Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, August 26, 2024
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55 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Disagreement regarding debate rules
“Politico”
More at the link of course
Bonoism of the day:
“And if your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough.”
Apparently there are fears in Trump World of “the prospect of a power struggle inside the inner circle that could become a major distraction just months until the 2024 election, even if the jockeying for influence by top officials has ended with a truce, according to people familiar with the matter.”
I’m guessing food fights at 20 paces.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/26/trump-campaign-palace-intrigue-election
@charontwo: It was reported that in the Biden debate Trump heckled Biden when the president was speaking, trying, with some success, to rattle Biden. But with his mic muted, the audience didn’t hear him doing it. POLITICO doesn’t seem to mention this.
The coming collapse of generative AI?
Another reason to ignore AI search results.
The final comment in yesterday’s open forum was a citation of a piece in Mediaite made by Gustopher. It really is worth repeating here.
http://www.mediaite.com/news/rfk-jr-s-daughter-recalls-him-using-chainsaw-to-behead-whale-in-resurfaced-interview-just-normal-day-to-day-stuff/
@gVOR10:
This is exactly the point. The muted mic rule was always a bad idea. Before the Biden-Trump debate, there was discussion that Trump would use the muted mic to his advantage by blathering nonsense to distract Biden when it was Biden’s turn to speak. And he did–Biden stated afterwards that he had difficulties because Trump was talking at him during his turn. This is not to say that it was the cause of Biden’s poor performance, as he could barely muster even his opening statement.
I can see the Trump campaign saying they’re going to stick with the debate rules agreed to by Biden, and they may have a point. If that’s how this debate will happen, then I hope Harris’ people are looking at what the rules say about podium spacing (move them much farther apart than the 8 feet of the first debate), and microphone types (use more sensitive microphones that will pick up someone talking at the other podium, more like a talk show mic that picks up audience applause, whoops, and hollers than a symposium speaker’s mic that needs to be near the speaker’s face.
@gVOR10:
I’m sure the audience could see his facial anus moving.
Maybe Harris can be less subtle. She could interrupt herself and say “What’s that Mr. Felon? Speak up, we can’t hear your nonsense.”
I’ve been watching lots of Mythbusters episodes. Now and then, they say something that’s a little ironic. For instance, they tested designs for engines using gunpowder, specifically black powder. Here either Grant or Tori said something like “imagine a car that uses explosions to move,” as though he has never driven or ridden in a car that detonates gasoline multiple times per second.
It’s not a crazy idea to use black powder for fuel for motive power. The big issue I see is that it’s a grainy powder rather than a liquid, therefore it would be harder to move from its container to the engine as needed. Indeed, that was a visible problem in the designs they tried on the show. It wouldn’t be impossible to make a car engine that runs on black powder, but it would be too expensive, too impractical, and possibly too prone to catastrophic malfunction,
The latter is because gasoline needs to be aerosolized or vaporized in order to detonate. Gunpowder happily burns the same all the time.
So much has happened since July 25th that many may have missed this story. The NYT quoted a woman who claimed to be a Democrat but was planning to vote for Trump. They removed her quote and published a retraction when it was pointed out that the woman quoted was a convicted fraudster who had sued Wendy’s after she herself placed a severed finger in her food.
Some people asked at the time how the Times even found this woman in order to interview her. We still don’t know that answer, but another media outlet, this time CNN, may supply a clue.
CNN did a focus group with undecided voters, who they insisted several times on air had not made up their mind about who they were voting for. The group listened to Harris’s DNC speech and then were asked their thoughts. Many said the speech made them want to vote for her. One person was still undecided. And one person said he disliked the speech and was going to vote for Trump.
The folks at Meidas Touch News looked into the last guy, who turns out to have a Twitter account under his own name that was filled with pro-Trump tweets going back years. They published this, and the guy is now talking. He says that CNN’s Gary Tuchman, who hosted the panel, approached him at a restaurant and asked him who he was voting for. He said Trump, and Tuchman asked if he’d be willing to keep an open mind. The guy said yes and was invited to participate. So CNN knowingly selected a Trump supporter for their panel that they repeatedly insisted was composed of undecided voters.
Wonder if NYT’s selection of the Wendy’s finger lady was equally un-random?
@Monala: My understanding is that traditional polling methodology requires at least one participant who was part of a scam that involved severed body parts. The NYT was just doing their job.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Fears? I think it’s more like hopes.
@Kathy: I really, really, really want Harris to say at some point of the debate, “well, there he goes again,” ala Reagan and Carter in 1980.
@Kathy:
Are you familiar with the concept of “engine knocking” and anti- knock gasoline aka high octane number gasoline?
Technically, there is a difference between “detonation” and “explosion.” Normal engine combustion is explosion, engine knocking is detonation.
@charontwo:
@charontwo:
Even better for my point: gasoline cars run on explosions.
I vaguely recall that engine knock is when the gas goes off before the cylinder is done compressing it or something. I may have it wrong.
@charontwo:
Well, talk about a Pyrrhic victory…
@charontwo: OK, I’ll see your pedantry and raise. Yes, knock, or “pinging” is detonation of gasoline. And yes, detonation equals explosion. But it’s not supposed to happen in your engine, and with modern electronic controlled fuel injection it doesn’t happen, partly because there are knock detectors and the system squelches knock if it does start.
Everybody says spark plugs “detonate” gasoline, but they should say “ignite”, as in “ignition”. The difference is detonation v deflagration. Detonation is an explosion, propagated through the medium at sonic velocities on the order of 1KM/sec. Deflagration is burning, propagated as a spreading flame front on the order of 1M/sec. If, as gasoline and air burn, pressure and temperature get high enough in a cylinder detonation can occur through the remaining mixture.
@Lucysfootball: Small cross-tabs are people too!
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Someone at the FTFNYT needs to be shown the door for allowing the printing of this utter garbage.
Yes, this is the actual title.
Trump Can Win on Character
The author is Rich Lowry of the National Review, so I guess this level of laughable bullshit isn’t surprising:
The answer to all of the above has been proven to be a thunderous and earsplitting “NO!!!!!”
The rest is a litany of hogwash that doesn’t merit reproduction here, you can go to the link above and read it (it’s a gift link because for some masochistic reason I still pay for this kind of crap, although I am seriously considering stopping). Try not to laugh yourself to death.
@Mikey: it’t Rich Lowry, he of the Sarah Palin “twinkle-in-her-eye” lovefest. I can’t tell whether we’re running into NYT both-sidersism or “Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves”.
@Mikey:
I believe Rich is the guy who had starbursts in his eyes whenever he looked at Sarah Palin, and he has those same starbursts when he looks at Trump.
As Michael R and some others might say, Rich is now a member of Cult of Trump.
A friend of mine posted a question on Facebook that is now occupying a lot of space in my head.
He asked, why, with all of Trump’s wailing and whining and obsessions, he hasn’t said a word about the attempted assassination attempt investigation.
This does seem to be a bit out of character, doesn’t it? Even if it’s not some huge conspiracy, it IS strange how this dropped off the collective radar. All of the typical follow up articles about the shooter, his family, interviews with parents or grandparents or school friends or work buddies, all of the things that one would typically expect in the aftermath of something like this and there’s…nothing. At all.
This is odd, right?
@Mikey: This might be the most ridiculous op-ed in a major US newspaper that I have ever seen. Trump might win on character if he were facing Charles Manson, but that’s pretty much it. Let’s be generous and spot him the universe of mass murderers and pedophiles. Ordinary criminals he’d probably lose the character contest. As far as the other 175 million or so people who could run for president? Trump loses in a landslide. the Times should be embarrassed to print garbage like this.
@Kathy: If gasoline is detonating in your engine then you’re having a very bad day. The goal is a controlled flame front (aka burn) that propagates in a manner to optimize power output. Now nitromethane is basically just a series of hopefully controlled explosions.
Here’s an example of a car engine switching from gasoline to nitro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLOEp2nfxA4
If you’re wondering they used to do this to get the engine heated up so they can then use nitromethane for the race.
@charontwo: No, detonation is the strart of an explosion.
What you’re talking about could be called “dieseling”. A diesel engine does not have a spark plug to detonate the fuel, it uses the heat of compression and an injector that feeds the fuel at the right time. The kind of engine poorly described as a “gas” engine uses a fuel that is more difficult to detonate and depends on the timing of the spark from the plug to fire.
What “engine knock” is is the fuel in a “gas” engine igniting on it’s own (too early) because the fuel is igniting as it would in a diesel engine, due to compression, and before the time is right. This will melt or knock holes in a piston which is still trying to come up. Very bad.
Here’s something which most have the wrong impression of: Fuel octane. Most think the higher the octane rating the more volatile the fuel is. It’s the opposite. The lower the number the more volatile the fuel is, and thereby the more prone to premature detonation, AKA “knocking”. High performance “gas” engines, gain significant horsepower increase from using high compression in the cylinders, and need a less volatile fuel to prevent “knocking”. This is, of course, counter-intuitive. As is the fact that making those less-volatile fuels is more difficult.
@Jen:
Apparently Trump gave an interview to Breitbart (exclusively!) about it yesterday.
@charontwo: @dazedandconfused: Part of the issues with this conversation is the terminology utilized. When I see people saying fuel detonates in their car I immediately think of spontaneous combustion aka pre-ignition aka knock aka expensive repairs (as a racer). Proper combustion is not detonation to me as the flame front is burning in a controlled manner creating a smooth controlled pressure increase. When you start a wood fire you’re not detonating the wood. You’re (hopefully) initiating a controlled burn.
@dazedandconfused: The whole octane thing can be either hilarious or downright annoying to deal with (depending on the situation and who I’m talking to). It’s so ingrained in the average person’s mind that high octane = explosively powerful gas!!!
Then you start talking about water injection and things get really “fun”.
@Mikey:
I saw this this morning and like you was going to immediately note it as the absurdity nonsense that it is. I mean, many of us who follow this site have for a while been just flabbergasted at the nonchalant malevolence of the nyt in regards to this election. I mean, how many times does the general public have to question our msm and see the titled scales of bs in favor of a piece of shite and determine that they are anything other than, well, how do you phrase it? The absolute worst of the state of reportage, real journalism and honest opinionating. Instead the whole country is gaslighted with this utter bs. So infuriating.
Tulsi Gabbard has endorsed Trump. Gee, what a surprise.
Ok, given all the different interpretations on just what gasoline does in the engine, I’ll just quote Adam Savage: I reject your reality and substitute my own 😀
@dazedandconfused:
Not true. Volatility and octane ratings are independent of each other. Refiners control the volatility of gasoline by the amount of light ends, especially butanes blended in. The difference between “winter gasoline” and “summer gasoline” is the volatility, controlled by blending.
Octane is a matter of how branched chain the isomers present are. Straight chains are low octane, highly branched chain isomers are high octane. Or, if aromatic rings (benzene rings) are abundant they also are high octane.
(BTW, when I was working as a chemical engineer, designing oil refineries was part of my job).
@Jen: Even the best juggler in the world can only juggle a finite number of balls. Trump is far from the best at anything. He’s probably simply forgotten in the putative confusion of the anti-democratic takeover of the Democratic Party by India.
@charontwo:
Yes, I misused the term “volatility”, which is the evaporation point. I should’ve used flash or ignition point.
@Jen:
I make it a practice not to listen to him, nor read about what he says, as there is zero value in doing so (for me, others may differ). Still, it’s hard to ignore it entirely. So I need to ask: has the Weirdo Felon stopped claiming he took a bullet?
IMO, while no doubt it’s scary to be near where shots are being aimed at, the fact is that being barely grazed by a bullet, or a bullet fragment, isn’t too much of a much.
@Matt:
Yup. Knew a lot of guys who thought getting 130 octane av-gas would make their car faster. It’s necessary for high-compression engines but does practically eff-all for anything else.
The ability to use high-compression engines really made a difference in WW2, btw. The Germans and the Japanese couldn’t get the stuff and their planes had to use significantly heavier and bulker engines to obtain the same horsepower.
@CSK: In response to the question having shown up on Facebook? That would make an interesting point to confirm my (not very unique or insightful) theory.
@Matt: I took physics in high school and an auto maintenance course at Comedy College later and recall (vaguely) having been tested on octane as resistance to combustion with higher performance engines having higher compression and “hotter” spark plugs. But there was also, in both settings the notion that the spark creates “an explosion” in the cylinder, the force of which pushes the piston back down. So, it’s a sort of confusing mixed metaphor.
@dazedandconfused: I know exactly the type you’re talking about. I ran high octane pump gas in my B16 swap due to the combination of nitrous with 10.something to 1 compression. Only dude I knew that ran AVgas did so only when using boost beyond a specific PSI in his “vintage” 340 duster (I think it was a duster I’m not a mopar man). Track use only basically.
Yeah the allies had some amazing engine designs in ww2. The ability to produce massive numbers of said engines helped a lot too 😛
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Yeah you can find authoritative figures/literature using all the terms used in this thread. I’m in the ‘it’s a flame front/burn” camp. It makes “detonation” in an engine context limited to bad stuff.
For everyone involved the video below providers high speed high res video of a ford flathead style engine with a clear cylinder head. So you can see the entire four cycles clearly and slowly. It’s a really cool video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdW1t8r8qYc
The Taliban decreed that women’s voices are not to be heard in public. This will be us if we’re stupid enough to reelect Trump and his Project 2025 butt boys. FAFO.
https://apnews.com/article/taliban-afghanistan-women-vice-virtue-law-8be7e4ebbe8012a1290f6d5292f781e3
@CSK:
Got this playing in my head…
@Kathy:
There have been multiple types of internal combustion engine built that burn powdered coal. The problem is that it’s very abrasive. However you’re going to move the powder into the combustion chamber — valves, ports, injectors — is going to erode and have to replaced soon. That’s weeks if not days. Gunpowder is going to have a similar problem.
@Michael Cain:
One advantage of gunpowder is that it contains its own oxidizer. Therefore it doesn’t need air or oxygen, kind of like solid rocket fuel. Even so, I know of no proposals for gunpowder engines for submarines or torpedoes.
I read a few days ago that a couple weeks ago the Harris-Walz campaign had time to sit down with their pollsters. The pollsters advised dropping the “weird” thing, it turned off some undecideds. The campaign decided to ignore them.
There’s been a fair amount of opinion in these threads that democrats are hurt politically by “progressives” pushing unpopular stuff damaging to the party’s centrist appeal. Being one of the DFHs, I’ve always thought all this triangulation was kind of a buzzkill, reducing voter enthusiasm and making Dems a kind of GOP Lite. Rick Perlstein rang in this morning in a newsletter Say It to My Face; How Democrats learned to tell the plain truth and like it. He quotes Truman, “I don’t have to give ’em hell. I just tell the truth and they call it hell.” Then he observes that Dems are suddenly saying what they mean.
Perlstein goes through a history of Dukakis not saying what Ds stood for, Clinton’s triangulation, Al Gore ignoring climate change on the campaign trail, Kerry trapped by his antiwar past and vote for Iraq. He then concludes with Harris acceptance speech.
The piece is a bit long. If there’s a problem with the link, or you’d like a summary, this afternoon LGM provides.
@Matt: Definitely a cool video! Thanks!
test
edit is back
Matt B kicks it!
Take a bow Bernius!
Now maybe you can figure out why I can’t log in to Facebook…
Edit: Ok what’s up with this? I have not been able to log in to Facebook since last week. I would go through the log in routine and for some reason Facebook would not text me the six digit code to complete the two-factor authentication. I was able to see my Facebook page on my iPhone so I have not taken any extreme measures to reestablish my Facebook account. Even earlier today still no log in to Facebook from my MacBook Air.
So in this post I jokingly asked the Wizard Bernius to fix my Facebook log in.
(Cue up Twilight Zone theme)
I just tried it again and the Facebook log in routine worked just fine for the first time in days…
@Mister Bluster:
Yay!
Noises are being made about the following scenario: Mr. Cat-lady takes a hike and gets replaced with Mr. Brain-worm.
I have no idea whether this is something that is actually being considered or whether it’s wishful thinking on part of a pundit. But if Trump were to try this….
(The edit function is now back! Joy and Rapture and Joy Unconfined!)
@Mister Bluster:
The web is vague and mysterious.
Sometime in 2020 or 2021, the Starbucks app in my phone quit working. I wasted some days trying to get it to work again, no luck. I’ve been trying it on and off since then, in several phones (at least 4), and it won’t let me log in no matter what I do. I can log in on their website just fine, but not on the app.
I really don’t care by now. The rewards program has gotten even worse, and the cappuccino I get at the supermarket is better and like 2-3% cheaper*. It’s the principle of the thing. And the convenience if I’m ever feeling like burnt coffee. The app let me order ahead, so I’d just walk in and pick up my drink in under 30 seconds.
*It also comes with two complimentary mini pastries, but I seldom eat them. I just mention it because it’s an added value.
@Grumpy Realist:
I read the Weirdo Felon referred to Felon-Kennedy as the strongest ticket, though Junior isn’t on the ticket while Vance is.
So, maybe he’s already replaced Vance with his mind.
Odd choice going from weird to weirder, while complaining people are calling you weird.
@Kathy:..The web is vague and mysterious.
Yes it is. Now that I can see my Facebook page on my MacBook Air again, in my notifications there are multiple messages from the last four days that all read “Someone tried to log in to your account. We stoped them.” It is obvious from the times posted for these log in attempts that those were all me trying to log in. There is a way to notify FB of problems. I think that as long as things are working again that I should leave well enough alone.
See I am overly specific about definitions in conversations not even involving guns. 😉
THE GLORIOUS EDIT BUTTON WORKS AGAIN. ALL HAIL THE OMNISSIAH and … *checks notes*.. Matt B!!