Up From Facebook

“The Rest of us,” by Stephen Birmingham, is subtitled “The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews.” Birmingham wrote previously about the Sephardic Jewish immigration around the time of the American Revolution, and about the German Jews who arrived in the mid-1800s. This covers the third wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, the immigration of eastern European Jews starting in the late 19th century. These subsequent immigrants arriving from the Pale of Settlement were regarded by the by-then established German immigrants as an embarrassment to American Jewry: they not only had poor clothes and hygiene, but were religiously conservative and indifferent to the ostensibly genteel manners of the larger Christian community and the established Jewish community who aspired to assimilate. For the first 80 pages, I was beginning to get the impression that the book was about the rise of eastern European Jews in New York City, but with the appearance of motion pictures, some wealthier...

 I see where a bunch of newspapers will no longer pay Scott Adams for his comic strip Dilbert because of his racist rant. Adams says that this shows free speech is under assault. Well, no. Racism is under assault. And an openly racist person is finding that his brand is under assault. Adams wrecked his brand, and he has the freedom to do that here. That's free enterprise. Neither Scott Adams nor anyone else is entitled to a market for their product in America. The 1st Amendment protects your speech from the government. It doesn't protect you from the market. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/25/business/dilbert-comic-strip-racist-tirade/index.html

"The tenacity of the lone wolf myth has several sources. It’s convenient — evocative and powerful enough to draw and keep people’s attention. "By using this term, which individualizes extremism, law enforcement officials may also depoliticize their work. Instead of focusing on movements like white nationalism that have sympathizers in the various levels of government, from sheriffs to senators, they focus on individuals. "The lone wolf extremist myth diverts from what should be the focus of deterrence efforts: understanding how far-right extremists network, organize and, as the Jan. 6 insurrection showed, build coalitions across diverse groups, especially through the use of social media." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-idea-of-the-lone-violent-white-extremist-is-a-myth-and-its-dangerous

For awhile, my favorite radio show was This American Life. And one of my favorite voices on the show was Sarah Vowell. The nasal, girlish tone belied a sophisticated intelligence and wicked sense of humor. I recently read "The wordy shipmates" by Sarah Vowell. It's basically her idiosyncratic take on the Puritans who colonized Massachusetts at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. While they were escaping England because of religious persecution, they quickly established their own brand of religious intolerance. A couple of exceptions to this intolerance were Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson, who were exiled for their troubles and went on to found settlements in Rhode Island. Neither Roger nor Ann were particularly nice people. They were strict fundamentalists in their own brand of Calvinism, but they also believed in separation of church and state--mostly to protect the church from entanglement with government. Most of the second half of the book concerns Roger and Ann, and t...

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s [sic] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.” ~Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) Where are the Republicans who claim to be "uniters, not dividers?" Where are the Republicans who want the pledge of Allegiance to "one nation" recited in every classroom? Where are the Republicans with flag lapel pins, standing with their hands on their hearts and singing the national anthem? Will any Republicans repudiate Greene's call for secession?

Just finished “Lenin’s Tomb” by David Remnick. The book’s subtitle is “The last days of the Soviet empire.” At ca. 550 pages, it might seem a lot of text to devote to a few days or weeks, but that’s not what the book is really about. Remnick shows us how the history of the Soviet Union as codified by the Bosheviks and Stalin became the foundational myth that drove that society. In the face of daily evidence that the USSR was fundamentally a terrorist state built mostly by slave labor, the memories of those who managed to escape state murder and the gulag were of heroic sacrifice for Stalin. They lauded Stalin and his party for moving the Soviet Union from a peasant society to an industrialized nation in the space of 35 years. They revered him for defeating the Nazi army, even though he had decimated the Soviet officer corps just a few years before Operation Barbarossa and he ignored warnings of the invasion. Setting aside the fact that Stalin’s industrialization failed to penetrate mos...

From My Lovely And Talented Wife® My Ukranian friend just sent me a photo of a supermarket that was leveled to the ground during the Russian invasion and massacre in Bucha in March, 2022. She looks out on this from her nearby 14th floor window, and she is heartened by the fact that the area is now being cleared for rebuilding. Such efforts are everywhere, she tells me. People are hard at work to bring the city back to what it was. I just met my lively new friend this past week on Zoom as part of an online program, ENGin, to match young Ukranians with native English speakers in other countries so that they can improve their English. We will be speaking together every week for an hour at a mutually agreed upon time for at least three months. She loves to travel, and this is the actual reason that she joined the program. English being a more universally spoken language than Ukranian, she hopes it will enable her to speak to people in other countries in Europe that she might visit somed...

"The plan that read, “all federal legislation sunsets in 5 years” now includes exceptions for Social Security, Medicare and other essential services. “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years, with specific exceptions of Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans benefits, and other essential services. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again. Note to President Biden, Sen. Schumer, and Sen. McConnell — As you know, this was never intended to apply to Social Security, Medicare, or the US Navy,” the proposal now reads, emphasis his." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/after-annoying-everyone-scott-edits-exceptions-for-social-security-and-medicare-into-his-unpopular-plan

I have a big interest in prophecy. One of my favorite prophets is Nouriel Roubini. He bases his prophecies on arguments from evidence, not arguments from authority, which appeals to my scientific side. In that spirit, here's Roubini's predictions for 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aWYXjFWbRk

Does Tennessee have a George Santos problem? We report, you decide. "If you believe Middle Tennessee's newest [Republican] congressman, he's not only a businessman, he's also an economist, a nationally recognized expert in tax policy and health care, a trained police officer, even an expert in international sex crimes. "But an exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation discovered that Andy Ogles' personal life story is filled with exaggerations, a story that's often too good to be true." https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/businessman-economist-cop-international-sex-crimes-expert-the-stories-of-congressman-andy-ogles

"Two Idaho lawmakers have introduced a bill to charge those who administer mRNA vaccines with a misdemeanor. "Sen. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, and Rep. Judy Boyle, R-Midvale, sponsored HB 154. It was introduced in the House Health & Welfare Committee on Feb. 15 by Nichols. According to the bill text, "A person may not provide or administer a vaccine developed using messenger ribonucleic acid technology for use in an individual or any other mammal in this state."" Feh. https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/capitol-watch/idaho-lawmakers-introduce-legislation-to-criminalize-those-who-administer-covid-vaccines-legislature/277-2436a514-e7da-4b31-9762-f9be10300075?fbclid=IwAR3eUonEwX11sycf75cFDT3dd6i957rvVY8YJWIi09Jdk3PbsBPC4dx9C2M

Apparently, tens of millions of dollars that could have been used to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless were instead used for an ad that showed during the Superbowl. Don't know what text the ad was based on, but they seemed to have ignored Matthew 21:12. The folks who funded this ad also fund hate groups. "Several investigators have recently looked into The Servant Foundation because they funded the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl advertisements for Jesus (for example Americans United and Rebecca Watson, aka Skepchick). Both AU and Skepchick discovered that, in spite of the liberal-sounding nature of the Super Bowl advertising, the Servant Foundation also has donated to numerous fundamentalist Christian Nationalist hate groups. Apparently, the Servant Foundation is a “donor-advised fund” and receives donations for a number of worthy causes as well as cringeworthy hateful groups." Jesus weeps. https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/02/Funder-of-Super-Bowl.ht...

After bleating for years about mail-in ballots, apparently Trump has flipped: "The 2024 presidential candidate remains critical of various forms of early voting, advisers say, but his campaign is nonetheless mounting an effort to pursue such votes after Democrats excelled at doing so in recent elections. His team is studying state laws governing absentee and mail-in voting as well as ballot collection, called “ballot harvesting” by critics, in which third parties gather and turn in votes, people familiar with the effort said. … "Mr. Trump highlighted the move in a fundraising email this week, saying, “The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back.” "The email added, “Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT ...

 I stopped eating dessert a couple decades ago, and I rarely nosh between meals. I don't drink soda. I drink my coffee black and my tea with no sugar. One result is that I notice how sweet commercially prepared foods (salad dressing, pasta sauce) are. Some of that is owing to the widespread use of high fructose corn syrup (which is bad for you for other reasons), but I try to avoid the ones that taste sweet to me. A recent study implicates free sugar in cardiovascular disease--heart attack and stroke--risk. So even if you're not diabetic or overweight, you will be healthier if you avoid free sugar. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/health/added-free-sugars-cardiovascular-disease-risk-wellness/index.html

Here’s RSC Chair Rep. Kevin Hern (R:OK) “There is NO Republican in Washington, DC, in the House of Representatives or the Senate, that wants to CUT the benefits for seniors on Social Security and Medicare. That’s a falsehood. That’s a lie.” Biden claimed in the SOTU that the GOP wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. Hern rebuts this by saying they don’t want to make cuts that affect current beneficiaries. What he doesn’t say is that they want to make cuts that affect future beneficiaries, i.e,, cuts to these programs. Why does the GOP insult our intelligence?

 I've been blocked on FB. My crime? My post was a link to a wikipedia page and a quote from that page. Both referred to a true story about a guy who flew in a lawn chair using helium balloons. There was no violation of any community standard. When I tried to use their link to explain why this was an error, it returned the reply: "We could not process your request. Please try again later." This sort of thing is why I started this blog.

Look, Ron DeSantis doesn't give a damn about the Advanced Placement African American Studies course. This is all about political positioning with his right-wing racist base. They don't care about an AP exam either, they are just are triggered by the words "African American Studies." Good to see the College Board calling out DeSantis: "The College Board hit back at Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) on Saturday for rejecting their pilot Advanced Placement African American Studies course – and using his public rejection for political gain. "In an open letter published over the weekend, the educational nonprofit characterized the DeSantis administration’s vocal rejection of the course as a “PR stunt” used to further the governor’s agenda. The organization also expressed regret over not addressing DeSantis’ attacks sooner. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-college-board-strikes-back-at-desantis-for-african-american-studies-slander

"Politicians recognize that cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would be hazardous to their career health. But if both sides agreed with the proposition, they could diffuse responsibility by holding hands and plunging the austerity blade in together. The middle class would get screwed but not know who to blame. "President Biden’s jujitsu this week at the State of the Union address, effectively taking cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table in future negotiations around the debt limit, reveals how this dynamic has been ended. The deficit hawks have lost nearly all their friends in the Democratic Party, a significant sea change that makes a grand bargain to damage retirement security far less likely." Glad to see the Democratic Party is finally cutting loose the dull-witted austerians. https://prospect.org/economy/2023-02-10-democrats-budget-deficit-hawks/

Remember, when Republicans talk about "fixing" medicare and social security--and they have been talking about it for decades--they mean "fixing" in the same sense that people talk about "fixing" their dog as a form of birth control. "Cutting Medicare and Social Security has been a key policy ambition of the Republican Party for decades. Due to the popularity of both programs, they’ve often cloaked their ambitions in different ways: objecting to the harsh “cut” in favor of the friendlier “reform” or “strengthen,” and ginning up panic that the programs are in crisis anyway. "This antagonism toward Medicare — the government’s national health insurance program for people older than 65 and for some younger people with disabilities — and Social Security — a social insurance program where workers and employers pay a payroll tax that funds benefits for retirees and those with disabilities — stretches back decades. But even the recent history of the early...

I have many Dave Allis stories to tell. The one that meant the most to me personally was when he hailed me over between sessions at the national Cell Biology meeting in San Diego and asked me "Did you get your grant?" I told him I hadn't yet heard. He responded: "Well, you should. I thought it was the best grant on the table." In the event, I did. It was my path to promotion and tenure. Everyone needs a champion at study section, and Dave was my champion at a critical time in my career. In subsequent years, we co-authored a couple of research papers. He hosted me for a seminar visit when he was at UVa and I hosted him for a seminar visit at SLU. He went on to win the Lasker Prize, the American Nobel. We both were invited speakers at meetings in the US and Europe. He was funny, gnomish, elfin. He genuinely enjoyed the iconoclastic observation. When his lab first connected yeast GCN5 and histone acetylation, he tracked me down at the lab where I was on sabbatical ...

My "conservative" friends are fond of citing the New York Times as a lefty-biased paper. I have to chuckle, since I still recall when Judy Miller was stove-piping Bush Administration Iraq war propaganda at the Times. In 2022, the Gray Lady was still pushing the right-wing agenda, this time against trans people: "Perhaps no mainstream publication did more in 2022 than the New York Times to shift the mainstream conversation around transgender equality away from obstacles to access in housing, employment, and health care and toward the idea that the most pressing issue facing the trans community is actually too much medical care. The paper’s venerable pages featured profile after profile that platformed anti-trans extremists, fearmongered about the price of transgender acceptance, and framed rising trans identification as a social contagion. A recent article that centers the concerns of parents calling for the forced outing of transgender students shows why in 2023, the Tim...

Legacy admissions, the practice of giving preference in college admission to the children of alumni, was begun in the 1920s as a reaction to the increasing number of Jews, Catholics and Asians applying to college. Since a child of alumni in the 1920s was almost certainly white, legacy admission assured Anglo-Protestant dominance. It was affirmative action for whites. The use of affirmative action criteria that results in class balance for race and ethnicity has long been a whipping boy of the right, and now the right-wing SCOTUS looks to strike down affirmative action for underrepresented minorities. Of course, you may be certain that the SCOTUS will ignore affirmative action for legacies and for children of wealthy donors.

The right-wing 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a federal law barring people with domestic violence restraining orders from owning firearms, a ruling that gun control advocates said will cost lives. A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based appellate court said in its decision that the overturned law is an unconstitutional impediment to the right to bear arms, based on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. "In the 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, the Supreme Court said that the government must prove that any gun regulation is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” and because the Constitution’s Framers didn’t stop domestic abusers from possessing guns, we can’t either. As Ian Millhiser points out in Vox, it was not until 1871 that a state court determined that “a husband has no right” to beat his wife." The SCOTUS is likely to rule on this case. https://angrybearblog.co...

How come there are never any "antifa" shooting up transformers, invading the US Capitol, conspiring to kidnap and kill a governor or hoarding guns and ammo to kill elected officials? Why is it the American right that follows the Boshevik model? "Federal law enforcement officers say they seized 11 guns, a silencer, more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, body armor plates and several pounds of a binary explosive from a Springfield man with ties to the Boogaloo extremist anti-government group."

The US national debt is not a threat to the US economy. Japan has a far higher debt/GDP ratio and still doesn't have hyperinflation. Most of the debt is owed to ourselves, since Americans hold most of the debt. The real threat to the US economy is default on the debt ceiling. If the US stops paying the bills for debts incurred by previous Congresses, the good faith and credit of the US will be damaged, perhaps irreparably. The reason the US dollar is the world's reserve currency and the reason that US treasuries are the safest investments on the planet is because of trust. Break that trust and you break the faith in US leadership. If that happens it will hurt the US and advantage China, which seeks to make the Renminbi the world's reserve currency. Which American party wants to tank the US economy? Watch and see.

Becka Eissenova and Anna Eissenova gave me Emma Southon’s book “A fatal thing happened on the way to the forum” for Christmas. Apart from my longtime interest in history, there was a particular reason for this choice. Rebecca took five years of Latin in middle school and high school. She got a 5 on the Latin AP exam, which entitled her to college credit, although I’m not sure whether Colorado State awarded that credit on her transcript. Along the way, she learned 33 words for “kill” and supplied me a cheat sheet of these words along with the book. The lexicon turned out to be unnecessary, but it illustrates the scope of the task Southon undertook in writing this book. Homicide, both intentional and inadvertent, was common in ancient Rome. Just how common is unclear, since many killings went undocumented. In ancient Rome, the idea of murder lacked the moral overlay that it has acquired today in most cultures. The most important lesson in the book is just how remote and foreign ancie...

 Tomorrow afternoon, we're off to the theater. Face masks are mandatory. I'm totally fine with that. We've been to three other plays in the last six months, unmasked. We've also been to restaurants, parties, a lecture and a musical performance during that time, unmasked. So far, neither of us has had COVID, to our knowledge, and both of use have been tested, albeit not for circulating antibody to the COVID nucleocapsid protein. But like the SEC-mandated disclaimer for equities, past performance may not be indicative of future results. I personally don't believe that an unfitted cloth mask provides significant protection from COVID, unless the wearer is coughing or sneezing, but masks can serve as signaling to remind folks to social distance, which does provide significant protection. COVID is still endemic. Even if you're vaccinated, you can be infected. Vaccination doesn't keep you from getting sick, it keeps you out of the ED and the morgue. Long COVID aff...

Ever since Reagan, the GOP has cut taxes without commensurate cuts in spending, claiming that the tax cuts pay for themselves. They never do, and the annual deficits and the national debt go up. But debt doesn't matter in a Republican administration. Once a Democratic president is in office, though, Republicans suddenly become deficit scolds. Of course, their solution is never to raise taxes or cut defense spending. The national debt is the "crisis" that requires cuts in social spending, ideally in Social Security and Medicare. The bloody shirt that is always waved when the GOP is out of power is that the national debt has grown so large that the US is headed to hyperinflation. Look, Japan has a far larger national debt/GDP ratio than the US and not only does Japan not have hyperinflation, their economy is growing very slowly relative to other Asian nations. The debt ceiling is a phony crisis. No other industrialized nation has one. The ceiling gets raised without much de...

We moved to Rhode Island in August and are trying our best to assimilate here. Thus, it was fitting to receive “The Prince of Providence” as a Christmas gift from Bill Novakowski and Andrea Andrea Schoening Novakowski . The Prince of Providence was Vincent “Buddy” Cianci. Cianci (like nearly everyone here) grew up in Rhode Island. His father was a physician (a proctologist), so he grew up in privilege. He went to the right schools, although being of Italian descent, he came in for some ridicule in this ethnically Balkanized community. He got a law degree from Marquette University. When Cianci decided to run for mayor of Providence, he styled himself as the anti-corruption candidate taking on the graft and bribery that characterized city hall up to that point. Remarkably, Cianci ran as a Republican in this overwhelmingly Democratic state and won through energy, grit and determination. But rather than extirpating the corruption, Cianci was subsumed by it. The parade of petty criminals t...

 I've posted several times here that the GOP isn't the conservative party, it is the party of the radical right. The Democratic Party is now the conservative party. There is no significant liberal party. Why is that? Follow the money: "The SBF story makes sense only if we understand that he was a key player in the Democratic Party counterrevolution that materialized following the unexpectedly strong showing of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, the emergence of an overtly leftist congressional wing spearheaded by the Squad, the concurrent rise of radical social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and a new wave of union organizing. This new new left has been met with a cohort of donors and establishment strategists who, since 2018, have systematically targeted left-leaning primary candidates for defeat. This counterrevolution usually expresses itself though dark money spending—and only rarely and disingenuously articulates itself as an ideology. For t...