Get your nerd on:
You're welcome.
And, as always - It's OK To Be Smart
Friday, September 21, 2018
Today's Tweet
I remember this.
In today's Yale Daily News: what Brett Kavanaugh was up to back in his school days, when he belonged to a secret society known as "tit and clit". Motto: No means yes. Yes means anal. pic.twitter.com/ft4JXIGaJY— joyce maynard (@joycemaynard) September 20, 2018
And I remember being only mildly appalled by it, thinking that maybe this isn't quite as big a deal as they're trying to make me believe it is - radical feminazis and blah blah blah.
I've been wrong about a lot.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
A Tweet
Mazie Hirono is emerging as a true Lion of the Senate.
Mazie Hirono tells ABC that Chuck Grassley's claim that Republicans have done everything they can to contact Dr. Ford "is such bullshit I can hardly stand it." pic.twitter.com/cPUr0EeI0R— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 20, 2018
I wonder if "conservatives" will dump on her for being so politically incorrect.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Today's Tweet
FYI: Dr Ford has already been doxxed, and she's getting the threats and harassment from the Alt-Right and the trolls that we've come to expect from
hey dudebro,— m i t h (@ManInTheHoody) September 18, 2018
imagine if u were drinking with a girl and then she tied u up, put on a strap-on, and fucked u with it with no lube against ur will. think u would come out the next day and tell everyone what happened? next year? ever?
Little Help Over Here
First, I'd like to remind everybody of this one thing: in 2012 the NC legislature passed a resolution barring state institutions and agencies from using any reports on radical ideas like AGW and Climate Change and Sea Level Rise as they updated their plans for Emergency Response.
Let's just let that one marinate for a bit.
From Lumberton - a quiet little town about 70 miles inland from Wilmington - WaPo's Sarah Kaplan has a story about people caught in the massive ongoing fuckup that is the emerging American Plutocracy:
Paddling through the swamp that was once her front yard Tuesday morning, Megan Curry saw this waterlogged community through the eyes of someone who had lived there all her life.
That trash-strewn waterway was really a paved road. Those submerged shingles were the roof of the shed that held Curry’s childhood Christmas ornaments. And this sodden structure — with its walls buckling, its stairs crumbling, its floorboards detached from the foundation and floating in a foot of water — this was home. It was the house her grandfather built, on land her great-great-grandparents cleared, the house her family had finished repairing just 11 months ago in the wake of Hurricane Matthew.
But out there was the Lumber River, normally so distant it’s not even visible through the trees, now sloshing into her living room for the second time in as many years.
All Curry could think was, “Again.” It had happened again.
When it inundated North Carolina in 2016, meteorologists called Hurricane Matthew a “500-year rain event,” the kind of downpour that was likely to occur once every half-millennium. But then, just two years later, here came Florence, a “1,000-year event” that hit all the same places in all the same ways, if not harder.
“This can’t keep happening to us,” said Charles Gregory Cummings, mayor of Pembroke, 10 miles upriver from Lumberton. “We know what to do, but we need help.”
Last week researchers published that data in Earth’s Future. The numbers indicate the amount of energy Harvey pulled from the ocean, in the form of rising water vapor, equaled the amount of energy it dropped over land in the form of rain—the first time such an equivalence has been documented. Investigators say this revelation supports assertions climate change is likely to make Atlantic hurricanes bigger, more intense and longer-lasting than in the past. The researchers calculate climate change caused Harvey’s rainfall to be 15 to 38 percent greater than it would have been otherwise.
It gets worse until we get together and start demanding better service from Coin-Operated Politicians.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Today's Tweet
Of all the things we should never have to learn about POTUS.
"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom-shaped dick head."— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) September 18, 2018
I realize it's a very popular thing to tag something like this with "How the fuck did we get here?", but I think we know - deep down, we know.
Today's Political Theater
The "willing suspension of disbelief" is supposed to be confined to books and movies and such.
One of our political parties is trying to impose it on the real world.
GOP: Brett Kavanaugh's record speaks for itself.
Dems: Great - let's take a look at that record.
GOP: No
FADE TO BLACK
Monday, September 17, 2018
Critical Mass
At a certain point, it just has to go ka-boom.
Jay Newton-Small, Time:
If it seems like the structures that enable sexism are exploding, that’s because they scientifically are, according to the theory of critical mass. When women reached 20% in the Senate, they went after the Pentagon to reform the military’s sexual-assault protocol. When they reached 25% of Hollywood producers, they took down Harvey Weinstein and his casting-couch culture. And when they reached a third of the White House press corps, Fox’s Roger Ailes, NPR’s Michael Oreskes and other serial harassers in the media began to get called out. Somewhere in that zone, when women comprise 20% to 30% of an institution, things begin to change.
And from way back in June 2018, Ed Kilgore at The Daily Inetlligencer, NY Magazine:
In 2016, according to exit polls, women under the age of 30 voted for Hillary Clinton by a 63/31 margin. Men under 30 gave her a much more modest 46/42 edge. This 17-point gender gap in votes for Clinton was larger than the overall 13-point gender gap in the electorate as a whole.
A Pew survey in March showed a rapidly increasing gender gap in party identification among millennials (defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) as of the end of 2017, when men were Democrats or Democratic-leaners by a 49/41 margin, but women tended in that direction by an astonishing 70/23 margin.
And now in a new Pew generic congressional ballot question posed to a large sample of registered voters, women under the age of 35 tilt Democratic by a 68/24 margin, while men under the age of 35 prefer Republicans by a 50/47 margin. That’s a 21-point gender gap in the Democratic percentage, and a 26-point gender gap in the Republican percentage. Meanwhile, there’s a smaller gender gap among voters aged 35–49, and barely one at all among voters over 50.
Conventional wisdom is that if your candidate is behind by a differential of more than 5 points with Women Voters (vs Men), your guy loses.
This week, we got a poll showing that same 24-point gender gap in the only “national” election of 2018: the national popular vote for the U.S. House. A YouGov survey found that male voters preferred the Republican candidate by 9 percentage points, while female voters preferred the Democratic candidate by 15 points. It was a bit of an outlier, but not egregiously so: A RealClearPolitics-style average1 of generic-ballot polls taken in the past two weeks reveals a gender gap of 16 points, and the two highest-quality polls from that period — Quinnipiac and Marist — each showed a gap even bigger than 24 points. If YouGov, Quinnipiac or Marist is correct, then just like 2016 broke a gender-gap record for presidential races, 2018 will have the widest gender gap in congressional elections since at least 1992.2
Gender Differential = 6 points.
Imagine the Ka-Boom if that 6 point spread turns into 20.
Jay Newton-Small, Time:
If it seems like the structures that enable sexism are exploding, that’s because they scientifically are, according to the theory of critical mass. When women reached 20% in the Senate, they went after the Pentagon to reform the military’s sexual-assault protocol. When they reached 25% of Hollywood producers, they took down Harvey Weinstein and his casting-couch culture. And when they reached a third of the White House press corps, Fox’s Roger Ailes, NPR’s Michael Oreskes and other serial harassers in the media began to get called out. Somewhere in that zone, when women comprise 20% to 30% of an institution, things begin to change.
And from way back in June 2018, Ed Kilgore at The Daily Inetlligencer, NY Magazine:
In 2016, according to exit polls, women under the age of 30 voted for Hillary Clinton by a 63/31 margin. Men under 30 gave her a much more modest 46/42 edge. This 17-point gender gap in votes for Clinton was larger than the overall 13-point gender gap in the electorate as a whole.
A Pew survey in March showed a rapidly increasing gender gap in party identification among millennials (defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) as of the end of 2017, when men were Democrats or Democratic-leaners by a 49/41 margin, but women tended in that direction by an astonishing 70/23 margin.
And now in a new Pew generic congressional ballot question posed to a large sample of registered voters, women under the age of 35 tilt Democratic by a 68/24 margin, while men under the age of 35 prefer Republicans by a 50/47 margin. That’s a 21-point gender gap in the Democratic percentage, and a 26-point gender gap in the Republican percentage. Meanwhile, there’s a smaller gender gap among voters aged 35–49, and barely one at all among voters over 50.
Conventional wisdom is that if your candidate is behind by a differential of more than 5 points with Women Voters (vs Men), your guy loses.
Trump lost women by 13 points, but had an 11-point edge with men. Differential = 2 points = Trump "wins" (even tho' the outcome will always be in doubt because of Russian interference via American Social Media, if not outright precinct rigging, etc).Anyway - per Five-ThirtyEight:
This week, we got a poll showing that same 24-point gender gap in the only “national” election of 2018: the national popular vote for the U.S. House. A YouGov survey found that male voters preferred the Republican candidate by 9 percentage points, while female voters preferred the Democratic candidate by 15 points. It was a bit of an outlier, but not egregiously so: A RealClearPolitics-style average1 of generic-ballot polls taken in the past two weeks reveals a gender gap of 16 points, and the two highest-quality polls from that period — Quinnipiac and Marist — each showed a gap even bigger than 24 points. If YouGov, Quinnipiac or Marist is correct, then just like 2016 broke a gender-gap record for presidential races, 2018 will have the widest gender gap in congressional elections since at least 1992.2
Gender Differential = 6 points.
Imagine the Ka-Boom if that 6 point spread turns into 20.
But -
Don't get happy
Get together
Get busy
Get shit done
Today's Tweet
Follow the thread
I get the appeal of libertarianism, I do. But until there are empty worlds to conquer and an easy way to get there, or until the fundamental nature of humanity changes, libertarianism is utterly non-viable beyond a single selfish individual in the world we live in.— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) September 16, 2018
6/6
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Today's Tweet
"Yeah, but why don't I get credit for all the girls I didn't try to rape?" --Brett Kavanaugh
If we were about to start dating and I told you I had a letter signed by 65 men saying I wasn’t a psychopath, pretty sure you’d think I was definitely a psychopath.— Anonymous White House Official (@dvorakoelling) September 15, 2018
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