Please sign the petition below to remove the statue of Jefferson Davis currently in Kentucky’s Capitol Rotunda, and replace it with a tribute to Muhammad Ali, “the Louisville Lip” and “the Greatest of All Time.”
I just heard from the Ali family: It is the Champ’s belief that Islam prohibits three-dimensional representations of living Muslims. Accordingly, I have adjusted the petition to call for a two-dimensional representation of Ali (a portrait, picture or mural) in lieu of a statue.
UPDATE (Tuesday, December 2, 2014)
In this interview with WHAS-TV’s Joe Arnold, Governor Steve Beshear endorses the idea of honoring Muhammad Ali in the State Capitol (although he disagrees with removing Davis). Arnold explores the idea further on his weekly show, “The Powers that Be.”
Click here to check out WDRB-TV’s Lawrence Smith’s coverage of the story.
And here’s my op-ed in Ali’s hometown paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal.
UPDATE (Saturday, June 4, 2016)
In the wake of the 2015 Charlestown tragedy, in which a Confederate flag-waving murderer united the nation against racism, all of the most powerful Kentucky policymakers — U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, Governor Matt Bevin, Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker Greg Stumbo — called for the removal of the Davis statue from the Rotunda. Today, as we commemorate last night’s passing of Muhammad Ali, there is no better moment to replace the symbol of Kentucky’s worst era with a tribute to The Greatest of All Time.
UPDATE (Wednesday, June 8, 2016):
Great piece by Lawrence Smith of WDRB-TV in Louisville on the petition drive to replace Jefferson Davis’ statue in the Capitol Rotunda with a tribute to Muhammad Ali.
UPDATE (Thursday, June 9, 2016):
Excellent piece on the petition drive by Jack Brammer that was featured on the front page of the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Highlight of the article:
Miller said he has received a few “angry comments” on his call to honor Ali.
“One of them encouraged me to kill myself,” he said. “You can quote me that I have decided not to take their advice.”
UPDATE (Friday, June 10, 2016)
The petition drives continues to show the Big Mo(hammed): check out these stories from WKYU-FM public radio in Bowling Green and WKYT-TV, Channel 27 in Lexington:
UPDATE (Saturday, June 11, 2016):
Still not convinced? Check out this excerpt from today’s New York Times:
Josh Bowen, The Recovering Politician‘s resident fitness expert — and The RP‘s personal trainer — was quoted in this Sunday’s New York Times Style section, in an article entitled “Fitness Playgrounds Grow as Machines Go”:
Josh Bowen, until recently the quality control director for the seven-state Urban Active chain, referred to the sweeping revisions the company made last year as swapping “Arnold machines” (as in Schwarzenegger) “for AstroTurf.”
Mr. Bowen, who left Urban Active when it was acquired by LA Fitness, said, “Gyms are way out of the times if all they have is machines.”
People spend all day sitting with machines, he said. “When they come into a gym, they don’t want to be sat down at another one doing three sets of 12.”
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Apr 22, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
A seven foot basketball goal at a neighboring condo from the one we rented in Amelia Island, FL where I played basketball with my kids almost every spring break for nine years.
And probably will never see or play on again
The first few spring breaks the goal seemed big to my kids. And then about right. And then too small. And then too embarrassing to be seen playing on
For me, today, it seems too big —as I drive away for the last time
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Mon Apr 22, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
In the whole, wide, world I most wanted to visit the Pyramids of Giza. In fact, it was one of three things I wanted to see on this entire trip, yet it took two years to make it happen. The pyramids are worth the wait. They stand up to the hype.
.
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During the heat of the desert day exploring the area can be a tiring experience, but as the sun began setting the true beauty was revealed. At their least impressive, during the heat of the day, the Pyramids are a well-organized arrangement of rocks. Yes, they are enormous, but they are pretty plain. As the colors of the sunset start to hit them, the ancient tombs come alive with vibrant yellows and oranges.
Read the rest of… Matt & Erica Chua: Bigger than Imagined — The Pyramids of Giza
Need to turn around your company? Trying to start a movement? Want to change the world? Easy Peasy! Just turn it in to a game. Everywhere we turn, it seems there are experts claiming that the best path forward is to engage people with elements of competitive play. The business world in particular has gone gaga for gamification.
I thought games were mainly for kids, and the occasional ice-breaker or temporary escape from reality. Why encourage more of them? As adults, aren’t we supposed to set aside childish things and get down to work on the problems of the real world?
Truth be told, I have always loved games. Stratego was a mainstay among my school buddies. We spent hour upon hour lining up red and blue soldiers to protect our flags. My family’s Monopoly games were epic battles, beginning with the fight over game pieces. (No, I get the Scottish Terrier!) The side deals we struck and the arguments that ensued still liven up family gatherings. In college I became a professional Risk player. Tell me you didn’t learn about the challenges of fighting a multi-front war from playing Risk. Who among us hasn’t attempted to conquer the world by way of Kamchatka?
Games ruled – till it was time to make my way in the real world where they didn’t. By the time online games exploded onto the scene, I was so immersed in reality that I managed to ignore them. I’ve never created a level-80 character in World of Warcraft, won the staff of life in Spore, mastered an artichoke crop in Farmville, or knocked over any pigs with Angry Birds. But others have – hundreds of millions of them around the world. Already, 5.93 million years of total time has been spent playing World of Warcraft alone.
One response to this is to despair of all that wasted time. Imagine if only a fraction of it had been focused on improving our education, health care, energy, and economic systems. Another response, though, is to say: if you can’t beat them, why not join them?
Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken makes a strong case for leveraging game design and mechanics to work on the big social challenges of our time. McGonigal suggests that the four defining traits of any game – a goal, clear rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation – can be applied to any challenge. She even says game-playing makes us better people. The book is a passionate articulation of why we should pay attention to what is going on in the world of games.
Read the rest of… Saul Kaplan: If All the World were Gamified
The Lexington Herald-Leader political columnist Larry Dale Keeling, who once wrote under the moniker, “Kentucky Curmudgeon,” writes this morning of finding a kindred spirit in The RP. Read on:
For someone who claims to be “The Recovering Politician,” Jonathan Miller sure has been active on the political scene lately. The former state treasurer and cabinet official in Gov. Steve Beshear’s administration publically talked up the industrial hemp bill in the recent General Assembly session (Miller is a member of the Kentucky Industrial Hemp Commission). He touted actress Ashley Judd as a worthy Democratic candidate to take on McConnell in the 2014 U.S. Senate race.
And in a couple of recent pieces written for The Daily Beast, Miller got a bit in-your-face with some of his fellow Kentucky Democrats, accusing them (mostly without naming names) of elbowing Judd out of the Senate race and of botching their response to the leaked tape by focusing on the mistakes of the leakers instead of responding to what Miller termed a “vicious smear,” the tape’s revelations about the McConnell camp’s plan to exploit Judd’s past mental health issues.
In the latter piece, Miller wrote, “The circular firing squad Democrats have assembled comes as no surprise to observers of the state, who have watched for decades as McConnell’s national rise has been aided by his utterly inept opposition” before going on to chronicle the infighting within the Democratic Party that at times has resulted in McConnell facing weakened challengers.
Miller is right. Kentucky Democrats have been their own worst enemies for decades. It’s a “me first” party, a party still living in the era when winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning office and, consequently, a party more interested in settling internal grudges than it is in choosing the best candidate for the fall. Also, consequently, a party destined to future irrelevancy if it doesn’t wake up.
But according to its mission statement on its Web site, “The Recovering Politician provides a civilized forum as an antidote to our nation’s toxic addiction to vitriol and demonization. Here is a place for debating and discussing the issues of the day … without the finger-pointing and blame-assigning that’s all too typical on the Web and among our more crass media.”
With all due respect, I would suggest to Miller that some of his recent writings might border on the “finger-pointing and blame-assigning” The Recovering Politician’s mission statement deplores. To put it bluntly (and with more than a dollop of good fun), he’s getting close to invading my space as a vitriolic and demonizing member of the “crass media.”
Who knows what this tortured week in Boston means for the future? After all, the hunting down and killing of Osama Bin Laden hardly lifted America out of the morass that has distorted politics for the better part of five years, not even a little bit. There was agony at the shooting and maiming of a congresswoman while she was attending to her constituents, and the misery of knowing that a child died that day while on an outing to see democracy in action. Those tears haven’t washed any of the anger out of our campaigns, and they haven’t slowed down the denigration of public service.
But permit me one burst of wishful thinking. It goes like this. If only the fanaticism of two brothers who twisted themselves into killers would remind us that America faces threats worse than anything our left or right fear of each other. If only the intensity of the Tsarnaev brothers’ hatred makes the values we clash over, from immigration to gun laws to the weight of government, seem not unimportant but not worth surrendering our civility over, either.
If only both sides of the ideological divide will forego the politics this one time: the fact that one killer turned into a radical under the protection of a student visa, and that another plotted how to sever bodies months after becoming a citizen, tells us much about the unpredictable warp in human souls, but next to nothing about the immigration deal Marco Rubio is trying to save. The agents and officers who wove this case together in four days from thin air can’t be lifted up enough, but spare us any side lectures on sequestration or talking points about the limitations of federalism. Save it for a week that doesn’t keep punching our gut.
If only we could savor one moment, let it be the faces in the crowds gathering in Watertown to celebrate a return to the ideal of being safe in one’s own home. I spent enough time as a student in metropolitan Boston to know that the blacks and whites and browns, and Catholics and Arabs and Jews don’t ordinarily mix so easily on those streets after dark. They often clutch their purses and roll up their car windows, and clench when they see each other. What a striking thing to watch them unclench their mutual suspicions for even a little while. It only took two bad seeds to make those gritty, divided neighborhoods re-imagine the meaning of “us” and “them.”
(A version of this essay was cross-published at Ricochet.com)
By Garrett Renfro, RP Staff, on Fri Apr 19, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET
The Politics of Laughter
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, comedian Patton Oswalt took to social media. In a post that would soon go viral, Oswalt was able to give some perspective to the hopelessness that this sort of mayhem has the potential to manifest. [The Atlantic]
Earlier this week Steven Colbert riffed on the ridiculous collaboration between country music star, Brad Paisley and rapper LL Cool J entitled “Accidental Racist.” Colbert is joined by Broadway actor Alan Cumming to perform their new song, “Oopsy Daisy Homophobe”… hilarity ensued. [Colbert Report]
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Apr 19, 2013 at 1:06 PM ET
This week’s awful events provide a somber reminder about the critical role volunteers can play in aiding law enforcement and medical practitioners in the wake of a horrible human tragedy.
Your thoughts and prayers for the victims are important, but each of us can and should do a whole lot more when disaster calamity — we can all play a constructive role in protecting our friends and neighbors against an act of terrorism or a natural disaster.
The Red Cross offers some amazing programs that help train average citizens in first aid and emergency preparedness.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Apr 19, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Creatures of habit and dorsal fins
I remember in 3rd grade learning that some fish used to have a dorsal fin but no longer does because over the centuries there was no longer a need for it and it just sort of evaporated with time.
We humans are comfortable with what we know and have to be dragged kicking and screaming to try a new way of doing things (in the workplace and at home), even when it is obvious to everyone but us it is a far superior to our current approach
And then we try it.
And eventually get comfortable with it and even become an advocate for the “new way.”
Until there is a newer and obviously superior way to do things.
And we have to be dragged kicking and screaming to change from the old new way we are now comfortable with to the newer new way,
Maybe the solution is to give up our notion of ever being on auto pilot. Of ever getting too accustomed or comfortable with any process. Maybe the comfort of habit is like a human dorsal fin that has outlived its purpose
But that’s an awfully uncomfortable thought.
Maybe we can at least make a fashion statement with our dorsal fin of mindless habit. Pierce or tattoo it –or hang our new high tech gadgets (iPhone or Wifi tablets) on our hook of a needless fin.
But don’t get rid of it completely.
I may not need or use it but I don’t want to give it up.
Blog this!
