Most people know the well-worn maxim that defines insanity as repeating the same action over and over again, while expecting a different result.
What should one call it when the chief spokesman for a preeminent ultra-conservative “pro-family” organization publishes a collection of falsehoods which are soundly debunked, who then responds by repeating the disproved allegations, only to have them thrashed again – and then, 11 months later, republishes the exact same nonsense, unchanged and unmitigated?
We call it proof that Bryan Fischer, director of issues analysis for the American Family Association (AFA), has lost meaningful contact with the world around him.
Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, was in AFA’s home town of Tupelo, Miss., Monday to present an SPLC investigative report about Fischer. Due largely to Fischer’s relentless gushing of hateful and insulting speech against LGBT people (also here), Muslims (also here, here and here), blacks, immigrants, Native Americans (also here) and others, the SPLC lists AFA as a hate group.
Apparently irked by Potok’s scheduled presentation, Fischer posted a blog suggesting that the SPLC itself should be classified as a hate group, because the “10 Myths” about LGBT people SPLC wrote about in the November 2010 edition of its Intelligence Report magazine were in fact, 10 truths.
They aren’t. We made that clear in a Dec. 2, 2010, article pointing out that Fischer built his rejoinder on discredited, misrepresented and outdated research. Undaunted, Fischer published another post, restating the same arguments and using the same discredited research, and going further: This time, he mischaracterized what our original “10 Myths” article said. So we called him out again in a Dec. 20 post, pointing out how Fischer was attempting to use a new batch of lies to justify his earlier crop.
Silly us, thinking that laying out the truth should settle the matter. Imagine our surprise Monday when, like the cinema demon that just won’t die, Fischer’s long-disproven anti-gay rant surfaced again. Bryan Fischer evidently believes that all it takes to fool his followers is for him to successfully fool himself into believing that demonstrable lies can masquerade as the truth.
So, Mr. Fischer, in addition to this well-known quote:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
Albert Einstein
Here are some more for your day’s edification:
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
Carl Bernstein, U.S. journalist. Guardian (London, June 3, 1992)
“What luck for rulers that men do not think.”
Adolf Hitler
“Earth is an insane asylum, to which the other planets deport their lunatics.”
Voltaire, in Memnon the Philosopher
“Sometimes I think that the greatest sign that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe is that it hasn’t tried to contact us yet.”
Bill Watterson, “Calvin and Hobbes”
You probably figure if you state something over and over again, that will make it true.
But, the biggest insanity are those who follow you.
God knows what Adler, Jung, Horney, or even Freud ccould have done with their mental state.
The United Nations’ (UN) International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction is annually observed on the second Wednesday of October to promote a global culture of natural disaster risk reduction.
Local names
Name
Language
International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction
English
Día Internacional para la Reducción de los Desastres Naturales
Spanish
International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction 2012
The United Nations’ (UN) International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction is annually observed on the second Wednesday of October to raise the profile of disaster risk reduction. It also encourages people and governments to participate in building more resilient communities and nations.
Activities for the International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction usually include media announcements about launches for campaigns that center on the day’s theme. Governments and communities also take part in the International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction through various events such as drawing, drama, essay or photography competitions that focus on making people aware of natural disaster reduction and increasing their preparedness for such situations. Other activities include: community tree planting; conferences, fairs and seminars; and street parades.
Public life
The International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
Many people around the world have lost their lives, homes or access to essential facilities, such as hospitals, due to natural disasters, including earthquakes, droughts, tsunamis, heavy flooding, hurricanes or cyclones. Some of these disasters have caused economic damage to some countries. The UN acknowledges that education, training, and information exchanges are effective ways to help people become better equipped in withstanding natural disasters.
On December 22, 1989, the UN General Assembly designated the second Wednesday of October as the International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction. This event was to be observed annually during the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, 1990-1999. On December 20, 2001, the assembly decided to maintain the observance to promote a global culture of natural disaster reduction, including disaster prevention, mitigation and preparedness.
Symbols
The UN logo is often associated with marketing and promotional material for this event. It features a projection of a world map (less Antarctica) centered on the North Pole, inscribed in a wreath consisting of crossed conventionalized branches of the olive tree. The olive branches symbolize peace and the world map depicts the area of concern to the UN in achieving its main purpose, peace and security. The projection of the map extends to 60 degrees south latitude, and includes five concentric circles.
International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction Observances
Zoologists are scientists who study animals, in either the wild or in a lab, observing them in the laboratory and in their natural habitat. They study the origin and development of species as well as their habits, behaviors and interactions. They also research the development of animal diseases and how these diseases affect the quality of life for each species of animal. Their work also includes analytical research and experimental laboratory work.
When the word zoologist is stated, many people think of anyone but a Black woman.
But, zoologists come in many racial and ethnic groups, as well as both genders.
One such zoologist was Roger Arliner Young.
During a time when many professions were closed to Black Americans, Ms. Young blazed a path into a field which even today still gives many people the image of Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” Marlin Perkins. Ms. Young fought the skepticism, racism and sexism of many doubters. Here is her story.
Roger Arliner Young (b. 1889 – d. November 9, 1964). zoologist and researcher. In a profession notoriously inhospitable to Black Americans, the life and career of the zoologist Roger Arliner Young showed both the achievement of professional respect and the severe obstacles Black women faced as scientific researchers and teachers.
Ms. Young attended the University of Pennsylvania and received her PhD in Zoology in 1940, one of a handful of advanced degrees awarded to Black women in the sciences before that decade. Despite financial worries, academic pressures, and little institutional stability, Ms. Young participated as a researcher at the world-renowned Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and was published in the prestigious journal Science in 1924.
Born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, Ms. Young grew up in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, and attended public schools there. She first went to Howard University in 1916 to study music and took her first zoology class in 1921. Here teacher for this class, Dr. Ernest Everett Just, an established Black biologist, significantly influenced the rest of her life.
The “Black Apollo of science”, Dr. Just started his teaching career at Howard as an English instructor. He made a dramatic switch to the sciences when Howard’s president Wilbur Patterson Thirkeld persuaded him to obtain a graduate degree in zoology and build Howard’s research capabilities. This commitment meant that Howard University could provide the limited institutional support necessary for the education of scientific researchers.
Dr. Just recruited Ms Young, and she prospered as a student and researcher under his tutelage. In 1923 she graduated with a degree in Zoology from Howard and began teaching as an instructor there. Unable to obtain financial assistance, Ms. Young saved from her small salary and entered the graduate program at the University of Chicago as a part-time student in 1924. Over three summers she completed her classes, earning her degree in 1926. Her impressive academic scores led to her induction into Sigma Xi, the national science honors society, an honor not given to master’s students. During her masters work and after, Ms. Young continued her work with Just.
Ms. Young published her work on the marine organism Paramecium entitled “On the Excretory Apparatus in Paramecium”. It was published by the journal Science on September 12, 1924. She did the first of many summer research stints at the Marine Biological Laboratory, assisting Dr. Just. Ms. Young took on significant administrative and teaching responsibilities at Howard University for several years starting in 1929 while Dr. Just conducted research in Europe. Under pressure from university administrators who wished to upgrade the credentials of faculty and with the encouragement of Dr. Just, Ms. Young received support from the General Education Board and began doctoral work at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1929.
Ms. Young’s performance in classes was solid, if not as exemplary as her master’s work. Burdened with caring for her invalid mother, worried about her financial circumstances, and with Dr. Just out of the country, Ms. Young failed her comprehensive examinations in January 1930. She disappeared from Chicago for several months, reappearing to take some classes in the spring. When these did not go well, Ms. Young returned to teach at Howard. Over the next several years, Ms. Young saw her relationship with Dr. Just cool, even as she continued to do research at the Marine Biological Laboratory and shouldered a heavy a teaching load at Howard. Dr. Just began trying to ease Ms. Young out at Howard in 1933, and they had a final confrontation in 1935, resulting in Ms. Young’s dismissal in 1936.
At possibly one of her most trying hours, Ms. Young regrouped and took the opportunity to make a new start for herself at the University of Pennsylvania under the guidance of L. V. Heilbrunn. She published four research articles between 1935 and 1938, continuing her work on sea urchin eggs (1938) and starting research on the embryological development of the annelid (1939). Ms. Young became the first Black woman to obtain a PhD in Zoology in 1940, a notable accomplishment, especially for a Black woman facing the double burden of sexism and racism.
Over the next twenty years, Ms. Young struggled professionally and personally. She began her teaching career at the North carolina College for Negroes in Durham. She left the institution to become head of the Biology Department at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Financial problems plagued Ms. Young, who was still supporting her mother and increasingly worried about her own retirement. Ms. Young found her teaching responsibilities increasingly difficult. She left Shaw University in 1947 and then held appointments at four different institutions–North Carolina College again, Paul Quinn College in Texas, Jackson State College in Mississippi, and Southern University in Louisiana.
Suffering from depression, she sought treatment at the Mississippi State mental Asylum in the late 1950s, leaving that institution in 1962.
She received a nine-month teaching appointment at Southern University, where she lived out her life.
REFERENCES:
“Roger Arliner Young”, by Amy M. Hay, Black Women in America.
“Roger Arliner Young (1889 – 1964)”, by Evelyn M. Hammonds. In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, et. al. Oxford University Press, 2005.
“Roger Arliner Young”, by Kenneth Manning, Sage, A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 6, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 3-7.
“Young, Roger Arliner (1889 – 1964).: In Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives From Ancient Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century, edited by Marilyn Ogilvie and Joy Harvey. New York: Routledge, 2000.
SELECTED WRITINGS OF ROGER ARLINER YOUNG:
(with L.V. Heilbrunn) “Indirect Effects of Radiation on Sea Urchin Eggs.” Biological Bulletin, 1935.
“On the Excretory Apparatus in Paramecium.” Science, September 12, 1924.
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was 89.
October 6, 2011
Dave Martin/Associated Press
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Montgomery, Ala., in 2007.
He died at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, his wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, said. He also lived in Birmingham.
It was in that city in the spring of 1963 that Mr. Shuttlesworth, an important ally of Dr. King, organized two tumultuous weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen and others against a rigidly segregated society.
Graphic scenes of helmeted police officers and firefighters under the direction of T. Eugene (Bull) Connor, Birmingham’s intransigent public safety commissioner, scattering peaceful marchers with fire hoses, police dogs and nightsticks, provoked a national outcry.
The brutality helped galvanize the nation’s conscience, as did the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of a black church in Birmingham that summer, which killed four girls at Sunday school. Those events led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after the historic Alabama marches that year from Selma to Montgomery, which Mr. Shuttlesworth also helped organize. The laws were the bedrock of civil rights legislation.
“Without Fred Shuttlesworth laying the groundwork, those demonstrations in Birmingham would not have been as successful,” said Andrew M. Manis, author of “A Fire You Can’t Put Out,” a biography of Mr. Shuttlesworth. “Birmingham led to Selma, and those two became the basis of the civil rights struggle.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth, he added, had “no equal in terms of courage and putting his life in the line of fire” to battle segregation.
Mr. Shuttlesworth joined with Dr. King in 1957 as one of the four founding ministers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the engine of Dr. King’s effort to unify the black clergy and their flocks to combat Jim Crow laws. At the time, Mr. Shuttlesworth was leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which he had helped form in 1956 to replace the Alabama offices of the N.A.A.C.P., shut down for years by court injunction.
Outside their roles as men of the cloth and civil rights advocates, however, Mr. Shuttlesworth and Dr. King stood in sharp contrast to each other in terms of background, personality and strategies.
Dr. King was a polished product of Atlanta’s black middle class. A graduate of Morehouse College, he held a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University. Fred Shuttlesworth was a child of poor black Alabama whose ministerial degree was from an unaccredited black school. (He later earned a master’s degree in education from Alabama State College.)
Where Dr. King could deliver thunderous oratory and move audiences by his reasoned convictions and faith, Mr. Shuttlesworth was fiery, whether preaching in the pulpit or standing up to Bull Connor, who dueled with him for years in street protests and boycotts leading up to their historic 1963 showdown.
Diane McWhorter, the author of “Carry Me Home,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book about the struggle in Birmingham, wrote in an e-mail that Mr. Shuttlesworth was known among some civil rights activists as “the Wild Man from Birmingham.”
“Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” she added, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory — meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth was temperamental, even obstinate, and championed action and confrontation over words. He could antagonize segregationists and allies alike, quarreling with his allies behind closed doors.
But few doubted his courage. In the years before 1963 he was arrested time and again — 30 to 40 times by his count — on charges aimed at impeding peaceful protests. He was repeatedly jailed and twice the target of bombs.
In one instance, on Christmas night 1956, he survived an attack in which six sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his parsonage bedroom as he lay in bed. “The wall and the floor were blown out,” Ms. McWhorter wrote, “and the mattress heaved into the air, supporting Shuttlesworth like a magic carpet.”
When he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. When a doctor treating his head wounds marveled that he had not suffered a concussion, Mr. Shuttlesworth famously replied, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”
Freddie Lee Robinson was born on March 18, 1922, in rural Mount Meigs, Ala. He took the surname Shuttlesworth from a man his mother, Alberta Robinson, later married. He had eight siblings, and the family supplemented its income by sharecropping and making moonshine liquor, an activity for which Mr. Shuttlesworth was sentenced to two years’ probation in 1940.
October 6, 2011
Linda Stelter/The Birmingham News, via Associated Press
In 2007, Senator Barack Obama pushed Mr. Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair as he greeted former President Bill Clinton.
He was a truck driver in the early 1940s but was soon drawn to pulpits in Selma and Birmingham. He became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and joined the Alabama chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. before it was outlawed from the state in 1956. He and others established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to carry on the chapter’s work and came to challenge the white power structure on many fronts.
In 1963 he welcomed Dr. King to Birmingham to take part in the protests. They planned a boycott of white merchants coupled with large marches that they expected would provoke overreaction by city officials and show the world the depth of white resistance.
“We wanted confrontation, nonviolent confrontation, to see if it would work,” Mr. Shuttlesworth later said. “Not just for Birmingham — for the nation. We were trying to launch a systematic, wholehearted battle against segregation, which would set the pace for the nation.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth suffered chest injuries when the pummeling spray of fire hoses was turned on him. “I’m sorry I missed it,” Mr. Connor said when told of the injuries, The New York Times reported in 1963. “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”
After 1965, with the new civil rights legislation on the books and Dr. King turning his attention to poverty and black problems in the urban North, Mr. Shuttlesworth remained focused on local issues in Birmingham and Cincinnati, where he had moved to take the pulpit of a black church. He traveled frequently between Ohio and Alabama before returning permanently to Birmingham in 2008 for treatment after suffering a stroke the previous year.
Besides his wife, Mr. Shuttlesworth is survived by four daughters, Patricia Massengill, Ruby “Ricky” Bester, Carolyn Shuttlesworth and Maria Murdock; a son, Fred Jr.; a stepdaughter, Audrey Wilson; five sisters, Betty Williams, Truzella Brazil, Ernestine Grimes, Iwilder Reid and Eula Mitchell; 14 grandchildren; 20 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.
With the death of Dr. King, and later Dr. King’s chief aide, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Mr. Shuttlesworth eventually assumed the role of elder statesman in the civil rights movement. In 2004 he was named president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but he stepped down the same year, complaining that “deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization.”
He also came under criticism by gay rights advocates in 2004 when he lent his name to a campaign in Cincinnati to stop the city from passing a gay rights ordinance.
He remained an honored figure in Birmingham, however. In 2008, the city renamed its principal airport Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.
In 2009, in a wheelchair, he was front and center among other dignitaries in an audience of about 6,000 at the city’s Boutwell Auditorium to watch a live broadcast as the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was sworn in.
He had encountered Mr. Obama, then a senator from Illinois, two years earlier, along with former President Bill Clinton, during a commemoration in Selma of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches. As a crowd crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where demonstrators were beaten and tear-gassed on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, Mr. Obama pushed Mr. Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair.
Such dedication. Such stalwart, unwavering courage in the face of virulent racist hatred.
Through the KKK detonating a bomb outside his church, threats, beatings, slurs, and assaults against his humanity, Rev. Shuttlesworth never gave up the good fight, even until the end.
He never lost his love or faith in the city that he fought to free from the vise-like grip of segregation, and today, because of Rev. Shuttlesworth’s activism, Birmingham, Alabama is a better city. because of Rev. Shuttlesworth, America is a better place.
Thank you, Rev. Shuttlesworth for keeping your eyes on the prize.
Marv Tarplin, the Motown guitarist and songwriter who shaped the sound of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and was a co-writer of “The Tracks of My Tears” and other hits, died on Friday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 70.
October 5, 2011
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Marv Tarplin, standing at center with a guitar, with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles around 1962 in Detroit.
The cause of death has not been determined, a spokeswoman for the Miracles, Jeanne Sorensen, said.
Mr. Tarplin had a knack for coming up with catchy riffs and melodies. He was fooling around with a calypso song he had heard Harry Belafonte sing, rearranging the chords, when he came up with the three-chord vamp that formed the backbone of the 1965 hit “The Tracks of My Tears,” for which Mr. Robinson wrote some of the most poignant lines in pop music.
He also collaborated on several songs that Marvin Gaye recorded. Two of the songs he wrote for Mr. Gaye (with Mr. Robinson and others) reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1965: “I’ll Be Doggone” and “Ain’t That Peculiar.”
Mr. Tarplin first came to Berry Gordy Jr.’s Motown label in the late 1950s as a guitar player for the Primettes, a teenage girl group that later became the Supremes. Mr. Robinson, who was already with the label, auditioned the group and told the singers to keep working, but he hired away Mr. Tarplin on the spot to play for the Miracles. It was the start of a five-decade collaboration.
“Marvin was a brilliant guitarist whose music has always inspired me,” Mr. Robinson told the British newspaper The Guardian.
When Mr. Robinson began his solo career in 1972, Mr. Tarplin initially stayed with the Miracles in Detroit, but he moved to Los Angeles to work with Mr. Robinson the next year. Over the next decade he contributed music to many of Mr. Robinson’s most memorable songs as a solo artist, including the hit “Cruisin’ ” in 1979. He continued touring with Mr. Robinson until he retired in 2008.
Mr. Tarplin was born in Atlanta on June 13, 1941, and moved with his family to Detroit, where his mother enrolled him in piano classes before he picked up a guitar and found his vocation. He was walking into a Detroit nightclub called the Flame Show Bar when members of the Primettes shouted out to him, saying they had seen him from their rehearsal space across the street. Two of them, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, had gone to Northeastern High School with Mr. Tarplin. He agreed to become their guitarist, playing with them at their early gigs and attending their Motown audition. It was a decision that changed his life.
Mr. Tarplin’s wife, Sylvia, died in 2004. He is survived by their daughter, Talese Tarplin, and two daughters from another relationship, Lisa and Ebony Tarplin.
DERRICK BELL, PIONEERING HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR AND RIGHTS ACTIVIST
Steve Liss/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images
Derrick Bell walking with a group of Harvard law students after taking a voluntary unpaid leave of absence to protest the lack of tenured minority female professors.
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Published: October 6, 2011
Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who saw persistent racism in America and sought to expose it through books, articles and provocative career moves — he gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school’s hiring practices — died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.
The cause was carcinoid cancer, his wife, Janet Dewart Bell, said.
Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later one of the first black deans of a law school that was not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.
While he was working at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in his 20s, his superiors told him to give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P., believing it posed a conflict of interest. Instead he quit the department, ignoring the advice of friends to try to change it from within.
Thirty years later, when he left Harvard Law School, he rejected similar advice. At the time, he said, his first wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, had asked him, “Why does it always have to be you?” The question trailed him afterward, he wrote in a 2002 memoir, “Ethical Ambition,” as did another posed by unsympathetic colleagues: “Who do you think you are?”
Professor Bell, soft-spoken and erudite, was “not confrontational by nature,” he wrote. But he attacked both conservative and liberal beliefs. In 1992, he told The New York Times that black Americans were more subjugated than at any time since slavery. And he wrote that in light of the often violent struggle that resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, things might have worked out better if the court had instead ordered that both races be provided with truly equivalent schools.
He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even many of those intended to redress past injustices. His 1973 book, “Race, Racism and American Law,” became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.
Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday.
At a rally while a student at Harvard Law, Barack Obama compared Professor Bell to the civil rights hero Rosa Parks.
Professor Bell’s core beliefs included what he called “the interest convergence dilemma” — the idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless it was in their interest. Asked how the status of blacks could be improved, he said he generally supported civil rights litigation, but cautioned that even favorable rulings would probably yield disappointing results and that it was best to be prepared for that.
Much of Professor Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of stories. In books and law review articles, he presented parables and allegories about race relations, then debated their meaning with a fictional alter ego, a professor named Geneva Crenshaw, who forced him to confront the truth about racism in America.
One of his best-known parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his 1992 book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.” In the story, as Professor Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves.” In exchange, the creatures ask for only one thing: America’s black population, which would be sent to outer space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin. (In 1994 the story was adapted as one of three segments in a television movie titled “Cosmic Slop.”)
Not everyone welcomed the move to storytelling in legal scholarship. In 1997 Richard Posner, the conservative law professor and appeals court judge, wrote in The New Republic that “by repudiating reasoned argumentation,” scholars like Professor Bell “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.”
Professor Bell’s narrative technique nonetheless became an accepted mode of legal scholarship, giving female, Latino and gay scholars a new way to introduce their experiences into legal discourse. Reviewing “Faces at the Bottom of the Well” in The New York Times, the Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote: “The stories challenge old assumptions and then linger in the mind in a way that a more conventionally scholarly treatment of the same themes would be unlikely to do.”
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1930, in Pittsburgh, to Derrick Albert and Ada Elizabeth Childress Bell. After graduating from Schenley High School near Pittsburgh’s Hill District, he became the first member of his family to go to college, attending Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1952.
A member of the R.O.T.C. at Duquesne, he was later an Air Force officer for two years, one of them in Korea. Afterward he attended the University of Pittsburgh Law School, where he was the only black student, earning his degree in 1957.
After his stint at the Justice Department, he headed the Pittsburgh office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, leading efforts to integrate a public swimming pool and a skating rink. Later, assigned to Mississippi, he supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases.
In 1969, after teaching briefly at the University of Southern California, he was recruited and hired by Harvard Law School, where students were pressuring the administration to appoint a black professor. Mr. Bell conceded that he did not have the usual qualifications for a Harvard professorship, like a federal court clerkship or a degree from a top law school.
In 1980 he left Harvard to become dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, but he resigned in 1985 when the school did not offer a position to an Asian-American woman. After returning to Harvard in 1986, he staged a five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school’s failure to grant tenure to two professors whose work involved critical race theory.
In 1990 he took an unpaid leave of absence, vowing not to return until the school hired, for the first time, a black woman to join its tenured faculty. His employment effectively ended when the school refused to extend his leave. By then, he was teaching at New York University School of Law, where he remained a visiting professor until his death. Harvard Law School hired Professor Guinier in 1998.
Mr. Bell said his personal decisions took a toll on his first wife, Jewel, who had cancer when he left Harvard in 1990 and died that year. In 1992 he began a correspondence with Janet Dewart, who was the communications director of the National Urban League. Ms. Dewart proposed marriage before the couple even met. A few months later, Mr. Bell accepted.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons from his first marriage, Derrick A. Bell III and Douglas Dubois Bell, both of Pittsburgh, and Carter Robeson Bell of New York; two sisters, Janet Bell of Pittsburgh and Constance Bell of Akron, Ohio; and a brother, Charles, of New York.
In “Ethical Ambition,” Mr. Bell expressed doubts about his legacy: “It is not easy to look back over a long career and recognize with some pain that my efforts may have benefited my career more clearly than they helped those for whom I have worked.”
But Professor Guinier, who continues to teach at Harvard, differed with that view. “Most people think of iconoclasts as lone rangers,” she said on Wednesday. “But Derrick was both an iconoclast and a community builder. When he was opening up this path, it was not just for him. It was for all those who he knew would follow into the legal academy.”
Professor Derrick Bell exhorted us all to realize that the faces at the bottom of the well were our own. Professor Bell championed us to never forget that disregarding the humanity of our fellow humans diminished us all. Most importantly, Professor Bell never forgot that Black Americans who have put so much into this nation, still have to fight with the Sysiphus stone of economic, environmetal, social, and legal discrimination.
Dr. Bell spoke that the Space Traders still are a sword of Damocles in the lives of Black Americans. He was a prophet, and he stood alone when he knew he was right, even if it cost him tenure, position and social standing.
Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.
Steven P. Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 in San Francisco in 2010. More Photos »
The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage. A friend of the family said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with the disease, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment, introducing new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.
He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.
“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”
By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.
Tributes to Mr. Jobs flowed quickly on Wednesday evening, in formal statements and in the flow of social networks, with President Obama, technology industry leaders and legions of Apple fans weighing in.
“For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder. “I will miss Steve immensely.”
A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”
Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.
During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.
Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.
Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.
It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.
“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”
“Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”
Diane Cilento, an Australian actress whose long stage and screen career included an Oscar-nominated performance in the 1963 movie “Tom Jones,” died in Queensland, Australia, on Thursday, a day after her 78th birthday.
October 9, 2011
Lopert Pictures, via Photofest
Diane Cilento in the 1963 movie “Tom Jones.”
Her death was announced by Anna Bligh, the premier of Queensland. No cause was given.
Ms. Cilento began acting in her teens and was 22 when she was nominated for a Tony Award in 1956 for her portrayal of Helen of Troy in a production of the Jean Giraudoux play “Tiger at the Gates.” On screen she appeared with Charlton Heston in “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (1965) and with Paul Newman in the western “Hombre” (1967).
She received an Academy Award nomination in 1963 for her supporting performance in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s hugely successful film version of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, as a gamekeeper’s daughter who lusts after the roguish title character, played by Albert Finney. The film was nominated for 10 Oscars and won 4, including best picture and best director.
Ms. Cilento was born in Queensland on Oct. 5, 1933, to parents who were both doctors, and moved to New York after her father took a job with the United Nations. She later moved to London, where she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
In 1962 she divorced her husband of seven years, Andrea Volpe, and married Sean Connery, who began his career as James Bond in “Dr. No” and his rapid ascent to stardom that same year. She divorced Mr. Connery in 1973 and 12 years later married the playwright Anthony Shaffer, whom she had met while making the suspense film “The Wicker Man,” for which Mr. Shaffer wrote the screenplay.
She and Mr. Shaffer lived in Queensland, where she ran a successful open-air theater in the rain forest. Mr. Shaffer died in 2001.
Charles Napier, a character actor who portrayed ruffians, military officers and other strong men in films like the second Rambo movie, but who played against type as a judge in “Philadelphia,” died on Wednesday in Bakersfield, Calif. He was 75.
Anabasis Investments, via Photofest
Charles Napier in 1985’s “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”
October 7, 2011
Pyramid Film Distribution/Everett Collection
Charles Napier in the 1992 film “Center of the Web.”
His death was confirmed by his agency, Bauman, Redanty & Shaul.
Mr. Napier also had an active career on television. One role, which has become something of a camp classic among fans of the 1960s “Star Trek” series, was as a space age hippie musician who comes aboard the Starship Enterprise with a group of others like him and sings and strums a futuristic guitar.
But with his formidable jaw, gruff demeanor and growling bass voice, Mr. Napier was typically cast in rugged parts. He played Tucker McElroy, the irate frontman for the country band the Good Ole Boys, in “The Blues Brothers” (1980); Murdock, the villain in “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985); and Lt. Bill Boyle, who is murdered by Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991).
He appeared on television shows like “The Rockford Files,” “B. J. and the Bear” and, more recently, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He provided voices for “The Simpsons,”“The Critic” and other animated series. His most high-profile role was the contemplative Judge Garnett in “Philadelphia” (1993).
“I always felt I played myself or some kind of version of myself,” he told The Bakersfield Californian last March. “If you think about it, old actors probably don’t even have a self.”
Charles Napier was born near Scottsville, Ky., on April 12, 1936, and became interested in acting after performing in plays while at graduate school at Western Kentucky University in the early 1960s.
He then moved to Hollywood, where he spent time with young unknowns like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and got his first part, as a guard on an episode of “Mission: Impossible,” in 1968. In 1970, he played Harry, a corrupt sheriff, in Russ Meyer’s sex-and-drugs movie romp “Cherry, Harry & Raquel!” (1970).
His survivors include two sons, Charles Whitnel and Hunter, and a daughter, Meghan.
His voice was most recently heard this year on the animated comedy series “Archer.”
October 3, 2011 | After six months of studying the innermost planet with NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, planetary scientists are discovering unexpected surface compositions and are finally zeroing in on how the innermost planet came to be. > read more
October 5, 2011 | The observations spill light on the history of Vesta’s cratered surface, its mineral composition and its inner iron core. > read more
October 4, 2011 | The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to (left to right) Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess, whose observations of distant supernovae led to the realization that the expansion of our universe is accelerating. > read more
October 6, 2011 | If celestial prognosticators are right, the little-known Draconid meteor shower could deliver hundreds of “shootings stars” per hour during a brief window on Saturday, October 8th. But the outburst’s timing favors Europe, not North America. > read more
September 16, 2011 | As of October 3rd the supernova in the galaxy M101 was down to about magnitude 11.1, after peaking in mid-September at 9.9. It’s fading by about 0.1 magnitude every two days now, and it has changed from white to strikingly orange-red. > read more
September 30, 2011 | This is a month of transition: Northern summer becomes autumn, Saturn sets just before Jupiter rises, and Venus is moving from the morning sky before dawn to the evening sky. > read more
September 23, 2011 | The “King of Planets,” which will dominate the evening sky from late 2011 through early 2012, is a captivating sight no matter how you look at it. > read more
September 8, 2011 | The two brightest asteroids are in fine view for binoculars or a telescope. Here are instructions and charts to find them. > read more
October 7, 2011 | Jupiter is about as big and bright as it will appear this year. Look well to its lower right to catch Mira still in an unusually bright maximum. And will the Draconid meteors erupt? > read more
October 7, 2011 | Variable-star observers gathered to celebrate astronomy’s most successful citizen-science organization. But old ways are ending, and a very different next century lies ahead for the AAVSO. > read more
April 14, 2011 | Want to gaze at the Milky Way all night or peer into the eyepiece of a 12-inch telescope? Escape the city lights and head for the nearest big amateur nighttime gathering. > read more
The United Nations has issued a call to artists around the world to submit designs for the construction of a memorial that commemorates the victims of slavery. The memorial will be erected at the United Nations.
The UN Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will administer the design competition, under the direction of Ambassador Raymond Wolfe of Jamaica. Mr. Wolfe heads the chair of Permanent Memorial Committee on Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
That the memorial honors victims of past enslavement, as well as honors those of present enslavement (sex trafficking, child slavery, child prostitution, within America, and outside America) shows that the human race has more than a long way to go in releasing its grip on the continuance of practicing the worst crime another human being can do to another.
Then again, the United States has not come to terms with her enslavement of Black Americans as well as the lasting effects of 146 years of inhumane chattel slavery, the destruction of Reconstruction, and the 100-year reign of Jane Crow segregation.
UN LAUNCHES COMPETITION TO DESIGN MEMORIAL TO VICTIMS OF SLAVERY
30 September 2011 –
The committee tasked with building a permanent memorial at the United Nations to honour the victims of slaveryand the transatlantic slave trade today launched a global competition for the design of the structure to remind the world that millions of Africans were violently removed from their homelands, abused and robbed of their dignity.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will administer the design competition, Ambassador Raymond Wolfe of Jamaica, the chair of the Permanent Memorial Committee on Slaveryand the Transatlantic Slave Trade, told a news conference at UN Headquarters.
“As we launch the competition I am pleased to report that all stakeholders including the members of the committee, Member States of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Africa Group which participated in the negotiations are supremely confident that UNESCO will manage a transparent, inclusive and politically impartial selection process,” said Mr. Wolfe.He urged ministries of foreign affairs and culture of Member States to disseminate information about the design competition so that a “rich and diverse pool of applications can be submitted to UNESCO for consideration.” The deadline for submitting designs to the competition is 19 December 2011.
Philippe Kridelka, the Director of UNESCO’s New York Office and Representative to the UN, noted that the monument will not only be a symbol, but part of an education process in memory of slaveryand the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Some $4.5 million is required to build the monument, and just over $1 million has been raised through donations from States and others sources. Mr. Wolfe encouraged corporations, philanthropists and the private sector to contribute to the project.
World Post Day marks the anniversary of the Universal Postal Union’s establishment and is annually held on October 9. The union aimed to create and maintain a structure for the free flow of international mail around the world.
In many international organizations and countries, high ranking officials or ministers make speeches or issue proclamations on the history or achievements of national or international postal services. Postal services may issue special postage stamps to commemorate the ideals, history or achievements of the national postal service on or around World Post Day. These are prized by stamp collectors and philatelists (people who study stamps). In addition, special lessons on these topics may be arranged for school children and the postal services and their employees may receive extra training or recognition and attention in the media.
The Universal Postal Union in cooperation with UNESCO has, for the past 35 years, organized an international letter-writing competition for young people. Many participating postal services use World Post Day to award prizes to the winners of the competition.
Public life
World Post Day is a global observance and not a public holiday.
Background
From the earliest times in history, “postal services” existed in the form of messengers who travelled large distances on foot or horseback. In the 1600s and 1700s, many countries set up national postage systems and entered into bilateral agreements for the exchange of mail between countries. By the late 1800s there was a large web of bilateral agreements that made the distribution of international mail complicated, nontransparent and inefficient.
In 1863, Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General in the United States of America, organized a conference of representatives from 15 European and American countries. During this conference, the delegates laid down a number of general principles for mutual agreements on international postal services but did not create an international postal agreement. On September 15, 1874, Heinrich von Stephan, a senior postal official in the North German Confederation (an area that now forms parts of Germany, Poland and Russia), opened a conference in Berne, Switzerland, with delegates from 22 countries. On October 9, 1874, the delegates signed the Treaty of Berne and established the General Postal Union.
The number of countries that were members of the General Postal Union grew rapidly and the union’s name was changed to the Universal Postal Union in 1878. In 1948, the Universal Postal Union became a specialized agency of the United Nations. The 16th Universal Postal Union Congress was held in Tokyo, Japan, from October 1 to November 16, 1969. During this conference the delegates voted to declare October 9 each year as World Post Day.
The work of the Universal Postal Union continues to be very important to global communication and trade, even in the era of digital communication. In areas and communities with a high level of access to digital communication, postal services are important for distributing goods bought in Internet stores. In communities with lower levels of access to digital communication, postal services remain vital for the distribution of information and goods. Post offices and trucks used to deliver mail to outlying areas are also becoming service points to bring digital communication to many more people. Moreover, the union is working on ways to bring electronic money transfer services to rural areas in countries in the Middle East and in north-east Africa.
The United Nations is heralding the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to three women activists. The recipients—Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Liberia), Tawakkul Karman (Yemen), and Leymah Gbowee (Liberia) —all demonstrated the important role that women have in enhancing social, economical and environmental advancements; advocating peaceful means to solutions, and working for human rights and security around the world.
Congratulations to them all for their love of their fellow women, men and children.
UN lauds awarding of Nobel Peace Prize to three women’s activists
Nobel Peace Prize joint winners Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Tawakkul Karman, and Leymah Gbowee
7 October 2011 –
United Nations officials have hailed today’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to three women’s activists, saying the recipients demonstrate the vital role that women play in advancing peace and security, boosting development and securing human rights around the globe.Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female elected head of State; Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian peace activist; and Tawakkul Karman, a journalist and pro-democracy activist from Yemen, are the joint winners of this year’s prize.Nobel judges, announcing the decision in Oslo, Norway, cited the winners’ “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peacebuilding work.”Speaking in New York, Secretary-GeneralBan Ki-moon said the award could not have been better chosen.
“It underscores the vital role that women play in the advancement of peace and security, development and human rights,” he said.
“I myself have met women who have been the victims of sexual violence. I have seen for myself women’s leadership power in building and sustaining peace. And I have heard the voices of women calling for justice and democracy in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.”
In a subsequent statementhe described the winners as “three inspirational women of uncommon courage and commitment” and reaffirmed that promoting the cause of women is a top priority of the UN.
“With this decision, the Norwegian Nobel Committee sends a clear message: women count for peace. It is a testament to the power of the human spirit and underscores a fundamental principle of the United Nations Charter: the vital role of women in the advancement of peace and security, development and human rights.”
Mr. Ban’s remarks were echoed by Michelle Bachelet, the Executive Director of UN Women, the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, who notedthat each of the three Nobel recipients had overcome huge obstacles.
“All over the world, women are demanding their rights and their equal participation in peacebuilding, democracy and the development of their nations, and this year’s Nobel Peace Prize sends a message to the world that now, the 21st century, is the time for women’s full and equal participation at all levels of society,” Ms. Bachelet said.
Helen Clark, the Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), saidMs. Johnson Sirleaf, Ms. Gbowee and Ms. Karman demonstrate “what can be achieved when women participate and take on decision-making roles, and they serve as an example for us all.”
Margot Wallström, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said the recipients’ careers offer motivation to other women.
“If only three of the world’s women can achieve all they have, imagine what can be done if half of the world’s population is allowed the rights women are entitled to,” she said.
In its announcement the Nobel committee cited Security Council resolution 1325, the landmark text from 2000 that recognizes women and children constitute the majority of victims of conflicts, have a vital role in resolving those conflicts and must be given an equal role to men in all peace processes.
Ms. Wallström noted that, more than a decade after that resolution was adopted, less than 10 per cent of all peace agreements are negotiated by women and less than 3 per cent are signed by women.
“Women’s participation in peace processes needs to engage peacemakers, peacekeepers, peacebuilders and political leaders – not only women’s rights and gender experts,” she stressed.
Ray Chambers, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Malaria, spotlighted the work of Ms. Johnson Sirleaf as Liberian President in fighting the spread of the deadly disease across Africa.
“By working to save the lives of nearly 800,000 children a year, President Sirleaf is helping to bring transformative progress to Africa, and I look forward to continuing our work together,” he said.
The UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL) also welcomed today’s announcement and offered its congratulations.
Ms. Johnson Sirleaf is running for re-election as her country’s President, with the polls set to take place on Tuesday, and in a statement UNMIL underlined that “the elections are for the Liberian people to decide at the ballot box.”
Judy Cheng-Hopkins, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support, praised the work of women worldwide in translating the theory of peacebuilding into concrete actions in countries emerging from conflict and misrule.
“The peacebuilding architecture can learn from these exemplary women,” she said. “Liberia is one of six countries on the agenda of the Peacebuilding Commission, which champions the role of peacebuilding. The $395 million Peacebuilding Fund has invested in 22 countries, including Liberia, to extend peace, justice and security – a feat that cannot be realized without the active leadership and participation of women.”
From the fight to save Troy Davis to the Occupy Wall Street and Rebuilding the American Dream movements, we have to bring our movement together to re-conceive the world in which we live, Rinku Sen says.
Thousands of young, black men and women in the South are declaring “I am Troy Davis” as if their lives depend on it. And they do. Jen Marlowe and Kung Li see a new movement.
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