Yesterday I went to TriMet to reestablish lift access in my chair. The ten minute appointment took over three hours. Today the Home Health Nurse is scheduled to come before noon, so this this goes up late, that’s why. Tonight I’m expecting an experience that could be considered Angellic.
Fantasy Football Report:
This weekend it’s playoff time in Lefty Blog Friends, our own Fantasy Football League. Kudos to our top three players in the regular season: Patty Monster, Seth, and Vivian. Condolences to the two players who did not make the playoffs: Dusty and Pam. We look forward to your return next year. Here’s the playoffs bracket.
Short Takes:
From Daily Kos: Elahe Izadi runs down the well-documented efforts of Our Founding Fathers Themselves to ensure that yes, religious freedom even extended to Jews and "pagans" and Muslims.
So unlike Jews and Catholics, Muslims were discussed in the hypothetical — and often with negative opinions, including those held by Thomas Jefferson — to show "how far tolerance and equal civil rights extends," said Denise Spellberg, author of "Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders."
"In the formation of the American ideal and principles of what we consider to be exceptional American values, Muslims were, at the beginning, the litmus test for whether the reach of American constitutional principles would include every believer, every kind, or not," Spellberg said in an interview.
Ending collusion between the state and any state-preferred religion was not just Jefferson’s own objective, but the stance that would be codified in law and in the Constitution. There are ample writings to prove that non-Christian religions were specifically intended to be protected, and anyone who has the slightest intellectual interest in the American version of freedom of religion has read through them already. A few were in my old high school history textbook—but that was back in Ye Olden Days, so I have no knowledge of whether such quotes and letters have been scrubbed by the forces of Texas Jeebus, in the books your own offspring are thumbing through today.
The point is, there’s simply no way to claim you know either the Constitution or what America’s religious freedom was intended to "mean" unless you are aware of Jefferson’s own efforts to ensure sweeping inclusivity and that Jefferson was not operating in an intellectual vacuum but from a broader intellectual and legal movement to do that thing, both within the states and when the time came to piece together the national version people now carry in their shirt pockets.
Share this with Republican friends and family, and hope you aren’t uninvited for the holidays.
From The New Yorker: In what has become a tradition in the nation’s capital, the United States Congress on Monday notched the third anniversary of doing nothing in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
As on the first and second anniversaries of the tragedy, lawmakers took up no new measures to prevent future mass shootings in the United States, and instead chose to mark Newtown’s third anniversary with a day of inaction.
In that respect, the third anniversary of Newtown resembles the thousand-plus days that came before it, during which Congress took no action on guns except to periodically vote down expanded background checks.
Andy knows whose hands are bloody.
From Upworthy: A few days ago in a Bloomberg interview, businessman Michael Moritz was asked about the scarcity of women working at his company, Sequoia Capital.
His responses — among them that the firm is seeking women but is "not prepared to lower our standards" — were described by many as "open mouth, insert foot." Similar remarks across sectors and industries have been described this way, too.
But this foot-in-mouth characterization is wrong: It suggests that the speaker fumbled his words and misspoke.
What’s happening when Moritz talks about "lowering standards" is not a clumsy handling of speech. It’s this: In that moment, a deeply hidden synaptic pathway is temporarily illuminated.
When asked about Sequoia’s lack of women, Moritz said they were looking to hire more. But "what we’re not prepared to do is lower our standards," he said. Now, no one had asked, "Are you willing to lower your standards?" No: That was the question he heard when he was asked about hiring women. That was the association he made automatically.
Here, then, is a map of his synaptic firings: women → lower standards.
With the exception of Republican politicians and pundits, hiring women are is more likely to lead to higher standards.
Cartoon:
8 Responses to “Open Thread–12/15/2015”
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Yeah, that''s the problem with anything large – left and right hands don't speak (although you have to "talk to the hand" a lot), and there's always "hurry up and wait." That's why i learned to crochet when I was in the military (knitting came later). And the needlework is why it took me so long to have high blood pressure. I should have had it in my twenties, but it took till my forties. Enjoy yur experiene!
DKos – Oh, I don't know, being uninvited might actually be a benefit of sharing.
New Yorker – Actually this straight news is almost funnier than some of the other straight news he writes.
Upworthy – So true, and well said. remonds me of the old quote, "Women have to do everything twice as well as men in order to be thought half as good. Fortunately, that's not difficult."
Cartoon – Very sad. It used to be a decent group. That was within my lifetime, although just barely. Did y'all see the other cartoon?
DK: I'm at the age where I don't care if I get uninvited. See below:
Kind of like that 'A Thanksgiving Miracle' on SNL. Bringing Families together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=e2zyjbH9zzA
New Yorker: Good for you, Andy. And the rest of us who believe in gun control.
Haven't heard that expression for awhile, Joanne. 'Hurry up and Wait'. I said that too,…alot.
Hope that everything is in order, and that you get a chance to rest, how was the Nurse for you? Hope good.
Enjoy your evening, take care, and Thanks, Tom.
Pat, thanks for the Youtube link. I loved it. My son said he had the radio on in the car last week while taking his six year old daughter to school. He looked in the rearview mirror, and Sarah was lip syncing the song and doing all the moves Adele was doing. .Too funny.
Appointments don't seem to work any better than before you went into hospital, TomCat, but the Home Care Nurse apparently has come around today and your set for care from next week. I keep my fingers crossed that will go like clockwork from now on. Hope your angelic experience came through too.
Daily Kos: Jefferson was a disciple of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe with which he came into contact with when he lived in France for a few years. The principal goals of Enlightenment thinkers were liberty, progress, reason, tolerance, fraternity and ending the abuses of the church and state. Definitely not "an intellectual vacuum", but quite the opposite although it never reached the same heights here as the movement in Europe. Instead of the wave of Islamofobia that is rushing around the world we could do with a new period of Enlightenment, don't you think?
The New Yorker: Andy's satire is becoming sarcastic and bitter, and rightly so: "Interestingly, during this same period of time, many of these legislators were able to sleep at night, sources say."
Upworthy: Moritz could just as well have answered: "No, because women are inferior" to that question, it comes down to exactly the same. These businessmen are the worst kind of Republicans. For them there's no war on women, you don't go to war unless you think you're dealing with an adversary of sorts. Women, however, are so low beneath them they don't spend time thinking about them as employees, let alone equals. These men might just as well have been raised in Saudi Arabia or in the Middle Ages.
Cartoon: They don't know the meaning of the word.
I hope all went well with your Home Health nurse, and am curious about the "angellic" experience. LOL>
Daily Kos: You know that I live in the Bible belt, but I shared this article on Facebook. I shared a similar one last night. Guess I will get "unfriended" by some, but maybe I will be able to inform others. The Republicans and Faux news are doing all that they can to make people terrified, thus easier to control.
The New Yorker: Andy is so right again, and as long as the NRA owns most of Congress, things will stay the same.
Upworthy: He made quite a revealing remark. Things have changed very slowly for women and women still have to work twice as hard as men to achieve the same rewards. I worked for state government and learned that the mean who were classified the same as several of the women in our office were paid more money. They also, in my experience, did half the work.
Cartoon: The NRA has no shame and no morals.
c2 is still not letting me reply to emails. It did let me copy and paste from PP tonight though.
Thanks all! Hugs!! See today's Open Thread!!
Some consider angelic experiences hallucinations…kudos to all who made the playoffs!