Home » Open thread 11/27/2024

Comments

Open thread 11/27/2024 — 28 Comments

  1. Drove 20 miles to Walmart in Chiefland—barely any traffic. Normal grocery day is Thursday, but combined it with trash dump day today. Also went to bank in Fanning Springs and exchanged $600 in twenties for six $100 bills – in America, even those who live below the Poverty Guidelines can save money. Busy day for this humble hermit! Wednesday is also laundry day, but moved it back to yesterday afternoon. Don’t do holidays but do prepare for them. Guess that gives me a 6-day weekend 🙂

    Let’s Talk Turkey: The Truth About Thanksgiving Traditions

  2. Had to do a little shopping yesterday, and the supermarket was packed. In Denver, a little snow. Not going out, can be slick. Already have Thanksgiving dinner ready to heat up. Prepped before coming down for Wife’s cancer treatment. In a Residence Hotel for 3 weeks, comfortable. Miss our Cats.
    If anyone knows about CAR-T, that is what she is getting.

  3. RE: What did the ancient Egyptians know?

    Looking over the vocabulary of images used in Egyptian hieroglyphs, each one of these these images is relatively simple in appearance.

    Then, we have things like these hieroglyphs/images* which have been noticed, carved into the walls of the Hathor Temple at Dendera, which was constructed around 50 B.C., with indications that earlier buildings on this site were built as far back as 2,200 B.C.

    Is it a mere coincidence that these several complex, sophisticated images look like a helicopter, or other advanced aircraft?

    * See https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/hi%C3%A9roglyphe-d-h%C3%A9licopt%C3%A8re-d-abydos-27119851.jpg

  4. It was interesting to see it come out that both the Biden and Harris campaigns had internal polling showing they would not defeat Trump.

    What this tells us is that a) it is possible to poll accurately, and b) the polls published and commented on by the legacy media do not bother to poll accurately.

    And why were the legacy media talking heads, who surely had contacts within the campaigns who knew this, taking the worthless public polls seriously?

    Either a) this is all a performance on their part–they are not trying at all to report facts, just trying to shape public opinion by playing the roles of journalists, or b) they are so high on their own supply that they don’t really know what the facts even are.

    It seems that for future elections, there is no point whatever in paying any attention to any legacy media “news” about polls or public opinion. They have the power to collect the real facts, and they are simply not interested in doing that.

  5. @Snow on Pine: Is it a mere coincidence that these several complex, sophisticated images look like a helicopter, and other advanced aircraft?

    Yes. The way we know that is, that no advanced technology was developed by looking at ancient hieroglyphics; they are easy to interpret after the fact to kind-of sort-of look like technology you’ve heard of, but they carry no actual useable information about that technology.

    For some mysterious reason, these ancient depictions of advanced technology show nothing more advanced than technology we know of today. But if your hypothesis about aliens is valid they should have been exposed to much more advanced technology than helicopters, so where are those hieroglyphics?

    Your great-great-grandson will be posting here about how Egyptian hieroglyphics obviously look like flux capacitors and space elevators and fusion-powered hovertrucks, but because you don’t know what those things look like, you can’t show us any hieroglyphics that look like them.

  6. https://www.thecollegefix.com/university-of-north-texas-teachers-college-hides-dei-language-from-courses-following-public-scrutiny/
    ==
    The simplest way to address this problem is for the state legislature to strip UNT of the franchise to erect and maintain a teacher training program and debar from UNT employment any quondam faculty there.
    ==
    Republican legislators complain, pass ineffectual legislation that faculty and administrators circumvent, and nothing changes.

  7. Knew that they would lose. Trashed Trump supporters. Wasted huge amount of money. Just think how irresponsibly evil they were/are.

  8. Congrats to Biden?

    Biden announces Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire plan in Rose Garden address

    President Biden spoke from the Rose Garden Tuesday to tout a cease-fire plan between Israel and Hezbollah — claiming credit for helping broker the agreement after months of fighting.

    “I just spoke with the prime ministers of Israel and Lebanon. I’m pleased to announce that their governments have accepted the United States proposal to end the devastating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah,” Biden, 82, said.

    Biden said that “this is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities.”

    I thought France & Macron helped – why didn’t Biden share some of the credit with him ‘n France?

    What else is going on – does Hamas now fear Biden also?!

    Hamas begs for deal on its terms.

    Hamas claimed Wednesday that it is ready for a cease-fire in Gaza — just hours after Israel’s truce with Hezbollah terrorists went into effect in Lebanon.

    “We are committed to cooperating with any effort to reach a cease-fire in Gaza and we are interested in ending the aggression against our people,” Hamas said in a statement before reiterating its outstanding conditions.

    Hamas said any such truce must end the war, pull Israeli forces out of Gaza, return displaced Gazans to their homes and broker a hostages-for-prisoners swap deal.

    Guess not. Hamas needs to learn how to properly beg before dying…

  9. ah the French the ones who gave Saddam the rudiments of their nuclear program,
    who started up the program under the shah, who partitioned lebanon and syria, for good measure, they also gave the ayatollah sanctuary so he could spread his tapes into the country,

    its a terrible deal,
    as tony badran, my go to person on these matters spells out,

    https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/rootless/rootless-lebanon-disastrous-lebanon-ceasefire-deal

    the saving grace is that the sheriff will be back in town in two months,

  10. OT and all that …

    I’m learning guitar and discover that the distance between all the strings in standard tuning is four notes — except between the G and B which is three notes.

    This exception bothers me as a math and piano guy.

    But it comes down to human ergonomics. If the standard strings were all fourths apart it would be quite difficult to play some standard chord progressions with the human hand.

    There is deep thought and experience underlying standard Western instruments. Not saying there isn’t in other traditions. But our musical instruments are, among other things, amazing technology.

  11. @huxley:There is deep thought and experience underlying standard Western instruments.

    As a math guy, but not a music guy, equal temperament blew my mind. I’d had no idea it was that hard.

  12. As a math guy, but not a music guy, equal temperament blew my mind. I’d had no idea it was that hard.

    Niketas Choniates:

    Quite so.

    Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” is not only beautiful and essential listening, it was Bach’s way of saying, “Let’s take this baby out for a spin,” and blowing out the doors.

  13. Re: Equal temperament / Well-Tempered

    The revolutionary idea here is that a single keyboard could function beautifully in all 24 major and minor keys without retuning.

    There’s some fancy stuff under the hood to make this work.

  14. Boned Looser well what do you expect them to do? President Trump is portrayed by the media a Putin ally and Putin has been dropping glide bombs and missiles on Ukrainian civilians, and of course Ukrainian POWs have been getting execution after surrender. That might take the shine off President Trump’s reputation. It serves Vlad to create animosity towards President Trump. Not that you have any good will towards Ukraine or Ukrainians.

  15. the Azovs do have terrible pr, do they share Kamalas staff, like any Black Sun iconography, leave that out, yes we had some rough customers in Central America, like the Atacl battallions or the Kaibiles, but the same sort weren’t pressing to disarm Americans, and lockup 69 year old grandmas for praying too loudly capisce

  16. assume most everything they were telling in broadstrokes was a lie, I mean they do it everywhere else, ‘the gaza hospital’ the mr reed ride to the Capitol building they said this with a straight face, the only thing that’s true are the lives lost and the monies that dissapeared down a rat hole, like ftx speaking of ratholes

    of course none of these brushfires could happen without oil revenue, in Northern Europe and the Persian Gulf, that had been held at bay by our dynamic oil exploration

  17. @ Barry > “The Obama Empire Claims a New Province”
    Thanks for the link.
    Park MacDougald’s analysis of the Lebanese-Israeli situation is the most complete I’ve seen so far.

  18. Happy Day-after Thanksgiving!

    Mentioned the other day that I don’t “do holidays,” but I remember the celebration & meaning of each one. Love and celebrate every day pretty much equally now. Doctor visit days are the exception. Am guessing that certain Holidays are handled differently here than normal days ‘n Sundays (?). Went to post yesterday morning—thought I saw the new Open Thread—and posted to it. Hours later I noticed it wasn’t the Open Thread…oops!

    Always ‘Two Sides’ to a Story? Are closed-minded voters – on both sides – the problem in America?

    Brief from Highly Secret links:

    The Dual Nature of Perspectives

    Complexity of Human Experience: No single perspective can capture the entirety of human experience. Each individual’s viewpoint is shaped by their unique background, experiences, beliefs, and biases.

    Bill Clinton makes stunning confession about his bizarre behavior after Hillary’s defeat in America’s ‘darkest election’

    Writing in his new memoir, an emotional Clinton issues an apology to all those who found him hard going in the years following the 2016 contest, won by Donald Trump, which he describes as ‘the darkest election possible in the United States’.

    Clinton, president from 1993-2001, still blames Hillary’s defeat on a toxic combination of Russian propaganda, an unprecedented investigation into her use of emails by James Comey, then director of the FBI, and a supine political press which, he says, took more interest in the email controversy than the merits of the candidates.

    ‘The whole thing is hard for me to write,’ he says in Citizen – My Life After The White House. ‘I couldn’t sleep for two years after the election. I was so angry, I wasn’t fit to be around.

    Pointing to his wife’s calamitous loss of a six-point polling lead, he writes that: ‘Almost two years after the election, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a highly regarded social scientist said Russia’s cyber attacks piled on top of Comey’s interventions were effective enough to persuade voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to vote for third parties or stay at home.

    ‘If so, Putin’s enablers were Comey and the political press.’

    Wasn’t into Politics when Bill Clinton was in Office, but was stunned when he defeated incumbent Republican president George H. W. Bush. I thought GHW was a great President. Great Wartime Leader. Loved his Gulf War quick in and quick out. Do remember that his own party turned against him, and am guessing that helped to open the door for Bill Clinton. Maybe that also opened the door for Obama in the near future – as Clinton defeated Bob Dole next.

    Never cared for Bill Clinton. He began a list of weak American Presidents – Obama, Trump and Biden. Liked GW Bush, but his party also turned against him. A weak Republican party then ran McCain against Obama. McCain with help from Republicans helped to destroy Sarah Palin, IMHO. She could’ve been great.

    With no bench still—Republicans ran Mitt Romney against Obama next. Republican voters still blame Obama instead of themselves for those disastrous 8-years.

    Anyway, found it interesting that Bill Clinton, in his new memoir, sounds a lot like many Republicans on message boards ‘n Such

  19. FCC Approves Starlink Direct-to-Cell Service With T-Mobile

    This is the FCC’s first instance of approving supplemental coverage from space (SCS) — in which satellites communicate directly with unmodified cell phones using mobile network operator (MNO) spectrum, to “supplement” the reach of the MNO’s network. The FCC adopted a new regulatory framework in March to allow for SCS, the first regulatory framework of its kind.

    T-Mobile and SpaceX have been working together since 2022 to enable this service and allow T-Mobile customers to send messages via Starlink satellites in rural and remote areas. During Hurricane Helene and Milton this past fall, the FCC granted T-Mobile and SpaceX special temporary authority to operate direct-to-cellular service in affected areas. SpaceX and T-Mobile have also tested wireless emergency alerts delivered via satellite.

    Looks like it might be moving along a little quicker than I had thought. Switched to T-mobile in Jan of this year when I heard about getting service in dead areas. Have fiber internet so can use WiFi calling since phone signal is bad here. Once it is finished then not more worry about dead spots, from the way I understand it.

    Requires the right frequency (?) phone which I got for free (Galaxy A14 5G) for opening an account with them—well, phone is free if I stay with them for 2 years.

  20. @Karmi:Requires the right frequency (?) phone which I got for free (Galaxy A14 5G) for opening an account with them—well, phone is free if I stay with them for 2 years.

    “Free” means that you have already paid for it. The 2-year commitment you made is so much more valuable to them than the phone.

  21. @miguel:fascinating

    Leftist protests and movements are all top-down theater funded by deep pockets. There may have been a time when they weren’t, but it was at least forty years ago.

    Walk the streets of Berkeley for a few minutes and see the recruiters hiring protesters for so much an hour.

    In real life teens don’t have the connections to organize a movement on their own initiative; in real life they are slotted into a role as the face of a movement by the people who actually run that movement.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>