I guess lately I've been hearing/thinking about the princely bribes he's getting. I remember saying before he was elected that if he were he'd end up the world's first trillionaire. I think he might be on course to make that happen.
Speaking of WTF comments, this was remarkable. Not consequential, hopefully, but another demonstration of the administration's approach to winning friends and influencing people.
The guy who bombed the Borussia Dortmund team coach turned out to have been trying to profit by shorting the club's stock.
That business in 2 was the cherry on top of the Jeff-Sessions-loathing sundae scooped out from his recent rah-rah comments about the drug war. It caught me off guard how infuriating this simple denial of evidence was (drug war is working, must stop all this legal marijuana) I guess because it's meta-infuriating that obstinate anti-empiricism among political leaders is constantly rewarded.
I swear, I can't even bear to hear political conversations premised on a left-right spectrum anymore, as if "the right" represented any kind of ideology other than simple counter-enlightenment nihilism aimed at letting strongmen and grifters operate with impunity. I mean, like Steve King gloating about deporting a DREAMer is actually about immigration policy.
It wasn't a WTF about the administration, but I had a moment yesterday where some ladyfolks on twitter started talking about working and voting for Clinton, and I posted about how, despite all the bullshit that has followed, I will always remember how proud I felt in that moment. And then I just started completely bawling in my office.
So I guess I'm not over anything.
2: it's not impossible that Jeff Sessions doesn't actually know Hawaii is a state.
8: I can't remember where I read it yesterday, but I liked a comment in some writeup of the story that granted that it's forever 1959 in Sessions' mind.
I can't even bear to hear political conversations premised on a left-right spectrum anymore, as if "the right" represented any kind of ideology other than simple counter-enlightenment nihilism aimed at letting strongmen and grifters operate with impunity
Me too. Also, Trump may be unbelievably horrible but he's run-of-the-mill Republican.
working and voting for Clinton, and I posted about how, despite all the bullshit that has followed, I will always remember how proud I felt in that moment.
I think sometimes about how excited I was to don a pantsuit on election day.
Earlier this week Trump and Trudeau were saying nice things about each other which was minorly infuriating because Trudeau is such a pretty-boy-uselessness of a person. Then Trump went to Wisconsin and found out that Canada was doing something (undefined) to the US dairy industry and, of course, said stupid off-script stuff about Canada and then some official (ambassador?) from Canada wrote a letter that explain 'no actually the US is way worse' which led to Trump saying that he's definitely looking at NAFTA in the next two weeks because Canada and Mexico are both horrible job-stealing countries that need to be punished. Also NAFTA finding against the US and softwood lumber is back in the news which is the most Canadian of topics except maybe wheat subsidies or the seal hunt.
So basically it's the 1990s again except with a moron in charge. Maybe two.
3. That's capitalism. Just a bit less gussied up than usual.
Trudeau is such a pretty-boy-uselessness of a person
I feel that when the trend in first world leadership is racist destructive sociopathy, we need to appreciate the value of useless pretty-boyhood in our heads of state.
Trump may be unbelievably horrible but he's run-of-the-mill Republican.
Yes, but a run-of-the-mill Republican with a well-below-average level competence. That may actually save us from the worst of the depravity.
Of course, its bound to fuck up other things, like the White House Easter Egg Roll or the political situation in East Asia.
Trudeau is legalizing the weed, so he's alright by me. Maybe Democrats could take the hint.
I mean kind of? He basically told the provinces weed will be legal 01 July 2018 and deal. So the provinces have to figure out how/where to sell, driving regulations and testing, age limits, sources, etc. He did the easy part. Plus it's such an easy sell. He gets the political boost without doing any of the hard work. The election promises that are actually hard and may actually require compromise and work, he's skipped or postponed. Things like election reforms, issues related to Natives included the Missing and Murdered Women, or just replacing fired scientists (biased!). I'm honestly not sure what he's doing all day because the Liberal government really hasn't achieved anything.
Here's Teen Vogue, the newest trusted source:
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/your-political-fave-justin-trudeau-has-problematic-positions-too?mbid=social_twitter
Several scientists gravely declaring that they don't believe in protesting in support of science is so fucking naïve. Make the argument that protesting in general is dumb if you want, but they're claiming that "science is apolitical and if we associate it with a particular party it will become just like any other issue." Too late, assholes, I thought you were supposed to be smart. You may not be into politics but politics is into you.
I'm guessing the real situation is they're conservatives but don't want to admit it so they claim to be above it all and if Repiblicans cut your funding it's your own fault associating yourself with dirty partisan politics- it's the science version of "actually I'm a libertarian" (one of whom I'm specifically thinking of has in fact made that statement previously,)
18: I dunno, I'm a definitely-not-conservative, definitely-into-politics scientist, and I am partly sympathetic to this view. Not convinced by it, exactly, but I do sometimes feel that the worst thing that ever happened to climate science was Al Gore's advocacy. There will always be motives to deny or politicise science for people with something directly at stake, but it's painful to see an otherwise disinterested portion of the public turned into denialists purely over tribal affiliation when there's no real political issue at hand.
I'm pretty angry and inclined to go out and holler, but I do sometimes wonder if it's the best thing to do.
I admit I haven't completely thought through this issue as I have been saved recently from actually having to decide whether to march by a giant looming grant deadline (notice the recent uptick in commenting...)
He basically told the provinces weed will be legal 01 July 2018 and deal
Best Canada Day EVER!
I may go to the march if I can get enough done today. I go back and forth on it, not so much because I'm worried about general politicization of science as because I'm scared of retaliation in the form of pulling the grants that fund me.
OTOH, Our company put together a booth for Earth Day in Texas and Rick Perry stopped by and was very encouraging, so maybe the grants are safe. Our timeline for actual competition with fossil fuels is long, so the oil and coal companies don't mind us getting funded as much as they mind the near-term competition like solar, wind, and storage.
You just need to pitch yourself differently. This administration is very into the nuclear.
Several scientists gravely declaring that they don't believe in protesting in support of science is so fucking naïve.
That seems like a generous interpretation to me. I haven't seen the statements you're talking about, but I'd bet that they are just racists or xenophobes or general assholes who feel that they need a better excuse for not opposing Trump.
20: Right?! I know where I'll be on that day.
I'm very conflicted about the science march. So far my plan is periodic table shoes, 'nevertheless she persisted' shirt, and wander around looking at people. In contrast to the women's march, no one from my work is going. Or at least not organizing a group.
I am liberal enough that my friends call me a socialist, but I have the same reservations detailed in 18. I'm also not naive, though I am willing to entertain the possibility that my concerns are *functionally* irrelevant.
||
Could one of you academic types grab me an article off JSTOR?
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.25
My e-mail is mypseud at geemail. Thanks!
|>
He did the easy part. Plus it's such an easy sell. He gets the political boost without doing any of the hard work.
Huh? Under their proposal, the federal government will regulate advertising, health and safety, anti-competition policy, and issue federal licenses for business operations that would be required at a minimum for (the provincial licensing process is intended to be in addition to, not instead of, federal), establish a seed-to-sale antidiversion tracking system... lots more. So they have plenty of work and hard decisions in store at the federal level, including THC concentration, whether to allow people with drug criminal records into business, how big to let businesses become, etc. The full text of the bill, itself based on a consultative commission report, is 143 pages (call it 71 if monolingual).
The Sessions thing bothers me a lot. It seems obvious that Sessions was implying that Judge Watson is somehow less than legitimate because he's a judge of Polynesian ancestry and because he sits in the state with the smallest percentage white population in the U.S. And yet, when called out, Sessions refused to apologize, because there was nothing literally inaccurate about what he said.
The white supremacists in our government have become so comfortable and so emboldened -- it's like now they can sit around dog-whistling to each other and to the racists in our general population all day, and when we say something about it, they feign surprise and shrug their shoulders in mock confusion.
27: Just sent it. Let me know if it didn't go through.
Following up on 28: even without any policy details, the fact that the bill wasn't introduced until a year and a half into his premiership, and after that whole commission process, seems like counterevidence to the idea it was the easy way out. Maybe there's politics I don't know, granted.
I'm not sure how large the "anti-science" constituency is - I know, I know, climate change and vaccines and GMOs and all the rest of it, but if you look at these people, most of them aren't anti-science so much as people who think that they have better, more accurate science, or that science is just fine but it isn't definitive in this case yet or has been corrupted, etc. Being "anti-science" is equivalent to saying "I believe in magic instead", and there aren't so many people waving that banner.
It threatens to undermine the objective nature of scientific research that is so critical to its integrity...But a march for the very idea of science is counterproductive, unnecessarily pushing scientific research directly into one of the most tense and polarized political climates in recent years. Rather than forcing politicians to accept science, it is entirely possible that the march will do nothing more than provide them with an escape hatch, a justification for the idea that science is in some way biased.
32: Who is more devoted to "science" than antivaxxers? Jet fuel can't melt steel beams! That's science!
Science is great and all, but this one particular peer reviewer can go shit in a bag of juice.
My friend and I organized the Sacramento March for Science. It has been a really interesting and fun twelve weeks putting it together. I did not at any point in those twelve weeks care one single bit about any part of the 'should scientists protest' debate.
Or, as the French say, "Vider leur colon dans un sac de fruits écrasés."
I admit I'm not participating in the march. Sorry. Hope it goes well. It's partly because there's some stuff around the house that I could have done at any time over the past week, but I didn't, and tomorrow is the last minute. But it's also because tomorrow is the best chance to get together with a few friends I haven't seen in months, and that would be true whether I procrastinated or not.
"it provides visibility"
Screw visibility and its bastard cousin "awareness". Makes people feel good about doing nothing.
This march will also not make them say "I was in doubt about global warming and the usefulness of science, but now that I saw a guy in a labcoat making fun of the other party, I'm really going to be fight my legislators and/or vote against my pet social issues to support science."
The only plausible things I can imagine people saying are "Cool. I already like science, good for you." and "Bah, why are scientists so liberal" and "See, I told you those scientists weren't impartial."
Oh, and it's a morale builder for scientists, so if scientists want to march for that reason, I say go for it.
My intended audience has always been the marchers, and they might say things like:
Thousands of people agree with me that reality matters.
or
That wasn't so bad. Maybe I'll do more political things.
32, 39. More good people need to run for local office in the US, and soon. As appalling as the threatened EPA cuts are, this administration and short-term threats to the US remaining a decent country, the longer-term threat is a know-nothing electorate. Having reasonable people visible as endorsing good causes is going to make getting involved seem normal as it must rather than an exotic hobby for somebody else.
I say all of this as basically a lazy elitist, staying quiet or focussing on your sliver of biochemistry or monoids or whatever and only listening to seminars is, at least for these next few years, a bad idea. Along with being counted in the streets occasionally, the other organization that makes sense to me is SwingLeft, which lets people who live in safely blue districts find nearby places to help get out the vote or contribute or whatever.
Speaking of Sessions, in terms of pure WTFness there is the DOJ statement on increased scrutiny of "Sanctuary"" cities:
Additionally, many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime. The number of murders in Chicago has skyrocketed, rising more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels. New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city's "soft on crime" stance.
Huh. It looks like their stated basis for going after California is a law passed a few years ago on not obeying with ICE detainers, making me think it is even less risky to go further down the road and halt most/all cooperation with the in-process CA Values Act.
It seems like they've started letting Trump just write official statements with no subsequent editors. Wasn't there some other statement this week that was basically written in Trumpese? Vertical integration!
No spanish translation is available yet of the statement in 43. Maybe these are made by running the original nuggets of feeling through some kind of verbal juicer.
Jesus Fucking Christ, the point of a march or demonstration is generally not to convert the opponent, but to appeal to rational but uncommitted bystanders.
What was Al Gore supposed to do? Cede the field to professional deniers? Take up painting?
OK, I have to go out now and knock some more doors. Anyone who feels like they want to actually save the Republic (by electing a banjo playing Berniecrat*) is welcome to come out and join the effort.
* Sanders is coming. Some few HRC deadenders are whining, but, again, JFC, do we not have the luxury of reliving that bit of drama!
49: Some few HRC deadenders are whining
Why on earth?
I can't remember where I read it yesterday, but I liked a comment in some writeup of the story that granted that it's forever 1959 in Sessions' mind.
Nobody doubts for even one second that it's 1959 every single day in Sessions' brain. We were warned.
Shorter Sessions: 1959 today... 1959 tomorrow... 1959 forever.
So, I got bit by a big dog.
After which the owner popped out of his house and told me the dog (which was barking very aggressively) doesn't do anything. I pointed to the big patch of slobber at the top of my thigh. 150 pounder, very angry animal.
The humans are supporting my candidate.
From your pictures on Facebook, I would have guess you were 165 or so.
Imagine a tasseled loafer stamping on a human face - forever.
But I do need to start doing a bit more political stuff now that things have calmed down.
I joined a group, so now I get mail from everybody who wants to be a magistrate. Or everybody who wants to be a magistrate and isn't an actual fascist. Anyway, I stopped reading them.
We are planning to head into Oakland tomorrow. Will look for familiar faces.
I'm going to the soccer field, for justice.
It's not that I don't like science. It's just that we have an agreement to sometimes see other people on the weekends.
54. Yikes! Sounds like you are okay, but...you're okay, right?
It's Montana. He shot the dog, and felt good doing it. Though he may stare pensively into his campfire later.
With a $45,000 pickup truck parked nearby and voiceover by Sam Elliot.
Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Neither dogs nor television sets were shot.
That ad is great, the dog bite not so much. Glad to hear you're fine and out stumping for the cause.
I'm so mad at myself: I bought tickets to a 5:30 show instead of 1:30 for Ace's birthday. During the 5:30 show we have Hawaii's birthday party. It's a princess tea party hosted by the local high school and tickets were through some third-party website and there is absolutely no contact information anywhere to be found on any of the flyers. And it may have sold out.
I was just venting and mad at myself. Carry on. I found an organizer on facebook, although not yet a solution.
It's a princess tea party hosted by the local high school...
For a fundraiser so something? Why is the high school involved?
'Senior High Parents: As Sartre said, "hell is other people". Let your daughters learn this before college by having them volunteer at our annual "Princess Tea Party."'
Apparently my sister was Marching for Science while looking at her phone and walked straight into the Reflecting Pool.
That's about right, for a scientist.
Can we start calling Sessions "Bullshit Connor"?
Also: the princess tea party that I mentioned in the other thread was AMAZING. There were probably 150 high school kids dressed up as various disney or superhero characters - enough for them to pair off with each small child and take them around, and then break into song, and so on. It was a full-fledged installation-art Disney-themed princess musical for four year olds. It was sort of reminiscent of being at the Veronica Mars premier and meet-and-greet. "THEY'RE ALL REAL PEOPLE RIGHT HERE!"
Oh, I guess I mentioned it in this thread.
This article, dedicated to the idea that giving Rachel Dolezal more press is an abomination, contains a pretty good burn:
A lot of things in our society are social constructs--money, for example--but the impact they have on our lives, and the rules by which they operate, are very real. I cannot undo the evils of capitalism simply by pretending to be a millionaire.
77 is fantastic.
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Just for the record, Kevin Drum's two posts wrapping up his claim that Comey was a decisive (and partisan) factor in the election are good. Familiar ground, but I appreciate him beating that particular drum (no pun intended).
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Fuck. There's still the second round though.
86: Comey is of course smart to be cowed by Republicans. They would've persecuted him with whatever tools available, and not only would Democrats be unlikely to enforce consequences for any breaches of policy or law, they would be unlikely to defend him if he did act in a non-partisan manner.
Although maybe after the election things have changed. It was nice to hear the Democrats defend the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
87, 88: Gotta figure a 10% - 15% straight-up fascist vote in pretty much every European country, even Germany, where they should (and mostly do) know better.
That she got about 20% is not great, but better than recent results in other places.
I'm old enough to remember that she's not the first Le Pen to make it into the second round of a French presidential election. Her father was crushed in 2002. She probably won't do as badly as he did, but then he went down to the worst defeat in any French presidential election.
Relatedly, the largest conservative German newspaper had a big story on Sunday about following the trail of funny money that's supporting the AfD, Germany's latest far-right party to make a splash at the state level. The story was interesting in and of itself, but I also take the story's prominence to indicate that Germany's conservative establishment isn't even going to play footsie with the current axis of Putin-powered populist parties. It's too bad that America's conservatives don't have principles like their German counterparts, but what can ya do? AfD may yet make it into the federal parliament, which could lead to six parties in the legislature and thus some complicated coalition building. Wait and see and keep marching for reality, I suppose.
91: Interesting. It could use an import contacts from FB function.
92: Link please?
92 gets it right. Under the circs, I think this is probably the best outcome we could have hoped for. Externalities permitting, she'll get her arse kicked in the next round. Macron is not a fun time candidate though, he's the French version of neoliberal (not as brutal and extreme as the British and US versions, but not one of the good guys.)
Art Goldhammer (Piketty's translator) assesses it here.
Good link. This is the bit that worries me though:
Meanwhile, scowling Philippe Martinez, the head of the CGT trade union that led the opposition against a labor code reform in which Macron had a hand has economy minister, is no doubt girding his loins for future combat.
I don't know what the prospects are for CGT getting into bed with the FN, but they're probably not zero, and that gets you to all sorts of trouble.
I think it would be much more likely that the CGT would compete with the FN to lead any protest movement that emerged. The two institutions despise each other, and compete for working-class voters. An accommodation would have been more likely a few years ago when the PS was the only game in town on the Left. Now, a much more "cégétiste" candidate in JLM is running at competitive levels and it makes more sense to build him up as a populist alternative to the FN.
It's a bit after the deadline, but my biggest WTF the moment at is the situation described in the "An IPO" section of this article. I'm actually furious that they're allowed to sell shares in this non-company to retail investors, let alone solicit investments on TV. It's an IPO of a company with no developers whose only product is an app that doesn't exist, reliant on APIs that don't exist, run by someone who was until recently barred from being a director. There is basically no due diligence a member of the public can do, and the user/revenue projections appear to be plucked out of thin air. The JOBS Act is going to cause so many retail investors to lose their shirts.
93: Belatedly, and in German:
It was on page 3 of the front section on Sunday, pretty prime journalistic real estate.
100: Thanks. Fortunately, Google wasted money on machine translation before it got into juice.
101: Swiss media are starting to get in on the story, too.
On the science march: marches are valuable inasmuch they mobilize your side to do something more than march, on account of they see how much support the cause has and this actually motivates them to pick up a phone or write their Senator. (That step is what was missing from Occupy, which not only failed to provide a program for voters but on balance actively disdained electoral politics, which as we can see worked out swimmingly.) They're not going to convince the other side or magically change anything, but they are important for that first thing.
As for Trump: the more I watch the Russia scandal unfold, the less I think he's going to survive in office, because eventually he's going to be publicly exposed as an actual according-to-Hoyle traitor and even if the GOP is too rotted to impeach him, it's just going to become impossible for government to function until he leaves. This however is little comfort because we are watching the coalescence of a long-nascent extremist white supremacist movement in America which is radicalized enough to go to war on his behalf, or on some even more dangerous figure's behalf, if/when he is finally forced out.
(My WTF moment recently was watching people crow over the ouster of Bill O'Reilly as he was replaced by Alt Reich darling Tucker "You can't cuck the Tuck!" Carlson. I guarantee you O'Reilly will have a second life as the Reasonable Conservative circulating on "liberal" shows and clucking his tongue at the antics of this wacky young Senator Dick Spencer. Wherever did that young man get such notions?)
On the science march: marches are valuable inasmuch they mobilize your side to do something more than march, on account of they see how much support the cause has and this actually motivates them to pick up a phone or write their Senator.
I don't know about any of the other ones, but our march ended at an Earth Day event at the museum, with presentations inside and booths outside. Several of the booths had preaddressed postcards people could fill out to write to our congressional delegation and other officials such as Scott Pruitt. The local Dems and the local DSA chapter both had booths.
Thanks. I do disagree about Occupy, which I think was a direct precursor to the groundswell of support that (apparently unexpectedly) met the Sanders campaign in the 2016 primaries. And by "direct" I mean that it was not just the same kinds of people but to a significant extent literally the same individual people who were involved in both. But I don't have any rigorous data to support that, so.
I was leaving Sanders out of it, as to whatever extent that's true it's maybe even worse (as the bitter and self-destructive feuding of some of those people with Clinton was arguably one of the factors that allowed Trump to eke out his win).
That said if they manage to redeem themselves with actual constructive action going forward it may still be to the good.
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