Hockey is back! And there were some nice upsets (Go No Gata!), close calls (Vandy-UK) and good games in college basketball last night, especially the Buckeyes dismantling Indiana after that tough loss the other day in which they got screwed by the refs. I know many of you chose one of those two things rather than the SOTU last night. I decided to watch Weird Science and explain to my son this is how nerds used to overcome adversity: by creating women (or Pershing missiles) in their bedroom with bras on their heads. He was taking notes, which makes me nervous. Also, RIP Chet.
So you guys can discuss all that in the comments or you can discuss, among other things…the links!
From the recaps I saw and the comments I looked at last night, I can’t tell if Trump delivered his State Of The Union speech last night to his base, to those he’s courting to add to that base or exclusively to his political opponents. I do know CNN apparently conjectured that his wife wore white to protest…him? And that she rode separately out of protest too…even though she was escorting his guests personally to the event. And then Kennedy and the chapstick and his calling out Trump for bullying tranny kids or something? And where was Maxine? I was spectin to hea a ho lotta biness bout ‘peachment. An wif her not speak’n, I dinna hea bout ‘peachment. Oh well, I’m sure she’ll start talking about it again soon when the Nunes memo gets released.
Looks like Andrew McCabe, new hero of the left, has a few questions that need to be answered. I’m curious how the “Hillary got railroaded because they waited till the last minute to examine her emails” narrative will play out now that it looks like they were trying to sweep the whole thing completely under the rug but had to announce their existence as the truth was being leaked by front-line FBI agents.
Speaking of FBI agents, this one here sounds like a real idiot. Which means he’ll keep his job and/or get a sweet early retirement…all for killing the person he was sent to rescue but completely failed to identify before pulling the trigger twice. You know the way to not “fear losing control of your weapon”? Well, try not jamming it through a window barrel-first to a dark room in a hostage situation for starters.
Shit, I saw the headline and I assumed SA had finally got a spine. Then I read the story and realized they had merely increased the wattage in their social signaler. Seriously…what a bunch of fucking asshats.
I can’t figure this out. Is it some Harrison Bergeron-type shit going on, or is a Berkeley, CA public school using a weighted compression vest to punish kindergarteners who get a little excitable? Either way, its child abuse and stretches any acceptable level of in loco parentis beyond a reasonable level. And if it happened to one of my kids and I was given such a flippant answer when I questioned it, there would likely be blood spilled. Plenty of blood.
I’m shocked! Shocked to find corruption going on in Cook County, Illinois!
Somebody get this guy a bus ticket to Florida. Oh wait, Powhatan is the Florida of Virginia, so it all makes sense.
Here’s his theme music. He’s earned it.
Good luck out there today, friends. I know it’ll be filled with apoplexy over the SOTU. And with a little luck, the Nunes memo will push them over the edge. ::fingers crossed::
Comments
500 responses to “Wednesday Morning Links”
I missed the SOTU speech and the Glibs comments – sad!
Instead I was watching MST3K: Sidehackers with the late great Ross Hagen.
A classic! I always appreciated the fact that his character’s name is Rommel. Completely random and yet hilarious.
Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!
My 13 year old loves MST3K and Sidekhackers in particular.
The other Ross Hagen one, Wild Rebels I think, is even better
I’m just talkin’ ’bout Mitchell!
“But I’m the chubby blue line!”
Mitchell: “This is a police investigation”
Joel: “Oh, I thought it was just a fat slob wandering around my house”
You’re raising that kid well!
We were making pizza and drinking, much preferable activities to watching the retarded circus.
I watched arkansas get boat raced by Texas A&M instead. That was probably a better use of my time.
Aw man you missed a good one. There were Nazi symbols everywhere, mock lynches and nooses hanging, he even had a Grand Wizard stand for an applause.
It was one for the ages.
I see you’ve read the NYT analysis.
Time Chasers is hands-down the best MST3K. Mitchell is damn solid. Space Mutiny is also one of my faves, especially the constant cracks about the age difference between the love interest.
Werewolf is *stellar.* I know I’m missing many off the top of my head, especially the earlier episodes.
Controversial: I always liked Mike more than Joel. Both fantastic and not at all a deal-breaker, but I just prefer Mike. Maybe it’s something sexual. I need to ask Jesse some…things.
I like Joel more than Mike (and will rarely watch an episode of MST3K with him in it). Joel has a dopey laid back attitude and had an odder sense of humor that I appreciate.
No accounting for taste, I suppose.
But truly, I was born in ’87. When I get around to be old enough to get MST3K it had moved on to the later seasons on Comedy Central and SciFi. I’m quite certain that childhood exposure is the main reason that I like him better–also the later seasons had more money to buy rights to silly films that weren’t so grainy and easier to just simply enjoy as a kid. Watching some of the older eps on youtube is really hard considering the film quality. But some of the monster/Godzilla movies in the Joel age are priceless.
Certainly one of the most important influences on my pop-culture/sense of humor in my imprinting faze. . Surpassed perhaps only by obviously Good Simpsons and Calvin & Hobbes.
Early Mike sighting…
Morrissey Tupperware — “Did I mention that I Cried?”
I actually thought they got a guest appearance for a second.
But I’m a Joel.
Neither is a deal breaker for me. However, Trace Beaulieu as Crow or GTFO.
Watched “The Open House” on Netflix with the wife. It was sort of an unspoken agreement that watching the SOTU would be detrimental to the general state of marital contentment and harmony. We got about an hour in before we both agreed it had a low-budget film student feel, and not in a good way. Personally, I appreciated the dialogue between the son and his MILF-ish mom while she was in the shower with her back, etc., to the clear glass door. I did not mention this to the wife. The dialogue could’ve been longer for my tastes. Maybe the whole movie depending on where they took it.
By any measure, it surpassed the SOTU.
This is all I’m hearing about, so I guess Trump must have done okay.
Apparently he was an awful bigot and a bully and a hate-filled monster.
Which explains the measly 70-75% approval of the speech.
CNN headline: Trump speech has lowest approval in the history of our survey.
(for the category of “Very Positive”, at like 48% or something)
I am kind of disappointed there wasn’t trolling like having ICE nab the illegals, or Trump having some aides come in and hand out Diet Coke for everyone.
Or give everyone an ice cream and get two scoops for himself.
Wait, give everybody there an ice cream after they produce their ID that says they’re an American citizen…then get two scoops.
I’m picturing him walking to the podium tossing money in the air and telling everyone to pick up his crumbs.
Yeah, or a cannon that shoots hundreds of dollar bills into the gallery.
“Have some crumbs! That’s what Nancy called them, right Nancy?”
::BOOM::
“And you guys too. The Illegals up there on the left. You have some crumbs too!”
::BOOM::
“And the Democrat leadership. Here are some crumbs for you guys!”
::BOOM::
^This kind of stuff is exactly what people expected. Trump has the lowest hurdles in the race.
Transporting illegals within the US is also a crime, along with conspiracy for the same. Too bad he didn’t arrest the senators and reps who brought the illegals to the state of the union as well. Rules don’t apply to Top. Men.
Wouldn’t the be human trafficking?
Chappastickik? I heard it was drool. And Bernie ran out of other people’s video. So looks like Trump won bigly. Sad!
Is this worse than drinking a glass of water ala Rubio?
*snortlaugh*
It was hilarious as it was grating. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the corner of his mouth. I kept wanting to wipe his mouth.
It was all SJW emotional nonsense.
We’re not bullies, m’kay? He attacked what he inferred from the speech and not the content of what was said.
In other words, very much in line with Democrat progressive bull shit you’d expect.
Look, offering legalization and a path to citizenship for 1.8 million “dreamers” while improving border security and reforming the immigration system is totes racist, m’kay?
Ah, the Chicago Sun-Times – diligently uncovering Cook County/TEAM BLUE (same thing) corruption…and every election, endorsing a straight Democratic ticket. WHYCOME IT NOT EVER GET BETTER HERE?
LOL@ Gilmore last night re: “ginger dolt”
Kiddie porn enthusiast and Glee actor hangs self.
I hope it didn’t go easy for him. This dude deserved a more serious earthly punishment.
For Glee?
He killed a pedophile, so he can’t be all that bad.
Hopefully.
HEY!!!!
As in an old Dennis Miller routine, he took one for the team!
If someone were facing a prison sentence for any kind of sex crime related to children, I can’t say that suicide would be an irrational decision. Many years of regularly scheduled ass-rape followed by a life as a pariah on a government list with little to no hope of ever getting a decent job? I can’t blame the guy.
My understanding is most Pedos end up in special confinement, because otherwise someone in GenPop will end up killing them.
I watched some Father Ted, and then a few episodes of Justified; almost to the end of season 3. Ridiculous story, good dialog.
That describes Justified to a tee, finished up with a quick-draw contest.
Man, I miss that show!
Did you watch this episode of Father Ted? The one where he is mistaken for a Nazi? Would have been apropos.
Is season 3 the first one with Patton Oswalt? He had the best character in the show.
TW: Krugnuts
Bubble, bubble, fraud and trouble
He’s pretty much right though, even if its for the wrong reasons.
Exactly right. If you didn’t get in on bit coin in the early days you’re out of luck now. It is too late. It is a market being run up and down by the people who own the most bit coin. It might be a good long term investment if you dont need fast money and you can ride the up and down waves but anyone that gets in expecting to get rich overnight is going to be disappointed.
I can tell when Krugman’s thinking is wrong with 100% accuracy – his mouth moves.
Suthen,
I can’t seem to catch you in any of the comments!
I would love a cite (or even better, a film clip) of the Bolivian Air Force jets parading into the mountain…I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.
Thanks!
Curious, since I’m big into historical plane crashes, I googled around looking for plane crashes / mountains / military / jets / south america / bolivia etc without any luck.
Can’t find anything in the Aviation Safety database for Bolivia either
Only military crash into the mountains I could find was a USAF plane that crashed into a mountain in Bolivia in 1974
Link to that last crash: https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19740818-1
What’s the “tether to reality” of $100 bills? The next paragraph is not exactly… convincing.
Men with guns and tanks and warships and planes say they are real.
Hasn’t the dollar lost something like 96% of its value since the early 1900’s? The “value” fluctuates at the whim of the Fed and the government, because there is no asset backing it.
A significant chunk of hat ‘lost value’ is deliberate.
When economists appointed by the federal government sit down and decide that there’s a non-zero “target” of inflation which they’d like to achieve, they’re deciding how much of your money they intend to steal as it sits in your bank, home and retirement portfolio.
The USD is a wasting asset: its value does not fluctuate up or down; it only goes down.
The Fed’s and government’s whims do, however influence the rate of decline.
His argument is that the fed gov requires taxes to be paid in dollars, so that’s why the dollar holds value.
So, if we raise taxes, the dollar will be worth more?
related: There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever
A perusal of Mackay’s classic can be enlightening.
The other negative thing that happened shortly after the Tulip collapse was a naval battle where the Spaniards took out a large Dutch merchant convoy, and I think a lot of the economic hardship made legend by the Tulip Craze was a result of the battle 15 days later, not the Tulip Craze itself.
Probably the same for the South Sea Bubble. If Newton hadn’t lost everything, I doubt anyone would remember it.
Yes, no one has ever been able to back up that the story actually happened. It probably didn’t.
I’ve heard about the tulip bubble being twaddle. Which is interesting and I would love if anyone knows more about it. I’ll check out the link in a bit.
Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money is one of my favorite books and it goes into pretty great detail about the “bubble.” I’m fairly certain that Ferguson is a complete asshole in real life, but he’s got several books/docus that I really like. Mostly has a libertarian bent, it seems. Civilization and The Pity of War are also fantastic, IMO.
YES there was a huge tulip bubble. What this historian is attacking is a view that no historian has held for 100 years. The extreme version of tulip mania that has poor people gambling on tulip futures absolutely didn’t happen. But rich people throwing around massive shit-tons of money for flowers absolutely did happen. The Dutch trading empire was kicking ass in the 17th century* and the upper classes had unbelievable amounts of capital lying around. That led to a stupid and fruity (flowery?) bubble. It eventually popped and all was well again.
*The end of the 80 years war led to Spain dropping their embargoes on Dutch trade. Also Holland’s principle trading rival was Britain that went all in on the Navigation Acts and mercantilist protectionism which, unsurprisingly to anyone here, fucked up their trade balance and hiked commodity prices. The free trade Dutch merchants made a killing on Britain’s stupidity.
So, is bitcoin a giant bubble that will end in grief? Yes. But it’s a bubble wrapped in techno-mysticism inside a cocoon of libertarian ideology.
This is the level of idiocy I’d expect from Krugman. Sure, there’s a bubble in bitcoin. It’s probably still overpriced. But, it’s ridiculous to go, like Krugman does, from there to “bitcoin is not a viable financial medium”.
Krugman cites the example of Dutch tulips. But, people still buy and sell tulips. People still have them in their homes. The same goes for multiple bubbles over the years. There’ve been bubbles in Emerging Markets securities. They’ve come back. There’ve been bubbles in high yield debt. High yield is now a viable asset class. Even securitized debt is making its slow and steady comeback (prevented, I believe, by the government’s active dominance of the market).
Perhaps ironically, it’s the very lack of a tether to reality that Krugman speaks of within the multiple government fiat currencies that is creating an inflation in asset prices that is driving the bitcoin bubble.
The problem with bitcoin isn’t a speculative bubble. It is an architectural problem with the blockchain that is limiting scalability. There are groups working on solutions to the problem, but it currently is rather expensive and time consuming to execute a transaction. This from a currency that was initially free and almost instant to transfer.
Other digital currencies exist that appear to be more scalable. So that’s the threat to bitcoin, another, better currency. Not the flight of investors in a bubble.
I think you’re absolutely right in the long-term. That was a large part of why I was saying that the market for bitcoin will continue.
But, I don’t think that reality negates a speculative bubble in the short-term. Right now, lots of people are buying to bitcoin, not for it’s monetary value as a medium of exchange or store of value, but as an asset that they hope will appreciate in price (speculation). And that seems to be swamping even the architectural problem of prices being driven by excess demand for the currency’s supply growth. If prices begin to fall, that will drive a lot of the speculative players out of the market. And that will cause prices to fall even more quickly. And that could very well spook some monetary investors who are looking at bitcoin as a store of value.
But, and again I emphasize. These are short-term phenomena.
I Krugman understood Bitcoin in the slightest, he’d have noted that it has so far failed expectations for it to become a means of exchange.
To serve as money, a thing — commodity, fiat currency, or virtual currency — must be 1) a durable store of value, 2) a divisible unit of account, and 3) a means of exchange.
The extremely high transaction costs (my last transaction cost something like 8% of the total; fixed costs make small transactions infeasible) make Bitcoin an unpleasant means of exchange.
Unless you’re buying a full auto BAR and 10,000 rounds of AP ammo on Silk Road.
Tom Woods hosted a friendly but lively debate between Jameson Lopp and Roger Ver about Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash, http://www.tomwoods.com/1064
The real bubble that needs to pop is Krugman. He’s been wildly overvalued for decades.
He actually does a great job at confirming the world view of NYT readers, which is what he is really getting paid for.
He’s not anything that is tethered to reality. And Krugman can’t be used to pay taxes.
Can’t argue with that.
If you listen to the Contra Krugman podcast (which is excellent) you’ll notice this pattern that went on back in the Obama years where Krugman would alternate between two positions:
A) “The economy is terrible and it’s all the fault of those Republicans in Congress!”
B) “The economy has never been better and it’s all thanks to President Obama’s wise economic leadership!”
Of course, now he’s suffering from advanced-stage Trump Derangement Syndrome, so every column is Nazis and Russians or whatever. We can only hope that researchers find a cure for this devastating disease before it’s too late.
Agreed. That podcast has been fun and VERY educational. Bob Murphy is excellent at catching Krugman saying one thing a few years, or even a few months ago, and something totally opposite at another time. Plus, Murphy is great at checking the links Krugman includes which ostensibly support whatever he’s saying in his column. Many times they either contradict what Krugman is claiming, or are ambivalent. Good stuff.
The crypto currency market did have a massive growth in 2017 but it shows some ability to correct itself every now and then compared to the housing bubble that only went one way for a while. What is interesting is that Bitcoin is slowly losing its dominance on the market to other coins, so the drop in value of Bitcoin is mostly due to some form of diversification, not a crash in the market per say.
I doubt it will grow as fast in 2018 as it did in 2017, but I think it will continue to grow with high volatility. With many countries now regulating it, some even promoting it (in a statist way of course), big banks getting behind it (Ripple); crypto currency is definitively here to stay. But the big gold rush is behind us.
And to paraphrase John McAfee on the argument of no underlying value : it costs him about 1 000$ to mine one Bitcoin (in electricity and computers), so yup, there is some underlying encryption value there.
Fun fact : I was working for a guy that wants to do his own ICO to finance some project. He’ll do it, but I calculated that there is a 50% chance he’ll run afoul of the powers that be and get shutdown so I bailed. And now there is a 50 % chance that I just refused a boatload of money. We’ll see.
“Powhatan is Florida of Virginia”. Amen! At least the Florida of eastern Virginia. West of Charlottesville is might be something Galax or Grundy. Or are those the “West Virginia of Virginia”?
Norton
Yeah, Ralphie?
Ok, the Eurotards have went full on Eurotard. Never go full on Eurotard.
If this don’t take top derp linkage of today, I give up.
WTF?
I surmise the target group is girls ages 16-18?
“Youths”
I’m guessing not white kids in their private school uniforms.
That will last until they target some rich guy’s kids.
“The idea is to deter criminality by sending a signal that the men will not be able to hang onto their ill-gotten gains”
So, civil asset forfeiture. Not too much different that what U.S. cops do.
Hey you stupid redneck, why the fuck do you have 800 bucks in your glove box. I think I’ll be taking that.
Here is a copy of my pay stub. It’s in small print on the tip of my middle finger.
I watched the Wildcats struggle to finally beat a team in OT they should have destroyed from the get-go. March is going to be grim in the Bluegrass.
There’s simply no team chemistry at UK. None whatsoever. It reminds me of Ohio State last season: give guys out there lacking any shared goal on a given possession, standing around watching one guy afte the other go isolation. And then no defensive intensity whatsoever.
Of course UK has more talent than OSU had last year. Hell, maybe more talent this year. But they have no team unity and no heart.
It’s the one-and-done model. Dook has twice the talent UVA has, but we have a tough, experienced team that has played together for more than 5 months, and that’s why we beat them last weekend. UK and Duke have put all their chips on pure talent in the hopes that they’ll gel as a team by April. For the most part, it isn’t really working as far as NCAA success goes. Calipari has gotten pretty explicit about not really caring whether they win championships or not at this point – he has said that his main goal is prepping his guys for the NBA.
he has said that his main goal is prepping his guys for the NBA.
…and cashing those huge paychecks.
World Wide Wes’s pockets are deep indeed.
The players cashing their huge paychecks or Coach Cal coaching his?
Strange that the FBI found the “one and done” kids getting paid at Arizona, but not at Kentucky or Duke, the biggest one-and-done destinations.
Easy to see who wasn’t paying – people like Roy Williams at UNC were consistently getting a one-and-done player every year… then suddenly nothing. People were wondering if the game had passed him by and he couldn’t get the big recruits any more. Then they announced the arrests, and two weeks later he gets a one and done commit.
Bennett at UVA also seems to do things the right way. He gets some explosive players from time to time, but mostly he gets solid guys who will work hard and play the way he tells them to. And they win a ton that way. I wonder if he’ll get the one and done guy now? Kinda a tough sell for that kind of player…. come here and play a crap ton of defense and don’t score nearly as much as you would at Kansas, Kentucky or Duke…. it will be great!
Yup. No on-court communication whatsoever. Of course, this holds out the hope that not all of them will leave for the NBA and we will have some “elders” for next year.
So, I hear that Trump threw out some pretty good stuff in the SOTU, like prison reform and access to experimental drugs. I have a one up on that last one, how about leaving people the fuck alone and letting them use whatever drugs they want?
‘As a 1990s teenager, the world gave us girl power and pornification’
And I thought the 90s was about shitty grunge music.
Your entire species was hideous from 1989 to 1996
Am I a monster?
So, are bitcoins a superior alternative to $100 bills, allowing you to make secret transactions without lugging around suitcases full of cash? Not really, because they lack one crucial feature: a tether to reality.
But your Federal Reserve Notes are tethered tightly to reality, right, Doktor Krugabe?
You have to pay taxes in them so they are tied to the reality that if you don’t use them we will kill you. /Krugman
You know… morons
From Washington to Wall Street and beyond, a deep sense of unease permeated gatherings of high-status respectables at the dawn of the Trump presidency. The situation seemed dire: A madman had been swept into office in a wave of populist rage directed at them—and in that hallucinatory moment, it felt as if he was capable of anything. Would he tank their stock portfolios with a single tweet? Imprison their favorite New York Times columnists? Start a trade war with China, or a nuclear war with North Korea? And what to make of this mysterious movement he now marshaled?
Elites were tormented by visions of torches and pitchforks on the horizon—red-capped zealots encircling their co-ops, crashing through their gated subdivisions, banging down the doors of their brownstones. At a dinner party early in Trump’s first term, I heard a well-appointed Washingtonian fret that the #MAGA army might literally march on the nation’s capital to visit violence and destruction on its inhabitants. At another event, a top executive at a Fortune 500 company pitched me on monetizing the insights I’d gleaned from covering Trump by becoming a consultant for corporate America. “I’m telling you, there are CEOs and boards all over the country right now that are terrified of Trump’s Twitter feed,” he said with great enthusiasm. “They’re trying to figure out how to stay on his good side and get what they want out of him.”
This says a whole lot more about the “elites” than it says about Trump.
Imprison their favorite New York Times columnists?
The NYT had their own thoughts about that. And the left aren’t gonna like to read it.
Lol:
“In an interview last May, President Obama pushed back on the criticism that his administration had been engaged in a war on the press. He argued that the number of leak prosecutions his administration had brought had been small and that some of those cases were inherited from the George W. Bush administration.”
Lefties cheered the weaponization of the executive when their man was in. You’d think that Trump’s election would teach them a lesson about government power. They don’t appear to have learned anything.
They’ve learned that they must maintain power for themselves, by any means, and prevent any opposition candidate who gets elected from being able to govern, again by any means.
They learned to undermine any elected official that isn’t one of them, even if they have to burn the country down in the process…
/RESIST!!!1!!
“fret that the #MAGA army might literally march on the nation’s capital to visit violence and destruction on its inhabitants.”
No system can function without a proper feedback signal
Are they gonna take the same route the looters and rioters from Antifa took on Inauguration Day? Or will they stay up north and take the Baltimore BLM Riot Trail instead?
So many choices for those “potentially violent” Trump fans. And so many examples they can follow from the left.
It’s a people-based version of “fascism is always descending on America yet always landing in Europe”.
I suspect by that time it will be more of an orderly march up to the nearest bullet-scarred wall. Convened by an executioner going through DC residents’ social media feeds…too specific?
Truck mounted wood-chippers?
…….thought The Dark Night Rises was a documentary
I’ve always believed the reason these people are so afraid of the unwashed masses stringing them up is because deep down they know they deserve it.
Damn right!
This is actually very astute. Mind if I share it?
Curious to see what type of derp it gets.
“at the dawn of the Trump presidency”
Trump is president? What happened to the black dude?
I dunno, I think Trump is sort of the final warning shot toward the oligarchy before literal heads start to roll.
If anything, it’s even more true now as the same people that elected Trump become increasingly convinced that the same oligarchy abused state power to try to rig the election, and afterward to undermine the transition, and the oligarchy’s media was complicit in the actions and the coverup. If they become convinced that the elites have made it impossible to honestly change the country via electoral politics, 2nd amendment solutions is a much more likely scenario. Initially, it might only be a few crackpots, but if the elites panic and start harassing people on the fence, things will go south pretty quick.
The person I watched it with was baffled that I liked some of what trump said (on taxes, regulation, prison reform, killing the mandate) and didn’t like some of the things he said (those damn opiates, the great lovable cops, paid family leave fig leaf).
Makes me a hypocrite for not loving or hating everything.
I hate people
I hate people https://youtu.be/6lACe6upaww
One of the things (I didn’t watch, so just relying on what other’s are saying) I was unclear on, I guess a little apprehensive about, is when he was talking about lowering drug prices. It all depends on what approach you would take. I mean if he’s talking about more deregulation and reining in the FDA, then yes, by all means. But if he’s talking about government price controls, what the hell, has Trump been hanging out with Bernie? Hopefully, it’s the former he was talking about.
I think he would go the former route. I think he understands that regulations strangle markets. It’s probably his best quality.
The way to fix that market is to introduce transparency. And maybe require a store to have a fixed price.
We just went through this with a prescription for my wife. Prices varied wildly depending on which discount you could get and which pharmacy you were at. Prices ranged from $15 to $118 on the same drug – name brand too.
But there wasn’t an easy way to compare prices. Until now. There is an app that will price shop for you. It saved me over a hundred bucks on a month’s supply, so I was happy.
But you shouldn’t have a situation where prices are off by 10x. That means the market isn’t functioning properly.
Can you imagine a 2-liter of soda being a buck for the lady in front of you, two bucks for you and 9 bucks at the circle K down the street? No chance. Drugs shouldn’t be different. They are commodities – identical no matter which store sells them. It should come down to price, convenience and service.
I could definitely see the different price for pop if people only bought pop once a year or so and had no idea what it cost in other places. If suddenly you needed one, and your insurance was going to discount part of the cost, and you had to choose where you want to get your pop NOW because you can no longer carry your prescription around with you and shop, then yea, BIG disparity in pricing.
drug prices won’t start to make sense until individuals, not insurance companies or government, become the primary consumers.
I think part of it is the fact that insurers (both private and Medicare) negotiate different prices for their members, and some are able to negotiate better deals than others on a particular drug. There’s probably much less variation in the out-of-pocket costs. Of course, the out-of-pocket costs are exorbitant (believe me, I work at a mail-order pharmacy in a job somewhat related to billing). This is most likely because when drug companies set their prices, they’re doing it with the deep-pocketed insurance companies in mind, not the consumer.
If health insurance were only for catastrophic events (which I believe it would be in a totally free heathcare market) the drug companies would be forced to offer drugs at a more reasonable price. Of course, that would probably require the FDA to ease up on their restrictions.
I don’t think this is necessarily the case. It might be if employer provided health insurance were not prevalent. Even so, people buy health insurance for a number of reasons, some of those include lower negotiated drug prices.
Given that I can’t buy those medications at $15, put them in a box and go my own store next to the place selling it for $118 and sell it for $100, then yes, the pharma market isn’t working. But it’s not working as a result solely of some very specific regulations.
In short, for every potential purchaser of that medication, there is a different level of demand, based on personal choice. My $100 per ‘scrip option might be the optimal solution for the majority of the market. With regulation the way it is now, we could only discover that optimal point by sheer luck.
I saw the freedom to try idea as a direct shot at the FDA’s regulating authority. If you can “try” for a terminal illness, why not for a crippling terminal condition that is not necessarily fatal (rheumatoid arthritis, for example)? If that, then why not for a terminal debilitating condition (Shingles, etc). If that, then why not potentially fatal cancers that may or may not be terminal?
Freedom can be just as addictive as free shit; once people taste a little of it, they usually want more… Maybe I’m being too optimistic.
What, you evaluated each issue on it’s own merit rather than on whether you like the person promoting it?!
You monster!
“its”
Yeah, I guess some people can’t just get on a team and follow the herd. It’s sposed to be ‘yeah, it’s all good!’ or ‘boo, it’s all bad!’. Looks like someone needs some re-edumencation.
A little nap, a glass of warm milk and a total frontal lobotomy?
Well we do live in a society that expects 100% success or they will resort to litigation. I am all for allowing people to use experimental drugs as long as they waive the drug provider’s liability. That in itself opens a can of worms considering the new American dream is a good lawsuit making you rich…
Since they passed a half-way decent tax bill, my hope is that Congress goes back to their inability to do anything. So all the goodies like raodz spending never passes.
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration continues downsizing Federal Agencies and playing 4D chess with the deep state.
That half way decent tax bill is going to cause a lot of problems in the future if congress doesn’t do the most important thing-Fucking cut spending. I want them to pull their heads out of their collective asses and work on that.
Sure. Step 1 is to not spend more on “infrastructure”.
Seeing how the economy is heating up. I’m going to guess that those tax cuts are fairly revenue neutral.
Neutral isn’t near good enough when your starting point is a trillion dollar a year deficit. The fed needs to run about 20 years of trillion dollar surplus to keep our whole economy from eventually crashing.
It’s all your ever going to get. Sorry.
Keep fucking dreaming. The tax and spenders will make sure that as soon as we get a surplus that money ends up being spent on some vote buying program that keeps them in power.
Hockey is back!
Finally! The real NHL season starts. Watch the Hawks miraculously climb out of the cellar and get back to the playoffs. Fuckers.
Wild picked up a nice shootout win in Ohio. Parise won the game with a nifty little move and a filthy backhand.
Next up, Army.
And just in time, the Pens have won 8 of 10 and are probably going to win it all again, thus proving that there either is no god, or there is one and he really hates us.
Go Penguins!
Been a fan since ’84
From your frostbitten lips to God’s ear.
Hockey? What’s this “hockey” you speak of? /disgruntled Rangers fan
#fireVigneault
How did he pull off the finals run a few years back? Lucky, or different personnel? I get to see very few of their games so have no idea.
Different lineup, particular on the blue line. McDonagh was a better player then and Stralman was terrific. Letting him go was the biggest mistake they’ve made in the recent past. Lundqvist was better. No small bit of luck with Carey Price getting hurt in the Montreal series.
Go Blues !
*narrows gaze*
Norwegian flight with 60 plumbers on board turns back due to broken toilets
I just know there’s a joke in there somewhere.
In Norway toilet poops on you?
None of them had the correct pants on?
I wonder if the scorn and ridicule the Donks are getting for their petulant reactions to the speech is what finally begins to break the #RESIST fever, or if it makes them double down even harder. Wait, no I don’t.
Double Down Double Down!
My own theory: The Dems think they drove down Bush the Younger’s popularity with their constant attacks; ie not the shitty Iraq War. So if they run the same playbook they will get the same results.
They also forget that Bush declined to respond to any of the attacks, no matter how ridiculous, allowing the left to completely control the narrative. Trump doesn’t make that mistake.
Bingo. Whatever else you think of Trump, and god knows there’s plenty to hate there, I admire him for breaking the GOP establishment mindset of constantly trying to curry favor with the leftist media and fighting fire with fire. He just don’t give a fuck. He also has a much, much better understanding of public relations than Bush ever did and has a natural charisma with his base that Bush never really had.
My wife is libertarian-leaning, but she absolutely hates Trump and everything he stands for. This morning she was ranting about how idiotic the Dem responses were. She said if she didn’t know any better she’d think the Dems were actively trying to get Trump re-elected in 2020.
Everything they’ve done since November 8, 2016 certainly points to that as being true.
Seriously. Even leaving aside whether or not you agree with the substance of the speech, sitting there stone-faced for things like “lowest African-American unemployment rate” or “everyone should stand for the National Anthem”? How fucking stupid do you have to be to be oblivious to how those reactions are going to play with everyone other than the hardcore #RESIST crowd?
A child could see what Trump was doing there yet the Dems just kept walking right into the traps he was setting. Hell, even mere perfunctory and brief applause for anodyne statements would have looked better than sitting their scowling like my kids do when I take away their Kindles.
Every Republican with any kind of African American population in their voting precinct should be running attack ads with the phrase: “Is this who you want to help you get a job?” with pictures of the Dems sitting to that line.
And school choice. I’ve thought this for a looooong time – if they actually would pursue school choice rather than mouthing empty platitudes about it, and loudly promote it in black communities, they would have the Dems’ balls in a vise. The Dems are so completely dependent on lockstep black votes that peeling even, say, 15-20% of black voters away from them would be a massive disaster for their electoral chances.
They don’t call them the Stupid Party for nothing.
Yeah, bu Democrats are like “Hold muh beer!”
Yeah, but Democrats are like “Hold muh beer!”
It’s fairly obvious that if fewer black people are unemployed and dependent on government, they’ll have less incentive to vote for the party of government dependency.
In addition, if I were as identity politics focused as the left is, I could easily make a case that the way they did not react to low African American unemployment was racist, because the Democrats only get the black vote for giving out free shit, and if someone has a job, they are less likely to need free shit.
Black people didn’t have to go to work before, but now Trump made them get jobs. Trump has literally put black people back into slavery!!!
/sarcasm, but you know that someone, somewhere actually thinks like this
Someone will run on it, promising the good old days of free shit while you stay home.
I said the Democratic response should have been called “let us remind you why you held your nose and voted Republican last election”
Their answer to everything is always “prog harder!”
This Daniel Greenfield piece was still fresh in my mind last night. The Left and the GOPe believe in professional government – nothing infuriates them like a successful amateur. That’s why the refuse to even acknowledge that Trump won the election fairly.
America’s only hope for 2020 rests on the ability to keep this level of outrage going until after the primaries:
Holy Shit Hillary Clinton Tried to Bury a Huge Turd in the State of the Union
When you’ve lost Jezebel…
Most qualified presidential candidate ever!!!
She still has the commenters, at least!
The Redskins traded for future Kirk Cousins. This franchise is the worst.
And they gave him $71 million guaranteed. And they traded a damn good young cornerback.
I am very happy that Dan Snyder has several decades left owning the Redskins.
Eh, Fuller isn’t that good.
It wasn’t really an awful deal as far as the immediate future goes. Smith and Cousins are roughly equivalent, and tying themselves to the kind of contract Cousins is going to get would have been a bigger mistake, but they did hitch themselves to a 34 year old game manager for pretty big money.
sure but Alex Smith had a career year with a good defense and fantastic running game, Kirk Cousins had no run game or defense this year and lost two thousand yard targets and still put up equivalent #’s. Plus is 5 years younger. This Smith deal is going to be McNabb 2.0.
From your lips to his ears…
He’s young and already one of the best slot corners in the league. I’m glad to have him out of division and out of conference.
I’m with you Bluster this is only a good trade if you’re not a Redskins fan. Literally everybody else wins including the teams that now have a shot of signing Cousins.
Lifelong Skins fan, this is the worst move since the McNabb move. It’s arguably the worst move period. They downgraded at QB. If Kirk was gone, I would have rather signed Teddy B, drafted a QB, rolled on. They got worse, they got older, and it’s still QB1 money. Plus they lost a player and a pick. Terrible fucking deal.
I just hope it’s not actually Fuller.
It’s actually Fuller. They finally told him.
https://twitter.com/KeFu11er/status/958570217835245574
Jesus fucking christ.
That might be it for me honestly. I love the sport, but I am so fucking sick of this fucking team. I never really blamed them for not finding a QB, because they actually did try, it just never quite worked out. They drafted and signed and traded. Then they finally hit on one, and he’s actually pretty fucking good, and now he’s gone.
If Kirk goes to an AFC team, they’re definitely gonna be my second team.
I guess take with a grain of salt…
https://twitter.com/PFF_Mike/status/958553581308841985?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
He’s good.
Eric Berry comes back healthy and the Chiefs have possibly the best secondary in the NFL.
Bill Barnwell just posted at ESPN regarding some of the ripple effects of the deal. He’s claiming Cousins is about to become the highest-paid player in NFL history.
He probably will be, until Aaron Rodgers signs his extension.
Pretty much every top-level QB is going to become the highest paid player in NFL history when they sign their next contract until the next top-level QB signs a contract.
the prodigious intellects of MSNBC weigh in:
***
Church … family … police … military … the national anthem … Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for.
***
https://twitter.com/joyannreid/status/958528313563254784
So I guess we can assume the Democrats oppose all of those things? I don’t see how that’s a winning platform outside of Progtopia.
I’ll throw in for opposing the police and military. Well, the police as a whole. Only the military brass.
I’d oppose the practices of the military and the police, generally. I think it’s wrong to stereotype in opposition to a police officer or a member of the military in general. They’re still individuals, regardless of their profession
FUCK YOU! YOU WILL THANK ME FOR MY SERVICE YOU UNGRATEFUL SONOFABITCH!!!!!
That’s what I was saying: not to stereotype individuals.
So, I’m going to say “thank you for your service” and your going to fucking like it
I get that people are just trying to be nice, but I inwardly roll my eyes every time I get thanked. As you say, the military is a microcosm of society – there are wonderful veterans and there are scumbag veterans. There are heroes who braved firefights, and there are dudes like me who sat around in a repair van in Iraq, fixing radars and playing XBox. There’s a happy medium between the left’s disdain for us and the slavish hero-worship of the right.
Usually I say “thank you for your support”, but I prefer to say “I’m no hero.”
I’ve seen veterans take both positions. I have two friends that were in Iraq and one of them loved that when he got back people would buy in drinks at the local bar and I had another one who just wanted to pretend like he was never in the military and didn’t like being singled out.
I’m only saying that a blanket statement against police and veterans is mindless collectivism.
I’m only saying that a blanket statement against police and veterans is mindless collectivism.
Absolutely this.
My uncle served in Vietnam (as a helicopter repair technician), and apparently won a Bronze Star (never heard him talk about it, and he doesn’t open up about much except to point out cool shit to me on Hueys the few times we’ve been to the U.S. Air Force museum together).
Why would you look at Huey’s at an Air Force Museum?
/son of an ARMY AVIATOR that flew Hueys and Cobras
Well, obviously my uncle was in the army, and I’m talking about Wright Patterson AFB Museum, which for a period of 5 or so years (back in the early 2000s) had a huge Vietnam era aircraft exhibit near the B-52. I think they still have the Huey there.
Ah. So it’s an “Air Force and Army Aviation Museum”.*
I hope they address that incorrect signage during the next stimulus.
*Dad was an aviator but predated the division. He was an infantry officer who killed gooks from the sky.
(No offense meant to any Vietnamese. Those little bastards could fight.)
Sloopy, you’ve never been to The National Air Force Museum?
I probably let went to Wright-Pat a hundred times but it was so long ago I can’t remember specifics.
The Air Force does have their own choppers for SpecOps and Para-Rescue. Did some inter-service training with them at FT Irwin back in the 90’s.
Well, if Trump wouldn’t have gone too far by putting family in there. What a racist, it’s all about tranny bathrooms and #metoo. No one cares about some old fashioned family shit, that’s from the 50s, when there were still slaves!
Church and family is still a central part of the lives of the majority of the country. Rich white liberals should really get outside of Manhattan and LA sometimes. I’m just saying, I live in a major city, but I obviously know that the lifestyles of the people downtown or the gentrified communities does not represent the beliefs of families in the neighborhoods or suburbs and especially not the rural parts of the state.
Bah! It’s all about tranny bathrooms, that’s what folks really care about! And people are really going to have those tax cuts and more jobs! A blue wave is comin, it’s gonna be yuuugggeee!
That could have been said by the Democratic leadership or most writers at TOS
And the thing is, you don’t have to actually believe in/promote those things in order to just smile and say a nice word or two about them.
US teacher in trouble in Vietnam over offensive comments
US teacherIdiot in trouble in Vietnam over culturally tone-deaf cock accessoryoffensive comments.FTFY
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/958568711228706817
Washington Post changes headline because it upset the #resistance
“Democracy Dies at the Nick Gillespie of Newspapers”
– WaPo new tag line
“I’m an idiot, and I can prove it
Clothing company founder Scott Jordan of SCOTTeVEST made some widely criticized comments about his customers in a recent Facebook post by calling Fox News viewers, where the company “primarily advertises” its products, “extremely gullible and easier to sell than other networks.”
Jordan’s post goes on to say that he gets to tell the network’s viewers they are “f***ing idiots while getting rich off them.”
Jordan and his wife, Laura Jordan, co-founded SCOTTeVEST in 2000, according to the company’s website. SCOTTeVEST makes multi-pocketed clothing designed to hold various technology pieces such as cellphones and chargers. Scott was featured in season three of ABC’s “Shark Tank” in 2012 where he failed to make a deal with the show’s sharks.
What a maroon.
Holy shit! That is Patagonia level retardation.
I note that he is stepping down from management for the cliched ‘personal reasons’. How soon before he is in treatment?
This has been posted a few times here already but it still makes me chuckle. Nothing tattoos “IDIOT” on your forehead more effectively as a businessman than publicly disparaging and mocking your own customers.
Most telling moment of the SOTU addy: Congressional Black Caucus keep their seats, frown and dont applaud when Trump says that black unemployment is at its lowest in history. Everyone else stands and claps.
You dont really need to know anything else about the left, that says it all.
Good news for America is bad news for the Dems regaining power.
I love hearing BS conspiracy theories about how Big Pharma and the doctor industrial complex conspire to keep “real” cures off the market since “it’s more profitable to treat symptoms than cure diseases.” Because for the most part these same people have no such cynicism for politicians who are rarely held accountable, certainly never for Type 2 errors, and benefit much more from wielding tendentious issues than resolving them.
A politician’s job is not to solve problems. Their job is to create problems and then campaign on solving them. Trump is a problem solver. That is one of the things they hate him for. No matter what else he is, he is a problem solver. Outside of politics one doesnt get to be as accomplished as he is without being a problem solver. He is wrecking their game.
The D running for governor in Michigan has an ad that says he created drugs to cure all kinds of stuff that the Pharmacy companies kept off the market.
Seriously…
You would hope a website called “The Cougar” would have better articles than this. Sad.
Women’s March unified us, but movement falls short of intersectionality
“It’s not easy being a woman”
Bullshit.
The Glass Coffin
Men represent:
80% of suicides
80% of the homeless
80% homicide victims
80% of prisoners
90% of workplace deaths
They also die 7 years sooner on average than women.
But, but, 80 cents on the dollar!!!!
“Most tellingly, the Women’s March was woefully inadequate in championing women who have schlongs”
Jesus, when the fuck were women ever silent?
It’s like what my Grandpa said about cars: don’t worry about strange noises. When it’s absolutely silent, then you have a problem.
Prius is a bitch.
147 comments? Is everyone sleeping off a SOTU hangover?
More shitlords who weren’t willing to pay their fair share coming out of the closet:
Pfizer plans investments, bonuses in wake of tax law
Phizer could have been paying out bonuses and making charitable donations when the government gifted them billion dollars with medicare part D and then the ACA. Those pieces of legislation made them more money then the tax cuts.
Making Pfizer revenue is nice. Making investment in the the U.S. financially attractive is an entirely different thing.
Apparently they can distinguish between a windfall and an opportunity.
After the state of the union I had a question.
Do you think Mike Pence misses his soul or does he just pretend like he is still the governor of Indiana and all this is a dream?
Got his eyes on the 2024 prize, so nah.
Mike Pence is the nick Gillespie of vice presidents.
Harsh, but fair.
All Vice Presidents are the Nick Gillespie of Vice Presidents. Except Dick Cheney.
Yesterday I put up a Chait article about Libertarians being in the bag for Trump. Reason, as expected, responded.
Ilya Somin: No, Libertarians Have Not Thrown in With Trump
When you’re citing Shikha as a libertarian counterargument, just give up and go back to flipping burgers.
The problem is that Cato and TOS are going to double down on hysterics in order to prove the point wrong. Ilya Somin has been a measured critic, but others have betrayed their principles in order to show that they are #resisting.
Also, I think it would have been better to highlight libertarians, like Walter Block, who supported Trump during the election, because they believed that he was more anti-war than Clinton (remember when Cato and TOS use to care about overseas adventurism- it was the last time a Republican was president), and they have now turned against him because his foreign policy is now a standard Washington position.
Here’s the problem with all of them: they’ve fallen into the DC cocktail party trap of judging people on taste and tribe rather than action and principle. Trump is icky because he’s an outsider and he eats Big Macs and drinks Diet Coke. He says crude things. He is so yuck. If they pulled their heads out of their asses, re-looked at their fucking motto (“Free Minds and Free Markets”) they’d see that Trump’s actions have been the most libertarian in decades. Yeah, he’s not perfect. Boo fucking hoo. Nobody is. But, outside of the WoD, he’s doing a helluva lot more to move the ball forward for liberty than anyone else I’ve seen in a long time.
Outside of the WOD, and the war in Afghanistan, and a bunch of other things. The bar for “most libertarian in decades” is low indeed. Your overall point is a salient one, though – social mores and etiquette has proven to be more important to them than actual results.
That’s why I think the Mises people have more rational criticisms of the administration. They focus more on the continuation of bad foreign policy and less on perceptions. KMW literally wrote in response to Chait’s article that Trump was an authoritarian for calling the press ‘the enemy of the people’. That’s utter nonsense. You should criticize him for being as much of an authoritarian as his predecessors for continuing illegal wars and spying on Americans
I agree. Sober commentary on what Trump is actually doing is welcome. Caterwauling over his gaucheness is trite and a waste of time.
^^^Exactly. Those are valid, libertarian criticisms. They just happen to have the inconvenient truth of being US policy for decades so over time people have just accepted it and stopped giving a shit. Rand Paul is pretty much the only guy in Congress who even seems aware that warrantless domestic spying is a BFD. Everyone else (including the populace) has just shrugged and said, “ok, I guess this is what the government does now.”
agree.
Mises.org generally has more rational everything.
But he isn’t actually worse on those things than previous presidents, and he isn’t worse than Hillary would have been. If your list is “better”, “better”, “break-even”, “better”, what exactly are you whining about? Oh, right, he’s trying to create an immigration system that works for all 300 million people in the country, not just the few that get the most benefit from cheap labor and know that Mexicans aren’t about to start donating billions to think tanks and diluting their political voice.
Reason isn’t even really about pot, ass-sex, and Mexicans, it’s basically just about Mexicans, with libertine issues being an occasional afterthought.
How the hell would anyone at Reason know anything about who libertarians are throwing in with?
The libertarian criticisms of Trump on xenophobic immigration silliness, overseas perpetual war, and his failure to understand free trade are spot on, though.
I enjoy many things he’s done, but he’s no libertarian.
I enjoy many things he’s done, but he’s no libertarian.
Indeed. The problem with so many soi-disant libertarian critics of Trump is not that they’re wrong on the essential point, it’s that, besides the histrionics, they spent 8 years glad-handing Obama. There is no intellectual consistency, and that completely undermines their credibility.
And, at least in the case of Reason, many people were calling out the initial signs of this problem (and others) before Trump was even on the scene, and later when he was still just a contender. They didn’t listen then and they refuse to listen now.
Did they? I seem to remember constant criticism of Obama by Cato and Reason. Although they were stoked about TPP.
There was criticism, but it doesn’t compare in tone and tenor to how they talk about Trump. Despite noting that Obama had people executed without trial via drone strike, that he was waging a “war against the press”, that he had no authority to do a lot of the things he did and thus was also waging a “war on the constitution”, they never implied he had “authoritarian impulses” or that he wanted to be like dictators and autocrats.
Of course, looking back at some of their articles from before Trump, I notice that the most vocal critics of Obama tended to be Hinkle and Tuccille, followed by Sullum and Shackford, and the former two have been the most reasoned (drink?) critics of Trump and the latter two have been, while not as measured in their criticism, more reasonable than the rest of the writers in the age of Trump.
What kbolino said. One of my immediate criticisms with TOS’ coverage of the Trump Administration was that they clearly exposed their TOP MAN bias, where insider politicians are held to a far lower standard than any outsider candidate. So Obama can be a walking advertisement for narcissistic personality disorder for eight years and they say nothing, then they’re psychoanalyzing Trump in the first week and calling him a narcissist (I don’t even disagree with that assessment, but the fact that they’re willing to jump on that while ignoring it elsewhere is telling). Trump’s support for the Turkish government is evidence of his love of authoritarianism, whereas the exact same author will look at Obama’s support for the exact same Turkish government during the coup and say nothing, etc.
First off,
No, you’re thinking porcupine, which is the animal pictured on the yellow flag of which the above is the caption. FFS. Thanks for symbolically demonstrating how much you know about libertarianism.
Second, the author cops to being associated with CATO and writing for Reason, so good for him, but he does this at the end of a piece where he offers them up as the be-all end-all of libertarian politics. That simply isn’t true. Is CATO better known than the Mises Institute? Probably, but better known as a “conservative” or “right wing” think tank among non-libertarians, not as a specifically libertarian organization. And to the extent that anyone outside of libertarianism even knows what Reason is, they think of it as “far-right” or even “alt-right”. So basically he’s pulling a One True Libertarian argument, saying “real” libertarians don’t support Trump.
Finally, let’s unpack the “support” bit. What does that even mean? I think if the comments on these forums are any indication, nobody supports Trump (or anyone else) in the sense of backing the person over the policies. It seems to me that there are two schools, with one believing that in the balance he’s injurious to libertarian policies and one believing that he’s at least not a setback and in some cases more libertarian than not. Nobody thinks he’s Frederic Bastiat.
It seems like he’s bitter that there are self-identifying libertarians who are willing to judge Trump on a policy-by-policy basis, even–heaven forfend!–in comparison to the alternative in Hillary Clinton. He’s pissed that there are libertarians saying “it’s not all bad” or “it could’ve been worse” instead of “TRUMP IS THE DEVIL!”
Gadsden flag or bust.
Holy shit, those comments are worse than regular TOS comments!
Moar redheads!
http://archive.is/w2PbM
Good Lord number 8…
34.
Rule 34 with 34?
I think she’s in Pitch Perfect.
That’s it. Turn in your man card.
I have a 13 yr old daughter. We just went and saw it this past weekend. ;D
Yeah, I’ve seen it, too. Wife and daughter love those movies.
Was this chick the one in the shower scene?
Yep. Wife and daughter love the movies and there is plenty of eye candy for dad.
Nice…..should exclude obvious dye jobs, though.
Agreed. That said: 4, 8, 18, 29.
If half the shit said about Andrew McCabe is true, the guy is only slimy little asshole. Sounds like he set up Reince Priebus and double-crossed him with leaks.
I really hope they find a way to charge McCabe and at least strip him of his retirement benefits.
He sounds like this generation’s Mark Felt, a sad careerist passed over and lashing out ignominiously.
Sex for rent offered by creepy landlord, seedy underbelly of UK housing market culture exposed
That’s not a bad deal /cis-het shitlord
There was an experiment where they taught chimps to exchange tokens for food. Anyone care to guess what happened next?
Female chimps began trading sex for tokens.
World’s oldest profession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_among_animals
***
A study at Yale–New Haven Hospital trains capuchin monkeys to use silver discs as money in order to study their economic behavior. The discs could be exchanged by the monkeys for various treats. During one chaotic incident, a researcher observed what appeared to be a monkey exchanging a disc for sex. The monkey that was paid for sex immediately traded the silver disc for a grape. The researcher took steps to prevent any possibility of coins being traded for sex after his suspicions were aroused.
***
And Derpe beautifully illustrates my point.
Mmmhmm…
This is how we get the humanzee…
Chimp… human…. chump?
Different from marriage somehow…
Easier to get out of the arrangement?
Ok. *Hits refresh*
And you’re getting it way more frequently.
HEEEEY OOOO
Remind me again, what’s so terrible about this?
Women have been exchanging pussy for resources since the beginning of time, it’s one of their best bargaining chips. It sounds to me like the woman would be coming out ahead in this situation.
Remind me again, what’s so terrible about this?
Icky guy gets laid.
In Current Year, that is literally the greatest crime on Earth.
Sounds like marriage.
I think that is called ‘having a mistress’. So, that’s illegal now? Good luck enforcing that.
Sugar Daddies hardest hit.
I mean, sounds a lot like every live-in girlfriend (or boyfriend) I’ve ever heard of: free rent while the relationship lasts, kicked to the curb when the breakup happens. I guess if you actually call it rent it becomes scummy?
I thought these guys were supposed to be allies?
https://twitter.com/abdbozkurt/status/958679379378425856
Christ, what an asshole.
Trump should recognize the Armenian Genocide to troll Turkey. They are a lost cause at this point.
That would actually be brilliant trolling and good politics. There is a pretty significant Armenian community in the US and he could ingratiate himself to another voting bloc at virtually no political cost.
Tweet in the Near Future: “Turkish Losers want to try with Kurds what they did with Armenians. Can’t pull it off. Sad.”
If we could extract ourselves from Syria and take a breath, we would realize that Assad is a possible ally.
He’s got some Christian and minority support in Syria. Make it worthwhile to drop his anti-Israel stuff and the flirtations with Iran and terrorists groups.
If we can just get him to stop with that whole using-chemical-weapons-on-his-own-people thing…
Assad doesn’t need to be our ally. We happen to have a confluence of interests with regard to Turkey (and some other issues).
That’s why the whole “Assad has to go” mantra was stupid on its face. It makes U.S. interests subservient to one particular policy outcome.
He also doesn’t have to be our enemy.
His Christian/minority support is because the alternative (outright Islamism) is worse. Syria is a Arab-socialist (Ba’athist) country morphed into a personal heriditary dictatorship. He’s not a potential ally.
Yeah, I think it’s a case of “not our enemy” doesn’t necessarily mean “our ally”.
I also think we shit the bed with dictators after Qaddafi.
‘Really, you’ll back off if I do what you say? No tricksies or bayonets up the backside this time?’
YOU LEAVE HILLARY OUT OF THIS!
Yeah, when I become a brutal dictator, no way am I gonna trust the US Department of State for anything!
Apparently US needs to add as a standard clause
“If you start mass-murdering your people, and we tell you to stop, that means you should stop!”
Are these mouthbreathers aware of what NATO stands for? Particularly the first two letters? Turkey is a fucking disaster under Erdogan. Here’s hoping the Turks either GTFO or stage a coup.
stage a coup
Depending on who you ask, the Turks either already tried this (and failed) or Erdogan set up a massive sting operation to entrap as many would-be coup leaders/supporters as possible (and succeeded). This was after he already purged the military, the traditional guarantor (by coup) of Kemalism (Turkish secularism), of its Kemalist elements. There’s basically nobody left to oppose him at this point, at least not in any position of power. He’s Turkey’s Putin.
Sounds more like Turkey’s Trump.
Near as I can tell, Erdogan wants to be the next Assad/Hussein.
Except for, you know, not being a Ba’athist. While the end result may be the same (see also: communism “vs.” fascism), Erdogan has come to power via the route of Turkish Islamism, not secular pan-Arab socialism.
He just thought he was being smart like Batman, THE CLOWNS ARE THE HOSTAGES!
The man was covertly filmed saying he would waive the £650 ($920) per month rent in exchange for sex once a week.
It would have to be pretty spectacular sex.
I haven’t had $920 sex in, shit, 15 years. I’d probably drop a g for it if it was a weekly deal.
It’s really not that bad. His likely cost is more like sub-$500/month. Once a week means his cost is $160 or so per session, which (depending on services offered and the physical desirability) doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable.
Ass-to-mouth?
3 point blow-job.
The back of your head and your heels are the only part touching… And you have to un-tuck about 8 inches of sheet from your asshole.
I’ve definitely spent over $160 in a week trying to convince a woman to sleep with me. That’s definitely a reasonable figure.
The $160 isn’t for them to have sex with you.
It’s to have them not accuse you of rape 12 years later.
I don’t know what pros are charging in Wales, but in the US that’s not a bad deal.
I’m also assuming he gets to interview the applicants beforehand. It would suck if a Lena Dunham lookalike showed up.
The monkey that was paid for sex immediately traded the silver disc for a grape. The researcher took steps to prevent any possibility of coins being traded for sex after his suspicions were aroused.
So woke.
“aroused”
PHRASING!
So, when the experiment yielded undesired results they simply changed the variables to get the desired outcome. Huh, these guys should take up climate science.
Seriously… he’s trying to study economic behavior in a chimp model… and proceeds to try to teach them human morality instead.
Turns out, unexpectedly, that average Americans *like* hearing positive messages about putting America first policies. Whodathunkit? The Dems also came off as sour pusses and crybabies purposely trying to sow discord; so par for the course.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/viewers-approve-of-trumps-first-state-of-the-union-address-cbs-news-poll/
All the polls on various tv shows show his speech polled quite well.
I’m sure a record few number of people watched it though.
Still, if Trump can be sane like that until Fall, Republicans might not hemorrhage as much as expected.
The expectations for Trump’s demeanor are so low, he really doesn’t have to do much to be considered sane, or at least to get people to think “Eh, he’s really not completely nuts like people say”
Ok, so I gotta peeve. Sorry that I’m replying OT here, but I can’t reach the “Post Comment” button. The screen ends (won’t go to the bottom) and it won’t allow me to click the button.
*Hands up high!* I am NOT criticizing the hard work of SP and all those merited-Gliblords who stand on plinths above me.
But the last indented part of comments on Chrome for me get broken up into 3-4 word lines, leaving me to try to read 8 letter words with no spacing broken up into some time merely 2 characters. I’ve had to scroll down very interesting conversations because it just got tiring on my eyes and trying to Rosetta Stone the poster’s intent.
No one else has commented on this so I am SURE that it’s on my end. I have monocle…maybe I need to update it?
Help me Glib-kanobi….you’re my only hope( s)!
I had to swtich from Chrome to Firefox for my Glib commenting yesterday.
Monocle won’t run on Chrome for me any more.
If you’ve already opened a dialogue box to reply to another comment, the box at the bottom disappears until you post it or refresh.
Yo no se about the issue with Chrome. I browse Glibs at work, on campus, on my phone, and at home all on Chrome and haven’t had that issue.
(I never remember to use Monocle, so you may want to try disabling it for a go.)
Tech-tard here, but there have been a series of security and other upgrades fro WordPress being put in place in the last couple of weeks. One of them might have broken Moncole on Chrome. SP is trying to stay on top of the changes, but WordPress is not making it easy.
It fared poorly among students polled half a day before he gave it. (Courtesy of Just Say’n yesterday.)
Hilarious.
Best and brightest.
Of NYU, that ain’t saying much.
To be fair, the average American is a venal little shit with the short-term memory of a goldfish and the cognitive myopia of a mole.
FTFY.
Indeed.
I can’t remember who said “People are stupid, dangerous, panicky animals”, but I find it hard to disagree.
Agent K.
Odd, I’d have totally expected that from our very own Mr. Lizard.
random thought
There is this idea that war is like football game- if the US can maintain a favorably casualty ratio for a few months or years, the enemy is bound to surrender. However, there have been many wars where the winner took higher losses than the loser: The Civil War, The Napoleonic Wars, WW1, WW2, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War and others.
I’m no student of war, but it doesn’t seem outlandish that countries with more/more committed/more desperate people would take greater losses but still win. The US *has* to maintain a vastly disproportionate casualty ratio if we want to achieve anything; Vietnam-era death tolls would make any engagement other than defense of the homeland politically impossible.
2¢
I think that’s it. There is a big downside to that.
***
Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has.
***
-Osama bin Laden
I only know about these things in the broadest strokes, but I have to imagine fighting Hitler’s army was barely more palatable than dealing with Stalin’s domestic policies and secret police. You’re not going to wring out that level of desperation from Americans.
WWI was ultimately a war of attrition. But that is a very ugly and costly way to win. Before it was even over, strategists on all sides were thinking up better ways to achieve objectives – mobile warfare, shock, airborne encirclement, etc…
I would think that goes in with the winner being more determined and ultimately willing to go further to achieve victory. Winning comes at a cost and in war that’s the ultimate cost to your soldiers.
It does help when Stalin et al. choose a “Not One Step Backwards” approach and murder everyone that refuses to charge, and not caring a whit about the 20M deaths that that strategy entails.
It can’t last for too long, especially seeing how easy it was to get many Soviets to defect just because Jerry was saying over loudspeakers that “If you come over here we will give you food.”
I’d rather be a POW of the Germans on the Eastern Front than the attacking from the East. I’ve also never been close to combat and don’t truly viscerally understand how stressful that environment must have been.
Stalin’s tactics only worked because of Nazi racial policies. For one thing, without those policies non-Russians could have easily been split away from the Soviets. The Germans were initially welcomed as liberators in Ukraine, for example. That welcome didn’t last long once they started the mass executions. For another thing, when you expect awful treatment as a prisoner, fighting to the death doesn’t seem like such a bad option.
Being a Soviet POW of the Germans was a completely different experience than being an American or British POW. Germans didn’t follow Geneva Conventions with respect to Soviet POWs — unlike Anglo-Saxons they were subhumans to the Nazis. Nonetheless, millions of Soviet soldiers did surrender.
Yeah, the surrender thing was already dicked up by Germans.
Over the summer-winter 1941, some 2.8 million (or so says Wiki) POWs died in German “camps.” Said camps being basically barbed wire enclosures with no facilities beyond maybe a faucet that might or might not work. Feeding, clothing and housing them was not a concern. Yes, German logistics were spectacularly bad, and they didn’t expect so many prisoners at once. Doesn’t explain why any civilians trying to bring food were shot on sight. The cases of cannibalism did confirm to Germans that the treatment was correct, as it proved the savagery of the subhumans.
Once war started biting, more conscientious German officers (and there were people at all levels appalled by the treatment) were able to convince the leadership by playing the “if we take them to Germany/occupied territories, and give them minimal food, they can do menial jobs and free German men for industry/army service”.
Michael K Jones has written a few really good books on the Eastern Front that deal with swineries of various sides while still managing to keep the essential humanity of people involved in mind (though I’d say overall he’s has a Soviet bias), and this stuff is covered in The Retreat, which gives the story of Barbarossa from initial invasion through to German spring ’42 counteroffensive that blunted the 1941 Moscow offensive.
The South didn’t take higher casualties than the North.
Yes. The North won and also took more casualties.
So it goes in the category of “wars where the winning side had more casualties”.
***
While the figures of 360,000 army deaths for the Union and 260,000 for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are incomplete. In addition to many Confederate records being missing, partly as a result of Confederate widows not reporting deaths due to being ineligible for benefits, both armies only counted troops who died during their service, and not the tens of thousands who died of wounds or diseases after being discharged. This often happened only a few days or weeks later. Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent of the 1870 Census, used census and Surgeon General data to estimate a minimum of 500,000 Union military deaths and 350,000 Confederate military deaths, for a total death toll of 850,000 soldiers. While Walker’s estimates were originally dismissed because of the 1870 Census’s undercounting, it was later found that the census was only off by 6.5%, and that the data Walker used would be roughly accurate.[218]
Analyzing the number of dead by using census data to calculate the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from the norm suggests that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000, but most likely 761,000 soldiers, died in the war.[22] This would break down to approximately 350,000 Confederate and 411,000 Union military deaths, going by the proportion of Union to Confederate battle losses.
***
And attrition was Grant’s explicit strategy. It’s why he fought such meatgrinder battles in 1864 as Cold Harbor – he knew he could sustain such losses and march on and the Confederates could not.
On Grant’s Overland Campaign, from Wiki:
In terms of percentage of population does that still hold true? I don’t have the figures to hand but I’d always thought that the population of the Union states was markedly higher than that of the Confederate states, so while the North saw more casualties in raw numbers the South saw higher casualties in terms of percentage of fighting-age men.
“South saw higher casualties in terms of percentage of fighting-age men.”
Yes, amd that’s why grant’s strategy was the winning one.
The North won..
There’s where you err
WW2?
Military only, or total military and civilian casualties?
At least on the Pacific front, I’m pretty confident the Japanese took a lot more casualties of every kind than the Allies.
In Europe, the math gets complicated especially since the Germans (and perhaps the Russians) killed so many of their own people. I would believe that the Allies took more casualties in Europe because of the massive Russian death toll.
If you count military and civilian deaths and consider the Chinese to be allies, then China lost the most in the Pacific…somewhere between 7-9 million directly from military activities and another 5m to 10m from famines and such. Though as in Europe its probably hard to know how much to blame the enemy and how much to blame the government.
Japan lost 2.5-3 million and 2/3 of those were military personnel.
Or how many of those Chinese deaths could be attributed to their civil war.
But yeah, I hadn’t thought about the Chinese.
Enjoy your 12 cats girl.
Don’t get your panties in a bunch, tootz.
Oh, and what the fuck is “capitalism vectors” supposed to mean?
It means that everything before and after that phrase can be tuned out while she’s making me a sandwich.
Sammich is our word! It belongs to the shitlords! Say it, girl, and you’ll be makin us 2 sammiches!
It’s like a disease vector, ‘cuz capitalism is a disease, you know.
I originally read that as ‘Elise Moonbat’.
“To you, plunderers of the planet, oppressive colonizers”
You mean those plundering oppressors who have made it possible for twits like you to run around spewing that garbage with nary a care in the world?
You ma’am are no lady.
“We are not ladies, broads, dames, skirts – and most CERTAINLY not girls. That is our word, and we’re taking it back.”
That leaves me with bitch and harpy. Which do you prefer?
Harridan.
Neon-painted Carrie Nation.
Cunt, strumpet, ho, gash. All would work.
I like “hole,” too, though maybe a little insidery. I don’t know if it originated with O&A, but they used it to describe the women that producers insisted be added to a DJ lineup to round out the show and appeal to female listeners. The Hole is where all the comedy went to die.
Shrew
I’ll just go with the general term “awful”.
…or possibly “hurting”, as in:
“Ugh, Elise is awful.”
“Why?”
“I mean, she’s a big fat hurting [hehr-ting] for one thing, like Lena Dunham. Also like Lena Dunham she isn’t funny and she sucks to be around.”
HAH! You all fell for one of my classic pranks. Every word of that was mine.
I used to do it at TOS on occasion. I’ve done it here, but it’s been a long while.
And yet…
https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/grown-women-are-not-girls/
Rosalind Russell hit hardest.
“fell for” or expounded upon?
Deadthread reading some of the discussion last night about Trump, a thought occurred to me. As much as Trump represents the Hillary Clinton bullet dodged, I think one of the things that he also represents is a real wildcard entered into American politics. He’s not tied to the GOP Establishment’s DNA and doesn’t have their established responses to any proposition. At the same time, the left and the Democrats have assured themselves of never having much beyond an enemy role in his head. From a libertarian perspective this is both delightful and potentially terrifying. It means that Trump could actually get convinced of much more libertarian policies. And it means he could be convinced of outright authoritarianism. I mean, more than any president I can remember, I can imagine Donald Trump waking up one morning, eating his Egg McMuffin. calling up Jeff Sessions and telling him to deschedule cannabis because “we’re wasting money on fighting it rather than the real drug war. It’s a distraction from making America Great!”. At the same time, one could just as easily imagine him ording all Americans to get National ID cards and instituting a national “year of service”.
I think one’s opinion on Trump stems from what side of that wildcard one focuses on.
Lots of people have said for years that DC needed to be shaken up by and outsider. On one hand, thank G-d, on the other, be careful what you wish for…
There’s a reason the Chinese curse is “May you live in interesting times.”
I’ve said this for a while now: Trump likes Rand quite a bit, because Rand is easily the smartest Senator and he talks to Trump about ideas. You have to sell the ideas to Trump, but Trump is the first POTUS arguably ever who a Senator can actually persuade to support something. Typically Presidents come in with their wishlist, or their parties wishlist, or their political handler tells them what to do. Trump calls his own tune, and Rand Paul is in a position to give him some songs for the set list.
The Drug War is probably a lost cause, Trump seems to have a 71 year old teetotalers instinctive “drugs are bad mmmkay” thing. But there are other things that Rand can possibly get from Trump that he simply would not have been able to get from any other President.
I have to assume this is where Trump got the prison reform idea. Because where else?
I didn’t watch the speech. What did he propose for prison reform?
Speaking of the drug war, ending it would do more to fix the prison system than anything else he could do.
Maybe, but if it’s true that his DW stance is motivated by losing his brother to substance abuse, it might at least be softened toward trying to push drug users to overcome addiction, rather than a “punish the junkie sinners” stance.
I’d like for the scenario to play out like this:
*Trump wakes up one morning, thinks, you know what, I’m gonna de-schedule that weed. That will really mess with the Democrats*
*Phone ringing at AG office*
Sessions: Attorney General Speaking.
Trump: Hey, Jeff, go get an egg mcmuffin and then de-schedule that weed stuff.
Sessions: What? But… but you said I can get them potheads! We can’t…
Trump: You’re fired!
Trump: Hey hat, get me my pen!
Trump: You’re fired!
Dems, immediately: “Trump is obstructing the Russia investigation!!!”
Apparently, I missed this one. But it seems the most pantshitting of all the democrat pantsshitting is because Trump said ‘Americans are dreamers too’. That’s totally racist, right? I mean how can you be a dreamer unless you’re an illegal alien somewhere? Totes racist.
Listening to them on pretty much any issue is akin to engaging the homeless, schizophrenic alcoholic on the corner. Nothing makes sense, it’s all gibberish and don’t expect it to mean anything. It can be safely ignored.
That is good, but it isn’t as silly as when Conyers claimed Trump was bad because he said “chain migration” and everyone knows that that term is totes racist.
“They gonna put y’all back in chains!”
Again, crossing the line from “How stupid do they think we are?” to “How stupid would you have to be to think anyone is stupid enough to believe this?”
Here’s my theory:
Progressivism requires two things: collectivism and self-loathing. You have to have collectivism, because you need to be able to categorize people by type. This lets you de-emphasize the individual and also makes possible the “scientific” measurement of behavior and ensuing principle that behavior can and should be altered at the group level through the application of policies enacted by experts. You also have to have self-loathing, because otherwise you don’t have any problematic behaviors to address. Collectivism without self-loathing just gives you nationalism, or ethno-nationalism, stuff like that.
So the Democrats, or at least the “thought leaders” in the Democratic party who are at this point all Progressives, have to “hate America” in the sense of believing that being an American is to be a member of a deeply-flawed group that must be fixed by Progressive experts. If you drop the flawed bit, which is what Trump and others do, well shit, now you don’t need experts to “fix” the group.
MikeS is not eating his venison all at once.
Call me a sissy city slicker, but it does seem sort of cruel to make your second deer carry your first around for you. Just kill the buck and drag it out of the woods like a normal person.
Your a sissy city slicker
Ann Althouse talks about memos, metaphors, and mollusks.
Joe Rogan talks to Jordan Pederson. He starts off perfectly – so what you are saying…
I skipped the speech and started working on a mock-up one-bedroom apartment in Sketchup. I’m really enjoying this drafting class and looking forward to getting wrist-deep in AutoCAD and Revit later in the term. This is the first bout of enthusiasm and confidence I’ve felt since returning to college longer ago than I care to admit. Even entry-level work with this degree pays well, our instructor is a veteran architect and gung-ho about the program, it’s a mere five terms, and I’ve already got connections in the industry (plus a background in construction, which can’t hurt). If I can quit beating myself up for failing to figure things out in my twenties, I might even be happy.
Sketchup really triggers the OCD, though. I was awake until one fucking around with the model, and then couldn’t sleep.
“failing to figure things out in my twenties”
Protip: No one figures shit out in their twenties. Your twenties are supposed to be these halcyon days where you’re pursuing your dreams, making friends for life and drowning in pussy. It’s never like that. Everyone I’ve talked to (including myself) will admit, if pressed, that their twenties were a miserable time of anxiety about the future, discouragement that what they’re working toward is a waste. Give yourself a break. If you’ve found something you enjoy *and* has a solid career path, you’ve struck gold. Stick with it, work hard and everything will be ok.
You know what? Thanks for this. I’ve been self-flagellating for years, thinking EVERYONE ELSE figured it out except me.
Christ, I wouldn’t go back in time for anything.
50 is fine!
No Mojeaux, it aint just you. Like I said the other night, everybody has to bumblefuck their way through life on the first go, no practice runs, and no one is as smart as they think they are. You dont need to flagellate yourself, we have Warty for that.
no one is as smart as they think they are
Well, almost no one. 😉
Although I figured out I was gonna lawyer, I didn’t really land in the right kind of lawyering until I was 30.
I always assumed I’d end up as a lawyer. It took until my early 30s before I admitted to myself that it wasn’t going to happen because I simply didn’t really want to be one.
I’m 50 this year. Seeing that number is kicking my ass.
Damn kids. GTFO my lawn!
Kids! WTF am I doing raising kids? I DON’T KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT ANYTHING!
The 50’s were good to me, the 60’s are kicking my ass!
“Protip: No one figures shit out in their twenties.”
Not entirely true Q. By about 24 I was set.
I’m more sanguine about it as I get older, but I do know a couple people who absolutely nailed it. In fairness, they were bright enough and ambitious enough that they weren’t going to fail unless they’d been hit by a car.
It’s not a contest. Comparing yourself to others is a freeway to misery.
Indeed. I am quite confident that for a long stretch of my career (starting when I was fired from my first law firm, and up until my first General Counsel job) I was the lowest paid member of my law school class.
Never cared.
Indeed. That was my thirties.
It’s never like that, but connecting on one of those three would have been nice.
Are you denying my lived experience?
Agree with Q. And came to point out that much of the confusion shit used to happen in one’s teens until WWII ended and the education fetish retarded people’s development. It’s actually harder now because you’re expected to be an “adult” in your twenties – at least back in the day when people went through the confusion in their teens they weren’t expected to be adults yet and people expected teenagers to have confusion and difficulty making good decisions. Now the trend is to keep people from ever having to make real decisions until their senior year of high school when they are expected to decide about college and the $200K it costs.
I’ve played with sketch-up before, and yeah it can get maddening trying to get things just right.
Shine it on, bro. https://youtu.be/nWFJzudl6Mg
You can’t fixate on the past. Just be cool going forward. Suthen has offered some wise words on this subject.
Will the ravages of state-capitalism ever end?!?
http://time.com/5124666/venezuela-food-shortage-crisis-looting/
There is a shocking deal of ruin in a nation, judging by Venezuela in the last several years.
I’ll spare you the link, but it was an article at The Week (TW: I have never read any Week article which was not a giant steaming pile of turgid nonsense).
A woman (I think) writing about sex. Apparently, sex, for women is almost exclusively a nightmare of emotional torment and physical pain. It made me wonder why women consent at all, enthusiastically or otherwise, but she explains it; women are brainwashed from the womb to prostitute themselves and subjugate themselves to the male libido. They endure physical torture worse than the Spanish Inquisition to satiate the Male Gaze.
I hate myself, now.
That must be some pretty strong brainwashing. Especially considering my last girlfriend wanted it significantly more often than me and was a squirter so it was pretty obvious that she was enjoying herself. I guess the brainwashing extended all the way down to her vagina.
It’s brainwashing inasmuch as her brain is awash in dopamine and oxytocin.
Not for nothing, but I have to wonder whether feminism is inextricably related to depression and SSRI use. I’d be pretty averse to sexual relationships if my libido were on the rocks and I thought my partners were using me for sex I didn’t want.
I should qualify: I wonder whether this inexplicable brand of neo- Victorian abstinent feminism is etc.
Pretty much all of the SJW-ized ideologies seem linked to personality disorders.
I don’t understand the last three words you’re using there.
Are you dating Lena Dunham in this hypothetical?
But the last indented part of comments on Chrome for me get broken up into 3-4 word lines, leaving me to try to read 8 letter words with no spacing broken up into some time merely 2 characters. I’ve had to scroll down very interesting conversations because it just got tiring on my eyes and trying to Rosetta Stone the poster’s intent.
I’m not trying to be a dick; maybe this is a fatuous question, but- have you tried turning your phone sideways, to get a wider screen?
Disclaimer: I think I have tried reading this site on my phone twice, and gave up because it was a pain in the ass.
Roman Polanski is an even bigger scumbag than I realized. And somehow he’s STILL revered, even with the #metoo thing.
Separating art from the artist is a tricky business. I think Polanski is a scumbag who belongs in prison…..and yet I’m not going to stop watching his movies because they’re excellent.
Don’t disagree with that (though he should be in prison and not making movies). But the degree to which he’s DEFENDED in Hollywood is what disgusts me.
True. It’s one thing to say that his work should still be appreciated. It’s something else entirely to argue that he did nothing wrong.
The personal is political, so artists can’t be separated from their art. This means right-wingers’ art and left-wingers’ crimes must both be airbrushed.
HP Lovecraft was by all accounts a miserable human being, but he’s also one of the founding fathers of modern horror fiction.
One of the most interesting of these controversies the debate in Israel over playing the music of Wagner.
The same people defending him had a ‘people’s state of the union’ this year where they called for purging the u.s. of deplorables.
They are the worst kinds of people.
Skimmed the article, but I didn’t see mention that supposedly the DA was pulling some shady stuff in regards to plea deal they had offered him, don’t remember what exactly. That’s the only part of the story that’s ever led me to have any iota of shits to give.
BTW, for all the breathless predictions of a blue wave propelled by a surge in enthusiasm by Dem voters……the DNC is almost out of money
They run their party they way they run the country?
Let me find my shocked face.
Please, please let’s see the DNC go hat in hand to the Clintons to try to claw back some of the money she pilfered from their coffers. Because I rather doubt she’ll float them a string-free loan, and the gnashing of teeth among Bernie Bros will be a treat.
No problem, they can just print more, right?
Nobody has commented on the Berkley public school thing yet.
From the article, here is a quote from one of the “authorities”:
“We always have liability show up when we’ve dropped out some relationship,” she said. “We get policy when we’ve dropped out good procedure.”
A person speaking in tongues like that can only fuck up a child’s life, they cannot be helping them one iota.
BTW, for all the breathless predictions of a blue wave propelled by a surge in enthusiasm by Dem voters
Yeah, I’m not so sure about that. Just because a Democrat could beat Roy Moore…
And Virginia is basically South New Jersey at this point for statewide races. Ed Gillespie losing to a Dem who is NOT one of the wild-eyed #RESIST types wasn’t particularly surprising, although the margin was greater than I expected. Three of the four governors preceding Northam were Democrats.
#metoo comes for Charles In Charge/Chachi (depending on your age)
I missed the SOTU. Did Trump set fire to Congress and declare himself supreme leader?
It’s EXACTLY LIKE THE RISE OF HITLER except without Kristallnacht, burning of the Reichstag, political abductions or assassinations, brownshirts marching in the streets…
Well, there are blackshirts marching in the streets. Just, you know, for the side that is trying to illegitimately seize power because it has literally no principles or beliefs other than the will to power.
Acronyms trigger dyslexia for me, SOTU always looks like STFU.
Well, this confirms my pre-existing ideas (namely, that Donald Trump on policy is basically indistinguishable from Bill Clinton):
Donald Trump or Bill Clinton? Sometimes It’s Hard to Tell on ImmigrationPresident’s tough rhetoric at first State of the Union address has nothing on some of the 1990s speeches by another chief executive
There are points to be scored here, forcing the Dems to repudiate Bill Clinton or back off on Trump. Hard to have it both ways. For extra lulz, it would be funny to pull video footage of some of the Dem lifers who were around in 1995 cheering Clinton and then grumping when Trump says the same thing. Not sure how many there are, but there are some (Pelosi is one) and they are all senior now.
This was Trump’s genius: realizing that as the Democratic Party had so firmly planted its flag in its radical social democracy wing, there was the opportunity to flood the GOP base with tens of thousands of reverse-carpetbaggers who fully supported the GOP on social issues but were still clinging on to the Democrats out of aversion to the GOP’s free trade plank. By dismantling any pretense of the Republican Party as the party of free trade and capitalism, Trump was able to import his own electorate into the party.
I was watching a video last night that showed Trump, over the years, tended to position himself opposite the party holding the presidency at the time.
Considering the American fetish for the “underdog”, it’s a wise strategy.
On a related note: GO PATS!
It sort of makes sense, since the party in power are typically the ones fucking shit up.
interesting
The average ISIS fighter was about 8 years old on 9/11.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-documents-leak-reveals-profile-of-average-militant-as-young-well-educated-but-with-only-basic-a6995111.html
***
Male, 26, single, quite well-educated but not an expert on the Quran – this is the profile of an average fighter joining Isis.
Analysis of thousands of entry documents leaked from the terrorist group has provided vital new insight into the background and expertise of its international jihadists.
***
That does make some sense. Most of the idiots in their ranks blew themselves up by now, and they probably are seeking recruits specifically because they can obtain a Visa.
Terrorist groups are highly dependent on smart guys convincing dumb guys to sacrifice themselves for the cause.
Like any other military.
Ha!
Here in the Army, we spend an inordinate amount of resources using dumb guys to convince smart guys to join the cause.
A friend once pointed out the same type of deal re Vietnam: the soldiers fighting were kids when the commies were trying to take Korea, they were relatively well-educated (at least when college deferments were over), and they had little knowledge of capitalism or the reasons for fighting in Nam. Could one difference be that ISIS fighters aren’t drafted or do the jihadists actually round up young men with “fight with us, or die?”
Lies. I was repeatedly assured that the root cause of Islamic terrorism was poverty and lack of access to education.
More like lack of access to loose women amirite?
from the Before Place
***
In fiscal year 2016, $2.47 trillion of the federal government’s $3.66 trillion in non-interest expenses—in other words, 67 percent of every dollar spent that wasn’t going to payments on the national debt—went toward “mandatory spending” on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Within a decade, those three programs will consume $4.14 trillion annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
***
Military spending is too high and foreign aid could certainly be cut, but they’re not the main problem. Of course, we knew that already.
I have great sympathy for people who are genuinely trans
*imo the ‘genuines’ are a subset of the ones who just think they are; data bear this out. the % that permanently lives their entire adult lives as ‘not their birth gender’ is the minority; most go through some phase which can lasts through adolescence and might stick into early adulthood, but usually turns to “desistance”
as with all stats in this world, everything is disputed between pro and anti-activists… but most of the raw data tends to show a majority do not permanently transition.
e.g.
the complaint by the ‘pro’ activists is that these studies use far too-wide a definition (“they weren’t trans to begin with”); but its sort of a problem of their own making, since the loose-definitions are often the same ones they use to promote their own enlarged population-statistics.
in any case… my point is that ‘genuine’ trans people are a very small #.
I’ve always thought for technical reasons, that the best #s were ‘people who had applied for reassignment surgery’ + completeds. most countries count these because applying for transition surgery is strictly regulated. you need psych exams etc before they’ll let you go snipping stuff willy nilly. (hmm. nilly your willy. tee hee)
to make a long story short: partly because of this reality of ‘small numbers’, i’ve never understood the enthusiasm that the left has for championing ‘trannys’ as their victim-class du jour. there’s simply not enough of them out there to be an effective and visible constituency.
iow, you can’t “bully” people no one anywhere hardly has any direct contact with. Gender dysphoria is 1/2 the prevalence of schizoprenia. I’ve had ~2 people i know intimately develop severe schizo symptoms, but zero trans people (at least within my immediate circles); and not even the weaker-variety of gender-indistinct sort of thing.
I’ve met a few at parties. I used to go to those kind of parties. no one was bullied, afaik.
Anyway, my point is that on one hand, i’m genuinely sympathetic to the lives and concerns of a very small # of people who experience gender dysphoria; i imagine the difficulties they face in life are similar to the way mentally ill people are stigmatized.
that said, i think, due to some of the complication about ‘desisting’ above…. they make a terrible community as people to champion as a ‘victim class’, or as any kind of permanent political constituency. when someone like Jenner is your only widely known public figure (rupaul doesn’t count) its hard to create any perception of a distinct, cohesive community of people who are supposed to be treated as ‘normal’. Jenner, as far as i can tell, is sorta nuts.
the more i look at the subject, the more i begin to think that their very amorphousness/and lack of visibility is what the progressive-left *likes* about them. they can co-opt the ‘voice’ of the trans-‘community’ (there isn’t one) and simply speak on their behalf. Its the ideal ‘victim’ from their point of view: invisible, potentially everywhere, combining aspects of feminism, race, class… and allowing some people (SJW) to fall all over themselves declaring their ‘solidarity’, and others (SoCons) to denounce them.
In short, they’re being used as a political wedge-issue, not as a real subject by themselves. even if many people are sincere advocates, the simple shortage of real-mcCoy examples in day to day life makes the issue more of a ‘theoretical’ than a practical one for many.
to paraphrase something a professor said in college: “people are arguing about the idea of trans-people, not their reality”
apologies for long post. for some reason any time this subject comes up, it involves long throat-clearing and brief recap of statistics
The true victims here are the borderline cases of genuinely confused but not genuinely transgender people who are being encouraged to transition despite the risks and long-term trends. They, and the children of nutters who read gender dysmorphia into the fact that little Bobby put on his sister’s dress one time.
In the anecdotal category, I work with a trans woman (pretty sure post-op based on talking about spending time in Bangkok, but never comes up directly and I’m not asking) who’s very conservative. Hates proggie policies and politics. Obviously a target audience for the D’s, because sex.
That one will need to remain in the closet.
One of the most fucked up thing about it, is that a lot of American health organizations have demonized any kind of treatments using hormones for almost any medical condition. With the exception of one thing. Sex change. For that reason, they will fall all over themselves to get the ‘patient’ all they want, for medical reasons you know, despite any risks from the massive amounts they will need to consume. And health insurance will fall all over themselves to pay the bill.
What better way to shame your opponents than to claim they’re making an imaginary, ill-defined group of people ( for which you are the self-appointed spokesmen), feel bad?
No “true” trans-person can gainsay your shaming, because that there trans-person, while having transitioned, is not a true representative of the whole group, which only we, as the champions of the imaginary community, can be.
If trans-persons didn’t exist, they would have had to be invented.
Well, to be fair, we’ve invented 60 new genders which didn’t exist.
And some of those will ALSO be imaginary transgender.
Although how exactly you transition to an “nullgender attack helicopter” from “bisexual dragon otherkin” is a bit of a mystery to me.
“In short, they’re being used as a political wedge-issue, not as a real subject by themselves”
Feature, not bug. The Left never cares about their client groups as long as they keep voting D. That trannies are a vanishingly tiny percentage of the population is irrelevant, they’re just a cudgel to use against their political opponents by calling them bigots.
I love articles like this. Mysterious (insert whatever), scientists, experts baffled!
SPACE BALLZ!
to paraphrase something a professor said in college: “people are arguing about the idea of trans-people, not their reality”
I think this could fairly be used as the “progressive” modus operandi with regard to every identity group parade they jump in front of.
Even the “middle class” they profess such fondness for is a figment of their imagination. They want nothing to do with the blue collar working stiff hicks, other than their unquestioning fealty at the ballot box. The middle class as conceptualized in DNC focus groups seems more likely to be composed of Sierra Club college professors than guys with bass boats and snowmobiles.
Progtopia is a 2 tier system. The ruling elite and the serfs. A middle class has no use or place in Progtopia, they only serve as trouble makers since they won’t obey to get the scraps they need to survive from the ruling elite.
indeed. probably the biggest ‘fake’ constituency of all time.
this was actually something that was first discussed in college. i was in a class where we read a new yorker article about the “death of the middle class”.
What the piece really meant was that the older definitions had been slowly tossed out …. ones based on actual economic small-holders as a % of the population. Neither ‘working’ (laborers) nor industrialist owners of large-scale capital… but small-business owners and professionals who had private practices. (dentists, lawyers, people who ran 1-man-band offices)
the distinction was that there was no “income bands” relevant to that – it wasn’t about how much money one made, it was about your ownership of your own business.
that was changed over time to simply mean, “middle income”. Not rich, not poor. which means nothing and provides no real insight into the different economic interests of business owners vs. ‘high income laborers’.
The article we read was mostly how small-businesses, shopkeepers, single-franchisees, etc were shrinking as a share of the population in America. The only thing the dumb kids in the class could understand was, “But I’m middle class! my dad makes a lot of money!” They didn’t understand the point about the underlying structural changes in the economy
Marxist class warfare never took hold in the US because we have economic mobility here like nowhere else. The pinkos had to find some way to divide us so they morphed class politics into identity politics. As already pointed out most of those identities dont actually exist. The lunatic left is going to lose. Judging by the Dem faces I saw last night, they sense this. They cant seem to figure out why, but they seem to have a feral sense that it is coming.
There isnt going to be any blue surge in November, nor will there be one in 2020. Trump is going to crush them, or rather the Americans waking up from the long nightmare of inevitable progressive politics are going to crush them.
So the “middle class” is the black people of classes?
They’e the Nick Gillespie of classes.
BREAKING!
Rep. Schiff’s memo rebutting the Nunes memo has been leaked!
Too articulate for Schiff.
Fake News.
I presume their tactic here is to flood the media with all sorts of distracting news so that the details of the actual misconduct discussed in the nunes memo are buried in “discussions” of all the complicating factors they want to swamp the public with.
this was actually something that was first discussed in college. i was in a class where we read a new yorker article about the “death of the middle class”.
What the piece really meant was that the older definitions had been slowly tossed out …. ones based on actual economic small-holders as a % of the population.
The middle class is a slippery bunch, depending on the circumstances. I have seen the middle class defined as, essentially, “unionized public servants” to suit a particular narrative.
What happens when Midgets go to Prison?
Wouldn’t sending midgets to the “Big House” trigger them?
I assumed that midgets were the reason that cell bars are vertical and not horizontal. So they couldn’t limbo out.
Risky click. A little disappointed now.
OTQ: SP! Is it JetPack that’s fucking up your life or WP updates in general?
I do not use the evil Jetpack. Ever.
I had hoped you were as wise as I thought you were.
And now I know,
Hypocrisy? From a Clinton? Unpossible.
http://freebeacon.com/blog/hillary-clintons-1500-word-news-dump/
Today in progressive racism:
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2018/01/does-word-caucasity-used-in-nyt-today.html
Just sat through a “Town Hall” meeting with our agency’s head honcho and other semi-head honchos. I need a cocktail. Or I’ll just go to the kitchen and reheat my covfefe.
Hey Mustang, if you’re still in the Fukuoka area, you should try Menya Houten for a black broth ramen. They have a shop in ramen stadium which should be easy to find.