Don’t be. You’re hearing media do what it does: harp on one person’s lack of enthusiasm and make it seem that that one opinion is held by thousands.
This race went precisely as I thought it would. Precisely.
And it was absolutely a massive success.
So let me tell you why, so that you feel better and can easily put down the annoying crowing that republicans are going to do, because they managed to cling to a few things.
If the votes fall as I believe they will, the democrats will have retaken the house by some 30 seats. This is impressive and somewhat unique in our country’s history. The GOP, upon taking the house originally, jerrimandered these districts in impressively screwball ways. Wherever that rigging has been overturned, the districts have gone blue. Which is, of course, why they did it. Democrats have the house now, 30ish flips in republican rugged districts. 15 of those being female candidates.
That is absolutely impressive.
A few key candidates to whom many people were paying close attention did not perform as people desired. Abrams, O’Rourke, Gillum. Well…I’m not surprised. Abrams faces absolute state wide fraud. Her opponent being the person also in charge of voter registration, withholding some 50k votes of which 70% were black. Voter intimidation. This is blatant corruption. And yet still…her race was very close. So too with Beto. Ted Cruz was a presidential candidate! When he took Texas, he did so with a wide margin. Last night in Texas he was fighting tooth and nail. Gillum’s goobenatorial race for Florida was a figurative dead heat. 99% of the vote in—49% Gillum, 49.7% DeSantis. These are CLASSICALLY and FULLY republican regions in which Trump took the presidency by huge margins. That these races, with all those challenges, were as close as they were PROVES that something unprecedented happened.
3-400% voter turnout increases for a midterm election. Mostly with the youth.
But let’s talk about what it means to have the house.
Now I know you’re probably concerned about the federal judgeships that are about to pop up for consideration, and it’s true that the Senate was needed to stop approvals of those candidates, but…
Control of the house means that Democrats now take hold of some critical committees. These committees are the very ones that will be overseeing corruption allegations. Ways and Means, energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Intelligence, appropriations, foreign affairs, armed services, judiciary, transportation and infrastructure, and…government reform.
How do you feel now?
The worst political fallout of a GOP controlled government, the worst sound bites that weren’t Trump’s, the worst slaps across the face? All came from footage of those very same committees. Those committees now belong to Democrats.
Massive policy shifts also occurred in many classically conservative states—legalizing marijuana votes, Florida giving the vote back to former criminals who’ve served their time thus giving the vote back to a HUGE portion of the African-American Community that has been held in check by a racist and classicist policing method, then there were upsets in many small ways too.
I promise you…this is all excellent and it will have truly important and forceful impact. In 2020, if we can keep that same enthusiasm and rage, the entire government will shift. But that can only happen if we keep moving forward, if the candidates who won keep their noses to the grindstone and push back hard, if you and I and everyone on the ground continues to talk about this and force out bigots and greed.
Do not be discouraged. I promise you…this was an amazing election. Don’t focus on a few bright stars and think that all is lost because they fell. There is a great deal happening here, and one thing I know from being at sea—when a wave is building, there is first a terrifying shift, as the water level begins to rise. The ship will first dip, surrounded by walls of water, and then of a sudden, the swell. The ship raises and passengers suddenly realize that they are much higher than before, with an incredible view. Then the wave crests and takes the ship with it.
We didn’t see a wave crest tonight. So what? That means it’s a much larger wave than we realized. It will crest in the future. But only if that fluid pressure is maintained.
This is good. It is. So long as everyone keeps working. This is good.
Calm down. Have a glass of champagne. A cup of tea. When they Trumpet all their noise…say nothing. Nothing needs to be said. You’re higher than you were with an excellent view of the ending. So relax. Don’t fret.
In terms of what I’m seeing on Twitter re: calls for solidarity with the Jewish community by gentiles, it’s predominantly coming from Muslims. The pastors/ministers I’ve seen tweeting support are almost entirely from the Black community.
White Christians, y’all are unsurprisingly fucking silent right now, and that includes so-called progressives. Just know: I fucking see you.
This has been my experience as a southern Jew. Christian African Americans and Muslims and Jews show up for each other. We kick the f*cking KKK and neonazis out of town, we help each other wash off graffiti. White Christians, wake up.
You know, the news is really sheltering gentiles from the full horror of what happened this morning when they keep using the phrase “Brit Milah.” Yes, that’s what was happening in the synagogue this morning, but do you know what it is?
It’s a baby naming.
Every bit as important as a christening or first birthday.
That is what this shooter opened fire on. A baby naming with people praying for that baby’s health and happiness and future.
In case you had any doubt fascism has come to America. Squirrel Hill is a neighborhood I visited and patronized more times than I could count during my seven-ish years in Pittsburgh. I have friends there. Thoughts, prayers and support to the victims. Fuck this guy and his enablers. You have blood on your hands.
Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.
One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”
I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”
“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”
Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.
And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”
The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.
“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”
The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”
“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”
So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.
But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé – well.
Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.
What the whole world would look like.
Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time – more than nine times out of ten – CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.
If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.
(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)
Also, the custard pie has gravity on its side. Something falling from six feet up plus the height of the person dropping it (assuming they’re at the top of the stepladder), has a hell of a lot more force behind it than one that just sits there and does nothing.
Yes, I tend to take metaphors literally.
Which means you still TRY, you give it everything you have, because you might just make a difference, and this is where reblogging comes in, this is where quantum theory gets involved. How? Because small actions can have huge impact. Reblog that post you believe in, reach your followers, spread the word. THINK DR WHO. THINK THE LATEST EPISODE. THINK ROSA PARKS. One small act of resistance sparks change. One voice joins all the others until there are millions of voices all saying the same thing, until they have to be heard. If they are not there, then nothing will be done. So vote. Use your constitutional right to make a difference. If you don’t, then nothing will change. If you do, then things might change, they might not, but ask yourself, can you risk it? So, that person who just drops dead in front of you, are you going to ignore that person because the odds are against you succeeding at CPR? Or will you risk the chance that you could be in the 4% to bring them back?
To quote Gimli in LotR, “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
I just found out that they have thousands – thousands! – of Torah scrolls, which they then donate to other Evangelicals for financial reasons and political leverage. (In one case, they donated a 16th-century scroll to Liberty University. It was completely unfurled and directly handled in an auditorium. By untrained students.) Almost two thousand of them are sitting in an explicitly Evangelical museum full of supercessionist bullshit, and the text of the largest display talks about how they were “saved” from burial or the genizah.
Saved.
From proper Jewish ritual handling.
By Evangelical Xians.
Who then donate these things to other Evangelicals who mishandle them.
For money.
I… I think I’m going to cry.
I was just about to post this! I even got a little shout-out in the article. 🙂
The notion of “build[ing] a Christian museum on the backs of Jewish items” is, as I’ve come to understand in my research of the history of Judaica collecting, goes back several centuries to the origins of the modern museum itself. But it is particularly disturbing to see how this classically-supersessionist and fossilizing language (“God gave those people [Jews] a job, and they did that job well,” Steven Green explains, referring to the “job” of preserving the Torah text in identical copies so that evangelical Christians could prove the Bible’s unerring nature) is intertwined with corporate capitalism and greedy tax evasion. If only there was something in all those Torah scrolls on the subject…
Not okay. Not even a little.
It gets even more disgusting when you realize that the reason why they’re desecrating our most holy artifacts is because they’ve figured out how to use them to perpetrate tax fraud. This is how the scam works:
A congregation owns a Sefer Torah. It is worth many thousands of dollars.
A rabbi examines the Sefer Torah and discovers that it contains one or more flaws which render it no longer kosher and it must be retired from use. However, because a damaged Sefer Torah likely contains individual panels that are still in good condition it can be dismantled and combined with other damaged sifrei in order to produce a new kosher scroll. Those panels make the entire scroll worth a couple of thousand dollars.
The congregation offers the damaged sefer up for sale with the expectation that the buyer will use it to produce a new Sefer Torah with the undamaged panels while properly laying to rest any panels that can no longer be used. Somehow one of these assholes buys it.
Said asshole donates it to one of these museums.
The museum then ‘appraises’ the scroll as if it were a kosher Sefer Torah worth tens of thousands of dollars. After all, who’s to say it isn’t, amirite?!
Said asshole deducts tens of thousands of dollars off of their taxes when they only paid one or two thousand dollars to buy the scroll.
So there you have it. Not only is the Sefer Torah deprived a respectful burial but a low-income congregation somewhere is deprived a Sefer Torah that they are able to afford. All so that some rich Christian asshole can scam the federal government out of a few thousand dollars.
Reading this raised my blood pressure.
I’m BEYOND furious.
I live in spitting distance of liberty university, that evil community. We only have one synagogue, and a chavurah. Also only one Islamic Center. In a SEA of evangelical churches who hate us. Another nearby town only has one synagogue as well. My heart feels like it’s being torn to shreds. Any of these small congregations would gladly have bought or raised money for that non kosher Sefer Torah LU mistreated.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.
A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.
Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.
The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.
I have a habit of waking up my boyfriend with news alerts but I think this morning I’ll let him sleep just a little bit longer before mentioning we’re officially back in the Cold War
Between 1990 and 2014, visits to public libraries grew by a whopping
181%. For context, the population of the United States increased by 28%
during that period. Why have so many more people been using their
libraries in the last two decades? Here’s what I think…
Librarians Are More Involved in Communities
In the distant past, the library building was the center of a librarian’s professional world. Now, librarians regularly expand the library’s reach by presenting at
community meetings, staffing booths at events, and just generally
applying their skills in creative ways to helping their community.
Responsive, Unique, and High-Quality Program Offerings
Libraries have hosted programs such as book clubs, film screenings, storytimes, and arts & crafts for years. Today’s libraries have raised the bar with their program offerings in the past
few decades to respond to patron needs. Workshops and training on starting a business, basic job skills, and STEM programs for kids, “Community Reads” events and literary festivals are just a few new options available.
Embrace of a User-Centered Approach to Technology
Possibly the biggest reason that library visits have grown so
drastically in the last two decades is that libraries have become the
go-to places for computer classes, help with devices like tablets and
e-readers, and access to free ebooks and audiobooks.
Libraries succeed at technology not by upgrading their computers every
year, but by helping their patrons access the information they need,
whether it is at the library or at home using the skills they learned at
the library.
DarkestElemental616 