The School of Life: The Poignancy of Old Pornography

People have been making pornography for a very long time. It’s been on the sides of temples in India on Greek vases in Roman bedrooms and German drawing rooms. But a decisive moment in its history came in 1839 with the French artist Louis Daguerre’s invention of the photograph, known as the daguerreotype, which transformed the availability and realism of sexual imagery. It was not long before the new technology was being put to use to explore a variety of explicit scenarios. One of the earliest, a series of lesbian encounters, was made in Paris in the spring of 1840…

Politico: The man who invented Trumpism

Wilders admires Trump and encourages the comparison, delighted to cast his campaign as part of a global populist wave if it adds momentum ahead of the March 15 vote, in which polls indicate his Freedom Party (PVV) is neck-and-neck with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

“It’s the revenge of the rust belt,” said Tim de Beer, an opinion and policy research expert at the Dutch polling firm Kantar Public. “The Netherlands was among the first to have this revolt.”

But Trump and Wilders differ in important ways. Trump’s lack of focus is completely at odds with Wilders’ singular, dogged determination to pursue his proclaimed mission: stop Islam in the Netherlands.  And where Trump is a newcomer to politics, Wilders is one of the longest-serving lawmakers in the Dutch lower house, with a formidable command of parliamentary procedures. [...]

Wilders is mostly silent about the other side of his family tree. His mother was born in what is now Indonesia. She arrived in the Netherlands as a baby after her parents fled the collapsing Dutch colony that would later become the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. [...]

Wilders severely restricts media access to the party. Attempts to contact it, or any of its lawmakers, are typically met with a wall of silence. This is combined with carefully rationed pronouncements designed to outrage and grab headlines. Wilders specializes in coming up with insulting compound words, such as straatterroristen (“street terrorists,” or foreign-looking men hanging around); haatpaleizen (“hate palaces,” or mosques); or his infamous kopvoddentaks proposal (a “head rag tax” on headscarves). [...]

Over the course of Wilders’ life under armed protection, his views have become increasingly radical, casting Islam and the West as ancient enemies locked in a civilizational war for survival. In 2005, his manifesto allowed that not all Muslims were dangerous, noted the importance of freedom of religion, and advocated that only radical mosques should be closed. Nowadays, he claims there are no moderate Muslims, just liars, or people who haven’t read the Quran.

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Reuters: Pope suggests 'better to be atheist than hypocritical Catholic'

He said that some of these people should also say "'my life is not Christian, I don't pay my employees proper salaries, I exploit people, I do dirty business, I launder money, (I lead) a double life'."

"There are many Catholics who are like this and they cause scandal," he said. "How many times have we all heard people say 'if that person is a Catholic, it is better to be an atheist'." [...]

Less than two months after his election, he said Christians should see atheists as good people if they do good.

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Motherboard: Farms Are Turning to Solar as Electricity Prices Soar

Solar energy is a growing presence in the agriculture industry, partly as a way to offset increasing energy demands from water shortages and mechanization. This makes farming and ranching a prime partner for the solar industry, solar companies told Motherboard at the World Agriculture Expo last week.

And while start-up costs of solar energy are still more expensive than fossil fuels, a combination of state incentives and increased demand means it's starting to pay off. [...]

Some agricultural pockets of the country are moving more quickly to solar than others. In California, a five-year-long drought has forced farmers to pump groundwater from increasingly deeper wells, which use a lot of electricity during the summer months. But solar has also been catching on in states where coal production was once a major economic driver, too, said said Eb Russell, president of RP Construction Services, which installs solar power projects. [...]

Solar doesn't make sense for everyone in agriculture at the moment. In some areas of the country, like Washington state, the price of electricity is so low that installing solar panels wouldn't help farms' bottom lines, Crown said. And while they could sell back some electricity into their local grid, the regulations and pricing around those are expected to fluctuate over the next few years as solar expands.

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CityLab: How Charlotte's Nasty Early 1900s Politics Paved the Way for a Century of Segregation

But what few people know is that the South wasn’t always so segregated. During a brief window of time between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, black and white people lived next to each other in Southern cities, creating what the historian Tom Hanchett describes as a “salt-and-pepper” pattern. They were not integrated in a meaningful sense: Divisions existed, but “in a lot of Southern cities, segregation hadn’t been fully imposed—there were neighborhoods where blacks and whites were living nearby,” said Eric Foner, a Columbia historian and expert on Reconstruction. Walk around in the Atlanta or the Charlotte of the late 1800s, and you might see black people in restaurants, hotels, the theater, Foner said. Two decades later, such things were not allowed. [...]

This amorphous period of race relations in the South was first described by the historian C. Vann Woodward, who wrote in his 1955 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, that segregation in the South did not become rigid with the end of slavery, but instead, around the turn of the century. “There occurred an era of experiment and variety in race relations of the South in which segregation was not the invariable rule,” he wrote.

During that time, Foner said, black residents could could sue companies for discriminating against them—and win their lawsuits. Blacks could also legally vote in most places (disenfranchisement laws did not arrive in earnest until about 1900), and were often allied with poor whites in the voting booth. This alliance was strong enough to control states like North Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia at various points throughout the late 19th century. [...]

This wasn’t the first time whites and blacks had allied politically. In Virginia in the late 1870s, black and poor white voters formed the Readjuster Party, which worked together to overcome the power of white political elites. In North Carolina; they also worked together to write the Constitution of 1868, which mandated the creation and funding of a state system of public education.

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