Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

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

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

This fight is for everything.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

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War for Ukraine Day 781: A Brief(ish) Sunday Night Update

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(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 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.

 

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:

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.

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Medium Cool – Old Time Music Thread

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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.

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Four Directions AZ and NV Matches at 4x – an Extra Angel (6x) for the Next $500 in Matching Donations

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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!

Four Directions AZ and NV Matches at 4x – <s>an Extra Angel (6x) for the Next $500 in Matching Donations</s>Post + Comments (38)

Accidentally Like a Raver

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Accidentally Like a Raver

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.

Texas Eclipse Festival

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.

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Hey Lurkers!

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looking in a large storefront window with reflections in the glass and a sign that says “Come in, We’re Open"

It’s way past time for another thread for all the lurkers out there.  I don’t think we’ve had one for months!

You guys may already know this, but when you post your first comment, it goes into moderation, and sometimes it takes a while for one of us to see it and free your comment so it shows up for everyone.  Once it’s released from moderation, it goes into the comments with the time-stamp for when you first submitted it, so then most people probably never see it.  So it’s not surprising that first comments often don’t get replied to.

So here’s a special open thread where we can keep a particular eye out for first comments that go into moderation.

A few of you who poked your heads up on previous lurker threads have turned into commenters, but don’t let that scare the rest of you away!

I think it’s especially awesome to see lurkers joining in on the Ukraine raffles, meetups, Balloon Juice zooms, fundraising, and even Balloon Juice angels.  We don’t know your names, but you guys rock.

In any case, it’s lurker appreciation day here on Balloon Juice!  Welcome, all.

Totally open thread.

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Things We Wish the Media Would Cover

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I had a thought as I was reading the morning thread.

What if we make a list of stories the mainstream media should be covering?

For instance, I really want to cover Project 2025, but I have not found the time yet to get started.  Every week I move Project 2025 to the next week on my calendar.  If others are interested and concerned, we could do a whole series on the key parts of Project 2025.  Many hands make light work – chime in if you are horrified by what’s in the plan and you’d be willing to do some research and cover a particular chunk in a guest post.

Balloon Juice isn’t a big wave like the “we love Hiter, take 2” NYT, but we’re not salt in the ocean, either.

Open thread.

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War for Ukraine Day 780: The World Burns

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As I start tonight’s post, 6:17 PM EDT, only Kharkiv is under air raid alert and it has been under attack for the past two hours.

And Israel, Israel is under air raid alert too.

I’m going to keep the focus tonight on Ukraine, because, while Iran is not blameless in its own and its proxies actions against Israel, quite frankly, the Israelis, and specifically Bibi, have done this to themselves with their attack on the Quds Force commander in Damascus. I don’t want anyone else in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza to get hurt, and there is a real risk of that when debris comes down as Iran has launched several hundred drones and an unknown number of cruise missiles. These are expected to target Israeli military facilities in the Golan and Negev in the early morning hours, not Israeli civilians and civilian infrastructure. This is the same aerial bombardment strategy of using drones to overwhelm air defense so the missiles can get through that we are used to seeing the Russians use against the Ukrainians.

We are where we are because, as Avraham Shalom, the head of the Shin Bet in the early to mid 80s, stated in regard to Israeli leadership in The Gatekeepers documentary: ayn strategik, raq taktik. No strategy, only tactics. I will, however, start with a couple of items pertaining to what is going on between Israel and Iran.

First, a more recent former head of Shin Bet:

https://twitter.com/DanArbell/status/1779197825940701576

And two assessments from Eran Etzion, the former deputy director of Israel’s equivalent to the US National Security Council.

https://twitter.com/SinaToossi/status/1779129515475665209

⭕️Crucial points from Eran Etzion, former deputy head of the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office:

🛑The elimination of the Iranian general in Damascus was one of two things – either severe strategic negligence that needs to be investigated, or a deliberate attempt to draw Iran into the conflict, in absolute contradiction to the demands of the USA & its interests. Anyone involved in this decision needs to provide explanations.

🛑Israel is deep in the most severe crisis in its history, with broken national decision-making mechanisms, led by a man who has lost his judgment and acts based on foreign considerations, & without control and oversight mechanisms over the executive authority.

🛑In my cautious estimate, what is actually happening is coordination between the USA and Iran and containment of the Iranian response. If the coordination succeeds, the USA will prevent an Israeli response. And if the coordination fails, the USA will be in a difficult dilemma.
_

https://twitter.com/SinaToossi/status/1779262565077405699

Eran Etzion, former deputy head of the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office:

“At this stage, it is too early to assess what exactly Iran is trying to achieve with its massive and unprecedented retaliatory operation against Israel.

However, it seems that Iran does not intend to enter into a full-scale war. This is also clearly evident from the wording of the American response. Both countries are trying to contain the incident. Arab states are also walking a tightrope. They will intercept Iranian armaments that enter their territory and will not approve the passage of Israeli aircraft.

Tomorrow morning, when we will probably be after the Iranian attack, a damage assessment will be conducted. As long as the damages are limited (and we are not entering a more precise resolution at the moment), the USA will likely demand Israel not to respond, or to respond in a very limited way.

And so it is right that Israel should act. The main reason is the fact that Israel does not have a functioning government, led by a person who is unfit, and that the top ranks of the IDF are tainted by the terrible failure of 10/7.

This government must not drag Israel into a regional war, and we are already a step from there. In hopes that the event can be closed quickly, we must return to the negotiating table with Hamas, quickly agree on a hostage deal in exchange for a ceasefire, and go to snap elections.

Only a competent government, with new military leadership, will be worthy of the trust of the citizens of Israel, and will be able to start planning and implementing a comprehensive strategy against regional threats.

This will be done in full and close coordination with the USA, and with the relevant regional countries.”

Iran’s official statement:

https://twitter.com/Iran_UN/status/1779269993043022053

Bibi is hold up in a built to spec nuclear bunker under the home of an Israeli-American billionaire in Jerusalem where he and his wife Sara have been hiding from the protestors every night.

https://twitter.com/NTarnopolsky/status/1779205175745429878

Says it all really.

Bibi will, of course, do the stupidest thing possible in response because he needs to expand his war. The war against Hamas in Gaza is a failure. Israel has not achieved a single one of its strategic objectives because it never actually developed a theater campaign plan to do so. Just a tactical response. On the 8th of October 2023, Israel’s war cabinet voted to go to war with Hezbullah in Lebanon. President Biden put a stop to that, though Israel has been trading missile strikes both with Hezbullah in Lebanon and with other Iranian proxies in Syria. Those tit for tat strikes have led Israelis living in the north to flee. At the same time the extremist ultra-nationalist and ultra-devout settlers in the West Bank are fighting their own low intensity war against the Palestinians there. They are being egged on by convicted terrorist and Minister of National Security ben-Gvir and Minister of the Treasury Smotrich. Bibi needs a wider regional war even though he can’t even win the ones he’s currently waging.

Again, I DO NOT want to see any innocent Israelis, Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, or even Iranians who live under their theocratic tyrants, injured as a result of this strategic stupidity. However, as long as Bibi and his extremist coalition are in charge, Israel needs to be treated by the US as a hostile foreign power. It won’t be, but it should be.

Iran’s retaliatory strike on Israel will also negatively affect Ukraine:

https://twitter.com/maria_avdv/status/1779249781048516939

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. It is a bit of good news. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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