A couple more notes from the Smithsonian Magazine article about the 1918 flu: [Click] In Haskell County, Kansas, where it seems to have originated, people and hogs lived in close proximity, and many migratory waterfowl passed through—just like southern China, where new strains of flu arise today. And Woodrow Wilson was evidently afflicted by the flu rather than by a minor stroke at the Versailles Peace Conference—quite possibly permitting the vindictiveness of the resulting peace treaty and ultimately causing WWII.
Here’s one I posted a link to yesterday, Cat. [Click] It looks at some of the same data rather differently, and confirms mitigation strategies that worked in 1918 and are working now.
Via politicalwire.com: “Acting Brazil ambassador Nestor Forster, who sat at President Trump’s table Saturday night during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the embassy said late Friday,” the Washington Post reports. “Forster is the third person who visited the president’s South Florida resort last weekend to test positive for the virus.”
I wonder if they're actually *contracting* the virus AT Mar-a-Lago? His properties have never been noted for cleanliness - bedbugs, etc., kitchen violations and so on. My son and I were just discussing his insistence on holding rallies and shaking hands. Could somebody explain to him that he may be killing off his own voters?
By contrast, in his weekly video for his fans, Engelbert demonstrated simple sanitary precautions and how to put on a surgical mask correctly. He also apologized but said firmly that he has been advised not to shake hands with, much less hug, his fans until further notice. He is clearly concerned not only for his own health but for that of his fans and audience members.
In China, the number of new coronavirus cases brought to the mainland from overseas has exceeded the number of locally transmitted infections, for the first time.
This occurred on Friday, data from the National Health Commission showed.
Mainland China had 11 new confirmed cases on Friday, up from eight cases a day earlier, but only four of those, all in Hubei province, were locally transmitted.
The other seven – four in Shanghai, one Beijing and two in Gansu – came from travellers coming into China from Italy, the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Let me guess: it’s akin to what happened to Howard and Bernie...Democrats eat their own, valuing their power centers above the wisdom of the people and give too much leeway to people with money. Am I close?
I'm just a few paragraphs in, but here's something to chew over:
In one telling, this cycle’s Democratic field was composed of progressives, led by Bernie Sanders, and moderates, led by Joe Biden, with Elizabeth Warren offering herself up as an alternative to both while positioning herself well to the left of Biden and slightly to the right of Sanders. This strategy arguably wound up making her less acceptable to progressives and moderates alike. Jill Lawrence offered a variation on this theory in USA Today, arguing that Warren lost voters who were tired of disruptiveness to Biden while voters who wanted disruption flocked to Sanders.
No, you aren't close, listener. Look in your in-box in a little while. When the Atlantic tells me I have read my allotted four articles, all I have to do is exit the browser, start it up again, and it is reset to four free articles. I don't even have to restart the browser or used a different one. (Mostly I use Firefox.)
Similarly, Matt Yglesias split up the Democratic coalition between working-class, “beer track” Democrats, and richer, “wine track” Democrats. He argued that the candidates with the most working-class appeal, Biden and Sanders, competed for the beer-track vote, while the candidates who drew wine-track voters––Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren––were competing three ways for a much smaller cohort. Note that there is a long history of liberal Massachusetts senators running for president and failing to connect with the working class. Warren has joined a club with John Kerry, Paul Tsongas, and Edward Kennedy in it.
Unwillingness to state whether she was in favor of a health care plan or, if she was, how she would pay for it Later, when Warren declared that she would not even pursue Medicare for All until year three of her presidency, voters who opposed it were still worried, while those who favored it doubted her commitment.
Went way overboard on wokeness, to the point that the author states with distaste: Warren declared, during an appearance in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that a particular transgender youth she met on the campaign trail would interview her eventual choice for secretary of education and exercise veto power over the selection. “Only if this person believes our secretary of education nominee is committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone,” Warren pledged, “will that person actually be advanced.” That’s a patronizing stunt, not respectful outreach. We’re talking about a 9-year-old! Imagine the typical Democrat’s reaction if Trump plucked a Boy Scout from the crowd at a rally and declared to applause that the child would have veto power over the next secretary of defense.
Similarly, her ultra-PC word choice tended to turn off the man in the street, especially among black and hispanic voters whom, the author notes, the Democratic Party needs.
The author starts the section on sexism by siting several pols and studies showing that Democrats are considerably more willing to vote for female candidates than are Republicans and that, moreover, Democratic female candidates "suffer no discernable disparities in fundraising, vote share or probability of victory" when compared with male candidates.
Moreover, Warren has twice defeated male opponents in Massachusetts Senate races, first an incumbant and then a challenger. Nonetheless:
Some empirical evidence suggests that sexism may have cost Warren... some votes. Using the hostile sexism battery, a scale developed by social psychologists, the researchers Brian Schaffner and Sam Luks found last July that “among the least sexist voters, Biden and Warren are neck-and-neck; among the most sexist Democratic primary voters, Biden is preferred by as much as a four-to-one margin.”
In a study conducted by the progressive think tank Data for Progress, Warren received little to no support from the roughly one-third of the Democratic primary electorate that does not reject premises like women are too easily offended, most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them, and women seek to gain power by getting control over men. (The studies would tell us more about the net effect on electability if they included analogous questions about male candidates. For example, what percentage of Democratic primary voters agree that men fail to appreciate all that women do for them? And are they much less likely to support male candidates?)
In other words,such data are somewhat wobbly and unreliable. What about actual votes? The author looks at Warren's home state first.
So far, the best data we have about actual votes comes from exit polls, including the Super Tuesday outcome that most surprised me: Warren’s third-place finish in her home state. Massachusetts voters have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to elect a woman president: They preferred Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama in 2008, they preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders in 2016, and Clinton bested Trump in Massachusetts by 30 points. Massachusetts voters have also preferred Warren in two statewide Senate races against men: She beat a male incumbent in 2012 and a male challenger in 2018.
How did Warren do among the voters who know her best? According to The New York Times, women were 56 percent of the electorate and Warren lost women to both Biden and Sanders. In her best demographic, white female college graduates, she barely bested Biden, winning 33 percent to his 31 percent. Among white females who hadn’t graduated from college, she won 15 percent, just four points better than Mike Bloomberg. Biden won 44 percent. At least in Massachusetts, the hypothesis that sexism cost Warren a win seems very weak.
In Texas, where 53 percent of the Democratic primary electorate was female, Biden got 34 percent of the female vote, Sanders got 30 percent, and Warren got just 13 percent, tying with Bloomberg. Although Warren lost every age cohort, she did much worse with the youngest voters, up to age 24, than with voters between 25 and 64, the opposite of what one might expect if traditional views about gender were behind her struggles. In California, which has had two female senators for more than three decades, and where Clinton handily beat Obama in 2008, Warren finished a distant third among women voters. In Virginia, where 57 percent of the primary electorate was female, just 11 percent of women voted for Warren.
Nothing in these numbers substantiates the conclusion that sexism played a conclusive or even a major role in Warren’s loss, and the fact that she performed so poorly among women, who were a majority of the electorate, clashes with intuitions about what a loss due to sexism would look like. As Matt Yglesias observed, Warren did better with college-educated white men than with working-class women. “While no candidate wins any demographic universally, Warren didn’t come close with women. The stronger predictor of who supported her and who didn’t was education, not gender.”
Garbled reply: "When the Atlantic tells me I have read my allotted four articles, all I have to do is exit the browser, start it up again, and it is reset to four free articles. I don't even have to restart the browser or used a different one. (Mostly I use Firefox.)"
Clarified reply: "When the Atlantic tells me I have read my allotted four articles, all I have to do is exit the page, open it up again, and it is reset to four free articles. I don't even have to restart the browser or used a different one. (Mostly I use Firefox.)"
I thought one could choose among browsers on a cell phone; but I have never tried using the web with my cell phone, although I think it is possible.
The author discusses the murky concept of metasexism. Did voters, including women, who would themselves feel comfortable with a female president fail to vote for her out of fear that other voters would not do so? To what extent do apprehensions about sexism actually create or foster sexism? Further, is it true that the media were prejudiced against Warren because of her gender?
“Getting people to understand that sexism is a factor could inadvertently make them less willing to vote for a woman,” Thomson DeVeaux of 538 wrote, capturing the ouroboros-like quality of this hypothesis. “It’s a weird, self-defeating conundrum. You get people to accept that sexism in politics is real and it shakes their confidence in whether women can win.” After Warren dropped out, the advocacy group UltraViolet Action stated, “It is clear that there is a glass ceiling held firmly in place for women by a media who relentlessly shape voters’ perceptions of who is electable through a deeply sexist lens. In a year in which primary voters’ top concerns is electability—the media has had a massive impact on how voters perceived the candidates—and when Warren was on the top of the polls, the main narrative driven by the media was that she was not electable.”
I’m of two minds about this theory. Democratic voters this cycle said electability was very important to them, and it is plausible that many of those voters worried that it would be harder to beat Trump with a woman because, rightly or wrongly, they perceive the electorate as sexist.
But the description of the news media put forth by many Warren supporters, wherein she was treated worse than other candidates, questioned more about electability, and disadvantaged overall, seems dubious to me. As best I can tell, Warren was the favorite candidate of journalists, endorsed by The New York Times (along with Klobuchar), The Des Moines Register, The Austin Chronicle, and The Boston Globe. Commentators have expressed grave doubts about the electability of Sanders at least as frequently as Warren, and when I look at the voters Warren won, they overlap a great deal with the demographics of people who are the heaviest consumers of political media, whereas the voter demographics she lost overlap with demographics that consume much less political media. If constant questions about electability from the media caused her loss, how to explain that?
Given that Warren finished a distant third even among women in every significant Super Tuesday state, the notion that she would’ve won but for sexism is highly implausible, even if sexism hurt her candidacy on the margins.
Going forward, Democrats should stop worrying that nominating a woman would cost them elections. No definitive evidence shows that sexism is a significant drag on female presidential candidates. When Warren or a candidate like her runs again, her success is far more likely to turn on her ability to differentiate herself from rivals, the support that she attracts from the working class and people who didn’t attend college, and avoidance of the kind of pandering that alienates many Americans. Given that none of the remaining contenders for the White House will serve more than one term, focusing on those missteps rather than sexism gives Warren her best shot at winning in 2024.
Alan, it is not only possible but common (dare I say ubiquitous?) to surf the web on one's smart phone. I know you can choose Safari or Google on an iPad, but have no idear if that can be done on a phone.
Alan, the funny thing is that border crossing guards would be super easy in Vermont. We are bordered on the north by Canada, so those crossings are already covered. We are bordered on the east by the Connecticut River so most of those crossings involve metal bridges. We are bordered on the West by Lake Champlain and the Hudson River, so again bridges and even ferries are involved. It would only be a little work at the short (42mi) border with Massachusetts, and where the two interstates cross through...I91 into MA and I89 into NH.
No offense intended, but I keep thinking of the guard post at the entrance to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, as portrayed in the movie version of The Mouse That Roared--albeit with rather different costumes.
Yup! I actually heard this from a doctor's spouse this week. If you think your cold or virus is heading for your lungs, put a zinc lozenge near the back of your mouth and lie down. The zinc helps it not go to the lungs. Of course, good luck finding any on shelves right now. However! Food Science of Vermont (highly respected!) makes them and I found some here:
As of this afternoon Bay State Medical Center, one of the two big hospitals here in Springfield, is treating twenty-four patients who are suspected of having Covid 19, ; though, last I heard, the diagnosis hadn't been confirmed. That's cutting too close to home for comfort!
Decidedly too close, and too many, for comfort. We seem to have a big comfort zone at this time, but it will certainly shrink. I will wear a mask to my printing class on Tuesday primarily as a courtesy to others because I cough and sneeze once in a while, and am old enough to be considered at high risk (but I lack any comorbidities).
My son and I just got back from a late-night grocery run figuring there would be fewer people. NO ground meat, NO chicken at all, NO tissues, NO toilet paper, NO disposable gloves. We were disappointed about the meat,but don't need the other things.
My first thought was that it was odd about the ground meat; but it occurred to me that I have lately seen people buying big packages of hamburger at the grocery stores. Which reminds me, I haven't made Swiss steak for years and years--Miyoko doesn't care for beef, and I don't eat much of it any more. It isn't easy to find chuck roast any more--people seem too fancy for that these days; but it doesn't make sense to use fancier cuts of beef for Swiss steak.
E. J. Dionne Jr.: Sanders and Biden need each other. Here’s how they can make peace. [Click] Mr. Dionne may have a point, but Joe and his supporters have to meet me half way. So far they have never shown any interest whatsoever in my vote or what I think should be done for the good of the country. Joe has made a career of (IMO) disastrous actions. I will grant that he pushed Obama into supporting gay equality, but I can’t think of anything else to commend him for. It is not enough for Joe to argue that he isn’t as bad as Trump—the same could be said of a bump on a log. Title [Click]
Notes on the last thread!
ReplyDeleteNow, let’s see if I have this right. Guesses as to when the giant Snowpile at the end of my driveway will melt are:
Bill = April 1st
Catreona = May 5th
Renee = May 17
Susan = June 5
Alan = First Day of Summer
Did I miss anyone’s guess?
puddle?
Cat, I tried to email you twice, but it bounces.
ReplyDeleteI'll send a copy of the error message to your FB Messenger page.
Thanks, Listener. Before giving up on me altogether, try kethompson1964(at)gmail(dot)com.
DeleteCat--yes, that is a good video. I kicked in a little.
ReplyDeleteA couple more notes from the Smithsonian Magazine article about the 1918 flu: [Click] In Haskell County, Kansas, where it seems to have originated, people and hogs lived in close proximity, and many migratory waterfowl passed through—just like southern China, where new strains of flu arise today. And Woodrow Wilson was evidently afflicted by the flu rather than by a minor stroke at the Versailles Peace Conference—quite possibly permitting the vindictiveness of the resulting peace treaty and ultimately causing WWII.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me, I need to go back and read that article.
DeleteHere's one from Wired that juxtaposes Covid 19 and the Spanish Flu: Covid-19 Is Nothing Like the Spanish Flu - Click
Here’s one I posted a link to yesterday, Cat. [Click] It looks at some of the same data rather differently, and confirms mitigation strategies that worked in 1918 and are working now.
DeleteVia politicalwire.com:
ReplyDelete“Acting Brazil ambassador Nestor Forster, who sat at President Trump’s table Saturday night during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the embassy said late Friday,” the Washington Post reports.
“Forster is the third person who visited the president’s South Florida resort last weekend to test positive for the virus.”
Closer and closer…
I wonder if they're actually *contracting* the virus AT Mar-a-Lago? His properties have never been noted for cleanliness - bedbugs, etc., kitchen violations and so on. My son and I were just discussing his insistence on holding rallies and shaking hands. Could somebody explain to him that he may be killing off his own voters?
Delete"Never interfere when your enemy is making a mistake."
Delete--Napoleon
By contrast, in his weekly video for his fans, Engelbert demonstrated simple sanitary precautions and how to put on a surgical mask correctly. He also apologized but said firmly that he has been advised not to shake hands with, much less hug, his fans until further notice. He is clearly concerned not only for his own health but for that of his fans and audience members.
Delete
ReplyDeleteBoris Johnson Spurns Mass Closures [Click]
Well, everybody knows he's an idiot.
DeleteFrom The Guardian:
ReplyDeleteIn China, the number of new coronavirus cases brought to the mainland from overseas has exceeded the number of locally transmitted infections, for the first time.
This occurred on Friday, data from the National Health Commission showed.
Mainland China had 11 new confirmed cases on Friday, up from eight cases a day earlier, but only four of those, all in Hubei province, were locally transmitted.
The other seven – four in Shanghai, one Beijing and two in Gansu – came from travellers coming into China from Italy, the United States and Saudi Arabia.
'He's an idiot': critics say Trump has failed the US in this test of reassurance [Click] Oh, you noticed?
ReplyDeleteLMAO Alan.
DeleteWhy Elizabeth Warren Lost [Click] “The failure of Warren’s campaign merits a nuanced discussion that goes beyond sexism.”
ReplyDeleteAtlantic won’t let me read it.
DeleteLet me guess: it’s akin to what happened to Howard and Bernie...Democrats eat their own, valuing their power centers above the wisdom of the people and give too much leeway to people with money. Am I close?
I'm just a few paragraphs in, but here's something to chew over:
DeleteIn one telling, this cycle’s Democratic field was composed of progressives, led by Bernie Sanders, and moderates, led by Joe Biden, with Elizabeth Warren offering herself up as an alternative to both while positioning herself well to the left of Biden and slightly to the right of Sanders. This strategy arguably wound up making her less acceptable to progressives and moderates alike. Jill Lawrence offered a variation on this theory in USA Today, arguing that Warren lost voters who were tired of disruptiveness to Biden while voters who wanted disruption flocked to Sanders.
No, you aren't close, listener. Look in your in-box in a little while. When the Atlantic tells me I have read my allotted four articles, all I have to do is exit the browser, start it up again, and it is reset to four free articles. I don't even have to restart the browser or used a different one. (Mostly I use Firefox.)
DeleteSimilarly, Matt Yglesias split up the Democratic coalition between working-class, “beer track” Democrats, and richer, “wine track” Democrats. He argued that the candidates with the most working-class appeal, Biden and Sanders, competed for the beer-track vote, while the candidates who drew wine-track voters––Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren––were competing three ways for a much smaller cohort. Note that there is a long history of liberal Massachusetts senators running for president and failing to connect with the working class. Warren has joined a club with John Kerry, Paul Tsongas, and Edward Kennedy in it.
DeleteI was using my phone.
DeleteFrom the article
DeletePloints that hurt Warren:
Unwillingness to state whether she was in favor of a health care plan or, if she was, how she would pay for it
Later, when Warren declared that she would not even pursue Medicare for All until year three of her presidency, voters who opposed it were still worried, while those who favored it doubted her commitment.
Went way overboard on wokeness, to the point that the author states with distaste:
Warren declared, during an appearance in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that a particular transgender youth she met on the campaign trail would interview her eventual choice for secretary of education and exercise veto power over the selection. “Only if this person believes our secretary of education nominee is committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone,” Warren pledged, “will that person actually be advanced.” That’s a patronizing stunt, not respectful outreach. We’re talking about a 9-year-old! Imagine the typical Democrat’s reaction if Trump plucked a Boy Scout from the crowd at a rally and declared to applause that the child would have veto power over the next secretary of defense.
Similarly, her ultra-PC word choice tended to turn off the man in the street, especially among black and hispanic voters whom, the author notes, the Democratic Party needs.
The author starts the section on sexism by siting several pols and studies showing that Democrats are considerably more willing to vote for female candidates than are Republicans and that, moreover, Democratic female candidates "suffer no discernable disparities in fundraising, vote share or probability of victory" when compared with male candidates.
DeleteMoreover, Warren has twice defeated male opponents in Massachusetts Senate races, first an incumbant and then a challenger. Nonetheless:
Some empirical evidence suggests that sexism may have cost Warren... some votes. Using the hostile sexism battery, a scale developed by social psychologists, the researchers Brian Schaffner and Sam Luks found last July that “among the least sexist voters, Biden and Warren are neck-and-neck; among the most sexist Democratic primary voters, Biden is preferred by as much as a four-to-one margin.”
In a study conducted by the progressive think tank Data for Progress, Warren received little to no support from the roughly one-third of the Democratic primary electorate that does not reject premises like women are too easily offended, most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them, and women seek to gain power by getting control over men. (The studies would tell us more about the net effect on electability if they included analogous questions about male candidates. For example, what percentage of Democratic primary voters agree that men fail to appreciate all that women do for them? And are they much less likely to support male candidates?)
In other words,such data are somewhat wobbly and unreliable. What about actual votes? The author looks at Warren's home state first.
So far, the best data we have about actual votes comes from exit polls, including the Super Tuesday outcome that most surprised me: Warren’s third-place finish in her home state. Massachusetts voters have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to elect a woman president: They preferred Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama in 2008, they preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders in 2016, and Clinton bested Trump in Massachusetts by 30 points. Massachusetts voters have also preferred Warren in two statewide Senate races against men: She beat a male incumbent in 2012 and a male challenger in 2018.
How did Warren do among the voters who know her best? According to The New York Times, women were 56 percent of the electorate and Warren lost women to both Biden and Sanders. In her best demographic, white female college graduates, she barely bested Biden, winning 33 percent to his 31 percent. Among white females who hadn’t graduated from college, she won 15 percent, just four points better than Mike Bloomberg. Biden won 44 percent. At least in Massachusetts, the hypothesis that sexism cost Warren a win seems very weak.
What about elsewhere?
DeleteIn Texas, where 53 percent of the Democratic primary electorate was female, Biden got 34 percent of the female vote, Sanders got 30 percent, and Warren got just 13 percent, tying with Bloomberg. Although Warren lost every age cohort, she did much worse with the youngest voters, up to age 24, than with voters between 25 and 64, the opposite of what one might expect if traditional views about gender were behind her struggles. In California, which has had two female senators for more than three decades, and where Clinton handily beat Obama in 2008, Warren finished a distant third among women voters. In Virginia, where 57 percent of the primary electorate was female, just 11 percent of women voted for Warren.
Nothing in these numbers substantiates the conclusion that sexism played a conclusive or even a major role in Warren’s loss, and the fact that she performed so poorly among women, who were a majority of the electorate, clashes with intuitions about what a loss due to sexism would look like. As Matt Yglesias observed, Warren did better with college-educated white men than with working-class women. “While no candidate wins any demographic universally, Warren didn’t come close with women. The stronger predictor of who supported her and who didn’t was education, not gender.”
Garbled reply:
Delete"When the Atlantic tells me I have read my allotted four articles, all I have to do is exit the browser, start it up again, and it is reset to four free articles. I don't even have to restart the browser or used a different one. (Mostly I use Firefox.)"
Clarified reply:
"When the Atlantic tells me I have read my allotted four articles, all I have to do is exit the page, open it up again, and it is reset to four free articles. I don't even have to restart the browser or used a different one. (Mostly I use Firefox.)"
I thought one could choose among browsers on a cell phone; but I have never tried using the web with my cell phone, although I think it is possible.
The author discusses the murky concept of metasexism. Did voters, including women, who would themselves feel comfortable with a female president fail to vote for her out of fear that other voters would not do so? To what extent do apprehensions about sexism actually create or foster sexism? Further, is it true that the media were prejudiced against Warren because of her gender?
Delete“Getting people to understand that sexism is a factor could inadvertently make them less willing to vote for a woman,” Thomson DeVeaux of 538 wrote, capturing the ouroboros-like quality of this hypothesis. “It’s a weird, self-defeating conundrum. You get people to accept that sexism in politics is real and it shakes their confidence in whether women can win.” After Warren dropped out, the advocacy group UltraViolet Action stated, “It is clear that there is a glass ceiling held firmly in place for women by a media who relentlessly shape voters’ perceptions of who is electable through a deeply sexist lens. In a year in which primary voters’ top concerns is electability—the media has had a massive impact on how voters perceived the candidates—and when Warren was on the top of the polls, the main narrative driven by the media was that she was not electable.”
I’m of two minds about this theory. Democratic voters this cycle said electability was very important to them, and it is plausible that many of those voters worried that it would be harder to beat Trump with a woman because, rightly or wrongly, they perceive the electorate as sexist.
But the description of the news media put forth by many Warren supporters, wherein she was treated worse than other candidates, questioned more about electability, and disadvantaged overall, seems dubious to me. As best I can tell, Warren was the favorite candidate of journalists, endorsed by The New York Times (along with Klobuchar), The Des Moines Register, The Austin Chronicle, and The Boston Globe. Commentators have expressed grave doubts about the electability of Sanders at least as frequently as Warren, and when I look at the voters Warren won, they overlap a great deal with the demographics of people who are the heaviest consumers of political media, whereas the voter demographics she lost overlap with demographics that consume much less political media. If constant questions about electability from the media caused her loss, how to explain that?
The author concludes:
DeleteGiven that Warren finished a distant third even among women in every significant Super Tuesday state, the notion that she would’ve won but for sexism is highly implausible, even if sexism hurt her candidacy on the margins.
Going forward, Democrats should stop worrying that nominating a woman would cost them elections. No definitive evidence shows that sexism is a significant drag on female presidential candidates. When Warren or a candidate like her runs again, her success is far more likely to turn on her ability to differentiate herself from rivals, the support that she attracts from the working class and people who didn’t attend college, and avoidance of the kind of pandering that alienates many Americans. Given that none of the remaining contenders for the White House will serve more than one term, focusing on those missteps rather than sexism gives Warren her best shot at winning in 2024.
Alan, it is not only possible but common (dare I say ubiquitous?) to surf the web on one's smart phone. I know you can choose Safari or Google on an iPad, but have no idear if that can be done on a phone.
DeleteAlan, the funny thing is that border crossing guards would be super easy in Vermont. We are bordered on the north by Canada, so those crossings are already covered. We are bordered on the east by the Connecticut River so most of those crossings involve metal bridges. We are bordered on the West by Lake Champlain and the Hudson River, so again bridges and even ferries are involved. It would only be a little work at the short (42mi) border with Massachusetts, and where the two interstates cross through...I91 into MA and I89 into NH.
ReplyDeleteNo offense intended, but I keep thinking of the guard post at the entrance to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, as portrayed in the movie version of The Mouse That Roared--albeit with rather different costumes.
DeleteBTW An e-mail I got from Rite Aid mentioned that as well as Vitamin C, zinc is helpful for warding off viruses.
ReplyDeleteAh, should we then shelter under galvanized iron roofs? [he ducks]
DeleteHardy har har. *grin*
DeleteActually, when I mentioned it to Dad he observed that I'll become galvanized.
Yup! I actually heard this from a doctor's spouse this week. If you think your cold or virus is heading for your lungs, put a zinc lozenge near the back of your mouth and lie down. The zinc helps it not go to the lungs. Of course, good luck finding any on shelves right now. However! Food Science of Vermont (highly respected!) makes them and I found some here:
DeleteFood Science of Vermont Zinc Lozenges:
https://www.austinmedical.com/zinclozenge60.html
Putting a lozenge in the back of one's mouth and lying down sounds like a formula for choking on it. Just sayin'.
DeleteThat was my thought too.
DeleteRite Aid has zinc tablets in stock. The brand I prefer, Nature Made, seems to be on sale.
More coronavirus cases popping up in San Francisco Bay Area [Click]
ReplyDeleteSan Francisco closing libraries, indoor recreation centers to act as temporary childcare centers [Click] Hard for me to see how this is better than keeping the kids in school. Maybe longer hours?
Why Taiwan’s COVID-19 death rate is so low. [Click] They learned from the SARS epidemic, and were fully prepared.
It looks like the number of cases in the San Francisco Bay Area is about to increase dramatically.
DeleteAs of this afternoon Bay State Medical Center, one of the two big hospitals here in Springfield, is treating twenty-four patients who are suspected of having Covid 19, ; though, last I heard, the diagnosis hadn't been confirmed. That's cutting too close to home for comfort!
DeleteDecidedly too close, and too many, for comfort. We seem to have a big comfort zone at this time, but it will certainly shrink. I will wear a mask to my printing class on Tuesday primarily as a courtesy to others because I cough and sneeze once in a while, and am old enough to be considered at high risk (but I lack any comorbidities).
DeleteMy son and I just got back from a late-night grocery run figuring there would be fewer people. NO ground meat, NO chicken at all, NO tissues, NO toilet paper, NO disposable gloves. We were disappointed about the meat,but don't need the other things.
ReplyDeleteMy first thought was that it was odd about the ground meat; but it occurred to me that I have lately seen people buying big packages of hamburger at the grocery stores. Which reminds me, I haven't made Swiss steak for years and years--Miyoko doesn't care for beef, and I don't eat much of it any more. It isn't easy to find chuck roast any more--people seem too fancy for that these days; but it doesn't make sense to use fancier cuts of beef for Swiss steak.
DeleteE. J. Dionne Jr.: Sanders and Biden need each other. Here’s how they can make peace. [Click] Mr. Dionne may have a point, but Joe and his supporters have to meet me half way. So far they have never shown any interest whatsoever in my vote or what I think should be done for the good of the country. Joe has made a career of (IMO) disastrous actions. I will grant that he pushed Obama into supporting gay equality, but I can’t think of anything else to commend him for. It is not enough for Joe to argue that he isn’t as bad as Trump—the same could be said of a bump on a log.
ReplyDeleteTitle [Click]