Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, November 8, 2021
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110 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Teenager rescued after showing domestic violence hand signal to passing motorist, police say
why do i expect a rash of pranking along the lines of SWATting? Still, it’s better than not having such a hand signal for help.
In Trumpland parallel reality, election was stolen and racism was long ago
The 2020 election was rigged, but not the World Series. It gets worse.
@OzarkHillbilly: And oh yeah, I’m supposed to be understanding of these people and treat them with respect.
‘You can’t separate them’: the unlikely love story of Guy Clark, Susanna Clark and Townes Van Zandt
‘Extraordinarily rare’: intact 1,200-year-old canoe recovered from Wisconsin lake
@OzarkHillbilly:
Even to outsiders, the relationship between Townes and Guy was obviously special. In the early 90’s the two of them played at a club in Mpls. They must have gotten in a day early and Townes fell in with a couple of local musicians, who weren’t known for their sobriety. By showtime, Townes was a mess, obviously drunk, slurring words forgetting lyrics and losing the string in the middle of songs. Even from the sound booth, at the back of the room, you could see the disgust on Guy’s face.
Unfortunately intoxicated musicians aren’t rare, but typically a band or duo will jettison the problem player and move on. But not Guy with Townes, eighteen months later they were back, this time Townes was straight and put on a delightful show. The kind of performances that he was legendary for.
The ACL Townes tribute show: https://youtu.be/Lc7n7KsYkeg
@OzarkHillbilly: Gosh, that scratches several itches of mine!
First, in our little-ol’ St Pete there is a wonderful nature preserve where was found a log canoe estimated to have been 40′ long and radiocarbon dated to 700-1000AD. There is a cool display of all the recovered bits and pieces at
http://www.weedonislandpreserve.org/prehistoric-canoe.htm
And, have developed minor addiction to ‘prehistoric technology’ section of youtube. The chipped stone tools (arrowheads) were really bad at felling trees. The laboriously ground-down polished stone axes could be ‘hafted’ and made pretty short work of them. And you can watch log canoes being made with and without fire being used to hollow out the tree.
And thanks for the link!
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s been pretty big news around here.
@Mu Yixiao: i’ll bet.
No one talks much about radiation when enthusing about voyages to mars, never mind space dust.
Both problems might be solved with more shielding, which drives up weight, which drives up fuel, which runs into the rocket equation*, which means much more money needs to be spent.
*You need to carry more fuel to carry the shielding, and still more fuel to carry the extra fuel.
Will Elon Musk abide by Twitter poll and sell 10% of his Tesla shares?
And pay taxes on income???? You must be high.
Car shop owners deny asking Rittenhouse, armed men to protect their property during unrest
Since a huge part of the rationale of Rittenhouse’s “defense” is that he was there protecting property at the request of the owner and therefore was correct to be “patrolling” for “troublemakers”, it’s no surprise they’re now accusing the owner of tossing Rittenhouse under the bus. Damn right he’d be liable if he asked the kid to show up and people got killed but in this case, I don’t think he’s lying. The friends that claimed he asked for help might have misunderstood a comment or just happened to know some crazies that showed up and he was “sure guys not pissing off the armed loons”. On the off chance he’s just CYA – well, no honor among thieves or right-wing nuts taking the law into their own hands.
Unless Rittenhouse can prove it with concrete evidence, a large part of his defense logic just evaporated. The *WHY* of why he was there – protection and therefore inherent defense – is now in question. He wasn’t supposed to be there naturally as he crossed state lines ; now it’s looking like he wasn’t invited but choose to set up shop on his own. With no legal right to be there doing what he was doing, it’s going to come down to the initial confrontation with the first victim. Witnesses have testified that Rosenbaum wasn’t a threat to Rittenhouse’s life even if he was acting somewhat erratic – it’s really looking like Rittenhouse just jumped in with his big-ass gun to something he wasn’t prepared for, got worried someone might “take the gun and use it on him” the way he planned to use it on others and decided the chaos he willingly walked into made him so fearful he was justified in taking a life. When others tried to protect themselves by dealing with the threat, he shot even more of them and yet he’s the one with the benefit of the doubt for self-defense. Sucks to be him one of his victims survived to tell the tale and is up next on the stand…..
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, I live with a lot of them here in Texas. Keep thinking that I need some kind of stun gun for when they come near. Probably won’t though because I’d be too tempted to use it.
This is nuts. Or, as Ron Carey said in History of the World, Part One: “Nuts. N-V-T-S.”
http://www.thebulwark.com/notes-on-an-authoritarian-conspiracy-inside-the-claremont-institutes-79-days-to-inauguration-report/
@OzarkHillbilly:
Lake Mendota is not some obscure lake up in the boonies. It is basically downtown Madison. That would be like finding a major archeological discovery in Lake of the Isles or Calhoun.
The only thing you find in Lake of the Isles is algae growths, pretty chill ducks, and obnoxious asshole geese.
Calhoun at least has wind surfers and tiny sailing boats. I took a sailing class there.
Trump in a nutshell:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-told-top-official-he-was-done-with-the-republican-party-books-says?ref=home
Of course, when Ronna McDaniel threatened to stop forking over millions for his legal bills, Trump caved. Absolutely typical of him.
@Kathy:
The Mars Trilogy “solved” this by using water as shielding.
I’m still struck by the Theranos saga. What baffles me is the company was founded on almost nothing at all, yet reached a valuation in the billions.
Holmes didn’t really even had an idea. She had a notion, without any clue how to bring it about. Suppose I presented this idea: cheesecake that makes you lose weight.
Well, that’s not possible, is it? Hell, yes, it is! Digesting food takes energy (calories), only usually more energy is derived from digestion (otherwise we’d all have starved billions of years ago). So, if you ingest something which takes more energy to digest than the energy it contains, the result is like negative calories and you lose weight.
Ok. How do you make a cheesecake that tastes good but has negative calories?
Aye, there’s the rub.
Tyler Schultz, George’s grandson and Theranos whistle blower, said he was very disappointed when he saw the Theranos-developed Edison blood analysis machine. It consisted of a modified glue-dispensing robot and simple lab tools and reagents. It could perform a few types of immunoassays. Tyler had expected some kind of sophisticated microfluidics tech, one presumes including lab-on-a-chip components.
I don’t think Carreyrou says it specifically in either the book, Bad Blood, or the follow-on podcast, but for a company pushing a new technology, Theranos seemed to have spent very little money on R&D. I wonder how they expected to develop anything at all that way.
@CSK: Good lord. You’re right, nvts. Completely lost the handrail of any form of reality*. But nonetheless respected members of the conservative establishment. And who’s paying for all this?
* Except the part about the cops being eager Brownshits. That’s frighteningly realistic.
@de stijl: I know you’re tongue in cheek. But water is weightless? Well, OK, it would be weightless. But massless?
@de stijl:
Water would be good radiation shielding, but you’d need some dust/micrometeoroid shielding on top of that. Perhaps it would help to carry the water frozen*, covered in thin thermal shielding (in vacuum metal foil makes for good thermal shielding).
Either way, the rocket equation still applies.
*Clarke proposed this for interstellar travel in Songs of Distant Earth.
@Kathy: Re your negative calorie cheesecake. My google foo fails me for links and ‘proof’, but memory strongly signals there was an attempt to market foods with non-digestible fats used as shortening. Since not digested, no calories! Great idea!
Amazing diarrhea. Very shortlived idea.
@JohnMcC:
Olestra?
Yep. Olestra.
@Sleeping Dog:
The Replacements were known for gigs that started off the rails and went downhill from there. Drunken mayhem.
Saw a few. I wanted them to play songs. Was I owed that? It was free. I wasn’t owed anything. If they wanted to fuck around for a laugh it really isn’t a thing I can harshly criticisize.
Too often I would pre-party too hard and show up bombed at a show wanting someone to perform for me. Give me amusement. Play the good songs. Dance your monkey dance for my pleasure.
For no-cover shows if the performers want to fuck around, I have no leg to stand on.
I kinda respected The Replacements for bombing at some gigs. Showing up three sheets. It’s pretty ballsy.
@gVOR08:
This is a very long piece that attempts to explain how the Claremont Institute got where it is today:
http://www.thebulwark.com/what-the-hell-happened-to-the-claremont-institute/
@JohnMcC:
@Mu Yixiao:
Not just diarrhea, but anal leakage!
Olestra was all the marketing rage for a year or so.
People’s personal experiences with “anal leakage” put the hard kibosh on that nonsense.
Chips and cookies and such should not be fat-free. An indulgence has consequences – should have consequences.
@Kathy:
Marketing. Bullshit. Chutzpah. Theater.
She could snap her fingers and half the VCs in the Valley believed her. The other half turned into dust.
It wasn’t the high taxes in Nassau County, or the recent changes to New York’s bail laws that drove Lizette Sonsini, a former Democrat, to vote Republican this year.
Her reasons were more overarching.
“I don’t like the president, and the Democrats are spending too much money on things like infrastructure, when really we need politicians who are going to bring more money back into this country,” said Sonsini, 56, of Great Neck.
How do you message people like this? What does “bring more money back into this country” even mean? And she’s upset that money is being spent on infrastructure? Does she actually live in New York?
I do think the Democrats are fucked, and probably in the long run. Endless cycle of horrible Republican takeovers, and then a Democrat is elected to fix the problems, which take more than a year so you have brain surgeons like Ms. Sonsini deciding that ten months is more than enough time for Biden to have fixed all the problems in the country.
Is anyone still confused about why Sinemanchin are doing what they are? Here’s Balloon Juice on Sinema getting big money from the Multi-Level Marketing industry (prominently the DeVos family, yes, that DeVos) to block treating contractors as employees.
Going meta, democracy is dead unless we somehow get the money out of politics. A prerequisite is getting the GOPs out of the Supreme Court.
@de stijl:
I’m afraid you all missed the fine print in the product. Diarrhea and anal leakage were the consequences. Everyone mistook the feature for a bug.
@de stijl:
Windsurfing has a very hard element. Tacking upwind. Once you get it, no big whoop.
I was stuck in a lake for a few hours tacking and paddling back to home base. It was borrowed. I did not want to leave it stranded on the other side of the lake. Expensive gear that was not mine.
That would be rude.
Home was directly upwind. That was a long hard slog. Downwind is easy and thrilling. The sail pulls harder than you think it would – you really need to lean back hard to counterbalance.
I finally figured out you needed to go sideways and slightly up. Like a switchback trail on a mountain. I flailed for a half hour trying to bull my way forward before getting zen.
The best way forward is sideways. There is a life lesson in there somewhere.
I was exhausted. My gf laughed at me. I slept like a baby that night.
@JohnMcC:
@Mu Yixiao:
@flat earth luddite:
I remember that, and I think a non-fat ice cream called Simplese. But I just heard about the products, I never got to try them.
Wood is indigestible by the human intestinal biota (they do most of the work, really). So we could mix sawdust in the cheesecake batter, yes? It’s the Theranos way.
Serious note, I sometimes make something I call cottage cheesecake. You mix cottage cheese with yogurt in a blender, then pour that into a bowl and whisk in eggs and a little wheat flour, plus sweetener and vanilla flavoring. then bake the whole thing.
It’s not cheesecake, but it’s nice and has fewer calories. Just not negative calories.
@Scott: I keep pepper spray to hand.
@de stijl:
Unfortunately with Townes, this wasn’t the only occasion where he showed up incapacitated. He didn’t have George “No Show” Jones reputation, but mostly due to his concerts being attended by dozens to hundreds and not the thousands that George could draw.
Yeah, I saw the Replacements trashed more than once as well. After a couple of shows like that I stopped going to see them. That was too bad as they were a great band when straight.
@Sleeping Dog:
A colleague of mine once told me that one always had to get tickets to see Jones’s first show of the evening because he was almost always too drunk to go on for the second.
@CSK:
Read, “for the good, law-abiding WHITE people in those communities.”
@Kathy:
I cannot tell you why. Cottage cheese makes me want to puke looking at it. Even thinking about it makes my tummy unhappy.
It shouldn’t. It’s uncoagulated proto cheese. I like cheese. I am a wimp. I know this.
Hard pass on cottage cheese recipes. Nope.
@OzarkHillbilly:
That would be my guess.
@Sleeping Dog:
A hard reminder why youthful monkeyshines are sometimes not funny – Bob Stinson.
A genius guy. Truly gifted guitar person. Dead at 35 of booze and drugs. “Organ failure” at 35.
@de stijl:
Holmes had three things going for her:
1) The general state of the tech industry, in which many startups grow up to be huge companies with Brobdingnagian market valuations even when they don’t make money (see Uber), along with the fear of missing out on a promising startup.
2) A combination of ignorance and trust. People know little about medicine and biology, and people tend to trust other people don’t lie to them when speaking about their area of expertise.
3) The overall tax and regulatory structure. Rupert Murdoch, the Prince of Darkness Himself, invested about $120 million in Theranos. Holmes tried to use him to quash Carreyrou’s reporting in the WSJ, which Murdoch owns. He didn’t quash it, and he wasn’t worried about his investment. Carreyrou does mention that when the whole thing came crashing down, he sold his shares back to Theranos for $1 (one dollar, American), and wrote off the losses in aid of his tax bill.
The last is rather telling. Many of the Theranos investors may not have cared if they lost their investment, as the losses can be used to reduce their taxes later. Come to think of it, I’ve to wonder how many knew the whole thing was a sham and didn’t give a damn.
@senyordave: “Sonsini, 56, of Great Neck”
Except that half the time the Times or some other institution interviews real Americans to find out what’s really going on in the homeland, the Obama/Hillary voter turns out to have been a high-level Republican operative for years.
@Kathy:
Don’t forget that Holmes is young, blonde, and beautiful. I’m sure that helped her sales pitch.
@Kathy:
Have you been following the Theranos reporting over at Ars Technica? It goes into some detail on the fraud that was committed.
@de stijl:
Holmes honey-potted a good chunk of the VC firms in Silicon Valley into getting in bed with her, and all it took was one quick glance at her in a tight blouse/form fitting dress and resistance was futile. Anyone who wants to say that she was not all that, cool, cool, not going to go back/forth over whether or not she was quite the looker. I will say that when I google her and some of the images pop up, that by Silicon Valley CEO standards, she was above average looking imho.
The thing is, Marissa Mayer is not exactly chopped liver in the looks department, and yet she spent many years at Google, and moved on to being the CEO of Yahoo and helped shareholders make bank several years back, and she did it without relying all on her looks.
The sad thing is that Holmes did not exactly help the cause of women who want to be valued as more than just a pretty object to ogle in the boardroom, and a woman only being noticed for her looks is sadly still very much a thing in the year 2021.
@CSK:
@inhumans99:
Maybe I should partner with Jennifer Lawrence for the Delicious Weightloss Cheesecake.
@inhumans99:
Yep. As Sally Quinn once informed other female journalists: “Being blonde doesn’t hurt.”
@Sleeping Dog:
A great, great band when unstraight: Santana at Woodstock. (Although Carlos later said he’d not recommend doing what they did.)
@Kathy:
Yes, Cracker and I had a friend who was eager to try this. (Why, I don’t know, since he was 70+, about 165# at 6′ plus, but I digress…) Took him shopping at the local megamart, where he bought several of the items containing this franken-goop. The next day he wasn’t able to join me for his 20 oz 4 shot dark chocolate mocha, because his intestines were in rebellion. I wound up bringing his mochas to him for several days until the leakage eased. Not organic chemistry’s finest moment…
@Kathy:
That’s why beautiful individuals have always been the spokespeople for products.
@CSK: Holmes being good looking helps. It always helps. Good looking men do better, too.
AND, there are thousands, if not millions of women out there who are as good looking as that, and none of them pulled off a scam of that magnitude. I expect if you look into it, you can find some who tried and failed to even get going.
@Jay L Gischer:
Indeed. Holmes is a crook and a scam artist whose looks gave her a boost. And her manner may well have been very seductive and flirtatious.
@Mu Yixiao: Bingo! And thanks!
@sam:
Sam there’s a difference between being tipped and being so intoxicated that you are falling off the stage and forgetting the chords.
@flat earth luddite:
A marketing failure, really. Who wants to think about how food will come out when you consider eating it.
@Jay L Gischer:
I’m inclined in that direction, though negative evidence isn’t real evidence.
Yesterday late in the day, Gustopher suggested a campaign stance for Sanders suggesting that
What’s really scary about that statement is that it would probably resonate with significant numbers of GQP voters.
@Sleeping Dog:
Apparently. Since everybody in the band had dropped a tab of acid about an hour before they went on stage. Definitely unstraight, no?
@sam:
No, not straight, but your ability to function while tripping or stoned on pot, is much higher that when strung out on alcohol, heroin or barbiturates.
So, to return to our discussion of Foundation. I watched the first episode, which was beautiful to look at and I thought Jared Harris was a great Hari Seldon.
I decided to reread the book (which I originally read as a kid, and loved it, and then re-read ten-plus years ago). I remembered it not exactly being action-packed, but man, I had forgotten how much it really is just people talking to one another.
And I am over a third of the way in, and not only has there been no female character, I am pretty sure that females have not even been mentioned.
So, basically, just dudes talking to dudes.
S@Kathy:
She was promising a lab on a chip. That was the premise and the promise.
It was such a leap in tech people should have pegged it was vaporware. She was smart. She was glib. She was a charmer. She was attractive. She was blond.
Meanwhile, there was this back-current talk that it was all just utter bullshit. They bullshitted their own scientists and techs.
The pathology is very weird. No matter how much investment there was no way forward. The promise was undeliverable.
I understand the principle of fake it ’til you make it, but that is about personal anxiety sapping thoughts about self worth.
You can’t fake a new technology for very long.
She backed herself in to a corner where the only thing that could happen would be that all her lies would be exposed and she would suffer great humiliation and would be sued into the ground and she would be unemployable and shamed and humiliated for her entire life.
This was never going to work. She bulled forward. Pitching. Soliciting.
Who does that? Why? In too deep? Can’t back out now? It’s nuts.
Plus snapping her finger and wiping out half of sentient life in the galaxy was rude. Presumptuous.
(Yes, I made another Theranos / Thanos “joke”.)
@CSK: Thanks for the link, but lordy, tl;dr. I make it 12,000 words. But I did skim it. The author pretty badly undercut her argument that Claremont was once serious with, “Some very smart and thoughtful people—like Ross Douthat—have been fellows at the institute; so have Josh Hammer, Mollie Hemingway, Christopher Rufo, and Ben Shapiro.” I’m unfamiliar with Josh Hammer, otherwise “very smart and thoughtful” are not the words that leap to mind.
I was struck by how often she describers the statements by Claremont people as wandering, or contradictory, or trying to have it both ways. I quoted Frank Wilhoit yesterday to the effect that the central goals of conservatism can’t be baldly stated. The evasiveness of Claremont’s writing is evidence of this.
I wouldn’t call this really a very good explanation of how Claremont got to be what it is. She may have a case that they used to be more dignified. I don’t think she makes a case they weren’t always partisan hacks. And I don’t think you can examine their evolution without examining their funding, which she does not touch. The best info I could find quickly is out of date, but the usual suspects stand out: Scaife, Bradley, Olin. I expect there’s a chunk of Koch in there somewhere. I hope the drooling craziness of the Institute shows it’s getting harder to keep conservative funders on board.
@senyordave:
Long Island is weird. Not Staten Island weird but same ballpark. A lot of middle class white resentment.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It depends on what you regard as being Foundation.
If you take the prequels in, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, three are female characters early on. If it’s the classic trilogy, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, you have to wait until part two of the second book for any meaningful female characters to show up.
@CSK:
@gVOR08:
If you note Mollie Hemmingway and Ben Shapiro as distinguished past fellows you have lost the argument. Partisan polemecists to the core. Incapable of making a fair minded argument.
Douthat is occasionally not an immediately dismissable hack.
They need to recruit John Solomon and or Bari Weiss.
A slot is open after Eastman crapped the bed.
@gVOR08:
I agree with you, particularly the part where she cites Mollie Hemingway et al. as the resident geniuses.
Making Jack Posobiec a Lincoln Fellow blew any credibility the Claremont Instituted might once have possessed. It’s like making Alex Jones the head of the Brookings Institution.
@de stijl:
See here @CSK:.
@de stijl:
Only without the chip.
I recall hearing about Theranos here and there before it blew up, but it rose to have some of my attention only after it imploded.
One interesting thing is that Holmes would boast to investors of customers and actions Theranos never had and never undertook. For instance, claiming to have run lab tests for drug trials, or having placed blood analysis devices on Army medevac helicopters. Both were things Holmes tried to do, but never did.
The science has been much neglected, too. One may assume that blood is blood, and Holmes failed only because she couldn’t figure out* how to carry out hundreds of tests on a small volume of blood.
I’ll understate now: would that it were so simple.
Blood from a finger prick is not the same as blood drawn from a vein. Volume aside, blood from a finger will be contaminated by epithelial (skin) cells from the small wound that lets blood out. So the sample is not even blood, but blood and skin.
In addition, you need to squeeze the finger, as if milking it, to get more than a drop. This damages red blood cells, which then spill their contents into the rest of the sample. Some tests, especially testing for potassium levels, will be screwed up when that happens.
That’s not to say there are no blood test that can be done from finger sticks. Diabetics rely on glucometers and reactive strips and a drop of blood every few hours. You can also detect antibodies this way, and determine blood type with three drops.
The lab on a chip concept is an idea for future technology, not limited to blood analysis. As I recall, when it was hyped in science media, there was much talk about testing for pollution, drugs, even explosives.
*Of course, it’s even harder to figure something out when you’re not trying to figure it out.
@de stijl: No, they seem determined to keep Eastman in good standing. Even lauded. The subject article goes deep into Claremont’s involvement in fomenting the Stop the Steal nonsense well ahead of 1/6. To repudiate Eastman would be to repudiate the whole place.
@CSK:
After reading excerpts from The Claremont Institute’s October 2020 “79 Days To Inauguration” (spearheaded by guess who? John Eastman) I gotta say I preferred the original “The Turner Diaries”; at least that had a plot.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yesterday, I saw a PSA from the Washington State Department of Health where an urgent care specialist assured people that Covid-19 vaccine does not cause infertility or magnetize people who take it. That’s how fwking stupid Washington State anti-vaxxers are.
@de stijl:
That’s a fair comparison. My sister went to Claremont-McKenna College. No association between that and the Claremont Institute, but I’m sure they’re very unhappy about the name similarity.
@gVOR08:
Imagine an “institute” where distinguished past fellows included Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bill Maher.
The thing I hate most about Bill Maher is that he smirks at his own “jokes”.
Mitch Hedberg could pull that off and make it endearing and even funny. Maher can’t and it pisses me off.
While The World Was Watching Virginia’s Elections, Georgia Made Strides Quietly
Not to make too much of this but maybe, just maybe, this Stacey Abrams woman knows what she’s doing?
@OzarkHillbilly: I moved to Korea to teach just as the KORUSA FTA was being finalized and voted on. One of the points of contention was that importation of US beef was going to destroy the Korean cattle market and devastate producers of Korean beef. Several Koreans I worked with and talked to in my adult classes objected to beef importation. When I would ask them what their objections were specifically, they noted that a significant amount of Hanwoo (Korean) beef went to restaurants that specialized in–and advertised bulgogi and Korean barbecue featuring Hanwoo beef exclusively. (This type of restaurant is usually very expensive–it’s not uncommon for dinner for a party of 4 to be several hundred dollars and for larger parties to spend thousands of dollars on dinner.) My coworkers and students expressed the fear that these restaurants will switch over to much cheaper American beef while still charging Hanwoo prices for meals.
When I asked they why they feared this would happen, they all (as in actually 100% of them) “because that’s what I would do given the opportunity.”
I suspect that a significant degree of Covid-19 behavior among anti-vaxxers and maskholes is probably based on the same type of bad faith transference. We are so [expletive, deleted].
@CSK:
There was a guy who blogged The Turner Diaries and his profanely exacerbated reaction to it chapter by chapter. (Can’t remember who for the life of me. In the early to mid aughts – it took him years to finish it off. He would do a few pages every week or so.
The gaping continuity errors. The demented dialogue. The disturbing interpersonal relationships.
It was pretty amusing. The comment section rocked hard. Hat tip to those folks.
@de stijl: Funny you should mention Bari Weiss. She surfaced this morning as involved in the founding of the “University of Austin. (Nothing to do with UTA, nor accredited.) This is to be an anti-woke “University” dedicated to “free speech”. Over at LGM Scott Lemieux follows up. There seems to be a taboo on talking about where the money for this stuff comes from, but Lemieux notes who’s apparently paying for this grifter. (When do the GQP base realize they’re being had? Or the libertarian funders?)
I may try to start a new meme, “Lilac Time”. IIRC there’s a throwaway line in The Producers. One of the singers trying out for Hitler says he was up for the lead in Lilac Time. “What happened?” “I didn’t get it.” Seems to come up regularly in politics. “OMG, a donor to the Clinton Foundation asked for a meeting with the Sec O’State.” What happened?” “He didn’t get it.” “The woke left dumped on so-and-so about his racist remarks.” “What happened to him?” “Nothing.” The U (sic) of Austin noted some typical cases of the woke mob. Lemieux points out that in those cases, nothing actually happened to the subject.
@JohnMcC: @Mu Yixiao: I also remember a brief period when high-fructose corn syrup was being touted as a replacement for sugar because of it’s low glycemic index. But that one didn’t last long.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Projection. Time and time again, it seems projection is behind all their fears.
@de stijl: Other than that it’s a white supremacist tract from the ’70s and that it was Timothy McVeigh’s favorite book, I confess I know next to nothing about The Turner Diaries and wasn’t aware anyone in the mainstream had done one of those “I’ve read it so you don’t have to” analyses. I suspect I wouldn’t have the stomach even for that.
@Kathy: You don’t need it to be sawdust, any edible cellulose will work. Been tried. My company sampled some desert items “enriched” with cellulose back in the late 70s early 80s. Didn’t taste very good. And they they were kind of crumbly and dry as I recall, but they were low calorie. We did a hard pass on them.
@flat earth luddite: I must have been in Korea at the time, but I do recall you mentioning it. 😛
@Kathy: A few weeks back, my Medicare supplement provider sent me a kit for a test that measures A1C level using 5 drops of blood. I’ve not used the kit. The instructions note that the blood must drop on spots on the test strip without smearing or running. The likelihood that I would be able to drop five drops of blood on a test strip cleanly in 5 tries (or even 50) with the tremor that I have now is too small to measure.
But I suppose that it’s probably a decent idea for people who have low access to medical clinics that can send samples to labs. An A1C blood draw is pretty intrusive–fairly large bore needle and such.
@OzarkHillbilly: “…just maybe, this Stacey Abrams woman knows what she’s doing?”
An overweight black woman? With a diastema, and who couldn’t even win the office she was running for? Unpossible!
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yeah, you were overseas. But lawdy, it was a hard not laughing with him as I visited – me on the deck, him in the bathroom, yelling back and forth.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Saw dust ought to be cheaper. I mean, it’s waste from the timber and furniture industries!
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Corn syrup has become a replacement for sugar in soda and other processed foods, because it’s cheaper than cane sugar. You can grow corn well in a wider variety of climates.
@Kathy: True enough. And a significant portion of it is high-fructose c s; although it’s started to fall on hard times related to consumer attitude. And corn syrup has been a staple item in hard candy for ages. The whole idea that the fact of it being a low glycemic index item (though not particularly low as I recall) and that that fact would somehow outweigh that it isn’t lower in calories was interesting to me at the time.
@Kathy:
Grocery stores in the US sell Mexican soda at a premium. Coca Cola mostly. Although you see Mountain Dew occasionally.
“Made with real cane sugar!” Plus, it comes in glass bottles.
@Kylopod:
The blogger’s reaction and the peanut section of the commenters made it funny.
In a whistling past the graveyard kind of way.
It was grotesque and awful. Not just badly written, but Hannah Arendt banality of evil bad.
It was as if Mystery Science 3000 did a show goofing on Schindler’s List.
It was horrifying. It was uproariously funny.
Jezus Fking Christ!
Just came from the “specialized specialist” for my shoulder. He poo-pooed the concerns of the specialist, suggest it’s a completely different thing going on, didn’t sound like he viewed the MRIs, said nothing about the CT scans I had to have last week, and decided that I should “get a shot and come back in two months to tell him if it still hurts”.
And the 1-hour wait wasn’t exactly fun, either.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
In Mexico you find corn syrup sold as “corn honey,” which is added to baby formula, and it’s also used in desserts. It’s sold in half liter bottles, Maple-flavored syrup is also corn syrup, somewhat diluted, with maple flavoring.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
In the late 70s I did an advanced physiology class. One of this first units was on blood.
You had to prick your finger and get a drop on the slide. They had these little lancets that came in a pack. You broke one off the end like a Twix Used it. Tossed it.
Everybody had to do it. It was a quasi-requirement.
For people who couldn’t stick themselves there was this spring loaded gizmo you could place on the fingertip, hit the trigger and it would snap down. You were supposed to squirt the tip with alcohol between uses. We mostly forgot.
Mr. W was not the most attentive of lab supervisors.
Later, in the same class we did frog dissections and vivisections. The dissection frogs were stinky of formaldehyde and boring.
You had to “pith” the live frogs for vivisection. I.e. stick a scalpel into the forebrain but above medulla oblongata.
A lot of folks could not / would not. I was the designated frog whisperer. Even back then I was a little pagan and said a small thank you and goodbye to the little froggy dudes. Every class I had to do 3 or 4, but briskly because I needed to do my business too.
We did vivisection in HS. Pithed the frogs ourselves. Imagine the hue and roar if that happened today.
Mr. W was not attentive. We wasted a lot of time making fires with acetone in the lab sinks.
Acetone makes a nice fwoosh when ignited.
No, I am not a sociopath.
@de stijl:
We did frogs and fetal pigs–all preserved.
However! For a public-speaking class, one of the assignments was a “demonstration speech”–show (and teach) the rest of the class how to do something.
Background: This is small-town, rural, farm-country Wisconsin. We hunt ’round these parts–and not for fun or trophies*. For meat. Deer (of course), turkey (after they were re-introduced and flocks became large enough), pheasant, duck, goose, rabbit, squirrel, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting.
So… Hunting is common.
Jay (who went on to work for the Department of Natural Resources) did a very… different… demonstration–one that would cause current school administrations to explode.
He skinned a squirrel.
On school grounds, with an actual squirrel he’d killed, using a razor-sharp hunting knife.
It was somewhere between sophomore and senior year. So… except for the teacher, all of us were teens.
It was one of the best damn demos I’ve ever seen. He also competed on the forensics** team, and kept winning the gold with his demo on duck/goose/turkey calls.
==========
* Okay. Some idiots do it for fun (did I mention that they’re idiots?), but we also have a “donation law” which allows them to donate the meat to food pantries. Our local butcher shop accepts all donated deer and does all the processing for free. The meat gets ground into hamburger (with added beef fat, because it’s so lean), and handed out to local food pantries. They donate about 3 tons every year. Hides go to leather workers, and the rest is sold to various rendering plants which turn it into other stuff.
** Forensics is competitive public speaking.
Your fun food video for the evening.
(SFW)
(Not safe for woke snowflakes)
@Mu Yixiao: I processed an elk myself a couple weeks ago. Opening day, college kid had to get to a family funeral so he shot it at dawn, texted me to see if I wanted to eat it, and pretty much dumped it off in my driveway for me to deal with, minus the head. First time processing an elk, it’s a whole lot more meat than a deer or antelope!
We just had the first batch of steaks out of it last night, they were deeeelicious!!! I almost like them better than beef BECAUSE they’re so lean.
@Mu Yixiao: Fvck. Sympathies. Sometimes it helps to raise some hell. It took me a month to get the results of the MRI on my shoulder this time, and I had to come into the office and request/demand an appointment. One time I sat waiting in a doctors office for an hour. They didn’t know I was gone until they walked into the exam room and I wasn’t there. They called me post haste, very apologetic with another appointment at my convenience and I’ve never had to wait more that 20 mins since. Another time I walked out and never heard from the Doc again. Nope, never saw him again.
Sounds to me like none of the above will help you with this asshole. Time to roll the die and hope it’s not snake eyes again.
And don’t use it when cooking a recipe that specifically calls for maple syurple. No substitutions accepted. Tastes like… Not maple syurple, that’s for damned sure.
@Mu Yixiao: I think you need to go back to the original and “ordinary” specialist. Just sayin… (And he may be interested in how the “special” specialist handles referrals. As might the county medical board. Also just sayin…)
@Mu Yixiao:
I did forensics, too. (Quite badly)
And… What was that called? In college it’s called College Bowl. In hs it’s called … something else. Academic Bowl. Maybe. Something like that. We kicked ass.
I was such a nerd. I really did not care. In my head I was already out of there. (I kinda did want to be valedictorian though)
Never skinned a squirrel. I gutted a deer once with guidance. Plucked, gutted various fowl. Scaled and gutted a boatload of fish.
I went deer hunting exactly once. Never again. I will never shoot anything again ever. Deer, duck, partridge, pheasant. Never again.
When I fish, I catch and release. Mostly, I watch, watch the locator, fetch beers, watch the sky, kick my feet up and bullshit with folks.
For a few years I would I would “hunt” deer with a camera mostly because I loved the atmosphere of hanging out at the cabin at night – joshing around buzzed on bad beer and cheap liquor.
A high velocity rifle bullet does massive damage to a body. I once saw a buck get its foreleg get shot off. Crash down. Blood everywhere. Try to get up again scrambling. Get shot again through the lungs.
I noped out after that. I was done. Even with a camera.
@de stijl: I used to do finger sticks when I was in Korea to measure my blood sugar 3 or 4 times a day. These days, I’m not sure that I could hold the little spring loaded thing against my finger tip anymore.
Most days, I have at least 2 or 3 posts go to moderation. They end up there because either my nym or my email address have extra symbols in them–usually en-dashes, but sometimes “d”s or “e”s. The funny thing is that auto fill works very well on my computer and I’m only clicking the mouse to load my info one time. The stray marks sending my post to moderation are stray key strokes from either my mouse hand or a finger on the other hand striking a stray key. That’s the tremor acting up.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yeah, I’m a fiend on real maple syrup too. Real or no thank you.
I’ve started to use agave syrup for savory things that need a splash of sweet.
I did a kiwi, chipotle, lime, onion, agave “salsa” / chutney a few weeks back that kicked butt.
@Kathy: In Korea, one could buy granulated sugar (usually white only) in little tubes or sometimes in cube form, but most people used corn syrup or saccharide, polysaccharide, or disaccharide syrup. If you went to a large store that sold foreign foods, you could get Karo brand corn syrup, but I suspect most people didn’t.
Korean corn syrup was often a fairly dark brown color. Still translucent, but closer to cheap pancake syrup color.
@Jax: I have an elk roast memory for the ages. Or something.
I was hitchhiking thru WY in the Big Horns and got picked up by a van full of happy go lucky ex-cons (the driver had just gotten out of Leavenworth on a manslaughter stint iirc). We stopped at a gas station to refill the tank. We were sitting there for about 30 seconds when all of a sudden somebody is beating the hell out of the side of the van. EVERYBODY in the van piles out the doors ready to kick some ass and take some names.
Well, everybody but me that is. I got very small in the back and kept repeating, “I’m only the hitch hiker. I’m only the hitch hiker….”
Turned out to be friends of the folks I was riding with. They were camped just a little ways up the mountain having a nice little party blowing some smoke and maybe partaking of a few other hallucinogens, as well as the odd bottle.
“OH GREAT! You wanna come with?” What the hell, I was on a slowboat to nowhere, and a little detour would fill the bill just right.
An hour and 20 miles of bad road later found me sitting on a pad in front of a teepee, passing the odd bottle and cutting slices off a haunch of poached elk going around the fire.
To this day I swear, it is the best meat I have ever eaten. I have eaten a lot of different meats over the years, from moose to duck to antelope to raccoon to possum, but nothing has ever come close to measuring up to that elk.
@de stijl: In general I have the palate of a dingo. I can eat anything and call it good if I don’t puke it back up 30 seconds after I ingest it. Especially pancakes or waffles with butter and “syrup”. But when it comes to cooking…
If the recipe calls for maple syurple, use maple syurple. It’s a world of difference.
@Mu Yixiao: Hilarious! But I agree with the Italian chef about the bokum bap (egg fried rice). ANYONE CAN MAKE fried rice. Even jjiggae is harder to make than bap and jiggae takes about 4o seconds from when you order it at the shikdang to when it arrives at your table.
I learned to make carbonara from the Galloping Gourmet TV show in the late 60s and the recipes I’m seeing these days are quite different. Uncle Roger’s carbonara didn’t look particularly well coated with the egg/sauce to me, but I didn’t eat any, so I don’t know. Carbonara in Korea was boring. Most carbonara sauces were more like alfredo sauces than egg based sauces.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’ve developed nystagmus recently. Your eyes dart around super rapidly outside of your control.
Very limited conditions – only when I am doing word puzzles. Crosswords trigger it especially. 1 maybe two seconds every five or ten minutes.
Looked it up. Kinda a no biggie for adults.
I e-mailed a doc buddie. Low key. Not looking for a diagnosis or free treatment. Sit on this for a month if you want to. No rush. Should I see someone on this?
She hit me back next day. “Only while doing crosswords? That is brand new in the literature.”
Sometimes with anacrostics too. Less often. Mostly with crosswords. Reading, no. Walking around, no. Normal daily stuff, no. Crosswords, yes. Then she asked about time of day, lighting conditions, meds. She sent an e-mail to a brain doc and cc’ed me (asked me first)
Brain doc now wants to poke at me, I think. Has a germ of a theory about how nystagmus might be related to picturing things and figuring out the word for that. The interplay between different areas of the brain used to decipher and interpret tricky word play. Apparently, the just during crosswords thing is novel.
She now wants to give me physical. And she is not my doctor.
I think I might become a guinea pig in the near future. I’m cool with that.
@OzarkHillbilly: I turned about 40 pounds of it into jerky, which seems like a waste now that I’ve eaten the steaks!
I will confess to being a little pissed when I saw he’d literally left it in 4 pieces, still with the hair on, at the end of my driveway. It cleaned up all right. Probably a lot more work than it needed to be on my end, but I’m not gonna turn down a free elk that I didn’t have to trek up a mountain to find, shoot, or pack out, either. 😛
@OzarkHillbilly:
That was a good story.
When you went into the banging on the side of the van I thought it was going to be a demented, rabid elk.
—
After the Houston Travis Scott / Astroworld debacle I had a memory surface from long ago.
I needed to get into the student center aka stupid center aka stupor center asap to get my mail and boogie hard. I was gonna be late unless I pushed it.
Unfortunately a protest group decided to have a “die in” event directly in front of the main entrance.
I called out “I’m very sorry, but I have a job interview. I’m going to step over you now in the most respectful manner.” Something of that nature.
In stepping over the “dead” bodies I was looking down make sure I did not step on anybody. I knew / was aware of mostly everybody – it was a small campus aka crampus.
I was looking down and Heather was looking back up at me and my idiot brain spat out “Hey, Heather! How are you doing?”
Thankfully, she answered back “Pretty good. How ’bout you?” God bless her.
I felt like such a choad. I was blatantly futzing with their protest. This was a day or two after Chernobyl. I was literally line-stepping.
I made the interview. Ended up not getting the job. Worked out okay – it was for a non-profit. The pay would have sucked.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve already seen my MRI–and talked about it with a sports doc, a resident, and an orthopedist. It doesn’t “show some displasia”… the damn thing is bifurcated! With bits of ligament squishing through the crack.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Already on my plate. I’m getting the shot today (just to see if it actually works), and then I’m calling the “ordinary specialist” to book back with him.