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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread

Open Thread

by John Cole|  March 7, 20149:34 pm| 61 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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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?

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Reader Interactions

61Comments

  1. 1.

    schrodinger's cat

    March 7, 2014 at 9:36 pm

    Are you in Canada?

  2. 2.

    hilts

    March 7, 2014 at 9:39 pm

    RIP Bartcop

    http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/last-word-bartcop

  3. 3.

    Ferdzy

    March 7, 2014 at 9:40 pm

    March Break! Above freezing temperatures or bust! Lotsa students heading south! That’s what.

  4. 4.

    Svensker

    March 7, 2014 at 9:41 pm

    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

    March 7, 2014 at 9:44 pm

    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?

  6. 6.

    schrodinger's cat

    March 7, 2014 at 9:45 pm

    @efgoldman: I was confused, because Cole speaks of driving to Canada and then cooking steak. Wondering how can he drive to Ontario and then be back in WV to cook dinner?

  7. 7.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    March 7, 2014 at 9:46 pm

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

  8. 8.

    schrodinger's cat

    March 7, 2014 at 9:46 pm

    Open thread needs best dressed kitteh.

  9. 9.

    Ferdzy

    March 7, 2014 at 9:46 pm

    @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

    March 7, 2014 at 9:47 pm

    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

    March 7, 2014 at 9:50 pm

    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

    March 7, 2014 at 9:53 pm

    @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

    March 7, 2014 at 9:54 pm

    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.

  14. 14.

    the Conster

    March 7, 2014 at 9:54 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Chris Hayes had Nina Khruscheva on his show last night who said that Crimea is the jewel that Putin wants, and he’ll concede Ukraine as a sop to the rest of the world. She said it’s all over except for the shouting.

  15. 15.

    Roger That

    March 7, 2014 at 9:54 pm

    @Roger That: Geez, I sound angry there. I was laughing when I read it, can’t believe they expect to be taken seriously.

  16. 16.

    Pogonip

    March 7, 2014 at 9:55 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: He took a short cut through the farmer’s field.

  17. 17.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 9:56 pm

    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

    March 7, 2014 at 9:57 pm

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

  19. 19.

    Poopyman

    March 7, 2014 at 9:58 pm

    @hilts: Well… fuck.

  20. 20.

    hilts

    March 7, 2014 at 10:00 pm

    @the Conster:

    A day without dope is like night
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY8IQnHFKTA

  21. 21.

    Randy P

    March 7, 2014 at 10:02 pm

    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

    March 7, 2014 at 10:04 pm

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

  23. 23.

    Suffern ACE

    March 7, 2014 at 10:06 pm

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: yep. But if you’re a true liberal you should only point to right wing Ukrainians.

  24. 24.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 10:07 pm

    @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

    March 7, 2014 at 10:09 pm

    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.

  26. 26.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 10:13 pm

    @mclaren: Hey idiot, how ya doin?

  27. 27.

    Jay C

    March 7, 2014 at 10:14 pm

    @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….

  28. 28.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 10:15 pm

    @Jay C: As you point out, I think it is probably the time it’s been missing.

  29. 29.

    Cassidy

    March 7, 2014 at 10:16 pm

    @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

    March 7, 2014 at 10:17 pm

    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.

  31. 31.

    Pogonip

    March 7, 2014 at 10:19 pm

    @Cassidy: But when did you have time for pillage and plundering?

  32. 32.

    Cassidy

    March 7, 2014 at 10:21 pm

    @Pogonip: Tuesdays and Fridays.

  33. 33.

    Steeplejack

    March 7, 2014 at 10:21 pm

    @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.

  34. 34.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 10:21 pm

    @Hal: Hungary is a little different since we encouraged the Hungarians to revolt and then bailed.

  35. 35.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 7, 2014 at 10:24 pm

    @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)

  36. 36.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 10:25 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Even a blind squirrel gets an acorn once in a while.

  37. 37.

    Cassidy

    March 7, 2014 at 10:28 pm

    @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

    March 7, 2014 at 10:31 pm

    @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.

  39. 39.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 10:31 pm

    @Cassidy: Just attack, cut the head of the snake and when it grows back, do it again.

  40. 40.

    Cassidy

    March 7, 2014 at 10:31 pm

    @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.

  41. 41.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 7, 2014 at 10:32 pm

    @Cassidy: Well, yeah.

  42. 42.

    raven

    March 7, 2014 at 10:34 pm

    @Suffern ACE: Nor should we.

  43. 43.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 7, 2014 at 10:40 pm

    @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

    March 7, 2014 at 10:46 pm

    @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

    March 7, 2014 at 10:48 pm

    @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.

  46. 46.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 7, 2014 at 10:49 pm

    @Cassidy: There are reasons I got out.

  47. 47.

    Cassidy

    March 7, 2014 at 10:58 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Same here.

  48. 48.

    Kevin

    March 7, 2014 at 11:33 pm

    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

    March 7, 2014 at 11:33 pm

    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.

  50. 50.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 7, 2014 at 11:35 pm

    @Kevin: I have suspicions that Cole drives like a crotchety old man.

  51. 51.

    Comrade Mary

    March 7, 2014 at 11:46 pm

    Dude. DUDE. It’s St. Catharines.

  52. 52.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 7, 2014 at 11:49 pm

    @Comrade Mary: I am sure it is an accent thing. We in the Upper Midwest can understand both, but many cannot.

  53. 53.

    Comrade Mary

    March 7, 2014 at 11:50 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Nah, it’s just those people in the slightly milder part of Ontario being fancy.

  54. 54.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 7, 2014 at 11:55 pm

    @Comrade Mary: What do I know? All my Canadian ancestors come from the south side of the St Lawrence near Quebec.

  55. 55.

    Comrade Mary

    March 8, 2014 at 12:01 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: Where-ish?

  56. 56.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 8, 2014 at 12:06 am

    @Comrade Mary:Ici-ish. My Frog-Canuck people were here early – we can trace ourselves to Louis Hebert.

  57. 57.

    The Tragically Flip

    March 8, 2014 at 12:13 am

    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

    March 8, 2014 at 12:20 am

    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

    March 8, 2014 at 12:29 am

    @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

    March 8, 2014 at 12:34 am

    @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.

  61. 61.

    Omnes Omnibus

    March 8, 2014 at 12:38 am

    @Comrade Mary: I’ll look it up. Thanks.

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