Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Not all heroes wear capes.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

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

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

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

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

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Busy day today and I had to spend a bunch of time driving, and I have no idea what is going on in Ontario, but I swear the entire population of Toronto and St. Catherines were on I-79 heading south at 85 miles an hour and not using their turn signals. It’s a weird quirk I have noticed- one of the most polite nation in the world, and they drive like fucking oil rich Saudi Arabians princes with an Egyptian brake.

Tonight was red meat Friday, so I grilled two ribeyes, made some sweet potato fries with a touch of rosemary, and Shawn didn’t like the texture of the kale last night, so I steamed it a bit before the sautee, and I put some bacon and garlic and some portabellas in it again, and he like it a lot more, so that was good. I like the texture of kale, but I like a lot of different textures with meals. Apparently, not everyone does. Live and learn.

Waiting for the Pens to keep me up all night and lose again. You?

Reader Interactions

61Comments

  4. 4.

    Svensker

    The entire population of St. Catherine’s? You’ve HEARD of St. Catherine’s? Nice book store there.

    Also, as badly as you think Canadians drive, you have no idea how they WALK. Frigging pedestrians. Step right into the street without looking left or right, just expect the cars to spot them and stop. Every driving day in Toronto is like practicing for a heart attack. Terrifying.

  5. 5.

    the Conster

    Daine Sawyer told me that Colorado is training 100 cops how to bust you for driving while stoned because freedom. Since there isn’t a breathalyzer yet they’re being told to base arrests on dilated pupils. What could possibly go wrong?

  7. 7.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    It’s like Felix Unger started blogging here. A month from now we’re gonna be getting strong opinions on Donizetti vs Rossini

  9. 9.

    Ferdzy

    @schrodinger’s cat: No, the student-of-driving-age population of Ontario is streaming past Cole’s house on their way to the beach. A thawed out beach, that is. We have beaches, it’s just a little hard to tell exactly where they begin and end at the moment.

  10. 10.

    Roger That

    Me? Decided to check Reason.com for shits and giggles to see how they covered CPAC, their top story is by former MTV veejay Kennedy and is titled “CPAC: Fred Thompson, Other Cons Totally Cool with States Legalizing Pot, Gay Marriage” and goes “Surprisingly, the attendees she talked with were on board with letting states decide issues such as drug legalization and gay marriage.” How stupid do you think we are and deluded do you have to be to write that?

  11. 11.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Julia Ioffe: Crimea’s gone. It’s Russian. Forget about it.

    I tend to agree. I think the best case scenario is some kind of “autonomous region” fig leaf. Tatars are reporting their doors are being marked with what might be a cross.

    New Rule: Anyone wishing to comment on this situation must first point to Crimea on a blank world map.

  12. 12.

    dexwood

    @the Conster:
    Hmm, no idea, Step out of the car, mam, remove your sunglasses. Shine a flashlight in some poor guy’s eyes at night. No problems. Probable cause in their minds.

  13. 13.

    MomSense

    Made dinner for some friends and celebrated a successful concert they helped to put together. I pan seared some beautiful scallops and served with some homemade pesto and spinach pasta. The salad was full of baby greens, squash, nuts, fruits, avocado, etc. Yummy!

    I made flourless chocolate brownies for dessert.

  17. 17.

    raven

    A flight carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is missing and would likely have run out of fuel, the airline says.

  18. 18.

    Cassidy

    Watching heavyweights throw leather is fun. It’s like a slow motion meteor: it may never land, but the one time it does BOOM!

  21. 21.

    Randy P

    Tonight was red meat Friday

    Is this like anti-Lent? Do you have big meals every day, and then go for the red meat on Fridays?

  22. 22.

    Amir Khalid

    @raven:
    Latest word is that contact was lost when MH370 was over Vietnam. And that of its 227 passengers, 158 are Chinese nationals.

  24. 24.

    raven

    @Amir Khalid: Yea I saw that. Looking at the route on the web it appears it goes over Cambodia and Laos and cuts across what we used to call North Vietnam near Dien Bien Phu.

  25. 25.

    mclaren

    More evidence that America’s military is commanded by incompetent careerist cowards and made up of felons, rapists and gang members:

    The U.S. Army’s generals, as a group, have lost the ability to effectively function at the high level required of those upon whom we place the responsibility for safeguarding our nation. Over the past 20 years, our senior leaders have amassed a record of failure in major organizational, acquisition and strategic efforts. These failures have been accompanied by the hallmarks of an organization unable and unwilling to fix itself: aggressive resistance to the reporting of problems, suppression of failed test results, public declarations of success where none was justified, and the absence of accountability.

    Today, and consistent with these patterns, senior Army leaders are poised to reorganize the service into one that is smaller and less capable than the one that existed at the end of the Iraq War in 2011, and just as the threat environment is becoming more unpredictable and potential adversaries more capable.

    Source: “Purge the Generals,” Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, The Armed Forces Journal, 1 August 2013.

    No surprise.

    The Army’s best officers are leaving like rats jumping out of a burning building:

    Why are so many of the most talented officers now abandoning military life for the private sector? An exclusive survey of West Point graduates shows that it’s not just money. Increasingly, the military is creating a command structure that rewards conformism and ignores merit. (..)

    Why is the military so bad at retaining these people? It’s convenient to believe that top officers simply have more- lucrative opportunities in the private sector, and that their departures are inevitable. But the reason overwhelmingly cited by veterans and active-duty officers alike is that the military personnel system—every aspect of it—is nearly blind to merit. Performance evaluations emphasize a zero-defect mentality, meaning that risk-avoidance trickles down the chain of command. Promotions can be anticipated almost to the day— regardless of an officer’s competence—so that there is essentially no difference in rank among officers the same age, even after 15 years of service. Job assignments are managed by a faceless, centralized bureaucracy that keeps everyone guessing where they might be shipped next.

    Source: “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving,” The Atlantic Magazine, 4 January 2011.

    With the best and brightest abandoning the U.S. military officer corps, only inept clowns and fools remain. These halfwits lead an army made up of felons and misfits into battle — with predictable results. The American military is getting its ass kicked by teenage kids who are armed with bolt-action rifles.

    See “U.S. is recruiting misfits for the army: felons, racists, gang members fill the ranks,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 1 October 2006.

    This explains why one out of every three women in the U.S. military now gets raped by U.S. soldiers:

    “Factors Associated with Women’s Risk of Rape in the Military Environment,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 43:262-273 (2003).

    * A 2004 study of women veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, who were seeking help for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), found that 71% said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.

    * The VA study (referenced in the title above) was funded by the Army Medical Research Department and found that 30% of women veterans said they were raped while serving. That is almost one in three.

    * Thirty seven percent of the attempted raped and raped women in the VA study also reported being raped more than once and 14% of them reported being gang raped. This study also discovered that 75% of raped women in the military failed to report it.

    No wonder the useless incompetent U.S. military can’t win any wars. The officers are too busy punching their career tickets and the enlisted men are too busy raping their fellow soldiers to bother actually winning any wars.

    Time to shut the whole thing down.

    End the clusterfuck. Yank funding, shut down the U.S. army. Go back to a national guard and a coast guard for coastal defense.

    Shut it down, shut it all down.

  27. 27.

    Jay C

    @raven:

    How does one of today’s airliners not carry enough fuel to get where it’s going (barring weird flukes like the Gimli Glider)? From the published accounts, it looks like this was about a six-hour flight: not extraordinary long for a 777: one must assume that the airline personnel in KL put enough fuel aboard to get to China, anyway: must be something else….

  29. 29.

    Cassidy

    @mclaren: Oh yeah. We scheduled all out raping for right after morning maintenance. If we hurried, we could get our raping done before lunch and then move on to something else. Yeah man, raping, that’s all every single enlisted male ever did.

    It must be so easy to live in a world devoid of context, so simple, like a child’s world view.

  30. 30.

    Hal

    I was listening to Here and Now on NPR Thursday with Ron Elving, NPR’s Senior Washington Correspondent. I thought he made an exacting point about Obama’s inability to make Putin do what ever he wants:

    ELVING: We could have, at the time in 2008, done anything that the Republicans are currently contemplating, and it probably wouldn’t have made any difference to the Russians in terms of moving into Georgia. We were clearly not going to commit troops there in 2008, and President George W. Bush did not do that.

    Earlier, when his father was president and the Russians cut up Moldova, another country that they still see as being within their ambit, President H.W. Bush didn’t do anything. You want to go back to 1968 and the Prague spring in Czechoslovakia and LBJ, another Cold Warrior, was confronted with the Russians going in and crushing the aspirations of the Czechoslovakian people in 1968, and he didn’t do anything because he couldn’t do anything. And all the way back to 1956 and Budapest and Hungary, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower was the president of the United States, and he couldn’t do anything to stop that. Because this is a part of the world in which our influence and which our ability to operate in – certainly in any kind of a military fashion is extremely limited.

  33. 33.

    Steeplejack

    @Jay C:

    I think the point was that the plane has now been missing so long that it would have run out of fuel no matter where it was flying, not that it didn’t start with enough fuel to get to its destination.

  35. 35.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Cassidy: He isn’t wrong about the culture of conformity and risk avoidance of among the officer corps. It even existed in my day, and I have watched some very talented and innovative officers struggle to get promoted to high rank (H.R. McMaster, for example)

  37. 37.

    Cassidy

    @Omnes Omnibus: Sure, but I’m not going to pretend to have a reasonable conversation with someone so simpleminded to think that the whole enlisted corp are rapists. It’s stupid. There’s no other conclusion. The kind of person who jumps to that conclusion is dumber than dogshit.

  38. 38.

    Suffern ACE

    @raven: yeah. But I’m guessing going forward, we aren’t going to be throwing our lot with what comes out of protests for awhile. Egypt, Syria and Ukraine have not been positive outcomes. Maybe Tunisia and Libya worked.

    Now we’re going to be saddled with bailing out a Ukraine against a Russia that will be working hard to make certain that government never establishes itself.

  40. 40.

    Cassidy

    @Omnes Omnibus: To address your point, the officer corp has always been about conformity. This is nothing new. Any dipshit ring knocker who publishes that kind of drivel as wisdom should have his thinking privileges revoked for a while.

  43. 43.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Cassidy: Not completely. There are bright, capable people there, and they occasionally bubble up to the top. In the senior ranks, look for the guys with grad degrees in subjects like history, international relations, and/or foreign languages. The ones who gain an outside perspective.

  44. 44.

    Cassidy

    @Omnes Omnibus: Of course, but it’s not the norm. Dipping is okay, but no smoking, unless it’s a cigar. Be into something recreationally athletic, but nothing hardcore like combat sports. Read this list of books. Be married by Captain. So on and so forth.

  45. 45.

    Amir Khalid

    @Jay C:
    MH370 was due in Beijing at 06:30. (KL and Beijing are in the same time zone.) Its fuel reserve might have have given it an hour or so more of flight in case it needed to be diverted. It’s almost noon here as I type this.

  48. 48.

    Kevin

    Ha! I’m a Canadian, and every time I had to drive down to Ohio to visit my brother, i would wonder why a people who are known for being rude and aggressive drove so slowly and stayed in one lane. The dirty looks I would get as a passed them all confused me. So I wasn’t crazy, we do drive faster for some reason. Not sure I can explain it.

  49. 49.

    Kevin

    Ha! I’m a Canadian, and every time I had to drive down to Ohio to visit my brother, i would wonder why a people who are known for being rude and aggressive drove so slowly and stayed in one lane. The dirty looks I would get as a passed them all confused me. So I wasn’t crazy, we do drive faster for some reason. Not sure I can explain it.

  57. 57.

    The Tragically Flip

    I don’t really drive much out of province so I’ve never noticed people’s lane & signal habits, but on highways around Toronto, I’d say there’s a mix of those who signal lane changes and those who don’t. I’d say it’s more common than not, though we’re certainly not religious about it.

    I sometimes don’t if there’s no one near by, like if I’m passing and I’ve well cleared the other car (several car lengths – none of this cutting back in just in front of them). If someone passes me the same way, the lack of signaling doesn’t bother me. Prefer no-signal but lots of room to cutting in front of me with a signal.

    Ontario is big enough that different driving habits could prevail in St. Catharine’s or any other part, really.

  58. 58.

    Comrade Mary

    Ah! Can’t hear that place name without thinking of this (with a young and hawt Genevieve Bujold).

    Nice bragging point on Hébert! My dad traced our family to Abraham Martin dit L’Ecossais. Obviously Martin didn’t live to see what a mess people would make of his nice, green field.

  59. 59.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Comrade Mary: What I find rather interesting is that my mom’s French Canadian family and my dad’s early, early New England family spent years trying to kill one another. The Frogs lead Native Americans against the Yanks. And the Yanks tended to invade and burn things. My dad is a bit genealogy obsessed, but he has found “battles” where relatives fought each other. OTOH, they have been married for over 50 years so, the hatchet seems buried.

  60. 60.

    Comrade Mary

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yes, wars stop when the shagging starts. Sometimes, anyway.

    Kind of but not totally tangential: if you’re looking for a novel that covers a small chunk of the Canadian colonial period, you might want to look for The Orenda.

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