Gender and politics in America

My Twitter feed often ascribes GOP dominance at the state and federal level, and the patriarchal policies that follow, to male choices.

That is clearly incorrect. We know that 52% of white women chose Trump. In a white-women only election he’d have still won.

Today I wondered what overall gender differences are in voter turnout. The Center for American Women and Politics had some numbers:

They write (emphases mine) …

In every presidential election since 1980, the proportion of eligible female adults who voted has exceeded the proportion of eligible male adults who voted (see Figure 1) … The number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964.

Women have a larger voice in our elections than men. In 2018 America race and education are bigger divides than gender. White men are deplorable, but white women are not a lot better.

Macintouch in the twilight

I’ve read Macintouch for decades. It’s been a living fossil for 15 of those years; Ric passed on RSS and blogs and feeds and permalinks. For a year or two he tried to get permalinks working — which made Macintouch potentially tweetable. Recently those went away, so I wasn’t surprised by today’s announcement …

Thirty years is a long time. The Macintosh computer debuted more than three decades ago, and I've been involved with this revolutionary system and the community around it since 1984. A lot has changed in the meantime. 

… I’ve been constantly engaged, inspired and supported by the MacInTouch community for all these many years, but I think it's time to do something different. 

The revenue that used to sustain MacInTouch has dropped below a viable business minimum, while a plethora of other websites, operating under different business and security models, produces constant Apple news, reviews and commentary.  

The MacInTouch Discussions forum is unique, as far as I know, but it's also unsustainably labor-intensive, and there's no way around that in its current incarnation. 

At this point, my plan is to continue running MacInTouch Discussions and home/news pages at a reduced intensity for a little longer.  But, before long, it will be time for a change - a sabbatical, a new blog, research, development, or something else – I'm not quite sure what yet, but I expect macintouch.com to continue in some form. 

What I am sure of is that I'm enormously grateful for the support, contributions and engagement of this remarkable community over the past three decades, something words can't adequately express. Thank you for all that, for all you’ve contributed, and let's see where the journey goes from here. 

Ric Ford
Editor/Publisher
MacInTouch Inc

I hope he finds a new way to publish and write. Like me the Macintouch community is old and curmudgeonly; it’s been a place that speaks truth and never falls for modern Apple’s too frequent cons.

How to build a safe and sane social network

This is how to build a safe, sane, and sustainable social network.

1. Build it to be viable on $1/user year.
2. Sell memberships for $25/year. Each buyer gets one user license and contributes 24 to the free pool.
3. Donors can buy an unlimited number of free-pool memberships at $1/year apiece.
4. Donors who give over $1000 a year get an optional sustainer badge.
5. Anyone can join for free if there are free memberships available.

That’s about it. Essentially it’s the public radio model.

Medical topic monitoring: PCOS topics added to my RSS feeds

I’ve been a fan of the National Library of Medicine’s medical literature service through MEDLARS to MEDLINE to Grateful Med (my fave) to the current PubMed.

I monitor a number of topics though RSS streams of search updates:

To create an RSS search feed:

1. Run a search in PubMed.
2. Click RSS located below the Search box.
3. You may edit the feed name and limit the number of items displayed [2], and then click Create RSS. If the number of citations retrieved is greater than the number of items displayed the feed will include a link to display the complete PubMed retrieval.
4. Click the XML icon to display the XML and copy and paste the URL into the subscribe form in your RSS reader. Web browsers and RSS readers may use different options to copy the feed.

Today I’m adding one for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome/Disorder (PCOS/PCOD) with a focus on exercise, metformin, and research (I may split searches after a while). I have similar searches on a variety of topics as shown in the table below. (If I remember I’ll come back and update this post over time.)

I read results in my RSS clients - Feedbin (RSS server and web client) and Reeder.app (iOS, I’m also playing with Lire.app). I save selected references to Pinboard, generally with a tag (when I remember). The Pinboard tags have feeds too.

Search	RSS	Pinboard stream
PCOS etiology	PCOS/etiology [1]	pcos
PCOS and exercise	PCOS and exercise	pcos
PCOS and metformin	PCOS and metformin	pcos
arthritis and tolerance induction	Arthritis and tolerance induction	arthritis

PS. My longstanding #1 feature wish for MarsEdit is native table support. Just saying.
PPS. I miss Google Reader’s ability to share sets of feed subscriptions

- fn -

[1] You can search on a MeSH heading/subheading pair but I couldn’t get the RSS to work that way. OTOH, Pubmed was flaky this morning. That’s quite rare. I hope I didn’t break it. I’m going to have to update this post another day with some of the other topics I follow.
[2] With a new feed only 10 articles are displayed. I suspect this is a Feedbin problem.

And so it came to this

In the year 2018 it is no longer insane to suspect that the Soviet Union Russia executed a successful multi-year campaign against the United States of America which included the subversion of the GOP and the election of an incompetent President who effectively obeys Russia’s supreme leader.

I’m not saying this is likely. I’m not saying this was entirely planned rather than, say, somewhat opportunistic and emergent.

I’m just saying it’s no longer insane to suspect that we lost a war we didn’t realize we were fighting.