By The Numbers - part the sixty ninth

The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts are, once again as always, claiming voter fraud without, as always, even a mere shred of evidence that raping and murdering wetbacks are voting Damnocrats into office. Even the President. And they mean to stop it.

But, one might muse, what's the fair way to establish eligibilty to vote? At the beginning one had to be, more or less, a rich (if only land holding) white guy to vote. About 6% (lost the link, boo hoo, but various pages make that reference) of the population!! Ain't minority rule grand?

In the states that did hold elections, suffrage was generally restricted to white men who owned property.

What that means: some states assigned electors by the legislature. An even teenyer minority rule!!

Yes, that's what the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want to make the (Federal, just like abortion) law again, with no mistake.

If you read the wiki piece, you'll discover a fact not necessarily obvious: the Constitution accrues almost all voting authority to the states, separately. I suppose it's a recurring wet dream for the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts to have the Right Wingnut Supremes declare the 15th and 19th and 24th amendments unconstituional! And, without doubt, what's left of the Voting Rights act!! Party like it'a 1788!!

Since many of the uber-rich never pay any taxes:

We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.
-- Leona Helmsley/1989 (or earlier)

May haps the right to vote should accrue only to those who actually pay, not simply file, taxes. So, let's look for some numbers. And, of course, the point is that some number of non-legal immigrants still pay taxes. (The numbers come from different sources and slightly different times.) Green Card status doesn't explicitly confer National or State voting right. There are small exceptions. Suffrage based on paying taxes would change that, of course, and would not, in and of itself, require a Constitutional amendment. It would require a change in Federal law. Good luck with that.

number of eligible voters: 252 million

number of taxpayers: 128.7 million (and, no, I can't find an explanation for the size discrepancy)

number who voted: 122 million

For perspective, Sleepy Joe got 7 million more votes than Bone Spur Samurai^© in 2020, and one could expect that most of that 7 million other difference is largely W2 bound voters. Not likely to be MAGA morons. One hopes, anyway. So, one hopes, a ~14 million landslide for the Damnocrats is feasible.

So, who's more entitled? The Leonas who merely slurp from Uncle Sugar, or those W2 bound losers? It's your choice. But if you don't want dictatorship, which is just how the rich minority keep most of a country's resources in order to stay rich, then giving the vote to those who actually work and pay taxes and live here, irregardless of status, is most fairest.

NIMBY

Not In My Back Yard is an age old epithet, but so is Not Invented Here. Too often, in PhARMA, where the advances come from is at the least elided, if not concealed. And so it is with the mRNA Covid vaccines.

About the most stupid vector of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts cabal that appeared during Covid was the assertion that the mRNA vaccines were conjured up immediately to suck of Uncle Sugar's Bongo Bucks, and to poison the population, and so forth. The knee jerk affirmation of the sub-GED cult happened right on cue. About that time, and in more than one venue, I noted that mRNA had been around (well, it's been around pretty much forever, but it took some time for us bipeds to notice) for a very long time in medchem years. It was well understood by the time of Covid, and so on. Of some note, especially to those who call bullshit on PhARMA's bleating poormouth, these mRNA discoveries were done in academia and NGOs, not Big PhARMA.

Which brings us to Derek Lowe's current report on the subject. Again, well worth the read, even for those who aren't university trained medchemists. The delivery tech of mRNA vaccines is not exactly olde hat, but close.

Among those people who have now heard of LNPs [lipid nanoparticles], I would guess that many of them have the impression that these are a new development. They likely also have a similar impression that the idea of an mRNA vaccine itself is a new idea, but neither of these are true.

There was a time when gaining new knowledge was The Best Thing, but with the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts attempting to subvert intelligence and science, we may well fall into a very long Dark Age if the likes of Putin, Orban, and wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© run the world. I often wonder why they all don't sign up for Islam: a more Male Chauvinist Pig ideology is difficult to conjure. Ya don't need no book larnin to walk behind a mule and make babies!! Preferably fishbelly white, of course; none of those shithole country shades. "Party like it's 1829"^©

Yeah, Right

So, this is where the latest white folks killing white folks happened

We know you've made the best decision by moving inside the City limits of Winder, Georgia, founded in 1893. Originally called Jug Tavern, Winder gained its new name from railroad builder John H. Winder.

So, a joint that proclaims its existence as white trash. Perfect.

Leave it to the Brits to explain the corruption in Georgia.

In 2022, Georgia enacted a permitless carry law, repealing provisions requiring people to obtain a license and be subject to fingerprinting and a background check before carrying concealed weapons in public spaces.

In sum: party like it's 1829!!! We don't need no laws.

Likely not in what's left of my life span, but nobody with brains will live in these stupid Red States.

Nom de Guerre

As regular reader is aware, one of the joys of these missives is the opportunity to skewer prominent folk, mostly the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts of this world. On occasion, I've adopted their epithets for the progressive minded, Sleepy Joe being first among equals.

A whlle ago, I invented (so far as I know) Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© as a skewer to the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts' increasingly unhinged half-wits. Well, what do you know?

And in a reprise of past GOP campaigns branding Democratic nominees as extreme liberals, Trump and his supporters are trying to frame Harris as a communist and a "Bolshevik." South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem blasted Harris' running mate, Tim Walz, as a "security risk" because he once taught in China.

Life, sometimes, does imitate Art.

American Hegemony

A few weeks ago, I discovered that CBS Sports Network (a cab/sat-only feed) carries CFL games, two or three a weekend. Which led me to the wiki. I'm old enough to sorta, kinda remember Doug Flutie went to the UFL (playing for wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^©'s New Jersey Generals!) before getting a gig in the NFL. Then he went to the CFL and great fame in The Great White North, and thence back to the NFL. The odd differences between CFL and NFL are easily seen on the field. What I was curious about was where do the players (have to) come from?

The wiki, and other sources, describe a variable rule-set for rosters. Near as I can tell, the current rule is that a CFL team has to have 7 more-or-less Canadian players on the 24 man playing field; it's 12 a side up there. That's not a whole lot of Canadians playing CFL football. I had suspected that the rule, for competition reasons, would allow some number of non-Canadians on the roster, but not require a minimum number of Canadians on the field at all times. Turns out, they do. Good on them.

Which brings us to today's NYT (again), and the saga of Mexican baseball. Here the difference has gone for more imports.

[T]he floodgates opened this year, when the league office increased the number of foreign players allowed on each team's 30-player roster from seven to 20.

And foreign players, and not just Americans, flooded in.

Whenever the subject of immigration from the shithole countries to the South rears its head, I usually send readers off to the wiki to review how Operation Wetback actually came about. And it was the Mexican side that initiated the program; their government felt that losing workers, even the barely skilled, to El Norte was a bad thing.

[I]t originated from a request by the Mexican government to stop the illegal entry of Mexican laborers into the United States.

But now, let's get us some good ballplayers!! My, how times have changed! Although the report does note that some in Mexico find the loss of roster spots for natives is not a Good Thing.

"It has taken away from what I call the traditional Mexican League," said Diablos manager Bundy, who grew up in Virginia and first experienced the league as a player in the 1980s. "Obviously, it has definitely taken opportunities away from the younger Mexican players."

It's a small world, after all. Classical econ says that labor will always get its fair share of revenue. Were that such were ever true.

Deep State - part the first

Now we know more about The Real Deep State^©, thanks to the NYT, of course.

DoL reporting is supposed to have hard-and-fast embargoes. But, it turns out, not always. And more than a one-off in this last year of Sleepy Joe's administration. Could it be that there's a MAGA/Big Bidnezz/billionaire Boys Club deep inside such a Blue Gummint? Fool me once, your fault. Fool me some more, my fault. So, yeah, there has to be.

To be clear: much of the data that comes out of DoL is actually gathered by Commerce's survey staff. Gives them something to do when they ain't no census.

And in May, the agency inadvertently posted data on the Consumer Price Index 30 minutes before the scheduled release time. The report is closely watched and heavily traded, and some Wall Street firms and data platforms monitor the part of the bureau's website — internally called "flat files" — where the data was accidentally published. Less sophisticated users do not.

Yeah, and they not be using RDBMS. COBOL uber alles!!

Lost in Translation

Way back when, high school, I read Russian for a year. It was intended to be at least a two year stint, but The Powers That Be in the school system decided that our teacher was a latent Communist, and rather than fire the guy, pushed him into administration. And didn't get them a new teacher. Of course. It was the Cold War. Thus avoiding public scrutiny. Oddly, he was just a standard short Jewish American, who had been studying the language with a Russian native speaker, an older woman whose name I've long since forgot. This was Classical High School (no, I'm not making that up), designated as the city's college prep school, meant to rival the tony private schools that proliferated in my corner of New England. The number of languages on offer included Hebrew, of course.

All that by way of introduction to a long-ish piece in today's NYT on a husband and wife team of Russian literature translators. They've been at it for a while, and their output is considerable.

Both the NYT piece and the wiki page discuss their supporters and critics. The NYT piece points out that at least two of their critics don't read or speak Russian. I can't claim to have a perfect memory of the language from all those decades ago, but among other things, the structure is more Latin-esque than Latin itself. As in Latin, nouns have declension, while verbs have conjugation.

Here's the wiki for Latin declension: 6 cases
And for Russian: they go on and on

Yes, it was a bitch to keep it all straight. And, of course, the weird alphabet and script. CCCP isn't see-see-see-pee, y'all know, right?

I imagine that Russian is the toughest sorta, kinda Western language to render into idiomatic English. One point made in the NYT piece is that other translations leave some names merely transliterated into English alphabet; thus Foolsburg here is what the Russian word means in English. Previous translations just left the Russian/English spelling word. Unless you are somewhat fluent in Russian (I'll imagine the Russian word is a borderline swear word), you don't get the joke.

It's likely too extreme to say that translation of fiction is harder than writing fiction in one's own language. But it ain't like falling off a log.