tingilinde

school and covid in the us

A photo-essay from twenty schools.

 

jesus and john wayne

Anne Helen Petersen interviews Kristin Kobes Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne.

It rings true.

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The book is excellent. Like The Season, it is academically rigorous but deeply absorbing. If you grew up in and around Christian churches or in spaces shadowed by evangelical culture, it will connect a whole lot of dots. If you didn’t, it will connect a different set of dots about how white evangelical culture has explicitly and implicitly shaped the dominant ideologies we wade through, no matter our own belief systems, every day. Ideals of masculinity and femininity, of course, but also of purity and nationhood, of power and dominance, of how tailgate decals like the one above became commonplace in so many corners of the United States.

If you want to understand evangelical support of Trump, the roll-back of women’s reproductive rights, the fight over the bogeyman of Critical Race Theory, the general obsession with Braveheart, whatever happened to Promise Keepers, WTF is going on with Hobby Lobby, how whiteness undergirds it all — this book is a skeleton key. You can think of this interview as, like, the first turn in that larger unlocking process. Don’t be like me and spend months resisting it when you could have all that knowledge now.

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blind mathematicians

The mind is flexible and finds a way 

 

people power

an interesting take on railroads

 

ghost forests in new jersey

A sign of global warming

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

the republicans want the country to fail

Susan B Glasser writing in The New Yorker

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The partisan split has also translated into a deadly divide in vaccination rates—a tragedy given that vaccines are, for now, the only real way out of this mess. And no wonder this divide persists. It is not an accident or an immutable fact of American political life; it’s a fire built and stoked by Trump and his supporters. Among the top stories on Fox News’ home page on Thursday, I could not find a single reference to the pandemic, and little sense that covid even existed, beyond a link to a video headlined “Liberal host torched for labeling GOP ‘COVID-loving death cult’ in bizarre rant.” As I was writing this column, I received an e-mail from one Donald J. Trump. The subject was “Biden’s vaccine mandate.” “I totally OPPOSE this liberal overreach that requires Americans to be vaccinated,” Trump wrote. “The Left is working overtime to CONTROL you, Friend,” he warned. Biden, he added, “doesn’t care about you or your freedoms.”

As a matter of politics, of course, this is not necessarily a winning strategy for the Republicans. In California on Tuesday, Governor Gavin Newsom defeated a Republican effort to recall him by running a campaign painting the G.O.P. candidate as a Trump-loving extremist who would undo public-health measures to fight the pandemic. In Washington, Biden quickly released a statement proclaiming Newsom’s victory a vindication of his national policies. It was, the President said, “a resounding win for the approach that he and I share to beating the pandemic: strong vaccine requirements, strong steps to reopen schools safely, and strong plans to distribute real medicines—not fake treatments—to help those who get sick.” Even some conservatives have come around to the idea that, as Rich Lowry, of National Review, put it, “the stolen-election myth has become an albatross for the GOP.”

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on the need to vaccinate the world

The pressing need to quickly sort out how to vaccinate the world. It's very possible - perhaps even likely - that a variant or two could emerge that put everyone back to the beginning along with being much deadlier.

Also it goes without saying that some countries need to figure out how to vaccinate themselves along with developing adequate testing and tracking facilities. 

 

 

the ghost in the machine

People around the world are at the heart of the supply chain.

a tip of the hat to Dewayne

got milk?

Low fat dairy may not be the healthy dairy option.

It's probably wise to look at other studies as human health/nutrition studies are notoriously difficult (read nearly impossible) to get right, but if you like ice cream...

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

language changes

And American English is changing right now.  

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I know some find it wearying. Why does language have to change all the time with all we have to think about? But we are not unique: There are times when the language firmament shifts under people’s feet, and they get through it. In the 1700s, English speakers had to get used to a new idea that double and triple negatives were “wrong.” Shakespeare could write, “There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof” for Falstaff in “Henry IV, Part II,” but now we had to deal with the idea that two negatives signify a positive, despite no one being taught this aboutFrench and countless other languages.

In standard English, “thou” as the singular second-person pronoun fell away and one used “you” in both singular and plural. For a while, people used singular verb forms with “you.” John and Abigail Adams did it all the time. “I wish you was nearer to us,” wrote Abigail — these days embodied in our minds as, say, Laura Linney’s prim portrayal — in 1775. But grammarians didn’t like it, so people had to shape up and start saying even to one person “you were.”

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