Normally, I’d start with a little snarky bit related to my title and theme. But I’m getting more and more pissed off at one of our local Team Blue candidates, who has deluged us with mailer after mailer about what an evil human his opponent is. Last weekend, I showed a couple examples where he implied that his opponent was a child molester (or at least a sympathizer). This week’s mailers were all subtly aimed at Brett Kavanaugh, despite an Illinois state representative having zero to do with that process. Yesterday’s arrival, though, completely took me over the edge, enough so that I’m now voting for a Team Red guy for perhaps the first time in my life. Fuck you, Sam Yingling, you managed to turn me from indifferent to actively hating you and your campaign. I have no idea if the Team Red guy has any merit, but at least he’s not spamming me every day with this shit. You are everything that is wrong with politics.


While I’m ranting, I note that it’s also a remarkably shitty day for notable birthdays. When Harry Brecheen (“The Armkiller”) and C. Everett Koop (“Look at my cool uniform, I’m an admiral!”) head the list of luminaries born on this day, one cannot help but think that October 14 is a day that could be removed from the calendar without anyone missing it much.


Bah. Let’s look at the news, it has to be better. Maybe. Well, Jamal Kashoggi is still missing, the Turks are still claiming to have documentary evidence of his murder, and of course the usual media flacks are trying to make this all about Trump. 

In the past 24 hours, reports have emerged that a government hit squad, said to have been dispatched directly by bin Salman, first in line to the Saudi throne, seized, interrogated, tortured, then killed and, using a bone saw, dismembered the body of a journalist. Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was one of the regime’s leading critics.
A central question now is just how far Trump may be prepared to go in defense of the kind of rabid values the Saudis now seem to have embraced. But even more important for American interests, at home and abroad, are the potential consequences.

Remember the press indignation when Trump’s predecessors cozied up to the Saudis? Yeah, me neither.

 


Global Warming strikes again!

The Grand Forks Air Force Base recorded a whopping 17.4 inches overnight Wednesday into Thursday with snow drifts piling up to 33 inches high, according to the National Weather Service’s Grand Forks office.

“It’s kind of unbelievable that this happened in October,” Andrew Moore, an NWS-Grand Forks meteorologist, told the Grand Forks Herald.

Yeah, this is just weather and is entirely unrelated to AGW, but hey, if every hot day is blamed on it, every cold day ought to be as well.


If there’s any plus side to the Redward shift in the judicial system, it’s that it looks increasingly likely that the pernicious practice of overt racial discrimination in college admissions may have to go underground (it certainly won’t stop).

The lawsuit, backed by the Trump administration, could eventually reach the Supreme Court, giving the newly cemented five-member conservative majority a chance to bar the use of affirmative action to help minority applicants get into college.

Of course, “minority” in this context doesn’t include yellow people or Jews. Yes, Harvard is a private institution and ought to be free to want to avoid looking too Chinese and to bake in the concept that blacks are inferior and should not be held to the same intellectual standards. My ideal outcome (which will never happen) is that Harvard would be free to continue to practice racial/gender/whatever discrimination, but would lose all public subsidies and tax breaks. But on the bright side, if this suit goes as expected, that sort of racism will be much harder for public institutions to practice.


This is shocking: teenagers are STILL sending each other naked pix.

The superintendent of Ridgewood public schools says local police are investigating “possible sexting incidents” involving school-age students within the district. According to a release sent to parents of children in grades 6-12, the explicit images were not shared on school property but school officials are working with Ridgewood police to find out who was involved.

“I want all parents to be advised that the possession and/or transmission of sexually revealing or explicit images, or any material of that nature, constitutes the very serious crime of possession and transmission of child pornography,” Superintendent Daniel Fishbein said in the letter.

The selfless public servants of the Ridgewood schools and police are, of course, examining the evidence very closely and at length.


Vandals strike historic statues, but this time, it’s not Confederates, it’s Revolutionaries. And they didn’t tear the statue down, they glued goggly-eyes on it! Oh, the horrors!

“Who did this?! Someone placed googly eyes on our historic #NathanaelGreene statue in #JohnsonSquare,” the official City of Savannah Government account wrote on its Facebook page in a post Thursday.

“It may look funny but harming our historic monuments and public property is no laughing matter…”

Well, yeah, it is, actually.


Old Man Music is inevitable, so you may as well lay back and enjoy it. And all I can say is that this is a brilliant song, written and sung by a brilliant performer.