Home » Open thread 12/6/2024

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Open thread 12/6/2024 — 33 Comments

  1. There are dozens of posts by people who apparently approve of the murder of the United Healthcare CEO and are hoping for other HC CEO’s (and in some cases, CEO’s generally) to be killed. More evidence that there is truth in this post arguing that the fundamental split in American politics today is between people of Agency and people of Envy.

    https://intrastellar.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-agency-or-envy

    See also the Euripides quote and the Drucker reference at my post here:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/72532.html

  2. How ‘bout “merely “ people of conscience vs. people of crazed, hysterical, murderous insanity?

  3. Obama looks and sounds worried – is he concerned about getting caught up in the pending investigations?

    Obama hypocrisy

    Collin Rugg @CollinRugg

    NEW: Obama says Republicans are the ones who rig elections and weaponize the justice system while speaking at a “Democracy Forum.”

    The comment was so outrageous that Obama could barely get the words out of his mouth.

    “One side tries to stack the deck and lock in [very long pause]…”

    “A permanent grip on power, either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

    Are ‘Rats’ lining up to save their ‘Cheesy Buttocks’? Does Obama know this?

  4. Transitioning from “transforming America” to transforming reality, I guess.

    Such is disappointment…

  5. I quit sport hunting in the 1970s for the reasons implicit in this video. If you’re a hunter I’m okay with that, go right ahead. No judgement. But it’s not for me.

    Instead I herd sheep with border collies.

  6. IO49,

    Yes. Growing up I was with my father when we’d go all sorts of bird hunting; dove, pheasant, duck. Now, I am perfectly happy killing birds of the clay variety.

  7. The first time I saw a moose (up in Maine while canoeing on the Allagash River) I was just amazed at their size; they are really huge.

    I can’t imagine someone taking one out with a bow and arrow (as opposed to using a rifle), but I guess there are hunters that do this.

  8. the jury is deadlocked in the penny case,

    Obama whining about democracy in his own griftshop is not really surprising except crunchy irony
    for Soros’s sorcerers apprentice, after spending nearly 2 billion dollars on this fools effort

  9. Art Deco,

    All 3, but I’m best at trap. Skeet is really difficult and takes a lot of practice.

  10. If there is a hung jury, Bragg will go after Penny again. I do not think of me as being bad if I say any juror that votes to convict Penny should suffer while tiding the subway

  11. Israel Defense Forces @IDF

    The Head of Hamas’ Aerial Unit in Gaza City and head of Hamas’ Aerial Defense Unit in Gaza, terrorist Nidal Al-Najar, was eliminated in a joint IDF and ISA precise operation.

    Al-Najar was one of the masterminds of the aerial infiltration into Israel on October 7th.

    No more Paragliding for Nidal Al-Najar…

  12. Karmi

    Wouldn’t it be just the “thing” if 0bama woke up one morning to discover Good Ol’ Joe had pardoned him…of all crimes not yet charged…or whatever?

  13. Is Neo going to write about all these pardon proposals soon? Some of them don’t make sense to me. My understanding of pardons is:

    1 Pardons do not erase guilt only SOME of the consequences of guilt
    2 Accepting a pardon (which is always voluntary) is an acceptance of guilt
    3 Accepting a pardon pretty much torpedoes using the courts to reverse your case because of 2

    So, Trump should not blanket pardon the J6 people, only the guilty and work to free the railroaded another way. Nor should anyone like Trump with an appeal in the system [edit] accept a pardon.

    If preemptive pardons are valid they would have to either be extremely detailed to cover ALL protentional charges or very broad and very broad could mean forcing the criminal to repeatedly confirm that his pardon covers each new potential charge. (does all mean this newly discovered crime of whatever).

    So, Fauci accepts pardon for mass murdering war criminal and let the civil cases begin or

    Fauci accepts an “All Crimes” pardon then he gets dragged into court to say his pardon covers mass murdering war criminal and then let the civil cases begin.

    This seems risky absent a conviction.

  14. I had a bit of a realization last night. Or maybe it’s just a supposition.

    I was sitting with a couple friends who are not terribly political people, but on the left nonetheless. Perhaps like neo used to be a couple decades ago. The discussion wasn’t exactly political.

    The topic segued to “woke” attitudes and the cancel culture. There was hearty agreement that being woke and canceling was utterly toxic thought and behavior.

    How about that? Like huxley has been suggesting, maybe broad swaths of the public are really beginning to take notice and reject some of these things.

  15. When Gerald Ford granted Richard Nixon a blanket pardon, there was some discussion among legal scholars about whether a pardon needs to be for a specific identified offense. Some thought that a blanket pardon for any and all crimes, charged or uncharged, is not constitutional. I don’t think the issue has ever been adjudicated. Perhaps someday Neo will apply her legally-trained mind to this question and see if she can find precedents which I didn’t on a very quick search.

  16. Question for Lawyers: pardons are for federal crimes. Can a non-federal crime be pardoned? For example, murder, rape, pedophilia, drug use in a location where it is a crime?

  17. …maybe broad swaths of the public are really beginning to take notice and reject some of these things.

    TommyJay:

    Furthermore, C-suite guys, who want the bottom-line numbers more than a high ESG score, are beginning to pay attention.

    My Hollywood Death Watch indicates that:

    George Clooney
    Robert De Niro
    Whoopi Goldberg
    Rachel Zegler
    Joy Behar
    Rachel Maddow
    Joe Scarborough
    Mika Brezinsksi
    Sunny Hostin
    Amandla Stenberg

    … are losing projects and pay raises at an alarming rate for their inflammatory denunciations of Trump and Trump voters.

    However much conviction they bring to their Trump/Hitler declarations, they are looking at substantial hits to their income and futures.

    You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

  18. fiona:

    Presidents can only issue federal pardons. For state crimes, each state has a different procedure. Often the governor can issue a pardon, for example.

  19. What do the astrophysicists commenting on this blog think of Neil Degrasse Tyson?

    He’s on Piers Morgan basically saying Musk’s desire to colonize Mars is a waste of time and resources. He finally agrees Musk can go to Mars as a “vanity project”, but Space X is a business which requires a return on investment and there would be none of that going to Mars.

    Developing a technology that could even make the journey to Mars has created an immense amount of “return on investment”, IMO. I’m kind of surprised Tyson doesn’t realize that others may view the entire field of Astrophysics as a vanity project with no “return on investment.” Unlike our trip to the moon in the 60’s that created Velcro and Tang, has Astrophysics created a tangible product other than the advancement of human knowledge?

    It seems to me the entire field of Astrophysics is just a huge drain on resources that could be better used making the planet more habitable, which is one of Tyson’s arguments against going to Mars. Why doesn’t Musk just use that money to make earth more habitable as the planet warms, Tyson says.

    Surely there will be some practical advancement of science in Musk’s quest to colonize Mars.

    “SURELY You Can See This is Wrong?” Neil deGrasse Tyson on Elon Musk, Mars, Trans Sports & More
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST2MOe3i8I4

  20. hes a middling astronomer, a protege of carl Sagan, at one point, if memory serves, that gives him very little insight into the mechanics of the program

    maybe there are some heretofor mineral resources unmined, he has revealed a very terrestrially focused and a scientific element

    the Andrew weir novel suggests the terrain is rather difficult to live off, but I suppose not impossible with the right equipment

  21. On Mars, I tend to think of it as an exotic tourist destination. The serious stuff will happen elsewhere, not generally down a gravity well, even a puny one.

  22. As a teenager and young man, I hunted deer. Every kill I made for several years was clean and fast. Thern, when I was26, I took a risky, long shot. The buck deer moved as I pulled the trigger. The bullet struck him in the spine near his hindquarters. He bolted into the brush, and I knew I had to find him and put him out of his misery.

    I tracked him into a bushy hollow where he lay helpless with his back legs paralyzed. His eyes were wild with pain and fear. It was like a punch in the gut to see. I wanted to turn away, but knew I had to do the right thing, and put him out of his misery. I did it.

    I never hunted big game again. Seeing the look in this moose’s eyes brought that memory back. Not a pleasant memory.

  23. @Brian E:What do the astrophysicists commenting on this blog think of Neil Degrasse Tyson?

    Not an astrophysicist but I’ve never heard that Tyson has done a poor job running the Hayden Planetarium. His papers seem perfectly workmanlike, though there’s not a ton of them and I’m not sure he has any after 2008.

    He’s a celebrity scientist in the mold of Carl Sagan, who spends a lot more time popularizing than doing scientific work. Probably a smart enough guy. As for his criticisms of the value of space travel, he had much more positive things to say in his 2012 book “Space Chronicles” where he argued for NASA getting 0.5% of the Federal budget(!), but of course Obama was in office then and government spending at the direction of Top Men could be trusted.

    His scientific work has been on stars, not on space exploration.

  24. I don’t want to be stuck on earth when the sun finally burns out, so hell yeah, go to Mars as a stepping stone to what’s beyond. It may not be SpaceX that puts a man (or more likely a woman or non-binary, other-gendered person) on Mars, but they’ll make a contribution to doing so.

    Tyson gets put down for being a popularizer of science rather than an actual scientist. Fair enough. He also got put down for not being the equal of Carl Sagan. I don’t know about Sagan’s scientific achievements (which are most likely greater than Tyson’s), but the original “Cosmos” wasn’t much better than Tyson’s version. People who thought the “Spaceship of the Imagination” was Tyson’s hokey idea didn’t know or remember that it was Sagan’s.

    But what happened to the moose — and the bow hunter? Don’t you want to have more firepower in your quiver if you want to take down a moose?

  25. Abraxas, the way my best friend in grad school described it, Sagan made a number of contributions in research on Titan and its atmospheric composition, which had a bearing on what my friend’s lab was into, which was origins-of-life research. In fact, Sagan and my friend’s thesis advisor were fairly direct competitors in that area, at least as my friend described the relationship.

    That suggests to me – and I haven’t looked into Sagan’s publishing history in any detail, so take it for what it’s worth – that Sagan’s real expertise was in atmospheric science: some chemistry, some physics. I suppose that was why he got into the nuclear winter debate back then.

    (I had binders full of reprints on protein science and de novoprotein design. That was my subject. Probably still have a few of them lying around here in a box somewhere.)

  26. Re: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I’m not impressed. As I said, considering his entire life is consuming resources, his criticism of Musk comes across as a huge serving of envy.
    His weak attempt to cast Space X as the recipient of government largesse through contracts ignores that he is providing a service for the government transporting astronauts to the space station at half the cost of Boeing. Space X receives no subsidies from the government.
    Can Tyson say the same thing?

    I remember watching the Cosmos series in 80’s? and what struck me the most was I thought I was in church and Sagan was the pastor. In fact one of the episodes was in a church (Notre Dame?).

  27. @ TommyJay > ” Like huxley has been suggesting, maybe broad swaths of the public are really beginning to take notice and reject some of these things.”

    I encountered a tweet linked by one of Taibbi’s commenters that speaks to the change in views.
    What happens when the status markers gets up-ended by reality?

    https://x.com/RCDad92/status/1862231454018650345

  28. New Breed of tough young Republican women are showing up – ‘Incoming Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt’ is probably my favorite, and she is a holy terror on reporters ‘n progressive interviewers!

    Karoline Leavitt to Newsmax: Americans Don’t Listen to Legacy Media

    Leavitt joined host Rob Schmitt in studio, and she focused on what legacy media miss, that the incoming Trump administration will allow more independent media into the White House press briefing room. Leavitt said that it all has to do with how the modern audience consumes their information.

    “I will say this: The American people are clearly digesting their news in very different ways than they were in 1980, when the president at the time handed over the briefing room seating chart to the white House Correspondents Association. We respect tradition and precedent. With that said, there is certainly a need for new voices in that room and outside nontraditional media thinkers who the American people are listening to,” Leavitt said…

    “President Trump just won this election by running in that lane, by taking his message to different audiences who are not tuning in to cable news every night. And it would be irresponsible of us not to think about how we can implement those voices in the next Trump White House,” Leavitt concluded.

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