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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 14, 2024 17:11:40 GMT -5
Doc, check your irony detector--I think it needs new batteries.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 14, 2024 9:43:06 GMT -5
March adieu about noting.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 20:21:50 GMT -5
John: MAGA is a self-lumping social group*. And while "evil" is not a descriptor I'm comfortable with, I'm not afraid of "pathological" or "delusional" as a characterization of a movement that cheers when its leader says untrue or childishly nasty (to use one of of his favorite adjectives) things loudly and repeatedly.
I don't see any glaring problems with my description of the evolution of the culture that produced MAGA, or of the forces that feed its resentments.
* And they certainly are a group--they have hats and tee-shirts and bumper stickers and chants and all the rest of the things that make for collective identity. They're not the only self-identified sociopolitical group (all god's children got a tee-shirt), but you can pick 'em out of a crowd even when they're not the entire crowd themselves.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 12:49:15 GMT -5
Silly Ole--the winning number was obviously 6-7/8.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 12:45:50 GMT -5
Some people say Richard J Daley gave us John Kennedy. But was Kennedy a tool of the Daly machine? Was Truman a tool of the Pendergast outfit? FWIW (and as I think I have mentioned before), one of my great-grandfathers was a bagman for the New York State GOP--he'd come back home with a satchel full of cash, which was distributed to prospective voters from the back porch of his Canajoharie house. Or so my father told me that his father-in-law told him.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 13, 2024 11:22:26 GMT -5
From what I see with my own lying eyes as well as through the reporting of a range of outlets, there is emphatically not "nothing left to elect Trump." Instead, there is a substantial (if not solely sufficient) portion of the electorate absolutely and immovably attached to him personally and to his vision of the world. Then there are the opportunists, political and otherwise, who see advantage in remaining allied with him. And, thanks to a range of economic and social disruptions and unrelated matters (Gaza, for one) there are those who might move in Trump's direction or (almost as effective) refuse to vote for Biden. Trump has always won via leverage, and that redistribution of political-social-economic interests might well prove effective enough to get him back in office. At which point we will enjoy the reign of King Stork.
I don't know how many legs the GOP/conservative stool had (even after Renn's pretty thoughtful explanation), but the MAGA platform--and the way it is promoted by Trump and his allies--had me thinking of Germany in the early 1930s. I'm not sure that it can't happen here, but "not sure" is enough to contribute to five-in-the-morning worry sessions.
As for the "how did we wind up here?" question: The roots of MAGA in my lifetime start with McCarthyism and run through the John Birch Society to Tea Party movement. And on the professional-politics side, MAGA is intertwined with the dirty-tricks/propaganda techniques developed and polished by the likes of Lee Atwater and the scorched-earth political strategies of Newt Gingrich. A third strand to the braid is the backing money controlled by right-wing individuals (e.g., the Kochs, Richard Scaife, Robert Mercer), who leverage their influence by direct contribution or the creation of think tanks and policy foundations--or, in the case of the Murdochs and the Smiths (Sinclair Broadcast Group), entire news-media operations.
Now, there's nothing new about dirty tricks, rabble-rousing, bloody-shirt-waving, or plutocrats throwing their weighty money around in the political environment--nor is the GOP the only party in American history to have behaved badly (insert obligatory pointing at Chicago, Kansas City, and Tammany Hall). Nevertheless, there is a point at which quantity becomes quality (none of the three classic American corruption machines controlled the whole nation), and there is also a point at which the combined effects of media, money, political opportunism, and civic culture (AKA the culture wars) do indeed amount to a threat to our mostly-stable, kinda-democratic, not-too-dysfunctional system of governance.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 12, 2024 19:38:32 GMT -5
There was a time when we might have considered moving after retirement--the requirements included a liveable city, four seasons, not too hot, near a university and good health-care services. Then it turned out that we were already living there. C still has some wistful thoughts about, say, Portland (where her nieces live), but I remind her that by the time she's fully retired, I'll be 80 and she'll be 79-10/12 and that moving a house filled with books, music, guitars, and associated impedimenta is not a project for the officially elderly. It was hard enough 48 years ago, when all our worldly goods fit into a single 18-foot box truck--and that damn near killed me.
Besides, I like Minnesota.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 11, 2024 20:42:57 GMT -5
Evan, bureaucracy is as old as city-based civilization--it's a kind of division of labor and any social organization bigger than a village is going to invent some version of it, almost certainly organized along hierarchical lines, with a rulebook, and rules are generated from the top down*. I don't know where Orwell comes into this--his nightmare was the totalitarian authoritarian system, not the health department or the vehicle-licensing department.
* I'm not excluding ecclesiastical organizations, either. The Catholic Church has an impressive bureaucratic machine.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 11, 2024 17:29:25 GMT -5
Just wondering where the lines are for "authoritarian" in matters of general health and welfare. In public health matters, for example, is it authoritarian to close a restaurant or food-processing facility that is producing tainted food? To require vaccinations for highly-contagious diseases in schools? (I'm thinking of the smallpox vaccination I needed to be admitted to public school in 1949.) To forbid the release of toxins into waterways?
At what point should details of public health and safety require specific legislative action and language? What happens when a novel threat appears or is recognized? Do we wait for the legislatures to write them into the regulations?
I understand skepticism about and impatience with bureaucracy, but the "unelected" part is central to the deal. (And just because a decision-maker is elected doesn't mean he can't be bought, bullied, or bullshitted. Bullshat?)
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 11, 2024 13:59:23 GMT -5
How close is that to people who say that they don't belong to any particular church or that they don't hold with "organized religion"--sometimes called being "unchurched"? I suppose a "follower of Jesus" could be someone who has extracted the moral precepts from the Gospels without accepting their metaphysical foundations.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 11, 2024 13:16:01 GMT -5
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 10, 2024 11:30:53 GMT -5
The etymological entry here is interesting--I just assumed it was a semi-euphemism for "asshole." www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/asshatThough there is the example of the transformed Bottom to suggest an older association.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 9, 2024 19:39:21 GMT -5
Well, there's that matter of conflicing truths reported by multiple sources of revelation, followed by enforcement by explicitly authoritarian organizations. (Examples available on request.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 9, 2024 12:34:49 GMT -5
Hmm. Strong on rant, strong on mere assertion, weak on analysis.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 8, 2024 23:48:28 GMT -5
In my day I have deacquisitioned a '45 L-7, a '29 Gibson L-0 (the "Robert Johnson" guitar), a '60s Martin 0-16NY, several desirable Guilds ('59 F-40, '59 M-30, '65 M-20, '70 F-47, '78 F-30), and a Dell'Arte Sweet Chorus. Of all of them, the one that I might have kept was the L-7, except whenever it was time to take out an archtop, it was the Epi Broadway, and it seemed selfish to leave the Gibson in its case unplayed. I sold it via Willie's, and Nate told me that the young guy who bought it was tickled to have it. And I was pleased that it was going to be played and enjoyed.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 8, 2024 21:31:39 GMT -5
Nearly every guitar I've let go needed to be let go, and my threshold for needing to deacquisition is very high, so if I were given to regrets, I'd regret not selling off some of the guitars sitting in cases in the basement when the market for them was stronger. I suppose it would be kinda cool to still have my bright red imitation-Vox teardrop eeelecterick with the whammy bar and flip-up mute--though it was a thoroughly mediocre-sounding guitar and really hard to hold onto, physically. And in a perfect world (which means one in which I have near-infinite storage space and life expectancy) I would have kept my Deering D-6 banjo, but who really needs two six-string banjos? I'm not even sure I need two Cloutier guitars.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 8, 2024 11:01:05 GMT -5
I Googled (well, actually DuckDuckGo'd) "disable windows 10 copilot" and got a bunch of hits that suggest that copilot can be completely disabled, though it seems to require more under-the-hood activity than I think it should--registry editing always makes me nervous. But then, everything after Win 7 strikes me as being designed to discourage user control of features.
The real nightmare is C's office machine, configuration of which is 90% controlled by the university IT people, who in turn seem content to let MS set the defaults. She had to get permission to install WordPerfect (and can't use our personal copies--only the version the university paid the license for) and can't get any permission at all to install our preferred (and superior) file manager. Every time IT pushes out a set of updates, she has to make sure that they haven't reset her system to MS defaults.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 5, 2024 19:56:45 GMT -5
Actually, New York State still has the Regents exams, which are part of the system that leads to a Regents Diploma. A quick read-through of the Wikipedia article suggests that they're not quite the same as the ones that governed my high school education, but they remain content-specific comprehensive exams.
As for the letter, it strikes me as 1) badly written (and punctuated) and 2) maybe half-true on a good day, with a following wind.
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 2, 2024 17:46:20 GMT -5
This exchange from the House interrogation of young Biden appeared on Facebook, and I had to check to make sure it wasn't copped from The Onion. It's real, though. It starts on p. 134 of the transcript as published by the WaPo. I wonder if any other Democrats had similar fun at the hearing. Mr. Swalwell. Any time your father was in government, prior to the Presidency or before, did he ever operate a hotel? The Witness. No, he has never operated a hotel. Mr. Swalwell. So he's never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions at that hotel while he was in office? The Witness. No, he has not. Mr. Swalwell. Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval Office? The Witness. My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge. Mr. Swalwell. While your father was President, did anyone in the family receive trademarks from China? The Witness. No. Mr. Swalwell. As President and the leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in the family? The Witness. No. And I don't think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be the chairperson of the DNC. Mr. Swalwell. Has your father ever in his time as an adult been fined $35515 million by any State that he worked in? The Witness. No, he has not, thank God. Mr. Swalwell. Anyone in your family ever strike a multibillion dollar deal with the Saudi Government while your father was in office? The Witness. No. Mr. Swalwell. That's all I've got. The Witness. Thank you. www.washingtonpost.com/documents/2317b385-f967-42d6-ae32-79dedcbbef1b.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_3
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Post by Russell Letson on Mar 2, 2024 14:51:24 GMT -5
Photographic evidence of aging gracefully. Howard looks almost as young as John McCutcheon (71-1/2), who played for us last night. Not as tall, though with more hair.
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