Tuesday’s Forum
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FILED UNDER: Open Forum
OTB relies on its readers to support it. Please consider helping by becoming a monthly contributor through Patreon or making a one-time contribution via PayPal. Thanks for your consideration.
I may have mentioned before that I volunteered to be a drug test subject for a Alzheimer’s study. I have a family history of dementia so it is a obsession of mine. I also have 2 copies of the APOE4 gene which is a major risk factor for late onset Alzheimer’s. The study required that I currently have asymptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease. At age 71 and having the APOE4 risk factor I figured that I might have a chance for that and may be a good subject. A blood test for the tau protein (implicated with amyloid beta for AD) was done. Some studies consider it to 80-90% accurate. Happy to say the test turned out negative and I was rejected for the study. So I’ll watch my diet, exercise regularly, and keep my fingers crossed for the future.
@Scott: That’s a pretty great rejection, congrats!
A very deep, very long dive into the history of the US space program, and why NASA has yet to return to the Moon.
It’s almost two hours long. TL;DR: In 1966 the US spent 4.5% or so of the federal budget on NASA. This is the highest as share of the budget as NASA’s ever been. It then dropped steadily, even through the period of the space shuttle development. Today it’s at 0.5%. Here are some handy charts and graphs.
It’s not so much that space is hard, as that space is expensive.
I don’t usually have the patience to watch videos, prefer to read transcripts maybe.
I make an exception for this, 3 minutes of Jamelle Bouie on the topic of J D Vance, easy to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6J7K-C12qBM
Jamelle Bouie, 3 minutes on J D Vance, easy to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6J7K-C12qBM
3 minutes of Jamelle Bouie regarding J D Vance, easy to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6J7K-C12qBM
About those work requirements for Medicaid:
The GOP wants work requirements for Medicaid. Here’s what those rules do (and don’t) accomplish.
Bottom line: the purported savings for imposing work requirements will not come from “able bodies workers” suddenly working but rather administrative hoops and bureaucratic incompetence.
The the deficit will only go up.
Well, this made me laugh.
Army battalion bans use of profanity
Good luck with that!
Tariff costs are slipping into retail anecdote.
Stopped at a local coffee shop to indulge my sweet tooth yesterday and got shocked by the cost increase from last summer. The object of my sweet obsession was an Acai Bowl, basically a frozen concoction with lots of fresh fruit. Last summer with tax this was ~$10.50, yesterday it was ~$14.50. Given that the fruit was from Mexico and everything else also imported a price increase was expected, but $4!
Now there could be an accusation of gouging, but the owner of this place has long been reluctant to raise prices, despite increased costs. The tariffs are proving a bridge too far for him.
@charontwo:
I think that last little bit is important.
@Kathy:
Any idea how the money paid to Space X to explode stuff falls into that? Is musk getting a portion of NASA’s 0.5%? Is it over and above that?
@Scott:
A rejection story we can all get behind!!!
@charontwo:
I agree with Bouie’s assessment of Vance. Not to give myself credit for extraordinary presence, but back when everyone was cooing about what a great writer he was, I was thinking that there was something really off about this guy. It was not a popular opinion at the time.
Our president: Always a model of good taste and genteel deportment.
“And then they rigged the 2020 election, and then I said, ‘You know what I’ll do? I’ll run again and I’ll shove it up their ass.'” — Donald Trump at the Kennedy Center, May 19, 2024
The audience loved it.
@Kathy: And probes can do many types of exploration without a human riding along.
Happy Birthday Cher (b.1946)
Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves
Encore
comments working?
@Daryl:
SpaceX is a relatively small part of what NASA pays out. Crewed flights to the ISS are $60M per occupied seat, much cheaper than what the Russians charge. SpaceX cargo flights to the ISS are cheaper than the Cygnus flights. NASA is paying Bezos (Blue Origin) more to develop a lunar lander than they are paying SpaceX. Both of those are fixed-price contracts and are MUCH less than what has been paid to Boeing/Lockheed for SLS and Orion. SpaceX is currently winning the bids for high-value NASA payloads because there are no certified alternatives. SpaceX won the billion-dollar contract to deorbit the ISS in 2031 because everyone else was bidding an entirely new vehicle (and at the time, unflown boosters) while SpaceX bid an upgrade to the Dragon (and a proven booster).
Over at NRO and the rest of DoD, they’re paying considerably more to other providers than they pay to SpaceX for exactly the same services.
@charontwo: @CSK: Yesterday I posted a little rant about the pro-Republican bias of the supposedly liberal MSM. This is a great example. The Bouie bit is in response to an Atlantic story about what happened to JD Vance. Bouie’s response is that nothing happened to JD, he was always a lying sack of spit. What happened is that George Packer, author of the Atlantic piece, finally caught on. For the last several decades the MSM has seemed to be on a perpetual search for someone they can hold up as the “reasonable moderate ” Republican du jour: McCain, Romney, and for a while, Vance.
Incidentally, Jamelle Bouie is a treasure.
@CSK: I didn’t read the whole piece (paywall), but Ross Douthat in the NYTs recently wrote about another up and coming “edgy” man-boy influencer whose name I immediately forgot. Being “offensive” is part of the charm of this new breed of sexually frustrated lost boys, according to Ross and the headline.
Trump style trash talking may make some guys all tingly and giggly, but it is ugh-sexy to the large majority. Pure cringe.
@CSK:
I’m from generally the same culture, region, and to a lesser degree economic background as Vance. I remember pissing off more than a few of my ACLU coworkers here in 2016 when they were fawning over Hillbilly Elegy and I casually mentioned that it wasn’t just Trump voters who could be easily swayed by someone telling them what they wanted to hear.
Knock knock
Will someone open the comment door for me?
@charontwo: @CSK: Yesterday I posted a small rant about the Republican bias of the supposedly liberal MSM. The Atlantic piece Bouie is responding to is a perfect example. The piece asks what happened to JD Vance. Bouie replies nothing happened to JD Vance, he was always a lying sack of spit. All that happened is that George Packer, author of the Atlantic piece, finally figured out JD is a lying sack of spit. The praise for Hillbilly Elegy and elevation of JD was just one more chapter in the MSM’s desperate snipe hunt over the decades for a “moderate, sensible” Republican du jour. McCain, Romney, JD.
Jamelle Bouie is a national treasure.
“Prevail Greg Olear”
…
Our verkakte press overlords.
@Fortune & @becca:
Can you describe what you are encountering? Is it just the site is slow to react after you click “post comment”?
Or is something else going on.
Also, at some point in the near future, I’m going to be switching out our comments tool in the hopes of fixing some of these issues.
All…the comments do work. They go off into the ether for a bit, but do appear eventually.
@gVOR10: @gVOR10: OK. I wrote that comment and posted it. It didn’t appear. I refreshed, no comment. Left the site, came back, refreshed, no comment. I decided I must have forgotten to hit post. I wrote the comment again and made doubly sure I hit post, which sent me back to the site without my comment. I gave up, did something else for awhile, came back, read Tabs, came here, saw no comment, refreshed, and find both comments.
Fortunately, the points about pro-GOP bias and JD bear repeating.
iPad, current iOS, Safari.
@Daryl:
That trip through the ether is probably related to caching settings. If that’s the issue people are seeing–i.e. my comment doesn’t initially appear after pressing post and returning to the page–please let me know and I’ll dig into the caching settings to see if a switch needs to be thrown.
@gVOR10:
Generally speaking is this what other’s are experiencing?
Getting these type of descriptions really does help with diagnosis and treatment.
It’s been almost 48 hours, time to change tariff policy again!
What happened to all those deals we were promised? Surely Republicans wouldn’t be lying, now would they?
@charontwo: Yesterday I asked Charley in Cleveland “Eff Jake Tapper for sitting on the truth during the Biden presidency or reporting the truth now?” Thank you for a clear answer.
@charontwo:
Yesterday I asked Charley in Cleveland “Eff Jake Tapper for sitting on the truth during the Biden presidency or reporting the truth now?” Thank you for a clear answer.
second try – see if comments are working
@becca:
Trump speaking trash-talk is more and more frequent. He even used the phrase “kiss my ass” in a graduation speech given at the University of Alabama.
@Neil Hudelson:
I think what aroused my suspicion that Vance was, among other things, a fraud and a phony, was his claim that while at a dinner at Yale Law School, he called his girlfriend to ask her what fork to use. Sorry. You don’t get through four years of undergraduate school without learning that. You learn that from reading and/or observation of others, if no one at home during your first 18 years told you.
@Scott:
It’s already estimated Trump’s Big Ugly Bill would blow a ~4 trillion hole in the deficit. Betting that’s an undercount, given the ripple effects of Republicans kicking ~14 million off their healthcare.
@Daryl:
No clue. XpaceS will get the big money from the felon’s golden boondoggle, but that should come from Defense.
@Kingdaddy:
And much cheaper. But remember, you get what you pay for.
IMO probes should be used when sending people is impossible. But as soon as people can go, or there’s the will to spend the money to send them, they should go.
@becca:
Since yesterday evening, I’ve noticed posts take a while to show up, but they do show up.
@charontwo: 12 min of Joe Scarborough telling Mark Helperin he had multiple hours-long meetings with Biden in 2022-2024 and found him “more than cogent” and able to speak in-depth on complex foreign policy issues better than nearly all politicians.
Scarborough should invite Tapper and Thompson to drop by his show, to hawk their sleazy anonymous sources.
@charontwo:
Here, here, Biden is water over the damn, too many problems to deal with.
The last couple of weeks Trump has done a better job than usual of disguising his subservience to Putin. Much bold talk of weapons and pressure and sanctions. . . and yeah, all bullshit:
My long-standing belief has been and remains that Putin owns Trump. Maybe a monetary thing, maybe blackmail. But that belief was briefly shaken by better-than-usual kabuki. I even imagined I’d have to come here and mea culpa this thing. But, nope. To quote Jerry Lee Lewis, “I am right. I’m always right. One time I thought I was wrong, I found out I was right.”
@Scott:
Mission Accomplished. Biblical mandate–“if a man will not work, neither should he eat”–achieved. (Fundie nostrums have been dictating policy for a long time. NAR isn’t really all that new a thing, just more ambitious now.)
@becca:..knock knock
Who’s there?
Squirrels, squirrels everywhere!
“If your comments don’t post
we don’t care.”
ETA: This comment posted with no delay.
@Matt Bernius: That’s what I experienced also. Posted comment, no update. Walked the dog and on return, refreshed the screen, and lo and behold, there was the comment, albeit without editing availability. Laptop, Win11, Chrome.
@Matt Bernius:
Since yesterday, any comment I make takes about 20 minutes to appear on the forum thread.
@just nutha:
Christian nationalist authoritarians, meet communist authoritarians.
@Sleeping Dog: “Tariff costs are slipping into retail anecdote.”
While I can’t attribute all the price increases to tariffs, I can say that my experience is that prices have not gone down as the administration claims (with eggs as the notable exception). For example, we stopped by our local major supermarket to pick up a handful of things last week and found that the cost of chocolate chips and instant coffee drink had each gone up by about 25%.
And the price of gasoline worth a mention since the administration has made a raft of ridiculous claims about it. Treasury Sec Bessent, for example, said on NBC’s Sunday show,
But I have not seen any such change in gas prices, so I checked the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and sure enough, weekly gas prices have ticked up a little slightly since trump took office. Also, interestingly, gas prices did not go down under his first administration until demand began to crater during the 2020 pandemic.
@CSK:
Eh, while I’m certain that in his case he was prevaricating at best, I made it through 6 years of undergrad* and 3 of law school** and I have no idea which fork to use. Like, I can fake it decently enough, but I genuinely have no idea. I’d guess 80% of that in my case was part of my generally terrible/abusive upbringing and the rest is spending most of my life with undiagnosed ADHD.
In law school we even made friends with the “social director” woman. She was like 100 years old and started at the school as like a secretary and retired as a beloved dean. She was awesome. Like a 1940’s movie star. We made friends with her and parlayed that into getting the school to buy us lunches. We also got her to teach us charm school shit. I still don’t know what fork to use.
*3 years in community college without getting anywhere near a degree, into 3 years of actual university (Go Flames!) which got me a BA in Russian/British Imperial history.
** One really good thing about dissociation is like you can just point yourself in a direction and end up 10 years later and go “how did I get here?” I miss dissociation.
@Matt Bernius: “post comment” looked like I refreshed. It wasn’t slow, the comment was just gone. It was different than the other recent problems. I lost a few tries at commenting.
@Matt Bernius: my experience with comments mirrors gvor10 except I didn’t repost. Also on iPad and safari. I have had lots of issues with this site over the years. I sort of assumed it was because I am sloppy about updates and my devices scold me about this on a regular basis. The internets can sense technological ambivalence.
@Beth:
I think it was more the fact that he seemed to make such a big fucking deal of the fork bullshit–“I’m a real live rootin’ tootin hillbilly”–that put me off him.
@Scott: Scott- That reminds me of when we deployed to Saudi Arabia. Air Force, Navy and Marines were passing out free condoms. The Army general in charge thought would encourage bad behavior so he forbade them and issued an order that no one would have illicit sex. Lo and behold almost all of the pregnancies we saw were Army women. Then there was the crew of Army women who went to the Air Force and got free condoms. They then sold them to Army guys for $100 and helped them use them for free. Nature finds a way!
Steve
Laura Loomer and the algorithm:
“Jason Egenberg”
…
…
Comments take super long to appear, many minutes. Don’t appear for a long time when loading from a different profile either.
I’m posting this at 1:38 p.m. eastern United States time. Let’s see how long it takes to appear.
I read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out. I found it interesting. Vance described a subculture that wasn’t all that different from one I was familiar with and grew up in. (There was one big difference, the place that violence and violent speech has in the respective communities. This was very different. The rest, not so much.) So I read it, thought it was good, not great.
These days I can better appreciate that mostly the sort of folks that read it didn’t know anything about my people or how I grew up. They have strange impressions and prejudices about rural white subcultures (as noted above, we aren’t all the same, not by a long shot.)
I realize that it’s pretty normal to have odd ideas about a people that you haven’t spent time with, and consequently don’t understand the manners of.
Meanwhile, Vance ran for Senator, which made me realize that the book was campaign collateral. And what has happened since has me in complete concord with Jamelle Bouie. Vance is an opportunist and a chameleon. I can even see how that flows out of his biography.
@CSK:..eastern United States time…
I got a royal ass chewing for mentioning the time on an OTB post recently. I have since refused to note the time on any comment that I make.
Watch Out!
@Fortune: re: @charontwo: Yesterday I asked Charley in Cleveland “Eff Jake Tapper for sitting on the truth during the Biden presidency or reporting the truth now?” Thank you for a clear answer.
—
The primary reason I dropped the “Eff Jake Tapper” remark is because I believe that if you’re in the news business and you uncover actual news about an incumbent official, you shouldn’t sit on it until that official is out of office – when it is no longer *news* – so you can then use that info to pitch a book deal. I had the same sentiment about Bob Woodward and Jonathan Karl when they issued their Trump books in 2021. So eff them, too. That said, Jake isn’t getting paid (an estimated) $4M/yr. by CNN to withhold information, so MAYBE he wasn’t “sitting on the truth” when Biden was in office, as you assume. MAYBE there wasn’t a vast conspiracy by the Dems and the media and Joe’s inner circle to cover/conceal. If “everyone knew,” why on earth was the debate invitation accepted? And if Tapper et al. did know something back then, wasn’t immediately after the debate the time to report it? Lots of shades of gray here for we the people, and primarily shades of green for Tapper. So…eff him!
@CSK:
It appeared at 2:04 p.m.
@Charley in Cleveland:
“It’s not about his age, it’s about his mental acuity….I’ll tell you when the chickens come home to roost for everybody trying to defend this, or trying to make some equivalence to Trump: June the 27th. These two guys are going to get on a stage in a live television debate that will break all records I think for ratings probably around the world, and you know what’s going to happen over 90 minutes or however long it is? Donald Trump is going to take Joe Biden to pieces, and it’s going to be utterly, utterly humiliating for the president because he has been protected so carefully in his term of office from this kind of thing, and when he gets exposed, honestly, Cenk, I think it’s going to be utterly humiliating, and Trump will destroy him.”
“Well, Piers, there’s a reason why the debate is historically early, the debates are never before the conventions. I think Democrats put the debate before the conventions so they’ll have one last moment to try to talk Joe Biden out of this race….They hate me for telling people that the Emperor has no clothes, but my job is in news. We all can see how incredibly old he is, so my point is, for God’s sake, pull him, if you don’t pull him, we’re going to lose to Trump.”
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/cenk-uygur-democrats-like-maga-in-authoritarian-denial-of-bidens-terrible-shape/
It’s now taking hours for any comment I make to appear. I assume many others are having the same problem.
@Eusebio:
“Treasury Sec Bessent, for example, said on NBC’s Sunday show,
But I have not seen any such change in gas prices”
Bessent’s statement was false then. And it is falser now, in my experience… in the two days since that interview, the price of regular gas has increased 22 cents per gallon at my usual station.
@Jay L Gischer:
I read it sometime around then too, and was really struck by how much it resembled Charles Mingus’s Beneath The Underdog. Not in specific details, as Vance never claimed to be a pimp, but in the sheer obvious falsehood of so much of it and how much insight it gave into the person telling these lies. Very much a “the stories we tell about ourselves” meta thing.
Mingus was a grown ass man who had the same idea of what was cool as a pretty dim 14 year old boy, and padded everything to show how “cool” he was.
Vance was a complete cynical shithead who would trash his entire family and hometown to get ahead, but also told the myths that reflect a lot of the values of Appalachia at the same time — an insistence on believing they are self sufficient even when they are obviously not, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps through hard work and hard love, etc. They’re scrappy and scary and tough, and they have great couches.
I felt embarrassed for Charles Mingus. I felt hatred towards Vance.
@charontwo: Jamelle Bouie is so much better on video than in his columns. His columns are good, but carefully filtered for a bit of respectability politics. His videos involve calling Vance a “horrid little pig man.”
It’s just a matter of tone, but it’s so much more honest. and in a world where so many people are lying and/or acting in bad faith, this bit of earnestness is refreshing.
NORM!
George Wendt 77
RIP
@CSK: It’s a story about how Vance couldn’t just look to see what fork the person to his left or right was using. He’s either very stupid, or he has absolute contempt for the people who will hear the story as they would be so stupid that they would believe it.
It’s not even a good story, it has no real punch. It’s basically “didn’t know how to do X, called someone, was how to do X, did X.” Where’s The drama? Where’s the twist? I want better, more interesting lies.
If everyone was waiting for someone to pick up a fork because no one knew, that would have potential — then it would be a fun farce, where everyone knew that no one knew, and the deadlock is broken not by someone just guessing or deciding it didn’t matter, but by calling up the womenfolk who clearly know better because they all refused to be wrong. It would be better than his lame ass story at least.
(Or perhaps he has modified a story about how he wasn’t sure how to shoot up with heroin, since he just hadn’t done it before, and didn’t want his friends to think he was a square.)
I made the above post “NORM!” on my Chrome browser on MacBook Air however I can’t see it there. However I am now looking at my Safari browser on the same MacBook Air and I can see the post.
I wonder what will happen when I attempt to post this comment on my Safari browser?
Now I see it
Now I don’t.
We’re all going to Hell
In a little row boat!
Now I see it
Now I don’t
We’re all going to Hell
In a little row boat
@Fortune:
Clown.
Ok, so I’m still working to track down the caching issue. Just to give everyone a heads up, by the time you access OTB next, I will be turning off all caching and see if that resolves the issue.
If it does, then I will slowly add each caching option back. I’ll do it one at a time over the course of a few days to make sure that we can identify which aspect is causing the issue.
If turning off caching doesn’t fix this, then we know what isn’t causing the issue.
@Gustopher:
I think you’ve nailed what stands out to me about that story. Just look at what the person on either side of you id doing, FFS. No need to make an emergency call to your girlfriend.
@Eusebio: It is usually pointless to point out the BS from this administration but from the Trump Administration own website https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0u_pte_stx_dpg&f=w
Gas Prices Texas:
1/20/2025 $2.69
5/19/2025 $2.85
Time to shut down the Energy Information Administration. Can’t have them running around posting facts.
@Gustopher: Whenever I’m thinking that I need to hate someone, I ask myself if the person, reason, and zeitgeist justify putting that much effort in. I suspect that a lot of us waste good hate on things that don’t matter that much. YMMV.
I carry no water for JDV. I have not read the book. I am not inclined to give benefits of doubts.
My understanding is that memoirs aim toward the author’s “truth” as opposed to the universe’s “truth” (if such a thing even exists).
Having said that, I defer to the wisdom and judgment of other OTB commenters, especially the Authors* in the house.
*I’ve published a lot of peer-reviewed scientific papers, but I don’t consider myself an Author.
We’ve seen this story before.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Statement on Golden Dome for America
This is Reagan’s SDI (AKA Star Wars) all over again.
Take $25B (which will be borrowed money), light it on fire, and watch the program slowly die.
This is what happens when you create a new organization like US Space Force. They want to be a player also.
@Scott:
Totally.
There’s been talk of orbital lasers, too. People just don’t understand lasers are not like in the sci-fi movies (in most they’re not even called lasers). For one thing, they require a power source, which gets bigger as you want a more powerful beam.
The old 80s plans even include a mad scientist weapon: the fusion bomb powered x-ray laser.
At best, the felon will only burn a few billions of dollars over 4 years.
@Beth: “Eh, while I’m certain that in his case he was prevaricating at best, I made it through 6 years of undergrad* and 3 of law school** and I have no idea which fork to use.”
Two simple rules to get you through this kind of predicament: 1) You start with the cutlery on the outside and work your way in. And 2) if you really can’t figure it out, wait one beat and see which implement everyone else is using.
@wr:
That’s exactly it. And Vance hadn’t figured that out by the time he was in Yale Law School?
@Gustopher: Cenk Uygur is a clown who recognized Biden’s mental decline a year ago, and Outside the Beltway commenters are still denying it.
@Fortune: Defend your current clown.
At least Biden had competent people in. You don’t even have that. You’ve got people sniffing each others balls, and Laura fucking Loomer as an advisor.
How is any of this good, Fortune?
@Scott:
My suggestion from a couple of days ago was to call is SDI3K. But really I just hope it does not continue to be called “Golden Dome.” And that the DoD no longer puts out press releases that say “the One Big Beautiful reconciliation bill.”
@Eusebio: It has to be “beautiful”, apparently.
I am sad that our duly elected representatives and senators allow such language. “A Big, Beautiful Bill”. JFC. Ass-lickers.