Red pandas are just about the cutest thing ever. These guys are native to the forests in the Himalayas, and there are only 10,000 to 20,000 of them worldwide. In the past they had been misclassified as being in the same families as raccoons and bears, but have recently been reclassified in a family all their own; they are considered “living fossils”, which means they’re more closely related to animals found in fossils than any living species. The people native to the red panda’s region call them “Wha” after the sound they make. They are slightly bigger than a house cat and eat a diet of mostly bamboo shoots and leaves. They spend most of the day time napping in the tree tops, and are most active at dusk and dawn.
Hewlett Packard outlines computer memory of the future
By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News
17 memristors captured by an atomic force microscope
The fundamental building blocks of all computing devices could be about to undergo a dramatic change that would allow faster, more efficient machines.
Researchers at computer firm Hewlett Packard (HP) have shown off working devices built using memristors - often described as electronics' missing link.
These tiny devices were proposed 40 years ago but only fabricated in 2008.
HP says it has now shown that they can be used to crunch data, meaning they could be used to build advanced chips.
That means they could begin to replace transistors - the tiny switches used to build today's chips.
And, crucially, the unique properties of memristors would allow future chips to both store and process data in the same device.
Today, these functions are done on separate devices, meaning data must be transferred between the two, slowing down the computation and wasting energy.
"The processor and memory could be exactly the same thing," Dr Stan Williams of HP told BBC News. "That allows us to think differently about how computation could be done."
Professor Leon Chua - the first person to propose memristors - said the work was "conceptually, just the tip of the iceberg".
He compared the devices to the human brain's synapses and axons.
"In the near future we can use memristors to make real brain-like computers, he told BBC News.
Researchers at the University of Michigan recently showed that the devices can mimic synaptic activity in the brain.
The HP work is published in the journal Nature.
Tower chips
Despite being proposed by Professor Chua in 1971, it took almost forty years for a working memristor to be built, by Dr Williams and his team.
Hewlett-Packard's Stan Williams helped develop 'memristors'
The tiny devices are the "fourth" basic building block of circuits, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.
"I'm delighted because I never thought this would happen in my lifetime," said Professor Chua.
The devices get their name from their ability to "remember" the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the power has been switched off.
This means they are suited for building computer memory and storage; an application that Dr Williams believes could be on the market within three years.
"Our immediate goal is to make a competitor to flash memory for cameras, iPods and devices like that," said Dr Williams.
"Our aspiration is for it to have twice as much available memory as an equivalent sized flash memory device."
The team has also shown that the memristors can be stacked on top of each other to form 3-D arrays.
"In theory we can connect thousands of layers in a very straightforward fashion," said Dr Williams.
"It could provide a way of getting a ridiculous amount of memory on a chip."
Future path
Further into the future, Dr Williams said that he hoped that they could be used to build a single device for storage and computation.
"That would allow a huge speed saving and energy saving," he said.
However, he said, that kind of device was more than a decade away.
Memristors could also help with a problem that continues to challenge the chip industry, continuing to pack more and more computational power into smaller and smaller spaces.
Currently, chip makers follow a path defined by Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years.
This is currently achieved by producing transistors with ever smaller feature sizes. Current cutting edge chips have transistors with feature sizes as small as 22 nanometres (22 billionths of a metre).
But this miniaturisation cannot continue forever, experts say.
Memristors offer an alternative path.
"We can continue to make them smaller even past the point where people think that transistors cannot shrink any further," said Dr Williams.
Crucially, said Dr Williams, they can be built using "materials commonly available in any fab [chip fabrication plant]".
Professor James Tour of Rice University in Houston said the memristor's ability to be compatible with existing transistor based technologies was a "critical parameter to permit rapid implementation into present chip manufacturing processes".
Dr Williams said he had already made "crude" prototypes with features as small as 3nm.
"The functional equivalent of Moore's Law could go on for decades after we hit the wall where we can no longer shrink transistors," he said.
Paul Smith, the man with extraordinary talent was born in Philadelphia on September 21, 1921 with severe cerebral palsy.
Not only had Paul beaten the odds of a life with spastic cerebral palsy, a disability that impeded his speech & mobility but also taught himself to become a master artist as well as a terrific chess player even after being devoid of a formal education as a child.
When typing, Paul used his left hand to steady his right one. Since he couldn't press two keys at the same time, he almost always locked the shift key down and made his pictures using the symbols at the top of the number keys. In other words, his pictures were based on these characters ..... @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ ..
Across seven decades, Paul created hundreds of pictures. He often gave the originals away. Sometimes, but not always, he kept or received a copy for his own records. As his mastery of the typewriter grew, he developed techniques to create shadings, colors, and textures that made his work resemble pencil or charcoal drawings. This great man passed away on June 25, 2007, but left behind a collection of his amazing artwork that will be an inspiration for many.
You're critically wounded and dying in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam.
It's November 11, 1967.
LZ (landing zone) X-ray.
Your unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 yards away, that your CO (commanding officer) has ordered the MediVac helicopters to stop coming in.
You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns and you know you're not getting out.
Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again.
As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.
Then - over the machine gun noise - you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter.
You look up to see a Huey coming in. But ... It doesn't seem real because no Medi-Vac markings are on it.
Captain Ed Freeman is coming in for you.
He's not Medi-Vac so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway.
Even after the Medi-Vacs were ordered not to come. He's coming anyway.
And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 3 of you at a time on board.
Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses and safety.
And, he kept coming back!! 13 more times!! Until all the wounded were out.
No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm.
He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would not have made it without the Captain and his Huey.
Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Air Force, died last Wednesday at the age of 70, in Boise , Idaho .
Yoga documentaries are not instructional but offer inside looks to the practice of yoga past and present. A selection is reviewed below.
As yoga popularity increases, many films have been archived or created to tell the story of yoga. Although models, teachers, and actors have produced an abundance of DVDs to instruct in the basics of yoga along with online yoga classes and videos, this is a different film genre. These are films produced to display, explain, or discuss the many variances that compose yoga as opposed to how to videos. Some are beautiful and inspirational; others can put the viewer into a (un)welcome trance. All are informative on some level. Documentaries about the History, Origin, Development, of Yoga
Some of these films are must see for yoga aficionados. This is a composite of some of the popular or interesting.
* Yoga Inc. (2006) discusses the dilemma of the affluence of yoga in the West and the tradition in the east, of the billion dollar business it has become. It does not reach the expose limits of other inc. genre films such as Food, Inc. or Medicine, Inc., but does touch on the economics of Western yoga and the early signs of competitive yoga, a contradiction in terms.
* Thread of Yoga, directed by Eric Wils, is filmed in India as it practiced when Westerners aren’t participating. The scenes and people are real allowing entry into a yogi practicing meditation on a deeper level than experienced by the average participant in Western yoga.
* Naked Yoga (1974) has been repeatedly shown over the years. It is not instructional but a fusion of naturism and yoga. The four practitioners are attractive young women, which imparts a voyeuristic quality . It has since inspired naked yoga classes for those who want to deepen their practice in that direction.
* Yoga Unveiled, by Gita Desai, accompanied by musical selections and mantras is a testimony of and to the many teachers of yoga in the west and India through photographic footage and archive films and interviews. It is considered a moving image encyclopedia of yoga.
* Yoga Gives Back isn’t the same as the previous films but consists of shorter film interviews with women in India who benefit from a micro-loan program of gifts or loans from the western practitioners to India, the home of yoga. It is a non-profit organization focused on the yoga community.
* Living Yoga, the Life and Teachings of Swami Satchidananda, directed by Shiva Kumar is an hour long documentary of how the teachings of yoga were brought to the west by the swami who became known as the Woodstock Guru in the 1960s. The film includes footage of many notables including Oprah, Peter Max, and Larry King.
Documentaries about Yoga Events and Personal Yoga Journeys
Both the famous and the unknown tell how they discovered yoga and what yoga means to them. The films are available although some of the less commercial ones may take some searching. Undoubtedly some have been missed and new ones are added frequently.
Think pink ... You're not seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses:
This albino dolphin is pink.
The bottlenose - first spotted in Lake Calcasieu , an inland saltwater estuary in Louisiana, by boat captain Erik Rue, 42, in 2007. "Pinky" is believed to be the only pink dolphin in the world, and has "reddish" eyes. It is usually spotted with its dark grey mother. There are only 14 other known albino dolphins in the world, all of them white.
April 18, 2010, 6:34 pm Photographing Iceland’s Fiery Volcano By JAMES ESTRIN
Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano had been dormant for nearly two centuries before Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson, 51, flew to the scene on March 21 to photograph its first stirrings. Mr. Sigurdsson returned to the scene and made these dramatic photographs Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Mr. Sigurdsson has spent 30 years photographing the temperamental landscape of Iceland, as Kerri MacDonald reported Thursday in Lens. But until Sunday morning he had never seen anything like the volcano that is tying up air traffic in much of Europe, he said.
We reached Mr. Sigurdsson by telephone Sunday evening and asked him to tell us what it was like to be face to face with the volcano.
This is not my first volcano, I’ve been shooting them for 30 years. We have an average of one eruption every five years but these eruptions are different from the rest. The first one in March, which stopped a few days ago, had very beautiful lava fountains and I could go very close and take beautiful pictures. It was what we call here a tourist eruption.
This one, last week, was different. It started underneath a glacier nearby the first eruption. It melted down a lot of ice and we had huge floods. When the lava hits the water you have a huge explosion and it explodes into thin dust . You cannot go close to this eruption because it’s on top of a mountain and the explosions are huge. The hole is about 5,000 meters wide and 2 kilometers long.
Standing in front of it at night is magnificent because you can really see the lightning that is at the center of the eruption. It’s incredibly exciting. The adrenaline flows and I was shouting ‘wow look at that’ over and over. I’ve never seen something like this before.
I just love volcanoes and the Northern Lights. I’m very happy to live here in Iceland even though we’re broke. We’re poor, with beauty.
DID YOU KNOW.... The modern Athens Marathon commemorates the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield at the site of the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C.
Legend has it that Pheidippides delivered the momentous message "Niki!" ("victory"), then collapsed and died.
The Athens Marathon is recognized as the original marathon course and it's the same course used in the 2004 Olympics held in Athens.
The first modern Olympic games were held in 1896 in Greece.
The legend of Pheidippides was honored by a 24.85 mile (40,000 meters) run from Marathon Bridge to Olympic stadium in Athens.
Athens Stadium, the finish line for the Athens Marathon stands on the site of a stadium used in classical times.
Spiridon Louis, a Greek postal worker, won the first modern Marathon with a time of 2 hours, 58 minutes, 50 seconds, an average pace of 7:11 minutes per mile.
At the 1908 Olympic Games in London, the marathon distance was changed to 26.2 miles to cover the ground from Windsor Castle to White City Stadium, with the 2.2 miles added on so the race could finish in front of royal family's viewing box. This added two miles to the course, and is the origin of the Marathon tradition of shouting "God save the Queen!" (or other words relating to the Queen) as mile post 24 is passed.
2,500 Years of Heroic Running...
The modern Athens Marathon commemorates the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield at the site of the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens in 490 B.C., bringing news of a Greek victory over the Persians. Legend has it that Pheidippides delivered the momentous message "Niki!" ("victory"), then collapsed and died, thereby setting a precedent for dramatic conclusions to the marathon.
When the modern Olympic games were inaugurated in 1896 in Greece, the legend of Pheidippides was revived by a 24.85 mile (40,000 meters) run from Marathon Bridge to Olympic stadium in Athens. Traditionally the final event in the Olympics, the first organized marathon on April 10, 1896 was especially important to all Greeks. Greece was hosting those first modern Olympic Games. The Greeks had yet to win a medal, and had one final chance to bring glory to their nation. Twenty-five runners assembled on Marathon Bridge. The starter mumbled a few words and fired the gun, and the race was on. "The excitement of the crowd waiting at the finish line at the newly constructed replica of Athens' ancient stadium was beyond description" writes the Greek historian Quercetani. Spiridon Louis, a Greek postal worker from the village of Marusi and veteran of several long military marches, crossed the finish line a full seven minutes ahead of the pack. His time was 2 hours, 58 minutes, 50 seconds for the 40 kilometer distance (average pace of 7:11 minutes per mile). When it was all over nine runners finished, 8 of them Greeks. The host nation was ecstatic, and the marathon was born.
The United States was one of 9 nations at the 1896 Athens Olympics, thanks to sponsorship of athletes by the Boston Athletic Association. Middle distance runner Arthur Blake was the only American to enter the first marathon. Blake won a silver medal in the 1500 meters 3 days before the marathon but unfortunately this left him exhausted and he dropped out after about 14.5 miles. Planning for North America's first marathon began on the boat back to United States. The first annual Boston Athletic Association marathon was conducted on April 19, 1897, the date chosen to commemorate the famous ride of Paul Revere in 1775.
Here's a legal way to print money: change the font
By Associated Press
MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Here's a way you might save $20 this year: Change the font in the documents you print.
Because different fonts require different amounts of ink to print, you could be buying new printer cartridges less often if you wrote in, say, Century Gothic rather than Arial. Schools and businesses could save thousands of dollars with font changes.
Data on the subject from Printer.com, a Dutch company that evaluates printer attributes, persuaded the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to make a switch. Diane Blohowiak, coordinator of information-technology user support, has asked faculty and staff to use Century Gothic for all printed documents. The school also plans to change its e-mail system so it uses Century Gothic.
"The feedback we've gotten so far has been positive," she said. "Century Gothic is very readable."
The school of 6,500 students spends about $100,000 per year on ink and toner cartridges. Although students and staff can change the default font to something more ink-intensive, Blohowiak said the university expects to save $5,000 to $10,000 per year with the font switch.
When Printer.com tested popular fonts for their ink-friendly ways, Century Gothic and Times New Roman topped the list. Calibri, Verdana, Arial and Sans Serif were next, followed by Trebuchet, Tahoma and Franklin Gothic Medium. Century Gothic uses about 30 percent less ink than Arial.
The amount of ink a font drains is mainly driven by the thickness of its lines. A font with "narrow" or "light" in its name is usually better than its "bold" or "black" counterpart, said Thom Brown, an ink researcher at Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's top maker of printers.
Also, serif fonts -- those with short horizontal lines at the top and bottom of characters -- tend to use thinner lines and thus less ink than a "sans serif" counterpart.
But while using less ink at home can help you buy roughly one fewer printer cartridge each year, it's not necessarily better for the environment.
That's because some fonts that use less ink, including Century Gothic, are also wider. A document that's one page in Arial could extend to a second page if printed in Century Gothic. Blohowiak said her research suggests that ink comprises the main cost of a printout, but the environmental costs of paper are probably higher.
"Maybe the individual characters use less ink, but if you're using more paper, that's not so green, is it?" said Allan Haley, director of "words and letters" at Monotype Imaging Inc. in Woburn, Mass., which developed Century Gothic.
Also, Century Gothic was designed for limited blocks of text such as titles and headlines, not for full documents, said Haley, who describes fonts as his "children." Despite Printer.com's research and UW-Green Bay's experience, Haley said he still recommends Times New Roman or Arial for their readability.
The standard advice for trimming printing expenses still applies: Print in "draft mode," if you can. Use both sides of a page and do a print preview to make sure you're not printing pages with useless text such as a copyright line. Using an ink-saving font is just one more technique to consider.
And the greenest way to save on ink is not to print at all.
That's the philosophy Microsoft Corp. said it uses in deciding which fonts to include in its Outlook and Word applications. The more pleasing a font looks on the screen, the less tempted someone will be to print, said Simon Daniels, a program manager for Microsoft's typography group.
That's why the company changed its defaults in Office 2007 from Arial and Times New Roman to Calibri and Cambria, he said.
"We're trying to move the threshold of when people hit the print button," he said.
ONLY THE ENGLISH COULD HAVE INVENTED THIS LANGUAGE
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes. One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men, Then shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen? If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those, Yet hat in the plural would never be hose, And the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother and also of brethren, But though we say mother, we never say methren. Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!
Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England .. We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. We have noses that run and feet that smell. We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway. And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?
I WOULD LIKE TO ADD THAT IF PEOPLE FROM POLAND ARE CALLED POLES THEN
PEOPLE FROM HOLLAND SHOULD BE HOLES AND THE GERMANS GERMS
Home > Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America
Chomsky Warns of Risk of Fascism in America
Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.
“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.
Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.
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“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.
He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.
“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.
Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”
There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.
And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.
“The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain,” he said. “They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are “fine guys” and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’
People see that and are not happy about it.”
He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”
“People want some answers,” Chomsky said. “They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”
Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.
And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.
“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”
He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.”
When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.
No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said.
“These are lessons to keep in mind.”
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.
THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.
No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.
Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.
When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.
But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.
The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.
In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.
If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.
Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.
