Amanda Gorman has released a new poem, “New Day’s Lyric,” to mark the end of 2021.
The 23-year-old poet became internationally known after her reading her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. https://t.co/blAumh7OXW
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 29, 2021
BREAKING: President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin will speak Thursday as the Russian leader steps up his demands for security guarantees in Eastern Europe. https://t.co/45EVzJylLR
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 29, 2021
Biden asks U.S. Supreme Court to hear 'Remain in Mexico' case https://t.co/NHEN6jkLBV pic.twitter.com/1SoeE3q3W4
— Reuters (@Reuters) December 30, 2021
Democratic President Joe Biden attempted to scrap his Republican predecessor’s policy – often referred to as “Remain in Mexico” – soon after taking office in January. But after Texas and Missouri sued, a federal judge ruled it had to be reinstated and an appeals court earlier this month agreed.
Under the 2019 policy put in place by former President Donald Trump, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), migrants seeking asylum must wait weeks and sometimes years in Mexico for a U.S. court date instead of being allowed to await their hearings in the United States…
After a federal court ruled he had to reinstate MPP, the Biden administration re-issued a memo terminating it in the hopes it would overcome the legal challenges.
But the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was not convinced by the new memo, saying in its ruling on Dec. 13, that “simply by typing out a new Word document and posting it on the internet” was not sufficient.
Biden’s Justice Department asked the Supreme Court whether it must continue implementing the policy and whether the appeals court erred in concluding the new memo had no legal effect.
Also, due disclosure: I let myself be punked, because the mild LOL was too good to fact-check…
No, NASA hasn’t hired theologians to study possible reactions to a discovery of extraterrestrial life, despite false claims online. NASA granted funding in 2015 to a research center that held a since-completed program on the topic. The truth is out there. https://t.co/bg3mqoxNEQ
— AP Fact Check (@APFactCheck) December 29, 2021
Baud
Cue X-Flies theme music.
NotMax
Though it is 2021, it’s like something right out of Jules Verne.
Full ascent of Earth’s tallest peak accomplished for the first time.
Baud
@NotMax:
Using a sub is cheating.
debbie
If he hasn’t already, I hope Joe gives Putin a few red lines of his own.
NotMax
@Baud
Moon bears!
:)
OzarkHillbilly
The truth is out there.
So are the lies.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: and the lies are more attractive.
Cameron
@debbie: I really hope so, too. I hope they both bring a barrel of red lines and agree to all of them. That way we can get back to destroying the planet with fossil fuels instead of nuclear weapons.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: Pretty little lies, aren’t they?
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Geminid
@debbie: This call and lower level bilateral talks may help provide a way for Putin to climb down. He can truthfully say, “When i talk, Biden listens!”
Baud
They hired TikTok influencers.
Kay
Completely confident with Joe Biden on foreign policy. Nice not to have an inexperienced yet incredibly arrogant low quality hire in there.
Baud
@Kay:
Same.
OzarkHillbilly
Off to PT. Enjoy yourselves.
Omnes Omnibus
Getting boosted this morning.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
“President Orlean, who I do not support, was right to ignore the typical hysteria of the left and attempt something that would be a net job boost for forgotten rural and exurban workers. Her only mistake was in overly relying on the promises of tech overlords who stifle the free opinions of others. As I disrobe in preparation for my cryogenic sleep on my journey to the stars, I can assure all of you that I will be as diligent in rooting out leftist hypocrisy at our final destination as I am here, and rest assured that my interstellar substack will be just as insightful as it is here. Please continue subscribing up until the end for my final thoughts.”
-by Glenn Greenwald
Geminid
@Geminid: A U.S. President can send a signal just in talking to another leader, also by not talking to one. An example of the latter is Biden’s recent posture towards Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. The Times of Israel reported the other day that Bennett has tried to get a phone call with Biden for some weeks now, with no success. A form of pressure on the policies of Bennett’s government towards Palestinians.
Kay
@Baud:
It’s a good feeling. I mean, Trump, sure, but also people like Dick Cheney. Fucking reckless, power mad maniacs.
Cooler heads. People who aren’t kneejerk warmongers with some massive ideological/religious agenda. I don’t ask that much.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
No bid contract with the Southern Baptist Church last December.
narya
In an unusual (for me, lately) move, I did NOT run this morning. Or walk. I’ll do it later, I promise. Mostly, I’m just fussing around, throwing out little piles of crap, preparing to do some baking (bread, other bread, maybe cheesecake if I retrieve the unsuccessful-cookie crumbs from Downstairs Neighbor). Avoiding all interactions with all people except Friend, who has been similarly people-avoidant. Yesterday was my only work day, and I accomplished the necessary things, but I have been seriously enjoying the opportunity to not be working.
narya
@Kay: I continue to think about the Lincoln’s Bible/World Beneath episode that featured an interview w/ an exKGB person, who said TFG is EXACTLY who you’d want to compromise/recruit–a not-very-smart-person who thinks they’re smart, and who is easy to compromise in multiple ways.
Betty Cracker
@narya: Sounds like both a prudent and pleasurable way to wrap up the year! I am also enjoying some downtime. Good thing too since the new puppy is running me ragged.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
If extraterrestrial life exists, it exists: no majority can overrule the fact of its existence, and it doesn’t matter how anyone feels about it. Sure, some people would have their worldview upended by such a discovery and get upset. But the truth has handily survived the flat-earthers and creationists, and if it comes to that it will handily survive the ET denialists too.
Brachiator
I always thought that this was covered in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
JMG
I will do a little food shopping today and if it stops drizzling, go for a walk. That’s about it. I know the advice for folks to stay home this New Year’s Eve is deadly serious, but it makes me smile. It’s been about 40 years since I went out for New Year’s, with the one exception of Y2K. It’s the easiest crowds to avoid there are.
Gin & Tonic
Once again, they will talk *about* Ukraine, not *with* Ukraine. Really bullshit, frankly.
WaterGirl
In spite of the quotes, that is not actually something Glenn Greenwald said, right?
Geminid
@narya: I expect that the NSA and CIA have very thick files on Trump and the Russians, dating back to 1985. I always thought former NSA and CIA chiefs Haden and Brennan had this cat-that-ate the-canary look when they talked about Trump. And while Trump allies blustered mightily about going after those two, nothing ever came of it. Hayden and Brennan know.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Le Comte is among Glenn’s biggest fans, so I’m sure that quote is as accurate as it needs to be.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Gin & Tonic: As Rev Al says, if they’re doing it without you, it’s not about you.
Kay
@narya:
Oh, just the strutting around and boasting and exaggerating successes – I’m tired of it. It’s not strength. It’s just inflated bullshit, like his real estate “empire”. He talks too much.
mali muso
Day 4 of hanging out at home with Covid-sick kiddo. She’s still sniffly but no other symptoms. I guess my booster is proving its power, because I have been immersed in her germs (there is no such thing as social distancing with a 5 year old who needs mommy) and haven’t gotten sick yet. Fingers crossed it stays that way and that her sniffles start to abate soon.
Gin & Tonic
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Sorry, but in this case you are 100% wrong.
narya
@Geminid: Oh yes, I totally agree. And I’ve long thought that it would also explain why so many of the Rs go along w/ TFG–and why Liz Cheney does not. I don’t normally traffic in those theories/thoughts, but after listening to all of The World Beneath . . . it really is the simple explanation. Well, along with greed and stupidity and megalomania, but those things will also lead to being compromised.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic:
Maybe I woke up stupid this morning, but I don’t understand what you are saying there.
Soprano2
@Kay: I agree, it’s nice to have someone who doesn’t think making empty threats and wagging his weenie on Twitter shows “strength”. I get impatient with people who say Biden is weak because he doesn’t shitpost on Twitter about world leaders. TGF’s followers have no idea what real strength is.
Kay
The anti-cancel culture substackers on “public schools” are just great. They know absolutely nothing about the subject, so they believe their moronic and banal “insights” are new.
Watch as they grapple with the issues inherent in “public schools”, believing they invented these debates which have been going on for 150 years.
I cannot believe people pay for these newsletters. Honestly- how much “anti-cancel culture” blather can one read?
Chief Oshkosh
@Geminid: If they do have thick files on tfg, they apparently will never use them.
Ken
@Brachiator: I agree that in the “extraterrestrials are God” genre, 2001 ranks very high — certainly above Prometheus or whichever Star Trek used it. But I’d think in the near future, any discoveries are more likely to be Perseverance photographing an undisputable fossil, or Europa Clipper turning up chemical evidence of bacterial life.
I can’t offhand think of any movies that used those ideas. Not unless Europa Clipper can send back samples, when we’re in Andromeda Strain and Green Slime territory.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@WaterGirl:
It’s pitchbot-style parody, and something that Glenn would likely say if he inhabited the “Don’t Look Up” universe.
trnc
@Kay:
I’m confident in our president and his FP team, but they still have to deal with an autocrat with military power who has more support from about half of US congress than our president does. It’s the foreign policy equivalent of covid, which hit 465K new cases yesterday because of the same support dynamic.
Chief Oshkosh
@Soprano2:
Who says that? If they do, it’s news to me. But then, anything on Twitter would be news to me.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kay:
Netflix has that type of parent nailed in “Death to 2021”.
There is no special status or knowledge that goes along with “well, I’m a mom”. Facts stand on their own, and are outside the relationship. Besides, that’s why we have elected governments and school boards, so people can feel as though they have a participatory voice.
WaterGirl
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: But the quotation marks indicate an exact quote.
You’re just some guy on a blog, without a reputation or anything to indicate that it’s parody. There’s no //, there’s no “probably” at the end of it. Some person who comes to Balloon Juice may read that, copy it and present it anywhere on the internet believing that it’s true. That’s contributing to disinformation, and the world doesn’t need any more help with that. That’s how i see it, anyway. Not speaking for anyone else.
Kay
They all have biographies like this, too:
They have 350 students. I imagine it’s easier to come to a consensus than it is with public schools, who have 50 million.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Do any of them have children in public school? A person can have a valid opinion and NOT have children in public school, of course, but that would require some research.
Taibbi is also lying about what Hannah-Jones said, if this quote is from the exchange I read earlier.
Ohio Mom
@Geminid: So the CIA and NSA knew all about Trump and Russia — do we have any evidence that this deep knowledge was used in any beneficial way?
Baud
@Kay:
I like how Biden ended forever war that we’ve been complaining about for so many years and everyone just moved on to how he hasn’t slashed the Pentagon’s budget yet without even a how-do-you-do.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kay: and a guy not dumb enough to appoint some neo-con asshole like Bolton as his security advisor. Trump appointed Bolton was proof positive that Trump didn’t have a clue what he was doing.
Chris
@Kay:
What’s worrisome is that so much of the professional foreign policy establishment, i.e. the parts of Official Washington that dela with foreign policy (not necessarily the diplomatic, military, and intelligence career types, although those at the top do tend to become part of “the Blob”) are very much part of the “power mad maniacs.”
I still think at least part of the shit fit “the Blob” threw over the Afghanistan withdrawal was the fact that someone finally called their bluff. For all their credentials and all their years and decades of experience running foreign policy, “the Blob” was incapable of answering simple questions like “what is our vital national interest in Afghanistan,” or “what victory conditions will you accept,” or “what the hell are we going to do that we haven’t done in the last twenty years?” when Biden (or Trump for that matter) asked them. And boy, was the emperor pissed off when somebody finally pointed out that he had no clothes.
Geminid
@Soprano2: I think that talking tough is a “tell” that the person talking is not, in fact, tough. I known two or three people that I think were tough people. They didn’t talk tough, though, they just were tough.
Betty Cracker
@trnc: Agreed. Biden doesn’t have great options in either situation.
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
It’s just that this is a constant push-pull in public schools. It’s WHY it’s hard. It’s hard because they have to try to serve a really diverse group of people with all different ideas on even basic issues, like “what is an education?” They just discovered it and they have some banal “thoughts” on it.
Taibi thinks there should be parent input in public schools – he’s never been to one but it sounds sort of vaguely “right” so he’d like to debate it. Why didn’t we think of that? The INSIGHT- just staggering :)
It’s taken them a fucking year to get to this point too. They’re just now realizing the difficulties inherent in “public”. People already know this! They’ve been arguing about it for a century. To just jump in as a dabbler? It’s arrogant.
Ken
@Ohio Mom: There seems to be a question or assumption lurking there. Would CIA or NSA interference in the US government be “beneficial”?
Baud
@trnc:
Agreed. This point isn’t made enough.
Chris
@Kay:
The most exhausting thing about listening to conservatives (and I do mean just ordinary conservative man-in-the-street types, not professional pundits or politicians) is listening to them periodically going “holy SHIT, I’ve just had this BRILLIANT idea!” and whether it is in fact brilliant or not, it’s something that other people than them spotted centuries ago and either 1) already exists and has been implemented all over the place, or 2) was already tried and abandoned because it was found desperately wanting.
Geminid
@Chief Oshkosh: They may have used these files already. The NSA and the CIA are not exactly supposed to be keeping thick files on American citizens, so they are not about to dump them publically. But I would not be surprised of some Senators in both parties have been “read in” on some of these materials, or summaries of them. Among others, Darth Cheney may have been informally briefed as a “courtesy” to a former Defense Secretary and Vice President..
Kay
@Baud:
I agree. The Left have kind of shown their ass with Biden. There was a lot they should have supported, and didn’t. They’re just bad advocates for their positions. They cannot take a win and build on it.
They should have been all over the giant covid relief package. It’s one big experiment in liberal economics. A missed opportunity. It was more important to shore up their Lefty cred and bitch incessantly, in a horrible way that repels people and makes no one want to join them.
You’re supposed to ADD people to your “movement”, not repel them.
Ken
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Wasn’t Bolton the second or third national security advisor? I remember reports that Trump rejected him initially, because he didn’t like the mustache.
Kay
@Baud:
Focusing on the exact number of the stimulus checks- the amount– was really a tell for how bad they would be at this. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. I’m glad they don’t negotiate on my behalf. They’d get me 200 dollars in exchange for a 30,000 package of benefits. They’re bad at it.
Baud
@Kay:
I don’t think they’re bad at it. I think that’s their model — gain leverage against Democrats by always demanding more. Unfortunately for us, that model demands a powerful and radicalized Republican party, because that’s where the leverage comes from.
Kay
@Baud:
They should have been out IN FORCE back the Afghanistan wdraw. It isn’t hard to imagine how to build on it- “a new foreign policy approach after 25 years”. Nothing. They pissed it away. Biden isn’t cool enough to back. That’s “cringey”.
dnfree
@Brachiator: Better covered by Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
Ken
@Chris: That also happens when someone decides a law is stupid, with no understanding of its history or why it exists. Sometimes they even manage to get it repealed, and then everyone gets a fresh lesson about why it was passed in the first place. If we’re lucky, the lesson only involves sawdust in the bread versus, say, a major recession or a measles epidemic (hi, Ohio!).
Kay
@Baud:
Ultimately they’re not building anything. Labor unions have a phrase for what they do “slice and dice”
It’s where you peel off a portion of an existing group and set it against the rest. It always, always fails, hence, “slice”, then “dice”. It’s amusing, right? People who consider themselves some kind of Lefty vanguard have absolutely no concept of collective action or solidarity. They need to go back and read their own foundational ideas. Twitter isn’t that.
Kay
@Baud:
Ultimately they’re not building anything. Labor unions have a phrase for what they do “slice and dice”
It’s where you peel off a portion of an existing group and set it against the rest. It always, always fails, hence, “slice”, then “dice”. It’s amusing, right? People who consider themselves some kind of Lefty vanguard have absolutely no concept of collective action or solidarity. They need to go back and read their own foundational ideas. Twitter isn’t that.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kay:
There was a court hearing somewhere just this past week or so over reformation of school funding. As I remember, a lawyer (who is also the attorney for the legislative majority leader) was pushing a superintendent really hard on the notion of whether biology and algebra curricula were necessary for students who may wind up going into trades.
It was maddening. It sounded like a Facebook news outlet’s comment section, where high school dropouts “hurr-durr” science stories.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Oh my God, somebody posted shit on a blog.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@WaterGirl: One would like to think that “As I disrobe in preparation for my cryogenic sleep on my journey to the stars,” would be the give away.
Chris
@Ken:
That’s the eighties in a nutshell. Assume that because you personally don’t remember the Great Depression, all those rules and regulations built up over the last fifty years must be pointless and you can simply do away with them.
(The rich who supported this push knew exactly what they were doing, but the ordinary voters pretty much fell for this).
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I recall it was Trump wanted to fire Bolton for the mustache. Not that Bolton is a Neo-Con would do his best to undermine Trump’s attempt to cozy up with Russia.
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Oh, I could talk about this forever. He’s really ignorant on “trades”. The “trades” programs are oversubscribed and competitive. You really do need an Algebra I score, because the people you’re vying for a spot with will have one. The electricians apprenticeship program here takes 15% of applicants. My son had to take a certificate program at a community college just to get it- one year plus five as an apprentice.
Do you get your car serviced? Has that changed in the last 20 years? Do they think these people are using a wrench? They’re using a 20,000 dollar diagnostic computer. They can start their own contract business now- they can contract out to dealerships. They don’t even have to work for the dealer. So it’s not just nasty, it’s stupid. The lawyer didn’t prepare.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: The image of Greenwald dictating this while he is getting ready to stick himself in a freezer is just…. lol
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
It’s a shame too, because that’s EXACTLY the equity concern people have on trades- that doofus lawyers will track them in 7th grade and deny them a real education. It’s the outcome they fear most.
So dumbass gets up there and argues it because he’s too lazy to prepare.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I liked the initial idea of an ending better. In the first cut, they’re talking about building houses, but then realize that the pod containing the workers has blown up, so they start bidding billions of dollars for whoever can build a house.
Its far more ironic (not to say that the actual end wasn’t satisfying).
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
What exactly is the rush, btw? You can take Algebra I in 8th grade. The lawyer thinks the 8th graders should be at the factory? Getting their Amazon forklift certificate? They got nothing but time. I promise we’ll have them on a payroll by 18. Can they attend middle school, or is that too generous?
Chris
@Kay:
“You should just go into the trades” is the same shit as the people a decade ago who were saying “you should just start your own business” as a response to Great Recession era woes. It’s One Weird Trick thinking, the idea that you can somehow solve unemployment and bad wages and anything else wrong with the job market by having everybody make the same job decision. Never mind that you can’t have an economy where everybody’s doing the same thing. Of course it’s all going to be “oversubscribed and competitive,” and shortly, “oh, you should just go into the trades” will be as much of a joke as “you should just go to college” is today – too many people chasing not enough jobs that pay not enough money.
Ken
@Kay: I’m currently remote-tutoring my nephew, who wants to become a welder. The program requires algebra and quantitative reasoning, because you do indeed have to get the numbers right when you’re fusing together two pieces of metal that will someday support a building, or contain pressurized nitric acid.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I assumed the Lawyer then followed up with an unironic rant about how China is overtaking us in Science and High Tech and how our kids need to study more because that’s modern conservatism.
narya
@Kay: That’s my brother–an auto mechanic. Started tinkering w/ cars when he was a kid; first car was a 69 Camaro that he rebuilt. He works for a dealer–and has for years–but could write his ticket at this point. They canNOT find good mechanics to hire–simply cannot. But the “popular” opinion is that any schmo can walk in off the street and be a mechanic, that it’s somehow “unskilled” labor. The place my brother works threw money at him to keep him through the pandemic, precisely because he’s very good at what he does.
ETA, he does all of the computerized stuff, but he’s also just a very good mechanic and problem solver. It’s a very hybridized skill set in many ways.
Soprano2
@Chief Oshkosh: It’s a commentary on conservatives who think Trump was “strong” because he was willing to make threats against world leaders on Twitter. LOL I see a lot of “Biden is so weak, he won’t call out Putin” crap from conservatives I know on FB. I’m assuming this is what they mean, that he won’t call them bad names on Twitter.
Elizabelle
Has anyone else who has traveled abroad noticed this? From my comment on Anne Laurie’s always excellent COVID thread.
Two years ago, they guessed American more often. Have not had anyone suggest that might be the case this visit. Quite noticeable.
Are we international plague rats, or might it be the mask?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ken: To follow up what everyone is saying about math being important to the trades, speaking as someone who works in manufacturing – when everyone thinks “factory” they think Henry Ford style assembly line were the workers are just turning screws while they are stoned out of their mind. Today’s manufacturing is all skilled labor were you need to know how to do math because the robots are doing all the simple jobs.
Soprano2
@Geminid: My husband is like that. He’s a small man – about 5’5″, but he’s tough and no nonsense. When I see a certain look on his face I know someone is about to get a surprise from him. He may look mild-mannered, but he has been shot at in war and has no fucks left to give for fools. One of the things that initially attracted me to him was that unlike so many men around my age, he had nothing to prove about anything and didn’t have to puff himself up or boast to impress anyone with how manly he was. I was so worn out seeing that from men my age.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Elizabelle: I think regional accents are smearing away due to more exposure to entertainment sources from elsewhere (pandemic has accelerated it). I have to genuinely try to come up with my local Louisville dialect anymore, and most people in my travels assume that I’m from either Chicago or the mid-Atlantic, like Philadelphia.
Ken
I suppose we could cut the lawyer a little slack, since he would have gone to a trade school where you don’t need to know anything about algebra or biology, or even computers beyond how to run a word processor.
Jinchi
The judges ruling on this decided on the pretext that Biden didn’t hold public hearings before recinding the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
Maybe I missed it, but did Trump ever hold public hearings when he created the policy in the first place? It seemed like he just decreed asylum seekers a public health threat, despite a complete lack of evidence.
sab
@Ken: My oldest step-son is a machinist. He was absolutely not college material but he has always been really good at math.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Ken:
Ouch. I feel attacked. LOL
Suzanne
@Chris: “You can just go into the trades” is dumb advice for many reasons. I work with a lot of tradesmen, and I have heard many of them say that they don’t want their kids to do what they do, as they all have life-altering injuries by 40 and are in pain.
I have also heard a superintendent of a major international general contractor say, in recent years, that he will not hire anyone who he thinks is gay because there is still a lot of homophobia in the construction workforce and he doesn’t want to deal with the disruption it will cause. To say nothing of what it’s like for women, which I have witnessed.
Soprano2
@narya: My brother-in-law is a mechanic who retired several years ago because he got tired of the computer stuff and having to constantly update. He liked the “turning wrenches” stuff and doesn’t think mechanics today are “real” mechanics in the “old man yelling get off my lawn” way. My mother retired from GE in 2000, and they already had to do a bunch of stuff with computers when they built motors. People who don’t know anything about these kind of professions have an outdated notion of what they’re actually like now.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
The trades are the only high value occupation that I know where a cleaned up convicted felon can be welcomed and thrive without a lot of drama.
Jinchi
With all the travel restrictions during covid, maybe it’s just a matter of people guessing that an English speaker is more likely to be from the UK than the US.
I’m also not sure if the typical German would notice the difference between an American or British accent.
Zeecube
@WaterGirl: the reference to President Orlean kinda gives it away that it is parody.
Suzanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
And most general contractors (where the real money is) have college degrees, too, either in construction management, but also a lot in basic things like English, because contracting involves…. contracts. And documents, and correspondence.
Soprano2
That was so, so gross, as if when kids are young they can be divided into “going to need this information” and “not going to need this information”. It’s the kind of thing they used to condemn communist governments for, putting kids on “career paths” based on an aptitude test given when they were young. Now evidently they want to do it to save money. Who, when they’re in high school, says they want their career to consist of being a flunky at McDonald’s? A manager, yes, but who aspires to work behind the counter of a fast food restaurant for their whole life?
Cermet
Speaking of NASA, I noticed that they posted on the Webb site that they are taking a “pause” in deploying the solar shield system. To date, all has appeared to have gone very well. This might be NASA trying to be hyper cautious. Considering that solar heating and deep space cooling effects which can’t really be accurately simulated on Earth might an issue, they decided to slow down deployments. By waiting they then hope these will become less significant by thermalizing; or, maybe they are having some technical difficulties. Guess by tomorrow they will either proceed or else, not.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I thought it was ironic that my sister loved math and science and disliked English and writing, then she became an environmental consultant where she had to write proposals and grants all the time! Who knew science was going to involve writing…..LOL I used to tease her about that.
Ken
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: My apologies! I’ve always admired lawyers. I certainly couldn’t work in field where absolutely anything can change with little notice, because some legislators decided to rework part of the civil code, or some judge decides the law has been misinterpreted for eighty years. I got annoyed enough when Java introduced lambdas or go added generics.
trnc
That reminds me of an exchange between a left leaning ally (BLM rep?) and Obama:
Ally: You’re not listening to us.
Obama: You’re sitting in the Oval Office.
raven
@narya: I’ve always been a “shade tree” mechanic and I used to eat Saturday breakfast with these good ol boys who did it for a living. The depth of knowledge they had about all makes and models was incredible.
Kalakal
@Elizabelle: It may be that your rational demeanour ( de rigeour for all BJ’ers) confused them. The sterotypical view of Americans is MAGAs, Covid deniers and other assorted obnoxious idiots, after all they’re the ones people see in the media. The British have an ( often undeserved) reputation for politeness.
That and accents are weird. I have a neutral English accent and about 25% of Americans think I’m Australian. When I first came to America I was amazed that Americans couldn’t tell regional UK accents apart, eg Scouse from Mummerset. Not as in couldn’t identify them but couldn’t tell them apart. Then I realised I couldn’t do that to American variants except for a couple of really obvious movie cliches, New yorker from good ol’ boy. I couldn’t tell Canadian from American
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Most people have no idea what any job genuinely entails. Like, I am an architect, and people ask me all the time if I draw blueprints (literally have seen a blueprint machine once) and basically if I engineer the building, which is the engineer’s job. As for general contracting, the vast majority of it is paperwork, cost management, scheduling, estimating, and the like. The vast majority of general contractors haven’t built anything since high school woodshop. And the problem is that, when they talk about tradesmen pulling down $150K a year, that’s who they’re talking about, the supers and PMs and the owners. Not the dudes pulling wire or framing or hanging drywall.
sab
@Soprano2: I keep pushing Fionna Hill’s book and this is why. She describes her educational background in England. Basically she was slated for school leaving at 16 because she was working class. She pretty much had to educate herself. She taught herself French from scrounged books because she needed a language to pass her A levels and the schools had no teacher and no books for it. Their math was probably the same.
Suzanne
Re: American regional accents…. This video was fascinating. Mr. Suzanne is a SLP with a linguistics background, and he pointed me to it.
Chris
@Soprano2:
I wasn’t in the American school system until college, so I don’t have a perfect understanding of the options, but the French system, in high school, divided you into S (Science), ES (Economic and Social), and L (Literary) educational paths.
And one of the inevitable side effects is that kids and/or parents get it into their heads that some of these are the “good” tracks, for “serious” students, and others are the “bad” ones. S, at least in the early 2000s (and I imagine still today if it’s anything like the STEM craze in the U.S), was considered the “good” career track.
As it happens, a lot of the whiz kids at my school really were scientifically oriented and so it makes sense that they took the S track. But next to that were various kids who have since gone on to work in politics or law, and who already knew in school that that, not anything science or engineering related, is what they wanted to do. Now, maybe the S track followed by an ES career helped give them a more well-rounded education, and good for them and all that… but it was just really obvious in school that the main reason they were taking the S track is that that’s what “good” students are “supposed” to do.
To give you an idea how arbitrary this is, when my mother was going to school in the sixties, the L track was the one the “good” students were “supposed” to take. Whereas in my day, it was stereotyped as the career track for “creative” types if you’re being nice, and slackers if you aren’t.
I questioned back then the idea of setting career tracks that early (and this was only high school), partly because it was that early, and partly because it ends up creating that “good”/”bad” classification that in the end has very little to do with your actual aptitudes and career interests.
zhena gogolia
@Kay: Right.
JML
Some of these clowns seem really bound and determined to slot people into careers at like 14, might as well formally introduce a caste system if you’re going to try that nonsense.
I’m hugely supportive of the trades (union, of course) but they’re not for everyone either, and while a lot of them are facing shortages they’re also facing pension problems: either they were underfunded for years and running dry, or the newer (often non-union) don’t have sufficient benefits for people who are going to have to retire earlier because the physical burden of many of these jobs means you can’t keep doing it full-time until you’re 70.
College isn’t for everyone either, but it should be an option for a lot more people than it is. It also needs to turn back the clock and stop being treated as a job training program too. One of the biggest scams corporate america perpetuated against us was dumping their job training costs on colleges and making us think that was not only ok but right. Companies used to hire people and put them into a training program that wasn’t some 6 week orientation but a 6 month or year-long program for them to learn what the company did and how to do it. Now, they expect graduates to already know it on Day One…and colleges get slammed if they don’t tune their programs to specific corporate needs.
College should be a transformational experience, and every day we get a little closer to it being a checklist.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: I know! Don’t you hate that? :-)
It’s the quotation marks that make it different for me. ?♀️
Jinchi
Hmmm. He won’t hire anyone he thinks is gay because other people are homophobic?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: DSA tankies are still posting memes about drones even though Biden has greatly reduced them
Kalakal
@Suzanne:
This.
I was a software developer for years. People always asked me about support stuff.
“I can’t get my printer to work, how do I format a header” etc ad bloody nauseam
I just used to say I designed & wrote software, I didn’t use it except for Doom ( which was largely true) as I wasn’t a Bank, or Pharma company or whoever I was contracting for at the time
WaterGirl
@Zeecube: I don’t bother reading it because the use of the quotation marks pisses me off because it’s misleading to people who aren’t regular readers and don’t know his schtick.
sab
@Kalakal: Lol. As an American who studied in the UK I can tell Newcastle from Liverpool from Sheffield but I cannot tell London from Australia or Australia from New Zealand.
I grew up in the South and I can tell regional southern accents apart (and it drives me nuts when actors use the wrong one), but New York and Philadelphia sound alike to me.
schrodingers_cat
@Chris:
Its pretty similar to India, you are divided into 3 streams after grade 10. Science, Commerce and Arts (liberal). I chose science.
As for Algebra I it is essential for almost anything you do. It is the basis of mathematics from basic trigonometry to statistics to calculus and everything in between.
Trig is useful when building stuff be it machines or buildings.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: Sometimes I think all white collar jobs are alike. We all have meetings, spend a lot of time with email, and have a certain amount of bullshit to put up with.
For most of us, half of our job is communication.
It’s the subject matter of our work that makes it different.
Ken
@WaterGirl: This is why when I make up fake quotes, I attribute them to fake people. I do make an exception when the fake quote is “Hold my beer”.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: You’re about the only person reading them!
Dorothy A. Winsor
I was an English professor. People hear that and say uh oh, they’ll have to watch their grammar.
Suzanne
@JML: The other wrinkle is that I believe that college and trade programs have to be something you might do repeatedly over the course of your life, not just once. As the jobs that exist get more complicated (the simpler tasks are done by machines), or you decide you want to take some accounting courses to open your own company, or whatever it might be…. we have to get away from structuring society in such a way that you can’t do that.
Shit, one of my friends has a BS in biology and a master’s in education, and she was teaching high school biology. She always had an interest in welding. About ten years into her teaching career, she went back and did a welding certificate program. Now she teaches welding at a high school program, along with teaching agriculture and FFA at the high school.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia:
But I just said that I don’t bother to read them, so now i am confused.
topclimber
@Soprano2: The debate about tracking is one of those Kay alluded to re: 150 years of controversy. My conclusion after studying the issue in some depth: tracking makes sense in high school, where you can do it on a course basis rather than for all students in a given class.
As for algebra for someone unlikely to go into STEM fields, two thoughts: Math teaches logic; and way more Americans are innumerate vs. illiterate. People who are clueless about statistics and comparative concepts (e.g. per capita analysis) are easily bamboozled by political propagandists.
So maybe Johnny the plumber won’t need math for his trade, but WE need him to have it for his role as a citizen.
WaterGirl
@Ken: Ha! I enjoy the fake quotes that end in “probably”. I like that dry probably. My dad had a very dry sense of humor so that appeals to me, to this day.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: Okay, noticing them.
schrodingers_cat
OT: Why doesn’t Dennis Green post here any more?
This is his latest from Twitter. His posts on racism in the US taught me lot.
Suzanne
Honestly, I believe this. Construction sites have a lot of young dudebro types and they spend lots of time bullshitting (while working) and the super comes by once an hour, but most of the time there’s no one around to witness interactions. They don’t want to deal with HR problems. I’ve seen women tradespeople be treated like shit and they just put up with it because they don’t want to cause drama and they just want to do their work and get paid.
germy
Ms. Streep played President Orlean, and she also played Susan Orlean in a different movie a few years back.
Why isn’t Q investigating this?
Ken
“Not the kind of citizen that’s useful to us.” — GQP politician
(I am using this to illustrate what I said above: when I make up a fake quote, I attribute it to a fake person.)
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: Do you ever check out @LizBurgh? She and a couple Twitter colleagues are diving deep into the Justice Democrats, DSA, and the stealthy Momentum outfit. Some of their conclusions could be shaky, but it’s interesting research.
Jinchi
@sab:
There was a pretty dramatic example of this during covid, when the UK decided to assess students by predicting test scores in place of having them take an actual test.
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: Some of my mutuals follow her. So I do see her posts.
germy
@Suzanne:
One of my favorite comedians is Gina Yashere. She has some horrifying stories about the abuse she endured in her pre-comedy life as an engineer in the UK.
zhena gogolia
@germy: Wow.
That’s my philosophy on the question of leaving the USA.
Ken
You have to read them to know that you shouldn’t be reading them. There’s a fairly lengthy discussion of the proper frame of mind in 1984, when Wilson first uses the memory hole. China Miéville also uses it in The City and The City, with “unseeing” and “unhearing”.
topclimber
@Ken: All the evidence indicates that GQP types aren’t part of any WE worth heeding when it comes to education.
Also, let me clarify what I meant by course tracking rather than class tracking in high school. I do NOT mean what SC talks about in India and in much of the US, where you are branded at A, B, or C level for ALL courses. I mean you open up more advanced classes to students who show promise in that particular subject even if their overall profile is not college-prep.
germy
@zhena gogolia:
Same with me. I ain’t going anywhere.
evodevo
@Suzanne: Yep…50 years ago I could have told what region (or even town – Louisville vs. Lexington vs. Pikeville or wherever) in KY someone came from…now the younger generation (under 50 lol) all sound like valley girls or generic TV American accent. They all sound alike no matter what part of the state they are from.
Suzanne
@germy: I don’t doubt any of that. Ugh.
I feel like promotion of the trades as the solution to whatever job market problem we’re facing at that moment is so sexist and racist and classist. Many of those workplaces are really difficult for anyone who isn’t a straight white dude. Not to mention, it’s dying a slow death…. more and more construction is moving toward prefab, which requires highly skilled labor.
Geminid
@Suzanne: My friend Joan worked as a carpenter for ahigh end residential and light commercial building company back in the 1980’s. She got hazed some and otherwise faced a lot of resistance from male tradesmen. Then a friend gave her some advice: “Just pretend that they are boys, and you’re their mother.”
Joan was raising an eight year old boy at the time, so she knew what to do and it worked pretty well for her.
artem1s
There is a showdown coming with this court and the WH. Two “co-equal” branches of the government – one elected and one not. Neither one of which is supposed to be creating laws. Only interpreting and/or enforcing them.The Garland haters of course are going to interpret this as another sign that the AG is a weak corporate shill. But I can’t believe he’d ask for a review if he thought it was a total lost cause and there wasn’t some upside to asking for a second look at the appeals court ruling. I have a feeling Joe and the DOJ are up to something here, but I can’t see the play on this one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: This is one of the things I liked about my high school having the International Baccalaureate diploma program. Even if you lean a certain way in aptitude and the prevailing fashion pushes you a different direction, it gives you a broad education. I was involved early in my school’s participation in the program my choices were somewhat limited. Everyone took three higher level courses and three subsidiary level courses. We all did English, Biology, and History as highers and Mathematics, a second language (for me, French), and then either Econ, Anthro, or Physics (I took both Econ and Anthro). We had exams at the end that were graded in Geneva and he to jump through some other hoops like a Theory of Knowledge course, a research paper, and community involvement (sports, volunteering, other standard extracurriculars). Doing it kept people from being single track too young. OTOH, most people who got involved only did the courses that fit their interests. My year, there were only four people who did the whole thing and I don’t believe there have ever been more than 10 or so.
Omnes Omnibus
@topclimber: A plumber definitely uses math.
Jinchi
Years ago, I remember listening to a news segment about employers who refused to hire women unless they got a hysterectomy. It was one of John Stossel’s idiotic “Give Me a Break” segments.
No points for guessing who he thought was being unreasonable here.
That was when I realized that the libertarian idea of “personal freedom” is a pretty twisted thing.
Chris
@evodevo:
Midwestern has been the “generic” American accent for a long time, which is why I test as that and my sister and father sound the same despite none of us having ever lived there or spent any time there. (I think it goes back to the Civil War). It’s just that now that’s increasingly the only accent.
Kalakal
@Chris: The English system, when I went through it, was incredibly constricted. ( it’s improved a little)
Basically at around 16 you seperated into the rude mechanicals and the thinkers.
The lumpen proles either went straight to work or to a tech college where they learnt to bash lumps of metal and the approved manner in which to use an oily rag
The Intelligensia had their own sorting process
Everybody had to take O(ordinary) level exams. Usually up to about 10 in a broad range of subjects.
Depending on your results if you stayed at school you could study 3 subjects to A(dvanced) level and results were what got you into university and the subjects had to match the course applied for eg want to do any scientific/technical subject Maths/physics/chemistry -maths is a must, the others may be swapped for biology or geography . You would not study any other subject, eg no art, languages or history
You studied a subject at University for the full 3 years, no Majors or Minors. I did Chemical Engineering, from the age of 15 the only subjects I was taught were maths, physics and chemistry.
By the time I left I was very well educated in Physical & Organic chemistry but not all in Inorganic Chemistry. Thermodynamics I had slammed into me for 3 years solid but not a single play.
Quite frankly any system that makes you pick a career at 15 is imbecilic.
Fortunately not all the learning that goes on at university is taught and we were allowed to consort with “others” Why some of my best friends were psychologists, I was known to exchange affable greetings with a linguist and even went out with an economist.
Ken
@evodevo: Sounds like we need an update to “Hillbilly Elegy”, explaining why it’s so horrible that people in Kentucky now have enough access to the wider world that they’re losing their regional accents.
Hopefully J.D. Vance will soon have plenty of spare time to make the revisions.
James E Powell
@Kay:
I respectfully disagree. I am glad the TrueLeft® were not out front or cheering the Afghanistan withdrawal. I think it would have made the coverage worse. “Biden bows to hippies” and the like.
Besides, I think we pay too much attention to the perpetually indignant left. I got off all social media and believe me when I tell you everything looks better.
artem1s
@Amir Khalid:
It’s not the ET denialists I worry about. It’s the Literalists, Dominionists and the Cheneys (oh my). Militarization of space has always been the end goal for the Pentagon. Halliburton will gladly accept another 20 years of contracts to work on
Star Warsthe Death Star. Whether there is anything “out there” to use their death rays on. It’s all immaterial to Darth Cheney and his spawn. They’ll happily cram a few more billion into their pockets as whatever by-products of the research are used to blow up the godless heathens in the Middle East or SE Asia for another couple of decades.James E Powell
@Kay:
Not in Southern California.
sab
@Suzanne: Thanks! I have for years wanted to hear the mary marry merry distinctions,
PAM Dirac
@Cermet:
Where did you see that? The latest entry I see says that the momentum flap has been deployed and that everything is just about in place for the sunshield to start deployment and then a reference to the timeline that has been in place
Jinchi
Alas, militarization of space isn’t about protecting us from aliens or asteroids. The Death Star is pointed at us.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Carpenters too. The Pythagorean theorum often comes in handy in laying out structures.Some builders just know it as the ratio 3,4,5 for the sides of a right triangle.
I had to lay out a large elliptical raised planting bed one time, and I finally figured out how to apply the Pythagorean theorum to get the exact ellipse that I wanted. I was so thrilled!
Poe Larity
@WaterGirl:
Is there a lawyer here who will file a class action lawsuit against Balloon-Juice over DougJ?
Chris
@artem1s:
It’s a hell of a thing how the wars the Pentagon wants to fight and the wars they actually end up fighting keep diverging more and more.
In real life, they keep getting bogged down in third world failed states, fighting insurgents with fertilizer bombs and tenth-hand AK-47s – and losing, among other things because they simply don’t like that sort of messy and inconclusive warfare. But in their fantasies, they’re playing X-wing versus TIE fighter against the Chinese for control of the solar system.
cmorenc
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
What was truly bizarre about Bolton’s tenure as Trump’s National Security Advisor is that in that setting, he temporarily seemed a voice of wise rational, responsible sanity instead of the paridigm of a recklessly arrogant war-mongering ideologue who should never be allowed within light-years of the levers of power. Who among us would have ever thought that possible back in say, summer of 2016? Don’t get me wrong – we should hope Bolton never again regains any sort of national security or foreign policy post.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: It is weird. My younger brother insisted that he was not good at math, but could easily calculate the number of hits per game that a batter would need to get to keep his batting average over .300 and things like that when he was like nine. Natural Stats wizard, but he didn’t see that as math. OTOH, for the first week of my Prob/Stats class in HS, our teacher had us playing craps and black jack. I turned out far better at Prob than Stats.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2:
And when he got in a room with them, they’d just flatter him a little and he’d decide they were best friends and acquiesce to anything.
Matt McIrvin
@Elizabelle: I noticed that back in the 1990s. Europeans hearing a North American accent would guess you were Canadian, not because they really thought you were Canadian, but because the social cost of misidentifying a Canadian as from the US was high whereas the reverse was not.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: No, the army has no interest in that. The army wants the tank battles of late WWII. The Persian Gulf War made the army happy because it got to do what it wanted to and was damned good at doing. The first part of the Iraq War was the same.
sab
@Suzanne: Yes. I went from History (pre-law) to accounting (thank God for community college) with a Masters in Accounting ( tax) and one of the reasons I survived in accounting is that I was often the only person on board who could write professional letters.
topclimber
@Omnes Omnibus: I had a wonderful reply for you that died when the Internet cut out. I will try again.
You are right,. everyone needs math. This is is why the perspicacious TopClimber bemoaned innumeracy in this very thread (you know who you are you literary lights of BJ who are math morans). I was conceding the issue of who needs what for what job because the bigger question in K-12 is who gets access to advanced courses.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
LGM had a good post a little bit ago about how the NATO general secretary was able to prevent an American withdrawal under Trump, basically just by brown-nosing the guy to hell and back.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/11/what-stopped-trump-from-pulling-out-of-nato
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: You and me both. Especially because the right to be here did not come easy. It will be 5 years in 2022 that I became a citizen.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, I said the Pentagon, not the Army. You’re right, what I described is more what the Air Force wants. What the Army wants is… I don’t know, the Battle of Hoth, minus the snowspeeders.
Omnes Omnibus
I have no idea what you are talking about there. I was just noting that the army is part of the pentagon.
Matt McIrvin
@Kalakal: I am a professional software developer and I am less proficient with Windows PCs than the average person. Fortunately I never had to field tech support calls from my parents because my father was a pro and actually did know Windows. His retirement hobby is providing free IT support for everyone in his whole town.
Omnes Omnibus
And it’s never the comment you should have thought twice before posting. It is always the good ones.
topclimber
@Omnes Omnibus: To quote Baud/s: “All my comments are perfect.”
Baud
TIL that they don’t actually use sorting hats in UK to sort their students.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
True. It’s just that what the Army wants isn’t really related to the reality either. Different service branches have their different fantasies, but they’re all a ways from the reality of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Which I suppose would be fine if we were definitely not going to get bogged into one of those again, but I don’t have enough faith in our system for that.
Baud
@topclimber:
I didn’t realize I said that out loud.
WaterGirl
@cmorenc: Your comment went into moderation because there was a stray character tagged on to the end of your email address for this comment.
If you haven’t already, you will want to fix that so future comments don’t go into moderation.
Chief Oshkosh
@sab: I found Hill’s book to be a mixed bag. There’s lots of interesting aspects to her career and life; she remains a hero to me. But she was so, so heavy-handed in lathering on her take-away themes that the book just became tedious. Still, she makes some good points about how the UK, the US, and Russia all have problems with authoritarian populism. Better professional editing would’ve helped.
Her naivety about US race relations, the enormity and pervasiveness of which I don’t think she’s ever fully grasped (though she did discuss it a lot), makes her arguments a bit too close to those of JD Vance’s. She does cite Hillbilly Elegy as buttressing her arguments. This somewhat undermines some of her themes about how lack of access to education and other societal resources are due to economic class and not racial prejudice.
Separately, her descriptions of how she was underpaid in most or all of her higher-level positions were just painful. OK, she got screwed the first time, which she ascribes to sexism on the part of the employer and the system (and I completely agree). Did she learn anything? Nope, she went into at least two more high-level jobs, maybe three (I lost count), where she apparently thought that it was the responsibility of the people hiring her to ensure that she got the biggest paycheck possible from them, with no pre-negotiation research on her part and with, apparently, no negotiation at all wrt to salary and benefits. I give her credit for being honest about her lack of savvy, but gee whiz, that is not someone else’s fault once you are an adult on your third or fourth major career move.
Still, I think she’s a hero and I hope lots of people buy her book. Hopefully you’ll have different takes on it and come back to tell me where I missed important things. I’m used to learning that way. ;)
Kalakal
@Baud: It’s done by the time honoured ritual of ‘The Weighing of the Parental Wallets”
WaterGirl
@Ken:
No, you just have to have read a least a few in the past in order to see it and think, hmm this looks like a direct quote but it’s this guy again so maybe it’s some made-up bullshit.
I did not read a single word of today’s comment. I just wanted to be sure that i wasn’t making the wrong assumption when i saw that and thought “not worth reading’.
Another Scott
@Chris: Some folks are thinking about a future that is different from the past.
(For a while in the Reuters news app on my phone I was always getting ads for some war game that showed a Navy fleet approaching a couple of other battlewagons. The bad guys launched a hundred hovering missiles that almost instantly sank the carriers, etc…)
ONR:
Change is hard, but change always comes.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Kalakal:
I love tradition.
WaterGirl
@Poe Larity: DougJ is a known quantity – pretty sure that by the time you have 100,000 twitter followers they know what’s up.
Totally different.
FelonyGovt
@narya: Adam Schiff says the same in his book, that Trump was an ideal candidate for Russian pressure.
Tony Jay
@Kalakal:
When Lady Jay and I visited Seattle (and British Colombia) back in 2004 I found it well amusing that Americans had zero problem understanding my Scouse bellowing, but literally couldn’t understand her very faint North Manchester/Bury accent. Seriously, I had to translate.
OTOH while I could pick up on the obvious difference between various American accents when I heard them, unless someone was giving it 100% Noi Joisey or Saaaath Cahrolaahna it was all Generic Americano to me.
And I was very tickled to discover the Canadians I met (transplants from the East Coast) really did say “Eh” at the end of most sentences.
Poe Larity
@Chris: “Biden lied when he said progressive ideas could survive in the marketplace of freedom. LG&M perfectly represents this, as their liberal hypocrisy cannot survive without a shit-show of capitalistic ads that renders their views unreadable”
– Le Glenn Reynolds Pitchbot
Brachiator
@dnfree:
A favorite novel when I was deep into science fiction.
Ken
The followers do, but Twitter may not; witness the problems the DPRK News Service had this year.
Kalakal
@Tony Jay:
That was it for me exactly. I’ve gotten better at it
When I want to mess with people I go into ham Leeds with lots of of Reets, Happens, Gradeleys & Sithees. If I really want to go for it I use Doric which is basically incomprehensible unless you’ve spent a lot of time within about 40 miles of Peterhead in NE Scotland
Soprano2
@Suzanne: Here in the sewer department I had a boss who dropped out of high school and got his high school equivalency so he could enlist in the Army, where he was trained as a surveyor. He worked here for over 25 years; he knew so much about how our particular sewer system worked that sometimes the engineers would ask him questions about the system! They let him leave because they weren’t willing to give him more money for supervising over 35 people than the other supervisor in our department who had fewer than 10 employees. He’s now head of Wyandotte County KS sewer department, all because he doesn’t have an engineering degree and PE behind his name. He said when he was job hunting, everyone assumed he had a college degree and was an engineer! I truly think there are a lot of places that are missing out on some great people because they’re so hung up on having people with specific initials after their name. I understand that for some jobs those credentials are necessary, but many times they aren’t.
Soprano2
@JML: I was a business major (as well as general music, long story), and everyone kept telling me sales was where the money was. What I found out is that if you aren’t good at it, there is no money in sales. There’s a reason for different professions – no one can do just anything. Same way with engineers – I keep hearing that’s where the money is, but if you suck at it I bet the money is not good at all.
Cameron
@Chris: Dunno if they’ve learned anything in the intervening years.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/fact-us-military-lost-simulated-war-iran-back-2002-88136
Geminid
@Tony Jay: The word “cow” is pronounced differently by western Virginians I know. I pronounce cow with a round O, like my midwestern parents did. But I hear people in the Shenandoah Valley pronounce it with a flattened O, as in “keow.” This may be a Scots-Irish thing.
James E Powell
@Tony Jay:
They’ve all seen A Hard Day’s Night several times, but haven’t seen Control.
smith
Re school tracking, in addition to freezing economic disparities among students, it was and maybe still is used in this country as a way to segregate students by race within nominally integrated schools.
Feathers
Some of the real problems we have now are because of demanding young people decide what career they want and then getting the very specific education required for it. Whether or not people succeed in a job usually has far more to do with temperament than any specific knowledge. So people wash out of their dream field and end up corporate drones. I have seen a lot of this in terms of people believing the whole “affirmative action hires” and “only got the job because she’s white” malarkey. So many universities churn out degrees where the grads have minuscule chances of working in the field. And will probably lose out to English or Econ majors from selective colleges.
There is a great deal to be said for the old career path of general undergrad degree, followed by a few years working, then a masters in the field if you wanted to really commit. (And that your employer generally paid for.)
opiejeanne
Nothing to see here.
TheflipPsyd
Amanda Gorman’s poem really hits how I am feeling. I recommend reading the whole poem on her instagram feed. Just absolutely beautiful writing — and really cathartic as well. I’m not so sure if there are rules for copying the whole poem into a comment, so I’m not going to do that. But, wow, so worth reading it.
trollhattan
Beginning to believe those who say to get ahead, “don’t go to college.” There’s a better way.
germy
I was complaining here yesterday about Dersh on the BBC after the Maxwell verdict. Apparently they got many complaints:
germy
Someone did an amusing paraphrase of the BBC statement:
Spanky
@Soprano2:
I feel seen.
trollhattan
@Kalakal: @Tony Jay:
After a favo(u)rite Aussie pro footballer went from playing in the States to Everton Women (where? says I) she was interviewed by a local gal about the move, her new club, et al, and at some point asked “How are you getting on with the Scouse accent?”
She admitted it could be a challenge.
So it’s not just us. :-)
trollhattan
@germy: I can vouch World Service had a lot of Maxwell coverage overnight and it contained zero Dersh. Hope some fingers got burned enough to require bandages, over that screwup.
Also sounds as though the sword of Damocles still hangs over Andrew’s head on this whole thing.
Ken
@trollhattan: I am confident that Doctor Who‘s recent policy of casting actors who can be understood by only seventeen other people will make all of us better at these accents.
JaySinWa
@trollhattan: I’ve been saying for a while that this was an attempt at Joe the plumber part deuce. Oregon man is going to be a full grift campaign. There’s money to be
hadmisdirected.Another Scott
@trollhattan: Obligatory IamHappyToast:
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@smith:
It just seems to operate on anecdote and it doesn’t have to. The US has TONS of real info on jobs and wages and actual students in public schools right now and dating back 50 years. Real numbers.
I read it sometimes and it’s “I couldn’t find an electrician for work on my vacation home” – that was KellyAnne Conway. It’s just shit. It’s like a belief system.
It just seems wildly, insanely out of touch. We don’t have to just collect a random assortment of personal experiences and then design “vocational education” around that. There’s real info. You wanna know who takes Algebra I in 8th grade? If they go to a public school we can get that. Available. It doesn’t need to be an opinion.
Suzanne
@Feathers: Architecture has a huge amount of washouts. Everyone wants to do design and visualization work in specific high-end markets, but the reality is that you have to do production out of school. And most buildings are developer-driven. And the realities of regulation, building code, budget, constructability, feasibility, etc….. all are very disappointing to a certain subset of new graduates.
Ken
I’m sensing an unstated “They all wanted $60 an hour, and there’s no way I’m paying that.
Which reminds me of the old itemized bill joke: “Replacing fuse in water heater, $1. Knowing how to replace fuse in water heater, $59.”
Raven
@Soprano2: I got my GED after I went in but that was a looooong time ago!
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
When he was in college, a cousin’s son often said he wanted a job that made lots of money. He was an anthropology major, but had no intention of working in that field. But he had friends who had found good paying jobs soon after graduation and figured that he could also easily fall into something.
Didn’t quite work out that way, but he is doing okay.
Talking to him once, I told him that I didn’t have any magical key to success, but said that it sometimes helps to know what you love to do, and also know what you are good at, which might be something altogether different.
One thing that I said that might be a rule is never stay in a job that you hate and that makes you feel absolutely miserable. No one will reward you for being a martyr.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan: that makes my head spin. I’m not a believer but I know and respect a great many people who are and who walk the walk. Even my right wing cousin who lives with her husband in an empty nest five BR McMansion– they have two grown children– and upgrades her BMW every two years and bitches about taxes, but she also volunteers in a prison ministry and spends a week a year building houses. But… Jesus told me to make a middle-school level prank call to the President of these United States? I’ve got to pray on it so see if I can get the blessing of a rapist who mocked Christians? Everybody focuses on the stupidity of “two Corinthians”, not enough IMHO on the smirking contempt of “that’s the one you like, right?”
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Holeee fuck.
A colleague just got a serious request from someone related to wanting to figure out how to keep his father’s skull after he’s gone.
We’re all hooting about it in the local lawyer Facebook group.
Ive seen batshit before, but this is top notch batshit.
Kay
@Ken:
“Liberals mandate everyone go to college so there is no vocational training”:
It’s not true. it’s 20%, which is not “.2%”
Now maybe 121k and 20% is “not enough” if Conway wants a cheap electrician but this information is endlessly compiled and reported by public schools, so maybe she could look it up?
Or we could just design it around rich peoples cherished myths about bricklayers or something.
It’s so faddish too. One Right wing CEO said he needed welders so the herd decided everyone needs to be a welder. You know who could train welders if they need welders? Employers. They could pay for it too.
debbie
The New Year? I just want to survive this year. 500,000 new infections reported for yesterday. ?
different-church-lady
@Kay:
Hipster Kitty doesn’t give a shit. Hipster Kitty just repels what it wants.
JaySinWa
@Ken: Given a vacation home, trip fees could be huge and scheduling an issue, but yes, overall costs were probably shocking to her. Plus an apparent inability to do basic research.
Kay
@Ken:
Also, all elecricians don’t wire her bedroom. They’re industrial. They never go near someone’s house.
It’s a kind of contempt for what they do, to know so little about their work and yet opine on it in a policy position. Find something out before scheduling and speaking at the career conference.
Tony Jay
@Kalakal:
I’ve long suspected that the best way to get punched by anyone from Leeds is to say “I love the Leeds accent, it’s like really camp Mancunian”. I bet it even works with James Milner.
Not that I’d ever actually say that. 8-)
Now that is really mean. I love it.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
It may hang, but probably never drop.
There are many people whose only job in life is to protect Royals from scandal.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator:
“The Men in Grey Suits….”
JaySinWa
@Kay:
I see your problem right there. Real Americans go to private schools just like god intended. //pundit
MattF
@PAM Dirac: It seems the various JWST deployments are going slowly and deliberately. Webb blog says the sunshield covers have just been opened. Next comes deployment of the sunshield booms and tensioning of the five (!) layers of the shield.
Tony Jay
@James E Powell:
That’s as good a theory as any I’ve come up with. Lots of people want to see Control but pull out at the last minute when they ask themselves “Do I really want to put myself through this?”
Warblewarble
BBC regrets that “mistakes were made” unfortunately Jimmy Saville was not available.
Soprano2
@Spanky: I think it’s insulting to engineers to imply that anyone at all could do it if only they took the right courses. Engineering is not just a skill that’s learned; it’s something that people have an aptitude for!
I’ve come to believe that people with certain temperaments end up in certain fields for a reason. It’s not just about stereotyping; those people really are better at that particular profession.
Brachiator
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Is there some law against that?
Asking for a friend…
ETA. I agree that this is …odd. But would it be illegal?
Alce_e_ardillo
@sab: Sounds like my GF in Scotland. Was going to be a dock hand on Clydeside, but passed a test and won a scholarship to public school (private). That allowed him to become a chartered accountant.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony Jay: Hey, I liked it. I also liked 24 Hour Party People. OTOH, I have never been north of Finchley.
Captain C
@Kay:
A lot of them are the political equivalent of hipsters. If anyone outside their accepted circle agrees with them, they’re (the hipsters) doing something wrong, and must change.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soprano2: Why is it anymore insulting to engineers than it would be to lawyers, teachers, or nurses. All of those seem to be fields that everyone and their cousin seem to think that anyone could just pick up.
Kalakal
@Tony Jay:
That would do it :)
Even easier, just say “Man U” , the correct word is “scum”.
“Cantona” can be quite provoking, espescially with an older crowd
Ken
@Brachiator: It does seem that if people can direct that their bodies be used for medical training, or by that FBI forensics site, or so some artist can inject them with plastic and partially dissect them, it should be possible to direct a literal memento mori to the family.
Different matter if the father didn’t (or won’t) make such a direction, of course.
different-church-lady
@Captain C: Great minds think alike. As do ours.
Quiltingfool
@sab: I’m late to the thread, but I know Southern accents and, yes, they are different. We watched Ozark on Netflix and it was aggravating that they had actors using a Kentucky accent to portray folks living in the Missouri Ozarks! I kept thinking, “People, did you even HANG OUT around here before shooting your series?”
The accent we have here is what I call “country red-neck Missouri.” Not at all like a Kentucky accent, which I really enjoy hearing.
Uncle Cosmo
@Elizabelle: In summer 1990 I flew into Hamburg, rode downtown to the Bahnhof to buy a ticket to visit my friend in Copenhagen, but wanted to stop off in Luebeck for the afternoon. Something of a complex procedure so I asked the ticket agent if he spoke English & decided his English was better than my German. I used common words and simple sentences throughout the process and spoke very slowly and clearly.
When it was finished the agent asked me if I was British. This floored me – I didn’t think any European would mistake my way of speaking for anything but an American – so I told him I so and asked him why he thought I might be a Brit.
Because I understood you, he replied.
(We Amis have a tendency to speak fast, slur our words, use idiomatic expressions we probably aren’t even conscious of, and when we aren’t understood the first time, TALK LOUDER & then EVEN LOUDER!)
Chris
@Captain C:
About this. One of the most bizarre developments in the hardcore, Democrats-are-too-mainstream, Left over the last half-decade has been the total 180 they did on “identity politics.”
I mean, I remember what the hard left was like at the turn of the millennium, and race was all over their worldview. It was integrated with their critique of capitalism and militarism, sure, but from anti-globalists protesting sweatshops to anti-war types protesting the war on terror, the critique was repeatedly framed in terms of poor mostly-nonwhite people in the Global South suffering and dying so that rich-mostly-white-men in the Global North – and, to a lesser but real extent, the mostly-white middle-class of same – could profit. And that was, of course, following off of half a century of far-left activism against things like apartheid, segregation, and colonialism.
I can’t overemphasize how weird it’s been watching the far left transition from this to a quasi-Strasserite vision that places a mythologized White Working Class on a pedestal, judges all our efforts by how much we do or don’t succeed in appealing to them, and scolds anyone trying to talk about race, gender, sexuality et al as elitist and divisive and not caring enough about helping all Americans.
I’ve heard various theories for why this happened. The reason your comment reminded me of it is that… it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion that, the less white and straight and male-dominated mainstream society gets, the more corporations and other such institutions start at least pretending to care about “the woke agenda,” the less they care about these things. It’s mainstream now, therefore uncool and untouchable.
(Also can’t help but think that a lot of the far-lefties feel betrayed on some level by the way blacks and other such demographics are mostly more interested in integrating into the mainstream than burning it down to create Anarchist Utopia. Remember the various people in the Obama years who complained “I thought I was getting a black president, you know, scary and aggressive and burning shit down!”)
JCJ
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Maybe this person went to Hallstatt Austria and went to the cemetery? Pictures at the link
https://www.hallstatt.net/about-hallstatt/sehenswertes-en-US/catholic-church-of-hallstatt/bone-house-of-hallstatt/
JCJ
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Maybe this person wants to recreate the cemetery in Hallstatt Austria?
Google “charnel house hallstatt”
Feathers
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: There is a history of people trying to get their skull used to play the part of Yorric in (future) productions of Hamlet. https://hyperallergic.com/289581/actors-have-been-dying-to-play-the-skeletal-role-of-yorick-in-hamlet/
Uncle Cosmo
First time in Yerp (1980) I encountered a rather respectable couple & asked them if they were Australian. Naaow, they replied somewhat sadly, we’re from New Zealand.
So the next time I met someone who sounded like them I asked if he was from New Zealand, and he shouted back
The “tell” is all about “about” – Can-Eh-Jens pronounce it rather close to “a boot” in a way no Yank dialect does. You’re welcome!
Brachiator
@Chris:
This, in a nutshell, is why the far left is so often full of shit.
Feathers
@Chris: Some of this is due to having to share Twitter with actual Black Americans and people from the Global South who can tell them that they are fools and to STFU and get out of our way. The white working class is not in danger of out competing them.
Amir Khalid
It is very important that we all watch this video. It will open many doors for us.
Brachiator
@Ken:
True enough, but this is not the same thing as keeping daddy’s skull at home, placed atop the mantelpiece.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator: Desecration of a corpse – dispositions are pretty narrowly prescribed.
I mean, which mortician would say “no problem”?
Old School
@Amir Khalid:
It will close just as many.
Amir Khalid
@Uncle Cosmo:
As I recall, the Cigarette Smoking Man, played by Canadian theatre director William B. Davis, did let the occasional “aboot” loose on The X-Files.
Miss Bianca
@trollhattan:
Someone else here commented a couple days ago, “Who would Jesus tell to go fuck himself?” I think that’s the first question I’d like to ask this chowderhead.
NotMax
@Kalakal
Peterhead!
In 1974 a small group of us were, to quote to publican of the Peterhead Inn who came storming out of the establishment, “Banned fer life!” for kicking around a soccer ball in the car park after we departed the bar at closing hours, while waiting for a bus.
;)
Kalakal
@Uncle Cosmo:
The old joke about Kiwi accents is
“A bison is something you wash your fice in”
They’re also ridiculously sing-song. Every sentence ends in a rising inflection, just saying “hello” becomes a question.
“Aboot” eh? . Hadn’t realised no Americans used that
Soprano2
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s really not, that was just an example that I hear a lot – “If you want to make a lot of money you should major in engineering” as if there are no actual skills required for the profession. Try having to answer the incoming phone and help people with their problems. Everyone believes it’s easy to answer the phone. I always tell them that yes, picking up the phone and saying “hello” is easy – the skill is in what to do next!
Miss Bianca
@Feathers: There’s a whole arc in the TV series Slings and Arrows about that.
(I watch this series almost every year. Of course, I also work at a community theater with pretensions, so…it’s a workplace comedy for me.)
J R in WV
@evodevo:
On my local TV news, which covers stories out of Pikeville, KY pretty routinely, they sometimes run sub-titles when a person from up a hollow from Pikeville is talking, because people not from there can’t understand more than an occasional word the guy being interviewed says.
So strong local accents are still around here in the hill country of Appalachia. Wife has attended court cases where translators were used for witnesses speaking The King’s English of circa 1650, so that people from away would know what was being said by a witness from uppa holler. Both word choice and usage is quite antique, along with a thick accent to boot.
dopey-o
RONG! From the AP article linked in OP:
That would have been (checks calendar) yesterday.
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
I remember that like it was yesterday, when you told us about becoming a citizen, and everyone (well, mostly all) was congratulating you on your hard won success.
I’m still very glad to have you on board! We need all the smart people we can scrape up!! Thanks for joining up !! !!
J R in WV
@Tony Jay:
When my ship was sent to a shipyard in Pascagoula Mississippi in 1972, a shipmate’s wife was from coastal Connecticut and had a pretty serious Down-East accent. Not only could she not understand the local Pascagoula folks’ speech, they could not understand hers.
She would write questions on a tablet with her ballpoint pen, and ask them to write out an answer when it was important. . . was an unbelievable problem for her. Her husband was from Michigan and could interpret for her IF he wasn’t on duty.
J R in WV
@TheflipPsyd:
The miracle of the Innertube network is that you can post a link to the author’s post so that we can read the poem in her site. We even have a button for that, if you know how to copy/paste.
The Moar You Know
@Kay: I agree fully that employers need to be on the hook for a LOT more training costs than they are – occupational training is simply not done in this country, for any job – but would just like to point out as an actual certified welder, that process took me four years in high school, just to turn out a minimally qualified welder. You could get the same results in one year if that’s all the student did (full time trade school, not working or taking any other classes) but that newbie welder is still going to need quite a few years of on the job experience before you can let them go out unsupervised.
Geminid
@Chris: In 2018, Justice Democrats chief Saikat Chakrabarti flew to Kansas with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders to campaign for Brent Welder in the KS-3rd primary. A reporter went along, and when they pointed out that Welder was a white man and his principal opponent, Sharice Davids, was a Native Lesbian, Charabarti said basically, “we’re beyond Identity Politics.” It’s situational, though; Justice Ddmocrats still exploit identity politics when it suits them.
Many of Bernie Sanders supporters downplayed “identity politics” when it seemed to cut against their white male protagonist. Then a lot of Black Carolina Democrats voted for Joe Biden in last year’s primary. That was the beginning of the end for Bernie Sanders, and I see some lefties still bearing a grudge towards “old Black people” over this. Black Democrats I follow on Twitter see this too, and they get pretty hot about it.
Geminid
@Kalakal: There used to be people from Richmond, Virginia and “aboot,” who used that long O, as in “hoose” for house. It may have been an upper class affectation, maybe a survival from older English settlers.
NotMax
@Miss Bianca
Doesn’t seem to be streaming anymore at present, but if you ever come across a little gem of series (6 episodes) called Empty Space I have a feeling you’d enjoy it.
About a group trying to mount a production of Romeo & Juliet.
Non-spoiler: The snooty director is more than peeved when the actor playing Mercutio breaks an arm during rehearsals and insists on disdainfully referring to the replacement as Substitutio.
Captain C
@different-church-lady: Indeed they do!
Elie
@mali muso:
Wishing you all the best and kudos for doing what is so necessary now — loving parenting…
Captain C
@Kalakal:
Years ago, in the days of landlines, I had a phone number which was either very near to or formerly used by a specialty archery store. Despite my saying specifically on the outgoing message that this was NOT Timeless Archery, I kept getting requests and orders. One, a little smarter than the rest, was from Canada, and he let me know he was indeed probably a little sharper by ending his message with, “…if this is indeed Timeless Archery, and I have my doots.”
Note that this was in the days of by-the-minute charges for long distance calls, so I did not call any of these people back to let them know that I would not be sending them their various archery parts.
NotMax
@Kalakal
Lord Rockingham’s XI : “There’s a moose aboot the hoose.”
;)
Fair Economist
@Suzanne: That was great, thanks!
Omnes Omnibus
@Kalakal: The further north you go in WI, MN, and the UP of MI, the closer to Canadian the accent becomes. The tendency is to finish with hey rather than eh.
TheflipPsyd
@J R in WV: Haha. It’s only available through her Instagram account and I could not cut and paste the link. Maybe because I don’t have an Instagram account
Anotherlurker
@Soprano2: Agreed! Would you trust a carpenter who knows nothing of basic Algebra and Geometry, to build a set of stairs?
Miss Bianca
@NotMax: Ooh, I will look for that, thanks for the tip!
J R in WV
@trollhattan:
Evidence appears to show that G-D wants Schmeck to be a belligerent, ignorant, rude, failure of an asshole, and that Schmeck is totally not prepared for any other career choices.
J R in WV
@Geminid:
This, so much this!
I had elderly southern relatives who spoke like that, born early in the 1900s in Virginia, moved further south for most of their lives, would visit their relatives in the mountains in the summers because it was cooler here than down in the deep south — was long before whole house A/C was common.
Will never forget hoose for house, etc, etc.
ETA… they certainly thought they were upper class, also too!
debbie
@Geminid:
I don’t give a crap about easing Putin’s journey back down. He fucked up when he proved himself to be nothing more than a criminal thug. Since when should criminal thugs be given any kind of consideration?
(I think my inner Lativan is getting the better of me today.)
James E Powell
@Tony Jay:
Maybe just go with 24 Hour Party People.