Month: April 2012

Dan Levin reflects on hosting a Passover seder in Beijing:

China is hardly the only country whose people are struggling for political and personal freedom, but at Passover, it looms far larger than other countries with poor human-rights records because Jews, like everyone else, profit from and pay for those abuses. Just check your stocks. It would be easy for Jews to boycott Zimbabwe or Iran or North Korea as a protest. But China? Impossible. It is inextricably bound to the daily lives of American Jews. It’s the United States’ largest trading partner, and nearly everything American Jews buy is made by Chinese workers, from cell phones and laptops to the pans we use to cook our Seder meals and the tables around which we recline. China’s lack of freedom casts a shadow across every Seder.

Daniel Serwer focuses his thoughts on Syria:

I’ll pray for the Syrians at Seder tonight, as I trust many Jews around the world will do.  Not because I think praying will do the Syrians any good, but because the parallel between today’s Syrians and our own liberation narrative should inform our sensibilities.  The people of Syria are seeking the freedom that Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans and Yemenis have all started to enjoy, even if they are still at the beginning of their journeys through the wilderness.  I hope the Syrians catch up soon. The most frequent injunction in the Old Testament is to treat a stranger like ourselves.

A girl looks at a Bible while Indonesian Christians worship during a Good Friday service in the Raja Kristus Agung Catholic Church on April 6, 2012 in Bintan Island, Indonesia. Good Friday is a public holiday in Indonesia. By Yuli Seperi/Getty Images.

A close look at Florida's new voting laws, which are likely to depress minority turnout:

In March 2011, Governor Rick Scott rolled back the right to vote for hundreds of thousands – perhaps as many as a million – Florida citizens who have criminal records. Florida has long had one of the harshest felony voting bans in the country, but Governor Scott not only reversed some moderate reforms put in place by former Governor Charlie Crist, he made the state’s policy even more restrictive than it was under the previous governor, Jeb Bush. 

Under the new rules, even people with nonviolent convictions must wait five years after they complete all terms of their sentences before they are allowed to apply for restoration of civil rights; the clock resets if an individual is arrested, including for a misdemeanor, during the five-year waiting period. In some cases, people must wait seven years before being able to apply, and then they must appear in person for a hearing before the clemency board in Tallahassee.  

Remember: all of this has to happen just to have the opportunity to ask for one’s right to vote back. After the waiting period, the application and the hearing, you could be denied restoration with no reason or explanation. And if that happens, you have to wait another two years before starting the process all over again.

"I will never know why it took so long. It’s not easy looking at everything you thought you knew and saying “Wow, was I ever full of shit.” But eventually, if you have two remaining brain cells bouncing around your thick noggin, the amount of evidence becomes unavoidable and undeniable. Even for someone who voted for Bush twice," – John Cole, apostate, in a searingly honest and moving post.

Seriously: this was published as what John Derbyshire tells his children about a world with African-Americans in it:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

I am at a loss for words. Via TP.

The MCAT is getting an update for the first time in more than 20 years: 

The standardized test that all doctors-in-training must take will soon add a section on "psychological, social and biological" sciences. The aim is to bring the medical entrance exam better in line with medical research showing that health is as much influenced by behavior and relationships as it is by biology and genetics. These changes have been in the works for over four years now, vetted by various committees and academics until their approval last month.

I'm on Face The Nation this coming Easter Sunday morning debating Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Council on the crisis in Christianity. Also Saturday morning on CBS and tonight on CNN around 7.45 pm.

Not exactly: 

For one, you need to get somewhat close to a word’s proper spelling in order for it to be helpful. Second, it hasn’t yet been incorporated into most email and word-processing programs. The recent Google Docs upgrade is a significant improvement over traditional spell-check tools, but work remains to be done. Google Docs now flags the Brittany in “Brittany Griner Baylor” because that’s a popular search term. But when it comes to a phrase like “Brittany Griner of Baylor,” which you’d be more likely to use in an essay, Google Docs is mute. Spell-check programs will probably never make spelling as easy as a calculator makes arithmetic. But at least now they can put two and two together.

Scott Horton examines the extraordinary decision by this extraordinary court that anyone, for even the most trivial offense, can be strip-searched by the cops without any defense under the Fourth Amendment:

The decision reflects the elevation of the prison industry’s interest in maintaining order in its facilities above the interests of individuals. And it does so by systematically misunderstanding the reasons behind strip searches. Kennedy insists that they are all done for the aim of fostering order, and he backs up this position with exemplary bits of pretzel logic. For instance, he suggests that a person stopped for failing to yield at an intersection may well have heroin taped to his scrotum, and may attempt to bring it into the prison to which he is taken. In advancing such rationales, the Court ignores the darker truth about strip searches: they are employed for the conscious humiliation and psychological preparation of prisoners, as part of a practice designed to break them down and render them submissive.

And the scope for abuse is real.