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Weekly Meanderings, 28 November 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 28 November 2015

Last updated on: November 28, 2015 at 12:04 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 28 November 2015 2015-11-27T19:12:00-06:00 Scot McKnight

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Lisa Sharon Harper, and a white angel Christmas:

After a full day of work I went to Union Station to run errands. I stopped in the Christmas store to buy a gift for my niece. They had a wall full of beautiful ballerina angel ornaments. None of the adult ones I wanted were black. I asked the store manager for help.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, “do you carry black ballerinas?”

“I’m sorry, we don’t,” she said.

I explained, “I want to buy a ballerina for my niece who loves to dance, but I can’t buy a white one.”

“We’ve tried,” she said. “Black ballerinas are so rare. They just keep telling me they don’t have them.”

I asked, “Even with Misty Copeland?!”

Her jaw dropped. She was silent.

She brought me over to a wall where they did have two ornaments with a black little girl dancing. She wasn’t an angel, but it was close enough. Still, it was all too much.

As she showed me all five black ornaments in a store dedicated to ornaments, tears filled my eyes and began to spill over. We are not wanted in this world.

Image

[Sharon: we have a black angel atop our tree.]

Colby Itkowitz:

“The life of a homeless person is very, very solitary,” Noonan said. “When you’re a music minister your job is to use music to lift people up. I knew I was pretty decent at doing that.”

It’s been three years since Noonan started the Atlanta Homeward Choir, a group of homeless men who sing together Tuesday and Thursday evenings before the shelter opens. They’ve performed before local audiences, but this Christmas they’ve been invited to entertain guests at a very special venue.

The White House. President Barack Obama’s home.

The Monday before Christmas, 19 homeless men will gather in the opulent East Wing entrance hall to sing for people touring the festively-decorated grand residence. They’re planning to belt out Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song, and other holiday standards like Silent Night.

Some are veterans. Others are recovered drug addicts. There are former inmates estranged from family. Some have never left Atlanta, let alone flown on an airplane.

“For me, just the idea of going inside the White House is completely insane,” Noonan said. “And that’s how I feel. Can you imagine how the guys in the choir feel?”

They are not the same as the Syrian refugees, but Anne Frank and her family were not accepted as refugees to the USA:

Many have noted the historical parallels between the current debate over Syrians seeking refuge in the United States and the plight of European Jews fleeing German-occupied territories on the eve of World War II.

Among the many who tried — and failed — to escape Nazi persecution: Otto Frank and his family, which included wife, Edith, and his daughters, Margot and Anne. And while the story of the family’s desperate attempts ending in futility may seem remarkable today, it’s emblematic of what a number of other Jews fleeing German-occupied territories experienced, American University history professor Richard Breitman wrote in 2007 upon the discovery of documents chronicling the Franks’ struggle to get U.S. visas.

See this? [Extreme? Yes. Symptomatic? Yes.]

Joe Cochrane:

“The spread of a shallow understanding of Islam renders this situation critical, as highly vocal elements within the Muslim population at large — extremist groups — justify their harsh and often savage behavior by claiming to act in accord with God’s commands, although they are grievously mistaken,” said A. Mustofa Bisri, the spiritual leader of the group, Nahdlatul Ulama, an Indonesian Muslim organization that claims more than 50 million members.

“According to the Sunni view of Islam,” he said, “every aspect and expression of religion should be imbued with love and compassion, and foster the perfection of human nature.”

This message of tolerance is at the heart of the group’s campaign against jihadism, which will be carried out online, and in hotel conference rooms and convention centers from North America to Europe to Asia. The film was released Thursday at the start of a three-day congress by the organization’s youth wing in the Central Java city of Yogyakarta.

As world leaders call for Muslims to take the lead in the ideological battle against a growing and increasingly violent offshoot of their own religion, analysts say the group’s campaign is a welcome antidote to jihadism.

“I see the counternarrative as the only way that Western governments can deal with the ISIS propaganda, but there’s no strategy right now,” said Nico Prucha, a research fellow at King’s College London, who analyzes the Islamic State’s Arab-language online propaganda.

And Western leaders often lack credibility with those most susceptible to jihad’s allure. “They don’t speak Arabic or have never lived in the Muslim world,” Mr. Prucha said.

Glacier thaw.

The river of ice that hugs Mount Grinnell’s high ridges is neither big nor particularly beautiful, but it may be the most accessible glacier in all of North America. In as little as three hours, an average hiker can traverse the mountain’s well-groomed trail to plant a foot on a frozen relic of the Little Ice Age.

But if you want to see it, you’d better hurry. Grinnell Glacier is disappearing — fast.

This crescent-shaped glacier in Montana’s northern Rockies had been contracting for decades because of warming temperatures. Lately it has been shrinking at a breathtaking clip, losing as much as a 10th of its mass in a single year. As early as 2030, scientists say, it may no longer exist.

The glacier’s steep decline mirrors that of hundreds of other U.S. glaciers, from California’s Sierra Nevada to the North Cascades to the Central Alaska Range. All are in retreat, yet nowhere are the effects so profoundly felt as here in Glacier National Park, which experts say could be glacier-free by mid-century.

“They’ll be gone in a few decades,” said Dan Fagre, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey who monitors the park’s 25 remaining glaciers and plots each year’s losses. “Every year exposes rock that hasn’t seen daylight in centuries.”

Fats are not all alike – or bad for your health, by Julia Belluz:

University of Auckland researcher Rod Jackson put all the current science on dietary fat in perspective. “The original message was to eat less saturated fat, which got dumbed down to, ‘Eat less fat,'” he says. That was misguided. “But,” he adds, “this latest craze to eat more fat is an equally bad message. The evidence actually says replace saturated fat with unsaturated fat.”

In other words: Ignore the latest hype and magazine covers. Fat isn’t bad. But certain types of fat are better for health than others.

Marion Nestle goes even further. “The science hasn’t changed,” she says. “But we need to move away from nutrients because nobody understands what they are and it’s not how people eat.” In other words, nutritionists should stop saying things like “eat more fat” or “eat less carbs” and instead focus on what types of foods to eat.

Nestle points out that all foods with fat contain some mixture of the three types and that you can’t separate a conversation about fat from talk of food and calories. “People eat food, not nutrients,” she said. And if you’re getting too much energy from food, you’ll gain weight and be worse off no matter what you’re eating.

She also noted that the Japanese have great health outcomes, as do some Mediterranean countries and many other places in between — very different societies with vastly different diets. “As far as I can tell,” she added, “the common thread through all of this is Michael Pollan’s haiku: ‘Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.’ When people eat healthier diets they do better, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how much carbohydrate or protein or fat they ate.”

HT: LNMM

Jeff Beckham, on the obscenity of new stadiums and their shelf life:

Not long after the Dallas Cowboys debuted the NFL’s largest video board at their new stadium in 2009, the Houston Texans rolled out an even bigger screen. Then the Jacksonville Jaguars went even bigger at their new venue, throwing in an in-stadium swimming pool as a bonus. The building of NFL stadiums has become an arms race, but architect Dan Meis is calling for a de-escalation. Maybe, he says, the future of stadiums means less is more.

Meis knows first-hand what that arms race looks like. His company, MEIS Architects, has offices in New York and Los Angeles, and he designed two current NFL stadiums: Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati and Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. He’s also been among the architects to submit ideas for new venues in Los Angeles and San Diego. But no matter how many NFL owners light up at the thought of a 70,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof and seats that vibrate when the action on the field gets intense, Meis wants to push in the opposite direction. He believes the future looks smaller, more durable, and more versatile. Think Subaru Outback, not Maybach. [Think Wrigley, eh?]

Cecilia Kang, on drones:

Drones, those remote-controlled flying machines, are expected to top many wish lists this holiday season.

Now those who open those gifts will most likely need to tell the federal government.

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration, scurrying to prepare for hundreds of thousands of more drones flying into the air, released a list of recommendations for how to better monitor recreational use of the machines. Under the proposal, most drone owners would have to register the machines with the federal government, which would place the information in a national database, the first such requirements.

The recommendations, from a task force created by the agency, would be the biggest step yet by the government to deal with the proliferation of recreational drones, which are usually used for harmless purposes but have also been tools for mischief and serious wrongdoing, and pose a risk to airborne jets.

The F.A.A. is widely expected to approve the bulk of the recommendations in the next month, just in time for Christmas.

I see minority injustice, how about you?

A California man who spent 16 years behind bars for sexual assault convictions was cleared on Monday after DNA evidence linked the crimes to another man.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Ryan exonerated Luis Vargas after DNA evidence linked the crimes to the so-called “teardrop rapist,” who is suspected of more than 30 rapes in the Los Angeles area since 1996 and has never been identified, AP reported.

The teardrop rapist gained his nickname for a teardrop tattoo under his eye. The rapist was known for grabbing his victims and threatening them with a weapon before pulling them into a secluded area and raping them, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Vargas, lived near the area where several assaults took place and was misidentified as the rapist because of a similar teardrop tattoo, according to the Times.

In 1999, he was sentenced to 55 years in prison for three sexual assaults, but as he sat behind bars the rapes continued, the Times reported.

Vargas, who has maintained his innocence, reached out to lawyers and students at theCalifornia Innocence Project at California Western School of Law. He told them he believed the teardrop rapist committed the assaults of which he was convicted, according to AP. The group took up Vargas’ case in 2012.

The Warriors, by Kirk Goldsberry:

The first time I saw my boss, Nate Silver, give a talk was at the 2014 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. As usual, he was going on about numbers and statistics, but what stuck with me longest wasn’t quantitative. Pointing to the practice of relegation in European soccer leagues, he said European sports tend to be more capitalist by nature, while their American counterparts tend to be more socialist.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Silver said. “American sports are socialist.”

That may be true, but Stephen Curry is a pure basketball capitalist.

Nate’s framework was right: With provisions like “salary caps,” “revenue sharing” and drafts that generally allot the best new talent to the worst teams, American leagues intentionally promote parity while suppressing the natural tendency for some clubs to dominate others. But Curry and his teammates are unapologetically destroying Adam Silver’s Bolshevist basketball state. The Golden State Warriors are 15-0. If they win Tuesday against the lowly Los Angeles Lakers, they will break the record for the hottest start in NBA history; no NBA team has won its first 16 games.

How are they doing this?

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