Tag Archives: indians

Here come Tesla’s swanky solar roofs.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” he told an audience at a food summit in Milan, Italy. “When it comes to climate change, the hour is almost upon us.”

The global problems of climate change, poverty, and obesity create an imperative for agricultural innovation, Obama said. This was no small-is-beautiful, back-to-the-land, beauty-of-a-single-carrot speech. Instead, Obama argued for sweeping technological progress.

“The path to the sustainable food future will require unleashing the creative power of our best scientists, and engineers, and entrepreneurs,” he said.

In an onstage conversation with his former food czar, Sam Kass, Obama said people in richer countries should also waste less food and eat less meat. But we can’t rely on getting people to change their habits, Obama said. “No matter what, we are going to see an increase in meat consumption, just by virtue of more Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others moving into middle-income territory,” he said.

The goal, then, is to produce food, including meat, more efficiently.

To put it less Obama-like: Unleash the scientists! Free the entrepreneurs!

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Here come Tesla’s swanky solar roofs.

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The Pope Wants America to Learn From Its Horrific Treatment of Native Americans

Mother Jones

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As expected, Pope Francis implored Congress to protect refugees and other migrants in an address at the Capitol on Thursday. But before he did, he took a step to acknowledge the nation’s (and the church’s) often horrific treatment of American Indians. America, he argued, should demonstrate a sense of compassion it so rarely showed during the colonization of the continent:

In recent centuries, millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants. Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. For those peoples and their nations, from the heart of American democracy, I wish to reaffirm my highest esteem and appreciation. Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent, but it is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present. Nonetheless, when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible, as we educate new generations not to turn their back on our “neighbors” and everything around us. Building a nation calls us to recognize that we must constantly relate to others, rejecting a mindset of hostility in order to adopt one of reciprocal subsidiarity, in a constant effort to do our best. I am confident that we can do this.

This language is particularly significant because of what the Pope was up to yesterday—at a service at Catholic University, he formally canonized Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Spanish missionary who played an important role in the conversion of American Indians to Catholicism in California. Serra wasn’t by any stretch the worst European to visit the New World (the bar is very high), but the missions of California were deadly places for American Indians, cursed with high mortality rates (from disease and abuse) and forced labor. The core purpose of Serra’s work was to purge the region of its native culture and install the church in its place. For this reason, some American Indian activists were fiercely opposed to the canonization; Francis didn’t meet with any of them until yesterday afternoon—after he’d made it official. Consider Thursday’s allusion to past transgressions something of an olive branch.

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The Pope Wants America to Learn From Its Horrific Treatment of Native Americans

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GOP Congressional Candidate Apologizes for Calling Female Senators "Undeserving Bimbos"

Mother Jones

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On Friday, we reported on Minnesota Republican congressional candidate Jim Hagedorn’s history of incendiary comments about women, American Indians, gays, people he suspected of being gay, and President Obama’s family. Two days later, Hagedorn took to Facebook to issue an apology…of sorts:

Over the years I have written political satire and commentary, most of which defended conservative ideals and took aim at national politicians I felt were failing the American people and hurting our country.

Even though most of my writings were composed more than 10 years ago, national and DFL liberals are determined to attack me personally, mostly by exhibiting snippets of out-dated, misunderstood or out-of-context material and calling me derogatory names.

In this case, the rather worn and tired Democrat tactic of personal destruction and demonization is designed to deflect attention from the serious problems confronting our nation and the failed big government record of President Barack Obama and devoted liberal followers like incumbent DFL Congressman Tim Walz.

Of course, these same politically correct liberals remain undeterred by the offensive writings authored in the past by Al Franken. In spite of this hypocrisy, I do acknowledge that some of my hard-hitting and tongue-in-cheek commentary was less than artfully constructed or included language that could lead to hurt feelings. I offer a sincere and heartfelt apology.

Rather than dwell in the rigged game of political correctness, my campaign will forge ahead and continue to engage with the people of southern Minnesota and address the issues that will decide our country’s future during these critical times.

A better way to avoid the “rigged game of political correctness,” would be to not disparage all American Indians as “thankless” welfare recipients. You can read more about Hagedorn’s past comments here.

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GOP Congressional Candidate Apologizes for Calling Female Senators "Undeserving Bimbos"

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Travels Through India’s Sexual Revolution

Mother Jones

In late 2012, Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old medical student, boarded a bus in Delhi headed towards home. She never made it to her destination. While on the bus, she was gang-raped by six men who left her with fatal injuries.

But unlike in the past, when Singh’s story might have remained hushed, tens of thousands of men and women poured into the streets to protest the rape. This public pressure led to the passage of a bill that criminalized stalking, voyeurism, and sexual harassment (though it falls short of criminalizing marital rape). The January 2013 anti-rape uprisings are part of a socio-sexual revolution unfolding in India, argues journalist Sally Howard in her book The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys Through Modern India, which hit American shelves in May.

Anti-rape protests in India Courtesy Sally Howard

Originally from the UK, Howard has been traveling to India for the past 15 years, writing for Indian and British publications like the Telegraph, the

Guardian, and the Sunday Times. India is a land steeped in contradiction, observes Howard; a place which gave the world the revolutionary Kama Sutra, but remains hooked on the idea of arranged marriages; “where families bow down to a graphic depiction of a conjoined phallus and vagina, the Shivaling, but where couples are routinely attacked by the police for the indiscretion of holding hands in public,” she writes in The Kama Sutra Diaries.

But over the last decade, Howard argues that a sexual revolution has begun in India, one with very different characteristics than the West’s transformation during the 1960s. “While the Western sexual revolution was propelled by contraception and feminism,” she tells me, “India’s revolution has more to do with a young generation rediscovering sex, and pushing up against parental expectations.” Today, more than half of India’s population is under the age of 25, with 65 percent of the population under 35. “And these young are saying we’ve had enough, we want to have sex. They’re telling their parents ‘I don’t want the life you have ascribed to me,'” says Howard.

Kama Sutra temples in Madhya Pradesh Kirat Sodhi

Howard’s travel partner Dimple, a 32-year-old Delhiite who left a loveless arranged marriage, exemplifies this social shift. “I was married at 21 by arrangement to a man I didn’t know,” Dimple told Howard. “The consummation of my marriage was like being hit with a cricket bat. Now I’m 32 and I’m a divorcée. My mother, who was herself very unhappy, and my grandmother, couldn’t think of getting divorced. So this is a big change for my generation.”

Over the course of two years, Howard and Dimple journey to the Kama Sutra temples of Madhya Pradesh, the hillside station at Shimla where Indians had a history of sexual escapades with the colonial British, and to Delhi, rocked by the recent rape uprisings. In Gujarat, Howard interviews a gay prince who is setting up a retirement home for gay and hijra (third gender) Indians, many of whom don’t have families to rely on for support as they age.

Manvendra Singh Gohil, a gay prince who established a retirement home for eunuchs Hemant Bhavsar

Howard’s journey voyage helps her uncover some shifts in sexual attitudes across the country. “Middle class Indians are getting more flexibility in choosing their own mate, and finding the space to be together and experimenting,” she tells me. And aided by new digital tools, Indians seem more piqued by sex. Over the past decade, Google searches for the word “porn” in India have increased fivefold. In 2012, people in New Delhi searched for the word “porn” at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world. A survey by India Today showed that 35 percent of Indian women consume porn as opposed to 13 percent a decade ago. Fifty percent of women disapprove of pre-marital sex, as opposed to 64 percent in 2003. But remnants of a misogynist past still linger. The same India Today survey revealed that 36 percent of men blamed women’s revealing clothes for India’s rape crisis.

Not surprisingly, Howard notes, the shift in thinking about sex is happening mostly with younger generations. But that doesn’t mean the past is trivial. In fact, India’s ancient texts may better inform contemporary lust than America’s Puritanical roots. “I hope that the new sexual story the land of the Kama Sutra tells itself will feature some of the depths of romantic feeling of the old courtly poets—that it might rediscover the deep sentiments that gave the world its finest physical embodiment of romantic love: the Taj Mahal.”

The Kama Sutra Diaries is equal parts travelogue and cultural analysis, blending vivid characters with upbeat prose and humor. With this entertaining read, Howard pushes past taboo to give us a more exposed India.

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Travels Through India’s Sexual Revolution

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Oh, Good: More Sports Teams Asking Taxpayers to Pay for Their Stadiums

Mother Jones

Cleveland’s professional sports teams have poured more than a million dollars into a fight they’re hoping will end in victory on Tuesday. The end goal isn’t a championship, though—it’s a municipal tax extension.

While many voters will go to the polls Tuesday to vote in congressional primaries, Cleveland residents have another decision to make: whether to extend the city’s notably regressive sin tax, which bumps up the price of cigarettes and alcoholic beverages by a few cents. If it passes, the sin tax extension will bring the amount of public money Cleveland has spent on the stadiums, which are publicly owned, up to $1.2 billion since 1990. (The city’s mayor and council president have argued that the investment pays for itself, though such claims are often exaggerated.)

The NBA’s Cavaliers and baseball’s Indians have proposed $135 million in renovations to Quicken Loans Arena and Progressive Field, respectively, including new scoreboards and concrete repairs, while the NFL’s Browns already struck a deal with the city netting $2 million a year for 15 years to pay for new scoreboards, faster escalators, and a new sound system at FirstEnergy Stadium. The three teams are fighting to ensure that sin tax money will help assuage those costs—of the $1.4 million raised by Keep Cleveland Strong, the pro-sin-tax PAC, more than $1 million has come from the Browns, Cavs, and Indians. The opposing PAC, Coalition Against the Sin Tax, has raised a mere $6,500.

Teams aren’t just tossing in cash to make sure taxpayers help foot the bill for new scoreboards. The Indians instructed ushers to wear pro-sin-tax stickers on Opening Day, according to an employee instruction sheet a former usher gave to Cleveland.com. While the Indians had told reporters that the stickers were purely voluntary, the handout reads, “An Issue 7 Keep Cleveland Strong sticker is part of your uniform. Place it chest high on your outermost layer.” The former usher, Edward Loomis, said he was fired by the team after refusing to wear the sticker. When opponents proposed adding a $3.25 ticket fee to help pay for the renovations, Keep Cleveland Strong claimed that it would punish local families and innocent sports fans.

Cleveland teams certainly aren’t the only ones asking for public money to help their facilities. The Minnesota Vikings secured hundreds of millions of dollars for their new stadium after pleading that they “only have $975 million in the budget,” while the Atlanta Braves announced a new stadium that will cost suburban Cobb County, Georgia, $300 million. The absolute nadir of public financing for stadiums came two years with the construction of Marlins Park in Miami, which will end up costing city and county taxpayers $3 billion.

The Marlins Park fiasco created such a backlash that local voters rebelled when the Miami Dolphins asked for taxpayer-funded stadium renovations, voting the measure down. The strange alliance pushing for the same result in Cleveland—Ralph Nader, meet Big Tobacco!—has an uphill climb, given the funding differential and the pro-sin-tax support of so many local officials. Maybe Kevin Costner should forget about helping the Browns in this week’s draft—and instead help figure out a more efficient use of taxpayer funds.

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Oh, Good: More Sports Teams Asking Taxpayers to Pay for Their Stadiums

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Novelist Larry McMurtry’s Last Kind Words

Mother Jones

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AFTER MORE THAN five decades trying, Larry McMurtry—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Brokeback Mountain, and creator of Booked Up, one of the planet’s largest used bookstores—still can’t escape the enduring mythologies of the Old West, which he set out to debunk with the publication of his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, back in 1961.

The son and grandson of cattlemen, McMurtry, 77, was raised on the plains near Archer City, Texas, whose landscape and small-town mentality inform so much of his work—he left at 18 for college, returning decades later with the unlikely dream of transforming his hometown into a book lovers’ mecca. Among his 32 novels and 14 nonfiction works, you’ll find fictional accounts of Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, and other legends brought back to earth. In 1997, he told the New York Times Magazine he was “bored to death with the 19th-century West,” and figured Comanche Moon, the last installment of the Lonesome Dove series, would be his final say on it. But in his new novel, The Last Kind Words Saloon, fans will recognize that familiar pace, that spare diction, those somnolent settings—fading frontier towns with their ignorant, stoic cowboys and ranchers, beat-down Indians, whores, rustlers, drunks, schemers, and desperately lonely wives.

Mother Jones: I thought you were done with the Old West. What happened?

Larry McMurtry: I changed my mind. I got an idea and I followed it.

MJ: The Last Kind Words Saloon follows Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, among others. Yet their famous gunfight at the OK Corral seemed almost incidental.

LM: I don’t think I was that ambitious. It seems like the OK Corral is a good place to stop. I paid it much less attention because it was kind of a throwaway, an event that wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither side wanted to fight, and yet guns started going off and a fight ensued.

MJ: You’ve described Old West mythologies as destructive. Which ones particularly grate?

LM: The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist—it doesn’t allow for other cultures.

MJ: In your antipathy partly rooted in your own childhood run-ins in small-town Texas?

LM: It was more like the culture that I lived in and absorbed by osmosis: It was a racist, anti-feminist culture, and it had been throughout the whole period of settlement. It was still all that when I was a little boy.

MJ: To what degree have you succeeded in your demythologizing mission?

LM: I haven’t succeeded at all. It’s just as racist and misogynistic as it ever was. The image of the cowboy is one of the dominant images in American culture.

MJ: In the book, a brief sub-plot involves a group of ruthless Indians who do horrible things to a group of white travellers, and are in turn dispatched by the white authorities. What were your intentions with that episode?

LM: It was timely. For one thing, it actually happened during the period and in the places I was writing about. It was the last massacre on the southern plains. It was the final breakaway band of Kiowa who did it. It took place about 20 miles from my family home in Texas. General Sherman was on a tour of the western forts. He was there early in the morning and didn’t see the Indians. But they saw him, and waited until he left for Jacksboro. In the afternoon, seven teamsters came along that route and were massacred.

MJ: Much like Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove, the men in this book lack introspection; certainly they are reserved in their self-expression. The women are lonely and miserable and hungry for attention. What kind of men were your rancher father and grandfather, and how did they relate to their own wives?

LM: One of the reasons I wrote Lonesome Dove was to try to understand my father. My father’s reaction to the hardships his mother endured marked him for life. They left Missouri and came to our family home. There was nothing there when they arrived, but there was a stream. My father saw his mother carry bucket after bucket after bucket of water up from that stream to the house. She had 12 children. It made him intolerant of my mother, because she was not as competent as his mother.

MJ: What was it like for a studious kid like you growing up in small-town Texas?

LM: I didn’t realize that it was as limited as it was until I got to places that weren’t limited, like Houston. The only bookstore I had was the paperback rack at the drugstore.

MJ: How did your father feel about you going off to college and becoming a writer?

LM: He didn’t oppose it. We visited Rice and he saw what a wonderful school it was. He had some vain hope that I would change my mind and become a veterinarian.

MJ: Is your family still in the cattle business?

LM: Unfortunately, they are, and for nostalgic reasons. My two younger sisters both worshipped my father.

MJ: You studied under Wallace Stegner at Stanford, right?

LM: Actually, I didn’t. He was in India the year of my scholarship. I studied under Malcolm Cowley and Frank O’Connor. Mr. Cowley came in and turned off his hearing aid and let us all squabble among ourselves. But we knew he had value, because he came from the world of Hemingway, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald. He knew all of them. He wrote a wonderful book called Exile’s Return about that generation. In the end, Hemingway turned against him. Frank O’Connor was an Irish short story writer. He didn’t like teaching, and he was irascible. I mentioned once that I had read Smollett, and he exploded. But he was an exceptional writer, a beautiful short story writer.

MJ: You felt that Lonesome Dove was misinterpreted, that you’d intended it as an anti-Western. In what sense?

LM: Would you like your menfolk to be that way? The Western myth is a heroic myth, and yet settling the West was not heroic. It ended with Custer; it was the end of the settlement narrative, which had been going on since 1620.

MJ: Were you surprised when you learned that it had won the Pulitzer?

LM: I was teaching in Uvalde, Texas, the day I won. I gave six speeches that day. My friend Susan Freudenheim told me I had won the prize. I was too busy to have much of a reaction to it. I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath. If I hadn’t won the Pulitzer, I doubt I would have been president of PEN.

MJ: Do you find it strange being so closely identified with a book you wrote almost 30 years ago?

LM: That’s just the way it was and the way it is. Many people are identified with one book. Philip Roth with Portnoy’s Complaint. Joseph Heller and Catch-22. Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire. Strangely enough, Norman Mailer never wrote a novel that identified him. I think The Executioners Song is a great book.

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Novelist Larry McMurtry’s Last Kind Words

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