Home » Open thread 10/7/2024

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Open thread 10/7/2024 — 24 Comments

  1. Milton is going to be bad. FL hit again soon.
    Saw two videos on what Musk is doing to help, with Starlink. Looks like FCC giving, grudgingly, temp approvals of getting them working.
    The continuing face of Evil of the Dems.

    A moment of Slience for Israel.

  2. An elder colleague told me of once meeting with a man who had been a minister in the government of East Pakistan; some of us old folks may remember that this is Bangladesh which used to be part of Pakistan and was governed, poorly, from Karachi, and achieved independence through a bloody war.

    My colleague was American, like most of us here, or he might have thought harder before he asked the question, “What does an ex-minister of East Pakistan do?” The answer he got was, “Hide under the desk listening to everyone else in the office being murdered.”

    I have no respect for anyone banging the J6 “insurrection” drum. They have no idea what a real one is like.

  3. Stay safe everyone

    Yes i compared it to the delta house scrum at the end of animal house

  4. F recently posted a link to this Karol Markowicz essay on her substack: “I Have Spent the Last Year Angry at Jews” https://substack.com/home/post/p-149876586 (Markowicz is Jewish, an immigrant from Russia)

    Read the whole thing, as the kids say.

    “Most Jewish organizations are dinosaurs, committed to Democrats just as the Democrats make clear they are not at all interested in them. That’s the problem with tying your religion to a political party.”

    Separation of Church and State is not only healthy for the State. It’s even more healthy for the Church. Or as another Jew once said, “Render unto Caesar.”

  5. I read the Markowicz essay.

    I do wonder why so many on the Right who are not themselves Jews care who Jews support. Is it that they expect if Jews changed their minds, it would change anything for everyone else? Jews are such a tiny fraction of the population concentrated in areas that are overwhelmingly blue.

    I can see that someone who is Jewish might be frustrated about how Jews vote, but I’m not really sure how it would be broadly consequential. A really broad repudiation of the Democratic party might carry a majority of Jews with it, but that would be an effect of the repudiation, not a cause of it.

    There are slices of the population of comparable or greater size that we never talk about: there are almost as many Chinese Americans as American Jews, and almost as many Indian (subcontinent) Americans, and I don’t see anyone on the Right spending much time worrying about how they vote.

  6. FL 2024 party voter registrations:
    • REP – 5,385,554.
    • DEM – 4,359,354
    • Minor Party – 390,220
    • No Party Affiliation – 3,544,576

    Am guessing the Independent party is lumped in the Minor Party (?) … OK, yes it is.

    Couple of interesting articles this morning:

    Legendary Texas Republican makes shocking Harris-Trump prediction about ‘afraid’ GOP voters

    Former Tarrant County Judge Glenn Whitley — a life-long member of the Republican Party who served from 2007 to 2022 — has been one of Texas’ most prominent Republicans.

    Anyone here have a REP friend/family voting for Harris/Walz this year? Long time REP Glenn Whitley will be voting for Harris, and “believes many Republicans will vote for Harris in secret.”

    “There are a lot, I think,” Whitley said. “They’re afraid to come out, because when they do, they get ridiculed and they get bullied and they get belittled. And so a lot of people who have been staunch Republicans and still are staunch Republicans, are afraid to stand up and be confrontational with some of the leaders that we have right now.

    Interesting. So there may be some REPs who catch grief from both their REP & DEM friends/family. Ditto on the Interesting.

    Potential Trump loss threatens destruction of modern GOP

    Never before has a party’s identity been so deeply entwined with the fate, fortunes and flaws of one man. Four consecutive poor election cycles would unleash a wave of sustained scrutiny that the GOP — as it currently exists — may not survive.

    Don’t know if AXIOS is considered Left or Right here, but Article makes some good points. Guess author is saying 2018 midterm was a “poor election” cycle for REPs – along with the disastrous 2020 & 2022.

  7. I have been entertained by the “well ACKSHULLYs” from the legacy media on the FEMA money.

    Imagine a wife discovering that the rent money has been gambled away. Imagine the husband’s defense “well ACKSHULLY I budgeted that money expressly for gambling and I never would have used it to pay the rent.”

  8. The New Yorker links a poorly-written article about new book by Ta-Neshi Coates, about which they say:

    “In his new book, Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses his version of moral clarity: Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians.”

    Good response from @WindDustStars, who says:

    “What a bloated and self-indulgent essay. The author is irritatingly pretentious. And of course, Coates is simplistic and wrong in his racialized understanding of Palestine’s situation. The real adversaries in Gaza are Hamas’ leaders and foot soldiers, who have long instrumentalized the suffering of the Palestinians in order to extract more international aid.

    Doesn’t he (and don’t you) ever wonder why the top Hamas leadership was so wealthy? It was all a hate-driven grift, at the expense of Palestinian children and families.”

    Thread here:
    https://x.com/WindDustStars/status/1842234809248034960

  9. On the polling post thread Niketas wrote,

    “To really be able to reason rightly, you have to continually look for things that might prove your position wrong rather than just rack up things that support it. Very few people have any desire to put work into potentially proving themselves wrong.”

    I agree about putting in the work, I’m not even sure it’s laziness, I think some people just aren’t very curious.

    However, I don’t think one has to have an interest in proving oneself wrong. Being sufficiently focused on efficiency, or optimization would be enough. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

    Niketas appears to have a background in Physics. Newton himself, even Einstein, would likely be somewhat shocked at what the current model states is going on at the sub-atomic level. But they would be open to accepting the current model based on the quantity of experiments that have been run that support it over Newton’s model.

    Leftists have a view of the world, and human nature, and political systems. We all do. It’s just that every time an experiment is run based on their assumptions the data do not support their theories. I think most all of us, especially the changers here, picked up on that pattern. It turns out humans need challenges. Handing them the necessities of life like the Eloi in Wells’ “Time Machine” results in a populace about as robust as the Eloi in Wells’ “Time Machine.” It turns out humans need competition to thrive. It turns out gender differences are hard coded into our DNA. It turns out continually asking children how they feel, and if they are OK creates anxiety in children, rather than confidence…

    The problem with Leftists is they don’t connect the failures of the real world examples where their theories are tried with evidence that the world actually functions much differently than they believe. Human nature and DNA at the “sub-atomic level” cannot be altered no matter how hard we try to vote or legislate it away.

  10. Niketas,

    Perhaps people care not so much how Jews vote but where they put their considerable political influence, you know, money. Prominent Jewish business leaders contribute a lot of dough to Dem causes and campaigns. They punch way above their demographic weight.

  11. @Yawrate:Prominent Jewish business leaders contribute a lot of dough to Dem causes and campaigns.

    Why don’t we seem to know there are prominent Chinese-Americans and Indian-Americans doing the same? Because they are. On the Right we just don’t seem to be talking about it.

  12. Good tweet from B. Donald re the immigration bill that never passed. Every time that a D tries to blame Trump about the non passage of the bill, this list should be the response.

    https://x.com/ByronDonalds/status/1842934736383357413

    Why the Senate Border Deal FAILED:

    1–Codify Catch/Release
    2–Let in 1.8M Illegals
    3–Fund Sanctuary Cities
    4–Fund NGOs Moving Illegals
    5–Lawyers to Illegals
    6–Work Permits to Illegals
    7–Nothing to Deport Illegals
    8–No Immediate Wall Funds
    9–Weak Asylum Screening
    10–$60B to Ukraine

  13. Article at The Federalist by an Army veteran who participated in the Katrina recovery and rescue effort, comparing it to what is being done, and more importantly, is NOT being done, for Appalachia after Helene. The difference is huge. His opinions on why: (1) Administrative incompetence, (2) the possibility that the military units are on alert to be sent to the Middle East and therefore cannot be deployed to the mountains, and (3) politics, since Appalachian voters are heavily conservative.

    https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/04/comparing-helene-to-katrina-suggests-americans-are-left-to-die-because-democrats-run-the-white-house/

  14. @miguel:When mobs are stalking chinese all around the world then we’ll talk if half all the chinese had been previously wiped from the earth

    This is too cryptic for me. If I want to see the GOP win elections in 2024 or 2028, don’t I need to be primarily concerned with who voters are in the US and how many of what kind there are in 2024 and 2028? I’m not sure why a reference to the Shoah is germane to that, but if you explain in more and small words I might get the connection.

    Certainly, if you’d like to not see a second Shoah in Israel, the GOP winning elections is germane to that. But I think we should support Israel because that’s the right thing to do, not because it might win over the votes of a very small slice of the population.

  15. Best info on Milton:

    https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/storminfo/

    And Mike;s Weather page has all info:

    https://spaghettimodels.com/. He’s doing live updates every 5 hours now; next at 2pm EDT.

    For us in Jax, high res models show 40kt winds except at coast where it reaches hurricane levels. trying to get my daughter to leave Orlando, and come here as of now it’s expected to be somewhere between Cat 2 and 3 over Orlando. West coast is going to be slammed, maybe worse than Ian, and Orlando hasn’t been hit with something like this. It will travel directly up I4 exiting around Daytona, Palm Coast still at a 1 or 2.

    Given how the feds have treated red western NC, I’m sure there will be an attempt to block aid to DeSantis’ state since they hate him.

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