Martin Luther King: the crux of the problem

"Privileged classes do not give up their privileges voluntarily." —Martin Luther King

Morgan Freeman on Race and Black History Month

if politicians cared what people want: marijuana and gay soldiers

New Poll: 52% Say Marijuana Should Be Legal, Taxed, Regulated - Democratic Underground

A new Zogby poll commissioned by the conservative-leaning O'Leary Report has found 52 percent voter support for treating marijuana as a legal, taxed, regulated substance.

Acceptance of Gay People in Military Grows Dramatically - washingtonpost.com

Seventy-five percent of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll said gay people who are open about their sexual orientation should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military, up from 62 percent in early 2001 and 44 percent in 1993.

Internet Anonymity links

Internet Anonymity: A Right of the Past? | North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology

A newly designed Internet Protocol, restricting communication source autonomy, is being quietly drafted with detailed technical standards that “define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous” by a United Nations agency. The “IP Traceback” drafting group, which has declined to release key documents or allow their meetings to be open to the public, includes, among others, the United States National Security Agency.

Bloggasm » The ACLU defends anonymous newspaper commenters

Maggie McLetchie, a lawyer for the ACLU in Nevada, is defending four people whose names she does not know. ...four people who left anonymous comments on a story about a tax evasion trial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. A subpoena has been issued demanding the IP addresses, email addresses and any other information about them in an attempt to identify who they are. Prosecutors claim that these commenters were leaving threats against the jury and the prosecutor in the case.

Nightjack case kills the right of anonymity | Media | guardian.co.uk

It is just two months since Nightjack, the anonymous blog written by a police detective, was singled out for an Orwell prize. ...Today, Nightjack is silent and the blog, in its entirety, deleted after Mr Justice Eady ruled that bloggers have no right to privacy in what is essentially the public act of publishing.

today's heroes: the Katib family

The Heart of Jenin: ‘Do you think the Israelis liked what I did? Some would have preferred it if I’d blown myself up’ « P U L S E

After his son Ahmed was shot by israeli soldiers in November 2005, the Khatib’s courageously donated their beloved 12 year-old’s organs to a number of recipients in israel, to both Arabs and Jews.

property with rights but no duties

A footnote from Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:

During a few days spent in Ireland, I realized afresh to what an extent the country people still live in the conceptions of the gentile period. The landed proprietor, whose tenant the peasant is, is still regarded by the latter as a kind of chief of the clan whose duty it is to manage the land in the interests of all, while the peasant pays tribute in the form of rent, but has a claim upon him for assistance in times of necessity. Similarly, everyone who is well-off is considered under an obligation to assist his poorer neighbours when they fall on hard times. Such help is not charity; it is what the poorer member of the clan is entitled to receive from the wealthier member or the chief. One can understand the complaints of the political economists and jurists about the impossibility of making the Irish peasant grasp the idea of modern bourgeois property; the Irishman simply cannot get it into his head that there can be property with rights but no duties."

Italics mine. That's capitalism: rights but no duties. That's the nightmare of US health care. That's why the cost of destroying the earth is ignored when companies plan their profit. That's the philosophy of every hurtful person: rights but no duties.

The theory of responsible wealth is very convincing. But the reality of poverty shows the theory is false.

my kind of inspiring science news

As a romantic, I've always despised evolutionary psychology. It feels too much like an atheist's form of original sin: we behave badly because bad behavior helped our ancestors survive. I understand why its adherents like it: it explains everything. People are consoled by belief systems that explain everything.

But I'm really glad human behavioral ecology is the next step in understanding what we are. A few excerpts from a fascinating article, Can We Blame Our Bad Behavior on Stone-Age Genes?

Hill had something almost as good as a time machine. He had the Ache, who live much as humans did 100,000 years ago. He and two colleagues therefore calculated how rape would affect the evolutionary prospects of a 25-year-old Ache. (They didn't observe any rapes, but did a what-if calculation based on measurements of, for instance, the odds that a woman is able to conceive on any given day.) The scientists were generous to the rape-as-adaptation claim, assuming that rapists target only women of reproductive age, for instance, even though in reality girls younger than 10 and women over 60 are often victims. Then they calculated rape's fitness costs and benefits. Rape costs a man fitness points if the victim's husband or other relatives kill him, for instance. He loses fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food. Rape increases a man's evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn't even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. "That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low," says Hill. "It just wouldn't have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it's preprogrammed into us doesn't hold up."

...If the environment, including the social environment, is instead dynamic rather than static—which all evidence suggests—then the only kind of mind that makes humans evolutionarily fit is one that is flexible and responsive, able to figure out a way to make trade-offs, survive, thrive and reproduce in whatever social and physical environment it finds itself in.

...Called behavioral ecology, it starts from the premise that social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people's fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors—and different human "natures." That's why men prefer Ms. 36-25-36 in some cultures (where women are, to exaggerate only a bit, decorative objects) but not others (where women bring home salaries or food they've gathered in the jungle).

The earth has no price.

Johann Hari: A fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

Army helicopters opened fire on the protesters with live ammunition and stun-grenades. More than a dozen were killed. But the indigenous peoples did not run away. Even though they were risking their lives, they stood their ground. One of their leaders, Davi Yanomami, said simply: "The earth has no price. It cannot be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth. If we don't fight together, what will our future be?"

And then something extraordinary happened. The indigenous peoples won.

via  A Tiny Revolution: Latin America, World's Moral Political Leader, which notes:

all over Latin America a quiet revolution has been taking place. In a few months, for example, Colombia will be the only country south of the border left with a US military presence.

reporting rape

Vagina Dentata: Men, no women, are responsible for rape

via Almost Diamonds: Today's Reading

inspiring women - in Gaza and Iraq

Three inspiring women, a movement sails forth again « P U L S E

In three days, the Free Gaza movement sails 240 miles from Cyprus to Gaza, its eighth mission to break Israel’s draconian siege on 1.5 million Palestinians there. In the holds of the FREE GAZA and the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY will be tons of cement, and suitcases full of toys, crayons and coloring books for the children, all items banned by Israel’s government.

Informed Comment: Guardianship Council Rules out Annulment of Election Results;
Reformists Planning Strikes, Mourning

Today in Haft-e Tir, there were so many members of basij that they outnumbered the demonstrators 3 or 4 to 1. They were less focused on women. This must be related to the murder of poor Neda. And this was also why whenever they got hold of a man, women would surround them and shout don't beat him, don't beat and they would turn and anxiously say we didn't beat him. It was astonishing. They explained; they talked.

...women are playing an amazing role in the streets; both in terms of numbers and effectiveness.

when I thought racists couldn't get any weirder

This post calls for a little background: When I research things, I look for other points of view. But sometimes those points of view are even more "other" than I realize. Paul Craig Roberts appears on many sites, and he's got good credentials by conservative standards, so I recently linked to a post of his on a site I didn't know, VDARE.

Hearing that VDARE was racist, I went to their Wikipedia page and saw they run columnists "from various ethnic backgrounds, including Filipina-American (Malkin), Cuban (George Borjas), one Native American (David A. Yeagley), Jewish/Asian-American (Marcus Epstein), and Japanese-American (Lance T. Izumi)."

That suggested they're conservative, but not racist. But I continued to hear that the site was racist, so I googled a bit more and found Half Sigma: Vdare is not helping to mainstream HBD. It was immediately clear that Half Sigma is as racist as they come. For example, he says:

School teachers are the only people who are able to first-hand experience the inability of the average black child to learn what the average white child is able to learn.

But his terminology baffled me. HBD? Fortunately, he answers that at HBD = human biodiversity:

Human biodiversity is a superset of race realism, which I defined in my blog post, an essay on race and intelligence.

He uses another term I hadn't encountered: NAM = non-Asian minority

NAM is an acronym for "non-Asian minority," and it's a significant distinction from just "minority" because Asians (including Indians) don't cause any social problems (except to make upper-middle-class white parents fret that their children's math classes are too hard because the Asian students are ruining the curve).

Then I understood VDARE. They're not white racists. They're White-Asian-Jewish racists. Here's what Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about them: Keeping America White.

Maybe I'll just link to socialists from now on.

ETA: Changed the order of races for the vdare folks, because being able to refer to WAJ Racists might be useful.

on Iran, this is the only thing I know

A velvet revolution in Iran? « Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Whatever Mousavi’s intentions, there is no question that the students in Tehran have their own agenda in this battle which is to extend democratic rights.

I will always be suspicious of the people who want to exploit the protesters. But the protesters themselves only have my awe, and my hope their struggle brings about a better world.

szechuan pierogies

Boil pierogies.

Fry pierogies with onions, garlic powder, and spicy black bean paste.

Nom, nom, nom!

Recommended side dish or base: lightly steamed broccoli.

Source Verification: Notes for Activists Using Photo and Video in Protests

Source Verification: Notes for Activists Using Photo and Video in Protests

Source verification of digital information has risen to prominence with the Iranian election protests that have been ongoing since Saturday, 13 June, 2009. This does not just apply to alleged information distributed through social media, of course, as it also applies to mainstream media who, like the BBC, have been found to use doctored photos of protests showing a massive rally for Mir Hosein Mousavi that was actually a rally in support of the winning candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In an attempt to convince rapid readers who do not make time to fact check, or cannot check facts, it has become a habit for some who use Twitter to precede their tweet with the word, “CONFIRMED,” without any indication of how the information was confirmed, when, and by whom. “Citizen journalism” and civil society politics are both going to get damaged unless we take away some lessons from this conflict.

The writer goes on to give advice every citizen journalist should know.

Mosuo: the Kingdom of Women

NO-FATHERS DAY: Remote Group Has No Dads, And Never Did

"They are a society that we know hasn't had marriage for a thousand years, and they've been able to raise kids successfully," said Stephanie Coontz, family studies professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

The Flash Girls and Cats Laughing at Kiqlo

I may've found the solution for selling Cats Laughing and Flash Girls albums to people who can't or don't want to buy from Amazon US. Kiqlo seems too good to be true: it's a site to sell files that doesn't cost the user a thing. But I've done a little research, and it seems legit, so I'm giving it a try. The page with music from Emma's bands is here.

Gogol Bordello - Think Locally, Fuck Globally

now, a word from our sponsor

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Age of Bronze

Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze is a comics masterpiece, a gorgeous visual telling of the story of Troy. I just read issues 27 and 28, and I had my usual reaction: If I could fund art, I would be funding this project.

Liberal Pilgrims by Dan Harper

I like Dan Harper's writing, so I know I'll like his book, which he's made available at cost for a bound book and free for a PDF. See Yet Another Unitarian Universalist » New book: Liberal Pilgrims

“Some stories have never been told in detail before. There’s the story of Reverend William Jackson, the first African-American minister to declare himself a Unitarian when he addressed a meeting of the American Unitarian Association in New Bedford. There are the stories of North Unitarian Church, a church of immigrants, and Centre Church, which changed its affiliation from the Christian Connection to Unitarianism. Other stories include the story of Reverend John Murray Spear, Universalist and abolitionist, minister of an interracial church in the 1830s, who was driven out of New Bedford when he helped free a slave. There’s the story of Mary Rotch, perhaps the most original Unitarian theologian to come out of New Bedford, and a confidante of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.

“Each of the 19 chapters tells about a different liberal religious person, community, or art work. By examining how these people and religious communities of the past lived out their religious ideals in their times, we learn more about our own liberal religion in the present day and its potential for the future.”

Why some people see "other": the Other-Race Effect

Several studies have been done to see whether babies have a preference for faces from their own racial group, and to learn why many people are better at recognizing faces from their own racial group. The following results are from

• Cross-Race Preferences for Same-Race Faces Extend Beyond the African Versus Caucasian Contrast in 3-Month-Old Infants,
• ScienceDirect - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology : Development of the other-race effect during infancy: Evidence toward universality?,
• Race matters to 3-month-olds, study finds,
• Cross-race effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Note: I've made tiny changes, mostly in punctuation, to make the following more readable, but what follows is my edit, not my prose. Click the asterisk by each point for the original wording and context.

* Adults typically find it easier to recognize faces from their own racial group, as opposed to faces from other racial groups. This is commonly known as the other-race effect.

* The preference for own-race faces doesn’t exist at one month of age.

* The own-race face preference develops by 3 months of age.

* Babies raised with frequent exposure to people of other races don’t develop this early bias.

* One study investigated 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Chinese infants’ ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group and within two other racial groups (African and Caucasian). The 3-month-olds demonstrated recognition in all conditions, whereas the 6-month-olds recognized Chinese faces and displayed marginal recognition for Caucasian faces but did not recognize African faces. The 9-month-olds’ recognition was limited to Chinese faces. This pattern of development is consistent with the perceptual narrowing hypothesis that our perceptual systems are shaped by experience to be optimally sensitive to stimuli most commonly encountered in one’s unique cultural environment.

* Although the face processing system appears to undergo a period of refinement during this time of life, it does not become fixed. This is attested to by the finding that Korean adults who were adopted by French families during their childhood (aged 3–9 years) demonstrated the same discrimination deficit for Korean faces shown by the native French population (Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005). This finding is highly indicative of a face representation that remains flexible throughout both infancy and childhood. Although the face representation emerges early in life based on differential experience, it appears to retain its plasticity until at least 9 years of age.

* A plausible scenario for the emergence of the ORE is as follows: Predominant exposure to faces from a single racial group leads to greater visual attention toward those faces that in turn produces superior face recognition abilities with faces from that group and poorer recognition abilities with faces from racial groups that are not frequently viewed in the visual environment.

* Over three decades of research on the cross-race effect (CRE) suggests a rather robust phenomenon that carries practical implications for cases of mistaken eyewitness identification, particularly in situations that involve a poor opportunity to encode other-race faces and when a significant amount of time occurs between observation of the perpetrator and a test of the witness’s memory. While the CRE has not generally been observed in the accuracy of descriptions for own-race vs. other-race faces, research has found that individuals often attend to facial features that are diagnostic for own-race faces and misapply these feature sets when attempting to identify and describe other-race faces. As such, theorists have proposed that encoding and representational processes are largely responsible for the CRE, including the role of interracial contact and perceptual categorization processes.

* Significant exposure to other-race faces can block the development of own-race preference.

Or, as it's put in one of the few Rodgers-Hammerstein songs that I like:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHKzn8aHyXg&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

my feminine Japanese side loves these

Haibane Renmei is an anime about angel-like beings. I kept thinking the pace was too slow, but what was happening was cool and beautiful, and by the end, I was glad I saw it.

The beginning is on youtube:



Yotsuba&! is a manga about a green-haired girl who lives life turned to eleven. The first two volumes seemed pleasant. By the third, I was laughing out loud a lot.



Both recommended by the awesome Janni Simner's awesome husband, Larry (who is also intouch with his feminine Japanese side).

a favorite poem

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by H. Landman)

We never knew his fantastic head,
where eyes like apples ripened. Yet
his torso, like a lamp, still glows
with his gaze which, although turned down low,

lingers and shines. Else the prow of his breast
couldn't dazzle you, nor in the slight twist
of his loins could a smile run free
through that center which held fertility.

Else this stone would stand defaced and squat
under the shoulders' diaphanous dive
and not glisten like a predator's coat;

and not from every edge explode
like starlight: for there's not one spot
that doesn't see you. You must change your life.

The Woolly Mammoth and the Noble Savage

The Woolly Mammoth and the Noble Savage « Louis Proyect. I very, very highly recommend the last four paragraphs, if you're impatient.

sexism was the first classism

I'm reading Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, partly because a mention of it in Indian Givers intrigued me. Many of its examples are dated now, but the book stays relevant because of its ideas—anyone interested in the history of feminism should read it. For example, Engels writes:

In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.

Ahmadinejad probably won fairly

See Wishful thinking from Tehran | Abbas Barzegar | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Since the revolution, academics and pundits have predicted the collapse of the Iranian regime. This week, they did no better.

and LENIN'S TOMB: Ahmadinejad Won:

Most of the Western media were predicting a close race, and some were even suggesting that a landslide for Mousavi might be possible. But the actual results were presaged by those of the telephone survey of Iranian voters conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, the New America Foundation, and KA Europe SPRL about a month before election day.

IMHO, it's a class vote again.

There's a good discussion at Lenin's Tomb. Perhaps the most succinct point is this: In the Iranian system, they don't have to cheat. The rulers simply don't approve the candidates that they don't want. (In the US, the principle is the same, but the mechanics are different.)

ETA: FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Statistical Report Purporting to Show Rigged Iranian Election Is Flawed

ETA 2: My Eye Shadow Is Also Green - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2009. It's one poor young Iranian woman's take. It it doesn't touch your heart, you may not have one.

ETA 3: Iran News is a blog of raw footage. No way to guess the scale of the story.

ETA 4: From Slate: Guilt by Calculation It takes more than an Excel sheet to prove the Iranian election was fixed. From Time: Don't Assume Ahmadinejad Really Lost.

joke: how the Lord works

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realised that The Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me.

class war in the Confederacy

from Heather Gray: A New Perspective on the Confederacy

The South realized with the election that it was not going to have its way with the Republican Party or with the northern Democrats. Karl Marx, as ever the profound analyst, wrote in the German “Die Presse” in 1861, “When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing the part of the poor whites of the South” the Southern elite took their sword from the scabbard (Marx,1861).

The southern elite also faced a growing poor white population that was becoming harder to control. Poor white voters were increasing and they were making more demands through their franchise. Some have inferred, including Williams, that one reason the South went to war was because the elite were more concerned about poor whites than anything else. “The poor hate the rich” was the cry from South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond, who went on to say that the poor make war on the rich “especially with universal suffrage” (Williams, 2008). The elite began to explore ways to control the vote through class-based restrictions on white suffrage. Placing this “class” antagonism and passion of poor whites into a war was certainly one way to control them and diffuse the anger.

a koan by Ummon

Said Ummon to his disciples, "However wonderful a thing is, it may be that it is better not to have it at all."

mobbing: "feelings of bewilderment and dread"

'Mobbing' Can Damage More Than Careers, Professors Are Told at Conference - Chronicle.com

a Buddhist joke

Six blind elephants were arguing about what humans are like. They decided to each touch a human and report what they felt. The first blind elephant said, "Humans are flat." The other five elephants agreed.

Dead Kennedys - Religious Vomit [Live 1984]

RELIGIOUS VOMIT
Chorus: All religions make me wanna throw up / All religions make me sick / All religions make me wanna throw up / All religions suck / They all claim that they have the truth / They’ll set you free / Just give ‘em money and they’ll set you free / Free for a fee / They claim that they have “the Answer” / When they don’t even know the Question / They’re just a bunch of liars / They just want your money / They just want your consciousness / (Chorus) / All religions suck / All religions make me wanna throw up / All religions suck / All religions make me wanna BLEAH / They really make me sick / They really make me sick / They really make me sick / They really make me sick / They really make me sick / They really make me ILL

cracks in the western face of Tibetan Buddhism

This is interesting: When a 'Chosen' Tibetan Lama Says No Thanks - TIME. I generally find Thurman an annoying apologist for the worst abuses of Tibetan Buddhism, but his take on the kid's rearing was wise, if you accept the principle that it's good to take children from their families.

But this, which I missed last year, is fascinating:  The Dalai Lama's Buddhist Foes - TIME. One bit: "...a group of 500 or more audience members screamed at and spat at a mixed group of about 100 people, both Tibetan and Western, who had been peacefully protesting the high lama. Police felt it prudent to move in fast, with horses, and herded the smaller group into buses for their own protection."

advice for creators of imaginary race crimes

from Tawana Brawley rape allegations:

The racial epithets written on her were upside down, which led to suspicion that Brawley wrote the words.

from Woman With 'B' Scratched In Face Faked Political Attack

Ashley Todd -- who has a backward letter "B" scratched into her right cheek -- confessed to faking the story

As teachers often said when I was young: Handwriting counts.

imaginary black people are attacking real white people now more than ever

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Imaginary Black on White Crime
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

(thanks, desultorie!)

Readability on the web

For anyone who isn't reading coffeeem (Emma's LJ):

If you read lots of articles and fiction on the web, and wish you could easily set a more pleasant format for them--change margins, for instance, or type size--check out Readability. It's a sweet little browser bookmarklet that you can have handy at the top level of your bookmarks toolbar for whenever you find yourself confronted with ten thousand words on the Fourth Crusade in edge-to-edge sans-serif.

Big thank you to korvar_the_fox, who mentioned it on the Shadow Unit BBS!

I'll strongly second that. I installed it a couple of days ago, and have already found it useful at several sites that really should know better.

short, free story

"The Parable of the Shower" by Leah Bobet, one of the fine writers of Shadow Unit.

capitalist and socialist math

Last night, I made three posts that I deleted. The first linked to this news headline, perhaps the bluntest acknowledgment I've seen in a mainstream news source that the US is a plutocracy: Billionaire businessman helped GOP take back Senate.

The second was this old joke: How to Get Rich.

The third was this cartoon:

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Milt Priggee - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

I deleted all three because I thought, "That's the humor of generous people trying to survive in a greedy world. I need to think more about what inspires us and what only makes us despair."

This morning, I woke thinking about the Priggee cartoon. It's an example of a kind of political cartoon that's under-rated: It's not meant to make us laugh. It's meant to make us see a heightened truth.

But we can only see it if we already see it. To leftists, it juxtaposes two things and suggests an obvious solution. To devout capitalists, it's either baffling, or it says, "The homeless people must be driven away so the value of the neighborhood will return."

To capitalists and socialists, math is different. Socialists say 2 + 2 = 4. Capitalists say 2 + 2 = 3, plus one for the person who owns the adding machine.

Come, come, whoever you are

My favorite bit from the Unitarian Univeralist hymnal is this:

Come, come, whoever you are
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving,
Ours is no caravan of despair,
Even if you have broken your vow a thousand times,
Come, yet again, come ...

~ adapted from Rumi

I never saw another version until today: An Invitation:

Come, come, whoever you are.
Unbeliever, fire worshiper, come.

Our way is not one of desperation.

Even if you break your vows a hundred times,
Come. Come again.

The "fire worshiper" is significant: it's addressed to Zoroastrians, whose faith shaped the Abrahamic religions.

I also found a claim that the poem may not be Rumi's, and a translation that, I think, is a bit more ideological than Rumi may have intended, but since I only know a little about Rumi's life, I could be wrong and this could be right. From Is this poem authentically attributed to Rumi: (Come, come, whoever you are, come...)

According to Sidi Ibrahim Gamart (of the very useful Dar al-Masnavi site), "This is one of the most frequently quoted poems attributed to Rumi, but is not authenticated as his (and it is also not in the earliest manuscripts of the quatrains attributed to him). It is found in the same form in the quatrains of Bb Afzaluddn Kshn (died 1274-- Rumi died 1273) and is related to a similar quatrain attributed to Abu Sa`d ibn Abi 'l-Khayr, died 1048 (see "Nobody, Son of Nobody: Poems of Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir," renditions by Vraje Abramian, 2001, p. 4, c). It is one among the most frequently quoted poems by Turkish Mevlevis (the "Whirling Dervishes") themselves (who have long assumed it to be a Rumi poem), from a Turkish translation of the original Persian." [ref]

Further he offers a sounder translation, noting that:

"Come again, please, come again,
Whoever you are.
Religious, infidel, heretic or pagan.
Even if you promised a hundred times
And a hundred times you broke your promise,
This door is not the door
Of hopelessness and frustration.
This door is open for everybody.
Come, come as you are."

be the one to save a life

"Too Big Too Fail" by the Austin Lounge Lizards

maximum wage

Working Group on Extreme Inequality » Cap and Save

Meanwhile, in Britain, nine members of Parliament have just introduced legislation to place “a cap on the maximum wage that can be paid to any person in any one year.”

Millions of low-income workers, the measure’s lead sponsor, MP Paddy Tipping, told the House of Commons Wednesday, have benefited from the British minimum wage.
“We need to complete the policy circle,” Tipping urged, “and seriously consider the introduction of a maximum wage.”

A maximum wage set at ten times the minimum, the former social worker observed, “would give a maximum wage of £120,000,” the equivalent of close to $200,000.

contributing to the ephemeral web

It amuses me how I've gone completely from the "everything on the web must be preserved" to the "delete anything you don't like anymore" school. I just deleted one post and toned down another of this morning's posts—and may yet delete the second. My apologies to the folks who read the earlier versions via a feed.

Yesterday, I began to learn the ukulele, and I was happy. Today, I got into an email discussion with a well-meaning person whose ideology is not mine. The earlier posts were the result of following links she provided.

My thought of the day: Ideologies are the log cabins we build in our eyes.

My new motto: "Wouldn't you rather be playing the ukulele?"

top recommendation: Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford

This should be required reading for every high school student in North America: Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford.

chasing happiness

What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic (June 2009). I started off with a prejudice against it. Its second sentence is "You’re rich, and you made the dough yourself." It's talking about a Harvard student. Here's a simple truth: there's no such thing as a self-made product of an Ivy League school.

But it's fascinating reading. Whenever it starts to become annoying simplistic, it turns in an interesting way.

Cow Cow Boogie - that "Harlem touch"

Dorothy Dandridge:


Ella Mae Morse:

mobbing, a rape of the spirit

Yankton Press & Dakotan > Mobbing Like A ‘Rape Of The Spirit’

“Mobbing is like a rape of the spirit. It destroys a person from the inside,” Elliot said. “Before I found out about this, I used to wonder why someone would go into a work environment and spray the whole area with bullets. Why do people go postal? This is one reason why. You know who your friends are not, but you don’t know who your friends are. Everybody is suspect. These people become so paranoid. They can suffer extreme anxiety disorders and also, in extreme cases, post-traumatic stress disorder.”

It’s easy for people to become caught up in mobbing an individual, Elliot said. They want to belong and don’t want to become targets of abuse themselves. Elliot admitted that not only has she been the target of mobbing in the workplace, but she also engaged in the behavior herself on one occasion before she recognized that what she was doing was unacceptable and apologized.

“People think it’s funny, and they think it doesn’t have a lasting impact,” Elliot said. “Mobbers make fun of people behind their back. They spread rumors that are unkind. They get other people to gang up on someone. They humiliate someone and act like it is a joke. They withhold information the person needs to make decisions. They hold their targets to a different standard than they do everybody else. It’s engineered to confuse the target. It’s engineered to discredit.”

Bullies have harassed 14 percent of workers over past 6 months

The study shows that those aged over 45 are more likely to be the victims of such abuse.

race and history: weirder than you think

In some times and places, "white" just meant "American." From The great Arizona orphan abduction by Linda Gordon:

James Young, a black man at the Contention mine in nearby Tombstone, remarked "Si White and I were the first white men in Tombstone after Gird and Schieffelin."

the most egalitarian country usually wins a war

From The case for better income distribution:

What wins you wars — better firepower, economic depth, superior organisation, national character, better espionage, superior strategy, mistakes by the enemy? None of these.

In a recent paper for the University of Texas Inequality Project, James K Galbraith, Corwin Priest, and George Purcell* say, ceteris paribus, it is a better distribution of income that pretty much guarantees a victory. It seems between 1816 and 1962 more egalitarian countries have won 119 of 148 times.

In their own words, “given the occurrence of war between two countries, the country that is more egalitarian at the moment of military decision is likely to emerge the victor.” The evidence, they adduce, is hugely convincing. They have examined 80 wars between countries between 1816 and 1962. Some of them involved dozens of countries.

They also say that since democracies tend to be more egalitarian, they are more likely to win but, alas, not always. “There have been a handful of wars in which democracies were pitted against states more egalitarian than themselves…these were the twentieth century’s wars over Communism… in all these cases the Communist country prevailed…”

The paper is here.

Apocarteresis and strangulation

Someone expressed disappointment that David Carradine killed himelf. I think there are circumstances under which suicide is honorable. My first choice would be apocarteresis, a word I hadn't known until I saw it in Suicide methods:

Starvation has been used by Hindu, Jain and Buddhist monks as a ritual method of suicide. Albigensians or Cathars also fasted after receiving the 'consolamentum' sacrament, in order to die while in a morally perfect state.

The explorer Thor Heyerdahl refused to eat or take medication for the last month of his life, after having been diagnosed with cancer.

A hunger strike may ultimately lead to death.

Carradine apparently chose strangling. It's possible he was afraid someone would find him and force-feed him. If ever I kill myself, strangling would be my second choice. (I had once thought I would try to get lost in the snow, but people don't simply "go to sleep" in the cold. Sometimes they take off their clothes, which suggests they feel like they're too hot.)

Possibly of interest: More Patients Choose Starvation Than Assisted Suicide - Health News Story - WFTV Orlando

"We were surprised that patients who chose this means to hasten death were, according to their nurses, more peaceful and suffered less in the last two weeks before death than patients who choose assisted suicide," Ganzini said.

Obama on Abrahamic/post-Zoroastrian peace

Text - Obama’s Speech in Cairo - Text - NYTimes.com. I'll just snip what he chose for the end:

The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."

The Talmud tells us: "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace."

The Holy Bible tells us, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

understanding Christianity - for comic book fans

Imagine it's hundreds of years in the future, and much of the documentation for the 20th century has been lost.

Someone finds a Kane-Finger Batman and creates a religion.

Someone else finds an O'Neil-Adams Batman and does the same.

A third group finds an Englehart-Rogers Batman.

Then a fourth finds a Superman drawn by Curt Swan.

The sects fight with each other until a strong political leader orders them to merge, so they create SuperBatmanism and tell of their founder who came from another planet to live among us as a millionaire reporter who fights for truth and justice because evildoers are a cowardly lot.

Smaller sects that had based their faiths on Nedor and Charlton heroes are treated as enemies of the empire,

while a faith based on the Phantom newspaper strip is barely tolerated.

P.S. While I'm amused by the way the Bible evolved, I think a devout Superbatmanian could be a wonderful person.

why Christians should be Cafeterians: marriage, slavery, women's rights

The Brick Testament on

• Instructions on Marriage
• Instructions for Slaves
• Instructions for Women

Christians can take some pride in the fact that Biblical support for slavery is perfectly anti-racist and non-sexist; anyone may be enslaved.

My Cafeterianism is very comfortable with ditching Paul entirely, but I can see keeping the seven undisputed letters. The rest are just a waste of paper. (If you don't know about Golden Age Paul, Silver Age or Deutero-Paul, and Post-Crisis or Pastoral Paul, see Authorship of the Pauline epistles. And if you don't get the stupid joke in the previous sentence, be glad you wasted less of your life on comic books than I did.)

The Astounding World of the Future

more fine advice for writers

greyorm: The Internet is Loud