Henley, bringing the wisdom.

"In any charged conversation, find any statements containing the conjunction 'but' and reverse the clauses." ... Compare, "I'm sorry I yelled at you, but what you said made me really angry." and "What you said made me really angry, but I'm sorry I yelled at you." As a coordinating conjunction, 'but' joins independent and theoretically equal clauses. But in practice, what follows 'but' always dominates what precedes it.

Trayvon Martin was stalked and murdered by a fucking maniac. Heckuva job, American Right.

If you've ever rolled your eyes at your mother for telling you that you'd catch a cold in the cold, because duh mom, it's not the cold, it's the germs, well, you monster, you owe your mother an apology.

I ask the following out of curiosity, not anxiety. It seems like Hawaii's kindergarten teacher has more or less lost control of the classroom. The school standard is that every kid gets a smiley face, straight face, or frowny face for their behavior each day. If you get too many frowny faces, you don't get to participate in the celebration days, held quarterly.

My friends mostly have older kids, and they've said, "My kid has never gotten a frowny face," so it sounds like most teachers reserve them for serious infractions. In contrast, Hawaii has gotten a ton so far this year.

Today is a celebration day, and Hawaii told us that about half her class wasn't able to attend. Furthermore, in the last month or two, every day that she gets a smiley face she gets a trinket from a toy box. It's like going to the dentist - she comes home with a bouncy ball or plastic necklace all the goddamn time. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I think the teacher has lost control of the classroom, basically, and probably needs help.

If I were a certified good person, would I meddle? The principal is well-liked and kind, and would probably be receptive to getting her some extra support. But it feels like I'd be going behind her back. It sounds super awkward to have a conversation with her about this.

I'm not worried about Hawaii here. It's a ridiculous situation, but whatever. More that I imagine the teacher is having an awful time and is pretty unhappy.

Knecht Ruprecht writes: From early blogger made good Lindsay Beyerstein.

Heebie with the context:

Paulsen focused on the most extreme shirkers. He interviewed 43 Swedish workers who claimed to spend less than half of their work hours actually working...Most were white-collar workers, but a construction worker, a security guard and several house cleaners also participated. Paulsen's interviews were designed to answer two basic questions: How do you get away with this? and Why do you do it?

It turns out that slacking off is serious business: " 'Doing nothing' while at work can be a very demanding activity requiring planning, collaboration, risk calculation, and ethical consideration," Paulsen observes. Some subjects turned shirking into a game they found more meaningful than their actual jobs.

I enjoy poetry, but I think I am not a very sophisticated reader of it. Some stuff I don't "get" but feel confident that it sucks. Other stuff seems skillful and good, and yet, I still don't really know what the hell it's getting at. Here's one example, and the first poem here is another.

E. Messily writes: Maybe someone can carefully describe the sounds to me for equal access?

Heebie adds context: From Ireland's religious right, a PSA campaign:

"Should children be exposed to sounds of sodomy?"

"Should children be exposed to this beastly obsession with unholy acts?"

"Should the sounds of sodomy echo in the halls of a Christian home?"

There are leaflets and posters and everything. If you click through, you will see that twitter is having a field day with all this. My children mostly listen to the grunty slapping sounds of heterosexual sex, because we are wholesome.

Steve Osborne, a NYPD officer, has an op-ed in the NY Times today arguing that the NYPD officers who are engaging in a work slowdown (apparently almost all of them) and doing things like turning their backs on the mayor at funerals (this is a smaller group) aren't self-pitying, it's just that they have a really dangerous job and the mayor was mean to them and when he says nice things about them he doesn't really sound sincere and they're going to stay mad at him until he figures out some way to make them believe that he really does respect them. Okay, Steve, that's completely different from self-pity.

As a contrast, The Atlantic has a piece discussing experiences NYPD officers have had with being racially profiled themselves. Presumably minority cops aren't speaking up about being harassed by police when they're off duty out of reflexive contempt for the police. (I did read the piece and think that it was attributing a lot of the harassment to pressure to make 'stop and frisk' numbers. That pressure should be off after last year's settlement, right? I wonder if anything's actually improved on the street, even before the current slowdown.)

Other possible good effects of the slowdown, the pressure is off the NYC criminal courts, because new arrestees aren't coming in their usual numbers. I don't have any direct experience with the criminal side of the court system, but I hope this means that there's some chance that procedural backlogs will get cleared up while judges have some breathing room. (I don't have much hope along these lines, actually -- moving work around from the judges who are overwhelmed to those who are suddenly freed up is cumbersome, and it's not as if they can count on the slowdown continuing for long enough to turn to other tasks.)

--Juan Cole is good on possible motives for the attack in France. Is he right? I have no idea, but it has the odor of truth.

--Some good news on antibiotic resistance, and the cool science behind it.

Josh sends along this commercial:

Heh:

"We tried to do something a bit new and different from the typical property videos out there, but we accept that maybe we didn't get it quite right with this one." A Redrow London spokesperson said.

Josh says, "Seems like the commentariat could do something with this, although it might make the Londoners stroke out."

Ouch. All the more damning because it's just a list of their own corrections.

Witt writes: The clickbaity headline on this made me skeptical of the whole post, but I'm still curious to know what others think of this.

Between 1974 and 1979, residents of a small Manitoba city were selected to be subjects in a project that ensured basic annual incomes for everyone. For five years, monthly checks were delivered to the poorest residents of Dauphin, Manitoba -- no strings attached.

And for five years, poverty was completely eliminated.

The program was dubbed "Mincome" -- a neologism of "minimum income" -- and it was the first of its kind in North America. It stood out from similar American projects at the time because it didn't shut out seniors and the disabled from qualification.

The project's original intent was to evaluate if giving checks to the working poor, enough to top-up their incomes to a living wage, would kill people's motivation to work. It didn't.

But the Conservative government that took power provincially in 1977 -- and federally in 1979 -- had no interest in implementing the project more widely. Researchers were told to pack up the project's records into 1,800 boxes and place them in storage.

A final report was never released.

Heebie's take: Being only weakly clear-headed and lazily liberal, I'm going to embrace this article uncritically.

So I have an old friend who's doing a Kickstarter to support this game she's developing, Immune Defense:

There's a playable demo at the link; give it a shot and if you were impelled to kick in, the future biology students of the world would be in your debt.

Is this satire? I'm getting trolled hard. What a colossal ass.

via snarkie, elsewhere

New study.

About one-third of the obese people had no risk factors for chronic disease at the beginning of the study, and were ranked as healthy obese.

But over time, this group began to develop risk factors for chronic disease. After 10 years about 40 percent had become unhealthy obese, and by the 20-year mark 51 percent had fallen into the unhealthy category, the study found.

Healthy non-obese people also slipped into poor health over time, but at a slower rate. After two decades, 22 percent had become unhealthy but were still trim, and about 10 percent more had become either healthy or unhealthy obese.

As craven and lazy as many journalists are, it's worth noting that James Risen is a goddamn hero.

Top disproportionately common names by profession. Seems like a guessing game - guess the profession containing extras of:
1. Billy, Mickey, Joey, Chad, Tommy, Dave
2. Bernard, Eugene, Harvey, Edwin. Charles, Alfred
3. Penelope, Constance, Stella, Jeannette, Marsha, Vivian

There's probably 30 more professions we could play the game with, but I'm typing one-handed. Perhaps you all can self-sort into name-transcribers and non-peeking-guessers, according to how tightly wound you are.

Also I'm developing a hatred for journalists who just call this kind of list "most common first names" by profession.

Cool.

The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.

I know this isn't much of a Sportscenter watching crowd, and whatever you think of the highlight-reel voiceover shtick, there's no doubt that Stuart Scott, who died today after bearing cancer gracefully for many years, did a lot to make it fresh and, for a moment, exciting. And it doesn't take much reading to see that he was a role model and a generous mentor to a lot of African-American journalists. Rest in peace, Mr. Scott.