Recent Comments

1. about 2 years ago on JumpStart

   Some were paper-mache, some were all metal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_tank

2. over 2 years ago on Clay Jones

   I will add that at least some of the vandalism and other violence appears to have been deliberately caused by groups seeking to “pin” the violence on the BLM protestors with the objective of discrediting the protests.

3. over 2 years ago on Clay Jones

   Since BBH will simple-mindedly dismiss this study as biased or fake news, I am addressing it to you and any others reading this thread in the hope that others will be aware that BBH’s claims are disinformation.

   The Harvard Ratcliffe Institute did a study of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and published a report in October 2020. The conclusion of the study was:

   The Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent. When there was violence, very often police or counterprotesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters.

   The report of the study can be found at https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/black-lives-matter-protesters-were-overwhelmingly-peaceful-our-research-finds.

   For those who don’t want to take the time to read the report, here are some of the findings:

   Protesters or bystanders were reported injured in 1.6 percent of the protests. In total, at least three Black Lives Matter protesters and one other person were killed while protesting in Omaha, Austin and Kenosha, Wis. One anti-fascist protester killed a far-right group member during a confrontation in Portland, Ore.; law enforcement killed the alleged assailant several days later.

   Police were reported injured in 1% of the protests. A law enforcement officer killed in California was allegedly shot by supporters of the far-right “boogaloo” movement, not anti-racism protesters.

   The killings in the line of duty of other law enforcement officers during this period were not related to the protests.

   Only 3.7% of the protests involved property damage or vandalism. Some portion of these involved neither police nor protesters, but people engaging in vandalism or looting alongside the protests.

   In short, our data suggest that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7% of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police.

4. over 2 years ago on Mike Luckovich

   Alexander Lukashenko is the President of Belarus; Viktor Orban is the Prime Minister of Hungary. Both, in my opinion, fit the definition of dictators, but Lukashenko embraces the label while Orban seems to at least try to wear a fig leaf of being democratically elected. (I suspect you made the type of editing error I frequently make where I start to write something, then decide to take a different approach and forget to go back and tie up the loose ends.)

   Unfortunately, Hungary is a NATO member (the fox in the hen house?).

5. over 2 years ago on Non Sequitur

   Does the answer to your question actually change the answer to OP’s question?

6. over 2 years ago on Non Sequitur

   Most schools don’t allow students to have phones out of their book bags, etc. during classes.

   Well, I can’t speak for most schools, but in the middle and high schools where I was substitute teaching, many students used their phones to access on-line (Canvas) content and even submit assignments. In many cases, the students were more comfortable using their phones than using the school-system-provided laptops/Chromebooks (as comfortable as I am with that form-factor, I would rather use a larger device for that purpose, but they made it work), but in more than a few instances, there were insufficient functioning school-system-provided laptops/Chromebooks for every student in the class to use, so we allowed them to use their phones (while trying to give priority on use of the laptops to those few students who didn’t have phones).

   For the most part that worked to the benefit of both the students and the school system (sure, there were some who abused it but abuse happened – think of students hiding comic books inside the textbooks – even when the predominant method of imparting instruction was physical textbooks).

   The times, they are a changing. The mobile phone is rapidly becoming an essential tool for education (at least in my opinion). We may even be surprised that these devices wind up foiling the attempts by the so-call conservatives (I consider them to be regressives) to limit what students learn about our nation’s history and the reality of the world around them.

7. over 2 years ago on Barney & Clyde

   It’s really tough when a language does not have a standardized romanization.

   Indeed!

   But even languages which use the Latin alphabet are not standardized. Italian, for example, only uses 21 of the 26 letters used in English (Irish only uses 20). Languages such as Spanish, German, and French extend the alphabet using ligatures and/or diacritical marks. Even the sound associated with a letter (or combination of letters) differs between languages. In German, the “z” letter is pronounced more like a “ts” in English and the “st” pair in German is pronounced more like “sht”.

   So, when a speaker of a language which uses the Latin alphabet tries to map a sound from another language that has no equivalent in that speaker’s language and does not use the Latin alphabet, the speaker will attempt to match the sound to the letter (or combination of letters) which most closely matches the sound in the speaker’s alphabet. Therefore, there will always be differences in the mappings.

   The intelligence community addressed (but didn’t fully solve) the problem through technology by creating database search engines which not only searched on the enter keyword but, if the keyword was in a linked list of alternate spellings, would also search for instances of all the alternate spellings.

8. over 2 years ago on Barney & Clyde

   Because it’s really “царь”

   Reminds me of the debate that raged within the intelligence community in the 70s as to the proper transliteration of القذّافي. Because of the various ways the Libyan leader’s name (Qaddafi, Kadhafi, Gaddafi, Gadhafi, etc.) was being entered into English-language intelligence databases (and the various ways intelligence analysts would enter the name for search keys), critical reports concerning his activities were not being incorporated into the analyses being provided to policy makers who were trying to determine how much of a threat (or even if he was a threat) to US interests or the interests of our allies.

9. over 2 years ago on Doonesbury

   Yet, here you are doing what you claim others would do to you – finding “excuses” as to why links are not valid.

   I would hope that most American citizens have better critical-thinking skills than what you demonstrate on these comments, but I sometimes despair at the celebration of ignorance which has permeated American culture since the nation’s earliest days.

   I know you will reply because it is important to your self-esteem to get in the last word, so I will let you get in the last word.

10. over 2 years ago on Doonesbury

    I could spend an hour digging up links

    You just admitted that if there are examples of things you claim are so prevalent, they aren’t easy to find.

    Thanks.

    BTW, I provided a link and you didn’t even question its validity – you just ignored it.