The following Youtube clip claims to be a recording of Einstein on the violin. Music was very important to Einstein who claimed that his “disposition to architectonic logics of abstraction was formulated by by his early musical experiences” which resulted in a “rich mental perceptual fabric of space and time in which to perform his scientific theorizing.” (Quotes from fellow scientist Robert Mueller.)
Youtube of Einstein on violin (or so it says):
http://youtube.com/MQFmSnG5Ets
More on Einstein and music:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/imagine/201003/einstein-creative-thinking-music-and-the-intuitive-art-scientific-imagination
What follows is a brief summary of Paul Buchheit’s article on how privatization is hurting people. The complete article is linked below.
Health Care
Our private health care system is by far the most expensive system in the developed world. Forty-two percent of sick Americansskipped doctor’s visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs. The price of common surgeries is anywhere from three to ten times higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, Canada, France, or Germany. Some of the documented tales: a $15,000 charge for lab tests for which a Medicare patient would have paid a few hundred dollars; an $8,000 special stress test for which Medicare would have paid $554; and a $60,000 gall bladder operation, which was covered for $2,000 under a private policy…as a nation we have a shorter life expectancy than almost all other developed countries, Americans covered by Medicare INCREASED their life expectancy by 3.5 years from the 1960s to the turn of the century.
Water
A 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by Food and Water Watch found that private companies charge up to 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more for sewer services.
… Nestle buys water for about 1/100 of a penny per gallon, and sells it back for ten dollars. Their bottled water is not much different from tap water.
Worse yet, corporations profit from the very water they pollute. Dioxin-dumping Dow Chemicals is investing in water purification. Monsanto has been accused of privatizing its own pollution sites in order to sell filtered water back to the public.
Transportation
With privatization comes automatic rate increases. Chicago surrendered its parking meters for 75 years and almost immediately faced a doubling of parking rates. California’s experiments with roadway privatization resulted in cost overruns, public outrage, and a bankruptcy; equally disastrous was the state’s foray into electric power privatization. In Pennsylvania, an analysis of school busing by the Keystone Research Center concluded that “Contracting out substantially increases state spending on transportation services.”
Banking
Goldman Sachs designed mortgage packages to lose money for everyone except Goldman. Countrywide and Wells Fargo targeted Blacks and Hispanics for unaffordable subprime loans. HSBC Bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels. GE Capital skimmed billions of dollars from its customers. Dozens of hedge fund managers have been guilty of insider trading. Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase hid billions of dollars of bonuses and losses and loans from investors. Banks fixed interest rates in the LIBOR scandal. They illegally foreclosed on millions of homeowners in the robo-signing scandal.
…This is all the result of free-market deregulated private business. The best-known public bank, on the other hand, is the Bank of North Dakota, which remains profitable while serving small business and the public at low cost relative to the financial industry.
Prisons
One would think it a worthy goal to rehabilitate prisoners and gradually empty the jails. But business is too good. With each prisoner generating up to $40,000 a year in revenue, it has apparently made economic sense to put over two million people behind bars.
…Studies show that private prisons perform poorly in numerous ways: prevention of intra-prison violence, jail conditions, rehabilitation efforts. Investigations in Ohio and New Jersey revealed a familiar pattern of money-saving cutbacks and worsening conditions.
Consumer Protection
Deregulation not only deprives Americans of protection, but it also endangers us with the persistent threat of corporate misconduct. As late as 2004 Monsanto had insisted that Agent Orange “is not the cause of serious long-term health effects.” Dow Chemical, the co-manufacturer of Agent Orange, blamed the government. Halliburton pleaded guilty to destroying evidence after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. Cleanups cost much more than the fines imposed on offending companies, as government costs can run into the billions, or even tens of billions, of dollars.
Buchheit’s whole article is worth a read:
http://www.alternet.org/hard-times-usa/8-ways-privatization-has-brought-pain-and-misery-american-life
We had some sparks on the blog whenever I would criticize the empty rhetoric of the Obama campaign. It made me very unhappy for a moderate Democrat to use the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez to promote what we all knew would end in the utilitarian politics of compromise. And it made readers very unhappy to hear any criticism of a candidate who was being so vilified by truly hateful right wing groups. My criticisms of the Obama administration have been my least read and most criticized articles.
So I was not at all surprised to discover Obama’s chief of staff for the 2008 campaign and his campaign manager for 2012 has hired himself out to the other side. Jim Messina says that he has long admired David Cameron, England’s conservative Prime Minister. While Cameron is socially progressive on some issues his central economic strategy is to slash social spending and privatize whatever does not move. This week the former Obama campaign manager has agreed to work for the British Conservative Party.
My purpose in pointing all this out is not to criticize Messina, nor was my original intent to criticize Obama. They were just doing what it took to get elected in this country, and then to hold onto power. We in the States are so bombarded with advertising that we have fallen asleep in images. The Obama campaign was a media driven simulation of a grass roots social movement. That does not make Obama bad. It does not mean that he was not the lesser of evils.
So what is the lesson to be gained from the “Got Hope” manager switching sides like a professional wrestler? It is to stop believing in national heroes and begin to trust in universal principles . No politician can replace the hard work of a grass roots social movements. Blaming Obama would miss the point I am trying to make; which is, no politician can replace an active and informed citizenship.
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268743/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=beRmCNg1
I guess I’m not going to live long enough for humanity to outgrow this kind of foolishness after all. Once every few years some scholar who should know better makes an absolutely ridiculous claim to have discovered some artifact from the biblical story that will vindicate Christian claims about Jesus.
Archaeologists working in Turkey believe they have found a piece of the cross that Jesus was crucified on.
While excavating the ancient Balatlar Church, a seventh-century building in Sinop, Turkey, on the shores of the Black Sea, they uncovered a stone chest that contained objects that may be directly connected with Jesus Christ.
Excavation head Professor Gülgün Köroğlu definitively stated:
We have found a holy thing in a chest. It is a piece of a cross, and we think it was [part of the cross on which Jesus was crucified]. This stone chest is very important to us. It has a history and is the most important artifact we have unearthed so far.
Okay, here’s the thing. They found a fricking piece of wood that might be a cross. If it were a cross, that would not prove the cross is from Jesus’ time. If it were a cross from Jesus time, it still would not prove this is Jesus’ cross. Even if it were a piece of wood from Jesus cross, it still would say absolutely nothing about the truth of Jesus’ claims.
Jesus did not tell us to worship his cross but to take up a cross of our own. In other words to be willing to suffer for the world. Relic worship or belief is some theory of the atonement are completely beside the point. The essence of Christianity is not a belief in Jesus but in love.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/jesus-cross-found-archaeology_n_3691938.html
For a moment set aside the question of what happens to Bradley Manning. Let us put aside the fact that he was denied the right to a speedy trial, denied use of the defense that he was uncovering war crimes. Forget the months of solitary confinement, being stripped naked and being deprived of sleep as a form of punishment. Forget all that.
For a moment, ask the question why our nation has done nothing about the war crimes he uncovered. When civilians are gunned down by a military helicopter and the government covers it up, when that government’s only response is to arrest the person who made the revelation and tighten security, can that nation make any kind of claim of being moral? Doesn’t that nation have a duty to seek out and correct it’s own misdeeds?
Some have argued that Manning’s crime was not to go through proper channels. But what is the point of reporting a crime to the ones who have done it? Because the crimes Manning discovered were an assault upon democracy, he went to the people with the information of what was being done in our name. So far, we have gone into denial about what we discovered, but this story is not over. Set aside the question of what happens to Bradley Manning, and ask how are we as citizens of the American Empire to respond to the war crimes that have been committed in our name?
Every nation errs. That nation alone is great who will look courageously upon its own crimes and repent. Woe to that nation who would rather pluck out its own eyes than see what it has become.
Several of you sent links to the terrible interview FOX did with the Muslim scholar who wrote a book about Jesus:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/28/video_fox_news_lauren_green_asks_reza_aslan_why_muslim_would_be_interested.html
But clueless arrogance is not rare at FOX. One brave soul has put together the 10 worst of the last decade:
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/30/10_worst_fox_news_interviews_of_the_decade/
Keith Brekhus has a nice piece in PoliticusUSA about a topic you don’t normally hear discussed: white on white crime. Here are some excerpts:
“In the United States, a white person is
almost six times more likely to be killed by another white person than he or she is to be killed by a black person.”
“When media discussions talk about gang-related homicides, they invariably treat it as an almost exclusively African-American problem, yet according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics for the period from 1980 to 2008, a majority (53.3 percent) of gang-homicides were committed by white offenders, and a majority of gang-homicide victims (56.5 percent) were white. When was the last time you heard a discussion about the white on white gang violence problem?”
The vast majority of homicides are male on male murders, but we hear little to no discussion of male on male violence, or the unique pathology that afflicts men. This is because, without any awareness of bias, crimes by white men are explained not by race or gender but by the unique pathology of the specific person whose race, being white, is therefore deemed irrelevant.”
“Black on black violence is a defamatory label that assigns special racial significance to crimes committed by one black man against another without recognizing the complex sociological variables that account for the violence. A black on black homicide could just as well be termed male on male murder, or heterosexual on heterosexual crime or American on American homicide. None of these terms would have great explanatory power in dealing with the complexity of reasons for committing a homicide, but they are no more foolish than the term black on black violence, which foregrounds race as if it is the one compelling explanatory variable for understanding the crime, when in most cases it is not.”
Thanks to Barbara Miller for link.
Fundamentalism is religion after all its questions have been answered, all its passions have been quenched and all of its creativity stifled. In other words, fundamentalism is religion after it has died.
And religions do not die peaceably. They are like headless chickens running about the barnyard pecking and scrapping. Fundamentalism cannot leave others alone. It must seek out the warm blood of sinners because it has no warmth left of its own. It has lost its own living heart of love, so if it has no one to convert or criticize, it has nothing to say.
Fundamentalism is religion after all its questions have been answered, all its passions have been quenched and all of its creativity stifled. In other words, fundamentalism is religion after it has died.
And religions do not die peaceably. They are like headless chickens running about the barnyard pecking and scrapping. Fundamentalism cannot leave others alone. It now must seek out the warm blood of sinners because it has no warmth left of its own. It has lost its own living heart of love, so if it has no one to convert or criticize, it has nothing to say.
What to make of the Pope’s words? Yesterday the Pope responded to a question gay priests by answering, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” and “We shouldn’t marginalize people for this. They must be integrated into society.”
The comments are being hailed as a change in tone from the Vatican. The previous Pope held that those with deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests. The new Pope also showed that he understood that being gay is in no way linked to pedophilia. Several GLBT groups were quick to express gratitude for the new tone of openness.
At the same time, the Pope did not challenge Catholic doctrine that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” It is a good thing to say we should not judge, but what is needed is the recognition that homosexuality is not a sin.
Perhaps the Pope meant that because priests are expected to be celibate, it does not matter so much whether a priest is straight or gay. The Pope did say that priesthood for women is a “closed door.”
So I think the Pope’s statement can be understood as a step in the right direction by a church that is ten thousand steps behind the curve of Justice.