Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, October 27, 2022
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76 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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There are many important questions in the world today. Will we ever have fusion power in a usable, non-explodey format? Is Kanye mentally ill, a creep, or both? Will the inevitable drowning of Florida compensate for the down-sides of climate change?
But the question I propose is this: WTF is it with Europeans and shower design? 90% of European showers* do not enclose completely and thus spray water all over the bathroom. Why? Can some helpful European reader show me on this Lego model of a bathroom where the bad shower door hurt you? I’m in Florence looking out the window at Brunelleschi’s dome and somehow Italians can make that – more than five centuries ago – but are helpless when faced with a shower?
*Totally verified and accurate data.
@Michael Reynolds:
In my experience, there’s a difference between hotel and home showers. for example, most hotels I’ve stayed at in America have a shower and tub combo. Three homes I’ve visited did not.
@Michael Reynolds: When we were in Athens we stayed in a hotel that advertised full bath. The hotel was fairly nice, probably a 3 – 3.5 star hotel, but the bathroom was 1 star. The “shower” consisted of a a tiled area with no enclosure and a spray nozzle. You had to sit on the tile floor and spray the water on yourself, trying to not have it go all over the place. I found it mostly inconvenient but I’m a guy. My wife found it to be much more than a nuisance. Learned our lesson, when we’ve gone abroad since we always check reviews of hotels and see comments about the bathroom.
@Michael Reynolds:
Lots of homes in the UK have no separate shower at all; due to lack of space.
All you get is a shower outlet from the mixer taps.
What percentage of UK hotels that is true of, no idea.
In my experience the UK is a bit backward re. bathroom fittings generally.
Alito says leak of draft abortion ruling put justices at risk of assassination
Awwwww po po wittle Sammy is afwaid… Now you know how the rest of us have felt ever since your ludicrous 2nd amendment ruling. Life is rough all over.
eta: I love the fact that he seems to think the ruling itself has nothing to do with his increased risks.
Iranian government appears to be unable to restore it’s full control over large areas of the country.
Protesters seize Mahabad governor’s office after young man killed
Seen some reporting on twitter indicating rebels are in effective control of large areas of Mahabad and other parts of Iranian Kurdistan.
But also in other cities across Iran continue to be marked by protests and unrest
@JohnSF:
When I lived in Scotland, showers were apparently non-existent.
@CSK:
All you need to do for a shower in Scotland most of the year is just step outside. 😉
Mexico has approved legislation to end daylight saving time. This means we set the clocks back one hour this Saturday night, and then never adjust them again until someone inevitably revives DST some time in the future (Kathy’s first law: nothing lasts forever).
But remember Kathy’s first law: nothing is ever that simple.
There are some exceptions. Sonora will keep whatever time Arizona has, which last I heard was also standard time all year. Quintana Roo will keep EST/EDT for the sake of the millions of US tourists who visit Cancun and other places every year. Lastly. all municipalities in the US border will keep the times of the border US counties, in the interest of commerce.
Long story short, remember to ask for the local time when you travel.
Late reply to @Beth
I’m tempted to read the last few novels, as it looks the show ended in an abbreviated Season 6 (one ep to go, and then I can go back to series I’ve been neglecting), and it leaves many questions unanswered.
But more likely I’ll just hunt for spoilers and synopses online. My reading pile is already huge, and I haven’t even taken a dive into Scribd’s catalog lately.
Snippets of news:
Lucianne Goldberg, 87. founder of Lucianne.com, has died.
Ye has shut down his private Christian school, Donda Academy, down for the rest of the year.
It’s a blistering 6 degrees here right now. “Outside” is being very rude. 😛 😛
Ha! Didn’t one of the commenter’s here have a dream of playing a dead body on a TV show? Mister Bluster, was that you? 😛
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/27/tiktok-living-dead-josh-csi/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_national
@Michael Reynolds: Can’t speak for Europe, but in Korea, I never lived in a place that had a shower enclosure–at all (I had one bathroom that didn’t even have a sink and remember a friend who paid $50/month more to move to an apartment where the bathroom DID have a sink). I found the floor drain worked fine (I put drain cleaner down one once), but I did need to buy shower shoes (hotels provided them gratis), but I did struggle for a short while with tripping on the bathroom door threshold.
Over all, I wish I could convince my landlord to convert my current bathroom to the same configuration. As I get older, I’m finding that the tall step out of the bathtub is becoming a little problematical even with two grab handles in the enclosure, Also, I don’t like the shower curtain flapping against me and making the shower area even smaller as the rising hot air from the shower pulls the curtain. 🙁
@Just nutha ignint cracker: When I was stationed in Japan in the 80s, I loved the all tile bathroom with a drain in the center. To clean you just had to hose the whole place down. It has been a dream of mine to duplicate that here in the states. Unfortunately, all my houses were built on a slab so rearranging plumbing is very expensive.
@OzarkHillbilly: He might be thinking that he’s always been an @$$#*!3 and is perplexed that things have changed, I suppose. Some people aren’t good at self-reflection/awareness. Or empathy, either.
One of the most pernicious things about “Don’t Say Gay”, both Florida’s version and the proposed Federal version, is the attempt to write queer people out of history. We can be suppressed if we are just new fangled perversion. If no one knows there is a long history of Trans people, well then, off to the gulag. Make no mistake, Don’t Say Gay is laying the groundwork for genocide.
Here, here’s some of our history: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/doctors-who-gill-peterson
@Kathy:
I really hated where they ended the TV series. The whole Duarte part was well done in the book and really puts a cap on the whole story in a fairly satisfying way. If you do read the books, fold in Strange Dogs, it really makes everything that comes after it more poingient and understandable.
@CSK: I have to assume that the school’s enrollment is so small that no one will be adversely impacted by the closure, but visiting the website, I looked like though the school was small it wasn’t so small that the move won’t affect students and parents. I wish the people who are train wrecks would stick to being self-absorbed [expletive, deleted].
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It requires that parents sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Remember what I said a couple of days ago about advertisers fleeing Twitter if it becomes a noxious sewer of hate? Elon has some thoughts.
@CSK:
That caused a flashback to Jodie Foster asking “You want to classify prime numbers?”
My old place had a huge bathroom. The shower stall had a lower ceiling for some reason, and it was completely enclosed by the sliding door and acrylic panels above it. The steam coming out when one opened the door fogged the large mirrors. I loved that shower.
My current place’s shower lets the heat and steam out over the top of the door, but the bathroom is so tiny it doesn’t matter.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to run everything through a VPN. So, after research, I bought a service. Put it on the laptops, phones, kid’s phones, etc. Was watching the TV and realized I could run that through VPN also (I use a Fire Stick). So I downloaded the app and set it up.
Here is the interesting part. The connection was a server in Houston. All of a sudden I was getting political ads from Houston. Makes me wonder if the increasing use of the VPN would play havoc with targeted advertising if they don’t know where you are.
@Jen:
“Becomes?”
GDP increased in Q3.
Republican economic doomsayers are silent.
@Mikey: Hahaha, yes, the “an even worse” once content moderation goes away was implied… 😀
From Bloomberg:
“Early voters in Arizona were met by masked poll-monitors armed with handguns and full tactical military gear, who have turned to watching ballot boxes ostensibly to search for voter fraud based on Donald Trump’s false 2020 claims.”
@CSK:
Oh, and Steve Bannons has called on Infowars listeners to become poll watchers.
@Michael Reynolds: On the flip side, why can’t American’s make a public toilet door that actually closes and doesn’t provide a view to anyone walking by?!?!
Humans (and their cultures about what is acceptable) are weird.
@Beth:
The one thing I really want to know is what is the protomolecule. Not the technobabble definition (I’ve my own: it’s organic programmable matter*; old Trekkies know this stuff), but it’s purpose.
I’d like to know what the aliens who made it were doing with it, and why they got into a war with some other aliens (if that’s what happened*), and where those aliens are now, but if I don’t then I don’t.
*It’s possible the protomolecule got out of control and its makers had to develop the means to destroy it. Among many other stock theories.
@Jax:..play a dead body on a TV show…
Yes. These days I am content to watch Law and Order reruns. I’ll bump over 75 in January. A full day of jumping in and out of the car delivering newspapers every Wednesday has me feeling like death eatin’ crackers Thursday morning to the point that it’s all I can do to set the trash out before the sun comes up so I can beat the refuse wagon.
Kudos to Josh Nalley. He can play dead for both of us.
@Beth: Well, that was kind of a hair-raising piece of history, that speaks to both the long history of trans people as part of humanity and the kinds of trauma that is part of their collective and individual memories.
This week I’m making a casserole of chicken milanesas in chipotle sauce with beans and cheese.
there’ll be a layer of tortillas with beans facing up on the bottom, topped with some slices of manchego cheese. Over this goes a layer of milanesas in chipotle sauce. Next a layer of tortillas with beans facing down, more cheese, and a layer of tortillas with beans facing up. Over this, the rest of the milanesas in sauce. Maybe more cheese on top if there’s any left. It goes in the oven for a few minutes, just to melt the cheese.
The sauce requires:
one sliced onion
a 105 gram can of chipotles
2-4 tablespoons cottage cheese
690 gr. tomato sauce
3-4 cloves garlic minced
1tsp. powdered chicken bouillon
Some melty cheese (about 75-100 grams)
black pepper, paprika, oregano to taste.
First saute the onions. while that is going on, add the cottage cheese and chipotles to the blender and liquefy. When the onions are done, add the minced garlic. After a minute, add the tomato sauce and heat until it bubbles. Add the bouillon and spices and mix well. Then add the chipotle and cottage mix from the blender, than the melty cheese (I use Oaxaca cheese), mix until the cheese melts and gets incorporated to the sauce.
@Mister Bluster:
Wow, you brought me back! In a former life, every December, I would attend a performance of “A Tuna Christmas.” It’s a delightful play.
One of the characters delivers the line: He looks like death chewin’ on a cracker.
It hit my funny bone every single time. Her delivery is perfect. I’m smiling just now thinking about it. Thank you for the memory.
@daryl and his brother darryl: On pace to end 2022 with about 1% increase in GDP, don’t think Biden administration will be putting that out as an accomplishment. Q3 was greatly aided by plummeting oil prices, oil was $108 on July 1st and $79 on Sep 30th. Its a good bet that oil prices will not drop 25% in the fourth quarter. Chances of recession are pretty good in 2023, and inflation will still be a problem well into 2023 (it will drop a lot in the 4th quarter but a lot of that is mathematical, 4th quarter of last year were the worst months for inflation so as they drop out the year over year will almost definitely go down a lot). But core inflation will still be 5%+ for a long time.
Bottom line is its hard for the Democrats to run on the economy, yes people have jobs but wage growth is certainly not keeping pace with inflation
@Mimai:..saltines…
First time I heard it was years ago from a woman who spent her time on roller skates in dive bars. She also had a habit of spouting out “Christ on a crutch…” at totally inappropriate times.
We got to be good friends.
@Mister Bluster:
Sounds like something Jax would do. Probably has done.
Andy too 😉
Speaking of showers and shower cubicles, I’m reminded of a hotel in Ghent.
The shower cubicle there had complex controls and fittings, causing me to go “wut? whatsis for? wots these things then? eh?”
On reading the room instruction booklet, imagine my giggles on finding out it was a shower that doubled up as a sauna!
A fact that I put to good use next morning, after an evening spent drinking Belgian beer. 😉
Great description of the present U.K. government from someone commenting at the Guardian:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
The “asian shower” configuration, the entire bathroom is a shower, is becoming a thing here. There is a significant advantage aside from being the way things should be for the elderly or otherwise compromised: The entire bathroom floor is in a pan, no more worrying about water finding gaps when the silicone gets tired at the base of all fixtures and small flooding from the occasional fitting leak is thereby contained.
Oh look, Putin is back to loudly proclaiming that the US needs to “force” Kyiv to the negotiating table so he can get all nostalgic about how the Great Powers rule the world. FFS.
Nice going, Jayapal. What a stupid, STUPID, own goal.
St. Elon claims to have acquired Twitter.
I’ll await the obituary.
There’s some good news to balance this. same sex marriage is now recognized in all of Mexico’s states. Also, 10 states now have legalized abortion in the first trimester.
@Kathy:
Musk says he bought Twitter to “help humanity.”
Wonderful news!
Vlad the Impala has made another speech; to the Valdai Club.
(Known for their excellent luncheons and wine cellar, don’t you know)
Nataliya Vasilyeva:
On this point, look, here’s Liubov Plaksiuk (former history teacher) showing off her own entry in the parade float competition.
@CSK:
For anyone who buys that, I’ve this bridge in Brooklyn I’ve been meaning to sell cheap.
@Kathy:
If he lets Trump back, Trump will be out of TruthSocial and on Twitter so fast it will make your head spin.
@CSK:
We’ll see if I can drop Twitter faster than that, then 🙂
Speaking of Trump, the prosecutor in the Trump Org. fraud trial, Susan Hoffinger, said today that “If we were to strike every juror who had a negative opinion of Donald Trump, we wouldn’t be able to get a jury at all.”
In Iran, karma comes quickly:
Colonel and general responsible for drone supplies to Russia killed in Iran
We could argue about the particulars*, but why bother? It’s much ado about nothing and will have zero affect on the conduct of the war by either of the combatants or the people supporting them.
*ftr, I did not agree with the letter and wish they hadn’t, but I really can’t get my panties all twisted up over it. It will be all but forgotten in a week.
@CSK: Hmmm… I wonder where he got the idea to make people sign NDAs? And I wonder if he asked his lawyer if they would be legally binding? (A lot don’t seem to be.)
@CSK: If he was really interested in helping humanity, maybe he could consider ritual seppuku.
@Scott:
I’ve had a similar experience when using my phone as a hotspot.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: As I understand it, their are very narrow areas of the law that allow for them (corporate ideological property for one) but most times they are completely unenforceable. I now await a real lawyer coming to correct me.
There was a time when enrollment at Sleepytown U exploded from 5000 to 20,000 in just a few years. The locals did everything they could to accommodate the demand for student rentals including buying old trailer houses and cramming as many as they could into the back yards of their homes. One 13ft. trailer that I rented ($50/mo. 1972) was one of 3 or 4 in a back yard off an alley in town. The bathroom was in a corner of the bedroom. It might have been 3ft. on each side. And yes the whole thing was a shower stall with a drain in the floor. There was a tiny sink in the corner that would accommodate only one hand at a time under the faucet. The toilet was a prize. To flush it you had to turn a valve handle to get the water running and then step on a pedal that opened the bottom of the bowl to flush the waste.
I was almost asleep in bed when I heard a loud CLUNK from the bathroom. I opened the door to see that the toilet bowl had cracked an split in two. The front part laying on the floor. Good grief. Where is the land lord going to find another toilet like this one. I called him and the next day it was replaced. Somewhere he had a duplicate in storage.
One night in the winter the power went out. I did a little investigation outside before I called the landlord. The electric meter was mounted on the house at the front of the lot. I tried to trace the power line to the trailer but it was dark and I couldn’t follow it out. When the land lord arrived he looked around a bit. “Oh, here it is!” He reached to a puddle of water on the ground. There was the electric cable laying in the water. He picked it up out of the water, wiggled it around some and the lights in my trailer came back on!
“That can’t be safe.” I said. “you gotta’ do something about that.”
He mumbled something about calling an electrician.
It wasn’t long and the power went out again. I took a long tree branch and hit the power cable with it a few times and sure enough the lights came back on. After a few more calls to the land lord it was obvious he wasn’t going to do anything about it so I moved out.
@Scott: I dunno how this stuff works. I’ve been getting ads for the guy who was a logistics manager for the January DC tourists who’s running for Congress in Wisconsin all campaign long. I live in Washington and don’t disguise my location.
BTW. This guy is amazing! He’s going to enact term limits and prohibitions against Representatives and Senators working for lobbying firms after they retire! All by himself! With no one to help! He’s also going to make his city park safe for his grandchildren to go to. WOW!
@OzarkHillbilly:
No it is not, and unfortunately, no it may not.
It has gottten a lot of attention in pro-Russian commentary.
And it plays directly into a key element of Russian war concepts.
Putin is a secret policeman/politician; war and politics and propaganda are linked inextricably in his approach.
A key objective is to scare and horrify (by violence and atrocity) key western and especially US opinion sectors into a desire for peace, reinforced by economic factors: see the idiotic reference to oil in that idiotic letter.
A peace which can be obtained, preferably by maneuvering the US into negotiations that compel Ukraine to make peace on Russian terms.
Or if that is unobtainable, at this point an acceptable interim goal would be a ceasefire-in-place, enabling lots of quibbling over follow up terms, a “frozen conflict”, crippling Ukraine economically and leaving Russia able to restart the war at a time of it’s choosing.
It is also an incentive to Russia calculating that more escalation might do the the trick.
Far from having “zero effect” it could have an utterly horrifying effect.
It was stupidity of the first order.
Biden might consider a private message using the words of Clement Atlee to Harold Laski:
@JohnSF:
Agree 100 percent. As Stephen Collinson at CNN observed, Putin was watching and waiting for something exactly like this. It was a gift to him.
In the UK, Sunak’s entry into Downing Street provides the expected “new leader bounce” in the polls…wait, what’s that?
Like a dead cat, you say?
@CSK:
Well, hopefully the rapid walk-back, and dead-bat response of western parties and governments, may make Putin a bit cautious in his tendency to wishful thinking re. this letter.
Because that’s the danger; we have seen, repeatedly, that Putin is prone to wishful thinking.
At least there were no references to it in the Valdai speech I’ve spotted so far; not seen full English transcript yet though.
But it does feed into e.g this by Russian Ambassador to US, Anatoly Antonov:
But it’s a sad situation when Democrat Progressives are more wobbly than Giorgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy.
(A funky band, their “Post-Fascist Groove Thang” being a unexpected disco hit.)
I feel….dirty. An old computer client called me for help on setting up a Twitter account. I didn’t think much of it, I assumed he’d met some gal who had a Twitter account, or there was some new cattle website that he wanted to access faster. Once he got to the point where he was logged in and I’d had him turn off all but the necessary cookies and tracking bullshit, I said “Well, happy Twittering!”
He positively CHORTLED. I’ve never heard anybody chortle, I’ve always just seen the word and thought “I’m not even sure what that describes”.
Well, now I know. He’s excited because Elon Musk apparently bought Twitter and he’s gonna let Trump back on and he “wants to be the FIRST to welcome Trump back!”
Hand me the bleach, please. 😐 😐
So the f what? Who the f reads Russian commentary? Lighten up Francis.
Look, i swear to dawg, If in a week, 2 weeks at the most, nobody but Russian trolls will be talking about this, and if they are, you will then know who all the other Russian trolls are.
Fuck Russia, fuck their trolls. Who gives a fuck? Propaganda is a part of war. Again, mountains/molehills.
Meanwhile, Russia continues targeting civilian targets…
@Jax:
If it makes you feel any better, he’ll probably be beaten to the task by a bot.
Well, Trump has lost his appeal to keep his tax returns from Congress. Next stop, the Supreme Court, I suppose.
@Kathy: I thought about looking him up, but I’m going to just let him slide into the Twitter troll zone and pretend I still think of him as a good person. He’s one of the few I still fix computers for. I pretty much gave up on that shit, too much porn and Trump being the cause of their computer woes.
@JohnSF: And I’m not picking on anybody in particular, least of all you, but James has a particularly relevant post up right now: The Media is Biased Against Us!
I have gotten sick and tired of arguing with Libs complaining* about the media without ever doing anything about it. Push back? No, they just rage about how it’s all rigged against them. I’m tired of the whining, the rending of garments, the chicken little “the sky is falling…”
I am particularly bothered by those accusing these progressive DEMs of being on Putin’s payroll**. Maybe, just maybe, they were concerned about the loss of innocent lives???
*from politicians to lowly blog commenters, all of us can do something, however great or small, one way or the other
**and I am NOT talking about you, but I have read those comments from others and it really pisses me off
In a week or 2, this will be nothing. Those of us who support Ukraine need to focus on them. Everything else is chaff.
@JohnSF: And I’m sorry, this has been building up within me for several days now.
Holy crap this is delusional and bonkers.
https://apple.news/Ap-MD9bEJTOmlhJwUN0njYg
Please let that link work computer spirits.
@Beth:
What about all the Yankee Democrats? Where do they fit into the equation?
@Kathy: The protomolecule is a basically a mechanical “phage” able to hijack any replication system it comes into contact. It then builds/does whatever is hard coded in it. There’s clearly some ability for adaption based on many factors including environmental. The builders used it to…..build stuff. The builders sent out PM probes to every system that could potentially support life. The PM probe sent to the sol system was captured by Saturn as a moon.
In the book one of the scientists theorized that the builder’s gates hurt the destroyers (Dark Gods) in unknown ways. If you’re watching the TV show you’ve already been exposed to at least some portion of the destroyers. The first clear time being during the gate transition at the end of season 3. Later seasons show more tech and hints about the destroyers. In the books the Dark Gods are actively attacking humanity last I read. Thanks to Laconia’s bullshitery humanity is considered a threat now.
@Beth: This is a recurring theme amongst the Republicans I see day to day. They actually believe this shit. I’m part of several organizations where we have to listen to the “media representative” spew the same bullshit, and it’s been going on since the 90’s.
@Beth: [POLITICALLY INCORRECT TRIGGER WARNING]
As much as I’m going to hate myself for saying this, I’m imagining one of the Founders [TM] watching this from beyond the pale and muttering “This is exactly what happens when you allow the women folk to vote. Pfui!”
As I head off to sleep (and silence for the long weekend): If anyone thinks Google search is worth while… I just searched my (rather unique) real name. The image results quickly devolved into a gallery of someone with zero connection to me, or any similarity to my name.
But he’s bald and wears a white button down shirt. (No beard however).
Google completely ignored the input and decided “bald guy in a white shirt” was close enough.
I miss AltaVista.
@Matt:
Thanks. I figured something along those lines, but in the show it hasn’t quite been consistent.
I finished the show today. I may post some spoilerish comments tomorrow.
Just now, I saw an online ad from the MAGAt running in my Congressional District:
People who buy crap like that deserve whatever happens. Rethuglicans had a decently MAGAt representative who was good at constituent service and voted the Rethuglican line mindlessly. They kicked her to the curb for crap like this? Joe Kent is the best that the MAGAts can imagine for a rep? YIKES!