Chief Justice Roberts turns out to be another of these establishment Republicans who pretended to want to repeal Obamacare until they had the power, then found ways to fail at doing it still. Only he has a lifetime appointment, so he doesn't have to pretend anymore.
We still have a 5-4 left-wing court.
Oh, Yale
This is funny. From the New Haven Independent, a call for Yale to change its name:
The icing on the cake is all of the discussion of the author's own white privilege, a call to be on the right side of history, etc. And then the poll on what Yale's new name should be. Nice touch.
Slavery is as inseparable from Elihu as these paintings depict. Such a namesake is a liability for Yale the institution. By that I mean a billion-dollar brand, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, an affiliated college in Singapore, and a huge healthcare network. This “open secret” is a ticking timebomb. It is about to go off.
#CancelYale trended this past week on social media, having started as a trolling of liberal elites by conservative influencers.
One example: “For an institution that prides itself on its so called progressivism, why has Yale not yet distanced itself from its namesake - a notorious slave trader?!”
To Yale’s chagrin, they have a point. It must be difficult to take a cold, hard look in the mirror when your face is covered in blood.
The icing on the cake is all of the discussion of the author's own white privilege, a call to be on the right side of history, etc. And then the poll on what Yale's new name should be. Nice touch.
Death of a Rebel
One of the best motorcycle enthusiast sites of late has been The Aging Rebel. He fell and died recently, I gather. Sic transit gloria mundi; requiescat in pace.
The Translations are a Nice Touch
A stupid book that I have seen enthusiastically recommended by non-stupid white females with college educations (and graduate school ones at that) gets a brutal but deserved review.
It's quite hard throughout, but running the academic jargon through Google Translate was a punishing move.
Meanwhile, you've invested so much time and energy into it, it seems awful to just declare it dumb and walk away. But sunk costs are sunk, here as elsewhere. The wisest thing to do is to walk away rather than throwing good money after bad. Yet, here, there is so much social pressure; so much pressure to conform, to go along, to show that you are one of the good gals.
The courageous thing is to not.
It's quite hard throughout, but running the academic jargon through Google Translate was a punishing move.
DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices.... [they] make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone). In a world where only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. “To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people,” or “Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness, describes whiteness as multidimensional…”This is a common flaw to a lot of these critical theories. You have to invest a lot of time and energy into learning the code, which is just a subset of the time and energy you have to spend learning the overarching system of interpretation. Along the way you probably have spent so much time and energy in just trying to learn the mode of interpretation that you have missed the fact that the problems the system alleges to uncover are actually baked into the mode of analysis.
DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. “When there is disequilibrium in the habitus — when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they challenge our capital — we use strategies to regain our balance,” she says (“People taken out of their comfort zones find ways to deal,” according to Google Translate).
Meanwhile, you've invested so much time and energy into it, it seems awful to just declare it dumb and walk away. But sunk costs are sunk, here as elsewhere. The wisest thing to do is to walk away rather than throwing good money after bad. Yet, here, there is so much social pressure; so much pressure to conform, to go along, to show that you are one of the good gals.
The courageous thing is to not.
I like Barr
I admire his professional performance as well as his skill in responding to hostile questions. He knows why he does what he does, and he remains rational under fire.
Goal posts on skids
The anxiety level in my county has jumped significantly, though I'm still not quite able to see a big change in objective danger. Two articles today, one in Spectator and one by Avik Roy, put their finger on my frustration in reading about 20 headlines a day on the uptick in cases in June (say, what happened in June?), which is that reports focus almost exclusively on new cases. Of course there are going to be more new reported cases if we test a lot more. What we need to know is, are we getting more hospitalizations? In particular, are we getting more serious hospitalizations, more ICU impact, enough hospital and ICU impact to overwhelm our medical facilities? Ultimately, more deaths? Not only do the press reports avoid these issues, preferring to blame Republican governors for forcing people at gunpoint to crowd up against each other in bars and churches, but I'm finding it harder and harder to find good data anywhere on the burden on hospital resources. Texas hospitalization rates are up, but why wouldn't they be, given that we made people delay elective procedures for several months? A good number of all the people who show up for knee surgery will also test positive for COVID. Is that what they're counting? It's impossible to tell from any of the data sources I've been able to find.
The Spectator article does try:
Still, for the last several months, there's been a very weird inability to keep our eyes on the original ball: hunkering down while the virus works its way through the population--something we never seriously imagined we could prevent--while protecting the people at highest risk and avoiding high-tech medical service crunches of the sort that initially terrified us in reports from Italy.
Somewhere along the way, people seem to have gotten the idea, first, that we could make the virus go poof! if we locked down long enough, and second, that we can really lock the economy down indefinitely.
The Spectator article does try:
There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections. Half the states are seeing cases decline or hold steady. Case counts are affected by more testing; the positive infection rate captured by testing is declining. The current caseload is younger, which is a good thing. The more people who have been infected and who recover, the more herd immunity is created.Mind you. I'm not 100% persuaded this is a fair picture overall. For one thing, deaths lag case reports--but deaths lag serious hospitalizations a lot less, so I'd rather hear about the latter. Also, overall U.S. rates may obscure an impending problem in a particular area, such as the state that's nearest and dearest to me.
Still, for the last several months, there's been a very weird inability to keep our eyes on the original ball: hunkering down while the virus works its way through the population--something we never seriously imagined we could prevent--while protecting the people at highest risk and avoiding high-tech medical service crunches of the sort that initially terrified us in reports from Italy.
Somewhere along the way, people seem to have gotten the idea, first, that we could make the virus go poof! if we locked down long enough, and second, that we can really lock the economy down indefinitely.
Reformation
I normally enjoy the New York Post, but this is off-base: "Democrats in Congress just doomed police reform." There's no reason for the United States Congress to be involved in any "police reform" except as concerns federal police agencies like the FBI, which admittedly could use some work. If a local police force work needs work, state and local officials should be taking care of it, unless we want to see results every bit an inspiring as those that resulted from federal reform of public schools.
The underlying red/blue political argument I do get, of course.
The underlying red/blue political argument I do get, of course.
OK, now they're just having fun up there
Drones tire of keeping noses to grindstone, strike blow for freedom, teach themselves acrobatics. Soon they'll be skateboarding instead of looking for jobs.
This just in
Groundbreaking research:
Have they considered taxing the rich?
With beauty being a valuable commodity in our society, it's no surprise that women might use it to their advantage when competition heats up.But only when competition heats up, mind you, which is why they found the phenomenon more pronounced in areas of "gender income inequality." Get rid of the competition, and everything becomes a reimagined paradise.
Have they considered taxing the rich?
Grizzly Bear Blues
Corb Lund's new album got some of my time today.
Here's a fun song for anyone who might spend part of the weekend with a glass of something.
The young lady singing with him is Jaida Dreyer, if you liked her voice. She's a little too Nashville for me, but she knows her tradition; and she turns out a powerful song now and then.
Here's a fun song for anyone who might spend part of the weekend with a glass of something.
The young lady singing with him is Jaida Dreyer, if you liked her voice. She's a little too Nashville for me, but she knows her tradition; and she turns out a powerful song now and then.
Compensating the choir unseen
I prefer to think of them as differently vital. What could better qualify someone as vibrantly alive, helping to weave the exciting human tapestry, than cashing a government check?
We need to reimagine what it means to be among the living, and every other part of society. I'll begin by denouncing my own part in othering the dead and failing to center their voices.
We need to reimagine what it means to be among the living, and every other part of society. I'll begin by denouncing my own part in othering the dead and failing to center their voices.
Orcs are just Misunderstood
Because of course, Dungeons & Dragons is taking steps to fight racial bias against orcs and dark elves.good against evil... light against dark, no that one clearly won't do... hm, strong versus weak is right out, because no one is 'really' weak (whatever their Strength score)... 'woke versus unwoke' is too close to 'good against evil'... well, the story's conflict will be, hm, how about 'us against the guys from down the street we just don't like'?
Wizards also pledged to take a more nuanced approach with the way it portrays the drow, a race of dark-skinned elves that are depicted as evil, cave-dwelling murderers.... Wizards says it will try to present these races as “just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples” in both the RPG game and its various works of fiction. It also pledged to loosen up the RPG game’s rules around racial bonuses, which previously deemed certain species to be stronger, smarter or more agile than others.That's going to make for exciting campaigns, the struggle of
“This option emphasizes that each person in the game is an individual with capabilities all their own,” the company said in its statement.
The New National Anthem: "Imagine" by John Lennon
Honestly, if they don't understand why that's a terrible idea, I don't know where to start explaining it.
Getting Warmer
The President keeps using this word, heretofore unfairly, but his opponents are drifting more and more in the direction of making him right.
Strzok had a big mouth
Well, metaphorically. He was way too explicit in his notes and texts, and inexplicably careless about destroying them. He must have felt completely invulnerable.
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