Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Bark louder, little dog.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

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

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

T R E 4 5 O N

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

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Archives for 2024

War for Ukraine Day 803: Russia Bombards Continues Its Bombardment of Ukraine Despite the Holy Day

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A painting by Ukrainian artis NEIVANMADE. The background is white. In the center, which is black with blood red bordering, is an hourglass. Inside the hourglass is a Ukrainian Azovstal POW painted in blood red. He is shirtless. His arms are upward along the outer edges of the upper half of the hourglass forming a saltire cross. He is chained with steel gray chains shackled to his wrists. Above his head, in grey, is written "Ruzzian Captivity." below his torso in the lower half of the hourglass, written in gray, is "Kills." To the left of the hourglass "He Saved Others" is painted in gray. To the right of the hourglass "But He Can't Save Himself" is painted in gray.

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

As I begin tonight’s update at 5:20 PM EDT, all of the eastern border regions – Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk Oblasts – as well as Mykholaiv and Kherson Oblasts are under air raid alert. Now, as I get ready to hit publish at 6:25 PM EDT, only Sumy, Luhansk, and Crimea are under air raid alert. And, unfortunately, Luhansk and Crimea are always under air raid alert.

Russia did not let up in its bombardment of Ukraine on Orthodox Easter:

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

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Sunday Evening Open Thread: Some Hopeful Healthcare News

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… Here are six things to look for:

1) Drug price negotiation. For the first time in history, Medicare can now negotiate directly with manufacturers. For the initial round of negotiations, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chose 10 drugs that treat common health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis…

2) A cap on out-of-pocket spending. While the IRA’s price negotiation provision has garnered the lion’s share of media attention, this change will have the most direct consequence for most seniors. In 2025, everyone with Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, called Part D, will pay no more than $2,000 per year out of pocket for medications.

3) Lower prices for insulin. This provision has already been implemented. The IRA capped the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, allowing about 4 million seniors with diabetes to save around $761 million per year.

This change has resulted in a welcome “spillover effect,” with at least three major drugmakers voluntarily agreeing to cut their insulin prices for people with private insurance outside of Medicare.

4) Free vaccines. This has also already been implemented: All adult vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are now free for everyone with Medicare Part D…

5) Inflation penalty for drug manufacturers. A lesser-known but also noteworthy change is that drug companies now have to pay a rebate to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation. Those rebates will transfer to consumers, saving as much as $3,500 per dose in the next year, CMS reports…

6) Extra help for the most vulnerable. The IRA provides an income-based subsidy for Medicare enrollees. This, Brooks-LaSure said, is the least understood and least utilized aspect of the IRA’s prescription drug reforms.

The reason is because, unlike the other provisions, people need to actively opt into the program to benefit. But for people who depend on Social Security benefits and do not have other sources of income, she told me, the program “can result in significant savings — on average, a couple of hundred dollars a year.”…

 

Gift link for this one:

… Cancer drug trials are structured to promote high doses, which then become routine patient care. With evidence that thousands of patients become so ill that they skip doses or stop taking the drugs — risking resurgence of their cancers — the FDA has begun requiring companies to pinpoint the right dosage before drugs reach patients.

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Werebear – Writing a Book In 10 Days!

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This may be more of a writers or creatives post than our typical Authors in Our Midst posts, and I think it will be great fun.  Some might call the concept crazy, but you won’t hear that from me.

Let’s give a warm welcome back to Werebear, who has been sorely missed in the comments!

And now for something completely different!

Writing a book in 10 Days!

by Werebear

I’m in the midst of a fascinating experiment. I’m writing a book in ten days.

The book which so inspired me was How to Write Pulp Fiction by James Scott Bell, writer of the Mike Romeo series. Five thousand a day until 50,000 words. The goal is creating what Monty Python called “a ripping yarn.” A spell-binding story.

Auto Draft 100

I’ve been healing up and my brain is working much better. Only, at unpredictable times. This makes conventional employment still impossible, but fortunately I’m not conventional. So I set myself the challenge. Ten days to draft, 2-4 days to let it cool, and then I turn on my editing mode.

This is rough copy, of course, especially since a lot of it I dictate on my nature walks or while sitting in the car once I get to the grocery store. By breaking up my writing sessions throughout the day, and making my scenes mostly dialogue, the words can flow between the characters I’m inventing as needed.

I’m using the dictation app JustPressRecord and the writing software Scrivener. The next step is collecting this mess into chapters, but any outline/mind map software can work.

Because I’m not writing it in order. I think of a scene it must need, and I start setting the scene and discover characters. This is the first time I’ve ever first drafted an entire novel. My next cat book is progressing with much more polished chapters. My fiction book is going well but is more advanced, though I can still use this technique to fill in remaining gaps.

I’ve always been a fan of draft, then edit. But never went to the tallest diving board before, starting a whole book with only a vague idea. It’s forming a satirical tone to match the outrageous premise. This is the most fun I’ve ever had writing something. Maybe I need fun. Maybe my readers do.

This might be helpful for any writer who dreads staring at the blank page. Because drafts don’t have to be good. They merely need enough potential to be polished into something good.

At five days I was halfway, 25,103 words. Now I see a book. And I think, like the main character in Stephen King’s Misery, the last difficult years might mean I’ve been “Scheherazade for myself.”

This is such a general creative question: “Where do you get your ideas?” (For writing and anything else.) My answer is that ideas are everywhere. I think it’s really about: “How do you make them live?”

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Words To Live By

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Words to live by, right?

Even on our crankiest day on Balloon Juice, I don’t think there’s anyone who would argue with that in the comments.  But in the real world?  The men who need to see this, and think about it, won’t give it a single thought.

One good thing that came out of January 6 – we got to see / meet / know some phenomenal police officers who live up to “serve and protect” and not “control and push around”.

Open thread.

 

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Spring, Sprung!

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Blessed Orthodox Easter, to those who celebrate!

Somehow, this seems to sum up all media in 2024…

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — On a recent weeknight at this bar in northeast Portland, fans downed pints and burgers as college women’s lacrosse and beach volleyball matches played on big-screen TVs. Memorabilia autographed by female athletes covered the walls, with a painting of U.S. soccer legend Abby Wambach mounted above the chalkboard beer menu.

The Sports Bra is a pub where women’s sports are celebrated — and the only thing on TV.

Packed and buzzing with activity, the bar has successfully tapped into a meteoric rise of interest in women’s sports, embodied most recently by the frenzy over University of Iowa basketball phenomenon Caitlin Clark’s records-smashing feats.

“Things have happened at light speed compared to what my forecast was,” founder and CEO Jenny Nguyen told The Associated Press. “This tiny spot that I built for my friends and I to watch games and give female athletes their flowers means so much more. And not just to me, but to a lot of people.”

Under the plan, bars and entrepreneurs elsewhere will be able to apply to use The Sports Bra brand for their franchises. Nguyen is open to working with people who already have a physical space, as well as those who may only have a business plan. What matters, she said, is that the potential future partners share The Sports Bra’s values…

The expansion will be boosted by funding from a foundation created by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams. Nguyen said she already has received hundreds of inquiries…

 
Hooray, hooray, the month of May / Outdoor [redacted] begins today… Taking ‘shake your tail feathers’ both literally *and* seriously:

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Class Portraits

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat 125

Beautiful portraits from master gardener & photographer Mike in Oly:

The garden is still in transition, and will be for a few more seasons, but here are some recent flower portraits currently bringing us joy.

At top: Epimedium – Blooming nicely as the deer have not found it yet to eatall the flowers.

Pulminaria – I love this shade of pink so much, and this plant has been tough as nails and blooms for a very long time.
Sunday Morning Garden Chat 126

Magnolia – A magnolia tree in my neighbors yard that we had a lovelyview of. The sunlight comes thru it in the evening and lights it up beautifully.
Sunday Morning Garden Chat 127

Daffodils – Shining in the spring sun.
Sunday Morning Garden Chat 127

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Late Night Epistemic Bubble Open Thread: Literary Predators / Parasites

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What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?”

She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.

Levy was one of the niche icons of Dimes Square, the scene that bloomed on the little patch of the Lower East Side where we are currently drinking Diet Cokes. During the pandemic, it was synonymous with a squad of smart if somewhat bratty young people with vaguely anti-woke artistic ambitions. Their provocations can seem a little beyond their sell-by dates today…

Back in the dinosaur days, when I was still in high school, the NYTimes Sunday Magazine gave its cover to a frog-faced Yale frosh with an essay titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life“. Upon reading it, I thought This chick is Going Places, and I only hope some of them will be as repugnant as her writing here. Apparently the piece did attract fan mail from a number of Serious Literary People, among them J.D. Salinger, who would enter into some kind of a groomer / stalker relationship with that 18-year-old and further precipitate her literary career…

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