Sri Padmanabhaswany temple, in Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum), the treasures of which--recently inventoried by court order--make it perhaps the richest temple in the world (c. $19-23 billion exclusive of items' antique value), is at the heart of Jake Halpern's article, "The Secret of the Temple," (abstract) in the April 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
(Photo by NanYang Tours.)
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By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
First stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" (1836) via en.wikipedia.org
(Photo: The Lexington Minuteman representing John Parker. The Concord Memorial and Old North Bridge can be seen on this vintage postcard here.)
History gets busy on April 19th's:
Vikings show Archbishop Ælfheah of Canterbury to his heavenly award in 1012.
Pope Saint Leo IX dies in 1054.
Francis Drake sinks the Spanish fleet in Cádiz harbor in 1587.
The Baltimore Riot occurs when federal troops march through the pro-secession city in 1861.
Toronto is destroyed by fire in 1904.
FDR takes the US off the gold standard in 1933.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising begins when the ghetto is invaded by the SS in 1943.
The Bay of Pigs occurs (the CIA-backed failed invasion of Cuba) 1961.
USS Iowa gun turret accident occurs in 1989.
The seige of the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas comes to its fiery end courtesy of the ATF, FBI, Texas National Guard, and Texas Rangers (not the baseball team) in 1993.
Timothy McVeigh blows up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
It's also my friend Sharon's birthday.
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When you’re running for President, giving a good speech helps you achieve your goals. When you are President, giving a good speech can prevent you from achieving them.
Ezra Klein wrote an interesting piece in The New Yorker, "The Unpersuaded," about the work of George Edwards, the director of the Center for Presidential Studies, at Texas A. & M. University, outlining a strong argument that presidents--even those considered good communicators--have far less power to persuade with public speeches than many Americans realize.
Consider the following about presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Franklin Roosevelt:
Between his first inauguration, in January, 1993, and his first midterm election, in November, 1994, [Clinton] travelled to nearly two hundred cities and towns, and made more than two hundred appearances, to sell his Presidency, his legislative initiatives (notably his health-care bill), and his party. But his poll numbers fell, the health-care bill failed, and, in the next election, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than forty years. Yet Clinton never gave up on the idea that all he needed was a few more speeches, or a slightly better message. “I’ve got to . . . spend more time communicating with the American people,” the President said in a 1994 interview. Edwards notes, “It seems never to have occurred to him or his staff that his basic strategy may have been inherently flawed.”
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Reagan succeeded in passing major provisions of his agenda, such as the 1981 tax cuts, but, Edwards wrote, “surveys of public opinion have found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities”—all programs that the President opposed—“increased rather than decreased during Reagan’s tenure.” Meanwhile, “support for increased defense expenditures was decidedly lower at the end of his administration than at the beginning.” In other words, people were less persuaded by Reagan when he left office than they were when he took office.
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[P]olitical scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell...found that [FDR's fireside chats] fostered “less than a 1 percentage point increase” in his approval rating. His more traditional speeches didn’t do any better. He was unable to persuade Americans to enter the Second World War, for example, until Pearl Harbor.
In fact, Edwards' evidence suggest that many presidents achieve their policy goals most efficiently without publicly advocating for them. For a president to publicly address a policy goal, according to Edwards, is often to solidify partisan opposition against it. But it can also strengthen support among the president's own party. Presidents' public persuasion attempts often have a politicizing effect--whether they like it or not.
Edwards:
“Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not been able to transform the political landscape through their efforts at persuasion. When he succeeded in achieving major change, it was by mobilizing those predisposed to support him and driving legislation through Congress on a party-line vote.”
Of course, this is not to say that presidential attempts to persuade cannot effect the rhetorical landscape. Jeffery L. Bineham, a rhetoric professor at St. Cloud State University, notes in a letter to the editor of The New Yorker that "death tax," "wars" on poverty, drugs, terror, and mottos like "government is not the solution but the problem," are all examples of presidential speech entering the political lexicon.
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By the Episcopal calendar, my saint is Martin Luther. Good. Like many Episcopalians, I love irony.
The distinctly not-sainted Martin Luther lands on the Episcopal calendar by virtue of the Protestant elements of the church's Anglican heritage, in accordance with which all Christians together comprise the Communion of Saints; saints aren't limited to those deemed to be saints by pointy-hatted types in Rome. We have our own pointy hats, thank you. And there's no afternoon "riposo" in Canterbury! Thus, Anglicanism begets an empire upon which the sun never sets; popery begets an Italian building complex with a post office. But the wallpaper is great, I admit.
Luther was kind of a jerk. He declared, "women and maidens are all bold and coarse in their speech, in their demeanor wild and lewd." He penned Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, and On the Jews and Their Lies, which had nothing to do with the falsehood that gefilte fish is good. He spent hours at a time on the crapper. This is probably because beer consumption dehydrates. He also called God a "bulwark." I don't know what that means, but it sounds pretty bad.
(Learn more here without cheek or my tongue stuck in mine.)
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I've recently returned from my annual holiday trip home to central Iowa. While there, a state legislator told me Rick Santorum would carry the local county on Jan. 3rd or come in a close second-place behind Ron Paul.
I was incredulous relative to Santorum doing so well. About 48 hours later, the first polls were released showing that a surge in the former US Senator's popularity had been occurring. I then recalled a pundit on ABC's This Week having said earlier in December to not underestimate the potential dividends of Santorum's months-long hard work in Iowa. It reminded me of the value journalists find in informed, honest, and sufficiently forthright sources near to the action, and in their own experience. We'll see if the legislator’s prediction and the pundit's observation hold true. Based on my own inexpert observations while in Iowa, I think Santorum may in fact win or come in a close second-place in the county that I was in, but I think Romney will win the state.
The only frontline observation of my own that I make with any confidence is that yard signs are thin on the ground! I saw only five signs in four days in and around a town of 15,500 people fairly near Des Moines. Also, I saw not one bumper sticker! When I was growing up in Iowa, forests of candidate yard signs cropped up in neighborhoods. Farmers put them in fields and ditches, and sometimes even painted the sides of barns with their favorite candidate's name. Even in December 2007, while driving along I-80, I recall seeing Clinton, Obama, and Edwards signs galore--at least one barnside proclaiming HILLARY in red, white, and blue, and plenty of signs for Huckabee, McCain and others.
Does the disappearance of the yard sign reflect a lack of voter enthusiasm, or perhaps indecision—an unusually long wait-and-see stance by Hawkeye Republicans? Or maybe smaller campaign budgets? Maybe lesser focus on Iowa by the campaigns? Has the rise of social media or the dominance this cycle of televised debates displaced the need for the valiant foot soldiers of Iowa caucus campaign advertising, those brave little signs that endure wind, snow, the rare defacement attempt, and the more common assault from dog urine? Here's to the return of the humble yard sign.
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| Vote Projection | Chance of Win |
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|---|---|---|
| Mitt Romney | 21.8% | 42% |
| Ron Paul | 21.0 | 34 |
| Rick Santorum | 19.3 | 20 |
UPDATE: Unofficial caucus results from my parents' precinct in Jasper County, Iowa - Updated Jan. 3, 2012
161 votes:
Santorum 48
Gingrich 39
Romney 31
Paul 29
Bachmann 8
Perry 4
Huntsman 2
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Burgess Meredith's narration of To That Night In Bethlehem on The Chieftains' Bells of Dublin Christmas album (1991) is so good, I almost don't even think of The Penguin. Or Rocky.
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Between 2009 and 2010 the average US income fell 0.6% to $62,481, and Americans spent:
1.4% less on clothes
3.8% less on food
2.0% less on housing
7.0% less on entertainment, but
1.3% more on breast augmentation
5.1% more on lipo
8.1% more on eyelid surgery
24.4% more on butt lifts (yes, you read that percentage correctly).
Those increases are because the rich are spending, right? Yes they are, but not in the realm of cosmetic surgery like you might assume they do.... Of cosmetic-surgery patients, 33% make less than $30,000 a year and c. 70% make less than $60,000, according to a 2009 study.
(Image: Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent (as Dr. Jaffe) goes to work on Katherine Helmond (as Mrs. Ida Lowry) in Terry Gilliam's 1985 film, Brazil.)
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Brilliant! "Triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism...." Yup, that about sums it up.
(Doctor Who premiered on 23 November 1963.)
(Five famous celebrity Whovians.)
("What's a cold open?" you ask?)
(By the way, big no-no among Whovians: abbreviating Doctor in reference to the Doctor or the show.)
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Ronald Bailey ponders our responsibility in exploring other planets:
[O]ne chief reason [to avoid human contamination of new planets] is to prevent inadvertent contamination by Earth microbes from being mistaken as evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life. But do we have an ethical obligation to prevent harm that might be caused by Terran life to extraterrestrial life? Even more broadly, do we have the right to change the environments of other worlds even if they do not contain any living organisms?
Josh Rothman weighs the arguments:
About these questions, moral philosophers disagree. There's a long pro-terraforming tradition (especially among philosophically inclined science-fiction readers): Turning a lifeless place into an inhabitable one seems like a noble goal. Meanwhile, others argue that we have a moral, and possibly even an aesthetic, obligation to leave extraterrestrial life untouched.
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