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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 27, 2020 15:08:18 GMT -5
Dialed up Fatman last night.
Interesting film. Hard to classify it. The plot is probably best described as "surreal", but the direction and cinematography don't mirror that surrealism.
I can't think of much I can talk about that's worth mentioning and also not a spoiler. There is some clever and subtle stuff here. Worth a watch.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 25, 2020 15:17:21 GMT -5
I'm not sure. The idea of the deep state is that there is a fairly large group of people who are secretly controlling the government, and that the group is so covert and skilled at working behind the scenes that the rest of us can't figure out who the members are or what exactly they are doing or manipulating or what they are controlling, correct? Another idea being that people believe they are active and exist, correct? I'm just seeking understanding. I don't think it's sinister or secretive. My understanding of the Deep State is that there are thousands of civil servant type employees that, for a large part, run the government. The elected politicians are, to some degree, figureheads. So, the elected (or nominated) officials have a hard time steering the Titanic government of the US. Because Trump wanted to change the direction (180 degrees) from what most government agencies have been doing for decades, he put in place directors who were largely opposed to the current mission of the agency to try to reform it. But it was an uphill battle because the Deep State employees resisted every step of the way. Also of note, many of the agencies of government have expanded their reach into our governance beyond what was in their charter. Peter has ranted for years about the EPA's overreach. A similar case can be made for other agencies. Biden, on the other hand, has nominated people that have experience and are in agreement with the direction these agencies have been moving for decades. Thus, I quip "The Deep State is back!" (It's meant to be a joke. But one rooted in reality. And the pudding needs to be dove into to know if the outcome is tasty or not.) That's pretty much how I interpret the term. "Deep State" doesn't (or at least shouldn't) imply anything sinister or directed or nefarious. It's just the natural state of large bureaucracies to become inward looking. Back when I was working for the City of Omaha, I spent a lot of time with the Mayor's Chief of Staff. Paul Landow. Good guy. One of his favorite topics was explaining the reality that bureaucracies are inherently resistant to change. Landow and the Mayor (Mike Fahey at the time) knew, and the bureaucracy knew, and the Mayor and Landow knew that the bureaucracy knew, that they had at most eight years to make whatever institutional changes they intended to make. Back when all the key city leadershop jobs were filled via patronage, it was easier. But that system brought its own set of problems. Back in Evansville in the 60's, my grandfather was a Chief in the fire department...until the wrong guy won an election and the next thing my grandfather knows, he's a 50yo hose dragging grunt in the fire department. The Federal government is all that on steroids.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 25, 2020 14:29:45 GMT -5
It's like the Cliff's Note to a Steven Pinker book.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 25, 2020 13:45:20 GMT -5
Over the weekend, Lydia talked me into binge watching seasons 1 and 2 of Cobra Kai. Originally released on YouTube, it was recently released on Netflix.
It's surprisingly well done, even if there is a bit too much pandering for my taste.
The basic setup takes the universe from the Karate Kid movie franchise and fast forwards to the present day.
Daniel is super-successful car dealer with all the money, a smokin-hot wife, gorgeous home, (mostly) perfect kids, etc.
Johnny is down and out, estranged from his ex and their son, living hand to mouth in a dive apartment, etc.
With that as the setup, there was a scene in season 1 that I thought was brilliant. Johnny was talking with one of his current-day students, and rehashed the events from the original Karate Kid...and in his version of events, you could understand (quite reasonably) how he considered Daniel to be the aggressor/bad guy during the events back in the '80's.
I was surprised to see such a thought provoking direction in show that really has no pretense of much depth.
Turns out, that theory...that Daniel was the bad guy all along...is not new. Fans of the movie have been discussing it for years. Here's a video from 2015 that lays it out quite well:
Food for thought.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 25, 2020 13:30:02 GMT -5
And I figure I'm saving 100% already. Well, if you insist on wasting your money that way, I doubt anyone is going to be able to talk you out of it.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 25, 2020 12:53:47 GMT -5
Here is the historically average curve of most pandemics, though it is labelled Logan County. speedbinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/8-Logan-County.jpgAll other graphs are pointless til this burns itself out or is slowed by appropriate social distancing or vaccine. Just the way it is. Note the nearly undetectable run up to the quickly upsloping curve. There are two types of charts used when looking at this stuff:
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 24, 2020 21:04:04 GMT -5
Good to hear from you, Rick!
No.
It's not safe. 😁
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 24, 2020 11:34:44 GMT -5
I must be bored this morning. I started reading the study, and this popped out at me: 0.25 vs 0.08? Something's up with that. So I went looking in the study for an explanation, and they don't have one. Unless someone can explain to me what I've got wrong here, I think the study is (really, ridiculously) flawed. Every epidemic/pandemic/whatever follows more or less the same path. No cases, then cases jump up, then the epidemic burn itself out and it tails back off. The slopes going up and coming down can vary depending on the particulars of the epidemic, but more or less they always look like this: When those charts are created, the question that always comes first is "On what date did the epidemic start?" Epidemiologists generally use "the date of the 1000th case" to define that moment. There isn't anything magic about the number 1000. You can use 10, or 100, or 10,000 or whatever. The point is you need a normalized metric for defining the start of an epidemic in a given population. The reason for that is that different populations will all, more or less, experience the same epidemic curve. It will go up, and it will go down, and it will follow the same general shape. But, depending on the date a given population is "seeded", the curves will start at different times: For reasons that are both self-evident and made abundantly clear by our experience with epidemics, higher population/higher density locations tend to start on the curve sooner than lower population/lower density locations. There's a reason that the first heavy outbreak of Covid in the US happened in New York and not Cherry County, Nebraska. The fatal flaw in the Kansas study is that they made no effort to account for that basic epidemiological fact. Kansas implemented a mask mandate, but there was spottiness across counties on its implementation. Some opted out. The counties with a mandate were the higher population/higher density ones, and the counties without a mandate were the lower population/lower density ones. What the study was looking at was something like this: So "Someplace" (ie, the larger, higher density counties) experienced this: And "Someplace Else" (the smaller, lower density counties) experienced this: All of which is to say: The study claims to be measuring the effectiveness of mask mandates, but I say all they are measuring is the fact that the epidemic hit sooner in bigger counties than smaller counties. All that is theoretical. Here are some actual county-level charts. First, Douglas county, a relatively high population county: Here is Logan county, a small population county: If you superimpose one on top of the other, you see that it reflects exactly what I was speculating: The epidemic hit Douglas well before it hit Logan. (The vertical axis becomes meaningless when you do this, but the shape of the curves still has information.) Go back to that quote I started with. What does 0.25 vs 0.08 mean? What it means, and I think the subsequent analysis I've presented here bears it out, is that all this study really shows is the effect of different epidemic start dates in different locations. This final graph is also noteworthy. It shows is that the "mask mandate" counties are gaining new cases at a higher rate than "no mask mandate" counties. The fact that the mask mandate counties are seeing a downward trend in new cases, and the no mask mandate counties are seeing an upward trend is further evidence that all this study really does is look indirectly at epidemic start dates. Nothing in my analysis should be taken as "I just proved masks don't work". But nothing in this study supports the conclusion that masks work.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 16:55:24 GMT -5
just like Stalin in the '30s. I think Trump is more of the Hitler type. This is a reflection of my pessimism. If you have one side that thinks they are fighting Stalin, and another side that thinks they are fighting Hitler, what you are really seeing is that no one will put any limits on what they will justify in pursuit of their righteousness.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 16:05:46 GMT -5
I suspect you have already cast your last vote. The Party will pick the winners in 2022 and that won't be a recognizable Republican or Democrat party. It will be The Socialist Party (Formerly known as Communist). Kiss your private property good-bye. Just opinions of course, but I don't see full blown communism ever coming here or private property taken away etc. Too many guns floating around for one thing. Most likely over the next few decades we are going to wind up being Sweden or(shudder)Norway. Taxes will increase even more, government will slowly take over big $$ natural resources, there will be free education and free health care of maybe questionable quality. Those that don't have the IQ or desire to strive for more in life will welcome these changes. Those that do strive for increasing their economic prosperity will find it harder to rise to the top. But I bet they still will. We'll see. I think you might find "The Coming of Neo Feudalism" by Joel Kotkin to be interesting. Or chilling.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 15:33:55 GMT -5
I suspect you have already cast your last vote. The Party will pick the winners in 2022 and that won't be a recognizable Republican or Democrat party. It will be The Socialist Party (Formerly known as Communist). Kiss your private property good-bye. Help me understand what you mean by that. Are you saying that any voting that takes place from now forward is just for show, and the outcome will always be pre-loaded?
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 14:47:03 GMT -5
If the Republicans had run a competent experienced candidate (of which they have plenty) It would have been a landslide and probably congress as well. Big missed opportunity. Maybe. Probably. But like everything, it's complicated. One way of looking at it is that the only way for TheRepublicans, Inc. to get rid of Trump was for him to lose. 2024 is a long way off, but they do have some pretty good possible candidates. Our own Ben Sasse has to be right up there. He ruffled a lot of feathers around here with his anti-Trump posturing, but I think he was looking ahead. Part of what I was getting at above if that I expect the Democrats to run against Trump in 2024. Sasse has pretty well inoculated himself on that. My general sense of things is that more than anything, people want about 10,000% less drama coming out of Washington for a while. I think everyone's exhausted.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 14:42:35 GMT -5
...but you're not "rescue your puppy from the jaws of an alligator without losing your cigar" tough.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 14:10:18 GMT -5
I do wish at this point Trump would just go away.
If he wants to go out with a bang, do what other presidents have done and pardon everyone in sight. Go crazy with the pardons. Have a pardon orgy.
But just go away. It's over.
The interesting part of all this is I think the Trumpistas should be declaring victory right now. Not on the election, but on the things that Trump did over his four years. To the extent they had a point, they made it. And like it or not, Trump will be remembered in history as an enormously consequential President. Not just for the SCOTUS, but for everything. In any number of ways, he changed everything. Some good, some bad, but historians will wrestle with Trumpism for decades.
A more clever Trump would be peacocking around right now talking about that. The unending tilting at the election windmill is a loser.
********
Pessimism mode on: I think we're screwed, have been screwed for quite some time, and are well past the point of unscrewing. I've said many times that this predates Trump, and I still believe that. One possible future is that Trump serves as an excuse for excesses on both extremes, and in so doing becomes the running justification for things that we normally wouldn't tolerate. That's the future I expect, and I don't see any way we avoid it.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 13:25:00 GMT -5
Good enough for me.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 10:53:47 GMT -5
Jeff, if someone had proposed such an audit a year ago, I might not have had any particular objection. When I hear this only after one side is unhappy with the election result, and without any evidence that there were irregularities, I'd say no, unless the proponent of the idea could show excellent reasons for not proposing this earlier. We need finality. I think the President's unprecedented resistance to the result is going to get people killed. It's jeopardizing and delaying the necessary effort to get people vaccinated against the virus. It needs to stop. What's interesting is that most of the concerns being voiced a year ago (at least if my casual perusal of the headlines is any indication) were coming from the left. The previously mentioned analysis reported in Mother Jones, for example. To make sure I'm not misunderstood: I'm perfectly content with Biden winning, I think Sidney whatsername is a hack (an absolutely laughable one at that), and I think the Trump legal team is a bad joke. Biden will be inaugurated right on schedule. But having taken a cursory look at the technologies used in these machines, I find myself rather fully invested in the concerns that were being voiced a year ago. I also think what you call the "President's unprecedented resistance" is a street that runs both ways. Team Biden resisting an audit is no different than Team Trump implying fraud. The decision to audit is independent of any result.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 10:14:18 GMT -5
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 10:07:42 GMT -5
I avoid "news".
My list of go-to reading/listening is:
Glenn Greenwald Matt Taibbi Jesse Singal Andrew Sullivan Kevin Williamson Andrew McCarthy Tim Pool Bret Weinstein Michael Tracy Jonathan Pageau (added on edit)
(I'm probably leaving some off)
In general, they constitute my collective filter. If something happens of sufficient interest or meaning that it gets some attention from someone on that list, I'll generally be interested enough to pay attention.
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 9:53:36 GMT -5
You are so far out on a limb, Jeff. Maybe. But I am troubled by the reality that what I'm talking about would be really simple to prove/disprove. An independent audit by external computer forensic security experts would settle it. Why not? The cost is negligible. The time is negligible. Why the pushback?
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Post by fauxmaha on Nov 23, 2020 9:48:41 GMT -5
But if different numbers were sent would't a hand count of the printed paper ballots reveal the error? It apparently didn't in GA. I guess they are going to repeat the machine recount Depends on the process, I'd say. I don't know precisely what "hand recount" means. Are the machines still involved? There were roughly five million votes cast in Georgia. I find it hard to imagine how those could have been recounted (truly by hand, that is, without some manner of automation) in the available time.
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