Three French hens day open forum
Apologies for the delay, and happy third day of Christmas and third night of Hanukkah.
FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Apologies for the delay, and happy third day of Christmas and third night of Hanukkah.
Just read in the morning New York Times, that some in the incoming Trump Administration want to ban Pharmaceutical companies from advertising on television. Wow.
I know that Pharma advertising is prohibited re: television media in France.
@al Ameda: That would be a death blow to the nightly network newscasts.
@al Ameda: Banning pharmaceutical ads would be a net good, but there is no way the corrupt Trump administration would go up against such significant donors. I suspect this is just a shakedown.
As the times’ pharma article pointed out, there have been past attempts to ban or limit pharma ads, but the courts have struck them down on 1st amendment grounds. While a good idea, it won’t happen.
Azerbaijan Airlines says that the plane that went down suffered “physical and technical external interference.” (NBC)
According to CNN, Putin claims he hasn’t spoken to Trump in over four years.
@CSK:
Trump and Putin, two believable individuals.
I see the Bearimy spat today’s forum out.
I got home today around five am, and was asleep by 5:10. I must have slept 4 hours or so. And now I’m back at work. We’ve had worse weeks of Hell Week, but not many.
The problem was the calendar. We had four (4) proposals due today. Ideally we’d have finished them by working full time Tuesday and Wednesday. But we left early the former, and didn’t come at all the latter. So yesterday we were trying to cram 1.5 days of work into one.
Turns out 1.5>1. No one knew math was so complicated.
Of course there were issues with the government portal where we upload the proposals. Those are not that uncommon, but they tend to happen more when it’s late and we’re running out of time (or we something something heuristics bias and notice them more then).
And of course I need to come in on Saturday (long story; I’ll get to it later maybe). Things should ease up for a bit, then get started back up the first full week of January.
Upside is we do expect a Hell Week bonus around February or March.
Here’s some fun news: 3 stories on Daily Beast on the raging internal war in the Trump campaign.
One.
Two.
Three.
Apparently the rabid, racist cretins of MAGA don’t really like the smug, rapacious, Tech Bro assholes.
Lame joke from a sleep deprived brain:
Q: Why is it called Physics?
A: Because Mathematics was already taken
Q: And why is it called Mathematics?
A: Because Golf was already taken
Q: But why is it called Golf?
A: Because Shit was already taken.
Q: Stop that. Why is it called Shit?
A: Because Trump was already taken.
@Michael Reynolds: I think they could have been in one article. But if you’re the editor of the Daily Beast, you have to be thinking – why not get three times as many clicks out of this?
This morning Dear Wife had an early morning surprise.
We call it the The Ghost of Tweety Bird
For the first 5 years we have lived here, there was a black and white cat who’d climb a tree and be outside our 2nd floor door on some mornings. We nicknamed them Tweety Bird.
Around 6 months ago Tweety was poisoned. This morning another black and white cat was by our door. DW put food out for them which they ate. We haven’t seen the cat since.
The Ghost of Tweety Bird. Another example of life not making sense. I suppose the cat could be back if it didn’t break a leg or two going back to ground level.
@Charley in Cleveland: There are nightly network newscasts still? Who knew?
Something generative AI does very well: the iPhone photos app will generate a slide show every day based on the date and, well probably lots of stuff no one knows about. My wife shares hers with the family fairly often, and they are usually quite good in selection, framing, and cuts as well as combining thematically appropriate photos. It’s probably worth mentioning that Apple has been doing this for years and has never referred to it as generative AI.
Something generative AI does poorly: knowing when it doesn’t know something and so shutting the hell up. Yesterday my wife googled “how to reheat Cornish Hens” and didn’t realize the first answer was ChatGPT or equivalent. It told her to lightly cover it with aluminum foil (as opposed to using those heavy aluminum slabs?) and put it in the oven for 10-15 minutes at 200 degrees F, which would have had virtually no effect whatsoever. So we winged it at 300 for an hour and it worked out fine.
@Jay L Gischer:
The New Republic, which I subscribe to, sends me daily emails. I ignore these things mostly because I find out is click bait. Like this-
Trump’s Christmas Day Meltdown Was Deranged—Even for Him
Then you get into the meat of the short article, and find there isn’t a whole lot there. Trump going nuts on topics but stuff heard before. His rant about the 37 death row commutations is fresh but not exactly unheard of. How many people have said some killer should go to hell? Lots.
And the dergangement article ends with-
The article is click bait.
@Michael Reynolds: Meanwhile, Elon Musk continues to represent pretty much everything MAGA hates. And Ramaswamy is even worse.
I’m not surprised to find that Musk didn’t understand this. He is really naive in some ways. Myopic. I’m a bit more surprised that Ramaswamy doesn’t get it. Or maybe he does, but doesn’t care?
@MarkedMan:
That’s something I’ve noticed. Whatever question you ask, it seems programmed to try to come up with an answer and act like it knows that’s the correct one. It’s very reluctant to say “I don’t know,” much like humans.
Dear wife ends her 31-year work tenure at our church next Wednesday. Would you believe the Pastor still hasn’t interviewed anyone for the job. Fr. Eli must be hoping for a Christmas miracle aka my wife changing her mind.in
On January 31, DW and I will be flying to India. A movie being made from one of my books is being filmed there and we’re going to visit the set. I’m going to have a cameo in it. Supposedly as a priest or minister on board an airplane the main character is traveling on.
The makeup people for the movie better have a truckload of the stuff they use because I make the Frankenstein monster look handsome. Think the guy onthe right in this photo but three times uglier.
While in India, DW and I will also do some sightseeing and two book signings are in the works. India is one of the best markets for my books. We’ll be gone for 18 days
An editor hired to work on my ‘Mishap’ story has given new meaning to FUBAR. His work is just plain beyond ridiculous. I’ve been very occupied with this over the last ten days.
@MarkedMan:
@Kylopod:
Try to get its opinion on something, especially something you’ve come up with. With Copilot, at least, just about everything I say is brilliant, insightful, etc.*
Or try leading questions that may or may not make sense. Again with copilot, I asked something like “does it seem to you that “disteem” seems like the opposite of “esteem”? It agreed enthusiastically. By sound alone, disteem could be the opposite of esteem, if disteem were an actual word. So, not bad.
Then I tried, “does it seem to you that “disteem” seems like the opposite of “doughnut”? and got very enthusiastic agreement and an explanation. Same using completely different words like ketchup, dystopia, and more. Every time agreement and exclamation points and how brilliant I am. It’s almost like what a talking dog would be like. You know, eager to please and always wagging his tail.
*It’s nice the first few times, but then you begin to understand how the criminal who thinks he’s in heaven in the TZ ep felt.
@Jay L Gischer:
Ramaswamy has to make noise to prove he isn’t just Musk’s personal assistant.
Trump has to do the same, for the same reason. And JD Vance as well, since he was shown hovering behind the adults table.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think it was probably inevitable that the MAGAs would start tearing themselves apart, at least partly over the issue of who’s the most MAGA.
@CSK:
When I have enough data and carve out enough time to write it, I’m looking forward to examining why I think Trump’s victory had more to do with this moment (and, honestly, the moment we’ve been in since at least 2020–if not 2015/16) than anything else.
One aspect of that is, to the degree there is a MAGA coalition (versus a collection of voters), it’s an incredibly fragile one and will most likely come apart at the seams as Trump transitions from campaigning to governing.
FWIW, I also think this is one of the issues Biden faced over the last four years.
@Matt Bernius:
Do you think he’ll start governing now? 😉
Seriously, last time he was indulging whims and playing to his base.
@Kathy:
I see the invisible “/s,” and in most countries, that’s also called “governing” (for better or worse) when you are the chief executive or party in power.
@Michael Reynolds:
Have you seen BBC’s “Wolf Hall”? Might be the one of the best series they’ve ever done IMO.
If you’re gonna be a playboy king a cut throat chief of staff is essential to keep the courtiers’ in-fighting in check. Trump doesn’t have one, and anyone who would take that job is a fool.
@Matt Bernius:
I’d love to read that.
I don’t think Biden’s/Dems/Left coalition was fragile so much as it wanted to go farther than Biden was willing/able to go. I suspect that many on the right feel similarly, but are so wrapped up in lies and bullshit that they don’t know what they actually want.
My Father-in-law has gone full stupid and it turns out he watches Fox news (and CBS old people pablum) constantly. He’s so freaked out and stupid that he’s driven his family away. It’s sad.
As for the MAGA nonsense, our Right has been fed a diet of compromise sucks and is the worst thing ever with a side of “cooperation means your getting fucked in the face you queer” for what, 50-60 years now? There’s no way those people can set aside any of their differences to get what they all want. What each one of them wants is superior and if they don’t get 110% of it they are absolute failure and that’s impossible. I don’t see how this doesn’t end with bloodshed.
@Beth:
FWIW, I think you are leaving out the disenchanted Republicans (both Never Trumpers and flipping voters) who voted for Biden in hopes of “stabilization.”
The current tl;dr for the article boils down to following points:
1. These types of post election analysis are often far more focused at advancing people’s personal theories/axes than actually seeking to understand what did and did not happen. This also will apply to my analysis (and I will try to call out where that is potentially happening).
2. Regarding vote shifting at the district level, Trump’s victory is both noteworthy and somewhat overstated (there are a lot of places where he lost historic support that are worth paying attention to).
3. Few analysis that I have seen seriously consider that in the last 3 election presidential cycles we have swapped the party in power (Democrat > Republican > Democrat > Republican). I think that is a mistake.*
4. Rather than focusing on individuals (i.e. Trump or Biden or Harris) I think the party switch is more important for analysis. I’m firmly in the “In retrospect, for a combination of structural and agentive reasons, this was a “winnable” election for the Democrats.” I honestly think the “Republican” component (in our 2 party system) is more important than the “Trump” component.**
There are still a couple data-points I’m waiting for before I feel comfortable fully advancing this theory.
* – BTW, if anyone knows of an analysis that has addressed that flipping, please share! I really want to read them.
** – All that said, I need to give Trump credit for doing the politically unthinkable: (1) not going away after losing re-election and (2) being incredibly effective in eliminating his primary competition (including preventing people from running against him).
@Michael Reynolds:
Racists gotta racist. Smug gotta smug. Rapacious gotta rapacious.
The internal negotiations should be… enlightening.
@Jay L Gischer:
Except the power he brings to power their dark dreams.
@Michael Reynolds:
Finally, something we can all agree on. (I assure you, TechBro assholes also hate themselves — self-loathing hidden behind a thin layer of bravado, thinking they’re doing great and something must be wrong with them if they’re not happy)
We may all have different reasons for hating TechBros, but all roads lead to Rome and what not. Even filthy racist sewage lines.
@Bill Jempty:
Please be the dung beetle story… please be the dung beetle story…
I don’t know why the dung beetle is traveling on an airplane, but I’m here for it.
@Matt Bernius:
It’s like the electorate is grumbling miserably and wants something not on the menu, and just flailing about. Probably not some kind of NoLabels milquetoast moderate pablum, as someone would have delivered that.
I completely disagree with this.
I think Trump is a pretty singular individual in the Republican Party — no one is successfully replicating that. This might just be my inherent optimism talking though.
I also think that the only reason the election was close was because Trump is so repugnant to so many. A boring Republican would have won in a landslide, and people would be talking about a historic realignment, when it was just a really bad set of conditions for Democrats. Biden guided America through a crappy time, doing better than any of our peer nations, but people mostly just remember it being a bad time.
I kind of wonder whether Americans could have understood a campaign based on those accomplishments. “Yep, it really sucked a lot, you’re not wrong. But, with Old Joe’s leadership, we did better than anyone else, and we’re poised to do a lot better.” I suspect not, but with 20/20 hindsight, I wish we tried.
Of course, with 20/20 hindsight, settling the election with a duel might have done better. (Harris owns a gun, I think she would have done better than Trump — and she would have cleaned up in fencing, because Trump doesn’t move very fast… oh, god, Biden and Trump fencing…)
@Rob1:
Which puts them into what is known as a “hostile dependency” with him. Just like how many of them are in a hostile dependency with the Federal government. It is not a good thing for either party.
According to The New Republic today, Steve Bannon really, really hates Elon Musk, accusing him of taking jobs away from Americans and giving them to foreigners.
@Kylopod:
The fundamental problem is that it doesn’t know that it doesn’t know, and there doesn’t seem to be much progress on that piece. What they do now is override it for dangerous territory, which is fine for, say, speculating on the intelligence of ethnic groups and so forth. But no one is ever going to program an override for inadequate reheating of Cornish hens.
@Matt Bernius:
Such style of “governing” is more common among dictators and other undesirables.
The felon doesn’t want to be Adolph. He wants to be his own twisted comic book pro wrestling version of what he thinks Mad Vlad is. That’s why he’s making noise about taking the Panama canal, or Greenland, and “joking” about Canada being a US state.
@Kylopod:
@MarkedMan:
Isaac Asimov, whose font of knowledge was even wider than mine (if you can believe it), and far deeper, once claimed he could absolutely answer any questions, provided “I don’t know” is a valid answer.
@Gustopher:
We can get Samuel Jackson! “There are mother f*cking Dung Beetles on this Plane!!!”
@Gustopher: FWIW, I think that for 70-80% of the voters the election was decided on “Who is the toughest? Who projects confidence? Who has an immediate and certain answer for every question?” And, above all, “Who is the Alpha?”. I think everything else influences a percent or two here or there.
@MarkedMan: Im certain SLJ would manage to ad lib 1, maybe 2, more MF’ings into this line of the script.
@Matt Bernius: The last three elections were each decided by less than 250,ooo votes in key states against over 100,000,000 nationwide. Five out of the six candidates had negative net favorability and all six were in the bottom 10 for 1956 to present. The candidates must have mattered more than the parties.
@dazedandconfused:
Seen it and read the books. Henry at least had enough sense to listen to Cromwell – intermittently. Any time anyone competent gets near Trump, they either get fired or flee. Even Ivanka is keeping her distance. In the Trump WH it’s toadies all the way down.
I mean, we all knew this was coming, but 3 weeks before inauguration?
I’d love to believe that an actual schism is appearing between Musk and the people he is calling the r-word. Honestly, I don’t see it happening. A huge portion of this country needs the Prosperity Gospel. It’s a world of Coaches, Bosses, and Masters calling their inferiors names and their inferiors responding like dogs, because the alternative is to stand up for yourself. That means thinking, solidarity, emotions, even belonging to a union which telling you not to impress your dipshit manager by doing more than you should. There’s a reason why the geniuses who brought us the Biden/Harris campaign are busy pointing fingers at random non-tenure track academics for having brought about the loss. They’re doing the same thing since they supported the Iraq war and got promoted because of their duty.
Very few people standup for themselves in this country, and certainly not the pear-shaped balding litany of pundits who pretend to be sympathetic to working-class concerns regarding trans people but believe exactly what Musk believes which is that their inferiors should hurry up with their orders.
@Gustopher: @Matt Bernius: @ :
After getting caught up on post-election podcasts this holiday break—with all the usual Dem strategic punditry—it’s clear they are still flummoxed by what happened to them. These are people that have no idea how my handyman—who has no access to TV and only a Smartphone—can parrot the same talking points I see on Fox News almost verbatim. They have no idea why my secretary—AN ACTUAL CHILDLESS FRIGGIN CAT LADY—smugly sips her morning coffee in a Trump/Vance mug at work. My handyman was visibly distressed the few weeks before the election—he’s been quite happy-go-lucky since. Why?
When are the Dem Strategists and Politicians going to figure out that the story about how the Democratic Party and the Federal Gov’t are going to make citizens’ lives better—is a story the average voter DOES NOT WANT?!
Hey Mr Reynolds and Mr Jempty—tell us all about the time you wrote a story that didn’t sell—and you kept writing different versions of it because, by golly, its a damn good story and you just didn’t use the right words to connect with readers the last time.
If the average voter wanted a story about the Dems and the Fed Gov’t making their lives better, did not Joe Biden give them that story? My God, Build Back Better and Bidenomics was an EPIC novella if that was story the voters wanted. It wasn’t the messaging—it was a WEAK STORY.
Average Voters throughout American History want the story about how their lives could be better if “X” wasn’t preventing it. The art to this—is picking the “X” that resonates. This is where the Frank Lunz’s and now Social Media scraping come in to provide a prodigious supply of “Xs” for the Right Wing story machine. Trump’s rallies provided him a real time focus group to find the right X to put weave into his Story. We laughed at his Campaign—but he laughed at us.
I’m afraid the legacy Dem “Xs” of Corporations and Republicans have lost much of their force—so those are off the table—(CEOs could be a good one based on the reaction to the recent assassination). Trump runs against RINOs more than Democrats—because Republicans and MAGA still like the Story of how RINOs are denying their dreams—even better than the story about how Democrats are destroying America.
Who will be the Democrats “X” that resonates? If you inventory their current “Xs” you’ll find they are either old or don’t fit. Their X’s are fill-ins for the story of the Federal Gov’t and Democrats making their lives better: X=Abortion rights; X= Voter rights; X = Trans rights; X= Democracy. That story is in the nickel bin at the thrift store.
If you tell the type story the people want—your coalition appears. But you can’t produce a musical Western and wonder why it only attracts a niche audience. You want to talk demographic shift? How about the one where the population of non-college educated people grows? Guess who’s best equipped to talk to those people?
@Michael Reynolds:
I think of them as “dupelorables.”
@Jim Brown:
Never happened. I’ve never failed to sell a book. Also never failed to get net positive reviews. Because I know the market, then I shoot right over the heads of the market because kids at least, want to have to reach a little.
I agree, the market in this case doesn’t want a fairy tale in which Magic Mommy makes everything all right. They’d like us, A) To stop talking down to them no matter how clueless they actually are, 2) Tell them the truth. By that I mean, our market. There’s obviously a big market for lies, but the people either with us, or who could be with us, want to reach a little.
My first rule in kidlit is never, ever talk down. Those 12-14 year-olds are my employers, I’m their dancing monkey, not the other way around. Don’t talk down and do make them reach. I’ve ‘discussed’ a lot of serious issues in a lot of books for 1o and 12 and 14 year-olds, and I never told them what to conclude from the presentation of issues. You will have noticed that I am not a naturally patient or humble man, so if I can communicate with teenagers, Democrats can communicate with working people.
@Fortune:
Probably with waiting until the final post, but what leads you to think this?
If anything this points to structural aspects of our political system, but what leads you to think this is proof that candidates are more important than parties within our particular political system?
Especially if we can’t track (for good reasons) who those 250,000 people voted for (or of they even voted) in previous elections. That’s before we get to the fact that “Not X” (which includes not the Democrat/Republican) is a viable voting rational.
@Fortune:
Probably with waiting until the final post, but what leads you to think this?
If anything this points to structural aspects of our political system, but what leads you to think this is proof that candidates are more important than parties within our particular political system?
Especially if we can’t track (for good reasons) who those 250,000 people voted for (or of they even voted) in previous elections. That’s before we get to the fact that “Not X” (which includes not the Democrat/Republican) is a viable voting rational.
Put a different way, why is the premise that most of us ultimately are partisans (because our electrical system conditions that) and some people will regularly switch their votes for reasons that have little to do with being “informed” voters, whatever that means.
@Michael Reynolds:
A bit in this piece at The Guardian made me laugh out loud. The speaker is Laura Loomer: “The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy ….”
I wonder, what country has she been living in for the past few decades. And do they have unicorns there.
I was reminded of a scene in Aladdin where Jaffar, in disguise, explains the golden rule: Who has the gold makes the rules.
Hm. Another stowaway at Delta. This time they were detained before the plane took off. See, they’re getting better at it.
@Matt Bernius: Three basketball games, decided by 1-2 points with 40% shooting. You wouldn’t talk about how Team A’s coaching was better in game 1 and 3, you’d say one team or the other got lucky.
Somehow we ended up with lovely, sweet, kind children. Sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree.
Greg Gumbel 78
RIP
The NPR Obituary states:
Took 80 years for a black man to get a job that white men had been doing since 1921.*
I really should not be surprised.
*Source
Now that Musk is finally taking the mask off, this post bears reading if you haven’t seen it before.
As with most conservative leaders, the actual beliefs seem too crazy to be real.
@Michael Reynolds: Or maybe the other tree isn’t a horse’s bazzoo.