Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, November 19, 2024
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33 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus 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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Trump has picked another Fox News host, Sean Duffy, to run the transportation department. Well, better than Sean Combs. I suppose.
@CSK: He’s at least a former Congressman*, so not the worst/most unqualified choice he’s made. 😐
Don’t write off Diddy yet, I’m sure there’s a spot for him somewhere in this administration.
*And, not under an ethics investigation, nor an RT pet like Tulsi.
@Jen:
Trump reiterated recently that one of his top requirements for a cabinet post is that the candidate look good on television.
@CSK: “…top requirements for a cabinet post is that the candidate look good on television.”
Which doesn’t explain Gaetz or RFK Jr. unless Trump’s eyesight is failing.
Today’s first world rant.
To the insurance company, power company, water/sewer people, credit card folks and everyone else who sends me bills to pay: If you want me to receive the bills online and pay online, why not give me an incentive to do so (other than, of course, the bogus feel good save the environment one) rather the trying to charge me a “convenience fee”.
Continuing yesterday’s conversation:
Tony Gonzales, Chip Roy clash over mass deportation plans
Here’s the constituent difference between Gonzales and Roy: Gonzales has a huge geographic district mostly rural and agricultural and Roy’s district is compact and suburban (Austin/San Antonio).
I had a good weekend.
I didn’t finish writing my story. I reread it whole, and saw I needed to change some things, delete others, and move a few actions around. I spent most of Sunday thinking about while cooking, then did the rewrite on Sunday. One more scene and I’m done.
It will be a difficult one to write well.
Suppose you were given the second thing you most want in the whole world, and moreover it’s something you didn’t think at all possible to get. What would you tell the person who gave it to you?
Does it matter if this person loses nothing by giving it to you? In fact, she gets to keep on having it, because she happened to have two?
“The Family”
A family photo.
On cooking, I went with chilaquiles with chicken and onions, but with one twist and one issue.
The twist, I made milanesas instead of shredded chicken. this gives a nicer, richer, better chicken flavor, not just a meaty texture.
The issue was with the onions. I discovered when you use the water/steam to brown technique, too much water causes problems. See, the water turns to steam and wilts the onions quickly. Only when the water is consumed they begin to brown and caramelize. Use too much water, and they wilt a lot and then brown poorly even after the water is consumed.
It was still good.
I also made the sauce a bit more liquidy by adding 3/4 cup of chicken bullion, and not reducing it much.
In my spare time I’ve been sorting ancient photographs of which we have an absurd number. And I’ve come to a humbling conclusion: at no time in 45 years have I been within two tiers of my wife in terms of looks. She could have done so much better.
At 5 pm Easter Time today, XpaceX will do another Xtarship launch. Xlon Cisgender God of Emperor Mars will be there, along with a convicted felon.
If there was ever a time for Xtarship to fail catastrophically in the launch pad…
No one will be in the likely range of such a failure, assuming Xlon allows the most elementary safety precautions various space agencies have learned to implement over the years.
But if it failed like that, it would be worse for Xlon. It would make him look bad.
For those migrating from Twitter to BlueSky:
How to migrate from X to Bluesky without losing your followers
How to Migrate Follows and Blocks from Twitter to Bluesky
Howard Lutnick will be commerce secretary.
Here’s why a second Death Star won’t be that bad.
Alvin Bragg has asked Judge Merchan to delay Trump’s sentencing.
The entire state of Massachusetts is under a red flag warning.
@Kingdaddy:
Technically the second Death Star wasn’t that bad, as the Rebel Alliance’s victory in the Battle of Endor didn’t allow Palpatine to use it on another inhabited world, like his lackeys did on Alderaan.
That’s a very BIG technicality. Palpatine intended to destroy the Rebel fleet. He would then have deployed his terror weapon on the galaxy at large. The only reason he didn’t was that he was defeated before he could do so. Otherwise the second Death Star was at least as bad as the first one.
Yesterday @Gustopher pointed out Ukraine had no means of detonating the USSR nukes in its territory. To which @Rob1 asked whether they could be repurposed.
Yes and yes.
Nukes are rather complex devices, but the most difficult parts are the fissile material (uranium or plutonium) and tritium. The next hardest part is how to secure the weapons against unauthorized use. This is very complicated, and I’ve no idea how the Soviets secured theirs.
But having the materials, and several bombs already assembled, it would not be difficult at all, for a group of people with training in ordnance and nuclear physics, to take a few apart and disable the safeguards, or to use the components to assemble working weapons with different safeguards. All the components would be on hand already.
The issue with fissile materials is that you need the isotope U-235 for your bomb. It makes up only 0.07% of all uranium. The 99.93% that makes up the rest will never blow up in a chain reaction, no matter how much you can compress it or how many neutrons you shoot at it.
For a very inefficient nuke, you need the proportion of U235 to be no les than 20%. For an efficient design, you want 85%.
Separating the isotopes is not easy. They have the same chemical properties, and differ in mass by the grand amount of 3 neutrons worth. This the need to make uranium hexafluoride gas, and to separate the isotopes in very finely balanced centrifuges.
Plutonium does not occur in nature (on Earth, at least), but can be made in a breeder reactor that uses mostly the far more common U238 isotope. These are very expensive and figuring out how to build one reveals many dangers.
Had Ukraine kept the Soviet nukes, they would have been able to at the very least use the materials to build their own arsenal inside of 10 years.
Trump names Dr. Mehmet Oz to head Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
5 ‘quack treatments’ Dr. Oz has recommended that are totally bogus
@Mister Bluster:
Yeah, but he looks good on TV. I guess.
@CSK: NH has been under a red flag warning I think for over a week now. Tons of brush fires.
I read in The Hill that circumventing the FBI background check process is going over like a lead balloon in the Senate.
@Jen:
I’ll have to read that piece in The Hill. Thanks for pointing it out to us.
The national news on ABC said today that the entire state of Mass. under the red flag. Is that true of NH as well?
Trump’s appointments keep reminding me of Galaxy Quest. I keep expecting him to appoint William Shatner to head Space Force, or Hugh Laurie to head NIH. (And yes, I’m aware that neither of those old white men is actually a US citizen…)
Well, Xtarship didn’t blow up on the launch pad.
On the other hand, the booster Xlon said he’d catch in his show off launch tower, has been redirected to sink in the Gulf.
It is still reusable, so maybe it was donated to the squid space program or something.
Seriously, without reusability, Xlon’s rockets are neither better nor cheaper than anyone else’s. Sure, it’s all tests and fun and games and hyped up claims for now. but NASA fully expects the Xtarship lander in 2026. Naturally, “everything costs more and takes longer.” But if there’s even a one in ten chance of a lander by any time in 2026, I’ll rejoin Xitter for two milliseconds.
XpaceX is covering by saying they’d evaluate flight data and make a decision about a landing attempt based on real-time telemetry. Which is just a fancy way of saying either 1) we miscalculated the trajectory, or 2) the rocket did not go in the right trajectory for some reason we’ll never ever tell you about ever.
I know this, because before Xlon became a crazed, deranged lunatic*, I’d have taken such things as a minor setback to be corrected in five minutes. Now I wonder whom will the God of Cisgender Mars Phobos Emperor find to help them correct it.
*Is that a double or a triple pleonasm?
@Kathy:
Perhaps, if the squid are able to reassemble the booster after it exploded upon impact with the water. I know that cephalopods are intelligent for invertebrates, but this may be too much of a challenge for them.
The first launch feed I watched had an unofficial (I believe) commentator who stated that the booster may blow up after landing on the water–and a couple of seconds later, it blew up. Then I watched a couple of different feeds, including what I think was a SpaceX feed, and they curiously cut away from the booster just a moment before it blew up, and then commented on the successful water landing. That really had a bit of a corporate, or even Soviet, information control feel to it.
@Eusebio:
I’ve been reading live blogs on news sites. I had the impression of a soft landing. there was no mention on whether it would be recovered, but I don’t think XpaceX even has the capability for that, or even flotation devices on the booster.
This is a sad day for the squids, should any live anywhere in the Gulf.
@Mister Bluster:
Wait, I thought irony was dead.* No, wait, it’s just those of us who rely on fact based medicine.
* I’ve always attributed this to Tom Leher (back when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize), but that’s probably the drugs talking. Still and all, Dr freaking Oz?????????
Linda McMahon, co-founder of WWE, is Trump’s pick to be head of the Dept. of Education.
@Kathy:
In the event of a booster water landing, I’d expect it to be considered lost regardless of how soft the initial contact with the water. And I don’t mean to question the success of today’s flight because, a) it was a test flight, and b) recovery and reuse of the booster is not an essential capability for space flight.
@Eusebio:
You learn more from a damaged but intact booster than from a blown up one. But not if you let it sink.
@CSK:
Other than Gatze, I think of these appointments more like “Executioner of the department of” than “head of the department of”. The sexual predator is obviously the fixer general.
So, baby formula shortage, IV fluid shortage, I’m sure I’m missing more. But this is salient:
Hurricane Helene, which hit North Carolina in September, flooded a Baxter International facility that produces 60% of the IV fluids used in the U.S., according to the American Hospital Association.
In Tom Clancy’s one novel not part of the Jack Ryan universe, an intelligence analyst comments on car battery shortages in the USSR. His naval officer friend asks “Factory burned down?” The narrator explains that the Soviets like one huge factory rather than a bunch of little ones.
Did you ever expect late stage trickle down capitalism to look so much like Soviet communism?
I confess I didn’t. But on hindsight, it makes perfect sense. Capital accumulation moves as much towards consolidation and monopoly as state ownership of the economy does.
@Jen: How it goes over is less important than that Senators insist on having them AND acting on what they reveal. That it’s not being received well is only the equivalent of Susan Collins’ furrowed brow. We’ve seen that trick before.
@CSK: Meh… No worse than his previous pick last administration. In fact, a carny barker may well be better than a MLM scam artist.