A very creative Purim costume! pic.twitter.com/hb4dAjrBO1
— Frum TikTok (@FrumTikTok) March 6, 2023
I’m guessing the White House will have a reading of the Megillah later today, but I was afraid that if I waited till tomorrow, all the hamentashen would be gone.
Purim celebrates the strength and resilience of Jewish communities. As families across the country and world gather ā Democrats send our warmest wishes that those celebrating have a happy and joyous Purim. Chag Purim sameach!
— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) March 6, 2023
Also too (*sigh*) relevant…
(It's Purim, kids) https://t.co/9Gm9tZUd1d
— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) March 6, 2023
***********
When you are photobombed by @POTUS!
He shared this adorable video on his Instagram of the moment he photobombed @VP Harris, Labor Secretary nominee @JulieSuCA and her family this week. pic.twitter.com/QP84tl064y
— best of kamala harris (@archivekamala) March 4, 2023
"Weāre talking about environmental justice. Weāre talking about public health issue. Weāre talking about an education issue. And weāre talking about…what weāre gonna do with this Infrastructure Law to put billions of dollars to get rid of all the lead pipes in America.ā ā@VP pic.twitter.com/bCpGG76klx
— Climate Power (@ClimatePower) March 6, 2023
.@VP was in Colorado today talking climate action, drought and water policy, electric vehicles, and the intersections of our environment, equity, health, education, and economic opportunity. https://t.co/S7VedRwp2J
— Ike Irby (@IkeIrby46) March 7, 2023
Vice President Harris is going to Africa at the end of the month!
Thank you @david_darmofal for alerting us of this great news! https://t.co/Al10Ube70w pic.twitter.com/T6UMxZWT8F
— Barbara Lee 4 Me! ?? (@JuneSummer1) March 6, 2023
On The Road – BillinGlendaleCA – The North Fork of Big Pine Creek
Baud
What’s the connection between Purim and Coca-cola?
Geminid
There was some good John Fettermam news in this morning’sĀ Politico Playbook. They linked to a tweet by his chief of staff, Adam Jentleson. It showed a picture of Jentleson and Senator Fetterman at a conference table:
Ohio Mom
Wishing you all the hamantaschen, Anne Laurie!
My favorite Purim speil ever was based on the Jerry Springer show. I looked around that Silver Spring, Maryland synagogue and thought, āI am the only one here who ever voted for Springer, who remembers when he was a Cincinnati City Councilman.ā He was a good elected official in his time.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyoneššš
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: There is none. Purim is a Mardi Gras- type holiday, all sillliness is encouraged.
For those of us who subscribe to the school of comparative religious thought that says, Whenever the weather changes, you will find a holiday, it is no coincidence that Mardi Gras and Purim, both raucous holidays that include costumes and drinking, occur in early spring.
Whew! We lived through winter! We didnāt starve! Hooray!
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
Good morning! š
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Geminid: Glad he’s doing well.
I had a marketing meeting with my editor yesterday. Via Google meet since she’s currently in Spain. She gave me work to do, which is going to cut into my jigsaw puzzle time.
Steeplejack
Tucker Carlson and the Murdoch machine have launched their January 6 counterattack. New York Post: āJan. 6 footage shows Capitol cops escorting QAnon Shaman to Senate floor.ā
Sidebar stories:
ā£ āCapitol cops say they couldnāt get physical with rioters as new āQAnon Shamanā video reveals hands-off approach.ā
ā£ āFootage shows Capitol cop Brian Sicknick uninjured on Jan. 6.ā
ā£ āWhy Democrats are dreading a full Jan. 6 reveal.ā
Anyway
@Geminid:
Happy to hear this. Best wishes to Sen Fetterman.
Mmmmm hamantaschen…
( Rugelach is my favorite Jewish cookieĀ tho ….)
Kay
@Geminid:
Sherrod’s really pushing the rail safety legislation- two articles in my local paper where they got a quote from him. We have a lot of rail freight because interchange between east and west and Great Lakes shipping.
Sadly, he also credits (the loathsome) JD Vance but it’s probably smart politics to do so in a Trump 75% county. He did the same thing when he had bipartisan legislation with Portman.
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
Thanks.
Geminid
@Anyway: I was glad too. I rooted for another candidate in the primary but once Pennsylvania Democrats voted, I became a Fetter-man.
Edit: And I’ve been dogged by depression in the past, so I have a lot of empathy for people suffering from it.
Baud
@Steeplejack:
I don’t know.Ā I think keeping Jan. 6 in the news helps us overall.
Steeplejack
@Anyway:
Trader Joe’s has good rugelach. (If you see two kinds, get the one with the purple label.)
OzarkHillbilly
Artwork referring to abortion removed from Idaho public college exhibition
1st Amendment? What 1st Amendment?
lowtechcyclist
There’s our VP, doing nothing again! ;-)
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
She’s terrible at being invisible. /MSM
Kay
This was their dumbass pundit theory – based on absolutely nothing because none of them have any idea what it takes to run Twitter- where they decided all of the Twitter staff were redundant.
Remember how weirdly thrilled they were that he was firing people and then making the remaining people sleep on the floor? Like ay of these pundits have ever worked ONE SECOND past quitting time. It was fucked up. They’re really just mean, petty assholes.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
Where oh where are my Free Speech Warriors? Oh, right, Making tens of millions on the cancel culture panic grift.
Of course anti choicers erase women. It’s central to the ideology.
Baud
@Kay:
If Musk can keep Twitter running with a skeleton crew, more power to him.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
My concern is that this stuff will not be seen, or will be seen only tangentially, by ānormies,ā so it wonāt drive a big reaction among them against Trump, DeSantis, the GQP and the rest of the anti-Biden, anti-government right. The normies will be showing up at the voting booth like āBut muh inflation.ā
But this stuff will be flogged relentlessly on Fox News, NewsMax, OAN et al., further driving the crazies even crazier and motivating them to who knows what (seditious) actions.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Alas, the MSM can disappear anyone for awhile.Ā The East Palestine train wreck was practically invisible for at least a week.Ā Making a VP vanish is small potatoes by comparison.
Kay
@Baud:
My son, who does that sort of work,Ā tells me that isn’t how failure works in that environment. It won’t be immediately apparent. It’s a slow degradation leading to eventual dramatic failures :)
Slow then fast.
He has a story about an airline site that could have ominous music behind it- you know something bad is going to happen.
sab
@lowtechcyclist: E Palestine RR derailment was invisible for a week because they were arresting reporters doing their jobs, like covering the governor’s press conference.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
You saw that Twitter had a big outage yesterday, right?
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Future NYT headline
Baud
@Steeplejack:
Yes.Ā So less power to him, as it turns out.
OzarkHillbilly
And if that leaves you unimpressed…
You go Jimmy.
Steeplejack
@Kay:
True. And the failures will pop up at unexpected moments, like the one yesterday.
Kay
@sab:
The national coverage was just terrible. It reminded me of the Deepwater Horion spill coverage, which had the same theme- “hard work’in folks who are ignored” – and little or no facts.
I read the investigatory report into the Horizon spill. Anderson Cooper does not come off well- he was making shit up.
Chetan Murthy
@Kay: This is 100% accurate.Ā I did large-scale transaction-processing system troubleshooting (and one of my gigs was to clean up Twitter’s annus horribilis in 2008 — I was lent by IBM, so no, I didn’t get any big bucks, sigh).Ā Large distributed systems fail organically, like living organisms — bit-by-bit.Ā You can keep ’em running by feverishly running around restarting and fixing things as they fail, and that’ll keep things going for a good while, but unless you can get ahead of the failures, eventually they overwhelm the system.Ā Also, there are many different kinds of faults that such large, complex systems suffer, and new ones arise all the time.Ā You need engineers to diagnose these new faults and repair them (or figure out how to prevent them in the future).Ā And of course, these systems are under attack all the time by bad actors, so you can think of those as new faults, too.
A large distributed system with built-in redundancy can survive a good while with understrength maintenance, but eventually something breaks and you get catastrophic failure — like what happened yesterday morning.
Baud
@Kay:
Story of my life.
trnc
The tech may work for some time, but many of the people he’s fired worked on compliance and preventing various abusive uses such as child porn, bullying, state misinformation (eg, Russian propaganda), etc.
trnc
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s awesome.
Kay
@Chetan Murthy:
My sense with him is they feel underappreciated already because no one “sees” their work, but it’s essential. The tech sector will learn what every other sector that involves engineering learns- cutting corners costs more.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud:Ā ā My failures have all been rather undramatic.
BenCisco šŗšøšļøš„ļøā¦ļø
@rikyrah: Good morning!
trnc
Well, that sucks. I didn’t always like his stories, but I figured he was at least trying. Then again, I haven’t watched much CNN or other cable outlets for years.
Tony Jay
@lowtechcyclist:
Nope, sorry, but the awesome thought-kaisers at the FTF Guardian have clarified that it was all Buttigieg and Biden’s fault that the East Palestine thingumybob wasn’t front page news, and they may have thrown the next election to Trump in the process.
And people ask me why I routinely spit on the very idea that the FTF Guardian is a ‘progressive’ newspaper. It’s a vehicle for knee-capping whoever happens to be the official Party of the Left in any particular country by promoting shit-chat from whoever their internal enemies are.
Chetan Murthy
@Kay: As I’ve watched this saga, one thing I’ve noticed is that he doesn’t even know the first thing about running large-scale systems.Ā I mean, for example, one *must* have multiple levels of redundancy and slack in a large system, b/c if you get a surge you cannot process, then to the outside world you will appear *down*.Ā Not slow, but *down*.Ā And yet he goes and discards entire datacenters’ worth of capacity.Ā That’s nuts, and it shows: Twitter is much slower than it used to be, and that translates into “much closer to the edge of being down due to lack of capacity”.Ā Just nuts.
Another Scott
@trnc:
Case in point…
(via Oryx)
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I saw that column when it first ran and thought to myself, of course McArdle was the first to go there. Her entire shtick is triumphantly presenting anecdotes that she thinks confirm her childish preexisting biases, only to have them promptly blow up in her face. That such a boring, unimaginative and consistently wrong person was given a column in a major national daily says so much about the health of our mainstream media outlets.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I just love that it all flows from the incredibly rigorous analysis of “Musk is rich so most likely right about everything”. She thought announcing his business genius was a safe bet although she knew and knows nothing about that business! ! Why ON EARTH would she think that? Well, because rich people are super great, that’s why!
They could have asked someone who knows, like our own Chetan Murphy here:
It was also like catnip to the antiwoke warriors, because they completely bought into the nonsense that Twitter was somehow “Leftist” and discriminating against conservatives. To them it was probably good because “woke” people were getting fired, you know, in their imaginations.
Mousebumples
Quick reminder that we’re doing another music/postcarding post tonight at 745pm eastern (blog time) or 645pm central.
For more postcarding info check out this post. Hope to see you there! I’ll be writing addresses on my 5ļøā£0ļøā£ postcards for Judge Janet Protasiewicz! š¤©
prostratedragon
Happy Birthday, Maurice Ravel!
“Alborada del gracioso,” Alicia de la Rocha
schrodingers_cat
Its also Rangpanchami (5th day of colors, the day after Holi), the festival of colors.
Happy Holi!
M31
@Kay:
I had a geologist friend who was amazed at the lack of coverage of the Deepwater Horizon spill when it happened — “why aren’t we hearing about this, that is really bad”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: In my experience, engineers generally don’t score high on the “woke” scale.
AWOL
@OzarkHillbilly: Awful, actually. He won’t have the sexual or emotional skills to compete in the actual world of adults. I’ve met these types of young achievers. Most have enormous issues and many cope with substances before settling into mediocre careers. The same is true for teen athletes who are prodigies playing in leagues that are for players four or five years above theirs. They have no friends, so social skills.
Manyakitty
@Ohio Mom: and the evergreen refrain “they tried to kill us, we survived. Let’s eat!”
Also, too, the guidance to get so drunk we can’t tell Haman from Mordecai.
lashonharangue
@Betty Cracker: Not to defend McArdle but I find the whole idea of opinion columnists in MSM strange. Why should anyone be expected to know something about any topic in enough depth to write an 800 word piece on short notice?Ā You might as well go to the local diner, bar, or barbershop and just ask the person next to you.Ā That is why I hang out here. People will express their opinions but usually someone will add their voice who actually knows something about the topic.
Ken
@trnc: It takes a special kind of management skill to buy a company that is under an FTC consent decree, and fire the people responsible for complying with it.
Manyakitty
Always glad to see my favorite internet Rabbi (Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg) getting airtime. She’s a good human.
Ken
Twice a week, at that. And usually a different topic each time.
Not that “guest opinion pieces” have that great a track record.
OzarkHillbilly
@AWOL:Ā ā Gee, there is a downside to being extremely intelligent, better he should be ignorant and bored. Like I was. Well, bored to tears anyway, because they weren’t teaching anything I didn’t already know. I barely survived HS.
sdhays
@Chetan Murthy: Elmu doesn’t believe that large scale failures are that big of a deal. You can see this in his other companies, including Tesla and Neuralink. If someone gets hurt or killed, it’s just the cost of doing business and pushing technology forward.
The stakes at Twitter are much lower. Elmu believes that Twitter has enough critical mass that its users will stay, even if the site is slower than before, even if the site is down for a day or two, even if people are forced to see his shitposting regardless of their engagement with him, even if the site is overwhelmed with the worst trolls. So why spend money on making the site any good if your users don’t demand it?
That’s his bet, and based on how a lot of people talk about the unique niche Twitter carved out for certain communities, he may not be wrong.
James E Powell
@lashonharangue:
A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about – Miguel de Unamuno
Betty Cracker
@lashonharangue: The thing that’s so maddening about McArdle and other folks who relentlessly pound the square pegs of real events into the round holes of their abstract notions is their arrogance. A columnist with a drop of humility could have maybe reached out to someone with the requisite expertise? Or offered a more nuanced opinion? With McArdle, it’s always the same Randian claptrap. Always.Ā
cmorenc
@Kay: blind guess: American Airlines, from the flakey manner their app’s notifications get pushed out – got notified a flight I’d already taken was oarding, for example,
Scout211
Agree. And they are outdated, especially because it appears that all of the āhard newsā stories are now full of opinions, either subtle opinions of the reporter or news service or are blatant opinions of the āboth sidesā people quoted in the article.
The opinion pieces on the traditional opinion pages these days are more like social media click bait. The actual opinions are not as important to the news service as the reactions that they may trigger.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Even Maureen Dowd went to Colorado to overdose on weed herself.
Imagine having less humility or curiosity than Maureen Dowd…
lowtechcyclist
@sab: Who did they arrest besides Evan Lambert?
Somehow I doubt that arresting one reporter would silence the national media; if anything, quite the opposite.Ā And arresting a bunch of them would have been a major scandal which the media would have treated as such.
JMG
@Ken: I was a sports columnist for many years. In theory, a columnist is supposed to do some reporting to support whatever opinion they express, so as not to make a fool of themselves and by extension their employer. In practice, you had to do this in sports because the shared knowledge level of the audience is so much greater than that for general news. Your opinion could be proven wrong by events (happens a lot in sports) but it had to have some basis in the facts as known.
Emmyelle
@Ohio Mom: prior to the establishment of the Julian calendar (before it was corrected and replaced by the Gregorian calendar), New Years celebrations took place around the vernal equinox. Julius Caesar established January 1 as New Yearās Day in honor of Janus, the Roman god of gateways and new beginnings, and to celebrate the inauguration of senators. But still between then and the establishment of the Gregorian calendar, new years celebrations drifted and became dictated by local and regional tradition so weāre celebrated in March in many places.
Emmyelle
@lowtechcyclist: she needs to get her priorities straight. No mention of drag queens or critical race theory and the damage they are doing to our society. Everything was like āhereās a real problem that impacts real people in real ways and hereās a real solution bla bla bla blaā
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
I remember being totally baffled by the Deepwater Horizon coverage.Ā Here you had an environmental disaster on the level of the Exxon Valdez, if not bigger, and the media didn’t seem to be treating it with anything like the same seriousness.
It had been just a little over a year since we adopted the kiddo, so I was still too much wrapped up in dealing with being a father for the first time to dig into things and figure out what the hell was going on.Ā But shit just wasn’t adding up.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: I thought that reporter’s arrest amplified the East Palestine story.
My understanding is that the reporter was in a school gymnasium where Governor DeWine was scheduled to give a press conference. DeWine was late and the reporter had a hard deadline, so he set up in a far corner of the gym and started his on-camera report just as DeWine finally made it to his microphone. It was going to be a short report and not a loud one but a security officials stopped him. The reporter protested and was arrested.
Betty Cracker
@sdhays: LOL, I’d forgotten that! What a maroon!
@Scout211: I agree that’s often the case with opinion pieces. The click-bait aspect is part of the monetization of news as the industry collapses, I suppose.
Still, I like the idea of opinion pieces and believe they can play a useful role in exposing people to new perspectives or arguments they hadn’t considered. But in practice, that doesn’t happen much.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
Wonder if she ever saw Fiddler on the Roof.Ā As Tevye sings in “If I Were a Rich Man”:
J R in WV
@Kay:Ā ā
Anderson Cooper is not a reporter, nor an investigator. He is for the most part (as I understand the TV news biz) a news reader of text someone else writes. So while I am not surprised that someone was making shit up (or seriously misunderstanding real facts and events), I somewhat doubt it was actually Cooper.
There is a huge staff behind all those news readers, as they are more accurately called in Britain.
Ixnay
@Ohio Mom: only possibility I had, was that there is kosher cokeĀ that is sweetened with sugar not corn syrup. Better tasting.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay:
Through the nadir of the Democratic Party’s rightward move in the 1990s-2000s, I assumed they just did that to the US Democrats because we kind of sucked. I find that a lot of people and organizations seemingly can’t give up the habit.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
My dog whistle is “Bank executives are producing a Broadway musical about Ukraine”. Which sounds way too plausible both about something that could be happening and that Carlson, Hannity et al would somehow find a way to turn it anti-Semitic.
frosty
@Tony Jay: Iām a Grauniad subscriber to get a non-US look at the news (especially world). What should I be reading instead?
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: A lesson I learned from Bush’s wars was that it can take more time than you expect for a badly planned operation to really go to crap. In the short term it can look like you’ve scored a tremendous victory against all conventional wisdom.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Emmyelle: One of the things (possibly erroneous) I retain from Latin class is that the Romans had a very logical calendar of 12 months of 30 days each for a total of 360 days, followed by a 5-day celebration called Saturnalia.
And later I learned that Christian leaders chose Dec 25 to celebrate Christmas in order to try to displace Saturnalia.
Was Saturnalia different from New Year?
(When you think about it, the coldest darkest part of midwinter is kind of a strange time for a celebration of new beginnings, unless you’re celebrating that the days are now starting to get longer)
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
There’s always going to be something the Dems aren’t doing.
@Matt McIrvin:
Six months, tops.
Kay
I’ll try to find the actual lawsuit because I’m not linking to the WaPo or NYTimes abortion coverage – it’s terrible – womens health and agency is not a high priority for either paper. There weill be more words written on “woke” than womens health and agency in any given week at the NYTimes. Conventional, traditional people who think womens health is “icky”.
narya
Just got my first consulting gig . . .
mvr
@Mousebumples: And let me follow up by pointing out the Wisconsin fundraising link at the top of the right sidebar menu.
Matt McIrvin
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Don’t know but I think that Dec 25 was literally the date of the winter solstice at that time; things drifted a bit before the time that the Gregorian reform took as the baseline to reset to.
I think “we’re past the hump, things get less bad from here on” is precisely the sentiment of all of our wintertime “festival of light” type things.
Baud
@narya:
š
Kay
NPR on the lawsuit–Ā they’ve been better than national newspapers on covering abortion, and covering it accurately and properly.
Manyakitty
@narya: woohoo šš
mvr
@JMG:Ā ā
This fits my sense of sports reporting.
I’m not actually much of a sports fan, but I have long thought that many sports reporters do better analysis than non-sports reporters. They both let themselves actually say stuff that if it were political news would remain unsaid because if might be seen as taking a side, and at least often back it up.
narya
@Baud:@Manyakitty: And I did almost nothing to get it, tbh. I made one call to someone I’d met during my old employment; he does consulting, mostly solo, and pulls in folks when he needs them. I have an area of knowledge that is (a) missing from his and (b) a common need for the businesses with whom he works. We’ll see how this goes, but it could be a nice side gig and help me delay taking money from the retirement accounts.
Betty Cracker
@narya: One piece of advice I got on freelance work many years ago: charge twice as much as you initially think you’ll need. You’ll weed out the bottom feeders who would otherwise be a gigantic pain in the ass and cover expenses for all the administrative crap you’ll soon discover is required for the gig.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: NPR’s political coverage is uniformly bad, so I’ve been sort of surprised by how good they are on this issue. It would be interesting to examine why that is. Maybe they have more women in editorial positions?Ā Ā
narya
@Betty Cracker: I don’t even have to worry about that side of it! Basically, I’m gonna work for this guy–he will get the gigs, pay me 1099 wages, etc., and I don’t have to drum up business. He’s been doing it forever and has alllll the contacts, so I can basically work as much as I want, I suspect. And, even though this first job is going through two other entities (he’s a subcontractor with another larger group), the rate was what I’d estimated. And if there isn’t another entity, I suspect the rate will go up. He’d wanted to do business with the larger entity, so this actually gets him in the door there, too.
Baud
The media is rarely this dismissive of the GOP agenda.
Manyakitty
@narya: fantastic! Hope it works out for both of you.
Betty Cracker
@narya: You’re golden then! Mazel tov!
danielx
Yet more information than I really wanted: cardiac ablation for spousal unit yesterday.
Alison Rose
Chag Purim Sameach to all my jackal Heebs. If you’re not Jewish, you can still eat hamentaschen, but only the prune ones.
zhena gogolia
@danielx: I hope it went well!
Old School
@danielx: I hope everything works out well.
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose: I love the prune ones.
zhena gogolia
@danielx: Wait — did it happen already, or were you just told about it yesterday? I’ve had friends who’ve had it, and all was well.
schrodingers_cat
OT: Not everyone is accepting BJP’s lies as the gospel truth.
This young singer and songwriter, Neha Singh Rathore speaks truth to power
She asks in Bhojpuri (I guess to BJP supporters and the slumbering normies)
UP me ka ba?
What the hell is happening in UP?
Life under Yogi Adityanath (Ajay Singh Bisht) sucks so what exactly are you proud of.
Ganga is full of lies..
She also references the incident at Lakhimpur Kheri where a BJP minister’s son ran over a protester during the farmers protest.
Chowkidar (watchman) who is responsible for all this.
YA is UP’s Chief Minister who parades around in saffron clothes and is supposedly a monk and is looked upon by many as Modi’s successor.
CaseyL
When I was a kid, I thought of Purim as the only happy holiday on the Jewish calendar: the one where you got to dress up, party, and make noise.
As an adult, I still loved the story, but got a little sidetracked trying to figure out where it fit within documented Persian history (e.g., Who was “Ahasuerus”? Artaxerxes?)
There actually has been some scholarship in this area, which alas tends to think of the entire story as apocryphal, since Persian kings only married Persian women of highest rank.Ā I don’t know enough about Persian history to opine authoritatively on this, but SFAIK Jews were becoming thoroughly assimilated into Persia during this time, including into the higher ranks, which might also be a reason Haman wanted to obliterate them.Ā (As established hierarchies always want to keep their ranks “pure,” and alwaysĀ oppose extending privilege to people they considered their inferiors.
That Mordechai was a King’s advisor – a nonPersian!Ā – I think lends credence to my theory.)
danielx
Seems to have gone well, although (naturally) she’s seriously bruised. BOTH sides of the heart; technology is amazing.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Itās become very noticeable since they became a Hedge-fund owned subscription model, and entirely location specific. They were enthusiastic Bernie-blowers when he was up against Hillary and now promote the kind of professional Doom 4 Dems faux-leftist agichat that never seems to find room to notice how far back to the centre-left the average Democratic moderate now is and how productive the relationship between the Dem Left and the leadership has become since the GOP went MEGAMAGA.
But where the UK is concerned itās just come off a 5 year binge where it was all about smearing the Left and promoting the British versions of Joe Lieberman as the adults in the room. Theyāre currently waiting impatiently for the former Labour Leader to die so they can do a 180 and undermine the Nu-Lab corporate franchise from the left, but they just canāt go there yet.
Arseholes of the lowest quality.
RaflW
@Steeplejack: Tuckums continues to insist the 2020 election was manipulated.
I hope the lawyers for Dominion are watching every second of his shows (as much as that deserves hazard pay) and clipping things like that for filings and at (one hopes!) the actual trial.
It shows there is zero remorse by him or any of the managers and execs over their past slander. I’m sure they’re at least a bit careful to avoid directly mentioning Dominion’s machines now, but that they just keep lying makes a heck of an argument for a maximum dollar payout.
Alison Rose
@zhena gogolia: I’ve never developed a taste for prune anything. You can have all of those and I get all the apricot ones :)
Sure Lurkalot
@Alison Rose: Iām going to sneak in an apricot hammentaschen while youāre not looking.
dnfree
@AWOL: It sounds like much of his schooling has been online. Ā Law school is going to be a shock for him. Ā I suspect not every law school will be eager to enroll him. Ā I wonder where heāll wind up.
Tony Jay
@frosty:
Honestly? Gawd knows. Thatās why I come here.
Mimi Haha
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve always assumed they were guessing about the exact time/date of the solstice and just randomly picked the 25th.
CaseyL
@Alison Rose: I will never find a commercially-baked hamentashen that duplicates my Mom’s.
Most of ’em, the dough is soft and cakelike; my mother made it more like soft cookie, and fairly thin.Ā Much smaller, too, than what bakeries make, so the proportion of filling-to-dough was different, with emphasis on the filling. Yum.
Alison Rose
@CaseyL: True, the mass-produced ones are always going to be a bit less enjoyable.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Ohio Mom: This may be, though I’m sure Coca-Cola is happy to be part of a widely disseminated photo for any holiday.
zhena gogolia
@CaseyL: I love the book of Esther. Tevye the Dairyman uses it as a major source.
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose: I was offered a homemade apricot one by a colleague, but I was about to go to class so had to say no. :(
Ken
@CaseyL: There’s also some speculation, scholarly and otherwise, about the origins of the book of Esther, that notes the similarity between Mordecai/Esther and Marduk/Ishtar – a couple of Mesopotamian gods.
Matt McIrvin
@Mimi Haha: Their astronomy was good enough to be really precise about it but the civil calendar design had always been kind of lackadaisical.
Brachiator
@Kay:
This is beyond stupid. But it was written by McArdle, so beyond stupid is to be expected.
This happens with young companies, start-ups. But Musk wanted to play tech theater and demand idiotic displays of loyalty not connected to actual requirements.
Depends. I’ve known a lot of reporters and newspaper production people who at times have had to sleep in pretty crappy conditions, if they got any real sleep at all.
But I would think that pundits only look back at those glory days, which were long ago.
Anyway
@Matt McIrvin:
Word. RWers at every level from tweets to govt officials have learned to gaslight and go for short-term wins and BREAK stuff – which is their goal — Iraq, Brexit, Public Education … Pointing out that there are no WMDs or asking the path forward after Brexit just results in stonewalling. They have learned to modify the discourse to their advantage.
Recent deviations from the RW script are the CW in Ukraine war and the whole Biden administration – they haven’t completely molded the dialog to their POV. Small wins for the sane side.
Geminid
@CaseyL: I think Persian Kings had many wives, and not all of them were of royal descent (and Esther might have had royal blood herself).
I just cannot believe this theory ruling out Esther as Darius’s wife. I realize that the Great King had his pick of women from the Aegean Sea to the Oxus River. But are they trying to tell me he would pass up Jewish women? I don’t think so.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
He cut so hard, I thought it would be faster than this. Ā I left because he immediately decided anti-trans bigotry was just harmless jokes, but it sounds like the technology is progressively disintegrating.
@sdhays:
As someone who left early, I have been watching how hard people are digging in their heels not to leave a boat they think is sinking. Ā It looks like something else will kill Twitter before loss of users.
@CaseyL:
Iām Ā Jewish but no biblical history scholar. Ā Make pretending Esther was his wife a cleaned up version of āconcubineā or just āmistressā and it works. Ā There is a long history of powerful men, even more so kings, being very nice to women who officially had no choice about sex. Ā Their favorites could be pampered and wield great political power because the king/owner wanted the woman happy about sleeping with him. Ā That influence was sometimes so huge that the child of those unions inheriting the throne wasnāt totally off the table. Ā The big risk for the woman was the king losing interest and another woman taking that āmore powerful than the queenā slot.
This phenomenon has led to one Hell of a lot of deadly and dynasty-altering court politics, and as an integrated and influential minority Jews were prime mistress/concubine material in pre-modern Middle East.
danielx
@Brachiator:Ā ā
I would be greatly surprised if McMegan ever slept on a floor anywhere besides a slumber party.
Matt McIrvin
@Anyway: On the surface level it seemed like America was basically doing just fine under Trump, until COVID hit.
Part of the MO for Republicans is that when everything does break and they get turfed out, the other side of the coin is that it also takes a longer time than you expect to unfuck everything. So they can come roaring back because of public dissatisfaction at the performance of the Democratic cleanup crew.
But as you say, 2022 was kind of a small exception to that–they didn’t come roaring back, they just squeaked back, and lost a lot of races they’d been expected to take. It’s not that the public was so fond of Biden, more, I think, that Trump’s failed coup left such a sour taste that people actually still remembered it, and a lot of Trumpy politicians wouldn’t let go of the conspiracy theories behind it.
Ken
@Mimi Haha: Another complication would be the Roman calendar, which until the Julian reforms was inherently a mess, and on top of that was manipulated for political reasons.
Soprano2
@Steeplejack: Wasn’t one of the first commandments in “1984” to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears? They’re trying to get people to ignore what they saw live on January 6th! I have no doubt some Capitol police let those people in, because they were sympathetic to them. Not most of them, though. I think they’re going to have trouble getting anyone other than current MAGA’s to believe any of that bullshit.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: Seems like a lawsuit is in order over this. I’m sure if those artworks counseled against abortion they would be included.
Soprano2
And yet they will talk as if they have zero agency over any of this – evidently, they feel they are compelled by some invisible force to cover the news the way they do, rather than admitting that they make choices based on what drives eyeballs and ears.
Soprano2
@AWOL: My mother was jumped forward a grade when she moved from Ohio to Missouri. She said it was a problem because she was one year younger than her classmates, so I can’t imagine how hard it is socially for a 15-year-old in college. I saw 17-year-olds in college struggle a lot socially.
Matt McIrvin
Here’s the Wikipedia article about the Roman calendar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar
It was never super-regular with equal or alternating month lengths, as sometimes claimed. It started out as a sort of haphazard lunisolar calendar with months that already had varying lengths, and a 13th month between February and March that they stuck in there every so often to get the seasons to roughly align, but they often just didn’t put it in when they were supposed to.
The Julian reform made it basically the calendar we still use today except without the 100- and 400-year adjustments introduced under Pope Gregory. A huge improvement but there was still some long-term drift.
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: I wish there were better systems for kids like that, because I had a nephew who had the same problem. I think the big problem is with social development, because they’re too “old” for their peers but too young for the people they’re actually in school with.
CaseyL
@Geminid:
@Frankensteinbeck:
The multiple wives and concubine theories occurred to me, too, though I wonder about Vashti’s role/status in view of them.
The story says that Ahasuerus wanted to be rid of Queen Vashti because she refused to “show herself” to his Court (possibly naked, though even just without full court dress would be as bad).Ā Persian noblewomen were very cloistered, and asking one to display herself for the King’s amusement was hugely disrespectful, tantamount to calling her a harlot.
Was Vashti a concubine, then?Ā A highly-ranked one, but still a concubine?
Does that mean Esther wasĀ willing to “show herself” to the Court, in whatever dress/undress the King demanded?
Or: was Vashti infertile, and part of the problem for Ahasuerus? Did he order her to “show herself” because there were doubts about her being a woman (Persian kings were bisexual, with male as well as female favorites – or even gay, who married and sired children out of duty)?
I am getting very deep into the weeds here, but I know just enough about ancient Persian court and politics to come up with all sorts of interesting scenarios in trying to see where the story of Purim fits into Persian history.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: My parents were always against having me skip grades in school even though teachers apparently proposed it. Fairfax County’s “gifted/talented” program provided a kind of haven though I know that as social policy this is a mixed bag at best.
It did feel kind of like skipping ahead when I transferred into it; there were subjects that fell through the crack that I had to catch up on. One of them was the difficult half of the multiplication table, and it led to years of being terrible at arithmetic.
My wife did skip a grade in elementary school and seems to have done fine. But if she were 4, 5, 6 years ahead… probably another story.
scav
If you want to throw a really solid New Years party, probably better to do it in the dead of winter. Ā Closer to the time you generally slaughter a bunch of animals (canāt feed them over the winter), the harvest is in (and a known quantity) and honestly, youāre at a bit of a loose end. Ā In spring, while you really want to celebrate making it through the winter, youāve generally blown through most of your stores, these are the lean times. Huzzah! lots of moving towards green stuff and actual daylight! but there’s all this stuff that needs doing to get the fields prepped. Or, just have two entirely different sorts of celebrations and flip a coin about which one ceremonially flips the odometer.
Geminid
@Geminid: Now I realize there is a good theory ruling out Esther as Darius’s wife. The Great King in the story is Xerxes, Darius’s successor.
Old School
@Matt McIrvin:
I’d say Dobbs had more to do with it than January 6th, but it’s probably some combination of the two.
Frankensteinbeck
@CaseyL:
“This girl is willing to go along with my kink and my wife won’t” does have a long tradition too.Ā Honestly, though, sex and issues at all related to sex have been written in slang or code for so long that who the butt knows what it meant?
Brachiator
@CaseyL:
When I was in college, a religious studies professor made a good case that this whole thing comes from some pagan fertility rituals. This really upset an evangelical person in the class.
I have heard that Purim is one of the few Jewish holidays where it is acceptable to get intoxicated.
artem1s
@Frankensteinbeck:Ā ā
The risk worked out OK for Mary Boleyn. But unfortunately for Catherine and Anne, getting the King to the altar doesn’t prevent him from losing interest and dumping the Queen for another woman either.
CaseyL
@Brachiator:
Passover, where you read the Haggadah and drink a lot of wine, can get pretty boozy.Ā But Passover is a solemn holiday, so your intoxication must be solemn :)
Purim is not a solemn holiday, so you can get jiggy with it.
Frankensteinbeck
@Brachiator:
My ultra-orthodox neighbors would beg to differ, albeit slowly and with a noticeable slur.
Ohio Mom
@CaseyL: Like all aspects of religious tradition, the Purim story may be true but it is certainly not factual.
True in the sense that it contains eternal themes and reflects the human condition.
But not factual in the sense that facts can be verified.
When these stories first took form, there was only truth; facts were developed later, as people developed ways of calculating and quantifying observations and replicating them.
That gravity exists is a fact, as every baby discovers throwing peas off their high chairās tray. That no one loves them in the same way their mother and father do, that is truth.
Paul in KY
@Kay: When Meeeeeeeegan is shilling for you, you should know you’re in deep shit.
Ohio Mom
@scav: Yes, exactly. Winter is over, there isnāt much food left, letās have a holiday about sacrifice and doing without ā Weāll call it Lent.
Passover, doing without bread, comes as we are waiting for the first crops to be ready to harvest.
Paul in KY
@lashonharangue: It makes more sense when you think of them as propaganda mouthpieces for certain people/groups.
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: Whenever we book a trip thru a travel agent, the order is: ‘no American Airlines!!!!’.
Ohio Mom
@Brachiator: And Passover too, with its four cups of wine. Jews drink other times too ā every Sabbath meal includes a blessing over wine ā but those are the two Letāer Rip occasions.
Happy holidays like Purim and Passover, where you are supposed to stay up late and celebrate loudly, are always on full moons. Because then there is a source of light after sunset. (The old joke goes, What is more valuable to us, the sun or the moon? The moon, because it shines at night when else it would be dark, the sun only shines during theĀ day when it is already light.)
Paul in KY
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: ‘Mid-Winter’ is more in January-Feb.
That is the darkest part though (end of Dec)
Paul in KY
@narya: Sounds nice. Congrats!
Brachiator
@Ohio Mom:
Makes sense. I wonder if this is common with other cultures and civilizations?
Frankensteinbeck
@Ohio Mom:
One of my favorite things about history is that a lot of these ancient ‘histories’ that you would absolutely think are fake have gotten partially backed up.Ā The Trojan War was considered to be just mythic literature until Troy was found.Ā Or, technically, until a site on top of Troy was found by a guy who was a little too convinced of his own genius.Ā But they did find Troy several layers underneath soon after!
scav
@Frankensteinbeck: Ā There is a lot of fun to be had trying to winkle out what elements of observation / reality have trickled down to us through the looong game of telephone that is the oral tradition. Thereās also bits where we get to bang our heads against the details that were added along the way by people making the rough structure more understandable in their own period, plus recognize when they decided to go play with metaphor, toss in a few slapstick elements and freely invent and/or borrow an episode when theyāve forgotten that bit in the middle.
glory b
@Steeplejack: Sicknick had a stroke and died on 1/7. I haven’t heard anything to the contrary in the mainstraem media anyway. Carlson has created a straw man.
Also, I’ve read on twitter that his footage refutes storeis that the QAnon Shaman was violent. Again, I never heard stories of violence. Head scratching, yes. Speculation about his mental state, yes. Violence, no.
By the way, he was charged with, and pled guilty to, felony intrerference with a federal proceeding. That sounds about right for him.
glory b
@Old School: Have you seen that (i believe) 85% of voters between 18-24 want Biden in 2024? Wow, what happened to THAT polling?
Ohio Mom
@danielx: Yikes! I never heard of cardiac ablation before but anything with ācardiacā in it is in Yikes! territory.
Keep us posted.
Emmyelle
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I also has the understanding that the placement of Christmas was intended to disrupt all the pagan stuff, which I guess it sort of did but then we took their tree thing.
Funny thing about the cold dark days: when I was a kid growing up in New England, I of course didnāt know any different and anyway was not bothered by the cold or the dark. I lived in the south for a decade as an adult, and of course we had some of the dark, and not the cold. But I also experienced a few hurricanes with power outages that lasted a week or two, and it was then that I truly had the experience of darkness as oppressive.
Back in New England now and while I have decided that I never want to leave this pace, with its sane smart people and even the occasionally Republican governs give a shit about, you know, governing, I really truly dread the 8 or so weeks when I am driving home from work in darkness of, like, 5:30 or 6, and waiting until 7AM for the dog walk.
So I truly appreciate the symbolism of Advent (Iām a New England ex-Catholic turned mainline Protestant, of course), of light in the darkness, of waiting for the light to return, and of course all of this being about the incarnation and all.
So while the placement of Christmas and New Years had political motivations rather than spiritual ones, and this dark thing only makes sense in the northern hemisphere, I really do pull a lot of spiritual energy from our fake December holiday.
Geminid
@glory b: That poll has been getting a lot of attention. I can believe the number. I think that being new to politics,Ā younger people may not over-think questions as much as their “wiser” elders.
Matt McIrvin
@scav: And, in fact, whether the year flipped over in January or in March seems to have been ambiguous for centuries–the Roman Julian reforms set it to January but it seems like many European countries, including Britain, didn’t firmly establish that the year number changed in January until later. In Britain it was 1752, when they switched to Gregorian.