I'm going to a AAA baseball game in Norfolk today. Its a double header, because Thursday's game was postponed on account of the field being flooded.
Isn't Norfolk being super proactive about its fucked status, by contrast? Hiring Dutch and such as contractors?
One thing I heard about Norfolk is that the Republicans there actually agree that they have a problem. I imagine that goes a long way.
This is great news. Miami is a terrible place.
I love Miami. I like the Cuban coffee and the hedonism and visiting my friends there is always a total drug-addled bender good time.
I concur with Heebie. Miami can be a ton of fun.
Vanilla Ice always spoke highly of it.
Miami is in Florida and fuck Florida.
I concur with heebie and Sifu. We won't invite you to our meetup in the Versace mansion.
Without Florida, I probably wouldn't be an FPP.
12: Hope you guys bring scuba gear.
12: That's a crime scene now.
Like the rest of Florida.
These attacks are making me - dare I say it - rise up and feel some pride for Florida. F-L-O-R-I-D-A. Where men are the squarest and ladies are fairest of any old school down our way.
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I so do not want to have to go back to the ER. Thought I was in the clear. Vomited around 4 AM and again about 20 min ago. Pinkish shit but don't think it counts as vomiting blood.
If I have to g back, I'm going to make them keep e until they can take this godawful balloon thing out of my nose. The doctors claim that doesn't affect anything, but the nurses say that there's a vagus nerve there it could be stimulating
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Take your shirt off, twist it 'round your head. Spin it like a helicopter.
18: That sounds wretched, but I think I'd err on the side of "vomiting blood" w/r/t that description.
19 was to 17, but maybe it would help with 18 as well.
21: Yeah, I thought, "Oh, BG would definitely be admitted then."
Miami is nice!
I'm sayin' it twice!
Miami is nice!
23: Getting admitted is more expensive than staying in observation in the ED. $250 co-pay for getting admitted. Staying in observation is $100.
I went back.
Nice attending who told me that I should have filled the Valium prescription since it's good stuff to have around. But it was only for 3 pills, and I wasn't having trouble sleeping.
The Cuban coffee and food is fine in Miami but being only seventy and having to deal with the old people wasn't fun.
BG, it strikes me that it would be good if you could get a diagnosis. For the vomiting blood. I can't tell from what you say whether you have, or have not.
29: I'm going to throw my lot in with "a little mystery is the spice of life".
I endorse 28. Vomiting blood is not to be trifled with, although nine times out of ten it's fairly trivial, you can't ignore it.
Meanwhile, These attacks are making me - dare I say it - rise up and feel some pride for Florida.
Oh, dear. You heard about the ridiculous Florida redistricting debacle, right? That purple worm district is ridiculous.
Although President Obama won a narrow victory over Mitt Romney in Florida during the 2012 presidential election, Republicans control 17 of the state's 27 congressional districts. That means that, even though Obama won a majority of the votes cast by Floridians in 2012, Romney's Republican Party controls nearly two-thirds of Florida's U.S. House delegation.
As Lewis notes, Districts 5, 7, 9 and 10 are shaped the way they are in part because a Republican political consultant suggested that they be redrawn in a way that transformed them "from being four Democratic performing or leaning seats in early maps . . . to two Democratic and two Republican performing seats in the enacted map." So Republicans likely picked up two congressional seats because of the odd design of these districts.
Sorry, Florida, but cut out your crap.
In any event, Miami is not the only city that's fucked. Detroit is looking bad, for rather different reasons. Can we ix-nay the Publicans-ay now? The ones who love privatization so much.
Well, I probably swallowed some when the nose bleed was active. That's what they said yesterday when they thought that there was some blood in my vomit.
I've also consumed cherry jello since then which came up, so it's hard to figure out if some of it was the jello.
The current doctor seems to be trying to get to the bottom of what's going on.
A friend's wife came back from a bachelorette in Miami and reported that she'd made out with a random 20-something in a club. There's some debate about whether this entitles him to a similar peccadillo; I was taking his side, but the doomed-city aspect may be exculpatory.
Oh, I guess that should be Publicans-ray. I have no idea why I'm talking this way in the first place.
32: Probably best not to eat cherry jello for the time being.
31: you realize I live in one of the most absurdly gerrymandered districts in Texas?
36: No, I don't realize that. Explain?
32: You undoubtedly swallowed some. That can also cause nausea and vomiting and if you're sensitive it doesn't take much. And yes, avoiding red foods and drinks is a good idea until the Dx(s) are nailed down.
Good luck.
Oh, the big gerrymandering was after the 2000 census. Democrats fleeing the state, etc, to prevent a vote. They successfully carved up Austin into three districts stretching north to Waco, east to Houston, and south to the valley, which is our district. In between some versions were struck down by various courts. They made it even more ridiculous after this last census to try to get rid of Lloyd Doggett who is super awesome. So now we are in Doggett's district as part of a half-mile wide strip that runs north-south, but barely anyone else in our town is in his district anymore.
I mean, Florida is ridiculous but it's happened everywhere.
Okay. Thanks. Florida is not especially terrible for its congressional makeup, compared to Texas.
I have no idea, relative to the actual population, which one is worse. I'm just saying they're operating from the same playbook, along with two dozen other states.
Take heed, 'cause I'm a climatical prophet
Miami's soon gone just in case you didn't grok it
My town, encroached by waters that surround
Enough to flood and drown all of these clowns
Reactors in danger of chemical spill--
Feasible doom you just won't envision or feel
Flooded and swarmed--an en-tropical concept,
We preach no hype so you want to get with these
Projections we make, slim like our sigmas
Shrink like our error-bounds so fast, Other mod'lers say, "damn"
No time to debug continued-building plans
Suits flee exposure while tight'ning the noose
Hypnotized by profits as they press their boots
Sure there is a problem, but Yo - why solve it?
Launch out of orbit while mass death resolves it.
I think the question, and problem, is whether there's a significant discrepancy between the outcome of the popular vote in a given state, and how many seats the winning party of the popular vote actually came to hold. What was the outcome of the 2012 popular vote in Texas, compared to the number of seats Democrats and Republicans took (or held)?
I've never thought of Texas as a particularly purple state, so this may be an exercise in futility anyway.
The problem is that gerrymandering isn't the only explanation for a discrepancy between percent of votes cast and percent of seats won - first-past-the-post inherently makes that happen. (51% in every district = 100% of seats.) I'm not sure how one disaggregates the effects.
43 to 41.
CB is more masterful than I could ever be.
I'm not sure how one disaggregates the effects.
Sure. Still, you can see gerrymandering when you see it, can't you? I'm not inclined to suppose that it's a negligible matter, even though it's not the only explanation.
When scientists rig observations to act as Chicken Little, they deserve to be treated like Chicken Little.
46: Lately, yes, when the districts run hundreds of miles, but we aren't often asked to evaluate the sensicality of generally accepted districts. Population patterns themselves can be weird and snaky.
So how does one go about shorting real estate in Miami?
49: I think it starts with other people's money.
49: I was just wondering about that. I guess the idea is "Under this contract, I promise to sell you one (1) acres of land, at the current location of Miami Beach, for one thousand dollars ($1000), in the year 2050." Can you actually do that with land? Also, while I'm willing to bet on actual sea-level rise, I'm not eager to bet on the possibility of Miami Beach being rebuilt as a bizarre sea fortress protected by billion-dollar seawalls.
Sort of on topic of Miami Beach Wall or guillotines?
There was a thing in DKos once analysing the net effects of gerrymandering in various states and also the net effect of the VRA districts. IIRC Texas was had only very mild levels of congressional level gerrymandering and the VRA was a clear net benefit to Dems, with the two being closely related - they can't do too much gerrymandering with minority areas and the only area in Texas with a high proportion of Dem voting whites is Austin, everything else is solid red so no need for gerrymandering.
Republicans here in MA generally get a lot of votes for statewide races (sometimes they even win them: Scott Brown, Weld, Romney, etc.). Yet they don't ever get any House seats.
FPTP for the lose/win?
Pause-play-ish whiny personal comment: I have about a year I really can't remember, basically because I was actively trying to be as close to catatonic as I could during the months of my post-rape depression and mental instability, and that was followed with fun with psych prescriptions, which left me fuzzy and with holes in my memory too. So tonight at the grocery a guy came up to me because he remembered me from a class we took together when we were both in our teens and he'd never forgotten some of the conversations we'd had, etc. Obviously I don't have a moral obligation to follow up with some guy who had a crush on me 15+ years ago even though it is more tempting given that he's the top pastry chef at the grocery store and thus there'd be obvious perks, but I felt so bad not remembering him and not really wanting to explain that no, it wasn't him, it was me and so on. This really should have gone on alameida's thread, I suppose, but I don't feel like copying and pasting, so unpause.
he'd never forgotten some of the conversations we'd had, etc.
Yeah, it sucks when you actually manage to wait out the statute of limitations and then can't remember where the money was buried.
57: Well, the good news is that we both survived linguistically after having taken basic Russian from someone who thought Americans were too stupid to learn Russian and thus barely taught us.
He'll friend you on Facebook within a day, and you guys will be acquaintances and he'd probably hook you up if you stop by his bakery with your adorable children.
59 is right. No reason to feel guilty or to ever tell him you didn't remember him.
59: Absolutely - a paradise of free cookies beckons.
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I forgot this best delicious tidbit from the trip to the funeral. I've described Jammies' siblings here before, but in short, they are...not deep thinkers.
The youngest is a 25 petroleum engineer. He's not dumb, he took AP history classes, etc. He just got back from his second trip to Europe, with some of his frat-bros. I don't know how to say this except to say that...he just found out about the Holocaust. One of his friends wanted to go to the Holocaust museum in Berlin, and Jammies' brother basically found out that the whole thing happened. "I hated it! I mean, I'm glad I saw it but now I hate Germans. I can't believe it."
I really did my best not to laugh too hard in his face.
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Has anyone thought of creating a memorial or a museum or in some other way attempting to increase awareness?
Perhaps people should really emphasize the evil nature of whatever ruler could cause such a tragedy in the first place.
But not if they want to win arguments on the internet.
I assume next summer, the big revelation will be "People argue on the internets?!?"
"I hated it! I mean, I'm glad I saw it but now I hate Germans. I can't believe it."
Wrong thread.
I have many productive hobbies and diverse interests. 4096!
I see, way upthread, that someone here was actually going to this: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/11/3459229/norfolk-tides-baseball-flooding/
The telling detail, for me, is that someone from a team called the *Norfolk Tides* thinks coastal flooding is "surreal".
My grandfather had a few strokes in his mid 80s and then suffered from lung-cancer-caused oxygen deprivation in his later years, and it left him fairly senile. When he was about 90, we were having Christmas Eve dinner, and someone thoughtlessly sat him next to this young German couple in their late 30s (this is mid 2000s). The man, not really knowing what to say and just trying to make conversation, turned to my grandfather and said something along the lines of "I've never been there, but I hear Norway is a very beautiful country." My grandfather replied, "It was, until you invaded it." Somehow my grandfather had forgotten the war was over, and accused this man of being a Nazi and his friends of being German soldiers occupying Norway. The man tried to explain that while the war was terrible, he had been born in the 1970s and had learned about it in history class, but my grandfather was having none of it. My brother and I were giggling too hard to properly diffuse the situation. We made sure to keep my grandfather away from Germans after that.
a team called the *Norfolk Tides*
Soon to be renamed the Dogger Bankers.
he just found out about the Holocaust
So mind-boggling. It reminds me of a discussion not too long ago -- probably here -- about ... was it Americans who were college students in the '60s explaining that they actually hadn't known at the time that the Vietnam War was going on?
There was a Pew Research Political Typology report a few days ago that I had to stare at for a while (the chart took some sussing out): a profile of so-called political Bystanders, people who aren't registered to vote and pay essentially no attention to current affairs. Apparently this is 10% of the population. I was actually surprised that it was only 10%.
In our survey, Bystanders were often more likely than other political cohorts to answer "don't know," to say they've "never heard of" the topic in question or to refuse to answer questions altogether.
Of course that doesn't really speak to whether such Bystanders ever had a history course.
When we were studying the Holocaust in 6th grade, I had a girl tell me that I probably would have been killed in the Holocaust because I was raised a Lutheran.
was it Americans who were college students in the '60s explaining that they actually hadn't known at the time that the Vietnam War was going on?
I think this was my post about a math professor who I overlap with at conferences, who maintains that at his rural college in the late 60s, they were so cut-off that they didn't know about the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement.
One of those frustrating Southerners who will not answer your direct question non-vaguely, so I've never gotten enough details for the story to make sense, but I have asked him for clarification at later conferences after discussing it here. (All he says is that there was one TV and one phone on campus. He doesn't field questions about what about when you went home on break.)
What happens on break from rural '60s college stays on break from rural '60s college.
I wonder about what it means to have "just found out about the holocaust." I guess I live in a bubble, but I'd have a hard time believing that even a very very stupid, incurious person* could come out of 12 years of, say, the LA public schools plus college without knowing something along the lines of "Hitler was a really really bad guy who among other things killed lots of Jews and hated them and hated people who weren't white."
I could see not knowing about the systematic nature of the Holocaust, Auschwitz, etc., but there would have to be some knowledge that Hitler was a bad guy who intentionally killed lots of Jews.
*probably richer than you! see what I said about majoring in Petroleum Engineering!
My guess is something along the lines of 78. I don't think he'd seen photos of large piles of skeletal corpses or really knew what people meant by concentration camps.
76: Yeah, I think that was it.
78: I wonder about what it means to have "just found out about the holocaust."
Yeah. Heebie says he took AP history classes, but I don't actually know what that means: can a person take AP history classes that are about other subjects entirely? Maybe!
From Heebie's recounting, he "basically found out that the whole thing happened". Um, in what locale was this young man schooled?
On reflection, I didn't receive any information about WWII in high school either: history classes in successive years went through ancient history, then a year of early American history (puritans, Revolutionary War, and such), then a year of what I might call world history, which waded through things like the Magna Carta and the Wars of the Roses and the French Revolution, and finally a year of relatively recent American history: post-WWII, the Vietnam War. I noticed once in college that we hadn't done the World Wars at all. Still, the holocaust made itself known.
Anyway, yes, Jammies' sibling is apparently a deeply incurious person.
|| Facebook: it's about remembering where you come from, and being reminded that the people you vaguely knew and maybe couldn't remember when they reconnected with you twenty years later think amazingly terrible things are worth linking as proof of how great their relationship is. My favorite is item 6, which makes love sound like a very special episode of Doomsday Preppers.
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Presumably his AP history class, like many American History classes, didn't really get past WWI due to the year ending.
83: "1. It's something inside."
Also true of Cadbury eggs, GI cancer, stuffed crust pizza, and anal sex, so take this sign with a grain of salt.
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Megan, if you swing by, drop me a line? I have a water question.
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My time in Berlin (just got back) was very nice but we inadvertently packed it densely with state oppression and murder - Jewish Museum, Stasi Museum, Holocaust Memorial, and Ai Weiwei's exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau had a lot about his 81-day detention, including a walk-in reconstruction of the room he was kept in and this video.
The Norfolk Tides game was fun, although the field appears to be all of six inches above sea level.
My mom says she didn't know anything about the Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam War while it was happening. She was raised in an Irish-American Catholic school bubble in KC, MO, and lived at home while attending her Catholic college.
This probably isn't in the same domain, but I'd never heard of the 1953 uprising in East Berlin before going to the Stasi Museum.
apo's version of chris hitchens's list is interestig.
BTW, apostropher, are you going to be in the DC area sometime soon? </vague recollection of mention of possible meetup>
Why yes! I'm going to be in Rockville this coming week--with a car, too--and available for debauchery Friday night. WHO WANTS TO SEX MUTOMBO?
My current neighborhood in New Orleans is like six inches above sea level, and it's eerie when it rains really hard. Today my street was just covered in water for half an hour until the storm died down and the water drained away.
Also, say what you will about Miami, but it's no Cleveland.
If only LeBron had seen that video first.
89 is interesting, because my mom was an activist and still won't be open about everything she was involved in, but then in grad school they both became super conservative Catholics and have never turned back.
And I don't know why I was worrying (if that's even the right word) about the pastry chef. I guess in the moment of the conversation I wasn't sure whether to make a guess I could have that would make it seem like I remembered him even though I'd totally be faking it or just go on talking more generically. There's no other year of my life when I wouldn't have remembered a classmate and I know I don't have to feel bad about it but it felt weird. Plus they already give free cookies to kids and I just haven't told the kids that.
93: Yay debauchery in the suburbs! Or possibly in the city? I'm free on Friday night. Others?
I remember learning about the Holocaust for the first time. It was 3rd grade in Hebrew Day School and we had an assembly. I swear, from the word I thought it was about the price of braided bread. That was a shock.
I heard of the Holocaust over a decade before I heard of Chullah. My dad let me stay in the room when "World at War" was on and I grew up in a place so culturally gentile that I didn't know Cohen was a common lasy last name.
Mara was having a rough night and had trouble falling asleep, so Lee let her cuddle up on the couch while the two of them watched the PBS Freedom Riders documentary. I expect all kinds of questions tomorrow about things she sleepily half-heard.
There's ignorance and there's ignorance. My parents, East Coast teenagers during WWII, genuinely didn't learn about the Japanese internment until they met former prisoners involved in the early 1970s. Then again, that Professional Redneck guy was going on last year about how all the black people weren't really bothered by Jim Crow and all that -- I guess he didn't notice the LSU football program integrating while he was on the team.
I talk to high school students who were 4 or 5 years old on 9/11.
(I don't remember if I mentioned it, but last week a judge has ruled that despite Hobby Lobby, GTMO prisoners still aren't persons under RFRA. I guess they'll have to incorporate.)
Oh, right, he wasn't at LSU, but some other La public uni that integrated.
My mom says she didn't know anything about the Civil Rights movement or the Vietnam War while it was happening. She was raised in an Irish-American Catholic school bubble in KC, MO, and lived at home while attending her Catholic college.
This is really pretty amazing. She didn't read the newspapers for eight years? Surely even the local rag would have mentioned the war at some point.
Your faith in American attentiveness to news is touching.
This is the 10% who pay no attention to the news, have no political opinions and refuse to answer questions about events. It must make for a tranquil life in some respects.
Special notice: ToS sighting! Using name of Nazi rocket factory and being even more antisemitic than usual:
http://crookedtimber.org/2014/07/13/bullshitting-about-gaza/comment-page-3/#comment-542340
105, 106: never reading the newspapers, never listening to radio news or watching TV news, not even being aware of the headlines, never talking about current events with anyone at college, not knowing anyone who had been to VN (or anyone whose friends or relatives had been) out of the 4 million people who went, all from her age group, never seeing a protest march... this is just incomprehensible. What else was she unaware of? Had she heard of the Beatles? Did she know who the president was? Did she know that man had walked on the moon?
108: Catholics were ineligible to serve in the Army, since they're only loyal to the Pope and not America.
We talked about this with Heebie's acquaintance the last time. I can't really believe in someone who hadn't heard of Vietnam, but I can sort of believe that someone might (a) accept that men got drafted as a normal part of the life-cycle without really connecting it to a particular war, and (b) sort of know that the Army was ending up someplace foreign where there was some shooting and have heard some place names without concretely realizing that it was a full scale war.
104: It's hard not to even when you are trying.
'Didn't know anything' could well mean 'knew there was a war there but didn't know who we were fighting, really, and what the progress of the war was.'
99, I clearly still have so much to learn about Jewish culture. Chullah? Lasy? It's all Greek to me.
113: well, in that case, J Robot's mum could have been Robert McNamara.
Chullah? Lasy? It's all Greek to me.
Chullah is a sort of Jewish cactus. Lasy is a sort of Jewish drink based on yoghurt.
Miami, the keys, Everglades national park, and a handful of small communities along the Gulf, running essentially from St. Petersburg to the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Reserve (but, for avoidance of doubt, excluding Tampa), are the only parts of Florida worth saving. The rest of it not only shouldn't be saved from flooding, it should be actively flooded as soon as possible. The problem is that, water doing as water does, it will be difficult to keep the parts worth saving above water while the rest of the state floods. So, that's a real dilemma.
I'm surprised it took 95 comments for someone to make a LeBron joke.
I wouldn't remember whether or not to capitalize the 'B', so I used his last name.
James, Born of Frustration.
Or Akron, which is basically the same thing.
93/97/109 - I'm free. Would prefer somewhere near a subway stop.
There's a post up if you have suggestions. I am mostly unfamiliar with the area and will likely be taking the subway in from Rockville, so.
108: Did she know who the president was?
I think I've recounted here before hearing a public radio journalist reporting on political leanings in Florida shortly before the 2012 US Presidential election: he'd gone to several gathering places favored by Latinos -- because of the Cuban population in Florida -- and spoken with a young woman who was meeting her friends at a bar, who said, "Oh, is there an election coming up? Is Obama running?"
Well, at least she knew who Obama was.
But yes, this sort of thing is incomprehensible to me as well. The Pew Research report linked in 74 says that Hispanics are particularly likely to be Bystanders. Dunno why.
113 is right. She vaguely knew there was a war on, but nothing about it. It sounds like my mother's family didn't do much in the way of following the news, and she was very sheltered. Didn't know how babies are made until she was 19, and so forth.
By the birth of their third one, even the Irish figure it out.
But yes, this sort of thing is incomprehensible to me as well. The Pew Research report linked in 74 says that Hispanics are particularly likely to be Bystanders. Dunno why.
There are a lot of people who pay attention to the politics of their home country and not to the country where they live, I assume.
I had assumed 1 was a Shearer joke; thanks for clarifying.
131 to 132! Talk about being insular!
Oddly enough 132 was my first thought as well, even though as far as I know Shearer has no connection to Miami, and LeBron is REALLY BIG NEWS here in Ohio.
I guess it's because he's LeBron or King James or LBJ, but not just James.
You watch the gorilla.
If Montrose Mulliner had done so more assiduously, he might not have had so much trouble later on.
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On the Post-It pad next to me phone is the name "Marianne", in my handwriting, and I'm pretty sure the pad was fresh last week, so I either wrote it today or Friday. I have no recollection of who Marianne is, or what case this applies to, or why I wrote down her name. Luckily, there's no phone number with it, so there's nothing much for me to do about it.
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Maybe it's a disguised reminder about "M/ar/y J/an/e" but amnesia is kicking in?
The spelling hex I put on you was supposed to have worn off by now.
137: keep an eye peeled for the skipper.
Basile Day? Is he related to Nigel Fawlty?
My expat grandparents' last address was Quonset Lane, Florida -- I named the street and picked the reversible house number -- which is on the surviving half of the hill that gave High Ridge Road its name. Might be ten feet high; Google Maps gives it one contour line but the line isn't labeled. Twelve feet? All sand, so it will be a short-lived tiny island.
The lot came into the family when someone fleeing the Ohio Mob actually went and looked at the swampland being sold in the 1920s (or maybe he sold swampland in Ohio and therefore had to flee). It left when the response to empty aquifers was not to reduce water use but to pump sewage down. Also the lake-bottoms were on fire. Wonderful solid, self-cooling houses with good light and flow and great workshops, though; my grandpa was a good (though eccentric) builder.
131: Maybe somebody had Leonard Cohen as hold music.