What makes coffee smell so great.... even to people who don't like to drink it?
The graphic this morning comes from the site
Compound Interest where UK chemistry teacher, Andy Brunning, has assembled a truly wonderful stack of infographics. If you like it, I'll use more.
Charles Blow looks at Bernie and the black vote.
Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders spoke Saturday to a half empty gymnasium at Benedict College in South Carolina. The school is historically black, but the crowd appeared to be largely white.
This underscores the severe challenge facing the Sanders campaign: African-American voters have yet to fully connect to the man and the message.
An August Gallup Poll found that Hillary Clinton’s favorability among African-Americans was 80 percent while Sanders’ was only 23 percent. A full two-thirds of blacks were unfamiliar with Sanders.
This may sound a bit dismissive, but Blow really wants to like this guy.
There is an earnest, if snappy, aura to Sanders that is laudable and refreshing. One doesn’t sense the stench of ambition or the revolting unctuousness of incessant calculation.
There is an idealistic crusader in the man, possibly to the point of being quixotic, but at least it doesn’t come off as having been corrupted by money or power or the God complex that so often attends those in pursuit of the seat behind the Resolute Desk.
The rest of the article reviews a discussion with Sanders on the issue of his attempt to reach out to African-American voters. Go read it.
Now, grab your coffee and come on in. There are a lot of pundits to cover today...
Ross Douthat plays the favorite new conservative guessing game: is the Pope Catholic?
... the pope has actually made a major move on marriage. He’s changing canon law governing annulments, making it much easier for divorced Catholics to have their first marriage declared invalid, null and void.
The changes do not merely streamline the existing annulment process, as many expected, by removing a mandatory review of each decision. They promise a fast-track option, to be implemented at the discretion of local bishops, that would allow annulments to be granted in no more than 45 days if both parties consent and certain personal factors are involved. Since that list of factors seems capacious and varied, in effect the pope is offering bishops the chance to expedite most annulment petitions involving consenting ex-spouses, without fear of rebuke from Rome.
... What Francis has done is clearly a liberal move, more liberal than I expected. But it’s still not the wider opening on sex and marriage that many progressive Catholics sought...
But you just
know Douthat can't stop without informing the Pope of lines he shall not pass.
... it doesn’t imply that cohabiting and same-sex couples — and, in African societies, the polygamous — might also be welcomed to communion. And while it gives conservative Catholics grounds for dismay and critique, it doesn’t directly undercut belief in the pope’s infallibility or the permanence of doctrine. ... [Pope Francis] may have planned to start a civil war and then cleverly resolve it. But he could end up making that conflict more enduring, a split that widens and a wound that doesn’t heal.
Hmm. It's easy to read that as a threat, Ross. I'm not sure I would threaten this Pope.
Dana Milbank believes that Hillary has more to fear from her friends than her enemies.
“Hillary Clinton to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say,” was the headline on Amy Chozick’s piece this week, reporting that “there will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious.” ... “The coming months will also be a period of trying to shed her scriptedness.”
Planned spontaneity? A scripted attempt to go off script? This puts the “moron” into oxymoron.
Here’s a better idea: Find and fire people who talk about her that way. Thin out the whole bloated campaign and its cadre of consultants and shed those who orchestrate these constant makeovers of Clinton. Then, rather than stage-managing a strategy to appear spontaneous, Clinton might actually be spontaneous — and regain some semblance of her authentic self.
Go back and read Blow's comments on what he likes about Sanders. Now see if you can attach any of the same thoughts to Hillary.
Ruth Marcus begs for an end to the scandal that isn't.
Conducting government business via private e-mail was a mistake, Hillary Clinton has conceded. She’s sorry, albeit belatedly, grudgingly and rather unspecifically. The FBI will continue to investigate whether, and how badly, national security was compromised by transmitting classified information on the private server; the e-mails, redacted but still full of tidbits about everything from gefilte fish to TV’s “The Good Wife,” will continue to be released.
So this seems like an appropriate time to make what will seem like a naive suggestion: Could we possibly talk about something else? Like what, exactly, Clinton proposes to do about some of the challenges the country faces, and that she would confront as president?
The answer is, of course, no. We'll stay here until people are so tired of hearing about it they want to spit. In fact, I think we passed that point somewhere around June. We'll just stay here... until they think of something else to serve as the focus of outrage.
Radley Balko on the non-existent "war on cops."
Here are some more examples of media outlets and politicians spreading the hysteria:
“War On Police Sparks National Crime Wave”
“Police face recruiting shortage due to war on cops”
“Do Cops’ Lives Matter to Obama?”
“[New York Police Chief] Bratton warns of tough times ahead due to ‘war on cops'”
As I’ve noted here before, we’re seeing similar rhetoric from politicians, particularly from GOP presidential hopefuls, including Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Scott Walker.
All of this fact-free fearmongering is having an effect. A Rasmussen poll taken last week found that 58 percent of respondents now believe there is now a “war on police.” Just 27 percent disagreed.
Balko has the numbers to show that this is nonsense. Though, being as it's a Rasmussen poll, it's hard to tell if there're any real believe in this myth.
John Lewis reviews Ari Berman's book, Give Us the Ballot, and mourns the rollback of Civil Rights.
Berman describes two strategies undertaken to denigrate and dilute the voting act. The first sought to undermine public confidence in applying any federal solution to fix a centuries-old injustice. It did so by likening states’ creation of districts with majorities of minority voters to a kind of congressional “quota system.” Opponents began to suggest that the advent of these districts assured that a fixed number of congressional seats would always be held by minorities. Policing fairness was a role the public was willing for government to play. But overseeing a system of favoritism through quotas was taboo.
Also, certain “hired guns” were placed inside the Justice Department, nurtured within academia and tasked with complicating the success of the act. As Berman tells it, Hans von Spakovsky, a George W. Bush appointee to the civil rights division of the Justice Department, was assigned specifically to impede the voting act’s enforcement. Harvard-educated Abigail Thernstrom, Berman writes, was encouraged to devote her research career to the creation of an academic framework for the neutralization of the law.
How sad is it that some people would devote their lives to eroding the rights of millions? How much sadder that someone might feel proud of this accomplishment.
The second salvo, perhaps the more insidious, turned the act on its head. Begun in the Reagan years, this effort seemingly defended the law — but with the unspoken motive of destroying it.
I'm in danger of just quoting Lewis' whole piece. So go read it. And yes, I'm asking you to read a lot this morning.
Leonard Pitts delivers a few words about a man caught in a bad situation.
This is an elegy for John Gibson.
He was a married father of two, a pastor and a professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is said to have loved fixing cars and to have had an oddball laugh. In photos, he and his wife Christi and their two kids come across as a goofy, fun—loving bunch. Pictures of them radiate joy.
Christi Gibson found her husband dead of suicide in their home on Aug. 24th. Last week, she told CNNMoney that John left a note in which he said he was struggling with depression — and shame. In July, you will recall, news came that Ashley Madison, the website that brokers adulterous relationships, had been hacked and that the hackers were threatening to publish a list of 32 million customers — names, financial information, sexual fantasies. Gibson killed himself just days after they made good on that threat.
We are, all of us, imperfect beings, and have in our hearts gifts of astounding compassion and impulses of dark betrayal. Acting on our base desires is not very admirable. Neither is shoving people naked in front of the cameras.
The New York Times on how the GOP is threatening the first amendment.
This past June, in the heat of their outrage over gay rights, congressional Republicans revived a nasty bit of business they call the First Amendment Defense Act. It would do many things, but one thing it would not do is defend the First Amendment. To the contrary, it would deliberately warp the bedrock principle of religious freedom under the Constitution.
... the act would bar the federal government from taking “any discriminatory action” — including the denial of tax benefits, grants, contracts or licenses — against those who oppose same-sex marriage for religious or moral reasons. In other words, it would use taxpayers’ money to negate federal anti-discrimination measures protecting gays and lesbians, using the idea of religious freedom as cover.
So, the bill will positively assert the right of some people to deny rights to others... as long as the others are gay. Not only is this bill head-splittingly stupid, in five years you won't be able to find a single GOP congressman who will admit to having supported it.
Anthony Jack looks at the lessons we all learn when a poor kid goes to a rich school.
I call lower-income undergraduates who graduated from private high schools the privileged poor. Although they receive excellent educations, my research shows that their ability to navigate the informal social rules that govern elite college life is what really gives them advantages relative to their lower-income peers who did not attend elite high schools, those whom I call the doubly disadvantaged. Although also academically gifted and driven, they enter college with less exposure to the unsaid expectations of elite academic settings. They adjust, but acclimating to the social side of academic life takes time, potentially limiting their access to institutional resources and social networks. ...
The differences I observe in my research highlight how unequal opportunities constrain disadvantaged groups before and during college. To close this gap, we must address the entrenched structural inequalities that plague America’s forgotten neighborhoods and neglected public schools. These changes are what Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at N.Y.U., calls “durable urban policies.” They will go a long way to help counter these systemic problems.
Unfortunately, Jack's academic research reads like... academic research. However, it does reflect that–as in so many other areas–having a privileged background gives advantages that can make it
appear that some groups are smarter than others.
Timothy Snyder on how we're already on the path to the next genocide.
Today we think of the Nazi Final Solution as some dark apex of high technology. It was in fact the killing of human beings at close range during a war for resources. The war that brought Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program.
The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.
The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people. ...
Climate change threatens to provoke a new ecological panic. So far, poor people in Africa and the Middle East have borne the brunt of the suffering.
The mass murder of at least 500,000 Rwandans in 1994 followed a decline in agricultural production for several years before. ...
In Sudan, drought drove Arabs into the lands of African pastoralists in 2003.
People are already dying, by thousands and tens of thousands, from effects of climate change. Denying climate change is no more admirable than denying the Holocaust. This one is worth reading end to end (and it's one of several articles in recent weeks to suggest reasons for political instability surrounding China... which isn't making me feel exactly jolly).