Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Not all heroes wear capes.

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

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

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

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

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

Accountability, motherfuckers.

We still have time to mess this up!

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

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War for Ukraine Day 970: Two Thirds of Ukraine Is Under Air Raid Alert Because Russia Is Attacking with Glide Bombs and a Drone Swarm

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is doing great, as is Ruby. Rosie’s last treatment is tomorrow, so more to follow. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, I’m fried. It has been a very long, very draining two weeks. I’m just going to run through the basics tonight so I can rack out.

Russia has been attacking Ukraine with glide bombs and a drone swarm for several hours.

The butcher’s bill from the past week:

Every day, Russia strikes our cities and communities. This is the enemy’s deliberate terror against our people.

This week alone, Russian terrorists have used more than 20 missiles of various types, around 800 guided aerial bombs, and over 500 strike drones of different types against Ukraine.

A world united in defense can stand up to this deliberate terror. Ukraine needs more air defense systems and long-range capabilities. I am grateful to all partners who understand this and support us.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Medium Cool – Changing of the Seasons

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Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in.  We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.

Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered.  We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.

On The Road - JanieM - Maine #2
Maine photo by JanieM
Maine photo by JanieM. Same spot as the photo above, but facing the other way.

Cliosfanboy sent me a couple of ideas for Medium Cool as we move from summer to colder weather.

First up, changing of the seasons. Fall.  Autumn.  Whatever you call it.  This week, I call it RFC. (Pretty sure you can figure that one out.)

Next week we’ll talk about Halloween and traditions.

Okay, back to Fall.  What cultural things capture the changing of the seasons for you?  Music, books, movies,TV shows shoes, clothing, murals, postcards, neckties, samplers, stained-glass windows?  Changing leaves, apple cider, first frost on the windows?  (We had frost on the windows this week.)

Cliosfanboy will start off the conversation with these happy thoughts:

 My wife and I celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary in mid-October.  For our first dance as husband and wife at the reception we chose “Moondance” by Van Morrison.

Well, it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
You know I’m trying to please to the calling
Of your heartstrings that play soft and low.

OK, your turn!  (collectively speaking)

Note: for those new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.

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GOTV Open Thread: Shine On, Harvest Moon

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It’s a truism that Halloween has become the second-biggest adult consumer holiday after Christmas; people want to get hooked up before the cold weather sets in and the communal So, you’re bringing a date? gatherings start. And if there’s a fun way to suggest that fulfilling one’s civic responsibility is a good way to attract a mate, welll…

White dudes, needless to say, have STRONG OPINIONS about this (never read the replies):
GOTV Open Thread: Shine On, Harvest Moon

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Update from Four Directions: The Final 15 Days

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I just heard from Bret from Four Directions.

They are aggressively litigating a ballot access issue for Native Americans in Montana, and working overtime to turn out the vote.  Bret said that in previous elections, for every 100 Native votes for Tester’s opponent, there were approximately 2,700 Native votes for Tester.  These are great odds.

In spite of the seeming determination in Montana to limit the Native vote, we are not giving up on Montana, or giving up on Jon Tester.  Or giving up on any of the other states we have been funding.  But I have to tell you, the state of Montana is really pissing me off.  And don’t get me started on the racist piece of shit liar, Sheehy.

Bret didn’t call to ask Balloon Juice to raise more funds.  He called to fill me in on the Montana litigation, and to give me the heads up that Four Directions is doing a general fundraising e-mail to all previous donors asking for last minute funding for all their operations.

Bret said, as he always does, that they are infinitely grateful for all our support, and for the early money we raise for them that sets the foundation for everything that comes after.

He told me that they have no ability to separate out the Balloon Juice donors from their other donors, and I think he felt uncomfortable about the email going to BJ peeps – that it would seem that they were asking more of us – after everything we have already done to support the work of Four Directions.

I told him that starting in 2022 our thermometers have been set up to default to not sharing donor information with the organizations.  Therefore, a whole lot of BJ donors would not appear in their donor lists or the e-mails unless they had affirmatively “opted in,” or had donated prior to 2022.

Nevertheless, if you receive the e-mail, or if you want to make a general donation to Four Directions, I have made a thermometer for anyone who wants to kick something in for the home stretch, to be used wherever they need it the most.  Funds are going to the 501(c)3 side.

ActBlue thermometers require a “goal,” so I arbitrarily chose $5,000.  We may raise $2k, or we may raise $20k.  But we have not promised, nor has Four Directions asked, for any funds.  The thermometer will hang out in the sidebar, for anyone to use, or not.

Personally speaking, the more we look at candidate funding, the more grateful I am that we have been funding boots on the ground.  Millions upon millions of dollars going into TV ads.  I know there’s research showing that they work, but TV ads don’t work on me or on anyone I know.   But then again, we are not normies, are we?

Open thread.

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We Have the Best People – Ruben Gallego

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I found this quite moving.

Someone said he could have helicoptered in, but he didn’t.  He hiked in.  I absolutely love the look on his face which must have been from when he arrived and saw the native people who were there to greet him.

We Have the Best People – Ruben Gallego 1

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A Picture Really Is Worth a Thousand Words

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I had read about this, but seeing it is something else entirely.

I swear, the more I see of Musk, the more I think of him as a real-life Lex Luthor.

A Picture Really Is Worth a Thousand Words

Pure evil.

This time around, Trumps “friends” and allies are scarier then Trump.

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Authors in Our Midst – Ray Ingles – Colossal Geek Writes His First Book

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If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, send me an email message.  Don’t be shy!  I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please don’t hesitate to  get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Ray Ingles, whose first book comes out in just 3 days!

One survivor of our timeline. And it’s the wrong guy.

by Ray Ingles

Humble and fulsome thanks to WaterGirl for the invitation to talk about my debut novel, SECONDARY! I’ve been lurking here on the daily for years, posting a handful of comments. I really appreciate this community, and the chance to hear about news and stories that don’t show up elsewhere.

Anyway, right up front: I’m a colossal geek. The first book I ever checked out of a public library, back in kindergarten, was Space Cat. I’ve read voraciously ever since; mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a preference for the harder stuff. In particular I love when an author takes ‘one impossible thing’ and works out the realistic consequences. (Cheap teleportation? Sure, okay. Are you ready for places to crash like a webserver handling too much traffic?)

This gave me a fundamental inability to dismiss weird ideas without pondering them. In detail. Thinking about how actual humans would respond to some crazy phenomenon. Or technology. Or curse. It always annoys me when the story works the protagonist into an impossible situation… and then just ends. “Well, they’re screwed.” Okay, sure, your time meddling saved your brother but now Germany won WWII. What are you going to do about it? Why even tell a story about this character if how they respond doesn’t matter?

That said, it’s simplest to just give the back-cover blurb for SECONDARY:

Everybody has bad days. Jim McAllister’s having one that spans two timelines.

For an anthropologist, joining the Time Eye project is a career-making dream. He’s hardly above pulling strings–especially for a chance to pull photons from the Bronze Age and directly view ancient cultures. Then rogue scientists hijack the Eye, sending an engineered virus back thousands of years. Jim, the last person interfaced with the system, can only watch as reality warps around him.

Now he’s the sole remnant of the old history: a conspicuous, bizarrely-dressed young man who speaks no recognizable language. Thanks to the virus, anyone with two X chromosomes is a living, and potentially lethal, taser. Men have never been a significant threat to women–quite the opposite.

To have any chance of getting home–to even survive, in a world where men’s concerns have been secondary for all of recorded history–Jim will need to find allies. He’ll have to apply his skills to a uniquely unfamiliar culture, where much more than the gender signifiers are radically different. He must figure out who might listen to his story… a story that’s clearly impossible, deeply offensive, and just as a bonus, heretical.

Credit where credit is due: I heard about Naomi Alderman’s THE POWER, and I began to ponder. Her book was focused on our world, and what might happen here given a radical shift of power across genders. (She won awards, bestseller status, and an Amazon series, so it seems she did an excellent job.) But I was struck when I read about the novel’s framing device. Set millennia in the future, when our world has collapsed and been forgotten. A world where new norms have become so settled no one imagines they could ever have been different.

Now that’s a hella interesting premise for a science fiction novel. It almost demands a ‘hard sociological fiction’ approach. I mean, there are plenty of matriarchal – or just non-patriarchal – societies in history to draw from. What do they imply about a world where women (and others of the double-X persuasion) have a huge advantage over men when it comes to violence? What does anthropology and sociology tell us about how culture influences gender, and vice versa?

SECONDARY is available for pre-order and will be released on Amazon this Wednesday, October 23rd. The first four chapters are posted on my blog already, and the fifth will be posted Tuesday. If that sample doesn’t pique your interest, I completely understand. But I hope you’re curious about what happens after the Twilight Zone ending.

(Full disclosure – SECONDARY is a story for grownups. It doesn’t shy from the darker implications of the premise, any more than Alderman did. The situation Jim’s in is virtually unsurvivable; things get very bad for him before they get any better. He’s rather far from a genius, omnicompetent Heinlein hero. But he’s sometimes smart enough to ask the right questions, and he’s more resilient than he imagines.)

 

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