Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

The gop couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

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

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

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Archives for September 2016

Labor Day Monday Open Thread

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Happy thoughts from the Washington Post — “Can Democrats ride an anti-Trump wave to retake the House and Senate?”:

… As of Labor Day weekend, the unofficial start of the campaign’s final stretch, the electoral map is bigger than Republicans are comfortable with. Bolstered by Republican nominee Donald Trump’s unpopularity with non-white, female and suburban voters, Democrats have recruited candidates in enough Senate and House races to potentially flip control of both chambers.

Democrats’ chances are strongest in the Senate, where they now lead in enough races to eke out a majority, with hopes of putting more in play should Trump continue to falter throughout the fall.

Republicans, playing defense, are asking voters to look past Trump and to question whether they really trust Clinton’s party to fix Washington…

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What’s on the agenda as we wrap up “official” summer?

For the Pink Floyd fans, via NYMag‘s Vulture blog:

… To coincide with the band’s upcoming box set, The Early Years 1965-1972, a nice, soothing video for the Roger Waters-penned “Grantchester Meadows” has been released. The video features a rare performance of the song taped for the BBC — juxtaposed with modern pastoral scenes — with Waters and David Gilmour providing the acoustic vocals and guitars, and Richard Wright joining in on the piano…

I’m not sure there’s ever been a musical group of whom I felt I needed 27 discs’ worth, but it looks like there will be smaller samplers available as well.

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This is Wrong and Bullshit and You Shouldn’t Support It

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In the Walter thread below, Adam linked to this story about scumbag sex offender Brock Turner’s return home:

Turner, who was released on Friday, was greeted in Sugarcreek Township by around a dozen angry protesters wielding menacing signs and, in some cases, weapons.

“He’s not going to live some happy pleasant life,” one protester told WCPO-TV. “We’re going to never let him forget what he did.”

“If he is uncomfortable then he begins to receive at least some punishment that he deserves for his crime,” said another.

I’m embarrassed for those people, and I am embarrassed for all the commenters at Jezebel. This is not acceptable behavior.

I personally think he is a scumbag and if I had my way, he would still be in jail for a number of years. I think his family and the people who wrote those letters in Turner’s defense displayed a sense of breathtaking entitlement. But Brock Turner didn’t sentence himself. The sentence was within the guidelines. He served his time, must now register as a sex offender, and will hopefully be haunted by his actions for some time to come.

But cheering armed mobs outside his house threatening castration and rape is illiberal, offensive, and obscene, not to mention unfair to his other neighbors. You want to do something productive? Help rape victims, donate to women’s shelters, and WORK TO CHANGE THE DAMNED LAW. But you don’t resort to running around waving around weaponry and getting in on mob justice. It’s, quite frankly, unAmerican.

And about those letters his parents and friends wrote.

That’s about as dumb a take on things as possible. By that logic we should be stalking every defense lawyer and any character witness who goes to court.

Let me tell you all a story.

A long time ago when I was a young right-wing fascist right out of the army and in college, I worked in the county probation office in Morgantown. I did a number of different things there, but one of the things I did the most was pre-sentence investigations. I did it because it was interesting work, but I also did it because it involved spending a lot of time with convicted felons, many of whom were pedophiles, child rapists, and sex offenders, and the other interns were college aged women and they just felt uncomfortable. So I would trudge over to the jail with a notebook, and do in depth reports on the convicted. I would look at their background, where they went to school, education level, family life growing up, employment history, etc. I would spend hours with them, just listening and jotting down notes, and then I would spend hours writing a detailed report that the Probation Officers would review, and then they would be given to the sentencing judge prior to sentencing.

Because I was a curious guy, I always went to the sentencings for the people whose reports I had written. Again, I was pretty right-wing, and not in favor of leniency. One of the judges I worked with quite a bit was a good ole boy, someone I learned to appreciate as a great man. He was, allegedly, extremely liberal, and a lot of people thought he was too lenient. But he was good to those who worked with him and generous with his time, so I found myself talking to him a lot.

One day, there was a particularly awful person being sentenced (and I don’t remember the charges, but it involved raping young children and a host of other things), and I sat there and listened to family member after family member go up and testify that the convicted was actually a good person. I remember being nauseated by it, because I had spent hours with the guy, and he was not any of the things his family was claiming. At any rate, the judge sentenced him, pretty firmly, and afterwards we had a chat.

I asked him- “Doesn’t it make you sick to your stomach listening to all these family members swearing what a good guy that scumbag is when we all know what he’s done?” The judge paused, looked at me, and said something I will never forget-

“If his kin and his lawyer aren’t going to defend him, who will?”

The judge later went on to become State Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher. I’m seeing a lot of people who could have learned something from him.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

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Walter after a Week

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walteroneweekatdebit

It’s hard to believe I found Walter just a month ago and he has already been in his forever home for a week, but time flies, I guess. Debit passes on the following:

I have discovered that:

He does not eat cat vomit. I know this because my daughter did not want to lower herself to clean up a fresh pile and called him over. “Knock yourself out, buddy!” she said. He sniffed, raised a dubious eyebrow and then walked away.

He will eat his fish oil gel caps like they are dog treats. I’ve been giving them to both dogs mixed in with their breakfast. Ellie normally just wolfs them down with her food, but sometimes she discovers one, rolls it around in her mouth with a thoughtful look on her face, and then goes “ptui.” Walter snaps it up off the floor and then snuffles around for more.

He does not house soil. For the first couple of nights I had him gated in the kitchen with a pet bed, but once it became clear that he was not having bladder/bowel control issues he’s been given free roam of the house. He’s a very, very good boy and will come up and snuffle at me if he needs to go outside.

He found his voice about four days after he came here. He barks to be let in if I don’t hang out with him in the yard. If he’s outside and someone walks by, or pulls into our driveway, they get a volley of barks, letting them know There is a Dog and This is His Yard. Naturally, once they come in the yard he is all wags and nudges for petting.

However, he is also very protective. He can’t make it up the stairs to my room. Except for when we’ve had service people in that needed to go upstairs. Then he follows us up the stairs and sticks by me.

He’s moving so much better. I credit your rehab program: lots of good food, gentle exercise and plenty of love. His muscle tone is improving, as his is energy level. He’ll trot around the backyard with his tail up and he’s always up for a walk in the park with Ellie.

After one week, it seems as if he’s always been here. The cats treat him like they do Ellie; someone to rub up against and hang out with. I’ve yet to witness them sharing a pet bed, but I know it will happen once winter sets in.

My vet said the bare patches on Walter’s elbows are most likely from his having to sleep on bare dirt or concrete. The hair might grow back, it might not. When I bought this house, I’d planned on pulling up the carpet since the hardwood underneath in in great shape. But for now I’m going to leave it. It’s less pleasing aesthetically, but it makes me happy to know that Walter can lie down almost anywhere in the house and it will be soft.

Here’s a video of him rolling in the grass.

And by request, him barking, because I had never really heard it:

He looks really noble and wise in the picture up top. Also, I have the letter from my vet and spoke with the Sheriff, and we will be pursuing animal abuse charges starting on Tuesday.

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Open ‘Patriotism’ Thread: Football Follies

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kaepernich no more arguing ramsey

(Marshall Ramsey via GoComics.com)
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I think I hurt universally acknowledged commentor Raven‘s feelings by forgetting that this would be the first weekend for college football. Sorry, dude! (I’ll probably hurt them again next year by forgetting all over again; apologies in advance.)

These funnies seemed worth sharing, though. Dave Roth on “Colin Kaepernick’s Protest, And What Values Are Worth“:

On Thursday, Colin Kaepernick issued a statement regarding his socks. The public was owed nothing less. The public was very concerned about—or pretending to be very concerned about—the socks in question. The socks had little pig faces on them, and each pig was wearing a policeman’s hat. Kaepernick had worn the socks at 49ers training camp on August 10, which was four days before he first sat down during the national anthem before a NFL preseason game, and more than three weeks before Steve Wyche asked Kaepernick to explain why he had been sitting during the national anthem…

This story is not just another humid August News fartwave, because what Kaepernick did and why he did it are more serious than that. More than that, the actual seriousness of Kaepernick’s protest has blown a hole, deep and wide, right through the pomp and pretense and vast self-seriousness of the NFL and the conversation it wraps around it. The result has been a pitched battle between Kaepernick’s protest in itself, and the forces of that goonish rhetorical universe in which it occurred.

The protest itself is telling. Kaepernick sat through “The Star-Spangled Banner” several times before Wyche asked him to explain why, and Kaepernick has not stopped explaining it since, explaining and re-explaining it concisely and coherently and with startling patience. That explanation resolves to Kaepernick’s wish to bring attention to various longstanding national disgraces that, because they tend disproportionately to victimize poor people and people of color, are viewed by some people as more of a disgrace than they are by others. This is a wide-ranging critique—wide-ranging enough to include pointed criticism of both Presidential candidates, among other things—but not a terribly complicated one to understand…

The NFL has always been weird, in ways endearing and not, but it is never weirder than its most powerful people and their most powerfully weird beliefs….[T]he defining aesthetic aspect over the league’s ascent over the last decade and a half is the extent to which the NFL has come to see itself as a sort of unofficial auxiliary branch of the armed forces, and the attendant tendency to treat its games—which are, at the risk of belaboring an obvious point, games—as campaigns in an elaborately staged play-war.

A state of permanent war is not healthy for any political body, as you have probably noticed, and the NFL’s state of play-war has been corrosive in ways that parallel the broader culture’s. In the same way that America is more sentimental than serious about the people that fight and die in our abstracted and boundless and endless wars—quick to pay solemn and tearful tribute to the heroism of The Troops, but notably less keen on paying for their more mundane and more concrete and more vital needs—the NFL is more sentimental than serious about its own vaunted values. The league’s belief that it is important and stands for something important is unmistakably sincere; we might as well take at their ridiculous word the anonymous NFL execs who called Kaepernick a “traitor” and suggested they’d sooner resign than have him play for their teams. But just because the NFL believes its own wild rhetoric doesn’t mean that rhetoric is believable. The NFL hasn’t ever been very serious about defining what those important things are, or about actually standing for them. It has always been much more committed to gesture than actual action. This is a defensive instinct dressed up as a series of bold stances and statements….

(Kinda like the GOP presidential campaign?)

kaepernich patriotism mandatory anderson

(Nick Anderson via GoComics.com)
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kaepernich trump davies

(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)
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kapernich not standing stones luckovich

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Sunday Holiday Afternoon Open Thread: Lulz

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Anything interesting going on in your neighborhood(s)?

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Faunasphere: The Uncutening

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Hey Juicelings,

Yesterday was International Vulture Awareness Day. Here’s one man’s paean to the noble scavengers:

turkey vulture“You can imagine if you breathe the air coming from a rotting deer on the side of the road or if were to wash into our water supply it could make you and I sick, but they’re able to eat that material and destroy, remove the toxic elements and help keep the Earth clean,” Joplin said….

If the fact that they act as key parts of nature’s cleaning crew isn’t good enough for you, Joplin says vultures are pretty much harmless.

“They’re not dangerous birds, they have no way of protecting themselves other than throwing up,” he said.

Sounds gross, but, when you think about it, says Joplin: “If you’re going to have an encounter with a wild animal, it’s probably better to be thrown up on than bit or clawed.”

“They clean the Earth, they eat the dead decaying and rotting material, toxic things,” Joplin said. “They’re helping to clean the earth by consuming that material, stuff that would make you or I ill.”

Can we have a bit of love for the less-photogenic among us? The French have a term for it: jolie laide.

This shoebill bird is also jolie laide, and beyond that, he’s rather polite. However, he’s also pretty scary looking. Am I the only one who gets the impression he thinks he’s bowing to his dinner? (No embed available; totally worth your time to click over.)

 

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Hydroponics As Fashion Accent

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Not sure it’s liable to make a serious dent in anyone’s food budget, but I can totally imagine hydroponic plants as air fresheners/CO2 filters. From the Washington Post:

The International Space Station and your 500-square-foot studio have more in common than you might think: Both environments are a great place to experiment with hydroponics…

Gene Giacomelli, a professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering at the University of Arizona and director of the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, said that for those interested in commercial agriculture, incorporating hydroponics into large-scale production seems the way of the future. But is it possible to create a hydroponic system at home?

Absolutely, Giacomelli said.

“If you understand the fundamentals, what the plants need, and you have some practical use of tools, it can be just a kiddie pool filled with water and a floating piece of Styrofoam board with holes cut in it,” he said.

There are six kinds of hydroponic systems, the most basic of which is called a deep-water culture. This is what Giacomelli is referring to. It’s essentially a container of nutrient-filled water, with plants floating on top of it. You’ll need an air pump to introduce oxygen into the water, but it can be simply made with Ikea storage bins, a foam cooler, a bucket or any other container, as long as it sits in a place that gets a lot of light…

… But who wants a bunch of buckets or foam coolers in their apartment? Michael Zick Doherty, a permaculture designer from California, said that once you’ve got the basics down, it’s easy to transform a hydroponic system into something that adds to your home decor.

He designs hydroponic systems by taking into account the surrounding environment, whatever it may be: architecture, cabinet color, kitchen tiles. He’s a fan of using innovative materials: On a research residency in Singapore, he experimented with systems made of clay.

“I think hydroponics has gotten a pretty negative image because they aren’t aesthetically pleasing a lot of the time,” he said. “I think it’s easy to take that next step. Even pipes: Something as simple as making a wood enclosure around them would totally change the feel of them. Find ways to obscure the more mechanical parts.”…

Beautiful doesn’t have to be expensive. Britta Riley is the founder of a social enterprise called Windowfarms, and its first designs used water bottles to create a similar window system. She started an open-source website, on hiatus for this summer, so designers all over the world could share their designs…

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Anybody here had any experience with hydroponics?

Apart from indoor water gardening, what’s going on in your garden(s) this week?

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