Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, February 15, 2023
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67 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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Oh dear. I’m afraid I didn’t stay caught up on the White Trash thread yesterday….opened my computer today and I see there’s 101 comments! Is it worth getting caught up, or did the conversation wade into the weeds by the end?
DeSantis is now threatening to eliminate ALL AP classes in Florida.
Someone give this culture warrior a dunce cap and time out in the corner. I can’t see how this strengthens his case.
There was this airline called Aeromar that flew ATR turboprops. It’s been in financial trouble for a while, having planes repossessed by lessors, getting behind payroll, etc.
Today it quit flying. A coworker was at the airport for a flight to Tepic, and now he had to get a ticket to Guadalajara, where he’ll take a 2-3 hour bus trip to Tepic.
At least they stranded few people, seeing as they seemed to have had only two small planes left yesterday.
It was an odd airline with a mixed business model. It began as a leisure carrier, focusing on beach destinations. Then it got into thin (low demand) business routes. For now it’s left three states, Nayarit, Colima, and Tamaulipas, without air connectivity from their capitals to Mexico City.
Aeromexico is supposed to add some of these thin business routes to its network, but in March.
I never flew Aeromar, nor was interested enough in flying a prop plane to take a cheap flight to nowhere in particular.
@Jax:
It’s still going – I didn’t butt in yesterday, but added my bit just now.
@Jen: This will really piss off the middle-upper middle classes who count on AP classes to boost their kid’s grade point average and increase their class standing so they can get a greater chance to get into the college of their choice.
Top Threats to Birds, annually:
Cats – 2,400,000,000
Buildings – 599,000,000
Cars – 214,000,000
Windmills – 234,012
Marge Three-Toes, just yesterday;
I’m at a loss for the whale angle on this…first I’ve heard that one…but logically one can only assume she also wants to do away with cats, buildings, and cars.
@Jax:
Read @james piece and perhaps the first dozen comments and you’ll get the gist. No need to spend a lot of time with the other 100+ as the thread took on a predictable bent.
@Jen:
Groomer Ron’s efforts to outflank TFG on the right, really is lending lots of ammunition to his opponents both in the primary and to Biden in the general.
As a general rule, campaigns attempt to define their opponents, Groomer is giving them a helping hand.
@Jax:
@Sleeping Dog:
Thanks! I got distracted and wandered off yesterday. Tall weeds indeed. Nice job Dr. J!
I knew it would just reading the title and decided to not even bother finding out what James talking about.
@Jax: @charon: @Flat Earth Luddite: @OzarkHillbilly:
It’s up to 111 comments now.
@Jax: RE: White Trash thread. Relatively civil, but an insurmountable difference of opinion.
Here’s a fun story…
Teddy Joseph Von Nukem (you know anyone with that name is gonna have issues) was a prominent face among the neo-nazis at the infamous Charlottesville. You remember – there were good people there, on both sides.
After carrying a tiki-torch at UVA he got busted for carrying fentanyl across the Mexican border into Arizona.
Well…the tough guy from the master race killed himself the day he was to go on trial.
Good people. Both sides.
https://tucson.com/news/local/border/charlottesville-marcher-dies-while-facing-fentanyl-charges-in-tucson/article_8ed45204-acc3-11ed-8d38-fbbb2e0e741b.html
@CSK:
Yeah that’s mostly me. Sorry, hit a personal sore point this morning and can’t seem to come down.
Can anyone offer a good distraction?
@daryl and his brother darryl: The “whale angle” has been a concern for a while, but the issue rose to prominence recently when a number of whales beached themselves near a proposed offshore wind farm in New Jersey.
More at the link: https://time.com/6254785/whale-deaths-offshore-wind-power/
00pm@daryl and his brother darryl: Well, trying to think of a human being as ‘trash’…. try hard to avoid that, on gen’l principles… but Mr Nukem would sure come very close.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
I believe the complaint about wind turbines, at least out on the Great Plains, is that they kill raptors. If all they killed were a billion house sparrows and common starlings — both highly successful invasive species in North America — no one would care.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Most of the long threads in response to a pretty specific original post end up going down a rabbit hole. Too often it is two to several commentators arguing the number angels on a pin-head. The valuable commentary usually happens in the first dozen to two dozen comments.
This isn’t exclusive to OTB, go over to the Bulwark or the Athletic and you see the same thing. Can’t imagine how deep the rabbit hole is on one of those Yahoo threads with a thousand + comments.
@KM:
Distractions. Hmmm. Well:
1. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has abruptly resigned.
2. Dianne Feinstein forgot that she announced she wouldn’t run again.
3. Trump says 2024 will be a life or death election.
@Michael Cain:
Which is a valid point and an argument for mitigation and developing collision deterrent technologies. Certainly building design is already pretty far ahead on this.
But people like Trump and Marge Three-Toes are only interested in the fight against AOC and the Green New Deal.
I trust they are beaching themselves, Jen, in an attempt to get to the county board meeting to provide comments opposing these plans.
@Joe: Ha! To be fair, the site mapping can include deep water sonar studies. Still, there is ZERO evidence these strandings are being caused by the site work.
@CSK:
Yesterday he was polling on guillotines, now this. he has a real death wish going, a little too late.
@daryl and his brother darryl:
Deterring birds is a hard problem. Airports and airlines are still plagued with them.
It’s 63deg. f. in Sleepytown and Cubs pitchers and catchers report today. Spring is on the way!
@Jen:
So the whales read about the wind farms in the newspapers and killed themselves? Got it. And tell me more about how all the conspiracy loons and knee jerk reactionaries are on the right…
@MarkedMan: Well, as I mentioned above, site work sometimes includes mapping the sea floor, which can be done with what amounts to sonar equipment. They need to do this in order to appropriately anchor turbines and to determine the best paths to place transmission cables. So, the site work does actually include components that could conceivably disturb wildlife.
@Sleeping Dog: My son once showed me a legendary Reddit thread , that had hundreds (thousands?) of entries. It was on a bodybuilding forum and the topic was whether exercises done every other day were the same as exercises done four times a week. Man, were people on both sides ready to die on that hill!* What was almost exquisite was that there were more than a few posters who very obviously were just throwing gasoline on the fire every time the thread died down. Given that in any group of 10 or more people there will be at least one of them that can’t help but feed the troll, the thread went on forever.
*The fact that there were “both sides” was a travesty on its own. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which side was farcical.
@Jen: Man, I hate it when somebody harshes my self-righteous contempt with actual facts. How dare you!
Mastering the art of the Intro:
“The current Guinness World Records holder for the world’s largest digital image is a composite photograph of a sagittal section of a 1.5-millimeter-long zebrafish embryo. The picture, created in late 2010 by Frank G. A. Faas and colleagues at the department of Molecular Cell Biology of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, measures 921,600 by 380,928 pixels, for a total of 351,063,244,800 pixels.
That’s nothing, however, compared to an image created by one Washington, DC–based developer. Almost a year in the making, the image has an area of 102,040,171,200,000 pixels — 290 times larger than the current record holder. At one pixel per inch, it would wrap around the Earth 2.7 times. If printed out at 15 DPI, a fairly common setting for large billboards, the image would be as tall as 16,408 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. If 3D-printed, the image could (hypothetically) be used to bat the International Space Station out of orbit.
This image is so immense, in fact, that it can’t be opened like any common digital file. It can only be accessed with specialized software, programs used in fields like geography, microbiology, and astronomy. “Uncompressed, this thing would be 250 terabytes, which is huge!” the image creator, speaking to BuzzFeed News via Zoom, said with a proud grin. “Like, you can’t just pick up 250 terabytes at Walmart.”
The image itself is a cartoonish representation of an erect penis.”
@Kathy:
I think Trump meant that it will be life for the U.S. if he’s elected and death if he isn’t.
@CSK:
Life and death election
Yeah, he wants to bring back firing squads, group executions and maybe the guillotine.
I’d suggest the guillotine be used for those absconding with presidential papers.
@Jen:
It doesn’t. DeFascist’s national prospects and political instincts are overrated.
@Sleeping Dog:
Public executions, too, which is what the Jan 6 mob had in mind for Mike Pence, I gather.
@Jen:
He doesn’t have a case other then “education bad” and “obey me”. If college is supposed to be Liberal Indoctrination Central, of course he’s gonna eventually go after classes that claim to be college-level work.
Once he starts screwing up kids’ ability to get into the “good schools” the middle class will start to complain. Legacies can buy their way in but when Bill from FL with the perfect HS grades can’t get into an out of state school because Trip from NY with the same grades plus AP classes can, its gonna cause problems. This will literally drop them from compatibility lists by removing a criteria that could have given them the in. No AP Calc? Who cares about your 4.2 from Gator High -that can be grade inflation or watered down classes. He’s torpedoing a entire generations’ ability to go where they want or get scholarships to pay their way. Gen Z already hates the GOP so why not screw them a little more right when they gain the ablity to vote?
@Jax: Looked mostly like people repeating what they’d said before to me. (I usually try to read all of the comments in a thread just in case someone says something important. Usually doesn’t happen.)
@Jen: @DK: @KM:
Didn’t DeSantis say something about finding another vendor of AP-equivalent material?
@KM:
Part of the grander plan. Force FL kids to go to FL colleges that will be turned into christian nationalist indoctrination camps. Of course that indoctrination won’t work, just ask the fundamentalist churches that can’t figure out why their young have left/are leaving the churches of their parents in droves.
@daryl and his brother darryl: If you can’t do the time..
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….. Like they could give a rat’s ass. They just want to continue burning fossil fuels until the last nickel of profit has been wrung from them.
@CSK: DeFascist says a lot of things. What alternative vendor is he going to find? Gab? Truth Social?
@Sleeping Dog: Certain subjects just bring it out. It’s inherent to the internet.
Matt Gaetz will NOT be charged by the DOJ with sex trafficking.
@DK:
Beats me.
@CSK:
I hadn’t seen that, but it’s entirely credible. The vendor would likely be associated with his favorite source for educational expertise, Hillsdale College. And some of the state money would find its way into DeSantis’ campaign.
@CSK: Yes, he did, but good luck to him selling that. It’s like convincing people that the store-brand cereal is just as good as the name-brand stuff. It’s going to be a hard sell, especially for anyone who has been through the AP class circuit.
@gVOR08: @Jen:
The thing is, I can’t find any vendors of AP courses and exams BUT the College Board.
@CSK:
AP isn’t the only one – IB (international baccalaureate) is an option. However, it will have the same issue as the curriculum will not be acceptable under his rule. They won’t teach to FL standards as the courses are international. He can try to reinvent the wheel with his buddy’s but the whole point of AP and IB is they are a standard that can be used across colleges and even countries. He can try to trap the students in FL but parents want to have options and let’s face it, no parent that wants to brag is gonna accept a FL school over an Ivy. If your kid can’t get into MIT because DeSantis got rid of the AP course needed to cinch it, Mommy and Daddy are gonna be pissed. That kind of social cache matters in some circles and those are the kind who will flip on him for messing up their plans.
@CSK: Yeah. It’s a variation on “bring market competition to education” to improve results.
@Sleeping Dog: I think Christian Nationalist indoctrination probably has a better chance. Power over other people always sells better than humble lives of serving others. And lots of advocates of Christian Nationalism have very flexible definitions of how Christian one has to be considering that Trump qualifies.
@DK: As I recall from reading the link to the first vitriolic salvo, he was suggesting International Baccalaureate* (which is actually a pretty good program from what I remember) and a couple of others that I remember seeing referenced places but didn’t look into.
*I don’t think switching to IB would solve his “problem” with programs for the pseudo gifted, but I don’t think switching is what he intends to do. I think he intends to roil the waters for a while and then claim victory after people have forgotten about the issue. Sometimes, being angry is all that matters. Especially among conservatives.
In the zombie apocalypse thread a couple of doors down, KM pleads (?):
Try this:
(And yes, I learned this sitting at the feet of the fundies I grew up with. Sometimes, they knew what they were talking about; they just struggled to live what they believe as much as I still do 60-mumble years later.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Eh, people said that about Disney and Reedy Creek just got dissolved this week. Most conservatives do the whole “hope they forget it” bit but DeSantis really does seem to want to create his own kingdom. He seems to want to destroy things in order to get his way and revels in exerting his control.
I wouldn’t put it past him to ban all AP-type classes rather then back down.
Raquel Welch dead a 82.
Remember when you could call someone a Sex Symbol?
Remember the poster in Shawshank?
RIP dear lady.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDqgrZZtLnE
@Jen: I saw that he mentioned the International Baccalaureate program as an alternative. Having had both my kids go through this two year program I can vouch for the fact that it is very, very far from a drop in replacement. For one thing, it is one two-year program, rather than simply junior and senior year of high school. The requirements are incredibly rigorous and don’t take into account any state mandated programs, so those have to be added on top. But, yes, at the end you can test out of university credits just like AP.
Now that I think of it, it is an international program originally designed for children of expats having to deal with dramatically different school systems, and so the mandatory classwork is based on international standards, not Florida ones. So basically DeSantis is just blowing this out of his ass.
@KM: Whoops, you beat me to it. I should learn to read all the comments before I start replying to one of them (but I probably won’t).
@Just nutha ignint cracker: An astounding episode in the life of St. Francis of Assisi:
@CSK:
I believe my interpretation is more accurate.
@gVOR08:
Also, there will be a lawsuit claiming that non-FL colleges refusing to accept the Hillsdale courses for advanced placement is an unconstitutional discrimination against religion.
A bit late but Happy Lupercalia to everyone!
Today is a day of wolves, dogs and 75% candy – go forth and enjoy at least one of them!
Raquel Welch, 82, has died.
@MarkedMan: As someone who grew up attending international schools, I am very familiar with IB. The issue I was alluding to is not program rigor, it is program ubiquity. People know the AP system, both high school guidance counselors and college admissions people. The college admissions folks also know about IB, given the number of international students out there (many of whom pay full freight, so yeah, that matters).
Trying to get parents to understand what IB entails and–potentially even more problematic, getting schools to redo their entire college-track curriculum to adjust to IB standards–is not going to be an easy ask.
@KM: What is “75% candy”?
@MarkedMan:
Seems a little Globalist to me. Or is that (((Globalist)))? What kind of America First style program starts with the word International?
I’m not sure he’s playing to his base right.
I’m also anticipating Donald Trump announcing that Trump University will begin offering college level classes for high school students. (Quality of education and acceptance by colleges not guaranteed)
@Gustopher:
Sadly, the entity that called itself Trump University has been put out of business, and its eponymous founder fined $25 million for running a fraudulent operation.
@CSK: And how would this stop an announcement?
It will be huge, people are saying.
@Gustopher:
Well, he could start something called Trump Research Associates Student Helper.
T.R.A.S.H.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
75% off. All the valentine’s day candy is on sale so after Halloween, today’s one of the best days to snag candy cheap