In the Saturday Q&A (Z) was asked about presidents who might have been “great” but blew it, the example the questioner gave being Junior Bush who was given an opportunity after the 9/11 attacks to truly unite not only the nation but the world, but he squandered it.
(Z) answers: I suppose you can argue that the two presidents who botched the antebellum era—Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan—had a chance to be great, and dropped the ball. That said, the U.S. probably needed the Civil War to actually make the change, in terms of ending slavery.
Similarly, you can argue that Andrew Johnson, who botched Reconstruction, blew his chance. But the deeply entrenched racism in American and Southern society almost certainly meant that even Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have done a whole lot there.
Grover Cleveland and William McKinley presumably had the opportunity to do what Theodore Roosevelt did, and to confront the ills of the Gilded Age head on. But Cleveland was too conservative, and McKinley died prematurely.
Herbert Hoover got the first crack at the Great Depression. But he was also too conservative to have done better, and also, it was probably necessary for people to see how bad things could get before the New Deal could happen. Oh, and when I use “conservative” in describing Cleveland and Hoover here, I don’t exactly mean “politically conservative” (though they were both that, as well). I mean, “conservative in their sense of the limits of government power.”
Richard Nixon had an opportunity to build on the successes of the 1960s, and to reverse some of the failures (Vietnam), and did so for a while, before he was done in by his corrupt nature.
George W. Bush is a very good answer.
Donald Trump was a political outsider, and someone elected on a promise to “shake things up.” He could have done some interesting and/or positive stuff. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
If I were to narrow it down to, say, a top three, I’d probably go with Buchanan, Nixon and Bush.
In the same Q&A there was a question about AI. I’ve equated AI with BS for 40 years, and though it might be useful these days for summarizing a long report or a group of responses, I don’t trust it for much else.
(Z) answers: I do not use AI, except when I need a demonstration of how bad AI is at historical practice, or when I need to check and see if a student’s answer/essay likely came from AI. So, I don’t have as many examples as you might think.
That said, my policy is that if a student cheats once, on any assignment, they get a zero for that assignment, and an advisory referral to the Office of Academic Integrity. And if they cheat a second time, on any assignment, they get an F for the course and a disciplinary referral to the Office of Academic Integrity. A few years ago, I asked a question on a quiz: “What notable Californian, who smoked five packs a cigarettes a day, moved to the state because he thought it would improve the health of his lungs?” The correct answer is “Walt Disney,” but a student who had already been caught cheating once before nonetheless continued to use AI, and so dutifully gave the “correct” answer, as per ChatGPT: Winston Churchill.
Other than the fact that Churchill smoked cigars and not cigarettes, and that he never moved to or lived in California, and that he did not complain of lung problems, the answer’s a bullseye. Oh, and it was also strike two, and an F in the course for that student.
Does anyone remember Kyrsten Sinema?
She was the alleged Democrat who was a Senator from Arizona until Januarty of last year. She succeeded Jeff Flake, but really she was the flakey one, as her behavior made absolutely no sense. Unless she was on the take.
Anyway, she’s in the news again:
Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema can be sued under North Carolina’s homewrecker law over her relationship with a member of her security detail, a judge ruled Friday.
Sinema has acknowledged having a romantic relationship with Matthew Ammel but argued that she can’t be sued in North Carolina because she has no connection to the state.
U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon rejected that argument, saying nine text messages she sent Ammel while he was in the state give North Carolina jurisdiction over her. He found it implausible that she was unaware of Ammel’s whereabouts when she texted him.
Sinema’s lawyer, Steven Epstein, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The lawsuit, filed by Ammel’s ex-wife, seeks financial damages from Sinema, who represented Arizona in the U.S. House and later the Senate for one term that ended early last year. North Carolina is one of a handful of states that allow jilted spouses to sue for “alienation of affection” to seek compensation from a third party responsible for the breakup of their marriage.
Can’t help feeling a little schadenfreude there.
Can plants see?
That’s what’s driving PZ Myers crazy.
As a biologist he insists that plants cannot see, and yet he’s been presented with a seemingly valid scientific paper whose only conclusion is that the Boquila trifoliolata plant can see.
The plant mimics the shapes of the leaves of nearby plants. The original hypothesis was that it involved horizontal gene transfer:
Interesting ideas, and I find them very reasonable. Sure, horizontal gene transfer, of the diffusion of morphogenetic signals — that seems plausible, initially, when I didn’t know the degree of mimicry. These plants copy the shapes of leaves, and the degree and pattern of venation. That seems a bit much to attribute to the chance transfer of multiple genes, or picking up signals that change or modify the plant’s intrinsic signals. The authors of this paper propose a surprising alternative: the plants are watching other plants in their neighborhood, and copying them visually.
No way, I thought. Plants don’t have eyes. How do they see? Let’s skip right past that minor anatomical difficulty — maybe we can return to that issue another day — and instead block the possibility of genetic or developmental signaling. They came up with a delightfully simple experiment.
The simple experiment involved exposing them to artificial plastic plants, and they still copied the leaves! How could they do that unless they could see them?
Poor PZ seems verhuddled.
The very first blog post I ever wrote over 20 years ago (on a different blog that I was then hosting on my own server) was a defense of Maria Bartiromo when she was still on CNBC and had conducted an interview that some critics claimed was a conflict on interest for her. But she had asked tough questions, so I titled the piece “How Do You Solve the Problem of Maria?” and based it around a song.
A few years later when she turned out to be a right-wing ass wipe and jumped over to Fox “news”, I deeply regretted ever saying a kind word about her.
And now she has gone too far for even Fox “news”, and they’ve fired her ass.
This Week in Schadenfreude: Fox Confirms the Obvious, that Bartiromo Is Out
To end on a pleasant note, here’s a story about Tuco.
