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For Jeff
Feb 8, 2020 20:58:44 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by fauxmaha on Feb 8, 2020 20:58:44 GMT -5
Ural...as in "Ural be sorry!"
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 7, 2020 11:20:55 GMT -5
The problem with Schiff's mockery is that it goes directly to a more broadly relevant reality. Peggy Noonan speaks of it here: I'll beat a well-worn drum once more: All the arguing whether or not the national media is biased misses the point. Of course they are, but that accrues entirely to the Democrat's detriment. This is why Schiff was blind to how his mockery was going to go over. He probably thought he was being clever, and why wouldn't he? I'm sure it played well on NPR. More broadly, impeachment was a continuation of a process that began before Trump was inaugurated to de-legitimize his presidency from the start. What could have and should have been a wake up call turned into a missed opportunity. The Left, in their proper role, stands as the voice of "the outsiders—with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class". The Democrats, as the historic party of the Left, used to understand that. But today, the singular political reality they steadfastly refuse to accept is that all the sneering, all the talk of "bitter clingers" and "deplorables", all the oh-so-clever Jon Stewart mockery, all the reflexive accusations of bigotry and racism...all of that has left them on the wrong side of their traditional voters: What we used to call "the common man". Worse, it has left the party institutionally blind. They have replaced their traditional "deplorable" base with a new one. Call it the alt-woke, Social Justice Theory, oppression-industrial-complex. But they forgot to ask the people in Stevens Point what they think of that. Instead, any suggestion that it doesn't speak to their interests is met with "bigot!". Here's a simple pattern to look for, and I guarantee you can't un-see it once you see it: Observe Democratic candidates. Observe how they frequently not only criticize Trump, but Trump's supporters. Then observe Trump. Observe how he criticizes his political opponents, but never the people who vote for them.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 7, 2020 10:07:10 GMT -5
We got us a foot of wet heavy snow overnight. I was digging the truck out and heard a power transformer explode from down the hill. No power so got the wood stove going. Made it down the hill but had to drive over 2 small downed trees and slid in to a deer at about 1MPH and nudged the little guy out of the way. The truck has a locking rear differential which came in handy. It was like a north pole expedition just to get to the shop. Yeah, well, I...um...well, we ran out of coffee so I had to re-heat a cup of yesterday's left over in the microwave. Who's the macho man now?
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 6, 2020 15:54:48 GMT -5
I wonder how Obama would have voted, had he been in the Senate.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 6, 2020 15:46:05 GMT -5
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 6, 2020 14:30:13 GMT -5
What on earth are you talking about? He was a Republican governor from 2003-7. Ran for president in 2008 and won the Republican nomination in 2012. He has never been in congress. What votes are you talking about? George Romney died in 1995. Good grief I hate having to explain jokes.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 6, 2020 14:18:29 GMT -5
If George Romney is no longer a Republican but instead a natural Democrat... He's been voting democrat since 1995.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 5, 2020 14:35:12 GMT -5
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 5, 2020 12:51:46 GMT -5
I really can't overstate how much I detest the SOTU spectacle. It is a grotesque display of pseudo-monarchism, where the President orates while all the Washington bigshots bark like seals begging for a fish.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 5, 2020 12:22:31 GMT -5
This wasn’t a mistreak, it was gross negligence. Anyone familiar with software development and deployment will tell you that. It’s possible that the developers are incompetent, though it’s more likely that those who ordered and managed this fiasco are to blame (did I say Iowa DCC honchos?). My guess is that the Central Committee poobahs kept changing the requirement specs and perhaps other project goals then demanded, against the advice of the developers, that they go live with whatever they had when the deadline hit. All of that, and also this: The vendor that produced the app is explicitly ideological. "Our passion is to create a permanent advantage for progressive campaigns and causes through technology." When you make business decisions based on anything other than competence, this result is inevitable.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 5, 2020 8:35:29 GMT -5
Limbaugh wasn't lampooning the LA Times. The LA Times published an editorial by a conservative writer who generated the "Magic Negro" meme. (Yes, contrary to the paranoid fever dreams of conservatives, they do get guest editorials in "liberal" newspapers.) Then Limbaugh amplified and expanded on the racist meme. This is how the right wing echo chamber works. Speaking of fever dreams, you want to do a little digging into David Ehrenstein, pop a few aspirin, then get back to us? One suspects there is in fact an echo chamber at work here. The one that fooled you into characterizing a lifetime LGBTQ advocate with an unbroken, 16+ year string of contributions to ActBlue and various democratic candidates as a "conservative".
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 4, 2020 14:25:11 GMT -5
I don’t see it as a humiliation of would-be leaders. If that helps you enjoy it, so be it. It was a screw up that didn’t cost any of the results. It delayed them but that doesn’t change them. The caucuses are weird to begin with and IA might be better served with a primary only. Things like this happen without the world tilting, society ending, or stars falling from the sky. Regarding the technical foul ups, I think it's the perfect punctuation mark to bring to an end a bunch of would be Caesars running around telling us they are the ones who are capable of organizing everything.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 4, 2020 13:20:42 GMT -5
A lot of candidates today are asking them whether this was worth eating fried meat on a stick. You're saying that like eating fried meat on a stick is a bad thing. Oh, I think it's a great thing, in the "ritualized humiliation of would-be leaders" sort of sense.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 4, 2020 10:11:42 GMT -5
A lot of candidates today are asking them whether this was worth eating fried meat on a stick.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 3, 2020 17:01:55 GMT -5
Wow!
It's the nature of life that the people you encounter through the media age, and suffer the indignities of age, like the rest of us, but somehow being reminded that he is 69 years old and now with cancer feels surprising.
I have to say, that last paragraph from the AP is really out of line. Calling it "blatant racism" is not only a gross smear, and under the circumstances, totally un-called for, it is simply (as a matter of fact) incorrect.
The "Magic Negro" stuff from Limbaugh was him lampooning the LA Times, who published the following back in 2007. I took Limbaugh's point to be the asymmetry with which charges of racism are made. The AP, it would seem, made his point for him again, 13 years after the fact.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 3, 2020 13:41:31 GMT -5
Jeff: So it took the district that long--and that serious a charge--to get rid of an asshole? Did the previous district flag his record or allow him to resign without official notice of the real reason? That's a specific kind of organizational pathology--the violent-cop/pedophile-priest model. And, I wonder, what kind of school-board policies allow an administrator to unilaterally change grades? I know that such mechanisms exist in the university, but C. is generally notified of the fact and sometimes the reason (usually medical/personal-disaster issues). These are, after all, official records. Indeed, the pathology involved is familiar, and not at all unlike one Bishop passing off a troublesome priest to another. This guy survived in the Omaha district for about a year. As to the hands-on mechanics of a principal changing grades, I'm not directly familiar with the computer system being used, but the evidence I have is that, indeed, administrators can change grades. Presumably that leaves some breadcrumbs, which explains the principal leaning on the teacher first. None of this surprises me, in as much as everyone (from the Superintendent on down) is under constant pressure to "improve test scores". Easy enough to do when you're the one tabulating the results. I do have some sympathy for the impossible position into which the public has put the schools. The multitudinous pathologies I skipped over before are very real, and very much a large measure of why those students fail. Not all of it, of course. If you're nine years old with a measured IQ of 80, you're going to struggle. Of course, why you test to an IQ of 80 at age nine is a whole other discussion. In any case, as a society, we have few tools for dealing with those pathologies, mainly because doing so is really, really hard. So we warehouse those kids for 18 years, and hopefully keep them busy enough to avoid any real trouble during that time. If we manage to beat some rudimentary competence into them at the same time, that's a bonus. You want to hear a cheerful story? This one is also true. This school has a manufactured culture that promotes college degrees as the path to success. There is a constant drumbeat of praise for the wonders of going to college. That extends to twice-monthly pep-rally style gatherings in the gym where the teachers are conscripted to go up on stage and sing silly songs about the wonders of college, dancing along to popular music, etc. Go College! Go! Out of such nonsense, occasionally, a hero emerges. In this case a fourth grader we'llcall John Doe. Young Master Doe was thought of as something of a troublemaker, but principally because he was a bright and clever kid who bristled at the stupidity and regimentation of the school. Actually, he was smart as hell. Cool kid. So on this day, as the teachers are doing their thing, John has finally had enough. He stands up and shouts out "This is BULLSHIT!! It is all BULLSHIT!!". I love that kid. He didn't have the tools to really understand the dissonance he was perceiving, or to articulate it with any level of sophistication, but he got it. He saw right through the whole con.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 3, 2020 12:07:12 GMT -5
That's an area with which I have more than a passing familiarity. I agree in substance with earlier comments that this is way more than a function of how the schools are run. I think the root goes way deeper than this. The shortest-hand way of describing the way I view it goes like this: If you took a survey of 16 year olds, they'd more than likely do a pretty effective job of telling you about their rights. And they'd probably do a pretty effective job of telling you about a list of things they feel entitled to. Now, ask them "What are the duties that you feel society presses upon you?" and see what happens. Odds are you'd get reactions ranging from bewilderment to outrage. It's not that they don't subconsciously understand (at least some of) those duties. Things like "be honest" are, hopefully, understood, but never expressed as part of a comprehensive moral duty that the child has to society. And what of the child's duty to learn? At most, we press upon students the need to "get good grades", but it is always expressed in terms of how those grades (themselves an imperfect proxy for learning) will benefit the student himself. "Get good grades so you can get a good job", etc. How about this: You have a duty to learn because society relies on young people to perpetually re-learn the great truths that history teaches us, and without integrating those truths into your daily life, you are not adequately prepared to take your place in society. Without this sense of duty, you get exactly what the author from the Quillette piece described: There is no imperative that students actually learn anything, only an imperative that schools say students learned something. Naturally, parents demand that the schools say thus about their child. The idea of telling a parent or child "you got this bad grade because you didn't work hard enough" is exceptionally rare. Not impossible, of course, but rare. All this is said with the understanding that the schools are the tail, and society is the dog. Replace the 16 year olds in the above survey with random members of society of all ages, and you'll get the same result. The 16 year olds aren't the problem. They're just fish swimming in the water that surrounds them. Here's a true story, expressed with a bit of deliberate vagueness for reasons of prudence (I'm well aware of the water as well): A teacher in a public school entered a set of grades into the computer system. Typical result: Out of 30 some students, five got A's, 15 got middling grades, and 10 got F's. (I'll not bother with a long description of the multitude of pathologies in the "F" students' lives.) Principal calls the teacher into the office and says "We've got to get these grades up!" to which the teacher replies, in so many words "What do you suggest?" "You can go back into the computer...", the principal replies. "I entered the grades accurately according to the students' performance". "I realize that, but you can still go into the computer and change them", the principal insisted. "As can you", the teacher replied. "If you're instructing me to enter grades into the system that the students did not earn, I'm going to need to get that in writing." And that pretty much ended that conversation, but the situation was far from over. The principal did in fact alter the grades. And the teacher spent the next three months being tormented by all manner of abusive administrative oversight. The situation came to a close when the principal was bounced from the district for reasons of sexual harassment. (Also noteworthy that the principal was relatively new to the district, having been previously bounced from another for the same reason.)
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 3, 2020 10:35:11 GMT -5
God bless you, Mark. And you too, Joy!!!
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 2, 2020 22:45:35 GMT -5
How about them Chefs!
I was hoping they'd win. Looked grim for a while.
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Post by fauxmaha on Feb 2, 2020 13:04:21 GMT -5
Oh no! Goodness we've had our fill of bad news in recent times.
God bless you, Lar.
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