Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

You cannot shame the shameless.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

I was promised a recession.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

A consequence of cucumbers

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

The willow is too close to the house.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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

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Holly Update

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Just got an email update from Greg, and this is just great fucking news:

Today good and righteous seemed to win over circumstance. Holly woke up early and the respiratory therapist wanted to remove her intubation tube. He took it out, and immediately she began to talk and ask for me. I was en route, and once I arrived, we proceeded to chat for the next 11 hours in spite of the fact that she desperately needed sleep but could not get comfortable. It was a funny, weird, strange, scary day but everyone says we should all be encouraged.

She was able to drink some water and even had some dinner (think baby food) that she probably ate too fast and made her a bit sick. She is having Vaso spasms, which is normal but can be a pre-cursor to a stroke. She has what appears to be ICU Psychosis, and her heart is still not optimum after the multiple traumatic situations, but again, it was a good day. As for the ICU Psychosis, it’s not uncommon, but scary. She’s hallucinating and is paranoid. She’s not frightened terribly, but it’s really weird behavior. To give you an idea of the day…

Some of the more fun/smart things she said:

I can’t bring in my dissertation for them to read. I think they’d have trouble with Mirabai and Hadewich
Tolstoyism isn’t really a religion, it’s more a social movement
How can i touch your face ? I only have one eye (the other is swollen shut) and no depth perception.
I’m really having trouble with one of my religion classes, they just don’t get it.
I think my big old butt knocked out an important tube when I shifted.
We gotta break outta this place. I’m serious. We need a plan.
What kind of socks should I have people send (I asked) ? I need Smart Socks. i need to be successful in my field.

Some of the more ICU Psychosis things:

Can you get me that beer on the shelf ?
I need you to e-mail the consulate in Thailand. I think we’re being spied on.
I think a woman just came in here and stole your iPad.
There’s a man looking through the window and he’s pointing at me.

Hopefully, you get the picture. She was terribly uncomfortable and just can’t rest which makes me sad. They can’t put her on sedatives or any heavy painkillers. She has a headache and she’s sore. She’s already sick of her bed and is limited in the positions she can stay in. She seems to like company thus far but hold off on visitors for some time.

There always remains the threat of complications in the coming hours/days/weeks, but everyone whose name we brought up (just a few today) she remembered. Everyone she saw, she remembered. She got plenty of things wrong but they were not deemed critical. She knew her name, her birthday, the president, Mitch McConnell, the year, etc. She had a tough time grasping she was in long island and why, but she knew she had a migraine headache earlier this week. They want her to know, so they were a bit blunt and it scared her a bit. She kind of looked at me sadly and wanted me to answer the doctor’s question. But we told her, and she accepted it well. Pray for her to be able to rest comfortably through the night. It’s what she needs most. We can worry about baby steps forward tomorrow but she really needs a good night sleep.

Her personality was Holly. She was smart and funny and beautiful. Think a really happy, sleepy drunk, who’s a bit paranoid. That was Holly today, first day out of five harrowing, dangerous days. It was encouraging.

In all, it was a very good day I am told, and I have to trust in the professionals.

Thanks for all the continued love and prayers.
Greg

I had never heard of ICU psychosis before, but I imagine it is a more extreme and long-term version of what I went through in recovery after my shoulder surgery, when my mother and the nurses always seemed to be cracking up at the things I was saying. I have no memory of what I said deep buried shit I want no one to know that I inadvertently revealed, and I really do not want to know for my own sanity. Kind of like the real life corollary to the notion that if you are my friend and find me dead in my house, before you call 911 you will smash all of my computer hard drives.

At any rate, this is really great news, and I am just thrilled. I also love the dissertation remarks- my mother and I were just joking a couple weeks ago how at least once a week we have a nightmare that we forgot to turn in our thesis or forgot to turn in grades or something. I’m sure a lot of you can empathize.

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The Way We Live Now: “Sharing” for A Fee

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scotus free grazing davies
(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)

MisterMix’s post reminded me that I wanted to share Kevin Roose’s take in NYMag, “The Sharing Economy Isn’t About Trust, It’s About Desperation“:

Wired‘s cover story this month is about the rise of the “sharing economy” — a Silicon Valley–invented term used to describe the basket of start-ups (Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, et al.) that allow users to rent their labor and belongings to strangers. Jason Tanz attributes the success of these start-ups to the invention of a “set of digi­tal tools that enable and encourage us to trust our fellow human beings,” such as bidirectional rating systems, background checks, frictionless payment systems, and platforms that encourage buyers and sellers to get to know each other face-to-face before doing business.

Tanz’s thesis isn’t wrong — these innovations have certainly made a difference. But it leaves out an important part of the story. Namely, the sharing economy has succeeded in large part because the real economy has been struggling.

A huge precondition for the sharing economy has been a depressed labor market, in which lots of people are trying to fill holes in their income by monetizing their stuff and their labor in creative ways. In many cases, people join the sharing economy because they’ve recently lost a full-time job and are piecing together income from several part-time gigs to replace it. In a few cases, it’s because the pricing structure of the sharing economy made their old jobs less profitable. (Like full-time taxi drivers who have switched to Lyft or Uber.) In almost every case, what compels people to open up their homes and cars to complete strangers is money, not trust….

As Sarah Kessler discovered in her Fast Company investigation, it’s hard to make it in the sharing economy. Many of the people renting out their labor and goods through these services will end up making a fraction of what they did at their full-time jobs, and having none of the benefits. Tanz writes that “in the sharing economy, the commerce feels almost secondary.” That may be true for the buyers, but it certainly isn’t true for the sellers, for whom these transactions are often an important source of income…

During the first Gilded Age, “taking in washing” or “letting the spare room” was a derisive indication that one had come down in the world. But it’s all about the marketing now, so our Oligarch Overlords would prefer we plaster on a happy face (fist-bump your Lyft clients! Solicit ‘likes’ on multiple social media!) and call it a Sharing Economy…

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When Lyft Came to Town

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Rochester is now officially a Lyft city. Lyft, like Uber, is a car service where users summon and pay their part-time driver via a smartphone app using a stored credit card. I have no idea whether it will work here — my impression is that everyone here drives anyway, and cabs are certainly few and far between. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used a cab in this town, after living here for almost 20 years. Maybe Lyft will morph into a Friday night / Saturday night service to get drunks home from the bars (which would be a good thing).

What I do know is the pink moustache that graces Lyft cars is going to look like the carpet in the seediest, grossest, most run-down titty bar in town after a few days in a Rochester winter.

Here’s an open thread since I’m going to lyft my ass out of my chair and go about my day.

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Frack and Run

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A Texas jury awarded $2.9 million to a family living in what sounds like fracking heaven (or hell):

According to the lawsuit, Aruba Petroleum had 22 natural gas wells within a 2-mile radius of the Parrs’ property, with three wells in close proximity to their Texas home. The closest was 791 feet away.

As a result of poor management and lack of emission controls, Aruba Petroleum created a “private nuisance” to the Parr family by producing harmful air pollution and exposing them to harmful emissions of volatile organic compounds, toxic air pollutants and diesel exhaust, the lawsuit said.

Tests showed that the mother had 22 different chemicals in her body, the 11 year-old daughter suffered from nosebleeds, and so on. The story quotes some energy company attorneys saying it was a “knee-jerk” reaction, but the real question is how this stone loser made it to a jury, since it sounds like the other companies involved made the wise decision to settle out of court.

One of the benefits of living in a blue state is that New York doesn’t allow fracking, yet. I assume it will happen someday after the lessons learned in states like Texas and Pennsylvania are incorporated into tough environmental regulations. Unless there’s some kind of seepage in natural gas fracking and Pennsylvania drinks our milkshake, the billions of cubic feet of gas trapped in New York’s Marcellus Shale isn’t going anywhere. Of course, the gas in those other states wasn’t going anywhere either, but the free market dictated that families needed to be poisoned in the unnecessary, unregulated rush to extract it as quickly as humanly possible. Money will still be made in New York, but with any luck we’ll skip the poisoning.

(via Violet in the comments)

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Nagonnahappen

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It’s almost as if Chris Cillizza’s purpose in life is to administer life-saving resuscitation to every dumb beltway meme that’s on its last gasp. Today’s case in point includes this little bit of hackery:

[…] A March Washington Post-ABC News national poll showed that while tea party supporters are more Republican than Democratic, they are far from monolithic for the GOP.  Thirty eight percent of tea party supporters identified themselves as Republicans while 14 percent called themselves Democrats. The biggest chunk — 39 percent — said they were independents. (The party ID among all adults in that poll broke down this way: 30 percent Democrats, 22 percent Republicans and 40 percent independents.)

I followed Chris’ link to the poll and the crosstab of party registration of tea party supporters he cites was not included. However, the overall poll was of 1,002 adults, 8% of whom said they “strongly” support the Tea Party, so Chris’ little what-if is based on the party registration of 80 Tea Party members. But, even if that crosstab were of any statistical significance, the obvious question is where the “Democrats” who are Tea Party members live. I’ll bet that most of them live in the South, and that they are old, so the “D” after their name is a relic from pre-Southern Strategy days. But acknowledging that the Tea Party is a bunch of old, white, male racists who have been voting Republican for 30 years and have been a key part of the Republican base since they were courted by Lee Atwater isn’t as fun as wondering if they’ll secede from their natural home party.

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