Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, August 25, 2024
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27 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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It occurred to me the other day that if dark matter is so weakly interacting with normal matter, it should go through normal matter as if it weren’t there. If so, then you could have something like a clump of dark matter in a very close orbit around a star, and it wouldn’t suffer any orbital degradation.
Suppose it made an orbit of the Sun every six hours. That puts it inside the corona, the Sun’s atmosphere. Normally something in there would experience a great deal of drag, which would cause it to lose speed, which would cause it to impact the Sun. But if there’s no interaction via electromagnetic forces, then the corona wouldn’t produce drag or resistance, and the object could keep its orbit indefinitely.
I feel like paraphrasing JBS Haldane: the universe isn’t weirder than we imagine, it’s weirder than a drunk MAGA candidate high on drugs.
Producing the DNC:
“NYMAG”
Well, that didn’t take long. I unfriended a FB friend yesterday after her gross and sexist comment that all Kamala was good for was her “cackling laugh, but only when she doesn’t have a cock in her mouth,” (sorry for the language, but that’s what she wrote). I mean, what is wrong with these maga’s? I suspect more “friends” who self expose themselves will need to be let go of forever. Who wants that kind of horrendous person in your life. And we used to be pretty tight, and I’m like, what happened to you? Not worth the time to figure it out for me anyway. It’s going to be ugly. Just had to get that off my chest. Sorry to bring up such rancidness on beautiful Sunday morn, but this is the kinda shite we’re looking at.
WRT to the whole Boeing Starliner debacle, why do I have the Gilligan’s Island theme song going through my head. Someone much cleverer than I can draft new appropriate lyrics to match that tune.
@Scott:
“A 3 hour tour,
a 3 hour tour…”
For some reason or other, that was rattling around in my brain yesterday.
@Scott:
For me, the trapped in space aspect has made the more obvious parallel:
o/~ In the not too distance future, at Boeing Company
Defense, Space & Security was hatching an evil scheme
They hired Wilmore and Sunita, two astronauts pilots sent from NASA
Their capsule needed a good test case,
So they stuffed them into Starliner and shot them into space (Get me down!!!!!) o/~
Lies aren’t just a convenience, but a preference:
I love the leaderboard at the Women’s British Open
Shin
Vu
Ko
Korda
Shin
Yin
The first Shin, Jiyai, is trying to win her 3rd Women’s British Open. She won it previously in 2008 and 2012.
@OzarkHillbilly: “
On a related topic, who are you for?
Mary Ann
or
Ginger
I vote for MA
I am glad to hear that that the claims about Harris wanting price controls was wrong. It looks like what she wants is a fairly focused law on price gouging mostly limited to food and necessities during emergencies. It sounds like ti would look similar to the law that Texas and many other state have on the books.
https://www.sll.texas.gov/faqs/disaster-price-gouging/#:~:text=“Price%20gouging”%20is%20where%20a,Texas%20Deceptive%20Trade%20Practices%20Act.
Steve
@Bill Jempty:
How did it go with the doctor yesterday?
@CSK:
I had a scan Friday but haven’t got the results yet.
On Tuesday I have a appointment with the gastroenterologist. I’m probably going to need a needle biopsy in September.
Right now I’m up in the air. Trying to keep my mind off these things. Watch golf, play strat-o-matic baseball, and write.
Was out to dinner last night and the topic of Harley Davidson dropping DEI programs came up. It is actually an ongoing attack by right wing activists that are essentially threatening to cancel any company that makes any attempt to sell products to the outgrips they hate, especially LGBTQ groups. Among the verboten behaviors these companies engaged in was making donations to United Way.
Steve
@Bill Jempty: When I was a kid, it was MaryAnne. But my older (and not so wiser) self is a Ginger guy all the way.
Bonoism of the day:
“When I was three I thought the world revolved around me
I was wrong.”
I wonder how it would work if, instead of making laws/regulations defining those clases that are protected from discrimination, we instead made non-discrimination the default and made laws/regulations defining when discrimination was ok
@Scott:
Caption with “BOOEIIIIGGG!!!”
@Kingdaddy:
Trump only tells the truth by accident. This has been obvious for a while.
Great piece on the laughable “historical” claims behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine:
https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/putins-legend
I continue to be stunned by the weirdness of MSM factchecking this election cycle. First, many of the headlines have been weighted toward Republicans (several, including NPR and the AP, had headlines that said “factchecking the false/misleading statements at the DNC” vs “factchecking the RNC” with no negative adjectives in the headline, despite the actual numerical content of falsehoods during the RNC is much longer in these very same articles). Second, the thing they’re saying are false or misleading by the Democrats often aren’t: if at any point Trump has denied something, no matter how often he may have promoted that very thing by his words, actions, or attempts, then the Democrats are lying to claim he’s doing or plans to do that thing.
But even more blatantly, today Jake Tapper was interviewing Cory Booker on CNN. Booker was saying something about how, as a former football player, he loved the sports metaphors in Gov. Walz’s speech. Tapper interrupted him to “fact check” him in real time, saying that it was false that Booker was a former football player, since he only played for Stanford and not a pro team like the Generals. Apparently, Booker was stunned silent, both by being called a liar for something he didn’t say (he never claimed to have played pro ball) and for Tapper’s “hard hitting journalism” of challenging him about something totally irrelevant to what’s happening in our country.
Create a comment using voice to text while walking your dog + no edit button = Lots of typos. Oh well.
@Kingdaddy:
Thank you. That was a lot of history I was only tangentially familiar with.
Also, maybe the Weirdo Felon like Mad Vlad, Kim, Xi, Xlon, et al not because they are dictators, but because they are weird.
H/T to a commenter at Balloon Juice, who shared a USA Today article by Rex Huppke, that perfectly illustrates my point about the MSM believing any Trump quote despite evidence to the contrary, and claiming Dems are lying if they point that out:
@Monala: LGM has had several pieces the last few days addressing how idiotic “fact checking” has become.
For example, today: America’s most abjectly useless media organization achieves its platonic ideal
Just a musing.
Interesting that BJs had such different effects on the careers of Kamala and HRC.
Life is cruel.
@Jack:
“Interesting that BJs ….”
Drew, you seem to be constantly thinking about penises being inserted into mouths. Every third or fourth comment includes something like “slobbering” or “knee pads”. Why is that?
I found this involving someone bungee cording a severed whale head to the roof of a car:
Who ever could it be?