What would an Obama loss mean?

Obama Pessimism with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter

The Gift of Time

The Gift of Time-Letters from a Father
By Jorge Ramos

Affirmative Action Programs gone wrong

The end of race as we know it?

John H. McWhorter and Glenn Loury debate on Blogging Heads

Related;
The Stupidity of Dignity- Steven Pinker

This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called "therapeutic cloning" that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs. Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So what's not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council?...

The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using "dignity" to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes "immortality," improvement becomes "perfection," the screening for disease genes becomes "designer babies" or even "reshaping the species." The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.

A major sin of theocon bioethics is exactly the one that it sees in biomedical research: overweening hubris. In every age, prophets foresee dystopias that never materialize, while failing to anticipate the real revolutions. Had there been a President's Council on Cyberethics in the 1960s, no doubt it would have decried the threat of the Internet, since it would inexorably lead to 1984, or to computers "taking over" like HAL in 2001. Conservative bioethicists presume to soothsay the outcome of the quintessentially unpredictable endeavor called scientific research. And they would stage-manage the kinds of social change that, in a free society, only emerge as hundreds of millions of people weigh the costs and benefits of new developments for themselves, adjusting their mores and dealing with specific harms as they arise, as they did with in vitro fertilization and the Internet.

Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.

The prize Hillary isn't owed;

Women, we are told by some people who say they know them, are not amused. Women, or at least those whose consciousnesses have been properly raised, supposedly think that the impatience being expressed about the protracted futility of Hillary Clinton's campaign is disrespectful. They say that if the roles were reversed — if Barack Obama's delegate arithmetic were as hopeless as hers — people would not be so insensitive as to try to hurry a man off the stage.

But they would. And some people, claiming to speak for African Americans, would be explaining that African Americans find it all disrespectful. In identity politics, ritualized indignation about imagined affronts is highly choreographed and hence predictable.

In America, however, nothing ages as fast as novelty, and efforts to encourage Clinton to pack it in are heartening evidence that the novelty has worn off: The female candidate is like all other candidates. This is what equality looks like — life as an equal-opportunity dispenser of disappointments.

Foxed News on Obama/Osama

The Race Card

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,
Richard Thompson Ford

The black guy is a looter, a gangbanger, a stone-cold Crip out for an easy score. Isn't that a boom box in his hand? Oh, wait, it's a pack of diapers. The white couple: Jeannie and Jean Valjean, driven by adversity to take a loaf of bread, no doubt to feed their small children who are, unfortunately, just outside the frame. I bet they even left their names and telephone numbers and a note apologizing.

Moyers - 'Democracy is a story of narrow escapes'

Moyers on Democracy
by Bill Moyers

Related;
Broadcasting Legend Bill Moyers on the 2008 Elections, the Rev. Wright Controversy, the Media, Vietnam and More

Photo of the Day

Race is back in the Election

Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes. More than 8 in 10 who said it factored in their votes backed Mrs. Clinton, according to exit polls.

Wrongly Convicted in US

The Innocence Project

Race and farming

The struggle of black farmers in America has been captured in vivid black and white moments by documentary photographer, John Ficara. Black owned farms peaked in the early 1920s with an estimated total of 15 million acres and over 900,000 farmers. Today there are only 2.2 million acres owned by black farmers. These farmers are losing their land three times faster than white family farmers and a recent study by the university of Michigan predicts that within the next ten years there will be virtually no black owned farms.

Cornel West on Race in America

Cornel West

Lush Life

Richard Price talks about his new novel

14-year-old Bronx boy charged with manslaughter.

Two teens who watched their buddy attack a Columbia University graduate student will not be charged in the talented scholar's death, cops said Sunday.

After studying surveillance tape and interviewing the two teens, detectives determined only one of the trio punched Minghui Yu - who ran into Broadway to escape the attack and was struck and killed by a southbound Jeep Cherokee.

"We saw that it was only the actions of one of the kids that sent the victim into his flight," a police source said.

A 14-year-old Bronx boy was arrested Saturday and charged with manslaughter. Police said he punched Yu, 24, repeatedly at Broadway, near W.122nd St., as Yu walked back to the Morningside Heights campus at 8:50 p.m. Friday. The student was headed home after dinner with his girlfriend, classmates said.

Cops have not released the suspect's name because of his age.

"It's a mistake. That's it," the boy's aunt said as cops hauled him to a juvenile detention facility early Sunday.

-No charges for teen pals in fatal Columbia chase

Advice for the Day

Ms. Mitchell, a pioneer in early childhood education at Penn, once asked Dr. King, "How can you tell me to love people who treat me as if I were not human?" She said she will never forget his response. "He said we are created in God's image. So you love the image of God in that person."

Jesse Jackson on Race in America

A dream deferred?;

Affirmative action—and other efforts—have certainly failed to rid America of sharp inequalities. Past oppression probably counts for much of the persistence of black poverty: in 1967, according to the census, the average black person had an income that was just 54% of the average white one. By 2005 the gap had only closed to 64%. And lingering prejudice makes life harder for many black job applicants. Social experiments have repeatedly shown that employers who are offered two otherwise identical résumés prefer one that carries a typically white name to one with a typically black name. Increasingly it is poorer and less educated black Americans who use “typically black” names, according to research by Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago.

With educational and economic opportunities skewed, no wonder that health and welfare indicators are too: the Justice Department estimates that one in three black men will go to jail at some point. An astounding 68% of blacks are overweight or obese, compared with (a still high) 58% of whites. Black people get cancer slightly more often than whites (despite smoking the same amount), and are more than twice as likely to be shot dead. Overall, black lives are five years shorter than white ones.

Which Nobel Laureate was rejected by The Economist magazine?

Arthur Lewis. The Economist (around 1937) gave the following reason;

They said that they could not hire a black journalist since he would have to interview people who might refuse to see him because of his color.

The British Colonial Office also refused as the positions in the colonial service were reserved for persons of European parentage.

The Liverpool University rejected him and suggested that he visit Liverpool several times during the next academic year so that the faculty, students and community could get to know him. In other words, as Lewis says;

“so that public may be able to look at me and decide whether they can stand my appearance”

During his time at LSE, one of the faculty pushed for greater recognition of him.

Hayek wrote the director about Lewis’s “anomalous” position on the faculty". He argued that Lewis deserved an “exceptional promotion” since he was doing the work of senior members of the department “and doing it with conspicuous success”. In Hayek’s view, Lewis was “one of the best teachers,” who at the least, deserved formal recognition in the form of a teaching citation, for “uncommon versatility and by his teaching, ranging over practically the whole field of economics.”

Source; W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics, By Robert L. Tignor

Related;

I got into the history of the world economy because Frederick Hayek, then Acting Chairman of the LSE Department of Economics suggested that I teach a course on "what happened between the wars" to give concreteness to the massive doses of trade cycle theory which then dominated the curriculum. I replied to Hayek that I did not know what happened between the wars; to which he replied that the best way of learning a subject was to teach it.

So I lectured on this subject for some years, and published a book on it in 1949. Among the questions that the book did not answer was whether the great depression of 1929 was sui generis, or one of a cycle stretching back into the nineteenth century. This I was determined to find out. However, data for the years before 1914 were sparse and unreliable, and I could not proceed faster than additions to the data and revisions would permit. I spent a lot of time with the data, and, between 1952 and 1957, published a stream of articles on world production, prices and trade from 1870 to 1914. However, I could never get the book done. In 1957, just as I was ready to start, I went off into administration for six years, never touching the subject. I returned to it in 1963, in my new professorship at Princeton University, to find that the four or five researchers of 1952 had now multiplied into a crowd of writers on this subject. I returned to improvement of the data and was just about ready to write my book when I went off to Barbados for four years setting up the Caribbean Development Bank. Returning to Princeton in 1974, I finally published in 1978 my account of growth and fluctuations in the world economy between 1870 and 1914. My Nobel Lecture derives from this sector of my intellectual interests.

St.Lucia Nobel laureates

The Downside of Freakonomics

Glenn Loury and Heather MacDonald at Blogging Heads

Related;
Toward a Unified Theory of Black America

The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society

10 Questions for Heather Mac Donald

A black man and a woman on a sinking raft

The original Raft of the Medusa

Related;
Senator Obama and the Raft of the Medusa

On July 2, 1816, the Medusa got stuck on shoals in the Arguin Bank. Of the 400 passengers, most of the well-to-do escaped in the six life-boats. The crew, about 150, settled for a 65 by 23 foot raft. Mayhem ensued –murder, mutiny and cannibalism. About two weeks later, just four miles from shore, fifteen survivors were picked up by the Argus (the Medusa’s sister ship)—ten made it home to tell their stories to the press.

The black sailor who energetically waves his shirt toward the Argus may represent the military conscripts brought along to patrol France’s territory in Senegal. More likely, he serves to remind the viewer of France’s slave trade, which Géricault actively opposed and Leutenant-Colonel Schmaltz meant to profit from in Africa. Therefore, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa is more than a dramatic record of this event and a symbol of hope in the face adversity, it questions the body politic when its practice leads to corruption and human degradation. The artist’s choice of a black man leading the fight for survival called attention to those who had been abandoned by society, like the Medusa sailors left to fend for themselves on the open sea.

Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa

At the 1819 Salon, the painting was titled Scene of a Shipwreck in order to avoid criticism from the French government; a disconcerting decision considering how obsessed Géricault was with the creation of the work. Unable to find a buyer, Géricault exhibited the painting to the public in continental Europe and England and charged an admission fee, a popular trend at the time. 40,000 people came to see the work in London and it was viewed with horrified fascination. Eventually, the work did sell. It was saved by the French government from a group of French nobility who intended to cut the work up and sell it piecemeal. It can now be seen at the Louvre. Géricault died about five years after its completion at the age of thirty-two.

Reflections on Gericault's Face of Envy, Or: For Everyone Who Wants But Doesn't Get

The Raft of the Medusa

The artist avoided showing the most horrific aspects of the tragedy, which actually included murder. Instead he chose to depict the dramatic moment when the frantic castaways attempted to attract the attention of a distant ship that was eventually to rescue them. All are piled onto one another in every attitude of suffering, despair, and death, arranged in a powerful X-shaped composition. It is sublime and terrible at the same time, expressing such horror, yet with a glimmer of hope. Géricault placed remarkable value on accuracy in Raft of the Medusa: he carried out prodigious research and completed numerous preliminary studies for the work, even going so far as to seek and interview survivors of the wreck.

Talking Race in America

Language of Race in America- a recent event from Columbia;

The Kraft Program Series panel included Rodolfo de la Garza, Eaton Professor of Administrative Law and Municipal Science, Kimberle Crenshaw, professor of law, Sandhya R. Shukla, Conrad Lung Associate Professor of Asian-American Studies, Robert O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurson Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Ira I. Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History.

Is Philadelphia worse than Iraq?