Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, October 6, 2024
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35 comments
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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).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
Good morning everyone! I’m on my way home from a rave. I got my ears pierced again. At the rave. It was amazing.
Why we are constantly with Trump getting in our faces:
From July 2016:
“Politico“
@Beth:
Good morning, glad you enjoyed.
@Beth:
Good morning, glad you enjoyed.
I’ve almost run out of Mythbusters eps on Youtube. There were a lot of them. It’s a a bit startling to realize the era of long seasons wasn’t that lnog ago.
On other things, I saw a Xlon rolling refrigerator (he calls it a Xybertruck for some reason) out on the road. I didn’t even know they peddled it here. It’s one of the ugliest vehicles I’ve ever seen. It makes for an ugly fridge, too, but it would look less out of place in a kitchen.
Frontier flight catches fire on landing.
Video here.
I don’t even want to speculate on what happened. The one clear thing is the lading gear caught on fire, not the engine.
Wow. This is just…..insane.
https://gizmodo.com/truth-social-users-are-losing-ridiculous-sums-of-money-to-scams-2000506604
@Jax: This is just…..
insanetotally predictable.FTFY.
DeSantis current outrage:
“Meidas”
Threatening to sue or criminally prosecute TV stations for running ads for Amendment 4 (Abortion rights initiative).
@Jax: You’ve got to remember these are simple Trumpies. The common clay of the new GOP. You know…morons.
Long lead off article in the NYTimes (no subscription needed) on Trump’s cognitive decline.
@Mikey:
I signed up for Truth Social so I could follow Trump’s rants, see them for myself, but I’ve forgotten how to log in. Doesn’t matter now that he has gone back to Twitter.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve just skimmed through the piece but they seem to be really dancing around the word “dementia,” as if it’s some sort of D-word they are not allowed to say. I have plenty of links on file that say the symptoms they point to are dementia symptoms. (Admittedly, a few of them could be other things like Parkinson’s. But there are some that are specific to a frontotemporal form of dementia).
@Jax:
I am shocked, shocked that El Weirdo isn’t getting a cut off these scams.
@Beth: Glad you enjoyed them. I got two needle piercings also. On Friday, I got my high dose flu and Covid shots.
This is who they are:
Texas bakery threatened for making cookies featuring Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz
Lovely.
Much joy here in Music City as little Vanderbilt knocked off number one Alabama. Sorry, James.
@Scott:
It’s a bit odd to decorate food when you think about what happens to it. First it gets mixed with saliva and ground up into something that looks, quite frankly, utterly disgusting.
Next it takes a bath in stomach acids, which fails to improve it in any way. Then it makes its slow way through the intestines, where it’s broken down more, this time with help from bacteria.
Some is absorbed through the intestinal walls to the bloodstream and distributed to various tissues.
The rest is discarded eventually, along with other solid, liquid, and gaseous byproducts of human metabolic activity, into a substance we call by various names, none of them without negative connotations.
TL;DR, it makes no sense to decorate cookies in the image of El Weirdo or Vance, because they already are the end product mentioned above.
@a country lawyer: Vandy won a game? Their football team was a constant punchline the whole time I lived in Nashville. We had a little house tucked into some woods smack dab in the middle of town. Our street, which was two houses, dead ended into Love Circle, highest point in the city. Vanderbilt stadium is down the hill and across the street. We heard all the home games. Cue sad trombone.
@a country lawyer: My nephew is down there on business and commented that he saw a crowd of football fans carrying what he assumed was a goal post and dumping it in the river
@MarkedMan:..he saw a crowd of football fans carrying what he assumed was a goal post and dumping it in the river.
Confirmed
Trigger Warning!
@Kathy:
He is. It’s called stock options. And if he wasn’t a complete failure in business, he would actually be rich.
But he can’t help himself. Anything that he says will drive any legitimate advertisers away.
And since capitalism abhors a vacuum, all those other scammers fill the gaps.
@Mister Bluster: That’s quite a walk. It’s 24 blocks from the stadium to the river.
@Jax:
This doesn’t even warrant my “shocked face.” :-
@Liberal Capitalist:
You know, if any other website were to become known as pig butchering central, its stock would collapse. el Weirdo’s though…
Suppose at some point 2-3 million years ago some alien probe flew by the solar system. Having sensed life on Earth, it slows down enough to leave behind a satellite to orbit the Earth and send regular data back home for a few thousand years.
In time, the satellite’s machinery decays and eventually it becomes inert. But it’s orbiting high enough to stay up for several million years.
Would we ever find it?
I assume a polar orbit, so it would observe the entire surface of the planet every few days. And rather high up, so it would stay active with minimal use of propellant for station keeping over thousands of years.
Size is a problematic matter, You’d think it would have a HUGE parabolic antenna, like Voyager’s but larger, in order to send data to its makers. On the other hand, A big antenna is a big mass, so maybe a smaller one would serve, even a low gain, small. non-parabolic one. Assuming “home” is not too far away.
@Kathy:
Easy answer: for long term observation, don’t orbit.
Land it on the Moon.
Stick a relay station or two on rocks out in the asteroid belt; or perhaps the cometary home zones.
A sufficiently magical technology should be able to use local resources to fab big antennae etc.
@Beth:
I generally tend to avoid parties where I might be punctured, but you do you!
Skiplagging is on the news again. This time American Airlines is suing a skiplagging website.
Sigh…
Briefly, skiplagging is the practice pf booking a connecting flight and getting off at the connection airport. Why? It tends to be cheaper. Say a flight from LA to NYC is $500, while one from LA to Buffalo with a connection in JFK is $300. You buy your ticket to Buffalo and get off in NYC.
It’s not that simple. If you check luggage, your bags will make it to Buffalo. If you booked a return ticket, it will likely be cancelled, as the airline has reason to believe you’re not in Buffalo. And there’s more. But it you book one way and don’t check bags, you should be ok. If caught, the airline might demand you pay the fare in full, and you could be sued.
Partly the problem is how the airlines price tickets by demand. Imagine you go into a restaurant and see a half sandwich costs $15 while a whole sandwich costs $10. So you order the whole sandwich, eat only half, and the restaurant then demands you pay the higher price. Does it make more sense if the restaurant prices its sandwiches this way because there is more demand for half sandwiches than whole ones?
Ahoy from the Queen Mary 2. Day One: Brooklyn to Providence. Day Two: Boston, where I buy legal weed and wife buys slippers. Of course the weed is for the seasickness nausea. Purelymedicinal, because evidently I do not metabolize Scopalamine patches well. When room service brought breakfast I was staggering like a drunk. And the ship was docked.
So far: fantastic suite. We booked a two living room, two bathroom, suite with a large balcony. Because my wife is making fat stacks, as the kids say (said?) and it’s her birthday, somewhere around Southampton. I am a kept man.
Excellent service. Weak internet. And the food? Is very British. Pre-Ramsay, pre-Jamie Oliver, British. Back in the days when I was writing brutal restaurant reviews, I’d have had to beat on them. How do you make a cheesecake that bad? And how is that thing they served supposed to be a salad? Also, fish? Not so much cooked as tanned. Fish leather.
But, to be fair, when you’re cooking for 80 year-olds, you can’t really raise your game.
K and I at 68 and 70, are just about the youngest people aboard. I’d say my wife is clearly the hottest woman on the boat, but that might be a case of damning with faint praise.
Coming up: miles and miles of nothing but water.
@Gustopher:
If you want to avoid getting punctured at queer parties, just stay out of the darkroom.
@Michael Reynolds:
For grins and giggles, stand at the railing near a group of your aged travel companions, and suddenly scream ” periscope off the starboard bow! ”
Ya gotta get your entertainment where ya can. OTOH, wifey may throw you overboard.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
You know whats’s weird? There are prints showing the whole Cunard company, and they go there, straight to Lusitania and Titanic. Life boats are much improved since those days. Hopefully, decent WiFi.
@Kathy:
Flaps are up. No-flap landing? Must have had a lot of systems going bad. Unless you got 2+ miles of runway and plant it on the numbers the brakes get smoked. My guess is an electrical fire in a bad location to have one.
@dazedandconfused:
I’m rather tired from the latest cold I caught (damn family get togethers), but I can’s say from the video whether the flaps are up or down.