One of the things that the internet has enabled is the rise of the troll, the person who gains temporary fame by making some outrageous statement that lots of people pounce on in order to denounce it, such as the pastor of a New York City church who called for the stoning of ‘homos’.
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It is quite odd how some things that should be obvious are not so purely because tradition has deadened our sensibility. For example, it has long been standard practice for medical research on animals to use only male specimens since it was argued that the presence of female hormones would add another uncontrollable variable in the testing. This seemed reasonable enough that it was uncontroversial until people started finding that when the resulting medicines were used on women, unexpected things happened. The National Institutes of Health now demands that all testing be done on both males and females, something that seems glaringly obvious now.
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The Cleveland Museum of Art, a magnificent organization, has recently had a troubled time with three directors and four interim heads in the last fifteen years, a high rate of turnover for museums. Yesterday it announced a new director William Griswold but in a long article that had a lot of positive things about him, Plain Dealer reporter Arts reporter Steven Litt inserted this odd and unexplained passage.
Under an accord with the Cleveland museum and the Morgan, The Plain Dealer agreed Thursday not to publish news about Griswold’s impending appointment until 10 a.m. Tuesday — after the Cleveland board of trustees voted to accept the search committee’s recommendation.
The museums said that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal agreed to the same conditions.
So the papers had the news but sat on it for nearly a week? Why should a news organization agree to such an arrangement? It is not as if there was any investigation going on that warranted secrecy. This is the danger when newspapers don’t face any real competition.
The PD has long been accused of being too cozy with the local elites. Their publisher (Terrance C. Z. Egger) also sits on the board of the museum and was accused of being the reason the paper sat on the story about the last director who resigned after it was revealed that he had been having an affair with a staffer who died under mysterious circumstances and were scooped by the local alternative weekly newspaper Scene. That newspaper also reported on the new director William Griswold and added this last sentence: “The 53-year-old Griswold, for what it’s worth, lives with his partner of 23 years, Christopher Malstead.”
Cleveland elites are a pretty traditional bunch. The fact that they hired an openly gay person to head one of its most esteemed civic gems tells us how far we have come, even if the state of Ohio still bars same-sex marriage.
I was surprised to hear a report on NPR by Blake Farmer about the meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptists compete with the Catholic church for being the Christian sect that most stridently opposes equal rights for the LGBT community. But the report quoted some pastors at the meeting who shocked the audience into silence by saying that it was time to tone down the anti-gay rhetoric when other problems such as divorce were much more important moral issues.
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I have written before about the infamous National Security Letters that the government issues to people that demands not only that they turn over any information the government asks for but forbids the recipient from telling anyone, even their lawyers or spouses, that they even received such a letter. As a result, I had never even seen such a letter even though the government sent out 56,607 such letters in 2004 alone
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The senator from Massachusetts is hosting a conference on The New Populism tomorrow in Washington, DC that seeks to promote the following agenda:
The New Populism Conference is an all-day event focused on strategies for educating, energizing and mobilizing around an agenda for economic change that strong majorities of Americans already support, including:
- Investing in good jobs to achieve full employment
- Ensuring that anyone who works full time should not be in poverty
- Breaking up the banks that are “too big to fail”
- Increasing, not cutting, Social Security benefits
- Recognizing that America is not broke; the rich and big corporations are not paying their fair share.
- Rejecting the Supreme Court’s view that corporations are people, and refusing to let big money buy our democracy.
As a result of recent US Supreme Court rulings, rich people now have vastly greater freedom to contribute money to political campaigns and to candidates. It has now become possible for a single wealthy individual to bankroll a candidate for president and there are people like Sheldon Adelson who have made no secret of their intention to buy a candidate in this way. Maybe we will soon have a system in which wealthy people buy and sell and trade political parties and candidates the way they do now with professional sports teams and players. The candidates could wear clothing displaying the logos of their funders, like in NASCAR.
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One of the commonly heard aphorisms of reasoning is that correlations do not imply causation. It is good to be periodically reminded that correlations themselves can sometimes be so high as to suggest causality and this site offers a few amusing spurious correlations, reminding us to not be seduced into taking them seriously.
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A recent Pew poll surveyed voters’ attitudes about a range of qualities of people and what would make them more likely to vote for, less likely and indifferent. It turns out that for voters, being an atheist is the least desirable quality in a candidate for elected office, with 53% saying that they were less likely to vote for an atheist, while 41% said it would not matter and just 5% saying it would make them more likely.
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