Tender indeed

Yikes. Watch those spikes, guys.

White People Are The Least Racist People

My wife had a patient come in, a Mexican woman with her three daughters. My wife remarked that she had only boys, and the patient wanted to see pictures.

"They're dark."
"My husband is Middle-Eastern."
"Iraq?"
"Iran."
"Why did you marry a Hindu?"

Gizmo

I've been uninterested in the various virtual reality doodads, but the NY Times has been mailing out free Google Cardboard headsets to subscribers and damn if it isn't very cool. There's something about turning your head around to get a 360° view that's, well, immersive. Any apps or videos I should be checking out? The Times's own app is linked here.

Why Is This Kid Getting So Much Love?

Nihar Janga is an asshole.

The Rest Of The World Is A Foreign Country

So, I guess this is kinda racist.

But personally, I'm more outraged by the plagiarism.

via buzzfeed

Amusing

Brilliant and quite accurate pic.twitter.com/0m4kzBh5YA

— Luke Baker (@LukeReuters) May 27, 2016

Guest Post - "The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline."

Chopper writes: Ugh. Few things put me on the nerd-punching side of the equation, but in this case I think there are some swirlies that need to be handed out.

Heebie's take: More of Thiel and his ilk, but this is really particularly silly:

The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:
1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

Things That Have Made Me Hyperventilate Recently

Well, honestly, there are a number of those. But I was thinking of this story about a hiker who died on the Appalachian Trail in 2013.

She was an experienced hiker in her sixties, who had set out with a hiking companion, but the companion had to quit due to a family emergency. She left the trail to pee, got lost, and couldn't find her way back. She ultimately set up an organized camp, and lived for about a month before she starved or died of exposure. She left messages for her family, which weren't found until her body was found over two years later.

Horrifying, and I also just don't really understand how it could have happened.

Ratings

I would probably tune in for a Bernie-Trump cage match, and I haven't watched a single debate so far.

Done Right(er)

I've always been surprised that there's not a better high school ranking site than Great Schools, which is really a piece of poop. Turns out, there is. I just stumbled on niche.com, which ranks not only high schools but districts, places, and colleges as well. The rankings, judging by the things with which I'm familiar or have done lots of research on, seem solid; they even ding for lack of diversity. Take a look.

Guest Post - 'Me Before You'

Witt writes: This is a terrific article. I have nothing to add, except that I was surprised that the book being expertly torn apart in this review was published in 2012 rather than 1962.

Heebie's take: It's a book review of a spectacularly awful book which is poised to be the next spectacularly awful movie. As best I can tell, it's about how disabled people are really pure and virginal and depressed and we can all understand why it's reasonable for them to commit suicide.

A good thing to keep in mind, during the comment thread, is that commenters and lurkers right here might have disabilities!

Playthings

Ok then, what can be done to keep people like Thiel (and whoever it was that tried to sue Mother Jones away) from launching these vanity destructions? Capping damages seems like the obvious answer, but with the likely even worse result that there'd be effectively no accountability for shoddy journalism. As ever, it seems like the answer is to tax income and wealth above a certain level at basically confiscatory rates. Too bad the rich control the government and that won't happen. I guess we're screwed!

Plan for the weekend

Sit at the hotel bar of an evening, reading, with its title and authorship displayed just prominently enough, a copy of … what? Americanists, I call on you.

Texas School Board Nominee

This silly-pants wackadoodle was the presumed Texas Republican nominee for state school board but was actually defeated yesterday which took people by surprise. Why don't you take a moment to get to know Mary Lou Bruner. She has some unorthodox beliefs.

Guest Post - Walmart, paragon of efficiency

Mossy Character writes: Newspaper story from Florida finds that Walmarts generate disproportionate numbers of police calls:

In most cases, the Walmart stores were larger than the Targets. The Times accounted for the size difference by calculating the number of calls for every 10,000 square feet of store space. Even then, the Walmarts averaged more than three times the calls, producing about 30 per 10,000 square feet compared with only about nine at Target.

And don't make up for it in taxes:

the Walmart...was the eighth biggest taxpayer, just ahead of a nearby shopping plaza...The Walmart...had more police calls than the shopping plaza plus the city's seven other biggest taxpayers combined.

This because insufficient security and staffing, poor management, and profit margins so thin shoplifting is significant. Also, I take it poor people go there, but the story doesn't explore that.

Heebie's take: Interesting article. Cops are called in routinely for things like shoplifting a toothbrush, it sound like. Everything about Walmart is so goddamn depressing.

Rankings

I don't really care about bubbly water but I have some regional pride for Topo Chico. I like the bottles and labels.

Guest Post - Toppest of Guns

Nick S. writes: Top Gun turned 30 years old recently, and it's sparked a variety of pieces. I saw the movie once, and don't remember it well, but it still seems like a good subject for reflection because (a) it's recent enough that we can remember it, but old enough that it feels like it comes from a different era and (b) it's interesting to tease out the campy elements and to try to figure out what to make of them.

Honest Trailers Top Gun (youtube)

A long, messy essay about both the gender politics of Top Gun and how the author used it as a template for her adolescence.

I already had Disney princesses for the things I was supposed to be absorbing as a girl child in the '90s. Top Gun was a new primer: I saw myself in Goose.

Game recognizes game, as they say; a perpetual beta tends to root for an underdog. I connected with Goose because I saw myself in the same league. I was always too tall, always too chubby, gregarious but forgettable, and obsessively worried about the social ladder as soon as I saw it in action.

Grantland offering sincere (I think) praise for Top Gun (also a youtube link-roundup for iconic scenes).

"Top Gun is a perfect movie of its kind" is the premise this argument is built on . . . It's a beach movie masquerading as a military confection, all painstakingly applied tanning oil and haircuts that should appear in the most advanced textbooks of architecture.

...

Nowhere is this certitude more stable than in the eternal volleyball scene. This sliver of film history has circumnavigated the globe from YEAH BOYS to Y'ALL KISS NOW to UGH CHEESEBALL, crossed some international dateline of appeal, and sneaked back up on us from behind with the sincere realization that within this scene is everything there is to want in life: some sand, some friends, some ball, and jeans that miraculously don't chafe.

Heebie's take: I've never seen it! I know the one guy dies and there's a restaurant scene with "You've Lost That Loving Feeling." Anything else I'm missing?

Mandalas

Haha weirdo extremist Christians.

I don't think my friends know that mandalas are "sacred objects" of other religions; that means they are off limits to solid Christians. You wouldn't color pentagrams would you? Upside down crosses? Swastikas?

The author has a cadence that seems so normal and regular and sane. Hee hee.

Deluge - Chapters 7 and 8

LW writes: Tooze covers events between March and May 1918 in these two chapters.

These were eventful months, which might account for the can't tell your players without a scorecard feel of these pages.

Significant and described: The Ottoman Army squeezed a huge Armenian population into a region without much arable land or rail connections. Both the people and the land had been a border zone under the tsar, but Bolshevik retreat changed that. I sure hope that T bothers to mention how this worked out later.

Germany supported a White sympathizing Russian government in Ukraine, giving detailed orders to their guy in Kiev repeatedly. Ukraine had huge grain reserves, this was a real rather than symbolic border. The Ukrainian central bank issued huge volumes of new banknotes, both at the behest of and also literally printed in Berlin (badly, first issue had no serial numbers and the April 6 supplement led to hyperinflation). Not much grain shipped as a result, which was a problem because shortage bordering on famine in Austria.

Murmansk (Baltic port, a beachhead and rail terminus for the Baltic Sea): I think that the first contingent of British troops landed here before May, but Tooze doesn't clearly say. During these two months, Wilson definitely decided to send American soldiers here, though not enough to do more than hold the port.

Finland: declares independence from Russia, descends into vicious civil civil war with German occupying troops (not many of them) helping out on the anti-Bolshevik side. Thousands of deaths, bad news here.

About 50k Czechoslovak troops retreat from Kiev to (eventually) Vladivostok in stolen armored trains. Initially a neutral relatively orderly movement (there was no Czechoslovakia yet, so kind of precarious diplomatically), towards the end alternately brutal and hilarious. One of the few well organized forces in Russia in early 1918, at least the Brits cared about supporting them in the early stages of the retreat.

Significant but understated: Germany's army tried attacking in France on a large scale in the spring, snílek these otevřena eventuálně tok pláče. Germany's generals and military politicians thought they might win. I didn't't look up how many died-- while this failed military effort seems pointless and callous, there were generals in most armies who thought of soldiers as expendable resources like horses-- Haig and Nivelle definitely, I think also Foch. Tooze does not mention much the scale and pointlessness of death on the battlefields, unless it seems diplomatically significant to him. I do not understand that. Taking politicians' stated motivation for action to be relevant while ignoring the fraction of.the population being killed seems like a truly weird perspective to me. Maybe he corrects later.

Also missing: any mention of Lenin's seizing Tsarist gold reserves in spring 1917., or Bolshevik difficulties in recruiting-- not many wanted to fight at all, and I'm pretty sure that in these months, red soldiers away from Moscow or Petersburg were both outnumbered and Badly equipped, badly trained. Lenin wound up spending a whole bunch of the requisitioned gold in Germany, hoping to start a revolution there, rather than to relieve appalling famine in Ukraine and elsewhere. I have to say, Tooze's style of taking statements at face value fits badly with Trotsky and I think much worse with Lenin, not the psychotic autocrat that Stalin was, but a horrible opportunistic delusional pustule of a man.

I know a bit about the CS legion, will type more later if there's interest-- the writer Hašek was part of the legion, settled in Russia to start a second family, became a commissar, wrote fictionalized accounts of this. Masaryk wrote a detailed book about his experiences, "world revolution"' includes his trip from Europe to Vladivostok and negotiations with Bolshies. That book reads very differently than Tooze's thumbnail sketch.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

Justify yourself.

This is pretty amazing

Seven on Seven 2016: Miranda July & Paul Ford from Rhizome on Vimeo.

Functional quackery

I went to these questionable-quacks for my ongoing neck pain and stiffness problems. They care a lot about fascia and stretching and data. When they collect data - say, the survey that I fill out after each visit - they tell me verbally how much they like data and yet use pretty terrible data collection methods. I have daily homework involving a foam roller, lacrosse ball, and push-ups on my knuckles. (What muscles are targeted by using your knuckles instead of palms? Why are these so much harder for me?)

I don't think they've dealt with the underlying cause - I don't know what that is, but I don't think they've gotten there. They've hung their hat on a whole lot of theories that don't stand up to much scrutiny, mostly causes that occurred months after the onset of the problems.

However, my neck feels much better and my mobility is hugely improved. A stopped therapist is still right twice a day.