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New neofascist conspiracy targets Quakers

October 24, 2018
· Martin Kelley

I won’t link to the rightwing Dai­ly Caller web­site on prin­ci­ple but in a week in which some of their favorite tar­gets are being served with explo­sives (the homes of the Oba­mas, Clin­tons, and George Soros have been tar­get­ed with IEDs), an opin­ion piece by Raheem Kas­sam, a Bre­it­bart alum and assis­tant to UKIP leader Nigel Farage, tries to cook up a Quak­er conspiracy.

It’s hog­wash top to bot­tom, thin­ly con­nect­ed dots meant to look like an evil plot. Appar­ent­ly some peo­ple who were involved in Casa de los Ami­gos in Mex­i­co City lat­er donat­ed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns and Casa lat­er rent­ed office space to a migrant rights orga­ni­za­tion in 2012 and… well, that’s pret­ty much it. Proof that the “inter­na­tion­al Quak­er move­ment” is the orga­niz­ers of the refugee car­a­vans aimed at the “destruc­tion of U.S. borders.”

The lan­guage is florid in the man­ner of rightwing con­spir­a­cies. They specif­i­cal­ly call out Brigid Moix, a for­mer Casa de los Ami­gos direc­tor and well-respected Quak­er peace advo­cate who Friends Jour­nal pub­lished just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote some­thing rather obvi­ous about immi­gra­tion that sounds like some­thing rather obvi­ous oth­er peo­ple have since wrote about immi­gra­tion. Oh and the one guy is now a Mex­i­can ambas­sador to Greece. And some­one was on a con­fer­ence call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seri­ous­ly, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coher­ent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after anoth­er bridg­ing togeth­er ran­dom­ly Googled triv­ia, all care­less­ly run togeth­er because the author obvi­ous­ly assumes Dai­ly Caller read­ers don’t read past the headline.

This would all be laugh­ably obtuse in its over­reach except that these con­spir­a­cies are get­ting less and less fun­ny every day. The AFSC reg­u­lar­ly gets con­spir­a­cy webs spun around its work in Pales­tine but I haven’t seen much try­ing to tie Friends to the bian­nu­al con­spir­a­cies around immi­gra­tion. Hope­ful­ly it will fade away and Kas­sam will find some oth­er bogey­man. The only stitch of truth can be found in the com­ments. There, buried near the bot­tom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:

Hometown Heroes

May 22, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Josh Tal­bot is back look­ing at pub­lic recog­ni­tions that imply that patri­o­tism is exclu­sive to mil­i­tary ser­vice:

With­in the last month I became aware of the “Home­town Heroes” pro­gram. Hang­ing from lamp­posts in our down­town, and oth­er down­town dis­tricts in the region, are ban­ners with the pic­tures and names of for­mer mil­i­tary per­son­nel. I was look­ing at one of the ban­ners hang­ing out­side of my bank and I start­ed think­ing to myself. “Why is it always soldiers?

Off the top of my head I can think of plen­ty of oth­er mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty that are heros from my stand­point. Activists for jus­tice and con­science. Civic-minded gad­flies. Shopown­ers who pro­vide so-called “third places” for for peo­ple to con­grege­gate. Traf­fic engi­neers who push back against corner-cutting in safe­ty issues. The most impor­tant heros are often every­day peo­ple who sim­ply do the right thing when chance puts a dan­ger­ous moral dilem­ma right in their path.

I push back against a sim­ple military-are-heros nar­ra­tives because in times of author­i­tar­i­an­ism the mil­i­tary often become the enforcers. There’s the jin­go­is­tic non­sense you hear that the mil­i­tary is pro­tect­ing our free­dom to protest. No: in most cas­es our lib­er­ty has been pre­served by peo­ple stand­ing up and prac­tic­ing their lib­er­ty despi­tee intim­i­da­tion by author­i­tar­i­an bul­lies and their police forces. I have friends in the mil­i­tary and I respect their choic­es and hon­or their com­mit­ments. I know heros can be found through­out the enlist­ed ranks and in our police forces but so are scoundrels. We need to rec­og­nize home­town hero­ism wher­ev­er it hap­pens and resist the mind­set that it’s exclu­sive to state forces.

https://​quak​er​re​turns​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​8​/​0​5​/​h​o​m​e​t​o​w​n​-​h​e​r​o​e​s​.​h​tml

Early “photo of summer” candidate

July 6, 2017
· Martin Kelley

I writ­ten many times before that I like to find fam­i­ly pho­tos that encap­su­late a feel­ing — a time and place, a moment in our col­lec­tive lives. A few weeks ago I caught this shot, which I think will be one of my favorite pho­tos of this summer.

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Tech­ni­cal note: this was only pos­si­ble with a water resis­tant phone, as I would not have dared wade out into a pool with pre­vi­ous phones. The 3D bokeh effect is cour­tesy of the iPhone 7 Plus “Por­trait” mode. It’s not per­fect: zoom in and there’s some dis­tor­tion around his left arm, both at the top where it fuzzes around the mid back­ground of the slide and on bot­tom where there are arti­facts in the con­trast with the far back­ground of the fence line. But I’m still pleased and amazed at how well the 3D imag­ing works.

Baby name popularity trendsetters?

May 10, 2016
· Martin Kelley

The most pop­u­lar post on my blog, year after year (and now decade after decade), is a 2005 piece on baby names: Unpop­u­lar Baby Names: Avoid­ing the Jacobs, Emilys and Madis­ons. We used the tech­niques list­ed to aid in our attempt to give our own kids clas­sic names that would­n’t be overused among their peers. The 2015 num­bers are out from the Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion. How did we do? The charts below shows the respec­tive rank­ings from 2015 to the year they were born.

theodore

francis

gregory

laura

The names of our two “babies” — Gre­go­ry, 5, and Lau­ra, 4, are both less pop­u­lar now than they were the year we named them. Yea! They’re both in the low 300s – viable names but far from overused.

Fran­cis, now 10, was drop­ping in pop­u­lar­i­ty and drop­ping into the low 600s. With that trend, we actu­al­ly wor­ried about the name becom­ing too unpop­u­lar. But an uptick start­ed in 2010 and became pro­nounced in 2013 when an Argen­tin­ian named Jorge Mario Bergoglio decid­ed to start call­ing him­self Fran­cis. The name is now in the high 400s.

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of our eldest son’s name, Theodore (“I’m Theo!, don’t call me Theodore!”), start­ed off in the low 300s was hold­ing steady with­in a 20-point range for years until around 2009. In 2015 it cracked the top 100. It’s only at 99 but clear­ly some­thing’s hap­pen­ing. Equal­ly dis­turb­ing, “Theo” was­n’t even on the top 1000 until 2010, when it snuck in at posi­tion 918. Since then it’s leap 100 spots a year. It’s cur­rent­ly at 408 with no sign of slowing.

And for those of you look­ing to spot trends: did we just call our names ear­ly? Maybe “Fran­cis” isn’t a slow climb but is about the go shoot­ing for the top 100 in two years time. Maybe “Gre­go­ry” and “Lau­ra” will be all the rage for moth­ers come 2020. Yikes!

Digging into the first selfie, from Philly!

June 10, 2014
· Martin Kelley

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This guy in Streetview is stand­ing near the spot where the world’s first #self­ie por­trait was tak­en in 1839.

Robert Cor­nelius was one of the first peo­ple to try to repro­duce Louis Daguer­re’s pho­to­graph­ic tech­nique after news of the break­through reach Philadel­phia. A chemist work­ing at his fam­i­ly’s gas light­ing com­pa­ny, Cor­nelius start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent chem­i­cal com­bi­na­tions until he found a way to reduce expo­sure times so that a per­son to sit still long enough for a por­trait. In Octo­ber 1839 he took a pic­ture him­self “in the yard back of his store and res­i­dence, (old) 176 Chest­nut Street, above Sev­enth (now num­ber 710), in Philadel­phia,” accord­ing to an oral his­to­ry pub­lished half a cen­tu­ry lat­er (PDF). Cor­nelius recounts:

It was our busi­ness to make a great vari­ety of arti­cles of plat­ed met­al. Very soon after­wards, I made in the fac­to­ry a tin box, and bought from McAl­lis­ter, 48 Chest­nut Street, a lens about two inch­es in diam­e­ter, such as was used for opera pur­pos­es. With these instru­ments I made the first like­ness of myself and anoth­er one of some of my chil­dren, in the open yard of my dwelling, sun­light bright upon us, and I am ful­ly of the impres­sion that I was the first to obtain a like­ness of the human face.

Remark­ably, in 2014, the Cor­nelius and Co. build­ing is still there on Chest­nut Street, though bare­ly rec­og­niz­able, with an extra floor on top and exten­sive facade changes. It’s a dis­count drug store. The back is the nar­row alley named Ion­ic Street, home to dump­sters and peo­ple want­i­ng to stay out of sight. The yard is to the right of these dump­sters. With #self­ie such a pop­u­lar hash­tag, Cor­nelius’s pic­ture has cir­cu­lat­ed on a lot of inter­net lists as the “world’s first self­ie.” But it’s his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance is far greater: it is the first pho­to­graph­ic por­trait of our species. I’m not typ­i­cal­ly one for hyper­bole, but we humans start­ed see­ing our­selves dif­fer­ent­ly after that portrait.

I orig­i­nal­ly assumed the build­ing on the right of the alley stood where the yard had been but a satel­lites turns up a sur­prise: the yard is still there! Look­ing at the 710 prop­er­ty from above, the build­ings fac­ing Chest­nut and Ion­ic are sep­a­rate – with a large open space in between! There are two sec­tions that look almost to be gar­den beds.

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Yo Philly, how has 710 Chest­nut Street not been snatched up and turned into a muse­um of pho­to­graph­ic his­to­ry? The first floor could focus on nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Philadel­phia inno­va­tion, with the still-existent inner court­yard turned into a tourist des­ti­na­tion? It would be like cat­nip. What self-respecting mod­ern tourist would­n’t walk the few blocks from Inde­pen­dence Hall to take their pic­ture at the very site of the world’s first self­ie? I know Philly typ­i­cal­ly does­n’t respect any his­to­ry past 1776 but come on!

Update March 2021: Katie Park in the Inquir­er report­ing an all-too-predictable sto­ry: Philly L&I approves demo­li­tion of Chest­nut Street prop­er­ties that preser­va­tion­ists had tried to pro­tect. It’s not Cor­nelius’s house at 710 but it’s just a few doors down the block at 730 – 732. The arti­cle has some great info from Justin Brooks, a lawyer who’s been try­ing to orga­nize his­toric recog­ni­tion for the 600, 700, and 800 blocks of Chest­nut. One tid­bit: in 1891 Chest­nut Street was widened by the city, requir­ing “build­ing own­ers to tear down their own facades to move far­ther back.” (You could write a tome on Philly his­to­ry that’s been lost to road widen­ing projects but at least this was “just” the 700 block facades.)

The QuakerRanter Top-Five

December 28, 2013
· Martin Kelley

Outreach, Family, Pacifism, and Blog Culture

At year’s end it’s always inter­est­ing to look back and see which arti­cles got the most vis­its. Here are the top-five Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org blog posts of 2013.

1. Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning

This grew out of a inter­est­ing lit­tle tweet about search engine opti­miza­tion that got me think­ing about how Friends Meet­ings can retain the curi­ous one-time visitors.

2. Tom Heiland

My father-in-law died in Jan­u­ary. These are few pic­tures I put togeth­er while Julie was still at the fam­i­ly home with the close rel­a­tives. Thanks to our friends for shar­ing a bit of our life by read­ing this one. He’s missed.

3. Expanding Concepts of Pacifism

A look at Friends tes­ti­monies and the dif­fi­cul­ties of being a fair-trade paci­fist in our hyper-connected world today. I think George Fox and the ear­ly Friends were faced with sim­i­lar chal­lenges and that our guide can be the same as theirs.

4. Rethinking Blogs

A num­ber of new ser­vices are try­ing to update the cul­ture of blog­ging. This post looked at com­ments; a sub­se­quent one con­sid­ered how we might reor­ga­nize our blogs into more of a struc­tured Wiki.

5. Iraq Ten Years Later: Some of Us Weren’t Wrong

This year saw a lot of hang wring­ing by main­stream jour­nal­ists on the anniver­sary of the Iraq War. I didn’t have much patience and looked at how dis­sent­ing voic­es were reg­u­lar­ly locked out of debate ten years ago – and are still locked out with the talk that “all of us” were wrong then.

I should give the caveat that these are the top-five most-read arti­cles that were writ­ten this year. Many of the clas­sics still out­per­form these. The most read con­tin­ues to be my post on unpop­u­lar baby names (just today I over­heard an expec­tant moth­er approv­ing­ly going through a list of over-trendy names; I won­dered if I should send her the link). My post on how to order men’s plain cloth­ing from Gohn’s Broth­ers con­tin­ues to be pop­u­lar, as does a report about a trip to a leg­endary water hole deep in the South Jer­sey pines.