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Tuesday’s Forum
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12 responses to “Tuesday’s Forum”
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Fake religious and political ideology meets reality.
Navy announces new flu vaccination requirements for sailors
The U.S. Navy released updated influenza vaccination guidelines late last week, instructing a select number of service members to get the shot.
There is a whole list of Navy personnel that are now required to get the flu vaccine including those in training, healthcare, childcare, deployment status, etc.
Reality sucks, doesn’t it, Hegseth.
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How to throw away $1B dollars.
Bipartisan headwinds buffet $1B ‘anomaly’ for Trump battleship
As Congress acts on a stopgap funding bill to keep the government operating beyond Oct. 1 at current levels, unless specified otherwise, it must decide whether to grant exceptions — potentially including $1 billion to start procuring parts for the first of a new line of proposed Trump-class battleships.
Putting aside the fact that this is another Trump vanity project on which to put his name, battleships are obsolete. Reagan spent a ton on upgrading Iowa-class battleships which were scrapped later on.
In addition,
As Congress acts on a stopgap funding bill to keep the government operating beyond Oct. 1 at current levels, unless specified otherwise, it must decide whether to grant exceptions — potentially including $1 billion to start procuring parts for the first of a new line of proposed Trump-class battleships.
But three GOP-majority defense committees have already said the funding would be premature, given that the ship is not yet fully designed.
And
the Navy has not yet “finalized ship design, completed a formal analysis of alternatives, or established a stable set of requirements.”
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Something to look forward to.
Cyclosporiasis cases on the rise in Houston for second straight week
There were 21 Cyclosporiasis cases in Houston and 38 across the rest of Harris County as of Monday, a Harris County Public Health official confirmed to Chron. That number is up from last Tuesday’s count of 34 cases in Harris County, and 16 in Houston, per ABC 13. The next Cyclosporiasis case update in Harris County will arrive on Wednesday.
It’s not just explosive diarrhea, it is a fabulous weight loss program.
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Talarico leads Paxton by 5 points in new poll of Texas’ U.S. Senate race
The latest survey of the U.S. Senate race from Texas Public Opinion Research shows Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton, 45% to 40%, marking the Austin state representative’s largest lead in any public poll taken during the general election period.
Now Talarico is more liberal than I prefer but, then again, character is a higher priority for me than political stances. And Paxton is basically a career criminal.
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I’ve been rereading Peter Turchin’s End Times. Turchin talks of elite overproduction, a wealth pump, and popular immiseration creating instability. This morning I stumbled across the Grim Historian Substack Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold? which comes at it differently. She cites various historical examples from ancient Greece to Tammany Hall to show:
A city can carry a certain number of crooks just as a body can carry a certain number of parasites. It gets pale. It itches. It makes bad decisions. But it lives. Stable societies accumulate these parasitic coalitions — cartels, lobbies, insiders — the way ships accumulate barnacles, each one small, each one rational, until the hull can’t move.
That is the asshole threshold.
We are there. And she explicitly ties it to Turchin and cites Turchin’s study of MAGA Republicans, defined as having voted for Trump in 2020 and claiming he won. He puts a number on them, 15% of American adults. “And 58 percent (of them) consider political violence usually or always justified to achieve at least one specific political objective.”
But she offers a ray of hope,
Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?
A coalition of nobodies dragged it back. How they did it is the most important story nobody tells. Because we are standing at the line again — and this time we can measure it.
She elaborates on the Reform Era. Per Turchin, from here we go to civil war, revolution, or reform. Let us pray for, and work toward, reform. We do seem to be seeing a repeat of the Gilded Age revulsion at the billionaires.
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Coincidently, Up First at NPR had their 3rd segment on the public’s growing awareness of public and government corruption. Noted that we had a period of progressive cleanup and progress after the Gilded Age, then just 50 years ago, we had the Watergate reforms. Suggested we may be anticipating a similar stage after the Trump era and today’s new Gilded Age.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
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Hn. Apple’s stock is way up, and AI stocks are undergoing a “correction.”
Apple is the one of the major tech companies not to have jumped head first into the AI investment race. Last year it took a lot of flack over the very underwhelming “Apple Intelligence”* features in its 2025 product lineup, especially phones. This year, Apple partnered with Google to integrate Gemini into Siri and other “Apple Intelligence” features.
Maybe they know what they are doing. And maybe we’re hearing the first sounds of the bubble popping. On the other hand, the AI bubble pop has been predicted so many times, it’s beginning to feel like Texla’s full self driving.
*I said at the time they’d eventually claim AI has always stood for Apple Intelligence, and they invented it without any help from anyone. Like they invented the smart phone, the MP3 player, and the computer.
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Being fair, Apple has claimed to invent very few things, and the ones I know about are behind the scenes, operating systems, types of things. They have very publicly acknowledged that they don’t try to be first. Steve Jobs was famously challenged by a nervous tech reporter when the first tiny black and white Macintosh all-in-one computer was blowing up, “Isn’t it true that all the things the Mac is known for, the mouse, vector fonts, the laser printer, the GUI and the whole Desktop paradigm was invented by Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Center, and they demonstrated it for you and Steve Wozniak?” Without missing a beat Jobs said, “Absolutely! Lord knows they weren’t using it, so someone had to!”
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And now, the only nation where school shootings are a regular occurrence, may try to use drones to combat them.
It’s hard to say whether this will work or not. But from the piece: “They can be flown from thousands of miles away.”
I don’t think they will work unless they are stationed inside the schools to begin with.
Anything that is not controlling the insane proliferation of arms in America.
