Home » Open thread 4/30/22

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Open thread 4/30/22 — 45 Comments

  1. Just to stir the pot a bit. Everyday, I go through a number of news sites, almost exclusively on the right. However, I also check CNN about twice a day. Lately, their top story is almost always about Ukraine, and their coverage of the conflict seems to be more comprehensive than the right leaning sites. Whether what they are reporting is true is up to speculation. They also have covered the Shanghai lockdown much more than the conservative outlets.

    What’s been interesting this past week is that CNN has not even mentioned the Ministry of Truth story at all. Even the more centrist Daily Mail has given it quite a bit of coverage. A search of their site for Jankowicz yields nothing. Any reader of CNN exclusively would never even know about this item. And, of course, any story with Trump or DeSantis in the headline is sure to be a hit piece.

  2. What if the 2024 Presidential election turns into a 1912 rerun? Sort of.

    1912 was Taft(R), Wilson(D), Roosevelt(BM) and Wilson won.

    Would Trump blow up the Republican nominee to run as an Independent if the Republican party chooses someone like DeSantis over him?

    Whether or not Trump runs in 2024 is going to be a massive story in the next 12-18 months.

  3. “Pretty good but it missed the last high F.”

    It’s ok, a lot of great sopranos miss that too.

  4. Obviously I would prefer Trump to virtually any Democrat but the thought of going back to all of the chaos of his administration is very unappealing to me.

    And further I am done with the ‘gerontocracy’. We need leaders that are younger at all levels of the federal gov’t.

  5. Since this is an open thread I’m going to shift gears …

    Has anyone else read “Klara and The Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro? I finished it last night and was wondering how it might have affected others?

  6. Griffin:

    Do you think Trump failed to learn what was causing the “chaos” in his term?

  7. Griffin, I agree. Trump was perfect at the time. However, given how many people voted for Biden, just to vote against Trump tells me he would be a loser. I know many people who fall into that category. They voted for Trump because they thought Hillary was awful, but then turned on him after 4 years due to his personality. These are all MoR/Independent voters. And we can’t afford that now.

  8. Cap’n Rusty,

    Hopefully he did but his entire career makes me skeptical.

    physicsguy,

    Yes, if Trump is the nominee it automatically becomes all about him and not about the horrible policies of the left.

  9. There have been very few high level elected leaders that have impressed me as much as Ron DeSantis. He doesn’t shy away from the fight but he does it in a positive way and MOST important he does it in a way that doesn’t make it all about himself (another Trump trait that is tiring).

    The right needs young, positive, hopeful fighters right now.

  10. John Fisher,

    No doubt they will but DeSantis has less baggage than Trump (who doesn’t) and a much lower and shorter national profile than Trump.

    It won’t work as easily for them with DeSantis.

  11. I’ve seen The Magic Flute four times now. I actually get nervous as this aria approaches. A soprano who can truly nail this live on stage is very rare – and beautiful when it happens.

  12. My local major newspaper has not mentioned the Disinformation Board either, but they have run full-page ads begging for support for local journalism. If they broke ranks with the national papers, I might consider supporting them, but as it is, unless I want news about more racially equitable bike lanes, they are useless.

    Ps. Is that a cup of Q-tips in the birdie video? WTF?

  13. physicsguy

    Dinesh D’Souza is bringing out a movie “2000 Mules.” It’s about the effort of True the Vote to examine the irregularities in the 2020 election. Here’s a link to an interview with Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips who did the investigation. Of course, you may draw your own conclusions. But they estimate 4.7 million fraudulent votes were cast. 81 million minus 5 million equals the 76 million votes Trump received.

    John Durham is making progress on revealing what some call the greatest political scandal in our history. I consider it the greatest crime in our history.

    You would ignore all that because of Mean Tweets?

  14. There is a not small amount of people that simply will not vote for Trump but some portion of them will vote for some other Republican. I know people like that and I’m sure others do as well.

    I want someone not a Democrat to win and I’m sorry but I have a hard time seeing Trump getting more than about 47% of the vote. Super high positives and super high negatives are a bad combo.

  15. (Re Open Thread) A recent NY Post story quoted Elon Musk as saying he was “very proud to have voted for Obama.”
    The article also referred to Biden as “moderate.”

  16. Introduced to Salty Cracker by Viva & Barnes. Anti left, anti Ukraine war. Episode 190, Viva & Barnes podcast. He’s on Spotify and other platforms.

  17. Anti left, anti Ukraine war.

    Are they complaining that Russia invaded or that the Ukraine is resisting?

  18. There is a not small amount of people that simply will not vote for Trump but some portion of them will vote for some other Republican. I know people like that and I’m sure others do as well.

    There is an irreducible fragment of self-identified Republicans who are at any one time dissatisfied with the Republican president. With Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump it accounted for about 9% of self-identified Republicans. When Gerald Ford and George Bush the Elder were in office, it tended to be around 23%. NeverTrumpers are an obtrusive group of people, well represented among the Capitol Hill / K Street nexus and on Op-Ed pages. They are not demographically important.

    Someone else might do better, but they’ll do better because they attract more nonaligned voters.

  19. The UK Mirror reports “Vladimir Putin may soon vanish for a period as he is due to undergo surgery linked to cancer, according to a new claim.”
    Wouldn’t it be a hoot if he was coming to the US for the surgery? More plausible – UAE with US or Israeli docs.

  20. Art,

    Yeah I never said that group of people were solid Republicans instead they are in the mushy middle. And they are predominantly women in my experience who are really turned off by Trump and his whole act but take him personally out of the equation and they agree with a lot of his policy positions.

  21. It’s nice to have a bird video on the last day of the month! I put out the hummingbird feeder today for the first time this season. There’s a pair of cardinals nesting in a bush not far away from me this year, as I just realized today. I spent a good amount of the day listening for them. I hope the robins might start on a nest in one of the bushes next to my windows.

  22. It being Open Thread and all… I’ve been taking another crack at later Pink Floyd.

    I was a big fan of their post-Syd Barrett, pre-“Dark Side of the Moon” albums: “Ummagumma,” “Atom Heart Mother” and “Meddle.”

    I could tell “Dark Side” was a masterpiece, but I didn’t enjoy its cheap cynicism and pseudo-depth, which reflected Roger Waters ongoing domination of the group’s songwriting. With “The Wall” Waters went into full-on rock star stupidity and pretension. I couldn’t stand the album or Waters by that point. I stopped paying attention to Floyd.

    I wasn’t surprised when Waters broke up with the band and thought he could “k i l l” Floyd on his way out the door. Fortunately, David Gilmour and Nick Mason prevailed in court to keep ownership of the name and the group.

  23. Now and then I would touch base with the post-Waters Floyd, but there were a lot of albums and none of them jumped out at me.

    I was surprised to discover that after Waters left, Pink Floyd only put together two more full studio albums, “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” (1987) and “The Division Bell” (1994).

  24. The rest of their later output was live albums and recompilations. With the exception of “The Endless River” (2014) which was composed of outtakes from “The Division Bell” sessions.

  25. However, I come to praise “The Division Bell,” not bury the album. If you are an old Floyd fan who came to feel betrayed or ignored by the boys, this is where you might check back into “Hotel Floyd.”

    Seriously, it’s good, strong, old-school Floyd, before Roger Waters got ideas beyond his station. The boys don’t really have ideas, just strong deep hypnotic feelings, which when called upon, they can recreate sonically better than just about anybody.

    “The Division Bell” glories in Pink Floyd’s grandiosity and limitations. Start at track 4: “Marooned,” which won the 1994 Grammy for “Best Rock Instrumental Performance.”

    Pink Floyd was never great. They were just better at what they were aiming at.

  26. Excuse the previous comment fragments. I was fighting it out with the spam filer. Not sure why it was so persnicketty.

  27. In the end isnt it curious all they wanted was thought control, further xonsidering the sacrifices that the previous generation bore dont their complaints seem hollow

  28. About those food processing plant fires: somebody assured us that less than 2 dozen fires among 35,298, or 38,783 or about 36,000 plants was no big deal. Wait. My bet is every craft brewery is a licensed food processing facility. As is every grocery store that still makes their own sausage. Or Joe’s Garage in northern Wisconsin. During deer season he’ll butcher your deer. The rest of the year his place is a gas station, fast food, beer store, and cell phone repair. He is a licensed food processor. Now exponential functions are awesome. My bet is a bar graph where the bars are 5% chunks—the 5% largest facilities, then the next 5% largest facilities, and so on, that the top 10% easily process more than 90% of the food. Heck the top 1% probably process 40-50% of the food. In the Midwest, say Nebraska, there are facilities butchering 5-15 thousand head of cattle a day. Everyday. Since I’m in lazy mode, I will leave this to the gentle reader.

  29. Cognitive test for President Biden: He missed the eating part of the dinner. For Covid precautions, right. When was the last time he was seen eating in public? Licking an ice-cream cone isn’t eating. Eating requires cutting up ones own food, chewing and swallowing. Unfortunately, eating is one place dementia shows up early—the ability to chew, form a bolus, and then swallow. Diets are usually upgraded to soft mechanical, and then pureed. The resident needs prompting and occasional assistance. Liquids go from thin, as in water, to thickened, honey and then pudding consistency. Aspirating liquids and food can lead to pneumonia. We can see his gait is stiff, and he wants to shake hands with people who aren’t there. What else is wrong.

    As I was walking up the stair
    I met a man who wasn’t there.
    I met that man again today,
    I wish that he would go away.
    Anonymous

  30. Re: Biden’s decline

    Milwaukee:

    Good points.

    I’m wondering how much the American public was aware of FDR’s paralysis while in office. I know the media quietly ignored the matter, but was it that much of a secret?

  31. @huxley:I know the media quietly ignored the matter, but was it that much of a secret?

    According to my great-aunt it was. A friend of hers saw the President being carried to a speech and told my great-aunt what she saw, and my great -aunt told her she was crazy. It was known he’d had polio, but it was not known that he actually couldn’t walk.

  32. Frederick:

    Thanks. Your great-aunt sounds reasonable. I can believe that.

    Those were simpler times.

  33. Fdr was physically disabled but this fellow is cognitively rhats a quantum difference

    One can take issue with fdrs beliefs but not his ability ti express them cogently they dont care, in andrew marrs head of state think weekend af bernie in the uk the remainder apparatus will go to any length to keep the prime minister i. Office (this is a year before brexit) he also predicted johnson as a fmr prime minister

  34. Miguel Cervantes:

    I’m not equating Biden and FDR. I’m interested that their serious health deficits were successfully concealed from the American public at large.

    We didn’t know how problematic JFK’s health was either.

    Then there’s Woodrow Wilson. He had a serious stroke, which left him partially paralyzed and bed-ridden. This too was concealed for several months. In the meantime his wife and doctor were gatekeepers for all the work he did. His wife has been described as effectively “the first female President of the United States.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson#Health_collapses

    Interesting that these presidents were all Democrats.

  35. I’m wondering how much the American public was aware of FDR’s paralysis while in office. I know the media quietly ignored the matter, but was it that much of a secret?

    It wasn’t. My mother, who was in the 4th grade at the midpoint of Roosevelt’s time in office, chatted casually about it in our house.

    The notion that it was concealed appeared out of the blue in the early 1980s. Roosevelt was, btw, a promoter of the March of Dimes.

  36. Art Deco:

    You and I have had it out on this topic previously.

    My mother disagreed strongly with your mother. My mother was an adult during FDR’s lengthy administration and was very tuned into politics at the time. She told me several times that people – including herself – were aware of FDR’s polio disability but absolutely unaware of the extent of it. They did not know, for example, that he could not walk under his own steam.

    Just as Frederick said. My mother was very clear about it, and she certainly was no fourth-grader at the midpoint of FDR’s presidencies.

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