Author Archives: John Lusk

North Carolina BBQ

El cheapo Weber grill + half a bag of charcoal (NOT THE STUFF SOAKED WITH LIGHTER FLUID) + half a bag of hickory chips + el expensivo Bluetooth thermometer + one day of reading pulp westerns and drinking beer = truly awesome pulled pork, NC style. Seriously, that stuff just fell right apart. 5-lb pork butt.

What’s with the dang metric, Meater?

Better.

Pulp westerns and gun laws

Louis L’Amour, The High Graders, 1965.

“More thickly settled communities.”

So many Westerns I see start out with “we don’t allow guns here”, because, of course, common sense.

People pushing for open carry and concealed carry are just living in a fiction that never existed.

Trump voters

Megan McArdle:

«Try for a moment to see how the world looks to a Trump voter, which is to say, someone who probably doesn’t have many friends who work in academia, or journalism, or high up in some expert bureaucracy like public health or the courts. They are aware that those folks have long viewed them with a mixture of bemused contempt and outright loathing, and they’re understandably a little peeved. They’re also pretty mad that Republican elected officials colluded with those elites to suppress consideration of popular restrictions on immigration and trade.

That Trump is a pariah among the professional class is a feature, not a bug….

…most notably his baseless allegations of election fraud. But convincing someone that those allegations are nonsense requires either that they have an expert command of polling and election data, or else that they trust the pronouncements of mainstream institutional sources — which, if you are a Trump voter, means trusting people who have spent much of the last six years explaining that you voted for Trump because you are a) a bigot b) a fascist and/or c) too dumb to come in out of the rain.

You wouldn’t trust anyone who talked like that about you, either.»

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/21/trump-endorsements-senate-midterms-blowback/

Yes, we really need to find a way to speak more compassionately and convincingly across the divide. Somehow.

🙄

(Thanks, Republican party, for cultivating these people since 1964.)

Racism without racists

This is why this book is so dang hard to read:

1. Dense

2. So many footnotes.

3. SO PAINFUL. I’M SO SORRY, Y’ALL.

“However, the most respected study on this matter carried out by Professor David C. Baldus to support the claim of Warren McCleskey, a black man convicted of murdering a white police officer in 1978, found that there was a huge disparity in the imposition of the death penalty in Georgia.105 The study found that in cases involving white victims and black defendants, the death penalty was imposed 22 percent of the time, whereas in the white-black dyad, the death penalty was imposed in only 1 percent of the cases. Even after controlling for a number of variables, blacks were 4.3 times as likely as whites to receive a death sentence.106”

https://a.co/41KrSdq

And I’m only still in chapter 2.