Michael Bates: January 2020 Archives
Israel is the legal occupant of the West Bank, says the Court of Appeal of Versailles, France
"In 1990, Israel bid for the construction of the Jerusalem light rail. The tender was won by French companies Veolia and Alstom. The light rail was completed in 2011, and it cross Jerusalem all the way to the east side and the « occupied territories » (more about this term later).
"Following this, the PLO filed a complaint with the High Court (Tribunal de Grande Instance) of Versailles France, against Alstom and Veolia, because according to PLO, « the construction of the tram is illegal since the UN, the EU, many NGOs and governments consider that « Israel illegally occupy Palestinian territories ».
The quest for the International Legislation to establish the rights of each party.
"In order to rule whether the light rail construction was legal or not, the court had to seek the texts of international law, to examine international treaties, in order to establish the respective rights of the Palestinians and the Israelis.
"And to my knowledge, this is the first time that a non-Israeli court has been led to rule on the status of the West Bank.
"It is the first time since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 that an independent, non-Israeli court has been called upon to examine the legal status of West bank territories under international law, beyond the political claims of the parties.
"Keep in mind though, that the Court's findings have no effect in international law. What they do, and it's of the utmost importance, is to clarify the legal reality.
"The Versailles Court of Appeal conclusions are as resounding as the silence in which they were received in the media: Israel has real rights in the territories, its decision to build a light rail in the West Bank or anything else in the area is legal, and the judges have rejected all the arguments presented by the Palestinians."
FLEISHER: The Myth Of Arab Buy-In | The Daily Wire
"Kedar has crafted an alternative vision to the 'two-state solution' that is called the 'emirates plan.' He presented it to a well-known sheikh in Judea and Samaria (i.e., the 'West Bank'). The sheikh listened attentively to Kedar and in the end, announced: 'I like it. It is good for us. Now you will have to force it upon me.' ...
"Israel is a small Jewish enclave within the massive, and predominantly Arab, Middle East. It is therefore important to understand the regional mindset. While in the West, seeking consent and acquiescence is a sign of respect, equality, and moral uprightness, in the Middle East that same attitude may be insensitive. Trying to elicit public Arab buy-in can inadvertently put Arabs in the uncomfortable position of having to openly repudiate their religion and their nationalism -- even if they like the plan."
How the Church lost its flock over Brexit - UnHerd
Anglican pastor Giles Fraser writes about "a gathering of 60 or so church leaders of various denominations... at Lambeth Palace to discuss the way forward for the churches after Brexit."
"The most interesting thing that I took away from the day, listening especially to German Christians, was how the EU became, for them, a sort of project of atonement for the consequences of German nationalism - that the shame of Nazism led them to reject any starry-eyed or romantic conception of the nation and to replace it by what Professor Heinrich Bedford-Strohm from the University of Bamberg called a 'nationalism of rules'.
"In other words, that a particular people might be united not by the dangerous emotionalism of flag waving but by a decidedly unemotional common bureaucracy that could be rolled out to embrace different nations, united under a set of administrative rules and procedures. One German academic there spoke of the need for the UK to be 'integrated into the European cultural synthesis'. I shuddered and thought of the Borg in Star Trek, a hive mind where all cultural distinctiveness will be assimilated. Forget subsidiarity. 'Resistance is futile,' say the Borg.
"As Brits, our reaction to the Second World War was inevitably entirely different from that of the Germans. We didn't experience the humiliation of our nationalism, but quite the opposite: its overwhelming endorsement. For it was precisely through the sort of communal solidarity and fellow feeling that nationalism provides that we summoned the strength to stand against Nazism and help defeat it.
"The massive outpouring of feeling and relief at the end of the war, the 'never surrender' attitude, the solidarity forged by the Blitz, those familiar images of thousands of demobilised soldiers waving the union flag in Piccadilly, all that and more is why it is inevitable that the Germans and the British are going to have entirely different approaches to the moral valence of the nation state....
"...the whole point of a family, a church and a nation is that they accept people uncritically - and not on the basis of how clever they are, how mobile, how rich or how solution focused. This is indeed the love that asks no question. You belong to the group and are valued by it simply because you are a member of it. The family, the church and the nation are spaces where all are welcomed and esteemed irrespective of class, talent or ethnicity. This is the moral case for the nation state."
Lessons in longevity from Nicholas Parsons - UnHerd
Nicholas Parsons, host of the BBC Radio 4 panel quiz "Just A Minute" since its debut in 1967, has died this week at the age of 96. Simon Evans ponders his longevity.
"So, how has a Host, a mere persona really, who was I imagine, a little outdated when he first accepted a challenge for Repetition, survived perhaps the most tumultuous decades of cultural revolution the Nation has known since the Civil War, and bow out at the final curtain without having so much as rolled up the sleeves of his boating blazer?
"The answer is of course - because of his refusal to change. Parsons saw off The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and The Prodigy, The Dot Com Boom and Crash, The Walkman, the fax machine and the digital watch, without so much as a gesture towards modernity. ... Sir Nicholas gave not one inch."
You can listen to a rebroadcast of "Just A Minute: 50 Years in 28 Minutes" and a 50th anniversary interview with Nicholas Parsons on the BBC website through February 27, 2020.
(One of the things I had dearly hoped to do during my time in England, but which never materialized, was to attend a recording of "Just A Minute.")
Part of Sir Isaac Newton's Manuscripts Were Written in Greek | Greek Reporter Europe
"The notebooks in which Isaac Newton worked out the theories on which much of classical science is based were partly written in Greek, proving that in seventeenth century England, the knowledge of the Greek language was so widespread that a scholar could use it effortlessly even in simple notes.
"While the titles and subjects he was working on are presented in Latin - as well as the brief explanations at the margins of the pages - the subject analysis itself is given in a brief, well written Greek text, in lowercase letters, with the necessary diacritical marks....
BillHendricks.net: Is It a Calling Or a Whim?
Bill Hendricks of the Giftedness Center in Dallas lists and elaborates on five signs a path you're considering may be your calling:
"It fits your giftedness. ... You feel drawn to it again and again over time. ... It meets with encouragement and confirmation from those who know you well and who have your best interests at heart. ... You conclude you cannot do otherwise. ... You've made it a regular item in your prayers and you have received either (a) a strong indication from God that you should pursue it, and/or (b) no good indication that you should not pursue it. ... "
He also lists seven signs that it likely is more of a whim than a calling:
"Your envisioned future keeps changing. ... It's a recent idea and you have not given it much serious thought over time. ... You have not explored what it really entails, what it would really cost, and what you would really have to do to to make it happen. ... It involves grandiosity. ... It requires strengths and motivations you simply don't have. ... Those who know you well do not affirm it. ... It's a difficult path for which you are neither talented nor motivated. ..."
The Giftedness Center offers an online step-by-step guide to discovering your giftedness. I have some more links on giftedness and vocation on a blog entry from 2008.
I've often heard about Ike warning of the "military-industrial complex," but never knew that he warned about federal money corrupting science in the same speech. Edward Archer writes:
"...in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the pursuit of government grants would have a corrupting influence on the scientific community. He feared that while American universities were 'historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,' the pursuit of taxpayer monies would become "a substitute for intellectual curiosity' and lead to 'domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment...and the power of money.' ...
"Nowhere is the intellectual and moral decline more evident than in public health research. From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct. Fraud and retractions increased so precipitously from 2010 to 2015 that private foundations created the Center for Scientific Integrity and "Retraction Watch" to alert the public. ...
"Harvard is the wealthiest university in the world and, despite being a private institution, received almost $600 million in public funds from the NIH and other agencies in 2018. In fact, some faculty received more NIH funding than many states, and these funds are sufficient to pay for tuition, room, board, and books of every undergrad at Harvard. Nevertheless, Harvard's faculty has an ever-increasing number of retractions due to misconduct or incompetence. In one case, Harvard's teaching hospital was forced to pay $10 million because its faculty had fraudulently obtained NIH funding. The penalty was only a fraction of the NIH funds acquired by the guilty faculty. ...
"The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor. That failure means taxpayers are being misled by results that are non-reproducible or demonstrably false.
"A number of critics, including John Ioannidis of Stanford University, contend that academic research is often 'conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.' In other words, taxpayers fund studies that are conducted for non-scientific reasons such as career advancement and 'policy-based evidence-making.'
"Incompetence in concert with a lack of accountability and political or personal agendas has grave consequences: The Economist stated that from 2000 to 2010, nearly 80,000 patients were involved in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted."
'Civil Rights' And Totalitarianism | The American Conservative
Rod Dreher quotes form Christopher Caldwell's new book, The Age of Entitlement:
"Not just excluded and exploited Southern blacks but all aggrieved minorities now sought to press their claims under this new model of progressive governance. The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions: the persistence of different roles for men and women, the moral standing of homosexuality, the welcome that is due to immigrants, the consideration befitting wheelchair-bound people. Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted. It moved beyond the context of Jim Crow laws almost immediately, winning what its apostles saw as liberation after liberation.
"The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women....
"In the quarter-century after Reagan, conservatives lost every battle against the substance of political correctness. ... Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.
"... This language of '-bashing' and '-phobia' and 'bigotry' and 'lies' was new. No longer was the irreconcilability of individuals' and society's sexual priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime that was being committed against a whole class of people. The customs and traditions in the name of which it was being committed were mere alibis.
"... Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of 'diversity' advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them. Voters had not yet figured that out. As soon as they did, the old style of democratic politics would be dead."
Louisiana Purchase Exposition St. Louis - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Beautiful color map of the 1904 World's Fair, showing the state, territorial, and national pavilions, Model City, Intramural Railway, connections to steam and electric railways. A massive Philippine Exhibit included a model of Manila's Intramuros walled city, a map of the islands, and a Lantern Slides building. The Pike, an entertainment midway, included such attractions as Creation, Hereafter, Infant Incubator, Scenic Railway, Water Chutes, Boyntons Naval Exhibit, Battle Abbey, Galveston Flood, Old St. Louis, Ancient Rome, and Cairo. A large scale model of Jerusalem's Old City dominates the map. Be aware that South is up, and that the fair's boundaries extended from Oakland on the south to Lindell on the north, and from DeBaliviere / Hampton Avenues on the east to Big Bend Dr on the west.
Official guide to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at the city of St. Louis
The Internet Archive has the official guidebook for the 1904 World's Fair. Page 135 has a photo of the Indian Territory Building and a description of the attractions along The Pike. The entrance to The Pike was graced with Frederic Remington's "Cowboys Shooting Up a Western Town" -- the description sounds like his "Coming through the Rye." On page 138, we learn that the International Olympic Committee has designated all sports and competitions during the World's Fair as Olympic events, with the Olympic games proper occupying one week (Mon-Sat only) from August 29 to September 3. A photo of the Oklahoma Building appears on page 154. The description of St. Louis and its amenities, starting on page 176, is also interesting.
Explore a map of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis
This is an Adobe Flash application, published in 2010, so your browser may complain, but it lets you see how the 1904 World's Fair Map lines up with present day landmarks.
The 1904 World's Fair Society has a page of links related to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
Bartlesville Area History Museum : Online Collections
Archive of 2,274 scanned items, including photos, documents, newspaper clippings relating to Bartlesville, Dewey, and Washington County.
All the Single Ladies - Quillette
"The dating market for women is getting tougher. In part, this is because fewer men are attending universities. Why would male enrollment in higher education matter for women? Because women, on average, prefer educated men. One source of evidence comes from women's personal responses to dating profiles posted by men. Researchers analyzed 120 personal dating ads posted by men on the West Coast and Midwest. They found that two of the strongest variables that predicted how many responses a man received from women were years of education and income. ...
"For now, many young men understand that women want educated and successful partners. Why not work harder to adapt to this preference? In their book, The Demise of Guys, psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan suggest that the answer is twofold: fake war and fake sex. They argue that many young men have a natural desire for conflict, struggle, and accomplishment. Video games satiate this desire. They are designed to induce a sense of gradual achievement in the face of obstacles adapted to be just above the player's ability. Alongside this, young men also have a natural desire to seek sexual partnerships. Digital porn satiates this desire. Porn provides a virtual experience of sexual fulfillment with multiple different partners. Many young men may have simply decided to derive a sense of accomplishment from gaming, and a sense of sexual satisfaction from porn."
Cardinal McCarrick: Frank Keating Blew the Whistle a Long Time Ago - Patheos - Rebecca Hamilton
Shortly after the McCarrick scandal broke in 2018, former Oklahoma legislator Rebecca Hamilton recalled former Gov. Frank Keating's righteous anger at the corrupt behavior of Catholic bishops when Keating served as the first director of the Church lay oversight committee on the clergy sex abuse scandal:
"Needless to say, the whole thing blew up. Before long, Governor Keating had resigned his position, declaring that the bishops behaved 'like Cosa Nostra.'
"Here is what he said in his resignation letter:
"'My remarks which some bishops found offensive, were deadly accurate. I make no apology. To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church.'"
Tulsa is getting a fancy new park that residents can feel smug about - The Lost Ogle
OKC blog rates OKC's new Scissortail Park uninspiring compared to Tulsa's The Gathering Place, but also shares a bit of childhood park nostalgia.
"I grew up in Midwest City, and the coolest thing we had at Regional Park back then was a metal rocketship that baked you like an oven and had filthy graffiti scrawled all over the inside."
I remember that rocketship fondly. It was across the street from my aunt's apartment, and it resembled the USS Enterprise, with the main saucer and two engine pods. The biggest problem with it was that it was too popular and crowded, so you couldn't really reenact Star Trek episodes in it.
In the mid 1960s, acclaimed cartoonist Walt Kelly put Pogo and friends to work for the Federal Government, promoting job training and responsible television viewing.
Pogo: welcome to the beginning - Government Comics Collection: 24-page booklet for the Neighborhood Youth Corps, under the U. S. Department of Labor, Manpower Administration, from 1965
Pogo Primer for Parents (TV Division): 24-page booklet for the Children's Bureau of the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, from 1961.
Ken Fuson Obituary - Des Moines Register
Reporter writes his own obituary.
"In his newspaper work, Ken won several national feature-writing awards, including the Ernie Pyle Award, ASNE Distinguished Writing Award, National Headliner Award, Missouri Award (twice) and Distinguished Writing Award in the Best of Gannett contest (five times, but who's counting?). No, he didn't win a Pulitzer Prize, but he's dead now, so get off his back. There are those who would suggest that becoming a free-lance writer in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression was not a wise choice, but Ken was never one to be guided by wisdom....
"For most of his life, Ken suffered from a compulsive gambling addiction that nearly destroyed him. But his church friends, and the loving people at Gamblers Anonymous, never gave up on him. Ken last placed a bet on Sept. 5, 2009. He died clean. He hopes that anyone who needs help will seek it, which is hard, and accept it, which is even harder. Miracles abound. Ken's pastor says God can work miracles for you and through you. Skepticism may be cool, and for too many years Ken embraced it, but it was faith in Jesus Christ that transformed his life. That was the one thing he never regretted. It changed everything."
"Born in 1904, he grew up in Oklahoma - way off the cultural radar. Having demonstrated a flair for art as a child, the 12-year-old Goff was taken by his father to a Tulsa architects' office, where he pleaded with them to give his boy a job. After quickly learning the basics of drafting, he began to produce his own designs. A colleague remarked that his ideas resembled the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Goff had never heard of. So he wrote to Wright, who replied with words of encouragement, and advised him not to study at architecture school and to find his own path....
"...in 1955 he resigned [from OU] under a cloud. He was accused of abusing a 14-year-old boy. Many maintain the incident was a setup, engineered by rivals uncomfortable with Goff's sexuality and jealous of his reputation." Reading between the lines, one wonders whether he was re-enacting an experience from his own youth.
The linked page shows Walmart's 271 locations in eleven states. Wal-Mart, as it was then, had only just begun to move into metro areas, but not yet into big cities. The Catoosa store (actually just inside the city limits of Tulsa SW of 193rd East Ave and Admiral) was a recent addition. The list of Tulsa discount department stores includes Oklahoma City-based T. G. & Y. Family Centers (at 40k to 60k sq. ft., a larger format for the dime store chain, comparable to Wal-Marts of that time), K-Mart (Tulsa had four), Target (Tulsa had two), Woolco (Woolworth's large-format discount store -- Tulsa had one where the 41st and Yale Reasor's now is, and one on Admiral), and home-grown Oertle's (owned by this time by David's in Wichita). Note that the guide does not include non-discount department stores (e.g., Sears, Penney's, Dillard's, Froug's, C. R. Anthony). Nationally, K-Mart had 1607 stores and $11.7 billion in sales.
A Look Into Leonard Nimoy's Time in Boston's West End | BDCWire
"Off of Cambridge Street downtown is the Charles River Plaza Shopping Center, a small complex in a compact area where medical workers from Mass General and residents of Beacon Hill can park their cars and buy groceries at Whole Foods. What they might not know, however, is that the land they are walking on was once a bustling residential neighborhood, razed in the name of urban renewal, which displaced families and residents, including actor Leonard Nimoy, known most famously as the half-Vulcan, half-Human Mr. Spock, second-in-command of the U.S.S. Enterprise." The article is full of links to other stories and videos about Nimoy's Boston childhood. Nimoy also did a two-hour oral history interview with the Yiddish Book Center about his family and his neighborhood.
Bill Hader and Rachel Bilson on Coffee Date in His Hometown
I'm just disappointed that Hader chose the Utica Square Starbucks, out of all the options in this great coffee town. Next time he should ask Carrie Brownstein to recommend a Tulsa coffee house.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service: Fires Near Me
This is an interactive map showing the extent of the burned area and the status of fires in New South Wales and neighboring parts of Victoria and Queensland. Here is the fire map for Victoria, the road closure map for Victoria, and the road closure map for NSW. There are a few contained bushfires and grass fires in Queensland at the moment.
I'm sad to see roads I drove and towns I visited under threat. Three years ago, in October 2016 during the Australian spring, I took a four-day drive that included the beautiful Australian Alps and Murray River Valley. The town of Corryong, Victoria, home to a museum about the times depicted in the poem "The Man from Snowy River," is surrounded by burned areas, and roads out of town are closed to traffic. Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales, home to the highest peak on the continent, has been evacuated and the Alpine Way scenic highway is closed through the entire park, from Bullocks Flat to the Murray River on the border with Victoria. The Falls Creek ski resort is under mandatory evacuation. Residents of Bright, a pretty resort town in the foothills of the mountains, are being advised to leave.
