Tuesday’s Forum
I can never leave the past behind
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020
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57 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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Former Hernando commissioner charged with running a brothel files to run for his old seat
Unskew!!!!!
The headline of the day-
Tourist rescued after being trapped 6 days in well in Bali
Only the best people!
Trump Appointee to Foreign Aid Agency Has Denounced Liberal Democracy and ‘Our Homo-Empire’
Seriously, where do they find these people?
@Scott:
As a child Ms. Corrigan would have been the child if she didn’t get her way, would take her Barbies and go home.
@Bill:
When he loses, Tiny will find a spot for him. After all, he qualifies as among all the best people.
@Scott:
Some people are still fighting the 18th century battle against the age of enlightenment. Darn those founding fathers!!!
Really? Has it come to this?
New bill would prohibit the president from nuking a hurricane
BTW, I just hate stunt legislation.
@Scott: They used to “seed” the clouds with silver iodide to break down the strength of hurricanes and dissipate the wind current patterns. I think that they are still spraying something into the sky from what a lot of observers are saying. I have seen “contrails” when there was no airplane anywhere, and very strange clouds.
But trying to alter the weather should not be dismissed out of hand. It could help alleviate droughts and tornado conditions. There are also serious risks, such as creating even more powerful storms and cyclones of lightning. There have been lightning strikes coming from clear skies without one cloud.
See also: HAARP, emp bursts, magnetic field weakening, polar reversal, energy waves from space, gamma rays increasing.
See: Space Weather
@Tyrell:
Interesting… I look forward to you splainin how fundamentally beneficial the broad use of tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets are for the American public. Part 2 could be how an authoritarian dictatorship really IS better and far more efficient than a messy democracy.
@Scott:
At this point, who else is going to work for Trump?
@Liberal Capitalist:
Other than here and there for parts of the time, what makes you think the Enlightenment side is winning?
@Michael Cain:
Winning happens very very slowly, and often with great cost.
* 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments made a huge change.
* The 17th gave direct voting power to representational government.
* the 19th and women’s vote
* the 22nd (and I am glad about that one)
* the 24th prevents poverty from preventing voting
Our lives are short, our view of our impact on historical timelines is even shorter. Liberal Democracy will continue to win out, as long as people take to the streets.
@Liberal Capitalist: If a bunch of people are looting stores, throwing Molotov cocktails, burning up police cars (taxpayer property), and throwing rocks at people, then that is one example. I think you would agree that is preferable to real bullets and army tanks like they use in China.
A retired police officer was killed trying to defend a friend’s business in St. Louis: David Dorn. I have not seen much on the mainstream news about that. Or Security Officer Dave Underwood who was killed in the Oakland riots.
Twenty-seven police officers have been killed so far this year – from gunshot and intentional vehicle assault.
@Tyrell: And every year, police in the US kill 1,000 people.
Early warning.
Sorry, I have no links. yesterday The Guardian’s live blog mentioned a report by the WHO saying that transmission of SARS-CoV2 by asymptomatic carriers was “very rare.” This seems to turn the last three months or so upside down. Why the masks and distancing then?
It doesn’t. It just means people misuse the term “asymptomatic,” by equating it to “presymptomatic.” I mentioned this a few weeks ago. In simple terms:
Asymptomatic: a person infected with SARS-CoV2 who never develops symptoms.
Presymptomatic: a person infected with SARS-CoV2 who has yet not developed symptoms.
The former may only rarely pass their infection to other people. The latter does pass it along readily, and therefore the masks and distancing.
The problem is that if someone tests positive for SARS-CoV2 but has no symptoms, you can’t tell whether they will stay asymptomatic or develop symptoms later on. Nor can one tell how severe the symptoms will be.
I strongly advice everyone to keep wearing masks, maintaining distance from other people, and to ignore those who will be convinced now that presymptomatic carriers cannot pass the virus on to anyone else. If that were really the case, we wouldn’t have surpassed 400,000 deaths worldwide.
Your daily reminder of the fact there’s no nadir beyond which Trump can’t sink.
The Trump campaign’s new motto: “The old man had it coming! MAGA!”
Donald Trump Tweeted this morning that Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old man shoved to the ground by Buffalo Police, could in actuality be “an Antifa provocateur.” Yes! Trump claims Gugino was trying to scan police equipment in order to black it out. At least, that’s what he heard on OANN. Plus, Trump says, “I watched, he fell harder than he was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set-up.”
A set-up. Sure. And everyone in the hospital where Gugino is being treated is helping him fake his injuries.
@Mikey:
I see I was typing as you were posting. It will be interesting to see how many members of Cult45 are sufficiently stupid/evil to believe this.
@Mikey: Trump is losing it. If he thinks this will endear him to the elderly voters that make up so much of his support, he’s out of his mind. I have a lot of elderly people in my life and, to a one, they are fearful of falling. Their balance is off, their reactions are slow, and their bones are fragile. And they know it.
@Tyrell:
Man, does that sound like a Trump quote (‘something, someone, a lot of people say’)
If you want to be taken seriously, please offer some serious evidence. You could begin with the mysterious “a lot of observers”.
@CSK:
There’s a bit more to the story, according to NBC reporter Ken Dilanian: the OANN correspondent on that story also works for Kremlin propaganda outlet Sputnik.
I guess at this point we shouldn’t be surprised about stuff like this coming from Putin, or at Trump’s eagerness to slurp it up, but still.
I think we know how Merritt Corrigan got her appointment:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-appointee-usaid-merritt-corrigan-homophobic-1011069/
From the same article:
@Bob@Youngstown:
Maybe for this campaign they could switch from baseball caps to tinfoil hats.
@Tyrell: If you see a strange cloud in the sky and no airplane, then it follows, doesn’t it, that the cloud was formed naturally, and not by an airplane spraying something?
I think you’re smarter than this, but you’re letting your worries do your thinking for you. There is stuff to worry about. There are actors that spew bad stuff into the atmosphere. They are just things like coal power plants, and so on.
@Mikey:
Interestingly, I can’t find any trace of this speculation on the OANN website, though I can find a few stories about the incident itself when it happened. But nothing’s there about Mr. Gugino being an Antifa plant equipped with a scanner to destroy police communications. Did they scrub it because it was too shamefully ludicrous even for OANN?
@Scott:
The Nazis frequently recruited and elevated disaffected people who were, for a variety of reasons, on the fringes of German society. The people recruited were grateful to feel vindicated by the attention and prominence they received. Nazi officials were less concerned that they had histories of violence, crimes, or wacky ideas. Their loyalty to the party was far more important.
The icon of this strain in the Nazi Party was Himmler. Nazi opponents gave him the derisive nickname of “the chicken farmer,” because that’s what he did (unsuccessfully) for a few years in the 1920s. For the anti-Nazis, Himmler was emblematic of the sort of unsuccessful, broken, psychotic, or weird people whom the Nazis attracted.
What they underestimated was the number of these sorts of people in Germany at the time. The NSDAP gave them the feeling that they had found someone who appreciated them, shared their outrage at a society that had done them wrong, and a mission.
@Kathy:
Actually, the Trump campaign will send you a really neat camo hat and make you a member of “Trump’s Army” in return for a donation.
@Kingdaddy:
And, given their loss in WWI, there were people who wanted to assuage that defeat–however they could.
I-80 in Wyoming is shut down because of (drumroll, please)…..SNOW!!! June 9th. We got a little bit here on the west side of the state on the 7th, then down to about 25 the last two nights.
THIS is why I can’t have nice gardens. 🙁
@Tyrell:
Contrails can persist for quite a while. “Strange clouds” (not the B.O.B. weed song) are called homomutatus and are formed by contrails persisting and evolving internally.
https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/homomutatus.html
But I guess we can trust Alex Jones, et. al. instead of the World Meteorological Society.
@Bob@Youngstown:
Ah, I think I see the problem…
@CSK: Here it is:
https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1270335685514403840?s=20
@Kurtz:
Not only that, but they are much larger and brighter than the aircraft that produce them. It’s not uncommon to spot contrails when you can’t make out the airplane in front of them.
And for all that, they’re just water vapor clouds.
On the lighter side, for a change, I attempted a sauce made out of beans and potatoes, with onions and balsamic vinegar.
The result was rather good, but the use of it for a stew of chicken with more beans and potatoes proved I used too little chicken and potatoes in the stew. However, the sauce by itself, adding a few serrrano chiles for heat, would make for nice enfrijoladas (that’s like enchiladas, but with a milder sauce based on beans rather than tomatoes), albeit very nontraditional ones.
@Mikey:
Thanks. So OANN, that hard-hitting news organization, uses The Conservative Treehouse, a crackpot website run by a fool who spent half of 2015 promoting the idea that Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and twelve other Republican candidates were conspiring to give the 2016 nomination to Jeb Bush (the Splitter Strategy), as a source? Yowza.
@Kathy: And the WHO completely walked their statement back today. Bottom line is, we still just don’t know how pervasive asymptomatic spread is because it requires real-time testing on a widespread basis.
@Jen:
It’s absurd to think we’ll learn all about a new virus in a short time, figure out a treatment the next day, and a vaccine next week. We don’t live in a Star Trek episode. It’s worse to think there won’t be occasional mistakes along the way, either.
too bad we can’t test everyone daily.
President Donald Trump is “very much against kneeling in general,” press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared Monday. That was a head-spinner for those who spend time kneeling in houses of worship and at memorials and gravesides.
Then there is this:
@Kingdaddy: I’ve been watching some of the documentaries (in French) that have been put together about Himmler and his coteries of pet archeologists who were doing things like trying to find Atlantis, searching for the pagan population behind the Pagan Wall in Alsace….the Abendwehr…it looks like every single crank with a theory that could slot into Himmler’s grandiose history sidled up to him and started cashing in. It would have been like we had turned over all U.S.A. science policy and funding to the Area-51/Bermuda Triangle/HAARP kooks.
While they’re taking down Confederate statues, it’s also a good idea to change the names of military bases named after Confederate traitors…and speaking of the Confederacy, it’s so nice to see that it continues to be harder for certain people to vote in the state of Georgia…I’m shocked, aren’t you…
@Mister Bluster:
President Trump is against kneeling because it would take a heavy duty forklift to get him upright again if he kneeled.
Looks like the election in Georgia is a hot mess–AGAIN.
And, relevant to racial injustice issues, this is more sh!t that needs to stop:
So now we see the results of a decision made by five assholes on the Supreme Court…I bet Clarence Thomas doesn’t have to go through such trouble when he votes…
@Mister Bluster:
FTFY
Stephen Miller–yes, that Stephen Miller–has reportedly written Trump’s speech on race relations. It is being prepared, whatever that means, by the White House.
@CSK: To steal a line from Molly Ivins, I’ll bet whatever he writes will sound better in the original German…
@Mister Bluster: I’m pretty sure Trump has never kneeled in two instances: In prayer or to hug his children.
@Kathy:
Too bad that life isn’t like Miri, Babel, The Quickening, The Deadly Years or Requiem for Methuselah. Maybe somebody can do something with the deflector dish instead…..
@An Interested Party:
This is demented. Miller is a white nationalist. He’s been disavowed by his own family (whose progenitors were impoverished, persecuted Jewish refugees from Belarus) for his views on immigration and his alliance with Trump. What can this man possibly have to say about racial reconciliation or healing?
@Bill:
I now have this beautiful image in my head of the Orange Turd being blasted by unexpected coherent radiation from the peak of the Washington Monument…
@CSK: And your point is….
@JohnMcC:
What???? I would think my point would be clear. Miller is, as I said, a white nationalist. Yet he’s been chosen to write a speech about racial healing. Do you not find that, at the very least, ironic?
If you were joking, and I didn’t get it, I apologize. Otherwise, as I’ve stated, my point ought to be eminently clear.
Stephen Miller writing Trump’s speech about racial unity is as ironic as Trump trying to give a speech about paying your bills on time and marital fidelity….
What time is this speech supposed to go down? I’m going to need some fresh popcorn.
@Jax:
I think it’s supposed to be given on Thursday. And he’ll probably retract it on Friday.
Just left Red Lobster early because of the dude on speakerphone with his elderly dad talking about how Trump should use the Air Force to stop the protests. Sadly, my polo shirt has the company logo so visible you can see where I work from space. What the fuck are you going to do with the Air Force? Get a bunch of a-10 warthogs and strafe the crowds with anti-tank rounds so people’s bodies are visibly exploding on camera?
honestly I really believe that if Trump suggested using the Air Force against protesters, the general he was talking to would refuse to comply, and the Secret Service might even back him up. And suggest there would be Implications if he pursued the matter. And I mean Im…pli…CA…tions.