And shame on you for even asking, BBC America!
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| 103 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
by Betty Cracker| 139 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Energy Policy, Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads, Politics, Religious Nuts 2, War, Assholes, Flash Mob of Hate, General Stupidity, Get off my grass you damned kids, Our Failed Media Experiment, Sociopaths, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
Some of y’all give me crap about living in a backward hellhole like Florida. Well, were you able to pluck a Cherokee Purple tomato off your vine last night and have it for dinner with a little salt, pepper and mayo on multigrain bread?
I thought not.
Why I live at the P.O. and Other Random CrapPost + Comments (139)
But seriously, I live here because I was born here, as were my father and grandfather and his father, and my family and friends are here. Plus, the mister, an Upstate New Yorker, couldn’t be dragged out of Florida, not even by the Budweiser Clydesdales.
He joined the Air Force right out of high school, and his hitch included stints in Mississippi and a tour of Europe, where he provided background cocktail party music at fancy NATO shindigs as a pianist in the Air Force band.
He didn’t join the Air Force to play music. He’d hoped to learn about electronics or something practical. But someone heard him at the keyboard in the rec hall and drafted him into the band.
When his tour was up and the Air Force deposited him back in Buffalo in the dead of winter, he said to himself, “What was that Air Force base with all the palm trees? I’m going back there.” And he did.
Otherwise, I’d be gone like a shot to somewhere saner. Canada seems much less crazy, and during the peak madness of the Bush years, we did consider it. But we knew in our hearts we wouldn’t be able to stand the weather.
Why is it that the cold countries seem to be the sanest ones? Does the seasonal indoor confinement inspire ruminations on good government? But many of the northernmost US states are bugshit crazy too. It must be the guns and the white supremacy.
Others pointed out yesterday the difference in how the Canadian and American media handled breaking news of the shootings at Canada’s Parliament. It now looks like the shooter was an ISIS-inspired jihadi wannabe like the other Canadian-born convert who ran over a pair of soldiers earlier in the week.
Also this week, a trio of American girls were nabbed en route to join ISIS boyfriends in Syria, whom they’d met on social media. These kids today, with their hyper-modest clothing, murders, beheadings and forbidding of music! I don’t know what the world’s coming to.
It’s tempting to see a larger trend at work here, and Fox News hosts, the future-Reverend Erickson and other dishonest media yappers are running with that theory because they’re hateful pustules on the butt of humanity and/or need boogeymen under the bed for ratings.
But maybe it’s just that people are weird and inexplicable. Serial killers inspire scads of marriage proposals and online fan clubs. People are strange.
Individually, that’s a fact. But we know what crazy on a massive scale looks like and how dangerous it can be. We saw it in the US after 9/11, and history is laden with even more horrifying examples. The trick is to spot the tipping point, and to try to stop it if we can.
It’s also helpful to remember that even genocidal monsters build movements on grievances that contain a kernel of truth. The Nazis were psychopaths, but they probably wouldn’t have been able to persuade an entire country to join their mad scheme without the Treaty of Versailles (or at least German perceptions of its unfairness, depending on which historian you believe).
If you buy into the theory pimped by the future-Reverend Eponymous Eponymouson and label ISIS and jihad under any flag as the New Nazis (as opposed to Neo-Nazis, who are mostly hate-filled Christians), perhaps you can identify their Treaty of Versailles, which seems to be Western occupation of Muslim countries and historical influence over corrupt Middle East governments.
Would an acknowledgement of that injustice, a complete withdrawal of forces and cessation of political meddling and courtesy bombing short-circuit the proliferation of crazies? We’ll never know because it’s not going to happen: It would be Giving In to Terrorists. But it’s an interesting thought experiment.
This post is in: Open Threads
At least two people have been shot in an ongoing incident at Canada’s Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The live CBC broadcast is here. Reporters are saying there’s more than one shooter, but as we know from these type of events, it’s too soon to tell. The cops have confirmed that one shooter is down. A soldier was reportedly shot at the war memorial and has been taken away in an ambulance. Let’s hope it was just one nut and not a group of them and that everyone else clears the area unharmed.
This post is in: Sports
I was finding it hard to give a shit about this series until I learned that former Ray James Shields was pitching for the Royals. So let’s go Royals!
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Election 2014, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Both Sides Do It!, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment
So there’s another gubernatorial debate tonight here in Florida. Jake Tapper is the moderator, god help us. I know some of y’all like Tapper. I think he’s a supercilious prick and yet another tiresome songster in Brother David Broder’s Both Sides Do It Tabernacle Choir.
I first noticed these traits in Tapper when he supposedly busted then-Senator Obama for smoking after Obama said he had quit:
As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes…
It’s not a big deal in the scheme of things — the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis — indeed, it’s miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.
Except that I don’t like feeling that I wasn’t being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we as a nation are confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)
No, “corny” isn’t the right word. In the context of the then-ending Bush era and unfolding global catastrophes, making an issue of a candidate sneaking a butt fell somewhere between “self-righteous nanny” and “psychopath.”
So you could say I don’t have high hopes for tonight’s debate. I expect Tapper to focus on stupid shit like fans and flip-flopping rather than delving into the heavy-duty corruption and other shenanigans we’ve endured in Florida since 2010. But maybe he’ll surprise me.
by Betty Cracker| 116 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, RIP
Gough Whitlam, who served as Prime Minister of Australia from 1972 to 1975, has died at age 98. Being a typical navel-gazing American, I didn’t know about him until a “constant reader” who prefers to remain anonymous brought him to my attention.
But Prime Minister Whitlam is credited with an amazing list of achievements for Australians, including the establishment of universal healthcare, free college tuition, promotion of women’s and minorities’ rights, abolition of the death penalty, ending Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War, protecting the environment and lowering the voting age to 18.
Did I mention he served as Prime Minister for only a few years? Astonishing! Rest in peace, Prime Minister Whitlam.
This post is in: Open Threads, General Stupidity
John Oliver is right. If, instead of dialog illustrated by static courtroom sketches, Supreme Court arguments were reenacted by dogs, everyone would watch them in full, at least at first:
I’m not sure I would have cast a boxer as Justice Kennedy; he seems more like a Dalmatian to me, but that’s a minor quibble. Possibly the Justices could be represented by a new species every year.