Home » Open thread 5/30/23

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Open thread 5/30/23 — 34 Comments

  1. I really missed the 70’s music ( and Rap and Heavy Metal and —). Didn’t listen to the radio much except in the car. Bee Gees registered some but Disco was not my thing. I was married, out of the Navy and out of Grad School, just trying to make a living. But I have to admit that I like what Neo puts on the Blog.

  2. Boycott Target. It is up to the women now.

    From Twitter

    “The BudLight boycott was so successful because men are the primary customers and we made it socially unacceptable for other men to drink it. Women must do the same thing to Target now by telling friends they won’t shop there because Target pushed trans products onto little kids.”

    “Trans ideology has invaded women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, women’s cosmetic lines, and the stores where women shop. I don’t think women should be left alone to deal with it, and I haven’t left them alone, but we need more of them in the fight. A lot more.”

  3. The professor likes to talk. It’s a long video, but worth it for me.

    I liked the part about aiming for more rhythmic songs and how the rhythm for Jive Talkn’ came about. The main rhythm in their song comes from the bass synth with bass guitar added.

    A couple days ago a singer friend of mine was asked to guest sing with the band that was playing and the song they came up with was Dancing In The Streets. Which version she asked? Martha and the Vandellas. Perfect. It’s a wonderful song and she did a great job.

    As I mentioned previously, one of my favorite old songs that I currently reacquainted myself with, is the Van Halen version of Dancing In The Streets.

    Eddie Van Halen plays an inspired rhythm guitar track in that song that is continuous throughout and is so so infectious. It’s almost impossible to play that song louder on a good sound system and not move to it.

    I always associated the song with The Momas And The Papas, but here is the Martha & the Vandellas version.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68Uv959QuCg

    Here are two edited dance videos that are fun, featuring the Van Halen version of the song.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs8otXB1ixM

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT6osBhRsQM

  4. While I like the info he presents, I usually avoid most of his videos as I think he puts in too much filler and drags the story out too long. Like one of those Unsolved Mystery episode where after each break they repeat what they said previously just to drag it out to a full half hour. Drives me a bit nutty.

  5. So can any Texans here give us the inside scoop on what’s going on with the impeachment of the Texas AG? Do they have the evidence?

  6. no its payback for fighting the border war, and not losing to bush 111

  7. “Bob Wilson on May 30, 2023 at 11:21 am said:

    Boycott Target. It is up to the women now.”

    When the left complains and boycotts something-like Fox news, their army makes phone calls, twitter posts, emails to the advertisers, as well as to the victim.
    The right is not organized to do that. If a million people on the right called and emailed Target everyday this month, I expect Target would actually notice.

  8. Speaker McCarthy is warning the Director of the FBI that if the requested document about the Biden’s shady dealings is not turned over to Congress within the next 24 hours, then, Christopher Wray will be held in “contempt.”

    Being held in Contempt of Congress might have meant something and been an actual punishment–perhaps even a severe punishment–in past eras, when morals were much higher, people felt a sense of shame, and one’s personal reputation and standing in society were everything.

    Nowadays, however, citing someone for Contempt of Congress is just a meaningless gesture.

    Once cited, what are the enforcement measures that are likely to be levied against you?

    Are you likely to end up imprisoned, heavily fined, booted out of your job? No.

    See the instructive case of former Attorney General Eric Holder.

    So this is all just meaningless political theater, Kabuki.

  9. “…just a meaningless gesture…”
    Actually, Wray will wear this contempt charge like a medal on his chest.
    A whole array of medals, actually.
    (Think Brezhnev.)
    And the corrupt media organs will love it, as they fall over one another with paeans of support for the “beleaguered” and “maligned” loyal protector of the nation against the evil GOP.
    – – – – – – – –
    “…payback…”
    Probably also has a lot to do with Paxton’s threats to sue the Federal government over the way it’s been “securing” the southern border.
    (Or perhaps he’s already done it.)

  10. @Kate – On the face of it, there are similarities to the way that Tom DeLay was run out of the US House – a stealth campaign, some grey-area offenses that could be inflated into some debatable importance, and support from some political enemies in the same party. A lot of Republicans – 60 or more – voted with the Democrats to put it into motion, including the Representatives from my conservative area – but they have been called RINOs before. The Progressive media in Texas is running at full speed with the drama, whipping it up into a frenzy and doing their best to make it lurid. Conservatives are pretty mad about it, though, because they think it’s the spearpoint of turning the state Blue.

    It is not the first time that naked partisan lawfare has eminated from liberal progressive Austin, at the hand of liberal progressive Democrats. Not the first time for quite a few Republican politicians, and not the first time for Paxton.

    My take is that there is at least some substance to the problem, and the swift stealthiness of the investigation, with the FBI very efficiently primed and waiting in the wings to add to the efforts, points to a mostly-political effort to remove somebody that has been a very effective opponent, and a quite-popular AG with the populace. A political enemy is being dealt with, on a holiday weekend when people are preoccupied. We shall see what substance there is, in the trial.

  11. Evidently, while I wasn’t looking, string theory has worn out its welcome.

    –acollierastro, “string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

    The Lie here is the string theorists’ evergreen prediction, which, much like the climate change alarmists, they have been repeating every decade since the 80s:
    ___________________________________

    Big things are coming!

    A decade from now.
    ___________________________________

    Um, yeah. We’re waiting…

    acollierastro is a young female physics Ph.D with a YouTube channel. She seems to know her stuff, much as I can judge these things, but she’s also a Bright Young Thing delivering her lecture while playing a video game, displayed real-time in the upper right corner of the screen.

    Um, yeah.

  12. huxley,

    I think string theory has been dead for quite awhile. My take is, that except for the string theorists themselves, everyone else has moved on. She is right in the sense that ST is very much like fusion: more of a money scam where “just wait! We’ll have something for you in 10 years!” I hate to say it, but my generation of physicists (Boomers) have not produced much at all in terms of big new physics. Pretty good at advancing solid state, but not much else. I hope the GenZ and Millennials like her will do better.

  13. physicsguy:

    Last time I looked into string theory. as a curious layman, was Lee Smolin’s critique, “The Trouble with Physics” (2007).

    It sounded like string theory had become a dominant scientific dogma, much as climate change had become. I’m glad to hear physicists have beaten off string theory as dogma.

    Though it does become clear, how academia can be swayed by the latest, greatest claims of scientific revolution, thence the rest of us.

    My favorite phrase from the video: celebrity string theorists.

    I remember being innundated by the all the string theory, multiverse, supersymmetry, quantum gravity, Theory of Everything stuff being hawked everywhere.

    PS. How is Ed Witten’s reputation doing these days?

  14. I can tell you Republicans in the TX House voted 60-23 FOR impeachment, which says a lot. Paxton has already been indicted for the securities fraud and a couple other ones I can’t remember. His affair has been known about for years. The house remodeling from donations has been known about for years. His requesting the state to pay off the $3+ million whistleblower suit has been known about for years. He’s survived so long because he keeps getting re-elected, and up to this point has been very popular among the state GOP. But too much has built up over time and the committee report is pretty damning.

    There was a very funny moment once the decision for an impeachment vote was made. During a defensive speech by Paxton’s lawyer regarding the home renovation, it was revealed that “they weren’t granite countertops, they were tile countertops!” as if that made things any better.

  15. Music, radio, back in the day…

    Reminded me and I had to research a bit to find yep, I remember wrong. Nope it wasn’t Wolfman Jack who sold autographed pictures of Jesus Christ, I was wrong.

    Terry Allen says it was the bible salesman on the show following Wolfman’s that was selling them.

  16. Thanks, Aggie and sharksauce.

    I don’t, in principle. oppose removing corrupt politicians, even our own, unlike Democrats, who will support their bad guys no matter what. But I would like to be sure that the corruption charges are provable.

  17. On a completely different note:

    Just checked stock prices, BUD down almost 4% today while the Dow is down 0.5%. Target down 3.7% while the Nasdaq is up about 0.5%.

    Fascinating.

  18. My experience was that string theory was never a “dogma”. Physics is a huge field and if you weren’t actually working in particle physics you never had to pay any attention to string theory; I certainly didn’t. No matter what the string theorists came up with it HAD to agree with the theory and experiments I was doing or else they were just wrong. (Not because I’m awesome but because my work was “downstream” of theirs.)

    I certainly heard a lot of reservations from my professors and other mentors about whether there was anything “to” string theory; none of them had any qualms about being critical. They would all have been terrified to be overheard being critical of, say, affirmative action, which IS a dogma, so I think it’s safe to say string theory was NOT one.

    I didn’t think Lee Smolin did right by taking his perspective to the public, to the detriment of string theorists, simply because that’s dirty pool, in my opinion. It’s very easy to sway the public with a selective presentation of your own side, because most of them are never going to read more than one book on it. But most people I knew in physics didn’t know or care who Lee Smolin was or what he did, at most they knew he had a book out.

    In my further experience, the kind of people who say physics is captured by “dogmas” are almost always either a) crackpots, b) hucksters, or c) an interested party to one side of a debate, usually the one not doing that well among other experts.

    And it’s unfortunate that so many experts have decided to be slaves to politics, making half the population distrustful of expertise in general. But this too shall pass. Reality will not be denied, whether it’s the public or the experts doing the denying.

  19. well how sound was the theory about a construct, multiverse is a greater supposition based on everett’s work with prisoners dilemma and such, quantum gravity, is out in the mariannas trench for me,

  20. Incidentally I never read Smolin’s book against string theory. Instead, I read Brian Greene’s (and a few others’) books FOR string theory, and came away not convinced they were on the right track. They were doing a lot of work to generate things already known to be to true, and making additional predictions that couldn’t really be checked or weren’t panning out.

    Sometimes theories don’t go anywhere. It wasn’t for lack of effort… Some of the early quantum theories were like this, they could only get so far and no farther until someone else came along who got to the same place from an entirely different, and more fruitful, direction.

  21. so mathematically they might have been right, i suppose but what is the practical proof of same, this is why the crazy guy in real genius skulked in the crawl space,

    yes this lightning impeachment stinks to high heaven, was nate paul even charged or was he a catspaw like william allen,

  22. @Kate, that was the issue with Tom DeLay. He was convicted and sentenced on the corruption charges, but then the whole thing was over-turned on appeal because the courts found that the actual evidence presented at trial was insufficient to sustain the conviction, if I recall correctly (not a lawyer). His conviction was reversed and his sentence eradicated.

    But by then, he had resigned his position in the House to fight his case, which was the point of the exercise in the first place – getting ‘The Hammer’ out of the political environment as Newt Gingrich’s RH man, because he was too damn effective as a political power. The saying was, Yes, DeLay is a snake, but he’s our snake and every country boy knows, a snake living under the house means that no rats will be there.

    I suspect that Paxton may be done for, politically, because too many of the state Republicans are unwilling to spend political capital to defend him, which is too bad in a way – he has been a very effective foil to the Biden administration on voter fraud, COVID policy, border policy, gun control, etc. etc.

  23. what is the point of voting republican in texas, then, if you can be run on a rail by a corrupt apparat as the bureau has proven to be, I know thats a rhetorical question,

  24. I guess we’ll see when the Texas Senate has the impeachment trial. In DeLay’s case, the evidence was not sufficient.

  25. Oh and by the way, this is great,

    …the kind of people who say physics is captured by “dogmas” are almost always either a) crackpots, b) hucksters, or c) an interested party to one side of a debate

    I’ve had the good fortune to engage with many professional astronomers and physicists, in deep conversations, and have never encountered any who were dogmatic in the least.

    One of my favorite moments of my amateur astronomy “career”, was to to be a fly on the wall when Fred Hoyle came up among three 70-something retired astronomers after several drinks. They absolutely revered the man, and all were entirely convinced of the Big Bang theory.

  26. One of the technical details about TX AG Paxton is that the TX constitution allows impeachment only for offenses that have occurred during the term of office.
    One of Paxton’s defenses is that none of the alleged misdeeds have occurred during the current term- he’s been re-elected a couple of times. Apparently there is no case law on this, so it may come down to which state judge it’s assigned to.

    Note: I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not an expert on anything remotely related to this matter. I read this on the internet, so it has to be valid.

  27. Former US Congressman Louie Ghomert challenged Paxton in the last election, but lost. Some of you may remember Louie showing up on Fox News occasionally and The Sean Hannity radio show. Seems he even guest hosted for Sean or Rush one time.

  28. Yikes, miguel, that guy sounds like incredibly bad news—great for lawyers, though, no doubt—and getting involved with him, or anything he touches, the height of bad judgment…
    Would appear that Paxton will soon be having to find a new job.
    Maybe he can manage one of Nate Paul’s real-estate grifts?

  29. Saw a recorded presentation on quantum theory and string theory a couple of years ago.
    In the latter case, one of the boffins said it might be real or it might simply be convenient numbers.

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