The big news this week is Eric Cantor's epic defeat. We are now going to see the Greedy Oil Party get even more insane in its panic to please the teabaggers. Now there is not one single Jewish Republican in Congress. For my part I will be watching to see if this gives Democrats any chance to pick up VA-7. It is a longshot, but not impossible given the magnitude of the upset in the Repub primary. No matter what, NOW is a good time to join in the dKos effort to make this seat competitive. Click here to do your part.
And here is a good summary of what happened to Cantor.
Below is a roundup of news, politics science, and humor. I plan on doing this about once a week as long as people seem interested. I hope you enjoy.
But first, elections are 6 months away. We all know it's going to be close, though Dems are starting to poll better. If we want the next 2 years to be anything CLOSE to progressive, we need to focus now on winning in November.
Please donate to my 2014 ActBlue site. I am particularly hoping we win IA-3 and CO-6 House races.
Staci Appell (IA-3):
Andrew Romanoff (CO-6):
DONATE HERE IF YOU WANT TO WIN IN 2014.
More news, science and randomness below...
ENVIRONMENTAL/ECONOMIC ACTION ALERT: Save our food, save our pollinators (Part I: Monarch Butterflies)
About one third of our food supply depends on pollinators. Bees in particular but also butterflies, bats, humming birds, etc. are NECESSARY for one third of our food supply.
Because of pesticide overuse, climate change and habitat destruction, many of these pollinators are in sharp decline. This is not only an environmental disaster in the making, but an economic disaster...imagine if one third of our food supply suddenly became scarce!
I am going to highlight efforts to protect our pollinators and hence protect our food supply. I will start with the monarch butterfly.
Monarch butterflies have a complex life cycle involving migration across very large distances across national borders and dependence on different plants and ecosystems along those distances. Overuse of pesticides obviously will harm monarch butterflies (one reason to buy organic foods). But urbanization and habitat destruction are reducing the ecosystems and plants they depend on. I want to highlight two particular efforts to preserve monarchs. One effort seeks to protect and expand one critical wintering ground in Mexico. The other seeks to encourage people around the country to plant milkweed, a plant that is important for the monarch butterfly's larvae to eat. Together, these efforts go a long way to supporting the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.
The Monarch Butterfly Fundis focusing on the wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly migration:
Each fall the monarch butterfly travels thousands of miles to spend the winter in the forests on 12 mountaintops in central Mexico. The monarch migration is the most spectacular two-way migration carried out by an insect.
The forests provide unique microclimatic conditions that allow monarchs to survive the winter. Forest degradation is putting this amazing migration in peril.
MBF is meeting the challenge of preserving monarch butterflies and their spectacular migration through our conservation strategy that fosters healthy ecosystems and sustainable communities through Partnerships, Forest Conservation, Scientific Research and Monitoring, Education and Outreach, and Sustainable Development.
Please click here to support these important efforts to preserve not just some ecological wonders, but also our own food supply.
Bring Back The Monarchs is a more low key effort, focusing on a widespread planting of milkweed, one of the main food plants for monarch caterpillars. This, in combination with the preservation of the wintering grounds above, is critical for the preservation of the monarch butterflies.
Monarch butterfly numbers are down. A number of factors are involved: habitat losses in the United States and Canada, degradation of the forests that support overwintering monarchs in Mexico, and catastrophic mortality of monarchs due to winter storms at the overwintering sites. All of these have reduced the monarch migration.
We can “Bring Back the Monarchs” but we will need your help and that of many partners and supporters to do so...
Our goal is to restore milkweeds in “natural” landscapes and encourage their adoption in ordinary gardens throughout the United States.
To accomplish this goal we:
◾are embarking on a Nationwide program to collect seeds of milkweeds used most commonly by monarchs in each region of the country;
◾will distribute these seeds to organizations and individuals engaged in restoration of public and private landscapes;
◾will form partnerships with nurseries to produce young milkweed plants (plugs) that can be used for restoration and plant fundraisers by cooperating organizations;
◾will promote the incorporation of milkweed seeds and plugs into restoration projects along roadsides, at nature centers, within municipalities, in natural landscapes adjacent to schools, businesses, private lands, and other public lands;
◾will form partnerships with organizations engaged in landscape restoration and will encourage 4H groups, schools, science clubs, native plant societies, county conservation organizations, land managers and others to plant milkweeds and to protect monarch habitat;
◾will develop a number of partnerships to produce large quantities of milkweed seeds that can be used in the above projects; and
◾will extensively promote the planting of milkweeds in gardens, particularly the adoption of a number of western milkweeds into “dry’ gardens.
Click here to donate to this worthy effort.
And if you want to plant milkweed on your own property and enjoy the presence of monarch butterflies in your garden, click here for milkweed seed and supply sources near you.
HEALTH, SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS:
Last week I covered the recent findings that daily consumption of red meat can lower your life span by 15-20%. Now there is another study, though not quite so dramatic, showing the dangers of frequent red meat consumption: Red meat 'linked to breast cancer'
Now did it really take a 12 year old to invent something so obvious as this? Russia: Boy invents 'lard-o-meter' to measure pig fat
Debunking and confronting science denial :
A place that doesn't regulate cigarettes and warn against smoking's risks winds up with epidemic levels of smoking: The country where nearly two-thirds of men smoke
It is really sad that this is only happening now! Evolution to reach Israeli middle schools
POLITICAL NEWS:
The radical right wing is sending threats to the Idaho community where Bowe Bergdahl lives: Bergdahl's hometown flooded with hateful calls, cancels celebration in 'interest of public safety.' This seems insane to me. I suggest we counter this right wing hatred with some patriotic support. Hailey, ID, is raising money for their July 4th celebrations. I suggest we show them that the left can help them with their patriotic celebrations. On their community website, on the left side, is a place you can click to donate to their July 4th celebrations.
The way CEOs are destroying our economy with their personal greed: Why Executive Pay Results in an Unstable and Inequitable Economy
Finally the Senate has overcome anti-Veteran Republicans: Senate passes veteran health bill
Protesting Uganda's anti-gay policies: Uganda's Sam Kutesa elected as UN General Assembly president
Facing India's future: India must stop denying caste and gender violence
The latest issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report profiles would-be political leaders who have links to hate groups or engage in promoting extremism based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or antigovernment conspiracy theories. 12 extremist political candidates running for office right now in America!
HISTORY:
BLAMING THE POOR IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
There was an interesting diary on dKos about the roots of the "Hate the Poor" ideology in America.
This dove tailed with some reading I have been doing about America's founding fathers.
America was mostly founded by people fleeing Europe for various ideological, religious, or economic reasons. Among the strongest religious reasons for fleeing was belief in Protestantism. Catholicism and, in England, Anglicanism dominated Europe of course. Anglicanism is thought of as Protestant but actually shares more theology with Catholicism than it does with the Protestantism derived from the likes of Huss, Luther, Calvin, etc. So in this context, Anglicanism and Catholicism are similar and both prosecuted the post-Huss/Luther forms of Protestantism. So many people fleeing religious persecution came from the post-Luther forms of Protestantism. Of course not all! But it was an early, highly influential ideology that formed America.
In the often violent and highly complex ferment that led to the formation of Lutheranism, Calvinism, and the various other forms of Protestantism that followed, one central idea was predestination. In Catholicism of the time anyone could be saved and good works and the intervention of clergy and saints can save people even after death. One issue Protestants had was that often such saving came at a price, usually a monetary price, which they saw as favoring the rich over the poor and going against the words of Jesus. It was also seen as violating the concept of the omniscience of god.
If god knows everything it must mean that everyone is predestined to be saved or not saved and there is nothing anyone can do about it. This is a logical theological concept based on the omniscience of the deity. It further removed the basis of profit from the Catholic clergy...all your money cannot buy your salvation if you are predestined from birth. It also was appealing to the poor: the poorest serf had as much a chance of salvation as the richest cardinal. The combined theological logic and appeal to the poor of this idea is one reason Protestantism took root so well. Of course there is also the fact that it played well into the various political conflicts: Pope vs. Emperor, local vs. national power, etc. Decades of violent conflict ensued, most violently during the French religious wars and during the Thirty Years War.
A strange thing happened to the Protestant concept of predestination on the way to America...actually before that, but it received its biggest boost in America. It became a justification for the rich and powerful to be self-righteous about their wealth and power and for the poor to feel shame about their poverty. If we are all predestined to be saved or not, then it was an easy step to assuming that those who are predestined for salvation would be the ones most visibly successful in life: the rich and powerful. Being rich is a sign of divine favor and being poor is a sign that you are a loser in the eyes of god.
This was not a theme in the words attributed to Jesus nor was it what Luther or Calvin envisaged, but it was a fairly easy assumption to make. In crowded Europe, it wasn't such a dominant theme. But in America it became combined with a unique economic situation to form the "hate the poor" ideology we see in the right wing rhetoric.
Coming to America gave people space. The space to pretty much believe and do whatever you wanted with minimal intrusion from an authority, and space to settle land. If you didn't like the Boston Puritan authority, you could move to Philadelphia (as Ben Franklin did). You could also move away from everyone, find "abandoned" land (with scarcely a glance at those dense Native American ruins left behind by a shrinking native population) and, based on your own labor, achieve success.
In other words, possibly for the first time since humans spread from Africa, there was enough land for someone who worked hard enough to be successful. Ben Franklin, in an essay that influenced Adam Smith, wrote about how America would be a place where anyone could make it with hard work and where labor would always be scarce and expensive (slavery aside) AS LONG AS we are expanding our frontier. He recognized that once the frontier ends and we have no more spare land, there would be an end to the scarcity of labor and a transition in our economy.
I had never thought of it that way before, but I think our labor history does prove him at least broadly correct. The whole "blame the poor for their poverty" thing was inspired by Protestant theology and supported by the availability of cheap land and the consequent scarcity of labor. Once land stopped being plentiful, the theology no longer had even tenuous basis in reality. Now labor is plentiful and hence cheap, meaning hard work doesn't necessarily pay off. But that American "work ethic" is ingrained in our educational system and our national myths. And is the basis for the smugness of CEOs, the shame felt by the poor, and the right wing anti-poor platform.
The only things countering that are the progressive political movement and labor unions. One could argue that the difference between liberalism and progressivism is that the former formed in Europe and then America alongside the evolution Protestant work ethic, and is partially entwined with it, so doesn't necessarily escape the "hate the poor" ideology (though it often does). It was more of an anti-aristocracy movement. Progressivism, by contrast, was fundamentally focused on the working class and the poor and evolved in America at a time when the economic realities were changing from labor scarcity to labor surplus.
All of this is a bit oversimplified, but I think does put into context the left-right divide in America when it comes to viewing the poor, and it also puts into context some of the divisions within the Democratic Party, between those who may be better than Republicans but still have absorbed some of the American "blame the poor" ideology that is so out of date, and those who follow the progressive movement and abandon that outdated ideology.
Pirate History I: Blackbeard and the Golden Age of Piracy: A History of the Pirate Ship "Queen Anne's Revenge"
Pirate History II: Oy! Jewish Pirates! My wife's family had a legend about a Jewish pirate ancestor. We considered this a joke. But turns out there were LOTS of Jewish pirates. This book gives a good history of the subject.
RANDOMNESS:
Lists like this have only limited value, but I still like reading and analyzing them: The world’s most ethical countries: 2014
In addition to more standard criteria like unspoiled natural beauty and authentic cultural experiences, researchers judged destinations on 35 metrics in four categories: environment protection, social welfare, human rights, and for the first time, animal welfare. In other words, judges considered quality of drinking water in the category of environmental protection, women’s rights in the category of human rights, and so on...
The complete list for 2014 (in alphabetical order) includes the Bahamas, Barbados, Cape Verde, Chile, Dominica, Latvia, Lithuania, Mauritius, Palau and Uruguay. Ethical Traveler does not rank the countries within the top 10.
I have only been to Latvia, but
that is where one of my main success stories is happening. And Uruguay is top of my list of places I want to visit.
Henry Rollins (a distant relative) vs. Iggy Pop:
A real moment of Zen: One of my favorite Buddhist temples (not actually Zen, though) in Kyoto, Japan:
This week's moment of jbou: Pretty much anywhere you stand you'll eventually end up in someone's way.
From BBC News: Today's African Proverb
“Rats don't dance in the cat's doorway”
Sent by J Hendrix Fahnbulleh, Monrovia, Liberia
For last week's issue:
Mole's Cool News Roundup 8