Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Parsing . . .

https://hackernoon.com/consistently-bad-parsing-of-yaml-ae23eb3676a1
. . . fatuous claims . . . 

". . . “My Admin has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln. Passed Opportunity Zones with @SenatorTimScott, guaranteed funding for HBCU’s, School Choice, passed Criminal Justice Reform, lowest Black unemployment, poverty, and crime rates in history.”
— President Trump, in a tweet, June 2, 2020. . . Lincoln, of course, freed the slaves in the Confederacy via the Emancipation Proclamation and pressed for passage of constitutional amendments to give them equal status under the law. . . LBJ’s Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act rank right next to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.” . . . Ulysses S. Grant (securing creation of Department of Justice and empowering the attorney general to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan and racial violence, etc.), Harry Truman (de-segregating the military, using executive order to circumvent a Congress dominated by the south). . . LBJ (also) signed his landmark Medicare Act in 1965, (securing) de-segregation of hospitals throughout the south, which had been universal, and anywhere else it existed. . . Barack Obama should be included for his success in passing the Affordable Care Act, which is one of the greatest anti-poverty measures that this country has ever enacted.”. . . 

(and on the other hand)

Trump’s Opportunity Zones program, for instance, was supposed to channel investments into poor neighborhoods. But the New York Times revealed the “most visible impact so far has been to set off a feeding frenzy among the wealthiest Americans. They are poised to reap billions in untaxed profits on high-end apartment buildings and hotels in trendy neighborhoods, storage facilities that employ only a handful of workers or student housing in bustling college towns.”. . . The funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) is a congressional initiative. “Congress does all this work and presents it to him in the budget, and he can choose to sign it. This year, he held off on signing some significant STEM funding, making HBCUs beg for it,” said Marybeth Gasman, a Rutgers professor and one of the leading authorities on HBCUs. “Most HBCU support is the result of Congress. Trump has promised all kinds of things to HBCUs and has followed through on little. Under Trump, the White House Initiative for HBCUs was moved to the White House and is quite quiet compared to the work under President Obama’s administration.”. . . School choice offers families money to attend charter schools or home-school eduction. Passage of the First Step Act, which overhauled federal sentencing laws, was a scaled-down version of an effort that began in 2015 and built on a law passed by Obama. . . . As for black unemployment rates, they continued on a downward trend that started in the Obama administration — until the coronavirus pandemic. “While it’s true that economic conditions under Trump continued to improve for blacks as well as whites, the devastation wrought by the pandemic has complicated his efforts to claim credit,” Greenberg said. “If he gets credit for the improving economy through early 2020, why should he avoid blame for the current state of the economy?”. . . "




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Monday, July 27, 2020

Low Lights . . .


(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_improvisation)
". . . is the spontaneous invention of melodic solo lines or accompaniment parts. . . composing on the spot. . . since the release of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, jazz improvisation has come to include modal harmony and improvisation over static key centers, while the emergence of free jazz has led to a variety of types of improvisation, such as "free blowing", in which soloists improvise freely and ignore the chord changes. . ."


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Sunday, July 26, 2020

Dysfunction . . .



(from https://mashable.com/article/donald-trump-brags-about-cognitive-dysfunction-test/)
". . . Donald Trump wants you to know he is a very smart man. So smart, he repeatedly insists, that he "aced" a cognitive test. There's just one thing: The test isn't intended to be difficult. . . .The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which NBC reported in 2018 is the screening the president took as part of an annual physical, is back in the news now after Trump repeatedly argued with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace about the exam during a Sunday interview. While the president insisted that the final five questions "get very hard," the MoCA is "designed as a rapid screening instrument for mild cognitive dysfunction," according to exam instructions. . . In other words, the exam isn't an IQ test or anything even remotely close to it. Rather, it's meant to assist trained health professionals in evaluating forms of cognitive decline such as Alzheimer's. Doing well on the test doesn't mean you're smart, but rather suggests that — at least as far as the test can tell — you aren't experiencing some form of cognitive dysfunction. . ."




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Saturday, July 25, 2020

You . . .

. . . are a star . . .

You're a star.
Where you wanted to be,
You now are.
From afar
You appear not too different
Than me.
But the scars
You've acquired
Did not come free.

Had I tried;
Had I done all I could
With all my might
Would the ride
Give return on the price
Which was required?
Cast aside
Any thoughts of security.



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Friday, July 24, 2020

Tango . . .

. . . is 'Ognat' backwards . . . 

(from https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/the_cold_generation_1246364)
They don’t dance the tango in Argentina anymore
but you can do the twist alone but keep your distance.
However, the elegant the waltz is out, superb dresses
is not a defence against the virus.
To do the swing is awkward to without a hand to hold
on to, I don’t know about square dance though.
We are becoming a withdrawn society, like the Swedes
they are not famed for warmth and kisses.
That is the way they have *****-industry to make up for
the lack of intimacy.

Copyright © jan oskar hansen



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Thursday, July 23, 2020

Oh Yeah . . .


. . . the truth . . . 

". . . Claim: The U.S. has conducted 'over 50 million tests'
According to the graphics displayed behind Trump during his remarks, the U.S. has conducted more than 45 million tests. This requires context, because the president is citing the data point as a measure of the U.S.'s success in combating the virus. Public health experts say the number of tests that have been conducted doesn't on its own indicate a country's success in controlling an outbreak. He said the rate of positive tests indicates that far more people are being infected than are being tested, and he pointed to Arizona, where 1 in 4 tests are positive, as an example. "Right now, our pandemic is out of control," he said.

Claim: 'Our case fatality rate has continued to decline' and is lower than 'almost everywhere else in the world'  
This is misleading. Trump is trying to make the U.S. look better by emphasizing the ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases — known as the case fatality rate — over the more telling mortality rate. The former lowers as testing expands and detects more mild cases, while the latter reveals how many deaths a country has had relative to its population. According to Johns Hopkins University data, the U.S. mortality rate is one of the highest in the world, thanks to the large outbreak. The case fatality rate has fallen, but it isn't lower than "almost everywhere else in the world."

Claim: 'We're closely monitoring hospital capacity' in states with surging cases. 'All of the governors we've spoken with say they have enough bed capacity.'
While we can't verify what governors have told the Trump administration, U.S. hospital capacity appears to be strained.  Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, raised the alarm Monday over COVID-19 hospitalizations, saying the state's caseload had the potential to strain hospital resources and staff. Last week, NBC News reported that 54 hospitals in Florida had no available beds in their intensive care units and that 40 more hospitals had less than 10 percent availability. NBC News reported this month that Houston hospitals have been forced to treat hundreds of patients in their emergency rooms — sometimes for several hours or multiple days — in their scramble to meet the pandemic's rising numbers.

Claim: 'We again have tremendous amounts of supplies, we're in very good shape, and we can move them quickly'
Not according to internal administration documents obtained by NBC News, which showed that the federal government may not have the capacity to supply medical professionals with personal protective equipment.

Claim: The Trump administration inherited 'very, very empty cupboards'
This is a false claim we've fact-checked previously. Both former Obama administration officials and previous news reports dispute it. While Trump didn't inherit empty shelves, congressional budget cuts might have depleted parts of the Strategic National Stockpile during the Obama administration. However, Trump didn't do anything to change that during the first three years of his administration.










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Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Unclear . . .


(from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a-government/606793/)
". . . The adults were too sophisticated to see Trump’s special political talents—his instinct for every adversary’s weakness, his fanatical devotion to himself, his knack for imposing his will, his sheer staying power. They also failed to appreciate the advanced decay of the Republican Party, which by 2016 was far gone in a nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs. They didn’t grasp the readiness of large numbers of Americans to accept, even relish, Trump’s contempt for democratic norms and basic decency. It took the arrival of such a leader to reveal how many things that had always seemed engraved in monumental stone turned out to depend on those flimsy norms, and how much the norms depended on public opinion. Their vanishing exposed the real power of the presidency. Legal precedent could be deleted with a keystroke; law enforcement’s independence from the White House was optional; the separation of powers turned out to be a gentleman’s agreement; transparent lies were more potent than solid facts. None of this was clear to the political class until Trump became president. . . "

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