Back to the KKK and the history of American lynchings

It was only back in 2009 that I learnt something about the incredible openness with which American racial lynchings had taken place in the late 19th and early 20th century.  (See my post here, although it would appear that the BBC documentary link no longer works.  There are short extracts of it on Youbtube, though.   Here and here.)

This was all brought to mind by this article at New Republic that first sounds a bit light weight:  How the Klan Got Its Hood - but in the course of the explanation, it looks at this matter of the openness with which people could support the movement.

It is very startling to read things like this:

Lynchings were not spontaneous outbursts of “mob” violence, but the predictable result of institutional support and the outright participation of political elites. The lynchers of Leo Frank, in Marietta, Georgia in 1915, included a former governor, judge, mayor and state legislator, sheriff, county prosecutor, lawyer and banker, business owner, U.S. senator’s son, and the founders of the Marietta Country Club. Frank’s atypical case—he was white and Jewish—attracted media attention that thousands of black victims never received, yet it exposed the ways that elites and authorities exonerated themselves by blaming mob violence on so-called “crackers.” Meanwhile, Mississippi governor, later U.S. senator James K. Vardaman said in 1907, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”
 
Vardaman didn’t wear a white hood. Neither did the first woman U.S. senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, who said in 1897, “If it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.” They were cloaked, instead, in state power and popular support, and what their platforms concealed was the truth: Wells-Barnett’s reporting and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) research had disproved the “thread bare lie” of the lynch mob as honorable defenders of white women. Besides the fact that the myth of the black rapist was a white supremacist fantasy, 70 percent of lynchers didn’t even bother to invoke it to justify their violence. Lynchers killed for such alleged offenses as “sassing,” wanting a drink of water, being “troublesome,” “conjuring,” and often, as in the murders of Mrs. Jake Cebrose and an eight-year-old child named Parks, no excuse at all.

And to read the horrifying details of some lynchings:

In 1918, Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey wrote to the NAACP, “I believe that if the negroes would exert their ultimate influence with the criminal element of their race and stop rapes that it would go a long way towards stopping lynchings.” The “criminal element” he was referring to was Mary Turner, who had threatened to press charges against the lynchers of her husband, Hayes Turner, and of nine other men. The lynchers, as reported by the Savannah Morning News, “took exceptions [sic] to her remarks as well as her attitude.” They lynched Mary, who was eight months pregnant. Journalist Walter White, whose ability to pass as white enabled him to interview the murderers themselves, reported that they had hung Mary upside-down, set her on fire, cut out her fetus and stomped it, then shot Mary’s body multiple times. The Brooks County coroner’s jury ruled that all the victims had died “at the hands of parties unknown” and closed their cases; a lyncher served as jury foreman.

 But back to the question in the title of the New Republic article:  it appears Hollywood, in the form of Birth of a Nation, as well an enterprising mail order business, gave the Klan its "classic" look.

Not even just a border skirmish?

Saudi Arabia rules out war with Iran | GulfNews.com

Sorry, I shouldn't make light of it, but the Middle East is such a basketcase.  Or does North Korea deserve the top title for that?

Well handled by Obama

'American Sniper' widow confronts Barack Obama over gun control | US news | The Guardian

Seems very odd indeed that she should be taking the line "let's look on the bright side" when her fellow pro gun ownership lobby is always focusing on the need to arm themselves for self protection.

Seems a bit like the hydra-headed aspect of climate change denialism:  any line of argument will be used with complete disregard for consistency.

Encouraging information

I see that Bryan Appleyard liked Bridge of Spies quite a lot, and he did an appreciative interview with Spielberg and Hanks in which this information is found:

Spielberg is now 68, but as his mother is 95 and still running her Milky Way kosher restaurant in Los Angeles, and his dad is 99, we can take it he has a few decades of film-making left. 

Excellent.

Star hopping

Alien life could thrive in ancient star clusters : Nature News & Comment

Until now, scientists have largely discounted the idea of finding
extraterrestrial civilizations in globular clusters, which each contain
thousands to millions of stars. Out of the thousands of known extrasolar planets,
only one has been found in such a cluster, and many astronomers think
that the gravitational interactions among tightly packed stars would
have long ago hurled any accompanying planets into deep space.

But the proximity of all those stars may actually be an advantage for
supporting life, says Rosanne Di Stefano, a theoretical astrophysicist
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Lots of closely packed stars could also mean lots of
planetary systems within easy travelling distance. “If there is an
advanced society in an environment like that, it could set up outposts
relatively easily, because we’re dealing with distances that are so much
shorter,” she says.

With such networking, civilizations in a globular cluster might endure
for billions of years, and thus be around for humans to communicate with
today or in the future.

Teargate

Blog: Obama's fake tears?

The stupid thing is, after reading this latest evidence of, what? some sort of deranging brain damage afflicting the Right of American politics?, I actually re-watched the video to see if some of the "analysis" had the details right.  They don't.  (Surprise, hey?)

Krugman forgets to mention light bulbs - energy saving light bulbs - drives them nuts

Deadly Snits - The New York Times

Market breaks, and the coming crisis (allegedly)

Interesting bit of history here on the market of built in stock market trading breaks.

I see that Soros is going on about a potential financial crisis again, even though it would seem that it would not be based on anything too closely resembling what happened in 2008.  I get the feeling Soros is crying "crisis" too often now.   How old is he?  85?

I'm sorry, but this is pretty much the age at which my rule of thumb about being able to safely ignore the warnings of older men kicks in. Look at Rupert Murdoch's (84) peculiar recent tweet:

Mind you, this rule can be subject to modifications:   if libertarian, subtract at least 45 years, for example. 

Good point

Why the opioid epidemic is making a libertarian rethink drug legalization - Vox

Haven't I made the same point last year?  Yes; yes I have.

See, sometimes even a libertarian moves closer to my (always reasonable) opinion!

Rand doesn't do "chat" well

Gee.  Rand Paul has appeared on Colbert, and doesn't he come across (for the most part) as uncomfortable and awkward in that format?   I don't know that any of his attempts at humour work, although (as usual) Colbert has some good moments.

However, Rand's point about the lack of knowledge and gravitas on the part of Trump on minor matters such as, you know, potentially being in charge of the world's second largest thermonuclear stockpile, is well made.  

And it's also interesting to note that it appears Paul thinks it is trivialising him if interviewers always  want to talk to him about marijuana.  He appears genuinely annoyed that the topic has been broached, apparently breaking a pre-appearance deal.

I also learn that I am not the only person who think his hair is odd.

Watch the whole thing:

At last, the critics are catching up with me

While still getting not so bad aggregate scores on the likes of Metacritic, I have read enough mainstream critics' poor reviews of Tarantino's Hateful Eight to consider that they are (finally) really starting to turn against him and his oeuvre.   For example, Anthony Lane ends on this note:

Above all, we get confirmation of the director’s preëminent perversity: patient and elaborate in his racking up of tension, he knows only one way to resolve it, and that is through carnage, displayed in unmerciful detail.To be fair, the more blood is spilled, the more some people lap it up; the audience at my screening howled with glee as Daisy’s face was showered with the contents of someone else’s head. Chacun à son goût. By the end of “The Hateful Eight,” its status as a tale of mystery and its deference to classic Westerns have all but disappeared, worn down by the grind of its sadistic vision. That is the Tarantino deal: by blowing out folks’ brains, he wants to blow our minds.

David Edelstein:

You wonder what he has up his sleeve in The Hateful Eight, but gorgeous as that sleeve might be, what’s up it is crap. The movie is a lot of gore over a lot of nothing.

Dana Stevens in Slate:

What is Quentin Tarantino’s game these days? Who is he making movies for? Is it only my fun-hating prudishness that makes me regard this historical-revenge-fantasy bender he’s been on since Inglourious Basterds as ineffably evil?

Cool design, even if ridiculously risky.

Chinese drone maker unveils human-carrying drone

Just in case you needed reminding..

here's Sabine Hossenfelder (sounding very serious and, well, very German) explaining the correct answer to whether light is a particle or a wave:



Readers might also be interested in her speculating on how a lightsaber might work.  Or should that be "lightsabre"?

Colbert too smart for the times

Stephen Colbert is fantastically talented at comedy acting: energetic, sharp as a tack, probably the only chat show host in the history of television who also happens to be serious enough about religion to teach Sunday School at his Catholic Church, and he has a crack team of writers behind him.

He's also moderately liberal, which means a large slab of the American public (the part that thinks Obama really is a Muslim, and that Trump is the best thing to happen to politics) cannot stand him.

So it doesn't really surprise me that after a strong start, his chat show is now running third in the ratings.

But get this:  the lightweight, dumb comedy of Jimmy Fallon is number one.  I don't find Fallon offensive, but I fail to see that he has any great talent; and I just don't think his writers come up with great lines.  He is, at least, slightly hip with da kids in a way the daggy Jay Leno never was.  (I mean, who could believe that he routinely out-rated David Letterman, even when DL was at his peak.)

Yes, it's not just Colbert:  late night America doesn't tend to like its chat show hosts to be too smart.  But especially at this extremely peculiar time of distressing, spreading stupidity amongst much of the American public, Colbert was always going to have a hard time being the ratings leader.

So that's all by way of preamble to a couple of recent clips from his show that I found amusing:



 

Peter Martin on how the net didn't quite change things as expected

Why the blockbuster is far from dead

I liked this column from Peter Martin.

On the subject to the net and movies, as I have written before, I also find it curious that the change to digital projection, and therefore digital distribution, of movies has not seemed to have had the cost cutting benefits to movie making that would have seemed to be a natural consequence.  (Or maybe it has, but just other movie making costs have increased anyway to "compensate".)   

By way of comparison

1.  David Leyonhjelm, in 2016, when it is a matter of female journalists being made to feel uncomfortable at work:

2.  David Leyonhjelm, in 2014, when the issue was how he felt about John Howard's gun laws:

"All the people at [Sale that day] were the same as me," Leyonhjelm tells me, his light-blue eyes blazing. "Everyone of those people in that audience hated [Howard's] guts. Every one of them would have agreed he deserved to be shot. But not one of them would have shot him. Not one." He found it offensive, he adds, that Howard "genuinely thought he couldn't tell the difference between people who use guns for criminal purposes, and people like me".

Why around 3 degrees is still likely

I see that in the pre-Christmas rush, I overlooked the significance of a recent paper that showed why it was very likely that the "observational constraint" based studies (like the work of Nic Lewis) that had recently been suggesting that climate sensitivity was as low as 1.3 or 1.5 degrees are biased too low.

The explanation is at two posts at Real Climate. 

Conservatives and solar subsidies

As you might suspect, I quite liked this article in the New York Times:  The Conservative Case for Solar Subsidies.  

It's particularly worth following the link therein to the report from the Congressional Research Service that tallies up the government R&D funding for oil, gas and nuclear over the years. 

I'm also presuming that Judith Sloan, if she could tear herself away from reading the Wall Street Journal over her tea and scones, would splutter while reading this:

And there’s nothing in free-market economic theory that precludes government support. Markets tend to underproduce what economists call positive externalities — that is, the broad social benefits, like a cleaner environment, that aren’t captured on a company’s balance sheet.

Solar panels, and the companies that make them, are replete with such benefits: They eliminate redundant power plants that otherwise lie idle, empower consumer choice and have fewer negative consequences than most other forms of energy. But markets don’t always reflect these, which is why it makes sense for subsidies to enter the picture.

The kerfuffle over the Solyndra collapse aside, many conservatives already agree, and have for years. When I was at the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, we believed that an across-the-board energy policy was by far the best approach — and that included solar. From both a market and an environmental point of view, supporting the solar industry should make sense, no matter which side of the aisle you come from.

America's paranoid, nutty militia

Two pieces about the nut based militia movements of America - one at Vox, looking at their history since the 1990's (and pointing out how they re-emerged when it appeared that a black man may become President.  What a co-incidence, hey?)   The other is from LGF, and you should watch the video of one of the guys now in Oregon and his recreational interest in shooting arrows into effigies of politicians he considers "traitors".  Not that he's advocating violence or anything, although he does share with us that he'd like to line up and shoot them all in the back of the head. 

The only support in Australia that I've seen for the armed nutters like him currently holed up in the Oregon Wildlife Refuge building:  from some in the threads of (you guessed it) Catallaxy Files, which should just be renamed Right Wing Ratbag Central and be done with.  (Trump's pretty popular there too because - Muslims.)

Yay for free will

It indeed seems that those who interpreted the original Libet experiments as having effectively rendered all humans (and animals) into deterministically driven, quasi automatons were doing some unwarranted extrapolation.   (The Wiki article on Libet says that he himself did not discount the "veto" role of consciousness.)  But here's the latest experiment:

Using state-of-the-art measurement techniques, the researchers tested whether people are able to stop planned movements once the readiness potential for a movement has been triggered.

"The aim of our research was to find out whether the presence of early brain waves means that further decision-making is automatic and not under conscious control, or whether the person can still cancel the decision, i.e. use a 'veto'," explains Prof. Haynes. As part of this study, researchers asked study participants to enter into a 'duel' with a computer, and then monitored their brain waves throughout the duration of the game using electroencephalography (EEG). A specially-trained computer was then tasked with using these EEG data to predict when a subject would move, the aim being to out-maneuver the player. This was achieved by manipulating the game in favor of the computer as soon as brain wave measurements indicated that the player was about to move.

If subjects are able to evade being predicted based on their own brain processes this would be evidence that control over their actions can be retained for much longer than previously thought, which is exactly what the researchers were able to demonstrate. "A person's decisions are not at the mercy of unconscious and early brain waves. They are able to actively intervene in the decision-making process and interrupt a movement," says Prof. Haynes. "Previously people have used the preparatory brain signals to argue against free will. Our study now shows that the freedom is much less limited than previously thought. However, there is a 'point of no return' in the decision-making process, after which cancellation of movement is no longer possible." Further studies are planned in which the researchers will investigate more complex decision-making