Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Let’s finish the job.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

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

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Republicans don’t trust women.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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

“woke” is the new caravan.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Saturday Evening Open Thread: Foreign Travel Is Always Risky

Saturday Evening Open Thread: Foreign Travel Is Always Risky

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travel for suckers rall
(Ted Rall via GoComics.com)
.
Doing some housekeeping & this turned up. As my Intro to Anthropology professor told us, it is a fact universally acknowledged that The Tribe Over There is full of lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources. All else is commentary…

Apart from the universal verities, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Reader Interactions

86Comments

  2. 2.

    Morzer

    …it is a fact universally acknowledged that The Tribe Over There is full of lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources.

    In the interests of fairness and balance, I know one or two Jets fans who don’t eat taboo foods.

  8. 8.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I’ve never liked it. It tastes like sour peanut butter to me. I realize this puts me in a minority commonly considered insane.

  11. 11.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    My MIL is over visiting. Just watched the Tigers clobber the Hated Yankees. Again. I like the way this baseball season is starting out.

  14. 14.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    …lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources.

    Yep, that’s Indiana and Ohio in a nutshell.

  16. 16.

    The Dangerman

    Not counting any shockers before they are thatched yet, but last mid-major in the Final Game, IIRC, was Indiana State with Bird. Last Mid-Major to win? Does UTEP count?

  18. 18.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @The Dangerman:

    Butler kept it close with Duke in the championship game a few years ago.

    ETA: You might describe the Louisville team from the ’80s a mid-major, too. There’s an argument to be made for it, anyway.

  19. 19.

    Tara the Antisocial Social Worker

    Packrat and I were having the usual weekend boredom with cooking the stuff we have all the time. We had frozen chicken breasts and spinach, so I googled around until I found a recipe that used both without requiring a store run for any other ingredients.

    Will let you know if she winds up with botulism or anything.

  27. 27.

    arguingwithsignposts

    Pfft, everyone knows The Tribe at Balloon Juice is full of lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources. All else is commenters…

  29. 29.

    The Dangerman

    @Cacti:

    Butler was the last mid major to make it to the championship game.

    D’OH! Of course. Butler’s run has been long enough I’d forgotten them somehow.

  35. 35.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @raven:

    D’OH!

    I thought you were “seconding”. And I forgot about the second Butler final. Time to go flog myself again.

  40. 40.

    lamh35

    OMG…Becky!!! GIJoe was sooooooo lame! The only saving grace was seeing The Rock in some serious tight military tees. I know steroids are bad for u, but damn when it comes to The Rock, they do a body good!

    LOL!

  41. 41.

    Morzer

    @efgoldman:

    Pssst.

    I have this special offer on a pair of audience participation tickets.

    Just send me your bank details, credit card number, social security number and address and I’ll send them out to you right away for a very reasonable price.

  45. 45.

    M31

    One of my favorite vignettes from Herodotus is when a Persian king (Darius or Xerxes, I can’t remember which) demonstrates the power of local custom–he asks some Greeks under what circumstances would they cook and eat the bodies of their deceased parents, and the Greeks reply they would never ever do that for any reason. Darius (in front of them both) then asks some Indians under what circumstances would the NOT cook and eat the bodies of their dead parents and they are equally horrified.

    Good old Herodotus.

  46. 46.

    Morzer

    @efgoldman:

    You think it’s easy being the fake widow of an undead finance minister?!!

    Bigot! Hater! Obot! Firebagger! Voluntary consumer of French cheeses!

  47. 47.

    raven

    @JPL: Jump ball, alternating possession. They had the arrow.

    It should have been a foul but that would have favored the Ville as well.

  48. 48.

    Chris

    @lamh35:

    G. I. Joe in general is a pretty awful franchise, as is Transformers. (Feel free to skewer me, people who remember them fondly from childhood…)

    However, awful franchises can still turn out movies that’re in the “so bad they’re good” range, which is how I ranked the last G. I. Joe. (The previous one, on the other hand, was just plain bad. IMHO, at least).

  50. 50.

    Morzer

    @efgoldman:

    I am willing to do a certain amount of typing for freedom, but c’mon, all those extra derogatory epithets?! Seriously?!

  52. 52.

    The Dangerman

    Well, I can skip Monday night unless Michigan wins; I love the Kevin Ware story, but he was on TV far, FAR too much today.

    Cardinals had their scare and they survived. Good for them, they ARE a solid team (though I think Smith travels on occasion, but maybe I can’t count tonight, either).

    +?

  53. 53.

    danielx

    Dealing with one of those all-out viral assaults that makes you feel like you’re slightly out of phase with reality, although that could be the Dayquil as well. If I could just breath through my nose for ten minutes…it’s the little things in life.

  54. 54.

    Morzer

    @M31:

    Plus, did you know that he proved that socialist redistribution and big government (and liberal geometry!) both originated in Africa:

    The priests also told me that Sesostris divided the country among all the Egyptians, giving each man the same amount of land in the form of a square plot. This was a source of income for him, because he ordered them to pay an annual tax. If any of a person’s plot was lost to the river, he would present himself at the king’s court and tell him what had happened; then the king sent inspectors to measure how much land he had lost, so that in the future the man had to pay proportionately less of the fixed tax. It seems to me that this was how geometry as a land-surveying technique came to be discovered and then imported into Greece.

  57. 57.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @BruceFromOhio:

    Oh, no, I meant what I wrote. I’m sure that Kentucky and West Virginia are special, too, but since there are far fewer of ’em…

  58. 58.

    Corner Stone

    @raven: That wasn’t a foul. The guy presented the ball and Hancock had two hands in there. The call could’ve went either way, call the jump ball or let it wrangle a second longer. Either way nobody should be thinking twice about it.

  60. 60.

    joel hanes

    the tribe over there

    The waterhole scene early in 2001, A Space Odyssey is a fine portrayal of much of human history.

    Posturing, insults, acting out, escalating risk-taking; it’s all in good fun until someone picks up a femur.

  61. 61.

    Cacti

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Mental illness can strike anyone.

    Indeed.

    This past month, an old friend of mine from high school and college took his own life. He was 35 and had a teenage daughter.

  64. 64.

    Steeplejack

    Watching Prometheus on HBO (missed it in the theater) and immediately getting pissed off at the bad science and bad common sense.

    “Hey, according to my $20 wrist sensor, the air’s breathable! Let’s all take our helmets off.”

    (Five minutes later) “Oops, I think we may have affected the atmosphere in the room. Run for it!”

  67. 67.

    gene108

    WTF is wrong with this blog?

    No Final Four thread…bastards…

    Why does Cole hate college basketball. This is inexcusable.

  68. 68.

    gene108

    @efgoldman:

    Meh.

    Meh? That was a helluva game. Wichita St. got jobbed by a quick whistle at the end.

    The Michigan ‘Cuse game is looking pretty good so far.

    I guess this is one reason, why America is screwed. People don’t know good sporting events, when they stare at them on prime time TV.

  69. 69.

    Corner Stone

    @gene108: that wasn’t a quick whistle. completely typical call. made all year long. typical play, typical call.
    The announcers said something about it being quick to gin something up and now every hater in the fucking country latched on to it like the second shooter theory.

  72. 72.

    Hillary Rettig

    Paul Theroux once wrote a travelogue about the New York City subway in which he observed that everyone thought their subway line was the only safe one, and all others were instant death.

  73. 73.

    Corner Stone

    @raven: when was the last time I waited for a chump like you to send an invitation to refute your utter bullshit?

  75. 75.

    Steeplejack

    @Chris:

    Just got done with it a little while ago. It is a profoundly stupid movie, and I am flabbergasted that the Irish blogger Darren (a) wasted so much overwrought prose on its threadbare “religious” subtext and (b) rated it number 5 on his list of the year’s best movies. Ugh. I feel stupider for having watched it.

  77. 77.

    Xjmueller

    My intro to anthro prof said there’s one rule of field work; always boil the water. No matter how far upstream you are, there’s always someone further upstream pissing in it. Words to live by.

  78. 78.

    Corner Stone

    @Steeplejack: I felt that no matter what I had said in warning you would watch it anyway.
    But it is a truly awful movie with nothing and no one you would ask to survive the event.

  79. 79.

    Steeplejack

    @Corner Stone:

    I’m still soaking in it. The Weyland Corporation apparently has worse security (and worse hiring practices) than a second-rate strip club, and for Dr. Shaw to be the lone survivor after fucking up every step of the way was a travesty. And what a total waste of Charlize Theron. I hope she was able to pay off the beach house or something.

  81. 81.

    dance around in your bones

    Whatever you think about Ted Rall’s abilities as an artist/cartoonist, I remember listening to him on some LA radio station (KFI, I think) back in the day and he was always saying the ‘stan’s was where the shit was gonna go down.

    He even led several bus tours through Central Asia for a some listeners who signed up for the ride. Well, you can read about it here!

    eta: FYI, currently watching Airplane! on HBFw (whatever the hell that is). Just started on the left coast!

  82. 82.

    mainmati

    I’ve spent most of my adult life living and working in those funky countries. And in most of them, especially the larger countries with polyethnic populations, it’s not just the next country that’s perceived weird/alien, it’s the next province which might have a different ethnic group. Pakistan is actually a very good example of this but a lot of other countries, especially in Africa fall into this category.

    However, the globalization phenomenon, specifically the Internet and global trade has reduced this xenophobic tendency somewhat, at least in coastal and other large cities. Still, it is pretty common and not likely going away anytime soon, since it is a part of our fundamental legacy (territoriality, family, clan).

  84. 84.

    schrodinger's cat

    @mainmati: True in India too. If you go from one state to another, even the language changes and if you are away from the metros or touristy areas, they don’t speak much English and if you are in the South, not much Hindi either. So it is hand gesture time..

  85. 85.

    ursine

    My wife and I were on a far eastern trip in which we started in Thailand and then went to Vietnam. The Thais we mentioned this to universally gave us the same disgusted look a New Yorker would give you if you told him you were planning to spend the weekend in Newark.

  86. 86.

    Another Halocene Human

    The Tribe Over There is full of lowlife degenerates who … have sex with their relatives

    It’s not mean if it’s true… right?

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