Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, November 26, 2021
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23 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Yesterday I saw a woman in brand spanking new Carhartt jacket. That yellowy orange brown Carhartt color. She looked so bad-ass.
I had seen that exact color on the face of the moon during the eclipse a week ago. It shifted pretty radically through colors fairly quickly, but when I saw that jacket I was immediately transported back to that instant.
For a few beats the eclipsed moon was Carhartt “orange”. Took me a week and a random encounter to put a name to that transient color.
Hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving. I had to get up at 5 a.m. yesterday to catch one plane and then hang around for three hours to make another connecting flight. Dinner was good, I think. I was practically comatose during it.
A year ago today I took an epic walk.
I finally felt decent and whole and perky after 3 weeks of feeling like a weak kitten that got run over by a truck. Covid sucked.
I had not opened my front door in weeks except to get my mail. Occasionally a friend would drop off supplies. Totally physically isolated and self-quarantined for 3+ weeks.
Going out into the world again that day was astonishingly meaningful and precious. I felt so alive. It was the definition of catharsis.
I’m gonna take a walk today. The route is not important. I remember the destination. I remember what I was listening to (already got that queue’d up – Joe Henry’s Short Man’s Room).
I might make this a yearly ritual.
Dune finally premiered in HBO Max in Mexico. allegedly it’s in 4K. We’ll see. We’re in pre-Hell Week now, so I’ll likely wait to watch it until tomorrow.
Frankly, I’m more impatient for the rest of the Young Justice season 4. they seem to be building up to something, as the backstories and characterizations get darker.
Because I know y’all will appreciate it:
The Alabama Paradox
Historical electoral math (with cookies!).
It’s a bit of a long watch (40 minutes), but really interesting.
For all you Star Wars geeks: A real, honest-to-goodness light saber. Alas, batteries not included.
@Kathy:
I like that you liked Loki. I am not a fully invested MCU person. I enjoy some of the movies – they are usually very well crafted.
Movies are two hours more or less. And with multiple characters and storylines deep character development is hinted at.
Movies are like short stories or novellas. And always with the three act set-up (not always but mostly mostly). Restrictive.
With a tv show you can explore. Throttle down a bit. Poke at the corners.
Loki exceeded expectations for me. WandaVision too. These are complex, thorny stories told well. Intelligently. Sometimes subtly. Depicting overwhelming grief in a not obvious manner.
In 2021 I am quite impressed by Marvel. Five years ago or so I would not have said so. (But Guardians Of The Galaxy rocked pretty hard.)
I like their ephemera way more than the tentpole movies. (And their big, splashy movies have gotten better too, I must admit.)
Speaking of light sabers, I was reminded of this hilarious bit from the Blake Edwards movie Skin Deep, starring the late John Ritter. My understanding is Industrial Light and Magic actually did the work on the scene.
@de stijl:
Neither am I. As superheroes go, I like the DC bunch better*. Loki, though, was more like a Big Idea Science Fiction novel than a superhero story. Still what I call comicbooky (a little puerile with too many fantastic and impractical elements), but rather good for its sort.
Wandavision, now, was ok, but it did’t grab me. And the big plot hole: who was broadcasting the sitcoms and why?
* While DC movies have been mostly market failures, there’s a huge animated DC universe of TV shows and direct-to-video movies. They’re mostly well done, but not connected. One I recommend, available for now on HBO Max is The Flashpoint Paradox, even if it misuses the word paradox.
I know which I find more believable.
“Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”
― Richard Hofstadter
Former Biden White House Sr Advisor for COVID Response and past head of Medicare/Medicaid for Obama Andy Slavitt has this Tweet thread today about the COVID variant coming out of southern Africa.
@Mikey:
It’s a sad but necessary observation: humans are the one living being capable of mitigating an epidemic and even ending it sooner than it would naturally, but we refuse to take the steps necessary to do so.
It’s one of those “in theory but in practice” things, like political economic ideologies.
Partly, I think, it has to do with our need to know RIGHT NOW and to predict the future with certainty. One oft asked question since March 2020 is “When will the pandemic end?” The answer is very simple: we can’t know.
We will now when it’s over, but we can’t know when that will happen. It’s like when the fire department faces a large fire at a factory. They know it will take hours to put it out, but there may be unexpected flareups that will make it drag on longer. Say if the fire extends to a large cache of flammable materials, which maybe it did because firefighters were focused on preventing it from reaching fuel storage tanks. But it will be plain that the fire’s out once it’s out.
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t know where NH stands nationally, but we are currently at record-high hospitalizations and cases.
The new variant doesn’t look good either.
@Kathy:
It won’t ever be “over”. It, hopefully, will fade into the background noise. Like cancer and heart disease. Shit people succumb to.
At this point it is endemic.
At this point I know that my yearly flu shot is going to try to cover both. Two jabs or one. Either way, it will happen.
At this point I know that everytime I walk into a store or workplace or enclosed public space I am going to instinctively mask up.
This is the new now. I have to deal with it. I will.
The right is good at politicizing viruses – they did it with HIV too.
@Jen:
if it won’t depress you too much, you can go here:
covid19.nh.gov/dashboard
@de stijl:
The pandemic phase will. That is, we won’t see anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of new cases every day, nor overwhelmed hospitals or even critical care facilities.
Yes, but for different reasons. The flu changes and new variants aren’t quite covered by prior shots. SARS-CoV-2 also changes, but more important we need circulating antibodies to keep it away. Ergo, boosters every year.
It’s not the right. It’s the authoritarian mindset that’s good at it.
I’ve a technical question:
Take a computer monitor, not a TV, with an HDMI port. If I hook up the HDMI feed from the cable box or the DVD player, will it display the cable or DVD video feed?
I ask out of mere curiosity and not for any need to implement something. I mean, PC monitors have always been similar to TVs, but had a different input mode and lacked a tuner. I suppose they still lack a tuner, but input now is with HDMI ports.
On other things, the TV I bought is now $50 more at Walmart 🙂 We can conclude it was discounted for real at least that much.
@Jen:
73/100K daily new cases, 3rd highest behind Michigan and Minnesota.
New cases 49% increase in last 14 days (rolling average).
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html?pageType=LegacyCollection&collectionName=Maps+and+Trackers&label=Maps+and+Trackers&module=hub_Band®ion=inline&template=storyline_band_recirc
(Not sure if COVID stuff is still not behind the paywall).
Stephen Sondheim has died
@Sleeping Dog:
I read that he enjoyed Thanksgiving yesterday with friends…and that he was working on a new show. At 91. What an amazing life and career, active and productive till the very end.
They’ll be dimming the lights on Broadway tonight.
The latest worrisome COVID variant has been dubbed Omicron, and there’s real reason for concern. Apparently it beat or is competing with Delta for dominance in Pretoria. Delta was bad, this may be worse.
There’s reason to suspect it may evade existing antibodies, either from vaccination or natural infection, or that these antibodies might be less effective at neutralizing Omicron. As usual, though, there’s little said about T cells, the other BIG part of the immune response.
One of the new antiviral COVID pills works by disrupting RNA replication, because it mimics and RNA base. No mutation can impart resistance against that*. So if the FDA gives emergency use authorization and the manufacturers get going, we should at least be able to treat it.
the best thing to do, still, is to get vaccinated, get a booster, wear a mask, avoid crowded spaces, avoid indoor spaces where people don’t wear masks (like theaters, bars, restaurants, etc.), keep your distance from others, and so on. You know, what we’ve been doing for the past 20 months.
the other best thing to do is to rush vaccines to low income countries, so they won’t incubate variants like Omicron. This is not the exclusive domain of these countries, the Alpha variant arose in Britain, but lack of vaccines raises the odds.
*Well, the odds of an RNA virus becoming a DNA virus are slim. Also, viruses don’t ingest nutrients, so they can’t acquire resistance by developing different surface receptors, or by learning to put these molecules in vacuoles.