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Home » Open thread 6/18/24

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Open thread 6/18/24 — 46 Comments

  4. Gotta love these super-evolutionary posts….

    File under: “One small step for pet owners; one giant leap for Testudinidae.”…AKA “Giving Huxley (T.H., that is) the fingerboard.”

  5. Mike,
    “Tough love”?
    “Consistency” and “hobgoblins”?
    “The perfect is the enemy of the good”?
    “The ‘hard bigotry of high expectations'”?
    Other?

  7. I marvel that a tiny terrapin has more and better spatial awareness, adaptability and navigation skill than Freezin’-CheapFake Joe Biden, the nominal executive leader of the nominal Free World. Hilarious!

  8. Since the turtle is a water turtle, after the initial reaction of that’s so cool, it made sense to me. Not a lot of vid but the little leg movements look like swimming.

    Still very, very cool. I especially like that it took the opportunity to chase the cat around.

  9. RE: UFOs–A very recent peer-reviewed scientific paper on the Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis written by scientists from Harvard and Montana Tech.

    A number of figures who are well connected and should know, have been saying for many years, now, that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is just too simple a one to explain everything given the complexity of the UFO Phenomenon and that other, more exotic or “out there” hypotheses may be more correct and that, in fact, what we may be dealing with is a mixture of several different types of NHI, each from a different source and each with it’s own agenda and MO.

    Here is the full text of an interesting, well footnoted analysis which surveys a wide range of ideas and sources.*

    * See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381405238_The_cryptoterrestrial_hypothesis_A_case_for_scientific_openness_to_a_concealed_earthly_explanation_for_Unidentified_Anomalous_Phenomena

  13. 300 hundred light years, well thats close to the neighborhood, that notion that the black hole is a mirror seems particularly daft, because of the gravitational field, you can only observe it by the motions around it,

    the singularity in interstellar was not a black hole perse, that would make any intact planet unlikely, the time distortion effects were intriguing,

    more frightening than a singularity

    https://www.dossier.today/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile

  14. “…black hole suddenly awakens…”
    “…a void springs to life…”

    Gotta love those Daily Mail headline writers…

    (Reading between the lines, I think that what they’re saying is that there’s hope yet for Joe Biden. Of course, “Biden” is already well aware of THAT…)

  15. @miguel:that notion that the black hole is a mirror seems particularly daft

    You’re being a little more cryptic today and I’m not sure how to interpret what you mean by “mirror”, I did Ctrl F on the article and did not find that word.

    If you’re referring to black holes “emitting light” that’s a little glib, but however you want to put it the black hole can be responsible for its immediate neighborhood being much brighter.

    The Daily Mail piece, being filtered through a journalist, has a sort of breathless confusion to it about the black hole “reactivating” which is kind of silly. They’re never not being black holes. But what they look like in a telescope depends on what’s going on in their immediate neighborhood and that’s what changed.

  16. @Mike Plaiss:I’m not sure what to make of the Federalist’s quasi-criticism of Bari Weiss.

    I took from it that she’s still a woman of the Left, but her own ox was gored and a lot of people think she’s on “our side” now. But it’s more complicated than “our side”/”their side”.

    I remember bloggers in the 2000s used to call it “strange new respect” when a longtime Republican politician started helping the Left out on something. Folks like Weiss and Fetterman are getting strange new respect from “our side”, but they’re not different people from what they were.

    And this was true of those Republicans, it’s just the media had portrayed them with a false narrative before. Hence the portrayal of the Clinton Democrat Trump as a racist homophobic fascist wanting to turn the US into “The Handmaid’s Tale”. When he loses, and DeSantis or someone else runs in 2028, they’ll talk about how great Trump was and how DeSantis is so much worse. And in fact they already ran those kinds of stories when they thought DeSantis might get the nomination.

  17. now if its a pulsar, that a fish of different kettle, I do remember that from an episode of sliders, the multiverse show, of course the fact that it’s 300 light years away, means this is when we’re seing the image from 1724, around the time of Queen Anne’s war,

    fetterman has shown some nice gestures, but actual evidence of a change dobyi no probyi, trust but verify, weiss seems to have thought through some of these things, to a degree, pulliam is unhelpful in that regard, use the turtle metaphor,

    actually r emmett tyrell noted this in the early 90s, how possums grow in proportionate to how much they disdain their core consitutuency, like when graham disdained the first amendment around the time of the Arab spring socalled of course maverick preceded him by a country mile, see his partnership with Russ Feingold

  18. Perhaps that’s true of Fetterman. I can’t say. I don’t know what he was like before. All I know is that now, he’s making sense, unlike most if not all of those in his party; and he’s admitted that his almost dying has liberated him from spewing his party’s pathetic orthodoxies and woke bromides—has in fact enabled him to say, unfettered, what he thinks.
    I mean WOW! Talk about “Going Honest”…
    A true contrarian…at least sometimes(?)…

    WRT Weiss, she HAS changed.
    She’s been mugged. (And she RECOGNIZES that she’s been mugged, something that needs to be said because there are many who’ve been mugged but refuse to recognize it…or haven’t recognized it YET.)
    No, she hasn’t changed “entirely”; and yes, she’s changed because of who she is/was.
    The game changer in her case—as in not a few others, mostly Jews, I’ll hazard to say, but not all—is, alas, Israel and its grotesque, if to be expected, betrayal. I say “alas” because THAT was the wake-up call for her (and others); IOW, she was unable or unwilling to recognize that the same forces that knee-capped Israel have been knee-capping the US and the West, generally. The problem is that she doesn’t SEEM to understand that those same betrayers—those same destroyers—are working HARD to obliterate the “last best hope of earth”.
    OMMV.

  19. @miguel: Not a pulsar. Black holes do emit some light* and they cause their immediate neighborhood to emit light under some conditions. For example, mass that’s falling can gain energy and heat up, emitting light.

    *I should say “are predicted to”, because it’s a blackbody spectrum of much less than 1 K and so wouldn’t be easily detectable. It’s confusing that physicists use “blackbody” to describe something that emits light, but they do.

  20. For example, mass that’s falling can gain energy and heat up, emitting light.

    Yeah, many of the black holes that we’ve been able to detect often have some sort of accretion disc, a disc of material that orbits around them that heats up due to gravitional and frictional forces causing light/radation emision. Of course that’s technically not the black hole itself that’s emiting the light.

    There’s also theorized to be lots of black holes that don’t have any sort of accretion disk and aren’t near enough any other objects effecting their motion so we could easily detect them. For all we know, huge numbers of such “rogue” black holes could be traveling interstellar space that are undetectable to us. Some have theorized that the missing intermediate-mass black holes (essentailly black holes that are between stellar mass and super massive size ranges) could be such rogues. There’s even speculation that such an intermediate-mass black hole could be orbiting on the outskirts of the solar system as opposed to a planet 9.

  21. is this the argument clinic, black hole cannot be directly observed, much of what goes on is conjecture, kip thorne who was the technical advisor on the film seems to be a new authority,

    space is pretty vast between the edge of the solar system and the keiper belt, anything is possible but I would judge unlikely, what extra planetary body meaning a star would be large enough to create this type of object,

  22. Actually I was incorrect in my assertion that a hypothetical black hole orbiting the outskirts of our solar system would be one of those so called “intermediate-mass black holes”. If such a thing exists at all, given the perturbations of the various keiper belt objects it would likely be a much smaller one, a sub stellar mass black hole which would be a primordial one.

  25. WRT Weiss, she HAS changed.
    She’s been mugged. (And she RECOGNIZES that she’s been mugged, something that needs to be said because there are many who’ve been mugged but refuse to recognize it…or haven’t recognized it YET.)
    No, she hasn’t changed “entirely”;

    Barry Mesilin:

    Well spotted.

    Another case of conservatives who can’t take “yes” for an answer.

  26. It’s easy to anthropomorphize, but I say that turtle enjoyed chasing the cat.

  27. Re: Weiss and The Federalist. Weiss has come to see the dangers of our Big Brother government, and good for her. She is not, like the writers at The Federalist, socially conservative, or perhaps not even entirely an economic conservative yet.

  29. Talking past the sail

    Sullivan is gay and yet he forgot everything he learned under oakeshott douglas murray is too but i dont think he had any particular switch over

    Buckley besides his experience with eudocio ravines the peruvian dissident had at least three former lefties kendall meyer and burnham not to mention chambers

  30. I think the fact that Bari Weiss isn’t exactly a hardcore social conservative may actually be a good thing. At this point it’s probably more important that she acts as a persuader of the persuadable left leaners. Such people would likely dismiss a proven social conservative out of hand anyway.

  31. Well we have seen this with a few people on the left – Weiss, Taibbi, Greenwald, Dershowitz, even Bill Maher. While still on the left they agree with us on some, but not all, issues that we consider important. One significant thread is that the issues often revolve around free expression and/or honest reporting.

    It really should not be that remarkable that people do not always fit into some straitjacket of “left” vs. “right”. It’s just that the left has become so totalitarian that any deviation from the official line, even if changes weekly, makes one subject to ridicule and demonization from the “authorities” which has happened to all of these.

  33. @huxley:Another case of conservatives who can’t take “yes” for an answer.

    I don’t say it’s necessarily true of Bari Weiss but there’s a difference between a real “yes” and flag of convenience. It’s true that someone who agrees with you 80% of the time is not 20% your enemy. But what of someone who agrees with you 20% of the time? And it’s on the 20% that affects them personally, and the 80% is on what affects you personally?

    Andrew Sullivan is a great example. As soon as Bush came out against gay marriage he turned on Republicans, and wrote an editorial about how Kerry was “the conservative choice”. The NeverTrumpers have doing the same, making the “conservative case” drag queen story hours and whatnot. They were in the movement just as a flag of convenience and were pulling toward what they REALLY wanted the whole time.

    Weiss has been against cancel culture directed at people like her for some time, well before leaving the Times in 2020, but she thought Kavanaugh was probably guilty of whatever it was Ford accused him of and shouldn’t have been confirmed because he got angry about being smeared, and she said Jews who voted for Trump abandoned Jewish values.

  34. @Nonapod:I think the fact that Bari Weiss isn’t exactly a hardcore social conservative may actually be a good thing. At this point it’s probably more important that she acts as a persuader of the persuadable left leaners.

    A movement is made up of the average of individual humans who join it, they don’t assimilate into the movement average when they join it. Suppose that tomorrow 25% of the abortion-on-demand crowd, due to cancel culture or what have you, started to vote Republican; if that happened the GOP would soon afterward be an abortion-on-demand party. (I already see Republican talking heads cautiously hinting that maybe we should think about it, at least up to some number of weeks, as though people oppose abortion to elect the GOP instead of the other way around.)

    And it’s this that has let the national GOP be an echo and not a choice for my entire adult life. The national Dems put their extremists and ideologues in influential and powerful positions and occasionally let them have things, and the national GOP marginalizes theirs and focuses on tax cuts and appropriations, and that’s why we have the endless Leftward ratchet. And it will ever be thus until enough of us who vote GOP are determined to impose real change.

  35. Whoot!

    I tested my elderberry brandy from last year and will now decant cask 1. Will save 2&3 for December.

    It has a strong, deep and heady musky(??) taste and is the color of deep garnet, damn near the color of this stone.

    The three gal cask will yield not quite a gallon of brandy as 2/3 is berries which I can steep a second time but with less rum. I like my sipping brandies at around 35pf, so not something to drink like wine. While heavy, it’s not burn your tongue strong.

    I am quite happy at the moment. 🙂

  36. Suppose that tomorrow 25% of the abortion-on-demand crowd, due to cancel culture or what have you, started to vote Republican; if that happened the GOP would soon afterward be an abortion-on-demand party.

    I think it’s perhaps a bit reductive to suppose a large group of pro abortion people shifting their votes to Republican candidates, for reasons that as you say may having nothing to do with abortion, would therefore inevitably or inexorably lead to the GOP becoming an abortion-on-demand party. Or at least I don’t think fear of that occurring should dictate Conservative reactions to left leaning people choosing to vote for a Republican for unrelated reasons anyway.

  37. Well raggety ann rarely has any clue

    So they would be voting for other reasons crime issues immigration issues tax issuesetc

  38. …. if that happened the GOP would soon afterward be an abortion-on-demand party.

    You’ll have to do more than assert. You need some numbers, such as % of non-Reps who are abortion “on demand”, as not all those left of center are that extreme. Cons “cautiously thinking about it” (abortion) is nowhere close to “on demand”.

    Also, define what you mean by “on demand”. Does that include up to 8.9 months pregnant? Highly doubtful you’d convince any Reps of that. Or some of the left for that matter.

    Just as “they don’t assimilate into the movement average when they join it” nor do they convert those they have joined to assimilate into their view.

  39. @Oligonicella:You need some numbers, such as % of non-Reps who are abortion “on demand”, as not all those left of center are that extreme.

    The actual issue isn’t that important, of course it could be something besides abortion. The national party split is pretty close to even and the party balance in Congress reflects this.

    If some bloc representing some issue is worth 5% of the electorate, that bloc is going to get its way if it switches over. Maybe not immediately as a price of switching, but eventually.

    You have to be selective about who gets power in the movement if you want the movement to stay true to its original mission, and this is why every major institution in this country has been overrun by the Left. THEY understand this. They get one in, and then another one in, and then another in, and then they’re running it. Including more moderates and liberals in a conservative movement does not convert them to conservatives, it makes the movement more moderate and liberal.

    A big tent is okay if you have a leadership with a strong vision that imposes discipline. The national Dems have this and the national GOP doesn’t have it. If the national GOP builds that, then it could absorb more moderates and liberals and not betray conservative principles. But they’d have to pull their snouts out of the trough and they won’t do that unless some of them lose their office for not doing so.

  41. Barry Meislin (12:28 pm) remarks on how Fetterman’s almost dying “has in fact enabled him to say, unfettered, what he thinks.”

    Excellent choice of descriptor there, Barry Meislin!

  42. A GOP “leadership with strong vision that imposes discipline” (hoping for what, ( loyalty to our “party” as the highest devotion, party above all, all power for the party(imitate the Democrats)) doesn’t have anything to do with the strawman charge that the GOP only cares about pork.

    There are pork-afflicted Democrats IMO.

  43. Well what has the mcconnell cornyn wing really stood for how did the laughably named inflation reduction act get ratified by at least a dozen gope senators

    Why does the peoples priorities end up being 3rd wheel to the chiefs priorities in stead of vice versa

  44. Is Israel getting drawn into war with Hezbollah to the North, in Southern Lebanon? Andrew Fox reviews the data, but closes wondering if we are going to be drawn into a wider war between Iran and Israel? Before the election? He concludes:

    “Iran is besieging Israel on all sides, and Israel is bending, not breaking. This situation is genuinely dire. It explains why Hamas will not sign a ceasefire deal, and why other non-Iran aligned Gulf states are meeting with IDF commanders. The entire region is teetering on the edge of a much more widespread conflict with Iran, and Israel is taking the brunt of it.

    “If this situation deteriorates, our allies in the Gulf may call for aid. As a second front in the war against the Iran-Russia-China-Qatar axis of malign global actors, this could not be more serious or worrying. And all the while we see subversive Iranian proxy organisations organising protests about Gaza on Western streets. Hopefully the West is not defeated domestically before the war even starts in earnest.”

    https://x.com/Mr_Andrew_Fox/status/1801323700295209255?

  46. No, not a problem.

    It’s “Biden”’s overall strategy.

    The ONLY problem is how effectively “he” can cover it up.
    (That is, until “he” doesn’t have to anymore….)

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