Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, September 21, 2023
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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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The headline of the day- Woman rescued from outhouse toilet after climbing in to retrieve Apple Watch, Michigan police say
The Florida headline of the day- Florida Man celebrating Florida’s new open-carry law by firing rifle into the air faces multiple charges
I waded a little into Poe’s Law on yesterday’s forum. I commented that the reason Kanye is no longer taking his meds is because he says they’re “being used by Jewish doctors to control his mind.” It turned out some people thought I was making a joke, when I was describing literally what he said last year. Here’s the clip where he says it.
In the interest of fairness, I should mention that a few months later he announced that watching Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street made him like Jews again. That isn’t a joke either.
Well, that was a fun day! Had to bathe Annie twice to get the skunk off her. Washed just about everything in the house that could fit in the washer. Sprayed odor eliminator everywhere. Washed the floors a couple of times. Showered and changed about 3 times. Wife came home from work because her office starting stinking. Think we’re on top of it now. Going to boil more vinegar. Have charcoal scattered around the house in bowls. Lost an area rug which is now outside stinking up the neighborhood.
This was almost as fun as the time my daughter came home from camp and we found out two days later that she had lice. Had to tear the house apart for that one also. I think my scalp psychologically itched for months after that.
@Scott: Sounds like you had almost as much fun as I did when the hogs ate grandma.
@Scott: Hahahaha….one of the times the skunks sprayed under the house, a bunch of the teachers at the elementary school had ordered about 8 dozen eggs, total. It didn’t even occur to me that the egg cartons had absorbed the stench until I got a call from the school secretary letting me know that she had put all the eggs in the back of her truck because the office smelled like skunky weed, and did she want me to go ahead and distribute them, or did I want to come get them?
Everybody was laughing their asses off when I showed up to collect the eggs that “smelled like weed”. Quite embarrassing. đ đ
From Agence France-Presse, via Raw Story:
http://www.rawstory.com/four-indictments-on-trump-is-still-the-man-for-iowa-supporters/
“He hasn’t lied to me.”
What a crew of gullible saps.
Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chair of Fox Corp. and News Corp. Lachlan will take over.
@CSK: Let us all pray Lachlan proves to be a total failson.
@gVOR10:
The MAGAs are predicting this will make Fox totally left-wing.
@CSK:
Clearly, this segment of the inattentive public doesnât want information, just their comfortable fantasies.
@Kingdaddy:
Speaking of fantasies, the woman who claimed that “Trump keeps in shape” is truly delusional. Epically delusional. Keeps in shape? The man’s a waddling mass of lard. Or is that the Iowa standard of keeping in shape?
Indeed, the Senate needs to reform its rules. However, many of the rules in question protect the power of individual senators, so we will see resistance, masked in high-flown rhetoric about protecting rights. And they should reform carefully. We have the filibuster because Senate rules got reformed. Aaron Burr noted no one had ever made a motion to call the question, so in an effort to simplify the rules, they got rid of the ability of a simple majority to force a vote.
It appears the US is close to offering Saudi Arabia a formal security guarantee, (and possibly a “civilian” nuclear program, monitored by the US)
Daniel Depetris in Time on why this may be a bad idea.
Thomas Friedman in the NYT on why it may be a good one.
@CSK: A pear is a shape.
Revisiting a perennial discussion, an episode of which we had a few days ago, while running pictures of Trump in golf attire would be a winning tactic for Ds, it’s hard to do it without getting into fat shaming, which they’d avoid. GOPs have an EZ button for messaging that Ds do not.
@CSK:
Take a look at recent pictures. I wouldn’t call him “in shape” but he’s definitely lost weight.
@CSK:
It became publicly known that Rupert hated Trump. I wonder if that was part of the impetus to retire. Anybody know how Lachlan feels about Trump?
@gVOR10:
What if the NFL offers the Senate a football team, paid for by the Head Xitter, and give the Coach the positions of head coach, general manager, president, defensive coordinator, offensive coordinator, special teams coach, and quarterback coach.
@JohnSF: To be fair, Friedman puts a huge caveat on what kind of conditions should accompany this:
He also rather oddly frames it as somehow mitigating the effects of BiBi’s judicial power grab, which baffles me. But Friedman often baffles me.
@gVOR10: @MarkedMan:
Given Trump’s penchant for jeering at other people’s appearances, I’d say Trump is fair game.
@gVOR10:
Lachlan was, up through last year, quite critical of Trump.
@gVOR10: A few years back Murdoch yielded some amount of power to one of his sons and the media played it up as whether the pro-Trump, pro-right wing loony toon son would get the nod or would it be the son who thought Fox would be better off moving towards the center a bit. As I recall, the pro-loon got it. Was that Lachlan or the other one?
Not sure how much difference it makes in any case because during the Fox/Dominion trial it came out that Rupert was still making the most important decisions in real time. I imagine he will still be doing that even after this latest move.
@Kathy:
Tommy Tuberville would die of ecstasy.
@MarkedMan:
James Murdoch, the younger son, resigned from the Fox board. He and his wife donated over one million to the Biden campaign.
I’ve been mulling over why Trump is addressing abortion at this point. If he just mouthed platitudes or ignored it completely his voters, anti-abortion or not, would happily map whatever opinion they had onto Trump. So what’s the upside for him in bringing it up directly and repeatedly? The only thing that occurs to me is that deep down he is depending on Congress to somehow act and get him out of his legal mess, and realizes it can’t happen if the Repubs don’t control both branches.
@CSK: Thanks. Bottom line, Rupert chose the one who thinks like he does and then continued to run the show anyway
@MarkedMan:
It seems so to us. But the MAGAs seem to fear that Lachlan is a Communist Trump-hating globalist.
@CSK:
That only goes to show all my ideas are good đ
@JohnSF:
I understand the need to counter any effort by China to compromise our effective naval control of the oil shipping routes. But I have never liked taking sides in a Sunni-Shia religious war. It seems we’re replaying the Cold War, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no matter how big a monster he may be. It’s depressing.
What do we get in practical, real-world terms? The KSA is not going to let us build bases on their soil. They’ll let us preposition supplies but it’s my understanding we’ve been doing that for some time. What do we care if KSA and Israel remain hostile to each other, they aren’t going to go to war, and the tensions are great for our arms industry. In the end this will look as if MBS bought the US military to act as his personal bodyguards, which is a pretty contemptible thing to ask our soldiers to do.
@CSK: Speaking of fantasies, the woman who claimed that âTrump keeps in shapeâ is truly delusional.
She means that he keeps in the shape of a fat piece of shit. That is a shape, isn’t it?
@MarkedMan: Earlier in the year Trump seemed to be going hardcore anti-abortion, but more recently he’s been reversing course. It’s not hard to understand why. For a time he thought DeSantis represented a legitimate threat, especially after Trump’s private anti-Dobbs remarks dropped. By now he assumes he practically has the nomination sewn up and needs to worry about the general.
Let’s put aside the fact that his being a narcissistic man-child makes him utterly incapable of viewing the issue in terms of how it affects real people’s lives. I think he’s got a fairly rational assessment of the political dynamics. But he also can’t escape looking at it through the lens of his own public image. He’s aware that the common media narrative about the GOP’s underwhelming 2022 results centered on two explanations: (1) The Dobbs decision (2) Trump’s political toxicity.
He thinks emphasizing the first explanation helps him undermine the second. I don’t think it’s in his nature to shut up about anything, even when it would be in his interests to do so. But more pertinently, he’s trying to set the narrative, not just because he realizes correctly that the issue could hurt his party downballot, but also because he thinks it makes him look better. That’s always what it comes down to, of course.
@JohnSF:
Isn’t it a means to keep the Saudis from proliferating their own nukes?
Imagine nothing exists in the universe except two ships, named A and B. Alice is in ship A, Bob is in ship B. the ships move on their own without any menas of propulsion visible to either person, and without any feeling of acceleration. the ships are meters from each other.
Now suppose the distance between ships begins to grow, and keeps growing at an increasing acceleration. Eventually they’re moving in opposite directions at, say 99% the speed of light.
Suppose further each ship has a telescope powerful enough to look into the other ship, no matter the distance. Alice looks at Bob’s ship, and sees his clock has slowed way down. She also sees Bob moves very slowly, taking like hours to pour a glass of vodka and take a sip. in her ship, time passes at a normal rate.
Ok, but what does Bob see? Does he see Alice moving slowly and taking days to prepare a meal? Or does he see Alice moving faster than the Flash, taking a fraction of a second to fix a three course meal? Regardless, in his ship time would seem to flow at a normal rate.
The way I see it, neither Bob nor Alice can tell which ship is moving, nor at what rate of acceleration. Maybe A is, maybe it’s B, and maybe both are accelerating away from each other.
I bring this up due to one line in a piece I read years ago. It said there are galaxies at the far edge of where we can see, which move at close to the speed of light. Fine. But then the cursed line is “From such a galaxy, it would seem we’re moving at close to the speed of light.”
But there’s the whole issue of time dilation, In the twins paradox, one twin leaves Earth at 99% light speed, while the other stays home. The travelling twin eventually returns to Earth, say 50 years after they left, and find the stay at home twin 50 years older, and the traveling twin just a few weeks older.
They cannot both age slower and age normally, right?
@Kathy:
Can we all discuss this later, when the cocktail hour has arrived?
Maybe they see Carol and Ted in between them…
@Mister Bluster:
Who does?
@CSK:
Years ago, my favorite science podcaster claimed special relativity isn’t hard to understand, but hard to believe. I believe it just fine, but sometimes I don’t understand it. The other day while showering I set up the Alice and Bob thought experiment, and I couldn’t work it out.
There needs to be a third body for reference, and even then it’s a mess if it moves.
@CSK:..Who does?
I dunno. Maybe you should start your cocktail hour early today…
Josh Marshall has a piece up about this supposed Israeli/Saudi/US deal, and his thinking matches mine:
I worry that Biden may be pursuing this deal more because of the era he came of political age than for any real benefit to the US or the world. Since the 60’s President after President saw himself as the hero who finally brought peace to the Middle East. But that isn’t even a concept that has meaning any more. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia are done. As someone once described a large US corporation, “That horse was already dead it just hadn’t hit the ground yet”. Israel is steadily turning into apartheid era South Africa and is well on it’s way to being a pariah nation. Saudi Arabia can build a hundred museums and air conditioned islands in the desert, bribe all kinds of prestigious universities to build campuses, they can sponsor all the sports tournaments in the world, but once their oil money is gone they will quickly end up with a corrupt military junta presiding over the graves of all those turbanned Princes.
I just don’t see any upside into bribing them to play kissy-face with each other.
@Mister Bluster:
It took me a while, but I think I get it. You were responding to Kathy.
@Kylopod:
The anti-aborionists are now saying that Trump is “treating them like a cheap date.”
@CSK: They better be careful or they’ll end up pregnant! And then what’ll they do?
(When my wife worked for Planned Parenthood it was a topic of discussion how often women that were picketing the clinics showed up to have an abortion for themselves or for their daughters. Makes perfect sense when you think about it – they know the schedule of picketing at their clinic, but not at others, and so their picture might end up on a website somewhere. It also speaks to how much they trusted the ethics of the PP staff, who they knew would never call them out as hypocrites, as they returned to the line sometimes the next stay to scream at the staff as baby killers.)
@Kathy: So, for Bob and Alice, they arenât looking at each other, they are looking at the photons that take longer to traverse the increasing space. So they both see the other aging slower.
That happens just with Alice and Bob drifting on momentum, with no acceleration at all. Completely standard, Newtonian physics explains that, if Newton knew that light was a particle that moved at a given speed (not the highest maximum speed, as this is Newtonian, just some speed)
As soon as you start adding in Relativity though, my head hurts, and I start wanting to go solve some other problem instead, say mid-east peace or figuring out a spot for something in my home, on the assumption that problems are fungible and that solving one is as good as solving another.
I vaguely recall my modern physics teacher telling us of childrenâs books taking place in a world where the speed of light is 10m/s, and all the consequences of that playing out. I imagine they are not great for children, but might be good for adults. I have no memory of what these books are though.
I recall thinking that I understood it in college, but that might have just been self-delusion. I thought I understood all sorts of things when I was younger that I clearly didnât understand.
@MarkedMan:
Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. I know that kind of rank hypocrisy isn’t the least bit uncommon, but it never fails to startle me. You think that these people, given their inflated sense of righteousness and virtue, would be eager to preserve the precious little lives of their own superior offspring, not abort them. Guess not.
@CSK: I can’t remember all the details at the moment, but one book I read years ago spoke about how common it was for conservative women who identified as pro-life to show up at abortion clinics, and they always had an excuse about why their situation was different. It’s not difficult for people lacking in introspection to rationalize just about anything they do under the banner of their purported value system.
@Kylopod:
Abortion for me, but not for thee.
@Gustopher:
That sounds like the Mr. Tompkins books by George Gamow. I’ve read them. The speed of light is 15 mph or so. You get things like a cyclist looking compressed as he pedals on the street, and an old lady whose father is decades younger because he travels on the train so much.
But there’s more to the books. he also gets into quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. That gets really weird really fast.
Now, suppose Alice and Bob start cooking the same dish at exactly the moment when the ships first start to move. Neither has time to observe the other, as both are busy chopping, mincing, pre-heating, etc.
On this go round, the ships drift apart at high fractions of light speed, then eventually return to being close together.
Can we measure time by the progress of the dish? If time slowed for one but not the other, then their ship was accelerating away and the other was standing still. That person would barely be done slicing onions, while the other will be taking the dish out of the oven. If both ships were moving at the same acceleration rate and speed, then both dishes will be at the same stage of completion.
Lachlan. I think the other one got National Geographic.
@MarkedMan, @CSK: It is not uncommon. I remember reading about one picketer showing up with her daughter, passing out anti-abortion pamphlets in the waiting room while waiting for them to finish working on her daughter.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’d love to know how the woman justified this to herself.
@CSK: As MarkedMan said, “My daughter’s situation is the exception to the rule.”
I’m reading a very interesting article about Mark Milley in The Atlantic. It’s entitled “The Patriot,” and it’s written by Jeffrey Goldberg.
John Kelly on Milley: “The president [Trump] couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.”
@OzarkHillbilly:
Really? The rule of no abortions, ever, for anyone, for any reason? Even if the result is a dead mother and a dead baby?
@CSK:
What makes you think she needs to?
But if she absolutely must, I suppose it would be easy enough to imagine JesĂșs told her to.
@CSK: Butbutbut her daughter is special…
@Kathy:
It is pretty widely accepted that Saudi Arabia is one phone call and flight from Islamabad away from having nuclear weapons.
Saudi purchase of around a dozen Chinese CSS-2 IRBMâs is suggestive.
Too much targeting error and too few to be useful conventional strike weapons, but if anyone knows the characteristics of the Pakistani warheads, itâs China.
@Kathy:
Why would Jesus tell her to do that, especially if she believes Jesus cherishes all the unborn???
I know, I know. These smug, self-righteous fuckwits infuriate me, that’s all.
@JohnSF:
Making a nuke is not so easy that anyone could do it in a home workshop*, but not so hard that it would take billions of dollars and hundreds of scientists. The latter was true only the very first time.
What’s hard is obtaining the fissile material. For a uranium bomb, you need to turn the 0.7% concentration of U235 to something along the lines of 90%. This is difficult, expensive, and labor intensive, because it relies on physical means and a the tiny difference in the mass of three (3) neutrons.
You can also use plutonium. It does not exist in nature, so it cannot be mined. You need a working nuclear reactor, with uranium enriched to around 20-30% U235. This is even more expensive, and you still need to enrich the uranium first. The good news, so to speak, is the same kind of breeder reactor can also be used to make tritium, should you wish to progress from mere nuclear to thermonuclear scales of devastation.
This is why you need a lot of money and thousands of people to become a nuclear power. But putting a uranium or plutonium bomb together with a yield of 30-50 kilotons or so, would be easy even for poor countries with some technical know-how, if they had the weapons grade uranium or plutonium.
So, can MBS get his grubby paws on assembled Pakistani nukes, or on weapons grade metals, or on the expertise required to set up a program to soak up all that excess oil money?
If the first or second, how many or how much?
*Actually, if you have enough weapons grade uranium and don’t mind dying, I suppose you could assemble a small 10-15 kiloton weapon, guaranteed to work, in a home workshop. It’s unbelievably, ridiculously simple. The design wasn’t even tested at Los Alamos before it was dropped on Hiroshima.
@CSK:
Jehovah works in mysterious ways, don’t you know? One assumes his bastard son, JesĂșs, does as well.
(Mysterious ways is a registered trademark of HeavenHell, Inc.)
@Kathy:
Well, there was John Aristotle Phillips, the Princeton student who designed a workable a-bomb back in 1976. I grant you that, as far as I know, he didn’t actually build one.
@Kathy: For a photon traveling at the speed of light for a trillion years across the universe time does not exist. So, from its perspective, it never happened.
@CSK: In case anyone else is old enough to fondly rememberBarney Miller, they did an episode in which a student made an A bomb. It ended up in the squad room with everyone discussing whether a kid could really make a bomb. Steve Landesberg, playing the educate and smart-ass detective Dietrich, walks in, glances at it, and asks, Whose A bomb.” Later the expert from the AEC, who has a heavy German accent, declares it would work if it had the fissile material. He mutters, “If only we had had it first.” “We did.” “Ja, now us. Then…”
@Kathy:
Relative to what?
@CSK: Letâs say, hypothetically, that you prevent 10 abortions by passing out literature and harassing people and voting Republican. Doesnât that mean that you can murder one unborn baby and still be nine ahead?
Unborn babies are a fungible resource on the deadly sin commodity market.
Itâs like Jesus said: you canât make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Think of it like dieting: youâre more concerned with the longer term trends than whether you were perfect today.
@CSK:
@gVOR10:
Again, the big issue is the material. Separating U235 from the much more common U238 takes a lot of equipment, materials, training, and time. Among other things, you need to make uranium hexafluoride, which is corrosive as hell.
If you have ten kilos of it, and see above, a Little Boy type bomb is not hard to make. The difficulty then lies in making a bomb that can be dropped from an airplane, and won’t detonate until you want it to.
With plutonium, you need an explosive lens to get the stuff to go supercritical and blow up. That’s much harder, but not impossible given the right tools and the knowledge and experience. You also need to procure the explosives, and shape them more or less into a soccer ball, and get them to blow up all at the same time, and produce the right pressure waves in the right way. If things are off even a little, at best you’ll get a fizzle of much lower yield, at worse you’ll get a plutonium spreading device. Plutonium is crazy hazardous to human health.
Now, an H-bomb, fusion bomb, is waaaaaaaaaaay harder. In addition to plutonium you need tritium. The latter has to be fresh, or it will be contaminated with helium 3, which won’t fuse as readily. You also need an A-bomb, fission bomb, to set it off.
Long story short, you need to manage and channel several kilotons of nuclear detonation to fuse a small amount of tritium, 5 to 20 grams to release several megatons of fusion explosive power.
I don’t think there are publicly available blueprints for an H bomb, or a neutron bomb for that matter, or even an A bomb. But if I know this much from casual reading, there should be much more, in deeper detail, all over the place. Certainly a physics major, not to mention a postgraduate nuclear physics doctoral candidate, can find a whole lot more. The info on nukes has been around for almost 80 years by now.
@Joe:
That’s kind of the whole problem.
Let’s go back to the far away galaxy receding from us at near light speed. Suppose a being living there, call her Urania, looks through a telescope and sees us, the Milky Way group, receding away from her galaxy at near light speed.
Fine, who’s receding at relativistic speeds and experiencing fierce time dilation, we, or Urania’s people?
@Gustopher:
But aren’t ALL the unborn (stupid term; it sounds like the title of a Grade D horror flick) equally precious?
@Gustopher:
I don’t follow the antics and tactics of anti-abortion groups much, but they do claim “abortion is murder.” They don’t say “abortion is sin,” or “abortion is sinful.”
Sin may be fungible. Murder, in the Bible Belt states where much of this surely happens, and among the MGA crowds, and even some reasonable Republicans, deserves the death penalty every time.
So these anti-abortion women who get an abortion, or who help their daughter get one, should report to the nearest prison with a death chamber right afterward.
@CSK:
Easy, many people get involved for a Cause, but they stay involved for the Community. Community is a powerful motivator, even when the cause becomes inconvenient or illogical.
of th the MAGA spell is directly related to the sense of Community. With the broad decline in Church attendance…people are going to find other means to fulfill the need to belong.
@Jim Brown 32:
You’re probably right. I just don’t get it because I’m not built that way.
Trump is very, very jealous of Charles Koch. He called him a “very stupid, very awkward, and highly overrated globalist.”
Koch is also about 25 times richer than Trump. And since money is everything to Trump…
@CSK: My thought is that your supposition would only be valid to the extent that those women only engage in coitus to have babies, rather than just to have orgasms.
It might also require all such acts are always mutually consensual, but I’ll defer to others on that point.
@Kylopod: I would suggest that the same sets of conditions, but especially the second one would apply for your supposition, but again, will defer to the majority.
@Kathy: I think the answer is âit depends on your reference frame,â which can be defined however you choose. Neither person experiences time at anything other than 1 sec/sec. The time dilation is only relevant if they come back together and can compare clocks. NB: I am not a physicist, but I do listen to Sean Carrollâs podcast (highly recommended-he is an excellent interviewer and has a wide variety of non-physicist guests) where he answers this kind of question from listeners from time to time and Iâm trying to guess how he would answer. If I got it wrong itâs because Iâm not a good student, not because Prof Carroll isnât a good teacher.
@gVOR10:
One of my all time favorites, and Dietrich was the best. My favorite was the episode with the alleged time traveler from the future who, when introduced to Dietrich, says “Dietrich? Arnold Dietrich!? Sir… It’s an honor.”
@Kathy:
The Saudi’s paid about 50% of the costs of the Pakistan nuclear program.
They did not do so out of the kindness of their sweet Wahhabi hearts.
A lot of security analyst believe. and I agree, that it’s pretty certain the Saudis have finished weapons ready and waiting in Pakistan, specifically set up to be mated to the CSS-2 warhead assembly.
@Kathy:
IIRC the implosion design also needs a beryllium initiator, which is one of the most finicky parts of the design. Then you have uranium based implosion designs, much more efficient than the “uranium gun” type; but plutonium based implosion ones are still inherently less heavy and bulky.