There are special elections all the time, mostly at the state level. The news is full of the Moore vs. Strange race, which isn’t just strange because Strange is in it. You all know about that. But what you may not know about is the interesting victory, also yesterday, of Kari Lerner in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire politics are above-average complex at the state level, so I won’t dwell on context. But this is a New Hampshire state house race in a district normally held by Republicans. Lerner is a centrist Democrat. She won 39 votes, and a third party candidate, a Libertarian, won by 41. So, one could say that the right wing won by one vote but split the ticket. Nonetheless, a Republican house seat flipped Democratic.
The pattern has been similar in races at the state and national level across the country. There is some number, which I suspect is predicted by some other number, by which Democrats do better, even if they don’t win. So, for example, in a district where Republicans usually win 66-34, and where Trump got 65% of the vote, the special election will still have the Republican winning but in a close race, like 52-48. In the case of this New Hampshire district, Trump did get 65% of the vote, so it is pretty deep red, and the race came out virtually even (with the Democrat happening to win).
At some point we will have to start to dissect this dynamic and predict the color of states and federal districts over the next two years. Yess, my precious spreadsheet, we wills do thisss…..
Earlier today, Minnesota Gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto released her energy transition plan. It an ambitious plan that puts together several elements widely considered necessary to make any such plan work, then puts them on steroids to make it work faster. To my knowledge, this is the first major plan to be proposed since the recent dual revelations that a) the world is going to have to act faster than we had previously assumed* and b) the US Federal government will not be helping.
Here’s the elevator speech version: Minnesota residents get around five thousand dollars cash (over several years), monetary incentives to upgrade all their energy using devices from furnaces to cars, some 80,000 new, high paying jobs, and in the end, the state is essentially fossil fuel free.
Scientists are in the business of trying to understand the world. Exploring commonplace phenomena, they have uncovered some of nature’s deepest laws. We can in turn apply these laws to our own lives, to better grasp and enhance our performance in daily activities as varied as cooking, home improvement, sports—even dunking a doughnut! This book makes the science of the familiar a key to opening the door for those who want to know what scientists do, why they do it, and how they go about it.
Following the routine of a normal day, from coffee and breakfast to shopping, household chores, sports, a drink, supper, and a bath, we see how the seemingly mundane can provide insight into the most profound scientific questions. Some of the topics included are the art and science of dunking; how to boil an egg; how to tally a supermarket bill; the science behind hand tools; catching a ball or throwing a boomerang; the secrets of haute cuisine, bath (or beer) foam; and the physics of sex. Fisher writes with great authority and a light touch, giving us an entertaining and accessible look at the science behind our daily activities.
Wildlife of Ecuador: A Photographic Field Guide to Birds, Mammals, Reptiles, and Amphibians by naturalist Andrés Vásquez Noboa, witih photography byablo Cervantes Daza, covers mainland Ecuador (but by “mainland” we also mean ocean mammals). Focusing only on non-piscine verts, you will need to go elsewhere for your inverts and plants and such. But you get the point. This book covers most of what you are looking for when you are out in the wild looking for animals.
This is not a comprehensive guide, but covers the most frequently seen animals, totaling to 350 distributed across over 400 plates.
There is a good chance that if you are an American or European going to Ecuador, you are visiting the Galapagos, in which you will want to check outg Wildlife of the Galápagos: Second Edition. A rather broad gulf of evolutionary change and outlandish biogeography separates Ecuador from its famous island possessions. But there is a good chance that if you are going to teh Galapagos, you are making at lease one nature related stop, so this is the book for you.
This is a well done nicely bound standard field guide of field guide size and format with animal info and excellent photos on the same pages, and organized by taxonomic category (not all field guides are!). You might think a tiny country like Ecuador does not need range maps, but the topography is highly variable with conditions running from lowland moist to alpin-ish and from wet to dry, so there are, indeed, range maps as needed. And, that ecological diversity is explained in the preface material.
I highly recommend this book for travelers to the region.
If you want more ecology and evoluitonary biology with your field guides, check out my review of the Neotropical Companion, here.
We know it simply as “the pill,” yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig’s masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid.
Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.
Investigating numerical misinformation, Daniel Levitin shows how mishandled statistics and graphs can give a grossly distorted perspective and lead us to terrible decisions. Wordy arguments on the other hand can easily be persuasive as they drift away from the facts in an appealing yet misguided way. The steps we can take to better evaluate news, advertisements, and reports are clearly detailed. Ultimately, Levitin turns to what underlies our ability to determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. He grapples with the limits of what we can and cannot know. Case studies are offered to demonstrate the applications of logical thinking to quite varied settings, spanning courtroom testimony, medical decision making, magic, modern physics, and conspiracy theories.
This urgently needed book enables us to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. As Levitin attests: Truth matters. A post-truth era is an era of willful irrationality, reversing all the great advances humankind has made. Euphemisms like “fringe theories,” “extreme views,” “alt truth,” and even “fake news” can literally be dangerous. Let’s call lies what they are and catch those making them in the act.
Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec, Maria Popova.
Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates “the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life,” in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical. Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year’s set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives—including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists, correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.
This is not my favorite book, because I think the subtitle should be “No, it doesn’t Steve” … but How the Mind Works is not without merit, and Steve Pinker is a great writer. Anyway, I thought you’s like to know that it is now available on Kindle for two bucks.
I know a lot of you are interested in local elections. There are three special elections coming up Tuesday that you might want to know about, and possibly lend some support to, or at least, watch. The candidates are shown above. They are:
I usually write my annual back to school post earlier than this, but I was distracted by various events. There are three themes here.
1) You are a science teacher and I have some stuff for you.
2) You have a student in a school and you want to support the school’s science teacher.
3) You have a student-offspring or elsewise and are looking for a cool back to school gift.
First, for themes 1 and 2, a mixture of traditional back to school blog posts and some items that may be useful and happen to be on sale at the moment so now’s your chance.
My For Teachers Page has posts providing some science content in evolutionary biology (about Natural Selection and some other topics)
On the same page are essays on teaching philosophy, supporting life science teachers, and evolution and creationism in the classroom, including this famous video.
Books that teachers might find helpful. Consider sending your kids in to school with one of them, focusing on evoluton-creationism and climate change-denial:
This book should be on the shelf or in the classroom for every teacher in science, or even social science. It is essentially the highly digestable (and illustration rich) version of the IPCC report on the scientific basis for climate change, written by one of that report’s famous authors: Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change
And finally, how to not get caught plagiarizing, and what does that pillow that says “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops” really mean? Not what you think!
And now for the fun part, the toys. Amazon is having a huge sale on refurbished devices that you may want to have. I assume they are getting ready for the holidays or something. Go to this link to see what they are
I myself got a Kindle Paperwhite E-reader a while back, and I love it. Then, for her birthday, I got one for Julia. I recommend starting out with the one with “special offers” which are basically ads that are not there when you are reading. The device is cheaper this way, and if the ads really annoy you, you can pay them off to upgrade to the no ad version.
I’m seriously thinking about getting Amanda one of these refurb-Kindle paperwhites. She likes the Kindle just enough for a refurbished one, maybe not enough for a new one…
At the very least, when you meet your teacher at the beginning of the school year, say to them what I say or something like it. “If you ever get hassled by anyone — parent, administration, other teachers — about teaching real science, let me know, I’ll be your best ally. Of course, if you are a science denier or a creationist so the situation is turned around, let me know, I’ll be your worst nightmare …” Then kind of pat them on the shoulder, flip your cape to one side, get on your motorcycle, and drive off.
This is a picture of some men.
Since they are men, they have some abilities. They can, for example, knock each other over, and they can play with balls. This is what men do, and this is what these men can do.
This is a picture of some professional NFL foodball players.
They are also men. They can also knock each other over, and they can also play with balls. But the NFL football players are much better at knocking each other over, and you wouldn’t believe how great they are at playing with balls.
They are NFL enhanced. They are trained, embiggened with special diets, and they are clad with armor and vibrant, often scary, colors.
This is a picture of a hurricane from 1938.
It was a big one; It did lots of damage when it slammed into New England and New York.
A hurricane is a large storm that forms in the tropics, and sometimes hits land. The energy from a hurricane comes from a combination of the earth’s spin, trade winds, and so on, but mainly, from the heat on the surface of the sea. The rain that falls from the hurricane also comes mainly from the sea surface indirectly, and any water that evaporates into the atmosphere.
This is a picture of Harvey the Hurricane, the remnants of which are still circulating around in Texas.
Harvey is a lot like the 1938 hurricane, in that it formed in the tropics, in the Atlantic, and was a big spinny thing. It got its energy in the same way, and formed in the same way, and both slammed into land and scared the crap out of everybody.
But they are different, the 1938 Hurricane and Harvey the Hurricane. How are they different? Have a look at this map:
The pairs of photos above show “then” and “now” for two different things (men and hurricanes). This map shows both then and now in the same graphic. This map represents the current sea surface temperature anomalies, meaning, how much warmer or cooler the current sea temperatures are compared to the same time of year but at some time in the past, averaged over a long period, in this case, from 1971-2000. Global warming was well underway during that period, so present sea surface temperature readings that are above that baseline are not only high but are actually very high, because the baseline is high.
In this map, red is more, blue is less. Look at all the nearly ubiquitous more-ness in sea surface temperatures around the world. That causes the atmosphere across the entire globe to potentially contain much more water vapor than it could have contained during that that baseline period. Look at the sea surface temperature anomalies for the gulf of Mexico, where Harvey formed. They are high. This means that any hurricane that formed over that extra warm water will be stronger, and any tropical storm system that occurs pretty much anywhere on this map (or round the other side of the Earth as well, for that matter) will contain more water, than it would if it existed and all else was equal several decades ago.
This is a picture of a Unicorn.
A unicorn poops rainbows and pees mimosas. Or so I’m told. This is another view of Harvey the Hurricane.
What is the difference between the unicorn and Harvey? Harvey is real, and the unicorn is not.
I won’t quote you or give you links. Why? Because I find this whole thing a bit too embarrassing. But here is the thing. Otherwise intelligent and well informed individuals have stated in various outlets, including major media, and including twitter, that it is simply inappropriate to claim that Harvey the Hurricane is in any way global warming enhanced.
This is wrong. There is no such thing as a storm of any kind that is not a function of the current climatology. The current climatology has widespread and persistent, and in many cases alarmingly high, sea surface temperature anomalies. There will not be a tropical storm, including hurricanes, that escape the physics and poop out rainbows and pee mimosas. They will all be real. They will all have greater power and more moisture than they otherwise would have, had they formed decades ago before the extreme global warming we have experience so far.
There was a time when Harvey was a rabbit, an invisible rabbit only seen by a delusional character in a movie, played by Jimmy Stewart. Today, we have Harvey the Unenhanced Storm, playing that role. It is a fiction, something seen by a few but that is no more real than the above depicted unicorn.
As I was writing this post, Michael Mann posted an item in the Guardian that makes this case.
Sea level rise attributable to climate change – some of which is due to coastal subsidence caused by human disturbance such as oil drilling – is more than half a foot (15cm) over the past few decades … That means the storm surge was half a foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more flooding and destruction.
… sea surface temperatures in the region have risen about 0.5C (close to 1F) over the past few decades from roughly 30C (86F) to 30.5C (87F), which contributed to the very warm sea surface temperatures (30.5-31C, or 87-88F).
… there is a roughly 3% increase in average atmospheric moisture content for each 0.5C of warming. Sea surface temperatures in the area where Harvey intensified were 0.5-1C warmer than current-day average … That means 3-5% more moisture in the atmosphere.
That large amount of moisture creates the potential for much greater rainfalls and greater flooding. The combination of coastal flooding and heavy rainfall is responsible for the devastating flooding that Houston is experiencing.
… there is a deep layer of warm water that Harvey was able to feed upon when it intensified at near record pace as it neared the coast….
Harvey was almost certainly more intense than it would have been in the absence of human-caused warming, which means stronger winds, more wind damage and a larger storm surge…
Mann mentions other effects as well, but I’ll let you go read them.
The extra heat at depth Mann mentions is now recognized as responsible for the extra bigness and badness of some other famous hurricanes as well, such as Katrina and Haiyan. Harvey might be a member of a small but growing class of hurricanes, deep-heat hurricanes I’ll call them for now, that simply did not exist prior to global warming of recent decades. Further research is needed on this, but that’s the direction we are heading.
Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth recently noted that “The human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so up to the total rainfall coming out of the storm,”
Aside from Michael Mann’s Guardian article, he has this facebook post making the same argument.
Harvey the Hurricane is real, and so was the 1938 Hurricane. Climate change enhancement of Harvey is real, but unicorns are not. Sadly.
I really thought we had stopped hearing this meme, that “you can never attribute a given weather event to climate change.” But, apparently not. That is a statement that is technically true in the same way that we can’t really attribute an Alberta Clipper (a kind of snow storm) to the spin of the Earth. Yet, somehow, the spin of the Earth is why Alberta Clippers come from Alberta. In other words, the statement is a falsehood that can never be evaluated because it is framed incorrectly. Here is the correct framing:
Climate is weather long term, and weather is climate here and now. The climate has changed. Ergo … you fill in the blank. Hit: Unicorns are not involved.
Many years ago I was working on a project that, if I recall correctly, used the basic idea of the mouse-elephant curve to test out some statistical feature of reality or some such thing. Or the reverse. Either way, the point is I was using the mouse-elephant curve data.
What is the mouse-elephant curve? This:
You take all the mammals from mouse to elephant, and plot their metabolic rate or, if you like, brain volume, or any other metric, against body mass. You may or may not log an axis. The final result is supposed to be a straight line that approximates all the points. Then, you can measure how “off” any given species is by calculating its residual, or, how far off the line it is. One well known outcome of this procedure is the term “relative brain size” which shows that humans have ginormous brains compared to everything else on the mouse-elephant curve, even though they do not have the largest absolute brain size. (Never mind that cebus monkeys have larger relative brains.)
Anyway, I was working on this and talking about it with my friend Mark Pagel who is a statistics expert and a biologist, and he said something like, “That’s OK, but this is all theoretical, the mouse-elephant curve is made up.”
“What ever do you mean,” I asked.
“The metabolic rate scales to mass the way it does because body surface area scales allometrically to mass, right?”
“Ah, right… so?”
“How many of the animals on the mouse elephant curve have ever been measured for body surface area?” he asked.
“Uh…. eleven?”
“Zero, I’d bet.”
And that is when I realized that we know noting about anything.
Think about this for a second. You can find decades old texts explaining that mammals use XY chromosome compliments to determine sex. But where was the database for all mammals that showed the karyotype for each species? Nowhere. No one had done that. We probably had humans, mice, all the other lab animals of which there are probably about a dozen species, and the farm animals, of which there are probably fewer than a dozen species. That might seem like a good sample, but almost every farm mammal is a bovid, then you add horses, then you add close relatives in the old world murid family, and some closely related primates. Who knows, maybe they had more than that. But there could easily have been some subset of mammals that had independently and subsequent to their split from other mammals evolved a different chromosomal system. (There actually are multiple systems in mammals if you count ALL the mammals, but I’m speaking here of placental mammals.)
OK, maybe that is not easy to imagine, but it is possible to imagine.
The thing is, when it comes to organismic biology, we have made a huge mistake. Lots of research was done on a relatively small number of species, then rather suddenly, the fields of ecology and organismic biology were sidelines and everything became genetics. Genetics is nice and all, but it is not possible to directly answer every single question with just genetics.
This is why I was happy to see the beginnings of a project to cat scan all the cats, and along with the cats, all the other vertebrates.
I quickly add that even though the project is billed as scanning all the verts, and has in its various forms been called “scan all the frogs” or “scan all the vertebrates” etc, it is not that at all. At most, this project will scan a large but incomplete sample of genera, not species. And it really is a problem that they are claiming that they are scanning everything when they simply are not, because this will cause people to think this job is getting done when it is not.
Also, they are scanning a minimal number in each group, and only the available museum specimens. Museum collections are notoriously biased and there may be other problems with 3D morphology as well. Ultimately, a really useful project will scan a full range of development, multiple individuals at each stage, both sexes, etc. And, of I’m sure the folks doing this project understand this. And, eventually this may get done.
I wonder if it will be possible to use these scans to develop surface area estimates for several species of mammal ranging in size from, say, a mouse to an elephant? Of course not … there are no preserved elephats, or for that matter, any large mammal, so all of those critters are not part of this “scan everything” project…. 🙁
Anyway,
The resulting 3D renderings will be uploaded to an existing digital depository, MorphoSource, created by Doug Boyer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where they will be freely available for research in fields such as comparative anatomy, evolution, developmental biology, and biomimetics.
You can find out more about the project by clicking here, and depending on if you have a subscription, get either a summary or a more detailed accounting.
One mean spirited decision intended to end the effort to end slavery led to one million dead and the end of slavery anyway.
I spent some time this weekend at a political event comparing prosecutors and other legal eagles, who were all hoping to get the job of Attorney General. They were Candidates General, I guess. Trump was mentioned, and somewhere along the line, Dred Scott was mentioned as well. I turned to a highly placed official sort of dude and said, “Did you know that Dred Scott lived in Minnesota?” He did not know that. So I asked a couple of other people if they knew, and they did not. Finally I found the smartest person in the room and she didn’t know either.
Gee, I thought, if you want to be the Attorney General of Minnesota and you are going to invoke the name of Dred Scott, you really ought to know that he lived just a few short miles away from where you are standing there invoking!
So I wrote this:
Dred ScottIn 1857, US Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that a person who is black and of African ancestry can never be thought of as an American citizen, and therefore, has no standing to bring a law suit in federal court. In the same decision, Taney determined that a previous act of Congress that prohibited slavery in most of the territory north of a certain latitude, in land that was in the United States but not in a given state, was unconstitutional. In so doing he decided and determined that the US Congress could not prohibit slavery.
This decision was made in response to a suit filed by a slave named Dred Scott, who lived for a while, during a very important part of his life, just south of the Twin Cities.
Roger TaneyMr. Scott had been born a slave in Missouri, but later lived in various non-slave territories, as one of his owners was in the military and moved around a lot. During that time, he met and married Harriet Robinson, who was also a slave. Mr. Scott was owned by a military doctor stationed at Fort Snelling, which had been built on Lakota-Dakota land known as B’Dote (or Bdote) near what is now Bloomington Minnesota, home of the Mall of America. Ms. Robinson’s owner was Lawrence Taliaferro, who was the fort’s Indian Agent. Since Taliaferro was a Justice of the Peace, it was he who both gave his slave the permission to marry her fiance, and it was he who performed the ceremony.
The basement quarters of the Scott family at Fort SnellingAt the time, Fort Snelling was in “Wisconsin Territory,” which is why, I suspect, Minnesotans by and large don’t know that Dred Scott lived here. Wisconsin Territory included parts of North and South Dakota, all of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and possibly tiny bits of adjoining lands. But if you come across a reference to Dred Scott in a history book, the word “Wisconsin” is right there, and Minnesotans think of the Green Bay Packers and move on.
Previous legal decisions, and a certain amount of common logic sprinkled with a sense of humanity, had already determined that a slave who then lived as a free person for a while got to be a free person for the rest of their lives. Since slavery was not legal in what was to eventually become Minnesota, and other territories in which Scott lived, he had a pretty solid legal case to make that he should be freed even after his owner moved him back into a slave state at a later time.
In order for Justice Taney to determine that Scott’s case was invalid, he had to create law that made the federal abolition of slavery in all non-state territories impossible, and to make all blacks non-citizens. Taney’s ruling was only the second time the Supreme Court had found an act of Congress unconstitutional, and of all the SCOTUS decisions ever made, this one had by far the greatest and most negative ultimate consequence.
Mr. Scott’s history is more complicated. There were changes in who owned him. He had tried to buy his freedom. He and his wife had children, including children born in non-slave territory. Abolitionists got involved. The Dred Scott vs. Sandford supreme court case, and all the legal events that preceded it, were major news at the time. The final result of Taney’s decision sealed the fate of the United States, set back civil rights by a century and a half, and contributed materially to the violent deaths of about a million people.
Fast forward to 1879.
From the time of the birth of the nation, but with greater intensity starting around 1830, and getting more and more intense in subsequent decades, the United States continuously wrestled with the issue of slavery. Abraham Lincoln had always thought slavery was bad, but he was enamored with the US Constitution and could see no easy direct way to make slavery illegal country-wide. He felt it would eventually die out as a practice, through a combination of legal and social changes.
But reducing or eliminating slavery had become an order of magnitude more difficult than it ever had to be because of Taney’s Supreme Court ruling. When Abraham Lincoln was elected to be president of the United States, slave owners felt that their ownership of other humans, and their right to spread that practice to the other sates simply by moving to them (with their property, their slaves) was threatened. This threat was sufficient that they assembled armies, caused their states to separate from the Union, and attacked the US Federal government with military force. The ensuing Civil War is the reason most of the previously mentioned million people died, but many others, blacks, have been killed before, during, and after the war by white supremacists. (This includes Union soldiers who were black, who were routinely killed on the spot when taken prisoner by Southern soldiers.)
After the war, there was a rapid and remarkable shift in society and politics in the south. Federal authority made it possible and relatively safe for southern Blacks to run for office and to vote in elections. Suddenly there were black faces in state legislatures and the US Congress.
But at the same time organizations like the Klu Klux Klan formed, and these organizations and their supporters infiltrated local and state governments. In some cases, they set up separate governments. On election day, in some jurisdictions, there were two voting boxes, and you could pick which one to cast your ballot in. The white supremacists had their vote, everyone else had a different vote, and when the results were different, the federal government would enforce the correct vote. At times, these disputes turned into small shooting wars, and were sometimes accompanied by random slaughter of blacks living in local communities.
Eventually the new fight over the old south fully evolved at the federal level and things got really strange.
In 1876, the United States had its most contentious election for president ever. Samuel Tilden, a Democrat (and thus of the party of the South) from New York (and thus maybe not so much from the party of the south) won 50.9% of the vote to Rutherford B. Hayes’ 47.9%. Hayes is credited with having had 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184.
Initially, however, the count was Tilden with 184 electoral votes, Hayes with 165, and 20 from that special category of votes that involved the multiple voting boxes and other shenanigans. The states with the bad votes were Florida (of course), Louisiana, and South Carolina (and there was a small problem in Oregon as well).
Eventually, a deal was struck. This deal was almost certainly illegal and extra constitutional, but even if that wasn’t the case, the deal was bad. But it is hard to say because the process and even details of the decisions made in the deal were kept secret and to this day we are not entirely sure what happened.
Rutherford Hayes, the Republican, was awarded all the messy votes, and became president. But, in return for keeping the Presidency out of the hands of the Party of Slavery, the federal authorities that were in the South keeping the white supremacists at bay, were withdrawn.
This is the beginning of the Jim Crow era, the era of terror and and harassment, hate and murder, bestowed by southern whites on southern blacks.
OK, fast forward to 1879 but for real this time, now that you have the context.
Slavery, a fight against slavery, Roger Taney personally ensures the continuation of slavery for a few, as well as the many, and produces the most bone-headed court decision ever, which is on the top list of three or four reasons that definitely led to the Civil War, followed by a lot of white supremacist whinging about, followed by the Jim Crow era.
And that is when art and antiquities collector William Walters (of the Walters Museum), who had hid out in Europe during the Civil War and seems to have been involved in about zero political activities as far as I can tell, paid for the erection of a monument to Roger Taney in Baltimore.
Go figure.
Now, fast forward a bit farther to March 6th, 2017. That is when this happened:
This is Charles Taney III, a great great grand whatever of Roger Taney, hugging Jynne Jackson, a great great grand whatever of Dred Scott, in front of the Taney statue. This photograph was taken at a ceremony in which Taney publicly apologized to Jackson.
Lynne M. Jackson winced outside the Maryland State House on Monday as she listened to Charlie Taney repeat some of the words his great-great-grand-uncle wrote in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision 160 years ago.
Black people cannot be U.S. citizens and have no rights except the ones that white people give them. Whites are superior to blacks. Slavery is legal.
“You can’t hide from the words that [Roger Brooke] Taney wrote,” Charlie Taney said, standing a few feet from a statue of his ancestor, who lived in Maryland and was chief justice of the nation’s highest court from 1836 until his death in 1864.
“You can’t run, you can’t hide, you can’t look away. You have to face them.”
Then Charlie Taney turned to Jackson, the great-great granddaughter of Scott, an enslaved man who sued for his freedom. He apologized — on behalf of his family, to the Scott family and to all African Americans, for the “terrible injustice of the Dred Scott decision.”
And just a few short months later. during the early morning hours of August 18th, as a result of civil unrest stemming from pro-Nazi and pro-white supremacist remarks made by President Donald Trump, that Taney statue was removed:
Many of the Southern statues related to the Civil War, or, I suppose,pro-slavery supreme court decisions, were installed at about the same time as the Taney sculpture. The motivation behind the Taney statue, and possibly, who was really behind it, are an enigma, but in many cases, statues or monuments were erected by local governments under pressure (from within or elsewhere) by organizations like the KKK or other post war white supremacist groups and individuals. These statues were put up after the election of 1876 and the start of the Jim Crow era and their erection was very much part of that social movement.
A second wave of statue building and memorializing of things Southern happened during the 20th century Civil Rights Era. At this time, many schools were named after southern notables.
So at the start of Jim Crow, blacks living in southern cities were served up a reminder of their place in southern society. During the Civil Rights Era, black students were served up a reminder of their place in southern society, during the period of forced integration of schools.
No wonder so many northerners require southerns to prove that they are not a) assholes or b) stupid before giving them a break. Considering that our least racists and overall best presidents have come from the South, and Donald Trump comes from Queens, New York, northerners should give southerners more of a break. But we can do that while at the same time noting that there are a lot of people in this country that don’t deserve anyone’s respect because of their hateful views.
Meanwhile, in Bloomington, MN, you can find a memorial to Dred Scott, as well as a Dred Scott miniature golf course, a playground, and a car repair place.
I’d tell you what the plaques in Bloomington say, but I can’t find the text. I will visit the park soon and report back, it is not too far from me.
Meanwhile, if you live in or near the Twin Cities, get over to Fort Snelling and visit the place where Harriet and Dred lived. There is some interpretive history there, and the rest of the historic site is pretty interesting too.
Muslims must take the blame for all things done by anyone linked to an extreme Islamic group or ideology. Christians have nothing to do with anything, they were just standing there minding their own beeswax.
The video below was fixed by Media Matters for America thusly:
In a notably hypocritical segment on Fox & Friends, the hosts and their guest, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, attacked media outlets that called on Christian leaders to denounce white supremacy and the recent violence in Charlottesville, VA. Fox & Friends highlighted articles that noted that many white evangelical leaders have been silent since white supremacists in Charlottesville attacked counter-protesters on August 12 and that historically many Christians and Christian organizations have enabled systemic racism, from slavery to Jim Crow and into the current era. Co-host Pete Hegseth asked why the articles were “trying to make that link” and “rush[ing] to say” that “pastors or churches … are to blame.” Fellow co-host Abby Huntsman said that “people are pointing fingers” and “you have some journalists that are blaming white Christians.” And Brody claimed that “the fix is in, if you will, against evangelical Christians, white evangelical Christians in this country.”
Is it because it wasn’t a very big attack, and no one was killed or injured? The FBI has determined that it was an explosive device that blew up at the Bloomington Islamic Center.
I’m reminded of the attacks on Secretary Clinton, by the likes of Congressman Nunes, about ambiguity in the identification of an attack as “terrorist” during the very throes of the event. Will Nunes hold Trump to the same standard over Bloomington? Will Nunes even give Bloomington a second thought? A first thought?
Speaking of Nunes (who is the guy who tried to derail the House investigation of Trumpskygate), has anyone ever figured out if his supposed Russian connection is for real? I remember it coming out from somewhat questionable sources, but at the time it was never really put down. Probably nothing.
By the way, pro tip for would be hate-crime committers and terrorists: Bloomington MN is the city most closely associated with the Minneapolis St Paul International Airport (MSP), and Bloomington is the home of the Mall of America. In this post-9/11 world, you can bet that the Blomington Police are more than average equipped to deal with this sort of thing. You’ve got to be some kind of a dumb-ass to attack at site of any kind in Bloomington.
right now in Kindle format for two bucks
by naturalist Andrés Vásquez Noboa, witih photography byablo Cervantes Daza, covers mainland Ecuador (but by “mainland” we also mean ocean mammals). Focusing only on non-piscine verts, you will need to go elsewhere for your inverts and plants and such. But you get the point. This book covers most of what you are looking for when you are out in the wild looking for animals. 
. A rather broad gulf of evolutionary change and outlandish biogeography separates Ecuador from its famous island possessions. But there is a good chance that if you are going to teh Galapagos, you are making at lease one nature related stop, so this is the book for you. 
by Jonathan Eig
by Daniel J. Levitin
by Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec, Maria Popova.
is not without merit, and Steve Pinker is a great writer. Anyway, I thought you’s like to know that it is now available on Kindle for two bucks.
by Genie Scott
a while back, and I love it. Then, for her birthday, I got one for Julia. I recommend starting out with the one with “special offers” which are basically ads that are not there when you are reading. The device is cheaper this way, and if the ads really annoy you, you can pay them off to upgrade to the no ad version.
, for