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Years before becoming House speaker, Republican Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana played a leading role aiding Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
That history will be on display Friday, with Johnson set to deliver remarks alongside the former president about “election integrity” – a phrase Trump often uses to describe the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and unfounded concerns about future mass voter fraud.
Johnson carved out an influential role after the 2020 election, helping Trump’s attempts to subvert the will of the people and overturn the legitimate results. Many of his actions took place behind-the-scenes or didn’t break through beyond his Louisiana district, while more prominent pro-Trump figures soaked up the post-election attention.
Like many Republicans, he questioned the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory and raised concerns about the expansion of mail-in voting during the Covid-19 pandemic. His gripes echoed longstanding, garden-variety GOP complaints about mail-in voting, which largely ignore the reality that there is a staggeringly tiny level of fraud in US elections.
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The photographs in the book document communities across America, from the Country Boyz and O’city Riderz in Oklahoma to calf ropers in Las Vegas—where a crowd is captured by McClellan watching fourth-generation cowgirl and rodeo champion Kortnee Solomon throw a perfect lasso—all the way to Los Angeles, where the blunt-smoking Compton Cowboys ride.
Ivan McClellan’s Eight Seconds seeks to “get it right” when it comes to the documentation of contemporary Black rodeo culture.
Everyone has a story about a chance encounter on a night out that changed their life. For the photographer Ivan McClellan, it was when he met Charles Westley Perry at a party in 2015—where the filmmaker invited him to a Black rodeo in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.
At the time, Westley Perry was working on a documentary about Black cowboys, a culture that McClellan—a city kid from Kansas City—didn’t know much about. But what McClellan saw when he landed in Okmulgee that summer changed the trajectory of his career, and is now the focus of his first book, Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture.
As luck would have it, McClellan’s book is releasing around the same time of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album rollout; the pop icon is making history by going country and, in the process, reviving interest in Black country music and western aesthetics. “It’s great for all of the country singers like Reyna Roberts or Madeline Edwards or Mickey Guyton who have been trying to burst through the country ceiling for years as Black women,” McClellan says. “For Beyoncé to blaze forward and go, ‘Hey, you don’t need mainstream country radio to play you to have validity. Do your thing and do it as loud as you can and make your own platform…’ I love that she’s owning it. And I love that she called it Cowboy Carter: she’s making it a gender-neutral term, and regardless of the history, she’s taking ownership of it and putting her marker on it.”
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I’ve been getting the same question a lot lately, which suggests an old Christian apologetic trend has risen from the dead and is making its rounds, zombie-like, across the internet: “I’m being told it was normal in the ancient world to publish histories anonymously, that Suetonius and Tacitus and Caesar did that, so the anonymity of the Gospels doesn’t indicate their unreliability. Is that true?” No. Not even a single part of that sentence is true. But I wrote on this elsewhere so long ago that it deserves its own resurrection, and (as Paul said of Jesus) into an even better, superior body. So, here we go. Wolverine versus rotting zombie.
Not only is John anonymous (its author never claimed to be John; that claim was added later by someone else, whoever it was who assembled the four-Gospel edition we now know), but even John’s purported source is anonymous!
The Gospels Were Anonymous
Let’s start with the problem: it’s well known in mainstream scholarship that the “names” attached to the Gospels were all assigned later, by whoever assembled the four Gospels into a single edition to be published together. Moreover, their titles use the designation not of authorship, but of source: kata Markon does not mean “by Mark,” it means “according to Mark,” which in ancient parlance meant Mark was not the author of the Gospel, but the purported source used by that author. What author? We’re never told. Thus, some third party was attaching this claim to the Gospel.
Of course, we also know our copy of John has gone through multiple redactions, so no single author composed every part of it; and the version that mentioned this made-up witness clearly meant it to be the resurrected Lazarus, as fictional a character as ever was (as I also document in On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 10.7).
This is exactly what the author of Luke does: he says he just ‘believes’ that the prior Gospels he used as his sources preserve a “tradition” handed down by eyewitnesses; he does not say those Gospels were written by those eyewitnesses, or had eyewitness sources, or that he did; nor does he mention any way anyone even could know their content actually came from eyewitnesses at all.
Luke means he used anonymous sources. He does not name them…because they had no names attached to them when “Luke” wrote.
So we have an anonymous source citing an anonymous source. Hearsay rule, anyone?
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https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-corner-stone-speech?ssp=1&darkschemeovr=1&setlang=en&cc=US&safesearch=moderate
Certainly! **Alexander H. Stephens**, the acting Vice President of the Confederate States of America, delivered the **Cornerstone Speech** on **March 21, 1861** at the **Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia**¹. This oration is also known as the **Cornerstone Address**.
In this pivotal speech, Stephens defended slavery as a fundamental and just outcome of the supposed inferiority of the black race. He outlined the key differences between the constitutions of the Confederate States and that of the United States, enumerated contrasts between Union and Confederate ideologies, and laid out the Confederacy's rationale for seceding¹.
The term "Cornerstone Speech" derives from Stephens' use of the word "cornerstone" to describe the central belief upon which secession and the Confederacy were founded. He asserted:
> "Our new government's foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."¹
Stephens also invoked biblical imagery, referring to Psalm 118, verse 22, to argue that divine laws consigned black Americans to slavery as the "substratum of our society":
> "Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders 'is become the chief of the corner'—the real 'corner-stone'—in our new edifice."¹
The speech occurred a few weeks before the Civil War began, and it explicitly tied the Confederacy's existence to the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Stephens' words forever challenged the notion that the war was fought solely to preserve states' rights or oppose northern tyranny²³.
The Cornerstone Speech remains a significant historical document, shedding light on the ideological underpinnings of the Confederacy during a critical period in American history.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 3/19/2024
(1) undefined. https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/kevin-conroy-will-appear-as-batman-after-suicide-squad/ar-BB1hyBku?ocid=sapphireappshare.
(2) undefined. https://open.substack.com/pub/joycevance/p/still-waiting?r=5n3e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true.
(3) undefined. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/oregon-republicans-banned-ballot-trump.html.
(4) undefined. https://cnn.it/3HKXKYP.
(5) undefined. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jack-smiths-trump-case-removed-from-court-docket-raises-eyebrows/ar-BB1hF4td?ocid=sapphireappshare.
(6) undefined. https://youtu.be/27tbrJqfAc4?si=Q1zCHYvjF1fYf6km.
(7) undefined. https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/histarch/research/st-augustine/fort-mose/.
(8) undefined. https://youtu.be/P--xP-73Aao?si=HJttwtspIeYsNDLp.
(9) undefined. https://wapo.st/3UuJV8q.
(10) undefined. https://youtu.be/cZ6PLe2VGYc?si=1yCzSmEcrxr1MkHG.
(11) undefined. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/that-was-a-lot-mtg-storms-out-of-hearing-after-being-called-out-over-hypocrisy-on-crime/ar-BB1hVKOb?ocid=sapphireappshare.
(12) undefined. https://theatln.tc/WGItCLHv.
(13) undefined. https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/beyoncs-new-country-singles-break-the-internet-and-highlight-genres-black-roots/ar-BB1i9Vku?ocid=sapphireappshare.
(14) undefined. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-new-york-businesses-civil-fraud-verdict-rcna139030.
(15) undefined. https://apnews.com/article/georgia-elections-true-vote-ballot-stuffing-199113b47bc2df79c63fdf007cd23115.
(16) undefined. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/20/underground-railroad-mexico-texas-history-silvia-hector-webber.
(17) undefined. https://polinews.org/reporter-went-undercover-as-a-maga-supporter-secretly-recorded-conversations-overheard-at-trump-rallies-and-what-she-exposed-left-us-deeply-disturbed/.
(18) undefined. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2024/03/01/event-honors-mothers-of-gynecology.
(19) undefined. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-faces-insurmountable-difficulties-in-securing-m-bond-in-civil-fraud-case/ar-BB1k6bZJ?ocid=sapphireappshare.
(20) Cornerstone Speech - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech.
(21) The famous 1861 'Cornerstone Speech' that aimed for hard truths about .... https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2015/0708/The-famous-1861-Cornerstone-Speech-that-aimed-for-hard-truths-about-the-Confederate-battle-flag.
(22) Corner Stone Speech | Teaching American History. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-corner-stone-speech.
(23) 16.12: Primary Source Reading: Stephens’ Cornerstone Address. https://bing.com/search?q=Alexander+Stephen%27s+cornerstone+speech.
(24) Cornerstone Speech | American Battlefield Trust. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech.
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Who is responsible for saving the most lives in all of human history?
I’d argue than no one can beat my team.
A thread.
The first 1 is easy. You probably already know her name:
Henrietta Lacks
Although her cells were harvested without her consent, its possible that we’ll EVER KNOW how many lives were saved because of HeLa cells.
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Findings suggest golden locks evolved twice in human history
Pay a visit to Melanesia's Solomon Islands, 1800 kilometers northeast of Australia, and you'll notice a striking contrast: about 10% of the dark-skinned islanders sport bright blond afros. Hypotheses about the origins of this golden hair have included bleaching by sun and saltwater, a diet rich in fish, and the genetic legacy of Europeans or Americans. But a new study fingers a random mutation instead, suggesting that blond hair evolved independently at least twice in human history. And other novel genes, including ones with serious health consequences, may await discovery in understudied populations.
Human hair color is a trait usually governed by many genes, but study author Sean Myles, a geneticist at Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro, Canada, suspected things might be simpler in the Solomon Islands because he saw almost no variation in shades of blond hair. "It looked pretty obvious to me that it was a real binary trait. You either had blond hair or you didn't," says Myles.
To search for an underlying genetic blueprint, Myles and his colleagues collected saliva and hair samples from 1209 Solomon Islanders. Population genetic studies usually compare thousands of individuals, but the researchers predicted they could detect differences in a much smaller sample because of the stark contrast between the islanders' blond and dark locks. They compared the entire genetic makeup of 43 blond and 42 dark-haired islanders. The two groups, they found, had different versions of a crucial gene, one that coded for a protein involved in pigmentation. Switching one "letter" of genetic code-replacing a "C" with a "T"-meant the difference between dark hair and blond hair. A similar mutation creates blond mice by reducing the melanin content in their fur.
Blond Solomon Islanders carry two copies of this mutant gene, which is present in 26% of the islands' population, the team will report in tomorrow's issue of Science. The gene is recessive, which means that blonds inherit it from both parents. The researchers did not find the mutation in DNA samples of 941 individuals from 52 other populations around the world, including European countries. "It's a great example of convergent evolution, where the same outcome is brought about by completely different means," says Myles.
The mutation, which has no obvious advantages, likely arose by chance in one individual and drifted to a high frequency in the Solomon Islands because the original population was small, says Jonathan Friedlaender, an anthropologist emeritus at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. "This whole area seems to have been populated by very small groups of people making it across these stepping-stone islands, so you do have very dramatic effects in fluctuations of gene frequency.
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The first part of this book (from 1842) by Charles Colcock Jones is an historical sketch of slavery, with an emphasis on missionary and religious efforts directed towards the slaves. Part Two deals with the moral and religious conditions of slaves. The third part describes the obligations of the Christian church to rectify existing problems, while the final part proposes strategies for implementing programs of religious instruction for slaves.
Museum Audiobooks strives to present audiobook versions of authentic, unabridged historical texts from prior eras which contain a variety of points of view. The texts do not represent the views or opinions of Museum Audiobooks, and in certain cases may contain perspectives or language that is objectionable to the modern listener.
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02.28.2024
Religiously unaffiliated people now make up 28% of U.S. adults, according to a new study from Pew Research. That's a larger cohort than Catholics or evangelical Protestants.
Natacha Pisarenko/AP
When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check 'none.'
A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated – a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is "nothing in particular" – is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They're more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%).
Back in 2007, Nones made up just 16% of Americans, but Pew's new survey of more than 3,300 U.S. adults shows that number has now risen dramatically.
Researchers refer to this group as the "Nones."
Pew asked respondents what – if anything – they believe. The research organization found that Nones are not a uniform group.
Most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service.
They aren't all anti-religious. Most Nones say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. Most have more positive views of science than those who are religiously affiliated; however, they reject the idea that science can explain everything.
Nones could prove to be an important political group
Gregory Smith at Pew was the lead researcher on the study, titled "Religious 'Nones' in America: Who They Are and What They Believe."
The political power of white Evangelicals has been well-reported in recent decades, but their numbers are shrinking while the number of the more liberal Nones is on the rise.
He says the growth of Nones could affect American public life.
The political power of white Evangelicals has been well-reported in recent decades, but their numbers are shrinking while the number of the more liberal Nones is on the rise.
Similar studies by Pew and other groups such as the Public Religion Research Institute have found that people of color are far more likely to say religion is important in their lives.
"We know politically for example," Smith says, "that religious Nones are very distinctive. They are among the most strongly and consistently liberal and Democratic constituencies in the United States."
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Yes, it is true! The iconic cartoon character Betty Boop was indeed inspired by a talented African-American performer named Esther Jones, who was better known as “Baby Esther”. Esther was a jazz singer and entertainer during the late 1920s. Her unique style, including her signature phrase “Boop, Boop-a-Doop,” caught the attention of audiences in Harlem and beyond.
Helen Kane, another singer and dancer, attended one of Baby Esther’s performances. Kane was so impressed by Esther’s act that she incorporated it into her own performances. Eventually, this act became synonymous with the character Betty Boop in the famous cartoons. Unfortunately, Esther Jones never received credit or compensation for her significant influence on the beloved animated character 12.
Esther’s legacy lives on as the original “Black Betty Boop,” and her story sheds light on the often overlooked contributions of Black performers in entertainment history. 🎤🌟
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On **February 22, 1898**, a tragic event unfolded in **Lake City, South Carolina**, leaving **Frazier B. Baker**, a 40-year-old Black man, and his infant daughter, **Julia**, dead at the hands of a **white lynch mob**. Frazier Baker had achieved a significant milestone by becoming the **first African American U.S. postmaster** for Lake City. However, his appointment was met with fierce opposition from the local white community.
Despite the threats and hostility, Baker courageously held his position for six months. His house, which also served as the town's post office, became a target. On that fateful night, the mob set fire to the house, forcing the family out. As they attempted to flee, the mob shot at the Bakers, resulting in the tragic deaths of Frazier Baker and his infant daughter Julia. His wife and two other children were wounded but managed to escape the burning house and the violent mob¹²³⁴.
This heartbreaking incident serves as a painful reminder of the racial violence and injustice that plagued the United States during that era. Frazier B. Baker's unwavering commitment to public service and his tragic fate highlight the immense challenges faced by African Americans striving for equality and justice in the late 19th century. 🕊️🌹
Source: Conversation with Bing, 2/22/2024
(1) Lynching of Frazier B. Baker and Julia Baker - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Frazier_B._Baker_and_Julia_Baker.
(2) The Assassination of Frazier Baker - The Green Book of South Carolina. https://greenbookofsc.com/locations/the-assassination-of-frazier-baker/.
(3) Feb. 22, 1898: White Mob Lynches Frazier Baker and Daughter Julia. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/white-mob-lynches-postmaster.
(4) 1898 Postmaster Lynching | National Postal Museum. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/behind-the-badge-case-histories-assaults-and-murders/1898-postmaster-lynching.
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**Yale University** has formally **apologized** for its historical connections to slavery. In response to the findings of a scholarly book titled "**Yale and Slavery: A History**," authored by Yale Professor **David W. Blight** with the **Yale and Slavery Research Project**, the university acknowledges its role in and associations with slavery. The apology recognizes the labor, experiences, and contributions of **enslaved people** to Yale's history. It also acknowledges that Yale's leaders participated in slavery during the university's early history. President **Peter Salovey** and senior trustee **Josh Bekenstein** expressed their commitment to addressing the continued effects of slavery in society today. This ongoing work aims to build a stronger community and create a better future[^10^] ¹¹.
The comprehensive research project, initiated in **2020**, delved into Yale's formative ties to slavery and the slave trade. Led by Professor Blight, the **Yale and Slavery Research Project** involved faculty, staff, students, and New Haven community members. Their findings are now available in a scholarly, peer-reviewed book, which you can explore online for free[^10^].
Acknowledging this history is an essential step, but meaningful action is equally crucial. Yale's commitment extends beyond apologies, as they strive to address the lasting impact of slavery on society[^10^]. 📚🔍
Source: Conversation with Bing, 2/20/2024
(1) Yale vows new actions to address past ties to slavery, issues apology .... https://news.yale.edu/2024/02/16/yale-vows-new-actions-address-past-ties-slavery-issues-apology-book.
(2) Yale University apologises for its deep links with slavery. https://www.wionews.com/world/yale-university-apologises-for-its-deep-links-with-slavery-692110.
(3) undefined. https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/kevin-conroy-will-appear-as-batman-after-suicide-squad/ar-BB1hyBku?ocid=sapphireappshare.
(4) undefined. https://open.subst.
(5) undefined. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/oregon-republicans-banned-ballot-trump.html.
(6) undefined. https://cnn.it/3HKXKYP.
(7) undefined. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jack-smiths-trump-case-removed-from-court-docket-raises-eyebrows/ar-BB1hF4td?ocid=sapphireappshare.
(8) undefined. https://youtu.be/27tbrJqfAc4?si=Q1zCHYvjF1fYf6km.
(9) undefined. https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/histarch/research/st-au.
(10) undefined. https://youtu.be/P--xP-73Aao?si=HJttwtspIeYsNDLp.
(11) undefined. https://youtu.be/cZ6PLe2VGYc?si=1yCzSmEcrxr1MkHG.
(12) Yale apologizes for 'formative ties to slavery' | Blaze Media. https://www.theblaze.com/news/yale-slavery-apology-programs-24.
(13) Yale apologizes for its role in slavery, launches initiatives. https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/02/19/yale-apologizes-slavery-redress/.
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