The author here is making a mistake that happens a lot with this kind of situation: conflating effectiveness with overreaction. He cites to infection rates leveling off in other countries, but fails to consider the fact that they've also implemented significant restrictions. China lowered its own infection rate by basically closing an entire province, and it seems to have worked. Italy is now seeing the start of a leveling-off as well, and that's about 2 weeks after putting the whole country on lockdown. The comparison to South Korea is also inapt, given that they reacted much faster and more prudently than the US did.

On the death rate: there are three problems here. The first is that his number is wrong; the WHO estimates a fatality rate of 3.4% worldwide, not 1%. Next, he conveniently leaves out Italy, which has seen a fatality rate of 5%. At least part of this is attributed to an overwhelmed healthcare system: in China's case, the death rate was 5.8% in Wuhan province, but only 0.7% in the rest of the country. Finally, 1% is still far from insignificant. If we had half the country infected, which is on the lower end of the estimates I've seen for doing nothing, a 1% death rate means 1.8 million people. That is a lot.

As for the economic impact, it's the usual "think of the job creators" nonsense. He's right that the economic impacts will be significant, but why is it only a choice between accepting a few (hundred) thousand more deaths from COVID-19 and trying to return to business as usual? If nothing else, the last few months should be showing us just how unsustainable our current economic system actually is. Shocks like disease are inevitable, and if our system is too brittle to handle them, it deserves to fail. If we'd listened to progressives 10 years ago, we'd already have measures in place that would've handled the economic effects far more effectively.

I finally seem to be on an antidepressant that works, so that's pretty cool. We just upped the dosage a few days ago, and so far it's been that much more effective. I'm able to get a lot more clarity about what's going on in my head; rather than lifting my mood per se, it's instead making things quieter so that I can just relax more. It's easy for me to get lost in thought in a bad way, and this has helped with that a lot.

In other news, I got my newest tattoo finished last week as well. Here is a brief "fly-by" of it on my artist's instagram. The background music is a little loud on my default volume (and instagram doesn't seem to offer a volume control), although most other things in Firefox are too. It's the biggest and most visible one I have, and I'm super happy with how it turned out.

Not much else going on right now. I'm trying not to go crackers now that I feel like I can "do" more, and to let things happen more organically. Time management is a big problem for me: I tend to take on too much too quickly, but then lose interest equally fast. I think there's a fight in my head between the logical side and the emotional side, and I've been working on finding more of a balance between the two.

Shower thought for the day: a passion is something that becomes more interesting the more I understand it, not less.

I went to a CLE (continuing legal education) thing at my alma mater last week. The theme was restorative justice, basically the idea that there may be better responses to crime than just throwing people in jail. It was good to see the work being done, and also that it was being done by people actually in a position to do something (some of the speakers included a local trial judge and a prosecutor). The last speakers were a couple of guys who had only recently gotten out of prison for murder, and who helped co-found a local group trying to stop street violence before it starts. They were really amazing, and I had a good conversation with one of them afterwards. You can tell when people get It, even if you couldn't explain what It is, and these two get It.

The keynote was given by Dr. Johonna Turner, who is with the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University, just up the road. To start with, and I recognize the unfairness of this, she was the first person I've ever heard use words like "intersectionality" without making it sound like all the ills of the world are my fault as a white cisgendered male. She managed to talk about these things and somehow make it feel like everyone in the room (or me, when I was talking to her later) was in it together. I probably spent an hour talking to her after the main event ended, and even ended up giving her a ride back to her hotel afterwards. She was very patient with my fumbling attempts to talk about issues of gender and race.

Meanwhile, I'm in the market for a new psychiatrist, as the one I had is leaving practice (or at least the local one). I was able to get in with one earlier this week, but I was not impressed. Apropos of nothing he started talking about how when he did inpatient work, most of his job was in sussing out fraudulent requests for hospitalization, and spent a good chunk of our appointment bemoaning drug-seeking behavior. He doesn't take depression seriously as a thing, totally blowing off my own issues with that particular condition (which are getting worse of late). He talked about the low success rate of a given antidepressant as if that were meaningful, especially given that it's basically impossible to know if a given drug will work for a given person ahead of time (and objectively measuring the effectiveness is super difficult). It was all very surreal, and I get the impression that he's out on his own because of anger at The System. But it's also clear that he's very stuck in his ways, and is more interested in them than listening to me. (This was further supported by the fact that he kept talking about out-of-pocket costs despite my having insurance, and that we spent half my appointment going through the questions that I'd already filled out on the intake paperwork.) Ironically one of the things that I was excited about was that, according to his intake person when I made the appointment, he typically avoids stimulants in treating ADHD. I'd be glad to change, because the med crash is a bitch. He instead prescribed a stimulant. To be fair, he did say that this one tends to be a more gradual come down, although I'm skeptical of his statement that I wouldn't notice it wearing off. I still have a couple months of meds from my previous doc, so at least I have some time.

Name: johnnyFive

Place: Richmond, VA

Age: Halfway through my three-score-and-ten

Current Preoccupation: Training, growing my own teaching, and trying to find my writing niche.

Hoo, prepare for too much information :)

So you have a couple different big categories, and then sub-types within that. For more on how whiskey is made and the types, see here.

My personal preference is generally Kentucky bourbon, followed by Irish whiskey. I'm not typically a fan of Tennessee whiskey (with some exceptions) or Scotch. I prefer some combination of bite + sweet, and so tend to avoid the more peaty or smoky flavors common in Scotch. I also don't generally like rye, as they're too bitter for my taste.

To my experience, there is a stronger correlation between price and quality with whiskey than with wine. But this isn't 100%; older (and thus more expensive) tends to be smoother, with a potentially more interesting flavor, but you may find you prefer a cheaper kind from one distillery versus something more expensive from another. Pricing is here in Virginia, but we can only get liquor by the bottle from state-run ABC stores (so YMMV). What I'm listing is for a 750mL bottle. That said, this is only true to a certain point, with many of the super-expensive ones not really worth it.

There are also a couple different "standard" ways of drinking it. When I first started getting into whiskey, I'd drink it on the rocks (i.e. with ice), but now I prefer it neat (meaning with nothing added). That's sort of in keeping with my palette generally; I'm not a big condiment person, for example, as I want to taste what I'm eating.

First, I'm not really willing to go lower than mid-range, which I consider around $40 per bottle. If I want to spend less, I'll buy something that isn't whiskey and mix it. But depending on your area, you may be able to find the same stuff for less. I'm also not going into detail about "tasting notes" or whatever, since I don't really have the vocabulary. I've linked to reviews wherever possible, but as with wine (or anything else you drink, really), it's going to require some experimentation to find what you like.

Starting with the Irish, regular ol' Jameson is probably the cheapest thing I'll mention ($30), and is quite good. It's what got me into whiskey, and is a little lighter so is a good introduction. Eagle Rare 10-year, made by Buffalo Trace, is in the same price range and is also quite good, and would make an excellent starter bourbon given the taste-to-price ratio.

Next is Makers 46. It's a variation on Makers Mark (and is made by the same company), whereby they take a fully aged barrel of Makers, add a different kind of wood, and then let it age a few more months. It sweetens it a tad, and adds a hint of vanilla. Regular Makers Mark is also good, and is a tad cheaper. (Here in VA, the 46 is around $40, and regular Makers is about $10 less). Also in this range would be Jameson Black Barrel ($40), which is regular Jameson that is then aged further in barrels that were formerly used for stout beer and sherry.

At a similar price point ($45), Four Roses Single Barrel is excellent. Their Small Batch is also good (and is only $35), but I prefer the Single Barrel. Buffalo Trace is another great option for a similar price range. Elijah Craig's better stuff can be good (I liked their 12-year, but they've since replaced it with their Small Batch, which I haven't had).

Going slightly higher in price point would be Jefferson's Reserve Very Old ($53). It's my new go-to for special occasions, and is for me the best bang for the buck. Next up would be Blanton's, which is starting to get pricey ($60). It is superb, however. Another Irish shows up here: Red Breast 12-year ($62), which is pretty different from the bourbons here (tending towards fruitier and with less bite), but is also very good. They have some other variations (15-year, 21-year, and cask strength) that are more expensive still, but which I haven't ever tried.

Still more expensive is Jefferson Ocean. This is $80 for the regular stuff, $100 for cask strength. The conceit is that they literally put the whiskey barrels on a ship and sail that bitch around the world for a few months (the idea being different kinds of air and the rocking of the ship). Honestly, it's not worth it to me. It's definitely smoother than cheaper things, but it's almost getting too smooth for me, to the point that the flavor stops being interesting. I'd much rather have Blanton's or Red Breast at that point.

Finally, there are a couple local ones that are worth checking out, although they may not yet be available outside Virginia. Reservoir is made here in Richmond, and is quite pricey ($85). It's tasty, and is slightly unusual in being made from 100% corn. Another is Ironclad, made in Newport News (right where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay). They only sells theirs in 375mL bottles right now, which run $38 here. Supposedly being so close to the water makes a difference in the taste, but I've never tried. I have had Reservoir, which is quite good.

You can have things like Johnny Walker Blue (which is Scotch) or Pappy Van Winkle that are a couple hundred bucks a bottle, too. I'm not willing to go that high for a drink, and to be honestly can't imagine that they're truly 4+ times better than something like Blanton's. I expect there's a (large) extent to which it's just about the prestige factor.

Anyway, that is your TMI on whiskey.

Absolutely. He's a war criminal by any sane definition: we invaded Iraq based on intelligence that the government knew was false, after lying to our allies. The Afghanistan invasion was shaky but not wholly so, but in both cases the post-war period was so colossally mismanaged that it makes parts of Trump's presidency look magisterial. They chose loyalty and ideology over experience; for example, a 24-year-old with no experience in finance (and who had applied for a job with the White House) was instead sent to re-open the Iraqi stock exchange. They authorized the use of torture if we thought someone might have something to do with terrorism, they locked up people in Guantanamo Bay without proof of wrongdoing or access to lawyers, and generally torpedoed US credibility abroad. He also withdrew us from the Kyoto Protocol (an earlier treaty on greenhouse gas emissions).

On the home front, his administration brought us the Patriot Act, and the president of the United States saying that you're "either with us or you're with the terrorists." Not long after the Justice Department ruled that the precursor program to the current domestic spying programs was illegal, then-AG John Ashcroft was in the hospital for acute pancreatitis, and possibly dying. The administration sent the White House Counsel (Alberto Gonzalez) and Chief of Staff Andrew Card to Ashcroft's hospital room to try to get him to reverse the DOJ's decision (Ashcroft refused). The acting AG, who witnessed all this, was none other than James Comey. Bush also signed laws requiring stricter standards on driver's licenses, a highly anti-consumer change to the bankruptcy code, and subsidies for energy companies that didn't incentivize green power generation.

They also did things like No Child Left Behind, which was roundly considered a failure. He pushed for and signed a law cutting taxes on the wealthy, turning the first budget surplus since World War 2 into a deficit. His first ever veto was a law that would have allowed federal funding for research on new stem cell lines. His administration also thoroughly botched response to Hurricane Katrina, fired eight US attorneys for political reasons (which would result in the resignation of Karl Rove and then-AG Gonzales), leaked the name of a covert CIA operative for political reasons, and, wait for it, used a private e-mail server. The list goes on.

Overall, he presaged the worst of Trump's policies and rhetoric: he was anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT rights, botched healthcare reform (pushed for Medicare Part D, which was a massive giveaway to drug companies), and mismanaged the financial crisis. He totally wrecked any pretense of moral credibility by the United States, including labeling countries as "evil" (at the same time we were happily torturing random folks from the Middle East at black sites all over the world). In any actually just society, he would've been impeached and sent to jail, but we just got left with someone who set a new low for presidential competence, comportment, and integrity. It's worth noting that Bush finished his presidency with an approval rating of 19%, lower than any president in history.

But since the survey question did not define political correctness for respondents, we cannot be sure what, exactly, the 80 percent of Americans who regard it as a problem have in mind.

This strikes me as a huge flaw in the study, and makes me question the results a great deal. It's an incredibly fluid term, and it's used differently by tumblr than it is by /r/the_donald.

So to me, all we can really read into is the vast majority being sick of the conversation period (and I'd count myself among them, by and large).

Really the only surprising thing to me in all this is how the author, ostensibly educated and engaged, could be so surprised by the results. All it would take is a 10-minute converstion someplace other than Twitter!

I wish news outlets were more responsible in how they reported these things. People do this because they want to go out in a blaze of attention, they want the spectacle. I don't think journalists can say that on the one hand their reporting has an effect on the world (which of course it does), but then say that how they report things doesn't matter.

They can explain what matters, i.e. how many shooters there were and whether they were motivated by a cause or just illness, but they don't have to show every detail, and allow the killer to find the glory that is sought.

Quoting one of the tweets from the article:

[Sanders] is a broken-down bitter and racist old man.

This is why Democrats keep losing. It's especially stupid to call Sanders racist, given his start in politics. Sanders was an organizer of CORE and SNCC in Chicago while in college, and organized a protest of segregated campus housing ("We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments"). Dude saw MLK speak at the March on Washington.

When the bar for the "racist" label becomes so low it becomes meaningless, and this does a huge disservice to people who have actually experienced racism. When it becomes a magic argument-ender, it no longer means anything.

Stories from my own life, and some ranting follow.

First, I spent a couple of years hearing unemployment cases for my state. Basically, my job was to do a hearing if someone (either the company or the ex-employee) appealed the lower decision. I fast became incredibly cynical when it came to charges of racism, because every single time it was a shitty employee who was trying to blame the employer for their own failures. Now you may wonder how I know, and the simple reason is that I would ask. This is paraphrasing from memory, but is indicative:

Claimant: I was harassed.

Me: What did [employer] do that you felt was harassment?

Claimant: They wrote me up after I was late 37 times in 2 months.

Me: ...

I'm sure racial discrimination at work still happens, but shit like that (which happened every couple of weeks) makes it impossible for the legitimate claims to be taken seriously. I pity people who work for the EEOC.

Second. I volunteered at our local legal aid organization while in law school. This was a group funded by a combination of private donations and the Legal Services Corporation, and provided civil representation to low-income people (so not criminal defense). We did a lot of housing stuff (Richmond sadly has plenty of slumlords), some divorce and custody (but only if there was abuse, so those were fun), just kind of whatever. We'd go after anybody: our state's sole power utility (a lawyer for which once accused me of legal malpractice for suggesting that they can be sued, which even as a lowly 1L I knew was ridiculous), Wells Fargo, whatever.

Random aside: knowing tenant's rights served me well as a tenant myself. If any of you still rent, do some research on what your state's laws are if you haven't already.

Anyway, the "high" point of my time there was being told I was a racist while standing in the clerk's office of Richmond Circuit Court because our client had spent over a year (I worked on this case both summers of law school) ignoring everything we told her. We'd arranged a way to solve her mortgage problem by having a private investor take over the note, but she was convinced she could get the money together. She was wrong, got foreclosed on, and then this was our fault (and we were racist).

Now I get it, people (in both examples) often look for someone else to blame. It is what it is. But it doesn't excuse it either, and ultimately does more harm than good.

One, you get more flies with honey than with vinegar. As cathartic as it may be to yell at a racist, there's no evidence (whether anecdotal or more formal) that this actually helps. MLK didn't do it. There was a guy who has converted a bunch of white supremacists by simply sitting down and talking to them, which is a hell of a counterexample. And it's consistent with the conclusion that most racists have very little actual experience with the people they hate. I saw a stat awhile ago looking at Germany, and the folks who were most afraid of immigrants were also the ones with the least contact with them.

And second, as I mentioned earlier, it cheapens claims of racism. It's easy to be dismissive of someone crying race when your overwhelming experiences have been of people using it as excuse. For white folks, we don't generally see racism the way other races will, and it's difficult for anyone to trust a stranger over our own lived experiences. It took me until the shooting in St. Louis and all these protests to think that where there's smoke there's probably fire. Plus, talking to some folks there (mostly cabbies and the janitors in the building I was working in) really helped, and I am grateful to this day for their willingness to share their impressions and their fears with some white stranger who for all they knew could've been wildly unsympathetic. It was an interesting time, actually, and I'm hoping to write more about it one of these days.

Ultimately, we're all in it together, and none of us can solve this problem alone. It sucks that so much of the onus is on the same people who are taking the brunt of it, but pretending reality is other than it is doesn't lead anywhere. We can complain or we can get to work, but I don't think any of us have the energy to do both.

That's great, y'all!

...the startup is quick to point out it is not associated with Thiel Capital.

I lol'd.

This has been going on for a long time. I took an election law class in law school, and wrote my end-of-year paper on the first SCOTUS case to uphold voter ID requirements. It was poorly reasoned and based on wildly overblown evidence (and a misapplication of the legal standard), but even then, it was an uphill battle to try to convince anyone in my class that the laws were anything other than necessary tools to fight all this voter fraud that was apparently rampant.

I mean, he's not wrong.

This article hides the ball a lot. It gives 0 information on methodology, nor does it link to the study. I'm suspicious of looking at social attitudes from different countries -- how did they control for cultural differences? What about the fact that they used kids from 5-12 years old? Things like empathy and just general personality change a lot during that time.

Muslim children judged “interpersonal harm as more mean” than children from Christian families, with non-religious children the least judgmental.

So, religious kids were harsher critics of someone causing harm, and this is used as a conclusion that they're meaner?

This is one of the big problems with studies like this: they're incredibly reductionist, and all they really do is measure the extent to which people appear, if you squint hard enough (i.e. massage the data enough), to conform to the authors' chosen ideas of what something like "meanness" actually means.

Doubly so if you're not in an union and are working in an at will state? I know I can't. Shit's scary as fuck.

This is the crux of it right here. "At-will" employment gets described like it's somehow equal for both the employee and the employer, but the respective bargaining positions are not remotely equal.

What absolute nonsense. It's just an elaborate exercise in straw Manning -- if the intelligence community and military establishment can make it about the person, they don't have to get into the far stickier "shining a light on war crimes vs. keeping them secret" thing.

He takes one aspect of the defense argument, that Manning was ostracized in the military, acts like that was Manning's entire reason for doing what she did, and then says that's bullshit.

What is not accurate is the false and felonious image of the U.S. military on which the defense of her conduct has been, at its root, predicated: that somehow everyone in her formative years in the military was practically part of a tribe of 6’2”, overly-aggressive Alpha males pumping testosterone out their pores who ganged up on the smallest in the group and tore her apart out of hyper-machismo intolerance...

"Felonious" is a word that has no business in this sentence. But again, it's a meaningless argument. He cops out by saying that the idea that "everyone" was this alpha male type is wrong. That's fine, but even if that's true, how does that refute Manning's assertions? Notice too how he fails to mention that higher ups in the military said Manning shouldn't have been sent to Iraq (from the Guardian link Huwieler himself posted).

Moreover, he's failed to address any other possible motivations, such as the ones actually espoused by Manning:

These documents were important because they relate to two connected counter-insurgency conflicts in real-time from the ground. Humanity has never had this complete and detailed a record of what modern warfare actually looks like. Once you realize that the co-ordinates represent a real place where people live that the dates happened in our recent history; that the numbers are actually human lives—with all the love, hope, dreams, hatred, fear, and nightmares that come with them—then it's difficult to ever forget how important these documents are.

Which was confirmed by a psychiatrist who evaluated Manning during the court martial:

Well, Pfc Manning was under the impression that his leaked information was going to really change how the world views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and future wars, actually. This was an attempt to crowdsource an analysis of the war, and it was his opinion that if ... through crowdsourcing, enough analysis was done on these documents, which he felt to be very important, that it would lead to a greater good ... that society as a whole would come to the conclusion that the war wasn't worth it ... that really no wars are worth it.

But again, that would require the government to justify its secrecy and the underlying actions, which is much harder. It's far easier to write a hit piece on the person's character (that she's transgender makes that even easier). That way they can take advantage of the "ick" factor in so many people's minds too. Plus you get plenty of those sweet, sweet page views.