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from BBC Future (UK)
Fountain pens were a stylish statement but messy and impractical. Their replacement was a stroke of design genius perfectly in time for the era of mass production.
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from The Daily Caller
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED, American news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C.
Van Packed With Explosives Found In Philadelphia Amid Riots And Unrest
Van Packed With Explosives Found In Philadelphia Amid Riots And Unrest
Numerous explosives devices were found packed inside a van in Philadelphia Wednesday as unrest continues in the city following the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr., officials said. Authorities stumbled upon the vehicle around 10 p.m. on Wednesday, according to Fox 29. The Philadelphia bomb squad and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) responded to the scene, the local outlet reported.
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from The Hill
LEAST BIASED, MOSTLY FACTUAL, News & Media Website in Washington, D.C.I voted for Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary election, left my ballot blank in the 2016 general election, and now must decide whom to vote for this year. In several ways, I find Donald Trump over the top and offensive. I have said this on air and on Twitter. He can be too hot to handle, insulting people and often making himself the issue, diverting attention from more important policy matters. Many of my Republican friends, notably women, will not vote for him, not because they are “Republicans in name only” but because the president has given them some reason to reject him.
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
And If He Were Here Today
In his 1931 collection of essays, Reflections on the World Today, French polymath historiographer and public intellectual Paul Valéry wrote with ominous premonition of a world yet to come, more so than he might have done the world he was frequenting, contemplating, and gazing at in early 1930s France. On the eve of Nazi upheavals that no one else had yet predicted, Valéry’s Reflections were depicting an impending “history” as bitter fomenter of troubles among nations, a spiteful agitator angling to “intoxicate people, provide them with false memories, exaggerate their reflexes, sustain their old wounds, torment them in their peace, and drive them into deliriums of grandeur or persecution rendering men in turn bitter, magnificent, insufferable, conceited...”1
The Saudi Evolution
Fouad Ajami had an odd fondness for Saudi Arabia. He was an Americanized, secular Shiite with European sensibilities who, truth be told, had pretty much burned out on the ugliness of the modern Arab world. He once smiled knowingly at the comment of the late, great Middle Eastern historian Charles Issawi: “Thank God it’s Friday: I can stop reading Arabic, Persian, and Turkish and go home and read Jane Austen.”
Bearers Of Meaning In The Middle East
Every contributor to this special issue of The Caravan dedicated to the memory of Fouad Ajami will have wondered “What would Fouad be thinking of now?” Fouad’s capacious mind would be returning to the question “Have we just witnessed a turning point?” This in the context of Jürgen Habermas’s, The Liberating Power of Symbols, and C.S. Lewis’s assertion that “Symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words.” If so, what symbolic moment has just occurred? President Erdoğan of Turkey has annulled the law that made Hagia Sophia, the church of Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, one of the world’s greatest architectural works of genius, into a mosque – praying there and declaring the church to be a mosque, open for Islamic prayers as of July 2020.
Joseph Conrad said this about his work: “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.” The same should be said of Fouad Ajami who through his life and writing helped many, like myself, hear, feel and see the rich beauty and diversity of the Middle East.
Crosswinds may best be described as Fouad Ajami’s furthest exploration in the Arab world. He began in the 1970s with what he knew well: Egypt and the Levant. A child of radical Beirut and Nasser’s Arabism, he first had to escape the orbit of both. When I first met him, in a Princeton classroom in 1972, he was just beginning to shake loose. The Arab Predicament (1981), which he described as a “chronicle of illusions and despair, of politics repeatedly degenerating into bloodletting,” freed him to explore further and deeper. First he probed the Lebanon of his own fathers in The Vanished Imam (1986). In The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1996), he crossed into Palestine and Israel. Later, in The Foreigner’s Gift (2007), he ventured further afield, to Iraq. The Syrian Rebellion (2012) filled the space between. But beyond all these beckoned Arabia, and especially the Saudi kingdom. Of course, he knew it by legend. His own father had gone there to work. And it crept into his other writing, as early as The Arab Predicament, as a place of fabulous wealth that “only underlined a painful gap between what a society can buy and what it can be.”
Aspects of Fouad Ajami’s method are inimitable, or nearly so, inseparable from the distinctive personality of this one remarkable thinker. His reflections on the politics of the Middle East always depended on his empathetic understanding of the cultures, the complex histories, the literary achievements, and the ever-present currents of faith. Add to this his specifically Lebanese perspective, indisputably rooted in the region but also always with an eye to the sea, to the West, and to a very different political-cultural world.
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from Idaho State Journal
Newspaper in Pocatello, Idaho
July 4, 1931, was to be a celebration recognizing the emigrants that crossed the Portneuf River near Pocatello on their way to Oregon. The Wyeth Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) gathered around an Idaho-shaped stone monument for a group photograph at the corner of South Fifth Avenue and East Carter Street on what is now the Idaho State University campus. While there were some genuine smiles, others seemed a bit forced and one woman in particular does not appear to be terribly happy. No wonder: The text on the monument was ridiculously wrong. It said, “One half mile west is the old ford where the Oregon Trail crossed the Portneuf River. Erected by Wyeth Chapter, D.A.R., 1931.” The problem was obvious, one half mile west of the monument is the railroad depot, not the Portneuf River.
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Magazine of The Living Church Foundation (Anglican)
MERITOCRACY AND THE FAILURE OF THE CHRISTIAN MORAL IMAGINATION
In his confrontation with King David in 2 Samuel 12, the prophet Nathan tells a heart-rending story of a rich man who, rather than give up one of his own flock to feed a hungry traveler, takes away the single and much-loved lamb of the neighboring poor man and his family. Enraged at this obvious injustice, David condemns the man to death and demands that he pay quadruple restitution for the loss of the lamb. (2 Sam. 12:5–6). In a dramatic and prophetic turn, Nathan looks at David. “You are the man!” (2 Sam. 12:7). The theft of the precious lamb is of course an analogy to David’s rape of Bathsheba and murder of her husband, Uriah. If we have ears to hear, a similar denunciation, directed towards our pretense that we have earned what we have, echoes from the Scriptures.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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Spokane Valley-based Duncan Produce pivots again, now offering home delivery service during pandemic
After the coronavirus pandemic forced restaurants to temporarily close in mid-March, Duncan Produce was faced with the possibility it could lose most of its customer base. Owner Casey Duncan found a way to retain employees and sustain operations by expanding the wholesale business to include direct-to-consumer sales via a drive-thru at the company’s facility in Greenacres. Drive-thru business was brisk, prompting Duncan Produce to expand again with a home delivery service that launched last week, serving residents within an 18-mile radius of its facility at 69 S. Henry Road.
The campaign season had set “a new standard for nastiness, maybe because the campaign lasted so long and involved so much drama and intrigue.” Analysts pointed to a campaign “based more on personal attacks … the politics of personal destruction – than on policy issues.”
Two full moons in a single calendar month is a relatively recent definition of a blue moon. For centuries, the term “blue moon” referred to the third full moon out of four in a given season. Typically, a season consists of three months. But because the moon works on a 27.5-day cycle, we earthlings sometimes get a little more than our money’s worth. A full moon by this definition happens seven times every 19 calendar years. In 1946, however, an amateur astronomer named James Hugh Pruett wrote an article for Sky & Telescope magazine in which he mangled the definition into what we consider today to be the more familiar one: He said a blue moon is two full moons in a single calendar month.
Margo Hill doesn’t want people to forget the mid-19th century history of what is now the city of Spokane and what was then Spokane tribal territory. She wants them to know its brutal truth. To that end, Hill has been working with the Spokane Tribe of Indians on the long and involved process of renaming a milelong stretch of road in West Spokane that currently memorializes George Wright, a U.S. Army colonel who terrorized and slaughtered Indigenous inhabitants during a violent campaign to take their land. A proposal presented at a Wednesday meeting of the city’s Plan Commission would change the name of Fort George Wright Drive to Whist-alks Way. Whist-alks was a Spokane Indian belonging to a rich tradition of women warriors who existed among area tribes and played an unheralded role in the tribe’s fateful encounter with Wright and his men in 1858, according to Hill, a former Spokane Tribe of Indians attorney and current professor of urban planning at Eastern Washington University who’s a Spokane tribal member herself. Whist-alks’ marriage to Qualchan, a Yakama sub-chief, “brought peace and stability to the region” in the years before Wright arrived, according to a historical account compiled by the Spokane Tribe and presented to the Plan Commission.
In a two-story brick storefront off Market Street, Bob Whittaker found himself a time capsule. “Basically, we’re just huge historic preservation fans,” Whittaker said, referring to himself and girlfriend, Sandra Bilbrey, who bought the historic Kehoe block at the end of August. “That’s why (in) some of these rooms, we’ve just washed the walls.” The 1907 brick structure bearing the name of two giants in the early days of Hillyard has been home to a bar, a hardware store and more on the street level at Olympic Avenue and Market Street. But enter the building at the rear, and climb the old wooden steps where Agnes Kehoe could once spy boarders trying to sneak in dates afterhours, and you emerge into an old railroad single room occupancy lodging house largely untouched by the hands of time.
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from The Washington Times
News & Media Website in Washington, D.C.
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The U.S. economy rebounded at a record annualized rate of 33.1 percent in the third quarter as employers recovered from coronavirus lockdowns. The strong report gives President Trump a positive closing argument in the final days of the presidential campaign.
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