$ jlc (10,306)

I agree with Thoritsu: This is wonderful news, and we need to make sure it is spread around as widely as possible. There are tons of people who value a personal or traditional link to a religion and who will be offended by this exclusionary behavior.

The problem with conservative groups is that they have been so unfriendly to gay, minority, feminist, and non-normative groups that those groups have had no alternative but to adhere to the Democratic party vote. Conservative organizations need to have a blue-collar and religious plus techie, and non-normative "ya'll come on in here" sort of attitude. The only thing that matters is whether the individual believes in freedom and responsibility.

I guess I am saying that it is nice to see the opposition say something really stupid, but we need to clean house ourselves - and then capitalize on it.

Jan

You can continue to use a private insurance after turning 65. I am doing this (Blue Shield). The Medicare Part A (which covers hospitalization expenses) is mandatory and automatic under the most common scenarios - but Part A does not require any additional payments. This does not bother me because Part A does not make any healthcare decisions, does cover many hospital costs, and is some return to me for the Medicare I have been (involuntarily) paying for all during my working career.

If you have private insurance through work (yadda yadda parameters) then you can opt not to go on Medicare Part B. This is the part about which 'brightwriter' was speaking. I agree with brightwriter: The government should not be making healthcare decisions, eg Medicaid used to not cover testing for syphilis if you were over 55 (I am not certain if this still is the case). Obviously, people over 55 never have sex...

I have had a problem, concerning eye and dental and medical bills after I turned 65: the first of each of these instances after I turned 65 assumed that I was now on Medicare and tried to bill MC instead of Blue Shield. In each case, I had to call the provider (and sometimes Blue Shield) and straighten it out. Now - a year later - the bills are being directed properly. I think.

brightwriter: I quite agree with you. Medicare is making poor healthcare decisions, and these decisions should not be theirs to make. On the topic of B12: A sub-lingual B12/Folate vitamin is easily available. I take one every morning. Always take the Folate with the B12 - low values of either may cause Pernicious Anemia.

Jan

You got me with the "Invisible Basketballs" joke.

Jan

In geek-speak, "guys" is gender neutral. "You guys wanna go to a movie?" (a woman, addressing a group of women).

Technically, "tovarka" was the feminine form of "comrade" (tovarish), though the latter word is what was actually used to address both male and female Communists.

Just sayin'

Jan

Most of my friends are fanatic about the 'best use by' date. They routinely discard good food, either because it is something they mentally label as 'leftovers' (and hence not to be eaten) or because it is past its 'earliest imaginable use by date'. I know this because I have chickens, and I solicit these scraps for my hens. It is amazing the quantity of good quality food that I get for my chickens. (I also get some unusable 'back of the fridge' slime as well. May be a binary decision.)

They get fresh laid eggs in return, by the way.

Anything that can alter the now-common perception that food instantly becomes poisonous after the earliest date on the package/can should be encouraged.

Jan

This reminds me a lot of the panic in San Bernadino hospital ER when everyone was sick due to a mysterious chemical substance that seeped from a cleaning agency and/or alien landing (actually just hysteria). Or the mysterious saiga antelope deaths in Siberia (actually due to Pasturella multocida).

I suspect that there is a real disease that accounts for a small number of these deaths, a co-inicidence of other normal problems and a lot of hysteria and press hype.

Jan

The logic of the last one is amusingly inescapable.

Jan

I have found to the contrary.

Jan

You are correct about having to be concerned about confirmation bias...I worry about that I am unconsciously doing that myself. One of the major downsides about the internet conforming to one's preferences is that it feeds confirmation bias and, as a result, polarizes people further.

Jan

I popped onto the internet and used a series of key words to pull up a number of studies that reported this finding. The studies seemed adequate and had a reasonable p value. I spent all of 15 minutes on this process.

That being said, assertions of 'truth' of a particular datum (on this and other sources of information) often fail this simple test; this article did not fail that litmus test. Thus my response to this post did NOT begin with a charge of factual inaccuracy or source bias (NB blarman is generally good about his accuracy and sources).

I do not have sufficient interest in the topic to pursue its data source further. My main point is not to validate the current article's assertion (other than to check that it is not BS) but to suggest that existing statistics may not reveal an ongoing change in the basic model of society, which idea I thought would be interesting to the folks on this list.

Jan

I have verified the data in the article and can confirm that it is accurate, but I think it is also retrospective.

I would like to add to the observation made by Mike Marotta: Having stable family units does not cause a civilized society. That being said, given that the culture is already a civilized society, having young males get married is the best way of reducing violence in that most violent subset of our society.

It is my supposition, based on reading Ian Morris' books on the evolution of social structure (related to technology and measured by calories/day/person) is that we are now evolving out of the 'industrial' model and into something else. The 'agricultural' model of society (which lasted till about 1850 in the US) evolved into the 'industrial model by 1950 (more egalitarian; less tolerance of violence). Each 'type' of society has its own set of characteristics, and I think that the type of society into which we are evolving may not have traditional families.

Jan

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

As a result of phone, business, and general cameras and social media, this now applies to all of us. There is no need for a conspiracy to document all of the stupid/politically incorrect things that each fallible human does in the course of their lives...we have created a 'small gossipy town' out of what used to be pleasant modern anonymity. Now we must live with it, because even if we could change deliberate covert government programs to control politicians we will not escape Facebook and Youtube.

Jan

Also, from an article in 2005 (as reported in journal Emerging Infectious Disease):
"The meat from the sick camel that had been butchered on February 13 was shared among 11 families (106 members). No other food was shared among these families. The 4 patients with pharyngeal plague were among 37 people who had eaten this camel meat; 1 patient with bubonic plague (the man who slaughtered the camel) was among the 69 people who had not eaten the meat (risk ratio [RR] 7.7, p<0.05, Fisher exact test). Moreover, pharyngeal plague developed in 4 of 6 patients who had eaten raw camel liver, but not in 31 persons who had eaten only cooked camel meat or liver (RR not defined, p<0.01, Fisher exact test)."

Jan

Per the CDC:
Flea bites. Plague bacteria are most often transmitted by the bite of an infected flea. During plague epizootics, many rodents die, causing hungry fleas to seek other sources of blood. People and animals that visit places where rodents have recently died from plague are at risk of being infected from flea bites. Dogs and cats may also bring plague-infected fleas into the home. Flea bite exposure may result in primary bubonic plague or septicemic plague.

Contact with contaminated fluid or tissue. Humans can become infected when handling tissue or body fluids of a plague-infected animal. For example, a hunter skinning a rabbit or other infected animal without using proper precautions could become infected with plague bacteria. This form of exposure most commonly results in bubonic plague or septicemic plague.

Infectious droplets. When a person has plague pneumonia, they may cough droplets containing the plague bacteria into air. If these bacteria-containing droplets are breathed in by another person they can cause pneumonic plague. Typically this requires direct and close contact with the person with pneumonic plague. Transmission of these droplets is the only way that plague can spread between people. This type of spread has not been documented in the United States since 1924, but still occurs with some frequency in developing countries. Cats are particularly susceptible to plague, and can be infected by eating infected rodents. Sick cats pose a risk of transmitting infectious plague droplets to their owners or to veterinarians. Several cases of human plague have occurred in the United States in recent decades as a result of contact with infected cats.

Jan

Hallelujah!

Jan

The concepts she presents are crucial to understanding humankind. While I am NOT an expert, my interpretation of the Neolithic token clusters was that they were tallies of private ownership classes in a flock kept mutually for the security and efficiency of its management. The observation that in all of the societies (of which I have any knowledge) the next step after Neolithic tally-clusters was bills of lading and tags of ownership - mercantile records - shows that 'ownership' was the linchpin of early literacy and numeracy. After that, official contracts - perhaps held by a third party in some cases - paralleled the rise of the city-state and signaled fair trade; but temple taxation also occurred at this time and it was that (geeze - some good from taxes!) that probably caused the existence of a class of literate people. Another huge revelation from DSB was that true literacy was probably triggered by religion and the desire to use writing to continuously invoke a deity for the continuance and protection of your soul (Linear A barely got to this point) and that this evolution was manifest through art.

Wow. All these incredible ideas...from the work of one woman. Please pass to DSB the appreciation and thanks from a total stranger. Her work and insights have adorned the halls of my mind.

Jan

With respect to wolves, it is also true that the oldest members of the pack are the ones who have been over this route the most times and know it - and alternative routes - better than anyone in the pack. They know the old and traditional routes - and as long as those routes work, they are the best pathfinders.

I do not think that the leader always belongs in the rear, though the rest of the structure makes sense. It also must be taken into consideration that the purpose of that lineal organization is narrow: to protect the pack and get from one place to another; maybe to hunt on the way (I do not know enough about wolves to know if they hunt whilst they travel or if they wait until they establish their next base camp before hunting).

The leader sometimes has to get up front and lead. Because he is leader, the pack will follow him.

Also: my experience is the opposite of the Steve Jobs quote. Were I to make that quote accurate, I would have to add words. Jan's version: It does not make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; hire Motivated, Perceptive and Wise smart people and let them tell you what Their Ideas Are to do. Then, using the greater vision that being the boss gives you, decide if their ideas are right or if they are too limited.

Oh yeah, if you do not find the magical 'motivated, perceptive, and wise smart people' then you have to make do with what you have and use ingenuity to compensate for missing attributes.

Jan

One of the benefits of being on the Gulch was being introduced to the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat. I have her "How Writing Came About" and "When Writing Met Art", the reading of which has changed my perception of the roots of civilization.

If "Curious Currency" builds on this, I will be glad to add that to my collection...but from the review, I am not certain that it does.

Jan

Did you watch the video? This is a good thing, not a bad thing.

If the men (Muslim or any other religion) who DO beat their wives (and often put them into the Emergency Dpt and ICU) were to confine their actions to what this video shows, we would be in a better society.

Yes, it is repulsive to think that a man should consider it his right to beat his wife or that she intrinsically needs to be beaten in order for her to appreciate him as a man! But. Machiavelli has been castigated for centuries for saying the equivalent of, "If you can win a war with only losing 1000 of your soldiers, why choose a strategy that you know will cost you 30,000 of your men just for the sake of display and vainglory?" Similarly, if a man who already considers it his prerogative to beat his wife constrains himself to what the video shows, we will be better off and, in the real world, there will be fewer women admitted to the hospital.

Conclusion: philosophically revolting; empirically acceptable.

Jan

No problem - I can address climate change:

"Climate change is occurring at a rate of approx 0.13C or 0.2F per decade, probably as a result of residual warming due to the end of the global Medieval Ice Age. The anthrocentric component of this change is probably vanishing small. We intend to enjoy the warm weather, the decrease in drought and the lowering of human deaths that result from this benign change." (quote myself)

There! I have addressed it.

Jan

I too have been thinking about this, and have come up with (and eliminated items from) a list very similar to what is discussed in this thread. I would like to add some thoughts and get feedback.

The reason that CA has such pleasant weather is that it is one of the handful of places in the world with a "Mediterranean Climate", but if you are in SoCal and not near the ocean then the summer months are too hot to do anything outdoors. I love the outdoors and it is increasingly onerous to not be able to do anything after work in the summer months here in LA. Carson City it technically in the border of the Med Climate Region, and I am waiting to see what the weather is like there in the summer - whether one can hike and ride during the afternoon in July and August. (Since there are people here on this list with more knowledge of the area, I would like to hear back). It is certainly COLD in the winter in CC - 37 today vs 71 here in SoCal.

CA may not be a great place to live, but it is a good place to visit and living in Texas would make that hard. (I had pretty much decided on Austin at one point, but have now recanted. Austin is now a prime contender for Amazon campus, which will certainly alter the area.) From NV, at least I can visit my CA friends.

Yes, a Mormon population does seem to be a good buffer against leftist migration. I am not religious, but I have gotten along well with Mormons in the past - and Carson City seems to have a population thereof.

NV lacks a seacoast, which is really bad. That is the major advantage that TX has: if TSHTF, then Texas has both resources and coastline.

Just some thoughts.

Jan

We should not want nor seek a single global democracy. Were we to obtain that, there would be no recourse in case of tyranny or even just dissent. The reason that Europe progressed to technology before China was because it was broken up into warring kingdoms that competed against each other.

The nnly point at which we should seek a global government is after we have colonized other planets.

Jan
PS I was disappointed in this topic, because I thought that it was going to be about Martians and Membari at the voting booths.- 'freedom' - what were you thinking of! ;>)

Well then...I believe you are an outlier...

:>) Jan

We have a problem with the word “believe” that makes it difficult to discuss this subject:
- I ‘believe’ I like pistachio ice cream better than any other type. (trivial preference)
- I ‘believe’ in Odin. (non-falsifiable religious statement)
- I ‘believe’ in evolution. (falsifiable scientific opinion)
The most common use case is, obviously the first one. We routinely use the word “believe: in everyday conversation, to indicate a trivial or transient preference. Unfortunately, when we begin to discuss philosophy and enduring world views, we also use this word…but I think that people actually mean “somewhere on the spectrum between trivial and cosmic” when they are speaking philosophically. This can lead to arguments that sound philosophical but which really have a large semantic component.

Jan

Do you have any hard evidence for that? I would be happy if the off-course (sic) collegiate system were bypassed by self-learning and application tests, but I have not seen evidence that this is so.

Jan