I think people think we don't like them.

It's true, they are often perceptive that way, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

you've got some people who wanna be so far out ahead because it plays well on social media because they feel viscerally good about themselves

This seems unbelievably ungenerous, cynical, and shortsighted to me. People are often far ahead because they and/or their loved are actual real live members of marginalized groups and they're actively trying to make the world better for everyone, not playing a stupid game about winning political points.

It's fine with me if politicians want to carefully craft all their messaging so as to be maximally persuasive to voters. We don't ALL have to do that. Some people are allowed to say and do things based on their actual values, rather than based on how they think it will play in the polls.

It's definitely hard to tell when she's referring to politicians and when she's referring to the general public at times, but in that paragraph, she's definitely referring to politicians.

But also:

not playing a stupid game about winning political points. and rather than based on how they think it will play in the polls.

Winning political points and doing things based on how you think it will play in the polls are both much sillier motives than winning elections, and I think her motive is better characterized as a desire to win elections.

The bit about the backslide on trans rights kinda misses the part where trans rights came under systemic attack by the paper of record.

Yeah. It was a hit job.

Propaganda works.

I'm blanking on the NYT hit piece being referenced...

I'm always surprised not to see the point about the political parties reproducing gender dynamics made more often. Gender is a pretty pervasive category, but I think the idea of the Republican party of today actually goes further. I've been thinking for years about the way "conservative" has become its own mystified identity category -- not just white, not just male, not just Christian, cutting across many dimensions -- and I think that especially under Trump, the pitch is more or less that the Republican identity is purely superiority rather than inferiority. This is the pitch of white supremacy, antifeminism, Christian nationalism, nativism, and lots of other things, but none of those is broad enough to meet the moment. It's Wilhoit's in-group vs. out-group, increasingly distilled to the point where Republicanism actually does consist of a single proposition. So let's run it back one more time and see how we're supposed to defeat this:

The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I'll stop here for the moment. Thoughts?

It wasn't any one piece. It was piece after piece asking "isn't it extreme that trans people want to use that bathroom too?"

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Is these "cannots" intended to be empirical or nornative claims? (Sorry, not going to CT.)

Both.

I had one of my best comments on CT. But that was decades ago.

Spike @10: And more than one piece asking "is it dangerous to be subjecting children to invasive surgeries and hormone therapy on a whim? That they'll most likely outgrow?"

I'm not going to say coordinated attack, but geez, it sure felt like it at the time.

And it wasn't just FTFNYT. I read the Guardian and I -still- haven't forgiven them for their transphobic "reporting".

11: what part of "requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get" do you not understand?!

(I didn't actually wake up today thinking I was going to defeat tyranny by whining about Frank Wilhoit one more time, I swear. I set out to praise him! Kind of! But I see a lot of slippage around law, politics, culture, and individual psychology, so now I'm whining.)

People are often far ahead because they and/or their loved are actual real live members of marginalized groups

It's been interesting to me to look at the evolution of people like Yglesias or Ezra Klein. I think both of them were smarter 15 years ago, but Yglesias has degenerated more, and I think it has to do with his (probably accurate) perception of his audience. Yglesias is speaking to white men with liberalish sympathies.* So when he promotes tolerance of racists, for example, it doesn't really occur to him that he is asking Black people to be tolerant of racists.

We don't ALL have to do that.

Exactly. Even if, in the name of pragmatism, you accept Yglesias' logic on race (which I do not), it's not pragmatic to expect your view to be adopted by the direct targets of racism.

14 etc.: yeah, I think there was a concerted effort to portray an activist-ideologue faction driving "trans rights" beyond the boundaries of science, medicine, child welfare, and human rights, leaving a ton of collateral damage from meddling in God's domain and so on. There's a pretty solid liberal-elite tendency to be skeptical of gender transition -- some of which, honestly, I think is about distaste for certain kinds of rhetoric. It's less about science and more about what you think pernicious bullshit sounds like. (I'm happy to admit I'm prejudiced against particular flavors of bullshit while I give others more of a pass, and maybe this is projection on my part.) Some of it is reasonable disagreement, some of it is bigotry, and some of it is misunderstanding, lack of knowledge, failure of imagination... you know, it's like anything else and the proportions vary.

My contention is that current American conservatism is objectively shameful by the standards of the ideas that they allegedly hold (patriotism, hard work, Christianity, masculinity, etc) and that as such I correctly hold conservatives and those who vote for them in disdain.

16.1 makes the usual mistake of forgetting that Yglesias, unlike many pundits, spends a lot of time with Black dads since his kids go to a majority Black public school. He's actually much more aware of what plays well with 40-something Black men than most liberal pundits.

17: "beyond the boundaries of science, medicine, child welfare, and human rights"

This. So much this. I still read the Guardian, b/c shit, you gotta read some newspaper to find out the news, and they're better than FTFNYT FFS. But I will always remember and never trust them on social issues.

Article after article about the putative harm that might be visited on trans children by allowing them access to therapy and treatment. And then that damn report in the UK, and the Guardian (and FTFNYT) with their "so you see, we were RIGHT!" And now, a few years later, and suicide rates are rising and nobody gives a damn.

19: I'm talking about the content of Yglesias work, not his personal relationships. It's not that I forgot about those relationships. It's that they aren't relevant to the topic I am discussing.

Apparently another Michael bites the dust as Trump's National Security Advisor.

pf @ 21: You make a critique of Yggles' work -- a substantive critique. But for me there's not even a point in doing that. To me, he seems to be a troll, oscillating between two modes:

* spouting utterly unexceptionable statements of motherhood and apple pie that we can nod along with

* spouting thermonuclear hot takes that offend us so much we all react with anger and outrage

It sure looks to me like he's doing the latter for clicks, and the former as a beard to get away with the latter. All of which disqualifies him as someone worth paying attention to.

Shorter: any good opinion from Yggles is already available from someone else who doesn't have his history of being a click-bait-y troll.

oops, 23 was me.

What are these defaced flag pins republicans are wearing?

18: My father-in-law was pretty Conservative by Canadian standards. My mother in-law still is. They supported Harper. But something that Joe Scarbrorough said kind of resonated. JS might not live up to the ideals he expressed, but it was basically "masculinity is about taking care of and protecting the people you love." Now, the way they did it was by making money, but assaulting women or drinking too much was not what they saw as being a good man even in a world with clear gender roles.

Yeah. And by views on guns, which I got largely from an NRA training, are now very much not conservative approved.

23: Back when I was on Twitter, I followed Yglesias, and just recently I followed him on Bluesky, but I seldom read anything else by him. He was once interesting to me as a thinker, but now he's really interesting to me as a phenomenon.

So for instance: One thing that I've seen from limited exposure on Bluesky is that the pushback he gets is dumber than he is. And I think that's a contributing factor to the way he has degenerated. I think social media make people lazy thinkers because the quality of the arguments they are responding to is so low.

But yeah, content-wise, I'm in general agreement with you.

28: There's a thing we don't do enough, and that's mark people off the list of trustworthy commentators.

Yggles is a great example. Another is Tyler Cowen. There are probably others. I mean, there are people who are obviously beneath contempt (like Megan "first-graders should rush the shooter en masse" McArdle). Sure, we write those people off. But when it comes to Yggles or Cowen, we say "but sometimes he has decent opinions" not realizing that those decent opinions are the Shep Smith segments of the daily programming -- they're there as a beard to help the batshit insanity to pass.

I think it's a mistake to look at Trump's admin pushing extreme positions following a close election as a sign of large shifts in public opinion. We might as well ask how we lost the low-flow shower head battle, the gas stove battle, the incandescent light battle, and the germ theory of disease battle.

I don't doubt that there have been real shifts, but there has also been a shift in who is getting to loudly proclaim opinions they already held, and who gets to treat their opinions as if they are laws.

And to carry that idea one step further: My guess is that the engagement Yglesias gets on substack is substantially inferior to what, say, Klein gets at the NYT.

But of course, neither is up to the level of Unfogged.

30: Sometimes people incrrectly conflate a hugely consequential election result in a democracy with a hugely consequential shift in the electorate.

I had one of my best comments on CT. But that was decades ago.

I'm sad that post ha, ergo propter ha never caught on as shorthand for the "it's true because it's funny" fallacy.

How is Yglesias not getting punched in the face every single time he ventures outside?

Because of social norms.

I don't read anything by about Yglesias on X or blusky. I only read his free public columns and, FWIW, they've been better than average for the last several months. I don't agree with everything he's writing but, most of the time, he actually taking the time to explain what he's arguing, why it matters, and who he's arguing against in a way that's helpful. I'm not saying everyone needs to read him just that, lately, he's been a significantly better-than-average political commentator.

Noah Smith, by contrast, has been significantly worse, by the same standard.

22: Where "bites the dust" = nominated for UN Ambassador..

34: see, Barry, you could just shift your framing a little bit by asking "How am I not punching Yglesias in the face every single time he ventures outside?" And maybe you have a good reason! Maybe your reason is that you're living on a different continent, and that's fair! But lots of other people have equally good reasons, and that's how the collective problem remains.

He might have me on reach.

Also sorry I've been the bob mcmanus of this thread -- I was trying to avoid endlessly repeating myself but I ended up not really making any sense.

38 my very good reason is because I'm not even DC, I'm not even on the same continent!

But I'm coming back in June and there's the Acela so Yggles may want to stay in this summer

It would be so nice to live in a place with lots of rail service.

||

This morning I went to a Daught/ers of the Rep/ublic of Texas meeting, because the youngest won an essay contest.

There was an essay contest for 4th graders and 7th graders, because those are the years that you learn Texas History in school. (Along with a semester in college, if you go to a public university.)

Here are the prompts for the two grades:
4th: "Jua/na Nav/arro Als/bury - Survivor of the Al/amo"

7th: "Which site should be considered the birth/place of the Republic of Texas; West Columbia, Wash/ington-on-the-Brazos, or San Jac/into?"

The event was fine! Texas shaped iced cookies and flag-themed napkins/plates. I just think these are entertainingly difficult questions to expect 4th/7th graders to answer.

|>

Whenever I say that California should secede, I get the answer that the U.S. would never let us go. But I remain convinced that there could be a mutually agreed upon nonviolent dissolution into several regions, and that Texas would be one of the strongest proponents of it.

45: Do you mean that United States would split into several different countries? In that circumstance would Texans choose to become a part of the reborn Confederacy or to regain independence? This is a tough question!

One thing I know-- Ohioans would never agree to be in the same country as Michigan again.

I want to make a potato masher shaped like Texas that says "Don't mash with Texas." It will be shoddily built, so that it falls apart if you try to push into cooked potatoes with it. If you try to return it, you'll be denied as you didn't use according to the instructions.

I mean that it would become several countries. My guess would be that Texans would want to be their own but far be it for me to speak for them.

California would have to agree to large annual payments to get that conversation started.

Only if red states want to admit they're welfare recipients. We know we're a donor state but the red states are usually too proud to admit they live off us.

44 7th: San Jacinto, obvsly, because neither of the others features in a Peter Gabriel song.

The 7th grader did in fact make a case dor San Jack, but the whole essay was far beyond my measly florida education.

One set of my cousins moved from Connecticut to Texas when they were in middle-to-high school. The locals seemed to be surprised that they hadn't had a year of Texas history at school in Connecticut.

We just learned that they killed JFK.

In the DC area we just learned that the Cowboys sucked.

54 is funny but unsurprising.

Some billing shenanigans this week have reminded me that the principal natural enemy of trans people is the insurance industry, and that our struggle would garner overwhelming popular support if cast in pro-Luigi terms.

I want a year of Texas history.

Probably nobody is using 1983 now.

This crossed my path just today.

NMM Jill Sobule.

Aww. I can't believe she survived that Katy Perry song for decades.

My wife just mentioned this. I had no idea someone sang it before Perry.

Different song. Jill Sobule's song is very sweet and ingenuous (as far as I know -- I'm not super knowledgeable). Katy Perry's is a hate crime.

That's what my wife just said. The first part.

I should remember the 90s better.

65: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUi11Cz4ZUg

Your description is accurate.

I'm trying to focus on remembering things other than the 90s, but it's not going super well. "Yellowjackets" really didn't help.

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Assuming this is intended normatively, because empirically it isn't defensible without a huge amount of logic-chopping.

Also, the anti-conservatism, unexegeted, doesn't get you a lot. Very thin: equality of action, but nothing else specified. Bound (not) to do what? Protected from what?

70: isn't it riffing on the opposite, "the modern Republican party believes there must be an in-group that the law protects but doesn't bind, and an out-group that it binds but does not protect"?

Heebie's house is old enough that she has the legal right to use the water in its standpipe.

||

we have been focusing on Toyota Industries as the 'final boss' of corporate governance reforms

70: It's the Niemoller fallacy. Niemoller likewise wanted to persuade gullible privileged folks that they will eventually be subjected to the same treatment as members of out-groups.*

73: I kinda suspected I was setting up camp there.

This is long but worth it, Fetterman is totally unfit for office https://archive.ph/laRs9

You were stanning him during the primary. I was for Lamb.

77:Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news -- he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room."

Are we sure this quote is about Fetterman?

It's a growing ethos.

A Senator doesn't get the same aura of protection a President does. Fetterman should be pushed out before he shoots someone.

81 he bought a gun too

79 many such cases

Everyone here already had a gun.

Speaking of Texas history, my daughter has been listening to the Studs Terkel radio archives and sent me this interesting and fairly off-the-wall interview with Texas folklorist John Henry Faulk from 1964. He won a landmark suit after being blacklisted in the 50s and was an early mentor for Molly Ivins.

At one point he does a bit about Texans never having seen a Republican and suggest setting up a preserve in Bastrop County where they can live so they won't go extinct and Texans can see them in person ...

That's way more charming than Abbott threatening to de-fluoridate the entire state and Paxton investigating Crest and Colgate for putting fluoride in their toothpaste.

From the OP:

I've been so goddamned angry about November, that I haven't really been interested in changing or softening our message in order to be more effective.

Same here. I did not find her stuff very compelling in and of itself, but your comment did make me slow down and consider my unmitigated ragefulness. A thought I had is that we are in a situation where someone you are inextricably linked with has made a terrible mistake and now you are all paying the price. But you are still inextricably linked to them and must navigate the next steps for getting out of the crisis with them. Righteous rage is well nigh inevitable such a situation, but not productive in and of itself. Not sure what to do about the thought, but maybe time to get out of the car and see how we can possibly get out of the ditch. (but I'm not letting go of the rage...just channeling it ...)

Just working on rediscovering the wisdom of the analogy ban here, folks.

In particular I've withdrawn from some theoretically non-partisan things (voted education and the like) because I have doubted my ability to not pollute them with my angry partisanship. Also due to sloth, to be honest.

83: The number of evidently brain-injured US politicians is becoming disturbingly high, yes...I have just taken a moment to reflect and I can think of seven from the last couple of years.

87/88: If you listen to the podcast, it might make you feel even better that there are extremely smart young people with an appetite for conducting themselves with more grace than any of us can muster. She really was the most optimistic thing I've heard in months, while not being delusional. Just an appetite and strategy to keep fighting the fight.

Trump
Biden
Feinstein
McConnell
Kennedy?
Fetterman?
?

Seventh is on the tip of my tongue

Which Kennedy?

||
Dancing Home is fucking great. Much of interest, lots of joy.
|>

And many very ripped young men in loincloths, for those so inclined.

It's not gay if you denounce women while doing it. For reasons.

91: I was thinking of that football player the Rs stood in Florida or somewhere whose campaign team was literally telling reporters that they had to understand that he'd taken too many blows to the head and it had sent him a bit funny.

Hershel Walker in Georgia.

Gerald Ford's rap back in the day. LBJ: "Jerry played football too many times without a helmet."

Reminds me of when some Rs still had recognizable senses of humor.

Bob Dole on Seeing Ford, Carter and Nixon together at some event: "Look! Hear no evil, see no evil, and evil."

||
Anyone heard from ydnew lately?
|>

NMM Jill Sobule.

That is sad. I thought this was a nice description of her life & music: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/jill-sobule-kissed-girl-singer-105734256.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

My favorite song is "Karen By Night" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YhiFOdfgNI

Depressing the a complete freeze on all National Science Foundation funding doesn't even make the front page of the newspaper.

87: Yeah, I realized back in 2017 that I was a 'bolster our own side' type rather than a 'reach across the aisle' type. The best I can do is not gloat about the leopards in public. At this point I don't care if they inconvenience me so long as they hurt themselves more. Which seems likely! And common!

Fuck some small difficulty for me! Fuck the undeserving hostages. Maybe this will teach them they do have a stake in a well run government. Maybe it won't! Fuck 'em all.

This is why I don't participate in the public discourse anymore. I have nothing productive to say.

Although I did think that if there is ever a left government again, it should re-purpose ICE to confiscate guns with the zeal that it is currently showing for deporting citizens.

I just read the whole Fetterman piece in 77. Holy shit. Any guesses as to what the medication is where you need to get your blood levels checked regularly?

It's interesting how much the behavior described sounds like someone with an addiction disorder, without a substance abuse issue being at the center of it. But also, just... wow.

"What they say," I pressed on, "is that they've witnessed ups and downs that could be associated with kind of a relapse. And they also worry that the medication that you're on is not just for depression, but more serious drugs that if you're not on them would be a problem. Is there truth to that?"

"I don't have any comment on that," he said. "I'm going to go off record. Go off record. Go off record."

I cannot report what Fetterman said over the course of the next four minutes, but I can say that after he was done talking, I found myself in the hallway outside his office making awkward small talk with one of his press aides. Five minutes later, the door opened and I was ushered back in. The office felt different now. Quiet and tense. Fetterman was still in the same chair but slumped into himself, like a deflated parade float. His shoes were now on, and he avoided looking at me. Finally, I broke the silence. "Anything to say about that?" I asked, hoping to pick up our conversation where we had left off.

"There's not anyone that you're referencing who would be privy to my medical history," he said.

105: idk. The prospect of ICE with even more guns than it currently has does nothing for the cockles of my heart.

Vermont middle school students get around a year of Vermont history, but at least no one is under the illusion that kids in other states are getting the same lessons.

||

At its bottom, children, youth, and elders are busy sieving out gold from the muddy waters carried in pails in the hot dust of an angry sun.

77 is a very strange article because it spends two thirds of its length faithfully transcribing all these ex staffers suggesting Fetterman is very seriously ill and at the end it's like "then I interviewed him for an hour and a half and he has no signs of cognitive impairment whatsoever".

Didn't we have a whole thing quite recently where Biden was supposed to be suffering from severe dementia? Is this just how politics happens now?

"If someone says it's raining and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. It's your job to look out the window and find out which is true. Then write a long article faithfully reprinting all the people who have concerns about rain and failing to actually state any clear conclusion about the weather at all."

108: MA students learn that Plymouth is the oldest settlement in the United States that lasted continuously. Southerners just emphasize that Jamestown was setttled earlier. I didn't realize until I was 30 something that people everywhere did not recognize Plymouth as the oldest.

I should add that we did learn that it was the oldest English-speaking settlement in the US/Americas which still exists.

100: I'm around, just missing the conversation because work is busy. For example, I'm 2 days late to replying to a simple comment.

102: Boston Globe has been doing a good job, covering this stuff almost non-stop. NIH got more coverage, of course, because we get so much of it around here.

110: There is an odd bit where the reporter describes Fetterman going off the record for five minutes. I seriously do not know anything about possible categories of cognitive dysfunction that might follow from a stroke, but what the story overall seems to be describing is fairly normal functioning (barring the auditory processing thing, which seems separate) with frequent episodes of impaired impulse control/rationality. That sort of pattern would explain both all the anecdotes and the mostly normal interview. But I don't know if that's a medically plausible pattern at all, and, as you're strongly implying we all should be, I am completely uncertain about how to tell anyone publishing a story about it is telling the truth.

!ydnew

110.2: I thought the consensus, after he dropped out of the race, was that Biden was indeed suffering from dementia.

I'm sure he was just fine. Considering the alternative.

Not even allegedly demented.

Goddamnit

OT: Why are people walking backwards the on the treadmill facing the back?

116: yes, quite. I mean, there are two possible stories here. Either Fetterman is cognitively impaired to the point where he shouldn't be a senator, or he isn't, and his ex staff are lying about him because they think he's wrong on The Cause. The linked article manages not to draw either conclusion.

118: that was certainly what a lot of people were trying to turn into the consensus, yes. Sleepy Joe Biden etc. And I don't know, maybe this is what dementia patients sound like. https://youtu.be/KpNXKAq-4iA?si=DkqSNpPogxf-5DuZ

I asked someone. It's ACL injury retraining.

Of course. If you walk backwards it isn't anterior any more.

There's a PT clinic attached to the gym.

118: There was a lot of ambiguity in what people were saying. That is "demented" and "capacity for energetic work significantly diminished by age, to the point that it would be a bad idea to try to run for or serve as President" are not the same thing, but there's a lot of overlap in how people talk about them.

I can't really tell, but my overall impression is that he's not demented, but that the people saying he was too old to run were right. My dad, e.g., at 86, isn't demented. But I bet he'd sound awful in a debate or at an evening fundraiser -- his energy and reaction time aren't at all what they were even five years ago.

I still think the media (at the ownership level) deliberately tanked Biden and that they did not do it thinking it would help Harris.

This seems (and possibly is) inconsistent, but I think both that -- that media reporting on his alleged dementia was maliciously exaggerated -- and that his abilities are genuinely diminished enough that he was right to drop out, and probably irresponsible to have chosen to run for re-election at all.

He was comically too old and if he weren't the only person to have ever beaten Trump in an election, it would have been horribly irresponsible for him to have run.

Happy May Day observed!

We had a great parade this year, lots of little collectives of people sharing some affinity and the good old Southside Battle Train was in fine fettle

123: I think the difficulty is that they're not clear about the diagnosis, because the diagnosis itself is apparently not clear. Fetterman had a stroke, but he was also hospitalized with acute psychiatric symptoms and diagnosed with depression, and the whole article hints at some further set of issues that are still harder to pin down. I get that depression takes many forms, but whatever course of treatment they gave him requires him to have frequent blood draws -- not the case for any set of meds I've been on for the illness -- and there are behavioral interventions, like keeping him off Twitter, that reminded me a lot of how you'd deal with someone with an addiction. It sounds like his going off medication was a real concern, and maybe that withdrawal symptoms for the medication are concerning.

Do you suffer from mild to moderate calling for the use of nuclear weapons in Iran? Are you objectively pro-genocide? Ask your doctor about Seroquel. 50% of patients using Seroquel experience relief from calling for genocide and over 3 in 4 no longer want war with Iran or they want a strictly conventional war. Is Seroquel right for you?

Why even try

Sorry. I'm still mad at Fetterman. I could have had one good senator and now I have none.

The medication stuff is weird and hard to make sense of. Most of this just seems consistent with his stroke causing problems with emotional regulation, which is not super unusual, but also not something for which there's an obvious medical solution or something you'd need regular blood tests for.

The best I can do is not gloat about the leopards in public.

The best I can do is not call a bunch of people dumb motherfuckers to their faces, which I achieve by actively avoiding them.

136: Do you think that Lamb would defeated Oz? Genuine question. I remember thinking at the time that Fetterman brought out/won enough of the yobbish white guys to win in the general, and that Lamb would not have done that.

And it may be that Fetterman doesn't make it to a second term, one way or another. Arizona went Flake (R) -> Sinema -> Gallego, and each step was an upgrade. So maybe Pennsylvania's trajectory is Toomey (R) -> Fetterman -> Jenny Unbeatable.

I think Lamb would have won, yes. I think he might have done better than Fetterman.

But I'm just guessing.

Thanks, Moby! I went and looked, and apparently Fetterman's margin in the Dem primary was like 30%, so it wasn't exactly close. But the lesson there may be nothing more than Lt Gov is already a statewide office.

Which primary happened after his stroke. Anyway.

The treatments I've observed where someone is taking regular blood tests have been cancer treatments but it doesn't sound like that's one of Fetterman's conditions.

Given the connection between strokes and blood clots, wouldn't it be likely the treatments and tests are related to that?

Just went to the funeral for the mentor/chair/friend-qua-jackass. Of the six funerals, it wasn't the worst, but it wasn't quite the most authentic either. A little too much pretending he was guided solely by ethics - and many times, he was! but other times he was a major scammer - and not enough relishing of his sense of humor. But high on the number of good photos and turn out. It's been a hard weekend.

144: the anti-coagulant warfarin=coumadin requires regular blood tests for INR. It's given for a fib and stroke re-occurrence prevention.

136: nah, you're cool. I thought it was someone riffing on the idea that his staffers just want to take him down because of Gaza and are making shit up. I don't blame you for being pissed at all.

146 would make a lot of sense. The article seems to think that this was his mental health medication, but perhaps that was a misunderstanding.

I broke into apartment complexes for him.

148: could be a drug interaction thing too, e.g. if he was taking SNRIs (which I think were once suggested to me with the caveat that they can raise your blood pressure, but my memory is frustratingly hazy here -- I know only that I didn't take the offer).

To state the obvious, the putative gendered party divide could be matched to stereotyped parenting styles: nagging and cajoling vs yelling and hitting.

It's obvious, but it still doesn't get as much play as you'd expect. Among other things, the double standard between being a "good mother" (basically impossible, measured by distance from perfection) and being a "good father" (much wider range, perfection not conceivable), maps oddly well onto the "Dems in disarray"/IOIYAR double standard.

Bedtime for me.

lazy bleg: Has anyone tried African catttle breeds in the North American West?

https://www.agproud.com/articles/57803-development-of-heat-tolerant-breeds-in-the-us

Enormous herds of scrawny Baherie cattle on the Great Plains as we hit 2+C

Whoops https://archive.ph/HqMvy

Moo!
Barry, do you find this

It is notable that Qatar (and not a Western or African power) has taken a lead in chaperoning talks between the conflict parties. This couldn't have been without the blessing of the US, given the close relationship Qatar enjoys with the US as conflict resolution partners.

I don't know about blessing, maybe non-objection? Does anyone in the WH give a damn about Rwanda and the DRC? Or even know anything about them in the first place? I'd be surprised given this lot. This is the kind of foreign policy initiative Qatar likes to do and is good at and they may even have a good chance of pulling it off here, especially since the UAE isn't involved as with Sudan. Kagame seems to have good relations with Qatar, he even came over to visit the new national library soon after its soft opening.

BTW, did you see this from last week? https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/01/05/2025/qatari-diar-dar-global-ink-deal-to-develop-trump-golf-club-villas
Clearly intended to be blockade/invasion insurance; Udeid 2.0 in the Trump 2.0 era is a Trump branded luxury golf resort and serves the same purpose.

The treatments I've observed where someone is taking regular blood tests have been cancer treatments

Yeah, for me it was infection. But that only lasted a few months.

159 was me.

The power is out at work, so I'm having trouble posting.

I don't know about blessing, maybe non-objection? Does anyone in the WH give a damn about Rwanda and the DRC?

Monkey's paw curls.

I could imagine regular State officials, maybe all the way up to Rubio, getting out messages to quietly encourage Qatar-brokered talks, but if so that's all going to evaporate on contact with actual WH priorities.

Funny that the article talks about "heavy-handed" and "flagrant" actions by Rwanda as if that's something that would really toast the WH's cheese. Nor does it mention the concept of making Rwanda the next El Salvador, which you'd think would be a big part of tea leaf reading - note that was already an idea out in public when the article in the East African was published.

I think it would be a good idea for Texans to learn some Vermont history. Specifically, that Vermont was an independent republic before becoming a state.

As noted at the time, I had a frustrating conversation at the state Dem convention last summer with some folks from the Far East. They wanted us in the West to stop talking about trans-rights. So, we're not supposed to push back when one of our local reps, who is trans herself, is being expelled from the legislature? Or when the legislature is passing unconstitutional bills interfering with gender affirming care? Oh, no I was assured, we're not being asked to throw people under the bus. Just stop making a big deal of it. People of this ilk just won't get it through their heads that we're not choosing this agenda. We're defending humans.

It's not like Dems talked about abortion for 3 decades because they wanted this to be the central issue. It's because the right just refused to get over Roe, and actively chose to make this a centerpiece. Lots of people on the left side downplayed the risk to abortion rights, so they could get people to focus on issues that also matter. I'm far from convinced that they won any votes for Dems with this.

[As the archives will show, my response to Justice Scalia's suggestion that we 'get over' Bush v. Gore is that I'll think about doing so 3 decades after he gets over Roe v. Wade.]

I think there's a decent case to be made for Lincoln having let the Confederacy go, with some kind of provisions on using the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans. There's just no case at all for the US letting California or more probably the West Coast secede. We're more likely to annex Canada, as 11 states rather than one or two, which would be of great benefit both for the US Senate and a much better national anthem.

163: What's your take on the bill trying to ban mRNA vaccines in Montana? I'm much more worried about the Feds and what they are doing to science, the FDA, and the NIH, and it. However, I think the value of science is something worth fighting for.

At the same time, I'm pretty angry about the idea of Jared Polis as a good model for national Democrats, because he was RFK Jr. curious and has been too accepting of grunchy granola-y raw milk stuff. I feel pretty strongly that no child should die of measles in 2025 no matter what you feel about Covid boosters or flu shots. And letting people choose not to vaccinate their kids, when that risks the lives of other children, isn't morally acceptable in my book. Is this something Dems need to drop to stay competitive? Because I think the destruction of science right now is catastrophic.

165: I won't ever tell Tim you said that. Canadians are pretty touchy about that.

I don't imagine that the US would let CA go. I do imagine that several regions could realize they make sense as individual countries (Pacifica, Texas, the southeast, New England, Hawaii) and mutually agree to dissolve the U.S.. In Marjory Taylor Green's terms, a national divorce.

I think there's a decent case to be made for Lincoln having let the Confederacy go

Coates had the definitive answer to this argument: Uh, no, it's not okay to leave chattel slavery intact. It's the same answer as Lincoln, really:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

But I take your point and I've always wondered about the contemporaneous politics of this. Secession ain't gonna happen today, but if the West (or the South or the Northeast or whatever) got pissed off enough to take up arms today, would the rest of the country really choose to go to war without looking very hard for a negotiated solution? I'm sure Megan would be quite reasonable across the bargaining table.

But then there is the Coates objection. I spent a lot of my life in Tennessee, where there are quite a lot of very nice people deserving of decent treatment, even if they are an electoral minority today. And they can't all migrate to the new country of NonAssholia. What is the responsibility to them?

Back to the Fetterman article, I believe lithium treatment (usually for bipolar disorder) requires regular blood monitoring, at least for a while. Dunno if it's more likely than warfarin monitoring, but as long as we're darkly speculating about the mental health of public figures, it seems like a possibility.

Power is on, although internet still down. Got my final exams printed out and will now try to post from my phone.

There are apparently still people in Pittsburgh without power from the storm last week.

166.1 That bill failed in the House. Lost 34-66. Among Republicans it passed 34-24, but that's still pretty significant opposition. The legislative session has concluded, so no new laws here until 2027. The news from Montana for the next year will be our courts striking down various bills on constitutional grounds.

169 You're right, of course, about slavery. I live in a blue city in a red state. Ordinarily, being abandoned by the feds would be a really bad thing, and as malign as the feds are right now, I'm still not sure abandonment would be better. In fact it would not be: people like to talk about how federal expenditures here are so much higher than federal tax receipts from here, and that's true. It costs a lot of money to run national forests and national parks. And the Indian Health Service etc. And because we have a pretty high per capita number of veterans, the VA costs more per capita than lots of other places. It's great that the California economy is creating so much wealth. I'm not sorry that we've scaled back our big wealth creation (mining) which caused plenty of problems, and look forward to further reductions in coal mining. It would help our federal balance sheet, but there are a lot of things more important than that.

Not would, WON'T. Jesus.

173: Still crazy that 34 Repubs voted for it. 30 years ago, I don't think any major party's politicians were so strongly anti-vax.

34 years ago, politicians had grown up at a time when childhood diseases were far more rampant.

There's no vaccine for the MAGA virus.

Wokeness is the vaccine, that's why they hate it so much.

For the longest time, major media and a bunch of reactionary "skeptic movement" types were trying to make antivax impulses out to be liberal-coded so they could both-sides climate change denialism.

Yes. That was the thing back then.

That was a myth? I thought antivaxxers in Marin county 20 years ago was a thing.

When I had babies, my doula advocated for a delayed vax schedule, out of deference to their itty bitty immune systems. We didn't, but she was definitely lefty/crunchy.

It was real, but didn't have much to do with climate change, unless you were ExxonMobil.

Yeah, I think it was a thing in the past, but it has now swung back with Marin one of the most-vaxed counties in the state. (Although if you adjusted for age it might just be Bay-average.)

Also when it was a thing in the past it may have been more about school vaccination rates - Marin having a lot of outliers with all the Waldorf schools and similar.

Waldorf Schools are strange. Little bits of apple in them.

I suspect that outbreaks had a persuasive effect in Marin.

Also SB 277.

Evaluation of SB 277 - vaccination rates sharply increased because the families who just hadn't gotten around to it were given a strong incentive to, but the rates of personal belief exemptions were largely made up by new medical exemptions. Still worth having done of course.

I'm downloading the 2014-2023 data to see if Marin went up more than the statewide average.

181: As we're seeing now, vaccine skepticism is (or at least *was*) about low trust more than something ideologically partisan; even at the time there were a lot of right-leaning antivaxers, they just weren't country-club conservatives. But if you can't both-sides it, what good is it at all to centrists?

Wow. Just going by kindergarten compliance, where due to data masking the stat is "how many kindergarteners are enrolled in schools with at least 95% of students up-to-date on vaccines?", in the 2013-14 school year, Marin was at 13%, California as a whole at 47%. SB 277 took effect July 2016. By the last pre-pandemic school year, 2018-19, Marin had risen to 76% and the state to 79%. After a dip in 2020, Marin has now risen to an all-time high of 94%, while the state has languished at 75%.

Political polarization in action!

That's amazing. I remember that when Buttercup was around here, she bitched a lot about how transplants from Marin County were ruining Portland. I wonder if there's been a population shift with the cost of living -- Marin is super expensive, and maybe the people who live there now are more likely to be scientifically literate, pro-technology in general, medical professionals...?

Marin was pretty damn expensive in 2013 too.

Interestingly, the polarization effect does not appear to be statewide. Dividing counties into red and blue by the 2024 presidential vote, in 2013-14 blue counties were at 57% kindergarteners at schools under par, red counties at 42%. Now, while the gap has disappeared, it hasn't gone opposite: in 2022-23, blue counties were at 24%, red at 26%. And they've hugged each other the past several years. Differences may be more regional/cultural/ethnic.

Where herd immunity is 92%. Those numbers are catastrophic.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2833361

Who are you going to believe, hundreds of scientists and doctors or the only presidential nephew to ever bring road kill to Central Park?

193: Well, my metric of compliance here is who's up to date on all shots, so if 95 kids are up-to-date on MMR and 90 on varicella, the school will show as 90% in this. But obviously these things will be correlated.

If I look for MMR only, statewide compliance (95% threshold) was 77% in 2020-21, 88% in 2021-22, 90% in 2022-23. If I bump the threshold down from 95% MMR to 92% MMR, that's 83%, 90%, 92%.

Compliance in 2022-23 by vax type was: DTP 85%, HEP-B 94%, MMR 90%, polio 89%, varicella 89%, all of the above 75%.

I won't ever tell Tim you said that. Canadians are pretty touchy about that.

Agreed. I am pretty rapidly losing my tolerance for Americans suggesting war crimes and then saying "lol only joking" and I think that "we should invade and annexe Canada lol only joking" should be about as acceptable a statement as "some people should have to use their non-preferred variety of bathroom".