Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
JD Vance on UFOs: “I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons.”
He isn’t joking.
For 50 years the flat-earthers said the moon landings were fake
In response, NASA launches a moon rocket on April1.
What if Artemis 2 is fake? There’s reporting that its toilet is not right https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/science/artemis-ii-bathroom-toilet.html
Constrained more by windows of launch opportunity and planetary alignment than trolling.
Even Mark Levin, of all people, is unhappy with Trump over the ceasefire:
Pete Buttigieg confronts Joe Kernen with reality
Erik Swalwell demonstrates that political parties store up scandals and unleash them when they have something to gain.
357 members of congress voted to maintain a slush fund to pay off victims of people like Swalwell.
Why is that?
Did they recently have a change of heart?
Why did they have to close down the page program?
Interesting times.
Congress no longer has page[boy]s.
Kids age 13-16.
Because they were being sexually abused.
357 congressmen voted to maintain a secret slush fund to buy the silence of abuse victims. (The existence of the fund is not secret, but its operation is secret).
Swalwell was the loudest of the politicians calling for publication of the Epstein files.
His cohorts have covered for him for a decade, until he became inconvenient in California.
It is reasonable to believe that many elected official are being blackmailed. The existence of the slush fund is proof that this is not a baseless conspiracy theory.
Swalwell is just the first of several scapegoats. Everyone hopes that tossing a few goats into the volcano will quiet things down.
As for Epstein, all the unredacted documents are now available to any member of congress, without time limits.
It is not a defense of creeps to say that I seriously dislike blackmail.
It is the worst kind of corruption to withhold accusations as long as the perp is useful.
I was just wondering how many people here will be lining up for the covid vaccines “update” and the flu…
I’m just curious how many subscribers of this great blog are alive…
J-Mac:
I will. I never miss my COVID and flu shots. Those illnesses suck, so I’m all for prevention or mitigation.
More of us than would be if we hadn’t gotten the vaccines, quite possibly.
I’m alive. I confess to not getting flu shots.
I’m 80 and for unknown reasons, have never had a debilitating respiratory disease.
It seems to be familial.
I got three covid shots and stopped.
I do know a person who was hospitalized after their second covid shot, and one person who was in bed for three days.
Immune systems are personal.
Trump’s terrible new poll numbers put him in ‘Nixon resignation’ territory
I asked Claude whether Strength In Numbers and Verasight were reputable polling firms, and he confirmed that they were:
The crosstabs are behind a paywall, unfortunately, so I can’t provide numbers for Republicans and Trump voters.
https://paidsurveysgo.com/verasight-surveys-review/
petrushka,
That review is for the people who sign up to take Verasight’s polls, not for the consumers of the information.
It’s an interesting methodology.
petrushka:
Yes, and effective, too, evidently. Hence their good reputation, their high-profile customer list, their 2024 election accuracy, and the fact that their current presidential approval number — 35% — is in line with the major national polls, suggesting that their sample is representative.
Brutal numbers for Trump in a new Marquette poll.
On inflation/cost of living, he has only a 24% approval rating. Among independents, that drops to 7%, which is almost as bad as among Democrats at 5%. Even among Republicans, the number is only 48%.
On a generic ballot, they found that 53% of likely voters would vote Democrat as opposed to only 43% for Republicans.
Meanwhile, gas prices are expected to remain high through November.
Trump is going to become ever more desperate to steal the election. God knows what stunts he’ll pull.
Dear admins, don’t know how to best contact you, but I have a post pending for approval.
The internet is currently obsessed with the red button/blue button problem.
petrushka:
For anyone (like me) who hasn’t heard of it:
My immediate reaction: If everyone pushes the red button, everyone lives. So if everyone were intelligent and rational enough to realize that, then everyone would push the red button. However, a lot of people won’t realize that, and of those who don’t, some of them will press the blue button. Those people are doomed if enough people push red.
If immediate self-preservation were your only concern, you would always push red. If you have a moral compass, you won’t want the blue-pushers to die, and so that will pull you toward pushing blue, though only if you believe that there’s a sufficiently good chance that a majority of your fellow humans will choose to push blue also.
But then there’s the question: what would the world be like after all the blue-pushers were dead? Chaotic, no doubt, and since all of the amoral people would presumably push red, the percentage of amoral people in the population would jump. So you’d have a massively disrupted world, institutions would presumably fail, and you’d have a Hobbesian situation where the amoral people were running amok and life might be hellish. You might wish you had pressed the blue button, although I suppose suicide would be an option at any time.
If you have a conscience, then choosing wisely requires you to estimate the percentage of the population that will make each choice, taking all of the second-, third-, and nth-order effects into account, and that’s not easy at all.
Punjabi villagers trying cheesecake for the first time
No need to estimate.
The poll has been run numerous times, and blue always gets a majority.
How does that fit into game theory?
Not a rhetorical question.
keiths:
petrushka:
If you knew that ahead of time, it would change the problem completely. If a majority of people are going to pick blue, then the only reasons to pick red would be if a) you liked the idea of killing the blues, or b) the margin was small enough for you to worry that there wouldn’t actually be a blue majority, or c) you didn’t trust the information in the first place.
They took that into account (at least in the version I quoted) by specifying that you’re alone in a room when you’re presented with the dilemma. You can’t communicate with anyone and you can only estimate the number of people who will pick blue, and presumably you have never seen poll results upon which to base your estimate.
Game theory can accommodate scenarios in which people have varying degrees of knowledge, rationality, willingness to cooperate, and concern for others, so it seems like it would be able to handle the red/blue problem.
Statistics Canada just published their latest travel numbers. Travel from Canada to the US is down 35% from where it was in March of 2024. This is due to Trump’s destructive tariffs, his talk of annexing Canada as the 51st state, and his childish jabs like referring to ‘Governor Carney’ and ‘Governor Trudeau’.
Trump voters, this is what happens when you put a weakling in office. Due to stupidity and a lack of self-restraint, Trump has managed to alienate our closest ally, gaining nothing in the process. ‘MAGA’ should be ‘MAWAW’ — Make America Weaker and Weaker.
I suspect that it is also partly due to the way that Trump is treating immigrants.
Neil:
Yes, Canada’s attitude toward immigrants is far more enlightened than Trump’s and MAGA’s. You’d expect MAGA Christians to follow Jesus, not Trump, but they don’t agree with Jesus when he says things like
I’m pretty sure that if Jesus showed up, ICE would deport him.
Sweden will no longer use the term Islamophobia, and it encourages EU to follow suit.
My cynical mind cannot help but wonder if this is a planned phase designed to “tame” radical Islam.
Europe cannot survive if the Islamists become ascendant.
So was there always a plan to tighten controls? Or is it ad hoc?
It’s what the government of Sweden has agreed on for itself, to replace the word with anti-Muslim racism instead. The reasoning is that phobia is a term for individual sentiments, but the problem – discrimination – is actually cultural and institutional.
You certainly mean especially Western Europe. I think it can survive and will. Western Europe has seen nowhere near the level of immigrants and steep ethnic conflicts that some Eastern European countries have, yet Eastern Europe has survived.
ETA: In this case, the dividing line between Western and Eastern Europe is the Eastern border of Germany and Austria, the old Iron Curtain.
The survival of the EU is a different matter. The EU’s future is much less certain, but does not depend on Islamophobia or Muslims at all, not one bit.
NACHO joins TACO
My question isn’t so much about whether Europe survives as it is about how it adapts to militant Islam.
The Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) released a report this year identifying the major threats to national security. It indeed indentified jihadism as a large terrorist threat, but the other major threat they mentioned I found more worrisome: the rising influence of extremist right parties. These not only pose a terrorist threat but these have recently begun infiltrating politics. In addition, extremist right ideology was found to be seeping into societal values of the general public. Does that look familiar in any way?
Politicians need bogeymen to justify their existence.
This is just a variation on the Military industrial complex.
I think politicians are having an existential crisis.
There are foreseeable solutions to all the critical problems facing humanity.
Not instant solutions, but clear paths.
We could, within 20 years, produce 90 percent of our energy with solar and nuclear.
There is no food shortage, except where manufactured by warlords.
We have the means to provide education and internet access to any remote area.
Population is falling off a cliff. If overpopulation was a bogeyman, it is gone. Now the crisis is managing the decline.
We’re are entering the era of manufactured crisis.
Dear admins,
During this lazy sunday, I have made another post which is now pending for approval.
Thanks
Even by Enten standards, Harry is freaking out over this number:
ETA:
Trump approval rating so low on inflation he ‘broke the scale,’ pollster says