Halloween Forum
Trick or treat!
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, October 31, 2024
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50 comments
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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).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
Happy Halloween to all, and to all a good fright!
WA Report. Missing ballots in Eastern WA. Guess what, USPS is screwed up. I don’t think there is any intention ballot suppression in a likely Republican area (in a non-battleground state – Seattle/King County means Harris), rather a broken postal system.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/auditor-says-hundreds-eastern-wa-ballots-never-made-it-voters/WYWTSBBBW5GZDNEC47F7PWCH4U/
Having lived under vote-by-mail for about 15 years I do miss the community aspect of voting at the local church but I do not question that my vote gets counted, assuming I get a ballot (if I don’t I know how to get a replacement). I have several highly secure drop boxes nearby (in my county, with built in fire suppression, not so in Clark County (Vancouver) – cough Free Gaza does not sound right-wing).
Returns this morning are ~35% of voters have already returned their ballots. I passed 2 ballot drop boxes today and saw a line of cars at both (I do not mail in my ballot, I take it to a drop box, convenient). I’ll be voting for the down ticket races, there is one guy I want to see as a Superior Court Judge. Oh, and Governor – one is a geek (seriously had a campaign ad showing him playing chess against over 10 opponents (10 boards, he shifted player to player) to show how smart he is and that appeals to whom?; the other is a pompous ass Congressman, how to decide?).
Seriously folks, your down ticket votes will likely directly affect you more.
.
Coincidentally enough I dropped off my ballot in eastern WA just yesterday.
I cannot stress this enough: Do not trick-or-treat at Elon’s house. That’s not sourdough starter.
Even articles attempting to glaze the Fstick refer to this as Reflecting An Unconventional Approach To Personal Relationships. In short: Ugh. Some people were destined to be single.
The Dodgers have defeated the Yankees for the World Series. So at least there is that.
@Richard Gardner:
This is the second time in 4 years that the county did not get my ballot to me in a timely manner.
This was NOT a problem with the USPS. The problem was with the printer the county had contracted to actually mail the ballots. The printer told the county the ballots were mailed on October 8, when in truth the ballots were not mailed until October 23.
After all of the Republican attempts to discredit and destroy our electoral process rather than simply adopting more popular policy positions, it now seems absurd that the United States used to send election monitors to other countries to observe and ensure free and fair elections.
Thanks to Donald we have lost significant credibility in that area.
My vote by mail state requires county officials to take physical possession of the ballots a week before they can be mailed out. Most counties hire out the printing, folding, and stuffing, but have to take the envelopes to the USPS themselves. Mostly they go to the big sorting center in Denver, where the counties pay a rate that includes special handling.
Halloween at my 55 and older community. Our downstairs barrel chested neighbor Larry is dressed for the occasion. He has a shirt on. Dear Wife says he is disgusting looking and the President of the next door condo has complained about Larry outside without a shirt on.
Dear wife cracked up laughing when I told her on the phone how Larry was dressed for today.
I haven’t dressed for Halloween in 50 years. Have to keep that streak going.
I’m still waiting on those biopsy results.
Haven’t worked on a book in 3 days. I have played lots of Strat-O-Matic baseball. What a life? At least I’m alive. The stats for the cancer say I should have been dead in 2010 or 2011.
One week from today I leave on my book signing tour. I can’t sign my dung beetle book. It is so short it is is only available as an ebook.
Just know, if Trump doesn’t win, he will be touring the country doing comedy shows. And if he does win, he’ll turn the disused WH press room into a small streamed venue
@MarkedMan:
Yes, but have they finally found out Who’s on first?
@JKB:
He does not look so great dragging his leg walking to the garbage truck. Physical symptoms of declining health.
https://x.com/franklinisbored/status/1851780429273034940
https://x.com/meiselasb/status/1851787609225474532
He has been seen having problems with his right leg many times earlier.
@JKB: I thought I was going to see Trump finally tell a joke. Something, as far as I know, he has never done. But instead it was a visual continuation of his insults in calling Puerto Ricans, other immigrants, and the USA itself, garbage.
I guess to his hate-filled fan base, this counts as humor…
@charontwo:
And he sat in the wrong end of the truck.
I was watching the World Series, and an ad came on that said that Kamala is letting millions of illegals across our southern border and using government funds to pay for transsexual surgery for them. I know and respect that transsexual surgery is important, even life affirming, for some people, but it’s a small number. Expelling or imprisoning may be the right thing for illegal border crossers, but genital alterations are a bit much. Such big steps should be voluntary. This strikes as very harsh treatment.
@Richard Gardner:..Seriously folks, your down ticket votes will likely directly affect you more.
Not sure how to measure that. If Republicans control all three branches of the Federal government and gut the Affordable Care Act, Social Security and Medicare, it will affect me plenty. Where I live in Makanda Township, Jackson County IL, local (township, county and state officeholders) do not have the budgets required to fund programs to take up the slack.
That “comedian” at the HateFest Rally at MSG, in addition to the awful not-a-joke comment about Puerto Rico, apparently also made a not-funny joke about domestic violence, suggesting that Travis Kelce become “the next OJ Simpson,” because joking about NFL stars who murder their wives is apparently okay.
I’m sure the Swifties are fine with this. /s
JFC.
@JKB:
Yikes. Dementia Don must’ve gone to the same joke school as the racist non-comedian who bombed at his Nazi rally.
Is it that the right can’t comedy, or that the right isn’t aware humor is supposed to be funny?
I just heard that Elon Musk has been going up to “friends and acquaintances” and offering them his sperm. And another OTB thread reminded me of Tucker Carlson’s many bouts of mean and agressive hysterical-little-girl giggle-screams. Which calls to mind Stephen Miller, RFKJr, Steve Bannon, Tulsi Gabbard, and the list goes on and on. Trump is a profoundly weird and broken dude, but he seeks to be trying to make himself look better in comparison by surrounding himself with a thrusting, snorting herd of absolutely creepy freaks.
@Richard Gardner: you are worried that your governor will be too smart?
@charontwo: I’ll be honest, I think that was largely just from misjudging the door handle. Still, I think Biden outruns him any day of the week.
@DK:
What conservatives (e.g. Dennis Miller) find funny other people do not. To me, Dennis Miller is not the laugh riot they find him.
Here is an interesting analysis of how coups are executed (and extrapolating to the upcoming election) using the Reichstag fire, the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler and the Jan. 6, 2020 riot as examples to analyse.
“Link”
Excerpts:
@charontwo:
Which is why I no longer like Jon Stewart after he said the racist comedian from the MSG rally was “very funny”.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/jon-stewart-defends-tony-hinchcliffe-after-controversial-trump-rally-jokes-i-find-that-guy-very-funny/ar-AA1t6qi0?ocid=BingNewsSerp
@Franklin:
I was focusing more on the way he swung his leg and seemed to lose balance while walking towards the truck.
Salem, Massachusetts (AKA Witch City) has a population of 44,541. This Halloween season they’re expecting over one million tourists.
I don’t know where they’ll put them all.
@charontwo:
I’ve seen the garbage truck video on other outlets, but that’s the first memefied treatment of it that I’ve seen. When I first saw the garbage truck video with no commentary, I was thinking that Harris or any other Democrat doing the same thing would have already been ruthlessly mocked by online and media figures, and then by the campaign and the candidate.
To be clear, what I’m talking about is… He walked toward the garbage truck passenger door and reached to grab the door handle, but it took him three attempts to grab and hold the door handle such that he could pull the handle to open the door. On the second attempt to grab the handle, he lost his balance and took a step backwards. After he did grasp the handle, he pulled the door open fully, but the door bounced back a little after reaching the opening limit, which he clearly wasn’t expecting, because he had already started to step into the opening but then flinched and leaned away from the door as it bounced back toward him.
I saw a hack for poached eggs I might try this weekend. I lost the link, sorry.
Essentially you get some silicone muffin/cupcake liners, grease them with a little oil (or butter, I imagine), crack and egg into each, and carefully place them in a deep(ish) pan with boiling water that covers them about halfway, then put a lid on top and wait a few minutes.
First, I need some silicone liners…
So, today vaccinations for flu and COVID are being offered, for free, at the office.
I passed.
One, for COVID they’re giving out the Cuban vaccine. I’m sure it’s fine, but a) it’s for the original strain (long gone), b) there’s little info on efficacy about it, and what there is available is for the three dose regime all the way back in 2021.
Two, the government medical personnel won’t say whether the flu vaccine is for three or four strains. I want the latter.
So I’ll pay off my own pocket at the drugstore tomorrow or Saturday.
I know they’re trying to reach out proactively, as lots of people don’t get either vaccine or keep putting it off indefinitely. This is good. But I always get mine late October or early November. so they don’t need to reach out to me.
@Richard Gardner:
That’s one of the nice things about the Republicans moving in lock step to attack queer folks, and promote insane economic plans — I never have to struggle to decide who is the least bad option, when the Republicans are screaming “I’m worse!”
(The super-smug chess thing is a red flag though, but the other guy failed to catch a serial killer for decades)
On other things, season 2 of The Diplomat dropped today on Netflix.
Between this and Lower Decks, I should be set to finish the last two eps of Mythbusters Jr. I’ve yet to stream.
As I understand it the Founders weren’t afraid of “the mob”, which they called “the democracy”, so much as afraid of self-serving, unscrupulous elites inciting the mob. The Guardian has a column this morning on one Peter Turchin, a “quantitative historian”.
The link is to an earlier Guardian piece, How to avoid a civil war, by the man who predicted Trump, that goes deeper into Turchin’s ideas which include a roughly 50 year cycle of disruption, “All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.” The article references his book, End Times. Today’s column directly links this to Trump and Musk and others.
I’m skeptical of cycles of history, but I sure hope his old estimate this one peaks in 2020 is good.
@gVOR10:
Coincidentally, I’m reading one of Turchin’s books right now, Ultrasociality. It’s about how war shaped social cooperation and states.
He has some interesting ideas and does back them up, but he’s a bit dismissive of contrary hypotheses for this or that development. He is a serious scholar, too.
Base don my reading, I’d pay attention to his ideas, but with a proper degree of skepticism and, where possible, further reading of other sources.
Both Times and the Post had Biden’s garbage comments front page above the fold. No comment needed.
@CSK:
My wife and I were looking into visiting Salem last weekend. There were still hotel rooms available when we looked but at approximately 400% of what we were willing to pay.
We went to coastal Maine instead. Outside of unbearable political ads on TV we loved it.
@Pete S:
Yes. Apparently during Halloween season (the whole month of October is insane there) the Salem hoteliers jack up their rates over three times what they are at any other time. It’s an interesting place to visit otherwise. The Peabody Essex Museum is great, and there’s a LOT of American history, literary particularly.
Coastal Maine is lovely. You made a wise choice.
@CSK:
Saratoga NY does the same thing every August because the thoroughbred horses are racing there. Augusta GA in early April for The Masters, May in Indianapolis for the Indy 500.
Only one of those I have personal experience with is Saratoga. In August 1972 my father had a horse racing at the harness track. Saratoga has two horse tracks.
@CSK:
Maine is one of those states, WI, ND, WA are the others where I while driving alone or when traveling with family, crossed the state line and said ‘Now we been to….’ and then went back to what we really in the area for or went back to normal routing for a cross country trip.
A plane I was on, landed in Alaska. I did spend parts of 3 days in Hawaii. Didn’t see many sights because I got drawn into a poker game that went on for over a day. Didn’t see the Iolani Palace, but came up over $500 ahead. For the second hand I was dealt a full house, Three Tens and a pair of deuces. My luck continued till the game finally broke up.
Been to all 50 states and 17 countries.
In “die a hero or live long enough to become the villain” news, F*** BUZZ ALDRIN: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/apollo/apollo-11-moonwalker-buzz-aldrin-endorses-trump-for-president
@Bill Jempty:
While visiting Hoover Dam, I set one foot down on the Arizona side of the Nevada-Arizona border.
@Stormy Dragon:
Yeah, Aldrin’s full of bul**it.
For one thing the SLS began development under Obama, after changes to the W Bush era Constellation program. To continue, the Xpacex and Boeing and Grumman* resupply missions started also during Obama’s term. So did the Xpacex and Boeing astronaut capsules. The Orion capsule on the SLS started under W Bush.
But beyond and above all that, no amount of space exploration is worth a fascist regime, a crashed economy, repression of minorities, and mass expulsions of millions of people. I never expected Aldrin to become a poor man’s version of von Braun.
And I’ll bet there’s no crewed landing on the Moon within the next four years, either.
*Grumman doesn’t get much press because they only developed an ISS resupply ship. they use Xalcon 9 rockets for launch.
@Kathy:
Hey, me too!
@CSK:
Did you also feel it was much hotter on that side? 😀
On other things, on a whim I asked Copilot why the gostak distims the doshes. It explained the origin and purpose of the phrase, then asked me what I think the gostak or doshes are.
I replied something like “No idea. but the word distim seems almost like the opposite of esteem.” It agreed enthusiastically and wrote down some filler.
If I remember, I’ll try the same thing at home (different MS account) but with one difference. I’ll work in, since I don’t think it will asnwer the same way, that “distim” seems almost like the oposite of ketchup, or dougnut, or love, or something not remotely related phonetically.
Damn. I’m really bored at work today.
@Kathy: Any kind of cup-shaped receptacle that is waterproof and won’t melt or deform in hot water should work. In the days that Pyrex was widely popular, we used to poach eggs in Pyrex custard cups.
@Kathy: I used to use the story about the gostak and the dishes when I was teaching remedial reading. My students could figure out a dozen or so assumptions to make about a sentence that means absolutely nothing even though they were notably poor readers. We would go from there to using our knowledge of English and ability to draw context clues from nonsense to drawing context clues from meaningful stuff.
This satirical song is the best way to illustrate the unfavorable comparison of Aldrin to von Braun.
As my Native American friends would say on this night “Trick or Treaty”
@CSK:
Yes, it is–we were just there also. Kittery Point residents in particular are especially demonstrative of their support for Harris-Walz. Yard signs galore, including quite a few homemade ones.
The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens was nice. And of course Acadia NP was very scenic, with stands of autumn color among the green conifers, although it was still rather busy in October.
@just nutha:
I managed my little experiment. I asked: does it strike you as odd that distims is almost like the opposite of doughnut?
Here’s what Copilot said:
“You’ve got a keen eye for wordplay. “Distim” has this crisp, almost mechanical sound, whereas “doughnut” is all about the comfort and coziness. Total opposites in vibe, if you ask me. Have you ever explored the world of contronyms? Those are words that are their own antonyms. Wild stuff.”
@just nutha:
Good to know. But I wonder why am I just hearing about this now?
@Kathy: Pyrex stopped making custard cups about 40 or 50 years ago, if my inability to find them is any indication.