Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

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

This chaos was totally avoidable.

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

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

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

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

White supremacy is terrorism.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

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

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

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Repubs in Disturbingly Close Array! Open Thread

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… Over the past three years, Trump has spent his days at Mar-a-Lago — which he calls “The Southern White House” — surrounded by an unpredictable cast of Palm Beach residents, wedding guests and the characters Trump invites down for a meeting or a round of golf. It’s often led to a more freewheeling atmosphere, in which the president feels more comfortable to freely meet with people, knowing he’s outside the strictures of official Washington…

Multiple former White House officials said that Trump is much more comfortable when he is relaxing down at Mar-a-Lago and is surrounded by many fewer staffers who try to keep out shady individuals when he’s in the White House. One of those former White House officials described Trump as feeling “liberated” and at home when he’s at Mar-a-Lago…

In the early days, there was some consternation among White House officials about the lax situation. The Secret Service was “never happy,” according to the first former White House official.

“It was a bunch of hangers-on,” that official said. “You just don’t want to put the president in the same room with some folks … who were maybe closer to him when he was a developer or living in New York than you’d want, who were controversial in their own right, whether they were involved in lawsuits or other things.”

Back then, “every guy would bring a friend and the friend was some guy from some country or [a] lobbyist,” said a person close to the White House. “I think they put the kibosh on that and became a lot tougher on screening and who members were bringing as guests.”

The person remembered one time when a member showed up with people from a sub-Saharan African country who wanted to talk to Trump. In a sign that staff were trying to put some limits on things, the individuals were turned away…

War criminals, serial rapists, global gangsters — no problem! But anyone whose skin is darker than Tiger Woods’…

Laurence Leamer, the author of “Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace,” said one reason that Trump is in a better mood at the Palm Beach resort is because no members or visitors to Mar-a-Lago challenge Trump directly when they’re at his resort. Leamer noted that numerous one-time members who object to Trump’s policies resigned over their political differences.

“He can’t stand to be criticized or challenged. And when he asks you, ‘How am I doing?’ you just say ‘You’re doing great,’ that’s it, that’s what he wants to hear,” said Leamer, who has talked with Trump many times at Mar-a-Lago over the years…

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Wednesday Evening Leftovers Open Thread

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The Assault on US Embassy Baghdad Has Ended. For Now…

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Over the past couple of days Iranian backed Shi’a militia in Iraq, which describe themselves as Islamic Resistance, have attacked the heavily fortified US Embassy in Baghdad in what appears to be an attempt to besiege or occupy it or parts of it. It is important to keep in mind that US Embassy Baghdad is a large and heavily fortified compound. Perhaps the most heavily fortified diplomatic compound that we or anyone else has anywhere. The damage that was done by Ktaib Hezbullah and Nujabaa was largely done to buildings and structures around the perimeter. That doesn’t make the assault on the facility any less frightening or dangerous for the US diplomatic and Interagency personnel that live and work within the fortified embassy.

The Washington Post’s Baghdad Bureau’s Mustafa Salim is now reporting that the assault and attempted siege or occupation is over.

There are two outstanding questions: 1) what happens now? and 2) why did this happen. To answer the first, the quick reaction forces of the 100 Marines that were sent midday yesterday and the initial quick reaction companies from 82nd Airborne Division that were mobilized shortly after that are en route. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team/82nd Airborne Division (3BCT/82ndABN – the Panther Brigade) is the US’s designated rapid reaction brigade, but it is partially deployed to Afghanistan right now, so it is unclear just how much of the BCT is available if they have to deploy an entire brigade combat team. I would also expect the State Department’s Regional Security Officer (RSO) is conducting crisis action and contingency planning, as well as wargaming scenarios with his or her staff, as well as with counterparts from the Department of Defense. I expect that a Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) contingency plan is being prepared in case the assault on the embassy is restarted.

The second answer is provided by Salim:

What Salim is reporting is that the Iranian theater leadership decided that the US was responsible for the emerging Iraqi displeasure with the Iraqi government, its ties to Iran, and to Iran’s presence and actions in Iraq. This displeasure also appears to once again be breaking along tribal and sectarian lines. One of the major ongoing problems in Iraq that leads to instability is not just the tribal or sectarian divide, but the divide between the Iraqis that never went into exile and the Iraqis that did and came back. Especially those Iraqi Shi’a that went into exile in Iran, came back, and have been running the government since the US’ Coalition Provisional Authority empowered them to form the majority coalitions in successive governments. I spent almost six months conducting between 40 to 50 interviews with both Sunni and Shi’a tribal and religious leaders (often the same people as many sheikhs are also imams) across central Iraq in the summer and fall of 2008. With the exception of some of the sub-sheiks or sheiks of very small, rural tribes, all of the sheikhs and imams I interviewed, including and often especially the Shi’a ones, made it very clear that they did not like and did not trust the Shi’a political leaders that went into exile in Iran and had been empowered by being given control of the Government of Iraq (GOI). It was during this time that then Prime Minister Maliki, leading a coalition government with a Shi’a majority made up of leaders, like Maliki, who had gone into exile in Iran, began to telegraph that he was going to move against the Sawha (Awakenings movement) and Sons of Iraq (the tribal militias we were training and partnering with). These tensions have never been resolved, have begun to bubble over again, and Iran decided it was a threat to its influence in Iraq and needed to change the narrative. And the collateral damage from the retaliatory air strike this past week provided the Iranians with the opening they needed.

Now we wait to see if cooler heads can and will prevail.

Open thread!

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On The Road – ?BillinGlendaleCA – Fall Milky Way

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Good morning and Happy New Year!

We start with a special Wednesday submission from you-know-who!

And this where I break All The Rules…

As we started off in my last submission with my trip to Leo Carrillio State Park to photograph the Milky Way 3 years ago. While the photo was pleasing in many respects, it was a complete failure at capturing the Milky Way(you can see a bit of the galactic core, but that’s about it). Over the past couple of years I’ve searched for better locations and been mindful of the mistakes I made in the the photo that led my last submission to “On The Road”. I’ve been to the desert, the mountains and dark places along the coast to find the best place to capture the Milky Way on my cameras.

As the opportunity to capture the galactic core began to fade as Fall began, I headed again to Leo Carrillio State Park. Most of my journeys there that resulted in the photos here where not primarily to capture the Milky Way on my camera’s sensor, but for other photo ideas(sunsets, moon rises…). Yet, I did take my tripod and I did take pictures of the Milky Way before it made it’s early departure into the Pacific. Being that my primary motivation for the journey was not astrophotography, these shots sometimes violated “the rules” for shooting the Milky Way that I violated 3 years ago. I’ve included shots of the Milky Way with the Moon in the shot, the Milky Way in the full Moon, and the Milky Way at twilight. While many of these shots are drained of the color that you the viewer has seen in some of my other photos, I think they have a beauty in other ways.

As always, the photos for all of my submission to “On The Road” are available for purchase on my website: https://www.billinglendaleca.com/
I hear they make excellent holiday gifts!
If you like my work and want to support it on an ongoing basis I’ve set up a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/billinglendaleca

I’m not sure if Alain is going to post “On The Road” for Christmas Day or New Year’s Day, so I’ll take this opportunity to thank you all for your support this year.

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On The Road - ?BillinGlendaleCA - Fall Milky Way 5
Leo Carrillio State Park, Malibu, CASeptember 21, 2019

Just after sunset at Leo Carillio State Park.

The sun has just set behind Santa Cruz Island and casts a warm glow over Sequit Point.

Happy (Fingers Crossed) New Year!

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Happy New Year - Drew Sheneman

(Drew Sheneman via Gocomicscom)

And yet… Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker:

… In the midst of such unease, we tend to seek out moments of cheer or just consolation, and suddenly we have found one, in a cave. The cave is in Indonesia—the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, on the island of Sulawesi, to be precise—and it was occupied, according to recent findings, more than forty thousand years ago, by early modern humans. Inside it for all that time has been a fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red pigment, depicting about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo. The discoverers of its antiquity, a team of archeologists at Griffith University, in Australia, including Maxime Aubert, the chief author of an article about the painting in Nature, call it “to our knowledge, currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.”

The very first storytelling picture! The first narrative, and it tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast. What’s more, the hunters appear to be what people whose business it is to decipher cave paintings call therianthropes, humans with animal elements, like heads. These eight, then, are the earliest known examples of this mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction, which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and, for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes, it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is, for the first time, a startup.

The detailed resolution of the images in the Nature article is at first disappointing. Though the buffalo, called anoa, are distinct enough, one of the human figures, we’re told, has “a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. It is thus possible that [the therianthrope] represents a composite of at least three different kinds of animals: a human, an anoa and a quadrupedal reptile.” To this chimerical composite, one might add the trained eye of an Australian archeologist, which seems necessary to ascertain the full effect.

And yet it’s impossible not to feel a shudder of communion with these ancient beings, recounting their hopeful stories of abundance in a time that was, certainly, even more unstable than our own. (We worry daily about the next good leader; they worried daily about the next good meal.) Nor would the storytelling have been the product of a merely male hierarchy of hunting. The patriarchy had little place in caves. A study sponsored by the National Geographic Society in 2013 suggests that three-quarters of the hand stencils found on the walls of dozens of European caves were made by women, and that the paintings alongside them likely were as well. Early man may have thrown the spears, but early woman made the pictures telling how…


(We have that cat, and I need to know where to get that exercise wheel… also a cage to keep him in it!)

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