Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

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

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

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82Comments

  2. 2.

    Trollhattan

    And a shout-out to (necessarily paranoid) Russian drivers and their dash-cams. Amazing footage on this thing, largely from the driver’s perspective.

    Also, too, note to self: After the fireball passes, stand well away from the window.

  4. 4.

    coredump

    Right idea, wrong location. This is the reason you need to enable your location services and GPS when making the request.

    -c-

  6. 6.

    General Stuck

    The videos were awesome, weren’t they. A couple of summers ago one morning I was standing outside, and noticed a flash out of the corner of my eye, that was on a sunny day. Turned and saw where a small smoke trail was wafting in the low sky, and close to where I was. It was a small one, but kind of cool anyways.

  7. 7.

    dmsilev

    Someone needs to check the landing site for a small spacecraft containing an infant boy. Also, too, what’s Russian for ‘Kent’?

  8. 8.

    YellowJournalism

    After seeing the videos, I have developed a deeper respect for the depiction of meteors and other such objects in Hollywood movies.

    Funny that this came almost a week since that false zombie apocalypse warning.

  11. 11.

    gene108

    I swear I will stop asking for the FSM to bring on the meteor.

    Thank you.

    It’s pretty scary how quickly life as we know it can get wiped out.

    And this was a teeny-tiny-little-baby meteor that detonated 32,800 feet above sea level.

    Imagine the Godzilla of meteors making impact…we’d be so dead as a species, especially since we’ve forgotten all the stone tools making skills we’d need to survive, as much of the high-tech stuff wouldn’t work anymore.

    Really freaked out by this, ’cause we’re basically sitting and spinning on a little blue planet surrounded by a universe that could kill us in so many ways, either quickly or slowly and there’s not a lot we can do about it, but pretend that it can never happen.

  14. 14.

    different-church-lady

    Call Amazon, tell ’em FedEx really screwed up the delivery on your order, demand a replacement.

  16. 16.

    different-church-lady

    @gene108:

    Really freaked out by this, ’cause we’re basically sitting and spinning on a little blue planet surrounded by a universe that could kill us in so many ways, either quickly or slowly and there’s not a lot we can do about it, but pretend that it can never happen.

    Like the thug says in Marathon Man, “That’s not the catch — that’s the fun.”

  17. 17.

    different-church-lady

    Just realized: between this and you nailing Pink Floyd at the Olympics, I think you ought to be really careful next time you feel sarcastic.

  18. 18.

    Elizabelle

    Heard on the radio news that 75% of the planet is ocean, and that only 3-5% of the landmass is populated.

    Might be oversimplified. (Local radio news; consider the source.)

    Was wondering how this would have played out in a more populated area.

    And those dashcam videos were fascinating.

  20. 20.

    Anoniminous

    Do that and the next thing you know you’ll stop telling us to “eat a bag of salty dicks” and the whole market tone & tenor (aka “branding”) of BJ will crash.

    BOOM

    Have to think these things through, guy.

  21. 21.

    Comrade Mary

    @gene108: If you want to ever sleep again, don’t watch this. It’s just three minutes long, but your reaction may go from “Oh — cool!” to “Ummm …” to “We’re fucking doomed!” pretty quickly.

    But it does feature a soothing Scottish narrator, so that helps.

  22. 22.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Elizabelle:

    Well, Chelyabinsk is a big city and this was pretty close. It was populated enough for almost a thousand people to be injured, mostly by glass from shattered windows. (Also, the worst place/time for your house to lose its windows might well be Siberia in February. If DA14 itself had been 17,000 miles closer, I doubt we’d be talking about how cool the dash cams were.

  24. 24.

    JPL

    The internet told me that Russian cars have dashcams because of the high incidence of insurance fraud. One of the videos on nbc.com showed an erratic driver weaving in and out. It was difficult to pay attention to the meteor because I was more concerned that he was going to crash.
    Cole since you have magic powers, use them more appropriately. What did the Russians do to you?

  26. 26.

    Comrade Mary

    If you ever want to drive in Russia (ever), don’t watch this compendium of Russian roads as seem through (mostly) dashboard cams. It’s only 13 minutes long, but it feels like less.

    The poster says that there the included scenes caused no fatalities, which just proves that the FSM is saving the Russkies for last.

  27. 27.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Karen in GA:

    TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!!!

    I’m waiting for the GUBBERMINT to release the seekrit dashboard camera videos they have stashed away of the K/T comet which destroyed the dinosaurs. Rumor has it that if you squint your eyes really tight in the background you can see Jesus riding on one of the dinosaurs, AND THEY DONUT WANT ANYBOODY TO NOOW ABOUT THIS. COVERUP!

  29. 29.

    Comrade Dread

    @gene108: Look, mate, none of us is getting out of this business alive.

    And death by meteor is certainly more memorable on a planetary scale than death by car accident.

    We all die Deep Impact style and a few million years from now, the descendents of the rats or cockroaches or fish will be watching specials on “What killed the humans?”

  30. 30.

    jl

    Glad Cole softened up a little on the meteor strike thing.

    DA14’s closest approach was about an hour ago, and looks like that derned liberal science and math were right again, it missed.

    But was worrying about Cole’s grumpy disappointment over a missed ‘opportunity’.

    Asteroid Buzzes Earth in Record-Setting Flyby
    By Mike Wall | SPACE.com
    http://news.yahoo.com/asteroid-buzzes-earth-record-setting-flyby-195309073.html

    ” An asteroid half the size of a football field buzzed Earth in a historic flyby today (Feb. 15), barely missing our planet just hours after a much smaller object exploded above Russia, injuring perhaps 1,000 people.

    The 150-foot-wide (45 meters) near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 cruised within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth at 2:24 p.m. EST (1924 GMT) today, coming closer than many communications satellites circling our planet. “

  32. 32.

    jl

    @Comrade Dread:

    ‘ We all die Deep Impact style and a few million years from now, the descendents of the rats or cockroaches or fish will be watching specials on “What killed the humans?” ‘

    My money is on the water bears (tardigrades). I think they are toughest of all critters. They just need a few to mutate some opposable thumb clawlettes on the end of cute stubby little legs and they are set to go.

    And I think they are cutest candidates for succession.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

  34. 34.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    I still say we’ll Ice Nine ourselves out of existence before the cosmological Big One finds us.

  35. 35.

    Karen in GA

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I KNEW IT — Obummer travelled back through time and KILLED OUR LORD AND SAVIOR! Then on his way back he stopped in 1962 and planted the fake birth announcement!

    It’s his evil powers. Moozlims have that, you know.

  37. 37.

    Poopyman

    @Comrade Mary: As he says, each pixel is WAY bigger than the body, so what looks like a close approach isn’t, necessarily. And then you have to remember that they’re not all orbiting in the plane of the video, but at all sorts of inclinations, spending only a teeny amount of time crossing the earth’s orbital plane.

    Watch this video if you’re worried about an impact.

  38. 38.

    Redshirt

    As I’ve noted before, I’ve got mega-primo Asteroids skill, and I remain on standby. Call on me, World, when you truly need to be Saved.

  41. 41.

    Cermet

    @Lowkey: Is that anyway to treat a people who saved our ass’s by defeating the Germans almost by themselves? (At no time did they fight less than 70% of the German Army for a good part of the time, nearly 100%.

  45. 45.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Cermet:

    At no time did they fight less than 70% of the German Army

    Well except for the part where they invaded Poland from the East while the Germans invaded from the North, West and South, and they amicably met in the middle, and then the Soviets spent the rest of ’39, 40 and the first half of 41 shoveling everything they could in the way of supplies in Hitler’s direction to try to help him win the war, that is when they weren’t shooting captured Polish officers and botching an invasion of Finland. But hey, everybody makes mistakes.

  46. 46.

    geg6

    Well, a meteor that would just hit the GOP side of the House would be pretty cool and a good thing overall. The House Dems would probably have some cleanup to do, but I have no doubt that Nancy SMASH! knows how to clean up detritus.

    So, keep wishing for the meteor but be more specific about it next time.

  47. 47.

    gogol's wife

    Russians are very prone to reading everything as a sign of the end of the world, so things are interesting. My friend in Moscow said the female guard in her building told her today she had to go home early because she heard Moscow was going to be wiped out in two hours and she wanted to be at home for it.

  50. 50.

    liberal

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
    Yeah, except that IIRC if you read the stats, the Nazis still killed an order of magnitude more of gentile Poles than the Soviets did. (I can’t imagine how lopsided the stats for Jewish Poles looks like.) (IIRC it was ~ 300K for USSR, 3M for Nazis.)

  54. 54.

    liberal

    @Karen in GA:

    Obummer travelled back through time and KILLED OUR LORD AND SAVIOR!

    Speaking of which, and speaking of Poles in WWII, one of the PBS series on WWII had an entire episode about the Polish resistance (I can’t remember if it was part or in whole about the resistance and the Jews). One guy saved his Jewish neighbor(s), which of course is amazingly heroic because I assume he’d be immediately executed by the Nazis if found out. OTOH, because of the “they killed our savior” thing, he said he would go to the town square every time they hanged a Jew.

    Weird.

  55. 55.

    liberal

    @gene108:
    Whatever happened to the “we’re all going to be fried by a supernova, which is really 600My overdue?” meme that was circulating a couple decades ago?

  57. 57.

    liberal

    @m’quirk:
    I can’t remember who it was—someone like Chomsky or Daniel Ellsberg—who said they hoped the Soviets were stealing our computer tech, for this very reason (make more accurate judgements).

  62. 62.

    gbear

    If you think those Russian dash cams are clever, go to YouTube, type in a search for ‘Cars On The Road’, and prepare to lose an hour of your life. I don’t know if Russians are the worst drivers in the world, but those videos sure make a case for it.

  63. 63.

    ranchandsyrup

    I know Cole is joking about his power to summon meteors, but I read an article yesterday about the OBL shooter saying that he frequently listened to hip hop artist The Game while training, etc. When The Game was informed of this he immediately made it all about him.

    SQUIRE.COM: So how does it feel to hear that your song was what the guy who killed bin Laden listened to as he got pumped up?

    THE GAME: I think that’s the shit, man. What’s crazy about that is that bin Laden might have heard “Red Nation” right before he died. That’s pretty cool. ‘Cause if you’re thinking about the speakers, sometimes it bleeds out, you know?

    ESQ: [Laughs.] I don’t think he was actually listening while he was on the mission, because they’ve got to listen to each other. But when he was in training, he did.

    THE GAME: Oh. Maybe while he was on the way to kill bin Laden maybe he was doing an a cappella.

    ESQ: So you were, in a small way, a part of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

    THE GAME: I feel real patriotic. I feel real American. I feel like I had — ’cause what if he was listening to, like, John Mayer? Than he probably would’ve missed the shot or something. But I feel like “Red Nation” had him on-point.

    Read more: The Game The Shooter – The Rapper the bin Laden Shooter Listened to – Esquire http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/the-game-the-shooter-15097888#ixzz2L0ca3yAq

  64. 64.

    Trollhattan

    @ranchandsyrup:

    Colbert is gonna be in on this, soon enough.

    “The killing of OBL, brought to you by Fruit of the Loom, Mountain Dew, Cool Ranch Doritos and Chapstick.”

  65. 65.

    gene108

    @Baud:

    Don’t read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You’ll never sleep again.

    I’d actually feel a lot better, if I had an improbability drive handy. Though bistro math would be a downer to learn in school.

  66. 66.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @liberal:

    Yes, you are correct. I’m just pointing out that a certain amount of selective editing of the historical record goes into the traditional Russian complaint about being left all alone to fight the Germans by themselves, when their very own strategic blunders were part of the reason why there weren’t any other large organized military forces left on the European continent at the time, to give them a hand. And that isn’t even going into the issues of the role of Lend Lease in helping them to fight, or of Stalin’s ill-advised pre-war purges of the Red Army, or their operational/tactical mistakes made both before and after June 22, etc.

  67. 67.

    Lowkey

    @Cermet: Oh, nothing against the Russians. I meant somthing more along the lines of: when Grumpy Cole next invokes the wrath of our Noodly Master, he should remember to ask for a meteor big enough to blast us off this rock, not just cover a thousand startled Russians with broken glass.

    Also too, WWII was so last century. What has Russia done for me lately?

  68. 68.

    gene108

    @liberal:

    Gamma ray bursts…mock them at your own peril…

    But mother Earth is a resilient mommy. She has a way of letting life come back from mass extinctions, even if we aren’t included.

  70. 70.

    Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn

    Be careful with those dash-cam vids on the YouTubes. We were sent one by an inlaw that was simply labled, “Beware of icy conditions. This should be shown in every drivers ed class.” I watched, unaware that it showed a small SUV spinning out into oncoming freeway traffic, where it was immediately hit by about as big a semi as they make. Wasn’t really prepared for a snuff film.

  73. 73.

    Bubblegum Tate

    So I recently discovered the (quite funny) site A Bad Case of the Dates, on which people tell stories about their horrible/weird/ridiculous dates. And I just read this one in which a Romney supporter gets upbraided by a Gingrich supporter:

    “Newt is the anointed one. The guy’s practically a saint.”

    I asked, “Isn’t he kind of morally bankrupt?”

    Liam laughed long and hard, then said, “Dirtbag propaganda. Newt has powers beyond comprehension. He gave us a house majority and forced Clinton’s hand on everything. He’s the most well-read out of any candidate ever, and he’s a master at accomplishing the impossible. He’s touched. I can’t think of a better role model for Americans. Can you?”

    Liam sounds like one of my wingnut barometers.

  75. 75.

    Eric U.

    @gene108: there was an online quiz that I took a few years back that tested your ability to rebuild society after an apocalyptic event. I felt proud that I could get us back to the technology of 1850 or so. If I could find a metallurgist I could probably get us from zero back to some approximation of today. Granted, there would be some gaping deficits.

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    @Trollhattan

    Also, too, note to self: After the fireball passes, stand well away from the window.

    May not matter. Larger masses can heat up in the atmosphere to violet hot (the state above white hot).

    That super-ultra-heat (again, if the mass stays big enough) can fry stuff even several miles away.

    That’s the problem with a lot of those artist conceptions of dinosaurs looking up at a glowing mass in the sky. If they were that close, they would be vaporized long before the impact.

  77. 77.

    liberal

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    And that isn’t even going into the issues of the role of Lend Lease in helping them to fight, or of Stalin’s ill-advised pre-war purges of the Red Army, or their operational/tactical mistakes made both before and after June 22, etc.

    Right, I know.

  78. 78.

    Trollhattan

    @NotMax:

    Now that I’m sufficiently cheered up!

    Plan revision: presuming I survive fireball radiation, stand away from the window before the sonic wave hits.

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