Friday’s inflation report is likely to show that consumer prices worsened in September for the second straight month as President Donald Trump’s tariffs have lifted the cost of some groceries and other goods.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) October 24, 2025 at 5:00 AM
===
All of the pilfering, vandalism, and outright death caused by DOGE cuts, and all of the thefts from the future by illegally stopping research grants, didn't save a penny, Trump spent the money and more on corruption and incompetent ICE goons.
— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 11:15 AM
===
Hey, remember when Elon Musk was going save hundreds of billions of dollars by revoking Social Security benefits for dead people? Didn't happen, because hardly any dead people were getting Social Security. Instead, there's been a big *increase* in Social Security recipients since Musk's DC stint.
— Justin Fox (@byjustinfox.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 11:35 AM
===
“.. It’s to the point now where .. I could lose everything … Being a small business owner isn’t worth it when your country turns on you,” said Jared Hendricks, the CEO of Village Lighting, a small business selling Christmas products.
@cnbc.com
www.cnbc.com/2025/10/17/h…— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) October 17, 2025 at 7:12 AM
===
ENTEN: “.. Trump's at new lows when it comes to economic net approval. .. Q-Pac (-19 pt) & CNBC (-13 pt) find him at the lowest level of either of his presidencies.
“.. Also, he's lower than any president at this point in a presidency or 2nd term on record.”
@cnn.com @cnbc.com— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 10:52 AM
===
Generally this is best seen as a measure of enthusiasm.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 10:29 PM
===
I think many people of various ideological persuasions are missing how much the ground has shifted against Trump in the realm of public opinion in the last 9 months. Mostly because they’ve bought into the manufactured media narrative that Trump won a “mandate”—which wasn’t true.
— jack ?? (@kyriakos.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 5:54 PM
===
I think the topline moves are understating what’s happening, too- opposition is hardening and the remaining Trump supporters keep adding caveats
— ghost malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 7:14 PM
On The Road – Sure Lurkalot – It Was All Yellow
Baud
Looks like COVID did help with Social Security expenditures.
RFK Jr. is probably the key to saving the trust fund.
Suzanne
I am quickly coming around to the realization that following the news or social media closely makes one less informed, rather than more informed. There’s still nothing like getting outside and touching grass. Apart from his cult, people voted for lower prices and that’s really it. Even the racism and xenophobia was accepted in service of lower prices…. which by no means excuses it or reduces its destructiveness. But it should indicate to us that there are ways of winning even with a xenophobic and racist electorate.
I am wondering how people are planning to deal with tariffs right in front of Christmas, and rising food prices in front of Thanksgiving.
David_C
DOGE only made the government less efficient, as government employees had to jump through hoops to get anything done while normal functions were cut without any planning, leaving gaps and a mad scramble to get anything done while kind of continuity of operations. This will be hard to correct.
ETA: Meanwhile, we sit here doing jigsaw puzzles and figuring out how many means we can get out of a bag of lentils.
Baud
The difference in media coverage of the economy during Biden and Trump is stark.
Suzanne
@David_C: My favorite lentil soup. You can leave the cilantro off at the end if you’re one of Those People. It’s just garnish, really.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@David_C: Also, and this is what Republicans pretend not to understand THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY DOES NOT DECIDE HOW MUCH MONEY GETS SPENT!!! Congress appropriates X amount of money and THAT decides how much gets spent. Trump took a bunch of money from certain agencies- most notably USAID – but that money never went to the taxpayers. It wasn’t cut from the budget. It went…who knows where? Tracking down where those billions went would be something for an enterprising reporter or Congressperson to dig into or at least ask questions about.
Matt McIrvin
And yet, Trump’s topline job approval is still at about 40%. That’s higher than it was at this point in 2017. It’s higher than Biden’s was in 2024. It’s WAY higher than second-term George W. Bush once everything started spinning out of control.
He should be down to the Crazification Factor fringe by now, and he’s not.
Maybe 100 million Americans are loving this shit, think Trump’s putting everything on the right track. Maybe it’s just that the big economic crash hasn’t really happened yet.
Baud
Why would they release this if they’re not releasing the job numbers?
J.
How much more negative do things have to get for Republicans in Congress to turn on Trump? Is there a breaking point or is this truly a death cult where nothing will turn them?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I wouldn’t say we’re in an economic crash yet.
Biden deserved better, but Republicans are more loyal than Democrats.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: And that is the key to all our woes.
Baud
@J.:
Republicans aren’t going to turn on Trump as long as people hate Democrats.
They don’t have to outrun the bear. They just have to outrun us.
Professor Bigfoot
I saw that Quintanilla post and immediately thought, “who’d ya vote for, Jared? I bet it wasn’t the smart Black lady.”
Gvg
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: The regulations decide who gets benefits. The bare rats just process the payments that the laws passed by Congress decided should be made. Bureaucrats who are too few just process slower. Mistakes don’t get fixed. They are dodging their own responsibility AGAIN.
I have long thought that we were anti immigration because we underfunded immigration services to discourage citizenship approval. The democrats gave in on this because frankly a lot of democratic voters have been anti immigration for a long time. Not hate foreigners and treat them mean, just buy American and they are taking our jobs and industries, which they were in a way because American had an unnatural temporary advantage after WWII but thought that would last forever. Other countries naturally built themselves up. And we weren’t spending enough on ourselves because we were skimming the best from elsewhere cheaply and spending to be the worlds policeman. Explaining that is complicated and not a good election strategy though. Biden was doing things needed, but not able to explain over 60 years of non explaining/teaching to a public in a quick enough time. No one could. All of us need to start to help with that.
J.
@Baud: Sigh. When did wanting to help the majority of people have decent lives (Democrats) become a bad thing?
Jeffg166
Ontario launches $75 million ad campaign using the words of Ronald Reagan to argue against tariffs
youtube.com/watch?v=hN_CVvzExpM
Baud
@J.:
Probably when it started working.
mappy!
When one mines local voter rolls, voting history as it were, (from a somewhat purple municipality in my case) a couple of things stand out: people vote name recognition not policy. People vote for status quo. People vote paycheck. When the paycheck gets hit and names are attached, name recognition and status quo are dumped. None of this has anything to do with any media bias, it’s all word of mouth.
Keep in mind that there are elections every year, year in, year out, not just every two or four years. Municipals this year are going to be worth watching…
Suzanne
@Baud:
I saw someone on Xhitter make the observation that Dems have a lot more academics in the party. People who read criticism and history, and they critique, because….. that’s what academics do. Lots of us have also been intellectually brought up with an ethos of questioning our leaders as an act of good citizenship. So. Probably a good quality for us when it comes to being aware. And a bad quality when it comes to actually winning power.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Makes sense to me. Critical thinking is an important skill. It’s not the only skill worth having.
But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
MagdaInBlack
@Jeffg166: Yes, and trump big mad over that.
@Suzanne: And authoritarian followers do not critique/question. It’s easier for them that way. No thinking involved. They’ve had “questioning” beaten out of them at an early age.
bbleh
@Baud: lol not to mention the difference in its ACTUAL PERFORMANCE
@J.: this is the real question for me too. And I concur that it likely won’t be an outright rebellion, but IF AND WHEN it manifests, I think it will be more as skittishness and temporizing and lots of Johnson-like “I haven’t seen it” remarks, plus quiet rejections of extreme proposals, even more quiet adoptions of certain restrictions, and just a general sullen uncooperativeness. Whether that will be enough to make a practical difference in how things unfold, I dunno
@Matt McIrvin: I think it’s as you say: the 30-35% crazies are dyed in the wool — they’ll believe what he says over the evidence of their lying eyes any day — and the remaining 5-10% just haven’t got their noses out of their phones yet, in part because they haven’t been forced to. I’m afraid they will be, though, which will hardly be an unalloyed cause for celebration.
Professor Bigfoot
@J.: When Black people became part of the people Democrats wanted to help have decent lives..
lowtechcyclist
@J.:
They had a chance to turn on him with the impeachment in 2021, when the nation was still shocked by the J6 insurrection. Only a handful did. Given that, it’s hard to imagine what it would take now.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Questioning isn’t so much the problem for Dems IMHO. Rather, it’s the addiction to contrarianism.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: I agree.
I’m thinking about how much the authoritarian/republican mindset hates being questioned, and discourages critical thinking.
(perhaps I digressed)
Suzanne
@MagdaInBlack: That’s why the GOP is so anti-college.
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne: yup.
Can’t be educatin’ folks, they start thinkin’ for themselves.
Nelle
@Suzanne: This recipe is close to the Moroccan lentil recipe that I follow in terms of spices. It begins with heated ginger, then heated other spices.. Then it calls for sweet potatoes, carrots, and celery to be added, coated with spices, and heated for 5 minutes, followed by crushed tomatoes, chickpeas, and lentils. Also, quinoa, cooked separately, added at the end. The combination of spices seems to awaken some previous incarnation of a life lived before this one.
Professor Bigfoot
If there’s any justice, Big Beautiful Bill will be the name of Trump’s cellmate!
NotMax
Happy United Nations Day!
Somehow I don’t expect the tradition of U.S. presidents issuing a proclamation about the day to be upheld this year.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Absolutely. They are strong believers in status hierarchy, which does not brook being questioned by one’s lessers.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
gene108
@Baud:
Trump has an incredibly high floor of support amongst Republican voters, no matter what he does. A cult like following that will happily follow him to ruin.
No Democratic president has ever had, nor should they have, that level of cultish devotion.
But Republicans have turned on plenty of their own, Wyoming kicked Liz Cheney out of party, Rusty Bowers the the Speaker of the Arizona House was doxxed, SWATTED, and had people protesting outside his home for refusing to overturn the 2020 election for Trump, John Bolton is facing criminal charges for being disrespectful of Trump, and I’m sure there are more examples of Republicans eating their own for not following Trump blindly.
Trump’s hold on the Republican party, and Republican voters is unique and unprecedented for any president over their party.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
rikyrah
@Jeffg166:
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Baud
@gene108:
They’ll turn on heretics. But that just shows their loyalty.
This is why I believe the core of Trumpism is racism. It’s the modern version of the Confederacy mindset.
rikyrah
@J.:
1964, Dear😒😒
iKropoclast
I’m beyond ashamed of these “drug smuggler” bombings. Summary execution is not acceptable for any class of crime. If none of this is going through any Court, I’m operating under the assumption all of these boats are fishermen or kindergartens on field trips.
Baud
@iKropoclast:
Agree.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: yep.
TONYG
@Matt McIrvin:100 million Americans are happy to suffer if it means that the people who they hate are suffering more. That is the consistent element in U.S. history for almost 250 years.
TONYG
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Yes. How much of this money has just been stolen? All of it?
NotMax
@iKropoclast
You know how much cocaine can be packed inside a juice box?
//
TONYG
@Baud: One of the many legacies of the Confederate States of America.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: Except for the fact that employed noncitizen immigrants pay into Social Security and never receive any money back.
I’m not going to google that before breakfast but it’s a huge amount. It turns out that deporting these people is one of those Republican “not a bug, it’s a feature” things: working toward Social Security collapsing upon itself in tandem with promoting white supremacy.
(I’m not saying ripping off working non citizens is admirable, just that it’s a jerryrig while we continue to refuse to tax the wealthy).
iKropoclast
@NotMax: Haha, never thought of that, but I’d estimate a kilo.
gene108
@lowtechcyclist:
1. Only 17 out of 50 Republican Senators had to vote to convict for Trump to be out of our lives forever, or little over 1/3 of their caucus.
2. Republican voters never turned on Trump, despite J6. J6’s failure just made them angrier that Trump wasn’t president.
Lapassionara
@Baud: Racism and misogyny. Plus Trump has a celebrity factor that helps mythologize him in the minds of his cult. Those McNaughton paintings show him as his cult sees him. So far from reality, but I think Trump himself sees himself that way.
satby
Someone in the military has to explain to me how bombing boats in international waters isn’t a war crime and an illegal order that violates their military oath to the Constitution.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: The core of the conservative movement has ALWAYS been white supremacy.
rikyrah
Joy Reid nails it about this Administration 👏🏾👏🏾
tiktok.com/t/ZP8AK3Wn7/
Ohio Mom
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: That would have been a job for an Inspector General but conveniently, Trump/DOGE canned all of them.
In fact, identifying stuff like that happening before anyone else was the IGs’ forte.
Baud
@Lapassionara:
Misogyny is very important for them to get to a majority in the modern era. To the extent it’s worth parsing evil, however, I guess I believe that racism is truly fundamental.
Note they’ve been more cautious about going after abortion rights. They’ve been far more aggressive about going to war with non-white people.
gene108
@Ohio Mom:
Undocumented immigrants will not receive any money back because they cannot get valid Social Security numbers.
The other legal noncitizen immigrants can qualify of Social Security benefits, when they meet the requirements of quarters worked.
Professor Bigfoot
@iKropoclast: Man, you ain’t the only one.
Mass murder.
IN OUR NAMES.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: The media coverage of Trump’s many failures, but especially the economy, is intentionally tepid and vague.
@Matt McIrvin: See previous comment.
It’s a very old story around here, but if Biden/Obama/Clinton had done just ONE of the THOUSANDS of horrid things that Trump has done, and continues to do, the press coverage would be absolutely relentless.
Matt McIrvin
@J.: If you help the majority of people, that probably includes somebody you don’t like, and there’s always going to be somebody who gets cheesed off by that.
satby
I don’t think that’s true. I personally know a few veterans and LEOs who were Trump voters who were furious about Jan 6 and quit supporting him. But were they ready to vote for a woman? Probably not, I assume most voted Libertarian top of the ticket and R the rest, if they even voted.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: Since Kegsbreath fired pretty much the entire JAG corps, there’s no one to tell them they’ll be held accountable.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Like I was saying the other day, reactionaries and tyrants have always hated and mistrusted academics*, because it’s an entire mode of thought they can’t control. All they can do is wreck it or try to counterfeit it.
*And every so often you get some scientists thinking, oh, it’s just those freaks in the humanities, we’ll throw them under the bus. Been hearing a little of that lately. No, dude, they hate you too, just watch.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: I don’t buy that. The officers know. Didn’t one admiral (or some rank) just resign over it?
Bruce K in ATH-GR
For some reason, I am reminded that October 28, this coming Tuesday, is a national holiday in Greece: “Ohi Day”, commemorating the date on which, in 1940, Greek dictator/prime minister Ioannis Metaxas responded to an Italian demand to allow Axis forces to enter and occupy Greece with “Alors, c’est la guerre”, which the Greek populace interpreted as simply saying “όχι”, or “no”, or less literally, “go to hell, fascists”.
The fascist invasion of Greece culminated in the Italian army pushed back right up against the Adriatic in Albania until Mussolini called for help for Hitler and the Wehrmacht and the SS came in to save the Italians’ bacon. Greece found itself under Nazi occupation, which was exactly the nightmare you’d expect.
But Mussolini ended up dangling from a lamp post, Hitler finished his tenure with a mouth full of cyanide and a bullet in his brain pan, and since then, October 28 has been a bank holiday commemorating the day the Greeks told the Fascists to go sodomize themselves.
sab
@Suzanne: Oir food bank had an interesting food drive. They distributed empty grocery bags to hair salons with a list of ingredients stapled to the front. The list was for lentil soup. Donors were supposed to fill the bags following the list and return it to the salon that day. I’d had a haircut and was going to the grocery anyway, so I grabbed a couple of the bags, filled them when I did my regular shopping, and dropped them off at the salon on my way home. All the bags at that salon were filled by the end of the day
ETA Our recipe didn’t have the Indian spices. Bag of fresh carrots. Bag of dried lentils. Whole onion. Big can of crushed tomatoes. Two boxes of chicken or vegetable broth.
iKropoclast
The (c)onservatism of the (C)onservative movement is like the democratic tradition of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Lapassionara
@Baud: a woman of child-bearing age likely does not agree that they have been cautious going after abortion rights. That being said, I agree that racism is a highly motivating factor for some voters. I just don’t think our side can expect a woman president any time soon.
satby
@sab: nice! Good way to provide an easy, ready to cook meal for a family.
Matt McIrvin
@Gvg: The Democrats have always had an economic protectionist-nationalist wing that is sour on immigration. As schrodinger’s cat says, it’s been a strain in the Bernie movement.
A lot of white tech guys who lean liberal still approve of stopping H-1Bs, with the justification that they’re exploitative, but their preferred alternative isn’t less-exploitative liberalized immigration, it’s nothing.
Suzanne
@Baud:
Even people who are okay in the abstract with helping others “less fortunate” will only accept doing so if their own status remains higher.
This is why I have come to the conclusion that “income inequality” doesn’t mean the same thing to others and thus we are taking past each other. We mean it to criticize the fact that a small slice of unfathomably rich people control far too much wealth. But much of our society understands it in the sense of their high school classmates who went away to college, got an “email job”, and now are in a higher tax bracket and don’t come back. Related: college-educated women won’t date them, and their manager is a Black man, and that chafes on them. That’s the inequality they object to.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: Yeah, the head of SouthCom, Admiral Holsey, just retired.
That’s the only honorable way for a senior officer to register his disapproval of policies they are ordered to implement.
The downside is that if you walk, who walks in to take your place? Who takes care of your people?
I think you’re right that the “field grade” officers know better; but refusing to carry out orders in the field is a court-martial offense.
So I suspect there’s a rogue SpecOps operation that reports directly to the White House and led by men like Eddie Gallagher.
It doesn’t require the firepower of a frigate to destroy a civilian boat- but a drone carrying Hellfire missiles is plenty.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I think a big part of it is that men have become distinctly in the minority of college students. Something like 57-58% of college students, and ~60% of graduates, are women nowadays. So of course a male-dominated party is going to denigrate college, and denigrate the sorts of jobs that college grads get. “Email jobs.”
ETA: If women can do it better than men, then of course to them it must be worthless.
Professor Bigfoot
@Lapassionara: I often speak of white supremacy, but in fact the “male” is there.
The other words are silent, but we all know it’s really white male Christian supremacy
ETA: I should probably stop right here, before someone comes in and accuses me of “hijacking the thread.”
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: I imagine the chance that you MIGHT get away with a “that was an illegal order” defense at your court-martial is small comfort. Especially when Hegseth is doing his best to make sure that isn’t even the case (who’s going to defend you? They fired all the lawyers).
That’s one of the things that makes me think that when Trump finally gives the order to turn Americans into hamburger with machine-gun fire or drop a nuke on Boston, there’s a substantial fraction of the military who will do it.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: There’s a strain of that in the Balloon Juice comment section. Related: NAFTA was terrible, tariffs are good, and we shouldn’t build any more housing to accommodate a growing population.
Suzanne
@sab: That’s a really clever way to do it! I personally love crockpot soup in these cooler months. Added bonus: makes the house smell great.
satby
@Suzanne: I think that’s too narrow. People see that the game is rigged against them and for the obscenely wealthy in all the ways, but calling it “income inequality” doesn’t call out the way the deck is stacked. That’s why politicians like Mandami, Buttigieg, and AOC resonate; they specify how that hurts people and propose how a fairer system would make life better for more people.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Our left flank attacked the Biden admin relentlessly on social media and the MSM and they continue to insist that it has no effect on elections.
Even now look at all the criticism Jeffries and Schumer get compared to how much the Republicans get from our left flank
Ds are criticized by 1. Rs, Ds and the media, its a surprise that win anything at all.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: Thank you, that makes sense.
Soprano2
@Baud: I agree. The other night I felt I was being gaslit by my local 10 o’clock news, because they were running a story about how gas prices were lower. In my area, gas prices have swung between $2.39 and $2.99 since last fall. I have no earthly idea where they’re getting the idea that gas prices are lower than they have been for a long time.
When Biden was president, I heard stories almost every day about how high prices and inflation were hurting average people. Now, not so much.
Baud
@Lapassionara:
At the federal level, they’re moving very slowly. Red states are full speed ahead.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
And I think I’m quoting you by noting that the word ‘male’ is silent, but it’s there.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Yep like Dinesh D’Souza just found out the other day that white supremacists hate him too.
schrodingers_cat
@lowtechcyclist: And there are a lot of women who are invested in upholding patriarchy. Especially if they get to be the second best.
satby
@schrodingers_cat: other Democrats listen to them, Republicans don’t. Can’t influence people who don’t pay attention to you.
Plus a lot of online swarms aren’t real people, they’re troll farms and bots designed to discourage and sow dissent, but people continually assume it’s real.
Geminid
@satby: The head of Southern Command, Admiral Eric(?) Holsey, is leaving the job at the end of the year, but he is being pushed out. Holsey apparently objected to the boat strikes, but he did not resign over them.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Well, they correctly perceive that policy is all stacked to favor rich assholes, but the fact is, the restrictionist policies are too. It’s just a question of which rich assholes.
The reason we’ve had, for decades, a legal immigration policy that doesn’t satisfy the country’s stated labor needs is that hiring undocumented workers under the table and threatening them with deportation if they get out of line is cheaper. But if they’re forced to, they’ll be able to construct a legal guest-worker policy that is just as exploitative, all the name of protecting our nation’s precious bodily fluids.
Soprano2
It’s not a bad thing, it just doesn’t motivate people to vote for us. Unfortunately, self-interest and helping one’s own group is what motivates people to vote for a candidate. That thing we often say mockingly, that a white man roasting a sparrow on a spit under the overpass will be happy as long as the black man doesn’t have a spit or a sparrow, is more true than Democrats want to acknowledge. They have done studies on this, and over and over they show that people don’t care about helping “everyone”, they care about helping their own. That’s what people mean when they say FFOTUS “cares about people like me”, they mean he cares about white people, and this has the benefit of being true.
Baud
@Soprano2:
Technically, he doesn’t care about white people so much as he and his white supporters care about whiteness.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: The only people we put on TV nowadays are freaks.
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin:
Trump has amassed a coalition of interests, each of which has different priorities. As long as one of their priorities is being addressed to their satisfaction, they’re willing to disapprove of the other things he does without pulling their overall support.
So, some people disapprove of his economic policies – but still quite like his immigration actions.
Others disapprove of his immigration actions – but are very happy with his economic policies.
And so on.
Suzanne
@satby: I agree with you, and that’s how I understand “income inequality”.
But I’ve realized that far too many other people think being impossibly rich is cool, and what they, too, would do with their wealth (if they had any) would be to lord it over the people they already resent. That if they had “fuck-you money”….. they would be telling people making $170K a year to get fucked, not people making $170K per minute.
I don’t think enough people want economic solidarity, is really what I mean.
Baud
@satby:
It’s easier to spot on reddit because the structure like here with a dedicated post and comments underneath. So you’ll have a set up post and then comments underneath echoing the them. It’s not intermingled like on Twitter.
satby
On the plus side, now a lot of them are finding out that it’s not at all true. He cares about rich people and they can be Chinese, or Saudi, or South American; but average white Americans he doesn’t give a shit about and is perfectly content if they go bankrupt or die. Edit: and despite Fox and OAN, real life is getting that word out.
Soprano2
@iKropoclast: Unfortunately, I guarantee you that a substantial amount of people are happy about them, because they truly believe FFOTUS is keeping drugs out of the country, and they don’t look past that. They’re thinking he understands how to deal with these horrible people, while wimpy Democrats want to arrest them and give them a chance to get away. There’s a reason vengeance movies are popular – there’s a widespread belief that our justice system allows most criminals to get away with it.
Baud
@CaseyL:
Honestly, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Dems today are in a pickle because our groups tend to resent other Dem groups rather than Republicans.
Matt McIrvin
@Lapassionara: I haven’t been hearing much about McNaughton or Ben Garrison lately–I think they were the first guys to get completely obsoleted by AI.
different-church-lady
@NotMax: No. How much?
UncleEbeneezer
@Professor Bigfoot: Was just gonna say that in most circles “Abolitionist” was a slur.
UncleEbeneezer
@satby: My wife asked me yesterday “What do regular non-MAGA Republicans think/say about Jan 6?” I don’t really know enough of them to answer confidently. I’m guessing they view it like a family views that one uncle who everyone knows is a pedophile. They shake their head and change the subject but that’s about it.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: I am speaking of people like the PodBros and other influencers like them not nameless handles.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Bingo. I think Prof. B has it right, many white Ds don’t like the influence and power that minorities have in the Democratic party. For some it may even be at a subconscious level. So they get hot under the collar when it is brought up.
They couch it in economic justice terms but their targets see through them. See the lack of traction BS got among black voters in his presidential runs.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t think it’s going to get better. The entertainment industry always chases younger people, so the content will be designed to attract them.
Soprano2
@lowtechcyclist: I think it’s not even that women can necessarily do it better, it’s that these men don’t think they should have to compete against women for jobs. There is absolutely nothing stopping men from going to college. All this crap about how “school is made for girls” is irrelevant to me, because it was the same way when I was in school in the 1960’s and 1970’s and yet somehow boys didn’t have any problem going to college and becoming successful. All that’s changed as far as I can see is that now they have to compete against women for a lot of those jobs, and they resent that something fierce. The white men don’t like competing against male minorities either, but I think they especially hate competing against women, and thinking that a woman will become their boss someday. ETA – this of course doesn’t apply to all men, but I think it explains a lot of why men have stopped going to college in such numbers. They want the world to go back to how it was when I was a kid, when boys knew they could get into college and would mostly be competing with other men for the jobs they wanted. Or else they believe they can sit at home and become a crypto millionaire.
Matt McIrvin
@bbleh: I also wonder if there’s a fraction of respondents who are now afraid to express dissent to a pollster. (I don’t even talk to pollsters, so dwindling and increasingly problematic sampling is an issue too.)
I’ve been wondering if we’ll see a point when Trump’s approval numbers go up just because it’s clear that expressing opposition to him will go badly for you, or because all of the pollsters are afraid to put out numbers that look bad for him–the Kim Jong Un endpoint. You already have the issue where aggregates like Nate Silver’s have frequent infusions of these farcical right-wing polls pumping up Trump’s approval, which Silver doesn’t want to just toss because it’ll make him look biased, so the numbers go up and down mostly according to the less-frequent cadence of the more respectable media polls that don’t do that.
jonas
“How the economy is doing” is entirely a partisan issue now. Republicans will say it’s great because it’s tribal identification completely untethered from reality. Second, a lot of MAGA didn’t vote for a strong economy, they voted to see black and brown people getting stomped on by ICE stormtroopers. And Trump *is* delivering on that, big time. If there’s a recession, they figure at least poor POC will suffer more, so wev.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: So many people take polls as the TRUTH but I wonder how good their sampling is.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I had hoped the polls were skewed last year, but they weren’t. So hard to say.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
And let’s be abundantly clear, for the sake of completeness: FFOTUS doesn’t really care about anyone in his base, but if he has even a modicum of give-a-damn, it is for a specific subset of white people. His weird coalition of “Heritage Americans” and Real Housewives-types and megachurch Evangelicals and rugged-y bootstrappy family business owners.
We should not overlook how much some white people hate one another. LMAO. It’s related to how much some Christians love to tell other Christians that they’re going to Hell.
Soprano2
What no one seems to remember is that NAFTA was an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging. All through the 1980’s companies were shipping their higher-paying manufacturing jobs to Mexico, and Japan was eating our lunch. NAFTA tried to put rules in place to actually protect American workers, but all people seem to remember is that it was an agreement with Mexico and that must have been bad for working people.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: It’s not the whole story of 2024, since Democrats lost minority votes too, pretty much across the board. I follow a number of Black leftists who argue that that was partly because of Democrats not following up on promises to reform criminal justice after the BLM movement. But it’s also a case where satisfying one part of the coalition is inevitably going to piss off another.
WTFGhost
@J.: It never did; duh! That’s why Republicans call us pedophiles; they don’t have anything better.
@Suzanne: Just about everyone who learns about the world as it is ends up being far more liberal than the median US voter. Republicans insist that this must be because of propaganda, because there’s no way this many stupid white people have ever been wrong about anything, like whether slavery is an acceptable moral choice, or something important like that?
satby
@schrodingers_cat: in a way, so am I. They target Dems because no one else bothers with them.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: What I’m waiting for is when Stephen Miller has the “ah ha” experience.
jonas
Supposedly that’s because boys were free back then to be drunken frat bros and folks didn’t get all worked up over stuff that happened at Saturday’s kegger because “she was totally blacked out” and “everyone knew she was a slut anyway.” Now they have to sit and listen to some chick they have to address as “doctor” telling them that their trucks are ruining the climate. It’s a downer, man.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: I think the big legit polls do better than we might think correcting for the terrible samples they get. But at some point the process has to break down, and probably suddenly.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: For many of the women, the justification is that they have to protect their sons from the predations of liberals. I’ve often thought that at its base, they’re afraid liberals will turn their sons gay and help their daughters get an abortion.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I would guess inflation and misogyny had more of an impact.
Baud
@Soprano2:
I certainly would.
iKropoclast
Once that psychopath has his racial purification apparatus up and running across the country, he strikes me as the type to gladly surrender himself to it. Purest of white supremacists, that one.
WTFGhost
@Professor Bigfoot: And, I’ll note, the Freedom Riders rode while I was alive. Now, granted, I’m nearly 60.
You know who the Freedom Riders were? They rode interstate buses with Black people, trying to demand the South follow the law. The cops would be there – to protect the people who wanted to beat down the Freedom Riders, naturally! One day, the cops let the Riders be beaten, the bus set on fire, but, finally chose to help the Riders when the bigot-patrol tried to block them inside the burning bus.
So the cops decided not to let the Riders be burned alive, just, maybe accidentally killed due to a cracked skull.
There seriously was a huge backlash when Democrats realized they had to include Black people under the umbrella, and all the rest of the whining and the hate since then has been because the original Blue Bloods of America really did think there were slave races, and have stubbornly refused to learn or believe otherwise.
They Call Me Noni
test
Matt McIrvin
@jonas:
I’ve argued similar things, but I think there was a turning point calcifying public opinion in a hyper-partisan way when Obama entered office, and aside from the COVID crash which was this freakish exogenous thing that was quickly reversed through concerted government action, we haven’t actually had a major recession since then to test how extreme the polarization is.
Will they actually deny that they’re personally unemployed? I don’t know. A lot of them denied on their deathbeds that they were dying of COVID.
Soprano2
@Geminid: Hey, I heard a podcast the other day that might be of interest to you. It was a New Yorker podcast rebroadcast by “On the Media”, titled “How the Two State Solution Ended in Disaster“. They interviewed Hussein Agha and Robert Malley about their book “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, a book where they talk about how they came to believe that the two state solution was a charade. That link is a link to the podcast. It was an interesting if somewhat grim interview.
David_C
@Suzanne: My lentil soup recipe is a pretty basic AllRecipes dish, but I’m able to use carrots, thyme, and parsley from the garden. Maybe a few tomatoes to go with the canned diced tomatoes.
Meanwhile, painted flowers on the wall, they don’t bother me at all…
Soprano2
@Baud: To them it’s the same thing. They believe Democrats don’t care about white people at all.
iKropoclast
With COVID….🙄
Baud
@Soprano2:
People believe what they want to believe
ETA:
Men are increasingly telling themselves that Dems don’t care about them in order to justify supporting misogyny. Same dynamic.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
“Giant sucking sound” – Ross Perot
Professor Bigfoot
@Soprano2: To whit:
”White women will not vote to deny their sons the power and privileges of their fathers. It is effectively a biological imperative.”
Suzanne
@jonas:
One of my good friends is a pediatrician. She tells me about how many of the nurses, techs, and support staff address her by her first name while referring to the male doctors as Dr. Whomever.
Related thing I was musing on yesterday: so much griping about annoying cyclists and putting in bike lanes, relatively little griping about F-150 owners and smashing 10-lane freeways through the landscape.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: This is true. Perhaps I should stick to my original thesis, which is that they like him because he hates the same people they do, and gives them permission to hate them openly rather than having to hide their hatred. As long as he hates those people they don’t care that much if he cares about them. They interpret his hatred as caring about white people like them, because he’s acknowledging their grievances.
Soprano2
@jonas: Unfortunately, there is some truth to that.
lowtechcyclist
@David_C:
The solitaire game on your phone will never be missing a card. :D
satby
@Soprano2: I think people forget that college wasn’t required for a lot of well paying trades and manufacturing jobs, so a significant portion of white men never attended college in the first place. Those manufacturing jobs were offshored and automated; jobs in the trades are hard work and now require training and apprenticeships, where before people could learn “on the job”. Even a lot of farm work requires less workers. An entire subset of people with no tradition of attending college in their families, and no real support from the inferior schools or homeschools they attend aren’t prepared for college and seldom succeed when they try. I see these guys every day, they scrape by being handymen or mechanics or working at grocery and retail stores. Barely subsistence living, and there’s so much blame to spread around for this state of affairs.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
Yes this. He makes them feel seen. That’s legitimizing.
He also behaves the same way they do, or at least the way they want to and would if they could. They would fling ketchup at us all if they could.
Soprano2
Does she correct them, or let them get away with that?
WTFGhost
@satby: “Navy JAG, you are ordered to find this lawful.”
“It’s not lawful!”
“You’re fired, Navy JAG, you are ordered to find this lawful….”
That’s my guess, mind you, but, if you’re a dogface private, or the sea equivalent, and you’ve been told an order sure as heck is legal, you follow the order, or get court-martialed. Whether or not the order is truly legal, under our constitutional framework is above the paygrade of the people carrying out the orders.
The second part of my guess would be, once a bombing has taken place, questions about “was this lawful?” become moot, until a different legal proceeding takes place. So: no one has authority to say “no, we are not following those orders!” due to the emergency; then, after the emergency, the question of legality – “should we have fired?” is moot, and something else happens.
So it’s like Trump grabbing someone off the streets. He can’t due this without due process, but, he has the body, before anyone can sue for habeas relief. By the time they find the person, and sue for habeas, they’ve been moved, or deported, or whatever, and the question of “was this legal?” is moot, and, as an official act, can’t harm Trump at all, because our founders always said “someday, we’ll have an obnoxious, lawless, hateful man, and that is the man we want to be king! Someone far, far, worse, and much uglier, than King G-3.”
iKropoclast
It’s a powerful thing.
Soprano2
Back in the 1980’s I wondered what was going to happen when all of the high-paying manufacturing jobs you could get without even a high school diploma disappeared. Now I know, and it’s not pretty. Now even the jobs that people used to be able to do mostly by being mechanical require technical knowledge. For example, plumbers now routinely use tech to televise house service lines looking for problems. A lot of these jobs require more education than they used to. My BIL the mechanic constantly complained about all the computers and technology on cars now.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: Once I figured out this is what they mean when they say he cares about people like them when we all know he doesn’t care about anyone but himself, a lot of things clicked for me. That’s why he has a cultish following, they feel he understands them in a way no politician has understood them before.
WTFGhost
@schrodingers_cat: Plus, polls are restricted by tunnel vision, of the pollsters and the zeitgeist.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
Agree. My WAG is that there were a lot of formerly nonvoting people, mostly men, out there with whom the old GOP dog-whistles didn’t register, they were too subtle for them. So they saw neither party as catering to their racial prejudices. And Trump pulled them in by saying the formerly dog-whistled parts out loud.
NotMax
@Soprano2
Yup. Shade tree mechanics are becoming an endangered species.
Cue AI Walter Cronkite: “And that’s the way it is….”
satby
@Soprano2: my son the new cop was the senior mechanic in his shop at age 38, because he understood the new-fangled computers in cars. There were older guys working there, of course; and he was always respectful of their decades of experience; but on the test for the senior tech position, he passed.
Professor Bigfoot
@WTFGhost: I know that this entire mishegas was kicked off when Hubert H. Humphrey finagled a civil rights for all plank into the Democratic platform in 1948.
I know that Strom Thurmond and the rest of the Southern Democratic delegation walked out of the convention, and Strom ran as an independent for President.
I know that Harry Truman, seeing the handwriting on the wall, issued the executive order that desegregated the military.
I know that was part of the the origin story of how the Republicans became the Confederate Party (the rest being the ‘Lily White’ movement of the Republican Party in the early 20th century).
I know that when I was in elementary school, three young men— one Black, two Jewish, were murdered in the cause of human and civl rights. (Curiously, the two demographics that voted the hardest for Democrats in 2024 were Black people and Jews.)
I surmise that the reason there hasn’t been widespread violence against demonstrators is because the vast majority of those demonstrators have been white people. Middle aged to older white people.
But I also remember how the BLM protests were received. Don’t think for a millisecond that if there were a crowd of thousands of Black protesters, they wouldn’t use lethal force.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost:
Well, it’s also because a lot of them are pedophiles and they’re following the Karl Rove strategy of opening by attacking your opponent on YOUR weaknesses, to blunt their ability to do it.
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: This is exactly why I INSIST on calling EVERY woman with a doctorate that I meet “Doctor” or “Doc.” Even when they tell me to call them by their first names, I say, “no, I know too many people ignore what you’ve achieved and the work you’ve done to achieve that doctorate, so Doc, I’m just gonna keep on calling you ‘Doctor So and So.’ I APPRECIATE what you’ve done and what you’ve been through.”
And I am so proud of them.
Belafon
@Suzanne:
Fox or worse watchers somehow can be terrified by what they see on screen and yet don’t reconcile it with the calm they see outside.
satby
Going along with the discussion of unemployable (mostly white) men, Charlie Pierce on the ICE hiring surge:
satby
And Colbert was great last night too.
Professor Bigfoot
Cars are SO MUCH BETTER in every imaginable dimension than they were 40 years ago. They handle better, they brake better, they get more power from less fuel, they last a LOT longer than they used to (remember when a car was pretty much worn out at 80K miles?) and they are far, far, FAR safer.
All that has a cost, though. They cost more, and though they break down WAY less often (compared to, say, a 1980 Chevy Citation) they are WAY more difficult to fix.
Le sigh.
prostratedragon
Along those lines (satby@149), an interesting abstract I ran across this week:
Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina
Adam Scharpf and Christian Gläßel
The full paper is on jstor.
iKropoclast
Am I the only one who can’t think of a context where I would be directly addressing my doctor by either name, saving their proper names for third party discussion and referring to them directly as “you?”
Relatedly, though, I started with my current PCP a couple years ago while I was on Masshealth. I was dragging my feet selecting someone and Masshealth called me to initiate the process.
As I was talking to the, I guess I’ll call her a social worker, she asked me if I was ok with a female doctor. I laughed. I told her that would be great and I referred to the question as “quaint.”
“You’d be surprised,” she told me.
Another Scott
@MagdaInBlack: @Suzanne:
I don’t think that the GQP is “anti-college” and “discourages critical thinking” so much as they demand to be gate keepers. For everything.
They recognize that economic growth and a strong economy and free society depends on having eggheads who can do science and make that science into useful new things (before the godless commies can do so and enslave us all).
These monsters send their kids to college. The worst of the monsters went to some of the “best” schools and send their kids there. They bribe administrations to take them even when they’re not qualified. They know the value of educational opportunities for their little minions and that it’s a path for them too to be new mini-MotUs.
They want to control the curricula because they think that controlling the arts and history and how people learn to think about stories has nothing to do with creative thinking about how to figure things out and how to make amazing new stuff. (They’re wrong about that, of course.) And by controlling how people think about the arts and stories, they think they are cementing their political power forever and ever.
They want to be gate keepers. They want to force admins to restrict access by those they deem unworthy, and those that they think they cannot control.
They want to cut financial aid for normal people because they know that keeping them under crushing debt for 2-3 decades helps keep them compliant.
They want school administrations kept off-balance by irregular and uncertain funding so that they have to beg the MotUs for funding, and so that the latest trumped-up panic can be used to threaten them if they don’t bend a knee.
Etc.
Grr…
tl;dr – Watch what they do, not what they say.
My $0.02.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: Old cars could be easily user-serviced… and you had to do it all the time.
My dad spent so much of his weekends tinkering with the cars. I remember the pilgrimages to places where they sold foreign auto parts, which could be hard to get.
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: My dad was an MD. Hy older sister has a PhD and was a tenured college professor. He always said that she deserved to be called doctor more than he did because she spent years working on her dissertation, learning two more foreign languages in the process. All he did to get the MD was graduate from med school. I have a JD and I agree with him.
jonas
That’s true — in 2008 even die-hard Republicans were running away from W over the economy, after many had already abandoned him over Iraq. But W also wasn’t a North Korean-style megalomaniac with a hypnotic hold over a bunch of dead-eyed cultists. My bet is that even if the economy goes completely down the shitter, Trump’s floor is still in the 30’s somewhere.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
Usually, she corrects them, but she tells me that it is an ongoing battle. She has spent her career working in primary care in low-income areas. She told me about how she had to learn what jaundice looks like in Black babies, since she didn’t learn it in medical school. She’s also teaching now. That gives me hope that the next generation of medical students will be more aware.
She grew up in the same area I did, attended the same (mediocre, underfunded) public schools. The amount of resentment directed toward women who have enough audacity to strive for better is…. not small.
prostratedragon
@Ohio Mom: The first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers.
sab
@Soprano2: My oldest stepson is seriously dyslexic so college wasn’t an option. He is a whiz at math. He went to trade school and he is thriving as a machinist. He gets calls all the time from recruiters.
Dog Mom
@Jeffg166:
I’ve seen this a few times now and think it’s great – I don’t know if it will change any minds – though I hope it does. I’m in western NY and certainly there has been a big impact with far fewer visitors / shoppers from Canada.
Another Scott
@Soprano2: +1
Context means a lot
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
TheflipPsyd
@Professor Bigfoot: I really appreciate your saying that. I really do not care about being called doctor — I work with teens (the majority of whom are involved in either child protective or juvenile justice) and find using “doctor” adds this whole unnecessary level of assumed authority and privilege. It is not worth how it impacts my ability to engage and get youths and families to talk with me — really talk to me about their lives.
My first job after graduation, I worked at a community mental health nonprofit and my fellow (female) psychologists and postdocs laughed because we were not called “doctor” or “doc” by anyone. (Psychologists are predominantly female.) But the (white) male LCSW was called Dr. Steve by all of his clients. And the CEO of the agency also (white) male was called Dr. and never by his first name.
Also, correcting individuals to use the Doctor as a woman gets you labeled a b*itch pretty quickly. I introduce myself with my full name to parents and any other involved adults and let the person choose how they address me. Usually tells me a lot about how they feel about authority. As a white middle-aged woman who grew up as a minority in a majority-minority neighborhood In Philadelphia, I am aware that how I present racially and ethnically already may put me at a disadvantage as being seen as someone who wants to help and doesn’t have a whole host of pre-conceived notions about the youths and families with whom I work.
Anyway
@Suzanne: I was surprised at the ubiquity of lentil soup on the menu in Turkiye – for some reason I hadn’t realized it was so popular there.
Not my favorite thing — I make it like once a year…
Suzanne
@Belafon:
I think there’s an effect on us, too.
Anyway
Oh of all the sad what-ifs this one really stands out. These were senators and should have known better.
NotMax
@Anyway
Indeed. It meets the definition of food in the most generic sense. IMHO.
Anyway
I’m waiting to see the impact of fewer international visitors on Floriduh (sorry BC). So far all the stories are from blue states like NY, VT, CA, Maine reporting fewer Canadian visitors
CaseyL
@Baud: Yes, indeed.
That’s why I wrote my comment… fairly dispassionately.
That is supposed to be how coalitions work.
But the Democratic coalition is fraying. I’m trying to figure out why.
I think it has to do with the success of the coalition’s parts. As each segment of the population that Democrats served became more successful, they started identifying more with the “haves” and resenting the “have nots.” The middle class – which only exists thanks to unions and Democratic economic policies – decided it had been let down by both, and started voting Republican in the 1980s.
The “Progressive Left” has been a thorn in the side since the 1960s, and I can’t figure them out at all. They remember nothing and learn nothing.
Jackie
@Soprano2:
FFOTUS’s zeal for pardoning white-crime criminals plus demanding his DOJ to drop charges on criminals he likes…
There’s a valid reason for that belief.
prostratedragon
@Professor Bigfoot:
Me too. No way a flag officer could serve honorably once they’ve been cut out, and clearly they would be in no position to object or to make clear the reason for resigning.
Anyway
Yes, reading the blog is so painful — it makes me wonder if Ds can win any elections going forward
iKropoclast
Makes me wonder whether I want them to…
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: There’s a strain of thinking I’ve noticed among some engineers, particularly those with right-wing politics, which is the idea that we no longer need academic science at all because it’s completely corrupted and engineers can now do all the applicable science we need.
It’s completely wrong, but from an engineer’s perspective it’s not obvious that it’s wrong. Conservatives see science as primarily the handmaiden of technology and as a source of affirmation for what they already believe, not as a method for finding out wholly new things about the world. If it’s doing too much of the latter, they smell a rat and wonder if we even need the institution.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: I think what he’s really complaining about is that he finds new cars to be emasculating. You can no longer adjust the timing or tinker around as in days of yore, thus proving your manly manliness.
They Call Me Noni
@Anyway: They did know better but were terrified of being mean tweeted. Then Moscow Mitch gives his “we have laws and courts to deal with this” and here we are. I’m in the “if J6 didn’t do him in I don’t know what will” camp.
...now I try to be amused
@Professor Bigfoot:
Yeah. Your country didn’t turn on you, Jared. The Republicans turned on you, like the smart Black lady said they would.
RevRick
@Anyway: In reality, it would have taken at least 30 GOP Senators. Nobody would want to be the 17th.
WTFGhost
@Professor Bigfoot: Hee! Thanks for the additional history – with my brain damage, it helps when I can fill in more blanks.
I’m sure you know, but the edit window had closed, before I realized it looked like I was trying to tell you – not someone who read your earlier response! – about the Freedom Riders, who I first heard about from Paul Simon :-). “He Was My Brother” is chilling when I thought it was an anti-war song of some form (before I noticed how Freedom Rider was capitalized, and hit Google); it’s more powerful to realize it’s an anti-fascism song.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: I understand the impulse! Retro-computing is an interest of mine, and one of the attractions is that you can actually understand a 1980s personal computer on the machine level to a degree that isn’t practical with modern systems. And AI particularly reduces everything to an incomprehensible black box. It’s cool to be able to understand the whole system. Cars went through the same evolution.
Professor Bigfoot
@iKropoclast: Indeed.
But for me that also applies to female PhDs… I once had opportunity to work with a young Black woman PhD (CHEMICAL MF ENGINEERING!!!!) and when she said to call her by her first name, I straight up told her ‘no.’
Mrs. B’s goddaughter’s niece is now completing a PhD in microbiology. I know the girl as Madison, but by all the gods I WILL call her Doctor A______ next time I see her!
bluefoot
@Soprano2: I have someone close to me, a doctor who is a woman of color with a similar experience. When she persisted in pointing out how she was addressed, she got dinged for being “confrontational.”
I’ve had similar experiences as a scientist who is a WoC. Though these sorts of things are the very mildest of what I’ve had to deal with.
chemiclord
@Matt McIrvin: Immigration is a topic that liberal and leftist groups will continually crash on, because it is one topic that not just Americans, but humanity as a whole, genuinely leans really hard to the right on.
If you were to poll all humans everywhere, and ask them, “Should nations be allowed to dictate who comes across their border and why?” even an overwhelming majority of the political left would say, “Of course. Duh!”
This endlessly frustrates the “Open borders” advocates and the “Citizens of Earth,” groups, who are also frequently extremely privileged people who can move easily between countries, and find the restrictions annoying (which doesn’t help their case when they try to argue their position to general society).
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: I have a “classic” ‘97 Porsche; and while it IS user fixable, you need to have some computer knowledge (like how to run the software that truly interrogates the car).
My ‘18 Ford? I love the big damn thing, but if it ever breaks down I will definitely not be the one who fixes it!
(but that’s part of the thing, though— modern cars simply don’t break down like they used to. You get in, you turn the key, give it a few seconds, and you’re off. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Heck, my Ford will tell me when one of my tires is low!)
Professor Bigfoot
@prostratedragon: Every project I go to do, I say to my self, “well, the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. Then we can take off the wheels, disassemble the calipers…” ;^D
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: The other question is, when Trump is gone, does that support floor hold for whatever replaces him? Or is it a one-off personality cult that can’t be sustained without him?
Vance is trying to position himself as a cross between Trump and Charlie Kirk reborn, and media buffoons sometimes fall for it but I’m not sure the lumpen MAGA will.
WTFGhost
@RevRick: I grant, I understand a bit of that, but we’ve reached the point in which digital computing is faster and better than analog, in many circumstances. The engineer in me salivates at the improvements we’ve made, and how much better even gasoline powered cars are, but, recently, I’ve come to appreciate how there’s a beauty in an analog car, or in other analog systems, where you eventually understand by developed-instinct.
Here’s a thing you might appreciate: I sometimes go aphasic, okay? My brain stops producing words, because it can’t – the circuits are overloaded. And you think in a pure manner – this is where religion will always play a part in people’s lives, I believe, because it’s the connection to this analog thinking, without words, versus our normal, stilted, slow, monkey-brain mumblings. (Monkey-brain is a term from meditation, not a derogatory term; you want calm your brain, but it’s crawling, swinging, running, around like a monkey.)
I’ve always understood love that’s deep, unreserved, and unafraid in the moment. I’ve been wondering, is that because of my aphasia, forcing me to go nonverbal, and touch on the deeper love that our subconscious minds, our “souls,” might feel? Maybe.
For me, love, beauty, and joy, they dance, like music in my head, when I have the energy to call the tune, and, like music, it feels like analog, aphasic, connection.
Just like a hot rodder suddenly noticing how every bit of the timing of the car fits together, how the transmission works, and all that in unison, and going “whoa…” and realizing they’ll never want to do anything else, but work on these beautiful pieces of machinery.
BTW: yes, I’m probably going crazy, that’s when I start talking rainbows and butterflies and shit. I’m seriously not kidding – my misery makes me understand how thirsty a life can be for love, beauty, joy acceptance, community, kindness, etc.. Why wouldn’t I want that, for thems as can enjoy it? I seem to have donated most of sixty years worth of my share, so I hope it went to good use.
ETA: the above makes a bit more sense if you understand that I consider words to be like digital indicators. You see the word “tree” but you don’t know which tree, nor, what aspects of being a tree are important, just “the box marked ‘tree’ is checked.” So, analog thinking would perforce be without speaking your thoughts.
Melancholy Jaques
@Matt McIrvin:
Because the economic concerns were secondary to the desire for a racist bully, unrestrained by law or decency, who would hurt the people they hate.
bluefoot
@Professor Bigfoot: My (white, male) therapist was surprised when I asked in our first session how he’d like to be addressed. That is, “Dr. X” or by his first name. I don’t think it had occurred to him that it mattered. He’s also young. We had an interesting chat about names, titles, respect and privilege.
Karen Gail
As a nation the US ignores that “white male Protestant supremacy” is baked into the foundations of nation. (Am old enough to have had a history teacher in high school lecture that at foundation the only people who were going to be in charge of anything in government or military were WASPs. Catholics were even allowed to legally own anything which included a business.)
In a few weeks US will celebrate Thanksgiving and make a big deal out of the “Pilgrims” who supposedly were fleeing religious persecution; they were driven out of countries because they were dangerous religious zealots. Their ideas of how treat women have been part of foundations, they were willing to put scolds on women to keep them silent. As more than one Australian has said ‘they are thankful they got criminals rather than religious nuts.’ Sadly, we now have a religious nut as speaker of the House, along with a number who are congress critters.
Whatever rights or progress had been made towards “all men are created equal” has fallen back to days of founding fathers when that meant only all white male protestant rich are equal. Our law enforcement has returned to roots of slave catchers and wealthy protectors; nothing has made that more apparent than watching masked men brutalize innocents.
Matt McIrvin
@chemiclord:
I would say “yes, but the decisions we’ve collectively been making on that front are stupid and driven by self-serving lies and bigotry.”
The borders shouldn’t be completely open, but immigration with a path to citizenship should be much easier than it is. Part of the problem is that, as with many other issues, people think it already IS much easier than it is. The discussion runs on unreality.
thruppence
Since presidents can apparently destroy public property with impunity, I hope the next president rips out the grotesque ballroom and replaces it with an apple orchard or something.
Melancholy Jaques
@Professor Bigfoot:
I’ve been saying this since Reagan, but I’m repeatedly told that it’s all more complicated than that.
Anyway
Which reminds me : What is the attitude of Asian countries to immigration? I know someone born in KSA to Pakistani parents, lived his whole life there and was always a “visitor” – he is now here married to a US citizen. Japan is famously non-receptive to outsiders. But what about the biggies- China and India? What s their immigration policy? how open are they?
Miki
@sab: I regularly make The Barefoot Contessa’s Stewed Lentils and Tomatoes, which asks for “curry” powder, but I use garam masala and cook it in my Instant Pot. The carrots make it a nice hearty meal.
Dog Mom
@Anyway: I’m originally from Niagara Falls – There is a large factory outlet mall there that depends on Canadian ‘traffic’ – looks like the parking lot is empty most days now. . .
RevRick
@Soprano2: Gas prices are lower… because OPEC has opened the spigots… at the behest of Trump! Crude oil prices have been falling, though yesterday they surged $3.29. Because of sanctions on Russian oil. But that puts them only a buck over $60/barrel. And $60 is the bare minimum it needs to be to drill new wells in the US.
What’s happening under Trump is that drilling is plummeting, despite his rhetoric. There has been a huge reduction in rig count (of new wells), coupled with layoffs in the oil and gas industry.
Sooner or later, the US is going to face a huge energy squeeze, because of Trump’s stupid energy policies, coupled with all the energy-sucking data centers. Electricity prices are already skyrocketing. (It only took a 4% shortfall of electricity production in California to quadruple prices during the Enron days).
If we eke through the winter, next summer ought to be brutal. Just in time to get voters attention.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: Yeah. If he did vote TACO, then: Buwahahahhahahaha!!!!
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: Just about then…
Paul in KY
@gene108: Huey Long had something like that for a bit.
Castor Canadensis
@Matt McIrvin: He’s in a foot-race. He needs to gain enough control that he can dictate the outcome of the next election, before public disapproval makes Republicans un-electable.
If you want a guide to which are the critical actions in all the bellowing, just ask “does this help him win the election, and give him four more years of increasing one-man and one-party rule?”
For example, preventing evidence about Jeffery Epstein from leaking out is something he’s serious about.
Matt McIrvin
@Karen Gail: The big thing that’s changed there is that right-wing Catholics and Protestants are united against their own liberals. It used to be that we got cultural dominance of right-wing Catholics in places like early 20th century Boston that had been reshaped by Catholic immigration, but not nationally. But now it’s more of a nationwide thing. I fully expect that tension to reemerge if the country goes hard theocratic, though.
Paul in KY
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I hope all Greek people have a wonderful 28th! I will also celebrate here in Central KY their courage.
Castor Canadensis
@Jeffg166: Mr Ford sure got Mr Trump’s goat! He’s broken off negotiations with Mr Carney (once again), because he can’t get at Mr Ford directly
Eolirin
@Castor Canadensis: Trump can’t run again. This isn’t about electoral politics. It’s just about dominance.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: In fairness, almost every sentient creature should and does hate Dinesh.
Gin & Tonic
@Karen Gail:
Here in Rhode Island, which was founded by Roger Williams when he was banished from Massachusetts by the Puritans, we are well aware of this aspect of history.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes this.
And more Americans would be okay with immigrants if they were only a underclass. We keep talking about how many physicians there are who are immigrants. Like, that’s part of the problem for these people. They want a white dude cardiologist.
But the self-harm is so multi-causal. We have shortages of people in many skilled professions, and much of that is a pipeline problem. College or skilled trade programs are expensive and delay earnings, and too many Americans cannot access it or finish it. And why’s that? Because the GOP underfunded education at the state level for decades. So how do universities make up that shortfall? By enrolling international students, many of whom have fairly rich parents who pay for their education. Then many of them qualify for H1-B visas, and we need them….. because now w have a shortage of skilled professionals.
For the party that’s supposedly so much better on the economy, they keep forgetting that you don’t get anything for free.
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: Since I’ve been playing with computers since my “Microprocessors” (I bet nobody here remembers the good ol’ Motorola 6800!) class, served on an SAE vehicle communications subcommittee— being able to plug a laptop into my car is fun.
Just a different technology. I remember carburetors, points, plugs, setting the timing… ya just ain’t gotta do that anymore.
Another thing that comes to mind- “back inna day” you needed to change the oil ever 3000 miles OR ELSE. Nowadays with full synthetic oils some manufacturers are saying change the oil every 10,000 miles. (yeah, I’m not doing that!)
Geminid
@Soprano2: I have noticed recently that a lot of people are pushing the idea that the Two-State resolution to the Israel/Palestine problem is dead.
Ironically, this comes at a time when the prospects have brightened considerably. Observers in the region– both Arab and Israei– believe that the US peace plan that is now beginning to be implemented sets the parties on a path to a Palestinian State, and irrevocably so. That is not explicily stated in the plan but it is implicit in its provisions for the future governance of Gaza by the Paldstinian Authority.
This has been the only realistic and practicable plan ever since 1967, but it disappoints people who believe there needs to be a single state *instead* of Israel, instead of a Palestinian state *beside* Israel. A Saudi analyst I encountered recently, Shahid Bolsen,* described the attitude towards the plan of deadenders on both the pro- and anti-Israel sides:
Bolsen argues that the plan vindicates Saudi diplomacy promoting conditions for normalization of relations with Israel, based on recognition of a Palestinian State.
* Besides his lectures on geopolitics carried on YouTube. Bolsen posts commentary on Twitter. He contends that the US and the West are stagnating economically and politically, and that the “Global South” including his own nation are overtaking them and will leave them behind.
Bolsen recently commented on a picture of a large American flag draped over the demolished East Wing:
Professor Bigfoot
@WTFGhost: Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner had an impact on me.
They are why I am ride or die with Jews. Jews gave their lives for my rights, so, “they have my sword.”
Omnes Omnibus
I see that everyone woke up with a positive and cheery attitude today.
Castor Canadensis
@iKropoclast: The real smugglers are now in the market for stinger shoulder-fired AA missles. The price for smuggled rockets may be way up…
Gin & Tonic
@bluefoot: I suspect a contributing factor in this names, titles, respect discussion is that English does not have the formal vs informal second-person pronoun distinction that many languages have (like tu and vous.)
Eolirin
@Suzanne: The bulk of the electorate doesn’t understand the economy beyond immediate day to day prices and whether they have a job, so they respond more to shocks than to policy.
...now I try to be amused
@Matt McIrvin:
Well put. The right-wing US Catholics are practically a Protestant sect now. They reject the authority of Popes Francis and Leo XIV.
Jackie
@Eolirin:
If you don’t think FFOTUS and his Project 2025 buddies aren’t working nonstop to keep him in the WH after1/20/29, think again. They aren’t worried about ELECTING FFOTUS to a third term…
Baud
@Geminid:
Democrats and Republicans can barely live together in this huge country. I don’t understand how people think a single state of Israelis and Palestinians is going to be stable.
Omnes Omnibus
With the destruction of the Rose Garden and now the Jacquelyn Kennedy Garden at the White House, I have a theory that Jackie Kennedy snubbed Trump as the Outer Borough vulgarian that he is at some event in the 1970s and he is taking petty revenge now.
Professor Bigfoot
@Melancholy Jaques: bet money it’s been white dudes telling you that.
Big money. RENT money! ;^D
satby
@Omnes Omnibus: are you new here? 😉
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: And in the meantime, China is charging ahead at an insanely fast clip, building out green energy systems. A Chinese company is becoming the biggest EV dealer in Europe.
Paul in KY
@satby: All no-rich-and-can-help-TACO-financially people (vote for him or no) are suckers and fools and disgusting. That’s what he thinks.
Jackie
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s Friday – FFOTUS’s favorite day to rain new atrocities onto Americans. Call it anticipation? <shrug>
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: At my undergrad, a number of the older professors wanted to be addressed as Mr and addressed students as Mr/Miss/Ms. You know, everyone was vaguely equal as scholars in search of knowledge. I do note that they were all male and from prestigious backgrounds. No insist on deference, it was implicit. It also seemed kind of cool at the time.
RevRick
@WTFGhost: Monkey brains are that way, because they’re prey animals, and thus in a constant state of fear and hyper vigilance. And not too long ago, we were prey animals too. Our nightmares often have to do with being devoured.
The late Barbara Ehrenreich noted the intimate connection between war and religion in humans. We share common language, such as sacrifice. And the earliest depictions of gods and goddesses were often quite bloodthirsty. But as humans reflected more and more on their numinous experiences, their understanding of God shifted. The divine became associated with love and justice and mercy, and the divine intention began to be seen as desiring human thriving. It’s all about our sense of something moreness, that the morass we find ourselves in is not the final verdict.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: They do have the stereotype that female bosses are stricter and more focused on nitpicky detail stuff.
Kyle Rayner
Since seeing a few black bsky commentators say that 35% approval is rock bottom for a virulently racist president bc that represents the number of Americans who are still virulently racist themselves and will blindly support racism at all costs, hovering around 40% now makes sense to me. We gotta keep working to lift people out of the depths of their racism in our communities, no matter how stalled the whole cause has felt with them digging in and MSM messaging growing worse. This is person-to-person unpleasant but firm and patient regular engagement territory, I’m afraid. And education, if we can still manage any with all the sabotage.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: For alot of them, their dream is to be like the PewDiePie dude.
Omnes Omnibus
Mine are always about an exam in a course that I had forgotten that I had taken.
Castor Canadensis
@prostratedragon: Adolf Eichman: third-rater, hired by second-raters to kill people.
satby
Damn, he’s good: Buttigieg stumping for Spanberger.
Edit, audio is available, not sure why it opens an audio only link. Ok, button at top left of video.
I hate FB reels.
Baud
I’d like to be called Mr. Dr. Baud from now on (following the German style).
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: I grew up in the days of black-and-white TV and party-line telephones. So, I both appreciate and am mystified by the technological advances. I have seldom used my computer for more than being a glorified typewriter. And I studied advanced calculus and linear algebra in college!
I can grasp quantum mechanics, but I throw up my hands at the mysteries of computers and automobiles and microwaves.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@chemiclord:
That’s all fine and dandy when things are stable, your rights aren’t being stripped from you, etc.
More and more, as I’ve grown dissatisfied with the direction the US is headed in, I’m coming to see borders as prison walls, nations as prisons, and governments as our jailors. In the past, it was easier to leave and start a life somewhere else or assume a new identity. You can’t do that as easily anymore and haven’t for a century or so.
All I can say to such people, is I hope you’re never in a situation where you have to flee your country and be a refugee
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: Yes! Trump’s energy policies are insane, grounded in his stupid beliefs that climate change is a hoax and his personal animosity towards wind turbines. He and his GOP minions are cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: The ‘2 State Solution’ (I think) died with Rabin.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I have a theory that the decline in scope of repairability if modern cars is one of the reasons behind the decline in the NASCAR racing circuit’s popularity. NASCAR thrived in the 1970s and 80s because amateurs could emulate the racing teams with their own modifications– adding fancy carburators and the like. Now that connection has been broken
Castor Canadensis
@Eolirin: Well, I’d say he can’t constitutionally run again. That’s why you see his desire to overturn the 14th Amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
If he can overturn birthright citizenship, he can overturn term limits (IMHO, that’s a major reason he’s added that to his war against immigrants).
Professor Bigfoot
@Geminid: But you can still soup-up a more modern car— you just need computer skills to do it.
I’m in an “enthusiast” group for my twin-turbo Ford and they are constantly discussing various ‘tunes’ they’re able to upload into their cars to increase the BHP (stock it’s 350 HP).
I think they’re nuts— the stock 365 ft-lbs of torque are enough to scare myself— but then, see what the enthusiast community continues to do with Hondas and Toyotas.
Paul in KY
@satby: That was Ted’s theses and he had some very good points.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: If she wants them to call her ‘doctor’, then sad to say, she will have to correct them, etc. etc.
zhena gogolia
@satby: He always cheers me up.
Paul in KY
@WTFGhost: If the strike came from a naval vessel, then at the least the captain of the ship has to believe it is a lawful order.
Soapdish
Small business CEO in Utah? Safe bet.
My first thought was the angry goose meme. “WHO DID YOU VOTE FOR IN 2024???!?”
tam1MI
Case in point: Student loan forgiveness. I knew loyal Dems who would, unprompted, engage in purple-faced furious rants about “worthless little shits who majored in Basketweaving getting a handout while I had to stay in a job I hated for years paying off my student loan” and they were going to stay home and not vote at all rather than vote for the Dems. UNPROMPTED!!! I don’t know why that policy above all others elicited such unbridled rage, but it did.
The deep irony here is that student loan forgiveness ended up availing the Dems nothing, the youth vote turned away from them anyway.
Searcher
What happened in March 2020? That slowed the increase in Social Security recipients quite a bit. Can we do that again?
CaseyL
Back in the mid-1970s, when I first moved to Seattle, I lived in a walk-up apartment building that catered strongly to students and new immigrants. (It was inexpensive without being a dive; remember those days of affordable housing?)
There was a young woman down the hall, recently moved here from India. The first few times she came to visit, she wore the full kit of sari and headscarf; her hair was long and braided and kept tucked away under the scarf. Then, bit by bit, she assimilated into Americana: first the sari went, and then the scarf. (I remember my feeling of shock when she came by in jeans and a sweatshirt). Finally, the long hair got cut.
I remember thinking this was great! she felt free to define herself! – Well, she was free to re-define her cultural norms, and she had decided what she wanted were the “American” ones. Casual clothing, hair requiring less maintenance. I cannot know how much of that was due to her genuinely preferring those things, and how much was due to her wanting to fit in with “regular Americans.”
And now I also wonder if in today’s climate, her transformation would be celebrated, or if it would be criticized by the Left as giving up her culture for ours, and dismissed by the Right as insufficient because she wasn’t white.
Paul in KY
@They Call Me Noni: I don’t think ‘dead girl or live boy’ in the bed would do him in.
Jackie
@Searcher:
I assume you said that in jest? With FFOTUS AND Sec. Brainworm in power? Not even the least bit funny.
Professor Bigfoot
@Paul in KY: That is what leads me to believe it’s a “rogue” operation.
You don’t need the firepower of a real warship to take out a small boat— a drone with Hellfire missiles can do the job just fine.
I believe there’s a small “spec-ops” operation reporting directly to the White House, led by the likes of Eddie Gallagher.
Besides, one does not rise to become “Master after God” of a United States Ship by not understanding in at least a rudimentary way the laws of war and what’s really an illegal order.
I would expect that CO to understand that shooting at a vessel in international waters, sinking it and killing its crew with no warning is a war crime.
Would such a skipper give up his command (the one thing nearly ever surface warfare officer dreams of) rather than order such a strike?
I sure hope so.
Paul in KY
@chemiclord: My mom was a proud and voting Democrat her whole life. She was from Lancashire England and married my dad, emigrated, got citizenship, etc.
She absolutely hated illegal immigrants! She wanted everyone coming into US to have to jump thru the same demeaning hoops she had to back in 50s.
She didn’t really understand immigration quotas for other nations, neither did she care about how those impacted immigrants.
Matt McIrvin
@tam1MI: I heard people ranting about the injustice of student-loan forgiveness too but I suspect they were never Democrats in the first place (maybe not MAGA Trumpsters but definitely right-leaning bros).
Captain C
@gene108:
I think SWATTING someone should be considered attempted murder (murder one if the victim gets killed) and attempted (or actual) murder for hire, with a matching sentence for the perp if caught, tried, and convicted.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: I’m a 3000 mile dude. Even on my 2019 Avalon that gets the synthetic stuff.
Interesting Name Goes Here
@Geminid: No, NASCAR just sucks nowadays (even though I’ll root for Bubba Wallace until the end of time). The France Family has been so obsessed with taking a chunk out of the NFL’s ratings that they have created a putrid monster of an amalgamation of rules and regulations to try and keep the attention of those used to frequent commercial breaks and short bursts of activity. Also, their new car sucks at everything it was designed to do and is very unsafe; in it’s first year, there were a spate of fires and two seemingly-innocuous crashes put two drivers out for the season – one of those drivers retired as a result.
Paul in KY
@Geminid: I’m gung ho for a 2 state solution. Viable, honest-to-God Palestinian State.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: Trump can run again. The way to do it is to just do it.
He can’t constitutionally be elected President again, if one takes the Constitution at face value.
But if the Constitution is whatever a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court says it is, then he can run again, in principle get a majority of the Electoral College, and dare the Supreme Court to say it’s not constitutional. If they fold, then it’s constitutional, no matter what the text plainly says.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: Sound theory. East Wing destruction is his nasty minions (Vaught and the like) destroying something built by FDR.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yes but there will be still people who will deny and try to change the topic. You can see it happen in this very thread. People minimizing the effects of racism and bringing in other factors.
Yes the other factors exist but the core of it all is racism. When ww or minorities vote for Rs they are doing it to perpetuate the status quo. They do it because they think they stand to gain by being adjacent to white supremacy
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: Mine are about losing my car in some parking lot that I just cannot get to.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: He is building a bunker for when he loses the 2028 election.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: That’s not true though. States administer elections. Blue states and purple states with Dem leadership would not put him on the ballot. There’s enough of those to prevent winning the EC.
Absent the kind of consolidation of power that would make the election itself irrelevant, there’s no way for Trump to realistically run again.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne:
And this attitude is just puzzling to me. My PCP is an Indian-American woman and she’s great, listens to me but has this no-bullshit attitude.
But people will extend trust according to their tribal affiliations. I’m well used to Indian-American women being technical experts in other contexts, so that’s part of mine.
Paul in KY
@Baud: How about your full title: Mr. Dr. Baud, SP, GCUG
NotMax
@Paul in KY
My vehicle has a nag screen with a “time for an oil change” message popping up every 12 months like clockwork.
At this stage of life I drive only about 500 miles a year so I don’t deem it necessary, but as am still eligible for a lot more free oil changes at the dealership I comply.
;)
Paul in KY
@Geminid: I used to regularly watch it back in 70s and 80s. Finally quit when Davey died.
My peeve (biggest one) was the cars all got to looking the same and stopped being a sorta-stock car with many modifications to a purpose-built race frame with a fiberglass shell on it.
I understand they did that for safety reasons and competition concerns, but I just didn’t like watching it anymore.
Paul in KY
@tam1MI: They wouldn’t have liked me either. My parents paid mine off. They weren’t onerous, as I’d had scholarships and grants in college.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick:
Well, being devoured by the final exam for the class you forgot to attend all semester and the school building has become a strange labyrinth of wrong turns and you’re not wearing any pants.
The evangelicals I knew down South had a concept of divine love, justice and mercy that seemed to revolve around eternal torture for strange arbitrary reasons, justified using a sort of rigged moral calculus where you could never actually be good enough.
Which I think was in part because that was also how they raised children. Lots of complicated rules, a heavy emphasis on punishment and obedience, and “because I said so”. That was how they expressed parental love. They thought they had to.
Glidwrith
@Professor Bigfoot: I’m sorry, but white women voting Thuglican as a biological imperative is just gross. Roughly 40% of us are part of the Democratic coalition and I damn well have two children and I earn more than my husband by several thousands of dollars.
The world and my family are not safe with these fuckers in charge and I WILL vote for less status in trade for that safety.
I know, not all women, and I love you Professor.
Steam blown off, end of rant.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: I think you are definitely on to something here. As you said, you can put a hellfire on a remote controlled dinghy and it will do the job.
Also, all naval ship captains completely understand the laws of war and of the sea. Laws that go back to the 17th century. Going to now assume it was this ‘rogue operation’ controlled I guess by Unterreichsfuhrer Miller.
Matt McIrvin
@Paul in KY: I think they’re OK with that because it’s not their tax money. If your parents could pay off your tuition because it was 1986, you had scholarships and it wasn’t that high, that was just their prerogative.
Paul in KY
@Eolirin: I tend to agree with that. I also tend to think that the motherfucker is going to give it a go.
Or he will run Ivanka with him as ‘Veep’ or he’ll just have an office in the West Wing.
Bill Arnold
@Searcher:
That would be … a very fucking big lift ethically.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: My father grew up in the 30s, in the Depression, in Pike County, KY, to a family run by autocratic parents. You did whatever they told you to do, the first time they said it, or you would be whupped. After the whupping, you would then proceed to do what they commanded you to do. Their church was one where music wasn’t allowed. All singing was acapella.
I do think he really parented me and my siblings so, so, so much better/nicer than what he had been subjected to. Of course, my mom also was a huge influence there.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: It was their generosity to me. See your excellent point, though.
Captain C
@Soprano2:
That will be sometime after he’s taken to a camp and used for medical experiments.
Geminid
@Professor Bigfoot: My understanding is that a lot of the drone strikes the US conducts in the Middle East are directed from an Air Force base in Nevada. The airmen there don’t make the decision, but once they get the order they signal tbe drone to fire the missile. That may be the case with these strikes.
Geminid
@Paul in KY:
This is the general attitude of people who have watched this problem over the years, and I’m certainly not going to gainsay it. But if you are gung-ho for a Two State solution, it could be worth paying more attention than usual to how this peace process works out over the next four years.
But the first step is making this ceasefire stick, and that is the purpose of the Civil-Military Coordination Center that CENTCOM has stood up in the Negev Desert town of Kiryat Gat. The Jerusalem Post just published a short interview with a CENTCOM spokesman about the project, titled:
This link ought to work:
jpost.com/middle-east/article-871442
Captain C
@Baud:
Some of them probably don’t care and are hoping their preferred side drives out the other. The rest are likely idealists who haven’t thought this through.
Paul in KY
@Geminid: The ‘heartland’ for the Palestinian State will not be in Gaza, but in the West Bank. Maybe this is baby steps, but the heavy lifting will be ejecting the settlers from West Bank and also making sure infrastructure put in place for them is not destroyed, etc. etc. Also getting the borders acceptable to both sides.
Paul in KY
@Captain C: Anyone who thinks the Palestinians are going to ‘drive out’ the Israelis is smoking better stuff than I.
Geminid
@Geminid: One of the darkly humorous events of this war occurred a few weeks ago, when it was announced that the US would send 200 troops to Israel to manage the ceasefire.
For two years, people had been crying “Oh my God, this situation is terrible, somebody has to do something about it!”
Then when the US mission was announced, they were like, “Whoah! We’re doing something about it and this worries me deeply!””
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: As a liberal American, I’m much more comfortable with a secular multiethnic state based on common principles than with an ethnic/religious homeland seemingly based on 19th/early-20th-century notions of culture-based nationalism. But we have enough trouble making the secular multiethnic state work, here. And if they’re going to have the ethnic/religious homeland, a two-state solution is the only decent way to do it.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: to be fair, Trump being in the driver’s seat changes a lot of rational reactions to US behavior. There are a lot of things I’d be OK with us doing with a decent President in charge that become terrifying when it’s that guy and his minions running the operation.
Quiltingfool
@Paul in KY: I see the “Trump isn’t going to leave” and “Trump will run again,” comments here and at LGM.
Thing is, he’s not been campaigning non-stop. When he won in 2016, he declared his intention to run in 2020 and immediately started campaigning. He was campaigning non stop during Biden’s administration. I’m not seeing the rallies and campaigning now, though.
Could be that he figures he doesn’t HAVE to, because he thinks immunity means ignoring the Constitution, so, yeah, he’ll be on the ballot.
I dunno. I used to think he would be stopped, but now…
Matt McIrvin
@Paul in KY: I was in a similar situation. I got into a bunch of schools and some of them were very expensive private institutions. I chose instead to go to William and Mary, which was a state school offering low in-state tuition (much lower in real dollars, I’m sure, than any deal you can get today), and I’d gotten a scholarship that even covered some of it. And my parents were able to cover the rest.
So I got out of there with zero debt. And then for grad school, I did what many pure-science grads do and covered everything with a combination of NSF grants and (mostly) teaching assistantships. (A whole system that is in the process of being burned to the ground right now.)
So I got out of THERE with zero debt. And that’s been this absence of a drag on my life ever since.
Mind you, I then married into some educational debt, but we paid that off a while ago.
Paul in KY
@Quiltingfool: It could be that he’s just fucking with us about the ‘running in 2028’ as he loves the reaction he gets from TACO haters?
Hope all fine with you :-)
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: I’m glad that you were able not to be saddled with onerous debt. So many times we stand on the shoulders of our parents.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
True. But I bet people would freak out over US troops if there were a Dem president. Probably more so.
Matt McIrvin
@Quiltingfool: I don’t think he physically can do the rallies like he did during his first term; he’s deteriorated quite a bit.
And that, combined with the Supreme Court giving him immunity that doesn’t require that he remain President to stay out of prison, may actually keep him from trying to remain in office. But I’m sure the Republican Party also knows that their chances are much worse without Trump at the head of the ballot.
...now I try to be amused
@Paul in KY:
Rabin’s assassination was one of the most successful in history in terms of achieving its political goals.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: My thing is that I can get really mentally exercised over fringe intra-left disputes that have almost no connection to real-world politics, because I feel like I have a moral obligation to somehow consider them. But it’s just a lot of drama happening online.
(e.g. the people bashing the No Kings rallies because they weren’t armed revolution)
Paul in KY
@…now I try to be amused: Yes it was. That was Likud all the way. Never really paid a price for it, IMO.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin:
(e.g. the people bashing the No Kings rallies because they weren’t armed revolution)
To those idiots, just show that funny (fake) video of the Army drone operator explaining how he’s going to oppose this posse of Murcans armed with regular weapons. “OK, now I put the Hellfire targeting crosshairs on the group like so….press the fire button…and they’re all dead.”
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Soprano2: wow, gas prices where I live are around $4.90 or so. Appreciate your location!
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Another difference now is that Congressional Republicans are scared of Trump. He can push Netanyahu around and Republicans won’t take Netanyahu’s side like they would if it were Biden. And Democrats wouldn’t piss on Netanyahu if he was on fire.
Netanyahu is also scared of Trump. Yesterday a senior American official told Barak Ravid, “If Netanyahu screws up the deal in Gaza, Donald Trump will screw him.”
And Netanyahu knows Trump can and will screw him. Trump doesn’t care anout Netanyahu any more. Everyone who deals with Israel’s crooked Prime Minister eventually ends up despisng him. Even his coalition partners despise him, which is one reason Netanyahu has to stay in Trump’s good graces.
WTFGhost
@RevRick: No, it’s a sickness. It’s the belief that mercy and love are for the weak. Fuck, if we were weak, we couldn’t dare show mercy or love, when at war, but we liberals are so stupid, we’ll fight to fund the VA for veterans who don’t vote for us, and fight to fund medical care for hospitals for patients who don’t vote for us, and we do it while people dream of murdering us with their bright, shiny, unblooded AR_15s.
Fascism is the fear/hate response instead of the accept/move-on response. Fascism says “we dare not free our slaves, for justice is their slaughtering of us!” And OMG, is fascism humiliated when those former slaves just wanted a chance, to be fully human, and fully accepted, and you either had to accept you’d be a shit to humans, or, you’d have to embrace the “thousand year reich” idea.
If one stood before the God of Abraham, I believe the fascism would melt away, but, fascists would run from the countenance, because they know it will change them in ways they won’t accept. (Sorry – these days, I keep going back to being the “catholic kid” who knew some religious doctrine was messed up, but who still thinks of God as the ultimate super-hero who will put things right in the end. I know you’re not offended – but I know that I’m demonstrating my brain damage, which is embarrassing to me. Who wants to be brain damaged?)
tam1MI
@Quiltingfool: I’m not seeing the rallies and campaigning now, though.
His ill health may not allow it
Paul in KY
@Geminid: It would be crazy (and about par for the course in this timeline) if, as it took Nixon to go to the PRC, it was TACO that finally got the Palestinians their state, only because the Palestinian-hating PM of Israel was cowed by TACO.
Maybe, if this happens and lasts, then he could be legitimately nominated for the Peace Prize.
WTFGhost
@Paul in KY: That would be my assumption, too. However, when the CinC gets involved, things change.
Now: fascists want a military that’s willing to kill, on their orders. I’m willing to believe Miller, or Vought, suggested these strikes. “And, if those queer-ass liberals complain, say they must want more drugs in the US!”
Yeah, murder innocent people, because (backwards E for “there exists”) Drug Problems! That’s moral! If your brother dies of a fentanyl overdose, kill every doctor who prescribes fentanyl, if your brother died from ‘scrip, not street. If it’s street, murder random people hundreds, nay, thousands, of miles away! I mean, just ask yourself, WWJD, and, Right-Wing Jesus always agrees with murdering people, because every good fascist loves killing people extra-legally.
Face it, fascists love death, so, being able to kill people, and claim it’s for a good reason, well… you might as well hire Dexter as Secretary of State! (Technically, I think we may have hired Dexter as director of HHS. Except, Dexter was competent. Still, more deaths, so, it’s okay to appear stupid…?)
Where was the crazy person? Right, that’s me. Trump wants military folks ready to murder. I would imagine the Captain asking the precise number of folks needed to carry out the strikes, and probably gave them orders such that the Captain takes it in the shorts, when the orders are revealed to be illegal.
What the fascist movement wants to do, is excuse the captains, because they took the hit for the sailors under them. The non-fascists say “no, I’m sorry, good people have to suffer, so people see what happens when you knuckle under to fascists.”
I mean, that’s what I’d do, if I did torture someone under the “ticking time bomb scenario”. I wouldn’t accept a pardon, because torture is *that* wrong. Now, would I, facing a long prison sentence, remain so obstinate? I hope so.
Oh: if you hear of someone in Western Washington getting shot by feds, because he walked forward, hands up, saying he was going to pull down the face mask, okay, saying nasty shit like “you ain’t got balls enough to pull the trigger, pussy! NO BALLS! You’re a fucking PUSSY, and maybe after I unmask you, I’m gonna fuck you, you’re such a pussy!”
Yeah, if a fed blows someone like that away, without at least three people catching the audio on camera? That’s not me. Definitely not me. I’d make sure at least three cameras were on me.
Let’s not ask if I know it’s being shot from three different angles. I’m having a bad day. How bad? “I’d gladly let one of those DHS pussies plant me, as long as it’s on camera, and I’m shouting how I’m not going to hurt them.”
I’m also having such a horrible day, I’m willing to use the word “pussy” as a derogatory comment; apologies to women. I do like making (ahem) pussies purr, with my hands, just like petting a kitty, okay? But I heard “pussy” as a child, and imagined “itty bitty kitty, versus German shepherd.” I really was/am that innocent. So, if I (or someone of my generation) were trying to goad ICEholes into shooting me, I’d use such hateful language, but, by choice, I wouldn’t. It’s their word I’m using – not mine.
I like how Pandagon once put it: “A pussy can put up with any dicking someone wants to hand out!”
Ohio Mom
@Omnes Omnibus: Jackie was an ardent and prominent advocate for the historic preservation of New York City landmark buildings and during her lifetime, Trump tore down the art deco masterpiece that was the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue (it was a very high end store that Jackie surely shopped at).
AI tells me that Jackie was not involved in the protests that ensued, but her comrades must have been. In response, Trump promised to donate various parts of the building to a museum (some carvings/sculptures from the building’s exterior) but all of it went into the trash heap in the process of building the Trump Tower.
Did they ever meet, I don’t know. But they had to be very aware of one another and I think your instincts are on target.
Ohio Mom
@Searcher: Don’t worry, with the decimation of the public health infrastructure, I’m sure another pandemic will be along soon enough.
Professor Bigfoot
@Glidwrith: Absolutely no need to apologize!
That one came to me as I’m pondering why do the majority of white female voters vote for the white male supremacists of the GOP.
Obviously it’s not a literal biological imperative… but I haven’t yet come up with a better explanation; especially when you factor in the educational divide amongst white women.
Matt McIrvin
@bluefoot: I remember absorbing the idea that it’s faintly ridiculous for PhDs to insist on being addressed as “Doctor”, but realizing very recently that a lot of women with PhDs like it as a mode of address that is non-gendered and about something other than marital status.
In the physics community it seemed like being a Doctor who was not a Professor put you pretty low in the social hierarchy, so “Professor” was the title that carried prestige.
Professor Bigfoot
@Paul in KY: I think the conservative gun humpers know very well that they can’t stand against the US Army… but they CAN do some ethnic cleansing.
They CAN kill their neighbors and take their stuff.
Tulsa, Rosewood, Elaine…
Paul in KY
@WTFGhost: Hope your day gets better soon. The DHS creeps aren’t worth your life.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: Many of them are single-issue voters. Anti-choice.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: That raises another problem: for many Americans, this drama has only three main characters. The US and Israel are the anti-Heroes and the Palestinians are the Victims, and the Arab nations on the region are bit players of no account.
This is because Americans generally look down on Arabs and Arab nations, and dislike their leaders. Jordan and King Abdullah are exceptions to that rule. But these Arab countries are led by people every bit as smart as Americans and much more knowledgeble about this problem
And they’re more motivated because this is not some distant human rights problem. It’s a decades old source of instability they want to solve once and for all.
And they– the Gulf States especially– swing a lot of weight with this administration. And by administration, I don’t just mean Trump, who is a doddering fool. I mean Rubio, Witkoff, Vance and Wiles. They are the inner circle when it comes to decision making here.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: Matt was talking about Lefty dipshits grousing that the No Kings protests didn’t culminate in the great Proletarian Revolution ™.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: You have the math background to understand how “AI” works, for what it’s worth (to a greater extent than most computer science graduates).
Baud
@Geminid:
Makes sense. They are all people of the orb. Those bonds run deep.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Yeah, and, talking to people who are ride or die for Israel, I get the impression that the memory of Israel being at war with its Arab neighbors looms large. But they really don’t seem to be interested in that any more.
Matt McIrvin
@Paul in KY: Yeah, these are the Communist gun-humpers, a slightly different lot.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
In fairness, things can always change quickly. Look at the US as we went from Biden to Trump.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Matt McIrvin:
There are quite a few liberal/lefty pro-2A gun owners out there, especially after 2016/J6/2024
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: A lot of women buy into patriarchy and will vote the way their husband tells them to. Still. Today. There are places where it’s accepted for the husband to go into the voting booth with his wife and “vote her in”.
(And to the extent that I do have a small reservation about mail-in voting, it’s that it makes this kind of thing easier to manage. It’s a ballot that is not necessarily secret within your household.)
Professor Bigfoot
@Paul in KY: When what I hope and pray for is some variation on the Glorious Revolution of 1688– bloodless but transformative.
(and I’m sure that analogy fails miserably if you look at it too hard, but I refuse to look at it too hard. ;^)
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: A lot of the post-1989 revolutions in the Soviet Bloc were essentially bloodless. The situation didn’t necessarily remain so. But it was an object lesson that such things are possible. I’m not convinced it’s possible in America, but we can see.
Professor Bigfoot
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I was just at the range today; and there were Black people in most of the lanes… and I KNOW they’re not Trumpists and I’m fairly certain they’re not Communists.
The Black Tradition of Arms eschews political violence but embraces individual self defense.
The Unmitigated Gaul
@Suzanne: Brilliant observations.
lowtechcyclist
Thinking about Jared Hendricks, the distressed small businessman in one of the skeets up top, I couldn’t help but recall that Trump’s got a long, long history of stiffing small businessmen. And now for the first time, he gets to screw them over, not one at a time, but en masse. Maybe the Republican Party’s always been on their side, but they should have had their reservations that this one would be.
Oh well, too bad so sad. There are many people I feel a lot more sorry for due to this Administration, from kids starving to death in Africa to the families of the people on those boats that Trump had blown up. These small businessmen won’t die as a result of Trump’s policies. Many people have already, and many more will, unfortunately.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: I’m kind of fascinated by the Panthers: they were ostensibly Communists, and in the modern lefty imagination they seem to be romanticized as some sort of revolutionary super ninjas, but what they were really doing seems to mostly be community self-defense. People were trying to kill them and they were trying to prevent that, pretty simple.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Denise Oliver-Velez, who writes for Daily Kos, was/is a Black Panther.
chemiclord
@tam1MI:
And simultaneously, I knew SEVERAL young people who were furious that what DID happen wasn’t the total loan cancellation they convinced themselves had been promised and ALSO sat on their hands in 2024.
Matt McIrvin
@chemiclord: I recall a lot of blaming of Biden when the Supreme Court stomped on some of that, which is a basic civics knowledge failure, kind of like believing that Biden killed Roe v. Wade.
dnfree
@satby: I think there’s a lot of truth there. Plus, many union trades and even many local government union jobs like police officers and firefighters (formerly policeMEN and fireMEN) used to exclude minorities and women.
dnfree
@Professor Bigfoot: We had a 1980 Chevy Citation! Our kids loved that car but you’re right, it was worn out and in 1988 we replaced it with a new Dodge minivan for our growing children (same three kids but too big to fit in the Citation). I was just commenting to my husband that the cars we have now have lasted a lot longer with less mechanical trouble. I remember when we had to replace a $500 computer chip on the 1988 minivan, and that was a LOT of money in the early 1990s.
dnfree
@TheflipPsyd: My husband (MASW degree, LCSW) did not have a PhD and hence was not addressed as Dr. His boss at one job was a PhD psychologist and she absolutely insisted on being called Dr. , sometimes rudely. He later worked with another female PhD psychologist who not only insisted on being called Dr., she would park in the “Doctor” spots at the hospital that were intended for people seeing patients, even though she was only there for meetings. They insisted on their status being recognized whether it was relevant in a particular setting or not.
He certainly knew other PhD psychologists, male and female, who did not insist on being called Dr., although they accepted it if others used that title for them.
dnfree
@Matt McIrvin: I was a retro-computer programmer in the 1960s and with the early Windows PCs, and you are absolutely right. I remember DOS. I remember defragging a disk and being able to watch chunks of storage moved around. I remember being able to see every task running on my computer and knowing what they were. Now I start up Task “Manager” and there are screens and screens of stuff I have no idea if it should be running or what it’s doing.
dnfree
@Matt McIrvin: “The discussion runs on unreality”—brilliant way to express it!
kalakal
@dnfree: I remember being able to do that on PCs.
I absolutely loved UNIX
Ramona
@satby:
I hope this is true! Have you encountered some who have seen the light?
Ramona
@schrodingers_cat: I think you are right about this
Ramona
@Professor Bigfoot: I’m a woman with a PhD in Electrical Engineering (my dissertation was on machine learning, not i this century nor in this millennium but in 1992.)
satby
@Ramona: Not that they openly admit, but they no longer say anything at all about the felon either, compared to formerly declaring their “love” for him. No migrant workers for harvest, no SNAP beneficiaries to buy produce, tariffs hitting the soybean farmers (lots of those here), reductions in ACA subsidies and Medicaid immanent, prices spiraling upward on basics like coffee and beef: and the pain is just getting started.
Ramona
@sab: Also, the Ph.D. is the older degree and people with Ph.D’s were the original doctors. Physicians started calling themselves ‘doctors’ so as to gain respect equivalent to the holders of doctorates of philosophy.
Ramona
@WTFGhost: Have you talked about your aphasia before? Because I am surprised to learn you have it. I have always experienced your prose as lucid and clear. I’ve actually even envied your knack of writing!
Ramona
@Professor Bigfoot: I remember Motorola 6800 because that’s what I learned on!
Ramona
@Gin & Tonic: English did have the informal and formal version of the second person pronoun! Thee and thou were the informal forms. But, much like it is now happening in Spanish and French, people started to use the formal (and plural) form ‘you’ in order to be polite. And what tickles me to no end is that people now think that using ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ is a sign of great respect.
Ramona
@Omnes Omnibus: Or being naked in public in broad daylight or knowing that I am asleep but at the wheel of a car on the highway and come on fergawdsake OPEN your eyes, look out the windshield and drive but I am so sleepy… yikes! pant, pant, pant, phew, that was just a dream but I’m still terrified!
Ramona
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Capital, after all, is free to cross borders, so why not Labor!
Kayla Rudbek
@…now I try to be amused: and this is why I think that Pope Leo should bring back the meatless Friday tradition, it would clear a lot of the deadwood out of the American Catholic Church
TONYG
@David_C: Elon Musk danced with that fucking chainsaw. That was a narcissistic display from a horrible asshole, but it was also a predictor of how much careful analysis he would bring to the “DOGE” project. In a functioning government that psychopath would never have been allowed to play any role in the government.
Ramona
@Matt McIrvin: My understanding is that the Black Panthers were community organizers who among other things fed breakfasts to school children. The idea of them as violent rabble rousers is propaganda.
Fred Hampton was straight up murdered at the tender age of twenty-one. I hope I live long enough to see the flag at half mast on some December 4 in the future.
Ramona
@satby: Their no longer mentioning him is indeed a very good sign. It also is an indication of their shame at having been taken in by him.
TONYG
@satby: It’s almost as though the fucking farmers are learning the hard way how the economy works. Thoughts and prayers.
kalakal
@Ramona: In England surgeons are always addressed as Mr. When Drs were trying to gain respectability with their potions and leeches surgeons were looked down on as mere butchers operated practically on the street ( Barber – Churigens )
who you only went to as a last resort. Over the centuries as methods improved Surgeons got the last laugh as they now have god like status in hospitals, look down on mere Doctors, and rub it in by insisting on ‘Mr’ rather than the lower status ‘Doctor’
Ramona
@kalakal: My estranged brother in England is a surgeon. He used to be very smart. In a Skype conversation we had a decade ago, he wondered how to convince skeptics about climate change and asked me what convinced me of the reality of climate change. I mentioned the scientific consensus and he used the strawman of the general consensus on WMD in Iraq. I tried to stress that there was a huge difference between general consensus and scientific consensus given that the scientific method proceeds by attempts to invalidate one’s hypothesis. Somehow the conversation strayed to E=mc2 and he dismissed that as something arrived at by regression which caused me to fall silent in shock at how far his intellect had fallen.
kalakal
@Ramona: That’s very sad. I can’t even begin to see how he arrived at that conclusion. Doctors are a very mixed bunch, some are very smart indeed, some not so much. Very few of them actually have experience of scientific research, such as the ones who study at places like the London School of Tropical Medicine which is postgraduate only
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: Understand, professor! That would be glorious, considering where we are now :-)
Paul in KY
@Ramona: Me too.
Paul in KY
Professor Bigfoot
@Ramona: DOC!! Goddamn, but you HAVE to be a BADASS!
I got a BSEE by the very skin of my teeth in ‘81; anyone who manages to get it piled higher and deeper, ESPECIALLY any woman who does so… right the fuck ON!
Professor Bigfoot
@Geminid: We refer to her, reverently, as Ms. Denise.
She’s got the stories, she knows the history, and she won’t hesitate to (rhetorically, these days!) cut a MF as needed. ✊🏾
dnfree
@RevRick: Your grasp of quantum physics may be illusory.