Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, August 30, 2022
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60 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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Totally didn’t see this coming /s
But in a way it doesn’t matter. Millions will still be convinced that Hutchinson’s testimony has been debunked. Sort of like how Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet.
@drj:
It gets one to wondering, if Ornato himself hasn’t become a prosecutorial target.
Everything TFG touches, dies.
Oh my gourd: Nebraska man paddles 38 miles in hollowed out pumpkin
Did not have that on my headline bingo card. What is more, he broke the record for pumpkin paddling. The record?
I was expecting something like this.
Why doesn’t he just say it? “It’s a warzone over there.”
@OzarkHillbilly:
I remember being a teen reading the 1990 edition of Guinness Book and taking particular interest in the juggling section (as I’ve known how to juggle since age 11). There was, for instance, a guy who held the record for going the longest distance with a milk bottle on his head. I’m not kidding.
Over the years, I realized I could probably get in Guinness Book if I wanted to, just by thinking up some bizarre (but not especially difficult to learn) feat. But then, I realized, what would the point of it be? You don’t get money for it. All you get is your name in Guinness Book, which is a real honor for people who like to read Guinness Book.
Apparently, New York State has a Whippit epidemic. Don’t worry… the drug warriors are on it!
#ThisIsNotTheOnion
@OzarkHillbilly: One of the towns here in New Hampshire has an annual regatta/river race in hollowed-out pumpkins. Some of them are afloat for an impressively long time.
Hahahahahaha:
Wasting expensive missiles: excellent
Tricking Russian military: excellent
Humiliating headline for Putin: priceless
@Jen:
Up in Madison, it’s (of course), the Milk Carton Regatta. 🙂
@Mu Yixiao: I know whippits sound funny, but a highschool classmate of my daughter died from it. It’s no joke.
Some may recall my comments, following others references to him, on indications that Richard North, of “Flexcit” fame, also “Leave Alliance” and lately “Turbulent Times” might be smart (for an arbitrary value of “smart”), but has rather questionable judgement?
And possibly not a fellow to rely on for UK analysis?
Behold, the latest evidence of his tendency to, erm, “enthusiasms”.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Jesus, 38 miles?
*Angrily throws away the zucchini canoe I’ve been patiently growing since April.*
Lindsey Graham is part of the Old South political establishment, which has essentially taken over the Republican Party and permeated it with its values and world view. So it is no surprise that, sensing personal danger, he is trying to drum up a mob (no subscription needed), or at least threaten those pressuring him with the possibility of a mob. After all, that is the method of governance in the South for at least the last two centuries. Drum up outrage against a scapegoat group, get the mob going, then walk away and appear to be above it all while the mob wrecks its destruction.
@MarkedMan:
This was happening back in the 1980s. I recall high school kids who worked in grocery stores talking about it.
@Mu Yixiao: Yesterday Eugene Volokh ran this story under the title It’s Illegal for People Under 21 to Buy Canisters of Whipped Cream in NY. I was the first to comment to him that whipped cream chargers, the subject of the law, dispense not whipped cream, but nitrous oxide, laughing gas. I pointed out that his lead quote said as much. A couple hours later he updated his post with a correction. If I may say, a whiny, caviling update blaming everything except his own eagerness to leap to the conclusion this was a NY woke thing. And he’s supposed to be a leading light of conservative legal commentary.
IIRC there was a local story a week or two ago about a stoned kid crashing a car and found with whipped cream charger cartridges on the seat. As @MarkedMan: pointed out, this is a real problem.
@gVOR08:
Whippits have been a thing for at least 50 years (I remember them as a kid).
Teens in NY can get heroine if they want. Carding for whipped cream cans isn’t going to do a thing to stop them.
@Neil Hudelson: My knees hurt just thinking about it.
@Jen:
Deception in wartime probably goes back as far as there’s been war. It may even predate H. Sapiens.
Sometimes you get a bonus. The enemy might think a real target is a decoy, and decide not to waste ammo on it.
Somebody finally said what’s going on with the current GOP focus on “education”, scare quotes because actual education of students is the last thing they care about. Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place ties a lot of it into a succinct post.
And they want to destroy teacher’s unions. They want to destroy unions both as a source of funds and support for Ds and as labor power in opposition to capital. Republicans in FL are trying to make school board elections partisan and DeSantis endorsed a lot of school board candidates in last weeks elections, who did well.
One party suffers from the ignorance of the general public and one party depends on it.
@Mu Yixiao:
So wait, because kids can get one bad thing, we shouldn’t even try to stop them some other harmful thing?
Also, how easy do thing is is to get drugs? I’m sure for some kids is easy, but I’m willing to bet that for most kids it’s damn near impossible. Kids are drug users of opportunity. Trying to find a drug dealer isn’t easy. It’s not like you walk to the local drug dealer collective and be like “please sir may I see your selection of drugs.”
@Mu Yixiao:
Ok, never mind the spelling mistake, I know what you mean. But dang, I hope you see the humor in it.
Dude, you are engaging in a classic small-town move, which I am deeply familiar with because of my own roots. “Everything in the City (and NY City is the WORST!!!) is terrible. Drugs and crime everywhere!”
As @Beth mentions, it ain’t that easy to get heroin. Cocaine is probably easier and meth and fentanyl even easier. But still harder than getting a cartridge of nitrous. Even in NY City, which is a really big place with lots of different neighborhoods, only a few of which are crime ridden, and even in most of those, the folks there mostly wish the crime rate would be lower.
There’s life in the city, and then theres the city as small-town folks imagine it, in part because their knowledge is driven by TV coverage which is attracted to the lurid at least as much as moths are attracted by flames.
I push back on this with my fellow small-towners because it’s a bad look. It damages our reputation. I would have thought you knew a bit more.
Jackson MS is without safe drinking water, and will be “for an unknown period of time,” as the main water treatment facility failed yesterday.
Jackson, MS, is 80% Black or African American.
Anyone arguing that systemic racism doesn’t exist should head down there and drink up.
@Jen:
This may help some.
http://www.mississippitoday.org/2022/08/30/heres-where-to-get-water-in-jackson/
@CSK:
Delete.
@Jay L Gischer:
heh heh.
We are currently half-staffed and flooded with support requests. Our phones have an almost 2 hour wait, and e-mails (which I handle) are coming in faster than we can get them out.
Brain dead = spelling mistakes. 😛
(and now back to the grind)
@Jen: the Tennessee republican legislature is right out front about their intent to make Memphis bend the knee. Corrupt as hell, to boot.
The republicans should move the capitol to Knoxville, or even better, Johnson City. Nashville hates their guts.
@becca: I’m not sure I’m following…the issue with contaminated water is in Mississippi, not Tennessee, but yeah same vibe.
@MarkedMan: Whippets were in heavy usage in my very rural home town as I grew up (90s/00s). I never took part but I knew a lot of people who did. Seeing this “new” drug scourge the state and local governments cracked down on the sales and abuse of the NO2 containers for years. So instead the kids started abusing prescription drugs and meth. Black tar heroin also became a big thing too a few years later.
I’m not entirely convinced that was a positive result.
So I’m getting a lot of deja vu here..
@Beth:
HAHAHAHAH are you kidding me? I could find a drug dealer within 15 minutes of moving into a new neighborhood as a kid. Hell even now I can spot a score with little effort…
@Matt: Well only half my post went up for some reason. Since I cannot edit the post I’ll have to redo it here.
@MarkedMan: Whippets were in heavy usage in my home town as I grew up. I never took part but I knew a lot of people who did. So the state and local governments cracked down on the sales and abuse of the NO2 containers for years. Now the big thing is meth, prescription drugs, and black tar heroin….
Not entirely convinced that was a positive result.
@Jay L Gischer:
Last time I went to my home town it was easier to find black tar heroin than it was to find weed. I know because I tried to find a baggie and everyone kept offering heroin/meth/prescription drugs with a little coke..
0.2% of 8th graders have used heroin….
http://monitoringthefuture.org/data/21data/table2.pdf
What’s interesting to me is that fentanyl has never been one of the easier drugs to get in my experience. Despite all the attempts at hyping the drug up as being some hugely easily available high…
@Jen: sorry. Should have filled that out a bit. The point is systemic racism is out in the open all over the south. Errybody knows. Underfunding and overburdening is par for the course for AA majority cities.
It’s more than a vibe, it’s an ethos.
@Beth: @Jay L Gischer: I’m not speaking to now and certainly not for everywhere, but back in the 70’s at my middle class high school, getting drugs was as easy as walking out to the smoking area. Things have changed a lot since then but some things don’t. I rather suspect that if one wants to get some drugs, all they need to do is talk to the right person, and they know who that is.
@Matt: Probably depends on the region.
I’m in NH, and the opioid crisis here really took off when kids who were injured in sports were prescribed Oxycontin every time they got hurt. Fentanyl was right behind. The state was awash in middle-class kids who were addicted, and it was a huge issue in the 2016 NH primaries (when Trump referred to the state as a “drug-infested den,” IIRC).
@Jen: A lot of flooding down there.
@Mu Yixiao: I had to go down quite a few comments before realising that your “whippets” weren’t this. Was wondering “what in the heck do small racing dogs have to do with people frantic about drugs?”
@Jen:
Oh quite certainly as drug availability depends on demographics and geographical location.
Prescription drug abuse by school children was already a problem in my home town area by 2005. When I talked to the kids about their abuse they all seemed surprised it was a problem because after all prescription drugs are “good”. As long as you avoided the illegal “bad” drugs you were perfectly fine to take as many as you wanted. Basically a failure of DARE and the just say no jingoism of the 80s/90s left kids believing that as long as a drug was legal it was perfectly safe to take in any dose….
Once again the drug warriors made things worse by refusing to acknowledge reality and the complexity of existence.
@grumpy realist: I’ve been expecting a link to a Devo video, and even now just assume I skimmed over it.
The other day when we were talking about CA’s efforts to ban gas-powered cars, I made the point about the batteries needing rare minerals that are mined in places like China that could make things very difficult for CA to achieve its goals. I also noted that while US-based supplies would be the safest, there’d be opposition because mines are messy, ecological disasters unless very tightly monitored and regulated (which drives up the price of the mined minerals).
Well, here’s an example: This Remote Mine Could Foretell the Future of America’s Electric Car Industry
@grumpy realist: I had the same thought.
@Gustopher: Now I’m gonna have to youtube it.
Whip it.
Live 130 miles from Bend, but it’s where we have doctors and shop. The shopping center where two people were shot by a 20 year old is where we do a lot of business. Passed by it today on the way to the Doctor.
I remember my outrage when Gabby Gifford’s was shot in a Safeway. Now I just feel numb and powerless.
Trump is now saying that the FBI and Antifa were responsible for the Jan. insurrection.
news.yahoo.com/trump-truth-social-qanon-4chan-memes-messages-184803844.html
Mikhail Gorbachev has died.
@grumpy realist: I wasn’t sure which one was the subject, so I highlighted the word and did a web search. My first time doing that on my phone, and I didn’t even lose the original page, either! [fist pump emoji]
@Jen:
eta pretty sure he’s being sarcastic
@Skookum: My reaction, too. 🙁
“In Mississippi, a 10-year-old rape victim will be forced to deliver her rapist’s baby and then she can go get a gun.”
Say what you will, at least it’s Karmic balance.
WTF possessed Anne Coulter to show up at a roast full of lefty comedians? “PILE UP!!!!”
@OzarkHillbilly: went to Apple Music, searched for Devo, and started playing the top songs.
“Whip It” is the first 4, from different albums, versions of albums, greatest hits…
On the one hand, it’s silly they cannot consolidate four identical recordings. On the other hand, I’m listening to “Whip It” over and over, so maybe they know what they are doing.
6 glorious seconds.
@Gustopher: Yeah, they know how to hook us.
@OzarkHillbilly: Back in about 2010 or 2012, I read an opinion column by a guy who was saying that instead of imaging that we were going to reverse the trend of climate change, governments would need to work on what the world was going to do about the places that would be under water in a generation or so. He was discounted as a radical, and the most common response to his concerns seemed to gravitate toward “those people should have chosen where they were born more carefully, eh?” (Yeah, I’m being snarky. People didn’t actually say that; they only implied it. “Can’t save the whole world, yada, yada, yada.”)
So no, I’m not surprised, either.
@OzarkHillbilly: Now I’m curious about what Jewish Ginger Resister agrees with Ann Coulter about. Still, she handled the situation with more dignity that FG has shown in his entire life.
[Ba-da (rimshot, splash)]
@CSK:
So, Benito loooooves Antifa?
Weird.
@Jen:
As discussed the other day, California, Washington (and apparently) Oregon are all running towards banning the sale of ICE cars within the next decade. All well and good, and in fact, electric cars may be the next big thing after sliced white bread that doesn’t go all moldy before you can eat it, but my pondering led me to suspect that, ultimately, this will lead to ghettoization of significant portions of the population. The thoughts that bubbled up in Luddite’s febrile brain:
1. Make below upper-income levels? You’re not going to be able to afford the car.
2. Live in an apartment? Nope, no chargers for you.
3. Live in a condo? With parking? Who’s paying for the installation of your charging centers? The electricity to run them?
4. Not everyone lives or works in the city. So, how are people who live outside reasonable range of EV going to get to/from where they need to go?
Frankly, I’m hoping I’m wrong. But given the price point, utilization of scarce resources, and the infrastructure issues, I see this as a performative display that ultimately harms more than it benefits.
Yes, global warming is a critical issue (one we may well have left too late) but think about what the outcome will be. Frankly, most of the commentariat here are in an economic position where this change will not be onerous for them. Unfortunately, that leaves out the vast majority of the population.
Guess the poor folks shoulda been born richer, eh? Or is that too GQP of me? But then again, what else can you expect from a snarky, overheated Luddite?
@Kathy:
I think he’s saying that Antifa and the FBI were the ones who caused all the trouble, not the totally innocent and peaceful MAGA hordes.
@CSK:
I think he outed himself.
We’ve always known. He may pander to his base and make googly eyes at Kim, but what his heart craves is the mere approval of the pinko liberal elite who despise him.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Isn’t that why God gave us freezers? 😉
@Flat Earth Luddite: I expect the gas car bans to slide a few years as a lot of that gets worked out (plus, used gas powered cars will still be allowed, and that’s where lower income people are likely shopping for cars anyway)
Public charging stations are coming.
https://www.pse.com/pages/electric-cars/charging-with-pse
If I had my druthers, we would force everyone into public transportation, other than me of course. Just me and some busses on the road, and if we can get underground bus lines, that would be even better. Just me and a few people like me, driving on the surface above all the mole people.