Do people going to China take a burner phone?
I don't want to know what they do with the fishmeal, but I'm already leery of buying any food marked as made in China.
1 If you follow any China watching accounts on Twitter you'll often see that given as a recommendation.
Speaking of the police, did you know that in Nazi Germany there were approximately 10 police agencies, depending on your definitions. The US has about 57 federal agencies, and most cities are subject to a whole nother layer of policing -- State Police, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension or equivalent, County Sheriff, municipal Police Departments, Transit Police, University Police, often the state Dept. of Natural Resources rangers have arrest powers. 'Round every other corner stands PC 1.9.8.4.' indeed, Penny Rimbaud! Jeezum Crow! It's like making a precarious living arresting and imprisoning each other shall be our ultimate fate. Right? Right.*
*Fuck the Right. As if our lives and planet aren't already degraded enough, they want to drag us down ever deeper. The whole planet is Omelas. You can't Walk Away. You have to stay and fight.
1: Sadly my ex didn't have a job that took her this year. In past years she'd forgotten about the great firewall and not had things set up to actually be able to talk to the kids, which made it easy for us to spend six weeks without her.
6 is kind of morbidly interesting. Is there some pithy phrase for a-hammer-that-can-see-only-nails thinking?
Which ideally also indicates that the hammer in question is woefully bad at driving nails.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb that is next to a nail.
6 seems a bit of an odd thing to be upset about. At least from a civil liberties point of view. It's yet another symptom of the inability of the US government to have a unified policy machine on anything at all; the most infamous example of course being that during the largest war in US history the US government was unable to get internal squabbling and turf wars under control and hence decided it would be simpler to wage two pretty much separate and competing wars against Japan. There were even moments in 1942 when it looked plausible that the US Navy might defeat Japan while Japan defeated the US Army; by the transitive property the US Navy would have achieved victory over the US Army, which they would have enjoyed much more.
The DDR only had three police agencies: the Grenzpolizei, the Volkspolizei and the Staatssicherheitsdienst. So....yay Honecker?
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"The most we can expect to find out is the names of the dead"|>
11: The more police agencies you have, the smaller they'll be. The smaller they are, the less likely they'll be able to afford and prioritize training to promote civil liberties. Smaller agencies will also pay their officers worse, so you're more likely to have employees who are cops for the intangible benefits, such as being a nasty bully with the full power of the state behind you. Balkanization also means that any improvements in process are likely to disseminate more slowly.
This is not a hypothetical problem. We had a high profile case where an officer, after being on the job for all of an hour, shot in the back and killed a fleeing African-American boy. While he was subsequently found not guilty at trial, it was sketchy as all get out and rightly lead to much anger. He was an employee of an ultra tiny (less than 30 employees, I think?) municipal agency that was disbanded afterwards; I think that town came under the direct protection of county police.
It's kinda crazy here. Not counting federal policing agencies (which I'm unfamiliar with), in a usual day, without leaving the municipality I live in, I am likely to be in the jurisdiction of city police, county police, state police, the county sheriff (different from county police), transit police, and two to five university agencies.
Looked it up, they had nine officers before the shooting. That is far too small to have a sensible institutional culture.
I think they were all part time officers, or so but one. The borough has less than 2,000 people.
Fair one but does it really apply at the federal level? And "too many tiny police forces" is also a different problem from "too many levels of policing" - you could presumably be under the jurisdiction of the NYPD, the MTA police, Port Authority police, NY state police and probably some others in a single day but all those forces are pretty giant.
OT, can I present an outbreak of Twelver Shia Republicanism?
QAnon fans also showed up at the hotel sporting T-shirts of John F. Kennedy Jr., who they believe faked his death 20 years ago and will reemerge today as part of a wide-ranging deep-state conspiracy to prosecute Democrats for child-sex slavery. One woman said she thought there was a chance Kennedy would announce his presence at the rally. "It would be wonderful if he did," said the woman, who declined to give her name. Vincent Fusca, a Trump supporter who QAnon supporters believe is JFK Jr. in disguise, told The Daily Beast that he'll be at today's rally.
16.2 is hilarious. I'm tempted to start hanging out at Q sites spreading the rumor that JFK jr is in occultation.
16.1: I think that's also a problem from a civil liberties perspective. It means that you need all of those institutions to have good institutional cultures. All else being equal, that's less likely that one or a few giant agencies having good cultures.
I was going to try to try to make some sort of Islamic mysticism-themed joke about George Magazine, but then I looked it up and I don't even know what to say. The first issue's cover advertises "John Kennedy talks to George Wallace" in front of a picture of Madonna as sexy George Washington. Also an interview with Louis Freeh.
13-15: Gilberton in Schuylkill County has a population of 769 and this guy was the police chief until his videos attracted national attention. Later reports indicate he was the only member of the Gilberton police force, which no longer exists.
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Speaking of Gilberton, NMM2 João Gilberto.
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There was a story many years ago of the USAF landing a team on the moon and the tension apprehension and dissension when they found another base already there.
The U S Navy.
On the "too many agencies" front: I do immigration court observation. At a recent volunteer event, we were told that one of the reasons it's extremely difficult to craft effective laws and policies to protect immigrants is that there's such a number of interlocking townships and counties and municipalities and so on, such that an immigrant may be detained by the city and then transferred to a different jurisdiction without literally being moved. So we've been able to get the mayor to refuse to assist ICE, but the county and other other government bodies are much, much less accountable and of course they do what they please. Which means that different immigrant detention facilities work totally differently too - so someone can go from one where they get outdoor exercise, normal terrible prison food and some kind of way to pass the time to another where they are basically in lock-down with no exercise and vending machine food for months. Not that either of those is desirable.
Also on the federal level I've been reading some tweets that I don't totally understand about how some of the detention process is ICE and some of it is DHHS and how that makes organizing more difficult.
I wonder what our per capita police-and-police-adjacent-people to non-police ratio is, and if it's better or worse than other countries.
22.last: Pulling questionable numbers from random places on the internet is a skill of mine. Take these with a grain of salt, and as the beginning of a conversation, not the end. Note that I'm only including sworn officers.
United States, 2008:
Police: 809308 ( https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/csllea08.pdf , only including sworn employees)
Population: 304 million ( https://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table/by-year)
Police/1000: 2.66
England and Wales, 2018:
Police: 126,000 ( https://fullfact.org/crime/police-numbers/)
Population: 56 million ( https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/national-and-regional-populations/population-of-england-and-wales/latest)
Police/1000: 2.25
Canada, 2013
Police: 97120 ( https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3510007601)
Population: 35.15 million ( https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/130926/dq130926a-eng.htm)
Police/1000: 2.76
France, 2014:
Police: 220,000 ( https://www.bi.team/blogs/how-many-police-officers-are-in-france/)
Population: 66 million ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France)
Police/1000: 3.33
Australia, 2000:
Police: 42047 ( https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/712FAED4666FABD2CA256B35001967CE?opendocument)
Population: 19.1 million ( https://www.populationpyramid.net/australia/2000/)
Police/1000: 2.2
So, assuming that things haven't changed much in the last decade, surprisingly, we're pretty typical.
Whoops, the US number doesn't include federal officers. This pdf has full-time only federal officers in that year:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fleo08.pdf
That gives us an additional 102701, for a total of 912009 officers, or 3.00/1000. That's at the high end for the Anglosphere.
Interesting. Still probably in the other countries there aren't nearly as many individual police forces, small organizations operating largely autonomously. Not to mention training. The Wikipedia page for Police Academy (not the movie) looks like most countries have national police academies, or at least state level. Here it's all over the place. At county level, or it can just be a program offered by community colleges, depending on the state. A graduating class of 16?
New Hampshire
New Hampshire's PSTC (Police Standards and Training Council) provides all initial training and maintains certification standards for every full and part-time law enforcement officer in the state. This includes anyone who has the power of arrest (except federal officers) under New Hampshire law. PSTC also provides initial training and certification for correctional officers employed directly by the State. All recruits must have at least a conditional offer of employment from a law enforcement agency, have a background check and pass a medical exam and a physical fitness test. Each agency may add other qualifications such as education, polygraph and drug exams. The PSTC law enforcement academies require each recruit to qualify with a firearm, demonstrate driving skills, maintaining physical fitness, pass subject matter exams and, scenario evaluations as a condition of certification.[23]
Most agencies in the state use a Field Training Officer program to provide additional training and evaluation of new hires.
Texas
The agency which certifies police academies in Texas is the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE). Many major cities and sheriff's offices operate their own training academies, while some smaller municipalities cooperate to maintain regional academies. Some community colleges also offer police training courses. There are three state-level law enforcement academies: the Texas Department of Public Safety trains state troopers, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department trains game wardens, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice trains state corrections officers. Police academies typically last from 18 to 30 weeks, though there are many variations. All police cadets are required to obtain at least a Basic Peace Officer Proficiency Certification from TCOLE before beginning active duty; some academies require their cadets to obtain an Intermediate certification before graduating. TCOLE also offers certifications for jailers and corrections officers, who must also undergo training prior to being commissioned (albeit typically much less than full-fledged police officers).
New Hampshire sounds like it's doing it the right way.
ISTR Interpol/UNODC recommends ~3 police/1,000 people.
At a recent volunteer event, we were told that one of the reasons it's extremely difficult to craft effective laws and policies to protect immigrants is that there's such a number of interlocking townships and counties and municipalities and so on, such that an immigrant may be detained by the city and then transferred to a different jurisdiction without literally being moved. So we've been able to get the mayor to refuse to assist ICE, but the county and other other government bodies are much, much less accountable and of course they do what they please.
So having lots of little overlapping agencies is a problem for people who are trying to prevent the enforcement of unjust laws; but isn't it, by the same token, an advantage for people trying to promote the enforcement of just laws? An Evil Frowner might be able, through bribery or threats, to get the mayor to refuse to cooperate with prosecutions of civil rights cases, but the county and other government bodies would be less easily corrupted.
Almost as if the state is a tool by which things may done, and like other tools may be directed to ends good or will, howsoever the wielder may desire.
I have two separate crescent wrenches,, one for good ends and one for ill.
The yield curve inverted. Does that mean everyone is going to get laid off again?
The black-handled crescent wrench is used in the preparation of ingredients and the white-handled crescent wrench is used in the rituals of the Work itself.
Heartening thought:
One really common feature of right-wing politics is incompetence. You really notice this in histories of the Second World War. Time after time there's a bit like "Hitler's senior generals begged him not to do [STUPID THING] but he ignored their warnings and went right ahead and stuck his remaining bollock in the mincer". (Keegan, "The Second World War".) And you see it a lot in modern extreme right movements too; they're just not very good at doing simple things that would achieve their goals. Look at Trump. Look at the feuds and schisms in the various extreme right movements in UK and US politics.
Now normally this gets brushed aside with some reference to how much trouble the Allies or whoever would have been in with a competent opponent, and weren't we lucky. But maybe it wasn't luck; maybe there is a good reason why the extreme right tend to be incompetent. And the causal link could go either way. Maybe if you're incompetent you don't succeed in normal life or normal politics and you become an outsider and end up on the fringes. (We could call this the Sink-Trap Theory.) Or maybe it's that one way of becoming incompetent is not to listen to the advice of people who know more than you, and people who don't listen to advice also don't listen to advice like "don't be a nazi". (This would be the Bone-Head theory.)
Thoughts?
the white-handled crescent wrench
Known for its distinctive call.
32: I think the disheartening thing is that when all the really incompetent people get on the same side, they stand a very good chance of winning in the middle term because there are so many of them.
32:
1. Pre-pwnage! Brazil post in the pipeline!
2. I doubt we have enough historical data for strong conclusions, considering "right-wing" as we understand it was literally invented only 200-odd years ago.
3. Insofar as conclusions can be drawn, I don't think they apply to right-wingers per se, but rather to radicals of all descriptions; left-wing infighting being even more proverbial than that on the right.
4. Radicals (very generically) at the doctrinal level, attempt to answer complex problems with simple solutions, and thus are disproportionately likely to fail (Bone-head variant).
5. Radicals (very generically) at the psychological level, privilege emotion over evidence and performance over reality; leaders emerging in such a milieu are thus disproportionately likely to be charlatans.*
6. Similarly, followers of such leaders are disproportionately likely to be, essentially, stupid.*
7.Following from (5), radicals tend, essentially, to froth at the mouth, and thus in the normal run of things generally get shout out of responsible positions; when events develop such that radicals attain power, they are therefore disproportionately likely to lack relevant experience (Sink-Trap variant) .
*Authoritarian leaders and followers, AIHMSVMTHB.
get shut out. shout themselves out. shout themselves into shutout.
It is the distinguishing mark of the revolutionary that he cannot get elected.
32, 34: The other depressing thing is that it's easier to break a government than run one. That is, the insane right wing doesn't need to competently run the federal government to serve its policy ends -- its policy ends are largely about making it impossible to enforce the laws against wealthy and powerful people, and that's pretty easy even for stupid incompetent people.
38: I was briefly overcome by a wave of nostalgia. Remember when a wacky presidential candidate could be a bit dim, but not a horrible person? When someone like that could be essentially harmless (my opinion) or actually beneficial (maybe he got Clinton elected)?
32, 34, 39-- not just damaging government but also the social organs of perception. No census, no satellites pointed at the earth, no newspapers.
Since most people live in basically artificial environments, there's no immediate penalty for becoming voluntarily blind. I would so love to be shown to be wrong by a wave of public decency and sound judgement.
Chapter 8, "Why the Masses Intervene in Everything and Why They Always Intervene Violently"
39: Chaos is easy, order is hard...
This MJ piece is very good, incidentally: the New Coke failure as an early example of the right-wing reactionary grift. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/what-if-weve-all-been-wrong-about-what-killed-new-coke/
43: Good read, but I want to especially call out this throwaway reference in it. Bewildering.
38 I had no idea he was recently still alive.
Not the worst tie-in idea, not even the worst Handmaid's Tale tie-in idea. More details here https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jul/10/is-the-handmaids-tale-wine-collection-the-worst-tie-in-ever
Was 46 meant to link to something other than the wine? That seemed implied.
That story also looks symptomatic of the slow shift of American culture from "new, new, what is it, never mind, knock it all down and build parking over it" to "if it differs from what was in my childhood it's scary and an attack on me personally" that.
47: sorry. The article is about the wine but also mentions other worse tie-ins; I should have excerpted.
"Lot18, unfortunately, is not the first company to merchandize a show about totalitarianism and ritualized sex slavery. It may not even be the most harebrained attempt: that distinction goes to sleepwear company Lunya, which last spring released a red lingerie silk set named after Offred.
The Wing, a women-only social club and workspace in New York City, got flak for its line of Handmaid's swag, too, which included notebooks and pens embossed with peppy dictums of female empowerment. Laura Bogart, writing for Vulture, noted that the sale of white bonnets, silk-screened T-shirts, and pink matchboxes "exemplifies this tonal disconnect between the rah-rah you-go-girl-ism of the marketing plan and the deeper meaning of the show it's promoting"."
48: Otherwise known as aging. It's always the Boomers.
I don't have very perceptive taste buds, and my sense of smell is worse. But I can tell the difference between different carbonated drinks, and I can literally smell the difference between different sweeteners in diet sodas.
Michael Stivic was right. They taste different, and it's reasonable to have a preference. New Coke was more like Pepsi -- it was sweeter -- and some of us preferred old Coke to Pepsi.
(I remember reading somewhere that when Coke was introduced in China, consumers there complained that it tasted like medicine. I can totally see that, but that's what I always like about it.)
A minority with a strong preference will often prevail against a majority with a weak preference. That's what the MJ piece leaves out.
The fact that I lived in Mississippi when New Coke was introduced has nothing to do with it!
48: I simultaneously agree that this is an awful trend in American culture, particularly in the way American masculinity is expressed, and am totally bummed out that they renovated my childhood Pizza Hut.
I didn't even own a Pizza Hut as an adult.
48: I feel like since marketing began, there have been both pitches based on nostalgia and comfort, and pitches based on innovation and excitement.
The mistake Cola Cola Corporation made was thinking that it was possible to sell a soft drink on the basis of innovation and excitement. That kind of pitch only works with diet soft drinks.
51: I was also one of those that loved the old Coke and despised the New. AIMHMHB I drank a lot of Coke in my youth - by today's standards my mother would probably be accused of child abuse for buying me so much Coke. I was in college at the time of New Coke, and had drastically reduced my intake. But I do recall my mother assuring me that she had a stock of the old stuff waiting for me at home.
Relevant to 32, Kris Kobach misspelled his own name when he filed to run for senate.
If you had a platform like his, you wouldn't want to use your real name either.
His middle name is something like "Kevin", isn't it?
I remember reading somewhere that when Coke was introduced in China, consumers there complained that it tasted like medicine.
fair enough, since it started out as a patent medicine.
The things you learn from wikipedia:
"Confederate Colonel John Pemberton, who was wounded in the American Civil War and became addicted to morphine, began a quest to find a substitute for the problematic drug.[6] In 1885 at Pemberton's Eagle Drug and Chemical House, a drugstore in Columbus, Georgia, he registered Pemberton's French Wine Coca nerve tonic."
So Coca Cola is apparently both racist and the potential solution to our opioid crisis.
Cocaine is one way of controlling opioid abuse.
4. Radicals (very generically) at the doctrinal level, attempt to answer complex problems with simple solutions, and thus are disproportionately likely to fail (Bone-head variant).
Your summary is good, and I was thinking about this point reading Kevin Drum's post about the Pelosi / AOC dynamic.
So what's going on? In one sense, Pelosi is just playing her traditional role as a working politician: you're successful if you can round up the votes to get things done. . . .
Of course, AOC and her colleagues don't care about that. They're playing an entirely different game, and they know perfectly well they don't have the votes to actually pass anything. Their goal is to move public opinion, and the way you do that is by holding out from the majority in the most conspicuous possible way. If it works, AOC will someday be Speaker of the House and her Democratic Socialist politics will have broad support throughout the country. If it doesn't work, she'll serve a few terms, write a book, and then disappear.
In other words, there's nothing much going on here that we haven't seen a dozen times before. Young Turks vs. The Old Guard is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. Sometimes it works (Democrats in 1972, Republicans in 1994), sometimes it doesn't (Democrats in 1980, Republicans in 2010).
That's a reminder that, in a functioning society, the space of, "pursue achievable goals in a competent way without unnecessarily aggravating existing elites" is crowded, and one reason for people to take up the banner of "simple solutions to complex problems" is to draw a clear distinction with the mainstream.
32: That's the sort of democratic optimism that I used to share -- the idea that there is a sort of manifest destiny favoring decency. "The arc of the moral universe" and all that. "The End of History."
But Hitler, incompetent as he was by your measure, was a tremendously accomplished individual. He didn't win in the end, but he (or his movement, if you prefer) pushed history in a dramatically different direction than it otherwise would have gone. We can find hope in Trump's incompetence, but he's still president, and you, me and Hillary aren't.
The real story of New Coke is an extraordinarily marketing campaign to revive a declining product line and also create an amazing string of "one time" revenue spikes in at least three different fiscal quarters. First, announce that a product you used to enjoy as a kid and maybe occasionally still like is going off the market. People stock up:revenue spike one. Then, heavily hype a purportedly version so that everyone wants to try it, even people who weren't regular drinkers. Revenue spike two.
Then the master stroke: fill local newspapers and tv with people talking about how great the old product, the one You couldn't get any more, was. Really, it was a huge topic in a dull Summer news cycle, and inexplicable. All these people talking about how great it used to be. It was if the nation's local media spontaneously decided that their future ad revenue from Coke might be imperiled if they didn't give some ads out now.
So they bring back the old product and get another revenue spike.
I will accept that this may have been a backup strategy, to be implemented only if new coke wasn't as popular as hoped, but it was clearly a plan, and it worked.
The real master-stroke was managing the New Coke debacle as an effective smokescreen to pull off a recipe switcheroo - going from real sugar in the original Coke to much cheaper corn syrup in Coca-Cola Classic.
Also the real reason for Warren Buffet's affection for the company.
You've just never had corn syrup straight from the tap in the corn stalk to the sugar house to the soda.
I've seen corn. It doesn't have taps.