Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Let me file that under fuck it.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

Stand up, dammit!

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

The National Guard is not Batman.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

“But what about the lurkers?”

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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Archives for 2020

Election Year Open Thread: Stephen Colbert {Hearts} Elizabeth Warren, Too

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(Even after he tried to hoard all the ribs, and she threatened to stab him with a fork.)

Thing is — I’ve said this before — even if she’s not the nominee, Senator Warren already has a job she loves, and that she’s good at. So while I would very much prefer, given the current options, that she be our next president, well…

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Privilege and public health

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The Centers for Disease Control outlines first line public health measures to minimize COVID-19 dangers:

There is currently no vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The best way to prevent illness is to avoid being exposed to this virus. However, as a reminder, CDC always recommends everyday preventive actions to help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, including:

  • Avoid close contact with people who are sick. (my emphasis)

  • Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth.

  • Stay home when you are sick. (my emphasis)

  • Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash….

  • Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.

All of these are good things to do.  However there is a huge privilege and economic capacity gradient on the ability of people to really follow through on avoiding contact with sick or plausibly sick people and staying at home while sick.

I’m at work right now.  My calendar is fairly open today.   I have an e-mail to write about Silverloading.   I’m meeting with a co-author to have lunch and discuss a conference where she presented some of our preliminary work.  I have to make some slides for a meeting next week.  I want to verify that a data crosswalk is actually doing what it says it is doing.  Finally I need to read a few things for a project whose funding turns on this coming Sunday morning.  Everything except for lunch can readily be done offsite.  The lunch meeting could easily be converted to a Skype meeting.

If I was not feeling well today, I could go to my boss and tell her I’ll be back in the office on Monday.  Her only comments would be well wishes and a reminder to cancel my lunch order for tomorrow’s seminar.  I would either be able to work from home or take paid sick leave if I could not reasonably work.  And if I needed to go to a doctor, I have a low deductible plan with a network that includes a really good hospital for weird, bizarre and deadly things as the anchor hospital.

If half a dozen people in the office aren’t feeling good and look visibly ill, I could readily work from home at no cost of complying with CDC recommendations.  Hell, I might save a few bucks on coffee and lunches that I did not buy.  I’m privileged.

However, the Early Bird Donuts worker who rung me up this morning for my coffee and cinnamon roll needs to be at a particular location in order to do her job.  If she is sick, she can’t work from home.  She can neither make nor serve donuts via Skype.  She is unlikely to have many if any paid sick days.  If she goes home to avoid being a potential infection vector, she is likely not getting paid much or for long. Her incentive is to hope that any case of the sniffles is merely that, a quick transitory non-flu, non-COVID-19 virus that can be drowned with hot tea and over the counter medication.

In this country, at least, being able to afford to follow recommended public health measures faces a massive privilege gradient.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Somebody’s Got to Be the Grown-Up

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(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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On The Road – arrieve – Newfoundland West Coast

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Good morning everyone,

Sorry about yesterday’s misfire, we’ll complete Bill’s submission next week.

Today, we return to the Great White North!

 

The last group of photos from Newfoundland, mostly from the west coast and Gros Morne National Park, plus a few I like but didn’t include in the earlier submissions.

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On The Road - arrieve - Newfoundland West Coast 2
Gros Morne National Park, NLAugust 23, 2019

It was raining when we visited the Tablelands, but it would have been spooky even on a sunny day. It’s a long plateau of peridotite, an igneous rock found in the upper mantle below the Earth’s crust; the Tablelands is one of the few places on the planet where peridotite has been forced up to the surface. Very little grows there because the minerals in peridotite, like nickel and cadmium, are toxic to most plant life, so it’s an eerie, empty landscape, like the surface of Mars.

You can see its dark green color in the broken stones; the surfaces oxidize to that rusty yellow color. I know very little about geology; when I think of what lies beneath the crust of our planet I immediately picture magma: molten, angry, bright red. So I loved learning that under the mountains, under the oceans, the mantle that makes up most of our planet is, at least at the upper levels, actually — green.

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Wednesday/Thursday, 2/26-2/27

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In case you missed it earlier, here’s another brief, useful article on how to prep realistically for a (the) coronavirus pandemic:

Also:

Religious pilgrimages are being suspended in the Middle East:

You probably have heard that Trump gave a press conference about ‘the Caronavirus‘, and to call that presser a sh*tshow would be an insult to mere harmless sh*tshows. We know he’s taking it (or at least its effect on the stock market) seriously, because instead of giving the pandemic response portfolio to Jared, he passed it on to Mike Pence, Official Scapegoat. Seriously, read the Washington Post‘s report on the big announcement; if we’re not totally doomed, it will not be for lack of trying by the squatting administration.

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Remember Good Governance?

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I find that as I get older, I like to drive without any music. Just the sound of the road, whatever few sounds modern vehicles make, and the air when the window is cracked. I find it peaceful and relaxing. Mind you, I still listen to music, and sometimes NPR for a quick cardio workout, but a good bit of the time I just like the silence. Life is very loud. My new (well, new to me since it was built in 1910) is very quiet, and the appliances are new so they do not make much noise, but still there is t he sound of the pets and the neighbors and other stuff. But in the car it is just me and the sound of the road.

It gives me time to think and decompress. At any rate, I was thinking today, and I started to wonder if maybe I am the last generation who will remember good governance at the state and local level. Now obviously, there have always been problems and corruption and systemic racism, but at least when I was a kid they could do the basics- pave the fucking roads, pay the cops, do preventative maintenance. The coronavirus is a perfect example- we shouldn’t have to freak out and authorize a shitload of money, we should have the broad outlines of what to do in place and then just mobilize and fund as needed.

I don’t know what happened. I suspect it is because every election has been nationalized, and we have 34 year old idiots elected to the state legislature or city council and they think their job is advancing abortion policy or other bullshit, when actually their job is making sure the rivers and water isn’t polluted and the budget is balanced and the teacher’s get paid. The internet, the big money involved, and everyone wanting to be a star has also played a role, as well as talk radio.

Good governance is like maintaining an old house. You have to do things ahead of time to be ready for when shit goes downhill. You do the preventative maintenance, and when something breaks, you fix it instead of putting it off because you want to go on vacation or some other shit. You don’t wait until the roof caves in to make sure the shingles are ok. You can’t govern by just lurching from disaster to disaster like we have been doing for the last few decades. There has to be normalcy and routine. It’s one of the many reasons that I am supporting Warren, because she understands this.

What brought this to my mind today is I was out taking pictures of areas on the road near me that had had rock slides. I have two state Senators, one of whom is worthless and a right wing ALEC guy, the other is William Ihlenfeld, who was the United States Attorney from 2010-2016 before becoming a state Senator in 2018 (and one day Attorney General or Governor, I hope). While the other dipshit is out pushing fetal pain bills and other fucking nonsense, Bill Ihlenfeld answers his phone when I call to tell him there is a slip that is dangerous or the guard rail is broken on a treacherous part of the road where the college kids drive like maniacs. Every winter we have a bunch of rock slides, which is usual, due to the expansion and contraction due to freezes and thaws. I contacted him a couple weeks ago, State Road worked on them this week, and today I called to thank him and to tell him there is one area that still has what appears to be precarious overhangs, but that I can not provide informed comment because I am not an engineer or geologist or engineering geologist. Within an hour of leaving a message for him, he called and asked me to take some pictures. I was already in the big city, so I took some photos on the way home, and then marked up a map to show him locations:

Remember Good Governance?

Remember Good Governance? 1

Remember Good Governance? 2

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And you know what? I can guarantee you that by tomorrow noon he will have called or emailed me back. Good governance. Competence. It really is a precious commodity these days.

I think we forget that. Hell, much was made of the first transgender woman being elected to the Assembly in Virginia, Danica Roem, and she wasn’t campaigning on hot button issues. She campaigned on fixing the fucking roads. And people elected her without hesitation, because PEOPLE NEED FUCKING ROADS.

Maybe we will luck out and once again have a boring President and government that just does its job and we don’t have to see them on fucking tv every god damned night of the week being a disgrace. Right now, though, we are shit out of luck, and our idiot in chief just appointed the non doctor who created an HIV epidemic in Indiana to head the coronavirus response. So get ready for prayer and holding an aspiring between your knees or whatever fuckery that idiot has lined up for us.

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Late Night Open Thread: More of This, Please…

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I realize that a significant portion of the commentariat here is old enough to fall into the ‘senior’ class, but that’s all the more reason to keep our cohort fellows from embarrassing themselves. Per NPR:

… A recent study suggests these classes could be increasingly important. Researchers at Princeton and New York universities found that Facebook users 65 and over posted seven times as many articles from fake news websites, compared with adults under 29.

“And that raises a lot of questions about what could be driving this relationship,” says Andrew Guess, an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton and a co-author of the study…

Guess says there hasn’t been a lot of research into this question yet, but it’s likely digital literacy could have a lot to do with it. And he says that provides reason for optimism.

“People who are not digital natives didn’t grow up online, having a sort of a natural relationship to using computers and the Internet,” he says. “They are simply more susceptible to the kinds of online content that happened to be weaponized in that particular election. If it turns out this is the big part of the explanation, digital literacy is something that can be taught and it’s a skill that can be developed.”…

At the Schweinhaut Senior Center, trainer Bre Clark coaches participants about the difference between propaganda, deep fakes and sponsored content. And she runs through a checklist for evaluating information online: Who wrote the information? What’s the source of a claim? Does the author have an agenda?

“This topic is political,” Clark says. “And we form our opinions throughout our lifetime, and we get mired in our opinions as we grow older. And it’s not about being someone that can’t change their mind, it’s not those stereotypes of older adults.”…

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