Check out this wee hedgie:
He can roll up into a spiky sphere, making it impossible to tell where his head or feet are. He’s a freaky little critter.
Open thread.
Florida woman, still rocking a punk rock ethos in the 2020s, which is kind of sad. Betty Cracker has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2012.
by Betty Cracker| 111 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Check out this wee hedgie:
He can roll up into a spiky sphere, making it impossible to tell where his head or feet are. He’s a freaky little critter.
Open thread.
by Betty Cracker| 108 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads
This afternoon, an unauthorized person entered my fenced backyard and tried to open my locked back door while I was sitting three feet away from it. That’s when my lead watch dog sprang into action:
I woke her and the auxiliary dog up while calling 911. Ever stalwart, the dogs blinked confusedly, farted and went back to snoring and drooling on the sofa.
But when the deputy showed up, they barked their goddamned heads off. Fucking useless-ass dogs. At least they didn’t knock over the trash can.
Open thread.
ETA: I was never in any actual danger. I armed myself with a skillet, and I am skilled in its use. I can flip FOUR eggs over easy at once without breaking a yolk, and if some motherfucker ever kicks in my door, I’m sure I could use it to brain him. It’s all in the wrist, I suspect.
by Betty Cracker| 135 Comments
This post is in: Food, Open Threads
From a Polish cookbook I inherited from my late father-in-law:
The cookbook says these cookies are super-tasty, just a victim of the “lost in translation” phenomenon. Possibly, but I think I’ll stick with pączki.
Please feel free to discuss your favorite ethnic food — or any other topic. Open thread!
This post is in: Politics, Religious Nuts, War
The New Yorker’s George Packer is a decent writer and occasionally insightful analyst, but he gets things spectacularly wrong sometimes. He was one of the so-called “national security liberals” who reluctantly supported the Iraq War. (To his credit, he later recanted.)
Packer has written a piece on ISIS and why they murdered Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. It’s a timely question, given the breaking news that ISIS released yet another sick snuff film today, this time depicting ISIS fighters burning a caged Jordanian pilot alive.
Casus Belli DancePost + Comments (38)
Here’s an excerpt from Packer’s article:
The Islamic State doesn’t behave according to recognizable cost-benefit analyses…. The Islamic State doesn’t leave thousands of corpses in its wake as a means to an end. Slaughter is its goal—slaughter in the name of higher purification. Mass executions are proof of the Islamic State’s profound commitment to its vision.
There’s an undeniable attraction in this horror for a number of young people around the Middle East, North Africa, and even Europe and America, who want to leave behind the comfort and safety of normal life for the exaltation of the caliphate…. They are idealists—that’s what makes them so dangerous.
In this sense, ISIS is less like a conventional authoritarian or totalitarian state than like a mass death cult. Most such cults attract few followers and pose limited threats; the danger is mostly to themselves. But there are examples in modern history of whole societies falling under the influence and control of a mechanism whose aim is to dictate every aspect of life after an image of absolute virtue, and in doing so to produce a mountain of corpses. ISIS doesn’t behave like a regional insurgency or a global terrorist network, though it has elements of both. It joins the death cult to an army and a rudimentary state.
Possibly Packer is right about the irrationality of ISIS’s actions — certainly they are uncommonly cruel exhibitionists and bloodthirsty villains. But having heard the drumbeats that preceded too many wars and having seen too many tin-pot local tyrants tagged with the “Hitler” label, I’m suspicious when politicians and media figures describe even odious groups like ISIS in such apocalyptic terms. And sure enough, in the last sentence of the final graf of Packer’s article, there’s a grim prediction:
One thing we’ve learned from the history of such regimes is that they can be stronger and more enduring than rational analysis would predict. The other thing is that they rarely end in self-destruction. They usually have to be destroyed by others.
Well, that’s probably true too. Hitler didn’t off himself after all – oh wait, he did! But only after his armies had been conquered and his country laid waste by WW2. President Obama, commenting on the news about the horrific murder of the Jordanian pilot, seemed to agree with Packer, saying ISIS is “only interested in death and destruction.”
Maybe. Or maybe they’ve observed how easy it is to lure powerful states into a ruinous conflict, thereby elevating their (ISIS’s) stature from a local band of murderous fanatics to a consequential actor on the world stage and enhancing their cred / recruiting prowess with other fanatics.
Packer is probably right that ISIS will have to be destroyed by “others,” but the others in question must be the people whom they aspire to rule in Iraq and Syria. If anyone doubts ISIS’s ability to drag the US back into a major conflict in Iraq — even with a sane, competent president in charge — imagine what would be happening right now if the unlucky serviceman they shot down, caged and set ablaze had been an American pilot.
By getting involved militarily in the campaign against ISIS, the US is playing a dangerous game. The opponent may be depraved death cult, but its leaders aren’t necessarily stupid or irrational; they may hope to bring out the stupid and irrational in us.
This post is in: Open Threads, Sports
Saw this nest-sitter just now when I was running pre-Super Bowl errands.
It’s an actual “sea-hawk,” I think. Does the sighting of it augur a Seattle victory? I don’t know. I saw people with “Support Our Troops” magnets on their SUVs too, and they’d probably describe themselves as “patriots.”
I’m mostly hoping for a good game. Open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 197 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Just to kick off the big Superb Owl event today, here, via About.com’s birding section, are five astonishing facts about owls:
1) Owls have binocular vision, the better to see and eat you, little mole.
2) Only 19 owl species are found in North America, but there are 150+ worldwide.
3) Owls are found on every continent except Antarctica.
4) Some owls have asymmetrical ears — the same owl might have a large and a small ear located at different places on its head, the better to hear and eat you, wee vole.
5) Owls have three eyelids — one for blinking, one for sleeping and a third to keep the eye clean.
Owls. Goddamn, they’re weird.
Open thread.
by Betty Cracker| 103 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Food, Open Threads
Look at these beautiful carrots the mister grew:
The mister is still out futzing around in the garden, and I’m devoting myself to maximum indolence. I was thinking about making a quiche and salad for dinner, but we just gave a dozen eggs to my mother-in-law, and the hens are less productive than they once were, so I’d actually have to buy eggs to make a quiche today.
I think I’ll just wait a couple of days to amass the necessary eggs instead. Maybe a salad and roasted carrots for dinner.
What are you up to?