... you can talk all night... and do any shopping you might have through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.
The photo was taken at 5:48 this morning. The actual sunrise time was 5:46. Should I give you the 5:44 photograph too, so you can see what I was getting when Meade took this photo of me? Okay. Here:
Isn't it interesting how much the clouds reconfigured themselves in 4 minutes? They're really not as different as it may look, because the top photo is zoomed in.
Posts
181 comments:
Superior cloud textures in #1.
OK, probably discussed in the other threads, but I'm not going to go hunting through them.
This draft report -- DRAFT, i.e. incomplete and subject to substantial changes -- from Deep Staters that the alarmist MSM is trying to use to resurrect the "millions are going to die" hysteria, which predicts 200,000 covid-19 cases a day by June 1.
And, meanwhile, the revision of the Bill Gates model which essentially doubles the deaths from the last week's model.
Nice shot!
first pic cloud on the right has a sort of combination outstretched
hands of Michelangelo Sistine God's/ and E.T.'s withered appendage.
Hands across the Sky
The top one reminds me of the Navy Seal eagle and trident, the bottom one has a jet trail that is blowing away. I am an expert cloud image analyst.
Gomer Pyle: the classic where Gomer starts sleepwalking, chewing out the Sergeant every night.
As a helpful service to newer readers I have created the Drago Mental Stability Index™. This index is valuable surrogate for Donald J. Trump's reelection prospects. Currently we are at DMSI 3, Bedlam level. Things aren't looking good for Trump, but miracles happen.
DMSI 1: Dark Side of the Moon
DMSI 2: Arkham Level
DMSI 3: Bedlam Level ***
DMSI 4: Republican National Convention
DMSI 5: McDonalds on a typical day
Ouch!!
"Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is the knowledge intersectionally-appropriate feminist scientists would bring to this crucial problem? How many of those labs fiercely trying to find a treatment, a vaccine, a path forward, have a demographically appropriate number of women researchers? Not to mention racially and sexually “diverse” ones? What can possibly explain the lack of attention to this terrible problem of marginalization of the already oppressed?
On a women’s studies listserve I subscribe to, activity has been almost at a standstill for weeks. You’d think with the endless attention paid to the virus there would be vigorous debate about the need to bring feminist, queer, trans, and other such perspectives to bear, and heated discussions of how to convey this to students via distance learning."
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2020/05/03/covid-19-bites-identity-politics/
People talk about the sidebar ads here- it's happening to me. Trying to sell me a wheelchair equipped van yesterday. Today it's information on 4 weeks salary reimbursement for 'donating' a kidney.
The algorithms don't know me but think they do.
"The @PulitzerPrizes
are essentially administered by @nytimes for the benefit of the Times and its friends -- I speak as a three-time juror -- and today's award to the ludicrous @nhannahjones
of #1619Project fame merely confirms it".
per @PhilipTerzian
Renown historian Gordon Wood described the astonishing falsehoods in the now absurdly Pulitzer-Prize winning NYT 1619 project:
" Blogger rehajm said...
People talk about the sidebar ads here- it's happening to me. Trying to sell me a wheelchair equipped van yesterday. Today it's information on 4 weeks salary reimbursement for 'donating' a kidney.
The algorithms don't know me but think they do."
Get a VPN and perhaps use firefox/duckduckgo, Norton 360 is a reliable one if you want to pay a few bucks a year.
"Thank you first responders" signs everywhere... and they are starting to annoy me.
I'm old enough to remember when a "first responder" was a nuisance to the blog hostess ;)
first!
does one prefer "Pee-yew-litzer"
...or "Pull-itzer"
'The coronavirus crisis has inspired a wave of virus-related baby names as new parents pay tribute to the monumental moment of giving birth during a pandemic.
While parents are often inspired by their favourite film character or the names of lost loved ones when choosing the perfect moniker, the coronavirus outbreak has influenced couples around the world to chose novel names related to the crisis.
After giving birth to twins during lockdown on 27 March, a couple in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh named their babies Covid and Corona.
The mother, Pteeti Verma, told news agency Press Trust of India that a difficult birth inspired their choice: “The delivery happened after facing several difficulties, and therefore, me and my husband wanted to make the day memorable.”
“When the hospital staff also started calling the babies Corona and Covid, we finally decided to name them after the pandemic,” she added.
In a similar vein to other virus-themed names, another Indian couple chose to call their child Lockdown. Speaking to NDTV, the father said: “I named him after Lockdown as we all are reeling under [the] Covid-19 pandemic. In my view, prime minister Narendra Modi has taken the right step to impose lockdown in the entire nation to save us from the deadly virus. My boy will remind everyone to take precautions against Covid-19, to save themselves and the nation.”
In a bid to raise awareness of the importance of hygiene during the pandemic, a father from Uttar Pradesh, India, named his newborn baby Sanitiser on Sunday 19 April. Describing the choice as a “contribution” to the fight against Covid-19, Omveer Singh told India Today Television: “We have named our baby ‘Sanitiser’ because it is being used by everyone at present to deter the spread of germs on our hands.”'
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/baby-names-coronavirus-new-parents-covid-19-india-pandemic-sanitizer-a9480376.html
I use an ad blocker. Some sites are getting wise to it and demand that I disable it before I can view the content. Most of the time, I think, "Nope. I don't want to read what you have to say that badly."
I haven't noticed if my VPN blocks out annoying ads when the ad blocker is off. I will have to experiment.
It looks as though almost half the deaths are coming from older adults in old people's homes. This should figure into the debate on whether social distancing was a good thing or not. The point being that the people in almost all institutions spread out and away but in several institutions they did not and in all those there is high mortality - old people's homes especially, the NYC subway and meatpacking plants. But it isn't just "old people's homes" because Florida was not hard hit. It isn't just contact with homeless (via subway) because LA was not hard hit. My idea is cloudy, chilly and relative lack of sunshine is a prerequisite - the bat cave environment.
So then what is needed is more sunshine, full spectrum sunshine, for older people in elder care in the northern US states in winter? Solariums?
I use VPN on my computer. The ads show up on my phone. Like Anne-I-Am the adblockers in ios break too many sites I visit so I freed them up a bit. This is what they think of me I guess...
I use Disable Autoplay and that seems to keep the ads off the page.
Percentage of positive tests down to 10% today in MA. Averaging about 15% over the past 10 days. Net hospitalizations are flat to negative over the past 19 days. Daily deaths have trended down since the peak on April 23.
Lots of yellow and orange in the sunrise photos of late. Is boating allowed on the lake? Seems like there is often a nice breeze that would support dingy or hobie sailing.
So a huge dip (33%) in Wisconsin COVID ICU patients today, but no media coverage. I wonder what is going on. Is plasma treatment working? Is it a misreporting?
Date....NewCases....Death...Tot.InPatient.....Tot.ICU....
4-23.......207........11..........349(-6).......146(+7)
4-24.......304........5...........361(+12)......143(-3)
4-25.......331........4...........337(-24)......136(-7)
4-26.......224........6...........343(+6).......140(+4)
4-27.......170........9...........337(-6).......124(-16)
4-28.......208........19..........351(+14)......123(-1)
4-29.......231........8...........350(-1).......121(-2)
4-30.......334........8...........359(+9).......119(-2)
5-1........460........11..........342(-17)......127(+8)
5-2........346........7...........351(+9).......118(-9)
5-3........304........5...........347(-4).......116(-2)
5-4........272........1...........328(-19)......78(-38)
It started out as a social distancing enforcement."
– NYC Police Commissioner Dermot Shea
I honestly can't believe the things I'm seeing happen in America.
per @jason_howerton
·
Holy Shit!! You Better Social Distance Or Else!!
(scroll up a bit if req'd)
It looks as though almost half the deaths are coming from older adults in old people's homes.
75 percent are people 70 years and up regardless of residence.
Over 85 percent are people 60 and over.
DD,
That's ancient metrics thinking.
All about the testing now:
Testing April 1 to May 4
Evers targeting 14 day decrease in positives and 12,000 tests per day.
Mark said...
Over 85 percent are people 60 and over.
This would be fairly accurate representation of the people here.
The ads I ignore.
The @#%& pop-ups blocking big parts of the screen until to close them out, though, are getting more and more problematic.
The vpn keeps your info from being sold by your isp. So it helps give you no or at least bland ads.
Careful ARM,
That looks perilously close to personal attack that you decry.
But let us know when your side decides on a candidate.
My wife just gave birth to our first child -- a baby girl. Yay!! We named her "Trump is Stupid". As she gets older I think she'll understand our motivation. In the meantime, we plan to call her Tiz.
Rona Report from WA State:
Gov. Snakeoil presented multiple power point slides on Friday that were indephirable but showed lots of graphs and colors. Also, he showed one "slide" (what the term these days, asks this retired manager) with the "phased" approach - as of today (May 4) we are - finally - in Phase 1.
This morning, received the following:
Email from dentist - I can try to re-schedule the early April teeth cleaning appt.
Email from favorite boutique - they can now schedule one-on-one appts. 25% off on ALL clothing, shoes, etc. She needs to clear out inventory and try to at least make her rent.
Notice from carpet cleaners - now open for appointments!
Email from orthodontist - open for appts.!
Who that now
https://mobile.twitter.com/rexxurection/status/1257445399822032896
h,
Congratulations!
I have not seen the miniseries Waco (I don't have Netflix) but am fascinated by the commentary online and across social media. There are many apolitical people coming to the conclusion that the FBI can't be trusted. This is simultaneous with the revelations about the framing of Gen. Flynn. The contempt for the FBI based on Waco and now Flynn is across the political spectrum. I have even seen comparisons of BLM grievances against law enforcement with rightwing critiques of the deep state.
It always bothered me that Waco was considered only of interest to the right. Every American should have been furious at what happened there. Yes, David Koresh was a deceptive and manipulative cult leader. But the American government and news media provoked the conflagration that killed those people. It was entirely unnecessary. No one to my knowledge even lost their jobs.
This is relevant to the virus situation, as it's yet another example of experts and government agencies losing credibility. It plays into the reaction to the lockdown, for better or worse. Trump hopefully benefits, because the same FBI that attacked the Branch Davidians was also undermining his presidency from the beginning. At least a few people are having their eyes opened. Anyway, count me as surprised that so many people are watching Waco and learning what many of us have known for awhile: the FBI and similar agencies can't be trusted. Let's add the WHO and the CDC while we're at it.
Has anyone here watched Waco? What did you think?
it was about budgets for the atf wasnt it
Well, SG-1 is off to the Racist Planet.
And, yes, that's its actual name.
walter said...
looks perilously close to personal attack
I don't think a comment on demographics can be reasonably viewed as a personal attack.
The earlier link was about a joint venture between alibaba and politico, nothing to see here
IHME - Utah.
Original (4/1)projected fatalities: 586
Revised (during April): range of 580 - down to 163 - up to 483
Today (5/4): 84
Utah closed restaurants/bars and schools. That's it.
Can't wait to show this to my millennial son who was convinced that Utah would pay the horrible price for failing to shut everything down.
My wife just gave birth to our first child -- a baby girl.
Maga Tov, h!
Meanwhile, War Criminal Female Shapeshifter has come to Deep Space Nine.
Well well well.
The French are now reporting that their first ChiCom Bat Flu case was actually in December and the man had no known contact with any exposed person.
Nevada officials also believe their first case was much earlier than originally thought.
And we now know, based on our intel agency reports, that ARM's Beloved and Heroic People's Republic of China ChiComs were lying all thru December and January along with their Ethiopian marxist lapdog Tedros and using that time to hoard PPE and then later offering up ChiCom purposely defective PPE to the rest of the world.
You know, I continue to be amazed so many of the ChiCom cuckholster propagandists still dare to show their faces around here.
Absolutely amazed.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/05/04/world/europe/04reuters-health-coronavirus-france.html
Link for the NYT story for the above post.
Has anyone here watched Waco? What did you think?
The one with Taylor Kitsch? It was excellent.
Congratulation
congratulations
h- yayayayayayay! A baby!!
ARM,
You know I was referring to your Drago scale.
But then...
If you are a sadistic bully thug, you have a couple of career paths.
One path is to become a criminal.
The other path is to go into law enforcement (or some other position of authority).
I watched Waco. As it happened.
Anyone who doesn't realize that our Organs of State Security have been laws-unto-themselves for many decades now just hasn't been paying attention.
Waco was an irresistible opportunity to see if the "Children in Danger! Stand aside!" line would work, and it did. Now we're all endangered children, and must stay home while the authorities save us.
Narr
Or else
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...
does one prefer "Pee-yew-litzer"
...or "Pull-itzer"
*************
Back when I was single and living in a group household, we had a chicken dish we called
"Pullet Surprise".
“ Utah closed restaurants/bars and schools. That's it.“
Well, not entirely. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter/Day Saints suspended all meetings worldwide indefinitely (“worship in your own home”), closed all temples, and sent home a large percentage of the missionaries worldwide. (Bringing so many missionaries home might have made the statistics worse. Hard to know.) They had laid the groundwork for worshipping at home about 2 years ago so it was a really easy switch to flip - easy transition - and they started to close up thing in Asia back in late December or early January.
The current President of the Church is a former research heart surgeon who is fluent in Mandarin. That might have helped too.
5/4/20, 9:37 PM Delete
Watched “Rules of Engagement” on YouTube, which is a more in-depth documentary on Waco.
You’ll discover some horrifying facts that were not in the recent TV documentary.
For instance, as the tanks sprayed CS gas into the compound, FBI snipers fired machines guns into the compound to pin the Dravidians in and leave them no escape.
So is Tara Reade story basically becoming yesterday's news? Don't all these stories just end up sounding like tawdry trash? Is there any significant difference from the Anita Hills day? Hell, Biden's questioning of Hill was a mini scandal just last year that he ended up apologizing for. Clarence Thomas demonstrated the appropriate response. He unequivocally denied the charges, he questioned the motives of the accusation, and he kept his head down.
When the Weinstein case broke, I had a strong sense that an avalanche of accusations would follow and there'd be social consequences. I had no idea it would turn into a political movement as frivolous as #MeToo. Suddenly, obscure urban professionals were replaying countless bad dates in their head looking for awkward moments that may have pushed the boundaries of implied consent or even been an instance of sexual assault. We're then subjected to the second worst thing from an awkward date--an awkward date being recounted in excruciating detail by a stranger. Plus a commentary track.
Call me naive, but is #MeToo really that difficult of a problem to address? Did women have to collectively go to the bathroom the time "how to deal with unwanted attention" is taught in school? If so, can we reproduce it as a memo and distribute it? Perhaps staple it to diplomas. Or better yet, female birth certificates. Reproduced below for convenience:
MEMORANDUM
To: Everyone
From: Everyone else
Re: Unwanted Attention
if someone tries to touch you in an unwanted manner, scream for help and try to fight them off. When you get away, alert the authorities immediately. If you felt unsure or embarrassed or conflicted or if you worried about careerist concerns or effects on your reputation, that isn't anybody's problem. Nobody can answer those questions for you. You can either get it on the record or choose to do nothing and ignore it. You have the right to change your mind but within reason. Waiting almost 30 years and then taking it to media outlets is always a bad idea. Anyone that advises it or tells you you're being brave is probably using you for a political agenda (even unconsciously). It's neither of those things. It's sick and attention-seeking. You'll be the center of a media circus. You'll be used as a political football. You will invite attention from some of the most craven, parasitic elements of our society. A political-media process will chew you up and spit you out. At the end, if you're lucky, you'll get some paid appearances, a book deal, and your name will end up the answer to a political trivia question. At worst, you're revictimized and the only lasting difference in your life is your Twitter and Instagram accounts are now private.
Yet they have brought back anita hill like marleys for nearly 30 years now,
walking on the beach, minding my biz
Jane mayer and jill abramson wouldnt have to dine out on aomething else for 26 years.
@Shouting Thomas:
Watched “Rules of Engagement” on YouTube, which is a more in-depth documentary on Waco.
Most I've ever concluded about Waco siege is that (a) federal government was bumbling, heavy-handed, unprofessional, and probably somewhat compelled by bloodlust; (b) talking about the Waco siege in revolutionary metaphors and using terms like tyranny and patriots is almost never helpful. You're not being a brave freedom fighter. You're being a drama queen. It's the rhetorical equivalent of period costumes and historic reenactments.
My mother in law recieved her 1
$1200 covid check today. She died September of 2018. Anybody got the routing number for for the 1st Bank of Heaven?
I think this was pointed out in a earlier thread
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20078717v1
good question
“Waco was an irresistible opportunity to see if the "Children in Danger! Stand aside!" line would work, and it did. Now we're all endangered children, and must stay home while the authorities save us.”
Having a pack of feds stuff HKs in Elian Gonzalez grandmothers face convinced me.
I’d suggest you watch the documentary, J. Farmer, before you come to a conclusion.
I didn’t make any statements about revolution or tyranny. You’ve just made that up.
The ATF and FBI murdered the Dravidians in revenge for the initial killing of ATF agents.
The assault on the Waco compound, on the pretext of a minor gun charge, was a premeditated attack by the ATF. I have absolutely no sympathy for the political or religious beliefs of the Dravidians.
I’m not making this up. The surviving adult members of the Dravidians were tried on charges of murdering the ATF agents. They were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. The jury found that the ATF attacked the compound with machine guns and that the attack was unprovoked.
Thats why 'breaking up families, doesnt work as a slogan, btw guess who was getting the red carpet invitation at the sme time?
I also didn’t make up the bit about the FBI pinning down the Dravidians with machine gun fire as the compound burned to the ground.
Aerial surveillance photos taken by an outfit hired by the FBI clearly show the muzzle blasts as FBI snipers fired into the compound.
It's not what you do. It's who you do it to. The Branch Davidian attack was far more egregious and misdirected than the Kent State shootings. The feds and particularly Nixon got far more criticism for Kent State than Clinton got for Waco. And no songwriter ever memorialized the deaths there. I don't think Waco has any real value for propaganda purposes.
ST,
It's Davidians.
JF,
It was more than bumbling, unprofessional, inept, whatever. The feds could have arrested David Koresh when he went into town. They chose not to. They then allowed their self-righteous rage to excuse murder and burning children to death. No one needs to canonize the Branch Davidians in order to see that the ATF and FBI acted extrajudicially.
Ruby Ridge was no different.
Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein. They act in the same imperious, self-aggrandizing and extrajudicial manner--just without bloodshed.
I want to respect the people who go into law enforcement. Sadly, I find it almost impossible.
@Shouting Thomas:
I’d suggest you watch the documentary, J. Farmer, before you come to a conclusion.
I didn’t make any statements about revolution or tyranny. You’ve just made that up.
Fair enough on the first point. On the second, I did not mean to imply that my comments were directed at you personally. My apologies for not being clearer about that. I only meant to discuss the conclusions I came to in response to the incident, not a response to any position you had on the matter.
From your description, our assessment of the matter is probably quite similar. But I do tend to diverge in my reaction to it. In general, I think revolutionary language is rarely helpful. It plays too much on emotion. I also think it obscures the fact that even with the occasional catastrophic exception, we are lucky to live in a society where the state is relatively contained in its ability to use violence against the population. It isn't zero, but it's a lot what less than what most of the world endures.
It's kind of ironic, though, that those who tend to have such a response to Waco tend to support movements like "Back the Blue." Most of the violence administered by the state domestically is done through local police departments, sheriff's offices, and corrections departments. It's possible that controversies over incidents like Waco or Ruby Ridge compelled federal law enforcement agencies to be more circumspect about lethal force and the shock and awe approach. If so, that would at least be a positive outcome to a horrendous situation.
How goes it in the village anne?
On staff in an advisory capacity was brigadiers wesley clark and schoomaker.
Scotty comes to the Robin Masters estate.
@Anne:
It was more than bumbling, unprofessional, inept, whatever. The feds could have arrested David Koresh when he went into town. They chose not to. They then allowed their self-righteous rage to excuse murder and burning children to death. No one needs to canonize the Branch Davidians in order to see that the ATF and FBI acted extrajudicially.
That's precisely what I meant to describe by "bumbling, heavy-handed, unprofessional, and...compelled by bloodlust." I should not have written the stupid hedge "probably somewhat." I am not opposed to that interpretation and do not make any excuses for law enforcement. I only meant to describe that I had come to that conclusion but also did not like a lot of the over-the-top rhetoric that gave voice to that conclusion.
Here's an odd fact I came across. Isaac Babel, the Russian writer, was shot by the NKVD. That's not the odd fact. The odd fact was that he had been sleeping with Yezhov, the head of the NKVD's wife. There's a guy with balls. Yezhov was the guy before Beria. He had fallen afoul of Stalin. After Yezhov was arrested, Beria who was in his circle was also arrested. He didn't get in trouble for shagging Yezhov's wife but for being friends with Yezhov.....I don't think Kafkaesque is the proper way to describe this chain of events, but it's an absurd and sinister story....We celebrate Pablo Neruda and Dalton Trumbo. They were oppressed by the right people. I never heard of the untimely death of Isaac Babel until just recently. The bare facts certainly make his life sound more interesting than Neruda's or Trumbo's, but don't hold your breath waiting for the movie.
By the way, if you ever wonder why the American "far-right" is almost always anti-war, consider the manner and language people used to justify or excuse the law enforcement response is exactly the manner and language people use to justify our state's unleashing of violence against foreign peoples.
My mother in law recieved her 1
$1200 covid check today. She died September of 2018.
Has she received her mail-in ballot for the November election yet?
the attack was unprovoked
The whole thing was unprovoked, from the very first decision to try to get Koresh on something, anything.
Correction: Where I wrote "Beria who was in his circle" change to "Babel who was in his circle". Sorry.
shot by the NKVD. That's not the odd fact
Yeah, what's up with all these Russian doctors (and journalists) "falling" out of windows to their deaths?
Beria yezhov yagoda like klaatu barada nixto, ymmv but i. Think guy ritchies highly atylized man from uncle is a little known gem, the attention to detail with the sets customes and cinematography.
A Russian FB friend recently informed me that over 157,000 Russian soldiers were executed after court martial during WWII.
The Russian method of execution was a single gunshot to the back of the head.
Oh my God, I just burst out laughing. Let's see if you share my poitical mirth:
The NYT just published a piece by Obama politicos Axelrod & Plouffe, entitled What Joe Biden Needs to Do to Beat Trump.
Ok, yeah, I don't like these two weasels, but they are smart and winners, and part of an elite club. Guys who did it.
Anyway, essentially they still work for Obama, who is sending Slow Joe a stern message: shape up. Here's the Graf that caused me to spill my drink:
Now Mr. Biden is mired in his basement, speaking to us remotely, like an astronaut beaming back to earth from the International Space Station.
Earth to Sleepy Joe - beam me up!
“As a helpful service to newer readers I have created the Drago Mental Stability Index™. This index is valuable surrogate for Donald J. Trump's reelection prospects. Currently we are at DMSI 3, Bedlam level. Things aren't looking good for Trump, but miracles happen.
DMSI 1: Dark Side of the Moon
DMSI 2: Arkham Level
DMSI 3: Bedlam Level ***
DMSI 4: Republican National Convention
DMSI 5: McDonalds on a typical day”
ARM you outdid yourself here! Bravo, well done.
Arnie hammer makes a decent illya kuryakin )and henry cavill a pretty good napoleon solo.
Congratulations h! Good names, both of them.
Trump will be re-elected, Inga.
You’ve got 4-1/2 years of eating shit left,
I can’t think of anybody who deserves it more.
what is the deal with Noam Chomsky - it is like he is some bad post-extra-pepporoni pizza party character in one of those endlessly reiterated back to high school dreams so many of us have so many nights every year, a Social Studies teacher I guess, who people think is brilliant and why? because delusion
poor old lying loser is all he seems to be to me, and yes, I can speak several foreign languages, I guarantee you i am better in the waking world at foreign languages than him.
You’re difficult to understand, Inga.
You’ve shit yourself so thoroughly on this board for the past 3-1/2 years, with the lying and with the stupid Russia collusion hoax.
Why do you keep coming here?
You’d think you’d have the sense to disappear.
They borrowed some story elements fron the original moon raker, re a nazi polt.
@Mark:
The whole thing was unprovoked, from the very first decision to try to get Koresh on something, anything.
Even the child sex charges sounded pretty murky. Weird sexual hangups are pretty much on the job description for cult leader. Regardless of the professed ideology, cults usually end up with a socially awkward leader screwing a bunch of insecure, naive women.
In the early 90s, a lot of the ritual child abuse moral panic was still permeating from the 80s. There was strong incentive for aggressive state action "for the children." Concerns over such abuse was the official motive for the initial raid and the subsequent escalation. Earlier, bogus claims about Kuwaiti babies being dumped on the floor by Iraqi soldiers was promulgated by a PR firm hired to sell the war to Americans.
Come on.
We were doing so well.
Let's not crap all over everything.
One might quibble with nina simone on the soundtrack since her signature songs came later.
ST,
Well, the conversation was getting too interesting and too cerebral--so one of our resident troll has to do something to reclaim the center of attention. Let's be PeeWee Herman. Lalalalalalalala. Because when the back-and-forth devolves into name-calling, the boredom meter goes off the charts for those of us uninterested in the puerile insults.
Elizabeth debicki is the bad girl, counterpart to barbara carrera and sophie marceau.
The Rules of Engagement documentary suggests very strongly that the ATF raid was motivated by a desire to make a PR splash in the hope of increasing the department’’s budget.
The Davidians seem to have been targeted because the ATF considered them an emblem of right wing excess, and that targeting them would provide an impressive display for the Clinton administration.
Why the ATF looked at the Davidians in this manner is hard to understand. Perhaps, only because Koresh made his living from selling guns at gun shows.
The swedish gal who thought be laura croft was the other the name escapes me.
@stephen cooper:
what is the deal with Noam Chomsky
That sounds like something the love child of Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen would say. I don't agree with all of Chomsky's conclusions, and his tone can sometimes be overbearing, but he is an important and smart thinker. Catching up with him every few months to get his take on current events is often instructive. He has a pretty impressive command of cognitive sciences and political philosophy. As for the fact that you would be "better in the waking world at foreign languages than him," nobody would agree to that statement quicker than Chomsky himself. He readily admits that he is pretty hapless with foreign languages and that a lot of his work in linguistics is considered heterodox. Chomsky is not so much interested in language as a means of communication but as a means of cognition.
Lara as in love interest, CIA supported Nobel prize winner love novel heroine, not
Laura, as in hot chick in a black and white movie from the worst decade ever
Chomsky supports late term abortion.
He is the poster boy for old academics who have scraped and scraped to get attention.
You are much smarter than him, trust me.
“Coronavirus Live Updates: Models Project Sharp Rise in Deaths as States Reopen
An internal Trump administration report expects about 200,000 daily cases by June.”
NYT
I sure hope not.
Shes apparently based on a real person in pasternaks life, peter fenn wrote an inrtersting book about how the novel and tge film came to be.
FBI lied to Reno about child abuse "babies being beaten" when she would not approve gas attack.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/waco/wacotranscript.html
" PETER J. BOYER: The HRT are ready with a plan. It's simple, aggressive and quick. Under the cover of darkness they would take the compound with Bradley tanks and gas. The Davidians, overwhelmed, would come out. They are ready to act, but first the plan must be approved by Washington.
The record shows that using tanks and gas on a compound still holding 25 children was a tough sell to this attorney general. As a local prosecutor, Janet Reno had built a reputation as a zealous child advocate. And on Monday, April, 12th, she said no to the gas plan.
The FBI didn't relent. They came back at the attorney general. "The plan's too aggressive,'' she said. Then they'll water it down. She worried the Davidians might use the children as shields. If they did, the FBI promised to back off. Most of all, she worried that the gas would permanently damage the children. A military expert assured her the gas was safe.
For five days the FBI tried to eliminate her objections. After the Waco fire, Reno would say again and again that she authorized the gas plan because children were being abused.
JANET RENO: [ABC News "Nightline''] We had had reports that they had been sexually abused, that babies had actually been beaten. I asked when I first heard that for them to verify it and, again, that was the report that was brought back.
PETER J. BOYER: When she said, "I was told that babies were being beaten and I said, 'What do you mean? Babies are being picked up and beaten?' 'Yes,' I was told, 'babies were being beaten' ''_
WILLIAM SESSIONS: Then she will have to say who told her that. Certainly, I did not.
PETER J. BOYER: She says she doesn't remember.
WILLIAM SESSIONS: Well, if it was impressive_ something that impressed her tremendously, then she's responsible for what she heard.
PETER J. BOYER: But FBI documents uncovered by FRONTLINE confirm that as the Bureau was pressuring Reno to approve the gas plan, someone in the FBI told her that children were being abused at Waco. But the FBI knew that children were not being beaten during the stand-off. [interviewing] At the time, what she said was, "I was told that babies were being beaten.'' She told me that she was told that. Web Hubbel told me that he heard her being told that. Did you tell her that?
WILLIAM SESSIONS: No.
PETER J. BOYER: It is still not known who had told Reno about the child abuse, but on Friday, April 16th, she changed her mind and approved the gas plan. The FBI is ready, but will the Davidians play the role the FBI has scripted for them? When the gas goes in, will they come out?
that being said, I understand the feeling one has, listening to someone one knows is an utter fool, but who has great insights.
George Carlin used to be like that, before he up and died.
Right now, there are a couple people who are complete fools but who I can stand listening to, because they are what you say Chomsky is (and I simply refuse to listen to him after some of the things he has said, so I can't really argue with you on the details).
@Shouting Thomas:
The Rules of Engagement documentary suggests very strongly that the ATF raid was motivated by a desire to make a PR splash in the hope of increasing the department’’s budget.
Wouldn't be surprised if it was part of the mix of causal factors, though I'm never certain how self-consciously motivating that kind of thing is. Budgetary constraints and needs to self-justify are endemic to bureaucratic organizations.
The Davidians seem to have been targeted because the ATF considered them an emblem of right wing excess, and that targeting them would provide an impressive display for the Clinton administration.
Yeah, these kinds of groups were often conceptually bundled with with Christian Identity members, some racial activist groups, and some version of the Sovereign Citizen ethos. The kind of groups the SLPC and ADL get paid to constantly agitate about and hype. It's the world of the Turner Diaries and the Anarchist Cookbook. It's considered an organized movement plotting domestic terror against the government. In realty, it's often rather disaffected people who mostly want to be left alone, not start a race war or overthrow the federal government.
It's a cruel irony that the government's heavy-handed approach to a minor threat ends up being the catalyst for the very domestic terror its approach was supposed to prevent. The notion that overreactions to terrorism tend to cause more terrorism than they stop is not some crazy left-wing delusion.
pasternak was a good poet but a lousy human being
remember he was one of the richest people in the Soviet Union
and although he was tall, he would have gone nowhere with the ladies if he were poor
“The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington is now estimating that there will be nearly 135,000 deaths in the United States through the beginning of August — more than double what it forecast on April 17, when it estimated 60,308 deaths by Aug. 4. (The country has already had more than 68,000 deaths.)”
This is somewhat better, but not magically disappearing in the warmer months as some predicted.
Hopefully there won’t be anymore killings over wearing a mask to Dollar Stores. If people want to open up the economy it would behoove them not to shoot someone over the requirement of wearing a mask into their store.
@stephen cooper:
George Carlin used to be like that, before he up and died.
Right now, there are a couple people who are complete fools but who I can stand listening to, because they are what you say Chomsky is (and I simply refuse to listen to him after some of the things he has said, so I can't really argue with you on the details).
George Carlin got what Johnny Carson termed "comedian's disease." It's when comedians start thinking they're philosophers.
I tend not to have ideological litmus tests, except perhaps for the Info Wars/Alex Jones crowd. Accepting that level of conspiratorial thinking is basically the sociological equivalent of intelligent design. It isn't possible to argue against, and it almost always starts with a conclusion. I disagree a lot with Chomsky's conclusions, but I respect his ability to construct an argument and generally find it worthwhile to confront them.
Everyone talks about tolstoy but lermontov rarely comes up except as throw awa references es in the avengers and jack ryan recruit.
Are there no more task force briefings? Why? Because the press is too mean? On a day where the Univ wash model almost doubled the projected deaths to 135k, it would be nice to hear what the experts have to say. I think we are entitled to at least that
Its a common mindset shared in china the us and elsewhere, wuhan was a major industrial hub a major rail hub the site of their virology institute
I am going to be proven correct in my assertion that the virus was all over the globe last year. The French have started to test swabs of people from last year- so far, only people who were actually sick and in the hospital. They found a case from late December.
All such samples that still exist should be tested, as well as blood samples drawn should be tested for antibodies.
almost all of my favorite writers are people who are fundamentally unsound, so I guess we are on the same page.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Austen are two writers I respect as human beings, but of course they passed away long ago and have nothing to say about current events.
I guess my closest contemporary analogue to your Chomsky (that is, someone I profoundly disagree with but who says things that are worth thinking about) is a retired physicist called Greg Cochran (a blogger and an author, he is not a celebrity), or maybe Scott Adams, who is more famous than Cochran. At the Chomsky fame level, I guess i would have to go with Robin Quivers or Michael Moore.
I mean, I would not mind sitting next to Chomsky on a train for an hour or two (well, an hour or 90 minutes), but unless I read some really good quotes from him somewhere, I am not gonna willingly pick up a book of his. Not saying you are wrong to read his stuff, but what I am saying is that he appears to be an acquired taste, and nobody should blame anyone else for not wanting to acquire an acquired taste.
Iowan2 wrote:
"My mother in law recieved her 1
$1200 covid check today. She died September of 2018. Anybody got the routing number for for the 1st Bank of Heaven?"
Same position here- my mother got the stimulus check in the mail this morning- it was $2400, 1200 of which was for my father who died in the Summer of 2018. He was, of course, still the tax returns I filed for my mother last year. She will deposit the check, and I will see if I can find out whether or not this was a mistake with a solution, or not.
Why would anyone assume that "the models" (which have been dramatically wrong) are suddenly going to start being accurate?
"I think this was pointed out in a earlier thread
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20078717v1"
Yes, Arnold Kling linked to that the other day. It isn't like the study actually needed to be done- you can simply visually inspect the data on Worldometers and tell that the lockdowns didn't do shit.
"The coronavirus crisis has inspired a wave of virus-related baby names as new parents pay tribute to the monumental moment of giving birth during a pandemic."
If I had two fainting goats, I would be inspired to name them Inga and Ken.
Aerial surveillance photos taken by an outfit hired by the FBI clearly show the muzzle blasts as FBI snipers fired into the compound.
Sounds like a bigger screen version of Lon Horiuchi shooting Randy Weaver's wife in cold blood. Say, there sure were a lot of government-sanctioned murders under Bill Clinton. Can you just imagine what a President HRC would have unleashed? We dodged both sniper and machine gun fire in 2016!
Lewis Wetzel said...Why would anyone assume that "the models" (which have been dramatically wrong) are suddenly going to start being accurate?
Short answer: It feeds people like Inga who actually enjoys the lockdown.
@stephen cooper:
Not saying you are wrong to read his stuff, but what I am saying is that he appears to be an acquired taste, and nobody should blame anyone else for not wanting to acquire an acquired taste.
Certainly agree with that. I don't consider disliking Chomsky a fault. A lot of the criticism Chomsky gets online teds to suggest the critic is completely unfamiliar with his work and is attacking a caricature. I tend to be less interested in Chomsky's political writing per se and prefer the cognitive and linguistic aspect of his work.
I guess my closest contemporary analogue to your Chomsky (that is, someone I profoundly disagree with but who says things that are worth thinking about) is a retired physicist called Greg Cochran (a blogger and an author, he is not a celebrity), or maybe Scott Adams, who is more famous than Cochran. At the Chomsky fame level, I guess i would have to go with Robin Quivers or Michael Moore.
I also like Greg Cochran, but he has a tendency to be strident. I've never found Scott Adams interesting, but I do often enjoy listening to Michael Moore. My favorite documentary of his is one of his least known. It came out in '97 and was called The Big One, which was filmed during his book tour for Downsize This!. Anyone who has read that book would instantly recognize why Moore is a lot more in touch with the working-class voters who went for Trump than many other left activists.
The thing about Chomsky is that his argument with capitalism is obviously a result of his upbringing. His parents were orthodox Jews and Zionists. It is clear that he has simply transferred his conflict with his parents to a conflict with the next available authority figure -- the US capitalist "establishment."
Chomsky has somehow changed linguistics from a discipline where you could pose a question, do research, and answer the question, to a discipline where all you do is jawbone.
"On a day where the Univ wash model almost doubled the projected deaths to 135k, it would be nice to hear what the experts have to say. I think we are entitled to at least that"
To uhr is human, to forgive divine.
steve uhr: "Are there no more task force briefings? Why? Because the press is too mean? On a day where the Univ wash model almost doubled the projected deaths to 135k, it would be nice to hear what the experts have to say. I think we are entitled to at least that"
LOLOLOLOL
That would be the same "experts" that predicted 2.2 millions deaths and since then have been wildly wrong on both national and state-level predictions for infections, ICU beds needed, mortality, recoveries, etc.
Basically everything.
So here's what you do Li'l Stevie: take out your Magic 8 Ball and pretend its the "experts" and ask it whatever you'd like.
And while you are at it, ask it why the climate model predictions that told us snowfalls would be a thing of the past and whole coastlines would be submerged by 2020....never happened.
Oh, that's right, now its pushed out to 2040 or 2050 or whatever timeline is needed for ensure zero accountability for incorrect predictions.
Hey, you know who is a big funder of the ChiCom Bat Flu and climate model development?
Bill Gates.
Hey, you know who is a big rhetorical backer of Bill Gates in those activities?
Barack Obama.
Hey, you know who just bought massive beachside real estate (and on both coasts of the US)?
Bill Gates and Barack Obama.
Barack even went golfing the other day...without a mask.
So there ya go tiger.
“If I had two fainting goats, I would be inspired to name them Inga and Ken.”
If I had a pet donkey, I’d name him Yancey, a perfect name for a jackass.
The NYT just published a piece by Obama politicos Axelrod & Plouffe, entitled What Joe Biden Needs to Do to Beat Trump.
@NYMag
·"Joe Biden is at his best when he’s neither speaking nor appearing in public. Will his campaign have to abandon its most effective strategy? @zakcheneyrice writes https://nym.ag/2YnBChC"
...cults usually end up with a socially awkward leader screwing a bunch of insecure, naive women.
2 Timothy 3:6 For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts
If we can test 5 million people a day by June, you might get 200,000 new cases a day. However, we are not going to be testing even a million people/day by June, and probably not more than twice as many as we are right testing right now.
I told all of you weeks ago- new cases is proportional to the number of tests run- where we were seeing explosive spread was just explosive testing- at every point where testing plateaued, so did new cases. Only every time.
And my favorite part of Li'l Stevie Uhr's post?
He's complaining about the lack of a press conference today!! When the entire left has been screaming they want these press conferences stopped!!
Which came after the lefties screaming they wanted the press conferences!
Which came after the lefties screaming for Trump to stop talking!
......
......you get the picture.
Next up for Li'l Stevie and the sweet dulcet tones of The Impeachments: Sham-peachment III! Starring a cast of dozens of democrats and a few deep staters in the HHS!
@Lewis Wetzel:
His parents were orthodox Jews and Zionists. It is clear that he has simply transferred his conflict with his parents to a conflict with the next available authority figure -- the US capitalist "establishment."
Ehh. Maybe. I rarely find that kind of Freudian speculation particularly instructive.
Chomsky has somehow changed linguistics from a discipline where you could pose a question, do research, and answer the question, to a discipline where all you do is jawbone.
I think the field changed but not as a result of Chomsky. In fact, it largely left him behind. Chomsky sees linguistics as a method to understand cognition, but he freely admits that it is a dauntingly complex subject. Tom Wolfe's attempt at an anti-Chomsky take down with The Kingdom of Speech was embarrassingly inept. Wolfe's entire contention that the Pirahã language presents a problem for Chomsky's linguistic theories only demonstrates how fundamentally Wolfe misunderstands the argument.
Inga: "This is somewhat better, but not magically disappearing in the warmer months as some predicted."
Voila!
A prediction (from the same people who have been wrong about everything so far) suddenly, in Inga-world, becomes another "fact".
I wonder if the IMHE models included the fact that the ChiCom Bat Flu was already well established in the US and Europe in December of 2019 and that millions more people than originally thought had already been exposed by March of 2020?
You know what? I'll bet they didn't.......
Inga: "If I had a pet donkey, I’d name him Yancey, a perfect name for a jackass."
The very mascot of Inga's democratics party.
Willie Pete? FBI admitted to using incendiary grenades
anyone recall an account by a gun dealer iirc french last name?
interesting.
Interesting that you do not think Scott Adams is brilliant (the rest of your comment was fascinating, but I am gonna talk about Scott Adams for a little while).
When I was growing up I LOVED EVERYTHING about Peanuts and I thought hey maybe when I grow up I can do something like that. I grew up a very very long time ago and , trust me, i never did anything like that.
Not sure what Dilbert and his friends are called - the Dilbert gang, the cubicle dwellers, Dilbert's circle - but whatever it is called, I could never have dreamed it up, and props to the genius Scott A. for dreaming them up.
It is late, and I have worked a full day, and here I am commenting, and I wanna say this ---- back in the day I worked, as a reserve officer, in a SCIF, once a month, and the SCIF was one of the marine scifs, there are not many in the world, and - this is just a historical reference - I can still picture, on the refrigerator in the little kitchen in the SCIF, a newspaper clipping describing the timeline of how long every sort of food (from mayonnaise to chili and above and beyond) would safely last in a refrigerator, and I also remember that someone, a year or two at least before I started my reserve weekends there, had posted the CLASSIC Dilbert cartoon episodes where the cubicle dwellers make a pact to abjure coffee and then break the pact but instead of just heading to the local Starbucks like normal people THEY GO OUT AND ATTACK THE LOCAL COFFEE FACTORY in order to get their coffee fix
those aging cartoons made me laugh at least once a month for a year or two
I mean what else would cubicle dwellers do after they resolve to break their promise not to drink coffee ....
would they just walk, as friends walk with friends, to the local coffee shop
NO THEY LAUNCHED A COMMANDO ATTACK ON THE NEAREST COFFEE FACTORY
thanks for listening, I know some people think I say things that are not relevant to TRUTH
but ....
WHO ELSE IS GOING TO TYPE CAPS AT YOU DESCRIBING THE FUNNIEST CARTOONS THEY EVER SAW POSTED IN A SCIF
“The very mascot of Inga's democratics party.”
Republicans mascot... Dumbo.
Inga: "“Coronavirus Live Updates: Models Project Sharp Rise in Deaths as States Reopen
An internal Trump administration report expects about 200,000 daily cases by June.”
NYT"
The deep staters last gasp effort to create media panic in order to maintain the economic shutdown/depression into the fall to help the democrats election campaign.
But its already failed.
Newsom couldn't even keep thousands of Californians off the beaches and so he announces that CA is days away from CA Phase 2 opening while Cuomo signals he's headed there too.
Looks like Sleepy Joe's wish for little girls to creepily nuzzle and the opportunity to use the lockdown to fundamentally transform US society might be hitting a few speed bumps.
I told all of you weeks ago- new cases is proportional to the number of tests run- where we were seeing explosive spread was just explosive testing- at every point where testing plateaued, so did new cases. Only every time.
I'm on the 'transition team' for my church as we look at the path to in-person worship again. Our bishop is requiring A. "14 consecutive days of decrease in cases" and B. "widespread and increasing testing" before we are eligible to even open the doors. These two things are completely vague and also, on the face, mutually exclusive unless the virus magically starts self-destructing. More tests, more cases....duh? We are all on the same page that it's ridiculous (as someone pointed out, 500 tests with 20 positives is better than 100 tests with 25 positives, but that's not how the directive is written) but until our bishop revises this, we are stuck.
Inga: "Republicans mascot... Dumbo."
The beloved and adorable animal creature that has fans of all ages.
So much so that there have been recent remakes of the delightful Disney classic to satisfy the publics demand for more of this wonderful character.
“A Colorado man arrested after federal agents allegedly discovered pipe bombs in his home had also been helping organize an armed protest demanding the state lift its coronavirus restrictions, an official briefed on the case tells ABC News.
FBI and ATF agents served search warrants Friday morning at the Loveland, Colorado, home of Bradley Bunn, 53. Agents discovered four pipe bombs and potential pipe bomb components inside the house, according to a press release from the office of U.S. Attorney for Colorado Jason Dunn.”
ABC
Not only is Dumbo a beloved and revered character, but he can fly!
What can the democratics burro do?
Well, mostly just get painted and then stand there mute for tourist photos in Tijuana.
Poor Inga.
She's back to cut and paste mania because she's run out of other peoples words to write.
tsk tsk tsk
Ah those exciting and heady days of Mueller and "The Walls Are Closing In!" seem so very long ago, do they not?
new! from the folks at the NSA
Ghidra is a software reverse engineering (SRE) framework developed by NSA's Research Directorate for NSA's cybersecurity mission. It helps analyze malicious code and malware like viruses, and can give cybersecurity professionals a better understanding of potential vulnerabilities in their networks and systems.
The source code is available for download at ghidra-sre.org along with the 9.1.1 patch.
https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/ghidra/
You know, now that I recall, it took about a year or so to get Inga to finally say that it was wrong for Hodgekinson to shoot up a field full of republican congressmen.
Which is something really, since Inga still wont admit Trump/russia collusion was a hoax.
Well, baby steps I guess.
Baby steps.
Let's take it one item at a time.
J. Farmer-
Not Freudian. Simply a human & ancient observation that a fellow who rejects his parents' authority is likely to reject authority from anyone else. Personally, I find Chomsky's arguments against the US to be bizarre. He thinks that the US provoked North Korea into invading South Korea, when the historical record shows that Kim Il Sung was acting entirely as the agent of Stalin's USSR. He was told to invade the South by Stalin, and then he did so.
_The Kingdom of Speech_ was not so much a takedown of Chomsky as it was a takedown of the intellectuals who championed Chomsky. Chomsky doesn't make claims that can be proven to be right or wrong. He made linguistics into a non-science.
Dan O'Donnell
@DanODonnellShow
·
1h
You’re just saying that because you have three houses.
Quote Tweet
Bernie Sanders
@BernieSanders
· 3h
We need to cancel rent and cancel mortgages for the duration of this crisis.
@stephen cooper:
Interesting that you do not think Scott Adams is brilliant (the rest of your comment was fascinating, but I am gonna talk about Scott Adams for a little while).
My general reaction to Adams is along the lines of "the interesting stuff isn't true, and the true stuff isn't interesting." I get Amway vibes from Adams, and he seems like a bit of a charlatan.
don't bother reading this if you have not read my prior comments, but I am now going to talk about people with great faults, people with defective hearts, people who do not really care ---- and I am going to say nice things about them. assume for a second that I am an expert on "friends walking with friends"
"cor ad cor loquitur"
the nice thing is this.
my natural instinct - after years of knowing hundreds of people fairly well - is to not like anybody. I HATE the fact that people laugh at the suffering of pigs and say "BUT BACON IS TASTY", I am disgusted by the selfishness of the rich and the envy of the poor, and I do not ever want to spend a single moment with someone who is not kind to animals.
But then there is this ....
it breaks your heart to see the losers in life trying, like people who do not want to drown in their own selfishness, to enjoy what they have been given or could be given, and it makes you cry to know that
they are so so happy when they finally experience the friendship that decent human beings often share.
Let us all be a little more forgiving of people who screw up again and again by being cruel to animals, by being selfish or envious, or by being just a little too lazy to stop being proud of being on the spectrum. Let us think of them being disappointed when someone refuses to be their friend, and then let us think of the happiness they feel when someone chooses to befriend them, someone who expects them to be better tomorrow than they were today.
My friends, it is no small thing to be a friend to a creature who never had a friend in this world. You know that is right ----- but there is more ----- you have to want anyone to be a better person, you have to want them to experience that feeling that tomorrow they will be a better person than they were today.
As for people who are cruel to animals ---- you do not want to know what God has in store for them if they do not repent. Trust me on that, if you never trust anything else I say, trust me on that.
Well yeah, but you get charlatan vibes from me, too, right? and from our elderly linguist friend?
and I am not a charlatan
I have my faults but charlatanism is not one of them
Newsom couldn't even keep thousands of Californians off the beaches and so he announces that CA is days away from CA Phase 2 opening while Cuomo signals he's headed there too.
San Clemente and Laguna Beach were officially opened today -- these communities' local councils are Newsom-friendly. Newport and Huntington Beach are still on lockdown because they defied his royal-assed highness.
God, I despise that greaseball, Newsom.
Just watching the national debt clock. Simply amazing- the national debt is now increasing by $1 million dollars every 47 seconds.
Weird thing is that OC has fewer deaths than surrounding CA counties. Newsom must hate that b/c it doesn't fit any sort of convenient scare-narrative.
@Lewis Wetzel:
Not Freudian. Simply a human & ancient observation that a fellow who rejects his parents' authority is likely to reject authority from anyone else.
I don't think it's fair to say he rejects "authority from anyone else," but Chomsky is a classic anarchist and believes that power and authority must justify themselves.
_The Kingdom of Speech_ was not so much a takedown of Chomsky as it was a takedown of the intellectuals who championed Chomsky. Chomsky doesn't make claims that can be proven to be right or wrong. He made linguistics into a non-science.
Regardless, Wolfe's attempt to even describe Chomsky's theory demonstrate he doesn't understand the material he's critiquing. I actually find it peculiar that you can claim he "made linguistics into a non-science." Chomsky's position has never been the dominant position in the field. Whether Chomsky's innate structures and universal grammar or some other language acquisition model is correct is not a question we can currently answer. Chomsky himself has said that he fully expects his ideas to be overturned as the field progresses.
Before Chomsky, linguists would research questions like "is the icelandic aspirant 'f' descended from the proto-Germanic 'th'?"
After Chomsky. linguists research how badly formed sentences that are intelligible to some fit into Chomsky's "universal grammar."
J. Farmer-
"Whether Chomsky's innate structures and universal grammar or some other language acquisition model is correct is not a question we can currently answer. Chomsky himself has said that he fully expects his ideas to be overturned as the field progresses."
We are in agreement. Chomsky has turned linguistics from a science into a social science.
You don't solve discrete problems. Instead you talk about non-discrete problems. That is what is called 'jawboning'.
@Lewis Wetzel:
Before Chomsky, linguists would research questions like "is the icelandic aspirant 'f' descended from the proto-Germanic 'th'?"
After Chomsky. linguists research how badly formed sentences that are intelligible to some fit into Chomsky's "universal grammar."
I just think that fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature of the field. As I said, Chomsky's theory has never been the dominant position in the field, and his preferred method is that language acquisition be studied as a subset of biology, identifying the physical structures in the brain. In this sense, you might consider Chomksky within the narrower field of biolinguistics.
Talking about incidents like Waco in revolutionary terms is the usual way actual revolutions begin, or it is at least a symptom of a pre revolutionary situation. There is a lot of hard talk about the "bloody shirts".
It (all the revolutionary talk) can be treated seriously, academically, by historians, should there actually, eventually, be a revolt or revolution or some extended period of unrest (the Irish Troubles say).
Or it can be dismissed as some fantasy, as this often was at the time, even in cases where there was some consequential situation.
Before Chomsky, linguists would research questions like "is the icelandic aspirant 'f' descended from the proto-Germanic 'th'?"
After Chomsky. linguists research how badly formed sentences that are intelligible to some fit into Chomsky's "universal grammar."
You may be leaving out Saussure and the move from historical to structural linguistics that happened before Chomsky. There might have been a feeling that historical linguistics were played out and didn't provide much room for new work. The humanities and social sciences want to make "progress" and move "forward" but they don't have the continual progress in instruments that the physical and biological sciences have, so they latch on to new theories in an effort to have something new to say. Approaches that people attack or defend on ideological grounds may have arisen because other avenues of research have dried up. I'm not saying that's the case with Chomsky, but it seems to be true in other fields.
@buwaya:
The American vein of conservatism is a bit peculiar. I consider the fundamental insight of conservatism to suspicion of revolutionary change. Buckley probably overstated the case with "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." Yelling "slow down" is probably a more apt description. I think conservatives tend to have a more organic, bottom up view of social organization and should be skeptical of a progressive view of history. That's why I joke that an "optimistic conservative" is an oxymoron. George W. Bush was much more an idealist than a conservative.
@Lurker21:
The humanities and social sciences want to make "progress" and move "forward" but they don't have the continual progress in instruments that the physical and biological sciences have, so they latch on to new theories in an effort to have something new to say.
I think what's called "social science" is mostly a form of political activism masquerading as "scientific research." It's like they took the CliffsNotes version of the hard sciences and built it. We'll use big words and complicated constructions. We'll propose theories deduced from principles that make broad claims about human behavior. We'll have professional associations, credentialing, a publishing industry, and conferences.
I at least have some sense of what a biologist or a chemist knows. I don't have the slightest idea what a sociologist knows.
There is no "science" in these attempts at Covid management and there cannot be any, because there is so far insufficient information on it to create a model of any sort.
The PTB don't even know what the most significant factors are in determining the scale or rate of an outbreak. They simply cannot explain or predict anything. Therefore there is no way to come to a cost-benefit analysis of any public health measure.
There isnt even a sufficient degree of understanding on treating cases of this. It is not clear at all that the treatment regimes arent doing more harm than good. We are still at the bleeding with leeches stage.
What the experts have come up with so far amounts to ritualistic formulas largely invented on the spot - a priesthood inventing new rituals and prayers every week or so, and claiming they are venerable and sacred. Since the caste in charge are less "scientists" than a religious hierarchy built around an irrational fantasy of "science", it shouldnt be surprising.
The truth is that one may as well listen to any random internet rando for actionable advice.
There have been plenty of "conservative" revolutions, revolts, and "troubles".
A great number of these are the result of the commons/bourgeois yelling "stop", or more often "go back".
Mostly the inability to analyze these things objectively is the result of left wing filters on the historical profession. If a peasant has a complaint it is "left wing", unless the thing is so loaded with right wing symbolism that such a characterization is too absurd to work, even for an academic.
buwaya said...There is no "science" in these attempts at Covid management and there cannot be any, because there is so far insufficient information on it to create a model of any sort.
This underscores the difference between the two verbs in romance languages. For example, in Italian: sapere vs. conoscere; one is grounded in experience; the other in the clouds.
Covid19Crusher
@Covid19Crusher
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May 2
The pandemic was sending as many patients into the Intensive Care Unit in the UK as in Italy. Italy has adopted the early hydroxychroloroquine treatment end of March. If it is therapeutically active, it MUST create a “trend break” reflecting better clinical outcomes. Here it is:
LINK
“A Colorado man arrested after federal agents allegedly discovered pipe bombs in his home had also been helping organize an armed protest demanding the state lift its coronavirus restrictions, an official briefed on the case tells ABC News.”
CO governor Pollis is almost just as brain dead as the rest of the Dem governors. Talking to my next brother yesterday. Have basicly killed the ski season this year. Ok - Summit and Eagle counties got hit decently hard because of tourists. Apparently the rest of the ski areas were supposed to have a couple more days in late March. But Vail Resorts closed, so Pollis closed everything. Then they were supposed to be opening again at the first of May. But VR wasn’t going to join in (their ski areas tend to close early anyway). It was the independents, so Pollis shut that down too. But more egregious, he has effectively shut down most of the back country skiing. Apparently the latest is that he had CDOT plow in all of the pullouts on US 6 over Loveland Pass, between A Basin and a probably Loveland Basin, so no one can park or drop off skiers. Back country skiing is a bit like surfing. You might bunch up on occasion with your own small group, but are often a mile or so away from the closest group other than your own. Pretty much the entire time, whatever VR decided to do, Pollis mandated for the rest of the state. My brother asked why he was so subservient to VR? I told him that he had been in the wrong Congressional district. I had been in Pollis’ district, and it covered Eagle, Summit, Clear Creek, and Boulder counties - gerrymandered to give the Dems a safe seat. And VR is the largest employer in Eagle (Vail, Beaver Creek) and Summit (Breckenridge, Keystone) counties. He had been bought and paid for long before he moved into the governor’s mansion.
Covid19Crusher
@Covid19Crusher
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May 1
India looks like a recipe for a COVID19 disaster BUT it has one trump card: 70% of the world's hydroxychloroquine production, so it can treat early and preventatively at scale. Nearly 1 million tests later, only 3% of positives and the pandemic’s growth is stunningly contained.
LINK
His preferred method is that language acquisition be studied as a subset of biology, identifying the physical structures in the brain.
Chomsky has never claimed to identify brain regions that are the home of his universal grammar. It is jawboning, all the way down. When Chomsky speaks of "structures" he is not speaking of physical regions of the human brain. Read what Chomsky actually says about linguistics. He is a bull shit artist. He claims nothing that can be disproved.
Anybody got the routing number for for the 1st Bank of Heaven?
I checked, and wouldn't you know it? It's exactly the same as the routing number for my bank account! Ready to copy?
"India looks like a recipe for a COVID19 disaster BUT it has one trump card: "
Two trump cards.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/india/kolkata/ext
Tue
5 May Rain late. Afternoon clouds. 33 / 24 °C
6 May Morning clouds. 31 / 24 °C
7 May Sunny. 34 / 24 °C
8 May High level clouds. 35 / 26 °C
9 May More sun than clouds. 35 / 26 °C
10 May Sunny. 34 / 24 °C
11 May Overcast. 34 / 28 °C
@Lewis Wetzel:
Chomsky has never claimed to identify brain regions that are the home of his universal grammar. It is jawboning, all the way down. When Chomsky speaks of "structures" he is not speaking of physical regions of the human brain.
I agree he is not speaking of physical regions in the brain. I didn't intend to use "structures" in the grammatical sense. The neurological processes involved in language acquisition are very poorly understood. Chomsky analogizes studying language acquisition with studying an insect visual system. The jawboning accusation seems especially inapt. Chomsky's view is probably closer to the anti-Chomsky position than the pro-Chomsky position. It's not as if his linguistic views remain unchanged since the 1950s. And he has made significant contributions to the field in years. At most, he is a peripheral participant.
I'll take Pinker over Chomsky, as a thinker and explorer of what makes us who we are, all day every day. Met him once too.
The New York Times is amazing during this pandemic. I love the New York Times.
I see you guys were up at 2:00- 3:00am talking about Noam Chomsky.
Might be a good time to review your life.
Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...I have...Mental Stability...
Newer commenters should be reminded that our hostess deprecates personal attacks on other commenters, or something like that. Observe the above so-disant commenter as an example of how not to comment, or to be beloved, be reasonable, or be a man.
Nichevo ... an example of how not to comment, or to be beloved, be reasonable, or be a man.
Blogger Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan ... an example of how not to comment, or to be beloved, be reasonable, or be a man.
“Might be a good time to review your life.”
lol. I love the noam-iness of this comment.
In the early days of March I heard an epidemiologist say the “only meaningful statistic” we have during the pandemic (emphasis on DURING) is DEATHS PER DAY because the other metrics (# of cases, # tested & # recovered) all are dependent on other variables, whereas D/D would not be revised as more testing occurs (with some exceptions for marginal deaths). That’s why I started my graph. Tracking deaths is the only way we know when the we are past the peak, over the hump, and all those things we were watching for.
After hearing how this was “the important” metric I notice the DNC-Media started to ignore deaths per day. Never heard it on air again. We passed it mid-April, as Trump originally predicted the peak to arrive. D/D peaked at about 3200 and pretty steadily declined to about 1000/day presently. Yet this GOOD NEWS is 100% ignored by the media. We were all talking about flattening the curve, lowering that bump.
So why the news blackout for achieving that milestone? Why isn’t “THE SCIENCE” of our downward slope worth citing as proof we can safely reopen? Anybody else recall peak talk two months ago?
[re-posted after correcting error]
a falsiable theory of consciousness, a reprehensible view of American history, that follows Marxist dialectics, a white washer of the Cambodian degringolade,
The most sickening part of the Waco debacle came when president Clinton held a news conference and stated that he was surprised that anyone could suggest that Attorney General Reno should resign "because some religious fanatics murdered themselves."
And the press - without whom democracy dies in darkness, remember - applauded. Literally.
@Mike: Because their goal is not to report the science, nor expose the truth.
Not sure if it was at your urging or not, but I've been following the D/D in my state for a few weeks now. As you note for the US, D/D appear to have peaked in MA on April 23. Steady decline since. I've also been looking at daily net Hospitalizations, that has been zero or negative for nine of the last twelve days. The other stats (tests, positives) are largely useless except for % of Positives which has averaged around 20% though been in the teens (10% yesterday) recently.
What purpose is being served by this lack of curiosity and transparency from the Press?
Temujin said...
I see you guys were up at 2:00- 3:00am talking about Noam Chomsky.
Might be a good time to review your life.
I am in time zone GMT -10. But it still a good time to review my life!
“Coronavirus Live Updates: Models Project Sharp Rise in Deaths as States Reopen
An internal Trump administration report expects about 200,000 daily cases by June.”
NYT
I sure hope not.
Bullshit. If that was your hope, you wouldn't be constantly posting worst-case scenarios.
Fucking ghoul.
Temujin - I have many good suggestions on how to live a better life. Here are a few ....
(1) be passionate about what you care about
(2) read the Bible, as it is the divine word of the Lord
(3) be prepared to be yourself, because God created you, at any hour of the day or night
I am not sad that you childishly insulted me and my friends, I am only sad that you are not likely to read and profit from my good advice.
stephen cooper said...
pasternak was a good poet but a lousy human being
"cor ad cor loquitur"
the nice thing is this.
my natural instinct - after years of knowing hundreds of people fairly well - is to not like anybody.
And you're faithful to it. You never seem to have anything nice to say about anyone. Without intending insult, I'm obliged to tell you that it is not an amiable trait.
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