Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

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

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Books are my comfort food!

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

T R E 4 5 O N

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

No one could have predicted…

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

People are complicated. Love is not.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Motown is Joe-Town!

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

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

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

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Saturday Evening Respite Open Thread: KVATS

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  1. 1.

    WaterGirl

    I have been waiting for this to come back.  So adorable, all of them!

    Anne Laurie, I am so sorry I stepped on your post.  I didn’t think the calendar post would be much competition for any other posts, so I didn’t even think to look this time.  But 2 minutes later than yours is a bit close!

  4. 4.

    WaterGirl

    I absolutely LOVE Fat Fred.  And the bird and the kitty on the balcony.  The latte art is amazing.

  6. 6.

    PsiFighter37

    OT, but the Des Moines Register endorsed Warren. Not sure if local paper endorsements matter at all, but given her poll numbers, Warren can use all the good news she can get ATM.

  11. 11.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Kai-two: and yet… by 55-38, IA voters prefer a candidate “more moderate than most Democrats” over “more liberal than most Democrats”. /shrugging WTF emoji/

    I believe the way IA caucuses work, each candidate needs 15% of the people in a corner of the gym at Marion Morrison Elementary, and if they don’t have them, those people either go home or go stand with a different candidate’s group? Warren’s on the bubble at 15, and Klobuchar at 8.

  12. 12.

    Brachiator

    Earlier this afternoon, here in the Los Angeles area, a pair of Sanders supporters knocked on my door.  An older couple, white guy, Asian American lady.  The guy had an app on his smartphone that identified me by name and noted my party affiliation.  Mildly intrusive. I asked them what they liked about Sanders, and they touched on health care and free college.  But they also emphasized the importance of beating Trump, which I liked. They were pretty enthusiastic.

    Have not seen or heard any other candidate’s people.

  14. 14.

    Kai-two

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    I am just gonna guess that people give the old white guy “moderate” points, even though he’s a socialist.

    There’s a chance, too, that Sanders more centrist positions on gun controls resonates with Iowans.

    But you’re right, strange result.

  15. 15.

    debbie

    @Brachiator: 
    I saw a Pete yard sign driving home the other day. Took me about a half-block to realize it was Mayer Pete. Blue and gold, just “Pete” and “2020.”

  16. 16.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Kai-two: I remember a factoid (as in I don’t know if it was or is true) floating around in ’08 or ’12 that registered IA Dems run to the left of the party as a whole. Tom Harkin Democrats. I wonder if he’s endorsed anyone.

    @Baud: true, he and Warren together have 40, almost dead on with the other question

  17. 17.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Josh Lederman @ JoshNBCNews
    In tape obtained by @NBCNews, Trump also appears to say he wrote donor a letter of recommendation to South Korea’s president & president “told me he got the letter.” “So they must be treating you pretty good,” Trump appears to say

    very ethics, much extremely legal

  21. 21.

    NotMax

    Cat people.

    They make Wilmer bros look like dabblers.

    ;)

    @debbie

    Well, including mayor on the sign would give the impression that’s what he’s running for.

  23. 23.

    Another Scott

    @mrmoshpotato: It’s what cats do.

    A friend with cats would make cakes with frosting every once in a while.  So we’d have Cat Foot Cake.

    :-/

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  25. 25.

    dmsilev

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: “This donor is the best donor I have ever taken money from, in all of my years of taking money from people. I am sure he will do very well at giving money to you, just so long as I get a cut.”

  27. 27.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Just like in 2016, Sanders projects as a moderate to many, perhaps most Americans. I think it’s because, yes, he’s a white guy, and on race/gender/identity issues, he is a moderate. They’re not scoring the left/right scale on economics

    In ’16, a lot of people saw him as more moderate than Hillary Clinton.

  29. 29.

    WaterGirl

    @mrmoshpotato: Oh, wait.  I thought those were some sort of chinese dumpings.

    If those were homemade pierogies, that’s a whole different thing.  Damn that cat!

  31. 31.

    Patricia Kayden

    Team Trump again ranted about the whistleblower.Look…If 911 gets a call and that person reports a crime, but doesn’t give their name, we still investigate the crime.If the crime occurred, and there’s ample evidence, then the original 911 call Does. Not. Matter.— Rep. Val Demings (@RepValDemings) January 26, 2020

  32. 32.

    chris

    @TomatoQueen:Indeed he was, 34 pounds at at his peak. About 28 right up to his last year or so. He was about 3 years old when a vet told us he’d probably die young because he was so fat. He lived another 15 years out of spite. I’ve had cats all my life and loved them all but he’s the one I miss every day.
    Charlie and the 16 litre pot.

  34. 34.

    Matt McIrvin

    @zhena gogolia: No lie, I heard people saying it. People wishing the Democrats had nominated Bernie to capture the center instead of that crazy extremist Hillary.

  37. 37.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @zhena gogolia: one of my hobby-horse anecdotes is that Ur-Bernie-Bro Jon Fugelsang used to say that Biden was Obama’s impeachment insurance because Republicans didn’t want a “real liberal” in the Oval Office. I bring it up because it illustrates the way a lot of people, and I think Fugelsang is very smart, vote on affect, personality… a whole lot of things that have little or nothing to do with policy.
    And I actually think his likable, regular-guy affect is the thing that makes Biden– if he can keep his attention span going and thicken his skin a little– potentially our strongest GE candidate.

  38. 38.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @debbie: these people are so goddam embarrassing on the world stage, not just liars and bullies, but fucking buffoons

  40. 40.

    Jay

    “A Russian government-controlled bank deposited at least half a billion dollars into the American subsidiary of Deutsche Bank around the time that the bank lent Trump his most scrutinized loans, according to exclusively obtained confidential bank records.”https://t.co/VNccwhxWNp— Scott Dworkin (@funder) January 25, 2020

  43. 43.

    Jay

    @debbie:

    Pompeo is supposed to be meeting with the Ukranians next week, after yelling out that “Americans don’t care about the Ukraine”.

    He made Putin very happy.

  45. 45.

    Anne Laurie

    @WaterGirl: Absolutely no problem!

    I wondered if I should post, but I was gonna be away from my computer for  a few hours & wanted people to have something new to look at, if you didn’t have the chance to post.  Thank *you* for not taking offense that I ‘hopscotched’ your calendar post!

  46. 46.

    mrmoshpotato

    @WaterGirl: I don’t know exactly what they are, but at first glance, I thought pierogi.

    Looking again, they’re probably a different stuffed dough excellency.

    Cat’s still a jerk.

  49. 49.

    TomatoQueen

    @chris: Love that pot pic too. My own fatboy, Harpo, was a mackerel tabby too, but not of such generous proportions, about 22 lb before the hyperthyroid madness set in.

  52. 52.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    The Fat Fred kitteh was the cutest one. An absolute unit : )

    Anyway, was playing with OpenAI GPT-2 through Talk to Transformer:

    I put in the opening paragraph of 1984:

    It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

    The neural network gave me this:

    Even in his present condition, Winston was somehow aware that his actions had been prejudicial to his future usefulness. He knew that his job had been a delusion, that the Party was worse than he had imagined. He was frightened, furious at himself and at everyone. Thoughtful, disheartened by his experience and by the difficulty of deciding what further action to take, he was uncertain which way to turn. His mind was a murky and confused place. For two

    Pretty good, even if it seems to be rushing a bit. I’ll plug that in to the prompt and see what it gives me next:

    For two days he remained in a vague, impenetrable state of mind; he did not get out much at all. He watched the long history of the Party in his head, and not very long ago he had thought of the Party as ‘an omnibus of criminals’. Such thoughts would come again, and again, as for instance if any one suddenly felt himself fit to go into the open country.

    These thoughts had, however, nothing to do with the actual journey to Heroux. On the day before his departure he was somehow convinced that nothing was in his mind but the idea of being able to go into the open country; he was the last man in the world who could not imagine doing so. On the one hand, he wanted to go away from the Party and

    And so on:

    the State and the responsibility which has hitherto encumbered him, but on the other hand, he wanted to go away from his wife and his life, and so very stubbornly, too, he refused to consider that that must not be so.

    “And I cannot go,” he added, “I could not do it myself. I’m afraid it would only be a nuisance to her. And she is not able

     

    to bear that I should leave her. What I want is, that at least I should take one who is not one of my two children.”

    And then, at last, he regretted it: he regretted that he should not be able to take someone with whom he could live more openly and could look after him more kindly.

    Honestly, pretty good job in the beginning imitating Blair’s style.

  58. 58.

    patrick II

    I think that  bird  is trying to do.  to the cat  what James  Garner did to  Bruce Lee.

  62. 62.

    CaseyL

    Great magpie-cat argument!  Would like to know what they’re saying to each other: maybe the magpie boasting about being able to fly away if the cat even thinks about pouncing, which may be why the cat is increasingly irate :)

    The latte is *amazing* – I wonder if the barista used something to stiffen the foam. The Instagram page has many more creations, including quite a few “stacked foam” designs.

  63. 63.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    For caucuses, it’s often important to pay attention to who people’s second choices are. I haven’t looked at polls of Iowa in a couple of weeks, but the last ones I saw suggested that Warren might not have done that great as a first-place choice, but was the second-place choice of a disproportionately high number of voters. This makes sense, because it seems like Biden and Sanders supporters each can’t stand the other candidate, while Warren seemingly lacks the traits of Biden and Sanders that annoy people who can’t stand one or the other.

    I must make the caveat that these polls were before the asinine snake emoji stunts, though. I think that was roughly the point where I decided I’d had enough of paying attention to the primary until at least a couple of states had voted.

    In any case, this is, to me, another argument against voting for a single candidate, and especially against first-past-the-post voting. If we want to choose a candidate who satisfies the greatest number of party constituents, it would make sense for voters to be able to select as many candidates as they like. A system which selects Condorcet winners as often as possible would be greatly preferable to the current one. It should be noted that Donald Trump would almost certainly not have been a Condorcet winner in the Republican primary of 2016. The winner would undoubtedly have been a theocratic fascist and crypto-racist, but I’d have taken crypto over overt any day, since an insane amount of bigotry and violence has been normalised in this administration* that wouldn’t have been normalised in any other Republican administration*.

     

    Now, to go off-topic, I feel compelled to post a tribute to erstwhile Death/Cynic drummer Sean Reinert, whose death at 48 years of age was reported to the Death Facebook page today by his husband Tom. Technical and progressive death metal will never be the world’s most commercially viable forms of music, which is quite understandable, but it should be difficult for anyone to dispute the level of musical skill that is required to perform them. Origin/erstwhile Gorguts drummer John Longstreth wrote:

    Sean was and is the reason I play death metal.

    Cynic was the band that allowed me to understand what is going on in extreme metal and helped me develop an ear and love to double back and understand bands like Napalm Death, Deicide, Carcass etc etc. Along with Atheist, Cynic is WHY we have technical death metal. I’m glad I was able to know him.

    For those unfamiliar with Longstreth’s playing, this is roughly like having Neil Peart or Ginger Baker say that you’re the reason they picked up rock drumming, and that your band is the reason rock music even exists. A case could be made that Longstreth is the greatest death metal drummer of his generation, and a case could be made that Reinert was the best death metal drummer of his.

    However, Reinert was also able to perform in quite a number of other genres, including jazz and progressive rock, and was probably just as skilled in those. In fact, a large part of the reason why his metal playing was so influential was that he was able to bring in influences from such a disparate variety of genres; in particular, while metal drumming has always been influenced by jazz (for example, the blast beat originated in jazz), Reinert’s playing really took it to a new level.

    One of the major innovations of Focus when it appeared in 1993 was that it mixed metal passages with non-metal passages without seeming forced or abrupt. Fusion, Latin jazz, progressive rock, ambient, new age, and classical are just a few of the genres that Focus delves into when the band feels like it.

    A few tracks that even non-metal listeners may be able to appreciate: Cynic’s “Textures” (YouTube link), which is completely instrumental, and Traced in Air Remixed (Bandcamp link), which, unlike the original, mostly lacks the harsh “Cookie Monster” vocals that are the hallmark of most death metal. Death’s “Cosmic Sea”, on which Reinert also performed, is also instrumental, but I can’t remember whether the limit on links per comment is two or three, so I’ll restrain myself from providing any further links. (It’s also quite a bit heavier than either of the links I provided.)

    Reinert and his erstwhile bandmate Paul Masvidal were also amongst the few gay musicians in death metal at the time. (They do not appear to have ever been romantically involved with each other.) The metal community was (perhaps surprisingly) quite supportive when they publicly acknowledged their sexuality (then again, much like Rob Halford’s, it had been an open secret for years, anyhow).

    And we just lost Neil Peart three weeks ago. This has just a shitty, shitty month for fans of progressive metal drummers.

    Ceterum censeo factionem Republicanam esse delendam.

  66. 66.

    Mary G

    It’s not about cats, but I’ve been saving this amusing respite thread for Tom L, Kent, and all the teachers among us:

    I caught two of my students having sex in the lab today. How was your day?— Alepo ?️‍? (@Sciencing_Bi) January 25, 2020

  69. 69.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Brachiator: Earlier this afternoon, here in the Los Angeles area, a pair of Sanders supporters knocked on my door.  An older couple, white guy, Asian American lady.  The guy had an app on his smartphone that identified me by name and noted my party affiliation.  Mildly intrusive.

    I imagine it’s just the app version of a walk list, both generated from DNC data…

  72. 72.

    WaterGirl

    @Mary G: Definitely a bit of “respite” for the students.  I had no idea they were calling it that these days.  I can’t keep up!  :-)

  74. 74.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Baud: I will drop all of dictionary.com on you, and your campaign will not be able to save you from the pedants!

  75. 75.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Watching the NHL All-Star game on TV and it’s just occured to me that hockey is the only spectator sport that doesn’t bore me to tears to watch on TV. It’s way more exciting to watch than football imo. The players are always moving. Basketball is the same way for the most part now that I think about it

  79. 79.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Baud:

    It’s just a case of great minds thinking alike Baud

    And yes, I know that’s an Offspring reference : )

    @NotMax:

    Yup, I was referring to Orwell

  80. 80.

    Dan B

    @(((CassandraLeo))):  Impressive musicality and, although I usually don’t notice drummers in rock or metal, his drumming is fascinating.  It’s not an echo of the guitars or the bass.  The jazzy syncopation fits and adds a lot.  In some ways it is a link to the role of piano, which is a tuned percussion instrument after all.

  88. 88.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Mary G: No amount of booze…

    I've been looking at Peace Corps reenrollment to see if I can get out of the country by Monday.— Alepo ?️‍? (@Sciencing_Bi) January 25, 2020

    Hahahahahah

    Those faculty meetings are going to be aaaawwwwkward!

  97. 97.

    WaterGirl

    @JanieM: Well, as I used to say once I graduated HS and got to the university, “all this time, I thought I was saving myself for marriage, but as it turns out, i was saving myself for college.”

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