Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

The lights are all blinking red.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Let there be snark.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

The National Guard is not Batman.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

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

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

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Innocent, Helpless Victims

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Apparently this is the line we’re going to hear about Biden’s vote for Iraq:

Former Secretary of State John Kerry defended former Vice President Biden over the Iraq War, saying that the George W. Bush administration “broke their word with respect to how they would proceed” in Iraq.

“The fact is that we were promised by a president, by an administration, that they were going to do it as a last resort after exhausting diplomacy, that if they have to go to war it would be with a coalition that they built broadly, and that they would do it only in conjunction with our allies,” Kerry said Friday. “It didn’t have to happen; it was a war of choice.”

“It was a mistake to have trusted them, I guess, and we paid a high price for it,” Kerry added. “But that was not voting for the war.”

This is such a projection of weakness and, frankly, political cowardice – we trusted Bush and he let us down. A mistake “I guess”. Is that really where Biden wants to go with this? To say he’s a victim of Bush? Two thoughts:

First, if we’re supposed to trust your judgment as the biggest, baddest, smartest foreign policy guy, isn’t trusting Cheney/Bush on foreign policy a refutation of learning from your experience? We all know people who have worked in a job for a long time (“experienced”) and absolutely suck at it. It’s not the experiences you have, but how you’ve grown and learned from them. If you hadn’t learned that you can’t trust someone like Cheney/Bush not to go to war, and you haven’t learned that Iraq was the biggest foreign policy fuckup in the last two decades of this country’s existence–and that any role you played in it deserves apology rather than weak excuses like this– you’ve learned nothing.

Second, Iraq is such heavy baggage. If I had to point to one factor that sunk Clinton’s ’08 campaign, other than her advisors’ inability to count delegates, it was her Iraq vote in contrast to Obama’s position on the war. I also think it was a factor in Kerry’s ’04 loss, since he had to dance around his vote rather than have a simple, forthright position opposing the war. Instead of trotting out excuse makers, the Biden campaign needs to be working to dump that baggage with a short, sweet acknowledgement of error and failure.

All that said, there are some things about Iraq I don’t understand at a very fundamental level. I was never, ever for a war in Iraq after 9/11. I certainly supported the Afghanistan war, but Iraq was clearly an war of choice. It had nothing to do with the perpetrators of 9/11. It seemed just like the kind of overreaction that they were trying to bait us into, we fell for it, and any honest history will show that it was a waste of some of our best people and immense amounts of money.

So when the excuse making begins, I have no interest in or patience for it, because I thought it was an obvious mistake from the start. The fact that it was a popular mistake at the time, and that Cheney/Bush lied about it, holds absolutely no water. I don’t think I’m alone in that view, but I guess Biden wants to go to Kerrytown in a bucket. I’m afraid I’m not enjoying the ride.

(via LGM, worth a read)

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: “Like Sending Bees to War”

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No good intention goes unpunished, per the Guardian — “the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession”:

… A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.

Environmental advocates argue that the huge, commercially driven proliferation of the European honeybees used on almond farms is itself undermining the ecosystem for all bees. Honeybees out-compete diverse native bee species for forage, and threaten the endangered species that are already struggling to survive climate change. Environmentalists argue a better solution is to transform the way large-scale agriculture is carried out in the US.

Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.

“The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.”…

On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness…

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C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: sssTHAYER-Mennem!!!

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Can’t speak to the Iowa market, but here in the Greater Boston media market, the only political ads I’m seeing are for Bloomberg and Steyer. So much sssThayer, frequently more than one ad in the same commercial break, each more annoying than the last. About from the bragging self-rightousness, and the term limits crankery, Steyer has a really annoying voice. I’m starting to hate emus, just from not being able to avoid Steyer’s emu-oid mug.

(NB: The only thing I actually watch over the air these days is the news, which may or may not affect ad placement.)

I have the feeling that primary voters will award extra attention to any candidate who shivs Steyer at the upcoming debate. Maybe that’s just me, but…

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Sounds That Build High Like a Mountain- RIP, Neil Peart

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Neil Peart, one of the greatest if not THE greatest rock and roll drummers of all time, died after a three year battle with cancer. He was 67.

I have been completely amazed by the outpouring of appreciation for Peart from people I would never have expected in a million years. I am just genuinely surprised by the diversity of the people in my timeline on twitter, on fb, and elsewhere, who have all mentioned his death and the loss. I mean, I knew he was amazing, but I had no idea he was this widely appreciated by so many others. Peart like to state that Rush always wanted to stay the disaffected 16 year old teenage boy- I guess there are a lot of us out there, male and female alike. Perhaps my favorite quote regarding his death was “Your favorite drummer’s favorite drummer has died.”

***

One of the things about getting older (and I am still relatively young at 49), is watching the waves of events that seem to surround you. Early 20’s, the first round of friends marrying, grandparents dying; late 20’s and early 30’s, first rounds of friend’s kids and divorces; late 30’s and early 40’s, people’s parents and cultural icons from your youth, friend’s second marriages, friend’s kids graduating from college; late 40’s, your teenage heroes dying of natural causes, your friends start to die prematurely, and the generations ahead of you start to die off rapidly. In my small town of 300, four people in their late 70’s and early 80’s have died in the past few months. Harry Chambers, proprietor of the general store in town, and I were talking, and we noted that a couple more obituaries and we’re going to be the next generation under the gun. I said that I am not sure I am ready for that, and we both agreed that we don’t have much of a choice.

***

That’s kind of what is so remarkable about groups like Rush, for me. I understand that they are not for everyone, and that’s fine, but for me, all of the world has changed in the past four to five decades, but when I put 2112 on my earphones, I am again lying on the floor of the college radio station, lights turned out, speakers turned to 11, escaping from it all.

Thanks, Neil.

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Election Year Open Thread: Joe Biden, Quixotic Knight of the Cheerful Countenance

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Political twitter was briefly enthralled by this New York Review of Books essay from Irish columnist Fintan O’Toole. Then the rush of events carried it away, but it’s still (from my perspective as someone who grew up in the same Irish-Catholic milieu, not too many years after Joe) worth reading:

Mourning becomes Joe Biden. “I have found over the years,” he writes in his recent best-selling memoir Promise Me, Dad, “that, although it brought back my own vivid memories of sad times, my presence almost always brought some solace to people who have suffered sudden and unexpected loss…. When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience.” …

Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics. He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss. Richard Ben Cramer, in his classic account of the 1988 presidential primaries, What It Takes, wrote how even then it was a journalistic cliché to define Biden by the terrible car crash that killed his first wife, Neilia, and their daughter, Naomi (and injured Beau and his brother, Hunter), in 1972, shortly after Biden was elected to the Senate at the age of twenty-nine. Cramer refers to the “type that fell out of the machine every time they used Biden’s name: ‘…whose life was touched by personal tragedy…’ Joe Biden (D-Del., T.B.P.T.).”

Even now, as Hunter Biden’s name is threaded through Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings, there is a ghost behind it: Hunter is Neilia’s maiden name. Trump’s preoccupation with Hunter’s presence on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma hinges on a reality that is certainly worthy of scrutiny: Joe Biden was, as he recounts in some detail in Promise Me, Dad, deeply involved in the Obama administration’s relations with Ukraine, and it seems implausible that Hunter’s position with Burisma was merely coincidental. But the frenzied inflation of this story, like so much that involves the Bidens, is freighted with both dread and grief. The dread is Trump’s (arguably misplaced) fear of Biden as a competitor for the presidency in 2020, an anxiety that became a manic fixation that has led to his impeachment. The grief drives Biden’s fierce need to protect his living son, not just for himself, but for Hunter’s dead mother and brother…

But the indivisible counterpart of this heritage that O’Toole *doesn’t* stress, oddly enough, is the defiant joy we are raised to embrace despite the terrible inevitability of failure and loss. Biden, everyone agrees, is popular because he’s always hung in there, continuing to grin and politic and speechify no matter how often or how deeply he and his party are wounded.

In this election season, the idea that We will go on, because there is no choice, and because we know from experience that we have survived terrible events before… is no small promise.

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“Wait! Come back!”

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Almost got a really great shot of a roseate spoonbill that one time, right in our own little lagoon:


"Wait! Come back!"

Eat your heart out, Albatrossity!

We are cord cutters, and we’ve cobbled together a menu of TV channels that is in many ways superior to our old cable package for a lot less money. But there’s always one channel that falls through the goddamned cracks, and today it happens to be the one that’s carrying a sporting event we wouldn’t mind watching. Since we’re many miles away from a city, an antenna isn’t an option. Oh well.

Open thread!

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Adult Diversion

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I read mystery novels, always have, as a diversion. I like flawed detectives with a good old fashioned shitty home life and lots of baggage. I know it’s a cliche, but if it weren’t a cliche it wouldn’t be good comfort reading. Henning Mankell’s Wallander is probably the best example – bonus points because Mankell apparently hated writing them and would rather write anything else, and I think a little bit of that came through in his main character. Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch is good, Ian Rankin’s John Rebus is great, but I’ll read whatever Amazon gives me for free through Prime Reading. A simple crutch to occupy my mind is all I’m looking for.

I just finished Tyler Dilts’ Mercy Dogs, and I thought it was a great example of the genre. He also got the details of taking care of a parent who has dementia and medical problems right. I figure if someone gets the details you know right, they’re probably right about the other stuff, like the experience of having a traumatic brain injury.

Here’s an open thread, and if you have recommendations, please make them.

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