Then, in January this year, the college suddenly announced that the statue would stay – reportedly in response to wealthy alumni threatening to withdraw bequests worth up to £100 million.
.. Statues are not history in the sense of having significant pedagogical value. They are political symbols, which drift in or out of favour along with political and aesthetic tastes. The protesters who hauled down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003 did not deny or diminish the history of Iraq. They remembered Saddam’s legacy; for that reason, they rejected his glorification. Many in the West cheered when rebels in Hungary tore down Stalin’s statue in 1956 and when those in Ukraine knocked over several of Lenin in 2013-14. The history of the Soviet Union and its satellites may still be told and freely debated regardless of the loss of these monuments.
.. A campaign now aims to restore Volgograd’s former name, Stalingrad, changed by Khrushchev in 1961 as part of his de-Stalinisation programme. New statues of Stalin went up last year in several Russian towns.
.. In much of the criticism of Rhodes Must Fall, the question echoes: where will it stop? Who will be next? Cromwell, Clive, even Churchill? The answer is that it will not stop. Future generations can and will interrogate the past. Whatever happens to Rhodes’ statue, it is a sign of healthy public engagement with history that there is such a vigorous debate. Monuments to historical figures and regimes stand not by divine right, but by the grace of those who live alongside them. No vision of the past can be set permanently in stone.
Phil Vischer: Corporate Worship with David Gungor!
Episode 152: Corporate Worship with David Gungor!
Worship music in a lot of places is driven by the desire to get a dopamine hit.
Composers are tempted to write a hit for CCLI for the money.
Ted Cruz Didn’t Report Goldman Sachs Loan in a Senate Race
As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.
“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.
.. Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,”
.. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year.
.. She told Politico in 2014 that she thought they should apply “common investment sense” and not use their own money for the campaign “unless it made the difference” in winning.
.. While the Cruzes were well paid — he made more than $1 million a year as a law partner, and she earned a six-figure income as an executive in Goldman Sachs’s Houston office
Mexico: Making the Dogs Dance
Immediately afterward he quoted an old Spanish saying that sums up both his modus operandi and Mexico’s present humiliating condition. “Money makes the dog dance.”
“I put that escape at some fifty million dollars.” This highly professional estimate came from a man called Jhon [sic] Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, more commonly known as Popeye, Pablo Escobar’s closest bodyguard, contract killer, and go-between. Out of prison after twenty-two years behind bars, compulsively garrulous, a little tense, he discussed the case of Joaquín Guzmán with a reporter from Univision, the Spanish-language television network. “That’s a very delicate case,” he said. “In high security prisons you can’t make tunnels, because in the [control] room where they have the cameras they have sensors that detect immediately if there’s digging going on. That escape was about money…[involving] the prison guards and a lot of people outside.”
.. El Universal, a Mexico City newspaper, has estimated that 291 trips by a dump truck would have been required to remove the 2,040 cubic meters of dirt and rubble extracted in the construction process.
.. I give him eighteen months at large. Mr Chapo Guzmán must be feeling what I felt after we broke out of prison. Right now he’s feeling good, Pablo Escobar was feeling good, but [Guzmán] knows that…they’re going after his family, his wife. He’s going to have to break with all his old ties. He’s only going to be able to meet with his partners in the drug trade and with the people in charge of his military apparatus. It’s going to be hard to catch him [but] the Americans are going to put a 20 million dollar price on his head. Anyone with [that kind of price] on his head will fall.”
.. Café Tacvba has huge drawing power among youths from Mexico’s poorer neighborhoods, and it was these kids del Rey had in mind. “The message the escape will leave all those muchachitos who work with the drug trade,” he said, “or who are thinking of making a life in organized crime, and who already think that Chapo is more intelligent, more astute, more powerful, more moneyed, and also a lot more fun, is that he is! They’ll think Chapo Guzmán is proof that, just like in Star Wars, the dark side is more powerful. And this is a terrible thing.”