Weekly Meanderings, 15 July 2017

Last updated on: July 15, 2017 at 12:07 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 15 July 2017 2017-07-14T20:34:48-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Fun news item WTTW:

JULIA GRIFFIN: It was a routine patrol for a Sri Lankan naval team Tuesday morning, when they spotted something unusual bobbing among the ocean waves, not a bird or a boat, but rather a fully grown Asian elephant, struggling to stay afloat nearly 10 miles offshore.

Elephants are some of the best swimmers of land mammals, thanks to buoyant bodies and trunks that can be used as snorkels, but this pachyderm appeared fatigued and distressed.

Officials believe the animal had been trying to cross the Kokkilai Lagoon off the country’s northeast coast when it was swept out to sea. Deciding to intervene, the Navy and Department of Wildlife dispatched additional teams to the area, initiating a mammoth-sized rescue effort.

The divers plunged into the salty water to soothe the elephant and loop a tow rope around its body. Over the next 12 hours, they gently towed Jumbo, as it was affectionately dubbed, back to the Sri Lankan coast. And as day turned to night, rescue teams reached their destination, releasing Jumbo exhausted but alive into the shallow water.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Julia Griffin.

An innovative, if a tad controversial, proposal by Rahm Emanuel:

A product of Chicago’s South Side, DeAvion Gillarm will be the first in his family to attend college.

“I always had a plan,” said Gillarm, a Morgan Park High School graduate headed to Lincoln College next month. “You’re not going to be successful without a plan.”

Under a controversial new requirement, starting in 2020, students hoping to graduate from a public high school in Chicago must provide evidence they, too, have a plan for the future: either acceptance to college or a gap-year program, a trade apprenticeship, military enlistment or a job offer.

“It will help students think about what they want to do next in life,” said Gillarm, who wants to study exercise science in college.

But not everyone is sold on a plan that Mayor Rahm Emanuel said will steer every graduating senior in the nation’s third-largest school system on “a path toward a successful life.”

Chicago Republican Party chairman Chris Cleveland, the parent of a public school student, said the Democratic mayor should instead focus on reducing a public high school dropout rate of nearly 30%. He questioned how the cash-strapped school system will pay for additional guidance counselors to help students develop post-secondary plans.

“How can they deny a high school kid a diploma he or she has earned?” Cleveland asked. “It’s all well and good that they’re asking kids to think about their futures, but denying a kid a diploma because they didn’t get into college or get a job is absurd.”

Yes, politicians across the aisle can get along:

DALLAS – Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, sitting side by side on stage at Southern Methodist University Thursday night, offered presidential insights, shared laughs and anecdotes from their unlikely political friendship, and shared their next gift to the world: their newest crop of Presidential Leadership Scholars.

A combined effort of four presidential libraries and centers including the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Center in College Station and the L.B.J. Presidential Library in Austin, the Presidential Leadership Scholars program selects a diverse group of community, business, and philanthropic leaders from across the country for weeks of leadership training that includes the advice and counsel of the former presidents themselves.

On stage at the George W. Bush Institute at SMU, Bush and Clinton used their own unique friendship as an example of what they’d like to see their scholars achieve.

“It was a natural ability to respect and like each other,” Mr. Bush said of his friendship with Mr. Clinton. “Because he’s called a brother with a different mother. He hangs out in Maine more than I do,” Mr. Bush joked as a crowd of more than 300 broke into laughter.

Mr. Clinton talked about a connection made, in part, because they humbly accepted each other’s help while in office, including the help of Bush’s father President George H.W. Bush whom Clinton followed in the presidency. As for Bush 43, he joked it was also the fact they were born just 44 days apart. Mr. Clinton said they are currently in that 44-day span of each year when Mr. Bush is officially one year older.

“I said, ‘I’m calling you on bended knee because this begins my 44 days of respect for my elders,'” Mr. Clinton said as the audience laughed again.

But what their friendship really put on display Thursday night was their 60 most recent proteges – teachers, social workers, doctors, lawyers, military veterans and non-profit CEO’s from across the country. In classes and seminars at the Bush 41, Bush 43, Clinton, and LBJ libraries, they learned leadership and decision making from the best in politics and business. Scholars like SreyRam Kuy, a Cambodian refugee who is now a surgeon and the chief medical officer for Louisiana Medicaid.

“It is truly amazing what life will yield when you take that risk and work together to ensure that everyone has a chance,” Kuy said.

Good idea:

LEONIA, N.J. — A once-dangerous intersection hasn’t had a single pedestrian-motor vehicle accident in the past year after beginning use of an all-red phase traffic signal — stopping traffic in all directions for 26 seconds every few minutes.

During the two years before the all-red phase was introduced, seven pedestrians were hit by cars at Fort Lee Road and Broad Avenue in this New York City suburb, including one Fort Lee, N.J., woman who was dragged more than 70 feet along the road to her death.

Now, all four directions at the intersection turn red for 26 seconds every other cycle. That allows people on foot to cross the busy intersection safely and also allows them to cross on the diagonal if they desire.

“If we had kept going down the course we were going down, it was really a matter of when, not if, another pedestrian would be killed,” said Mayor Judah Zeigler, who considered the change a great idea.

Mary Bowerman:

Florida beachgoers banded together Saturday to save a family from drowning.

Roberta Ursrey and her family were at Panama City Beach when she noticed her sons were too far from shore, The Panama City News Herald reported. The boys were screaming, so Ursrey and her relatives swam to them, but became trapped in a rip current.

According to the City News Herald, nine people were trapped in 15 feet of water.

“I honestly thought I was going to lose my family that day,” Ursrey said. “It was like, ‘Oh God, this is how I’m going.’”

While several news outlets reported 80 people were part of the chain, Leona Garrett, one of the witnesses to human chain, said it was 30 or fewer people.

Starting with the children, the rescuers towed the swimmers along the human chain and pulled them to shore, the newspaper reported.

“I am so grateful,” Ursrey told The Panama City News Herald. “These people were God’s angels that were in the right place at the right time. I owe my life and my family’s life to them. Without them, we wouldn’t be here.”

Matthew Diebel. My response: “C’mon man!”

Many Americans are downright lazy. And it’s making us fat.

That’s among the findings of a study by Stanford University researchers using step-counters installed in most smartphones to track the walking activity of about 700,000 people in 46 countries around the world.

Scott Delp, a professor of bioengineering who co-led the research, told the BBC the “study is 1,000 times larger than any previous study on human movement.”

The least lazy, according to the study published in the journal Nature, are the Chinese, particularly those in Hong Kong, where people averaged 6,880 a steps a day.

The worst nation was nearby Indonesia, where people walked nearly half as much, averaging 3,513 steps a day. The worldwide average is 4,961 steps, with Americans averaging 4,774. (See chart below for full results of the survey.)

Does that mean Indonesians are much more likely to be obese than Americans? No, the researchers say. The key is the variation in the amount of walking.

In countries with less obesity, the Stanford researchers say, people typically walked a similar amount every day. In nations with higher rates of obesity, there were larger gaps between those who walked a lot and those who walked very little.

Among those latter countries is the United States, where “activity inequality” ranks Americans fourth from the bottom overall.

“If you think about some people in a country as ‘activity rich’ and others as ‘activity poor,’ the size of the gap between them is a strong indicator of obesity levels in that society,” Delp told the Stanford news site.

Angela Watson:

In the eleven years that I’ve been writing on this site, I don’t think I’ve ever, ever used the term “miracle” in relation to behavior management. But lately I’ve been hearing a lot of teachers talk about a strategy that might be as close as it gets. If you have a student for whom no other solutions seem to work, read on.

The 2×10 strategy is simple: spend 2 minutes per day for 10 days in a row talking with an at-risk student about anything she or he wants to talk about. There’s no mystery to the reasoning here, of course–the strategy builds a rapport and relationship between teacher and student, and lets the child see that you genuinely care about him or her as a person.

The miracle is in how it turns that abstract, overwhelming, where-do-I-start concept of relationship building into something easily manageable with an immediate payoff for everyone involved.

And the miracle is in how well it seems to be working in real classrooms, at all grade levels, across the country.

I heard about this strategy through the Encouraging Teachers Facebook group.

Why he returned to church?

But why now? At the age of 37, what motivated me to seek out a church community where I’d feel safe—spiritually and culturally—to be baptized and, more importantly, have my daughter baptized?

I went back to church for three reasons. I went back to church because of my daughter, my father, and Donald Trump.

Since the election there has been a lot of talk from scholars, pollsters, and journalists about whether Trump’s victory will lead to a resurgence of the “Religious Left.” Some point to coalitions of diverse Americans, who have shown up in the streets, in town halls, and at airports. While white evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump, other Americans of faith have become a key arm of the resistance to the president’s assaults against immigrants and refugees, the environment, women’s rights, the poor, and the norms of American democracy. Still others argue that despite evidence of a post-election bump at liberal Protestant churches, the Religious Left is too small, too old, and too fractured to effectively organize against Trump.

This debate doesn’t quite capture my idiosyncratic—though perhaps not unique—story. I’m a liberal who returned to a (fairly) conservative church in response to the rise of Trumpism. I did so consciously. I thought that the church was a place for Americans to reforge the bonds of community, which have withered in recent decades due to declining participation in civil society and increased economic and cultural anxiety—all of which Trump masterfully exploited.

I also returned to church arrogantly. Before the election, I believed that the cultures of compassion and service that I know to be practiced within white evangelical churches would serve as a theological prophylactic against Trump’s narcissism, bullying, and immodesty. But my naiveté was crushed when my father—the most devout churchgoer I know—told me that he was voting for Trump. By returning to church, I hoped to serve as a witness to white Christians like my father who, I believed, turned their backs on the gospel mandates to love our neighbors and to care for the least privileged among us. I also wanted to show my daughter a different kind of masculinity than the one that will be on display in the Oval Office as she comes of age over the next four or eight years.

But in my return to church, mostly what I’ve confronted are my own failings—my failings as a Christian and as a citizen; my failings as a father and as a son. [HT: JS]

Big old ice cube/rectangle:

LONDON (Reuters) – One of the biggest icebergs on record has broken away from Antarctica, scientists said on Wednesday, creating an extra hazard for ships around the continent as it breaks up.

The one trillion tonne iceberg, measuring 5,800 square km, calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica sometime between July 10 and 12, said scientists at the University of Swansea and the British Antarctic Survey.

The iceberg, which is roughly the size of the U.S. state of Delaware or the Indonesian island of Bali, has been close to breaking off for a few months.

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