Well the Rockets sure shit the bed in the second half last night. Not that it wasn’t predictable that the Warriors would go up in the series. In fact, they’ll go up 3-1 tomorrow night. And then Houston will win at home and the Warriors will close them out in 6 after the league thinks they’ve bled enough tv revenue ofut of the series without looking WWF-like. The Celtics, now up 2-1, will fall again tonight to there Cavs and that series will go 7.
Meanwhile, on the ice, the Vegas/Army Expansion Knights have won the Campbell Conference and are waiting to see who they’ll play for the Stanley Cup. Congratulations, NHL. Your retarded-ass expansion rules for this go around have created a team that never would have happened on its own, at the expense of the rosters other teams took years to build. Which means I’m wholeheartedly on the Tampa Bay bandwagon. Not only because I love Stevie Y, but because the Caps vs Vegas in the Stanley Cup final will make me cheer for a meteor to strike the arena they’re in one night.
Oh, and the Astros took 2 of 3 from the Indians. And some other baseball happened, including an appearance by the mercurial Sidd Finch. (If you don’t remember that story, that’s a bummer. It was one of the best trolls by a major media publication ever.)
You better say happy birthday, fool!
I pity the fool that don’t recognize Mr T’s birthdate. Also sharing this date are jazzman Fats Waller, Canadian actor Raymond Burr, industrialist Armand Hammer, douchebag Al Franken, actor Judge Reinhold, gourmet cook Jeffrey Dahmer, and marijuana enthusiast Ricky Williams. Its also the day the American Red Cross, once a responsible charity now a money-making empire for those on its board, was founded by Clara Barton, Leopold and Loeb, inspiration for Hitchcock masterpiece “Rope” did their deed, Lucky Lindy Landed in Paris, The Sultan of Swat hit three homers in a row, douchebag Heinrich Himmler was captured, and “Empire Strikes Back” hit theaters.
That’s out of the way. Which means we are ready to segue into…the links!
Imagine your local economy doing so well that it actually supposedly created a food desert. Of course the story is a lot more complex, but local leaders want, nay demand answers from businesses as to why they won’t keep unprofitable stores open even though local residents didn’t use them with enough frequency to keep them profitable.
The latest entry in the “libertarians told you so” book. Which means local pols will immediately try to find a way to get their grubby little hands on it and fuck it up.
Former officials Comey, McCabe, Wray and unknown Mueller staffer
Former Clinton staffer unleashes on the Office of the Special Prosecutor. Not that it’ll matter. Witch hunters don’t usually stop their witch hunt until they do the nose bit. And the hat.
Today’s entry in the “Christ, what an asshole” sweepstakes is this former Playboy centerfold. Nice job, lady.
I’m shocked, shocked, I tell ya, to find corruption and abuse going on in a Chicago housing scheme. Just kidding. I’d be shocked if it was only used by the people it was intended for. Not that it would do any good then except inflate prices and cause other working poor to be priced out of the market.
Oh, for the love of fuck, can’t people stop apologizing for shit like this? I mean…ah, fuck it. Just read it yourself and give me your thoughts in the comments.
Badass
This dude right here makes Bear Grylls look like a little bitch. Seriously, this man should never have to buy himself a drink again for the rest of his life.
And in local news, people are starting to blame “bullying” rather than the piece of shit person who pulled the trigger in the school shooting rampage just south of town.
Have a great start to your week, friends!
The only thing stuck in my head after seeing the shark vomitting rainbows was “can sharks even vomit?” Given the stuff found in the stomachs of dead sharks, I’m not sure how well they regurgitate.
You’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Well, the continental United States is a pretty darn big boat. Unless…
Are you telling me we have Landsharks now?!
Knock knock. “Flowers.”
“Flowers for whom?”
Pause. “Plumber, ma’am.”
Vomit Theme this morning…sharks, Norks.
Vomit Theme is not a very good band name, but not bad either.
It’s an awful band name. Very good song title though.
103) You know what upsets me most about media coverage of school shootings, and especially the almost automatic linkage in much news reporting between school shootings and the availability of guns? There is never any consideration, not one bit, of the role the media itself plays in perpetuating school shootings. But that’s what these fuckers want—the publicity! Guns are a tool, but the media coverage is what’s making this happen again and again.
I mean, we could ban all gun sales tomorrow and make firearm ownership a criminal offense, and we’ll still have school shootings. But if the media took a few simple steps to alter their coverage and stop glorifying the shooters, this would likely be the last school shooting season ever. (No need for laws! Just common sense changes by the media!)
To end school shootings, coverage should not mention a school shooter by name (you’re not going down in history, asshole). It should not include the body count or types of weapons or ammunition used (no more competition among shooters for highest body count). And it should not include footage of the crime scene. That’s all. A sample report would be something like this: “Another school shooting today, this time at Jones High in Anytown. The shooter is reported to be a sixteen-year old student at the school, and several students have been killed. We’ll follow-up with scenes from the funerals in coming days.”
Replacing the sensationalistic coverage with straight-forward reporting like this would dry up school shootings overnight. The only cost might be some loss of viewers—but that shouldn’t be a problem for media companies who have long insisted banning guns is worthwhile if it saves even one life.
You’re not looking at this from their prespective. The goal is not to end shootings, it’s to get eyeballs on their ads. Hence the adage “if it bleeds, it leads”. People will want the details you want to keep out of it, and the media markets can’t risk not giving them.
Whenever this subject comes up it reminds me of an old Eddie Murphy SNL skit. Eddie plays a character that kills Buckwheat and there’s a big bit about the media coverage on his character. It was pretty funny, but I can’t ever seem to find it online.
This one?
https://www.hulu.com/watch/10389
Mention arming teachers or staff, something that would bring a screeching halt to school shootings, and they tear their hair and gnash their teeth. I interpret this as them saying “You cant take soft targets away! We need martyrs for the cause!”
It seems to me that the only people who sincerely want a stop to this evil madness are the pro-2nd A people.
something that would bring a screeching halt to school shootings
Don’t think so, it would just cause a change in tactics.
Every one of these loons either give up or commit suicide upon being confronted with someone shooting back. They are cowards through and through. Yes, it would cause a change in tactics, they would pick other soft targets. School shootings would become as rare as hen’s teeth. They would go to malls or movie theaters.
Or if they want to commit mayhem in schools, the either use bombs or tactics more suitable- e.g., burst into a classroom and take out the teacher first. The element of surprise is a significant advantage.
That’s you in the middle, isn’t it?
Yeah, the bomb thing has occurred to me. I think their primary motivation is notoriety, not necessarily causing mayhem in schools. They are looking to maximize the body count which means soft targets and any will do.
Bombs are crazy easy to make but I am not gonna discuss that. There are a lot of things I dont want to discuss because I dont want to give any ideas to the crazies.
In any case, we aren’t likely to find out as any serious efforts to put a stop to it will be fought tooth and nail by the gun grabbers.
I think your larger point still stands, frankly. There are clearly deeper and more difficult issues involved with mass shootings than just that people can own guns, but people who want to ban gun ownership begin with the goal and then work backwards. Nobody at the Brady Foundation wakes up and say, “You know what? Maybe banning guns isn’t a net positive. Let’s look at all the statistical data and see if this is a position we should continue to advocate.”
The advantage of arming teachers is that some will shoot themselves.
Why weren’t kids doing this shit at this rate 50 years ago? I want a gun grabber to answer this question.
It’s becuase of teh evul assault murder-rifles with fully automatic clips that nobody had back then!!11!!
When my father was in the 5th grade one of his classmates brought an MP40 to school that his father had captured in ww2. It was for show and tell. It got passed around the class so everyone could get a good look at it.
Gun racks in every pickup when I was a kid. Guns in the lockers or in the flat bed.
When I was in high school (1980s South Florida), pickup trucks with shotguns in the window racks were fairly common in the school parking lot. Also, there were a great many BB/pellet guns in window racks of those under 18.
Ditto in 80’s North Carolina. “Gang shootings” had already become a thing out in Los Angeles, and they were starting to use metal detectors. But in our neck of the woods, guns were still “normal”. Nobody would freak out if a truck with shotguns and rifles prominently displayed in the back window pulled up. That was normal. And nobody every shot anyone with those guns.
You didn’t suspect the driver of being a criminal or murderer. At the most you might suspect that he’d be likely to pull over and shoot a deer on the highway right-of-way.
My dad kept his Taurus 8-shot .22lr revolver in the center-console of his truck specifically to plink at stop signs. Sigh…
If your dad keeps his .22 in the truck so he can plink at stop signs….
… you have a really awesome dad?
No.
Yooooooo just might be a Redneck.
/Foxworthy.
(not incompatible with awesome dad… it just doesn’t fit the meme)
There were a bunch of guys in high school who would go duck hunting before school and come to school with their shotguns on the rack in their trucks. Routine.
Violent video games?
In the crime book Bill James wrote a few years ago, he talks about trendiness in crime. In the 60s-80s, serial killing was a trendy crime. There were lots of serial killers, lots of media coverage, movies and books glorifying it, etc. Then, for some reason, interest in serial killers dried up. By the late 90s, the number of serial killers in operation had dropped considerably, media interest dropped way off, and the public was bored with the whole topic.
I suspect school shootings are simply the current crime fad.
The culture is so fucked up by wrong incentives at this point that I’m not sure even getting the media to stop doing the obviously wrong thing (publishing these douchebags pic and names) would make much of difference. Culture rot is a bitch.
Here are my favorite theories for the dramatic drop in violent crime rates:
1. The Freakonomics idea positing that Roe v Wade and more abortions account for it. Makes sense. It’s the right time frame, and with the hypothesis that abortions are more likely to be performed on poor, single-mother, inner-city women makes sense on its face.
2. The adoption of unleaded gasoline—with the idea being that the higher lead expsosure lead to more violence and chemically damaged psyches.
3. With more luxuries available to more people, people simply don’t care anymore. If you are air-conditioned and comfortable in your apartment while playing PS4 and smoking some dope reefer, you’re not outside where you might get angry and commit a crime out of anger or general unpleasantness.
I’m sure there are more contributors and is assuredly a combination of effects.
With more luxuries available to more people, people simply don’t care anymore.
back when I lived in the ghetto of Kalamazoo, the winter was the nicest part of the year; at least for the reduction in crime. No one was out compared to the hot summer, so walking the streets was the safe.
This was in the early 90s but most of my friends had gotten mugged, one ending up in the hospital with a wired jaw after getting a baseball beat down. Also a lot of break-ins. I quickly learned to dress poor – or maybe being tall helped or just situational awareness. Because nothing ever happened to me.
btw – I also credit cell phones for a reduction in crime.
That was a fantastic book and written in a way only James could.
Him pointing out how gun crime has been declining but only seems high is because the cumulated figure still factors in the period right after the Civil War when there was an explosion in murder. Take that period out and crime in America is no worse than anywhere else.
He also said an FBI agent told him at any given time they estimate 90 serial killers are operating in the U.S.
There’s way more than 90 bad cops.
Everyone involved is behaving exactly as you’d expect once you understand their core motivations. The media is getting attention, which translates to prestige and ad revenue, and the gun grabbers are getting a chance to manipulate the emotions of voters and politicians, and particularly to present the former as a threat to the latters’ chances of reelection. Nobody has, as their primary objective, the increase in public safety or the reduction in gun-related homicides. That isn’t to say that the Brady Campaign wants students to die any more than PETA wants dogs to die, but, like PETA and pet ownership, the Brady Campaign is interested in ending gun ownership first and foremost, and if it takes a few eggs to make an omelette then so be it.
Thanks for writing this, in a more elegant way than I would. This morning I checked the weather on my phone, and in the news feed there was a string of stories on CNN about the shooter and the details of the shooting. It really pissed me off. I agree with you that these shooters are looking of attention/notoriety. And CNN just did the best they could to encourage the next shooter.
In response to straffinrun, I think the big differences between now and 50 years ago are the 24 hour news cycle, and the instant gratification culture we have due to social media. So many people live for likes and tweets and shares. Shoot up a school and you’ll get plenty of those.
Sermon duly noted
…or a bowl of bulgogi.
That dude is a badass. I just hope the Norks don’t have bodycam footage that shows his story is all a big, fat lie.
But even if it does, He can just double down or move the goalposts like these commenters do when it turns out the head of an NAACP chapter made his story up.
“You’re lucky I dont take you to jail”
For failing to use a turn signal? Jeebus.
“We don’t condone the wrong that a person has done, we just don’t believe he would have told a lie about something of that magnitude. We’re not saying a person is incapable of lying. Just from his character, we don’t think he would have lied about something like that. In all fairness to the NAACP and the community, we will watch the video and have a conversation with our NAACP president,”
Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?
t “not all communities can celebrate what life was like in 1776.”
Being dead and all…
Technically, he didn’t say what life was like in America in 1776. Do people can celebrate what life was like in the lands of their ancestors as well.
Well, at least those whose ancestors had mastered the written word and ability to mass-reproduce it by then.
Hmm, if we really wanted to celebrate what life was like in 1776, it would be a party emphasizing self-reliance, improving yourself and your environment with diligence and industry, and a relaxed attitude towards drinking copious amounts of beer and whiskey.
No central bank and no income tax. Must’ve been just terrible.
No Electricity.
No Automobiles.
No Air Conditioning!
No Clapper.
No Iraq or Syrian war from our side.
No Nanny state.
Pick your poison.
I long ago concluded that my optimal era has not existed yet.
No phones
No lights
No motorcars
Not a single luxury.
“Not a single luxury.”
No phones sounds like a real luxury to me.
Thanks for the earworm, you dick!
I always wondered why you would care about motorcars on an island that appears to be about 2 acres in size.
Like Robinson Crusoe it’s as primitive as can be.
Helps to have a “Professor” who can build a cold fusion reactor from two clamshells, a vine and a coconut.
““not all communities can celebrate what life was like in 1776.”
It’s not like those visionary founders, though being flawed men of their times themselves, had the foresight to try to put a system in place that would eventually lead to the fairest society to ever exist or anything.
I wasn’t a fan, but it seems having a black President kind of was a game-changer for the history of the Republic.
You’re right. It was a game-changer. Especially if you meant it set race relations back at least 50 years.
Agree. But it seems also to have destroyed any credibilty to the argument of a historically structurally racist system
How in the fuck is celebrating the events of 1776 “insensitive”? The only proper response to that complaint is FUUUUCK YOOOUUUU!!
No, it’s to cover them in pine tar and feathers, then dump them outside the town limits.
Even better.
Brits hardest hit by this insensitivity.
The best part is they only apologize to blacks. Apparently Native Americans deserved it.
WHY DO WANT TO PUT YOU ALL BACK IN CHAINZ??:?!??!
The Brightline high-speed train, the only privately owned and operated passenger rail system in the U.S., took its inaugural run to Miami on Friday filled with politicians and reporters.
Now I would never wish for a horrific crash, but…
What, like what happened with the government-built and operated train in Washington state recently?
Don’t know of it. Did it fall off a 10,000 foot cliff into a lake of magma filled with magma sharks?
You’re never going to get a lake of magma at the base of a cliff like that, the roofing and excavations needed to keep it from becoming lava are cost prohibitive.
That’s what you focused on and the “magma sharks” didn’t bother you.
I figure they were the fire elemental relatives of Landsharks.
You’ve jumped the geek shark.
It’s safer that way, Geek Sharks are mostly harmless.
More of a bulette.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/18/passenger-train-derails-bridge-onto-highway-washington-state/
And it’s been totally swept into the weeds. According to wiki, NTSB report will take 12-24 months.
“A housing-assistance program that Mayor Rahm Emanuel set up two years ago to help people with “low to moderate incomes” buy homes has frequently ended up financing pricey homes in expensive neighborhoods, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.”
It’s almost as if complicated government bureaucracies are more easily navigated by educated, well-connected people.
I once read a commentary/review on “How the Other Half Lives”, the late-19th century photo-documentary book of the impoverished in New York City. The review mentioned how the most common reaction of modern New Yorkers to seeing the old pictures of tenement apartments is “they had so much room.” This at a time when Manhattan had more population than it does today! Almost as if the best way to address housing shortages is to remove zoning and code restrictions. True, the apartments may have been shabby, but they met the needs of the population who could afford them.
Far better than today’s schemes were we shovel money into affordable housing programs that only haphazardly benefit the people they’re allegedly targeted at.
Whoa! Whoa! Everyones getting their beak wet under the current system, why would it change?
But if the media took a few simple steps to alter their coverage and stop glorifying the shooters, this would likely be the last school shooting season ever.
I don’t really buy that, but I would most definitely like to see media outlets stop regurgitating the Bloomberg puppet organizations’ bogus statistics. The NYT article the other day about how children have been coached into an unreasoning nonstop terror is a case in point.
To be sure, most kids are not spending their waking hours trying to plot lines of fire and escape routes. They’re furtively going “pew pew pew” at the girls’ field hockey coach.
“The principal of a New Jersey high school is apologizing for what he calls “insensitive” language on tickets for the upcoming senior prom. The Courier Post reports the Cherry Hill High School East senior prom tickets urged students to “party like it’s 1776” during the event at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center.”
I’m struggling to find what the offense is here? Also, when the apology police show up at your door, remember this advice: Don’t explain, don’t complain. I don’t know about New Jersey, but among my male Midwestern relatives this is a way of life.
An apology is an admission of wrongdoing to these people, never ever apologize.
“I’m sorry you’re a thin-skinned wanker.”
“I’m sorry you’re a thin-skinned wanker who thinks that America’s independence and founding is a bad thing, you commie fuck.”
(read in the voice of Kevin Kline playing Otto)
“Oh, you British are sooooooo superior! You ever stop to think where you’d be without us, the good ol’ US of A? I’ll tell you what – the tiniest little province of the Russian empire! Wait, what am I saying? You’d all be speaking German, singing ‘Deutchland, Deutchland uber alles….‘”
“YOU’RE the vulgarian, you FUCK!!”
“I am writing to apologize for the hurt feelings this reference caused for members of our school family”
He’s apologizing for others’ feelings?
No kidding. Is he married?
If you want to end school shootings (spoiler alert- you can’t), you should start out by putting an end to victim culture, and the crippling idiocy that every slight or snub or insult is a mortal wound.
If public schooling ended, school shootings would be way down.
I wonder how many of these school shootings have taken place at private schools? I can’t think of any….
(Just checked Wikipedia–Private schools account for 25 percent of the nation’s schools and enroll 10 percent of all PK-12 students. So 10% of all school shootings should be at private schools, right? If that’s not the case, and, as I suspect, the number of shootings at private schools is way lower, maybe investigate why that is….)
Selection bias. If private schools were all that existed, the school shootings would shift to them.
How do we do that? Check out “Romeo and Juliet” five hundred years ago – dudes killing each other in the streets with swords over which family you happened to be born into. Propensity for violence, and idea that on some level it will solve a person’s issues, seems universal and uncorrectable.
End School.
Problem solved. No more public education system.
You know, I’d really like to see a roll-up of the Trump investigation from the side supporting it. I’ve seen some articles from the side calling BS on this whole affair that had very in-depth timelines, but if there’s a reasonable article from the other perspective that someone knows about I’d like to enact your labor to find it for me. I am really curious to hear it from someone who isn’t a screeching maniac.
I am really curious to hear it from someone who isn’t a screeching maniac.
I’m not sure that exists. Shapiro claims that there was sufficient grounds to start the investigation into “Russia fucking around”, but the Mueller investigation isn’t even about that anymore.
Turn on MSNBC tonight during prime time. They’ll feature outright lies, stories about felonious activities with the Russians by people you’ve never heard of but are like super-close to Trump, and every fact you know spun up to 10,000 rpms by smug-faced assholes. Don’t watch for too long, the madness is contagious.
It frightens me that these people are willing to go to this length to protect the criminal activities of the Obama administration because of their irrational anger that despite all tier efforts to rig the election for Clinton, the American people decided to give them a big fuck you. We are just starting to get a glimpse at how corrupt and self-serving that weaponized government Obama created – hoping to hand it off to Clinton – was. If they were willing to spy on a political opponent, and yes, I know they expected Hillary to win so none of this would come out, can you imagine some of the other shenanigans that our intelligence apparatus and the massive government bureaucracy so loved by the left were engaged in?
Richard Nixon was run out of town for saying he wished he could use government agencies to spy on his opponents. The Obama admin, to help steal an election for one of the most corrupt and inept people you could ever think of, did this shit. And now the very people that will tell you how evil Nixon was and proud they are that it was people in their profession that called him out and ran him out of town, are basically destroying whatever measly drop of credibility and honor they had lying to protect their guy from doing it.
Confirms my belief that the people claiming to have gone after Nixon to save the country likely doing it to protect their ideology/party, as now that someone on their ideological side has actually done the things Nixon could only dream of, they are not just turning a blind eye to it anymore, but desperately trying to help cover it up.
Obama did fundamentally change America…
Into a banana republic in every sense of the word if you look at what his tenure did to an already bloated and spiteful government that feels entitled to pick the winners and losers in life…
I don’t really think there’s been anything new since the IC assessment, at least not in terms of concrete facts. There has been lots of hearsay, lots of “anonymous ‘high-level’ source says”, and the ever trustworthy “someone familiar with his thinking believes”.
If public schooling ended, school shootings would be way down.
I approve this message.
Oh, for the love of fuck, can’t people stop apologizing for shit like this? I mean…ah, fuck it. Just read it yourself and give me your thoughts in the comments.
Principal. Education bureaucrat. Public leech. What else do you expect? Intelligence and independence?
I am really curious to hear it from someone who isn’t a screeching maniac.
Rotsa ruck, Kemosabe.
ZOMG, Trump didn’t just collude with Russia! Did the conspiracy to steal the election from Hillary stop anywhere?!
“Zamel’s company, which employs several former Israeli intelligence officers and has the comically villainous name Psy-Group, says its motto is to “shape reality.””
It’s always ((((THEM)))) with you people
They are really grasping at straws, now. You can sense the panic setting in.
Meanwhile, the one candidate for president that we know for a fact actively worked with Russian intelligence (to the tune of spending millions of dollars to obtain it) and used it to subvert not only the election but the rule of law and the peaceful succession of power… that one isn’t worth looking in to.
That’s because she wouldn’t go down alone, and the dnc apparatchiks want to protect that inept and unqualified moron they foisted on us for 8 years, that she is sure to take down with her…
Both of them should be wearing orange jump suits and making license plates.
From the falling mammal and her hatchling article, I am impressed by how much water can be carried by wringing hands
It is hard to see how a year-long investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.
Haha, good one.
“who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong“
More like that other ancient Chinese game:
FahQu-FahQmi
Fah Qu Dat Wy
There’s a new book that I’m sure will be on all your guys’ reading lists the next time you have a “What We’re Reading” post. The Restless Wave by everyone’s favorite senator, McCain.
Was the working title “How to be the World’s Biggest Asshole”?
Subtitle: How to be a self-righteous, vindictive cunt while being praised for your “integrity”.
This guy has consistently been the biggest prick in the GOP Establishment. I mean from trashing the Tea Parties (“Tea Party Hobbits”) made up primarily of people who voted for him to trashing people in his own party whose only crime is standing on principle (“Whacko Birds”) to leaving his running mate to hang out to dry (Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, McCain’s behavior was contemptible. He either made an unqualified candidate his running mate as a publicity stunt or he failed to defend someone he put in the political crossfire.). This is a guy who has an established record of corruption (Keating Five) and seeks to limit the freedoms of people who weren’t corrupt (McCain-Feingold) to take the heat off of himself.
A Farewell to Arms II: Wait, Those Guys Were ISIS?
A Farewell to Brains.
Germany to Cities: Go Nuts With the Diesel Bans, Starting Now
In other news the price of sausage in Germany unexpectedly rose by 50%.
The same enlightened country that decommissioned all their nuclear plants out of fear of tsunamis and are now digging open-pit coal mines instead?
This make me happy if only for professional economic reasons. Personally I would prefer they had the choice to use whatever makes sense for the individual consumer.
This make me happy if only for professional economic reasons.
Are you an EV dealer or something?
I make components for autos, one of of which is used only for gas not diesel engines. So I will sell more of them if they convert to gas.
Which points out why this type of regulation is so stupid. Instead of dictating the underlying technology, they should dictate the emissions standards and be done with it.
We make the same mistake with airport security. Instead of creating a million federal workers out of thin air, we should simply set the standards for airport security.
But of course we can’t do that… because it doesn’t allow us to pick winners and losers. And if you don’t get to dictate which type of engine is used, you can’t accept payoffs from the makers of that engine. And if you can’t pick which full body scanners are used at the airport, how are they supposed to take care of you?
Why even go through silly emissions standards with commensurate enforcement and punishment nonsense? Raise the taxes on the fuels you’re trying to discourage.
Germany produces very little natural gas and petroleum. Why they want to become MORE dependent on products mostly produced by countries they don’t like that also have larger militaries is rather stupid. Not that tax schemes can’t be stupid but at least tax schemes can be changed somewhat quickly. Instead they prefer to double-down on locking themselves in to ensuring that they remove all backup options. They proceed as if the shit will never hit the fan ever again, despite all the recent history they complain about that shows otherwise.
CNN is on the case with Trump’s collusion denial! The president keeps moving the goalposts! Don’t worry, they’ll catch him eventually!
That’s pretty good echo chamber stuff right there. We’ve gone from “Trump worked with the Russians to subvert the election” to “a couple of people at the Trump campaign took meetings with people who have indirect connections to Russia or are Russian citizens and therefore Trump lied about nobody having any contact with Russia.
Look, the guy might be a fully-owned puppet of Putin for all I know.
But I also know this… your thinly veiled attempt to do an end-run around the electoral process and the constitution is pathetic, and if there was any “there” there, you’d have produced it by now.
The fact that the media – specifically CNN and the New York Times, but everyone else too – has yet to focus on the “vast left wing conspiracy” that actually brags about its accomplishments in the New York Times is just nuts. I mean, they literally boast of distributing classified information – on the record! – and they make it clear that it was done for the explicit purpose of bringing down the president-elect after he takes office…. and they are heroes, not conspirators. Some of the same people sent a professor to secretly infiltrate the Trump campaign and ingratiate himself with senior members of the campaign and pump them for information. But this guy wasn’t a spy, he was an informant. So that makes it OK. Because we use the word “informant”, even though this case doesn’t really fit the definition of an informant, and not the word “spy”, even though it fits the dictionary definition of the word perfectly, that means that it is all OK and perfectly above board and you are a liar if you say we spied on you with our spy… because he’s an informant… not a spy….. because we said so.
And nobody has yet asked, “how did you know that there were “suspicious contacts” if you were not already spying on them in the first place?”
Someday when we finally get to the very bottom of the Deep State, the weaponization of government agencies against Republicans and citizens in general, and all the hit jobs on Trump – we’ll find this commie thug piece of shit at the center.
John Brennan Fires Warning Shot to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell After Trump Orders DOJ to Investigate FBI’s Campaign Infiltration
He must follow the best defense is a good offense doctrine because he may very well be in deep shit.
Or he is following the doctrine of “my people are still all over the place over there, and we can get to you just like we got to everyone around Trump.”
I think the CIA/Intelligence community took its best shot, already. Letting the piss dossier circulate as “intelligence” hurt them a lot. Also, hanging out Carter Page. They fucking hung out a guy who helped catch foreign agents.
There is no “may very well be in deep shit” here: he should be in deep shit.
This guy is about one of the most corrupt people you can find, and he is freaking out. That’s because, despite their best attempt to deflect, followed by their desperate need to drag this charade out – hoping a power shift in November will allow them to finally put the lid back on the bottle and prevent the American people from learning how banana republicesque the Obama administration had turned a weaponized massive government bureaucracy into in the hopes of handling Hillary the magical weapon that would finally cement the left’s hold on power permanently – the facts are coming out. And it looks really, really bad for the lot of them, with this asshole Brennan leading the pack in people that need to be doing time in federal prison.
WW2 bomb disposal
“It’s a sea mine” – Farmer, Hot Fuzz
Soften the blow of another workweek with fantastic lady pillows.
http://archive.is/9k4TI
Gold: 35
Silver: 37
Bronze: 11
So why are grocery stores closing in areas that need them the most?
Jo Wynn, founder of Walking’ in My Shoes, a nonprofit organization serving people in need, believes some residents shunned the stores because they could get free food at churches and food pantries.
Take that, robber barons!
See! People should only become dependent on the government!
Poor MikeS. He won’t be able to vote for the libertarian’s choice for Sec of State in NoDak.
This is how we got Bush.
That was where Gardner happened to be standing, and what he was looking to see…coincidentally.
A bush in the hand is worth two on the street.
Had he been a student, I would have shrugged it off. But the timing and his situation when the offense occured just highlights the lack of resourcefulness and sense.
+1 Bluto
Senator Blutarsky has a sad.
I’m gonna start a write-in campaign.
The Complexity of Lord Humungus
Two minutes until I’m done with work. Tomorrow is Buddha’s Birthday and a national holiday. Bitchin’.
My little something something on the side messaged me this morning with “One more fuck fest tomorrow?” Yes, please. she’s been riling me up all day. She was goading me and challenging me to have the stamina to go three rounds with her tonight. I apparently will be rewarded with a prize if I hold me end of the bargain. I do not know what it is.
This girl, is indeed, nuts, but I have made my decision on the hot/crazy axis. The next 24 hours will be fairly dope. I have to wait two more hours for festivities.
Mmmmm. This suspense is killing me. I hope it lasts.
I apparently will be rewarded with a prize if I hold me end of the bargain. I do not know what it is.
She leaves?
“Surprise! I have a penis!”
-your ladyfriend
A drunk appreciates this. Thank you.
Humor. I recognize it.
However, I am full-blown Cuddle Monster and all of my limbs need to squeeze female flesh at all times. I purr, nuzzle, nibble and rub.
It’s very obnoxious at first and I have to delay the implementation of this until the girl knows that I’m being sincere. They need to know it’s not a game or ploy—I just genuinely love physical affection and imparting it.
Once they get used to it, it’s quite endearing and gets me laid. Cuddle Monster gonna cuddle, yo.
STEVE SMITH IS CUDDLE MONSTER.
AND BY “CUDDLE” MEAN….
HumorYouth. I recognize it.Bachelor hood. Single life. Childless. I recognize it and I sigh a sigh of deep satisfaction and thanks. (I’m also tremendously lonely and realize that children are the most meaningful way to achieve happiness.
🙂
I trust you have the holiday as well—enjoy, recoup and recover!
No holiday here. We get the emperor’s b day off. Buddha and Christ can suck these heathens’ asses.
T.M.I.
You’re more than welcome to try you little bitch.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a20747292/nra-guns-take-them-away/
Also, please explain what law would have prevented the Texas school shooting?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
What? You demand rational behavior here, you monster?
False.
A while back while out to dinner with a group of friends two of the proggies were complaining about guns and rising violence. I noted that there was a reduction in violent crimes of at least 50% since the 1990s while many more guns were in circulation and gun laws got looser. They insisted I was just making it up until I Googled it on the phone and showed it to them.
At which point they….
At which point they stated that correlation is not causation and it didn’t prove that guns were not bad, m’kay?
They will believe whatever their masters tell them to believe…
But the ever-honest and accurate TV news told me so!
So she is opposed to school resource officers?
“I want to take your guns away so that I can hurt you.”
By all means, spend your every waking hour in a futile attempt to amend the constitution.
You know what is worse than a HOA? A HPC (Heritage Preservation Commission)
Holy fuck, I’d blow up my house after a few dealings with these assholes.
Long story about how the HPC has refused tons of requests from people to simply replace their old single paned windows. And this isn’t a new issue either. Back in 2014, they told a guy he had to rip out the new windows he put in and retrograde them (at a cost of $100K)
How did we ever get to the point where people who buy something aren’t free to do what they want with it? If you want some building to be preserved, fucking pony up and buy it yourself.
Friends of mine bought this neat Victorian house – inside of a historical district. Need to build a garage? It has to look like part of the original house, meaning real wood, not siding. Want to pave your driveway? Sorry – have to keep it gravel since that’s part of the originality.
They paid a small fortune to have the house painted – those yards and yards of wood add up.
A friend of mine got himself elected to his towns Historical District Board just to make sure his property got carved out.
Christ, the quotes in both those articles made me roll my eyes so far they sound completely around.
“We are trying to lead an environmentally-conscious lifestyle.”
*barfs*
“Going before the city council reaffirmed my belief in city government.”
Sure, because they gave you what you wanted, twit.
“I’m a huge preservation fan, but I worry that we can do the cause harm when we overreach and (require) things that don’t seem practical,” Thune said in a recent interview. “Right now, we’ve got our hands full just trying to keep our historic properties from being torn down and turned into McMansions. And we can do that by working with people.”
No, you’re a big douche.
You picked up on my favorite quote. “reaffirmed my belief in city government”, AKA “of course those laws weren’t meant to apply to me.”
“Right now, we’ve got our hands full just trying to keep
ourother people’s historic properties from being torn down and turned intoMcMansionswhatever the property owner wants. And we can do that byworking with peopletelling people what to do.”I have to deal with this for a family owned summer house at the New Jersey shore. Officially it is called the “Historic Preservation Advisory Committee”. We all call it the Hysteric Preservation Advisory Committee.
When we rebuilt the place after Hurricane Sandy they easily added $20k to $30k in costs to the build. You Glibs will be happy to know no federal flood insurance or or federal aid was used in the reconstruction.
Long story short – we had a beach shack there that was essentially un-modifiable because of the historic requirements and not particularly useful. Hurricane Sandy did us a huge favor and made the home uninhabitable. As a result I was able to tear it down and build new. Without Sandy that wouldn’t have been possible.
New meaning to “Creative Destruction” I suppose.
To give you and idea – for tax assessment purposes the structure was valued at 10% of the value of the land.
With the rebuild the structure is now valued at closer to 50% of the land assessment.
There was no point in having flood insurance on the original structure. The new structure is raised and has no mortgage – so we also do without flood insurance.
We have a lot of dumb rules around here, even without historic preservation societies. Among these are rules about trees. The city gets to say what you can do with trees, whether you can plant them, what kind, whether you can cut them, etc.
So when there is a hurricane, everyone who has a tree they want to get rid of runs out and cuts it down the next day. Saves a ton of headaches.
They actually use photo surveillance to monitor what happens to your trees.
We have one neighbor who put two huge palm trees in the front yard, and two huge shade trees in the back by the pool. He did a tear-down, so he put the trees in the back before building the house. The city came by after the fact and said that he had to move the shade trees out front (because they wanted more shade along the street) and the palms to the back. Of course, he didn’t want shade out front, he wanted it on his pool deck. After spending tens of thousands on the mature trees in the first place, on a plan that was signed off by the city, I’ll note, they wanted him to spend tens of thousands on a huge crane to lift giant, fully mature trees over a big, multistory house. And they thought this was reasonable. (he took them to court over that one)
It is just nuts.
That is nuts. The only reasonable restriction on trees should be to regulate the planting of new ones that may interfere with public utilities when full grown. Regulating the planting based on aesthetics and regulating the removal of trees at all is ridiculous.
Some fool bought an antebellum mansion in Natchitoches. He paid a million bucks for it. He agreed to put another million into restoring it. By the time the Historical society was finished with him he was out 5 million bucks and he was required to let the public tour the house 5 days per week.
My take? Dude lays down in the road. In a steep curve. At night. Dude gets run over.
The Vieux Carré Commission is the tool of the Devil. They take aerial photos of the French Quarter so as to catch and fine those who install air-conditioners or otherwise modernize.
Wow. That’s impressive.
I have a buddy in Williamsburg, VA who built a professional services office park. As a part of the construction, the city forced him to pay $250k to build a new turn lane and sidewalks (there were none before). Six months after it was finished, they came through and bulldozed all of it…. they were widening the road along the entire stretch.
He said he’d have been better off taking a loan out for a quarter million and setting it on fire in the front yard.
The worst part of that story is that construction is a slow enough process that if they were bulldozing six months out they already knew they were going to widen the road while that new construction the guy paid for was being done.
I smell a kickback, yes I do.
LOL
I live in Williamsburg.
But I’m going to bet that actually happened in James City County. The city would have held him up on construction for another 3 years.
We have something we lovingly refer to as the Annapolis Hysterical Society. If you’ve got a residence in the historic area, basically the downtown area around the harbor, Church Circle, and State Circle that matches the city limits as of, oh, 1720, but it’s not a “historic” building, all you really have to worry about is that the paint doesn’t clash too much with the rest of the buildings. Once you get that prestigious historic plaque, however, the game changes. Now you have to clear any work done on the house with the historic society. All exterior colors and any interior colors visible from the street, i.e. through your front windows by passers-by, have to be chosen from an approved, “historically-accurate” color palette. That’s annoying and inconvenient for home owners, but that’s ruinous for businesses. One store burnt down fifteen years ago and the space has since been abandoned, because nobody was willing to invest the money to rebuild, and because once historic status is “granted” it never goes away, the space itself can only be occupied by a building that matches the absent building. So there’s nothing there. A pub had an electrical fire. The wiring was damn near seventy years old, but the owners couldn’t afford to bring it up to code AND meet the historic requirements. They sold what was left and it took another five years before someone moved back in and paid for the restoration.
I used to have a house (an old one-room schoolhouse, actually) that was easily eligible for historic designation. I passed.
We did a full gut-job renovation on it. It had these giant windows (13, 3’x5′). They were the original divided light, single pane windows. In Wisconsin, so the drafts and heat loss were significant. I replaced them with double-pane windows, with true wood divided lights. You could not tell them from the originals from the outside until you got within a few feet of them. They did wonders for heating and to keep the place even quieter. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it was officially designated as historic.
I still that miss that house. Maybe the only one I’ve sold that I wish I still had. It was in dairy country, I hunted wild turkey and deer by walking out the back door. The reno turned out fabulous, although I technically didn’t see it finished (one of the bathrooms wasn’t quite fixed when I moved). I had to move because, a couple days after demo began, the law firm I worked for fired me, so I was living in a wrecked house, paying reno bills, without a job. I got a job after several months, but not in Wisconsin. There’s actually a schoolteacher living in the house now.
Muddying the waters
When it comes to the Russia investigation, it’s not so much that the Trump team has a habit of “moving the goalposts,” but that those goalposts have been rigged to roller skates and pushed downhill toward what feels like an inevitable end: where no matter what special counsel Robert Mueller finds, Trump will declare himself vindicated.
———–
They’ve also worked overtime to muddy the waters, litigating the meaning of “collusion” and often adding, as Trump did during an interview with the Times in late December, that “even if there was (collusion), it’s not a crime.”
“For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being violated,” Trump’s personal lawyer in the Russia investigation told CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, in a New Yorker story from earlier that month. “There is not a statute that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion.”
“I’m not moving the goalposts, you are!”
“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”
Fun fact: Google does not autocomplete “bill clinton meaning of is”. It looks like the other recent ex-Presidents get a similar treatment. Heaven forbid we tarnish the legacy of our glorious leaders with facts.
I love how “You know, this is a criminal investigation, and it hasn’t shown that I committed any actual crimes” is “moving the goalposts”.
You know what is worse than a HOA? A HPC (Heritage Preservation Commission)
Holy fuck, I’d blow up my house after a few dealings with these assholes.
My parents owned a house in New Jersey which dated back to before the Revolution. It was a beautiful big stone house. People kept telling them they should get it on the Historic Registry (miraculously, it wasn’t already on it). My dad told them to fuck off, every time.
To be fair, your dad probably told people to fuck off when the talked to him about the weather, or the new car models out that year, or the upcoming elections, or how the Giants would be this year, or ….
Well you get the drift.
I have only listened to the first 10 minutes of it, but this week’s EconTalk involves a guy corrupting Henry George.
Leftists just can’t let people labor for themselves.
The dude is way more credentialed than me, and from what I can tell, my article that I wrote in 20 minutes is better thought out than his book.
I hope the South Florida train is a profitable venture. I super double hope that no tax funds are spent on any of it. I would further posit that the traffic down there might be significantly mitigated had the planners, in their infinite wisdom, not dedicated so much roadway to seldom used restricted pay-express lanes. Also, the sooner the East coast of Florida is depopulated and left to the wildlife and the Miccosukee/Seminole the better.
Apologies if I was a bit surly tonight. I can’t believe I polished off a half bottle of whiskey by myself. Fuckin’ hell. Anyways, I meet my daughter on the way home today. She’s waving, “Hello, Papa!” from halfway down a busy street. Swerving into oncoming traffic. One car veers off to avoid her. I just tell you that you can’t do that. It’s dangerous. Of course she has excuses. “I couldn’t see the car behind me. It was, “I didn’t have enough money for train fare. A friend came in from out of town. There was an earthquake.” Trying to tell your kid that reality doesn’t give a fuck about your excuses must be an age old dilemma for parents.
Realizing you are half way through a bottle was she walking, bicycling or driving? Although it’s nice she was happy to see you.
If you guys drove on the proper side of the road there you wouldn’t have these problems… 😉
It would also help if they opened their eyes fully while driving. You can’t tell me that they can see as much all squinty-eyed as we can. Exhibit A is my wife marrying me. If she could see clearly, no way she would have done that.
She was on her little, pink bike. She’s always happy to see me. Still… Honey, you can’t swerve into traffic.
“look before you cross the road” seems pretty simple too. And yet my kids will frequently sprint across a parking lot or street mere seconds after hearing that without so much as a glance.
It is a wonder any of us live long enough to breed.
‘No, I’m not over it’: Hillary Clinton jabs Trump, shows off Russian hat at Yale Class Day
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/20/no-im-not-over-it-hillary-clinton-jabs-trump-shows-off-russian-hat-at-yale-class-day.html
***
Early in her address to graduating Yale students at Sunday’s Class Day, Hillary Clinton reached behind the lectern, pulled out a traditional Russian ushanka hat, and held it aloft.
“I mean, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” she said as the audience laughed and applauded.
The Russian hat gag, a nod to the student tradition of wearing extravagant headgear during Class Day, set the tone for a wide-ranging speech in which Clinton alternately cracked jokes about her loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and warned Yale’s Class of 2018 that “we are living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy.”
***
[Jay Sherman voice]
Oh, will you *shut* *up*?
“we are living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy.”
We certainly are, Hillary. You’ve played a huge role in that
Spoken by one of the people that is currently trying to overthrow the results of a free and fair election with bogus narratives.
And of course the Hillary campaign id the source of the phony Russian dossier that was used as a pretext to spy on Trump. It’s all projection, whatever they accuse you of, they are actually doing 10 times over.
I think history is going to have a blast with her. This kind of stuff will be a masterclass in how not to react to losing.
If the history is still being written by proggie professors, then she will be portrayed as a martyr who was robbed by sexism and Trump getting away with colluding with the Russians to steal the election.
Unless the people writing history books have stopped being a bunch of internationals socialists, I don’t think they’re going to come down hard on her.
We’re not talking the next ten or fifty years. We mean a thousand or so years from now when future generations look at the ruins of this civilization the way we look at the political machinations of Romans.
Exactly. Some day when lunacy has receded a bit. I don’t expect to be around.
Unless the U.S. collapses in the next 20 years*, I imagine the only Presidents of note to historians 1000 years from now will be Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.
* = And even then, who knows? Nobody remembers the last dozen or so (Western) Roman emperors.
The last Western Roman Emperor was named Romulus. I remember it because of the symmetry with one of the mythic founders.
TBH, the US collapsing in the next 20 years is possible. Everybody is laden with debt, but once they figure out who the biggest debtor in world history is, the worm could turn fast.
Nixon will be on there, too, as our Nero, undeservedly so IMHO. Kennedy, too. But I agree they’ll be lesser figures known mostly by history buffs and experts in the field.
I’m a big believer in Long Cycle Theory, so I think the likely trajectory is a retrenchment of American power overseas as our economy weakens and other regional actors fill the void. So, by say 2070, maybe China becomes the new hegemon while the US remains a regional power, but more in the vein of the UK.
We dont have a goddamned democracy. We have a republic.
A democratic republic, but a republic nonetheless.
If we can keep it, that is.
“Thomas Groleau, a Carthage College management professor, wondered if the Kenosha market is oversaturated with grocery stores, or if “supermarket chains are choosing not to be in areas that are considered bad neighborhoods.”
lol.
On my last vacation I picked up a paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It must have been a good 25-30 years since I last read it. I remembered it being very funny and interesting.
Revisiting it was a mistake. The humor isn’t that good and it just drags… to the point where I got 2/3rds done and decided to switch to something else.
Revisiting old favorites is usually a mistake. Reality never lives up to nostalgia.
Yeah… I tried to reread the Highhiker’s series a while back as well. Douglas Adams (for all the positives) was not a skilled writer, nor were the books well edited. Terry Pratchett was superior in every way.
I read the Dirk Gently books recently and was underwhelmed. I’ve since lost any desire to revisit the Hitchiker’s series. Like Neph says, Pratchett is far and away a superior author, with all due respect to Adams.
You guys may be being a little to harsh on Adams. I loved the series 30 years ago and that is enough. Times change and people do, too. The best we can hope for is someone to entertain us at any moment.
I wouldn’t say I’m being harsh, when I was younger I went through everything that Adams had ever written. I have a first edition signed copy of Neal Gaiman’s book Don’t Panic. If my nephews haven’t heard of the H2G2 series by the time they’re hitting their teens, they’ll be getting a copy of the book as a gift from me.
Revisiting the series on the other hand… you can see that Adams somehow managed to nail down a brilliant idea, but struggled with how to convey it.
You’re right that it isn’t for an older person. I appreciated it at the time just like I appreciated The Foundation Trilogy at the time. We get old, older? and stuff that was killer back in the day is pure cringe worthy today. I’m just trying to be thankful for all the fish he gave us. It’s not like we were reading Marx.
Ugh, yes. I reread the Foundation trilogy a couple of years ago. Just downright awful. I used to be the biggest Asimov fan when I was a kid.
Two words. Thomas Covenant. That was some awful shit that I ate up.
I remember the book covers but I never started those.
I was a voracious reader when I was younger; I’m afraid much of what I consumed didn’t age well (I’m looking at you, Piers Anthony).
I never read any of his silly Xanth stuff but I did enjoy the Adept series (mixed sci-fi and fantasy). But his best book IMHO was written before any of that. Check out “Macroscope” if you haven’t read it.
I tore through the available ones when I was a tween to early teen, but I was was an appropriate age for them, not sure I’d appreciate them now. I see he’s since published about a bazillion more of them since I dropped them (I made it to book 8, I think – it looks like #43 is in progress).
As did I – I’m wondering if they held up. I can still recall the storyline quite clearly.
I did not read Macrosope, though I have read others of his early work, like Chthon – very 70’s vibe to those.
I never read the Thomas Covenant crap. I tried a couple of times to get started on it, never got more than 5 or 6 chapters in and every page I read the only thought I had was “this has to get better at some point doesn’t it?”
Ditto
Oh, I don’t mean that Adams wasn’t a good author or that I didn’t get any enjoyment out of the Hitchhiker series, I’m just saying that for me his stuff doesn’t stand the test of time as well as Pratchett’s Discworld series. Although I do maintain that the Dirk stories didn’t do anything for me. I was expecting a lot more just from my memories of Hitchhiker’s, which might not have been fair.
You’re being more than fair. Time machine never works. I was listening to Baker Street today and the only joy I got from it is that I remembered getting joy from it. Nostalgia is nasty little wench. Sometimes have a good memory of having a good memory can get you through the day. Going a little Agile on you guys, sorry.
It is more than age… Hitchhiker’s Guide was a radio show. And a farcical one at that. It definitely bears the marks of that heritage when translated to novel form.
I just remembered that I bought my niece Hitchhiker’s Guide a few years ago for her birthday, she never even said if she read it much less liked it.
I read it to my son. He loved it.
‘No, I’m not over it’: Hillary Clinton
Shocked. Shocked, I say.
Because she’s a loser, mentally ill and part retarded.
Part?
There is no way she weighs less than a duck.
She’s a toxic person. The only people that like her are people that have never actually spent more than 2 minutes with her.
So question to the admins: for a post is there a hard limit to number of pictures / size of pictures? I am thinking of a post with more pictures than usual and don’t want to take to much space …
Submit away. We’ll let you know if there are any problems.
Now I have a vision of Hillary Clinton on her deathbed, surrounded by her closest associates (the door has been barricaded to keep Bill at bay), wheezing her final words.
“Trump….. ggglble.”
Is that before or after the symbiote crawls out of her mouth, or other orifice to find a new host?
Slithers out of the tip of the pseudo-penis.
Clinton alternately cracked jokes about her loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and warned Yale’s Class of 2018 that “we are living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy.”
I can’t say I vehemently disagree with that, but my reasons are probably different than hers. And I’d be throwing a different cohort of actors into the dungeon.
Speaking of revisiting old favorites… I watched The Duellists again (second time in about ten days). What an excellent movie.
PSA: it’s currently available on Amazon Prime. Watch it.
Harvey Keitel deserves all the attention De Niro and Pacino received combined.
I seem to recall a rather intense debate back in the 90s (when I was visiting film repertoires) about whether Keitel was a good or bad actor. It’s when I realized people will debate anything. Even Velveeta versus Kraft cheese.
One of my favorites – well-done considering the small budget. Also Keith Carradine looks remarkably like my dad, 1970s era.
Also, on the topic of movies: If you enjoy what I shall describe as “Limey gangster clusterfuck movies” as much as I do, watch In the Blood, also on Prime.
Thanks, while not really familiar with the genre, I love The Long Good Friday so I’ll check it out.
Pay attention to the soundtrack in Long Good Friday. Excellent. https://youtu.be/PAXxYKave6o
Harvey Keitel deserves all the attention De Niro and Pacino received combined.
Yes- I need to watch The Bad Lieutenant again.
Pacino always plays himself. DeNiro, not quite as much. I haven’t seen Keitel in enough movies to know that, but I loved him in The Piano.
So far, Brightline is going pretty well, except that something like 5 people have died since January because people are too dumb for trains to exist.
I’m actually looking forward to it expanding up to Orlando.
It happens. Light rail and surface streets == autodarwinator.
We do have a lot of people who wander in front of trains down here.
When I first moved into this neighborhood I was late to work three times in the first 6 months because police had shut down my main rout to I-95… because a pedestrian had walked in front of a train each time.
It was surreal… after the second one my wife asked if I had heard about the guy getting hit by the train. I said, “yeah, that was right up the street a few weeks ago…” “No”, she said, “this morning…”
Jeez. It isn’t like they are stealthy.
You’d be surprised how many times they sneak up on joggers and drunks.
Well, I once spent 2.5 hours stuck on the DC to BWI commuter train because someone dumped a corpse onto the train tracks.
Yeah, nearby city has the same thing. And there’s a push from residents and city planners who haven’t wasted enough money to make the area a train horn free quiet zone. The requirements for a horn free zone are mostly about trying to keep cars from going around the gates and do little to stop people from doing so.
The requirements for a horn free zone are mostly about trying to keep cars from going around the gates
Claymores, or flamethrowers?
Speaking of “don’t go away mad, just go away” that BOOOOOSH guy deserves a hearty golf clap for his disappearing act after he turned in his keys in 2009.
I remember Sidd Finch. I read that story twice, and almost got sucked in. Then I looked at the date on the issue.
Grocery stores usually operate at a extremely small profit margin to begin with like 2% give or take. So every $2 stolen equals $100 in sales lost. That’s a huge reason why the inner city groceries can’t make any money. Shoplifting.
For stating the obvious – points at JB and howls racist!
There’s 3 or 4 undercover shoplifting dudes at the grocery store where I work, and they catch a bunch of shoplifters. And I live in a good neighborhood
“Undercover shoplifiting prevention guys” that should read
The local written comments on that story confirm shoplifting was a huge problem.
Shrinkage isn’t only caused by purported customers, either.
Convicted murderer Don Blankenship, foiled in his initial attempt to make sure Manchin is re-elected in West Virginia, will run as a third party candidate in November, guaranteeing that Manchin will be re-elected.
The GOP really does want to be the minority party in Congress.
I don’t think you can blame the GOP for that one.
What a fucking asshole, running as a spoiler to get back at those who voted against him for the nomination. Whether Manchin wins or loses, moves like this prove those who voted against this prick were right.
Makes me think he will get a libertarian-size portion of the vote if he really runs.
Convicted murderer Don Blankenship
Hyperbole, much? The guy is a grade-A asshole and his actions indirectly contributed to the deaths of the miners, but he’s not a murderer.
El Salvadoran rapist murderers are unique snowflakes worthy of our respect, but NRA members are terrorists. What a time to be alive.
It’s weird what lefties choose to get ecumenical about. Is everyone taking stupid pills? You’re opposed to Trump, and this is how you express it, splitting hairs about the nature of humanity and whether narco-terrorists qualify? Seriously?
Did someone at MSNBC think, Hey, that Sarah Sanders, she seems like she has a tough job. Let’s do it for her. Let’s make Trump look like the sane one in the most spectacularly insane stunt imaginable. Let’s stick up for gang members who use rape and beheadings as intimidation. That’s the ticket.
That is just one of total batshit crazy hairsplitting things they’ve done this week. The last one I saw was that Jordan Perterson wants forced marriages. Crazy, ain’t it.
And people think they can’t be trusted! Trump lies about the most innocuous things in the most blatant fashion, and the media handed him their beer. “No, no, seriously though, watch this.”
Trump didn’t even put out a mouse trap this time. He telegraphed the most innocuous sentiment on earth: people who rape and behead are pretty bad. And the leftist media, they saw that wholly uncontroversial statement, they saw no mouse trap in which to stick their noses, so they went out and armed a bear trap and stuck their heads in it instead. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!?
“Trump lies about the most innocuous things”
Exactly. Trump is a self promoter and a Class A bullshitter. We’ve known that for 40 years… “I’ve got the best hotels”… “Fantastic gold courses, some say the world’s best”… “My mother was one of the great people of the world, perhaps the greatest”… he also generalizes a lot.
But he’s not a pathological liar, like many politicians. He doesn’t blatantly make shit up like Hillary and the “sniper fire” in Bosnia, or that the Benghazi attacks were in response to a YouTube video.
I don’t know, the inaguration attendance claims are pretty close to the same area as the sniper fire lie Hillary told. Maybe not on the same street but certainly in the same neighborhood
That was the one that showed me the effectiveness of Trump’s baiting of the DemOps. He throws out this claim (somewhat ambiguous, as I recall, as to in-person v watched on TV/the intertubes), and we spend days talking about how big the attendance was and how the DemOps routinely exaggerate attendance at events.
On balance, I think he won those news cycles with everyone not already irretrievably opposed to him.
Also spy or informant…
Yeah, Cyto broke that one down pretty succinctly a day or so ago. When you go to the dictionary, you’ve lost the argument.
And yet no one seems to even notice this stuff. I think I’m more annoyed by the willful ignorance than the people who are refusing to accept the results of the election.
There is no way that the Washington Post shouldn’t be all over the story of “Washington insiders conspire to undermine newly inaugurated President”. Or “Agency admits spying on opposing presidential campaign”. Those should have been the bombshells, not “Trump tweets out crazy claim that his wires were tapped”.
Its pretty simple. The DemOp claim is that he wasn’t spying, he was “investigating”. The difference is pretty easy to spot. An investigator is above board, and a spy is secret. He was secret, ergo . . . .
I agree with cyto – this is easily the biggest scandal in my lifetime, dwarfing the shit out of Watergate, Iran-Contra, even Obama sending pallets of cash to the mullahs. And the DemOp media ignores it until they can’t, and then runs interference for the malefactors.
“Animals” isn’t strong enough for the average MS-13 member. At least animals aren’t aware of right and wrong.
Nancy fucking Pelosi standing on her soap box to deliver a message worth of Martin Luther King on the spark of divinity in all people. Okay, hon, let’s set aside the abortionist jokes, those pretty much write themselves. We’re going to discuss the dividing line between animals and humans when it comes to MS13 members? That’s the hill you want to die on? You staked out that death valley of a hill to take your stand? Am I crazy? Am *I* taking stupid pills? This is lunacy, right? This is Todd Akin level of foot-in-mouth stupid.
The people protesting this language don’t have to deal with them, if they did they’d be whistling a different tune. From what I’ve seen though, everyone but the propagandists and the crazed true believers know the narrative the MSM et al were pushing is nonsense.
I don’t get it outside of the reflexive urge to do whatever the opposite of what Trump does. And, as you said, just to be absolutely clear, Nancy Pelosi is advocating for MS-13 as God’s children, just like the rest of us, while claiming that NRA members are murderers and terrorists. Lest there be any confusion, the Dem platform appears to be that members of MS-13 are victims of circumstance and redeemable, while Trump voters are “deplorable”. This is why I take some exception to the old Scarborough refrain of, “Both parties are equally wrong.” The Republicans suck, but there are Republicans who at least advocate for positions that are liberty-friendly, and the default position is closer to what a libertarian or a classical liberal would want. The Democrats don’t even give you that much.
^ +1
This is why I take some exception to the old Scarborough refrain of, “Both parties are equally wrong.”
I think we left that behind during the Chicago machine-style weaponization of the Deep State by Obama. One party is actively trying to destroy our Constitutional government, while the other is content to let it wither on the vine. Not the same.
RE: Straff’s comment upthread about why school shootings didn’t seem to happen with such regularity 50ish years ago. (sorry for the length, not trying to Schultz it)
This is a complicated question. Many have pointed out that although school shooting seemed less common (notice use of the weasel word “seemed” because I don’t have any hard data that they weren’t, perhaps they were just less publicized), the crime rate was significantly higher before beginning a precipitous drop in the 90s that has continued to this day. Again absent any data and just spitballing my pop-psychology I can come up with 2 reasons why I think this is a phenomenon:
1. As people have stated it’s the media notoriety/slow motion riot effect. Columbine “normalized” this sort of crime as “acceptable” for angry teenage loners. It’s kind of become a game to see how big a body count you can get and how much media attention you can get. You’re pubescent, hormonal, depressed and lack insight. Your brain hasn’t fully developed the understanding of consequences of actions and you have decided there is no way out. Most teenagers have feelings like this from time-to-time, but they are fleeting. Some tiny percentage take it to the extreme and try to negate their feelings of worthlessness by going out with as big a bang as possible. Even negative attention is attention right? Since the school shooting paradigm is de-facto culturally accepted (endless media coverage, constant “national conversations” about it, plenty of examples in recent history), you decide to go that route.
2. I’m not much a culture warrior; I don’t have particularly strong feelings about how people should live and I certainly don’t believe in bureaucratically enforced norms. HOWEVER, as I’ve pointed out many times on other posts, based on past performance, traditional bourgeois 2-parent households seem to be the most effective arrangement. Unfortunately, making this arrangement work requires a modicum of personal restraint and delay of gratification, along with tolerance of what has now been labeled “repressive norms”. Instant gratification (particularly sexual) has become the summum bonum of existence. Couple this with welfare, family law and other bureaucratically maintained dysfunction generators and what you do have is a historic amount of family breakdown.
These two factors are the biggest things I see that changed in our culture since then. Unfortunately, I don’t see going back from either of them. Libertarians advocate maximum freedom, but only coupled with maximum personal responsibility. Modern life has delivered the first, but deemphasized the second to the point of irrelevance.
As usual progs latch on the most simple minded solution; the tool is to blame. Since it also aligns with their goal of maximum control over the populace it’s no wonder that disarmament is their war cry.
It’s got to be a little seductive when you see the classmates of a school shooter given unlimited air time to discuss him. If you wanted to inspire more school shooters you could hardly do better than celebritizing shooters and their victims.
Q on cue.
Thanks. Curious as to why you didn’t mention the death of religion and the dangers that Nietzsche mentions in his famously misinterpreted statement that “God is dead”. Would you not put some responsibility on the atheists that killed god and yet failed to replace him with anything else? *Not a believer.
The atheists didn’t do it, the progressive movement did. And they replaced God with the state.
Commies killed God.
That’s the point, T. People are going to replace it with something, so you better give them something real. Nietzsche thought he could replace god with art. I don’t know the answer. Personally, I replace god with beer.
I don’t know that there is a suitable replacement. From an ethics standpoint, the whole point of having a deity is to elevate certain truths above the realm of human debate. Cultural relativism tells us that if a society “needs to” sacrifice a virgin every month in order to maintain harmony, then that’s ok. We’d like to say that human sacrifice is always wrong, no matter the context; however, postmodern ethical frameworks don’t allow us to do so.
As soon as you have an outside force (invented or not) that says “You can’t do this because I said so and my word is law” then you can form a bedrock foundation upon which a set of absolute ethical principles can be built
You can see this order being chipped away before our eyes. Sexual ethics have largely been completely replaced with relativism (everything is permitted) and right to life ethics are in the process of being eroded (first with abortion, now we’ve moved onto voluntary euthanasia, UK is already experimenting with involuntary euthanasia… you can see where this leads).
Let’s create a system where only assholes believe in God. At least keep them in line for a bit.
We could reinstitute tribal law of the jungle and anyone showing disturbing behavior is killed off by other members of the tribe before he can do anything crazy. It’s probably effective if not a bit brutal.
anyone showing disturbing behavior is killed off by other members of the tribe
“Taxation is theft!” *BLAM!*
I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson’s “12 rules” book, and there’s a bit that stands out about basically valuing yourself enough to behave responsibly and make decisions with positive, constructive long-term effects. He refers to it as “Act[ing] as if you’re someone who you’re responsible to take care of,” or something like that, the idea being that people make better choices for people (or pets) in their care than they do for themselves, because they see themselves as worthless. So instead of doing what’s best for themselves they do what feels best in the short-term. I wonder if there’s something there.
I think if there’s a common thread among mass shooters, excluding narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, I would say it’s some combination of a lack of self-esteem, an abdication of personal responsibility, and externalizing shame. That little shit in Texas allegedly shot up the school because a girl wouldn’t go out with him or something. So rather than be a man about it and accept that she wasn’t interested, he decided to blame everyone but himself and “take revenge”, as if she owed it to him to salve his poor feelings. And then the media and everyone around the situation gives him exactly what he wants by treating him with gravity and respect, instead of repeatedly shaming him for being a coward and a weakling as they ought to do.
The push for “Self-Esteem” boosting measures in schools are also actually counterproductive, because true self-esteem comes from having accomplished something. Never having to actually win and knowing the praise is hollow eats away what vestiges of worth and esteem there are.
Self-esteem isn’t being told you’re a special snowflake, self-esteem is understanding that you’re the only person in control of how you handle the situations life presents you with, and you can choose to handle them with strength and resolve, or you can choose to resign yourself to failure. Just as bravery isn’t the absence of fear but rather the determination to persevere despite fear, success isn’t about never failing, it’s about resilience in the face of failure. Kids aren’t allowed to fail anymore, to their detriment.
As an old guy told me once when I was bitching about how bad my life was, “mebbe you don’t have any self-esteem because you haven’t done anything esteem-able in a while.” I owe a lot to a couple honest old Dutch uncles who didn’t pat my ass and tell me I was a good kid at heart.
“because they see themselves as worthless.”
You get treated as worthless and that is what you’ll believe. It’s why identity politics is so dangerous. They’re telling a whole generation of young, white men that they’re the problem. Yeah, let’s relive the 20th century.
Do we really know this? To date all I have seen is the allegation from the girls mother that it was the reason. I mean I am sure it at the very least influenced his choice of targets but there seems to be more to it that just that
Per #1 above – historically the fringe students would have dropped-out. Until relatively recently, many students dropped-out after 8th grade, and significant percentages dropped-out by sixteen. The current system pushes everyone through to 18 (or beyond) at all costs.
Another good observation. There are a many factors invilved, but I am intestested in the overall psychology/zeitgeist thingy going on. American can culture is as inscrutable as any out there. You guys freak me out and I lived there for 25 years.
Today, in Vaporware
On Saturday night Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a few announcements via Twitter about new options for the Tesla Model 3. Specifically, the CEO said that in July the Model 3 would be available with options for a dual-motor and all-wheel drive. On a normal Model 3, that addition will come at a cost of $5,000.
Musk also announced a “performance” Model 3, which will also have dual-motor, all-wheel drive. That model will cost $78,000. What you get for all that extra cash will be the ability to go 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds, with 155 mph top speed and at range of 310 miles. “Cost of all options, wheels, paint, etc is included (apart from Autopilot),” Musk tweeted.
“Hey, look over there!”
Or I could just go buy a new Porsche Cayman on pocket the extra 20K.
What a delusional fucktard.
Delusional…. except they’ve already sold out their next several years of production.
Oh, and if you want a cayman that is close to to that 0-60 time you’ll need to fork out for the GTS. So closer to 90k. Also, still not as quick off the line.
Still, I’ll take the Porche… for everything else that it does better.
There is more to life than 0-60.
*Points, screeches*
C’mon, man. I put a supercharger on an FJ Cruiser. I will never accept the idea that more horses aren’t better than fewer.
Meh – I’ve owned a few fast – in a straight-line – cars but these days I love ripping through a corner / curve at a speed that leaves yer average car (and especially a truck/SUV) in trouble.
I hear ya. Straight-line speed is less interesting to me than speed and stability. My dream car. Only a lottery ticket away from living in my garage! I’ll also need the lottery ticket to expand my garage, but that’s a different issue.
And now for something lighter.
https://imgur.com/a/V7Yrt92
More top quality pussy.
Aw. I was expecting David Hogg.
That would be clearly bottom shelf.
This is a complicated question.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’ll be none of that. This is America, Mister, and we demand simple answers.
Your retarded-ass expansion rules for this go around have created a team that never would have happened on its own, at the expense of the rosters other teams took years to build.
Hockey has the most parity of any sport, even with the new team. If there’s anyone to ‘blame’, it’s Pittsburgh for letting MAF go. Or Columbus with Karlsson. Or Minne with Haula/Tuch.
Nah, I think it’s cool as hell. A bunch of guys not protected, other teams bribed to protect certain players. The Army GM played it well.
Florida. Marchessault.
And didn’t Neal have a bad rep for being selfish?
Now he’s a captain.
I know someone who knows Gallant. According to him, he’s an enlightened coach who knows how to handle players. He doesn’t let ‘systems’ drive his team.
/Looks straight at Babcock. He’s fucking around with Matthews and that’s not good.
In a vacuum it might be cool, but we don’t live in a vacuum, we’re living in a world in which a team that shouldn’t even exist has “fans” that are going to yuck it up about playing for a Cup when they’ve never had to experience any hardship whatsoever. Fuck those people. Go Bolts/Caps.
This occurred to me, a while ago. Most of what gets proposed as a solution to school shootings is like deciding you should repaint your car after your house has been broken into, because that will keep people from breaking into your house.
And then dragging a roller over your windshield, because if you’re going to do something stupid you may as well be incompetent, too.
I like ‘you decide to kill the pig because the fox ate the chicken’.
On the upside, though, at least you get bacon that way.
I’ve been blaming bullying for the school shootings, too.
Government bullies people into compulsory education, which creates toxic environments for some people. Government reaps what it sows.
Exactly. You introduce energy into a closed system and you will get a reaction.
I’d blame more how bullying is handled. Back in the day, someone picked on you, you either took it or popped one back. Usually the latter. It also got sorted in elementary or middle school. Now it’s “bullies are mean. don’t be a bully” PSAs and zero tolerance for normal childish behavior.
King Goat
So how are you people even able to look at the news these days? It always was tiresome, but now I get AIDS every time I try to read some tedious story about some tedious culture war fight. Maybe you are all tedious too?
I avoid it as much as possible. I spent the weekend in Harper’s Ferry field-testing a pop-up camper and drinking Maker’s. Nobody mentioned anything about politics or any news other than whether and how much it was going to rain. Beautiful.
Culture war is bullshit.
However, I try to keep abreast of 2A stuff as much as possible not only because I have a personal stake in it, but also because I think it’s the ultimate canary in the coal mine when it comes to the direction of our society.
I agree – culture war is bullshit. Problem is, the enemies of liberty do not hesitate to initiate to wage it in pursuit of their ends. They infiltrated academia, city halls, newsrooms because they fought for it.
You may not be interested in Kulturkampf, but Kulturkampf is interested in you.
I avoid it. I’m very busy and while I feel I should and be a Good Little Prepper, I really don’t have time to pay attention.
I think the SJWs simply have too much time on their hands. Where do they get their money? How do they pay their bills? Why aren’t they making a living or feeding the homeless?
“Where do they get their money? How do they pay their bills?”
Mommy and Daddy and/or Soros money being laundered through activist groups.
“Why aren’t they making a living or feeding the homeless?”
That would require actual effort. Much easier to get your sweet moral superiority and warm fuzzies from virtue signaling, attending pointless rallies and being a keyboard warrior.
Speaking of never apologizing. Jason Kenney isn’t apologizing.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4213451/jason-kenney-comments-on-justin-trudeau-trans-mountain-pipeline-trust-fund-millionaire/
“I know Justin. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. This guy is an empty trust-fund millionaire who has the political depth of a finger bowl,” he is quoted as saying.”
You can’t apologize when it’s true.
So…….what the hell is the “Office of Net Assessment”, and why did it pay Stefan Halper $400K?
What, you think you just get to drop a net on someone and nobody’s going to assess it? No, no, man. That’s not how it works. Nets get assessed like anything else.
Jacqueline Newmyer, the president of a company called the Long Term Strategy Group, has over the last 10 years received numerous Defense Department contracts from a secretive think tank called Office of Net Assessment.
We’re in Terry Gilliam territory here.
Stupid pills. Everyone is hooked on stupid pills.
Thanks. Reminds me of Candlemass.
Did you see/hear about this ruckus/possible shitshow/incredible reissues if NWN does the LPs?
That was directed at Warty.
I didn’t see it. But now I’m going to go burn a church to celebrate.
As people have stated it’s the media notoriety/slow motion riot effect. Columbine “normalized” this sort of crime as “acceptable” for angry teenage loners. It’s kind of become a game to see how big a body count you can get and how much media attention you can get. You’re pubescent, hormonal, depressed and lack insight.
I guess I’m at a disadvantage, being not-crazy and whatnot (well, maybe, under certain definitions of crazy). I was taught that problems demand solutions. I’m not sure how shooting a bunch of people, and then yourself, is perceived to be a “solution” to your teenage angst, so I’ll take another whack at my dead hobbyhorse of victim culture.
As I see it, modern victim culture is not about finding solutions, or even barely tolerable workarounds. The goal of the social justice warrior is to identify a crime against humanity, and then to find a way to marinate oneself in that injustice while loudly vilifying one’s oppressors. That’s why, “Just go find somebody else to bake your goddam cake” is an insult and additionally insufferable.
It used to be, as I recall, common knowledge that life gets better as you grow older. High school is not as good as it gets.
I read a great article about school shootings a few months ago. The author talked about what it takes to push someone over the edge and into violent acts.
She referred to mobs and how riots starts. In general people behave themselves. At some point, someone gets really wound up and becomes the “first” person to throw a rock through a store window. It then becomes socially easier for the 2nd person to throw a rock through a store window. It is then socially easier for the 3rd person to throw a rock. Eventually, it becomes really easy for the 30th person to join it.
With school shootings, Columbine and some the other early shootings, were rare because they were the early shootings. After another 20 years of shootings and lots and lots of media coverage, it has become much, much easier for these guys to become the 20th or 30th mass shooter.
I’m sure that’s a big part of it. Monkey see, monkey do.
She profiled one young autistic dude that planned out a huge school shooting (but never went through with it). He knew all the prior shooters and had memorized their technique and stats. He was a “fan” who worshiped the earlier shooters like many young men follow sports. She considered mass media sensationalizing these events as a major contributors to future events.
I think you are onto something, P. Modern victim culture celebrates victimhood, so actually resolving what makes you a victim is counterproductive. You are rewarded for always being a victim, not for getting past it.
The response to victimhood is to attack your “oppressors”. So, if you are a loser/outsider kid, you are now an empowered victim who has been trained to attack his oppressors. Shooting up the school where you were a victim is pretty much a straight-line reaction, especially with the extra coating of “I can respond with violence to speech that victimizes me” that came on-line during the last election.
As an aside, Mrs. Dean was talking about the Santa Fe shooting and wondering why these have gotten so much more common. I told her they really hadn’t, not as a rate, but it only seemed that way because of the publicity around them. She was incredulous until I Binged up the data and showed her.
But the number of teachers sleeping with their students has gone up for sure. It’s like every other day. I’d be pretty pissed off if all my classmates were gettined to nail the hot teacher.
That’s the big lie the anti-gun side is spreading. There isn’t an epidemic of mass shootings, there’s an epidemic of media coverage of mass shootings. If my wife and I get in one argument a month and then I talk about it every day for the other 29 days, it’s going to seem like we’re constantly fighting.
Can you link to the data?
I think it was this one.
Glucose deficient link. Try again.
America’s most famous CP-USA voter seems a bit worried, doesn’t he?
What a shitstain.
Lol.
I remember when we used to say shit like (thanks to a shithead left-wing high school teacher now that I look back), ‘America is a fascist country cloaked in a democracy’. Of course, this was during the Reagan years when it was common for the media to make fun of him and Quayle. Then they settled down and started up again with Dubya….then went back to sleep under Obama and now again….fascism.
What a bunch of shitstains for real.
I grew up modestly poor in a smallish city just like this one where all the decent shopping was in the burbs. The way it works is you have to have a car to do anything. It doesn’t matter what a piece of shit it is or how often it breaks down or what else you have to sacrifice to get one and keep it. And at that point you’re going to drive to suburbia to get your groceries just like everyone else.
In a lot of major cities you have to shop at the grocery story in the suburbs so you don’t have to bring your own bag.
This sums up the experience of probably 80-90% of people in the US. There are very few places where you can get away with not having a car (NYC, Chicago, SF, maybe Boston, maybe DC). Everywhere else, not having a car makes your life very small.
Definitely Boston – I’ve technically never owned a car though one came with the now-wife. It sits in the driveway (itself a rarity) ~ 6 days a week.
There’s a supermarket 300 yards away, another one a 10 minute walk away, a large upscale market 10 minutes in the other direction and a vast number of options once you hop on the T.
As you say, this is one of the few places where that’s an option. I would 100% need a car anywhere else I can think of (your list aside).
And even in those metropolitan areas it is only a small fraction of “the city” where one can get away without having a car
Residents of those areas without access to a car now have to rely on public transportation to travel to stores
Wait, now that’s a bad thing? I thought being carless and using public transportation all the time was what these people were pushing for.
Of course it is. It’s why Richmond VA is now actively trying to make traffic miserable by taking lanes away from major streets to create bus-only lanes for the new
boondogglerapid transit bus service and eliminating street parking for bike lanes in some areas.Every Richmond mayor needs to have his BIG GIANT PROJECT to enrich his cronies and supporters.
Meanwhile in Henrico County, little miss proggy fat bitch who has been in office for less than a year in is not going to grace the Board of Supervisors with her prescence again, after they shut down her MOAR MONEYZ FOR TEACHEWRZ budget plan.
http://www.richmond.com/news/local/henrico/lynch-won-t-run-for-re-election-in-henrico-says/article_322addd2-0ba8-5227-8c92-01aa3537ee68.html
In my ‘hood that’s filled by taxis, in some cases by taxi drivers just doing favors for relatives or friends of the family.
I see in today’s newspaper that the local GOP nominee for Congress has been granted special status by the RNC, which will include campaign money, aides, etc.
What is this special target program known as? Why, the Stupid Party calls it “Young Guns!” Not “Tomorrow’s Leaders” or “America’s Young Hopes.” nope, let’s associate the candidates with the kids who are shooting up their school.
1776 is a problematic year or something
https://twitter.com/nytdavidbrooks/status/998238271439278082
David Brooks cites the Mises Institute when discussing how school shootings have actually declined since the 90’s. Brooks is either about to be “unpersoned” or the Mises Institute has gone cosmo.
“War of Northern Aggression” gets into public parlance in 3… 2… 1…
YES! It’s already begun! Some of the commentators are already pointing out that the Mises Institute was founded by Ron Paul (woah- if true) or something. And that’s totes problematic or something for reasons. Go down the rabbit hole my pretties!
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Replying to @nytdavidbrooks @WestWingReport
.@nytdavidbrooks Have you done your homework on the political agenda of the Mises Institute? Are you sure you are promoting unbiased sources?
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@sbtan
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Exactly. One of its founders is Ron Paul and it is self-described as “non-PC”. ? I’ve marked the article read through when I have time to consider it, but I’m awfully skeptical of its source.
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el oh el. I don’t know what Warty’s complaining about, you can’t pay for entertainment like this.
http://business.time.com/2009/01/02/tyler-cowen-statist-anti-rothbardian-agent-of-the-kochtopus/
The last time someone asked “What is the Mises Institute” they shit themselves after realizing that the Koch groups are the milquetoast variety.
This was from a few years back and this poor writer was forced to write an article about Tyler Cowen and slipped down the rabbit hole.
Sometimes I wonder if some of the people at the Mises Institute (like Hoppe, for example) just exist to shock people into accepting Milton Freidman as the moderate alternative.
God, could Buckley turn a phrase. What a magnificent put down.
It’s not until people encounter the Mises Institute that they realize some libertarians are actually serious.
“These are my principles. If you don’t like them,
I have othersfuck off, slaver.”And Bill Weld is the LP frontrunner? 2018 is an embarrassment of lulz. We live in the lulziest of all possible worlds. I don’t know how anyone can be anything other than smiling broadly all day, every day. It’s a cornucopia of keks.
Yes, Buckley was fine at his craft, but that Rothbard obituary that he wrote was a lot of sour grapes. He was still upset that Rothbard left National Review at the very beginning and then went on to ridicule their hawkish foreign policy.
Are you sure you are promoting unbiased sources?
It would be a pretty major change if Brooks were to stop promoting unbiased sources, so . . . .
It would blow that commenters mind to discover that facts remain facts even when produced by a biased source
The Mises Institute goes cosmo and I’ll transition myself.
“How I learned to stop worrying and love State approved liberty”
-unfortunately, i think the data being cited is bullshit.
the studies cited are basically pulling an inverse-SPLC and changing definitions and dates to make a claim about a small-sample type event.
reality is that between 2015-now there have been nearly twice the 1990s/2000s decade-average (200 deaths in school shootings in 5 years, vs. average about 100 pr decade)
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564/the-disconnect-between-perceived-danger-in-u-s-schools-and-reality
What about this one?
Another point about the victimology cult: the closest they seem to get to contemplating a solution to their problems is demanding accommodation (which may be reliably construed as unconditional surrender) on the part of everyone who offends them. The notion of active participation in finding common ground is foreign to them.
Just as foreign is the idea that hardship or adversity can ever be the result of anything other than nefarious action on the part of other people.
(((other people)))
Happy Monday!
I got to see George C. Looney take off from Heathrow to Milan on Saturday. Yay?
Nice little Falcon jet, though.
Fascinating write-up in the WSJ Saturday edition on tequila (their magazine insert was a NatGeo thing, a real step up from their usual magazine insert of uber-cosmopolitan fashion freaks). Long section on Clooney’s Tres Amigos tequila company. Short version:
It started when Clooney and a couple of pals did what rich celebrities do, and got a distiller to tweak a recipe to give them a tequila they really liked. After a while, the distiller said that a thousand bottles a year wasn’t “samples”, and they needed to get a license. So they did and founded Tres Amigos. Which I really like, BTW. My second favorite after Casa Noble, and cheaper.
Five or six years later, they sold it for a billion-with-a-b dollars. One of Clooney’s pals is also a resort developer, it turns out, and Clooney’s got a big piece of one of his resorts. Clooney’s a freakin’ billionaire. I had no idea.
0 “launching a beverage brand,and selling it to some big beverage conglomerate” is one of the dumbest-ass ways to get super fucking rich, but it actually isnt’ really that hard.
Paul Mitchelll – of haircare product fame – is the guy who did this with Patron
50 cent – vitamin water
Arizona Ice tea was a couple of goombahs in brooklyn
I honestly don’t think Clooney did it to get rich. I think they just kind of stumbled into having a good tequila brand, leveraged their personal brand-building powers, and hit the jackpot.
The deal was $700mm up front, $300mm if certain targets were hit. Clooney et cie are still involved in “management”. I’m trying to imagine a situation where I have six figures plus in the bank and am at all motivated to work for more money.
I see your “Cowboy Kitteh Riding a Rainbow-Vomiting Shark”-pic….
…and i Raise You
Needs more Yakub
Just dropping by to parent brag that my 14-year old just won a Design a Logo contest for a West Los Angeles non-profit org. The contest was originally just ‘design a logo for our Christmas celebration’ but the organization liked it so much they are going to adopt it. Also a cash prize of 200 bucks!
Woot!!!
Also a cash prize of 200 bucks!
Make him (her) give you 40%, as a life lesson.
Heh, when I started working at a tender age and picked up a paper delivery route, my dad basically sat me down and told me some of that money would go to the household as a means of me contributing (there was really no need for this as my dad was a very successful business owner, but there was a life lesson here), so when all was said and done, I ended up with $5 a week, and the rest went to the household. Being an eager beaver, I found me a better paying job real fast. When all was said and done, I was making $5 a week and the rest went to the household. Being skilled and smart I quickly kept finding jobs that were paying very well, but my pay at the end of the week never went above $5. When I turned 17 I left the house to make it on my own.
I shared this story recently with a few parents that regretted their children still being home mooching off them (full disclosure my son lives with me, but pays rent and buys his own stuff). When prompted for details most admitted they not only let them live there rent free (too many didn’t have a job) and paid for everything else, but most of them also gave these kids money to spend on entertainment. You should have seen the light go off when I pointed out that the kids would be stupid to go out on their own when given such a sweet deal…
Now apply this to all the government fat we give people sitting on their asses…
I guess that’s okay. I had to give 1/3rd of my paycheck to the house. I have a friend whose father presented him with a bill on his 18th birthday. I’m not sure they spoke again after the bill was paid.
That’s a bit extreme on that old man’s part. Didn’t want to create the illusion my dad was not a good man. In fact, he remains one of my heroes, and was an absolutely awesome dad. He just was not one to coddle or protect you when aware that he couldn’t do so forever. He always told us (me and my 2 brothers) his primary function was to prepare us to be decent, well rounded/educated, and productive members of a society that often will be sorely lacking and undeserving.
My father’s lesson with this money thing clearly was that while he loved us dearly, he didn’t want to keep providing for us in perpetuity. I admit that I also am someone unusually driven to want to do everything I could/can on my own: a characteristic I didn’t realize until much later in life was not the norm, but the exception. So for me this was no biggy. Some people might not have appreciated this sort of stuff.
(full disclosure my son lives with me, but pays rent and buys his own stuff).
Well, how will he ever afford to move out when his take-home is only $5 a week?! 😉
Heh heh.. Since he pays rent he keeps most of his money.
I should mention that he has put away some $35K in the last 2 1/2 years, and plans to have something over $70k when he moves out. And yes, he will move out or I will move me out.
Oh, Black Panther signed this? I’m totes on boards now!
What third-world country doesn’t like to be lectured by wealthy, privileged Westerners?
How long does it usually take the plebs to climb the monument at USNA? Because they’ve been at it for a while. Seems like they’re sending too many burly dudes to the top.
I’m yelling at the video “Put the chicks on top!!!!”
(that’s what she said)
On a side note: at what age do dudes get hair on their chests? Because none of these 19-year-olds have any.
I think all the kids shave/wax these days.
For some of us, never
One guy took about 10 shots at it and didn’t make it
I’m I to understand you’re at work watching a bunch of greased up teens writhe about in a big pile?
Waiting for Help Desk to come fix my blue screen of death! So I’m watching this and providing my retired Navy boss updates on the sly
Implicate your boss, smart.