gehringer_2

This is the time old question in politics - what do you care about in a leader and what don't you? If there are people out there that in two years have never once violated the recommendations, good for them - but is that what I really care about in my governor or PM? Whitmer's got nailed both for going to the bar one night and IIRC also something around visiting family out of state (of course note that the bar was open - since regulations in America always make so much sense!). Johnson was apparently more of a serial violator than Whitmer, but if I were a Brit the bigger thing to me would still be Johnson's somewhat estranged relation with telling the truth more generally than his particular weakness for socializing. But the other truth is that everyone is a hypocrite, but some people are hypocritical in bigger or smaller ways! I'll go back to the example of Clinton again. I couldn't have cared less if the Prez was getting some on the side, I did care that he lied under oath, but my take on those relative importances was in the minority so I'm clearly out of step.

TBF, the 'well put' credit goes to Adam Serwer and Cedric Robinson. Bouie was just the curator.

and yet while that focus did finally give them some offensive identity, I question that it can consistently defeat the better teams in college football. You're basically going with the Barry Alvarez model and the limitations of that model have been clear for a long time.

yeah - it seemed natural since jobs are open at the Fish as well. But as Cardinal says, it's almost worst this way. It seems to say that despite what Harbaugh says, his assistants don't see him as stable place to cast anchor.

The Lancet with some research into what may be behind the difference in pandemic outcomes in different countries. Basic conclusion was they found that on the medical side, age, poverty, and BMI mattered, but they also found that beyond that, countries with effective responses were those were those not racked by political and social division. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00172-6/fulltext

the thing it's a self fulfilling kind of thing. If centrists are not interested in being active in 'their' party, that just leaves the field open to the more extreme believers who are more activist to control it. Not that I should talk, I have no interest in getting involved in the local dem party today, so there you go.

party registration on both sides has been falling for years. We have this weird situation in the US where half the people identify as independents even thought there are almost no swing voters! Most people vote pretty consistently one way or the other. Which tells you that most people aren't that thrilled with what either party puts out even if they vote for them.

Just another way of repeating that race is a social construct, but it I thought it was well put.

Maybe having a party while he left the Queen mourning by herself struck an particularly English nerve, because while breaking COVID rules in small groups may been boorish, in general it does seem like small potatoes in the overall scheme of operating a national government.

one follows from the other. You can't harass the armor if you are running for your life from the aircraft. Make them pay a price for flying over you and you can get in, harass the armor and get out. Of course that is where the drones come in. Keep drones overhead and given the cost/availability ratios the stinger might be more dear to the resistance than a drone is to the Russians. Unless the resistance has its own drones......and so it goes...

The other huge variable has to be how many Stinger type weapons the resistance had been able to get their hands on. That has to be one of the critical time lines for Putin. A stinger equipped resistance immediately ups the ante on expected losses. If Poland is shipping them Putin probably can't wait until many get there.

Ha! Forecast for Kyiv next week is all 30-40F. Maybe mother nature gets a work in here along with the pols.

the fact that service people are coming from a progressively narrow segment of the population and that so few as a % of the population serve at all is not a good thing, but you know we could no longer draft our way into a competent military in a technological era even if you wanted to put the Selective Service System back in action. A lot of people talk about the virtues of instituting some kind of American 'universal service' for young people, but the reality is you couldn't shunt them all into the military anymore, you'd have to find other stuff for them to do - which would tick off business if it was anything with economic value so it gets complex in a hurry. At any rate the today's military wouldn't want want them or know what to do with them.

I don't really think that is true either, but it's another topic.

Building a shared sense of persecution is a key element in propagandizing a movement. You (in fact make it "we") should be on guard against it. I happened to spend an hour recently trapped in a space playing country music and no kidding, 90% of the lyrics were "We're the only sane ones, kiss my ass the rest of you". ("kiss my ass" was literally a featured lyric) It was kind unprecedented to my memory. The nearest thing I could come up that had the same kind of sense to it was David Crosby - "Almost cut my Hair" as the hippy anthem back in the day. They felt they were persecuted because they were being sent off to war involuntarily. Not sure what the right is suffering from that matches that other than a paranoia of not being a majority. But if you are going to live in democracy, you have to accept the odds you are not always going to be in control or else you are being a terrible hypocrite.

then you know that a nation is perfectly capable of presenting one aspect of itself to its chosen enemies which can be quite different from the aspect it shows its friends or internally. That is the parallel between the US, or any great nation and China, (not a net moral equivalence) and why your outrage at their treatment of the Uyghurs is justified but should not color your thinking about how they act internally in a different context. Xi has no interest in being malevolent to his own Han Chinese population (as long as they don't make political waves anyway) regardless of how differently he feels about/treats his Muslim minorities.

which you still insist on mis-characterizing. No one is making the Chinese out to be what they are not, only pointing out that as a highly advanced, socially organized, economically powerful, rich, scientific and technologically sophisticated nation they are perfectly capable of doing domestic pubic health regardless of whatever bad things they may also be doing.

One thing with an odd odor to me in all this Romad - doesn't it seems odd to pick mid-winter in Europe to start a major armor blitzkrieg? The SO was just reading a so-called analysis piece that said - "oh yes winter is perfect, they can cross frozen rivers!" I'm sorry but I'd like to see the river frozen hard enough to hold up a 60 ton main battle tank.

in the 1st 6 months CDC estimated that 30% of hospitalizations were obesity related. So yes a very big %, but big enough to be the 300% difference between the US and Canada? OTOH CDC does say obesity 'triples risk' https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/obesity-and-covid-19.html

No one is denying for a minute that the Chinese are being terrible in Xinjiang. It's still completely irrelevant to the question of how they are doing public health in the rest of the county. Just like in the ancient past of August 2021 we were blowing up civilians in Afghanistan at the very same time we were developing vaccines for Covid.

so is there is a statute of limitation on murder, burning villages and poisoning nations with defoliant? I don't find the 50 yr gap to be an justification for seeing the difference. How many civilians have we killed in the last 20 years in the ME? I don't think anyone in the US is even interested in figuring that number out. Beside, isn't 1950 the America the right wants to go back to? Great powers do terrible things - it's the nature of the beast. Some are better or worse on the whole than others, but none have clean hands and OTOH very few reach the territory of the Nazi Germany or Stalin's CCCP. You find most on a broad continuum. China is a mixed bag, they can be terribly coercive but are less likely to outright murder people than say - the Soviets were. That's just the reality in this world. You don't get anywhere demonizing every aspect of a billion people because their empire acts like every other empire that ever existed.

that would be interesting to see some data on - I wouldn't argue that's one factor.

you have don't 'have it straight." No one said anything is "OK", no one said one thing justifies the other, only that both things exist together in one complex reality, just like how the US does some great stuff and some shitty stuff. The Chinese today see Islam as exactly the same kind of existential threat to them that we saw Communism as 70 years ago and they are doing the same kind of horrible stuff in the name of those unfounded fears that we did 70 yrs ago in the name of ours. In fact we have a president not too long ago that wanted to 'ban Muslims'. Our sympathy for Muslim populations as a nation even today in fact tends to track inversely to the possibility of them emigrating here, which makes the Uyghurs a safe object of our political sympathies.

this is pretty funny. Video - about 8 min. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opinion/boris-johnson-party-scandal.html

they didn't say it might not fall on you. Just remember before you jump on the China can't do anything right bus that if you emptied your house of all the things you bought from them you'd be living a very different life. There is plenty to knock the Chinese for, but for better or worse, we are now locked into an economic symbiosis with them. To the degree we have allowed China to make our lifestyle possible, we are complicit in how they have accomplished that.