Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Boil the Chinese Seeds before you toss them

Posted: July 29, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

I was rather astonished, although I shouldn’t be, about this story:

Amateur gardeners beware: Officials in at least 27 states are warning the public about unsolicited seeds sent from China and appearing in mailboxes across the U.S., including in Texas.

The Texas Department of Agriculture says the seeds “could contain harmful invasive species or be otherwise unsafe” and urges Texans to not touch or plant the seeds.

And it’s not just in the US:

The New York Times reported that officials in Washington State, Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Florida, and Alabama have all put out warnings about the seeds. The Daily Mail also reported that “hundreds of British gardeners” have received seeds as well.

Some officials are also asking residents to avoid throwing the seeds away, lest they begin growing in landfills.

My advice is if you can’t get them to a lab to be analyzed I’d boil them before tossing them.

Closing thought: Presuming this is either an invasive species or something polluted to damage the soil or endanger lives, how is this not an act of war by China?

Quick Tuesday Thoughts Offensive Statues , Saxon & de Havilland missed Redsox & WNBA not Under The Fedora:

Posted: July 28, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

It makes perfect sense that Antifa & BLM are able to convince young college student to pull down statues of great men.

Every moment such statues stand it’s a reminder that they have no now nor are likely to every accomplish even a tiny percentage of the good such men have done. No wonder they’re offended by them

It’s actually the same reason why the MSM & Boomers kept classifying the WW 2 generation as “the greatest generation”. If they are the “greatest” then it’s not odd that the boomer and other fail to achieve what they did.

Actor John Saxon died this weekend. He was a guy who seemed to be everywhere, always did his job well, made the people around him better but never managed to get top billing on a big moves or show.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The John Saxons of the world keep it going

Speaking of actor’s dying Oliva de Havilland died this weekend at 104. She was the last great star of Hollywood still with us (Angelia Lansbury 9 years younger came later). Of the 16 movies I own on Amazon Prime she co-stars with Errol Flynn in four of them. With her finally dies the Golden Age of Hollywood.

I wonder how many of the obits running today and yesterday on her were initially and largely authored decades ago by writers now dead?

Well cancel culture can now come for her, if not for Gone With the Wind or her roll in speaking out against communism maybe for the fact that the 1st act she does in the 1st significant movie she appeared in (Captain Blood) involves her buying Errol Flynn’s character Peter Blood at a slave auction.

Apparently the 1st Baseball game which was the 1st broadcast of a Major Sports game since the COVID closer had, as might be expected rating through the roof.

To those who might claim this as proof that the kneeling to the anthem in empty stadiums and the BLM messages will not hurt their draw let me remind them that the 1st episode of Jodie Whitaker’s run on Doctor Who had high ratings too.

I wonder how than ended?

Meanwhile Sunday for the 1st time in my life I was driving a car at a time when the Redsox where playing a game and did NOT turn on the radio to listen.

Didn’t miss it and given the COVID 19 outbreak among the Marlins this might be the shortest season in history.

Oh and I had to laugh when I read this story of the WNBA teams walking off the court during the national anthem, which according to a correction took place before the anthem (like it matters).

Either way if there is any sports league that will not be hurt by this it’s this one. Given the predominance of the uber woke within their microscopic fan base it would likely help.

Even better for the WNBA they are so used to playing in empty arenas that their players’ games are unlikely to be affected not to mention that for the 1st and likely last time in their history their fan draw at games will be equal to the NBA.

Report from Louisiana: Back to School, Part II

Posted: July 27, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Over the past few weeks I have read everything I can get my hands on about reopening schools, about Covid-19, about teacher anxiety, about parent anxiety, about the disparity of internet access across rural America, and all of the other problems that are coming with the new school year.

Copious amounts of reading and research, and I still don’t have any answers.

This much I know:

Most teachers are freaking out about having to return to in-person classes in a few weeks. Some teachers are just ready to get back to the classroom, Coronavirus be damned.

School systems don’t have any real idea how to do this. There’s no blueprint. Some places have the virus more under control than others, and that has to play into whatever the plans for your district are.

Poor kids and rural kids don’t have the same internet access that suburban middle class or wealth kids do. This makes virtual schooling a challenge.

We need schools open for childcare so parents can work. No, wait, schools are for learning! And sources of food, and socialization! No! Wait!  What are we doing?

So. Much. Confusion.

And so many variances in our plans. In my school district, we are currently scheduled to go with an A/B-day hybrid model with kids coming on alternating Fridays. Parents uncomfortable with this can also opt for a virtual only option. Teachers will have kids in the room every single day.  Students will get on the bus, with or without a mask, sit two to a seat, get breakfast in the cafeteria, take it to their classroom and eat. THEN we will take temperatures.

How many people will have been exposed at that point if a student is carrying the virus?

Teachers are worried about supplies: are there enough thermometers? Do they work? Are there enough supplies for cleaning the classroom all day long? (We have to sanitize between every group that comes in).  What happens when there is an exposure, or an outbreak? New CDC guidelines say you don’t really have to quarantine for 14 days. In fact, you could be back at school before your positive test even comes back. Do we trust the CDC guidelines, now?

Everything has become so political.

So, look. At this point, after all this reading, after all of this ever changing research, I’m going to do what I should have resolved to do in the very beginning and save myself a lot of time. I’m going to protect myself. I’m going to wear my mask, keep my area wiped down, stay six feet away from everyone, all of the time, and take any other measures I deem necessary to protect myself.

I have that right.

There is absolutely nothing I can do about my district’s plans; they never asked for my input, after all. So all I can do is take care of myself. I’ll take care of my students the best I can, but if I don’t have the supplies, I will be limited in what I can do. I hope we have them.

At this point, all we can do is try to survive. I can’t read any more about best practices (we don’t have any), or try to keep up with changing sanitation measures.

I think we will probably be in session long enough to get Chromebooks out, kids accustomed to virtual platforms, classes set up, and then back home for 100% virtual schooling. I give it two weeks.

God knows, I hope I am wrong.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

The Left’s Southern Article of Faith Collides with the Data. (updated and bumped)

Posted: July 27, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

(Note, this post was originally posted on Aug 17th 2017. However the subject came up during my appearance on fault lines radio this morning so I thought I’d repost and bump it so listeners could see the actual post and data I was referring to.)

If you are even slightly a leftist such as the folks I covered on the Boston Common this weekend one of the things that you believe without question is that the only reason why the GOP has control of legislatures in the south is because of a backlash over the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965.
This has been an article of faith for years and it’s quite handy when you want to explain away uncomfortable electoral defeats. Why woo voters when you can simply cry “racism”.

It’s an easy to sell argument, after all the pre 1964 south was called the solid south for a reason. Through 1892 no former slave state (including border states) voted for a GOP presidential candidate. No state of the old confederacy voted GOP post reconstruction till Tennessee voted Harding 1920. Through 1955 when the fight for civil rights started looming large the GOP only managed to take states in the old confederacy two more times once when Eisenhower after winning World War to managed to take Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia and once in the Herbert Hoover landslide of 1928 that added North Carolina to that list.

But the real power of the Democrats in the south wasn’t in presidential elections where they were outnumbered. It was in the state legislatures, where, with the exception of Missouri which was pretty competitive in the first half of the 20th century A republican speaker of the House in the old south and most of the old slave states (I’m missing data for Delaware) just didn’t exist.

And then came Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson

In 1957 Johnson in an effort “sanitize” himself on civil rights for a presidential run pushed through the first civil rights bill post reconstruction. When he became president after JFK’s murder in 1963 he managed to get the Civil Rights act of 1964 passed doing so with only 8 votes from the old confederacy in the house and none in the senate, he followed that up with the Voting Rights act in 1965 and declaring that he would secure the black vote for Democrats for the next 2 centuries (although he used somewhat different phrasing describing the black vote, employing a word rhyming with “trigger”).

It is at this point that according to our friends on the left that the old solid racist south (including many of the slave holding border states) decided to abandon the Democrat party and started voting GOP

However there is one problem that stands in the way of that argument: The facts.

As Tip O’Neill once said all politics is local and nothing better reflects the feelings of a local electorate than a vote for a state legislator. So if the left’s meme is to be believed it shouldn’t have taken more than a few two year election cycles for a combination of mass defections and outraged old racists to fill the south with GOP speakers in their houses. So let’s take a look at a chart that lists all the old slaveholding states and see how quickly those racist southerners and old segregationists managed to flip their states to their new favorite party.

 

[table id=1 ]

As you can see when the data is presented the left’s article of faith runs smack dab of a factual cliff.

With the exception of a two year period of in Tennessee when a democrat defector gave the GOP the house for one term, No state of the old confederacy elected a GOP house until 1995 and even with that happened in North and South Carolina, North Carolina flipped back to the Democrats the very next election and stayed there until 2011.

Of those states only one other (Florida) joined South Carolina as a solid GOP state in the 20th century five of the states flipped this decade. And think about it. If you believe our friends on the left then Alabama the state where Martin Luther King wrote is famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Mississippi the state where the famous case of the murder of civil rights workers dramatized in the film Mississippi Burning took place in the 60’s were so apparently so outraged over the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights act and LBJ that their voters they waited nearly 2 1/2 generations to vote GOP.

That’s simply not credible.

Now as this is such an article faith for our Democrat friends they will sooner imagine armies of ancient segregationists bussed from Nursing Homes on election day each years than believe the data.

Because there is a much more credible explanation as to why the left is losing the South that’s staring them in the face but that’s a post for later this week.

Update:  Heard back from the Delaware legislative librarian 9/21.  She was out on Friday but when she got back she kindly provided me both house and senate info from 1965 to present that I’ve used to update my table.  Many Thanks

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