"You're lucky Mom says I can't open my presents until Christmas."
"But I'm not-"
"Tick tock, motherfucker."— Uncle Duke (@uncleduke1969.bsky.social) December 6, 2025 at 9:17 AM
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) December 9, 2025 at 12:30 AM
"Professionally I’m married to cinema, and this movie felt like I was renewing my vows, if that makes sense," said Ryan Coogler, the director of "Sinners," upon learning of the film's Golden Globe nominations. Follow for more reactions from nominees.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) December 8, 2025 at 11:00 PM
President Donald Trump won't be getting his wish, at least not soon. ABC says that it has signed late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel to a one-year contract.
— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) December 8, 2025 at 9:30 PM
President Donald Trump won’t be getting his wish. ABC said Monday it has signed late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel to a one-year contract extension.
Kimmel’s previous, multiyear contract had been set to expire next May, so the extension will keep him on the air until at least May 2027.
Kimmel’s future looked questionable in September, when ABC suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for remarks made following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Following a public outcry, ABC lifted the suspension, and Kimmel returned to the air with much stronger ratings than he had before.
He continued his relentless joking at the president’s expense, leading Trump to urge the network to “get the bum off the air” in a social media post last month. The post followed Kimmel’s nearly 10-minute monologue on Trump and the Jeffrey Epstein files…
Bill Carter, author of “The Late Shift” and veteran chronicler of late-night TV, cautioned against reading too much into the length of the extension. Kimmel, at age 58, knows he’s getting close to the end of the line, Carter said, but when he leaves, he doesn’t want it to appear under pressure from Trump or anyone.
“He wants to make sure that it’s on his terms,” Carter said…
On The Road – frosty – 2024 National Park Road Trip – Washington (7/9) Mount Rainier National Park – First Day
J.
Interesting move by Disney (ABC). Wonder if this means they’re thinking Trump will be toast a year from now.
Baud
Best antifa cell ever.
Suzanne
They really overplayed their hand with this Charlie Kirk stuff. Kirk wasn’t as famous as they thought he was, and they look like the most delicate flowers with how they responded to any joke, social media post, etc. I recently saw some graph that indicated that well over half of Gen Z didn’t even know who Charlie Kirk was.
It’s a bit of a weird phenomenon in this social media age. Among the Too Online, there is this constant overestimation of someone’s fame and influence. But the media monoculture is quickly disappearing. Everyone’s bubble is highly personalized. It becomes incredibly easy to see something on one’s feed and think that others are seeing the same content. They are not.
ETA: Also, it is easy to mistake small numbers of annoying people online for a critical mass. All sense of scale is gone.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Sometimes I meet people who have never heard of Balloon Juice, and it’s shocking.
mappy!
Stay tuned?
Suzanne
@Baud: Don’t they know this is an almost-top-10,000 blog?!
I see this phenomenon a lot with SuzMom. (Irony: I have to talk more with my mother than with my kids about misinfo, propaganda, internet safety, AI slop, etc.). Her feed serves her up all manner of gossip and trash. She will often remark on something and say, “Didn’t you see XXXX?! It’s all over Facebook!” or whatever. And she’ll show me, and it’s some obvious bot-created ragebait crap.
mappy!
Some blunt talk for our American neighbours at the Halifax International Security Forum.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Yeah, the true schism in society is between the easily fooled and not so easily fooled.
Jeffro
It’s a good point: under trumpov, we have kinda Brexit-ed ourselves
(that’s one of them thar gift links)
Baud
@Jeffro:
That just means the next Democratic President will be blamed.
MagdaInBlack
Oh yay. Freezing rain for the evening commute. The hits, they just keep coming.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Texas plans to fix that problem.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Pining for the halcyon days of Nigerian princes?
//
Baud
TS
@mappy!:
From your link – this is how too many outside of the US now see the situation – even when trump is gone – so is the trust.
Princess
@Baud: I guess that’s one way to prop up ai stocks.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: They thought they would be able to spin it into a national trauma on the level of 9/11 or the JFK assassination, and that this would compel obedience and give Trump legitimacy, like 9/11 did for George W. Bush and a war agenda. Charlie Kirk apparently was a huge deal among right-wingers, but he was a subculture figure.
Baud
@TS:
They shouldn’t trust us. I don’t trust US voters to do what I consider the morally right thing.
MagdaInBlack
I see over on Raw Story that Sean Duffy and RFKjr decided that having a pull-up contest (showing off) in the middle of a DC airport would be a great way to encourage travelers to be more fit.
I got nuthin’
Princess
@TS: I’d say this is fair. It’s not that we can’t trust some given US president. It’s that no one can trust US voters. 2/3 are likely to vote for the spawn of Satan, or not care and stay home. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Baud
@Princess:
Eyeroller
@Matt McIrvin: Kirk’s whole shtick was owning the libs, and as we know that’s really all most of them care about. So he was an idol in certain circles.
mrmoshpotato
@MagdaInBlack: Blame Tom Skilling.
mrmoshpotato
@MagdaInBlack: LOL! Are there any adults in that bastard administration?
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: I’m having a fit with a friend in Australia, who says trump is doing some good things, that trump is for democracy, and then he brings up corruption, hunter’s laptop, the Clintons. It’s as if he thinks we’re having regular corruption and partisan politics as usual. And I’m picking my battles, not willing to explain to him the authoritarian major law breaking anti constitutional events happening here.
I invited him to read here on balloon juice, and I’ve asked him 3 bloody times, where does he get his “news” from. Why is it people won’t answer that?
if he were here, I’d tell him he was vastly uninformed and misinformed. He’s troubled enough by the goings on in His country. But I WOULD like to know how the rest of the world is being fed their information. These information bubbles, and all the misinformation, it troubles me greatly..
Librettist
Fed is starting the wind down of paper check processing.
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
Yeah. Those are red flags. Dems aren’t perfect, but that’s not really a serious point of view.
Eyeroller
@Jeffro: Reminder that except for tariffs, which have been unusual and have had a significant impact, Trump’s policies are bog-standard Republican economic policies, just carried out closer to the full extent they have always wanted. They still dream of destroying Social Security and Medicare in addition to services for the “undeserving” but those are tough nuts, so they can at least try to cut them and make them difficult to access. And they’re chipping away at SNAP and Medicaid.
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: it’s my understanding Charlie Kirk was the front man and young spokesperson for some very organized right wing folks, who cultivated him to be their guy. Sorry I don’t have the link for where I read about that.
Princess
@Baud: She’d make a great president. But alas.
Eyeroller
@Gloria DryGarden: He was recruited when he was 18 to found TPUSA. It was funded by some dark-money group(s) and I believe he also had a wealthy father who contributed. But I also would have to go looking for the specific groups and individuals involved, I don’t recall off the top of my head.
Edit: I think his marriage was also sort of “arranged” — she was a beauty queen and involved with right-wing politics, and somebody made sure to introduce them.
Ben Cisco
@mrmoshpotato: No. No there are not.
Baud
@Eyeroller:
They’re not only standard republican policies, but Trump is ramping it up to 11 in implementing them.
Also too, inexcusable pardons.
Princess
@Gloria DryGarden: Thetes a reason Trump and Vance are targetting publicly funded news in other countries (bbc in the uk, cbc in Canada). They can’t be bought by billionaires. News outlets are cheap for them and they can run them at a loss and still come out ahead by having the narratives they want pushed come to the fore.
Baud
Steve in the ATL
This might be the only thing that gets my wife to visit South America again. That is heaven!
Eyeroller
@Librettist: I still sometimes write checks to small businesses–my mowing/leaf removal company does not eat the credit-card vigorish, and if I’d had several services performed, the 3.3% charge adds up. So losing paper checks would be very annoying to me.
Ben Cisco
@Gloria DryGarden:
Not a serious response.
Either b/c he KNOWS his sources are shit, or he thinks you’ll tell him that they are and he cannot accept it.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: right, that was my clue that flagged my bullshit detector system. How is someone over in another country getting fed this stuff, thinking FFOTUS is doing some useful things? Completely taken in, by a pile of utter nonsense. What news sources are passing that junk out around the globe?
meanwhile, did you see the thing Japy posted in the overnight, about a 2 foot square punishment box they’re putting people in at the Florida Alcatraz detention prison? It’s so the opposite of pretending normalcy and reasonable operations coming from our government.
satby
@Ben Cisco: yeah, I just don’t bother with people like that. I’m not the dumbshit whisperer and our values clash too much to be “friends”.
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
Trump 1 kidnapped children. Voters didn’t care.
Geo Wilcox
@Gloria DryGarden: He was their JD Vance and was being groomed for the office of president. Much the same way JD was groomed to be VP then president by Peter Theil.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud:
I thought Spinal Tap references weren’t allowed before 11 am eastern. Did I miss a rules change?
NotMax
Thing I did not previously know (from all the way back in 2011!):
China Bans Time Travel Films and Shows, Citing Disrespect of History.
;)
mappy!
Oops.
AP: China exports grow
Baud
@Baud:
Gloria DryGarden
@Eyeroller: re “owning the libs,” a quote from the mythical deified guy
” forgive them father, they know not what they do.” I just mean, if they knew what they are trying to oppose, by harming the liberal progressive agendas, if they knew they were harming themselves and buying into support for the ultra wealthy, they might be sorry. I’m saying nothing about forgiveness, it just places the quote.
I’ve read the hateful things people write when they discuss owning the libs.
Steve in the ATL
@MagdaInBlack: when I was a kid and moved from Chicago to Memphis, my clock radio could still pick up WLS at certain times of the day. More than once I woke excited about snow days only to realize that I was on a Chicago station rather than a local one and I would be going to school that day after all. That’s when I became bitter and angry, which is of course how I ended up at Balloon Juice!
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
Pretty sure the Supreme Court has declared all rules to be mere suggestions.
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
Nominated!
Dave
@Baud: Exactly; I’m not offended by this because it’s correct. I’m offended by the mix of dumbasses, faithless losers, and malignant manipulators that make the sentiment a correct one.
Librettist
@mappy!:
I expect they are just shipping around that idiot’s tariff barriers.
Gloria DryGarden
@Princess: I didn’t know about this. They are somehow able to push their narrative on the bbc, cbc, and abc? Without buying up the media companies? Forgive my unawareness.
Im either shocked, or revolted.
lowtechcyclist
@Eyeroller:
Same here – I write checks to the plumber, the auto mechanic, the septic guy, etc. One of our cars needed major brake work recently; that 3.3% was more than fifty bucks. I’d much rather give that $50 to the mechanic than to Visa.
Spanky
@Eyeroller:
This action will certainly boost the cash/ underground economy. And that may be a welcome development for those who are not happy with where their tax dollars are going under Trump.
Gloria DryGarden
@Geo Wilcox: eew.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Contractors are increasingly using zelle or venmo, from what I can tell
ETA: or PayPal
Ben Cisco
@satby: Pretty much. Observe, assess, and respond. At this point, my existence and that of my loved ones is at stake and I am NOT playing.
satby
This has been suggested before: Dammit, it’s not Alzheimer’s
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: that has been my experience as well. Though my dealer prefers cash or crypto.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: seconding Dave’s comment at approx #51.
I wouldn’t trust the US voting population, or the info a majority of ‘Mericans are getting, nor the word and commitments coming from the government “leadership” here. Nope. We cannot be counted on. Which is why I feel impatient with Europe, that they don’t recognize how much they need to step up, to replace what they counted on from us.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Baud: More precisely, the Sinister Six seem to be acting on the presumption that rules empower but do not bind Republicans, and bind but do not empower Democrats.
More and more, I’m becoming resigned to the view that I won’t live to see the damage repaired. And I don’t think there’s a living soul on this world who will live that long, either. Including people who were being born as I wrote this post.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Spanky
@mappy!:
Wow, Temu is more popular than I thought.
Eyeroller
@Gloria DryGarden: Since he won’t reveal his source of “news,” there’s a good chance that he chooses outlets that feed him these stories. So he may not be entirely an innocent victim of disinformation.
Librettist
@Spanky:
I would assume the replacement is mostly Zelle and the like for the lower end service industry.
Paper processing cost is 10x per transaction more than electronic.
Shalimar
@MagdaInBlack: If someone told me 20 years ago that Sean Duffy and RFK Jr would have a pull-up contest in an airport terminal, I would have said “yeah, they’re both idiots, that definitely is going to happen.”
If someone told me they would be two of the 10 most important people in our government at the time, I would have said “fuck you, we aren’t anywhere close to that stupid.”
satby
@satby: And why this writer says we should be aware:
rikyrah
Just going to remind folks….
A safe Republican District is now R+13
R+13
We just need to run good Democrats FOR THE SPECIFIC DISTRICTS AND LET THEM RUN THEIR RACE.
R+13🤔🤔
I like our odds.
satby
@rikyrah: good morning! I do too.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
None of mine have mentioned any of the above to me.
And I’m definitely NOT using PayPal; their fees are bigger than the credit card fees. Our HOA stopped accepting dues payments by PayPal on account of the bite they were taking out. (We still take Venmo.)
satby
Just saw a perfect example of clickbait:
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That’s what they’re closing for. 🙄
evodevo
@Gloria DryGarden:
Yep..a long-time MAGAt acquaintance on FB would do that all the time – dance around where his fake news came from. “I don’t watch Fox” he would say proudly, as if that excused his total lack of valid info for his reichwinger talking points. Never would say WHERE his info came from, as if ashamed LOL
Eyeroller
@Baud: There’s a charge for those services as well. Zelle is owned by the big banks and I don’t know who’s behind Venmo (I could look it up but it’s not that important). The fees may just be more hidden.
Credit-card fees may be “legacy,” i.e. they needed a hefty fee in the early days and it never went down. So could be Zelle/Venmo are cheaper.
Ultimatealy, though, moving away from cash and to some extent checks (which have a processing cost also, though with modern OCR it’s pretty small) results in overall higher prices/expenses.
Also various government entities send me checks for things like tax refunds, they don’t do direct deposit for those. So I’m not sure what will happen there if checks disappear.
And I’ve read that there has been a surge in usage of “buy now, pay later” apps like Klarna. People are buying basic groceries and fast-food meals on credit. That all adds up.
I have a Venmo account because I had to get one to pay coworkers for “group gifts.” But I’ve only used it to pay, I don’t really know how to convert inputs to spendable money. I guess it’s linked to my bank account. Something else I’ll have to pay attention to.
Professor Bigfoot
@evodevo: White guy, right?
Somehow, it’s almost always a white guy; but people get really mad at me for pointing this out.
eta: obligatory #NotAllWhiteMen
Eyeroller
@lowtechcyclist: Somebody set up a fake PayPal account using my personal email. It was associated with a bogus address and credit card number. I finally managed to take control of the account. I keep it just so this doesn’t happen again.
Same thing happened with a Walmart account.
Soprano2
@satby: Most people aren’t aware that there are many types of dementia, they call it all Alzheimer’s as shorthand. But yeah, it’s not Alzheimer’s.
Eyeroller
@Professor Bigfoot: Well, she said he’s Australian, so extremely high chance of that, more so than the US.
satby
I see it was announced that Jasmine Crockett entered the race for Senate in TX and Allred left it to run in his reconstituted old House district instead. I liked all three, but we’ll see whom the TX Democrats choose. They have two good primary candidates with vastly different styles when delivering the same message.
Josie
@Baud:
It seems to me that the Supreme Court doesn’t believe that Dems can win another election. I hope we can make them eat that belief.
satby
@Soprano2: the author is a member of Duty to Warn, a group of psychiatric professionals. His point is that without Congress to rein him in, and apparently not the military either, we’re in an extremely dangerous situation because the felon is unhinged enough to launch a nuke. The unthinkable needs to be planned for.
Baud
@Eyeroller:
Wow. Most places nowadays send a confirmation email that you have to click to avoid this problem.
p.a.
@Josie: The problem/paradox is that to win in winnable R districts we may have to run people who don’t want to do what’s necessary to de-nazify the USSC.
Professor Bigfoot
@Eyeroller: Yeah, and I’ve noticed a fair strain of white supremacy among Aussies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
JML
@Eyeroller: lot of places won’t take checks, and increasing numbers of places are adding in the processing fees for credit cards. It’s great being the consumer!
You have utilities and so forth constantly pushing automatic payment and paperless delivery…and their reward to the consumer is like $1 a month or nothing.
Sigh.
I added Venmo so my friends could chip in for pizza or something on game nights (most of them don’t carry much if anything for cash) and since I can wait on the transfer the fees aren’t an issue. But I’m not living paycheck to paycheck any longer.
Gin & Tonic
@Gloria DryGarden: It comes from russia. There’s a well-oiled mechanism for creating disinformation, laundering it through fake but legit-seeming sources until it manages to float up into legit media. Both scholarly and technical articles have been written about it; I’ve linked to some of them here in the past.
Scout211
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: I don’t *how* interested you are in Charlie Kirk, but I am interested in right-wing phenomena and found an article by Eamon Whelan informative.
It was published by a site named the The BAFFLER on December 2.. I had never heard of The BAFFLER but I figure they’ve never heard me either.
Anyway, the title is:
There’s a lot of material about Kirk, TPUSA, and Nick Fuentes who came along five years later and instigated the “Groyper Wars” between his and Kirk’s followings Whelan contends Fuentes won; also, about Candace Owens, who became a Kirk ally in 2017 and figures in the controversies that have erupted over Kirk’s assasination.
This link ought to work:
share.google/W7UGe3VooF98cEsFc
@Eyeroller:
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Its not a recent phenomena either. I had a physician in India tell me that AIDS was a CIA plot. This was in the 90s. She is now the head of a medical school in the Mumbai suburbs now
The US has loomed so large in the post war world that many of the fantastical lies are believed. Soviet/Russian disinfo predates the rise of social media.
How is the new citizen?
Viva BrisVegas
@Gloria DryGarden: He’s almost certainly watching Sky News. You can see a lot of their output on YouTube.
They are basically Fox News with ugly people. Their debating technique is essentially to sneer at people who aren’t rich and white.
Gin & Tonic
@satby: Ah, makes me recall this Herman Kahn classic.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gin & Tonic: Russia’s been at war with the rest of the world for years now, haven’t they?
It’s only Ukraine where they’ve gone “kinetic,” but from Brexit to TrumpII, the bastards are winning.
satby
@JML: adding the processing fees is a particular annoyance for me, because as a business owner I know those are deductable on income tax. It’s an attempt to push people to use cash, which can be underreported.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: Our very own BiP was big on the AIDS-as-CIA-plot theory.
ETA: We went for a nice brunch afterward, she had a mimosa to celebrate. It was so goddamn cold standing outside in the wind and 27 degrees though. The whole process was deeply underwhelming – I wrote a bit about it in the open thread last night. But today she’s completing her passport application.
Librettist
@Eyeroller:
Venmo = Paypal, which is a publicly listed company. Venmo use case is P2P, while Paypal is P2B and more robust with functions like international transfers, etc.
Clabberbrain issued an eo about ending paper checks, so I assume they’ll stop during the next Democratic administration.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: He blamed me for an incident that happened before I was born and insisted that I was CIA. Fun times on the blog.
Speaking of social media, not all accounts are created equal, reporters/news media folk may be small in number but they have massive reach. A lot of media folks are BS bros. So we get anti-D bias from both the right and the purity left.
Purity left insists that they are tiny in number and grassroots in the same breath.
Professor Bigfoot
@Viva BrisVegas: SkySports F1 coverage has been quite good… but then, FoxSports NFL coverage has been quite good.
It’s kind of the inverse of the Cronkite era: back then CBS news was a prestige operation paid for by the entertainment division.
Now “news” is no longer a prestige operation but a propaganda outlet, paid for by the sports/entertainment division.
tobie
@Gloria DryGarden: @Baud: The phrase “Hunter’s laptop” always feels like shorthand to me. What was nefarious about his laptop except photos he saved of him having sex? Burisma feels like small beans. Okay, Hunter may have gotten a board seat because he last name was Biden. Given the millions — pardon billions — that have been given to Trump’s spawn and son-in-law, a board seat is trivial.
I can’t wrap my mind around this right now. My boiler failed last night, the coldest night of the year, and I’ve been waiting for a repair person for two hours now to fix it. It’s cold in my house.
Viva BrisVegas
@Professor Bigfoot: Strangely, it always seemed to me that white supremacy was far more overt in the US.
Baud
NYT, but one of the decent columnists.
I didn’t search to see if she mentioned leopards or faces.
NotMax
Reports are that in his opening address during this year’s Kennedy Center Honors event, Dolt 47 called the audience “horrible, miserable people.”
Any guesses whether that will survive the edited broadcast later? The first ten guesses don’t count.
They Call Me Noni
@satby: Bruce Willis has FTD.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: NYT byline and decent? That’s an oxymoron.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t usually even bother with their op/eds, but I thought Goldberg had a good reputation with thoughtful people. But maybe I’m out of the loop.
satby
@Gin & Tonic: Congratulations to her and your family.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: I remember hearing “AIDS is an American bioweapon invented at Fort Detrich” straight from Radio Moscow over shortwave in the 1980s. The USSR was spreading it really openly.
satby
@They Call Me Noni: unfortunate. But he’s not the President, so a tragedy for his family and friends, not a danger.
chemiclord
@schrodingers_cat:
And therein lies the fundamental problem.
What right-wing media and right-wing social media has done is merely weaponize the process of disinformation. The desire to consume it, the desire for hateful sources that tell the asshole what they want to hear, has always been there. Even if you tear down that entire infrastructure, the people who want it, and WILL seek it out, will always be there.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It was a lab leak!
suzanne
@evodevo:
For a while, they were all zoomed in on Breitbart and Drudge and Alex Jones. I’m sure all of their sources now are of similar quality.
Belafon
@Suzanne:
They’re trying to fix that in many states. Here in Texas, Abbott is forcing every high school in the state to have a TPUSA chapter, that way kids will get trained to spy on teachers.
NotMax
@Baud
“My eyes are up here.”
“Be that as it may, your bazongas are down there.”
//
Scout211
@satby: TBH, as a spouse of someone officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by an actual neurologist, I am not at all comfortable with anyone diagnosing older adults from afar, even this author, who is Ph.D.
I have no problem with people describing Trump’s personality changes, physical changes and cognitive and communication declines, but I really do not feel comfortable with armchair diagnoses of any type of dementia.
And from a political angle, it misses the point that Trump cannot physically and cognitively do his job. The chatter about what type of dementia Trump has gets off into the weeds when the focus should be on his inability to do his job..
Gin & Tonic
@satby: Thank you. My rule of thumb now is that anyone who says “they should just do it the right way” with respect to immigration obviously does not know anyone who has immigrated and become a citizen in this century.
Steve in the ATL
@schrodingers_cat: @Gin & Tonic: it’s just ridiculous. AIDS isn’t the flu, which the CIA does release every year. Sheesh.
satby
@Belafon: that should work about as well as sex education that only teaches chastity and abstinence.
Professor Bigfoot
@Viva BrisVegas: Get an Aussie to start commenting on US culture and politics and it comes through loud and clear.
satby
@Gin & Tonic: exactly. Or that for most of our history “the right way” was basically checking off the names on a ship’s manifest, nothing more.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: if she’s decent then I guess she’s not related to Jonah Goldberg and his equally loathsome mother
Professor Bigfoot
@Steve in the ATL: By way of the contrails!
I thought everyone knew this! //
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: as well as the condescending attitude.
satby
@Scout211: he didn’t really diagnose the felon, just points out the symptoms we all see match a different diagnosis. And strenuously points out that it matters only because the malignant narcissism already made the felon unsuited for the job, whatever dementia he has just amplifies how unable he is.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I was just pulling your leg. I haven’t read a lot by Goldberg to determine whether she is their new Krugman.
Belafon
@TS: Until enough people get hurt here that they get physically sick hearing the word Republican, I wouldn’t either.
These next few years are going to be interesting for my company, which relies on the US’s superpower status.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Their only experience with immigration is their distant ancestor who came through Ellis Island or before.
Matt McIrvin
@Gin & Tonic: Anyway, Stephen Miller’s MO is to shut down nearly all of the legal immigration that even did exist. The flip side of “we only hate ILLEGAL immigration” is making all immigration illegal. It’s a great catch, that Catch-22.
NotMax
@satby
“Brznskiwicz? Welcome to the USA, Mr. Brennan.”
;)
satby
@schrodingers_cat: well since you mention Krugman, here’s his latest: America has become a digital narco-state.
Scout211
That’s how I read this:
That reads to me like an armchair diagnosis.
ETA: my husband’s neurologist initially diagnosed him with vascular dementia by his symptoms. After the MRI, he changed it to Alzheimer’s. Just symptom analysis won’t always tell the whole picture. Even Bruce Willis wasn’t initially diagnosed with FTD.
satby
@NotMax: 😂 pretty much.
Matt McIrvin
@satby: when my most recent immigrant ancestors came in, “the right way” meant “not being Chinese”.
Eyeroller
@Librettist: Good bet that is due to the banks requesting it. I’m sure they are champing at the bit to stop processing checks.
I wouldn’t mind using Zelle instead provided it became as universal as checks were, but that doesn’t seem to be the case yet.
Cash really isn’t an option for paying my mowing service. I don’t really blame them for not wanting to deal with a hassle of deducting credit-card charges.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Mine was at the Old Sturbridge Village on July 4th so that was nice!
I even danced with Uncle Sam before the ceremony. It was hot sunny day in July.
Steve in the ATL
@NotMax: so all those Chicago Irish are really Chicago Polish? That explains so much….
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah and India and USSR were cold war allies when Kissinger and Nixon chose Pakistan in the hot war with India. Plus India needs Russian oil to survive.
Steve in the ATL
@Librettist:
So that means that the busiest check processor in the country, the Atlanta Fed, is no longer a top terrorist target to disrupt the US economy? I feel safer already!
Ohio Mom
@Librettist: I need checks for Ohio Son’s account!
When he was on SSI (now he is on SSDI), I was told Social Security frowns upon those checks being deposited in accounts with fees. So I found a little local savings and loan bank with a no fee checking account and have stuck with them ever since.
It’s essential that Ohio Son never goes over $2,000 in assets so it’s just the kind of account most banks don’t want to be bothered with. But this little bank never blinks.
Over the years, he’s worked with a lot of private practitioners — psychologists, music therapists, social coaches, etc. These people do not take credit cards!
For that matter, my plumber doesn’t take credit cards anymore either. His brother retired, it’s just him now, and he’s simplifying things. He’s on old guy, I doubt he wants to start accepting Venmo either.
This all is so very Trump, not think of any ramifications of anything, just wantonly destroying every working system he (and Vought) come across.
satby
@Scout211: “are consistent” isn’t an official diagnosis (though doctors do say that when they speak to families prior to further testing). Without further tests, like an MRI, it’s not a diagnosis.
And I see your edit, which actually proves my point. Matching symptoms isn’t an actual diagnosis. Besides, the author was more concerned with the malignant narcissism affected by whatever cognitive thing is going on.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: Russia is still trying the tactics that worked for imperialists of yore like Britain and France.
satby
@Matt McIrvin: exactly.
p.a.
@Matt McIrvin: I keep thinking of Ming China & Tokugawa Japan closing themselves off to “protect” themselves & because of an arrogance that “we have nothing to learn from others.”
Then it took time for the effects to show, but with the increasing pace of change in the modern world…
And then I look at what we’ve elected since 2000 (1980 really) and get to the “fuck it we deserve it” phase.
#NoWeDon’tAllDeserveIt
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: The Baffler is a lefty publication of long standing, originally a print magazine. One of its founders was, believe it or not, Thomas Frank of “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” fame (I just learned that).
Jackie
@satby: Thanks for the article. It explains a lot.
satby
@Steve in the ATL: watch it there 😠
lowtechcyclist
@Librettist:
Interesting. But that may explain why, even though they’re the same company, PayPal was taking a ~4% bite out of every dues payment we got through them, while Venmo rarely takes a dime out. And these days we get roughly half our dues payments via Venmo.
jonas
There was some guy on Twitter back during FFOTUS’s first term who claimed some medical knowledge and gained a following swearing up and down that Trump was clearly in the advanced stages of FTD and would be a drooling vegetable by 2020 at the latest. Whatever ails Trump, I’m convinced he most likely suffers from sociopathy and stupidity so acute it’s indistinguishable from clinical dementia.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
To this day I miss Ramparts magazine.
prostratedragon
@Dave:
I also find it alarming that the writer’s perception that the Americans in the audience were surprised by this might be correct. These are supposed to be people who know something of the world. What else should they expect, when other counties have such a huge stake in the US being reliable in certain matters? It’s mindboggling.
Geminid
@p.a.: I have no problem with that so long as candidates don’t commit *not* to expand the Court or in the case of Senate candidates, abolish the filibuster across the board. I think candidates ought to center issues they think speak to their district or state voters’ concerns, and those aren’t neccesarily the ones some Democrats want to center on a national basis.
We have to win a majority in both Houses of Congress plus the White House before we can enact structural reforms. Next year’s midterms are a neccesary first step. There is an idea that, if all our candidates don’t center certain issues, we won’t win even if we *do* win, and I find that notion pernicious because it’s demoralizing.
Anyway, Democratic voters and candidates can fight this out in the midterm primaries, and I trust their judgement on these matters.
Gloria DryGarden
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: THAT is one hell of an analogy; and Dr. K makes it stick. 😳
lowtechcyclist
@They Call Me Noni:
Someone ought to send him some flowers.
satby
@Eyeroller: I recently had an 8 day ordeal trying to straighten out a Zelle payment gone wrong. Zelle takes NO responsibility for any payments sent through their system because “they don’t transfer the money, the banks do”. Which we all know. I had to escalate to third level software support to point out the glitch in their software never told the sending bank to release the payment after Zelle asked me to confirm my phone number (again). If you send it to the wrong person, you won’t get it back if they don’t willingly send it back.
I still use it, but I don’t like it. Also, it was because I used to be in IT and understood what happened and how to get past the first level manager that I got any resolution. Other people just would be left hanging.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: I mean there was an Australian cricketer who would make monkey noises when playing in India. This was in the early 90s.
lowtechcyclist
@Belafon:
That’s so weird. For one thing, aren’t student clubs supposed to be started by, you know, students?
hueyplong
@Steve in the ATL: The CIA has a longstanding mission to muck up your holiday and winter staffing. Not sure why, in light of the teams for which you play.
Eyeroller
@schrodingers_cat: She’s been writing there for years. She and Jamelle Bouie are their token liberals.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: Yeah saw that in my mailbox this morning, I haven’t yet read it. Will do that soon.
schrodingers_cat
@Eyeroller: Not a huge fan of Jamelle. I stopped reading them after what their did to HRC. BUT HER EMAILZ was their doing.
Central Planning
@Steve in the ATL: Did you mean 10am?
Professor Bigfoot
No we don’t… but we’re gonna catch it anyway.
BOHICA.
Gloria DryGarden
@Gin & Tonic: thank you! I’ve missed your links, just wasn’t on some days. What search terms do you recommend? I’ll look into this, because it bugs the hell out of me.
what can be done to counter it, and if there is something being done, who is doing it?
[all the misinformation makes it so hard to move forward, get anything done. It’s painful, and divisive, and weakening.]
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: The US largely shut off immigration, or at least dialed it way down and throttled it in openly racist ways, from the 1920s to 1965. That’s basically what MAGA nativists want to bring back. It was a time when the country’s influence was increasing on the world stage, so it’s not impossible for that to happen. But there were also things like, you know, World War II and the Cold War affecting the situation.
Layer8Problem
@Ohio Mom:
For stuff like this Vought is helpfully doing the thinking for him.
Sandia Blanca
@Gin & Tonic: And to those who claim their ancestors came here legally, ask them what immigration laws were in effect at the time. Most will have no idea. (Spoiler alert: many came before we even had such laws!)
NotMax
@NotMax
Also had a subscription to the lesser known irregularly published The Realist.
Steve in the ATL
@Central Planning: on your clocks, but mine? These go to 11!
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
We also had the Great Depression, which reduced the demand for labor.
Deputinize America
@Jeffro:
I find myself wondering what life is like for family lawyers and bankruptcy lawyers in DC suburbs in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, what with all the upcoming delinquencies in credit obligations and child support among former federal employees and local businesses that rely on discretionary spending (coffee shops, restaurants, bars, boutiques, aestheticians, etc.).
lowtechcyclist
@Gloria DryGarden:
Which overnight thread? I looked for it but couldn’t find anything.
Gloria DryGarden
@Ben Cisco: maybe I would tell him it’s shit sources, maybe not. But I would like to know who around the globe is believing crap that FFOTUS says, and reposting it.
I rechecked my Aussie friend and left a note for any lurkers, that it was misinformed stuff. And to please not repost toxic misinformation (He had a post about if we impeach trumpie, we should put Obama in jail. Oh boy. Grrr) and then I said I was taking a break, and snoozed him, and the page he reposted. I think I reported it to Facebook as misinformation, as well.
I hope it doesn’t count as ghosting. But I can get over my max toxic load just by current events we learn of here in the USA
Gloria DryGarden
@Ben Cisco: maybe I would tell him it’s shit sources, maybe not. But I would like to know who around the globe is believing crap that FFOTUS says, and reposting it.
I rechecked my Aussie friend and left a note for any lurkers, that it was misinformed stuff. And to please not repost toxic misinformation (He had a post about if we impeach trumpie, we should put Obama in jail. Oh boy. Grrr) and then I said I was taking a break, and snoozed him, and the page he reposted. I think I reported it to Facebook as misinformation, as well.
I hope it doesn’t count as ghosting. But I can get over my max toxic load just by current events we learn of here in the USA
rikyrah
DeVory Darkins
@devorydarkins
BREAKING: Justice Kavanaugh appears to support the Trump administration’s case to extend Presidential powers.
Kavanaugh: “Independent agencies are not accountable to the people. They’re not elected as Congress and the President are, and are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion dollar industries, whether it’s the FCC or the FTC.”
x.com/devorydarkins/status/1998118447570677946?s=20
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks. I had a hard time placing The Baffler judging from the headlines on other articles. They seem oriented towards intellectual matters, but I found Eamon Whelan’s Kirk article to be a good piece of observational journalism.
p.a.
@schrodingers_cat: I didn’t know that about Bouie, but I do remember the anger here from the 2007-2008 primary season & HRC’s unsuccessful dog whistle campaign against Obama, and imagine that anger wasn’t just here.
NotMax
@Deputinize America
If the earth shoe fits….
//
Deputinize America
@mappy!:
For the sake of my children and eventual grandchildren, I am hoping and relying on the notion that the upcoming Chinese global leadership remains rational and forward thinking in its plans for all economic sectors.
Baud
@p.a.:
Obama got over it and made her SoS. There’s no valid justification for how HRC was treated in 2016, especially by supposedly professional journalists. YMMV.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Neither are courts. Doesn’t stop him.
schrodingers_cat
@p.a.: Actually I was talking about NYT not Bouie. They lead the media frenzy against her in 2016.
NotMax
@Deputinize America
Check your meds, buddy.
Scout211
I don’t disagree with this, but it’s splitting hairs, IMHO. And most of the readers of his substack won’t understand that difference.
And while it may be accurate in the medical field, “consistent with” is as close to a diagnosis as we can get in the mental health field. I am a retired psychotherapist and my husband is a retired Ph.D. professor of psychology and licensed clinical psychologist. “Consistent with” is a diagnosis in the mental health field.
My initial point is that armchair diagnoses and thoughts about symptoms “consistent with” Trump’s cognitive diagnoses make me uncomfortable. We hated it with Joe Biden and I don’t like it now.
Eyeroller
@Ohio Mom: Good bet he’s destroying it because the big banks don’t like it and want to stop it, and the wealthy don’t care and don’t need it. Nothing more complicated than that.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: Monday night open thread # 83
Monday night open thread
Baud
Speaking of the Australian Internet
Belafon
@rikyrah: OK, Brett, when the next president comes in, they should be able to break up any company that is allowed to merge by the current one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: What an odd villain origin story.
UncleEbeneezer
Morning rant:
Steven King’s Dark Tower series to be revived by Mike Flanagan…
Ugh, ugh, UGH!!!!!!! No!!!! Why?!!!!
The Dark Tower is one of my favorite book series’ and King stories ever. And I was really hoping after the tremendous flop of letting Ron Howard try to direct the Gunslinger that we would get somebody good to do this epic story justice. Flanagan’s whole schtick is doing “horror” for people who don’t really want to experience horror. His movies are about as scary as a Disney ride. There are so many good directors doing edgy horror, sci-fi, and futuristic westerns nowadays (all of which are big elements of the Dark Tower) who could bring this project to justice. People who did stuff like Game of Thrones, Westworld, Godless, Barbarian, The X trilogy, The Descent, etc. Horror has been having a revival with a lot of people doing interesting twists on the genre. Flanagan is not one of them.
The Dark Tower is absolutely loaded with gunfights and other intense action sequences. There are so many great directors who do this astoundingly well. Not just in Hollywood but in Korea and other foreign markets.
DT is full of crazy cliffhangers. Numerous directors in Nordic Noir, Scandinavian Crime series’ have absolutely mastered this in recent years.
Flanagan is the worst choice imaginable. Mark my words, what we are going to get is the same mediocre actors he always uses, the same bad-CGI rooms with faces in the walls that we all know will start moving at some point and another watered down product fit for the Hallmark Channel.
King films (at least the scary ones) really haven’t been good since De Palma and Kubrick took a crack at them. The tv series’ It and The Stand were both crafted for network television and sadly that seems to be the goal of every adaptation since; to be moody and creepy kinda/sorta but not even close to scary. Ugh.
Sadly I don’t think we will see good versions of King novels on screen until he’s dead and can no longer always choose the cheesiest directors possible.
But then again, King’s behavior throwing Biden under the bus last year, was downright disgusting, so fuck him anyways.
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: right? Adam pointed out a few nights ago that misinformation and election interference were hybrid warfare. I wish the main stream and leadership would address this head on. It’s serious stuff.
it was in the Ukraine page the night Zelensky landed in Dublin, and so did 4 military drones.
(Which Adam stated was not hybrid warfare, but actual warfare. And no one is talking about it anywhere, not here, except on that thread, not in you tube, with only a passing mention on heather cox Richardson politics chat. )
Geminid
@Scout211: As long as reporting on Trump’s mental lapses isn’t suppressed, I don’t think diagnoses of their origin matter very much.
Which makes me think of this item posted last night by Ankara-based Clash Report:
The post showed two pictures from Russian TV of Trump sleeping at last week’s Cabinet meeting.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gloria DryGarden: “Surprise is when something you’ve known about all along turns out to be something else.”
Anyone with more than three neurons to rub together can look at our current situation and conclude that the President is a Russian asset.
BUT DO WE ACTUALLY ACKNOWLEDGE THIS AT ALL?
Slowly you see the light dawning as people realize what they thought was an American President turns out to be the asset of a foreign intelligence agency.
prostratedragon
@Professor Bigfoot:
It’s the framework within which I think of 🤡 as a traitor. I am dead serious about that; it’s how he and his cohort should be dealt with.
Baud
@Geminid:
It’s a concern. A sleeping Trump isn’t serving Russia’s interests.
Booger
@They Call Me Noni: Should we order flowers for him?
Does Florist Transworld Delivery even exist anymore?
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: yes he’s white. And apparently doesn’t get any accurate news sources about us, doesn’t have a way to know how much we know that he’s not hearing about.
in this case, since he’s Aussie, what does him being white indicate to you? A lack of discernment, or an unawareness he might be being played by fake news presented as “real”?
He’s minding our business, he’s not here, he is getting a fucked up idea of how it’s good we’re addressing our immigration problem because they have one…. Is that where the racism awareness question applies? I’m confused, not clear how to apply your question.
Also I don’t know anything about the immigrants and non white people entering Australia; do you think that’s influencing his view of our immigration situation?
the racism in Australia seems different to me, not that I’ve been there, only watched movies. The black people there are also the indigenous folks, and they’ve been subject to erasure and assimilation, boarding schools. But I don’t think he was going after that sector. Just getting in our business, but malinformed.
Professor Bigfoot
@prostratedragon: Je suis d’accord.
Completely.
As well as a significant plurality— if not the majority— of the Republican Party today.
I haven’t forgotten Maria Butina, the NRA, and buckets of cash donations.
p.a.
@Geminid: Yep. These people…”Oh these diagnoses are not medically proper or credible.” With a subtext: we should only use factual, courtroom-sufficient evidence to attack this human p.o.s who may already have made a restoration of US democracy impossible????🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
Maybe accusing him of cannibalism is beyond the pale… besides that, let ‘er rip!
prostratedragon
Gin & Tonic
The glamorous life of a high-powered millennial (my daughter) Chapter N. Flying home from a week sailing in the Leeward Islands, due to land JFK at around 7:00 pm, she gets a message – you have to be in Maine tomorrow. Don’t worry, we booked you on a 10:45 tonight to BOS, so you can Uber home, pack some warm clothes and head back to the airport. You’ll have plenty of time.
She actually made the flight. Nice morning in Maine, probably a balmy 2 or 3 degrees.
I’m glad I’m retired.
Eyeroller
@rikyrah: Kavanaugh and especially Gorsuch have been jonesing to destroy the administrative state for years (since his teens in the case of Gorsuch). The “reasoning” is completely bogus, of course, since Congress authorizes agencies ot do things. The idea behind the “separation of powers” was supposed to be that Congress would pass laws describing policy in general terms, and provide the funding, but the executive branch would carry out those instructions and take care of the details that Congress just outlined. The USSC is out ot destroy that.
Professor Bigfoot
Yes.
400 years of white male supremacy have made them so.
ETA: my underlying point remains that it is not coincidence that these sorts of views are held almost entirely by white people and especially white men.
Others, obviously, have mileages that will vary.
prostratedragon
@Professor Bigfoot: Sadly, yes.
Jeffro
@rikyrah:
amen! much to look forward to, much work to do…but very promising
Librettist
@Eyeroller:
Increased complexity decreases uptake. It mostly works for those with means and caretaker/family doing advocacy, otherwise those in need are moving under a bridge.
America is a rigged version of Wheel of Fortune, where the wheel always lands on keeping the socialism to the white peeps.
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: indeed. Seems worthy of being addressed head on. Except , these powerful rich kgb mafia types have a lot of power.
@prostratedragon: traitors, indeed. Sigh.
lowtechcyclist
@Gloria DryGarden:
I have jay pied, that’s why I didn’t see it.
Link:
forever-wars.com/torture-techniques-from-cia-black-sites-were-used-at-alligator-alcatraz/
It is torture, pure and simple.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gin & Tonic: on the one hand, I’m totally “GIT IT, GIRL! DO THE THANG!!”
And on the other, I’m damned glad I’m retired, too. ;^D
Castor Canadensis
Off-Topic: what’s the shaded band at the bottom of the page in this image ? I turned off my ad-blockers, but it’s still there drive.google.com/file/d/15RENnx6tCTZXGdlQUd3zTbNay97J3Q_q/view?usp=drive_link
Geminid
@Baud: They may also be preparing viewers for a Vance presidency. A friend thinks that could happen soon. I’m not as confident, but I do assign a 50-50 chance to Trump not finishing out his term.
Maybe the Russians know something, or maybe they’re just stirring the pot.
Professor Bigfoot
@lowtechcyclist: Torture and murder at the hands of the United States of America.
This fact fills me a seething, incandescent, rage.
I feel soiled, dishonored, used.
Geminid
@Jeffro: Anything shaking in your district, VA-05? I think that one qualifies as a “stretch” district. As someone said: if you see a wave coming, put out plenty of surfboards.
Jeffro
yup
it’s definitely having an impact
job cuts + tariffs + immigration slowdown = it all has a negative impact
the Edsall piece I linked to talks about long-term drag on the whole economy. what it doesn’t get too far into is…it’s a complete self-own (thanks to trumpov’s stupidity and the GOP’s enabling)
stinger
@Scout211:
But when official and honest reports on the President’s health aren’t released, and when every American has access to his speeches and late-night ravings and clips of him walking across a stage and greedily grabbing something that was supposed to be formally presented to him — then we are all armchair diagnosing anyway and it’s surely better to hear from actual experts, even when they have no more data than we do.
Jeffro
NYT has a somewhat horrifying piece up today about the future of warfare, including drone swarms and tailored viruses, too.
No need for expensive, manned fighter planes or tanks, IMHO
Jackie
More good news!
Jeffro
@prostratedragon: while I hope our Dem candidates pledge to #EraseEveryTrace of trumpov once he’s gone, we’ll also have to rebuild the stuff he destroyed. just as an object lesson
(just don’t call it ‘build back better’!)
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
If we Dems ever regain control of our government, “look forward, not back” is not an option this time.
Jackie
@Castor Canadensis:
It just started for me, too. I’m on my phone. I’m happy to see “it’s NOT just me,” but it’s annoying as hell.
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: I don’t get the connection. Unless this is the
“I live in a safe world and I can trust others”
kind of mindset.
or
“I’m happy to maintain the party line of what folks like me say”.
if it’s not these two, it doesn’t make sense. Unconsciousness, And unawareness, and denial come in all kinds of people. All Colors, all education levels. Discernment is also available to all. Intelligence might be lacking in some, and that affects discernment.
if I don’t find it constructive, or don’t know how to apply it, it makes no sense. I don’t ask was it a man, when someone was a jerk, and then cite 2000 years of historical patriarchy. It’s not helpful, (except sometimes)
I don’t wish to fight or argue. I just couldn’t get why your question. I don’t think I’m being all that stupid, right now.
Jeffro
@Geminid: nothing that I know of, but I’m planning on getting more involved with the local Dem party in the new year.
I know McGuire (well, his staff) are going to get an earful from me later today. I’m sick of his lying and his latest press release slagging the 6 Dems who reminded the military that they have an obligation to disobey illegal orders is really slimy. One would think as a veteran, he’d understand that; I guess his craving for the taste of trumpov’s boots outweighs simple morality/principles.
lowtechcyclist
@Castor Canadensis:
I was just about to ask the same question. It’s there on the main page (now that I’ve refreshed it) and on any thread page I open.
ETA: Maybe it’s related to the ad stuff?
Aziz, light!
In the 1980s I lived in NYC, where Trump’s shitty behavior was all over the news. Back then is when Graydon Carter tagged him as the “short-fingered vulgarian.” Trump’s ability to restrain himself in public may be flagging, but he is the same flaming asshole he has always been.
sab
@NotMax: My grandmaother (born in 1898) used to tell me about a Nigerian prince scam her father almost fell for back in her childhood.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: it is torture. You saw my comments, how sick it makes me feel, right? I guess you had to toggle off the pie. Phooey.
I don’t know what the black sites are. Maybe I’ll not look it up right now, I figure it’s something bad, bad-bad.
I really have to go to bed.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jackie: mine is a clear one, no color, but there’s a band at the bottom of the page, yes.
Spanky
@Gin & Tonic: There was the time I was flying to San Diego for a one-day meeting. Left DC mid-afternoon, changed planes in O’Hare. Flight left late, flight was diverted to LA. Landed in LA 1 AM Pacific time, rented a car and drove to San Diego. Got a couple of hours sleep and made the meeting, got on the return flight and landed ~ 1 AM Eastern. Went to work early the next morning.
When you’re in it you’re in it, but now that I’m not I wonder why and how I did it.
Scout211
@Castor Canadensis: Finally someone else is seeing it!
This is the third time for me. I sent a screen cap to WaterGirl. I am assuming this is a placeholder or testing for the future ad. But when no other commenter saw it for the few seconds it appeared the first time, I was questioning my sanity.
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
The ‘how’ probably involved lots of caffeine.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: I’m thinking I need to construct a 2×2 box, and put it in my front yard as an exhibit.
appalling. Unthinkable.
hueyplong
@Professor Bigfoot:
“Torture and murder at the hands of the United States of America.
This fact fills me a seething, incandescent, rage.
I feel soiled, dishonored, used.”
Repeating because I wasn’t going to say it better.
Jackie
@Gloria DryGarden: It’s clear, just a band that’s a shade lighter than the rest of the page. Like looking through an opaque window.
lowtechcyclist
@Scout211:
I see the fnords!
p.a
@lowtechcyclist: I’m getting it on my rss feed
Ben Cisco
@Gloria DryGarden: Well, there’s a whole industry dedicated to spreading dis/misinfo, FUD, etc. And that doesn’t include those doing it for free. And as you said, at least some true believers. The belief system is not as important here as the results of the actions taken. I hang onto sanity by surmising that the number of true believers is lower than I think they are.
Quinerly
Do yourself a favor and check out Milo, the Border Collie. “Fetch King.”
He and his guy live in the beautiful fishing village of Staithes on the North Yorkshire coast. I am in love with Staithes.
FB, Instagram, TikTok.
Jackie
@Scout211:
I was busy checking other non-BJ links to make sure my phone wasn’t suddenly ghosting LOL Then we all started noticing it around the same time.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jackie: yes, exactly.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gloria DryGarden: Very well, it has nothing to do with whiteness; the fact that it’s almost entirely white people who espouse these views is mere coincidence.
I withdraw the observation.
YY_Sima Qian
@NotMax: The CPC regime also banned stories about ghosts, except those already in classic literature. So, Chinese entertainment companies pivoted to alternate universe fantasy, instead.
Bupalos
@Baud: Absent an unforseeable social turn, I think the next dozen presidents of either party are going to be blamed, for what is generally the slow-motion failure of the broad civic structure of the United States. If we had to date that decline, I’d put it back roughly to the Reagan administration.
The “nine most frightening words” or whatever has gradually morphed, (with assistance from all points of the political spectrum) to “very few of us actually believe in each other or this common project anymore.”
Geminid
@Jeffro: I was thinking that maybe Sally Hudson ought to take a shot at John McGuire. The former Delegate seems like she could be a dynamic campaigner, and she’s a favorite of an Albermarle County donor couple who could help raise plenty of money.
And when you give McGuire’s staff that earful, remind them that you made McGuire and you can break him too. “Don’t make me push the button!”
schrodingers_cat
@Gloria DryGarden: The history of the globe of past 500 years since Europe became dominant is the reason behind the spoken and unspoken attitudes regarding racism.
White Australians/Europeans don’t need to learn racism from the US. So many unspoken assumptions, come from the assumption of white/European supremacy. Our systems of knowledge, even geography.
You can be oblivious to it, but once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Gloria DryGarden
@Ben Cisco: the results of the actions taken…
but that all hinges on, is based in, the pool of misinformation.
Did I say pool? Quicksand. Rotting landfill. Many word choices. I haven’t slept, and my vocabulary goes away…. cesspit.
Baud
@Bupalos:
Agreed.
Belafon
@Bupalos:
“very few of us actually believe in each other or this common project anymore.”
A country built of us liberals would only have trouble in agreeing what comes first. A country of the conservatives would have trouble agreeing which one of them should be eliminated first.
It’s not that very few of us agree in this common project, it’s that those that don’t get the same vote as those of us that do.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: R party has progressed from racism with an avuncular visage to racism with snarling mob boss visage.
Old School
This stinks. I saw the Mavericks this past summer and they were fantastic as always.
Jeffro
@Geminid:
I’ll add that! thanks for the chuckle =)
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: Hong Kong Disneyland doesn’t have a Haunted Mansion– instead it has “Mystic Manor”, with a different premise about a colonialist guy’s pet monkey accidentally unleashing the magic of an enchanted amulet.
Bupalos
@Baud: Actually there was a relatively broad backlash to Trump’s border cruelty, documented in issue polling and likely expressed in midterm underperformance for R’s relative to economic sentiment and expectation. Remember the “red wave” that barely trickled?
sab
@Ohio Mom: I just paid our new, young handyman with a check because he won’t take credit cards because of the fees.
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: actually, you’ve just answered my question, thank you. “ the fact that it’s almost entirely white peoples that espouse these views”:
I can hear that.
just it was coming from abroad, their racism is based differently, and his mistaken belief is due to crappy bullshit in his news source, right wing sources controlling what gets said about us, abroad. Just seemed more like a news misinformation quandary.
I can see how the two might coexist. I’d really need to speak with some people of color in Australia, to get a sense..
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Yep. Avuncular didn’t prevent Dems from winning again. And then Obama followed Bush, and they realized they needed to go for broke.
Miss Bianca
@YY_Sima Qian: OK, now I’m intrigued. Why the PRC ban on ghost stories?
Gloria DryGarden
@schrodingers_cat: that might be too gentle an understatement. From the outside, it looks very violent, very directly intentional. Not criticizing; adding emphasis.
Baud
@Bupalos:
2022? I sincerely doubt immigration policy during Trump 1 played a role.
suzanne
@Scout211: I see it, not just you.
taumaturgo
@Baud:
If militarily, Ukraine has the upper hand, this stance will make sense. On the other hand, it would be folly since the clock is ticking and the deal to end hostile in the future would be much worse than it is today.
Mr. Bemused Senior
🎶 I see a [window] and I want it painted black…
Gloria DryGarden
Pretty red sky photo in the sidebar. Sunrise, sunset…
there’s a sailors weather prediction saying, about red skies..
Belafon
@taumaturgo: Do you have any children? How about we send them to a foreign country and then tell you due to our relations with that country we can’t get them back?
Do not forget that this is about more than just land.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: which led to John “Roger Taney” Roberts gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and their apparent intent to eliminate the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
YY_Sima Qian
@Baud: When Trump allowed Nvidia to sell the neutered H20 GPUs to the PRC, the PRC government banned the import of these chips because they were not much better than the domestic alternatives, & the PRC government wants to accelerate the adoption of domestic solutions. The H200s are a couple of generations behind Nvidia’s current state of the art, that being the B200s (& soon B300s). However, it is still significantly better than any Chinese alternative today, & perhaps for the next year.
Elizabeth Warren & all of those proponents of the tech. containment of the PRC are wrong. The Trump-Biden tech. war has already proven to be counterproductive, solving what had been intractable coordination issues among PRC government, corporations & academia to develop, deploy & diffuse domestic alternatives to US/Western tech, & massively boosting PRC’s localization efforts which are now bearing fruit.
Even w/ the restrictions of chip exports, the Chinese open sources LLMs are mere weeks behind the US frontier labs, the constraints on compute have forced Chinese “AI” labs to innovate on “AI” solutions that are compute efficient, for both training & inference. Lack of access to the EUV lithography machines have forced Huawei & Chinese chip designers & foundries to innovate on chip design, advanced packaging, systems engineering, & stretching the prior generation DUV lithography machines farther than though economically viable.
The PRC government’s response indicates that it is willing to allow Chinese frontier labs to buy some H200s to ease their compute constraints in training their frontier models, while keeping a tight leash on the imports to ensure that the domestic solutions continue to have a change to develop, especially for inference. If the open source Chinese labs are so close behind the closed US labs in spite of the constraints on compute, having access to the not quite leading edge H200s might vault them ahead, indeed. However, that is a consequence of the front tier US labs being closed source, which limits adoption, diffusion & pace of development, & these labs being “AGI/ASI-pilled” & overly focused on speeding running to the “AI” god by piling compute w/ brute force.
Of course, the Chinese labs have always had access to H200s, & even the leading edge B200s, via smuggling, & by renting compute from data centers in SE Asia/ME, or by building data centers in these countries themselves. So the approval to sell H200s is not quite as significant an event as the tech. warriors make it out to be.
Finally, the natsec angle is dubious at best. The largest LLMs (“world models”) that require so much compute for training & influence haven’t really found profitable applications, & what applications there are have primarily been civilian in nature. The “AI” for military use do not require such large models, & thus do not require so much compute.
Yes, Trump is setting a new precedent by backing off restrictions that had been imposed for ostensibly natsec justifications, but that became kind of inevitable when successive USG Administration (including Trump 45 & 47) have overreached more & more in waging the tech. war, & as the PRC has developed strong leverage to retaliate.
Of course, Trump being Trump, has to take a cut. & calling Xi up to inform the latter of the H200 approval is far too solicitous, probably wants to be seen as the great salesman.
But, Xi does know how to troll Trump, or Trump can [unknowingly?] troll himself:
Bupalos
@Belafon: From the founding we’ve always shared the table of politics with folks holding immoral and antisocial views, in most eras, ones that were more even more stridently so. The difference was that on the whole everyone saw the value of a common project that justified the accommodation of wildly differing views. Of course with the exception of that other time that the Republic cracked.
The difference today is that folks all over the spectrum hold in common a kind of taking the benefits of union for granted, as if those benefits will exist without union. That kind of “if we got rid of the people with the wrong views” hypothetical bit that you’ve set down there. That hypothetical would actually lead to complete collapse of living standards and the moral and civic order that those standards undergird.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: as my country’s leaders press Z. to cede land, I started thinking how would we like it, to cede Alaska to Russia, or return the Mexican territory we bought, to Mexico. To be forced to do so…
I can’t ask trump to imagine this, as a way to rethink things.
Jackie
@Gloria DryGarden:
Red skies at night, sailors delight.
Red skies in the morning, sailors take warning.
Pretty much true!
YY_Sima Qian
@Miss Bianca: Superstition, “spiritual pollution”, born of the usual Marxist-Leninist “scientific materialism” mindset, on top of the traditional über-paternalism that characterizes the Sinic style of governance.
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: it’s on the list of things to be really really pissed off about. And dismayed. And despairing.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: I’ve been following a Florida Republican who’s running for governor and is taking a Nativist/racist lane. Rep. Byron Donalds has Trump’s endorsement and is the early leader in the race, and the challenger is calling him “H1Byron.”
This Fishback guy has an ally running for Congress against Republican Rep. Randy Fine. That candidate blames Republican establishment figures for Trump’s current problems, and says Trump needs to fire Chief of Staff Susan Wiles and bring in Michael Flynn of all people. He calls Wiles “Swamp Granny” which I thought was pretty funny.
Gloria DryGarden
@YY_Sima Qian: if I google those terms, I wonder how long it would take me to understand what this describes. I might have to get to this another day.
Gin & Tonic
@taumaturgo: No Ukrainian President nor conceivable President could agree to ceding territory. It is simply a non-starter politically.
Bill Arnold
@satby:
Interesting piece. Thank you for the link.
BellyCat
Excluding the fine Jackals here at Balloon-Juice, obviously….
Belafon
@Bupalos: Yes, there are all sorts of complications of a real world with half of the population suddenly disappearing, but fixating on that is to totally ignore my point that it’s not all or most of us that have given up on this project. It’s that those who have given up get to vote to destroy it.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: I did not know that!
Belafon
@Gloria DryGarden:
As a Texan, I can say it would be hilarious watching the people who are ok with Trump making those deals with Ukraine suddenly freaking out over this idea.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: sorry–I left out the murdered parents and nuclear waste!
YY_Sima Qian
@Gloria DryGarden: A lot of these “AI” related terms have been discussed in Carlo G.’s “AI” threads.
PS: oops, you meant “scientific materialism”.
Baud
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: I think you could understand those terms from their context. But you might need to take a nap first.
Betty Cracker
@Old School: Damn, I’m sorry to hear that. I love The Mavericks. :(
Paul in KY
@Baud: Of the Net…which shows you how lame we are at negotiating.
Gloria DryGarden
@Geminid: I think I’ll have to read up, get a refresher. After my nap. Golly, my eyes are burning.
Miss Bianca
@taumaturgo: Sounds like you’re ready for your spot on Trump’s “negotiating” team.
Paul in KY
@Steve in the ATL: So, that’s where it all began…
Gloria DryGarden
@YY_Sima Qian: ah. I need to catch up on those. But yeah, that too.
I could sure get on board with mystic and magical instead of haunted, but that’s a personal preference. I love time travel books. I have some favorites. That would be a bummer. I’ll look into those meanings later.
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: I watch Newsmaxx, libtard. A trustworthy news source!
Gloria DryGarden
@Belafon: then it might be an excellent mental exercise. Feel free to suggest it. It’s a classic reversal
CCL
@Spanky:
Ditto for me.
Professor Bigfoot
@Paul in KY: I remember when Newsmax was just a disreputable website… you know, there’s a lot of money in right wing propaganda.
See also the late, unlamented Reichsführer Kirk and the mysterious origins of TPUSA.
Paul in KY
@tobie: I hope you can get that cheaply fixed fast!
Elizabelle
Ireland has been having a day of it with the high winds.
Have been watching the planes circle Dublin on FlightRadar24, before getting diverted somewhere else. They seem to be landing now.
Some folks on Ryan Air from Lanzarote (in the Canary Islands) got quite the flight before being diverted to Stansted, (which is a Ryan Air hub, and a “London” airport at some distance from the city).
That was quite the flight path.
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: Yup. And I think the Shanghai Disneyland doesn’t have a Haunted Mansion equivalent at all (it’s the biggest outlier content-wise: a lot of the standard Disney attractions aren’t there, and the ones that are are heavily reimagined and state of the art).
Ramona
@Baud: A good portion of the easily fooled wish to be easily fooled. To be more specific they want confirmation of their belief that some feature of theirs makes them superior and more deserving than others.
Ramona
Pity that in his case, the personality change has not been for the better!
cain
hahahaha!!! They don’t know how high school is like, right? Want to know if someone is an instant asshole/shithead? Join that turning point USA chapter, and let’s see how well your social capital goes.
They won’t pay teachers their due but will spend millions inserting some third party into their schools. I hope turning point usa is not going to be publicly funded at these high schools.
satby
@Scout211: ok. I understand your point.
WTFGhost
@Baud: Well, I knew most of the standards, “shoreline” is real estate, diesel uses glow plugs, if anything, but I’d only ever heard “balloon juice” in some ancient scifi, so old it was before scifi was scifi, if you know what I mean. We’re talking E.E. “Doc” Smith, who always struck me as a strange person to introduce.
“Here’s the author of the moment, E E “Doc” smith” – no, wait, they’ll think his name is “docsmith” and I just paused in the middle. Um. Should I air-quote the “Doc”? Should I use the quotes as a cue for “aka” so I should say “E E ay kay ay “Doc” Smith…”.
Anyway: he used the expression balloon juice, for hot air, so I did learn about it then. Still, it’s a pretty obscure reference, for sure.
pieceofpeace
@Professor Bigfoot: Do you have a link? Thanks!
Bupalos
@Baud: yeah…. whoops! Point reasserted though, ’18 midterms were stronger for D’s.
WTFGhost
@tobie: There is a laptop purported to be Hunter Bidens. A copy of a disk image, from that laptop, contains e-mails that are proven to have come from, or sent to, Hunter Biden. However, the disk image has been changed and altered so much, for all we know, someone manually inserted those e-mails into an otherwise nefarious-looking set of e-mails, so that some nasty e-mails were in the same database as proven-from-Hunter e-mails.
Now, that “it was proven true!” is the e-mails, okay, some e-mails were definitely Hunter Biden e-mails. But not all e-mails were provably Hunter Biden e-mails.
There were dick pics, and, apparently , he continued to discuss “yes, I got paid a lot of money, because other companies would assume I was using my dad’s influence, and that assumption helped the company that was paying me.”
Note that Republicans don’t give a fuck about that sort of corruption… not a bit of it. They just wanted the dick pics, the drug discussion, the addiction behaviors, to upset Joe Biden. And they’re lucky as hell Biden isn’t as corrupt as they are, or the worst bits of the Epstein files would have dogged Trump from Jan 21, 2021! Trump’s money laundering would have been all over the news! Trump’s “mortgage fraud” would have been all over the news! The Secret Service would film Trump reading TOP SECRET/SCIF documents on the shitter, and it would leak to some liberal blogger – hopefully not the Rude Pundit, who would gleefully fog out just the document, and nothing else.
Ahem. Sometimes it sucks to be the good guys.
Bupalos
@Belafon: I think there is a kind of “giving up” in these spaces as well, though I’m not directing that at you. There in fact has to be something like a ‘giving up’ for folks to turn their focus from a project of improving and convincing their political opponents to a project of overcoming or eliminating their enemies.
Not that this is exactly a ‘both sides’ story, because the Republicans have in fact turned towards the language and action of enemies first, and in many cases with an understanding that the type of division this unilateral move creates serves their purposes. Democrats are left in a seemingly impossible position.
Ramona
@Professor Bigfoot: In that case, I renew the observation!
Ramona
@Professor Bigfoot: In that case, I renew the observation!
Ramona
@Gloria DryGarden: As a child in Saudi Arabia in about 1969, I had a book for children on Australia (published when I don’t know) that towards the end spoke very emphatically on how limiting immigration to White people was necessary and right.
HopefullynotCassandra
@Gloria DryGarden: yesterday was pretend you are a time traveler day.
HopefullynotCassandra
@BellyCat: kids don’t even watch the same cartoons during holidays. Once upon a time, everybody knew about Linus and waiting for the great pumpkin. Not anymore. I think we are heading for a Shaka when the walls fell moment, or perhaps that has already happened
HopefullynotCassandra
@rikyrah: when these fools dismantle the expertise it took decades to amass, what do they suppose will replace them? Chaos. Hold on tight.
Gloria DryGarden
@Ramona: yikes. As a child reading that, it must have felt weird/ terrible/ uncomfortable/ excluded, to read that.
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullynotCassandra: well, it probably helped some politicians, to have to public forget about Lucy and the football.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin:
correction: enchanted music box
The Lodger
@lowtechcyclist: I saw it too. I thought my phone was pining for the fnords.
Kayla Rudbek
@Deputinize America: heck, I should probably go into bankruptcy law instead of IP, much more demand in that area
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: I was going to say, every accusation is a confession
Paul in KY
@Professor Bigfoot: So much evil money…