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NPR
Apr 10, 2024 11:43:06 GMT -5
david likes this
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 10, 2024 11:43:06 GMT -5
I still listen to NPR, along with BBC, and subscribe to the WaPo, NYT, New Yorker, and Atlantic, and follow the likes of Reuters and Forbes. I like the WSJ (outside of their op-ed page) and the Guardian. I'm leery of sources like The Free Press for reasons clearly visible in the comment thread to Berliner's essay.
And I have no reason to question Berliner's account--I'm thoroughly familiar with the guilt-and-shame response* that is the lefty version of the anger-and-resentment response that is characteristic of the righty end of our culture. The double-whammy of Trump's election and the George Floyd murder reinforced the liberal-guilt syndrome (which has annoyed me for most of my adult life) and sent much of the "left" into a tizzy of overcompensation, especially in those parts of the culture that were already "liberal." I have limited patience with identity-driven policies, even though I sympathize with people who have had to put up with bigotry and condescension. (No, not conservatives--they've been whining all the way to the bank and the Federalist Society for years.)
So I'll buy Berliner's description of an insufferably oversensitive politico-moral climate at NPR--but I'll also observe that the right was bitching about NPR and the MSM and the lefty academy long before this current lefty moral panic.
* Related to the examination-of-conscience practice that reinforces the Catholic Church's psychological control machineries.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 9, 2024 13:03:33 GMT -5
Guild has been acquired a couple of times, but not, as far as I know, by venture capitalists. The current ownership is Yamaha, which, like previous owners Fender and Cordoba, is actually an instrument-making outfit. Which does not, I suppose, mean that the funding didn't somehow come from the venture-capital world--just that Guild is not necessarily burdened with a bunch of debt that its new ownership will somehow shed while stripping all the assets for a quick return.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 8, 2024 17:46:55 GMT -5
Been rainy and overcast here since yesterday, and even though it wasn't actually raining at 2 pm, there was enough heavy cloud cover so that the sky and ambient light just looked like it will at 7:30 tonight, just before sunset. Then it got back to normal gloom. Nothing like the clear-sky partial eclipses I've seen, which are a bit spooky. But given how dry it's been around here, I'll gladly take two or three days of rain over a viewable eclipse.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 6, 2024 13:56:14 GMT -5
The Folk Society (and First Presbyterian Church) hosted Mike Dowling last night--the first time we've managed to book him. A really pleasant, laid-back concert with a good bit of interaction with the audience despite the size of the venue. We had chairs set up right in front of the sanctuary/stage, but Minnesotans still are reluctant to sit up front in church. (At Bo Diddley's you can't get very far from the stage and stay inside the building. It's cozy.)
Mike has two more local gigs before taking off for summer-camp season, and I'll be looking hard at driving for one or both. Almost certainly to the Creek House concert in May.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 3, 2024 15:53:48 GMT -5
Why not just get one that reads "Key my car right now"?
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 2, 2024 17:25:36 GMT -5
Joe Flaherty from Pittsburgh makes his career in Toronto and names his daughter Gudrun. Is this a great country or what. (Canada, too.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 2, 2024 14:27:35 GMT -5
Peter, I'm not in a position to know the details of your particular situation, but what I've seen in St. Cloud--since well before Obamacare--has been consolidation of at least two kinds. One nominally non-profit organization (CentraCare) has hoovered up nearly every medical practice and specialty, starting with the local hospital and extending to small primary-care practices to imaging/radiology to pharmacies to nursing homes.
The practice of our original doctor--48 years ago, he was one of the hot young internists in town--was acquired by CentraCare, and he seemed to me to become increasingly impatient with the management overhead and retired a bit early. I quite liked his (also CentraCare-employed) successor, but I was also annoyed by the big-organization stuff, so we switched to a smaller-but-substantial group and were quite content, until they sold themselves to CentraCare. Now, CentraCare is very good at medical stuff--everybody we've dealt with has been competent and pleasant, and the hospital's reputation is very high (especially for cardiac care). Nevertheless, despite improvements in its record-keeping system (our old doc and I went through the teething period of electronic-records adoption--"You're not diabetic. How did that get in there?"), the business end still feels like a big bureaucratic machine. And the protocols for something as straightforward as an annual exam mean that the doc has about 20 minutes with me, and should I ask a question that's not on the checkoff list (and I'm not Medicare patient), it generates a separate office-visit charge. First time that happened, I'd asked about my blood pressure and found a $285 charge for what was supposed to be a covered annual checkup. Arguing with the billing people did no good--it was coded as a separate encounter and billed accordingly.
I doubt that much of that has anything to do with Obamacare or low Medicare reimbursement. Though the rules and rates that result from negotiations with insurance companies might. And that doesn't address the effects of private-capital acquisitions of ERs, ambulance/EMT services, and various specialty practices (anaesthesiologists, for example). (Dental and veterinary practices, too.) What all those have in common is the view of medicine as a surefire way to make lots of money from a market in which demand is essentially infinite.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 1, 2024 18:24:24 GMT -5
Actually, I'd trade the pot for a second kitten. And an extra decade or two of life to raise them.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 1, 2024 18:03:42 GMT -5
I'll take the kitten and some pot, thankyouverymuch.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 1, 2024 15:04:32 GMT -5
Addendum: "Red line" political/moral positions are always going to be problem points in setting policies and regulations. The underlying problem is where and why exactly one sets those red lines. I understand the absolutist nature of some of them--the life/death and human-status issues behind some anti-abortion positions, for example, or (to a lesser degree) the binary-gender views affecting the treatment of transexuals and non-binary identities. But other factors lead some politicians to take red-line positions, and some of them are pretty clearly attempts to cater to factions with particular material or political-power interests. And holding matters X or Y hostage to unrelated issue Z strikes me as dysfunctional--but then, the farthest-right rump faction of the House GOP isn't interested in function.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 1, 2024 14:04:21 GMT -5
Some issues can't and/or shouldn't be compromised. Abortion is an example. You either allow it or you don't and there really isn't any middle ground to be occupied. With respect, that's not really the case, except for those whose position is that the product of conception (that is, a fertilized egg) must never be removed from the maternal body by human intervention. In fact, the very meaning of "abortion" is not singular and undebated. (I won't expand on that last statement--the range of positions is easily researched.) Aside from the matter of the moral and legal status of the termination of an otherwise successfully-proceeding pregnancy, there are non-trivial questions about prenatal development--the progression from zygote to embryo to fetus, the point at which various structures appear, the point of viability--as well as philophical/moral/theological questions about personhood and rights--including risk-benefit calculations and the possibly conflicting rights of fetus and mother. So legal/ethical arguments about abortion are neither simple nor binary.
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 1, 2024 11:19:01 GMT -5
When I saw the thread title, I thought, "Or, as we used to call them, '8 a.m. intro to lit courses.'"
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 1, 2024 10:03:51 GMT -5
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?
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Post by Russell Letson on Apr 1, 2024 9:54:03 GMT -5
Flat-foot Floogie with a Floy-floy! (Vout-o-reenee!)
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 31, 2024 23:43:42 GMT -5
Great coordination. Stunt arranging. I couldn't manage to get past the two-minute mark.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 31, 2024 14:09:01 GMT -5
Since "compromise" seems to have become an emotive term*, how about "deal-making" or "working things out" or "getting things done"? The practical work of politicians (and others who have to devise policies, practices, and protocols) is doing stuff, and since there is rarely unanimity in figuring out what things need doing and how to do them, adjustments get made. People compromise all the time, in settings from families to the UN.
In matters of moral or practical importance, the crucial problem is nearly always where to draw lines, and when either party sees absolutes at stake, those lines are often hard--and that's where compromise is seen as a moral failing rather than as a practical mechanism. I strongly doubt that the proposition that compromise is a "progressive strategy" can stand up to close examination. (For that matter, I'm not sure that "progressive" is a category with hard, impermeable boundaries.)
*Actually, it already has a negative edge, thanks to its application to spies and women's virtue and structural integrity.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 29, 2024 11:42:55 GMT -5
I also tune into NPR/BBC news (AKA "other people's miseries") until C. asks for music, since she can't fall back asleep to voices talking--she has to pay attention. Me, I just drift off whether it's massacres or Bach or Bill Evans.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 29, 2024 11:13:19 GMT -5
I realize that every case of tinnitus is a bit different, but as far as I can tell, the brain's signal processing can alleviate its most annoying effects. Mine (which I've had at least since my teens) has gotten louder and more intrusive, but it still doesn't seem to interfere with most of my hearing needs (Is my guitar in tune? Is the furnace/toilet running? Is that a robin or a purple finch? Is that a diesel or ordinary SUV idling outside?) I understand that treatment for new cases consists mostly of adaptive training, along with some environmental adjustments such as white-noise generators at night. (My version of that: play music on the bedside radio. KBEM's streaming service runs jazz all night.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 29, 2024 10:50:32 GMT -5
It's the water the entire culture swims in. More often, progressive thinking believes itself to be moderate, and conservative knows itself to be counter culture. Every culture has a water in which it swims. And in every culture bigger than, say, a village or a clan there are currents and countercurrents. The culture I grew up in was a mixture of moderate Republicans and Democrats (leaning toward the GOP, then and there), Christian (Catholics allowed, Jews side-eyed but not openly persecuted), and heteronormative, among other things. The culture that surrounded me (off-campus) in grad school (different there/then) was redneck-conservative, fiercely heteronormative, and suspicious of Catholics (not really Christians) and hostile toward anybody darker than I was. (I'm pretty pale.) Times change, places remain variable, and presumed norms are all over the place. The public expressions of these norms are subject to all manner of pressures and fashions and market forces, but, as Wallace Stevens suggested, the squirming facts exceed the squamous mind. BTW, that silly quiz identifies me a progressive, though I can point to all the places where my particular and precise notions don't quite fit the three click-stops on offer. And that's before we get to the design of the questions themselves. Which is why I have very little patience with phone surveys that are attempting to map public opinion--my answers are most often "It depends."
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 27, 2024 13:28:00 GMT -5
I can't really do justice to "My Funny Valentine," which is conventionally a girl's song, but I'd do it in a NY minute if my pipes were up to it. But then, it's a love song to a guy that was written by a gay lyricist, so there's already some genderbending going on in it. (Gerswhin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" has a similar attraction, though uncomplicated by Ira's conventional orientation. I would just bull through "Though he might not be the man/Some girls think of as handsome," which is a brilliant phrase. I'm too old to be insecure about how I present.)
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