ancient cat toy pic.twitter.com/WerNhiFh6L
— cats being weird little guys (@weirdlilguys) November 19, 2023
Play to your strengths!
well, half the time, the other half the time it's a fact that you genuinely weren't taught but only because it isn't true https://t.co/FqfKlOFrXn
— flglmn (@flglmn) November 17, 2023
that's true the other category is genuinely weren't taught plus actually true fact but the fact is something like did you know the inventor of the second plastic button molding machine had a cat with the most adorable little feet https://t.co/rnziWt0B9u
— flglmn (@flglmn) November 17, 2023
I would actually watch an Olympics with this kind of color commentary!
C’mon Megan ????@theestallion stars in a new promo for the 2024 Paris @Olympics ?? pic.twitter.com/HVSu5vzdPv
— Okayplayer (@okayplayer) November 24, 2023
Israel-Hamas War Update: The Truce Appears To Be Over (Again)
Ruckus
I’ve been reading/commenting on BJ for a long time and I swear that I’ve read a post exactly like this at a prior time, as in the way back.
Of course the term Timeline Respite may have given it away….
JWR
From Politico:
So, we’re back to the “rigged election” charge again, this in spite of the fact that the process is a FL state law. Boy, where’s DWS when he needs her?
Odie Hugh Manatee
JWR don’t count because the meatball at the top with the number has a 1 in it and they have the second post. Why is WordPress denying the existence of JWR?
I sense a conspiracy!
Edit: After my post the meatball has a 3 in it so WordPress thinks that I’m two people. Hmmm… I wonder if I can vote in 2024 using WordPress…
opiejeanne
@JWR: Hardly surprising that they would cry “rigged!” when you consider who he hired to run his campaign.
Jay
@JWR:
All the “rigged election” lawyers, are busy at this time,
Stay on hold and we will see if Rudy can take your call,….
Dave
There absolutely are a lot of important true things that are not taught, both in the past and now. Eg. a lot of history from the point of view of the “not us”, but those don’t tend to go viral
JWR
@Odie Hugh Manatee: WTF? Local meatballs all check as functioning within normal parameters. ;-D
Baud
@JWR:
Funny how he’s bucking the party by competing in New Hampshire, but now cares deeply about party rules.
Baud
@Baud:
That said, leaving him off the ballot may do more harm than good. I wouldn’t be surprised if Philips intended this outcome for the media coverage.
Geminid
@Baud: As a general principle, I don’t like party organizations determining who gets on a primary ballot. But I see little practical harm in this case.
I’d be concerned if party committees started choosing who is allowed ballot access in races like Congressional primaries. Last year Kentucky Republicans kept a credible House candidate off the primary ballot, but that was exceptional. Generally, the access of candidates to a ballot line is determined by state laws regarding petitions, etc. Then the voters get to sort them out.
Baud
@Geminid:
Yeah, I think an objective standard is best.
Frankensteinbeck
I’ve seen a few accurate ‘they don’t teach you this’. Not many. Mostly stuff about minority contributions to society. A very few psychological health suggestions. Life hacks that work… like, twice, maybe. Overwhelmingly it’s “Isn’t that common knowledge?” or “That isn’t true” like the OP says.
EDIT – @Baud:
In this case, I doubt it. The “RIGGED!!!” crowd are Leftists. Phillips’ tiny constituency isn’t into that particular delusion.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
Everything in media and social media is hyperbolic these days.
Geminid
@Baud: This is an important difference between our system and the UK’s. Labour Party members have to accept the candidates approved by the Party’s committees, who can purge MP’s who do not follow Keir Starmer’s line.
Dems here occasionally put a turkey on the general election ballot, but we usually put up sound candidates who represent what rank and file Democrats want. In states like Minnesota, District Conventions will endorse primary candidates, but voters still have a choice.
New Jersey’s system is somewhat more authoritarian, with county bosses putting their preferred slates at the top of the ballot. We’ll be hearing plenty about this practice when it is applied to the Senate contest between Rep. Andy Kim and Tammy Murphy, the Governor’s wife.
satby
Happy First Friday everyone! Count down to longer days again in 20!
Also 30 day count-down to closing my Etsy store and that chapter of my life. Anyone who wants to go into an online business, don’t use Etsy. It was good once, but the fees are ridiculous now. If you make a sale from their offsite marketing, it’s a 15% charge on the total before they lard the other fees on top. Will not miss that place.
Baud
@Geminid:
We mostly got rid of caucuses. We’ll continue to make other reforms. But every imperfection becomes an excuse for someone to support fascists.
Baud
@satby:
Congratulations on the new phase of your life.
MagdaInBlack
@satby: I loved your oatmeal honey soap. It smells so good I almost want to eat it. Good luck with the new chapter ❤️🪷
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
They won’t vote for Philips. But they’ll use it to engage in anti-Dem propaganda.
satby
@Baud: @MagdaInBlack: Thanks! Still a big month ahead, and to avoid Etsy and the higher prices to balance the fees people can email me at skinluvvers at gmail if wanted.
Still will be making soap anyway since I can’t use commercial stuff, so still will sell it, but on a smaller person to person (via email) scale. I just can’t take the way corporate greed has even infiltrated a site dedicated to handmade goods.
satby
@Baud: Absolutely. Especially since the RFK Jr dirigible went the way of the Hindenburg.
Geminid
@Baud: Caucuses suck. In 2018, I watched Democrats in the Virginia 5th CD pick a weak candidate who lived in DC but had a weekend retreat on the northern edge of the district. She had a good enough social network to win caucuses with a total turnout of 6800 people.
By contrast, Abigail Spanberger won the primary in the 7th District with 35,000 votes. She had to beat a Republican incumbent in November, and the primary gave her much-needed exposure.
Due to Republican Tom Garrett’s unexpected retirement, the 5th CD was an open seat that year. Republicans nominated Denver Riggleman in a contentious District Committee meeting.*
Leslie Cockburn ended up losing to the charisma-free Riggleman by 5 points, in a Democratic wave year. At the time, I thought Democrats had a better candidate who would have won a primary and given Riggleman a tough race.
*Fun 5th CD fact: Rep. Scott Garrett said he was retiring in order to deal with his alcoholism. Denver Riggleman, his replacement, ran a vodka distillery.
Mai Naem mobile
@satby: its with everything. I have a realtor friend who’s a real go getter who built a property management from scratch expanded it into 6 states and sold it to PE firm a few years ago. The PE firm has been laying off the main employees and basically doing a crappy job. He’s gotten back together with the laid off people to start all over again. I have extended family who run one of the branded lodging chain places. When you make a reservation through the 800 corporate number which most people do, they get 30% off the top. That’s on top of a $50K annual franchise fee and overpriced franchise labelled supplies. It would be okay if they actually did anything for the fees but they don’t. They don’t even run a lot of ads which is the big item they’re supposed to do. I know the Obama admin was busy but I really feel they didn’t pay attention to consolidation of businesses. Fidelity National Title Co was hit with a ransomware attack last week and it affected tons of people. Fidelity ate up a lot of smaller title cos and now is the largest title co. in the US. That’s not a good thing. It’s a national security issue if you’re getting hacked.
satby
@Mai Naem mobile: Totally agree. Unrestrained greed is making pricing worse, housing scarce, customer service non-existent, and goods shoddy in many cases. And the money flows to the top 1% who don’t produce anything.
Matt McIrvin
I watch a fair number of videos about mathematics. When they’re explaining high-school-level content, there are always commenters saying “why didn’t they teach it this way in high school?” even when the exposition is a bog-standard high-school approach. Maybe they didn’t teach it that way in THEIR high school–some teachers are just bad–but I doubt it, most of the time.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The people complaining the hardest about the rigged 2016 primary were Bernie Sanders supporters who got a lot of their wins by gaming the caucus system, that is, in the states where the process was least democratic.
(The same was true of Barack Obama, if I recall correctly, so I’m not going to argue that this was cheating. But Obama didn’t whine that the primary was rigged against him.)
Manyakitty
@satby: I am interested in a batch of lavender patchouli soap. Will also reach out via email.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: I resent caucuses because Virginia’s prevented me from voting in the 1992 primary entirely (I was off in grad school and voting absentee–I probably should have just registered in Massachusetts but Virginia’s vote-suppression efforts had given me an exaggerated idea of what you needed to prove residency; I held off until I had a MA driver’s license).
Gvg
@Matt McIrvin: I recall Obama’s people had done their homework and had a plan to win with the system as it was in 2016 which included calculating in the caucus’s and their point values for effort. So they won. Hillary’s people weren’t ready, miscalculated and complained it wasn’t fair. Caucuses aren’t fair, but she was a much more experienced and connected politician who should have known about the system. She was Bill’s wife and he won in that system. I felt she had proven unready and looked whiny. Obama backed reforms too. Lots of people did notice, though it was more after Bernie I admit, because so many of his supporters were a pain.
That is usually one of the problems with reform. Winners under one system don’t usually like to reform it. Rare for a winner to know the deck was too stacked.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Caucuses aren’t cheating. But their problems are exposed in a world where the GOP is actively suppressing voting.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
It’s actually worse than that.
These decisions aren’t being made by some duly authorised committee based on clearly understood rules that naturally favour the candidate with the backing of the Party leadership. Quite often it’s just the anointed bureaucrats of Labour’s London Branch announcing that only one candidate will be allowed to stand and don’t you dare complain or you’ll be suspended.
When it’s local Council candidates, the appointees to the Regional election coordination body will hand over candidate selection authority to local loyalists. Their job is to flatly refuse the candidacies of anyone on the Left, and where the incumbent is on the Left they just ban them from defending their seats, usually on the grounds that anonymous complaints have been filed and until those complaints have been investigated and dealt with by the central complaints unit (run by London Labour – so good luck getting a hearing this decade) they are provisionally suspended from the Party.
Here in Liverpool that authority was given to a woman who actually left the Party to campaign for the Lib-Dems in 2019, and whose return to the Party was unanimously opposed by her local Party membership. Region overruled them and then put her in charge of candidate selection. Unsurprisingly every candidate she approved was a Starmer loyalist. That’s in Liverpool, a Labour stronghold for decades, now entirely run by appointees of Nu-Lab Central.
Where the candidate is too well known to smear, or they’re an MP, what they do then is fall back on the Anonyvoter online voting system brought in during Covid. I mentioned a huge scandal down in Croydon in London last week where Nu-Lab Central have been exposed using voter fraud and identity theft to win internal elections (an investigation has been announced, run by any-Lab Central, so that’s going nowhere), but they don’t need to be so obvious,
Where they know their candidate is going to lose, as with a recent MP run-off in Wales, they just announce that in person voting is called off and everyone has to use Anonyvoter. Between lots of suspect members never receiving an invitation to cast a vote and wholesale vote-rigging behind the scenes, the Starmer loyalists always just manage to squeak through.
As an aside, they went full Anonyvoter in Wales because when they tried to finesse the vote-rigging in Liverpool to deselect my MP in favour of a corrupt little scumbag local councillor, their plans to win with over 90% of online votes were blown sky high when we managed to get hundreds of local members to attend the hustings and vote in person.
They delayed the opening of the hustings for an hour, hoping the rain would put people off waiting, they blocked as many people as possible at the door, some for ‘aggressive behaviour’ to the London Labour mob staffing the sign-in desk whose open contempt for everyone there was palpable. The count itself took three hours (to count about 550 votes) in a sealed room where only the MP and his assistant were allowed to enter. Most of that time was spent with the assistant repeatedly challenging handfuls of fake and already disallowed postal votes the counters kept trying to stuff into the Vetted boxes. The same shit, over and over again.
We won the hustings by over 90%, but the election itself by only 12 votes.
That’s what the modern Nu-Lab Party is all about. Cheating, lying, smearing fuckers who hate the vast majority of the Party’s members and voters and see nothing wrong in treating them like dirt, confident in the knowledge that even the ‘Liberal Media’ will wink and look the other way while they purge the Party of anyone who could potentially challenge their control.
Your Primaries might throw up oddballs, but at least they’re openly democratic. This shit is out and out Stalinist.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Why didn’t anyone remind me that the Newsom/DeSantis debate was last night? From what I see online this morning, Newsom beat the tar out of him.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Now it’s the Republicans who favor caucuses here. That method gives the advantage to more ideological people willing to turn out for hours-long meetings, as opposed to voters willing to cast a ballot at a polling place between the hours 7am to 7pm. Former Representative Tom Davis summed up the dynamic: “Activists have passion. Moderates have lives.”
I thought Lt. Governor Bill Bolling would have won a primary in 2013, and then gone on to beat Terry McAuliffe in November election for Governor. Republicans chose a caucus/convention process instead and nominated Ken Cuccinelli. Bolling had won 8 straight elections, two state-wide, but he knew he had no chance against Cuccinelli’s network of religious zealots and tea party cranks. So he didn’t run.
I think Virginia may have changed the rules now, because next year the 5th CD nomination evidently must be decided by a primary. State Delegate John McGuire is challenging Rep. Bob (No)Good, and unlike in 2020, when Good knocked incumbent Denver Riggleman out in a convention, there will be June primaries for Republicans as well as Democrats. Virginia does not register by party so the primaries will be open to all voters.
MagdaInBlack
@Dorothy A. Winsor: From what I’ve seen on it so far, I think we missed some fun!
Dorothy A. Winsor
I know caucuses are undemocratic. Most of the time we lived in Iowa, I couldn’t go because I was always out of town for work on Tuesday nights. And there’s no such thing as a secret ballot. You caucus in your precinct so your neighbors are there.
But my first caucus was the one for Obama in 2008. And it was glorious! I know I’ve told this story on here before, but we were in the second round, and we Obama people had moved out into the hall to give the Richardson people room to debate what they were going to do. I was standing next to an African American lady who said her husband hadn’t wanted to come that night (it was beyond cold), and she said, “Baby, you got to come. It’s history.” And it was.
So I think it’s a good thing caucuses are going. But I wouldn’t have missed that night for anything.
kalakal
@satby: I was so annoyed when Etsy bought up Reverb*, prices have soared, because of Etsy jacking up the fees. Because Reverb was such a large player in the field it’s affected prices across the board and Etsy themselves have added nothing
*Online market place for used music gear
kalakal
@Geminid:
An important difference is that UK party memberships are tiny, there’s no party registration like here, total membership for the Tories and Labour is 170,000 and 370,000 respectively. At whichever level you put the candidate selection process, which varies from party to party, it’s hardly an ad for democracy. Back in the 80’s and 90’s Leeds NW (pop 70,000) Labour party had a membership of a few 100, the candidate selection process had about 100 people showing up to the meetings. Historically the level of centralised control has varied a lot, but ultimately the decision has always been taken by small groups of activists, the variance is at what level in the party hierarchy those groups are. Labour has always had a lot of left/right wing infighting, most of the 60’s through the early 90’s was essentially a civil war with the left mostly in the ascendant, since then it’s been the right but both sides love gaming the rules.
Tony Jay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
FOX have released their ‘Exclusive Official Authoritative Coverage’ online. It’s 36 seconds long and consists of De Santis walking on to rapturous applause, walking off to even louder applause, De Santis saying “I love America”, Newsom nodding sadly while a voice-over castigates “…the stench of open corruption from Crumbling Joe’s White House” and finishes on De Santis’ weirdly coy smile as “Everyone’s A Winner, Baby” plays over the credits.
It’s entirely convincingly
JML
Caucuses are profound statement on grassroots democracy. Caucuses are exclusionary and often discriminatory. They are frequently both things at the same time. Probably the biggest reason they’re going away is they’re also a massive amount of work and very easy to screw up. Primaries are easier to run.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: Primaries in the US are actually run by the state government’s election system (as opposed to caucuses, which are run by the party). Our state elections do have all sorts of problems, but that’s what made it implausible that the DNC was somehow rigging the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton–people claimed this was happening in states where the government was not even controlled by Democrats.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
The thing that really sticks in my craw is that back when the Labour Party had a left wing leadership, the Right of the Party and their transactional friends in the Media SCREAMED about bullying and election fixing and ideological intolerance and punishment of dissent for years based on absolutely nothing. They just straight up lied and the Press rewarded them for it with breathless coverage of their brave battle against the forces of Red Stalinism.
Fast forward a few years and there’s a full embargo on coverage of any of this. The most the media will say at present is that Starmer’s lot “refuse to apologise for making the Party electable”. Actual evidence of identity theft and data security breaches by Nu-Lab Central down in London and it doesn’t even merit a mention in the Press.
Utter scum run this country, top to bottom. Roll on the apocalypse.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I see what you did there.
Everything, ha!
Thor Heyerdahl
@kalakal: Cory Doctorow and his article about tech “enshittification” has yet another example.
gwangung
@JWR: Isn;t Phillips the moron who missed the deadline for filing by a month?
If he can’t do basic things like file on time, why should he be on the ballot?
206inKY
For folks in their twenties, there’s an endless well of things that meet criteria of weren’t taught, true, and significant.
1) 1985 bombing of the MOVE row house by Philadelphia police that destroyed two city blocks
2) US Navy downing a commercial passenger jet in Iran in 1988, which remains a centerpiece of propaganda in Iran to this day
3) The single largest concentration of US wartime deaths were the one million Filipinos—all US citizens at the time—who died during WW2
Matt McIrvin
@206inKY: I remember #1 and #2 well from hearing about them in the news.
I was just reading an analysis of the Vincennes shooting down that airliner that attributed it to three separate user-interface-design failures in the Aegis software that all happened to come up at the same moment, resulting in an aircraft that the system had already identified as a civilian airliner being mistaken for an attacking fighter jet anyway. It’s that “holes in the Swiss cheese line up” kind of thing that is the basis of most disasters.
Seanly
Okay, not into Megan Thee Stallion, but that ad was actually cute. Still not going to watch the Olympics though…
And I’d love to get to Paris again. Wife’s never been and the last time I was there my brother & I were staying in the hostel.
Paul in KY
Guessing Boris is long dead. He acted great on Alien.