On the way home from running some errands I stopped by the Barn With Inn and spent some quality time with Chatman and the animals:
Such a good place.
by John Cole| 86 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
On the way home from running some errands I stopped by the Barn With Inn and spent some quality time with Chatman and the animals:
Such a good place.
Comments are closed.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Looks like a nice day down on the farm. October is the best.
Cacti
Oh happy day.
Hispanic crowd boos Marco Rubio off the stage at the Calle Orange festival.
Hal
I’m seeing a lot of don’t believe the polls posts on facebook from Trump supporters and plenty of statistics? Is that even a thing!? The white tears posts like from 2012 should be a sight to behold.
DanR2
Thanks for shooting the video horizontally!
That turkey have any idea what holiday is coming up?
debit
Just FYI: Walter’s kennel cough seems to be easing off; he’s gone from needing a cough suppressant every four hours to every six. I’m glad we caught it right away so we could stay on top of it before it could develop into something serious.
Pogonip
@debit: how’s he doing on the clinical trial?
I hope the other dog didn’t catch the kennel cough.
gogol's wife
So cool. That landscape is beautiful. God’s country.
Now I want a pet pig!
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
In case it’s missed at the end of the thread downstairs, a huge thank you to everyone who recommended algebra websites a couple of weeks back. Just re-took my placement exam and went from needing two remedial classes to going straight into the degree math class. Thank you for saving me the cost of tuition and two semesters of work in my least favorite subject.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@debit: Hooray Walter! Iggy had kennel cough — scary stuff. Glad to hear Walter’s doing better — please give him ear scritches from me.
debit
@Pogonip: Clinical trial hasn’t started yet. He had his second injection of Adequan, but I don’t expect results until the fourth. I also hope Ellie doesn’t catch the kennel cough, but my vet and I are prepared to be just as aggressive if she shows any symptoms. She came home with it when I adopted her, it turned to pneumonia almost overnight and we almost lost her. Kennel cough is a minor thing for young, healthy dogs but can turn pretty serious for puppies and elderly dogs.
Highway Rob
What gives with the Google Consumer Surveys state-level polling? Clinton gets Utah (+5), Montana (+3), and Kansas (+9!), but she barely leads Pennsylvania (+1) and Trump’s got a cushion in Ohio (+5)? This makes no sense to me, and I haven’t seen anything at Silver’s or Wang’s that digs into it.
Note: I have an unhealthy obsession, and I might be better off if no one had an answer.
Bill E Pilgrim
Or as an alternative you can do the zen version and visit the barn within.
If you’re not near WV for example.
debit
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: Thank you and I sure will! :)
Betty Cracker
Love the noise that turkey makes! Such weird creatures. I wish my fowl and dogs got along. I have to keep them separated.
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: Oh that’s just wonderful.
OGLiberal
@Hal: Most of my wing-nut FB friends are fully convinced the polls are skewed. I don’t know of they felt the same in 2012 because they were nowhere near as rabid as they are this year..they loves them some Trump. I think a lot of it is because a lot of the swing states have more registered voters who are Democrats than Republicans and they just don’t want to – can’t – believe that. So, the see a poll of NC that shows Clinton in the lead and a 6 Democratic edge in party ID – which is probably pretty close to reality – aand they are incredulous. I also think that some don’t understand polling and think that all polls should be a 50-50 party ID split, or 33-33-33.
jacy
Early voting began today in Baton Rouge. Big line this morning, although it moved fast — 36 minutes from stepping into line to pushing the button to accept my ballot. Took my 78-year-old mom, so she could also cast her vote for the first woman President of the United States. Yippee!
hovercraft
@Hal:
Depends on who you are listening/ watching, Rush got burned last time, so he’s cautious, others are going the truther route.
Bill E Pilgrim
Colin Powell announced that he’s going to vote for Clinton.
Apparently at the news conference he held up a little vial and claimed it contained his integrity, but the audience was skeptical and wants to run some tests.
David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch
Turns out “Blacks for Trump” aren’t very Black (photo)
The Moar You Know
@debit: That’s about right. You will be amazed at the difference it makes for the poor guy. Glad you got him on it.
Matt McIrvin
@Highway Rob: Managing the sampling for a political poll is hard. Google Consumer Surveys is most likely not even trying.
Hilfy
John Cole, thanks for the charming videos. And especially the Steve update last night.
Please, please give us some pics and info abt the HOUSE. Flood in the basement? Thousands more $ to repair? What is going on? Would be grateful for even crumbs of information. You don’t have to write a long post, photos can be fast and helpful.
laura
@debit: man Walter won the lotto when he met John, and then you-his forever people.
Speaking only for me, the pets-n-critters posts bring joy, and make the we’re getting old and ill and barely surviving this dang election season bearable.
Thank you Debit.
Shell
@Hal: The magical thinking has started. Whats also big now is believing there are hordes of shadow Trump voters out there that have been overlooked but will swarm the polls on Nov.8.
David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch
Rubio’s support is collapsing like a wet taco. #BADHOMBRE #DRAINTHESWAMP Sad!
OGLiberal
@OGLiberal: re: NC. I just checked exit polls from 2012 and Dems edged out GOPers by 6 that year in party ID. PPP’s latest NC had a 9 point Dem advantage in party ID and people yelled at them that they were partisan hacks. I just went to the NC Board of Elections voter statistics site and their registered voter numbers give Dems…..a 9 pt lead. Guess that’s why PPP responded to the angry tweets with, “you don’t know NC, do you?”
catclub
@laura:
seconded.
David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch
MOAR “not so Blacks for Trump” springing up (photo) TOTAL DISASTER!
Ceci n'est pas mon nym
@hovercraft: Wait. Rush freakin Limbaugh is voting “reality” over “bubble”?
Does this Rush have a goatee?
Schlemazel
@Cacti:
I am pissed that the DSCC decided a couple of weeks ago to pull out. Dumb bastards may have thrown away a win that was within their grasp
Schlemazel
@gogol’s wife:
I’d love a pet pig! The are delicious.
Schlemazel
@laura:
Second. I am a little pissed off at you people for trying to convince me there is a modicum of value in saving humanity but grateful that you are trying.
EDIT: @catclub: OK, third for me
Iowa Old Lady
@David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch: I hope that’s true. I’m concerned because the democrats pulled funding.
David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch
Trump’s fundraising has dried up. Fat Cats race for the exits. Now, he’s gonna try to spin as an affirmative choice to stop. But the reality is no one wants to fork over money to meet him anymore.
Dog Dawg Damn
Everyone on Cable flogging the Ocare rate hike. They want a horse race so badly, it’s just sad at this point. I don’t think anything in the world would make most voters who are anti-Trump change their vote.
But now would be a pretty good time for a nasty oppo dump to push this off the news.
? Martin
@Shell: The magical thinking has started? Heh. My mom still believes that Hillary shot Vince Foster. I was barely out of college when that shit was going down.
But yeah, reality is going to be a particularly hard punch in the face this cycle. On top of the polling gap that conservatives are denying is that Dems are likely to pick up 2-3 points on top of that due to their GOTV advantage which appears extra pronounced this year. If Dems pick up the house/senate, day one should be national voting rights bill – uniform ballot and rules for access for national elections. States can do what they want on the state ballots but invariably they’ll all drift back to the national rules. No point letting people to vote on a national ballot only to kick them out for having the wrong ID for a state ballot – that shit will get ugly fast.
Walker
The thing about the polls is that the likely voter models are all very white. 2004 white. And that is not what we are seeing in early voting. I think all of the polls are going to break (though hopefully in a good way).
MattF
@David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch: Uh, yikes. ‘Winding down’ two weeks before election day is not SOP.
James E Powell
@David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch:
He’s Cuban-American, so it’s like a wet bacán or maybe a medianoche?
Miss Bianca
So, on top of reading the new Volker Ullrich biography of Hitler, also reading this article on propaganda during WWII – or, since the word “propaganda” had become discredited, “psychological tricks used to help win the war” – and found this excerpt, highlighted from a pamphlet entitled “The Battle for Civilisation”, rather resonant right now when I think about this election, and pushing back against Trump and the forces of Trumpism:
scav
@James E Powell: or a Merenguito?
Chris
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Ah, fuck him.
Peale
@David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch: I think one of the most effective things that got reported this cycle briefly was that Trump wasn’t spending money wisely on his campaign and was likely to keep it for himself. I think you are seeing the fruits of that reporting now. Even if you give Trump a billion dollars, he wouldn’t know how to effectively invest it and he’d take another day off to promote his soon to be bankrupt Old Post Office hotel. I think that idea stuck to him with donors early and he hasn’t been able to shake that.
Brachiator
Fellow Californians. Help me out with the dumb ass ballot propositions. There are 2 plastic bag propositions. Can I safely vote for or against both of them? Or what’s the deal?
And the tobacco proposition, Prop 56. I hate smoking, but kinda want to vote NO on this one. It wants to raise tobacco taxes because the last proposition increasing taxes was too successful in curbing smoking, so tax revenue declined. So they need this one to make up for the loss?? And they want to tax e-cigarettes exactly like regular cigarettes even though they are not the same thing. Seems kinda dumb.
geg6
@Miss Bianca:
How is the Hitler biography? I’m very tempted. I used to be obsessed with WWII and Hitler/Nazis. Read so many books. But I left off after reading “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” by Daniel Woodhagen (I think that’s who the author is). Really depressed me instead of making me feel more interested. That was years ago, so I might be willing to read a new take on things and not get too depressed over it. Humans can just be horrible.
bystander
@Dog Dawg Damn: It’s as if they think the people who will have to pay more to maintain insurance will now change their votes for the guy who will take away their insurance ASAP.
Brachiator
@? Martin:
It happened in Reno. She shot him just to watch him die.
Eric S.
@Betty Cracker: I saw my first wild turkeys (the animals, not the booze) two weekends ago driving the back roads in northwest Illinois. They were hanging out beside the road looking at the farm field through a fence.
karen marie
@David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch: What “high-dollar fundraising”? Trump stopped doing that months ago, because no one with piles of cash would even talk to him.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
I don’t have the link handy, but Google for a short film called “Don’t Be A Sucker!” that was produced for the armed forces after WWII. It’s basically comparing the Nazis to con men who got Germans to follow them by dividing everyone into micro-groups. I suspect it was made to support the desegregation of the Army, but I’ve never actually researched it.
ETA: IMDb says it was made in 1943, so during the war.
Patricia Kayden
@David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch: Hope that audience is adhering to President Obama’s “Don’t boo. Vote!”
Miss Bianca
@geg6:Let’s just say that if the revelations in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” depressed you, then you are not going to find the Ullrich book an uplifting read..//
It strikes me as a very good, well-researched, very thorough biography. And it’s making me feel very glad that Trump doesn’t have Hitler’s flair for politics, because I’d hate to find out just how many of my fellow citizens would be Trump’s willing executioners.
Nom de Plume
@hovercraft:
You have really fallen a long way when Rush Limbaugh warns you about creating a “false reality”.
JMG
Pollsters and number crunchers who are on Twitter, a move they must now regret, have spent the last month futilely explaining to Trumpists that party ID is a self-identification that changes with every election and in fact every poll. Most polls don’t adjust for it, treating it like a “who’re you gonna vote for question. In places where Trump is ahead, of course most respondents identify as Republicans. But there’s no teaching those who’re failing in life because they hated listening to teachers.
gf120581
@David ?▶️Bad Hombres▶️? Koch: That action is a big “fuck you” from Trump to the party he supposedly is leading. He’s all but blaring, “I don’t give a shit about any of you. If I lose, I hope you all lose with me.” If you’re a downballot Republican, that news is cue for panic.
Anoniminous
Jim Wright, he of Stonekettle Station, is calling Scott Adams “Loonbert.”
SiubhanDuinne
@Schlemazel:
You don’t eat a great pig like that all at once!
SiubhanDuinne
@gf120581:
Trying very hard — oh! so very hard! — to muster up a smidge of compassion.
Failing miserably.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: I think we’ve had this discussion before…both you and Adam recommended that film, as I recall. I’ll look for it again.
Oh, and o/t, but for completely silly haunted house movies, as opposed to really scary ones, there’s an obscure 60s gem called “The Spirit is Willing” which I just loved as a kid. Actually got my library to purchase it when I couldn’t find it anywhere else in the system.
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
FWIW, a lot of scholars felt that “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” was a bit overstated, and a lot of people’s willingness to go along with the regime was grounded in good old-fashioned greed and fear, not pure anti-Semitism.
But don’t read about what was going on in Eastern Europe. I started to read “Balkan Ghosts” and the massacre of Jews in Romania (I think) that the author described at the very beginning was so horrific that I couldn’t read the rest of the book.
Schlemazel
@SiubhanDuinne:
WINNER!
KS in MA
@Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA: Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chris
@gf120581:
Hey look, the “greed is good” ethic strikes again! I’m sorry guys, what did you expect after preaching this for 35 years?
hovercraft
@efgoldman:
Chuck Todd had Mark Caputo on said that the Schemer pulled out of Florida because he saw it as a reach, apparently Murphy’s dad has the money to write a check, which Papa Murphy has not done. So now the expectation is that Hillary’s coat tails will have to carry Murphy over the finish line. If the democrats can get a 5 point lead in the early vote by election day, and Rubio is 2 to 3 points up in the polls he will lose. But if the dems are only up 2 to 3 in the early vote, Rubio will lose. Come on Florida you can do this, as of around 5 pm, the democrats have erased the republican lead in absentee ballots, they were only 7 K ballots behind, so tomorrow we should pull ahead.
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
On the bag thing: “Yes” on 67 upholds the ban as passed by the Leg (not yet promulgated) and “No” would overturn it. I’m voting yes, as it unifies the current crazy-quilt of city and county bag regs into a single statewide one.
A “Yes” on 65 takes the 10-cent fee away from grocers and gives it to various funds. This is the one that bag-makers want–I guess as a big “FY” parting gift. I’m voting no.
Definitely voting yes on 56, the tobacco tax. CA’s tax has gone from one of the nation’s highest to one of the lowest, and tobacco sales and use are quite sensitive to price. I have a teenager and my dad died of lung cancer, thanks to his tobacco habit. Screw those guys.
Am also voting to eliminate the death penalty (62) and against speeding up executions (66).
My $0.02
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Actually, the sense I’m getting from Ullrich’s book is that Hitler’s success as a politician was due in no small part to his rabid, and very open, anti-Semitism, which resonated with a lot of “good Germans”. Yeah, he toned it down a little to appeal to the more liberal elements of society in the period between his Munich days and taking over as Chancellor, but he was never secretive about what he planned for the Jews.
People probably accuse Goldhagen of exaggeration because they really, *really* don’t want to acknowledge the truth of what he’s saying. It’s violently distasteful.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
I understand, but I see no reason to tax e-cigarettes as though they were regular cigarettes.
I would be happier if the prop had a single purpose, the way props are supposed to be written.
Yep. No brainer, here.
Thanks for the feedback.
Kay Eye
Barn With Inn is the best!
Brachiator
@Miss Bianca:
The racism was long and purposeful, first to drive Jews and others out of society, and ultimately the murderous intent. The people happily went along with it. There is no real question about this.
And obviously, others were included as well.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
From what I remember, the criticisms of Goldhagen that made sense to me were the people who said that he overestimated anti-Semitism as a pure motive and underestimated related motives. So if you had (for example) a story about Germans who turned their Jewish neighbors over to the authorities and then moved into that bigger, nicer house, Goldhagen attributed that to pure anti-Semitism, while some other scholars pointed out that there is, shall we say, a certain amount of self-interest in turning in your neighbors and then looting their stuff to benefit yourself.
I have the companion book to the BBC series “The Nazis: A Warning from History” that points out that a lot of people don’t realize that the Nazis basically did their best to profit from enslaving the Jews under their control: they stole all of their money and property, forced them to work as slave labor and, when the system threatened to collapse, started killing people wholesale because it was cheaper than keeping them alive. Those huge piles of hair and clothing and teeth in “Schindler’s List”? That’s a visual quote from a documentary called “Night and Fog.” After people were murdered at the concentration camps, their corpses were looted and the useful parts were sold off for cash by the Nazis.
I don’t think it makes it less horrifying that the Nazis robbed and killed Jews in part so they could steal their stuff and enslave them based on their religion/ethnicity — I think it makes it more horrifying.
WaterGirl
@The Moar You Know: Either 4 or 5 was the magic point for my dog.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: I’m not sure Goldhagen’s critics are really grappling with the understanding that for years and years the German people were absorbing the message that Jews didn’t *deserve* to have what they owned – that they were parasites on the body social, that they made their money in illegiitimate ways, that they weren’t German, etc. So “greed” may have played a part in the land/stuff grab – but this greed was underlined by righteousness – German Jews *deserved* to have their stuff pillaged, to be driven out of society, to be killed. So, sorry – “greed” as opposed to “murderous anti-Semitism” doesn’t get a pass as a motivation for me.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
Why do you keep saying “getting a pass”? I actually think it’s morally worse to loot the corpses of the dead out of a combination of greed and ethnic hatred than out of pure ethnic hatred.
I think that claiming that it was pure anti-Semitism gives some people a smug can’t happen here feeling because as long as it doesn’t happen to that specific ethnic/religious group again, they can ignore the times where other groups are killed and exploited in similar ways but for different, if equally bigoted, reasons.
If the Holocaust happened solely because of anti-Semitism, then we only have to watch out for that degree of anti-Semitism to raise its ugly head again and don’t have to watch out for anything else. I’m saying that it’s not — and never has been — as simple as that.
SoupCatcher
@Mnemosyne: David Neiwert wrote about something similar in Strawberry Days, about the theft of property in Washington while the owners were concentrated in internment camps.
It was a part of the story that was glossed over when I heard older Angelenos talk about neighbors who were interned.
Mnemosyne
@SoupCatcher:
There are a LOT of similarities between what the Nazis were doing and what the US government was doing with their “undesirables” and how the other citizens exploited that.
The crucial difference was that the US government did not imprison Japanese-Americans with a stated aim of exploiting and then exterminating them, so the US actually fed and clothed people, let them live as families in the camps, etc. They were prisoners, not slaves.
But most of the Japanese-Americans who had been interned were never able to recover their property or be fairly compensated for their losses.
TheronWare
A home with many animals is a happy home.
TriassicSands
I’ve used the word pejoratively, but I still wince when I hear someone call someone a “pig,” since pigs can be such cool critters. Trump is a pig in the worst sense of the word, a sense that has nothing to do with actual pigs.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
In Canada and the US there were plots to steal the property of citizens of Japanese ancestry. Japanese Americans had land in Torrance and Palos Verdes and other areas that is worth millions today. In parts of Canada there was a pernicious belief that Japanese Canadians had to be broken so that they could not compete with white people.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: I’m kind of scratching my head at your hair-splitting, here. Sounds like Goldhagen’s critics are downplaying his claim that anti-Semitism wasn’t the most important element in the Holocaust. I contend that it was. Hitler’s obsession with getting rid of “Marxism” as an element in German society sprang in great part from his conviction that Soviet-style Marxist Socialism – as opposed to good German “National Socialism” – was a Jewish thing. This in turn fueled his justification not only for getting rid of German Communists – and Jews – but for making war on the Soviet Union. Where exactly am I saying “greed” may not have played a role in the Holocaust? I’m saying that using “greed” as an excuse for how people turned in their Jewish neighbors but also took their property is kind of…missing the point. Almost insulting, really. Greed may have played a role, but greed wouldn’t have been enough to drive the bus.
And as for saying, “oh, well, if you emphasize anti-Semitism you give people the feeling that “it can’t happen here” ” – Good Lord, Mnem, it’s already happened here. Where do you suppose Hitler drew his inspiration from, if not here? Hitler was a fervent admirer of American genocide against our native population, and drew inspiration for his extermination program from ours. Just because I posit that anti-Semitism was indeed the main driving factor behind the Holocaust, and that without Germany’s – and Europe’s – pre-existing, deep-rooted and openly acknowledged anti-Semitism, it couldn’t have happened on the scale that it did – doesn’t mean that I’m saying there were no other factors involved. Just that invoking those other factors – “it wasn’t anti-Semitism, it was greed! Or generic ethnic hatred!” – begins to sound like denial. To me. YMMV.
Zinsky
@TheronWare: A home with many animals is a happy home… As long as they are dead, deep-fried and served with lettuce, tomato and slice of onion on a sesame seed bun!
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
I’m getting a feeling that we’re talking past each other a bit, probably in part because I was typing on my phone (I should know by now not to try and have a deep philosophical argument while typing with my thumbs).
I’m going to see if this makes more sense now that I’ve brought up the American treatment of Japanese-Americans in the same time period: I’m saying that what the Nazis did was a difference in degree, not something unique to them that only happened because they were more anti-Semitic than other countries (which I felt was Goldhagen’s claim). We only call the places that we sent Japanese-Americans to “internment camps” now because the Nazis ruined their original name of “concentration camps” by using their concentration camps to efficiently kill large numbers of people. Until then, it seemed like a normal terminology for the US government to put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
The unique evil of the Nazis was that they decided on outright extermination of their target groups (they had more than one) rather than the more common exploitation and robbery that the US government did with Japanese-Americans. People talk about the 6 million who died in the Holocaust, but it was actually 12 million who were deliberately slaughtered by the Nazis — six million Jews and six million additional “undesirables” like the Roma (Gypsies), GLBT people, the disabled, etc. The Nazis were largely driven by anti-Semitism, but not exclusively driven by anti-Semitism, which is why other groups were specifically targeted as well.
Matt McIrvin
@JMG: Rasmussen is one of the very few polls that attempts to rebalance directly for party ID. It’s probably the main reason their results are so off all the time.
rikyrah
@debit: ???
Yeah, thanks for the good Walter news.The
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
And then, after that giant block of text … I’m going to slightly argue against myself now. There was a specifically anti-Semitic aspect to Germany’s version of eugenics, because Hitler’s fascist allies in Europe did not get on board with the whole shipping Jews off to slaughter thing. In Italy, Mussolini enacted Nuremberg-type laws against Italian Jews, but they didn’t do mass deportations until the Germans essentially took over their government in 1943. In Spain, Franco did a census of Spanish Jews for the Nazis, but never did any mass deportations.
So, even with everything I’ve said above, I’m not trying to argue that the Nazis did not have an extra-special hatred for Jews among all of their other “purity” obsessions, because they clearly did. But I’m not sure that that hatred alone explains why they set up death camps.
seaboogie
@Brachiator:
Happy to help. I accessed the Sonoma Valley Democrats’ FB page for rec’s on those issues or for those people (i.e. school board) for which or whom I did not have a preference. Folks here are pretty down to earth, sane and highly involved in local issues – of which we have many.
So – on the plastic bag props:
Prop 65 – Carryout bags: no position. I voted YES because it makes sense to me to direct resources for paper bags sold to environmental considerations.
Prop 67 – Ban on single-use plastic bags: YES. And I heartily concur – great to have no plastic bags caught in trees, on fences, etc. It also feels to me rather “community minded” to bring our assorted cloth and other such bags into stores – very getting back to basics in our consumerism. Plus it’s fun to see people walking to their cars with some random items in their hands – I’m easily amused. Good mental stimulation for those bagging groceries too, because they really have to think on their feet with each bagging situation.
WRT to cigarette tax – I voted yes, and I still smoke a bit. Anything that is a deterrent is fine by me. Also vape pens and such (which can tend to blow up in your face). Would not be against lowering any taxes on other nicotine delivery systems designed to help one quit, or just as a substitute.