Noteworthy entries.
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
I've seen this iconic photo periodically. It has always inspired me. I keep a copy of the image file on my desktop, and I periodically look at it and feel intense emotions. Until today, however, I didn't know the story about the man refusing to salute Hitler. I didn't know what happened to him.
[caption id="attachment_34346" align="aligncenter" width="792"]
Employees of the shipyard Blohm und Vow from Hamburg gathered for the launch of the training ship 'Horst Wessel' and demonstrate the Nazi salute with the raised right arm. One worker in the right half of the picture denied it and crosses his arms in a defiant gesture - also a kind of resistance. The name of the worker is August Landmesser., 01.01.1936-31.12.1936[/caption]
Here is the opening paragraph of the story behind the photo from Wikipedia:
August Landmesser ([ˈaʊ̯ɡʊst ˈlantˌmɛsɐ]; 24 May 1910 – 17 October 1944) was a worker at the Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany. He became known as the possible identity of a man appearing in a 1936 photograph, conspicuously refusing to perform the Nazi salute with the other workers.[2][3] Landmesser had run afoul of the Nazi Party over his unlawful relationship with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman. Later he was imprisoned, and eventually drafted into penal military service, where he was killed in action.
The Wikipedia article
continues on and it is a story that is jarring, inexcusable, horrid. This is what can happen when bullies bring terror up a group (or nation) of people, causing them to form a destructive tribe. There are millions of stories of the Nazi regime, but August's photo allows him to visually inspire the rest of us. If only most of us had the guts and integrity to stand up to 1% of the social pressure and the danger that he faced. I wonder whether this photo was used in the case against him, or if his sin of falling in love with a Jewish woman (Irma) was more than enough evidence for his persecutors. Bullies don't need much evidence. Actually, they don't need any evidence.
August's non-salute proves that one can stand up to massive social pressure to succumb. The salutes of everyone else
in this photo is evidence of something else, what what? Is it that most people are sheep? Is it that most people stop thinking when under social pressure, thus acting out Hannah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil? Or did most people, at some early glimpse of trouble, decide to stop thinking? Or did most people knowingly live hypocritical lives day after day, laying low, passively hoping that the entire thing would wash over and that they and their families would emerge intact, though compromised?
This photo of August Landmesser inspires me, reminding me that nothing I ever face will compare to what he faced. If he could stand up to the Nazi's, I will never have any excuse for failing to speak what I believe to be truth, no matter how upset people around me are getting. August Landmesser's photo is an excellent reason for being the first one in the room to stand up and tell the mob that you disagree with them.
I had never before heard Jewel’s story. Heart-warming and inspiring. This is an excerpt of a much longer interview.
From the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a story where one of the heroes goes to prison:
A year on from the FinCEN Files investigation, the United States Treasury unit at the heart of the global exposé is now “working overtime” to implement major anti-money-laundering reforms, while the whistleblower whose leaked documents sparked the investigation languishes in prison.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, BuzzFeed News and more than 100 media outlets published the FinCEN Files in September 2020, uncovering more than $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions flowing through the global financial system, passing through U.S.-based banks with relatively few impediments.
. . .
While the FinCEN Files has been widely lauded and cited over the past year as a key driver for global money-laundering reform, the former FinCEN official-turned-whistleblower who originally provided the thousands of documents at the core of the investigation reported to prison earlier in September to serve six months for sending the confidential documents to a BuzzFeed News reporter.
Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards was first arrested in 2018, more than two years before the FinCEN Files was published. After pleading guilty last year to sending highly secretive suspicious activity reports from FinCEN to a reporter, she was finally sentenced in June this year.
“I’m absolutely proud of what I did,” Edwards told BuzzFeed News in an interview before reporting to a federal women’s prison in West Virginia earlier this month. “My motive was accountability, and the American people had a right to know what was occurring within Treasury and that it was a national security issue and that American lives were in jeopardy.”
The more I learn about the brain, the more I am amazed and confounded. It doesn't seem possible that brains should work nearly as well as they do. Let me rephrase . . . it doesn't seem possible that brains should work at all. For starters, what's with consciousness? Yes, we are exquisite survival machines, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should expect to have a front seat to the show, the sounds and lights and smells and touches associated with surviving. But we are plopped into front row seats and it's glorious and terrifying to be a conscious witness to our day-to-day adventures. This makes no sense to me. It seems that we could be exquisite survival machine yet not be conscious of anything. What is the value-added of being conscious witnesses? I'm not a believer in "free will," so I'm not convinced that it is necessary to have a conscious commander of my body. On the other hand, I can't believe that natural selection threw in would would seem to be an expensive add-on like consciousness just for the entertainment value.
All of the above is a mere warm-up to another miracle performed by brains. Today I was looking for a tiny bluetooth speaker, but could not find it. I decided to walk down to work in my basement on an entirely unrelated project, but my mind returned to the search for the bluetooth speaker. While standing in my basement, my three-pound brain retraced my steps over the past week, ruling out certain locations any playing little "videos" convincing me that the speaker was not somewhere other than my house. Then while my eyes were wide open, my mind generated imagery of me placing that little speaker next to a guitar case in my bedroom (two floors up). This imagery was vivid and convincing. I was now certain of where the speaker was, even though I wasn't yet looking at the speaker. I walked upstairs and found it exactly where my brain said it would be. My three-pound brain created an accurate model of my house and replayed my activities over the past week. It did this quickly and effortlessly, generating "videos" and a rationale for why I put the speaker where I did. Billions and billions of microscopic neurons doing something that seems impossible, even after I saw that it could actually happen. My brain did it without any programming by any sentient being. I has no central processing unit and no traditional software. As best we know, this set of miracles occurs as the result of this Hebbian insight: Nerves that fire together wire together.
My difficulties understand the magnificence of the brain reminds me of the story of the engineers who, studying the anatomy and physiology of a bumblebee, concluded that it would be impossible for such a creature to fly.
And now that same brain that found my lost object harnesses the intricacies of the English language, allowing me to share this story about how two ways in which ordinary brains are beyond-belief extraordinary. The only reason we aren't repeatedly stunned and disoriented by the amazing things are brains can do is because we have gotten used to such miracles, day after day after day.