The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Doctor Science:

That was no FAIL, that was WIN!

I knew about Ishi and the Kroebers before Always Coming Home came out, so I always figured the title referred to UKL coming home, too -- that it was about how she had circled around until she was ready to come back to the issues and the landscape she grew up with.

Linkmeister:

NJ unions are *very* powerful, so we get paid like a good union job -- $200 for at least 16 hours (5AM to 9PM+). The national average seems to be more like $100.

This is one of the big reasons I'm a pollworker -- I'll have absolutely no time or energy for a freakout tomorrow. By the time I get home to drink my well-earned chocolate beer and watch returns, my primary emotion is going to be OMG!exhaustion.

I recommend this approach. Also, in NJ they pay good money ($200!).

Clifton:

I don't really think the German folk magic/religion can have much to do with early Mormonism, because the Burned-Over District was most settled by immigrants from New England and, I'm guessing, from the "borders" region of the British Isles. In Albion's Seed (always the first stop for analyzing American culture) there's some discussion of the magical practices of the Border culture, but not IIRC about the "roll your own" quality, the degree to which movements like Mormonism could be detached from Christian tradition.

It's also surprising to me how divergent Mormonism (etc) could be from the teaching of the First Great Awakening, especially given how many immigrants to the region were from New England. I happen to have read a lot of Jonathan Edwards, and he's solidly inside Christian tradition in a way Joseph Smith et al. were not.

Clifton @200:
very earliest stages of Mormonism likely fits more closely into that same American folk-magic tradition which includes scrying for visions, invoking angels, weird apocrypha

Yes indeed. It's striking how little of conventional Christian theology was in the mix, given that the first generation of Mormons were all converts from Christianity, and lived in an area (the "Burnt-Over District") rife with Christian preaching.

To me, Mormon theology & storytelling is about as closely (or distantly) related to Christian theology as Muslim stories & theology are to the Jewish & Christian beliefs Muhammed acknowledged as forerunners. But Muhammed knew about Judaism and Christianity second-hand, he wasn't raised in a Jewish/Christian milieu. Joseph Smith *was* raised in an ostensibly Christian culture, but he diverged much further than the various preachers of the Protestant Reformation or even most of the early Christian "heresies".

Much of that American folk magic seems to be garbled and translated versions of German magical traditions

German rather than English or Scottish? Do you know of a good book on the topic?

Faren @198: do you mean this review of WAKING GIANT: America in the Age of Jackson? sounds interesting.

Coming from a very strong background in mainstream (Catholic & Lutheran) Christian education, one of the most striking things to me about Mormonism is how very far from the Christian mainstream it went within a single generation.

It's as though the differences between Catholicism and Lutheranism, or Lutheranism and Calvinism, are step-wise Darwinian mutations; but the change from Protestantism to Mormonism is an X-Men mutation, a total transforming leap.

Yes, it's clearly a test about probability. I used figures from fivethirtyeight.com as my basis for calculations. I'm not sure what they'll make of some of my answers, because "Probability of X supposing McCain wins Illinois" is a divide-by-zero-type situation, so I defaulted to 50%. That is, "supposing McCain wins Illinois" requires supposing that some huge, totally unexpected bizarre event occurs in the next 6 days -- and how do you estimate any other probabilities, given that you're already in some alternate probability space?

Note about "white trash": I'm pretty sure that this term was originally an African-American expression from at least as far back as Reconstruction. It has that extra edge of both bitterness and scorn: they think they're better than us because they're white, but they're really just trash -- that's what it's supposed to convey.

The question I have is, does this mean Krugman has achieved his life's ambition, and he *is* Hari Selden?

Alison Scott @44:

Clearly there is a burning need for the UK version of SchoolHouse Rock, which taught at least one American generation to sing the Preamble to the Constitution, and about how bills become law.

Lila @67: How can students be expected to identify even the Big Dipper if they've never spent much time in a place where the sky gets dark at night? And where their parents didn't, either?

Now, one of *my* pet peeves is that 99.98% of movies & TV showing "space" depict a uniform sprinkling of stars and no Galaxy. The one exception was Babylon 5 -- they weren't consistent, but at least there *was* a Galaxy, much of the time.

Nobel Prize commentary:

Medicine: Count me as one of the ones disappointed that Gallo didn't split the Prize with Montagnier. Notice that both citations (for the HPV half and the HIV half) cite the discovery of the *virus*, not of what it *does*.

Chemistry Prize: Everyone's favorite, a methodology prize. No really, these are the best kind -- the Nobel committees live in fear of honoring something that turns out to be not all that important, but a useful technique is *always* important.

I gather that there's a bit of a kerfuffle over the Physics Prize, but I know less about the inner workings of that one.

One thing handy Emergency Preparedness lists like the one Jim linked to often include is:

backup/reserve supplies of any medications you take on a regular basis

How are you supposed to get these? My insurance company won't authorize getting a month's supply of most of my meds more often than about once every 27 days. They go to considerable lengths not to *let* me stockpile.

Chris @ 58:
McCain was clearly aiming at the Republican base

But why should he do that? The prize for the debates is the independent/undecided/lo-info vote, not the base.

NelC @12:

A *lot* of people noticed McCain not-looking at Obama. I've seen some speculation that it was a tactic to keep his temper under control. I don't think it played at all well with the independents & undecideds -- and they, after all, are the targets, not people like me who are already in the bag.

albatross @115:

what changes in financial market regulation were enacted or vetoed in the last couple years, since the Democrats have had congress, to address these problems?

None that I know of -- but I can think of very little in that way of regulation of *any* kind that the feckless Dems in Congress have been able to pass, against the solid wall of GOP (& Presidential) opposition.

Sadly, "feckless" appears to be part of the Democratic brand these days, or at least a Charlie Brown-like willingness to go for the football one more time.

albatross:

Branding is partly a matter of who identifies with a party, and partly a matter of "ownership". So: if the Dems are in power and create a massive government program that fails, they "own" it -- it resonates with their brand. Conversely, though a Republican President (Nixon) started the Clean Air Act, the GOP doesn't "own" its successes -- it's not part of the party's self-identification, and (thinking as I type this) because it's not part of the GOP's self-identity, neither the Republicans nor the rest of the country expects them to *build* on it. And that expectation is a substantially self-fulfilling prophecy, because the parties tend to attract people who like the brand.

Stefan @110:

Jerry Pournelle thinks illegal immigrants are to blame.

I truly do not understand how anyone can use a brain to produce something that evil yet *stupid*. I mean, it's aggressively, in-your-face stupid -- and this from a guy who prides himself (however wrongly) on his intellect and rationality.

albatross @111:

I don't see any way that this could be a Republican or Democratic sort of screw-up, as the people committing the errors were pretty much purely motivated by greed

I agree that greed was the number one driving force in the whole catastrophe, but I disagree about which party is more to blame. Though both Dems & Reps politicians helped grease the skids, unfettered capitalism is part of the Republican brand. "The market will decide" has been their mantra for decades now, along with reducing regulation, reducing taxes on the rich, letting wealth "trickle down". Hell, this dates back to the 1920s at least, probably further.

What is notable to me is that racism, a much more recent element in the Republican brand, seems to trump capitalism for so many. That's what happened in the collapse of the immigration bill, too: the fat capitalist cats wanted "pro-business" immigration reform, but the Republican base said No.

That statement was what tipped my reaction over the line from train-wreck-of-horror to train-wreck-of-farce. I mean, I had been calling it the And A Pony! Plan, but *I* thought I was kidding.

My husband (the Flaming Moderate) points out that presumably Paulson et al. intended this to be slapping Wall Street with a really big trout to snap them out of their funk. But it's kind of amazing that it never occured to them that the fishmongers were going to get kind of upset.

Re: Dead Man Walking. Isn't that post contradicted by this report (CNN/Mayo Clinic), which says that McCain's worst melanoma was Stage IIA?

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