Optimist. Link here.
A foster parent of a different sort. The infant, the one with no visitors for 5 months, got a mother: her pediatric nurse.
A special 80th birthday for the school janitor: cheers, cards, hugs, and help collecting all his cards.
The nation's first African American female mayor. No, it was not the recently elected Ms. Lightfoot of Chicago. Rather, it was Lelia Foley-Davis in Taft, OK, in April 1973. (For the record, "Doris A. Davis, the first black woman to be elected mayor in Compton, Calif., won election two months later.")
A bicycler and his cat touring the world.
Notable dates in American history.
3 April 1968: MLK, Jr. gave his final speech at a rally of sanitation workers in Memphis, TN. 1996: Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski was arrested at his remote cabin in MT.
4 April 1968: MLK, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, TN. 1975: More than 130 died, most children, when a USAF transport plane crashed on takeoff in Saigon.
6 April 1830: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized by Joseph Smith in Fayette, N.Y. 1909: American explorers Robert E. Peary and Matthew A. Henson and four Inuits became the first men to reach the North Pole. 1917: The United States entered World War I as the House joined the Senate in approving a declaration of war against Germany that was then signed by President Woodrow Wilson. "The world must be made safe for democracy."
8 April 1864: Congress passed the 13th Amendment, which was ratified by the states in December 1865.
9 April 1865: Confederate commander, Robert E. Lee, surrendered to Union Lt. General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House, VA. 1939: After having been denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, America's world renowned African American operatic singer, Marion Anderson, sang at the Lincoln Memorial. The DAR's ill-tempered refusal is an excellent example of unintended consequences. Ms. Anderson's performance gained even greater, long-lasting worldwide acclaim.
Cryptozoology. Cryptozoology: the study of animals who existence is unproven. Lyrically, perhaps, it is a question of "Is you or is you ain't?" (Words from a blues song by Louis Jordan and Billy Austin.)
In this HCN story, Laura Krantz wonders about "Big Foot," Sasquatch. She remembers how man has for ages read about Gilgamesh’s city-state, Beowulf’s mead hall. A friend, Robert Michael Pyle, lepidopterist, naturalist, and poet, told her, “I think we need (Bigfoot) in a deep-seated psychological way, because of our evolutionary origins...I think it goes all the way back to what we came from.”
Krantz notes, "Half-wild creatures have been feeding the human imagination for thousands of years. We have evolved with them, and away from them. In the grand scheme of human evolution, we rarely lived without monsters at the edges...Bigfoot — that tether to a primitive state — is a reminder that the world is big and wide and wild. wilderness — a place where the unexplained still happens."
One can only wonder, "Just what's out there," gazing at the fantastic, other worldly images from Hubble. Those weirdly wondrous pictures of galaxies, stars, nebulae, black holes.
A true teenage gift. From the editor of Tuesday's CSM email daily.
[T]he story I couldn’t let pass today was about a robotics team in Minnesota. Their gift: Freedom for a 2-year-old boy.America for sale? In Foreign Affairs, David Klion says, "Failure at the center has left the United States up for sale to the highest bidder....[He asks,] How did a decadent ruling class become a national security risk, an existential threat to the American empire?"
A group of high schoolers accepted the challenge of building a low-cost wheelchair for a toddler with mobility issues. The result is way cooler than what you might imagine.
The Farmington, Minnesota, teenagers hacked an electric toy car, rewired it and rewrote the controller code, added a custom seat, and built a joystick with a 3D printer.
Little Cillian Jackson doesn’t walk – now he flies around the house.
His parents describe it as the gift of choice and independence. “When he gets in his car, he will consciously stop and look at a doorknob or a light switch or all of these things he’s never had time to explore,” says Tyler Jackson. And his mom, Krissy, tells CNN, “It really helped his discovery and curiosity.... Having the car has really given him the agency to make choices on his own.”
These teens love competing in robotics events. But they learned innovation is most rewarding when it’s about people. Freshman Alex Treakle says that when he saw Cillian try the car for the first time, “The joy on his face really made my entire year.”
African American columnist Leonard Pitts: Why today, seemingly, we are not Americans first, comments by Barack Obama (2004) and Beto O'Rourke (2019) not withstanding.
Stolen wild space. HCN reports that then-Secretary of the Interior Zinke set in motion the intrusion on some of America's/the world's most pristine spaces, the little known Izembek’s wilderness in AK's Aleutians. It was an unpublished land swap concluded with the "Aleut Natives so their cannery town of King Cove can build the final 12 miles of a 37-mile gravel road to the Cold Bay Airport. In exchange, the federal government gets an equal amount of Aleut land."
The Aleuts first said the road was needed to haul fish, but, when they got nowhere, changed their story to that of medical necessity.
Tech "colonization." Fewer affordable housing units, skyrocketing home prices; increasing homelessness. It is not happening just in Silicon Valley; it is becoming a nationwide, and worldwide problem. A grassroots movement recently blocked NYC giveaways to Amazon in the borough of Queens (NYC), as was also the case in Berlin, Germany.
House (of Commons) Speaker. It quite a difference between being Nancy Pelosi (Speaker, US House of Representatives) and John Bercow (British House of Commons).
Border disorder. Given the news of the president's wholesale cleaning of DHS, it is not surprising that others are weighing in. From the Guardian is this piece by the former British foreign secretary, David Miliband comments about President Trump's penchant for "manfuactured crisis."
Brexit chutzpah: Thanks to the internet, the whole world can watch as the Brexit proposal of Prime Minister May is dissected and debated in the British House of Commons -- it is their CSpan. In utter dismay, the author of one such failed alternative simply saw no other choice: he publicaly resigned from the Conservative party and walked to other side of the chamber, or as we would say, he crossed the aisle.
Mass transit, then and now. This link provides interesting graphics and statistics (from both the US and Canada) to illustrate how our present day transit problems might not be as great if only we had kept what we had in the past.
The future: 5 things you should want to know about. Stephen Walt wants to know:
- China's future trajectory?
- How good are America's cyber capabilities?
- What is going to happen to the EU?
- How many states will go nuclear in the next 20 years?
- Who will win the debate on U.S. grand strategy?
Ballot initiatives. The initiative and referendum came out of the west and continue to be popular today. "By the 1920s, some two dozen states had adopted citizen-led ballot measures, allowing voters to legalize everything from women’s suffrage to an eight-hour workday. The practice was especially robust in the West; even today, 60% of all ballot initiatives come from Arizona, California, Colorado, North Dakota, Oregon and Washington....[and spiked at 71 in 2016]...t[T]he reasons for the spike boil down to 'voter unrest or dissatisfaction with state legislators.'”
Many legislators are fighting back by repealing voter proffered proposals. For example, [s]heriffs in 20 Washington counties are refusing to enforce gun regulations that voters overwhelmingly passed, calling them unconstitutional." Sheriffs in CO have announced similar views. Court cases are certain to follow.
Chernobyl cover-up. As the world considers using nuclear power as a solution in halting atmospheric warming, it should consider the past. In 1986, Operation Cyclone was initiated by the USSR leaders to save cities in Russia, especially Moscow, from the clouds heavy with radioactive waste that were drifting towards Moscow after the Chernobyl disaster. Soviet bombers shot silver iodide crystals into clouds precipitating radioactive rain -- over southern Belarus, a Soviet republic; Moscow was saved. Belorussians and others all over Europe paid the price.
As researchers monitored Chernobyl radioactivity, they made a troubling discovery. Only half of the caesium-137 they detected came from Chernobyl. The rest had already been in the Cumbrian soils; deposited there during the years of nuclear testing and after the 1957 fire at the Windscale plutonium plant.One has to assume there were similar, worldwide downwind results from any nuclear testing sites.
Socialism. This story from HCN notes that once upon a time, in the dark days of the 1930's Great Depression, "...nationalizing forests was labeled ‘socialist.'" Of course, today many Americans and foreign visitors revel in the forests' beauty. Currently, the so-called "Green New Deal" has stirred the forest-floor dust. Adam Soward recounts the dire times of the great depression and those concurrent early days of environmentalism. The current concern is not that of the Great Depression, but the planet's rapidly changing climate and growing economic inequalities.
Crony capitalism, e.g. the Jones Act (1920). Mr. Will explores both the origins and present day results of an act that long ago ceased to be relevant -- unless you are a business owner looking for an advantage and are willing to disregard how it adversely affects your country and fellow citizens. A small part of the swamp that then-candidate Trump promised to drain!
For example: "A hog farmer in North Carolina purchases corn feed from Canada rather than Iowa because delivery costs make the Iowa corn uncompetitive [sic]. A Hawaiian rancher flies cattle to West Coast feedlots and slaughterhouses to avoid Jones Act shipping costs." The list goes on and on.
Thank you for reading. These closing quotes come from the end of the Economist's "Expresso" morning email.
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. Maya Angelou (Today, perhaps, Ms. Angelou would add "she?" The saddest fact of life right now is that science gathers knowleddge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov
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