From aclu.org:

The Voting Rights Act is a historic civil rights law that is meant to ensure that the right to vote is not denied on account of race or color.

1867
1866 Civil Rights Act of 1866 grants citizenship, but not the right to vote, to all native-born Americans.

1869
Congress passes the Fifteenth Amendment giving African American men the right to vote.

1896
Louisiana passes “grandfather clauses” to keep former slaves and their descendants from voting. As a result, registered black voters drops from 44.8% in 1896 to 4.0% four years later. Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and Virginia follow Louisiana’s lead by enacting their own grandfather clauses.

1940
Only 3% of eligible African Americans in the South are registered to vote. Jim Crow laws like literacy tests and poll taxes were meant to keep African Americans from voting.

Here is an example of real literacy test:

The State of Louisiana Literacy Test (this test is to be given to anyone who cannot prove a fifth grade education)

Do what you are told in each statement, nothing more, nothing less.Be careful as one wrong answer denotes failure of the test. You have 10 minutes to complete the test.

Draw a line around the number of letter of this sentence.

Draw a line under the last word of this line.

Cross out the longest word of this line.

Draw a line around the shortest word of this line.

Circle the first, first letter of the alphabet in this line

In the space below draw three circles,  one inside by (engulfed by) the other.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This year’s theme is “African Americans and the Vote.” Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions)

Bret Kugelmass in USA Today:

As a technology entrepreneur, when I am approached by startup founders for fundraising advice, I ask: “What would the world look like if you got everything you’re asking for?” It’s a test to see whether they are setting out to solve the right problem or whether they are choosing their preferred course of action and justifying retrospectively.

Climate change researchers fail this test. Every single time.

A giant disconnect exists between the science branch and policy branch of the climate change community, obscured by a strong tribal bond that unites us against “deniers.” But if climate advocates get what we say we want, our own hypocrisy would soon be made painfully apparent.

The accepted policy rhetoric is that if we get to net-zero global emissions, we would “solve” climate change — when, in fact, this belies scientific reality.

More here. And see also this: Japan Races to Build New Coal-Burning Power Plants.

Ian McEwan in The Guardian:

It’s done. A triumph of dogged negotiation by May then, briefly, Johnson, has fulfilled the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands. The rest of the world, presidents Putin and Trump excepted, have watched on in astonishment and dismay. A majority voted in December for parties which supported a second referendum. But those parties failed lamentably to make common cause. We must pack up our tents, perhaps to the sound of church bells, and hope to begin the 15-year trudge, back towards some semblance of where we were yesterday with our multiple trade deals, security, health and scientific co-operation and a thousand other useful arrangements.

The only certainty is that we’ll be asking ourselves questions for a very long time. Set aside for a moment Vote Leave’s lies, dodgy funding, Russian involvement or the toothless Electoral Commission. Consider instead the magic dust. How did a matter of such momentous constitutional, economic and cultural consequence come to be settled by a first-past-the-post vote and not by a super-majority? A parliamentary paper (see Briefing 07212) at the time of the 2015 Referendum Act hinted at the reason: because the referendum was merely advisory. It “enables the electorate to voice an opinion”. How did “advisory” morph into “binding”? By that blinding dust thrown in our eyes from right and left by populist hands.

More here.

Joseph M Hassett at The Dublin Review of Books:

The integrating power of the erotics of poetry was on Heaney’s mind when he decided to take on the task of producing a modern English version of the quintessentially Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. Contemplating a version distinguished by many Hiberno-English uses, Heaney concluded, as he wrote in “The Irish Poet and Britain”, ‘So, so be it. Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland.’

That he succeeded spectacularly is apparent in reactions from two different viewpoints. Terry Eagleton observed that Heaney’s Beowulf was his “final, triumphant reversal of his cultural dispossession”. This was true not only in literary terms, but also in terms of readership. The Mapping Contemporary Poetry report released by the Arts Council of England in 2010 reported that Heaney’s Beowulf was the fourth-highest-selling contemporary book of poetry in England.

more here.

Anne Michaels at Lapham’s Quarterly:

In 1944, in Warsaw, German soldiers scrawled numbers on the buildings in white paint and then systematically demolished the city, while the Soviet army watched and waited across the Vistula. After the war, the Poles returned to Warsaw and, living in the rubble, began to rebuild. Devastated cities across Europe faced the same choices. Should the ruins be left in view, like the cathedral at Coventry, with new buildings erected beside them, a permanent memorial? Should the rubble (with its dead) be hidden and a new, modern city built on top of it? Or perhaps, as the Poles decided, the old city should be replicated, rebuilt in the same place, in every last detail—every cornice, lamppost, and windowsill—an act of defiance and despair, the fiercest response to the fact that we can’t bring back the past, we can’t bring back the dead. In this replication was a kind of terror—the calling forth of spirits and the speaking aloud of a harrowing, unanswerable doubt: that the replica might erase precisely what it was meant to memorialize.

more here.

Richard Davenport-Hines at Literary Review:

‘Sometimes I think I am the enemy of womankind,’ Lowell told Hardwick. He hurt all three of his wives grievously, but he believed in their greatness as writers, enriched them creatively and improved their sense of self-worth. He gave the first, Jean Stafford, lifelong facial disfigurement after crashing the car they were in while drunk at the wheel, and later broke her nose during a drunken row in New Orleans. He also encouraged her during the writing of her first novel, Boston Adventure, which sold over 400,000 copies following its publication in 1944. The novel that Hardwick wrote after marrying Lowell, The Simple Truth, is a big improvement on its predecessor, and the novel she wrote as a response to The Dolphin after his death, Sleepless Nights, is her best. ‘Everything I know’, she attested, ‘I learned from him.’

more here.

From NPS:

Rashid Khalidi in The Wall Street Journal:

THE ERASURE OF the Palestinians on display this week as President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a one-sided “vision for peace” might have been an unusually blatant act of disregard, but it was in no way new. The omission is the essence of the conflict. I was reminded of this back in the early 1990s, when I lived in Jerusalem for several months at a time, doing research in the private libraries of some of the city’s oldest families, including my own. I spent over a year going through dusty worm-eaten books, documents, and letters belonging to generations of Khalidis, among them my great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi.

Through his papers, I discovered a worldly man with a broad education acquired in Jerusalem, Malta, Istanbul, and Vienna. He was the heir to a long line of Jerusalemite Islamic scholars and legal functionaries, but at a young age, Yusuf Diya sought a different path for himself. After absorbing the fundamentals of a traditional Islamic education, he left Palestine at the age of 18 — without his father’s approval, we are told — to spend two years at a British Church Mission Society school in Malta. From there, he went to study at the Imperial Medical School in Istanbul, after which he attended the city’s Robert College, recently founded by American Protestant missionaries. For five years during the 1860s, Yusuf Diya attended some of the first institutions in the Middle East that provided a modern, Western-style education, learning English, French, German, and much else.

With this broad training, Yusuf Diya filled various roles as an Ottoman government official: translator in the Foreign Ministry, consult in the Russian Black Sea port of Poti, governor of districts from Kurdistan to Syria, and mayor of Jerusalem for nearly a decade. He was also elected as the deputy from Jerusalem to the short-lived Ottoman parliament established in 1876, and he did stints teaching at the Royal Imperial University in Vienna.

More here.

Gentile et al in The Scientist:

While some details of the mechanisms of splicing remain to be worked out, it’s known that mature, edited mRNAs result from an interplay between multiple factors within and outside the transcript itself. Among these is the spliceosome, the machinery that carries out the splicing. Each splicing event requires three components: the splice donor, a GU nucleotide sequence at one end of the intron; a splice acceptor, an AG nucleotide sequence at the opposite end; and a branch point, an A approximately 20–40 nucleotides away from the splice acceptor. These three “splice sites” are recognized by two core small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) of the spliceosome, U1 and U2, followed by a protein, U2AF. The binding of these molecules to a transcript recruits a complex of three more snRNAs—U4, U5, and U6—which facilitates the splicing reaction. A variety of factors affect how transcripts from a particular gene are spliced. Exon recognition by the spliceosome can be influenced by RNA binding proteins (RBPs), which bind to enhancer and silencer motifs within the mRNA and help or hinder spliceosome recognition of the splice sites. And because pre-mRNAs are frequently spliced as they’re transcribed, the speed of transcription by RNA polymerase II further tunes the window of opportunity for splice site recognition by the spliceosome.

Titin, which codes for a protein in muscle, is one example of a gene whose pre-mRNA transcript can be spliced in multiple ways to yield different protein isoforms. During development of the fetal heart, more exons are left in during splicing, which produces a relatively long, springy protein. In adult hearts, an RNA-binding protein called RBM20 associates with long stretches of the mRNA transcript during splicing, forcing the spliceosome to cut out those bits of DNA. The result is a relatively short, stiff protein. If RBM20 is missing or defective in adult hearts, these hearts will produce more fetal, springy titin protein relative to the stiff adult version. This is thought to reduce the capacity of the heart to contract, contributing to a condition known as dilated cardiomyopathy.

More here.

Writing Love

…—for Tammara Claire

The road is a long sentence. The only solution
is a full stop. Commas reduce the flow of our
passage mutually edited. You seem to clutch the
edge of the page under your teeth. The crevices
in denture are punctuations. One may call love
a colon, a hyphenated phase, shelled in brackets
and joined by three random dots of continuity
questioned exclaimed nudged by apostrophes
hostage to quotations and unasked ellipsis
this piece is reviewed and sent for corrections

by Rizwan Akhtar

Eric Schliesser at SpringerLink:

In this essay, I discuss Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (hereafter From Bacteria) and Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life (hereafter Other Minds) from a methodological perspective. I show that these both instantiate what I call ‘synthetic philosophy.’ They are both Darwinian philosophers of science who draw on each other’s work (with considerable mutual admiration). In what follows I first elaborate on synthetic philosophy in light of From Bacteria and Other Minds; I also explain my reasons for introducing the term; I look at the function of Darwinism in contemporary synthetic philosophy; and I close by analyzing the sociological challenges to synthetic philosophy.

By ‘synthetic philosophy’ I mean a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both).

More here.

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

Clarke’s First Law goes: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he’s a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen.

I’m only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what’s inside, the two defy easy comparison.

More here.

John le Carré in The Guardian:

I’m not just a remainer. I’m a European through and through, and the rats have taken over the ship, I want to tell him. It’s breaking my heart and I want it to break yours. We need your voice to wake us from our sleepwalk, and save us from this wanton act of political and economic self-harm. But you’re too late.

If Johnson and his Brexiteers had their way, it would be declared St Brexit’s Day. Church bells across the land would peal out the gladsome tidings from every tower. And good men of England would pause their stride and doff their caps in memory of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Trafalgar, and mourn the loss of our great British empire. Empires don’t die just because they’re dead.

We Brits are all nationalists now. Or so Johnson would have us believe. But to be a nationalist you need enemies and the shabbiest trick in the Brexiteers’ box was to make an enemy of Europe.

More here.

Katherine J. Wu in Smithsonian Magazine:

Boasting wingspans of up to 11 feet—the largest of any bird alive today—these feathered goliaths, native to the Southern Ocean and North Pacific, are built to soar. Gliding at speeds that often exceed 50 miles per hour, they can cover vast swaths of the sea in minutes, all the while scouring the water for bright flickers of fish. Some species are known to spend years at sea without touching down on land, and a few have even been documented circumnavigating the globe.

With their keen eyes and wandering ways, albatrosses are, in a way, the de facto “sentinels of the sea,” says Henri Weimerskirch, a marine ornithologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Weimerskirch is working to make that title a little more official—by recruiting the seabirds to patrol the ocean for illegal fishing vessels. He and his colleagues have outfitted nearly 200 albatrosses with tiny GPS trackers that detect radar emissions from suspicious ships, allowing the birds to transmit the locations of fishers in the midst of illicit acts. The results of the tracking method were published today in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngdgCZMPKcc

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

At one point in A Very Stable Genius, the conservative lawyer George Conway – the husband of Trump’s acid-tongued apologist Kellyanne Conway – doubles over in incredulous mirth at the man’s idiocy. Then the joke palls, as Conway realises with a shudder that “the object of his ridicule was the president of the United States”. We’re lucky that it’s only Trump’s hissy fits that are “thermonuclear”; instead of launching missiles, he childishly makes war by weaponising sweets. At a summit he tosses two Starburst candies at Angela Merkel and grunts: “Don’t say I never give you anything.” I wonder what flavour he chose for this undiplomatic exchange: sour or summer blast?

Although the title of A Very Stable Genius ironically adopts Trump’s preening self-description, Rucker and Leonnig present him as a lord of misrule who delights in instability, running a government that resembles “a virtual tilt-a-whirl” at a carnival. Despite his claim to be a genius, under his combed-over crown he has an entirely vacuous head: he tells India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, that it’s a good thing the country doesn’t have a border with China, and at a ceremony in Pearl Harbor he asks what exactly happened there to justify the commemoration. Forget about CIA briefings: as Steve Bannon puts it, Trump “doesn’t even know what intelligence is”. As proof, Rucker and Leonnig have a scoop about one of his crazier wheezes. Denied funds for his wall along the Mexican border, he proposes a human chain of hefty enforcers, hundreds of thousands of them, who would join hands in a barricade extending across 1,200 miles. A stable genius or a rampaging dimwit?

More here.

“And if the white man had not come would there
still be dead zones in the Mexican Gulf?” —Harry Buck
_______________________________

They are Taking Us

They are taking us beyond Miami
They are taking us beyond the Caloosa river
They are taking us to the end of our tribe
The are taking us to palm beach, coming back inside
……Okeechobee lake.
They are taking us to an old town in the west
.
Native American poem of the Seminoles
… —After the White Man Came
from, American Indian Prose and Poetry
Capricorn Books, 1974