Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

This blog will pay for itself.

đŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockin’ đŸŽ”

When I was faster i was always behind.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

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

So fucking stupid, and still doing a tremendous amount of damage.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

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

Hot air and ill-informed banter

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.


 riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

So very ready.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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Archives for 2014

Better get your ebola shots

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Welp, looks like we are all going to die.

A patient in a Dallas hospital has been confirmed to have the deadly Ebola virus, News 8 has learned.

That person has been held in “strict isolation” as he or she was evaluated for possible exposure to the virus.

This is the first case of Ebola confirmed in the United States.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas said the patient was admitted based on symptoms and “recent travel history.”

On second thought probably not. Advanced countries have good protocols to fight diseases like ebola. We can track his or her contacts to identify everyone we need to watch, we have no tradition of handling messy corpses with bare hands (yech), there is lots of trust in the medical establishment and most major hospitals have good resources for isolating infectious patients. My only concern is that some idiot will get the anti-vaxxers riled up like Jude Law in Contagion, or the virus mutates in some crazy way. Otherwise this first case of ‘wild’ ebola in the U.S. should be one of the last.

If the patient was symptomatic in the airport then tracking back every contact will be hell, but authorities can still do it. Just about every square inch of an airport is monitored by cameras and passenger manifests are easy to check.

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Open Thread

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Got back from the doctor and the diagnosis is an inner ear and outer ear infection and a throat infection. I also was told I am a jackass for waiting so long and given drops and cipro.

While I was at the grocery, someone scraped my car and just left w/o telling me and there are no cameras at the store.

All that is left to make today perfect is for the Pirates to lose.

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Empricism, another victim of gun culture

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The owner of a gun range in Hot Springs, Arkansas this week declared that her business was a “Muslim Free Zone.”

In a post on her website, Gun Cave Indoor Shooting Range owner Jan Morgan explained why she had decided to ban all Muslims.

“This is not a coffee and donut shop. This is a live fire indoor shooting range,” she wrote. “In the range, people are shooting guns in close proximity to each other, so my patrons depend on me and my discretion regarding who I allow to shoot beside them. One mistake in judgement on my part could cost innocent people their lives.”

Banning certain people across the board would sound crazy if nobody ever rented a gun and shot up the range, but people do that! People like white gun nuts, and…well…pretty much just them.

Oak Ridge Gun Range, the scene of the latest suicide last week in Orange County, changed its policy after a previous death more than a year ago. Oak Ridge is now attempting to identify customers who would be a suicide risk.

“We don’t rent to any white male Florida resident who comes in alone,” said owner John Harvey. “In the past 30 years, we’ve never had a suicide that wasn’t a white male Florida resident who came in alone. They don’t want to mess up their families’ homes, so they do it here.”

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IUDs and future costs

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Interuterine devices (IUDs) are now one of the two recommended forms of birth control for teenagers.  This is good news on multiple fronts as IUDs are extremely reliable, relatively inexpensive, and the woman controls her reproductive choices.  She does not need to worry about how long that condom had been in that wallet, whether or not he will actually pull out when he promised that he would, if she took a pill that morning or forgot or anything else.  Once inserted, IUDs are effective and forgetable. 

Teen girls who have sex should use IUDs or hormonal implants — long-acting birth control methods that are effective, safe and easy to use, the nation’s most influential pediatricians’ group recommends….

IUDs and hormonal implants cost more, usually hundreds of dollars, because inserting them involves a medical procedure typically done in doctors’ offices. But they’re less expensive in the long run than over-the-counter condoms or prescription birth control pills, said Dr. Mary Ott, an adolescent medicine specialist and associate pediatrics professor at Indiana University. She is the policy statement’s lead author,

Teens have to remember to use pills and condoms consistently. By contrast, IUDs typically work for three to 10 years after insertion, while implants typically last three years…..

This is excellent news, and it is illustrative of some of the problems with incentives that PPACA is working to fix. 

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Wal*Mart Goes for the Chutzpah Award

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(Nearly) killed their victim (did kill his friend), then called him a scofflaw when called to trial. Via commentor Corner Stone:

Walmart today faulted Tracy Morgan for not wearing his seat belt in connection to the injuries the comedian sustained in June from a six-car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Morgan, 45, and others are suing the retailer after one of its trucks slammed into the “30 Rock” star’s limo bus, sending him to the hospital and killing a fellow passenger, James McNair…

Walmart added that if the passengers had been wearing safety restraints, “all or a portion of the injuries could have been diminished or minimized.”

The company did not respond to the plaintiffs’ claims that Walmart driver Kevin Roper, who hit Morgan’s limo bus, had driven hundreds of miles during his shift and was fatigued because it’s a party to the National Transportation Safety Board investigation…

The lawsuit from Morgan and others claims that Walmart should have known Roper was awake and driving for more than a full day before the crash.

The kicker, of course, is that most Wal*Mart victims don’t have Morgan’s ability (money) to haul them into court in the first place.
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Apart from thinking about the proper usage of tumbrils (“a two-wheeled cart or wagon… in particular they were associated with carrying manure”), what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Occupy Central (Hong Kong): #Umbrella Revolution

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Yeah, it’s the middle of the night for most BJ readers, and the middle of the afternoon over in Hong Kong, so let me indulge myself. The South China Morning Post is still liveblogging, here.

… Since Monday morning, Hongkongers have had the very novel experience of walking along streets empty of traffic, as much of Central and Admiralty remain completely closed to cars.

Low pollution has proved to be an unexpected but welcome side-effect of the protests, with Environmental Protection Department data showing that air quality in all the affected areas was far better than on a normal weekday…

NBC, Monday evening [warning: autoplay video]:

Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong set a Wednesday deadline for a response from the government to meet their demands for reforms after spending another night blocking streets in an unprecedented show of civil disobedience.

A brief statement from the Occupy Central civil disobedience movement said it had set an Oct. 1 deadline for the city’s unpopular Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying to meet their demands for genuine democracy and for him to step down as leader of Hong Kong. It said they would “announce new civil disobedience plans same day.”…

Wall Street Journal‘s ChinaRealTime liveblog here.


(This is actually from last night.)

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