Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I never embed TikTok videos – most of the time TikTok videos don’t even play for me on this device – but this is one righteous rant!
@ang.rose1 No response IS a response. Dont sit around and allow hate to be spread. Stand up and SAY SOMETHING. Thank you Senator Bisignano #iowasenate #transgender #lgbtq #representALLconstituents ♬ original sound – Ang
h/t SWMBO
In case anyone is interested in something besides the NY trial jury selection.
So, at 5:30 am, we were rudely awakened to the sound of the fire alarm screaming:
Fire! Fire! Fire! (pause)
Fire! Fire! Fire! (pause)
Fire! Fire! Fire! (pause)
repeat 20x
(Thankfully it was a false alarm, but it does get you out of bed, rounding up the pup and kitties, etc.)
I fed them at 7, which was too early, but we had all been up for 90 minutes by then, so it seemed only fair.
So of course Henry at 11 am, Henry decided it was lunchtime and would not be convinced otherwise. Henry: 1, WaterGirl zero.
By 9 am, the 3 smoke detectors had been replaced, and hopefully that will be the end of the excitement for awhile.
Thought we could use a light open thread while waiting for the trial to come back in session.
Open thread.
Henry Would Like His Lunch Right Now, Please (Open Thread)Post + Comments (170)
pic.twitter.com/I8R2sXONuh https://t.co/LYM7FTnt94
— Jean-Michel Connard 좆됐어 (@torriangray) April 15, 2024
Per Maxi Tani at Semafor (which has its own problems, yes), “The Intercept is running out of cash”:
The Intercept, the left-wing U.S. newsroom that’s been a thorn in Joe Biden’s side and a hub for pro-Palestinian coverage, is nearly out of money and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control.
At the heart of the crisis is a nonprofit whose founding donor, Pierre Omidyar, decided in late 2022 to end his support for the organization. Now spun off from Omidyar’s First Look Media, The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025, according to data shared internally in March…
The Intercept’s CEO, Annie Chabel, told Semafor in an interview this week that those projections were a worst-case scenario, and that the Intercept had a “stretch revenue goal that would allow us to continue into a longer horizon.”
The Intercept was born a decade ago in a very different moment for media and politics. Two of its founders, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leaked surveillance files in 2013, which reshaped how Americans thought about the government and their privacy. Omidyar, a leftish billionaire with no known appetite for political combat, rapidly pledged deep support for an organization that would combine that anti-establishment mission with a combative form of online journalism born out of Gawker Media.
A decade later, American politics are almost unrecognizable. Greenwald quit in fury to make quixotic allies on the right. Liberal donors have lost their taste for party infighting as the specter of Donald Trump looms, while voices further left are promising to punish Joe Biden over his response to Gaza…
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
I chose not to do an update on Israel and Iran because there’s not much to say. The US assembled a coalition with the British, French, Jordanians, and Saudis to either take down Iranian drones and missiles that were overflying their airspaces (the Jordanians and Saudis) or to just shoot them down en route regardless of whose air space they were in (the US, Britain, and France). There was only one Israeli casualty – a 7 year old Bedouin girl was injured and is being treated in an Israel hospital – and minimal damage to the bases in the Golan and the Negev. President Biden apparently got Bibi to not immediately retaliate, thereby lowering the temperature. At the same time he laid it on thick telling Bibi that this was a huge victory for Israel, demonstrated how Israel can defend itself, and that Bibi should take the win. The reality is that had the US and the coalition the Biden administration had not quickly put together interceded, we have no idea whether Israel’s air defense and missile defense would have been effective enough. Because of the intervention of the US led coalition, we don’t really know how effective the David’s Arrow and David’s sling missile defense systems are.
Ukraine condemns Iran’s attack on Israel using “Shahed” drones and missiles. We in Ukraine know very well the horror of similar attacks by Russia, which uses the same “Shahed” drones and Russian missiles, the same tactics of mass air strikes.
Every effort must be made to prevent…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) April 14, 2024
Ukraine condemns Iran’s attack on Israel using “Shahed” drones and missiles. We in Ukraine know very well the horror of similar attacks by Russia, which uses the same “Shahed” drones and Russian missiles, the same tactics of mass air strikes.
Every effort must be made to prevent a further escalation in the Middle East. Iran’s actions threaten the entire region and the world, just as Russia’s actions threaten a larger conflict, and the obvious collaboration between the two regimes in spreading terror must face a resolute and united response from the world.
The sound of “Shahed” drones, a tool of terror, is the same in the skies over the Middle East and Europe. This sound must serve as a wake-up call to the free world, demonstrating that only our unity and resoluteness can save lives and prevent the spread of terror worldwide.
The world cannot wait for discussions to go on. Words do not stop drones and do not intercept missiles. Only tangible assistance does. The assistance we are anticipating. We must strengthen security and resolutely counter all those who want to make terror a new normal.
It is critical that the United States Congress make the necessary decisions to strengthen America’s allies at this critical time.
Difference is that in Ukraine it sometimes happens on a daily basis https://t.co/EyRpJNOd0H
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) April 14, 2024
We do know that modern fighter jets are a necessary component of anti-drone and anti-missile defense. While they already knew this, the Ukrainians have again taken note of this reality. And that at the end of the day, despite all the rhetoric, they are on their own. No one is going to launch fighters to intercept inbound drones and missiles targeting Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure. And because the Biden administration dithered, hemmed, hawed, and let Putin have a say in their deliberations, the Ukrainians are still month’s away from getting F-16s. Israel does something strategically stupid and it gets all the help it needs. Ukraine fights for its life and gets fuck all.
As of right now, 7:09 PM EDT, the only air raid alerts are the ones over Russian occupied Luhansk and Crimea.
While the US was leading a coalition to defend Israel, the Russians once again bombarded Kharkiv:
Russian troops struck a private house in Kharkiv Oblast with an air bomb, resulting in the deaths of a couple living there. A 61-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man were killed, buried beneath the rubble of their home. pic.twitter.com/CCpdhnvlK0
— Iryna Voichuk (@IrynaVoichuk) April 14, 2024
Dnipro was also targeted again today. Unfortunately I can’t embed the tweet with video from Iulia Mendel because it is one of the ones that won’t embed because Musk has manipulated the code to target certain types of posts about Ukraine.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 781: A Brief(ish) Sunday Night UpdatePost + Comments (63)
Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Little Boots was mentioned in the Hey Lurkers! thread, and it reminded me of how much I miss the music threads we used to have. So let’s have one tonight!
You pedants can tell me how to best punctuate the thread title so it’s clear that I am asking for a music thread like we used to have – and not asking for an old-time music thread like polkas or Sinatra or Elvis or whatever. Though all of those are welcome!
I thought about titling the post Classic Music Thread, but then I figured you’d think I was looking for classical music. Titles are complicated!
I’ll add a YouTube video up top for one of the first 5 songs that is mentioned in the comments.
Update at 6:15 pm:
We are back to 4x matching now, with the external match and an angel for each state.
*****
Opportunity knocks!
We have a new Balloon Juice Angel who is willing to add his angel match of $500 so we can complete BOTH of the current angel matches. Thank goodness for impatient people. :-)
So anything you donate up to $50 will turn into 6x the amount you donate.
$50 -> $300 / $35 -> $210 / $25 -> $150 / $10 -> 60 / $5 -> $30
And everything in between!
To complete our current matches, we need $150 donated to AZ and $275 to NV. The remaining $75 can go to either one.
To count toward the match, let us know about your donation in the comments, or you can drop me an email message if you prefer. Let me know which state or state in the comments.
ARIZONA
NEVADA
Let’s do this!
I’ve been writing about my trip to rural America to see the eclipse. We did see it, by driving at the last minute to a town on the edge of totality, and barely avoiding clouds. (As you can see, the rightmost picture is almost totally obscured by clouds.)
I’ve been to other eclipses, most recently the annular eclipse on October 14, 2023, and the fun of it for me is to see it with a crowd. With that in mind, my wife and I booked four days at the Texas Eclipse festival. It was basically a rave, which we booked in near-total ignorance of what that meant. It turns out that some promoters took over a 1,300 acre ranch near Burnet, Texas and converted it to a festival grounds. That conversion involved bulldozing out a number of roads, RV pads, tent sites and parking areas. They sold almost every ticket, and crowd estimates were around 35,000.
Because it was windy, and because most of the site had been scraped out of the red dirt of the countryside, there was a lot of dust. The festival grounds were huge, so most of us had a pretty long walk from our campsite to the main festival area — from our campsite, two round trips plus some walking around at the site was recorded by our smart watches 10 miles of walking each. As far as I’m concerned, the weather from Friday through Sunday was pretty good, daytime highs in the 70’s and low 80’s, and overnight lows in the mid 50’s to low 60’s. The shows were really well done and near-constant. I am not a fan of techno/EDM, but there were some presentations from space scientists as well as a couple of bands that were more like jam bands.
Even though I thought that the promoters did about as well as they could have given the circumstances, there was a huge amount of complaining on social media. These complaints took two forms. First, for festival goers, there was a bunch of bitching about getting into the venue, the parking process, and the lack of some amenities. Our experience was that the first day of parking was a disorganized mess, and it took about 3 hours from the gate until we were in our campsite, but after we were settled we found that the portable toilets were cleaned out more-or-less regularly, and that the promised clean water was provided in a number of stations in the campgrounds and in the festival grounds. Some people also complained that their favorite artist didn’t perform, but there were something like 500 acts booked, and the entertainment was constant. The second form of complaints came from area residents, who didn’t like the idea of 35,000 people descending on their rural county. Some of the complaints were pretty nasty, calling the ravers “human garbage” and so forth.
On the day of the eclipse, thunderstorm warnings caused the promoters to cancel the rest of the festival and encourage everyone to get out. I didn’t have to be told twice: within a half hour of getting the notice, we were on a Texas road heading for the edge of totality, where the weather looked the best. There were no traffic jams, and we found a place to watch with a few other people in a commercial parking lot in Brady. People were upset about the cancellation, but I think the promoters did the right thing, and they’re promising some kind of refund. They’ve also pointed out that there were tornado watches and lightning strikes on the festival grounds on Tuesday, which was the planned day for everyone to vacate the festival grounds.
So, if you’ve read this far, I do have a point to make: the “human garbage” comments by people claiming to be residents of the area were, to me, all too predictable. There’s just so little tolerance of difference by a lot of these rural folks who are living on a diet of right-wing media. My experience of this festival was that the people there were some of the kindest, friendliest and peaceful folks I’ve ever met. Yeah, they smoke pot and take shrooms, and there were a lot of weird costumes (and thong bikinis and pasties worn by the women), but this was mostly just dress up for adults. I didn’t see a single fight or even a cross word exchanged, and all of the ravers (as distinct from the accidental spectators like me) seemed to really love the music.
In short, I disliked the music and liked the people. It’s something I’d never do again, but it was an experience worth having. But I came to this experience without feeling the need to judge or belittle the young people who clearly put a lot of time and effort to get here, and then to dress up. When your worldview requires you to cast out anyone who looks or acts different, any experience like this is just an excuse to hate “the other”. And that’s both boring and sad.