Jordan Peterson, on Liberals and Conservatives

And why we need them both:

Jordan Peterson (Trump vs Biden 2020 Election)

A plane needs both a left wing and a right wing to fly.  Sometimes, to fly without crashing, it needs to lean more to the left, or more to the right.

It's insanity for one side in our political system to try to destroy the other.   Vilifying half the people in the country, will solve nothing.  A house divided against itself, cannot stand.  We, as a nation, need to straighen up and fly right.   We need to find common ground, and work together to solve our problems.

Or we will crash and burn. 

 The Root of Our Partisan Divide

Christopher Caldwell gets it right, in this analysis.  It's what has polarized our politics so severely.  Unfortunately, he doesn't have a solution.   I don't know that anyone does.

Oregon voted to stop Daylight Savings Time. Yet we fell back anyway. Here's why.

Didn't Oregon do away with daylight saving time? Why you still have to 'fall back' Nov. 3

[...] Oregon lawmakers said the change takes effect the first November after both Washington and California adopt year-round daylight saving time. 

Washington lawmakers passed legislation to do so, and California voters cast ballots directing lawmakers there to do the same. But the bill stalled in the state senate; California lawmakers say they will revisit the issue in 2020. 

All three states also face one final hurdle: Congress needs to sign off on the deal. And while legislation has been introduced to allow the change, daylight saving time isn't at the top of the agenda in Washington, D.C., as an impeachment inquiry and the 2020 presidential election approach. 

So stay tuned: Oregon lawmakers built a 2029 deadline into the law, so there's time for the change to happen in coming years.

The folks in D.C., are more interested in fighting with eachother, than dealing with anything we care about.

And so it goes.

      

Death of the working class... and of Capitalism, as we knew it?

How fighting one pandemic can deepen another Review of “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton

By Carlos Lozada, Book critic
May 1, 2020 at 5:00 a.m. PDT
DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM
By Anne Case and Angus Deaton.
Princeton University Press. 312 pp. $27.95

Even before the coronavirus struck, America was suffering an eviscerating epidemic. Its cause was not a virus; its spread could not be blamed on foreign travelers or college kids on spring break. No masks or gloves could slow its contagion, no vaccine could prevent new cases. Its toll is clear in the rising deaths of white Americans in their mid-40s to mid-50s over the past two decades, particularly in states such as Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and West Virginia.

Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call these “deaths of despair” — the deaths from suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholic liver disease ravaging swaths of the country. The victims, overwhelmingly, are less-educated Americans whose loss of life was preceded by a loss of jobs, community and dignity, and whose deaths, the authors argue, are inextricable from the policies and politics transforming the U.S. economy into an engine of inequality and suffering. “The American economy has shifted away from serving ordinary people and toward serving businesses, their managers, and their owners,” Case and Deaton write in their new work, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.”

Although the authors completed this book before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic — it was published four days after President Trump declared a national emergency — their diagnosis is still painfully relevant. Mass unemployment and mass infection, occurring simultaneously in a nation where health insurance often depends on employment, threaten to both prove and aggravate the conditions Case and Deaton describe. The debate over how quickly to ease social distancing restrictions and get the economy moving again forces a reckoning: How do we balance the risk of increased coronavirus infections if we reopen the economy too soon against the risk of more deaths of despair if we do so too late? “Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life,” Case and Deaton write. “Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive.”

Reading this book during a pandemic, I found myself bracing for more death — from the virus or from despair, and, more likely, from both.

Many memoirs, histories and investigations have been written on America’s white working class in recent years, probably too many, but fewer purely economic studies. Case and Deaton are world-renowned practitioners of the dismal science (Case is a top expert on the links between economic and health status, while Deaton snagged a Nobel in 2015 for his work on household poverty and welfare), and their lens on the subject makes for stark reading. They estimate the magnitude of the deaths of despair in the United States by comparing the improving trend lines of recent decades — i.e., if mortality rates had continued falling as before — with what actually came to pass.

“When we add up those numbers from 1999, the critical point where the turnaround began, to 2017,” the authors report, “we get a very large total: 600,000 deaths of midlife Americans who would be alive if progress had gone on as expected.” Case and Deaton liken that number to “what we might see during the ravages of an infectious disease, like the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918.” They also compare it to the roughly 675,000 deaths of HIV/AIDS in the United States since the early 1980s.

Case and Deaton are largely dismissive of arguments that stress the supposed individual or cultural failings of the white working class, and they focus instead on systemic shortcomings that lead to deaths of despair. Manufacturing towns and cities have seen their factories boarded up, they write, and “in the wreckage, the temptations of alcohol and drugs lured many to their deaths.” Education is another consideration, the authors argue, with “almost all” of the increase in deaths due to suicide, alcoholism and drug overdoses found among people who lack bachelor’s degrees. Deteriorating health matters as well. “Many people are experiencing pain, serious mental distress, and difficulty going about their day-to-day lives,” Case and Deaton write. These conditions make it harder for them to work, which reduces income and undercuts work as a source of “satisfaction and meaning” in their lives.

Who lives, who dies, who decides: How the virus makes us weigh the value of one life

More than 30 million Americans have sought unemployment aid since mid-March, a level of dislocation not seen since the Great Depression. In this context, the impulse to return to work is understandable. Yet the loss of earnings, Case and Deaton contend, is just part of the challenge. “Much more important for despair is the decline of family, community, and religion,” they write, a decline they regard as related to falling wages and disappearing jobs, but distinct from them. Other authors have tackled this problem recently — see, for instance, Timothy P. Carney’s insightful 2019 book, “Alienated America” — and collectively, their conclusion is clear: Long before we began social distancing, Americans had already grown far too distant from one another.

Case and Deaton focus on the white working class because it is undergoing a particularly harrowing shift, not because they believe this demographic matters more than others (they don’t) or because it is worse off in absolute terms than others (it isn’t). Black mortality rates remain persistently higher than white ones, the authors point out, even considering the increased deaths of despair among white Americans. But black mortality rates are falling faster than white rates — and the deaths of despair among white citizens are the difference. “The main reason why death rates of blacks fell more rapidly than death rates of whites at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that blacks were not suffering the epidemic of overdoses, suicide, and alcoholism,” Case and Deaton explain. [...]

It's worth reading the whole thing. While I don't consider myself an anti-capitalist at all, there have been changes in the economy, locally an globally, that have been eliminating working class jobs and incomes. It's a reality.

When Obamacare tried to force small businesses to provide health care for full time employees, the employment industry responded by making all employees part time. I worked as a tax preparer, dealing with all their W-2 forms, and was astounded at how many families were raising children, with two parents working at an assortment of part-time jobs, to pay their bills and keep thier families alive.

This article touches on many causes, and asks many questions we need to face, as it's only going to continue to get worse for the majority of people, if viable solutions are not found.

Many of these people are Trump supporters. And they will vote for Trump, no matter what anyone says, because they feel that the Democrats don't care wether they live or die, so they will vote for anyone who opposes the Democrats. You can argue about wether that perception is right or wrong. But it won't change the fact that they percieve it that way. If the Democrats are serious about winning more votes, they should be addressing this, instead of only attacking Trump non-stop. They have been doing that for the past four years, and it hasn't worked. Isn't it about time they try something that does?

I have Democrat friends who believe that all Trump supporters are racists, bigots and morons. And that if they keep repeating that mantra, it's going to win them the elections. But I think they have forgotten, what every election is about: it's the economy, stupid. Duh. It affects the most people. And the majority will vote for whoever they think, whoever they perceive, will do the better job of that.

     

Kamala Harris: an interesting choice

From the Guardian:

What to make of the Kamala Harris VP pick? Our panel's verdict

[...] Harris, like Biden, is a remarkably malleable candidate. She is not an ideologue; she’s a political animal, someone who will move with the changing tides – a representative, one might say. That makes her untrustworthy to people who want a true believer in office. But it also means that the most dynamic movements, such as Black Lives Matter, and the laudable efforts of disappointed Bernie Sanders fans to get more progressives into office, create an environment into which Harris will fit herself. As the Democratic base goes, so go both Harris and Biden. This is good news for the progressives who are winning the hearts and minds of Democratic voters. [...]

[...] In this election, it’s clear that Donald Trump is going to run as a bulwark of law and order who stands between Americans and roving anarchists and antifa. He regularly paints Democrat-run cities as “totally out of control” on crime. In a sit-down interview with Fox anchor Chris Wallace last month, Trump claimed that Biden wants to “defund the police,” which Wallace pointed out was inaccurate on-air.

That line of attack is going to be difficult when your opponents are the author of the 1994 crime bill and a hard-nosed prosecutor who laughed about cracking down on truancy.

In much the same way that partisan discipline put the kibosh on the Tara Reade accusations against Joe Biden, Democrats and the liberal media that support them will put daylight between Democrats and the disorder in the street.

Turns out all the opposition research that progressive activists used against Biden and Harris in the primary is suddenly a strength in the race against Trump. [...]

     

Covid-19: it's not your grandfather's Influenza. In fact, it's not Influenza.

The Covid 19 Pandemic is frequently compared to the Influenza pandemic of 1918-1920. But is the comparison correct? Corona viruses are not the same as Influenza viruses.

What Does Disappearing Immunity To Covid-19 Mean For A Vaccine?

[...] SARS-CoV-2 is broadly similar to the four coronaviruses that cause about one third of all common colds. Each year, the same four viruses infect us the world over, sweeping the Northern Hemisphere from December to February; south of the Equator from May to July; and in the tropics, year-round. These waves of infection, which with rare exceptions cause minor symptoms only, have repeated year in and year out since the discovery of the virus in the 1960s. The ability of this coronavirus quartet to persist absent alteration is highly unusual. Influenza infections occur annually, too, but the dominant strains differ each time to evade the population’s protective and persistent immune responses.

In the 1970s two independent teams of medical researchers conducted experiments to determine whether or not the same coronavirus strain might reinfect and give a cold to the same person. Volunteers who were deliberately exposed to the virus contracted colds and recovered. A year later, they were again exposed to the same virus—and again were infected and developed cold symptoms. These experiments established that protective immunity to the cold-causing coronavirus is short-lived.

I call this phenomenon "get it and forget it,” and it describes the interaction between these viruses and our immune systems that is so unique. Confronted with a cold-causing coronavirus, our bodies evidently forget that we were infected at all. For us, this leaves us susceptible to annual colds, which are generally harmless but a nuisance besides. For the viruses, this is a winning strategy, as it rids them of the need to change to survive. At present, we don’t understand coronaviruses in sufficient detail to know why our immunity to them so short-lived.* What we do know is that if SARS-CoV-2 behaves as its coronavirus cousins do, Covid-19 is sure to become a seasonally recurring pandemic. [...]

Studies Report Rapid Loss of COVID-19 Antibodies
The results, while preliminary, suggest that survivors of SARS-CoV-2 infection may be susceptible to reinfection within weeks or months.

This is not Influenza. Is this going to keep circulating around, like the common cold corona viruses? God I hope not.
     

Windows 7 support ends. So where to now?

Microsoft suggests upgrading to windows 10. That would be fine... if it worked. They offered free windows 10 upgrades. I tried that, and it was disastrous. It seemed to work well at first, but as time went on, updates would cause different parts or functions of the the computer (like SOUND) to stop working. Turns out, that unless your computer hardware -all of it- has been "Windows 10 certified", Microsoft does not guarantee that it will work on YOUR computer. Wish I knew that before I installed it. By the time I discovered this, it was too late to roll it back from Windows 10 to Windows 7.

So if you want to "upgrade" to Windows 10, you are probably better off getting a computer with it already installed and certified for that hardware. Then, the Windows 10 fun can begin. It has some good features. Yet, some things never change:

But... what should you then DO with your old Windows 7 machine? You can keep using it for a while longer of course, but as time goes on, without security updates, it will become riskier and riskier to use.

Personally, I found a solution with my aborted Windows 10 computer, that couldn't be rolled back to Windows 7. I'm using it with all my Windows 7 machines now. The solution is a Linux operating system called Linux Mint. It's a complete, free opensource operating system that you can download and install, free of charge.

There are several versions you can choose from. I prefer the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), because it's a "rolling" distribution; you only have to install it once, then it updates itself continuously after that. Other versions use Ubuntu as a base, and major upgrades require a complete reinstall every three to five years.

It's probably the easiest Linux system for a novice to download and use, and easy to learn and use too. A perfect way to extend the life and usefulness of older computers that cannot be successfully upgraded to Windows 10. Highly recommended.
   

Richard Bandler (How to keep your New Years Resolutions)

Richard Bandler is one of the founders of NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming). I've been reading his book, "Guide to TRANCE-formation". In this video, he's talking about how your mindset, what you tell yourself, about what you are doing, determines wether you will follow through with it and be successful. Also, to think it through first, so when the inevitable happens, you aren't taken by surprise, and have a plan to deal with it. It's good stuff:

   

"Democrats cannot capture the presidency or either branch of Congress by lurching leftward"

Here is some well considered advice for the Democrat party. It explains how Donald Trump got elected, and why, if the Democrats don't change course, Trump stands a good chance of being re-elected for another term:

Commentary: The perils of mythmaking

[...] Democrats cannot capture the presidency or either branch of Congress by lurching leftward. A candidate in the AOC/BS mold would be a hero in New York, California and Massachusetts — and a disaster in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which handed Trump the presidency in 2016 and will be critical again next year.

Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, stressed this point to The New York Times: “The more we have presidential candidates or newly elected congresspeople talking about the Green New Deal, talking about ‘Medicare-for-all,’ talking about socialism, the more that plays into the Trump campaign’s hands.”

Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, added: “If you want to lock up Pennsylvania for a Democrat, the more moderate Democrats are the key.”

The numbers support them. A Gallup poll in January reported that 35 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives, the same number that identify as moderates. Only 26 percent are self-described liberals, the same portion who chose that label in 2016 exit polls.

It’s true that within the Democrats’ ranks, the percentage of liberals is rising, hitting 51 percent this year according to Gallup. But pragmatists still dominate the party. Fifty-four percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want the party to “move closer to the center” while 41 percent “would rather it shift further left.”

The same tension between purists and pragmatists is playing out in the House, where the AOC types are calling for the rapid impeachment of the president. But Democratic leaders are taking a much slower approach, with Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, insisting that impeachment must meet a “very high bar.”

“If you’re serious about removing a president from office, what you’re really doing is overturning the result of the last election,” Nadler told Roll Call in November. “You don’t want to have a situation where you tear this country apart, and for the next 30 years half the country’s saying, ‘We won the election; you stole it.’”

That’s why Democrats should be focusing on the next election, not impeachment. No president has ever been removed through impeachment (although Richard Nixon probably would have been the first, had he not resigned). The bar is and should be “very high.” [...]

Read the whole thing. It explains so much. Good advice, and like much good advice, will probably be ignored. Elections are about demographics, and numbers. If Democrats insist on letting the most leftist and shrill among them lead their party, they will lose again.

Also see:

How can Republicans defend Trump? Because of the Clintons

     

A Star Dies

Obituary: Doris Day, America's archetypal girl next door

Big fan here, of her movies and her music. This day was inevitable, but...

Below is a link to the last post I did about her. At the end of it, are links to other posts I made about her.

Doris, we won't forget...

Doris Day's New Album: "My Heart"

     

Duolingo Mascot Get's Pushy

Duolingo PUSH

A nice April 1st video. ;)
     

"Comprehensible Input" in Language Learning

An interview with Steven Krashen, about the importance of comprehensible input in language acquisition:



I'm learning Spanish, and I've gotten beyond the beginner's phase, and am in the intermediate level, which can be very hard. I'm finding the concept of working with "comprehensible input" to improve my language learning to be very helpful. It's backed by a lot of sound research, which continues to demonstrate it's effectiveness.

https://youtu.be/YnesW3kL5cY

www.sdkrashen.com

     

Who was Joachim Gottschalk?

He was a famous German actor in Nazi Germany, who died along with his family, when he refused to be separated from his Jewish wife and their son. Seventy seven years ago today. From Wikipedia:

Joachim Gottschalk

Joachim Gottschalk (10 April 1904 – 6 November 1941) was a German stage and film actor during the late 1930s, a romantic lead in the style of Leslie Howard.

[...]

Gottschalk, the son of a physician, was born in the small town of Calau, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg. He attended the Gymnasium high school in Cottbus and from 1924 worked for four years on seagoing vessels. He later began an theatrical education in Cottbus and Berlin. During an engagement in Stuttgart, he met with his later wife, the Jewish actress Meta Wolff (1902–1941). Both married on 3 May 1930 in Halberstadt, shortly before Hitler came to power. They had a son, Michael, who was born in February 1933.

After the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels promoted the establishment of the Reichskulturkammer institution. Actors were required to apply for membership in the Theaterkammer on presentation of an "Aryan certificate" which meant a prohibition (Berufsverbot) to Gottschalk's wife. The couple managed to avoid the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws and rising tide of anti-semitic violence in Nazi Germany. From 1934 Gottschalk performed at the Schauspielhaus Frankfurt and in 1938 joined the Volksbühne ensemble in Berlin. In the same year he began his film career starring in the romance You and I directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, side by side with the popular German actress Brigitte Horney.

While World War II began with the German Invasion of Poland in 1939, Gottschalk and Horney appeared as a "dream couple" in a string of successful movies. Gottschalk took his Jewish wife to a social function and introduced her to some of the prominent Nazis who were present. Although the Nazis were charmed, Goebbels (a virulent anti-Semite) learned about this incident, and decreed that Gottschalk would be required to separate from his Jewish wife. When Gottschalk refused, Goebbels ordered Gottschalk's wife and child transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp[citation needed]. The minister's Special Representative Hans Hinkel insisted on the divorce and Gottschalk was threatened to play no further roles[citation needed]. Gottschalk insisted on accompanying Meta and Michael to Theresienstadt, but Goebbels ordered Gottschalk inducted into the German Army, the Wehrmacht[citation needed].

[...]

On 6 November 1941, minutes before the expected arrival of the Gestapo at their house in Berlin-Grunewald, Gottschalk and his wife committed suicide by gas poisoning after sedating their son, who died with them. They are buried at the Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery. Though warned by Minister Goebbels, Brigitte Horney and Wolfgang Liebeneiner, as well as other artists like Gustav Knuth, Hans Brausewetter, Werner Hinz, and Ruth Hellberg attended the funeral.

Goebbels ordered no further mentions of Gottschalk in the German newspapers, but word got out anyway and millions of German women mourned his death. Because of Nazi censorship, most of his devoted fans did not learn the awful circumstances of his death until after the war. In 1947 Kurt Maetzig directed the DEFA melodram Marriage in the Shadows after a novella by Hans Schweikart evoking the couple's fate. The 2002 drama Times Like These written by John O'Keefe is based on their individual tragedy. [...]

When I was in college, I did a term paper on the subject of Nazi Cinema. It dealt with the fate of people in the German film industry who refused to cooperate with the Nazis, and didn't leave Germany. Joachin's story was just one of many.

   

Have you experianced the "Helper High"?

Apparently, we are hard-wired to experience it:



How to Be Happy Every Day: It Will Change the World | Jacqueline Way | TEDxStanleyPark

The World Happiness Report states “Over 1 billion adults suffer from anxiety and depression.” How do we get to happy? Jacqueline Way, Founder of www.365give.ca shares a secret to happiness so simple a 3 – year old can do it. Jacqueline is a mother of three boys and social good activist dedicated to changing the world 1 give, 1 day at a time. You will learn through her powerful story how your body is hard-wired for giving. Researchers from all over the world have been studying the science and physiological of giving for decades. They’ve discovered giving makes you happy, makes you high, is our bodies natural “Fountain of Youth” and reduces stress. Her inspirational journey with her son and thousands of children will inspire you start a daily giving habit that will make you happy and change the world.

Jacqueline Way is the founder of www.356give.ca a charitable organization dedicated to educating, empowering, and inspiring children to change the world "one give, one day at a time." You can reach Jacqueline at jacquelineway365give@gmail.com [...]

Around Christmas time, there is an emphasis on giving. But what if giving were to become an ingrained habit, a habit you practice 365 days a year? And what if doing so benefited you, made you feel better, physically, mentally and emotionally? That is what is interesting about her Ted Talk. Giving doesn't have to always be a major sacrifice either. You can give in small ways, every day. And if it becomes a habit, you reap multiple benefits. A Win/Win for everyone.

   

When death affirms life

We saw this movie recently:



The Fault in Our Stars

Two teenage cancer patients begin a life-affirming journey to visit a reclusive author in Amsterdam. [...]

You might think it sounds depressing. In some ways it is. But it also manages to be uplifting. People being forced to deal with reality the way it is, not the way they want it to be. And the Gems you can find hidden in that. And, how much the dying have to teach us how to live.

Wikipedia: The Fault in Our Stars (film)

   

Russia's Satan II Missile

This was just a blip in the news. Should we be paying more attention? I think so:

Russia unveils 'Satan 2' missile, could wipe out France or Texas, report says

[...] The missile will have a range exceeding 11,000 kilometers (6,835 miles), TASS said. The warhead will weigh 100 tons and is designed as a successor to the R-36M Voyevoda.

According to a statement posted on the maker's website, "the Sarmat is designed to provide strategic Russian forces with a guaranteed and effective fulfillment of nuclear deterrence tasks" and is being co-developed with the Russian military.

The Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau's website describes it as "one of largest research and design centers in Russia for the development of rocket and space technology."

NATO has been bolstering its defenses in countries along the Russian border amid growing concerns about Moscow's military direction. NATO defense ministers are currently meeting in Brussels to discuss the situation, as well as the fight against ISIS.

Earlier this month, Moscow announced that it was suspending an arms reduction agreement with the US in which both countries agreed to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium, enough for thousands of nuclear bombs, over what it called Washington's "unfriendly actions" toward Russia, TASS reported.

I had posted previously about why sanctions against Russia would be likely to fail. While we've been downsizing and underfunding our military, China and Russia have been spending billions expanding and updating theirs.

While the Democrats flog hysteria about Russia, in an attempt to smear and discredit Donald Trump and the Republican party, they seem oblivious to the real danger they are encouraging and facilitating.

Closing the two Russian compounds on American soil was an appropriate response to any meddling the Russians may have attempted. It was enough. But everything else goes too far, and isn't serving our national interest. It's serving Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who can't face up to the fact that she was a poor candidate, who lost once to Barack Obama, which proved she could be beaten, and who couldn't even beat Donald Trump, with all his flaws.

As usual, she takes no responsibility and blames anyone and everyone else, when her will is thwarted. Hillary's sour grapes are NOT something worth escalating conflicts with Russia for.

     

Do you have "Real ID" for when you might actually need it?

When I got my new passport in 2016, I got a passport card too for an extra $30. It didn't seem necessary, but after reading this, I'm now glad I did:



Why You Want a Passport Card

Why You Want a Passport Card
My wife and I recently renewed our passports and we opted to get passport cards while we were at it. The Passport Card was originally intended as a convenient form of your passport to use when crossing land borders and ports-of-entry. But we don’t do that much. As in, pretty much never.

So why would we get a passport cards?

As identification for local flights
While a passport card can’t be used as identification for international flights, it can be used for local flights instead of your driver’s license. So why use the passport card instead of your drivers license?

First off, some state licenses are not Real ID compliant, but a passport card is. At some point the TSA will require Real ID compliant IDs. While most states will eventually comply, having a passport card removes any question concerning having a valid ID.

Secondly, when checking in at the airport you usually need to show an ID twice: first at the counter when you check your bags, then at security. That means two times digging into your wallet to get out your driver’s license. That means two opportunities to loose your license and two times you have to remember to put it back in your wallet. With a passport card you can leave it easily accessible in your carry-on (like you do with passports) and it can stay with your travel papers instead of your wallet.

Also, if you loose your license and want to rent a car — you’re pretty screwed. If you loose your passport card you’re just out $30. You still have your license for identification and driving.

To use for employment verification
A passport card is considered a “List A” document for I-9 employment verification just like a passport is. So you can leave your passport safe at home when doing employment verification.

To use as an international ID {...]

Read the whole thing, for embedded links, and several other useful purposes the Real ID compliant card can be useful for.

     

"It’s always dangerous to poke an angry bear", or Why Russia Sanctions are not likely to work

This article doesn't have a date on it, I think it may have been written before the current sanctions by Congress, but the reasoning seems just a valid now:

Why Sanctions Against Russia Might Backfire

[...] Is the hope that his friends will threaten to boot him out of office if he doesn’t shape up? One analyst recently claimed that Putin could be ousted easily, arguing that his replacement might be someone like Kudrin. But this neglects an important element of what holds Putin’s networks together: the pact of KGB loyalty. Many of the targeted individuals have past employment in, or suspected connections with, the KGB or its follow-on organization, the FSB (Federal Security Service). Putin, a career KGB officer and former head of the FSB, has repeatedly shown he can use FSB methods and tradecraft to harass his opponents, for example by releasing compromising materials (kompromat) that lead to their prosecution and imprisonment. He would certainly use those skills and connections to punish anyone who defects from his own team. Since many of his associates are reputed billionaires, they can afford to lose quite a bit of money before taking the enormous personal risk of betraying Putin and his KGB friends.

And the sanctions seem almost designed to enrage Putin personally, since they hit his personal networks so closely. The hope can’t have been that this would put him in a compromising mood. Is it instead that they will provoke him toward more aggression, leading him to miscalculate and increase his ultimate losses? Russia has already backed off some of its Western food-import counter-sanctions, because Putin’s original policy underestimated Russian dependence on specialty items like lactose-free milk, seed stock and salmon produced in Europe.

But it’s always dangerous to poke an angry bear. In recent months Putin has begun to encourage a conspiracy-mongering form of anti-Western nationalism. It’s impossible to know whether he and his cronies actually believe this neo-Eurasianist ideology. But neo-Eurasian arguments fill state-sponsored Russian media, and variations of it are seeping into the writings of even mainstream diplomatic analysts in Moscow. The West is blamed for denigrating Russia throughout history as backwards and wrong-headed, denying Russia its rightful place simply because its culture is different from Europe’s. In the 1990s, the story goes, the West tried to transform Russia in its own image, denying Russia’s separate identity and stealing its resources. Neo-Eurasianism rejects Western values of democracy, liberal tolerance, and individual rights. It argues instead for the superiority of a uniquely Russian communal and statist culture.

Ukraine matters, from this point of view, because Kiev was the medieval birthplace of Russia’s unique civilization, and now Ukraine’s eastern regions form a cultural buffer against the encroaching and degenerate West. Of course the West wants to stop Putin—his actions are rolling back Western influence. The sanctions bolster Eurasianist claims that the West has always persecuted Russia. They can be portrayed as another feeble attempt to demonstrate Western superiority.

Rather than pushing Putin toward accommodation, his cronies might push him toward nationalist extremism, to ensure their own continuing relevance in this new environment that Putin himself unleashed. The tilt toward extremism is already underway. [...]

Read the whole thing, for links and more. Also, there is the energy angle:

How U.S. Sanctions Against Russia Could Backfire

[...] France and Germany—the de facto, if often irreconcilable, leaders of the European Union—illustrate how Russian energy can shape foreign policy. France may rely heavily on foreign energy, but most of its oil and natural gas comes from Algeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Libya—not Russia. France can therefore afford to be more aggressive and supportive of sanctions against Russia.

Not so with Germany, which receives 57 percent of its natural gas and 35 percent of its crude oil from Russia. Berlin must therefore tread lightly between its primary security benefactor, the U.S., and its primary source of energy, Russia.

This is one reason Germany has been such an outspoken critic of the recent U.S. sanctions, which penalize businesses in any country that collaborate or participate in joint ventures with Russian energy firms. Germany supports the construction of Nord Stream 2, a pipeline that would run through the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine—the transit state through which Germany currently receives much of its energy imports. The pipeline would help to safeguard German energy procurement, since it would allow Russia to punish Ukraine by withholding shipments of natural gas without punishing countries such as Germany further downstream. [...]

The Russia hysteria has to stop. Time for the Dems to face facts about losing the election; they ran a weak candidate. It was hers to lose, and she lost it. Deal with it.

These new sanctions are being seen as the U.S. using the Russia excuse to snatch market share in European Oil and Gas markets. It's going too far, we should back off.

     

Cocktail ingredient substitutions

Cocktails From a Low-Stocked Bar: A Guide to Substitutions

[...] So you walk into your house and suddenly remember. You're out of gin. Your spouse finished the bottle last night. After all, a screaming toddler and a broken dishwasher and a leaking ceiling is also grounds for an intense Negroni craving.

Now what do you do? Comb the house for replacement ingredients.

That's the purpose of today's piece. If you don't have X, maybe you have Y, and if you have Y, what can you make with it?

For example, if you have everything for your Negroni except gin, but you have rum, are you good to go? If you want a Sidecar, but you don't have triple sec, will the maraschino work, or do you need to schlep back out to the liquor store?

The Substitution Principle
The first thing to think about here is, "Like replaces like." Swap one fortified wine (vermouth) for another (sherry, for example), when making a Martini or Manhattan. Brown liquors stand in well for each other, in drinks such as Manhattans or Juleps. Various liqueurs can tag in for others, within reason. For example, bitter amari sub in well for each other, as I'll talk about shortly, but an amaro might not be a great swap for triple sec in a Sidecar.

Think about the flavor of a given ingredient, and the role it plays in the drink, before attempting substitutes. You'd never try to build a Manhattan out of three vermouths and bitters. Why? Because the main ingredient needs to be a strong spirit for the drink to be anything close to Manhattan-like. Similarly, don't take the triple sec from a Sidecar and replace it with gin. You need a sweetening agent to balance the cognac and citrus. So try another liqueur, even one that's not fruity. [...]

It goes on to talk about the different "families" of drinks, and ingredient substitutions and the logic of how they work. It ends with a cheat sheet of suggestions that follow the logic. Very useful, especially if you don't want to spend a fortune on bar ingredients, and like to experiment with drink recipes.


Also see:       An A to Z List of Popular Liqueurs and Cordials

     

Russia Gate: no "golden ticket" for clueless Democrat Leaders?

I think even most Democrats see it for what it is, even if their party leadership is clueless. A case in point:

Russia-gate Flops as Democrats’ Golden Ticket

The national Democratic Party and many liberals have bet heavily on the Russia-gate investigation as a way to oust President Trump from office and to catapult Democrats to victories this year and in 2018, but the gamble appears not to be paying off.

[...]

Indeed, the Democrats may be digging a deeper hole for themselves in terms of reaching out to white working-class voters who abandoned the party in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to put Trump over the top in the Electoral College even though Clinton’s landslide win in California gave her almost three million more votes nationwide.

Clinton’s popular-vote plurality and the #Resistance, which manifested itself in massive protests against Trump’s presidency, gave hope to the Democrats that they didn’t need to undertake a serious self-examination into why the party is in decline across the nation’s heartland. Instead, they decided to stoke the hysteria over alleged Russian “meddling” in the election as the short-cut to bring down Trump and his populist movement.

A Party of Snobs?

From conversations that I’ve had with some Trump voters in recent weeks, I was struck by how they viewed the Democratic Party as snobbish, elitist and looking down its nose at “average Americans.” And in conversations with some Clinton voters, I found confirmation for that view in the open disdain that the Clinton backers expressed toward the stupidity of anyone who voted for Trump. In other words, the Trump voters were not wrong to feel “dissed.”

It seems the Republicans – and Trump in particular – have done a better job in presenting themselves to these Middle Americans as respecting their opinions and representing their fears, even though the policies being pushed by Trump and the GOP still favor the rich and will do little good – and significant harm – to the middle and working classes.

This article, I could argue with that last comment or any number of assumptions and assertions that the author makes throughout. But I'm not going to bother. Because far more interesting to me, is the arguments he makes about how the Dems are out of touch and really screwing things up. Read on:

By contrast, many of Hillary Clinton’s domestic proposals might well have benefited average Americans but she alienated many of them by telling a group of her supporters that half of Trump’s backers belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” Although she later reduced the percentage, she had committed a cardinal political sin: she had put the liberal disdain for millions of Americans into words – and easily remembered words at that.

By insisting that Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee – after leftist populist Bernie Sanders was pushed aside – the party also ignored the fact that many Americans, including many Democrats, viewed Clinton as the perfectly imperfect candidate for an anti-Establishment year with many Americans still fuming over the Wall Street bailouts and amid the growing sense that the system was rigged for the well-connected and against the average guy or gal.

In the face of those sentiments, the Democrats nominated a candidate who personified how a relatively small number of lucky Americans can play the system and make tons of money while the masses have seen their dreams crushed and their bank accounts drained. And Clinton apparently still hasn’t learned that lesson.

Citing Women’s Rights

Last month, when asked why she accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking to Goldman Sachs, Clinton rationalized her greed as a women’s rights issue, saying: “you know, men got paid for the speeches they made. I got paid for the speeches I made.”

Her excuse captured much of what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party as it moved from its working-class roots and New Deal traditions to becoming a party that places “identity politics” ahead of a duty to fight for the common men and women of America.

Demonstrating her political cluelessness, Clinton used the serious issue of women not getting fair treatment in the workplace to justify taking her turn at the Wall Street money trough, gobbling up in one half-hour speech what it would take many American families a decade to earn.

While it’s a bit unfair to personalize the Democratic Party’s problems, Hillary and Bill Clinton have come to represent how the party is viewed by many Americans. Instead of the FDR Democrats, we have the Davos Democrats, the Wall Street Democrats, the Hollywood Democrats, the Silicon Valley Democrats, and now increasingly the Military-Industrial Complex Democrats.

To many Americans struggling to make ends meet, the national Democrats seem committed to the interests of the worldwide elites: global trade, financialization of the economy, robotization of the workplace, and endless war against endless enemies.

Now, the national Democrats are clambering onto the bandwagon for a costly and dangerous New Cold War with nuclear-armed Russia. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish their foreign policy from that of neoconservatives, although these Democrats view themselves as liberal interventionists citing humanitarian impulses to justify the endless slaughter.

Earlier this year, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found only 28 percent of Americans saying that the Democrats were “in touch with the concerns of most people” – an astounding result given the Democrats’ long tradition as the party of the American working class and the party’s post-Vietnam War reputation as favoring butter over guns.

Yet rather than rethink the recent policies, the Democrats prefer to fantasize about impeaching President Trump and continuing a blame-game about who – other than Hillary Clinton, her campaign and the Democratic National Committee – is responsible for Trump’s election. Of course, it’s the Russians, Russians, Russians! [...]

He's nailed it! Read the whole thing for even more about the deep roots of the problem, and the serious errors the Democrat Party are continuing to make.
     

What do you drink with your boss?

Having drinks with the boss is not a situation I've often found myself in, especially since I've been self employed. But here is some interesting advice for that scenario, which could also apply to drinking with a client or someone you want to leave with a good impression:

7 Drink Orders Guaranteed to Impress Your Boss

It’s a cardinal rule of corporate life: if the boss asks you for a drink, you say yes. Period. We don’t care if you’re a teetotaler or it’s your 20th wedding anniversary—you’re accepting that invitation. Over a few rounds of cocktails you’ll learn more about the company than you ever will in a boardroom setting, and you’ll put yourself in his or her good graces for the foreseeable future. Blow off the boss? Don’t be surprised if he or she returns the favor one day.

But there are rules for boozing with your corporate leader. No whiskeys neat, and no martinis. And definitely no cruiseliner daiquiris that will (rightfully) make you look like a less-than-serious man. Instead, select drinks that are manly and respectable, but won’t floor you in the process. If you’re not sure what those are, don’t worry. With the help of some top mixologists, we’ve compiled them all right here. And for more great drink recs, try one of these amazing spring cocktails. [...]

I was a bit surprised that the Martini was on the forbidden list. Isn't that a popular one for businessmen? I think the point is not to come across as a lush or a boozer, and the martini might be a bit strong? But they recommend the Manhattan cocktail, and that can be very potent.

This advice also seems to be for men. And perhaps a bit old fashioned. But perhaps that's the best way to behave when drinking with the boss? ;-)

Read the whole thing for the list of drinks, pics, and embedded links.