Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

In after Baud. Damn.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

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

“They all knew.”

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Let there be snark.

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

He really is that stupid.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

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

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Autumn Again

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Autumn Again

by | 63 Comments

This post is in: 

… or Spring, if you’re reading this from the other hemisphere. Happy shift season, either way.

Best Wikipedia edit of the week, via NYMag:

mitch mcconnel otherkin

Professor Krugman, on “Life in Belle Epoque America“:

The Atlantic has an article about a website that sets up “mutually beneficial relationships” between wealthy older men and college students. Yes, it’s prurient, and I’m probably a dirty old man for even linking to it…

But there is some economics here too. Thomas Piketty tells us that we’re living in a new Belle Epoque — and he’s right, in some ways contemporary society feels more like that era than the cruder, more hypocritical American Gilded Age — and one thing extreme inequality brings is, yes, a courtesan class…

However, Snopes.com shatters the dreams of straight men everywhere by classifying the rumor of a bodymodded three-breasted Florida woman as “false”.
***********
Apart from such frivols, what’s on the agenda for the day?

Reader Interactions

63Comments

  3. 3.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    Being it’s an open thread, I’ve finished scanning all my slides(probably about 2000). Now I’m geo-tagging them. The slide that I just finished tagging turns out to have the oldest auto factory in the world in the background.

  5. 5.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: 46 in the Ozarks! (I am more impressed with your 59) My leaves are beginning to turn now. The days are cool with clear deep blue skies. I love it.

    Started pouring the concrete under the porch yesterday, and I can feel it this morn. Almost wish I had done more concrete back in my younger days, if I had maybe I would be more confidant in my skills and have a truck bring it in all at once. As is, I’ll mix and pour it one 3 x 5 pad at a time.

    Got all the posts for the wood shed set last week, so today I’ll frame it up. The rest of my week will be spent in STL getting an apt building ready for sale. I’ll be going up there off and on for the next month as that building has problems.

  9. 9.

    Betty Cracker

    It’s 73 here now, and the high is only 86. Thank FSM summer is over! I’ve always loved fall because of the weather and football and also because I’m fond of the holidays. It’s bittersweet this year since it’s our first without my mom and the mister’s dad, but we will make the best of them.

  11. 11.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Betty Cracker: We had the last dinner with the kid before the start of school. Yummy Korean food. Tomorrow she has to get her parking permit for the quarter; Wednesday, she’s doing mentoring for the new students; and Thursday is her first day of clinical for the quarter(12 hours in the hospital).

  13. 13.

    Amir Khalid

    Now that I have a cellphone again, I am undergoing a week-long (at least) experiment in doing without a wristwatch. I now have a rather bulky pocket watch that I can phone and send text messages from. (And surf the net, and play games, and take photos, and note my appointments, etc., were I so inclined.) So far so good, although my now-unencumbered left wrist still feels curiously light.

  17. 17.

    Schlemazel

    @Betty Cracker:
    I don’t remember summer breaking on the “Space Coast” till November. But from then till March it was glorious. No humidity, 70-80 degrees no afternoon flushing of the toilet.

    51 out here on the frozen tundra this AM. Highs will be in the 70s. Thats pretty normal but usually a couple weeks later than this. The down side is that it is all down side from here till March.

  18. 18.

    Schlemazel

    @Amir Khalid:
    I love watches and have a half dozen including 2 pocket watches. I stopped wearing one a year or so ago as it does seem redundant when I have big digital in my pocket. I guess that watchmaking is another industry ground under the wheels of technology.

  20. 20.

    danielx

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Total sympathy….spent two hours using a circular saw to clear the space between deck boards for my sis-in-law yesterday and my forearms are hurtin’ this morning. LOT of boards on this deck and they were all spaced too closely. Two solid hours of it is too much, and more to do today.

    But yet another beautiful day in store.

  21. 21.

    Betty Cracker

    @BillinGlendaleCA: Brava for her! The world needs good nurses desperately.

    @Amir Khalid: I gladly gave up wristwatches when I got my first cellphone, but my sister still wears a watch. She just likes them and couldn’t get out of the habit.

  22. 22.

    danielx

    @Alex S.:

    Is that a question?

    Only if there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office and/or it doesn’t involve bombing brown people.

    Shorter: Nope.

  23. 23.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Amir Khalid: I haven’t worn a watch since… Well really, ever. I got whistle-bit a few times, but not being able to check the time always seemed to make the day go faster.

  24. 24.

    Baud

    George Will: I Am an Atheist

    In other news, John Cole finds religion to get as far away from George Will as possible.

  25. 25.

    Baud

    Google is to stop funding a major conservative group over its stance on climate change. Speaking in a radio interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt said that Google would not be renewing its membership to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), because the group was “literally lying” by opposing efforts to reduce global warming. The right-leaning ALEC, which has received donations from fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil, has fought against the US government’s efforts to pursue renewable energy sources, battled against regulations for coal power plants, tried to get ecological activists classified as terrorists, and questioned climate change research.

  27. 27.

    Mustang Bobby

    76 F here in Miami. On or about October 15 someone throws a switch and we go from steamy summer with afternoon rain to clear and dry days and pleasant evenings until May 15 when we switch back. I don’t mind the humidity as much as some, and the orchids love it, but I do look forward to the days when I can have the patio door open for more than two minutes without making the A/C kick in.

  32. 32.

    Baud

    Stop gap measures.

    WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew announced rules on Monday that are aimed at making it more difficult for American companies to lower their tax bills by relocating overseas and that would wipe out the benefits for those that do. It is the administration’s latest move to sidestep a paralyzed Congress and tackle a politically charged element of President Obama’s agenda.

  34. 34.

    Baud

    @MattF:

    Yeah, $6000 should have been worth it for that guy.

    As I get older and my mind goes south, I can actually see forgetting making the first claim when making the second. But it sounds like that’s not what happened.

  35. 35.

    Baud

    @danielx:

    The Treasury fact sheet doesn’t explain why they were excluded, but it suggests that banks were excluded only from one aspect of the new rules.

    Limit the ability of companies to count passive assets that are not part of the entity’s daily business functions in order to inflate the new foreign parent’s size and therefore evade the 80 percent rule – known as using a “cash box. (Action under section 7874 of the code) Companies can successfully invert when the U.S. entity has, for example, a value of 79 percent, and the foreign “acquirer” has a value of 21 percent of the combined entity. However in some inversion transactions, the foreign acquirer’s size is inflated by passive assets, also known as “cash boxes,” such as cash or marketable securities. These assets are not used by the entity for daily business functions. Today’s notice would disregard stock of the foreign parent that is attributable to passive assets in the context of this 80 percent requirement. This would apply if at least 50 percent of the foreign corporation’s assets are passive. Banks and other financial services companies would be exempted.

    I’m not certain, but it may be that normal rules regarding valuation of passive assets doesn’t work for banks and financial institutions.

  37. 37.

    PurpleGirl

    The article on the Courtesan Class in France during the Belle Epoque was interesting. But I was waiting for a reference to the Colette story and the movie Gigi</emi.

  39. 39.

    Schlemazel

    @danielx:
    Peer pressure, all their friends were doing it so they felt they had to do it too so their friends wouldn’t think they weren’t cool.

  41. 41.

    Schlemazel

    @Keith G:
    I saw that yesterday, it is hilarious because the guy is unhurt. That is as close to tragedy as you want to get though. Too bad the biker didn’t have a gopro on, the first person of that scene would have been a pants wetter for sure.

  42. 42.

    JGabriel

    NewsMax Headline from Right Side of Home Page:

    Dick Morris Reveals Obama’s ‘Secret’ Agenda

    Which must be true because, if I were President Obama, the first person with whom I would want to share my secret agendas would clearly be Dick Morris.

  44. 44.

    JGabriel

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I haven’t worn a watch since… Well really, ever.

    Same here, like I don’t already know Time is racing up on me without being handcuffed to the bastard.

  45. 45.

    JGabriel

    @danielx:

    Sort of begs the question as to why the fuck were they funding ALEC in the first place….

    In the interest of efficiency, Google shortened it’s motto by one third: from “Don’t Be Evil” to “Be Evil.”

  49. 49.

    Woodrowfan

    a great comment on Krugman’s article, “the job creators never said what kind of jobs they’d create.”

    (and it’s 54 F in DC)

  50. 50.

    cmorenc

    I wear TWO watches at the same time! One on each wrist! Strictly digital watches.

    Of course, the only time I ever wear a watch is when I’m refereeing soccer games – when whatever game (or set of games) is over, they go back into my referee equipment bag until next time I’m reffing. Sometimes when I replace one of them, it’s a month or more before I bother to set it to accurate time-of-day, cause the timer/stopwatch function is what I’m interested in using it for. However, I do need one of them to be approximately accurate, in order to start the game around the appointed game time.

  53. 53.

    bemused

    Paula Deen was on my tv talking about “what she learned” and just as I rushed to change channels, she said “we are putting together a documentary” on her fiasco. Barf.

  57. 57.

    Cervantes

    @Baud:

    Yes, I think Will called himself an “amiable, low-voltage atheist.”

    (Not the first noun or adjectives I’d use to describe him.)

  60. 60.

    ThresherK

    Anyone up for a good comment bomb?

    If you are anywhere near the media footprint of CT public radio/TV, (or just want to anyway), submit a question for the Oct. 9th “debate” at CTFORUM.org.

    I would like to know what it God’s name the Connecicut Forum is doing having Karl Rove on a panel “Debating Our Broken Political System”.

    Charles Blow and Doris Kearns Goodwin are the other two panelists.
    CT public radio, who is hand in glove with the CT Forum, and provides a host, usually knows better than this. Their locally-made shows are much better than the NPR pablum.

  61. 61.

    Cervantes

    @ThresherK:

    I would like to know what it God’s name the Connecicut Forum is doing having Karl Rove on a panel “Debating Our Broken Political System”.

    Who better than one of the schmucks who broke it?

  63. 63.

    Linnaeus

    Summer is my favorite season, so I always go through a mild down period when it’s over. There’s a lot about fall that’s good, so I don’t dislike fall, but I do not welcome the coming gray and darkness. I accept it, but I’m not enthusiastic about it.

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