Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

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

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

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

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

75% of people clapping liked the show!

No one could have predicted…

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

In after Baud. Damn.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

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

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Cool Tech

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Great article on low-cost, high-value technology from the Boston Globe:

Some students go to MIT to plumb the mysteries of the atom, or of outer space, or to press the limits of computer science. Amos Winter went another way: He’s trying to revolutionize the wheelchair. Specifically, he wants to make that most familiar aid to the disabled work in the Third World, where roads are bad, money tight, and the need immense.
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A doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, Winter calls his invention the Leveraged Freedom Chair – leveraged because it is powered by hand levers.
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Abdullah Munish has another name for it. “I call it my little angel machine,’’ he said.
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For years after he survived a car crash but lost the use of his legs, Munish struggled to move his wheelchair along the rutted, hilly roads of his hometown in Tanzania. Frustrated, he often just stayed indoors, and lost touch with friends and relatives.
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Now, with the help of Winter’s invention, he has reclaimed his freedom and sense of connection. He can push himself up the hill to a neighborhood playing field where he can once again toss a ball around with friends. He can scoot along the gravel paths of Moshi to visit people again. “We believers, we know that anything that changes your life in terms of mobility, that is something that comes from heaven,’’ said Munish. A 31-year-old wheelchair technician, he is one of six wheelchair users in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda who have been testing the prototype since August.
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The genius of Winter’s wheelchair lies in the design of the long ratchet-like levers that power it. Hold them low, near the axle, and it goes fast. Hold them higher up, and it generates a lot of torque, making it possible to climb slowly but surely over rocks and up hills. In effect, you change gears by changing your body geometry.
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That helps keep the wheelchair simple and inexpensive, and may make it affordable to some of the 20 million people who need wheelchairs in the developing world…

Click through the link, and there’s a short video and an interactive graphic along with the rest of the story — exactly the sort of value-added content that the internet was supposed to enable, but all too rarely does.

And, frankly, I suspect there are plenty of people here in The Greatest Country in the World whose lives would be improved by a Leveraged Freedom Chair.

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Open Thread:… And A Pony!

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Well, a horsie. Tonight’s pet rescue heartwarmer, from commentor Nicole:

This is Cosmo (he’s the one on his back). I had no intention of acquiring him, or any other horse. Horse ownership is for people with money, land, or both. I live in New York, haven’t owned a car in 20 years, and am decidedly middle-class. So, of course, when I turned 30, I decided what I wanted, more than anything else, was to learn to ride a horse. At the time, there was still a riding stable in Manhattan, and I spent every extra dollar I could earn on lessons. Then the stable closed and I bid a tearful farewell to the horses who had bitten me, stepped on me, thrown me, and otherwise made me google-eyed with adoration for the equine. That includes the one who broke my knuckle. But it never occurred to me to own one.

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A year later, I met Cosmo at a trail-riding stable in Queens. There’s no rhyme or reason to why you like one horse and not another (or why one horse likes you and another doesn’t), but I can point to two moments with Cosmo. On my 36th birthday, I took Cosmo out alone for a ride. I was depressed about this birthday, my career, my life, and I moped through the first half of the ride. And Cosmo, who hates not being in the company of another horse, moped along with me. The second half of the ride, he turned into a thousand-pound cannonball, determined to get home to his friends, ideally at a full gallop. So we fought the rest of the ride- I wanted to walk; he wanted to run. And not once did I mope about where my life was going, because I was terrified I was going to die. When we finally got back, both of us covered in sweat, everything I’d been depressed about seemed idiotically trivial and I had a lovely rest of my birthday. And made a pledge to never, ever, make Cosmo go out alone again.
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The second moment was on the sad day I showed up for a ride to find out this stable, too, was closing. My husband, who is not a rider, but will try his best because he knows I love it (if he were a horse, you’d call him “willing”), went along on a last ride, me on Cosmo, him on another horse. When we stopped for a break Cosmo sidled over and laid his head on my husband’s knee. My husband looked down, delighted at the spontaneous affection, and Cosmo then wiped his mouth on my husband’s jeans, leaving a trail of spit from thigh to ankle. You’ll never convince me horses don’t have a sense of humor.

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Rescue Dog Update

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The last time I mentioned rescuing a dog a couple of you mentioned that Dobermans make great family pets. That sounded kind of fishy to me, but I’m a data-and-logic guy rather than an anecdote guy (everyone thinks their pet is adorable and harmless) so I looked it up.

The publication Animal People maintains what many regard as the most comprehensive table of dog breeds and serious attacks out there. According to their chart Dobermans have taken part in many fewer serious attacks than comparable dogs like Boxers and German Shepherds and even Labs (!), although Doberman attacks are more likely to be fatal. Attack numbers for Rottweilers and Pit Bulls were off the charts. The CDC report here puts Dobermans closer to the middle of medium-sized dogs, although I couldn’t tell whether the CDC’s attacks numbers included working dogs doing their job (Animal People excluded those).

So far “safe dog” and “maybe kind of dangerous” are tied at one each. The situation called for a tie-breaker, so I applied the Randall Munroe Google technique. Here are the number of Google hits for the search string “killed by a X” (with quotes), where ‘X’ is a breed of dog. Note that Dachshund numbers are almost certainly understated because nobody knows how to f*cking spell Dachshund.

Pit Bull: >5,000,000
German Shepherd: >4,000,000 (apparently Shepherds hate cats and rabbits)
Rottweiler: >750,000
Boxer: 130,000
Poodle: 78,000
Labrador: 73,000
Doberman: 10 (two actual incidents)
Dachshund: 4
Airedale: 1 (a duck)

QED? Discuss.

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Jon Chait is Shrill

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More of this, please:

Jesus Christ, Mike Allen, Reconciliation Is NOT THAT COMPLICATED

When I read the op-ed, I figured it had to be totally redundant. What sentient being who’s following this closely could not understand it by now? I give you Politico’s Mike Allen, writing Saturday:

    When Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) made this confusing argument last week on “Face the Nation,” we weren’t sure he was being deliberately disingenuous. It was, in fact, spin. Now, he’s made the same case in a similarly obtuse WashPost op-ed, “Reconciliation is not an option for health-care reform.” Don’t misread it: It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland argument FOR the use of reconciliation as part of the recipe for getting comprehensive health reform to the president’s desk

Confusing? Obtuse? Does Conrad need to stop by Politico’s offices with a picture book and some finger puppets? I understand perfectly well how intelligent people who don’t follow this debate closely might not catch on to the distinction. But this is what Mike Allen does all day — and, as I understand it, much of the night and the wee hours of the morning as well. How can anybody still not understand this? I’m at a loss here. Look, there’s an endless list of topics I don’t understand at all. I went through an entire semester of pre-Calculus in high school and was never able to understand what a function is. I still don’t. It’s a complicated subject and I was a lazy student. But this reconciliation distinction is easy, and Mike Allen is (legendarily) not lazy. So, what the hell is going on here?

Mike Allen, dishonest right-wing hack, or complete moron?

I vote both. And how much better would our media be if everytime someone was as bad as Allen, someone like Chait would call them on it?

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Tunch is Shrill

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This is what I have been dealing with since 9 am this morning:

I have no idea what he wants. He has clean water and food. His litterbox is clean. He has been furminated and I have played with him all morning. Yet he will not leave me alone.

Also, Laura send along the great news that the Balloon Juice store has raised close to $915 bucks for Charlies Angels pet rescue. Make sure you get your swag today.

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