Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, November 13, 2021
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92 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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I finally figured out knuckle tattoos last night.
It needn’t be 4 x 4. It could actually be a 2 x 2.
3 x 3 would be distracting. Unbalanced. Uncentered. Ugh.
4 × 2 or 2 × 3 is not something I would ever be comfortable with. Triple ugh. On knuckles I want symmetry. That is a a given. Not negotiable.
I was monkeying around last night with Icelandic music. Poking and digging to amuse myself. Old Sigur Ros and The Sugarcubes.
Jonsi has a pretty decent song. Pretty good. Great message. I love the sentiment. I like it.
I am extraordinarily captured by the title:
go do
Very active verbs. Two verbs together. Visually rhyming. A sentiment I heartily approve of. A thing I need to actually follow through on more often. A reminder. A prompt. A totem.
The song is actually quite good, but it is the combination of those two words that sparked a thought in my head – I had always looked for a 4 × 4 word combo in the past. A “hold fast” or “love hate”, but not that obvious or derivative. Always with the 4 x 4. I was blind.
I have been sitting on knuckle tattoos for decades waiting for the right combination of two words to hit my brain right. Nothing ever did – too cheesy, too easy. Too forced. Too weird.
go do
Extremely simple. Two extremely powerful words. Two letters long.
I found a way through.
It fits me in so many ways. Reversed so it reads correctly in a mirror / other people.
Now, what typeface?
‘A slap in the face’: nurses’ strike signals Kaiser’s end as union haven
Uh huh, “heroes” my ass. At it’s core, the Empty Words style of management is always hollow of any real meaning. It’s just the same “we’re all family here” bullshit.
2 tier staffing never makes sense. It breeds dissension as those new hires make less doing the same work side by side with those making significantly more. Only an idiot would think it might be a good idea. Unless of course, breeding dissension is the goal.
Fire all the MBAs and you will vastly improve your chances.
SNAFU.
1969 Ohio bank robber disappeared to quiet life in Lynnfield, authorities say
Life imitating art. Considering that no one was injured or endangered by this caper, can it be considered a win for the little guy? Wondering though, how was he not discovered when going through bankruptcy.
Hmong face bias and discrimination even from their countrymen.
There was this this weird dichotomy when I was a kid. Diaspora from Viet Nam: Hmong refugees settled in St. Paul. Lowland Vietnamese landed in Minneapolis. After the fall.
I imagine two different social service agencies with different foci did what they did. Ended up creating an unintended solution.
I went to HS in Mpls and college in St. Paul.
St. Paul is literally the Hmong diaspora heart.
There are Hmong gangs. Do not fuck with them and they leave you alone. It looks like ethnical fronting mostly and some protection racket. And drugs.
There is not a natural affinity between highlanders and lowlanders, it appears to me.
In no way am I close to being a a decent cultural expert. I might be be seeing it all wrong.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Don’ t get me started on MBAs. Bane of my career life.
@OzarkHillbilly: A niece of mine is a ‘travel nurse’ (a professional, traveling temp) specializing in ER work. She is raking it in.
Better article here.
Mystery solved: Theodore Conrad vanished after robbing Cleveland bank where he worked in 1969; marshals traced him to Boston suburb
Wasn’t somebody talking about Chris Christie yesterday, or the day before?
His “pugnacious Jersey persona…” is as fake as a 3 dollar bill, and he sure as shit pulled his punches from 2016 thru 2020.
Ambition is at the center of everything Christie does. He’s sold his soul so many times for the sake of it, I have to wonder if there are any willing buyers left for such a used up piece of junk.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think Sleeping Dog and I were batting this back and forth on yesterday’s Open Forum.
Pretty cool indeed. Too bad it will make no impression at all on the anti-vaxers.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/summer-zervos-drops-5-year-old-defamation-suit-against-donald-trump
And a judge has dismissed Michael Cohen’s suit against Trump.
[Continuation of a discussion from yesterday]
@Mu Yixiao:
Absolutely, since testing in mice is part of the standard path to drug approval. And before that is testing in Petri dishes. So we can say that virtually all drugs released are successful in mice and Petri dishes. My point was that there a many, many drugs that are successful there that ultimately prove ineffective in humans or whose negative side effects outweigh any benefits.
Some background: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/04/10/522775456/drugs-that-work-in-mice-often-fail-when-tried-in-people
@OzarkHillbilly:
No, because they’ll doggedly insist that the mRNA alters your DNA.
If you want to hear Bjork before she became Bjork check out The Sugarcubes.
The Icelandic version of Birthday will kick your ass.
So many good memories of this.
@MarkedMan:
I read those comments and looked into it a bit. It’s a complex issue scientifically; a minefield ethically.
The bit of reading I did left the impression that animal testing is an issue of inertia rather than efficacy. But my priors about animal welfare lean toward some sort of rights model. It would take a lot more than @Mu Yixiao’s link as it seemed a little light on evidence. But predispositions and all.
@JohnMcC:
Good for her. More power to her.
The AMA goes SJW
Oh… and certain populations aren’t “vulnerable” to COVID. They’re “oppressed”.
@de stijl:
And if you want to check out Debbie Harry before Blondie, when she was a brunette.
Wind in the Willows
@Kurtz: We are an unfathomable distance away from being able to forego drug testing on animals, unless we are willing to do experimentation directly on humans. Our other models are laughably inadequate and, although work is being done to continuously improve them, we don’t even have a clue as to how to get there.
‘I am an American’: how a city official stood firm against an anti-Asian attack
I just finished reading Unlikely Liberators: The Men of the 100th and 442nd and of course they had to rise above a *whole lot of racist bullshit*. One thing that struck me was the justification for sending them to Europe as opposed to the Pacific was that if Japanese soldiers donned American uniforms they could easily penetrate our lines and nobody would be able to tell them apart from our own soldiers of Japanese descent. Which on the surface makes sense until one wonders why we never worried about the same possibilities with our Caucasian soldiers fighting the Germans.
** what those guys went thru in the Vosges Mountains was nothing less than a blood sacrifice on the altar of white supremacy. From the Wiki page:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Not all MBAs are douchebags.
I have worked with many fine people who held that degree.
There is a subtype who shows up out of nowhere and proudly declaims he (it’s always a dude) is gonna fundamentally change how we do business.
“I am a disrupting agent.”
1. Fuck him
2. He is profoundly naive
We have deadlines and deliverables. Help, please, or shut up. If not, everyone is going to ignore you and dismiss you. You will have zero power.
We have one unified goal. Get busy helping.
People who self-identify as an MBA – generally a nuisance. People who help make things better and you incidentally find out 7 months later have an MBA are appreciated. Sometimes godsent.
Not all MBAs are assholes.
—
Later in life I ran into a guy who led off the discussion that he was a Wharton School grad. Talked about alpha curves, or beta. I don’t fucking know.
I seized up. Nope. You might be highly credentialed, but you led off the exchange with that. I do not trust you. You are giving off bad vibes to me. Not getting my business.
@Mu Yixiao: I’ve always had a problem with the way the medical profession relies way too heavily on correlation rather than admit they don’t have causation. “African Americans are more likely to get heart disease.” How is that in any way useful? Unless it is directly linked to melanin this is just a random statistic. Is it diet? Okay that’s useful. Is it genetic? Okay, we can screen for the genes. If we don’t know? Put on your big boy pants and admit it.
I suspect screening by race provides no actionable information whatsoever and instead diverts time and resources that could be spent on something useful.
@de stijl:
We’ve all encountered a guy who brags about being a Wharton graduate. His name is Donald Trump.
@Sleeping Dog:
OMG. That was utter 60s crap. I kept expecting them to break into Puff The Magic Dragon. The male lead singer made me want to shoot myself after shooting them.
Debbie was the voice that pulled me out of that murderous reverie. That is a really cool find!
My best Blondie song?
Dreaming
Yours?
@de stijl: They nearly all have some level of douchebaggery indoctrinated into them, the mastering of douchebaggery being a requirement for graduation with many/most of them writing their masters thesis on one form of douchebaggery or another. The amount of DB does vary from one MBA to the next and I suppose it is always possible that there are MBAs in which it is entirely lacking but unfortunately, not in my experience.
Still, as always, when I make a generalization about a demographic, feel free to insert Jim Wright’s “Emergency Not All” at the beginning, as in, “Not all MBAs are douchebags, but it’s the way to bet.”
ftr, I have a very good friend from HS days (one of the few) who is an MBA. He’s still a really good guy on some levels, but he was trained in school to think of employees as not really human, just numbers. When he and I get together and dawg forbid the discussion might turn to business, it is cats and dogs.
How Does This End?
A good article with some recommendations for factors to consider.
@de stijl:
Whatever Debbie sang, was mesmerizing. Off I’d go to male fantasy land.
Actually, I didn’t mind Wind in the Willows, probably because psychedelia was the background music of my youth and I was into bands like Pentangle, The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention.
I’m 15-20 years older than you so different influences. I have your reaction to Willow, when I hear 50’s rock
@CSK:
I gave my business to Wharton grads assistant. I was her first client. Katie from St. Cates. We bullshitted a bit when I was in the waiting area waiting for slick dude.
I knew I wanted to invest there, just not with that Wharton guy. Way to slick for me. Nope.
I’m not much of a client. I rarely do income generating activity. I pretty much suck as a client. Stay as is.
Katie is now Wharton guy’s peer. She rocks.
Office as big as his. If you need a personal / investment banker I can hook you up. She kicks ass in a very professional manner.
Texas principal forced to resign over critical race theory
A more honest headline would be, “Texas School District Proves that Critical Race Theory is Absolutely Correct”.
His real sin?
Yep, he has a white wife and hasn’t been quiet about the fact of his blackness.
There are other parents voicing objections to this ouster in the article, so yeah, definitely not all.
via Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice
Cancel culture strikes again.
@gVOR08: Nyah nah nyah nah nah… Beat you by thiiiiisss much. 😉 😉 nudge nudge.
@Sleeping Dog:
Chrissie Hynde. I fell in love with her voice.
Talk Of The Town
I am not even that big a The Pretenders fan. I like 3 songs. The rest, kinda meh.
Shirley Manson with Garbage, too. Man!
She explicitly calls out Chrissie in Special near the end. I was so smitten with her.
Special is a great song too, not just for the call out.
I like feisty, fiery women. Burned my butt a few times, but I hold by it true. It is my thing.
Trump wants DeSantis to make a public pledge that DeSantis won’t run against him in 2024.
Just another manifestation of Trump’s overwhelming insecurity and need to be the alpha male.
@MarkedMan:
@Kurtz:
It’s incredibly complex. Not just rodents to humans. But between rodents. Rats != mice. Enormous differences in physiology, cognition, social behavior, etc.
In many respects, rats are so much easier and accommodating of hypothesis testing. But when genetic engineering first came on board, mice were prioritized and remained so. Until CRISPR!
@Sleeping Dog:
I love 50s rock, rockabilly, some of the country, some of the pop.
I think there is this thing that makes you disdain and dismiss the thing that came directly before you achieved full sentience of music you like and respond to.
Got into that with The Stooges which had a anti-hippie vibe.
When I discovered punk I started hating the recent past. Chipmunk Love can bleep my bleep. Fuck off with that nonsense bullshit. Air Supply can bleep off, too.
Burn the house down, especially the recent additions. Took me years to appreciate CCR. I was taught to be prejudiced against a time-frame. I was taught to hate pop.
I got over it eventually. In fact, I was the “softest” of my cohorts. Thank deity, btw. I had way better and more inclusive tastes eventually than my peers.
For example, I liked Blondie. The Pretenders. Et alia.
I think I found a bargain. A Philips 43″ 4K for $300 Us (approx.) at walmart. In amazon it was listed at over $500, but who knows how many markups that includes.
@Sleeping Dog:..Considering that no one was injured or endangered by this caper, can it be considered a win for the little guy?…
Which little guy? You?
Have you gained somethig from this criminal act?
Just askin’.
@MarkedMan: correlation does allow medical professionals to look for/prioritize different diagnoses for groups that those diagnoses are correlated with, even if they don’t know the specific mechanism. Better tools would be great, and you have to do the best you can with the tools you have, while also recognizing the limitations of those tools. I do agree with your general point though.
@de stijl:
I agree with that. In the middle to late 60’s, my high school years, I developed a strong dislike for doo wap and similar. I was ok with rockabilly, but late 50’s and early 60’s country, nah. I love Chet Atkins as a guitar player, but as a producer, not so much. He came close to turning country into Lawrence Welk. I can dislike Elvis, but that is mostly due to the hagiography that exists around him. Once I get past that I can enjoy his music.
@Mister Bluster:
Me, my only semi-regular crime is speeding.
The rhetorical little guy.
@Kathy:
Go for it.
I have found that if you wait for the perfect deal in electronics, it never comes.
Pick good enough for now at a price you are comfortable with.
Good enough for now is bad advice for personal shit, but it works for a tv / monitor.
You aren’t marrying it. Discard it in 4 years when the tech gets better.
I never buy brand spanking new gear. New game console, new display tech, whatever. Wait for a year. You get better gear at a cheaper price.
The early worm gets burned in this arena.
@Sleeping Dog:
I hated Elvis. Thought he was a sick, bad joke.
3 years later I was into his very early stuff. I decided to ignore the white jumpsuit stage. His version of Blue Moon hits the spot. Perfect camping song.
A few years after that I was into the white jumpsuit stuff. Give me some Suspicious Minds please and thank you.
I did the Graceland tour when I was in Memphis age 29 or so. It was gloriously hideous. Man needed an interior designer desperately. I loved it.
Dwight Yoakam does a killer cover of Suspicious Minds. Younger me would never have listened to Dwight Yoakam just on principle. Younger me can suck my bleep.
@de stijl:
I did 🙂
I’d been browsing on and off for weeks now, and the next best thing I saw was a 40″ HD at around the same price. So, this seemed good enough.
@OzarkHillbilly: I am reading Ian Toll’s trilogy on the Pacific in WW2. In the last lingering phase of the battle for Iwo Jima there were Nissei civilians who were trying to talk the last Japanese soldiers out of their caves. Some even walked unarmed into those caves.
Many had been recruited right out of the internment camps.
Crooks, creeps and indecent proposals: Emily Ratajkowski on being paid to hang out with rich men
It gets pretty gross.
No judgements from me, I sold my body for over 35 years. I had my limits and walked off a number of job sites when somebody transgressed them. I hope ER is able to do the same.
@de stijl:
My wife dragged me to Graceland about 20 years ago. In the era of McMansions, my view was, it is a pretty typical suburban house, suffering from overwrought 70’s decorating. God that lounge room with the pleated fabric ceiling… But across the road in the Welcome Center, they played a looping tape of Elvis performing, about 5 minutes of it was a clip of him doing acapella harmonies with 3 other guys in a hallway somewhere. It was amazing. I’ve never been able to find that clip on YouTube, but if I did, I’d bookmark the link.
I enjoy Dwight Yoakam, he puts on a great show.
@Kathy:
The last three tvs we’ve bought have been Phillips. They seem to always hit the nexus or price vs quality. Nothing to complain about after a decade or so of having only Philips tvs. Bonus: they are easy to repair with off the shelf components. When lightning took out my bedroom tv, my wife took it apart, found the parts that were blackened from the electric surge, and used Google image search to identify them. One week and $35 later we had a working tv again.
@Kathy:
Sometimes good enough is good enough at the right price.*
You gave me a kick in the butt. I need to get an Xbox series X in the very near future.
* This does not apply to intimate personal relationships. Hold out for the right one, there.
@de stijl: I love Dwight Yoakam. I’ve liked everything I’ve heard him do..
@de stijl:
Messrs Crosby, Stills, and Nash disagrees.
@JohnMcC: The book I just finished mentioned that the few who went to the Pacific ended up serving in intelligence, mostly working as interpreters/translators. Not surprising at all to me that some were called on to do that.
I’m gonna have to get that trilogy. My old man was one of 10 children. My uncle Walt was the only one who ended up in Europe (From Utah Beach on D-Day+3 all the way to Germany). All my other Uncles ended up in the Pacific along with the old man or on the home front for those too old. One, my Uncle Alex even got a mention in a YA book about “Frogmen of World War II” for some stuff he did during the invasion of Saipan. They all made it back except for Joe (Navy). I never did learn what happened to him. They just never talked about it.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The more I learn about Emily Ratajkowoski the more I think she is a truly smart cookie. Probably too smart to be “successful”.
Harvey Weinstein might be gone, but that objectifying coercive male presence is not. Hopefully, new people will not put up with that bullshit at all. More power to em. Please.
@de stijl: TBH, beyond perusing the pages of SI’s swimsuit issue, I don’t pay much attention to super models. Her book definitely looks worth a read but I wonder If I could get thru it. Just that short excerpt had me tasting bile.
@Neil Hudelson:..Messrs Crosby, Stills, and Nash disagrees.
Along with a few other lovers. Per WikiP.
Stephen Stills: lead vocals, guitar, organ, steel drum, percussion
Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels: bass
Jeff Whittaker: congas
Rita Coolidge, Priscilla Jones, John Sebastian, David Crosby, Graham Nash: background vocals
Love the One You’re With
@Neil Hudelson:
I strongly disagree with CSN. I hate that song.
Love the one you love. I tried to be a playa, a man about town, whatever. Sow my wild oats for about three weeks.
Utter disaster. Humiliation. Perhaps I should have not tried to woo two women who knew each other. Worst personal humiliation ever.
I deserved it. It wasn’t me. I am a strictly monogamous person. It is how I am built. I cannot and should not play the field. I need to be true blue.
Anything else is heartache and pain. Even at the beginning when things are fluid I need to be monogamous. Solely directed.
My brief foray into playahood was not bad per se. That works for people – just not for me. I was bad at it, and getting caught out was not the worst thing. I was going against my nature.
Yes, getting busted sucked pretty hard too. I had two women yelling at me during a party where basically everyone I knew was there and watching. I felt 1mm tall.
I am the worst playa eff boy ever. Being 20 is not an excuse. I knew my nature. I was acting against type.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I like that Ratajkowski has a lot to say about what it is like to be sexually objectified.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The taste of bile is what you get when you read about women being treated as disposable commodities.
@Sleeping Dog:
@OzarkHillbilly:
A Thousand Miles From Nowhere gets me everytime. The perfect roadtrip song when you’re driving through northern Nevada.
Next stop 108 miles. Big empty.
Guitars, Cadillacs, and Hillbilly Music
@de stijl:
A good friend of mine met her once and she invited him back to her hotel to party. She said she’d registered under an assumed name: “Hoochie Playful.”
My friend didn’t go but probably wishes he had. He says she was pretty cool and genuinely nice.
@CSK: We’re all disposable commodities. I got disposed of at the ripe old age of 55. My wife at 60. shrug
There is something particularly gross about what these rich fat fcks do around these women. Not even to them (tho I am sure there is plenty to object to there too) just around them. Flaunting their disregard for any and all social norms. It’s all a big laugh.
When I was a young man I’m pretty sure I thought most of that kinda shit entertaining to watch, tho I would have partaken in very little of it (too much Catholic upbringing I guess). There came a point where I just couldn’t tolerate it any more. I was at a Fat Tuesday parade in Soulard and of course several young women were flashing their tits. That didn’t bother me but when one in particular who was riding some guys shoulders started getting groped by numerous guys in the crowd (she was laughing throughout) I couldn’t watch anymore.
“If I don’t leave I’m gonna end up getting my ass kicked.” So I did. Which was a good thing because as I walked away the cops moved in and it turned into a near riot. I’ll never know why they let me go.
Anyway, my tolerance for that shit has grown so minuscule in my old(er) age as to be almost nonexistent.
@OzarkHillbilly:
These women have names.
Desires. Goals. Dreams. Lives.
@OzarkHillbilly:
BTW, Jho Low, has a Wikipedia page. Entirely predictable biography. Another argument to soak the rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jho_Low
The Fifth Circuit ruled against Biden’s OSHA vaxx mandate. The Guardian quotes the opinion, written by a Federalist Society Trump appointee. Reads like a fracking GOP political ad.
The other two judges involved are a Trump and a Reagan appointee.
The bit about “varying degrees of susceptibility” is the GOP framing that the vaccine is solely about individual protection, not limiting spread, and therefore purely a matter of individual choice. And I love the scare quotes around “grave danger” and the capital M in “Mandate”. Using the Commerce Clause to attack OSHA, not just on vaccines but on it’s very existence, is straight out of the FS playbook. They intend to use the Commerce Clause and the Equal Protection Clause to destroy corporate regulation.
We are in deep shit when senior judges are as much under the thrall of FOX “News” as any rube in Arkansas. The article notes there are similar cases in other circuits and that the cases will be combined and go to the Supremes, six of whom are also FS Stepford Judges.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Of course we’re all disposable commodities. But as you yourself say, “there is something particularly gross” about what these guys do.
The pleasure these men get from ordering up women like take-out pizzas isn’t so much sex-related as it is the knowledge that they can treat the women as sub-human. That’s what’s gross. Beyond gross. Women = used Kleenex.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I would agree, but I also would note that in the past history I’m familiar with that 2-tier wage scales have been about creating conditions where wholesale reductions in salary become possible as the second tier becomes 51% of the labor force. The dissention created is simply a bonus. The goal is chopping wages by 40 or 50% over the longer term. (I would note that the 2-tier wage agreements I saw in the past had the second tier never catching up to the prevailing wage–usually capped at about 70-75%.)
Ifn’s anyone is interested: Copping an Attitude
Riot police led by St. Louis Police Chief Ronald Henderson bring a violent end to 1999 Soulard Mardi Gras festivities
It largely agrees with my recollections, tho of course, I have no idea of what happened after the cops moved in.
I never saw any “baring other parts of their bodies,” but it was pretty chaotic and I could have easily missed it. The cops kettled the crowd but there was never a command to disperse via megaphone. They just quietly moved in and started pushing. Naturally enough, people panicked. Some pushed back and things went from bad to worse.
It was a close call, something I’ve had a number of over the years. As often as not just dumb luck but a few times I picked up on something. This was one of them.
Always, it’s about power. “I can do anything I want and you just have to accept it.”
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Yep, that has been my experience.
@Neil Hudelson: “Messrs Crosby, Stills, and Nash disagrees.”
Not to be pedantic — oh, screw it, to be totally pedantic — that was just Stills… (Although to be even more pedantic, C and N sang back up on this Stills solo single…)
@gVOR08: “We are in deep shit when senior judges are as much under the thrall of FOX “News” as any rube in Arkansas.”
But remember, per JJ, it’s only when you have three Democrats on a panel it threatens to call into question the objectivity and fairness of the judiciary.
@MarkedMan:
African-American man comes in presenting with signs of heartburn.
Except the symptoms of heartburn and heart attack are overlapping. Being very aware that African-Americans are more likely to have heart disease means you are more likely to not miss other symptoms and ask about them without waiting for the patient to bring them up. Symptoms the patient might just think are normal for an out of shape 50 year old.
Is the cause genetic, dark skin blocking healing light from getting to the heart, stress from a lifetime of racism, traditional African American foods like deep fried sticks of butter…? Doesn’t matter, the correlation is useful as is.
Understanding the causation would be more useful, as we could then change the trend rather than react to it, but knowing the correlation is useful.
@de stijl:
@OzarkHillbilly:
What’s great about Yoakam is that not only does he capture the Bakersfield sound, but hearkens back to the country sound of Hank Sr., Lefty Frizzel and others.
@Neil Hudelson: The only version of Love the One You’re With is Steven Stills only backed by a band called “Manassas” IIRC. Then again, my record collection is mostly Classical, so most popular music I’ve listened to is limited to what plays on the radio.
Or are you making another reference?
@Mu Yixiao:
There is a chart in the AMA document that lists alternatives to “vulnerable.” The word “oppressed” doesn’t appear in it.
When I read pieces like this, I find myself getting frustrated, because these things get retweeted and linked all over the place. The value of citation is the ability to check the interpretation of the author.
@MarkedMan:
Yeah, I know. My position is not to get rid of animal testing. But the criticisms of it are valid.
The arguments about overuse are legitimate. That is what I meant by inertia.
@wr:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
You be pedantic, I’ll be repetitive…
See my post in this thread at 13:09 or click here.
I saw Stills with Manassas live in the ’70s. They kicked ass.
@CSK:
.
That’s about defending campaign grift/donation turf. He just can’t think of another way to check the Rs big money people’s efforts to groom someone to replace him.
Perhaps there is no other way…
For some reason, I just checked the web site where my local power authority posts their source mix for the past 15 minutes. 87% of the current mix is wind, hydro, and solar. Of course, days like this don’t happen very often.
@Neil Hudelson:
I was a bit surprised Philips still sells TVs.
@de stijl:
Good luck with that. The last game system I had was Super Nintendo, sometime before the stone age.
@Michael Cain:
Current UK 9:50pm 13/11/2021:
16.7% wind/solar/hydro (=wind/hydro, cause solar is zero)
46.8% fossil fuels (42.5% gas)
20% nuke
10% interconnectors (mainly from France)
The British Isles simply do not have the insolation in winter for solar power to work.
And we also have a “cloudy high” meaning both insolation and wind speed are in the weeds.
And as for economic storage of renewable energy, that has been promised for thirty years and still doesn’t cut the mustard.
Compare France: 90% CO2 free, of which 77% is nuke.
@MarkedMan:
So many people want to insist that medicine is a hard science–like mathematics or physics. It’s not.
And while the notion that “race” actually describes well-delineated genetic groups is false, it does give us soft delineations that are very useful.
If African-Americans are more likely to get heart disease, then we need to look at various factors.
And… I need to point out a fallacy that you seem to believe: “African” is not an ethnicity–and it’s certainly not a singular genetic group. “African-American” is an entirely social designation.
If raw data shows that “African-Americans” have a higher incidence of X, then the first thing to do is to look at others who live in the same area, look at diet, look at all the other common factors and eliminate them from the equation.
Guess what? The scientists have done this.
They’re not sitting around saying “Dude… the black dudes have more heart attacks. Must be because the black dudes are black.”
In Africa–where ethnic groups have less inter-breeding (because of culture and geography)–it might be easier to separate out genetic groups with a vulnerability to certain medical conditions. In the US (or EU) were there’s a greater mixing of genetic lines, “black” (or “white” or “Asian” or “Middle Eastern” or “Mediterranean”, or…) can be a reasonable first-line indicator for decision making.
I have zero issue with the fact that a doctor can look at me and–at the first line–rule out Tay-Sachs or sickle-cell-anemia because I’m Slavic-White.
And for music:
Toni Halliday and the noise-gods Curve:
Coast is Clear
@dazedandconfused:
I think you’re right about that. But it’s possible the big donors are growing disenchanted with him.
@Mu Yixiao:
Talking to a biogeneticist earlier this year.
There is more genetic variation, averaged out, within Africa, than outside of Africa.
Even taking the rough ethnic indicators (height, build, nose shape, cheekbones, hair, etc) if you discount being”not pasty” in skin colour, various African ethnicities are much more divergent than, for instance, Europeans compared to South Asians.
@Michael Cain: Cool.
@JohnSF: That is to be expected in the birthplace of humanity. They’ve had more time to genetically diversify than any other place on the planet.
@Sleeping Dog: I am not a student of music. More of a “I know what I like when I hear it.” guy. I had read of the Bakersfield Sound before but I don’t think I ever actually looked it up before now (if I did, I forgot it). Imagine my surprise (s//) to find that 2 more of my favorites (Buck Owens and Merle Haggard) were big in it.
Dwight rules. Not Bakerfield, but so does George Jones. I know more than a few can’t stand him, but for down in the dumps, drowning my sorrows in a bottle ’cause I done screwed up so badly she’ll never take me back again drinking songs, nobody beats George.
@Mister Bluster: Oh, I saw it, just not before I posted. (And I am pedantic enough to note that if Crosby and Nash did back up vocals on it, CSN counts, at least partially, as accurate.)
@MarkedMan: “I’ve always had a problem with the way the medical profession relies way too heavily on correlation rather than admit they don’t have causation. “African Americans are more likely to get heart disease.” How is that in any way useful? Unless it is directly linked to melanin this is just a random statistic. Is it diet? Okay that’s useful. Is it genetic? Okay, we can screen for the genes. If we don’t know? Put on your big boy pants and admit it.
I suspect screening by race provides no actionable information whatsoever and instead diverts time and resources that could be spent on something useful.”
Speaking from my 29 years of experience as a statistician, epidemiologists and statisticians are not just running massive correlation matrices and pulling out the biggest values. And note that ‘screening for genes’ is a rather nontrivial process.
@MarkedMan: ” I’ve always had a problem with the way the medical profession relies way too heavily on correlation rather than admit they don’t have causation.”
BTW, causality from observational data has advanced a lot. Send me your e-mail address and I’ll send you some PDF’s covering the techniques.
@de stijl: I seem to remember that Bjork is the only popular singer who has ever written something in the Lydian mode. (There are quite a few explanations on YouTube.)
It’s a very weird scale.
@grumpy realist:
Bjork is a genius at her job.
Technical and emotional.