Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, December 12, 2021
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40 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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Anne Rice, author of the Vampire series and erotica under the name A. N. Roquelaure, has died. She was 80, and had suffered a stroke.
I never read any of her work, nor saw any of the movies based on it, but Interview with the Vampire was a major phenomenon in popular culture, spawning a decades-long fascination with the undead and a host of imitations.
Judd Legum
@JuddLegum
1. Trump’s “media company” is currently valued at $2 BILLION.
It has no product, no customers, and no revenue. But it’s much worse than that.
Follow along if interested.
2. The most detailed information we have about Trump’s media company is from an investor presentation filed with the SEC. I want to draw your attention to Page 22 of the presentation which is an overview of the “Infrastructure” of the company. Pretty important!
5. The entire page describing the “infrastructure” of Trump’s media company is cut-and-pasted from other sites. In other words, not only does this company not have any technical infrastructure it could not be bothered to even write its own slide of what the infrastructure will be.
6. Yet, this is a company purportedly worth $2 BILLION. An unknown investor or investors have kicked in $1 BILLION. But there is little evidence it really exists.
More on the mirage of Trump Media & Technology Group.
Clown show in action:
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-bill-oreilly-tour-begins-empty-seats-florida-live-arena-1658541
Even in Florida they can’t get no respect.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s Trump. It’s a transparently shoddy scam engineered to appeal to suckers. So what else is new?
Cali is going to move forward on a vigilante law that targets assault weapons.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-11/in-response-to-texas-abortion-law-newsom-calls-for-legislation-to-restrict-assault-weapons
It’ll get tied up in court and unlike the TX abortion law, the SC will let the injunction stand, keeping the law from going into effect. Eventually they’ll throw it out on some made up 2nd amendment reasoning. Before the proposed Cali law is even introduced, the enforcement method will be a dead letter.
The SC will gut Roe using the Mississippi case and TX, and other states, have already introduced legislation that mimics MS. With Roe gone, the SC will then declare both the TX and Cali vigilante laws unconstitutional.
You read here first.
@CSK: I never read the books but did watch the movie, which was generally well-received by audiences. I haven’t watched it recently, but recall enjoying it and thinking Tom Cruise made a far better vampire Lestat than I had expected.
@CSK: I had expected Nunes to actually have to DO something for his cut.
@OzarkHillbilly:
He is. He’s lending his name to the project.
@OzarkHillbilly:
They couldn’t even write “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV”?
@Kathy: Heh, thanx. I needed that laugh.
@CSK: His cows have more cachet than he does.
@OzarkHillbilly:
As I said the other day, Nunes should stick to milking cows rather than investors.
New Hampshire hospitals are starting to report out their hospitalization statistics to include vaccination status.
@CSK: Heh, I love this closing of the article:
A fool and her money are soon parted.
@Jen:
The majority of the cases appear to be among the unvaxxed.
We are now having pts lie about covid to us. They answer all of their screening questions as having had no exposure but when tested they come back positive and we find out they had someone at home with covid. Given how many people online have said they would just get a fake card if they needed a covid passport I guess this should not have surprised me. I passed a lot of that off as online bravado and didnt think we would see people directly lie like that.
Steve
@CSK: @Mikey: I read the first book and saw the movie (ages ago, though I rewatched it a few years ago), and I liked it a lot—in fact it’s one of the better vampire movies I have seen. There was a film adaptation of the third book, Queen of the Damned with none of the original cast, but it wasn’t well received critically or commercially, and I haven’t seen it. (It’s noted for the final film appearance of the singer Aaliyah before her tragic death at 22.) I have for a long time felt the books lent themselves to a TV series. (The first movie is sometimes criticized for its lack of a cohesive plot—it’s just a series of events in the “lives” of these two vampires across several centuries—but I didn’t mind it.) Apparently there were plans for a series on Hulu a few years back, but they fell through.
Chris Wallace is leaving Fox News to join CNN+, a streaming platform soon to launch.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yes, that was GREAT, wasn’t it? A fool indeed.
@steve:
You have to wonder why, if Covid is either a big nothing (just a slight cold!) or a Deep State hoax to force us all into Communism, they’d feel compelled to lie about not having it.
@CSK:
I was intrigued enough by the movie to read the first book, and then for some reason i read several others.
They weren’t bad, but they weren’t memorable either. I appreciated the attempt to explain how vampires came to be, and how they develop over time, especially as the “facts” presented were consistent. I think that’s what I remember most about the books.
One thing I found disappointing, is that these beings do very little with their very long lives. For one thing, an immortal vampire is perfectly well placed to keep a good record of history as it develops. And did none of them think of taking up scientific research, or even to fund it?
@Kathy:
Well, I suppose if you have to crawl back into your coffin during sunrise to sundown it would somewhat limit your opportunities for productive enterprise.
But I admit that A Vampire’s History of the World would be an engaging read. Longer than Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, though.
@OzarkHillbilly:
And she did, of course, pay all the appropriate sales. income, and import taxes… right?
(The IRS counts “income” from bartering (e.g., a gain in worth) as taxable income.)
@CSK: I never understood the appeal of his “I’m the only celibate in the whore house” schtick
@Kathy:
They’re pleasantly-written brain candy. She had a way with words and phrasing, and a feel for characters, that make you forget that there’s really no plot.
She’s similar to Andrew M Greeley, who’s “Blackie Ryan Mysteries”, I devoured when I was in college. They’re fairly formulaic locked-room mysteries, with some (nigh-heretical) glimpses into the Chicago-Irish Catholic Church (we follow Blackie from lowly priest to a bishop over the course of a dozen or more novels).
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying some well-written fluff.
@CSK:
Is there anyone left at Faux News that could be considered a journalist? It is ripe that he is going to a CNN affiliate.
@Jen: These numbers are a bit deceiving. Overall, New Hampshire has 2/3 of the population fully vaxed, so even at first glance the numbers show higher likelihood of hospitalization among the untaxed than the raw numbers seem to show. But when you consider that for the age groups most likely to be hospitalized the vaccination rate is hovering at 90% and above, the penalty for being unvaxed is at least an order of magnitude greater than the raw numbers indicate.
@MarkedMan:
Over at Lucianne.com they’re saying that they might just watch Fox again now that rabid ultra-leftist Chris Wallace is departing.
@Sleeping Dog:
You know, I so seldom watch Fox that I’ve no idea who their journalists are, except for Bret Baier, who like Wallace gets cursed by the right for being a Communist subversive.
You’re not really fully vaccinated, even if you got a booster, until around 95% or more of the population in your area gets at least two vaccine doses.
@MarkedMan:
Only whore in a nunnery seems more fun.
Yesterday I caught myself making up a false memory.
Fact: I tripped and fell moving about a known place in the dark due to an obstacle which shouldn’t have been there. I banged my knees a little, but they weren’t even bruised.
Later, passing through that same place once the sun had come up, I noticed I came like within half a meter of hitting my head on a table, had I been walking closer to it (but then I wouldn’t have tripped), or fallen differently.
Later on, thinking back on the incident, I could picture seeing the table’s edge whizzing past as I fell.
That not only didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened. It was dark, remember? I saw nothing because I couldn’t see anything. Not the table, not the floor, and not the thing that tripped me.
A fall is happens too quickly anyway, and the view is so out of the ordinary, that most people can’t even process the visual input in a way that makes sense. Perhaps if you fall often, or are taken down often, and need to concentrate on the way down, like football players for example, you may train your brain to notice what happens when you do.
@steve:
As your medical colleague, Dr. House was known to say: Everyone lies.
“You read here first.”
True, but I thought it as soon as I read the headline about it. I hadn’t even clicked on the article yet.
@CSK: What has me puzzled about the “offering” is how many of the investors are exactly like MTG and how you go about finding people like that for this kind of investment. I get the whole “getting in on the ground floor” thing, but this is a FG enterprise FFS! It’s not the ground floor, it’s the 5th sub basement. (And there’s no elevator or stairway in the building, either.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yeah, I know. What I don’t know is how much money Marjorie has to throw into a doomed enterprise such as this. All I do know is that Trump will probably pocket a tidy sum and walk away laughing at the saps.
@steve:
I assume it is the same as the people who lie about slipping at home after the showing and ending up with a cantaloupe or something up their butt. Except, worse, because cantaloupes aren’t generally contagious.
@Mu Yixiao: I’m not their accountant so I wouldn’t know.
@Gustopher:
Tyler is NOT a liar…..he is merely the most focally unfortunate man to ever inhabit these hills.
Also, post-butt cantaloupe can indeed be infectious.
@CSK:
I’m not even sure I’ll go that far. My money would be on TMTG walking away with most of the money if I were going to bet. The “laughing at the saps” part I’ll agree will probably happen, but again, I’m not sure who’ll be doing the laughing (other than it won’t be MTG).
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Well, it’s been set up as a Trump enrichment fund. Why do you think MTG will walk away with most of the money?
@CSK: Not MGT, TMTG–the company FG is merging with in this “media venture.”