Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, February 7, 2023
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45 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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Old-school backpacks too heavy, Japan’s pupils complain
Waaaaa… (old man voice) Back in my day? We didn’t even have backpacks for our books. We had to carry them in our ungloved hands while walking with bread bags on our feet thru ice and foot deep snow to and from school uphill both ways!
Kids these days.
Current make-up of the Federal Court System:
Total – 1,407
White men: 779 (55.4%)
Black women: 63 (4.5%)
So Tucker Carlson goes on his show, last night, and rips Biden for his record of appointing judges; out of 97 federal judges confirmed under Joe Biden, total number of white men.. five. Twenty two are Black women.
You can see why even the least racist MAGAt would lose their shit. Trump appointed 226 judges, of which 9 total were black people. So far more in line with the GOP view of equity.
Non-White Judges appointed, historically:
Trump………16%
Obama………36%
Bush 43……..18%
Clinton………25%
Bush 41……..10%
Reagan………6%
Carter………..22%
(Non-White categories here also include Hispanic, Asian, and Other)
My point —
So, yeah, the Democrats record on this is far better. But you can understand how the people who say racism doesn’t exist, and there is no such thing a systemic racism, are reduced to cherry picking data to make their viewers angry instead of examining the bigger picture and comparing it to their false witness.
@OzarkHillbilly: Some kids had randoseru backpacks in Korea (they’re sort of a luxury item there). It’s more on the order of a Haliburton briefcase with shoulder straps than a Jansport rucksack, so I have some empathy for kids who are dragging this gear around for 7 am to 5 pm (for students in grades 1-5, earlier–as early as 5 am–and later–up to midnight–for middle schoolers and high schoolers). Even in Cowlitz County where I live, kids are starting to have back problems from lugging around 30 or so pounds of gear from class to class. Yeah, they have lockers, but what they don’t have is 5 minute passing times until they get to high school. Middle school students get three (which means I actually only get one or two before students start filling the room; no wonder burnout is so bad 🙁 ).
And in other news – Lauren Boebert, in a political appearance at a church*, called for the untimely death of Joe Biden.
Of course the parishioners at Charis Christian Center in Colorado Springs are sure to know that Psalms 109:8 continues;
Emphasis, mine.
A true Christian, she is.
*Who amongst us thinks this church will lose their tax-exempt status?
@OzarkHillbilly: Actually, I had very little homework in Jr and Sr High in the late 60s and early 70s so I never had a backpack. My kids had backpacks but they carried mostly sports equipment. Our school district is fairly affluent so there was always a class set of textbooks in the classroom so they didn’t have to haul textbooks back and forth.
OTOH, my wife remembers having breadbags for shoe coverings when she was in elementary school.
@daryl and his brother darryl: 4.5% is higher than I expected. Blackw woman make up about 6% of the population.
@Scott:..breadbags for shoe coverings…
My grandma (1893-1980, RIP Ida) must have had something like that growing up so she wouldn’t be barefoot on her way to school. Where else would she get the idea for the toe jam and navel lint sandwich that she said she would make for me for lunch one time.
I think I ran into the bathroom to puke as she laughed and laughed!
@MarkedMan:
I see numbers in the 13% range?
@daryl and his brother darryl: Percentage of population that is black is 13.6% (higher than I remember it, but it may be because the latest census data allows people to mark two races). Assuming that women are slightly more than half of that, that puts them at 7% of the population. 4.5% is a pretty dramatic under representation, but (unfortunately) more than I expected.
Today is the State of the Union address. One of the games is to bring guests that have some performative virtue. Most of the congresscritters do this.
Here’s my brilliant idea: To tweak Biden’s age issue, he should arrange to invite these two pillars of American business: Warren Buffet (age 92) and Charlie Munger (age 99). Chairman and Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, revenues $276B.
Just a thought.
@MarkedMan:
Clearest delineation I have found.
https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-of-color-in-the-united-states/
Doesn’t really affect my original point, either way.
Fro some reason, I decided to binge season 2 of Another Life on Netflix over the weekend. Season 1 left me uninterested enough not to keep my Netflix subscription last year, so I’m at a loss why I went on to watch the rest. But once i got started, I did want to see how it ended (spoiler alert: meh).
The initial premise was really good: an alien ship lands on Earth and grows into a massive “artifact” with lots of glowing lights and no visible entrances nor any openings. While there are attempts to establish communications, a ship is dispatched to look for the aliens’ home world(s) as well.
That was at least quite different from other fist contact stories.
The rest, well, I was not impressed.
Too much on the past, on tragic backstories, on personality conflicts. Too little about the aliens or their objectives.
I think if one wants to tell the story of the backstories, then that should be the story made. Sure, a backstory can be relevant to the actual story, but usually it’s more of a diversion or distraction.
Now two massive spoilers
You’ve been warned
Turns out neutrinos kill the aliens. Not just any neutrinos, but “concentrated neutrinos.” See, this is where Trek’s patented technobabble comes in handy. Neutrinos are very weakly interactive, and completely harmless to matter. A character even says this, but then another says it affects the aliens anyway. This is where you need some imaginary particle that can affect one biochemistry or technology but not another, or not to the same degree. You know, Trek technobabble.
Saying “concentrated neutrinos” kill these aliens would be like saying “concentrated tissue paper” can destroy Russian tanks. It’s just absurd.
The other spoiler is an even more preposterous reduction of the pulp science fiction device of: a weapon is needed one day, a discovery is made the second day, mass production begins the third day.
In this case, a weapon is needed, so a discovery is made and a weapon devised in a few hours.
It’s almost as though they had to end the series in some form of conclusion, because Netflix had not renewed it for a third season, and they’d wasted a lot of time on backstories and stuff, so there was no time to end it logically.
@daryl and his brother darryl: I see where we got crosswise. Blacks (male and female) are 13.6% of the population (male and female). Black women make up a bit more of the female population, 13.9%. So they would be about 7% of the whole population (male and female). Since the comparison was with white males, who make up about 35% of the population, it makes sense to compare them both to the overall population.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
Does it count if I think ALL churches should lose their tax-exempt status?
Over/under on the number of Joe Wilson-style House GOP outbursts during the SOTU tonight?
Josh Marshall said this today, and it got me thinking about Engineering, of all things:
I’ve been an Engineer as a student or a professional for 45 years, and I had an engineering mindset even before that. What I mean by an engineering mindset, at least in this case, is an innate feeling that if something can happen, it will happen, given enough time and occurrences, and you have to design for that. “One in a million” doesn’t take as long as you think, whether it is cars crossing a bridge, widgets coming out of a piece of production equipment, or bird flu crossing into a mammal carrier. My first job was working on a digital scanner (remember those?) and I had a problem on one of my circuit boards. It was tough to solve, but I finally thought I had it and set a simulated test running over the weekend with millions of repetitions. On Monday my boss asked how it had gone and I was excited and said it had only failed twice. “That’s pretty good”, he said, “Let’s go with that. By the way, I’d like you to do just one more thing. When the error comes up, rather than display the error code, program it to display your home phone number.” I went back to my desk and did the math on how often my phone would ring given the number of these units we expected to sell and the number of scans per day they would do. Needless to say, I worked a bunch more late nights and weekends until I had it right.
@Stormy Dragon:
I’m with you on that.
BTW – black churches are not innocent of this, at all!!!
@Stormy Dragon:..Does it count if I think ALL churches should lose their tax-exempt status?
Don’t be taxing my Holy House!
Church of Logic, Sin and Love
Cactus, venom, rodeo
To answer my question from yesterday, the difference between the buildings that completely collapsed vs. the ones that only partially collapsed is concrete beams vs. steel beams:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/07/1154816277/turkey-syria-earthquake-why-buildings-collapsed
@MarkedMan: I love that story. I have a similar story, from pure software. I was having a lunchtime conversation with the VP of Engineering, who as it turns out was also CS Department Chairman while I was in grad school, so I sort of knew him. I talked about some problem the compiler had with really, really big programs. “It’s hard to imagine how a program could get that big,” said I. “Imagine you’re a 747,” quoth he.
The point being that there are certain systems, typicaly chip emulation, that spit out reams of C code (or maybe C++) that is then compiled and linked into one ginormous executable that simulates what the chip design does.
Duval County (Jacksonville) has banned a book about Hank Aaron. Hank fuqing Aaron.
https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Aarons-Dream-Matt-Tavares/dp/0763658200
https://pen.org/banned-books-florida/
During the initial Twitter/Musk melt down, a lot of people were talking about Mastodon, and it reached 2.5M users at one point. I signed up to a server and played around, but soon predicted that while an individual Mastodon server might take off, or the Mastodon technology might be incorporated into something that took off, “Mastodon” itself wasn’t a thing that could take off. I felt it was only engendering confusion from people who were excited to move to a new Twitter only to find it was instead something between a toolbox and a listserv. Well, it is already back down to 1.4M active users. Enthusiasts and hobbyists generally have much, much more tolerance to experimentation and hacking around than people who are primarily interested in using something straight out of the box. Here’s a good description I came across:
@Stormy Dragon: Concrete and brick/unreinforced masonry are definitely problems. If there’s ever a big quake on the New Madrid fault line, that’ll definitely be a problem, along with the potential for liquefaction along the banks of the Mississippi.
@daryl and his brother darryl: I looked at the PEN list. It is amazing. Among the controversial books in addition to Henry Aaron, there is one about Jim Thorpe, one about a girl who invites gentile neighbors for Shabbos, and they all eat cholent. There is a Berenstain Bears book! Look for yourself and be amazed.
@Jen:
When we lived in StL, it was in one of those lovely piles of bricks that the city and its inner suburbs are noted for, any earthquake over 5.0 and it would have cracked like an egg.
Given that there were so many abandoned properties in the city, it wasn’t uncommon that a building would partly collapse due to water damage and freeze cycles. The New Madrid fault slipping would pretty much destroy the city.
United has been dinged by the FAA for not following it’s maintenance protocols. Here is it’s excuse:
Why they feel this is a justification is beyond me. Removing a step from an approved maintenance routine requires analysis, oversight, challenges, agreement and as the last step, people from every function agreeing to put their signatures on the change. There may be more to it, but this has the sound of just winging it and going around all that.
@Sleeping Dog: Same here. I rented a third-floor walkup in the DeMun neighborhood–an all-brick building that was likely built somewhere in the 1920s. It was beautiful, but I’d taken an upper-level geology class in college and had written a paper about the New Madrid fault line, and where the devastation would likely be the greatest.
I had an earthquake kit the entire time I lived there, knowing that there was no way it would likely be enough.
@Stormy Dragon: I’ll go with zero. Biden’s not black enough to warrant them. 🙁
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’ll take the over on that one
@Jen:
Hey we were nearly neighbors. We lived on the north side of Wash U. There once was a nice little wine bar across from Demun park.
When we bought the house I recognized the tiny risk, but being the chances were so small, never worried.
@Mister Bluster:
Your avatar is distracting. I somehow spent a year unaware of the green M&M controversy, then vaguely aware that something happened recently. That is, until your avatar. Then I looked it up.
Now I’m confused about everything in this world, and I want to box my ears then pour bleach in my eyes.
From what I can tell, Tucker Carlson was upset his waifu was changed, one group of the wokeleft was upset the gm&m was deyassified, and another part of the wokeleft was upset the gm&m should just be allowed to be a slut if that is what she wants without being shamed.
Prior to all of this, if I had been asked what I would expect Carlson’s position on the gm&m would be, I probably would have guessed he was concerned about a sexualized character aimed at selling candy to children.
Man, would I have been way off the mark. Now I’m just wondering if CIA rejected Carlson because their background check found his odd video rental history troubling.
@MarkedMan:
there’s an interesting coincidence: United 737 MAX returned to San Diego after a laptop battery caught fire in the cabin.
This isn’t related to the fire safety warning maintenance issue. that one probably refers to engine and cargo bay fires, which are far more serious.
BTW, lithium ion batteries are far superior to the older nickel-cadmium ones in many respects, but at least you didn’t worry about your phone catching on fire in the old days. That said, none of my phones, laptop,power banks, or bluetooth speakers have ever caught fire.
@MarkedMan:
There are effectively two “manuals”, the manufacturer’s minimum equipment list (MMEL) and the supposed to be (if anything) MORE restrictive company MEL, so the mechanics use the MEL as their bible. I suspect there were no big debates or assessments in the ranks about the content of the MEL on this issue. More likely some penny-pinching exec just up and did it, somebody on the line noticed it…and after being told by the bean counter to let it be….the licenced mechanic did his or her job and notified the feds.
@Kurtz:
What really pissed Carlson off is that people have pointed out originally there was a male gM&M and suggested that the current gM&M is a post-transition trans woman. 😉
@dazedandconfused:
This stirred some memories of a slew of metal fatigue accidents in the 80s, one of which involved a United 747 (the most notable was the Aloha Airlines 737 that lost the top of the cabin’s fuselage a few years later). At the time, mentioned was made in the news that United had a fleet older than the average US airline.
A quick check says this is still so, with an average fleet age of 16.5 years.
That’s fine in itself, but older aircraft require more maintenance, and more attention to small details as well (like scanning for fatigue cracks). Airlines that skimp on maintenance and procedures tend to have accidents.
There are reasons for an older fleet. Start-ups often begin with older, cheaper, used aircraft. US airlines have had a difficult time replacing the 757, and are only now turning to the A321neo LR and XLR versions, and some are looking to the 737 MAX 10.
I’d worry about an airline with an older fleet cutting corners on maintenance.
@Kathy: Aye, but the feds are hip and moreover so are the mechanics, who have a well-worn back-door path to notify the feds anonymously. They know they will get scapegoated by the execs if something breaks and don’t particularly want to get anyone killed too. There is a built-in check on that extremely predictable process from getting out of hand. Here and in most countries anyway….
@Sleeping Dog: Jeebus, you guys were high dollar.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Ames Place, not Park View. So yes a nice neighborhood with houses ranging in size from 1800 to 2500 sqft. It was a 1910 housing development. Everything in Park View was 3000 to 8500 sqft and were architect designed and custom built, with live-in servant quarters.
@Kurtz:..green M&M controversy…
Always happy to encourage folks to keep up with current events. That pic is at least five years old. When I asked the Kroger cashier who was adorned in the promotional M&M costume if I could take a picture her friend told me to stand next to Ms. MM and the friend used my phone to take the picture you see.
Can’t tell in the avatar but I suspect Tucker would approve of the white high top boots Ms. MM is wearing.
@Stormy Dragon: Okay. You’ll have to tell me which one of us won because I won’t be tuning in.
@Kurtz: “Man, would I have been way off the mark. Now I’m just wondering if CIA rejected Carlson because their background check found his odd video rental history troubling.”
Enquiring minds want to know. Fire up the tabloid presses!
@Stormy Dragon: Shows what I know. Given that the original green M&M was a peanut version, I thought the new “plain” M&M was the original green’s daughter. 🙁
@Just nutha ignint cracker: There is apparently a newish, female, Purple M&M. Carlson derided her as fat compared to the other characters. She’s the same shape and size as Yellow and Blue. Apparently it went over Carlson’s head that Purple, Yellow, and Blue are peanut M&Ms. I may watch the Super Bowl only because there are stories the “cancelled” M&M characters will make a big comeback in a Super Bowl commercial.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Obviously m&m transition includes an an orchiectomy where the nuts are removed…
“while walking with bread bags on our feet thru ice and foot deep snow to and from school uphill both ways!”
You could afford bread bags? You guys were rich!
Steve