Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

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

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

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

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

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

Bark louder, little dog.

Consistently wrong since 2002

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

When we show up, we win.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

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Archives for 2024

Las Vegas Rally Last Night Open Thread

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We have them beat on every measure that counts, or at least on every measure that should count.

As they say, there’s no accounting for crazy!

And now we’ve got the charisma factor in our favor, too.

https://twitter.com/cwebbonline/status/1840593274941350280

Call me crazy, but I have always felt certain that our first female president would have to be beautiful, or at least very attractive.  Lucky for us, Kamala Harris is the whole package.  Attractive women get more promotions and get paid higher wages than their less slim and less attractive counterparts, which is wrong in more ways than we can count.  In this case, I’m happy to take the upside of this particular prejudice – if it helps us win the White House!

Open thread.

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Foreign Office Briefing: We Are Sausages to Fortune

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When I moved to the UK back in 2005, Tony Blair was still the prime minister. He’d managed to unite the country in contempt—a contempt richly deserved thanks to his role as handmaiden to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A friend wrote to me at the time to ask, “What is the deal with British politics? How do you know who the good guys are?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. Sometimes I still feel like I don’t. 

Consider Sir Keir Starmer, now entering week 13 of his premiership. I’m not a socialist—as a Liz Warren Democrat, my positions and preferences don’t really match up completely with any political party over here, not even Sir Ed Davey’s Amazing Adventure Pals Liberal Democrats. Starmer’s dedication to cutting out and cauterizing the left wing of the Labour Party since taking power in 2019 frustrates and disappoints me—again, as a Warren Democrat, I like Big! Structural! Change!, and he’s not offering that. I have, let’s say, carefully curated my expectations for this government.

oh dear, sir keir

However, I don’t yet feel the searing, white-hot rage others do toward Starmerite Labour. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention properly; maybe I don’t have the same deep, tribal feelings as the natives do about the political parties here. Maybe it’s because I recognize the tenuousness of his mandate—Labour won with 33.7% of the vote this year after losing with 32.1% in 2019. Any government elected under those circumstances will likely tread cautiously, and Starmer, a lawyer, seems like a temperamentally cautious man to begin with.

Still. I hoped that he and Labour would at least be able to show the country—a country exhausted by the petty infighting, gloomy outlook, and obvious corruption of the Tories—that even in the wake of Johnson, Truss, and Sunak, serious leadership was still possible.

So far, it looks like even that was too much to ask.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Choose Hope

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Meanwhile…
Monday Morning Open Thread: Choose Hope

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

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On The Road – Albatrossity – Photo Walkabout August 2024 – 4

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On The Road - Albatrossity - Photo Walkabout August 2024 – 4 10

Albatrossity

Although I am still posting pictures from my Arizona excursion, by the time you read this I will in in California, taking more pictures and visiting old friends. I plan to join a pelagic birding trip out of Monterey, so hopefully there will be new vistas and perhaps even some lifers on that trip. Of course, the last two times that I planned to do pelagic birding trips, they got canceled due to bad weather. Keep your fingers crossed!

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On The Road - Albatrossity - Photo Walkabout August 2024 – 4 9
Ash Canyon Bird SanctuaryAugust 24, 2024

After spending a morning in Ramsey Canyon, I wandered to another fabulous birding spot, the Ash Canyon Sanctuary.  Known for the hummingbird species that it regularly hosts, it also has ponds and shady areas to attract other kinds of birds. But we can start with the hummers. This is a female Rivoli’s Hummingbird (Eugenes fulgens), which if you have an older field guide is found under the name Magnificent Hummingbird. This is a large hummer, but unfortunately very shade-loving; I’m still jonesing for a good picture of the male bird in a sunny spot. Click on the species link above and you will see why. Click here for larger image.

Unexpected Respite Open Thread: To Save the Birds…

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Because even a DC journo is capable of growth and grace… Dana Milbank, at the Washington Post — “To save the birds, I’m killing my farm” [gift link]:

Not long after I bought a dilapidated farm in the Virginia Piedmont, I was surprised to learn that it came with its own farmer.

For years, a cattle farmer from up the road, a salt-of-the-earth guy named Travis, rode his big John Deere over and cut the hayfields in late spring and then again in early fall. The arrangement, common out here, works for both parties: The farmers get hay for their cows, and the landowners get their fields mowed for free.

But this summer, I delivered bad news to Travis. I asked him not to cut most of my fields and paid him so he could buy his hay elsewhere. For decades — perhaps a couple of centuries — this has been pastureland and hayfields. But no longer.

Now, this place is for the birds.

I’ve begun turning the hayfields into pollinator meadows of wildflowers and native grasses, with the goal of providing food and cover for grassland and shrubland birds, as well as for all the other critters who need these biomes to live.

These birds desperately need a break. A landmark study for Science in 2019 found that bird populations in the United States are down by nearly one-third over the last 50 years, the equivalent of removing 3 billion birds from our skies, because they’ve lost their habitat to development and their food sources to the overuse of pesticides. Birds are an indicator species — it’s much easier to see and hear them than, say, amphibians and small mammals — so it’s likely that other critters are declining similarly as our planet hurtles into a crisis of shrinking biodiversity and accelerating extinction…

Before humans began their meddling, grasslands and shrublands were created by natural disturbances such as fires, windstorms, landslides, insect infestations, beavers and bison that turned portions of forest into meadows and the like. These areas, technically known as early successional habitats, would gradually revert to forest, but for a decade or two would provide temporary havens for the creatures that thrive in grasslands and shrublands. Now, however, people have disrupted that process of natural disturbance, mostly by suppressing forest fires. Forests remain forests, and cleared areas for homes, industry, farms and manicured lawns offer little food or shelter for birds.

“Nobody actually creates this shrubland on purpose,” Rosenberg observes. Yet that is what I am about to do…

It’s not easy to convert hayfields into bird-friendly meadows. You have to kill off the fescue and other non-native grasses, fight off the invasive weeds that will try to spread into the fields, and drill in the seeds of native grasses and forbs. Then, every couple of years, you have to level the meadow with prescribed burning or mechanical means to prevent it from growing into forest, thereby mimicking what happened in nature for thousands of years before humans messed everything up.

Creating these shrublands isn’t cheap, and there are all kinds of ways in which it can go wrong. But, for the sake of the birds and the other creatures of the fields, I’ve begun the process — on a wing and a prayer.

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Asheville, Goddam

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Asheville, Goddam

My wife and I are traveling from Hawaii to Rochester, picking up our van, then heading to Virginia and back to Denver, and I wanted to travel through Asheville on the way back, so I’ve been watching the news about that town. It’s awful.  This is a town that’s 6 hours from the nearest beach.

A few years back, we visited Corning, NY, which was inundated by a flood caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, and there are still markings on the walls there indicating the high points of the flood caused by that storm.  They weren’t at the rooftops, but it was still bad.   So, massive inland flooding caused by tropical storms dumping massive amounts of rain isn’t unprecedented, but this feels different.   Some of the mountain towns around Asheville are still cut off, and at least 1,100 people are missing.

I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity, and I think we can fight the causes of climate change and engineer solutions to limit loss of life.  But we can’t do this if a bunch of ideologues who pretend it doesn’t exist are in charge.

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War for Ukraine Day 949: Russia KABs Against Zaporizhzhia

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A painting by Ukrainian artist NEIVANMADE. The words "NEVER AGAIN" are repeated over and over, from left to right and top to bottom, in a faded, washed out black against a white background. Red, the color of blood, runs and drips down across 2/3rds of the painting. "WHILE YOU TOLERATE TYRANTS" is written/painted in the bottom white corner below the three rows of "NEVER AGAIN".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is doing very well. She has her second to last treatment tomorrow. Thank you for all the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, everyone is most welcome. I appreciate the kind thoughts and, as we’ve previously discussed, look forward to not having to do these anymore. If I’m not replying to you it’s not that I’m ignoring your comment, it’s that I go to be pretty early as I have to be up very early as some of my clients are a number of time zones ahead of me and I have to be able to get to them during their work days.

Last night in comments, way2blue remarked:

As for Biden (perhaps) being risk adverse owing to hard-wired fears instilled during the era of backyard bomb shelters—avoiding risks by hedging—paradoxically creates its own risks.

The dilemma for policy makers, strategists, and decision makers is how much risk to assume. If you’ve decided you’ll accept very little to no risk, as President Biden has, then you are at the whim of everyone else – ally, partner, peer competitor, hostile state and non-state actors – and especially how much risk they’re willing to assume. The late GEN Odierno had a formulation, which most people misunderstood:

Shape, Fight, Win

Almost everyone thought he was saying shape so you can fight and win. This was not what he was saying. What he was actually conveying was far more subtle and far more strategically foresighted: shape the Operational Environment (OE) so that conditions are set in a more favorable way so that we won’t have to fight. However, in case we do have to fight, we have set the conditions to ensure that we can win.

You can’t do this if you do not or will not accept any risk. Rather, others will set the Operational Environment for you, which is what has happened in regard to Russia and the Middle East. The one place that President Biden and his natsec team are actively trying to shape, which is the Asian-Pacific OE, they are doing so based on a significant misunderstanding of the PRC as a peer competitor that is also, sometimes, a hostile actor, as well as its political, military, human geography, and civil environment.

The Russians opened up on Zaporizhzhia with KABs today.

Today, Russia struck Zaporizhzhia with aerial bombs. Ordinary residential buildings were damaged, and the entrance of one building was destroyed. The city’s infrastructure and railway were also damaged.

In total, 13 people were injured, and two were rescued from under the rubble. I thank all the emergency services for their rapid response and providing the necessary assistance. The rubble clearing is still ongoing.

This week alone, the Russian army has used nearly 900 aerial bombs, over 300 “Shahed” drones, and more than 40 missiles. This Russian terror knows no pause, and it can only be stopped by the unity of the world—unity in supporting Ukraine and unity in putting pressure on Russia for the war.

The death toll now stands at 14.

I whole heartedly agree with my former colleague. Bob was a student, though not in my seminar, at USAWC during my first year and then joined the faculty during my final three years there. He retired at the rank of colonel and is a Functional Area (FA) 48 C/E, which is a Eurasian Foreign Area Officer (FAO). His knowledge and understanding of the security situation in Europe, as a senior practitioner, is extensive.

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

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