A blog written for those whose interests more or less match mine.
The Republican party doesn’t hide what it is. Prem Thakker writes in The New Reublic:
A just society would not allow teachers to hit disabled kids at school. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Well, Oklahoma Republicans disagree.
On Tuesday, the Oklahoma House, in which Republicans have a supermajority, voted against House Bill 1028, which would have outlawed school district personnel from “using corporal punishment on any student identified with a disability in accordance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.”
After lawmakers read Bible verses and talked about the need for physical discipline, the measure failed to proceed by a vote of 45–43 (though a narrow majority, the bill needed 51 votes to pass).
Current Oklahoma law only prohibits “deliberate infliction of physical pain” to discipline students with “the most significant cognitive disabilities.” Even then, schools can obtain permission from parents or guardians to supersede the ban.
“The rod and reproof give wisdom. But a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame,” said Republican Representative Jim Olsen. “So that would seem to endorse the use of corporal punishment. So, how would you reconcile this bill with scripture’s counsel on this matter?” he asked Representative John Talley, a proponent for the bill.
Olsen then asked, “On what basis would we automatically conclude a special needs child should not get corporal punishment?” as if there’s some dangerous risk in allowing children not to be hit by their teachers.
Olsen proceeded to nonblushingly cite a constituent call he apparently received from someone who said their “special needs” child “did not respond to positive motivation but that she responded very well to corporal punishment.”
According to his biography, Olsen himself serves as a Sunday school teacher.
Another Republican representative, Randy Randleman, actually wanted to get into the minutiae of the bill to make sure parents could still freely hit their kids.
“A child could have dyslexia, and then you couldn’t spank him, correct?” he said. “I would never spank an emotional problem, I would never spank a neurological problem,” he continued, in curious syntactical manner. “But if a parent has the choice, and they know that it can stop a misbehavior for behavioral problem, is this bill stopping that?”
Again, the bill’s bare-minimum ambition was just to outlaw school staff (not even all people) from being able to hit disabled children (not even all children).
“‘You can’t . . .
Gil Duran and George Lakoff have an important and interesting article at Frame Lab. It begins:
“Woke” has quickly become the most ubiquitous weapon word in American politics. Republicans use the term as a pejorative term to describe Democratic or progressive policies in general. Increasingly, everything Republicans don’t like gets described as woke, and wokeness has become the scapegoat for any bad news, including the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Some non-Republicans also use the term, mostly to describe a certain type of militant progressive activism.
Despite the rapid adoption of woke as a major frame in American political discourse, it lacks a set definition. This presents some tricky problems. For example, if the word lacks a universal meaning, why are so many people using it? Also: If Republicans see attacking “wokeness” as a key to political victory, why are so many people accepting the frame and playing along?
In this edition of the FrameLab newsletter, we examine how the Republicans have used woke — a term stolen from African American vernacular — to control the political discourse. Woke provides a great example of how the framing wars usually play out in American politics. Republicans frame an issue, choosing specific words or language. Then everyone else falls into the trap by accepting the frame without giving much thought to the underlying strategy.
The strategy nearly always works to further Republican political interests by framing political arguments to suit a conservative version of morality.
An undefined word
Recently, we asked FrameLab readers to define woke. Our unscientific poll elicited hundreds of thoughtful responses with varied definitions. Despite the negative definition of the word when it’s used by conservatives, many readers shared positive definitions of the term.
These definitions were rooted in the basic metaphor of woke, which derives from the state of being awake, aware or conscious. (A new Ipsos poll released last week revealed that 56% of Americans have a positive definition of woke. A majority defined woke as being “informed, educated on and aware of social injustice. Only 39% agreed with the Republican definition of woke as “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.”)
After all, there’s nothing inherently bad about being awake or conscious when it comes to social injustice or political issues. Awareness is a positive trait. The opposite metaphor of being awake — to be asleep or unconscious — is generally used as a negative. For example, to call someone “asleep at the wheel” is to accuse them of not paying attention to their responsibilities. But conservatives have reframed the metaphor of consciousness and awareness as a negative, transforming woke into a smear.
Despite understanding the positive connotation of the metaphor, many readers also understood the negative meaning of the word, which denotes a “holier than thou” form of radical politics.
“Though the term originated in the Black community, woke now lacks a standard definition, and is sometimes used as a catchall label for a group of only loosely related ideas,” wrote Olga Khazan in The Atlantic in 2021. “People often use the term to describe neologisms that are more popular among progressives, such as pregnant people, as well as policy choices advocated for by some on the left, such as defunding the police.”
A poll conducted by The Atlantic and the polling firm Leger found little support for some of the radical ideas apparently associated with the word. For example, only 10% of people polled agreed with the idea of using the term “pregnant people” instead of “women” and only 14% agreed with the idea of referring to Hispanic or Latino people as “Latinx.” Only 18% expressed support for defunding police departments.
Woke, as defined by The Atlantic, entails the adoption of unquestionably radical ideas or language with which most Democrats disagree. Of course, the fact that Democrats mostly disagree with these ideas does not prevent Republicans from labeling them as woke.
Conformity, sensitivity, radicalism
For the most part, woke appears to be little more than a single-syllable replacement for “politically correct,” a word that was used in a similar way in the 1990s. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “politically correct” as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” Oxford Languages defines the term as “conforming to prevailing liberal or radical opinion, in particular by carefully avoiding forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.”
Let’s break down these definitions, because they also tell us something about the true meaning of woke. The first element in both definitions is the idea of . . .
“A distinction without a difference” is the phrase that springs to mind. Liz Dye reports in Above the Law:
On Monday, Donald Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina went on Good Morning America to explain that his client, a man who was notorious for his infidelities even before he got caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Stormy Daniels. In fact, he went so far as to say that Trump had been a “victim of extortion,” paying the porn star $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter that never happened to avoid embarrassing his family.
It was merely a coincidence of timing that Trump tried to bury Daniels’s story of their 2006 encounter — and at least two other stories as well — just months before the 2016 election. And thus, the lawyer insisted, the hush money payment cannot be seen as an excessive, undisclosed contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign.
The problem with that theory, aside from being fundamentally ridiculous, is that there are a whole bunch of witnesses who can testify otherwise, including: former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and editor Dylan Howard, who conspired with Trump and his campaign to “catch and kill” embarrassing stories; Stormy Daniels’s first lawyer, Keith Davidson, who negotiated the hush money agreement; Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the deal, as well as several other illegal tax schemes; and Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who discussed the payment scheme with Cohen at least once. And every one of those people has testified to the grand jury impaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to investigate the payment.
Donald Trump has not testified, although he was invited to do so. But, as the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery points out, Trump was not given the automatic grant of immunity provided to grand jury witnesses, indicating both that he is the target of the investigation, and that this process is speeding toward its inevitable close.
There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that an indictment will be forthcoming here, not least of which is that . . .
I’m sure that my grandmother would have told me as a little boy, “Be careful what you click on” if the technology had been around back then. Dan Goodin writes in Ars Technica:
Widely regarded as one of the Internet’s top threats, the Emotet botnet has returned after a months-long hiatus—and it has some new tricks.
Last week, Emotet appeared for the first time this year after a four-month hiatus. It returned with its trademark activity—a wave of malicious spam messages that appear to come from a known contact, address the recipient by name, and seem to be replying to an existing email thread. When Emotet has returned from previous breaks, it has brought new techniques designed to evade endpoint security products and to trick users into clicking on links or enabling dangerous macros in attached Microsoft Office documents. Last week’s resumption of activity was no different.
A malicious email sent last Tuesday, for instance, attached a Word document that had a massive amount of extraneous data added to the end. As a result, the file was more than 500MB in size, big enough to prevent some security products from being able to scan the contents. This technique, known as binary padding or file pumping, works by adding zeros to the end of the document. In the event someone is tricked into enabling the macro, the malicious Windows DLL file that’s delivered is also pumped, causing it to mushroom from 616kB to 548.1MB, researchers from security firm Trend Micro said on Monday.
Another evasion trick spotted in the attached document: excerpts from the Herman Melville classic novel Moby Dick, which appear in a white font over a white page so the text isn’t readable. Some security products automatically flag Microsoft Office files containing just a macro and an image. The invisible text is designed to evade such software while not arousing the suspicion of the target.
When opened, the Word documents present a graphic that says the content can’t be accessed unless the user clicks the “enable content” button. Last year, Microsoft began disabling . . .
A whole-food plant-based diet looks better and better. Angela Speth, MD, reports in Medscape:
In our Western diet, dairy and beef are ubiquitous: Milk goes with coffee, melted cheese with pizza, and chili with rice. But what if dairy products and beef contained a new kind of pathogen that could infect you as a child and trigger cancer or multiple sclerosis (MS) 40-70 years later?
Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) suspect that such zoonoses are possibly widespread and are therefore recommending that infants not be given dairy products until they are at least age 1 year. However, in two joint statements, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) and the Max Rubner Institute (MRI) have rejected such theories.
In 2008, Harald zur Hausen, MD, DSc, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery that human papillomaviruses cause cervical cancer. His starting point was the observation that sexually abstinent women, such as nuns, rarely develop this cancer. So it was possible to draw the conclusion that pathogens are transmitted during sexual intercourse, explain zur Hausen and his wife Ethel-Michele de Villiers, PhD, both of DKFZ Heidelberg.
Papillomaviruses, as well as human herpes and Epstein-Barr viruses (EBV), polyomaviruses, and retroviruses, cause cancer in a direct way: by inserting their genes into the DNA of human cells. With a latency of a few years to a few decades, the proteins formed through expression stimulate malignant growth by altering the regulating host gene.
Acid Radicals
However, viruses — just like bacteria and parasites — can also indirectly trigger cancer. One mechanism for this triggering is the disruption of immune defenses, as shown by the sometimes drastically increased tumor incidence with AIDS or with immunosuppressants after transplants. Chronic inflammation is a second mechanism that generates acid radicals and thereby causes random mutations in replicating cells. Examples include stomach cancer caused by Helicobacter pylori and liver cancer caused by Schistosoma, liver fluke, and hepatitis B and C viruses.
According to de Villiers and zur Hausen, there are good reasons to believe that other pathogens could cause chronic inflammation and thereby lead to cancer. Epidemiologic data suggest that dairy and meat products from European cows (Bos taurus) are a potential source. This is because colon cancer and breast cancer commonly occur in places where these foods are heavily consumed (ie, in North America, Argentina, Europe, and Australia). In contrast, the rate is low in India, where cows are revered as holy animals. Also noteworthy is that women with a lactose intolerance rarely develop breast cancer.
Viral Progeny
In fact, the researchers found single-stranded DNA rings that originated in viruses, which they named bovine meat and milk factors (BMMF), in the intestines of patients with colon cancer. They reported, “This new class of pathogen deserves, in our opinion at least, to become the focus of cancer development and further chronic diseases.” They also detected elevated levels of acid radicals in these areas (ie, oxidative stress), which is typical for chronic inflammation.
The researchers assume that infants, whose immune system is not yet fully matured, . . .
Stephen Wertheim writes in the Guardian:
Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.
Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened.”
The president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad. The White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement. Reporters do not appear to have asked about it. The country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line. Neither of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy.
Did the Iraq war even happen?
While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used. Worst of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region.
The Iraq war wasn’t the only law- or country-breaking military intervention launched by the US and its allies in recent decades. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya form a tragic pattern. But the Iraq war was the largest, loudest and proudest of America’s violent debacles, the most unwarranted, and the least possible to ignore. Or so it would seem. Biden’s statement is only the latest in a string of attempts by US leaders to forget the war and move on.
Barack Obama, who came into the White House vowing to end the “mindset” that brought America into Iraq, decided that ending the war was good enough. “Now, it’s time to turn the page,” he said upon ordering the withdrawal of US forces from the country in 2011. Three years later, he sent troops back to Iraq to fight the Islamic State, which had risen out of the chaos of the invasion and civil war. It fell to Donald Trump to harness public outrage over not only the war but also the refusal of elites to hold themselves accountable and make policy changes commensurate with the scale of the disaster.
Tempting though it is to look forward, not backward, the two are not mutually exclusive. And it might not be possible to reach a better future without understanding and appreciating why past attempts failed.
Ukrainians are now paying part of the price for western misdeeds. Russia’s invasion was an act of blatant aggression. Moscow violated the UN charter and seeks to annex territory as part of an explicitly imperial project (in this respect unlike America’s war in Iraq). Few people outside Russia have genuine enthusiasm for Putin’s effort. Yet, much of the world sees the conflict as a proxy war between Russia and the west rather than a fight for sovereignty and freedom.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, approximately 58% of . . .
This article by Spencer Ackerman in The Nation bears a pointed subheading: “You don’t have to reflect on a war if that war doesn’t end, let alone pay reparations for your crimes.”
eave it to George W. Bush to misspeak his way to the truth about the Iraq War that he launched 20 years ago. Last May, in a speech addressing Ukraine, he lambasted Vladimir Putin’s “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
Bush, stammering, quickly corrected himself but then conceded the point, murmuring, “And Iraq, too. Anyway…” His audience laughed awkwardly, allowing the former commander in chief, then 75, to deflect the significance of the moment with a senility joke.
It was indicative of how deeply the United States has avoided reckoning with the barbarism of invading, occupying, and privatizing Iraq, a reckoning that might have cast Putin’s war in an uncomfortably familiar light. Instead, Iraq demonstrates an innovation in American imperial amnesia: You don’t have to consider the lessons of a war if that war doesn’t end—let alone pay reparations for those you killed, tortured, and displaced.
There are all manner of differences between Ukraine and Iraq, but little difference in the imperial ambitions of their invaders. Both the US and Russia resorted to violence to bring a resource-rich country within their sphere of influence, and both underestimated the will and capacity of locals to resist. Whether phantom weapons of mass destruction or phantom Nazi regimes, the invading power resorted to paranoid pretexts to justify a war of aggression in unambiguous violation of the United Nations Charter. But where Bush claimed breaching the charter would strengthen the international order, Putin, unburdened by global hegemony and its necessary posture of lawfulness, didn’t bother with such ridiculous assertions.
Two other key differences concern Russia’s inability to take Kyiv and the support Ukraine enjoys from the NATO juggernaut. But both Putin and Bush found their militaries placed within a crucible while hawkish voices back in the metropole, seized with fears of humiliation, demanded escalation. Little wonder Bush found himself unable to remember which war he was discussing.
Bush’s escalation, the 2007–8 troop surge, never produced the promised political reconciliation among Iraqis. Instead, it entrenched Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who persecuted the disempowered Iraqi Sunnis. But because it substantially reduced US troop deaths, the surge produced something subtler: a narrative that the Iraq War, after five agonizing years, had been functionally resolved—although to stay resolved, US troops, paradoxically, needed to remain in Iraq. It was a useful contradiction, forestalling not just an unambiguous defeat but the prospects for reconsidering what Barack Obama once called “the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” Now the only lessons of the war would be operational. And so Obama exported the surge to Afghanistan and pursued a new war in Libya, all while troops remained in Iraq.
In 2011, a fractious Iraqi parliament declined to extend legal protections to the remaining US forces, prompting Obama to recall the troops. Many in US national security circles decried the withdrawal as a failure of Obama’s diplomacy rather than as a verdict on the viability of a US presence from Iraqi leaders willing to work with Washington. When the Islamic State conquered Mosul in 2014, the blame in Washington went to the withdrawal, not the war that created ISIS’s parent entity, Al Qaeda in Iraq. . .
And just look at the article in the next post.
Some progress. Now block scam voice calls. Jon Brodkin reports in Ars Technica:
The Federal Communications Commission today finalized rules requiring mobile carriers to block robotext messages that are likely to be illegal. The FCC described the rules as the agency’s “first regulations specifically targeting the increasing problem of scam text messages sent to consumers.”
Carriers will be required to block text messages that come from “invalid, unallocated, or unused numbers.” Carriers must also block texts from “numbers that the subscriber to the number has self-identified as never sending text messages, and numbers that government agencies and other well-known entities identify as not used for texting,” the FCC said.
Carriers will have to establish a point of contact for text senders so the senders can inquire about blocked texts. The FCC already requires similar blocking of voice calls from these types of numbers.
The FCC still has a 2-2 partisan deadlock more than two years into Joe Biden’s presidency, but the robotext order was approved 4-0. The FCC sought public comment on the rules in September 2022 before finalizing them today. The order will take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register, according to a draft of the order released before the meeting.
More robotext rules on the way
More robotext rules may be on the way because today’s “action also seeks public comment on further proposals to require providers to block texts from entities the FCC has cited as illegal robotexters,” the FCC said. For example, the FCC proposes to clarify that Do Not Call Registry protections apply to text messaging.
The FCC said it’s further proposing to close the . . .
I received a reader request for a shave that features the iKon Shavecraft X3, here shown on the excellent RazoRock stainless-steel Barber Pole handle. I last shaved with this razor on January 30 (this year, I hasten to add). I rotate through my razors, 6 shaves a week. Right now I have 66 razors, so that means I use any one razor once every 11 weeks — right at 5 times a year.
That doesn’t seem enough, particularly for razors I like a lot. I thought about making a “favored razors” collection of razors to use more often. But I do like a lot of them… I thought about picking a razor and using it once in every week for a month — then I could have 12 favored razors. But then those favored razors would each be used roughly 4 times a year instead of 5 times a year.
This is so very much a first-world problem, isn’t it? And only a fraction of the first world at that. But I do have some razors (such as the X3) that I would enjoy using more often. Maybe — just maybe — I have too many razors. Perhaps I should start pulling from the rotation razors that don’t bring all that much to the party — the Gillette Heritage and the King C. Gillette spring to mind, along with the Charcoal. All three of those are simply EJ clones, and I have an actual EJ.
I’ll be thinking about it. And I am definitely getting rid of this inept Stealth counterfeit copy. On to today’s shave.
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The CK-6 lather was extremely good, and I enjoyed using my (pre-Vulfix) Simpson Emperor 3 Super. It’s a big knot, but it’s comfortable, and I really like the handle design. There was a guy making custom handles to order and I wanted a black palm handle in this design, but I reached out to him just as he decided to quit the business. (He did say that it looked like a great handle for black palm.)
I do like Agharta’s fragrance: ““Talc, Ambergris, Amyris, French Vanilla Bean, Japanese Sandalwood, Cedar, and Oak Moss.” And even this label design adds its mite of pleasure to the shave.
Well-prepped (because of course I had also used Grooming Dept Moisturizing Pre-Shave, as I do for every shave), I set to work with the X3. One benefit of not using a razor very often is that you experience a semblance of the initial delight of discovery — “Oh, wow! This really is a good razor!” — and I enjoyed that this morning. Flawless performance and a very comfortable shave — just as our AI overlords have said, a slant works best. The X3 slant is one of the more comfortable slants for me, one where I don’t feel I must exercise some care and thought about the angle (as I do with the iKon stainless steel slants and the Fine aluminum slant). Three passes produced a perfect result.
A splash of Agharta aftershave (augmented with a couple of squirts of Grooming Dept’s Aion Hydrating Gel) and the day is launched — a brilliantly sunny day, and warm enough for a comfortable walk. (I have brought out the Nordic walking poles and resuming the daily walk.)
The caffeine this morning is Murchie’s No. 10 Blend: “a mild, sweet combination of Gunpowder and Jasmine greens and Keemun and Ceylon black teas.” (His tartan in green and black, I swear.)
And a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to ye. For the green today, see photo at right, with a nod to John Murchie (for all that he’s a Scot.)
Later On 