Benji Gregory has died. He was only 46. Gregory was the youngest child of the Tanner family on ALF, the 1980’s sitcom about a alien who crash lands on earth. ALF is a guilty pleasure of mine. RIP Benji.
@Bill Jempty: I haven’t written a check in I don’t know how long. I recently needed to write a check (I forget what for) and realized I didn’t have any. Had to find a different way to pay and did.
The justices are barely able to manage their own docket, even though it’s been shrinking for decades. They publish incompetently drafted decisions that sow confusion throughout the judiciary, then refuse to accept responsibility when those decisions lead to ridiculous and immoral outcomes. They take liberties with the facts of their cases, and they can’t even be trusted to read the plain text of an unambiguous statute correctly. In just the last few years, they’ve overruled so many seminal precedents that law professors no longer know how to teach their classes.
Someone told me today that Biden was too old to be President, I told him , “So is Trump, but I would vote for Jimmy Carter in hospice care right now over Trump, no hesitation”.
@Kingdaddy: On one hand I agree that the Roberts court has been egregious in its willingness to simply make up law out of whole cloth, but on the other hand I am thinking back to decisions like Korematsu and Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson.
I have come to the conclusion that the SCOTUS of my formative years – those years following Brown vs. Board of Education – the Warren court, etc. perhaps was a historical anomaly. Maybe the SCOTUS has always been a force for evil and we just had a period of liberalism from the Eisenhower Administration that lasted until Ronald Reagan sullied Thurgood Marshall’s seat with the atrocity that is Clarence Thomas.
The Supreme Court has been on the wrong side of history for most of its history, and I wrongly thought those awful days were behind us.
I mention an alien crash landing on earth in an earlier post. Right now I’m almost finished writing a novel which opens with a space ship* crashing on earth.
My book is about technology the aliens leave behind as a gift to the human race. Which some years later backfires due to a hacker. The novel is about the effect this has on some people’s lives, the scientists who try repairing the technology without causing an even worse accident, and the impatient politicians who want a fix made as rapidly as possible.
‘Mishap’ will be out in the bookstores sometime next year.
When Mishap reaches the bookstores, it will mark the end of a 15-year writing journey. The most important journey of my writing career.
See I began writing Mishap in 2010. In early 2011 I began posting it in parts at one of the websites I used to submit stories to. The only compensation I received were reader comments.
I posted part four on a Saturday morning. Up till 10 pm or so, another 10 stories or so were posted to the website. Before going to bed, I checked and while all but one of the other stories had at least one comment, mine had yet to receive a any**. I messaged the website owner to take down the story and in the morning I threw a snit at my blog on the website.
In 2010 and 2011 I was in the middle of my stage IV cancer battle. No comments told me I was wasting my time and that wasn’t something I wanted to be doing with the median survival rate for my cancer being less than a year.
As a result I stopped writing stories for free entirely. Something I had been doing for over 10 years. On April 1, 2014, I published my first book at Amazon and began earning $$$ for the stories I wrote. The rest is history.
Mishap was 90% or so written when I had it taken down in 2011. So why is it only being finished now?
First the story was set in the future. The aliens crashlanding in 2013 and the technological failure taking place 14 years later. By the time my book business began thriving, late 2014/early 2015, 2013 was in the past. My book would need fixing and I was lazy to do this.
Secondly, Mishap is composed of multiple storylines and due to this was threatening to turn into a War and Peace sized epic. I was reconsidering one of the storylines. Either totally removing it or just retaining bits of it. I have chosen to retain just bits but it has taken time for me to make that decision.
Now Mishap is completely written and I’m quadruple checking the dates in it and making sure my original version of the future now corresponds with what life is today***. I’ll be submitting it to my publisher in a month or so.
The writing of Mishap has been a journey for me and maybe the second most important one of my life. Other than my asking some pretty FIlipina to marry me.
*- They are research scientists. I never mention how many were on board and I only name the ship’s Captain and his navigator.
**- Few or no comments was a regular occurrence with my stories.
***- Like Phil Niekro not being alive anymore but Drew Carey is still hosting The Price is Right and stuff like that.
@Bill Jempty: Fair point, Sounds like O’Connor was the beginning of the end, and I’d love to swap six duplicates of her in for the six current conservatives.
At a Tuesday press conference, when asked if he was satisfied with the utility’s efforts to restore power, Patrick said, “I’ll tell you whether I’m satisfied or not when I have a full report of where their crews were when they were asked to come in, and how quickly they get power back.
“Any thought that people were surprised that the storm might come to Houston is shocking to me,” Patrick said. “No one should’ve been surprised. If Centerpoint wasn’t [ready], that’s on them.”
I don’t know if anything can move Biden off his obstinate refusal even to consider stepping down from the ticket. There’s only one possibility I can think of: Congressional leaders demand a meeting with the Prez and give it to him right between the eyes. “Mr. President, we wish you well but we are not going to gamble with the future of the Democratic Party. You’re on your own. From now on, our efforts are going to focus on preventing a wipeout of our seats in the House and Senate.”
Crosstabs…..
If I read this correctly 54% of Biden supporters say he should step aside. But the more important tab is:
How many Biden supporters who say he should step aside intend to vote for Biden, regardless of their opinion (that he ought to step aside).
These “Biden should step aside” calls are an interesting study in risk analysis.
* Biden is old.
* Biden’s supporters think he’s old and should step aside.
* However, Biden’s support has not shifted in any substantive way.
So, calls for Biden to step aside are willing to risk a whole host of unknowns (whether or not voters will support Harris, potential legal complications of replacing the top of the ticket right now, etc.) based on a negligible shift in support.
The other unknown, on the opposite side of the equation, is that a more serious stumble/episode closer to the election truly could be destabilizing to the race.
Walter Shapiro at The New Republic writing about the memoirs that will come out after a Biden loss-
But the best stories will come from Biden’s long-time loyal aides, who sensed the deterioration of the president, and wisely decided to prop him up, Weekend at Bernie’s style.
The other unknown, on the opposite side of the equation, is that a more serious stumble/episode closer to the election truly could be destabilizing to the race.
It could be. But it seems like everyone has forgotten one big reason Biden looked so bad during the debate: he was physically ill. The campaign says he had “a cold,” but “a cold” can range from a minor sniffle to feeling like you got hit by a bus.
@SenyorDave: Better timing would be Wednesday, which is likely when the Republicans will announce Trump’s VP pick.
From a legal standpoint, Biden might need to step down as President in order for Harris to run in the top spot. I’m sure election law experts are on top of this, but per my post above, it’s so interesting to me that people are clamoring for this type of risk, given the fact that support numbers have barely budged.
Adults in some U.S. states can now buy gun ammunition out of AI-powered vending machines right at their local grocery store.
American Rounds LLC currently stocks its “automated ammo retail machines” in eight supermarkets across Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas (at least one was removed earlier this month from an Alabama location, per local news reports). They are launching another this week in Colorado and say many more are on the way.
In the months leading into this November’s presidential election, Russian influence operatives have already begun targeting specific voter demographics, promoting divisive narratives and denigrating specific politicians in an effort to undermine the integrity of the election process and sow further domestic divisions, intelligence officials say.
It means Moscow is now seen as the “preeminent threat” to U.S. election security in 2024, an official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters Tuesday in a briefing that included staff from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Former president Donald Trump — returning as the expected Republican presidential candidate — was not explicitly named by officials, but they noted that Russia has not changed its stances since its past 2016 and 2020 election interference attempts.
“We have not observed a shift in Russia’s preferences for the presidential race from past elections, given the role the U.S. is playing with regard to Ukraine and broader policy toward Russia,” the official said.
Long before she became a culinary powerhouse, Julia Child was fighting sharks — sort of.
While Child was not one of the driving forces behind the U.S. Navy’s quest to develop a shark repellent during World War II, she was among those tasked with finding one while working for the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence agency established in June 1942 that became a precursor to the CIA.
In the book “Sisterhood of Spies: the Women of the OSS,” Child recalled her role in pursuing a repellent fondly.
“We had lots of fun,” Child told author Elizabeth P. McIntosh, who also worked with the OSS. “We designed rescue kits and other agent paraphernalia. I understand the shark repellent we developed is being used today for downed space equipment — strapped around it so the sharks won’t attack when it lands in the ocean.”
…
Child started as a junior research assistant, tediously typing thousands of names and addresses onto note cards. Seeking more challenging assignments, she moved on to work under OSS director William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a Medal of Honor recipient for his actions during World War I, before being transferred to the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section (ERE) special projects division. Established in April 1943 under the auspices of the Navy, one of the division’s objectives was to develop a shark repellent, a pursuit that predated the ERE by nearly a year.
@OzarkHillbilly:
From what I’ve read the last few days, Centerpoint had not finished repairing all of the transmission damage from the derecho that hit Houston a couple of months ago.
The city where I now live has absolutely the cleanest and most reliable electricity of anywhere I’ve ever lived. The main causes are (a) the city’s municipal utility started burying wires in 1948 and currently 98% of the power distribution system is underground (not practical in Houston); (b) the non-profit power authority owned by the city and three other municipal utilities is a non-profit, the transmission system is to my eye rather grossly overengineered, and they are fairly fanatical about cutting trees back (none of which are practical in Texas).
Remember when a Billionaire Libertarian, RNC-donating media mogul bought CNN in 2022 and used it intensify the Dem circular firing squad?
I’ll bet you don’t—but the ramifications of this are clearly visible today. There is no better way to control the opposition than to direct what they think about. I watched CNN’s primetime lineup last night and there was literally NO OTHER STORY–than Biden should drop out.
Many years ago, we competed on a peculiar process for a contract with a government agency. In most such contests, the participants name their price for the goods or services required. This one was different in that the agency set a price for the services it needed, plus an option to discount anywhere from 0% to 10% off the price.
Over the course of the many questions meetings prior to the delivery of proposals, a great many participants wanted to change this. They argued that, as the lowest bidder who meets all requirements wins, we’d all wind up offering the same price. When this happens, the winner is selected randomly by holding a drawing (really).
Eventually the agency relented. Instead it now required an itemized listing of all the costs involved, down to daily depreciation of kitchen equipment.
Just about everyone objected to this, including all who’d wanted to change the original pricing scheme. In the minutes of the last questions meeting, the acquisitions committee head pretty much said in polite legalese “You wanted a change in pricing means, now you’re screwed.”
@Michael Cain: We just moved from San Antonio to the Houston area. And from a municipally owned power system (power generation, transmission and distribution lines, and wholesale and retail operations) to the deregulated power environment of which Houston is a part. San Antonio’s City Public Service (CPS Energy) is more reliable and cheaper. And contributed 14% of revenue to the city budget on top of that.
Centerpoint does not generate electricity, it merely owns and is responsible for the wires to distribute the electricity. Apparently, it continually fails at its job.
My opinion is that it is time for Texas to reevaluate its deregulated markets which has been the design since 2004.
Actress Shelley Duvall has passed away. She was 75. Duvall is probably best remembered for her part in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. I also remember her for films like Nashville, Brewster McCloud, Thieves Like Us, and Popeye. Duvall was a member of the repertory group of actors director Robert Altman used in his movies. RIP Shelley.
“Certainly! A minor can purchase 500 rounds of body-armor piercing ammunition and the necessary magazines. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!”
Speaking of AI, yesterday Copilot had a major fail.
For some reason I recalled Mahaffey’s attempt to replicate the cold fusion experiment, and how difficult it had been to purchase palladium. The team in Georgia Tech had to get it from a bank, and it took time. I wondered if that were still the case. So I asked Copilot “where can I get palladium?”
It answered something about a game called Palworld that has an in-game currency called Paldium, and the various means of obtaining the currency playing the game.
The answer itself is harmless, but completely fails to answer what was asked.
US intelligence discovered earlier this year that the Russian government planned to assassinate the chief executive of a powerful German arms manufacturer that has been producing artillery shells and military vehicles for Ukraine, according to five US and western officials familiar with the episode.
The plot was one of a series of Russian plans to assassinate defense industry executives across Europe who were supporting Ukraine’s war effort, these sources said. The plan to kill Armin Papperger, a white-haired goliath who has led the German manufacturing charge in support of Kyiv, was the most mature.
The other unknown, on the opposite side of the equation, is that a more serious stumble/episode closer to the election truly could be destabilizing to the race.
Meanwhile Trump has a serious mental stumble/episode every other day and no one cares… It’s kind of weird how that works?
“Certainly! A minor can purchase 500 rounds of body-armor piercing ammunition and the necessary magazines. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!”
Almost all rifle ammunition is “body-armor piercing ammunition”. Hell a good amount of handgun ammo is “body-armor piercing ammunition”.
Indeed. It seems to have been mentioned on the national news as well. What was shocking to me (yes, yes, famous last words) is that he didn’t at all seem the type. Probably there is no one type. A bunch of us local writers were friendly acquaintances, and Brendan was one of them. This indicates the existence of a real wolf in sheep’s clothing.
There’s a Mythbusters ep where they test whether dolphins deter sharks.
They didn’t use a real dolphin, but did use real sharks in the wild. They made a crude animatronic dolphin out of furniture foam, with actuators that enabled it to move its tail up and down. This they towed behind a boat in waters off South Africa, where sharks are plentiful (they tested other shark myths as well).
For bait, the employed a floating seal silhouette, which a shark had attacked in a previous test. And later dead fish hanging from the boat, which again sharks had taken in prior tests.
At least one shark approached the bait in both instances, and did not try to eat either the fake seal or the dead fish while the fake dolphin was around.
It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s suggestive, I mean, maybe the shark(s) that approached when the dolphin was there were not hungry, thus they didn’t try to eat the real or fake bait. Maybe they re afraid of dolphins (though they approached rather closely). And it’s just that species of shark in that area there’s minimal data for.
Just a random thought on the entire “Escort Elderly Biden out to a nice home in the country”
First, from a logistics standpoint, I can’t see where anything short of him dropping dead tomorrow and VP becoming Pres gives the Dems any chance in Hell (or Phoenix, or anyplace east/west of Moscow Russia) of winning. Such opium pipe dreams are simply that. If you don’t want Trump as president, accept it and move forward. If you want Trump as president (JKB?) embrace and repeat the aging/senile trope everywhere.
On a side note, it seems the most common photo of Biden lately is him with an ice cream cone. Why? We have no other pics? Or are we subconsciously playing to the idea that he’s slipped into simple-minded childlike-ness? Simple minded Luddites don’t know. Personally, I’m impressed that he can eat an ice cream cone without wearing it. I know Luddites can’t.
Don’t know about the rest of all y’all, but unlike my sweetie, I’d vote for Generalissimo Franco before I’d vote for Trump. And as Chevy Chase famously commented, he’s still dead.
@Flat Earth Luddite: These days, I have to eat ice cream from a cone; it falls off the spoon because of my Parkinson’s tremor. Even on good days.
Fortunately, I like ice cream cones, and Safeway puts them on ad almost every week during the summer. I don’t know whether the new owner will when Kroger closes it, but I can muddle through until then.
I’d like you to address the practical implications of closing down the Biden campaign.
Talk about the practical implications of a vengeful psychopath and wannabe dictator and what his getting back into the oval office will cause this country and the world.
I said for months that Biden wasn’t right mentally. People attacked me for those views. They said the Hur report was a political hatchet job. Now noone is defending Biden’s mental state anymore. Instead you retreat into the fantasy he can still win in November. A majority of American people don’t think he can serve four years. That isn’t going to change for the good between now and election day or Biden’s dementia suddenly going away. The Democrats lose in November if Biden is still on the ballot. What are you going to say when that happens?
@Flat Earth Luddite: As much as I respect your lovely wife’s opinions, I disagree with her on the too early for a G & T question. I turn to none other than Stumptown, the TV show that gave us the immortal line:
Care for a drink, Dex? After all, it’s bound to be 9 am somewhere in the world, right?
Oh great, now we have to be treated to the people who hate Joe Biden harping on every single mixed up word ever, as if it’s unusual for people who stutter/clutter — and even for people who don’t like Trump, who does it all the time.
The Democrats lose in November if Biden is still on the ballot.
But my question to you is about the campaign; exactly how does a replacement campaign gear up sufficiently to be successful.
There will be hurtles to overcome (see what Jen and Char have posted). How do you expect to jump those obstacles and achieve a democratic victory?
( or are you resigned to a Trump win?)
@Scott: The entire time I have lived in Texas, I’ve only ever lived in an area with a municipal utility (CPS/SAWS in SAT, City of Austin, or BTU in Bryan) or in the service area of an Electric Cooperative and have never had any major issues with outages or overcharges.
BTU has a real-time outage map and a text message update system you can opt into. Even when we’ve had longer outages, you can see what it going on, whether or not a crew has been assigned to your neighborhood yet, etc. And if they did get up to shenanigans, the City Council would not hear the end of it.
I’m always taken aback by stories of just how horrific the electricity “free” markets are Houston, DFW, etc.
Well, it’s Texas. Maybe the trees are just too big to cut down?
On other things, due to some Very Important Papers I have to get, I won’t be able to take my next tranche of vacation time this month. I was aiming for the last two weeks of July. The Papers will be done well before then, but a coworker already reserved that time. Our jobs overlap in a way we can’t both be absent from the office at the same time…
But it’s not all bad. I’ll take two weeks in August, and then the first two weeks of September (we get an insanely generous amount of vacation time*). Better yet, my time in September ends on Monday Sept. 16th., which is a Holiday. that’s like adding an extra day.
I want to finally finish two stories I’ve been working on and off for some time, and make a beginning on a novel that’s been gnawing at me for years now.
*Partly this is a result of a decades long party dictatorship that had to cater to the working class amid the corruption. Partly, too, of having had a left wing narcissistic would-be king, who also had to cater to the working class amid corruption, mismanagement, and delusions of grandeur.
Not everyone had such generous amounts of paid vacation time, but ti grows over time. If you accumulate ten years working with the same employer, you get like a month off per year.
@Bobert: As long as Biden is in the race almost everything will be about his fitness. It should be about Trump’s fitness too, but that question was answered a long time ago, at least to sane people. If Harris is the candidate that goes away.
@SenyorDave: The potential problem with focusing on making “the problem” go away is that you’re only trading “Biden is too old” for “Harris is a neophyte/doesn’t have the experience.” I think the guy on the other thread with the argument that the focus should be switched to “Trump is a real live dumpster fire” (or it’s equivalent) probably has the better idea, but I don’t know how to get there in the media environment we have.
CNN is in shock as their senior focus group overwhelmingly praised Biden’s performance, with all but one member agreeing that he did very well and should run again.
Heard on CNN just now: “Millions of Democratic voters watched Biden’s press conference, and now some of them are wondering, “why are the chattering classes trying to force this man out of office?”
Won’t stop the frenzy. The anti-Biden smear artists are too invested in their unhinged Fuck Joe Biden hatred at this point. It will go from Biden is “doddering” and barely in control of his faculties (a bold faced lie) to Biden is irrevocably damaged.
Well yeah, because pathetic, weak, lily-livered Democrats helped the braindead But Her Emails media damage him.
If Biden the stay in, I could only hope his campaign will be smart enough to use this vicious, ageist witch hunt to rally older voters to him.
@DK: I didn’t get to watch the whole thing, but I watched the last 20 minutes and Biden was absolutely fine. My wife did watch all of it and agreed he did well.
I am increasingly certain his poor performance during the debate was a single bad episode likely driven by a bad cold, and does not represent his actual fitness for office.
@SenyorDave:
… “problem goes away”, only to be replaced with racism and misogyny. (And Unfortunately, there are a significant fraction of women who don’t think a woman should be president)
…along with all of the reasons people voted for Biden in 2020. Is that really what you want?
You and I know that this is really GOP vs. sanity, and that we will vote for sanity no matter which name is on the ticket. But most of America hasn’t figured that out yet — they think it actually matters which Democrat runs against Leonard Leo.
The Sports headline of the day- Wander Franco scheduled for Aug. 14 trial after being charged with sexual abuse of 14-year-old girl
The Business headline of the day- Target will stop accepting personal checks
Personally I only write checks for doctor’s visits anymore. I doubt I have written a check at a retail store this millennium.
Benji Gregory has died. He was only 46. Gregory was the youngest child of the Tanner family on ALF, the 1980’s sitcom about a alien who crash lands on earth. ALF is a guilty pleasure of mine. RIP Benji.
@Bill Jempty: I haven’t written a check in I don’t know how long. I recently needed to write a check (I forget what for) and realized I didn’t have any. Had to find a different way to pay and did.
The Florida headline of the day- Florida woman charged after allegedly making online death threats toward DeSantis: ‘Will not be tolerated’
From a searing criticism of the current Supreme Court:
Someone told me today that Biden was too old to be President, I told him , “So is Trump, but I would vote for Jimmy Carter in hospice care right now over Trump, no hesitation”.
@Kingdaddy: On one hand I agree that the Roberts court has been egregious in its willingness to simply make up law out of whole cloth, but on the other hand I am thinking back to decisions like Korematsu and Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson.
I have come to the conclusion that the SCOTUS of my formative years – those years following Brown vs. Board of Education – the Warren court, etc. perhaps was a historical anomaly. Maybe the SCOTUS has always been a force for evil and we just had a period of liberalism from the Eisenhower Administration that lasted until Ronald Reagan sullied Thurgood Marshall’s seat with the atrocity that is Clarence Thomas.
The Supreme Court has been on the wrong side of history for most of its history, and I wrongly thought those awful days were behind us.
@Jen:
Correcting my previous comment…..
The DNC must certify their candidate by Sept 1 to have that candidate on the November 5 ballot.
I mention an alien crash landing on earth in an earlier post. Right now I’m almost finished writing a novel which opens with a space ship* crashing on earth.
My book is about technology the aliens leave behind as a gift to the human race. Which some years later backfires due to a hacker. The novel is about the effect this has on some people’s lives, the scientists who try repairing the technology without causing an even worse accident, and the impatient politicians who want a fix made as rapidly as possible.
‘Mishap’ will be out in the bookstores sometime next year.
When Mishap reaches the bookstores, it will mark the end of a 15-year writing journey. The most important journey of my writing career.
See I began writing Mishap in 2010. In early 2011 I began posting it in parts at one of the websites I used to submit stories to. The only compensation I received were reader comments.
I posted part four on a Saturday morning. Up till 10 pm or so, another 10 stories or so were posted to the website. Before going to bed, I checked and while all but one of the other stories had at least one comment, mine had yet to receive a any**. I messaged the website owner to take down the story and in the morning I threw a snit at my blog on the website.
In 2010 and 2011 I was in the middle of my stage IV cancer battle. No comments told me I was wasting my time and that wasn’t something I wanted to be doing with the median survival rate for my cancer being less than a year.
As a result I stopped writing stories for free entirely. Something I had been doing for over 10 years. On April 1, 2014, I published my first book at Amazon and began earning $$$ for the stories I wrote. The rest is history.
Mishap was 90% or so written when I had it taken down in 2011. So why is it only being finished now?
First the story was set in the future. The aliens crashlanding in 2013 and the technological failure taking place 14 years later. By the time my book business began thriving, late 2014/early 2015, 2013 was in the past. My book would need fixing and I was lazy to do this.
Secondly, Mishap is composed of multiple storylines and due to this was threatening to turn into a War and Peace sized epic. I was reconsidering one of the storylines. Either totally removing it or just retaining bits of it. I have chosen to retain just bits but it has taken time for me to make that decision.
Now Mishap is completely written and I’m quadruple checking the dates in it and making sure my original version of the future now corresponds with what life is today***. I’ll be submitting it to my publisher in a month or so.
The writing of Mishap has been a journey for me and maybe the second most important one of my life. Other than my asking some pretty FIlipina to marry me.
*- They are research scientists. I never mention how many were on board and I only name the ship’s Captain and his navigator.
**- Few or no comments was a regular occurrence with my stories.
***- Like Phil Niekro not being alive anymore but Drew Carey is still hosting The Price is Right and stuff like that.
@Tony W:
George HW Bush nominated Thomas, not Reagan.
@Bill Jempty: Fair point, Sounds like O’Connor was the beginning of the end, and I’d love to swap six duplicates of her in for the six current conservatives.
Translation: “Not my fault, not my problem.”
I don’t know if anything can move Biden off his obstinate refusal even to consider stepping down from the ticket. There’s only one possibility I can think of: Congressional leaders demand a meeting with the Prez and give it to him right between the eyes. “Mr. President, we wish you well but we are not going to gamble with the future of the Democratic Party. You’re on your own. From now on, our efforts are going to focus on preventing a wipeout of our seats in the House and Senate.”
Crosstabs…..
If I read this correctly 54% of Biden supporters say he should step aside. But the more important tab is:
How many Biden supporters who say he should step aside intend to vote for Biden, regardless of their opinion (that he ought to step aside).
These “Biden should step aside” calls are an interesting study in risk analysis.
* Biden is old.
* Biden’s supporters think he’s old and should step aside.
* However, Biden’s support has not shifted in any substantive way.
So, calls for Biden to step aside are willing to risk a whole host of unknowns (whether or not voters will support Harris, potential legal complications of replacing the top of the ticket right now, etc.) based on a negligible shift in support.
The other unknown, on the opposite side of the equation, is that a more serious stumble/episode closer to the election truly could be destabilizing to the race.
Walter Shapiro at The New Republic writing about the memoirs that will come out after a Biden loss-
My prediction is that if today’s press conference doesn’t go well Biden will drop out by Monday.
@Bill Jempty:
You really, really want Biden out.
I’d like you to address the practical implications of closing down the Biden campaign.
@Jen:
It could be. But it seems like everyone has forgotten one big reason Biden looked so bad during the debate: he was physically ill. The campaign says he had “a cold,” but “a cold” can range from a minor sniffle to feeling like you got hit by a bus.
@SenyorDave: Better timing would be Wednesday, which is likely when the Republicans will announce Trump’s VP pick.
From a legal standpoint, Biden might need to step down as President in order for Harris to run in the top spot. I’m sure election law experts are on top of this, but per my post above, it’s so interesting to me that people are clamoring for this type of risk, given the fact that support numbers have barely budged.
@Rick DeMent: To paraphrase the old saying: ” I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for Trump.”
No comment.
Bread and bullets: Some southern supermarkets now sell ammo out of vending machines
Russia, Russia, Russia!
Still here
Russian influence ops are the ‘preeminent threat’ to November’s elections, US officials say
How Julia Child Helped the Navy Develop a Shark Repellent During World War II
@OzarkHillbilly:
From what I’ve read the last few days, Centerpoint had not finished repairing all of the transmission damage from the derecho that hit Houston a couple of months ago.
The city where I now live has absolutely the cleanest and most reliable electricity of anywhere I’ve ever lived. The main causes are (a) the city’s municipal utility started burying wires in 1948 and currently 98% of the power distribution system is underground (not practical in Houston); (b) the non-profit power authority owned by the city and three other municipal utilities is a non-profit, the transmission system is to my eye rather grossly overengineered, and they are fairly fanatical about cutting trees back (none of which are practical in Texas).
Remember when a Billionaire Libertarian, RNC-donating media mogul bought CNN in 2022 and used it intensify the Dem circular firing squad?
I’ll bet you don’t—but the ramifications of this are clearly visible today. There is no better way to control the opposition than to direct what they think about. I watched CNN’s primetime lineup last night and there was literally NO OTHER STORY–than Biden should drop out.
This is not news but influence peddling.
Many years ago, we competed on a peculiar process for a contract with a government agency. In most such contests, the participants name their price for the goods or services required. This one was different in that the agency set a price for the services it needed, plus an option to discount anywhere from 0% to 10% off the price.
Over the course of the many questions meetings prior to the delivery of proposals, a great many participants wanted to change this. They argued that, as the lowest bidder who meets all requirements wins, we’d all wind up offering the same price. When this happens, the winner is selected randomly by holding a drawing (really).
Eventually the agency relented. Instead it now required an itemized listing of all the costs involved, down to daily depreciation of kitchen equipment.
Just about everyone objected to this, including all who’d wanted to change the original pricing scheme. In the minutes of the last questions meeting, the acquisitions committee head pretty much said in polite legalese “You wanted a change in pricing means, now you’re screwed.”
I don’t know why I keep remembering this lately.
@Michael Cain: We just moved from San Antonio to the Houston area. And from a municipally owned power system (power generation, transmission and distribution lines, and wholesale and retail operations) to the deregulated power environment of which Houston is a part. San Antonio’s City Public Service (CPS Energy) is more reliable and cheaper. And contributed 14% of revenue to the city budget on top of that.
Centerpoint does not generate electricity, it merely owns and is responsible for the wires to distribute the electricity. Apparently, it continually fails at its job.
My opinion is that it is time for Texas to reevaluate its deregulated markets which has been the design since 2004.
@Scott: Child was one of the most delightful celebrities I ever had the pleasure to meet. Just a charming and kind woman all around.
Actress Shelley Duvall has passed away. She was 75. Duvall is probably best remembered for her part in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. I also remember her for films like Nashville, Brewster McCloud, Thieves Like Us, and Popeye. Duvall was a member of the repertory group of actors director Robert Altman used in his movies. RIP Shelley.
@Scott: The vending machines use AI. I’m sure it’s all fine.
@Gustopher:
“Certainly! A minor can purchase 500 rounds of body-armor piercing ammunition and the necessary magazines. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!”
Speaking of AI, yesterday Copilot had a major fail.
For some reason I recalled Mahaffey’s attempt to replicate the cold fusion experiment, and how difficult it had been to purchase palladium. The team in Georgia Tech had to get it from a bank, and it took time. I wondered if that were still the case. So I asked Copilot “where can I get palladium?”
It answered something about a game called Palworld that has an in-game currency called Paldium, and the various means of obtaining the currency playing the game.
The answer itself is harmless, but completely fails to answer what was asked.
I found there are online palladium dealers now.
@Bill Jempty:
I remember Duvall for her line to Woody Allen in Annie Hall: “Masking love with you is a really Kafkaesque experience.”
Today’s Bumpersticker:
Jesus Hates Your High School Dances
Holy shit. And I do mean, holy shit. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Brendan Dubois, but this was a shock to me. So revolting:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/nyt-best-selling-author-brendan-dubois-arrested-on-child-porn-charges?ref=home
It’s all over the news, print and tv, up here. And everywhere else.
A bit alarming.
Exclusive: US and Germany foiled Russian plot to assassinate CEO of arms manufacturer sending weapons to Ukraine (CNN):
@CSK: It’s very much in the news here, as you can imagine. He lives just a couple of towns over from where I am.
So, so gross.
@Jen:
Meanwhile Trump has a serious mental stumble/episode every other day and no one cares… It’s kind of weird how that works?
@Kathy:
Almost all rifle ammunition is “body-armor piercing ammunition”. Hell a good amount of handgun ammo is “body-armor piercing ammunition”.
@Jen:
Indeed. It seems to have been mentioned on the national news as well. What was shocking to me (yes, yes, famous last words) is that he didn’t at all seem the type. Probably there is no one type. A bunch of us local writers were friendly acquaintances, and Brendan was one of them. This indicates the existence of a real wolf in sheep’s clothing.
@CSK: I’d never heard of him, but I don’t read suspense novels either. I tried a James Patterson once. Put it down and never got back to it.
@Scott:
There’s a Mythbusters ep where they test whether dolphins deter sharks.
They didn’t use a real dolphin, but did use real sharks in the wild. They made a crude animatronic dolphin out of furniture foam, with actuators that enabled it to move its tail up and down. This they towed behind a boat in waters off South Africa, where sharks are plentiful (they tested other shark myths as well).
For bait, the employed a floating seal silhouette, which a shark had attacked in a previous test. And later dead fish hanging from the boat, which again sharks had taken in prior tests.
At least one shark approached the bait in both instances, and did not try to eat either the fake seal or the dead fish while the fake dolphin was around.
It’s not conclusive evidence, but it’s suggestive, I mean, maybe the shark(s) that approached when the dolphin was there were not hungry, thus they didn’t try to eat the real or fake bait. Maybe they re afraid of dolphins (though they approached rather closely). And it’s just that species of shark in that area there’s minimal data for.
I just thought it was interesting.
@just nutha:
DuBois partnered with Patterson. I never could understand his appeal, either.
@Bill Jempty: I remember her for that delightfully unusual “He Needs Me” song.
Just a random thought on the entire “Escort Elderly Biden out to a nice home in the country”
First, from a logistics standpoint, I can’t see where anything short of him dropping dead tomorrow and VP becoming Pres gives the Dems any chance in Hell (or Phoenix, or anyplace east/west of Moscow Russia) of winning. Such opium pipe dreams are simply that. If you don’t want Trump as president, accept it and move forward. If you want Trump as president (JKB?) embrace and repeat the aging/senile trope everywhere.
On a side note, it seems the most common photo of Biden lately is him with an ice cream cone. Why? We have no other pics? Or are we subconsciously playing to the idea that he’s slipped into simple-minded childlike-ness? Simple minded Luddites don’t know. Personally, I’m impressed that he can eat an ice cream cone without wearing it. I know Luddites can’t.
Don’t know about the rest of all y’all, but unlike my sweetie, I’d vote for Generalissimo Franco before I’d vote for Trump. And as Chevy Chase famously commented, he’s still dead.
@Flat Earth Luddite: Biden famously likes ice cream. If anything, it’s a flattering photo of a man clearly there, in the moment, living his best life.
When he gets a presidential portrait done, it should have an ice cream cone.
@Gustopher:
Thanks! I’m afraid all the doom and doom have left me both befuddled and gloomy. This warm and friendly reminder helps!
ETA too early for G&T per SWMBO. So, guess I’ll go wear some ice cream!
Xlon’s missing too many opportunities with his brain chip venture.
He should instead develop a synthetic spine and test it on the GQP.
And then a heart and test it on himself.
@Flat Earth Luddite: These days, I have to eat ice cream from a cone; it falls off the spoon because of my Parkinson’s tremor. Even on good days.
Fortunately, I like ice cream cones, and Safeway puts them on ad almost every week during the summer. I don’t know whether the new owner will when Kroger closes it, but I can muddle through until then.
Roy Edroso breaks it down:
@Bobert:
Talk about the practical implications of a vengeful psychopath and wannabe dictator and what his getting back into the oval office will cause this country and the world.
I said for months that Biden wasn’t right mentally. People attacked me for those views. They said the Hur report was a political hatchet job. Now noone is defending Biden’s mental state anymore. Instead you retreat into the fantasy he can still win in November. A majority of American people don’t think he can serve four years. That isn’t going to change for the good between now and election day or Biden’s dementia suddenly going away. The Democrats lose in November if Biden is still on the ballot. What are you going to say when that happens?
@Flat Earth Luddite: As much as I respect your lovely wife’s opinions, I disagree with her on the too early for a G & T question. I turn to none other than Stumptown, the TV show that gave us the immortal line:
You deserve a G & T. Tell her I said it was okay.
Biden in a question about VP Harris- “Look I wouldn’t pick Vice-President Trump to be Vice-President if she wasn’t qualified.”
@Bill Jempty:
False. I’m defending Biden’s mental state. So. “No one” is inaccurate.
@Bill Jempty:
Oh great, now we have to be treated to the people who hate Joe Biden harping on every single mixed up word ever, as if it’s unusual for people who stutter/clutter — and even for people who don’t like Trump, who does it all the time.
@Bill Jempty:
You’ve made your opinion clear:
But my question to you is about the campaign; exactly how does a replacement campaign gear up sufficiently to be successful.
There will be hurtles to overcome (see what Jen and Char have posted). How do you expect to jump those obstacles and achieve a democratic victory?
( or are you resigned to a Trump win?)
@Michael Cain:
Trees in Texas are more saw-resistant? They fight back? (Or did you mean “Texans won’t stand for letting the government trim their trees.”?)
@Scott: The entire time I have lived in Texas, I’ve only ever lived in an area with a municipal utility (CPS/SAWS in SAT, City of Austin, or BTU in Bryan) or in the service area of an Electric Cooperative and have never had any major issues with outages or overcharges.
BTU has a real-time outage map and a text message update system you can opt into. Even when we’ve had longer outages, you can see what it going on, whether or not a crew has been assigned to your neighborhood yet, etc. And if they did get up to shenanigans, the City Council would not hear the end of it.
I’m always taken aback by stories of just how horrific the electricity “free” markets are Houston, DFW, etc.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
mmmm, good booze!
@DrDaveT:
Well, it’s Texas. Maybe the trees are just too big to cut down?
On other things, due to some Very Important Papers I have to get, I won’t be able to take my next tranche of vacation time this month. I was aiming for the last two weeks of July. The Papers will be done well before then, but a coworker already reserved that time. Our jobs overlap in a way we can’t both be absent from the office at the same time…
But it’s not all bad. I’ll take two weeks in August, and then the first two weeks of September (we get an insanely generous amount of vacation time*). Better yet, my time in September ends on Monday Sept. 16th., which is a Holiday. that’s like adding an extra day.
I want to finally finish two stories I’ve been working on and off for some time, and make a beginning on a novel that’s been gnawing at me for years now.
*Partly this is a result of a decades long party dictatorship that had to cater to the working class amid the corruption. Partly, too, of having had a left wing narcissistic would-be king, who also had to cater to the working class amid corruption, mismanagement, and delusions of grandeur.
Not everyone had such generous amounts of paid vacation time, but ti grows over time. If you accumulate ten years working with the same employer, you get like a month off per year.
@Bobert: As long as Biden is in the race almost everything will be about his fitness. It should be about Trump’s fitness too, but that question was answered a long time ago, at least to sane people. If Harris is the candidate that goes away.
@SenyorDave: The potential problem with focusing on making “the problem” go away is that you’re only trading “Biden is too old” for “Harris is a neophyte/doesn’t have the experience.” I think the guy on the other thread with the argument that the focus should be switched to “Trump is a real live dumpster fire” (or it’s equivalent) probably has the better idea, but I don’t know how to get there in the media environment we have.
Video of CNN Focus Group participant:
Chris Jackson:
Heard on CNN just now:
“Millions of Democratic voters watched Biden’s press conference, and now some of them are wondering, “why are the chattering classes trying to force this man out of office?”
Won’t stop the frenzy. The anti-Biden smear artists are too invested in their unhinged Fuck Joe Biden hatred at this point. It will go from Biden is “doddering” and barely in control of his faculties (a bold faced lie) to Biden is irrevocably damaged.
Well yeah, because pathetic, weak, lily-livered Democrats helped the braindead But Her Emails media damage him.
If Biden the stay in, I could only hope his campaign will be smart enough to use this vicious, ageist witch hunt to rally older voters to him.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: The media and the American/Russian oligarchs need clicks and engagements, even if they burn the whole world down.
I hope I can make a trip to Portland before it all burns down, and meet you and Luddite.
@DK: I didn’t get to watch the whole thing, but I watched the last 20 minutes and Biden was absolutely fine. My wife did watch all of it and agreed he did well.
I am increasingly certain his poor performance during the debate was a single bad episode likely driven by a bad cold, and does not represent his actual fitness for office.
@SenyorDave:
… “problem goes away”, only to be replaced with racism and misogyny. (And Unfortunately, there are a significant fraction of women who don’t think a woman should be president)
@SenyorDave:
…along with all of the reasons people voted for Biden in 2020. Is that really what you want?
You and I know that this is really GOP vs. sanity, and that we will vote for sanity no matter which name is on the ticket. But most of America hasn’t figured that out yet — they think it actually matters which Democrat runs against Leonard Leo.