Welcome to March Forum
Now that the longest month is done, it is on to the next bit.
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, March 1, 2024
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37 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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1am PST. outside with a drink and a cigar, a not so balmy 36°f. Hoping the new month treats you all well.
It’s nearly 60 degrees here in So Cal at 2:30 AM (our usual time to wake up since we hit 50).
I’d say March is coming in like a lamb this year, at least around here.
An upper end of seasonal temps 53 today. Then climate change works it’s dark magic and we return to 60s and 70s.
I’m going to try to avoid politics this weekend and instead concentrate on spring training baseball. There’s a 1:00 PM game on Saturday and I’ll walk over to my favorite bar and watch the game from there. I’d rather think about whether Mateo has his swing back than dwell on the corruption of our Supreme Court.
Eat the rich:
Remember this when you file your tax return this year.
@OzarkHillbilly: Gee, I wonder if that is part of the reason why the projected deficit is about $1.5 trillion for 2024, which is ridiculous in a strong economy. You know, the deficit that didn’t matter when a Republican was president but is a national crisis now that a Democrat is president.
@OzarkHillbilly: Just took the dogs out for their first post darkness pee-time and realized that we got a smattering of sleet last night, just enough to make walking an adventure.
Fingers crossed
@OzarkHillbilly: We had that happen on our ranch. I don’t know how many hands the wells have passed through ever since they were plugged, but they’re still not done with the reclamation process. All of the well sites are basically trash heaps full of invasive weeds, now. And there’s nobody to call to complain.
@Jax: It’s an oft told tale.
A few years back my neighbor was contacted by an Oklahoma lawyer inquiring about purchasing 40 acres she owned a few miles down the road for “a client”. It made me nervous (I was thinking of fracking waste), enough so that I said as much to her. She ended up telling them “No way, Jose.” for reasons I am not privy to but happy I am she didn’t.
@OzarkHillbilly: Standard privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
Thousands Turn Out for Navalny’s Funeral in Moscow
Hmmm. Why does a leader as organically popular with his people as we are told Putin is need to murder political opponents, imprison protestors, control discourse, and quash dissent so brutally?
His “strongman” leadership and ideas are so so naturally popular, he ought to be able to beat the opposition straight up, fair and square.
What is Putin so afraid of, since his deep popularity indicates Russians would choose him over viable alternatives given the opportunity?
Last Friday my daughter came home with a fever, which turned into horrible laryngitis along with some nausea. Fast forward 7 days, and her fever finally broke in the early morning.
A few hours later, my son started exhibiting all the symptoms of Hand Foot and Mouth disease.
(For you non-parents, HFM is incredibly contagious and both adults and children are susceptible. Symptoms include painful acne on your hand, feet, mouth, and butt. My coworker and her husband lost all of their finger and toenails from the blisters.)
I finally get the kids settled in order to start work and saw an email from my Executive Director, who is in week…4?…of his tenure. Two of the four directors at our org accepted jobs at other organizations, in the middle of our legislative session. That leaves two senior staff and a brand new ED to run political opposition in the Statehouse (Dems are largely powerless, it being a supermajority), manage communications, keep fundraising going, manage the former directors’ teams, and recruit and onboard the new directors, whenever we have time to find them.
I’m exhausted from the last week, and pre-exhausted for the weeks that are coming.
@Neil Hudelson:
Hey if anyone’s ever been interested in working at the ACLU and really wants to Fight the Good Fight against some truly malevolent folks, we have some opportunities!
@Neil Hudelson: This might have been more attractive without your prior post. Good luck with everything.
@Neil Hudelson: “My coworker and her husband lost all of their finger and toenails from the blisters.)”
Do you mean temporarily or permanently?
It sounds horrible either way, but still…
Neil, our Ad Services manager has a daughter that this week also came down with something nasty that also gave her laryngitis (she is in the Bay Area of California), I wonder if this is something that is going around all over the place. I do not have kids and it seems they are more likely to fall ill, but I am just curious if other folks in your orbit have mentioned that their kids have gotten sick recently.
It sounds like after a harrowing week she is on the mend, which is great to hear but when it rains it pours and sorry to hear about your son and hang in there. It is not much, but at least you know that you can always hop on this blog to hear words of encouragement when needed.
A good summary of how blindly pro-Putin Elon Musk and one of his billionaire fellow travelers are:
https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/musk-sacks-ignorant-isolationism-ukraine
Yesterday, I got a blizzard of phishing emails purporting to be from GOP sources like the Trump campaign and Tim Scott. An example:
Followed by a link that you definitely should not click.
The fact that these texts could be actually from Republican sources is less a nod to the skill of the scammers to credibly look like Republicans, and more a testament to how much the Republicans now credibly have become scammers.
“Retaliation”: Texas AG Paxton Demands PFLAG Provide Names, Addresses Of Trans Members
On another thread there is a sidebar discussion about what the main stream media publishes and doesn’t publish, and it calls to mind something that I noticed decades ago and has only gotten worse: when media uses not-wanting-to-offend as a copout. From what I can see, non-specialty publications, whether local papers or the NYT, do not want to drive readership away and they employ techniques not so much to avoid offending anyone, but rather to have that offense associated with someone else, not the publication. The most obvious examples of this are things like, “Republicans say twice as many immigrants are coming across the border, Democrats say half as many”, and make no attempt to discern the truth. To me, this is a pretty obvious example of “The Dems will be mad at the Repubs and vice versa up until the point we actually report the facts, in which case one side or another will be mad at the paper and cancel their subscription.”
But there is an even more insidious form of this. I’ll give an example. There are a few subway and light rail projects being discussed in Baltimore and also some changes to zoning to encourage more mixed income and denser housing. As is inevitable, a lot of the arguments boil down to “We are against it because it will bring crime into our neighborhood and bring down property values”, versus “That’s just a smokescreen. They are against it because they don’t want to see people of color, the poors and white trash in their neighborhood.” The thing is, if building these things actually bring crime into a neighborhood, that is a cause for concern. Even a bigot has a right to fear crime. And there are a lot of studies over the decades that have addressed these issues. They are not super easy to read because there are many factors to account for. Nevertheless, they can be sussed out and used to predict what would happen in the specific instance proposed this time. I’ve done it and, in the age of the internet, it isn’t that hard. But, as I first noticed thirty years ago, the media never go there. They report he said/she said. If you read the articles closely, you realize that both sides can feel vindicated by the same article, with the anti side vindicated because the pro side never addresses their concerns, and the pro side vindicated because it is obvious to all by their words that these people are just bigots using dog whistles and code words. It would seem ideal for a reporter to do some research and find out what happened to crime rates in some of the hundreds or thousands of similar efforts in the past, but it never happens.
@Neil Hudelson:
Neil, HFM is a fairly common side-effect of some of the more effective chemo treatments. I remember winding up in ICU briefly as a side effect, because my immune system was (of course) trashed. Ugh, hope everyone’s better soon.
ETA, any help would have to be remote, but let me know if a mostly retired Luddite can do, besides “thoughts and prayers.” You and yours already have that from Casa Luddite.
@Stormy Dragon: Paxton, man. What a jackass.
I may have to consider ponying up for PFLAG and maybe also the Transgender Education Network for Texas. Does anybody have any other suggestions?
Bear in mind I’m more interested in taking care of people than I am in political advocacy. Thoughts?
I came here to just rant for a lil’ bit and received offers of support and help, just for a sick household. Thank you Flat Earth et al, the OTB crowd is truly a thoughtful and generous bunch.
@wr fortunately just a temporary loss.@Joe: Ha! I will say, I’ve been with the org a decade. The two people who left were there 10 and 7 years; that type of longevity only happens in well-run organizations that are good to their employees. Their timing is really painful for those here to run the ship, but it is what it is.
I do find myself often repeating under my breath “Chaos is a ladder.”
@MarkedMan: Just re-read my post above, as I am wont to do because of my terrible spelling, and realized some might be interested in whether light rail/subway stops or mixed income housing causes crime to go up in the affected areas.
Light rail/subway – From the papers I’ve looked at that really try to look at these things and account for all the variables (i.e. not Heritage Society crap), the answer is “No” at least to any approximation that matters. And long term (decades) it definitely improves property values. Heck, as anyone looking in NY, Paris, and London can tell you, there are subway stops in some of the most desirable real estate. However, those cities were built up and expensive already when the subways were put in and so the stations were put in odd places that didn’t require destruction of expensive infrastructure. The reason those odd nooks and crannies became valuable real estate is because of the stations built there.
Mixed-use or more dense housing: These vary by so much and by so many surrounding factors that you can’t make a blanket analysis. This is where setting a couple of investigative journalists onto it for an extended period of time would really bring some value.
@MarkedMan:
I remember my dad telling me that Marin County did not become part of the BART system because the powers-that-be did not want to make it easy for people that could not afford cars to get to Marin. It’s interesting that the official history of BART tells a very different story.
I spent half the work time before lunch trying to copy one table from one Word file to another. It’s the strangest thing I’ve seen it do. As soon as you reached the table, which is exceedingly long, the thing froze, often displaying the NOT RESPONDING tag of doom at the top of the window.
And then it got worse when I managed to copy it. It wrecked the other file as well.
IT just spent an hour on it, and can’t find a fix.
Weather in England: continues to piss it down.
One of the wettest autumn/winters ever.
Ground everywhere is sodden; can’t clear the borders beds because the soil’s too wet to work on without turning to a mud puddle. All the fields are showing pools of water at low points.
Yuck.
Meanwhile in Europe:
Transnistria (home of the sweet transexual transvestites?) appeals for help to sweet Uncle Vova.
Have the Moscow “pension” cheques bounced again? LOL.
President Macron (openly) and the UK (less openly) are getting very fed up with Scholz pandering to the SPD/industrial appeasement lobby.
Hence Macron: possibility of sending French troops to Ukraine, if necessary.
UK: Dear Bundeskanzler: please shut the fuck up
Scholz is not a war consigliere.
Macron, OTOH is a total ruck-goblin. LOL
@Neil Hudelson:
Ah, but up or down?
That’s the question.
🙂
@MarkedMan:
People with math skills do not become reporters. That is an overgeneralization, but not by much. As a result, reporters are generally not qualified to distinguish valid research from junk science or propaganda.
@anjin-san: @anjin-san:
In DC, Georgetown does not have a metro stop because the residents of Georgetown really, really did not want to be easily accessible from the eastern more-than-half of the city.
@DrDaveT:
But how do the servants get back and forth?????
Aurora paramedic who authorized lethal dose of ketamine for Elijah McClain sentenced to five years in prison
https://www.cpr.org/2024/03/01/aurora-paramedic-peter-cichuniec-sentencing-prison-elijah-mcclain-death/
@DrDaveT:
The lack of a rail connection(s) to the North Bay is no joke. From the east bay, the aging Richmond Bridge is subject to slowdowns and closures from things like chunks of concrete dropping on to the lower deck roadway. Highway 37 is subject to the whims of climate change and has suffered extended closures due to storm and tide damage.
So, we don’t have a truly reliable connection between the east & north bay in one of the wealthiest places in the history of the world. How insane is that? But, this is post-Reagan America. We can’t have nice things.
@DrDaveT:
A reporter that can only summarize what’s been said and by whim, could be easily replaced with a ChatGPT program with voice and face recognition abilities.
On other things, anyone who wants to delve into the money issues involving Lardass A. Drumpf, may want to check out what Investopedia says about appeal bonds.
You can also find links to surety bonds and other related matters.
How about that? Yogurt may reduce the odds of type 2 diabetes.
I’m not sure what the minimum amount, 2 cups, means in grams, which is the measure of yogurt. I eat some every weekday. At breakfast with oatmeal and bananas, and at lunch with desert.
A measuring cup contains about 250 ml. two cups would be 500 ml. If it were water, that’s close enough to 500 gr. Yogurt is denser, so say between 400 and 500 gr. I guesstimate I consume more than that.
I’d be more worried about how much sugar some yogurts contain. I get mine unsweetened, so no added sugars at all. Just the ones found naturally in milk and dairy, which are on the high end. Let’s not forget milk evolved to feed infant mammals, not adult humans.