Politics Plus

Yesterday was, of course, a holiday – so I was going to fall back on “News of the Weird” in the short takes for a little comic relief. Then I saw the article on Ken Burns’s newest docuentary, whch is about the Holocaust, centering on American behavior during that period, and staring soe truths in the face that most of us would rather not see.I encourage everyone to look it up on your local PBS station, especially if your local station has more than one channel (mine does, and they’ll be screening it on the main one 9/18-9/22 and on the fourth one from 9/25-10/10), but essentially there are just three episodes (which may or may not be 2 hours each), named after lines in the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statur of Liberty: “The Golden Door,” “Yearning to Breathe Free,” and “”The Homesless, the Tempest Tossed.”

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

The Conversation – Dog owners take more risks, cat owners are more cautious – new research examines how people conform to their pets’ stereotypical traits
Quote – In another study, we wanted to get individual-level data, so we used an online survey tool to recruit 145 owners of either a cat or a dog – not both. We gave participants an imaginary US$2,000 and asked them to invest any portion of it in either a risky stock fund or a more conservative mutual fund. Dog owners, who made up 53% of participants, were significantly more likely to invest in stocks and also put more money at risk than cat owners.
Click through for details. I see only correlation here – do cat peole avoid ridk because their pets do, ot do risk avoiders seek out cats as kindred spirits? I know I am a cat person and a risk avoider, but since I have been around cats literally since I was born, I have no way of knowing which came first. I do know that. when I vote (which I would do in any case), what’s uppermost in my mind is generally avoiding the havoc that Republicans would wreak.

The Daily Beast – Why Ken Burns Is Exposing America’s Evils During the Holocaust
Quote – An in-depth study of fascism, intolerance, and the push-pull between ideals and complex political/social realities, The U.S. and the Holocaust, buoyed by testimonials from scholars and survivors of the Holocaust, is informative and heartbreaking in equal measure. For Novick, it’s also an inquiry that’s apt to shock many. “I think this will be, for the general public, somewhat surprising and a little hard to ingest,” she says. “That we could be both the liberators of freeing the world from tyranny and fascism, and unwilling—as Daniel Greene says in the film—to do much to rescue the victims of fascism.”
Click through for article and interview.

Food For Thought