By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I carefully cleared my calendar for lunch today (which is why Conor is posting, and not me; thank you Conor). Post-lunch, I had a transport debacle and mistook the time due to the [family blogging] time change, which I still not have gotten my head around.
On the bright side, we are now in the midst of the 2024 Water Cooler fundraiser. My goal is 400 donors; so far, we have 100 127 156, or 39% of goal (thank you, and please keep them coming), but that means we are running far, far behind last year. Please remember that your 2024 donations reward work that I have already done in 2023, and click the donate button at the bottom of the page.
So a virtually non-existent Water Cooler might serve as an object lesson? Of a possible and highly unfortunate future? If you can give a lot, please give a lot. If you can give a little, please give it a little. And if you’ve been lucky this year, please consider paying it forward by donating in the place of those who cannot. Thank you!
More soon! –lambert UPDATE And more soon!
Bird Song of the Day
Beautiful Nuthatchม National Highway 313, Arunachal Pradesh, IN (28.237, 95.874), Lower Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh, India
Look for the Helpers
Alert reader reify99 sends in the following:
North Haven Island, Maine
Living on an island of 300 people frequently wear more than one hat. The tendency is for everyone to become a helper.
Even if you don’t particularly like your neighbor you’ll help him in a crisis.
And it’s not mentioned but you can get your dog’s nails trimmed at the church (or maladies diagnosed) when the vet comes every couple of weeks from the mainland.
Some readers asked for something table of contents-like, so here are a few highlights amidst the density:
High- and Lowlights
(1) CDC’s internal “Project Firstline” Covid guidance differs from their public guidance.
(2) R.I.P Akira Toriyama, creator of ‘Dragon Ball.’
(3) Marisol and her lineage.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
The Constitutional Order (Insurrection)
“Joe Biden, D.C. Judges Pressure SCOTUS on J6” [Declassified with Julie Kelly]. “With six justices—John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—seated directly in front of him [at the SOTU], Biden reiterated his warped view of the events of January 6 in an effort to salvage the crumbling storyline… ‘The insurrectionists were not patriots. They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power, to overturn the will of the people.’ In other words, if SCOTUS overturns how the DOJ used 1512(c)(2) [“obstruction of an official proceeding”], resulting in the evisceration of the most common felony associated with the ‘insurrection,’ justices will rule on the side of Americans who tried to murder ‘democracy’ on January 6. Justices who vote to reverse 1512(c)(2) essentially support the confederacy. Not exactly a subtle ultimatum.” Still not clear to me why insurrectionists weren’t charged with insurrection. More: “In granting early release for two J6ers convicted of 1512(c)(2), Beryl Howell, the former chief judge of the district court, last week cautioned that defendants ‘may be overly optimistic that the Supreme Court’s resolution of [Fischer v. USA, the case that will be heard by the highest court on April 16,] may be favorable’ to their case.’… Howell noted that all of her colleagues except one endorsed the government’s use of obstruction of an official proceeding in J6 cases over the past three years; in a footnote, Howell listed cases tied to 14 judges—from Trump appointees down to Reagan appointees as well as the current chief judge—who denied motions to dismiss the obstruction count. (The total number of judges who consented to the government’s interpretation of 1512(c)(2) is 17.) Howell’s message to SCOTUS was clear: the reputation of more than a dozen federal judges in the nation’s capital is at stake. Don’t do it.” • Yikes.
“The Trump campaign paid an expert $750,000 to find fraud in the 2020 election, only for him to dismiss their complaints in minutes” [Business Insider]. “Software engineer Ken Block told Business Insider ahead of the release of his forthcoming book “Disproven,” that he was paid about $750,000 to conduct research that would verify the existence of mass voter fraud in swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Despite the massive payday, Block couldn’t find any. He even disproved some of the claims of voter fraud within minutes, pointing to incomplete data that was wrongfully interpreted as fraudulent, that voters with the same name had been counted as duplicate votes, and that data for mail-in ballots had been wrongly flagged. While Block said he wasn’t pressured to misrepresent his findings, Trump’s team didn’t want to hear it when he brought them news the fraud couldn’t be substantiated. In one instance, Block confirmed that he proved one of the claims behind a Trump team lawsuit in Pennsylvania was wrong, which immediately ended the conference call he was on. Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. All told, Block found fewer than 200 duplicate mail-in ballot votes had been fraudulently cast from all of the swing states combined, he wrote in a recent op-ed recounting his experience in AZ Central.”
2024
Less than a year to go!
* * * “Trump’s Jaw-Dropping Praise For Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler Revealed By Ex-Chief of Staff John Kelly” [Mediate]. “According to comments Kelly made for Sciutto’s book ‘The Return of Great Powers’ that comes out Tuesday, Trump started by saying Hitler ‘did some good things’ and went on from there: ‘He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing,” Kelly recounted. ‘I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.'” • Hmm.
* * * “Lara Trump promises legal ballot harvesting to be part of new RNC strategy” [Washington Examiner]. “Newly-elected Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump [(!!!)] said it is time for the RNC to up its game and compete with more strategy against the Democrats…. ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have one day of voting, we don’t have paper ballots, we don’t have voter ID everywhere. So we have to play the hand that we’re dealt,’ Trump said, noting the importance of early voting and mail-in voting where possible. ‘That way, we have votes banked as we head into Election Day, and we’re not playing catch up on Nov. 5 with the Democrats.'” • I don’t understand in what sense votes are “banked,” unless that means that voters can’t react to new information between when they voted and election day — which is reason enough to end the practice.
* * * “Biden’s State of the Union Address Strikes Campaign Tone” [RealClearPolitics]. “In the end, the speech was an us-vs.-them routine, more pointed in its identification of class and wealth than Biden has previously embraced. Progressive pollsters who huddled with the White House insisted that kind of rhetoric would lead to a boost in the polls. Eager for a second term, Biden adopted the argument during what could be his most viewed speech before the election.” • Maybe. I don’t think Biden can re-introduce himself to the voters as a class warrior.
“Nervous about November? Stop listening to pundits and start defending the president” [Salon]. “Despite the fact that we’ve been living in a world in which a small group of authoritarians surrounding Donald Trump continue to gaslight and attack the rest of us, there are still pundits and operatives who haven’t adapted their strategies and tactics to those realities. They view every single thing said by the abusers as something we need to consider and we need to be afraid of. These conversations end up fueling private conversations at the cocktail parties all over Washington, in which otherwise well-meaning staffers, consultants and strategists discuss and dissect these attacks to the point where they result in big portions of the progressive infrastructure seizing up, unsure of how to react and afraid that whatever they do will be the thing that will propel Trump back to the White House.” • Idea: Progressives should never go to cocktail parties, and should never listen to those who do?
* * * Kennedy (I):
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”> The federal government will do anything to infringe upon your right to privacy or your right to question the establishment narrative. They'll label you a “domestic extremist” to justify the surveillance state. That stops with me. https://t.co/5Zq3phrBH9
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) March 7, 2024
And he’s not wrong.
Realignment and Legitimacy
“America’s election chiefs are worried AI is coming for them” [Politico]. “A false call from a secretary of state telling poll workers they aren’t needed on Election Day. A fake video of a state election director shredding ballots before they’re counted. An email sent to a county election official trying to phish logins to its voter database. Election officials worry that the rise of generative AI makes this kind of attack on the democratic process even easier ahead of the November election — and they’re looking for ways to combat it. Election workers are uniquely vulnerable targets: They’re obscure enough that nobody knows who they really are, so unlike a fake of a more prominent figure — like Joe Biden or Donald Trump — people may not be on the lookout for something that seems off. At the same time, they’re important enough to fake and just public enough that it’d be easy to do. Combine that with the fact that election officials are still broadly trusted by most Americans — but don’t have a way to effectively reach their voters — a well-executed fake of them could be highly dangerous but hard to counter.” • I can see this narrative coming a mile off, because the origin of the fakes will be completely unclear, and we’ll have to rely on the spooks to, well, determine the legitimacy of the election, which is what this boils down to (and what the spooks would very much like to do).
#COVID19
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (dashboard); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Censorship and Propaganda
If you think living in fear is bad, try living without it:
The @TheVertlartnic is not messing around this week. https://t.co/jeWmur6IGT
— Kathryn (@kadamssl) March 10, 2024
Origins Debate
Marc Johnson is the scientist who collects and studies cryptic Covid lineages in wastewater:
I’ll make 4 points.
1. Random insertions in Coronaviruses are common.
2. Insertions most often occur in genetic ‘soft spots’
3. The S1/S2 border is a clear ‘soft spot’.
4. Furin-cleave sites (FCS) are easy to make.5/
— Marc Johnson (@SolidEvidence) March 10, 2024
The whole thread is worth a read.
Celebrity Watch
“Nineties award-winning musician is forced to cancel gigs after ‘collapsing in a pool of blood’ and being rushed into surgery” [Daily Mail]. • It’s almost as if there’s some bug going around that’s messing with people’s vascular systems. Because of course:
I recently had Covid. Kept it quiet till now. Was awful. It goes for everything. I’m asthmatic so my lungs were in bad shape. Thankfully, I’m out the other side now, though a bit knackered. I think yoga breathing helped me but everyone is different. Wear a mask. Please be safe 🙏🏾 https://t.co/EhGr3WIS6h
— Nitin Sawhney (@thenitinsawhney) November 7, 2020
Elite Maleficence
“Project Firstline Session Plans Topic Fourteen: Asymptomatic Spread of COVID-19” (PDF) [CDC]. This is an internal CDC training document. Naturally, any mention of aerosols is suppressed; they use the fudge phrase “respiratory droplets” instead. I wish I could go through the entire thing, but from page 41:
As you can see, internally CDC has an entire training module devoted to asymptomatic transmission, which by definition rules out fever.
However, externally, in their new “one day” public guidance, the central focus in on symptoms, and on fever in particular:
(See NC here for more detail on the guidance). So, as I keep saying: They know. They just don’t want you to know.
* * * “STAT readers on new CDC Covid guidelines, weight loss drugs and mental health, and new psychiatric meds” [STAT]. Comments on Jha’s article (“makes perfect sense“): “By allowing known Covid-positive people to resume normal life, we shift the burden of Covid prevention to those who are at the highest risk [stochastic eugenicism]. Most high-risk individuals have been taking much more precautions than the general population, and will need to increase those actions. Many feel unsafe seeking medical care, using public transportation, and going to the grocery store. Many of us act as if every stranger we encounter could have Covid; our lives depend on it. Instead, our governments should focus on low-effort ways to reduce Covid spread, such as setting standards for clean indoor air, testing to leave isolation (using freely available rapid antigen tests), offering high-quality masks and recommending them in public indoor settings, and mandating paid sick leave.” • It would sure be nice to hear Jha and the GBD crowd loudly promoting “setting standards for clean indoor air.” One can only wonder why they don’t.
TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts
| Cases | |
| National[1] Biobot March 4: | Regional[2] Biobot March 4: |
 |
 |
| Variants[3] CDC March 2 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC March 2 |
 |
 |
| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data March 8: | National [6] CDC February 24: |
 |
 |
| Positivity | |
| National[7] ★Walgreens March 11: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic March 2: |
 |
 |
| Travelers Data | |
| ★ Positivity[9] CDC February 19: | ★ Variants[10] CDC February 19: |
 |
 |
| Deaths | |
| Weekly deaths New York Times March 2: | Percent of deaths due to Covid-19 New York Times March 2: |
 |
 |
LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (Biobot) Biobot drops, conformant to Walgreen positivity data (if that is indeed not a data artifact). Note, however, the area “under the curve,” besides looking at peaks. That area is larger under Biden than under Trump, and it seems to be rising steadily if unevenly.
[2] (Biobot) Regional separation re-emerges.
[3] (CDC Variants) As of May 11, genomic surveillance data will be reported biweekly, based on the availability of positive test specimens.” “Biweeekly: 1. occurring every two weeks. 2. occurring twice a week; semiweekly.” Looks like CDC has chosen sense #1. In essence, they’re telling us variants are nothing to worry about. Time will tell.
[4] (ER) Does not support Biobot data. “Charts and data provided by CDC, updates Wednesday by 8am. For the past year, using a rolling 52-week period.”
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Not flattening. (Date for data corrected; it was a glitch.)
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC) Still down. “Maps, charts, and data provided by CDC, updates weekly for the previous MMWR week (Sunday-Saturday) on Thursdays (Deaths, Emergency Department Visits, Test Positivity) and weekly the following Mondays (Hospitalizations) by 8 pm ET†”.
[8] (Cleveland) Flattening, consistent with Biobot data.
[9] (Travelers: Posivitity) Now up, albeit in the rear view mirror.
[10] (Travelers: Variants) Backward revisions remove NV.1 data. JN.1 dominates utterly.
Stats Watch
There are no official statistics of interest today.
Tech: “You can write long-form articles on X if you pay for Premium+” [Engadget]. “X now allows verified organizations and Premium+ subscribers to publish long-form “Articles.” The feature adds a basic text-editing interface that includes embedded media and some text formatting options, like the ability to make bulleted lists. It also appears that articles can be longer than the 25,000-character limit currently in place for premium subscribers’ “longer posts” feature. According to my initial tests, I hit the character limit for articles at just over 100,000 characters or about 15,000 words.” • So, Silicon Valley has come full circle and re-invented Blogger. Good job!
Transport: “Delivery drone operators say their growths are clearer than ever as hurdles begin to fall away. U.S. regulators over the past year have given drone companies including Alphabet unit Wing and Zipline permission to fly their devices beyond an operator’s visual line of sight” [Wall Street Journal]. “Liz Young writes the regulatory clearances are leading more retailers, restaurants and healthcare systems to expand existing drone delivery and launch pilot programs. Routine use of delivery drones in the U.S. has largely eluded operators as the technology has developed, although it is more widely used in some other countries. Logistics experts caution drones still have a long way to go before they become entrenched in commercial parcel distribution in the U.S. Cost of delivery remains a major concern, and the growing services may give operators a chance to see if both the technology and the economics can work.”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 67 Greed (previous close: 74 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 78 (Extreme Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Mar 11 at 2:22:53 PM ET.
Rapture Index: Closes unchanged [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 186. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) NOTE on #42 Plagues: “The coronavirus pandemic has maxed out this category.” More honest than most! • Goat sacrificers irrelevant? Atlantic meridional overturning circulation irrelevant?
Games
“Akira Toriyama, creator of ‘Dragon Ball,’ dies at 68” [Nikkei Asian Review]. “Toriyama’s creativity extended well beyond manga. He also designed characters for Dragon Quest, Square Enix Holdings’ immensely popular series of role-playing games. Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest, said: ‘I am still in disbelief at the sudden news of Toriyama-san’s passing. I have known him since I was a writer for Shonen Jump and asked him to draw images for the game when we were launching Dragon Quest. Since then, for 37 years, he designed characters and monsters, and drew so many fascinating characters that I can’t even begin to count.’ Toriyama’s Dragon Ball is one of the iconic titles that helped Japanese manga culture gain global acclaim. American singer Chris Brown posted a photo of Toriyama on his Instagram with the message, ‘Thank you for shaping my childhood.’ Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi noted Toriyama’s global appeal during a news conference on Friday. ‘He produced a number of manga works that are loved by many people at home and abroad,’ Hayashi said. “He played an extremely important role in demonstrating Japan’s soft power.” • A cabinet secretary!
The Gallery
“A Major Retrospective Carves Space for Marisol’s Most Prescient and Under-Recognized Works” [Colossal]. “Born María Sol Escobar in 1930s Paris, Marisol quickly adopted the singular nickname first used by her mother. She relocated with her father to Los Angeles as a teenager before moving to New York in the early 1950s, where she saw an exhibition of pre-Columbian clay pieces that prompted an evolution of her practice from painting to sculpture. Not long after, she began working with wood, the medium for which she’s most known today…. A major retrospective on view now at the Toledo Museum of Art explores Marisol’s under-appreciated legacy, presenting 244 sculptures, self-portraits, sketches, underwater films, photos, and more. Included are several of the artist’s abstract figures with their angular, boxy bodies and softer defining features like hands and faces.” • Toledo, Ohio, I hasten to add. For example:
A popularization, albeit in plastic:
demon item pic.twitter.com/L4HNX9FPto
— wint (@dril) March 10, 2024
Another popularization. In wood:
Just saw this on a Fb post and thought you'd appreciate it! pic.twitter.com/bcOQ965acH
— Jo 😷 #MasksInHealthcare #AsthmaticsAtRisk (@Jo_11__) July 3, 2023
The Conservatory
Not the first song I would have thought could be covered:
News of the Wired
“The Anarchists of Dune” [The Anarchist Library]. “Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, lived the happiest parts of his childhood in a failed socialist colony called Burley, located along the Salish Sea near the city of Tacoma, Washington. It was dreary and cold during the fall and winter, and back in the day, before Herbert was born, all the excitement further down the sea in the anarchist Home Colony, a much more successful experiment in collective living. While the socialists of Burley struggled to replicate their small colony, Home grew bigger every year, even converting some of Burley’s socialists into anarchist defectors…. Frank Herbert’s grandfather Otto had been a socialist and follower of Eugene Debs, and he moved his family to Burley Colony in 1905, just as the community was falling apart. Given how close Burley was to Home, the Herbert family learned much about their anarchist neighbors, especially when several of them were arrested during a nude bathing scandal. The Herbert family was in Burley from 1905 to 1919, the year Home ceased to exist as an anarchist community, and they were nearby for all the major intrigue and conspiracy that took place there. Given young Frank Herbert’s love for his grandfather Otto and grandmother Mary, both socialists, it’s likely he cherished their stories from the old days and sought them out over stories from his father, who became a cop” (!!). More: “In the novel Dune, a character named Duncan Idaho is sent to make an alliance with the Fremen, something he barely achieved with these distrusting rebels. Many have laughed and wondered why a character from the year 10,191 would have the last name Idaho, but back in the old days, Idaho was where the crazy bomb throwing miners lived, the ones who blasted apart their ex-governor in 1905. It was a place where Eugene Debs had called a rebel army to invade Boise, a place where rebels had hijacked trains and gone mine to mine blowing up their shafts with dynamite.” • Well, I’d always wondered “Why Idaho?”
For the knitters among us:
Hornet's nests on the outdoor patio were always a problem until 4 years ago when I crocheted and hung my fake one after reading that hornets are territorial. Not a single one since then! -Sandy Kendall Dennis pic.twitter.com/hqbs3jA3JW
— Your other Grandma loves you as you are! (@Beverlylovesboi) March 7, 2024
Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From Sub-Boreal:
Sub-Boreal writes:
These were planted on February 24th, and some of the easy ones like jalapeno were up in less than a week. It really helps to put the tray on a heating mat, and I even noticed that the germination was faster for the inserts above the middle of the mat vs. the edges.
About 2/3 of the seed varieties came from the Chili Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University which is a great source for anything pepperish. Although their online store says that they can’t take international orders, they were able to send seeds to Canada as of a couple of years ago. (One of the few advantages of being a proximal vassal state…)
Here in central British Columbia it should be safe to transfer the seedlings to my unheated greenhouse around the beginning of May, and if we get another warm summer like the last few, I can move the pots with small-fruited types outside to a sunny, south-facing spot in early July.
These are the photos I asked Sub-Boreal to send in yesterday. Neat project!
Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. So if you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:
Here is the screen that will appear, which I have helpfully annotated:
If you hate PayPal, you can email me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, and I will give you directions on how to send a check. Thank you!
100 comments
Comments are closed.
Just ti get the link up I think this latest Alastair Crooke is worth a read.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/03/11/out-of-touch-with-reality-white-house-fails-to-navigate-the-israeli-re-calibration/
It’s about the failure of Biden’s Ganz ploy against Netanyahu and how the US Israel lobby distorts the situation and perhaps does more harm than good to Israel while fostering its own power as a side goal.
From the article:
But on the other hand:
Netanyahu is an experienced ‘old Washington hand’. He prides himself on his ability to read U.S. politics well. No doubt he calculates that whilst Biden can raise the rhetoric a pitch or two, the latter is on a tight leash in respect to how much of a gap he can open between him and the Jewish mega-donors in an election year.
So Biden is caught between the river and the deep blue sea. Let’s see does he sacrifice the pro-Palestinian voters or the Jewish mega-donors?
A fine, detailed article but no mention of policies under a Trump presidency. Maybe Crooke thinks some sort of resolution will be reached before then. Crooke concludes that “Yes, things might get worse, much worse, for Israel.” I’m wondering just what that’s going to look like. At present I see no factors restraining Israel from its current course without outside intervention. Given that the U.S. is well and truly out of the running in that role, I wonder who will step up.
One would think that with TDS rampant and Trump’s support for Israel more rancid than Biden’s the Dems would see an opportunity to best Candidate Comb-over…
but nooooo….
Who says Team D have no non-negotiable principles?
It’s just that those non-negotiables are literally genocidal.
pleased to agree with you
Thanks for the link. Definitely worth reading. Alas, my more lengthy reply to you appears to be lost in space.
Former Representative Paul Findley wrote a book about the Israel Lobby and its family of junior assistants called They Dare To Speak Out.
https://archive.org/details/They-Dare-To-Speak-Out-Paul-Findley
In part of the book is detailed the Long March through the Jewish Instutions conducted by supporters of and believers in the particular flavor of Zionism known as Revisionist Zionism and its political expressions such as Likud, etc. He writes about the once-revered Old Lions of the various centrist and centrish Zionist movements who sought peace and accomadation between Israel and the PLO ( including with its Chairman Yasser Arafat most of all). He writes about how they were all smeared and dismissed and un-personised as dupes of antisemitism or stealth antisemites their own selves.
I think it is worth considering the possibility that the Likudians were concerned about winning their own wars with the non-Likudians and driving them out of influence or even visibility, and that they turned AIPAC into their chosen tool for manipulating Israel itself in a Likudiform direction, reaching back into Israel from their base in America.
I myself suspect that for the Likudians who now own AIPAC, enhancing their own power is their main goal, and doing more harm than good to Israel is a side effect of enhancing their own power which they are prepared to live with. When the chips are down, they would rather see a Greater Likudistan be destroyed under Likud and Goat Sacrificer Rule than to see “center-and-left” Zionists save a Lesser Israel by destroying Likud and the Goat Sacrificers.
The COVID parallels to smoking I think are instructive, as I sit here considering this — and I agree the time change is garbage, I missed most of the day today already, it usually costs me several weeks of just missing hours and hours due to screwed up sleep.
So once upon a time, cigarette smoking was a desirable social signal. The direct health risks are unassailable, and eventually it fell out of favor with the elite. We went beyond personal responsibility and surgeon general warnings, eventually past smoking sections, to outright bans on smoking in public places, which is to say, public health. But this no longer inconvenienced the elite, as smoking is now a dirty working class concern.
Meanwhile, we have SARS2, which spreads through the air, like smoke. The health risks are similar, worse overall. They’re unassailable. A SARS2 infection increases the risk of death from several of the causes that banning in-door smoking sought to curtail, such as heart attacks!
But public heath measures to reduce risk from SARS2, which spreads in the air, just like cigarette smoke, and has overlap in afflictions, is verboten.
And reducing morbidity and mortality from SARS2 infections ought to be much much easier to track and confirm than that of second-hand smoke inhalation.
One risk was tackled, the other everyone is left to steep in. Why? One’s inconvenient to the elite, the other provides an environment of elite preference. It’s a shame SARS2 doesn’t lead to 100% ED; the virus would be eliminated overnight, no expense spared.
>>>But this no longer inconvenienced the elite, as smoking is now a dirty working class concern.
Have you noticed, that as with our “food,” tobacco has also been crapified? I do not smoke, but I have noticed over decades, that cigarette smoke has steadily gotten more noisome as they made it more addictive, like with our food. Those few people who still roll their own cigarettes, use a pipe, or smoke cigars especially with the better brands all create tobacco smoke that while still noisome is far less offensive than any factory made. It still smells like tobacco. The tobacco, the filter, even the paper has all been frankenfied with additives. The glorious wonders of frankenmedicine, frankenfood, and frankendrugs, all addictive, all profitable, and all approved by the FDA. Isn’t modern science grand?
Of course, our betters all get the organic, unmodified, unimproved everything. I wonder why?
i smoke cigs.
and yeah…the major brands are worse than i remember from 30 years ago…for the frankenification you mention.
i do the poor mans native american grown cigs(seneca/cayuga tribe in oklahoma).
when i hafta bum a …say…marlborough light…its obviously filled with chemicals, to me.
my backup is “american spirit” roll yer own….my go-to factory rolled is “skydancer”…made by the above tribe.
if i could obtain “Drum/Halfzware shag” for my backup roll yer own, i would…as its a superior product.
ive still got a handful of tobacco seeds(so frelling tiny!)…that i acquired years ago(and have kept care to store properly)…maybe next year i’ll try again to grow my own…having given up on giving up, and all.
I was sure that after the fourth year of Covid, the realization that we were on a path of widespread perpetual deterioration of public health (the workforce, if we must think that way) would be common knowledge, causing anxiety even among the elite, and motivating adaptations like better ventilation. I was very wrong.
All the information is there. The science is clear, disability is up sharply, early retirements up sharply, all sorts of health problems and diseases increasing. Acquaintances are finally mentioning health problems and sometimes even long Covid, but there is no motivation to change anything. It is very weird to me. It is very a ‘eh, what are you going to do’ attitude. Climate change is similar. It seems the problem gets big enough, to interrelated to our way of life, and we freeze up. The elites are so scared many are building bunkers, which is also them freezing up. What kind of plan is that? They think people won’t be able to get to them in a bunker? I guess this is how we will deal with climate change, just grind down our ability to conduct economic energy consuming activity. Someone here posted a link to Speech Sounds by Butler. She may have been onto something with that short story.
It’s the ultimate manifestation of “there is no alternative” …
“…mistook the time due to the [family blogging] time change, which I still not have gotten my head around.”
Just remember this: depending on the time of year it’s either earlier or later than you think.
Maybe not for everyone…Styx..”too much time on my hands, and it’s ticking away from me…”
I like the spring ahead part, at a minimum it hints that winter might be ending. Winter is not especially difficult here in South Carolina of course but I digress.
> Just remember this: depending on the time of year it’s either earlier or later than you think.
Just remember this: depending on one’s time of life it’s either earlier or later than you think.
Now you’ve just triggered my existential dread.
“You’re soaking in it!”
Hey now!
My take on this has always been, it depends on your birthday. People who were born during the normal time of the year, such as myself, are born, but shortly after have an hour stolen from them. Later on, perhaps, they get it back, but if one dies during the summer say, they don’t. Being in this category I loathe it, and am also a pessimist (realist) you might say.
On the other side are those born during spring summer etc. They are living a normal life, when suddenly, through no effort of their own, they get an extra hour. Yes, they may need to return it eventually, but if they pass on at the right time of year they get to keep it. These people are (IMHO) the optimists out there, and rightfully so.
In any case, we suffer what we must, but under no circumstances should we forget to contribute to the WC fundraiser!
When I was a kid, daylight savings time was the last Sunday in April. And every so many years it would fall on my birthday – making me lose several hours of birthday-time throughout my childhood. I resented so much – no one else in the family ever lost (or gained) birthday time. That was a long time ago but the never-grown-up part of me still resents it.
Also, as morning person I’m not that all happy about shifting the sun from morning to evening.
in the late 80s and early 90s when i was an outlaw and a musician, the fall time change happened on halloween…which happened to fall on a saturday…so the bar my band was in residence at(beerjoint) stayed open an hour later, til 3am, summer time regime.
one of the best, wildest parties in a public space ive ever been to…and we werent playing that night, so got to revel with the rest.
somebody brought a bunch of glow sticks and glow necklaces, etc…and handed them out…so a bunch of rednecks, looking for all the world like a rave.
but to the happenin beats of dwight yoakum and garth brooks and george strait(!?)
surreal.
and all it took was an extra hour….and Walter(owned a bunch of ti^^y bars in houston) showing up with his entourage of lingerie clad girls…and the owners locked the doors at 2am(formerly3am) and the epic debauche ensued.
i ended up cooking breakfast on a fire(since i lived in a van and had iron cookware) for about 40 very hungover rednecks and redneckettes who mostly couldnt find their clothes, or wallets or memory
That is possibly the finest memory I have ever heard about Daylight Savings Time. Okay it is the only fine one. But it is grand!
i remember it every fall.
a high/low point in my strange life.
i can still see them…frelling redneck hillbillies.
there was glitter.
From the wilderness bar to cornhole Ohio, rednecks and hillbillies can be a lot of fun and wonderful people.
We should all get to know each other.
Your story reminded me of the scene in the Blues Brothers singing rawhide. Giggle!
Great story. I’ll bet it was a ball. Unexpected off the wall stuff we never forget.
The good old days.
Done and now it’s nap time.
Time, by The Alan Parsons Project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhRzORqNa0E
Time Has Come Chambers Brothers
How does importing7-10 million “newcomers,” the latest Orwellian term, help our homeless veterans and people who cannot find a livable wage job or an inexpensive place to live?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs4ngNp5wrY
The seething fury coming out of the African American community over services to immigrants is quietly expressed by the Hodgetwins.
That’s a lot of peppers!
—
Input from gardeners is sought: is there a way to deter squirrels from digging in pots and trays that is less laborious than erecting physical barriers over them? I’m hoping someone has had good results from some method or another, perhaps some obnoxious-smelling spice blend. I want to start hardening my perennial starts off, but the first trays to go out were dug into by the family-blogging critters, and 3% loss per day will ruin the projects. Internet search has not been particularly helpful, which perhaps indicates that there is no simple solution. Trapping and relocation worked in prior years, but the donee prefers to not have any more of the things.
Same here. I can’t grow anything outside in my apartment complex, but when I did, the little thieves would casually waltz among my strawberries, carrots, and other things for a meal.
They are so fearless, I wonder if they would go through my living room’s open windows to much on the plants along the window stool.
Something to consider:
Great British Food Awards
as Smeagol said, “they are young, they are fresh, they are tasty…eat them! eat them!”
historically, month and a half to go with squirrel season…month with an R, and all.
helps to soak/marinate them…in milk, white wine(dry/sec)…my dad soaked em in cocacola overnight.
they make pretty good fricassee…or like one does oven fried chicken, with gravy made from the scorched bits and remaining oil.
a pellet gun will suffice.
or a bow, with an arrow tipped with a stunner head(and run up and dispatch with a knife)
neither are “fire arms” under the law…in texas, at least.
last i looked, and i aint a lawyer.
for less lethal means of control…cayenne pepper in between waterings should do the trick…and if methodically applied, may train yer local squirrel herd that your stuff aint worth bothering with.
ive been intending to thin my squirrel herd for several years…and havent got around to it.
i like them, as individuals…and talk to them all the time(i could prolly hunt them bare handed, in fact)..but they are, indeed, pests…and destructive.
i fight them for peaches, grapes, etc every year.
since we’re the apex predator…having removed most of the rest of them…its our responsibility to fulfill that role.
might also try a sack of deer corn(should be cheap out of season)…just dumped out somewhere where they wont bother anybody…higher up is better, lest you attract wild pigs….or deer….
I got rid of squirrels nesting in my walls between the studs with cayenne pepper. They had gnawed through an old redwood rain gutter to get there. I’ve never eaten squirrel but we have quite a lot of them here, given its a fairly dense residential area. One of the signs of spring is young not and never will be streetwise squirrels flattened on our streets. We’ve got lots of crows too that take care of that.
My neighbors and I live on 1.5 – 2 acre frontage properties a farmer/rancher sold years ago. The back property line is a deer highway. Several months ago one neighbor put up a seed and berry block near the deer path, which three grey squirrels quickly attacked.
I was waiting to see three exploded or incapacitated squirrels since they had been on the block for four hours or more. Maybe the Red-shouldered Hawks caught them on the edge of the tree and brush line. (Watching a Red-shoulder Hawk try to make an overgross weight take-off is something to see. “Yo, you’re not going to clear the trees… you’re not even gaining altitude.”)
The block was removed quickly.
Can the same be said of chipmunks? The little buggers are the bane of my existence. Might take a lot to make a decent meal.
horse divorce.
Hors d’oeuvres is how I translated Texan to Standard US English. /s
I’m better with Georgian and Alabamian dialects.
yes, they would happily enter your home for food… my squirrels eagerly came into my house (before I sold it recently) when I was handing out peanuts. I miss them and their squirrely ways…
My mother has a “squirrel proof” bird feeder.
The local squirrels love a challenge, and I’ve spent many happy hours watching them demonstrate that “squirrel resistant” is a better description. One of them managed to squeeze completely inside it once – fortunately he was able to get out again.
Maybe some sort of trap crop? I met someone who sowed the edges of his property with something appealing to deer, and they left his garden alone (or so he said). We have over half an acre, with pines, spruce, oaks and more apples than we need on the edges. Needless to say, we have squirrels, but they leave the garden alone. They love the apples and look so cute running the fence clutching them in their mouths. .
A good air rifle. They learn . You don’t have to kill them all. If your laws and concious allows, of course. YMMV.
I trap them and then let them go after a good scolding. They quit falling for the trap, anyway.
Chicken wire and electricity is how my Ag eng FIL did it. Plastic stakes, put the chicken wire on so that that a squirrel can not go underneath w/o touching. You don’t want the wire to touch the ground, but you do want to temp them to try. Then hook it up to fence charger. The squirrels touch it and are gone. He let the top of the wire hang loose out over the squirrel so it is overhead once they are close. It worked great as they would not try to jump it.
That’s a lot of peppers!
These are way more than I need for myself, but I have a small circle of hardcore pepper pals who will take surplus plants, so it just gives me an excuse to try more and more kinds! And after that there can be at least 100 extras most years, which go to the fundraising plant sale for our local botanical garden.
I should have given the link for the Chile Pepper Institute.
I despise them – The damn things RIP through my apples, plums, peaches in a matter of a days after they discover the (very unripe) fruit. Electric fencing is impractical. Can’t deal with the cruelty of doing what needs to be done, I’ll spare my fellow readers, so try relocation (very illegal), but it’s a bother. Roasted peanuts in hav-a-hart traps are irresistable to them, but the hav-a-harts only hold one at a time.
Shawn Woods has a YouTube channel called “Mousetrap Monday” dedicated to the art and craft of catching small animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZG4NZcfLk
ive saved old sunglasses and spent/scratched dvd’s etc for decades for deterrence…attach a hook made of wire and throw it into the tree…they see eyes and/or shiny things that blink…and stay away for a time.
but you must move these things around, or they’ll get used to them.
2 dvd’s attached by a string like a bolo…often with old rusty nuts attached for weight…flung unto the tree…and they’ll hang down and blow in the breeze and send shafts of sunlight all around at random…that works pretty well.
these days, im distracting them with their very own deer corn…like on the roof of the shop and house…or way over there, away from the fruit trees.
i intend to finally thin my herd this fall….say november….and cook up a large squirrel fricassee in the big dutch oven, and make a shindig out of it.
near as i can tell…as they never congregate so as to make counting them easy…ive got about 20 that need to be harvested.
jasmin rice and corn bread to soppy the gravy, and that’ll feed around 30 people.
A cat. The only issues I’ve had with squirrels are with the window boxes my cat can’t reach. Otherwise the excessive cat stink keeps small critters out of the plants.
Cayenne powder and cats? Both are doable.
my cats…both Bob, and all the essentially feral bar cats….dont give a damn about squirrels.
they sit there and watch them.
usually with a superior and haughty demeanor.
I know that pouring or spraying one’s own urine on the bed to be protected will deter cats, dogs, etc. They smell a big angry animal marking its territory.
Will it work on squirrels? I don’t know.
I’m an old guy but a young gardener. I did not have problems with my garden last year. I live in an area with lots of feral cats and my front yard has a huge black walnut tree. The garden is in the back. Anyway, I’ve noticed that black walnuts seem to be “squirrel cocaine”–they love the stuff and seem to stay away from the garden. So maybe feed some feral cats (will take care of rabbits, too) and plant a black walnut tree.
Note: black walnut trees can also make your life hell (black sidewalks and driveways). But you’ve got to pick your poison.
Hale-Bopp was the comet of my life so far, damned thing was up in the air for many months and you could see it naked, er that is with the naked eye.
Went to Death Valley NP with my wife and mom & dad on a road trip to see it in dark skies, and it didn’t disappoint.
There’s an old fan favorite coming to town on an every 71 years comeback tour, with the awkward name of 12P/Pons-Brooks.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/11/larger-than-everest-comet-could-become-visible-to-naked-eye-this-month
Hail Bop!
after i ran off my first wife(for not being on board with the whole farm thing, as well as running off with all our $ to party with her natural born killers fanboi….), i took a woman on a date to the top of the mountain out back…there, among the prickly pear and algerita and other assorted thorny shrubs, i had set up a lil round bar table i had absconded with years before…and 2 chairs.
a bottle of wine, and some french bread, hard salami and hard cheese…and she says “what are we doing?”// and i pointed at the comet hanging overhead like an omen…and she was amazed…being a typical american, and thus unaware of such things, pre-internet….
I have added a tranche of orts; I had to assault that amazingly vile CDC study which took some time. So expect another tranche in the near future!
Guaranteed snark appeal from Responsible Statecraft, “On air, Biden walks back his own Rafah ‘red line’ in real time”. The lede, Meanwhile Netanyahu calls his bluff and prepares for an invasion anyway. I have to include this gem from the 2nd para, The president stressed that the “defense of Israel is still crucial, so there’s no red lines [where] I’m going to cut off all weapons” and he said, “I’m never going to leave Israel.” There was a discussion just this morning on virtue and the lack there of.
Yes, I heard that in real time.
Here is an interesting counterfactual to consider: what if Biden has in fact been an anti-israel agent for decades, working his way up and up and up? And now he is in a position to give Israel the rope to hang itself with, and that is what he is doing and will complete.
Maybe the Soviet Union supported far right political groups in the US to undermine the US? Who did more damage internally to the US after WW II, leftists (New Dealers) or rightists (John Birchers)?
Would that be the Center for Disease Communication and Propagation?
here’s the link to the Look for the Helpers article for today:
https://www.islandinstitute.org/working-waterfront/dave-macy-steps-away-from-the-pulpit/
Thanks. The Island Institute is neat.
Something to file under Class Warfare or Billionaires are Different. The Musk foundation, yes named for Elon, is in a bit of troubles with how foundations are supposed to function. Video below from a CNBC interview today, just stumbled onto this.
Seems a tangential item to include given coverage of the Isaacson biography in the Sunday version of links. Whether it is Musk, Bezos, Gates, Buffet or whomever…can’t I get a foundation to record tax breaks for all the new found wealth and good fortune ? Oh that’s right…not nearly enough 000s on my balance sheet.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/03/11/taking-a-deep-dive-into-the-musk-foundations-shortfalls.html
It’s going to take a college effort for Musk to out-corrupt the Clinton Foundation. Just saying.
The final tranche of orts and scraps. I apologize for being so disjointed. Not the best time! Tomorrow I’ll have time to add the appropriate amount of snark MR SUBLIMINAL No, lambert! No!
I met Biden briefly when he ran for president in 1988 (he ended up losing the Dem primary to Dukakis). He came to my school and gave a stump speech to 100 or so not that enthusiastic students, and a half dozen or so hung around afterwards to talk to him a little more. He was a clearly slimy git even then.
I was at a fundraiser for Suzanne Kosmos D-Banking Industry, for her first and only run, and Rhambo was there. He was much shorter than I imaged. Asked what venue we were at. Was the usual vote D blah blah event. She went on to get a seat on the house banking committee with Alan Grayson. She spent her time fundraising while Grayson actually did stuff on the committee. She wasn’t reelected, I think they elected a real Republican the next election.
aye. ive been fortunate and unfortunate to have bumped into quite a few politicians…some of great repute…in my time.
i cooked breakfast and lunch in the “Democratic Building” in Austin for a time, filling in for someone…Anne Richards, Bob Bullock, Rickfuckingperry when he was a dem…
sometimes that radio preacher(now litegov)…then a mere thorn, without a vine(elected office) would sweep in to wrangle the commies…or attempt to.
republicans who ventured there were much pickier customers than the run of the mill dems…of whatever standing.
but that was long ago,lol.
Anne and Bullock were my faves.
they’d actually come into my kitchen and jaw with me.
the former often had Cecille in tow…then a shy child.
she fell a bit farther from the tree than i would have liked or expected.
Anne Richards is the only politician whose passing i have actually mourned.
because she was cool as hell.
Wasn’t that the campaign where he was caught plagiarizing speeches?
Kinnock controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_1988_presidential_campaign#Kinnock_controversy
Did you get to listen to a plagiarized speech?
Come to think of it, has anybody run his current speeches through some software to see if he finally paid for real speech writers or he’s still lifting them from somebody else?
BIDEN ADMITS PLAGIARIZING IN LAW SCHOOL WaPo
SENATOR DEFENDS HIS INTEGRITY, VOWS TO STAY IN PRESIDENTIAL RACE
By Paul Taylor
September 17, 1987 at 8:00 p.m. EDT
I’ve never met him, or even gotten close. But Joe Biden, for so many reasons — his unctuous, beaming, sh*t-eating smile, his appalling role in the destruction of Anita Hill, his utterly contrived ‘working man’ persona, his characteristic tendency to dominate every conversation with glib bullsh*t — has always struck me as a slimy git. That the Democratic Party has been forced by its own corruption to support such a nasty mediocrity as their flag bearer is fitting.
Thank you for the Prince-idote, it reminded me to watch his performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” for the hundredth time
RE: I don’t understand in what sense votes are “banked,” unless that means that voters can’t react to new information between when they voted and election day — which is reason enough to end the practice.
In my limited experience with “vote harvesting”, which I haven’t done personally because I think it’s corrupt as hell, the aim is to make sure all likely voters for your party get to the polls and don’t forget come election day. Public records indicate who has voted recently and party affiliation, so “vote harvesters” don’t even try to convince unlikely voters or people likely to vote for the other side – they go after their own partisans and aim to get everyone registered to their party and who voted in recent elections to do so again.
So yes, they are “banked” in your sense that they can’t change their mind, but they’re also banked in the sense that there will be fewer people to chase after on election day with visits and calls if they get people to vote early or by mail..
When I was involved with the Green party some years ago now, one Green go-getter took a 70-something older guy with him to a retirement home, where they proceeded to hand out ballots to all the residents. This is legally OK to do (although I’m not sure it should be) as long as you don’t try to influence the voter to choose your party’s candidate of choice.. I can guarantee you that the vast majority of those residents were not registered Green, and after the election there were accusations that the Greens in question did attempt to influence the voters. I’m quite sure they didn’t put in the effort just to contact the one or two people that might have been registered Greens. There was an investigation and if I remember right, the older guy, who I thought was a really nice man and who was likely just trying to be helpful and had no idea what he was getting into, wound up getting fined by the state for the violation. The younger go-getter, who led this “vote harvesting” and who I had personally witnessed trying to influence internal Green votes and committing actual campaign finance violations, not only got off scot free, but put out a press release on the local Air America (told you it was a while ago!) affiliate to let everyone know.
That go-getter is now an elected member of the Maine state Senate. As a member of the Democrat party.
These people just can’t be satisfied, can they? They get to go to the f**king cocktail parties having thrown the immunocompromised, such as kids with cancer, under the COVID bus, and that not being enough, they’re wetting themselves because Trump, who will continue the same COVID policy that Biden normalized, might get elected, and somehow these parties might become illegal or something? Even under Trump, liberal Democrats had no trouble virtue signaling, why wouldn’t that continue apace under Trump yet again?
aye. trump is not hitler…or frelling conan…driving his enemies before him.
its stupid hysteria from people who think too much of themselves and their own, narrow, concerns…and assume that those concerns matter to everyone.
Lasch was spot on, it turns out.
legacy of the first Me generation…recursive iterations in the next 3.
let them come build fence with me for a week.
meanwhile….back at the Farm…my youngest made a bet …that he lost…and “had” to run a “Milk Mile”…wherein one drinks a gallon of milk and runs a mile….
…and then inevitably pukes all that milk up and feels like crap.
so i had forgotten that such idiocy was on hand, today…and now my boy is all frelled.
he might have a future in politics, at this rate.
saltines and acidopholus.
thats his dinner, tonite.
the rest of us had boudin and peppers on black bread with real butter.
sigh.
‘aye. trump is not hitler…or frelling conan’
More like an updated carnival barker who turns everything into a circus.
#COVID19 #Walgreens
Still giving side-eye to those low test numbers. Gonna wait a couple weeks to see if they go back up now that Change Healthcare has paid the ransom (via cyberdaily.au) …
#Biden2024 #NotAnEndorsement
> In the end, the speech was an us-vs.-them routine, more pointed in its identification of class and wealth than Biden has previously embraced.
Which speech were they watching?! And even if he did talk about making the wealthy pay their fair share, and his family’s struggle in Scranton back in the day, does anyone really buy that? Joe Biden ascended to the presidency while stating that he had no empathy for the plight of younger generation and assuring big money interests that nothing would fundamentally change. If Biden’s a class warrior, then he’s on Warren Buffet’s side.
dude has a record, after all…that we all have access to.
but we’re supposed to forget about his long history, while admiring his old age, and just vote for him, because the orange devil…mumble, mumble…
just like with Herself.
they’re stuck in the 90’s.
glorious empire.
and thats to say nothing about how my experience of the 90’s was much, much different than theirs,lol.
but they never asked me.
(and i voted for Perot, twice)
#Boeing
whut. tha. familybog.
“A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the company’s production standards has been found dead of a reported “self-inflicted” wound” (BBC.com article via X/Twitter)
Let me guess … self inflicted gunshot wound to the back of the head?
Stabbed himself in the back?
Dismembered himself and locked the pieces of himself in the trunk of his car? Those suicide perfectionists!
There was that case of the controversial guy in the UK who committed suicide and the sealed himself into a suitcase. Neat trick that and it was only several years ago
The scenario I described was actually one concocted by writers for That Was The Week That Was as an explanation offered by a Southern sheriff for the death of a civil rights organizer (AKA “outside agitator”): suicide. TW3 was an early television exponent of black humor.
RIP Toriyama
It really is hard to overstate the impact the man had on manga, anime, and japanese video games during his time on the earth. The most famous game series he did art and character design for, Dragon Quest, was so popular in Japan that the police complained to Enix (now Square Enix) and helped convince them to release the games on weekends b/c so many kids were skipping school at game launch to play them. They’re probably the best fairy tales in game form that the industry has to offer, honestly.
For FOIA fans, this is hysterical via Cory Doctorow::
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#augusta
The staff at the Augusta County Sheriff’s office somehow got the impression that if they wants to make an official communique immune to a public records request, all they had to do was add the words “NO FOIA” to the memo…NOPE!
Biden reiterated his warped view of the events of January 6
—————
I don’t think Biden’s view is warped.
Let’s put the shoe on the other foot; let’s say it was Antifa trying to take a stroll inside the congress, stop Trump from being president, walk around saying let’s hang Mike Pence, attack a few cops and generally create mayhem.
Would republicans still be saying the same? I bet they’d call it an insurrection!
Let’s say it was Democratic supporters called Antifa who pushed in or had the doors opened to the Capitol, toured around shouting and taking selfies while never getting near to Pence or Pelosi or by Mitch McConnell or any one else before leaving pretty peacefully. That the head of the Capitol Police is kept out of the loop about warnings regarding their plans, , for some reason the DC police pass on having extra police coverage for their permitted event, and the National Guard gets orders that they aren’t needed for extra crowd control so cauldoning off the protestors as they travel from the protest to Capitol isn’t done and the Capitol Police is unprepared for extensive crowd control.
Oh and then the Biden hating Democratic chairmen of the supposedly bipartisan committee examining the event spends no time on how unprepared the various law enforcement agencies were for that and WHY and who gave the orders so that it was unmanned even by the standards used for previous friendly protests….
I don’t know what the Republicans would call it, probably just a riot. But I could be overestimating them. Still the Democrats would not be lying about it anymore and would be screaming to high heaven that it was warped and rotten.
“Nervous about November? Stop listening to pundits and start defending the president”
That is getting problematical for Democrats. When you defend the President, you have to defend what he stands for and what he is doing. Somehow being in the position of defending outright genocide is something that cannot be done no matter how many times you bleat Israel must defend itself. Images of Palestinian children looking like Biafran children from the 1960s is something that is going to weigh down the Democrats in the weeks ahead and the look of America buckling to Israel’s demands is not a good look either. They should never have picked him four years ago as the Democrat Presidential candidate when he was obviously past it but now they are in the position where they have to pretend that he is fine for another four more years. If there was no two term limit, in 2028 they might have found themselves in the position of saying that he was good for another four more years.
my mother in law…whom i love, unlike my mom,lol…gushed a bit about the sotu and how good biden did.
i laid it out….is this…him and orange devil…the best we can do?
and go watch yotube vids of kamela the pothead word salad artist…shes even more incoherent than the geriatric CIC.
no, hon, we’re well into late stage empire, here.
she’ll stew on it for a time…decide its too big, and move on.
theres grandkids and kids entering middle age and much chisme to consider….
i grok that this is common.
” ‘I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.’” • Hmm.”
Yes, I guess it’s all relative.
Well he did make the trains run on time.
in case it was missed…and as ive only now gotten to it:
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/when-the-musics-over
what an amazing time to be alive, and so connected to happening afar.
(and i still have a crush on Zarakhova(sp-2))
The Oscars were a subject earlier today. And it turns out they screwed up the In Memorian segment by listing a whole lot of people in fine print at the end. Now I might resent that they put Lance Reddick, Treat Williams and David McCallum in the also ran section, but I can concede a time issue even if they did find time to show dancers.(?) But starting with a clip of Navalny from the nominated documentary while putting actual Oscar nominees Burt Young and Don Murray in the also dying list does take a bit of cheek.
Let’s go Academy!
(let’s not, disgusting people they)
Alas, this is the second year that a documentary taking the side of far-rightists won at the Oscars.
It should be noted that “The Zone of Interest”‘s director condemned the genocide in Gaza.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/10/zone-of-interest-anti-war-glazer-00146195
Nice water cooler today, especially the pic of the starts in the tray. Just came in from up-planting many tomatoes, eggplant and bell peppers. The tomatoes are our bulk produce. We grow between 50-75 plants. Our germination was good this year. The best, if you can do it, is to save your own seeds. They have memory and will remember their grandparents growing up “here”. Our favorite varieties (all ol’ skool) are New Jersey Devil, Pineapple, Brandywine, Amish Paste, Amana (nice big yellow), Cobra and some Sungolds for nibbles by the entry doors. And yes, heating pads are real helpful and accelerate the germination. If you do canning like we do, stay a year or more ahead with the jar lids. Remember the panic to find them during the recent pandemic? When the next pandemic is created, an easy way to control people is to ruin the trade in specific items such as canning lids and Ivermectin.
yeah.
save them seeds…even from the F1’s.
ive got a costoluto tomato that ive kept going for the last 10 years at least.
saved seeds from a giant tomato a cancer patient ex teacher gave me.
i named it after her(pat culver)
its gotten smaller over the years, what with cross pollination and all(i’m not very persnicketty)
but still tastes good.
i select for the biggest and best with all of them…peppers, cukes…whatever…but my organisational skills…and this is almost office skills, really..are lacking.
ie labeling.
i forget…or the labels get scattered.
hope to get better at this, after the infrastructure is done, and i settle into a groove.
In good news, Alex Zweifelhofer, former member of the Georgian Legion, and would be fighter for Juan Guaido was just convicted in federal court for various crimes, including violating the Neutrality Act(!), and conspiring to kill persons in a foreign country.
His partner in crime, Craig Lang, is still at large in Ukraine.
https://www.nbc-2.com/article/army-veteran-convicted-2018-estero-murder-married-couple/60167264
The Water Cooler fundraiser continues: We are now at 161
156donors, with a goal of 400, so 4039% of the way there. The Tip Jar is right up there.