Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Come on, man.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

This fight is for everything.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

T R E 4 5 O N

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

“woke” is the new caravan.

After roe, women are no longer free.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

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84Comments

  2. 2.

    Major Major Major Major

    Adult media company interview went fantastic, and when I pulled a number out of my arse at the end they actually said “we can work with that!”

    And now I’m heading to dinner with the headhunter. I’m quite chuffed, today, very different from my usual state.

  7. 7.

    JPL

    @efgoldman: It has just been dreary for days, in the Atlanta area. Last year I kept the heat at 68 and this year 70. There are somethings about aging that are not fun and one being the internal thermostat.

  8. 8.

    elmo

    @Major Major Major Major: Great!!
    One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to ask for the salary I wanted, instead of trying to guess what the company was intending to pay. After considerable coaching, I asked for about 30% more than I thought was on the table, and ended up with 20% more than I expected to be paid and was prepared to accept. It was nervewracking, but ultimately very Mich worth it.

  11. 11.

    raven

    Watching

    NATURE’s two-part special Dogs That Changed the World tells the epic story of the wolf’s evolution, how “man’s best friend” changed human society and how we in turn have radically transformed dogs.

  18. 18.

    elmo

    @JPL: All my life I’ve been a polar bear. I swam in mountain lakes at 10000 feet; I surfed in SoCal year round with no wetsuit; I go out barefoot in the snow. This year, I’ve been keeping the thermostat at 70 degrees and bitching at my wife to “shut the fuckin door” when she lets the dogs out.

  21. 21.

    Corner Stone

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Adult media company interview went fantastic, and when I pulled a number out of my arse at the end they actually said “we can work with that!”

    Years ago I had a chance to work for a company that produced “dorm room” video 24/7 for a number of stripper clubs. Sounds great and all, but the issue becomes how do you hide that vacancy on your resume when you’re ready to move on?

    So, “adult media” does actually mean adult entertainment, right? Is this a weird colloquialism?

  22. 22.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Corner Stone: I’m fighting the spam filter. They make gay prawn. Keep in mind I live in California and am a librarian, they tend not to care about such things if found on resumes.

    ETA: working for this company as a librarian. Not a model. The ALA defends nazis in court, some digital curation for said industry isn’t really an issue.

  24. 24.

    JPL

    @Baud: I’ll try to watch it on the replay. He is getting grief but the fire chief was doing things that could cause lawsuits. It has little to do with freedom of speech. Speech is free but if you cross certain lines at work, you could get fired.

  25. 25.

    Corner Stone

    @efgoldman:

    Running NoScript was such a pain in the ass, I dumped it and put up with a few ads here and there.

    It’s actually been pretty useful enough for me over the years that I donate for it.
    This site (BJ) is almost un-readable without some kind of filter. If there’s something I just gotta see I usually open IE and paste it in there. I hate enabling bs after bs after bs just to eventually see a lolcat meme on instagram.

  26. 26.

    catclub

    @Corner Stone: I was going to point out that pron is one of the drivers of innovation on the web. So I would guess that if you are doing web services for them, you are doing leading edge stuff and do not need to hide it.

  27. 27.

    Corner Stone

    @Major Major Major Major: That’s great. My profession would have run like a scalded cat if that was on a resume.
    So even as lucrative as it may have been, (and it was!), long term it reduced my earning opportunities and options.

  29. 29.

    NotMax

    cannons?

    Really, truly, do tweets ever make any sense to anyone? Or is it an emperor has no clothes thing and people are too cowed to admit they’re gibberish?

  31. 31.

    Corner Stone

    @catclub:

    So I would guess that if you are doing web services for them, you are doing leading edge stuff and do not need to hide it.

    Not really. There was nothing leading edge about on demand shower cams and by request masturbation or girl on girl action in streaming video.

  32. 32.

    Bob In Portland

    Delenda: Operation Gladio, Days of Lead. No, it can’t happen here and it can’t happen there.

    I find it humorous that you BJers can chatter among yourselves about how fucked up things in America are, and describe them. I’m guessing half of the posts here are complaints about something in America. Yesterday Cole even said a certain American cop was giving Nazi stormtroopers a bad name.

    So at least Cole kinda sees it. In fact, most of you admit it, but don’t admit to it being real fascism. I guess all of you must think it’s happenstance. Gee, we have racists over here, we have a political party that caters to them, we have a government that is increasingly responsive to bankers at everyone else’s expense. But unlike Nazi Germany, there isn’t an organized financial wing in America that would push for kinda-fascist policies that increases profit. Right? Those German bankers who thought that invading their neighbors would be good for business have no analogs here in the US. Right?

    But fascism? Well, maybe an occasional cop (or an occasional cop’s union) comes off as fascist, but it can’t be that America has become fascist because real fascists wear swastikas (but not the guys who wear swastikas in Ukraine!). Because you all would have noticed. And even if it is fascist, it’s no more fascist than when grandpa got gassed in WWI.

    So can we agree? We agree on all the symptoms but we disagree on the seriousness of the symptoms. Because if it’s not that serious then you don’t have to consider doing anything.

  33. 33.

    fuckwit

    @Corner Stone: I use NoScript and love it. Also I have other tools to make reading news and blogs less bleak and more fun. GreaseMonkey is set to turn any reference to “the market” to “the racket”, of the “tea party” to the “testicle suckers”, and a few others. And to turn any occurrence of the names of Shrub, McCain, the Cheney crime family, Palin, Limbaugh, and other annoying fevered egos, into unmentionable obscenities. Been using it for years.

  37. 37.

    Corner Stone

    @Bob In Portland: America is ripe for fascism. It’s all over the place in pockets. It’s even, arguably, in some small places of control and command.
    But sliding into Fascist Germany, or some other proto-fascist state is quite a long way away. And that’s from someone like me who sees a lot more Deep State control than a lot of commenters here (sometimes) want to admit.
    But the MIC, et al, and other power players aren’t going to head us into a full on fascist state. It makes no sense for their bottom lines.

  38. 38.

    NotMax

    @catclub

    I was going to point out that pron is one of the drivers of innovation on the web

    Used to be a joke (spelling altered to mollify FYWP) that what jpg really stood for was Just Pron, Gentlemen.

  39. 39.

    Corner Stone

    @Major Major Major Major:

    yeah this issue is just sheer content management issues.

    I have many lewd jokes to make here, but actually, kudos for taking on a challenging issue with some complicated subject matter.
    I hope that works out for you.

  43. 43.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @raven: I will not be oppressed by topics, and I believe you will not be either, tough guy.

  47. 47.

    Tommy

    Well I am making some “easy” money just sitting here FTPing info, making some edits to a WordPress install, and hacking some of the PHP files. I mentioned the other night I’ve done a few sites for a local government in California, including a site for a huge park district they run. There was recently an election and all the liberals I worked with, and they are rocking liberals, lost every seat to a ticket of folks that seem to be to the right of Rush.

    The Executive Director contacted me about the site, wanted some minor work done, but didn’t want to pay for it. I politely said I was already lowering my hourly rate, as I did for the person that previously held his position, by 50% because they are a not-for-profit entity and I am an avid hiker/camper so anything I could do to help promote more of that, well I would be all behind that.

    He got somewhat mad and said what he was asking was easy, again he shouldn’t have to pay, so he’d just do it himself. That was two days ago.

    Got a frantic call today. In fact it wasn’t as easy as he thought (it is stupid simple easy for me — but what I do for a living). Yes he would pay me, just PLEASE help he messed up everything. Nothing like making $300 in an evening while I can also post here and watch TV at the same time :).

    Oh and being the fiscal conservative I am sure he fancies himself, he is paying three times what it would have cost if he just paid me at the start and didn’t get into the WordPress install and going all crazy clicking on and deleting things he didn’t understand.

  50. 50.

    divF

    @Major Major Major Major: Congrats. At least one traditional San Francisco business has not been completely driven out of the city by tech companies with unpronounceable names and unintelligible products.

    (I’m kind of old school – I program computers to do floating point arithmetic. Everything else is overhead).

    ETA: +38000 ft.

  51. 51.

    Baud

    @Tommy:

    How much would your charge to create a Comments RSS script for Balloon Juice? Mistermix said he turned it off because it had like 3 million comments, which was causing the site to crash. He thought there might be a way for someone to write a code that would cause the system to ignore older comments. Maybe we can do a fundraiser if the price is reasonable.

  54. 54.

    Tommy

    @Baud: I’d need to see the backend of Ballon Juice’s WordPrss install. Not long after the launch of this version of the site I had some back and forth with Mistermix about how this site was set-up. This is not remotely a dig at Mistermix, but from the screen caps he sent me of the backend/Admin Dashboard of WordPress the person Cole hired to do this site really did a disservice to him. I have no idea what he paid (clearly none of my business) but the amount of time and the UX I am looking at right now, well I find it lacking to say the least. Don’t even get me started on the basic functionality of the site ……

    Back to the RSS comment feed. It wouldn’t be a “ton” of money. Not thousands and thousands. Days of work, not months. But again I’d have to see what I would be “dealing” and/or “working” with.

    With that said most high-end WordPress developers have the problem (or at least I think it is a problem) of always wanting to write their own original code. There are third party, paid services I’d look to, then based on the specific needs of both Cole and the community as a whole, I’d tweak, rewrite, or edit the third party’s code to get the end result desired.

    He’d have to pay a monthly fee for that third party service, but of course just as he runs ads on the site to pay his expenses, he can do the same with the RSS feed.

    BTW: I’d also push Cole to look for a daily email blast/digest of comments (totally automated of course). That would be another way to “skin the cat.”

  56. 56.

    srv

    Drunk, homophobic, racist and assaulting white man at DFW gets his justice:

    By day’s end, says Grapevine court administrator Cindy Eteaki, Benham’s case will be closed, and he will be out a total of $474 — $262 for the Class C misdemeanor assault charge and $212 for the public intoxication ticket.

    “When he was arrested,” Eteaki tells The Dallas Morning News, “he posted a cash bond and signed a conditional plea of nolo contendere.” Which meant that if he didn’t show up for his court date, he gave the court the OK to plead no contest. He was due to appear back in Grapevine on November 26, says Eteaki, but he never appeared, so she’s now in the process of forfeiting his bond and closing his case.

    “And since he hasn’t had any correspondence with the court, we’re ready to enter that conditional plea of nolo contendere and forfeit the bond,” Eteaki says. And that, as they say, is that.

  58. 58.

    Baud

    @Tommy:

    Hmm. Thanks. I have a feeling I should just let it go. I do miss it, however, especially when there are multiple threads running.

  59. 59.

    Anne Laurie

    @NotMax: T-shirt cannons are an actual thing at major sporting events, and even “radio remotes, cheering squads, pep rallies, mascots, trade shows, conventions, & small concert venues”. Using them at the SotU might be undignified, but no more so than opposition Congressmen yelling you lie!…

  61. 61.

    Tommy

    @Baud: Honestly I am not sure how much desire there would be for it. Personally I am an RSS feed freak. I get around 125 related to WordPress, web design, design in general, lifehacking, DYI, you name it (no politics or general interest news I might add). I get them on Outlook on my desktop, my tablet, my phone, and my Chromebook (all using the same synced app).

    It wasn’t that long ago every blog has a RSS icon that linked to their feed. I find most don’t even have them anymore (and Google let their Reader just die). I often have to take the primary URL of the site and let my feed reader locate the RSS feed URL. I can only assume that is because less and less people are using them.

    For somebody that likes to consume massive amounts of information I think they are the best thing since sliced bread for Internet content, but clearly many others appear not to hold the same opinion.

  63. 63.

    Insomniac

    For the sewers of Balloon Juice…if you can, IFAW is asking you to please help rescued Australian Joeys by making them pouches. Instructions can be found here. Joeys will thank you.

  65. 65.

    different-church-lady

    @Tommy:

    For somebody that likes to consume massive amounts of information…

    But those kinds of stimulation junkies have moved on to Twitter.

  66. 66.

    Tommy

    @Baud: This stat is two years old, but the last survey I found on the topic of RSS feeds. At the time only 14% of the survey respondents knew what an RSS feed was. The study didn’t say how many of the 14% used them, but of course it would have been a lower percentage. Hard to justify the expense and time to do them “correctly” if that small of a percent even knows what the heck they are.

    For me I find RSS feeds only a close second to email as a way I get and consume information online.

  67. 67.

    NotMax

    @Anne Laurie

    Looked briefly at your link, and still don’t get it. They shoot an el cheapo shirt into the crowd so people have to risk mayhem and injury to scramble for it rather than patiently standing in line to be handed one?

    However, setting up a dozen or so of the Gatling models along the walls in a large space to spit out Superballs would make for quite a show.

  69. 69.

    different-church-lady

    @Cacti:

    Europe’s answer to the terror “attack on free speech”?

    I rather think it was an attack on actual human beings themselves, and not just their speech.

  70. 70.

    Tommy

    @different-church-lady: Yes that is very true. I’d say about 90% of the people I follow on Twitter are “thought leaders” and/or experts in the industry I work in. I want to know what apps they are playing with. What books they are reading. Conferences they are attending.

    But I still have to wade through what they had for dinner and their idle musing on stuff I could care less about to get to the “good nuggets” (and there are often really good “nuggets” of info) they also Tweet out. I don’t have to deal with that using RSS feeds.

  71. 71.

    burnspbesq

    Found a two-pound box of chocolate-covered Utz pretzels on the Valentine’s-candy display at my local Von’s tonight. Ridiculous.

    Well, yes, now that you ask, that box is now in my kitchen. It’s an anniversary gift for spouse. It’s not for me. How dare you infer to the contrary!

  72. 72.

    Major Major Major Major

    @divF: I despise these BS projects as much as the next person-who-knows-what-they’re-talking-about, but this is a good company.

    Interviewed at Optimizely last year. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, that was terrible.

  76. 76.

    Tommy

    @burnspbesq: Yeah that dude is a rock star. He was on 60 Minutes a few years ago trying to climb El Capitan like he just did. He has tried many times. Who knew, but it seemed from the interview free-climbing is kind of competitive and nobody likes each other. But when they interviewed people they were in actual awe of Kevin Jorgeson.

    Oh and all he does is free-climb. Most of the year he lives out of a Ford Eco van so he can pull right up, get out, and go climb.

    Have to admit I am kind of jealous.Well not the climbing but living out of a van parked in some of the most beautiful and stunning places in America. What it must be like to wake up each morning and go to bed under the stars each night!!!!!!!!

  78. 78.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    I am spending the evening trying to figure out how to convince my co-worker that I do not want to steal her project and, in fact, wouldn’t take on what she does if someone made a bet with me. I think I may just have to be that blunt, because she has our mutual boss half-convinced that’s what’s going on. Sigh.

  79. 79.

    workworkwork

    Doing a Warehouse 13 re-watch on Netflix.

    Results so far?
    Jaime Murray is absolutely gorgeous and Allison Scagliotti is totally adorable.

    And Saul Rubinek is my spirit animal.

  81. 81.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @Violet:

    Same co-worker. We get along 90 percent of the time, but she’s more used to being a project manager with outside contractors than she is with fellow employees, and she doesn’t seem to get you can’t make the same kind of demands on both. If she assigns me extra work, I don’t have a team back at the office who can do it. It’s just me. If I run into a problem on the project, she has to solve it, because she’s the project manager, not the client. Etc.

    We’ve been having the same conflict over the same annual project literally for years. I think our huge blowup last year finally brought it into focus. Right now, based on a conversation I had with our mutual boss today, she seems to think I crossed some kind of line into insubordination, but nobody told me the line was there.

  83. 83.

    mclaren

    Is it just me? Or did New Year’s Day 2015 seem to lance a giant pulsating boil of craziness in America and let all the nutso wack-a-mundo freak-o-rama spray out in a giant Old Faithful-sized eruption of lunacy?

    First, we have the CIA on trial in the Jeffrey Sterling farrago involving Project Merlin, producing a witness for the defense who gets compared to the Vizzini character is The Princess Bride. Pro tip: prosecutors who produce a witness for the government that gets described in this way have a problem with their case.

    Then we get another installment of our weekly hikinks titled: “Gross incompetence by doctors who get paid north of half a million dollars a year.” In this case:

    “A few months later, Scott had another MRI, and the radiologist came
    back with a horrifying report: The tumor had grown substantially,
    which indicated a far more grave condition than was initially
    diagnosed. But back at home, Balzer used Photoshop to layer the new
    DICOM files on top of the old images, and realized that the tumor
    hadn’t grown at all — the radiologist had just measured from a
    different point on the image.”

    http://makezine.com/magazine/hands-on-health-care/

    Meanwhile, over in the sociology department of the local university,
    we have even more gross incompetence:

    http://www.eji.org/node/893

    The New York Times reported this week on the “superpredator” myth, which 20 years ago led nearly every state in the country to expand laws that removed children from juvenile courts and exposed them to adult sentences, including life without parole.

    A documentary by Retro Report, The Superpredator Scare, tells the story of how influential criminologists in the 1990s issued predictions of a coming wave of “superpredators”: “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Much of this frightening imagery was racially coded.

    In 1995, John DiIulio, a professor at Princeton who coined the term “superpredator,” predicted that the number of juveniles in custody would increase three-fold in the coming years and that, by 2010, there would be “an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990.” Criminologist James Fox joined in the rhetoric, saying publicly, “Unless we act today, we’re going to have a bloodbath when these kids grow up.”

    These predictions set off a panic, fueled by highly publicized heinous crimes committed by juvenile offenders, which led nearly every state to pass legislation between 1992 and 1999 that dramatically increased the treatment of juveniles as adults for purposes of sentencing and punishment.

    As DiIulio and Fox themselves later admitted, the prediction of a juvenile superpredator epidemic turned out to be wrong. In fact, violent juvenile crime rates had already started to fall in the mid-1990’s. By 2000, the juvenile homicide rate stabilized below the 1985 level.

    And then there’s the latest FRONTLINE PBS investigation of the skyrocketing rates of solitary confinement among prisoners in U.S. prisons.

    In one of its better recent episodes, Frontline looked at the rise of solitary confinement in American prisons. Like so many other mindlessly punitive and counterproductive aspects of our justice system, solitary confinement exploded in popularity during the Reagan years. The rationale sounds good on the surface – to remove inmates who are so violent and dangerous that the staff and other inmates are not safe around them. The problem, as the medical profession has known for well over a century, is that solitary confinement makes people insane. Like, really insane. And quickly. Take a superficially normal person, seal them in a box with next to nothing to do, surround their cage with other solitary inmates of dubious mental fitness, and wait about two months. See how normal they are then.

    Source: “Prisoner’s dilemma,” Gin and Tacos blog, 13 January 2015.

    And then of course we’ve got Mitt Romney announcing a run for president. For the third time.

    I’m thinking he got bored with torturing the underage girls in cages
    under his house in La Jolla.
    And he’s probably wacked out of his gourd on various high-end
    designer drugs. So the guys who get paid to say “Brilliant idea,
    chief!” around Romney say…”Brilliant idea, chief!” if Romney
    announced he was going to climb to the top of Mount Rushmore and
    sacrifice penguins to Tlaloc so he could bring on the end of the
    world, his advisors would likely say: “That’s a REALLY brilliant idea,
    chief!”

    And now we’ve got John “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran!” McCain as chairman of the senate armed services committee.

    “McCain is planning hearings with Kissinger, 91, Scowcroft, 89, and Brzezinski, 86.”

    Jeffrey Dahmer is dead and Cthulhu wasn’t answering his
    cellphone, so presumably he had to settle for those 3 war criminals.

    I could go on. It’s like America is now living in a David Lynch movie. I keep waiting for the dwarf in the wheelchair to give cryptic orders to somebody through a microphone.

    Hey…maybe that explains it…the Iraq invasion of 2003 was caused by a dwarf in a wheelchair giving cryptic orders to some guy in the Pentagon through a crackly static-filled microphone…

  84. 84.

    Cervantes

    @mclaren:

    That’s quite a roster.

    Thanks … I think.

    (NB: Zach W was not called as a witness for the defense, though he is turning out to be just that, it appears.)

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