One-two punch out at Wimbledon yesterday. Looks like I was wrong about Sam Querrey vs Andy Murray. And Joker had an injury and was forced to retire. So its Fed’s to lose now. On the ladies side, Venus marches into the semifinals today, where she has to be the favorite to win it all now, although the locals will likely be cheering for her opponent.
Guys are riding bikes through France toward an inevitable win for Froome. There USAMNT (soccer for those of you who don’t know or care) beat an island with the population of Sugar Land, TX by one measly goal last night and our very own Brett L was there to bask in the glory mediocrity. And ESPN let Mr Potato Head host an awards show that I didn’t even bother to watch, because…meh.
Thank the good lord that baseball is back today, otherwise I would probably just give up on the intro tomorrow and just head straight into…the links!
Loretta Lynch needs to take another oath
The Natalia Veselnitskaya situation gets weirder and weirder. I’m sure lots of people got special permission from Loretta Lynch herself to enter the country and then weren’t asked to leave for at least six months after their purpose for being here had expired, though. Right? RIGHT?!?!
Talos Energy strikes (black) gold! Let’s see how this works out once the Mexican government gets involved and all but fucks up the wealth her people should enjoy from it.
A true story of environmentalism and compassion. Followed up the a stark reminder that nature is a motherfucker.
Expedia’s CEO decides to piss off half of his customer base.
How to earn a taxpayer-funded vacation. Or: I’ll call an Uber from my early retirement party.
The meme war gets underway…with rape
And finally, the meme war is over. The ultimate battle was a slaughter. Seriously, I can’t stop watching. I had it on loop for a half an hour last night and I was literally crying. It was the most glorious piece of editing I’ve ever seen. Now if we can just get POTUS to retweet it (yes, its twitter, but even if you aren’t a user, you still need to click through this, trust me), the MSM will literally shit themselves. So, you know, I’m praying he does.
It opens with a great guitar riff and gets better and better as it goes. You’re welcome!
That’s all I got today. Off to play the Shell Houston Open tournament course at Redstone. Wish me luck…I’m gonna need it.
I never have to look at the name when you post the links Ken. Your choice in photos gives you away every time.
Oh look, I got a first. Blind squirrel I guess.
Let’s see if this works – the Model 94 I bought
Nice! I have a model 64 from the 1940s I need to get checked out to see if it is still operable. Would love to take that thing out to the range…
Serial number on mine puts in at 1925. I sold my AR I just built to get this; really want something to be “my rifle” if that makes sense.
Hope yours is operable!
I know for a fact that it hasn’t been fired since Eisenhower’s administration- it was my father’s old hunting rifle. Spent decades on a wall rack in my house (just below a 1876 Springfield trapdoor). Besides the guns I purchased myself, I don’t think any of the guns I own have been shot since then. Don’t think they even make the ammo for half of them anymore…
Definitely take it to a gunsmith, but with some lube and cleaner I can’t think of why it wouldn’t work.
Also, sounds like you have an awesome gun collection. I’m currently trying to track down my great-great grandfather’s shotgun. It was supposed to go to my grandmother, but her uncle ended up taking it
It’s an interesting, eclectic collection. One of the big gun shops here in town has a little museum area between the shop and range with a lot of old guns/swords. I have about half of them in my collection (none of the machine guns unfortunately).
I think my favorite is a German inter-war drilling gun. It’s a double barrel shotgun with a rifle barrel underneath. Not a small caliber either – if I’m reading the markings right it’s a 16 gauge/8mm Mauser…
Our hoplophobic work proxy blocks “weapons” sites.
🙁
Mine too.
Damnit. Will the gods of glibertarians dot com show thou mercy and post the picture in a comment? I will sacrifice 4 virgins at thy altar
My work blocks the Glib site entirely (it doesn’t like WordPress). But they don’t ban cell phones!
Phones make and recieve phone calls.
I know you’re a curmudgeon and did not really want this so that makes this all the more pleasurable for me.
http://imgur.com/a/I5B3K
Scruffy, if you’re taking requests, Mr. Saturn could use a spot of millinery.
Why would I use it for that?!? I’d have to interact with people. As a government employee/libertarian/introvert I’m strongly opposed to the concept…
Will this work for you?
http://imgur.com/a/kluqg
So..um…I was thinking…Ignignokt would probably look sharp in a gentleman’s head covering, too.
It’s positively dashing, thank you!
As you wish….
http://imgur.com/a/AcUab
And a monocle too! I love it!
I owe you Scruffy. (Unless you ever try to collect. Then we never had this conversation)
I run all my collections thru a third party service based in Pakistan.
I’m not cool enough for a top hat…I have to keep this dunce cap on.
Wizard’s cap. Keep telling yourself it’s a wizard’s cap!
A little bacon magic and voila….
http://imgur.com/a/SYFQf
Bacon, ignore the other one, this one is better.
http://imgur.com/a/pJPpB
Sorry I missed you last night. Wife dragged me to bed. Now I have missed you this morning. I had to get up and make biscuits and gravy.
That looks pretty nice. Mind if I ask how much you paid?
I would not try to replace the blueing. That gun will be worth a shitload of money in a couple of decades compared to what you paid for it. Ten years ago you could have picked it up for 100 bucks. The value of the ’94s is rising rapidly.
Are you going to shoot it? Can you get ammo? have a gunsmith check it out. I have one that old and it shoots like a new one. Mine is in 30-30. I have a .32WS but it was manufactured in 1972.
No worries. Paid $500 for it.
I do plan to take it to the range occasionally and try to bag two deer a year with it. Maybe a box of ammo a year. Gun shop I bought it from said they fired it, but you’re right, I will take it to a local gunsmith before I load it up.
It’s 30-30 so ammo shouldn’t be an issue. The other one I was looking at was .32WS and I kind of wanted it for the uniqueness of it, but it was $125 more.
Hey Jefe, where did you purchase your ’94?
Gunbroker via a gun shop in Oregon
Cool thanks. I’ll have to look at GunBroker more. See if I can find some deals.
I have a hypothetical question on taxes.
This is not a philosophical question it’s “what would happen if…”
This is part of brainstorming for fiction.
Suppose there is a family with a farm-sized plot of land in the Oklahoma area with an assessed value of around six million. The owner of record dies, with enough insurance to cover inheritance taxes. If the heir turns around and sells the land for the assessed value by which the inheritance tax was calulated, how much tax would be placed on the sale?
Suppose also that instead of the heir seeking a buyer, someone interested in the mineral/water/whatever rights attached to the land offered ten million for it and a sale was conducted, what sort of taxes would apply in that case?
To clarify, I’m wondering about capital gains, and what the initial acquisition value would be calculated using (the value when the family acquired it way back when, or the value when the previous owner died and passed it on)
The basis value for inherited property is always the value as of death. The heir takes the property at the value assessed for inheritance taxes, whether or not such taxes were due. In your example there would be no capital gains due as the property is being sold at its basis price.
But there would be in the second, where the sale was above the inheritance-taxed value?
It’s the same as stock options. The value that the IRS uses is the assumed value on the day of transfer, not when it is sold. You may be able to recoup some taxes after sale by posting it as a loss, but you can’t duck that initial bill.
Your second scenario would have capital gains (long term) tax due on the difference between the basis ($6 million) and the sale price, assuming it was an actual sale. If it was a lease of mineral rights, or a sale of only mineral rights, you would be in a different situation, and would have to decide how much of the basis you were going to attribute to the rights sold. It would be largely at your discretion how you applied the basis.
Thank you.
The rule is that inherited property is always treated as a long term item for capital gains taxes, the basis ‘steps up’ to the value at death. And when you sell part of a previously undivided asset, you get to decide how to apportion the basis of the full asset to the parts, in other words you can generally apply the whole basis to the partial sale, to delay the capital gains taxes until you sell the remainder.
And always set up a trust if you buy properties or whatever.
Don’t let the government steal more of your money. And certainly don’t let the progs get it.
We just had to set up an estate freeze because if my parents died – paf! – it would have been considered a ‘deemed disposition’ and triggered capital gains on all their assets. Yeah, no thanks. It was a bitch but we managed to convince the matriarch (who has POA because my father is not well) and froze everything.
I’m sorry to hear that.
(Not sure if Canadian law is worse than US law on capital gains)
In the US you do NOT pay capital gains on the increase in value from acquisition to value at death, the heirs take the property at the new (date of death) valuation, the total estate is subject to estate taxes (if the total estate is above the threshold), but that ‘step up’ in basis is not a taxable event.
Nah. Nothing bad. It’s all good in the end.
My father refused to put things in a trust for some reason.
Okay. I was trying to figure out how badly this character was going to get screwed over on taxes.
He doesn’t live anywhere near the farm, and will definately be thinking of divesting.
I guess the only question is who is assessing the value at $6 million, when someone else is offering $10 million? There would be some wiggle room to possibly say the FMV at death was closer to $10 million.
Which would be worse, causing a higher death tax bill on that 4mil difference, or paying capital gains on 4 mil?
But wouldn’t that be a mistake? Inheritance tax ratres are higher than cap gains.
Yeah I screwed that up.
The estate would file a return first and that would be the value at date of death. Pay no attention to me.
And this is why you never (well, almost never) transfer property before death. A family member had this question recently about transferring title so it was no longer in the elderly parents name. Fuck no. First, if the elderly parents are moving out, they could likely use some cash and possibly take advantage of the home sale exclusion and pay no tax. If the property is held and they die, the son who inherits it will pay little to no tax either when he sells it.
The son also lives in Ohio and the property is in Maryland. He might want to use it as a rental. What the fuck. If you had cash and no property in Maryland, would you buy a rental in Maryland when you live in Ohio? No, no you would not.
I can’t really argue with that.
(Though in this story’s case, the demise was unexpected, so there was little pre-planning)
“what sort of taxes would apply in that case?”
None?
Oh, I thought that said ‘should.’
On an interesting note, I poked around the internet to look at real world listings for agricultural land in the general area the ficticious farm was supposed to be.
At the average market rate for those up for sale, a $6mil plot of agricultural land would run close to 4500 acres.
There were plots not on the market of that size in the area (and several up to 25,000 acres) so seven square miles does not seem terribly outrageous. It gives me a good idea of how big the space should be when the characters visit.
Are you saying those are contiguous acres? I could believe range land that size, but tillable acreage plots that size must be very rare.
Also, to give you an idea of the range of land values; in the area I live in, sugar beet land was going for over $5000/acre a couple years back. It has cooled off some since then, but I believe the best land is still around $4000+/acre.
It is not necessarrily under the plow. The acreage was based off the average of slightly over $1300-1500/acre which might indicate range land.
Was that for raw land? Or did it include the commercial buildings? As an inheritance in a running farm it will include equipment, stored product, water rights, etc.
I was flying over many of our central/west states last week (CO, NE, IA, IL, ID) @ 10000ft and saw that most sections (1 sq mile/640 acres) had houses/barns on each individual square. Perhaps a large farm oriented Glib could add some detail.
*shrugs*
The previous owner was a licensed hero who spent more of his time fighting crime than farming. I’m not sure what state the land would be in other than “It has the house where Nick grew up”
Then I think you may want to go with ranching/open range/oil-gas leases… and just make sure that your location matches with that sort of terrain, then it could have just the one house/barn combo.
Tilled land or good pasture wouldn’t be left unused, even if the hero wasn’t there it would be leased to neighbors.
It’s effectively Oklahoma panhandle (but Cimarron became a state in this setting) Not sure if there’s real life oil under that part of the state.
NatGas – http://newsok.com/article/5494596
Call me biased, but I think North Dakota would be a good choice.
Okay, you have a bias.
You are right about the sections of land having structures on them. And in the not so distant past nearly every quarter section would have a house on it. That’s why I questioned whether he’s talking about contiguous acres.
I haven’t been to every farm area in the country, but I grew up in NoDak farm country and have gone custom combining from NoDak to southern OK. Almost all the farm land I’ve seen has roads of varying quality in a one mile square grid. And those sections are usually divided into quarters (160 acres). I stress I’m talking tilled acres. It’s my understanding that range land is indeed bought and sold in much larger parcels.
One of my thoughts was the previous owner didn’t actually use the land other than for houseing, but leased the use to a more agriculturally inclined neighbor. If it were range land, this would be rather straightforward in execution. I’m not sure how odd such an agreement might be though.
In my experience, it would not be odd at all. Fairly common actually. With more out-migration of youth from the farms, more and more farmers have no heirs interested in farming so the land stays in the family but is rented out.
So the odds are the property in question is owned by the family, the surface rights are leased to a nighbor and the mineral rights are leased to a fracking company, and we finally have an example of passive rents on a land that cover the abhorrant property taxes allowing the house to stand unperturbed.
What I don’t know is if there’s much of a profit left over to support a person or not.
In certain cases, yes. Depending on the quality of the soil above, and the amount of gas/oil underneath. It is my understanding that in western NoDak many people are doing VERY well just sitting back and collecting checks on their mineral leases
I was half expecting a comment on big ballers and such in the sports section of today newspaper. Strange.
Get well soon, Loretta.
I can’t believe you’re talking about hassling her with subpoenas when she has so many health issues.
Ahem.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449418/right-wing-populism-next-target-american-higher-education
No yokel talk?
Nice. Equating useful idiocy with higher education. Ignorance or mendacity? Decades after they have lost they still wont know why it happened. I liked the quote yesterday from the Venezuelan bemoaning the state of affairs in his native country – “We have to find a solution!”
They are like animals with eyes on the sides of their heads; put something right in front of their nose and they just cant see it.
*Warty – How is the job situation going?
I cant remember if I mentioned before that I had an engineer friend who bought a Burger King franchise and quit his job. He ended up with a pretty equivalent income, fucked all of the cute cashier girls and was happier than a pig in shit.
Still at the same place, but hopefully not for long. I have a few good leads, so something should work out soon.
Hello Warty!
He’s not wrong. The higher ed bubble is ripe for being targeted.
Maybe. Trump’s attacks on CNN are effective because they tap into the anger at left-wing bias without denigrating the entire institution (he is perceived as criticizing fake news, not all news organizations). Not sure how you do that with higher education.
Maybe the entire institution needs to be denigrated at this point. Literally every course of study outside of hard science and engineering (and they’re working on those) has been infected with Marxist critical theory BS. It’s not education. On top of that, the current on-campus model is completely financially unsustainable. The way this gets better, IMO, is, if not the destruction, then the complete transformation of the entire model. More online and vocational training. A re-embrace of actual liberal education as originally conceived. A drastically scaled back residential college. Tenure reform (if not outright elimination). Though they’re discrediting themselves pretty well, no reason they can’t be helped along.
The spawn has been touring engineering schools and I’m pleased to report that I have seen nothing that suggests this silly shit. Hell, even the class requirements seem pretty sober and serious. No sign of any sort of ‘studies’.
I did aeronautics and was still subject to Marxism in nearly every class outside of math. Even statistics would use examples of surveys of “denialists vs scientists.” Its inexcapable.
When will Loretta testify?
So Net fucking neutrality is back in the news. Oh joy.
http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2017/07/net-neutrality-global-access/
The provision of a fair and open Internet lies in the hands of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and government agencies that regulate these providers. PLOS supports today’s Day of Action in the United States, led by Battle for the Net, aimed at publicizing the issues surrounding Open Internet Rules and their critical role in maintaining Internet freedoms as currently in place.
What the ever-loving fuck is fair internet?
In Bucharest we have not much net neutrality, but you can get a gigabit connection for under 10 bucks a month. It is called cutthroat competition and it works wonders. The unregulated periods are exactly what led to the internet being what it is. And it went swell without government control. But now netflix is afraid of paying extra so we need regulation. And this regulation will in no way be used for nefarious purposes. Thats crazy talk.
The funny thing is, big sites supposedly reduced performance on their “day of action”.
I didn’t notice, because it was as crappy as ever.
I didn’t notice anything either yesterday. This must mean that this is entirely a non-issue.
I thought PLOS was an online peer-reviewed journal, I didn’t realize they have a shitty blog too.
Gig for 10 bucks? Is that connection speed or data limit? We just got fiber optic here in bumfuck, and 100mbps connection is 50 bucks a month. The 1gig speed is 100 bucks a month. The 100mbps rate is comparable to the shitty 2-3 mbps connection over broad band that was the best available until the fiber was installed.
Connection speed. It is not guaranteed, off course, but usually it is blazing fast. 39 of our romanian currency which is under 10 bucks. No data limit, thats like so 2005
http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet-fix&pachet=digi_net_fiberlink_1000
TW: Romanian language
That is unbelievably cheap. Awesome. I have the 100mps connection now, and it is a big improvement, but my oldish computer, I am usually on, lacks the RAM to really appreciate it. It still loads up and web pages slow. It is nice to download a movie in 3-5 mins vs 7 hours though. Internet connection is not the only thing you guys excel at. Every time I came home, and had to turn on my US phone I would rant about the cell phone rates in the US vs pretty much the rest of the world. The only place that gets hosed more than the US is Canada when it comes to phone service and data. Ya, we need more government regulation. That always helps the consumer.
If you’re out in the sticks, there’s no way you are getting city-cheap internet, government interference or not. Pie’s quoted internet service was for Bucharest, a capital city with a population density of 24K/mi^2 (reference: NYC has a density of 28K/mi^2). The higher a population density, the cheaper it is to build internet infrastructure, so the lower the price to the consumer (assuming things aren’t distorted by regulation).
I wish a certain “progressive” relative of mine would come to understand the relationship between population density and Internet speed to price ratio. Ever since he visited South Korea, he has been pontificating on how the US needs to “regulate” their Internet like SK so we can have blazing fast Internet like them.
It’s not like SK is a tiny country with a population that is almost entire concentrated in two major metro areas, and many US states are several times the size of SK with populations dispersed throughout a huge rural area.
I don’t buy it. I am sure that regulation causes magic fiber lines to appear all around.
We made a law.
Unicorn dust is a well-known lossless, inexpensive, conductive medium.
And we wants it now!
Also, one part of my family lives out in the country about 20 minutes away from any town of significant size, and they have somewhat slow wireless Internet. They’re always complaining that the local ISP won’t build a line out there (well, they would, but they wanted $800 for it).
They chose to move out there into a custom-built house, so they’re not exactly poor. It’s just irritating to me that some people think it’s a corporation’s duty to provide their services to every single person or else not provide it at all.
We just got fiber optic here in bumfuck
Sorry, if you are rocking fiber, you don’t live in bumfuck. Still stuck with $80/month here for 20Mbps DSL that actually runs about 3 or 4Mbps most of the time.
Never change CNN and enjoy your slide into irrelevance and (hopefully) insolvency.
http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2017/07/12/espn-chooses-michelle-obama-to-give-arthur-ashe-courage-award-for-25th-espys/
ESPN?
Whoops, yep. Need moar coffee.
*hands over mug of Java*
Ha, ha. ESPN is so full of shit. I wonder how much influence Disney has on that social signalling SJW outfit pretending to be about sports.
I live in a very liberal area. At work, I hear a ton of conversation about how ESPN is falling apart. It’s less of a partisan issue than most people think it is – most of the conversations I hear around the office are “it’s all talk shows and shitty BS theories – all I want to hear about is the game yesterday…”
Also a lot about how Stephen A. and that other fool are the absolute worst.
I wonder if anyone at ESPN calculated how much revenue he alone brings in by generating outrage with the stupid things he says. He might be their cash cow at this point.
I started a Glibertarians Discord.
https://discord.gg/5aKBR2E
Basically its a little real time chat server.
I don’t get it.
Who the hell would want to chat with you people?
Guess I’m signed up for that. Don’t know what it’s about though.
More reason to chat and be pulled away from….erm….work?
Never used discord before. Guess I’ll look into this when I get home after work. Which Rufus only does on weekends apparently.
/does Vaudeville dance.
This is actually a pretty cool idea.
If any of you fabulous bastards game in the evenings, it might be a place I would frequent.
I do!
OPEN THR MEME WARS LINK, GOD DAMMIT!!!!!!
That is AWESOME. Truly a work of art
That was a lot of work for something that’s certain to be pulled down from all the major sites for copyright infringement.
Parody work around.
Fair use if I ever so any
WE DID THAT ALREADY
That is fantastic. I give even odds the Hat retweets it.
Getting your smelling salts ready if he does.
That was a pretty good one.
That was great. Especially the Alex Jones bit. I laughed through the whole thing. That was a lot of work put into that.
Truly spectacular. Thanks for that one, Sloop.
I’m all for free speech, BUT we have to draw the line at these calls to enact violence upon members of the press. These violent memes are going to get someone in the media killed!
STOP THE MADNESS!
STOP THE ICEBERGS!
IMPEACH TRUMP!
That really is good. If only we had the attention span or adderall supply to put something like that together.
I’m firewalled and I deleted twitter…
“And finally the meme war is over”
Wife’s girl’s night out was last night. I wore out on their choice of location a couple of years ago but I am still the designated driver so I just take her to the restaurant and drop her at the door. I have a full-of-shit little dog that follows me around like a shadow with sparks flying out of his ass all of the time, I take him with me. Our usual routine is to buy fried chicken from a nearby grocery deli. I may go across the highway and browse the tool store for a little bit and then we go back to the restaurant. We park under a tree and share the fried chicken while we listen to the Mark Levine radio show. I find it pleasant as it is the only time I get to listen to the guy’s show.
Last night I was laughing and listening to Levin grind the Democrat’s asses into butter and it hit me: Trump is going to win this fight. I dont mean the Russia thing, I mean the whole thing. He is going to drain the swamp, or at least a large part of it. The idiocy coming out of the useful idiots mouths just rolls off of him like water off of a duck’s back. While they chase their tails and destroy their own credibility he just keeps hitting the balls out of the park. The biggest danger to him are the republicans and I think the mid-terms may fix a lot of that. People think he is a buffoon but I think he may be Kung-fu Drunken Master.
Levin is an unpleasant, mean-spirited little man. That makes it quite difficult to pay attention to what he’s saying rather than regard him as background noise.
I prefer Savage for my manic conservative diatribes.
“Levin is an unpleasant, mean-spirited little man.”
*Looks around at Glibertarians crowd*
Yeah?
I was offering my assessment. The only reason I still watch him is because I need background noise and I already paid for the year (and exhausted the other content)
Would you say you were (((UnLevin)))?
To give the elaboration no one was asking for, he made an awful first impression on me from his year end ‘Highlight reels’. Especially his so-called “Funniest Moments”. None of them were funny and all were needlessly mean. The fact that he went out of his way to highlight these moments said a lot about his character and only made me notice further un-necessary moments of verbal cruelty all the more.
As for whether ot not there will be any reduction in swampwater levels – I reserve judgement.
I’m hopeful but as he said, the Congressional Republicans aren’t cooperating in the least.
I’m a soft Trump supporter but the Trump Jr stuff has me a bit worried, not that he did anything illegal but the perception of illegality is being shaped by the media sans evidence.
Even the lefties I know (being in New York, there are plenty) are not paying much attention to the old guard media anymore.
Not to worry. Turns out the Trump Jr thing has loose ends all going back to the Dems. Plus, Jr dumped his emails, so no coverup. It’ll fade away.
The media burned every single bridge with me with eight years of cockslobber over Obama.
They are Democratic operatives, and I don’t believe anything they report.
Whether they ever get any credibility back is up to them, and it’s going to take a long time
One doesnt get credibility back. You just cant unring that bell. Once people know you are dishonest, they know you are dishonest. Besides, they dont seem to have any interest in trying to rebuild credibility.
Watched Trump’s lawyer, Sekulow, making the rounds on the news shows. The media kept throwing the “OMG, it’s so inappropriate what Jr. did!” and Sekulow came back with it wasn’t illegal. Fine, but it’s a bit ridiculous that not once did anyone mention that the US has interfered in the internal politics of countless democracies over the past 40 or 50 years.
“Yeah, and all those people abroad whom we helped politically are scum for accepting our help. We were just throwing out feelers to discover the scum. And now Trump is scum. QED.”
/Possible prog retort?
That’s because us messing with them is the natural order of things.
Going the other way is an outrage (that still happens all the time)
Not only the interference in other democracies, but is anyone so naive to think that all that cash DC is swimming in hasn’t resulted in untold number of dubious campaign tricks. It’s the “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”.
If what Trump Jr. was illegal, then what Obama did was way illegal.
Seriously, let’s at least talk about that stuff once in a while. Can’t because both parties want to keep doing it.
I assume he mentioned the Clinton collusion with the Ukrainians?
Yeah, he brought that up. He could easily have pointed out how we interfered in Ukraine. Nope.
Yesterday? I heard one outraged MSM bobble head say “This is first degree collusion!”
They were deliberately insinuating that a crime was committed, a crime that broke laws that dont exist.
Besides, it looks pretty likely that the whole thing was a setup by the DNC. Jr. went to the meeting, listened to what she had to say, gave her nothing and never called her back. Just another bite of nothing burger with manufactured outrage.
Other than the press – who is actually ‘outraged’?
98% of my Facebook feed.
Time to get a new feed.
Larsen ice shelf calving is not due to global warming, but we want it to be so…
And then…
Emphasis mine.
No serious scientist, not even alarmists, said it was due to global warming, but it didn’t stop the power of the internet commenters.
That’s how Jedi mind tricks work
With the possible exception of the Snowball Earth period (Still debated if this occured), ice sheets will always end up breaking off into the sea and melting. How this is significant beyond “oh cool, we have another calving” is thusfar unproven.
Not only will ice sheets always end up melting, by some estimates ice caps only exist during ice ages, which would mean that the world has been ice sheet free for ~80% of its existence. But if the ice caps melt this time it’s totally man’s fault, despite the fact that this has happened four times before.
This is a really stupid question, but whatever:
Why would melting ice make the sea level rise? Isnt it like ice cubes in a glass? Didnt Archimedes figure this out?
I guess it would matter in Antarctica given it’s a land mass underneath. Think that ice cap is thickening though.
Melting ice that is already floating will not make the sea levels rise. Melting ice from glaciers will make sea levels rise as that ice is on land and not contributing to the total volume of the oceans.
Grammar fail.
Floating ice melting – no change.
Ice from glaciers on land melting – change.
This is the same reason why I ask “so what’s the big deal if the arctic ice melts?”
Polar bears you insensitive shitlord.
Thanks for the heads up on NoScript to you and HM. It is awesome.
If it is attached to land maybe it keeps part of it out of the water
Actually the ice sheet presses the crust (land) down quite a bit. It takes a while to bounce back up…the great lakes area and the north sea area are in the process of doing that now.
So the Edmund Fitzgerald may surface again!
Here’s another question: how is three feet in a century an insurmountable dilemma? That’s a third of an inch a year. Does that even compare to what you can expect your home’s foundation to do in a couple decades?
Hey, just because the Dutch managed to keep their below-sea-level country dry using medieval technology doesn’t mean we can do the same with modern technology. We are now so advanced that we are literally helpless in the face of rising waters. The only workable solution is to raise taxes and abandon reliable sources of energy.
Giant iceberg? More like Giant crock of shit.
This is nothing geologically unusual. Take a regular but little known natural event and sensationalize it as AGW effect. They do this all of the time. Noticed yesterday all of the breathless articles with ‘one of the largest’, ‘largest in recent history’, etc. weasel words in the titles.
Last couple of winters the ice shelf grew at record paces. Now we have giant icebergs, big surprise. I can remember this happening at least 2x before in my lifetime. The first time it was evidence of global cooling. This one isnt even close to the largest recorded.
Remember a couple of years ago the idiot professor/true believer who announced “It’s too late! The Antarctic ice sheet has begun collapsing! See? The ice is sliding off in the sea!” We haven’t heard from that idiot again, have we? I imagine he woke up one morning with his dog’s severed head in his bed with a note pinned to it that said “It can never be too late. ‘Too late’ has to always be just around the corner. We are trying to induce panic, not resignation. That’s how you get ’em to pay so shut up you idiot”
It’s not my area of expertise, but it does seem like “largest iceberg ever” could also be used in the service of global cooling propaganda just as effectively.
These giants are usually the product of excessive ice formation due to a cooling spell. That allows for the formation of greater than average ice formation. What we are seeing here is a return to the mean.
I imagine that as we move out of the ice age things will continue warming up. In a few thousand years Antarctica will probably be mostly ice free the way Scandanavia is now.
Tekeli-li
Tekeli-li
Tekeli-li
I guess everyone has heard about this?
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/341677-house-dem-files-article-of-impeachment-against-trump
Grandstanding Donkey Grandstands, story at eleven.
Harvard students could soon be banned from joining any private social organization or club.
If the recommendations contained in a just-released, 22-page report are enacted, Harvard would extend previously-proposed sanctions against students joining single-gender clubs, to all “fraternities, sororities, and similar organizations,” regardless of their co-ed status. And instead of instituting a blacklist — leaving non-compliant students unable to captain Harvard-recognized sports teams, or be nominated for prestigious scholarships, for example — violators would be subject to formal “disciplinary action.”
https://www.thefire.org/breaking-harvard-committee-proposes-banning-all-social-clubs-punishing-violators/
So they have to admit all 87 genders now? Ridiculous.
They’re only off by 85.
This is what gov’t health care gets you.
The entire article is infuriating.
“Wont help, there is no cure so why try?”
Uh huh, and socialized medicine doesnt kill innovation or progress. What is it with progressives and their obstinate resistance to progress?
Re: Expedia CEO
Better see what the polling says just to be sure.
Clearly Expedia was lacking the board member talent that Chelsea Clinton provides.
So it looks like Janice Rogers Brown is retiring. Too bad, I would have liked to see her join the Supremes.
Eh kinda old already. But some heads would have exploded
Oh that’s right, I forgot, you hate old people.
That’s only because we hate all people.
CAMBRIDGE — Progressive city leaders have spent more than a year crafting an ordinance that would ban the sale of various animals at pet shops, and now it appears the City Council is on the verge of passing it.
This ordinance would not just apply to furry creatures — it would cover feathered and scaly friends as well, including reptiles, rodents, amphibians, and even spiders. Cambridge, however, boasts just two pet stores, industry giants Petco and PetSmart.
The only transactions allowed under the ordinance involve rescue organizations or shelters.
Fish are not listed in the ordinance, but once the ban is enacted — likely in the summer of 2018 — the chances of creatures like goldfish being added to the list at a later date will likely increase.
http://newbostonpost.com/2017/07/07/cambridge-on-verge-of-banning-pet-shops/
So basically drive outside city limits and buy pets there?
So the stores are grandfathered or are they fucked (ad locked up my browser)?
So you may remember Jody Allard, who last year wrote an article for WaPo entitled “My Teen Boys are Blind to Rape Culture”, in which she called out her own sons for being part of rape culture.
In a very shocking development, one year later, this was the result. She’s still continuing to insult her own children, one of whom is depressed and suicidal as a result of her, to further her own agenda.
How would you know? Or is there such a thing as non-verbal communication? Couldn’t there then be such a thing as non-verbal concent?
PS, you are the problem, awful harridan.
It was probably all of the family photos with her eyes scratched out.
What a colossal bitch.
*whispers* also, linky is brokey
Serves her right. That callous, narcissistic, self-serving bitch has no business being a mother.
SF was the result, that is terrible!
Do you really need to read more?
Only if he wants to be a citizen.
Ah, the shower scene. Thanks for the reminder.
Holy fuck. It takes an inordinate amount of dumb progressive smugness to make this libertarian immediately think the words “parenting license”, but this woman has gone and done it.
BTW, you SF’d the link.
Now that sounds like collusion. Check her emails for MGTOW plants. What a great recruiter.
I have the utmost sympathy for those boys, saddled as they are with a hyperpartisan shrew of a mother who uses them as metaphorical props in her newspaper column. Must suck something fierce.
I hope the crazy bitch ends up in a hell-hole nursing home all alone in a soiled diaper with her happily married sons and grandchildren refusing to visit or return her calls.
they won’t forget. and that will blunt any guilt from not visiting/calling.
So your saying she is going to end up like Mike Hihn?
BULLY!
I’d rather her sons remember to honor their mother, because there isn’t a Bitch Exception to that commandment – and the commandment would not be necessary if it weren’t for people like her.
He is angry at me now, although he won’t admit that either, and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels; places where he can surround himself with righteous indignation against feminists, and tell himself it’s ungrateful women like me who are the problem.
So he is a bright kid in spite of having a bat shit crazy mother who is also a horrible parent.
She was an object lesson in what her ideology really means and what sort of people it creates.
^This^ He got sick of being told how awful he was for being a male and turned to the internet to find voices on the other side. He then discovered anti-feminist YouTube channels, maybe even MRA and/or MGTOW channels, and apparently liked what he saw.
So there’s hope for him. My teenage son is so red-pill it’s hilarious. My talks about being careful around and somewhat suspicious of women is met with “oh yeah, I know that!” responses.
It’s batshit women like this who are destroying romantic relationships in general.
imma guess he’ll find us eventually.
Revenge-porning your sons as He-Man Woman Haters in a national publication and then lecturing them on the importance of consent. I can’t imagine how that didn’t endear them to you and your ideology.
I SF’d the link on purpose, because the derp might explode your brains, and I didn’t want to give her the clicks.
Here it is if you really feel you have to click. http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2017-07-im-done-pretending-men-safe-even-sons/#.WV5zqH_7FTl.twitter
for CZ
Jesus, what a sad shrew of a woman. She has serious psychological problems, to the point you wonder about the sad sap that decided to sleep with her twice.
She has 7 kids in all. No clue how many different fathers.
The World must be really scary to this lady if the group of people who she feels relatively confident will not rape an unconscious woman behind a dumpster is limited to “most progressive men.” The real answer is “almost all men”, or “nearly everyone”. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if she believed that non-progressive men made a habit out of doing this regularly.
Well, how else do you get a 1 in 4 rate?
There it is. That’s why the rantings of people like her have no more meaning to me than the chirping of frags and crickets as I sit on my deck at night.
Did you mean to type “the chirping of fags?” BIGOT!
No – the grenades I toss into the woods at night just to suppress the critters.
Ah yes. That makes way more sense. Sorry about the false accusation, you nature hating shitlord.
According to her only progressive men won’t rape a passed out woman behind a dumpster.
People like this are why I hate people.
And to her being progressive is necessary but not sufficient, as she notes that only “most” progressive men are able to resist raping women behind dumpsters.
Well the Kennedys and Clintons are progressives, so she kind of has a point, just not the one she intended.
I guess she didn’t get verbal consent from her some to write about them.
Sons*
Certainly not enthusiastic consent.
Your single? imagine my surprise.
I doubt the men you want your boys to be like would really be the “leading” type anyways.
So people like this (mom) are who got me started down the road from progressivism to libertarianism. I just never had that much guilt I guess. No one was ever able to convince me I was a bad person, at least no worse than the people trying to do the convincing. And nothing I did could convince them that I was a good person (being a straight, white dude), so I stopped caring what they thought.
I used to joke that raising sons does a lot to soften a mother’s over-the-top feminist tendencies, and for most who really love their sons, it does. Of course, there’s always people like this woman. What possible conclusion can these boys come to, except that their mom likes attention more than she likes them?
To me, guilt is an unproductive emotion. Guilt is distinct from remorse. Remorse is what I feel after I’ve wronged someone, and it motivates me to make amends and not repeat the offense going forward. Guilt is just self-loathing; it’s the feeling that you’re responsible for something, but can’t do anything about it. At least, that’s how I see it. So guilt endures, and beats you down, and makes you hate yourself. But why? Who does it help to feel this way? It helps nobody but misanthropes, and it only helps them by making them feel better about themselves. Why suffer for someone else’s dysfunctional amusement?
I think one has to be careful, though. There is a line between being immune to guilt and being a sociopath, and it’s probably a lot finer than we realize. It’s not so much that you’ll wake up one day being a sociopath, but that you’ll not notice that you don’t even feel remorse any more. I also think guilt crowds out remorse; the more you feel, and want to make others feel, guilty, the less remorse you have when you wrong someone. You’ll already guilty of so much, what difference does it make if you wrong others? They’re probably guilty of so many worse things, too, right?
I get what you’re saying, but I’m not too worried about being a sociopath. (of course, a real sociopath wouldn’t be worried about it either) 🙂 I do feel remorse and regret from time to time, mostly but not totally in relation to my children, getting mad and flying off the handle occasionally. And I apologize when it happens, genuinely, not forced like when I make them apologize to each other. 🙂
Their father needs to man the fuck up and get them away from her right the hell now. Waiting another few years until they’re 18 and can decide with whom they want to live (and obviously they won’t choose their crazy ass mom) is a gutless call if that’s the game the dad’s playing.
To be sure, we have all enjoyed the
clarity, wit, and elegance of Jody’s prose.
But for those who would like to get to know
her as a person: here you go
Campus Rape Policies Get a New Look as the Accused Get DeVos’s Ear
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/us/politics/campus-rape-betsy-devos-title-iv-education-trump-candice-jackson.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
The NYT picked comments do not seem so bad
The current professional victim’s group was outraged that the advocates for the falsely accused got the same amount of time allotted as they did.
Man Who Self-Identified as Bear Found Bear Community Highly Intolerant
Ryan Riese of Fulton, MD died yesterday after deciding to don a bear costume and attempt to live among actual bears. He was 36 at the time of his passing.
Nobody knows exactly what prompted cyber security manager Ryan Riese to abruptly walk out of work and into the forest. An ongoing police investigation reveals that for nearly a year, Riese had been spending his savings on commissioning a Hollywood prop designer to create an elaborate bear costume using a secret email account. “I had no idea. I thought he was spending the money on testicular cancer treatments,” his wife, Victoria Riese told BNN. Autopsy reports show Riese did not suffer from testicular cancer but had forged medical records to convince his family he needed the money for treatment. “I even created a GoFundMe account for him,” his wife said.
https://www.bearmageddonnews.com/2017/06/30/man-who-self-identified-as-bear-found-bear-community-highly-intolerant/
Wrong type of bears
STEVE SMITH NOT LIKE COMPETITION
The family of the deceased is suing the costume designer is the best part. What sheister took that case?
Ha………after reading the part that said it was a plumbing problem that set him off, I suspected satire. I was hook line and sinker believing that article until the end. Nice work.
Shit, I gotta be more careful when I skim the fake news.
There was some dude in San Diego years ago that decided to climb in one of the Asian bear exhibits because he felt a connection to them. He felt betrayed by the bears when they used him for a scratching post.
Something something gay joke
Fake. Had me going until the end when the tolerance professor wanted to list bears as a hate group.
Say what you want about this guy, at least he chose a species much less likely to kill him.
Yeah, but when the bears get hungry for goat…?
Six days? Six days as a goat? What an astonishing lack of commitment.
After that, he’s going to Helmand Province to see if he can find a real man to share the rest of his life with.
Life imitates art.
I think the real story here is there’s a website called bearmageddonnews.com.
Look closely at the picture… is Bigfoot walking around Catawba County?
STEVE SMITH NEVER EVEN BEEN TO CAROLINA!
ONLY IN MIND
IMITATION GREATEST FLATTERY AS LONG AS FLATERY MEAN RAPE
A 7-foot tall half-man, all-rape monster
STEVE SMITH FTFY
Do you live in the world’s laziest country?
Once again the United States lags behind Europe. We need the government to step in to fix this activity inequality gap!
US scientists have amassed “planetary-scale” data from people’s smartphones to see how active we really are.
Seems like invasion of privacy to me.
I note that China is at the top of the list for total number of steps. Having been to China a few times, I can guarantee you that it’s not because they want to.
The Long March might have busted the curve.
We’re not shelling out so the Euros can buy cars.
They can cut their own taxes to buy cars.
If you read the article(I know it’s against the rules), they want to redesign cities to make them more “walker friendly”.
Because that’s what people want. Who needs a car?
If that’s not what you want, well you just don’t know what’s good for you, comrade,
“Walker Friendly”? Why would we want to aid the undead?
I thought they meant this.
Given the ADA compliance lawsuits, I went for the more absurd.
What is ‘femonationalism’?
Academic Sara Farris talks about the ‘instrumentalisation’ of migrant women in Europe by right-wing nationalists – and neoliberals.
Be careful not to confuse femonationalism with femonationalsocialism, also known as feminazism.
“she doesn’t really care about women’s rights, ”
She never cared about women the way Hillary Clinton did.
“are increasingly attacking Islam as a religion, claiming that it is a religion that oppresses women.”
Well that’s a bold claim. We need to stop these right wingers from denigrating and lying about how society functions in an Islamic theocracy.
Inevitable win for Froome? Only because of the nature of the TDF. There are 10 stages left (10!) and it shouldn’t be over by now. Aru trails by just 18 seconds and Bardet 51.
The TDF lacks action and drama. Giro and even Vuelta kill it these days. Lots of lead changes and right down to the wire. And if Froome wants to go down as an all-timer he has to win all three in my book.
Trump Derangement Framework?
I find the TdF very actiony and dramatic, but in the last few years, everyone has been very conservative, almost lackadaisical, about challenging him. Then they all got on Aru’s case for attacking when Froome had an equipment malfunction. We have mountains coming up, so hopefully these guys will stop emulating Lance Armstrong and grow pair.
That’s the point. The TDF is being crushed under the weight of all these silly unwritten rules. Aru is a maverick and loves to attack. Would love to see Froome handle that.
The last decade or so the best racing has been in the Giro and Vuelta. Giro changed its conservative disposition about 15 years ago and it has been doing very well.TDF may have to consider something similar; they tried to make the course more aggressive and it claimed Richie Porte.
This is a good rundown from Velonews. I don’t think the issue is so much TdF organization/route as it is people not wanting to risk their top-10 place in order to go for the yellow. It’s like they’re saying “Oh well, 5th place is pretty good, too”.
But I still think it’s interesting enough. I thought Sunday’s stage (that claimed Porte) was great.
Thanks. Saved and will read later.
Link doesn’t work though!
Sunday’s stage was excellent and a great technical descent – sorry to lose Richie Porte. Sagan’s expulsion was an outrage.
I thought so as well, especially after seeing the super slo mo video.
I know zero about tricycling, but was looking for something to watch and came across the TdF. Some guy was like 20 seconds behind the pace and the commentator said he put himself out of a chance to win. It was the first day of a three week race.
There are precious few opportunities to change your position in the race, and the time trial (which is what I’m assuming you’re referring to since it was the first stage) is the major one. Twenty seconds is a big deal.
The mountains are another, but it’s way harder to do, as whoever is in the yellow jersey will not allow someone close to him in time to get a jump. In the mountains, you try to break the yellow jersey by constantly attacking. But the yellow is the yellow for a reason, and it’s hard to crack those guys. But what I’ve noticed in the last few years with Froome being the new Lance Armstrong, is the top contenders are acting defensively to maintain their 2nd, 3rd, 4th place positions, and not attacking the yellow jersey.
How many times have I seen this story pushed?
Feminists adjust to the age of Trump
For many feminists, the instinctive response to grim reality is to hide, and certainly to get off social media.
I’m going to need to see some evidence on that one.
If only that was true.
Being asked for facts is harrassment!
*blocks Scruffy*
/Feminist Response.
You forgot to call him a “garbage human” first.
I’m pretty sure the block comes first.
Of course it does – you think they’re going to risk having to face any reactions?
PROG outrage response: March around and dump trash. Then post shit on InstaFaceTwitterSlate
Team Red outrage response: buy ammo.
At least one of your two competing groups of mammals has some foresight…
It’s funny how it was ‘time to move on’ from Bill’s sexual escapades WHILE IN POWER but with Trump they use what he said in private when he wasn’t in politics as a political tool for as long as they choose. Suddenly, it’s no longer time to move on but to be used to whack someone over the head with it over and over.
If these systems were setup for men then the men who set them up did them wrong. Unless they want to try to spin the pussy pass for giving significantly lighter sentences to women than men for the same crimes as somehow pro man and anti woman. (I’m sure they would try to spin that)
“a world in which the structures of workplaces and political and judicial systems, set up by men for men,”
In their language that is just a long way of saying ‘capitalism’.
Exactly. And tell the men who get fucked over in family court that the system is stacked in their favor.
You mean that it wasn’t a huge win for uncle to have to pay alimony for life to his worthless drug-addict ex-wife, a woman who was a CPA before she started pissing her life away and thus eminently capable of supporting herself if she cleaned herself up?
Florida divorce laws are evil.
“a world in which women get to run things”
Are these the same people throwing rocks at Betsy DeVos?
And the ones who cheered the death of Margaret Thatcher?
Yeah, it’s the same crowd.
As Linda Sarsour would say, they’re not real women and should have their vaginas removed.
THEY WEREN’T REAL WOMEN!
I like how that article tries to steal a base by sliding from talking about Trump to talking about the UK without ever mentioning that the UK is currently being run by a woman. And it forgets to mention that the majority of voters are women, so women are clearly heavily involved in picking the leaders of their nations. I guess it only counts as “women get to run things, too” if the women happen to agree with the author.
I saw this odd story linked at Instapundit yesterday. Cliffs Notes version – Richard Spencer’s mother owns an apartment building in a small Montana town. A local realtor, who is Jewish, says she warned Spencer Mère about protests at her building and supposedly offered to help her by selling the building for her. This leads to Stormfront types initiating a campaign of harassment and threats.
Now, we of course all agree that the Stormfront crew is made of vile, horrible people…..but the story, even written as it is to be sympathetic to the realtor, makes me suspect that they aren’t completely wrong about this woman. Why would there suddenly be protests at a building owned by Spencer’s mother out in the sticks? Why does this realtor know about it? Sounds an awful lot like the realtor went to Spencer’s mother with an implied threat of protests as a mechanism to force her to sell, doesn’t it? This might be a story with nothing but bad guys and worse guys.
As you requested.
http://imgur.com/a/Q7EMt
Oh that is just exquisite! You’re swell!
Nice building you got here, sure would be a shame if anything should happen to it…
Exactly. Why is she contacting the tenants in the first place? What exactly is her motivation if it’s not to subtly threaten Spencer’s mother?
Seattle passes illegal income tax
The measure applies a 2.25 percent tax on total income above $250,000 for individuals and above $500,000 for married couples filing their taxes together.
The quote of quotes:
“Seattle should serve everyone, not just rich folks,” software developer Carissa Knipe told the council before the 9-0 vote, saying she makes more than $170,000 per year.
“I would love to be taxed,” the 24-year-old from Ballard testified, drawing applause from a room packed with supporters of the tax.
I would love to be taxed! But I only make a measly $170k a year 🙁
Go eat a log of shit, Carissa Knipe.
From last month’s Seattle Soda Tax Article
Proponents said the tax would reduce consumption of unhealthful beverages and help the city provide better access to nutritious foods in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
But will a tax on income reduce income? We may never know.
“I would love to be taxed!”
I’m sure the city of Seattle would happily accept your check, ma’am.
Yes, but she doesn’t make $250k, only $170k. She’s barely getting by.
“I would love to be taxed,” the 24-year-old from Ballard testified
You can write a check to the Washington State treasury and even specify which of 14 accounts, including the general fund, you wish to receive the money.
Pat, you sonofabitch!
I read your book!
As always, I would like to point out that there is absolutely no barrier to Carissa Knipe donating however much she wants to the Washington state treasury. I’m sure they can expect a sizeable check from her directly, no?
High-income socialists are truly the worst kind of hypocrites and scum – and most dangerous.
What in the fuck is wrong with Seattle? Heck, the entire West coast? I don’t even think B.C. (though pretty stupid) is that retarded.
Combination of youth & big salary = giant societal bubble.
You aren’t fooling me. That’s the factory scene from Atlas Shrugged.
Since the tax is illegal, If you don’t pay it which side will the judge fall on. And if it gets struck down, will ask the people who voted for it keep mailing in this checks?
Well, the tax will likely never be implemented after the city loses any incoming lawsuits. This is a good use of taxpayer dollars.
At least those taxpayers are happy to pay, amirite?
Good piece by Harsanyi about the weakness of “whatsboutism” arguments.
OT: a while back one of the FL posters on the other site mentioned wanting to shoot/get a M1A. I am finally getting my SOCOM 16 put back together (bought it used in a god awful tacticool setup that had to be removed). I’m always looking for an excuse to go to the range, so if you (the poster) are here and located somewhere in the middle part of Florida, I’m up for a trip…
Have you shot it at all yet?
If it DOES have a Springfield muzzle brake on it (and the 16 shouldn’t) – get good ear protection. Get everyone else within 100 yards good ear protection. Get the people standing in line from the porting on the muzzle break VERY good ear protection.
I’ve shot it a couple of times. And yes, it is a fire breathing, ear rupturing monster. This on came with no muzzle break on it – I think it came from one of the states that bans them (New York?) Gunsmith had to drill out a pin holding the gas lock in place to get the tactical crap off it.
It did scare the bejesus out of the people beside me in the range (and the shop owner two rooms over) when I first shot it, but after that they all wanted to have a go on it….
In CT, I have to have a muzzle break on mine (a Scout), and when I go to my local outdoor range they put me on the last port, and try and leave the 4 ports to the left empty. Most of the guys at the range are firing AR-15’s and pistol carbines.
The occasional old guy with a Garand and a few WW2 bolt actions, but that 30-06 round and those other actions don’t seem to sound *as* bad.
The gun range I go to only has two rifle lanes, and they are tight. First time I shot it there were two guys in the lane beside me shooting ARs. First round out of the SOCOM and they jumped. Guy sitting in the lane said he could see the fireball coming out of the barrel even with the lane divider blocking his view of the rifle. They both shot a couple rounds and loved it.
I’ve put mine into a military surplus wood stock and it looks much less “mall ninja” now. Just waiting to get a replacement front band and it will be back in working order…
Looks like a ‘tanker’ now then (not to be confused with ‘tankie’).
Franken-14’s
Exactly. Mine is not in as good shape right now though – it is definitely government surplus and still has the inventory number painted on it.
Except with the 16 the gas lock/front sight is right at the end of the hand guard. Can’t believe how much weight it dropped by changing the stock – I’d swear 3 or 4 pounds (but probably half that).
Brake, not break. Swear I typed the correct way.
It’s OK. It’s not like I can mark you down for spelling now, is it.
Not sure how many of you saw/remember the Canadian redneck rap video “Out For A Rip” a few years ago. Well, they are about to get a big payday from Coca-Cola.
Out For A Sip
Canadian redneck
redundant?
Not really.
Trudy is Canadian, but not classy enough (or competent enough) to be a Redneck.
Rowsdower!
+1 Canadian Tuxedo
I wonder if they have beer on the sun?
Rowsdower!
Buddy, Buddy and Steve. lol.
That lawyer’s letter – if real – is awesome.
I can’t believe Coke fucked that up.
That is the funniest thing I’ve seen all week. I’ve got to show that to my lawyer.
RE the Lynch alt text. Why hasn’t she been called to testify? That subpoena is about five months late in being issued. Combine that with the Obamaites hiding her unmasking request records in the light bringers library….I don’t know, wtf? Who is obstructing justice?
Dazed and Confused was on last night. First time I’ve watched it in a while, and two things hit me
1 – When the movie came out (fall of 1993), I was a senior in high school and the 1976 of the movie seemed like such ancient history. It’s strange to realize that my high school days are even more remote to kids now as 1976 was to me.
2 – Was that paddling something that really happened at the time? Was it just a Texas thing? There was hazing of freshman when I was one, but it wasn’t this big organized thing and it wasn’t as vicious as wooden paddles. I know the world was very different then, but it just seems so over the top.
80s child here but my older brothers went to HS in the 70s. And there wasn’t any hazing – at least not in this neck of the woods. When I watched D&C I thought it was uh, kinda boring.
I can see that, but then I always felt that was part of the movie being true to life. High school social life is often made up of a lot of doing nothing much at all and pretending like it was all important somehow.
Yeh, there was a lot of just ‘what do we do guys’?
We did a lot of sitting around our cars in the vacant lot behind the 7-11, waiting to get word of a party breaking out. No cell phones meant word traveled slowly in those days. Really, you could have made the exact same movie about my time and the only major differences would have been the clothes and the music.
Had to hang out in the same places everyday so people knew where to find you. Don’t need to do that anymore. It’s strange how if you walk into a McDonalds now, or park in a convenience store parking lot, there aren’t teenagers just hanging out anymore. They don’t need to.
I like the hat.
I’m a few years older than you (graduated HS in 1985) , but that movie always resonated with me. My uncle was only 8 years older than me, so 10-12 year old Tundra got to hang out with him and his friends and it was very much like the movie. Very chill times that have probably disappeared forever, unfortunately.
I think the paddling was mostly fiction. Around here, the hazing was your standard stuffed in a locker or taped to the wall. Kid’s stuff.
OT for Tundra: I am pretty sure I will be in Plymouth for work the last week in September. Do you Twin Cities Glibs ever have get-togethers?
We do a great job of talking about it, but never doing it. In your honor, we’ll definitely get together while you are here.
That would be great. We can talk more when/if it becomes a for-sure
Just let me know. I’ve got his Holiness on speed dial.
I know there are other Glibs in MN, are any of them in the Cities?
A bunch. Someone mentioned the other day how many of us there are in this proggy utopia.
Same here – my youngest uncle is nine years older than me (and about your age, I’m guessing). He lived in Florida, but I used to spend most of the summer down there at my grandparents’ house and he and his friends would sometimes let me tag along with them.
Our school had a “senior lounge”, and you did have to be alert when you’d walk down the hall past it. They would occasionally snatch someone up and dogpile them before tossing them out of the window (it was the first floor so it wasn’t that bad).
When the movie came out (fall of 1993), I was a senior in high school and the 1976 of the movie seemed like such ancient history. It’s strange to realize that my high school days are even more remote to kids now as 1976 was to me.
Get ready to have your mind blown even further:
1979 by Smashing Pumpkins came out in 1996. If an equivalent song were written today it would be entitled “2000”.
Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams came out in 1984.
So the equivalent would be Summer of ’02. Subject to conversion from Canadian time, so Summer of ’08?
You can go round and round with this stuff. The 1955 of Back to the Future was 30 years in the past for Marty McFly, but Back to the Future itself is now 32 years old. Somehow I suspect kids today don’t gaze lovingly at an ’85 Ford Tempo the way 10 year old me did with a ’57 Chevy.
If Wonder Years was still on air it would be set in ’97, 4 years after the last episode aired.
In 2000, I was in the third grade.
/youth
I work with people who were born after I graduated from college. It boggles me all the time.
Ditto.
I’m more of a Stoned Age kind of guy.
Uhmmm…no, its not unrealistic or over the top at all. I was never accepted into a frat. That really broke my heart because I am such a natural, enthusiastic joiner type but one of my buddies joined. He nearly ended up in the hospital. He and the other pledges had the shit beaten out of them with paddles.
Oh, I know idiotic shit is a part of fraternities – I wasn’t in one, but my freshman year roommate pledged one and one of his fellow pledges had to be rushed to the hospital after they were forced to chug hot sauce. He had some kind of reaction to it that made his throat swell up so much that he could barely breathe.
So yeah, college fraternities did that stuff, but what I was talking about is mass hazing of high school freshman.
I see what you did there.
As a confirmed misanthropist, the very idea of fraternities frightens and confuses me.
I understand the potential career and networking benefits of said, but I can’t help wondering how the other side of it works, if you’re successful – and visibly so on something like Bloomberg mail – being hassled by gaggles of people whose only claim on you is that they ALSO passed out on the same sofa as you and had their heads shaved and decorated with sharpies too.
“Gissa job, bro”
The whole thing sounds profoundly unappealing.
I also don’t get it.
Beyond that I don’t understand why people would try to join such an organization in the first place, knowing what awful things would be done. What is the appeal? It seems to be a net negative.
Yeah I’m definitely not frat material – hated those yahoos when I was in college since (professional frats excluded) they seemed to appeal to the highest derp idiots around. I’m sure that feeling may be unfair to some, but I certainly saw enough evidence during my college years that I never wanted to associate with frat bros.
I’ve always had a fondness for Linklater’s films. A lot of them have a strange underlying streak of libertarian individualism running through them, though I don’t know enough about him to determine whether it is intentional. Dazed and Confused is pretty great, but Slacker will always be my favorite.
Boyhood is one of my all time favorite movies. There are a couple of scenes that really stick out for me: Photography teacher telling the kid he’s got talent but talent doesn’t mean shit if you’re lazy. Dad’s talk to his son in the green room of the club, trying to convince him not to care about a girl who dumped him. There’s really great advice in that movie for young men.
Also, Everybody Wants Some is the rare indie movie where the jocks are friendly and sympathetic. He’s one of my favorite directors.
And I can confirm, there was still hazing in my Texas high school in the late ’80s/early ’90s. Maybe more mild than paddling, but not that much.
I’d say this guy would be winning the Infowars cash prize if not for the fact that he took a pretty funny jab at Alex Jones.
Fun musical selection today. I saw their final tour in 1984 at the St. Paul Civic Center. It remains the loudest show I’ve ever seen. We were in like the 8th row and I couldn’t hear for a week afterwards.
WHAT?
SAY IT AGAIN! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!
When Van Halen came thru here on their World Vacation tour, the police detective across the street invited my father to come to the concert with him. Basically, the cops would take all the pot and booze from the teenagers, make them sit in the temporary holding tank they set up if they didn’t charge them (mostly not). Then afterwards they would go to one of the cop’s houses, play poker and get drunk/high.
My father never really cared for cops after that.
They’d steal the stash?
Depends on the age of the cop. The older ones would dump it out, the guys would ‘confiscate’ it.
Yup
The latest on the UK’s attempt to restrict the parents of Charlie Gard of bringing him to the US for treatment: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-40593286
When my daughter was ~2 weeks old, a pediatrician told us the diameter of her head was so small as to suggest microcephaly, and suggested an immediate referral to a pediatric neurologist. We measured ourselves and found a significant difference in the pediatrician’s measurement and ours, but we spent an agonizing week waiting for the appointment for the pediatric neurologist.
Pediatric neurologist took one look at her and said she’s fine, and agreed with our measurements.
We changed pediatricians before her next checkup.
Medical professionals seem incapable of measuring an infant’s head circumference or body length.
Our daughters head apparently shrinks approximately every other checkup.
My mother regularly tells me the story about her first pediatrician she took me too when I was a few months old. “He’s gonna be a little guy.” He told her. I’m now almost 6 feet tall and weigh about 260. My mom tells me at least once a year she would give anything to have me meet him.
“Almost 6 foot”? You are short. I say this as someone who is only 6’3″ himself…
Some of us don’t live in a NBA locker room like you apparently.
He’s white, you fool. He doesn’t belong in an NBA locker room.
They still have coaches and managers don’t they?
/shitlord prime
I think it’s been determined before that UCS lives among Dutchmen. 6’3″ is within the top 3% worldwide for male heights, but only “above average” for the Dutch (tallest people in the world).
Who’s a chubby wubbie? Who’s a chubby wubbie? Are YOU a chubby wubbie? Yes, you are! Yes, you are!
(pinches Vhyrus’ nipples)
<huddles in corner a bit, somewhat happy that he just dropped below 270 but is 6’2″>
I’m very happy that my weight has dropped below 250….and I’m 5’7″. Hah!
Aiming at about 250 via dieting and then I should be able to devote the time to some weights to shed some more. Target is 230 with a far higher muscle density. Still a bit overweight, but I can live with having just one dadbod.
Yes I’m fat. Make fun of me and I’ll clean out your fridge.
I have a freakin’ lock on MY fridge.
Didn’t help my parents, won’t help you.
::reads subthread::
I’m glad we don’t have an equivalent of a female (or gay) John around here – she (he) would be in chubby chasing heaven.
Note: I’m 6’2″ and 215pounds of fitness… well except for the slightly deflated spare tire in my mid. That Dutch farmer DNA is hard to beat down.
25 years of connubial bliss added its inevitable 2-3lb gain per year, and even without courting overt chubby-chasers in the channel, we know we have one or two *cough*Kristen*cough* so we ain’t totally safe.
For me, one of my problems was that before I got this way, I had a rugby build (with big, muscled shoulders, huge hams etc) and those suckers have slowly burned off and been replaced with fat, so I anticipate that if I went to 215 I’d look in better shape than I was when I was 25. I know for sure my core strength is shit, so when I do start dedicating time, I have to get that sorted out at the very least.
For those who like women with no souls.
NB: I used archive.is so CZmacure doesn’t boil my rabbit. No ad-blocker shenanigans.
http://archive.is/JLkqB
My soul is being consumed!
Number 17 proves how much better a big smile is than duck lips and I would play Russian Roulette with 3 chambers full to have a run at number 14.
I hate duck lips so much that I think there needs to be some sort of camp system where we can concentrate all the duck lips.
Yes on 14. Holy smokes.
I’m not *against* ink really, but I think it’s a shame how many women now have shitty emoji-quality tats.
A really well executed partial sleeve – I totally get. But a $40 pair of fuzzy hearts slap bang in the middle of their pecs? Sad, ‘cos that last girl was really toothsome otherwise.
Joan Walsh writes idiotic article about Ivanka Trump’s dress, gets schooled by Vice reporter. Also, would (the Vice reporter, not Joan Walsh, because with you people that needs to be said).
https://twitter.com/evepeyser/status/885501874719379456
dat nose
A real schnozz.
Judging by the rest of her twits, the Joan Walsh thing was a brief moment of clarity for her.
You’d know that by the fact that she works at Vice.
Even ENB is getting in on the action.
In between her retweets of Anna “I went to the Columbia School of Journalism goddammit!” Merlan.
Weigel in drag, now and forever.
Like I said yesterday – Fashion Icon™ Joan Walsh.
Well kids, I got offered a job in Colorado Springs so I’ll be exiting Middle America Progtopia soon. It’s not Cheyenne like I wanted (they took too long getting their asses in gear) but it is a vast improvement traffic-wise, cost of living-wise and, aside from the SoCon element, ideologically.
Congrats and good luck. Enjoy the change of scenery.
Damn right, Pikes Peak is my gangsta.
Congratulations.
It’s not that close, but come on up to Copper in Feb for apres ski!!
That is one thing I’m gonna miss is the extra hour of driving for skiing. Though, ski traffic from Denver has gotten so bad the past few years I have cut down on my trips anyway.
That sounded awkward… I’m not going to miss the extra hour… or something… hell you all understood what I meant! (huffs some more rubber cement)
…It’s a euphemism for anal sex with Joan Walsh, right?
Pegging, actually.
Say hi to Kenda for me!
Well, my, my, my!
Congratulations. I miss it up there every summer, but I change my mind come October.
Huzzah! Even though it wasn’t your ideal, congratulations! The west is a great place, generally speaking…. until you get to coastal west, anyway 😉
Congrats Q
Sweet Q!
I’ve got today’s derp gold standard.
….
Wait, that’s supposed to be an argument FOR allowing the government to regulate the internet?
Well yeah… government is unaccountable except to the plutocrats so the only way to get any power over the plutocrats is to give more power to the government.
Don’t you get it?
+1
Cats and rats, man. Cats AND rats!
Another great point. If corporations are so bad, then why should we do this thing that I see tons if corporations supporting. Their arguments are not nuanced enough to handle that issue. Yesterday I got bombarded with spam from companies talking about how companies were going to ruin the internet.
I’m disappointed by how many companies I see jumping on this bandwagon just because they think it’s good marketing.
And many of these companies have demonstrated that they understand the long game, yet are incredibly short sighted when it comes to net neutrality. Yes, it benefits Netflix now if government regulations maintain their ability to pump massive amounts of internet traffic over other people’s networks, but in the long run what is to prevent Netflix itself from becoming a regulated content distribution utility? The same goes for Amazon, Google, etc. You’d think these guys would understand that they benefit a lot more if the government keeps out of their way.
It would allow them to stop having to innovate and compete with newcomers.
Protection from change is appealing once you’ve gotten to the top.
Which is hilarious, since most of them completely disrupted their industries and toppled long entrenched players.
But it will never happen to them, of course.
Or, they recognize that they are in the position to capture any future regulatory bodies and thus cement their position at the top.
Which is where I get lost in this, because these companies (and the people running them) have in many ways been laser focused on delivering innovative products to consumers for the last twenty years…and now are switching their strategy to stagnation and regulatory capture?
The other possible explanation is that they simply aren’t that good at forecasting the future damage it could cause. The people that run corporations are just as fallible as anyone else.
The whole Net Neutrality thing pisses me off because it’s full of sensationalism. Repealing net neutrality will return the internet to the horrific state of …2015?
And I love the characterization of free-market economics as fairy tale. The only way they get away with this is because public education is so derisive towards it. Take one semester of econ and you see econ it’s not a fairy tale.
The same reason it is important to keep creationism out of high school biology classes. They teach a version of economics in schools that is essentially economic creationism and it actually causes a lot of damage. The public schools really are a potent weapon.
Also, the whole: your free market beliefs are magical, betrays a level of arrogance that is astounding. If you can’t explain exactly how things will work then it must be worthless to try to let other people add in their little part to find a solution. To them, All solutions must be fully fleshed out and designed ahead of time.
I was actually under the impression “net neutrality” hadn’t even begun being implemented yet.
It hasn’t. The feared non-neutral internet is the selfsame one we are using right now.
BUT COMCAST MIGHT MAKE YOU PAY EXTRA TO USE FACEBOOK!!! OR GOOGLE!!!
I believe Comcast was actually at one point in history were the only provider to throttle anything. Like over a decade ago, they had the gall to slightly slow down the tunnel used for BitTorrent — a program only used to share porn and pirated software.
The backlash was so severe they quickly stopped and have never dipped their toe in those waters again.
I thought they put the squeeze on Netflix traffic a couple of years ago to help spur on the Net Neutrality push.
I thought they put the squeeze on Netflix traffic a couple of years ago to help spur on the Net Neutrality push.
Not exactly (and I don’t think Comcast is pro-NN).
Netflix accounts for something like one third of all traffic on the Internet. But most of that traffic is redundant in the sense that it’s just replaying the same content to different people in different places at different times. Before Netflix and Comcast reached an agreement, all Netflix traffic to Comcast customers came from Netflix’s servers through Netflix’s ISP (that is a bit of an oversimplification, CDNs aren’t that simple, but it gets the point across). Basically, the pipes were too small to serve every Comcast customer with HD video and audio from Netflix at the same time. It also meant that some other traffic through the same pipes was being crowded out, which meant that Comcast customers who weren’t even using Netflix experienced issues at times.
There are different ways to solve this problem. What the pro-NN crowd wants is for everybody to build bigger pipes. That’s all nice and good but it’s also the most capital-intensive answer and thus is not particularly smart. Also, at some point, we might start hitting upper limits on what this solution can achieve, although we’re not there yet.
Another answer, which is more ambiguous from an NN perspective, is to run local Netflix distribution nodes inside Comcast’s network. They’ll download content from Netflix once then serve it up to regional customers. This greatly reduces the transit across more expensive, geographically spread out channels of the Internet which are shared with other services, even though the total bandwidth usage technically remains the same. This is what Comcast and Netflix agreed to do; initially, Comcast had refused to host Netflix-owned equipment in their data centers, and Netflix didn’t want to hand over their proprietary technology to Comcast. The exact details of the agreement aren’t public, but it’s probably some thing where Comcast buys and maintains the hardware while Netflix distributes opaque binary software that Comcast agrees not to inspect or modify.
There is yet another answer/part of an answer which is definitely not NN-compatible, and that is to prioritize traffic. For example, Netflix during peak hours might be limited in such a way that it does not saturate any connection, and that e.g. VoIP or email or whatever other kinds of traffic take priority over streaming. Alternately, people might be able to buy plans which intentionally prioritize Netflix, but make no guarantees about the performance of online gaming, torrents, etc. In this way, you’d be paying Comcast specifically to make Netflix better with the understanding that other things might be worse.
This reminds me of that….Stanford?….study that showed that if you were rich, you were 2x as likely to get legislation passed that you wanted. But even if you took that study completely at face value, even if 100% of rich people were “for” something, there was only a 60% chance it would get passed. Which, while definitely 2x the 30% of the non-wealthy, was by no means a guarantee.
It’s funny to me that the idea of the wealthy controlling everything still has cachet after Trump. Yes, Trump is wealthy, but a large majority of the moneyed interests lined up against him, yet he still won because the non-wealthy voted for him. One of his selling points was even that he’s rich, so he can’t be bought by the moneyed interests. You can spend all you want on an election, but in the end it is not dollars but votes that are counted to determine the victory.
I’ve been Listening to ‘SPQR’ by Mary Beard, and in it, she talks about how, while the rich were defiantly given the most political power, they were rarely united and so they still had to depend on the votes of the poorer classes.
Good to hear that tax money is subsidizing porn.
http://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-use-arts-funding-subsidize-billion-dollar-nonprofits/
“There’s nothing left to cut! We’re down to bone here!”
What about NEA grants?
“That’s so small, it would hardly make a difference.”
The article in The Hill that Sloop linked sheds some light on the Trump Jr. lobbying thing, and it’s starting to look like a huge nothingburger, with a side of run of the mill bureaucratic incompetence on the part of the Obama administration.
To sum up, Russian lawyer/lobbyist tries to get permission to enter the US to do some lobbying, is denied. Gets a gig as a lawyer that requires her to be in the US, and she’s allowed in. While she’s here she does some lobbying on the side, working to get more favorable human rights issues treatment for Russia. The primary purpose of her visit ends, but she doesn’t leave and continues to do some lobbying. Finagles a meeting with Trump Jr. by claiming to have oppo research, but lobbies him about the same stuff she’s here to lobby everybody else about instead. Trump team listens, leaving the meeting possibly a little perplexed, but hopefully a bit wiser in the duplicitous methods of political lobbying.
I think it was a setup with fusion gps and folks like McCain
The first gold stone email reads like a bunch of trigger words
Remember the rumor of fisa in June and October 2016? The October 2016 one was based on pee gate (given from McCain to comey)
I think they tried to bait the trumps. As fusion gps has ties to lawyer and is involved with lobbying against magnitsky act
That’s about the only thing that makes sense. This was a totally routine lobbying trip facilitated by the Dem AG who gave her a visa waiver, she met with an assload of Dems while she was here, she attends anti-Trump protests*, and then outta nowhere there’s this story about how she’s going to deliver the dirt on Hillary in a meeting that’s ultimately a bait and switch?
Loose ends – who cooked up the bait for the bait and switch? If it was Fusion (and it stinks like them), this was a Dem dirty op from the get-go.
*I think – she was at some kind of lefty protest, but I can’t remember exactly what for.
Oooh, found my nutpunch for the day
Police: Looking for 25-30 year old, male, black, bald suspect, standing 5’10” and weighing about 170 pounds
Police find: 19 year old black female, 5’2″, 115 lbs, definitely not bald.
Police report:
Also, the cop sicced his dog on her and was unhappy when she didn’t allow herself to be bitten.
The dog “engaged” on her right thigh. Just say the dog fucking bit her. Christ.
Old woman!
I’m a man!
I’m 37. I’m not old!
I didn’t know you were called Dennis.
-And you didn’t bother to ask, did you?
They’re just trying to relive the glory days of the Dorner hunt.
Oh, they were firing on random middle-aged Hispanic women, too?
Hey, those 90-year-old women throwing newspapers from their truck looked just like that big burly cop killer. Seriously it looks like we need to give All cops a health class: This is a woman, *Flips Slide* This is a Man *Flips Slide* This is a non-binary alien.
So he was getting beaten up by a 5’2″ teenaged girl? That’s the story he’s going with?
Our brave men in blue are under constant attack!
The humiliation is a small price to pay for the satisfaction of brutalizing an innocent.
Maybe she was hopped up on PCP and super strong!
Decisions, decisions.
enie, menie, minie, moe…
Good news AZ Glibs, our state is still below average but no longer in the bottom ten! Of course it probably means others dropped in recent years.
Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition 2017 Edition
Florida is number 1? I can’t live in this world any longer!
And how is New Jersey worse off than Illinois? Illinois is Venezuela North.
I don’t think the NJ pension bomb is as big as IL’s. But the state is a liberal shithole and as much as people criticize Christie, when he’s gone it’s going to get worse fast.
We tax tourists. It’s the only reason I can tolerate driving anywhere in the state when school is not in session – I keep repeating the mantra “they’re the reason you don’t pay income tax…”
Yep. I’ll take the extra traffic, especially in the “winter”, to let them pay all the taxes I’m not paying.
It’s the one decent thing about this state. It’s in the State Constitution that we can’t have an income tax, and amending the state constitution takes a 60% popular vote.
New Mexico: ranked two ahead of California.
God, I hate the people who run this state.
Why, all those coastal, supposed net federal tax donor states are in horrible shape. That can’t possibly be. Must be a flawed methodology.
Delightful almond cookie French President on those darkies having too many babies and ruining their civilization.
Ha. Imagine if Trump said that!
Nice suit though.
There you go. Aru attacked, Froome couldn’t respond, and took the yellow jersey.
Euphemism?
Don’t you fucking work? Sheesh!
I supposed I deserve it after spoiling someone’s viewing yesterday (though I posted many hours after the event, in my defense)
It pays to be boss.
FYI: Your Velonews link above didn’t work.
This work?
Yes. Thanks.
Uh, some of us DVR the Tour and watch it after, yes, work.
SPOILER ALERT warnings would be nice.
He’s a perfect example of the kind of racism that the Social-Justice/PC crowd creates. (or of the kind of racism that is actually v. common in Europe)
someone who has deeply rooted opinions of the inferiority of minorities, but keeps bloody quiet about it in 99% of their conversations, and rationalizes it away to themselves as something other than what it is (“its not racism” – iow, they think of themselves as ‘the least racist person in the world’). You only realize it over time and on close inspection.
Both my brother and my best friend were at one point dating (and engaged) to french girls living in NY. on a few occasions the subject of “french racism” came up – particularly during the (2005? or 2003) Banlieue riots in Paris, where police had killed a muslim teen and the poor/public-housing neighborhoods effectively turned into a week-long series of rioting and car-fires.
they both said the same thing, “there is no racism in france!” – proudly. “not like America”. and within 2 sentences also said, “but those people in the Banlieue =they are animals. they are not French and they should just leave”
its this weird conviction that they’re the most open-minded people in the world, yet at the same time will say things that expose a deeply rooted belief that some people are *essentially inferior*. Its “not racism” so long as you never say, “its because they’re arab”. As long as you claim its to do with some other aspects of their culture – something consciously chosen rather than ethnic/genetic, why, “that’s not racism… not like America”. I think their notion of what Racism even is might be completely based on some fictitious notion that the entire country is some cartoon parody of Mississippi Burning… and because ‘we’re not like that’, well then, there’s nothing to apologize for.
Its “not racism” so long as you never say, “its because they’re arab”. As long as you claim its to do with some other aspects of their culture – something consciously chosen rather than ethnic/genetic, why, “that’s not racism… not like America”.
I’m confused. I consider unfettered immigration from unstable regions, which happen to be majority muslim, to be a bad thing. Not so much because of the color of their skin, but because the predominant ideology happens to be largely anti-individual rights. Would that make me racist in your eyes?
+1 banana on the soccer field
Imagine that happening on an American football stadium field.
The French are some of the most overtly racist MF’ers I’ve ever met in a Western country. It’s almost like time traveling back to pre-civil rights America. I have a relative who worked there for a couple of years, and she saw the same thing.
As long as you claim its to do with some other aspects of their culture – something consciously chosen rather than ethnic/genetic, why, “that’s not racism
Because its not racism to dislike people because of their culture?
Its collectivist thinking to say “everyone from country/region X has a crap culture and that’s why I don’t like them”, but its not racism. Bigotry, maybe? But, also, the kind of default/shortcut thinking that is both inevitable and reflexive for normal human beings. Not engaging in this shortcut might even make you fairly dysfunctional, in fact, as you would be ignoring cues that are generally useful.
I strongly suspect, though, that the French lasses were engaging in something more like racism, and basing their reflexive attitudes on ethnic appearance. Its a very fuzzy line.
But if thinking people raised in primitive barbarian cultures are not necessarily people I want around is racism, then so be it.
The French are assholes but Macron is hinting at a rather important point. If the problems of Africa could be solved with foreign aid, then they would have been by now. If the problems of the banlieues could be solved with social welfare programs, then they would have been by now. Yes, using crude stereotypes is dehumanizing and it shows a lack of depth to his understanding of the individual circumstances faced by people in many parts of Africa and other predominantly poor areas of the world. But he’s not every African’s personal Jesus; he’s President of a large European country. The pervasive idea underlying the criticism of his comments, racism aside, is that if we all just come to understand one another better, then we can funnel unearned money from one group to another in the right ways and that is what will solve the ills of the world. That is a theory that has no proof and quite a lot of evidence against it. People must solve their own problems, and when they create problems for others, they should expect some measure of intolerance. Many parts of Africa being poor doesn’t justify racism, but it does justify skepticism about non-Africans taking responsibility for Africa’s problems.
There’s foreign aid, and then there’s foreign aid. The real issue is which of them is tried.
Foreign aid of the “Feed the World” kind – not so good.
The only good kind of “foreign aid” is the kind where party A has something party B wants and party B has something party A wants and they agree to exchange these things to their mutual benefit. Also known as trade.
Thank the good lord that baseball is back today, otherwise I would probably just give up on the intro tomorrow and just head straight into…the links!
Considering baseball has a pointlessly long 162 game season, they can’t take too many days off or they would risk carrying over into winter.
Considering baseball has a
pointlessly longgreatly enjoyable162 game season…FIFY
I wish I enjoyed baseball, considering I could watch games basically every day of the week for months and months.
That would be my definition of purgatory.
Only out-done by cricket, which at least, when played at international level, is notable primarily for the excellent catering in the boxes. In the case of baseball, every time I went to a box or something like that, the focus was still slightly on the game. I blame … fans.
I never thought about it, but you are right, cricket does sound like a sport that would have excellent food in the boxes.
Well, even the players stop for tea with those nice cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
How could the spectators expect anything less than a gastronomic orgy?
I could see 100 games, but that would not generate enough revenue to pay the huge salaries that even a utility infielder batting .225 makes today.
Meanwhile, add the DH to the National League and, perhaps, allow only one pitching change per inning to speed up the game.
Pitching changes should not be allowed mid-inning, except for injuries. And injured pitchers should be prohibited from pitching for several subsequent games. (like five for a reliever and ten for a starter)
injured pitchers should be prohibited from pitching for several subsequent games.
Baseball has the disabled list, in which injured players reside and not play.
No, not injured pitchers, “injured” pitchers.
Stephen Hawking is a sad joke. He was always a mediocre scientist, he just got canonized because he’s in a wheel chair. Kip Thorne and John Wheeler would kick his crippled ass all the way back to British boarding school.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/dadaist-science/article/2008803
Imagine the worship if he black and gay, too.
LIttle fire and brimstone preaching from the Rev. Hawking of the church of climate change.
I dunno, what makes you say that? In terms of the science of astrophysics, this statement is something I would disagree with strongly.
There were some things that got weird at the edges, like the math pretzel he proposed to eliminate the beginning of the universe and make time a circle.
Scruffy – what do you need to put a hat on an avatar? Because I like the tophat thing.
I can probably work with your avatar image as it is, but if you’ve got the original and post it to imgur, it would make it easier.
Gilmore’d it.
Thanks, bro. As someone who has never used imgur, it may take a day or two to get around to it, but those are hilarious, especially as so many avatars are getting them.
I love the one for UnCiv. Too bad he’s too much of a crab to use it. 🙂
Try this…
http://imgur.com/a/WgJUU
Those look awesome! i’d love to see what you’d do with mine.
Lord Humungus will never wear a top hat – except for formal occasions!
Its a little shrimpy. I’ll upload something for you, if you don’t mind.
NP
Try this:
Its more originaler.
Now the first one looks better. Its a keeper, but if you want to try from the original, I will allow a deposit into you karma account.
Scruffy, since you are offering free hats, can I has one for my cat? http://imgur.com/a/K6wwP
I’ll get to these, but I’ve got an ERP snafu to deal with first.
*sets out DMV ticket number dispenser*
Now serving B177 at window number six
So what you’re saying is, that you’d really like a pussy hat?
One pussy hat made to order.
http://imgur.com/a/mL171
I finished this while pissing off a customer who wanted to “negotiate” his bill down to half or he’d take his business elsewhere. I offered a third off and he wouldn’t take it.
This is a longtime whiner who has problem on every contract or wants a special discount on every purchase. I just got tired of it. Everyone in the office thanked me for getting rid of him.
Some days.
This is starting to look cult-like.
ZARDOZ APPROVES!
Excellent! Thanks Scruffy!
Totally understandable regarding the customer – I work with a lot of different company executives and we have a few “special cases” – their CEOs or CFOs always want special discounts, things for free, fees refunded, etc. even though they aren’t even our financially-strongest borrowers. Its infuriating. Sometimes I just want to tell them to “take a hike,” but I’m not running the company… yet.
In fact, they’re often the ones that struggle and constantly ask us for waivers and modifications on the terms of their loans…
Response to post 19 (I’m not pulling a Brooks, honest).
If you honestly believe in the existence of rape culture, you are delusional and of limited intellectual capacity. It’s tinfoil hat, conspiratorial, unprovable horseshit. It’s like believing in chemtrails, water fluoridation mind control and reptilian Illuminati. The woman who wrote that piece is sick. I mean that in the most literal way possible. I would pity her if she weren’t inflicting such damage on her children.
water fluoridation mind control
Have you ever seen a white man drink water?
(I’m not pulling a Brooks, honest).
pfffft
Hornswogglers!
Long before the federal government roused itself, individual state governments were fighting to bring discipline to an unruly and untrustworthy corner of the educational market — for-profit schools that saddle students with crushing debt in exchange for degrees that are essentially useless.
The states are still fighting the good fight: In a lawsuit filed last week in Federal District Court in Washington, attorneys general from 19 states and the District of Columbia served notice that they will resist any attempt by the Trump administration to weaken or ignore hard-won regulations that protect students and taxpayers from predatory schools.
Useless degrees obtained by taking on crushing debt? This sanctimonious distinction between teh evul for profit schools and bona fide noble colleges and universities is so fucking infuriating. What substantive difference is there between a kid victimized by ITT Tech and Evergreen?
My suspicion is that there are far fewer instances of students at for profit technical schools being taught things which are demonstrably wrong than there are at Yale.
I know a guy who got a degree from ITT Tech, and it was useful. Can’t say that a degree in non-gender-binary studies from Evergreen would be very helpful
“Sure, we’ll loan you unlimited money for your gambling habit. But we’re gonna go after those evil casinos afterward.”
P.S. Maura Healy is a cancer.
Nice
Suicide awareness briefing today listed several risk factors:
Relationship problems
Financial problems
Alcohol abuse
Etc
Death by gunshot
One of these things was not like the other. I asked for clarification on the “death by gunshot” bit, pointing out that it’s not a risk factor, and was told that somehow gun ownership magically increases the likelihood of someone committing suicide.
Funny they didn’t include “traffic stops” then.
In Japan, that last one is “Death by hanging” and the presenter explains that rope ownership magically increases the likelihood of someone committing suicide.
Also, being surrounded by trees. Trees cause suicide, the correlation is irrefutable.
And let’s not forget the grim suicide-toll of closets.
OMG disingenuous bullshit alert! Maybe it’s that people contemplating suicide go out and buy guns they would not have otherwise purchased, geniuses!!
somehow gun ownership magically increases the likelihood of someone committing suicide
Even if this were true, you are quite right that “death by gunshot” is not a risk factor for suicide. It’s just suicide. Once you’re dead by gunshot, you’re no longer a risk. You’re the outcome.
Access to a firearm does increase suicide. Specifically, it increases the % chance that a suicide attempt is converted into a suicide instead of a failed suicide attempt. I believe that it also increases, slightly, the chance that men past middle age perform a suicide attempt. This is the group least likely to purposefully fail a suicide attempt – they aren’t cutting their wrist to get attention, they really want to shuffle off the mortal coil.
This is a real and basic issue. If your briefing didn’t go into the difference between attempts and success %, you should ask for your money back.
Full disclosure – I personally think prevention services should only be given to those that don’t ask for it to be removed. effective, humane suicide assistance should be as legal as any other medical procedure.
It increases the likelihood of a suicide attempt succeeding but the presence of a gun doesn’t automatically increase the likelihood of an attempt.
I didn’t pay for it and I don’t have a choice about attending, unfortunately.
I don’t have the link hand, and I’m not going to go searching for it while I’m at work, but I know that I’ve read some pretty dry statistical analysis that said that access to a firearm does increase the likelihood of an attempt for older men.
So now we know why they’ve been running this Russia thing so hard. They had put so much time and effort into the set up.
This is very standard fare for police chases, but just fast forward to where the driver surrenders. Because I was not expecting that.
(let’s just say the driver probably likes urban farming and vaping)
Aw crap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzhWR3cTxA
I’ll say the cop did a textbook maneuver there and waited for the right time to do it.
Yes.
But ultimately not the fun payoff I was talking about.
Last night’s “Outrageous Acts of Science” had a device that someone invented that deploys basically a long strap from the front of the pursuing car, wraps around the rear axle, and stops the car being chased. I gather it’s only good to about 50 mph, so won’t work on a freeway chase, but if it works in real life as well as the demo, we’re going to start seeing it on police cars since it’s such a simple thing to do.
Unnecessary when all the cars have energy management systems with IOT integration. They’ll just hook up to your ECU and crank up the limiter until your car stops.
That long strap will work for tractors and Red Barchetta-type scenarios. Most of us won’t be afforded anything more exciting than the car slowing down.
And what does the strap do to stop front-wheel-drive cars?
It just takes longer, instead of almost instantly, it took about fifty yards. I guess because the back wheels are just dragging along? But it did work, at least according to the segment.
This video gives me all the feels. (yes, it’s two statist assholes, but godDAMN it’s awesome. You know the cop was thinking “I am sooooo fucked”)
+
I did enjoy her calm demeanor.
Did you hear his voice go all quivery? Then he started clearing his throat a lot when he started to mansplain why he stopped her.
not “May I have your business cards” but “Alright, do you guys have cards on you?” while smirking was the “I got these dumbass rookies” moment.
Darmok & Jalad at Tanagra
That’s awesome.
Okay, that’s pretty damn funny.