Since some of you cannot hold it until an open thread comes around, enjoy Creed’s greatest hits.
Chat about whatever, including but not limited to what a terrible person I am.
Archives for 2014
Lovely weather we’re having
On the plus side, it looks to reach 34 degrees today with a twenty percent chance of rain. In Anchorage. Needless to say most people expect freezing weather in Alaska in January. So, for the slower folks out there, ‘polar vortex‘ does not describe the cold cycle on your washing machine. Climate is a global system and not just the snow falling on your pickup truck this morning.
Lesson number infinity in why climate change sucks. We depend more than most people realize on predictable weather. We can probably survive warmer summers but our agriculture system depends on knowing little things like whether they will have the water to plant crops next year. A lot of states, especially in the border south, just do not have the infrastructure or the building codes to deal with exceptional cold snaps and building contractors in Alaska* would appreciate if the permafrost would stay frozen. Yes, people can deal with crazy temperature extremes, but living in a climate where a loss of power can kill you forces people to invest in expensive backups like a generator or heater, or take your family’s life in your hands. That in turn forces everyone to learn about things like carbon monoxide and the difference between regular gas that will not go bad within a few months and ruin your small motor, and the ethanol-added kind that will. Of course you can live in an unpredictable and highly variable environment. It just costs a lot more to keep something like a first-world quality of life.
(*) Alsotoo, the trans-Alaskan pipeline.
Just a tiny figure, rigid and restrained, blue eyes filled with pain…
The decision of the Supreme Court to grant a stay of same-sex marriages in Utah shouldn’t really come as a great surprise, whatever the actual merits of the stay application.
The attorneys from the Utah AG’s office have shown no particular signs of competence. Take, for example this passage from Judge Shelby’s decision denying the State a stay on December 23:
The court had a telephone conversation with counsel from both parties a few hours after it issued its order. The State represented to the court that same-sex couples had already begun marrying in the Salt Lake City County Clerk’s Office and requested to the court to stay its Order of its own accord. The court declined to issue a stay without a written record of the relief the State was requesting, and asked the State when it was planning to file a motion. The State was uncertain about its plans, so the court advised the State that it would immediately consider any written motion as soon as it was filed on the public docket.
Now, that all sounds fairly innocuous but, although I’m not a constitutional lawyer, I’ve been in and out of a few court rooms in my day, and those last two sentences are like a silk-wrapped brick around the ears. When a judge politely asks you exactly when you were planning on actually filing the motion you are seeking, the correct answer is never, ever, “We’re not sure”. My lawyers call that a CLM.
Rachel Maddow blamed it on incompetence, and I don’t disagree. However, I suspect there may also have been an element of hubris, a misplaced confidence that Shelby (National Guard, Desert Storm, the United States Army Achievement Medal and the National Defense Service Medal; a BA from Utah State and a Juris Doctorate from University of Virginia; a law firm practice in commercial litigation and personal injury; a registered Republican with a wife and two kids, who was endorsed by Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee for his qualifications and his “unwavering commitment to the law” when he was appointed to the District Court, if you believe the wikipedia) wouldn’t do anything so silly as letting the gays get married. Not in Utah, surely.
The AG’s office has spent the last two weeks desperately trying to stick the ferret back in the bag where the ferret don’t want to go. Their stay application to the Supreme Court (which you can find here, along with the couples’ response here) parroted the usual guff – that the same sex marriages occurring in Utah are an “affront” to the rational interest of the State in banning same-sex marriage, because the ban somehow makes straight, married people have more babies, and that the couples seeking to be married are seeking a new right called “same-sex marriage”, rather than the established right of “marriage” which right, they note, the gays are perfectly free to use as long as they marry someone whose genitals revolt them, like in the bible.
Still, on one front they are right – this is a question that the Supreme Court needs to decide and, until they do so, the better position is probably to preserve the pre-decision status quo in Utah, no matter how touching the photos of gay Utahnanians getting hitched, or how entertaining the freakout by the godbotherers about the gays touching marriage and getting dirty fingerprints all over it.
With the stay issue out of the way, one would like to think that we might be able to get back to talking about the substance of Shelby’s decision, at least until that Duck Dynasty guy gets caught cottaging or one of Mitt Romney’s grandkids turns out to be asian.
[I’ve put the illustration for this post below the fold, for this is a family blog, and I don’t want the sight of two naked breasts to scare the horses.]Just a tiny figure, rigid and restrained, blue eyes filled with pain…Post + Comments (93)
The Most Dangerous Object on Earth
Obviously, this object must be treated with great caution lest you be deprived of life or limb. Because this wrecking machine is probably too scary for some of you to view, I’ll bury it after the break. Open Thread.
Red Means Run, Son, Numbers Add Up to Nothing
I guess these idiots don’t know how to feel. On the one hand, the poors are moochers so why wouldn’t they sign up for Obamacare in droves? On the other hand, they should be too lazy to sign up. Maybe this guy lives in Texas or some other Obamacare-denialist state, where people can’t sign up because the state refused to expand Medicaid:
Red Means Run, Son, Numbers Add Up to NothingPost + Comments (85)
Open Thread: Mutiny on the Trip to Bountiful
The Space X launch excites me, because we need outer space as a new frontier. We need somewhere the libertarians can go. And they will die.
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) January 6, 2014
@jonrog1 "In space, nobody can hear you going Galt."
— billmon (@billmon1) January 6, 2014
@billmon1 "If you don't think this workplace is safe, you can always leave. AH HA HA HA HA HAaaaa no it's space, shut the fuck up."
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) January 6, 2014
@jonrog1 In a way, HAL was 1st objectivist in space – cutting off handouts of air & nutrients to those nonproductive hibernating astronauts.
— billmon (@billmon1) January 6, 2014
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Yup, same John Rogers: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
Apart from not freezing, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Open Thread: Mutiny on the Trip to BountifulPost + Comments (87)
Late Night Movie: Hoover’s FBI ‘Enhancing the Paranoia’
Very interesting thirteen-minute ‘Retro Report’ video over at the NYTimes. From the appended article:
… [O]n a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups…
“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”
Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence…
Ms. Medsger’s [original 1971] article cited what was perhaps the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent. The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups.
“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I. headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.
But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro…
Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.
“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.” …
Late Night Movie: Hoover’s FBI ‘Enhancing the Paranoia’Post + Comments (33)