Sunday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. CSK says:

    Anne Rice, author of the Vampire series and erotica under the name A. N. Roquelaure, has died. She was 80, and had suffered a stroke.

    I never read any of her work, nor saw any of the movies based on it, but Interview with the Vampire was a major phenomenon in popular culture, spawning a decades-long fascination with the undead and a host of imitations.

    2
  2. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Judd Legum
    @JuddLegum

    1. Trump’s “media company” is currently valued at $2 BILLION.
    It has no product, no customers, and no revenue. But it’s much worse than that.
    Follow along if interested.

    2. The most detailed information we have about Trump’s media company is from an investor presentation filed with the SEC. I want to draw your attention to Page 22 of the presentation which is an overview of the “Infrastructure” of the company. Pretty important!

    5. The entire page describing the “infrastructure” of Trump’s media company is cut-and-pasted from other sites. In other words, not only does this company not have any technical infrastructure it could not be bothered to even write its own slide of what the infrastructure will be.

    6. Yet, this is a company purportedly worth $2 BILLION. An unknown investor or investors have kicked in $1 BILLION. But there is little evidence it really exists.

    More on the mirage of Trump Media & Technology Group.

    3
  3. CSK says:

    Clown show in action:

    http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-bill-oreilly-tour-begins-empty-seats-florida-live-arena-1658541

    Even in Florida they can’t get no respect.

  4. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    It’s Trump. It’s a transparently shoddy scam engineered to appeal to suckers. So what else is new?

    1
  5. Sleeping Dog says:

    Cali is going to move forward on a vigilante law that targets assault weapons.

    https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-11/in-response-to-texas-abortion-law-newsom-calls-for-legislation-to-restrict-assault-weapons

    It’ll get tied up in court and unlike the TX abortion law, the SC will let the injunction stand, keeping the law from going into effect. Eventually they’ll throw it out on some made up 2nd amendment reasoning. Before the proposed Cali law is even introduced, the enforcement method will be a dead letter.

    The SC will gut Roe using the Mississippi case and TX, and other states, have already introduced legislation that mimics MS. With Roe gone, the SC will then declare both the TX and Cali vigilante laws unconstitutional.

    You read here first.

    3
  6. Mikey says:

    @CSK: I never read the books but did watch the movie, which was generally well-received by audiences. I haven’t watched it recently, but recall enjoying it and thinking Tom Cruise made a far better vampire Lestat than I had expected.

  7. OzarkHillbilly says:

    After a year and a half of pouring blood, sweat and tears, Demi Skipper has successfully taken one single hair pin and traded it up all the way to a house.

    In May this year, the Guardian spoke to her after she’d traded three tractors for one of only a few Chipotle celebrity cards in the world, worth about $20,000. She had been inspired by Kyle MacDonald, who in 2006 traded a red paperclip all the way to a house, and hoped to reach her goal by summer’s end.

    Only a few months later than hoped, Skipper, who is 29, has been handed the keys to a little house near Nashville, Tennessee. No mortgage. No fees. And not a penny spent (except on shipping). The modest ‘fixer upper’ house, complete with a big garden, is her 28th trade since she embarked on her project in May 2020.
    …………………….
    “There were just so many negative people saying it wasn’t possible. I was willing to do this for five years if that’s what it took to get to the house.” She beams: “I wake up and I’m like ‘is this real?’ I have the house. I traded this from a bobby pin!”
    ……………..
    Skipper and her husband are leaving their rental home in San Francisco and are moving to Tennessee to renovate and live in their house. There’s a plan in the works to trade the original bobby pin back for something and frame it in their new home.

  8. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @CSK: I had expected Nunes to actually have to DO something for his cut.

  9. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    He is. He’s lending his name to the project.

  10. Kathy says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    In other words, not only does this company not have any technical infrastructure it could not be bothered to even write its own slide of what the infrastructure will be.

    They couldn’t even write “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV”?

    1
  11. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Kathy: Heh, thanx. I needed that laugh.

    @CSK: His cows have more cachet than he does.

  12. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    As I said the other day, Nunes should stick to milking cows rather than investors.

    1
  13. Jen says:

    New Hampshire hospitals are starting to report out their hospitalization statistics to include vaccination status.

    3
  14. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @CSK: Heh, I love this closing of the article:

    The structure of the PIPE deal, however, suggests that these investors are less interested in influencing a future president than fleecing retail traders for a quick buck. Levine notes that typically “in SPAC mergers, the PIPE investors can’t sell their stock the day after the merger closes.” Rather, the PIPE investors need to wait “a couple of months.” In this case, however, “DWAC and TMTG have promised the PIPE investors that they’ll be able to freely resell their stock the minute the merger closes.”

    In other words, there seems to be a real push by these investors to flip these stocks immediately. The investors, whoever they are, seem to be keenly aware that time is not on their side. They want to be able to cash out before anyone gets too much information about how the company actually performs.

    It’s a deal that makes Trump money and the investors money. The people holding the bag will be retail investors paying premium prices for a mirage of a company because they like Trump.

    That group includes Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-GA), who bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of DWAC on the day it announced its merger with TMTG. She paid somewhere between $67.96 and $175 per share. That means she’s probably already lost about half of her investment — and possibly a lot more.

    A fool and her money are soon parted.

    2
  15. CSK says:

    @Jen:
    The majority of the cases appear to be among the unvaxxed.

    1
  16. steve says:

    We are now having pts lie about covid to us. They answer all of their screening questions as having had no exposure but when tested they come back positive and we find out they had someone at home with covid. Given how many people online have said they would just get a fake card if they needed a covid passport I guess this should not have surprised me. I passed a lot of that off as online bravado and didnt think we would see people directly lie like that.

    Steve

    2
  17. Kylopod says:

    @CSK: @Mikey: I read the first book and saw the movie (ages ago, though I rewatched it a few years ago), and I liked it a lot—in fact it’s one of the better vampire movies I have seen. There was a film adaptation of the third book, Queen of the Damned with none of the original cast, but it wasn’t well received critically or commercially, and I haven’t seen it. (It’s noted for the final film appearance of the singer Aaliyah before her tragic death at 22.) I have for a long time felt the books lent themselves to a TV series. (The first movie is sometimes criticized for its lack of a cohesive plot—it’s just a series of events in the “lives” of these two vampires across several centuries—but I didn’t mind it.) Apparently there were plans for a series on Hulu a few years back, but they fell through.

  18. CSK says:

    Chris Wallace is leaving Fox News to join CNN+, a streaming platform soon to launch.

    1
  19. CSK says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Yes, that was GREAT, wasn’t it? A fool indeed.

    @steve:
    You have to wonder why, if Covid is either a big nothing (just a slight cold!) or a Deep State hoax to force us all into Communism, they’d feel compelled to lie about not having it.

    4
  20. Kathy says:

    @CSK:

    I was intrigued enough by the movie to read the first book, and then for some reason i read several others.

    They weren’t bad, but they weren’t memorable either. I appreciated the attempt to explain how vampires came to be, and how they develop over time, especially as the “facts” presented were consistent. I think that’s what I remember most about the books.

    One thing I found disappointing, is that these beings do very little with their very long lives. For one thing, an immortal vampire is perfectly well placed to keep a good record of history as it develops. And did none of them think of taking up scientific research, or even to fund it?

  21. CSK says:

    @Kathy:
    Well, I suppose if you have to crawl back into your coffin during sunrise to sundown it would somewhat limit your opportunities for productive enterprise.

    But I admit that A Vampire’s History of the World would be an engaging read. Longer than Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, though.

  22. Mu Yixiao says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    She beams: “I wake up and I’m like ‘is this real?’ I have the house. I traded this from a bobby pin!”

    And she did, of course, pay all the appropriate sales. income, and import taxes… right?

    (The IRS counts “income” from bartering (e.g., a gain in worth) as taxable income.)

    1
  23. MarkedMan says:

    @CSK: I never understood the appeal of his “I’m the only celibate in the whore house” schtick

  24. Mu Yixiao says:

    @Kathy:

    I was intrigued enough by the movie to read the first book, and then for some reason i read several others.

    They weren’t bad, but they weren’t memorable either.

    They’re pleasantly-written brain candy. She had a way with words and phrasing, and a feel for characters, that make you forget that there’s really no plot.

    She’s similar to Andrew M Greeley, who’s “Blackie Ryan Mysteries”, I devoured when I was in college. They’re fairly formulaic locked-room mysteries, with some (nigh-heretical) glimpses into the Chicago-Irish Catholic Church (we follow Blackie from lowly priest to a bishop over the course of a dozen or more novels).

    There’s nothing wrong with enjoying some well-written fluff.

    1
  25. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    Is there anyone left at Faux News that could be considered a journalist? It is ripe that he is going to a CNN affiliate.

    1
  26. MarkedMan says:

    @Jen: These numbers are a bit deceiving. Overall, New Hampshire has 2/3 of the population fully vaxed, so even at first glance the numbers show higher likelihood of hospitalization among the untaxed than the raw numbers seem to show. But when you consider that for the age groups most likely to be hospitalized the vaccination rate is hovering at 90% and above, the penalty for being unvaxed is at least an order of magnitude greater than the raw numbers indicate.

    1
  27. CSK says:

    @MarkedMan:
    Over at Lucianne.com they’re saying that they might just watch Fox again now that rabid ultra-leftist Chris Wallace is departing.
    @Sleeping Dog:
    You know, I so seldom watch Fox that I’ve no idea who their journalists are, except for Bret Baier, who like Wallace gets cursed by the right for being a Communist subversive.

  28. Kathy says:

    You’re not really fully vaccinated, even if you got a booster, until around 95% or more of the population in your area gets at least two vaccine doses.

  29. Gustopher says:

    @MarkedMan:

    I never understood the appeal of his “I’m the only celibate in the whore house” schtick

    Only whore in a nunnery seems more fun.

    2
  30. Kathy says:

    Yesterday I caught myself making up a false memory.

    Fact: I tripped and fell moving about a known place in the dark due to an obstacle which shouldn’t have been there. I banged my knees a little, but they weren’t even bruised.

    Later, passing through that same place once the sun had come up, I noticed I came like within half a meter of hitting my head on a table, had I been walking closer to it (but then I wouldn’t have tripped), or fallen differently.

    Later on, thinking back on the incident, I could picture seeing the table’s edge whizzing past as I fell.

    That not only didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened. It was dark, remember? I saw nothing because I couldn’t see anything. Not the table, not the floor, and not the thing that tripped me.

    A fall is happens too quickly anyway, and the view is so out of the ordinary, that most people can’t even process the visual input in a way that makes sense. Perhaps if you fall often, or are taken down often, and need to concentrate on the way down, like football players for example, you may train your brain to notice what happens when you do.

  31. Michael Reynolds says:

    @steve:
    As your medical colleague, Dr. House was known to say: Everyone lies.

    1
  32. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    “You read here first.”

    True, but I thought it as soon as I read the headline about it. I hadn’t even clicked on the article yet.

    1
  33. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: What has me puzzled about the “offering” is how many of the investors are exactly like MTG and how you go about finding people like that for this kind of investment. I get the whole “getting in on the ground floor” thing, but this is a FG enterprise FFS! It’s not the ground floor, it’s the 5th sub basement. (And there’s no elevator or stairway in the building, either.)

  34. CSK says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    Yeah, I know. What I don’t know is how much money Marjorie has to throw into a doomed enterprise such as this. All I do know is that Trump will probably pocket a tidy sum and walk away laughing at the saps.

  35. Gustopher says:

    @steve:

    We are now having pts lie about covid to us. They answer all of their screening questions as having had no exposure but when tested they come back positive and we find out they had someone at home with covid.

    I assume it is the same as the people who lie about slipping at home after the showing and ending up with a cantaloupe or something up their butt. Except, worse, because cantaloupes aren’t generally contagious.

    1
  36. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Mu Yixiao: I’m not their accountant so I wouldn’t know.

    1
  37. Mimai says:

    @Gustopher:

    Tyler is NOT a liar…..he is merely the most focally unfortunate man to ever inhabit these hills.

    Also, post-butt cantaloupe can indeed be infectious.

    1
  38. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK:

    All I do know is that Trump will probably pocket a tidy sum,,,

    I’m not even sure I’ll go that far. My money would be on TMTG walking away with most of the money if I were going to bet. The “laughing at the saps” part I’ll agree will probably happen, but again, I’m not sure who’ll be doing the laughing (other than it won’t be MTG).

  39. CSK says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    Well, it’s been set up as a Trump enrichment fund. Why do you think MTG will walk away with most of the money?

  40. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: Not MGT, TMTG–the company FG is merging with in this “media venture.”