Thursday’s Forum
Believe it or not.
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, May 28, 2020
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124 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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Charles Blow goes there:
Top this one Bill: Man acquitted of entering a home with a weapon after successful sex fantasy defence
ETA: I think the article is even better
The Greatest American Hero theme song! Oh, Steven, how did someone with such a wasted youth ever manage to turn his life around?
A nice profile at GQ: The Remaking of Steve Buscemi
Continuing from the last open thread
Obviously Trump couldn’t do this, he’s incompetent, but there are a lot of institutions in numerous countries working on this.
There are already 10 vaccines in human trials, and 114 different candidate vaccines being worked on right now. Some stage three trials are expected to begin before summer is over. There’s more effort and money being put into finding a vaccine for this disease than any disease ever got so quickly.
Almost all of the vaccines will fail to be efficacious, maybe 100% of them will fail. But very very few vaccine trials are ever stopped because the vaccine is dangerous. For the time being I live in a Trump part of a Trump state, and my job involves touching people’s cell phones all day, so if December comes around and the Mayo Clinic is saying there’s a good vaccine for this thing, you bet your booty I’ll be taking it.
How do you spell ‘moron’?
Actually no, you’re betting your booty, that all of a sudden decades of vaccine development work has been turned on it’s head and that this time, we don’t need time, to develop and properly test a vaccine.
ETA: the most optimistic time frame I have seen is a minimum of a year and a half.
ETA 2: I was quite plain on my first post that I was limiting my objection to any trump admin pushed vaccine (they lie). What we are now talking about is reality versus what we all might dream of. That is a different discussion entirely.
@OzarkHillbilly: all the time it takes is because of lesser resources and fewer development candidates. As I said, most of the candidates won’t work. Maybe all of them won’t work. But there’s a simply unprecedented amount of resources being thrown at this one.
Let me give you an example to help illustrate why the timetable could compress this time. In the last 33 years, there have been just over 30 candidate vaccines for HIV. In less than a year we’ve developed 114 for this virus. Will we have a vaccine by December? Not very likely. Could we have a vaccine by December? Yeah.
NYT: The Bird Watcher, That Incident and His Feelings on the Woman’s Fate
@Teve: For the 4th night in a row I have been awakened at 1 or 2 AM and been unable to go back to sleep. As such I am too tired to argue, especially about something we are 90% in agreement on, which is more than good enough for me.
They’ve decided to cancel Cheyenne Frontier Days and 5 other large rodeos here in Wyoming. Suffice to say, it’s not sitting well with most people. I will be surprised if Sturgis actually happens, too.
I particularly like this statement.
“We are entertainment planners, not health specialists, unlike most everyone on Facebook today,” he said. “We rely on our state officials to give us guidance on our events. We appreciate their time and the job that they must take on.”
https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/cheyenne-frontier-days-canceled-for-first-time-in-its-history/article_33c7d969-4698-5396-a5a6-2143342307a7.html
Militant fired in Kentucky for threatening governor
@OzarkHillbilly:
@Teve:
One other reason vaccines take a long time to develop and deploy, is that testing for efficacy involves vaccinating an at risk population or group, and then tracking how many of these people don’t get infected. Over the course of this testing, people go around their normal lives taking whatever precautions are necessary. This can take many months or over a year.
One way to speed this up is to have a human challenge trial, something I’ve mentioned before. You vaccinate a group of people, then expose them to the pathogen and see how many get infected.
In the case of COVID-19, the ethics are not that good. For one thing the mortality rate is high, and for another there is no effective treatment available. Just the same, there are volunteers for such a trial.
All that said, I’d be very surprised if there is an effective vaccine by December.
The modern Republican Party is an active harm to this country and to us as individuals. Here is an example. The Republican majority in PA called the legislature back into session and have been voting on party line to reopen PA and using their speaking time to parrot Trumpian nonsense about hoaxes and so forth. It turns out that one of their members got sick with C19 and they kept it secret. They did do limited contact tracing but only notified Republicans that had come in contact, no Democrats and no staff or anyone else that he had run into.
@Kathy: Even if we do a volunteer human challenge, with deliberate exposure to the virus, if we rush to mass distribution we won’t be able to rule out mid to long term effects. Some of these can be quite severe, including making people more susceptible to re-infection.
It is a war on all fronts:
Forces Behind Conservative Judicial Nominations Network, Including the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo and Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino, Join the Fraudulent Fraud Squad with the “Honest Elections Project
@Scott: One could also read the irreplaceable Dahlia Lithwick at Slate this morning: The Right-Wing Legal Network has Taken a Troubling Turn.
@Kit:
If I hadn’t wasted so much brain space on the useless, I might be on top of the world!
Instead, it’s just me.
@Scott:This is a secretly funded society that keeps membership and leadership murky. Elected Republican officials have ceded to them their responsibility to chose and vet federal judges, an they now conduct the process in closed door meetings. We do know it is conservative billionaires who pay the salaries and bonuses to the staff and also provide the funds to bring lawyers and judges to posh resorts for “training”. The idea that there is a non-corrupt purpose here requires a substantial level of gullibility.
Two weeks after court scraps Safer at Home, Wisconsin sets record for new coronavirus cases and deaths
Whooocooodanoooode?
@OzarkHillbilly:
With every passing year, I see more clearly that mastering sleep is one of life’s fine arts.
@Teve:
I admire your enthusiasm but I’m in the caution camp. This virus is simply too new for us to really get a handle on it – we don’t fully understand it’s mechanisms or physiologically effects. Had you asked a mere 2 months ago, you would have been told this was a respiratory disease. Now we’re seeing it’s more of a systemic infection, causing issues with blood clotting and the like; it just manifests for many as primarily respiratory.
Creating an effective vaccine requires more then just understanding it’s protein folding or finding the right chemical bond. You can throw all the resources in the world at a problem but it doesn’t necessarily move the needle any faster. I would never take anything that doesn’t have a good 6m-1y worth of data after it’s been released to the public. Too many stories of drugs or products being found later to be worse than what they tried to cure.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Join the club. If I’m lucky, I’ll fall asleep around 4 a.m. and sleep for maybe 3-4 hours. That’s if I’m lucky. No over-the-counter remedy helps. I remember the last time I got a full night’s sleep. It was in the spring of 2013.
COVID-19 conspiracy + 5G silliness + woo woo vocabulary + grifter cons = PRICELESS.
I don’t know whether to request that the grifter cons who did this get put away for life (repeat offenders) or give them a medal at separating idiots from their money.
@Kathy:
In the US and Europe the ethics may be an issue. But in China?
@KM: the vaccine equivalent of “never buy software version dot zero”?
@KM:
The decades long effort to find a malarial vaccine is instructive here. I’ve been following this since I first went to Africa in 1988. Since that time there have been at least a dozen vaccines that showed a lot of promise in earlier stage trials but not a single one proved themselves to be effective when the trials began to grow in size. Some of them had nasty side effects.
What I think is going to happen is that in September/October the Republicans will latch onto some vaccine, any vaccine, tell everyone that they and they alone will be able to bring it to market fast and get everyone back to normal. It will be deployed in a widespread manner without adequate testing and end up setting back this effort and, worse, set back vaccines in general.
@OzarkHillbilly: One detail that struck me about the story, but that hasn’t gotten as much attention as I might have expected (I can’t read the rest of Blow’s column as it’s behind a paywall), is how explicitly the woman invoked race. She said to him directly, “I’m going to tell [the cops] there’s an African American man threatening my life.” In that one line, she was acknowledging outright that cops have a racial bias and attempting to use that fact to intimidate him.
Usually with these kinds of racial confrontations, the white person never explicitly mentions the other person’s race. This allows these controversies to become Rorschach tests where one side is accused of “playing the race card” and seeing what isn’t there. That’s not an argument anyone can make in this case, because the woman made what she was thinking very plain. She may not have shouted the N-word at him, she may have used the politically correct term “African American,” but unquestionably she’s the one who brought race into it, and no one can deny it in this case.
@KM: The vast majority of vaccines that fail trials do so because of efficacy, not because they caused some weird disorder. I’ve worked with the Mayo Clinic before. If those people say the Covid vaccination is good to go, I’ll be in line for it.
OK, so what you’re saying is you’ll only take it if people like me take it first. Works for me. 😉
Charles Koch’s new book shares wisdom to bolster social entrepreneurs
I’ll leave it there.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m not so sure in the United States ethics would be an issue. Ever hear of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment?
Air Force covers up racial bias in military justice
@Kathy:
Oh, I’m not suggesting we’re morally superior, just that we have an active press and a litigious population.
@KM:
Many, many years ago, one of my summer jobs was helping out at a large insurance company’s reinsurance* claims division. One of the sections I had to audit the files from were the thalidomide claims, many of which contained photos. It left me permanently wary about “miracle” medications.
I am a big believer in vaccines–as a kid I moved around globally and have a very thorough shot record. But I agree with you that a rush to production brings with it potential risk.
*Reinsurance – insurance that covers insurers’ losses from large-scale catastrophes.
Rush Limbaugh claims that Trump knows perfectly well that Joe Scarborough didn’t kill Lori Klausutis, and that he’s only Tweeting about the death to “own the moralizers” in the press. So in Limbaugh’s view, it’s fine for Trump to torment Lori’s survivors. They don’t count.
Limbaugh is as vile as Trump.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer considered for VP position.
Wouldn’t that send the crazies into orbit?
https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1262805403412377600
@Teve:
I’ve always admired folks willing to be Phase One testers. Someone does need to go first and if you want to volunteer as tribute, society is grateful. I’m sure it won’t end in tears but frankly, I don’t trust my luck any more then I trust the WH right now.
You see, I’m one of the unlucky few the MMR didn’t take on – hence my reactions whenever measles or anti-vaxxers come up in the threads. I’m fairly sure that if we did titres for the other shots I got as a kid, I’m either not immune or barely so. It’d be just my luck to get a COVID vaccine, only to find out the hard way I’m yet again in the unfortunate percentage it didn’t take with. False hope is a bitch – you walk around thinking you’re safe from a disease with this spiffy new science, and BAM! Whoops, it works but not for you, bucko – back to self-isolation till the plague’s past. The pessimist in me would rather just stay put till we get better info.
Doesn’t really matter though – I’m already heading to FL after Labor Day. Turns out Disney is reopening and the family is do-or-die even though die actually on the table for a change. I suspect I’m about to get my immunity the hard way……
@CSK:
“own the moralizers”
WTF does that even *mean*? Like seriously, is that Trumpese for “make the pearl clutters faint”?
Limbaugh’s also saying it’s OK to falsely accuse people of murder if it makes others upset. Love the new norm – wait till some fed-up libs start doing it and spreading rumors about them. After all, aren’t they supposed to be the Moral Majority party? Own the moralizers and start some lies about the GOP today – it’s apparently Trump-approved behavior and now Twitter can’t do nuthin’ because he’s signing a piece of paper. Winning!!!
@KM: I worked in hospital labs, was in the Air Force, and went back to college without medical records from childhood, so I probably have had the MMR about six or seven times, along with 30 other ones. The last dose of Heptavax, I gave myself, because a doctor left a free bottle in the fridge for us.
An unknown percentage of people who seem to be asymptomatic have possibly-permanently reduced lung function and visible damage on scans from this thing. And I have a job where I have to handle peoples dirty cell phones all day long. So I’m a little more motivated with this disease than with some others.
But just to reiterate what I said before, if Trump appointed Joe Arpaio head of the CDC and they said they had a great vaccine, I wouldn’t trust it. If the Mayo Clinic, Harvard medical school, etc say it’s good to go, I will take it.
@KM: a Politics of Spite. They are bad people.
@CSK: Limbaugh is as vile as Trump.
I would say worse. Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich were tow of the driving forces in destroying civil political discourse in this country, as well as the whole idea of compromise to solve problems facing society. When Limbaugh goes* we should break out that special bottle of wine or pour yourself you favorite scotch to celebrate.
* My brother is a pulmonologist and over 30+ years he has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of patients die from lung cancer, and he says he can’t imagine a much worse way to die.
Seen on the Tweet Machine:
Interesting Econtalk podcast with Martin Gurri on what he dubs the information tsunami that started in 2001. The information got free and has expanded exponentially since then causing much angst among the former monopolizers in government, media, politics and academia who still try to party like it is 1999 as far as information control goes. But since all those are having their boxes shaken pretty hard by the pandemic, some adaptation to the 21st century of decentralized expertise and information is likely to result.
@KM:
“Owning the moralizers” seems to mean upsetting liberal journalists. Trump, according to Limbaugh, is “throwing gasoline on the fire” and having fun doing so. The feelings of Lori Klausutis’s survivors are less than negligible.
Limbaugh seems to think what Trump is doing is entirely laudable. After all, what could be better than owning the libs?
@senyordave:
True. I’d also blame Pat Buchanan, who paved the way for Sarah Palin, who paved the way for Trump.
I can see that JKB is still “sitting up at attention” as his master has demanded.
@JKB:
One word refutation: Watergate.
@JKB:
BTW, what’s your position on Joe Scarborough, murderer?
@JKB: Yeah, it amazes me to remember that as late as the year 2000 there were no books or magazines, that talk radio didn’t exist, that there was no way to make or distribute copies of videos…
Today I had to do fasting blood work and ever since I came home I have felt totally drained. Therefore I won’t be posting any headlines of the day today. Not that I have been able to find any strong candidates.
Now time for me to watch the first installment of the original Hawaii Five-O’s best episode(s).
Stan Greenberg and Rachel Bitecofer both say that Liz Warren gives Biden the best shot in November.
Greenberg
@Teve:
Stacy Abrams has made that a hard choice. I think it was a mistake on her part and dramatically reduces my interest in her political future.
This idea that the Democratic Party depends on African-American votes ignores the fact that of all the constituent groups of the Left, it’s black voters who have the most to fear from Republicans. This is a co-dependency, not a one-way street.
@Michael Reynolds: True. On the flip side, black voters coming out for him in force starting in SC is what thrust Biden ahead of Bernie.
You know, I can remember visiting San Francisco in Christmas of 1970 and while walking around near Fisherman’s Wharf, there were all kinds of underground newspapers with all kinds of ideas that were not particularly endorsed by the government. They were an eye opener to 15 year old me.
In some ways though, yes, the internet did change things, giving people with a non-conforming message a potentially much larger audience. I know this as “disintermediation” and it’s a primary quality of the internet.
So, the only thing I think JKB is wrong about is that he focuses solely on the government. There’s a lot of other, non-government actors who still want to control what information you see. I think you have to constantly ask yourself, “what am I not hearing about that I should be hearing about?” regardless of your political persuasion. I am not one to tell anyone, for instance, to stop watching FOX news. I’m much more likely to tell them to pick up some other news source with a different ideology. What things are THEY seeing and writing about?
@MarkedMan: Well our local board certified internal medicine specialist has moved on to Vitamin D now. At 70-some total cases in a county population of just over 100,000, he’s pretty harmless so far. We’re getting ready to reopen next week. It’ll be interesting to see if our county has the same sort of spikes that have happened elsewhere on reopening. I hope we can keep it as uneventful as it’s been so far.
@senyordave:
I wonder how many people have been condemned to that horrible death due to care delayed or denied because of Limbaugh’s lies about the Affordable Care Act, and the gutting of that Act to which his lies contributed.
It’s impossible to know, of course, but one thing is certain: when Limbaugh finally kicks it, the world will be an immeasurably better place.
@Scott: So he’s… what… going to advanced the counter argument? Go for irony? Hmmmmm…
[Going wildly off thread in another post so I’m moving this here]
@CSK: And that’s the personal finance part of Deutshe bank, the one that is being bankrupted because of its involvement in money laundering. The real estate arm won’t touch him. Of course, Trump hasn’t actually built anything in decades. If you research Trumps real estate deals what you will find are court cases where bilked investors believed they were buying into a golf course/vacation condos/ that Trump had his money in and was personally overseeing every detail only to find that all their money had gone to paying trumps and other players fees, with nothing actually built. Just ask the Chawla Brothers who sunk $20M into a Trump “property”, overseeing all phases of the project and ending with the idiot Trump sons leaving them in a ditch. (Oh wait, maybe they weren’t as gullible as I assumed. Here’s a little insight into their character).
Another Deutsche bank tidbit:
Here’s a Yahoo story that I just saw:
Pennsylvania Democrats: GOP Lawmaker’s Positive COVID-19 Test Kept Secret For A Week
Here is a link: https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/pennsylvania-republican-covid-19-positive-024647950.html
One Democratic member, Brian Sims, called on the speaker and other members who withheld information to resign, and for the PA state AG to investigate.
Is it that all Republican politicians just don’t care about people, or does it only seem that way?
Meanwhile, PA State House member tests positive for COVID-19, informs his own caucus, but not the other party for almost a week.
“A Republican state lawmaker from Central Pennsylvania confirmed Wednesday that he tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month, leading at least one of his House colleagues to self-quarantine.
The admission immediately ignited outrage among Democrats in the chamber, who said they were recklessly left in the dark for nearly a week about the lawmaker’s condition.”
@Teve:
Naturally one should be informed about a new vaccine, especially with rushed testing. That aside, there are two considerations:
1) America is not the world. Other countries do their own evaluation of new drugs and vaccines.
2) There’s the matter of risk. As cases keep climbing in Mexico, I’d take the vaccine tomorrow if it were available. If by the time the vaccine is released there are few active cases, I might wait a bit. Same if there is any kind of effective treatment.
@MarkedMan: A little more info from the Chawla brothers. Per this article it seems they paid about $2M to the Trumps before they were dumped. Or at least that’s what he seems to claim. In any case, they are now getting federal aid money, supposedly to be used in completing the hotel.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: meanwhile, Trumpers are still claiming that all the worldwide studies saying Hydroxychloroquine is dangerous for Covid patients still haven’t done it right: it was administered too soon, or too late, the doses were too big or too small, it was given with or without zpak, with or without zinc, etc. And they claim that the researchers are deliberately sabotaging these studies in order to stick it to Trump, and/or so Big Pharma/Bill Gates can profit from a vaccine that will control everybody.
So countries all over the world are willing to let a significant proportion of their populations sicken and die rather than accept what Trumpers believe is an inexpensive and effective treatment because they hate Trump? Or that they’ll let a lot of their people die in the short term in order to control the survivors with a vaccine at some unspecified later date? Or countries with universal healthcare that place financial limits on how much pharmaceutical companies can charge are doing this for profit? Or other countries even care about what Bill Gates is doing? How does any of this make sense?
@MarkedMan:
Trump reminds me of a guy I once knew. If there were nine honest, profitable ways to do business, he’d invariably pick the tenth dishonest, unprofitable way of doing business.
Trump and Jared have a lot in common: They’re not just crooks, they’re stupid crooks.
@Kit:
Something I actually really want RL: now that Disney owns the rights to the character, have Roger Harrington (one of Peter Parker’s teachers from Spiderman: Homecoming and Spiderman: Far from Home) become the MCU version of The Greatest American Hero
@OzarkHillbilly:
Buscemi was great as Kruschev in “The Death of Stalin”, which if you have not seen, you definitely should.
@KM:
As the old project management saw goes, just because one woman can have a baby in nine months doesn’t mean nine women can have a baby in one month.
@Stormy Dragon: Double thumbs-up on Death of Stalin. Hilarious!
From Dave Holmes Twitter: Imagine failing to unite people against sickness and death.
@Mike in Arlington: Easy to imagine when one understands the goal is division.
@Jay Loren Gischer:
Ah, yes. This.
One of my favorite common assertions I see is, “the liberal media doesn’t talk about this.” I laugh everytime I see it, because the vast majority of people who say it are highly likely to have no way of knowing whether it has been covered or not.
Of course, I’m sure there are some that read both sides. But I doubt the average Fox viewer is taking time to watch other networks or read the papers of record.
Even if one does, they have already been told the truth of the matter and how to think about it. So even if one of the other outlets publishes a competing report, it’s just evidence that the MSM is lying.
The other thing is, no one knows whether the Post or NYT looked into the story, but what they found didn’t meet their standards for publication.
—
The other main point you make, about the conservative focus on the government* to the exclusion of other loci of power is also true. To be fair, I’ve pushed back against some of the commenters here who use similar reasoning.
We are seeing this play out now with this Trump vs. Twitter crap.** The same people who defend the right of a baker unwilling to bake a cake for a same-sex couple are now calling for regulating social media or breaking-up the big tech companies.
This speaks to a point @Michael Reynolds made in another thread. But this isn’t unique to Trump–it’s a side effect of the GOP moving away from actual conservatism.
[soapbox ascended, read at your own risk]
Not to give too much credit to Murray Rothbard, but his description of the Old Right set against Classical Liberalism resembles much of what we are seeing here.
The only real defense is to say that those with private power earned it, whereas hereditary power was not. But this assumes a level playing field at birth, and I think we all know that is a fantasy.
[I pick up my soapbox and saunter into the sunset.]
*Unless it’s the police. Then government can do what it wants.
**Maybe it’s just me, but the word crap seems to have more rhetorical force than shit or bullshit does these days.
@Kit: I used to be able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. After one trip back when I was still doing expedition caving, the photog on our team sent me copies of all the pictures he took. In damn near every single pic, I was asleep on a rock, or in a trail, or halfway up a wall, etc etc. It was the punchline to every joke.
Not anymore.
Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghost for The Art of the Deal, has a good essay at Medium.com: “The Psychopath In Chief.”
@CSK: In my case it is mostly chronic pain, for which my only choice is opiates (allergic to anti-inflammatories). While I always have some (i horde after my surgeries) things have to be pretty bad before I’ll take one. Partly because I am wary, but also because I know I won’t get another scrip without an extreme event.
So I sleep 2 hrs, wake up, roll over, go back to sleep for another hr or so, wake up, roll over… This week it’s the need to get up and pee like a race horse at 2 Am or so, and by the time I stumble back to my bed i’m half awake, just enough for the bowels to begin complaining and then…
Getting old is not for the weak.
@Stormy Dragon: There is a whole world of Buschemi that I have somehow missed. another for the list.
My favorite is, “You won’t see this in the news.” or “The media isn’t talking about this!”
I always ask, “Then how did you find out about it?”
@CSK: I just went to Medium.com to take a look at the article you mentioned. What the heck is that site? I couldn’t even figure out what to click…
@MarkedMan:
It’s a blogging platform
A friend just posted a link to this piece on Vice. I’m…not even sure what to say about this, other than if the gun guys are turning on one another, this certainly is the weirdest timeline.
The headline of the day-
Soldier Stopped Shooting by Driving Into Gunman, Kansas Police Say
Thank you for your service Master Sgt. David Royer
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s bad. During January and February, I was in excruciating pain from an ulcer on my left heel (trust me, you don’t ever want to develop one of these) which of course didn’t help the insomnia. I asked my doctor for pain-killers. She prescribed Tramadol. Did nothing. Then Percocet. Nada. Dilaudid. Nothing. A shot of morphine in the E.R. helped for a few hours. It was awful. There must be something about my body chemistry that makes me resistant to sleep aids and opioids.
@MarkedMan:
I’m sorry I couldn’t furnish a link, but I get kicked into moderation when I do. Medium is a site where you can publish what you like. The more people like it, the more you get paid. A fair number of pros use it.
@Jen:
I’m aghast.
@CSK:
Same here. Different chemistries I guess. Vicodin works for me, takes the edge off, and if I am having muscle spasms it does stop them so I can sleep. But like I said, things have to get pretty bad before I take one.
Morphine…. A gift from the gods. I collapsed a lung once, had emergency surgery w/o anesthesia, spent 5 days with a drainage tube coming out of my chest cavity. I would go all day without the morphine but when I wanted to sleep, oh lord… Nothing better than getting that mule kick in my ass and feeling that warm golden wave of bliss wash over and thru every inch of my body….
Didn’t make the pain go away one iota, but it was a beautiful pain, one I wanted to hold in my hand so I could turn it over and gaze upon it’s magnificence from every possible angle, to become one with it…
Dangerous shit.
@Kathy:
yep. I mentioned that above.
@Bill:
And here we were recently talking about how overused the term Hero is on this site but if this man is not considered a hero for potentially stopping a mass-fatality event from taking place than I will eat my shorts.
Wow…I love how calm he was as he neutralized the situation and he did it without a gun and without killing the suspect (the irony is that he is of course a soldier and trained to kill).
Another mark against gun nuts (and this is coming from someone who used to tag along onto a gun range or clay pigeon range with one of my brothers older friends who was into guns, but very respectful of them) who always like to say a person with a gun could take this type of individual out…what about a person and his Chevy?
I should clarify, I did not just tag along but shot the guns at the range, it was many years ago when I was in my I think mid-late 20s (now 48 yrs old) but this southpaw had some beginners luck at the clay pigeon range as my first time doing this had me scoring 16 out of 25 (the folks I was with were mighty thrilled at how well I performed my first time up to bat).
So yeah…not anti-gun just anti putting them into the hands of folks who are cuckoo-bananas or should be permanently enrolled in an Anger Management program.
Protesters criticized for looting businesses without forming private equity firm first
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, my experience with morphine wasn’t as transcendent as yours, but it relieved the pain, which had me nearly suicidal, and for that I was extremely appreciative. Let me describe to you what that heel ulcer was like: Imagine, if you will, a red-hot coal pressed into your foot, and kept there for hours on end.
@CSK:
It seems I’m not: The Psychopath in Chief.
@Jen:
I thought they were photos on how to insert the prosthetic where it belongs.
@Kathy:
Again, thank you.
@JohnMcC:
Dahlia Lithwick is basically the only reason to read Slate. She’s really good often.
@Kit:
@OzarkHillbilly:
I am lucky enough to sleep when I am tired with little regard to a clock now. It is bliss.
Having to be in an office 8 to 5 did not align well with my cycle.
Btw, I never started at 8. Start at 7:30 or 8:30 and avoid the biggest spike in traffic.
@JKB:
Decentralized expertise like the independent researchers who “prove” conspiracy theories? Or the Electric Universe guys trying to prove the tenets of 20th century physics through poorly designed “experiments?”
Do we really need to go through a laundry list of private companies who made money using innovations at NASA, DoD, and nonprofit or public universities? Those breakthroughs came directly from public funding of basic and applied science research. But public funding is inefficient and wasteful compared to private for-profit enterprises, right?
Snarky response aside, let’s also consider the post about the future Koch publication about “empowering people throughout society.” Do you understand that government databases in all sorts of fields, (e.g. epidemiology, meteorology, economics) are the types of government policies that allow for innovation ‘throughout society?’
Take weather for example. The different media outlets that forecast weather all use the same source for quite a bit of their data. AccuWeather, The Weather Channel, DarkSky all use the NWS database.
Source. Emphasis mine.
A Bush Administration official, not exactly someone expected to be opposed to privatization, nor a person advocating public investment in a sector seeing increasing investment of private capital, ought to make you think that broad public databases maintained by the government feed innovation rather than stifle it.
This also does not touch on an important factor of weather forecasting. It relies on global observation, because the weather is a global system. The key factor that allows the efficient gathering of data are multilateral agreements. As an example, Europe and the US freely exchange the data gathered by their satellites. That coordination reduces the cost of observation.
Putting that into private hands risks increasing costs, because the profit motive incentivizes walling off data to generate licensing fees.
To be fair, some of the private companies getting large influxes of private investment are improving data collection. But the reason that their methods are better is because some group of people reject all government spending regardless of necessity. Wow, I must be developing dementia, because the name of that group is on the tip of my tongue and I just can’t spit it out. Do you know who that is?
@CSK:
“She prescribed Tramadol. Did nothing. Then Percocet. Nada. Dilaudid. Nothing. A shot of morphine in the E.R. helped for a few hours.”
Years ago, I stepped on a nail when inspecting a house being built for me and ended up going to the ER with a puncture wound in the ball of my foot. The doctor gave me percocet and I took a half of one before bed. My last coherent thought that evening was that I was not sure if I could have gotten out of the bed if it were on fire.
On the other hand, my grandfather had a truly horrendous case of Paget’s disease of bone and took up to 12 percocets a day. I am still amazed he could hold up his end of a conversation under the influence of them.
@Moosebreath:
That must have been awful. As for the Percocet, I’m glad they worked for you, and I hope they worked for your grandfather, but I might as well have been eating M&Ms for all the pain relief they afforded me. Same thing when I took some Synalgos prescribed for me after periodontal surgery: to wit, absolutely nothing.
@Jen:
This reminds me of the classic episode of The Simpsons, “The Cartridge Family.”
Some, great, highlights.
I couldn’t find the clip of the NRA meeting where Homer demonstrates how he uses his gun to turn off the TV. The rest of the members are aghast that he is so irresponsible.
Ya know, The Simpsons was a satire* of America; Homer being the quintessential lovable, yet ignorant idiot. It depended on him not being malicious. Unfortunately, the real life person Homer represents is malicious.
*I got frustrated when Hank Azaria expressed remorse for his voicing of Apu, because the whole framing of the show was to poke fun at the white-washing of American culture in family sitcoms. It was written to make fun of xenophobic Americans, not glorify their bigotry. He should have defended the show, because he knows what it was.
It’s not like there weren’t right-wing writers–John Swartzwelder was one. He also seems to have been the writer that embodied Homer best.
It sucks that South Asian kids were called Apu by bullies. But those bullies would have found some other way to be bad kids. It just shows that Americans have terrible skills interpreting art.
@CSK:
here’s a thought: next time copy the link as text. Most browsers will give you the option to go there is you highlight a text link and right-click on it.
@Monala: I’ve given up on the notion that Republicans at large (but particularly those who align with Trump) will say things that make sense. Our internal medicine specialist was today touting Remdesivir as a treatment because “our President reports that it’s very promising.” As if Trump actually KNOWS anything about any subject under the sun.
You simply have to assume that Republicans are on the jazz. It’s the only reasonable assumption.
@Kathy:
Worth a try. Thank you. I really don’t know why this site suddenly finds my links objectionable. It’s not as if I’m directing people to Pornhub.
@OzarkHillbilly: My mom’s answer was always that she found out by going to the sources who weren’t afraid of the government and had the courage to tell the truth–usually Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsay, and Jack Van Impe (whose claim to fame in his early life was as an accordion-playing evangelist).
“become the MCU version of The Greatest American Hero”
Why? Who would watch it? It wasn’t even a “so bad it’s cool.”
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Two wrongs don’t make a right. 🙂
@Jay Loren Gischer:
The people you really need to worry about are the people who want you to believe that the government is the principal threat to your liberty. There have been places and times in history when that was true, but they have been rare, and this ain’t one of them.
@Kurtz:
Back when I was a dude who availed himself of third party data because management’s call.
Market data, demographics, etc.
If the link was on ZIP, there really isn’t an ethical issue.
We did partner with a then leading data miner where the join was on SSN for purchase behavior. I was not cool with that. Let everyone know that I was not cool with that.
Unsafe at any speed.
Finally! Something for cheese heads to take pride in.
@de stijl:
Our in-house statistician wouldn’t touch the stuff. Noise. Unuseful.
Now we have Google serving us individualized ads based on data like this × 100.
They get it wrong often though. Google thinks I am a Spanish speaker who lives in Omaha. YouTube serves up hilariously inappropriate ads for me. I love it. That means I have successfully misled them.
Note to all: Preserve your privacy.
@Kathy:
Before I finish the article, I had to share a couple thoughts. As I was reading about Trump’s penchant for cheating at Golf, I had the thought that I am confident most, if not, all of us have when reading these stories:
Why would anyone poor or disenfranchised think Trump cares about them? He has shown nothing but contempt for people just like them his whole life. And he has made a living off of grifting and cheating.
Put yourself in their shoes as best you can. They have consistently voted largely for Republicans. Their party spoke to them directly during campaigns, but didn’t do much for them once in office. So why would they continue to vote for them? There are several answers, one of which, I will save for last.
One is that Republicans have defended a couple things they hold dear–Christian identity and the 2A. Those two wedge issues are huge in rural areas.
Indeed, access to guns is at least somewhat more important in rural areas than it is in urban areas. There is less police protection there, longer response-times, and more wild animals that may cause property damage or endanger the lives of children, pets, and livestock.
And religion, specifically Christianity, is the center of social interaction in less densely populated areas, because the glue in urban areas–dense economic activity–is relatively sparse outside of larger cities.
Of course, using them as wedge issues requires some manipulation of the historical record. It also demands selling a specific interpretation of the Constitution as the only correct one, even if it means overturning many decades of judicial precedent.
Both of those things also nicely create a market niche that Republican elites can use to make money–an ecosystem that blurs opinion and news and promotes willful distortion as serious scholarship.
Because of that, it is easy for the GOP to sell them on the notion that Democrats who argue for gun control, defend religious minorities (most of whom do not live in rural areas,) and try to enforce 1A by ensuring education is religion-neutral are hostile to the rural person’s way of life.
Those messages, honed over decades, are incredibly effective.
Secondly, the Democrats represent groups toward whom the GOP has shown outright hostility. Because close elections shift the focus of politicians toward turnout rather than expansion of their base, the Dems tailor messages to minorities.
So when Obama or Clinton or any other Dem speaks to Black or Brown people, the GOP can just tell rural Whites, “they don’t care about you.” And those rural voters, based on what they see, hear, and feel think it to be true. The well has been poisoned.
Combine that with messaging that says your way of life is the embodiment of America, after all it’s in the Constitution! We all know that America has always been a Christian society, read history!
Putting it that way, why would a rural White person see the Dems as anything other than gun-grabbing atheists who favor minorities over authentic Americans? Worse, their policies go against the very ideas that our nation was founded upon–freedom and personal responsibility.
Now, before we get to the third reason, understand that politicians and their political advisors know what ties those things together. The first two reasons are not in addition to the last one–they exploit it.
The third one is the primacy of partisanship as a heuristic. Notice what the first two emphasize–identity. They define not just an individual identity, but identity of America itself.
Republicans, through their excellently executed messaging, have established that identity to the point that they are able to get people to vote against their own economic interests.
Again, put yourself in the shoes of rural, white Trump voter. They can either vote for the party who appears to actively hate them, their way of life, and their nation or vote for a guy who is hated by the elites of their own party who tells them he understands that they have been forgotten by the people they elected in the past. From their point of view, who would you choose?
It’s not that they are correct. It’s not that they are irrational. It’s that they were born in a country that resembles a form of neo-feudalism way more than it does a modern democratically-based system. Given the state of public education nationwide, unduly influenced by the school board of one state, it’s no wonder they can’t make a distinction between factual information and bullshit. Throw in an electoral system compromised by money, and a Supreme Court nominated and consented to by their willingness to allow that money to continue flowing, and none of us should be surprised that we find ourselves in this state.
The only way out is to first realize that the perceived differences between our political adversaries and ourselves is thinner than we want to think and then treat them as people with legitimate gripes about the system.
We can acknowledge that the same forces that we see negatively affect women and minorities also negatively affect many white males. Yes, it falls disproportionately on the former group, but that doesn’t mean that rural whites haven’t been abandoned, ignored, and put upon.
It probably won’t work in the short-term, but it’s worth a shot.
@DrDaveT:
Yeah. Your employer likely exerts more direct influence on your daily behavior, and regulation is the thing that prevents them from becoming even more over-bearing.
You’re more likely to be surveilled directly by a private entity or neighbor than the government. Of course, we should all be concerned about government suppressing dissent, but it seems that most right wing protest these days are organized to…supress dissent.
I always use this example:
If the USFG and state governments legalized recreational weed, what entity is likely to prevent you from partaking? Your employer. What entity can prevent your employer from regulating your behavior off the clock? The government.
—
When I feel like a masochist and go down the deep state conspiracy rabbit hole, I am often struck by how much it resembles the left-wing criticism of the national security state. But it’s applied to a domain that functions completely differently, so it is just nonsense.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I own season 1 on DVD, so I would watch it, obviously. ;P
@Kathy:I Probably missed your prior discussion about human challenge test for a SARS-Cov-2 vaccine. Regarding the purposeful exposure to the virus, I’m assuming that there would be no control group (that is a group inoculated with a placebo.
Do researcher’s now know what the MID 50 is for SARS-CoV-2? (MID50 defined as minimal infectious dosage that will result in inflection in 50% of a healthy cohort).
It would seem to me that the challenge subjects would need to be exposed to a multiple of the MID.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I saw some movie where William Katt was the bad guy and it took me an hour to figure out it was GAH dude. Bugged the crap outta me until I placed him.
So long, Amy!
linky
@Kurtz:
As someone who was raised in a midwestern evangelical Baptist family, this is the one that most sticks in my craw. Yes, the church was the center of our social life. Yes, our identity was inextricably entwined with that. But it wasn’t content-free: being a member of that church had implications for what you believed in, and everything we purported to believe in was 180 degrees antithetical to Donald Trump. I simply cannot fathom the mental gymnastics required to reconcile evangelical Christianity and a pro-Trump position.
Then again, the churches we were members of abandoned the Southern Baptist Convention sometime in the 1980s or 1990s, so maybe it’s a selection bias problem…
@DrDaveT:
Oh, some fundamentalists are willing to admit Trump is bad. But–he fights for their rights, they’ll tell you. The nice guys, the good Christian guys, knuckled under to the evil Democrats.
@DrDaveT:
I don’t think Trump has attended a religious service since he was elected. Golf is his church.
That’s fine.
I am not religious.
People who are amateurs shouldn’t speak for the church. Trump uses religion as a cudgel. Attack, attack, attack. Roy Cohn would approve.
That conservative Christians in aggregate are okay with and indeed embrace Trump tells us a lot about that voting bloc.
I thought that worldliness was to be disdained. Was wrong, obviously.
@DrDaveT:
Yeah, growing up with a religious (non-SBC) family, mostly in the Bible Belt, and attending an SBC affiliated University, I see how much that culture produces gold medal mental gymnasts at an unbelievable rate.
My post was an attempt to step out of my particular viewpoint to try to understand a world that I’ve been surrounded by, but have never been able to fathom.
I have no problem with religion as a social institution that gives individuals the tools to make sense of themselves and the world. Once politics corrupts that function, and religion corrupts politics (it’s certainly a bi-directional relationship) then it becomes a source of strife and division.
But to your specific point, I don’t know about it making no sense that evangelicals would back Trump. There are plenty of examples in the Bible of deeply flawed, sinful human beings fulfilling God’s will. What we see as proof that their worldview makes no sense, they see as a descriptive of the relationship of God to humans.
—
I was reading the Atlantic profile of Gingrich from ’18 yesterday. And he was talking about how we can learn from the animal kingdom. But, of course, he took the wrong lessons from it–his view, common among just-smart-enough people who remember the basics of evolution, was that the natural world is just combat.
The mistake is in interpretation; because chimps have a complex structure that includes cutthroat political games and that they go to war with other troops, then humans must behave the same way.
What they miss is that if you replace all cooperative behavior within a troop with adversarial competition, the lineage would die out through one or more mechanisms–less successful foraging/hunting, lack of genetic diversity, etc.
It also ignores that sociality as an adaptation provides for cooperation, which is what confers the evolutionary advantage in the first place.
It’s a case of a malignant narcissist reading everything around him as a sign of his destiny to be an historical figure. It makes sense that this asshole backed Trump, because they are essentially the same person. Gingrich is smarter, for sure. And without his philosophy on politics, Trump is never in a position to win the nomination.
The point of both examples–religion and Newt–is an illustration that people can read anything they want into anything they see.
We, despite having a smart crowd of commenters, have several prolific posters who do the same thing. And you know what? We are less likely to call them on it because they agree with us.
It’s some sad, shameful shit. But you either deal with it, or find a substance to take you away from the world. It’s a terrible menu of choices, but if you can help people around you in even small ways, it helps ease the pain of being human.
@DrDaveT:
I was going to do an ETA, but this is easier. To be clear, you are correct that it isn’t content free. But that content is malleable.
Its central text is a complete, contradictory mess. It is translated from a couple archaic languages to another (less) archaic language. It’s about a culture that we only have some detail about. It has been filtered and shaped by other political entities. It was compiled by a political entity from a list of writings, most of which have been lost to history in whole or in part. On and on and on.
All of these things make it ripe for exploitation by cynical, power hungry and/or money grubbing individuals.
Because of all of those things, it can be interpreted one way for a period of time, and then re-interpreted any way a minister or politician sees fit. And the people in the pews just see it as evidence that it was written by the Hand of God–how else could an ancient book be so applicable to any time period! Have doubt? It’s okay, the Bible even tells you how to deal with it. Faith! Just believe in the thing yet unseen and you will be rewarded. It’s a complete system for hucksters–its one true consistency.
Remember the Bible Code? Yeah, you can find passages that say “Satan is God” using the same method. You can find messages in any text of sufficient length.
It’s funny though, because you don’t need to contrive fancy numerlogy to to do it. You just need to reinterpret the words and it works just as well.
What that police officer did was murder. Straight up.
He killed that man purposefully.
It is a hard thing to watch all the way through, but you owe it to yourself to watch all of it.
Don’t click off.
That was murder.
@Kurtz:
Edit.
Concision.
Way too many paragraphs.
@de stijl: @Kurtz:
I’m gonna back that off a bit.
Often I use this place as a sort of a writing exercise. I can strut and preen.
If that is what you do too, go for it.
If you are truly trying to communicate, your message is lost amongst 47 three sentence paragraphs.
@de stijl:
You’re probably correct. And honestly, I spend time on these things as if I was writing something other than a comment. So, really, I should be writing somewhere other than comment sections.
OTOH, if I were to reduce what I say, then it’s probably going to be nothing more than snark and half-argued points. Most of what we talk about here requires more discussion than that. But again, probably the wrong forum. I concede.
@Kurtz: I, for one, always appreciate when people take the time to organize their thoughts. I liked what you wrote, and only lack of time kept me (and still keeps me) from engaging.
@Kurtz: No, I appreciate the in depth look at a world I live in but am only peripherally aware of. As an unashamed atheist living in rural MO I can’t ever truly know these people I call ‘neighbor’ and a big part of that is distrust of me. A bunch of what you said makes sense, a bunch more I am still chewing on, and some… No, I don’t agree with. No matter what, I very much appreciate the effort.
@de stijl: Last night when I was tired and still frustrated by what felt like an unproductive day, Kurtz’s musings were very much in tl;dr territory. This AM, after finally having a normal night of sleep (well, normal for me anyway) they were well worth the time to read. These open forum’s are probably the only comment thread’s I will return to read the next morn and I am quite often glad I did.
@Kurtz:
Yeah. I pushed that too hard. Sorry.
This is an open comment thread. Write what you want.
It was not an appropriate critique. I apologize.
@de stijl:
No way. You were being constructive, no? Then no apologies necessary.
@Kit: @OzarkHillbilly:
Thanks! I know I should cut down on length. Really, I should be writing a blog. I just like interacting with the people here.