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Open thread 7/17/2026 — 16 Comments

1. Andros polytropos, a man of many turnings, our felllow, Ron. Long may he cat-tease.

2. Grab bars give me a warm feeling.
   Cats give me even warmer feelings, although I have seen no evidence that mine would react as did Fluffy (Fluffy, aka Fluffy Tuffy, was the name given to our first Siamese 64 years ago by our then 3 year old). I think our current Calico would come sit on me, while the 14 lb tabby, affectionately known as Bozo, would just look puzzled.

3. I’ve been shivering in Monterey, but decided to head up to Santa Cruz for a beach party concert last evening. 83 degrees and sunny. Aahhh! The band was decent, but nothing special. The song list was rather good though. They happened to play two songs off of this following list of 10 One-hit-wonder bands of the 70’s.

   I stumbled across this video, because I saw the image of the lead singer of Shocking Blue. Yes, And Venus was her name! 😉 The video is a little slow, and they deleted one of the song fragments, probably for legal reasons, but it a fun and mostly accurate exposé.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIufT2jvDMA

   My one complaint is the section on Slow Ride by Foghat. That it their only really iconic song, but they had a few other hits. I knew their top three songs on youtube quite well.

4. Some Democrats are pathetic!
   https://www.foxbusiness.com/fox-news-travel/united-offer-travelers-free-flight-changes-avoid-landing-trump-international-airport

5. TommyJay:

   “Venus” on the radio inspired me to plunk down my $4 at the record store. Sadly the rest of the “Shocking Blue” album felt like filler. Still “Venus” was a peak moment in 70s pop.

   Foghat had more than one hit to be consigned the one-hit wonder bin. They had a surprisingly long career. I lived in the South in the 70s and assumed Foghat was part of the Southern Rock surge, but they were actually from England.

   One-hit wonder is an interesting category. It takes a lot of talent and luck to make a rock hit. Kudos to those who can do it more than once, but I appreciate the stray jewels as well.

6. So what is happening with my leftists friends today? Same ol’ same ol’….cheering Ukraine, still going on about the Reflecting pool, and the Iran war is just to distract from the long forgotten Epstein files. Classic broken record syndrome.

7. Venus is fun to play on the guitar…simple 3 chord progression that hooks. Much like Wild Thing by the Troggs, or Gloria by Them.

8. They briefly mention Bananarama performing Venus in the above video. That’s my favorite, even though original is good. We’ve got a local cover band that does an excellent job with the song too.

   I think it was about 10 or 15 years ago, I was shocked to read that some expert from the UK said that Bananarama (with a number of hits) was the 5th most played band on air in the UK.

9. physicsguy, your leftist friends probably didn’t hear anything about Trump’s speech or about the declassified documents which are being released. Nor will they in the coming days. The legacy media are going to try to completely ignore the whole thing.

10. When we remodeled several years ago, we had Grab Bars and seats put into the showers. I also had them install Grab Bars by the toilets.

11. Kate,

    Even if they hear about it they’ll just immediately dismiss it as more Trump lies.

12. ESPN
    AP
    NEW YORK — Major League Baseball is restricting iPad usage in dugouts to prevent the tablets from running artificial intelligence to help make decisions

13. What was the cat doing during those 16 hours?
    That the phone hit the man’s hand was God’s providence, even though the cat knocked it off the counter.

    We have had grab bars in both bathrooms for years, although we are both still just 74ish.
    I think I will start taking my phone into the room when I bathe.
    But no cats.

    PS to Neo’s question on the DST thread: why yes, there ARE other night owls here!

14. @ physicsguy on July 17, 2026 at 3:48 pm said:
    “Kate, Even if they hear about it they’ll just immediately dismiss it as more Trump lies.”

    Which is exactly why the networks didn’t cover it; although the “last-minute decision” had probably been made as soon as they knew the topic had evidence attached.

    https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/trump-card-friday-july-17-2026-c

    Shortly before last night’s historic speech, at least three of the alphabet networks reneged on their agreements to give Trump prime time. Then corporate media sullenly refused to link to certain parts of the story that are arguably more than a little important.

    So, here are a few helpful resources before we dig in:

    A PBS streaming video on YouTube of Trump’s entire speech. I put an index to the video with topical links below.

    The new White House Election Integrity website. It should be titled, “Here is the evidence.”

    Not one single “news” platform published a transcript of the whole thing. So I did it. The unedited transcript is included at the end of today’s post, along with helpful subtitles for easier navigation.

    …
    Obviously, the New York Times didn’t like it, reporting, “Takeaways From Trump’s Speech Claiming Election Vulnerabilities and China Interference.” Sneering began right in the subheadline: “Documents released by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims did not back up his most aggressive statements.”

    image 8.png

    I could dissect the Times’s entire, terrible article and show the various tricks it used to falsely ‘fact-check’ the President. But I will just tackle one illustrative example that will tear down the curtain, and I’ll take the most significant claim that the President made.

    It’s a long but beautiful fisking.
    Shows exactly how the Times operates, like revealing the Magician’s Secrets from behind the scenes.

    When your argument is solid, you don’t need this much semantic wrangling and hand-waving at anonymous reassurances; you can lay out the documents, even-handedly show the limits, and let the reader see the gaps. Here, they’re constantly massaging their story so that nothing Trump surfaced can be allowed to count as serious evidence of “vulnerabilities.”

    That effort level is itself a tell: if the Intelligence Community and Democrats’ narrative about “nothing to see here” around China’s voter?data-harvesting operation were comfortably true, the piece could have been much more straightforward. The fact that it leans so heavily into wordplay, shrink rays, and selective frames suggests they know the declassified documents are, at minimum, embarrassing.

    But at the same time, we should meet our own standard and be intellectually honest. Trump didn’t disqualify the two Georgia Senators. He didn’t disclose any evidence of actual voting manipulation in 2020— or any other year. Barnes and Haberman enthusiastically quoted the President’s own declassification lead, John Solomon, who conceded to reporters that the intelligence documents “show no evidence that votes in election machines were changed in the past three elections.” (That was the one and only time they quoted John. Shocker.)

    But. The President did declassify enough to show intolerable levels of election vulnerability. And that was the point.

    Maybe Orange Man really is crazy like a fox.

    Trump’s speech reminded me of how, during the pandemic, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did something structurally similar. Before announcing big moves like banning vaccine passports or prohibiting mandatory masking in public schools, he convened public roundtables with outside experts —Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Scott Atlas, and others— and let them argue the case for him in front of cameras, streamed to the world.

    Those panels were explicitly designed to give his policy decisions a visible “expert record” and force critics to attack not just him, but the data and arguments aired on?stage. He was just following the science.

    Trump’s election?integrity rollout —speech, declassifications, a new website— was like the national?level version of DeSantis’s Florida playbook. They’re not identical. DeSantis’s panels were calm, lawyerly, technocratic, and highly curated; Trump’s speech was populist and hyperbolic. But that’s just a stylistic difference.

    The underlying strategy —create a public “Here is the evidence” moment that precedes and justifies a controversial move— is strikingly similar. But … what controversial move could Trump be planning? That is the only real question.

    ?? We don’t know the plan. (Nor should we.) But President Trump holds the declassification card. No administration in history has ever declassified so much information from the intelligence community. You could call this power a Trump Card. He just played another hand. Now recall another classic Trump strategy: He makes an argument with apparent holes in it and lets his outraged adversaries get out over their skis.

    Then, the President resolves those ‘problems’ by playing new cards of declassified information in Round II. Ante up.

    He did exactly this with the Epstein disclosure drip-out. He made it look like they pulled the information reluctantly out of his administration. Then a bunch of progressives and Democrats got steamrolled.

    So this could just be the first tranche of declassified documents. That’s one possibility.

    The second option is that Trump is letting his opponents reframe the debate onto ground he prefers. He didn’t really argue that the 2020 was stolen. His real argument is that our elections are vulnerable to being stolen— which is all he needs to prove to justify a major new move.

    Just think about it. If China can hoover up ‘secure’ voter information on every US voter, and the intelligence agencies are helpless to prevent it or even surface the problem, how secure is our system anyway?

    If Trump’s critics admit that the data is being used “to better craft influence campaigns to shape voters’ perceptions,” how can you say our elections aren’t vulnerable?

    In other words, even without documentation of a single actual tabulation flip, the capacity for targeted pressure, manipulation, and exploitation is enormous. The vulnerabilities are baked in. Even in the Times’ miniaturized version, the argument proves itself.

    “Tomorrow, the Secretary of Homeland Security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems,” President Trump said last night. “They are bad.”

    Personally, I can’t wait for Act II. How about you?

15. Revisiting the Time Controversy with a little humor, and a great cartoon.

    https://donsurber.substack.com/p/modern-time-began-in-1883

    https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z1CH!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe1f78937-aa10-427c-9293-c8b330a77392_375x250.jpeg

    Note that the origins of Standard Time, and the travesty of DST, are a good illustration of the value of Capitalism vs the tyranny of Government (socialist or not).

    Standard Time was convenient and if there is one thing Americans agree on, it is convenience is a very convenient thing to have.

    This was all done in the marketplace—a problem solved without a federal bureaucracy’s decree and without any congressional hearings.

    All went swell for nearly 35 years until Congress stuck its nose in, using the excuse of entering the Great War, which we now call World War One. The Standard Time Act of 1918 formally adopted on March 15, 1918, the time everyone already was using—and replaced Standard Time with Daylight Saving Time.

    That’s how government gets its kicks, by taking something that works perfectly well and fixing it. The people rebelled and Congress repealed it the next year. When World War Two began, Congress seized the opportunity to impose DST on us again.

16. Karmi got teeth!!! A lot more than the $1500-2000 that I had figured they would be, but first: have notice some have wished me a HB and welcome back, etc. Haven’t replied back to anyone other than Neo because I just may not be doing any debating, replies, etc. this time around…so to speak whilst trying not to sound or be rude.

    Teeth had started falling out around 8-10 years ago…they were getting ‘long in the tooth’, then loose, and eventually fall out. Had checked on getting a sore one pulled but a $500 quote caused me to just wait and let them fall out on their own. Rough when chewing food and biting down on one of the loose and sore ones – OUCH!

    Figured I’d get dentures after they all fell out; however, the remaining 14 weren’t getting real loose (except for one) and they weren’t falling out within a year. My gums had developed a horrid smell but brushing and mouthwash cleared most up. Some ladies talked me into getting one of those free exams and x rays to see what 14 extractions & dentures would cost.

    First estimate was like a “discounted” price of over $7200!?!?!?! Second estimate was over $8000 and whatever the cost of pulling “hard extractions”!?!?! Yeah, dentists were seriously gouging on extractions. More research and estimates were still too high for me, and what Medicaid and Medicare I had would not cover teeth, AND those Advantage plans wouldn’t take a couple of my best doctors. Oh, first exam and estimate had found that my teeth, gums, and “bone” had a bacterial infection (smelly smelly but I seemed OK with it).

    Then I saw Affordable Dentures & Implants ads – one in Ocala, FL had listed extractions at $140 each so I went there for a free checkup. Almost didn’t go there because Dr. Mahmud had an Islamic or Arabic name, but $140 was sure a lot less than $300-500 AND up for the hard ones. Dr. Mahmud was a U of Florida Medical School graduate and he pulled all 14 in one visit – saying that if I heard a “snap” to not worry about it. No “snaps” (whew!!) and a set of “temp” dentures went in. $4100 with extractions, temp dentures (he gave me new temps because the first set were weak) and they have been great after getting used to them. The permanent dentures are also included in that price, but it can take 6 months to a year before them. Gums and bones need to heal and adjust. I have the Economy Plus on that price, but may upgrade to some better fancy ones before actually getting the perms. Took out a revolving loan from my bank of $2800 because I had saved some money up. Down to $1900 this month, so may move to the best dentures when time is right for perms and if the upgrade would only be 7 or 8 hundred more than the Economy Plus I might add that cost to the loan. I dunno yet, since these temps seem fine…loose but Sea-Bond fixes that if I want them tighter.

    Tough adjustment tho. Couldn’t eat my favorite Genoa Salami at first – not a lot of other stuff either, tho I seem to be able to eat anything now. Extractions were done at end of January 2026.

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