.. They are America’s original sins: Slavery and guns…and they have never been washed clean.
.. The necessity of a large and unified new nation to defeat Great Britain and create a truly independent United States meant massive concessions to the plantation owners of the South, including the notorious decision to count (non-voting, of course) slaves as 3/5 of a person, to boost that region’s representation in Congress.
.. But within the new nation, fears of an all-out slave revolt only grew as the population of black people in bondage eventually swelled to 4 million. It is here that the second vine starts growing: The American romance with gun culture. Remember the 2nd Amendment, which establishes the right to bear arms in the guise of “a well-regulated militia”? By the time that amendment was drafted into the Bill of Rights in 1789,militias in states such as Georgia that were essentially slave patrols with the goal of putting down any blacks who dared seek their freedom.
.. As early as 1840, antebellum historian Richard Hildreth observed that violence was frequently employed in the South both to subordinate slaves and to intimidate abolitionists.”
.. As I mentioned here recently, invest two hours of your time at your local cinema to watch The Free State of Jones, which portrays how terror against freed blacks was launched in the South with virtually no gap after the war — white men trading their gray Confederate caps for the white hoods of the Klan.
.. But just as we ignore the horrors of the post-Reconstruction South, we also forget that the reaction to the civil rights era — especially when many American cities erupted into full-scale revolt — had arguably a greater impact on how we live today. Those uprisings led directly to the “law-and-order” administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and to “white flight” that left urban neighborhoods devoid of services, and created separate and unequal school districts.
.. The two most important developments were this: A draconian “war on drugs” that targeted urban drug use (while ignoring, largely, illegal recreational drugs in the suburbs); this in turn paved the way for stepped-up police activity and then so-called “broken windows” policing that led to the unprecedented and shocking mass incarceration of blacks — the New Jim Crow.
.. It was in the aftermath of 1960s racial unrest that the National Rifle Association went from a sensible, moderate voice for sportsmen to become the lobbying group for lucrative merchants of death that peddled fear and promised manhood until, remarkably, there were more guns in the United States than people.
.. Police in the United States are more likely than their counterparts in other nations to be killed by a civilian with a gun. That in turn makes police more suspicious and more anxious in traffic stops
Fossil finds in China are challenging ideas about the evolution of modern humans and our closest relatives.
.. “But it’s increasingly clear that many Asian materials cannot fit into the traditional narrative of human evolution.”
.. Stringer even suggests that H. heidelbergensis might have originated in Asia and then spread to other continents.
But many researchers, including most Chinese palaeontologists, contend that the materials from China are different from European and African H. heidelbergensis fossils, despite some apparent similarities. One nearly complete skull unearthed at Dali in Shaanxi province and dated to 250,000 years ago, has a bigger braincase, a shorter face and a lower cheekbone than most H. heidelbergensis specimens3, suggesting that the species was more advanced.
.. Politics at play?
Some Western researchers suggest that there is a hint of nationalism in Chinese palaeontologists’ support for continuity. “The Chinese — they do not accept the idea that H. sapiens evolved in Africa,” says one researcher. “They want everything to come from China.”
.. But the continuity-with-hybridization model is countered by overwhelming genetic data that point to Africa as the wellspring of modern humans. Studies of Chinese populations show that 97.4% of their genetic make-up is from ancestral modern humans from Africa, with the rest coming from extinct forms such as Neanderthals and Denisovans5. “If there had been significant contributions from Chinese H. erectus, they would show up in the genetic data,” says Li Hui, a population geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai. Wu counters that the genetic contribution from archaic hominins in China could have been missed because no DNA has yet been recovered from them.
.. Despite the different interpretations of the Chinese fossil record, everybody agrees that the evolutionary tale in Asia is much more interesting than people appreciated before. But the details remain fuzzy, because so few researchers have excavated in Asia.
I never really understood how fascism could have come to Europe, but I think I understand better now. You start with some fundamental historical transformation, like the Great Depression or the shift to an information economy. A certain number of people are dispossessed. They lose identity, self-respect and hope.
They begin to base their sense of self-worth on their tribe, not their behavior. They become mired in their resentments, spiraling deeper into the addiction of their own victimology. They fall for politicians who lie about the source of their problems and about how they can surmount them. Facts lose their meaning. Entertainment replaces reality.
Once facts are unmoored, everything else is unmoored, too. People who value humility and kindness in private life abandon those traits when they select leaders in the common sphere. Hardened by a corrosive cynicism, they fall for morally deranged little showmen.
.. New sorts of political leaders emerged. In city after city, progressive reformers cleaned up politics and professionalized the civil service. Theodore Roosevelt went into elective politics at a time when few Ivy League types thought it was decent to do so. He bound the country around a New Nationalism and helped pass legislation that ensured capitalism would remain open, fair and competitive.
This was a clear example of a society facing a generational challenge and surmounting it. The Progressives were far from perfect, but they inherited rotting leadership institutions, reformed them and heralded in a new era of national greatness.
The Republican candidate refuses to apologize for his mistakes—and that may be key to his success.
Being Donald Trump means never having to say you’re sorry.
That, he explained to Jimmy Fallon last September, is among the advantages of never being wrong. “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong … I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.”
Instead of apologizing swiftly, assuming responsibility, and putting controversies behind him, Trump prefers to deny potential problems, disclaim responsibility, and move on to some fresh controversy. It flies in the face of decades of accrued wisdom about how to handle political crises. And it appears to be working for him.
.. When social-media users quickly objected that the conjunction of the star and the cash seemed to traffic in anti-Semitic tropes, Trump took the rare step of deleting and replacing it:
.. He offered no apology, no admission of error, and no explanation.
.. It’s a minor classic of its genre. There’s the arms-length distancing from the problem. The introduction of irrelevant information—Sheriffs! Microsoft!—to cloud the issue. And the concluding sorry-if-you-were-offended half apology.
.. Trump has a genius for repurposing images and slogans, drawing them from an eclectic array of sources. Ronald Reagan urged, “Let’s make America great again!” America First has been a slogan used by politicians from Woodrow Wilson to William Randolph Hearst. It’s not always clear that Trump knows, or cares, about their origins.
.. many find overconfidence and a willingness to discard rules attractive. Trump appears willing to put that to the test, gambling that he can win by projecting certainty and confidence, that voters would rather have a self-assured leader than one willing to acknowledge missteps.