Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 56

Nashville Bomber

There doesn't seem to be any sort of motive. He worked in IT and might have had a thing against AT&T? Not sure. And he didn't seem to want to hurt anyone (announcements made to get people out of the area). Kinda odd, huh?
Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

Hi Odd Comment Spammers

For all you real readers out there, quite a few comments are "borderline understandable" compliments wrapped in the kind of gibberish we're all used to coming from our president. Nothing needs to make real sense as long as the general compliment is there (already written about Trump as flarf, as an algorithm that skims the most popular comments in a thread and, even if they're ideologically opposed, throws them into one sentence). That being said, don't click on their info as it's probably spam (and who knows, malware), but I am leaving it up as it feels right for this age (again, see how our president speaks, how the GOP launches a million ideas at once, all just denial of services attack on sense, and also see conspiracists). 
Let me know if you think different. 
Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

Vaccinations

The fact that we got a medical cure for the covid virus this soon after the Chinese let the world know its genetic makeup, is something of a testament to how far we've come to understanding disease. Having read about the past and how little they knew, and how they blamed random things or habits or actions, it shows how far we've come. Modern science truly is an amazing thing. [1]
And yet, our reaction to what was a straight forward virus that we knew how to control. Hell, read this article and see how, if you were going to go against the lockdowns, there was another possible reaction than "business as normal". [2] Note how the article points to super spreader events being the main way the virus spreads (Japan never had a lockdown but managed it well). Of course, when you get to US levels of covid then all is lost. 
But how did we get to such high levels of disconnect between the reality of the virus and people fears and denials about it?
Like Climate Change, we've come to realize that the technical knowledge is not the same as the political and human knowledge that exists out there [3]. And, more than that, with a carnival barker in charge [4]we know see how actual knowledge can be short circuited by animal fears. But why? And why only in Western Countries (well, Brazil and to some extent India also fucked up, the former way more than the latter)? 
Education seems to be one explanation I hear a lot [5] but I don't see that happening. 
What I see is a sick society with sick people in power, holding on to power (like in CC and, apparently with Covid) and needing the economy to work a certain way. Combine that with our grifter-rewarding system, and how the best way to sell anything, and we're nothing if not an overrated bazaar, is through fear and you see how we couldn't have had any other reaction. 
But fear could have sold a sane reaction to covid, you say. Well, there is where the sickness comes in. It really does work with structural powers as well as the myths that many here rely on. Much of this started with Reagan and his ilk, his playing to old racism and other tribal instincts, and you see how we're paying the price today and will continue paying the price. 
Take, for example, this case about how many nurses, college educated etc, are refusing the vaccine. 

A case where being college educated and coming face to face with the virus still don't trust the vaccine. Of course, I didn't trust it at first because Trump, but seeing the (layman's levels) of science behind it held allay my fears. 
And in that above thread, there's this anecdote:

Showing once again, there is a trust issue here in the states. Tribally based (Reagan and his bat-shit insane talk about how "I'm from the gov and I'm here to help" is bad), sure, but there's the fraying of our social fabric that comes from increased inequality (and I would like to see what the covid response is, lost trust in gov vs inequality [6])

And from that stems the calculus of fearing the side effects of the vaccine more than the actual disease. So, yeah, a lot can be changed to combat this. Certainly "some" education, but mainly building trust. So much of the liberal screaming about x or y variables when it comes to [7] covid doesn't actually help. And if you're doing this, you're actually hurting the cause and are part of the problem. [8]
Thoughts?

[1] That being said, that the US, with its super expensive health system has failed so spectacularly, and even in terms of vaccine creation has not managed to be any better than other systems, is something to chew on. That right wing lie (it's mostly lies with that idiotic lot) that we pay more for better R&D, is once more put to lie. We pay more for snake oil salesmen who peddle on fear and we still have a worse outcome for this pandemic and generally as we have worse life expectancy (flatlined and going down this far decade) than other similar countries... freedumb isn't free. 
[2] mainly the right, but look at neoliberal idiots like Gov Newsom in Cali who had a decent reaction, then opened things up and after that went to a large gathering. Same with Cuomo's initial reaction and Blasio's. They weren't as bad as Trump, but they were pretty bad. 
[3] Took a class in Columbia on this. We have the tech to very easily combat climate change, but we don't Why? The payoff is there to be seen but people just don't want to change. Is it that? Of course not. 
[4] 


[5] And during that class in Columbia I remember hearing the same thing: we get enough scientific training and we'll be fine. Naw, this is a nation in which 40%  believes that earth is 6k years old, that evolution is false and that white Jesus is coming (and thus we need apocalyptic conditions for that coming) soon. What kind of education is going to penetrate that?
[6] Not saying it's the only variable, but certainly is one variable. 
[7] I was running in the park, my mask off, and 50 feet away some lady starts screaming about my mask and how fuckig horrible I was and how there are kids on the trail. Uh, calm down lady, it's 50 feet away, on a windy day, you'll be fine. But for a moment I could imagine if some right winger faced this, they would think only idiots are taking this too seriously. After all, that screaming lady was playing into well known puritanical ruts in our nation, right? Of course, I'm not going to dismiss the entire covid reaction. even here in Seattle they took down all outdoor gyms (while allowing indoor gyms to go on, and even if you wipe those places down, outdoor is still better than indoor). When I asked about this on a Seattle site I was yelled at for not understanding things (this is while restaurants were open, which, again, more dangerous than any outdoor gym). So yeah there is some stupidity on our side, but nothing compared to the right. 

[8] And going back to the trust issue, our elites have not earned it, have they? Liberal or otherwise. 
[OT] as far as crabs in a bucket syndrome goes, read the entire thread here on a Pakistani town that makes most of the soccer balls for the world. Interesting, but of course the subject gets into how much they are paid vs how much a ball is worth. Some claiming they're happy to get those jobs (I'm sure they are) and do-gooders from the west come and take them away, when the companies just go to another country to exploit people. Fair enough, but as someone else pointed out, FIFA could regulate that all their balls are made by worker owned coops, and perhaps even spread the love a little. But no, they won't do it. Remember this is at a time when mountain ranges of $ has been handed over to financiers and bankers of our world (which they don't spend on improving the world one iota). 
Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

Be Safe.

Covid is still out there. Let's not forget how fucked up many aspects of our health care system is, especially for minorities. Try not to meet up, then... Not that this is stopping many in the fam, and from what I'm seeing, around the country. Suppose if you keep it small that's fine. Well, the world is still rough and, based on what I'm seeing, 2021 will be little respite from what has happened, even though the vaccine will make it chiller than we thought.
Ethiopia is burning, war in Western Sahara (nvm the official statements and how worthless our MSM is as they only parrot the official statements, but there's an actual fucking war breaking out and no one is paying attention)and Modi helps push Caste atrocities in India...  Meanwhile more migrants have died off the coast of Tunisia. This seems to be a result of a non-sea worthy vessel, and unlike the 15,000 or so dead migrants, not European fault (not directly at least). So what's up with the most successful of the Arab spring countries? Well, things haven't been that great. And though many felt that they rose for a reason but now things are less safe and that corruption is worse than ever. Hence the reason people are fleeing. Economic pain. 
Sigh. Add Climate Change on top of these and I think we can only assume each year will have a higher chance of being worse than the previous. We'll see. Be safe. 
Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

Cool Finding

Cool finding in Nature magazine. (Link to NGeo) Here we find that the Caribbean had two waves of people (though if they only looked at 2 major sites, no matter how large, I sense that's not a great sample? hopefully more to come). One was an original set, and another when invaders from South America (it appears there was little mixing, hence the theory that they were invaders). I suppose Caribbean was off, in that the Arawaks were the invaders, rather than vice versa. Food for thought. Stay safe out there.

 

Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

Police Control or Lack of it.

A tweet, but the article points to the problem many of us saw in our own cities: the impunity with which cops can act. Apparently there is no civilian control and even police chiefs don't have any control (vs union bosses). That many police departments apparently are brothers-in-arms with the far right, only serves to show how dangerous this situation is. See this, where the police are actually bear maced and windows are broken, but guess how the police didn't react? Like they react to all BLM protests. Not a surprise, but MSM never covers that. What next indeed.

 

Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

The Vaccine is Here. But Still be careful out there.

The fact that we have a vaccine, and this quickly, should be considered nothing less than a time to celebrate the distance science has come to bring something so quickly to us. 
If only. UK is now shut off from the world (a new strain, more infectious but not yet known if it's more deadly) [1] as the incompetence of the west is still there for the world to see. In general this makes the usual comparisons that many in the center like to make vis a vis Europe beyond useless. Yeah sure we're doing better than a few (usually places with universal healthcare) EU countries, but what does that mean? They fucked up too. Asian countries have also kicked the ass of this virus and it was by a bare minimum competency. Something lacking in most countries here, and I'm still not sure why exactly. [2]
Again, there's been a host of variables that have mattered, such as age of the population, access to healthcare etc etc, but the biggest one is taking it seriously and having the population of said countries taking it seriously. But there is something else that hasn't been factored in, and that, I think, is social cohesion. This comes across in things like trust in government and so forth (and thus actually listening to mask mandates etc) but it's other things. Like how much do you care that your fellow citizen might die? I sense there's something else driving many people in these countries and it's a moth to light desire that neoliberalism creates in the people of a nation. [3]

If get rich or die trying is the national motto and someone dares to cut off your money supply, then of course you'll balk. Better to fight that and play Russian roulette with a virus than fall behind. I get it, I really do. Once again, the bulk of the blame falls on our leaders. Thoughts? [4]
[1] Apparently, with how the virus works, and how the vaccine works, these strains will not be different enough, or the part that the vaccine attacks will not be different enough to make the vaccine ineffective. I imagine that's a probability thing so we'll see. Fingers crossed for now.
[2] Those of you sad that the US isn't #1, don't worry, we're passing the EU and I'm sure we'll soon crush them. 
[3] Note that this has happened in many Euro countries where even their normal safety nets have been chipped away at (see the NHS in the UK etc etc), or not been provided to the darker people there etc. And sure, Asian countries like S.Korea are capitalistic like the west, but they have different functions, like their leaders seeming to care about who dies (and quite possibly they lucked out that the previous right wing nutter wasn't in charge when the virus came along). 
[4] And yea, sure, the Dems are better, I agree, but I do love that right now there seems to be such consternation over a measly 600$ being sent to people in need when, with the flick of a button, hundreds of billions (and trillions) of corporate debt was wiped out and also pumped back into the stock market. Yep, socialism for the rich and hard capitalism for the poor, as it was so shall it be. I mean, I get it, I just expected a little more of an outcry about all this. 
Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

On the Middle Road Dems

Keep trying to GOTV for GA and the Dems there. Those two will be pivotal. Not only that, but the dems really need to get their shit together, the ones busy punching the right (nevermind the middle road GOPers who are worse). See this for more on Dem elites.  This kind of corruption shows that Trump and his high level corruption was only a symptom. If it continues and gov continues to be ineffective, then we're gonna see an even worse demagogue than Trump rise up. Or a system failure. Sigh, so what I said before, that after the votes the real work starts? Yeah, that matters. Wouldn't know it from the liberal sites I used to go to though.

Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

On the 2020 Election

Not a parsing of what happened, though I will get to that soon enough. Much of the media will have you looking at either counties or states as red or blue or on the edge, when in reality, this is a nationwide issue (urban/rural a more useful split) that means Cali has more Trump voters than most "red" states. Seriously, the electoral college needs to go and I don't even know if that means more GOPers will vote. So mainly posting this map from xkcd because it's really fucking helpful in seeing where the voters are over the county and state maps you usually see. 

Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.

Drone On

 An interesting, but ultimately hagiographic (and bordering on outright propaganda at times) piece here in the New Yorker. [1] I mean, most of our MSM is filled with courtiers, and even when Trump hit them on the nose, you could see them still begging for scraps of compliments from him and chomping at the bit to call him presidential [2].
But that someone can write something like this, which has a few good views,tbf, like the fact that the results after Raqqa and after Aleppo (the latter ostensibly fought with no laws being followed) were much the same, seems to say something about our way of warring, but that it doesn't even bother to take apart official statements, sees things that have just happened wrongly, is a huge disappointment. It also takes officials' statements as facts as well as their intentions. Lol. Forever courtiers and no analysis. [4]
Many are happy trump is gone, and sure it's one less thing to worry about, but given how the GOP is now trying their hardest not to give $ to poor people who need it, and climate change (nvm the drone reaction to people in the path of CC) etc, we truly are facing a crisis.

[1] OT: been thinking about the centrists like Matty Yglesias who think anyone who brings up war drones etc now but were quite so loud in the Trump years, are being mendacious. First: no. Many of us did bring it up (the Trump years were certainly more brutal to many), but given Trump's (evil-genius) of denial of services attack on the left by having so many fronts to fight one couldn't actually fight them all effectively (or you had to pick one and go with it). But, even putting that aside, plenty pointed out that the drones were killing way more civilians than Obama ever did but there were no takers to pump that out into the ether (why the media was willing to listen to the left on this during Obama's term but not this time is probably because Trump did play them like trained dogs and knew how to make a scandal every hour so that they couldn't concentrate, unfortunately.Which brings me to another point: signal boosting. Was talking to my BIL about BLM and other movements (like the color revolutions in Eastern Europe or fake riots in Bolivia etc) about fake movements and real movements, about who backs them and who doesn't [3]. Of course, my easy answer is not to trust anything with a right wing touch and to trust the left wings ones, but that's me (and the evidence, tbf). But when it comes to the anti-war movement, I've seen many, too many,
 

[2] And that, like Trump's ability to mock people who once worked for him, is his one thing I liked: he knew what the media (especially the WH press wing) was, a borderline entertainment wing filled with sycophants and he treated them with the contempt they deserve. See also this piece, whereby in only March some people pined wistfully for Rudy's 9/11 touch (see also how they now treat Biden's slights versus Trump's yelling in their faces and one can only think that they truly deserve this). 
[3] This also gets into the matter of proxies and what's a group that simply gets funding from someone and a group that is created almost whole cloth from outside funding. I sense here the answer is a complexity of human nature. One must ultimately look at what it is that the group is aiming for, how real their grievances are. Outside funding can definitely keep alive a group that would otherwise wither away (and also to sow chaos, one merely needs to fund gangsters and the like, right?) and it's why insurgencies on islands are usually easier to squelch, but that means we have to talk about origins of real reasons to fight for one's rights. IMO BLM has that, the opponents of Chavez and Morales do not. They are the right and the right is morally equivalent to a virus. 
[4] This goes for almost every news site I know. Even AlJazeera, which I like, covering the plight of the Palestinians, in a doc, hardly covered what the people on the street think and plied some bs Hamas propaganda. Yeah, I'm no fan of Israel and think Gaza has every right to fight back, but even for me some of that was tripe. No analysis unfortunately. And this is why demagogues like Trump will keep winning in the future.
 Enjoyed it? Share it via email, facebook, twitter, or one of the buttons below (or through some other method you prefer). Thank you! As always, here's the tip jar. paypal.me/nlowhim Throw some change in there & help cover the costs of running this thing. You can use paypal or a credit card.