John Kass comes out in favor of forcing Mayor Emanuel into a run-off in his bid for re-election:

But there is one thing that is necessary. Think of it as a gift, one that can be given to Chicago on Tuesday, Election Day, Feb. 24.

Only those who live in the city and love Chicago the most — those who will vote Tuesday — can give this gift to the city. I live outside the city. So I can’t. But you might.

What is this one thing Chicago desperately needs?

It needs Mayor Rahm Emanuel to fall short of winning re-election outright Tuesday.

There, I said it.

I’m not saying he should lose the election and get tossed on the ash heap of history, no, no, no. Nothing of the kind.

I’m just asking that on Tuesday, he fails to receive the 50 percent plus one vote that would make him the outright victor.
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The oligarchs who installed him want him to win Tuesday. They don’t want a runoff. They installed him as a caretaker to protect their interests and as a janitor to clean up the mess of the last mayor, who spent the city into oblivion.

A runoff might impress upon Rahm that this isn’t Rome and he’s not Rahmulus.

So a runoff is exactly what the city needs.

Oddly, Emanuel needs it too. If he survives, it would make him a better, perhaps more humble mayor, rather than that Mayor Antoinette that erupts on occasion.

If Rahm doesn’t win outright, there would be a runoff election campaign between two candidates, one of them most likely Rahm and his $30 million political war chest.

He’d have to spend it. And my motto for weeks has been: Make Rahm spend it all.

For your edification and enlightenment here are the results of the Trib’s investigation of the mayor’s campaign finances:

In an unprecedented look at the intersection of Emanuel’s political fundraising and his public duties, the Tribune analyzed years of his public schedules, thousands of administration actions and all of the more than $30.5 million in contributions to his campaign funds since he first ran for mayor in 2010.

The examination found a pattern of mutually beneficial interactions between the mayor and his major supporters. Some of those actions play out in public as part of the Emanuel administration’s high-energy marketing strategy. But the political piece typically takes place behind the scenes.

Emanuel is at the center of it all, moving seamlessly between his roles as chief executive and chief fundraiser.

The pattern may be best viewed through Emanuel’s top donors.

Nearly 60 percent of those 103 donors benefited from his city government, receiving contracts, zoning changes, business permits, pension work, board appointments, regulatory help or some other tangible benefit.

I’ve mentioned it here before but when I was a small child my dad and I went wading in a stream in rural Missouri. When we emerged from the stream we were both covered with ticks. In my case I had ticks from above my waist to just above my knees. Everywhere a tick attached itself a boil emerged. I had, quite literally, hundreds of boils and I became very, very sick. Ever since I’ve been subject to extreme fatigue and muscular and joint pain. It sort of waxes and wanes. Sometimes I barely notice it. At others I’m nearly incapacitated. It was hard in my teens, tolerable when I was from my twenties to forties, and for the last twenty years it’s been pretty hard. Most days I must force myself to rise and get about my business.

Whenever I read reports of tick-borne illness I go into a virtual frenzy of research. So, for example, there’s been an outbreak of a newly-identified tick-borne disease called “Bourbon virus” (after the Kansas county in which it was discovered):

CNN)The CDC has discovered a new virus that may have contributed to a Kansas man’s death, the agency announced Friday.

Named the Bourbon virus after the county where the patient lived, the virus is likely spread by tick or insect bites, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

A 50-year-old man suffered multiple tick bites in the spring of 2014 while working outside on his property, the CDC said in an article published in the agency’s “Infectious Diseases” journal.

The man fell ill over the next two days, went to a doctor on the third day, was hospitalized and died of a heart attack 11 days after becoming sick, the CDC said.

That led me to learn about Heartland virus:

Heartland virus belongs to a family of viruses called Phleboviruses. Viruses in this family are found all over the world. Some of these viruses can cause people to get sick. Most of the phleboviruses that cause people to become ill are passed through the bite of a mosquito, tick, or sandfly.

It might be that I have what’s called “chronic Lyme disease”, basically an immune reaction to an earlier infection with Lyme disease. Or I may have some other condition related to one of these other diseases. I believe they’ve been around forever. They’re just being discovered now because our tools for doing so are better.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t have a problem with questioning whether people who advocate doing unChristian things are really questions at all. It isn’t enough just to be baptized and to say your a Christian. You’ve got to live your faith as well. Here’s the real deal:

Bishop Angaelos, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United Kingdom, was in Washington on Friday for the swearing-in of the United States’ new ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, David Saperstein. Angaelos spoke to CNN about why ISIS targets Coptic Christians, and why he forgives them, even as he rejects their horrific acts.

Q: Not long after the video released, you tweeted about the killings, using the hashtag #FatherForgive. Did you mean that you forgive ISIS?

A: Yes. It may seem unbelievable to some of your readers, but as a Christian and a Christian minister I have a responsibility to myself and to others to guide them down this path of forgiveness. We don’t forgive the act because the act is heinous. But we do forgive the killers from the depths of our hearts. Otherwise, we would become consumed by anger and hatred. It becomes a spiral of violence that has no place in this world.

As it says in Matthew “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”

The editors of the Chicago Tribune want Congress to authorize more sweeping powers to President Obama and future presidents to wage war on DAESH than the president’s asking for:

We’re on record saying that while President Barack Obama wants permission to engage — this after 2,000 airstrikes, and with 2,600 U.S. troops on the ground — he also wants lawmakers to tie his hands. He’s asking Congress to sign off on a plan to fight a limited war that excludes “enduring offensive ground combat operations.” He also would tie the hands of a future president by setting a three-year expiration on the resolution.

We’ve instead urged Congress to give this president not the limited authority he seeks but the broader authority that he and future presidents may well need.

Before Congress grants such an authorization I would like President Obama to articulate his reasons for wanting authority to wage war on DAESH that does include defending U. S. interests but doesn’t include slippery slope arguments, appeals to pity, or considerations of the interests of our frenemies in the Middle East or elsewhere. I think we have interests in opposing DAESH but they’re almost entirely right here within our borders by looking more critically on mosques that are financed with foreign money, imams that preach hatred, and our absurdly lax policies on travel and student visas.

As Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota pointed out yesterday on ABC’s This Week, Muslims practice their religion more freely in the United States than practically anywhere else in the world. That’s one of the reasons radicalization is a harder sell here in the United States than it is in, say, France. While Americans have gone to fight with DAESH, their numbers are extremely small. DAESH can’t replenish its numbers by recruiting in the United States. You can recruit 150 people to do just about anything in the United States.; The number of young French Muslims who’ve gone to joing DAESH is at least 1,000. My point is that France’s interests in opposing DAESH are clearly stronger than ours. France’s onions are in the fire where ours aren’t.

Those of you who have only been visting The Glittering Eye for the last few years may not know that for several years I curated a weekly round-up of the work of Iraqi bloggers. I kept track of every blogger actually blogging from Iraq that I could identify. With only a few exceptions they were young enough to be my children or grandchildren and I felt sort of paternal towards them. I’d guess I stopped seven or eight years ago.

This afternoon it suddenly occurred to me that one of the bloggers I kept track of was a young woman (Sunni Arab) in Mosul who posted as “A Star from Mosul” and, since Mosul had fallen under DAESH’s control, it might be interesting to see what she had to say.

Her most recent post is here. It’s dated June 26, 2014 and it’s pretty heart-rending. Here’s the opening:

I don’t know what to say, my heart is full of sorrow and fear

The past 3 weeks were the hardest ever, 11 years of war , I’ve written about hard days in blog but they are nothing compared to what happened this time.

and the conclusion is here:

Right now, there is no shooting , and armed men took control of Mosul and near by villages, as well as other cities ..

there is no electricity, no fuel, no gas, no salaries, lack of food supplies especially the one that need Freezers , the vegetables and fruits are bad and expensive , as there are no electricity the food in our refrigerators molded , people are struggling in this hot weather (42 Cel)

Everyone is worried and upset , no one knows what will happen next.

We just want a suitable life like any other human being in the world, is it too much to ask?

We are thinking seriously to leave , but how? where? When? We don’t know ..

The last words are:

note : I’ll try to post some photos as soon as i have a better internet connection .

and nothing has been written since.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for some time and in the absence of anything else interesting to write about there’s no time like the present.

The picture at the top of this post is a picture of an old curio cabinet we have in our family room (our architect, who is also my brother-in-law, designed the room and called it a “hearth room”). First, the cabinet itself. It was purchased by my maternal grandmother at auction about 75 years ago. It’s not a good piece of furniture but I have a strong sentimental attachment to it. I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t either in my mom’s house or mine, filled with interesting knick knacks. It’s fragile and wobbly, its glass is cracked, and some of its many repairs are starting to give out. No wonder I’m attached to it.

Now to the contents, starting at 12:00. We refer to the black pebble as “the Knock Rock”. My mom picked it up in Knock in County Mayo when she visited there. Below that is the baby bracelet put around my wrist when I was a newborn. Proceeding clockwise, next to that is the engraving plate for my parents’ wedding invitation. My dad’s name is misspelled which tells you something about my grandmother.

It’s a bit out of focus but above the engraving plate is a miniature old-fashioned coffee grinder. It reminds me of the several coffee grinders my mom had around her home. If you’ve never tried grinding coffee with one of them, it’s quite a chore.

Continuing around the clock, there’s a compass my dad bought at an army surplus store. The figure of Kwan Yin and the various little carved ivory objets are things that I remember as always being in the cabinet. Along with the elephant bell.

I found the arrowhead in a riverbed in rural Missouri when I was, maybe, seven or eight years old.

The black squares with raised green letters on them were tiles used in the game Anagrams which preceded Scrabble and which we used to play as a family. I doubt that very many people play Anagrams anymore. Not enough patience.

At 7:00 is a watch chain that belonged to my great-grandfather Schuler. He allegedly received it from Anheuser-Busch in consideration of his being a major distributor for their beer. I don’t know whether that’s true or not—his receiving it, I mean—I believe that he was a major major distributor for Busch’s beer, not to mention being a political bigwig.

The tarnished thing is a bronze keepsake from the 1964 New York World’s Fair and I honestly don’t know how it came into our possession.

The locket standing with its hinge up at 10:00 contains two old photos, one of my maternal grandmother, dolled up for the stage and one of my mom as a little girl.

Finally, at 11:00 is one of my baby shoes.

That’s the lot. My dear wife put this display together. It’s humble but heartfelt. Sort of a time capsule of my family’s history over the last century. The display changes seasonally. At Christmas time my wife replaces what you see with old Christmas ornaments, Christmas cards from three quarters of a century ago (or more), and other things representative of the season.

It happens every so often. I really don’t care about any of the inter-party bickering that’s going on right now. I don’t care whether President Obama loves America or not, whether Rudy Giuliani is vile for having raised the question, or whether Republicans should disavow Giuliani’s remarks. I don’t care whether President Obama is a crypto-Muslim. I don’t care if Scott Walker is cowardly for not giving plain answers to “gotcha” questions. Or even not “gotcha” questions. I just don’t care.

I do care about the policies that the president and the Congressional Republican leadership are putting forward all of which I think are pretty insipid. Keep in mind, for example, that President Obama’s White House has never produced a plan which even they claim would result in full employment, only a fraction of that. Basically, both sides are trying to paint themselves as different while really being very much alike, adhering to the prevailing Washington wisdom even when the prevailing Washington wisdom is strongly opposed by most Americans.

One of the occasional but regular themes around here has been something I’ve called “visualcy”. A quick summary of the hypothesis is that, just as orality was supplanted by literacy, visualcy, a reliance for information on visual imagery of different sorts, is replacing literacy as the primary way by which most people receive information and, just as literacy produced cognitive and behavior changes in people, so will visualcy. In a recent article at Reason.com, Michael Shermer, citing the “Flynn effect”, wonders if we’re “becoming morally smarter”:

If the moral Flynn effect is real-and I think it is-the implications for the future of humanity are encouraging as we continue expanding the moral sphere along with the abstract complexity of our technologies and culture.

It’s hard to accept the notion that people in the early 20th century were moral idiots, two standard deviations dumber than us. Their attitudes about race and gender sure seem morally moronic to us today, but does that mean in another half century our descendants will look at us with equal moral dumbfoundedness? Surely we’ve learned some things that will carry civilization forward and that are grounded in relatively permanent principles, such as equal rights for everyone. I believe we have.

The “Flynn effect”, a secular increase in IQs, was named for the psychologist, political scientist, and activist James R. Flynn who documented it. It posits that over the last century or so IQs, as measured by ordinary IQ tests, have risen on a regular basis. As Mr. Shermer notes, that has occurred almost entirely due to improvements in abstract reasoning. He then draws a link that I find suspicious between the rise in IQ scores and moral improvement as evidenced by greater rights for women and minorities.

Unfortunately, although he dances around it, Mr. Shermer fails to identify the actual processes involved. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a demonstrated causal relationship between literacy and abstract reasoning. The causality moves from literacy to improvements in abstract reasoning to increases in IQ.

Recent research has suggested that the “Flynn effect” ended in 1975 and may even have reversed. That supports the visualcy hypothesis: as people increasingly derive their information through visual means abstract reasoning ability actually decreases along with a host of other cognitive and behavioral effects, as I’ve catalogued in previous posts.

In my view the sheer volume of information with which we’re being deluged strongly suggests that visualcy will only increase and as it does the very things we’ve noticed over the last several years—an increase in reflexive “tribalism” and more agonistic modes of expression.

Who could possibly have predicted that as the Baby Boomers got old they’d require more Social Security, pensions, disability benefits, and healthcare? Or that when you tax savings and subsidize consumption you’ll get less of the former and more of the latter?