Good Morning All,
Working on things on the back end and soon we’ll have anew form, etc. For now I’ve got tons of submissions lined up. Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 19 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
Working on things on the back end and soon we’ll have anew form, etc. For now I’ve got tons of submissions lined up. Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!
Today, pictures from valued commenter Greg in PDX.
Some more pictures from my tour of America via train and bus. Amtrak has proven to be non existent or way too expensive for the last few weeks. So, buses have ruled my world…..
Rhode Island
Taken on 2018-06-16
Sunset over Slack reservoir. Johnston RI
Massachussets
Taken on 2018-06-18
Fogland beach, Tiverton MA
Thank you so much Greg in PDX, do send us more when you can.
Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.
One again, to submit pictures: Use the Form or Send an Email
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Dolt 45, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Clown Shoes
Determined corgi tries to get his lethargic friend to go on a walk https://t.co/EXP08NowPk pic.twitter.com/1y0wj3rgbQ
— Colin Campbell (@colincampbell) July 27, 2018
Note that the ‘lethargic friend’ is holding their end of the rope in their teeth, so it’s more game than trial.
This poor little dude, on the other hand…
Party with your doggo while he's wearing this lit vest pic.twitter.com/0iKC8MkRhr
— Mashable (@mashable) July 28, 2018
Stay positive!
A number of Republicans glumly agree that the Democrats’ tidal wave looks big enough right now to wash over the seawall they’ve built with gerrymandered districts https://t.co/28kGM11amx
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) July 27, 2018
… In more than a dozen interviews with top strategists in both parties conducted by TPM this week, every Democrat and all but one Republican said that the Democrats have the upper hand heading into the homestretch of the campaign. But there’s plenty of disagreement about how sure a bet that is. Different plugged-in Democrats guesstimated their chances of winning control as between 55 percent and 80 percent. Two Republicans put their party’s chances of control as low as one in three, while one optimist put it at 60 percent likelihood.
That’s a wide range of opinions held by people with access to a lot of private polling and modeling information, as well as the opposition research and TV ads that have yet to air, though the majority of strategists in both parties put Democrats’ chances of winning at between 50 and 60 percent. The one thing all strategists, granted anonymity so they could speak candidly, agree on: Democrats’ chances of winning the 23 House seats needed for control look significantly better than they did even one month ago…
Democrats’ enthusiasm gap advantage remains large. Independents are breaking for Democrats by double-digit margins nationally and in most districts. The map of true tossup races seems to keep shifting Democrats’ way. With Sunday marking 100 days until the election, the unofficial start of the campaign’s homestretch, professional Democrats are a lot cheerier than their Republican counterparts as they look to get their clients to Congress…
In a special preview for Axios readers, @Redistrict of Cook Political Report unpacks the GOP's daunting math: "With 102 days to go, Democrats remain substantial favorites for House control." https://t.co/dJ1FF6YcFz
— Axios (@axios) July 27, 2018
Open Thread: Another Monday, Another DumbshowPost + Comments (159)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Foreign Affairs, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Religion, Republican Venality
NYT reports on lobbyists selling National Prayer Breakfast tickets to foreign leaders for as much as $220,000. Yay, NYT! As I wrote in THE FAMILY. Trying hard not to say “Told ya so.” And failing. https://t.co/NCHX25CDtc
— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) July 27, 2018
With a lineup of prayer meetings, humanitarian forums and religious panels, the National Prayer Breakfast has long brought together people from all over the world for an agenda built around the teachings of Jesus.
But there on the guest list in recent years was Maria Butina, looking to meet high-level American officials and advance the interests of the Russian state, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a Ukranian opposition leader, seeking a few minutes with President Trump to burnish her credentials as a presidential prospect back home.
Their presence at the breakfast illuminates the way the annual event has become an international influence-peddling bazaar, where foreign dignitaries, religious leaders, diplomats and lobbyists jockey for access to the highest reaches of American power…
Lobbyists say the event has become even more of a coveted invitation in the Trump era, as foreign politicians scrambled to forge connections with a president who swept into office with few ties to the international community or Washington’s hierarchy of established foreign access brokers.
With its relative lack of diplomatic protocols and press coverage, the prayer breakfast setting is ideal for foreign figures who might not otherwise be able to easily get face time with top American officials, because of unsavory reputations or a lack of an official government perch, according to lobbyists who help arrange such trips. They also contend that it is easier to secure visas when the breakfast is listed as a destination.
At last year’s breakfast, Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, posted a photo on Instagram of himself seated next to Andrei Makarov, a member of the Russian Parliament who had pushed for tax breaks for Russians who faced sanctions. A spokesperson for Mr. Grassley said that the senator poses for many photos with people he meets at a range of events…
[Is it *my* fault there so many grifters, crooks & criminals hanging around the GOP?, asks Chuck.]
The congressional co-chairmen of the 2019 National Prayer Breakfast, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, and Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, praised the gathering as one of the most important annual events in Washington.
“It is unfortunate that some have attended the Breakfast in the past for the wrong reasons,” they said in a statement to The Times. “Nevertheless, we’re as committed as ever to ensuring that the 2019 National Prayer Breakfast is a success and follows the tradition of being nonpartisan and unifying.”…
Yes, there are Democrats involved with The Fellowship as well, more shame to them — although it can be argued there’s a considerable distinction between Yulia Tymoshenko and Mariia Butina. We really do need to pull back the tax exemptions for “non-profit” quasi-religious groups like this, and I say this as a person of faith.
by Major Major Major Major| 68 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads
When I was a kid, we got a big kick out of the McDonald’s Monopoly game. You know, where little plastic tags are on the packaging, and when you peel them off, there’s Monopoly pieces or instant-win codes on them? Anyway. My older brother was convinced that it was a scam, that all of the big-ticket winners were fakes. McDonald’s put them there, the story went, to trick people into thinking that winning was possible.
As it turns out, from about 1995-2000, almost all of the big-ticket winners were fakes, but they weren’t put there by McDonald’s. The chief of security at the company that printed the tags was stealing them, and laundering them through dozens of associates. The Daily Beast has a crazy long-read up detailing the rise and fall of said security chief, the real Hamburglar, Jerry Jacobson.
Before each bi-annual game, Jacobson arrived at the drab Dittler Brothers’ office at 5 a.m to observe their Omega III supercomputer making the McDonald’s prize draw. He watched the printing presses that roared for 24 hours a day for three months, using 100 railroad cars of paper to print half a billion game pieces. . . Jacobson observed technicians applying the “INSTANT WINNER!” stamp to blank game pieces, and pioneered random watermarks that deterred counterfeiters. He locked the winning pieces in a vault behind coded keypads and dual-entry combination locks. It was Jacobson who personally scissored out the high-value game pieces and slipped them into envelopes, before sealing each corner with a tamper-proof metallic sticker. In a secret vest, of his invention, Jacobson transported the winning pieces to McDonald’s packaging factories across the country.
[…]The 1980s was America’s “decade of greed,” and it was Jacobson’s job to create instant millionaires. Playing God was intoxicating, as was holding a stranger’s fate in the palm of his hands. . . It was a thrill to protect the Monopoly promotion, and only a natural part of his job to consider the system’s fallibilities. But soon the temptation to steal had become irresistible.
One day in 1989, at a family gathering in Miami, Jacobson slipped his step-brother, Marvin Braun, a game piece worth $25,000. “I don’t know if I just wanted to show him I could do something, or bragging,” Jacobson later admitted, but he just needed “to see if I could do it.”
[…]The judge sent him to jail for 37 months. He did not pass go.
Apparently the reason this didn’t capture our imagination as the White Collar Trial of the Century is that the trial began on September 10, 2001.
It’s well worth a read, if you’re looking for something to pass the time in what’s left of your evening. Me, I have a Scalzi out from the library I need to tend to. Open thread!
True Crime: Rich Uncle Pennybags (Open Thread)Post + Comments (68)
This post is in: Climate Change, Excellent Links, How about that weather?, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
"The longer-view is much more harrowing: not just more months like July, but an unfolding century when a month like this July has become a happy memory of a placid climate. That it is almost hard to believe only makes it a more important story to tell." https://t.co/8TSiDeGvzD
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) July 26, 2018
From Joshua Keating, at the Washington Post: “This is what happens when climate change forces an entire country to seek higher ground”
… Small island states like Kiribati and the Maldives have become symbols of the potential impacts of global warming. At the 2015 Paris climate summit, they pressured larger countries to accept the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than two degrees, over preindustrial levels. (It was mostly a symbolic victory: Barring unforeseen circumstances, particularly since the Trump administration pulled the United States out of the accord, both targets will be exceeded.) They are also working to develop first-line defenses against the effects of sea-level rise, including planting mangroves to prevent coastal erosion and improving rainwater-collection systems to protect water quality.
But if none of that works, they may have to consider more drastic options. And so, in 2014, Kiribati purchased about eight square miles on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu for a little less than $9 million, potentially for the purpose of moving its population there one day. “We would hope not to put everyone on one piece of land,” the country’s then-president, Anote Tong, said. “But if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it.” Fiji would become the new home of the nation’s inhabitants, known as the I-Kiribati.
The relocation of people due to climate change isn’t unprecedented. Papua New Guinea has already begun moving the population of the Carteret Islands, a group of low-lying atolls, to the mainland. But this would be the first time an entire country had to relocate because the land on which it was built no longer existed. This raises a new and frightening question: If a country no longer exists in physical form, can it still exist as a political entity? Can a nation just up and move?
I knew Tong by reputation from the impassioned speeches he delivered at U.N. General Assemblies and climate change conferences during his time as president, from 2003 to 2016. So when I visited Kiribati in 2016 to research a book about border changes and the future of the world map, I called him. When we met one afternoon in Tarawa, he had just come in from fishing and was relaxing in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt in the maneaba, or meeting house, outside his family’s home in a crowded residential neighborhood. John Denver played softly from a Bluetooth speaker. But the former president was troubled. “One of the most difficult things I’ve had to expect is planning for the demise of my country,” Tong told me.
He wants the I-Kiribati to stay if it’s even remotely possible. But, he rued, relocation is probably unavoidable. “The science is pretty clear: zero emissions, we’ll still go underwater. Unless some drastic work is undertaken, there will be no option. That’s the reality. It’s not a hope. It’s not a desire. It’s the brutal reality.”
Yet no one’s quite sure what that reality will look like. When I visited Secretary of Foreign Affairs Akka Rimon, she cracked the joke I’d been afraid to make: “Climate change really put us back on the world map. The irony is that we’re being erased from the world map.” Rimon had tried to think through what relocation could entail, though she didn’t really know how Kiribati’s nationhood could be preserved. “We don’t have the answer. There doesn’t seem to be any entity that looks after that. Sovereignty exists within the borders of your nation, but what happens when that changes? Nobody has the answer,” she said…
… Countries like the Maldives and Kiribati are probably disappearing — and not that long from now. I came to Kiribati expecting to find a place planning for its own destruction, but instead I found something more dispiriting: a place that, with a few exceptions, wasn’t even contemplating that destruction. “Who wants to believe that their home won’t be here?” said Tong. It was an understandable sentiment. “People here don’t even like to plan for next week. But we’ve got to be hardheaded about it.”…
Three things surprised me reporting this story:
1) I didn't realize just how much of the US economy depends on outdoor labor
2) Heat hurts productivity well before it reaches dangerous levels
3) There's no national workplace heat protection standardhttps://t.co/b2dKSrIJnF— Umair Irfan (@umairfan) July 27, 2018
by Betty Cracker| 213 Comments
This post is in: Birdwatching, Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Politics, Assholes, General Stupidity
Something tells me new indictments may be forthcoming:
This follows an extended rant about unfair treatment in the press, doubling down on the press as the “Enemy of the People,” and threats to shut down the government this fall because Democrats (who don’t control any branch of government) won’t give him money for the wall Mexico was supposed to pay for.
It’s a good thing we’re paying tens of millions of dollars to shuttle Hair Furor back and forth between self-branded golf resorts. Imagine how much more deranged he’d be if he didn’t relax on the links!
In other news, Jake Tapper sure can be a cockwaffle sometimes:
Fuck you, Jake.
Lastly, we were checking out some property in the country, and we took Badger along to 1) give Daisy a break from his constant harassment, and 2) ensure he learns to be a good road trip dog. The property we were inspecting had a pasture next to it that was occupied by an emu:
As a small breed pup, Badger weighs around 10 pounds currently. He’ll likely max out at around 20-25 pounds. My guess is he’ll grow wider rather than much taller than he is right now. He’s used to eye-balling chickens through a fence. I wish I had video of him processing the sight of this giant bird. It looked something like this:
But he charged at it to the limits of his leash and barked his head off because he’s a foolish boy. I kept him from getting within striking distance. The bird was neither afraid nor impressed, not even a little bit.
Open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 206 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Representative John Lewis, national treasure, fell ill during a flight to Atlanta yesterday and was hospitalized, but he’s expected to be released today, according to a spokeswoman. Per CNN:
Civil rights icon and Georgia congressman Rep. John Lewis has been hospitalized but is expected to be released Sunday, his spokeswoman says.
Spokeswoman Brenda Jones told CNN that Lewis is under routine observation but she did not give details of the nature of his illness or where he is hospitalized.
CNN affiliate WSB-TV reported that Lewis was being treated at a hospital in metro Atlanta, and the station quoted unnamed sources as saying Lewis became ill on a flight to Atlanta on Saturday.
Wishing Congressman Lewis a full and speedy recovery. Needless to say, we can ill afford to lose a courageous, inspirational man like Lewis at any time, much less in 2018.
Open thread!