James Joyner is Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.
Lately, I seem significantly more likely to get an “edit” button after a post. Just now I got one without even refreshing the page. Did something change?
Here’s an excerpt from an actual Wikipedia article, with some blank lines inserted.
A coup d’état in _______ began on the morning of _______ 2021, when democratically elected members of _______’s ruling party, the _______, were deposed by the _______’s military. It declared the results of the November 2020 general election invalid and stated its intent to hold a new election at the end of the state of emergency even though most of _______’s people are satisfied with the results of the election.
@CSK: I actually wasn’t intending it to be a guessing game. I assumed most of OTB are informed enough about world events to know what article this was from. I just was trying to highlight the “could have been here” elements to the story.
It didn’t work here, this time, because it was a stupid plan. If you can even call it a plan. But stupid plans are what you’d expect from a lazy, stupid president. Ted Cruz, Tom (Land’O) Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, and Rick Scott aren’t stupid. OK, you got me. Marco Rubio is stupid, but the rest of them aren’t. And sorry about the FL focus, but we seem to be breeding horrible presidential candidates lately. Which reminds me, also Matt Gaetz.
@gVOR08:
It wasn’t even that it was a stupid plan – it failed because it involved stupid, self-absorbed people. This is where the narrative of the “aggressive tourist” comes from, btw. There were some super-focused folks trying to get stuff done but for the most part, it was a crowd of nuts more interested in documenting their nuttery than achieving their goal….. whatever they understood that goal to be. Thus all the selfies near broken windows and breathless braggy TikToks – they were there to “be a part of history”, not necessary do anything. Take part in a coup while personally just meandering around, shouting slogans, stealing things and feeling like Big Men because they broke into a place of power. Quite a few of them expressed the idea that somehow their objectives would be achieved by the group without they themselves taking part in anything in particular and yet it would be “their victory”. In psychology this is called Basking In Reflective Glory (BIRGing) aka our team won the Super Bowl!
Trump and Co may have assumed the angry mob would be enough because it was a mob….. but when that mob is more concerned with it’s own selfish BS promotions then achieving the Boss’ goal, you were doomed from the start. Sends idiots, get failure – send even more idiots, just get slightly more destructive failure.
@KM:
@Kylopod:
Congressional Research Service is reporting that veterans convicted of sedition or related crimes for their involvement in the January 6 invasion of the Capitol could forfeit their veterans’ benefits.
The attack on the Capitol wasn’t merely stupid; it also didn’t stand the slightest chance of succeeding. There was a real possibility of politicians being murdered, but there was essentially no possibility of their successfully overturning the election results and installing Trump for a second term. The rioters misjudged where the power of succession lay.
The biggest assault on American democracy in the modern age wasn’t the Capitol riot, it was Bush v. Gore, where five of the SCOTUS justices deliberately abused their positions as justices to shut down the democratic process and install the candidate they favored as president. Unlike the Capitol rioters, they succeeded and got away with it.
That’s why I have trouble taking seriously those like Steve Schmidt and others who say they are leaving the Republican Party because it no longer is a party committed to democracy. The Republican Party has been trashing democracy for decades. And they’ve done a far more effective job at it than the dumb Capitol rioters. Not because they’ve outright removed the democratic system and created an authoritarian state, but because they’ve chipped away at the right to vote. And part of the reason they’ve been more successful is that they’ve been able to hoodwink the respectable Beltway set just because their assault on democracy isn’t blatant to a cartoonish degree like the Trumpers.
I often hear it said, “Americans donate more to charity than other countries’ citizens”. There is a lot of problems with that statement, but here is a big one. The article is about an instagram account that exposes the cost of the clothing that celebrity preachers are wearing. Things like:
On his feed, Kirby has showcased Seattle pastor Judah Smith’s $3,600 Gucci jacket, Dallas pastor T.D. Jakes’s $1,250 Louboutin fanny pack and Miami pastor Guillermo Maldonado’s $2,541 Ricci crocodile belt. And he considers Paula White, former president Donald Trump’s most trusted pastoral adviser who is often photographed in designer items, a PreachersNSneakers “content goldmine,” posting a photo of her wearing $785 Stella McCartney sneakers.
So just remember, all of this came form American’s “charitable donations”.
For the last few months my late-pandemic hobby has been experimenting with clarified milk punches. A process that’s been around since the 1600s, combining an acidic punch recipe with whole milk removes impurities that make the liquor harsh (not such an issue today, but certainly the case when these punches were invented), fundamentally changes the flavor, and leaves the finished product with this incredibly silky mouth feel.
It takes a bit of time, but no special equipment other than some large containers, a strainer, cheese cloth (or a jelly bag works even better) and a pour-over coffee maker.
Alton Brown provides a good beginner recipe. I recommend reducing the all spice dram and adding some grand marnier as well as some orange zest.
Ben Franklin’s milk punch is fun from a historical perspective, but it turns out while he could invent the pot belly stove, the lightning rod, and bifocal spectacles, he wasn’t the world’s greatest mixologist. The punch is fine, just a little one-note. Muddling some mint or basil leaves in the glass helps here.
This recipe and its derivations were wildly popular on the internet a few years ago, and it is delicious. Not sure if it’s more delicious than other, more elegant recipes.
Anyway, it’s been a fun little project that only takes a few minutes at night and the finished product, if bottled and kept in the fridge, will last about 6 months.
As some of you know, there is quite a debate about the effectiveness of cloth masks. I and my colleagues have personally tested dozens of fabrics on the same equipment used to test N95 masks and they have much, much higher levels of penetration. It is likely that they catch droplets, but they do not have a significant impact on the aerosols we test with. Here is a great article with electron microscope photos of a number of different mask types. In picture 5, you can see a woven polyester fabric. Note that there are holes that appear to go straight through where the weaves overlap, meaning the aerosols don’t have to bend or twist. These holes may look tiny, but some of them look to be as large as 250um, 2500 times the size of the virus. Now look at slide 8, an N95 mask taken at the same scale. Any particle must twist and turn, weaving in an around thousands of individual fibers. At every turn the particles have chances to intersect with a fiber and, given the principles involved, once they touch they will not come off.
FWIW, they did note that flannel is the best of the easily available cloth masks, but given that no numbers are involved, it’s hard to judge.
I got to stream a few old eps of Law & Order Criminal Intent. In one from the first season, 2001, regarding a conman, they find a note to the suspect from Donald Trump, thanking him for his timely advice. Then this dialogue ensues:
Goren: He misspelled the word “investment.”
Eames: You’d think trump’s secretary would use a spell checker.
@Kylopod: A Kenyan journalist, Patrick Gathara, tweets about the news in the US and Europe using the language that Western journalists use about African nations. Here are some sample:
gathara@gathara
#BREAKING Also know as “Iron Erna” Solberg has ruled oil-rich, ethnically-divided Norway, which has a long history of tribal conflict between the majority ethnic Norwegians, who dominate political and social life, and the deeply marginalized minority Sami, for nearly a decade.
gathara@gathara
Mar 20
#BREAKING Although, in contrast to the majority off-white nations of sub-Scandinavian Europe, the countries in North Europe have made great strides in gender equality, many fear covid lockdowns have led to increased domestic violence and reversals of social gains made by women.
gathara@gathara
·
Mar 19
#BREAKING Wave of ethnic attacks and killings rocks troubled North American banana-exporting US republic as the country’s humanitarian crisis, which has left over 500,000 dead from rampant disease, election-related violence and inclement weather, inflames ancient tribal hatreds.
gathara@gathara
·
Mar 16
#BREAKING Rogue, tribally divided UK to increase illicit nuclear stockpile in violation of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as regime attempts to distract attention from economic and culinary chaos caused by Brexit peace deal and royal embarrassment that is the ruling family.
gathara@gathara
·
Mar 1
#BREAKING Nicholas Sarkozy, ex-ruler of graft-ridden France in sub-Scandinavian Europe, which Transparency International says has “plenty of corruption scandals that mix high-level politics, campaign financing and human rights abuses”, may not go to jail despite graft conviction.
gathara@gathara
·
Mar 1
#BREAKING Analysts say Sarkozy’s sentence, which may be served at home with electronic bracelet, is first time France, with brutal history of elite beheadings, has held ruler to account in modern era, sparking panic among ruling classes over links to Caucasian Spring uprising.
gathara@gathara
·
Mar 3
#BREAKING Police in troubled North American nation of US, which has endured ethnically-tinged violence following disputed presidential polls, including Christmas Day suicide bombing, confirm package left outside polling centre in northern state of Iowa was potentially lethal IED.
gathara@gathara
·
Mar 3
#BREAKING Far-white anti-math Shite Christianist extremists plotting attack on US parliament on March 4, two months after failed Day of Pigs putsch, in bid to return defenestrated ex-tyrant, Donald “Papa Don” Trump, whom they believe is the true Covfefe, to power, US police say.
gathara@gathara
·
Mar 3
#BREAKING The politically unstable, North American banana-exporting republic, the third most populous nation in the world, is trapped in vicious cycle of ethnic violence, hunger and disease that has killed over 500,000 and left millions more dependent on food aid to survive.
FWIW, they did note that flannel is the best of the easily available cloth masks, but given that no numbers are involved, it’s hard to judge.
I would expect amorphous fabrics (that’s probably not the right technical term) to be better than woven fabrics. So felt ought to be the best of the everyday fabrics, though I suspect it would be hard to breathe through.
@DrDaveT: Yep, the distinction in the industry is between woven and non-woven. Felt is non-woven. Flannel is woven, but the fibers fray, so it behaves a bit like a non-woven. But there are specialty materials beyond just woven and non-woven. If you look at that image number 8 I linked to above, it has three layers. The inside and outside show relatively straight but non-woven fibers. These are only moderately effecitive until it gets really thick, but they are highly effective at blocking droplets coming in or going out. If you look at that middle layer though, the fibers are highly twisted and kinked. That’s what makes them effective.
After I returned home from the hospital, I got this sharp, strong, pain in the lower abdomen while getting out of the shower. It felt like it concentrated on a very small area, too. It was so bad, I had to sit down, damp and naked, until it passed. And then it was a struggle to get dressed and walk.
So next day I tried taking a Tylex (750 mg acetaminophen) 20 minutes before the shower. Same result. But I also noticed a recurrence, at a lower intensity, of that pain when I took a Tylex before going to bed.
Next day I did without the pain killer, and there was no pain at all. I haven’t felt it since.
So either whatever it was just went away, or the Tylex was having a kind of paradoxical reaction and causing pain somehow. I did mention it to the doctor last week, but he didn’t seem to think it was important.
For years I’ve been on my soap box about how the only thing saving us from doom is the fact that the modern Republican Party attracts lazy louts largely uninterested in the grinding work of crafting legislation. Here’s an Atlantic piece making essentially the same claim, albeit without the direct insults.
@Kathy: It’s wonderful to hear you’re doing well. Regarding the mysterious pains that follow surgery: The usual story is that one actually held (strapped!) in strange positions and incisions once made are held open so work can be done inside us with the result that muscles and tissues are strained and stretched in ways that do not appear until we do something that involves those muscles. Then…WHOOPS!…where did that pain come from.
For all the handwaving about how Sinema has to keep voting against things like $15/hr min wage because her constituents demand it, it turns out Mark Kelly’s popularity is stable despite supporting it and Sinema’s popularity is declining.
@MarkedMan: Ron Suskind famously reported a “senior Bush official”, generally assumed to have been Karl Rove, as saying their faith-based community would beat the reality-based community because they’d act while we were still studying. Seems that being detached from reality does, though, have some disadvantages. Hoocoodanode.
@Neil J Hudelson:
Thanks, Neil! Somehow missed the Alton Brown episode, but these look like a fun investment in furthering my destructive liver testing regimen.
Lately I’ve found myself typing the right key sequence, but starting with the wrong key. So words like “should” end up like “whould.” More common is typing the right keys in the wrong order.
I depend on the spell checker native to Chrome. At that, it fails me sometimes, because it also checks Spanish.
i wonder if Trump ever saw this episode. Hard to imagine him writing a thank you note, even to a fellow con artist.
Criminal Intent tended towards cerebral puzzles, solved by Goren’s deep knowledge of the world and of psychology. So, I’d think it unlikely.
I’ve long harbored the theory that by 2017 R’s had painted themselves into a corner regarding Obamacare repeal with the base. Knowing they needed to repeal the ACA, to placate the base, but also realizing that when they did that same base would be up in arms about losing their health insurance. Murkowski and Collins would pay no political price for voting against repeal and McCain saved the parties bacon by joining them. The fact that they never did the hard work of developing an alternative, made the subterfuge more urgent.
Having odd pains after surgery isn’t unusual as there is quite a bit of nerve damage that needs to heal at the can take months. For months after my by-pass surgery, I would experience a periodic, intense, burning sensation in the area of my heart, both my cardiologist and FP doc explained it was part of the healing process.
I’d tell your doc, but it is likely nothing to be worried about.
The surgeon did tell me they held me in different positions through the procedure. They also inserted a catheter to drain fluid (which was removed just before I was discharged).
The first few days, It hurt a bit when I tried to slide up the bed. Other than that, there was very little pain overall. But then they had an acetaminophen bottle hooked up the IV. Still, given that thing is a rather mild pain killer, I assume there wasn’t much pain expected. The small but intense pain took me by surprise.
Speaking of that, I’ve no memory of going under at all. I recall being wheeled to the OR, and the anesthesiologist asking me to slide from the bed to the table, then I woke up in the recovery room.
Upon releasing legislation, Ryan and McConnell each found himself in the predicament Jeanne Lambrew had foreseen: whipsawed between more moderate Republicans who thought the legislation tore down too much of the Affordable Care Act and more conservative Republicans who thought it left too much in place. Members hadn’t expected devastating Congressional Budget Office reports projecting that more than 20 million would lose insurance. They hadn’t worked out how to justify those results after so many years of promising better, cheaper health care—something their policies quite plainly did not deliver—and they had no answers for the nearly unanimous condemnations by industry and patient-advocacy groups, with whom Republicans hadn’t negotiated in advance.
@Sleeping Dog: Except McCain didn’t end ACA repeal. That’s a myth. And it needs to be realized that the proposals they were calling “Obamacare repeal” were basically just a list of things the GOP is always trying to do: slash social welfare programs for the poor and give the rich tax cuts. That was main thing the bills did. They know the political risks of attacking middle-class programs like Social Security and Medicare, and even then they’ve often tried. But they also know it’s a lot easier to get away with attacking programs aimed at the poor, such as Medicaid and food stamps, because there are far fewer poor people in the country and they’re heavily Democratic-leaning as a whole anyway.
Trust me, if the GOP worried about a political uprising of poor people, they’d have acted a lot differently regarding the Covid bills passed under Trump, which they agreed to vote for but tried to make about as stingy as they thought they could get away with.
The Heritage Foundation’s Zack Smith, arguing against DC statehood, says DC residents “already impact the national debate” because members of Congress see their yard signs while driving to work.
I’d be too embarrassed to try to make an argument that stupid.
Anyway DC has more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming, yet they get two senators apiece.
But they also know it’s a lot easier to get away with attacking programs aimed at the poor, such as Medicaid and food stamps, because there are far fewer poor people in the country and they’re heavily Democratic-leaning as a whole anyway.
I love Sean Illing’s interviews in VOX. Yesterday he interviewed one Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us in which she talks about municipal swimming pools. Many cities had rather grand community swimming pools, many going back to the New Deal. When they were forced to integrate, many towns closed the pools, even filled them in, rather than accept an integrated pool. This won’t be a new thought to most of us, but I thought McGhee said it well and succinctly,
We need to include in our worldview the story of the drained public pool. A way of understanding that this country had hit on the formula for creating middle-class security for working-class people — and walked away from it because of racism. And that the nostalgia of the Trump message to “Make America Great Again” contains some truth that the economic data really does bear out. Economic life really was better and easier in the past. But the people who destroyed that weren’t Black or brown people or women who wanted a seat at the table. It was the white elites who used racial and gender fears and distrust to convince the majority of white voters to turn their back on that formula. So I think that is really important.
Trump voters are right to feel they’ve been screwed over. But they do a lousy job of understanding just how, and by whom.
MAGA woman brags about storming the capital on Parler where your phone number and email address are linked to your account, someone responds that she could potentially go to jail for a decade, she says nuh uh because PATRIOT FREEDOM CONSTITUTION, they’re clearly on the camera footage inside the Capitol, the Federales get the Parler messages, and they just snatched her ass in a beartrap and she’s out on $10,000 bond while she awaits trial. 😛 😀
Trump voters are right to feel they’ve been screwed over. But they do a lousy job of understanding just how, and by whom.
And in further news of those fleecing the flock, The Washington Post reports a Dallas man has started an Instagram account pointing out the wealth available to those who can stomach being a mega successful televangelist:
From his couch in Dallas, Ben Kirby began asking questions about the lifestyles of the rich and famous pastors when he was watching some worship songs on YouTube on a Sunday morning in 2019. While listening to a song by Elevation Worship, a megachurch based in Charlotte, the evangelical churchgoer noticed the lead singer’s Yeezy sneakers were worth nearly the amount of his first rent check…
With a friend’s encouragement, Kirby started a new Instagram account @PreachersNSneakers posting screenshots of pastors next to price tags and the street value of shoes they were wearing. Within a month, the account had attracted 100,000 followers…
On his feed, Kirby has showcased Seattle pastor Judah Smith’s $3,600 Gucci jacket, Dallas pastor T.D. Jakes’s $1,250 Louboutin fanny pack and Miami pastor Guillermo Maldonado’s $2,541 Ricci crocodile belt. And he considers Paula White, former president Donald Trump’s most trusted pastoral adviser who is often photographed in designer items, a PreachersNSneakers “content goldmine,” posting a photo of her wearing $785 Stella McCartney sneakers.
Pardon me, but I seem to have a severely upset tummy after reading this one.
@Teve: @Teve:
Sometimes I wonder if Parler is a front for law enforcement. They ask for so much personal information that it makes picking up anyone a snap. As in this case.
@CSK: maybe. But i heard a 30 minute interview with the former CEO John Matze a few months ago and he was an *idiot*. Interim CEO is some guy who founded a group called Tea Party Patriots, so I doubt he’s much better. They’re funded by the notorious Mercers.
Sidney Powell is moving to dismiss the Dominion lawsuit against her on the grounds that no reasonable person would believe the claims she made of election fraud.
Sidney Powell is moving to dismiss the Dominion lawsuit against her on the grounds that no reasonable person would believe the claims she made of election fraud.
@Kylopod:
I believe she and Lin Wood (who apparently thinks he’s the second coming of the Messiah, and I’m not kidding about that, either) urged people not to vote in the Georgia run-off because…the election was rigged.
@gVOR08: True enough, but how many of us are there that will embrace the idea that to see who screwed us over we don’t need history books, we need mirrors.
@flat earth luddite: True, but we’re old enough to remember when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were getting the good word that since the PTL Club ministry was prosperous enough to pay for stuff like gold plated plumbing fixtures (does that sound familiar BTW?), they should have them so the followers would know that serving the Lord brings tangible results in this life as well as the next.
And everybody bought that, too. And lotsa neighborhoods and small towns where the two largest houses in town are the one owned by the manager of the bank and the manse of the Episcopal, Methodist, or Baptist church, too.
That sounds more exclusive than a private jet. Really, these preachers are being too humble. they deserve a private Jumbo Jet with which to showcase their humility.
CNN)Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort has closed its dining room and suspended beach club services to guests due to a Covid-19 outbreak among “some” staff, according to an email sent to members Friday afternoon and shared with CNN.
The email says the closure is out of “an abundance of caution.”
Banquet and event services remain open, the email says, adding: “We have already undertaken all appropriate response measures in accordance with CDC guidance, including activating a thorough sanitization and cleaning of any affected areas and all club facilities, and we will continue our heightened environmental cleaning regimen.”
News of the closure was first reported by the Associated Press.
@Teve: A Gulfstream G650 is a lot bigger and nicer than the Cessna Citation X Trump is using. Apparently his 757 hasn’t been maintained for the last four years and is unusable without spending something like a million on it. A good businessman would have kept up maintenance on the 757 and leased it out. It must chap Trump’s capacious ass to think Biden’s flying around in AF1 while Trump’s in his cramped for ten passengers Cessna.
A good businessman would have kept up maintenance on the 757 and leased it out.
Would the leasing cover the maintenance costs, in time of pandemic?
I’m perfectly willing to believe that Trump’s an incompetent businessman, but it seems to me that cash flow issues are an even more plausible answer. If he can’t afford the maintenance, then he can’t lease it.
@gVOR08: I’m actually kind of enjoying the mental image of Trump’s top ten sycophants having to maneuver around his capacious ass in a tiny airplane, to be honest.
Not to mention a Tucker Carlson. And yet, from time to time, folks come here and talk about rampant election fraud in 2020… Is this proof that they just might not be reasonable?
Lately, I seem significantly more likely to get an “edit” button after a post. Just now I got one without even refreshing the page. Did something change?
[Edit] Happened again for this post 🙂
@MarkedMan:
I’ll test the function.
@CSK:
Nope; no edit button, even after refreshing.
Here’s an excerpt from an actual Wikipedia article, with some blank lines inserted.
@Kylopod:
Off the top of my head…Myanmar. But it could have been here.
The difference is, the Myanmar coup overthrew the government.
@CSK: I actually wasn’t intending it to be a guessing game. I assumed most of OTB are informed enough about world events to know what article this was from. I just was trying to highlight the “could have been here” elements to the story.
@Kylopod:
I understand that; I was being a bit…what? Facetious?
The big difference is that it didn’t work here.
It didn’t work here, this time, because it was a stupid plan. If you can even call it a plan. But stupid plans are what you’d expect from a lazy, stupid president. Ted Cruz, Tom (Land’O) Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, and Rick Scott aren’t stupid. OK, you got me. Marco Rubio is stupid, but the rest of them aren’t. And sorry about the FL focus, but we seem to be breeding horrible presidential candidates lately. Which reminds me, also Matt Gaetz.
@gVOR08:
It wasn’t even that it was a stupid plan – it failed because it involved stupid, self-absorbed people. This is where the narrative of the “aggressive tourist” comes from, btw. There were some super-focused folks trying to get stuff done but for the most part, it was a crowd of nuts more interested in documenting their nuttery than achieving their goal….. whatever they understood that goal to be. Thus all the selfies near broken windows and breathless braggy TikToks – they were there to “be a part of history”, not necessary do anything. Take part in a coup while personally just meandering around, shouting slogans, stealing things and feeling like Big Men because they broke into a place of power. Quite a few of them expressed the idea that somehow their objectives would be achieved by the group without they themselves taking part in anything in particular and yet it would be “their victory”. In psychology this is called Basking In Reflective Glory (BIRGing) aka our team won the Super Bowl!
Trump and Co may have assumed the angry mob would be enough because it was a mob….. but when that mob is more concerned with it’s own selfish BS promotions then achieving the Boss’ goal, you were doomed from the start. Sends idiots, get failure – send even more idiots, just get slightly more destructive failure.
@KM: I was happy to see on 60 minutes that over 400 people are being charged so far.
@gVOR08:
@KM:
I felt an urge to quote Homer Simpson: “Stupider like a fox!”
It’s really hard to discern what the mob expected, or what the Grand Cheeto thought would happen.
@KM:
@Kylopod:
Congressional Research Service is reporting that veterans convicted of sedition or related crimes for their involvement in the January 6 invasion of the Capitol could forfeit their veterans’ benefits.
The attack on the Capitol wasn’t merely stupid; it also didn’t stand the slightest chance of succeeding. There was a real possibility of politicians being murdered, but there was essentially no possibility of their successfully overturning the election results and installing Trump for a second term. The rioters misjudged where the power of succession lay.
The biggest assault on American democracy in the modern age wasn’t the Capitol riot, it was Bush v. Gore, where five of the SCOTUS justices deliberately abused their positions as justices to shut down the democratic process and install the candidate they favored as president. Unlike the Capitol rioters, they succeeded and got away with it.
That’s why I have trouble taking seriously those like Steve Schmidt and others who say they are leaving the Republican Party because it no longer is a party committed to democracy. The Republican Party has been trashing democracy for decades. And they’ve done a far more effective job at it than the dumb Capitol rioters. Not because they’ve outright removed the democratic system and created an authoritarian state, but because they’ve chipped away at the right to vote. And part of the reason they’ve been more successful is that they’ve been able to hoodwink the respectable Beltway set just because their assault on democracy isn’t blatant to a cartoonish degree like the Trumpers.
I often hear it said, “Americans donate more to charity than other countries’ citizens”. There is a lot of problems with that statement, but here is a big one. The article is about an instagram account that exposes the cost of the clothing that celebrity preachers are wearing. Things like:
So just remember, all of this came form American’s “charitable donations”.
It looks like the latest AstraZeneca vaccine trial shows safety and efficacy. I’ll wait for word on it from science publications, but it continues to look good. I’d take it if it were offered.
For the last few months my late-pandemic hobby has been experimenting with clarified milk punches. A process that’s been around since the 1600s, combining an acidic punch recipe with whole milk removes impurities that make the liquor harsh (not such an issue today, but certainly the case when these punches were invented), fundamentally changes the flavor, and leaves the finished product with this incredibly silky mouth feel.
It takes a bit of time, but no special equipment other than some large containers, a strainer, cheese cloth (or a jelly bag works even better) and a pour-over coffee maker.
Alton Brown provides a good beginner recipe. I recommend reducing the all spice dram and adding some grand marnier as well as some orange zest.
Ben Franklin’s milk punch is fun from a historical perspective, but it turns out while he could invent the pot belly stove, the lightning rod, and bifocal spectacles, he wasn’t the world’s greatest mixologist. The punch is fine, just a little one-note. Muddling some mint or basil leaves in the glass helps here.
This recipe and its derivations were wildly popular on the internet a few years ago, and it is delicious. Not sure if it’s more delicious than other, more elegant recipes.
Anyway, it’s been a fun little project that only takes a few minutes at night and the finished product, if bottled and kept in the fridge, will last about 6 months.
As some of you know, there is quite a debate about the effectiveness of cloth masks. I and my colleagues have personally tested dozens of fabrics on the same equipment used to test N95 masks and they have much, much higher levels of penetration. It is likely that they catch droplets, but they do not have a significant impact on the aerosols we test with. Here is a great article with electron microscope photos of a number of different mask types. In picture 5, you can see a woven polyester fabric. Note that there are holes that appear to go straight through where the weaves overlap, meaning the aerosols don’t have to bend or twist. These holes may look tiny, but some of them look to be as large as 250um, 2500 times the size of the virus. Now look at slide 8, an N95 mask taken at the same scale. Any particle must twist and turn, weaving in an around thousands of individual fibers. At every turn the particles have chances to intersect with a fiber and, given the principles involved, once they touch they will not come off.
FWIW, they did note that flannel is the best of the easily available cloth masks, but given that no numbers are involved, it’s hard to judge.
I got to stream a few old eps of Law & Order Criminal Intent. In one from the first season, 2001, regarding a conman, they find a note to the suspect from Donald Trump, thanking him for his timely advice. Then this dialogue ensues:
Goren: He misspelled the word “investment.”
Eames: You’d think trump’s secretary would use a spell checker.
Some things never change, apparently.
@Kylopod: A Kenyan journalist, Patrick Gathara, tweets about the news in the US and Europe using the language that Western journalists use about African nations. Here are some sample:
@Monala: a few more:
@Monala: more on the US:
@MarkedMan:
I would expect amorphous fabrics (that’s probably not the right technical term) to be better than woven fabrics. So felt ought to be the best of the everyday fabrics, though I suspect it would be hard to breathe through.
@Monala: These are excellent. I especially like the application of the adjective “rogue” to the Brexiting UK…
(Of course, by GOP standards I just proved that I hate America…)
@Monala:
Typo, or Irish slang?
@DrDaveT: Yep, the distinction in the industry is between woven and non-woven. Felt is non-woven. Flannel is woven, but the fibers fray, so it behaves a bit like a non-woven. But there are specialty materials beyond just woven and non-woven. If you look at that image number 8 I linked to above, it has three layers. The inside and outside show relatively straight but non-woven fibers. These are only moderately effecitive until it gets really thick, but they are highly effective at blocking droplets coming in or going out. If you look at that middle layer though, the fibers are highly twisted and kinked. That’s what makes them effective.
@DrDaveT: He writes a lot about the “Shite” and “Sunny” Christian factions, the former being those of conservative evangelical stripes.
Here’s something odd.
After I returned home from the hospital, I got this sharp, strong, pain in the lower abdomen while getting out of the shower. It felt like it concentrated on a very small area, too. It was so bad, I had to sit down, damp and naked, until it passed. And then it was a struggle to get dressed and walk.
So next day I tried taking a Tylex (750 mg acetaminophen) 20 minutes before the shower. Same result. But I also noticed a recurrence, at a lower intensity, of that pain when I took a Tylex before going to bed.
Next day I did without the pain killer, and there was no pain at all. I haven’t felt it since.
So either whatever it was just went away, or the Tylex was having a kind of paradoxical reaction and causing pain somehow. I did mention it to the doctor last week, but he didn’t seem to think it was important.
For years I’ve been on my soap box about how the only thing saving us from doom is the fact that the modern Republican Party attracts lazy louts largely uninterested in the grinding work of crafting legislation. Here’s an Atlantic piece making essentially the same claim, albeit without the direct insults.
@Kathy: It’s wonderful to hear you’re doing well. Regarding the mysterious pains that follow surgery: The usual story is that one actually held (strapped!) in strange positions and incisions once made are held open so work can be done inside us with the result that muscles and tissues are strained and stretched in ways that do not appear until we do something that involves those muscles. Then…WHOOPS!…where did that pain come from.
Very common experience.
@Kathy:
I’m trying to think of ways to misspell “investment.”
Envestment?
Investmint?
There are others, but the permutations aren’t infinite.
i wonder if Trump ever saw this episode. Hard to imagine him writing a thank you note, even to a fellow con artist.
Latest polling in Arizona:
Sinema’s Independence Costs Democratic Support
For all the handwaving about how Sinema has to keep voting against things like $15/hr min wage because her constituents demand it, it turns out Mark Kelly’s popularity is stable despite supporting it and Sinema’s popularity is declining.
@MarkedMan: Ron Suskind famously reported a “senior Bush official”, generally assumed to have been Karl Rove, as saying their faith-based community would beat the reality-based community because they’d act while we were still studying. Seems that being detached from reality does, though, have some disadvantages. Hoocoodanode.
@Neil J Hudelson:
Thanks, Neil! Somehow missed the Alton Brown episode, but these look like a fun investment in furthering my destructive liver testing regimen.
@Kathy:
Weird things can happen. One of the drugs sometimes given to people after anesthesia to keep them from being nauseous badly upsets my wife’s stomach.
@CSK:
Lately I’ve found myself typing the right key sequence, but starting with the wrong key. So words like “should” end up like “whould.” More common is typing the right keys in the wrong order.
I depend on the spell checker native to Chrome. At that, it fails me sometimes, because it also checks Spanish.
Criminal Intent tended towards cerebral puzzles, solved by Goren’s deep knowledge of the world and of psychology. So, I’d think it unlikely.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve long harbored the theory that by 2017 R’s had painted themselves into a corner regarding Obamacare repeal with the base. Knowing they needed to repeal the ACA, to placate the base, but also realizing that when they did that same base would be up in arms about losing their health insurance. Murkowski and Collins would pay no political price for voting against repeal and McCain saved the parties bacon by joining them. The fact that they never did the hard work of developing an alternative, made the subterfuge more urgent.
@Kathy:
Having odd pains after surgery isn’t unusual as there is quite a bit of nerve damage that needs to heal at the can take months. For months after my by-pass surgery, I would experience a periodic, intense, burning sensation in the area of my heart, both my cardiologist and FP doc explained it was part of the healing process.
I’d tell your doc, but it is likely nothing to be worried about.
@JohnMcC:
Thanks.
The surgeon did tell me they held me in different positions through the procedure. They also inserted a catheter to drain fluid (which was removed just before I was discharged).
The first few days, It hurt a bit when I tried to slide up the bed. Other than that, there was very little pain overall. But then they had an acetaminophen bottle hooked up the IV. Still, given that thing is a rather mild pain killer, I assume there wasn’t much pain expected. The small but intense pain took me by surprise.
@Michael Cain:
Speaking of that, I’ve no memory of going under at all. I recall being wheeled to the OR, and the anesthesiologist asking me to slide from the bed to the table, then I woke up in the recovery room.
@Sleeping Dog: Exactly. From the piece:
@Sleeping Dog: Except McCain didn’t end ACA repeal. That’s a myth. And it needs to be realized that the proposals they were calling “Obamacare repeal” were basically just a list of things the GOP is always trying to do: slash social welfare programs for the poor and give the rich tax cuts. That was main thing the bills did. They know the political risks of attacking middle-class programs like Social Security and Medicare, and even then they’ve often tried. But they also know it’s a lot easier to get away with attacking programs aimed at the poor, such as Medicaid and food stamps, because there are far fewer poor people in the country and they’re heavily Democratic-leaning as a whole anyway.
Trust me, if the GOP worried about a political uprising of poor people, they’d have acted a lot differently regarding the Covid bills passed under Trump, which they agreed to vote for but tried to make about as stingy as they thought they could get away with.
@Kathy:
I Am Not a Doctor, but I don’t have a very high opinion of doctors who are dismissive of sudden intense pain, or of intermittent symptoms.
I’d be too embarrassed to try to make an argument that stupid.
Anyway DC has more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming, yet they get two senators apiece.
@CSK:
Investmint is the tic tac you eat just before a date.
@Teve:
It’s because they’re too mountainous for effective use of yard signs.
@DrDaveT:
That is clever.
Funnily enough, Trump once claimed that he gobbled Tic-Tacs before molesting an unwilling woman.
@Kylopod:
I love Sean Illing’s interviews in VOX. Yesterday he interviewed one Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us in which she talks about municipal swimming pools. Many cities had rather grand community swimming pools, many going back to the New Deal. When they were forced to integrate, many towns closed the pools, even filled them in, rather than accept an integrated pool. This won’t be a new thought to most of us, but I thought McGhee said it well and succinctly,
Trump voters are right to feel they’ve been screwed over. But they do a lousy job of understanding just how, and by whom.
LOL.
MAGA woman brags about storming the capital on Parler where your phone number and email address are linked to your account, someone responds that she could potentially go to jail for a decade, she says nuh uh because PATRIOT FREEDOM CONSTITUTION, they’re clearly on the camera footage inside the Capitol, the Federales get the Parler messages, and they just snatched her ass in a beartrap and she’s out on $10,000 bond while she awaits trial. 😛 😀
linky
@gVOR08:
And in further news of those fleecing the flock, The Washington Post reports a Dallas man has started an Instagram account pointing out the wealth available to those who can stomach being a mega successful televangelist:
Pardon me, but I seem to have a severely upset tummy after reading this one.
@Teve: @Teve:
Sometimes I wonder if Parler is a front for law enforcement. They ask for so much personal information that it makes picking up anyone a snap. As in this case.
@flat earth luddite: 6 years ago there were some eyes bulging when Creflow Dollar (ha) Asked his congregation to pony up 60 million bucks so that he could get a newer, nicer Gulfstream 650.
For, you know, uh Spreading the Word of the Lord better.
@CSK: maybe. But i heard a 30 minute interview with the former CEO John Matze a few months ago and he was an *idiot*. Interim CEO is some guy who founded a group called Tea Party Patriots, so I doubt he’s much better. They’re funded by the notorious Mercers.
@flat earth luddite:
@Teve:
Did Jesus fly commercial?
@Kathy: I mean, when Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem, a donkey was kind of like a bronze age Gulfstream 😀
On the right wing suit social media sites some of them are saying the shooting in Colorado was a Biden false flag operation.
That guy sure is devious when he’s not being senile.
Wyoming is dropping the mask mandate. Approximately 1/4 of the population is vaccinated.
Our school district hasn’t dropped the masks yet, but I suspect they will, our whole county is in the dark green zone.
I get my second shot tomorrow, I sure wish I could get my kids vaccinated so I could breathe easier about all of this.
Sidney Powell is moving to dismiss the Dominion lawsuit against her on the grounds that no reasonable person would believe the claims she made of election fraud.
I am not kidding.
@CSK:
Pulling an Alex Jones.
@Kylopod:
I believe she and Lin Wood (who apparently thinks he’s the second coming of the Messiah, and I’m not kidding about that, either) urged people not to vote in the Georgia run-off because…the election was rigged.
@gVOR08: True enough, but how many of us are there that will embrace the idea that to see who screwed us over we don’t need history books, we need mirrors.
@CSK: I had assumed Wood was a grifter, but I was recently reading a profile of him, and the impression I got was that he’s seriously mentally ill.
@flat earth luddite: True, but we’re old enough to remember when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were getting the good word that since the PTL Club ministry was prosperous enough to pay for stuff like gold plated plumbing fixtures (does that sound familiar BTW?), they should have them so the followers would know that serving the Lord brings tangible results in this life as well as the next.
And everybody bought that, too. And lotsa neighborhoods and small towns where the two largest houses in town are the one owned by the manager of the bank and the manse of the Episcopal, Methodist, or Baptist church, too.
@Kathy:
No, he rode on angel’s wings.
@Kylopod:
Oh, he is ill. No doubt about that.
@CSK:
I’m still laughing my a** off.
@Sleeping Dog:
That sounds more exclusive than a private jet. Really, these preachers are being too humble. they deserve a private Jumbo Jet with which to showcase their humility.
Nike, which was built in the beginning through small independent retailers, is now going to fuck them over to increase profits
A bunch of independent retailers that make a lot of their revenue selling Nikes are about to shut down.
@Teve: A Gulfstream G650 is a lot bigger and nicer than the Cessna Citation X Trump is using. Apparently his 757 hasn’t been maintained for the last four years and is unusable without spending something like a million on it. A good businessman would have kept up maintenance on the 757 and leased it out. It must chap Trump’s capacious ass to think Biden’s flying around in AF1 while Trump’s in his cramped for ten passengers Cessna.
@gVOR08:
Would the leasing cover the maintenance costs, in time of pandemic?
I’m perfectly willing to believe that Trump’s an incompetent businessman, but it seems to me that cash flow issues are an even more plausible answer. If he can’t afford the maintenance, then he can’t lease it.
@gVOR08: I’m actually kind of enjoying the mental image of Trump’s top ten sycophants having to maneuver around his capacious ass in a tiny airplane, to be honest.
Welcome to coach, m’lord!! 😉
@Kylopod:
Not to mention a Tucker Carlson. And yet, from time to time, folks come here and talk about rampant election fraud in 2020… Is this proof that they just might not be reasonable?