President Joe Biden authorized up to $100 million from an emergency fund to meet ‘unexpected urgent’ refugee needs stemming from the situation in Afghanistan, including for Afghan special immigration visa applicants https://t.co/dTHX5XRc5H pic.twitter.com/xevlfvFdB4
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 25, 2021
Pentagon to house Afghan interpreters at Fort Lee in Virginia https://t.co/mNFhpKwUOR
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 20, 2021
The Biden administration is planning to temporarily house about 2,500 Afghans fleeing unrest in their home country at Fort Lee, Va., with expansion to other military bases possible in the future, U.S. officials said Monday.
The Army post, about 25 miles south of Richmond, will serve as a way-station for Afghans who have passed the State Department’s screening for special immigrant visas, said John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. The group includes interpreters who worked alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan and their family members…
Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said that the administration has activated a task force that includes experts from several government agencies to take qualified applicants out of harm’s way and to the United States “once security vetting is complete.”
About 4,000 other applicants have received a lower level of approval for visas from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Price said. The administration plans to take those individuals to safety in other countries, where they will be provided with accommodations that “can last a number of months.”…
U.S. officials have said previously that they are reviewing using military installations in the Persian Gulf region to house interpreters who are earlier in the visa-review process. Few details have been released…
I’ll admit, I wondered if similar programs to help the refugees succeed in America might be useful. We so need more farmers:
Settling veterans who know little of farming on farmland. Very Roman Republican! https://t.co/WK62XVoUWA
— The Mall Krampus (@cakotz) July 22, 2021
New Gallup data shows support for immigration at all-time highs pic.twitter.com/E3ZX596m6C
— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) July 23, 2021
Of course, the GOP Death Cultists are agin it:
Sixteen Republicans voted against Jason Crow's bill to repatriate the people who helped us in our west Asian adventures. Sixteen. Hey, Kevin McCarthy, your caucus blows goats.
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 23, 2021
The 16 R's who voted to leave the Afghan interpreters out to dry: Biggs, Boebert, Brooks, DeJarlais, Duncan, Good, Gosar, Hern, Hice, Massie, Moore (AL), Perry, Posey, Rosendale, Roy, Taylor-Greene. pic.twitter.com/prWU5mLpGW
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 23, 2021
this is disgusting even for rand paul, whose neighbor should be given a second crack at him https://t.co/Llopvuzeov
— NATION-STATE INSURGENCY MACHINE (@golikehellmachi) July 19, 2021
"The U.S. has asked Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to take in about 9,000 Afghans who assisted with the American occupation." There are over 18,000 of these applicants, over 50,000 family members, and they deserve US green cards, not this weak shit. https://t.co/vS8KEvkBWl
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) July 2, 2021
raven
They need to watch “Clarkson’s Farm”!
NorthLeft12
Canada has agreed to accept refugees from Afghanistan who worked with our armed forces and diplomats. I have not heard any numbers mentioned but I hope it is more than ten thousand.
Canada, since Confederation, has benefited greatly from immigration from all parts of the world.
Yeah, I know, indigenous Canadians might disagree. Especially with the first few groups (Vikings, French, and English) who found their way to Canada.
OzarkHillbilly
Reality is knocking on Paul’s head, but there is nobody home.
Suzanne
I am shocked — but never surprised — by how reprehensible Rand Paul, Biggs, Gosar, etc. truly are.
It’s so disappointing. I am fairly skeptical/cynical by nature, so I don’t expect them to be better…. but I do wish for it to be different.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly: I feel like Rand Paul has aged really fast in the last year. I wonder if his Covid infection was worse than he let on. He looks really bad.
Ken
Obviously the problem is agricultural subsidies, and if those were cut the farmers would keep working; by analogy with cutting off the extra unemployment benefits.
PsiFighter37
@Suzanne: Blame their constituents. They’re the assholes who keep electing assholes to office.
Gin & Tonic
I support immigration for those Afghans, but it sure would be nice if green card applications for spouses of American citizens could be processed on a timely basis too.
Geminid
One of the Republicans voting to leave the interpreters out to dry is my VA 5th District congressman, Bob Good. A former Liberty University fundraising administrator, Good is every bit as despicable as Boebert and Taylor-Greene, just less flamboyant.
Good won his first term by only 5%. The 5th will be a prime pickup opportunity next year, and Democrats here and I think nationally will go all out to make Good gone.
The district lines drawn by the new redistricting commission may help. The district drawn by General Assembly Republicans in 2011 was intended to be safe for a Republican, as were the 2nd, 7th, and 10th Districts won by Luria, Spanberger, and Wexler in 2018. (the 2nd and 7th districts were altered some when a federal judge ordered the VA 4th District redrawn, in a case under the Civil Rights Act that led to the election of the excellent Representative Dan McEachin.)
NotMax
Weekend history hook-up. Longish compilation yet a relatively fast read; a few minutes’ worth of gustatory history of the Civil War
More sowbelly than you can shake a stick at (if that’s your idea of a good time).
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Everything is backed up. Apparently, it takes forever to renew passports right now.
Amir Khalid
@raven:
On the other hand, no one really deserves to have a smug douchebag like Jeremy Clarkson inflicted on them.
Baud
I thought most farming was corporatized now.
OzarkHillbilly
I find it funny that in pinhead’s eyes the US is be-all, be-everything, epitome of desire for people all over the world. Never even occurs to him that some Afghans might feel more comfortable, more at home in one of the other ‘Stans. I personally think most would rather come to the US, but can’t help wondering if that is just my egotistical westernized supremacy speaking.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
My reaction was well. Also, apparently the assumption that State is legally authorized to hand out green cards like candy.
OzarkHillbilly
How very Christian of him
raven
@Amir Khalid: It’s funny. He fucks up nearly every aspect of the work and his assistant is hilarious. I also had never heard of him so that probably helped. They renewed a second season!
germy
Is Gosar suffering from some sort of brain wasting disease? I don’t mean this in a sarcastic way. When I see footage of his speeches, he’s so odd. His head movements, hand gestures, eye squinting:
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Heh, looks fun.
stinger
@OzarkHillbilly: That was my thought, too — that some people might want to stay relatively closer to their native land. If things change, it would be easier to return. And if not, the climate, culture, religion, etc. would be closer to what they are used to than Virginia. Religion especially.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: It is corporatized. Those fields won’t sit empty. Corporations or neighboring farms will buy them up. I doubt if farmers could “retire” if that didn’t happen. Their land is their retirement account.
If it really is “unclear” who’s going to farm that land, that’s a sign those farmers’ kids chose to move to the city.
At least in Iowa, small farms are a disappearing breed. You can’t make a living that way.
dmsilev
@Suzanne: I was surprised not to see Louie ‘perennial contender for Stupidest Representative’ Gohmert on the list.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
We need to get some liberal Democrats into farming. Those rural states are killing us.
dmsilev
@germy: The Post had this hilarious story on Gosar several days ago, people from his district saying ‘as a dentist he was great. As a politician, he blows goats. WTF?’.
raven
The best thing Jeremy’s done: why I can’t wait for more Clarkson’s Farm
stinger
@germy: Watched that clip. He is weird. I can’t decide if it’s medical or fundigelical.
OzarkHillbilly
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Small farms around here are plentiful, but they tend to be cattle and/or sheep operations, something that isn’t an all day, every day job. It pays the taxes and helps defray the mortgage if there is one.
Suzanne
@PsiFighter37:
Oh, do not fear: I most certainly do.
I used the FTFNYT tool this week to see the party balance of my area (do I live in a bubble?). My area is 70% Democratic and 30% Republican. I told my husband that this was now my maximum. I have zero desire to be one of those Democratic settlers in a red place. Sorry. That’s a shitty way to live and I’m done with it.
germy
@Baud:
https://www.soulfirefarm.org/
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Dr. Biden saluting the US soccer team (photo)
US soccer team returns salute (photo)
OzarkHillbilly
The trailer alone makes me want to agree. I hope I get to see it someday.
Suzanne
@dmsilev: Gosar is so, so bad. He represented the worst parts of Arizona, BTW. He has Prescott in his district but everything else there is bad.
Cameron
These patriotic Republicans are acting in the country’s finest tradition of hanging allies out to dry. Just ask the Kurds, multi-time winners of the coveted Charlie Brown Football award.
Geminid
@Baud: It depends on how “most” is applied. The most money is made by corporate farmers. And studies show that by far the most subsidies go to corporate entities, and to individual absentee owners living in zip codes in cities like San Francisco and Minnapolis, or in gated golf or skiing communities. These people only see pictures of tractors.
But most farmers are just people, and often families. Some make a good income, more are working poor. Many of these have full time jobs.
Small scale farming has been in decline for a century, but it could be making a comeback. Interest in organic food, and food locally grown has increased, and a more people are making a living growing it. This development seems to be gathering steam, and may amount to something economically and socially.
WereBear
I agree. Might be more going on than “Emperor Palpatine” disease.
A big new study from Britain indicates that people can be dragged down by COVID-19, even without the clear signs of Long Covid. All the more reason… to use science and reason.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Is there a valid reason, other than sloth?
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly: Can I say something about farming that surprised me, as someone who has lived in cities or suburbs her entire life? My MIL grew up in Fayetteville (Arkansas) and she moved to San Francisco, met my FIL, married and had and raised her kids, and then the two of them moved back. She recently inherited her father’s small cattle farm when he passed. I had always heard that farming was really difficult work. Honestly, I was kind of shocked the first time I went out there by how little work it was. The cows eat the grass, they needed some supplemental stuff a couple of times, they needed to be moved (herded?) around a little bit, a little bit of fence repair. Like, maybe a grand total of three hours of work per day, albeit broken up. On subsequent visits, I would see more of the operations, like when they would have the vet come, or take the cows to auction. I’m by no means saying that it was nothing. But it was by no means as intensive as even most desk jobs.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Has anyone asked Rand if he’d like to take their place?
Betty
@PsiFighter37: I understand the sentiment, but one of the jerks is my Congressman who I definitely did not vote for. He is a devoted Trumper. So not all constituents.
WereBear
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The successful family farms around here have gone artisan. They specialize in organic produce, special cheeses, humanely raised meat, even winemaking.
They are all over the farmer’s markets every local town has at least one day a week, and many have contracts with local restaurants who do farm to table.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: After the Black Death in England, farms got bigger because inherited land was divided among fewer people. And many farms switched from growing crops to raising animals because it was less labor intensive and they didn’t have enough people to do the harder work.
Life sucked in the 14th Century
WaterGirl
It’s not good when your first words of the day are Fuck Rand Paul.
Rand Paul: “You stay where you are and wait to be murdered and tortured, oh, and thanks for all the help.”
Suzanne
@WereBear: Yes, that’s how my MIL is doing the farm. She’s super-liberal, so not a hypocrite. The successful family farms are surviving by selling to essentially the liberal/NPR crowd.
Geminid
@OzarkHillbilly: Most of the farms around here are like that. The farmers keep cows and make hay in time left over from a factory or highway department job. Then they get to retire and keep cows and make hay. And hang out at the store and talk about it.
debbie
@germy:
He sounds like some of the members of the Ohio legislature. All dumb as rocks.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WereBear: You remind me of something a guide told us in New Zealand. In order to compete on the global market, many farmers were raising “value-added” crops or animals. It could be organic or just something particularly high quality.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Being a city/suburb kid, it didn’t really dawn on me until I was considerably older how many people were raised with the expectation that their parents would literally pass down a money-making asset or a career. It is exceedingly foreign to me that people in this day and age have resentment because they cannot make a living doing the job their parents did. Like, what?! That is a lifestyle difference that I really did not expect.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Not completely sure, but I think it’s a combination of State people not being as efficient teleworking and an influx of new applications with people travelling again.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
Isn’t it a lack of staffing up during TFG’s administration (like the IRS)?
Baud
@Suzanne:
Seems to me there are two separate issues there. One is whether the resentment is legitimate, and the second is the decision of a majority of them to take that resentment out on us.
debbie
@Suzanne:
I have a couple of well-off friends who have bought small farms. They’re running them as more of a hobby than an occupation, but I figure any land left fallow can only be a good thing.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: I think it’s because so few Americans have a realistic understanding of the rest of the world. They probably assume the “rest of the ‘stans” (central Asia) is as poor as Afghanistan is, but they were Soviet states and were much more modernized. Still, the culture and religion are more of a match, and as @stinger: says, easier to return home from if Afghanistan ever stabilized enough to allow them to.
Edited to add: the program that brought my two Muslim exchange girls to the states also included students in our area from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic:
Sloth? TFG decimated the State Department.
Suzanne
@Baud: I go with “no” and “no”. It is a blessing and a privilege to inherit an asset like a farm or a business, or to be raised on a track to a specific career or trade, especially one that doesn’t require the expense and effort of higher education. It is not the reality for most, and thus the resentment is misplaced (and is quite frankly really gross and entitled), IMO.
Jeffro
@germy: I’ve noticed this as well
Hosting a demon will do that to a guy
debbie
@Suzanne:
Around here, it seems like most farms are inherited and then sold to become apartment/housing developments.
I used to drive through farmland to get my hair cut. Bit by bit, it’s turning into industrial parks and housing. And fucking roundabouts.
Jeffro
@Geminid: I can’t wait to make Good gone. My entire adult life, I’ve had Reps who were at least tolerable (and usually ones I could be proud of). Not this lowlife.
OzarkHillbilly
No! Absolutely not! ……… Well, OK, just this once. ;-)
Cattle, sheep and goats are good that way, especially cattle. Sheep and goats tend to need an hour or 2 of personal attention every day but otherwise, with a good dog or 2, are able to take care of themselves. Pigs and chickens need a little more attention every day.
The big time suck on any farming operation is equipment maintenance/repair. All that stuff one uses to make everything else a snap needs care too. That’s what farmers do all winter in the hopes they won’t have to do that much the rest of the year.
There is always something that needs to be done. The guys I worked with who had cattle or sheep on the old homestead spent most of their wkends catching up. In the valley down below me, a couple of those places are in desperate need of new fencing, have been for years. I’m always dodging cattle down there but they just keep piecing it all back together, either they don’t have the time to restring it, or they don’t have the money. Probably both.
debbie
@Jeffro:
?
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: Oh, I’m sure he’d be happy to. s//
OzarkHillbilly
My pig farming buddy sells his pork and birds to a farm to table market.
Amir Khalid
@raven:
If you’re not familiar with car shows on TV, Clarkson was a co-host of the BBC’s worldwide hit Top Gear, until he was fired for assaulting a member of the production staff. Clarkson was Top Gear‘s resident smug douchebag, which of course made him a bigger star to the show’s fans than his co-hosts.
OzarkHillbilly
It doesn’t surprise me and I am at least somewhat sympathetic. The old homestead has been in the family for generations, passed down from father to son to daughter to son… Everybody grew up working that land when they weren’t in school and were told they would get it when Ma and Pa died. If they didn’t want it, their brother/sister did. It was a constant, always in the family. Even if they left they could return once or twice a year for a visit.
Growing up, they were taught that it had always been that way and that it always would (or at least that was the hopeful lie the parents told) and yet now…
Change is hard, and sometimes it’s heartbreaking.
zhena gogolia
Somebody cleaned up and captioned the Tucker Carlson/Montana Man video:
lashonharangue
@OzarkHillbilly:
The people I have met that are making it work environmentally and economically have changed a lot from how their neighbors do it.
https://holisticmanagement.org/
Another Scott
@Baud: Yup. TFG gutted services like that.
GovExec – State to surge staffing for passport office
It will take a while to fix everything that they broke.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@debbie: Yes, for sure. My MIL is selling the farm she inherited because the ones around her have become housing developments, so she is selling to a housing developer and then buying another farm further out from the city.
She is not an asshole, but I am really tired of the generalized attitude from much of that cohort that they work harder and are bootstrappier than the rest of us, especially us ELITES who went to COLLEGE.
frosty
@raven: Clarkson’s Farm looks good. I hadn’t heard of it, will have to put it on the list.
frosty
@Suzanne: Add Scott Perry to that list. York County can do better, 2022 will be the third election where I’ll be working to get rid of him.
Barbara
@Geminid: Good is in the district that is deliberately structured to dilute the influence of Cville and Albemarle County.
Barbara
@OzarkHillbilly: But the Afghanis are Muslim so, hey, no gratitude is necessary.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly:
Again, I’m sorry, but I’m not sympathetic. They were raised with some really fantastical expectations, and the worst thing that happens if those expectations don’t work out is that they go live the same kinds of lives as most of the rest of us working stiffs.
debbie
@Suzanne:
Too many people think resentment is a required part of patriotism. //
OzarkHillbilly
@lashonharangue: Adapt or die.
WereBear
I’m seeing how the right wing attempts to push vaccination are falling flat, and I’m amazed — after a year of scaring people with lies about COVID in general and then vaccines in particular — that they thought they could turn the mobs in a different direction.
I’m not sure when it started, but now the mob is in charge. They aren’t doing everything the leaders tell them to, and maybe, never did. They do what they want, and that’s that.
I’m really really hoping this is the hill they die on. Metaphorically, and even, otherwise.
Suzanne
@debbie: I think the aspect of resentment that I find the most infuriating is the idea that people who were good students in high school or college shouldn’t be more financially successful. Like, dudes, did you think that school honestly didn’t matter?! Did you think that some of us were putting our noses to the grindstone because it was fun and we didn’t want to be rewarded for it?! Like, many of us went to college at great personal sacrifice specifically so we could make more money.
germy
germy
WereBear
@Suzanne: My personal take when I encounter this attitude is to ask, “So, when you are dragged out of the ambulance in the emergency room, you tell them to bring you the best football players?”
Kay
There’s really two kinds of small farm operations. They can produce for a small, high quality consumer market or they can operate as farm managers and grow crops like corn or soybeans or wheat on leased acres or a combination of land they own and leased acres. The “farm” you see when you drive by (the house and fields around the house) may be just a small portion of the ground they’re working that season because the leased acres don’t have to connect. They can work 50 acres “here” and 70 acres 2 miles away. They grow commodity crops because those crops can be combined with the harvest of other small operators and stored and sold thru a broker. They have to be good managers – it’s complicated- they have to be able to price all the outlays up front correctly and then predict the profit 6 months later when they don’t know the weather and they don’t know the eventual sale price. They have ranges, though. There’s room for error within a range of weather and eventual sale price.
You can be a “farmer” and not farm at all. You collect lease payments from people who farm your ground. The price of the lease fluctuates with the value of the ground and the value of the ground fluctuates with the value of the crop grown in an area. Again, ranges though- it’s not “zero to infinity” – it’s more like “between 5k and 7k” – they’re just endlessly searching for the sweet spot in these ranges.
Geminid
@lashonharangue: And many of the people making organic farming work made the transition on the family farms they grew up on.
frosty
@OzarkHillbilly: I worked with a guy who had a small farm in Anne Arundel County growing ‘baccy. Also a crop that doesn’t require daily work (I guess).
He had a cartoon on his cubicle wall: “I heard you won the lottery Clem, whatcha gonna do with all the money?”
”Reckon I’ll keep farming ‘til it’s gone. “
Suzanne
@WereBear: For sure.
American workers — college-educated professionals and not — do not make enough money and that sucks. But that is a separate issue from the resentment of the working class toward the college-educated middle class. No matter what happens, pay is never going to be equal, and it is likely that those with an advantage in the knowledge economy will make more. I don’t see that as a bad thing, as long as everyone has enough.
frosty
@PsiFighter37: Let’s revise that to “blame their voters”. At least a third of Perry’s constituents want him gone.
WereBear
@Geminid: In the last few years, I visited a model dairy farm. It’s been in the same family at least three generations, and the middle-aged paterfamilias gave the tour. He was quite vocal about the contributions his children contributed to their current operation.
More humane was a big part of these changes. Even I, with my decades of animal activism behind me, could not see any sign the cows were mistreated at all. They showed every indicator that they were actually contented.
Every cow and calf had a name. All the employees, inheritors or not, told funny stories about their favorites.
Geminid
@Suzanne: I know a comfortably retired industrial chemist who makes that to point to his brother back on the farm in Missouri. He likes pulling dandelions and other weeds on his son and daughter-in-law’s property, and doesn’t miss farming at all.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I think that’s my fault. I’ve been pretty successful phoning it in.
frosty
@Suzanne: Agreed. My car mechanic will likely pass the business to his son, who was working in the shop and is now manning the desk.
Suzanne
@Geminid: I think it’s interesting how the term elite has come to mean “anyone who went to college and has a job which required that degree”. Since I attended in-state public universities on scholarships, the vast majority of the people with whom I associated were by no means what anyone would consider elite. Most came from very middle-class upbringings, attended mediocre public schools, also had jobs, used public transport or rode bicycles, took out some student loans, and earned some scholarship money.
raven
@Amir Khalid: I’ll put you down as a no.
sanjeevs
Story about how social media influencers were paid to promote anti-vaccine content by an agency registered in the U.K. and Russia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-57928647.amp
Another Scott
@Geminid: You make some good points, but I have to think that farming is going to continue to change (and continue to become smaller as a percentage of the population) going forward. Cutting a slot in the ground and hoping for the best is too risky now.
I assume that greenhouses and similar intensive agriculture will become a larger percentage of farming (except maybe for things like nuts and corn, and that may happen too eventually). Water and nutrients can be titrated, temperatures and light can be adjusted, even things like CO2 levels can be adjusted. Increased productivity, and productivity per acre, and having production closer to cities reducing transportation (and refrigeration/etc.) costs, will help mitigate the costs. Plus it would allow more land to return to forests and prairies that can help with AGW.
But we’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@WereBear:
The bloom is off the rose that is TFG. It was his idea to hold back on vaccination—in fact, he still hasn’t spoken up—and the rising death rate of his base ought to show that Dear Leader is not infallible and can make no error or do no wrong.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: I particularly enjoy the way rich R politicians talk scornfully of elites.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: Also aren’t most vets from rural counties, like our John Cole? While the mind recoils in horror at thought of the kind of accidents that would happen to a farm run by John. presumably this would be a good option for a vets with a farming background.
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Yeah, no shit. Ted Cruz, a Harvard alum, has absolutely zero business implying that anyone is elite.
I also can’t help but notice that the GOP encourages their voters to look down on college graduates as soon as women and black people start really kicking ass at college. When white men dominated college campuses, it was honorable. Now that black women are the fastest-growing cohort at colleges and women outnumber men amongst graduates, the tenor is decidedly different, and they want to devalue the degree.
WereBear
I wish. It will be blamed on the usual suspects.
lashonharangue
@Suzanne:
The ranchers I know who adopted holistic management were knowledge workers, even if they didn’t have degrees. They make measurements of ground cover to assess the effectiveness of their operations. They plan when to move cattle based on the carrying capacity of specific parcels and projected recovery times, as well as adjust herd size based on weather trends. They bred their cattle based on what thrived in their location. They constantly look for ways to deal with problems without resorting to costly inputs of chemicals or machinery. And…. they are often resented by their neighbors who want to keep doing things the old way.
raven
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: “aren’t most vets from rural counties”????
Elizabelle
@WereBear: They can blame all they want. They cannot necessarily make it stick, though, and it would seem a lot of people are paying a lot more attention these days.
Pandemics, death, and insurrections tend to make that happen.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sure people don’t change, but the decline of the family farm been going on since the 1930 and everything from The New Deal to Farm Aid hasn’t been able to stop it. That’s four generations now, some point people need to deal with it.
smith
@sanjeevs: And vaccination efforts in Russia are now seriously hampered by vaccine resistance. Did they think their own people would somehow be immune to these messages?
germy
@Suzanne:
Black women and men found employment in government offices like the DMV (because there they were less vulnerable to the cruel and racist bullshit of the private sector) and so there’s lots of animosity towards the DMV and government “bureaucrats” as well.
frosty
@raven: Clarkson’s douchebaggery was a frequent target for his co-hosts, and they turned it into a punchline. It was one of my favorite shows until …
who in the world is so full of himself he thinks he can punch out his boss and keep his job? Clarkson, the fucking idiot.
Suzanne
@lashonharangue:
Yeah, no shit. My MIL is running the farm much differently than her father did. She went to the local university, and took classes in environmental science, and is making her farm more productive. I hope she reaps some rewards from that once she gets set up at her new place.
germy
@Another Scott:
Vertical farming is getting more widespread.
And this is probably far off, but I wonder if lab-grown meat will be an alternative to acres of livestock that need to be fed and managed?
Gvg
@Suzanne: you didn’t see everything then. First, farm accidents are deadly. Bulls are dangerous, so most if not all have to be castrated, which is dirty work and not easy. Livestock has to be fed everyday no matter what the weather is. I am not sure which kind of cattle you mean, meat or milk. My experience is second hand with dairy farming. My uncle was the runt of 5 children but the only one who wanted to farm. It was remarkable how muscular he ended up even as he got old. Heaving bales of hay, even shoving the 2000 lb. owes just a little to have room to hook up the milk machines, fixing things around the farm endlessly, building things, keeping milking equipment super clean so milk can pass infection, shoving pills down sick cows throats, helping with births, raising orphans….that’s the physical side of it. The mental stuff is also hard, records of breeding, finances, constant self education, etc. he was good at it for decades and expanded until his wife got cancer again and then he lost the farm that our family had had over a century. None of his kids wanted the farm life by the way.
Ranching beef is more out in the weather but I don’t know as much about it. I will say most kinds of farming has seasons of super urgent big amounts of work, and slower times when you watch things grow and can’t do much. Logically your relatives would have company in the slow times?
The lack of health benefits is a major problem. They also probably aren’t paying into social security because owners don’t have wages.
Suzanne
@germy: Yep.
And look how they heap scorn on teachers, who are overwhelmingly women who went to college. “Breaking the back of the teachers’ union”?! It makes me sick.
I also resent those who deplore the state of “America’s failing public schools” from the same party as Mr. C-in-Meats.
Geminid
@Barbara: The western boundary of the VA 5th runs along the Blue Ridge, except where it makes an eastern swing around Lynchburg, putting those predominately Democratic voters in the conservative 6th District. Just adding Lynchburg to the 5th could make the difference in a district Good carried by 5%.
But the 5th District might change more than that. Both the 5th and the 6th extend in parallel all the way to Northern Virginia. If the redistricting commission is considering compactness and population trends, it may well combine the northern halves of the two districts into one with a southern boundary somewhere near the James River. That’s what I would do.
Mike in NC
Somebody noted that if Facebook and FOX News existed in the 1950s and 60s, spreading misinformation about vaccines, today we’d have millions of people in this country with polio.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Josh Hawley’s father was a banker. John Kennedy went to Vanderbilt, U Va Law and Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a very expensive corporate lawyer before he re-grew his accent and became the Foghorn T Cornpone of Trumpism (sometimes called Mr Haney on twitter, but I think that’s an obscure reference these days). The contempt the Ivy/Oxbridge Rs have for the trump base is different from trump’s, but just as strong and cynical.
Suzanne
@Gvg: My in-laws have a beef cattle farm. They pay a vet to come out to have the bulls castrated and to help if any of them get sick. They have enough acreage that the cattle eat grass much of the year and then they feed them hay part of the year, which they put out with a tractor (I did it a couple of times). They also get cattle cubes, so those have to go out. I have been out there a lot, at multiple times if the year. I would say that their biggest task was mending fences when they got damaged, or putting up new ones when they divided it into separate pastures for rotational grazing. So, yes, there were spurts when it was more intensive work, and then longer periods where it was less intense. I never saw it exceed 40 hours, though. And it is not more physically strenuous that working in a warehouse, or as a hotel maid, or a retail worker, or an administrative assistant.
Kay
@Mike in NC:
One of the things that worries me is the anti-vaccers are recruiting among the newly anti-vacc Trumpsters. I think we’re going to have a lot more anti-vaccers. Covid is like the gateway drug where the anti-vaccers pul them into the lifestyle. Ugh. I’m not even mad anymore, they shouldn’t flatter themselves that I’m judging or “scorning” them. That’s a level of interest I no longer have. I’m just sick of them and their incessant whining.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: There were lots of changes going on when I was growing up (I think I’m older than you). Kids older than me could earn money with a paper route or working at the corner store. They could graduate from HS and get a good union job at the GM or Frigidaire or US Steel plant, or go to college for not much money and do engineering or law or whatever and be solidly middle class.
Gas was cheap, cars were cheap, it was easy to live on not much money. Our older friends and parents mostly (but not always) did Ok.
Then gas went from $0.30 to $1+. Interest rates went through the roof so credit to get a car was expensive. Factories closed. If one made it into college, annual tuition and fees increases could mean that going the next year would be difficult or impossible.
We were told growing up that we were good kids and the world was wide open to us if we worked hard and kept out of trouble. Yet the world seemed to be falling apart just as we were starting to be old enough to really contribute.
I can understand the resentment that built up and festered.
(And to be clear, yes, much of that resentment came from the privilege of being a young white guy in the midwest. Women and minorities had it worse even if we didn’t see it.)
Stories that we (collectively) tell our kids growing up are important, but so is having competent leadership and managers thinking about the future and planning for change. Bad things can happen when people get resentful, and people do get resentful when there are wrenching changes in the economy that workers are just supposed to grin and bear it and figure it out on their own. Ultimately, our stories need to have some resemblance to reality.
I had a feeling of dread after the GQP blew up the economy with the housing bust and Great Recession. (The 1930s rise of fascism should have been a less on that everyone knew.) The US government didn’t do enough. At least a few lessons were learned and applied this time and we’re doing better…
[/soapbox]
tl;dr – Even if feelings are irrational, they need to be addressed or bad things can happen.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Thin Black Duke
@WereBear: As long as they die, I don’t care.
Suzanne
@Another Scott:
I think this is such an important thing to remember. Every successful woman and/or racial minority I know expected it to be a fight. They expected it to be competitive and that they would have to prove themselves. Maybe I feel this more acutely because I am in a totally white-and-male-dominated industry, and the educational requirements just keep escalating while the salaries hold steady.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Many of them are now creating bad things for themselves in order to feel resentment.
Jim Appleton
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: He’d grow mustard.
Or Subarus.
Suzanne
@Baud: Not to mention, plenty of people figured out that the economy was changing and that their goals would have to change with it. Why are black women the fastest-growing cohort at US colleges? Because they figured this out. Why are women enrolling and graduating and getting higher GPAs than dudes? Because they figured this out. Why are US medical schools graduating higher and higher percentages of immigrants? Because they are figuring this out!
I would be sympathetic if they were only frustrated by “shifts in the economy” but that isn’t it. They are frustrated that the “wrong people” are succeeding.
Kay
Nina Turner entered into a partnership with Mercury Public Affairs to start her own lobbying/PR group after the 2016 election.
It’s an attenuated connection but it’s also exactly the sort of connection Nina Turner would pounce on if it was Hillary Clinton in this partnership instead of Nina Turner.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
God love Pat Buttram for his brilliant portrayal of one of the great characters in tv sitcom history.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
raven
@frosty: I just don’t care, the show was funny.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Putting his own stupendous luck aside, it’s noteworthy that concern over spreading it to others has no place in his algorithm.
Baud
@Suzanne:
And of course, if the “wrong people” aren’t succeeding, it’s their own damn fault.
Suzanne
@Baud:
A stunning lack of personal responsibility. Must not have been raised right. Where are the fathers?!
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Yup.
After I got my PhD and was waiting for my “ship to come in”, I worked for a company that had a bunch of pizza franchises. My degree was very specialized so I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get a job in it in that town doing what I wanted to do, so I was Ok with waiting for a while. There was a young woman who worked in the office that I was chatting with once, giving my “woe is me” story about not having the world at my feet as I was told it would be.
She said, “Tell me about it. I was told the same while working on my MBA and here I am working as a glorified entry-level person…”
;-)
I think we were on the leading edge of the cohort that was told that everything would be perfect if we just got that expensive degree!! Education is important and usually does pay off eventually, but it’s just one part of the puzzle.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If he was also doing his own personal health care, I’d be fine. But he’s not.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
bolding added to reflect the caveats later in the thread
Amir Khalid
@frosty:
The guy Clarkson punched out wasn’t an American-style executive producer; he had that p-word in his job title, but he was really a rank-and-file BBC employee, more like a production assistant. Which only makes Clarkson’s assault all the more heinous.
WereBear
@The Thin Black Duke: I saw your loss on the COVID thread. My deep sympathies.
MagdaInBlack
@Gvg: Thank you. My experience farming is first hand. Its hard work. Period.
The Thin Black Duke
@WereBear: Thank you.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: I can never quite grok why they can’t/won’t grok that part about spreading infection, but then I think back to a story from The Washington Post in the early days, interviewing people at some fancy outdoor mall in suburban Atlanta, a guy at a wine bar terrace saying he was concerned, of course, but he figured he wasn’t part of the most at-risk “demographic”. I could just picture that early, middle-aged Chad in a pastel polo shirt and boat shoes, the type who make me wish smugness was painful.
and I’m not a believer but when they talk about prayer and putting their faith in God rather than Fauci, I picture Jesus sitting on cloud, rubbing his temples and saying “I sent you fucking goobers three fucking vaccines….”
My Jesus curses like a Soprano.
frosty
@raven: Agreed. I’m pissed that he threw it all away and the show ended. Grand Tour was OK, but not the same. No “Star in a reasonably-priced car”. Which Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise did brilliantly, BTW.
@Amir Khalid: I didn’t know that, and you’re right, that makes it worse. Punching down.
WereBear
When I hit college and needed to pick a major, I could have been resentful that my two biggest career interests were the two highest in demand.
Instead, I went with something that was still new, IT and computers. One could get a degree in it, but it wasn’t necessary, especially after I discovered my skills learned by doing were in high demand.
Now, I’ve had a successful career in it, as these things go, and journalism is full of people working big box stores, and lawyers are similarly overstocked.
As the saying goes, You can have anything you want. You just can’t have everything you want.
raven
@frosty: I don’t know anything about any of that. His show on his farm is fun.
Kay
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
People have been telling me for months- more than a year now, I guess- that they observe changes in their children after Covid. It’s always cognitive. I don’t have an opinion- I have understood from the start that they have incomplete information on Covid and recommendations would change so although I lean toward the idea that it either isn’t happening or is caused by something other than Covid I don’t know.
I have heard it over and over and over though from people who are not political and not invested in anything other than their children’s health. My middle son had Covid and he was quite sick (for a healthy 25 year old) – not hospitalized but it laid him out for a week – and he says he hasn’t noticed any changes. He got the vaccine. He doesn’t want to get Covid again. It’s the sickest he’s ever been.
WhatsMyNym
@Another Scott:
No-Till farming would be a big boost to surviving climate change for the farmer and the world.
For farmers across the country, it comes as no surprise to hear that conservation tillage practices – particularly continuous no-till – can save time and money compared to conventional tillage. The potential benefits of no-till are well-documented, from improving soil health to reducing annual fuel and labor investments.
Still, continuous no-till has been adopted across only 21 percent of all cultivated cropland acres in the United States. Why? One concern involves money saved compared to money spent. Can fuel and labor reductions really make up for the money invested in switching to a new farming practice?
MagdaInBlack
@WhatsMyNym: In the early “80’s my husband ran the No-Till program for Lasalle County, IL. He wrote the original county No-Till Handbook, a couple copies of which I still have around here somewhere. I don’ know about now, but it sure required a lot of ” Round Up” then
Eta: His educational background was Ag. Production, so we do have some college folk out in the hinterland. Also too, it was a lot of physical work.
Baud
@Kay:
I’m surprised I haven’t gotten an email. I should check my spam folder.
Another Scott
@WhatsMyNym: Interesting. Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sorry, not sorry. Good.
WhatsMyNym
@MagdaInBlack:
Small world, I grew up DuPage County in the 60’s and 70’s, when it was the edge of the suburbs.
Using herbicides was/is always the easiest way to get somebody to switch, along with trying seasonal No-Till. There are better methods though, depending on crop and local factors.
Another Scott
@MagdaInBlack: Neat.
I’m reminded of stories like this:
He only plows about 1.5″ deep, but uses lots of chemistry.
I have recollection of a previous corn record in Iowa that used deep plowing (16″?) as their “secret” to high yields, and also using lots and lots of fertilizer, etc. A similar story, from Iowa..
There are many ways to skin the cat, but keeping more stuff in the ground (by not turning it over too frequently) has to be good for the future.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@debbie: yup, my Schaden is a’freudening
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
What really, really ticks me off is how they are trying to criminalize Fauci. I hope he has protection. I worry about lone lunatic nutjobs.
debbie
@Kay:
I thought I heard getting vaccinated seem to end any previous COVID-related cognitive difficulties.
Sadly, I’m still waiting for my jabs to make me smarter.
Baud
MagdaInBlack
@Another Scott: Considering they started pushing No-Till way back then, the fact that we are still only at 21% is not encouraging, to me at least.
MagdaInBlack
@WhatsMyNym: Back when Fox Valley Mall was surrounded by corn fields. I remember ?
Kent
Farming is probably the most stupid idea for Afghan immigrants. Unless you are talking about something exploitative like dumping them into the San Joaquin Valley to pick lettuce or something.
Buying and operating a farm in the US requires an immense amount of capitol. Who is going to provide those $1-5 million loans for an Afghan family to buy a dairy farm along with all the equipment? And who is going to teach them how to actually do that work? It requires a lifetime of learning to know how to run a profitable American farm. I grew up on farms and still have a lot of family who farm. It can be a brutal and unprofitable life. Most of my family living on farms now have outside employment or side businesses to make it work.
brantl
@OzarkHillbilly: Cattle and sheep may not be all day, but they are every day.
MattF
Kinzinger will serve on the Select Committee.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: They are also frustrated because the “rule” that white men should always be at the front of the line for everything is changing, and they resent the hell out of that because they believe they have earned that “right”. “Why are you taking away my rights?” they howl.
WhatsMyNym
@MagdaInBlack:
Forget Fox Valley Mall, I remember when Oakbrook Center was it for shopping and then the opening of Yorktown Center. Otherwise you had to go into Chicago if you couldn’t find it locally or in catalogs. :-)
ETA: pretty amazing what’s important to you as a kid, shopping centers must have been my thing even back then.
Doug R
@NorthLeft12: My grandfather fled Ukraine with his young family just before the Holodomor.
I’m glad he picked Canada.
NotMax
@Kent
Virginia, future poppy farming capitol of America?
//
Baud
@MattF:
Wow.
Doug R
@OzarkHillbilly: Covid has shown to cause brain damage in at least 25% of survivors. Not that Rand Paul had that much to start with…
https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/covid-19-causes-brain-damage-even-in-mild-cases/285-eec1cf1c-ee28-4601-8af2-df71252fd340
debbie
@Baud:
Really? They’d pretty much cut him off from the party anyway. NFLTG.
Steve in the ATL
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I knew the crowd at Balloon Juice skewed older but wow….
debbie
For Karen Marie, after last night’s discussion on Cheney:
debbie
@MattF:
I scrolled and scrolled through all the comments and only counted two negative ones. It makes me think these noisy TFGettes are really in the minority of their party.
But this one’s my favorite comment and it’s the Minnie slippers that seal the deal:
brantl
@Suzanne: Yeah? When the place you grew up in, sweating your ass off to make it work, and having it be a part of all of your existence, tell me how that might feel to you?
MattF
@debbie: I think there’s an unreported story about McCarthy losing control of the R caucus. Can Pelosi appoint Republicans to existing House committees? Just wondering…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MattF:
I think control goes the other way. The “Freedom Caucus” is in charge of the leadership.
MomSense
OT but what the hell am I going to do with all the dill, basil, cilantro, lettuce and spinach? My freezer is full of pesto and I just brought in a huge shopping bag full of basil. My neighbors see me and run the other way. I’ve never had this much before.
ETA It’s been raining hard for hours and I didn’t pick half of what was ready.
MattF
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: And they’re going to betray McCarthy. It’s what they do.
O. Felix Culpa
@brantl: First I would feel bad and then I’d start making other plans. My world has fallen apart on me more than once. I didn’t have the luxury to marinate in resentment or grief. I felt those things and moved on, reconstructing my life. It’s called resilience and resourcefulness.
ETA: I don’t mean to make myself the hero of my own story, but shit happens and one has to deal with it the best one can. Part of growing up is dealing with disappointment and dashed expectations.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Like Farm-Raised Red Deer Tenderloin steaks. Which are now carried by my middle-of-the-road grocery store in the greater DC area. And which are yummy.
raven
@WhatsMyNym: I’m from Villa Park, I left in 66.
Geminid
@debbie: One thing I like about our political system is that parties do not control access to elections. The Republican District Commitee commitee can hold their breath ’til they’re blue in the face, but Kinsinger can still run in the primary, and if he wins he’ll be the party nominee no matter what party officials say. I always felt like a weakness in the British system was the monopoly party organizations have over picking candidates.
raven
@WhatsMyNym: I saw the Turtles in the parking lot of Oakbrook. There were hundreds of kids there and they didn’t play they just made an appearance!
Kent
She can do whatever she wants. Whether individual Republicans go along is a different story. Normally she would allocate x-number of spots on a committee to the GOP and let them sort it out. If they want to leave those seats empty that is on them. The committees will still do the work. The House has a LOT of committees that meet simultaneously. You can’t put the same few GOP-ers on every committee. You gotta spread it out.
NotMax
@MagdaInBlack
“Welcome to
LevittWaltontown. Up there? That’s already staked out as lots for Walton Heights.”Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The Freedom Caucus is a lot of why Paul Ryan bailed, and why Democrats regained control of the House in 2018. Some of the same radicals made retirement a more attractive option for John Boehner.
brantl
@O. Felix Culpa: I get that, but if you can’t sympathize with how it makes them feel, you need to work on that. I only got to work on a farm (that I lived on) for 2 years, and I still left with a lump in my throat.
Matt
TBH I don’t see what the Afghans expected to happen – the Democratic Party isn’t even willing to deliver on its promises to people who _can_ vote for them.
MagdaInBlack
@NotMax: That’s exactly what surrounds it now. When they first starting building, we were all aghast’ “$75k for a house, omg.” I’m def dating myself ?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I demand that Joe Biden abandon the Constitution and enact by fiat the policies he never campaigned on and that lost Bernie Sanders the Democratic primaries by two-to-one!
Baud
@brantl:
My sympathy ends with their hatred of me. Resentful white rural America is the backbone of the GOP.
NotMax
@Matt
“Tain’t funny, McGee.”
– Molly
.
Kay
@Baud:
Because the influencer business usually has such high quality control standards and is definitely not jam packed with complete grifters and frauds.
WhatsMyNym
@raven: ’66, I started school about then.
What was the name of that private estate that had a war museum?
Geminid
@MagdaInBlack: My familiy lived in Lombard 1960-62. There was still undeveloped land nearby, and I remember trekking to a nearby pond to look at the tadpoles. The pond probably did not last very long after we left.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Afghans will definitely be voting for Jill Stein!
satby
@O. Felix Culpa: yup. Today’s garden chat is another such story.
Resentment at bad luck just wastes time. Time you need to make things better.
Baud
@Kay:
I wonder if their followers ever think of themselves as influencees.
raven
@Geminid: Lilacia Park! Did you go to Willowbrook? I used to hang at the Dog and Suds on St Charles.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Geminid: The redistricting commission in VA is problematic — cf
https://thebulwark.com/virginia-gop-makes-a-mockery-of-the-redistricting-process/
BlueVirginia.us was constantly advocating for not passing a plan where the parties picked those who set the redistricting as the blog master, Lowkell felt and was proved correct that the GOP would not act in good faith. As the GOP has proven at all levels of government.
raven
@WhatsMyNym: Cantigny, it looks like it has expanded it’s mission from just the 1st ID Museum.
Suzanne
@brantl:
I’m sure it feels bad. I am also sure that growing up in urban poverty feels bad. That growing up to be a housewife feels bad. That growing up having to join the military or hope you earn a college scholarship because your parents have nothing to give you feels bad.
Martin
@MattF: Who asked him? Pelosi/Cheney or McCarthy?
If I were Pelosi, I’d be empowering Cheney to do this to undermine McCarthy.
raven
@Geminid: When I went to my 50th in 2017 I couldn’t believe what Butterfield Road had become. We lived in Brandywine on Roosevelt Rd and it was country south of there for miles!
eta I guess that it Yorktown.
Geminid
@raven: I cannot remember. I just recall how when we moved to Southern California I thought it was a crappy place because it didn’t have snow. I was an idiot even then.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: The gardens are beautiful. I go for the roses, but they’re all worth the trip. Have not been for awhile, I see they have a cafe now.
raven
@Geminid: Do you know about York Center? I’m friend with and African American woman who lived there then. I think there were four AA students at WB then but, at the time, I knew nothing about York Center.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud:
well, don’t forget the exurbs, the bungalow belts, Staten Island and The Villages
Cameron
@Martin: I like!
Martin
@Cheryl from Maryland: This is why CA has nonpartisans on the commission. You have to build a coalition to approve the maps.
raven
@Geminid: Do you know about York Center? I’m friend with and African American woman who lived there then. I think there were four AA students at WB then but, at the time, I knew nothing about York Center.
Another Scott
@Cheryl from Maryland: I thought that he, and people who were doing the work for ages, were correct in saying that it was a bad plan. I didn’t like the idea that the GOP-stacked state supreme court would have the explicit ultimate say (though in practice that will probably always be the case, at least until the DoJ steps in). Maybe they’ll surprise us.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@Geminid: That’s funny, moved to Whittier in 57 and back to Villa Park in 61.
Geminid
@Cheryl from Maryland: I was aware of the potential problems with the independent commission, and was uncertain how to vote on last year’s constitutional amendment. I finally voted for it, along with two out of three other Virginians.
The Lodger
@germy: With those symptoms, I think it was a good idea for Gosar to get out of dentistry.
Suzanne
@brantl:
My sympathy ended when it became a culture war on those who came from even less. And my sympathy ended when they elected Trump as a way to flip the bird to “elites”.
You know, no one in political life gives a shit about what I feel. That’s the case for most people. I don’t know why I’m supposed to consider their feels so critical that they continue to be beneficiaries of white patriarchy.
WhatsMyNym
@raven: My mother would take us to get out the house for a day, we would meet up with a friend of hers & kid. The house and gardens were great.
raven
@WhatsMyNym: Yea my uncle lived in West Chicago and it’s even closer to there.
MattF
@Martin: Pelosi. Which I think is appropriate. She’s in charge.
ETA: McCarthy has already been skinned and filleted.
Immanentize
@Cheryl from Maryland: sounds yummy. I have a nice recipe for a vinegary blueberry bar-b-que sauce for venison.
But if it ain’t back strap, it’s only halfway to heaven.
O. Felix Culpa
@brantl: Sorry, no. I once had empathy, but they have turned into a bunch of hateful people who would rather destroy people like me than improve their own situations, or recognize that they actually don’t have it so bad, they just have to share the world with others. I grew up in a rural area and am talking about high school classmates. First hand experience.
ETA: I second Suzanne at #209. Why the constant insistence upon caring about their tender feelings? What makes them so special? Apart from white patriarchy not being what it used to be, I suppose. Sad things happen to all of us. Why must we carve out a special sympathy exemption for this crowd?
Immanentize
@raven: Can you please write down a list of all the great concerts you have been to and where including side notes like that? For extra credit, and for me and SteveinWTF, add all 80s and 90s gigs of the great Athens bands?
Geminid
@raven: I had not heard of the York Center. But a friend from Macon, Georgia told me about Koininia Farm, a Georgia project that sounds similar. One of it’s founders, a Mr. Gaston, was a left-wing Baptist. I’ve met his grandson, who used to be partners in a custom millwork shop in Charlottesville. Now he builds beautiful chairs and tables.
There are a lot of Church of the Brethren folks in western Virginia. They have a church five miles from me, and plenty more in the Shenandoah Valley.
Immanentize
@O. Felix Culpa:
Truer words never blogged. I believe it’s what happens after shit happens that requires/builds/shows character. I miserably fail that test often enough, but watching my son, and his post-shit happening — damn that young man can likely meet any challenge he will face with his faculties intact. Sans whining.
If people need to deal with their butt hurt feelings, I recommend therapy.
Happy Sunday everyone!
Cameron
“Tell me, Donald, what is best in life?” ” To fleece the rubes, to screw porn stars, to own the libs and hear the lamentations of their pundits…. “
The Thin Black Duke
@Immanentize: That would be a great thread. For myself, I didn’t like living in Connecticut much, but I saw some amazing concerts at Toad’s Place in New Haven. And like an idiot, I threw away my ticket stubs.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
For all the talk of Pelosi playing higher-dimensional chess against a bunch of checkers amateurs, I’m starting to think the game she’s playing against the GOP is Fizzbin.
WhatsMyNym
@Cameron:
Or to slowly lose the fortune Daddy left??
Immanentize
@satby: i loved your garden chat. Thanks! Here’s a little Shel Silverstein for this rainy (where I am) Sunday:
Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda
All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
Layin’ in the sun,
Talkin’ bout the things
They woulda-coulda-shoulda done…
But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
All ran away and hid
From one little did.
-Shel Silverstein
Suzanne
@O. Felix Culpa: On a personal level, I can sympathize. It sucks to feel like you’re losing something, even something unearned. It’s the political level — the common project level — where I lose interest. And I deeply, deeply hate the notion coming out of that cohort that they work harder and are more genuinely American and therefore worthy of greater esteem than others.
And, I mean, they said “Fuck your feelings” to us, so…..
Cameron
@WhatsMyNym: That, too.
James E Powell
@Baud:
You first. The closest I get to farming is watching Field of Dreams.
O. Felix Culpa
@Immanentize: I agree with you agreeing with me. ;) Both you and your son are prime examples of resilience and character. I’ve done my share of thrashing and whining during bad times. I’ve also wanted to give up more than once. We don’t need to be perfect at all times in handling adversity. We feel the bad feels and keep going, as best we can.
Happy Sunday to you too!
Martin
@MattF: McCarthy deserves far more skinning and filleting.
Cameron
@Suzanne: I guess my response to them would be “My feelings aren’t yours to fuck, and your feelings aren’t worth fucking.” Probably a reason I have no friends.
Cameron
@James E Powell: I had an ant farm as a kid. Does that count?
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne:
QFT. Plus, aren’t they somehow uniquely rugged? What’s up with all the whining from these genuine bootstrap Americans™?
Immanentize
@The Thin Black Duke: I would love that thread. I have seen amazing concerts with great bands — sometimes warm up acts! (Like T-Rex for Three Dog Night).
I like hearing who what where when people saw great music. It feels like it enlarges my experiences through envy osmosis.
Suzanne
@O. Felix Culpa: You know what kills me? How undervalued some labors are. These people grow up working on farms with the expectation that they’ll inherit it and have something of value. My mother was raised with the expectation that she would care for her sick mother, and she didn’t get shit for it, other than decades of time wasted. No one in political life cares about that, because that’s women’s work. And yet, my mom, not being a resentful Trumpist dimwit, votes to provide these people greater services and educational opportunities all the time.
O. Felix Culpa
@WhatsMyNym: Cantigny Park. I lived in DuPage County for a number of years too. :)
Immanentize
@James E Powell: There are so few farmers in what you think of as such. It’s almost all corporate or conglomerate farming with chemicals and big machines. My grandmother and grandfather grew up on family farms. My mom and her brothers farmed. We belonged to the Grange when I was a wee lad. Those place do not exist anymore except in small amounts that loom large in our imaginations. And politics.
MagdaInBlack
My contempt is for the deliberately ignorant of all economic and social classes and colors. I don’t reserve it for the working class, be they rural, urban or suburban.
Immanentize
@Cameron: ? to that response. Stealing it.
Baud
@James E Powell:
What do you think sounds better? Baud Acres or Rancho Baudo?
debbie
@The Thin Black Duke:
I still have my ticket stubs (not that I went to hundreds of concerts). I chuckle every time I look at the $10.00 orchestra seat for Boston Music Hall.
I also have all my ticket stubs (hundreds, I’m sure). I usually remembered to write down the name of the movie on the stub, but not always.
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne: That’s the other point: we may not like those people very much, but (in general) we don’t seek to hurt them. In fact, we libs tend to pursue public policies that will help them, along with others. The inverse is not true.
And yes, rarely are the public tear ducts activated for women’s work and especially the sorrows and hardships of women of color. Beyond being undervalued, they’re invisible. It’s infuriating. They are the true people of strength in this country.
Martin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Even if they aren’t ‘corporate’ they are leased out. Bill Gates is the largest ‘farm owner’ in the US. He owns the land. He leases the land out to farmers, the farmer run the farm, and Bill gets a share of the output. And if the crop is ruined, or prices fall too far, Bill as landowner gets the federal farm insurance, so he gets paid no matter what happens. What crop gets planted is part of the contract.
You don’t need to be a billionaire, you just need to be able to afford the $5K/acre or so to acquire the land, or to have inherited it. They call it ‘share-contracting’ now instead of sharecropping.
In the end this will fail, because it’s already failing. There’s not a lot of expertise on these farms. They’re usually dependent on cash crops, rather than food. ⅔ of Iowa corn is either for industrial use or as feedstock. They’re really reliant on invented demand, rather than marketing their product. Cotton in the south was a money losing crop since the end of the civil war until at least WWII – and yet the farmer kept growing the stuff because they didn’t fucking know how to do anything else, or didn’t want to put in the work.
Why does CA grow so many grapes and almonds? They’re really labor intensive crops, and only CA has the labor. The south never evolved from farmwork being slavework, and red states are determined to keep immigrants, who do have the knowledge to farm successfully, out of their states. Corn is highly mechanized, as is cotton, and wheat, potatoes and root crops, etc. Most of the crops we think of as ‘farm crops’ – greens, fruits, delicate vegetables, are all mostly relegated to CA even though most of them would grow just fine outside of CA, and really should be if they are water intensive. But no, that’s too hard.
Martin
California says ‘hi’.
Low Key Swagger
I’ll say this about farm work. If you aren’t factoring in weather, you’re not doing a fair comparison. I work in 90 degree heat with the same level humidity, or when it’s so cold I can hardly hold whatever tools I’m using.
Geminid
@Baud: How about, “The Baude”? That has the classy ring developers favor now.
raven
@Immanentize: I can tell you this without looking. I NEVER saw three-fucking-dog-night!!!
raven
I spent three hours shelling butter beans that the princess grew out at our friend’s farm. She got about 3 quarts.
raven
@Immanentize: This was one festival in 69.
Country Joe and the Fish
Iron Butterfly
Johnny Winter
King Crimson
Pacific Gas & Electric
Sweetwater
The Chambers Brothers
The Rugbys
Add Setlist
Grand Funk Railroad
Janis Joplin
King Crimson
Pacific Gas & Electric
Rotary Connection
Sly & the Family Stone
Spirit
Spooky Tooth
The Byrds
Vanilla Fudge
Wavy Gravy
We had to leave Sunday morning but I saw all these at one time or another.
Grand Funk Railroad
Jefferson Airplane
Rotary Connection
Steppenwolf
Terry Reid
The Byrds
The Rolling Stones
The Thin Black Duke
@debbie: I saw Living Colour at Toad’s. The tickets were $5.00 because nobody knew who they were.
Geminid
@Martin: There are plenty of immigrants farm workers in central Virginia. They’ve been coming here since the 1960s, when the state was turning red and apples were the big crop. Now they work apples, peaches, and grapes. Their kids are going to school and joining the middle class.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Immanentize: Maybe, but venison tenderloin steaks sauteed in olive oil with shallots, then deglaze the pan with port wine, rosemary, and juniper berries for a meal in 20 minutes are nothing to sneeze at.
The Thin Black Duke
@raven: Goddamn, dude. That’s f*cking amazing.
debbie
@raven:
Byrds must have been on the comeback road by then. I saw them a few years earlier for free at a neighborhood rec center. It was my very first concert.
zhena gogolia
Wow, not a lot of new posts today.
MagdaInBlack
@Cheryl from Maryland: That sounds so good I hyperventilated just thinking of it ?
debbie
@The Thin Black Duke:
Loved them. I remember walking through the Natural History Museum and breaking into giggles when “Everybody Loves You When You’re Bi” started playing on my Walkman.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You see, this why CA is dangerous, out of control socialism. Proper governance is done by an incestuous cabal of mediocrities given to dubious ideologues.
raven
@The Thin Black Duke: The Chambers Brothers played at about 3am and that reverb will never leave my brain. Timmmmmeeeeeeeeee ……………at about 8:33
O. Felix Culpa
@Cheryl from Maryland: Wow. Now I’m getting hungry. My green smoothie with fresh garden veggies is lovely, but somehow not quite hitting the same gustatory notes.
JWR
@MattF: Yep. This is a good thing.
raven
This is obviously copywrited but Janis and Johnny Winter together !
raven
@debbie:
MagdaInBlack
@raven: OH how fun! Thank you ?
Steve in the ATL
@Immanentize: I’ll bet you want to hear all about my college band opening for Guadalcanal Diary!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
is it just me, or does that kind of sound like a terrorist threat? and yeah, I get that he was “joking”, and he wouldn’t actually go hunting in DC, but some of his followers just might
Immanentize
@raven: damn!
Immanentize
@The Thin Black Duke: I saw Living Color in Boston. I even scored a Vernon Reid guitar pick which I still proudly own.
marcopolo
I did small hand cultivation intensive organic farming for 5 years. It is ridiculously hard work, hard on your body, hard on your brain, hard on your wallet. The folks I met during that time who had dedicates large swaths of their life to it saw it as more of a calling than vocational choice. I’m willing to be surprised but it is not a career that your average veteran would settle down in and excel at.
Driving a big combine/being an operator at some huge industrial farming outfit might be another story, but a lot of those folks are only a step or two up from sharecropping when it comes to making a living.
Gin & Tonic
If there is an Olympic sport more boring to watch than swimming, I have yet to find it.
Immanentize
@raven: not nearly as iconic, but I was at this one:
Heatwave Festival, 1980
Vladymir Rogov (opening artist) with his band ARKITEX
Teenage Head
BB Gabor
Holly and the Italians
Rockpile featuring Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe
The Rumour without Graham Parker (just after he had gone solo)
The B-52’s
Talking Heads (at sundown)
The Pretenders
Elvis Costello and the Attractions
The Kings
It was the first time the Talking Heads debuted their “Big Band” with Adrian Belew! The Clash was supposed to play, but no-showed. Saw them in NYC about a month later.
Immanentize
@Steve in the ATL: I do!! I really liked Guadalcanal Diary. I have one of their 45s somewhere — Watusi Rodeo. Jangle jangle!
Martin
@Geminid: Define ‘plenty’. CA has nearly half of the farmworkers in the US. Around a million.
I mean, all states have some, but do they have enough to meet the national demand. If CA stopped growing greens, ¾ of the nations supply is just gone. And you can grow that stuff almost anywhere in the US, but there’s not the labor to do it. You can’t run a combine through there, you need to bend over and do it, at scale.
It’s the scale that’s key. And Iowa can’t pivot off of corn that doesn’t feed people without bringing in the immigrant labor that knows hows to run these operations at scale. That’s why Iowa grows corn over more valuable food crops.
Steve in the ATL
@Gin & Tonic: dressage
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Until Bulldogs go 1-2!!!!
Immanentize
@raven: It is a shame, but before the 80s(?) Multiple performer concerts had a really great range of sounds, styles, races…
raven
@Immanentize: Jeff died a couple of years back but Rhett lives around the corner.
mrmoshpotato
@Steve in the ATL: Ah, the horse dancing…
raven
@Immanentize: I getting ready to ship to the Nam from FT Lewis when I hitched up for this one.
Martin
@Gin & Tonic: I’ll watch Katie Ledecky do superhuman things, and that’s about it for the swimming.
Immanentize
@raven: Jeff was a great guitarist — how many Athens bands did he inspire with his style/sound? If you see Mr. Crowe, tell him random people are still fans.
Immanentize
@raven: How many days did that go on? A lot of those bands are lost to history, at least for me. But here is a little 1970 version of It’s a Beautiful Day at Tanglewood
Geminid
@Martin: Well, I guess you’ve defined “plenty” for me: enough to supply the most productive agricultural area in the nation. We are indeed minor players compared to your state. But these immigrants are a substantial and productive part of society here. And they may be inferior in numbers to those in California, but they are not inferior in quality, nor are their neighbors.
My point anyway was that these immigrants entered the farm workforce here despite it being a red state at the time. I believe this was also the case in California. Your state does not have these agricultural industries because it is blue, but because it has a huge amount of flat land with a good climate, and enough water to irrigate it.
raven
@Immanentize: I haven’t seen him in a while. Michael works at the art museum and I see him quite often. Vic Varney, Pylon’s manager is around and just lost his buddy Dvid Gamble from the Method Actors last week.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve in the ATL: In which you can actually see the athletes.
Immanentize
@raven: Also, loved Pylon. Unrequited love for Vanessa after seeing them live once.
raven
@Immanentize: Three.
raven
@Immanentize: I didn’t get them but you’ll be happy to know she is still at it,
Pylon Reenactment Society
I moved here in 84 and a lot of the Athens “scene” had moved on. B-52’s to NY, REM to superstardom and others broke up. As an aside REM’s manager is at the Newport Folk Festival and reports they are requiring proof fo vaccination for entry!
Gin & Tonic
@raven: Only 3-day festival I went to was Watkins Glen, 1973. Only three bands, too.
raven
@Immanentize: Belew lived in Champaign for a while.
Steve in the ATL
@raven: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot!
@Immanentize: @raven: Jeff gave me a big smile when I got on stage with my seafoam green Strat, and I returned the look when he got onstage with his an hour later! That was in Virginia, obviously, and we actually joked about it a couple of years later at the 40 Watt in Athens when I was in law school. Great guy.
Much nicer than Murray Attaway….
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Nice
Gin & Tonic
@raven: Actually proof of vaccination *or* proof of a negative test within 72 hours.
raven
Try this one, I made a pretty penny moving commodities!
Time Machine: 1970 Wadena Rock Festival
Steve in the ATL
@Immanentize: I second that. Another band that should have made it big See also: Big Star, the db’s, and Webb Wilder.
Flanders Other Neighbor
When my coworkers are stressed or angry about something, I like to remind them it’s not farm work. Having worked both on my grandfather’s dairy farm a bit and a lot more in high school with my farmer best friend in the mid 80s, it’s not just a quip. That work was hard enough out doors, but man, putting up hay in the mow on a humid mid-90s day.. Seriously, the worst that could happen to me now is getting fired. Big deal. Back then I had a portable grain elevator fall on me. Couple of inches either way or not being 17 and I wouldn’t be here today.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Yea, I saw that on the website.
raven
@Steve in the ATL: I never got that Big Star either. The REM guys are all over it but seemed like bubblegum to me.
James E Powell
@Baud:
How about the Baud-erosa?
raven
Well rock on, I’m getting dragged to a party I don’t want to go to.
Steve in the ATL
@raven: probably helped that I knew Alex and Jody (Jody and mom are still friends) and the other two went to my high school, plus the Hummels lived down the street (one block over from prostratedragon’s grandfather).
realbtl
OK I’ll play.
Folk- Kingston Trio, Bud and Travis, PP&M, Simon and Garfunkle.
Rock- I arrived Sat morrning for the rest of the Monterrey Pop Festival so all of those, Janis 2 more times, Dead, Steve Miller, Neil Young solo, multiple Who shows and probably some I can’t remember. Oh Yeah, Warren Zevon.
Misc- Mose Allison, Cosby before he was famous- ~1962, Louis Armstrong.
Another Scott
@raven: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was on our TV last night, playing with Bob Weir and Wolf Brothers at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley.
He’ll be 90 on August 1!
A review.
Cheers,
Scott.
Elizabelle
@Cheryl from Maryland: Yum. I have everything but the venison steaks, and am sure they are easy to find in central VA. (Famous last words.)
Thank you. If you have a more exact recipe, that’s great, although you’ve given us enough to figure it out. Again, yum.
Elizabelle
In 25 minutes, it will be nine hours since this thread went up.
Happy summer, everybody.
columbusqueen
@OzarkHillbilly: Tell me about it. I grew up in New Albany, Ohio, long before that prick Les Wexner showed up to develop his perfect community. My mother’s family lived there starting in 1813, & my grandparents’ farm was bought in 1868. In the mid ’70s, Grandpa cut 3 pieces of land from the farm so each daughter could build a new house (my uncle already had done that).
I lived in our little family compound from ages 12 to 36. In 2001, we all finally sold to the New Albany Co., because of both family health issues & the huge increase in our property taxes.
Was it necessary? Of course it was. Did it hurt like hell? Damn straight. After 20 years, the uprooting still can feel physically painful, like losing a piece of my heart.
James E Powell
@raven:
Big Star is a band that went from unknown to underrated to cult favorite and are now a little overrated. I recently read someone who called Big Star “America’s premier power pop band.” They have some really good songs, but sorry, man, that would be The Raspberries.
Big Star seemed to have a lot of potential, but got screwed by record company dealings: the stuff of rock n roll legend.
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle:
And when I wake up tomorrow morning, there will have been 5 interesting threads overnight.
O. Felix Culpa
Question for anyone who might still be hanging around: I am considering buying a tablet to take when traveling and considering several options. I would use it mostly for reading (e-books), some video streaming, email, and scrolling through Balloon-Juice and making the occasional grumpy comment. I’m not a gamer.
I’m looking at Amazon Fire 8, 2020 Apple iPad (I generally don’t do i-thingies, but am open to change), and Samsung Galaxy Tab A7. I don’t want to spend more than ~$300 and preferably less. Any thoughts/recommends from the hive mind?
Steve in the ATL
@Elizabelle: why do you hate T. Bogg?
Martin
@Geminid: Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that they were inferior, just that for labor crops, you need a LOT of them to make things work like WAY more than you realize. Driving up through the central valley, and I don’t care if it’s 5AM on a Sunday, there are white buses *everywhere*. Driving through the Salinas valley, you’re hard pressed to find a spot on 100 miles of the 101 where you can’t see at least one at all times. There are work teams that just lay irrigation pipe, that just dig holes, that just prune trees, etc.
We don’t really see labor much any more – they’re usually inside, but the sheer scale of what you need for even mundane crops like celery or garlic – things you don’t think of as being high value is just astonishing to see in person.
We need to both continue to improve their pay and working conditions, and convince other states to embrace this because CA just doesn’t have the water to keep this going indefinitely, not with our current mix of crops.
Steve in the ATL
@O. Felix Culpa: we use iPads for real stuff, Samsungs for burners, and Amazon Fires never. I distrust Apple the least of those three wildly untrustworthy companies.
O. Felix Culpa
@Steve in the ATL: Can you expand on what you mean by “real stuff”?
Agreed that there are issues with all three companies. So I’m trying to pick my poison judiciously.
Patricia Kayden
Steve in the ATL
@O. Felix Culpa: real stuff=anything using my real name and real accounts, or possibly traceable to me, such as B-J.
PsiFighter37
@Elizabelle: Was about to mention the same thing – been back multiple times this morning, and still the same thread! Talk about a lazy Sunday for sure…
In personal news, we are closing on our condo on Thursday. Excited to finally put the tie on top of that, although not excited about the giant check we are writing and the mortgage we will have hanging over us afterwards. The day after, I will be going to pick up the first car I will have ever owned. Never thought it would be a Toyota Highlander, but I did get the hybrid version – so I am adhering to something I told myself once I was of driving age, which is that I would never own a purely old-school combustion engine car.
In less exciting news, we found out that our daughter’s school she will be going to starting in September is starting before Labor Day. Why??? Means we are going to have to cut our trip to Philadelphia at the end of August in half. The AirBNB reservation is (thankfully) refundable, but changing the last couple days of the week, plus Labor Day weekend, into a staycation in NYC sucks.
O. Felix Culpa
@Steve in the ATL: Gotcha. Thanks!
Steve in the ATL
@O. Felix Culpa: and if you value privacy whatsoever, don’t even think about an Apple Watch
Another Scott
@O. Felix Culpa:
AndroidPolice – Consider A7 Lite.
$160 at the moment (has been as low as $130).
I have an iPad v1 + cellular that I never really used much. Multitasking was almost non-existent and doing almost anything caused the screen to refresh (eating cellular data on the road).
We’ve got several old Samsung Wifi tablets. They still work (I use them for quick weather checks), but they fill up quickly and don’t get updates. I wouldn’t spend a lot on a tablet, myself.
HTH a little!
Cheers,
Scott.
mrmoshpotato
@Patricia Kayden:
W: Dick, did you hear what Carl Bernstein just said?
Dick: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Chief Oshkosh
@Suzanne:
This is the best news I’ve heard all day.
O. Felix Culpa
@Steve in the ATL: Is that like not thinking about pink elephants?
zhena gogolia
On my Richard Armitrage film-festival, last night we started “Uncle Vanya.” It’s bad! Why can’t the English, who have such a great acting tradition, do Chekhov? Why do they have to ruin it?
ETA: I guess I should also be blaming the Irish person who adapted it, Conor McPherson. No mention of the poor shlub who translated it, of course. They’re just anonymous.
O. Felix Culpa
@Another Scott: Thank you! Another choice to put into the hopper. :)
Geminid
@Martin: I know you did not imply they were inferior. Just got a sense you were implying that California was superior, as in we’re so great because we’re so blue. And while you say I may not comprehend the scale of California agriculture, I’ve driven the Central Valley, and passed miles of apricot orchards stretching towards the hills into the distance, and seen ten miles of corn with a frito factory in the middle. I understood what this implied.
And while I’m at it! When you said southern farmers kept growing cotton because they didn’t know any better, I thought of the Boll Weevil Monument of Enterprise, Alabama. When the boll weevel wiped out cotton in Coffee County, enterprising farmers started growing peanuts and other crops. They did so much better they had a statue put up in the county seat. It was of a lady in a grecian robe, holding up a pedestal with a bug on top.
So take that, you Coastal Elitist!
PsiFighter37
@Chief Oshkosh: To be fair, with that used rug on his head, Rand has never looked great to begin with.
Steve in the ATL
@O. Felix Culpa: it’s literally just like that!
O. Felix Culpa
@Steve in the ATL: I am literally (ok, figuratively) ROFL!
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia:
And a quick google search sees that the critics are enraptured by it. I don’t get it. They turned it into “All in the Family.”
MattF
@O. Felix Culpa: I use an iPad for pretty much the uses you mention. It works pretty well. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask.
ETA: It’s an iPad Air, I forget the exact price. But < $500.
O. Felix Culpa
@MattF: Thanks for your input. How is the iPad as an e-reader? What source/format for books does it use?
Sure Lurkalot
@Immanentize: I hope some FPer picks up on this thread suggestion!
J R in WV
@stinger:
I genuinely believe that most of the fundigelicals have serious mental/medical issues. My cousin who became theocratic had a serious head injury back in the late ’70s, a rock fell on the construction site where he worked, he was bent over working on something, it hit him in the back of his head.
He nearly died, but his skull was broken enough that his brain was able to swell and then heal, after his medical recovery he gradually became less and less like the guy I grew up with. When he died not long ago it was more a relief than a sadness, he had passed on from me and our other cousin years ago.
I really think you need something bad wrong in your head to follow these fast talking money hungry preachers. Bad wrong!
MattF
@O. Felix Culpa: It comes with the Apple Books app (which can purchase ebooks) and there’s a Kindle app that you can get from the App Store. You can read PDFs with it. It’s… adequate, although I’d like more and better options for organizing things.
O. Felix Culpa
@O. Felix Culpa: I did a little googling myself (novel concept, I know) and learned that the iPad supports several e-reader systems, including a Kindle app.
@MattF: We posted simultaneously. :) Thank you for your response.
Geminid
@Geminid: I take that “Coastal Elitist” back. “California Chauvinist” would be more fair, and not so invidious.
Another Scott
@O. Felix Culpa: One big advantage of going with iOS is that it’s the Godzilla in the portable space. If you can think of an app, there’s probably a dozen that already exist on the iPad. That won’t be a problem.
The problem will be whether you can live with the Apple way of doing things (making it “easy” by forcing you do things their way), etc.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
O. Felix Culpa
@Another Scott: Too many choices. A first-world dilemma.
Sure Lurkalot
@O. Felix Culpa: I use the Kindle app to read on my iPad. But I can also use the one Overdrive (my library app) uses as well as Apple’s own app “Books”.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, in Ohio…
(via TheRealHoarse)
Cheers,
Scott.
Steve in the ATL
@O. Felix Culpa: kindle paperwhite is much, much better for reading books, and is cheap, with great battery life.
O. Felix Culpa
@Steve in the ATL: You do realize that you’re supposed to be narrowing, not expanding my list of options, right? //
Seriously, thanks for the suggestions.
@Sure Lurkalot: Being able to operate several e-reader systems seems to be an advantage of the iPad. I wish there were One Tablet to rule them all and render decision-making easier.
Elizabelle
Going for ten hours.
TBogg. Here we come. Hope you have some cute doggies.
Baud
@Another Scott:
Is that Turner’s catchphrase?
Elizabelle
@PsiFighter37: Congrats on the condo. My sister has a Highlander (several years old) and loves it. Good vehicle.
Your daughter is already in school. (Preschool??) Wow.
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle: Doing my best to help make it (the TBogg unit) happen. And I do have a cute doggie. He’s very sensibly napping right now.
Geminid
Well, the Nationals keep losing, and they keep getting closer to trading Max Scherzer. I’ll hate to see him go.
Elizabelle
@mrmoshpotato: That’s funny. Possibly accurate, too.
I like that, little by little, journalists and writers are using very plain language to describe what is going on in the US.
Another Scott
@Baud: I guess so – it’s the name of her podcast. (I didn’t know that until I looked.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Elizabelle
New thread! But this one is plenty good for discussion, too.
sab
We saw a Lamborghini convertible at one of our local stripmalls, parked outside a breakfast/lunch reataurant. So we parked our Honda Fit right next to it. No way could either of us climb out of a car that low-slung. Lamborghinis are highly unususal in our neighborhood. We tend more towards Dodge Ram pickups and Kia sedans.
When we came back to our car, the elderly owner was just leaving. He almost stalled it about three times trying to drive out of the parking lot. I am not a nice person, so I laughed out loud. $450,000 car that he can barely drive.
Another Scott
@O. Felix Culpa: You can probably get any eReader app for the Android boxes, too.
I was thinking of things like running your milling machine from your iPad, or doing remote surgery, or running some quantum computer remotely, or something. ;-)
Do you use Macs? Do you have an iPhone? Do you like the Apple ecosystem? If so, you might be happier with an iPad. If the price is a problem, you could browse around Swappa. If you pick a highly rated seller, you’ll probably be fine (I got my S20+ there).
If you don’t have any other Apple stuff, and don’t envision going that route, the premium might not be worth it.
Similarly Swappa has Android tablets, too, of course. :-)
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
karen marie
@zhena gogolia: I sure as hell hope Meidas is paying “Montana man” for the video. They annoy me as much as the Lincoln people. A bunch of grifters making bank off of work others are doing. Just because they’re ostensibly backing what Democrats are doing doesn’t make them any less grifty.
“Retweet if you agree” really pisses me the fuck off.
O. Felix Culpa
@Another Scott: I was forced to use a Mac at one workplace and hated it. My sons have often and authoritatively informed me that Apple things are superior, and yet I do not like them. (The Apple things, that is; the sons I like just fine most of the time.) But perhaps an iPad would be a gateway into that environment or so I tell myself. I’ll check out the website for options–thank you!
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa: I have an iPad and a MacBook, and don’t find myself using the iPad much, because I so prefer the laptop.
But: the iPad is great for travel (le sigh; travel, what’s that?). And they have come down a lot in price. And you can get bluetooth keyboards as accessories.
Let us know what you decide on.
sab
Finally got my cocker trimmed enough that I could take him the groomers without undue embarrassment. Sewing scissors worked a let better than the clippers. They asked if he needed rhe ususal cut. I said no. I want him to look like a beagle. So that is what they did.
They said there are two types of cocker coats- woolly and field. We had always had field cockers, which are pretty low maintenance. The woolly cocker fur turns instantly to felt. Poor little guy.
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle: Will do! I’m supposed to go to Germany next month. The delta variant is starting to create concern about the wisdom of traveling right now, but I’m not canceling just yet. Stupid unvaccinated people f’ing up my freedom to move about the planet. Grrr.
Citizen Alan
@Matt: Fuck off.
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa: Germany. You lucky bug.
Although: you might be constrained with where you can go, with the virus variants out there.
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle: At present, constraints are no worse in Germany than they are here. But that could change. I’m in touch with relatives and monitoring the situation. Thankfully I had no plans and no relatives in the flooded areas. Those poor people: as if living in times of pestilence wasn’t bad enough.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I love her. I really hope she puts Turner away. That campaign has been a laughable shit-show, or would be, if we had the luxury of laughing at the anti-Democratic left
debbie
@columbusqueen:
Somewhere above, I spoke of farmland changing to industrial park practically overnight. If your family was anywhere along Hamilton or 161, that’s the land I was referring to. I loved driving those endless acres of corn and other crops!
J R in WV
@raven:
I saw the Chambers Bros at the then giant arena (The Spectrum? a long time ago, much trippin’ at the time…) in Philly in late 1969, in their home town. They were opening for the Kinks. I loved the Chambers Brothers, the crowd loved them, knew all the songs, sang along. A great show!!
Then after a long intermission, the Kinks fired up their show. It was terrible, I left after just a couple of songs, walked back to center city where I had a tiny apartment.
In early 69 I saw a one day rock fest at the old convention center, Santana, Janis, Joe Cocker, BB King.
In summer of 1968 I was lucky enough to be invited to crash on a floor in Newport RI and to attend the Newport Folk Festival, which that year was mostly focused on the blues… amazing acts from elderly Delta guys to Janis. My first exposure to real live rock and roll~!!~
Saw Dr John the Nighttripper in Mobile AL in 1972, did two sets because they didn’t sell enough tix to afford for Spirit to play. Was glad enough, Dr John was prob better live than Spirit, who I saw in Chicago while in Navy school at Great Lakes. Dr John did a wonderful show, and when he announced that Spirit wasn’t going to play, a R&R riot broke out. We scooted away fast to avoid trouble.
Saw/heard great music in New Orleans. Many visits there. My ship did liberty each year in NOLA during Mardi Gras — she was named for a Medal of Honor officer from the city, his widow had dinner in the officers’ wardroom, we partied on Bourbon Street.
Saw Bonnie Raitt open for Little Feat — again, she played a great set, then 3 or 4 songs into Little Feat we were outa there. Bob Dylan several times, Steve Ray Vaughn, Lonnie Mack, Pinetop Perkins, Jimmy Vaughn in NYC at BB King’s nightclub, Wife saw the Allman Brothers at MAdison Square Gardens.
Tina Turner here locally, what a performer !! So glad she made it so huge she could retire to Europe and relax. ZZ Top, same arena, great show. Many more, great classical orchestra shows, piano concertos at Lincoln Center in NYC, violin concertos at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony. I love all kinds of music well done. From banjos to Bach.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
I’ve tried watching that. Can you recommend a good version?
debbie
@O. Felix Culpa:
I love my Apple iPad mini. Even if I didn’t love all things Apple, I’d still love it.
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The OH-11 race gives me agita.
If Turner wins, we will have to put up with everything she says being attributed to Biden & all Democrats. A constant source of “Democrats are too far to the left!” bullshit.
Of course, if Brown wins, it will be RIGGED!!! THE DNC BETRAYED US!!! VOTE GREEN!!!
debbie
@Another Scott:
Somewhere, BS grimaces…
O. Felix Culpa
@debbie: What do you particularly like about the iPad mini? Inquiring minds want to know. :)
raven
@J R in WV: suweeettt
debbie
@J R in WV:
Alcohol always got in the way of a decent Kinks live performance.
debbie
@O. Felix Culpa:
The size (somewhere around the size of a trade paperback) is perfect for Internet roaming and general reading. I can go look up what I paid for it, but I don’t remember hesitating because of the cost of it.
Geminid
@James E Powell: I worry more about the disruption Turner may bring to the House Democratic Caucus. This would be a very bad time for Speaker Pelosi to have a saboteur in the ranks.
O. Felix Culpa
@debbie: Thank you! I like a comfortable size in the hand too.
frosty
@Immanentize: Dying thread, but I second that, Raven! I started my own much smaller list and have to confirm things with friends I think I went with.
zhena gogolia
@debbie: No, I really don’t know any other ones.
I love Chekhov’s stories, but I don’t really get his plays. And I’m afraid directors don’t either.
The best Chekhov play performance I ever saw was by Yale undergraduates in someone’s backyard, of The Seagull. Seriously, I was in tears by the end. They didn’t do anything fancy, they just had studied the play for a semester and they really had an interpretation of it.
I have to admit I’d never even read Uncle Vanya before, for some reason it never interested me. I read the play in preparation for watching this performance, which may have been a mistake.
J R in WV
@O. Felix Culpa:
I’ve been really happy with my Samsung tablet, esp for reading escapist fiction. I also read this odd blog called BalloonJuice, but not so much video/music, because that’s not my mobile thing.
They’re good for navigation on the road too, we were all over Tuscany with nothing but saved Google maps. “Turn left in 200 meters!” she says…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
that’s interesting, I’ve read a bunch of his short stories– he can break your heart with children, can’t he?– but never seen a play. I’d like to
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
I’ll put Chekhov on my reading list.
You know, I would bet the previous generation (Richardson and the rest) were better at doing subtle. I’m going to check and see if my library has anything.
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
@debbie: I recommend the Norton edition of the stories edited by Cathy Popkin.
As I recall there was a pretty good British Seagull with James Mason as Trigorin, but I saw it ages ago. Anything with James Mason is good, of course. Vanessa Redgrave as Nina.
zhena gogolia
@debbie:
In that one with Armitage, they already have it cranked up to 11 in the first act! I don’t know how they’re going to build to any sort of climax.
That’s besides all the ridiculous anachronisms. Why is she worried that the crows will get the chicks, when they’re in the living room? (they’re supposed to be outside in Act 1).
J R in WV
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’ve been donating on a regular and frequent basis to Shontel, Turner is one more traitor in the crew. Why don’t people who hate Democrats just be Republicans?
Another Scott
@J R in WV:
I know you know this, but, …
They want to take over the party and remake it in their own image. It’s too hard and slow to build a new party from the ground up.
Cheers,
Scott.
stinger
@J R in WV: True, that Venn diagram has a pretty big overlap.
Elizabelle
@zhena gogolia: James Mason. Le sigh. Love him.
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle:
I see it’s for sale on Prime. Hmmm. Simone Signoret too. That sounds great.
zhena gogolia
My poor husband. Turns out we have to watch The Hobbit. I got HBO Max to see In the Heights and I haven’t canceled it, so the Richard Armitage-as-dwarf evenings are coming up.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
LOL, that sounds like the one I started watching. So much shouting!
zhena gogolia
@debbie:
Yeah, we must be talking about the same one, with Toby Jones. All good actors, but the director I think has driven them into a frenzy. Only Roger Allam (so far) seems to be retaining his dignity.
Origuy
@O. Felix Culpa: I’m happy with my Samsung Galaxy Tab A. I’ve had several other tablets and they eventually stopped being updated. Samsung has kept mine on the latest Android; just updated to 11. I needed something with GPS and precise touch sensitivity.