It's true. We Democrats all want the best of everything for everybody, whether they don't like it, or not. (HT Misterjaw) It's not our fault that a raging but shrinking minority refuses our offer for fear that Those People will get some. We stand for Progressive measures that the real and vocal majority of Americans wants on almost every issue. Even gun safety and women’s medical choices and Global Warming.
Progressives are not “far to the Left”: What Genuine Centrist Ideas Look Like.
Starting here.
We want the best voting rights for all. Yes, Much McTurtled, it’s a Democratic power grab. We are going to grab back all of the power that was stolen from us under Jim Crow and gerrymandering and voter suppression for all those years. And from Native Americans, and women, and those who didn’t own property and those who were regarded as property before that. (See Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power)
Gerrymanders and voter suppression and fear-mongering have pretended to move the country far to the right for the last half-century. But Bush 41 lost to Clinton, and neither W nor Trump was legitimately elected.
Watch AOC Give a Direct Message to White Supremacists: “We Will Love You Back”
You see? And then there are the vile responses that I will not repeat.
Now let me say this again.
- We want the best voting rights for all.
It is estimated that getting rid of gerrymanders would have much the same effect as having three million more voting Democrats. And then there are the actual millions whose votes have been suppressed and stolen. And then the other millions who will start voting once it is clear that their votes matter. And the Southern states that will be reliably Blue under fair voting, and those that will be in play. Even Texas.
Consider all of the Progressive laws that can be passed in Congress and those flipped states.
Let's try some.
We want the best education for all. Including science, which is a deal-breaker for some. (See Answers in Genesis.) Also art and music and real history and civics. Ask any teacher not approved by Betsy DeVos. Or Voldemort.
Wide and growing divides in views of racial discrimination
- We want the best jobs for all, including multitudes of non-exportable renewable energy jobs, with a share in productivity growth, and benefits, and real pensions, and all. Including everybody who is out to “steal” jobs from entitled White folks, particularly the jobs that White folks won’t do. (Yes, we offered very explicitly, and no, they were equally explicitly not having any.)
Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job.
Trump’s immigration crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For
California farmers, it’s worsening a desperate labor shortage.
- We want the best health care and public health systems for all. Including gunshot victims, anti-vaxxers, and nativists who want undocumented immigrants to be a health risk to all the rest of us. (Even the AMA has come around.) And prisoners, and the undocumented, and even tourists.
See Dying of Whiteness, by Jonathan Metzl, for those who would literally rather die than let minorities, immigrants, and women have proper health care.
- We want the best taxes for all, so that everybody gets value for their money, but nobody gets to rip off all the rest of us. The horror! The horror!
See Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, and
Everything for ourselves, and nothing for anybody else, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the Masters of Mankind.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
- We want the best Liberty for all. That includes Freedom From Religion. (Thanks, Ron Reagan. Check out his ad.)
Deal with it, snowflakes. It isn’t just atheists who want out from under your Christianism.
- We want the best Justice for all. No more war on drugs. No more Slavery by Another Name. No more punitive bail for the oppressed. No more felon disenfranchisement. No more police murders with impunity. No more ripping children of asylum seekers from their mothers’ arms, and pretending that it would traumatize the children to give them back. No more corrupt conspiracies between coal mines and state governments. And much more.
Sorry, I don't have room for all of the data on all of our Injustice System.
So yes, the best. Of everything. For everybody, no matter which side they think they are on.
The only counter-arguments are political possibility (but what if we win comprehensively in 2020?) and bogus complaints about affordability when our options would save real money and bolster the economy.
SOSHULISM!!!!!!@!!!
is not an argument.
And neither is the Second Amendment, which does not say what they pretend to think it says. See The Second Amendment: A Biography, by Michael Waldman. It says only that the Federal government cannot disarm a state militia. Well, today that mostly means the National Guard. So by all means, gun fetishists, join the National Guard, if they will have you under the well-ordered rule, and maybe you can qualify to bear arms, up to and including tanks and fighter jets, and keep them at National Guard facilities. Even Scalia agreed that the Gummint can regulate guns quite strongly, except for guns inside the home for the (bogus) purpose of self defense.
Now, the US is not yet ready for a real discussion about what kind of reparations for slavery would actually repair the damage that is still being done. Mainly because of those who aren't having any, because it is for the benefit of Those People. I have some ideas on that, and thus another Diary draft.
Nor are we ready for genuine immigration reform, which would benefit Those Other People. But I have a draft on that, too.
It isn’t the fault of Progressives that extremists won’t have any of that because those [insert pejorative here] who are taking our country away from us (Yes! We are! And then we will make sure that you get your share.) would get some.
It isn’t the fault of Progressives that millions of children of the Deplorables fall away every year, and that their elders are in a blind, raging panic about it. Nor that more than half of White Millennials are now Democrats, as I pointed out last week.
Their own children will, by the millions every year.
The Week: The kids are all Democrats
For over a decade, young people have been voting overwhelmingly for progressives and, more importantly, telling pollsters that they identify with or lean towards supporting the Democratic Party.
If you think that's always been the case, you're wrong…
Pew Social Trends: Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations
Among registered voters, 59% of Millennials affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with about half of Boomers and Gen Xers (48% each) and 43% of the Silent Generation. With this divide comes generational differences on specific issue areas, from views of racial discrimination and immigration to foreign policy and the scope of government.
Republicans Are Fueling a Generation of Democrats
Of course, there are Denialists on this topic, as on anything of importance, but I am going to ignore them today.
I isn't our fault that Deplorables will be in the minority soonest in former Confederate states plus the Southwest.
In Other Good News
Vegans, rejoice! The Impossible Burger hits Burger King nationwide today. Show them some love, after all those years of, you know. I don't know whether they all open at 9 am local time as ours does, but anyway if you go out and try them, by all means come back and give us your comments on them.
Which Chain Restaurants Have Vegan French Fries?
Are French fries vegan? Short answer: Yes! Most fries are 100 percent vegan—but in some (rare) cases, they aren’t. For example, McDonald’s French fries contain beef fat!
We checked every fast food joint and popular chain restaurant we could think of, and every place* we called–except for McDonald’s–offers delicious vegan fries so that you can get your fry daze on without hurting any animals.
*Some restaurants may cook their French fries in the same oil as non-vegan foods.
Discuss.
Sudan crisis: Military and opposition agree constitutional declaration
Excellent, if it holds.
Oh, and Science, Of Course
Space
New space discovery sheds light on how planets form
Researchers at Dartmouth College have discovered a planet orbiting one of the brightest young stars known, according to a study published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Aged at approximately 45 million years old, the star and its planet could provide valuable information on how planetary bodies form.
The exoplanet observed in the Dartmouth research—known as DS Tuc Ab—can be considered a "pre-teen" in planetary time. The planet is no longer growing, but, because of its young age, it is still undergoing rapid changes like losing atmospheric gas as a result of the radiation coming from its host star.
Scientists now think that that was about the age when the proto-Earth got hit by Theia, resulting in the Moon.
Star nearing death offers a preview of our Sun's fate
Dr Joyce said the star studied, T Ursae Minoris (T UMi), was similar to the Sun.
"This has been one of the rare opportunities when the signs of ageing could be directly observed in a star over human timescales," said Dr Joyce.
[In its] ultimate transition to a white dwarf, T UMi has been undergoing a series of pulses, whereby its size, brightness and temperature have fluctuated enormously.
"Energy production in T UMi has become unstable. During this phase, nuclear fusion flares up deep inside, causing 'hiccups' that we call thermal pulses.
"These pulses cause drastic, rapid changes in the size and brightness of the star, which are detectable over centuries. The pulses of old stars like T UMi also enrich the entire Universe with elements including carbon, nitrogen, tin and lead."
The team has observed the star diminishing in size, brightness and temperature over the past 30 years.
"We believe the star is entering one of its last remaining pulses, and we'd expect to see it expanding again in our lifetimes. The star will eventually become a white dwarf within a few hundred thousand years," Dr Joyce said.
Viewpoint: Highest Energy Astrophysical Photons Detected
From the Crab Nebula. 100 TeV, pointing to the likelihood of PeV photons. They create air showers of multitudes of particles, starting at energies far beyond our best accelerators.
Not Space
Synopsis: Ion Collisions Reveal Photon-Photon Scattering
When ions are accelerated to high energies, a large field of virtual photons surrounds them. If two ions pass each other closely enough, a virtual photon from one particle can scatter off a virtual photon from the other. The likelihood of this scattering increases with heavier ions because the number of virtual photons surrounding an ion scales with the square of its nuclear charge. When the virtual photons scatter, the lead ions lose a small amount of energy to produce two real photons. The ATLAS Collaboration looked for the signature of these two photons striking opposite sides of the detector and confirmed their origin by reconstructing their properties.
[T]he collaboration observed 59 light-by-light scattering events, compared to 13 candidate events in [an] earlier paper. To identify the photons more efficiently, they developed a neural network to look for candidate signals.
No, you can't just shine two laser beams through each other and get photons to bounce.
Recursive language and modern imagination were acquired simultaneously 70,000 years ago
While studying acquisition of imagination in children, Dr. Vyshedskiy and his colleagues discovered a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. It became apparent that modern children who have not been exposed to full language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination essential for juxtaposition of mental objects, known as Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS).
Unlike vocabulary and grammar acquisition, which can be learned throughout one's lifetime, there is a strong critical period for the development of PFS and individuals not exposed to conversations with recursive language in early childhood can never acquire PFS as adults. Their language is always lacking understanding of spatial prepositions and recursion that depend on the PFS ability. In a similar manner, pre-modern humans would not have been able to learn recursive language as adults and, therefore, would not be able to teach recursive language to their own children, who, as a result, would not acquire PFS. Thus, the existence of a strong critical period for PFS acquisition creates a cultural evolutionary barrier for acquisition of recursive language.
The House that Jack Built is a recursive poem in this sense, with clauses building on top of each other. The Jewish Passover song Chad Gadya/One Lone Kid is another. Or the song There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea. Or The Green Grass Grows All Around. Children love them, and they evidently help the children's brains grow. These are not ordinary cumulative songs, like the Twelve Days of Christmas or Children, Go Where I Send Thee, that are just lists. The items have to be related in a grammatical chain of meaning in recursive language. "Feather on the wing, and the wing on the bird, and the bird on the twig, and the twig on the branch…" (You can do something similar with chained prepositions: "What should he come up from out of around back in under there for?")
This model calls for:
- two or more children with extended critical period due to "PFC delay" mutation;
- these children spending a lot of time talking to each other;
- inventing the recursive elements of language, such as spatial prepositions;
- acquiring recursive-conversations-dependent PFS;
- teaching recursive language to their offsprings.
The hypothesis is named after the celebrated twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.
Or maybe it could have been Tarzan and Jane. Adam and Eve?
There were several rounds in the development of speech, corresponding to several different brain structures, starting something like 100,000 years ago. Maybe. Song has different areas, too.
I was taught in an introductory psych class about children in the most backward orphanages in the most backward countries who never were spoken to, so that they could not learn language at all, ever, past the age of 5 or so. There is a particularly nasty bit in Neil Gaiman's American Gods about that.
But with proper interventions even those born totally blind and deaf can acquire full language, using a form of alphabetic signing directly on the hand. See Land of Silence and Darkness, directed by Werner Herzog in 1971. He felt that it was his most important film.