I’m here a day early to help the Texas contingent. They are busy dealing with frozen turds, confined screaming kids, and Sloopy’s alcoholic coma. So I guess it’s Call The Jew Time.
Birthdays today include a guy with crazy-ass ideas about the sun; a guy who could really rate; an artist whose most famous sculpture could have been called “Banana in a Bic Pen Holder”; an actual tough guy who played tough guys; a union tool who was famous for a shower; a guy who never got the whole “intersectional” thing; a guy who was Jethro Tull’s guitarist and played for some other band as well; and an asshole who was instrumental in ruining a sport we used to love.
Now to news.
Ted Cruz is an embarrassment. Not because of the trip.
I hear the sound of cash being palleted and shrink-wrapped.
OMG, SHE HAS CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS!!!!!! RUN!!!!!!
“Period poverty.” You can’t make this shit up.
Old Guy Music is the best goddam forgotten guitarist in the history of electric blues. Listen to this and marvel.
Okay, I’m ashamed to admit that I never knew Iommi was in Jethro Tull. Thick as a brick, I am.
I still like you.
You’re certainly no Gerald Bostock.
😉
Tony probably is probably ashamed to admit it too.
Post 1970’s Jethro Tull is lame.
I’d narrow that to post-1970. There were a few flashes of excellence after Benefit, but they got rarer and rarer over the years. “A” was the nadir.
BTW, I got SP a bass for her birthday. My instructions were, “Learn the bass line to ‘Bouree’ and we can annoy people who come here for parties.”
Have her learn Money by Pink Floyd. Very catchy bass riff. The weird timing of the song makes drummers grimace though. What bass did you get her?
Smallmouth.
But there’s no flute part to that. “Serenade to a Cuckoo’ would also be a fun one- I played both the JT and the original version, but I suspect the JT bass line would be easier to learn.
Baked Penguin has promised to give her some lessons.
The bass is a Brazilian knock-off of a Precision. I’ve played it a few times now- it’s surprisingly nice.
What kind of bass did you get her? Please say “Billy the Bigmouth.”
Haven’t heard Thick as a Brick 2, eh?
/looks for cat butt gif
I’m liking Lauren Boebert more and more all the time.
OMG, the hysteria. Somehow they forgot to mention the pistol. At least they didn’t say “assault rifle,” or “[semi-]automatic rifle,” which are their go-to, and inaccurate, scare terms. But I suspect reporter Colby Itkowitz, who normally covers PA politics, may not know jack about guns.
Help for Clueless WaPo Journos: “four guns,” or “three rifles and a pistol.”
That rifle is FULL semi-automatic!
MS: Sorry, I already used my GC for the thread. But know that you totes deserve one.
Epic troll…. And tragic echo.
Early in the covid we saw a few kids get kicked out of school and even have the police search their home in one case for having BB guns and Nerf guns visible during Zoom meetings.
I’d be having some words with the school administrators. Not nice ones.
They may not care what you think. Oakley, CA school board members caught on tape mocking parents who desperately need their kids back in the classroom.
Uh oh. “We have the meeting open to the public right now.”
Then you’re using the wrong words. Maybe some tar and feathers as a prop would help.
Or a padlock tied to a bandanna.
Mark Twain was, as always, right about the idiocy of school boards. Somewhere in heaven he’s smiling down.
Mark Twain was, as always, right about . . .
Congress
elective war
slavery
imperialism
Jame Fenimore Cooper
federalism
Jane Austen
I think we can go with:
Mark Twain was, as always, right.
“Who says this is storage?”
I larfed.
Wood.
Mercy buckets for the links, Old Man! I go back now to peruse them at my leisure.
I’m having trouble parsing what happened here. She’s in the Mecca bar, then she takes her clothes off in a nearby store and steals some things, then the police catch her in another bar where she’s wearing a stolen t-shirt from the first bar…
Thank Yahweh that there weren’t photos.
University of California faculty expressed delight at the death of conservative radio legend Rush Limbaugh hours after his passing Wednesday, calling him a “one-man hate industry” in an email pitching themselves as “Rush Limbaugh experts” for media interviews.
Fighting hatred with hatred. Works every time.
Yeah, I think I lost friends over that. Someone posted on social media celebrating the death of Limbaugh, someone who is ximself a cancer survivor. I called him a POS and blocked him. Suspect I’ll be blocked by anyone who read that. Good riddance.
Hatred brings them together. You’re better off without them.
In fairness, fighting hatred with open arms doesn’t seem to work out so well either.
I didn’t listen to Limbaugh regularly. However while he regularly and relentlessly mocked liberals, I never heard him espouse “hate” per se, certainly not like these assholes that are coming out of the woodwork in order to profit from his passing.
It was Limbaugh’s mocking the deaths of AIDS patients that most enraged them. Which is understandable; it was a POS move. But those who in turn mocked Limbaugh’s death only sunk to his level and revealed themselves to be no better than the person they sought to demonize.
Ah yes, early shock jock Limbaugh. Admittedly, the only things I remember from the 90’s and Limbaugh was his skewering of Clinton.
He crossed the line a few times
*remembers Barack the Magic Negro song*
OK, that was actually funny, and well deserved.
Yes, he DID say some pretty terrible things. I don’t get the ‘he never said awful things, so leftists are particularly terrible’. I view Rush and the leftists saying nasty things about his death as both pretty terrible. I’m not going to dance on his grave, but I don’t think he was wonderful at all.
What appealed to me about him back when was that he gave the leftists back what they were doing. Yes, Limbaugh said some real nasty shit, but the left was already doing that for a couple of decades without anyone fighting back. Everyone rolled over when the left accused people of being motivated by nefarious reasons for opposing leftist shit (racism, sexism, homophobia, and you name it shut everyone down ASAP). He fought back with their tactics.
I get that that turned some people off. Just like with Trump. But the problem is that you can’t enter a ring and follow Marquis of Queensbury boxing rules while your opponent is fighting with prison yard rules and coming at you with a shank made out of a bunk bed’s metal pole that looks like a war spear.
Moral equivalence is a fallacy, not the height of reasoning.
What Rush did is nothing, at all, like celebrating his death.
Pretty much where I am.
Which is why I didn’t listen.
I also find the hagiography from The Right to be pretty grotesque.
That having been said, I remember getting in a discussion over on TOS, I think with you, about the difference in treatment of people who contract AIDS versus those who contract other VDs.
Not saying Rush didn’t do that. But your link is the type that infuriates me. The “fact check” doesn’t quote Rush at all. It uses articles written by others to to fact check. Not one piece of primary source material was used, nor any direct quotes. Again, not saying it wasn’t a thing, but shouldn’t “fact checkers” use primary source material for something like this?
Yes but that may require some work.
It’s like peer review. If fact checkers agree, it must be so.
When they accuse you of it then you are evil, but when they do it, you are a cad for calling them out…
1 who cares
2 there should be no such thing as a publicly-funded University of California
I’m still utterly bored with partisans pointed at each other over nothingness, unending whataboutism. If you want to celebrate someone’s death or never eat Chick-fil-A again, it’s neither morally wrong or anyone’s business. This refereering of what’s out of bounds is a waste of town. There is no line that is arbitrary once we leave the simple points of natural rights.
3 who cares
4 who cares
obviously: there’s no line that ISN’T arbitrary . . .
Thanks for the Roy Buchanan. It’s been awhile since I hear tha6t.
So, you’re a reverse shabbos goy?
[golf clap to the beat of “Hava Nagila.”]
Actually, yes. I’m the one who steps in when you people are busy with your Christmas or Easter crapola.
Wow… The propaganda machine is still in effect and strong as ever.
Yes Cruz dominated the morning news shows. Same language on every station.
ABC won bonus propaganda points with their graphics… They had a big wrap around the commercial break with HUGE font across the bottom:. Cruz under fire-7:31.
Giving us a countdown so we could all read that Cruz did something evil.
What was it? He took the family to Cancun to escape the power outages and freezing weather.
Sounded like a non-troversy to me.
But the target demographic is outraged. The wife was all fired up last night. She liked Cruz more than I did in 2016. Today? He is evil.
Response to my “not a big deal” take was hot. She thinks if he really was a christian he would have taken his girls to distribute blankets instead of leaving. That is what she would have done.
Pro tip guys… If she who must be obeyed says something like that, don’t point out that we left when the power was out for a week after a hurricane.
Progs love suffering, and he is, somehow, responsible for that suffering because he’s a climate denier, or something. He should stay and suffer with them as a gesture of solidarity. And of course they’ll trot out the Poor People(tm) who can’t afford to escape.
What do they expect him to do, seriously? It’s not like a US Senator can do anything special to help local recovery efforts. It’s not like he’s a lineman, or anything. No sandbags to stack for the cameras, as politicians like to do for flooding.
“What do they expect him to do, seriously?”
CNN has you covered.
No one expects Cruz to fix the problems with Texas power grid. (As I explained on Wednesday, the issue with the grid has its roots in Texas’ long-standing belief that it is an independent nation-state, operating entirely apart from the federal government’s reach.)
Cruz isn’t a power grid expert. Nor, as a senator, does he have any ability to effect immediate change in the way the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which runs the Texas grid, operates. (ERCOT is overseen by the Texas state legislature and the state’s Public Utility Commission.)
But in moments of crisis — and there are millions of Texans in crisis right now — people look to politicians for comfort and reassurance. And they do it even if they know that no one particular politician has the ability to help them out of their current problems. They do it because, in theory, our elected officials are leaders in our community and, therefore, are responsible for bringing the community together in moments of tragedy or catastrophe.
People who look to politicians for comfort and assurance are idiots. But idiots need to be coddled, so that makes Ted Cruz evil.
There was some local Texas politician who had to resign because he said citizens need to quit waiting for the government and get off their butts and take care of things themselves.
Now, and this day and age that is pretty crass and kind of tone deaf.
However, that should be an uncontroversial sentiment from an American citizen. It is amazing to me that even after major government failures like Katrina in New Orleans, we still sit around in our own filth in ankle deep water with no power at the Superdome waiting for the government to come and get us.
At that time I was basically throwing stuff at the television wondering why nobody just got a group of guys together and walked down to the school bus depot that was about 2 mi away and stole all of the school buses and got the people out of there. It went on for like a week, and everybody just kept reporting about it. Nobody ever stepped up. They just kept waiting for government to get everything together.
If government had not kept saying that they had it handled, national charities would have fixed that thing the same day. The Southern Baptist conference could have easily arranged churches across the region to take those people in. I guarantee that would have been a done deal within a couple of hours if they had wanted to take that route. There’s zero chance that Greyhound would have said no if asked to get 50 buses to the Superdome.
But that’s not the world we live in. In the world we live in, you just have to sit there and wait to die unless the government comes to help you.
It isn’t just our current attitude that it induces despair. It is our complete inability to learn from past mistakes. Since at least 1990 our country has been unable to remember things from even a week or two ago.
I don’t think I can’t count the number of times my father said to me:
“Government isn’t going to save you. You need something, take care of it yourself.”
Your Dad and mine sound like two of a kind.
Is yours an ornery, contrary, type A+ personality too?
Yup. He was a stubborn old man, and I’m following in his footsteps.
My dad reminded me that the scariest words in any language was “I am from the government and hear to help”. This stuck especially hard with me when he was stationed in a South American nation, and we were living there, where I had some neighbors all disappeared overnight for pissing off their government.
“… we still sit around in our own filth in ankle deep water…”
The Cajun Navy was one counter-example.
“Yes Cruz dominated the morning news shows. Same language on every station.”
It helped them get Cuomo and his old people killing saga, where they played a prominent role, out of the headlines… This is all made up shit (but Ted Cruz is also/still, despite this being fake shit, an asshole).
They are also debating whether or not Cruz is worse than Newsom. You can probably guess that the guy not violating his non-existent executive orders is worse than the guy violating all of his real ones.
They really really are missing Trump, because when the cycle was 24/7/365 Trump-Putin-Hitler is and evil and bad orange man, the bureaucratic machine, media, and team blue got away with being not just inept, but downright evil and corrupt.
“Response to my “not a big deal” take was hot. She thinks if he really was a christian he would have taken his girls to distribute blankets instead of leaving. That is what she would have done.”
So how many blankets did your wife hand out? Or is that someone one should only expect from Christian Senators?
We do a ton of charity work. So her self-image is that we would have done charitable work, like always.
But when a big hurricane knocked the power out for a week, we drove to Atlanta.
Nobody likes to have their puffed up self image deflated.
But I just thought the hyperbolic response was silly.
It echoed the spin machine exactly. A bunch of media personalities, most of whole make several million per year, telling us that “those guys that we disagree with over there” should never do anything other than genuflect.
Same thing happens every disaster.. Republicans are always calous and unfeeling, no matter what they do. Trump visits disaster, he is disrupting efforts and making everything about him. Trump doesn’t visit, and he is uncaring and arrogant. Obama plays golf during a disaster… He is on top of things and the most caring leader ever.
Sometimes I cannot keep my eye-roll hidden.
Next time something like this happens around here I’m going to document the lives of the out-of-town journos covering the event – their RV’s, the hotel rooms they are occupying when there are locals without power, etc.
And where, pray tell, was he to get those blankets? One suspects that blankets, warm clothing, and similar items have all been bought by people who lost power. Headline: “Rich US Senator Ted Cruz Hoards Blankets; Constituents Shiver.”
*polite applause*
“Rich US Senator distributes COVID infected blankets to the poor, hungry, and cold”
Also on the list of things not to say when your wife has this kind of hot take.
Her reaction to the first take kept me silent when she suggested the blankets. That was exactly my first thought. I’m stupid, but I’m not so stupid that when I’m in a hole I’m going to keep digging. 🙂
LOL
“if he really was a christian”
If your wife was really a Christian she’d go help and stop judging others.
*Shows off tattoo* Only
Godother Christians can judge meI guess I’m on the opposite side in this. It was stupid of Cruz. Really really stupid. He should have seen the optics of this a mile away.
I personally don’t care where or when Cruz vacations, as long as it’s not on my taxpayer dollar. I don’t think he has any responsibility for to suffer along with other Texans. But he’s not an inexperienced politician and should have known what was coming.
I don’t fire half of my team due to budget cuts and then take my wife out to dinner at a top steakhouse in her new mink coat. It’s just bizarrely tone deaf.
This. I noted above that the comparison to Newsom (and Cumo, Pelosi, etc.) is too much, but Cruz is still a dum-dum for thinking he could just leave and no one would have a problem with it.
I’m in the same boat. Optics should have been seen a mile away. However, now that he has already done it, he should troll them. Post pictures of eating caviar, selfies that talk about it being “too hot” and “thank god for air conditioning.”
Agree. Smart politician would have stayed in Texas, walked around with a concerned look on his face while bothering those who really were in a position to do something about the power outage. Trump was tone deaf about a lot of stuff too. Yes, the media will spin anything you do in a negative fashion, but a pol should realize it is easier to overcome “he got in the way” criticism than it is to “this bastard doesn’t care about you” criticism. Remember when Obama showed up in New Jersey after a hurricane and Christie gushed all over him? Obama may not have anticipated the forced error but it certainly helped him more than if he and Michelle had decided to fly off to Hawaii that week.
Ok. I’ve talked to a few people today and they all said about the same thing. Then I asked them, “Do you really think politicians are doing these public acts of solidarity for any reason other than for manipulative ones? Are they actually hindering people in times of trouble by flying in and taking photo ops? Do you think you are unique in seeing through the kabuki of it all?
They gave the same answers I would’ve given to those questions. We are well past the Emperor having no clothes by this point. Let’s just call it what it was: irrelevant.
I never mentioned public acts of solidarity so I’m not sure what those questions have to do with anything. I don’t think Cruz needs to do those. I’m sure Cruz has a standby generator on his house where he could have bunkered down in comfort.
All I’m saying is it was stupid to jet off to Cancun. I’m not arguing whether it was right or wrong. Principled or unprincipled. I’m just saying it was stupid of him given the optics and his employment.
I agree it was stupid judging by the way we are bombarded by the propaganda machines. My point of those questions is to get people to stop thinking about what they think others are thinking. We need to see reality more clearly and if we all know that it didn’t matter what Cruz did, then it didn’t matter. I’m not really disagreeing with what you said. Media is seeing it’s reputation getting destroyed and the harder they try to get us to believe a lie we won’t believe, the better.
Does Cruz have wealth independent of his career in government? If not, everything he does is on the taxpayer dollar.
This is pretty much where I land on it. I think the superheated outrage is a joke, and is being stoked to obscure a)the fact that Andrew Cuomo directly caused a lot of WuFlu deaths b)Biden’s embarrassingly incoherent “town hall” in which he dismissed Chinese atrocities as “cultural differences” and has responded to the Texas situation by taking lots of nappy naps.
However, as stupid as it is, it was all utterly predictable and thus stands as a completely unforced error. Cruz is a very smart man, but his judgment is pretty damned questionable.
On the way in to work everything was closed but, to my surprise, a donut shop. I waltzed in there like a king on coronation day! After ordering pretty much every donut and breakfast sandwich they had, I noticed their cooler hadn’t been raided yet. one jug of milk and a monster energy drink later I had a pretty good haul to take to work.
After I got the word around that there were a few dozen donuts in my office, I had a lot of visitors. A few of them not doing very well with what’s going on here in Texas. One lady started crying while eating her donut and telling me about having to take care of her kids and not knowing what to do for 3 days. Both of her tankless water heaters burst and she’s got a ton of water damage to deal with now too.
It’s funny how something we take for granted as simple as a donut can bring people an immense amount of happiness when you haven’t had the luxuries you’re used to for about a week.
The point being before I rambled off, it was and still is really bad in a few places here in Texas. Ted Cruz should be lauded as a father who put his family first and I think he made the right decision. In a perfect world, I would think he’d send his family and he would stay, but… that’s realyl splitting hairs. WTF was Ted Motherfucking Cruz going to do if he’d stayed in Texas?
“WTF was Ted Motherfucking Cruz going to do if he’d stayed in Texas?”
That is the million dollar question. Government is going to save everyone? It’s the same dumb stuff about how much Obama or Trump golfed. This state worship has warped people’s minds.
On TOS, someone remarked that Sandy Cortez, from freaking NY, had raised about $1 million to “help those suffering in Texas” and that Cruz certainly could have used his clout to have done something similar by asking his supporters to give to a Texas relief cause. AOC will now be the heroine and Cruz the villain.
I wonder what will happen to that $1mm? Given to a “charity” run by cronies seems likely. I am quite confident nobody will ever ask, though.
Doughhts, is there anything they can’t do? – Homer Simpson
Such vocabulary. Much elite. Wow.
[Edit Fairy closed your tag, yo.]
Thanks edit fairy!
Check your forum msgs.
You should absolutely point it out when people close to you have a complete disconnect like that.
And be ready to duck.
Good morning, Old Man!
I woke up at 4:30 this morning, so I am in a FUCK YOU kind of mood as well.
Although Roy helps. Great goddamn song!
Sounds like its a trend. 5:00am here. I was i a good mood however as I had time to get coffee and egg sandwich before work.
Great song to wake up to, It’s also Friday.
I took a Valium last night, so I slept in.
Frikkin’ muscle spasms were eating me alive yesterday.
I’m up at 4:30 *every* morning.
Quit your typically Minnesoda notching. :-p
I’m trying to figure out that graphic at the top.
Seems rather specific.
I’m trying to figure out that graphic at the top.
#metoo
Make titties great again with Friday Funbags.
https://archive.li/Vo7Nv
It was windy last night. Really windy. I can’t wait to see what my drift looks like.
Hopefully better than this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrs_YTfcr70
HBD Lee Marvin, one of my favorites. He could play an intimidating heavy very well – See Bad Day at Black Rock. Although I remember that film more for watching Ernest Borgnine get his ass kicked by an elderly one armed Spencer Tracy.
Love that movie. Ditto their reunion in Dirty Dozen (though a much fluffier film, lots of fun).
I met Marvin briefly some decades back while on a layover in (ironically) Phoenix. I spotted him in the gate waiting area and gave him a silent nod, which he returned. Our flight was delayed, so we both went over to the bar and had a drink. A couple minutes of light conversation. Nice fellow, maybe because I had basically left him alone and didn’t do the, “Remember when you were doing that drunk song in ‘Paint Your Wagon’? That was awesome!” shtick.
My exposure to Borgnine was always negative since I was a kid of the 70’s and 80’s. He was always chosen as the winey old guy in tv and movies. See Airwolf and Escape from NY..
My main exposure to Borgnine was from watching late afternoon re-runs of McHales’s Navy as a kid. He was miscast in Bad Day in Black Rock – he isn’t cutout to play a heavy even with his bulky build. His best role was in Marty – perfectly cast in that one.
Rule of thumb: Never trust anyone named Marty. Great movie and performance, though.
I loved the way Borgnine played the heavy in Black Rock. Not his usual character, but he projected a remarkable menace.
I watched that movie in the 90’s Ex was a huge old movie buff. Marty is solid.
He also had some less than intimidating roles like Donavan’s Reef. And don’t forget Paint Your Wagon. Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in a musical comedy?
Cat Ballou FTW.
My parents loved that film.
Thanks for making me feel old, asshole.
Usually used to feeling young, amirite?
Coworkers born after I graduated college makes me feel old.
The thing I find interesting about Lee Marvin is his choice of grave markers. He’s buried in Arlington, and his marker, as they do in Arlington, simply states his name and “PFC, US Marine Corp, World War II.” I remember he was on Iwo Jima, and remember his describing to Johnny Carson once how he got “shot in the butt.”
Compare that to the crop of useless assholes that pass for action-movie actors today.
Or John Wayne, even.
Word is that Wayne often regretted not serving in the military.
Even Mel Brooks has combat experience.
Mel Brooks disarmed land mines. And in his spare time he rigged speakers in trees and blared Al Jolson at Nazi troops.
I believe his wounds came on Saipan, not Iwo.
Likely. I’m running on memory.
Another badass on the screen and in real life was Sterling Hayden – he was an OSS agent who won a silver star. Jimmy Stewart was a B-24 pilot and completed 20 combat missions in I believe the Italian theatre. According to his wife he suffered from PTSD the rest of his life upon returning.
I really like him in Death Hunt – chasing around Charles Bronson while knowing he probably isn’t the right guy.
The China Syndrome and Silkwood killed Nucluur Energy ded ded ded in the Western Hemisphere. This is the value of well-made propaganda. Watch and wait.
Excellent point.
For some reason we keep hearing that Europe does everything better than the US, but the fact that they rely a lot on nuclear power gets ignored.
Icy this morning, followed by sleet and now big, fat snowflakes. No walk this am. Made dog go to backyard and it is frozen so hard that she doesn’t break through the crust of ice on the backyard grass. And so slick she has a hard time walking on it.
I made the mistake of showing the girlfriend the hot butterscotch drink. Now I believe I’m being drafted to make it at some point this weekend.
I’ve made similar mistakes. I made a grilled cheese one time and now I’m asked every day almost. I don’t like making them, but apparently I do it really well. Same thing with my handmade milkshake. I wish I had never let on that I have any competency whatsoever.
I just showed her the recipe. I hadn’t even made one yet. That then led into a discussion of hot buttered rum, and the ingredients there.
Apparently I’m bartending at some point this weekend.
I made some butter washed rum over the holidays, and I can fully recommend it. Brown some butter, I used .5 cups butter per 1.5 cups rum, emulsify the brown butter with rum and freeze. Then break the butter layer off and strain it into a bottle. Shelf stable and buttery delicious. You could also add .5tablespoon of vanilla extract if you want. To serve dilute to your desired consistency with hot water and stir with a cinnamon stick
You would make the perfect bureaucrat!
It’s going to be amazing!
I love a hot buttered rum and I’m gonna love me some butterscotch drink when I can make one.
Tried this beer tonight, Neph. You can probably at least figure out the specs on the left of the page. Pricy at 1000 yen for a 500 ml can, but holy smokes does it have some bite to it.
http://verterebrew.com/brewlog/californica/
Based on the ingredients, looks like a pretty standard West Coast IPA (think Stone IPA or Lagunitas IPA for wildly available examples).
“Standard”. *Kisses thousand yen good bye*
By standard, I only meant sticking to the style guidelines, not a judgement on the taste or the brewery. It’s neither a brewery nor a beer that has pinged my radar, so I’m ignorant of their reputation. Now, if you want a detailed analysis, I can gladly provide my shipping address. 🙂
We’ll talk tomorrow. Gave for that if semi legal.
straffinrun:
Not knowing Japan’s laws, I’m fairly certain it would violate several US laws. Stupid revenuers and prohibitionists.
Poor baby.
Not a happy dog. She looks at me like it’s my fault.
Lee Marvin?
Point Blank. That is all.
+1 Angie Dickinson
They were also in “The Killers” together with Ronald Reagan.
Ah, Reza Aslan the I’ll take a bite of human brain for TV ratings guy. Will the country be better after kuru takes him I wonder.
Any description of him should always have “and cannibal” as part of it.
What’s the matter with Texas?
I have long insisted that a kind of frontier ethic still informs life down here in the Lone Star State. The old American myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance and neighbors helping neighbors. But that doesn’t explain our overwhelming distaste for government.
Almost every conservative Texas politician elected in the modern era has won by running against perceived evils in Washington and Austin. The most successful of these anti-government outsiders have settled into long careers on the public payroll, with great government benefits like health care and pensions, which the regular citizens they serve have increasingly found difficult to acquire.
Texas’s attitude toward government has become deadly.
Yeah, okay.
Why do I assume this screed will veer off from plowing roads to fighting period poverty and providing free sex change surgery for tweens?
The only thing deadlier than not embracing government is embracing government. That always seems to end up in a very bad place.
No Tony Iommi for the music link?!? Truly you have no soul.
Sabbath > Jethro Tull
I like em both for differing reasons.
This.
Kinda like how I enjoy Hank Williams III for his solo stuff and when he was in Superjoint Ritual. Nothing similar about the music at all, can enjoy both depending on what mood I’m in at the moment.
I always wondered, and now I have someone to ask: what was it like to ride that short bus?
Sitting on a park bench
Snot running down his nose.
Ask Jethro…he’s experienced.
*flute rocks in the background
*edit fairy I asketh ye for an Anchorman flute solo gif
In (somewhat) local to Animal news:
What a way to go: Alaska woman bitten by bear while in outhouse
Damn dirty hippies!
A yurt?
Definitely hippies.
Bears like to hang out in outhouse pits? Damn they’re sneaky bastards.
It could smell the menstruation. Keep your eyes peeled and ears sharp, newsroom workers. They’re coming for you next.
Ok, that might be the best news of the wierd in a year. Can you imagine?
When I was really little I was already scared of the giant hole on the outhouse… Then I was at a jamboree with the cub scouts and a snake crawled out when I was getting ready to pee.
Yeah… That was bad enough…. But bear???
‘Twas the spiders that gave me pause but snakes up the chute is even more terrifying.
And wasps. One year there was a wasp nest in the latrine.
Yeah…. I ain’t sitting on that. I’ll just hold it for a week…..
Are they sure it wasn’t a Norwegian?
Is it just me or do I want Lauren to harangue my neighbor instead of me?
More hilariously, Cruz ridiculed the Austin mayor for flying to a Mexican beach during Covid after urging his city’s residents to stay home.
Ooh, ZING!
I was not previously aware cold weather was contagious.
The Austin mayor was imposing travel restrictions and curfews while blowing them off. Big fucking difference.
Damn, a minute late.
Or that we had travel bans for unusual local weather patterns.
I’m not going to defend Cruz. It was a bad look, period.
Ted Cruz is an embarrassment. Not because of the trip.
But you are only allowed to be a shyster pol if you have a ‘D’ next to your name.
In todays example of “pop culture in utterly out of ideas,” NPR had a gushing interview with Russell T. Davies about his stunning, brave, and utterly original new series about white gay 20-something men partying in the age of AIDS.
University of California staff celebrates Rush Limbaugh’s death as media pitch
Tolerance. Inclusion. Unity. Healing.
“For decades, Rush Limbaugh made millions trafficking in racism, sexism, and xenophobia,”
His closest business confidant was/is black.
Bo Snerdly (a pseudonym, as I recall) took to Twitter yesterday, demanding people “produce a racist statement” by the man he worked with for thirty years. I don’t know (and won’t look) to see what replies he got.
Probably a bunch of assertions without any actual quotes.
Todays top baseball birthday is Dave Stewart. Insert transvestite prostitute joke here.
New Zealand to provide free period products in all schools
Colonial period? Victorian period? Industrial period? What period we talking? //jk
Bolshevik Red
Just saw a fairly entertaining meme: Al Gore “The Ice caps will be melted by 2020” (2003), 2021, Galveston, TX Beaches frozen and covered in snow.
There’s no shortage of assholes running around telling everyone about the ‘Climate Change’ Religion and how we’re all doomed unless we follow them. No shame for these idiots. Just give them more power and more money and they’ll solve everything.
They have no intention, nor even desire, to solve everything. They just want the money and power.
Poor guys having to do the real work of moving those goalposts. Hopefully they are earning a living wage.
That’s because of the polar vortex, duh! The caps will melt, but the temperate zone will freeze! SCIENCE!
A California woman is facing several charges after police say she got drunk and stole some clothes from a store while getting completely naked in Wickenburg on Tuesday.
We’ve all been there.
anddundat
Maybe I have to read the article a little closer ’cause all I came up with is “How can you be stealing clothes if you’re naked?”
Define “good job”.
When asked what grades he would give Biden after 30 days, Carville said, “I would love to be sort of mildly critical of something the new president has done. I really can’t think of anything so far. I think his town hall was just right on the money. I thought he had the right attitude about it. He seems to be handling things. I’m sure it’s a bit of a honeymoon. We’ll have plenty to complain about later. As of right now, I think he’s doing extraordinarily well, and his demeanor and his policies and everything that he’s done so far. But this is not going to last, but right now, I’m 100%. I think a lot of people feel that way. He’s doing a remarkably good job so far.”
Carville’s job is to play the fucking idiots like a violin, and he always had it super easy, because the idiots he was playing are as fucking stupid about reality as they come.
I’m feeling rather sickly right now and that just made everything a little worse. Fuck off, Carville you pretentious sneering cunte!
I’m torn. I’ve met Carville before and he is a very nice, erudite, affable fellow; his politics are bloody poisonous though. He once, back in 2005 or 2006, did a guest bartender event at Molly’s on The Market. I wore my old “Impeach Billary” t-shirt and had a great time making Carville step and fetch my pints of Guinness with shots of blackberry brandy on the side.
He seems alright, actually. He just understands the racket like a Dick Morris.
“Define “good job””
Signing EOs, breaking deals with the Taliban, and sucking CCP dick
His comedic performance at the town hall was pretty good.
a couple multi-trillion dollar pork bills …
Eliminating thousands of union jobs, causing gas prices to go up, having a negative approval rating in his first months (something even Trump didn’t even do). REMARKABLY GOOD JOB!
Unity/healing/etc.
California Democrat Congresswoman Linda Sanchez has introduced a bill to deprive President Trump of the typical honors of every former president.
Her bill, HR 484, is called the “No Glory for Hate Act,” and seeks to deprive the former president from being buried in Arlington National Cemetery or to have any kind of memorials erected in his honor.
Schmuck Schumer already handled the erection.
Someone suggested yesterday, but an R needs to put in a simple amendment: Change the word “two” to “one”.
If it passes without the change and Republicans are ever allowed control of the House, a couple quick impeachments should get their attention.
I’d be delighted if they changed it from two to zero. No government employee of any kind should ever have anything named after them.
But then we’d have to rename whole cities and states.
I think it’s comical how they want so bad to pass a bill of attainder, but know they can’t, so they just make it super specific to Trump.
Written in a seemingly even handed way, but designed to target a specific person or group. Just like the Grandfather Clause.
This plan has about as much chance of getting off the ground as a penguin trying to fly. D.C. is bought and paid for by the CCP. They threw off the mask to get rid of Trump when he cockblocked their plans (selling us out to China’s CCP now for 3 decades and going). Anyone thinking they will allow anything to get in their way of getting rich selling the country away to the CCP is going to be found face down in a ditch dead from a double tap to the back of the skull suicide attempt.
I wonder if the Democrats will ever realize devoting 97.2% of their energy to undoing everything the Cartoon Villain did might not actually be a winning strategy.
6 months in, I expect them to quietly walk back some of this stuff when it clearly isn’t working. I’m thinking energy and foreign policy first. For 4 years they were under the impression that LITERALLY EVERYTHING Trump did was bad. Logically that’s just not possible. Also, they will have to come to terms with normally Democrat voters who supported Trump. Those are the people who are making Biden’s approval numbers sink.
I expect (and hope) that at least the Abraham Accords survive.
I’m sure it is all fine.
The world’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 356% in 2020, a new report from the Institute of International Finance finds, up 35 percentage points from where it stood in 2019, as countries saw their economies shrink and issued an ocean of debt to stay afloat.
They are starting vaccine trials on pregnant women, now.
PETA must be jumping for joy.
What pregnant woman have you ever met that would submit to that sort of “science”?
That seems inadvisable.
Why not give the trials at a Planned Parenthood? Seem to be the more ethical thing to do.
Most pregnant women are young and healthy. They do not need the vaccine.
I need to split my Sunday shift up until Winter is done. From here on out I’ll be working 7 days a week again. I can’t physically do both sites in one day. I feel like crying but I’m a Man, Dammit!
Can you hire someone to halp?
Nope. Security clearance. More O.T. for poor old Festus. My body damn near broke down last night. Glibfit weight 175 and holding. I’ve been chasing 180 for two years.
Me too!
From the other direction… I was down to 185 just prior to the lockdowns starting.
Hey Neph I think we’re weight buddies. I’m in a similar situation.
#metoo.
Hit goal 1 this week (210), so Saturday I’m treating myself to a good brunch, and drinks in the evening.
Then on to the next goal (195), with only vacations interrupting days of calorie counting. I’m a bit irritated today because I cancelled my spin class due to a work change (theoretically, if the change went smoothly, I could still make it… I don’t anticipate the change going smoothly).
countries saw their economies shrink and issued an ocean of debt to stay afloat.
Something something still checks in the checkbook.
When the dam breaks, it’s going to be one hell of a show. But I wonder if every country keeps printing and issuing debt, what’s the actual end game?
The fantasy of English freedom
It was believed to be as much a part of the national character as the repression of Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter, or the stoicism in all those roles played by Kenneth Moore. An Englishman was freedom-loving and would never submit to tyrants big or small, whether French-speaking sheriffs or Hitler, or indeed petty busybodies closer to home.
But that was 80 years ago, and if it was ever true, the idea of the freeborn Englishman has been quietly put to bed by the pandemic, exposed as nothing more than an empty myth.
A vewy intewesting wead.
Here’s another impossible to answer political orientation test.
https://www.theadvocates.org/
“Trusted by academics and taken by millions of students on university campuses, worldwide.”
*hackles raised*
Only scored 90 on the personal because of the undocumented worker question.
I am a high wall/wide gate open-borders type. It should be super easy, barely an inconvenience to be documented. Foreign invaders should be shot on sight.
I fully admit to stealing that last paragraph from the Badnarik campaign.
Did Badnarik steal it from Screen Rants, or the other way around?
I scored 80 on Personal. I did say illegals should be booted.
Shock of all shocks, I scored as a conservative.
Huh- the purge of the Palace Guard has begun. Trump sympathizers are being identified and expunged from the Capitol Police.
That should instill loyalty and respect among the survivors.
Link?
After all the “defund the police” talk this summer, there were record numbers of resignations and early retirements. I expect to see more of that.
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/licenses/combo.html
I received an email from the Minnesota Dept of Natural Resources stating anyone wanting a combination husband/wife (how long will that name last?) hunting or fishing license needs to provide both SSN# and DL# along with full name and birthdate. Ostensibly, they need this to make sure the person doesn’t have unpaid fines or child support, etc.
Rant on:
First, It seems a bit much to NEED all this information at POS. Identify the person, sure, but they have all my information in their database and probably on a half dozen hard drives in the admin office. This leads me to the meat of my rant…
I need to give less information to vote. Minnesotans have a constitutionally protected right to hunt and fish. They plan to take that away if someone owes the government or the beneficiary of a government mandated fee. Do they take away a person’s ability to vote in the same circumstance? Of course not.
Rant off.
I could bolster the argument, but typing on an iPad is lame. You get the picture.
Why do they always have to do this?
https://twitter.com/everywhereist/status/1362531482040819713
Over 81K likes? Fuck you Twitter
O fer fuck’s sakes…
Sometimes you want to keep something for a little bit and “like” is the only way to do it. I mean, you can bookmark but that takes more clicks.
Cause they are stupid douchebags?
Seriously, I was worried you were going to send me to a link where a dog was licking his balls..
That’s for my onlyfans.
From the comments: “This thread is a good reminder of how angry people can get at the mere thought of menstruation.” I have been alive 49 years, and I have never met anyone who is angry at the thought of menstruation, aside from being angry that their period started at an inopportune time. We continue to live in a time of manufactured drama.
“People hate me!”
Never trust something that bleeds for 5 days every month but doesn’t die!
That was my exact thought. Well, except the 49 years part.
It’s called blood rage you shitlord.
Her cuck husband chiming in “so proud”. Jeebus.
That is quite a stockpile. Does she bleed a couple pints every month?
It’s hard to imagine that we live in a world where people degrade themselves so willingly.
Because they’re shallow and stupid?
I suppose if Boebert were sticking her guns up her privates they might have a point.
That’s a bloody mess.
Because they are useful idiots?
Obnoxious cunte are obnoxious and cuntey.
Exchange I just had with my husband about this.
Get this “man” another soy latte.
Link?
Sorry, no link. They were talking about it (Capitol police) on the teevee.
If we just had windmills which ran on batteries…
Steam engine powered
/insert Morbo here
Or a fan-powered sailboat
Three professors from the University of California, Riverside, appeared to celebrate Limbaugh’s death after he lost his battle with lung cancer at age 70, claiming that “America is objectively a better place without Rush in it.”
And the world will be a better place when these people die. Yeah, I’ll go there.
Even when it comes to just their mood the next day, people whose waking time varies from day to day may find themselves in as much of a foul mood as those who stayed up extra late the night before, or got up extra early that morning, the study shows.
Someone got paid to run this study?
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday the United States would be willing to negotiate plans with Iran and other signatories for both nations to return to compliance with the Iran nuclear deal.
Oh boy.
“If somebody wants to have a shrine to their gun fetish as a Zoom backdrop in their private life, they can do that,” Huffman said. “But this is our hearing room, and at some point we will get past the covid epidemic and we’ll all start showing up in person.
“It’s necessary that we lay down these ground rules that whatever your fetishes or feelings are about guns, you’re not going to bring them into our committee room,” he added.
Huffman can go fuck himself.
New Zealand will provide access to free period products in schools beginning in June, government officials announced Thursday.
And the government is releasing Auckland from a lockdown! How generous the government is!
A California woman is facing several charges after police say she got drunk and stole some clothes from a store while getting completely naked in Wickenburg on Tuesday.
Would not.
And the government is releasing Auckland from a lockdown!
Well, until somebody sneezes, anyway.
In fairness, I could read that as you’re not going to bring the fetishes or feelings about guns into the committee room, but I know that’s not what he meant.
Maybe it’s how jaded I’ve become, but I have a real hard time giving those folks the benefit of the doubt anymore.
Leftist racism
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9275711/amp/CALVIN-ROBINSON-Believe-theres-no-racist-like-hard-Left-racist.html
The only real times I have experienced racism, I mean down right ugly racism, I saw it from people that were hardcore leftists (I am sure there are racists on the other side too, but I have never met ones that showed it). They either slipped and accidentally & showed their true colors, or somehow thought if they said racist shit around me I would be cool with it. As with everything, these fucks always seem to be projecting their own faults/actions on others…
He should meet Kmele Foster.
To back him up, in the 15 years we were married my ex and I never once heard anything remotely racist from a single white person. We regularly went to locations that are widely known to traffic in the sort of people who would espouse such views. Never one single peep.
we did hear it from black folk quite a bit though. Pretty much every time we went out in downtown Atlanta someone had something to say.
The only time I’ve heard anyone say something overtly racist in the last couple of decades, it was my wife’s ultra liberal friend who has a PhD in social justice warrioring – concentration in African American studies and racism. We were having lunch at a local pizza establishment when a youth soccer team showed up. They were mostly Central American and African American kids. She was very loud about calling them dirty and disgusting and making loud statements about learning how to behave in public when you come to America. I’ve honestly never heard anyone who was under the age of 75 talk that way. And she was doing this at 40. I also did not want to be the one who got my butt kicked because I was sitting with the loudmouthed racist chick.
I cannot speak to beliefs or what is in people’s hearts, but when it comes to behavior it is not close.
I had a very liberal friend of mine (in most respects) start in on Clarence Thomas and the idea of originalism. I told him I didn’t think Thomas was terrible at all. He asked if I’d read some book explaining just how evil Thomas is, and I’d said no. He said I should and that I would be enlightened by the author’s arguments. Then I asked why I should defer to the supposed authority of the author when I’ve read plenty of Thomas’ opinions to form my own conclusions.
Then he started in with “Well, he’s an Uncle Tom” bullshit.
That was very likely the most racist thing I’ve ever heard short of my grandmother wishing out loud how she wished “the colored man” (who was doing yard work) would leave because she was scared he’d take advantage of grandad not being home.
My temporary boss is so wrapped up in following some fatigue rules on our shifts that he is losing sight of how to get a technician out to Grand Canyon for some over the night work safely. Worry about if you broke the rules later, make sure the tech gets there safe, has rest, and can safely drive back.
Why is that so hard for some people?
Micro-management is unpleasant at the best of times. I hate that shit.
I told him “I would rather get yelled at because we inappropriately paid someone an hour of overtime rather than sitting through investigations on why he was driving 400 miles after a nine-hour shift, crashed and was injured or died”
I think he got the point.
wouldn’t it be cheaper to charter a helicopter or air taxi to get him there in a lot less time?
We have contemplated that idea….no one wants to pull the trigger on it though.
Roy Buchanan is great.
I discovered him through a former coworker that saw Buchanan play live.
If the Democrats successfully erase Former President Cartoon Villain from the pages of history, how will future generations know about their noble struggles in service of DEMOCRACY?
It’s a conundrum.
It’ll be like Voldamort?
I’m sure all of that will be well fortified so the future generations don’t have any wrong think. Who am i kidding, there won’t be any future generations be cause we’re all going to drown in 5 years or was it freeze or cook or… fuck I don’t know what’s our talking point this week?
Nice!
I never understood that line from 300. “Why, uttering the very name Leonidas will be punishable by death.”
How can you have a law punishing stating a name without stating the name that can’t be said?
Yeah. The line should be “Why, uttering the name of you-know-who (nod, nod) will be punishable by death.”
Don’t fret, he and Hitler will never be forgotten. Kindly Old Uncle Joe Stalin will always be democracy’s ally.
“Trusted by academics and taken by millions of students on university campuses, worldwide.”
*puts on biohazard gear, dumps in hermetically sealed waste container*
Mel Brooks disarmed land mines.
Wow. I never knew that.
Now that is the worst job in the military.
I figured it was the linesman that had to run new radio wire…but land mine hunter would be right up there
Can anyone point me to a rational take on the Texas power outage? My understanding: shit froze because it is not winterized. This seems to be reasonable, because Texas doesn’t have bad winters, so why incur the cost when the risk is low. Others will then scream it happened before! But from what I can tell those outages were comparable to normal outages from bad weather.
Blaming the turbines is a shitty take too since also not winterized, but saying the answer is more wind is also likewise shitty.
I assume we have no rational takes out there, but just in case anyone has one I would like to read it.
The immediate counterpunch was that the gas turbines were out because of weather. I have a hard time understanding how cold weather would take out a gas turbine, but there you go.
The funny part about it is, the spin they are trying to put on it is that by opting out of the federal government regulations they created this situation. Therefore we need more government. However, government is what mandated all of that wind power. And if they still had coal or nuclear for that 20% of their power, they’d be in much better shape.
Texas will be much better off in two years. We had something similar happen in Florida back in 2005. We had three hurricanes in very short order, including Wilma which knocked out the lower half of the state. That thing was huge and it took down power lines across the entire state south of lake Okeechobee.
In response we got mandates that gas stations had to have backup generators. The problem being that people could not get out of here because they couldn’t buy gas because the gas stations could not pump it. The power companies also fortified their network. All the old polls got replaced, and in lots of places steel or concrete went up in its place.
The results? Well, when we have hurricanes these days, most of the power structure is intact afterwards so restoring power is much quicker. We don’t have situations where you cannot buy gasoline for a week and you cannot buy perishable food because the grocery stores installed generators to run their refrigeration and air conditioning. The entire system has been hardened against hurricanes in a way that it was not previously.
I also think part of the vicious backlash about the Texas power grid is due to the fact that California had a couple of very high profile problems with their power system that were entirely created by government. First there were mandates about prices that caused supply problems. Then there were a bunch of power plants that were taken offline by government order because of green power initiatives, leaving the state short of power generation capacity.
The turbines are typically fine. The gas supplies will freeze up if not properly insulated.
My father made a fair amount of money renting portable kerosene heaters to the old VEPCO when a similar incident occurred in Virginia back in the 80’s. They were using them to heat up gas regulators that had frozen solid in the power plants.
Texas subsidized wind turbines, which are intermittent and should not be included in baseline power. The subsidies meant that baseline coal/gas generators were uneconomical, and were not built. Texas thus lacked sufficient baseline power. Its lack of baseline power was exacerbated when some baseline plants went offline due to insufficient winterization.
That’s the dirty secret of intermittent green energy. Every single watt has to be backed up by baseline power (fossil fuels, hydro, nukes). Intermittent green energy is surplus to baseline power. But the cost of electricity is driven largely by the large capital base of the utilities. Adding surplus power adds to that capital base, and drives up rates. Or you try to substitute intermittent for baseline, as Texas apparently did, and you get blackouts.
You can turn intermittent generation into baseline generation by the means of energy storage. But you need to plan around the duty cycle of the intermittent generation, the inefficiences of storage, and of course the risks of storage. Having windmills drive water against gravity and storing it in a reservoir can provide pretty damn reliable* hydropower. But at that point you’re talking 10-20% of nameplate capacity. That means you need 5-10 times as many windmills as you think you need (which will be the case anyway, but at least you’re accounting for it now). You also now have a flood risk that you didn’t necessarily have before.
* = Assuming there’s water around to pump and that the reservoir doesn’t evaporate too quickly
Probably worth mentioning that hydropower from an artificial reservoir with no natural supply may not be the best solution in this particular situation, as a frozen reservoir does not drive turbines well.
Now I’m envisioning a closed water cycle where multiple windmill pumps lift water from a lower chamber to an upper chambe rin a sealed subterranian reservoir and the turbine sits between the chambers.
At my former employers we were involved with a company that was proposing something very similar involving subterranean cylinders, very large concrete pistons, and a pump/turbine/motor/generator setup.
Underground closed loop solves most of the problems of above-ground open air systems, but at probably 10 times the initial capital cost (not sure about maintenance costs, but I’d imagine they’re a little higher too).
The problem with “green” energy is not that it’s impossible, it’s that it is way more expensive than most of its proponents will own up to. There are unaccounted externalities with any power system, but lack of operational experience combined with self-righteous religious fervor lead to a lot of people having overly rosy views of solar and wind.
In N. Lousiana most of the streets are still skating rinks. The parish/city is putting whatever resources they have towards keeping the main arteries as clear as possible. The Interstate is relatively clear, I am not sure which tier of government is responsible for those. In any case, I grew up in the midwest and I am used to the weather. However, I am not used to is having roads not cleared the next day.
Here in Ohio, the road clearing is done at the state/county level. At some of the county borders, you could see a stark difference right at the county line (Lake/Geauga was always a sharp line).
12 years ago an ice storm took out my power for a week. **shrug**
Louisville isn’t Texas, we got snow every year, it was a fluke storm.
When hurricane Ike went thru, I lost power for a week again. Louisville doesn’t normally get hit by hurricanes. **shrug**
So I lost significant power twice in about a year and never before and never after. Shit happens.
Indeed, but now when shit happens, there needs to be a political reckoning and endless tweetstorms over it.
In the last decade there has been a HUGE chance at power plants from coal to natural gas. The paralysis was partially because of the field equipment of the natural gas wells. It’s ironic how everyone keeps talking about how archaic our system is when massive portions are damn near brand new. Had we not killed, we would still have winterization issues but the fuel for the plants would be sitting in piles next to the rail where the train dumped it. Not stuck behind a frozen valve or water seperator 100’s of miles away at the top of the gas well.
To give you an idea, one of the class one railroads is now running half of the coal sets that they did 10 years ago. A single coal set ranges from 90-130 cars. Anywhere from 19,000 tons to over 30,000 tons of coal.
We all live in emotional ghettoes of our own making.
Not us, necessarily, hence your rational post. Just the people on TV.
Traitorous bastards
Thirty-five Capitol Police officers are under investigation — including six who have been suspended with pay — for their actions in the deadly January siege, according to the department.
Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman has indicated that any officer whose actions are found to be unacceptable on Jan. 6 will be disciplined, a department spokesman said in a statement to WTTG on Thursday.
“Our Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the actions of 35 police officers from that day. We currently have suspended six of those officers with pay,” the statement read.
Some Capitol Police officers were caught on video watching the rioters enter Capitol Hill without taking any action.
In one video posted to YouTube, Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Khalid Johnson can be seen wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat while talking to several supporters of President Donald Trump.
Maybe those guys can be shot at dawn for aiding and abetting the enemy.
In one video posted to YouTube, Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Khalid Johnson can be seen wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat while talking to several supporters of President Donald Trump.
Undoubtedly got it from a protestor. By putting it on and chatting with the peaceful protestors, he was de-escalating. Can’t have that, apparently.
It’s coming.
Now do the cops who were on video doing nothing while BLM rioters destroyed property and assaulted people.
The real question is “What were they instructed to do?”
“Tarik Khalid Johnson”? Sounds like a white supremacist name if I’ve ever heard one!
Beat me to it.
Ooh, I’m not sure I’ve seen “siege” before.
They probably are used to letting in protestors who have the proper connections, e.g. the Kavanaugh protestors, so they thought this was ok too.
Gotta bail, glibs. Have a nicey!
In response we got mandates that gas stations had to have backup generators. The problem being that people could not get out of here because they couldn’t buy gas because the gas stations could not pump it. The power companies also fortified their network. All the old polls got replaced, and in lots of places steel or concrete went up in its place.
That reminds me of a story a friend told me. He was tending bar in a place in Livingston one winter, and a big storm knocked the power out all over town. One of his customers said, “Shit, I don’t feel like going home. I’ve got my welding truck right outside.” They fired up the diesel generator on this big welding truck (probably railroad property) and ran power into the building so they could keep drinking. It was the only place in town still open.
That was Livingston in the good old days. Now, you’d probably get arrested for that.
We did that about 5 years ago in OKC at a bar. Tornado knocked out power, we all looked at the guy with the rig out back that had a genny and said…help some thirsty patrons out brother. He did, and we drank more.
During the big NE/MW blackout many years ago, the bars opened the doors and started selling beers for cash, and people sat on the steps and drank them. It even got a beer named after it: Blackout Stout.
“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.”
― Benjamin Franklin
The term Bacterium wasn’t coined for a genus of microorganism until 1828.
Franklin died in 1790.
The closest he might have come were the Animalcules of can Leeuwenhoek.
Everything you read on the intternet is false.
– Mark Twain
Seeing as my town’s roads are frozen over, I have been getting a small bit of joy from watching these kids with jacked up and lifted 2WD trucks spinning their knobby 30″ tires going up even the mildest of grades as I pass by in my stock 4WD soccer-mom SUV.
Speaking of that obsession with tearing down everything Trump touched
The Pentagon opened the door to the possibility of sending more American troops to the Middle East as part of a newly expanded NATO training mission to support Iraqi forces and ensure that ISIS does not rise again.
“The US is participating in the force generation process for NATO Mission Iraq and will contribute its fair share to this important expanded mission,” Pentagon spokesperson Cmdr. Jessica L. McNulty told CNN. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke about the mission with his NATO counterparts during a meeting with defense ministers on Thursday.
Late Thursday night, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby clarified that there are “no plans” to send more US troops into Iraq itself. However, US troops could also support the mission from outside the country, a defense official told CNN.
“We support NATO’s expanded mission in Iraq and will continue to do so, but there are no plans to increase U.S. force levels there,” Kirby said on Twitter.
Such a move would have been a reversal of the previous administration’s policy which reduced the number of troops in the country to 2,500 following former President Donald Trump’s election defeat. The Biden administration is also weighing whether to stick to a May deadline to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan.
Something something dick.
Something something sausage grinder.
Three cheers for Forever War!!
I would stick to the May deadline and be arguing that I couldn’t do anything about it because it’s too late to change anything.
No president wanted to be the one to “lose” Afghanistan. This way you can finally get US troops out of Afghanistan and you can blame Trump for making a bad deal if the whole thing goes South. The media would accept a Trump failure.
A few weeks ago I got asked to enter this guy’s apartment because somehow the management company didn’t have a working key. I got asked on a Friday afternoon and I said I could do it but that it would probably be good to have someone from the company with me in case I found a body inside the apartment. They couldn’t get someone out there so they called me back late Saturday afternoon and said the police would meet me there. I refused the job because I knew what that meant- the police could show up anywhere from 30 minutes before I arrived and leave immediately to me waiting there for a couple hours for them to arrive or come back. I went with the wife and kids to the beach and they got someone else and found the apartment empty. I don’t know how they didn’t smell it coming from the ceiling. They finally cut him out of there a few days back, he’d been up there for a month.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/19/missing-programmer-found-dead-in-crawl-space/
Well, at least the programmer wasn’t found dead in the shower, with a shampoo bottle that read, “Wash, rinse, repeat.”
First…crazy story. Second…gotta get this into every article about completely unrelated things “Before his death, he sent family and friends paranoid messages about the Capitol riot and that he wanted to escape to the mountains, according to the outlet. “
Another Trump death. Sigh.
That would be just about the worst way to go.
Maybe they were like “yeah I’ve been in a SF programmer’s apartment before and this is what they all smell like”….?
“His family says he also suffered from depression. Before his death, he sent family and friends paranoid messages about the Capitol riot and that he wanted to escape to the mountains, according to the outlet.”
Another riot casualty for the news! Victims! Victims as far as the eye can see.
I mean INSURRECTION!
Yeah, I had heard he was spouting strange things about the Jan 6 event and his family hadn’t heard from him for a week or so. When I got the job description I figured there was a fair chance he would be deceased inside. I’m just really surprised they wouldn’t have noticed the smell or decomposition from the ceiling as it was about a week after he got up there that I was asked to do this. I was just doing something at the same building three days ago. Now I’m going to have to get the story of who went in there that day and how they didn’t notice that.
Wow.
From the article:
His family says he also suffered from depression. Before his death, he sent family and friends paranoid messages about the Capitol riot and that he wanted to escape to the mountains, according to the outlet.
Bizarro suicide attempt?
The SFPD description from their site says “no foul play suspected”. But yeah, either a strange suicide or he got stuck up there. For a former job I have crawled up in hundreds of those spaces, they can get really tight and I guess it could be possible to get stuck. I would think someone would hear you screaming, but that building does have a number of empty units due to the flee going on here right now. If it was an accident and he got stuck that is truly a terrible way to go.
People on TV crawling through tight spaces gives me the heebie jeebies.
Dragging your belly across joists in hot, tight, spider web and rat infested crawl spaces is indeed not the best job in the world. Sometimes the space between the upper and lower joists would be 18 inches or less, so not enough to get on all fours, you had to scoot or drag yourself. In large buildings (such as this one) you could find yourself pretty far from the entry hatch. We had a signal switch to alert the other guy if you got into trouble.
My final thought on this before I get to work is that there are lots of people living alone in this city that have had minimal human contact in the past year and are going crazy from it. I can see when I go into some apartments that I am one of their only interactions in person with another human (besides maybe the grocery checker) that these people have had. Much craziness from this. Fuck the lockdowns.
“Witnesses”, “Victims”. “Tomayto”, “Tomahto”.
Armed citizens should observe and report violent attacks, rather than try to defend themselves or other innocent victims, according to Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong. The chief’s statement came during a briefing on the arrest of a business owner in Oakland, California’s Chinatown earlier this week.
Armstrong made it clear that he is no fan of residents arming themselves for self-defense, even with a huge uptick in the number of robberies and assaults reported in the community. In his press briefing, the chief declared, “We don’t want our business owners or others to begin to arm themselves. We would really prefer them to be good witnesses.”
I…uh….”good witnesses” can only be witnesses if they are still breathing.
observe and report violent attacks, rather than try to defend themselves or other innocent victims
*clears throat*
Fuck off, you fucking fuck.
“What we really don’t want to do is bring any additional issues that threaten safety into the equation,” Armstrong continued. “Having armed people out there tends to not be helpful. Officers sometimes have to determine who they’re trying to encounter and that also makes it unsafe for all of us. So while I appreciate those who have stepped forward and are looking to help our community members and be there and intervene, I think you can do that with your voices, you can do that with making phone calls to the OPD, but allowing us to come in and respond.”
Yeah, my first priority is going to remain ‘staying alive.’
‘Making the cops’ jobs easier,’ isn’t even on the priority list.
The irony is, if you do everything the way they want, they might write a report and then just leave. That’s it.
I have a counterproposal:
Go fuck yourself.
Succinct and to the point.
They hate you and want you dead.
That sounds like the people of Oakland really need to arm themselves. This guy can go fuck himself.
OMG! It’s +34! First time above freezing in few weeks
Guess I etter take the trash bags that have been building up in the garage out to the dumpster in the alley before they start to thaw.
+10 here and I’m in a vest. Amazing how we acclimate to the shitty cold.
My copy of Deplorables arrived today.
Interesting….may need that for our next game night.
You need the Virtue Signal game. Deplorables really can’t be played without Virtue Signal.
This guy clearly ain’t black.
“[Y]ou know, Sean, we can’t wrap our arms around this,” Golden said. “We can’t wrap our brains and our hearts around this that our beloved Rush has returned his talent to God. And we are so thankful to him. You know, Rush is to me a second-generation founding father. This went beyond radio. This went beyond politics. What Rush did for America, one man changed so many trajectories in this — in this country. When Rush began his career, there were 1,200 radio stations roughly doing the talk radio format. Today, there are over 12,000. The number of print conservative publications, very few, today, they — it’s a flourishing market.”
“You — there was no Fox TV,” he continued. “There was nowhere on TV that you could get conservative ideology, that you could get the values that represent what most Americans believe until Rush, he changed the media. He changed the landscape. Rush Limbaugh’s radio show grew for over 50 years. This is unheard of. And audiences from small children all the way up through the senior of senior citizens. And beyond all of those accomplishments, Rush Limbaugh was one of the finest human beings that you would ever want to meet. A generous, wonderful, beautiful spirit, humble, a gentleman, always, never failed to thank people for the smallest service that they could do to him.”
“He never looked down on people,” Golden added. “It burns me to my soul when people sully his reputation with falsehoods calling him a racist. This man was just an incredible phenomenon. And we love you, Rush. God bless you.”
Armstrong made it clear that he is no fan of residents arming themselves for self-defense, even with a huge uptick in the number of robberies and assaults reported in the community. In his press briefing, the chief declared, “We don’t want our business owners or others to begin to arm themselves. We would really prefer them to be good witnesses.”
“You’d be surprised how much a good coroner can learn.”
Auroras should be popping off in Norway tonight. Except it’s cloudy
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast
Also cloudy & blizzardy in Churchill. WAHHHHH!!!
Alright NASA/JPL needs to get on it with pictures of their drone flying around the surface of MARS. I demand it right now.
Speaking of SCIENCE
The United Nations released a report Thursday on the health of the planet that proposes a radical shift in the way mankind thinks about it.
The report, “Making Peace with Nature,” spans 168 pages and distills the latest science on climate change and mankind’s “war” on the planet. It also argues that amid our pursuit of wealth and security, humans must now learn to value the fundamental “natural capital” of geology, soil, air and water — and urgently.
“For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at a news briefing Thursday presenting the report. “The result is three interlinked environmental crises: climate disruption, biodiversity loss and pollution that threaten our viability as a species.”
“We are destroying the planet, placing our own health and prosperity at risk,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which released the report.
——-
“At the current rate, warming will reach 1.5°C by around 2040 and possibly earlier. Taken together, current national policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions put the world on a pathway to warming of at least 3°C by 2100,” it reads.
Humans are already paying a bitter price, and not only in the form of the increasingly extreme weather. According to the report, a quarter of the world’s disease burden now stems from environment-related risks, including diseases that emerge from increasing proximity to wildlife — such as Covid-19, thought to have originated with bats — and exposure to our own toxic waste; pollution causes some 9 million premature deaths every year, according to the report.
Now could be the time to change all that, as the world reemerges from a pandemic that has upturned business as usual. Governments thinking about big policies to restart their economies could seize this unique historic moment to prioritize the planet, the report says. “The COVID-19 crisis provides the impetus to rethink how society can accelerate the transformation to a sustainable future.”
This is our chance to kick modern economics, agriculture, and transportation while they’re down! Sure dude. Take your meds.
Std disclaimer: Weather is not climate, unless it’s hot outside.
It continued, “sure, we’ve been wrong about this entirely in the past, but this time we definitely have gotten it right!”
The trend so far (raw satellite numbers) has been +0.12°C per decade. It’s already 2020, so 1°C between now and 2100 is a lot more likely than 3°C.
During my grandfather’s lifetime they went from icicles from the corner of the porch to the ground every winter to the hottest decade of the 20th century back to a foot of snow every winter back to the grass staying green all year. I saw it go from that to snow every winter to grass staying green all year back to brown winter grass and today I am trapped by snow and ice. This year may be a one-off but maybe not. We are at the tail end of an ice age. It is going to warm up but the temperature curves are not straight lines as the AGW morons would have you believe…they are jagged as hell.
Lookking at the long term trends over the last one million years we are exactly where we should be. I said that to a young man recently and he balked at me. He was a business major at LSU.
Me: “Yeah, I just sat through 36 hours of Earth Sciences, what do I know.”
Assuming that the warming trend continues. Which we don’t know, since we are likely due for an ice age to start sometime in the next 1,500 years or so.
Yes, it is just pure linear extrapolation from the current satellite record, which extends only back to about the mid-1970s. Its predictive power is weak, but at the same time, it has had better predictive power than a whole lot of much fancier models published by the UN IPCC and others.
It is entirely possible that the trend could change, in one direction or another. And this all assumes that the satellite record is accurate to begin with.
Much of the country could benefit from a little global warming right now.
the latest science on climate change and mankind’s “war” on the planet
*outright, prolonged laughter*
That’s an impressive pile of horseshit.
Well done, The UN.
“At the current rate, warming will reach 1.5°C by around 2040″
Doom is always just around the next bend. I have been hearing this nonsense all of my life. None of their arguments make any sense from a real scientific point of view.
The real threat? Totalitarianism and the great reset. This global warming BS is just another tentacle of the crowd pushing it.
The entire quote from the article is gibberish. Any hope of disentangling ourselves from China and the UN disappeared when the Dems got enough fake votes and booger-eatin’ morons to put Puddin’ Cup in office.
“I hate Trump!”. Let me say it again: How you feel personally about an individual in office means fuck-all. You think you are going fishing with them next weekend? You think they are going to show up at your family BBQ?
You dont vote for people, you vote for policies. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face…
“The result is three interlinked environmental crises: climate disruption, biodiversity loss and pollution that threaten our viability as a species.”
“We are destroying the planet, placing our own health and prosperity at risk,” said Inger Andersen,
Absolutely none of that is true.
One of my ancestors:
Revolutionary War-Drum Major under Capt Nathaniel Edwards, Gen William Waterbury & Capt Samuel Gale, Col. Parsons
Now I am on a genealogy kick..
In the 1700s, my family married into the lineage of King Ælfwald of East Anglia..quite interesting and not uncommon since everyone was doing everyone back then.