1 billion data points

I know a French historical architecture conservator who's been trying to do a similar project for the Dome of the Rock and Masjid al-Aqsa. You know, before some ultra-right wing Israeli fanatic blows them up.

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Any commentary on Bahrain?
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Anything in particular? It will have to wait though, going out for drinks...

The mass disfranchisement because supposedly IRGC sleepers thing. Also just ? in general.

5 Clearly bullshit. Bahrain is pretty fucked up. Just earlier today I was talking with someone who did a dissertation at U of Michigan on the mass protests here in the 50s during the early oil years about the locals getting a raw deal from the oil companies (principally Shell). The Emir sided with the locals. In Bahrain the same thing happened around the same time and several times afterwards with a completly different reaction from the Shaikh. It's been more or less the same ever since.

Maybe related to Bahrain having a US base at the time and its government undergoing more heavy-handed pressure and coercion, despite both being UK protectorates?

Should I hijack this thread to talk about charitable giving and make everyone post their income percentage given to charity as well as IQ? I thought, you know, maybe we could get some relief from the relentless international focus here and get a bunch of UMC people in the U.S. to talk about their money, because that's scintillating and diverting.

These figures do need a few caveats. First, they only cover people who itemize their taxes and took the charitable deduction, which is only about a quarter of taxpayers [the little people -ed]. ... Also, in case you're looking for a quick, more detailed guide to what you should give to charity each year, here's a more detailed list of average charitable contributions by income bracket drawn from the IRS's data. See if you measure up better than the O'Rourkes.

These people appear to deserve your money:

The 884 953 doses of oral cholera vaccine arrived in Mozambique on Tuesday. They were taken from the global cholera vaccine stockpile, which is fully-funded by Gavi. Gavi is also supporting operational costs of the campaign. The use of the stockpile for outbreak response is managed by the International Coordinating Group (ICG), which features representatives from WHO, UNICEF, IFRC and MSF.

Since the stockpile was launched in 2013, millions of doses every year have helped tackle outbreaks across the globe. In the fifteen years between 1997 and 2012, just 1.5 million doses of oral cholera vaccine were used worldwide. In 2018 alone, the stockpile provided 17 million of doses to 22 different countries. Since the beginning of 2019, more than 6 million doses have already been shipped to respond to outbreaks or address endemic cholera in many countries including Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Somalia and Zimbabwe.

Thanks, Mossy! My money is seriously tied up right now and for the foreseeable future, but I bet I can find something for cholera treatment. I'll just decorate my new home office with MSF maps. The churches I posted about in Louisiana have apparently seen a lot of contributions in the wake of Notre Dame...

Continuing 8: sorry, I meant the remaining 75% are the little people. There must be vague ballpark figures somewhere for itemizers' and non-itemizers' shares of total charitable giving in the U.S. ... A couple of links:

1. Giving By Non-Itemizers Continues To Fall

2. How large are individual income tax incentives for charitable giving? (PDF)

These two sources seem to directly conflict:

1. According to the report, while 87 percent of all filers [in the study group, I assume, not population at large] itemized their deductions in 2005, the figure was 81 percent in 2007 and has barely moved since. As the organization notes, taxpayers who itemize their deductions are twice as likely to give to charity as those who don't, with 82 percent of the former donating to charity and only 40 percent of non-itemizers doing so.

2. Estimates from the Tax Policy Center (TPC) suggest that for 2018, charitable giving by individuals could reach a total of $299 billion. TPC estimates that the 90 percent of households that do not itemize their deductions will contribute about 40 percent of total charitable giving while the 10 percent of households who itemize will provide about 60 percent (table 1).

$299 billion is an impressive number. That would be visible in the federal budget.

Americans: Sometimes less awful than we appear to be.

It's a more impressive number if you don't think too hard about where exactly the money is going.

Or about how much the government would likely spend to achieve the same goals (an issue briefly mentioned in the link).

You want to beat yourselves up, I won't get in your way.

It does provide evidence for the robustness of the nonprofit sector in the US compared to other countries, an issue we've discussed before.

13: (whistles quietly)

I guess I could look at the links, but I wonder what the numbers show on giving to extraordinarily wealthy private universities.

Aunt Becky deducted her bribes.

Even I just skimmed the links, but I did spy this paragraph:

Tax proposals that affect incentives for higher-income individuals to give, however, will have a disproportionate effect on the charities to which these individuals are more likely to donate, such as higher education and museums.

So yes indeed. Maybe I'd give money to Stanford in a sort of anti-Peter Thiel maneuver, where it would fund the education of students who pledged not to work in the tech industry for at least ten years after graduation. (After ten years, obviously, everyone's gotta eat.)

There's Bogota, New Jersey which is pronounced like "pagoda".

Entertainingly, the one person I know in Bogota NJ is Colombian. I should ask her how she pronounces the town name.

22: I just listened to a podcast about a Lebanese guy that visited all the towns named Lebanon in the U.S.

Go big or go home or go to some place named after home.

Any y'all ever been to BOLLiver West Virginia? Named after Simon, of course.

In the midst of my current genealogy project, I've been following a branch of the family that has used the names of historical figures more than most. Took me a while to really get Marcus Lafayette Daggett, Marcus Lafayette Blue, or Marcus Lafayette Yates.

I wonder if a similar process didn't lead to the first name "Earl".

The only Colombian I know lives in Columbia (SC)

They should move to Charleston. Much nicer.

25: wait, like Marcus = Marquis?

Ancestry.com is still addictive af, in that it is a) essentially a video game in which b) people are wrong on the Internet and you get to correct the mistakes. I've been stripping out contamination from Shawnee Heritage, which is fucking everywhere (well, "everywhere" in "family trees of white people with indigenous forebears") once you start looking for it. There's got to be a final volume where he proves that the Shawnee are Israelites. I have also exonerated a dead woman of the charge of having sexually assaulted a minor for eight years, resulting in six children, which was an actual fact in a live family tree with "proved by DNA!" graphics and everything. HIGH SCORE.

How does the math work out on that?

It really does not.

Biologically, I guess it's possible.

Kind of.

Mistakes like that happen all the time due to oversight. This one was unusual because the researcher had clearly put a lot of effort into verifying things and scrounged up many useful archival documents surrounding these two people (who were not married to each other, and the whole thing ended in a lawsuit), and yet it didn't seem off to her that the relationship had started when the guy was 9.

Maybe he lived in West Virginia?

I feel like going to rural Wales and smiling and waving at people until they either murder me or cheer up.

Or both.

"I am not a guidebook traveler. Striding around in Paris I came upon an ethereally beautiful building. I collared the nearest pedestrian. 'It's the Notre Dame,' he replied. I gaped for a long time, and returned each day. "