Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Republicans in disarray!

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

In my day, never was longer.

Republicans don’t trust women.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

T R E 4 5 O N

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Second rate reporter says what?

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Well Now, This is Depressing and Predictable

Well Now, This is Depressing and Predictable

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Obama rescues industry in Elkhart, Indiana, they still don’t like him and think Trump is the bee’s knees:

Seven years ago President Obama came to this northern Indiana city, where unemployment was heading past 20 percent, for his first trip as president. Ed Neufeldt, the jobless man picked to introduce him, afterward donned three green rubber bracelets, each to be removed in turn as joblessness fell to 5 percent in the county, the state and the nation.

It took years — in 2012, Mr. Neufeldt lamented to a local reporter that he might wear his wristbands “to my casket” — but by last year they had all come off. Elkhart’s unemployment rate, at 3.8 percent, is among the country’s lowest, so low that employers here in the self-described R.V. capital of the world are advertising elsewhere for workers, offering sign-up bonuses, even hiring from a local homeless shelter.

Mr. Obama, whose four trips here during 2008 and 2009 tracked the area’s decline, is expected to return for the first time in coming weeks, both to showcase its recovery and to warn against going back to Republican economic policies. Yet where is Mr. Neufeldt leaning in this presidential election year? He may keep a photograph of himself and Mr. Obama on a desk at the medical office he cleans nightly, but he is considering Donald J. Trump.

“I like the way he just won’t take nothing off of nobody,” Mr. Neufeldt said, though days later he allowed: “He scares me sometimes.”

Republicans destroy shit, Democrats fix it, voters elect more Republicans. The NYT, as always, buries the lede:

Brian A. Howey, publisher of the Howey Politics Indiana newsletter and once a reporter in Elkhart, sounded stumped, even allowing for the state’s conservatism: “I’m a lifelong Hoosier. I’m just amazed that not only do people not appreciate what happened in ’09, but there’s a lot of hostility toward Obama. I think part of it is racial and a lot of it is political.”

You think?

Reader Interactions

305Comments

  2. 2.

    rikyrah

    And THESE are the muthaphuckas that Hillary should be chasing according to Thomas Frank and others who post on this blog.

    Once again, I say

    Phuck.outta.here.

  3. 3.

    rikyrah

    Armed hate group backs out of Texas mosque protest when faced with gun-toting worshipers
    02 APR 2016 AT 18:16 ET

    An anti-Muslim hate group planned an armed protest at an African-American mosque in Texas — but it didn’t go as planned.

    The group, the Bureau of American Islamic Relations, or BAIR, has made it a habit in the past to show up at mosques with firearms and intimidate worshipers. In November, armed protesters stalked Muslims in Irving. In December, they again stalked Muslims at the Islamic Association of North Texas.

    But on Saturday, the group that makes a show of carrying guns while they surround places of worship was met in-kind at a Nation of Islam mosque in South Dallas, the Dallas Morning News reports.

    “This is an armed defense maneuver, making sure that our communities are safe and secure from any insurgents coming in,” Krystal Muhammad of the New Black Panther Party told Fox4. Muhammad was armed with a large shotgun. “We won’t allow anybody to come in and try to intimidate our brothers and sisters.”

  4. 4.

    JMG

    So some white folks hate Obama because they always did, and others hate him because he helped them, and that’s just too humiliating to be borne. Nice rational group of folks there. I’d like to send Charles Barkley to give them a pep talk so they’d feel better.

  5. 5.

    dr. bloor

    @rikyrah: The legislation that this event will generate in the Texas state house is going to be spectacular.

    And by “spectacular,” I mean “tortures every law of logic known to human kind and turns the definition of every word in English on its head.”

  11. 11.

    redshirt

    I can get what your average Trumpenproletariot might not have the facts, but what excuse does the media have? Just for example, every Republican Admin increases deficits and every Dem Admin lowers them and yet its only a problem for the Dems.

    How’s that work?

  12. 12.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Almost every issue in our politics is tied, in some degree, to the belief of too many white people that government is some kind of zero some game between the races. I think polls show that the number of white people who think they’re discriminated against has increased under Obama. I’m pretty much the color of milk, and I gotta say, it has only been a problem when I forget the sunscreen.

    And this happened in Miami, where somebody knew Grunwald is a political reporter

    Michael Grunwald ‏@ MikeGrunwald 8h8 hours ago
    Trump guy at the tennis courts still razzing me: “You don’t get it, Politico! Everyone’s doing better except the white man!”

  14. 14.

    Amaranthine RBG

    @Baud: And West Virginia, too.

    People in WV yammer about the so called “War on Coal” that Obama is supposedly waging and are completely ignorant of the fact that tourism is more important to WV than coal. Hell, last time I checked there were more registered nurses in WV than coal miners.

  17. 17.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s worse than I thought

    In a new poll released by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) on Tuesday, a whopping 43 percent of Americans told researchers that discrimination against whites has become as large a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minority groups.

    My gob, it is smacked

    Half of white Americans — including 60 percent of the white working class — told researchers that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. Meanwhile, 29 percent of Latinos and 25 percent of black Americans agreed. White Americans feel put-upon and mistreated — and large shares of non-white Americans do not seem to have any knowledge of the challenges that white Americans say they face.

    Poor, poor, pitiful me.

  18. 18.

    boatboy_srq

    To be fair, “y’see, you all got your jobs back (paying what they did two decades ago)” does sound a lot like “everyone’s getting scr3w3d” to some people. And because it didn’t happen immediately then obviously Obama’s magic wand is a gimmick, so he can’t be the Great And Powerful Oz after all.

    These are the people who send a sane person to the WH and crazies to Congress and are then mystified when life (or God, take your pick) doesn’t bring them unicorns and a leprechaun’s hoard the day after the election.

  19. 19.

    boatboy_srq

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Perhaps if the pollsters phrased it in terms of “rich,” “middle class” and “poor” the results of those polls would be more informative and less crazy-making. But that would require admitting that the mistreatment is class-based and not race-based, and Kochistan would never allow that.

  20. 20.

    Peale

    @rikyrah: I wonder if Texas would pass a religious freedom bill to cover attempts at intimidation like that. But since the bigger threat to social peace are two men marrying, I can see why it’s a lower priority for Christians.

  23. 23.

    redshirt

    I still am amazed Obama won Indiana in 2008. I thought that might be the sign of a real change in the political dynamics in this country. Alas!

  25. 25.

    scav

    Acknowledging Obama (or govt help) would mean acknowledging that they haven’t levitated entirely due to their own sacred bootstraps.

  27. 27.

    James Powell

    @srv:

    Right. And I look at Obama and I think about all that’s been thrown at him and put in his way from Day One – you don’t need a list do you? – all the indignities he and wife have had to endure. I see a guy who keeps smiling, keeps going to work and – oh yeah – keeps winning.

    I don’t know what the USA has had a stronger more winning president since FDR.

  29. 29.

    raven

    @Adam L Silverman: Ooo, no, have to take a look.

    How bout The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars

    The author, a well-known cultural critic and author of The Sixties (1987), focuses on the politics of textbook adoption in Oakland, California, in the early 1990s. He sees this process as a microcosm of the ways in which the public debate of issues generates more heat than light. The textbooks under consideration, written by a well-known multiculturalist and former leftist activist, were attacked as racist; the charges, made by people who were former activists themselves, were accompanied by a level of acrimony and rage out of all proportion to the subject at hand. Meanwhile, Gitlin notes, the larger issue, the fact that state funding of education has been repeatedly slashed, goes undebated. Widening his discussion, Gitlin goes on to talk about the decline of the Left, whose preoccupation with the needs of select “identities” and “cultures” has caused the movement to squander its energy on petty turf wars. He also argues that the Right, formerly associated with privileged interests, now claims to speak for the common good and has parlayed this image into considerable political clout. Gitlin calls for a return to consensus building in this lucid, eloquent, and persuasive book, which seeks to move us out of the current climate of bitterness and hypersensitivity and toward a more reasoned debate of our most pressing social problems. Joanne Wilkinson

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: I know of his work, but haven’t read this. I’ll give it a look. I’ve followed several of these textbook and school board controversies. My polisci doctoral chair was Ken Wald – considered to be one of the founders of the modern study of religion and politics. So this stuff is always professionally fun to read.

  33. 33.

    dedc79

    One thing the bible got right about human nature is the whole exodous story where moses keeps doing amazing things for the israelites and a second later they’re bitching about something else and worshiping idols again.

  36. 36.

    Belafon

    So, you’re saying solving economic problems doesn’t turn people’s feelings about a black president around?

  37. 37.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: Its always amazing to see reporting and other write ups on how various local government matters get handled. People think the dysfunction in DC is somehow unique or special. Just go to your average school board or zoning board or even county commission meeting and you can see the single A version. Often its even more fun because these minor leaguers are so completely unprofessional.

  38. 38.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    This is also further proof that Sanders’s theory that working class whites will return if you give them a big chunk of redistribution is wrong.

    Now, it’s good policy and it should be pursued, but the idea that they’ll be grateful is naive and ignores decades of voting history.

  40. 40.

    patroclus

    The auto industry has not been under severe threat for almost 7 years and memories fade rather quickly once things are changed. And besides, Indiana is a very weird state politically – it has been Republican-leaning for over a century and a half and the Klan – in the 20’s actually had its home in the Republican party; not the Democratic Party, like elsewhere. The political divisions are ossified – unlike other states, there really haven’t been any realignments there ever. Parties are tribal, or, rather, familial and one inherits one’s party and virtually never varies from it. The 2008 election was an outlier and was influenced by the really strong Obama support emanating from Chicago. Democrats can win there, but rarely and only in unusual circumstances. Illinois used to be like that, but changed in the 1980’s and turned blue. Indiana should turn blue but it hasn’t and probably won’t. Trump, however, is an unusual circumstance, so if he;s the Republican nominee, it might go for the Dem.

  41. 41.

    raven

    @Adam L Silverman: One of my buddies was elected mayor of Urbana 25+ years back. Dude was a quaker, very progressive and a good dude but the “liberals” turned on him and the shit was really nasty. I won’t say who they remind me of.

  44. 44.

    hueyplong

    [a knock at the window; Obama gets up and sees the same woman who insulted him earlier]

    Elderly Elkhart Woman: Good evening, Sheriff. Sorry about the “Up yours, ni**er”. I hope this apple pie will in some small way say thank you for your ingenuity and courage in defeating that horrible Mongo/GOP-generated recession.

    Obama: Well, uh… thank you, much obliged. Good night.

    [Obama closes the window and smells the pie… but returns to the window when he hears another knock]

    Elderly Elkhart Woman: Of course, you’ll have the good taste not to mention that I spoke to you.

    Obama: Of course.

    Elderly Elkhart Woman: Thank you. And you know I’ll be voting for Trump.

    Obama: Of course.

  45. 45.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @patroclus: he 2008 election was an outlier and was influenced by the really strong Obama support emanating from Chicago

    That’s just what I was wondering about. I wonder what Obama, and Mrs Obama, can do as campaigners sans fucks.

  47. 47.

    Baud

    @patroclus:

    The auto industry has not been under severe threat for almost 7 years and memories fade rather quickly once things are changed.

    That’s why you never hear much about Reagan anymore.

  49. 49.

    raven

    @Gin & Tonic: I know, I’m not staying up foir the second one, I’ll dvr it and catch it in the am. We’re going to the Masters practice MOnday and I suspect I’ll be shot when we get back too.

  52. 52.

    Mnemosyne

    @rikyrah:

    In general, I don’t like the advice for Black folks to start open carrying because I worry it will get them accidentally shot by nervous cops, but In this instance where they’re fighting fire with fire against jerks who have set out to try and intimidate people, I heartily applaud it.

  54. 54.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud: Tweety (yeah, yeah, I know, but I think his unleashed id often speaks for the Beltway and not a few tote bag types around the country) was bellowing once in the summer of 2012 about how Obama needs to do something BIG! something the whole country will remember and associate with his presidency, like Reagan firing the air traffic controllers. Union busting and firing people: Big. Saving by most estimates a million jobs– and I agree with those who say the the death spiral would’ve pulled the whole economy down with it)? “Huh? What? Oh yeah, that. That was a long time ago”.

    But Tweety and the Village and the R’s aren’t alone. A Super-liberal regular here told me a few weeks ago that Obama did nothing for working people in his first six years.

  55. 55.

    Gin & Tonic

    @raven: They said a few minutes ago that BFD Biden had Villanova vs Syracuse in the finals in his bracket.

  58. 58.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @Baud: it’s hard to kill zombies. especially when they have their own hit cable show.

  59. 59.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: Tracking. Its amazing how quickly even people who have been inside the system forget how the process works. I once had to brief a VIP who was interested in our social science and socio-cultural research in regard to her thesis that collateral damage was a principal driver for adopting terrorist identities, joining terrorist groups, and engaging in acts of terrorism. This woman is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and a former senior staffer on the Senate Armed Forces Committee. When I politely explained that one of the problems is that the average Brigade Combat Team Commander, while looking to always minimize collateral damage (for a variety of reasons – some moral and ethical, some professional warfighter, same simply to avoid the professional hassles of inquiries) was not going to dedicate resources to creating a database, with reporting beginning all the way down at the squad level, which would then be aggregated at Division, then Corps, then Theater/Force command, then pushed back to Geographic Command, and then up to DOD for analysis. There simply isn’t time with the operations tempo in a non-permissive environment, whether interstate war or Phase IV/Counterinsurgency Operation. I then explained that unless the elected and appointed officials in DC ordered this, resources wouldn’t be directed and our program was not properly situated to actually take it on as it was tangential, at best, to our mission set. I then finally explained, still politely, that no elected or appointed official was going to give this order because the American public simply doesn’t even think about these things, so there’s no pressure to make it happen.

    I basically took ten minutes to explain the process to someone who’d done a good chunk of her career within that process. And she wanted to argue with me about it so badly she followed me, on the break, all the way to the men’s room, then waited for me to come out and pinned me against the side of someone’s cubicle on the way back to the conference room to try to convince me of her proposal. It wasn’t a bad thesis, though it is mono-causul. And it wasn’t a bad idea to track this stuff. But there was just no appreciation of how things actually work by someone who was an expert on that process.

  62. 62.

    patroclus

    @Baud: Well, you really don’t hear much about the real Reagan anymore; what you hear about is the mythical Reagan that movement conservatives have created after he got Alzheimer’s. The real Reagan cut deals with the Dems, did an immigration bill that explicitly granted “amnesty,” responded on some things to liberal pressure, appointed some moderates to the judiciary and, at times, tried to be President of all the people. (Sure, he did a lot of bad things too). The mythical Reagan did none of that.

    This story is just a “what have you done for me lately?” story and Hoosiers revert to type if there is no good answer for that.

  63. 63.

    Patricia Kayden

    @rikyrah: Applause to the Nation of Islam and New Black Panthers for going toe to toe with White Supremacists. That’s exactly how it should be done.

  64. 64.

    JMG

    @Adam L Silverman: The very small Cape Cod town I visit in the summers just had a meeting between the waterways commission and a small neighborhood committee halted by bleep-laden fisticuffs between two members, one from each group on the vital issue of nonresident boating docking fees (see the Cape Cod Times website for details). I think you could make a mint with a sort of FL RedZone cable channel that just had the high/lowlights of local public access channels across the USA.

  65. 65.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud: Everybody in the USA
    Hates their stupid neighbor
    He’s Flanders and he’s really, really laaaaaaame.

  66. 66.

    Hal

    Meh. I’ve always thought it would be years and years before Obama gets the credit he deserves. Not ignoring the warts BTW, every president has his good and bad, but Obama is never going to get the respect he would if he were Barry O’Bama, proud Irish Catholic. Hell, if George Bush had ordered the kill on OBL, that alone would have been enough for a new head on Mount Rushmore.

  68. 68.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: chief executives don’t get enough credit for preventing something. Adams prevented war with France. Kennedy prevent a nuclear war. Meh. start a tiny war over some bullshit islands in the Falklands and you”ll be remembered forevah.

    likewise presidents don’t get enough credit for stopping a depression. Oh, but cut taxes for the 1% and they’ll name airports after you.

  69. 69.

    Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA

    @Danack: Yep. See, white people help black people (out of the goodness of their hearts because racism is over, of course). White people do not accept help from black people. You don’t take assistance from your inferiors — it’s humiliating.

    So the rest of us have to watch in horror as Trump wins primary after primary, and pray to the FSM that the neurological illness that causes people to vote Republican hasn’t infected too many people.

    Morons.

  70. 70.

    Loviatar

    Republicans destroy shit, Democrats fix it, voters elect more Republicans.

    So yeah John, tell us why is that.

  72. 72.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Hal: My god, can you imagine the kitschy art from that guy who does the kitschy political art? Dumbya as St George with his foot on an Osama bin Dragon. I Peggy Noonan would have that image sewn onto all her clothes. And painted on her bedroom ceiling. A whole judgment day thing with GOP presidents triumphant on His right and the demons Republicans think they slew on the left?

  75. 75.

    Daulnay

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Almost every issue in our politics is tied, in some degree, to the belief of too many white people that government is some kind of zero some game between the races.

    In economic matters, looking only at the working and middle class, is it true? Fact is, yes. Our economy has been a zero-sum economy for everyone in the bottom 80% of the economic pile. For thirty @#$ years.

    The average income of Americans in the bottom 80% has not increased in real terms for the past 30 years. You and I know that it’s because the 0.01% has been raking in all the benefits of economic growth over that period. But what that means for everyone in the bottom 80% is that anything that benefits a group that they’re not in will hurt them. Any gain by a group in the bottom 80% resulted in a loss by people not in that group. That’s how averages work. It is a $%%& fact, and a really painful one to face for those of us who want improvements for non-whites, women, the disable, and other people who’ve been marginalized.

    The Republicans have put in place a no-win system, where any attempts to help the poor and working-class marginalized groups will actually harm the poor, working-class and middle-class majority. We need to break that system, and point the anger of the ‘majority’ at the wealthy 0.01% who’ve been raking off all the economic benefits.

    So, when Trump and others say that efforts to help marginalized groups have come at the expense of working-class whites and middle-class whites, they are factually correct — but only because the Republican establishment (with help from so-called moderate Democrats) have put in place a raft of laws and policies that help the wealthy in the top 20% take all the economic gains, so that the rest of us face a zero-sum economy.

  78. 78.

    Mnemosyne

    @raven:

    They should probably get someone to show them how to use them properly so nobody gets hurt accidentally, but it’s probably even scarier for the BAIR jerks this way.

    (I think I’m kidding at the end there. Maybe.)

  84. 84.

    Mnemosyne

    @Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:

    I remember someone here telling us about her Southern aunt wanting to refuse Obamacare because she’d been taught to never accept charity from black people because they were her inferiors. I don’t think it was you, though.

  86. 86.

    enplaned

    I went house-to-house for Obama in Las Vegas in 2008. One that stands out was a white couple, probably 40s-50s, who were marked as being Democrats (remember, Obama had cutting edge data).

    It was instant hostility. “We don’t need help from *him*.” What I took from it is that for some white folk, it’s the ultimate in uppity blackness that a black man (or woman) could ever be in the position to help them. If they are, something is very definitely not right with the world, for these people.

  87. 87.

    Mnemosyne

    @Daulnay:

    The metaphor I’ve seen is that a rich white guy, a poor black guy, and a poor white guy are in a room with a dozen cookies. The rich white guy takes 10 cookies, while each of the other two get one cookie.

    The rich guy then leans over to the poor white guy and says, “I think that other guy is eying your cookie.”

  90. 90.

    raven

    @Gin & Tonic: Yea, that was when the EER’s had some kind of chance. Now all we get is some hockey numbnuts telling us how swell that shit is.

  93. 93.

    Daulnay

    A more encouraging event — reusable, cheap space launch vehicles:
    Blue Origin.

    Maybe I will get to go to space before I die. I’d kind of given up on it.

  94. 94.

    rikyrah

    hmmmph

    Walker says Cruz victory in Wisconsin can change momentum
    By Scott Bauer | AP April 1 at 10:41 PM

    MILWAUKEE — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, in his first joint appearance with former presidential rival Ted Cruz, implored hundreds of Republican Party activists and insiders on Friday to back the Texas senator, saying a win for him next week will change momentum in the race and unite the party.

    Cruz, who called Walker a “rock star,” hugged the two-term governor as he took the stage at an event just four days before Wisconsin’s primary. Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, speaking on behalf of Donald Trump, also attended the Milwaukee County GOP dinner.

    Cruz won Walker’s endorsement Monday, giving him a boost as he looks to win Wisconsin and its 42 delegates. Walker planned to campaign with Cruz across the state Sunday.

  96. 96.

    Chris

    @rikyrah:

    Really, a Nation of Islam mosque?

    You stupid, stupid, stupid bastards. Stick to attacking Sikh cab drivers one at a time, it’s about your speed.

  99. 99.

    Bobby Thomson

    I have never seen the overt racism anywhere else that I did when I lived in Indiana.

  100. 100.

    Mnemosyne

    @rikyrah:

    /looks around for Omnes

    Well, what did you expect from a bunch of cheeseheads?

    /runs away before he gets here

  101. 101.

    frosty

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    I still call it DC National.

    Washington National for me. And the one up the Parkway is BWI , not Marshall, when I’m not regressing and calling it Friendship (which was a perfectly good name.) Named after the town the scraped away to build the airport.

  102. 102.

    raven

    @Chris:

    The Sikh Regiment is a 19 battalion strong, infantry regiment of the Indian Army, drawing a bulk of its recruits from the Sikh community. It is the most decorated regiment in the Indian army and was at one stage one of the highest decorated regiments in the British Empire

  103. 103.

    redshirt

    @Daulnay: Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Bigelow form a nice foundation of future commercial space progress.

    And then today I was freaking SHOCKED to learn there’s an R congressman from Texas, John Culberson, who got NASA’s budget way increased in 2015, including a boost in Earth sciences (there was a bunch of prior noise that Earth sciences were going to be massively cut so as to prove Global Warming isn’t real). He also got a law passed that requires the upcoming mission to Europa to include a lander, which NASA didn’t want to do but now they have to.

    First time in a LONG time I’ve been impressed with anything a Republican’s done.

  104. 104.

    MomDoc

    @Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:

    So true. When I was in medical school, I remember that a white patient (not my patient — I was talking to another one in a different bed) had undergone cardiac catheterization and had a weight on the entrance site in his groin to keep him from bleeding out. He was supposed to be still for a few hours — he wasn’t — and he started bleeding everywhere. The nurse on duty was a black woman who without hesitation (as she should) quickly placed her hands on his groin to stop the bleeding and called for help.

    His show of gratitude: He called her ni**** and a host of other words that I was shocked to hear come out of his mouth at the time. Still she did her job through the barrage. My supervising resident (a white man) walked in calmly, paused for a moment, and told the patient, “I advise you to shut up — she is the only thing between you and death right now,” He eased on on the racial part but was still incredibly rude moving forward.

    I was impressed by the fact that she didn’t flinch from her job even with what he was saying. I was still young…A couple of years later, as an intern, I had a white patient who greeted me with the n-word. He tried to be nice about it but he had no other reference with how to greet me, I was the ni**** doctor that was taking care of him. I was nice enough and competent enough but still a ni*****.

    When it happened to me, how did I handle it? I transferred the patient off my service and gave him to someone else. I found I didn’t have the patience to be that selfless. I still think about that nurse today — she was a better woman than !.

  105. 105.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @rikyrah:
    @dr. bloor: It seems like there was some gun control legislation in California quite some time ago. Am I remembering correctly?

  108. 108.

    Tripod

    It wasn’t just 2008. They elected Donnelly and made a run at Pence. The state’s demographics are trending Democratic, which means browner, more graduate degrees, and more urbanized voters.

  109. 109.

    schrodinger's cat

    I canvassed for Obama in NH in 2012 and it was the not the working class neighborhood where we encountered the most hostility to the President.

    * It was town with few if any minorities.

  110. 110.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @raven: You do know that if Mrs. raven has an unexpected conflict, I’m always up for a walk in a giant garden, right? I’m sure she’ll be in hog heaven, and we expect pictures. I would probably have bought one of your tix if I’d known.

  111. 111.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Racist swine are racist swine.

    (Apologies to all members of the suidae family)

  112. 112.

    ruemara

    The right hates those uppity blacks; the left pats us on the head and says leave the deep thoughts to us. I’m gonna be bold and say I like neither.

    May those good souls in Elkhart get the fuck off their duffs, show some goddam appreciation and vote fucking blue. Using the common parlance so as not to appear above my station and dissuade some innocent person of beige from voting in their best interest. I know not all white people yadda yadda, but holy crap. Is anyone talking honestly with their conservative relatives? It might be worth the effort to patiently explain why this is dumb.

  114. 114.

    Plantsmantx

    @rikyrah:

    …and Bernie Sanders:

    One cause for concern, Sanders explained to Schultz, was seeing many white, working-class voters in “low-income states” like Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina voting against their own best interest.

    “These are guys getting hung up on gay marriage issues,” Sanders told Schultz. “They’re getting hung up on abortion issues. And it is time we started focusing on the economic issues that bring us together: Defending Social Security, defending Medicare, making sure that Medicaid is not cut, that veterans’ programs are not cut.”

  115. 115.

    Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA

    @MomDoc: That’s just infuriating. How can someone consider you or the nurse inferior when you’re saving his life?

    I mean, I can sort of understand having stupid beliefs if they’re ingrained in you from childhood — but when you’re confronted time after time after time with evidence that what you learned just isn’t true, how do you keep clinging to it?

    Pisses me off as a white woman. If I were black and on the receiving end of that shit every day? I can’t imagine the perpetual anger I’d be stuck wallowing in. I’m not good at rising above.

    I often wonder what Barack and Michelle Obama say to each other when they’re alone about the shit they have to deal with. And what goes through their kids’ minds?

  117. 117.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @redshirt: Well, he does represent a district(TX-7) in Houston, though not the district the space center is in(TX-36).

  118. 118.

    MomDoc

    @redshirt: LOL. Although I suspect that if she had been the nurse the outcome might have been different. I am not totally familiar with the back story but suspect Luke Cage would not have allowed that patient to speak to her that way!

  119. 119.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Plantsmantx: If only Obama had thought to do something about expanding access to health care, or stimulating the economy ….

  120. 120.

    schrodinger's cat

    @ruemara: If any winger friends or family send me casteist/racist/Islamophobic stuff. I politely but firmly tell them off, and tell them to not forward the hate, thank you very much. Most get the hint.

  121. 121.

    schrodinger's cat

    @raven: Another cool thing about Sikhs is that they are progressive where it comes to gender relations, both men and women have the same names. Suffix for female names is Kaur while that for male names is Singh.

  123. 123.

    Capri

    Bryan Howie is my favorite local columnist. He leans republican, but isn’t so enmeshed in the bubble that he can’t see reality. He wrote against the anti-LGBT legislation that the GOP embraced, for example. He has sounded more and more mystified as the GOP has gone further off the rails.

  124. 124.

    Uncle Cosmo

    Blue Origins is bullshit & Bezos can go fuck himself. Anyone can send something up to 100 km & bring it back still functional–von Braun proved that in 1943 (as London could attest) & Space Ship None did it for “space” tourists.

    Wake me up when they’re flying orbital missions, recovering both the cargo module & boosters more or less undamaged & reflying them in a couple of weeks without major replacements or repairs (as in the old joke about how to repair a Yugo: unscrew the oil cap, tow the busted one away, pull a new one in, screw on the oil cap). Do that routinely & we can talk. Not unless, not until.

  127. 127.

    redshirt

    @BillinGlendaleCA: I was kinda blown away, 1. Because I hadn’t heard of this earlier, and 2. Even though the guy starts his interview in the April issue of Astronomy magazine with the words “I believe the good Lord…” he then goes on to say how important it is that NASA look for alien life in the solar system, with Europa being the prime candidate. I can dig that viewpoint.

    He must be a monster because he’s a Republican from Texas, but his work on behalf of NASA so far is outstanding.

  128. 128.

    Mike J

    @redshirt:

    He also got a law passed that requires the upcoming mission to Europa to include a lander, which NASA didn’t want to do but now they have to.

    It was congress/DOD that fucked up the shuttle program so spectacularly. It’s a pity that NASA didn’t get to build a smaller vehicle to learn how to do quick turnarounds on before being weighed down with tons of useless crap that never got used in a ship that was too expensive to fly, had no mission beyond resupplying a space station that was built to give it somewhere to go, and was too complex to turn around.

  129. 129.

    Adam L Silverman

    @JMG: Most likely. Apparently, as Americans, we’ll happily watch anyone beat the crap out of anyone else. As long as there’s no nudity. Then its somehow scandalous.

  132. 132.

    redshirt

    @Mike J: I’m sure Congress is at the root of most problems with NASA. Hell, they shuttered the inflatable module program and sold it for a pittance to Bigelow, who’s now poised to revolutionize space habitats using those designs as the foundation.

  134. 134.

    MomDoc

    @Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: It is infuriating but in professional situations, I had to keep my cool.

    I have been interrogated when I showed up in a room to do a exam. I had one patient who was visible bothered by my being his doctor. But when I showed him that I actually knew what I was doing and wasn’t going to blind him during my exam (I am an ophthalmologist by training), he actually set out to figure out how I happened because I couldn’t possibly be normal.

    He asked about where I attended college and medical school — both of which passed his inspection. He was actually perplexed because I didn’t go to a school that he thought would let me in (a top 15 med school). He then asked me what country I was from — in Africa or which island — because that would explain how I got into the places I did. I told him I was from the country of Alabama and sent him on his way.

    I suspect he went home that day and told his family (similar to that newscaster in Pittsburgh) that he met one of the “good” black people. I told my colleagues that I met a racist that day.

  136. 136.

    Mike J

    @Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA:

    but when you’re confronted time after time after time with evidence that what you learned just isn’t true, how do you keep clinging to it?

    Science has shown again and again, people don’t look at the evidence and make up their minds. They make up their minds and then pick which evidence they want.It’s why the scientific method is so important, and so hard to actually use properly.

  138. 138.

    Ked

    I can turn left on the highway and reach Elkhart in five minutes.

    In 2008, this county was fucked. Most of Indiana was, really, but we were especially screwed with Detroit imploding and our parts manufacturing becoming useless as well as the RV industry losing its mojo. I watched fortunes built in this county in the ‘aughts. Most of those people sold their businesses and got out before the Great Recession and as the economy struggled back into vaguely normal mode those same people have started a new wave of RV companies and they’re getting rich again.

    Some friends who lived in the apartments nearby struggled mightily through that stretch. He was a guy who had learned cabinetry through three decades in the local factories (hardwood cabinets are a big thing in RV’s – who knew?), she was a housewife with bad vision problems and a love for cheap science fiction. They were always on the verge of bankruptcy – he was a good worker, but every job he took seemed to end with a closed factory or a shut down line six weeks after he started. In 2008, he had a stroke. In the early months of 2009, both of them got hired to help start a new line at a factory down the road in Goshen… it was good pay (“Twelve dollars an hour!”) but the operation was run as a complete gong show, where the supervisors obviously meant to reduce the workforce by aggressive attrition. You worked hard for twelve hours five days a week, and if you slacked off, they booted you out. I still don’t understand how they didn’t have to pay overtime rates. …and then she burned out, lost almost all her vision to diabetes complications, and they both lost the job because he had to shuttle her to the specialists in South Bend one day.

    And of course there no health insurance – the company wasn’t interested in funding wellness for workers they were treating as disposable, and there was no way this couple could even have hoped to wade their way through the individual market with their conditions. They went to live with her sister (who they both hated), and the last I’d heard he found a job with a more-reputable employer back in ’10 and they moved to Mishawaka (it’s the other half of South Bend), but she was basically still uninsurable.

    And while I know she voted Obama in 08, I know he was a lifelong Republican and she tended to be influenced by his preferences. For so much of the lower-class white population in this region, it’s simply impossible to imagine voting D. I don’t know that I’d generally call it racism (though there’s lots of that) or even religion (we have our crazies, but the fundies just don’t quite seem to get traction locally), but just a habit of thought, a mode where no one around them thinks liberalism is acceptable, and the possibility that government could actually help them is not acknowledged.

    Elkhart County ended up going for Obama in 2008. There’s a row of blue counties that stretches from Gary to South Bend, and we got tacked onto the end of that just that year. The county seat of Goshen is a somewhat liberal college town, and the whole region is going more professional and more latino with the inevitable blueing that brings. I’m not so egotistical to claim that we won the state for Obama in 2008, but one has to think that his visits here swung the numbers in the local counties.

    Despite the county being very purple, it’s difficult to be a dem here. Where I work, we’re outnumbered about 45-5… or at least that’s the public face people put on. You can say just about anything about a D, but heaven forbid you criticize a R. If the damn business owners don’t shout you down, the line workers will. Yet somehow the important mayors are dems. Be damned if I can see how to break the logjam.

    As for Trump… I dunno. I suspect that the Clinton Derangement Syndrome should prevent her from winning the state, but things get just weird enough around here that a weak Trump candidacy could blow things up. I’m not hopeful, but it’s possible. More likely we’ll get something silly like 15% vote for the libertarian candidate.

  140. 140.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @MomDoc: It’s things like what you describe that make me so embarrassed to be a white person. I am ashamed that people who look like I do act that way.

  141. 141.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: Three of the last five Indian Chiefs of the Army have been Sikhs. The one before the current one I’ve met. He’s got an absolutely great sense of humor. His remarks upon being inducted into the US Army War College International Fellows Hall of Fame were some of the best standup I’ve ever heard. He had the entire room busting their guts.

  143. 143.

    Miss Bianca

    @Adam L Silverman: @raven:

    It’s been boggling me to watch what’s been happening in my county. The paper of record, “The Wet Mountain Tribune” (as opposed to “The Sentinel”, the rag that started up a few years back to promote – I’m not kidding – “conservative news,” – a reaction to the “Tribune’s” editor making fun of the open-carry nuts who insist on parading their pieces in the 4th of July parade…seriously, you can’t make this shit up) has been running a series of articles on the hearings that the town of Silver Cliff has been having on the issue of whether or not cannabis is going to be sold in the town limits. There’s a ballot issue this Spring.

    So far, the witnesses who have been called apparently have not, to put it mildly, been complying with the prejudices of certain of the populace. According to the Trib articles, the LEOs from the towns where recreational cannabis has been approved for sale are all saying, “no, crime rates haven’t gone up – in fact, crime rates have gone down” and the other town officials have been saying “well, sales tax could be a real windfall for the town – as much as $300,000 per year”.

    Now, you’d think this would all be good news, right? But a bunch of letters to the editor are accusing the Trib of “bias” in its reporting – “you reported on what these people said at Town Council but you didn’t send a reporter to cover this meeting held at the library by Some Guy who doesn’t like drugs so UNFAIR AND UNBALANCED!!”

    And the Sheriff…Lord God, the Sheriff’s diatribe in the paper…between “well, these crime statistics don’t count because REASONS” and “won’t someone think of the children??” and then in another article talking about Colorado’s gun laws are “unconstitutional” because “they violate the 2nd Amendment!” I’m thinking…do I really want to try to run for office here in the next few years?

  145. 145.

    Adam L Silverman

    @MomDoc: If I remember correctly didn’t the doctor that invented the process for separating blood from plasma die because he bled out after a car accident. The hospital they took him too wouldn’t give white blood to an African American man.

  147. 147.

    redshirt

    @Davebo: I’m A-OK with that. It used to be called pork, and it made the government function.

    How is it these Tea Bagging congressman can get elected and bring nothing back to their districts but hot air and failed shutdowns?

  150. 150.

    Miss Bianca

    @MomDoc:

    you’ve got to be fucking kidding. But…I know you’re not.

    @Ked: I hear you about being outnumbered. Despite the obvious corruption in our county that come from, essentially, one-party rule, an everybody grumbling about it – and despite the damage that the “no government money allowed for anything except raising our salaries!” attotude of the County Commissioners – it’s going to be a hard slog to convince anyone to run as a D. You have to develop a very thick skin overnight as people you thought were friendly suddenly turn hostile. It’s scared a lot of good people away from running for local office.

  152. 152.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Uncle Cosmo: To maybe clarify my point: It is one whole fuck of a lot harder to land something safely from orbit–shedding in the process ~17,000 mph worth of kinetic energy in the form of heat–without deforming the structure & destroying its contents, than it is to do the same from 100 km traveling about 1/4 of that speed. But until you can routinely put people & stuff in orbit–IOW put them up & keep them up indefinitely–& return them safely without having to use up a manned capsule & booster every freakin’ flight, spaceflight remains horrifically impractical due to the cost.

    And just FTR, the real reason 100 km (~62 miles) is the “agreed” boundary of “space” is that the US pushed for that definition to qualify pilots in the X-15 program as “astronauts.” Real honest-to-goodness “space” begins at whatever altitude where an object can be put into orbit & stay up for at least a few days before either re-entering or sustaining damage due to the friction of the upper atmosphere. That’s at least 150 km & more like 200 km. Anything short of that is bullshit.

  156. 156.

    smith

    @Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: That was Dr. Charles Drew, working at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. According to Wikipedia, the story of him being refused a transfusion is false, but was disseminated via the TV show MASH, so still in wide circulation. I worked at Cook County Hospital for 8 years, and while there met a physician who’d been inspired as a child to become a doctor when a “white” hospital refused to admit his desperately ill brother, who died as a result. That story is true.

  157. 157.

    MomDoc

    @Adam L Silverman: Dr. Charles Drew. I grew up believing (and being taught) that as well. With what we know, it is difficult to not jump to that conclusion, right?

    However, that story is supposedly not true — his injuries were pretty horrific after his car accident and he couldn’t be saved. I have seen in several different places that the doctors worked diligently to save him.

    I have been trying to give those doctors the benefit of the doubt. There are so many instances that are obvious and upsetting, I need to have one that isn’t about racism, you know?

    @smith
    My father had a shop accident and sawed off 2 fingers his senior year in high school. He almost died because they didn’t know where they could take him in 1950s Birmingham that could handle the severity of his injury. They drove around in circles before they found a clinic that would treat him.

  161. 161.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: The Sikh generals? They’ve always worn them. It was that American Sikh lieutenant who recently got the rules changed to allow his turban and beard. Prior to that it was an individual, and temporary, exemption to policy in the US Army.

  165. 165.

    schrodinger's cat

    @raven: They have always worn their turbans in the Indian army. Actually, I do know a fair number of Sikh men who don’t wear turbans. Sometimes, only the oldest male child wears a turban.

    ETA: The Sikhs adopted the 5 Ks that set them apart, in the time of Emperor Aurangzeb who was a Sunni zealot. One of the k’s stands for kesh==hair.

  168. 168.

    raven

    @schrodinger’s cat: Here it is

    WASHINGTON—The U.S. Army has issued a special waiver allowing a Sikh officer to keep a beard, uncut hair and wear a turban while on duty, after a five-month campaign that Sikh-rights advocates say shows lingering discrimination in the military.

    The Army issued a memorandum on Mar. 30 allowing Capt. Simratpal Singh to “wear a beard, turban and uncut hair in a neat and conservative manner,” in accordance with his faith.

  169. 169.

    mclaren

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Tweety (yeah, yeah, I know, but I think his unleashed id often speaks for the Beltway and not a few tote bag types around the country) was bellowing once in the summer of 2012 about how Obama needs to do something BIG! something the whole country will remember and associate with his presidency, like Reagan firing the air traffic controllers. Union busting and firing people: Big. Saving by most estimates a million jobs– and I agree with those who say the the death spiral would’ve pulled the whole economy down with it)? “Huh? What? Oh yeah, that. That was a long time ago”.

    This is a real problem that progressives have to deal with.

    Your typical progressive gets in office and fixes the bridges, repairs the potholes, rebuilds the sewer mains, weeds out corruption and graft, avoids endless unwinnable foreign wars, tones down the War on Drugs. And the population screams: “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR US???!??!?!??”

    And then when the progressive pol says, “Well, I made things work the way they’re supposed to,” the electorate shrieks: “YEAH? AND WHAT ELSE?”

    Meanwhile, when a Republican gets in power, s/he creates a huge economic bubble, invades a bunch of foreign countries, puts a bunch of cops on the streets and starts filling up the prisons and signing into law a bunch of brutal laws criminalizing everything from swallowing in public to breathing too loudly, and the electorate rises spontaneously to their feet and cheers: “WOW, THIS POL REALLY DID SOMETHING FOR A CHANGE!!!”

    It’s depressing.

  170. 170.

    Darkrose

    So I read this, and it sort of sums up my issues with Sanders. In a Q & A with the LA Times, he said this:

    But all that I’m saying is, we’ve got to start thinking outside of the box. If 50 years ago you can have free tuition at the great University of California, why, why, why can’t you do it today? Oh, because wealthy people don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes? So, to answer, public colleges and universities and lowering student debt, a tax on Wall Street population, what else do you got?

    The reason we don’t have free tuition at UC has nothing to do with Wall Street, and everything to do with the fact that in 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13. The problem is not Wall Street or wealthy people not paying their fair share–it’s that most people do not want to pay taxes, especially for things that don’t immediately benefit them, and many voters seem to believe in the magical fairy who will provide services without it costing individual taxpayers anything. If your plans depend on a “revolution” from people who are too short-sighted to realize that cutting taxes means fewer services, then your plans aren’t going to happen because you’re not dealing with any recognizable reality.

  173. 173.

    Miss Bianca

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Don’t get me started on anti-cannabis propaganda. I did a lot of research on the issue when I worked at KVNF (the same radio station that produces the HCN podcast/radio show, btw), and we produced a ten-part series on cannabis and hemp and all the crazy laws and mythos surrounding and (okay, I’m going there) clouding the issues. It’s just sickening how many people’s lives have been fucked with and ruined because of our hysterical animus against A PLANT – particularly POC.

    I like to think that eventually there’s going to be a saturation point of human irrationality. I *like* to think it – it gives me pleasure. But I haven’t seen any evidence of it yet.

  174. 174.

    Adam L Silverman

    @schrodinger’s cat: They’ve always been at odds. Called themselves the Black Jews of Cochin and the White Jews of Cochin. My master’s advisor was one of their most prominent religious studies chronicler, analyst, and historian.

  175. 175.

    amygdala

    @MomDoc: An African-American friend is a surgeon at the local Level 1 trauma center. We go way back–we were residents together–and he is high on the list of people I’d want around in a mass casualty event or other catastrophe. A lot of docs are smart, but he’s also supremely sensible, empathetic, collegial, funny, and devoid of BS. I can’t get my head around the fact that he still, as a senior surgeon, gets asked to scrub down a room on the ward or empty the trash.

    He told me years ago that he had gotten stat paged to the ED in the wee hours of the morning for someone who had been shot multiple times. My friend arrived in the trauma room to find the staff trying to get the patient stabilized and cutting him out of his clothes… to reveal a collection of swastika tattoos.

    We’ve come a ways, but not nearly far enough.

  176. 176.

    Davebo

    @redshirt:

    A lot of them haven’t, especially at the House level. “You’ve had 2 years and there’s still Obamacare!”

    Culbertson’s district is among the most affluent in the area and really much more establishment than Tea Party.

  177. 177.

    sherparick

    @rikyrah: Franks and all these other upper middle class white lefties (see Sanders, Sarandon, and all the Bernie Bros), just think the “race” and “religious” thing are just “false consciousness.” But it is not. The tangible and intangible benefits of belonging to the “superior race” and “correct religion” and not being a “deviant” and making sure everyone is in their proper place with the man on top are very real, and having a Black President has been a constant corrosive to that hierarchy and he is hated for it.

  178. 178.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Miss Bianca: Its going to be reflected in generational change. You heard Tweety’s question of Trump on marijuana legalization at last week’s town hall? It was couched in all sorts of inaccurate assumptions.

  179. 179.

    mclaren

    @Darkrose:

    The reason we don’t have free tuition at UC has nothing to do with Wall Street, and everything to do with the fact that in 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13.

    But why did California voters pass Proposition 13 in 1978?

    Why didn’t they pass Proposition 13 in 1958? Or 1928? Or 1908?

    Voters in California passed Proposition 13 in 1978 because in 1970 wages stagnated but inflation skyrocketed, courtesy of Nixon’s misbegotten Vietnam war dragging on and on and on and on until 1975, and Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s consequent decision to protect rich investors by purging inflation from the American economy using brutal 15% prime interest rates.

    Take a look at this graph of the Fed’s prime rate from the 1970s to the 1980s. The effective Fed funds rate peaked at 19% (yes, nineteen percent) in 1980, as was well above 12% in 1978.

    Now take a look at real wages (adjusted for inflation) during the same period. By 1978, real wages had fallen by 30% from their peak in the early 1970s and would fall further. At the same time, inflation was skyrocketing, averaging 12%.

    Now ask yourself: why was all this economic holocaust destroying the middle class at that time?

    Answer: because Nixon artificially extended the Vietnam War to keep himself in power without raising taxes to pay for it; because Nixon and then Ford and Carter eagerly colluded with the super-rich governors of the Federal Reserve to wring inflation out of the U.S.economy by brutally increasing the prime rate, punishing the middle class while helping the rich (inflation is great for homeowners but terrible for investors); and because automation had by 1978 started to brutally erode the real value of the working wage in America.

    Proposition 13 was a reaction to these trends. It was the only way someone living in California in the 1970s could keep from losing their home.

    So Proposition 13 was actually a reaction to a bunch of policies deliberately designed to hurt the middle class and enrich the wealthy.

    Blaming the average person for passing Proposition 13 in 1978 is like blaming a young girl for getting raped because she wasn’t a virgin.

  180. 180.

    Adam L Silverman

    @sherparick: all of our social behavioral research shows that even weak, and in some cases completely imagined and arbitrary, identities can become very powerful and salient under stress and pressure. While the press, and his opponents, twisted what he was trying to say, President Obama’s remarks about people clinging to their faith and firearms and small town morays was actually an attempt to explain the dynamic to his supporters who don’t normally think about these things.

  183. 183.

    Miss Bianca

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Nah, I missed that particular exchange. Probably just as well.

    Generational change is going to come. I guess I just get impatient about all the residue and fallout from the War on Drugs that still needs to be cleaned up.

  184. 184.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Steve in the ATL: I keep forgetting. I’ve not been well. But I still would have bought raven’s extras just to get shots of the sundry blooms. Women (white) are permitted as spectators now, is that correct?

  186. 186.

    MomDoc

    @amygdala: I didn’t run into that one! Since the guy was probably unconscious (or close), your friend didn’t have to worry about being disrespected, right?

  187. 187.

    redshirt

    @Miss Bianca: It’s very sad that this very day, when marijuana tourism is a thing in some states, some person (likely male, likely a minority) is going to jail for 20 years because he sold 3 ounces. And he’s just one of many.

  189. 189.

    Adam L Silverman

    @mclaren: Actually there was another, and much more moderate and sensible, tax reform proposal on the table at the time and the small group of wealthy interests in California ratfucked it in order to jam through Prop 13 as the first, and test example, of applying their anti-tax philosophy. Did the economic conditions at the time make their job easier? Most likely. But the campaigns for each of the two competing reforms and the fight to have them enacted have been very well documented. I highly recommend you look up this history. There are several good articles and books on it and you’d probably enjoy them as political and economic policy history.

  192. 192.

    Miss Bianca

    @redshirt: $300,000 per year for the town of Silver Cliff, projected. That’s a hell of a lot of infrastructure money for a county of under 5,000. And the ballot initiative surely won’t pass. This is what sickens me – conservatives are all about “business! and jobs!” and “get the federal government off our backs!”. And then something like this comes up and they’re all like “but the FEDS!” and “there are more important things than jobs!”

    I swear, it’s the hypocrisy, based on puritanical misinformation, that sickens me the most.

    ETA: Rikyrah linked to some articles a while back about how the legal MJ boom is a boom for white people only, pretty much, because of start-up costs being prohibitively expensive but also because of the BS rules about how if you’ve been convicted of a felony – oh, say, like, being busted for cannabis possession – you can’t apply for a license. It’s all okay if you’re white, folks, but if you’re black, get back. More sick-making stuff,

  193. 193.

    divF

    @MomDoc: Madame Dr. divF is a geriatrician serving an ethnically diverse population in Oakland CA. A lot of the more patriarchal cultures have trouble with (1) a woman as a physician, or (2) an elderly relative (particularly one who is female) having the right to confidentiality when talking to their doctor. With elderly patients who do not speak English, this requires getting a translator on the phone, something that the relatives just do not get.

  197. 197.

    Adam L Silverman

    @aangus: I’ve had the honor and privilege of serving with several of your current general officers. Two of them were Deputy Commanding Generals at the Corps level on multinational assignments here in the US at the time. The third was one of my students as a colonel who was promoted to brigadier general just before graduation and then went on to one of these multinational deputy commanding general assignments. All of them are great people and excellent officers.

  198. 198.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: The four young St. Andrews’ students working as starters at the 4th tee – or whichever one it is this year – are the current batch at Emory. The newly selected group from Emory going to St. Andrews next year will go for a day that includes a reception in Butler Cabin.

    I’m pretty sure if I wanted to go I could call someone at the Atlanta office of the Bobby Jones Trust and they could get me a pass.

  199. 199.

    Miss Bianca

    @aangus:

    Cool! But the article calls him “a reputed Lt Colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces”. “Reputed”? I don’t think that words means what they think it means…whatever they think it means!

  200. 200.

    amygdala

    @MomDoc: I couldn’t bring myself to ask about that, or if the guy survived to wake up in the recovery room or ICU to see who had saved his life.

  201. 201.

    raven

    @Adam L Silverman: Nice. I met a fellow her in Athens that is a member at the Royal and Ancient and he was telling me that it wasn’t really all that expensive for him.

  202. 202.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Adam L Silverman: You and raven both hate me. I’d have paid what he got for them, gladly. I’d have gotten my bud in Charleston to go in with me and we’d have had a grand time – he with the golf and me with the blooms.

    And then Steve in the ATL, my fellow Bundy junkie has to pile on to the midwestern trial trash who doesn’t even practice any more over her pedantic failure of naming the admission identification correctly.

    Did none of you see what Hungry Joe said in the thread below?

    ::Weeps softly, so as not to disturb the dog::

  204. 204.

    mclaren

    @sherparick:

    Franks and all these other upper middle class white lefties (see Sanders, Sarandon, and all the Bernie Bros), just think the “race” and “religious” thing are just “false consciousness.”

    Alas, the reverse is true — the identity politics mavens thing that “racism is the source of all America’s problems.”

    When I show these kinds of ideologues a graph like this, showing the change in total factor productivity over the last 10 years from 1900 to 2000, they just wave it away. “Doesn’t matter! That’s not what’s causing our political convulsions today! It’s all racism! Just racism! Nothing but racism!”

    Sorry, no. Racism matters. It matters a lot. But it doesn’t explain the overall convulsions that today are hurling up Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. That graph of change in total factor productivity over the previous 10 years, graphed from 1900 to 2000, does go a long way to explain our political paroxysms in America today.

    This presentation by the OECD about “The Future of Productivity” is deeply scary. Joseph Schumpeter predicted the end of capitalism in chapters 11-14 of his book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (1943), pp. 111-156, and it looks like it’s happening right now.

    This graph of real wages from 1960 to 2015 shows us what’s happening to the middle class.

    And here’s an up-close-and-personal depiction of work in the 2010s:

    My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store.
    Hey—it’s only minimum wage, but at least she’s working, right? And at a major-league, blue-chip company, An American icon; an institution; a name every man, woman, and child in this country knows; an historic company that rings of the American Dream the world over, besides. Surely, if nothing else, it’s a start.
    Perhaps you’re right. Maybe it isn’t the start she always dreamed of…but at least it is one. If so…then awaits her at the finish?
    What is Mara’s job like? Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed “orders” at her, parroting her own “performance” back to her, telling her how she compares with quotas calculated…down to the second…for all the hundreds of items in the store…which recites “influence and manipulation techniques” to her…to use on unsuspecting customers…that sound suspiciously like psychological warfare. It’s as if the NSA was following you around……and it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest of your life.
    Mara’s boss sits in the back. Monitoring all twelve, or fifteen, or twenty people that work in the store. On a set of screens. Half camera displays, half spreadsheets; numbers blinking in real-time. Glued to it like a zombie. Chewing slowly with her mouth open. Jacked into a headset. A drone-pilot… piloting a fleet of human drones…pressure-selling disposable mass-made shit…as if it were luxury yachts…through robo-programmed info-warfare…like zombies…to other zombies…who look stunned…like they just got laser blasted, cluster-bombed, shock-and-awed…
    WTF?
    It’s bananas. The whole scene is like a maximum-security mental asylum designed by sadomasochists in a sci-fi movie. If Jeffrey Dahmer, Rasputin, and Michael Bay designed a “store” together, they couldn’t do any better. Her “job” will begin to drive her crazy—paranoid, depressed, deluded—in a matter of years if she continues doing it. No human psyche can bear that kind of relentless, systematic abuse.

    Source: “The Asshole Factory,” Bad Words website, Umair Haque, 21 April 2015.

    If this is capitalism, then capitalism is dead and we’re all in hell. This is unsustainable.

    As billionaire investor Nick Hanauer wrote in 2014:

    Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
    And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
    If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

    Source: “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats,” Politico website, Nick Hanauer, 2014.

    None of these graphs or charts can be explained by racism. Schumpeter’s book is not explained by racism. Hanauer’s warning is not based on racism in America.

    At a certain point, even the most devoted acolyte of identity politics has got to realize that something else is happening in America today to cause all this turmoil than just racism.

  205. 205.

    Steve in the ATL

    @raven: Exactly like that, you lucky bastard!

    Actually, I was offered badges for Friday and declined. Practice days are the best. Less crowded, fun and unusual player pairings, and looser golfers. The par 3 tournament on Wednesday is good too.

  207. 207.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    @Plantsmantx: This is so silly. He thinks on a tactical level if liberals ignore gay and abortion rights the other team will play along. This superficial thinking is the product of living in a homogeneous state for 50 years with no political opposition. The Dukakis/Kerry model of ignoring Lee Atwater/Karl Rove doesn’t work. You have to fight and put them on the defensive. (video)

  209. 209.

    mclaren

    @gwangung:

    In other words, people didn’t want to pay higher taxes.

    I was there.

    I was living in California at the time too. No, it wasn’t that people didn’t want to pay higher taxes. It was that people like my widowed mother would have lost her house without Proposition 13.

    The favor-the-rich policies that washed over America started in California with Reagan as governor. Those policies were the reason average middle-class people were so economically squeezed by 1978 that they voted for Prop 13, just so they could survive.

  210. 210.

    Steve in the ATL

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): It is a beautiful place even if you don’t like golf. I have friends who are members; they invite to wedding receptions there but never to play golf. Bastards. I have played the Augusta Country Club, which is nice but it’s not Augusta National.

  211. 211.

    aangus

    @Miss Bianca:

    I’m not sure what that was supposed to be. However, “The new Defence Minister has been awarded with numerous military honours which also include the Meritorious Service Medal in 2013, for reducing the Taliban’s influence in the Kandahar Province.” is pretty clear.

  212. 212.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: I’ve been to a few of the Royal and Ancient functions when I was in St. A’s. At the first one, the secretary, who was also a Trust trustee/board member, came up and asked: “Laddie, d’ye know why we ca eet golf? Because fuck wus takin!” Then he chortled and went to the bar for a refill.

  215. 215.

    david10

    @redshirt: When I was young and naive, I attended a moon launch. That giant rocket, I asked where the space ship was and my uncle let me use his binoculars to see the tiny, tiny, capsule so very high up.
    All the commercial space projects are low orbit and destined to remain so. And Nasa’s new launch vehicle? Still the Saturn with a few bells and whistles. Payloads of course are incredibly sophisticated, but if von Braun came back I’m sure he’d be amazed and chagrined that essentially no progress has been made in launch vehicles.

  216. 216.

    redshirt

    Golf is an amazing sport as it combines several different things at once. Skill, strategy, perseverance, patience, money and the form of OCD that makes you keep trying to get better at mundane things like your mid-chip swing, among other swings.

  218. 218.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: I figured you would. When we went, as Jones’ Scholars selected, in 1992, we met Alistair Cook at the cabin. He was an unpleasant old man.

  221. 221.

    MomDoc

    @divF: Med school actually taught us about that to prepare the women in the class.

    I feel like ophthalmology didn’t seem to have that particular issue very often. As an eye doc, I saw a lot of older patients, but I didn’t notice that. I am sure I saw patients who may have been uncomfortable with me as a woman but nothing ever happened that stood out — they never said so. Maybe they just didn’t come back.

    I saw more patients from those cultures when I was a resident and when I was a resident, I almost always had male supervising residents or attendings which may have made that issue less obvious. There are a lot more women in ophthalmology now than when I trained.

    As for privacy, I found that older patients with cataracts or glaucoma typically were telling everyone about their eye issues — from the front desk, to the technician, other patients in the office… No interest in privacy there!

  224. 224.

    Ruckus

    @Darkrose:
    This is not aimed at you. You just hit a sore spot for me.
    Someone on my FB feed post that people just want free stuff, like roads fixed, clean water, etc. And this pisses me off. Nothing provided by the government is free. We all pay for everything. Some of us pay more, some less and some not at all. Me for example, I pay federal income tax on my SS payments because I also work, and SS/Medicare tax on my working income, even though I’m over 65 and on SS. I pay sales tax and state income tax on my wages, I pay property taxes through my landlord, I pay fuel taxes, phone taxes, electrical taxes, water taxes and on and on.
    Nothing is free. We all pay for everything, like it or not, know it or not. Of course I may pay at a higher rate than some rich folks and I for sure do pay more income tax than some very successful corporations, with billions in profits per year.

  226. 226.

    mclaren

    @david10:

    … if von Braun came back I’m sure he’d be amazed and chagrined that essentially no progress has been made in launch vehicles.

    Not so much. The rocket equation is logarithmic, and the propellant mass fraction is just brutal, even with multistage rockets. For the Ariane 5, the payload fraction is 0.025%. That means you get to send 0.025% of the total mass of the rocket into orbit.

    To get large payloads into orbit cheaply, we need something fundamentally different from a cylinder with a giant bomb on its base. Think: space elevator. Or scramjet-to-orbit. Or possibly electromagnetic railgun boost up the side of a major mountain.

  227. 227.

    Adam L Silverman

    @raven: Yep. It was nice though on the flip side. In 1995 the British Open was in St. Andrews and I had just turned in my master’s dissertation and my parents had not yet arrived for their three week tour of Scotland, England, and Paris. So I went and watched the open.

  228. 228.

    Ruckus

    @amygdala:
    There was a episode of Gray’s Anatomy that dealt with a black surgeon, Chandra Wilson’s character, having to operate on a man with a swastika tattoo. Sounds like either your friend is not so unusual or is the inspiration for that.

  229. 229.

    mclaren

    @Ruckus:

    Someone on my FB feed post that people just want free stuff, like roads fixed, clean water, etc. And this pisses me off.

    Corporations are the supreme welfare queens. If we’re talking about “people who just want free stuff” corporations are the kings of that kind of freeloading.

    Corporations typically demand roads be developed, sites laid out, electricity and sewage provided, massive tax breaks offered, all in order to locate in a particular site.

    Corporate freeloading makes the most extravagant welfare queen driving around in a Cadillac look like a pauper.

    1. Tax Breaks for obscene CEO bonuses ($7 billion/year)
    Currently, the biggest corporations are exploiting a 20-year-old loophole that allows them to write off inflated compensation packages for CEOs, billing stock options, and performance-based bonuses to taxpayers. In 2010, the Economic Policy Institute found out that the biggest corporations cost Americans $7 billion by writing off inflated executive pay. Between 2007 and 2010, this loophole accounted for more than $30 billion in corporate welfare. According to The Guardian, fast food industry CEOs cost taxpayers $64 million through this loophole.

    That $7 billion could singlehandedly fund the annual budget for the National Science Foundation — which, as I recently reported for US Uncut, funds 11,000 scientific research projects each year and has funded 26 Nobel laureates in the last 5 years.

    2. Tax cuts for luxury corporate jets ($300 million/year)
    Currently, corporations can claim a huge tax deduction every year by writing off purchases of corporate jets, lavish cars, and chauffeurs as “security” for their top executives. A Bloomberg analysis from 2011 showed that these tax breaks for some of the wealthiest Americans cost the rest of us $300 million each year. While that may not sound like much, that’s approximately 50 percent of the annual budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren that protects Americans from the financial sector’s most predatory schemes.

    3. Big oil subsidies ($37.5 billion/year)
    According to Oil Change International (OCI), the U.S. government spends anywhere between $10 billion and $52 billion per year on corporate welfare for the fossil fuel industry — one of the wealthiest industries in the world. OCI estimated that total combined subsidies to big oil approached $37.5 billion in 2014, which includes $21 billion on production and exploration subsidies.

    These subsidies alone cost more than what we currently spend on providing rental assistance for low-income families. In 2013, the department of Housing and Urban Development allocated a total of $34.3 billion toward tenant-based rental assistance ($19 billion), project-based rental assistance ($8.7 billion), and general public housing programs ($6.6 billion). These programs helped 4.5 million families — half of whom are elderly — keep a roof over their head.

    4. Pharmaceutical subsidies ($270 billion/year)
    As US Uncut has previously reported, the pharmaceutical industry costs taxpayers roughly $270 billion a year when accounting for the cost we pay for life-saving drugs whose patents have been bought up by Big Pharma. This is over $1,914 per household in corporate welfare. This is partly due to the Medicare Part D bill that George W. Bush signed into law in 2003, which prevents Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. But the biggest drug companies also make a pretty penny (a combined $711 billion in profits between 2003 and 2012) by buying patents for drugs that were largely developed with taxpayer-funded research, then jacking up the price by absurd amounts after cornering the market.

    This $270 billion annual subsidy could be virtually eliminated by passing Bernie Sanders’ bill to establish a government fund that buys up drug patents as soon as they become available for purchase. Then, the government would sell drugs at-cost to save money for those who need them. The money saved could pay for the annual $270 billion in insurance costs from Obamacare that would help more Americans get access to healthcare.

    5. Capital gains tax breaks ($51 billion/year)
    When anyone makes money from selling off investments, the IRS classifies that as capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (20 percent as of 2012) than real, actual work (35 percent). Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don’t affect the incomes of most retirees. The Century Foundation found that the total amount of lost revenue by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages cost $256 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, or $51 billion a year over the last 5 years. According to the Tax Policy Center, if investment income was taxed at the same rate as wages, 75 percent of that new revenue would come from the richest 0.3 percent of Americans; 92 percent of that revenue would come from those making $200,000 or more per year. The chart below shows what percentage of income each tax bracket makes from capital gains — not surprisingly, the wealthiest Americans get most of the benefit from capital gains.

    If we taxed wealth like work, the extra $51 billion per year in savings could fund two-thirds of the annual budget for food stamps.

    6. Corporate tax subsidies from state and local governments ($80.4 billion/year)
    In 2012, the New York Times did an analysis of every existing tax break in each of the 50 states and learned that 1,874 programs cost taxpayers $80.4 billion every year for corporate welfare in their state. Compare that cost with the cost of providing tuition-free public college to every student, which The Atlantic estimated would be a mere $62.6 billion. As the chart below shows, this is actually way cheaper than what we currently spend on federal student aid.

    7. Handouts to Big Ag ($18 billion/year)
    Crop insurance — a program originally intended to help farmers recover from the dust bowls of the 1930s — has become a slush fund for wealthy corporate farmers who have become experts at manipulating the system for their own means. As Bloomberg reported, the median income of commercial farm households (in which farming makes up more than 50 percent of a household’s income) was $84,649 in 2011 — 70 percent more than the average American household. Farmers have learned to exploit the program by growing crops on land they know will be unproductive, then making money from insurance claims rather than crops. In 2011, 26 farmers each got an annual subsidy of $1 million, including one tomato farmer in Florida who got a $1.9 million subsidy.

    This $18 billion in corporate welfare is more than NASA’s annual budget, which has hovered around the $17 billion mark since 2009.

    8. Welfare for Wall Street ($83 billion/year)
    The biggest banks have grown even bigger than they were just before the 2008 financial meltdown. And due to their size, these banks are perceived as “too big to fail,” as their demise would spell doom for the US financial sector as a whole. So as these big banks grow bigger, the Federal Reserve allows them to borrow at lower interest rates than other big banks — essentially subsidizing the continued growth of the big banks. In 2013, Bloomberg estimated the ten biggest TBTF banks suck up $83 billion per year in corporate welfare.

    If we were to force the big banks to borrow at the same interest rates as every other bank at a rate of $83 billion per year, that would be enough to double the current federal budgets for highway spending ($48.6 billion), Head Start ($10.1 billion), the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.89 billion), nutrition assistance for women, infants, and children ($6.2 billion), the National Parks Service ($3 billion), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ($2.39 billion), with $5 billion left over.

    9. Export-Import bank subsidies ($112 billion)
    This week, the House of Representatives voted to revive the Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank, which has been maligned as a slush fund for large, multinational corporations. In its most recent year, the Ex-Im bank had a $112 billion portfolio, of which $90 billion went to multinationals. If that wasn’t bad enough, a huge portion of that money went to just 10 wealthy corporations.

    According to the New York Times, the federal government spends roughly $105 billion on public K-12 schools. If we allow the Ex-Im bank to fade away, the money formerly set aside for corporate subsidies could instead double that investment in public education.

    Source: “10 Taxpayer Handouts to the Super Rich That Will Make Your Blood Boil,” 28 October 2015.

  230. 230.

    Adam L Silverman

    @mclaren: Have you read these?
    http://www.amazon.com/Perfectly-Legal-Campaign-Rich—verybody/dp/1591840694/ref=la_B001KDG3PW_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459651704&sr=1-2
    http://www.amazon.com/Free-Lunch-Wealthiest-Themselves-Government/dp/1591842484/ref=la_B001KDG3PW_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459651704&sr=1-1
    http://www.amazon.com/Fine-Print-Companies-Plain-English/dp/1591846536/ref=la_B001KDG3PW_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459651704&sr=1-4
    http://www.amazon.com/Divided-Perils-Our-Growing-Inequality/dp/1620970856/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459651698&sr=1-1&keywords=david+cay+johnston

    If not, I think you will enjoy them immensely.

  231. 231.

    Miss Bianca

    @aangus: Ah, good. So the good Lt. Colonel is actually *a Lt. Colonel, of actual stellar reputation, as opposed to “supposed or reported to be such”. There’s a relief!

    Pedantic? Moi?

  232. 232.

    mclaren

    @redshirt:

    It’s shameful how Nixon then Reagan and Bush destroyed our space program. Carter’s Spacelab crashed in Iran.

    Permit me to demur. It’s shameful how NASA persisted in putting all its eggs into the manned space mission basket when it always made much more sense to send robots into space.

    The SkyLab crashed in Iran because it orbited so low (only 146 miles). Every time there’s a major coronal mass ejection from the sun, the solar wind expands the earth’s thermosphere to the point where it produces major drag on low-orbiting satellites. Unfortunately, SkyLab had to be in a low orbit for two reasons — first, in order to be able to resupply it affordably (delta v is determined by the natural log of the mass fraction, so more delta v requires exponentially more propellant in a multistage rocket); and, second, because in a really high orbit, SkyLab would have been outside enough of the earth’s magnetic field that galactic cosmic rays would present a real health problem to the astronauts who manned it.

    As Charles Stross has pointed out many times, humans are not well suited for space travel. The problems with a manned space program are technological and biological, not political.

  234. 234.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mclaren: You do understand that a lot of people here are actually well informed about the world, right? The fact that people laugh and joke or talk about silly things doesn’t reflect a lack of knowledge. Everyone copes differently; just because someone doesn’t respond as you do doesn’t mean that people don’t care or don’t know.

    Also, the fact that people come to different conclusions than you about how to proceed doesn’t mean that they are shitty humans. They may just have reasoned their way to a different decision. Reasonable people can disagree.

  235. 235.

    Adam L Silverman

    @mclaren: His regular column is also very good. He is very good at explaining the macro economic concepts in lay terms so that those not initiated into the mysteries can follow them.
    (that is not an insinuation that you, personally, are not initiated into the mysteries)

  236. 236.

    amygdala

    @Ruckus: Interesting. My friend told me that story long enough ago to antedate the show. He knows a lot of high-powered people these days, so it’s possible the plot element came from his experience.

  238. 238.

    mclaren

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    You do understand that a lot of people here are actually well informed about the world, right?

    No, my experience tends to be the opposite. Many commenters on Balloon-Juice seem to believe that an asset is a baby donkey, and that royal jelly is produced by putting the Queen of Britain in a hydraulic press.

    Unlike you, I have hard numbers to back up my claims. According to recent polls, 43% of Americans believe in creationism as opposed to evolution. America remains the only first world country that build Creation museums showing Adam and Eve riding to church on Sunday on a dinosaur. (Charmingly, the major Creation museum uses an English-style dressage saddle, suggesting that Adam and Eve taught their dinosaurs the equestrian sport of dressage.)

    25% of Americans polled currently believe that the sun orbits the earth.

    Do I really need to go on?

  240. 240.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mclaren: Okay. If that is your view, why do you bother commenting here? If you see people as both stupid and ill informed, why bother?

  241. 241.

    david10

    @mclaren: Space elevator-we can barely supply one man in the space station, how will we get the equipment for the elkevator into space.
    Rail gun-a reverse meteor, burn it up getting OUT of the atmosphere.
    I pretty much gave up on science fiction because no matter how otherwise plausible, leaving the Earth was always pretty much-Then Johnny switched on the vroom-vroom drive and went to the moon.

  242. 242.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mclaren: Is Balloon Juice representative of the US population as a whole? You have said it isn’t by pointing out education stats. You refute yourself. Quelle fun.

  243. 243.

    mclaren

    @david10:

    Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. All that Heinlein crap of zooming into space for a moon holiday and the even sillier Larry Niven stuff about fusion torchships zipping off to Neptune in a week just never passed the straight-face test for technological or physics or engineering plausibility.

    The American manned space program was a classic example of human bravura and gusto and imagination crashing head-on into the hard realities of physics.

  244. 244.

    redshirt

    @david10: I think a rail gun could work if the cargo (non-living) could be packed in a manner to handle the acceleration. Like packed within a semi-solid gel?

    And that’s a good future for space travel. Fling the parts into space and then send some folks in an entirely different ship to put it together.

  245. 245.

    mclaren

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    The front-pagers seems to have advanced degrees. That doesn’t apply to the commenters AFAICT.

    As to the question “Why do you comment here if the American public is so ignorant?” that’s simple. I’m not about to let someone else’s ignorance control whether or not I can speak.

    It all goes back to Russell Baker’s classic 1972 essay “Being Right At the Wrong Time.” As Paul Krugman points out, Very Serious People are taken seriously because they are conventionally wrong rather than unconventionally right. The great sin is to violate the norms of the tribe, a gaffe known as Biga Pula in the Solomon Islands — viz., someone who makes the mistake of speaking out loud some fact everyone knows but which is taboo to mention publicly.

  246. 246.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mclaren: Dude, the commentariat here tends to skew over 40 and having an advanced degree or two. Read the fucking comments.

  247. 247.

    rikyrah

    @Chris:
    Yeah, I chuckled at that myself….them thinking that they would step to the NOI like that.
    Naw Son….the world doesn’t work like that.

  249. 249.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @redshirt: Rail guns wouldn’t be good for shoving things into orbit. 60,000 g’s is great for throwing fast, dumb shells at an enemy, not so good for lifting expensive stuff, and not for anything delicate or precisely fabricated.

    Fighting gravity is difficult, but finding ways to do it slower and more gently is probably the way to go (e.g. maybe something like airship to orbit).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  250. 250.

    mclaren

    @redshirt:

    If you do the math, air friction burns up so much of the delta-vee from a railgun acceleration that you need some kind of additional booster rocket on the capsule to get to orbital velocity. Heinlein’s spaceships used a railgun to accelerate partway into orbit along the side of Pike’s Peak, then a booster rocket ignited to get the rest of the way.

    Alas, the amount of energy required rises as the railgun gets longer due to air friction. You can reduce the rate of acceleration by lengthening the railgun, but for best results the railgun tube would have to be enclosed and evacuated to a near-vacuum. It’s just not very practical for a manned launch vehicle, since the Startram maglev project would produce enough electromagnetic radiation to blank out communications in several states.

    See Startram project here.

    This paper from the IEEE Transactions on Magnetics from 2003 found a suborbital railgun launch to be practical for unmanned satellites, though.

    http://simulationsllc.com/pdfs/resources/electromagnetic%20launcher%20propulsion/Launch%20to%20Space%20with%20and%20Electromagnetic%20Railgun.pdf

    The main virtue of the railgun system involves reducing the cost per payload pound. The author estimates a railgun launch payload cost of around $600 per kg instead of the current $10,000 per kg.

  251. 251.

    mclaren

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    Current military railguns use very high accelerations because the railgun itself must be short enough to fit on an aircraft carrier or Zumwalt-class destroyer. If you accelerate more slowly over a railgun that’s multiple kilometers long, you can get a very high muzzle velocity without super-high accelerations.

  253. 253.

    Callisto

    @mclaren:

    The front-pagers seems to have advanced degrees. That doesn’t apply to the commenters AFAICT.

    What is your advanced degree in?

  254. 254.

    mclaren

    Also check out this paper on “Low-cost launch system and orbital fuel depot” by Jerome Pearson of the U.S. Air Force Wright Patterson Aeronautical Laboratory, published in Acta Aeronautica in 1989.

    The numbers Pearson runs bang down payload costs to the vicinity of $10/kg. That’s impressive. You could build some serious stuctures in high earth orbit with that kind of payload cost.

  255. 255.

    Mnemosyne

    @amygdala:

    My idiot older brother got a swastika tattoo on his chest in his 20s. He was very embarrassed in his 50s to need heart surgery and realize that his doctor was Jewish.

    He was at least smart enough to apologize and say it was an old tattoo that he now regretted.

  257. 257.

    Mnemosyne

    @mclaren:

    So your mom decided to support a short-sighted proposition that froze property taxes for both residential and commercial properties, caused a massive housing shortage that has only gotten worse over the years, and crashed the state’s education system from the top to almost the bottom just to save a few dollars on her own taxes?

    Yeah, that sounds about right.

  259. 259.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @mclaren: From the abstract of your PDF link:

    For launch to orbit, even long launchers (> 1000 m) would need to operate at accelerations > 1000 gees to reach the required velocities, so that it would only be possible to launch rugged payloads, such as fuel, water, and material.

    According to Wikipedia, limited human tests at ~ 46 g’s (with eye damage) have been demonstrated.

    Making rails “muliple km long” introduces lots of other complications (curvature of the earth, ensuring sufficient precision in the straightness and parallel-ness under the heating (induced by the very large electric currents), etc.) And at the end of the rail, the load still has to have reached escape velocity (~ 11 km/s) unless the load has its own motor (then you still have the issue with fuel, etc.).

    These aren’t simple problems.

    As I said, railguns aren’t the way to go for putting delicate stuff into orbit.

    HTH.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  261. 261.

    redshirt

    @Mnemosyne:

    Apparently so. Or at least a dumbass who thought it would be funny to get a swastika tattoo when he was drunk.

    I mean, none of us have been there, but I guess with some exception.

  263. 263.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne:
    To be honest many, many people were having their tax bills enlarged substantially every year as assessors raised property taxes due to real estate speculation and just the cost of property due to many areas being built out or close to it. Including me. It was understandable, and very short sighted in how prop 13 was sold. Jarvis was an enormous asshole.

  264. 264.

    Mnemosyne

    @redshirt:

    There are many reasons none of us speak to him anymore, but unfortunately you don’t get to pick your relatives.

  266. 266.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ruckus:

    No, I get that it was sold as a rescue for retirees and no one bothered to read the fine print, but that’s kind of my point — no one bothered to read the fine print and realize it was going to benefit corporations and businesses far, far more than homeowners. But I may just be bitter because I know there’s no way we’ll ever be able to buy a home in California thanks to the people who screwed us over when I was 9 years old.

  267. 267.

    Ruckus

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
    As I said, railguns aren’t the way to go for putting delicate stuff into orbit.
    And of course most everything that goes into space is in this context delicate stuff. To be strong enough for railgun use it has to be heavier than otherwise, making the task that much more difficult. The cost of building everyday things for use in space is already very expensive and difficult, adding the need to overbuild just to survive the first 60 miles would doom the entire idea.

  269. 269.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @redshirt: The Navy has been working on railguns for at least 20 years:

    The Electromagnetic Railgun INP was initiated in 2005. The goal during Phase I, a proof-of-concept demonstration at 32 mega-joule muzzle energy, has been achieved. A future weapon system at this energy level would be capable of launching a 100+ nautical mile projectile. This launch energy has the advantage of being able to stress many components to evaluate full-scale mechanical and electromagnetic forces.

    32 MJ is same energy as 11 pounds of C4 explosive. It’s tiny for moving something into orbit. (1 kg at 11 km/s = 60.5 MJ)

    The technology isn’t there yet for even using it as a deployed weapon, and there’s no conceivable rationale for trying to get it there for lifting stuff to orbit. It doesn’t make sense. Railguns have great potential for high-energy guns, not for lifting stuff.

    HTH.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  270. 270.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne:
    Oh I get that. I was looking to purchase a home in CA when prop 13 happened. It wasn’t only retirees that had a problem it was everyone. But prop 13 was the wrong way to deal with the issue then and still is, as is obvious from your comments and from the destruction it has caused to what was a nicer place to live. It also gave a green light to the idea that we shouldn’t have to pay taxes, that very thing that gives us a nice place to live, nice schools, nice roads, clean water, clean air and that everything would be OK if we just wanted it to be. But it was a compelling story to people who didn’t want to know the nuts and bolts of government, they just wanted the benefits, without it costing them anything. And that’s not even a fair telling as most people didn’t mind paying what they perceived to be a fair price. But the cost of government was not going up as fast as the property tax rates were. There was greed on all sides in this argument.

  271. 271.

    ? Martin

    @mclaren:

    The main virtue of the railgun system involves reducing the cost per payload pound. The author estimates a railgun launch payload cost of around $600 per kg instead of the current $10,000 per kg.

    If we can get reliable reusable rockets, that should come down to $1000/kg.

    The current rockets are really minimally viable rockets with just enough engineering in them to make them slightly reusable. If they can get this process down, the next step would be to build (comparatively) over-engineered rockets that are designed for multiple launches. The cost of fuel is minimal (< $400/kg) The key will be to design a fully reusable rocket that is designed for extended lifetime and cheap turnaround. The shuttle was envisioned as that thing, but never got close to it.

    The advantage to this approach is that you have a great deal more flexibility and control over launch than a railgun. Railguns could work if you were constantly launching into a single orbit, but that's rarely true. The cost of changing an orbit inclination can be as high as the cost of launch, so retasking a satellite in that way is completely impractical.

  273. 273.

    Darkrose

    @Ruckus: I absolutely agree with you. The problem, at least in CA, is that there’s a disconnect, with voters saying “I don’t want my taxes raised to pay for schools/road repair/etc” and then complaining when state schools are bad, public university tuition is so high that out-of-state students are getting preferential admissions because they’ll pay full ride and the roads are crumbling.

    In Sacramento, there’s the added foolishness of people complaining about lazy, overpaid state workers when not only do state employees pay taxes like everyone else, but this city would go back to being a cow town were it not for the state workers who spend their paychecks in all the amazing restaurants and local businesses here. And of course, those same people whining in the Bee conveniently forget that the highest paid state workers are the UCLA and Cal football and men’s basketball coaches.

  274. 274.

    Ruckus

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
    In the early 70s I watched missiles being launched that achieved Mach1 in their own length, using solid propellants. Their top speed being about Mach 1.8. Your link discusses launch speeds in the order of Mach 6. That’s a rather large increase. And the concept given that it would get rid of explosives on board ship seems rather disingenuous as what ever is being thrown at the enemy would have high explosives. Otherwise you are just throwing very fast rocks.

  275. 275.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Ruckus:

    Otherwise you are just throwing very fast rocks.

    Very fast rocks. ;-) YouTube (1:13)

    The acceleration is such that (AFAIK) only a solid projectile can survive the launch.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  276. 276.

    Ruckus

    @Darkrose:
    That disconnect is everywhere, not just in CA. There has been (and maybe always has been) put forth for the last 40-50 yrs that taxes are only used for things that the collective you doesn’t want. And of course that gets eaten up like free ice cream because people think that if only taxes were lower I’d be rich. And with many rich now paying a lower rate than the middle class and many corporations paying no federal income taxes the middle class may be closest to being correct.
    Taxes are the cost of a society, free or otherwise. They have to be somewhat fair, those with the least paying the least and those with the most paying the most but everyone except those at the very bottom paying something. Yes some of those at the bottom use more services, but those in the middle and above really would not want to live under the conditions that people at the bottom do. And if those services were really done well instead of a range of not at all to just below adequate there wouldn’t be as many people down there. But our friends on the right want those people to just die, so they won’t have to give a shit. Which strangely enough they don’t seem to anyway.

  277. 277.

    ? Martin

    @Darkrose:

    public university tuition is so high that out-of-state students are getting preferential admissions because they’ll pay full ride and the roads are crumbling.

    That’s simply not true.

    The CA legislature funds a specific number of students. Every one of those seats is filled by a CA resident. We lose our subsidy if they aren’t.

    Beyond what the state will pay, we will admit non-resident, but we started doing that when the state cut the per-student subsidy (by nearly ⅓) and we were losing money on every student. The non-resident student funds largely went into financial aid (between ⅓ and ½ of tuition dollars are returned to financial aid, depending on the public university) and much of the rest went into capital expansion – building classrooms that should the state decide to increase in-state attendance (which they are doing – adding 10,000 CA residents to UC) will already have been paid for.

    There has never been a case where a non-resident student denied an in-state student a seat. Now, there would probably be in-state students willing to pay non-resident tuition to attend if the subsidies had run out, but there is no mechanism to do that, which is unfortunate.

  278. 278.

    Ruckus

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
    Oh I agree that only something solid and non explosive would work but then you have to be very, very accurate at hitting the target, and there are many, many things that the shooter is not in control of if launching rocks. If you do hit the target with that very, very fast rock you are going to do some damage, but I don’t think that is readily doable. Even in the 70s with much slower speeds the missile path had to be corrected and smart bombs are because they can aim themselves using GPS or laser guidance. How do you do that with a rock?

  279. 279.

    prob50

    @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:

    Turns out “Blazzing Saddles” was a documentary.

    Including the Governor’s, too. Mike Pence – what can one say but, “Eeewww”?

    Remember, Mel Brooks’s Governor’s, “Work,work,work,work, work”, bit.

  280. 280.

    Trakker

    @Ked: I grew up in Elkhart. I worked in a factory after high school in the 60s There was still some Klan members back then. I left in ’74 and even though my family still lives there I never visit because every conversation ends in shouting. I mean how can one have a discussion with people who respond with, “But the Bible says…”??

  281. 281.

    pseudonymous in nc

    One of the many remarkable things about President Obama and his administration is the extent to which he has deliberately assisted groups and communities while knowing that there’s very little direct political benefit, and often a political cost. Yeah, Blazing Saddles.

  283. 283.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Ruckus: From the earlier links:

    160 km range at Mach 7 (2.4 km/s) = 67 s – yeah you wouldn’t want to use it against something moving from that far away. But something closer, well…

    And they are thinking about smart projectiles.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  284. 284.

    Darkrose

    @? Martin: Okay, I’m wrong. I didn’t know that the lege actually subsidized a certain number of CA students; I just know that there always seemed to be roughly the same number of places (~5000) for the freshman class at Davis, but every year the President’s office touted the increase in the number of out-of-state and international student admissions, and Katehi was constantly talking about how they wanted even more international students. My perception was definitely that they were heavily courting diversity, where diversity meant “not from California” and also “not African-American or Chicano.”

  285. 285.

    Darkrose

    @Ruckus: It hurts my brain. “Get Government Out Of My Medicare!” Social Security is fine for me because I paid into it, but Those People obviously didn’t. The revolution won’t happen as long as the majority of voters are convinced that they’re one lucky break away from joining the hallowed ranks of the Job Creators and that until that happens they’re going to shit on everyone else.

  286. 286.

    ? Martin

    @redshirt:

    @? Martin: Secondary rockets after railgun launch.

    That works for boosting orbit and for small changes in inclination, but for larger changes in inclination it’s simply too expensive. For example, the last SpaceX launch was almost 180 degrees from what a ISS launch would be. Do do that in orbit would require, effectively, stopping and turning around. Not only would it be cheaper to land and relaunch, it’d be nearly impossible to launch with enough fuel to do the trajectory change.

    You always choose a launch azimuth that will put you as close as possible to your target inclination because changing inclination requires burning normal to your intended inclination – you are simultaneously burning against your heading and burning to maintain overall velocity in order to maintain altitude. A 90 degree inclination change is more expensive than the launch cost. That’s why most ISS intercept launches have an instantaneous launch window – you have a single moment when the inclined plane of the station intercepts the rotational plane of your launch location. Miss it, and you’re not just behind the ISS, but you’re also in the wrong plane and you almost certainly don’t have the fuel to do that inclination change.

  288. 288.

    PatrickG

    @? Martin:

    There has never been a case where a non-resident student denied an in-state student a seat.

    In-state vs. out-of-state admissions to the UC system is complex, and I think we’re most likely coming from the same place… Just a preface in case a hasty comment comes across badly. Disclaimer aside:

    There was a rather damning audit* recently, which rather emphatically showed both a relaxed admission standard for and dramatic increase in rate of acceptance of out-of-state applicants. This is coupled with a dramatic capital construction project over the last decade or so to significantly increase capacity in the UC system.

    The state funding may not be specifically allocated for in-state residents, but the capacity is there. In fact, the UC system at large has been aggressively expanding that capacity, then filling the space with out-of-state students. For clearly pecuniary reasons.

    In terms of funding stream from the State, your statement is true. But we could be using increased capacity for in-state students. Alternately, we could be using funds dedicated to increasing capacity to prioritizing in-state admissions. We’re not. I don’t think your statement holds water given the priorities demonstrated. If the mission of the UC system is to provide higher education to California residents, out-of-state students are emphatically taking resources away from in-state students.

    That said, I think that restricting admission to premier institutions based on state residence is a ridiculous system in these United States, but that’s an entirely different subject. :)

    Finally, please insert a boilerplate comment about administrative bloat here. Obviously that’s quite relevant to the issue at hand, and a strong motivator to prioritize more lucrative students.

    Signed,
    A BJ reader with an advanced engineering degree (fuck off, mclaren!)

    * It’s Saturday night, which means I didn’t link directly to the audit because whiskey.

  290. 290.

    PatrickG

    So BJ moderation allows ASSLaw through, but apparently my post about UC admissions was beyond the pale.

    Thanks Obama!

    ETA: Short version was @Martin, referencing the recent audit showing the UC system lowering standards to prioritize more lucrative students in a time of capacity expansion. Hard to argue that in-state admissions aren’t impacted by that, IMO.

  291. 291.

    Ruckus

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
    I’m also ashamed to be white because I get associated with the racists, etc. But I also know that like anyone else, I don’t control what other people who look like me do or think. I can try to enlighten them, I can try to get them to see what’s in front of them but I’m not responsible for adults that act like or are ignorant assholes just because I look superficially like them. I can try to change the arc of the future but I’m also not responsible for the humans that came before me. Even if I look like them or speak like them or my family is descended from assholes, I’m not responsible for them. I am responsible for me, for how I leave my very tiny place in the world, for how hard I tried to make it better. Or not.
    That to me is why society is so important. One of us can not make much of a difference, even a president, but together we can. Hopefully we try to improve it, make it a better place than we found it, being part of that is what I am responsible for.

  292. 292.

    ? Martin

    @Darkrose:

    I didn’t know that the lege actually subsidized a certain number of CA students; I just know that there always seemed to be roughly the same number of places (~5000) for the freshman class at Davis, but every year the President’s office touted the increase in the number of out-of-state and international student admissions, and Katehi was constantly talking about how they wanted even more international students. My perception was definitely that they were heavily courting diversity, where diversity meant “not from California” and also “not African-American or Chicano.”

    The legislature funds a very specific number of seats, and we fill every single one. How they are distributed between the campuses is a bit of a story, driven by specific campus goals as well as constraints. There’s also some variation in terms of freshmen, transfers, and graduate students. Davis is pretty limited on growth due to concerns from the city that they can support additional campus growth. Santa Barbara is also constrained by the city and the SCAQMD. Berkeley is just out of space. Growth at LA is possible but very expensive.

    The legislature has not funded growth of Cal-res (California Resident), even though application growth has been through the roof. It’s infuriating to us that we have to deny so many residents. We need the international students because that’s how everything gets built, where new faculty get hired.

    If anyone says diversity, they most definitely do not mean non-resident. Diversity is shorthand for ‘Cal-res and low-income, first-generation, or low opportunity to learn’. It effectively means african american, native american, chicano/latino in a statistical sense. In a real sense it means geographic diversity – more students from the central valley, from the desert, etc. A fair number of those kids are white but they come from communities where college is not routine. But put another way, it means that kids from high-achieving (eg wealthy) communities have to work a lot harder to get into a UC. We call it broadly ‘eligibility in the local context’. That’s both a specific program where the top 4% of students from every high school are guaranteed admissions to one of the UC campuses (not necessarily the campus or major of their choice, however), but it also means that students are largely evaluated in the context of their community. If they came from a school with no AP courses, they are likely to be admitted ahead of a kid with a few AP courses who came from a school with dozens offered. The idea is that students aren’t penalized for growing up in a shitty school district.

    The problem the UCs are facing isn’t how to decide which students are qualified to attend. We have more of those than we know what to do with. The state would need to double the number of subsidies to capture every qualified cal-res student. The problem is determining who we will say no to, and why. We denied 25,000 qualified students just from my mid-tier campus.

    And lest anyone question the fairness of the system, this year I denied my own son. We take this seriously and it is painfully difficult to do.

  293. 293.

    ? Martin

    @PatrickG:

    ETA: Short version was @Martin, referencing the recent audit showing the UC system lowering standards to prioritize more lucrative students in a time of capacity expansion. Hard to argue that in-state admissions aren’t impacted by that, IMO.

    I worked on that report, btw. It was complete bullshit – a pretty blatant effort by the legislature to divert public anger from them to the campuses.

    Just an example – the first year of the study showed that the international students on my campus had much lower GPAs than the cal-res. Well, there were 112 of them, compared to 5200 cal-res, and their GPAs were lower because students outside of the US don’t have weighted honors and AP courses. AP is a US thing, and is more common in California than many other states. My average admitted GPA for cal-res this year is a 4.22. The highest an international student can score is a 4.0, and that assumes that you can accurately normalize the different grading systems. They cannot be compared in many of the ways people expect. But how could 112 students (2% of the class) have had such a distortive effect? There were so many opportunities in the report to give perspective that were never taken.

    If we cut the non-resident populations, we’d simply have fewer students, not more Cal-res. We’d also have fewer programs since most of our academic program expansion in the last 5 years has come from the international growth. My campus added nursing directly off of that money. We desperately need nursing programs in CA and a bunch of extra kids from China studying economics paid for it. The Governor came through with more subsidies this year, and we’re cutting international to take cal-res. Pretty clear cause and effect there.

  294. 294.

    PatrickG

    @? Martin:

    I haven’t critically read either the report or the rebuttal — my moderation-trapped comment stressed that, while my shorter version didn’t. I’m fully in agreement that the basic problem is a sustained lack of adequate funding by the state across decades, but it’s difficult to disentangle these issues from other structural problems (e.g. administrative bloat, seemingly crazed capital construction improvement projects*).

    What I’m going to be looking for is how much of the money Chinese kids studying economics actually went directly to needed programs, scholarship subsidies, etc. and how much went to increased salaries for provosts and functionaries. I got .. a bit cynical in my UC PhD program. Of course, grad students being treated poorly and feeling resentful is par for the course. :)

    If my comments come across as combative, not my intent (and probably because of the few nips of rum as well). Pretty sure I said that in my moderated comment as well!

    * Some of which were absolutely necessary, but I will never forgive Cal for painting Evans Hall those grotesque pastel shades. One simply does not paint an enormous concrete block fucking pink and green.

  295. 295.

    Ruckus

    @? Martin:
    It is great to hear from someone on the inside how the CA higher ed system works. Probably a very small percentage of residents know how the system works overall, let alone details. And given that the leg wants to blame someone else for all the problems……
    It’s much the same way with anything economic. It was and is that way with the prop 13 mess, why and how we got into it and why it’s stayed this way for so long. It’s that way with the states that didn’t take the Medicaid expansion, they are paying more and helping fewer. Or the idea that lower taxes on the wealthy will increase jobs instead of their bank accounts. Or that tRump is a brilliant business person because he has money. They leave out that he started with what was a pretty good chunk and has turned it into less than a simple investment would have. Well now that I say it that way I see that according to RWNJ logic he is brilliant. He made money by being stupid. That’s 100% in accordance with their ideals.

    It must be late I strayed off topic much quicker than usual.

  296. 296.

    Ruckus

    @PatrickG:
    One simply does not paint an enormous concrete block fucking pink and green.

    Hey! It’s different isn’t it? OK it’s very badly different but at least is isn’t beige is it?

    ETA I owned a house in CA that had a HOA. Every house was one of 4 shades of beige. I moved to OH and bought a blue house. I didn’t know those existed.

  297. 297.

    PatrickG

    @Ruckus:

    I WISH they’d painted Evans Hall beige! Or maybe a beautiful sky blue.

    Evans Hall was Cal’s tribute to Brutalist architecture. A dull grey rectangular cuboid stretching to the sky, causing everyone within five miles to spontaneously exclaim “What an eyesore!”

    Then they painted it lime green to “match the hills”, and everyone got an object lesson in how things can always get worse. It did get repainted again to a more muted green. Of course, that was better than the scary period when chunks of concrete were falling from ten floors up. Ah, memories… I spent a lot of time in that hall, as you may have gathered. :)

    It’s a good thing I never had a point, otherwise I would feel bad for not making it. Bed is clearly indicated, and thank you for your indulgence.

  298. 298.

    ? Martin

    @PatrickG:

    What I’m going to be looking for is how much of the money Chinese kids studying economics actually went directly to needed programs, scholarship subsidies, etc. and how much went to increased salaries for provosts and functionaries. I got .. a bit cynical in my UC PhD program. Of course, grad students being treated poorly and feeling resentful is par for the course. :)

    The current financial aid return for my campus is just under 40%. The international students my campus takes are self-supporting – that is, they don’t touch the financial aid pool, but nearly 40% of their tuition goes back into that pool to help, typically, low-income (<$80K household) cal-res students.

    In my most specific case, I'm building out a pile of new instructional facilities. A number of these are focused on collaborative design work and manufacturing. Half the equipment in the facilities didn't exist on the market 10 years ago, but is commonplace now. There's a difficult technological shift we are trying to go through – and it's difficult because there is not consensus on how far to go (I'm in the camp pushing forward the hardest). We're trying to advance to hybrid and online classes. These are easy to do poorly, and lots of universities do it poorly. We're trying to do it well – some courses lend themselves very well to it, others can work better in this format, but require different infrastructure than we've traditionally built.

    There is a challenge on administrator bloat, but that too is complicated. Because of the cut in state funding, we were forced to explore new revenue channels. Some of that was actually helpful – forcing us to do things we probably should have been doing all along, but any time you push into a new market you need to spend ahead of revenue. My division added 3 new units – new administrators – and pretty expensive ones too. This year they will probably break even – having brought in enough money to have paid off everything we've dumped into the unit. Next year they'll be profitable – and we'll use that money to hire new faculty and update some more instructional spaces. But that took 4 years. And one of those programs was an international program where a foreign government is paying us substantially above the non-resident rate to take their students. We're taking in USC money for those students and using the profits from that specific program as seed money to build a program with the VA to train veterans in advanced manufacturing.

    What people fail to understand about a lot of government programs – we don't have the same ability to raise capital as companies do. We can't typically issue a bond or stock to raise money. We have to either rely on gifts or carve out bits of money from existing programs. The US and state taxpayers are unbearably risk adverse (behold the continuing cries of Solyndra) but foreign governments and individuals are not. We would much rather not have to build out infrastructure to pull these dollars in – taxpayer money doesn't require a lot of high-paid administrators to acquire, but it's not showing up. As a result, we have infrastructure that looks a lot like an election campaign. We used to just be faculty and some staff that could turn state dollars into classrooms and bunsen burners and such. It was efficient. 94% of our budget isn't state dollars. It costs a lot to get those other dollars. Its extremely inefficient, but we come out ahead in the end. None of us like it.

  300. 300.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @? Martin:

    94% of our budget isn’t state dollars.

    Virginia is in the same boat. UVA gets ~ 5.6% of its operating budget from Virginia state appropriations.

    Given the huge drop in state funding over the decades, it’s kinda nonsensical for state schools to really be called “state schools” any more. The legislatures put up so little money, but the schools still have to suffer the various constraints imposed by them in return.

    It’s so short sighted. My father’s generation was able to go to great schools (even private schools) for relatively little money and didn’t have much if any debt on graduation. California is the perfect example of what happens when a state had a strong college and university system (Stanford, Berkeley, etc., made HP, Fairchild, Intel, Oracle, etc., possible). Strangling affordable university educational opportunities is eating our seed-corn…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  301. 301.

    henqiguai

    @Mnemosyne(#53):

    In general, I don’t like the advice for Black folks to start open carrying because I worry it will get them accidentally shot by nervous cops

    “…accidentally shot by the cops…” would be a concern only if breathing while black weren’t already in play. Regardless, I seem to recall talk of even Dr. King beginning to think some of the response advocated by Malcolm X having some merit, given the intransigence and violence peaceful demonstrators were experiencing.

  302. 302.

    J R in WV

    @Ruckus:

    One thing to correct. I’m retired, just turned 65 and started receiving Social Security benefits. I do not work, I am retired. I still pay the IRS income tax on every F’in dollar of Social Security benefits I receive. And pay a premium for Medicare out of that benefit as well. And a premium for a Medicare supplemental policy as well.

    So your assumption that people who don’t work for anyone also don’t pay income tax on their Social Security is wrong. No offense, just saying what it is.

  303. 303.

    henqiguai

    @Adam L Silverman(#148): Dead thread, yeah, I know, but —

    @MomDoc: If I remember correctly didn’t the doctor that invented the process for separating blood from plasma die because he bled out after a car accident. The hospital they took him too wouldn’t give white blood to an African American man.

    Dr. Charles R. Drew — name of my elementary school back in DC.

  304. 304.

    henqiguai

    @smith(#159):

    According to Wikipedia, the story of him [ed. Dr. Charles Drew] being refused a transfusion is false, but was disseminated via the TV show MASH, so still in wide circulation.

    Nope. Wikipedia wrote “once repeated on an episode of the hit TV series M*A*S*H”. If it’s still in wide circulation it’s because, especially in the ole Confederacy, Blacks were routinely denied medical attention in hospitals. And it’s possibly still an article of faith in Black communities; certainly, that was the story told when I was at Chas. R. Drew Elementary School, long, long before either the movie or the television show.

  305. 305.

    Ruckus

    @J R in WV:
    Know about the Medicare costs and how Medicare for all would be an eye opener for lots of people who think it’s 100% provided health care. I have the VA so I declined the paid for Dr visit coverage. If the VA goes away or gets drastically cut back by the right, I’m screwed. But I figure if they get away with that Medicare is going away as well. And with working I make enough that I have copays for any visits, hospitalizations, meds, everything. It can add up.
    If I only get SS I don’t receive enough to pay federal tax. Wasn’t trying to say SS alone isn’t taxed. Sorry I didn’t make that clear.

Comments are closed.