Why is the flag on Trump's helicopter backwards? (Inverted left-to-right. Upside down I could understand as a gesture from the crew.)
Is there an ultimate slow dance songs list? I am assuming that the "slow dance" was something that lasted roughly 1975-2005 during the corporate rock ascendancy and that kids today now slow twerk, or something. I vote for "The Lady In Red" in the mix.
Also why aren't there giant baby balloons following Trump around everywhere in the US? We need to copy that ASAP.
Oooh also Cyndi Lauper, "Time After Time."
The librarian used Google and got a list. No "Wish You Were Here"?
Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton
Lady In Red - Chris De Burgh
Let's Get It On - Marvin Gaye
Let's Stay Together - Al Green
At Last - Etta James
Unforgettable - Nat King Cole & Natalie Cole
Unchained Melody - The Righteous Brothers
Amazed - Lonestar
God Bless The Broken Road - Rascal Flatts
Have I Told You Lately - Rod Stewart
Can't Help Falling In Love With You - Elvis Presley
Into The Mystic - Van Morrison
When A Man Loves A Woman - Percy Sledge
You And Me - Lifehouse
Faithfully - Journey
Lucky - Jason Mraz & Colbie Caillat
You're Beautiful - James Blunt
You're Still The One - Shania Twain
I Don't Want To Miss A Thing - Aerosmith
If I Ain't Got You - Alicia Keys
4: I vaguely remember an interview with some semi-famous musician who was commenting on how versatile that song is. He said he'd heard it played in almost every musical style you can think of and it always worked.
Maybe a speed metal version would be tricky.
Don't forget "Mama has a squeeze box, daddy doesn't sleep at night."
Rod Rosenstein's giving a press conference at 11:45 a.m.--previously unscheduled, no topic announced. Trump is out of town. I'm going to guess it's Indictment Friday.
Some lyrics are about drugs or playing chess in Thailand.
I just found out a couple months ago that One Night in Bangkok is about chess.
Why is the flag on Trump's helicopter backwards? (Inverted left-to-right
Because the US military thinks that all the flags it displays should be shown as though they were flying from an actual flagstaff. So if they're on a vehicle (or a person), the blue rectangle with the stars has to be towards the direction of travel - just as though there was a real flag with a real flagstaff, and it was blowing backwards as the vehicle went along.
That's fine if the flag's on the left hand side of the vehicle or person, but if it's on the right then you have to have the flag reversed.
No other nations do this, as far as I know. Some nations, of course, have flags that are symmetrical about the vertical axis (like the UK or Canada or Japan, for example) so they don't have to worry. Others use non-flag symbols like the German Bundeswehr cross.
I remember a weird flap about this with Clinton -- there was some picture of him in a jacket with a flag patch on his right shoulder, and people were interpreting it as sending unAmerican signals.
Fortunately Hillary was wearing her I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO YOU? jacket, so it was all right.
Is it uncharitable of me to find 12 jaw-droppingly stupid?
15: I certainly do, but that might just be my unconscious vertical-symmetry privilege speaking.
It seems, and I don't know why, that it must be related to the reason why US road markings are written backwards. As in, if you're coming to a bus stop in the UK, you will see this on the road:
BUS
STOP
But if you're coming to a point where (say) the road narrows in the US, it will be
AHEAD
NARROWS
ROAD
as though American drivers can only read road signs as they are passing over them.
Like, the bold warships that set free the colonies from ancient tyranny were wind-powered, and thus by definition never had their cantons pointing in the direction of travel. Similarly the brave foot-powered patriots at Bunker Hill. Etc.
the bold warships that set free the colonies from ancient tyranny were wind-powered, and thus by definition never had their cantons pointing in the direction of travel
They might have done if they were rigged fore and aft, d'ye see, wi' the wind blowin' fine over the bow and them close hauled, wi' the bow almost in the very eye of the wind and the spritsails all set (continues O'Brienish gibbering)
I don't care about the flag on Trump's helicopter, but I wish they'd fly the entourage around in something quieter than an MV-22 Osprey. Well, whole gaggles of between two and six of the fucking ugly noisy inelegant thrashing deathtraps shuttling back and forth over my flat. The RAF 100th anniversary flypast was less noisy and that had 103 aircraft including fifty odd fast jets.
AHEAD
NARROWS
ROAD
Honestly, that works in either order.
16: I don't have any vertical-symmetry privilege, so you're fine.
20: I'm rather fond of the Osprey because they make me think of what might happen if you gave an enthusiastic but dim ten-year-old two separate Airfix kits for his birthday and he got over-excited and tried to build them both at once. And they're only deathtraps, I am assured, if they have Marines flying them. The USAF has rather a good record with them.
Lincoln's traffic engineers appear to have decided that the green light in a left turn lane was too ambiguous of a way to say you can turn when the road going the other way is clear, so now you get a flashing yellow arrow for that. You can get this without having a preceding green arrow, which bothers me.
I can't find a reference for this so take it with a grain of salt, but I once read that the Japanese navy would write the names of its ships on their sides, starting from the front. Thus, on one side you'd read the name left-to-right and the other right-to-left. This lead to a ship called "Kaba" appearing to be "Baka" (idiot). Probably apocryphal, since the one Kaba I found uses entirely different kanji from baka.
The flag thing is a little bizarre, given the rule that US flags on walls should always have the canton in the upper left.
Ah, but only as long as the building isn't moving.
ONLY ON A NORTH-FACING WALL!
OMFG how does NASA even handle this.
In atmosphere the shuttle would have been ok but in orbit it WENT TAIL FIRST and strictly speaking there is totally still air at LEO altitude!
AND THE FLAGS ON THE MOON??!!!?!
Have the lunar flag extend west out of the flag pole.
1: Before seeing 12 I did image searches for "Obama Marine One" and "Trump Marine One" and confirmed that under both, it's been painted canton forward depending on the side.
12: Turns out the UK flag isn't quite symmetrical on the vertical axis: if you look closely the St. Patrick saltire (the red X) is offset from the St. Andrew saltire (the white X). So the far left hand side of the upper edge of the flag should have a broad white band, not a red one. if it's reversed, the flag is upside down.
This is really hard to notice! It also led to my workplace once getting a very scary call from the lacky of a very senior Royal Navy officer, which was very, very mad that my workplace was flying the flag incorrectly while the fleet was visiting for NATO exercises.
Click to the second picture in the slideshow for starboard side of the Discovery, which follows the same pattern. However, there's also a flag on the wing, not so oriented, maybe because it's horizontal.
Missed this:
Some nations, of course, have flags that are symmetrical about the vertical axis (like the UK or Canada or Japan, for example)
The Union Flag doesn't have any mirror symmetries, only rotational. It can actually be flown upside down or placed backwards, even though only pedants will notice.
Turns out the UK flag isn't quite symmetrical on the vertical axis: if you look closely the St. Patrick saltire (the red X) is offset from the St. Andrew saltire (the white X).
True. But on things like sleeve badges that difference is too small to notice...
One of the least subtle ever was Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fu-u-u-u-
The Union Flag doesn't have any mirror symmetries, only rotational.
I like the idea of choosing flags based in their symmetries. When I found a country, our flag will be SU(8).
The White House / CEA has declared victory in the war on poverty, or more precisely, declared most people getting assistance to be dirty scroungers meaning everyone deserving must be fine at this point.
(Just for shits and giggles I looked for the context of the pull line the articles and tweets used, "our War on Poverty is largely over". It seems the AEI has designed a measure "consumption poverty" which has gone down to 5% since the 60's, designed for precisely this purpose. Even their technical specs are hazy, but it seems to be whether a household's annual consumption, measured in BLS CE survey, is greater than or less than the FPL. So the SNAP, TANF, UI, and WIC benefits that keep people's heads barely above water get to contribute toward the statistic arguing these benefits have become unnecessary due to the magic of the market!
Heebie, I'm commenting here since it has been over 24 hours since your actual post yesterday, and you earnestly seem like you want an answer to at least part of your question. Besides, who really thinks about the past posts anymore, we have twitter to worry about.
"A Random Walk Down Wall Street" as a readable, basic discussion of what the stock market is and why the speculative/market aspect of the approach human society has taken to commerce, in this instance through trading stocks, bonds, and commodities, is at the same time both fundamental and flawed. Burton Malkiel wrote it in the 70s so no worries, America was great then! He was also at Vanguard when they created the first low cost index funds with John Bogle.
Obviously this is not a universal theory, but it gets the basics right.
|| Turns out Russian intelligence hacked the DNC. Who knew? |>
A lot of lefty media entrepreneurs seem to have fallen into a habit of milking people's desire to feel like everything is going to come crashing down around the Trump administration Any Minute Now. Obviously with clowns like Eric Garland and Seth Abramson, this has been obvious for some time, but I'm thinking of people at the level of Josh Marshall, who does genuinely good analysis, but then puts it under headlines like "Buckle up, folks" or "Here we go" that push my "oh shit is this really it?" buttons.
45: CNN knew, two years ago.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/21/politics/dnc-hack-russians-guccifer-claims/index.html
Also indictments for attempting to hack "computers involved in administering elections" which is old news but a little bit wider.
More speaking indictments of people safely out of the country? OK, I guess. Good on them for potentially spoiling the Helsinki mutual appreciation event.
Also, per his lapel pin, Rosenstein only walks crabwise, right side leading.
Also the entire goddamn intelligence community, I guess.
Wasn't it "14 intelligence agencies say XXXXX, but Trump says it was a fat guy on a bed in his basement" and the NYT said "hmmm, maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle."
Indicting foreign nationals isn't nothing, it means those people basically can't travel outside Russia. IIRC some of these people had crossed borders in the course of the operation, and they'll never be able to do that again. For the oligarch cutouts involved, those restrictions are an added cost to supporting Putin. That said of course they can only be a small part of any solution.
Though Prigozhin isn't in the indictment.
Which says they're all GRU officers.
So apparently there's a bit about a Congressional candidate directly soliciting stolen documents from Guc/cifer 2.0 - would be very interesting to find out who that was (Nunes?)
I don't remember the name, but it's a very familiar sounding story -- wasn't it known at the time? Someone in Florida?
It was info about an opponent, and Nunes was barely under threat in 2016. Rohrabacher, maybe, given the existing predilection we know of?
The description "Congressional candidate" rather suggests it's not an incumbent.
Though if I remember rightly the document says "candidate for Congress"
56: You're thinking of Joe Garcia, in his run against Annette Taddeo.
Just caught what looks like the first anti Ben Jealous attack of the general election. It notable how uncreative it is. It's the totally standard republican "Tax and Spend OMG!!!!" line. I wonder if that's lost some of its punch these days; not with the republican faithful obviously, but with everyone else.
The "state lobbyist" and "congressional candidate" are in two separate sections of the indictment. The lobbyist is almost certainly Nevins, as the 2.5 gigs of files specified in the indictment matches the 2.5 gigs of files the WSJ reported Nevins to have received. Unless that was the standard package that the GRU was handing out to all the "state lobbyist and online source[s] of political news" out there.
17. I have heard it claimed that the reason words-on-the-road are "STOP BUS" in the US is that people notice them because they're odd, while they don't notice words in normal reading order. Not at all sure I believe it.
Yes, I also took it for a weird assumption that people would read the lines in the order they passed over them. On the other hand, judging by silent film titles, a lot of people's reading pace may indeed have been much slower in the past.
Because the US military thinks that all the flags it displays should be shown as though they were flying from an actual flagstaff. So if they're on a vehicle (or a person), the blue rectangle with the stars has to be towards the direction of travel - just as though there was a real flag with a real flagstaff, and it was blowing backwards as the vehicle went along.
I've actually heard this from the inverse perspective: that there's no such thing as a backwards depiction of a flag, because a real flag has two sides and each side may be visible from any location, according to the whims of the wind. That the true crime is prioritizing one side over the other.
Ie liberals are the real nazis.
as though American drivers can only read road signs as they are passing over them.
LANE BUS. DOWN SLOW. COURSE OF.
44: Thanks, Montissimoo! I appreciate the tip.
Ok. I guess I need to comment on this thread since I demanded it. (I was watching super-long boring white guy servy tennis. Interspersed with indictment/criminal buffoon loose in england reports.) But I'm somewhat spent and it seems that I whatever "features" of my Twitter account were supposedly limited for 24 hours weren't anything that I normally do. Maybe reply to one of the specific people? Not interested enough to find out. I assumed it was not being allowed to write any tweets.
71 - Kind of feel bad that twitter and not here is your go-to rage release joint these days. What if I said "Maggie Haberman" in your ear 10 times slowly, would that produce a beautiful rage rant?
No. I'm inured. Over there I can indulge the fantasy that someone not in the "choir" will hear it. Plus the discipline of enforced brevity.
The NYT has always maintained very high standards of journalism.
Sorry, various democrats running for office!
Sorry, immigrant children separated from your parents!
Any extra dollars I have are going to this https://www.gofundme.com/let039s-get-kylie-jenner-to-a-billion
74: Does this improve or reduce the odds of publication for my insightful piece "All My Wife's Exes Have Micropenises"?
(And I Leave Any Conclusions To Be Drawn About The State Of Texas To The Listener)
Maybe the worst thing from today is the talk of ending the war on poverty. Saying there are close to no poor people in the U.S. based on consumption and using that as a basis to restrict or end the programs that make is possible for people without sufficient income to have that level of consumption is nothing but sophistry in the defense of cruelty.
In the old days that would have been a front page post in these parts.
The indictments were stuff already pretty well known, but they are in fact indictments and not just reports in the media now. In a sane world (so yeah, somewhere else) the juxtaposition of these indictments and yesterday's despicable Show Hearing would be jarring even to Republicans.
The White House out with a statement that is every bit as whinging as you would expect:
Today's charges include no allegations of knowing involvement by anyone on the campaign and no allegations that the alleged hacking affected the election result. This is consistent with what we have been saying all along," she said.
She further pointed to three key points Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made in his announcement:
There is no allegation in this indictment that Americans knew that they were corresponding with Russians.
There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result."Way to focus on the actual fucking point you guilty shitfucks.
79: Sandwiched between two posts about cock jokes, though.
81: In other words A Completely Novel Sex Act.
||
So I obviously don't like to cast aspersions on lawyers just for defending the guilty, but does it seem reasonable to brand David Boies a villain based on the methods he resorted to to protect Weinstein? (New Yorker, Farrow, from last year, not new.)
|>
26: I have no idea whether a Japanese ship was ever called "kaba" (it seems unlikely, as that means "hippo"), but yes, ship names in kanji are written from bow to stern, so they appear in the opposite order on each side.
I have no idea whether a Japanese ship was ever called "kaba" (it seems unlikely, as that means "hippo")
If the Royal Navy can have HMS Minotaur, HMS Tremendous, and HMS Elephant, the Japanese Navy can have Hippo.
Here is a general thing that I have been thinking about on and off recently given the clear iniquity of our "elites" (an was reminded of during the recent Whitewater discussion that broke out here.
During the course of Whitewater several times a week the Wall Street Journal had some truly batshit editorial about Whitewater/Vince Foster/Clintons something-or-other. You can see them collected together in a *three* volume set--over 1500 pages of utterly lunatic ravings. (And it looks like a couple of companion volumes.) I know the savvy take is all about the separation between the decent WSJ news operation and its Opinion page (expectially back then, not so much now), but here you have a paper read by just every financial "elite" (and many sub-elites like my co-workers) just about every day that chose to deliver a near-daily dose of crazed invective. Because why? An extremely centrist Dem was in the White House after the sainted Reagan and his former CIA lapdog?
Forget where I was going with this but our rich people suck beyond all measure and have minds polluted with stupid dreck for decades.
And I will say that watching the "elite" lawyers of the world of all political leanings masturbating to the Kavanaugh selection has not increased my regard for the winners in our society.
Can I haz populism now?
87: I don't think there's any reason to believe that the firewall between the opinion and newsroom at the WSJ is any worse today. The recent upheaval there suggests to me the opposite. And no, you cannot haz populism.
They got a name for the winners in society
I want a name when I lose
They call Brett Kavanaugh Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Call me JP Stormcrow
88: Yeah, I had not followed all of that very closely but I guess that the news division pushback prevailed?
Can I haz populism now?
The problem is that the people is ALSO made out of idiots
Hippos are goddamn dangerous animals.
I would support naming a ship "Hippo." After all: aquatic, large, dangerous, sweats blood (not really, but it looks like it). These are reasonable characteristics for a vessel.
I've impressed upon my nephew how dangerous hippos are, so he's well prepared in that regard. We rank animals in a grand hierarchy according to how appropriate they are to kiss, and it's surprising how few kissable animals there are. Basically deer and giraffes.
I have safety issues I would like to raise before you try that in practice.
Just saw TV commercial for the Democrat running for Pat Tiberi's seat in Congress (my congressional district). A white woman says she voted for Kasich, and she voted for Trump and now she's voting for Danny O'Connor because she met him and he seems really nice. The voiceover and writing on the screen say "Vote O'Connor. He'll work with Democrats and Republicans and President Trump to get things done." I think I'm going to be sick.
94: Giraffes may be kissable, but make sure it doesn't give him tongue.
97: In general I think leftists are completely nuts about what candidates can win in firmly red* districts, but I also think that centrist Dems are completely confused about what voters in those places think of as centrist or reasonable or whatever. Some of it is leftover cringing (as I think JMM put it), and some of it is spending too much time begging for money from people who are basically Republicans but not quite monsters, and some of it is the fact that centrist Dems really believe this crap (just like how NPR listeners love compromise more than they love winning).
*that is, not toss-up places where enthusiasm probably matters more than anything, which are probably few and far in between, but places that are full of UMC white homeowners with very few POC, but educated enough not to be 65% Trumpist
90: Yes and no. Murdoch is slightly more complicated than you think. He really is a journalist, as is Robert Thomson.
Murdoch coveted the Journal because he was a genuine admirer. Murdoch's effect on the integrity of the oped page was negligible, because it simply could not have gotten any worse. And his negative impact on the news pages has, I think, been primarily motivated by cost-cutting.
Brief update on my hopeless crush: maybe not quite hopeless, only time will tell. I won't bore you with the Kremlinology I've been applying to the various minor signs and portents. Meanwhile I am suddenly listening to a lot more music (normally I approach LB levels of indifference) and even reading poetry. Oh dear. Also have been pulling one of my usual procrastinator's late nights before going on hols only to spend ages "tidying" a whole bunch of photos in my camera roll which happen to feature guess who. Haven't had these full-blown symptoms in YEARS.
Is there data on 'centrist' leanings by generation/cohort? Not, like the youth will take over stuff, which is pretty clear, but what about people who are currently Dem or Rep just because it really meant something basic to their world view 20 or 30 years ago, when they started voting?
I can think of multiple things about even the middle stances both parties that I don't like or agree with (I have a view on current party platforms, some things I care about more, obvs some dealbreakers going forward, each does not get equal weight, you get to guess! if you want! it's not important what).
How big is social inertia in sticking with a party for no reason other than your own feeling of what it is/was and represents to you?
101 - i think Burt Reynolds is married. Seems pretty hopeless.
103 - I thought it would take longer to guess. Shit.
101: sound of whooshing as joke goes over my head
Damnit I mean 103. Time to go to sleep. A week with the niblings should clear my head anyway. Not that there aren't going to be some fraught moments with some of the parties to this vacation. My mother decided to bring us all together but ... some people have not been good at keeping in touch with their family and now while they're making a big effort some other people are holding a serious grudge which those of us who know about it will have to manoeuvre around.
102 first: I don't think centrism has much to do with anything, you're talking about inertia, as in 102 last. On that IIRC the South didn't swing solidly red until the 1980s.
A former professional Burt Reynolds impersonator now leads a 32,000-employee public agency.
Can you remember those sweet distant days when one could make jokes about such things?
I just shared a depressing family detention crisis story at the other place, and thought to myself "hmm, should I put a content warning on there?" But then I thought, "naw, at this point, if you see a news article where the art is a small, Latin@ kid, you just have to figure it will be triggering."
107: I'd peg the South's definitive swing to the '94 election: a big part of the Gingrich wave was longtime Southern Dems being swept away at last. There was definitely a lot of movement through the '80s, but even in '90 "Southern Dmeocrat" wasn't at all an oxymoron (and they weren't all Dixiecrats either).
Anyway, I think that's a special case, because Democratic identity in the South was so deeply tied to TIDOS. It was the inverse of blacks turning Lincoln's portrait to the wall to vote for Kennedy, but blacks always knew that the Republican party was only vaguely on their side, while Southern Dems wielded huge influence on the party
To the original question, they always say that whoever you vote for in your first presidential election tends to become a foundational fact about your politics, but I have no idea how "sticky" that is for individuals, nor just how true it is (that is, it may be the single biggest factor, but still only explain 25% of your vote).
I'd guess 20-30 year lags in loyalty. That's consistent with some liberation party experience in Africa, frex.
111: I voted for Dole in 96 in both the primary (to stop Buchanan) and the General, because I was raised by Republicans. Didn't even consider it in 2000 or any time after that.
Dole-Kemp: Up to one of us can have an erection without pharmaceutical help.
Jet lag + insomnia really sucks.
Is it really jet lag without insomnia?
Is it really jet lag without insomnia?
Did you really read the same thing twice or is it just jet lag?
Did you really read the same thing twice or is it just jet lag?
117 - I've had that where I was just tired and nauseous for a day or 2 after travelling to Italy from Boston.