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Discrimination in New London

Monday, January 17, 2011

Should anyone doubt that Martin Luther King’s work is far from over…

The New London Day reported yesterday that the City of New London has not hired a black firefighter since 1978. At the current time it has one black firefighter (who must be a rather elderly gentleman by this time), and two Hispanics. The department just swore in a new batch of recruits, each one a white male, and each a resident of a suburban town.

But not to worry. According to the chief, what looks like an egregious pattern of discrimination is simply the inevitable by-product of the department’s insistence on getting highly qualified candidates. And indeed it is, since the department’s definition of “highly qualified” practically guarantees that no one need apply save white suburban males. The department gives heavy weight to previous experience, which white males can pick up in their suburban volunteer fire departments, an option not open to city residents. So, this is not merely a system that discriminates against minorities and women, it is one that discriminates against all New London residents, albeit the unspoken motivating cause might be a desire to keep out the minorities.

This type of faux insistence on credentials has held up remarkably well as a bulwark against opening up boys clubs like the New London Fire Department. In fact, believe it or not, it does not take a rocket scientist to be a fireman, and it would not be difficult for the City of New London to have a top rate fire department and give job opportunities to its own residents at the same time. If prior experience is so important, why not begin an internship program and bring in New London youth to work alongside the professional firefighters and give graduates of that program preference? After all, that’s essentially what the white males from the suburbs are getting from the volunteer fire departments, from which they learn their trade (without the benefit of prior experience) until they can cash in to the disadvantage of New London residents. Then again, why have an experience requirement at all, given that all new hires are immediately sent to the state’s fire academy to learn the trade once again? I repeat, this isn’t rocket science. Any reasonably intelligent physically fit person can learn how to do it.

There’s nothing new under the sun. My father was a firefighter in the ’50s for the City of Hartford. Of course, back then, it was unthinkable that a black person or an Hispanic would even be considered for the department, but the clubbiness didn’t stop there. My father managed to get hired, despite his strangely polysyllabic last name, but, he couldn’t earn a promotion despite acing the objective written test. Mysteriously, he totally flubbed the oral “test”, and the job went to a deserving son of the Emerald Isle. I know this story only from hearsay, as I was quite young at the time, but I have no reason to doubt it in any of its particulars.


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Sustinet lauded by Firedoglake

Monday, January 17, 2011

The folks, or at least one contributor to, Firedoglake think very highly of the recently announced Sustinet Board’s Draft Report:

Both the new health care bill and other federal laws like ERISA make it very hard to for states to adopt my preferred solution of single-payer health care, or even my secondary choices, like a robust national public option or a comprehensive, extremely regulated all-payer system of only non-profit mutual insurers.

Assume the state can’t get waivers from the new federal laws until 2017, and this unfortunately restricts this relatively progressive proposal. I highly commend their recommendations to limit the worthless private exchanges by using the basic health plan for people making less than 200% FPL. I’m also glad they suggest a basic design that should produce a viable public alternative to private insurance for everyone in the state. Although I would prefer SustiNet to be a fully governmental agency instead of a quasi-governmental one.

In a few days, Vermont’s health care advisory board is expected to present three proposals for reforming their health care system, which I will be looking at very closely. So far, though, this is the best proposal to deal implementing the new health care law I have seen in any state. While not prefect, if Connecticut and other states adopt this model, it will be a good step at the state level toward making decent reform out of what was frankly a pretty bad new federal law.

Betsy Ritter, State Representative from Waterford and Montville, and, more importantly, one of the co-founders of SE Connecticut Drinking Liberally, was instrumental in creating Sustinet. If the legislature and Governor Malloy can now follow through, Connecticut might lead the way in showing the rest of the country how to do health care right, or at least, how to do it right given that the best ways to do it have been declared off the table.

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Mapping the USA

Sunday, January 16, 2011

This map, which I saw on Digby’s blog, is not terribly surprising for what it illustrates: the incidence of death by firearm in the various states. And yes, once again, despite all our faults, we here in Connecticut can be justly proud of being at the forefront of the forces of reason.


The folks who prepared the graph felt that the only explanation for the disparity is the lax gun laws in the redder states, but I would say that, while that statement is true, the lax gun laws are themselves merely an expected outgrowth of the deeper problem that the redder states are bastions of ignorance and hate.

What struck me on first viewing the map is the fact that this same pattern, with only minor variations (largely because some more northerly states would do better by other measures), would repeat itself if you mapped any number of other unhealthy social phenomena, such as divorce rates, religiosity, rates of illegitimate birth, mean level of education (not to mention the more difficult to measure “quality of education”), access to health care, attendance at high school football games, popularity of schlocky country music, birtherism, tentherism, tea partyism, and of course, support for the Republican party. While more intangible and more difficult to measure, I’d hazard a guess that it also correlates well with the frequency with which politicians claim the moral high ground for their part of the country, the frequency being, of course, inverse to the reality. Additionally, I would also hazard the guess, in fact I’m sure, that the map correlates well with the extent to which the states are net exporters or net importers of federal dollars, the exponents of states rights and individual responsibility being, of course, the most avid suckers at the federal teat.

Make of this what you will. At the moment, these people run the country, and given the wisdom of the founders in giving Wyoming as many Senators as New York or California, not to mention the eminent Schuyler Colfax’s (you remember him, don’t you?) gift of the filibuster, they are likely to retain control as our empire crumbles around us.

My own conclusion is that, were it not for the absolute need to abolish slavery, it would have been better to allow the South to secede in 1860. It’s not too late. Maybe we should re-open talks. The lighter parts of the map could form a bi-coastal republic (California would have to agree to reform its referendum system) and the red parts of the map could try to institutionalize their distorted view of an 18th century mode of government on their godforsaken part of the earth and see how it works out.

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Fast tracking sainthood

Saturday, January 15, 2011

It appears that good Pope Benedict is in an unseemly rush to sanctify his predecessor. For the non-Catholics among you, I will explain first that the Catholic Church has appointed itself God’s master, so to speak, in that it can declare a person a saint. Many a sinner has apparently entered heaven that way. The process is rigorous. One must perform one miracle from beyond the grave to be beatified, three for full sainthood. That being done, and so declared by God’s vicar here on earth, it is bound in heaven. Apparently there were lots of candidates for miraculous intervention by the Polish Pope, but this one won the laurels:

Church-appointed investigators concluded that a French nun was miraculously cured of Parkinson’s disease after praying to John Paul within weeks of his death on April 2, 2005. He had suffered from the same ailment.

Apparently the Church defines a miracle as any event for which it cannot currently provide an explanation, which leads one to wonder how many saints have snuck into heaven on the basis of miracles that are now completely explicable by modern science. For my own part, I would consider an event miraculous only if it defied the laws of science. If, for example, the sun really did demonstrably stand still in the sky, as we are told it did for Joshua (thus implying an otherwise calamitous halt in the earth’s rotation) without discernible ill effects, that would be a miracle. Falling up might also qualify. Inexplicable medical events are pretty commonplace, and a recovery from Parkinson’s really rates as no more than a mystery, particularly if, as the article hints, there were some questions about the diagnosis in the first place.

But let all that pass. Personally, I suspect that the Pontiff is setting the stage for his successor to be as o’er-hasty to beatify him, as he has been to sanctify his not overly saintly predecessor. My current audiobook is “I, Claudius”, and this beatification scam brought to mind a scene in the book in which Livia, the unspeakably evil widow of Augustus (who has already been raised to godhood by the Roman Senate) pleads with Claudius to do his best to see that she is similarly elected after death, it being her only hope of escaping eternal punishment in the Roman equivalent of hell. One wonders if Benedict, considering his somewhat checkered past, is hoping for a similar get out of jail free card.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, January 14, 2011

A couple of repeats, each suggested in part by recent events.

My wife suggested this song in tribute to Obama’s masterful performance, which, at least for one brief shining moment, did seem to bridge the troubled waters.

And this one occurred to me, though I won’t try to articulate why.


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Channeling the Dead

Friday, January 14, 2011

I recently read an article somewhere on the vast internet, in which the point was made that we Americans have a tendency to venerate our political ancestors that is not necessarily a universal attribute. Britishers, the writer pointed out, do not cite William Pitt to validate their political positions, much less debate about his position on the Euro or whatever else might be roiling our godless cousins across the sea.

Americans, on the other hand, can’t seem to stop themselves from attributing all kinds of opinions to the “founders”. But we don’t stop there. Witness this story on the Huffington Post, where we learn that a Pentagon spokesperson has somehow channeled Martin Luther King, and made the surprising discovery that, were he alive today, J.Edgar Hoover’s nightmare would be an enthusiastic supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He’s probably right. It has often been observed that many people grow more conservative as they grow older. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this process stops with death, at least judging by the views recently attributed to the Enlightenment types who started our Revolution and wrote our Constitution, all of whom appear to have grown more tradition minded, less open to reason, and more mindlessly religious as the years have rolled over their heads as well as their graves.

Madison Avenue is missing a great opportunity here. Since the opinions of these folks, were they alive, are so easily accessible, or so easily counterfeited, why not use them as advertising spokespersons? If Ben Franklin were alive today, for instance, he’d surely be a Mac kind of guy. Alexander Hamilton could shill for Dell.


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Obama does good

Thursday, January 13, 2011

In a brief post yesterday, written as I was watching the memorial event for the Arizona victims, I noted my irritation at the, probably unintentional (and therefore even more objectionable) exclusionist religiosity of some of the speakers, notably Eric Holder.

Obama’s speech had none of that, and I think, overall, it was masterful. There will be carping from the right, of course. If he says black they’ll say white and if he switches to accommodate them, they’ll switch right back.

But I don’t think it’ll do them much good this time, because people saw the speech first hand, so it will be harder to misrepresent. Obama was particularly good in that he raised the issue that’s been on everyone’s mind-the poisonous hate coming from the right- without specifically pointing the finger at anyone, or saying anything to which they could really object. He did not, saints be praised, assign blame to both sides equally. For this we can be doubly thankful. First, it would have been untrue, and second, it would be depressing to think that Obama believes in that meme or that he feels he must parrot it. Parenthetically, I was personally pleased that he made only glancing mention of religion.

It’s at times like this that Obama is at his best, trying to get us into contact with the better angels of our nature.

I, for one, had no problem with the cheers. There were at least two reasons for holding that event. First, to both grieve for, and pay tribute to the victims. Second, and ultimately more important, to make the case that we can put this sort of thing behind us if we stick together, reject it, and fight against it. So the cheers were not just for the folks on the ground who distinguished themselves during the massacre, but for all of us who reject violence and hate as a way of dealing with those with whom we disagree and as an affirmation that we can beat the hate back now as we have in the past.

I’ve criticized the guy a lot, but he deserves credit for his handling of the national psyche in this case. He’s got his faults, but isn’t it nice to have a basically decent person in the White House?

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Sigh

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

We are watching the proceedings in Arizona. It appears to be a religious ceremony. Eric Holder just read from an Epistle of Paul, in which we are assured that Jesus, who it is presumed we all worship, is with us.

Thus are large chunks of Americans excluded from the ceremony, including, at least in part, the members of the religion to which Congresswoman Gifford adheres.

Obama, however, appears to be setting the right tone, though I understand the right wing smear machine is already rolling out the Wellstone tactics.

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Blue snow

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

My wife and I have spent the better part of the day digging out from the snowstorm, doing the driveway in stages. I noticed something I never had before; some of the shoveled snow has a faint blue cast to it. I don’t think I was imagining it, since my wife saw it too.

I remember when I was in Alaska learning that glaciers get a distinctly blue cast because the ice is extremely low in oxygen, which, at least if this site is correct, is not the cause of blue snow, which apparently has something to do with the scattering of light, in a process that is apparently the reverse of what makes the sky blue:

When light passes through ice, however, the red light is absorbed while the blue is transmitted. Were the operating process scattering as in the atmosphere, then the transmitted light would be red, not blue. However, because of the large size of snow grains and ice crystals, all wavelengths of visible light are scattered equally. Scattering therefore does not play an appreciable role in determining the color of the transmitted light. It takes an appreciable thickness of pure ice to absorb enough red light so that only the blue is transmitted. You can see the effect in snow at fairly shallow depths because the light is bounced around repeatedly between ice grains, losing a little red at each bounce. You can even see a gradation of color within a hole poked in clean, deep snow. Near the opening, the transmitted light will be yellowish. As the depth increases, the corer will pass through yellowish-green, greenish-blue and finally vivid blue. If the hole is deep enough, the color and light disappear completely when all the light is absorbed.

I have no idea if this accounts for the phenomenon that we observed. Maybe it was another sign that God hates gays, like dying birds in Arkansas.

Update: I think I actually managed to capture the blue cast in this picture, which you might have to make full screen (double click on pic) to see.

Have I just been missing this for the past 60 years?


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Great minds

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

I believe it was Emerson who said that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. The operative word is “foolish”, but that is often ignored. Among American conservatives, there are apparently no little minds, as they are comfortably inconsistent, whether foolishly or not.

They have of late been proving their minds are not little by their adherence to a quite different maxim: the best defense is a good offense, to which one might add “whether the defense (or offense) be consistent or not.

Sensing some vulnerability to the charge that their rhetoric may have spurred the Arizona assassin, they are, at one and the same time claiming that it was his mental illness alone that led him to kill and that the violent rhetoric that they spew has no effect and, by its nature, could have no effect on any unstable individual (because presumably no one is really listening, and, in any even, no one would ever take them seriously). At the same time it is the case that he was, against all the evidence, a left winger, and was driven to his deeds not by the violent rhetoric that they spew, but by dry and dusty tomes such as “The Communist Manifesto” (which does not, as it turns out, feature Congresspeople in crosshairs) or “Mein Kampf”, which the right has lately converted to a piece of communist propaganda. Thus, we are to believe that exposure to hate filled propaganda both did and did not drive the man to kill, and that his presumed mental illness was solely and not solely responsible for his decision to engage in what was, by any measure, a political act with quite specific political targets, both of whom had been marked out by hate radio.

In one thing they will prove to be consistent. They will, as always, succeed in getting most of the media to spread the blame for hate filled rhetoric evenly among those who spew it and those who don’t. Who knows, the media may even buy into Rush Limbaugh’s latest claim:

“What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country. He’s sitting there in jail; he knows what’s going on. He knows that a Democrat [sic] Party — the Democrat [sic] Party — is attempting to find anybody but him to blame.

“He knows if he plays his cards right that he’s just a ‘victim.’ He’s the latest in a never ending parade of victims brought about by the ‘unfairness of America.’ The ‘bigotry, racism, homophobia’ of America. The ‘mean-spiritedness of America.’ […]

“That smiling mugshot — this guy clearly understands he’s getting all the attention, and he understands he’s got a political party doing everything it can, plus a local sheriff doing everything they can to make sure he’s not convicted of murder.”

Certainly it’s not likely any Republican will disavow Rush. After all, they will probably agree with him. When convenient (e.g., when no Muslims are involved) it is impossible for them to understand that someone who encourages the mentally unstable to perform violent acts has a share of the responsibility when they do in fact go out and kill the targets chosen for them by the fomenters.

Speaking of inconsistency, isn’t it interesting that they also have no problem blaming his actions entirely on an assumed mental illness, when they are so very reluctant to agree that mental illness should be exculpatory in any other context.

Afterword: It is an inconvenient fact for the right that the assassin did not have the good grace to either kill himself or get himself killed in the process of the massacre. He will go on trial for his life, and his mental state will no doubt be in play. I don’t do criminal law, but my instincts tell me he might get more mileage blaming present day right wing rhetoric for his misdeeds than To Kill a Mockingbird. Could be wrong, though.

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