tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post6862646233063247736..comments2024-03-18T21:52:45.757-07:00Comments on CONTRARY BRIN: More "designated survivors!" And why our anger should be measured. Controlled.David Brinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comBlogger76125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-59527746068453730222019-02-07T16:17:02.634-08:002019-02-07T16:17:02.634-08:00Dr. Brin, I should say that while I certainly agre...Dr. Brin, I should say that while I certainly agree with your characterization of Barry Goldwater and Friedrich Hayek as clear-thinking "great minds" of conservatism, I somewhat disagree with describing William F. Buckley in the same way. While his talent for both debate and writing is indisputable, he also, throughout his career, made several statements and advanced several arguments which are at best strange and difficult to defend, and at worst simultaneously factually inaccurate and rather bigoted. Specifically, I refer to his characterization of multiculturalism as an enemy of Christian faith (as described in his book "Nearer, My God"), his description of HIV/AIDS in the mid-80s as "the special curse of the homosexual," and finally his defense of McCarthyism, which began (of course) during the McCarthy era and continued for the rest of his life. So, Buckley; intelligent man with genuine skill at both speaking and writing? Absolutely. Poster boy for rationalism and even-handedness in the conservative movement? I'm so sure about that one. Dusty Albershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04920911196914398103noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-26798695265857889302019-02-06T11:08:35.107-08:002019-02-06T11:08:35.107-08:00onward
onward
onward<br /><br />onward<br /><br />David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-86612898173609737422019-02-06T10:44:03.358-08:002019-02-06T10:44:03.358-08:00But I am also on record suggesting that Trump migh...But I am also on record suggesting that Trump might be wise not to eat anything those sponsor-despots offer him.<br /><br />It doesn't look like he got the memo, since he scheduled his meeting with Kim in <i>Viet Nam</i>.<br /><br />Somehow I suspect a few people there might still hold a grudge over that minor police action a while ago... :(A.F. Reyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08102355714883828348noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-34646623376523130772019-02-06T10:42:28.622-08:002019-02-06T10:42:28.622-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.A.F. Reyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08102355714883828348noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-48982884811514252572019-02-06T10:11:06.613-08:002019-02-06T10:11:06.613-08:00@Larry Hart
His goal seems to be nothing more tha...@Larry Hart<br /><br /><i>His goal seems to be nothing more than getting attention (at which he is very good, thus he probably considers himself a success by that criterion).</i><br /><br />Which is why I've seen the nickname, Needy Amin, show up in the blogosphere recently for Individual-1.<br /><br />john fremontAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1954889847037952132019-02-06T07:00:23.279-08:002019-02-06T07:00:23.279-08:00From that calvinball article that Tim H links to a...From that calvinball article that Tim H links to above. Emphasis is my own, and illustrates what I've been trying to argue with Alfred Differ about you-know-who's illegitimacy:<br /><br />http://www.ginandtacos.com/2019/02/05/calvinball/<br /><i><br />...<br /><br />Here's the thing: Donald Trump isn't even trying to be president in any sense that the job of the president is understood. An analogy might illustrate my point best. Imagine you wanted to rank the (53 x 2) 106 quarterback performances in the Super Bowl. But you didn't have 106 quarterbacks – you had 105, and then this one guy who showed up on game day wearing a loincloth, swinging around a baseball bat, and making no effort to play the game at all. He simply showed up, preened for the crowd, and screamed "Fuck you!" at the referees for three hours.<br /><br />In one sense, you could easily look at that list and say he is 106th of 106. But in another sense you can't even rank him on the same list as the others. It's not merely that he played a bad game (as players 104 and 105 obviously did). It's that he was playing an entirely different game that nobody else during, before, or since was playing. His goals and motives were wholly his own and largely inscrutable.<br /><br />It is entirely possible that aside from Trump's commitment to rapacious tax cuts for the wealthy and his puerile obsession with The Wall, there is nothing he is even trying to do. In that light it is incorrect to say he's a weak, crappy president. <b>He simply isn't the president at all in any meaningful sense.</b> He spends most of his day doing nothing. He is on vacation more than he is in the White House. His goal seems to be nothing more than getting attention (at which he is very good, thus he probably considers himself a success by that criterion).<br /><br />In the end it's an apples / oranges problem. Forty-four presidents were attempting to drive a bus, and then you have this other guy who wanted to blow up the bus and refused to drive it. It's not clear at all that the 45th guy even belongs in the conversation. There's a difference between doing something poorly and simply not doing it at all.<br /></i>Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-85721690977996988582019-02-06T05:08:50.482-08:002019-02-06T05:08:50.482-08:00I just typed "who" into Google, and it a...I just typed "who" into Google, and it already suggested "Who is the designated survivor 2019".<br /><br />Apparently, it was Rick Perry.Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-74571476821113526462019-02-06T03:22:22.529-08:002019-02-06T03:22:22.529-08:00Ed Burmilla has comments of interest on the SOU:
... Ed Burmilla has comments of interest on the SOU:<br /><br />http://www.ginandtacos.com/2019/02/05/calvinball/<br /><br />Given the base the "Pick handle" Republicans "Enjoy", Bush-Cheney might be the very best that can survive their primaries.<br />Tim H.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-56061293719572427472019-02-05T20:43:19.343-08:002019-02-05T20:43:19.343-08:00Dem males shoulda wore white ties. Was RBG there?...Dem males shoulda wore white ties. Was RBG there? SCOTUS should have a designated survivor.<br /><br />Curiosity, anyone know who the designated cabinet survivor was?<br /><br />David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-39006465884023512372019-02-05T16:57:50.885-08:002019-02-05T16:57:50.885-08:00Dr Brin:
Did RGB show up? Any other supreme dropo...Dr Brin:<br /><i><br />Did RGB show up? Any other supreme dropouts? I didn't watch. <br /></i><br /><br />I'm not planning to watch either, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't started yet. I'm posting this at 7:00pm Chicago time.Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-86308071951795583182019-02-05T16:53:29.408-08:002019-02-05T16:53:29.408-08:00>TCB, The red giant phase is irrelevant... 5Gyr...>TCB, The red giant phase is irrelevant... 5Gyrs from now. It's the gradual brightening that applies pressure in 100Myr. What? you never watched my video on how to LIFT THE EARTH? Google those words and my name<br /><br />Oh, yeah, I elided that part. Things get ticklish well before red giant... But yes, exactly. Looking up that video now.TCBhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08153506222271955110noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-82870502188655203142019-02-05T16:50:57.438-08:002019-02-05T16:50:57.438-08:00Did RGB show up? Any other supreme dropouts? I di...Did RGB show up? Any other supreme dropouts? I didn't watch. She has an excuse.<br /><br />TCB, The red giant phase is irrelevant... 5Gyrs from now. It's the gradual brightening that applies pressure in 100Myr. What? you never watched my video on how to LIFT THE EARTH? Google those words and my name.<br /><br />We didn't start off at the outer edge, or even the middle of the goldilocks zone. The boundary doesn't shift that fast. <br /><br />No, what is unnerving is the early OSCILLATIONS! The Iceball Earth era was only 600 Myr ago. Those periods were brief, but devastating... but also seem to have stimulated life to boom.<br />David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-87772763361140260412019-02-05T16:34:05.515-08:002019-02-05T16:34:05.515-08:00Someone is listening to you. RBG to skip State of ...Someone is listening to you. RBG to skip State of the Union tonight. <br /><br /><br />https://thehill.com/regulation/administration/428582-ginsburg-not-expected-at-trumps-state-of-the-union?amp&__twitter_impression=truematthewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17757867868731829206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-83627781508365818382019-02-05T16:29:37.514-08:002019-02-05T16:29:37.514-08:00This here is a random thought that isn't germa...This here is a random thought that isn't germane to the current post, but I'm a gonna drop it while I think of it.<br /><br />As all cogent readers here know, global warming is, to put it MILDLY, a problem for our civilization/species/biosphere. Now, I've read that Earth is just barely outside the inner limit of the habitable zone. How unfortunate! I thought. What a rough bit of luck for a fossil-fuel civilization to be already skirting the inner edge of habitability!<br /><br />Lately it dawned on me that this is <i>not a matter of luck at all.</i><br /><br />Here follows a thought experiment. Imagine a planet like ours forming around a star like ours at the very outermost edge of the habitable zone. Main sequence stars, over time, get brighter and larger as they burn their hydrogen and helium. When that's run out they go red giant for a bit and habitable-zone planets get fried. This is all astronomy 101, of course.<br /><br />So a new planet, once formed, is on a timer, like a bomb. When the parent star goes red giant, BOOM. Show over. Life, if it exists on that world, must evolve in the available time between formation and BOOM. Larger stars, all other things being equal, burn out too fast. Biospheres don't evolve to sentience in a mere ten million years (as far as we know). On the other end of the scale are little red dwarf stars with very long lifetimes. Can civilizations evolve there? I don't venture to guess. What concerns us, at the moment, is main sequence solar mass stars: ours.<br /><br />Our Earth formed (in the hab zone, natch) some 4.54 billion years ago, and living organisms came in no later than 3.7 billion years ago. No time was wasted, really: it's even possible that primitive life existed sooner but was sterilized by colliding planetoids; no matter, the clock is ticking!<br /><br />Point is, it takes time for eukaryotes to evolve, and then multicellular life, and then brains and then technology, and all this time the sun and therefore the hab zone are expanding outward! Even without coal and gasoline, the planet would, eventually, graze and then slip past the inner hot line. I repeat, it's <i>not an accident</i> that we find ourselves closer to the inside of the habitable zone; <i>it is exactly what you'd expect</i>, when you factor in the need for time before technological civilization can arise.TCBhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08153506222271955110noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-29471455492868535632019-02-05T15:58:13.480-08:002019-02-05T15:58:13.480-08:00RIP Norman Goldman.
No, he's not dead, but th...RIP Norman Goldman.<br /><br />No, he's not dead, but the radio show almost is. He announced today that, after willingly losing money for almost 10 years, he has to pull the plug.<br /><br />The world will be a poorer place.Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-24155641707443920182019-02-05T15:03:57.274-08:002019-02-05T15:03:57.274-08:00Because his usefulness as an asset may shift to ev...<i>Because his usefulness as an asset may shift to even greater value as a disruptive martyr, at any point, now.</i><br /><br />I'm still more worried about a domestic false-flag attack. Sure, make him a martyr, but be able to blame the Democrats and Liberals for it. Now <i>that</i> would lock in at least the next couple of elections. :(A.F. Reyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08102355714883828348noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-51684945805842917742019-02-05T09:50:57.449-08:002019-02-05T09:50:57.449-08:00What know two. Is known even to the swines. ;)What know two. Is known even to the swines. ;)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-86338807242509973072019-02-05T09:43:50.159-08:002019-02-05T09:43:50.159-08:00Apparently, there ARE some good New England Patrio...Apparently, there ARE some good New England Patriots. Maybe I don't hate them as much as I had thought:<br /><br />https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2019/Pres/Maps/Feb05.html#item-7<br /><i><br />The New England Patriots took a very long time to score a touchdown on Sunday, but many of them took not long at all afterward to announce that they would forego a White House visit, if invited. Some players even went so far as to say that they would like to follow in the Golden State Warriors' footsteps and visit Barack Obama instead.<br /></i>Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-78578322627299163382019-02-05T09:34:18.167-08:002019-02-05T09:34:18.167-08:00Sorry, anon... (and traditionally anonymous poster...Sorry, anon... (and traditionally anonymous posters do give themselves at least a sign-off monicker)... but that scenario doesn't work. <br /><br />Mind you, in my story "Senses Three & Six" most of the over-spending on Air Force toilets and shuttles etc and hyper inflation of the 1970s came from emergency spending to build a crude starship to attempt to slip through an alien blockade-quarantine. Jimmy Carter sacrificed himself. So, I am good at imagining what-if scenarios.<br /><br />In yours, top democrats would have been briefed and would be playing along.David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-90199988764852034432019-02-05T09:33:31.826-08:002019-02-05T09:33:31.826-08:00Paul Krugman tells us what we should already know ...Paul Krugman tells us what we <b>should</b> already know (emphasis mine)...<br /><br />https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/ralph-northam-howard-schultz.html<br /><i><br />So what do the empty quarters of U.S. politics mean for the future? First, of course, that Schultz is a fool — <b>and so are those who dream of a reformed G.O.P. that remains conservative but drops its association with racists</b>. There’s hardly anyone who wants that mix of positions.<br /></i>Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-29559427863905628262019-02-05T09:26:26.721-08:002019-02-05T09:26:26.721-08:00Jim Wright pulls no punches:
http://www.stonekett...Jim Wright pulls no punches:<br /><br />http://www.stonekettle.com/<br /><i><br />I used to have this idiot cat who would fall asleep in some precarious position. Then inevitably, it would fall from a height, bonk! It would get up, look around, and then try to pretend that hadn’t just landed on its head like an idiot. Trump and those who surround him don’t even have that much awareness. He’s so goddamned stupid, or rather the people who he surrounds himself with (because these two tweets were threaded, something Trump himself doesn’t know how to do) are so goddamned stupid, that they don’t even realize when they incriminate themselves.<br /></i>Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-7243808080859238612019-02-05T08:03:15.640-08:002019-02-05T08:03:15.640-08:00Anonymous, the noted behavior of Donald Trump goes...Anonymous, the noted behavior of Donald Trump goes back <i>decades</i>. This isn't something new - his current behavior is of a piece with his behavior in boarding school, with his dodging of the draft in Vietnam, with his insistence on calling for the execution of the Central Park Five even when DNA evidence exonerated them, with his (and his father's!) refusal to lease properties to, shall we say, certain melanin-advantaged people, with his long-standing tendency to take companies over and then drive them so deeply into the ground they could uncover lost civilizations (and then get rescued by Daddy's money, and by bilking investors and contractors). This didn't suddenly begin, say, around the turn of the century, or even when the Soviet Union fell - it's Donnie. It's always been Donnie. Just ask a New Yorker.Jon S.https://www.blogger.com/profile/13585842845661267920noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-32264089074652157342019-02-05T07:33:11.933-08:002019-02-05T07:33:11.933-08:00Darrel
He need to be that way to make beleive not ...Darrel<br />He need to be that way to make beleive not us<br />but some cunning person with mighty secret service of his own. ;)<br />Read about operation MeansemeatAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-59811123682736946152019-02-05T05:43:55.087-08:002019-02-05T05:43:55.087-08:00Another new Stonekettle Station post. I can hardl...Another new Stonekettle Station post. I can hardly keep up:<br /><br />http://www.stonekettle.com/<br /><i><br />...<br /><br />You know, in retrospect, that’s an unfair comparison.<br /><br />In the movie Idiocracy, President Camacho was a decent person.<br /><br />He sincerely wanted to be a good leader for all of his people, but he also knew that he was a moron in a nation of morons.<br /><br />He didn’t know much, but he knew that.<br /><br />And so Camacho set out to surround himself with those smarter than himself, a key plot point of the film.<br /><br />Real life president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt once famously said, “I’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.” In that light, maybe Camacho wasn’t so dumb after all.<br /><br />...<br /></i>Larry Harthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01058877428309776731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-77451310094578194232019-02-05T05:13:09.262-08:002019-02-05T05:13:09.262-08:00Anonymous,
That could be an interesting plot outl...Anonymous,<br /><br />That could be an interesting plot outline for a fictional story, but as a real world hypothesis it just doesn't work. There is one <i>yuuuggge</i> immediate problem. Trump himself. We know he is a shallow, selfish, stupid asshole who doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself. It's a matter of public record established long before he became President. What we are seeing with his presidency matches perfectly well with what was already known about him. Except, of course, for the easy marks who actually believe the Trump's lies despite all of the truly massive amount of evidence to the contrary.Darrell Ehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14054311762477388637noreply@blogger.com