The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it in the space dimension. As soon as you do that, you’re in a position of being able to listen again and again to a performance, to become familiar with details you most certainly had missed the first time through

Many people are familiar with the Sarah Palin quote that Saturday Night Live spoofed.

I can see Russia from my house!

ABC edited the video to only show the immediate question:

GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

Though I didn’t support her candidacy, her remarks are not as looney as they may have seemed, taken out of context.

Jefferson-Memorial (Wikimedia Commons)

Jefferson on Race

Historians have long known of Thomas Jefferson’s troubled racial views and actions.

When the Jeffererson Memorial was commissioned in 1934 and completed in 1943, Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for America had not yet challenged and reinterpreted Jefferson’s belief that African Americans could not live in the same government as whites.

Jefferson’s racial views are not widely know by the public. Part of the reason for this is that when Jefferson’s work is quoted, it is quoted selectively.

You can see below the way that the Jefferson Memorial selectively quotes from Jefferson’s writings, leaving off the part about deporting all African-Americans after they are freed.

Jefferson Quote: Cherry-picked

If you look at the phrase about two-thirds down the text, you can see a quote from Jefferson’s 1821 autobiography:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

Yet this is a cherry-picked quote, because if you continue reading the original quote, you can see that Jefferson believed that free African Americans could never live under the same government as whites and he intended to eventually deport all African-American (to Africa).

Click on the blue arrows above and below the quote to get the surrounding 500-characters of context and click on the “source” link to view the document this quote context was extracted from.

Note:

This entire text on Panel 3 of the Jefferson Memorial is a collection quotes, are what I call “naked quotations”- because they have been stripped of their context.

Notice that their extended quotation on Monticello.org does not include the reference to deportation.

Well-behaved women seldom make history

During her failed 2019 presidential campaign, Harris’ economic policies included a $3 trillion tax plan aimed at increasing taxes on the wealthy. Like her current campaign, she wanted to raise the federal minimum wage, direct billions of dollars in tax credits to low-income renters, create a Bernie Sanders-style Medicare for all health care system and lower cash bail for criminals.

“Walz has destroyed Minnesota,” Dunning said.

Although fibbing with numbers is an old trick, the etiquette of budget discussions leans toward references to “rosy scenarios” and the like. But how can you explain a budget that counts $2 trillion in claimed economic growth twice? It’s used once to “pay for” massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and another time to paint Trump’s budget as reaching balance in a decade.

These people — all of them — need to get out of domestic politics, leave cable, and go back to living off overpaid no-show jobs at the Rand Corporation or Raytheon as God ordained.

to what extent was slavery crucial to the economic expansion of period between 200 BCE and 150 AD? And did the prevalence of slavery impede innovation?