Clarence Thomas vs. Daddy

“I complained bitterly about the oppression of blacks and told him that a revolution was coming,  He assured me in return that America was the best country in the world, but I stood my ground and argued right back at him, and my newfound insolence made him furious.  “I don’t know why I worked so hard to help you, boy,” he said more than once.  “I never thought you’d go to some damn school way up north and have all this foolishness put in your head.” [snip]

“How could a black man from the Deep South who had survived the worst kind of bigotry possibly refuse to admit that America was tainted and corrupt and had to be rebuilt from the ground up?  Was he a coward, or just a fool?”

The gulf between the two men widened as Clarence continued on in college.

The greatest man I’ve ever known

“One Sunday he saw that my shoes were unpolished…  I replied that if I stopped to polish them, I would be late for church.  The next thing I knew, I was lying in a crumpled heap against the wall with Daddy standing over me saying, “You better not be late for Mass, boy!”… I polished my shoes as fast as I could and ran all the way to church, getting there just in the nick of time.”

“We saved nearly every part of the animal…. Portions were given to friends and relatives, while the rest went into the freezer to be saved for a rainy day.  Daddy always seemed to be preparing for rainy days.  Maybe that’s why they never came.”

“blisters come before calluses, vulnerability before maturity”

“Because of man’s fall from the Garden of Eden, Daddy said, it was our lot in life to work ‘from sun to sun.’  Once, years later, I got up the nerve to tell him that slavery was over.  ‘Not in my house,’ he replied.”

“In Pinpoint I was a little Negro boy growing up among hardworking but uneducated people.  From there I moved to the confusion and squalor of a run-down tenement in Savannah, where I led a life of being cold and not knowing when I would feel warmth again, of constant, gnawing hunger and not knowing when I would eat again, a life in which knowledge trickled in by the thimbleful when I yearned for floods of truth.  To stay there would have doomed me to a dismal life of ignorance, perhaps even crime– a life lost before it started.”

“But as I grew older , made my own way in the world, and raised a son, I came to appreciate what I had not understood as a child:  I had been raised by the greatest man I have ever known.”

Justice Thomas’s grandfather was a hard man.

My Grandfather’s Son

There are so many great passages from Clarence Thomas’ memoir, it makes it difficult to narrow down, so I will share a few for the next several days.  Enjoy.  

 “The damn vacation is over,” Daddy [his grandfather] had told us on the morning we moved into his house.  I thought of the filthy outdoor toilet behind Pigeon’s [his mother] old tenement and tried to figure out what vacation he was talking about.”  

“Old Man Can’t is dead– I helped bury him”  –Myers Anderson (Daddy)

“… we missed school only once in all the years I lived on East Thirty-second Street.  That was not Daddy’s fault:  he warned us that if we died, he’d take our bodies to school for three days to make sure we weren’t faking, and we figured he meant it.” 

 ”I was honest with Juan [Williams] about my view of the race debate, which I found increasingly exasperating.  I didn’t care which schools blacks attended, so long as they recieved a good education.  As I told another reporter, ‘I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral, I’d fight against it with every breath in my body — but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write.’  Nor did it matter to me if certain neighorhoods were predominately  white or black so long as they were safe and blacks could freely choose to live in either.  I was sick and tired of the  theories and statistics that had come to dominate the discourse on both sides of the political fence.  What mattered to me were individuals and their problems, but most of the people I met in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, seemed hell-bent on winning arguments instead of solving those problems.  Juan understood my pent-up frustration with this self-serving, irrelevant debate, a constant struggle that never seemed to change anything for the people who needed our help.”

What do you think?

Galileo

Galileo certainly had a serious run in with the Catholic Church, but would you believe it was his faith that made his science possible?

It is Rondey Starks contention that Christian theology made the development of science possible.  He argues quite impressively in his book, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, just that. 

David McCullough

I just love reading books written by David McCullough.  I will eventually read all of his works (their aren’t that many).  My favorite so far is John Adams. But so many of them are just excellent.  Truman, Mornings on Horseback, 1776, and the Path Between the Seas. 

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

Grant’s memoirs are generally considered the best memoirs written by a president.  His memoirs aren’t your traditional presidential memoirs because he died before he had a chance to write about his presidency.  But that doesn’t hurt Grant because the most interesting thing (to me) about President Grant happened to him before he was president (his life as a soldier).   So his memoirs describe his life prior to the Civil War through the conclusion of the Civil War.  His memoirs aren’t just good for the details he gives, although if that were lacking the book wouldn’t be nearly as good either, it is good for the insights he gives into his views.  Here’s an example.

 There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North.  The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation.  The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class.  With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory.  The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so.  The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash.”  The system of labor would have soon exhaused the soil and left the people poor.  The non-slavholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor.  Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them.  The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost. 

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (The American Civil War)

Green, not green?

A short pop quiz.

Which of the following energy sources are green?

 1.  Windmills

 2. Oil

3. Solar Panels

4. Nuclear power

Answer key is below.

  

  

  

  

Answer Key:

1.  not green

2. green

3. not green

4. green

“But wait teacher you made a mistake.  I got all of my answers wrong and I know I have the correct answers.”

“No, I am sorry you are quite wrong.  Let me explain.”

Wind and Solar energy are very diffuse sources of energy.  So to collect sufficient amounts of energy we would have to use millions of acres of land on windmills and solar panels.  Using up land for these purposes is wasteful and NOT green.  Let me give you an example.  To power New York City we would have to put solar panels over the entire states of Kansas and Nebraska.  On the other hand, oil and atomic energy are very dense energy sources and found in places we don’t find life.  We can dig deep in the ground where there is virtually no life and use a relatively small amount of land for nuclear reactors to power New York City.    Oil is less green than Atomic energy but still more green than the others (Oil is less green than atomic energy because it is a less dense source of energy) .  Once again we dig deep in the ground and use a relatively small amount of land on pipelines and refineries to extract the energy we need. Land is conserved and that IS green.

“Aha I’ve got you now.  The refineries release so much carbon and polution in the air and that can’t be green!” you reply.

“I am sorry you don’t understand.  Let me continue.” 

You see we are in the process of reforesting the United States.  Thanks to pesticides and fertilizers (once again VERY green) we get greater and greater crop yields from less and less land.  We also use a lot less land feeding horses which used to be our main source of transportation.  All of that land is returning to its natural state and consuming more and more carbon dioxide from the air.  More than we even produce.  You see wilderness is the key.  That is why airplanes are more green than trains.  Doubt it as you may it is true. 

Oil from the Middle East

So how much oil do we actually use from the Middle East?  Is it 50% of our oil? No, Okay it must be at least 40%?  No, 30%?  No, 20%?  No, a little less than 13%. 

“Of the 7 billion barrels of oil (BBO) we currently use each year, only 0.9 come from the Persian Gulf. We produce about 3 billion barrels domestically; our largest foreign suppliers are Canada (0.6 BBO) and Mexico (0.6 BBO); Venezuela and more than a dozen smaller suppliers take care of the rest. Getting to the point where the U.S. need not import any oil from the Middle East would not be very hard.”

from Getting over Oil

Peter Huber and Mark Mills  (Author’s of The Bottomless Well)
Commentary, September 2005                               

Order

Electricity is expensive as far as energy is concerned.  But electricity is highly ordered. 

“The order in energy is the ONLY part that has any value.  The sun provides us with 100 watts of light for free, through a couple of square feet of skylight, at noon on a moderately sunny day.  Yet we pay good money for a 100 watt bulb and the elecrons to light it.  A photon is a photon, but better-ordered photons packed into less space, delivered on demand, are worth far more than the diffuse, disordered, episodically available alternative, however “renewable” the sunlight may be.”

Chapter 1 of The Bottomless Well

Where do all the Quads go?

1 quad = 10¹⁵ Btu = 2.931 x 10¹¹ kilowatthours

Quads=thermal units of raw heat.

The U.S. uses 100 quads of energy a year.  Approximately 40% goes to electricity, 30% transportation, 30% heat.  Here is a great graph from The Bottomless Well. 

Click here Energy Usage.