Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, July 12, 2020
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50 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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The headline of the day-
A critically endangered gorilla is about to be a mom, and she’s using a doll for practice
The Florida headline of the day-
Sheriff: Driver crashes into occupied church and sets it on fire
If I were Biden, I’d go after the people who enabled and aided Trump, like Barr and the rest, and let New York deal with Trump.
This way he can avoid the appearance of engaging in a political vendetta. More important, he does not teach the wrong lesson to would-be tin-pot dictators like Trump: if you want to avoid prison, stay in power by any means necessary.
We need the opposite of Sulla’s lesson. Sulla thought he was saving the Republic, when what he taught others was how to seize and exert power.
The F-16’s Replacement Won’t Have a Pilot at All:
This is for all you city folk: Noise control: sound wave system cancels out drum of traffic
My in-laws lived in 4th floor condo on a very busy city street in Palma and had no AC (few on the island did). They certainly could have used this, especially for the damn mopeds.
@sam:
Fusion is the power of the future — and always will be!
Don’t hold your breath on this one.
@DrDaveT:
If anything, a combat drone is championed by the Pentagon and not the Air Force brass. Yesterday’s post on Gen. Milley made the point that top Army officials are always Rangers, Airborne or Spec. Forces. For the Navy it is ship commanders and carrier group commanders. For the AF, the path to the top is being a fighter jockey.
@OzarkHillbilly: my $60 Anker active noise cancelling headphones take traffic noise from a roar to a whisper.
@Teve: Can you sleep with them on? My in-laws are gone and I don’t need them where I live, but I am curious.
@Bill:
Dude, is that Adam Driver?
@sam:
There goes the third installment of Top Gun. It just doesn’t seem as dramatic to have Iceman and Maverick open the door to their offices to argue in a hallway.
@OzarkHillbilly: I couldn’t because I’m a side sleeper.
how the American worker got fleeced
The Business headline of the day-
7-Eleven Day is canceled this year, meaning no free Slurpees
@Sleeping Dog: Ranger and Airborne are leadership schools that any specialty can be recommended and selected for…although it is true that the majority of the graduates of those courses are in Combat Arms (i.e. infantry, tankers, air assault, etc)
Special Forces are a very niche community that isn’t top heavy on General officers. What they do is considered a tactical function so their Generals are rarely put in high level strategic jobs or jobs at the nexus of politics and the military (i.e. CJCS or a Service Chief). They generally make terrible Staff officers for obvious reasons. Special Forces Generals are mostly posted in positions where they oversee the operations conducted as well as the training and equipping of Forces. The exception is the Commander of Socom who is a quasi-Service chief for training of special forces of all services to work together as 1 integrated team.
The Air Force absolutely is a fighter pilot guild…but there is a pecking order by platform. You wont see an A-10 driver as the Chief of Staff or Chairman. Personally I think F-15 and F-22 pilots are the smartest but they are outnumbered drastically by F16 pilots (who are the most represented specialty in the General Officer corps.)
Believe it or not… Navy Flag officers that make it to the big leagues of DOD level posts (vice being posted in a Navy job) are Navy pilots, usually FA-18 drivers. They are usually very motivational but not keen on details. After that its the Surface Warfare guys/gals… and specifically– people who Commanded
Carriers/ Destroyers that launch cruise missiles.
@Sleeping Dog: I have read that the USAF top brass are increasingly having to admit all of their own studies show flying skills are no longer the most important to be a successful fighter pilot. Now it’s analysis of the incoming data stream(s) and pushing the right buttons. Combine that with the cost of the new platforms — too expensive to risk in the kind of combat where flying skills are critical unless it’s absolutely unavoidable — and the logic is inevitable.
I have been known to assert that the decision to make the F-35 a single-seat fighter was a huge gamble that the software package would be able to do enough of the data analysis that a human could make the correct final decisions while being distracted by having to fly the plane.
@Bill:
Quelle tragique.
GOP Governor Larry Hogan:
Hogan is one of the few GOP executive officials that might be able to do something about this. I only wish the interviewer had followed up with what I believe is the crucial question: “Do you think that simply means just educating minorities and women about Republican policies, or does it actually involve giving them a seat at the big table, listening to them and altering Republican policies based on their goals?”
@Michael Cain:
Of course, if you’re going to put all of your eggs in the basket of “40 million lines of software that happens to have wings and an engine,” you should probably treat the software as the primary risk and the focus of your management approach. This… didn’t happen.
@sam:
Sounds Swedish.
@MarkedMan:
What is left that Republicans could actually champion, that is both popular and good for America? I can’t see them becoming the party of decreasing wealth inequality, promoting equal justice, or avoiding environmental catastrophe. Economic populism is a con, but it might work — except of course that their commitment to anti-labor and anti-education policies is almost as firm as their commitment to racism has been. They already own the single-issue anti-abortion and Christian theocracy fringe; there’s no room for growth there.
What worries me is that starting a war to stir up jingoism and paint the Dems as anti-American doesn’t seem nearly implausible enough at the moment.
About those drones, and the brass: See, Colonel Blimp, the Life and Death of.
@DrDaveT:
In one of the moments between slumber and lucidity I had the thought that Putin would gift Trump with an October Surprise–an attack to be attributed to Antifa, Islamists, whatever group.
Far-fetched. Then again, he’s done it before.
Two pilla were released today for Texas. In one of them, Trump is leading Biden by one. In the other Biden is leading Trump by five.
Texas is in play.
“Let’s Play Two!” Ernie Banks
Major League Baseball is scheduled to start in 10 days.
But before this season starts I think we should look back at one of baseballs finer moments and then be glad that there will be no fans at the games.
(My personal take is that after 6 years of the unholy designated hitter rule in the American League something like this was bound to happen.)
@Mister Bluster: My brother was actually there! Craziness. And it is one of the reasons I keep telling my kids not to make the mistake that thuggish cops who like to beat unarmed people will for some reason act like gentlemen if the skin is white. Those cops charged in swinging batons at heads and the crowd was 99% white.
@Kurtz: JFC what a horrifying possibility.
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah! Great idea. My current apartment stays cool most of the summer without needing to open windows, but I’ve had places where I would definitely bought that.
@Bill: Wasn’t 7/11 day yesterday anyway? Not that it would matter for me. The closest 7/11 is ~50 mile away in Vancouver, and I’ve never been a Slurpees guy.
@MarkedMan: I trust Larry Hogan to be able to lie about that. Don’t you?
@MarkedMan:..I keep telling my kids not to make the mistake that thuggish cops who like to beat unarmed people will for some reason act like gentlemen if the skin is white.
You got that right. There were very few black students enrolled
at Sleepytown U in the spring of 1970 when thousands of white college students demonstrating against the draft and the Vietnam war were attacked with tear gas and billy clubs by the Illinois State Police for two weeks leading to the close of the University.
@Mister Bluster:
Bill Veeck was GM of the White Sox at the time, but Disco Demolition Night was the work of his son, Mike. It was a disaster so far as Mike’s career went. He was black balled out of baseball for a decade before re-emerging as a front office person of some minor league team.
@Kurtz:
Its possible but Trump may blunder in some way. Like ordering an attack on Freedonia or the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
The creationists, you won’t be surprised to hear, are almost all Trumpers. Some of them are now claiming that Trump has absolutely no responsibility for fighting Covid, it’s up to the governors of the individual states. Here’s an example:
linky
Any of your political hobbyists want to weigh in on this?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
You’re right. I’m not a 7-11 or a Slurpees person and I lived two or less miles from a store for 30 plus years.
Today would have been my brother Charlie’s 44th wedding anniversary but he and Barbara divorced some time 15-20 years ago. I have a few short but amusing tales from it.
1- My sister Patty was dating at the time her eventual husband. His name is Marty. Marty is Jewish and as the custom for a person of that faith, was going to wear a yamulke in church. Barbara’s parents (They were Italian and Roman Catholic) learned of this and supposedly got into a tizzy as a result.
My born in Germany (and Roman Catholic) maternal grandfather supposedly said to Marty. “If you don’t wear a yarmulke, I will.” Papa could be very funny, especially with his Charles Laughton impersonations, he just drank way too much. Maybe that helped make him funny.
2- At the wedding reception, me and my brother George spent time a good of time drinking champagne. We were 15 and 13 at the time. I have no recollection of whether I had a hangover the next day or not. If I ever was drunk in my life, this was the one and only occurrence.
3- My cousin Beverly grew so tired of her husband Alex (An alcoholic) referring to Marty as Jew boy, she knocked Alex off his feet with a whack of her purse around the time the reception was ending.
So far as I know Alex and Bev are still married and he still drinks. But Alex is one of those sad drunks who doesn’t take his misery out on others. If he ever tried, I think could beat the s**t out of him.
It’s always about Tiny.
https://apnews.com/a3f8fe11e88898cd4fa96ea50038e57d
Chalk up another win for Tiny.
@Sleeping Dog:
Ungrateful s.o.b., isn’t he?
@Sleeping Dog:
Now that’s what I call WINNING.
@Teve: That’s kinda what I thought, so am I.
@sam: overly complex pieces of machinery + AI + programmer who didn’t know about quaternions == planes flipping over during flight.
Do we really need to learn this lesson again? Sigh.
@grumpy realist: I know what quaternions are, but how do they relate to programming?
@Sleeping Dog: @Sleeping Dog: He could fuck up a wet dream.
@Sleeping Dog:..Trump rips private Texas border wall built by his supporters
Tommy Fisher, CEO of Fisher Industries, said Sunday that he thought the president “just got some misinformation on this stuff” and that he had “complete respect” for Trump.
“The wall will stand for 150 years, you mark my words,” Fisher said.
Of course no one born even today will live that long to bear this out.
Another bootlicker for Trump.
There is apparently a Navy ship on fire in San Diego right now.
Link
Oh. My. God.
“We’ve had 21 deaths in Wyoming. Most of those were people with pre-existing conditions or in old folks homes,” trustee Kevin Christopherson said during the board’s Wednesday night meeting. “They were going to die. They just died sooner.”
He said the quiet part out loud. The Boomers on my Facebook are PISSED.
This is from our very own Casper Star Tribune.
https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/health/as-reopening-plan-that-calls-for-face-coverings-school-board-members-express-resistance/article_0b67f362-9532-5832-a1fe-ef8662e55431.html?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter_CSTribune
@Jax:
Hey Kevin — of whom is that NOT true? Or are you expecting The Rapture sometime soon?
@DrDaveT: I thought we were still at All Lives Matter, but again…..he said the quiet part out loud, All Lives DO NOT Matter. 😐
@Teve:
I believe @grumpy is referring to a possibly apocryphal legend that early versions of the F-16 avionics software would incorrectly flip the orientation of the aircraft when it crossed the equator. See for example this article from 1986. I had not heard that quaternions were involved; indeed there is at least once source on the web that says using quaternions (which preserve smooth orientation) could have prevented such an error. Also, no credible accounts talk about this bug getting through ground tests — it was caught and fixed before the plane ever flew.
@Jax:
It’s unfair to focus on Christopherson… Let’s let McCullar have a moment in the spotlight.
For some reason, the simplest of concepts–an infected person sometimes spreads their infection to others–overwhelms the brain for these people.
Now back to Christopherson:
What does a Soviet judge give the American in a contest of stupid?
@Kurtz: Haha….I don’t know, what?
Yeah, the whole thing was eye-rollingly stupid. This is the largest school district in the state, and those are their leaders. 🙁 Did you read the comments? I was surprised there wasn’t more backlash right on the article.
Over in Conservative Land, even when a good point is made, many of the foot soldiers don’t like it too much…the whataboutism and supposed crimes of Obama run rampant in the comment section where they defend their dear leader…oh, and just when you thought that Ted Cruz couldn’t get any more slimy…
@Jax:
Darn¹, I was hoping you had an answer.
¹I’m practicing the no profanity thing as per the post today.²
²Is the alternative to “darn” considered profanity?³
³damn, this is tedious for me.⁴
⁴shit!ⁿ
ⁿI mean, crap!*
*what was the question, again?