One of my clients decided that they want me to train their lab people in person, so they kindly offered me an all-expenses paid trip (with a generous stipend) to Istanbul. Despite my paternal family living in Turkey for likely almost two millennia, I haven’t been there before, and the last my family saw of the place, in the 19th century, they were running off from their home of Trabizond to the other side of the Black Sea. The trip comes at an inconvenient time, but still, woo-hoo! I’m looking at a possible side-trip to Tblisi if I can get away. And yes, (((I))) am slightly apprehensive about being a Jew there, but most of the Turks I’ve met are not Erdogan and seem like pretty nice folks.
The world is often but not always improved by births, and on today’s date, born were a couple of guys who went double or nothing; the guy who founded Acme Coyote Supplies, just to popularize JATO skates; the guy who wrote every song you’ve ever heard of; a guy you didn’t want to loan your watch to; a guy who only had one character but it was a good one; my personal hero, whose books are treated nearly biblically at my house; a guy who’s trying to outlive his soulmate, Jimmy Carter; and a guy with a fabulously rocky and unfocused career, but real animal magnetism.
So before I go off to spend my last day in the US drinking with Prime, let’s see some Links.
I have to admit that this one is a bit mysterious.
I note that the mother looks well-fed and the baby has a birth defect. Propaganda much?
Speed isn’t everything, and I’m shocked at an actually thoughtful article in The Atlantic.
Warning: Video. And I love this shit.
This all seems totally legit. Totally.
Very worth downloading and reading.
OK, there’s no other possible Old Guy Music, and here’s the original, actually predating my birth by a year, which far too few people have heard.
I have a friend whose dad is fresh-off-the-boat Greek. He travels to the homeland once or twice a year (he’s actually there presently). He hates Turks with the passion of a thousand suns. But then, he’s not that keen on the Hebrews either…
The Turk I know best is a good friend of my son from his grad program at Texas A&M and is just a great person. Given the history (and pre-history) of the place, I’d love to visit.
My (((mother))) loved when she was there.
This company has been wonderful to deal with- their owner pays me within minutes of invoicing and has given me gifts every time we’ve had a business meeting. And by “gifts,” I mean things like top-shelf Mont Blanc pens. Head of R&D and I are particularly cordial and tries every idea I throw at him, which is great since at a lot of American companies, I’d be resented by the tech guys for having expertise that they don’t. So I’m going in with a good impression…
Happy birthday Chuck Jones?
Happy birthday Max Martin?
Happy birthday Johnny Mercer!
Happy birthday Peter Benchley?
Heh.
I like it. Merc every minor functionary to keep the rest on their toes.
When your seething anti-Semitism also dovetails nicely with your rape-y foibles.
Hard to believe the ICC wasn’t already hounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.
Have they gone after Trump yet?
If they want to help pitchers, fix the strike zone. That little strike box they use now is about half the size the rules say it should be.
Move the top of the zone back up to the armpits and keep calling the high strikes. Maybe then they can get some balls past hitters without throwing 100 mph.
You said it! On other hand, stop calling half swings where it isn’t obvious batter offered at the ball.
Not mentioned was that the current techniques are effective, even if they destroy pitchers.
Well, somebody’s going to have a hard time putting bread on the table once the next Democratic administration is in charge of grants again…
The “green” fraud is falling apart so quickly there might not be any grant money thrown at it next time if we’re lucky.
Ehrlich just faded away after he was shown to be so spectacularly wrong, right?
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
Erhlich-Simon bet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
No, but Ehrlich is firmly in the world of fantasy. Now, reality is hitting hard.
In New York, to take just one recent example. All those fancy offshore windmills that are supposed to replace the nukes they shut down? Stopped in their tracks. All the companies that were supposed to build them bailed because the economics doesn’t work.
You think the green energy types aren’t fantasists? They will claim capitalist conspiracy to deprive them of their cheap, renewable, non-polluting energy.
“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
…Mencken
books are treated nearly biblically
Surely You’re Joking is the book of Levity-us?
Really, there are just Tuva them at his house.
Now you have me wondering if he just scrolls through them.
Surely you are joking, Juris?
Here is what’s on tap for Prime and me today.
That website is delightfully minimalist, although I would’ve used different colors.
If you get over to Auburn, try Prison City brewing.
And if she’s not a herbivore, I highly recommend their burger.
She is very much not an herbivore and is the most omnivorous person I’ve ever known. I’m still trying to find some food she won’t try.
To Scotland!
Thanks for the music, that was one of my first lessons in geography, in grade school.
A couple look interesting. If that’s all theirs; I’m always a bit leery of a brewery with too broad a lineup. They often end up with a sort of mediocre same-same (large) set of beers rather than 4-5 that are done top of the line. But will fun to find out! Enjoy.
“My watches are melting” is my favorite thing to say when things going on are a little too surreal. Almost nobody gets that reference, so I don’t use it as much as I’d like
“These pretzels are making me thirsty!”
Since I first saw you use it here during a discussion of art, I get the reference. Though that is an unfair advantage.
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E16/250165
whaddup doh’
yo whats goody yo
TALL SABBATH CANS!
A new low for the Pulitzer Prize
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The greatest fraud ever perpetrated on two distinct things – academia and the press.
I really don’t get the propensity of the Left to glorify the most horrible humans they can find; the worst of it being that it drives people away from otherwise-honorable causes (see also: Floyd, George).
It’s straight out of Goebbels – don’t believe what you see, believe what we tell you. That requires extreme cases to be made noble, so that the dissociation is strongest.
You dont get it because you give them too much credit. They are not well meaning or mistaken. It is a calculated lie. They are morally bankrupt. This is a real thing and you see tyrants doing it all of the time, everywhere.
“When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
It is as simple as that. They do it deliberately.
Yup.
I am reminded of the other day when I was marveling at how the pro-Hamas displays always include the whole grab-bag of leftist agitating. They hate the rich, they hate Elon, they hate Jews, etc. etc.
I then coincidentally read that this phenomenon is lifted straight from Alinsky or some like-minded scum. Briefly, they don’t care about specific goals – issues don’t really matter – just “revolution” matters. That is why these events are full of deeply stupid people most of whom don’t even know why they are there.
The issue is not the issue – the issue is revolution
The truly hilarious part here is that the third world, all those poor downtrodden the left claims to support, cannot build coal plants and other fossil fuel infrastructure fast enough. They are not interest in playing along with the left’s delusional fantasies.
“The prize is overseen by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.”
Ya’ don’t say.
Yeah, I didn’t know that. It does explain a lot.
Interesting article on Mazzone
The Tigers had to face Kyle Hendricks the other night in Anaheim. I’m pretty sure he didn’t hit 90 mph in the game but he had the Tigers off balance the whole time.
It was like a time warp.
1 run on 4 hits in 7 2/3 IP
History can be a learning tool
*the ghost of Tim Wakefield has entered the chat*
(although I assume Mazzone isn’t suggesting everyone learn to throw knuckleballs)
Is Tim Wakefield dead?
Huh, brain cancer. I don’t remember that.
Yeah, 57.
Cancer sucks.
Randy Jones, only pitcher to win a Cy Young and retire with a losing record – thanks Padres. When he pitched you weren’t sitting through a 3 hour game.
Fuck yes, Kyle! Was my Favorite Cub. His nickname “The Professor” is earned.
First: Teaching lab in the Middle East. I have some advice – on day one explain to them that you understand fabulism, culture etc and that is all fine but YOU CANT LIE ON TECHNICAL REPORTS. Stress this repeatedly. They will all shake their heads, agree and promise not to. Then they will go about fabricating technical reports that say exactly what they think you want to hear.
Nothing would make me happier than for you to come home and say I am dead wrong.
Speaking of fabulists, yeah, they deliberately starved that baby for the purpose of propaganda.
The global warming scam. It is almost like The USC Marshall School of Business has been reading my comments all the way back to TOS days.
You can save yourself a lot of grief, not just regarding the climate scam, but a lot of other issues as well….including the starving baby link.
Scams rest on an unfalsifiable premise. It superficially appears to be true but its truth is not verifiable.
All scams have one attribute in common – the urgent need for money.
That will be paired with starving children, old people in sack cloth or shivering puppies: weaponized empathy or: doom approaches, the gods are angry, sacrifices must be made.
The climate scam has always fit that blueprint perfectly. It is not just a scam but very obviously a scam. Between that and the cootie bug scam I have to wonder, if the grifters masquerading as scientists real goal was to destroy the credibility of science what would they do differently?
Aristotle noted that tyrants always do two things: use crime to keep people beaten down and dispirited and destroy the economy to keep people impoverished. The global warming scam is specifically designed to impoverish people, i.e. disempower people. Pure evil.
A papacy against populism? That is a terrible idea
Apparently I missed a news cycle and didn’t notice a new pope had been selected.
::stage whisper:: Should we break the news to Pat about Lou Reed?
Is he about to release a new record?!
I have to confess some bemusement at the surprise on both the left and right that the pope would be a mush-brained bleeding heart who elevates the poor above the rich and castigates wealth as a source of evil. I guess people just locked in John Paul II as the exemplar or something, but that was never more than a momentary marriage of convenience between secular liberal capitalism and the church owing to a mutual distaste for the genocidal atheism of the Soviet Union. The very term “social justice” came from Christian theology before it was co-opted by the fashionable left. No one in history has despised the wealthy more than the early church fathers. Humility, self-effacement, self-denial and ultimately the total relinquishment of the individual self is the highest pursuit in Christianity. It’s not an individualist, liberal, or capitalist theology by any stretch of the imagination. All of those things represent the Enlightenment rejection of religious moral authority. The pope is necessarily going to be a bleeding heart pseudo-commie because it’s basically the job description.
“a mush-brained bleeding heart who elevates the poor above the rich and castigates wealth as a source of evil”
Well, elevates some poor people above some rich people, and castigates some people’s wealth, anyway.
The very term “social justice” came from Christian theology before it was co-opted by the fashionable left.
Just as error has no rights is so beloved by those who believe they are on the right side of history.
It’s not the charitable desire to help the unfortunate, or even the distrust for the wealthy and powerful, that sets one pontiff apart from another. It’s the simple question of whether they recognize that in the world, not of the world applies to attacking the free west as well as dictatorships. Reminders that we should love our neighbor are great, inability to distinguish the gnat in Trump’s eye from the beam in the eye of the left gets old.
I’ll have you know my Old Testament and Latin teacher was an Augustinian priest who roomed with and attended the seminary with the new pope.
So you all now have seven degrees of separation with
Kevin BaconPope Leo XIV.Don’t think I won’t find a way to drop that in some conversation at some point.
By apostolic succession that links you with Peter, you Christ denier and slowpoke!
Istanbul is perhaps my favorite place I’ve ever visited. Such an interesting mix of everything.
I strongly recommend.
Not until Byzantium is Liberated.
“The focus on velocity, ‘stuff,’ and max-effort pitching—have caused a noticeable and detrimental impact on the quality of the game on the field,” the report observed. “Such trends are inherently counter to contact-oriented approaches that create more balls in play and result in the type of on-field action that fans want to see.”
So you’re giving management something to measure so they’ll pay attention to it. Because if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist. Success!
Because if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.
-1 corporate goodwill
Slutty Sunday handbraz.
https://archive.is/UVBxy
Happy Mother’s Day!
and appropriately MILF-y. You’re and ossifer and gentleman.
3 isn’t my customary “type,” but looks like a lot of fun. 17 is more my customary type, and also looks like fun. It takes all types.
It’s right there in the Constitution
Trump has argued that having to negotiate with unions over workplace matters impedes his ability to manage the government as he sees fit.
Some would say that’s by design.
In a New York University Law Review article, Nicholas Handler, an associate professor of law at Texas A&M School of Law, argues that collective bargaining serves as a check on presidential power. The binding agreements that unions negotiate with federal agencies over personnel matters such as working conditions, performance reviews, and grievance procedures “restrain and reshape the President’s power to manage the federal bureaucracy,” he writes.
The work done by federal bureaucrats is much too important to be subject to Presidential meddling.
Nobody tell them about Reagan shitcanning 10,000 air traffic controllers and bringing in scabs.
A semi-polite fiction.
They are actually negotiating with the people they work for – that’s us – and moreover, we don’t get a say in any of the conditions. Ask the DOGE nerds how this winds up.
You would think that if unions, and negotiating with them, was so important and such a necessary check on the powers of the president, it would have been placed in the constitution originally, and not needed to be backdoored into to the country.
Jackass.
You and I would think think that. The author, on the other hand,….
History lesson
But in the early 1960s, the federal government was facing a labor crunch. It needed scientists, economists and lawyers to staff growing agencies, but it couldn’t pay big salaries. What it could offer was stability, job protections, and — after President John F. Kennedy signed a 1962 executive order — the right to unionize.
“Collective bargaining becomes an attractive tool for presidents to recruit people into the federal civil service and take advantage of a lot of those highly skilled workers that otherwise might be difficult to recruit,” says Handler.
Congress later codified those labor protections in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, asserting that the right to organize and collectively bargain “contributes to the effective conduct of public business” and “safeguards the public interest.”
Through the law, Congress also created for itself and the courts a way to police the executive branch, Handler says.
That explains a lot.
Ban public sector unions.
Tell us, NPR, why the federal government was ballooning in the 1960’s! And 70’s. And 80’s…..
What, exactly, have we gained aside from $36 trillion of debt?
We gained NPR!
Don’t know if someone posted this yesterday but there are some funny ones here:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/05/the-week-in-pictures-escape-from-alcatraz-edition.php
I don’t get this one??
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2025/05/1746628603091blob.png
Looks like AI is writing punchlines in addition to generating images.
Half those pictures look like AI to me. I don’t like it.
Off the hook
In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.
And in more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies. Those matters range widely, from safety investigations into Tesla’s “self-driving” features to alleged workplace safety violations at SpaceX.
Jon Michaels, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on administrative law, said he wouldn’t be surprised if federal agencies are slow-walking the 40-plus ongoing matters involving Musk’s companies.
“You’re not just going against Elon Musk. You’re going against Elon Musk who’s puppeteering large swaths of the federal government,” he said, referring to Musk’s sweeping role as a White House adviser for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The justice system is in total collapse, thanks to President Cartoon Villain.
A puppet-master, diligently plotting to save taxpayers money. What a monster.
NVM that the investigations were launched 15 minutes after Musk endorsed Trump.
Translation: “We’ve engaged in a bunch of lawfare and our normal shakedown/grifting operations, and he’s stopping it!”
No question about whether any of the lawfare is legitimate or is, in and of itself, political and/or the legalized highway robbery the government always engages in. Obviously, they assume that, as government action qua government action, it is by definition correct and moral, and that stopping it can only be the result of a backroom deal, you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. Something like “That’s what we do and have always been doing – see us going after Musk! – so they must be too.” Which is not to say that it’s entirely possible that’s exactly what’s happening here, but as there’s a push in the administration to significantly pare back the whole regulatory state, there’s a burden to demonstrate that.
“…government action…it is by definition correct and moral…” but government employees still need unions for some unknown reason. It baffles the mind.
“The late filmmaker David Lynch’s partnership with Chicago Public Schools to teach children transcendental meditation is bound to send The Windy City’s taxpayers into frenzied cries of “Serenity now!” when they see the legal bill.
CPS and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace are paying $2.6 million to settle a class-action lawsuit by students who argued the “Quiet Time” program, run by the foundation for four years at eight schools, violated their First Amendment rights by subjecting them to Hindu rituals pitched as “non-religious” exercises.”
https://justthenews.com/nation/religion/serenity-now-hindu-rituals-class-cost-chicago-schools-filmmakers-nonprofit-26m
This story is almost as weird as his movies.
Everything is still coming up seventies.
Meanwhile, a natural history museum is teaching children how to tranny. Because of course it is.
LEAVE THE KIDS ALONE
We gained NPR! That’s egregious.
I just finished Twin Peaks, the series, the movie, and the reboot. Other than that the only thing I’ve seen of Lynch’s is Eraserhead. Like most Hollywood types, he should have just stuck to his craft. Also like most Hollywood types, he should have left the past in the past and not rebooted a franchise that was already complete as-is…
“not rebooted a franchise”
Inconceivable.
“Sitting Congressman Reveals Secret Underground Tunnel Beneath U.S. Capitol — Claims There are Still Hidden Network of Passageways Still Unknown to Public”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/05/sitting-congressman-reveals-secret-underground-tunnel-beneath-u/
wannafud?
That must have been how AOC escaped nearly being raped and mutilated by the J6 insurrection.
And while other Republican presidents have also loosened environmental rules or labor law enforcement, Michaels said this time is different because of Musk’s personal involvement in taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
“The administrative state as we traditionally understand it will be incapacitated,” he said.
He’s taking a wrecking ball to the Shakedown State!
Sir, please, I can only get so erect.
Notice what is really important to this guy – not the possible corruption favoring Musk, but the the titanic, leftist leviathan.
The horror?
Back in the early 00’s when I was living in Amsterdam I convinced a couple of American friends to come bicycle with me from the Dam to Istanbul. Murphys Law had it that we picked the rainiest summer in decades to do it. We got pissed on through the NL, and Germany up to close to the Czech border. We took a train with the bikes to Italy and resumed in the sun, riding through northern Italy, Slovenia and all down the Croatian coast till we got to Dubrovnik and the skies f’n opened for five days straight of rain. We ended up buying a pretty decent Skoda from a couple of Aussies that were flying out of there and needed to unload it and drove through Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria to Istanbul. That city is truly awesome and amazing, Im sure you’re going to love it. We spent a week there and it wasn’t enough to soak it in.
“…bicycle with me from the Dam to Istanbul.”
Dervla Murphy’s Law?
Awesome Zwak. Thanks, I had never heard of her before. Gonna check out one of her books.
Musk and his companies faced dozens of investigations and lawsuits by federal agencies as of January, according to research by Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In a report last month, they estimated that Musk and his companies faced at least $2.37 billion in potential liability if all the investigations and lawsuits resulted in enforcement, not including intangible costs such as being forced to change labor practices.
“The truth is that the breathtaking scope and scale of benefits Mr. Musk is gaining from his present position may never be known, and that is by design,” the Democratic researchers said in their report.
Many of the cases “could quietly disappear,” the report said, with investigations potentially “dismissed without explanation, deferred indefinitely, or resolved in any number of ways that prioritize Mr. Musk’s private interests over that of public accountability.”
Of the 11 federal agencies that Senate Democratic researchers identified as investigating Musk’s companies as of January, most of them such as the Federal Aviation Administration have suffered cutbacks from Musk’s DOGE. Trump’s budget blueprint released earlier this month could portend further cuts.
They wouldn’t be investigating him if he wasn’t guilty!
This is all feeling like a waste of time now anyway. It’s obvious this is a bone Trump threw Musk to get elected and he’s not the slightest bit interested in cutting spending.
Sadly, that’s right.
Swindled
As a 54-year-old student debtor who has struggled for years to make my loan payments, I have experienced decades of a broken student loan system: failed income-driven repayment programs, mismanaged payment systems and public service loan forgiveness that stayed just out of reach. I know firsthand the terrifying hardship of having your meager wages seized because of a years-old loan you can’t pay off. President Donald Trump is not protecting taxpayers, as the government claims. He is punishing the working poor to justify tax cuts that benefit billionaires.
For as long as I remember, Americans have been told getting a degree is the way to get ahead, and I believed that. Before going to college, I was hustling between fast-food jobs and telemarketing gigs to make ends meet, a young single mom with two children, just out of an abusive relationship. I could barely keep my head above water and needed a path out of poverty. So, with a herculean effort, I went back to school. My children and I moved back in with my parents; I juggled work as a nurse’s aide, taking a full course schedule at the local state university and caring for my children.
In spite of the exhaustion, going to college was the most hopeful time of my life. I built community, gained insights, developed critical thinking skills, learned how to research, learned to believe in a new world. That education has helped me see and understand my subsequent labor — a public transit scheduler, a certified nurse’s assistant, a mother and a grandmother — as a major social contribution to society.
But with more than $60,000 in student loans that date back to 1996, the price of that education still stalks me. A lifetime of work in underpaid care labor has meant that over the last 30 years of working and paying this debt, I have never earned enough to even make a dent in the principal.
But think of the fun you had.
30 years and $60000 of debt? Not to get all “let them eat cake flour” here (and maybe my experience/bubble isn’t relevant), but that seems to be very manageable debt load with ANY kind of job with some minimal planning/discipline. I’m all for fixing the corrupt student load system – allowing discharge in bankruptcy would fix most issues almost immediately – but her story just doesn’t seem reasonable as an unbearable debt load.
Did she ever actually admit what her major/degree (assuming she actually graduated) was in? I suspect it was something along the lines of social work, a well-known path to financial advancement for oneself and one’s family. 🙄
When my wife and I married, we sat down and looked at our bills to figure out what to tackle first. She was only paying $0.03 towards the principal on her student loans every month. I had to break it down for her that she wasn’t ever going to pay it off at that rate. My guess is this woman has my wife’s financial literacy.
Grievance studies? I wonder how much complaining MSNDNC pays. 🙄
I think she is saying she got a CNA degree. She wouldn’t get rich with it but I can’t understand how she wasn’t able to pay any principle on her loan.
Sounds like many years of poor choices. *sob*
CNA degree – this illustrates a key problem with student loans at this point – the goal is simply to fund your life in-general versus obtain and education or degree. The new class of perpetual student.
Working-class families like mine need more relief — not higher bills and harsher consequences for missed payments. Instead, Trump is worsening consequences for struggling borrowers. Coupled with proposed changes to the student loan system being pushed by Republicans in Congress, the president and his party want to ensure a generation of student debtors die with their debt, and encourage future generations to avoid college out of fear of a similar fate. Republicans do not want to reform a broken lending system. Their goal is to decimate public higher education while enriching Wall Street lenders.
Right on, sister.
Put those critical thinking skills on display.
Lol. I guess the one thing she learned in college was class warfare.
Permanent relief would be having the government cut down on the number of people raking off a vigorish.
As many as 10 million Americans have fallen behind on student loan payments — nearly 25% of all student borrowers. Now, millions face the seizure of their wages, tax refunds and even their Social Security payments. Trump doesn’t want to help people with their loans — he wants to punish us for having them.
The system is not irretrievably broken. It’s just not being administered properly.
Good morning, all!
I know this is the dead thread now that IFLA is up, but it seems more appropriate to put my hearty congratulations to Old Man here than there. That’s fantastic that you’re getting the trip to Istanbul/Constantinople, and on someone else’s dime! I wish you all the best for the visit itself, and for what we Christians call “travel mercies” along the way.
Istanbul is on my short list of places I’d like to see before shuffling off this mortal coil. Hagia Sophia is something I’d love to see in person. I sometimes mentally construct a tour of Europe based around visiting beautiful or historically significant cathedrals. Someday perhaps.
Have a wonderful time!