A[nother] Republican defector?

Posted on by albrooke

ScreenShot142I was proud to be a Republican. The GOP I worked for, fundraised for and fundamentally believed in put forward candidates who reflected my values. But now? I’m embarrassed to be a Republican because of who is leading in the polls. We’ve become a party that preys on the discouraged, not one that fosters hope. We’re incentivizing anger, not integrity. We tear down others to promote ourselves.

T.T. Robinson, “Why I’m no longer proud to be Republican” Washington Post (April 25, 2016) [link].

Don’t despair, T.T.  There are a lot of Republicans who agree, and who will continue to be “compassionate, innovative and enthusiastic . . . . woven together by our common belief in . . . the importance of character.”  Of course, this group may have to become “former Republicans” to make a point.

“No, I don’t” [link]  “To be clear . . .” [link]

An Improbable Rescue from Ultimate Danger

Posted on by albrooke

ScreenShot187A Pattern of Prayer, part 10: A Pattern of Redemption
April 17, 2016  – Revelation 22

I have often told you stories from World War II as a way of illustrating some of the life and death principles we find in the Bible. I have told you stories about the Raid on Cabanatuan in the Philippines, The Battle of Midway, the taking of Pegasus Bridge, the invasion of Okinawa, the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the making of the atomic bomb, and most recently, the Siege of Leningrad.

Today, I’m going to change wars.

Just about 44 years ago, Lieutenant Colonel Gene Hambleton had an uncommonly difficult week. A specialist in electronic warfare, Hambleton had served in various capacities in WWII, the Korean War, and the Cold War. On April 2, 1972, on his 63rd mission of the Vietnam war, Hambleton was a aboard Bat 21, an EB-66C aircraft which was trying to jam North Vietnamese radar.

Hambleton’s call sign was “Bat 21 Bravo” — he was the mission navigator.

There were five other crewmen on the plane when it was stuck by a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile, but only Hambleton was able to eject.

Continue reading An Improbable Rescue from Ultimate Danger

Wearing race?

Posted on by albrooke

ScreenShot164If I were still teaching the “Beyond Fiction” Tutorial, I would add this article to the reading list: Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “Can a Dress Shirt be Racist?” BackChannel [link via Medium].

Mr. Velasquez-Manoff writes:

And here’s what kept nagging at me as I reported: even as science tells us there’s no biological basis for many of the ideas we’ve inherited on race, one can sense a yearning in this soon-to-be majority minority country for acknowledgement that we do actually differ according to our ancestry, and that we shouldn’t all be held to one, in this case mostly northern European, physical standard.

The article is particularly interesting to me since I am reading Gautam Shroff’s The Intelligent Web, which is (in part) about how Big Data permits conclusions to be drawn which at least appear intelligent.