AdamSmith

True. But the OP of this sub thread was not really Tom's opinion but rather zipperzone's delicious speculation we might get to watch the cat fight of Tom suing Joan. Imagine trying to lay a gag order on her!

He won me over when he knew how to play the Vampire Lestat. In contrast to poor Mr Pitt who had not a clue what was supposed to be going on.

Evidently only through a process that seems altogether more trouble than it's worth. Thetans and death Non-Scientologists Joel Sappell and Robert Welkos described in a 1990 article in the LA Times how Scientologists believe that when a person dies — or, in Scientology terms, when a thetan abandons its physical body — they go to a "landing station" on the planet Venus, where the thetan is re-implanted and told lies about its past life and its next life. The Venusians take the thetan, "capsule" it, and send it back to Earth to be thrown into the ocean off the coast of California. They quote Hubbard as saying, "If you can get out of that, and through that, and wander around through the cities and find some girl who looks like she is going to get married or have a baby or something like that, you're all set. And if you can find the maternity ward to a hospital or something, you're OK. And you just eventually just pick up a baby."[19][20] Operating Thetan Main article: Operating Thetan According to Scientology doctrine, a thetan exists whether operating a human body or not. Scientology advertises itself as being able to "rehabilitate" the thetan of a practitioner to a state where the individual can operate with or without a "flesh body". The term "operating thetan" would then apply as it does when an individual is operating a body. The Operating Thetan (OT) levels are the upper level courses in Scientology. The Church defines "Operating Thetan" as "knowing and willing cause over life, thought, and matter, energy, space and time (MEST)."[21] The Church of Scientology states as a point of doctrine that an individual exists with or without a body.[22] Cleared Theta Clear Even beyond the Operating Thetan levels comes the "Cleared Theta Clear", a godlike state which Hubbard describes this way: "A thetan who is completely rehabilitated and can do everything a thetan should do, such as move MEST and control others from a distance, or create his own universe; a person who is able to create his own universe or, living in the MEST universe is able to create illusions perceivable by others at will, to handle MEST universe objects without mechanical means and to have and feel no need of bodies or even the MEST universe to keep himself and his friends interested in existence".[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thetan

"Nicole Kidman said that Tom Cruise wasn't the love of her life. WHAT? A rich gay guy who always works and never wants sex? That's my dream man!" -- Joan Rivers

Agree completely. But it has gotten much better than in the past, and continues to. Gary Hart felt he had to withdraw from the 1988 pres campaign over getting caught with whatshername on the boat, yet by the '92 campaign, Clinton could confess to womanizing -- serial at that, pretty clearly -- and survive. And a majority didn't care about Monica even though her blowjobs were given in the presidential loo right outside the Oval Office. Voters didn't care about George W.'s past drinking nor the drug stuff that came to light during his campaign. Nor did Obama's writing about using weed when younger make any blip at all. Sanford of SC won election to Congress despite his Argentinian affair while governor and subsequent divorce. Polls showed voters forgave Weiner his first round of sexting, only getting fed up when it emerged he had kept on doing it even after getting caught and saying, Whoops silly me well I've stopped that now. So, progress of a sort.

Hah! It was Paul de Man (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_Man). Whose classes I took at Jale. Which might explain things.

As footnote to MsGuy's A+ exegesis (honorarium is in the mail ), Sokal's aim was to burlesque the wilder applications of social construction theory (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism), reasonable enough at base (arguably) but which has gotten way out of bounds and metastasized into a pathology warping many aspects of academic inquiry where it has no business. See Critique section in the Wikipedia article, and more extended vivisections such as The Social Construction of What? http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0674004124 The tie-in to the MIT computer scientists' satirical project is that even their discipline has become infected by the clotted mode of discourse spawned by the social constructionists. Who themselves picked up some of their worst habits from post-structuralist and deconstructionist theorists, q.v. (Almost all of whom were French. Except for one of the worst, who was Belgian. Hmm...)

What, HE likes Camilla too?

Busted!

Somewhat hilarious. SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator About Generate Examples Talks Code Donations Related People Blog About SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website). There's also a list of known bogus conferences. Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005! See Examples for more details. We went to WMSCI 2005. Check out the talks and video. You can find more details in our blog. Generate a Random Paper Want to generate a random CS paper of your own? Type in some optional author names below, and click "Generate". Author 1: Author 2: Author 3: Author 4: Author 5: SCIgen currently supports Latin-1 characters, but not the full Unicode character set. Examples Here are two papers we submitted to WMSCI 2005: Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy (PS, PDF) Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn This paper was accepted as a "non-reviewed" paper! Acceptance e-mail A strange follow-up email, along with our response Anthony Liekens sent an inquiry to WMSCI about this situation, and received this response, with an amazing letter (PS, PDF) attached. (Also check out Jeff Erickson's in-depth deconstruction of this letter.) With the many generous donations we received, we paid one conference registration fee of $390. Our registration fee was refunded. See above for the next phase of our plan. We received many donations to send us to the conference, so that we can give a randomly-generated talk. The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking (PS, PDF) Thomer M. Gil For some reason, this paper was rejected. We asked for reviews, and got this response. Talks Thanks to the generous donations of 165 people, we went to WMSCI 2005 in Orlando and held our own "technical" session in the same hotel. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The session included three randomly-generated talks: Harnessing Byzantine Fault Tolerance Using Classical Theory Dr. Thaddeus Westerson, Institute for Human Understanding (Max) Synthesizing Checksums and Lambda Calculus using Jog Dr. Mark Zarqawi, American Freedom University (Jeremy) On the Study of the Ethernet Franz T. Shenkrishnan, PhD, Network Analysis Laboratories (Dan) As promised, we videotaped the whole thing. You can download the resulting movie, titled Near Science, below. Movie length: 13:15. High quality (AVI: 88 MB, RealMedia: 65 MB): Download AVI | Download RM Bit Torrent AVI AVI Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI) RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI) Medium quality (AVI: 48 MB, RealMedia: 42MB): Download AVI | Download RM Bit Torrent AVI Coral cache AVI | Coral cache RM AVI Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI) RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI) Low quality (AVI: 20 MB, RealMedia: 9 MB): Download AVI | Download RM Bit Torrent AVI Coral cache AVI | Coral cache RM AVI Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI) RM Mirrors: MIT (MA) | CMU (PA) | Brown (RI) Trouble playing the AVI? Try downloading a DivX codec for Windows or Mac, or try the open source VideoLAN player. You can read more about the trip here, and check out some pictures here. Many thanks to everyone who made this possible, especially Tadd Torborg and family, Open Clipart, the PDOS research group, and of course all the SCIgen donors. Code The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is currently available via anonymous CVS. % cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:/cvs login Logging in to :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:2401/cvsCVS password: _press return_% cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu:/cvs co -P scigen We're still working on documentation and making it more user-friendly, but you should be able to figure most of it out from the code. Here's what you need on your computer to run it (we've run it on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux platforms): Perl LaTeX/BibTeX Gnuplot GraphViz If you would like to contribute code to this project (i.e., by helping us expand our context-free grammar with more sentences, nouns, etc.), please contact us with any patches and we'll apply them if they seem reasonable. We hope to set up a better system sometime in the near future. Running the code. We've been getting a lot of questions about how to run the code. There are quite a few misleading files in the source -- sorry about that. All you need to do to generate a paper is to run make-latex.pl (also look at make-latex.pl --help). You can also use scigen.pl to generate any arbitrary starting target. See scirules.in for most of the grammar rules. Donations As indicated above, one of our generated papers got accepted to WMSCI 2005. Our plan was to go there and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face. However, this is very expensive for grad students such as ourselves. So, we asked visitors to this site to make small donations toward this dream of ours; the response was overwhelming. Amount of donations: $2401.43 (after PayPal fees) Number of donations: 165 Amount of time: 72 hours We used this money to hold our own session at the same hotel as WMSCI 2005. Related Work Other papers: Another fantastic submission to SCI 2005, by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler Alan Sokal's brilliant hoax article (i.e., the Social Text Affair) Researchers in Vienna take down the VIDEA conference Justin Zobel raises some questions about the validity of SCI Other generators: gzzt.org's list of the best online generators The Dada Engine, another tool that generates random text from context-free grammars List of text generators from elsewhere.org (on the right) Barath Raghavan's Systems Topic Generator An essay generator SBIR grant proposal generator We initially based SCIgen on Chris Coyne's grammar for high school papers; Chris is now making neat pictures with context-free grammars. Other SCIgen successes: Philip Davis got a paper accepted to the Open Information Science Journal. Peter Trifonov got a random paper accepted to the GESTS journal. Mikhail Gelfand and the Troitsky Variant newspaper published Rooter in Russian in a nationally accredited Russian scientific journal. "Herbert Schlangemann" got a SCIgen paper accepted to the IEEE CSSE 2008 conference. Students at Sharif University in Iran got a paper accepted by the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation. Mathias Ulsar got a paper accepted to the IPSI-BG conference. Professor Genco Gülan published a paper in the 3rd International Symposium of Interactive Media Design. People We are graduate students in the PDOS research group at MIT CSAIL. Jeremy Stribling Max Krohn Dan Aguayo Contact us at this email address: scigen-dev at the domain pdos.csail.mit.edu http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

That contradicts what I said? The real back story one suspects is jealousy among the UK press that His Nibs granted such access to -- horrors -- not a native rag but rather Time, so are now falling over themselves to nice up in hopes of like favor. Public-school fagging absolutely. But with Jug-ears?

21, I would think. At least.

Or, then one could not tell the difference...?

Update... No plans to change shape of Illinois church that looks like penis from the sky, officials say Officials at Christian Science Dixon say the church was designed to preserve a tree, and hope the Internet chatter dies down. However, they did make light of the controversy on the church's Facebook page: 'Giant fig leaf coming soon.' By David Boroff / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, November 12, 2013, 9:04 AM A Google Earth view of Christian Science Dixon church in Dixon, Ill. An Illinois church that looks like a penis from the sky will stay that way. Officials at Christian Science Dixon are standing firm about the new structure, saying the church was designed to preserve a tree. “We didn’t design it to be seen as what they’re seeing,” church officer Scott Shepherd told Sauk Valley Media. “And we didn’t design it to be seen from above.” According to the Dixon church's Facebook page, the new structure was "intentionally designed around a beautiful oak tree." However, the shape of the church, as viewed on Google Earth, looks to many like a giant phallus. The social media ribbing has been relentless. "Check out this 'God's eye view' of a church in Dixon, Ill. Yeah, that's right, I said Dixon," read one Twitter post. "A church in Dixon, Illinois looks like a penis from up here. Of course, the church motto is 'Rising Up,'" tweeted user almightygod, who has more than 50,000 followers. An aerial photo of the church with a water main leak, which turned out to be photoshopped, was widely circulated online. With the building expected to be completed next month, officials hope the toilet humor will subside. “The Internet has great capability for good,” church officer Scott Shepherd told Sauk Valley Media, “and great capability for gossip and destruction.” But even the church made light of the controversy on its Facebook page, joking, "Giant fig leaf coming soon." Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/plans-change-shape-church-penis-article-1.1513939#ixzz2kSdPNmaO

Tempted to crack that the cure is not that much better than the affliction, but any good news about this is welcome. Alzheimer's patients' brains boosted by belting out Sound of MusicFour-month study finds mental performance of people with dementia improves after singing classic hits from musicals Ian Sample, science correspondent, in San Diego theguardian.com, Monday 11 November 2013 05.47 EST Dementia researchers chose songs that would be familiar to care home residents, including The Sound of Music. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Everett/Rex Features Belting out classic numbers from hit musicals can boost the brain function of people with Alzheimer's disease, according to researchers who worked with elderly residents at a US care home. Over a four-month study, the mental performance of patients who took part in regular group singing sessions improved compared with others who just listened. In the sessions, patients were led through familiar songs from The Sound of Music, Oklahoma, The Wizard of Oz and Pinocchio. The sessions appeared to have the most striking effect on people with moderate to severe dementia, with patients scoring higher on cognitive and drawing tests, and also on a satisfaction-with-life questionnaire at the end of the study. Jane Flinn, a neuroscientist at George Mason University in Virginia, said care homes that did not hold group singing sessions should consider them, because they were cheap, entertaining and beneficial for patients with Alzheimer's. "Even when people are in the fairly advanced stages of dementia, when it is so advanced they are in a secure ward, singing sessions were still helpful. The message is: don't give up on these people. You need to be doing things that engage them, and singing is cheap, easy and engaging," she said. Flinn's colleague Linda Maguire worked with the residents of a care home on the US east coast. Some of the residents with moderate dementia were assigned to an assisted living group. Others, who had more severe Alzheimer's and were kept on a secure ward at the home, formed a second group. Both groups took part in three 50-minute group sessions a week for four months, but only half in each group joined in with the singing. The rest turned up, but only to listen. Maguire chose most of the songs to be familiar to the patients, and included classics such as The Sound of Music, When You Wish Upon a Star and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Scores on cognitive tests given before and after the four months of singing classes showed that mental ability improved among the singers. Those who joined in the singing also fared better at another task that involved drawing the hands on a clock face to show a particular time. The study was described at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. Though memory loss and a decline in brain function are hallmarks of dementia, patients often demonstrate a striking ability to remember the lyrics and melodies of songs from their past. "A lot of people have grown up singing songs and for a long time the memories are still there," said Flinn. "When they start singing it can revive those memories." But the singing sessions seemed to activate a raft of brain areas. Listening sparked activity in the temporal lobe on the right-hand side of the brain, while watching someone lead a class activated the visual areas. Singing and speaking led to more activity in the left-hand side, Flinn said. The findings are backed up by other work in the area. In September, researchers at Helsinki University looked at the impact of a 10-week singing course on patients with dementia. Compared with their usual care, singing and listening to music improved mood, orientation, and certain types of memory. To a lesser extent, their attention and general cognitive skills also improved. The UK Alzheimer's Society holds regular group singing sessions nationwide. "There is much anecdotal evidence that the groups have real benefits for people with dementia," a spokesperson said. "Even when many memories are hard to retrieve, music can sometimes still be recalled, if only for a short while. The sessions help people with dementia communicate, improving their mood and leaving them feeling good about themselves." http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/11/alzheimers-patients-brains-boosted-sound-music-singing

Thank you! Fascinating.

Brazilian Model Claims Justin Bieber Is "Very Good in Bed" 1234 Related This Is a Video of Justin Bieber in Bed When it rains, it pours. Read… According to Brazilian model Tati Neves, 27, not only is Justin Bieber "marvelous and unforgettable" in the sack, he's also "very well endowed." Now who are we supposed to believe in the Bieber Penis Wars? The Panamanian prostitute who said Bieber was packing a "so-so" member or Neves, the married woman who filmed Bieber sleeping and uploaded it to YouTube? Neves began her post-coital press tour on Saturday, giving an interview to Brazilian network Globo TV's Fantastico program where she coyly admitted to sharing a bed with Bieber, but not to having sex with him. But in an exclusive interview published with The Sun on Monday, Neves, who also said she's separated from her husband, admitted that the couple did more than sleep. She even said that when she left Bieber's room in the morning, she got a voicemail from him asking her to come back, but that she couldn't return because she was "too exhausted." She then praised Justin for his "stamina" and "energy" and said he "looked great" naked. Gross. And because we're all deeply concerned about the personal lives of teenagers, Bieber's ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez is not taking the news well. According to Hollywood LIfe, sources inside the Gomez camp report that "she misses Justin" and that she "doesn't need or want to know what he's doing behind closed doors." The same probably goes for the rest of us, and yet here we are. http://gawker.com/brazilian-model-claims-justin-bieber-is-very-good-in-1462713506?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

'Whisky and 15 cigarettes a day is the secret of my good health' says Dorothy as she celebrates her 100th birthday (with a glass of her favourite tipple, of course) By Sarah Bridge PUBLISHED: 11:22 EST, 11 November 2013 | UPDATED: 12:40 EST, 11 November 2013 Daily Mail UK Hardy pensioner Dorothy Howe has reached her 100th birthday - despite smoking nearly half a million cigarettes during her life. The retired secretary took her first drag aged 16 and has puffed her way through 15 Superking Black ciggies every day since then. She has smoked around 460,000 cigarettes over the last 84 years - costing £193,000 at today’s prices. 100-year old Dorothy Howe puts her longevity down to her love of cigarettes and whisky But despite the obvious health risks, Dorothy believes smoking is the secret to her old age - and a regular drop of whisky. Relaxing with her favourite tipple of Bell’s, she said: 'I put my health down to whisky and cigarettes. I only drink when I’m out but my doctor said I wouldn’t be alive without them. 'I’m still alive and I can lift my elbows - it’s great. I’ve had a great life and God has treated me very well. I’ve been very lucky.' Childless Dot, who still lives in her own home in Saltdean, East Sussex, worked as an assistant to the chairman of Martin's newsagents. She lost her husband of 26 years Peter to cancer in 1993, when he was just 60 years old, and has lived alone ever since. 'I keep telling myself that I'm going to quit smoking when they put the prices up, but that's just not going to happen now,' she said. Dorothy celebrated her 100th birthday with friends and a few glasses of her favourite drink before returning to open her card from the Queen 'When I started smoking, I was about 16, and they cost 11d and a halfpenny for 20. I can't believe how much they cost now. Whisky tastes just as good as it used to though. My pins aren't as fast as they used to be, but my mind is still sharp.' On her milestone birthday, friends took Dot to her local pub where she had a couple of drinks before returning home to open her card from the Queen. Friend Lynn Sass said: 'She has the respect and friendship of a lot of people around here. She's wonderful and a great character. 'She's thought very highly of and we hope she's had a great time. It's a real achievement for a great woman.' Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2500759/Whisky-15-cigarettes-day-secret-good-health-says-Dorothy-celebrates-100th-birthday-glass-favourite-tipple-course.html#ixzz2kRDbEfF0

Precaution against tapeworms, down South here.

An appreciation of him, for a change. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-charles/10436121/Prince-Charles-at-65-A-modern-man-of-undimmed-energy-ready-to-be-king.html

Also quite a few restaurants around the country offer free meals on Veterans Day to veterans, enlisted people, and often their families. http://freebies.about.com/od/freefood/tp/veterans-day-free-meals.htm Some report this trend was given its biggest boost by the guy who heads the Golden Corral chain. If so, kudos. There was a big crowd at our local one yesterday.

I confess I was baiting you. For a change! I loathe the penultimate comma and have waged holy war against it ever since taking up editorship of the high school rag. In every job since then, my first task has been to seize editorial control and, among other things, nuke that comma. Further enjoying the fruits of benevolent dictatorship, I freely confess to putting it back in whenever I think it makes reading easier, such as when the "and" or "or" is followed by a messy noun clause or the like, or when it helps the rhythm.

Forget The 50 States, U.S. Is Really 11 Nations, Says Author Credit Colin Woodard Colin Woodard's map of the "11 nations." WUNC - North Carolina Public Radio Originally published on Mon November 11, 2013 12:16 pm Listen 8:01 For hundreds of years, this nation has been known as the United States of America. But according to author and journalist Colin Woodard, the country is neither united, nor made up of 50 states. Woodward has studied American voting patterns, demographics and public opinion polls going back to the days of the first settlers, and says that his research shows America is really made up of 11 different nations. "Yankeedom" in the Northeast and industrial Midwest was founded by Puritans and residents there have always been comfortable with a government that regulates and moderates. The communities of the Deep South in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and other states were founded by former West Indian plantation owners who wanted to recreate the society they were used to: government based on the sacrosanct rights of a few wealthy elite. "Greater Appalachia," extending from West Virginia in a wide band to the northern half of Texas, was settled by people from Northern Ireland, England and Scotland. Those people were openly antagonistic to the so-called "ruling oligarchies" and upper classes, so they opposed the slave plantation economy, but they also distrust government. Woodard says that while individual residents will have their own opinions, each region has become more segregated by ideology in recent years. In fact, he says the mobility of American citizens has increased this partisan isolation as people tend to self-segregate into like-minded communities. "This isn't about individual behavior, it's about the characteristics of the dominant cultures of these various regions. And you can, as an individual, like or hate the sort of surrounding assumptions where you live," Woodard says. "But that force that you feel that's there, and those sort of assumptions and givens about politics, and culture, and different social relationships — that's the forces of dominant culture that go back to the early colonial period, and the differences between various colonial clusters and their founders." Transcript CELESTE HEADLEE, HOST: This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Celeste Headlee. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, two authors explain why it's so important to encourage American authors to write about Africa for kids. That's in a few minutes. First, though, we want to get a new perspective on America. Author and journalist Colin Woodard says this country has never been united states or even one nation. He thinks the country's really made up of 11 separate nations. Woodard has studied voting behaviors and opinions on things like tax and gun control, and he's traced them all the way back to the days of the first settlers. The migration of Americans from state to state, he says, has strengthened regional differences as people sort themselves into like-minded communities. We'll let Colin Woodard explain these 11 American nations himself. Colin, welcome to the program. COLIN WOODARD: Thanks for having me. HEADLEE: People can check out on the map where they live and kind of figure out if they're in Appalachia or Yankeedom, but you're not talking out everybody who lives in Massachusetts thinking and voting the same way, right? WOODARD: Oh, of course not, and I'm glad you brought that up. This isn't about individual behavior, it's about the characteristics of the dominant cultures of these various regions. And you can, as an individual, like or hate the sort of surrounding assumptions where you live, but that force that you feel that's there and those sort of assumptions and givens about politics and culture and different social relationships, that's the forces of dominant culture that go back to the early colonial period and the differences between the various colonial clusters and their founders. HEADLEE: So let's take, for example, you know, we heard quite a bit about people saying the representatives who voted in favor of shutting down the government recently, for example, that they all came from areas in the country, or many of them came from areas in the country that also supported secession in the 19th century. You also point that out as well. And you say that's backed up by the fact that many of those areas were settled by West Indies slave plantation owners. Explain exactly how that connects. WOODARD: The Deep South, one of the areas from which many of the Tea Party Caucus are drawn and the Tea Party has been most successful on the national stage, was founded originally by English slave planters from Barbados. I mean, in contradistinction to the Puritans of New England or the Dutch, who founded what's now the Big Apple or even the sort of gentry of the Tidewater, in the 1660s, Charleston was founded by Barbadian English slave planters who were intentionally and explicitly re-creating a West Indies-style slave plantation society. In fact, it was originally called Carolina in the West Indies. And they brought with them a form of classical republicanism that they adhered to that was modeled on the slave states of antiquity - Ancient Greece and Rome. HEADLEE: Like Ancient Greece and Rome, yeah. WOODARD: Right, where a small set of people and oligarchy had the privilege of democracy, and that slavery was considered the natural born lot of the many. And that, of course, carried through as an explicit governing philosophy right into the 1860s. HEADLEE: And what's really interesting is that then you move up north to what you call greater Appalachia, and this includes places like West Virginia, right? And that was settled by people from England and Scotland and especially Northern Ireland, and they couldn't be more against the ruling oligarchy if they tried. WOODARD: That's one of the interesting paradoxes. It's also strong with Tea Party support because this region, as you point out, was settled by people coming from the war-ravaged borderlands of northern England and Lowland Scotland and Ulster. And this is a culture that had formed in a situation where the ravages of war were constantly being brought upon you and government was ineffective and unable to protect you. So the culture had developed, you know, this warrior ethic and this great emphasis on freedom - being freedom of the individual, personal sovereignty, lack of having constraints on individual behavior - is what has put it in with having many members of the Tea Party elected in the Tea Party caucus... HEADLEE: Right. WOODARD: ...When you look at current politics. HEADLEE: Which couldn't be more different than what you call Yankeedom, which was settled a lot by Puritans, who are absolutely OK with there being a ruling order. What about the places, like, maybe say, the West Coast - places that used to be former Spanish settlements? WOODARD: Yeah, in the sort of southwest of the country, and including the northern provinces of Mexico, you have a culture that's the heritage of New Spain, but a particular one in the north of New Spain and in the north of Mexico. They were so far from Madrid and from Mexico City, with the transportation technologies of the age, it formed its own special frontier culture that was very different than the system in central Mexico and very different from the U.S., and sought to be a third state or nation-state in between. There were repeated secession movements in the Mexican period - the Republic of the Rio Grande and even the Republic of Texas, right. The Austin and his Anglo supporters were backed by the entire Spanish-speaking elite of Texas when they formed the Republic of Texas. These were all efforts to create a sort of third nation-state in between, separate from both Mexico and the U.S. And, of course, it didn't work out that way. HEADLEE: This all sounds - to many people I bet - like ancient history in it of itself, you know, hundreds of years ago. How do we know that this still holds true today? If you moved to another state for work or to go to school, how do you end up living in greater Appalachia with that particular political culture as opposed to Yankeedom? WOODARD: Well, I think if you move around, you'll immediately notice the profound differences and cultural assumptions as you move from nation to nation. The question is, wouldn't the mass migration and movement of people have eroded the effect of these cultures? HEADLEE: Right. WOODARD: Well, first of all, the observable evidence says it absolutely hasn't. In fact, the differences are growing in political polarization and other things. But part of the reason is that people are moving - a large portion of them are choosing where they want to move, moving to places where they feel they are among like-minded people. If you superimpose my nations map over that, you'll see that this is also resulting, to a large extent, in people sorting by nation. They're not conscious that they're doing that, but that is self-selection as we move around is actually reinforcing these national characteristics and differences. HEADLEE: In fact, probably the most depressing part of your research - 'cause it's all fascinating - is that this means we don't really have a prayer on something like gun control, something that is so highly charged and so much a part of a hundreds-year-old tradition. WOODARD: Yes, this and many other issues. And we're of course seeing it these days, to a great extent, on almost anything that Washington has asked to discuss. What has happened throughout our history is there's been sort of a battle of coalition building for the past 200 years. It usually involves a coalition led by Yankeedom and one led by the Deep South, and it's a shifting coalition. But neither of those groupings - the current red state, blue state groupings we talk about - have a lock on federal power. You need the presidency, a filibuster-proof Senate majority and a majority in Congress. None of them have the population and the electoral strength to do that, which is why we keep seeing the control of our national politics flipping back and forth on a knife's edge between the two coalitions. What would have to happen on gun control or any of these other major issues is one or the other of the current party formations would have to change their message in such a way to build a larger regional coalition that would isolate the other party. And to do that for either grouping would require a change in strategy, thinking and messaging. HEADLEE: Well, again, you can check the map at our website, Colin's map, and see where you live. Colin Woodard is the author of "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America." He was kind enough to join us via Skype from Portland, Maine. Colin, thank you so much. WOODARD: Thanks, it's been a pleasure. http://wunc.org/post/forget-50-states-us-really-11-nations-says-author

I would. You little comma-snatch. (See previous post P.S.)