Every single one of us knew that this toxic stew of ignorance, arrested development, and gun worship would, in the end, boil down to something like this:
Can we mandate that as part of their jail sentence they be required to get high school degrees?
Archives for January 2016
Saturday Evening Open Thread: Business Opportunity
More evidence to support my theory that affordable tattoo removal is the technology to invest in ASAP https://t.co/rknZeduh94
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) January 30, 2016
#DonaldTrump: Seth Bailey shows off his new @realDonaldTrump tattoo in Seabrook! pic.twitter.com/s7l5nzNU0U
— Kimberley Haas (@KimberleyHaas) January 30, 2016
Seabrook, NH is a tourist town right over the Massachusetts border, and since tattoo parlors were illegal here until (fairly) recently, it has long been a haven for Massholes seeking skin art (while they were stocking up on low-tax booze and smokes). Second-biggest industry after tourist milking is probably the ever-precarious, ever-contentious Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant… insert your own Homer Simpson jokes here, and don’t spare the chin pube snark.
Apart from the livestreaming of the final J. Ann Selzer Iowa poll before the caucus (6:30pm EST), what else is on the agenda for the evening?
Saturday Evening Open Thread: Business OpportunityPost + Comments (88)
Over My Dead Body
I’ve always been intrigued by mushrooms, but ever since moving to the midwest, three years ago, I’ve been flat-out obsessed. Last year I attended the Telluride Mushroom Festival, a kind of mycological cross between Burning Man and Davos; and this year I’ll be attending the National Morel Festival, from which I hope to report back in a few months.
I’ve also grown a few, as documented earlier on this blog.
I’m in the midst preparing an epic fungi post, but this popped up in the newsfeed:
Just when you thought you had a handle on all the intricacies of modern, eco-friendly burials, a new post-mortem option has emerged. After creating a stir when it was announced five years ago, the Infinity Burial Suit, also known as the Mushroom Death Suit, is almost ready for real-world use.
The suit is embroidered with thread infused with mushroom spores that grow from the body after burial. These mushrooms digest the body as it decomposes and neutralize many of the environmental contaminants found in the body—including pesticides, preservatives, and heavy metals. In other words, wearing this suit will make mushrooms eat your body once it has been buried.
Jae Rhim Lee and Mike Ma, co-founders of the Infinity Burial Suit, met at the Hassno Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Lee conceptualized the idea of a burial method that would help reconnect our bodies with the earth. She came up with the idea of an “Infinity Mushroom,” a fungus which would be able to “eat” her body and neutralize its toxins once she died. To test it out, she began “feeding” a group of mushrooms her hair, skin, and nails, and selected the ones that were able to best decompose them.
“We are both responsible for, and victims of, our own pollution,” Lee said in a 2011 TED talk on the Mushroom Death Suit. As a way of handling some of this responsibility, the suit would prevent the toxins in the human body from being released into the environment after death. It would preclude the use of formaldehyde, which is used in many American funerals as a preservative in order to slow the decomposition process. The suit is also intended to help deliver nutrients to plant roots more quickly and efficiently.
Personally, I’m not one of those nonattached Buddhist types who can view her own demise with perfect equanimity, but I have to say that being food for pretty and useful mushrooms does make the outcome more (err) palatable:
btw, in the realms of the mushroom obsessed, I’m not even close to the most, or worst, or whatever. Last summer I was hanging out in a local graveyard (as mushroom people are wont to do) and saw these:
Yeah, that’s a headstone carved with morels and another flanked by some wooden morels.
Of course, here in Kalamazoo I routinely spot headstones sporting Wolverines and Spartans, so why the hell not morels? Fly your freak flag proudly!
So would any of you consider being food for shrooms? Also, fess up! How many of you read the headline and thought this was going to be a super-inflammatory Bernie post? :D
Seattle Brunch Meet-Up Tomorrow
Per former-&-future Seattleite Yutsano:
Looks like we are settled for Sunday January 31st at 10am. Come one come all! Could I get a post tomorrow so I can get a head count? I’ll be able to check in during the day after my appointment tomorrow morning.
Venue: The Watershed, 10104 3rd Ave NE. Menu (.pdf) at the link, and I must admit it looks delicious!
Lurkers, spouses & friends always welcome. Drop a comment below if you’re planning to be there, or send me an email (click my name in the right-hand column, or annelaurie at verizon dot net) if you have questions, and I’ll forward them to Yutsano.
Heh
Someone smart wrote this in early 2007.
At its heart the GOP has two basic camps* – business conservatives who bankroll the party and the social conservatives/theocons who staff it. In that light one could say the towering achievement of Bush’s term as POTUS was that he defied the centrifugal forces of majority power and held the GOP’s unlikely coalition together as firmly and as long as he did. If so, his towering failure will undoubtedly be his adamant support of this immigration bill.
I have tried for days to think of something that could wedge the social cons apart from the business cons than immigration but I just can’t do it. The Chamber of Commerce loves our current system because one can pay illegals practically nothing and they will thank you for it. In their view any fix to the current system has to keep bringing in large numbers of people with poor language skills (can’t have them reading those OSHA flyers on the wall) and a weak bargaining position, e.g. guest workers. Otherwise Americans had better get ready to start paying more for hotel beds, restaurant meals and packed meats.
The key problem is that the thing that the business cons need more than anything is exactly what the social cons desperately want to end. This issue has no conceivable middle ground because the social cons want less of precisely the same thing that business cons need more of. The historical calm between these two camps lasted and could only last as long as party leaders had the good sense to keep the issue off the front burner altogether. Any move to change the status quo would necessarily set off contrary demands that could easily spiral into open warfare.
Pushing immigration now was a dumb move by Bush, but it was far dumber than I think most people realize. Hilzoy has argued that the immigration is really a convenient outlet for Republicans to vent their deeper disappointment over issues J through Z, and I’m sure that there is plenty of that, but I think that the president’s screwup is more profound than Hilzoy lets on. The president’s party is reeling from Iraq, rudderless and lacking in leadership at any level, facing political losses as bad or worse than 2006, and now his own mulish push on immigration has lit the fuse on a wedge-shaped charge** that could split the party in two.
***
(*) There are two kind of people in the world: those who see two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.
The GOP can’t keep reallocating money upwards if they rule over a rabid but shrinking demographic of white people. Karl Rove knows that rich people need latinos. Marcio Rubio bloody well knows it, for all the good it did him. FOX News keeps those rabid white folks voting, but it also keeps them rabid. You could point at a lot of ways the GOP painted themselves into this corner but I think immigration is the alpha and omega of their problems.
And now they have the perfect wedge-shaped charge. He doesn’t tap dance. He doesn’t give a crap what the Chamber o’ Commerce wants. For rabid white FOX viewers the guy is all dessert, all the time. At this point I suspect he really could win the nomination, but overall I take that as a good omen. Those rabid white folks already vote. But latinos don’t vote, not in anywhere near their potential numbers. I think the idea of a country ruled by Trump will give latino Americans all the reason to show up in November.
Remember the first rule of politics: once a new voter starts voting they keep voting. And party loyalty is a potent thing.
Bernie, We Hardly Knew Ye
IOWA — January 30, 2016 — Bernie Sanders campaign staffers were reeling yesterday in the wake of a prediction by WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan that their candidate will win both the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic primaries.
“I was watching Bernie Sanders speak last week at a town hall in Bedford when an early intuition became a conviction: Take Mr. Sanders seriously,” Noonan wrote in Friday’s column.
As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan points out, Noonan famously predicted Mitt Romney’s victory in 2012, even though he was consistently behind in national polling, because Noonan had personally seen more Romney yard signs.
“It’s not quite as devastating as a prediction of a win from Bill Kristol,” noted a Sanders campaign staffer, who commented on the condition of anonymity. “But I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t updating my résumé to send to the Hillary people.”
Although Noonan, proprietor of the Peggy Noonan School of Political Prognostication, is most recently known for predictions based on hard data like yard signs, she typically advocates relying on internal monologues that produce convictions such as the one that prompted the prediction regarding Senator Sanders’ prospects. An example of that process can be seen in the video below:
Another Sanders staffer who was seen cleaning out her desk said only, “Game over, man. Game over.”
Late Night It-Ain’t-Beanbag Open Thread
By this time in the '08 race, Obama aides had called Clinton (D-Punjab) and Clinton was talking about the concerns of "white Americans."
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 28, 2016
So the Clinton/Sanders race doesn't feel QUITE so negative
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 28, 2016
That having been said, some more room for speculation:
Finally, an IA poll (@ppppolls's) asks O'Malley backers to reallocate, as will most certainly happen Monday night: they choose Sanders 57-27
— Taniel (@Taniel) January 29, 2016
Late Night It-Ain’t-Beanbag Open ThreadPost + Comments (150)