Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Bark louder, little dog.

You cannot shame the shameless.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Stay strong, because they are weak.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

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

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

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

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

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Today’s Coronavirus Update

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This is like cancelling Christmas, if Thanksgiving and maybe Amity Island‘s Independence Day were also celebrated at the end of December. (Despite the obvious snark potential for Westerners, remember that the astrological symbol for the new Year of the Rat does not have the same negative connotations in Asia.) Good news is, the relevant authorities are taking this with all due seriousness. Bad news — seems to be pretty damned serious.

It’s reached the stage where the NYTimes is running live updates:

The authorities greatly expanded a travel lockdown in central China on Thursday, essentially penning in more than 22 million residents in an effort to contain a deadly virus that is overwhelming hospitals and fueling fears of a pandemic.

The new limits — abruptly decreed ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, China’s busiest travel season — were an extraordinary step that underscored the ruling Communist Party’s deepening fears about the outbreak of a little understood coronavirus.

Chinese health officials reported on Friday that there had been 26 deaths from and 830 cases of the coronavirus, a sharp increase.

The official death toll increased by more than a half-dozen in 24 hours, while the number of confirmed cases jumped by more than 200.

On Thursday morning, the authorities imposed a travel lockdown in Wuhan, the industrial city of 11 million at the epicenter of the outbreak. Airlines canceled hundreds of flights to Wuhan, leaving thousands of people stranded. Later in the day, officials said they would also halt public transportation in the nearby cities of Huanggang, Ezhou, Zhijiang and Chibi, which are together home to more than nine million residents. And by Friday, restrictions had extended to Xiantao, Qianjiang and Enshi, three other cities that include large rural populations.

[Only] Two deaths have been confirmed outside the virus epicenter.

One patient died in the province of Hebei — more than 600 miles north of Wuhan — after contracting the coronavirus, the provincial authorities announced on Thursday. Another death was confirmed in Heilongjiang, a province near the border with Russia more than 1,500 miles from Wuhan.

The disease had also been diagnosed in patients in Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.

In Wuhan, where the outbreak began, anxiety and anger prevailed as worried residents crowded into hospitals and teams of medical workers in hazmat suits sought to identify the infected…

As a corollary, it’s becoming harder to pick up anything useful from a basic google or twitter search — there’s too many random individuals forwarding guesses, half-truths & conspiracy theories. From the first dozen mentions I saw, I figured the ‘special hospital construction’ story was fear-mongering, but the People’s Daily seems to be a legit news source:

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Senate Impeachment Open Thread: Big Contrast

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The “loyal” opposition:

Representing Indiana:

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Cowards in Academicals

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Babson College, previously known to me primarily as a center of Isaac Newton fandom in the Boston area, has shown all the moral courage and commitment to discourse one would find in a pail of slops.

The backstory: First, Trump announced that he might target Iranian cultural sites in any escalating conflict.

Cowards in Academicals 1

Cowards in Academicals

In response, Babson’s director of sustainability, Asheen Phancy, mused on the Book of Faces that perhaps Iran’s ruler should counter by tweeting out “a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb.”

That bit of snark got picked up by a Boston bro-sports site that likes taking aim at what it calls SJWs — bro-code for people who think beating on the poor or structural racism are bad things.  From there it got into more mainstream news outlets (where have we seen this game before?) and from there, as The Boston Globe reports, “within 48 hours he was suspended and then lost his job.”

The apologia for the move:

[a consultant for the Association of G(overning Boards of Universities and Colleges] Larry Ladd said colleges have to look out for the rights of the students, faculty, and employees, but also must ensure that the institution’s reputation and culture are protected. If Babson officials thought that Phansey’s post ran counter to its values, it had good reason to fire him, Ladd said.

“He had a right as an individual to make the post; he doesn’t have a right to have a job with an employer that doesn’t like that,” Ladd said.

IOW: the firing is (likely) legal, but that don’t make it right.

Babson ain’t commenting yet.  But as something of a Newton guy, I’ll note that for a college founded by someone obsessed with Sir Isaac, my man Izzy wouldn’t have survived long if his college had not been willing not to notice his anti-Trinitarian views (not to mention his very odoriferous alchemy lab tucked against the wall of the Trinity College chapel.  This is cowardice, plain and simple, and another tiny surrender to the forces of thug-tyranny in our culture.

Feh.

In that vein, the Twitter thread that begins with this:

“I study genocide. It’s been a theme in my academic endeavours for nearly 30 years. More accurately, I study the conditions in the lead up to genocide, be they cultural, social, political, economic, etc… 1/n”

has left me…even less happy…

And prince that I am, I choose to share such sweetness and light with all of y’all.

Open thread.

Images: (The pretty illusion) Jan Both, Ruins by the Sea, before 1652

(Reality) Imperial War Museum Collection Ruins at Ypres in the Sunlight, 3rd Battle of Ypres, (Passchendaele) 1917.

 

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Guest Post from Schroedinger’s Cat: “Silent No More”

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Protest Sign - Orange is the New Black

It has been more than a month since the Citizenship Amendment Act or the CAA was passed by both the houses of the Indian parliament. The protests that started immediately following the passage have continued unabated for over a month despite more than thirty deaths due to heavy handed police tactics. Many more have been imprisoned on flimsy charges for excercising their right of free speech and assembly.

In state after state, in towns large and small and cities, on college campuses, at the court houses, at historic venues, the anti-CAA protesters are registering their protest against the body blow to India’s founding principles by singing the national anthem and reciting the preamble to the constitution.

After the passage of the bill in mid-December a feeling of helplessness enveloped me. I was afraid for India’s Muslims and other vulnerable groups. The rise of the BJP from a bit player on the political scene to its current status is built on the demonization of Muslims and anti-Muslim pogroms. Those fears were realized when reports of the brutal police actions in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led states, especially in Uttar Pradesh started trickling in.

The CAA takes aim at the heart of the Indian Constitution by singling out Muslims and treating them differently than adherents of other religions. This bill along with the BJP’s government’s plan to construct a National Register of Citizens would be a living nightmare not just for the 100 million plus Muslim population but also the poor and dispossessed. The NRC conducted in Assam gives us a window on how a similar exercise conducted on a national scale would turn out.

The BJP had tried to pass this law in an earlier session of the Parliament but it died because they didn’t have the numbers to pass it through the upper house, Rajya Sabha prior to the elections last May. But after gaining an imposing majority in the Lok Sabha in the last elections, this time around many smaller parties decide to go along with the BJP’s agenda in the Rajya Sabha and the bill passed both the Houses easily.

Modi and His Idol

(Left to Right : The Sangh role model, Mr. Modi in the Sangh uniform)

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Tough on the Seniors

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I get why Moscow Mitch is cramming the impeachment into a couple of days – it has to be done before the SOTU so Trump can declare victory from the podium. But my God what a toll that’s going to take on the older Senators. When Collins complained to the manager about her order, sent a note to Roberts to complain about Jerry Nadler, it was after midnight, for christsake. That’s way too late for the over-80 crew ( Shelby, Feinstein, Grassley, Roberts, and Inhofe) and probably pretty damn late for the over-75ers (a bunch of them).

My experience with people in their mid-80s is that they sleep a lot, and they need their sleep to get through the day. And these were relatively healthy 80-somethings, “relatively healthy” being a stretch for a few of these Senators.

Look, I’m not pissing on these people for being old. Aging sucks, I fucking hate it, and we’ll all suffer through it, if we’re lucky. We can have an argument about whether these guys should all have retired some other time. But from just a simple human perspective, we’re risking the lives of a bunch of people just to ram this thing through the Senate.

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Lobbest thou thy human hand grenade in the direction of thine foe…

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Here’s the stuff I’ve looked forward to the most: House Manager Schiff rubbing the assembled Republican senators’ noses in Trump and Giuliani’s Ukraine/DNC/Soros crackpottery:

I think Trump sincerely believes this bullshit since he’s dumb and aggrieved and he admires Putin. The Ukraine conspiracy theory is therefore irresistible since it suggests that Trump did TOO win fair and square without a boost from Putin and conveniently exculpates the latter so maybe they can hang out and swap tales of crushing underlings and bond over their shared impulse to aggressively bend scowling women to their iron will or whatever.

Giuliani may be a believer too, or perhaps he merely sensed the massive opportunities for graft in the Ukraine shakedown scheme. Regardless, most Senate Republicans know it’s all a load of bullshit. So the least they can do is sit there and squirm through every agonizing and embarrassing account of how Russia-driven propaganda informs U.S. foreign policy thanks to their party’s idiot president.

Open thread.

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