The legislation passed in dramatic fashion, approved on an overwhelming voice vote by lawmakers who’d been forced to return to Washington by a GOP colleague who had insisted on a quorum being present. Some lawmakers came from New York and other places where residents are supposed to be sheltering at home.
The procedural move by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) drew bipartisan fury, including from Trump who derided him over Twitter as a “grandstander” who should be tossed out of the Republican Party.
Massie, who opposes the legislation because it adds to the deficit, insisted over Twitter that he’d “sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution” and was simply doing his duty. The Constitution specifies that a quorum — or majority of the House — should be present for legislative business, but that is rarely enforced.
Anticipating Massie’s move, leaders of both parties had urged lawmakers to return to the Capitol if they could, and many reluctantly complied, boarding red-eyes or early flights, or in some cases embarking on long drives. Some came from New York even though people there have been urged to quarantine for 14 days if they leave.
With Rand and Mitch as Senators, Kentucky was already well in the running for most assholic Congressional delegation, but Massie puts them #1 with a bullet.
Llelldorin
When your competition is Inhofe and Lankford, that’s a hard-won victory.
chopper
lol at “bbbut it adds to the deficit!” sorry dogg the horse is outta the barn on that one.
Leto
Is there something in the water, in Kentucky, that helps produce this many assholes?
chopper
also, today’s my birthday. birthday under “lockdown” is kinda weird.
Baud
@chopper: Happy birthday!
trollhattan
The pettiness directive shall be retained in force, no matter what.
trollhattan
@chopper:
Depends on who holds the keys. ;-)
CaseyL
@chopper: Even wierder because the Happy Birthday song is the (unofficial?) anthem for anti-virus handwashing.
Happy Birthday! Hope you have a very good day, even in these circumstances.
Brachiator
Trump called someone a “grandstander?”
Grandstanding, with a flourish of pettiness.
satby
@chopper: Happy Birthday chopper!
NotMax
@chopper
Happy happy!
Mai naem mobile
Massie is an MIT grad. He’s got an interesting background. I just want to ask Tom Levenson why MIT graduates so many assholes. James Woods, the Kochs, Massie and Joe Kernen a Trump sycophant host on CNBC. I know Yale and Harvard have their assholes but I would have thought MIT would have fewer assholes because it’s way more of a science based education than the average college.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator:
He wasn’t wrong.
God, I need a shower.
Mai naem mobile
@chopper: Happy Birthday Chopper. I wonder if Safeway would deliver a birthday cake?
Anne Laurie
Don’t say that too loudly — we don’t wanna give Texas any ideas!
Since I can’t manage emojis, you’ll have to use your imagination, but here’s an attempt at a ‘drive-by celebration’ in pixels:
{Honk}HAPPY!! {Honk}BIRTHDAY!!! {HonkHonkHonk}CHOPPER!
… and may all the happy returns be under better circumstances!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Mai naem mobile:
Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met were smart engineers.
Archon
It’s almost like Massie forgot the Republican pact that deficits are only concerns when Democrats are in power.
NotMax
OT.
Fan of Duck Soup from the brothers Marx? In some ways a dry run for that, the W. C. Fields vehicle (although he doesn’t get top billing) Million Dollar Legs on TCM at 8 p.m. Eastern.
We now return you to Mediscare For All.
Calouste
@trollhattan: Good thing no Democrats were invited, because there will be no social distancing at the signing event, and there will be people who have been in recent contact with someone who tested positive for the corona virus (i.e. Rand Paul).
Brian
@Mai naem mobile:
The undergraduates tends to be achievers or self entitled legacies.
trollhattan
@Mai naem mobile:
My brother is a perfectly fine human, just has a quirky set of social skills. I don’t remember MIT breaking him, just creating more living space for me when he took off to go there.
Sample size: 1
joel hanes
@Leto:
something in the water ?
Something in the history.
Kent
I’ll raise you Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert.
trollhattan
@Calouste:
Right? Nancy SMASH turned 80 and the last thing she/we need is to be making photo-ops with virus-dredged Republicans.
John Revolta
IOW, everybody knows what an asshole this guy is and doubtless hates his guts. Yes, KY seems to breed a particularly toxic strain of asshole. I’ve seen it firsthand.
Mai naem mobile
@Brachiator: he’s been pretty along. When they had the meeting at the WH after the Parkland shooting they had Marco Rubio there but not Bill Nelson. This week Mnuchin in his interviews praises the Senate and McCarthy but not Pelosi. He doesn’t like strong women – that’s the other piece of this ofcourse.
I just think this shit is really bad long term. There are people whose family members are going to die because this asshole is playing his red v blue game. Does the GOP realize many survivors are going to carry this hatred of the other side around with them. We are talking Jews vs Arabs and Indians vs Pakistanis kind of generational hate.
robmassing
L.A.Times story called Massie a “maverick.” Argh.
John Revolta
@Mai naem mobile: MIT is the Ivy League for nerds and knowitalls. Draw your own conclusions.
Kent
Don’t forget about Jeffrey Epstein and the MIT Media Lab
PsiFighter37
GOP going to do what it going to do. Color me unsurprised.
Sister Golden Bear
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Some of the people with the least social skills I’ve ever met were smart engineers.
Combine that and….
FWIW, having numerous engineers among my relatives, there do seem be a number of engineers who assume that because they’ve mastered one complex subject area, that they’re equally expert in other areas that they haven’t a clue about. Combine that with an all-too-prevalent binary thinking-style of “I’m right, you (non-engineer) are not” attitude, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for clueless assholery. Obligatory #notallengineers
Kent
The center of his district is Covington, home of the famous MAGA teens.
NotMax
@John Revolta
Also too, RPI.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@chopper:
Many Jackal good birthday wishes to you! Eat cake for us
Eric U.
Wegmans had lifted most restrictions on items from 1 to 2, and removed them on some. Unfortunately, one they removed was condensed milk, so people had wiped out the low-cost items. Still no toilet paper though.
It’s amazing how positive these small improvements made me feel
Peale
Whether or not you believe their numbers, it really is rather clear that the Chinese Communist Party, home of the Great Leap Forward, the Social Revolution, environmental catastrophes, and various other mischief actually cares about its population more than Capitalist Conservatives and their Evangelical Christian minions ever will.
Kent
My wife (a physician) says the same thing about doctors. At least male doctors.
When we lived in Texas she had a SHITLOAD of male GOP doctor colleagues who never could figure out why their paychecks and bonuses went down when Texas failed to expand Medicaid under the ACA. The dumbfuckery runs deep down there.
Kent
Watched a Russian movie about the siege of Lenningrad the other day. You wanna talk about deprivation. I found it interesting that the workers and solders were always being fed pancakes. I was thinking, what’s with these Russians and all the pancakes? Then it occurred to me that the simplest and easiest way to make a meal out of a bag of flour is pancakes. Much easier and faster than baking bread. Especially for soldiers and workers in camps.
MattF
@Mai naem mobile: Ah, no. Story: I was rejected by MIT for college— they reject lots of people, so I wasn’t devastated, but I still wondered why… And then one day, I met Mildred Dresselhouse, a very famous MIT physicist, who had been (I think) Dean of Admissions. I asked her about it, and she answered, good-naturedly, that my verbal SAT score was too high. “People like you don’t do well at MIT,” she said.
raven
@Kent: They boiled their belts and ate them too.
Martin
Re MIT: There’s an interesting phenomena in ethics courses, shows up a LOT in engineering ethics, where the focus is too much on ethical issues around adhering to regulations rather than on the ethics of the regulations themselves. A lot of engineers assume a sort of collective-perfect regulation development process and aren’t taught that politics is part of the process, and politics may give them regulations designed to hurt people, not help them. So there tends to be a kind of deference to authority for rules that are seemingly well intentioned without enough effort put into whether the ethical thing to do is not follow the rule (consider that a pretty immediate path to getting fired is not following the rule, body count be damned). That holds for economics, procedures, regulations, etc.
Some of that is inherent in some of these professions. Somebody needs to design the guillotine, the bomb, the oven to shove people into and you need to set up a system where they won’t question it, otherwise they won’t design it. Just as soldiers are taught to instinctively shoot at a paper outline of a person so they won’t waste time thinking about whether it’s paper of flesh, engineers are taught to design to the detailed regulations for the oven so they won’t waste time thinking about what goes into it.
NotMax
@Kent
Blinis traditional Russian and Ukrainian comfort food.
Redshift
@trollhattan:
It’s not just pettiness, it’s making sure that only people who support him are in the news photo of “people who got this done.” As usual, he wants all the credit despite having done nothing except stay out of the way and not torpedo the negotiations.
ciotogist
Did Massie vote for the 2017 tax bill?
Peale
@ciotogist: Yes
Bard the Grim
@Mai naem mobile: As an MIT grad, I’d suggest that MIT has fewer assholes per capita than most institutions. It’s just that they tend to be more impactful assholes.
chris
@chopper: Happy birthday! And many more!
NotMax
@Redshift
Did the cameras zoom in on him Sharpie-ing in “and $1 billion for Junior” before signing?
//
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
Who want to go anyway? Apparently the WH seems like one big virus cluster since that Pence staffer tested positive
Ohio Mom
Kent: After many years of being a patient, my policy now is women doctors only. Because they listen.
Not that there aren’t men doctors who listen but the chances of finding one is smaller. In my experience.
Brachiator
Unofficial but useful, perhaps
Stimulus Check Calculator
Sab
@Leto: Watch the Film Harlan County War about the coal wars. Rural Kentucky government is so screwed up and corrupt that voters cannot trust anyone so they don’t. West Virginia has the same problem.
Another Scott
Possible repost from someone else here.
Thread:
tl;dr – Polarization is going to make Donnie’s floor 43% (when it should be about 5% with the tremendous damage he’s done and doing), but if GOP voters start breaking, then he has a long, long way to fall.
Eyes on the prizes.
Cheers,
Scott.
chopper
@CaseyL:
well i’m sitting back with a nice glass of whisky so things could be a lot worse.
Martin
Boy, you’re misreading that by a lot. China is perfectly happy to turn their population into chum when it benefits them (go ask any Uyghur). But China has a strategic plan for their economy and role on the world stage, one that necessitates not having their population drop dead of something they can prevent. They don’t fucking care about the next quarterly earnings statement, they care about who will be the top global power in 20 years and that’s what governs their actions.
The US doesn’t care about its people or whether we’re the top global power. We only care about the next quarterly statement and the next election.
The US emerged from WWII as the only relatively untouched major economy and we coasted on that for 20 years. China’s economy is pretty much back where it was 3 months ago. We’ll be lucky to be able to say that 18 months from now, as will everyone other than Taiwan and South Korea. They aren’t coasting. Respect for human life has nothing to do with it.
Martin
@Ohio Mom: Been my policy for a long time. Except for the Sikh doctor who took care of my broken foot. He was awesome.
J R in WV
@Kent:
But Jeff never attended MIT, he just pretended. Like he pretended to be a Hahvad man. Never graduated from any school of higher learning, ever. Just Trump U of grift and blackmail.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I doubt that will help them when the effects of climate change take their toll around the same time. Xi Jinping has only weakened the Chinese system. In fact, isn’t true the outbreak only got as bad as it did in China because of the PRC’s structural and ideological problems?
dmsilev
@Mai naem mobile: (re: MIT). I was a student there and like to think that I turned out as an ok human being (please don’t shatter my cherished illusions…). However, a highly STEM-focused education does have the potential risk of turning out people who look at the world entirely as a mechanical system that can be described by equations. Such people, once they form beliefs of how the world works, cling *hard* to them (because the math _can’t_ be wrong…).
Subsole
@chopper: Happy Birthday!
Kattails
@chopper: Well have a happy birthday anyway, dammit. I will sing happy birthday to you and the present will be that you can’t hear it…
@NotMax: “Mediscare for All” made me chortle, thanks.
hedgehog mobile
@chopper: Happy happy!
Martin
@Another Scott: Anyone who doesn’t think that this colossal fuck-up won’t drive traditional non-voters to vote in November are missing the bigger story.
Trumps 43% base is going to get fucking rolled by a wave of apathetic voters suddenly really, really pissed off and eager to pull a lever. If anyone needed a narrative for why voting matters, a massive death count will give you one.
NotMax
@Martin
Sikh and ye shall bind.
:)
Subsole
@trollhattan: God I cannot wait to vote that fucking mutant out in November.
mrmoshpotato
@chopper:
The only response is, “Fuck you! Repeal your tax scam, and retroactively tax the shit out of the rich, greedy bastards!”
raven
@Ohio Mom: Me too, I had a gp who had been a Marine infantry office in the Nam and he was a total fucking asshole. I finally said “why and I doing this”??Now Dr Jane says, “There there, now now, now now, there there!
Subsole
@NotMax:
Joy joy?
raven
@Martin: Like when they did human wave attacks and only the first wave had weapons.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Exactly. Not to mention some of his base will probably die from the virus or from hospitals being too overwhelmed to care for non-COVID-19 patients
That’s not how I want to win or that I want to happen, but it’s likely to occur at this point
Kent
There are studies which conclusively show that female primary care doctors have statistically significant better outcomes than male primary care doctors. The listening is cited as one of the reasons.
mrmoshpotato
@chopper: (Happy) Birthday!
Subsole
@Anne Laurie: Regret to report we need no inspiration on that front. Ref. Deadeye Crenshaw, The Gohm-Jabber, Long Knife Cornyn and Robert the Bear Cruz.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@chopper:
Happy Birthday!
StringOnAStick
A friend who volunteers with them tells me the Oregon Shakespeare festival has cancelled the season except for maybe 5 plays in the fall, laid off basically everyone.
My neighbor has a friend who is a PA at a huge orthopedic practice in our area; they laid off all but 4 of the 42 PA’s, cutting the entire staff from 1200 to 80 remaining, I suppose for trauma cases.
The bill signed today will be a drop in a very empty bucket.
Kent
Of course. I was referring to the douches at MIT who shat all over themselves to take money from a known pedophile.
Sab
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Authoritarian leaders hear bad news late, because they tend to shoot the messenger. The previous guys were sort of authoritarians because that was the political pool they swam in, but they were basically engineer technocrats trying to make things work.
Xi is more of a culture warrior. He’s trying to bend reality by bending perceptions. Since he is trying to bend perceptions, he himself has created his own blind spots.
Ella in New Mexico
Also, in case you all bailed on the last thread:
@trollhattan: Like I JOKINGLY (but not so jokingly) told my kids this am in the above named Group Text when they got snippy with me re: Democrats can’t do anything right “Yeah, you guys keep on blaming Mommy and the Democrats for everything that goes wrong in your life and we’ll just keep on getting shit done”.
Martin
@NotMax: Heh. He really was a great doctor. But my grandmother taught me decades ago that if you need help, find a Sikh. That advice has always served me well.
Eric S.
@Kent: Also the Creation Museum. I’m assuming it’s the same district.
laura
@chopper: I wish you a delicious Suntori Hibiki and many happy returns of the day. Next year, I hope someone makes you a cake and gives you a pinch to grow an inch.
Ella in New Mexico
@Mai naem mobile:
Not sure about Massie but I’d say the Autism Spectrum is much more highly represented at a heavily science-based university like MIT. Seriously, Asperger’s type is way overrepresented in engineering.
My husband works with a lot of them who have circulated through the NM National Labs and the White Sands range where he works now. They make completely inappropriate, insensitive and insulting “Tin Ear” comments all the time in groups that people cannot believe they just said.
They don’t understand why people just don’t see things as brutally honest and logically as they do. Also why no one wants to sit next to them at trainings.
Martin
@raven: They didn’t need weapons. They were invincible to imperialist bullets.
Kent
How many US factories have suicide nets installed around their perimeters? I think what the Chinese Communist Party is rather better at than pretty much any other political party on the planet, is consolidating power, generating economic growth, and thinking long-term rather than quarterly profits. But I’m not sure they particularly care out the Chinese people except as a means to the end.
Cacti
So, any thoughts about the dirtbag left fabricating a rape allegation against Joe Biden? BJ has been strangely silent on that one.
Luciamia
@raven: plus all the dogs and cats. And there was lots of some kind of filler to stretch out those pancakes.
PsiFighter37
@Ella in New Mexico: Perhaps, but I’ve also met plenty of MIT folks who have also been regular people as well. I wouldn’t generalize a population of folks like that.
Sab
@Ella in New Mexico: How does somebody with Aspergers get elected to Congress? I don’t see them as having the right skill set.
Baud
@Cacti:
It was discussed in the last thread.
Subsole
@Mai naem mobile:
The GOP thinks America has moved beyond elections – likely because they have smoked, shot, snorted and suppositoried their ENTIRE own supply. They really believe they are the majority and can do as they please.
Also, they figure they’ll be dead or retired before the bill comes due. They likely see the party the way they see America: it is just a vehicle for them; they could not care less about it’s prospects. The corporate raider mentality applied to every facet of life.
NotMax
@Cacti
“Strangely silent” as in included in the thread directly below this one, and others.
Not all pots require constant stirring.
Darkrose
@Cacti: Folks were talking about it late last night. Reposting my comments, which are the tl;dr version from LGM:
Added note: The whole thing reeks of borscht. This is a Putin ratfucking operation.
Subsole
@Peale: The Chinese still believe in long-term business prospects, which requires smart resource management.
Reagantopia doesn’t know how to think past the tip of its plumbing. Resources are something to be stripped, not managed.
James E Powell
@Darkrose:
Strikes me more like the Clenis Hunters getting back in business.
Subsole
@Sab: Was that the one where the USAAF bombed the rebelling miners?
Cacti
@Darkrose: You haven’t seen the latest.
Old internet posts by the accuser gushing about Putin:
Add in The Intercept being all over this, and the whole thing reeks of a GRU op.
KSinMA
@Ella in New Mexico: Well said!
Nelle
@Kent: I trailed along to a Geophysical Society of America meeting in Hawaii a number of years ago. At one of the “mixers,” I remarked, a little too loudly, that a lot of the participants seemed to have Aspergers. A gorgeous man, really stunning, sidled up to me and said, quietly, “I have Aspergers. Would you talk to me?”
I wish I had known at least one engineer before I married one. It would have changed expectations.
Darkrose
@James E Powell: Nope. See my reply to @Cacti below.
Baud
@Ella in New Mexico:
Like.
Darkrose
@Cacti: I was aware of that, yes. See also point #3, about who the accuser went to. Instead of talking to, say, Ronan Farrow, or Jane Meyer, or the WaPo or NYT or WSJ, she contacted one of the hosts of the “Useful Idiots” podcasts. Katie Halper and her partner Matt Taibbi are loud and proud about denying Russian interference in 2016, calling the Mueller Report a hoax, and generally being pro-Putin. Taibbi is a particularly nasty, misogynist piece of work who’s written cheerfully about being a sexual predator in the ’90’s, only to claim it was “satire” now.
lgerard
I can’t help thinking that at some point one of these governors is going to blow his or her top and direct the state National Guard to just seize stuff from the feds.
This would be an interesting conundrum for our wingnut friends who are always advocating for a second civil war.
I am for states rights agin the feds?
or
Am I trump uber alles vs, the far left socialist liberal governor? (who may actually be a republican)
Subsole
@Cacti: I was freaking out earlier, but folks here pointed out it ain’t getting traction and has some pretty pronounced holes.
Also, the other smears do seem to keep blowing up on them. Dementia, greenscreens, etc.
Bernslime gonna Bernslime.
Another Scott
@Martin: I’d like to think so too, but then you have to answer why his polling numbers aren’t collapsing.
Bitecofer may be wrong, but she’s got a model that explains the observations to date. We’ll see how it plays out.
We need to fight for every vote we can get, not count on things meeting our wishes.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who was expecting HRC to win in a blowout, because, hey, it’s obvious that she was so much better, amirite??!” ;-)
Tom Levenson
@Brian: No legacies. MIT doesn’t do them.
As for assholes? We’ve got our share. Engineers, as someone else noted, are not surgeon-level-self-confident, but they have some of the same traits, with some of the same results.
But it’s my anecdotal experience, having done the student thing up the river and the teacher thing at the eastern end of Cambridge that my current employer is a lot less nether-orifice-enriched than the more conventional Ivys and kin.
Tom Levenson
@MattF: This is no longer true, if it ever was. (She might have been being nice…)
J R in WV
@Kent:
Now, now!
You know that money never did a pedophile to any little girls!! It was as clean as a bank can make money!
terry chay
@Mai naem mobile: Half of MIT had a mediocre GPA. Show me the transcripts of these people and I think you have an answer (like most Republicans, they’re pissed off there are so many people smarter than them and want to punish them).
Another Scott
calculatedriskblog.com/2020/03/march-27-update-us-covid-19-tests-per.html
(Emphasis added.)
Some progress this week, but we seem stuck around 105,000 – 115,000 tests per day. It’s not enough.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@Cacti:
Nope,, you’re wrong again. We’ve seen reports that the woman making the accusation is a nut job who claims to have been engaged to V. V Putin at one time, and has made many comments on line calling Russia the best nation on earth.
I took you out of the pie safe just the other day, now I find that I was way premature on that move back into the real world.
Bub-bye, butthole~!!~
evodevo
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Most of the engineers I know are right wingers….and a LOT of the leading lights in the Creationist movement are engineers…go figure
Mai naem mobile
@Tom Levenson: I like the term ‘nether orifice enriched’
So they don’t have legacies. So did Daddy Koch buy the admissions for David and Charles or they were smart enough to get in legitimately? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want about the living one. I don’t think the dead one can sue you.
misterpuff
@Mai naem mobile: I’m sorry, other than business school students, engineering students are the biggest assholes. They avoid the humanities like the plague and barely deign to do the science courses required. (Experience gained during college years in mid 70s)
Yes I’ve met some good ones over the years but most tend to be the most basic black and white mindset people.
trnc
And on top of that, you know hundreds of congresspeople getting on flights due solely to this stunt didn’t cost taxpayers anything, right?
DivF
@Tom Levenson: since you mentioned surgeons, an old joke.
Q:what is the difference between a surgeon and God?
A: God doesn’t think he is a surgeon.
bowtiejack
Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that at the End of Days, he wanted to be in Kentucky because they were always a hundred years behind?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@chopper: Happy b-day.
Uncle Cosmo
“Science based education” – with a heavy admixture of engineers. In the 2018-19 school year, students with a declared major of engineering were an absolute majority of undergraduates (2,355 of 4,530, vs 758.5 with a declared science major).
Ever hang out with engineering students? I did when I was an undergrad. Or engineers (im)proper? For 8.5 years at a defense contractor in the 1980s my job title was Senior Engineer** & I shared a floor with 150 of them, mostly EEs. So let me tell you:
Many if not most engineering types (full-grown or in larval form) are nearly as bad as MDs in their utterly unsupported certainty that, if they were to spend half an hour thinking about a field of inquiry they have no training in, they would know more than people with doctorates and a lifetime of experience in the field. They think knowing how to (occasionally) program a computer and (sometimes) evaluate an integral demonstrate their massive intelligence… ::rolleyes::
Also, most of them are politically several megaparsecs starboard of Genghis Khan. In school I had several friends who like me were physics majors & leftish; among the engineers I knew (mostly fellow townies who ate lunch & played cards together in the townie cafeteria) nary a one. Years later, at that defense contractor, there was exactly one other liberal on my floor – & he was a generation older, having seriously considered emigrating to Canada as a young man when Eisenhower trounced Stevenson the first time.
** As an undergrad I would have taken great umbrage, or at least penumbrage, at the designation, but by then I didn’t give a rodent’s rectum what they called me so long as the nicely-denominated checks didn’t bounce.
Mike in Pasadena
@trollhattan: it is well known that trump is a vindictive little biatch
Kent
Listened to the latest Pod Save America today and the guys discussed this exact thing. Their take was that (except for Mexico and Brazil) approval ratings for basically all leaders around the world are going up right now in the initial phase of coronavirus. But that Trumps approval ratings have gone up MUCH LESS than those of pretty much every other leader in the free world. And that it is mostly Dems and Independents that are rating him a little bit higher right now. That doesn’t mean any of them will actually vote for him in November when given a choice.
Anyway, we are in unchartered waters. Any approval ratings published today were surveyed before the worst of this even started hitting NYC much less the rest of the country. It is only going to get worse and worse for Trump on a daily basis because you can’t fix this with bullshit.
Uncle Cosmo
@Uncle Cosmo: FTR, re the unwarranted intellectual egotism of engineers, hat tip to Sister Golden Bear at #31 for having gotten there long ahead of me.
An engineer joke:
/rimshot
OK, just one more, shorter:
/rimshot #2
RSA
@misterpuff:
This matches my experience as well. That is, it’s more an issue with engineers than with scientists, and I’d add software developers to the mix. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, of course, but I’ve been surprised how often I get into an argument with someone about climate change or evolution or Ayn Rand, and that someone is an engineer or a programmer.
Uncle Cosmo
KY is 87% white and 8% AA, over half of the latter in the Louisville metro area. KY was a “border state” like MD and MO during the Civil War, slave states that did not secede.
Meanwhile WV is 92% white and 4% AA, and became a state in the middle of the Civil War, as a free state composed of the mountainous western counties of VA where slavery was economically impractical & thus almost unknown.
Compare & contrast. There’ll be a test next hour.
joel hanes
@Ella in New Mexico:
They don’t understand why people just don’t see things
I am one of those described.
I would say that a more important factor is that those of us on the spectrum are less adept at picking up social and emotional cues from those around us. We word-bludgeon without being aware that the audience feels bludgeoned. We are tactless without being aware that we have appalled. It’s difficult to improve without the feedback, but we miss the feedback.
chopper
thanks y’all. mother nature celebrated my birthday by bringing a giant-ass golden eagle to perch for a while right next to my window.
joel hanes
@RSA:
Back when I was a frequent poster to talk.origins*, the Usenet evolution/creationism form, it was a well-understood phenomenon that many of the most obdurate creationist cranks were engineers.
—————————–
* Semper allouatta! Go you fighting anomalocarids!
joel hanes
@chopper:
Wow. They are truly impressive up close.
Sen. Sanders got a sparrow, I believe.
Kent
Karma is a bitch
Uncle Cosmo
FTR Dr Guillotin’s device doesn’t belong with the others. If you’re going to have capital punishment, it was designed as a humane alternative to the ax (for the axe-man can misplace his blow) or the gallows (for the hangman can misadjust the noose to slowly strangle the victim rather than breaking the neck), and is quite definitely final…most of the time:
Typical damn dumb engineer. ;^D
/rimshot
Uncle Cosmo
I would love to see MD GOV Hogan – one of those rare not-batshit-insane Republicans who can’t stand Mango Mussolini – do exactly that. And then share the haul with DC, which (IIUC) was excluded by the Thugs from receiving any Federal pandemic assistance because “it’s not a state.”
BobS
@MattF: Noam Chomsky was an MIT guy with some ‘verbal skills’.
J R in WV
@Uncle Cosmo:
There was never Jim Crow laws in WV. Wife’s G-Uncle was Superintendent of Schools in McDowell county back in the 30s and 40s… she has a prized photo of him with the Board of Ed… 50% Black and 50% White… close to the proportion in the county population. Not so much today…
Were never any black folks in our county, no coal mines, no southern blacks hired to break strikes, lots came here that way.
My high school had black students all along, but my senior year a new building brought all the students from the black HS into the main newly built HS. It worked out OK, somewhat to my surprise. Then I left town for college, drafted into the Navy, etc, Most of the AA younger folks left for places like Washington DC. Same in most WV counties, all the AA folks left for urban centers where there were good jobs.
Martin
@Another Scott: Polls are two models in one. First you need to model the electorate, and then you need to model the option of the electorate. You fuck up the first one, because you over/underestimate turnout among certain demographics, and the 2nd one becomes pretty useless.
JaneE
Then the House returns, the speaker and minority leader should co-sponser a resolution expelling Massie from that body for willfully and deliberately endangering his colleagues.
Martin
Data update:
I’m probably going to build a few new models this weekend.
Cacti
@J R in WV: Okay, boomer.
J R in WV
@Cacti:
There it is, the blessed cupcake! Buh Bye again, asshole.
Ella in New Mexico
@joel hanes: You’re a very specially gifted person to be able to be aware of this. No insult intended by my post. I just think we blame people and act like they’re some kind of evil humans for things the rest of us just don’t realize is not trying to be evil at all. It’s just a difference.
I get it. Not everyone does.
@PsiFighter37:
I’m not generalizing. Just trying to make sense of why these people often don’t make sense to the rest of us. Plus I have these same folks in my family, so I get how easy it is to get pissed off and label them as being assholes, as the original post referred.
Ella in New Mexico
@J R in WV:
Smart decision. Amazing how that one hasn’t been around at all until now, doncha think? ;-)