Not Too Late To Make A Difference This Year

That's it. I am sick and fucking tired of wingnut freakazoids getting credit for being "charitable" when all they're really doing is paying protection money to their churches, whose clergy use it to buy cocaine and secret abortions.

When a supposed liberal like Nick Kristof falls for the lie, it's gotten out of hand.

We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, "Who Really Cares," cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Bullshit. Utter, complete, unadulterated bullshit.


Dig down into those studies and you'll find - oops!, sorry, not so much.

Rich people - conservative and liberal - tend to give money to education (private colleges they want to get their kinds into as legacies), museums/arts (fancy new wings named after the donors) and research (more personalized construction.)

Religious people of all persuasions give to their religious organizations, which spend the vast majority of that money on administrative salaries and building maintenance. Doubt it? Drive past Southland Christian Church in Lexington and tell me you think that fancy ten-building campus looks like a charitable organization.

Non-religious, non-rich conservatives don't give jack shit to anybody. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, bitch, and don't whine that you're barefoot!

Non-religious, non-rich liberals, granted, tend not to give much to charity, either, but here's the difference between them and their conservative counterparts: liberals make their contribution by pushing for pro-labor, pro-worker, pro-job, pro-family, pro-health care government policies that help large numbers of people in ways private charity simply cannot.

George H.W. Bush's ridiculous "Thousand Points of Light" was the perfect example. All the charities in the country together could not replace a single government program to help poor people, like even the minimal Food Stamp Program.

And if you think I'm making excuses for myself, here's my own charitable record: I give to what I consider real charities - those who help those who cannot help themselves. Local food banks, homeless shelters, drug rehab for single mothers, family planning, victims of war and disease. I have gradually increased the amount over the years, until last year I gave three percent of my gross income. This year, with so many in need, I jumped it to four percent. Not much, but finally more than the national average.

Don't get me wrong; I do it out of pure selfishness. My favorite part of the holidays is making the list of charities I will donate to, figuring the total amount I will donate, dividing it up among the charities (making sure everybody gets at least a little more than they got last year), and writing out each check. I like to send a holiday card with it, so the organization can tape the card up on the door to show off their donors.

They always send a letter of thanks. Yes, it's required by the IRS, but the local charities almost always add a little hand-written personal note.

It is absolutely the greatest feeling in the world to know that someone in need is getting a meal, a home, medicine because of you.

There aren't enough church recreation centers in the world to match that.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

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Celebrate Ten Days of Newton

It's 26 days until we inaugurate a President who genuinely values science, so let's begin the countdown by celebrating the 366th birthday of the scientist upon whose discoveries all our science and technology rest: Sir Isaac Newton.

In the New York Times, Olivia Judson explains the calendrical reasons why Newton needs 10 full days of celebration.

Some years ago, the evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins pointed out to me that Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, and arguably the greatest scientist of all time, was born on Christmas Day, and that therefore Newton's Birthday could be an alternative, if somewhat nerdy, excuse for a winter holiday ...

Yet things are not so simple. It turns out that the date of Newton's birthday is a little contentious. Newton was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar — the calendar in use in England at the time. But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this calendar, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643.

Rather than bickering about whether Dec. 25 or Jan. 4 is the better date to observe Newton's Birthday, I think we should embrace the discrepancy and have an extended festival. After all, the festival of Christmas properly continues for a further 12 days, until the feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6. So the festival of Newton could begin on Christmas Day and then continue for an extra 10 days, representing the interval between the calendars.

SNIP

Newton does not seem to have been a pleasant man. He feuded with several of his professional colleagues, most famously Robert Hooke and Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz; he was reclusive and secretive and seems to have formed few lasting friendships. But he was also a genius, and his work laid the foundations of our modern understanding of the world. He is a man to celebrate.

In honor of Newton's Birthday festival, I therefore propose the following song, to be sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." For brevity, I include only the final verse. All together now!

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me,
Ten drops of genius,
Nine silver co-oins,
Eight circling planets,
Seven shades of li-ight,
Six counterfeiters,
Cal-Cu-Lus!
Four telescopes,
Three Laws of Motion,
Two awful feuds,
And the discovery of gravity!
Happy Newton, everybody!

Merry Newton!

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

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Number 77

Marine Lance Corporal Thomas Reilly Jr., 19, of London, Kentucky, died in Anbar province, Iraq, four days before Christmas, and the day before he became an uncle.

Reilly is remembered in his hometown paper:

The 19-year-old lance corporal — who had considered entering culinary school after his military service — was killed in combat Sunday while serving in Iraq.

Mary King, Reilly's former teacher and Family, Career and Community Leaders of America advisor, said she kept in contact with her former student after he had been deployed to Iraq over the summer.

SNIP

King said Reilly's mother, Georgina Bray of London, was given the news of her son's death at the hospital in Harlan, where her daughter Regina had just given birth.

SNIP

"I had talked to him just a few days ago, and I just had mailed a card on Saturday and I got this news Monday," King said. "He was killed Sunday, 10 p.m. our time."

King said Reilly's mother had signed for him to become a recruit at age 17. Reilly graduated from South Laurel High School in May 2007, and from boot camp last October. He had been stationed in Hawaii and was deployed to Iraq in July.

"That's just what he wanted to do," King said. "He saw that (the Marines) as a place he could excel and be a leader and be someone who could be in charge and move on up in the ranks."

At South Laurel High School, Reilly showed his potential to lead as an office holder in both the local and regional chapters of the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America, a national organization for students in Family and Consumer Sciences education, formerly known as home economics.

"He took the lead in things like that," King said. "His senior year he was a teacher's aide for me. He was very reliable.

"He was very interested and had a talent in culinary," King added. "He could decorate cakes really well... He was interested in maybe doing a culinary school at some point."

Carol Eicher, a former FCCLA advisor at South Laurel, said Reilly was a wonderful student and that club members had continued to write to him after he was stationed in Iraq. Reilly also came by the high school to say goodbye to teachers and friends before his deployment — something Eicher said he was very proud about.

"He had his dress blues on, and I gave him a big hug and I said 'please be safe,'" Eicher recalled. "...He just looked so handsome."

No, President-Elect Obama; 16 months is not remotely close to fast enough. 16 days is far, far too slow.

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Earthrise: The Picture That Changed the World

Forty years ago tonight, an American serviceman took a photo from the window of his vehicle.

William Anders could not have imagined what that photo, developed from Kodachrome film and reproduced millions of times around the world, would mean to a billion people devastated by the most violent and destructive year in a quarter-century.

After Tet, and Martin, and Bobby, and Chicago, and Tricky Dick winning, it seemed nothing could rescue our spirits from the '68 Slough of Despond.

Then we saw it. For the first time in a million years of human existence, four billion years of the planet's existence, creatures from the surface of the earth got to see what our home - our only home - really looked like.

(More after the jump.)

The Apollo moon program resulted in a legacy of thousands of images - all of them of immense value as both scientific and documentary records. Yet 30 years after the event most of them speak only as images from history.

However one particular Apollo photograph transcends all others, an image so powerful and eloquent that even today it ranks as one of the most important photographs taken by anyone ever.

The colour photograph of Earthrise - taken by Apollo 8 astronaut, William A. Anders, December 24, 1968. Although the photograph is usually mounted with the moon below the earth, this is how Anders saw it. This photograph was taken during the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, seven months before the first lunar landing ...

The 'Earthrise' photograph was not on the mission schedule and was taken in a moment of pure serendipity.

In order to take photographs of the far side of the moon the Apollo spacecraft had been rolled so that its windows pointed towards the lunar surface. During this time, the Moon was between the spacecraft and Earth, effectively cutting-off all radio communication with mission control. As Apollo 8 emerged from the far side on its fourth orbit, crew commander Frank Borman rolled the spacecraft so as to position its antennas for radio contact with mission control. Looking to the lunar horizon for reference he exclaimed - "Oh my God, look at that picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up!" ...

But regardless of which way the photograph was taken, the image shows our entire world as a small and blue and very finite globe, with our nearest celestial neighbour a desolate presence in the foreground.

US Nature photographer Galen Rowell has described this image as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken".

In the LA TImes, Susan Salter Reynolds reviews the new book 'Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth' by Robert Poole, "A stirring account of the iconic Earth portrait taken by the crew of Apollo 8 - and its consequences."

On Christmas Day, in the New York Times, Archibald MacLeish wrote that the image of Earth would create a paradigm shift: "To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold -- brothers who know that they are truly brothers."

SNIP

In "Earthrise," Poole explores the evolution of a shift just when the enormity of the possibility of nuclear war threatened to shut down our collective imagination, just when we were most paralyzed by our ability to destroy the Earth. "One thing was obvious to all," Poole quotes biologist Lewis Thomas: "while the moon was 'dead as an old bone,' the Earth was 'the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.'"

Earthrise is a revelation, and a promise, and a warning. This is who we are, this is what we can be, this is what is at stake.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

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A Season of Giving; A Sense of Common Purpose

Here's your Holiday Miracle: the President-Elect's Christmas Eve address expresses the true meaning of the season without a single mention of baby jesus, wise men, stars in the east, mangers or even "god."

Take that, Rick Warren!

That is why this season of giving should also be a time to renew a sense of common purpose and shared citizenship. Now, more than ever, we must rededicate ourselves to the notion that we share a common destiny as Americans – that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. Now, we must all do our part to serve one another; to seek new ideas and new innovation; and to start a new chapter for our great country.

That is the spirit that will guide my Administration in the New Year. If the American people come together and put their shoulder to the wheel of history, then I know that we can put our people back to work and point our country in a new direction. That is how we will see ourselves through this time of crisis, and reach the promise of a brighter day.

After all, that is what Americans have always done.

Click here for the video and full text.

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Harnessing the Power

The Obama campaign is still and again dunning its supporters for donations.

Donations to charity.

This holiday season, the grassroots movement you helped build can make a big difference for those in need.

I hope you will join me in supporting your favorite charity or contributing to causes that are especially meaningful to me and my family.

While many of us will spend the holidays counting our blessings and sharing dinner with loved ones, millions of people around the country won't be so fortunate. Donating to your local food bank will help provide a holiday meal to people in your community who can't afford one.

Talking with the families of deployed troops was one of the most rewarding experiences I had during the campaign. Giving to Operation USO Care Package is a great way to send members of our military stationed around the world a reminder that someone back home is thinking of them.

This is a time to celebrate our blessings, the new year, and a new era for our country. But it's also a time to come together on behalf of those who need our help.

Do what you can to help today by locating your local food bank and giving your support:

http://my.barackobama.com/foodbanks

Or send a care package to an American in uniform:

http://my.barackobama.com/carepackage

Thank you for all that you do and have a very happy holiday season,

Michelle

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