SLIGHTLY OVERSTATED

Stopped to visit the Brown v Board of Education historical site in Topeka yesterday. The exhibits included a number of contemporary predictions about what would happen if the Court desegregated the schools. Suffice it to say many atrocities would befall Our Women and society as we know it would collapse. They predicted the same things reactionaries always predict at the slightest potential for change. You've heard them all. And I found myself wondering, How many times have we been promised these outcomes? Have the predictions ever come true?
online pharmacy wellbutrin best drugstore for you

buy cymbalta online www.parkviewortho.com/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/cymbalta.html no prescription

Are there any examples of apocalyptic predictions – the kind that accompany issues like gay marriage, desegregation, etc. – that were anything less than wild exaggerations? Any example we can point to of the Pat Robertsons of the world warning us of dire consequences that kind of, sort of came to pass?
online pharmacy amitriptyline best drugstore for you

buy elavil online www.parkviewortho.com/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/elavil.html no prescription

The jury's still out on the whole "Repealing DADT will reduce the military to one furious gay orgy" prediction – Just give it a few years, it'll happen – but on others the record is complete. Neither gay marriage nor female suffrage led to the predicted collapse of civilization, after all. But maybe something else that I'm forgetting did.

INCENTIVE STRUCTURE

Like any professional association or interest group, the American Political Science Association bombards its members with emails, occasional junk mail, and various Calls to Action. Lately and quite regularly those Calls have been related to Congress's attempts to cut funding for the social sciences from the National Science Foundation. There are no data available but I suspect the response rate on the exhortations to "Contact your elected officials and tell them to fund the NSF!" is very low. Part of that is the nature of the shotgun approach to asking for help. Part of it is because while no one in the field doubts that funding the study of all subjects is inherently good for obvious reasons, the APSA is trying to mobilize its 10,000 members to save something that directly benefits about 0.
buy augmentin online gilbertroaddental.com/wp-content/languages/new/generic/augmentin.html no prescription

5% of us.

As is the case in any profession, I assume, academia has a pretty rigidly defined class structure. If we're being honest with ourselves, 99% of the NSF funding in this field goes to tenured faculty at about three dozen universities – with the top 5 or 10 collecting a disproportionate amount. So when the APSA asks all of us to help it lobby for NSF funding, what it's really asking us to do is to petition Congress to help our social/professional betters stay on top of us. Sure, they push hard on the idea that NSF-funded projects affect us all, and that's not without merit. But if I'm self-interested – and who isn't, regarding their own professional advancement and compensation – I want to know why I should help Joe Blow get a $5 million dollar grant at Stanford to conduct a survey in the hopes that years down the line I can use the crumbs of the data to scavenge for publications knowing that Dr. Blow and colleagues have already published all the good stuff.

It's a nice case study of how the incentive to participate in politics declines as inequality rises. Maybe if the vast majority of the profession had a snowball's chance in hell of getting an NSF grant we would all be fired up about this and put some real pressure on the relevant members of Congress.
buy symbicort online gilbertroaddental.com/wp-content/languages/new/generic/symbicort.html no prescription

Or, as I suspect many of us do, we look at it as the rich asking us to help them get richer in the professional sense and check out. That 50% of Americans who cannot be motivated to vote, or can be only at great cost, probably looks at the political process and draws the same conclusions. Hard to blame them. Survey data shows not only that income predicts participation but also that it predicts political efficacy – one's sense of whether participation is meaningful and the process itself is legitimate. The more money people have, the more they believe the political process is responsive to their interests.

online pharmacy amitriptyline no prescription

They believe that because it's true.

online pharmacy lipitor no prescription

As a gainfully employed white male, I generally don't have a hard time paying attention to politics because the entire system and the society it reflects are biased in my favor. It's remarkable, though, how easy it is to disengage when that's not the case. No wonder so many Americans do it so often. We could debate whether the futility of politics is reality or merely a perception generated to keep the poor complacent. Either way, it's working like a charm.

THE CLOSET

Within hours of the Dennis Hastert news breaking, I texted two people I know who have met him on multiple occasions for their thoughts.

Both stated that he did not Seem Like the Type but that the evidence of what he did is substantial and he is now persona non grata. This was a relief to hear, as it bothers me when people leap to "I know him and he would never do such a thing" defenses. What scandals like this remind But us is that whether our friends are nobodies like us or powerful elected officials, you never know them as well as you think they do.
online pharmacy lasix best drugstore for you

I sincerely believe that a lot of Hastert's friends, even family, are shocked by these revelations. They're shocked because you never suspect someone you know so well of harboring this kind of secret. But that's just it; everybody has secrets. Maybe, hopefully, not everyone has a secret as vile as having molested a minor. But show me somebody who has never done anything of which they are ashamed or was against the law and I will show you a liar.

It's not a defense of his actions in any way, shape, or form. Instead it is a reminder that humans are remarkably talented at hiding parts of themselves from one another. Even our spouses, our parents, our children, our best friends…no matter how well we think we know them, we never know them fully. What we've seen lately, this wave of men being outed for secret (and in some cases lawbreaking) lifestyles, is a result of our shrinking privacy. I don't mean that in the "The gub'mint's stealin' my emails!" sense, but rather a recognition that the ability to hide some secret aspect of one's life is becoming more difficult. If some pastor wants to have sex with other men on the side and ends up, as people do these days, using the internet to facilitate that, it's not a matter of if but of when it will become public knowledge.

I used to fancy myself someone who was a good judge of character, the kind of person who said he knew right away what a person is like. Over time and with experience I learned how silly that is. There are people in this world who are married for years and still don't know everything about one another, people who sit next to one another in the same office for forty years with no idea that one of them is swindling money from the company and the other hosts bi-weekly Craigslist anonymous orgy meetup in that charming little ranch house. So "I know Bob and he wouldn't do that" is one of the most dangerous conclusions a person can jump to. We don't know what the people we interact with and know are capable of. We've seen the cliche often enough, the reporter interviewing the neighbor of the recently unmasked serial killer saying "But he seemed like such a nice boy…
online pharmacy clomid best drugstore for you

"

Life is full of surprises; finding out what the people we know are hiding from us and from the rest of the world is the least pleasant type.

NPF: GRAND TOUR

A quick programming note.

For the next month I'm going to be living out of a rental car on a long road trip across the country hopefully ending as near to the Arctic Ocean as someone who doesn't work in the oil industry can get. Technically I guess it will end when I return to Central Illinois, but for the moment let's pretend that I will be eaten by a bear, shanghaied by pirates, or crushed by a falling piece of Skylab since all of those will most likely seem more appealing once I reach my destination.

I'm violating the internet rule against announcing vacations (and thereby alerting ne'er-do-wells to the dates on which your home will be unoccupied) because I have secured a house-sitter.

buy advair online welovelmc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/png/advair.html no prescription pharmacy

Besides, there is little worth stealing in the soon to be foreclosed home I rent and the modal burglar in this city lacks internet access.

Though I stand firmly against the proliferation of overwhelmingly redundant social media sites, to supply family and friends with Visual Evidence of Experiences I have created an Instagram account. You may follow it if you want to see pictures of Nature and most likely the Sounds of Real America.

Instagram

As I will be sleeping outdoors and doing a vast quantity of driving, it is likely that my internet access and time for writing will be reduced over the next few weeks. That is just a guess; honestly I have no idea how frequently I will be able to or will want to write something here. Logistically it is more difficult to post On the Road, but I also happen to do some of my best thinking during 12-hour drives.
buy clomiphene online buy clomiphene no prescription

So ideally the posting will continue at close to the current pace.

I have conflicting feelings about this.
buy premarin online buy premarin no prescription

Obviously I'm looking forward to doing it but I have a tremendous amount of pressure on me at the moment to churn out more publications, so it is really hard for me to 1) not work, and 2) not think about work when not working. Ultimately I decided that staying here would reduce my productivity and negate the benefits of spending more time in the office; in the next month I'm hopeful that if the amount of time I spend glued to the screen is reduced, the quality of it will rise.

In any case, I'll update my progress as I go.

buy fluoxetine online welovelmc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/png/fluoxetine.html no prescription pharmacy

I don't have a schedule or agenda except in the loosest sense, but hopefully a grand time will be had by all and I will be allowed into Canada without incident.

ABOUT FACE

Some things are funny because they are predictable, but it's a tricky kind of humor.
buy valtrex online buy valtrex no prescription

When Leslie Nielsen turns to the bartender and asks for a Black Russian, you know with such certainty what's about to happen that there is no room left for humor when the visual punchline arrives. Foreshadowed is funny, telegraphed is not. Predictability is a source of humor more often when there is no overt attempt to be funny. When Charlie Brown lines up for the hundredth time to kick the football he's not trying to crack you up. It's funny because he doesn't know what's going to happen but you do.

When we saw the first reports of severe flooding coming out of Texas, I suppressed a soft chuckle. Not because I think death and destruction inflicted upon my fellow man is funny – no, the impending humor was the certainty that we'd be seeing Greg Abbott requesting Federal disaster relief aid by the end of the week. It may not take long, though, since he has already met with He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken in Texas.

Stop me if I've mentioned this before, but when I teach Intro American Government (a breadth course that forces you to cover a new topic every other class, with no time to address anything in real depth) I am a realist who accepts that the students are unlikely to remember more than a fraction of the details. So I try to make sure that there's one or two big points from each topic that they remember. With the obligatory chapter on federalism, the One Point is that states balk at Washington's involvement in their affairs only until they're begging for it.
online pharmacy synthroid best drugstore for you

buy premarin online buy premarin no prescription

With the dire budgetary situation found in most states today, there is no Rainy Day money lying around for hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, measles outbreaks, or anything else that can't be forecast with certainty. All the tough-sounding talk about getting Washington off Our backs goes right out the window when things, as the kids say, get real. It is politically appealing for state-level politicians to bash the federal government; some of them may even believe it. They learn very quickly, however, that ideology goes out the window when the state is faced with billion dollars in repair and cleanup costs. No one's a states' rights advocate when a city is under water and the Coast Guard and FEMA are the only ones equipped to handle it.

The men who wrote the Constitution were more suspicious (earnestly so) of power in the hands of a national government than any of the corn-pone orators elevated into high offices today. Yet they understood the necessity of having such a government. Even if they don't realize it, people like Greg Abbott recognize it too.
online pharmacy cipro best drugstore for you

It takes very little reflection and imagination to come up with a dozen scenarios that would have even Sam Brownback reaching for the phone to beg for Washington's help faster than he could say "I've never met Josh Duggar."

WORTH REMEMBERING

Usually on Memorial Day I go through the list of people serving in the military who died in the previous year in Iraq or Afghanistan, choose someone at random, talk a little about who they were and what happened to them. Generally I think this holiday is misguided, though, in that it focuses on the sacrifices made to the exclusion of why they were made. As important as it is to recognize that the ordinary men and women of the military do what they are ordered to do regardless of whether they want to or think it's a great idea, recent history teaches us that we and the political process in which we participate have an obligation to think a little harder about when we require them to make that sacrifice. Because if you'll recall we didn't think too hard about it the last time it came up, and here we are, 13 years later still fighting wars that were pitched as brief excursions.

This is more important than ever now not because the events are so recent but because as we stand here today they are distant enough in the past to be forgotten. Worse, they are distant enough in the past to be remembered not entirely accurately, with the intervening decade slowly eroding away the details.

online pharmacy buy udenafil online cheap pharmacy

We remember, but we remember selectively and heavily influenced by 13 years of re-imaginings and re-tellings that cast the events as we want them to be rather than as they were.
buy ventolin online buy ventolin no prescription

The narrative of the well-intentioned political and media class acting in good faith – a phrase that has become the modern Nuremburg Defense, "just following orders" – leading us astray because of intelligence that unfortunately and unexpectedly turned out to be false has taken root with a large segment of the population. It is worrying to think of young people who don't recall the events from personal experience being exposed to such an appealing but wholly fictional version of events.

With Jeb Bush apparently being considered seriously for the presidency by some portion or the electorate, Iraq is likely to come up periodically in this election. And the early indications are that we are in for some brazen revisionist history.
buy cymbalta online buy cymbalta no prescription

The "faulty intelligence" trope simply isn't true even if our recollection of the run-up to the wars is distorted as badly as the intelligence in question. Even giving it the benefit of doubt, the faults were a direct result of the ideological and political commitment to generating a specific narrative. To say "Knowing what we know now, I would not have done it" is the most intellectually dishonest of cop-outs, since the passage of time has only confirmed and added more detail to what was already known at the time. Facts will always remain unknown to people who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge them.

online pharmacy buy flexeril online cheap pharmacy

And people died because of it. Remember that part of the story today as well.

A VORTEX OF SHIT, PART II

(Check in with Part I here)

So does Scott County really have to be as bad as it is? Realistically, yes. Its fate is sealed. Here's why.

There is no reason to stay in Scott County, Indiana. There's nothing to do there, no economic opportunities. It's ugly. The weather sucks. It has a lot of crime. Its only real asset – low cost of living – is a direct function of its status as a void in the universe and therefore not worth much. So like any half-rational person, you leave. You find the nearest big city or make the big move out to New York or whatever. You leave just like everybody leaves.

Well, not everybody. The people who are capable of leaving – young, not tied down, not incarcerated or on probation, not dirt poor – leave.

online pharmacy neurontin no prescription

So who's left behind? Old people who refuse to leave. Young people counting down the minutes until they can leave. People who can't pay their bills let alone the cost of moving. People with life-obliterating problems (with drugs, with booze, with gambling). People who have no skills or education that might be salable elsewhere. People who are barely adults and have four kids. People who don't have a parole officer. People who don't think that (insert name of essentially city anywhere) is better than Scott County. People who can't get their shit together even if they have the means. People who either had their asses kicked by life or are losers, basically.

So who ends up in charge? Who makes the decisions that make the Scott Counties of the world so spectacularly and consistently backward? Well. The idiots elect a handful of other idiots, who hire their idiot relatives to perform important jobs very badly. The Chief of Police in Scott County is behaving like some kind of reactionary, pitiably stupid backcountry hick because he is a reactionary, pitiably stupid backcountry hick.
buy clomiphene online www.adentalcare.com/wp-content/themes/medicare/fonts/engl/clomiphene.html no prescription

We know that with certainty because if he were any good at his job or had marketable skills he would move 25 miles away to work in the safe, fancy suburbs of Louisville, KY and do the same job only easier and at double the salary. And that's the reason communities like these are in a death spiral – anyone good enough to do the job(s) of running the place well is good enough to get a better job in a better place at a better salary. If a few capable people do stick around, they'll find it impossible to accomplish anything against the tendencies of the elderly, the ignorant, and the ignorant elderly.

How do we fix it? We don't. Communities need people with a mix of skills in order to prosper, and short of handing out Ferraris and a blowjob to anyone who agrees to move there it is not going to get a mix. It is going to get people for whom getting through one day is a struggle and therefore unwilling to focus on anything other than their own lives.

online pharmacy diflucan no prescription

It is going to get knuckleheads and miserable old people. It's going to get a lot of people caught up in the justice system or on meth.
buy flagyl online www.adentalcare.com/wp-content/themes/medicare/fonts/engl/flagyl.html no prescription

And they're going to be on the school board, in the police force, teaching in the schools, and raising their inevitably terrible children.

They will try to fix the local economy with ideas that were stale 20 years ago. They'll take ineffective, counterproductive, and punitive approaches to dealing with social problems like drugs, poverty, and crime. They'll teach their kids that the Earth is 6,000 years old and girls all want to be raped and The Messicans are comin' to take their part-time job at Casey's General Store. The courts, justice system, and law enforcement will be corrupt, petty, and inept. And that's just the way everything will be, and everyone will be used to it, and everyone will accept it as their lot in life and that will be that.

The only hope is that a higher level of government – particularly the state legislature – is run by less incompetent people who can enforce some half-decent choices on rural and failing urban areas. Good thing Scott County has Mike Pence and the Indiana Legislature handling the really important things in the State Capitol.

THAT WAS EXCESSIVE

One of the hazards of following Gin and Tacos during the Stanley Cup Playoffs is the potential for a five hour, six period game with 115 shots on goal to come between me and the schedule of posts for the week. I had the best intentions. Thank you for your patience. This has been your annual Overtime Hockey Service Interruption (OHSI). Part II of yesterday's post will be here as soon as possible.

Bonus fun fact: Headers are illegal in hockey, so I guess it's not correct to call it Ice Soccer anymore.

A VORTEX OF SHIT, PART I

For the last several months, one of the worst places I have ever been in the United States has been in the news. Not surprisingly the reason isn't positive. Scott County in southern Indiana (anchored by the metropolises of Austin and Scottsburg) was the site of a rapid spike in HIV infections from prescription opiate addicts sharing needles in that little slice of Real America. If you've never been to Scott County, you've been to Scott County. Just think of whatever nearby dilapidated, tumbleweed-strewn rural dump is nearby and you're there. Think of a big trailer park, but dirtier and poorer. Think of small towns that have no reason for existing anymore. That's Scott County. Everything necessary to create an HIV outbreak is there in spades: lack of healthcare, lack of public health services, lack of education, lack of employment, lack of money, and lack of anything to do but make and shoot the kind of drugs that destroy people from the inside out.

After some of his trademark waffling between right wing talking points and massive public and Federal pressure, Indiana Governor Mike Pence recently approved a temporary needle exchange program for Scott County.
online pharmacy temovate best drugstore for you

Then after he swore repeatedly he would veto it, he signed a law to the same effect. For a moment it seemed like a rare example of Republican lawmakers making a decision based on evidence rather than ideology.
online pharmacy xenical best drugstore for you

buy levaquin online blackmenheal.org/wp-content/languages/new/us/levaquin.html no prescription

Not to oversimplify the issue, but everyone who isn't weapons-grade stupid or steeped too thoroughly in War on Drugs propaganda to see over the edge of their paranoia understands that things like needle exchanges are sensible policy. People addicted to things like heroin and meth are going to do things like heroin or meth every day regardless of whether they have proper sterile paraphernalia available.
buy nolvadex online blackmenheal.org/wp-content/languages/new/us/nolvadex.html no prescription

There is no opiate addict on the planet who ever said "Looks like I'm out of clean needles. Guess I have to quit using." Until some kind of treatment program intervenes (which in the United States usually takes the form of getting incarcerated, at least for poor people) to break people from addiction, addicts use drugs regardless of any externalities. Even anti-drug crusaders are capable of understanding that things like HIV and Hepatitis outbreaks are expensive public health problems that cost far more in the long term than a bulk-bought $0.49 syringe.

Don't worry, though. The yokels of Scott County have found a way to fuck it up. Even when events conspire to accidentally produce good public policy from the Governor and state legislature, leave it to the ingenuity of the kind of people in positions of power in America's rural sinkholes to ensure that no sensible ideas are enacted on the ground.

Why does it always have to turn out this way? Aside from the obvious lack of a stable economic base, why must places like Scott County suck so completely and consistently? Many Americans insist that not terribly long ago small town America was actually a fairly pleasant place to live. The same is said about any number of medium sized Rust Belt cities that have been on the decline since the 1950s. Obviously these places are poor and that's a big problem. But lacking great wealth doesn't mean everything has to be terrible. Your school district might not be rich, for example, but it doesn't cost anything to teach students that the Earth is not 6,000 years old. It costs nothing to teach real Sex Education rather than abstinence-only detritus.

I have been thinking about this a great deal lately, and I have an idea that doesn't invoke religion, the Culture Wars, or the Republican Party's messy divorce from reality. But that will have to wait 24 hours.