“I am the night… menu at Arby’s. Drive thru service only.”
Before too long, a reporter will become a direct casualty of the Trump era.
With the ever-present caveat that predictions are worthless: an American journalist is going to get murdered as a direct result of our current political climate. Hating reporters, of course, is nothing new. But neither is political assassination. Sometimes when you sense a storm rolling in, you realize that the sunny days you’d been enjoying were actually the exception, rather than the norm.
Here and there and everywhere, explicit violent threats against members of the media are on the rise. Most of these threats are bullshit, trash talk, empty venting by angry people who would never imagine doing anything in real life. But not all. As with all types of threats, some small percentage of them will be backed up by serious intent, and as the frequency of threats grows, so too does the likelihood that one or more of them becomes reality. This is all on top of the normal, latent threat level that accompanies a job in journalism—the sort of danger that accompanies any job that involves frequently and publicly criticizing, exposing, or embarrassing people. The Capital Gazette shootings earlier this year and the murder of TV reporter Alison Parker live on air were both examples of the regular kinds of risks that journalist face: angry, crazy readers or story subjects and a constant opportunity for a maniac to achieve instant publicity for a brutal act. That’s always there. Today, though, we have the whole “enemy of the people” thing. All the maniacs now have a hard-to-resist political motive. And, as always, they have lots of guns. Inevitably, someone will seize on both.
*The last I heard, Hamilton Nolan was still using male pronouns. If this is no longer the case, I apologize.
STEVESMITHLAND is in grave danger!
Where the Pacific Northwest’s “Big One” Is More Likely to Strike
The Pacific Northwest is known for many things—its beer, its music, its mythical large-footed creatures. Most people don’t associate it with earthquakes, but they should. It’s home to the Cascadia megathrust fault that runs 600 miles from Northern California up to Vancouver Island in Canada, spanning several major metropolitan areas including Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
This geologic fault has been relatively quiet in recent memory. There haven’t been many widely felt quakes along the Cascadia megathrust, certainly nothing that would rival a catastrophic event like the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake along the active San Andreas in California. That doesn’t mean it will stay quiet, though. Scientists know it has the potential for large earthquakes—as big as magnitude 9.
Geophysicists have known for over a decade that not all portions of the Cascadia megathrust fault behave the same. The northern and southern sections are much more seismically active than the central section—with frequent small earthquakes and ground deformations that residents don’t often notice. But why do these variations exist and what gives rise to them?
Damn, Scientific American, you a dirty girl…
Man on valiant quest to review all of Fargo’s chicken tenders
John Miller of Moorhead, Minnesota, wants to eat all the chicken strip baskets.
From a pure technical standpoint, they are the cleavage of the chicken.
Miller is the author of the Thrills With JMills blog, where he has thus far reviewed more than 20 chicken strip baskets served around the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area.
“Chicken strips are a universal language,” Miller tells news station WDAY. “I am a man of the people; chicken strips are the food of the people.”
This deep-fried populism carries imbues his reviews. In a recent review of Old Broadway’s chicken strip basket, Mills writes: “For the most part, I enjoy simple pleasures. …That’s what the OB offers. Affordable, solid bar food. The chicken strip basket has simple elements that just taste good. It’s nothing to write home about, but I won’t complain about it.”
His criteria for judging chicken strip baskets are simple and straight-forward: “The aspects of the basket that influence the review are the chicken strips (duh), fries and ranch. Extras such as toast are greatly appreciated, but will not be taken into consideration to maintain a level playing field.”
He’s not afraid to dish out criticism when the strips fall short; of a recent chicken-strip order at Sonic, Mills writes: “It had an acceptable crispinessbut didn’t seem to be that great of quality. They just didn’t taste that good.”
“I WANT MY HILLARY TV!”
(l to r) Dead, 82, Dead, 72, 68, 53, 57
New Murphy Brown will address #MeToo, and the producers address Les Moonves at TCA
In January, when CBS announced that it was reviving Murphy Brown, we noted that the show would be modernizing its investigative journalist action with some bleeding-edge timeliness, as Candice Bergen’s eponymous Murphy Brown would be entering a world of “fake news,” Fox News (called “Wolf Network” in the Murphy-verse), and general attacks on the media. Speaking at a Television Critics Association event today, Murphy Brown executive producer Diane English noted that the revived show would have an episode inspired by #MeToo. “It’s a powerful movement,” English said, adding, “we wanted to do it justice, and the episode title is ‘#MurphyToo.’”
I’m sure that 30 minutes hectoring coming out of Candice Bergen’s 72-year-old face in 4K HD–interspersed with ads for bladder leak underwear and Vagasil–will be warmly embraced by an America hungry for a thoroughly non-erotic scolding.
The best part of Murphy Brown was the secretaries.
Now hit my mother-f’in Theme Music!
Faith Ford would be hot except for the teeth that frighten me.
15 year old me thought she was pretty hot at the time. Then again, at that age all it would take was a JC Penny catalog underwear section to get me going.
Definitely.
STEVE SMITH ALWAYS MEGATHRUST.
Good on ya.
I came here to say that, if nobody had just yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve31XhpaPRU
15-year-old Kansas City girl charged with murder, accused of shooting and killing her parents
“When investigators got a search warrant and looked at Holmes’ phone, they found the web searches, rap lyrics, and a video of Holmes holding a gun and dancing in her bedroom. They also found a hand-drawn stick figure illustration where one labelled “me” was pointing a gun at another labelled “dad”. A third illustration had a stick figure with X’s for eyes and blood around it.”
Well she made that easy for the cops.
I wouldn’t put it past the Heroes in Blue to screw that up.
That literally sounds exactly the way a 15-year-old girl would commit murder.
Daejona M. Holmes faces two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of armed criminal action and tampering with physical evidence. She will be tried as an adult.
Holmes is accused of shooting and killing mom Kinderly Holmes and dad Brian Starr on April 9 at their home in the 5000 block of Belmeade Road.
Court records say that police found Holmes, 37, and Starr, 38, both shot to death inside their home.
the WaPo had a cover story on safe storage laws and homicides by minors over the weekend. on that note, Pelican has a new lineup called “Vault” of affordable* firearms storage boxes…
http://www.pelican.com/us/en/discover/vault-cases/
*affordable for Pelican
Friend of mine has a biometric (fingerprint) locking case. I’m gonna try one out when I get ready to buy. Seems like it would be easier to open in the heat of the moment than trying to enter a combination or use a key.
The only way I would ever have a case for the “ready guns” is if I had kids in the house. If I did, I’d probably opt for the fingerprint case and make sure I could get to the key in a big frickin’ hurry if the fingerprint gizmo wasn’t working.
Growing up, of course, nearly every house had guns, and I doubt many of them were locked up. Zero shootings by children.
^ This ^
I suspect (and in many cases it’s obvious) that accidental kid shootings are caused by curious kids who were never taught gun safety. Rule #1 being; it’s not a fucking toy.
I drill my kids on this all the time. Not just when we’re doing anything related to firearms either – I’ll just randomly ask them “What are the four rules of safe weapons handling? What do you do if you ever find a gun, or someone hands you one?”
An ounce of preparation, etc etc.
My best friend was shot by a BB gun at YMCA camp by his counselor, who didn’t look to see if anyone was down range before pulling the trigger. Needless to say, when we first met (also at Y camp), the gun range instructor used his 3 inch scar to point out that any shenanigans would not be tolerated. I was also taught to not touch any guns at a young age, due to my step grandfather’s large collection, which was up in the attic, and certainly not locked up. Unfortunately, my grandma auctioned them all off shortly after he died, with the sole exception of a shotgun and the Kentucky Long Rifle custom build a client gave him (it’s painted beautifully, more of a work of art than a firearm).
My grandpa always used to say, “the kids that grow up along the river are never the ones that drown.” My four were raised knowing that there were guns in the house, knowing where they were and, when they were old enough, knowing how to handle them safely. No mysteries, no secrets. That’s the key.
My wife’s grandfather kept a bowl of candy with a revolver in it on top of his fridge. As kids, my wife and her cousins would reach for candies and inevitably touch the revolver every time, but all knew to leave it alone.
The fingerprint-activated time clocks at work go wrong distressingly often.
That’s my fear. I have an electric pushbutton safe for my carry gun, but I’ve had it not read a keypress and I’ve had the battery run out. I have the key hidden close, but it’s faster to just grab the shotgun that is hanging up near the ceiling.
At 15 either you’re mature enough to be around guns, or I will have already taken action to lock everything up.
I have biometric safe. Simply hit the button and put your thumb down, good to go.
I have both fingerprint and punch code.
The punch code is faster and more reliable.
I have multiple STACK-ON safes scattered around the house for quick access. They are ~$25 on Amazon and use your choice of punch code or key. They’re small enough to keep inside a cabinet drawer or bolted to the side of something. A thief can easily break into one, but they’ll keep a kid out, which is my purpose.
Fingerprint locks are very complicated. And they can fail to open if your hands wet, sweaty, greasy, dirty, etc. A four-number combination should be easy enough to remember.
At the pistol license class, they were recommending punchcode/RFID opening combos.
Only second-degree? Seems pretty premeditated on the surface.
“If you want to see the guns come and get me. You can look at them and shoot them any time you want but come and get me first. Don’t put a finger on them without me.”
We never had any problems with children and guns in the house.
“Children that grow up along the river never drown”
I like that.
Megathrust being what unfortunate hikers experience upon encountering STEVE SMITH.
I once read an article exploring what would happen if/when the “really big one” hits the Cascadia subduction zone. One quote I remember said that emergency managers near Seattle will operate under the assumption that “everything west of I-5 is gone”.
The one good thing about living in Florida is that we can see our disasters coming (you know, like the very existence of Florida) and have time to get the fuck out of Dodge to avoid it.
Do you see Florida Man coming?
I’m sure there’s a Pornhub of that, if its your thing.
emergency managers near Seattle will operate under the assumption that “everything west of I-5 is gone”
Including them, I suppose.
If nothing else, it will greatly simplify disaster response.
Found it.
They don’t mention the Galveston hurricane of 1900.
So, can we assume that FEMA is afraid it will suffer budget cuts in the near future?
I think I read that article too. It reminded me of the TV “news” specials that ran every year or so in Utah when I lived there. “When not if the Wasatch Fault lets go, the world will end.”
They should probably be more worried about the Yellowstone supervolcano. Or tidal locking leaving them on the dark side of the earth.
This was pushing 20 years ago. I don’t think Yellowstone was on the map much. It certainly wasn’t for the Salt Lake TV stations.
One quote I remember said that emergency managers near Seattle will operate under the assumption that “everything west of I-5 is gone”.
Something I keep trying to drill into the heads of family members and friends is that, if we get a megathrust earthquake in Vancouver, approx. 2 million people will be trapped west of the Pitt River and north/south of the Fraser River in the Lower Mainland. Utilities will be gone, communication (including the cell network) will be trashed, roads will be a shambles, and while most of the bridges can be crossed on foot, they’ll be impassable by non-tracked vehicles. Emergency services will be tapped out after 24 to 72 hours, the cops will disappear like a puff of smoke (they’ll be too busy taking care of their own loved ones to give a rat’s ass about the rest of us), and the closest that rail services will probably be able to get supplies will be Chilliwack or thereabouts (or if they’re really lucky, mebbe Mission). If it happens during winter, things get worse.
You can’t walk north — it’s mountains. You can’t walk south — the National Guard will be at the borders of the U.S. with orders to repel Canadian refugees by any means necessary, because they’re gonna have a shitload of their own problems to deal with. You can’t walk west — it’s ocean. That leaves walking east along the Fraser Valley, past the town of Hope and into “true” winter.
Lotsa people are gonna die, not as a direct result of the ‘quake, but in the clusterfuck that is the aftermath. And there isn’t much (if anything) that the Feds or the rest of the country could do for us, at least in the short term. Rule of Threes applies here — three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Any one of those will kill you. I suspect there’ll be a lot of situation 2 and situation 3 (mostly 2, actually — I’m astonished at how many people don’t have a reserve supply of water on hand).
We have Go Bags and a plan, and we purposely bought our house where we did because we’re east of the last major bridge. ‘Course, if the megathrust is really HOOGE, or we get hit while we’re west of the Pitt Bridge, even we might not be able to navigate the roads. Then we shelter in place. We have plans for that, too, though they’re definitely not my preference. Get The Hell Out is my preference. I don’t wanna have to deal with thousands of refugees on foot, hungry and desperate, streaming east to find help or food. Pitt Meadows would probably get overrun within the first couple of days after people figured out that substantial help would be a long time a-comin’ . . .
“new Murphy Brown”
Take any political position you want and pose women leads however you wish, but: the men in those screenplays are scripted and directed in the style of someone who would never get laid. Are the writers lesbians NTTAWWI ? Cis-chicks don’t like their guys stale, soft, or limp; accordingly, real men don’t meekly wimp about projecting softness. I don’t go around work grabbing reporters by the pussy, but Murph would probably guess which team I play for.
Did that dude ever finish painting her apartment?
Euphemism confirmed.
There’s a hot and steamy sex scene where a lady licks a pen seductively before signing a consent form, followed by three minutes of a guy asking for her to reconfirm consent every fifteen seconds. Unfortunately for him, he was supposed to reconfirm every ten seconds, according to the consent form, and he winds up in jail for rape.
Not trying to stealth brag. The bragging is up front. But a relevant story:
I was at an event and had finished tying someone up, brought her back down, and was hanging out with friends. This petite redhead, who apparently watched the scene, walks up and joins us and asks me if I’ll tie her up. I offered that we could discuss that possibility. She then hands me a 13 page consent manual/contract to read and sign before we even start negotiating. I declined at that point, once I was no longer too flabbergasted to speak. So you may think you are kidding, but…
I seem to recall that story being told here. It’s sad that I wasn’t completely kidding.
Murphy Brown was a holier than thou pontificating shitpit of a show in the ‘80s and I dread seeing what it’ll be like now. Unlike the left, though, instead of crying for it to be canceled I just think I won’t watch it.
If it weren’t for potatoe-head Dan Quayle, it probably would have been cancelled much earlier.
Bergen later said that Quayle had a valid point.
In which Maggie McNeill makes STEVE SMITH sad
https://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/big-dick-energy/
“We’ll work on the penis today, Harriet.”
She’s very intelligent and clever and I appreciate her providing an illustration that not all prostitutes are drug addicted sex slaves. But her articles are always just *this much* on the side of too cynical for me to take her cool, disconnected, world-weariness seriously. What really surprises me is that she has non-redacted pics of her face on the internet.
Also, there’s just as much natural variation in vaginal size as there is in penis size.
She’s acerbic. Probably comes from working in her field for as long as she has. But nothing she wrote in that blog is false. Vajayays don’t get “loose” from “too much sex” or from a bunch of different penises.
(one of my exes thought tampon size was based on vagina size. Dafuq?)
I mean that doesn’t seem so farfetched. I could understand a male going through life thinking that. I honestly have never had a single thought about tampon sizes in my entire life and if I were to think about it that would round out the top 5 for reasons tampons come in different sizes list that I would make in my head.
The extra large tampons are for loose butthole. Nobody likes skids.
Do you have something you would like to tell the class?
Spit take.
There’s so many things I don’t know.
i don’t know what the Grauniad is doing here but it ain’t journalism i would pay for…
You say if you want good information, pay good money for it. The Silicon Valley adage is information wants to be free, and to some extent the online newspaper industry has followed that. Is that wise?
The idea of free information is extremely dangerous when it comes to the news industry. If there’s so much free information out there, how do you get people’s attention? This becomes the real commodity. At present there is an incentive in order to get your attention – and then sell it to advertisers and politicians and so forth – to create more and more sensational stories, irrespective of truth or relevance. Some of the fake news comes from manipulation by Russian hackers but much of it is simply because of the wrong incentive structure. There is no penalty for creating a sensational story that is not true. We’re willing to pay for high quality food and clothes and cars, so why not high quality information?
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/05/yuval-noah-harari-free-information-extremely-dangerous-interview-21-lessons
You are now a highly successful public intellectual. In what ways has international recognition changed you?
/retching noises
^oops. shows how much i know about tampons!
The writer is under the mistaken impression that newspapers and other news media are in the business of selling information to subscribers. They aren’t. They are in the business of selling ads to businesses.
There is a point in there, though, which is that the news media hasn’t figured out a new business model for the internet era, which means there isn’t a business model that “monetizes” quality information enough to pay much for it. Of course, at no point have newspapers really ever depended on quality information to drive readership which drives ad revenues. There’s a reason why print media refers to the “news hole” in magazines and newspapers as they are being laid out – the news stories have always been largely filler, which only marginally affects readership. The content that really drives readership has always been sports and human interest. Adequately sensationalized news helps, as well, but meticulous reporting, not so much.
Obligatory: https://whatculture.com/tv/curb-your-enthusiasm-season-9-8-times-larry-david-was-a-social-assassin?page=2
I don’t know about the later, but I can confirm the former.
NOT AFTER STEVE SMITH FINISH.
She’s just jealous she can ‘t do math with her vagina.
I am reasonably sure it is not men who are the primary propagators of this myth. Furthermore I do not believe it to be a myth in the least but rather an accurate description of the actual behavior of a very large percentage of if not a majority of actual rape victims.
As far as the rest of the post, yeah I mostly agree with that, guys who think their dicks have magical powers or that having lots of sex somehow damages a woman are morons.
We may need Zardoz to weigh in on this. Oh that’s right, something about the penis being evil.
the penis as some sort of semi-divine instrument
So far, so good.
this absurd mythology…is so pervasive…that a rape victim who fails to behave according to the approved script may not be believed
Nobody is saying “don’t believe a woman who, years later, has gotten on with her life just fine”. What people do say sometimes is “Huh. You’d think if she’d actually been raped she would have cut off contact with him and called the cops.”
It seems to be a conflation of two idea sets that don’t overlap: the prudish “she’s a ruined woman now, no one will ever have her” that has been pretty thoroughly stamped out, and the third-wave feminist “you are a survivor, you have PTSD, you will suffer forever” vibe of the professional victim class interested in supping on pain to fuel politics (combined with the flattening of the trauma of rape to be the same sort of cosmic wound you get from an asshole at concert grabbing your boob.)
The first was driven by men prizing virginity; the 2nd almost exclusively by women prizing social status. Her inchoate argument was neither created nor driven by dick energy, big or small.
But that would be the perfect name for doing gay porn while paying for a physics degree.
There appear to be pussies that look rather worn out. Particularly on women in the porn business. I don’t know the science of it but inclined to believe my lying eyes.
Now that’s how you do a Monday afternoon musical selection. And because the song is so cool, even the comments are solid:
I will never hire into a firm again without checking first to see whether they have a suspenders day.
Speaking of disasters, I saw a Quebec license plate at Wawa this morning. WTF RUFUS, THAT’S TWO ALREADY. Y’ALL AREN’T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE FOR ANOTHER 2 MONTHS AT LEAST.
I hear the roar of the big machines.
I was going to write something snarky about Murphy Brown lasting 2 weeks, but it seems the Will and Grace revival survived and is going to have a second season. So I guess you no longer need THAT many viewers to keep a show going lately.
Yeah but Will and Grace and Murphy Brown are VERY different shows as the former went out of it’s way to be as apolitical as possible while still sending the message that “gays are just normal people like everyone else”
What if they turned it on its head?
What if the Metoo episode was her ranting at some dipshit snowflake about how she came up in an era when there were real glass ceilings, and HR was uninterested in sexual harassment claims that didn’t involve penetration?
Yeah. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.
I will watch W&G because of Karen.
Excuse me…I have to go vomit my brains out.
OK, so they are soldiers on the battlefield of truth. Which side are they on?
And Donny Osmond was a Soldier of Love.
And now my ears need to vomit.
I have succeeded! :woohoo:
There shouldn’t be sides of truth.
He should have followed that with:
“And here’s another video of Hulk Hogan naked…”
Red Cross on the battlefield of truth my ass. How about liars in the service of an agenda they won’t admit to?
RCD had it right above – they are soldiers on the battlefield of truth.
Because deserters come from somewhere…
If reporters are soldiers on the battlefield of truth, I assume they’re all named Gomer Pyle.
Is chow allowed in the barracks, Private Pyle?
Are you allowed to eat jelly donuts, Private Pyle???
Golly.
Oh you are going straight to hell for that one
I think this idiot actually accidentally hit upon getting it right.
The Red Cross is notoriously neutral. They are there to provide support to the wounded independent of the agenda of those the wounded are fighting on behalf of. A “Red Cross on the battlefield of truth” would be someone providing support for the facts independent of anyone’s particular narrative. The facts are the wounded. If they were soldiers all along, they were fighting on behalf of a particular narrative and agenda, and not a neutral supporter of humanity.
Some soldiers can get whatever’s coming to them though.
GREGORYABUTLER10031
The Dreaded Rear Admiral
8/06/18 1:07pm
TBH Charlie Hebdo was and is a racist hate sheet, so it’s really hard to feel any sympathy for them, or the terrorist bastards that used their racism as an excuse to kill them
It’s as if the capo of the Mafia was murdered by the grand dragon of the KKK – scumbag on scumbag violence
Alex Jones was banned by Facebook, Youtube, Apple and Spotify* all with 12 hours.
Like some kind of conspiracy or something.
*I might be full of crap about the Spotify timing. Let’s go with that just for truthiness anger generation purposes.
You can think Alex Jones is a dumbass nut bag and think this is kinda shitty at the same time. Standard disclaimers apply.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think it’s corporate lawyers/public relations managers for those companies watching every move the others make. The last thing any of them want is to be the only available target for the SJW mob.
Yeah, me neither. Although I doubt its so much “we don’t want to be the only target for an SJW mob” as everyone involved has the same narrow belief system, so its no wonder they all do the same thing. The timing might be down to “OMG, Facebook dropped him, now we need to.”
Or maybe they all conferred and decided to (more or less) simultaneously deplatform him.
Ya, the above scenarios sound entirely more plausible than an emergency Illuminati meeting down at the Elk’s Club. But I’m not sure how they are any better than a Registered Conspiracy (TM).
How easy is for one person, even near the top, to take immediate action at each of the companies? Maybe it’s simple. I have no idea.
It takes me a month to get the required signatures to release an external, one fucking paragraph memo. Top level execs can move faster but still have to navigate red-tape.
Honestly, isn’t this a bit counterproductive anyway? What better way for a nutjob conspiracist to prove he’s on to something than being able to scream “SEE, THEY’RE TRYING TO SILENCE ME BECAUSE THEY KNOW I’M SPEAKING THE TRUTH!!!”
Damn your nimble fingers!
My bad 🙂
Alex Jones is a poor excuse for a human being. If the Sandy Hook parents were to capture him and beat him to death I wouldn’t have an issue.
But, like you said, this is still shitty.
Agreed, although the political activity of some of the Sandy Hook parents deserves to be called out.
Oh come on, Alex Jones is way more entertaining, and no less full of shit, then those late-night comedians on the major networks.
“like some kind of conspiracy”
Nah: people are just chickenshit; after the first firm took the heat, the rest followed; this happens in all cases on both sides.
did he backup all of his videos? i assume he won’t have access to his content on Youtube’s servers.
Given his publicly expressed levels of paranoia, one would assume so. Although that is a lot of hard drive/AWS space.
How many videos does he have? I’d assume putting them on DVD wouldn’t take up too much space.
Good point. I think the number is in the thousands. But still a few rooms of DVD’s would handle that. I was thinking about online backups only.
An hour of good quality video is perhaps a gigabyte. So,
supposing “thousands” is 5 thousand, and they’re each an
hour, that’s 5 TB, or about $200 worth of disk drives.
People underestimate how cheap mass storage is.
Mass storage is indeed cheap.
Between my DVD and BluRay rips (keeps the kids from scratching them), and the thousands of episodes of TV shows I’ve recorded from a Tivo/HD Homerun, I could run a TV station for a year or so without reruns.
And it all lives on a pair of 5TB external drives…one live for the Plex server, and one for backup.
Maybe someday I’ll get around to watching them all.
huh. I’m guessing another order of magnitude.
But still that’s only 2000 bucks.
I think he’s sold enough super-male-brain-vitality-force pills to cover that.
I’m thinking almost all of them are still up on InfoWars.
I’m not saying it was aliens…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAh0r4C6Q2Q
Alex Jones – Halloween (1997)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbRJt6iKCc8
“First, They Came For Alex Jones”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lPhSreTkXc
It’s Sargon of Akkad, but it’s less than 13 minutes long.
Perspective isn’t something Hamilton Nolan is very good at, is it?
Off topic – anyone have any opinions about the Ruger Redhawk? I’ve had a weird hankering for more unusual cartridges lately, so the .45 Colt/.45 ACP dual capacity intrigues me and the price isn’t too bad.
Ruger makes a good revolver. Some say not as refined as S&W, but I think this doesn’t apply to the newer models. The Redhawk is a big ass gun though and is strong enough to handle nearly any load.
“Ruger makes a good revolver.”
I agree with this.
I’m guessing the .45ACP has half-moon clips? If so, I’d pass.
I like .45Colt; why not get an old Colt just for wild-west gunslinging fun?
I live .45ACP: G30 FTW on cost, concealability, capacity, reliability.
And then get the Redhawk in .44Mag because reasons.
Yes, half moon clips.
My only experience with .44 magnum was not terribly pleasant, TBH.
Man, I could never love the clips; the whole point of a wheel gun (after accuracy and reliability) is the joy of perfecting the loading. You drop behind cover; they counted six and know why you went quiet. You thumb the release and nose the barrel up and left and knowingly hear six hulls plop onto the ground while your left hand grabs two new rounds; nosing the barrel down, you nimbly drop paired, fresh heavies into neighboring chambers and instinctively thumb the cylinder two spots while looking over or around your cover to assess their advance and their options. Three and four drop together; thumb again, five and six go home and you’re up moving, the right wrist flicking the cylinder home to make that delicious click of readiness. Six fresh: make ’em count!
I’ve got a SW686 like Suthen’s; I promise you he has long since perfected this happy dance, same as me, and can do it in the dark. Maybe he’s not ambidextrous and goes the extra seconds to swap hands twice ; I pray otherwise.
I have these for my 686+.
http://www.5starfirearms.com/357-38-Caliber-s/116.htm
I shot a .44 magnum once, and gave it back to the guy. I told him I was pretty sure it would give me a flinch, and ain’t nobody got time for that.
Get a 454. You can shoot 45 too.
Redhawks are huge revolvers that weigh a ton. Granted, the weight reduces recoil. But you aren’t going to carry one for self-defense against humans. Although some people do carry them for bears. And double-action isn’t much of an advantage for hunting, because no animal is going to wait around for a second shot. So if you want to shoot .45 LC with a Ruger, perhaps a Blackhawk might be a better choice?
The S&W 625 is arguably one of the best double-actions in .45 Colt, but they are difficult to find:
http://www.gunblast.com/SW-25Mountain.htm
So this happened. YouTube, Apple and Facebook remove content from InfoWars and Alex Jones
I am torn. The libertarian capitalist in me says, “So? Private company.” The skeptic in me thinks these companies are damn near a monopoly. Theconspiracy theorist in me sees social media being used as a tool for government propaganda and control of information.
The business guy in me says “why the hell would you prove you’re a monopoly and and ought to be regulated as such?”
A business doesn’t prove it’s a monopoly. The government proves it, or else they can prove companies act in collusion to limit the market. See DOJ v Apple et al with ebooks.
That said, these services are free. So the best I can do is sit on the bummed bench with Emerson Biggins.
Just saying that if you look around and don’t see any legitimate competitors, keep a low profile and enjoy the avalanche of cash.
these companies are damn near a monopoly
i’d say that unless Congress grants them too big to fail status, then their monopoly will end soon.
I’m 100% with the “Private Company, they can do what they want” line of thought.
But I’m also really bummed out that the defacto major platforms for sharing ideas seem to be developing a political purity test as part of their terms of service.
We call this “a market opportunity”. As improbable as it may seem, someone will step up and fill the void.
Hope you are right man. Hope you are right.
Yep. I bet the alternatives already exist and just need time to mature.
Gab is trying. They aren’t going to outpace Twitter anytime soon.
Facebook and google own a big chunk of fiber, both terrestrial and undersea.
They are impossible to compete with at this point.
No idea on facebook, I’ve never understood the appeal. As for
google, I’ve been entirely google free (personally, some of the
businesses my company sub-contracts with use google)
for several years now. Duck duck go for the win, and I use
ghostery to block all the analytics built in to web pages.
Honestly, I only give a crap about Youtube.
Now I’m going to have to build a tower myself that I can watch bitchute on while in bed with a remote control. Gonna be a pain in the ass.
It’ll end up like Gab. All the non-political and normie stuff is on Twitter. Nazis are on Gab. Thus, when you get banned from Twitter and sent to Gab, you are reclassified as a Nazi.
And Gab/Twitter is by far the easiest service to replace. Something like YouTube is utterly horrifying. There’s a reason vid.me shut down.
Want to piggyback off porn, maybe? What makes you think you don’t get booted off there? If, say, your credit card processors hint that, if you keep having Nazis, they might cancel your contract…
(for reference, see what happened to Freestartr, who was gonna be a Kickstarter competitor).
Facebook and Twitter are already a void.
I’m 100% with the “Private Company, they can do what they want” line of thought.
Not if they’re taking big chunks of taxpayer dollars, they’re not.
I did not know that.
>:(
That link completely borks my browser (tried it three times). WTF.
I appreciate the effort. But I can’t say that getting property tax breaks and bullshit subsidies from 3 states means they shouldn’t be able to kick people off their website for arbitrary and capricious reasons.
The platforms terms of service are a contract. There could be legal recourse if one or all of them violated their own terms of service.
There may be some recourse available thru that line of thought, but it seems like they make the terms of service so vague and subjective that it’s kind of a dead end. Or least just a pure lawyer fight.
Private company my ass. They’re owned by public employee pension funds shirking their fiduciary duty.
Welcome to Fasicsm American Style.
OMG they’re monopolies!
I guess you young’ns don’t remember IBM, GM, Digital, Yahoo, MySpace, and a bunch more.
*This* time is never different.
I am the great and powerful CORNHOLIO
“WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEEEEEEEEE MY BUNGHOLE?”
+1 roll of TP for my bunghole
ARE YOU THREATENING ME?
It’s home to the Cascadia megathrust fault that runs 600 miles from Northern California up to Vancouver Island in Canada, spanning several major metropolitan areas including Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
I’m not seeing a downside. Also, Cascadia Megathrust was my nickname in college.
Sounds like an acoustic indie rock duo
Or a triple-hopped, imperial IPA
*ahem* I live west of I5. Who will you all turn to for advice on kinky fuckery if I’m drowned by a 100 foot wall of water and mobile homes washed in from the coast as part of the tsunami? HM? Huh. You really want to live in a world where it’s all anime eyes, tentacles, and thicc?
Is that a trick question?
I think the suggestion is that you move inland.
Yeah. I need out of the Portland area. I don’t know that even east of the river is going to make that much difference if it cuts loose. It’d wipe out water, power, oil, natural gas, and food from all the downed bridges and destroyed roads. I keep about a month’s worth of supplies for an emergency instead of the usual couple of days. I figure we either bite it, or we live through it or a month is long enough for us to get out of dodge.
I also think that article oversells it a bit.
I thought we turned to Q for all normal kinks, and HM and Sugar free for the really sick puppies.
This is why The Wall needs to go north at the California state line.
From the comments “I live in Texas. People who had Trump signs no longer have Trump signs. You do see a few Beto signs. That few is gonna change Texas forever.”
Umm maybe because it’s not a presidential election year?
That was my first thought. Trump isn’t running this year, why would his campaign signs be in everyone’s yard? I don’t still see many Hillary 2016 signs anymore either… did they all abandon the Dems?
Lachowsky, what the fuck? How are you letting this go on?
This is the guy running against Cruz? What are his chances, slim and none?
I think the buzz is that Cruz’s opponent has raised a lot more money than him.
Of course, how much of that is in-state, and how much out-of-state, I don’t think has been mentioned. My bet: a lot of it from out of state.
Haven’t seen any polling, but I don’t pay that much attention.
Supposedly his chances are quite good?
Just looked over at CNN and Beto has been behind an avg of six points on every poll taken over the past two months. His chances are none and none.
I don’t think his chances are good so much as he’s losing by less than most people expected.
Not really. He’ll outperform the last D to run for the Senate in TX (40%), but the optimism comes mainly from increased D enthusiasm this year plus the abiding expectation that Texas will flip (again) due to demographics. The longer Texas stays red, the less plausible the D’s dream of a coming permanent majority fueled by demographic change.
No, this is the guy running against Cruz
https://twitter.com/BetoORourke
Cruz is likely to win, but the polling’s a little closer than I’d think. https://realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2018/senate/tx/texas_senate_cruz_vs_orourke-6310.html
Cruz is just naturally unlikable, even for people who agree with him.
I like him just fine when he is in “Legalistic Libertarian Constitutionalists” mode. Not so much when he is in “Bible Thumper” mode.
But, I am kind of an asshole.
Being an asshole is a prerequisite to posting here.
Whatever, Tulpa.
?
Also, Tulpa.
Beto’s got the 40% that any D would have. Cruz has considerable unfavorables, but the 20% undecided are social centrists who don’t have anywhere to go and will vote Republican.
Texas is like most other states: cities versus the rest of the state. 33% are firm Dem: the only city that is Republican is Fort Worth. Almost every state is 60/40….just a question of whether the city folk outnumber the truckdrivers. There’s this idea that TX is 85% blue, but it’s just like Oregon in that Portland vs the rest of the state sort of way. Roustabouts working the Eagleford are not in a warm brotherhood with the urban agenda in, say, Dallas; that said, 60/40 is a floor in TX…maybe it is indeed 70/30…which is huge. Just remember that there are 30% everywhere who don’t agree with the powerful local majority.
With the ever-present caveat that predictions are worthless: an American journalist is going to get murdered as a direct result of our current political climate. Hating reporters, of course, is nothing new. But neither is political assassination. Sometimes when you sense a storm rolling in, you realize that the sunny days you’d been enjoying were actually the exception, rather than the norm.
Yeah, who counts as a “journalist” here? Cause guy getting beat up at GenCon cause “NAZI” sounds like a good harbinger of this prediction, but not in the way author is insinuating.
an American journalist is going to get murdered as a direct result of our current political climate
So you’d think they’d be trying to turn down the heat and foster a cooler, more rational discussion. Right?
Maybe he’s been reading Matt Bracken.
Hell, no. They’re all itching for someone else to get martyred so the real crackdown of deplorables can start.
Just try to imagine coverage if it were Democrat congresscritters who get ARed instead of Republican ones. And now add “one of us” angle to it.
well that’s only b/c there would be a high number of casualties.
Careful what he wishes for. If we get the promised civil war, lots and lots of reporters and democrats will get shot.
Busty babes to distract you from the clear meaninglessness of your pathetic existence!
http://archive.is/oMvrh
I’d spot 21, but not if it got in the way of signing a prenup with 23.
And, just because it’s Monday, I thought everyone deserved a little bonus THICC.
https://dulich360.com.vn/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2536368_492x328.jpg
Hey I’d like to think there is some meaning to my existence.
I stopped at 3.
That other poor, pretty young girl got mounted on someone else’s fat ass.
As with all types of threats, some small percentage of them will be backed up by serious intent
As with all types of news stories, some small percentage of them will be backed up by serious investigative reporting and research.
But not this one.
Another thing about Hamilton Nolan’s puffery – how much would you wager that he’s never been too concerned about, or even addressed, the attack on Rand Paul or the shooting at the GOP softball practice?
Whataboutism! You’re a Russina bot!
/every prog on the internet
Rand was at the softball practice too. I am disappointed that he was not packing heat.
Oh, he covered the Rand Paul attack… https://splinternews.com/drink-more-milk-rand-paul-1820191062
“Christ, what an asshole” seems insufficient.
Oh, what a witty card that Hamilton Nolan is! See, it’s funny because he was hospitalized!
What a piece of shit.
Wow. What a pos.
Hey, violence is fine when it happens to the right people.
Here’s an idea:
We put Mr. Nolan on a riding lawnmower with all of its hard metal angles and protruding pieces.
Then, we get someone his size to japtackle him.
Then we count the broken bones. If he’s got more than Rand Paul did, he has to take that column down and apologize. If he has less, he gets a cookie.
‘Japtackle’ still makes me giggle.
What’s that, an unexpected attack?
*points and screams* SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITLORD!!!!
*bows than tackles*
Ok, that made me LOL.
Nice to see you around again, bacon!
Still busy but I’ve been lurking…peeking from the bushes.
So Now I suffer from anatidaephobia but with bacon instead of ducks.
I’m disappointed that he didn’t blame the lack of Milk on budget cuts and deregulation and spin it as a “hoisted on his own petard” thing.
I think that might be the reference to “Milk is a white supremacist drink.”
Well I meant shots at how libertarian budget cuts take milk away from schoolchildren and how deregulation leads to bad milk.
And I checked online and “Milk is a white supremacist drink” is a real thing…
Why would I make up stupid things when there’s so much high-quality stupidity already out?
And hah, “bad milk” is #1 stated reason for why Canada must must MUST keep ridiculous dairy tariffs and tightly controlled dairy farm quotas, or we’ll all be drinking rat’s milk or someshit.
Too much stupidity on the net to look at it all. That said I am not surprised.
Also doesn’t this mean Hamilton Nolan is a white supremacist? Or “ironically” calling Rand Paul one?
Andrew Scheer has a happy…
WTF
*drops gloves lies in wait*
“With the ever-present caveat that predictions are worthless: an American journalist is going to get murdered as a direct result of our current political climate. Hating reporters, of course, is nothing new. But neither is political assassination. Sometimes when you sense a storm rolling in, you realize that the sunny days you’d been enjoying were actually the exception, rather than the norm.”
After years of the left bashing Fox News and talk radio, now they’re getting a taste of their own medicine. The horror!
These idiots think this is a Trump problem. Everybody else knows this has been simmering under the surface for 30 years.
The only difference is that standard-issue GOP politicians didn’t play to the already existing hatred of the press. Trump does.
I think it is amusing that the journalos so badly want a deplorable to kill a bunch of their fellows. Not themselves of course, but some other newsroom would be fantastic. It would feed into all their fantasies where they are the good people fighting the evil forces of darkness.
I think it really, really bugs them that the deplorables have been happy to scorn them, but not actually do more than that. It is hard to identify as a pure hero when the other side won’t play the role of the evil orcs.
I doubt that they have noticed that in their efforts to goad a conservative into shooting a reporter, they have whipped their side up to the point where they are shooting up Congressmen, sucker punching people who are in the middle of an interview and bashing people with bike locks.
Massachusetts Republican trolls the Dems by being more PC than them.
That is some world-class trolling, right there. Huzzah!
This man is my hero!
“How many genders are there? New York City under Mayor Bill de Blasio once ruled there are 31 — easy to remember, because it’s same number as Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors.”
Well I’ll be damned, a Republican with a sense of humor.
Relevant
That is beautiful
Nice. This also caught my eye:
That’s can’t be right. Reason has repeated assured me that illegals never ever receive welfare benefits.
He’s right. Gotta list every one of them.
I’m sure that 30 minutes hectoring coming out of Candice Bergen’s 72-year-old face in 4K HD–interspersed with ads for bladder leak underwear and Vagasil–will be warmly embraced by an America hungry for a thoroughly non-erotic scolding.
So they just re-purposed your election-year Hilary stories and then blandified them? Pass.
We need Hat&Hair in primetime.
In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people.
*gazes wistfully into distance, smiles*
Dan Rather still as no self-awareness
Dan Rather was once the anchor of the evening CBS News broadcast. He got the job in 1981, filling the very large shoes left by the avuncular Walter Cronkite.
He did everything to embiggen himself, but in the end, he crashed and burned for a heavy partisanship that blinded him.
In a nutshell, here’s what happened: Trying to derail George W. Bush’s presidency and his re-election bid — and searching for a Watergate-sized blockbuster — Rather aired a completely false story about Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard. He was fired and left journalism in disgrace.
The 86-year-old has sought to reframe himself ever since. Mostly, he’s just parroted the Democratic talking points and toed the liberal line.
So it is hilarious that The King of Fake News is now calling out President Trump for complaining about fake news.
“Whenever I see President Trump rail against ‘Fake News’ or call us the ‘enemy of the people’ I think ‘you can’t handle the truth.’ You may not like it, but the press is protected by the Constitution (you know that document you swore to preserve, protect, and defend?),”
i bet that fucker thinks “the press” refers only to credentialed media.
He absolutely does – wasn’t he the one who said something about bloggers being “guys in their pajamas”, leading to the name Pajamas Media?
“searching for a Watergate-sized blockbuster”
While acknowledging the inbuilt bias of the media, I think that Watergate did more harm than good to the journalism profession. Much of the information came from anonymous sources who initiated contact, i.e. Woodward & Bernstein didn’t do a whole lot of investigating. The result was the resignation of a president i.e. a home run.
Journalists could actually accomplish a whole lot if they got off their butts and went and did some actual investigation looking to report on day-to-day problems/injustices, etc. Instead they’re all running around looking for the golden source that will take down an administration.
Also, “Woodstein” didn’t actual drive the scandal, nor did they bring anything to light that hadn’t already been uncovered in the FBI investigation that Mark Felt was leaking them details from.
embiggen
Embiggen?
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FcxsgZxqnEg
Well damn…
That is what you get for finding the link.
It’s a cromulently perfect word.
Has anyone had the pleasure of watching the movie released at the end of 2017 called The Snowman? It might be the greatest terrible movie I’ve ever seen in my life. Had to watch it twice, I might watch it for a third time. I still have no idea what the plot is or the general relationship of the characters to each other. Also Val Kilmer is in it and they dub his voice because he apparently can’t talk due to throat cancer. The movie is littered with a whose who of decent actors that signed onto this abomination, I have no idea how the studio allowed it to be released but thank god it is a revelation.
Oh and the lead detective’s, played by Michael Fassbender, name is i shit you not is detective HARRY HOLE.
I liked the Harry Hole series written by Jo Nesbo. I think it is supposed to be pronounced Holly.
I read three or four but they hit the “oh, this again” stage pretty quick, very few crime/police procedurals can pull a 12+ book run.
You should see Night of the Lepus if you haven’t already.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!! DeForest Kelly’s finest work. 100% unintended hilarity.
SSSSSSSSSSSS! with Strother Martin!
That was good Shlock right there,
So it is hilarious that The King of Fake News is now calling out President Trump for complaining about fake news.
Cut him some slack. He’s a senile old gasbag who can’t find his way from the kitchen to the bathroom without assistance.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/01/never-trumpers-democrats-2020-centrist-candidates-219080
Sorry if this has been posted before.
Uh huh.
Um doesn’t this contradict the whole “move the Dems to the right” justification? Also they use the example of the anti-slavery Democrats who did pretty much sell out all of their Jeffersonian and Jacksonian principles by becoming Republicans.
They wrongly view the Democratic Party as a rotten cauldron of crass identity politics, recreational abortion and government run amok.
Gee, how would anyone have ever gotten THAT crazy notion?
To be fair, its a rotten cauldron of crass identity politics, recreational abortion, government run amok, corruption, lawlessness, unearned moral superiority, economic illiteracy, greed, envy . . . .
Don’t forget the elitism and classism. Where would the Democrats be if not for the suburban/yuppie “I have a college degree and I believe in evolution so therefore I’m smarter than most people” demographic?
if you are a conservative, #NeverTrump, pro-immigrant, free-trading, anti-Putin defender of the post-World War II international order,
You can hold your meetings in a phone booth?
Or pull for Johnson. Fuck it, be a spoiler you want to be.
The neverTrumpers, aka neocons, we’re always just leftists who liked bombing people. I’d say their natural home really is the Democratic Party.
Its mostly a historical accident that they aligned with the Repubs. The accident being there was a Repub in the White House at the time.
I think of them as the old Rockefeller / HW Bush vein of the GOP. Any talk of conservatism was pure bullshit for the rubes.
“Unlike traditionalist conservative thinkers who conflated liberalism with the New Left, neoconservatives believed the New Left had infected the liberal intellectual culture they loved. That they detected such a change was one of the central reasons for their political conversion; it was one of the primary reasons neoconservatives proved so useful to the modern American conservative movement.”
From:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/neoconservatives-kristol-podhoretz-hartman-culture-war
“neoconservatives proved so useful to the modern American conservative movement.”
I would say their war boners helped destroy it.
Letting the neocons get in the door was the worst mistake the conservatives ever made.
Considering that the neocons were originally disgruntled Cold War Liberals than this is true.
This does assume that all NeverTrumpers are neocons which I’m not sure is true but certainly this is the sort of type this article is catering to…
Not quoted by me but he does say that pro-life Never Trumpers shouldn’t bother…
Not all of them are, but most of the GOP neocons seem to be.
The neocons are the guys who still want to fight a war against all of Israel’s enemies.
once conservatives free themselves from the Fox News echo chamber, it would be easier to conduct good faith, fact-based negotiations over policy specifics
That’s the moment Lucy yanks the football away. The Left has never negotiated in good faith. These days they haven’t the slightest idea what it even means to be a “liberal”. It’s just a collection of insane fringe ideas and shrieking rejection of reality.
free-trading
The Democrats were once the party of free trade, but they have long since abandoned that.
it would be easier to conduct good faith, fact-based negotiations over policy specifics
Uh huh…
such as how to tackle climate change through a revenue-neutral carbon tax
Immediately jump to conclusion on pet-project unsupported by observable reality.
I’d just be happy if the Democrats stopped acting like the government is full of experts with pure hearts and selfless motivations.
Of course, that’s half the reason the never-Trump crowd wants to jump on the (modern) Democrat bandwagon. If not for the worship of faux-expertise (read: sinecures for overeducated people), the Democrats wouldn’t be so palatable to the self-appointed elite.
The center of this story is Steve Schmidt. In case you were unaware, Schmidt is a longtime GOP consultant who Trump had no interest in bringing aboard. He ran McCain’s campaign into the ground, all but threw it for Obama, and blamed losing on Palin. The truth is that, simply, there is no actual constituency for the nonsense he is selling. It’s not Trumpism, traditional conservatism, libertarianism or really much more than being the junior partner to the left’s majority. He’s nothing more than the relic of a failed agenda with an increasingly irrelevant Rolodex.
” monopoly …. ought to be regulated as such”
Some time we ought to kick this around. After I heard the Democrats come up with a good reason why Greyhound and Trailways should be allowed to merge, leaving really only one national bus line, I got to thinking more about goods and even commodities, and here’s what I’m thinking:
Let the monopolies run amok. We can opt out of their product. We can buy an inferior substitute. Some firm will come up with some entirely new way of solving the problem.
I might not be saying this well, but who cares if Standard Oil has no competition? Just ride your mule….or your bicycle….or invent electrical cars (the first cars were electric anyway, IIRC). Fighting monopolies just creates inefficiencies and props up one certain solution. The answer is that the market will find another way: if we let the pain and utility of alternatives sort themselves out.
But I figure this is for another day. Maybe someone will write something coherent on this topic for us.
“Some firm will come up with some entirely new way of solving the problem.”
And then the entrenched will petition the Democrats to make their product/service illegal, thus preserving the monopoly.
Fighting monopolies just creates inefficiencies and props up one certain solution.
Lost me there. Fighting monopolies is restoring competition, which is hostile to both inefficiencies and single solutions.
Monopolies can typically only persist over time with government support. However, if one firm does actually corner a market, it can do a lot of damage until the market routes around it. I’m of two minds on antitrust law – I can see the purist argument against it, but I also work in an industry that is heavily, heavily concentrated at one level (third-party payors, who are either (a) governments or (b) have regulatory barriers to entry), so I see the problems that kind of concentration creates, as well.
Pure competition rarely exists, in most cases their are product differentiation that makes an effective monopoly anyway (Bell’s has a monopoly on 2-hearted ale. There are a ton of IPAs in competition with it, but none of them are 2-hearted). As Don said, there are alternatives to any monopoly, they just might not be ones we like as much.
I just meant that when the government intervenes to stop a monopoly, the resulting market has two players providing only one type of solution, one product (eg: gasoline) that now will persist and therefore delay the introduction of a better mousetrap.
That monopoly doesn’t do any damage in this wise: they only make money because the market agrees that their product is great (eg: gasoline cars are better than riding your mule; paying their prices for gasoline is still a choice and demonstrates preference). Reminds me of the MSFT situation: packaged software is so horrible and oppressive than 80% just run their machine just like it shipped from the factory, and a whole boom was amplified by said monopoly of sorts….hard to say that we were terribly scarred because we weren’t browsing with Netscape.
I’m not saying that monopolies don’t have fun in the obvious short-run way; no one’s that stupid. I’m just saying that there is no fixed reason for building frames to be made of steel, for pocket phones to run on Android, or for transportation to be based on buses……entirely different solutions will present if we leave the markets alone….and they will present sooner if the presumed perfect solutions aren’t “managed” by bureaucrats in a way that might promote and extend the life of an inferior solution.
entirely different solutions will present if we leave the markets alone
A successful anti-trust action doesn’t foreclose anything other than the monopoly. A monopoly is blocking the market from functioning as a market – its not a functioning market if your only choice is “buy from X or don’t buy at all”. Breaking up a monopoly doesn’t result in two and only two players in the market. It results in one player getting knocked down, leaving room for multiple others to enter.
Breaking up Standard Oil didn’t somehow lock us into running our cars on gasoline by creating two oil companies where only one existed before. Whereas monopolies do foreclose other things – competition and, possibly, the development of substitutes/alternatives.
We actually agree here.
But I never said “foreclose.” I said “delay.” I wrote in grand categories: transportation; to speak of only possible answer being one commodity would miss the whole point of substitutes.
I implied two competitors, but that’s clearly the minimum: a debate stipulation, not a technical calculation. Having third and fourth competitors propped up (think of steel in the 1970s) only further delays entry of better solutions.
In the example, it’s possible that that Standard Oil would have fomented the popular use of electric cars or coal cars or whatever in, oh I don’t know 1950?, if the USG had not broken it up: they would have run up the price until something else appeared attractive. The many major oil companies competed, gasoline remained (remains) cheap, and no other viable solution has appeared.
I’m not an EV guy….not barking up that tree. The logic was never necessarily limited to two competitors; the logic never required an acute implosion of the one solution offered. It’s just a scheme, a model, an example to illustrate the larger dynamic. Again, I’d never argue that the short run is different.
…there is no fixed reason for building frames to be made of steel…
To nitpick, the tensile strength of steel is the reason. No amount of competition is going to change that.
Nitpicking is good; no worries. I offered a short story, but it appears fleshing everything out has become necessary.
Respectfully, the reason was the relative cost of the price of tensile strength per unit volume. Steel loses all the time on just this basis: carbon fiber and aluminum and even laminated wood are better solutions in many application. Iron was all we knew; then steel was all we knew, then steel was propped up, and now steel is slowly being displaced where it makes sense. I love steel, but it’s just one material. We have more choices today, but that’s only after the USG delayed their entry after a decade of propping up steel; that delay is nothing for consumers to be happy about.
Again, I just offer all this as a simple example of government interference.
Oh, and: compressive strength was really important, too: masonry walls get thicker as buildings got taller.
ugh…per unit weight
Your industry is heavily concentrated because it is heavily regulated.
Monopolies only pose an issue when they are enabled by the government through regulation and barriers to entry.
Otherwise, they never last.
Scruff nails it in 18 words….wish I had written it that succinctly.
Well can there really be an actual monopoly and are “natural monopoly” and how much of it is due to mercantilism?
*are “natural monopolies” a real thing?*
Maybe – hospitals in small rural communities. Hospitals are very capital-intensive, and with a small population base/density, it would make no sense for anyone to open another one in that community. They are local monopolies, although there are alternatives if you travel far enough.
Also, many of them are not financially viable as-is without government support. There are also licensing requirements, but honestly those aren’t really a barrier to entry.
I’ve experienced this first hand. One of our two rural hospitals just folded up shop. The other is scaling back operations.
It doesn’t really matter to me though, barring a heart attack or stroke where 911 would be called (and was for my wife), I’ll always drive an hour to the alternative where I can get better care.
Lots of new outpatient specialties and practices sprouting up recently though.
And that’s the market and technology developing substitutes/alternatives. Its amazing what can be done now in an outpatient/ambulatory setting that used to require an inpatient hospital setting.
This is a good example and largely true, not arguing.
But other medical options do arise to displace and compete with hospitals in remote locations, which is a good thing: smaller institutions, remote specialists, specialty clinics, online services, nurses at the pharmacy or at work. Following my construction: if the government propped up a second hospital to compete with the natural monopoly, the other solutions (my list is admittedly ignorant and short) are delayed because market opportunity is less appealing. The best competition (replacement?) for a hospital might not be a hospital at all.
The government doesn’t go after monopolies by propping up a competitor. It goes after monopolies by knocking down the monopolist. There is nothing in anti-trust law that supports doing anything else, and I can’t think of any examples where the government did this.
The closest might be breaking up Ma Bell back in the day, into (if memory serves) a bunch of smaller regional monopolies. But I think those were still government-supported “utilities” with massive barriers to entry.
That’s a good point.
Elsewhere I expand on Std Oil as a better example. Also a bit regional like the Bells, but a better example.
But there are seldom true monopolies; usually there are minor players who are barely tenable, and the government boot on the neck of the big boy with 80% necessarily raises these other boats into contention.
But I concede that my construction was simplistic……necessarily so.
Power companies – the barriers to entering the transmission and distribution sides are pretty well insurmountable.
Cable companies were another until satellite companies became more competitive.
Let the monopolies run amok. We can opt out of their product. We can buy an inferior substitute. Some firm will come up with some entirely new way of solving the problem.
As others have said, government-enforced monopolies are a different beast.
For one example, there is no opt out possible for school systems to purchase auto-injection epinephrine devices. Even though epinephrine can be purchased for pennies in a regular syringe, they are forced to spend hundreds of dollars for an auto-injection system for which there is only one supplier. The monopolistic supplier is politically connected and all competitors’ products have been denied approval by the FDA.
Thanks to Roberts, opt-out is no longer an option for healthcare and potentially other areas as the consequences of that decision play-out.
That reminds me; I haven’t said “fuck John Roberts” yet this week.
*spits*
The closest we ever came is the railroads, and to a certain extent utilities where acquiring and maintaining thousands of miles of infrastructure right-of-ways is expensive, both in physical and political capital, and nobody wants 50 different railroad or power line traces taking away from other productive uses of the land. This isn’t to say that there is no solution other than government, but just the reality that such a specialized use of capital with such a broad utility leads to very few companies wanting to invest, and the smaller your town, the fewer companies want to invest. And what power do you have? If the first power offering goes under, it could be a decade before someone tries to run another or buy out the old one. You just waited a decade for the market to catch up to you while the world was passing by.
Calling-out the organic cartel – bonus points for the Bruce Ames reference.
But when it comes to the $47-billion-a-year organic industry, the FDA gives a complete pass to blatantly false and deceptive advertising claims. Consider the Whole Foods website, which explicitly claims that organic foods are grown “without toxic or persistent pesticides.” In fact, organic farmers rely on synthetic and natural pesticides to grow their crops, just as conventional farmers do, and organic products can contain numerous synthetic as well as natural chemicals. As observed by UC Berkeley biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues in 1990, “99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.”
Pesticides are by definition toxic, and many organic pesticides pose significant environmental and human health risks. One is copper sulfate, a widely used broad-spectrum organic pesticide that persists in soil and is the most common residue found in organic food. The European Union determined that copper sulfate may cause cancer and intended to ban it, but backed off because organic farmers don’t have any viable alternative.
In addition to blatant untruths, food marketers are masters at subtly misleading consumers. A favored technique is the “absence claim”—asserting a meaningless distinction between products in order to make theirs seem superior. Generally, the FDA comes down hard on such behavior. They would never allow an orange-juice producer to label its product “fat free,” for example. To claim an absence of a certain ingredient, there has to be a “standard of presence” in that product to begin with, and there is no fat in orange juice.
But Tropicana gets away with labeling its orange juice “Non-GMO Project Verified,” and Hunt’s labels its canned crushed tomatoes “non-GMO,” even though there are no GMO (genetically modified organism) oranges or tomatoes on the market. In fact, absence claims about GMOs are never enforced: I was unable to find a single FDA warning letter or other enforcement action against deceptive “non-GMO” labeling.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-organic-industry-is-lying-to-you-1533496699?mod=hp_opin_pos3
If there are no GMO oranges or tomatoes, then how can the label be wrong?
The problem is the implication that competitors’ stuff isn’t nonGMO I guess?
Technically correct is the best kind of correct!
“Pesticides are by definition toxic”
Legally, maybe. Scientifically, absolutely not.
Toxicity comes from dosage.
Tell that to the State of California you Prop 65 hater!
Toxic to the pests.
I don’t believe any of it. I know their apples and corn aren’t “organic” because they aren’t full of worms. I laughed when I saw honey labeled “organic”. Do the other beekeepers give their bees steroids?
Excellent. Thanks for that. Spawn 1 and I have been fighting this battle here, trying to convince my uber-fit wife that the industry is a crock of shit.
Pics?
Wow. I haven’t heard his name in a while.
Professor of yours?
Nah. I’m math/econ.
He has an assay named after him.
Also, pics?
Anyway are there any post-colonial success stories since the 1950s and 1960s?
Namibia and Mauritius are both doing relatively well for Africa.
Botswana, too.
“Formerly one of the poorest countries in the world—with a GDP per capita of about US$70 per year in the late 1960s—Botswana has since transformed itself into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. The economy is dominated by mining, cattle, and tourism. Botswana boasts a GDP (purchasing power parity) per capita of about $18,825 per year as of 2015, which is one of the highest in Africa.”
Ghana and Nigeria aren’t in terrible shape, especially relative to their neighbors, and Algeria is doing surprisingly well given how nasty their independence and civil wars were. How stable/likely to improve in the medium- to long-term any of these countries are, I can’t say.
The most successful post-colonial countries from that time period tend to be small island nations, although that’s often largely due to tourism.
South Africa was, nuclear power, invented the heart transplant, etc. But then they decided they wanted to win at Soccer so they expanded their voter base.
That 20% should rule over 80% with an iron fist should strike anyone as atrocious, just as it should that 20% be sacrificed–whether literally murdered or “only” driven out–for the pleasure of the 80%.
South Africa had a lot of potential and both apartheid and the ANC fucked it up.
I say 20% will be sacrified because, although whites make up about 9% of SA’s population today, another 11% are coloured (mixed race) or Asian (mostly Indian). The ANC is not going to stop at driving just the whites out. Their rhetoric is “Africa for Africans” and anybody with any knowledge of history knows where this is headed.
I have been drunk in Old Broadway in Fargo many, many times.
I was channeling my inner Sioux. Getting goofy on firewater and stalking female members of the Thundering Herd
A friend of a good friend of mine owns this pizza joint. I have been there one time, but was with the family so I had to be on my best behavior. Looks like a fun place though.
I find the whole issue of nuclear versus extended families interesting since the socons have been derided for their love of the former while the anti-socons here are big believers in “move out when 18/22”.
There was basically 1 generation in history where extended families in a household werent the norm.
What generation would that be?
https://www.economist.com/international/2018/08/04/countries-team-up-to-save-the-liberal-order-from-donald-trump
So how will France defend itself from Russia? Need a bigger army…
They are going to start digging a big trench, with gun emplacements and hardened pillboxes.
IMaginot That!
^ Heh.
Considering we could eliminate Germany’s ability to make war by achieving air superiority using one carrier battle group, I don’t think it’s looking good for them on any scale against a possible aggressor.
FOR the past four years senior officials from a group of leading democracies, calling themselves the “D10”, have quietly been meeting once or twice a year to discuss how to co-ordinate strategies to advance the liberal world order.
The problem with “liberals” is that they are not. As such, I’d much rather they do no such thing.
Eurofighter: all the stupidity and wastefulness of the American defense spending model and none of the patriotism or institutional expertise.
The US could achieve air superiority over Germany with a couple of P-51s and P-47.
Find some Corsican guy and give him command of the entire country? Almost worked the first time.
First you have to scour the country looking for wrong-thinkers to dispatch with your mobile guillotines.
Wow, unintentional hilarity, intentional signalling/satire, or blind ignorance.
The Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, has a program called National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement. Its acronym? NSLVE.
Before you answer, the Institute recently published a paper on “Educating for Democracy” the abstract of which includes the following:
“Those with an absolutist perspective take a zero-sum game approach by pitting the important American principles of freedom and individualism against the equally important principles of equity and community. Not only is this an unnecessary choice, but it infringes on academic freedom and the right of academics to decide how best to educate for the health and future of democracy. Academic content, standards, norms, and pedagogy should be based on educational goals and objectives. The solution lies in fostering discussion about democratic principles and practices as well as a sense of shared responsibility among members of a campus community for student learning and success”
That is one big load of disingenuosness or stupidity. Or both.
Crush wrongthinkers using the tyranny of the majority. Got it.
Those with an absolutist perspective take a zero-sum game approach by pitting the important American principles of freedom and individualism against the equally important principles of equity and community.
Yeah, sounds like NSLVE is a perfect name for their agenda. They’re all but admitting they are opposed to freedom and individualism.
Those with an absolutist perspective take a zero-sum game approach by pitting the important American principles of freedom and individualism against the equally important principles of equity and community.
None of those principles are inconsistent. In a minarchy like we are supposed to have. “Equity” and “Community” are only inconsistent with freedom and individualism when “Equity” and “Community” are advanced as reasons for the state to nightstick dissenters into compliance.
Give up your state enforcement of equity and community, and you will find this is, indeed, an unnecessary choice. Keep your Total State ever striving for equicommunity utopia, and the choice isn’t false at all.
Naturally, how insistence on freedom and individualism infringes on academic freedom is an exercise for the reader. Its pretty clear to me that the only threat to academic freedom comes from the Total State demanding adherence to Equity and Community as defined by the Total State, but I’m pretty sure that’s completely lost on these clowns.
Since someone made me click on the ‘cromulent’ link, THIS gem appeared in my side-bar. So help me, Id attend a council meeting with Doug Stanhope speaking.
He appears here, if you dont want to sit through the lady.
There must not be a lot to do in Bisbee. Although I would do the chick sitting by the podium.
“Che Guevara’s legend grew when his diaries were published after his death — a glimpse at how his revolutionary legacy would endure. Watch it all unfold on Future History”
https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1025765009295638528
At least the replies are good.
Great goodness that video. Talk about lies of omission.
Yeah, the replies are a little encouraging.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dj5JsXrUUAAhyR5.jpg:large
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Nice:)
Her Eyes are all fucked up!
RACIST! I mean
LACIST!
HEY YUFUS!
Sup Tres!
It’s Brutal out there and only getting worse so , you know….
TALL CANS OF COBRA! and Awesome Burgers on the Grille
These imbeciles are impressive – apparently, they’ve never heard of of other races being racist or sexist.
Funny, the only way that can happen is if you’re totally ignorant of other cultures. – but we knew that already.
“Funny, the only way…” you can imagine other peoples as non-racist is… “is if you’re totally ignorant of other cultures.” – but we knew that already
I think they’re gonna need a bigger boat . Or that dude is gonna need some cleaner pants.
The mammals on the smaller boat should’ve GTFO
Chum!
Its hard to tell, but that shark looks like an easy 12 feet long. Probably weighs over a ton.
/boils water, adds Zatarian’s, and lights Suthen Signal .
You know who else tried to take over Europe?
I refuse to believe that thing is “food”.
Top of the Chain right there, I dare ya to go in the water……..
I love langostinos.
That either.
Was it a capful of liquid crab boil? He may not respond otherwise. Oh, and it’s Zatarain’s, Sally, not Zatarian’s. /Ted S or UCS or whatever other pedants we have around here.
Tony Chachere’s or go home
Youtube doesn’t have the crayfish scene from RocknRolla so I’ll just link this one.
Buy it by the gallon.
https://www.amazon.com/Zatarains-Orleans-Style-Crawfish-Shrimp/dp/B006UCU9O4?psc=1&SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B006UCU9O4
https://www.mccormick.com/zatarains/zatarains
I dont get it. Crawfish are taking over europe? Stop fucking around and catch them in 100 lb batches and have a boil. This isnt a hard problem to solve.
I like their dirty rice mix.
Brother, I am going to send you a cajun dirty rice recipe. It is so good you cant believe it. Once a month or so I make it and the wife and I eat just that as a meal. I usually figure the batch will last about three days but Ambien munchies always spoil that plan.
Trazadone munchies direct me towards OG Soft Batch cookies. Oddly, almost always right @ 3 am
they haven’t worked out the licensing scheme yet, for how to allow the peasants to harvest these newcomers from the kings land.
Been hunting underwater fat-tailed crustaceans all day down in the keys, now I’m drunk
I’m glad we vertebrates can agree on something.
I got thrown out of Sloppy Joe’s in Key West one Christmas night for being too drunk. I find honor in that.
Sounds way better than my day.
Gee, another dangerous trend. This is my surprised face.
https://www.whimn.com.au/love/intimacy/theres-a-new-way-to-orgasm-and-its-super-weird/news-story/43a2c340a36bc7472a0af08648dc17a7
“Bladders need to be treated with respect. It’s important to go when you need to go, not when you’re busting,”
“She said these orgasms sometimes leave her lightheaded and off balance, and are pretty different from her clit or vaginal orgasms,”
But is it different from a tittiegasm?
JUST PEE FFS!
I think it was an old M*A*S*H episode when Radar, quoting his mom, said “its better to hold the phone, than to risk a kidney stone”
Sooo, a half dozen indie comic books on indiegogo have raked well over a million dollars in a couple of months – with more passing their minimum benchmarks every day.
On the more traditional side of things, maybe Mythical Libertarian Woman and Uncivil Servant have some thoughts on Blake Northcott’s book kickstarter? https://twitter.com/BlakeNorthcott/status/1026310377980784640 (John Del Arroz is apparently #1 in steampunk titles on Amazon right now as well).
Curious if these projects are getting any play in the YA social media circles or if they’re being shut out and given the silent treatment all around?
see also from Blake:
Let’s hope he replied by sending the agent her 2017 email.
Blake is pretty cool. Have to admit, that even though I agree with them politically, I hate the takes from diversity and comics and crew.
I may have to interview her.
AND BY INTERVIEW . . . oh, never mind. Thought this was a STEVE SMITH comment for a second.
Blake’s great and I think Barbara would like her current Executive Assistant Iris comic by Aspen.
OTOH, this kind of thing is so frustrating: https://youtu.be/u19J325XIlo
It looks like the social media rep was forced to delete a lot of their comments but it’s just irritating – esp since it doesn’t necessarily match the views of the writers/artists – so why would you actively try and deprive yourself of customers for something as stupid as a profile note?
For the self-publishers – here’s another take I saw earlier that’s really interesting: https://twitter.com/SplattoDelGato/status/1026240079700869120 (graph of social media audience vs funds raised).
This doesn’t look like a Blue Wave to me:
We are almost to the real polling season where election polls might actually have some relevance. As an aside, it has to be driving Obama crazy that Trump has better approval ratings than he did halfway through his first term, and has “right direction” numbers 75% higher than his were before he left office.
“I am going to look after the interests of the people that hired me” polls higher than a world-wide apology tour and bowing to foreign princes?
I am shocked.
I’d be interested to see some analysis of how “right direction” polling correlates with pickups by the party out of power in a mid-year election. It seems like it would be a drag on the usual expectation that the party out of power picks up seats.
As our first black President said, “It’s the economy, stupid”.
Looks like Barry is just edging out Donny at this point but these pools are fixed anyway, right up until they agree with my worldview anyhow, then they are rock solid.
“Here’s the deal, dummies who are like “it’s a private company” — censoring certain views based on politics means that Facebook is a publisher not a platform and therefore they should have their liability waiver on illegal user posted content revoked.”
https://twitter.com/CassandraRules/status/1026570713350717449
That’s been my point all along.
Taking down posts (and frequent offender users) that infringe on a copyright, or are simply not legal at all (a very small category: child porn, not sure what else) keeps you in the liability free zone. You could probably extend that to taking down posts/users who are spam factories or who trip an algo that says they probably aren’t people. Taking down posts/users that are offensive takes you straight into being a publisher who has responsibility for everything on your site.
I’m not familiar with the details, but I bet one of the Founders could write up a post on the basics.
I thought you were a lawyer.
(j/k; I know lawyers specialize)
not legal at all (a very small category: child porn, not sure what else)
Threats, defamation, instructions for how to defraud the U.S. government, buying/selling/making/using illegal drugs/bombs/guns, terrorism, violations of an NDA or gag order, the existence or target of an NSL, and probably a few other things.
Not that small.
Good points. The list is longer than I thought (obvs), and has some very fuzzy categories (threats, defamation, terrorism). Some of them are very easily identified because they would be based on legal documents (NDA, gag order, NSL).
Taking down posts or users due to “offensive but not illegal” content or just because others ask you to still seems to put them firmly in publisher territory, though.
“Don’t worry, establishment – I’ll figure out something!” – John Roberts
Prediction: when Kavanaugh joins the Court, Roberts will “evolve” into the swing justice that tries to keep the Constitutionalists from winning too many votes.
“InfoWars Ban: CNN, Democrats Successfully Lobby Big Tech to Censor Their Critics
Big tech’s coordinated purge of InfoWars — which was hit by bans from Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube in rapid succession — did not occur in a vacuum. On this issue, Silicon Valley bowed to CNN journalists and Democrat politicians who ceaselessly lobbied for the site to be censored.”
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/06/infowars-ban-cnn-democrats-successfully-lobby-big-tech-to-censor-their-critics/
That isn’t going to end well, I think.
Re shark comment: my favorite is this video of a stooooopid motherfucker flapping his jaws about how sharks aren’t really dangerous to people and two seconds later he loses a leg.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/538003/scientist-loses-part-leg-calf-bull-shark-attack-discovery-channel-Erich-Ritter-Cayman
They are giant fish that eat meat. You are made out of meat, genius.
The same goes for Bears (especially Polar Bears). They are monsters that will kill/eat you.
Cute as shit, though.
Until you shave it.
El chupacabra!
El get me away from that thing-a.
I love bears. From a distance. A far distance.
Damn right.
I was rooting for that bison in Yellowstone to gore the shit out of that asshole tourist.
Years ago my wife and I were in Yellowstone and stopped by a marsh to watch – from a good quarter-mile away- a bull moose feeding. Some idiot tourist decided he wanted a close up of the critter and started splashing across the area to get close. The bull took exception and ran the moron out of his marsh. I rooted for the moose all the while.
Never get involved in a project with someone you have a romantic relationship with. That’s my take away from this week. It’s so stupid and obvious that only an idiot like me would miss it.
Back in recording studio to try this without hating each other.
Billy Davis and Marilyn McCoo have been married for 49 years.
Crossing my fingers. Mrs. Suthenboy and I have been married half of that time and I am not even close to tired of her company. In all of that time I have never run across anyone that would tempt me away from her.
49 years is very impressive.
The wife and I hit eight years this past June. We grind each others gears pretty good, but we actually seek to spend time with each other. The dynamic pretty early on was kind of us as a team interacting with the rest of the world, and it’s stayed that way. We bitch at each other all the time about dishes and dumb crap like that, but we’re also best friends. That bang and stuff, which is a nice bonus.
You call 10 to 20 foot changes in elevation at the coastline small relative to what happens along the San Andreas? Uh-huh.
Huh. It turns out that hanging out with the cable guy for two and half hours trying to fix one missing channel is not conducive to päntsdrunk.