to PZ Myers and Pharyngula…

Writing letters is an all-but lost art. I have a letter, an email actually, but written as a letter, that has been sitting in my draft file since Monday, 2 December. Imagine sitting on a letter for more than five months. Every passing day makes it harder to finish the letter. Hell, I could just write: Sorry, I’ll write more later today, but I wanted to get this out of my draft queue now, but I haven’t.

Letters are perhaps our greatest primary-source historical documents because they represent a conversation, an attempt to communicate ideas and emotions and realities. I think of the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, for instance, but I also think of the letters written home by soldiers in our Civil War.

Diaries are often cited as being more significant, but, for my money, the letter trumps the diary because the former is personal and written more spontaneous, more from the heart, than the later.

So, when I came across Shaun Usher’s Letters Of Note blog this weekend, via Brain Pickings, I was fascinated.

I’m a late-comer, the blog was launched on Wednesday, 9 September 2009 and the book, I ordered my copy yesterday, was first published last October in the United Kingdom and last week in the United States.

The first letter I read was the one from E.B. White to a Mr. Nadeau on the subject of losing faith in humanity, a good start.

What’s going on here…

Today’s headlines include:

Local News

MC Commencement
WSCC grads celebrate
Mother’s Day 5K race held
Animal baby shower
A Marietta YMCA swim coach

Top Headlines Poll: Do you think there is a lot of discrimination against those with mental illness?

(For comparison’s sake, I’ve added a link to the The Anchor News to these posts.)

Previously…

While I’ve been banned from commenting in my hometown newspaper for launching Not The Marietta Times as an answer to the paper’s non-response to my request for a price quote on an online subscription before I turned over my personal information for data mining, I can still read bits and pieces of it and this morning I came across this little tidbit of lunacy concerning a mother-load of voter fraud in North Carolina.

rocker: North Carolina is investigating hundreds of Voter Fraud Cases. State officials identified thousands of registered voters with the same personal information as voters who voted in other states in 2012. Looks like the demokrats have been at it again promoting voter fraud.

Kunectdots: OK! Let’s hear all the Libs here start protesting against voter IDs…again.

The problem is, of course, that once again the smoke and mirrors go away when you look behind the curtain.

Conservative supporters of voting restrictions think they’ve found the holy grail in North Carolina: A genuine case of massive voter fraud that can be used to justify efforts to make it harder to vote.

The reality, of course, is far less clear. Non-partisan election experts are already pouring cold water on the claims, noting that other recent allegations of major voting irregularities have fizzled upon closer scrutiny.

In a report released Wednesday, North Carolina’s elections board said it had found 35,570 people who voted in the state in 2012 and whose names and dates of birth match those of voters in other states. The board said it also found 765 North Carolinians who voted in 2012 and whose names, birthdates, and last four digits of their Social Security number match those of people in other states. The board said it’s looking into all these cases to determine whether people voted twice.

There’s a lot riding on what the board finds.

North Carolina Republicans last year passed a sweeping and restrictive voting law, which is currently being challenged by the U.S. Justice Department. The law’s voter ID provision would likely have done nothing to stop the double voting being alleged here, but solid evidence of illegal voting could still bolster the state’s case that the measure is justified. It could also make it easier for the state to remove from the rolls voters who are thought to be registered in two states—raising concerns that legitimate voters could wrongly be purged.

But Republicans and conservative media, predictably, aren’t waiting for the results of the probe. Instead, they’re already shouting voter fraud. “N.C. Board of Elections audit finds up to 35,750 instances of ‘double voting’ (voter fraud) in the 2012 election,” tweeted Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer Wednesday. A headline at National Review made the same claim. In a statement, state Sen. Thom Tillis, the frontrunner for the GOP Senate nomination, pointed to “alarming evidence of voter error [and] fraud.”

The notion that the board found over 35,000 cases of voter fraud—or even one case—is flatly false. With the investigation not yet even underway, the board, headed by Kim Strach, hasn’t come close to concluding that any specific case involved double voting.* And there are very good reasons why it’s held off.

First, it helps to understand statistics. The political scientist Michael McDonald and election law scholar Justin Levitt have shown in a detailed statistical study that the number of people who share a name and birthdate is much higher than it might at first appear. (Just for fun, take the RNC’s Spicer. Though his name is less common than many, online records show 20 different Sean Spicers who were born on September 23rd, his birthday.) That statistical reality, McDonald and Levitt conclude, has big implications for how to treat potential cases of illegal voting.

Ah, math. Year’s ago I attempted to demonstrate to a publisher (fancy word for successful salesperson in this case) that a favorable story from a major advertiser was pure bull shit and that we would look like fools if we published the piece without serious disclaimers. The publisher’s response to my statistical analysis of the data was: “Figures lie and liars figure.”

I left the company for a better job not long after that.

A great performance, but one that still pales in comparison to my all time winner…

Niall O’Dowd writes:

Journalist Ed Moloney has been busy convincing everyone he is the victim in the Boston College tapes fiasco. The reality is different.

Put frankly, if he hadn’t decided to make some money for himself from his book on the tapes, “Voices from the Grave,” none of the issues that have now arisen around the tapes would have happened. The tapes by now would have quietly become the preserve of academics and historians.

Moloney’s intent was clear from the beginning. He hired anti-Gerry Adams researcher and dissident spokesman Anthony McIntyre and only interviewed IRA figures who hated Adams for various reasons — hardly the mark of a dispassionate researcher/historian.

I have long maintained that Moloney was out to get Adams when he decided to do the tapes, and persuaded Boston College to underwrite the project and give it academic recognition – something the college now deeply regrets.

Moloney has denied all of this, but in a recent reply to a Unionist writer, Water Ellis, on his own blog site, he seems to admit it.

It is difficult to live in America and not have, at least, heard of a letter written by a little girl inquiring as to the reality of Santa Claus. Others have written letters asking more important questions and received thoughtful responses deserving, as the subtitle of Shaun Usher’s Letters Of Note tells us, of a wider audience.

In 1973, E.B. White wrote one such response to a Mr. Nadeau who felt he had lost his faith in humanity.

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E. B. White

I can not count the number of times my students lament that nothing they do will make a difference, that life just sucks, so why not play video games and wait for the zombie apocalypse. Still, 1973 was not 2014. I wonder what White would write today.

I confess that I was unaware of this particular controversy concerning a wrestling slogan used at Parkersburg South High School until I spied the Letter To The Editor in yesterday’s Marietta Times, but I applaud the parent, or possibly student, who contacted the Freedom From Religion Foundation and asked for assistance.

FRF’s charter states that:

The purposes of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc., as stated in its bylaws, are to promote the constitutional principle of separation of state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

I first became aware of the concept of Free Thinkers when I began to read the works of Kurt Vonnegut (I began with his science fiction and graduated to the good stuff in high school). As I grew older I learned that the individuals I admired the most were Free Thinkers. I’ve also learned that a few of the most intelligent people I knew, if their world view was influenced by what is commonly referred to as faith, were unreliable in other areas as well.

Those who, like commenter KDK in the discussion thread at WTAP, have invested a life in a fantasy and I get the whole cognitive dissonance issue. Letting go of a concept that you have invested years and years in, especially when you have defined much of who you are in that erroneous view, can be as difficult as quitting smoking or breaking a heroin addiction.

I feel confident that there are now a group of students at Parkersburg South breathing a little easier, perhaps feeling able to express their views without fear of intimidation.

Yes, those students who adhere to their religious beliefs are most likely feeling the opposite. What about their ability to express themselves openly? My long standing position regarding our First Amendment is that the solution to objectionable speech has never been censorship, but rather the free exercise of more speech.

During my own high school years, I knew members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at Warren High School. Some were good people. Some were just students going along to get along and some were flat out Neanderthal jerks, just like the rest of the student population.

If FCA members want to form a club and wear FCA t-shirts at school and at events, I’m fine with that. More power to them. I just as strongly support, encourage, actually, any students who go public with their feelings about FCA sloganeering and wear t-shirts in support of their position. I suspect, however, that if such activity becomes rampant, as I would hope it would do, the administration would make the wise decision to ban all such statements during school hours in the interest of focusing on what the school is supposed to be about: education.

Yesterday, in a reply to a comment to Ex Of Devola, I noted that rural America is different from Urban America because the relative sparsity of population allows for greater isolation from a diversity of thought and world views. I’m sure that FCA chapters exist in our cities (there is a Cleveland Chapter) but I also expect that membership is not as robust as it is outside of our beltways.

We are emotional creatures and our reason does not always triumph as much as we might like, but our founders, in their wisdom, planted the seeds to help us grow in that direction. As a nation, we’re only 237 years old, that’s less than a blink in human history. We probably have a much longer time to spend in this particular wilderness before we get to any place resembling a promised land, but I’ve learned that the journey is much more important than the destination.