Obsidian Wings

cantor's out

by russell

Eric Cantor lost his primary to economics professor David Brat.  Cantor spent about $5M, Brat about $200K.

What does this mean (if anything)?

Is it a demonstration of the ongoing vitality of the Tea Party movement?

Proof that money doesn't always prevail, even in Washington DC?

Evidence that people around Richmond VA really, really don't want any more Mexicans in the US?

Is Cantor the victim of a "throw the bums out" mentality, regardless of who the "bums" are?

Your thoughts, please.

Mnemonics for Christian denominations

by Doctor Science

The Sprogs were saying how difficult it is to keep track of the differences between Christian denominations, especially when you're raised Jewish in a community with no real religious majority and a plurality of Catholics. They have a good sense for "what's a Catholic", from my relatives, but Protestants confuse them.

Sprog the Younger thinks that there should be some kind of mnemonic or acrostic or something for Protestant denominations. I told her the only one I know:

a Methodist is a Baptist with shoes
a Presbyterian is a Methodist who's gone to college
an Episcopalian is a Presbyterian who lives off their investments

Variants of this saying have been around for well over a hundred years, but it's by no means a complete survey. When I look at the list of the largest protestant denominations I realize my own ignorance:

1. Southern Baptist Convention: 16.2 million members
2. The United Methodist Church: 7.8 million members
3. The Church of God in Christ: 5.5 million members
4. National Baptist Convention: 5.0 million members
5. Evangelical Lutheran Church, U.S.A.: 4.5 million members
6. National Baptist Convention of America: 3.5 million members
7. Assemblies of God: 2.9 million members
8. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.): 2.8 million members
9. African Methodist Episcopal Church: 2.5 million members
10. National Missionary Baptist Convention of America: 2.5 million members
11. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS): 2.3 million members
12. The Episcopal Church: 2.0 million members
13. Churches of Christ: 1.6 million members
14. Pentecostal Assemblies of the World: 1.5 million members
15. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: 1.4 million members

I have no idea how to distinguish many of these, especially the various and very large African-American denominations. Not to mention that, as Fred Clark was just pointing out, Baptists aren't supposed to be a denomination at all -- their core principle is supposed to be soul freedom and the autonomy of individual churches. That's why the organization of Southern Baptists is called a convention: it's supposed to be individual churches in mutual agreement, not a top-down hierarchy. Well, that used to be the idea.

Anyway, do any of you know any mnemonic or list or saying or ditty that a Jewish girl can use to keep all those Protestants straight? How do those of you who are Protestants keep the other kinds of Protestants straight? No-one has much trouble identifying Catholics or remembering that they're The Ones With The Pope.

This Family Tree of (Christian) Denominations is actually very handy, at least for my brain. Found here, citing: Rose Book of Bible Charts, Maps, and Time Lines (Torrance, CA: Rose, 2005), 179.

What I mean by Swedish Pancakes

by Doctor Science

Wednesday food blogging falls on a Sunday (night) this week.

This week our "Family-sized" share, which we split with another family, included another 8 quarts (!!) of strawberries. They were so abundant and delicious that Sprog the Younger and I picked our share's worth in about 1/2 an hour. One thing about joining a CSA: you develop *serious* respect for field agricultural laborers. Even "easy pickings" is friggin' hard work.

After StY and I got back from picking on Tuesday, we were very hot and filthy. We made something pretty simple for dinner, and used up a couple quarts of strawberries right then:

This is what our family calls "Swedish pancakes". It's not at all what most people mean by that: these aren't super-thin and delicate, they're robust and filling:

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• 1c eggs
• 1c milk
• 1c flour
• butter for frying

The way we eat, the basic recipe feeds only 2-3 people, so we doubled it and had some leftover for breakfast the next day.

Beat the eggs together with a fork until well-blended. Mix in the milk. Mix the flour into the wet ingredients. When it's well-mixed, cover it and stick it into the fridge while you cut up your strawberries.

When it's time to eat, take the batter out and add a little milk if you think it needs it -- the batter should be thinner than regular pancake batter, but thicker than crepe batter. Heat an 8-10in frying pan until it's hot enough for pancakes, then lightly smear some butter on it -- I use a frozen stick of butter to paint the bottom of the pan. When the butter foam subsides, pour a ladleful of batter around the bottom of the pan, then tilt the pan so it's evenly covered. You might want to turn the heat down to medium. Cook until the top surface is mostly dry, flip it with a spatula, cook it just 30 seconds or less until the former-top surface is lightly speckled with brown, and take it out of the pan. You can stack up a bunch of pancakes until you have enough to feed everyone.

Put on the table with sliced strawberries, more butter, maple syrup, Nutella, powdered sugar, lemon slices, or whatever each person fancies. Make someone else cook the second round.

Gove and May open weekend thread

by liberal japonicus

A little late with this, but interesting (at least to me). Two of Cameron's ministers, Teresa May and Michael Gove, are involved in a nice catfight. Both being Tories, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but the use of government infrastructure for evaluating education (Ofsted) illustrates how these evaluations can not only be used for political infighting (May is supposed to want to replace Cameron, so there is a bit about staking out a leadership position, and Gove seems like a total berk to me) and how they can be manipulated by the questions one asks. 

This is D Day, the BBC announced at twelve. "This is the day."

by Doctor Science

I have no friends or relatives who were at D-Day, but I'm sure many of you do. Talk about them, please.

One of Robert Capa's literally death-defying photos from the first wave assault on Omaha Beach. If this doesn't give you chills I don't understand you at all. It's not just the shaky image, the men struggling through the water, the camera angle that tells you Capa had no time to set up a neat shot -- it's the French shore, looming ahead fatefully in the dawn's early light.

James Holland has a good article at CNN exploding the myths of the Normandy landings:

1. MYTH: D-Day was predominantly an American operation
2. MYTH: American forces were ill-prepared
3. MYTH: The Allies became bogged down in Normandy
4. MYTH: German soldiers were better trained than their Allied counterparts
5. MYTH: The Germans had stronger tactical skills
6. MYTH: America and Britain got off lightly in World War II

The last one really surprised me, I confess:

Losses to frontline troops were proportionally worse during the 77-day Normandy campaign than they were during the major battles along the Western Front during World War I.

I mean, holy shit, that's horrific.

Overall, the BBC coverage seems better than what US "news" organizations are dishing out. I really wish I could listen to the BBC archival reports, but they seem to be blocked for non-UK computers. I particularly want to hear the first announcements, the ones Anne Frank listened to:

TUESDAY, JUNE 6, 1944
My dearest Kitty,

This is D Day, the BBC announced at twelve.
This is the day. The invasion has begun!

This morning at eight the British reported heavy bombing of Calais, Boulogne, Le Havre and Cherbourg, as well as Pas de Calais (as usual). Further, as a precautionary measure for those in the occupied territories, everyone living within a zone of twenty miles from the coast was warned to prepare for bombardments. Where possible, the British will drop pamphlets an hour ahead of time.

According to the German news, British paratroopers have landed on the coast of France. "British landing craft are engaged in combat with German naval units," according to the BBC.

Conclusion reached by the Annex while breakfasting at nine: this is a trial landing, like the one two years ago in Dieppe.

BBC broadcast in German, Dutch, French and other languages at ten: The invasion has begun! So this is the "real" invasion.

.....

A huge commotion in the Annex! Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation? The liberation we've all talked so much about, which still seems too good, too much of a fairy tale ever to come true? Will this year, 1944, bring us victory? We don't know yet. But where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again. We'll need to be brave to endure the many fears and hardships and the suffering yet to come. It's now a matter of remaining calm and steadfast, of gritting our teeth and keeping a stiff upper lip! France, Russia, Italy, and even Germany, can cry out in agony, but we don't yet have that right!

Oh, Kitty, the best part about the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way. Those terrible Germans have oppressed and threatened us for so long that the thought of friends and salvation means everything to us! Now it's not just the Jews, but Holland and all of occupied Europe. Maybe, Margot says, I can even go back to school in October or September.

Yours, Anne M. Frank

D-Day, like any past war, is (for me at least) an Aristotelian tragedy, evoking pity and horror -- though also the hope of eucatastrophe, a long-for success or reversal of fortune.

Well-illustrated by the photo spread at The Atlantic, showing Scenes From D-Day, Then and Now. The present-day scenes seem banal, pointlessly placid by comparison with the drama of the invasion -- but that peace is what the invasion was for, that's why they fought.

At the end of The Return of the King (book, of course), Frodo says:

I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

Many died at D-Day, or received wounds of body and mind that never truly healed. Many, many others, like Anne Frank, took hope from it but died before it came to term.

Composite photo by Sergey Larenkov of Omaha Beach, D-Day 1944, with the beach in 2010 and the monument Les Braves.

Yuri Kochiyama RIP

by liberal japonicus

Yuri Kochiyama, Japanese-American activist, passed away on Sunday, and it provides an interesting moment of synchronicity in our discussions about reparations. She was with Malcolm X when he was assassinated and was one of the main movers for the reparations for those who were involved in the Japanese-American internment. Her memoir Passing it On, is highly recommended.

Will try to do a real open thread tomorrow AM, unless someone beats me to it.

This seems rather ill considered

by Ugh

I'm sure folk have read about the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from Taliban custody in exchange for transferring five Taliban mutant super-terrorists (worse than Magneto!), formerly held at Gitmo, to Qatar.  And likely the assorted related and unrelated right-wing outrage that has accompanied the exchange, most of it predictably misdirected, offensive, and/or irrelevant.

What is of interest is that the Obama Administration is running around openly admitting, it seems to me, that it violated the 30 day notification requirement of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 for transferring folk out of Gitmo.  (text of the law is here).

Of course, it would be rather unseemly for the President to run around openly violating duly enacted statutes of the US of A (BURN THE TAPES BARACK!), so there must be an attendant explanation, justification, legal fig leaf, thin reed, etc., lest we worry.  And aha!  There is!  To wit:

delaying the transfer in order to provide the 30-day notice would interfere with the Executive’s performance of two related functions that the Constitution assigns to the President: protecting the lives of Americans abroad and protecting U.S. soldiers. Because such interference would significantly alter the balance between Congress and the President, and could even raise constitutional concerns, we believe it is fair to conclude that Congress did not intend that the Administration would be barred from taking the action it did in these circumstances.

"Two related functions the Constitution assigns to the President."  Neither of which, of course, are specifically listed in the Constitution.  Presumably they're referring to the Commander-in-Chief clause and possibly the whole taking care that the laws be faithfully executed thing (query which way the latter cuts in this case), the former having become a handy catchall for Presidents of both parties.  Standing against this rather flimsy justification (to put the best light on it), are the specifically listed powers of Congress, which include the power to "make rules concerning captures on land and water" and "make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces."  Seems that that is exactly what Congress did with the 30 day requirement (however stupid and counterproductive).

But apparently, the Administration really really had to:

the Administration determined that the notification requirement should be construed not to apply to this unique set of circumstances, in which the transfer would secure the release of a captive U.S. soldier and the Secretary of Defense, acting on behalf of the President, has determined that providing notice as specified in the statute could endanger the soldier’s life.

I would have hoped that there was a better legal justification than those two paragraphs, but it appears not to be on offer.  Maybe in a few years we will be allowed to see the OLC memo (although I'm guessing there isn't one).  Anyway, not the biggest deal in the world but not ideal either.

When "slut" wasn't much of an insult

by Doctor Science

Over the weekend, I was at a party with both young people (in their 20s) and people of my generation (50s), mostly graduates of an Ivy League institution. We were talking about Olga Khazan's recent Atlantic article, There's No Such Thing as a Slut, which several of us had read. It's about something sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura Hamilton had discovered when they were embedded observers in a women's "party" dorm at a flagship Midwestern state university, research that became their book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality.

All but five or six of the women practiced "slut-shaming," or denigrating the other women for their loose sexual mores. But they conflated their accusations of "sluttiness" with other, unrelated personality traits, like meanness or unattractiveness. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure.

If you want to make a young woman feel bad, pulling out the term ‘slut' is a sure fire way to do it, Armstrong said. "It's 'she isn't one of us, we don't like her and she's different.'"

The strange thing is, neither I -- nor any of the other women (or men) of my generation in the discussion -- remember "slut" being used much at all in our youth; the 1970s, roughly. One man remembered reading the word, and thinking that it sounded kind of old-fashioned and not really insulting, sort of like "trollop".

The younger generation found this kind of boggling. So I went over to Google's Ngram viewer, and it was immediately clear why "slut" sounded old-fashioned to my ears:


Just zooming in on the period from the mid-1950s to 2008 (as far as Google's corpus goes), we see that my high school years (the early 70s) were a comparative low point for the use of "slut", and it only really took off in popularity in the late 80s, when "slutty" first makes it to the chart:


I honestly have no idea how to explain this. Is resurgence of "slut" part of an anti-feminist backlash? Did it displace some other term for "woman who has the wrong kind of sex"? If that is indeed the meaning in question:

One of the most striking things Armstrong learned was that, despite the pervasiveness of slut-shaming, there was no cogent definition of sluttiness, or of girls who were slutty, or even evidence that the supposedly slutty behavior had transpired. In the study, she notes that though "women were convinced that sluts exist" and worked to avoid the label, some of their descriptions of sluttiness were so imprecise (‘‘had sex with a guy in front of everybody") that they seemed to be referring to some sort of apocrypha—"a mythical slut."

The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut was or no one knows what you have to do to be that, she told me. "It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them."

Perhaps no recent example of slut-shaming is as horrifying as the shooting in Santa Barbara last week. Before killing seven people in his rampage, Elliot Rodger vowed to "slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde slut"— all while complaining that those very same "sluts" refused to sleep with him.

To Armstrong, the shooting highlighted that "slut" is simply a misogynistic catch-all, a verbal utility knife that young people use to control women and create hierarchies. There may be no real sluts, in other words, but there are real and devastating consequences to slut-shaming.

Sprog the Younger and her friends tell me that they don't use it in their (marching band, robotics club, mixed race and income) circle, but that they mostly hear it used by upper-class white girls.[1] Armstrong and Hamilton also saw a significant economic or class component to "slut" in their work. Their study population fell into two groups, one richer and the other poorer:

The two classes of women also defined "sluttiness" differently, but neither definition had much to do with sexual behavior. The rich ones saw it as "trashiness," or anything that implied an inability to dress and behave like an upper-middle-class person.

I wonder if it's possible for the increasing use of "slut" to somehow be a side effect of America's growing economic equality.

Defoe's Moll Flanders, succinctly summarized by Three Panel Book Review.

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1. The school district is more diverse racially than economically: it's only 85% white, but only about 2% of the students get free or reduced-price lunch (a good measure of poverty).