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My dentist said he needed a hand like this...
3,526 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 1201 – 1400 of 3526 Newer› Newest»Our antipode is inhabited by fish and other marine creatures.
https://www.antipodesmap.com/#did-you-know
I see the Duke of Edinburgh is going to retire from public life. We will miss a great source of inadvertent humo[u]r, for those of us who follow things British.
The antipode from here (Los Angeles) is in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I have a friend who is from Mauritius, of all places, so that's a sort of bond between us.
A lot of my bank's support jobs have moved to India. They are too far north to be precisely the antipode, but are 12 hours away, which is the same in terms of what matters practically. Or they would be 12 hours away if India weren't on a half-hour time zone.
"The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times."
University of California has data on hundreds of thousands of students, maybe millions, and knows their personal characteristics, test scores, high school grades, and UC outcomes. As a result they can control for the personal characteristics and high school, and adjust the test scores and grades to reflect historical data on UC performance when ranking the candidates. They aren't trying to punish people, rather to correct for people from backgrounds and schools where their data on application is worse than their performance.
My dad was a UCLA professor and one of his buddies was on the committee that dealt with these things, and when they got together at Thanksgiving etc. he said they did analyze the high schools and the student characteristics, and try to come up with measures to neutralize their effects. Sort of analysis of variance to a statistician.
Another consideration is the low level of precision of the measures, test scores and GPAs. Someone gets 1109 and someone gets 1107. To me, they are both qualified (or both not), and to distinguish them, look to other factors. These days the other factors seem to be becoming rather trivial, but that's the place to look.
If I remember correctly, Berkeley and UCLA were turning down applicants who had jumped through all the hoops, many years ago. I wondered whether a system might be set up to identify "fully qualified" applicants, then run a lottery as to who gets to go to which UC campus.
I was possibly fortunate to get into Penn State's main campus, fall term at a time when they were trying very hard to farm students out to branch campuses or require starting at summer term. Oddly, there wasn't even a letter asking whether summer term would be OK. That was back when there was a firm class barrier: PSU was for the (white) working and lower middle classes. The place was astonishingly segregated.
Come to think of it, PSU joined a huge data-sharing project on applicants and students that fueled studies of admissions practices and student success. If I remember correctly, at the more exclusive private schools, nepotism and athletics were vastly important. SATs of the admitted were high, but that was only a part of the package.
If the voting inquisition can crunch massive data, I suppose Justice can do a giant crunch and prove that deserving white kids have been pushed aside.
On an almost daily basis I hear some news on the topic of who can use which bathrooms. It's bizarre.
Also, those people in places whose antipodes are not located in oceans, do they have sole-mates?
But Trump claimed to LIKE the poorly educated...
And Rick Santorum (son of a Ph.D. father and Master's degree mother, with an MBA and JD himself) hypocritically claimed during his 2012 primary campaign that too many Americans already attend college (IOW, the old Yuppie rallying cry, "I got mine, to heck with you!").
Ara Parseghian has died at age 94. I recall how much he HATED Tommy Trojan's horse Traveler :-)
http://articles.latimes.com/1985-09-19/sports/sp-2230_1_tommy-trojan
When I look at the likes of G.W. Bush and D. Trump, a college education can be a waste of time and money. Truman, for instance, did not go to college.
Trump makes Dubya look like almost a Renaissance Man (less a compliment to Dubya than a diss of Trump).
Despite all the smoke and mirrors and Mooch puns, Trump-Russia chugs on. Fox news being sued by Rod Wheeler; he says Trump actually vetted the story and inserted the fake quotes and charges the Fox reporters were in contact with Trump, Spicer, and Bannon before the fake Seth Rich story broke.
I am glad Fox News is getting sued for lying. Rod Wheeler is a former homicide detective and I am sure he has the documentation underway. This was in May. I guess the blackmail allegations Joe Scarborough levied against Trump as of June 30 will probably be criminal, so pending impeachment.
I hear rumors that GOP are ready to impeach as soon as next week. His talk of war with North Korea regardless of the Constitution just adds English on the cue ball of crazy.
This does smell like the rising action before the climatic implosion and impeachment.
I also think after persusing the headlines today I am ready to sleep another 12 hours.
Uh-oh, better not tell the Creationists! And it was bisexual, which will definitely dismay the RWNJs. "Scientists find the first ever flower, both the father and mother of all those that surround us today":
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/first-ever-flower-found-scientists-angiosperm-water-lily-fossil-nature-communications-a7872776.html (rather resembles a water lily)
The process of identifying "primitive" features is novel; I'm not able to critique it, but the suggested original flower isn't too different from what's been assumed, except flower parts aren't in spirals. One problem, of course, is that flowers rarely turn into fossils. Wood is much better. Even leaves, and there's been productive work on leaf anatomy.
Congressional Republicans are organizing to legislatively authorize Obamacare subsidy payments. The NY Times story is straightforward. I'm impressed at how fast members can organize when motivated.
Our antipode is well west northwest of Perth, Australia, which is the farthest international airport from Orlando. So of course I want to go there.
Trump's signing statement for the Russia sanctions bill
. . . Trump's written comments on signing the sanctions bill (apparently not the actual signing statement) set a new standard for flakey.
Kelly looks like he took full advantage of his first-week honeymoon with the President to oust and to support. Now to see how long his ability to do such things lasts.
Sending cooling wishes to SeaSea during the record-setting heatwave (unless she's lucky enough to have gotten away).
2017 KenCen Honors: LL Cool J, Norman Lear, Gloria Estefan, Carmen de Lavallade and Lionel Richie. Lear says he'll attend the show, but that he's unlikely to attend the associated WH reception, however. Shucks, I was hoping he'd do an "Eartha Kitt" number all over Trump.
Gloria Estefan has a local presence. Come to think of it, that busy area was messed up by a pool chemical spill this morning.
The heat wave isn't too bad - at least we don't have the humidity to deal with. We're getting smoke from the BC wildfires, so the temperatures have moderated a bit - low 90s. A few years ago the temps did get to 100 and above for about 3 days in a row, during an art fair Mr Seasea was in, and which was held in a parking garage. Talk about stifling! We haven't had rain in over 30 days, none predicted soon.
No good place to escape to. Eastern WA is hotter and dryer, the mountains may be a little cooler but the sun feels more intense, the coast is cooler but packed this time of year. There are plenty of cold, cold lakes and rivers. But I'm fan with a fan going and the curtains drawn.
seasea
I met a woman who moved from Seattle to here. She loved Seattle and when we talked about the weather she said that during the two years she lived there the weather was beautiful. Maybe rainy Seattle is a turning into a myth of old times with the changing climate.
I hope you cannot smell the forest fire.
Ooops, meant to say I'm fine with a fan going...
I love the weather in Seattle, mostly. The winters are mild, there is always something green or in flower. At times the weather is like a never ending spring, and that gets tiresome in June or July when it won't get out of the 50s. Last April (2016) we had days in the 80s which was really unusual. I love the summers, which are usually warm during the day and cool at night, and dry. Not sure how much climate change is contributing. I'm sure it does a bit. We had a very rainy and cool Apr-June this year.
seasea
For HF and other connoisseurs of glass art. "Tiffany Is Known For Lamps And Stained Glass, But He Made Magical Mosaics, Too":
http://www.npr.org/2017/08/03/540891752/tiffany-is-known-for-lamps-and-stained-glass-but-he-made-magical-mosaics-too (audio, text and images already online)
http://www.npr.org/2017/08/03/540891752/tiffany-is-known-for-lamps-and-stained-glass-but-he-made-magical-mosaics-too
The Corning exhibit draws on the Neustadt collection, which is also contributing to an exhibit in Cincinnatti.
http://neustadtcollection.org
The little Morse Museum in Winter Park is a Tiffany trove.
http://www.morsemuseum.org
NP, I heard that. I think the Tiffany exhibit was up when we were in Corning (and at the CMOG) a month ago. But we ran out of time & energy.
So now we have a Grand Jury looking into who knows what related to DJT. My guess is that even if the particular prosecutor is fired, the GJ will continue, because its existence does not depend on that individual. Does anyone know?
I hope my investment portfolio doesn't include any high-rise residential buildings in Dubai.
I gather that the Senate will remain in pro forma session, precluding Trump's making any recess appointments, should he try to get someone to fire Mueller.
Yes. Sen. Murkowski made the motion and everyone agreed. A Republican senator has to show up every three days to preside over a pro-forma session.
Muller information has been slipping out today. Grand jury and assorted leads. Remnick at the New Yorker has the clearest short explanation of how the whole Trump family looks like a hopeless mess.
Meanwhile, the religious right has moved into the White House. Tony Perkins (Family Research Council) says he's there more than under the younger Bush, and one Ralph Drollinger is running a weekly Bible study for the Cabinet. He's from California and once was having a nice time in Sacramento until he denounced Catholicism. http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-la-pol-trump-cabinet-pastor-20170803-story.html
Jim, do you recall Ralph Drollinger? I don't, despite having followed college basketball closely on TV back then, although clearly he was no Bill Walton.
Re his anti-Catholic insult, I wonder if (Catholic) new Chief of Staff John Kelly will rein in his White House access. I doubt that (Catholic) Bannon or (Catholic) Conway is charmed by Drollinger's bigotry, either. And if an atheist like me finds Drollinger's comment offensive, one can only imagine how American Catholics must feel.
Awww, British actor Robert Hardy has died, age 91. I first saw him on Masterpiece Theatre as Robert Dudley in Elizabeth R starring Glenda Jackson, then most memorably as veterinarian Siegfried Farnon on multiple seasons of All Creatures Great and Small:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hardy
Thanks for the tip to Stonekettle Station's latest. I came here bearing a link to the ACLU snark-ville
This is actually worth reading. https://www.scribd.com/document/355291378/ACLU-Brief-on-Behalf-of-John-Oliver
That is an impressive fossil flower reconstruction, like a magnolia (itself pretty old.) But that itself suggests considerable evolution and duplicated sepals/petal patterns to attract pollinators, rather than wind-pollination like a lot of simpler flowers do.
The three parts (petals, etc.) makes sense. The simpler flowers, like wild ginger, have three petals/sepals only. I've always wondered if the original was something like what I once found gathering in a forest-- just three thin stalk-like flower organs (stamens?)-- green-- on top of a stalk, widely spaced. Almost looked like a grass, but wasn't (leaf base not monocot-like IRRC)
Ants were climbing up it and collecting nectar off it-- I looked at it carefully and concluded it had to be a flower because it smelled like licorice a bit and was sticky. I tentatively identified as wild fennel, although these have yellow flowers. It's possible it was a small fennel or anise and the petals had fallen off, although I didn't see any.
I could see a primitive flower like this adapted to ants and gradually becoming more flamboyant for aerial wasps and bees. What struck me was how easy it was for the ants to climb up and down this kind of structure, rather than an conventional flower. I had not seen ants as pollinators before and couldn't think why not, really. (They do develop symbosis with trees.)
Dave, I wonder if one of the Republican Senators might *fail* to show up, leaving the Senate out of session, or can those in the rotation be trusted 100%. These days, I don't take anything for granted.
NP, Drollinger played at UCLA, and I would remember him, except he played UCLA and NBA while I was in Oz, so I have no memory.
I would consider a state that is the largest per capita polluter in the world and refuses to participate in the world-wide effort to lower CO 2 output a rogue state.
Unfortunately any state helmed by a rogue also qualifies. I worry about the real likelihood of intervention by foreign powers against Russia if we don't get things cleaned up PDQ. I am sure there will be a steady process with indictments but we need the path to impeachment and the pro-Russia regiment out.
I am going to take a deep breath and pray for Tillerson and Pruitt to be curbed ASAP.
I see people are on le weekend. I am so ready for a break from this crazy, too. Enjoy.
Hi, HP. Been working overtime this weekend, reformulating a couple of slides for my talk this fall. I thought it would easy...
Especially for co-boodlers here. "Please Confirm You Are Not a Robot":
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/please-confirm-you-are-not-a-robot
My experience has been it takes three times the time to prep for a lesson than to actually deliver it, and powerpoint is around 20 times (if you're any good at it) the time as you have to make sure it is legible, short, concise and a good visual aid, and you are not just parroting your notes off the slide.
Fortunately for my audiences, my PowerPoint slides are nothing like that. Tnstead, they primarily contain photos, diagrams or maps illustrating my text. On the rare occasions that I make a text slide, it's to show all the possible alternatives I could've used, each of which was in one way or another less desirable than my eventual solution (which saves time during my talk, since I then don't have to read them all aloud). And it takes me easily a day to write and polish the narration for each of my slides (yes, I'm painstaking, but at least my audiences stay awake).
Lovely day out there. HFGF and I joined some old friends and did a long bike ride from north of Old Town down to Mt. Vernon and back.
Bike Ride - Nora Jane Struthers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVBbSQ882ow
Goin' on a bike ride
Sidewalk on the right side
I could go anywhere
Goin on a bike ride
Nothin' but the sunshine
I could go anywhere.
NP, you may know of Edward Tufte's PowerPoint presentation showing how PP is, as he termed it, Stalinist. Or think a North Korean public ceremony where everyone seems to be thinking and acting exactly the same. I prefer to come up with slides that illustrate my points, but don't make them directly. In that way the audience have to use their brains to connect the information on the slide to the point being made, so they might remember it rather than just filing away the whole presentation file and forgetting where it is, what it said.
Interesting that for the last dozen or so posts, I haven't been challenged with pictures to show I'm not a robot by identifying which ones include a store front or whatever. Does that mean I'm accepted by blogger.com, a form of robot, as not one of its kind?
HF, that sounds lovely. How about the "Great Allegheny Passage, a nearly flat 150-mile bicycle and walking trail connecting Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland"?
https://gaptrail.org/
Sounds interesting gmbka. In our case a "long bike ride" was 22 miles... and kinda flat. Not really ready for a century and a half...
At this point I doubt that even Yello would like to do that. But for a friend of mine this would be nothing, and he is more my age. :-(
Jim, thanks for mentioning Edward Tufte. I recall having long ago read about his critique of PowerPoint, but couldn't recall his name. We've all suffered through other people's Powerpoint displays that would merit Tufte's scorn. I'm also vastly relieved to discover that my work doesn't fall into the traps he condemns. Whew!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte#Criticism_of_PowerPoint
How boodle-y is this? "Hang 20: Abbie Girl Takes Top Pooch In World Dog Surfing Championship":
http://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/542084690/hang-20-abbie-girl-takes-top-pooch-in-world-dog-surfing-championship (with photos)
The dog surfing video is really neat!
The Orlando Sentinel reports that the Florida legislature, seeing an increase in federal funding for opioid addiction, slashed spending for mental health care. So in central Florida, thousands will lose state-funded mental health care. The biggest losers are mental health triage facilities, the places where police can take people who need immediate attention.
At least the Sentinel made the mental health mess their top story. Do I need to mention that our legislature is of the Alabama-Oklahoma sort, minus obsessions with the Ten Commandments and bathrooms.
I think we have all known that North Korea will act when threatened about the way Israel did in 1967, not waiting for others to make the first military move. Trump's "sea of flames" bit is not merely responding in kind to NK hyperbole.
National Hurricane Center doesn't think so, but European and Canadian models put a hurricane off the Florida coast on Sunday.
Trump can do nothing but bluster. It's a bad combination with the boisterous and trigger happy North Koreans.
Glenn Campbell died, age 81 (CNN).
Barbara Cook has also died, age 89 (the original Cunégonde in Candide and Marian the Librarian in The Music Man).
The Great Allegheny Trail ties right into the C&O Canal trail which is an additional 182 miles into Georgetown. I know people who have done all sorts of segments of it. It's obviously a multi-day trip. You can either camp along the trail or book bed and breakfasts.
It's the sort of ride which is on my bucket list.
How's the arm doing these days, yello?
Stuff I could never make up. "‘God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un,’ evangelical adviser says":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/08/god-has-given-trump-authority-to-take-out-kim-jong-un-evangelical-adviser-says
...“When it comes to how we should deal with evil doers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary — including war — to stop evil,” [Texas megachurch pastor Robert] Jeffress said. “In the case of North Korea, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong Un.”
Jeffress said in a phone interview that he was prompted to make the statement after Trump said that if North Korea’s threats to the United States continue, Pyongyang will be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”...
Does Trump recall the "fire and fury" of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the power of the US's H-bomb tests in the Pacific?
I wonder if the US generals and admirals would refuse such an order from Trump? Where's Army Brat when we need him to illuminate the issue of refusing an unlawful order?
"A Summer School for Mathematicians Fed Up with Gerrymandering":
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-summer-school-for-mathematicians-fed-up-with-gerrymandering
Some of the abstract mathematical approaches to Gerrymandering deal with the shape of the districts. Fun for mathematicians, but not necessarily much value. There are real geographical reasons for some of those odd shapes, like there's no way to get from here to there. I think the better ones are those that deal with the actual effects on elections -- party A had 40% of the votes but won 60% of the districts? Eh, what?!
Hi Yello,
nice to see you and even nicer that you plan to get back on your bike. That probably means that your elbow is behaving. Is it?
Jim, I agree that using a straight distance measure is probably not the best way to generate districts. Silly things like mountains and rivers are important barriers that should be accounted for. But you can use different measures instead of distance. Think of those maps you see occasionally where each state is scaled to population instead of geographic size. I think travel time would be a better 'distance' measure for compactness than physical distance. It does make the calculation harder, but a better map should result.
That isn't to say it will be more accepted. Another level of difficulty may be more problematic when it comes to public acceptance.
Overly-mothered puppies are less likely to make good guide dogs. Sort of.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/08/01/1704303114
Just stopped by to say howdy. Kudos to those that deserve them, hugs to those that need them, and best wishes to everyone.
Pacifica
Howdy back atcha, Pacifica! How are things Chez Ouest these days? I have no shame: I'll take some kudos, hugs AND best wishes, just on general principles :-)
Pacifica, thanks for the hugs.
Kudos is singular, like Gyros, so you don't take some, you just take it. :-)
If you want to test a long-range missile, and send it into the ocean far away, are there rules about where the target can be?
If you are France, or UK, or US, you might own both ends of the trajectory. Or Russia/USSR might be able to do it internally on land. But what about every one else?
Jim, I think they contract out.
I found this cartoon clever, but some people may consider it offensive.
https://daily.spiegel.de/#refsponi
The cartoon is somewhat unfair to Kim III, who after all has to kill relatives and present credible nuclear threats to preserve the dynasty.
An odd photo showed up on Instagram, so I followed it to the fashion-designer source, a provider of sane-looking $400 shirts and assorted wacky fashions.
https://www.thombrowne.com/us/article/thom-browne-surf
Among surfers, there is general consensus that wetsuits don't look like much; for most, black is best. Professionals and attention-getters tend toward colors so photographers can tell them apart. And so their wetsuit sponsors have recognizable goods. Hurley (a branch of Nike) has done well with racing stripes.
Triathlon wetsuits are, for some reason, flashier. Less concern about sharks?
More seriously, here is the "Political Warfare" memo that led to the unrest against National Security Council director McMaster, allegedly part of the anti-Trump Deep State. Horrors.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3922874-Political-Warfare.html#document/p1
Recipe I found on the Interwebz that made me think of HP's recent foraging efforts, since you probably know which wild greens and herbs can be successfully substituted.
Garden Pesto
From the garden, harvest leafy greens (can be made with various leaves):
* Carrot fronds
* Lettuce
* Beet tops
* Oregano
* Sunflower seeds
First grind the seeds, then add and grind the herbs. Stir in sunflower oil, garlic and lemon juice. Season with salt and black pepper to taste. Easy, fresh and full of vitamins. Delicious for flavoring pasta, soup or a salad.
NP - life has been uneven. I have made several trips to Arizona to see my Dad. My brother was the prince who spent close to three months there. He was there when Dad lost most of one leg, found him the rehab, I watched him cajole Dad into standing up twice. Then it was all down hill from there. The day I went home Dad fell asleep during physical therapy. Brother found a spot for Dad when rehab was going to convert him to private pay. Sister was there when rehab called to tell her Dad was fading and the end was near. Her response was that his children had accepted that reality, but his wife was in denial. He died an hour later. At least all four of his children visited within two weeks of his death.
My step mother is accepting his death, it is approaching three months. I find it odd that I am giving step mom advice on being a widow.
Pacifica
Oh Pacifica, what a trying time you've been through, both lately and in the past few years. Faxing hugs, although in no way adequate to the situation, but nonetheless heartfelt. Your father was fortunate to have had family with him then.
There will be a memorial for Dad in November. All the kids had planned to visit then, so instead of visiting with Dad, we will have a memorial when all his snow bird buddies are back in Arizona. All the kids are looking for photos to play at the memorial. I just dug out my wedding photos to find the photo of me and Dad going down the aisle.
Pacifica
It's great that the children were able to visit. In my family, during my mother's terminal illness, two final visits were quite wonderful.
The Post has photos of White House refurbishing, mostly West Wing. Kinda looks like the wallpaper in the Oval Office might stay. It's mostly covered in clear plastic sheeting.
I like the wetsuit. If spotted at dusk, looks like James Bond just climbed out of the water on the way to a party.
Commentary posted from one of the far-flung regulars at a central Florida surfing site that has a sub-forum for politics. I've lightly edited.
We were on our way to Charlottesville today to see a concert. Encountered a rental man full of racist . . . types on their way to their pow wow at a gas stop along the way. Surrounded our car commenting on the Bob Marley sticker. Wouldnt let us (my wife and young son) back into our car. State Police now have them.
Show canceled.
F... nazi cowards just rammed a crowd of people up there.
Speach by VA governor now.
Strong start, I am impressed.
Pacifica
How about if the South were to secede again. This time let them do it.
They would be out of our hair. McConnell would not be leader of our Senate.
Why did we want them back in the first place?
Kentucky never seceded.
One of the consequences of Kentucky's not having seceded was that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't apply to slaves in that state, who weren't declared freed until the 13th Amendment. (Ditto for Missouri).
The abolitionist movement in Kentucky was strong in the Berea area, including Berea College (the South's first non-segregated, coed college):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berea_College#History
Curiously, one of Kentucky's most renowned abolitionists was named Cassius Marcellus Clay (i.e., it wasn't exactly a slave name).
For boodle bicyclists (and gmbka's rugged friend). "Michelle Marciniak recounts difficult final days of Pat Summitt's life":
http://www.espn.com/espnw/culture/feature/article/20244471/michelle-marciniak-biking-1098-miles-pat-summitt-recounts-final-days-coach-life
...Oct. 17-28, Marciniak will ride 1,098 miles from Knoxville to Key West, Florida, (1 mile for each of Summitt's career wins -- the most ever in the college game) as part of a fundraising initiative called Pedal for Pat...
Pacifica, I'm so sorry to hear of your dad's death. What a tough time for you and your family!
Re the white supremacists in Charlottesville -- I'm not surprised they chose UVa for their big fight. It's a lovely campus, which they hotly resent, and it's just stuffed full of people learning interesting things, which they absolutely hate, and it's populated with all sorts of different colors and shapes of people with all sorts of accents, which just makes them crazy.
They're marching around under the banners "You think yer bettern me!" and "You think yer smartern me!" and in the second case, at least, they are absolutely correct.
Richie Spencer has announced that they'll be back, and I expect that he and his resentful little friends will meet the National Guard first thing, instead of later. The mayor and the governor won't be caught off-balance again.
No coincidence Cassius Clay's name; the fighter named for his grandfather who was named for the abolitionist pol.
I'm not sure about the South's economic trajectory. Charleston's rice economy was on its way out by 1860 (competition from Louisiana and Arkansas, and hurricanes). Virginia was dependent on selling slaves. I guess the economic powerhouses were Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. But there seems to have been something of a slave bubble. The prices of enslaved people were going through the roof. The market value of those people constituted, on paper, enormous wealth, yet Frederick Law Olmsted's "The Cotton Kingdom" was a thorough wrecking job on the South's economy and culture.
I need to actually read several excellent recent books on the economic history of cotton and American slavery.
I remain impressed by the inscription on the McClellan Gate in Arlington National Cemetery: "Here rest 15,585 of the 313,555 citizens who died in defence of our country from 1861 to 1865."
Recalling Sousa's "King Cotton" march led me to these links.
"Cotton States and International Exposition":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_States_and_International_Exposition
The 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition was held at the current Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia. Nearly 800,000 visitors attended the event. The exposition was designed to promote the region to the world and showcase products and new technologies as well as to encourage trade with Latin America. The Cotton States and International Exposition featured exhibits from several states including various innovations in agriculture and technology. President Grover Cleveland presided over the opening of the exposition. But the event is best remembered for the both hailed and criticized "Atlanta compromise" speech given by Booker T. Washington on September 18, promoting racial cooperation...
"Atlanta compromise":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_compromise
The Atlanta compromise was an agreement struck in 1895 between Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, and other African-American leaders, and Southern white leaders. It was first supported, and later opposed by W.E.B. Du Bois and other African-American leaders.
The agreement was that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic education and due process in law. Blacks would not agitate for equality, integration, or justice, and Northern whites would fund black educational charities.[..
NK's latest rocket engines seem to have been imported from Ukraine. Found via morning email from Foreign Policy, which led to NY Times, which linked to the International Institute for Strategic Studies
http://www.iiss.org/en/iiss%20voices/blogsections/iiss-voices-2017-adeb/august-2b48/north-korea-icbm-success-3abb
In anything like a normal week, this would be something of a bomb.
BTW, my grandfather was born not far from the Booker T. Washington birthplace.
Feels like donkeys' years since I checked in... can it only have been five days?
One of these days I want to go back in bed and hide under the covers. Did register my general umbrage with my congressman's office first, though.
I am now ready to insist the House overturn the election results and put HRC up as President. It is now the only acceptable option. Impeachment would imply that Russia pawn and traitor was ever legitimate.
So they risk losing Gorsuch. Still beats being dragged into nuclear war or random military action across the world or further harm by his inability to color inside the lines-- or indeed in a book or on a table at all, instead of scrawling all over the walls and himself.
Clinton sounded *expletive* more presidential in one tweet re Charlottesville than Trump has done in a year's worth of tweets. It is time, and it must be done speedily and we cannot wait until September.
No outright condemnation by Trump yet of the white racism of those who converged on Charlottesville almost 48 hours ago. But within one hour he managed to tweet against Merck's Black CEO who made a principled resignation from Trump's manufacturing council. How much clearer could Trump make his priorities (and his spleen)?
Olmsted had a famously blunt account of a woman put on trial for killing her infant child. She was enslaved and her owner had raped her. The child faced an awful future.
I've barely poked around in "In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker" by Claudia L. Bushman (Johns Hopkins 2002). It was a different world. The part free-part slave, part money-part barter economy was complex in its own way. Walker would buy vegetables and such that his slaves had grown on their own time. Walker's son Melville survived the same Point Lookout prison camp as one of my great-great grandfathers.
Dave, OTOH Mr. P's great-great-grandfather on his abolitionist side somehow managed to survive Andersonville. Prisoners who didn't succumb to disease there staved off starvation by eating rats, bugs, etc.
A wink-wink-nudge-nudge by Trump to his white nationalist supporters, signaling that they not take his shamefully delayed statement re Charlottesville seriously: the same day, Fox News reports he's "seriously" considering pardoning long-time Maricopa County (AZ.) sheriff Joe Arpaio.
If Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore managed to get himself kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court twice, could he get himself kicked out of the US Senate? It would be difficult, of course.
Looking back at the Civil War, North Carolina had rather little of the firebrand secessionism of Charleston or Virginia, and was very late to join the Confederacy, with politicians changing sides suddenly. We need to bear in mind that the breakdown in confidence in our national government is such that major, possibly violent, changes are possible in a way that didn't happen during the Great Depression (when Hitler was much admired) or circa 1970. I would keep an eye on what might become open season on statuary.
Several observers have noted that the Trump Administration is avoiding honoring US participation in the destruction of Nazi Germany. Perhaps it's time to kick start the Eisenhower Memorial, which seems to have stalled again. Perhaps a new design with a triumphal arch, gobs of Roman columns and a dry fountain would gain support?
Joel hosted a chat about the eclipse
https://live.washingtonpost.com/qa-eclipse-coverage-live-20170815.html?hpid=hp_no-name_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fchat-schedule
Sounds like he'll be in OR for the event.
seasea
Billy Graham's daughter is insinuating that eclipse mania is a sign of heathen worship that could be punished.
"Anne Graham Lotz Warns of God's Judgment After Great American Eclipse":
http://www.christianpost.com/news/anne-graham-lotz-warns-gods-judgment-great-american-eclipse-194774/
Owe, the humanity!
And now for something different... "What Brands Are Actually Behind Trader Joe’s Snacks?":
https://www.eater.com/2017/8/9/16099028/trader-joes-products
Jebus. Trump without a teleprompter...
Just wait until he pardons Arpaio :-(
I watched that "whatever" as I have a pollster on the phone asking some $s so that we could hold our politicians accountable.
I am not sure we were looking at the same politicians- but I told the dude the president was having a meltdown and needed to be held accountable. Then he upped the $ amount he was asking for.....
Pacifica
The Trump base love Arpaio.
I don't watch TV, so had to read the Post and Times to fully appreciate how badly Trump had stepped in it. Of course Breitbart and Fox (in prime time) treated the news conference as a big win for Trump. We really are living in alternative worlds.
A federal court decision invalidating only two congressional districts in Texas looks disappointing for those of us who would have liked to see several more Democratic members of Congress from that state.
Dave, I don't watch tv either but between NPR news and Vox Sentences, both in my inbox, I don't miss the worst. The transcript of the press conference was rather painful to read.
There's some competent, in-depth news on TV: e.g., we watch the PBS NewsHour most evenings while eating dinner. Last night substitute anchor Hari Sreenivasan and reporter John Yang opened the program with analysis of Trump's presser that afternoon, including damning Trump clips so absurd that to my amazement reduced both men to momentary laughter before they could compose themselves and offer cogent commentary (perhaps you can find the video online).
We also stay up to watch Colbert and Meyers' monologues when their shows are taped that same afternoon. See summary of last night's openers, "‘Clinically insane,’ ‘7th circle of hell’: Late-night hosts process Trump’s news conference":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/08/16/clinically-insane-7th-circle-of-hell-late-night-hosts-process-trumps-news-conference (with video embeds)
Yeah, this is a turning point for this country. Fox News' Shep smith said they could not find a Republican willing to come on and defend Trump.
On stranger news, an counterintelligence expert in the FBI who was part of Mueller's team has been abruptly reassigned to HR. This is a demotion and usually done to make sure a FBI agent cannot get eyes on stuff that could compromise them (as an witness, or an IA issue.) It usually means a career is over. Given the timing I wonder if that much-lauded FBI agent had been embedded with white supremacists in the past or he has compromised things, or Wray demoted him? (IT could have been Mueller who kicked him out.)
An Ukrainian hacker turned himself in for writing the malware used to hack the DNC and is now working with the FBI. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/world/europe/russia-ukraine-malware-hacking-witness.html?_r=0
I hope whatever they do, Trump has no prior notice of his arrest in time to plan retaliation. And he must be arrested, not just removed from office.
Jefferson Davis, for example, went to West Point and served in the US Army, was a member of the House and Senate, and Secretary of War prior to the Civil War. He might be worth a statue in his home town or the Mississippi state capital, on those grounds. Stonewall Jackson, OTOH had fewer achievements, all of them in the army, until he blossomed in the Civil War.
It certainly is a fact that there was a Civil War, and Memorial Day was created as an occasion to honor all the dead from both sides (decorate all the graves, Decoration Day). Decoration Day was celebrated all over, North and South. If the ordinary soldiers’ graves were honorable, I would think that a few statues of their military leaders, in their military role, would be, too. That said, some of the leaders were at such high rank (Lee, etc.) that they seem to be viewed as standing for the Confederacy and its ideals rather than just for effective military leadership.
Those statues belong into museums as a testimony to American history. The people represented by the statues are historically important, but like so many other influential persons not necessarily to be revered.
I suspect there are going to be more statues than places to put them. Many are going to have to be destroyed. I don't have a big problem with that, so long as the best are maintained, in context. Stone Mountain is one that will present a problem. I think it should stay but with proper context.
Developing story. "Stephen Bannon out as White House chief strategist, say two people familiar with the decision":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/08/18/stephen-bannon-out-as-white-house-chief-strategist-say-two-people-familiar-with-the-decision
I wonder whether his American Prospect interview was cause of effect.
SCC: Cause OR effect.
I don't know much about Stone Mountain in GA. I was thinking about it the other day, when I was reading about the Jefferson Davis Memorial Hwy, which led me to this about a Confederate memorial in a private cemetary in Seattle, with the stone for the memorial coming from Stone Mountain. Before all this, all I knew about Stone Mountain was from the MLK speech:
"let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!"
Anyway, it turns out that Hwy 99 in Seattle was called the Jefferson Davis Hwy till 2016, when it was renamed. I never knew (or had forgotten). I never heard it referred to that way. The United Daughters of the Confederacy were behind the Jefferson Davis Hwy, going from the east coast to the west coast, and they were behind the statues and memorials and textbooks that played up the "Lost Cause" version of the Civil War. Interesting what you find out when you look under the rocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain
http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/why-is-a-confederate-memorial-in-seattle-a-q-and-a-about-its-creation/593592314
http://www.heraldnet.com/news/sr-99-to-be-renamed-for-snohomish-black-civil-war-soldier/
seasea
In these trying times, comfort food can be beneficial (and not just sheetcakes, either).
Yesterday Mr. P brought home some favorite Greek foods for dinner; he had souvlaki (because he still occasionally eats meat), while I had spanakopita as my entrée. Among the desserts were loukoumades (fresh fried dough balls) with honey syrup. He also bought some galaktobourekos, which I'll heat up for dessert tonight, and serve drizzled with a little homemade honey-and-sugar syrup (adding ground cinnamon to taste)
He also got a couple servings of Greek green beans, a dish I'd best describe (in an admittedly over-simplified way) as ratatouille with green beans instead of eggplant. We saved them for today, and will stretch the dish by adding steamed fresh green beans from our garden (which should yield enough of the dish for two nights, although I'll need to add a little more oregano).
What are your comfort foods this time of year? (Sweet corn finally should be ripe in our garden starting next week; we like it steamed, and served with only butter and salt, as Nature intended ;-) ).
The "look under the rocks" made me laugh because when I do that all kind of creepy creatures try to run away because they don't like any light and darkness keeps them alive. "Democracy dies in darkness" WaPo pronounces every single day.
Wikipedia has an entry for the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, which indeed starts in Arlington and had, until a few days ago, its western terminus monument, dedicated by President Warren Harding, in downtown San Diego. The Washington State road was an apparently separate 1939 thing. Oregon did have an influx of logging workers from places like Arkansas, so perhaps also Washington.
Frank Bruni's latest column "The Week When President Trump Resigned" has a nod to the Post's James Hohmann with respect to others (ex-Presidents, cabinet members) "filling the void".
My own comparison in a comment zone was to Georgia governor Lester Maddox, the restaurant owner who became a celebrity through his efforts to keep his restaurant all white. As governor, he had no idea of how to use the levers of power and influence. At least Twitter hadn't been invented.
Interesting how the highway numbers persist. US-99 used to go from LA to Seattle and on to the Canadian border. Then it was superseded by I-5, but CA, OR and WA keep parts of it still under the designation State-99, except where I-5 follows the same alignment. There's even US-199, the number meaning a branch off US-99, even though US-99 doesn't exist any more. In the San Joaquin Valley, I-5 pioneered a new route on the west side, leaving CA-99 nearly as important as US-99 was, as the connector for the major cities and towns.
In Denmark, when a new freeway from Hamburg to Copenhagen pioneered a path up Jutland away from the previous highway, the land values were appraised beforehand, and the government took a hefty tax from the vast increases for commercial sites along the new highway (pastures turned into commercial sites), on the grounds the increase was a result of the highway, which was a government investment. Nothing like that happened along I-5, of course.
In case some folks have been too busy to go check Charles Pierce's remarks on the topics du jour:
What to do when the neo-Nazis and KKK start strutting down the street in YOUR town? Why, give them some music to march by! What else?
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57089/rosanne-cash-kkk/
The Brownshirts' song was Horst-Wessel-Lied. Is it one the way back? The first verse, translated:
Raise the flag! The ranks tightly closed!
The SA marches with calm, steady step.
Comrades shot by the Red Front and reactionaries
March in spirit within our ranks.
Comrades shot by the Red Front and reactionaries
March in spirit within our ranks.
It's a good tune -- there are a lot of good German marches. My German major college roommate (who also taught me Horst Wessel as irony) said Der Jaeger aus Kurpfalz is like Dixie to some Germans.
To extend this, in college Western Civilization 1A we all saw The Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's movie about the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. It wasn't hard to connect the dots, between that event and WW II and associated massacres. I suspect today's US population contains many who can't connect the current nationalists/racists to any previous events.
The book cover with Bannon that allegedly infuriated Trump:
http://www.npr.org/2017/07/18/537885042/inside-the-shakespearean-irony-of-trump-and-bannons-relationship
CS (and CP), I was thinking about Yakety Sax before I watched the video. I still think I'm right, but you would have to speed up the march quite a bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHmskwqCCQ
Guessing Joel will be in Corvallis with an eclipse drone. Locally, school will be abandoned Monday afternoon.
A German student I knew at my football-crazy land grant university commented that a lot of the game spectator stuff would have been strictly off-limits back home. Too Nazi.
The season is approaching. January's schedule now includes a 3-night marathon of orchestra, Pink Martini, Renée Fleming with orchestra. Five orchestras in four weeks.
A city commissioner in Eustis, NW of Orlando, suggested setting up a refuge for unwanted Confederate statues. Fellow commissioners and constituents were not amused. The county lacks Confederate monuments but has a history of lynchings, featured in Gilbert King's "Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America."
It's discouraging to think back at how much effort it took to abolish lynchings. There's still a long way to go.
New Yorker has posted "Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington: Was President Trump’s richest adviser focussed on helping the country—or his own bottom line? by Patrick Radden Keefe
AP explains this is why Mr Icahn resigned from an unpaid position as an advisor to President Trump. What next?
I was thinking about the "marching music," and while that passage from The Sorcerer's Apprentice on the tuba was lovely, I began to consider other tunes.
"Jingle Bells" would be good; "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know" would be good; and "The Colonel Bogey March" would be fun because it's a lively tune and you could slowly speed it up until you had the marchers hurrying along at a brisk trot and getting all out of breath and sweaty.
Oh, there's just all kinds of fun that a couple of musicians could have!
I've seen football and cricket games in Oz and UK. They never did national anthem, military color guard before the game. An air force flyover would be considered a ridiculous waste of taxpayers' money. Back in the late 50s in Oz, God Save The Queen was be played before the newsreel at the movie theater.
Now the anthems are played for national team games (England vs Switzerland) but not for club games -- the players might be from any country. In US baseball the players are pretty cosmopolitan, too, but they do the nationalism bit. In Canada, do they sing O Canada before MLB games? I suspect very few of the players are Canadian.
I would like military parades performed with waltzes, that would be much livelier.
I looked up the Dodgers -- they are 65% born in USA. I know my friend who briefly played for them and still sings the anthem about once a year would hate this (he voted for Trump), but the patriotism show should be dropped from sporting events. It's irrelevant to the purpose of the event.
Here they play the national anthem even at the opening of the symphony season.
Elephant Waltz would have been nice.
I suggest kazoos doing Wild Blue Yonder.
"The Star Spangled Banner" is a waltz.
Might be fun to perform the anthem as a mazurka, with emphasis on the second beat of each measure.
In other news, ignorance persists -- although I always enjoy apocalypse predicters winding up with egg on their faces afterwards, performing logical contortions to try to rationalize their mistakes.
"Conspiracy theorists use the Bible to claim the eclipse is a sign of the apocalypse":
http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article166475397.html
Loose "lypse" will synch their slips.
I ♥ Jumper!
Holy carp! I only now came across the following article, written BEFORE the Charlottesville demonstrations and terrorist attack (which makes it all the more prescient regarding Trump's subsequent reactions).
"My meeting with Donald Trump: A damaged, pathetic personality — whose obvious impairment has only gotten worse":
http://www.salon.com/2017/08/12/my-meeting-with-donald-trump-a-damaged-pathetic-personality-whose-obvious-impairment-has-only-gotten-worse/
...Trump embodies that old therapists’ saw “perception is projection.” You can use this handy tool to locate the truth, exactly opposite from whatever he just said. He has a weight management problem, so women are “fat pigs.” He can’t stop fibbing, so his primary opponent becomes “Lyin’ Ted Cruz.” His career is rife with fraud so the former secretary of state becomes “Crooked Hillary.” He is terrified of ridicule, so Barack Obama is a “laughingstock.” When he says America’s a wasteland but he’ll make it great again, we know his secret fear...
Trump’s whole life is a fraud that Robert Mueller may soon expose as a criminal enterprise. His business career was a disaster till a book someone else wrote and a TV show someone else produced made him a celebrity. He then fell into the only line of work he ever prospered in: licensing that celebrity. He does it pretty well, but Zsa Zsa Gabor did it first and Kim Kardashian did it better and neither of them should be president...
I've heard at least one performance of Stravinsky's arrangement of the National Anthem. It was in effect Banned in Boston.
I assuredly watched "The Geisha Boy" as a kid in Puerto Rico.
Don't overlook Charles Ives' imaginative Variations on "Ämerica":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variations_on_%22America%22
Composed in 1891 when Ives was seventeen, is an arrangement of a traditional tune, known as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (words by Samuel Francis Smith), and at the time the de facto anthem of the United States. [...] Ives prepared it for a Fourth of July celebration in 1892 at the Methodist church where he was organist in Brewster, New York. He performed it for the first time on February 17, 1892, and made revisions to the work until 1894.
It went unpublished until 1949, when the organist E. Power Biggs rediscovered it, and prepared an edition for publication. He incorporated it into his repertoire, and it became a regularly performed piece by American organists. In 1962 it was orchestrated by William Schuman, and premiered in this version by the New York Philharmonic under Andre Kostelanetz in 1964. The Schuman orchestration formed the basis of a wind band version by William E. Rhoads, published in 1968...
The interludes are Ives's first notated use of bitonality: the first combines F major for the right hand and D-flat major for the left hand and pedals, whilst the second combines A-flat major and F major.
Ives' biographer Jan Swafford notes that whilst it might be tempting to hear Variations on "America" as a satire, the probability is that Ives meant the work as a sincere exercise in variations for organ. He adds that whilst Ives was capable of musical jokes, they are usually considerably broader than here. Ives was not deaf to its comic potential however: he later noted that his father "didn't let me do it much, as it made the boys laugh" in church...
SCC: "America" (not "Ämerica"). Darn United States-International.
Joel reported from Madras.
So what will everyone here be doing for the eclipse today? I'll be channel-surfing network coverage this afternoon. Also, doing the "pinhole camera" thing in order to view the partial eclipse safely, assuming skies are clear enough. Then tonight PBS is airing a NOVA special, opposite Trump's address (which I wouldn't be watching anyhow).
From James Hohman's Daily 202, "The elites strike back — getting under Trump’s skin":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/08/21/daily-202-the-elites-strike-back-getting-under-trump-s-skin/599a4e1230fb0435b8208f3a/?utm_term=.604c428340aa
...Make no mistake, Trump cares deeply about these snubs. He has spent his entire life trying to get onto the A-list. He’s a Queens kid who has tried hard to win acceptance in Manhattan. The pomp and circumstance of the presidency were big draws when he chose to run. He was genuinely excited about the ceremonial duties of the office after he unexpectedly won the election. More than most presidents, whatever he may say to the contrary, he has shown a love for ceremonies like the one at the Kennedy Center.
What he does not like, and goes to great lengths to avoid, is public humiliation. After his experience at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, when Barack Obama and Seth Meyers ridiculed him from the stage, he announced that he’d skip this year’s. He didn’t throw the ceremonial first pitch at the Nationals home opener, as past presidents have, because he was afraid of getting booed.
As an alpha male, Trump seems to take special satisfaction when people who are richer, cooler and better looking than him kowtow. It seems silly to have to write this, but it’s true: Having his ring kissed seems to be one of Trump’s favorite parts of the job. But there’s not been very much ring-kissing lately...
LA Times story points out that, while the Koch brothers sat out the election, they're steadily gaining influence at the White House. Border adjustment tax? Ten thousand phone calls from the Koch network. Dead.
A CNN story documents the destruction of a Florida Medicaid program for children, evidently to benefit insurance companies that had made large political donations. May the perpetrators spend eternity as sick children.
The eclipse cut the temperature and provided a nice quality of light for weeding.
Likewise Mr. P went out to pick green beans for dinner during the partial eclipsem in part to see if it would be any cooler or darker.
Don't miss Petri's latest column, "Great American Eclipse: Winners and Losers:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/08/21/great-american-eclipse-winners-and-losers/
So Trump departed to the Washington Post March.
New cream wallpaper in the Oval?
Do you mean Oval Office? The Oval is a stadium where they play cricket in London. :-)
Thinking of stadium, the Ellipse and the area south of it would make a nice parade ground for tanks and missiles. Maybe an Arc de Trump, too.
I didn't watch/listen to Trump's speech, but if "The Washington Post March" was played for his recessional, I wonder if the person who chose it will suffer professional repercussions.* Or, in the spirit of tyrannical royalty, "Off with his head!"
* I'd like to think the selection was a sly subversive dig that the person figured Trump would be incapable of recognizing, although no doubt he's found out one way or another.
No doubt Trump will enjoy delirious adulation at his Arizona campaign rally tonight, especially if he pardons Arpaio there. I can only hope that Trump goes "off-message" during the evening and damages himself even further with the American public (not to be confused with an ever-narrowing band of Trumpistas).
I took the afternoon off yesterday. Bailey and I experienced a partial eclipse here as I had doubts about making plans in advance and bet on the sure thing over possible gridlock, rain and totality. We toasted with craft brews as 2:00 p.m. arrived, sitting in the front under the pecan tree's shade.
Other family made the trip and experienced totality. We did not text or call each other. They may know how to act after all.
The crescent never got thinner than a frog hair here but the scattered dappled crescent shaped spots cast on the ground through the leaves were pretty. Bailey had come through, producing a pair of Eclipse Glasses as the last 30 minutes of darkling commenced. The street light came on. Crickets and cicadas were quiet and had been for a few days. None of the local owls said anything, the deer remained hidden and no coyotes pranced. I haven't seen a crow in a week.
Trump may be less unpopular than anyone else in politics.
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/08/22/the-only-thing-less-credible-than-trump-is-everything-else/
What it's like to be a dog. This guy's had promising results using MRI to predict whether a dog will make a good helper for people with disabilities. Via a story at New Scientist. http://gregoryberns.com/what-it-s-like-to-be-a-dog.html
Of course, being a CAT is like being royalty :-)
(And being me is like being a tortoise, just plodding along doing my work slowly but steadily)
Florida, for the first time, executed a white man for killing a black man. Used a couple of new drugs, too.
First time? Really?
Come over here to the Left Coast. Yeah, housing can be extremely expensive (because this is where so many want to live), but it's a royal mixture of peoples, and it seems the interests of most of the groups are being dealt with to some degree, and consequently we don't see aggrieved groups. Whites like me may no longer be the majority in numbers, but we're still doing okay. And it seems other groups are doing okay, too, which explains why they keep coming and driving up the house prices.
A rant I have inside me and occasionally issue: US workers should blame US consumers for much of their problems, not those unfair people in other countries. You used to make steel, assemble appliances, and have lost your job? Well, that's because the American consumer has been taught the only thing that matters is consuming MORE, which means they will always go to the lower price product, so the manufacturers buy Chinese steel, the consumers buy Chinese electronics, and the former US makers of those products lose their jobs. Tariffs make things more expensive and cause consumers to change their choice, but we could also look at where things are made, and let that be a factor in the decision. But we don't. So we get what we pay for, in a sense.
The next step is the new products originate outside the US, so US workers don't lose their job -- they never had it in the first place.
À propos of US consumers wanting to buy cheaper goods, in today's WaPo, "One way to make sure workers weren’t abused while making your clothes":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/24/one-way-to-make-sure-workers-werent-abused-while-making-your-clothes
China is getting somewhere with product development. There's been a lot of develop in Japan or Taiwan, make in China.
I've scheduled a visit to Portland, but think it'll be postponed due to the hurricane season. The Atlantic has quieted for now, but we're already at the letter H. It's a little bit later than last year's Hermine, but that was a busy season. In 2005, we were already at J.
Princeton University Press continues to release provocative books. Check their web page for:
• The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848
• The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (the True Believers who ran Russia lived in a giant Moscow apartment building, until Stalin put most of them on trial and had them killed. A thousand pages).
• Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby. (All about the Museum).
http://press.princeton.edu/
Dave, is that the Portland in Maine (with a slight risk of hurricane) or the one in Oregon (state where you used to reside)? Or is it risk of a hurricane striking Florida that concerns you?
Having fun this afternoon chortling over some of the vignettes in Hax's annual Wedding Hootenanny:
https://live.washingtonpost.com/carolyn-hax-live:-wedding-hootenanny-2017.html
The Portland that should have gone ahead and renamed itself Multnomah.
This is looking like a busy hurricane season (of course 1992 with Andrew hitting south of Miami was a quiet one), so I think the chances of cancelling/delaying the September trip are high. I nearly lost my October vacation last year to Matthew and in 2004, a visit to Arlington was put off by Frances, rescheduled for two weeks later, only to be wiped out by Jeanne.
Joel's doing Harvey from Washington. He did Ike from Galveston.
BTW, the National Institutes of Health have banned "climate change," so investigators with grant abstracts using that term are being told the term will be removed. Orwell would appreciate the no-nonsense, straight-faced notices that are going out.
But Trump is against censorship and speech codes...
Shoot, I'd been looking forward to the prospect of Joe Arpaio in pink undies and prison stripes, bivouacking among the Hispanics in an un-airconditioned outdoor tent in the Arizona heat (and monsoons and dust-storms).
We don't have any Boodlers in Texas, do we? Harvey's getting nastier and nastier as time passes, and while I can't think of any down there, that's not necessarily significant.
P.S. Okay, okay, I admit it -- I'm a robot! So there!
The National Weather Service at Corpus Christi is still operating, complete with radar. Wind speeds are not available. In Aransas County, hurricane conditions are possible through Sunday night. Temperature is 76, rising to 85 by 5 am.
The TX Governor has asked for more federal aid. Do I have to say what's wrong or rather inconsistent about that?
Does Tal_Greywolf still live in Houston? Is anyone in contact with him?
Look for the latest New Yorker cover, called "Blowhard", issue of 28 Aug 2017.
"How to Make Fun of Nazis":
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/how-to-make-fun-of-nazis.html
...For decades, Wunsiedel, a German town near the Czech border, has struggled with a parade of unwanted visitors. It was the original burial place of one of Adolf Hitler’s deputies, a man named Rudolf Hess. And every year, to residents’ chagrin, neo-Nazis marched to his grave site. The town had staged counterdemonstrations to dissuade these pilgrims. In 2011 it had exhumed Hess’s body and even removed his grave stone. But undeterred, the neo-Nazis returned. So in 2014, the town tried a different tactic: humorous subversion.
The campaign, called Rechts Gegen Rechts — the Right Against the Right — turned the march into Germany’s “most involuntary walkathon.” For every meter the neo-Nazis marched, local residents and businesses pledged to donate 10 euros (then equivalent to about $12.50) to a program that helps people leave right-wing extremist groups, called EXIT Deutschland.
They turned the march into a mock sporting event. Someone stenciled onto the street “start,” a halfway mark and a finish line, as if it were a race. Colorful signs with silly slogans festooned the route. “If only the Führer knew!” read one. “Mein Mampf!” (my munch) read another that hung over a table of bananas. A sign at the end of the route thanked the marchers for their contribution to the anti-Nazi cause — €10,000 (close to $12,000). And someone showered the marchers with rainbow confetti at the finish line...
Which brings us to Charlottesville, and the far right rallies that will surely follow. To those wondering how to respond, Dr. [Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace] says that “nonviolent movements succeed because they invite mass participation.” Humor can do that; violence less so.
The broader issue, in her view, is this: Why do oppressive regimes and movements invest so much in fomenting violence? (Think of our president and his talent for dividing the country and generating chaos.) Because violence and discord help their cause. So why would you, she asks, “do what the oppressor wants you to do?”
I still think that having a handful of trumpets playing "Jingle Bells" and "Jesus Loves Me" -- and other appropriate songs -- would be a great idea. Trumpets cut cleanly through the ambient noise, and what could be sillier than "Jingle Bells" on a hot summer afternoon?
I was thinking more along the lines of this:
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-kazoo-ensemble
Somehow, "Jesus Loves Me" doesn't seem quite appropriate for protesting the KKK, neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites.
I was in Corpus Christi for Hurricane Allen in '80. My apartment was right on the bay but opened on the leeward side. Somehow the power stayed on and the local TV station which normally went off the air late, played Mae West movies in between storm updates. I spent some time with a half gallon of white wine on the back deck watching debris including a galvanized roof fly over. A day or two later a friend and I drove to Aransas Wildlife Refuge (home to whooping crane revival efforts) to check it out. Somehow I got the Toyota stuck in sand hopelessly. This meant a five mile hike out.
There is some sort of rare exotic mosquito which has eggs which reside dormant for years, only hatching after the most torrential rains. This was their night and they were hungry. We could only run so much, so when walking our arms were almost blacked out by feasting insects. We finally got out of the refuge and to a phone.
Jumper, you lead a far more colorful life than I ever have!
In the "those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them" category, JA reports that "FEMA director says Harvey is probably the worst disaster in Texas history":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fema-director-says-harvey-is-probably-the-worst-disaster-in-texas-history/2017/08/27/ef01600a-8b3f-11e7-8df5-c2e5cf46c1e2_story.html
Galveston 1900, anyone?
Galveston 1900 killed a lot more people (6-12,000 vs 5 so far) and did more damage relative to what was there at the time -- essentially destroyed Galveston. But now millions live in the area being flooded, who may all suffer damage, lose a car, etc., which multiplied by the number of people affected is a huge total. It would be interesting to come up with a metric to compare disasters at different points in time.
The Martin Redish article in NYT is good, and he was on the air today https://backgroundbriefing.org/
The point is that courts have ultimate authority over unlawful behavior via injunctions, which lead to contempt of court and potentially jail time if the behavior continues. Giving a pardon to someone guilty of contempt of court destroys the courts' power to regulate the executive. The president could say, "Do this illegal act, and if you're caught, I will pardon you." For example, Nixon saying that to a Watergate burglar. Nixon didn't go that far, but Trump has opened the door. The original idea of the Constitution was the executive would not have such unconstrained power, but would always be subject to the Constitution, limits that could be imposed by the other branches if needed. The founders didn't want a king.
NP,
TGW lived in Houston. He was severely ill the last time we heard from him.
I've somehow never had a long stuck hike. Luck.
The technical terminology of "___ year flood" or storm surge, or whatever has to be dropped. New Orleans' shiny new levees are only 100 year, which means at least a ten percent chance of getting blown in the next decade. Could they consider orderly abandonment of the lower parts of the city?
Houston doesn't seem to have shown any political interest in the elaborate construction that would be needed for storm surge barriers and pumping systems. Flood management is something they've paid attention to, but as the Houston Chronicle has shown, the urban area's growth is so fast, and hard surfaces increasing so rapidly, that it's fiendishly difficult to merely keep up. a Red Queen situation.
Louisianans with small boats have been heading west. Corpus Christi is looking like a good base for relief.
Lots of Texas residents living in areas with low probabilities of flooding have no doubt been flooded. A small percentage of them must have bought flood insurance anyway. For the insurance program, it's like the reverse of winning the lottery.
Reading "Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a bit of a chore but the underlying thesis is solid. Extrapolating statistical probabilities beyond the richest part of the underlying data is a fool's errand. There are some things that are so fundamentally low probability/high risk such as asteroids or volcanoes, or slightly less so, super-hurricanes that guarding against them is just impossible.
Following Twitter has exposed me to some valuable insights I wouldn't have found elsewhere. One valuable thread is that flooded highways is an intentional outcome of Houston's disaster management strategy, such as it is. It gives water a place and path to go while protecting property. The perhaps not entirely unintended consequence is that it makes mass evacuation much riskier and nearly impossible. And just where do you send 5 million plus people?
Due to global warming we are in an arms race with nature and we are going to be making hard decisions in the couple of decades on what are acceptable losses.
One important difference I've noticed on TV between Harvey and Katrina is that now people are allowed to bring their animal companions with them: they've shown quite a few dogs with their humans in rescue boats (presumably cats are being brought in pet-carriers).
During Katrina, animals weren't allowed, prompting a good many folks not to evacuate when ordered because they refused to leave their animals behind (possibly to die).
I finished McPhee's "The Control of Nature" the other day. I had read some of it before long ago. It is still very relevant. To say the least.
Next [but not really next, as I'll finish Cixin Liu's second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy, The Dark Forest, first] is Jared Diamond's Collapse which has met with some criticism. I suspect it's worth a look despite such criticism. Or rather the resulting dialectic is where the value might lie.
I've heard Diamond speaking or interviewed, and he's a bit over the top in selling his hypotheses, but he's a prof of geography (my major) at UCLA (where I attended K-6), so he can't be all bad.
Diamond is extraordinary, but his book went overboard. It's provided lots of opportunities for alternatives if not outright debunking. Science in the past year had research on why the Norse quit Greenland. Worsening climate helped but a collapsing market for walrus ivory may have been more important. Ivory from Russia was cheaper.
Google Maps shows the road mess in Houston. The good news is that the city isn't isolated. Bad news is that it's impossible to get around very well and open roads (9 pm eastern) were congested. My guess is that disaster relief people would be urging the public to stay put and off the roads as much as possible to allow relief workers access.
Houston Intercontinental Airport's webpage is utterly uninformative, but United, for which it is a big hub (formerly Continental), has this: "Due to Hurricane Harvey, United flights to and from Houston Intercontinental are canceled until at least noon on Thursday, August 31, and additional flights to and from Texas and the Gulf Coast may be affected."
Is a road under let's say 5 feet of water still a road?
5' water = 50' to 60' snow.
Joe Arpaio is considering running for Jeff Flake's senate seat. I think he'd get brushed aside like dandruff.
I have some virtual acquaintances reporting from Houston-- safe but their local roads are fully flooded and water coming up to their steps as of yesterday. I wanted to share this for the shoe fashion snark (Warning: contains images of 45). https://twitter.com/NoahGrayCNN/status/902511801262329856
Thanks for the assistance dog MRI book. I've read the article and saw newsclips on this, this sounds interesting in a "I may check that out from the library" way. I succumbed to sheetcaking on Sunday night. A one-pan recipe for fudge cake, halved.
Re the inevitable Trump trainwreck ahead; many cyberhack/warfare sites have been shut down in the last month.
Alphabay (dark bitcoin site, was used for sex trafficking among other things), Strontium sites (Fancybear hack sites) are now the property of Microsoft by a court injunction, and they cannot be deleted. Clearly they will be used as evidence. Also, Stormfront was not just shut down, it's blocked from being deleted, and a chat host shut down chat and saved chats indicating they planned to do violence at C-ville including car attacks. That will almost inevitably be checked and impounded as possible evidence in the murder trials. If true, it could bump the charges up to Murder One-- premeditated, planned murder-- and possibly subject the whole group to criminal conspiracy charges.
Maddow apparently did a segment last night tracing all the Russian banks and their ties to Trump. I haven't found it captioned online yet. If you can find it open access (no cable provider login), let me know.
In all, I would say that it looks like a key phase of the Russian probe is finished or nearly so. Marcus Hutchins (who shut down Wannacry, but is charged with writing and selling malware that was sold and used to hack banks. He admits writing, not selling/distributing.) is out on bond in Wisconsin but they want to revoke the terms of his house arrest (while his defense wants him to have even more freedom) and discovery has been sealed, indicating some evidence may be of use to other cases.
The court injunctions are blocking deletion of data from these sites , which means these are likely to be evidence in other cases.
Political consultants (not all US) are subpoenaed. Simpson and Steele have already testified re the dossier. Manafort’s noose is tightening with all the discovery and subpoenas (he wants to deal, rumor has it, but no deal.) . Felix Sater seems to have flipped, according to the WaPo story's implications ("sources") and that is going to make the WH panic. I suspect he has already done his testimony and depositions.
Russian sanctions have been passed and after August 31 vendors of SWIFT (atm and bank transfer software) will no longer vend it to two Russian banks involved in the Crimea.
Sen. Burr of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has proposed a very extensive bill hat makes many recommendatios and demands full reports within 60 days of all electon hacking and strategies from DNI, CIA, and secretary of state of all 50 states, plus a lot of other goodies (it blocks the possibility of cybersecurity coordination with Russia, about everything else Trump has been floating.) Text here: https://www.congress.gov/115/bills/s1761/BILLS-115s1761pcs.pdf Note it also has a "bug bounty" program (heh heh.) A lot of provisions in what seems a simple refunding program for CIA. Since this is by a Republican senator, I think bipartisan passage odds are high.
Trump has carved out exemptions for Citigo in his Venezuelans sanctions, which will benefit Rosneft (which has an interest in Citigo) so he is STILL trying to help Putin. He will do this until he is out of office and in jail and his assets seized. I hear his advisors are now alarmed about impeachment. Just now?
Yes, I'm riveted to the legal and cyber side of things. This is uncharted waters for our country. The fastest way to get rid of all these traitors would be to prove our election was thrown. Let’s see.
Dave, Collapse was written years ago when the evidence was in favor of such. I agree with you that a lot of it was shakier than thought, but it's still a good read. I like "the World Before Yesterday" best, though. I recommend that instead.
Given Diamond's wide range of speculation, he did pretty well.
Reconstructing past environmental and social history is fraught and even now, we have to deal with things like a mysterious weather-affecting volcanic eruption that must have happened, but no one knows where. We know that birds went extinct as people and rats spread across the Pacific, but details are difficult to work out. There turns out to be a late arrival of people and dingos from India to Australia, while the original Australians keep getting older, as do the original Americans. Old famines and epidemics are hard to interpret, though splendid parish records in places like England sometimes help. The pre-European Amazon and Central America remain mysterious. We are reasonably sure that North America and the Caribbean had fairly large populations, but I think still fuzzy about how they supported themselves. Cuba looks like a difficult place with (I think) shrink-swell soils, serpentine barrens, and all sorts of difficulties for farming. But corn had come from Venezuela via the Caribbean islands.
There is reason for keeping Citgo and Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. going. PDVSA is the country's main business, main source of government revenue. The government has managed to impair those revenues by its own actions. The business model is to blend Venezuela's heavy oil with lighter US oil to make a marketable export product, so there's a lot of interest in Houston.
Yes, but right now Houston is in the middle of a new hurricane Lake Harvey. I object to the Rosneft profit. It's a way to bypass the sanctions. Exempting Citigo from the other sanctions means Venezuela will have to rely disproportionately on it for income. It could be extortion.
Story on Trump Rat: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/08/29/a-giant-inflatable-trump-rat-will-tower-over-washington/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.41cb6e0b69ab#comments
Posted on somebody's remark that maybe America would have a Guy Fawkes day in honor of Trump's perfidy, given our spirit of protest and these inflatables.
"... there will also be an annual comedian's festival, where among other things, there is a contest to retell "The Aristocrats" joke-- "aristocrats" of course replaced by "Trumps."
There will be many very obese pumpkin-headed scarecrows set on fire or otherwise ritually destroyed. There will be symbolic breaking and spraypainting of tiki torches. We will have people in bear costumes and fancy underwear streaking through the crowd, carrying plastic bugs on their fur. Each bug will have a candy packet inside. Who catches them and the bugs gets a candy bounty, then.
And there are Trump and Putin impersonators french-kissing on a float, before they fall through a trapdoor.
And it all ends in flag-waving and cheers. I like this. But first, we need to get rid of them. "
First things first.
At least one English town has a spectacular Guy Fawkes fire parade.
The coming month could be politically catastrophic. Speaker Ryan has announced that the debt ceiling will be raised, but he's been inclined to do what the Freedom Caucus demands (good Vox profile of its leader, Meadows, who is a buddy of Trump at the moment). Strong chance of failure to agree on appropriations (continuing resolution, actually). Flood insurance has to be reauthorized. Harvey relief? I don't think Trump will be involved in any meaningful way.
I haven't seen this meme variant yet, but...
Trump: Kim Jung Un is starting to respect us.
Kim: Hold my beer.
And now for something completely different:
--The Houston Food Bank (www.houstonfoodbank.org) is now helping to feed evacuees, of which Houston has LOTS, so they badly need donations.
--The Texas Diaper Bank (www.texasdiaperbank.org)- Babies don't stop needing diapers when they're in shelters, disaster relief agencies don't provide diapers, and carrying a diaper bag through chest-high water is not easy. Big problem! Serious need.
--The Houston SPCA, the Houston Humane Society, or animal rescue organization of your choice: http://abc7.com/how-you-can-help-animals-impacted-by-hurricane-harvey/2355030/
Lot of critters in deep trouble and the animal rescue groups are doing everything they can, but they badly need funds.
A distinguished North Korea expert has a thoughtful column on Trump's policy mess at the Post. My comment:
It's starting to look as though there won't be many appointments to the State Department (other than plum ambassadorships) until something changes in Washington. Perhaps Tillerson will announce his reorganization of State, or the White House will allow Tillerson to begin recommending appointees, or Tillerson (or White House personnel) will quit, opening up the appointment pipeline. Or maybe Trump's vision of having the military handle foreign relations means that State can be vastly shrunk. The shutdown of hiring programs points in that direction.
There seem to be quasi-serious proposals to partially disarm North Korea with carefully designed, low-yield nuclear strikes that would kill only a few hundred people, mostly military, and not make much of a fallout mess.
________
That last sentence is meant seriously.
If such low-low yield nukes exist.. well, we also have conventional and not-so-conventional weapons that also could do the same without danger of nuclear fallout. :(.
Mr. Hastings is in a grumpy mood as he has had to have his ears doctored. Even pulled pork sandwiches and other treats do not change his mood enough. He's not really to accept that he has to have more doctoring for a week plus. This should be a fun fall ahead.
At least he's getting comforted.
I see that another commentator is worried that Trump might actually sit down at a table with Kim.
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