Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

In after Baud. Damn.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

The lights are all blinking red.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

“But what about the lurkers?”

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

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Good Cookware Is Plentiful And Cheap

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This is a random ass post, but I was in scrubbing the kitchen when the Amazon person arrived with a package, and it was the dutch oven I had ordered. One of the things I have learned rather recently is that there is a LOT of really good cookware for cheap.

When I got my first paycheck after grad school, one of the first things I did was buy a really expensive chef knife. It was a Viking, it was super heavy, and it was like 120 bucks. And then, over the last 20+ years, I have slowly built the kitchen one item at a time. I only buy stuff that is going to last. So I will spend 140 bucks on one sauce pan, and then I will have that sauce pan for the rest of my life. A couple of items a year the first couple years, one or two a year over the next few, and then as needed. So I was able to amass a nice setup without every having to do a massive outlay of cash, but also didn’t have to buy a bunch of replaceable crappy stuff over and over.

At any rate, I have all that shit at home, but it is not here. And I have neither the financial means nor the desire to stock another kitchen. So I have been doing shit on the cheap. And so far, I have been super impressed. Two items of note- at home I have a range of matfer bourgeat skillets. I have no intention of doing the same thing here, but we did need one skillet, so I picked up a preseasoned Merten & Storck for 29 bucks off Amazon. And it’s been a great pan. I’ve used it 20 times already, and it is my go to skillet. Were I to do it over again, I don’t think I would spend the money on higher priced ones like I have at home.

Same with this dutch oven. I’m not spending the price of a small car on Le Creuset for here. This Mueller one for 60 bucks looks, feels, and probably is every bit as durable and good as the OG le Cresuset.

So that’s nice to know.

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Everything Seems to be Going Faster

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I don’t know what is going on anymore. And it is not for a lack of trying. Every day I sit down, and I check a number of news sites, blogs, magazines, twitter, etc., and try to catch up on what is going on. And I will find something, read about it, go to look somewhere else for more info or a different perspective, do some background reading and try to understand the issue, and before I have formulated a coherent, deliberate, and worthwhile thought, I’ll see eleventy-seven other things pop up that deserve my attention and concern.

I mean just look at the front page of every news page- there is just so much shit happening it is hard to even attempt to keep up. It’s a constant bombardment of shit I don’t know or understand. Here is the lead story on the WaPo:

Everything Seems to be Going Faster

The amount of brainpower required to process everything in that headline and story is too much.

“OK- UAE, so Asia next to Saudi Arabia. Need to remember history of UAE. Don’t recall our relationship with them. What is the dynamic/relationship with Saudi Arabia. Are they Sunni/Shia? Any involvement in Yemen mess? Relationship with Iran? I think it’s a monarchy, dunno if authoritarian or figurehead. Oil, of course. What is China’s goal? Is China actually doing anything new or different than what we do? Who wrote this? Do they have a history of pushing an agenda? Why is this surfacing now? Who leaked this? Who did they leak it to? Was it a strategic or accidental leak? Who benefits by this? Is this saber rattling? Are American corporate interests pushing this? Is this part of a coordinated effort?”

And on and fucking on.

It’s just too much. And that’s just one of hundreds of things I see every fucking day and I simply can not process it all. It’s just too much news. Too much stuff I can not control. Too much stuff I can not understand or have time to understand.

And this is not even going into the hundreds of daily domestic assaults on democracy by Republicans.

It’s hard to not be overwhelmed.

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Hybrid v. Electric and Gas Shortages

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My 2013 Honda Crv that I bought used in 2016 will be paid off in six months, and while I currently have no interest in replacing it, I have been looking at newer cars to see what is available.  Truth be told, I’ll probably drive it another 5-6 years until it starts to irritate me or becomes more expensive to maintain than purchasing a new one.  Right now it is pretty cheap- I check the oil and put in gas, and every now and again I buy some tires.  I still have never replaced the brakes, but I imagine that will be coming due soon.  I don’t really brake very much, and i have been driving these roads for so long I know which curves to bank out of and would guess I probably only hit the brakes 4-5 times on the eight mile drive to and from the big city.

At any rate, I would really like to buy an electric car eventually, but I just don’t think they are there yet.  Right now, I’m not sure the environmental cost of an electric vehicle…

LEMME STOP RIGHT HERE.  I AM NOT AN EXPERT ON THIS, I AM JUST DOING MY OWN THINKING, AND IF I AM WRONG, CHIME IN IN THE COMMENTS IN FACT I AM REALLY NOT AN EXPERT ON ANYTHING OTHER THAN NAPPING AND ACCIDENTAL INJURIES

As I was saying, from what I understand, I’m not sure the environmental cost of producing an electric vehicle doesn’t really offset the gain to driving one.  The batteries are a real pain to produce, and if you want a battery that will go a distance without recharge, you have to upsize your battery so it costs even more to produce and requires more energy to make.  It’s a complex thing, from what I understand.  Electric batteries require a lot of lithium, cobalt, and a whole host of rare earth materials, the vast majority of which come from overseas.  And rare earth materials, despite their name, are not really that rare, they are pretty much everywhere, but the extraction process is dirty, nasty, and produce huge environmental impacts, which is why we are totes cool with letting China and India poison their citizens extracting them and not mining them in say, Wyoming or California (although that is changing).

So there is that.  There is also the issue that the availability of charging stations that can charge in a speedy manner are not there yet, nor are there vehicle replacements for the kinds of cars I would like to drive in a hybrid option.  There’s only one or two models that are hybrid from every major automaker, with the exception of Tesla, but those cars are complete shit with horrid production.  The interiors are crap, there are gaps in every window, the consoles squeak and wiggle.  Just utter shit.

On top of all that, the vehicles still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels.  For various reasons we have not upgraded to safer nuclear systems, and solar and hydro are not going to carry the load.  So you are still stuck driving a vehicle that is powered by coal or natural gas, both of which have their underlying environmental costs.

On top of all this, we are in a really awkward phase right now.  Since we are not allowed to do any massive governmental capital investment because socialism and tax cut jeebus and generally not allowed to do nice things, we can’t just invest in government run renewables projects and update our power grid.  We’re still in the early phases of most things, including solar, and nothing is really to scale yet and the people who want to do things can’t because we’re still in the lawsuit phase to see who gets to rob the American people and  who is cheating by buying from China and blah blah blah.

On top of all this, the gas issue is not going away.  In one regard, we’re finally starting to get close to the price we SHOULD be paying for gas (I think $8-9 a gallon would be a target I would like to see in an ideal world), and it’s a price high enough to maybe start actually changing people’s behaviors.  At the same time, that will be devastating to the vast majority of Americans.  Regardless, it’s probably going to happen anyway, because we simply do not have the refining capacity that we need to supply all our domestic needs.  A new refinery has not come online for like fifty years, there are none under construction, and no one wants to build or run them because… everything is changing.  I read the other day that there is a refinery for sale that would create a couple hundred thousand barrels per day, and no one wants to buy it.

Refineries are big, expensive, difficult to maintain, and everything is expensive to maintain and modernize.  Additionally, refineries are vulnerable to the whims of the market place, as are oil drillers.  No one ever talks about it, but Trump absolutely fucked American energy producers in 2018 when he blackmailed the Saudis to produce more oil because the price of gas was going high and threatening to fuck with his precious stock market (the only thing in the world he cares about other than himself), and that in turn put tons of American energy companies out of business because prices plummeted (google how many oil production and exploration companies went tits up in 2019).  Then in 2020, when the price of oil futures was plummeting because the entire world was shut down in a global pandemic, Mr. Super Fucking GENIUS Businessman bullied Saudi Arabia to cut production or we’d stop helping them kill Yemeni and might stop being quiet about the murder of Kashoggi.  And so they did.  And the cuts in production were part of the reason we are in a crisis right now, because that two year deal just ended two months ago.

So any way you slice or dice it, we’re just kinda fucked until things sort themselves out.  And it leaves very few good options for people like me who want to do the right thing.  I suppose all of this was a very long winded way of saying for right now, I think a hybrid would be the best option for me, but maybe in a few more years when there are more options available.  For right now, I will just drive the vehicle I have because I can’t afford a new one anyway, and the environmental cost of building my car has already been dealt with.  I’ll just drive left.

You are welcome to this look insight the twisted mind of John Cole where there are no simple answers to anything and where I am probably half wrong about everything.

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Couple Quick Thoughts

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Are we FINALLY done with Nina Turner? How many times does she have to lose and hurt the Democratic party in the process. Just go away.

Does anyone care if the Supreme Court is in disarray after the leak? I sure don’t. I hope they are in pure chaos. Secretive fuckers wanna roll back the country to the 1830’s, let them have a little angst. Their shit should be more out in the open. It’s in the dark where they perform their partisan bullshit.

And I love that the reich wing is more upset about the draft opinion leak than they are actual crimes committed by Trump. It’s no crime to leak a SCOTUS draft, so I dunno what they expect the DOJ to do. Even more, since we are now all forced to play by their fucking rules from the 1700’s, I’m pretty sure nowhere in the Constitution does it say they are allowed to perform their dark magickz with no one knowing what is going on. They just made that shit up over the years.

The loathesome JD Vance correctly bet that there is nothing Republicans like more than a craven fraud who will just tell them what they want to hear.

Also, it was Alito who leaked the opinion to lock in Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

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Are Things Looking Up?

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I’m not sure why, but for the last few days I have been feeling hopeful. I feel like the last couple months have been the pit, and we (the Democrats) are starting to climb out of it. I say feel, as there is nothing hard I can point to, but just a sense. Gas prices are dropping, the pandemic phase of covid is over, we’re entering the summer months, Republicans have some real nutters nominated and are fractured, the economy is doing well, and the media love nothing more than a comeback story.

Is it just me? Or have I just been getting good sleep and feel positive?

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I’m Out of Touch

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One of my biggest fears as I started to get a little bit older was feeling out of touch with younger generations. Oddly enough, I think I am pretty in touch with them, and I find myself increasingly isolated by my peers. For example:

President Joe Biden’s approval rating has fallen to the lowest levels of his presidency over concern for his handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and rising inflation, an NBC poll found Sunday.

Just 40% of those who responded to the survey said they approved of Biden’s job performance overall, the poll results show. His job approval rating has gradually fallen since April 2021 when 53% of Americans said they approved of his performance.
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The number of those who said that they disapprove of Biden’s job performance was 55%, a figure that has been relatively unchanged since October.

The President doesn’t control inflation and Biden is doing a great job with Ukraine. Not one fucking American soldier has died, we’re sending a ton of arms and money (we should send more), Europe is galvanized, Russia has been exposed as a paper tiger with nukes, and so on. He’s doing far better than I even expected him to do.

The inflation thing is baffling. First off, a lot of the inflation is price gouging. Second, the price of oil is high for a number of reasons (among them, price gouging at the pump). But it wasn’t Joe Biden who in 2018 blackmailed the House of Saud into pumping more oil, thus creating a glut, and causing tons of American oil and natural gas producers to go under. And it wasn’t Joe Biden who negotiated with OPEC in April of 2020 for them to DECREASE production for two years because he was worried about a glut and his fucking stock market during the pandemic. And it wasn’t Joe Biden who told everyone not to worry about the pandemic and fighting everything to slow it down and end it sooner. And it wasn’t Joe Biden who neutered regulations sop we can’t do anything about gouging. None of this was his fault. And there’s lots of other reasons, including having the fed engage in behaviors and actions solely to goose the fucking stock market. Or Wall Street pressuring oil producers to not produce more, as they are now. And on and on.

And that’s why prices are where they are today.

So yeah, I just don’t get it and I don’t understand why I am so out of touch with everyone.

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