Athletics:
Image by greg westfall. 
[A2] Not being the basketball fan, I had missed the whole sleeved uniforms trend. We had sleeves in YMCA ball. It was kind of a big deal to graduate to a more competitive league where we got to wear real basketball jerseys.
[A3] Ed Latimore writes about what he learned growing up in the Hood.
[A4] Mark Zeigler proposes moving the Chargers to… San Diego.
[A5] This sounds right to me. At some point I’m going to have to go back and see if there is any correlation between my eyesight and my sporadic little league performance.
Money:
Image by MattHurst
[M2] It’s tough times for Macy’s and Sears and company.
[M3] Despite my personal discomfort, I tend to support the small seats on airplanes and allowing people who need more (like me) to get more to pay for it. At some point there are some legitimate health concerns, though, so I don’t mind a fair inquiry into that.
[M4] Samsung has delivered their Note 7 Disaster Autopsy. What a disaster. A month or so ago it really looked like I was going to be in the market for a new phone and it was weird not having a Note to consider. (My next phone will likely be LG.)
[M5] Sustainable burial practices? That sounds cool, I guess, but fire me up when I die. (My wife, notably, wants the same – but only after she’s dissected in a medical school laboratory.)
[M6] I love capitalism.
Relationships:
Image by harlandspinksphoto
[R2] Lucius Wisniewski’s proposal to his girlfriend did not go off as planned, but he learned an Important Lesson. My proposal involved me trying like heck to get the Internet up on her laptop while she sat on the sofa irritated with the fact that I couldn’t Let It Go and do without Internet for a day.
[R3] This strikes me as a reasonably good dating site strategy if you’re female. Less so if you’re male. But looking back to when I was on that scene, I wonder if I was too timid. Sometimes, standing out is better than anything.
[R4] Texting didn’t really become a universal thing until after I married, but even so this article really brought back some unpleasant memories vis-a-vis AOL Instant Messenger.
[R5] I guess I could get on board with adding some new words to our vocabulary.
Family:
Image by Kelly Sue
[F2] How the Japanese grieve the miscarriage.
[F3] Sometimes it would take my mother four names to get to me.
[F4] A look at the pros and cons of co-sleeping.
[F5] We did the 90-minute nap thing with Lain and had some real success with it. Not sure if it was actually the 90 minutes or whether it was mostly a matter of establishing a rhythm.
Space:
Image by Brett Jordan
[S2] In case you wanted to see some images of what galaxy collisions look like, here you go. Is this our future?
[S3] Never mind “learning” from it, how do we get this sucker to Earth?
[S4] The ins and outs of colonizing Jupiter’s moons.
[S5] Venus was thought to be perhaps the most habitable planet aside from Earth. What happened?
[S1] Behold! The earliest maps of Mars!
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Who the heck uses scientific notation and then ends with “short Tons”?
Damn Yankees
2.27×10^16 Tons, or, even better, 2.27×10^19 kg, if you don’t mind.
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In my first job in the USA, in the late 90s, I was asked when something would be ready (mind you, the job was low, low, upper management)
“In about a fortnight” was my non-glib answer. Received with a mixture of hilarity, and WTF is a fortnight. (*)
In my discharge, in Spanish, a quincena (fitteen days, half a month, or two weeks, depending on context) is a very common unit of time, particularly since most people are paid quincenalmente (fortnightingly)
(*) A similar response to when I described in a presentation to upper management a potential customer as a “plastic cutlery manufacturing facility”. Eventually they got used to my Sunday words folksy style.
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My favorite word that doesn’t mean what you think it does: “mordant” used as an adjective.
(and yes, English has a gadzillion words that nobody knows about. Like fleer, one of the few monosyllabic words that people have never heard of).
I got lectured by multiple bosses for using words that they didn’t understand.
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The funny thing was, it took me several minutes to come up with the word “faucet.”
I have since asked people about it and apparently “spigot” is more or less a northern US regionalism. Or at least that’s what I’ve concluded.
I love words and I find I often get asked what I meant when I use an unfamiliar one, or use one that has a second meaning. So far I’ve never been lectured by a boss over that, but I work on a college campus and I suspect my admins would be embarrassed to admit they didn’t know a certain word.
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I think the UK also has a different meaning of “billion” than the US. I prefer scientific notation.
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You mean, the U.S. uses the word “billion” incorrectly :-)
In most of the world, a billion is 1^12, not 1^9, which is properly called a “milliard” (Fr.: milliarde, Sp.: millardo)
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I’m pretty sure the deal was “First person to put a man on the moon decides what ‘billion’ means”.
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http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
“….However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound (force)-seconds (lbf·s) instead of the SI units of newton-seconds (N·s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. The spacecraft encountered Mars on a trajectory that brought it too close to the planet, causing it to pass through the upper atmosphere and disintegrate…..”
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We have multiple metric units because was have…four? Five? different measurements — length, force, stress, fracture toughness, etc — and we don’t let you specify each individually. So we’ve got a few companies that like the standard defaults except they want to use meters for length but sqrt(mm) for fracture toughness, etc.
And since they pay a lot for our software, we give them the mix they want so they don’t have to multiple or divide by 10. :)
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Internally, it’s all SI.
My dynamics prof was an old NASA engineer, still did work for them from time to time. He used to always tell us that converting SAE units was easy and he never understood what all the fuss was about. He was dead serious too. It was obvious he had just memorized all the conversion factors and developed mental shortcuts to process them, so for him, it was easy.
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It displayed in your local time zone, and handled DST.
But we had to fight with the people commissioning it because they kept thinking it would display GMT (well it would if you wanted) and we kept insisting on it, because one of their core criteria was to be able to look at the absolute order of inputs to the system — which mean “time” was the first and most critical variable to nail down, and we didn’t want the risk of some bug in time zones or daylight savings time hosing it up.
In the end, best decision we made. Made life SO much easier for a lot of the extensions they wanted.
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When they returned, they flipped the satellite — and millions of dollars crashed to the floor.
Someone had come in during lunch and taken the bolts OFF, leaving the satellite no longer secured when inverting. And no one checked when they returned to lunch.
So…boom.
Lock-out, tag-out is important kids. Or else millions of dollars turns into scrap on your floor.
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“Gott in Himmel! Halte sie alle für die Befragung.”
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I get the impression from the lawyers here that they have the same problem with their clients.
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(And be thankful I don’t recite my poetry here)
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Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.”
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M3: probably lots of factors in play here. I know the last few times I was in a mall (quite a while back as I live in a town without one), it seemed people increasingly didn’t know how to behave in public, and when people act like that, I’d almost rather just order stuff online and have it delivered to me. (I could see a day coming where we have Amazon for stuff we can wait a couple days for, Wal-Mart for things we need immediately, and very little in between, which does make me kind of sad…..I was a teen in the 80s and while we didn’t live CLOSE to a mall, on occasion I got to go to one and hang out with friends.)
Also, I think the media may have not as good a grasp on just how bad the economy really is in some “heartland” towns. (We are well on our way, in my town, to having ONLY Wal-mart left as retail….)
And yeah, I know, I’m part of the problem because I order online, but when you live in a town where the only book-selling places are a small department of wal-mart or the local (conservative) Christian bookstore, you kind of wind up defaulting to Amazon for things.
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I hear a lot of Russian spoken where I live.
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A2 – The first basketball player I was really aware of was Patrick Ewing because of his style of wearing a t-shirt under his tank top while at Georgetown
A5 – I thought the association between good vision and baseball proficiency was fairly well known. Ted Williams had famously good eyesight (which he also used as a combat pilot). And of course, it was literally a sight gag in the movie Major League.
M3 –
I’m more of a rah rah team capitalism than the median person at this site, but it’s become a major peeve that the advertised price for an airline seat is now most often for the worst seat on the plane, and you really have to pay 10s of dollars per leg (and per seat) to get most of the seats that are actually available (and United is even doing this differential within its economy plus upgrade system – so its ‘upgrade for 75 dollars’ – no, really its 100 bucks if you don’t want the bulkhead seat without unseat bag storage)
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Training the brain for pattern recognition is, well, it’s what the brain is designed to do in a lot of ways.
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Hence the top two reasons for why young phenoms don’t make is “all tools, no toolbox.”
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Improved my appreciation of boxing, too. I found that when i watched it (my grandfather boxed in his youth, and he still watches it occasionally and I try to join in) that I noticed a lot more of the finer details.
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But the game has slowed down for them, and they can do what they’re capable of doing without getting flustered doing it.
While there are hundreds better at trapping and dribbling that can’t make it happen off the training ground.
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Try watching it at ice level, even at low talent level. The from a distance overhead thing they show on television is for those that have already absorbed a basic appreciation for the game and want to see the tactics in real time and keep track of every participant. But if you want to understand how cool what they are pulling off on the fly and how exciting the game really is, first you have to see it up close and feel the speed and power involved. Which is how you get a bunch of Canadian men in a bar excited about little dots rushing around accomplishing seemingly nothing. Most of them would have played it at some level and empathize with what’s going on, or spent time watching someone else play from close up.
I imagine (association) football is much the same.
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Maybe 5 years down the road, a failing franchise might move to San Diego. The San Diego Jaguars, maybe? If the Chargers rebrand this year, maybe the new San Diego franchise will be able to get back their name.
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Keeping the name could be good for retaining their old fans, but a rebranding could help put a lot of losing seasons out of mind.
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I think this goes for most other things that Sears and Macy’s would sell like Kitchen Equipment, Bedding, etc. The middle ground is hollowed out but stuff on the low-end or high-end is thriving.
R3: I don’t know why conservatives seem to think that all liberal/feminist women have stopped shaving their armpits and legs and hate cooking/domestic stuff. Most of my female friends (if not all of them) are liberal and a lot of them are pretty girly and also into baking/cooking. I’ve never seen an on-line profile that struck me as something like “OMG Rush Limbaugh and Steve Bannon are right about women!!” Most are about stuff like bands, books, movies, TV, and other hobbies that the woman liked.
I just think the uncomfortable truth about dating like so many other things in life is about dumb luck and random chaos and this makes us all really uncomfortable because very few people want to embrace an Becketian “Nothing to be Done.” My girlfriend of two years told me that she was considering writing me off after our first date for the same reasons that a lot of women wrote me off after the first date. Basically, I was sweet and kind but they weren’t feeling chemistry. But my girlfriend needed to leave the country for two weeks and go back home when I asked her out on date #2. This allowed us to have a back and forth via e-mail and then when she got back, we took it really slow. But I can’t but help that if she did not need to go home, I would have been written off.
From what I remember in my OKCupid days and from hearing from my female friends, a lot of guys on on-line dating tend to do the kitchen sink method of response. They will ask out a million women and if 10 say yes and 2 agree to make out, that’s great!!! I always got complimented for writing in full sentences and responding to stuff in the profile.
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No, it’s worse than dumb luck and random chance. Chemistry is … um, kinda literal. It has to do with our immune systems.
Prior to the days of the internet, a lot of people got by “getting set up by someone” because there were smaller pools of people. You live in a small town? You’re a bit smarter than the rest? You’ve probably got 10 folks out of 1000 that are at all remotely interesting to have a conversation with (bearing in mind that a good proportion of that 1000 are children or otherwise not available even under “everyone is single” circumstances).
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One of my several guilty habits is that I read dating advice, even though I’m several years into a great marriage. I met my wife on a dating site and it’s just interesting to me to see how people are navigating this world.
But one of the things I see on more left-leaning columns and sites is that women get annoyed when men don’t read the long lists of “don’t contact me ifs,” which are usually a long list of feminist shibboleths. Most of them are hard to disagree with individually, but all together they read like a polemic.
What they don’t understand is that they have restricted their pool of men willing to contact them to those who don’t read the profile. For men who bother to read profiles, it’s a huuuuuuuge red flag. First, giving someone a series of sociopolitical hoops to jump through just to be worthy of contact is a big power play. Second, first dates are almost entirely for chemistry. Before we split up household chores and plan for paternity leave, I want to know if we can hold a conversation without long, awkward pauses – all the long-term stuff puts the cart ahead of the horse.
The women in the linked article had an interesting strategy, not just for politics, but for posturing. By appearing more like a gracious party hostess than an irritated bouncer at the world’s most woke nightclub, she can find a subset of men who respond better to comfort and affection than exclusivity. Does that mean she’ll just rope in a bunch of lazy man-babies? Time will tell.
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I suspect that there’s very little gain in accuracy that comes from Item #12: don’t ever ask me to make you a sandwich. The guy who would ask her to make him a sandwich probably didn’t make it past the first few items about respecting her intersectional whatever. I also suspect that the guy who would actually answer the ad with those first few items wouldn’t be scared away by Item #12. I also suspect that the long list could be an important signalling mechanism, letting the guy know that this is a high-maintenance woman.
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If all things are equal and I have to choose between a woman who slyly signals progressive tendencies and one who lays down a dozen-part ideological obstacle course as a prerequisite for talking about the possibility of a first date, it should be clear who I’m going for. Even if their politics are identical, one signals being egotistical, an unbearable pedant and a generally tiresome person.
If I’m not reading the profile, it doesn’t matter.
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Pretty much my experience in life generally.
Like how we admire the costume dramas of past eras, romantically imagining life in Regency England, conveniently forgetting that 99% of us would not be Hugh Grant in a dashing frock coat, but instead we would spend our lives polishing his boots and emptying his bedpan.
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He also popularized allowing men to use umbrellas and coaches in order to avoid bad weather and keep nice and clean.
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(Macy’s or rather, its parent company, has been run very poorly in the past, but I had thought they had righted the ship since the 90s bankruptcy and the 00’s restructuring)
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(Also, it may be part of the overall decline of the mall thing. All the legacy malls in the DC area are probably no more than 5 miles on avg fm the next nearest one. So I imagine a lot of metro areas were able to sustain the less than 10 mi radius until recently)
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Macy’s had a store in the Galleria, Houston’s premier shopping mall. Foley opened another later on. After the merger, Macy’s found itself with two stores in the same mall, and they kept both up for like ten years. But the old Folley’s one ended getting all the traffic, while the original Macy’s was like a phantom place that barely anyone patronized (great to find those heavily sought items, like medium sized shirts, that had run out of in the popular one)
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I never thought of it that way but that could be it. I won’t buy clothes at places like wal-mart (unless desperate and I can get a “national” brand (like Lee) that I can more or less trust not to fall apart after the first washing).
And most of the truly upscale stores, at least from past experience when I lived in a city that had them, look at people like me (I wear a misses’ size 14) and sniff and go “We don’t dress YOUR kind here” – so I don’t shop there.
For a few years my wardrobe was almost exclusively Land’s End and LL Bean. (And no, don’t give me the lecture about the Trump fan on their board – seen that, read that, saw the debunking.)
I also used to love Deva Lifewear, but they closed up shop. (As did Coldwater Creek, where I shopped when I got a bit more money)
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I am not one of those liberals who like to call for boycotts just beacause one high up said something in favor of an idiot. Though my unpopular opinion regarding New Balance is that they should only be worn when going to or from working out, hikes or working out/on a hike.*
Land’s End is not so much my aesthetic personally.
But I wonder if there is a need for a company like Sears anymore where you can buy hardware and a shirt at the same time. I can see how there old catalog was useful in the pre-Internet and even pre-Highway/pre-Car era but it seems like a time that has passed. My image of Sears is firmly 1970s and firmly kitsch. This is not going to keep a company alive.
I suspect that people who shopped at Macy’s are fashion conscious/interested and can now get better deals for designers on places like Gilt or now that a lot of the more expensive department stores have outlets for their remainders like Barney’s Warehouse or Off Fifth.
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I wear Nikes. Perhaps I karmically balance that by buying SAS (made in San Antonio) as my dress shoes. (I have “special” feet. It’s a drag)
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NB fits the way I walk and jog (where my foot lands, the heel issues I have, and the way my feet place stress when I stand). Other brands…not so much.
So I just buy the same shoe, basically, when the pair I have wears out.
Taking 30 minutes and having expert staff help was a great decision. They mentioned half their clientele were heavy duty runners, and the rest had foot issues.
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For people like whose feet obviously don’t match NB’s lasts, find something that works for you.
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I need a store like that. Was that Luke’s Locker?
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You can see how I ended up there.
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Service the last two visits has been a bit uneven I admit.
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Do they have places like the Gap, JCrew, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and the like round you? They hit slightly different price points (especially the Gap family which seems very clearly aimed at different demos) but all seem pretty middle-of-the-road and offer a quality product. They still have lots of storefronts around me (NYC Metro) and Gap is actually opening a new flagship in Times Square.
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Big city traffic and aggressive drivers give me the willies so I’ve never gone there.
The next-largest city to where I live (a half-hour away) has a Kohl’s and a Lane Bryant and a few of those other types of places, but it’s incredibly spread out and it’s depressing to have to drive longer than you are shopping if you are looking for something specific.
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I’m not a huge shopper, especially clothes. And since I stick to pretty familiar brands, I can usually do fine online. This is obviously my “bubble” showing but the idea of not having decent clothing options within a reasonable distance still strikes me as so foreign.
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I thought the sticks for NYC was Scranton. 2 hour commute easy.
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This is just my own experience, but the way I found around the first date no-chemistry hump was to build a sense of investment in prospective partners before meeting. This also allowed me to learn out to weed out the women taking the window shopping.approach. This should be emphasized, its the window shoppers that love the no chemistry line most. When non-window shoppers use the no chemistry line, its because its the actual problem after making a good faith effort on their part.
Which is basically to say one should play to ones strengths. A literate, intelligent and introverted modern young man is probably strong at written communication, strong at the long and involved conversations one has after you’ve gotten to know someone a bit, but weak at the intitial small talk phase, so should strategize to minimize that last bit. (there is also learning to be good at the physical interactions bit, but this is a public forum).
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Frick, my best move was moving from Vancouver back to Edmonton which got my out of what appears to be a somewhat toxic dense urban area dating culture. So as far as I know, your worst issue might not even be you, it could just be you’re not in a good enviroment for people like you. I also acknowlege I have a huge advantage over some other awkward male lonely hearts in that I’m still tall, fit and considered conventionally good-looking, so there are some problems I get to avoid, even if my brain isn’t naturally geared to this kind of thing.
Main things I’d say to you is. Hang in there, I’ve been in a similar space and felt similar things. I’ve found people who haven’t been their usually make sympathetic noises but don’t really get it. And if something isn’t working for you, try something different that you think might play to your strengths better.
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Vancouver, A+, will go again.
(If Trump kills us all, at least I lived.)
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The ones in Edmonton have a less of a presence, because it isn’t a dense coastal metropolis that attracts so many of them (instead it just draws in the various people who can’t stand living in small town prarries but still want to be close to their families). I did help get a qualified and capable gay man elected as the local member of parliament though, so there is that.
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If we can do it with Hydrogen, we can do it with a lot of other gases and that can open up a lot of frontiers.
*Standard Temperature & Pressure ~ Room temp at sea level
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canada-to-pay-entire-cost-of-detroit-windsor-us-customs-plaza/article23062321/
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Costing Mexico money and then asking them to pay for it is ridiculous in the extreme.
PARTICULARLY since it’s not Mexican Citizens crossing into America.
seriously, I expect you to put your money where your mouth is and plunk down some money to support Mexican Slavery before Mexico will pay for us to cut off “free trade”.
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Really, no Mexicans are crossing over? Did you get your facts from Chip?
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This cites Pew, who I have no reason to disbelieve on this.
It’s not hard to track who goes in and out of America, we do keep records — even on the illegal immigrants.
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You said,
This clearly isn’t true unless you can show that no Mexicans are crossing over.
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On net, they’re leaving. You wouldn’t believe what a nightmare 2009 was, in terms of getting information out of Arizona… (What do you do when all your agents decide that since the housing bubble burst, all their jobs left and they’ve got to head home to Mexico? You curse, loudly and vehemently.)
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A-b = -C If C is negative, then on net no Mexicans are crossing over. Evidence has been provided above for this assertion.
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I am often unclear in my statements, it’s a weakness of my writing. “No Net Mexicans” was exactly what I had meant to convey in the initial statement.
When I overreach, I will of course admit it. That isnt the case at this particular point.
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Canada wanted the infrastructure built.
While Canada began negotiating on the basis that the US should pay half, they ended up agreeing to pay for it all.
Agreeing. In negotiations toward getting a thing built that both countries wanted built. They were not forced.
There is no similarity between this and the Mexican border wall business. Your attempt at a point is in no way valid.
EDIT – OK I take that back.
Federal Transport Minister Lisa Raitt insisted Canadian taxpayers won’t bear the cost of the U.S. installations.
“The cost of the U.S. Port of Entry will be repaid from future toll revenues and not by Canadian taxpayers,” Ms. Raitt said
So in fact there is one similarity going on even though it has nothing to do with your point.
Canada is taking the approach proposed by Trump to make the US pay.
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I was actually referencing Rush Limbaugh, who devoted a whole section of his show recently to scorning liberals fixation with “consent”, and was obviously befuddled and enraged by the whole concept.
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Also, it looks to me like Obama negotiated a pretty sweet deal there.
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For sure, that Obama is totally a 3D chess player. He played that Canadians. (snark)
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notme: Obama got a good deal on his thing. Why can’t trump?
dragonfrog/mo: Here’s why. And also, yes, that’s a good deal.
notme: Obama’s an idiot. Only gullible people think he could get a good deal on anything.
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One is negotiating around a mutually beneficial outcome, the other is an act of international hostility directed at the country’s third largest trading partner, which everyone there knows perfectly well is being justified by racist characterizations of their own people as thieves and rapists.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4160678/Mom-offers-help-build-Trump-s-wall-son-shot-dead.html
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Do I really need to post how many people have been helped?
Because I have as evidence hundreds of thousands of dollars that show how much they’ve been helped.
Now, you might say, no amount of money is worth someone’s life.
It’s true.
But I’m certain at least one illegal has performed CPR, as well.
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Related: A story about jewish refugees turned away in 1939. People often have seen us a refuge from the horrors of their own country. Far, far more of them have been saved by coming to the US and building lives here than anything else.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/jewish-refugees-in-the-us/514742/?utm_source=atltw
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It’s funny, but notme never mentions the illegals hiding from the Chinese government in the back of white vans.
Because they’re under a death sentence, whichever country they’re in.
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I assure you I’m not grasping. Not when I see then hiding in white vans under a literal death sentence.
Is that all of them? most certainly not. But more than you’re willing to countenance
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But of course, the purpose of the immigrant-hate isn’t to make persuasive arguments, its to justify the speaker’s own rage and fear.
The Murdoch tabloids seem to have a daily section devoted solely to immigrant bashing, as part of the Radio Rwanda agit-prop strategy to build a vengeful fury against refugees.
Not coincidentally, this is Trump/ Bannon’s plan as well.
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Do you have any evidence for this or it is just more Chip overreach?
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The point is, there is a full blown propaganda campaign to whip up rage and fear of immigrants. Its led by Murdoch, and now aided and abetted by the white supremacists in the Republican Party.
They are the hyenas, and the Republican base are the terrified wildebeests stampeding in panic.
I’m just trying to get the rest of us not to follow the madness.
And yeah, Holocaust Remembrance Day is a helluva time for that.
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In practice, he might actually want to have some sort of a negotiating plan. Flopping his giant, Trumptastic phallus on the table and waiting for the applause to die down probably won’t make it happen, given that his negotiating position seems to be, “Give me a bunch of stuff that benefits only me and get nothing in exchange.”
Maybe he thinks that now that he’s POTUS, he doesn’t have to run the scam part of his deals before he starts the looting stage. I think that at least with Mexico, he’s still going to have to go to work laying out the bait before he pulls the switch. Time will tell.
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The incentives.
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https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest
“My name is Vera Ascher. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered at Auschwitz”
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In the days of laser eye and glasses becoming chic nerd wear, there is something to be said for how good contact lens technology is at improving eyesight.
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Presumably the major source of revenue will be the gate receipts. They will play an eight game season, but there are two teams in the game, so they have to split the gate, so that is really four games per team to make back costs. So what will people pay to see these games? Let’s say $20 each, to pick a number out of the air. Do the arithmetic and it comes out that they have to average 31,250 a game, just to make payroll.
Of course there are lots of expenses beyond the players. The linked article has much vagueness about what stadiums they will be using, but presumably they will have to pay for them. There are coaches who will also expect to be paid. How much? Football is very coach-driven, and the market for good football coaches is extremely competitive. Are they going to pay top dollar for good ones, or go cheap and hope those NFL scouts they are trying to attract won’t notice. And we still haven’t discussed equipment, marketing, insurance, or the twenty other categories of expenses we could come up with.
Did 31,250 a game at $20 a pop seem plausible to you? Quite likely not. It didn’t to me. But in reality the situation is much, much worse.
My prediction is that this is the last we will hear of the idea. If I am wrong about that, it still won’t last long. This is a money pit waiting to happen. Over-enthusiastic wanna-be football team owners just barely might buy into the idea, but sticking with it once the money starts pouring down that pit is another matter.
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Two of Roger Zelazny’s best early stories are examples of these: The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, about trying to catch a Venusian Leviathan, and A Rose for Ecclesiastes about how that dying race might still have a few tricks up its sleeve.
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https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/darweesh-v-trump-petition-writ-habeas-corpus-and-complaint-declaratory-and-injunctive
For future reference, where is a good place to post things like that. I’m uncertain of the protocol.
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Add: does this one work?
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I have some American con law training (for kicks at my Canadian law school), but one thing I knew in general is its bad to make half-formed opinions on this area. Immigration law is very much its own little thing and a lot of normal protections against the state don’t apply, particularly at the border.
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Paul Ryan reverses his principled statement, decides that a religious ban is conservatism after all.
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Then we had a long talk about his approach to politics. [Bannon] never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed.
Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment”. … “National Review and The Weekly Standard,” he said, “are both left-wing magazines, and I want to destroy them also.” He added that “no one reads them or cares what they say.” His goal was to bring down the entire establishment including the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress.
Egads!!
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MUAH! Ya big lug, you! Such a little rascal.
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If you follow NotMe’s track record here, you’ll see that he held Obama accountable for pretty much everything negative that happened during his time in office and attributed responsibilities wildly. As my comment was directly specifically to him, I do not consider it a cheap shot in the least.
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There has been a lot of destruction in the past week and I fear it is going to get worse.
Trump announced his highly unconstitutional immigration ban late on a Friday afternoon. The ban took immediate effect and people with valid green cards were turned away at immigration. But there were lots of protests and a federal judge issued an emergency injunction on a Saturday, that’s good!!!
But what else happened today? Bannon and Kushner received spots on the National Security Council and replaced the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs and the Director of National Intelligence. This is bad, very bad. This is a coup happening before our eyes. Part of me would not be surprised to see Trump arrest every Democrat in Congress on Monday.
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Shoving away the military from a prime place in decision making and information is not a way to ensure your power in DC. It’s a risky move that will increase the number of leaks from the military sources. If an operation goes bad the military will be the first ones with knives in the backs of bannon and flynn and trump. Really, if you are staring a coup you don’t insult the Joint Chief of Staff and kick him out of an important role.
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The American republic is dead.
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A lousy President signed an unconstitutional executive order, which was quickly and rightly struck down by a federal court. If he goes full Roosevelt, tries to pack the court, and actually succeeds, I’ll concede the point. Until then, this is nothing we haven’t seen before.
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No, it worked just fine. Despite all her advantages, Hillary couldn’t beg, borrow, steal, buy or lie her way into office. This sounds like sour grapes to me.
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Don’t stop your enemy when he’s making mistakes.
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Putting political hacks on the NSC does appears intended to be malevolent, but actually stupid.
But, and this underscores nearly every act by this regime, it is just as alarming.
The Republic can fall under a constant barrage of stupidity and incompetence just as easily as malevolence.
When I read stories of dictatorship like Pinochet’s Chile, Marco’s Philippines, or East Germany, what stands out is their staggering incompetence as the basic functions of governance.Contrary to legend, Mussolini did not make the trains run on time.
Simple things like keeping the power on, streets clean, and thievery within limits are ignored in favor of settling scores and inflicting dominance.
Which is what we are seeing with Trump/Bannon.
ETA: The reason this needs to be stressed, is I see periodically, confident assertions that somehow the Deep State or military or corporations will rise to stop Trump on our behalf.
This is whistling past the graveyard.
Full alarm about the threat to our Republic is warranted and every citizen needs to take part.
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Why settle? The actions can be both malevolent and grossly incompetent.
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Trump lives for the applause, right? He wants to be praised. He chases approval.
So he walks into office, small inauguration crowd (and he knows it), historically low approval numbers (and he knows it), falling poll numbers (and he knows it), and massive protests.
His best days were on the campaign trail, listening to the roar of the crowds — that approval was what he sought.
So what’s a man who is faltering now going to do to get that approval back? Wouldn’t you reach to the things that got you the biggest, loudest responses from your rallies? The things that in your personal experience everyone loved and screaming in praise about?
The Wall. The Muslim Ban.
But as they don’t work, he’ll keep reaching. Care to recall one of the big remaining applause lines? “Lock her up”.
As yourself: If Trump thought it’d get him those cheering crows, reverse those falling numbers, get him the approval he wants — would he even hesitate?
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Yes and no to your theory. IIRC Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans is 81 percent. Maybe that is all he needs.
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he seems the sort to not only seek out the applause, but to seek out the slights.
The kind that has to find out the bad things people say, in order to feel properly aggrieved and plot vengeance.
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I gotta admit, this sort of thing distresses me quite a bit. Not so much this comment in particular, more strategizing from libs about how to get the better of poking Trump’s psychological vulnerabilities.
First of all, from what I’ve seen of the ideas, here and elsewhere, I don’t think they’re gonna work. Even if we think that libs have correctly analyzed Trump’s psychological makeup, their ability to game about the relevant repercussion is way insufficient for what they want.
Much more than that, I’m disappointed that libs have formulated their interests in strictly partisan terms. I can’t expect that libs are going to ignore that, of course, but it’s very depressing that there seems to be a bottomless well of hostility from libs toward Middle America and the people who voted for Trump.
Today’s lib factionalism looks from here to be horribly myopic. That somehow our problems are better resolved through constant antagonism over finding some way of keeping the trains running on time, it just seems ridiculous that that’s going to help libs, even it they don’t care about the rest of us.
It seems so much easier simply to do the right thing for the right reasons, but so far it’s been difficult for libs even to consider it.
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Why is that depressing? His approvals are, like, 26% right now. Most of the people who voted for him don’t like him.
Today’s lib factionalism looks from here to be horribly myopic.
In what sense? That they’re not open minded enough to give a person and party advocating policies they reject a fair shake? That doesn’t seem myopic to me. Just a fundamental disagreement.
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So…brilliant and clueless.
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But I’m sure that could never happen to you, because you know everything already.
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Yeah, I’m thinking of the immigration EO and a couple other things but now that I read what I wrote it’s a little more meta than I let on so I should take a couple steps back.
Specifically, what the events of the last day or so say about the motives of the lawyers at the airports (and other protestors as well, but especially the lawyers). That current US lawful permanent residents were denied reentry seems very unfair, but there’s more to it than that.
I was thinking if I were some schmo in PG County or Yonkers, and I was struggling through the tears with my soon-to-be ex-wife, and we needed to figure out who was going to get the kid and who was going to get the car. Would any of those people have been there on Saturday night, pro bono, and bringing a printer to execute a client representation agreement toute suite?
Of course not. The overwhelming likelihood is that none of those lawyers would have ever been there, and if they did they would have charged through the nose.
And in a broader view, reading here and a couple other places, I’m disappointed that the libs are energized and laser focused on getting rid of Trump’s immigration EO. I mean, I get the part about the greencard holders but that’s not what’s animating things as far as I can see. The libs want to get rid of the whole thing, and apparently expect to, without any kind of thought about why there shouldn’t be new immigrants from Syria or Libya or wherever, or why other people might not want them.
Most likely, the libs hate the EO because Trump signed it. This whole business of Trump being fit or not fit for office is at the moment tremendously misleading. It could be legitimate as a campaign talking point, but the campaign is over. And it’s a plain fact of reality that Trump is President of the United States, and we all gotta deal.
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Believe me, we’re all painfully aware of that. And we’re going to give him every bit as much deference as the other side gave Obama.
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Even the birther stuff was different than this. Ie, birthers rejected President Obama because he didn’t represent America (born in Kenya, etc). Libs are rejecting President Trump because he does represent America.
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Yes, Trump represents 10% of America, plus the 15% of America who thinks EBOLA is a good thing.
Compared to that, Obama represented all of America.
(and, no, I’m not kidding on the percentage of Americans that favor Ebola. Check out PPP for all your latest trolling polling needs)
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President Trump represents some part of America who were enthusiasts of him, he represents another demographic who acquiesced to him at various points as he advanced his candidacy. And now he represents all of America as the sitting President.
The libs who are rejecting Trump are rejecting each of these.
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As President, he’s representing us all.
In so far as he’s being a maniac, I’m going to call him out on that. It reflects poorly on the rest of us, after all. (But I’ve been one of the quieter people around here, you’ll note).
I do not need to support him to wish that he doesn’t screw up. My definition of screwing up is probably different than yours.
(Allowing Russia to take over Ukraine would probably get my dander up. And this is despite the pictures coming out of Ukraine, not because of them.)
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But this is about implicit or explicit power grabs, specifically intended to deny President Trump, his Administration and other political adversaries to do the everyday things than any executive would do. The idea being to create or maintain adversarial power structures to what we already have, to usurp the authority that our voters legitimately have, and replace it with the illegitimate mentality of grab what you can.
This is why the resistance to Trump is only tangentially about Trump.
About Russia and Ukraine, that’s a situation where I think Trump is actually right, to the extent that he knows his own mind. This is for two reasons: first, that Russia is a country of some power, and maintaining de facto or de jure authority over Ukraine is among the highest priorities of the Russian state, and the Russian people. To the point where for them, it’s not so much a matter of foreign policy as a domestic issue. That’s not something where we have enough leverage to interfere with, even with Russian interventions as brutal as they are.
Second, all the major political factions in Ukraine, including or especially ours. Again, that limits the sphere of our effectiveness.
For me at least, the problem is that I’d like to have somebody a little more cultured than Trump in charge of managing this. Trump’s instincts are right, but I still have doubts of what I expect his actions and policies to be.
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To the extent that Congress or the Judiciary take power away from the Unitary Executive, it can only help our democracy.
I would support such actions if the President was Obama, Clinton, McCain or Trump.
I consider myself fortunate to have helped elect such a poisonous president, so that we can reign in the Executive Powers that have been allowed to Usurp Congress’ Rights to Govern (the executive still has the Right to Administer, mind).
War Powers is a particular sore spot, both with drones and torture. Obama did jack-all to reign this in, so I’ll be glad if Trump backfires enough to give Congress back their Right to Declare War.
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Specifically, it’s about extragovernmentally empowering the upper-middle class SWPL libs and their cultural worldview. Let’s face it, the reason that so many people got outraged over Libyans and Syrians being detained at JFK is because they weren’t Americans. If they were, then it just sucks to be you.
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It was already a problem before Trump was elected. I hoped, at least in the immediate aftermath of the election, that we’d see progress on that score, ‘cuz even libs aren’t too dense to see the counterproductivity of their disdain. Well, it hasn’t worked out that way so far. Oh well.
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It’s more the attitude that I’m out to get political power (at least in some operational way), and that I’ve got license to shit on any part of America I need to get it. On the one hand, it very well might not work. After all, it’s why you lost the election in the first place.
And on the other, if that did succeed, it’s very clearly detrimental to America as a whole, and doesn’t necessarily even benefit libs, even if that’s all I cared about.
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If we’re counting absurd things you said in your first sentence, I’d go with “Trump/Bannon” first, then “always” second. But that’s sequential. I think that “always” is the more absurd part.
“Putting political hacks on the NSC does appears intended to be malevolent, but actually stupid.”
I think this is more unfounded than absurd, because some of the moves are pretty hacky.
I can see that the next sentence goes back to your long memory of the entire Trump presidency, talking about the nature of nearly every move he’s made. So I can tell that this comment isn’t worth the effort of fisking.
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I can see that the next sentence goes back to your long memory of the entire Trump presidency,
More like, “the entire Trump campaign and actions preceding that”. Restricting judgment to only 8 days of decision-making when the writing was on the wall strikes me as trying to chip away at what constitutes “relevant” evidence.
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But who actually conduct coups? Alienated military leaders who feel they need to take extrorordinary means to save the nation from the existing government.
(That’s how Egypt and Thailand roll, for instance)
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But DHS as of noon eastern time Sunday Jan 29 is totally towing the Trump/Bannon Lion with the EO and may be even actively refusing to comply with yesterday’s federal court orders.
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Newly hired 60 some odd year olds US Marine Corps 4 star generals are supposed to do the right thing – or at least do a thing right (The DHS this weekend has done neither)
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ETA: By that I mean, there is so much institutional inertia to only care about civil rights when forced to, or when it serves a PR purpose, that I’d be surprised if the new head could turn it around in the first week on the job.
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Spellcheck run amok, or wordplay that currently escapes me?
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The plumbers that Obama stood up are almost certainly still around.
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It would not be hard to make a president an impotent figurehead if no one felt like executing his orders.
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Intentional or not, it would seem that certain systems would sort of structure themselves to empower a law-and-order President.
Odds are, you don’t get into CBP if you have real scruples about keeping people out of the country. And you probably don’t get into law enforcement if you have scruples about pushing back protestors. Or the DAs office if you have scruples about persecuting people as strongly as possible. And on down the line.
That doesn’t mean that there is no one who will offer resistance, but probably the vast majority of folks at the tail end of the whip are not going to offer much.
I’m sure there is an analogue for different types of Presidents, but I can’t really think of those right now.
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Kolohe is right here. DHS is defying the court’s injunction as far as I can tell from the media reporting. Maybe they will let up soon but this seems to be a high alert situation.
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I’d imagine that the courts are, bluntly, allowing the various agencies 24 or 48 hours to get it under control, after which they will become more unhappy.
Which is also the amount of time necessary for lawyers to find out they’re not obey, draft more motions, bring it back to court — and so if there’s egregious disregard for the orders (and not just pockets of poorly managed idiots), then it’s Monday and courts will proceed to tackle it.
If nothing else, most judges are going to be leery against starting to work up the chain of command with contempt orders if it turns out to be confusion and not malice. They’re going to want documented proof, sworn statements, and enough evidence to make sure they’ve got a solid footing.
The idiots running the show might not care about the Constitution, but most judges do.
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What if …? well, you know.
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The various DoJ branches work VERY closely with the courts, which are more partners than antagonistic “others” that get in the way of doing their jobs.
Doing what DHS or BP is doing would be….far more unlikely, as the rank and file is as fully invested in supporting the courts and judicial system as management is.
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Thoughts?
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Best 120 Presidential days evarrrrrr.
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If law enforcement (which is what CBP is) really is following instructions from political appointees to ignore court orders, we have lost the rule of law.
Hopefully, not irrevocably.
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But yeah. If they’re being instructed to disobey court orders well….whomever ordered that is acting unconstitutionally.
Not that it matters. The GOP Congress is neutered and spineless. They’ll ignore it, possibly in favor of another email investigation into Clinton or another Benghazi panel.
They certainly wouldn’t demand resignations backed by Congressional action should judicial remedies fail.
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So including green card holders in the ban was very, very deliberate — no matter what comes out of the pipe later on that topic.
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Meanwhile, a new baseline will have been set.
We’ll see what happens today.
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Miller is an interesting case study in how political beliefs form. He is from a big standard liberal Jewish family but the profile I read of him over the summer stated he was right-wing from an early age. This raises the question of where his beliefs came from.
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Netanyahu comes from a Jewish family, no?
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Different contexts. Nethayahu is Israeli and the politics there have always had left and right-wings like all countries.
Miller is American and 80 percent of American Jews have been consistently Democratic and liberal since FDR if not before. They were largely further to the left before FDR and known for electing socialists to Congress in the districts that they dominated.
I suspect many or most people sort of inherit their politics from their families based on anecdotal evidence. So that Miller is the opposite is intriguing from a philosophical standard. Netanhayu’s family was always on the Israeli right and followers of Menchamin Begin.
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I suspect many or most people sort of inherit their politics from their families based on anecdotal evidence.
The evo-psych/social-psych research doesn’t bear that out. In general, psychological traits, including political orientations, pretty consistently show a 50-0-50 pattern where the first percentage is genetic, the second is shared environment, and the third non-shared environment. Shared environment roughly translates to family upbringing. Where this gets tricky is that the factors are easily conflated if one isn’t careful, since most siblings are closely related genetically.
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Please point out explicitly where I called Bibi liberal because I am pretty sure I did the exact opposite.
Just because we are brothers does not mean we say or believe the same things.
Fucking hell!!
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Ergo!, the context in which some Jews are raised is right wing!
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{{Channeling my inner Jaybird here…}} could that be part of the problem we’re trying to navigate?
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And tribal. Team beliefs change over time. E.g, supporting Israel used to be a left thing, but has shifted rightward.
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In israel, a women has trouble getting divorced without her husband’s permission. This is actively supported by Bibi’s coalition (in that the religious groups don’t want to lose any power at all).
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