Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Let me file that under fuck it.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Not all heroes wear capes.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Shut up, hissy kitty!

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

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

“woke” is the new caravan.

You are here: Home / Archives for @heymistermix.com

Read a fucking book.

Perhaps some day, over a glass of whiskey that I accept, despite my gastritis, we could talk frankly about this.

mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.

The FU Rules

by | 16 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Right on the heels of yesterday’s Times piece on our new riches in Afghanistan, this morning’s story tells us that a Friedman Unit has passed and it’s time for more troops. But the White House says we’re supposed to wait another FU before deciding:

Even before the recent setbacks, the military was highly skeptical of setting a date to start withdrawing, but Mr. Obama insisted on it as a way to bring to conclusion a war now in its ninth year.

For now, the White House has decided to wait until a review, already scheduled for December, to assess whether the target date can still work.

Obviously, the functioning of the FU in Afghanistan is not quite the same as the Iraqi variety. The Iraq FU required that all serious participants keep up the charade that things were working until the last possible minute, when everyone finally conceded that a mere 6 more months would be required to really fix things. Perhaps the Afghani FU has some sort of look-ahead window? Since I’m not a serious person, these little details escape me.

The FU RulesPost + Comments (16)

Hayabusa

by | 15 Comments

This post is in: 

This is a still from the re-entry of the Japanese space probe Hayabusa, which is returned yesterday with a sample of the asteroid Itokawa.

Itokawa is a 500-meter-long potato-shaped rubble pile, an asteroid that is not a solid rock like a boulder or mountain, but probably an assemblage of rubble held together by its own gravity. If one of these things were headed straight for us, we could lob nukes at it, even slam it with space probes at high speed to try to push it out of the way, and it would laugh at us. We need to understand these objects much better than we currently do if the time ever comes that we need to keep one from smacking into us.

Of course, this being a Japanese mission, we also have this:

Lots more here.

HayabusaPost + Comments (15)

Dronetastic News

by | 34 Comments

This post is in: 

Maybe it’s just my sour nature and dim view of humanity, but I fail to see why the discovery of trillions of dollars of minerals in Afghanistan is Good News for America®. Is it because mining companies will stuff more cash in Karzai’s pockets, so he can continue with the good works and generosity that have characterized his benevolent rule? Or is it because the Taliban will give up the fight now that the land they hold is full of precious metal?

Dronetastic NewsPost + Comments (34)

You Say Abortion, I Say Contraception

by | 47 Comments

This post is in: ,

The FDA is considering approval of “Ella”, a new morning after pill that works up to five days after sex, causing Right-To-Lifers to get all pissy pants (via). That’s funny, because this WHO study (via this menstruation blog) shows that the existing Plan B emergency contraception pill will stop most pregnancies in the five day window. Ella might be better, but what we have now is pretty good.

Plan B is the biggest unheralded loss that the Right-to-Lifers have suffered in the last few years. From their perspective, it’s an over-the-counter abortion in pill form. And look who’s using it:

It turns out in the study — published in the Journal of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — that most of the women who took the drug between two days and five days after unprotected sex were young, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25. And 60 percent were white. More than two-thirds had some college or were college graduates.

If Right-to-Lifers can’t force smart white girls to have unwanted babies, what’s a movement for? (Apparently to punish poor and minority women, but that’s not news to anyone who’s been paying attention.)

Ella is chemically related to RU-486, which is another big Right-to-Life loss. In 2006, the last year with statistics, it was responsible for 11% of abortions. I’d be surprised if that number hasn’t doubled by now.

You Say Abortion, I Say ContraceptionPost + Comments (47)

Annals of Hoocoodanode

by | 49 Comments

This post is in: ,

One of the biggest fuckups in the history of American business was the firing of Steve Jobs by Pepsi executive John Sculley and the Apple board. The ensuing nose-dive almost put Apple out of business. On the 25th anniversary of that debacle, the Daily Beast dug up Scully and a few Apple board members to see what they thought. Some of their justifications are a hoot:

Board member Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist who helped found Intel, among other outfits, dubbed Jobs and his co-founder Steve Wozniak as “very unappealing people” in the early days. “Jobs came into the office, as he does now, dressed in Levi’s, but at that time that wasn’t quite the thing to do” […] “I’m not sure, but it may have been a while since he had a bath.”

Crisp recalled how undisciplined Jobs and the original Apple crew could be—enough so that they didn’t shrink at defacing the home of David Rockefeller. […] He says Rockefeller told him the following day that he enjoyed the party with Jobs and other top Apple managers, but added, “Next year, ask them not to put logos on the mirrors in the lavatory.” Some of the Apple faithful, it seems, had come armed with stickers of the company’s multicolored emblem.

I’m sure the author of this piece is playing up the cluelessness to get some clicks, but I’m not surprised to find very little regret in that piece. Titans of industry who drive their companies into the ditch apologize rarely and rationalize often, even if the rationalizations are as lame as Jobs’ habit of wearing jeans and smelling funky.

Annals of HoocoodanodePost + Comments (49)