Measuring the Presidents by their Presidential Portraits

Which President Looked the "Most Presidential?"

What’s the true measure of a man? According to NYT blogger Clinton Cargill, if the man was a past or current president of the United States, a man’s true measure can (sort of) be determined by his presidential portrait. In his brief blog post, Clinton Cargill lists his favorite presidents in order as determined by each of their presidential portraits.

Andrew Jackson wins the title as Clinton Cargill’s favorite president, mainly for the military garb he wore in the portrait. The writer claims that the military uniform makes him look “oddly vulnerable.” It’s odd to think of Andrew Jackson as “vulnerable” because if history serves me correctly, he was kind of a bad-ass when he was president of the United States.


Second on his list of famed presidential portraits is Rutherford B. Hayes, whose portrait the writer likes because the portrait is a tad bit “Rembrandt-ish.” Of course it is.

The third and final president to make the cut based solely on his presidential portrait is Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is also in uniform. In contrast to Andrew Jackson’s military garb, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military uniform makes him look “slightly confrontational” and “intense.” Whether or not this is based on the portrait itself or the uniform is a little difficult to tell.

In Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential portrait, he is not wearing a red cape. Believe it or not, the absence of a cape can actually make a person look tougher than he would with a cape draped around his shoulders.  

What do you think about Clinton Cargill’s choices?

I like the idea of ranking presidents by their official portraits; I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do anything like it before. That said, I don’t think that he necessarily chose the most striking or interesting presidential portraits. After taking a look at a few presidential portraits, I think my personal favorite was the presidential portrait for John F. Kennedy. (This portrait was done after John F. Kennedy’s death; I believe Clinton Cargill only looked at the official presidential portraits when making his selection.)

The John F. Kennedy portrait shows John F. Kennedy at a time when the weight of the world was on his shoulders; I imagine that each and every president of the United States has felt exactly the same way at some point during each of their respective presidencies.



 

Edmund Burke hated the French Revolution

Edmund Burke was an influential Irish writer and politician in 18th century England. Born in 1729, h moved from his native Ireland to Britain where he served as a Whig party member in the House of Commons for many years. He was a hugely influential thinker within his party and during his time period, shaping the Whig party politics for many years. In fact, he split the party into two—the conservative section that he lead called the “Old Whigs” in opposition to a more liberal group he called the “New Whigs.”

After his death in 1797, Burke’s politics were lauded by conservatives and liberals in the 19th century and have generally been dubbed the cornerstone of the modern conservatism. Burke supported the American Revolution and opposed the French Revolution. He went on to write a pamphlet called Reflections on the Revolution in France and published it in 1791. The pamphlet started a small pamphlet war of its own with Thomas Paine writing The Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft writing A Vindication of the Rights of Men in direct response to Burke.  

As mentioned, Burke spoke quite often against the violence of the French Revolution. In his essay “On the Death of Marie Antoinette,” Burke criticizes the inhumane and violent actions that took place during the French Revolution. During this period, people with royal French ancestry, as well as their supporters, were often imprisoned or executed. In 1793, Antoinette, after being thrown from the French thrown, was beheaded following the French revolution. In the essay, Burke mourns the queen’s death as well as the end of beautiful time that her death represented.

In this essay, Edmund Burke is a proponent of following old traditions in political systems. In short, Burke loved monarchies and saw no reason that they should reach their demise. He believes in the inheritance of ruling positions based on birth into royal families and says this system of inheritance follows the ways “of nature.” He also believes these ruling families were the example the lower classes needed and should look to in modeling their own behavior. For example, he looked at France’s queen Marie Antoinette less as a person, and more like a “sublime object” her people could emulate.

This quotation fits into Burke’s idea of inherited political institutions as natural and to his idea that the ruling class is a model for the lower people to follow. The quotation “nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer” fits into his argument about the inheritance of political institutions. This quotation seems to say once institutions were no longer inherited and then replaced by new institutions; people could never know in what direction they were headed like they would in a stably inherited institution. When he speaks of having “no compass to govern us,” Burke seems to be speaking both in a political sense, and based on his earlier argument, a behavioral sense. People not only don’t have a stable political family to rule them, but also have no ruling family on whom to base their societal behavior.

 

A Brief History of American Cities

American cities didn’t always resemble the kind of places that we know and recognize today. Government and police forces weren’t organized, but instead operated as volunteer forces. Plumbing and sanitation concerns killed hundreds of thousands of people. Roads weren’t designed and neither was housing organized. We 21st century city dwellers wouldn’t have known what hit us, that’s for sure.

In early American cities, immigrant groups from Western Europe made up the bulk of the population. Cultural assimilation of white, Western immigrants was quick and absolute—it wasn’t long until German culture in places like Chicago was American culture. Class and wealth distinction weren’t set yet in early American cities—in places like taverns, lower and upper class mingled together drinking and cavorting.

By 1890, over 80% of Chicagoans were either born outside of the country themselves or had parents who were. Germans and the English knew how industrialization worked so they worked to industrialize many American cities. Cities started being structured in this way—factories employed mostly immigrant labor and these immigrants lived in rings and towns around the factories. Lumber, meatpacking, mail order catalogs and transportation were the biggest industries in early industrializing American cities.

Still, it wasn’t all fun and games in America for the new immigrant populations. Cholera epidemics in the early 19th century were blamed on the uncleanliness of the lower immigrant classes. People thought that disease outbreaks came from the crowded quarters that they lived in and were spread by vapors in the air.

Some of these ideas were half-truths—sometimes the conditions of American lands were so foreign to immigrants, they couldn’t adjust properly and fell ill. Tenement housing in America’s largest cities were cramped and unclean, but poor immigrants had few other options. There weren’t fresh foods in many cities and without health regulations, wheeler-dealers made people even sicker with their sales of unsafe foodstuffs.

Unfortunately, critics at the time started associating this kind of physical illness with moral degradation. This idea started the orphan train, sending orphaned or poor immigrant children out of America’s largest cities into the countryside.

There were also a number of anti-immigration movements throughout the country. The Know Nothing party despised Irish Catholic and encouraged businesses to bar them from entering. The Nativist movement and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan rallied to have immigration stopped altogether. After the Haymarket bombing in Chicago, perpetrated by seven German anarchists, anti-German sentiment ran high.

In the second waves of immigration, central and eastern Europeans started coming to the United States. Unlike their fairer skinned European counterparts, these darker skinned immigrants stuck out amongst city populations as foreigner. Because of this, newer immigrant populations resisted the assimilationist patterns of earlier Europeans. They kept their own schools and churches and many, particularly Italian immigrants, only planned on staying in American for short periods. These sentiments drove further divisions between the lower and upper classes. Upper classes watched football and other sports while lower classes went to movie theaters and amusement parks.

Sex with Neanderthals Made Us Stronger

This gives a new meaning to the phrase sexy beast

A lot of groups might have us believe that breeding with other colors than our own or starting families with the same sex as our own would be an abomination. It wasn’t very long ago when mixed race couples were outlawed or violently opposed; they still face struggles in many areas today. The same can obviously be said of gay couples, who still face opposition in most states in terms of marriage. I wonder what the people so vehemently against these unions have to say about humans actually breeding with another species?

Because we did, of course, do it. Our human ancestors mated—probably quite happily—with our cousins, the Neanderthals. And according to new research, doing the deed with another species was not only perfectly fine and dandy for us—it also resulted in us having better immunity. And according to researchers, not only did it help, it was actually critical to our survival. We are able to cope with modern day viruses because of this activity.

We are not the only inter-species breeders, of course; many may have heard of the liger (yes, Napoleon Dynamite’s favorite animal), the whalfin, and many other animals whom resulted from inter-species sex.

Now, I’m sure our ancestors didn’t have our modern survival and ability to ward off disease in mind when they were seeking to satiate their carnal pleasures; mating was much simpler back then, I am sure. Hopefully they were in love, but who knows? Maybe it was arranged, or not even consensual. But if their coupling had this much meaning regarding our own DNA today, imagine what the unions that are so heavily opposed could do to affect the DNA of our progeny.

Think about it—all of the gay families able to adopt together and raise stronger, happier children than the ones who’d otherwise be stuck in an orphanage. All of the colorful families with mixed traditions and loving acceptance of everyone rather than the close-mindedness that led us to the hatred that fills our country—even in the homes of our own leaders!—today. Could interracial couples and gay families save our future just as inter-species sex might have saved us all from the common virus?

You might think that I’m making a stretch here, but I think the answer is yes. The more we adapt, the more we grow and change and help one another, the better we are. Remember, Darwin’s studies about evolution did not simply translate to survival of the fittest, as many people would simply state—but the survival of those best able to adapt. And right now, Congress and a good portion of Americans are prohibiting that adaptability by trying to keep us all living in the fifties—which is not only the opposite of progress but also evolution itself.

And please don't think I am akining interracial and homosexual couples with inter-species; I am simply saying if we can accept inter-species mating within our own bloodlines, then there certainly should be no barriers to ANY people of the same human species mating! These barriers are ridiculous either way.

These people are directly inhibiting our ability to adapt and survive! Of course, you could add environmental concerns and the unsustainable lifestyle we’ve adopted to this equation as well. Perhaps these impeders of progress could do well to study sex with Neanderthals, for both their own good as well as our own.

Dawisha's Views on Nasir's Arab Nationalism

Adeed Dawisha is an interesting guy. Born in Baghdad, he went to study political science in England. Now, he works in the political science department at Miami University in Ohio. Dawish takes his background and his way of thinking and writes quite a bit about Arab nationalism, especially about how Egypt’s  president in the 1960’s, Gamel Abdel Nasir, influenced Arab and Egyptian nationalism.  

Dawisha says Nasir knew Middle Eastern peoples’ thought had to be changed from thinking of themselves as Egyptians or Syrians to thinking of themselves as Arabs. Through a varied number of arenas such as schools, mass media, and secularizing Islam, Nasir slowly changed the way people thought. Nasir knew he needed people to think as a unit rather than as individual states if he wanted Arab nationalism actually to occur.

This argument is valid because Dawisha uses examples from Nasir’s ideology and practices and invalid because Dawisha places too much emphasis on Nasir’s charisma in public speaking to change public thought. Dawisha includes examples what methods Nasir used to change peoples’ ideology. For example, Nasir used rewriting history to try and ensure education was in every sector of the country.

Dawisha explores the different methods Nasir used to change thinking and how effective these methods were on the population. Dawisha places too much emphasis on Nasir the brilliant public persona. This statement seems to negate everything Dawisha said earlier about educational reforms, mass media propaganda, and secularized Islam really changing the way people thought. If the peoples’ thought had been completely changed and they thought of themselves only as Arabs, the loss of charisma by even a very influential ruler could not have changed an entire population’s national outlook.

Dawisha explains what methods nationalists used to spread nationalism throughout the various Middle Eastern communities. Nasir spread nationalism through a climate of fear. Rather than simply expecting Arab nationalism to take hold through reforms in the way people thought and as a popular way of thinking, Nasir used force and violence to make sure competing ideologies would not take people away from thinking in an Arab nationalistic state of mind.

This argument is valid because Dawisha explains a difference in Arab nationalism which may not have occurred in other nationalism and is invalid because Dawisha doesn’t establish Nasir as a leader who did not trust Arab nationalism or his reforms enough to spread throughout populations on their own. Dawisha’s explanation of the violence or persecution to those who thought differently from Arab nationalism is important because it is different from European models. Many theorists say those who adhere to competing ideologies are marginalized by nationalist societies and the people in power leave them alone because they believe their own nationalism is strong enough for the general population to support it. Following Dawisha’s account, Nasir also seems to have faith in peoples’ changed thought and in Arab nationalism as the most popular way of thought in the Middle East. If this was Nasir’s belief, Dawisha needed to explain why he felt the need to punish those with competing ideologies rather than just trust they will be marginalized like in the European model.

Black Women in the North in the 1800's

We hear quite a bit about the plight of black Southern women during and after slavery. We know that they were discriminated against, given the worst possible jobs and relegated to systematic poverty. Why is it that movies like The Help portray black women as the most sought after maids in the city? But was it really so much better in the northern United States during this same period? Let’s learn a bit more about black women in the north:

Slavery created the idea that black men and women needed separate spheres of work and division of jobs to provide the division between men and women necessary for them to create children. This division applied to black women in the north, as well. Women typically continued the trades that they or their mothers perfected while they were enslaved—sewing, spinning, nursing, entertaining and cooking.

In the 1820’s and ‘30’s, black women immigrated to what came to be called Freedom Cities, or cities with high populations of black people. Boston, New York and Philadelphia were three immigration hot spots. Black women hugely outnumbered black men in these cities—from a census taken in Philadelphia in the 1840’s, the ratio was 16 black women to 5 black men—because the need for domestic labor provided by black women was high.

Nearly every black woman in the north worked in the service industry. Black women were domestics, seamstresses, washer women and dressmakers.  A few owned their own shops, but many more were street vendors that would hock their wares on the mean streets. The majority were household workers in the homes of rich northerners—imitating almost exactly the duties and getting the same respect level as they did on the southern plantations.

As time went on, since black women performed similar duties as the ones they did during the times of slavery, people began perceiving these domestic and service duties as black women’s natural abilities. They began to be confined to these occupations because that was what their blood made them able to do. Every black woman could be a cook or servant and only needed a little training.

Some black women worked with their husbands on abolition campaigns, correspondence and publishing. Others headed ladies’ abolition organizations. Still, this didn’t mean that they stepped outside of the arenas appropriate for women at this time in history. Black women were always assigned duties like cooking and letter writing.

One of the saddest and most ironic elements of the whole system was the way that black women were perceived in the north. They were black women, but they were also women and at that time, women were only perceived as moral if they worked within the home. Black women, single or with families, needed to work outside the home and therefore were perceived as immoral. Ironically, this worked both to keep women within the home—they wouldn’t want to be perceived as immoral—but also opened up a larger job pool for black women looking for work in white homes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Five Seriously Racist Advertisements

And some are newer than you think.

We’re used to seeing historical racist advertisements. Aunt Jemima, the smiling black mammy, selling pancake mixes.  Uncle Ben, the kindly slave father, hocking rice. All varieties of aboriginals, Native Americans and Asians peddling everything from shoes to coffee to alcohol. But it’s probably a bit more surprising to see that we’re still putting out racist advertisements today. Whether blatant of not, these ads still follow the racist traditions of yesteryear.  Let’s look at some of the most racists ads from the 1920’s to the present day:

 

1.) Aunt Jemima is probably the most well-known of all racist advertising characters. She started out as an advertisement for pancake flour in 1889 and she never changed. Not really, anyway. Now she has pearls and a nice hairstyle, but she's still Aunt Jemima, a happy slave from the old south. Here's a vintage advertisement of Aunt Jemima, with a head scarf and a checkered top, feeding her slave masters her mighty fine pancakes.

 

2.) In this ad for the Canadian Patriotic Fund, a First Nations member apparently not only wants to be a white man, but also a Canadian patriot! The disparity between the First Nations member's life--traditional garb and a teepee--and his modern currency and letter writing ability shows that this ad was woefully misinformed about the lives of First Nations members. Although the man in the ad was sadly born as a First Nations member, his soul can at least be redeemed into white heaven if he gives money to the Patriotic Fund. Praise God! We're not even going to get into the chicken scratch "language" at the beginning of the ad.

3.) In this ad for Van Heusen shoes, only one man doesn't buy the Van Heusen brand. Can you guess who?  You're right, it's the man who doesn't wear shoes at all! Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. The subtext of this advertisement is obviously that only savages don't choose Van Heusen shoes. The nondescript, non-white man wears a bone in his hair so he could never understand the subtle luxury of well-made loafers on his feet. Interestingly, the ad also displays four white men that look exactly alike with different hair colors, subtly homogenizing white men. Sorry, guys, it looks a lot more interesting to be shoeless man #4.

4.) In this 2007 ad from Intel, the boss is white and the employees are black. The slave imagery or white mastery imagery in this ad is apparent from the second you look at it, but Intel claimed to not recognize the racist imagery.  Really, Intel? You're going to claim innocence on an ad that uses the age-old thinking that black people are good at running? You're going to claim innocence on an ad that uses visual levels to put black people on a lower plane--bent down!--to a higher, standing white man? If you're this stupid, Intel, I'm definitely not buying a computer from you.

5.) In India and other places on the subcontinent, there is a huge beauty market to turn brown skin whiter.  That's what this advertisement is for: Pond's White Beauty is designed to turn brown skin whiter and pinkish. Because if you're not a white girl your man will leave you! That's what happens to the woman in this commercial--her skin is apparently not white enough, so her boyfriend leaves her for a lighter-skinned mega-bitch. This commercial is part of a series of five commercials which chronicles the leading lady's harrowing quest to turn her skin from icky brown to lily white:

-tRasuTtMJo

India-Pakistan Wars of the 1940's

I bought a map from 1937 the other day at an antique shop.  It's a fascinating map--the individual who owned it first drew swastikas on the countries as they were taken over by the Nazis at the end of the 1930's and into the 1940's.  But the thing that I didn't quite remember was that at this time in history, India was even huger than it is now.  There is no Bangladesh or Pakistan.  Along with India, Pakistani states gained their independence from Britain in 1947. It became an independent Islamic state in 1956. Bangladesh was granted its independence from Pakistan in 1971. The history of the creation of Pakistan is one we often forget, so here's a reminder:

A conflict in Kashmir in 1947, between Muslim and Hindu countries, began the first war of the India-Pakistan wars. These wars, with violent battles in 1947-48, 1965, and 1971, lasted throughout the majority of the twentieth century. The 1947 uprising, caused by a series of agreements between the state of Kashmir and both India and Pakistan, created discord between Hindus and Muslims and also Indians and Pakistanis.

In August of 1947, Great Britain formed their holdings on the Indian subcontinent into two independent countries, India and Pakistan. The five hundred and sixty-five states previously belonging Great Britain were given the choice to become part of either Pakistan or India.

Many states, ruled mainly by princes, made their decision mostly based on religion. If the majority of the state’s citizens were Muslim, that state would become a part of Muslim Pakistan. If the majority of the state’s citizens were Hindu, that state would become a part of Hindu India.

Maharaja Hari Singh, ruler of the two states of Jammu and Kashmir, couldn’t decide which country to join because he was a Hindu, but the majority of his population was Muslim. Instead of joining a country, Singh signed a “standstill” with Pakistan stating normal Kashmir-Pakistan relations would continue. Singh didn’t sign a similar agreement with India.

Soon after, aided by Pashtun tribesmen from Pakistan, Kashmiri Muslims rebelled against their ruler. Singh requested help from India. In return for their aid, Singh approved an agreement with the Governor General of India. This agreement, called the Instrument of Accession act, allowed Kashmir to be ruled temporarily by India.

Pakistan hotly contested the Instrument of Accession Act. Pakistanis said Singh couldn’t sign any such agreement under the terms of the “standstill” act with Pakistan. Pakistan argued Kashmir should’ve been a part of Pakistan because the majority of Kashmir residents were Muslim).

Despite dispute over the legality of the Instrument of Accession Act, Singh’s requested Indian aid came to the rescue in Kashmir. Indians fought the Pashtun “volunteers” until they left the country. More conflicts, in Punjab and Bengal, ensued in the following months.

This clash caused one of the greatest human migrations in history. Twelve million people became refugees as Indian Muslims fled to Pakistan and Pakistani Hindus went to India. One estimation says more than five hundred thousand people died on their journey.

           

“Lost Continent” Sinks Beneath the Ocean

An entire lost continent, which used to exist next to Scotland, has recently been discovered by scientists. The continent was created around 10 million years after the dinosaurs died out, caused by a sea floor eruption. The resulting continent neighbored Scotland sank two kilometers below the surface later, after being around for at least a million years.

 This is a huge piece of news—as incredible as it is scary. Imagine how the continents that we live on could someday simply follow this lost continent into lack of existence. If you click on the link, you can read about some scientific theories about how the continent sank—but nothing is known for sure. Had it been around today, the lost continent would have been covered with mountains and flowing rivers—quite a magical looking place. I wonder what lived there? I wonder if any species were native to the continent alone and died out along with it?

The actual rise of the continent itself, say scientists would have been considered a huge natural disaster at the time. The lost continent was located with sound waves, which is another incredible piece of news. Keep searching the world with these waves, I say—imagine what other magnificent finds we could discover.

New Triceratops Find Validates Apocalyptic Asteroid Theory

New dinosaur bones may give credence to the theory that an asteroid ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

    

We all remember the elementary school videos showing the animated dinosaurs all foraging, going about their rather Disney-like lives (even T-Rex looked kind of friendly). There's a streak in the sky, all of the harmless-looking creatures look over their shoulders, mild curiosity registering on their lip-less faces. There's a flash of white and then a  pleasant narrator explains what's happened without actually having to show the placid dinosaurs incinerated. Of course, the truth is that the age of the dinosaur was incredibly violent, natural selection more at play than at any other time in history; biodiversity being a fraction of what it was after the last ice age (of course, we're working on changing that, too). What's much less certain is how, and why the age of the dinosaurs came to a close. A recent discovery in Montana, may have unearthed the answer.

     What isn't disputed is that an asteroid did slam into the Yucatan peninsula of present-day Mexico about 65 million years ago, in the Cretaceous Period. What scientists do disagree on is whether that was the catalyst of the dinosaurs mass extinction, or whether dinosaur species were already on the decline, or even extinct, by the time the asteroid hit earth. According to those that believe the asteroid extinction theory, any dinosaur that couldn't fly or burrow into the earth was wiped out by the impact and subsequent climatic disruptions. Incidentally, this is what allowed mammals as an animal kingdom to survive, as they were primarily still a burrowing, rodent-like collection of species. Avian dinosaurs were able to quickly relocate, en masse. The land-bound creatures, however, were killed; if not by the initial impact, then by subsequent freezing from a nearly global cloud of smoke and ash that blotted out the sun for many hundreds of years and the volcanic activity and earthquakes that were sparked by the catastrophic impact.

     In southeastern Montana is the Hell Creek Formation, an area known for incredibly rich deposits of fossilized bones and other evidence from the Cretaceous through Paleocene Eras. Most notable within this range of time, represented in the striations of rock, clay, and sediment, is the Cretaceous Tertiary Boundary, or the K-T Boundary. The K-T Boundary is the "extinction zone", illustrated by heightened levels of iridium and quartz, the moment in history at which the asteroid hit earth and dramatically changed climate, weather, and volcanic activity. No fossilized remains have even been found within 3 meters of the K-T Boundary, implying that dinosaurs did not exist at this time, until now.

     The youngest dinosaur ever discovered, the brow horn of a young triceratops, has been discovered 13 cm below the K-T Boundary, indicating that the animal was alive right up until the moment of the asteroid's impact. What this means for prehistoric science is still uncertain, and those in the scientific community that doubt dinosaur's existence around the K-T Boundary have yet to respond. However, it seems that there is greater truth in that elementary school video of the friendly dinosaurs and their untimely demise.

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