Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

The revolution will be supervised.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

How stupid are these people?

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

T R E 4 5 O N

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

The willow is too close to the house.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Giving up is unforgivable.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

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65Comments

  1. 1.

    seanindc

    Blizzcon Update – New Expansion – Mists of Panderia – level cap up to 90 – New Race: Panderan / New Class: Monk – If you sign up for a one-year WoW subscription, you get Diablo 3 FOR FREE. Color me excited.

  2. 2.

    WereBear

    I have a bleg going:

    Remember the three week old kitten I rescued last year? Well, my friend’s family started feeding a stray cat with an uncanny resemblance to my little kitten boy… and she has three kittens, too! She and her kittens got trapped this weekend, now at a vet who was flooded out during Hurricane Irene… but is valiantly battling on.

    We wouldn’t have troubled her, except the shelters were overwhelmed. So if you ever said to yourself, Oh, if only I had a kitten like the lovebug, Tristan… here you go.

    Already placed one, three to go. Momma cat is a real cuddler, the vet reports, and the kittens are taming up beautifully.

    Save Tristan’s Relatives!

    I WILL DELIVER YOUR KITTY to the NYC Metro Area or New England, as the case may be.

  5. 5.

    Uncle Clarence Thomas

    .
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    Friday Hate Roundup  
    Unfortunately, emoballoonbaggers will not be able to tell Mr. Steven P. Jobs to Die In A Fire or to Fuck Off And Die after learning that he told President Obama to his face that “You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” because Mr. Jobs is already dead from pancreatic cancer.
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  8. 8.

    Hill Dweller

    Romney, who has a knack for looking stupid when it comes to foreign policy, is attacking Obama for leaving Iraq.

  14. 14.

    Sentient Puddle

    @seanindc: Probably something to that effect if they’re going to be the only new playable race. I would imagine it’s something more like they get to choose which faction to join, but this of course is just pure speculation over something that might have already been announced when I wasn’t paying attention.

  15. 15.

    lamh34

    saw some military dude on CNN, and I know what the new meme will be for neo-cons. Dude said this is a good thing for “individual soldiers” who get to come home from Iraq, but it’s a “stategic mistake”.

    I expect to hear this everywhere the neo-cons dwell. ya heard it here first.

  17. 17.

    nancydarling

    @schrodinger’s cat: This may seem like a stupid question, but it is sincere. If we were capable of inter-galactic space travel and our craft came near “dark matter” would it suck us in like a black hole? Or would it be like running into a wall? Any one with a reasonable answer is welcome to chime in.

    Since we are talking cats, my cat Max (a rescue) has a best friend, Mijo (also a rescue) who weighs nearly 90 pounds. Every night at bed time, Max washes Mijo’s face and ears. Max is very fastidious—Mijo not so much.

  18. 18.

    Hill Dweller

    @lamh34: The stooges running for the Republican nomination are already accusing Obama of making a political decision that defied the military’s wishes.

    The Republican party is full of vile, soulless people.

  20. 20.

    S. cerevisiae

    Physics has always interested me, particularly astrophysics and cosmology. It’s been a really interesting time since Cosmos came out; string theory, dark matter, dark energy, M theory, the pursuit of the Higgs – all really cool stuff. I can’t understand the math but I try to grasp what I can.

  23. 23.

    Rosalita

    @WereBear: I wonder what it is about Hurricane Irene? We had five drops offs at our shelter before it even fully hit CT. “Tempest” and “Whirlwind” have been placed but “Irene”, “Gale” “Typhoon” are still with us.

    Breaks my heart to see so many animals left behind.

  24. 24.

    schrodinger's cat

    @nancydarling: If we were capable of inter-galactic space travel and our craft came near “dark matter” would it suck us in like a black hole? Or would it be like running into a wall? Any one with a reasonable answer is welcome to chime in.

    No it is not a stupid question at all. I think it is called dark matter, because it cannot be detected by optical means, i.e. does not radiate any energy. I don’t think we still have a good handle on what dark matter and energy really is. I certainly don’t.

  28. 28.

    joes527

    I love dark matter.

    Physicist 1: Damn, none of our theories match up with observations.

    Phsicist 2: No problem. Let’s just make up something that no one has ever seen that balances the equations. (and use the fact that it balances the equations as PROOF of its existence)

    Physicist 1: Works for me.

  30. 30.

    WereBear

    @Rosalita: I wonder what it is about Hurricane Irene? We had five drops offs at our shelter before it even fully hit CT. “Tempest” and “Whirlwind” have been placed but “Irene”, “Gale” “Typhoon” are still with us.

    I wish I knew. Panic, maybe?

    When I had my rescue, I had plans worked out with the whole family, from the salvaged dog crates to who could be put into the dog crates together, along with the tie down straps to put them in the trunk if it came to that. Ten cats… and I could get them to relative’s or friend’s houses.

  35. 35.

    r€nato

    “dark matter” sounds suspiciously like the 21st century equivalent of the “ether” which 19th century scientists hypothesized as the medium through which light traveled from the Sun to the Earth. Just sayin’.

    As for Multiple Choice Mitt criticizing Obama for pulling out of Iraq… sweet Jesus on a Ritz cracker. If Obama hadn’t pulled troops out, he’d get nailed for not following through on his promise to get us out. Now that he is… that’s bad too.

    Republicans – world champion whiners.

  36. 36.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @joes527:
    Physicist 1: Hey, changing Maxwell’s equations to a moving coordinate system don’t seem to work.
    Physicist 2: What if we make the speed of light constant. Then everything works.
    Physicist 1: Works for me.

    It’s one way physics actually works.

  38. 38.

    Jay in Oregon

    Did Dreamworks and Nintendo pay for a crapload of product placement, or what?

    Kung Fu Panda + Pokemon Battle Stadium = Mists of Panderia. I agree that Blizzard just trolled the crap out of its player base.

  39. 39.

    Trooptrap Tripetrope

    I think I’m gonna host a pre-Halloween movie marathon on the 29th. Anyone want to offer suggestions on suitably scary (or entertainingly ludicrous) movies to include?

  40. 40.

    Roger Moore

    @nancydarling:

    If we were capable of inter-galactic space travel and our craft came near “dark matter” would it suck us in like a black hole? Or would it be like running into a wall?

    We don’t know the answer for sure because we don’t know exactly what dark matter is. It might be WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) that you wouldn’t even notice except for their local gravitational effects. It might be MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) that are essentially cold, dark planets or stars. It’s possible that it might be something like large numbers of small black holes. But we really don’t know exactly what it is, so nobody can say for sure what would happen when you encountered it.

  42. 42.

    Martin

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I don’t think we still have a good handle on what dark matter and energy really is. I certainly don’t.

    Nobody does. We presume it exists because there’s more gravitational impact than energy measurements suggest, so for dark matter, either its conventional matter with no or little energy impact (like brown dwarfs, etc.) If it’s conventional, then yeah, we could go bombing around and hit a gravity well that we didn’t expect to find. But that’s a problem we already face – planets, asteroids, comets, etc. generally don’t radiate energy (some planets, like Jupiter do) so they’re whizzing around out there and if there’s no nearby light source to illuminate them, or we don’t have super-sensitive gravitational sensors (that can compensate for the effects from a moving, vibrating spaceship) then yeah, we’re going to go crashing into shit.

    If it’s non-baryonic matter, mass that isn’t like conventional matter, then it could just be really diffuse (like giant clouds) that doesn’t absorb or radiate energy that we just pass by without even noticing.

    It could be that there are black holes that are too small to give us a radiation signature (black holes are just super-dense sources of matter that spin and slingshot matter and radiation that gets close, but not too close, in specific ways that we can detect) that we might run into, or that we’ve miscalculated the mass of some of the supermassive black holes that live at the center of galaxies, etc.

    Mainly it’s a mathematical/measurement byproduct because of exactly what you say – we can detect the gravitational effect, but we can’t ‘see’ it because there’s no energy signature. It’s a big byproduct, in fact. Better observations, better mathematical models, better assumptions, much of it may simply disappear. Cosmological models are pretty incomplete. They get better all the time, but there’s a TON of really cool stuff going on out there that is so far away that we really struggle to measure it and understand it properly.

  44. 44.

    lamh34

    I hope to never hear liberal-minded people say that Mittens wouldn’t be that bad as POTUS (believe me, I’ve heard it from people I expected better of):

    Romney: Mission not accomplished

    Romney statement: President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women. The unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government. The American people deserve to hear the recommendations that were made by our military commanders in Iraq.

    It’s a short step from here, though, to a dangerous political place: Romney wants to keep the troops in Iraq.

  45. 45.

    Roger Moore

    @joes527:
    What you’re describing is the way science works. When we make observations that disagree with our theories, we are forced to change our theories to account for the new facts. Then we make new predictions based on the updated theories and try to test them to see if the new theories are any good. You may not like dark matter because it involves weird, hard to believe stuff, but lots of people also didn’t like relativity or quantum mechanics when they came out and they’ve proven to be remarkably successful. IOW, if you don’t like the way scientists have changed their theories to accommodate observations, it’s incumbent on you to propose a better alternative.

  48. 48.

    schrodinger's cat

    @WereBear: You are welcome. I am hoping they find good homes soon. Keep us updated. Have you emailed AnneLaurie? may be she can FP it on Balloon Juice.

  52. 52.

    Martin

    @lamh34:

    It’s a short step from here, though, to a dangerous political place: Romney wants to keep the troops in Iraq.

    Actually, it’s worse than that. Because the Iraqi government doesn’t want us to stay, demanding that we stay is effectively demanding that we re-invade Iraq on 1/1/2012, declaring the Iraqi government as our enemy.

  53. 53.

    joes527

    @Roger Moore: wow. Defensive much? I said I love dark matter.

    but your description of what is going on here doesn’t quite match what is actually going on.

    Observation didn’t match theory. But instead of adding epicycles to the existing theory, or coming up with a new theory (set of equations), we pulled a whole new entity (dark matter) out of our collective asses.

    DON’T GET ME WRONG. Far from being uncomfortable with dark matter, I think it is beautiful. (though a bit … dark) And yes, I understand that this case is the epitome of science, not some aberration.

    I love what it says about science, epistemology, and metaphysics.

  55. 55.

    r€nato

    @Roger Moore: That’s why I prefer religious dogma when it comes to science. The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it. Forever.

    Or until reality becomes too hard to ignore, in which case I just reinterpret dogma differently to retrofit the facts.

  57. 57.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Amir Khalid:

    Oops. I think I forgot some rabbit ears in the html for the link.

    Please head to the Max is a cut doggie/open thread two flights up. Link there has been tested and works!

    On edit: Different site, same information. He’s a cowardly shit either way.

  60. 60.

    Cermet

    @joes527: You really do not have a clue on this subject that you speak or else are making a bad joke.

    The short answer is we KNOW gravity theory works and that galaxies are stable. These facts face a problem – stars are moving way too fast for galaxies to be stable or gravity theory to be correct. Also, we see no other matter between stars so either we give up and stop thinking OR devise to eat the cake and have it too (of course you can ALWAYS have your cake and eat it too.)

    Physicist have to make up possible systems that meet all these criteria and allow gravity theory to remain valid – these ideas ARE onlye theories and NO ONE in science claims them as fact or even something close to fact but well worth looking for.

    That is how science works – unless you are a re-pug-a-thug in which case you are too stupid to even try to understand anything about the universe and sit in your own shit and make more shit up.

  63. 63.

    joes527

    Note to self:

    Do not kid a physicist. They will think that they the universe is being attacked.

  64. 64.

    Roger Moore

    @joes527:
    I’m sorry, I thought I saw some sarcasm tags on your post. In any case, I don’t think there’s any real difference between coming up with a new theory and proposing a new kind of matter. After all, nobody has ever actually seen an electron or proton, and our theories even predict that it should be impossible to see a bare quark. We only accept their existence because we have theories that include them that have great explanatory power. Including a new kind of matter is just one way you can change your theory.

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