#which of course for a wealthy privileged man in his early 20s is not a lot!

[jamesscarstairs]

as a true and obsessive logan girl, i do agree that his lack of passion and his lack of drive does slightly defeat the purpose of his argument. however, i don’t think that he’s forced into this career because he’s lazy. i think his passionless pursuit of anything other than partying and drinking is simply a byproduct of an oppressive and entirely dysfunctional family dynasty.

it’s repeatedly made clear that he’s a damn good writer (unfortunate that his dad is a big newspaper guy!). he’s talented. and we know this talent isn’t an assumption made about him due to his father’s prominence in the world of journalism, it’s doyle who reluctantly confirms logan’s natural affinity for writing. logan, however, isn’t a fool. if anything, he’s rather logical and realistic. so when you put a father, a newspaper mogul known for discovering upcoming journalists with the “it” factor, and his evidently talented son in the same room, the outcome is apparent to anyone. perhaps if mitchum wasn’t so emotionally unavailable, logan would have been able to reject that path that was so clearly set out for him - but mitchum was unavailable. he was unavailable to logan throughout his entire youth and early adulthood. there is such a disconnect between father and son, that there is never room for discussion nor argument. so why would logan, content in his present to delay the inevitable, ever attempt to pursue a passion he knew would not be his fate?

despite his wealth and his status, it’s true that, in logan’s eyes, he does only have one door open; the door that has been created by his father.

One thing, beyond the many things, that I find ridiculous in the fight scene between Logan and Rory in the bar is when Logan says: “I don’t want this life, it’s being pushed on me.” Okay baby, then what life do you want? What career would you like to follow? What passion do you have besides partying, getting arrested, sinking you father’s yacht and drinking so much that your girlfriend has to take you plus your very drunk friends home by herself? Because this is the thing, if Logan had an interest somewhere else, like painting, for example, and he was being pushed by his father to follow a specific career, I’d understand him. He’s being denied his passion, his speech would make sense. This, however, is not what is happening. We see no sort of passion from Logan, besides partying, which Rory rightfully calls him out on. We don’t even see him confused about what he wants, which is also something I could understand. He’s near to graduating on something (I have no freaking clue what his major is and is not like the show focuses on it) and is expected to now get a job, a.k.a, a responsibility. But the thing is, he does not want responsibility, he wants to keep sucking on his dad’s money tits, while not having to work or put some effort into living a comfortable life. Therefore, his heart felt speech in the bar fails spectacularly to bring some empathy out of me.

[phroyd]

I’m not going to pretend that I know how to interpret the jobs and inflation data of the past few months. My view is that this is still an economy warped by the pandemic, and that the dynamics are so strange and so unstable that it will be some time before we know its true state. But the reaction to the early numbers and anecdotes has revealed something deeper and more constant in our politics.

The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.

As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatosto, Ari Glogower and Darrick Hamilton for the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.

“With poverty, to address it, you just eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “You give people enough resources so they’re not poor.” Simple, but not cheap. The team estimates that its proposal would cost $876 billion annually. To give a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was about $4.4 trillion, with $1 trillion of that financing Social Security payments and another $1.1 trillion support Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Beyond writing that the plan “would require new sources of revenue, additional borrowing or trade-offs with other government funding priorities,” Hamilton and his co-authors don’t say how they’d pay for it, and in our conversation, Hamilton was cagey. “There are many ways in which it can be paid for and deficit spending itself is not bad unless there are certain conditions,” he said. I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.

I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”

But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

It is true, of course, that some might use a guaranteed income to play video games or melt into Netflix. But why are they the center of this conversation? We know full well that America is full of hardworking people who are kept poor by very low wages and harsh circumstance. We know many who want a job can’t find one, and many of the jobs people can find are cruel in ways that would appall anyone sitting comfortably behind a desk. We know the absence of child care and affordable housing and decent public transit makes work, to say nothing of advancement, impossible for many. We know people lose jobs they value because of mental illness or physical disability or other factors beyond their control. We are not so naïve as to believe near-poverty and joblessness to be a comfortable condition or an attractive choice.

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation, lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good reason not to take those jobs. These would reflect not America’s love of poverty but opposition to the inconveniences that would accompany its elimination.

Nor would these costs be merely imagined. Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power. We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as intolerable. You can see it happening right now, driven by policies far smaller and with effects far more modest than a guaranteed income.

Hamilton, to his credit, was honest about these trade-offs. “Progressives don’t like to talk about this,” he told me. “They want this kumbaya moment. They want to say equity is great for everyone when it’s not. We need to shift our values. The capitalist class stands to lose from this policy, that’s unambiguous. They will have better resourced workers they can’t exploit through wages. Their consumer products and services would be more expensive.”

For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.

“Ultimately, it’s about us as a society saying these privileges and luxuries and comforts that folks in the middle class — or however we describe these economic classes — have, how much are they worth to us?” Jamila Michener, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, told me. “And are they worth certain levels of deprivation or suffering or even just inequality among people who are living often very different lives from us? That’s a question we often don’t even ask ourselves.”

But we should.

Phroyd

[thekillerssluts]

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler on How White Privilege, Race Reporting Informed New Solo LP

The fall after Will Butler’s debut album, Policy, was released in 2015, he went to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to study…policy. After working with Partners in Health, a non-profit focused on providing global medical health care, by donating proceeds from Arcade Fire’s single “Haiti” off Funeral and licensing proceeds from NFL ads that used the band’s “Wake Up,” Butler wanted to help the organization more. It would also be a great opportunity to be exposed to people he wouldn���t have necessarily met otherwise.

Studying at Harvard coincided with Donald Trump winning the presidency, intensifying Butler’s desire to investigate how the United States got to the point where this could happen and how to move forward from there. Butler studied under Leah Wright Rigueur, the historian who wrote The Loneliness of the Black Republican. In her course, Butler read the Chicago commission report on the Chicago riots of 1919, which left a substantial impact on him.

“[The report was] like ‘We noticed in our 1920 media that when we talk about criminals and they are Black, we say that they’re Black, and when they’re white, we don’t talk about their race! It really feels as though we are racializing media reporting around race in America and perhaps we should address that!’ That was very impactful,” Butler tells SPIN over Zoom. “The moment in time that the Charleston shooting happened was the same moment that Donald Trump declared his candidacy, came down the golden [Trump Tower] elevator, and talked about how Mexicans were rapists. That horrifying stretch of history that we were reporting on for class really has informed my worldview of America since then.”

Butler analyzed how America’s past and present tied into his own identity, questioning how it fit into his family history and position of privilege as a white, wealthy man. It ended up being the impetus for his new solo album, Generations, out Sept. 25 on Merge Records.

“My parents live in the house that my dad grew up in on the island that my dad’s family has lived for 200 years in Maine, so it’s always been quite present in my life,” he says. “We drive past land that people in my dad’s family have been like, squabbling over for hundreds of years. The explicit family legacy has always been quite present, but I never analytically thought about it, and I never situated it within American history in any rigorous sense. So I started to put those pieces together.”

One of the first songs Butler wrote for the record was “Fine,” a satirical look at his family history, where he acknowledges his lineage of privilege. It also references the 1963 murder of Black barmaid Hattie Carroll at the hands of William Zantzinger. (The story was brought to public attention with Bob Dylan’s song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”)

“There’s a line in the song where I say ‘I’m more Zantzinger than Carol,’ which isn’t necessarily meant as kicking on this burden of guilt that I’m a white man, but literally if I killed someone, I would have a lesser prison sentence,” Butler says. “Zantzinger got six months and was suspended for killing someone, and that’s the position that I am in structurally in this world. If I killed someone, I would have a light sentence.”

While writing “Fine,” Butler also thought about his grandfather, famed jazz musician Alvino Rey, and how Charles Mingus was in his band as a bass player. But as a Black man, Mingus wasn’t allowed to travel or eat with the group in public, so they had him pretend to be Hawaiian. “They had him wear a Hawaiian shirt and say he was Hawaiian because it would fry people’s racist brains,” he says. “There’s a dark comedy to it, but it’s so fucking brutal that he’s a genius that they had to give a Hawaiian shirt for him to live his life and do the thing that he was a genius at. It’s horrifying and so fucking thorny.”

Much of the album revolves around Butler’s relation to his white privilege. The album’s release comes at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement and a vital conversation about race are at the forefront. But Butler hasn’t spoken much about the subject on social media.

“I’ve thought about it, and I’ve felt like, ‘Should I be talking about this more?’ It’s just not my skill set,” he says. “I’m dying to play shows and put together town halls and have weirdo activists open for me at shows, but that’s all stuff that happens in person. I have a skill set that’s pretty good at putting that stuff together. I learn a lot from other people talking online, but I don’t have the toolkit for being online. Maybe I’ll develop it if we stay in a pandemic for years and years. I don’t have a perfect knowledge of the role I can play, but I have a sense of the role I can play in the world, and I try to focus on that.”

Although the album was written between 2015 and 2019, Butler says many of the topics feel pertinent to the state of the world now, including the apocalyptic feeling brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. “‘Hard Times’ came on, and [my eight-year-old son] was like, ‘This song is called “Hard Times,” is that about now?’ And I was like ‘You know, these are hard times! It wasn’t literally about right now, but yes, these are hard times; this sucks,'” he says.

The pandemic also halted Arcade Fire’s plans of working on the next record. This year, the band was supposed to gather their new songs and see which ones would fit for the follow-up to 2017’s Everything Now — a fact his brother Win confirmed on social media in April. Butler says the band still isn’t quite sure what direction it will take.

“We always have a giant pile, and we’re still in the giant pile phase, and then we narrow it down to 15-20 songs, and then it starts to take shape,” he explains. “Always in the giant pile, like, it could be a punk record; it could be this kind of record. It just depends on once we get back together — god willing we’ll be able to get back together at some point — it’ll be pretty clear what we’re good at playing and what direction it is, but there’s kind of not a direction yet.”

Generations is the closest in Butler’s solo music to his work in Arcade Fire, recalling the band’s early records like Funeral and Neon Bible, yet it’s inherently Will Butler. And it couldn’t have come at a more fitting time.

https://www.spin.com/2020/09/arcade-fires-will-butler-on-how-white-privilege-race-reporting-informed-new-solo-lp/

[antoine-roquentin]

Gun rights in the US are mainly white rights. It’s always been that way, sort of baked into the North American experience.

The “well regulated militia” to which the Second Amendment to the US Constitution refers were a creation of colonial North America, as I explained back in July 2008,

“Colonial America and the early US was a very unequal place. All the good, cleared, level agricultural land with easy access to transport was owned by a very few, very wealthy white men. Many poor whites were brought over as indentured servants, but once they’d completed their periods of forced labor, allowing them to hang around the towns and cities landless and unemployed was dangerous to the social order. So they were given guns and credit, and sent inland to make their own fortunes by encroaching upon the orchards, farms and hunting grounds of Native Americans, who had little or no access to firearms. The law, of course did not penalize white men who robbed, raped or killed Indians. At regular intervals, colonial governors and local US officials would muster the free armed white men as militia, and dispatch them in murderous punitive raids to make the frontier safer for settlers and land speculators.

“Slavery remained legal in New England, New York and the mid-Atlantic region till well into the 1800s, and the movements of free blacks and Indians were severely restricted for decades afterward. So colonial and early American militia also prowled the roads and highways demanding the passes of all non-whites, to ensure the enslaved were not escaping or aiding those who were, and that free blacks were not plotting rebellion or traveling for unapproved reasons

“Historically then, the principal activities of the Founding Fathers' “well regulated militia” were Indian killing, land stealing, slave patrolling and the enforcement of domestic apartheid, all of these, as the Constitutional language declares “being necessary to the security of a free state.” A free state whose fundamental building blocks were the genocide of Native Americans, and the enslavement of Africans.”

That my friends, is why the United States of America in 1791 needed a Second Amendment. It was about deputizing every available white man for what the Constitution called “the security of a free state.” Those were the original intentions of the nation’s founding fathers, baked into its body politic at birth.

With slavery gone and the genocide of Native Americans accomplished 80 or 90 years later, what we know as “gun culture,” along with a substantial arms industry existed serving a civilian mass market needed to find new reasons to exist. They did exactly that. Advertisers and marketers have been hard at work the last twelve or fifteen decades creating and expanding the market for civilian arms. They’ve been so successful that the NRA and allied organizations now get tens of millions each year from small donors, to match other tens or hundreds of millions in corporate and big donor largesse . Today’s corporate sponsored NRA makes no bones about appealing to fearful white supremacy . It’s great for business.

The Kerner Commission , convened to address causes and cures for the series of black urban insurrections of the late 1960s recommended tough urban gun control laws. These were adopted in many northern cities with large black populations like Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington DC. No cops or lawmakers though, would ever seriously imagine disarming white Americans. It’s pretty much unthinkable. But when two Chicago cops were shot from a Cabrini Green high rise project in 1970 I recall seeing police seal off a quarter square mile and search more than a thousand apartments without warrants, seizing every gun and some other goods they could find.

Reported gun ownership among blacks is less than half that among whites, 19% compared to 42%. The Pew Research Center breaks the US into four regions with gun ownership lowest in the northeast at 27%, 34% in the west, 35% in the midwest and 38% in the south. About half of all African Americans live in the south, so the reported gun ownership for southern whites is highest of all, around 50%.

Two obvious factors might impact the lower rate of reported gun ownership among African Americans. The first is that firearms and ammo are expensive and seldom used items, luxuries less likely to be owned by people with lower incomes, and blacks generally do have lower incomes. The second is that after 40 years of vicious racially selective policing and mass incarceration far higher proportions of black families include one or more person convicted of a felony. In most states convicted felons are banned from owning guns for life unless they file special paperwork which has to be accepted by state authorities. It makes sense that fewer black households would have guns, and also that fewer of those that do would report it to pollsters. Again in practice, gun ownership is a white right.

The US leads the planet in civilian and domestic gun violence, and gun suicides, and of course it’s the place where the phenomenon of the nonpolitical mass shooter first emerged, the place where this kind of thing still happens most often. The Vegas killer was a high stakes gambler and real estate investor with relatively few social and family connections. As Glen Ford points out this week, neoliberal capitalist America produces more than its share of dislocated, disaffected and disconnected people. Some of them are armed, and not just with privilege.

Hindsight is 20/20. Concert promoters in Las Vegas packed 21,000 paying customers into a stadium overlooked by multiple high rise buildings. Helicopter drones with remote cameras are dirt cheap, starting around $300 retail. A couple drones in the air monitoring the sight lines between those vantage points and the stadium might well have spotted the shooter breaking out multiple windows in his 33rd floor hotel suite before the first shot was fired. That’s a mistake that cops and insurance companies likely will not make again.

But neoliberal capitalist America isn’t built on solidarity. America won’t stop, can’t stop producing dislocated, disaffected, disconnected people whose manhood, whose personhood is tied not to their class status but to fantasies of rugged individualism and to the gun. And we’re a long, long way from disarming white Americans.

[progressivemillennial]

In Defense Of Millennial Feminists and Bernie Sanders

I was reading a piece in The Guardian entitled “The destruction of Hillary Clinton: sexism, Sanders and the millennial feminists” last night before bed and wanted to put together a response piece today since who better to talk about millennials and Bernie Sanders than The Progressive Millennial?  So, I’ll share my thoughts on some excerpts from the piece.

“Many younger women, on the other hand – no less feminist, no less committed to gender equality – had formed their ideas about “the Clintons”, as Savannah Barker reminds us, in the shadow of 20 years of relentless personal and political attacks. Few of them – as I know from decades of teaching courses on feminism, gender issues, and the social movements of the 60s – were aware of the “living history” (to borrow Hillary’s phrase) that shaped the woman herself.”

Now, this is undoubtedly true: most millennial feminists probably have very little awareness of the history of feminism in the 20th century and of the struggles that women in previous generations had and have gone through.  The author shows respect for millennial feminists, and I want to show respect for this author and to feminists of all generations because we have a lot to learn from each other.

“They hadn’t experienced a decade of culture wars in which feminists’ efforts to bring histories of gender and race struggle into the educational curriculum were reduced to a species of political correctness. They didn’t witness the complicated story of how the 1994 crime bill came to be passed or the origins of the “super-predator” label (not coined by Hillary and not referring to black youth, but rather to powerful, older drug dealers).”

Again, it’s true that we either weren’t there for that or don’t remember all of that.  However, I'm puzzled by this idea that Clinton used the super-predator label to refer to older drug dealers because her original quote was:

“They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators: no conscience, no empathy...we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel, and the President has asked the FBI to launch a very concerted effort against gangs everywhere.”

Does she refer to older drug dealers as kids?  That seems off.  Moreover, millennial feminists were also concerned about Clinton’s reaction to protesters who brought up the super-predator label at a fundraiser.  Perhaps you remember her saying “back to the issues” after the protester was escorted away from the speech.

“Any rift between feminist generations, however, would almost certainly have been healed by Donald Trump’s outrageous comments and behavior, had younger progressives not become bonded, during the primary, to a Democratic male hero who both supported the issues they were most passionate about and offered young women independence from the stale and, in their view, defunct feminist past. These young women weren’t going to rush to order a plastic “woman card” for a candidate that had been portrayed by their hero as a hack of the establishment. They didn’t believe in sisterhood– a relic of a time when, as they had been told (often in women’s studies courses) privileged, white feminists clasped hands in imagined gender solidarity, ignoring racial injustice and the problems of the working class.”

This paragraph could easily have started out as “Had it not been for a man named Bernie Sanders, Hillary would have won against Donald Trump, who spoke and acted outrageously.”  I am at a loss because I really can’t speak to whether young, progressive women didn’t believe in sisterhood.  I was at the Women’s March on Washington, and a lot of the women there seemed to be interested in sisterhood.  But it’s true, I don’t know a single millennial woman who ordered the woman card from the Clinton campaign.  And I think it is true, as well, that young women believe in a different kind of feminism than what young baby boomers believed in during the 1960s and 1970s.  I am grateful for it.  My contemporary women friends want equality and want all genders to partner together for women’s rights and equality.

“And as much as I am in agreement with many of his ideas, Bernie Sanders splintered and ultimately sabotaged the Democratic party – not because he chose to run against Hillary Clinton, but because of how he ran against her. Sanders often boasted about the importance of the issues rather than individuals, of not playing dirty politics or running nasty ads in his campaign. And it’s certainly true that he didn’t slime Hillary by bringing Bill’s sexual accusers forward or by recommending that she be put in jail, as Trump did. He also seemed, at the beginning of the primary season, to be refreshingly dismissive about the “email scandal”: “Enough already about the damned emails!” he shouted at the first debate, and I remember thinking “Good man, Bernie! Way to go!” But within months, taking advantage of justified frustration with politics as usual (a frustration more appropriately aimed at GOP stonewalling of Democratic legislation), Sanders was taking Hillary down in a different way: as an establishment tool and creature of Wall Street.  ‘I think, frankly,’ he said in January, campaigning in New Hampshire, ‘it’s hard to be a real progressive and to take on the establishment in a way that I think [it] has to be taken on, when you come as dependent as she has through her super PAC and in other ways on Wall Street and drug-company money.’”

Both candidates talked about the importance of focusing on the issues, and it allowed Democrats to boast that their primary was far more civil and far more issues-based than the Republican circus.  In fact, the whole campaign was especially tame when compared to 2008, and with reason: the Podesta emails show that there was some kind of agreement that appeared to guarantee that Sanders would not attack Clinton.  Clinton also had eight years to prepare for these attacks that she’s establishment and beholden to Wall Street.  Some of these charges were made--with more vigor--in the 2008 primary.  And it is challenging or impossible to take money from large, powerful entities like big banks and pharmaceutical companies and implement a progressive agenda.  How do you fight corruption when you take money from the corporations whose corruption you must fight?

“Too many young Democrats made it clear they were only voting for Hillary Clinton as the lesser of two evils.”

I could be wrong, but I think this sentiment permeated the populace regardless of generation.

Progressive. It’s a term with a long, twisty history. In the 19th century, it was associated with those who argued for the moral “cleansing” of the nation. A century ago, both racist Southern Democrats and the founders of the NAACP claimed it for their purposes. The Communist party has described itself as progressive. By the time Sanders argued that Clinton was “not a true progressive”, the word was not very useful descriptively – one can be progressive in some ways and not so progressive in others, and no politician that I know of has ever struck every progressive chord. Context matters, too. As Jonathan Cohn wrote, in May: “If Sanders is the standard by which you’re going to decide whether a politician is a progressive, then almost nobody from the Democratic party would qualify. Take Sanders out of the equation, and suddenly Clinton looks an awful lot like a mainstream progressive.”

Progressives were for the moral cleansing of a nation?  Many progressives were also for enacting anti-trust legislation, prohibiting the establishment of monopolies, and replacing corrupt politicians who were more interested in serving the interests of the ultra-wealthy instead of the people.  But it is true, the term progressive means different things to different people.  The term has been used as a replacement for liberal when liberal became unpopular.  But by using progressive in either way, whether as a term to mean anti-corruption or a term to mean liberal, Bernie Sanders was more of either than Clinton.  This is an interesting relativistic kind of notion that progressive’s meaning has changed over time and that Clinton would look like a mainstream progressive if Sanders hadn’t run.  So, if you run against a progressive and you don’t look like a progressive, then you’re probably not a progressive.

“When Sanders denied that badge of honour [of progressivism] to Clinton he wasn’t distinguishing his agenda from hers (their positions on most issues were, in reality, pretty similar), he was excluding her from the company of the good and pure – and in the process, limiting what counted as progressive causes, too. His list didn’t include the struggle for reproductive rights or affordable child care. Nor, at the beginning of his campaign, was there much emphasis on racial justice.”

One of the great shortcomings of the Sanders campaign was that it did not focus more on racial justice.  I recall the reproductive rights issue a little differently.  He had a good relationship with Planned Parenthood and hoped for their endorsement.  His website had information on women’s reproductive rights dating back to at least summer 2015. 

“Charged with making coffee while the male politicos speechified, shouted down and humiliated for daring to bring up the issue of gender inequality during rallies and leftist gatherings, their early calls for sexual equality were seen as trivial, hormonally inspired, and counter-revolutionary. Inspired by the Black Panthers to look to their own oppression, women began to speak up about what came to be known as “personal politics”. But unlike the Panthers, women were told over and over that they had to subordinate their demands to larger causes in the interests of the movement. They found themselves simmering and stewing as boyfriends and husbands defined what was revolutionary, what was worthy, and what was progressive.”

I appreciate the perspective that this author brings to this piece.

“I’m fairly certain that Sanders himself doesn’t see “equal rights for women and minorities” as so firmly inscribed in our culture as to be “traditional” or “passé”. Nonetheless, Sanders gave Clinton no credit for her longstanding progressivism in these areas, while identifying her with the corruption he was dedicated to cleaning up. Organising against the abuses that he made his signature causes was indeed a worthy progressive agenda. Portraying Clinton as the enemy of systemic change, on the other hand, was not only factually incorrect, but proved politically disastrous in the general election.”

I was not aware it was the role of a political rival to prop up the other rival during the primary to help them win the general election.  Why run for office if you talk as if you can’t win?  I know many, many progressives who were left scratching their heads during the primary wondering why Sanders did not attack Clinton more.  Clinton might not have been the enemy of systemic change, but she also was not the champion of systemic change.  You can’t be that when you run as a continuation of Obama’s presidency.  Google Clinton third term Obama.  The search results are endless.

“Sanders’s branding of Hillary as establishment, however, seemed vastly unjust and corrosively divisive to me, especially when delivered to a generation that knew very little about her beyond what Bernie told them. Like progressive, establishment is a pretty meaningless term, particularly when lobbed at one Washington politician by another. Neither Sanders nor Clinton had been working outside the system.”

It’s true that neither had worked outside of the system.  However, Sanders is a self-described socialist and Independent.  Clinton is Clinton.  There’s nothing more establishment than the Clintons.  History books may very well write about Clintonian Democrats from the 1990s through the 2010s.  What once was new in Washington is now old.  The fact that the Clintons are so easily described as the establishment demonstrates how successful they have been in politics.

“Appearances to the contrary, Sanders was not a union organizer, but rather a longtime member of the Senate. And if Clinton had more support from the Democratic party, that was due in large part to the relationships she had cultivated over the years, working with others – something Sanders was not particularly good at. Nonetheless, for weeks during the early months of the primary, I listened to 19-year-olds and media pundits alike lavish praise on Bernie Sanders for his bold, revolutionary message, and scorn Hillary for being a part of the establishment.”

Ah, yes, Sanders was not good at working with others.  If you read through the whole piece, you’ll notice subtle jabs at millennials and Sanders alike.  As far as the media goes, I think both sides have beef.  Sanders barely got any play on television.  He’s on television way more often now than he was during the primary.  Clinton had more negative press than I know her supporters would like, and Donald Trump had way too much coverage.  The Trump coverage was particularly pathetic.  I would also say that, yes, 19 year-olds praise for Sanders’ bold message was well-founded because his message was far bolder than Clinton’s.  Clinton attempted to be the boldest progressive at times while also being the most centrist, and you can’t be both.

“Later, the news media even let Sanders get away with describing Planned Parenthood and NARAL as “establishment” when he didn’t get their endorsement. They made little of it when he described abortion as a social issue (as though loss of control over one’s reproductive life has no impact on one’s economic survival). They accepted, without question, his descriptions of himself as an activist for feminist causes, when all he had done was vote the right way in the Senate. They posted pictures of him being arrested at a protest against the University of Chicago’s real estate investments, while making no mention of the work Hillary had done, when she was the same age, investigating racist housing practices with Marian Wright Edelman. Clinton’s emails and her “trust problems” were the only stories about her they were interested in reporting.”

To be fair, Planned Parenthood is a fairly establishment organization.  It’s valuable, it’s important, but it’s not on the outskirts of importance to the Democratic Party.  Again, the media did a poor job covering the primary.  I think both sides have room to gripe. 

Sexism had absolutely a role to play in Hillary Clinton losing the election.  Putting it on the shoulders of Bernie Sanders and young feminists seems mistaken and fairly harsh.  Bernie Sanders lost the respect of many of his followers when he insisted repeatedly that they vote for Clinton during the general election.  He did not tell them to vote for someone else.  He consistently relayed that message to his supporters.

While it is accurate to say that most millennial feminists know little to nothing about the struggles of previous generations of feminists, to claim that they were swayed by politically motivated fictions to not vote or to vote against Clinton suggests that millennials are incapable of thinking critically and coming to well-informed decisions.  It should also be said that millennials had a unique perspective in viewing Clinton because they had not been raised with exposure to the Republican attacks on her and didn’t have an especially strong emotional tie to her as feminists. 

The bottom line, for me, is that people will blame Bernie Sanders and millennials all they want for Clinton’s loss in 2016. 

And that’s the beauty of being the establishment: if you lose, you can blame whomever you’d like, and people will go along with it.

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Donald Trump: Psychopath Elect

IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not a a professional pscyhologist or psychiatrist. I do not purport that my findings in this blog entry have any clinical validity. They are the conclusions of a relatively well-informed layman. Oh, and some of the crimes I mention in Point 20 are unproven. I’m confidet that Trump is guilty of all of them, but for legal purposes, I’m obliged to tell you that they are allegations, not prove acts of criminality.

TRIGGER WARNING: Rape and sexual assault.

Have you ever heard of the Bob Hare checklist of psychopathic traits? Basically, it’s a list of personality traits that can be rated 0, 1 or 2 for any given person. If a person scores a certain number or higher (most clinicians use 30 as their benchmark), that person is a psychopath. I just had a go at rating Trump on the checklist, because I have a sneaking suspcion that America may have elected a bona-fide, certifiable psycho, neurologically incapable of empathy and prone to extreme, dangerous callousness.. And let me be clear here, the Hare test is the most widely-used psychopath-testing tool in psychology. It is the gold standard for checking if someone is a remorseless hazard to those around them. Let’s run Trump through the checklist and see what we come out with.

1. Glib and superficial charm Personally I find Trump about as charming as anal polyps, but a lot of people would seem to disagree, since he was a successful gameshow host for quite some time. Let’s split the difference and score him 1 out of a possible 2 points.

2. Grandiose sense of self-esteem This is a man who routinely boasts about his obscene wealth and privilege; who insists that he climbed to the top on his own despite being given a million dollar loan by a family member at a young age; and who owns an apartment filled with fucking gold-leaf. Also, any casual listener to his political speeches can tell his got a big ego. Do I really have to justify this score? 2 whole points!

3. Need for stimulation I don’t know how much stimulation Trump needs in his personal life, but it’s worth noting that this guy has pinged from one high-energy career to another throughout the course of his life and who has the kind of ridiculously overblown public persona that requires constant activity to maintain. Even when he has a spare moment, the cunt never fucks off or calms down: he gets on Twitter and picks fights with people. With some hesitation (but not much), I’m going to give him 2 points.

4. Pathological lying. I think he’d prefer the term “alternative facts”. Then again, I’d prefer to be addressed as “Your Highness”, but it aint’ going to happen. 2 Points.

5. Cunning and manipulative He managed to win an election despite being one fo the least qualified people in the running. He’s definitely manipulative. I’ll also grant that he has a form of low cunning, like a fox or a predatory weasel. However, I refuse to credit it him with the true, machievelian cunning of the truly successful political animal, so let’s split the difference again and give him 1 point.

6. Lack of remorse or guilt Trump has demonstrated that he has no qualms about mocking the disabled, sexually assaulting women or ripping healthcare away from the poor. 2 points. If it was an option, I’d give him 3.

7. Shallow affect/ superfial emotional responses In this repsect, Trump is a perfectly typical politician. 2 Points.

8. Callousness and lack of empathy See item six. 2 Points.

9. Parasitic lifestyle Trump’s wealth was initially granted by family connections and has grown as a result of his continued willingness to exploit other people. Now he’s taken the final step in the parasite skill-tree and become a politician. 2 points.

10. Poor behavioural control He couldn’t resist boasting that his fame allows him to “grab women by the pussy” while running for election. He can’t resist a fight on Twitter. He says the first idiotic thing to pop into his head at political rallies. 2 Points.

11. Sexual promiscuity Once again, I refer you to him boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy”. 2 Points.

12. Early behavioural problems During his school days, Trump would become a juvenile delinquent, but since juvenile deliquency is another item on this checklist, I guess ‘early’ must mean ‘earlier than his late boyhood and adolscence’. I don’t know about this period of his life, but we can assume that his later deliquency didn’t come from nowhere. Let’s be cautious and score him 1.

13. Lack of realistic longterm goals. The dude wants to build a wall stretching across America’s entire southern border. Then he wants to force Mexico to pay for it. Even with the power and backing that go with his position as American president, this scheme is clearly insane and unworkable. If the wall gets built at all, it’ll be a shambolic mess that’s impossible to maintain within a limited budget and Mexico sure as shit won’t give him a penny for it. 2 points.

14. Impulsivity He decided to run or president on a whim. Also, I would (for the third time) refer you to his comment about grabbing lassies by their lady-parts. 2 points.

15. Irresponsibility 2 Points. He’s been president for barely a week and it’s already pretty obvious he isn’t going to take it seriously.

16. Failure to accept responsibility for his own (negative actions). Trump thinks everything he does is wonderful. He doesn’t so much refuse to take responsibility for his fuck-ups as reframe them as triumphs. Er, 1 point I guess?

17. Many short-term marital relationships Many psychopaths enter into marital relationships in order to appear normal, but can’t hold them down for long because, well, their psychopaths. Trump has had three marriages. I don’t know if that qualifies as “many”, but it’s rather suggestive. Let’s give him 1 point and move on.

18. Juvenile deliquency Trump’s behaviour at school was so disruptive that his name was used as shorthand for “getting into trouble” by his classmates and he was evenutally sent to military school. 2 Points.

19. Revocation of conditional release To the best of my knowledge, Trump has never been imprisoned, so I have to give him a 0. However it’s worth pointing out that he hasn’t been to prison because he’s excessively wealthy and privileged, not because he’s never done anything illegal.

20. Criminal versatility Let’s see, there’s sexual assault, defamation (of one of the women he sexually asssaulted), violation of anti-discrimination laws (he refused to rent or sell housing that he owned as a property tycoon to people based on their race), and con-artistry (he once set up a fake “university”, ostensibly to teach his business skills to young entrepeneurs. He charged students over $30,000 apiece. Later, they found out that Trump had almost nothing to do with running the university, which failed to teach what he had promised. It also turned out not to be a university, because it was operating without an educational liscence in a state that required them. It eventually had to change its name). Oh, there’s also tenant intimidation, refusal to pay workers and contractors what he legally owed them, violation of the legal rules surrounding casinos, violation of corporate takeover laws, mafia ties and a possible marital rape. 2 points.

Right, let’s tot up the numbers and find out if Trump really is a psychopath or if he’s just a run-of-the-mill arsehole. Drum roll, please. Trump’s final score is... 33. Even if we discount the point for ‘early behavioural problems’ (which I can’t know about with certainty), we’re still left with a score of 32. In short, yes: Trump is a psychopath. It’s not even marginal. He’s just a psychopath.

Incidentally, I’m not the only one to come to this conclusion. A study reported in The Independent newspaper came to the same conclusion, using a different test. Three Harvard Professors in the field of psychology have all suggested that he has narcisstic personality disorder (psychopathy is more-or-less the extreme end of this disorder, and the disorder is the closest clinical dianosis available to psychopathy).

Well, done America. You’ve elected Patrick Bateman. Y’know? The guy from American Psycho?

SOURCES

I did a lot of reading to create this blog entry. If any of you would like to verify it, these are the places you need to check out.

Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test (2011)

Various authors, The Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders (no date given), ‘Hare Psychopathy Checklist’. http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare-Psychopathy-Checklist.html

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, ‘The Many Scandals of Donald Trump’ (2017). http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/donald-trump-scandals/474726/

Counter Current News, Admin, ‘Harvard Psychologist Explains that Trump is Dangerous Because Hes Literally a Narcissistic Psychopath’ (2017). http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/02/psychologist-explains-trump-is-literally-a-narcissistic-psychopath/

The Independent, Shehab Khan, ‘How much of a psychopath is Donald Trump’ (2016). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-psychopath-researcher-oxford-university-kevin-dutton-a7204706.html

Psycho Donald, Unknown Author, ‘Juvenile Delinquency’ (2016). http://psychodonald.com/category/psycho/jd/

[oldbeavers-blog]

Benjamin Franklin

(b. Jan. 17 [Jan. 6, Old Style], 1706, Boston, Mass. [now in U.S.]—d.

April 17, 1790, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.)

Benjamin Franklin was an American printer and pub-lisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. One of the foremost of the Founding Fathers, Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence and was one of its signers, represented the United States in France during the American Revolution, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He made important contributions to science, especially in the understanding of electricity, and is remembered for the wit, wisdom, and elegance of his writing.

Early Life

Ben Franklin was born the 10th son of the 17 children of a man who made soap and candles, one of the lowliest of the artisan crafts. In an age that privileged the firstborn son, Franklin was, as he tartly noted in his Autobiography, “the youngest Son of the youngest Son for five Generations back.” He learned to read very early and had one year in grammar school and another under a private teacher, but his formal education ended at age 10. At 12 he was appren-ticed to his brother James, a printer. His mastery of the printer’s trade, of which he was proud to the end of his life, was achieved between 1718 and 1723. In the same period he read tirelessly and taught himself to write effectively.His first enthusiasm was for poetry, but, discouraged with the quality of his own, he gave it up. Prose was another matter. Young Franklin discovered a volume of The Spectator—featuring Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele’s famous periodical essays, which had appeared in England in 1711–12—and saw in it a means for improving his writing. He read these Spectator papers over and over, copied and recopied them, and then tried to recall them from memory. He even turned them into poetry and then back into prose. Franklin realized, as all the Founders did, that writing competently was such a rare talent in the 18th century that anyone who could do it well immediately attracted attention. “Prose writing” became, as he recalled in his Autobiography, “of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement.”

In 1721 James Franklin founded a weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant, to which readers were invited to contribute. Benjamin, now 16, read and perhaps set in type these contributions and decided that he could do as well himself. In 1722 he wrote a series of 14 essays signed “Silence Dogood” in which he lampooned everything from funeral eulogies to the students of Harvard College. For one soyoung to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a remarkable feat, and Franklin took “exquisite Pleasure” in the fact that his brother and others became convinced that only a learned and ingenious wit could have written these essays.

Late in 1722 James Franklin got into trouble with the provincial authorities and was forbidden to print or publish the Courant. To keep the paper going, he discharged his younger brother from his original apprenticeship and made him the paper’s nominal publisher. New indentures were drawn up but not made public. Some months later, after a bitter quarrel, Benjamin secretly left home, sure that James would not “go to law” and reveal the subterfuge he had devised.

Youthful Adventures

Failing to find work in New York City, Franklin at age 17 went on to Quaker-dominated Philadelphia, a much more open and religiously tolerant place than Puritan Boston. One of the most memorable scenes of the Autobiography is the description of his arrival on a Sunday morning, tired and hungry. Finding a bakery, he asked for three pennies’ worth of bread and got “three great Puffy Rolls.” Carrying one under each arm and munching on the third, he walked up Market Street past the door of the Read family, where stood Deborah, his future wife. She saw him and “thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous Appearance.”A few weeks later he was rooming at the Reads’ and employed as a printer. By the spring of 1724 he was enjoying the companionship of other young men with a taste for reading, and he was also being urged to set up in business for himself by the governor of Pennsylvania, SirWilliam Keith. At Keith’s suggestion, Franklin returned to Boston to try to raise the necessary capital. His father thought him too young for such a venture, so Keith offered to foot the bill himself and arranged Franklin’s passage to England so that he could choose his type and make con-nections with London stationers and booksellers. Franklin exchanged “some promises” about marriage with Deborah Read and, with a young friend, James Ralph, as his com-panion, sailed for London in November 1724, just over a year after arriving in Philadelphia. Not until his ship was well out at sea did he realize that Governor Keith had not delivered the letters of credit and introduction he had promised.

In London Franklin quickly found employment in his trade and was able to lend money to Ralph, who was trying to establish himself as a writer. The two young men enjoyed the theatre and the other pleasures of the city, including women. While in London, Franklin wrote A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), a Deistical pamphlet inspired by his having set type for William Wollaston’s moral tract, The Religion of Nature Delineated. Franklin argued in his essay that since human beings have no real freedom of choice, they are not morally responsible for their actions. This was perhaps a nice justification for his self-indulgent behaviour in London and his ignoring of Deborah, to whom he had written only once. He later repudiated the pamphlet, burning all but one of the copies still in his possession.

By 1726 Franklin was tiring of London. He considered becoming an itinerant teacher of swimming, but, when Thomas Denham, a Quaker merchant, offered him a clerkship in his store in Philadelphia with a prospect of fat commissions in the West Indian trade, he decided to return home.

 Achievement of Security and Fame

Denham died, however, a few months after Franklin entered his store. The young man, now 20, returned to the printing trade and in 1728 was able to set up a partnership with a friend. Two years later he borrowed money to become sole proprietor. His private life at this time was extremely complicated. Deborah Read had married, but her husband had deserted her and disappeared. One matchmaking venture failed because Franklin wanted a dowry of £100 to pay off his business debt. A strong sexual drive, “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth,” was sending him to “low Women,”and he thought he very much needed to get married. His affection for Deborah having “revived,” he “took her to Wife” on Sept. 1, 1730. At this point Deborah may have been the only woman in Philadelphia who would have him, for he brought to the marriage an illegitimate son, William, just borne of a woman who has never been identifi ed. Franklin’s common-law marriage lasted until Deborah’s death in 1774. They had a son, Franky, who died at age four, and a daughter, Sarah, who survived them both. William was brought up in the household and apparently did not get along well with Deborah.Franklin and his partner’s first coup was securing the printing of Pennsylvania’s paper currency. Franklin helped get this business by writing A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729), and later he also became public printer of New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Other moneymaking ventures included the Pennsylvania Gazette, published by Franklin from 1729 and generally acknowledged as among the best of the colonial newspapers, and Poor Richard’s almanac, printed annually from 1732 to 1757. Despite some failures, Franklin prospered. Indeed, he made enough to lend money with interest and to invest in rental properties in Philadelphia and many coastal towns. He had franchises or partner-ships with printers in the Carolinas, New York, and the British West Indies. By the late 1740s he had become one of the wealthiest colonists in the northern part of the North American continent.As he made money, he concocted a variety of projects for social improvement. In 1727 he organized the Junto, or Leather Apron Club, to debate questions of morals, politics, and natural philosophy and to exchange knowl-edge of business affairs. The need of Junto members for easier access to books led in 1731 to the organization of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Through the Junto, Franklin proposed a paid city watch, or police force. A paper read to the same group resulted in the organization of a volunteer fire company. In 1743 he sought an inter-colonial version of the Junto, which led to the formation of the American Philosophical Society. In 1749 he published Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsilvania; in1751 the Academy of Philadelphia, from which grew the University of Pennsylvania, was founded. He also became an enthusiastic member of the Freemasons and promoted their “enlightened” causes.Although still a tradesman, he was picking up some political offices. He became clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature in 1736 and postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737. Prior to 1748, though, his most important political service was his part in organizing a militia for the defense of the colony against possible invasion by the French and the Spaniards, whose privateers were operating in the Delaware River.In 1748 Franklin, at age 42, had become wealthy enough to retire from active business. He took off his leather apron and became a gentleman, a distinctive status in the 18th century. Since no busy artisan could be a gentleman, Franklin never again worked as a printer; instead, he became a silent partner in the printing firm of Franklin and Hall, realizing in the next 18 years an average profit of over £600 annually. He announced his new status as a gentleman by having his portrait painted in a velvet coat and a brown wig; he also acquired a coat of arms, bought several slaves, and moved to a new and more spacious house in “a more quiet Part of the Town.” Most important, as a gentleman and “master of [his] own time,” he decided to do what other gentlemen did—engage in what he termed “Philosophical Studies and Amusements.”

Scientific Studies

In the 1740s electricity was one of these curious amuse-ments. It was introduced to Philadelphians by an electrical machine sent to the Library Company by one of Franklin’s English correspondents. In the winter of 1746–47, Franklin and three of his friends began to investigate electrical phenomena. Franklin sent piecemeal reports of his ideas and experiments to Peter Collinson, his Quaker correspondent in London. Since he did not know what European scientists might have already discovered, Franklin set forth his findings timidly. In 1751 Collinson had Franklin’s papers published in an 86-page book titled Experiments and Observations on Electricity. In the 18th century the book went through five English editions, three in French, and one each in Italian and German.Franklin’s fame spread rapidly. The experiment he suggested to prove the identity of lightning and electricity was apparently first made in France before he tried the simpler but more dangerous expedient of flying a kite in a thunderstorm. But his other findings were original. He created the distinction between insulators and conductors. He invented a battery for storing electrical charges. He coined new English words for the new science of electricity— conductor, charge, discharge, condense, armature, electrify, and others. He showed that electricity was a single “fluid” with positive and negative or plus and minus charges and not, as traditionally thought, two kinds of fluids. And he demonstrated that the plus and minus charges, or states of electrification of bodies, had to occur in exactly equal amounts—a crucial scientific principle known today as the law of conservation of charge.Public Service in Later LifeFranklin was not only the most famous American in the 18th century but also one of the most famous figures in the Western world of the 18th century; indeed, he is one of the most celebrated and influential Americans who has ever lived. Although one is apt to think of Franklin exclusively as aninventor, as an early version of Thomas Edison, which he was, his 18th-century fame came notsimply from his many inventions but, more important, from his fundamental contributions to the science of electricity. If there had been a Nobel Prize for Physics in the 18th century, Franklin would have been a contender. Enhancing his fame was the fact that he was an American, a simple man from an obscure background who emerged from the wilds of America to dazzle the entire intellectual world. Most Europeans in the 18th century thought of America as a primitive, undeveloped place full of forests and savages and scarcely capable of producing enlightened thinkers. Yet Franklin’s electrical discoveries in the mid-18th century had surpassed the achievements of the most sophisticated scientists of Europe. Franklin became a

living example of the natural untutored genius of the New World that was free from the encumbrances of a decadent

and tired Old World—an image that he later parlayed into French support for the American Revolution.Despite his great scientific achievements, however, Franklin always believed that public service was more important than science, and his political contributions to the formation of the United States were substantial. He had a hand in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, contributed to the drafting of the Articles of Confederation—America’s first national constitution—and was the oldest member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that wrote the Constitution of the United States of America in Philadelphia. More important, as diplomatic representative of the new American republic in France during the Revolution, he secured both diplo-matic recognition and financial and military aid from the government of Louis XVI and was a crucial member of the commission that negotiated the treaty by which Great Britain recognized its former 13 colonies as a sovereign nation. Since no one else could have accomplished all that he did in France during the Revolution, he can quite plausibly be regarded as America’s greatest diplomat.Equally significant perhaps were Franklin’s many con-tributions to the comfort and safety of daily life, especially in his adopted city of Philadelphia. No civic project was too large or too small for his interest. In addition to his lightning rod and his Franklin stove (a wood-burning stove that warmed American homes for more than 200 years), he invented bifocal glasses, the odometer, and the glass harmonica (armonica). He had ideas about everything—from the nature of the Gulf Stream to the cause of the common cold. He suggested the notions of matching grants and Daylight Saving Time. Almost single-handedly he helped to create a civic society for the inhabitants of Philadelphia. Moreover, he helped to establish new insti-tutions that people now take for granted: a fire company, a library, an insurance company, an academy, and a hospital.Probably Franklin’s most important invention was himself. He created so many personas in his newspaper writings and almanac and in his posthumously published Autobiography that it is difficult to know who he really was. Following his death in 1790, he became so identified dur-ing the 19th century with the persona of his Auto  biography

and the Poor Richard maxims of his almanac—e.g., “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”—that he acquired the image of the self-made moralist obsessed with the getting and saving of money.

Consequently, many imaginative writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence, attacked Franklin as a symbol of America’s middle-class moneymaking business values. Indeed, early in the 20th century the famous German sociologist Max Weber found Franklin to be the perfect exemplar of the “Protestant ethic” and the moderncapitalistic spirit. Although Franklin did indeed become a wealthy tradesman by his early 40s, when he retired from his business, during his lifetime in the 18th century he was not identified as a self-made businessman or a budding capitalist. That image was a creation of the 19th century. But as long as America continues to be pictured as the land of enterprise and opportunity, where striving and hard work can lead to success, then that image of Franklin is the one that is likely to endure.

[seniorbrief]

21 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Learned About Christopher Columbus

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1. We don’t know where Columbus was born. Historians agree that Columbus was born somewhere in the Republic of Genoa in northern Italy, but they’re not sure whether he was born in the city of Genoa or not.

2. Or when he was born. His birthday was sometime between August and October in 1451. Some sources say he could have been born as early as October, 1450.

3. He was the oldest of five siblings. He had four brothers: Bartolomeo (who also became an explorer and even joined Christopher in Hispaniola for a few years), Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo. They also had a sister named Bianchinetta.

4. His first voyage was likely not to the New World. Not much is known about Columbus’ early life, but as a young man, he was allegedly involved in an attack on Spanish ships off the coast of North Africa. His first long voyage was said to be in 1474, when he was hired for an expedition to the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea.

5. He had two sons. His first son, Diego, followed in his footsteps and served as admiral, viceroy, and governor of the Indies. After his wife died or left him (historians aren’t sure), Columbus had his second son, Fernando, out of wedlock.

6. His hair turned completely white early in life. Columbus was born with blonde hair, but it turned white by the time he was 30, according to his son, Ferdinand.

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7. He first landed in the Bahamas. When Columbus reached the New World on October 12, 1492, his ships landed on one of the islands of the Bahamas, probably Watling Island, which he mistook for Asia.

8. Actually, he never set foot on the mainland of North America. The parts of the New World that Columbus saw were the Caribbean Islands, South America, and Central America.

9. He made four trips to the New World. After his first trip in 1492, Columbus returned to the colony Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1493, visited Trinidad and the South American mainland in 1498, and reached Panama during his last voyage in 1502.

10. He was an author. In addition to journaling about his journeys, Columbus wrote two books. The Book of Privileges contains royal charters, papal letters, and other legal documents from the Pope, the Spanish royalty, and himself about expeditions to the New World. Part of the reason for writing it was to prove the Spanish crown didn’t honor promises they made to him over the years. In his second book, the Book of Prophesies, he claimed all of his voyages were part of a divine mission and he was bringing about the end of the world.

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11. He didn’t discover America. According to a 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the first humans arrived on North America 13,300 years ago.

12. He was not the first European to cross the Atlantic either. This title is believed to be Norse Viking Leif Eriksson, who reached North America (present-day Newfoundland) nearly 500 years earlier. Though Leif Eriksson Day, celebrated on October 9, was made a national day of observance in 1954, most people don’t celebrate it—or even know it exists.

13. He had many slaves. Since the new lands Columbus discovered didn’t have precious gems, he saw people as the most valuable resources. On his first day in the New World, he told his crew to take six of the natives as servants. Over the course of his journeys, he ordered thousands of Taino, the native people he called Indians, to either be shipped to Spain to be sold or stay on the island and work for his crew.

14. He nearly destroyed an entire race. Only a few hundred of the Taino population were left within 60 years after Columbus first made landfall, primarily due to the diseases his crew brought over. However, some descendants of the Taino still live on the Carribean Islands.

15. He never knew he discovered a new continent. He died convinced that he had found a new passage to India.

16. He was arrested. In 1500, during his third voyage, Columbus was arrested by a royal commissioner and brought back to Spain in chains. Spanish royalty accused him of mismanaging the colony Hispaniola, but he was eventually released. King Ferdinand even subsidized his final voyage.

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17. His remains are scattered. Historians believe Columbus’s remains are scattered between the old and new worlds because he was transported across the ocean so many times.

18. His name isn’t Christopher Columbus. Since he was Italian, his birth name is believed to be Cristoforo Colombo. In Spanish, his name is Cristobal Colon, and in Swedish, it’s Kristoffer Kolumbus.

19. His sailors were gross. Columbus’s crew wore the same clothes every day for the entire voyage, and no one wore shoes. At that time, only the wealthy owned multiple sets of clothes. Lice was also a persistent problem onboard.

20. Nina and Pinta weren’t actually names of his ships. Those are nicknames that sailors gave the vessels. The Nina was originally called the Santa Clara because of its owner, Juan Nino. Pinta was also a nickname, meaning “the painted one” or “prostitute.”

21. He is celebrated around the world. In the Bahamas, Columbus Day is called Discovery Day. It’s called Dia de las Americas (Day of the Americas) in Belize and Uruguay. Argentinians celebrate Dia del Respeto a la Diversidad (Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity), and Latin Americans celebrate Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race).

Original Source -> 21 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Learned About Christopher Columbus

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