Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, May 7, 2024
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49 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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Lucky me.
People with two copies of a risk gene have genetic form of Alzheimer’s, scientists say
@Scott: Sorry to hear that. My father had it, and his father before him. I suspect the odds are not in my favor, but who knows?
@OzarkHillbilly: My Mom had dementia as did her mother. OTOH, they were rock solid physically. At the time of her death at 88, Mom was on no medications, had all her teeth, and was out shoveling snow the previous day. And oddly, although she had severe short term memory loss, she knew to the penny where her money was.
@Scott: May researchers and doctors find ways to slow down or stop any progression for you before it becomes debilitating.
I’m afraid that my wife is at great risk for Alzheimer’s, because she has seen cases on both sides of her family. I keep hoping for some treatment to alleviate (if not cure) the situation.
@Franklin: @SC_Birdflyte: They are making progress. Don’t know if any treatments will come soon enough for me (assuming I get it)
Just to point out how asymmetrical the treatment is between TFG and Biden, has anyone bothered to ask Trump about the Israeli \ Palestinian issue? I found something on line from a while back and TFG’s answer was about as sick and counter productive as you could imagine, basically throw the Palestinians out (to where he didn’t say) and let Israel take the all the land “from the river to the sea” (the irony is thick).
My point here is Biden is being criticized and his actions scrutinized to a fair-thee-well for trying to thread the tiniest needles while TFG is never asked any hard questions and even if he was gets to leave it at whatever bile comes out of his mouth uncritically. One candidate has to have all the answers and those answers are picked apart while the other one just riffs and no one bothers to put those “thoughts” into any context because … reasons.
The media has given up trying to get answers from TFG so they don’t even try but they do give him a platform to spout performative nonsense.
@Scott: Recent experiments show that human genes can be edited with beneficial results. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/health/gene-editing-blindness-study-scn/index.html
Remember when people were at the mercy of genetic disorders back before 2025?
News from the UK: in the local elections held last Thursday, the Conservatives received the punishment beating generally expected, thoroughly deserved, and widely appreciated.
Not all areas had votes, but the implications are clear.
Cons won just 515 councillors, down by 474 seats.
Labour gained 186, Liberal Democrats 104, Greens 74.
Of the 107 Councils in play, Labour have 51, up by 8
Conservatives 6, down by 10.
And the Conservatives got hammerings in places that have voted Tory since Methuselah was a nipper.
Mayoral elections: of 11 areas voting, the Conservatives took just one, Tees Valley, and that with a much reduced vote, and based on the unusually strong personal vote of Mayor Houchen, who distanced himself from the national party.
In Blackpool by-election, the Conservatives slumped to just 17.5% of the vote, barely getting second place ahead of Reform (= reincarnated UKIP) on 16.9%.
Labour won with 58.9% though turnout was only 32% (pretty normal for a by-election)
Conclusion: you can spread butter on the Tories, ’cause they’re toast.
Sunak is reduced to hanging on grimly till late autumn and hoping something may turn up to mitigate the defeat somewhat.
All that’s in doubt now is the scale of the Labour victory.
Some years ago, we had to send some documents to another city. I filled out the shipping label for the courier company, and delivered it at one of their offices.
But I made an error, and put our office address as the destination. Next day, we got the envelope back. It had traveled from about a kilometer form the office, to a sorting center near the airport, to a delivery center somewhere, and finally to our office.
Suppose a billion years from now humans still exist in a radically different form, and one of them, while traveling between stars (as one does) on a routine solo trip, stumbles across one of the Voyager probes. So the probe would have traveled light years in order to deliver its message, the golden record, to the descendants of the people who launched it.
I found a figure that Voyager 2 would take 70,000 years to cover one light year. So in 1 billion years it will be at 1,000,000,000/70,000 or, if I can trust my desk calculator, 14,286 light years away (rounding up). Copilot is having a hard time estimating Voyager’s position then…
Of course, 1 billion years from now, the Milky Way will have changed some.
@JohnSF:
Can you explain to me why the Lib Dems are seen as a joke? I watch a lot of British comedy and have never seen them mentioned without a dismissive sneer.
@Scott:
Well, that’s not good. But neither is it hopeless. 20 years ago it was hopeless, but now? Optimism may not always be warranted, but it is much better to live with hope. Contra what many people believe, hope is rational, a much more enjoyable, productive world view than despair.
Something from the ‘It takes all sorts of people to make up world and if you live long enough you will meet every single one of them’ files
A few moments ago somebody bid a million dollars on the The Price is Right.
A friend of my vintage who lived in San Francisco from 1966 to 1972 gave me a book to read, Season of the Witch by David Talbot. It is a warts and all portrait of the city written by someone who clearly loves the place covering the 1967 to 1982 era. My memory was full of gentle hippies and free concerts in Golden Gate Park, but the book is a powerful reminder of lots of bad stuff. Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, yes, but STDs, ODs too. I had forgotten about the Symbionese Liberation Army, terror bombings, and lots of bad things.
Every period has its problems. The golden haze that our memory provides the past is an illusion. By 2075 there will be entertainments looking back on those funny, romantic days of the Trump administration; our wistfully cute protagonist will encounter a serious but naïve romantic partner while hunting for toilet paper all over town.
@JohnSF: It strikes me that the UK has had to take Conservative government straight up for many years and the Tories are suffering backlash. FDR took over from Hoover three years into the Great Depression. The voters saw clearly who owned the Depression. Obama took over in the first year of W. Bush’s Great Recession, so a lot of voters associated the recession with Obama. Similarly, Republicans have had major influence since the 70s, but their rule has been mixed with Dem rule, so the effect of Republican misrule has been less clear, allowing them to continue without the backlash.
Interesting, if true:
I’ve always found Rothkopf credible.
@Slugger: You’re reminding me that four years ago I was in Walmart for something else and noticed their TP shelves were nearly bare, so I grabbed some of the off-brand stuff that was left. That was enough to get us through to the next time I saw TP on the shelf at our Publix grocery store. I had a box of dust masks in the garage. Not N95s, but better than cheap surgical masks. By rewearing them way too much, they got us through as well. Good times.
I still have masks and gloves on the shelf if anyone needs props for the inevitable sitcom. Also some Everclear I bought when I saw there was no rubbing alcohol or peroxide on the shelves.
@OzarkHillbilly: I got no comment except holy crap. Followed, I fear, by hoocoodanode.
@gVOR10:
That’s your story, and you’re sticking to it.
@OzarkHillbilly: @Scott:
I happened to have just left a meeting with a representative from the Alzheimers Association. I was really struck when she said something along the lines of “When I started here 10 years ago we had an often-used talking point that ‘Alzheimers is the only common cause of death in the US in which there’s no cure, no prevention, and no way of slowing it down. Three years ago we had to stop using that phrase because of the myriad advancements in the last 5 years.”
There’s a lot of hope to be had, and a lot of positive evidence to back up that hope.
@Neil Hudelson: Yes, it’s a different world than the one my father died in.
I don’t know who all plays Dungeons and Dragons/Table Top RPG’s here, but I gotta say listening to someone rapping about how their opponent is a known pedophile who has skipped out on their illegitimate daughter, all in a cartoonish voice, really brought home how great a concept the “Vicious Mockery” spell is.
@Neil Hudelson: Yes, there is a lot of research and testing going on. That is hopeful. Now you got to realize that I’m Scots/Irish and, as such, possess a lot of dark humor. My kids laugh at the memories of their Grandma’s dementia and yet, I’m extraordinarily proud of their everyday extraordinary kindness and gentleness they exhibited toward her. Of course, they joke about putting me on the ice floe whereby I remind them that, ha! there are fewer ice floes because of global warming. Anyway, the sooner there are some remedies the better even though the Medicare system may crash and burn because of them.
Trump Aide Promises Ban on Pornography in 2nd Trump Term
Welp, there goes the MAGA vote.
The world has a Boeing problem.
There are two companies that produce mainline jets, Boeing and Airbus. The former is showing itself to be unreliable, and is close to becoming unsafe. Airbus has problems of its own (we all do), but unreliability and safety concerns are not exactly among them (though the A 321XLR has been delayed).
The question is why there are only two such companies? After all, thousands of aircraft are needed all over the world.
Part is how high the barriers to entry are. See COMAC in China, and whatever the Russian company is called that’s trying to redevelop the MC-21.
The other major part is consolidation. In the 70s and 80s Boeing and McDonnell Douglas formed essentially a duopoly for most commercial aircraft, with competition around the edges from British firms and Lockheed’s L-1011*.
Airbus arose because individually European aircraft firms couldn’t compete with the US companies. So the consolidation began there. and then it was completed when McDD assimilated Boeing**.
As usual, stating the problem is much simpler than finding a solution. It’s not like Boeing can be broken up into two competing companies. Ditto for airbus.
Perhaps in 20 years COMAC might offer real competition, if a lot of ifs happen to happen (worldwide certification, a good second generation narrow body, etc.). Meantime, the company bets positioned to compete with the duopoly is Embraer. They could scale up one of the E2 jets to near mainline size, and then design a newer, more efficient narrow body mainline jet.
There are two problems with this: 1) it’s very risky, see what happened to Bombardier with the C Series (now the A220), 2) Embraer shows no inclination to do so, I suspect largely due to the preceding point.
So we end up with the hope that Boeing can be fixed. Somehow.
*Anyone looking to do some aviation alternate history, might ponder what if Lockheed had launched a narro body short-medium haul plane to compete with the B727, B737, and DC9, rather than a long haul wide body to tackle the B747 and DC10
**In aviation circles, the quip is that McDD bought Boeing with Boeing’s money
@OzarkHillbilly:
Two very serious (honestly) questions:
1. What, exactly, is pornography?
2. How can we live with these people?
Ooopps.
@Beth:
1. What, exactly, is pornography?
A) Whatever they say it is.
2. How can we live with these people?
A) Because “He needed killing.” is not a viable defense?
@OzarkHillbilly:
Like, seriously, how are we supposed to live with people that think that one half (at a minimum) isn’t human and doesn’t deserve any rights?
Ohio State University books a mind-numbingly bad commencement speaker:
https://www.rooster.info/p/ohio-state-chris-pan
Next year, perhaps they should hire a Chuck E. Cheese robot instead?
They’re out there. Ex-CNN reporter “haunted” to find “closeted” Trump fans says that they look “look normal”.
@Neil Hudelson: Most definitely…. J Cole’s diss tracks are really making real the idea of “psychic damage.”
@Michael Reynolds:
Well, it’s mainly because the Lib Dems are so incurably reasonable and well-meaning, taken as a whole.
No one ever feared a Lib Dem hooliganism outbreak.
Which is all very well, but it tends to come over as, well, a bit soppy.
And Brits, despite our superficial peaceableness, are a basically a rather truculent bunch.
@gVOR10:
Well, yes, there’s all the accumulated economic mud sticking to them.
But they’ve also comprehensively worn out their welcome in a variety of iterations:
insousiance (Cameron), stubbornness (May), frivolity and fatuousness (Johnson), utter incompetence (Truss) ,and total lack of political nous (Sunak).
They have failed to sustain key state capability due to pursuit of “austerity” and low taxes, screwed up relations with the EU, and pandered to a relatively marginal right with “culture war” bs that repels many traditional Tory voters, due to being swayed by overly-online (and Republican connected) think-tanks and 30-something advisors.
At this point the general public attitude to the fate of the Conservative Party is akin to an eagerly anticipated bowel-movement.
Another news item that has gotten perhaps less attention than it might:
Gazprom is now a loss-making operation; in the red to the order of some $7 billion.
Shame, eh?
@Kathy: Back in the 80s my wife and I flew from Detroit to Cincinnati. She was put off by boarding a small Embraer twin turboprop, IIRC a Bandeirante. Somehow she was not reassured by my saying it was one of the safest airplanes built in Brazil.
@Kingdaddy:
Or they could book one of animatronic characters from Five Nights at Freddy’s and watch the hilarity that ensues.
@Slugger:
I love San Francisco, but … there are no Nirvanas.
Also, let me add to the list: the People’s Temple with Reverend Jim Jones, the assassinations of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, and a not-so-fun fact, Charles Manson lived in the Haight-Ashbury for a few months during the 1967 Summer of Love.
David Pozen, Columbia law school prof, has a nice piece on what’s going on at Columbia with a look at how things have developed over time. The outsize influence of endowments has been an obvious issue for along time I think. He also had a nice bullet capulization fo why the protests have generated so much heat. There really is no acceptable way to criticize Israel that cant be turned into claims of antisemitism. It’s hard to criticize Palestinians without people claiming you are calling them all terrorists. There just arent proper terms that are acceptable for the debate.
“Legal standards such as hostile-environment harassment are not well suited to this situation. These standards assume a reasonably stable and widely shared baseline as to what counts as an act of intimidation, on the one hand, and what counts as public-spirited advocacy, on the other. In the current context, however, that baseline is itself fiercely contested. Students have disagreed about the boundaries of acceptable speech many times before. But I cannot think of another instance where one group’s asserted experience of discriminatory harassment corresponds so closely with another group’s asserted expression of political protest—and where both groups contain a substantial share of the student body. This campus speech debate has produced so much more heat than light not only because of the horrifying violence to which it responds, but also because it is taking place in the absence of any consensus on the meaning or morality of core slogans and symbols. Moreover, the debate is inextricably bound up with a higher-order argument about who gets to set the terms of acceptable discourse on Israel-Palestine issues.”
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2024/05/seeing-university-more-clearly.html
@OzarkHillbilly: According to Marcy Wheeler over at Emptywheel, the pictures are of a box of spilled document on the floor at Mara logo in which a couple of classified documents were visible..
Last week I cracked on Representative M. T. Greene (R-MAGALand). But I did give her an extra day to carry out her threat:
Today. The first Tuesday of the week:
All she has are words…
@al Ameda: Zebra killer, Zodiac killer….
@a country lawyer: For my sense of things, that feature leans into “distinction without a difference” territory given that it speaks to a…
cavalier (??… yeah, I think that’s fair)…
attitude toward the security of the documents in question–no matter whose property Trump imagines them to be.
But IANAL so YMMV.
@gVOR10:
Optimized from the get-go for ops below 10,000ft. Not having pressurization saves a significant amount of weight, particularly when it comes to having a large cargo door (something you want in the Brazilian sticks) and contributes to it’s rather good short field ability. Lessens construction cost….and really helps to cheapen those annual inspections. A general rule of thumb: The less complicated the machine the more reliable it is. Reliable = $$ to operators.
Within this niche, you find a predominance of Embraer 110 variants in flatlands, Beech’s King Air variants around mountains.
A bit of online searching led me to the estimate we might be able to detect radio signals similar to what we leak into space, at a distance of around 32.5 light years.
I then made the mistake of obtaining the volume of a sphere with that radius. It’s huge. Immense, even. And it contains maybe 71 stars all told (or more if binary and other multiple stars are counted as one system).
So, we haven’t found aliens in part because there aren’t that many possibilities around.
This actually makes me feel better. If we detect any signals of intelligent origin, they’d likely be farther away, possibly much farther. Meaning they’d likely be signaling on purpose. Or it might mean they are broadcasting to 1) interstellar colonies they’ve set up, or 2) other aliens they’ve found. In any case, such signals would require a lot more power than we commonly use.
TL;DR we may not have found anyone else because they are too far away to detect, and maybe no one uses up energy to signal the void, nor has interstellar colonies, now knows any other aliens.
On other, less cosmic matters, scouring online info and making use of Copilot, I think my problem making sorbets is lack of sugar. Adding sugar to sugar free sorbets kind of defeats the purpose. But if I’m only making coconut and pineapple ice, there’s no need for the ice cream maker, right. I can just put a container in the freezer.
More research and more questions at Copilot*, led me to allulose. I found some at the store. The claim is that it has the same taste and texture as sugar. It’s sweet, no question, but the texture is way different. Copilot assures me it dissolves similarly to sugar (ie evenly throughout the mix).
So, given I already got some, and I’ll be taking the next week off (insane amount of vacation days this year), and most of what I want to make are sorbets (lime, coconut lime, orange, tangerine, etc.), I’ll give it a go.
Now, Copilot recommends, and several keto sites agree, about 20% allulose by volume. For a 1 liter sorbet, what would mean about 3/4 of a cup. This strikes me as way too much, even if when cold it tastes less sweet. I’ll use the kitchen scale, and add little by little to the mix while tasting it. Then we’ll see.
*One other thing about asking Copilot, is that it will often summarize content from search results. This spares me looking at various recipes one after the other.
Porn star brings pornographic testimony that was salacious and immaterial to NYC show trial of Donald Trump
Judge admonishes defense attorneys for not stopping him from making a mockery of the NYC bench by allowing the witness or limiting her testimony to relevant facts.
Now if only the former Biden DOJ appointee head of the prosecution could present some evidence of an actual crime.
@JKB:
IANAL, and most especially IANANYUS lawyer.
But I’d think it pretty obvious that in a case relating to mis-accounting and concealment of payments made to supress reporting of a candidates sexual relations with an “actress”, whether or not said relations took place is relevant.
Accordingly, testimony from said “actress” is required to address the obvious defence argument that no such relations ever occurred.
If you wish to avoid such salacious testimony, perhaps the Republican party might consider paying rather more attention to the character of its candidates.
Especially one who was well known in New York for many years for being, not to put too fine a point on it, a total sleazeball.
@JKB: A serious response, for once: are you aware that the judge admonished Daniels at least twice to stick to the facts AND issued his own objection to her testimony once? By all appearances, the judge is doing his job keeping the trial professional, a difficult job in a high-profile case with many characters.
Plus, what JohnSF said should be obvious to you.