Either way I'm done witcha. — Mongrel

Merciful God.

Toasted bread with sardines is fantastic with beer. — Sir2u

Is that some sort of sick joke? Sardines are fine either straight from the can or in spaghetti sauce on pasta; I can't quite imagine them on toast. Maybe you could season the sardines with some of that yeast spread. What's it called?

It isn't the case that no solutions can be suggested; suggestions have been made. There are two problems with the suggestions: The tolerable suggestions do not result in enough of a reduction in CO2 and other greenhouse gases such as methane or CFCs to help a lot. The intolerable suggests could (probably) result in large enough reductions in green house gases to limit warming, but would also be extremely, and intensely, disruptive to most aspects of life.

Were we to abruptly stop processing petroleum, stop burning coal, switch to a 95% vegetarian diet, sharply reduce manufacturing, begin massive reforestation projects, reduce total world population, and so on we might bring global warming to a halt -- not instantly, but in a century or so. Some side effects of this approach would probably include: Economic collapse; massive social upheavals including revolutions; extreme dislocations of population; increased deaths due to exposure to heat and cold (not in the same places at the same time); a loss of health care infrastructure; and so on, and on.

"Severe disruptions" should not suggest inconvenience; it should suggest hell on wheels.

If we were to take the extreme measures and stretch them out over a century of time, then we would probably not achieve a stabilization or reduction in global warming. The consequences of not controlling global warming include: rising sea levels and flooding; the loss of trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure; more severe and more erratic weather; major environmental changes making food production much more difficult; increased insect disease vectors would result in several tropical diseases becoming much more wide spread (like malaria). Food production (meat or vegetable) would decline as a result of heat, resulting in widespread starvation. There would be massive migration and severe social conflict.

So, either way we're screwed.

Meanwhile, In Durham, NC protestors (from various leftist organizations like IWW, Workers World Party, etc.) pulled down a statue of an ordinary confederate soldier (neither an officer nor a heroic equestrian statue). Fortunately, no one was hurt by being to close to the falling statue.

Hey Bitter Crank. Why don't you go fuck yourself? — Mongrel

Now, now...

He also said in a thread about Trump that most women would enjoy the particular "treatment" he bragged about giving them during the campaign. It was pretty vile. — John Harris

You also: go get the quote and put it up for examination. Why should anyone take your word for it? (And please differentiate between what Trump said and what Agustino said about, or in response to, Trump.

Mongrel, are you experiencing thinning skin? It's a real hazard for anyone participating in a public forum, even this quite civilized, moderated one.

I am a bit surprised that you decided to take your dispute with Agustino public. I'm not worried about Agustino's feelings -- he's quite capable of taking care of himself. But you're likely to not achieve a great victory in this.

Why don't you give us a string of Agustino's alleged sexist comments? If you reported them by PM to the moderators, then you presumably have them in the record of your PMs.

The bulk of his sexist remarks were made a few months ago. He made a few more a few weeks ago. — Mongrel

Well, dig them up and put them on display.

As for sexism, racism, etc., of course there are sexists and racists here. "We the People" are sexist and racist. Maybe, perhaps, possibly "we the people" wish to be, and it could be that we will be less sexist and racist in the future, and if we do, congratulations to we all. But not yet.

Chat Mitchell Trio, Round 3: The 'I was not a Nazi Polka"

For the lonely neo-nazi, here is a Christmas Carol to brighten the hot southern summer.

How does anybody not know that? — Mongrel

Some of the white supremacists (e.g., the Ku Klux Klan) also have a thing about Catholics who, in the United States, are mostly white. White racists tend to come out of Protestant communities. That tendency isn't a factor of Protestant theology, it's more a function of ethnicity and the geography of religion.

Uncle Karl says that the state is a committee to organize the affairs of the bourgeoisie.

I have 6 6packs of cheap beer in the fridge. Not much else though.

I'll try to think of something else and get back to you in a bit. — Sir2u

Fruits and vegetables maybe? Some cheese? Bread?

This post is your most compelling argument against keeping the statue. The quote from Lee's letter is a good display of the justifying reasoning at least some pro slavery people strained to produce.

Lee was right to acknowledge the evil slavery was to white people, wrong to compare the suffering. For white people, the evil was a self-inflicted moral wound; for slaves, the wrong was an externally imposed moral, physical and emotional wound renewed daily.

Per and , the statue's service as a lightning rod will likely speed it's change of address.

Perhaps we should have a 'world park' where the statues of former glories of various regimes could keep each other uncomfortable company: Stalin, Hitler, Lee, Calhoun, Idi Amin, bad popes, tsarist tyrants, Saudi kings, ISIS caliphs, Mexican drug cartel thugs, backward regressive jerks like Trump, record-breaking crooks, et al. It should be located somewhere quite unpleasant: among multiple petrochemical refineries on the gulf coast of Texas, overlooking a sewage lagoon, near the ends of the landing/takeoff runways at Heathrow, permanently ruined forest land in the tropics, mosquito ridden swamps...

I'm going to bed — Buxtebuddha

Me too. It's been real.

Who am I? You know that's an awfully complicated question. I still don't get what you are up to. Never mind. I'm a 70+ year old accumulation of "who am I". There are several of us old folks here. BTW, "Bitter Crank" is becoming more of a liability than an asset. Time to change, me thinks.

Living up to your user name I see. — Thorongil

See, that's why I need to change my user name. What was bitter or crankish about that post?

Excellent article.

do you think education has devolved, evolved, or progressed since you were last in school? — Thorongil

There were lackluster teachers and indifferent students (like me) when I was in school over 50 years ago. I was very lucky to get firmly directed towards a state college shortly before graduating. It made all the difference in the world.

What I see in the children of reasonably happy professionally employed people is that their children seem to be more verbally and socially sophisticated than children used to be. I attribute this to good day care and pre-school programs, and the aspirations of their parents. It's a good thing, but my sample is very small and my observations are brief.

If schools are devolving, and I think some school districts are devolving into collapse, it's a result of collapsing communities. The very very best schools can not repair economic and social problems (at least as presently constituted). Given reasonably healthy communities, adequately funded schools, and reasonable expectations, schools perform at least reasonably well.

So, problems schools are the result of problem economies and problem-loaded communities, and there are plenty of them.

Very good education still requires alert students, well organized teachers, reasonable class sizes, and good instructional material. The Internet is a great external resource. It doesn't replace good teaching.

Maybe you're being a little too hard to get with your OP.

The lady who was most unfortunately killed, ("Heather D. Heyer, a paralegal who was killed on Saturday, was a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised, her supervisor said.") was not injured by the statue, which wouldn't fit into the smallish car that was driven by James Alex Fields Jr. Fields may have intended to drive his car directly into the crowd, but that isn't what happened. He plowed into a parked car (at x speed) and the force of the collision caused a chain reaction, at the end of which was Ms. Heyer, and 19 other people who were injured. That's probably why Fields was charged with second degree and not first degree murder.

The statue was not named in the charge and has refused to comment.

The statue of Robert E. Lee, try as it might, hasn't harmed anyone since it was erected in 1924.

Beside Robert E Lee was a traitor, a turn coat...who should be abhorred as much as Benedict Arnold. — Cavacava

Who, these days, "abhors" Benedict Arnold?

Arnold was born in Connecticut and was a merchant operating ships on the Atlantic Ocean when the war broke out in 1775. He joined the growing army outside Boston and distinguished himself through acts of intelligence and bravery. His actions included the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, defensive and delaying tactics at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain in 1776 (allowing American forces time to prepare New York's defenses), the Battle of Ridgefield, Connecticut (after which he was promoted to major general), operations in relief of the Siege of Fort Stanwix, and key actions during the pivotal Battles of Saratoga in 1777, in which he suffered leg injuries that halted his combat career for several years.

Despite Arnold's successes, he was passed over for promotion by the Continental Congress, while other officers claimed credit for some of his accomplishments.[3] Adversaries in military and political circles brought charges of corruption or other malfeasance, but most often he was acquitted in formal inquiries. Congress investigated his accounts and found that he was indebted to Congress after having spent much of his own money on the war effort. Arnold was frustrated and bitter at this, as well as with the alliance with France and the failure of Congress to accept Britain's 1778 proposal to grant full self-governance in the colonies. He decided to change sides and opened secret negotiations with the British. — Wikipedia, Naturally

Maybe he wasn't as craven as some would have it.

As you no doubt are aware, the Civil War was an ambiguous issue for many Americans, North and South. Traitors? Of course they (the Confederates) were. Just like deserters were during the Vietnam war who went to Canada -- I thought then, still think, they were on the right side.

If you want to argue for reparations, a better focus would be national housing policy between the 1930s (under FDR) and the 1980s when the Federal Government actively and explicitly excluded blacks from housing assistance of any kind. The Federal Home Loan program was powerful enough to bring banking loans and real estate practices into line. The combination effectively resulted in apartheid. Loans could not be made to whites on blocks with 1 or 2 black families (which should never have happened in the first place) or for blacks to buy houses anywhere. Suburban developments were funded with the legal requirement that they start and stay white. (The covenants which underlay this expectation were eventually ruled unconstitutional, but... too late to make a huge difference.)

The Federal housing policy deprived the population in black communities of the opportunity to leverage home ownership into a substantial amount of wealth. Even if blacks were able to buy homes (as they were) various factors prevented most of them from harvesting accumulated value. Segregation prevented privately owned housing from appreciating. The Interstate Highway Program tended to steer freeways through black or poor neighborhoods. "Urban Renewal" and "slum clearance" were often euphemism for "black removal".

Blacks suffered a great deal because of these policies. Reparations can't take blacks back to a time when many suburbs were just forming, can't duplicate the long-term rise in home values between 1945 and the present, can't make up for the 2 or 3 generations whose educations were quite inferior, who had little access to employment, and were left out of the post war economic boom (which is now decidedly over). But...

A compensatory program for the people and their descendants harmed in the last 25 to 50 years of federal housing policy is possible. It won't seem like manna from heaven, because individuals will have to strive hard to take advantage of housing, education, and labor training programs with clear-cut goals, even if they are free of cost and offer great future benefits.

No, it is just, That's why we have laws like Affirmative Action, to attempt to offset past injustices. — Cavacava

In 1961 John F. Kennedy issued the first "affirmative action executive order" and Johnson followed up later with enforcement. Past injustices were, no doubt, on the minds of policy developers, but Affirmative Action was intended to achieve present and future fairness for those who were then experiencing discrimination in the present time.

For the most part, affirmative action achieved modest success, at best. Local government employment seems to have been the area showing the most success, likely because increasing visible employment among minorities would usually be good politics for local politicians. But affirmative action is also known to be a divisive factor among workers and organized labor. That a significant portion of minority hires under affirmative action direction resulted in less competent hires is a common assumption.

Applying affirmative action to college admissions has been much more contentious. Institutions can not simultaneously follow an admissions policy based on merit and at the same time on compensatory quotas.

The justification for reparations is gradually erased by time. Time doesn't make injustice into justice, but the connection between the last generation abused by slavery (and the last generation of slavery beneficiaries) -- is now 150 years past -- and continuity is too diluted, too distanced, too remote, too disrupted.

The now deceased Ottoman Empire's Holocaust of Armenians is a century in the past. The time when reparations can effectively be made hasn't passed, but it is slipping away. The Jewish Holocaust remains close enough in time for reparations to continue.

Reparations for Native American genocide is even more problematic, since it was an on-going process over several centuries. Maybe 1890 can be fixed as the end of outright war against Indians--the battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota. How many of the Indian peoples have any extant trace remaining? (Some clearly do.)

Determining the costs of slavery, genocide, or cultural extirpation, and thus the bill of reparations is practically impossible. It is larger than any sum that later, uncoerced generations will be willing to pay. None of problems of reparation undermine the injustices and great wrongs that were done. But the bad things that happened in the past can not be undone.

No, I don't agree. I think that a debt is owed, It needs to be repaid — Cavacava

By whom? — Thorongil

And to whom?

To the descendants of "white trash" indentured servants who were cleaned off the streets of England and shipped over here?

To the descendants of the Irish who were scorned and abused?
To the descendants of the Italians?
To the descendants of the Jews?
To the descendants of the Japanese?
To the descendants of the Eastern and SE Europeans?
To the descendants of the Mexicans (lost much of their country)?
To the descendants of the Native Americans--as few of them as there are?
To the descendants of the blacks?
To the women who were discriminated against and who worked for nothing at home?

There are a lot of bigoted people in US. Just drop by your local service club on a Friday night and listen. — Cavacava

And you think the debate over reparations (to whom, from whom, how, and for what purpose) will end all of the bigotry? Ha!

At least when I was in high school (back in the carboniferous period) there was little to no instruction on ordinary economic life. Geography is the best field to cover economic life. Where do goods come from? How are they distributed? What does location, location, location mean? How are seaports, canals, rivers, railroads, highways, airports... work together? How is it that a fragile tropical fruit (the banana) is everybody's favorite, and cheap? Why aren't the apples in the store grown locally? (A lot of it is G E O G R A P H Y.)

Education standards in middle and high school should require competence in "general education". The subjects of "general education" include (minimum)

American history (2 years)
World history -- particularly western civilization (1 year, minimum)
World literature and composition (2 years)
American literature and composition (2 years)
British literature and composition (1 year)
General Science (2 years, minimum)
biology (2 years, minimum)
geography (2 years, minimum)
a foreign language (2 years, minimum)
personal finance (1 year)
Less general education includes:
Additional classes in math and science (algebra, geometry, etc.; chemistry, physics, etc.)
vocational classes (focused on practical tasks)

Obviously, subjects taught in 7th grade will be have a less complex presentation than the same subjects taught in the 11th or 12th grade. Geography needs to be included in elementary school to present the general kinds of information--a good grasp of the size and organization of the United States (or Europe for British and European students).

Maybe this seems old fashioned.

A mix of apathy on the part of students and poor teaching. — Thorongil

Well, Thorongil, this is the sum and substance of school for a good share of the population. I've said elsewhere that maybe 20% of students get a good to excellent education. It isn't an accident. The 20% get good education because their parents move into good school districts, or send their children to good private schools. 20% of the school population actually have a bright future. The other 80%, not so much.

Why doesn't everybody get a good to excellent education, when the benefits are so obvious? Because, in the big world of real politic many students are going to be economically irrelevant to a large extent and it just doesn't matter whether they know where Iowa, France, or New Zealand is. It doesn't matter whether they know shit from shinola. It doesn't matter if they know anything at all.

Irrelevant, useless people is what results when economies are organized only to maximize profit for stockholders. Production requiring low skills is transferred to the lowest wage countries. Some goods require lots of skilled workers, large overhead, and investment, but those industries don't employ huge numbers of people.

Irrelevant, useless people will still eat and buy stuff, so they have a function after all, but advertising on television or the internet can take care of teaching them what kind of junk they should buy.

Some things should be memorized, like:

the name, capitol of, location, and the graphic shape of each state
the name, capitol of, location, and the graphic shape of the 100 major countries
the source of basic commodities that we use (coal, oil, iron ore, copper, tin, zinc, niobium, dairy, beef, pork, vegetables, grains, beer, cotton, linen, wool, and so on. No one should get past their 21st birthday thinking that spaghetti grows on trees or that Velcro is a city in Transylvania. (Some people, when told that spaghetti grows on trees, thought that was true.)

Anyway, I'm basically asking for anyone to recommend me some books or writings that can help me deal with not being overwhelemed by resentment or frustation, and staying positive and focused on my goals while not being bothered by anything external. — Jempire

You are totally welcome to all the sympathy, empathy, psychopathy, skeptopathy and any other pathos I can offer, but why should you not be bothered by anything external? [NOTE: this post is not an attack.]

There are any number of long, thick, difficult books in which you might immerse yourself which would be distracting. I have here a 10 pound biography of Marcus Aurelius. You might achieve a beneficial result by causing it to forcefully collide with the skull of one of your abusers at work. (Just kidding of course.)

"Accepting the world the way it is" is always the first step. We are all in a world full of externals over which we do not have control--bad weather, people with whom we are in relationships, earthquakes, co-workers who are assholes, forest fires, and so on. Life is often stressful. We -- you, me -- are not covered by impervious shells. People can get to us. ("Hell is other people" Sartre said, sarcastically.)

"Understanding what it is we really need and finding ways to get it" is another important step. Many of us (me, for instance) would have had happier lives if we had figured out what we really needed, sooner rather than later.

"Making changes in one's life" is necessary IF you are not obtaining what you really need." Is there a book which will tell you how to do these things? Maybe, but I think we kind of have to figure it out, and generally we are capable of solving our problems IF there is a solution. (Sometimes there isn't. If someone needs to live in a problem-free world, they are shit out of luck.)

Do what you can to understand what you really need and how to get it. Meanwhile, enjoy life. Do interesting things. Have lots of relationships with good people. Deal with the assholes at work as well as you can, short of braining them with heavy bios of Marcus Aurelius. Maybe there are ways of disarming them. (Remember, there is a reason why people have to be paid to come to work every day.)

Peace, and protect your head.

I don't know -- I tend not to spend a lot of time around cadaver labs.

What's to like about a dead body you didn't know when it was alive? It's the life of the living we respect, not the package the dead occupy.

There is also no gravity. The earth sucks.

If only 99% of the population WERE actually familiar with political maps. Along with not knowing how to balance a checkbook (or make sense of a credit card statement), name their senators and state governor, a large number of people can not find their state on a map, let alone finding Edinburgh, Beijing, or Cape Town. And using GPS all the time leaves people unable to find their way without it.

It isn't stupidity, it's a lack of map instruction (and instruction in arithmetic, civics, and every so many other topics).

soils — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Here's a picture of the loess hills of western Iowa. Loess is soil that blew off the receding glaciers, piled up, hardened, and there they are. It's kind of a yellowish soil. One learns about such things on geology field trips. In flat Iowa a hill this high has to be experienced to be believed.

There are climate change deniers, true enough. And there are people who shy away from affirming climate change because they can't quite grasp enough of the complex concept to agree with it. It's a bit over their heads. There are people who WISH it wasn't true, and there are people who SAY it isn't true because they have too much invested in the status quo.

Some people have shut down about all this stuff because they are overwhelmed by bad news. Aside from global warming, there is soil loss, invasive species, plastic in the oceans, drugs flowing across porous borders, people dying left and right from gun violence and drug overdoses, new diseases (Zika, West Nile, AIDS, Ebola, etc.), failure of the economy to improve the wellbeing of a majority of Americans, pandemic obesity, and so on and so forth.

The majority of people, though, recognize that climate is changing. Your average American can't do much about plastic in the ocean because a lot of it is coming from SE Asian countries that simply don't have the infrastructure to deal effectively with solid waste. Flimsy bags blowing around a Walmart parking lot in Iowa, Texas, or Massachusetts are not ending up in the ocean, for the most part. A lot of problems are simply out of people's individual control.

"They believed the world is flat" is a 18th/19th century assumption about what people in the middle ages thought. In fact, the spherical, globular world was settled science centuries BC. Here's an article in the Washington Post about it.

Maybe I have my sociology wrong, but it seems that in contemporary society there is absolutely no correlation between ability in and contribution to collective intellectual life and income and wealth. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Your sociology is generally right, I think, but how right depends on what you mean by the collective intellectual life and income and wealth.

Income and wealth first:

In the world, income and wealth is heavily skewed toward high income and great wealth. A few people --less than a dozen--have as much wealth as one third of the world's population (according to Oxfam). In the US (and in other countries) the richest 1% to 5% have more wealth than the rest of the population. People don't end up in the rich end of the income distribution by being intellectuals, that's for certain. The business of generating wealth is difficult (it takes immense intellect, ingenuity, drive, a certain insensitivity, etc.) but it isn't an intellectual pursuit.

Some intellectuals can certainly prosper in the modern world society compared to ordinary workers. Wealth, no. A modest level of comfort, convenience, security--yes. Some intellectuals are housed in academic institutions (like Noam Chomsky). Some make a living in government or industry (or non-profits). A few make an income from books and speaking fees. Some are professionals.

An intellectual whose output is extremely arcane (maybe Sanskrit rhetoric), or targets criticism at critical institutions may well have a life similar to a poorly paid worker. And this ins't new. Discounting intellectuals who were well off from non-intellectual pursuits, many intellectuals died broke. Karl Marx survived because Frederich Engels supported him, but that didn't land Uncle Karl in the lap of luxury. It just kept him and his family from becoming homeless and starving. Quite a few intellectuals have been "kept men" -- somebody underwrote their living expenses.

The thing is, a lot of intellectuality is. of necessity, a significant sideline of people who must do other things (which proves your point). Jeff Miller was a high school graduate and worked various temporary and short-term jobs, whose thinking was (still is) on a high intellectual level. There were several people in his circle who supported themselves through ordinary work, but were intellectuals.

Such a person is seeking the benefits of religion without the costs, the costs being assent to a specific set of truth claims and obedience to religious authority, both of which it is especially hard for modern man to accept. — Thorongil

This sounds a lot like Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace":

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

You are right that "religion is an inherently communal and institutional enterprise". It is within the collectivity of a congregation that one finds religion. It is easy to claim that one is "spiritual" rather than "religious" because "spiritual" is amorphous, vague, undemanding, and solitary -- at least the way the term is commonly used.

The startle response upon seeing a snake might not be "unconscious" -- it's probably more of a reflex operated by the CNS below the level of higher brain functions. Animals have this reflex system, because by the end of the second or two the brain needs to make up it's mind about the snake and what you should do about it, you might already be bitten. The reflex arc takes less than a second, and that could save you from a very painful bite.