Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We still have time to mess this up!

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Bark louder, little dog.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

T R E 4 5 O N

You can’t love your country only when you win.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Everybody saw this coming.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

No one could have predicted…

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Thursday Morning Open Thread

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Hurricane Joaquin is now a Cat 3, track still uncertain. Here’s a spaghetti model from CNN:

joaquin-track-225a-thursday-exlarge-169

This seems like a good time to share favorite weather apps and sites. Yesterday, valued commenter Lee shared a link to the Plymouth State Weather Center site. Of course, the National Hurricane Center site is indispensable for storm watchers — as fine an example of our tax dollars put to good use as you’ll find on the web.

I’m also partial to the Central Florida Hurricane Center site, which not only has maps and data but links to meteorology blogs, where disagreements over forecast models can get every bit as ugly as a firebagger-on-freeper flame-war.

For mobile radar, I can’t praise MyRadar highly enough. It’s available for free in both iOS and Android flavors, and you can choose the layers you want to display. Here’s my iPhone screen with wind direction, clouds and radar:

Oct 1 MyRadar

I picked a great time to drive from Florida to the Carolinas! What are your favorite weather apps and sites? Open thread!

PS: If you missed Cole’s Vegas essay from late last night, do yourself a favor and read it now. It’s so good I’m reluctant to post over it. But time marches on.

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread

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Did anyone see Colbert last night? The incredible shrinking Trump was on. He mentioned building a wall, but added that it will have “a big fat door.”

Colbert also asked if President Obama was born in America, and Trump said, “I don’t talk about that anymore,” and swerved back onto his scripted talking points about veterans. He’s done, people.

Today is the first day of fall. Yay! In my area, the high today is 90, but the long-term forecast does not mention a temperature in the 90s after today. Huzzah!

What’s up in your neck of the woods?

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Open Thread: Hot Time, Summer in the City

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Apart from the Beltway returning to the muck from which it was born, what’s on the agenda for the afternoon?

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Don’t Give Jeb That Good Ol’ Religion

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Suddenly the party of the Moral Majority, culture wars, and freedom of religious expression uber alles isn’t too keen on religion and politics mixing anymore.  The leader of Jebya’s Catholic faith is no longer welcome in his 2016 campaign.

“I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope,” said Bush, a devout Catholic. He added that he wanted to see exactly what the pope recommended “before I pass judgment, but I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”

I wonder how that’s going to play with the Huckster/Santorum/Rubio “strong faith guides my policies”crowd.  The guy has bigger issues though.

In an hourlong town hall, held in a narrow, three-story opera house, Bush, in his shirtsleeves, spent considerable time talking about entitlement reform and the need to fix programs like Social Security, something he noted his brother tried, and “got totally wiped out.” But on those big-ticket issues, he said, both parties need to find common ground.

“We have to reweave the web of civility,” he said, a message that plays well in a state where firebrand conservatives have not done as well. “I have deep disagreements with liberal Democrats, but I don’t assume they have bad motives.”

And on national security issues, he said, “I would like to get back to the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy,” where everyone understands “if we engage, it’s not to create war, it’s to create peace.”

“I’m like my brother, only I’ll make the absolute failure policies he implemented work!” is a hell of a campaign slogan, yes?

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Kung Fu Pope v. Big Carbon

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Via Slate, I came across this little bit of video:

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Per Eric Holtas in Slate, this is the brainchild of some delightfully twisted Brazilian climate change activists.
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My favorite shot?  Dawn-backlit papal Tai-Chi exercise.  IOW:  just watch this.
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PS — the soundtrack could/should have been Inhofe and Santorum skull detonations.

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Open Thread: Crowded Calendar

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Eastern Massachusetts was three inches short of rain for the month of May, till the weather gods decided to dump most of that on us during the last half-hour. So we’re not at the garden center, buying more potting mix, or in the garden, filling planters.

Apart from downpours, what’s on the agenda as the weekend winds down?

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Rejuvenation through vampirism: the medical ethics are not getting easier

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For those of you paying attention to either the biomedical literature or to this here blog, it won’t be news that researchers can reverse aging. And it’s easy! At least it is in mice. Just transfuse older rodents with the blood of much younger mice and it’s like that segment of the Twilight Zone movie. The ramifications of this work were obvious and a little queasy*, but it helped that researchers identified a protein called GDF11 that might offer the same benefit in pill or injection form, no young blood required.

Or maybe not.

Egerman [and co-workers] undertook a careful analysis of the function of GDF11 in young and aged mice. They report the opposite of what Sinha et al. reported, that overexpression of GDF11 results in impaired satellite cell function and reduced muscle regeneration. Notably, systemic delivery of GDF11 into old mice had no effect, whereas in young mice muscle regeneration was delayed due to reduced expansion and differentiation of satellite cells.

Meanwhile the overall benefit of perfusing young blood into old rats has held up pretty well.

Ten bucks to be a fly on the wall at Mayhew Insurance while they debate how to cover it.

(*) Count all the people who would prefer not to suffer from old age. Now multiply it by how much young blood each person would need. Factor in just how badly (some) people want to keep their youth and vigor, or get it back. Now consider that the group who wants the blood has all of society’s wealth and influence whereas those who would provide it have none.

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