All posts by Greg Laden

The Great British Baking Show Translator

Anthropology, Language, ,

Why do we like The Great British Baking Show? It lacks a chef who’s whole shtick is to be an asshole. The judges are fair, consistent, and open, even if the White Supremacists at The Sun are annoyed when a British-born Bangladesi from Bedfordshire wins. The judging process is meant to be entertaining, educational, and encouraging, if sometimes very baudy. The contestants reflect interesting diversity in both their own backgrounds and their diverse approaches to cooking. There is interesting and evolving interaction between the people on the show. We like the tent and the challenges it creates, especially in some seasons.

And of course, many of us watch the show to see the crashes.

Without further ado, a glossary. Add more to the comments if you’ve got em. Continue reading The Great British Baking Show Translator →

COP26

Climate Change, , ,

Conference of The Parties 26 is a climate summit being held in Glasgow. This is widely called the “last best chance” to address climate change.

Commentary and excellent perspective by Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (Amazon associates link*) interviewed on CNN:

Notice Mann’s comment on Russia (and Saudi Arabia). I’m not sure if people realize the extent to which Russia has made itself, under Putin, a specialized economy based almost entirely on fossil fuels. See Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (Amazon associates link*), a must-read read, to read about that.

The opening of COP26:

See also this commentary in the Los Angeles Times.

Hollywood uses many fake things, why not fake guns?

Violence and Guns

Apropos this:

Baldwin was on set filming for the upcoming Western movie “Rust” at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in New Mexico Thursday when the prop gun he was handling misfired, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. Souza remains in the hospital.

It’s unclear whether the gun contained blanks or what was discharged.

This is tragic, though not the world’s most important problem. But it happens now and then. I’d worry about the use of guns with blanks in any situation, and I think accidents like this have happened outside the context of filming a Hollywood movie.

Here’s the solution: Invent a series of firearms that look like the various models one would use in films or on stage, but that don’t have the capacity of shooting bullets of any kind, including blanks, but that look like they are shooting bullets. This is not beyond the capacity of our modern day technology. Sure, it would be expensive, but so is every other single thing used in making movies.

Then, disallow actual firearms of any kind on any stage or set.

Heat Kills. More Heat Kills More

Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Severe Weather and Other Disasters,

Over the last few years, the Atlantic Ocean and other parts of the world smashed their weathery fists into the faces of climate change deniers again and again until the denial of climate change fell to the mat, bleeding, and forever silent.

I wish. It wasn’t quite that extreme, but nearly so. In certain social settings, a person ranting about climate change, say a decade ago, would be looked at as though they might have a lose screw. Me, for example, at a family gathering. But a few weeks ago, a matriarch in my extended family, whom I might have expected to give me the stern look during one of my own rants, began ranting herself about climate change, and how astonishing it was that people could not see that it is real. I had to get her a glass of water. Times have changed. The big storms have spoken, and American society has listened, and at the very least, the deniers now look like the ones with the loose screw.

However, storms are not the biggest problem with future climate change. Sure, a storm can cause floods that kill hundreds of people. Sure, storms can carve away large sections of the shoreline, including those on which humans have built towns and cities, more so especially as sea level rises. Sure, strong tornadoes can destroy a storm shelter as though it wasn’t there, or pick up a school bus and throw it into a ravine, or whatever they want.

But storms are whiny babies compared to their own mothers, the weather-mother that causes the storms to be worse to begin with, and that will eventually become recognized as the real problem with global warming: heat. Continue reading Heat Kills. More Heat Kills More →

Ritualized Language Can Be Inaccurate and Annoying

Anthropology, Language

Rituals are things people do in a more or less consistent matter, often to the extent that the manner of doing is more important, or at least, more persistent, than any possible original reason for doing the thing. Ritualized behaviors are all around us, even in highly modern settings like medicine. As a possibly apocryphal example, I will refer to the story of the oven roast. Grandma had the best recipe for a roast beef, and passed it on to daughters, not by writing it down, but rather, by showing how to roast the beef, and the daughters wrote it down. That recipe was passed on, in written form, to grand daughters, and one day one of the grand daughters roasted the beef for the whole extended family for Sunday dinner. One of the younger folk marveled at the great roast beef, and someone else noted that it was grandma’s recipe.

“But what makes it so good, better than when I cook it,” an in-law said.

“I’m not sure. Maybe it is cutting the end of the roast off before putting it in the oven?” said the granddaughter who had done the roasting that Sunday.

“Yeah, grandma,” said the other granddaughter, causing grandma to sort of wake up and pay attention for a moment. “Why does cutting the end of the beef off before roasting it make it taste so good?”
Continue reading Ritualized Language Can Be Inaccurate and Annoying →

What ya gonna do when they come for you?

Politics, ,

In Ramsey County, Minnesota (home of Saint Paul) you can be jailed for up to 90 days, and fined up to $1,000, if you are found in a park after hours. “Hours” in Ramsey County parks are from sun up to sun down, so the hours change daily and in pragmatic terms, are subjective.

I can see having a rule about when you can be in the park, and fixing it to sunlight makes sense, and I can even see a modest punishment for offenders. But three months in jail because you thought the sun was still up 15 minutes after sundown? Note to those reading this from the equator: The sun continues to brighten the northern sky long after official sundown, since the penumbra is quite wide in high latitudes.

That was in the Star Tribune, the region’s newspaper of record. In the same issue is an op-ed penned by a local retired cop who has a new job of screaming at clouds. There was a horrific and tragic shootout at a local bar the other day, in which over a dozen innocent bystanders were shot, one killed. It was a shootout among some bad hombres including one with an open warrant. Old Guy Cop made the argument that if only cops were allowed to make “low level stops” (aka pretextual stops) then this shooting could have been avoided. The argument goes like this: Cops were formerly allowed to pull people over for things like busted taillights. In so doing they would also end up finding felons with outstanding warrants, so they were thus kept of the streets. But now with all the “defund the police” talk this isn’t the case anymore, thus the shooting. Continue reading What ya gonna do when they come for you? →

Anthropology and Racism with Greg Laden, by Brycearonee

Anthropology, Race and Racism

The Promethian Secular Frontier presents this excellent interview, which I enjoyed greatly, with, wait for it …. me!

Promethean Secular Frontier (PSF) is an educational/secular humanist page meant to provide a community for discussion on various topics ranging from the natural sciences (astronomy, physics, geology, biology/evolution, etc), to social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, archeology, etc), to philosophy (religion/theology, epistemological, rationalism, morality, etc). Our goal at PSF is to bring concepts that are different for laymen audiences and make them understandable and easily digestible to people seeking knowledge. PSF also wants to create a community that promotes inquiry, skepticism, critical thinking and secular humanism.

Small correction: I was a faculty instructor at Harvard, but actual professor (later) at University of Minnesota.

What is Freedom?

Anthropology,

Once upon a time in the Congo, there was a democratically elected President; Some* called him the “Big Man.” The Big Man was elected every seven years by a majority of 97.8%. The people loved him because before he became President, war was everywhere, and just before that, the colonial overlords and punishers were everywhere. You couldn’t get a break. Then after a brief interlude of a different duly elected president who died in an unfortunate execution, Big Man saw to it that there would be no more wars.

Well, not exactly. He had wars, and the people of the Congo were given the opportunity to get jobs fighting in the wars, but they were all in adjoining countries, and they were all paid for by the United States Congress. So no war without taxes, and that was good.
Continue reading What is Freedom? →

If all the vehicles are electric, where will the energy come from?

Electric Vehicles, Energy

That is a complicated question I will not answer here. But it also a stupid and misleading question, and that part of it I comment on, in relation to Minnesota specifically:

In Minnesota, between a third and half of the energy we expend is converted into useless heat or work, mainly owing to that fact that converting the source matter into something that produces usable energy has useless heat as a byproduct.

A large (and at this time not accurately accounted for) amount of energy is used moving or refining fossil fuels. Minnesota refines and moves (through pipelines and on trains) more energy-related matter (oil and coal) than any other state that does not also produce such products. We have no oil or gas wells, and no coal, but we are the crossroads for much of that material. If we did none of that, a pretty good amount of energy would be freed up for use elsewhere.

We use energy at an uneven rate throughout the day. If we mostly used electric vehicles, they would be mostly charged at night when demand is currently low.

People sometimes ask: If we stop burning fuel to make things move, and instead use electricity, where are we going to get all that electricity? (When someone asks you that, usually the answer they have in mind and that they are leading yo to, is “nuclear energy! free and clean!” so watch out for that.)

A huge amount of the energy we use now is used to do nothing. It is either turned into heat or it is used to make more of the stuff that we use to use energy. Simplistic questions like “If all the vehicles are electric, where will the energy come from?” this exist outside the actual reality of energy use. Ignore them and learn about energy use and transmission.

Read books like Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. See also: 2030 Report: Powering America’s Clean Economy

Terrorist Attack in Travis County, Texas

MAGA terrorism,

MAGA attacked the Democratic Party headquarters in Travis County, Texas.

No one was hurt, not much damage, but it could have been bad. A threat of further attacks was made.

Spiritual and physical terror.

They caught the guy, but they are treating it like he was passing out pamphlets or something:

Spiritual and Physical Terror

Uncategorized

On January 6th, 2021, the Republcian Party attempted a violent coup d’etat. The attack resembled previous attacks on state governments, most notably in Michigan, but was carried out on a much larger scale. Security agencies in Washington D.C. were internally hampered as part of the Coup, but managed eventually to put it down anyway. Immediately after the failed attempt to overthrow the government, a second date, for a new attack, was announced by the insurrectionists.

Much of my political life is governed by the regular tic-toc of monthly board meetings in one or another organization. One of those monthly meetings occurred after the January 6th coup attempt but before the announced Republican coup 2.0 date. At that meeting, one of our members talked about verbal attacks and physical threats, including trespassing, damage to property, and invasion in to her home, made against her and her family by one of her Republican neighbors. Others had less frightening stories to tell, but serious concerns nonetheless. Everyone became worried. We went so far as to consider setting up a phone tree and a network of safe houses to which one might flee in the event of a local attack, in particular against people of color, since that seemed to be the trend among the White Supremacists that make up most of the Republican Party.

In short, we were terrorized. Mostly “spiritual terror” with a touch of “physical terror.” Continue reading Spiritual and Physical Terror →

History vs Now

Anthropology, , ,

At a low but consistent frequency, I see a remark on Twitter or Facebook like: “So, where were all yahoos objecting to the Polio vaccine??!!11!!?? That is a disease we wiped out with a vaccine, that could not have happened if antivax existed then!”

This would be a reasonable lament were it true. I recently read, in Chernov’s Washington: A Life, that George Washington was anti-vax, before he changed his mind based on evidence made clear to him, and then became pro-vax. That was in relation to smallpox, and the “vaccine” was actually “variolation,” which is to modern vaccines what a camel is to a modern RV. Same idea, different technology. Continue reading History vs Now →

Covid Contaminants Harm Self

Health and Medicine, ,
Republican Contaminants are killing Americans at the rate of about one half million per year, because of their pro-Covid stance. But they are killing more of their own.
This is probably not a self correcting phenomenon. Not enough Contaminants are dying of Covid to change election outcomes. But a precinct by precinct study may reveal a small effect.

“John Nolte argued that the partisan gap in vaccination rates was part of a liberal plot. Liberals like Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci and Howard Stern have tried so hard to persuade people to get vaccinated, because they know that Republican voters will do the opposite of whatever they say, Nolte wrote.”

This would be funny if it wasn’t so …. no wait, this is actually just really funny.

Source: New York Times “The Mornting” September 27, 2021, byline: David Leonhardt

Plymouth and Minnetonka MAGA Alert and Voter Guide 2021

Uncategorized, ,

Block a MAGA Takeover of the Wayzata School Board

Our Senate District 44 is now overwhelmingly Democratic. All but one small precinct in SD44 votes reliably for DFL candidates.

But sleepy off-year elections are perfect for a minority takeover since so few people vote. All it takes is a fired-up base and an organized plan. This year, the MAGA folks are enraged and they’re well organized to dominate the Wayzata School Board, a “non-partisan” body.

Republicans have recruited small teams of candidates to coordinate their campaigns in order to sweep the 2021 local elections in Minnetonka (council and mayor) and the Minnetonka and Wayzata school boards. Countering this well-organized plan will take fast, assertive action. Continue reading Plymouth and Minnetonka MAGA Alert and Voter Guide 2021 →

This ain’t the Washita River, General

Health and Medicine, , , , ,

A growing number of Contaminants (aka Republicans aka Magatrumpers) believe that Liberals and Democrats are pushing vaccines in order to make conservatives and yahoos dislike and therefore avoid vaccines, so that on election day, more Republicans are dead of Covid than Democrats.

Maybe we are doing that, maybe we are not. Not my job to tell you. I am not the mule skinner.