Thanks to increasingly indispensable blogger Lt. Col. Robert Bateman, who pops up every week or so over at Charlie Pierce’s joint, I just watched this:
House of Chicken Fuckers
Today Rep Steve Stockman R-TX tweeted: "I'm voting NO on the $1 TRILLION spending bill" – he missed the vote
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) January 15, 2014
Here’s another one: Darryl Issa’s House Oversight Committee has been investigating Healthcare.gov’s security for months, because someone wrote a memo warning someone else about a vulnerability in code that wouldn’t go live until this Spring. Meanwhile, three Senate committees have convened hearings about the actual data breach at Target that has leaked information on 110 million real Americans. There’s no word on whether Issa is going to drop the healthcare investigation, or his other imaginary lover, Benghazi, to look into something that affects a real human being.
Late Night Open Thread: Sign of the Times
.
Was doing some housekeeping, and realized I hadn’t yet posted this. Artist Andres Serrano in the Guardian:
Sign of the Times was conceived in early October when I started to see what I perceived as a greater number of homeless people in New York City. As a native New Yorker, it surprised me because I had never seen so many people begging and sleeping on the streets. It occurred to me to start buying the signs that the homeless use to ask for money.
I immersed myself in the project, going out almost on a daily basis and walking five, six, seven hours a day. Once, I even walked 12 hours around the city – uptown to Harlem, East and West, downtown to Battery Park and back home to the East Village. I never took transportation anywhere because I felt that since the homeless live on the streets, I had to walk the streets like they do. After a while, a few said to me, “I’ve heard of you. You’re the guy going around buying signs. I was wondering if you were ever going to find me.” I bought about 200 signs and usually offered $20 which they were happy, even ecstatic, to get. (Once, though, I saw a sign that said, “Just need $10”. So I said to the guy, “I’ll give you $10 for it” and he said, “You got it. I guess the sign did its job!”)…
Late Night Open Thread: Sign of the TimesPost + Comments (51)
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Marketing
Deep thought of day: Most of what passes for politics & policy these days makes way more sense when interpreted as a marketing exercise.
— billmon (@billmon1) January 15, 2014
@R_Ephemeral Not just conservatism. Politics in general. Pretty much like "journalism," 2 biz models: a) clickbait, b.) billionaire patrons.
— billmon (@billmon1) January 15, 2014
.
What’s on the agenda for the evening that doesn’t suck?
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: MarketingPost + Comments (101)
The roughest, toughest, rootinest, shootinest, etc.
In the wake of the recent theater shooting, The Tampa Tribune contacted a team of psychiatrists to speculate on why “senseless shootings, escalating from minor disputes, are becoming an all-too familiar pattern.” Here are some theories offered by the experts:
Reeves [the theater shooter] showed signs of a personality disorder called extreme narcissistic injury…such a disorder, when combined with Reeves’ police background, could be a deadly combination.
But isn’t there something else that might have contributed to the tragedy…the ubiquity of something metal that goes “bang” and the loosening of restrictions on the use of deadly force? Nope; it must be the shooter’s age:
Reeves’ age, 71, could have been a contributing factor. As people get older, their brain’s prefrontal cortex suffers some degeneration. Among other things, this brain region is responsible for regulating behavior and suppressing emotional or sexual urges.
That accounts for the retiree crime wave that has the Youngs sheltering in place while graying hordes rape and pillage. Or not:
Society… seeks instant gratification. With smartphones and apps that effortlessly secure reservations at restaurants or seats at a concert, the world seems to be at our fingertips. When it isn’t, people sometimes react badly.
Yeah, that’s why I killed those dragging-ass varmints in the Piggly-Wiggly checkout line this morning; I completed my online banking in seconds flat, but those motherfuckers were STILL bitching about Obamacare, so BOOM.
Here’s an alternate theory: People were dumb hotheads even before the NRA rammed the Stand Your Ground law down the state’s muzzle. But since the state jettisoned the “duty to retreat” principle in favor of the Yosemite Sam mud flap, people are ending up dead over texting, popcorn, Skittles and walking while black, among other sinister activities.
The good news is, we don’t have to cure personality disorders, dementia, paranoia or impatience to address this sorry state of affairs: We just have to reassert the principle that saving lives and preventing harm is our highest priority, not affirming everyone’s right to be a badass.
Such a move won’t stop crime or eliminate idiotic aggression in public spaces, but it will signal to the citizens of the state that it’s no longer open season.
The roughest, toughest, rootinest, shootinest, etc.Post + Comments (107)
Let the Broken Heart Stand as the Price You Gotta Pay
Do you think Chris Christie died a little inside when he saw this? I do. Open thread.
Let the Broken Heart Stand as the Price You Gotta PayPost + Comments (302)
Another thread
Some HBO-themed noodling about pop culture.
True Blood: Has there been a worse event in vampire history than Sookie Stackhouse? Try to count how many ancient or very rare people-ish things have died because of her in some way. The woman is genocide on two legs. I will not list her full body count or even the most notable ones for spoiler reasons and because my keyboard might not take the strain, but it includes an awful lot of very significant characters in the supernatural world and even general world history*. If your every single storyline involves people a lot more important than you dying, maybe you are the problem.
Game of Thrones: I dig how G.R.R. Martin only implies key elements of the story and even buries some things so deeply in indirect allusions that a normal person like me needs to dive into obsessive discussion boards to understand why some characters do what they do. At this point I feel pretty good about the parts of the story that Martin wants us to know or infer at this point, except for one thing. It involves second season spoilers so I will toss it below the fold.