July 2020 Archives
Teaching marginalized kids taught me orderly classrooms, Western canon keys to liberation
Sohrab Ahmari, writing in the New York Post
"Do you know what would have happened if I'd told my Mexican-American students' moms, 'You know, ladies, I'm not teaching your children grammar, because grammar is an integral part of the white, phallocentric structures of Âoppression that keep you and your community down'?
"They would've slapped me with their purses and called me a pendejo -- and rightly so.
"The same would have gone for the notion, bizarrely gaining currency these days, that the yearning for order and even abstract reasoning as such are white, Âcolonial constructs.
"I watched the best of my fellow teachers run tight ships, with clear expectations for behavior, systems of reward and punishment and a general ethic of uprightness pervading their classrooms. And, again, guess what? The kids, and their parents, appreciated such efforts enormously."
Malcolm Gladwell: How I Rediscovered Faith - Relevant
"Le Chambon is an area of France called the Vivarais Plateay - a remote mountainous region near the Italian and Swiss borders. For many centuries, the area has been home to dissident Protestant groups, principally the Huguenots, and during the Nazi occupation of France, Le Chambon become a very open and central pocket of resistance....
"Where did the people of Le Chambon find the strength to defy the Nazis? The same place the Derksens found strength to forgive. They were armed with the weapons of the spirit. For over 100 years, in the 17th and 18th centuries, they had been ruthlessly persecuted by the state. Hugeunot pastors had been hanged and tortured, their wives sent to prison and their children taken from them. They had learned how to hide in the forests and escape to Switzerland and conduct their services in secrecy. They had learned how to stick together.
"They saw just about the worst kind of persecution that anyone can see. And what did they discover? That the strength granted to them by their faith in God gave them the power to stand up to the soldiers and guns and laws of that state....
"What I understand now is that I was one of those who did not appreciate the weapons of the spirit. I have always been someone attracted to the quantifiable and the physical. I hate to admit it. But I don't think I would have been able to do what the Huguenots did in Le Chambon. I would have counted up the number of soldiers and guns on each side and concluded it was too dangerous. I have always believed in God. I have grasped the logic of Christian faith. What I have had a hard time seeing is God's power.
"I put that sentence in the past tense because something happened to me when I sat in Wilma Derksen's garden. It was one thing to read in a history book about people empowered by their faith. But it is quite another to meet an otherwise very ordinary person, in the backyard of a very ordinary house, who has managed to do something utterly extraordinary.
"Their daughter was murdered. And the first thing the Derksens did was to stand up at the press conference and talk about the path to forgiveness. 'We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these people's lives.'
"Maybe we have difficulty seeing the weapons of the spirit because we don't know where to look, or because we are distracted by the louder claims of material advantage. But I've seen them now, and I will never be the same."
"Not for Camera View" -- Strong Towns
Photographer Johnny Sanphillippo's habit of photographing ordinary places has attracted a fair amount of negative attention and suspicion over the years.
"Why not capture what the landscape really looks like? America is mostly parking lots, squat concrete strip malls, storm water retention ponds, refineries, chain link fences, and tract homes made of plastic siding. Photographing the authentic American landscape is both more challenging and ultimately more rewarding if you can do it well....
"I was walking around a nondescript neighborhood in Chicago a few years ago when five squad cars surrounded me at an intersection. I was asked for my identification, they were keen to see what was on my camera, and there were all sorts of questions about who I was and what I was up to. The police wouldn't say exactly why they descended on me in such an overwhelming fashion, but it was pretty clear there had been a report of unsavory activity of the terrorist variety."
I can only think of one occasion where I was challenged in a frightening way for taking pictures. I had spotted an interesting neon sign on a hotel located along what was once a major highway on the edge of Orlando. I made the mistake of getting out of the car to take the picture, and a burly guy who looked like he stepped out of The Sopranos came out to ask me what the **** I was doing. (Maybe he thought I was photographing license plates.) He calmed down after I explained that the sign had caught my attention, and he encouraged me to come back some time for dinner at the restaurant. (No thanks.)
A Not So Happy Warrior: Mike Adams, 1964-2020 :: SteynOnline
"The American academy is bonkers and has reared monsters - so that we now have a 'black liberation movement' staffed almost entirely by college-educated white women (including a remarkable number of angry trans-women) from the over-undergraduated permanent-varsity Class of Whenever. We are assured that out in "the real world' there is a soi-disant 'silent majority' whose voices will resound around the world on November 3rd. For what it's worth, I don't believe in the existence of this 'silent majority', and a political party that has won the popular vote only once in the last thirty years (2004) ought to be chary about over-investing in it.
"But either way, if you're doing the heavy lifting on an otherwise abandoned front of the culture war, what you mostly hear, as Mike Adams did, is the silent majority's silence - month in, month out....
"Pushing back can be initially exhilarating - and then just awfully wearing and soul-crushing: 'I'm with you one hundred per cent, of course. But please don't mention I said so...'
"And yet, if the facts are as they appear, a tireless and apparently 'happy warrior' - exhausted by a decade of litigation, threats, boycotts, ostracization and more - found himself sitting alone - and all he heard in the deafening silence of the 'silent majority' was his own isolation and despair."
A Not So Happy Warrior: Mike Adams, 1964-2020 :: SteynOnline
"The American academy is bonkers and has reared monsters - so that we now have a 'black liberation movement' staffed almost entirely by college-educated white women (including a remarkable number of angry trans-women) from the over-undergraduated permanent-varsity Class of Whenever. We are assured that out in "the real world' there is a soi-disant 'silent majority' whose voices will resound around the world on November 3rd. For what it's worth, I don't believe in the existence of this 'silent majority', and a political party that has won the popular vote only once in the last thirty years (2004) ought to be chary about over-investing in it.
"But either way, if you're doing the heavy lifting on an otherwise abandoned front of the culture war, what you mostly hear, as Mike Adams did, is the silent majority's silence - month in, month out....
"Pushing back can be initially exhilarating - and then just awfully wearing and soul-crushing: 'I'm with you one hundred per cent, of course. But please don't mention I said so...'
"And yet, if the facts are as they appear, a tireless and apparently 'happy warrior' - exhausted by a decade of litigation, threats, boycotts, ostracization and more - found himself sitting alone - and all he heard in the deafening silence of the 'silent majority' was his own isolation and despair."
Australian politics explainer: Gough Whitlam's dismissal as prime minister
Australian constitutional law professor Anne Twomey explains the 1975 events that many characterize as a constitutional crisis and which the Australian Left has seen as a conspiracy by Queen Elizabeth and/or the CIA against their golden boy, Labor PM Gough Whitlam. Letters between Buckingham Palace advisers and Australian Governor-General Sir John Kerr, Queen Elizabeth's vice-regent in Australia, released on July 14, 2020, undermine the conspiracy theories and highlight seldom-exercised constitutional powers.
My take: The 1975 dismissal of Whitlam by the Governor-General is the Australian Left's Lost Cause. (Something like the Alger Hiss cause was for American Leftists.) Whitlam, the narrative goes, was set to unleash a Leftist paradise of sex, drugs, and socialism, but the CIA inveigled the Queen to fire him. The reality is prosaic. Whitlam had a majority in the House but not the Senate, couldn't pass a bill to fund the government, and was afraid to face the voters in the kind of election that could break the deadlock. Kerr stepped in to ensure funding for government. Kerr fired Whitlam and commissioned the opposition leader to form a caretaker government to fund the government then dissolve themselves for an election. The December 1975 election was won by the Liberal/Country Party (center-right) coalition by a landslide.
From Prof. Twomey's explainer: "The dismissal of the Whitlam government provided one of the biggest political shocks in Australian history. It put on open display vice-regal powers that most did not know existed, and tested Australians' understanding of their own Constitution and political system."
In an op-ed reacting to the released letters, op-ed in The Age, Prof. Twomey shows how the release letters demonstrate the caution and propriety of the Governor-General's action and reveal Whitlam's desperation that the Palace should pressure Kerr to reinstate him as PM: "[The 'palace letters'] show nothing other than people taking their responsibilities seriously and doing the best they can in difficult circumstances."
Here's a Twitter thread of commentary on the Palace Letters themselves from Australian constitutional attorney Gray Connolly. Connolly writes: "Australia is a monarchical commonwealth where executive power flows from the Crown down to ministers & officers. There is only a 'crisis' if you are a minister & your commission is withdrawn. And this is only a 'crisis' for you - both the Crown & Commonwealth keep marching along.... Sir John Kerr exercised the Governor-General's powers:
- by Ch.II & s61, the executive power is vested in the Monarch & exercised by the G-G
- by s.64, Ministers hold their officer at G-G's pleasure
- by ss 5 & 24, the G-G can dissolve House for an election on his own motion."
Whitlam's biographer, Jenny Hocking, has been pushing for the release of these papers for decades and claims vindication, arguing from silence that "just as important as what is in the letters will be what isn't there."
Japan has long accepted COVID's airborne spread, and scientists say ventilation is key - CBS News
"Large droplets expelled through the nose and mouth tend to fall to the ground quickly, explained Makoto Tsubokura, who runs the Computational Fluid Dynamics lab at Kobe University. For these larger respiratory particles, social distancing and face masks are considered adequate safeguards. But in rooms with dry, stale air, Tsubokura said his research showed that people coughing, sneezing, and even talking and singing, emit tiny particles that defy gravity -- able to hang in the air for many hours or even days, and travel the length of a room.
"The key defense against aerosols, Tsubokura said, is diluting the amount of virus in the air by opening windows and doors and ensuring HVAC systems circulate fresh air. In open-plan offices, he said partitions must be high enough to prevent direct contact with large droplets, but low enough to avoid creating a cloud of virus-heavy air (55 inches, or head height.) Small desk fans, he said, can also help diffuse airborne viral density."
'It's a Superpower': How Walking Makes Us Healthier, Happier and Brainier
"'Our sensory systems work at their best when they're moving about the world,' says [Neuroscientist Shane] O'Mara. He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants' activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O'Mara, 'from the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion - and we need to test this - is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.'
"O'Mara's enthusiasm for walking ties in with both of his main interests as a professor of experimental brain research: stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory and cognition. 'It turns out that the brain systems that support learning, memory and cognition are the same ones that are very badly affected by stress and depression,' he says. 'And by a quirk of evolution, these brain systems also support functions such as cognitive mapping,' by which he means our internal GPS system. But these aren't the only overlaps between movement and mental and cognitive health that neuroscience has identified."
