2020-09-30
Mermaid MMMCCCXX
2020-09-29
2020-09-28
模倣子 The Ankles are Tasty GAWAYBAB
Please Google and Wikipedia and YouTube before ankle-biting (GAWAYBAB).
模倣子 Onwards and Upwards with Feminism
There seems to be a strange kind of disempowerment which the feminist movement has apparently only partially addressed (and in some cases made worse) which drives (American) women to a kind of passive-aggressivity where the woman knows she (a) can strike with irresistible force, and (b) against which counter-attack is impossible.
The only solution I can see is to press on, in the teeth of frustration, with a women's liberation agenda (caution: self-described "Feminists" are often such in name only), help women to gain and use more positive power, stop alienating men and other women through narcissistic emotional violence, recognize that there is such a thing as "female privilege" and to stop abusing it, and foster productive connections rather than cauterizing them through selfishness, manipulation, and vitriol, all too common these days as I think we can agree.
2020-09-27
模倣子 The Cops and Who's in Charge
Breonna Taylor, one officer charged in shooting, NYT
Policing has to be changed and that will only happen if a SIZEABLE mandate elects Democrats at every level of government.
And it will take years because we are ALL addicted to the abuse of power - just think of what we call entertainment.......
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My money's on forming cooperation. Otherwise it might be one of those "if a frog had wings he wouldn't bust his but when he landed," type of things.
Can you be addicted to power if you don't have any power?
Do you know why the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover didn't go into enforcement of "drug crimes"? Hoover said because it was a losing proposition and he didn't want to drag down his agency.
Yes, there is a certain motivation to have more power, especially among the "vice squads." Read Cop to Call Girl by Norma Jean Almodovar. There are vice cops (maybe most) live that life because they get free money from drug busts, and they get blown by underage prostitutes as a condition of cutting them a break. If you have flexible morality or are behind the eight ball and need the power and money to get by, there are strong enticements. It's the same with "bad cops." If you like to kill people, being a bad cop is a way to get your vampire ghoulish licks in. Have you seen Training Day? Really good movie about that sort of thing.
Cops want to do their jobs, at least most do. Bad laws make them do bad things, and in a lose-lose situation. They want to collar the bad guy. That's their only real job, and their only way to be effective. There's a number, something like 92% to 98% (you can look it up) where if a criminal is that likely to be caught or more, crime drops like a rock. It gets above that point, crime skyrockets. If cops are made to fuck around with stuff that isn't their job (and I include vice crimes, but there's contension on that), that number drops, and eventually the sluice gates open.
A politician and negotiator worth her salt needs to couch things in these terms. How to get the cops to give up the stuff they shouldn't be doing and hand that over to other social service offices. Mentally ill -- more mentally ill people than black people (probably) get murdered by the police every year. In LA it was 4,000 a year before the LAPD set up a "mental health division" to serve beat cops dealing with mentally ill "perps" or "suspects." Defunding the police is the "stick" approach, but I know cops who are highly trained in detective work, weapons and tactics, driving, police equipment, and some things just don't fit that. If you've trained to local, identify, track down, and arrest criminals, and to take them down if they resist, and get the evidence the DA needs to send them up the river, dealing with domestic disputes "by the book" or mentally ill people or children is off the menu. Knowing how to talk down a delusional "suspect" does not make me a better detective, a better evidence collector, better at snapping the 'cuffs on a violent arrestee, and forcing somebody who's trained to be a good cop to choose between being all "nurturing" or whatever.and being a hard-nosed cop just distracts and detracts and may ruin performance of either role.
Anyway, whatever. We need to help the cops figure out how to weed out bad cops. That's tough. They're a tight-knit group. "Internal affairs" seems like it should be handled externally somehow. Did you know that an overwhelming number (c.f., John Oliver) of cops who commit bavures, wrongfully kill people, take money, whatever, and get fired (of course they don't get prosecuted, but that's a whole 'nother) go to the next town or State and get hired on as a cop again? Maybe there could be background checks. It follows that most bad-coppery is committed by cops who got fired for the same thing somewhere else. Maybe we need rehab programs to get these cops off the force, retrained, and into some other role. If a bad cop has a "no-fault" way to get out, funded by the city or county, start anew, maybe that could solve that problem.
And instead of dumping every new half-cock program on the police to implement, start letting them shed tasks and duties that don't fit them. They'd appreciate it, I think.
The Repulican Party did use the idea of "vice and virtue" to up the ante on using the police to fight drugs and other "vice crimes." It would be good, in my view, to decriminalize this, and it would probably go a long way towards demilitarizing the police. Drug criminalization is strongly rooted in racism. Chinese smoke opium, blacks and chicanos smoke weed. Chinese also run gambling games, kind of like everybody. Women are highly targeted for prostitution. Do we have to admit that laws against all of these things were put into place in order to target these minorities? They serve to sic the police on these groups, and to control women. It's a tough sell. It goes way back before Reason. Now it's hurting Whitey. Under Nixon, by far and away the most weed arrests were white, middle-class kids. Racist laws and institutions hurt everybody, including the dominant culture, either through degradation of the soul of society, or through the more in-your-face outcome of having your own teenager busted and facing hard time for a law that was past sixty years earlier for the purpose of destroying the freedoms of a targeted race of other people. In the end, there is no "other." Maybe that's what we have to admit.
There are Republicans who don't want to see their party destroyed, and who recognize that this has been being done steadily for the past forty years by a lot of self-serving decisions.
But if you really want to get the Republicans out, Gerrymandering (1)(2) is the thing to fix, and also voter suppression. I've been watching "All In" on Prime or Netflix.
Anyway, voting rights and redistricting. It's all just whistling Dixie without fixing that.
The police have an agenda, and it might not be "seize total power and start killing everybody." Maybe it is, but if we assume otherwise, then the cops will be glad to shed all of the roles foisted upon them in which they have a low chance of success, and these are many. Plus, getting rid of bad cops is currently hard, and that should and probably could be fixed.
I haven't heard a real plan from either the Democrats or the Republicans for any of that stuff. If our votes don't count, then we are kind of stuck in an "addicted to power" and "rooting from the sidelines" and "hoping that our guy gets on top and does a few things that we don't absolutely hate." If our votes did count, then I don't know what it would look like.
Anyway, cool beans,
Jay
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(1) You probably know more about maps than I do. How do State congressional districts and Federal congressional districts and State counties correspond? Are counties irrelevant? I'm thinking about Federal laws that could be drafted to control redistricting, like it has to be whole counties, and rules for splitting them up.
(2) Elections are the purview of the several States, so districting for State and Federal elections is their thing. This is the problem -- if one party (so far, usually the Republicans) draws the districts weird , they control the election outcomes. How much pressure can the Feds exert? Silly folk think we need to dismantle the Electoral College. Even if it were possible, I think it might be a dumb idea. There are two extra "Senator Electors" and it might be interesting to give those to a downtrodden minority, such as the blacks or the Native Americans. That way they would be guaranteed one or two Presidential votes.
2020-09-26
Nanowrimo Postcard Game
Yes, I'm organizing that again. I'm aiming to post the information for it sometime next week, Saturday by the latest.
— S. Y. Affolee (@syaffolee) September 16, 2020
I hope Planned Parenthood will Change Course
I just got another letter from Planned Parenthood, and I feel horrible (again). I was a regular donor for years. Reproductive rights are super-important, and they are about to tear down Roe v. Wade, and that's terrifying. But Planned Parenthood dropped the ball in a really bad way and they need to fix it before I can trust them with my money again.
Okay, the deal is that in 2015, Planned Parenthood spent my donor money to fight a New Hampshire House Bill 251-FN, sponsored by Bedford, New Hampshire Republican Keith Murphy, to exclude circumcision from the NH Medicare plan at an estimated savings of $212,000 annually. This is not the mission of Planned Parenthood -- they should be opposing genital mutilation and denial of sexual freedom by the state rather the exact opposite.
This is a bad thing and Planned Parenthood needs to apologize for it.
It's also hypocritical, since they, as many medical sources do, deny the existence of the human foreskin in a 2012 video made to teach young people that their bodies are "normal." They are saying that boys being mutilated, which can result in death and lifetime dysfunction, is "normal." This flies in the face of Planned Parenthood's sexual health and well-being message.
Planned Parenthood's attitude is dismissive of men's health, and surprise, in this case it's very much bad for women's health as well (as it negatively impacts condom usage rates, see below).
It's also dismissive of men's money. I'm a man, and when they lie to me and misappropriate my money in order to undermine my health with lies and the manipulation of the political process, opposing good legislation that's good for men's sexual health, this makes me not want to make donations, not the reverse.
Any woman with any conscious should feel the same. I'm sick of self-described "feminist" organizations making these kinds of self-serving "the ends justify the means" tactics, or taking the stand that "we're the only ones fighting the bad people, even if we're not perfect." No, right is right, and you apologize and change your ways when you do wrong.
One well-known statistic is that the US STD rate is the highest in the developed world. Also, something like 50% of pregnancies are unplanned (Unplanned Parenthood?), also far higher than in other developed countries.
Here's another one: an uncircumcised man wearing a condom has three times the sensitivity of a circumcised man without one. Think of the implications for unplanned pregnancy and STD transmission. American men and women are told that unprotected sex is the ideal, that "riding bareback" is the gold standard to be aiming for.
So, just like in their little video, Planned Parenthood is telling us that unprotected sex is normal, high levels of STDs are normal, and high levels of unplanned pregnancy are normal. Oh, and coincidence, that's where they make their donor money -- fighting the very things that their lopsided, hypocritical polices are promoting.
2020-09-25
Mermaid MMMCCCXV
Barbie doll braided into this girl's hair, because she had two show-and-tells that morning at school, so dad helped her out.
模倣子 Not Caring is Not the Same as Caring
I posted on this post about equality and, I guess, white...
Posted by Jay Dearien on Saturday, September 19, 2020
2020-09-24
2020-09-23
2020-09-22
COVID-19 Texas Takes a Turn for the Worse
Twenty thousand Texans will be dead by Election Day at the rate we're going. Thirty by New Year.
The Election Day (green) line dropped precipitously coming out of the "Memorial Day Bump", but now it's heading back up. The End-of-Year line is rising even more sharply.
Memorial Day Bump
In both these graphs, you can see this point where the blue line (number of actual real deaths and cases) takes a strong turn up. It's not exponential, per se, but it looks like people are getting sick and dying two to three times faster than before Memorial Day. Note that the deaths trail the cases by a couple of weeks, then they shoot up as well.
The exact same thing appears on the charts for Idaho, same timeframe.
The chart for the US cases does this, but softer, and I don't really see it in the US deaths data (I'll upload these graphs later -- make sure to comment if you're keen to see them). That suggests that not all States underwent the shift in behavior which seems to have made the virus deadlier.
Here are the cases, similarly bad. If things get any worse, we'll have two and a half million Covid-19 cases in Texas by year's end. It looks like we're guaranteed a million cases by Election Day, if not well before then, if something doesn't change drastically, and soon.
2020-09-21
Mermaid MMMCCCXI
again with the plunging line of scales below the belly.
The whole "big hair" thing while underwater is a big mermaid thing. The how the hair dries when the mermaid is above water and becomes all full and luxuriant again is sub rosa, though.
2020-09-20
Mermaid MMMCCCX
I have got to mess around with some Japanese carp 鯉 mermaids.
Hey, I just noticed that both 鯉 and 狸 (Japanese raccoon) have the main "home town" 里 radical! One with fish, and one with beast as the hen 偏, obviously. Makes that easier to remember, no?
Let me know if you're interested in an on-line Japanese class, by the way.
2020-09-19
Mermaid MMMCCCIX
Okay, so we have the Scottish girl from that other Disney animé rendered here as a mermaid. An expansion of the Mulan-as-mermaid leitmotif, I guess. I like it.
2020-09-18
2020-09-17
2020-09-16
Mermaid MMMCCCVI
2020-09-15
2020-09-14
COVID-19 Down in Texas
Okay, unpacking the two projection graphs for Texas. We see a "bump" in July for cases which turns into a bump in August. There seems to be some kind of "Memorial Day Backslide" in behavior of Texans and Americans in general.
One thing we see on the projected deaths is that in June our projections (based on growth rates and numbers at the time) had deaths by Election Day around ten thousand Texans, and now it's coming in closer to twenty thousand. In other words, the situation got fundamentally worse, the November 3 projected numbers went off the chart for a while, and only just started to come back down. So it looks like whatever happened in June translated into twice as many dead Texans as we originally expected by Election Day.
One thing we notice, too, is that around mid-July we see that blue line (actual number of deaths) shifts to a steeper curve (more people sick and/or dead per day). This same change took place in the above infection chart in mid-June, again.
Some bad behavioral changes seem to have happened around Memorial Day, are probably still going on. The bad stuff that happened in August, whatever it was (fallout from Memorial Day?), seems to have calmed down, and instead of out-of-control projections for Election Day, we're back down to twice what we anticipated in May, not quite twice what we have now.